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  • Recasting Moses: Narrative and Drama in the Dumbshow of Freud’s “The Moses of Michelangelo”
  • David Wagenknecht

Introduction

The extraordinary attention paid of late to Freud’s valedictory “novel” Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses Und Die Monotheistische Religion: Drei Abhandlungen), 1937–39, has understandably eclipsed, to a degree, interest in its more exclusively “aesthetic” younger brother, the essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914), an essay Freud was as apparently hesitant to publish as he was hell-bent (after overcoming similar hesitations) to issue the later book. 1 Considering the putative effect on a world witnessing the first acts of German genocide of the argument in Moses and Monotheism that Moses was not in the first place even a Jew, it might seem more logical for Freud to have feared the response to the book rather than to the article, and to have published the former anonymously rather than the latter, as he did. The tendency to worry Moses and Monotheism in terms of Freud’s own Jewishness and/or “loyalty” will probably eventually be absorbed by broader studies of the cultural historicity of psychoanalysis than we currently have, but while we are waiting for these to materialize it opens the door to re-considering his earlier treatment of Moses to notice that, albeit “aesthetic,” Freud’s approach to the sculptured figure has more parallels to his later psychoanalytic study than first meet the eye. The sturdy megalomania displayed by Freud’s historical scholarship in the book has its counterpart in the generally accepted assumption that by the Moses of his essay, whose essence is magisterial self-control, Freud means to allude to, or encourage, his own forbearance with respect to the backsliding of disciples. 2 It contributes to the force of this resemblance that paranoia (of which megalomania is a [End Page 439] symptom) is more than a casual association to both these texts: Freud’s version of the Moses story in the book is a clear variant of what he describes as “The Family Romance” fantasy, where a child represents disappointment with his parent in terms of a lost “real” father of higher status. Adepts of Freud’s interpretation of paranoia will recognize this “romance” as an especially plotted example of the “decomposition” inflicted on the parental imago in cases of paranoid psychosis. In the Schreber case-study, for example, father imagos fissure into an abundance of divisions, and there is a relationship between Schreber’s paranoid associations to his care-givers and the structure of his theology, according to which God himself is decomposed into “higher” and “lower” manifestations. 3 More historically, and ominously, Freud’s representation of Michelangelo’s Moses as becalmed by the context of a Christian monument (honoring a Pope) can be read as a previsionary sign of his own later quiet patience in a Vienna, controlled anyway by a hostile Catholicism, lately over-run by Nazis. At which point, needless to say, paranoia met its vanishing point.

My purpose in this essay, however, is not to record the poignance of the collision between Freud’s humanity and its awful historical context, but to approach the dialogue between the two Moses texts in a more theoretical spirit. The treatment I have in mind will preserve (I hope provide a new context for) a certain fixation on Freud’s part in “twoness”—a need not to choose between two different cultural identifications (Jew or Gentile), between two different countries, two versions of parent, perhaps even two different emphases in sexual theory (bisexualism versus patriarchalism). In fact, translated into a formal difference, I mean to take the two works, not as allegorically representative separately of any of Freud’s “two” positions, but rather as allegorical in concert, so that what can be seen to be happening imaginatively in “The Moses of Michelangelo” performs a certain dialogical impasse, or decomposition, which can be conceived as occurring within the tension between the two texts. In psychoanalytic terms, since passionate issues of origination are common to both texts, what I will be discussing bears general relevance to the issue of “primal scenes,” but I’m less interested in subjecting my formal [End Page 440] point to psychoanalysis than in...

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