Language’s navel in Freud’s Moses

Freud’s study. Courtesy Freud Museum London

Abstract

The article begins by presenting the collection of Die Antike, found in Freud’s library in London. By examining the contents of some articles by Werner Jaeger, the famous classicist author of Paideia, and at the same time contrasting his ideas with those of Freud’s Moses, one can perceive the position that the two authors took during the political upheavals in the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. Questions about historical construction, temporality, language and political ideologies are addressed. With this, Moses and Monotheism emerges as a deeply political text, linked to a psychoanalytic social structure different from that proposed in Totem and Taboo.

Keywords: Freud; Moses; Werner Jaeger; classicism; Die Antike

Among the thousands of books in Sigmund Freud’s library in London is the almost complete collection of the journal Die Antike, launched in 1925 by the classicist philologist Werner Jaeger, author of the famous Paideia. Freud possessed a considerable part of the set, published between 1925 and 1944, including all the issues that appeared between 1929 and 1938. Although there are no annotations on the copies, the condition in which they are found indicates that they have been handled and read, and not simply piled up in some corner. Freud chose to take them to London – it should not be forgotten that his London library was composed from the selection he made during his exile after the Anschluss in 1938.

Freud wrote nothing specifically on the classical studies carried out by Jaeger. The aim here, therefore, is not to identify or compile evidence of these classical writings in Freud’s work, but rather to observe the direction of some of the important debates on Antiquity ongoing in the Weimar Republic, in order to situate more precisely Moses and Monotheism (Freud, 1939), written in this period.

The authors of Die Antike were exponents of classical studies. Considering that Freud closely followed what circulated in this intellectual circle led by Jaeger, it becomes possible to establish comparisons between the ways in which both Freud and Jaeger addressed issues related to Antiquity, connecting them to their time. Freud’s essay thus gains an unparalleled radicality and appears as an unprecedented political gesture when looking at the rest of his work.

Werner Jaeger and Western purity

The Weimar Republic evokes a multitude of the most daring expressions of the artistic and intellectual avant-garde. On the other hand, the image of erudite researchers dedicated to the study of ancient cultures is that of specialists detached from their contemporary world, studying topics without any involvement with what politically and culturally engaged intellectuals observe and write. Neither of these images corresponds to the Society for Ancient Culture inaugurated by Jaeger, whose quarterly publication carried the title Die Antike. This society for the research of ancient culture was established in the middle of the Weimar Republic, in which the dream full of promises of freedom was accompanied by astonishing political chaos. It was composed by important names, such as Hans von Arnim, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Eduard Meyer, Ferdinand Noack, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wolfflin, Werner Jaeger, Christian Jensen, Karl Reinhardt and others. The document introducing the group makes it clear what is at stake:

The society sets itself the task of finding new ways, which will once more make accessible to the people of our time the world of ancient art and culture, keeping open one of the sources through which our education, now threatened by internal erosion as well as external decay, drew in its best times, in which vital forces of spiritual life were created. Without impairing the effectiveness of similar organizations devoted to local art or culture, and as a more comprehensive union of all the friends of Antiquity, this society [Gesellschaft für antike Kultur] aims to provide elements to the long-standing need of the wider circle of scholarly and educated people for a constant and intense contact with the spirit and creations of Antiquity. Therefore, under the title of Die Antike a journal richly endowed with the art and culture of Classical Antiquity is published four times a year starting in the first half of 1925 and circulated predominantly in these circles. (Jaeger, 1928: 2)

Delivered at the opening of the Society for Ancient Culture, the presentation allows us to glimpse Jaeger’s perspective on his classical studies: in them, the flame of Antiquity is never lit in a neutral way – the present offers the possibility to look at the past. In this specular relationship, one time feeds the other, and the images, reflected in each other, appear in juxtaposed layers. In this way, Die Antike attempted to revive German classicism after the terrible events of the First World War and the turbulent insurrections that led to the German Revolution, the results of which shaped the Weimar Republic.

In the opening speech of the Society for Ancient Culture, published in volume 5 of Die Antike, Jaeger evokes the Greek atmosphere of the panegyrics. The idea was to make the spirit of Antiquity vivid and familiar in the Weimar Republic, but also to wedge the marks of the classical world into the heart of contemporary German culture to bind it to Greco-Roman forms. For the group, represented by Jaeger, the fugacity of the present demands a durable measure that makes it possible to find some stability capable of interrupting the ephemeral character of the now. Resurrecting the fantasies of historical memory, he says, means inciting a conversion from perfectum into praesens historicum.

As Jaeger points out, this effort would not have occurred one hundred years earlier, for at that time Antiquity was still alive in the world of German poets and thinkers – Winckelmann would have been the first to polish the Greco-Roman floor on which artists and poets later worked. Behold, the First World War and the German Revolution shattered the floor. To patch the cracks in this foundation, the Society for Ancient Culture was born. It sought not only to cultivate science, but also to restore the living values of Antiquity as an effective force in the modern spirit. Although violent outbursts and terrible crises capable of ruining the laborious construction of culture reside in the memory of mankind, still the monuments that represent the spirit of different times survive and solemnly stand up. For the society, classicism is the spiritual unity of such representations.

