In my opening lecture to the workshop on the theme of “Lacan and Religion” I wish to shed light on the figure of Moses as a medium for cross identifications by Freud and Lacan (vis a vis the alternative figure of Jung), particularly in the context of the theological fundamentals of Western culture in general and of psychoanalysis in particular.
Two well known Lacanian interventions in the way Freud discussed the figure of Moses in his “Moses and Monotheism” can by found in two interrelated seminars, seminar 7 and seminar 17. Here I will focus in the previous seminar, “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis”. In it Lacan shares his amusement and amazement about Freud’s mythologizing of the genesis of Judaism by portraying the split nature of Moses. On the one hand Moses is the rational, Egyptian leader, preaching the Monotheist God, and on the other hand he is the Midianite leader, preaching the zealotry and extremism characteristic of the God of the desert. Lacan emphasizes that the latter is the one who speaks his name as “I will be whatever I will be”.
For the purpose of understanding the Lacanian exegesis to the Freudian issues of concern to us here, I feel the need to go deeper to the historical context as much as to the biographical one as a condition for the rest of the debate. It seems that Freud’s Moses complex is a topos that is being crossed by the historical emblem of the Judaeo-European fantasy of fusion being shattered by the state of historical emergency.
In his latest essay, “Moses and Monotheism”, Freud offers an account that is at the same time autobiographic, cultural and theoretical-therapeutic. In the double-faced figure of Moses, he sees his own ordeal as the Jewish leader of a new “religion”, torn between his commitment to enlightenment and his status as the Jewish uncanny subject of this German culture. Moreover, in his depiction of Moses, and implicitly of himself, Freud resonates ironically the image of the Führer, the hateful leader who stands for the irrational sub-current within enlightenment itself. Hitler is, in a way, a key to understanding the paranoid model of God, a jealous God who intends to save the world in the name of the absolute.
Back to seminar 7 I wish to discuss the way Lacan is maneuvering the Freudian core of the Real-traumatic of the Moses Complex, eliminating its subjective anxiety and criticizing its mythical Christian content of the murder of God. All this in order to pave the way to his invention of the semi-theological concept of the Real under the transformation and translation of the historical Real to a structural one.
Das Podiumsgespräch wird veranstaltet in Kooperation mit dem Theologischen Institut der Universität Hamburg.