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Some ninety-odd years since its publication, Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken continues to sustain a thriving cottage industry in Schreber studies—far less developed perhaps than the critical industries spawned by the work of Joyce, Kafka, or Pynchon, but no less likely to subject its participants to the effects of a certain preprogramming (as Freud himself discovered early on).1 In a sense, however, the Schreber industry has thrived precisely because its practitioners have refused to take Schreber at his word: either because they have tended to reduce his megalomaniacal fantasies to the status of simple by-products of Oedipal conflict (with Moritz Schreber, Paul Flechsig, or God Himself), or because they have passed over the detail of Schreber's cosmological scheme in their rush to read the despotism of the Schreberian father as proto-fascistic, as the coming Nazism writ small.
In this extraordinarily rewarding new book, Eric Santner suggests that taking Schreber seriously means learning to appreciate Schreber's sense for the dirty little secret of symbolic power—its dependence upon forms of “tautological nonsense” (e.g., “The law is the law”), the idiotic repetition of which serves to obscure the fact that such power is “without ultimate justification or legitimation” (10-11,43). What Schreber's cosmological delusions reveal, in other words, is “the inner ‘rottenness’ of every symbolic investiture insofar as it remains dependent on a dimension of performative force, compulsion, drive”—a dimension that Santner clearly equates with “enjoyment,” jouissance (37,95). To take Schreber seriously, in short, is to reread the Memoirs at the point of intersection of several powerful theoretical optics: Benjamin's work on violence as the “something rotten in law,” Bourdieu's uncovering of a “performative magic” inherent to all acts of symbolic investiture, and Žižek's insistence upon an obscene enjoyment necessarily secreted by symbolic power and aut