Overview
Aaron Schuster (BA Amherst College; MA, PhD Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a philosopher and writer, based in Amsterdam. He is the author of The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (Short Circuits Series, MIT Press, 2016). His book Spasm: A Philosophy of Tickling is forthcoming from Cabinet Books, and he is a co-author, together with Eric Santner and William Mazzarella, of Sovereignty Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment, to be published in the Trios Series of the University of Chicago Press. Other recent publications include “Being and Enjoyment in Plato’s Philebus: A Lacanian Perspective” (in College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, Spring 2018), “The Sexual Life of Communists: Reflections on Alexandra Kollontai” (forthcoming in The Alexandra Kollontai Reader, Sternberg Press and Kontsfack, Stockholm), and “Fasting and Method: Kafka as Philosopher” (in Poiesis, eds. Petar Milat and Nathan Brown, Zagreb: Mama Multimedia Center, 2017). He has written on such topics as the history of levitation, the politics of sleep, the psychopathology of AI, the debt drive, the comedy of Lubitsch, Genet’s theater, Kafka’s philosopher dog, Platonov’s Anti-Sexus, and complaining. He has been a fellow at the Theory Department of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin, and the Institute for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe, Rijeka, Croatia. In 2016, he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, at the Center for Disciplinary Innovation, the Franke Institute for the Humanities.
Research Focus
A Clinical Anthropology of Authority
In this project I will propose a clinical anthropology of authority, starting with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and extending to the work of Norman O. Brown and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The psychoanalytic study of psychopathology will be used to illuminate different aspects and problems of authority, in accordance with Freud’s “crystal principle”: in the same way that crystals cleave and break along pre-established yet invisible fault lines, so too do human beings “break” according to fractures which secretly traverse their existence. Likewise, psychopathology provides a kind of privileged window onto authority, not in the sense of displaying the phenomenon in the full light of day, but rather bringing out its hidden subtleties and distortions, its points of weakness and uncertainty, its crises and discontents (indeed, why is authority almost always spoken about together with the word crisis, the so-called “crisis of authority”? It is as if authority were not some substantial thing susceptible to breakdowns and crises, but rather the name for an ongoing crisis in the life of individuals and societies, a gap or sensitive spot in their constitution). This approach was already announced at the dawn of modern political theory, in Étienne de La Boétie’s seminal text The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, or the Against-One, where he calls voluntary servitude the “mortal illness” of humankind. For a certain tradition of philosophical anthropology, it is the problem of authority that makes the human being into the sick animal par excellence, that is, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, the “great experimenter with himself, discontented and insatiable.”