Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (34 page)

body. This is, I suggest, to be taken both “straight” and also as parodic of gen- tile claims to superiority over Jews. The best analogy I have found to this dis- course is the text to which Jenny Sharpe refers wherein two Bengalis converse on why the English would benefit from learning Bengali; this text “restages the colonizers’ privileging of racial purity and their own superior intellect in a manner that turns the language of purity and superiority against them” (Sharpe,
Figures
145, but see her properly skeptical glosses on this text). In both the premodern Jewish descriptions of the uncircumcised penis as ugly, gross, impure and the Bengali reverse discourse about the superiority of their language, we find the parodic rejections of the claims of the colonizing cul- ture that Scott refers to as “hidden transcripts.”

Scott argues eloquently against the notion of hegemony, claiming that the appearance of hegemony is only the “public script” that serves the purposes of both colonizer and colonized in situations of near total domination: “In this respect, subordinate groups are complicitious in contributing to a sanitized official transcript, for that is one way they cover their tracks” (Scott,
Domi- nation
87). He further claims that something like “genuine” hegemony is only achieved in situations where the oppressed or dominated party hope one day to be the dominator (not, of course, over their present oppressors but over others), e.g., age-graded systems of domination. I suggest that the condition of incipient decolonization, represented for Jews by the fin-de-siècle transi- tional emancipation status, and for Fanon by his education in France and all that it implied, is precisely such an “expectation that one will eventually be able to exercise the domination that one endures today.” According to Scott, that would be “a strong incentive serving to legitimate patterns of domina- tion” (82) and thus an occasion for canceling the hidden transcript of con- tempt for the oppressor and turning into self-contempt. Thus, the moment (or the incipient moment) of decolonization on the political level (“emanci- pation” for the Jews) ironically gives rise precisely to hegemony. An early twentieth-century American Jewish professor remarked of his coreligionists in eastern Europe that their bodies are bound but their spirits free, whereas for those of the West it was the opposite, anticipating this analysis of hegemony (see also Guha, “Dominance”).

At this moment for the Jewish colonial subject circumcision takes on the aspect of a displaced castration (Geller “Paleontological”).
44
Freud looking into the mirror, experiences his own circumcision as the “uncanny,” and, clos- eted behind the white mask of scientist, sets out to explain (almost to justify) antisemitism. To the extent that psychoanalysts reading circumcision in that way were/are Jews, this reading is a chronic inscription of their own ambiva- lent gaze on Jewish male difference, an ambivalence recorded in American

culture in such mythic figures of Jewish psychoanalytic discourse as Alexan- der Portnoy and Woody Allen. Freud is thus a paradigm for this ambivalent subjectivity, and one of the strongest symptoms of this ambivalence is the fre- quent but not ubiquitous misogyny, racism, and homophobia of his thought (Gilman,
Freud
23). The precise incongruity of this misogyny, homophobia, and racism with the best of Freud’s thought leads me to search for a specific etiology for them, as a kind of lapse (cf. Fuss, “Interior” 36).

The most dramatic example of this particular sociopsychic process in Freud and his work is the production of the master complex, the Oedipus/cas- tration complex, as the notional infrastructure that is Freud’s most conspicu- ous speech act of misogyny. I return to the Freudian passage: “The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of anti-semitism; for even in the nurs- ery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis—a piece of his penis, they think—and this gives them the right to despise Jews. And there is no stronger unconscious root for the sense of superiority over women.” I have already noted the passage’s equivocal meaning. I have argued that Freud claims boys hear of circumcision as the unconscious root of misogyny, antisemitism— and, at a deeper level—Jewish self-hatred: a Jewish male reaction to the accu- sation from outside their own “castration” or “feminization.” Gilman reads this as the development of normal Jews who “overcome their anxiety about their own bodies by being made to understand that the real difference is not be- tween their circumcised penises and those of uncircumcised males, but be- tween themselves and castrated females”; I can add that the same paradigm would determine the misogyny of the colonized Jew.
45

