Reviewed by Peter D. Mathews
Aaron Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2024), xx + 323pp.
Aaron Schuster’s How to Research Like a Dog combines literary analysis, psychoanalytic theory, and metaphysical comedy in a sustained meditation on Franz Kafka’s 1922 short story “Investigations of a Dog.” Published by MIT Press in late 2024 as part of the Short Circuits series edited by Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, and Alenka Zupančič, the book is both a tribute to Kafka’s philosophical imagination and a manifesto for a new kind of theory, one that embraces failure, constraint, and absurdity as conditions of thought. Schuster’s central claim is that Kafka’s dog is not merely a fictional character but a neurotic philosopher whose obsessive inquiries into nourishment, music, and freedom parody and illuminate the structure of modern thought. The dog’s investigations are thus marked by hesitation and deferral, marking him not as a master thinker but a failed theorist, a failure that makes him a model for contemporary philosophy. The book is structured around twenty chapters and an appendix, each of which develops a facet of the dog’s inquiry. From the metaphysics of food to the politics of complaint, Schuster traces the contours of a “new science” that emerges from the ruins of metaphysical certainty. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, German Idealism, and Kafka’s metaphysical comedy, Schuster reimagines philosophy as a practice of constrained thought, a way of thinking from within the silences and failures that structure the symbolic order.
The Structure of Neurotic Subjectivity
In How to Research Like a Dog, Schuster reimagines Kafka’s canine narrator as a philosophical model. In pointed contrast to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s foregrounding of the schizophrenic in their influential Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), Schuster’s reading is deeply informed by the obsessional neurotic, whose relation to knowledge is marked by hesitation, deferral, and compulsive questioning. The dog’s inquiries into the origin of food, the meaning of music, and the nature of freedom are not directed at mastery or certainty, but rather symptoms of his alienation from the symbolic order. As Schuster writes, Kafka’s dog “isn’t looking for a cultured collaborator, since what he’s after are the gaps in knowledge.”[1] This formulation captures the essence of the dog’s philosophical vocation: he is not a seeker of truth but a diagnostician of its absence. His investigations are “hopeless but indispensable” (1), driven by a compulsion to think that cannot be satisfied and cannot be stopped.
This compulsive thinking is emblematic of the obsessional structure, caught in a loop of questioning that defers the encounter with desire. The dog’s rejection of the norms of dogdom, his melancholic solitude, and his endless inquiries all mark him as a figure of philosophical resistance. Yet this resistance is not heroic: his failure is merely a condition of thought, a way of inhabiting the gaps that structure the symbolic order. Schuster situates the dog within a broader philosophical lineage, linking him to figures such as Diogenes the Cynic, Socrates, and even René Descartes, confronting authority not with defiance but with melancholic inquiry. Unlike the classical Cynic who tells Alexander to “stand out of my light” (14), Kafka’s dog is haunted by the absence of authority, by the missing “true word” (136) that would justify his existence. This absence is not merely epistemological but ontological: the dog is a creature of lack, a being whose very subjectivity is structured by the failure to be whole.
In this sense, the dog embodies what Lacan calls jouissance, a paradoxical enjoyment that exceeds pleasure and pain, and that marks the subject’s relation to the Real. The dog’s fasting becomes a method of philosophical inquiry, a way of confronting the void at the heart of being. Fasting, the dog says, is “the final and most potent means of research” (4). The dog’s hunger is not just physical but metaphysical; it is a hunger for meaning, for recognition, for a place in the symbolic order. His refusal to eat is not a rejection of nourishment but a protest against its unexamined givenness, a demand to know where food comes from, what sustains life, and why it is given without explanation. This theme culminates in the dog’s encounter with the hunting dog, a mysterious figure who sings a sublime song that seems to emanate from nowhere. This voice, Schuster argues, represents the emergence of the Real, the point at which language fails and enjoyment speaks. The dog’s investigations lead not to knowledge but to a confrontation with the limits of knowledge, with a silence that surrounds the voice. The voice is not a message but a manifestation, not a signifier but a symptom. It is the point at which the symbolic order breaks down and the Real intrudes.
