Jibes at Trump, parodies of Freud, and profanities against God abound in this irreverent blitz, in which I.M. Scheisse blasphemously retells Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), an account by the esteemed German judge Daniel Paul Schreber on his paranoid schizophrenic delusions of a nerve-ray cosmology and God’s emasculation of him into a woman. In this chaotic adaptation, Daniel Paul Schreber is redubbed Daniel Paul Trump, whose story is now retold as “Trump’s desire to be transformed into a whore,” drawing on, of course, the whole Freudian gamut of castration complex, infantile sex drive, etc. In this black-and-white, bawdy bricolage, deliberately coarse painting, grainy photographs, and scratchy handwritten text detail Daniel Paul Trump’s narcissistic and self-destructive delirium: “If God wants to fuck me, there is no conflict or disgrace.” Parallels are drawn between Trump’s hubris and misogyny and Schreber’s own delusions of divine grandeur and hierarchical ordering of masculine and feminine salvation. The zine ends with a triumphant, “Trump was God’s own WHORE, and he would change ze world!”
Enthusiastically vulgar and offensive towards all its depicted parties, Paranoia completely co-opts Schreber’s actual biography for political and atheistic purposes, so do not read it expecting sensitivity for mental illness. With such an expectation set aside, prepare for a rapid, exhilarating surge into a tangle of obscenity in all directions.
