The Trouble with Pleasure

Abstract

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.

Machines driving machines: Deleuze and Guattari’s asignifying unconscious

“…The relationships between Deleuze, Guattari, and psychoanalysis have received relatively little attention in social theory (Schuster, 2016). This is arguably because Guattari (1983, 1988) coined the term schizoanalysis to describe their work as a new-and-improved form of psychoanalysis.…”

“…This neologism was chosen because they posited the schizophrenic condition of disconnected experience to be far closer to the messy mutability of reality than the narrative-led, chronological illusion of identity that 'normal' people labour under (Hietanen, Andéhn, et al, 2020). Schizophrenic tendencies were also becoming increasingly common amongst the general population, thanks to the ever-accelerating, ever-intensifying and ever-diversifying system of capitalism (Hietanen, Murray et al, 2020;Kozinets et al, 2017), potentially overtaking the earlier psychoanalytic concerns of narcissism, neuroticism, and perversion (Schuster, 2016). Put simply, many more people struggle to 'biographically unify' in market societies that are materially precarious and symbolically ambiguous (Lambert, 2019: 332).…”

“…The rest of this article begins by considering the relationship between Deleuzoguattarian thought and the psychoanalytic tradition. It then follows Schuster (2016) in tracing a 'split' in Freud's work between earlier linguistic models and later machinic models. After this, a review of the existing literature makes the case that psychoanalytic marketing theory leans heavily toward the linguistic model; the central argument of this section is that although these studies are informative and impactful, they are limited by their reliance on the language metaphor.…”

Feeling Down(town Julie Brown): The Sense of Up and Expiring Relationality

“…Intensity and sense thus involve an imperceptibility that can be distinguished from psychoanalytic concepts. As Aaron Schuster (2016: 77) reveals, Lacan and Freud presume a unity between one’s body and an other: ‘bodily unification is made possible through the process of identification with an external image; it is the fascinating power of the imaginary Gestalt that gives the body a wholeness and a mastery.’ Meanwhile, Deleuzian intensities respond to the presumption of a holistic body by emphasizing fractures and moving away from the impulse to have things make (full) sense.…”

Crossing wires: short-circuiting marketing theory

“…Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch…?’(Žižek, in Schuster, 2016: ix)…”