On Hesitation

Let me begin with an image and its description and then describe them again, together. This purpose is perhaps justified by the fact that one sees very little or nothing in this image. As in many other such cases, this image—as well as its description—is produced by an invisibility, and what is more: it is produced by a gap, by something that only belongs to this image because it is quite missing from it. The image in question represents an empty space; its description circles around this empty space; and therefore my description of image and image-description can only let itself be captured by the two-fold drama of this omission—a particular kind of enigmatic image.

That, in any case, is how Sigmund Freud approached the Moses of Michelangelo in one of his most beautiful essays: he was drawn to a puzzle that contaminates all visible evidence with a deep questionability. That is to say, Freud has devoted himself to this sculpture not merely with every caution, but with the reservation that he was no "art connoisseur"—a reservation I readily admit for myself. Above all, Freud found the image's "immense effect"¹ (as he calls it) in that this image of the sitting Moses does not really narrate what it ought to have narrated. For on the one hand there seems to be

Michelangelo's Moses. From the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome.

no doubt that this arrangement—the powerful, bearded man with the tablets of laws under his arm—refers in some way to the episodes from the second book of Moses: Moses, equipped with the tablets of laws, descends from Mount Sinai, notices the dancing around the golden calf, throws down both tablets in a rage, shattering them... and finally throws himself into the impious mass. On the other hand, none of this is to be seen in the Moses depicted by Michelangelo—as Freud himself notes; sitting, frozen in its movement, this Moses has fallen straight out of the narrative, comes from nowhere, goes nowhere, tangled forever with tablets of laws that he certainly does not break.

Freud accordingly connects a two-part argument with this Moses. He first recalls variants of a possible meaning that this frozen image might have obtained in the course of the biblical story, and thus mobilizes the art history of his time. Does the image condense a particular moment in the life of Moses, a dramatic moment that captures Moses shortly before his burst of rage, an inhibited movement in the prelude of the act? or is it an image that has to do with a Moses who is startled by the rowdiness of his people, turns his head to the left, barely holding onto the sliding tablets, a moment of high tension before they fall?²

Freud immediately brackets all these interpretations, however, and merely skims through them, because they are produced only by an "absence of meaning" in the overall concept.³ In his essay he takes the path of securing evidence on which only the detail counts, the apparent insignificance.⁴ A hermeneutics of meaning, which oscillates between biblical narrative and renaissance sculpture, is surpassed by conjecture based on evidence. Allow me briefly to explain.

The one detail to which Freud dedicates almost four pages of his concerns the entanglement of the index finger of Moses's right hand with the low hanging tresses of his beard that sway from his left cheek to the right side of his chest. If this detail actually has a meaning, so goes Freud's argument, then it lies in an invisibility. The detail can only be explained by the presence of the mere remainder of a relation, by the endpoint of a movement, where the right hand now lingers with the beard strands. And this would be Freud's hypothesis or conjecture: Moses in fact sat there rather calmly, then heard a noise, turned his head, saw the scene, was stricken with rage, impatiently moved his right hand towards the left and into his beard...