Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Credits
- Introduction: On the Case
- 1 Miscarriages of Transmission: Body, Text and Method
- 2 Silencing Schreber: Freud, Lacan, Rejection and Foreclosure
- 3 Morbus Juridicus: Crisis and Critique of Law
- 4 The Impure Theory of Law: The Metaphysics of Play-With-Human-Beings
- 5 The Judge’s New Body: Am I That (Woman)?
- Conclusion: Laughing in the Void
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Silencing Schreber: Freud, Lacan, Rejection and Foreclosure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Credits
- Introduction: On the Case
- 1 Miscarriages of Transmission: Body, Text and Method
- 2 Silencing Schreber: Freud, Lacan, Rejection and Foreclosure
- 3 Morbus Juridicus: Crisis and Critique of Law
- 4 The Impure Theory of Law: The Metaphysics of Play-With-Human-Beings
- 5 The Judge’s New Body: Am I That (Woman)?
- Conclusion: Laughing in the Void
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The-human-thought-of-recollection was used to indicate man's automatic need to imprint on his mind by repetition an important thought which had occurred to him.
Schreber was voluble as a scribe of his nervous condition and as an enraged, litigious and bellowing captive, held against his will, in the Sonnenstein Asylum. He voiced and penned his resistance at length, but as I have argued in the previous chapter, it is equally evident that the juridical aspects of his writings hit a blind spot and were scotomised by his translators, while his auditory inventions and bellowing, his anger at his treatment by the psychiatric institution, his rage and his pain, his gender dysphoria, his drive to transition, fell back then, on the petard of form, on deaf ears. Only upon final appeal to the Royal Court did his reason and juristic writing gain a limited acknowledgement, although his theology, philosophy and sexual politics were ignored and have been pretty much dismissed to the present day. His corpus, his text, is treated uniformly as being fit only for autopsy. It would seem that Judge Schreber's oeuvre falls still, and pivotally into Foucault's depiction of an archaeology of a silence: ‘The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.’ That censorship, the quietude of his reception, the refusal to attend to the language and speech of the Judge on its own terms, as a discourse in its own right, fully self-aware of its extremity, its fictions and its own alien law, should be understood quite literally. His discourse, his ‘running around’ as MacCabe puts it, was blocked by the extant powers, both institutional and interpretative, and the prior perception and categorisation of his condition, a malady and madness always known in advance, precluded any candid scrutiny of the thesis, his ennui with law, his desire to create, to legislate, and most radical of all, the bodily transformation that he propounded in his magnum opus. As my focus begins with the juristic discourse of the Judge I will concentrate on the Freudian impasse, the absence of an oeuvre as constitutive of madness in his and later in Lacan's reading and pathologisation of the Memorabilia.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Schreber's LawJurisprudence and Judgment in Transition, pp. 32 - 60Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018