Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis explores the critical relationship between psychoanalysis and the work of Derrida (Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and his later writing on autoimmunity, cruelty, war, and human rights) and Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, and more). Each essay illuminates a specific aspect of Derrida's and Deleuze's perspectives on psychoanalysis: the human-animal boundary; the child's polymorphism; the face or mouth as constitutive of ethical responsibility toward others; the connections between pain and suffering and political resistance; the role of masochism in psychoanalytic thinking; the use of psychoanalytic secondary revision in theorizing film; and the political dimension of the unconscious. Placing a particular emphasis on liminal figurations of the human and challenges to discourses on free will, the essays explore shared concerns in Derrida and Deleuze with regard to history, politics, the political unconscious, and resistance. By addressing the need to overcome the split between the psychological and the political, Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis illuminates the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to critical interrogations of culture and politics.

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.

This book provides a clear, comprehensive survey of Deleuze's philosophy, whilst also offering deep analysis of key aspects of his thought.

Deleuze and Psychoanalysis is both a guide to reading Deleuze and a direct confrontation with issues at stake in his work, particularly the debate with and against psychoanalysis.

This book argues that psychoanalysis has a unique role to play in the climate change debate through its placing emphasis on the unconscious dimensions of our mental and social lives. Exploring contributions from Freudian, Kleinian, Object Relations, Self Psychology, Jungian, and Lacanian traditions, the book discusses how psychoanalysis can help to unmask the anxieties, deficits, conflicts, phantasies and defences crucial in understanding the human dimension of the ecological crisis. Yet despite being essential to studying environmentalism and its discontents, psychoanalysis still remains largely a 'psychology without ecology.' The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, combined with new developments in the sciences of complexity, help us to build upon the best of these perspectives, providing a framework able to integrate Guattari's 'three ecologies' of mind, nature and society. This book thus constitutes a timely attempt to contribute towards a critical dialogue between psychoanalysis and ecology. Further topics of discussion include: ecopsychology and the greening of psychotherapy our ambivalent relationship to nature and the non-human complexity theory in psychoanalysis and ecology defence mechanisms against eco-anxiety and eco-grief Deleuze|Guattari and the three ecologies becoming-animal in horror and eco-apocalypse in science fiction films nonlinear ecopsychoanalysis. In our era of anxiety, denial, paranoia, apathy, guilt, hope, and despair in the face of climate change, this book offers a fresh and insightful psychoanalytic perspective on the ecological crisis. As such this book will be of great interest to all those in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, and ecology, as well as all who are concerned with the global environmental challenges affecting our planet's future.

It is often said that Lacan is the most radical representative of structuralism, a thinker of negativity and alienation, whereas Deleuze is pictured as a great opponent of the structuralist project, a vitalist and a thinker of creative potentialities of desire. It seems the two cannot be further apart. This volume of 12 new essays breaks the myth of their foreignness (if not hostility) and places the two in a productive conversation. By taking on topics such as baroque, perversion, death drive, ontology/topology, face, linguistics and formalism the essays highlight key entry points for a discussion between Lacan's and Deleuze's respective thoughts. The proposed lines of investigation do not argue for a simple equation of their thoughts, but for a 'disjunctive synthesis', which acknowledges their differences, while insisting on their positive and mutually informed reading.

In his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault notes that in the late sixties, there is a turn away from Freud anda movement toward what he calls an “experience and technology of desire that is no longer Freudian”. Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari were interested in, and engaged with this shift and their collective work in these areas spawned a larger post-Freudian literature. This book gathers contributions from international scholars with the aim of exploring the social, political, and philosophical dimension of Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Foucault’s critical encounters with psychoanalytic thought: Their possible connections, their divergences, the fields of reflection that these encounters open, and the problems and debates that led Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari to engage with psychoanalysis in the ways that they did. In doing so, the main goal of the book is not to engage in a critique of the discipline of Psychoanalysis as such, but to investigate how Foucault’s and Deleuze’s critique of Psychoanalysis gives rise to a political reflection that draws on some of Psychoanalysis key notions. Among these, the concept of Desire is central as it allows us to grasp the different ways in which Foucault and Deleuze politically engage with Psychoanalysis: for Deleuze, Desire is the element through which Revolution becomes possible, whereas for Foucault Desire is a cornerstone of the modern mechanisms of subjection. Drawing both on new material like Confessions of the Flesh, the 4th volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and on Foucault and Deleuze main work, the book covers a variety of topics including the contrast between Foucault’s and Deleuze political understanding of desire and pleasure; the genealogy of desire as a way to investigate the historical shaping of psychoanalysis; the relationship between psychoanalysis and the normalizing mechanisms of power (e.g. biopolitics and disciplinary regimes); the ways in which psychoanalysis and neoliberalism come together in particular moments, the status and role of desire in revolt, resistance, and transformation; Foucault and Deleuze’s different approaches to the unconscious; the role of desire in the formation of identity; etc.,. In the 50th anniversary of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, one of the major references that inspires the many chapters in this book, we aim to pay homage to these two important figures of contemporary thought by enriching and opening new lines of thought and problematization of the political reflection on Desire that Foucault and Deleuze developed.