A provocative book that proposes a new and surprising inspiration for
philosophy today--the canine thinker from Kafka's story "Investigations
of a Dog."
Written toward the end of Kafka's life, "Investigations of a Dog"
(Forschungen eines Hundes, 1922) is one of the lesser-known and most
enigmatic works in the author's oeuvre. Walter Benjamin remarked that it
was the one story he never managed to figure out. Kafka's tale of
philosophical adventure is that of a lone, maladjusted dog who
challenges the dogmatism of established science and pioneers an original
research program in pursuit of the mysteries of his self and his world.
Schuster revisits this text, using the canine as a guide dog through
which to rediscover Kafka's fictional universe, while taking up the
cause of this ingenious, possessed, melancholy, comical, and
revolutionary thinker.
Neither an exercise in literary criticism nor a traditional
philosophical commentary, this charming and idiosyncratic book aligns
itself with and develops the research program of Kafka's dog. It
constructs an "impossible" system based on the fourfold division of
nourishment, music, incantation, and freedom--or, stated a bit
differently: enjoyment, art, institutions, and freedom. Schuster puts
the dog in dialogue with psychoanalytic theory (Freud and Lacan), the
history of philosophy (Plato, Diogenes, Descartes, Kierkegaard, German
Idealism, Marx, phenomenology), and literature (Gogol, Melville,
Flaubert, Cervantes, Lispector). Imagining the "Unknown University" that
Kafka's new science calls for, the book enlists new comrades in the
dog's struggle.
