The Cosmo-Body-Politic

Abstract

The year 1903 saw the publication of one of the most extraordinary discussions of corporeality and cosmic connection ever to impact on occidental history. The work, entitled Memoirs of My Nervous Illness was written by Daniel Paul Schreber, presiding judge of the Court of Appeal at Dresden and subsequent subject of Freud’s well-known case study of psychosis. The Memoirs constitute a fascinating record of the illness for which Schreber was hospitalised, an account which elaborates unprecedented possibilities for bodily reconfiguration via a unique technology of transhuman contact. A work of such labyrinthine complexity defies any easy summary, yet there is an important sense in which Schreber achieves what very few thinkers in the Western tradition have managed: namely, a sustained meditation on the integration of human life with extra-human systems — a genuinely exploratory rather than a merely reflective philosophy.

I realize that such a conception, according to which one must think of my body on our earth as connected to other stars by stretched out nerves, is almost incomprehensible to other people considering the immense distances involved; for me however as a result of my daily experiences over the last six years there can be no doubt as to the objective reality of this relation.

(Daniel Paul Schreber (1903), Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, pp. 118–19)