In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding
judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic
breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic. He would spend
the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once
released, he published his "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" (1903),
a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political
intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine.
Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the "Memoirs "into
the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of
Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible as a sort
of "nerve bible" of "fin-de-siecle" preoccupations and obsessions,
an archive of the very phantasms that would, after the traumas of
war, revolution, and the end of empire, coalesce into the core
elements of National Socialist ideology.
The crucial theoretical notion that allows Santner to pass from
the "private" domain of psychotic disturbances to the "public"
domain of the ideological and political genesis of Nazism is the
"crisis of investiture." Schreber's breakdown was precipitated by a
malfunction in the rites and procedures through which an individual
is endowed with a new social status: his condition became acute
just as he was named to a position of ultimate symbolic authority.
The "Memoirs" suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into
a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of
symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject's
self understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of
these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic
persecutor, some "other" who threatens our borders and our
treasures. Challenging other political readings of Schreber,
Santner denies that Schreber's delusional system--his own private
Germany--actually prefigured the totalitarian solution to this
defining structural crisis of modernity. Instead, Santner shows how
this tragic figure succeeded in avoiding the totalitarian
temptation by way of his own series of perverse identifications,
above all with women and Jews."
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