Passions and Perversions
The symbolic maps of contagion
Willa Smart and Beckett Warzer
One summer morning in 1893, the accomplished German judge Daniel Paul Schreber awakens with the now famous fantasy: “I had a feeling which, thinking about it later when fully awake, struck me as highly peculiar. It was the idea that it really must be rather pleasant to be a woman succumbing to intercourse.” The appearance of this fantasy sets the course for the trajectory of the remainder of Schreber’s life, from the termination of a prestigious appointment to the Saxon Supreme Court that autumn to a seven year stay as a patient at the Royal Public Asylum at Sonnenstein. Schreber publishes her Memoirs of My Nervous Illness in 1903, as part of her successful attempt to win back legal competency. In her Memoirs, we learn more about this precipitating fantasy in which she “succumb[s] to intercourse” as a woman part of a vast cosmology and taxonomy of minor gods and divine forced-feminization. She also likens her experience of her body to an imaginary Jewish body that, influenced by antisemitic tropes of the time, is “unmanned” or undergoes a male to female sex change. Schreber’s Memoirs went on to have a life of their own, having remarkable and durable influence on psychoanalytic thought beginning with Freud’s case study of the Memoirs in 1911, and subsequently generating such a profusion of analyses, interpretations, and appropriations as to constitute an academic subfield.
One of these treatments, Eric Santner’s 1996 book My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, reads Schreber’s life and body for the inner cultural logic that led to European fascism. Returning to Santner’s text today allows us to better understand the role that anti-trans sentiment has in nascent contemporary fascisms, and the passions behind the vigorous production of anti-trans legislation. Schreber’s fantasies do not appear to us today in exactly the same light that stirred the judge from her beautiful fantasy in 1893. But reading Santner’s reading of Schreber helps to index the enduring political uses to which trans people are put—the stakes of cultural fantasies about sex, and that of submission to sex’s mutability.
While Freud’s case study of Schreber centers on the judge’s paternal and fraternal relationships, reading her illness as founded in “an outburst of homosexual libido,” Santner uses Schreber’s body and text much more promiscuously: he sees, in her perilous break from German masculinity and her fantasies about Jewishness and effeminacy, a key to understanding the modern world-system. Like a number of other commentators who have worked to situate Schreber as a historical subject rather than a purely psychological subject, Santner draws a link between the systematicity of Schreber’s psychosis and the systematicity of the totalitarianism that came to power in Germany in the decades following Schreber’s nervous breakdown. Contrary to influential readings by Elias Canetti and William Niederland, though, Santner argues against a reading of Schreber as a proto-fascist. In Santner’s estimation, Schreber’s writings reveal how she “managed to avoid, by way of [her] own series of aberrant identifications, the totalitarian temptation.” It would be naive, however, to recruit Schreber for a simple narrative of resistance to state power: despite her successful appeal for release in 1902, she was re-institutionalized several years later and died incarcerated in 1911. Or as Santner cautions, “one should not, as they say, try this at home.” Such a proscription is a bit more complicated, though, for those of us who see something other than symptom in Schreber’s fantasies of feminization. Those of us, that is, who, under different terms than those of Schreber, have tried this at home. This being transsexuality.
Ψ
Schreber’s fantasies about feminization don’t fit into the contemporary, mainstream trans narrative of identity and identification. Referring to Schreber with feminine pronouns is not to identify her “correctly” per se, as much as it is to make ourselves complicit with her in her passions and fantasies. Besides a certain relationship to fantasy, we also share with Schreber the experience of living—or not living—through a series of capitalist crises and their appropriations by reactionary projects of race and nation. Santner situates Schreber in the scene of fin de siècle anomie, quoting the eugenicist, cultural critic, and co-founder of the Zionist movement, Max Nordau: “There is a sound of rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with today. Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall, because man is weary, and there is no faith that it is worth an effort to uphold them. Views that have hitherto governed minds are dead or driven hence like disenthroned kings.... Meanwhile interregnum and all its terrors prevails.” Nordau’s cynicism indexes a widespread anxiety among bourgeois Germans over the interracial and interclass contact brought about by urbanization. For Nordau this would crystallize in his diagnosis of civilizational “degeneration”; and in a similar fashion, his contemporary Richard von Krafft-Ebing would theorize sexual “pathologies” as an unfortunate product of modern cities. As with today’s anxieties over the threat of trans people to tradition and “family values,” Schreber’s historical context is one where we can see the racial and colonial foundations of anti-trans/queer rhetorics masquerading as morals and civility. In the present, this masquerade persists most starkly in the symbiotic bind of Zionism and trans panic, both dependent on absolute hierarchies of civility and civilization, and weaponizing the rhetorics of ethics and even ‘social justice’ to authorize their genocidal projects.
