Exploring the interplay between sexuality and theory, Eric Santner's work delves into the allure of critical thinking since the 1960s, challenging the prevailing "postcritical turn." By weaving his intellectual history with personal experiences, he reexamines major theoretical paradigms, emphasizing their transformative potential beyond mere suspicion. Santner argues that dismissing these theories overlooks their vibrant, life-affirming qualities, ultimately revealing the profound "gay science" that underpins their appeal and the libidinal energy they evoke.
Exploring the intersection of sovereignty and the human body, Eric L. Santner examines how the rituals of kingship persist in contemporary democratic societies. He argues that the "carnal" aspects of sovereignty have shifted to the populace, where the legacy of royal authority manifests in the psyche and physicality of modern individuals. By connecting influential thinkers like Freud and Kafka, Santner reinterprets the implications of modernity, highlighting the transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship and its impact on politics, psychoanalysis, and literature.
In his own reading of Rainer Maria Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open
as the proper domain of human existence, but suggests that human life remains
haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter
Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges have a biopolitical aspect.
In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, the newly appointed presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, faced a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic, spending the remainder of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. After his release, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), detailing real and imagined persecution, political intrigue, and experiences of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's case study of Schreber transformed the Memoirs into a key psychiatric text on paranoia. Eric Santner's analysis presents Schreber's work as a "nerve bible" reflecting the obsessions of the fin-de-siècle, foreshadowing elements of National Socialist ideology following the upheavals of war and revolution. Central to Santner's argument is the concept of the "crisis of investiture," which highlights how Schreber's breakdown coincided with his new social status as a figure of authority. The Memoirs illustrate a shift into modernity marked by crisis and uncertainty, where traditional rites of investiture fail to redefine the subject's self-understanding, leading to perceptions of external threats. Contrary to other political interpretations, Santner argues that Schreber's delusions did not anticipate totalitarianism; instead, he navigated this crisis through perverse identifications, particularly with women and Jews, thus evading the totalitarian temptation.
