ABSTRACT
In this chapter I propose a new interpretation of one of the most fascinating, yet also most inaccessible texts of the twentieth century, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken , translated into English as “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.” Drawing on Bernhard Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology, I read Schreber’s text as a performative effort to create order in his experience through responding to alien forces that threaten to overwhelm and destroy him. Schreber’s responding takes place on several levels, correlating with a variety of ordering processes: the psychological, the social-historical and the epistemological-ontological. The concept of a responsivity to the alien allows us to treat these levels as intertwined and, consequently, to address Schreber’s text as a whole, creating a unity between its heterogeneous elements.
