World-Craving: Rahel Varnhagen, Daniel Paul Schreber, and the Strange Promise of Paranoia

Abstract

This essay reads Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen (1957) alongside Sigmund Freud’s case history of paranoia, The Schreber Case (1911), two texts about 18th- and 19th-century personalities caught up in the gender and ethnic politics of their times. Noting affinities between the fantasies documented in Varnhagen’s and Schreber’s memoirs, I compare Seyla Benhabib’s and Eric Santner’s readings of these two texts as political, not psychological, documents. I propose a reading of paranoia positioned between Benhabib’s too optimistic dismissal of paranoia and Santner’s too tragic approach. The result is a new reading of Varnhagen’s story and an approach to paranoia as a potentially promising political affect. Might paranoia stand not just for world-withdrawal but also for world-building? If so, this would be in keeping with Arendt’s own treatment of her subject’s persecution fantasies not only as a “verdict against the world” but also as a desire for a world.