Return to Moses

Before and after the linguistic turn and the proximate posts (poststructuralist, postmodern, postcolonial, and so forth), there were other turns that register still on academic radars (the cultural turn, the spatial turn, etc.) (see Surkis 2012). There were also returns: the returns to Freud, to Marx, to Nietzsche and, less well-advertised perhaps, the return to Spinoza. More recently (though going further back) there was a return to Paul. In Racial Fever (2009), Eliza Slavet speaks to us of what may or may not signify the return to the oldest source yet: the return to Moses. I mean by this first of all the proliferation of studies that, responding or reacting to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, have made the biblical figure into a major occasion for research, reflection, and speculation.¹ As with the return to Paul, however, and as with most of these turns and returns, it is no easy matter to date with precision the beginnings of each “trend” and its precise discursive location. Was not the sixteenth century—the Reformation—the crucial beginning of the current return to Paul in its distinct temporalities and velocities? Should the return to Moses be dated to the 1990s or to the nineteenth, eighteenth, or even seventeenth century? And if, as Jacob Taubes suggested, Paul himself was enacting his own, ambivalent return to Moses (2004, 13–54), was not the return to Paul always already a return to Moses, and vice versa?²

The duality of Moses and Paul—rather than their near-collapse under the aegis of an increasingly common “monotheism” or “Judeo-Christianity”—has long served as a convenient screen (at once image and cover) for more enduring divisions, the most obvious of which are at once buttressed and undone by the narrative I just sketched: Judaism and Christianity, law and love, faith and works (Paul 1996, 193–218). One could pursue these vectors further and consider, with Jan Assmann (1997), that Moses stands for an ambiguous return to Egypt; away, at any rate, from monotheism. “Moses the Egyptian” would here be opposed perhaps to “Paul the Jew,” Black Athena to Jerusalem, with each figure understandably marked by internal and external splits, doublings, or ambivalences (Bernal 1987; Irwin 1983). Such developments may seem to remain confined to the realm of religion (the turn to Paul and to Moses would be contemporary with yet another return—to religion this time), to testify with Freud to the origins of (monotheistic) religion out of the sources of polytheism. Yet the very nature of the debates suggests that they were bound to spill over, as they indeed have, into yet other realms, other dualities.³

Somehow overdetermined in this respect, the return to Moses has thus involved an appeal to identity (whether Jewish or Western, whether Moses’s or Freud’s) articulated in national, ethnic, or racial terms. Even Paul’s universalism could be conjured, somehow more grudgingly, under the specter of race and ethnicity. In this context, it is demanding enough to sort through and adjudicate on the most interesting advances in the scholarly work done about Moses and Paul. It would be more arduous still to determine whether these advances have been made by upholding the epistemological purity of one figure or category (religion as opposed to race, say; or Judaism as opposed to Christianity) with the nearly complete exclusion of any other or, to the contrary, by insisting on the joined, even networked, pertinence of both figures.⁴ The singular brilliance of Daniel Boyarin’s (1994, 1997) work, to take a prominent example, should not prevent us from including him as representative of the latter tendency (race and religion, Moses and Paul), whereas Assmann’s (1997, 2010) exclusive focus on religion, and indeed on Moses, neatly illustrates the former. Thus, if it has been tempting again to map Judaism and Christianity on the familiar oppositions of flesh and spirit, particularism and universalism, and ethnicity and religion, the recent “advances in intellectuality” (to use Freud’s expression) have showed us better, more intricate, ways.

To be true to Slavet’s terrific book (“Why Is This Book Different from...