The discourse uncovering this aspect (an aspect of psychoanalysis’s cul- tural unconscious) is postcolonial theory and specifically Fanon’s elaboration of the colonized male subject. I am not denying that other factors contributed to these ideologies and representations in both Freud and Fanon. In Freud’s case we must certainly reckon with the general upsurge in misogyny that came to a crisis in western Europe during the fin de siècle, as Bram Dijkstra has most fully diagnosed in
Idols
. For Fanon, certainly, the influence of Freud is undeniable. For both, elements of misogyny and homophobia inherited from their “traditional” cultures preexist. I think, however, in these two cases that the “influence” explanations inadequately figure as a simple
cause,
because both thinkers were eminently able to rise above their surroundings. The ques- tion is why they did not do so in certain textual moments, and their own so- ciopsychological situations as men “in between”—neither “native” nor fully Western—provides a powerful determining response to this question.

In the context of postcolonial theory, Freud’s universalized theories of subjectivity all centered on the phallus—the Oedipus complex, the castration

anxiety, and penis envy appear as an elaborate defense against the feminiza- tion of Jewish men. His essentializing of misogyny is also a way to appropri- ate the phallus for himself as a circumcised male. In other words, Freud’s the- ories allowed him to assert that the “real” difference is not between the Jewish and gentile penis but between having a penis at all and not having one. The binary opposition phallus/castration conceals the same third term that Freud conceals in his mystification of Little Hans’s identity: the circumcised penis. Both the “
idealization
of the phallus, whose integrity is necessary for the edi- fication of the entire psychoanalytical system” (Johnson, “Frame” 225) and the flight to Greek cultural models and metaphors signal this production’s im- brication in the affect of the colonized people. In psychoanalytic terms the Oedipus complex is Freud’s “family romance,” in the exact sense of the term. He is fantasizing (unconsciously) that he is not the circumcised Schelomo, son of Jakob, but the uncircumcised and virile Greek Oedipus, son of Laius (cf. Anzieu,
Freud’s
195), just as he earlier fantasized that he was Hannibal, the son of the heroic Hamilcar and not the son of his “unheroic” Jewish fa- ther. Fanon writes of “a bilateral process, an attempt to acquire—by internal- izing them—assets that were originally prohibited [by the colonizers]” (Fanon,
Black
59–60). Such was Freud’s sublated penis (Lacan, “Meaning”

1. become phallus, not as an asset that he owned but rather as one that he sought to acquire: a mask—the product of a mimicry—as abject and subver- sive as that of black skins, white masks.
   

   At the same time, by disagnosing Weininger’s “pathology”—and “his own” as well, “a bit of opposition to our own Jewishness,” as in the letter to Zweig just quoted—Freud shows how the liminal racial position that he oc- cupies is a place that generates knowledge as well as unknowing. My histori- cizing account of the conditions of the production of Freud’s theories of sex and gender is not reductive. Freud’s narrative of sexual differentiation as
   non- biological
   in its foundations is more liberatory than is, for instance, Karen Horney’s contention that people are born male and female (cf. also Ramas, “Freud’s” 480–81). The castration complex thus represents an astonishing theoretical advance over naturalized views of sexual difference. Freud’s great- est insight—that sexual difference is made and not born—is also his darkest moment of gross misogyny; it emerges out of precisely the same point in his discourse, like one of those words that mean something and its opposite, words to which he was so attracted. If we do not accept crude readings of Freud that caricature him merely as a white male woman-hater, neither can we ignore the gross gender effects of the discourse of castration. The point is certainly not to disqualify Freud’s contribution by locating it in a particular social circumstance; rather the function of my argument is to contextualize
   

   those places where Freud’s thesis seems incoherent, unnecessary, or otherwise unhelpful—that is, to identify its moments of blindness, not its moments of insight. A signal blindness exists in Freud’s unwillingness to figure sexual dif- ference in any way other than by the phallus, which, as Lacan
   correctly
   inter- preted, is symbolically equivalent to the Name-of-the-Father. Why was a thinker who was in so many ways willing and able to break the paradigms of his culture seemingly unable to do so here?
   

