On Grounding Identity

Like Beethoven's late works, Freud's Spätwerk is obsessed with returning not just to the problem of Moses's identity - which, of course, is at the very core of the treatise — but to the very elements of identity itself, as if that issue so crucial to psychoanalysis, the very heart of the science, could be returned to in the way that Beethoven's late work returns to such basics as tonality and rhythm..... Above all, late style's effect on the reader or listener is alienating — that is to say, Freud and Beethoven present material that is of pressing concern to them with scant regard for satisfying, much less placating, the reader's need for closure. Other books by Freud were written with a didactic or pedagogic aim in mind: Moses and Monotheism is not. Reading the treatise, we feel that Freud wishes us to understand that there are other issues at stake here — other, more pressing problems to expose than ones whose solution might be comforting, or provide a sort of resting-place....

As to whether Moses can be said to be "foreign" to the Jews who adopt him as their patriarch, Freud is quite clear, even adamant: Moses was an Egyptian, and was therefore different from the people who adopted him as their leader - people, that is, who became the Jews whom Moses seems to have later created as his people....

More bold is Freud's profound exemplification of the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborncommunal identity — for him, this was the Jewish identity — there are inherent limits that prevent it 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 Edward Said (2003), Freud and the Non-European, 28-29 &35

Nothing seems more trivial than, A=A. Let's call it (that is, 'A=A,') 'clean identity.' 

Said has Freud say that in human circumstances, that first 'A' (of 'A=A') is not self-grounding. (Freud resists the Spinozist solution of an infinite chain of As.) It's not that Said is wrong that Freud thinks leader and people co-constitute each other (much the way David Hume constitutes his public), but as Jacqueline Rose perceptively notes in her invited commentary on Said's lecture, Said understates the way in which Freud argues that violence is presupposed even constitutive of any form of identity. (I wish I had read her before writing this post a few years ago.) For, when he turns to his political solution to the problem of Zionism, Said posits a kind of heterogeneous even besieged identity as political ideal, but then fails to name the violence required to sustain partial identities. 

Be that as it may, Said's lecture (recall my post), suggests that any clean identity claim (at least in political contexts) is both more than meets the eye and less. More in that it presupposes (not just violence, but also) symbolic forms that make possible its intelligibility and stability. Less because the impurity of the ground infects the purity of the terms in the clean identity. Each 'A' in clean identity is itself a composite of As and not As.* Yet, ordinarily the not As' elements in 'A' are effaced. 

In the lecture, Said spends quite a bit of time on how Zionist scientific activities (archaeology) facilitate such effacement when it comes to Jewish identity.+ That is, in fact, compatible with individual archaeologists being motivated by the purest moral motives and acting with may be thought best individual epistemic practices. (I would argue the problem is rooted in the structure of the community and its relationship to society.)

In so doing, Said ignores the symbolic ways in which not wholly As can become purified into As. Judaism has many rituals that act as such forms of purification (bathing, washing, fasting, etc.). My friend and one-time-co-author (and less hesitant Zionist than myself) Yoram Hazony audaciously notes that one such species of purification is itself the embrace of the moral law.** (His exemplar (recall) is the compassionate daughter of Pharaoh who saves baby Moses.) The thought is, through some transformative process, one can become essentially 'A' in clean identity.++ 

One may be tempted to respond that such purification is a cheat. I have some sympathy for the complaint. As regular readers know, I am no friend of baptismic accounts that somehow fix identity. But a Freudian (or even a Humean) can't use this line of objection because on her view such symbolic cheating just is, like tonality and rhythm, the essential ingredient of living.  

*This way of putting the point is indebted to Deleuze.

+Regular readers know that I am no friend of efforts to de-legitimize Zionism (recall this post; and many subsequent ones).

**Hazony is a critic of Kantianism, but there are surprisingly Kantian resonances in his thinking.

++Rose makes a similar point by treating Freud's self-understanding of the essential of his Judaism.