Repetition Compulsion?

“It has often seemed to me far easier,” Sheldon Pollock says, “to argue that it isn't those who forget the past who are condemned to repeat it, but, on the contrary, those—in Ayodhya, Belfast, Jerusalem, Kosovo, or Washington—who remember it.

But there is something in Pollock's claim that resonates uncannily with the Freudian concept of compulsion, and this resonance is worth a concluding glance. Pollock himself does not treat Freud in any detail in his discussion, but he looks at historical phases where empires are driven to mimic other empires and he asks how the world might move toward “a new future, a kind of Empire that might fi­nally end the numbingly repeated imitations of empire.” For Pollock, a possible way to avoid imperial repetition and to progress to an age without imperialism lies in such models as “the Sanskritic cosmopolitanism of Bharata Varsha and the Islamic cosmopolitanism of Al-Hind, which suggest however faintly some alternatives.”^[1337] Unlike Freud, who seldom offered the salve of utopia to his readers, Pollock appears to be saying that, were we to look back to precise historical periods and concepts, we would be able to forge a community in the future that was less imperial and more egalitarian and more peaceful than the empires of recent history.

It was to ancient Egypt that Freud turned in Moses and Monotheism, the book in which he explored the possibility that Moses was an Egyptian priest in the kingdom of the pharaoh Akhenaten.^[1338] In Freud's account, Moses is originally Egyptian and not Hebrew, while the originary traces of Mosaic monotheism prove to be Egyptian as well. There are many ways to understand Freud's study of historical memory, but in this context it would be essential to refer both to Edward Said's brief exploration in Freud and the Non-European and Jacqueline Rose's response to Said. “For Freud,” Said says, “writing and thinking in the mid- 1930s, the actuality of the non-European was its constitutive presence as a sort of fissure in the figure of Moses—founder of Judaism, but an unreconstructed non-Jewish Egyptian none the less. Jahveh derived from Arabia, which was also non-Jewish and non-European.”^[1339] According to Said, the central implication of Freud's book is that Jewish identity, including Freud's own identity, was divided from the inside, and that its defining characteristic was the combination of Jewish, non-Jewish, and non-European elements. To be Jewish, for Freud, was to be cosmopolitan through and through. Jewish identity, in this analysis, cannot conceive of itself “without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian.”^[1340] Thus, the historical memory of Moses agrees with Freud's self-conception of Jewish identity and shows the psychoanalyst himself to be a many-sided, worldly individual. Yet, Said also makes the further point that a group with this sense of identity could potentially reach out to another fraught identity, “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”^[1341] Said thus suggests that Israeli Jews ought to embrace Freud's vision, reach out to Palestinians as another people with a complicated identity, and seek to live peacefully, and on equal terms, with them, so that both might be able to coexist harmoniously together.

Rose observes in her response that there is an additional dimension that needs to be brought to bear on Said's analysis: trauma and the response to trauma. As Rose writes, “the most historically attested response to trauma is to repeat it.”^[1342] Freud's text is surely marked by at least a couple of violently traumatic moments, including the murder of Moses by the Jews and the exodus from Egypt. And Freud himself saw the book as further denial of the conventional Jewish understanding of Moses, a denial he made explicit in his memorable opening sentence (“To deprive a people of the man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons is not a thing to be gladly or carelessly undertaken, least of all by someone who is himself one of them”). But in addition to the literal and figurative killing of Moses, and to the his­torical memory with which Freud attempts to engage, we should look at the his­torical situation in which the book appeared. Freud's book was published, in 1939, the year of his death, after he was forced to flee Vienna and seek refuge in London, and after he had reworked the text during the latter half of the 1930s. The book assumes a poignancy in the light of Freud's exile, and postwar readers cannot but approach Moses and Monotheism without an awareness of the Holocaust as well as of the author's anguish.

The identity of a people who have suffered from a trauma so enormous can only have undergone a huge stress—and not necessarily for the better. Rose asks, “Are we at risk of idealizing the flaws and fissures of identity?” and she points out that trauma, far from leading to openness, can cause “identities to batten down, to go exactly the other way: towards dogma, the dangers of coercive and coercing forms of faith.”^[1343] In other words, Israel's treatment of Palestinians can be interpreted as a response to the historical traumas suffered by Jews, and Israel's recent history suggests that a traumatized people may go on to inflict suffering on others.

Said's lecture emerges from Rose's response as a “misreading” of Freud as much as a noble attempt to seek a blueprint for reconciliation. Yet, Freud's own treatment of Egyptian and Hebrew material in Moses and Monotheism was also a misreading of the sources, as many scholars have remarked, and even in his own day few estab­lished historians actually espoused the views he held about the “the man Moses.” But what is powerful in each case is less the interpretive misprision and more the uses to which the thinker put his analyses, less the putative inaccuracy and more the challenge to a contemporary state of affairs. Each author was compulsively drawn to make an intervention in the political situation of his own day, Freud in relation to the already dangerous circumstances of Jews in the 1930s, Said in rela­tion to the postwar plight of Palestinians. Each was responding to a trauma, the understanding of which was shaped by memories historical and personal. Each teaches his readers, as indeed does Pollock, that remembering the past is not merely sufficient to avoid repeating it and that what we remember is often shaped by the cues of the moment. Memories of empire are variable, and the way we stitch them together are the result of present exigencies. The lesson for us appears to be that working through jealousy, melancholia, nostalgia, or euphoria is one way to come to a deeper understanding of the past and to avoid repeating the worst excesses of empire.

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