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 ...
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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" pre-occupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms which 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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Very Good. First Edition, First Printing. Published by Princeton University Press, 1996. Octavo. Gray cloth boards stamped in white. Book is very good; with no writing or names. Sharp corners and spine straight. Binding tight and pages crisp. Previous owner pencil underlining throughout. Boards have light shelf wear with a sticker and a partially removed sticker on back. No dust jacket. 200 pages. ISBN: 0691026289. 100% positive feedback. 30 day money back guarantee. NEXT DAY SHIPPING! Excellent customer service. Please email with any questions or if you would like a photo. All books packed carefully and ship with free delivery confirmation/tracking. All books come with free bookmarks. Ships from Southampton, New York. We Buy Books! Individual titles, libraries, collections. Message us if you have books to sell!
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Fine in Near Fine jacket. European History Book is in excellent condition. Binding is solid and square, covers have sharp corners, exterior shows no blemishes, text/interior is clean and free of marking of any kind. Dust jacket shows light2 shelf wear only, no tears. 200 pages.
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