An investigation into the strange and troublesome relationship to
pleasure that defines the human being, drawing on the disparate
perspectives of Deleuze and Lacan.
Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be
abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself
fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the
crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan,
two of the most formidable figures of postwar French thought. Though the
encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze's work, we are yet
to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted
toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his
career. In The Trouble with Pleasure, Aaron Schuster tackles this
tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading
of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and
comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers
and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster
focuses on drive and desire--the strange, convoluted relationship of
human beings to the forces that move them from within--"the trouble with
pleasure.
Along the way, Schuster offers his own engaging and surprising
conceptual analyses and inventive examples. In the "Critique of Pure
Complaint" he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud's
theory of neurosis to Spinoza's intellectual complaint of God and the
Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate, among other
things, a theory of love as "mutually compatible symptoms"; an original
philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian
treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of
the 1920s "literature of the death drive," including Thomas Mann, Italo
Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.