Schuster’s reading of Kafka’s dog as a neurotic philosopher also engages with the broader question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy. He argues that Kafka’s dog is not merely a literary character but a conceptual persona, akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion in What is Philosophy? (1991) of the philosopher as a “conceptual persona.” The dog’s obsessive inquiries mark him as a figure of resistance, yet this resistance is not grounded in certainty or clarity, but instead is born of confusion, anxiety, and the compulsion to think. Kafka’s own relationship to philosophy was ambivalent. While he was deeply influenced by thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer, his fiction often parodies philosophical ambition. “Investigations of a Dog” is not a treatise but a tragicomic monologue, a caricature of the philosophical quest. Yet, as Schuster shows, this parody is itself a form of philosophy, a “new science” in which the dog’s investigations are not attempts to restore lost truths but instead to inhabit their absence.
This “new science” is a method rather than a system, in which the dog’s inquiries are marked by a refusal to accept the givenness of the world. He does not take nourishment for granted; he demands to know its origin. He does not accept music as entertainment; he interrogates its meaning. He does not accept freedom as a right; he questions its possibility. In each case, the dog’s inquiry is driven by a refusal to accept what is given, by a demand to know what cannot be known. This refusal is not nihilistic but generative, producing a new kind of thought that begins in failure and ends in silence. The dog’s investigations do not culminate in answers but in questions that cannot be answered, a catalogue of impossibilities rather than a system of truths. Yet it is precisely this impossibility that makes his thought valuable. As Schuster writes, “Kafka’s dog cannot not-think” (24): this compulsive thinking, this inability to stop questioning, is both the source of the dog’s suffering and the condition of his role as a philosopher. In an age of epistemological exhaustion and bureaucratic alienation, Kafka’s dog offers a new science of complaint, of constraint, and of enjoyment.
An Epistemology of Failure
One of the most compelling aspects of Schuster’s reading of Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog” is his development of an epistemology grounded not in mastery, but in failure and constraint. In contrast to traditional philosophical models that seek to overcome ignorance or resolve contradiction, Kafka’s dog exemplifies a mode of inquiry that begins with impossibility and remains faithful to it. Schuster’s analysis of this paradoxical epistemology draws on psychoanalytic theory, literary modernism, and the aesthetics of constraint to articulate a vision of thought that is defined by its limits. At the heart of this epistemology is the idea that failure is not a deviation from the norm but a constitutive condition of inquiry. Kafka’s dog is not a successful philosopher; he is a failed one. This failure is not a weakness, since it mirrors the very structure of his thought. His investigations are driven not by a desire to know but by a need to confront the impossibility of knowing.
Schuster links this structure of failure to Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death drive. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud posits a drive that operates beyond the regulation of pleasure and pain characterized by a compulsion to repeat, to undo, to return to an inorganic state. Schuster interprets the dog’s investigations as expressions of this drive. The dog’s refusal to eat, his obsessive questioning, his plaintive solitude are all symptoms of a deathly repetition that undermines the logic of mastery. Yet this repetition is also creative, producing new forms of inquiry, new ways of thinking, and new modes of being. This paradox of creative failure is exemplified in Schuster’s reading of Kafka’s “quixotic suicide” (25), a motif that appears in one of Kafka’s fragments, where Don Quixote, already dead, attempts to kill himself again. The image of a dead man trying to die, of a subject caught in an endless loop of failed negation, becomes a metaphor for Kafka’s conception of life as a continually arrested cancellation. The subject does not live by affirming itself but by its inability to negate itself, thus becoming the condition of vitality in Kafka’s universe.
Schuster’s epistemology of failure also engages with the aesthetics of constraint. Drawing on the experimental Oulipo tradition (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) in French literature, he proposes a parallel philosophical approach: “Oufipo” (245), an Ouvroir de Philosophie Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Philosophy. Just as the Oulipo writers use formal constraints to generate literary innovation, Kafka’s dog uses the constraints of his situation, including his ignorance, his isolation, and his silence, to produce a new kind of thought. His investigations are attempts to inhabit constraint rather than overcome it, to think from within its limits. This approach resonates with Schuster’s broader philosophical project, which seeks to rethink the nature of theory itself. Kafka’s dog is not a systematic thinker but a methodologist of the absurd: his fasting, his musical inquiries, his reflections on incantation are all techniques of inquiry that defy conventional epistemology. They are not designed to produce knowledge but to expose the limits of the symbolic order.