Building on analyses by Benjamin, Bourdieu, and Butler, Santner sketches a picture of the performative nature of institutional validation and interpellation (what Santner calls “symbolic investiture”). In other words, what makes me a husband, a judge, a PhD student, is in the end a long chain of other people saying or otherwise affirming that I am, that this is who I am. The arbitrary foundations of this chain of signification are a kind of cursed knowledge that under normal conditions must be repressed, but under conditions of crisis, what is “‘rotten in law’... begins to leak through its normally circumscribed spaces.” The givenness and naturalness of law in moments of “investiture crisis” begin to fray, which raises the question of where libidinal energy goes and where it gets redirected when it is no longer able to be invested in an integral nation or tradition.
Santner’s answer is that an investiture crisis, “a generalized attenuation of symbolic power and authority,” does not register solely as a generalized anxiety over the breakdown of abstract social institutions, but is experienced intimately, in “the most intimate core of one’s being” as a visceral overproximity, as contamination. “Once it emerges from the individual and ‘political’ unconscious, this dependency is experienced as decadence, as a chronic wasting away of one’s symbolic power and authority. The decay and rottenness produced thereby are figured by the work of individual and social fantasy as contaminations, as a leakage of toxins—and transgressive intoxications—emanating always from the other side of a social boundary.” Hence a heightened anxiety over which forces (or which people) ultimately determine one’s symbolic position in society; hence a concern over the contaminations of “ideology.” This “other side” in Schreber’s context is inhabited by the specters of femininity and Jewishness—the two major poles of Schreber’s ambivalent identifications, while masculinity is figured as that which is ordinarily immune to these contaminations. Likewise, cissexuality and whiteness today function as unmarked positions beset by the decadence and contaminations of transness and racialization.
“transphobia is less the motivating force behind these laws than the means by which their popular support is secured”
Despite Schreber’s fantasies of feminization, Santner’s book is not explicitly about transness. But it is a book about sociohistorical crises and their registration in the social and individual body—hence its relevance to a discussion of trans panic today. Santner’s insight about the interiorization and somatization of crisis goes some way toward explaining the visceral dimensions of disgust and hatred that course through this panic. However, the hatred of trans people does not on its own foment legislative action. That takes money. And while we don’t doubt that lobbyists’ funding and lawmakers’ support of these efforts are, indeed, transphobic, the calculation and coordination required among them belies such a singular motive. Kay Gabriel’s contextualization of the trans panic within a broader right wing program of disempowering organized workers is helpful here: as Gabriel notes, much of this legislation has centered on education and health care, two sectors that in recent years have seen widespread (and successful) labor actions to secure more sustainable living and working conditions. In this sense then, transphobia is less the motivating force behind these laws than the means by which their popular support is secured: trans people are cast as a malevolent, corrupting force, serving as a scapegoat and projection screen for anxieties over the ongoing erosion of social infrastructure.
Gabriel understands the targeting of trans people and those who make our lives more possible as opportunistic, as really about the ruling racial and economic class securing continued power through social control. Legislating against trans life serves the status quo economy. But what does hatred of trans people serve in the affective economy of the American body politic? Anti-trans sentiment has always been a part of American history, but in recent years, it has reached a new level of fervor. Santner’s book helps us understand why this appetite for hatred is growing now, and what, in the social and individual body, that hatred is satisfying.
Ψ
Again, a crisis of symbolic investiture does not only manifest as crumbling social infrastructure, or as a publicly fraying social fabric. It is also deeply experienced inside an individual body. Santner shows that our social concepts, such as what a woman is, or what a man is, are given meaning through their continued, performative reiteration. This reiteration, this “(repetitive) demand to live in conformity with the social essence with which one has been invested, and thus to stay on the proper side of a socially consecrated boundary, is one that is addressed not only or even primarily to the mind or intellect, but to the body.” When the iterative traditions that constitute these socially consecrated boundaries start faltering, when there is a crisis of investiture in shared social meaning and value, this produces feelings within individual bodies of alienation, anxiety, and fatigue. But, again, an investiture crisis is also experienced as an anxious overproximity, an “obscene and malevolent presence that appears to have a direct hold on one’s inner parts.” We see this anxiety expressed in anti-trans ideologues’ concern about “ideology” as such—not only “gender ideology,’’ but also critical race theory.
While on the surface what appears to be in question is a number of more or less disparate claims—“gender and sex are not binary and can be changed,” “America was founded on and remains structured by a logic of white supremacy,” “children should have the right to bodily autonomy,” and so on—these claims are formally bound together under the sign of “ideology.” The specific content of these claims is disputed and rejected, but at a structural level, what is really objected to is their function as ideology, as a set of ideas that can take root within a body and grow, producing changes in that body, and changing the traditions which that body honors and reproduces. If “gender ideology” has become a kind of transnational rallying cry for reactionaries, what is perhaps more at issue here is this function of “ideology” than of “gender.” What in the end is so unacceptable about trans people is not so much our gender “transgressions” as our embodiment of the contingent nature of social meaning, of “the subject’s dependency on tradition in the widest possible sense, on the transmission of symbolic power from the outside—from institutions, authorities, and ancestors—in a word, the subject’s irreducible dependency on procedures of investiture.” Specifically, this is our embodiment of the capacity for those traditions to change.