   It is as if a moment of oscillation surfaces between looking with contempt at the circumcised nonphallus and then understanding his own self-contempt as the product of the psychotic (Lacan,
   Psychoses
   ),
   46
   antisemitic imaginary that Freud cannot escape—an enormous gap between figuring his affect as “de- fense against castration” and as “a slyly hidden opposition to his own Jewish- ness.” This is precisely an instance of the doubled consciousness of the colo- nized subject from which is generated “the divided subject posited by psychoanalytic theory to refute humanism’s myth of the unified self ” as well as the misogyny, homophobia, and racism of that very subject. We have now a paradigm with which to explain the curious Freudian effect whereby his texts support both the most radical and the most reactionary of sociopolitical projects.
   

   Barratt and Straus have well captured this division’s effect within Freud (without relating it to his doubled “racial” positioning):
   

   Freud’s psychology
   both
   stands as the apotheosis of modern reason, the heir to enlightenment values grounded in refl e-subjective and scientifi objective practices . . .
   and
   it stands as the harbinger of postmodern inspi- ration, the exemplar of discursive practices that emancipate whatever may be excluded or repressed by the totalization of analytico-referential reason. In this sense, the discipline of psychoanalysis occupies a very signifi but disconcertingly ambiguous position in relation to the critique of patriarchy.
   

   . . . In one frame, psychoanalytic doctrine can be seen as one of the last manifestos of patriarchal legitimation, an ideological structure that system- atically rationalizes masculinism [heterosexuality]. In another frame, psy- choanalytic method can be seen as an inspiration for feminist [queer] cri- tique, an enigmatic and extraordinary challenge to the hegemonic structuration of masculinist [heterosexual] discursive practices.
   

   (“Toward” 38)
   

   My argument implies in a strong sense that the division of Freud’s social po- sitioning produced the division within his subject position, resulting in both a Janus-like doubledness of his discourse, radical and reactionary at one and
   

   the same time, and his very understanding of the subject’s scissions or divi- sion. Seen in this light the peculiarly American developments of Ego Psy- chology, which mobilize only the most reactionary side of Freud’s thinking on sex and gender, can be read as a rather desperate attempt on the part of Eu- ropean Jewish refugees to escape the postcolonial subject position.
   

   Notes
   

   This essay was previously published, in an earlier version, entitled “What Does a Jew Want?; or, The Political Meaning of the Phallus,” in Christopher Lane, ed.,
   the psychoanalysis of race
   (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
   

   1. Susan Shapiro is now writing a book on the uncanny as a trope for the Jew.
      

   2. For an explanation of the “uncanniness” of this recalling, see Freud, “Uncanny” 247–48.
      

   3. Cf. Kofman,
      Enigma
      32.
      

   4. I wonder how akin Freud’s mirror is to Dedalus’s description of Irish art as “the cracked lookingglass of a servant” (Joyce,
      Ulysses
      6).
      

   5. In an illuminating essay Geoffrey Galt Harpham describes the
      conversos
      (“forcibly” converted Jews) of early modern Spain as the paradigmatic modern subjects (“So” 550–51).
      

   6. Freud really seems to mean that misogyny is caused by fear of losing the penis. How- ever, since he uses the positive language of “sense of superiority,” it is hard to escape the positive language of sense of possession as well.
      

   7. Cf. the similar reading of Geller: “The circumcised Jew seems to question sexual dif- ference” (“Paleontological” 56). Jonathan Boyarin has proposed an even more disturbing reading that the syntax allows, and even prefers: little boys hear in the nursery about the “castration” of the Jews and learn to feel contempt for them long before they know that women have no penises. The contempt for women is derived from the primary anti- semitism, because women are similar to Jews. Antisemitism (including Jewish anti- semitism) is then literally the unconscious root of misogyny.
      