Schuster’s reading of Kafka’s stories as a form of office comedy further develops this theme. Characters like Kafka’s Blumfeld (from “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor”), Herman Melville’s Bartleby (from “Bartleby, the Scrivener”), and Nikolai Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich (from “The Overcoat”) are not just bureaucratic victims, they are also figures of failed alienation. Their obsessive copying, their refusal to serve, and their silent resistance all point to a deeper structure of constraint. Kafka’s critique of Gustave Flaubert’s encyclopedic accumulation of facts during the writing of Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is likewise reimagined as a critique of knowledge itself: not its content but its form, its gaps, its silences. The office becomes a blackly humorous site of epistemological breakdown, where the machinery of knowledge collapses into repetition and absurdity. In this context, Schuster’s reading of Kafka’s “The Burrow” is especially illuminating. The burrow is not just a physical space but a metaphor for the psyche, for the subject’s attempt to secure itself against the noise of the world. Yet this security is always undermined by an “impossible gaze” (104), a voice that cannot be located. The burrow becomes a site of paranoid enjoyment, a place where the subject is both protected and exposed. The dog’s investigations, like the burrower’s digging, are driven by a desire to find what cannot be found, to secure what cannot be secured. This paradox of security and exposure is central to Kafka’s epistemology. The dog’s inquiries are attempts to create a space of safety where knowledge can be stabilized and meaning secured, yet this space is always haunted by noise, by voices, and by gaps. The dog cannot escape the intrusion of the Real, the breakdown of the symbolic order, just as the burrow is not a refuge but a trap, a site of compulsive repetition and paranoid vigilance.
The Mythology of Reason
In the final thematic arc of How to Research Like a Dog, the philosophical stakes of Kafka’s canine narrator are elevated to the level of myth. Schuster argues that Kafka’s dog is not merely a neurotic philosopher or a failed theorist, but a mythologist of reason. This mythology is not a return to metaphysical grandeur but a parody of it, a tragicomic reimagining of the philosophical canon from the perspective of a creature who cannot not-think, cannot not-suffer, and cannot not-desire. Schuster’s analysis begins with Kafka’s engagement with classical myth by showing how, throughout his oeuvre, Kafka reworks figures such as Abraham, Prometheus, Odysseus, Poseidon, and Diogenes, transforming them into allegories of modern alienation and neurotic subjectivity. In “Investigations of a Dog,” this mythological impulse is refracted through the dog’s inquiries into nourishment, music, and freedom. The dog’s refusal to accept the givenness of food, his interrogation of musical performance, and his melancholic reflections on liberty all point to a deeper structure of myth that reveals the failures of reason.
Central to this mythology is the concept of freedom. The dog’s relation to freedom is not one of triumphant realization but of stunted growth. Freedom, in Kafka’s universe, is “ein kümmerliches Gewächs” (215), a malformed sprout, a crippled possibility. The dog’s investigations into freedom, in short, are both indispensable and hopeless, revealing the impossibility of autonomy and the necessity of heteronomy. The dog cannot be free because he cannot escape the structure of his desire, the silence of his community, and the absence of authority. This paradox of freedom is exemplified in the dog’s reflections on incantation. In one of the most striking passages of the story, the dog speculates that food is not given naturally but summoned through ritual. He imagines a “theory of incantation by which food is called down” (5), a symbolic system that mediates the relation between need and satisfaction. This theory is not empirical but magical, not rational but mythological, revealing the dog’s belief that nourishment is not a biological fact but a social construct, a product of ritual, authority, and symbolic exchange.
Schuster interprets this theory of incantation as a critique of institutional reason. The dog’s inability to accept the naturalness of food mirrors Kafka’s broader refusal to accept the naturalness of law, authority, and meaning. The dog’s inquiries into incantation expose the symbolic structure of power in which authority is maintained not through logic but performance, not through truth but belief. This critique of institutional reason leads to a political reading in which Kafka’s dog is recast as a dissident theorist, a creature who interrogates the symbolic order from within. His investigations are not revolutionary in the classical sense, but rather subversive, ironic, and melancholic. He is a “living curse word” (141), not overthrowing authority but exposing its failures, its silences, and its absurdities. This solidarity, however, is not grounded in shared truth but in shared enjoyment. Again drawing on Lacan, Schuster explores the concept of jouissance as a political factor. The dog’s fasting becomes a way of accessing a surplus enjoyment that exceeds the logic of utility and pleasure. Eating suppresses enjoyment; fasting reveals it. The dog’s hunger is not just physical but libidinal, a symptom of his alienation and his desire. His refusal to eat is a protest against the symbolic order, a demand for a different kind of satisfaction. Schuster’s reading of “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk” further develops this idea. In Kafka’s final story, Josephine’s music is not beautiful but incantatory, calling to the people and binding them together in a shared enjoyment, yet an enjoyment that is fragile, unstable, always on the verge of collapse. Josephine’s singing is not a performance but a ritual, not an aesthetic act but a political one that reveals the symbolic structure of desire, the rituals that sustain community, and the failures that haunt it.