Such an embodiment, though, rarely looks like progressive development. Certainly, the change that Schreber embodied looks more like looped compulsion, like chronic overwhelm, than it does like linear self-actualization or restorative cure. As Santner puts it, “Rather than trying to restore [her] symbolic identity by repressing the drive dimension underlying it, [Schreber] finds a kind of relief by entering more deeply into its patterns of repetition and acting them out.” Schreber’s fantasies of feminization, Jewishness, and sexual promiscuity can’t be straightforwardly recuperated as a utopian queer or trans longing for an identity or set of relations not actualizable in her lifetime. It’s clear she suffered, and not only because the expression of these fantasies was met with violent suppression in the form of incarceration.
“Schreber allowed herself to be undone, allowed herself to be overcome by the knowledge that her assigned subject position as a white German man was contingent.”
At the same time, as Avgi Saketopoulou writes, paraphrasing Kathryn Bond Stockton, one’s subjection to re traumatizing, perverse, and transgressive fantasies and identifications is often experienced “against [one’s] will but in accord with [one’s] desire.” For Saketopoulou, such experiences of overwhelm in sexuality—or more simply, such perversions—are vested with political potential, but like Santner, she warns against the romanticization of such states. Succumbing to fantasy invites risk: of psychic destabilization, of state oppression and psychiatric control, of not getting what you thought you wanted. But risking overwhelm also invites new possibilities of relation between one’s body and the sociohistorical scene into which one is non-consensually born. To make good use of one’s traumatic history means to “[enter] more deeply into its patterns of repetition,” rather than seeking to heal or eliminate trauma—a phobic response that leads to compulsive repetition rather than the possibility of transformation. In Saketopoulou’s terms then, we might think of Schreber as a “traumatophilic” subject. Even as Schreber’s Memoirs served the very pragmatic end of securing her (albeit temporary) decarceration, throughout the text she avows her belief in the importance and reality of what her clinicians characterized as delusions. That is, Schreber allowed herself to be undone, allowed herself to be overcome by the knowledge that her assigned subject position as a white German man was contingent. Allowing her body to be vulnerable to that knowledge, she was perturbed and seduced by the possibility of being something else.
Santner’s provocation is that in Schreber’s cultivation of “an ensemble of ‘perverse’ practices, identifications, and fantasies,” she manages to reroute, refigure, and refuse the “totalitarian temptation” that would come to seize many of her contemporaries. In other words, Schreber illustrates and embodies one possible response to, and refusal of, the conditions of a moral panic. Schreber’s twinned identification with Jewishness and femininity—that is, with positions of abjection at the turn of the twentieth century—undermines the integrity of the symbolic investiture on which the state depends. Such a transgression is met with state violence, but also, at a more ambient level, it is met with disgust and experienced as a violation and contamination of the individual body. Once again, this is a familiar enough dynamic from the perspective of the moral panic over trans people today. Of course, the instructiveness of Schreber’s example hinges not just on her relation to social crisis, but to her own gender. A number of scholars in the twenty-first century have affirmed Schreber’s transness, perhaps most notably Trish Salah and Patricia Gherovici. For our purposes, reading Schreber as trans, which is not a possibility entertained by Santner, isn’t a matter of rescuing an identity from the archive of historical repression and transposing it onto the present. Instead, on the one hand, it’s a matter of affirming Schreber’s assertion of the veracity of her fantasies and, on the other hand, of tracking the ways that gender and its vicissitudes are invested in by those who claim to love and/or hate us.
What’s clear is that whatever refusal of moral panic that we might locate in Schreber’s ensemble of fantasies and identifications cannot be neatly partitioned into discrete racial or gender or class identities. As Santner makes very clear, Schreber’s fantasies of being feminized and of being Jewish are not separate desires, but are bound together, co-constitutive. That’s not to say that Schreber’s transness is any less real for its proximity to this racialized fantasy, but it does point to an element of social determination and signification in the animation of these fantasies. Schreber’s identification with femininity was not a passing phase or transient symptom—later in the memoirs she discusses regularly wearing women’s clothing, both in public and in private—but it is also clear that this identification with effeminacy cannot readily be separated from its registration as a kind of social denigration, of a proximity to the contaminations of nonwhiteness. While Santner’s attention to the sociohistorical grounds of Schreber’s identifications is what ultimately prevents him from understanding Schreber as a trans woman, it is ironically also what makes his text instructive for an analysis of the contemporary trans panic, which likewise treats transition as a matter of social forces, of contagion, and of cultural decline. To follow Schreber, or to side with Schreber, means not necessarily to identify with her fantasies and her cosmology, but to side with contamination and perversity and the pleasures that may be suffered there.