Santner, My Own Private Germany

[Dave Monroe]

And speaking of paranoia, Schreber, Deleuze and Guattari, and so forth,
from Eric L. Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's
Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996),
"Preface," pp. ix-xiv ...

It was obvious that paranoia had played a crucial role in the ideology
of National Socialism, that it had enjoyed the stauts of a
quasi-official state ideology, even religion.  It struck me that a
proper understanding of the successes of teh Nazis in mobilizaing the
population could only be achieved by a detailed study of the nature anbd
structure of paranoid structures as they functioned individually and
collectively.  Daniel Paul Schreber's Denkwurdigkeiten eines
Nervenkranken (Memoirs of my nervous illness), a work drawing on the
very phantasms that would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and the
end of empire, colaesce into the core elements of National Socialist
ideology, offered itself as a unique textual archive and "laboratory"
for just such a study. (ix)

Connections between the Schreber case and the paranoid core of National
Socialist ideology had already been noted, albeit in broad and
idiosyncratic strokes, by Elias Caneti in his remarkable treatise on
mass psychology [Crowds and Power], published in 1960.  The final two
chapters ... are dedicated to Schreber, whose Memoirs Canetti reads as
nothing short of a precursor text to that more famous paranoid
autobiography composed in confinement, Hitler's Mein Kampf....  For
Canetti, the crucial link between paranoia and totalitarian leadership
was not so much a matter of the historical content of the conspiratorial
"plots" against which the paranoid and the totalitarian leader
struggle--both Schreber and Hitler saw their aftes profoundly bound to
that of all sorts of historicaly specific dangers, including the danger
of Jewish contamination and corruption.  For Canetti, the link bewteen
paranoia and Hitlerite leadership was of a more formal nature.  The
paranoid and the dictator both suffer from a disease of power, which
involves a pathological will to sole survivorship and a concomittant
willingness, even drivenness, to sacrifice the rest of the world in the
name of that survivorship. (ix-x)

Although far more sympathetic to the ambiguously transgressive
dimensions of Schreber's delusions, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
ultimately second Canetti's reading of Schreber's text as a storehouse
of protofascist fantasies and fantasy structures.  Referring to
Canetti's work, they characterize the paranoid type as someone who
"engineers masses," as the 'artist of the large molar aggregates ... the
phenomena of organized crowds"  [Anti-Oedipus, p. 279, 364]....  There
will be much to say about Schreber's imaginary identifications, one of
which happens to be the Wandering Jew ... (x)

A somewhat different approach to the larger political implications of
teh Schreber material and its ultimate relevance to the study of German
fascism was broached by the American psychoanalyst William Niedeland
who, beginning in the 1950s, focused on the importnace of Schreber's
father, Daniel Moritz Schreber, in his son's mental illness.  According
to Niederland [The Schreber Case], Moritz Schreber, an ambitious
physician, author, and promoter of exrcise and physical fitness,
chronically traumatized his son by a series of aggressive orthopedicand
pedagogical interventions and controls.  Schreber's paranoia was,
Niederland suggested, a monstrous product of a monstrous
medicopedagogical project, the delusional elaboration of years of real
and systematic child abuse experienced at the hands of a domineering and
medically trained paterfamilias.  (x-xi)

These views were amplified and popularized in the early 1970s by Morton
Schatzman [Soul Murder], who, combining Niederland's and Canetti's
speculations on power, proposed a direct link between the "micro-social
despotism in the Schreber family and the macro-social despotism of Nazi
Germany."  Schatzman claimed that "Hitler and his peers were raised when
Dr. Schreber's books, preaching household totalitarianism, were popular"
... (xi)

The wager of this book is that the series of crises precipitating
Schreber's breakdown ... were largely the same crises of modernity for
which the Nazis would elaborate their own series of radical and
ostensibly "final" solutions.... the deepest structural layers of the
historical impasses and conflicts that would provisionally culminate in
the Nazi catastrophe.  In contrast to Canetti, however, my question will
ultimately be not how Schreber's delusional system prefigured the
totalitarian solution to the crises already afflicting the
bourgeois-liberal oder at teh turn of the century, but rather how
Schreber,who no doubt experienced the hollowing out of that order in a
profound way, managed to avoid, by way of his own series of aberrant
identifications, the totalitarian temptation. (x)

My hypothesis is that these impasses and conflicts pertain to shifts in
teh fundamental matrix of the individual's relation to social and
institutional authority, to the ways he or she is addressed by and
responds to the call of "official" power and authority.  These calls are
largely calls to order ... (xi-xii)

We cross the threshhold of modernity when the attenuation of these
performatively affectuated social bonds becomes chronic, when they are
no longer capable of seizing the subject in his or her
self-understanding.  The surprise offered by the analysis of
paranoia--which, as shall become clear, bears important structural
relations to hysteria ...--is that an "investiture crisis" has the
potential to generate not only feelings of extreme alienation, anomie,
and profound emptiness, anxieties associated with absence; one of the
central theoretical lessons of the Schreber case is precisely  that a
generalized attenuation of symbolic power and authority can be
experienced as the collapse of social space and the rites of institution
into the most intimate core of one's being.  The feelings generated
thereby are ... anxieties not of absence and loss but of overproximity,
loss of distance to some obscene and malevolent presence that appears to
have a dirtect hold on one's inner parts.  It is, I think, only by way
of understanding the nature of this unexpected, hitsorical form of
anxiety that one has a chance at understanding the libidinal economy of
Nazism, and perhaps of modern and postmodern forms of totalitarian rule
more generally. (xi-xii)

Schreber made his discoveries at the very moment he enetred, by way of a
symbolic investiture, one of the key centers of power and authority in
Wilhelmine Germany, the Saxon Supreme Court.  His discoveries were
grounded in an institution that his symptoms were, so to speak,
symptomatic, that they were a form of knowledge concerning profound
malfunctions in those politicotheological procedures that otherwise
sustain the very ontological consistency of what we call the
"world."(xiii)

... my work is informed by a concern that where there is a culture of
paranoia, fascism may not be far behind.  (xiv)

... note the possibilities here, however, "totalitarian" vs.
"antitotalitarian" (constructive vs. deconstructive?) paranoia?   At
least, in the latter case, provisionally?  I've long thought that there
was a study of those Pynchonian texts to be written called On the Uses
and Abuses of Paranoia for Life and Literature ((c) me).  And keep in
mind Bersani's characterization of reading, interpretation as "paranoid"
as well, perhaps even, after Berube, "pornographic" in that Pynchonian
sense as well, analysis, reconstruction.  We are all implicated in the
very act of reading, interpreting?  But that Canetti connection, given
that Pynchon seems to have been familiar with just about anything of
note and then some ...

"Identifications" = "impersonations," a la Young Stencil?  And recall
Slothrop's various "idnetifications" as well.  The "conditioning"
Schreber's father apparently put him through, that "mostrous
medicopedagogical project," reminds me of Jamf and Slothrop, the latter
indeed experiencing "attenutaion" and no small "investiture crisis" of
his own, esp. in the last section of Gravity's Rainbow.
"Overproximity," "some obscene and malevolent presence," "a direct hold
on one's inner parts," indeed ...

The phrase "household totalitarianism" evokes perhaps the Weissmann
"family" as well as the Slothrops.  In and endnote, Santner mentions as
well Alice Miller's For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing
and the Roots of Violence, which "offers a psychobiography of Hitler in
which the 'poisonous pedagogy' codified in Moritz Schreber's writings is
made largely responsible for Hitler's own paranoid hatred of Jews and
other enemies" (MOPG, p. 147, n. 6) ...