The dog’s investigations into music, nourishment, and incantation form a triad of mythological inquiry. Each domain reveals a different aspect of the symbolic order: food as the site of biological need and social ritual; music as the site of aesthetic performance and communal binding; incantation as the site of symbolic mediation and institutional power. The dog’s refusal to accept the givenness of these domains is a refusal to accept the naturalness of the world: he demands to know where food comes from, what music means, and how authority is maintained. His inquiries are not empirical but mythological, not rational but symbolic. This mythology of reason is not a rejection of rationality but a reimagining of its limits. His investigations are not attempts to restore a lost order but to inhabit its ruins, to think from within the gaps. This is what makes Schuster’s book an important contribution to contemporary philosophy: a rethinking of reason, freedom, and enjoyment from the perspective of failure.
Schuster’s engagement with German Idealism further enriches this mythology. He draws on the “Oldest System-Program of German Idealism,” a fragment attributed variously to G.W.F. Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, and Friedrich Hölderlin, which calls for a “new mythology of reason” (222). Kafka’s dog, Schuster argues, fulfills this call by parodying the very idea of such a system. His investigations are not systematic but fragmentary, not foundational but symptomatic. He does not build a new mythology; he inhabits the ruins of the old. This ruinous mythology is deeply political. It reveals the failures of liberal democracy, the absurdities of bureaucratic authority, and the silences of institutional reason. Kafka’s dog is not a citizen but a subject, not a participant but a dissident. His inquiries are not acts of civic engagement but symptoms of alienation. He does not demand rights; he demands meaning. He does not seek justice; he seeks understanding. His politics is not one of action but of inquiry, not one of revolution but of resistance. In this way, Schuster reimagines Kafka’s dog as a model for political thought.
This is where Schuster’s notion of “involuntary insubordination” (155) becomes politically salient. Kafka’s dog does not choose resistance; he is compelled by it. His refusal is not heroic but symptomatic. He is not a revolutionary agent but a dissident subject whose very structure of thought is marked by constraint. Involuntary insubordination names the paradox of a subject who cannot not-resist, whose resistance is not a matter of will but of structure. The dog’s investigations cannot be satisfied and cannot be stopped. His politics is not one of action but of inquiry, not one of revolution but of melancholic resistance. This form of resistance is not grounded in clarity or conviction, but in confusion, anxiety, and the failure to be whole. The dog’s refusal to accept the givenness of nourishment, music, and freedom is not a gesture of defiance but a symptom of his alienation. He is not a master thinker but a failed theorist, and it is precisely this failure that makes him politically significant. His insubordination is involuntary because it arises from the structure of his subjectivity, from the impossibility of his integration into the community of dogs. He is not outside the system but caught within its gaps, its silences, and its contradictions. In this way, Kafka’s dog becomes a model for a new kind of political subject, one who resists not through power or agency, but through the very impossibility of agency. This is the politics of the impossible, a politics that begins not with the assertion of freedom but with the recognition of its stunted form. Schuster’s reading of Kafka is not only a reimagining of philosophy but a reimagining of politics that begins in failure, finding its truth only by realizing the impossibility of truth.
Conclusion
Aaron Schuster’s How to Research Like a Dog is a masterful and original work of philosophical criticism. It offers a sustained and rigorous reading of Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” transforming an apparently minor story into a major philosophical event. Through the figure of the dog, Schuster explores the structure of neurotic subjectivity, the epistemology of failure, and the mythology of reason. What makes Schuster’s book compelling is its refusal to treat Kafka’s dog as a mere literary curiosity. Instead, the dog becomes a model for thinking in constrained conditions and investigating the gaps in knowledge. His reading of Kafka is both rigorous and imaginative, scholarly and speculative. He brings together psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, and politics in a way that is rare and necessary. The book is a model of interdisciplinary thought, a testament to the power of constrained inquiry, and a celebration of the tragicomic vocation of philosophy. Kafka’s dog asks, “Where are my real colleagues?” and Schuster’s book answers: they are here, in the gaps, in the silences, in the failures, “everywhere and nowhere” (248).
University of Macau
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Aaron Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2024), 84. ↑
