Deleuze, Sense, Verb, Schreber: The Impossible Series

Abstract

Daniel Paul Schreber, the author of Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, is without a doubt an important and constant reference in the writings of Gilles Deleuze. Is this relation invertible? What would Schreber's critique of Deleuze be like? The paper demonstrates that the starting point of this impossible critique is the problem of the verb, which is one of the key concepts in The Logic of Sense. Schreber's specific use of the verb wundern thereby emerges as the materialistic radicalization of Deleuze's concept of the “undetermined infinitive” and at the same time provides a correction of the linguistic formulas in Freud’s analysis of Schreber.