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The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis
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.
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.
235 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 26, 2016
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336 people want to read
About the author
Aaron Schuster
12 books2 followersAaron Schuster is a former Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies, Rijeka, Croatia, and at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin. He is Head of the Theory Program at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 16, 2018
There has been some truly wonderful work produced in the field of Lacanian theory in the last few years, such as A. Kiarina Kordela's Surplus: Spinoza, Lacan (2007) and Samo Tomšič's The Capitalist Unconscious (2015), which use their fusion of Lacan with, respectively, Spinoza and Marx to bring dramatic insights into the value of his work. Aaron Schuster's The Trouble with Pleasure manages the same approach by bringing together Lacan and Deleuze.
Such a strategy seems, at first glance, rather unusual, as these two thinkers are often seen as radically opposed to each other. Whereas Lacan is (supposedly) a thinker of lack and negativity, Deleuze is (supposedly) a affirmative philosopher in the vitalist tradition. And anyway, didn't Deleuze and Guattari sound the death knell for psychoanalysis when they published Anti-Oedipus (1972)? Wouldn't that book be the ultimate take-down of both Lacan and his Freudian buddies?
When I was undergraduate, I certainly swallowed this dichotomy hook, line, and sinker, but more recently I have come to question its validity. François Dosse's dual biography of Deleuze and Guattari, Intersecting Lives (2007), revealed just how close Deleuze and Guattari - especially the latter - actually were to Lacan. Rereading Anti-Oedipus, I also noticed just how little they actually criticize Lacan in any direct or meaningful way. By the time I came to read Schuster's book, then, my mind had already been re-opened to the possibility of a convergence.
Schuster opens his book in an unexpected and seemingly disconnected preface: an extended commentary on the practice of complaining. He starts from a psychoanalytic perspective, using a famous Jewish joke about being thirsty to demonstrate how the purported object of a complaint is a misdirection: the real source of dissatisfaction is with existence itself. This then leads to a meditation on another famous joke about the misfortune of being born. This then shifts the theoretical focus to Deleuze, who analyzes this joke as an acknowledgment of the relative disempowerment of the ego: life is more vast than my own self. We should not be distracted then, by the negativity or lack in the act of complaining, for what it really attests to is the vitality of the drive (Lacan) or desire (Deleuze).
The book begins in earnest with an introduction that considers the split between Lacan and Deleuze. Schuster asks: "If anything, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuzian philosophy are unbearably close, and the real problem is: what generates the gap between their two positions?" (p.30). After all, at various points in his career, Deleuze has moved from affirming psychoanalysis, to critiquing it, to ignoring it altogether. The trajectory of Schuster's thought lies in the direction of the death drive, the beyond of the pleasure principle, this principle of negative that converges most clearly in Lacan and Deleuze through their readings of Sade. Schuster asserts that he will use this convergence to "present a less positive and less affirmationist Deleuze, to abjure the all too easy opposition between negativity, impossibility, castration, and lack versus creativity, difference, and becoming, and instead to interpret Deleuze’s philosophy as an extended and highly original attempt to think negativity and the violence of the negative differently" (p. 46).
Chapter 1 attempt again to articulate the difference between Lacan and Deleuze, this time along the lines of sensibility (Deleuze) and language (Lacan), which in turn represent two aspects of Freud's thought. This simplistic division is broken down, however, by the concept of the drive. Schuster thus argues that "the split between Lacan and Deleuze can ultimately be understood as different theoretical approaches to what is for each a similarly double-sided 'topology'—a topology which is strongly linked to the 'impossible synthesis' of the two aspects of Freudian metapsychology, the speaking subject and the drive-machine" (p.49). Through a careful reading of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Schuster shows the way in which drives/habits form who we are in the absence of an ego, and that pleasure is inscribed into these habitual practices. "How and where the organism finds pleasure is a function of its habits, not the other way around" (p. 54). Schuster further ties this idea to the influence of Bergson and Proust on Deleuze, who provide the idea that memory itself is like a drive.
"What Deleuze’s Bergsonism adds to the psychoanalytic concept is the accent on time: for Deleuze, partial objects are not so much separated body parts as autonomous temporal organs or, to use his own term, destinies. Just as the body is conceived by psychoanalysis as a body-in-pieces, so too should time be conceived as a fragmented “body,” a collection of temporal fragments without any single unifying stream or history." (p.60).
There is always a risk of the Deleuze habit/drive turning into something negative, and this is where he returns to the death drive. In Deleuze's case, it is Kant's critique of Descartes that provides the equivalent of the Lacanian notion of the split subject. Turning then to Lacan, Schuster contemplates that Lacan's insight is also to question the relationship between the symbolic order of language and the "headless" drives.
to be continued...
