The trouble with pleasure
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 such concerns. 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.”

Speaker
Aaron 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. The publication of Aaron Schuster’s new book The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT Press, 2016).

Moderator
Dr. Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a cultural critic and professor in Kyung Hee University, Republic of Korea. He obtained MA in philosophy from University of Warwick and PhD in Cultural Theory from The University of Sheffield. His publications include The Idea of Communism 3 with Slavoj Zizek, Theory After Althusserianism, Futurism, The Obscene Fantasy of Korean Culture, Nationalism as a Sublime Object, Deleuze as a Theatre of Philosophy, This Is What Is Called Cultural Criticism, The Impressionists, and Framing a Witch.