Book launch
Book launch: How to Research Like a Dog by Aaron Schuster
How to Research Like a Dog proposes a new and surprising inspiration for philosophy today—the canine thinker from Kafka's story “Investigations of a Dog.”
Written toward the end of Kafka's life, “Investigations of a Dog” is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author's oeuvre. Kafka's tale of philosophical adventure is that of a lone, maladjusted hound who challenges the dogmatism of dog science and pioneers an original research program in pursuit of the mysteries of his self and his world. Schuster uses the investigative canine as a guide dog to rediscover Kafka's fictional universe, while taking up the cause of this ingenious, possessed, melancholy, comical, and revolutionary thinker.
Cutting across philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, and literature, the book envisions what the dog's new “science of freedom” could be, enlisting new comrades in the dog's struggle, and ours.
Aaron Schuster is a philosopher and writer who lives in Amsterdam. He is the author of The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT, 2016), and How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka's New Science (MIT, 2024). His writing spans many topics including the history of pleasure, the philosophy of tickling, Bolshevik feminism, political comedy, anti-sexuality, the history of levitation, the theory of breakups, and complaining. He has collaborated with artists as a writer on a number of projects, most recently “I Am a Sad Robot,” at TU Eindhoven. He is an editor of e-flux Notes.