Such a strategy seems, at first glance, rather unusual, as these two thinkers are often seen as radically opposed to each other. Whereas Lacan is (supposedly) a thinker of lack and negativity, Deleuze is (supposedly) a affirmative philosopher in the vitalist tradition. And anyway, didn't Deleuze and Guattari sound the death knell for psychoanalysis when they published Anti-Oedipus (1972)? Wouldn't that book be the ultimate take-down of both Lacan and his Freudian buddies?
When I was undergraduate, I certainly swallowed this dichotomy hook, line, and sinker, but more recently I have come to question its validity. François Dosse's dual biography of Deleuze and Guattari, Intersecting Lives (2007), revealed just how close Deleuze and Guattari - especially the latter - actually were to Lacan. Rereading Anti-Oedipus, I also noticed just how little they actually criticize Lacan in any direct or meaningful way. By the time I came to read Schuster's book, then, my mind had already been re-opened to the possibility of a convergence.
Schuster opens his book in an unexpected and seemingly disconnected preface: an extended commentary on the practice of complaining. He starts from a psychoanalytic perspective, using a famous Jewish joke about being thirsty to demonstrate how the purported object of a complaint is a misdirection: the real source of dissatisfaction is with existence itself. This then leads to a meditation on another famous joke about the misfortune of being born. This then shifts the theoretical focus to Deleuze, who analyzes this joke as an acknowledgment of the relative disempowerment of the ego: life is more vast than my own self. We should not be distracted then, by the negativity or lack in the act of complaining, for what it really attests to is the vitality of the drive (Lacan) or desire (Deleuze).
The book begins in earnest with an introduction that considers the split between Lacan and Deleuze. Schuster asks: "If anything, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuzian philosophy are unbearably close, and the real problem is: what generates the gap between their two positions?" (p.30). After all, at various points in his career, Deleuze has moved from affirming psychoanalysis, to critiquing it, to ignoring it altogether. The trajectory of Schuster's thought lies in the direction of the death drive, the beyond of the pleasure principle, this principle of negative that converges most clearly in Lacan and Deleuze through their readings of Sade. Schuster asserts that he will use this convergence to "present a less positive and less affirmationist Deleuze, to abjure the all too easy opposition between negativity, impossibility, castration, and lack versus creativity, difference, and becoming, and instead to interpret Deleuze’s philosophy as an extended and highly original attempt to think negativity and the violence of the negative differently" (p. 46).
Chapter 1 attempt again to articulate the difference between Lacan and Deleuze, this time along the lines of sensibility (Deleuze) and language (Lacan), which in turn represent two aspects of Freud's thought. This simplistic division is broken down, however, by the concept of the drive. Schuster thus argues that "the split between Lacan and Deleuze can ultimately be understood as different theoretical approaches to what is for each a similarly double-sided 'topology'—a topology which is strongly linked to the 'impossible synthesis' of the two aspects of Freudian metapsychology, the speaking subject and the drive-machine" (p.49). Through a careful reading of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Schuster shows the way in which drives/habits form who we are in the absence of an ego, and that pleasure is inscribed into these habitual practices. "How and where the organism finds pleasure is a function of its habits, not the other way around" (p. 54). Schuster further ties this idea to the influence of Bergson and Proust on Deleuze, who provide the idea that memory itself is like a drive.
"What Deleuze’s Bergsonism adds to the psychoanalytic concept is the accent on time: for Deleuze, partial objects are not so much separated body parts as autonomous temporal organs or, to use his own term, destinies. Just as the body is conceived by psychoanalysis as a body-in-pieces, so too should time be conceived as a fragmented “body,” a collection of temporal fragments without any single unifying stream or history." (p.60).
There is always a risk of the Deleuze habit/drive turning into something negative, and this is where he returns to the death drive. In Deleuze's case, it is Kant's critique of Descartes that provides the equivalent of the Lacanian notion of the split subject. Turning then to Lacan, Schuster contemplates that Lacan's insight is also to question the relationship between the symbolic order of language and the "headless" drives.
to be continued...
January 22, 2021
Kötü çeviri, özensiz baskı. Hiçbir editöryel denetimden geçmemiş gibi. Büyük yayınevlerinin ilgi göstermedikleri önemli kitapları çevirdikleri için butik yayınevlerini desteklemeliyiz ama kısıtlı imkanlar özensiz kitaplar basmalarının mazereti olamaz. 3 yıldız kitabın içeriğine.
July 13, 2016
Schuster makes the attempt to bring Deleuze into discussion with psychoanalysis without resorting to oversimplifications and vulgar reductions. While the book ultimately offers no grand conclusion or resolution, Schuster makes a lot of high theory accessible. The problem is that the book becomes absorbed into summaries and takes no definitive stand. There's also a lot of stylistic imitation of Zizek, but nothing that encroaches on Schuster's own material.
