Nemo nascitur artifex

My argument, as brilliant as it now seems banal, is that Schreber's transition, his pain and dysphoria, as also his desire to identify as feminine, to feel as a woman, to leave the law so as to right the law, was a simple reflection, among other causes, of the contemporary institutional prohibition of such visceral and visible performances of ambivalent or transitional gender identification. He was diagnosed as mentally ill, incarcerated as mad, and yet maintained throughout that he was sane, that his transition was real, and that the experience was sufficiently important to record in minute detail and to present to science and philosophy as an empirical datum. Medical categories change, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) moves on, and today we would more likely view the Judge's jouissance, the pain and the pleasure of transition, as expressing a profound conflict between convention and desire, between the erotic and the juridical, between affect and medicine, the repetition compulsion of the feminine and the failure of the repression barrier. What is surprising is that the antinomy was one of which Schreber was in significant measure aware and in which he was, at great personal cost, one could say at the expense of his life, far ahead of his times. This was his Luder, his wretchedness, but also, as I have detailed, his play, his self-conscious comedy of bellowing resistance, of increasingly ‘loud laughter’, his extra-judicial howl from the Asylum, as he became his chosen self, a Seer, a woman, a gnostic, in the sense of one who knows full well the comedy of human abandonment. How better to end than to pursue this novel thesis, the liminal figure of the jurist as jester, the serio-ludere of the ever theatrical performance of law enacted at its most radical by the sex-swapping Schreber. Looking back over the book, traversing the century and more since the great jurist penned his remarkable text, there is a great deal of insight and considerable foresight in his painful levity, his torment and his joy, his writing of a life that he was precluded, foreclosed from living.