Aaron Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog

Join us for a presentation by Aaron Schuster on his latest book How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (MIT Press, 2024), followed by a conversation between the author, Jamieson Webster, and Evan Calder Williams.

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 quixotic tale of adventures-in-theory 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.

The ambition of Kafka’s new science is not to become the Queen but the demon of the sciences, a folisophie (follysophy) as Lacan once quipped. Cutting across philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, and literature, the book envisions what such a new science could be—called by the dog the “science of freedom”—enlisting new comrades in the dog’s struggle.

Bios

Aaron Schuster is an editor of e-flux Notes. He is the author of The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT, 2016), and co-author of Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment (University of Chicago, 2020). His most recent book is How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (MIT, 2024).

Evan Calder Williams is Associate Professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies for Bard College, where he also teaches in the Human Rights program. He is the author of the books Combined and Uneven Apocalypse; Roman Letters; Shard Cinema; and, forthcoming with Sternberg Press in 2025, Inhuman Resources. He is a Contributing Editor to e-flux journal and is the translator, with David Fernbach, of Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism. His first novel is forthcoming with Riverhead Books.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and is on the board and faculty of the Pulsion International Institute. She is the author, most recently, of On Breathing (Catapult, 2025).

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
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–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

e-flux, 172 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, United States