From a Freudian perspective, the human being can be defined as that animal that strives to sabotage its own being but is so incompetent it ends up bungling even that. This double sabotage, most evident in neurotic symptoms, produces its own offbeat enjoyment, a strange contentment in discontent. To better grasp its novelty, we might call it “absolute lust,” the pleasure that marks the end of the history of pleasure.
This workshop will focus on Aaron Schuster’s The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2016). Questions that will be addressed include: how to understand debates about the “philosophy of desire” in French thought of the 1960s and 70s, and their legacy; Lacan on the difference between pleasure and enjoyment; Deleuze’s different engagements with psychoanalysis throughout his career, and the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire and Lacan’s own; complaining as a privileged example of pleasure, and the anthropological basis of criticism and critique; and, what would it mean to write a history of pleasure.
The workshop will begin with a short presentation, and then open for discussion.
For excerpts of the book, please use this link to a google doc with the selections available.
Aaron Schuster is a fellow at the Society for the Humanities. His book Sovereignty, Inc: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment, with Eric Santner and William Mazzarella, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in Fall 2019. Spasm: A Philosophy of Tickling will be published by Cabinet Books in 2019.
