ABSTRACT
The experience which Coetzee assigns to his fictional Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg of feeling utterly transfixed and claimed by the cry of a dog – then the need of a suddenly appearing beggar – crystallises the perils and the promise of possession. It also suggests that these threats and opportunities are shot like stars throughout our ordinary moral, spiritual and sexual lives. The nineteenth-century burgher Daniel Paul Schreber’s traumatic experience of possession, of becoming, in the most material sense, the wife of God, which is the subject of this concluding chapter, will no doubt seem more remote to most of us. And yet, as I’ll suggest, Schreber’s account of his life as God’s whore does resonate with normative experience and occasions his development of the most explicitly and materially elaborated theology of passive possession as a state of agonised sainthood.
