Freud and the Non-European

 A brilliant reading of Freud's Moses and Monotheism by the late Edward Said. It originates as a talk given at the Freud Museum in London. After Said's talk, Jacqueline Rose responded, and her response was fittingly included in the Verso book.

Said concludes:

"Freud's uneasy relationship with the orthodoxy of his own community is very much a part of the complex of ideas so well described by Deutscher, who forgets to mention what I think is an essential component of it: its irremediably diasporic, unhoused character. This is a subject which George Steiner has celebrated with great elan for many years. But I would want to quality Deutscher by saying that this needn't be seen only as a Jewish characteristic; in our age of vast population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants, it can also be identified in the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside of his or her community. This is now a relatively widespread phenomenon, even though an understanding of what that condition means is far from common. Freud's meditations and insistence on the non-European from a Jewish point of view provide, I think, an admirable sketch of what it entails, by way of refusing to resolve identity into some of the nationalist or religious herds in which so many people want so desperately to run. More bold is Freud's profound exemplification of the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn, communal identity—for him, this was the Jewish identity—there are inherent limits that prevent if from being fully incorporated into one, and only one, Identity.

"Freud's symbol of those limits was that the founder of Jewish identity was himself a non-European Egyptian. In other words, identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered—and later, perhaps, even triumphed. The strength of this thought is, I believe, that it can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well—not through dispensing palliatives such as tolerance and compassion but, rather, by attending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound—the essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved or Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even within itself. This is a necessary psychological experience, Freud says, but the problem is that he doesn't give any indication of how long it must be tolerated or whether, properly speaking, it has a real history—history being always that which comes after and, all too often, either overrides or represses the flaw. The questions Freud therefore leaves us with are: can so utterly indecisive and so deeply undetermined a history ever be written? In what language, and with what sort of vocabulary? 

Can it aspire to the condition of a politics of diaspora life? Can it ever become the not-so-precarious foundation in the land of Jews and Palestinians of a bi-national state in which Israel and Palestine are parts, rather than antagonists of each other's history and underlying reality? I myself believe so—as much because Freud's unresolved sense of identity is so fruitful an example, as because the condition he takes such pains to elucidate is actually more general in the non-European world than he suspected."

Properly for a Freudian, Jacqueline Rose was far less optimistic about the prospects of such a notion, as she made clear in her response to Said's lecture. 

"What I am suggesting is that we move, in a sense, further along the path of Said's reading: that we should see Freud less as purely the diagnostician of—more squarely inside—the dilemma of identity which he describes. More simply, I am suggesting that the fixity of identity—for Freud, for any of us—is something from which it is very hard to escape—harder than Said, for wholly admirable motives, wants it to be. And on this subject, Moses and Monotheism also has a great deal to say. For if it offers an account, so brilliantly drawn out here this evening, of identities that know their own provisionality, it also does the opposite. In addition to bearing all the marks of late style so vividly characterized by Said—and, indeed, perhaps for that very reason—Moses and Monotheism is also one of Freud's most violent texts.... It offers the thesis, already adumbrated in Totem and Taboo, that an act of murder is constitutive of the social tie. In fact monotheism, together with the "advance in intellectuality" that is said to accompany it, takes hold only because of the bloody deed which presided over its birth. As has often been pointed out, you can reject the flawed historical argument of both these texts while accepting the underlying thesis that there is no sociality without violence, that people are most powerfully and effectively united by what they agree to hate. What binds the people to each other and to their God is that they killed him.

"It would be odd, then, if Freud himself was free of all the conflictual strains of identity to which, in this last work, he gives such potent and strange shape. What a people have in common, Freud suggests, is a trauma: a "knowledge"—to return to the quote from Said's Beginnings—so devastating as to be unbearable in one's down sight, and only slightly more bearable as a subject of psychoanalytic investigation. This is, if you like, the other half of the story. For trauma, far from generating freedom, openness to others as well as to the divided and unresolved fragments of self, leads to a very different kind of fragmentation—one which is, in Freud's own words, "devastating", and causes identities to batten down, to go exactly the other way: towards dogma, the dangers of coercive and coercing forms of faith? Are we at risk of idealizing the flaws and fissures of identity?...

"... I am less sanguine about the ability of new forms of nationalist to bypass the insanity of the group, especially given the traumatized history of both sides of the conflict in the Middle East. As Judge Richard Gladstone put it at the Ernest Jones Memorial Lecture in October, on the subject of the Albanians of Kosovo, we have an unrealistic expectation of how traumatized peoples will behave.

"And I believe that Freud was less sanguine too—not only because, as Edward Said puts it, history represses the flaw, but because the most historically attested response to trauma is to repeat it. It is for similar reasons that I believe Freud to have been more torn between belonging and not belonging as a Jew, between his own remarkable vision of the Jew as created by a non-European and his belief in the Jew as the bravest—even the last—embodiment of the best of the spirit of Europe; between the Jew as eternal foreigner and the Jew as someone who wanted to enter the world of nations, who wanted, deluded or not, to go home. This evening, Edward Said has paid the most extraordinary tribute to Freud by taking out of his last work a vision of identity as able to move beyond the dangers of identity in our times. If I dissent a little, it is not just because I am not sure that Freud was quite there, but also because I wonder—as we look at the world around us today—whether any of us ever will be."