Frank Ruda reviews How to Research Like a Dog

Aaron Schuster. How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2024. 352 pp.

12 June 2025

Canine-Fodder

In 1946, one year after the end of the second World War, still in American exile, and one year before the publication of his Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer wrote a poetic essay called “The Dogs’ Declaration of Independence,” in which the author assumed the position of a dog demanding and declaring specific human rights for dogs (including the right to eat, drink, sleep, sniff, bark, bite, to raise one’s leg, stray off the right path, play foolish games, or indulge in “a reasonable degree of general destruction”).[1] Some of these activities have been denigrated by human arrogance—sniffing is supposedly swinish and the most intimate olfactory communication is perceived to be mere healthcare—and others presumed to be a human privilege: playing bridge or the like is supposedly more cultured than dog-play and unmeasured destruction has become the defining feature of the human species itself. But for Max Dogheimer—my bad pun—the time has now come to declare the dog to be more human than mankind. For man has degenerated, entartet, which literally means de-specied itself. Thereby man has lost the right to claim humanity, which is why dogs must declare their independence, claim their very own unalienable rights and become spokespeople for a true panhumanism. Only the dogs, man’s best friends (if affirming their independence), can do this.

How did human beings freely bring themselves to lose their freedom? The answer to this demanding question leads straight into the heart of Aaron Schuster’s new book on Kafka: How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science. In its twenty-one chapters that address a surprising panoply of panhuman phenomena like swimming, music, food, fasting, enjoying, complaining, and philosophizing (to name just some), Schuster develops an explosive and exploded reading of Kafka’s unfinished 1922 story “Investigations of a Dog.” He proposes to read the dog’s research as a new scientific enterprise that is taking its shape during an epoch characterized by the invention of psychoanalysis. The declaration of canine independence can thereby be linked to the locus-independent research activity that is embodied by the (discourse of the) university. But the dog’s novel science is new because it methodically examines its very own (conditions of) existence, its own having come into being. Therefore the dog examines—inter alia—the very self-sabotage, the self-debunking, the destabilization and undoing (of the dog’s master) that must have occurred for him to end up a researcher and thus independent in the first place. That “the Big other seems to have disappeared from the canine universe” instructs this research (p. 65). So, again, what happened?

Schuster—with Kafka and his dog, and through mobilizing Kafka’s mole, his mouse-singer, and a bachelor—thinks through a situation marked by (the consequences of) the self-imposed disappearance of the dog’s master. What results from such “fall of authority” is a universe populated by institutions that continue to operate but lack the proper mandate, institutions that live on after the demise of their legitimacy (p. 150). Thereby they are turned into mere offices that cannot but produce comic effects. But Kafka, for Schuster, is ultimately the author of the peculiar genre of “the screwball tragedy” (p. 23). This is what we come privy to by looking at the situation puppy-eyed. For “since to be a dog means to serve,” a dog without a master cannot but undergo a transformation of its very own being (p. 146). What is a dog without a master after all? A creature without place and therefore determined by “a lifelong hesitation” about itself (p. 120). This comes with the neurotic temptation to indulge in myth-making activities (about one’s own genesis), but it ultimately means—and here one can see in what sense Schuster seeks “to explore the parallels between Kafka and psychoanalysis,” for both “meet on the research field of self-sabotage”—that the dog is “the ultimate name for subject in Kafka” (pp. 20, 242, 108). If the subject in modernity, which for Schuster is defined by the crisis of authority, has a name, it is “dog.”

Schuster reads Kafka from “a fresh perspective” and shows how he was aware that we, the modern dogs, are out of place, constitutively uprooted, stray dogs (p. 41). He shows how modernity aims to institute the authority of knowledge—the university discourse—as a compensation of the hole the absent master left (as much in the dogs as in any form of discourse). But the dog now turned researcher, theoretically exploring its own displaced being—the dog as subject and theorist of modern subjectivity is the advent of “autotheory”—does also not find a place within the university (p. 242). Because the strange “new causality” that the modern dog brings to the fore and embodies highlights the non-derivability of subjectivity from any existing form of knowledge (p. 46). Modern dogdom emerges from the gaps of knowledge, and its own theoretical examination cannot but lead into a “science of gaps” (p. 240). Yet the university, which is the only potential place for the theorists of that which does not have a place (the subject), does not really have a place for canine theory, for the theory of the subject, or, in Schuster’s translation: for philosophy. Because subjectivity is never just about knowledge nor about reason. Modern subjectivity rather embodies “reason with a glitch,” reason astray (p. 228). In this reading, Kafka’s literature debunks the idea that language could be considered our stable house of being. Rather, it is a kennel with dislocated entrances we cannot close. Those who made it are gone and provide the stuff for all kinds of mythical explanations. Schuster’s reading of Kafka’s dog-science aims to make us see the kennel as what it is: a gappy and unfinished construction that we must but cannot inhabit.

[1] Max Horkheimer, “Unabhängigkeitserklärung der Hunde” (1946), in Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949, vol. 12 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), p. 342.