Schuster spends a lot of time developing Freud, then playing Deleuze and Lacan off of each other in response to Freud. This of course focuses on Deleuze's career and development as a philosopher. Personally, I take Lacan's side in almost all arguments (the exception would be Alain Badiou), so I'm not very forgiving of Deleuze's positions. The book culminates on the discussion of Schizophrenia, Deleuze (and Guattari)'s privileged and "revolutionary" position over and against the Freudian/Lacanian Oedipal neurotic of "normalization". It's still laughable that a schizophrenic can be an agent of revolution. This of course makes no sense when one understands that the majority of corporate executives are this unhinged (non)subject, fully empowered by social relations to be desiring machines uninhibited and uncastrated.
The book is readable, yet Schuster weaves together so much seemingly disparate material that one wonders what the end result is. It's a book of comparisons which draws very little consequences and comes off at times like a new age self-help book for the inhuman age, with its witty antinatalist aphorisms. Harsh to say, but the book cannot really answer if one poses the question: who cares, so what? Perhaps the book was better off not written, me phunai.
Schuster spends a lot of time developing Freud, then playing Deleuze and Lacan off of each other in response to Freud. This of course focuses on Deleuze's career and development as a philosopher. Personally, I take Lacan's side in almost all arguments (the exception would be Alain Badiou), so I'm not very forgiving of Deleuze's positions. The book culminates on the discussion of Schizophrenia, Deleuze (and Guattari)'s privileged and "revolutionary" position over and against the Freudian/Lacanian Oedipal neurotic of "normalization". It's still laughable that a schizophrenic can be an agent of revolution. This of course makes no sense when one understands that the majority of corporate executives are this unhinged (non)subject, fully empowered by social relations to be desiring machines uninhibited and uncastrated.
The book is readable, yet Schuster weaves together so much seemingly disparate material that one wonders what the end result is. It's a book of comparisons which draws very little consequences and comes off at times like a new age self-help book for the inhuman age, with its witty antinatalist aphorisms. Harsh to say, but the book cannot really answer if one poses the question: who cares, so what? Perhaps the book was better off not written, me phunai.
March 8, 2021
Zor bir okumaydı tamamiyle çeviriden ötürü. 3* da çeviri ve baskı hatalarından dolayı. Son 4 sayfa hiç okunmayacak şekildeydi. Konuyu derinlemesine bilmeyenler eline bile almasın ya da İngilizcesinden okusunlar mümkünse.
September 17, 2020
Mostly useless.
January 30, 2023
A beautiful book in which Aaron Schuster, one of the authors of the new era and who has made a line in the field of Psycho-Philosophy in particular, reinterprets the Jun principle with a blend of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuze's psycho-philosophy. Of course, he avoided explanations by making comparisons from time to time and turned to objective questions, but in general, he has published a book in which we see his own opinion and ability to Decipher.
Motive, desire and Junket.
Which one is the trigger for which one? Could the lack of any of these three be the source of the deep existential problems experienced by today's people, or rather by every generation born after the second world war? or that it has been disinformation?? Should we talk about what it feeds on as much as the source of desire? as such, answers to many more questions have been sought in this book. Dec.
However, it seemed to me that Deleuze left the subject unfinished regarding Lacan's criticisms. Especially the fact that he did not comment on a topic that contemporary thinkers touched on and tried to explain, so to speak, made him feel that he had practiced his pen cowardly.
One issue that I think should be separated as the Juni Juni principle and beyond is the problem of gratification. I think at this point, when we remember Nietzsche's approach, "Should we talk about what it feeds against as well as the source of desire? " we will have found the answer to your question. At this point, when the book was dealing with Deleuze, it didn't happen that he missed the names that he was influenced by. Also, I have not been able to understand how the approach of a valuable person like Nietzsche is not seen. Apart from these shortcomings, it is a pretty good book. This is an address where the person concerned will often start asking himself questions. I wish you a pleasant reading.
Motive, desire and Junket.
Which one is the trigger for which one? Could the lack of any of these three be the source of the deep existential problems experienced by today's people, or rather by every generation born after the second world war? or that it has been disinformation?? Should we talk about what it feeds on as much as the source of desire? as such, answers to many more questions have been sought in this book. Dec.
However, it seemed to me that Deleuze left the subject unfinished regarding Lacan's criticisms. Especially the fact that he did not comment on a topic that contemporary thinkers touched on and tried to explain, so to speak, made him feel that he had practiced his pen cowardly.
