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In this carefully constructed book, Aaron Schuster takes as his starting point the contention that the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze poses ‘a profound and far-reaching philosophical challenge to psychoanalysis that is all the more challenging in that it is difficult to know exactly how to place it’ (Schuster, 2016, p. 29). Schuster's project then aims to explore this provocation by locating it within the history of a longstanding debate concerning the nature of pleasure. According to Schuster's argument, the concept of pleasure has held a problematic position in the history of western thought ever since Plato and Aristotle provided ‘two paradigms of pleasure, which oppose each other on practically every point’, the former defining it negatively, as a relief from distress, and the latter opting for a more positive description of pleasure as an ‘efflorescence of life’ (p. 101). This split, we are told, is then visible in Freud's work due to the asymmetry that exists between the ‘twisted cognitivism’ of Freud's psychological works, where the unconscious is presented as a kind of unthought thought, and his metapsychological works, where the unconscious is treated as a ‘quasi-machinic’ apparatus for managing external stimuli (p. 47). Finally, to bring this story up to date, Schuster shows how Deleuze's work can be placed alongside that of Jacques Lacan, as one of two modern attempts to resolve this Freudian asymmetry, and thus ultimately deal with the ‘trouble of pleasure’, by prioritizing a different aspect of the Freudian corpus. Without essentializing either of their positions, Schuster argues that while the Lacanian approach highlights Freud's work on language and leads to a broadly Platonic conception of desire-as-lack, the Deleuzian model pays closer attention to Freud's economic analysis of the libidinal drives and leads to a more Aristotelian understanding of desire-as-production.
In order to make his point about how Deleuze fits into this history