Maria Aristodemou
Aaron Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (MIT Press, 2024)
The narrator dog of one of Kafka’s short stories, “Investigations of a Dog”, declares that “all knowledge, all questions and all answers are contained in the dog.” Aaron Schuster takes this statement to heart and resolves to continue Kafka’s dog’s unfinished philosophical project. The result is a long playful journey into philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature that takes us past Homer, Plato, Cervantes, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Melville, Benjamin, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze & Guattari, to name just a few of the myriad writers Schuster scrutinizes on behalf of his canine colleague. That these excursions do not feel out of place is because Kafka’s dog, and Schuster, have one overarching goal in mind: an investigation into freedom. By the end of our journey we are convinced Kafka’s dog is a worthy companion to the German idealists and we should no longer be talking of cogito, but of “dogito” and that Hegel’s absolute spirit is not a bone but a “bone marrow”. In short, highly enjoyable and highly recommended.
Aoife O’Donoghue
Nell McCafferty, In the Eyes of the Law (Ward River Press, 1981)
In the Eyes of the Law by Nell McCafferty is a rich book. Rich in the sense of its searing critique of the humdrum day to day life of courts, but also in the writing’s quality, particularly its biting wit. Nell McCafferty was a feminist journalist from Derry who made an incredible contribution to the (ongoing) process of throwing off the shackles of colonial, patriarchal and religious control of the Irish state. Her writing about the law is outstanding. Clear eyed in her account of Ireland as never as homogenous as others might like to present it. In the Eyes of the Law, first published in 1981, she retells the stories of those on the edge of society in Ireland and their interactions with the courts, according them a dignity that the state often did not. The judiciary are the subject of caustic analysis, with each named and critiqued that contrasts with the care in which she talks about those before them. This is an excellent book on the law.
Anna Doyle Wheeler and William Thompson’s 1825Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political, and Hence in Civil and Domestic is in every sense a forgotten classic. A brilliant feminist socialist account of all that was wrong with UK society – including at that point Ireland – and what absolutely needed to be dismantled. They foresee and write in terms that are extraordinarily prescient. It is also quite witty. ‘Awake, arise, shake off these fetters’ they write. We still need to.