From Jaeger’s perspective, the formal aspect is ‘the realization of an epoch for its own time [epochemachend für ihre Zeit]’ and became, in classical Antiquity, ‘a cornerstone for all historical thought [ein Grundstein alles historischen Denkens]’ (1929: 170), being living proof of its own truth. This formal structure, derived from the Aristotelian notion of entelechy, was applied to all Western development. The author adds, ‘in all formal changes, despite the constant incoming of new formal religious, racial, and spiritual forces, the basic [Western] form is constantly maintained [in allem Formwandel, trotz des steten Hinzutritts neuer religiöser, rassehafter und geistiger Formkräfte, erhält sich die Grundform constant]’ (1929: 170). It is founded on the Ancient ‘culture’ allocated in the structure of European Western history. Without it, ‘the history of the West becomes a meaningless chaos [die Geschichte des Abendlandes wird zum sinnlosen Chaos]’ (1929: 170). Two propositions, issued in his inaugural speech to the Society for Ancient Culture, express the angle from which he observes classical Antiquity: ‘Hellenism comes to us not as tradition but as idea [Das Griechentum kam zu uns nicht als Tradition, sondern als Idee]’; ‘The Latin spirit is the spirit of stability and organization [Der lateinische Geist ist der Geist der Stabilität und der Organisation]’ (Jaeger, 1929: 179).

In Jaeger’s arguments there is no trace of any civilising perspective outside of Europe, nor is there any glimpse of questioning barbaric actions from European territory. Colonising acts and slavery gain civilised tones if moulded into the profile of ‘noble simplicity and fedate grandeur’ (Winckelmann, 1765: 30). Therefore, when trying to identify the layers that form the culture, Jaeger observes a distension of the millennial alliance between Christianity and Antiquity around 1500, but even there he cannot see, as one of the main reasons for such a loosening, other ‘discoveries’ – perhaps invasions and plundering are more accurate terms – such as the one made in the Americas at that time. With the traditional alliance mysteriously dissolved, humanism arose to renew it in a secular manner. With the Reformation, on the other hand, this secular humanistic culture beings to walk parallel to the supramundane, primitive Christian faith.

For Jaeger, ‘cultural ideas are not food for the masses [Kulturideen sind keine Nahrung der Masse]’ (1929: 176) and turning one’s attention to Antiquity is not

mere aesthetic interest, which finds objects more attractive, unknown, and stranger … in the art of China and India, or among the primitives [Der Ausgangspunkt ist für unsere Zeit nicht das bloße ästhetische Interesse, das für sein unbegrenztes Einfühlungsbedürfnis in der Kunst Chinas und Indiens oder bei den Primitiven reizvollere, weil unbekanntere und fremdartigere Objekte findet]. (1929: 176)

Considering it ‘too relativistic to the European cultural consciousness’ to extend the cultural spectrum into foreign territories, such as India, China and Egypt, Jaeger was committed to establish a clear boundary between the Hellenic Geist and what was Oriental (cited by Hübscher, 2017: 70). This ‘barbaric’ or ‘primitive’ horizon, certainly unfamiliar to Jaeger, was to be pushed aside with the reinvigoration of classicism, to be conquered with steady eyes on the Germany of Winckelmann, Goethe, Hölderlin and Nietzsche.

Originated from the Renaissance cradle, the Franco-English Enlightenment of the 19th century, classical German idealism and modern neo-humanism would have been the main stages in the development of this modern secular culture in Europe. For Jaeger, each of the historical layers of European spiritual life reveals, in its foundations, the immanent presence of classical Antiquity. Interestingly, this does not take part in his observations that such changes are related to the extra-European. Jaeger’s reader has the distinct impression that the historical changes in European culture are endogenous, and that it should close itself off even more in order to maintain its own metamorphoses, without evil influences from what is devoid of classical formal perfection.

Hence, for Jaeger, there is a unity between classicism and later events in European history, which would have sedimented what had already been established as a constitutive part of Western culture. This unity would be in clear contrast with the abstract idea of Moscow, he argues. The Russian Revolution lacked the solidity of archaic layers able to provide material density to what is properly European. According to Jaeger, humanism assumes the place of a ‘political entity’ that foresees the continuity of the humanism that began in classical Greece. By rescuing some of Anatole France’s thoughts following Goethe’s phrase ‘[t]he only permanent works are occasional works [Die einzigen dauerhaften Werke sind Gelegenheitswerke]’, Jaeger says:

But, after all, there are only occasional works, for they all depend upon the place and time in which they were created. One cannot understand them, nor love them with an understanding love, if one does not know the place, time, and conditions of their origin. It is a matter of arrogant weakness to believe that anyone has produced a self-sufficient work. The highest work has value only through its relationships with life. The better I grasped these relationships, the more interested I became in the work. I know of none of the characteristics found by modern studies of Antiquity that have stood in opposition to classicism and its internal connection to the contemporary art and literature movement [Aber es gibt schließlich überhaupt nur Gelegenheitswerke, denn alle hängen ab vom Ort und von dem Augenblick, wo sie geschaffen wurden. Man kann sie nicht verstehen noch sie lieben mit einer verstehenden Liebe, wenn man den Ort, die Zeit und die Bedingungen ihres Ursprungs nicht kennt. Es ist Sache einer hochmütigen Schwäche zu glauben, man habe ein Werk produziert, das sich selbst genügt. Das höchste Werk hat Wert nur durch seine Beziehungen zum Leben. Je besser ich diese Beziehungen erfasse, desto mehr interessiere ich mich für das Werk. Ich kenne keine treffendere Charakteristik der modernen Altertumswissenschaft in ihrem Gegensatz zum Klassizismus und ihres inneren Zusammenhangs mit der Bewegung in der gleichzeitigen Kunst und Literatur]. (1929: 173)

The author insists on his considerations of a temporal nature: ‘How does the facticity of Antiquity, whose duration is transposed in time, fit into the prevailing scientific view? Classicism has always considered the works of the ancients as timeless standards of beauty, as absolute standards of form and content.’ Or yet, in another masterful phrase: ‘Although Chronos runs, Kairos returns again and again in the cycle of Aion [Zwar Chronos flieht, doch Kairos kehret wieder im Kreislauf der Aionen]’ (1929: 174). With them, Jaeger emphasises the idea that literary and artistic works go through the moment in which they were conceived to reach universal forms and principles.

Seen independently, the quotes would not incite disagreements on our part. However, when considering Jaeger’s writing entirely, one cannot help but notice the uncomfortable coincidence between what he captures from his now and the ideals of Nazi ideology; that is, among the various positions that disputed political places in the Weimar Republic, Jaeger’s voice appears deeply aligned with the Nazi mindset. More explicitly, in his perspective, it would be necessary to remove any ‘taint’ capable of misrepresenting the ‘beautiful purity’ of the roots that support German cultural architecture.

Theses like Jaeger’s claim to advocate the materiality on which the Teutonic pillars are established, while their abstract flights could not be higher. The Roman organisation, the Greek idea, the European spirit, the perfect form, the West, and the German Geist are concentrated in pure domes. The classical resumption, with its feet planted on German soil, deviates from shapeless routes, such as those taken by Bachofen or Nietzsche, who is still considered a German, despite his slips and mistakes. Among an intellectually diluted culture, both would have exalted an irrational, neo-Dionysian, ‘pre-Socratic’ humanity that should be avoided. One can assume that on the classical-Teutonic side are reason, the Apollonian and Platonic forms, in which the intelligible realm of beautiful essential forms prevails.

The Greeks, Jaeger admits, lack the will for individual expression of interiority or that which is psychologically stimulating – the expression of subjectivity. ‘In our subjectivism [In unserem Subjektivismus]’, he continues, ‘lies our otherness [liegt unser Anderssein]’. Therein would lie ‘the [modern] reason for the constant need to find our way back to the Greeks [der Grund unseres dauernden Bedürfnisses, uns an den Griechen wieder zum Ganzen zurückzufinden]’ (1929: 181). That is, satisfying the subjective urge today would mean seeking those classical roots, and not taking easy shortcuts that denote weakness. Jaeger identifies the road to be avoided at all costs: The one that leads to the East. A dissolution into unlimited understandings of the self and the foreign would have occurred. Hence, ‘the European world can only be organized and reborn by its own forces [die europäische Welt kann dennoch nur aus ihren eigenen Kräften wiedergeboren warden]’ (Jaeger, 1929: 181). The foreigner to be nurtured is the one coming from the classical world. The first misstep, the first deviation from ‘pure form [reinen Form]’ and ‘primordial nature [ursprünglichen Natur]’, would have been the ‘luxuriant lust of the Baroque [der schwelgerischen Üppigkeit des Barock]’ (Jaeger, 1929: 175).

Walter Benjamin (2005), as could not be otherwise, goes against these theses – and, with this observation, I advance in a discussion to be resumed later. In the middle of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin abandons classicism to dedicate himself to the baroque:

‘Weimar’ Republic, the official name of the German state from 1919 on, denotes the intention to restore the values of classicism, the legacy of Schiller and Goethe, as if they had remained unscathed. Against this attitude, Benjamin mobilizes another tradition, a repressed one: that of the baroque, in which historical violence was not camouflaged under harmonious aesthetic theories, but rather flaunted. (Bolle, 1986: 9)

Ursprung ist das Ziel

To be radical is to grasp things by the root.Marx (1843-1844/1967: 257)

My language, is German. My culture, my attainments are German.I considered myself a German intellectually,until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudicein Germany and in German Austria.Since that time, I consider myself no longer a German.I prefer to call myself a Jew.Freud (1926, as cited in Gay, 1987: 139)

If I return to the Baroque, tensioned by Walter Benjamin to classicism at the time of the Weimar Republic, it is because the essay Moses and Monotheism itself – written in the heat of the tensions of German culture after the rise of Hitler – also safeguards the irregularity and deviant aspects in the style of the counter-reformation, averse to any attempt at uniformity. Such a Baroque procedure is opposed to that used by Werner Jaeger who, in recovering classical antiquity, aims to retrace a linearity capable of re-establishing the purity of what modern Europe inherited from the ancient past. Let’s see why these irregularities exist in the construction of Freud’s essay on Moses.

A problematisation of Jewish identity is the starting point of the work on Moses. Freud knows he will destabilise it completely. In Freud’s Moses, Yosef H. Yerushalmi (1992: 38) retrieves Freud’s Hebrew preface to Totem and Taboo. With it, he seeks to answer the question that intrigues him: ‘after all, why did Freud write Moses and monotheism?’. In 1914, Freud locates a link between his Jewish identity and the ‘very essence’ of Judaism, although he admits that he cannot ‘express this essence in words’:

So the question might have remained, had it not been for the advent of Hitler and Nazism. For Freud, as for many others, the shock of anti-Jewish barbarism brought to a new level of existential demand the question of what it means to be a Jew, and there can be no doubt that it was this which provided the immediate impetus for the actual writing of Moses and Monotheism. (Yerushalmi, 1992: 39)

This passage clarifies how the uncanny shock of the modern German civilising structure composes each line of the essay dedicated to Moses. Faced with a regime that praised the purity of the Aryan race, Freud excavated the imprecise roots of his people. It dissolves any idea of purity or unitary origin. An unbreakable knot involves the threads that intertwine East and West, Africa and Europe.

In 1934 Freud does not look at Moses in the same way as he did in 1914 in front of the statue of Michelangelo. Far from contemplating a Moses who contains his wrath, Freud throws away his idealised German-Hellenic cultural heritage, steeped in classic Renaissance images, and rescues his Jewish origins to shout against the Nazi perniciousness, also originating from this Western classical cradle. Recovering the Jewish repertoire, repressed for so long, does not match, it is worth emphasising, with movements whose flavours would be nostalgic or even linked to a certain kind of redemptive Zionism. Rather, Freud seems to make use of a whirlwind of distant images – both from his personal life and from the history of civilisations – that snatched him away at that political moment in Europe. With these figures, he exposes deep tensions from the past that still shake the meshes of the present.

Written between 1934 and 1938, Moses and Monotheism is a landmark for scholars of Freudian work who intend to go beyond the pillars established by the West. Freud recovers the figure of the founder of the Jewish religion and subverts it in a surprising way. In the biblical scriptures, Moses is Jewish and his origin, a threat. Fearing a growth in the enslaved Israelite population, the pharaoh of the time orders that all newborn Hebrews be killed. Trying to save Moses’ life, his Jewish mother puts him in a basket and throws him into the waters of a river. The boy is found by the daughter of the pharaoh of Egypt who adopts him, making him heir to the pharaonic nobility.

In a consciously inexplicable way, Moses feels connected to the Israelites and revolts against slavery and the violence inflicted upon them. On a day like others of oppression and violence against enslaved people, Moses loses his mind and murders an Egyptian soldier who had wounded a Hebrew. Under new risk, he flees to the region of Midian and there God speaks to Moses about his mission to free the Jews from slavery. The pilgrimage towards the promised land, narrated in Exodus, begins. Moses becomes the leader of that people, who brought God’s revelation to men through the tablets of the law.

This narrative version is not, however, the same as Freud’s. Plunging into gaps in the biblical narrative and into works by unreliable ethnographers of his time, Freud transfigures Moses into an Egyptian, a disciple of Akhenaten. The Egyptian antiquity is markedly polytheistic and the belief in life after death is expressed in the mummification of bodies. The cult of images and amulets, especially related to Amon, ordered the daily life of the Egyptians.

Brushing history against the grain, Freud discovers gaps in the apparent fictional continuity of the scriptures and reveals processes of construction of culture that occur through defence mechanisms. The tradition is formed by hiding and introducing elements into the symbolic fabric itself. Investigating these processes, Freud concludes that Jewish monotheism would come from Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, renamed Akhenaton, erased from Egyptian history for having subverted the polytheistic millennial order. Compelling the population to believe in a single universal god and banishing manifestations of polytheistic idolatry, Akhenaton reigns for some years under continuous violence from opponents. The resistance to his precepts leads to the destruction of the real city that he designed and his memory is proscribed as that of a criminal (Freud, 1939).

Moses would be someone committed to re-establishing another version of Aton, the banished god, freeing the Jews from Egypt in the name of this deity. He finds in the Hebrew people the possibility of founding a new religion, in which it would become feasible to rescue the fundamental characteristic of Akhenaton’s faith, the devotion to a single almighty god, now added to his own characteristics: the energetic, strong and dominating spirit. The Jews thus constitute themselves as the chosen people, the preferred children of God. A step that removes them from any record of inferiority.

In Freud’s work, the beginning of the exodus and the scene of the tablets of the law, received from God at Mount Sinai, mark the division between two figures of Moses. To the Egyptian Moses, leader of the exodus from Egypt, is superimposed the other, the Midianite who, summoned by God, receives the Ten Commandments. The tradition of the scriptures would have condensed the images of these two men, the Egyptian and the Midianite Moses, forging a linearity that was consolidated as the official history. Between the Egyptian and the Midianite there is still the traumatic fissure of a murder. The leader of Egyptian origin would have been murdered by his followers. At this point, Freud follows Ernest Sellin’s line of thoughts: ‘The first, discovered by E. Sellin, is that the Jews, who even according to the Bible were stubborn and unruly towards their law-give rand leader, rebelled at last, killed him and threw off the imposed Aton religion as the Egyptians had done before them’ (Freud, 1939: 98). As in Totem and Taboo, the murder of Moses, father of Judaism, will not pass in vain. The marks promoted by the intensity of the trauma are never sufficiently inscribed and insist on making themselves present, making the trauma the very place of transmission. The monotheistic strand is supported by the force of the trauma incited by the murder of Moses and, at the same time, silenced in the overlapping of narratives that contradicted it. Denial emerges as the only accessible way of constructing culture: superimposed, suppressed, grafted, amalgamated writings. A good example of the fiction that weaves together the records of history and culture can be found in the following passage from Moses and Monotheism:

Let us begin by marking what critical research work on the Bible has to say about how the Hexateuch the five Books of Moses and the Book of Joshua, for they alone are of interest to us here came to be written. The oldest source is considered to be J, the Jahvistic, in the author of which the most modern research workers think they can recognize the priest Ebjatar, a contemporary of King David. A little later, it is not known how much later, comes the so-called Elohistic, belonging to the northern kingdom. After the destruction of this kingdom, in 722 B.C., a Jewish priest combined portions of J and E and added his own contributions. His compilation is designated as JE. In the seventh century Deuteronomy, the fifth book, was added, it being alleged that the whole of it had been newly found in the Temple. In the time after the destruction of the Temple, in 586 B.C., during the Exile and after the return, is placed the re-writing called the Priestly Code. The fifth century saw a definitive revision, and since then the work has not been materially altered. (Freud, 1939: 68–9)

From all this confusion identified in the body of the biblical text, Freud deduces that ‘[t]he history of King David and his time is most probably the work of one of his contemporaries’ (1939: 69). In other words, ‘it is real history, five hundred years before Herodotus, the “Father of History”’ (1939: 69). This mix of events becomes, from the psychoanalyst’s perspective, easier to understand if the hypothesis about the Egyptian Moses is accepted. According to Freud it is difficult to discriminate whether the reports about distant times unfold from writings that preceded them or if the origin of it would have come from an oral tradition. Nor is it easy to locate time gaps between events and their records. Be that as it may, the Mosaic writings indicate, according to Freud, two opposite ways of treating the traces printed on them:

On the one hand, certain transformations got to work on it, falsifying the text in accord with secret tendencies, maiming and extending it until it was turned into its opposite. On the other hand, an indulgent piety reigned over it, anxious to keep everything as it stood, indifferent to whether the details fitted together or nullified one another. (1939: 70)

As Freud (1939) states, these alterations, which cause a substantial deformation of the text, are close to the murder itself: ‘The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in the doing away with the traces’ (1939: 70). As he reminds us, the term ‘Entstellung’ [distortion] carries a double meaning, meaning not only ‘to change the appearance of’, but also ‘to wrench apart’, ‘to put in another place’ (1939: 70). Therefore, although transfigured and torn out of context, passages that undergo textual deformation can be located elsewhere. The tools that psychoanalysis offers can help in this difficult task of sniffing out the fictional truth – and not the factual reality – under narrative constitutions that seek to conceal it.

It is well noted how this description of the Mosaic scripture applies to the very way in which Freud constructs the essay dedicated to Moses. Betty Fuks (2000) considers it ‘a hypertext, whose writing does not lend itself to capture: multiple meanings – but not arbitrary – bubble up in its pages’. Freud, soaked in the classicism that fed European culture, especially the German-speaking one, places it in harmony and in tension with other Oriental references, until then appreciated by him only in the intimacy of his personal collections. To his previous publications, full of European sources and references and the Greco-Roman tradition, are added, this time, sources from Egyptian Antiquity which assume protagonism. It can be said that some of the ancient objects from the East, which inhabited his office in Berggasse, 19 and later in London, come to life.

As in this article we are dealing with the publication Die Antike – whose objective was to study the origins of civilisations and their reverberations in the present of the Weimar Republic, as proposed by its editor Werner Jaeger – it is necessary to make a brief detour that seeks to explain what is understood exactly by the concept of origin. With this, it is intended to show how both authors, compared in this article, return to the distant past to make it vibrate both in the Weimar present and in the one that took place right after Hitler’s rise. Two different perspectives on the idea of origin will be presented. With Freud, the past is traced until it pierces the Aryan ideology; Jaeger, as we have seen, seeks to reestablish a formal purity of German culture by tracing a linearity that connects it to Classicism.

To return to the idea of origin, central to Walter Benjamin’s philosophy, indicates how Freud resists any unitary character in his investigation. Consonant with Freudian methods, Benjamin thinks of the origin [Ursprung] as a target, but in no way aims to reach a genesis or the chronological beginning of a historical narrative. Origin operates, for him, as a temporal vortex, in which disconnected matter and energy shift and blend until they are purified into a new substance. Routes that are above all unstable, for which conventional calculation does not work; only long-range leaps over nodal points of a buried past follow this path – suffocated points, but of sufficient power to make the present tremble, demanding new flows of oxygen for us. These suffocating events, which cry out for their original desiring vocation (Ur), can only be reached by anachronistic leaps that rupture with the historical line established by the canons – a movement that suspends the apparently natural chain of history, making the origin a suspended promise to elaborate traumas or fulfil desires abandoned by the forces of repression. That is to say: desire or trauma at the origin then maintains its living force, without its structure being erased in the progressive line of history.

These original nodal points, suffocated in the biblical narrative and in the most conventional exegesis of the scriptures, are precisely the matter reconstituted by Freud. When studying research done by ethnologists and modern historians, Freud identified that the Jewish tribes, from which the people of Israel later originated, did not come only from Egypt. Nor did the new religion reveal itself exactly at the foot of a hill on the Sinai peninsula. In this new construction, the Meribah-Kadedes site appears as a kind of oasis in southern Palestine. The people of Israel mingled with others in the region and began to worship the god Jehovah (or Yahweh), who probably descended from the neighbouring Arab tribe of the Midianites. This God, according to E. Meyer (cited in Freud, 1939), was a sinister demon, greedy for blood, who wandered through the night in fear of the light of day.

Moses, son-in-law of the Midianite priest Jethro, was shepherding when he heard the divine call. In this reconstituted version, ‘the figure of Moses is [inextricably associated with Qades (Massa and Meriba)] so closely bound up with Midian and the holy places in the desert’ (Freud, 1939: 57). Moses, as the son-in-law of the Midianite priest, put the Exodus and the whole story of youth in a secondary position, a consequence of the insertion of this Moses in a legendary narrative that had some coherence and was continuous. In the words of Meyer, quoted by Freud:

Moses in Midian is no longer an Egyptian and Pharaoh’s grandson, but a shepherd to whom Jahve reveals himself. In the story of the ten plagues his former relationships are no longer mentioned, although they could have been used very effectively, and the order to kill the Israelite first-born is entirely forgotten. In the Exodus and the perishing of the Egyptians Moses has no part at all; he is not even mentioned. The characteristics of a hero, which the childhood story presupposes, are entirely absent in the later Moses; he is only the man of God, a performer of miracles, provided with supernatural powers by Jahve. (Freud, 1939: 57–8)

There is a contrast between this Moses of Qades and Midian and the other ‘august Egyptian’ (Freud, 1939: 58), who presented the people with a religion in which all magic and sorcery was strictly banned along the lines of the monotheistic pharaoh. Here another riddle of Jewish prehistory, convincingly reconstructed by Freud, surprisingly reveals the mysterious origin of the Levites, which goes back to one of the 12 tribes of Israel. Although the Levites hold the most important of priestly offices, they are distinguished from the priests. A Levite is not necessarily a priest; it is not the name of a caste. The hypothesis Freud built about Moses can explain some gaps about this segment of the Jewish people:

It is not credible that a great gentleman like the Egyptian Moses approached a people strange to him without an escort. He must have brought his retinue with him, his nearest adherents, his scribes, his servants. These were the original Levites. Tradition maintains that Moses was a Levite. This seems a transparent distortion of the actual state of affairs: the Levites were Moses people. This solution is supported by what I mentioned in my previous essay: that in later times we find Egyptian names only among the Levites. (Freud, 1939: 63)

It would not fit here to reproduce in detail all the consequences of the Freudian reconstitution of this tense and vibrant Jewish monotheistic origin – the reader can go to the Freudian text to check it out directly. In this clipping, however, it is clear how such overlaps, deletions and grafts occur due to traumatic aspects – the murder of the Egyptian Moses, recognised both by Sellin and by the young Goethe. Crime seems to be the nerve center of all fictional biblical architecture disassembled and reassembled by Freud.

The whole theory of trauma detailed by Freud in Moses and Monotheism starts from the neuroses and intense marks of childhood until it leads to the postulates of Totem and Taboo, linked to those of Moses. This psychology does not depart from the way in which culture is composed in symbolic terms. Cultural inscriptions become portraits of a specific model of sociopolitical organisation. Seeking to understand the depth of the anti-Semitism that resulted in a Nazi regime, Freud considers that an ‘attractive suggestion that the guilt attached to the murder of Moses may have been the stimulus for the wish phantasy of the Messiah, who was to return and give to his people salvation and the promised sovereignty over the world’ (Freud, 1939: 144). According to him, ‘[i]f Moses was this first Messiah, Christ became his substitute and successor. Then Paul could with a certain right say to the peoples: “See, the Messiah has truly come. He was indeed murdered before your eyes”’ (1939: 144). With this, Freud sees some vestige of truth in the resurrection of Christ, who would be a kind of resurrected Moses. Behind him, there would be ‘the returned primaeval Father of the primitive horde as well only transfigured and as a Son in the place of his Father’ (1939: 145). He concludes that the trauma of the Father’s murder and the obstinacy of denying it cost the Jewish people dearly. That can be observed with the constant return of the accusation: ‘You killed our God!’. While this is evidently not the only cause to explain anti-Semitic violence, Freud recomposes a narrative in which a thread of hatred can be found. Another thread would be in the envy of the people who declared themselves the firstborn and favourite son of God the Father, still unsurpassed by other peoples who give credence to this statement.

These temporal origins, a kind of concentric vortex, hold forces where everything that was once oppressed converges. Made of this rotation capable of merging present and past, this movement sheds light on small points. These bright points, in turn, make up a constellation whose image would be revolutionary, full of promises of liberation. Therefore, in this version of time, the present is not a mere surface of the now, but the reverberation of intense and vivid layers that were previously inert.

In the most conventional psychoanalytic sense, origin goes back to the timeless childhood, which remains alive despite the passage of time. Inapprehensible by the conventional signs of imagery or verbal representation, this origin cannot be captured; one can only touch its edges. Vibrant in adulthood, its traces embody new scenes and images in the now. From Nachtraglichkeit it is known that time in psychoanalysis happens in two moments, in which trauma is repeated in the present and may – or may not – be elaborated by a narrative that entangles nachtraglich seemingly disconnected events that collide.

After expounding these brief lines, the reader may still eventually confuse them with Werner Jaeger’s vision, previously presented. There, as we saw, the origin seems to occupy a central place in the reflections about the present and the past intertwines with the current moment. Nothing, however, could be more wrong. In Jaeger, the past is at the service of the normativity of the present, normativity excluding everything that does not match ideals identified above all with the German Geist and the Western model in an immaculate version. This version doesn’t consider miscegenation, influences, shocks, traumas, in short, finally, it annuls constitutive and unavoidable relations between Western Europe and other places on the globe, seen as peripheral. Light and shadow, that is the difference: while psychoanalysis pursues the erased, aiming to create forms that allow it to acquire a place, approaches like Jaeger’s violently toss into darkness what does not fit into its bright prefabricated moulds. Perhaps, the best term for images of the past that concern psychoanalysis is hauntings, as Stephen Frosh employs it in Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmission (2013). That is, unlike normativity which aims to fit into ideal forms that which presents itself spontaneously, or to amputate that which does not conform to a certain model of perfection, psychoanalysis works exactly with the remnants of histories, walking against the grain, visiting hauntings and shapeless elements.

The contrasting lines between this path and the one adopted by Jaeger become increasingly clear. Nowadays, Jaeger’s affinity with National Socialism is consensual. William Calder defined it as a ‘reluctant fellow-traveler’ (quoted by Hübscher, 2017: 147). His departure to the United States in 1936 led him to be included in the group of German intellectuals who would have ‘vigorously resisted the advent of National Socialism’ (Murray, quoted by Hübscher, 2017: 147); however, it is clear among scholars of his work that Jaeger had sought to establish a dialogue and rapprochement with the new regime as early as the first months of 1933.

The legacy of characters like Jaeger often leaves a trail of controversy. At times, some stand up to defend the work, making the author’s political and personal image unscathed so as not to invalidate his writing; at other times, both author and work are attacked, based on manifestations and public positions of fascist tenor. This controversial debate took place around Jaeger’s work, as Hübscher (2017) exposes in his thesis. Our approach, however, will not follow either of these directions. Rather, we seek to contrast how Freud and Jaeger turned to different horizons of Antiquity. With the imminence of National Socialism coming to power and the rise of Hitler in 1933, each of them directed their attention to points in the past that seemed consistent with their positions in the present.

This contrast can provide a density to the text Moses even greater than that intuited by Saïd in his admirable Freud and the Non-European (2003/2004). It becomes clear that Freud did not turn his eyes towards the East by chance but did so as an intense political gesture in that context. Writing his Moses meant driving a stake through the heart of normative perspectives, whose orientation supported the values spread by National Socialism. With this strategy, Freud follows his own traumas, revisits his past, makes a turn in the traditions inherited by him – the German and Jewish cultures – pursuing movements of a psychic and historical temporality consistent with the logic of Nachtraglichkeit.

Therefore, just as Benjamin brought to light the acts of violence repressed by the official versions of history when analysing the baroque in the middle of the Weimar Republic, breaking the wave that highlighted the harmony of classicism, Freud, at the climax of the exaltation of values such as purity of races, nationalism or superiority of the Aryan strain, opened the borders to the East at the core of Western culture – whose pillars are also composed by the Judeo-Christian culture.

Freud’s Moses and secular time

I cannot receive a demand,much less a commandment, from a historical elsewhere without translating,and, because translation alters what it conveys,the ‘message’ changes in the course of the transferfrom one spatiotemporal horizon to another.Butler (2012: 10–11)

Freud’s option for an Egyptian Moses makes the biblical character a non-identitarian figure. His mestizaje, his indetermination, his babbling language are precisely the characteristics that make Moses capable of founding a new culture and other laws, those of Judaism. To reach the historical origin of the Pentateuch through Moses’ image is almost like trying to capture dream’s navel – an impossible task. As we saw before, the Bible contains stories overlapped and rewritten at different times, whose dense layers take on a mythical form with historical pretensions, an irregular sequence of events that sometimes intensify the images, sometimes stretch time by the seemingly infinite flow of days.

The Bible’s translation is its only literary form. There is no original text, no true narrative. There are several translations that constitute it, so that the original version is not reached – to the Hebrew Masoretic is added parts in Greek that only exist in the Septuagint, and both versions are jumbled in the transpositions into Latin, which in turn form the vernacular translations. The Bible can be defined more by the amalgam of words and languages than by the formal and semantic clarity of what is written in it. The choice of hermeneutical paths is, thus, of an ethical and aesthetic order. Hence, it is possible to say that it is not even a question of hermeneutics, but rather of effectively granting words to that which is undecipherable in the scriptures.

As in the analytical process, in which from the layers of the present and the signifiers – metaphors and metonyms – one never gets the thing, in biblical reading one never arrives at an ultimate truth. Perhaps, even the most faithful portrait of its language is that uttered by Moses, a stuttering language whose stammering pronunciation reveals an uncertain place of enunciation – language that lies between the translation of the divine word and the verbal expression of the murmuring of men in the precariousness of the desert. The collective babbling, frequently alluded to in the Exodus passages, obeys a mournful cadence, a rudimentary fado that dilutes the outline of the words, making them a concentrated sonorous materiality, far from the clarity of Hellenic philosophy, whose rhythm is that of logos and dialectics. Between Moses and God, in turn, communication is perhaps more consistent with the archaic rules of telepathy than with those of classical logic – a constant appeal for translation between different languages and linguistic forms, from the divine (YHVH) to the human (Moses) and vice versa, and from the noble (Moses) to the people (Israelites) and vice versa. In this passage of languages, it is imperative to turn to the ‘chasm in translation’ (Butler, 2012: 12). The gap is the condition for getting in touch with what is outside myself, since the weight of truth remains deposited on the void that surrounds language, and not on the identity of one of the terms at the expense of another. Translating is, then, a movement of dispossession of epistemic fields and an opening to inhabit a void in which identity unity is erased.

