The will of Dr. Schreber

Moscow: Gaidar Institute Press, 2022. – 448 p. – (Logos magazine library).

ISBN 978-5-93255-633-7
М13

The book examines the phenomenon of paranoia, the fundamental textbook on which is the "Memoirs of a Nervous Patient" written by a psychiatric hospital patient Daniel Paul Schreber in 1903. Victor Mazin re–reads Schreber's book, using mainly three keys – psychoanalytic (Freud, Lacan), related media-philosophical (Kittler, Stigler) and cultural-historical (Canetti, Santner).

Schreber's paranoia exposes the truths of the epoch – the intricacies of discursive threads of scientific spiritualism and neurology, the technology of emerging mass communication and positivism, the disease of power and the decomposition of the law. The deconstruction of Judge Schreber's text, undertaken by Viktor Mazin, not only prescribes the crisis of power relations at the end of the XIX century, but also prescribes the crisis of the ideology of neo-positivism of the first decades of the XXI century.