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Uncanny Jewishness: Freud's Quest for the (Im)possible Origin

In his last work, Moses and Monotheism, Freud sought to articulate the essence of his Jewishness, the key to Jewish survival and the real object of undying hatred in all anti-Semitism. There is no Jewish property. The Jew is the other who has nothing of his own. Jewishness never means symbolic traits which make Jew different from others. But it is something refused to be wiped away after erasing all positive traits of Jewishness, that is, objet a, the non-symbolic remainder of the processes of symbolization. For Freud, what resisted the erasure was the Egyptian Moses, a stain that survived at the core of the Jewish tradition. Endeavoring to prove that Moses, the great Jewish leader, was a foreigner, Freud takes a radical gesture of striking at himself. But it is only such a suicidal act that could clear the terrain for the Jewish identity as such. In addition, absent but not really missing Egyptian Moses can be compared to a kind of ghost which is dispelled but not murdered entirely, in that he unexpectedly haunts without being transformed into imaginary image and symbolic meaning. No direct confrontation with a ghost is possible. The undead in its unthinkable presence appears only in fantasy, the third region which is not represented by objective facts nor by pure fiction. Isn't this the reason why Freud originally considered Moses and Monotheism to be a kind of "historical novel"? As Freud was obsessed with an unlaid ghost named Moses throughout the whole of his life, so Jewish history was haunted by its spectral supplement. In Moses and Monotheism Freud encounters the very thing that persists as a haunting proximity. As for him, Moses becomes not so much Egyptian as uncannily Egyptian: both foreign and familiar. Freud surprises us by his last articulation of the agency of the father in so far as Moses as a foreigner is neither symbolic father nor father jouissance, which means that Egyptian Moses doesn't have a transcendental place. Moses as objet a is not the external limit making possible the dimension of the universal but the internal limit circumcising the symbolic order itself. The internal limit relates to a void that can never be fully integrated into any symbolic narrative. The first thing to note is that the void is not the negation of the symbolic meaning, but the precondition for the rise of symbolic meaning. Egyptian Moses as the ex-timate kernel of Jewish history, who makes Jewish identity possible, is the internal stain as something foreign to the inside, not the external limit adulterating the pure Jewishness. The thesis that I seek to defend in this essay is that Freud's attempt to construct the origin of Jewishness is coterminous with the birth of the subject of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis teaches us that the subject doesn't come into being without confronting objet a, both the most familiar and the most foreign thing, both the condition and the limitation of subjectivity as such. Not until he confronted his impossible origin, the spectre of the Egyptian Moses did Freud constitute himself as a subject. Moses and Monotheism gives its readers some idea of the constitutive feature of subjectivity as well as the secret of Jewishness and what has made Jewish survival to the present day possible. The affirmation of Judaism has the same structure as that of the subject as a radically deterritorized being in the symbolic world. "We are all Jews" as Derrida says. According to Copjec, what emerges from monotheism is not the outside conceived as a beyond, but rather the sameness that would be the return of self-difference. The haunting of the ghostly other within makes the subject experience the gate to the ethics of psychoanalysis.