One issue that I think should be separated as the Juni Juni principle and beyond is the problem of gratification. I think at this point, when we remember Nietzsche's approach, "Should we talk about what it feeds against as well as the source of desire? " we will have found the answer to your question. At this point, when the book was dealing with Deleuze, it didn't happen that he missed the names that he was influenced by. Also, I have not been able to understand how the approach of a valuable person like Nietzsche is not seen. Apart from these shortcomings, it is a pretty good book. This is an address where the person concerned will often start asking himself questions. I wish you a pleasant reading.
August 28, 2021
Zihni tembelliğinden uyandıran, kolay okuma alışkanlıklarından arındıran bir kitap. Çok talepkar. Dikkatini, odağını, ilgini tümüyle istiyor. Başvuru kaynağı. Bir akademik yazı için olsun, kişisel merak için olsun, okuma deneyimi ilkiyle sınırlı kalmıyor. Tekrar tekrar dönülmeden sindirilmesi zor. Öte yandan çeviri ve editöryal eksikliklik kendini hissettiriyor. Okuma hazzını düşürüyor. Keşke tekrar daha özenli basılsa. Böyle harcanan bir eser olmuş daha çok.
July 20, 2020
Moments of lucidity break long passages of psychoanalytical babel.
October 10, 2025
Ik ben er niet helemaal over uit of dit de boel nou duidelijker maakt of niet. Desalniettemin vond ik het waanzinnig. Thesis life continues!!! Lacan, I’m coming for you!!!!
September 16, 2016
This is a very readable book which brings out the connections and disconnections between Deleuzean and Lacanian thought in a clear and accessible way, although I imagine the level of clarity is probably somewhat dependent on the reader's background and prior reading. There is an obvious Lacanian direction to the book and Schuster appears to feel considerably more comfortable and confident when discussing Lacan. He does, however, for someone with a background in Lacan, at least, render aspects of Deleuze unusually clear. There are moments where he glides over complex points and is difficult not to take the impression that he himself is a little uncertain but, then, neither Deleuze nor Lacan are straightforward and this book does go a long way towards opening them up and invites you to pick up Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense again and read them afresh.
January 4, 2018
I picked this book up after listening to a Podcast by Schuster (I actually mistook him for Zizek). I came to Lacan by way of Deleuze, and have been doing my best to give him a charitable reading (Bruce Fink was quite helpful in this regard). I will say that, for a Lacanian who is writing in a series presided by Zizek, this book is awfully gracious towards Deleuze. I appreciate the bend towards psychoanalysis, as well as Schuster's attempt to resist the cliche reading of Deleuze as simply a philosopher of 'affirmation'. As written by others, Schuster is remarkably clear in explaining two philosophers who can be extremely confusing (especially Lacan). I gave him 4 stars due to this clarity and charity, but he didn't get star 5 because, IMO, he remained chained to his Lacanian point of departure when attempting to land Deleuze.
August 11, 2017
Well worth the read
Succinctly summarizes and compares Lacan and Deluez. An excellent starting point for further understanding these complex works. Three more words, required.
Succinctly summarizes and compares Lacan and Deluez. An excellent starting point for further understanding these complex works. Three more words, required.
August 30, 2020
surprisingly helpful in salvaging DG, written from a Lacanian (in the broad, ecumenical sense) pov
January 25, 2020
Schuster's easy confidence in explaining Deleuze and Lacan is admirable, but I am unsure that he synthesizes their work into something new or worthwhile. Despite this he does an amazing job of making Deleuze and Lacan seem much more similar than either philosopher was want to be seen as during their lives. At times Schuster pulls out parts of Lacan that make him seem more of a radical anarchist than Deleuze, and some Deleuze that makes him seem more of a structuralist psychiatrist than Lacan. It is all impressive, but it does not always produce more than the sum of its parts. At its worst Schuster spends long portions of the book juxtaposing very cryptic remarks from either in philosopher in a comparison that will leave people other than Schuster confused.
Bonus: Schuster explains some of Deleuze's concepts really clearly. He makes anti-oedipus almost explicable and the body without organs something that can be spoken of. In the end YOU might not be able to explain the BwO, but you will feel as if you were much closer to it.
Bonus: Schuster explains some of Deleuze's concepts really clearly. He makes anti-oedipus almost explicable and the body without organs something that can be spoken of. In the end YOU might not be able to explain the BwO, but you will feel as if you were much closer to it.
March 7, 2023
Is there an analogy between the compulsion to repeat and the compulsion to ontologize? Does intellectual temperament seed our metaphysical ground? Does the desire of philosophy extimately condition its final decision? These are questions which Schuster aims for and tentatively orbits in The Trouble with Pleasure, much to the dissatisfaction of my speculative desire. Still, a better attempt to bridge the divide than Zizek’s Organs Without Bodies.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews