Purloined Paranoia
The Insistence of Schreber
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895709 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Adleman (0000-0002-4563-773X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 44-62 |
| Publication date | 2020-07-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-2019-011 |
| OpenAlex | W3128289669 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
University of Chicago German-Jewish studies scholar Eric L. Santner is a singular psychoanalytic thinker. His criticism stands out for the finesse with which he brings Lacanian thought into resonance with Foucault’s ideas about the advent of modernity. To this end, Santner’s My Own Private Germany performs a nuanced meta-reading of Lacan’s reading of Freud’s reading of fin-de-siècle Saxon jurist Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Surprisingly, many psychoanalytic humanities scholars have never encountered the Schreber affair and know little of Lacan’s work beyond his “Seminar on The Purloined Letter.” However, the portrait Santner paints of what I call Schreber’s “purloined paranoia” is arguably even more replete with significance for the future of Lacanian thought across the disciplines. His supple analysis of the travails of Schreber’s “psychotic” text, as it passes hands from thinker to thinker, tracks the itinerary of subjectivity in a paranoid milieu defined by the impossibility of a metalanguage or God’s-eye-view. Through this lens, Schreber’s gender-bending text, and the cascade of interpretations it produced (and continues to produce), indexes a modern “crisis of sovereignty” whereby phallic authority is slowly divested of its long-standing libidinal buttressing as the calamity of media modernity sends seismic tremors through the architecture of the Lacanian unconscious. Drawing on the work of the aforementioned thinkers and others, this article works through the import of Schreber to our particular historical moment. As Santner’s work reveals, a historiography of Schreber’s text and its cascade of effects gestures toward vital new pathways for Lacanian reading strategies in the digital twenty-first century
Art · Art history · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Paranoia · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Subjectivity · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |