HORSEFEATHERS BOOK NOTES
Edward Said Throws Another Stone:
Comments on “Freud and the Non-European.”
By Mattathias
Professor Edward Said, famously photographed throwing a stone at Israel from the safety of Lebanon, has continued his career as a fearless terrorist by now hurling an academic brickbat at Israel from a safe podium in England. This book, which purports in its title to be a discussion of Freud’s Eurocentrism, is in fact nothing less than an attempt to pathologize Zionism on the basis of Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism.” Said takes for a fact Freud’s speculation on the Egyptian identity of Moses, and builds on this shaky foundation a polemic on the one hand of praise for Freud in his ability to rise above his Jewish roots, on the other of derision of the Zionists for their inability to be similarly expansive regarding Israel, which they pathologically insist should be a Jewish State. In support of this thesis Said conjures up an anti-Israel Freud by collecting various Freudian remarks ambivalent about Jewishness and hostile to nationalism—somehow never noticing that Freud died in l939, before both Holocaust and Israel, events which usually impact a person’s opinions, to say the least.
Said’s book would be utter nonsense and a total calumny to Freud were it not for the discussant, Jacqueline Rose, herself no friend of Israel, but who has at least the integrity to remind Said of Freud’s Preface to the Hebrew Edition of Moses and Monotheism, which she quotes almost in full: “No reader of the Hebrew version of this book will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the language of the holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers—as well as from every other religion—and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideals, but who has yet never repudiated his people, who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew, and who has no desire to alter that nature. If the question were put to him: “Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?” he would reply: “A great deal, and probably its very essence.” Rose left out Freud’s key concluding sentence: “He could not now express that essence clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to the scientific mind.” And never, one might add, to the twisted mind.
Christopher Bollas provides an introduction to Said’s book which immediately establishes the perverse—possibly anti-semitic—tone of the volume: “The stone throwing Palestinian is symbolically returning that Israeli violence that has used stones to build the settlements. The horror of the suicide bomber returns the violence of Israeli guns, tanks, and warplanes. The aim of such resistance is not to overcome Israel, it is to return Israel to itself, for better and for worse. Palestinian violence seeks to maintain sanity for its people through the insistence that the self exists even as the oppressors seek to deny it, something that, of course, the Jewish people know only too well through the catastrophe that was the Holocaust.”
The use of the Holocaust in polemic against Jews is pathognomonic of anti-semitism. This diagnosis was first manifest, it is said, by the Emperor Hadrian, who used Torah law as a basis on which to persecute Jews. Edward Said, in his (failed) attempt to deploy Freud against Israel, firmly establishes himself in this cruel and perverse tradition.
P.S.
It should be noted that Said’s lecture was rejected by the
Freud Museum in Vienna, but rescued by the Freud Museum of London, which sponsored its presentation and publication. This is a supreme embarassment to psychoanalysis world-wide, and an eternal disgrace to the nudniks who run the London Museum.