In Parting Ways, Butler notes that ‘Moses is not only in exile from his future homeland but from Egypt as well, suggesting that he is himself a figure of exile in which two traditions meet’ (2012: 228). Egyptian and Jewish: The Jewish identity becomes fractured in its essence, which was also well characterised by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe in ‘The unconscious is destructured like an affect’ (1989). The authors remind us that Jewish humour is exactly that which is capable of operating by a kind of conjunctive disjunction – the most obvious example being the Jew telling a Jewish joke, in which the target of the mockery is invariably Jewish. Perhaps, what the two mirror images and the ability to laugh at oneself reveal is the foreign gaze that inhabits a supposed Jewish identity: unable to be captured in a definitive essence, the Jew assumes the precariousness of his existence and rightly laughs at it. Many jokes present the Jew’s integrity on the verge of collapsing. In this state of imminent dissolution, the Jewish unary trace (Lacan, 1961–2) emerges – something that is in permanent transit between the solid and the diluted image, allocating itself not in one or the other, but in the gap between the two.

The archaic version of this humorous model was identified in the Bible itself by Northrop Frye (1980–1), who recognises in it the specific formal structure of comedy. According to the Canadian literary critic’s analysis, both tragedy and comedy have their bases in social contracts, but tragedy focuses on the hero implicated in this bond, while comedy lays its emphasis on an oppressive or absurd society and its victims, who throughout history undergo transformations until they reach a more liberated and sensitive situation than the previous one. The continual loss of everything is interesting in this context, for at the same time the Jews consider themselves God’s chosen people and recognise the misery of which they are a part, that is, the fact that deep down ‘we are all … the unchosen’ (Butler, 2012: 24–5) and arbitrarily thrown into the most unusual social plots. This dubious nature of our place in the world and constant instability are aspects that characterise all of us humans, and Jewish humour sharpens it and puts it into words. Perhaps, that is why Butler asserts that ‘to “be” a Jew is to be departing from oneself, cast out into a world of the non-Jews’ (2012: 15), an inescapable heterogeneity that simultaneously composes and dissolves Jewish ‘being’. She points out, recalling Freud and the Non-European, ‘although Said reflects on the origins of Judaism, he finds there, at the site of that origin, an impurity, a mixing with otherness … which turns out to be constitutive of what it is to be a Jew’ (2012: 31).

This portrait is also well represented in the biblical characters. From the most different origins, in the Mosaic narrative they are grouped in an indeterminate spatial field, the desert, which promotes a continuous confrontation with impermanence, in which traces and imprecise images of moving bodies are the only capturable fragments of such identity. They are fragments that reflect a negativity, since displacement deals with the axiomatic character of absence. ‘The exilic – or more emphatically, the diasporic’, says Butler, ‘is built into the idea of the Jewish’ (2012: 15, emphasis in original). Peoples that are formed by gestures, by history woven from a stake around nothingness – the negativity that forms YHVH’s existence – and by the belief in a free life. Purity is not part of these biblical plots and scenarios. From the Jewish origin springs an undecipherable miscellany capable of breaking with dichotomous visions established in secular modernity.

Final notes

Contemporary issues throw us over the ruins of the past, allowing us to fill the gaps between the rubble with recent elements. This process is not arbitrary, but a construction in which hypotheses about the encountered fragments are shaped and give consistency to a narrative aligned to the present that decisively interferes in its directions. The ways in which narratives are constructed are born out of ethical and aesthetic issues rooted in the present. Without such questions, ruins would not even be perceived or recognised, emerging as undecipherable and, therefore, disposable leftovers. History is, therefore, also the composition of these traces and creation in the heat of the now.

In this article, it was possible to observe how elements from Antiquity joined with other traits found in the Weimar Republic and attached to the rise of Nazism. Werner Jaeger brings together aspects that reinforce the Nazi ideology, while Freud excavates symbolic aspects capable of imploding this ideology. Freud’s works go even further, since both Totem and Taboo (1913/2010) and Moses and Monotheism (1939) are attempts at psychoanalytic construction of social structures that repeat themselves in history and indicate their universal aspects.

Although he seems to stitch these structures together within the critical debate of scholarly authors, Freud is not interested in archaeological empirical evidence, either to reinforce or to reject one version or another of anthropology or biblical history. In his texts, the theoretical constructions articulate identifiable affections that support pillars of different social forms – that is, which affective identifications can give rise to the supports of society. In fact, this affective materiality is what psychoanalysis can claim as unprecedented in its theoretical-clinical and social research: Psychoanalysis does not approach history by looking at empirical facts or ideas that bring them together; it pursues the history of affects and the way they structure a subjectivity or a society.

With his Moses, Freud gave consistency to a revolutionary structure, far different from that of Totem and Taboo. Although he revisits the 1913 text, claiming a certain continuity between the two, it is quite clear how the symbolic figure of his mixed Moses – Midianite, Jewish and Egyptian – leaves very different traces from those inscribed with the death of an arbitrary and tyrannical father. If Moses is a leader who takes risks with his people through indeterminate spaces, trying to decipher their desires and demanding coherence and commitment to the peoples’ longing for liberation, the primal father in Totem and Taboo is the one who thinks only of his own enjoyment and makes the society a means to achieve it. Accordingly, it is not simply the emptiness or absence of the father that shapes the symbolic order in the form of the law. The flesh and history that precede the absence of the father will be responsible for the structural mould itself – Moses’ figure designed a structure that impels his people to follow indeterminate steps, without subjugating themselves to a law foreign to their own historical desire for emancipation.

By turning to such a structure, Freud constructs an architecture entirely distinct from the authoritarian destiny that prevailed in parts of Europe. In the tenebrous territory of Nazi Germany and its annexed Austria, the structure arbitrarily imposes itself on the subjects, eliminating everything that does not conform to the defined ideal image. With Jaeger’s text compared to Freud’s, I hope to have made these contrasts clearer.