   8. Nor can it be objected that he assumed that everyone knew this fact, since he in- forms us exactly who Weininger is, leaving out only the fact that he was Jewish.
      

   9. These formulations are, for me, ultimately the same, because, as I have argued else- where, the very positing of the phallus is already an instantiation of the “dominant fiction.” I know that this statement will be, at best, obnoxious to Lacanians, but it is precisely the nature of my argument to suggest that the very terms
      phallus
      and
      castration
      , if they are not interrogated historically, lose the very symptomatic power they might have to explain mi- sogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism/racism and become, willy nilly, complicit with those discourses. We must then, with Juliet Mitchell, read Freud not as positing “the phal- lus,” but as positing the
      positing
      of the phallus (Mitchell,
      Psychoanalysis
      ).
      

   10. I have elided here two words “
       pace
       Freud,” because I disagree with them and am ap- propriating Brenkman’s otherwise exact formulation here for my own text. I would argue that Freud is, at least sometimes, brilliantly aware of the “rifeness” of these passive and active aims.
       

   11. This point seems often to be missed in even critical discussions of Freud, which as- sume the “patriarchal,” oedipalized family that he describes is a seamlessly sutured sequel to something called biblical patriarchy rather than a European production with which
       

       Freud identifies with the desperate identification of the colonized subject. Thus Bersani writes, “The psychoanalytic Oedipal myth also describes a very limited situation . . . the fantasmatic field of the nuclear bougeois family at a particular moment in European his- tory, and perhaps also a certain crisis in a patriarchal community structured in conformi- ty to an ancient Judaic veneration for and terror of the law-giving father” (Bersani, “Gay” 8). Such a structure of “ancient Judaic veneration and terror” is, however, a fantasy. Nei- ther God nor the human father were venerated as objects of terror in any variety of tradi- tional Judaism with which I am familiar; object of a pathic erotic desire for a “maternal” father would be a more accurate description. Rather the crisis here is the crisis of the al- ways preoedipal Jew seeking to become a full participant in the fantasmatic field of the nu- clear bourgeois family. Feldman, “And” (9–11) is astute on this point as well. Of Isaac, one of the classical Patriarchs, she writes: “One can hardly imagine such a paternal figure serv- ing as the source of a Freudian castration threat or of a Lacanian ‘“No” of the Father’” (10)—exactly! See also her n. 1 on p. 22.
       

   12. In a rather fascinating essay on
       Daniel Deronda,
       Catherine Gallagher has elaborat- ed yet another basis for the association of Jews and (loose) women, their supposed lack of economic productivity (“George” 130). These two aspects, circumcision and economic uselessness, converge at the site of the “clipped” coin, as my student Willis Johnson has brilliantly argued (Johnson, “Henry”).
       

   13. Paul Gilroy has very sensitively treated the moral and theoretical power of the com- parison of the histories of blacks and Jews and its limitations (
       Black
       212–17).
       

   14. For the justification of the “(post)” with reference to Fanon, see below.
       

   15. In his reading of this Freudian text, Sander Gilman finesses this enigma by writing as if Freud had revealed precisely that which he concealed, that which he hid in the clos- et. See also Pellegrini, “Without” for a parallel critique. According to Gilman, Freud cited Otto Weininger as “an example of the problematic relationship of the Jew to his circum- cised penis” (Gilman,
       Freud
       77). Gilman goes on to argue that “Weininger is like the lit- tle (non-Jewish) boy in the nursery who hears about the Jews cutting off penises, except that he, of course, knows that it is true. His hatred of the Jew is ‘infantile,’ according to Freud, since it remains fixed at that moment in all children’s development when they learn about the possibility of castration. Jewish neurotics like Weininger focus on the negative difference of their bodies from ones that are ‘normal,’ and use this difference, like their evo- cation of the bodies of women, to define themselves” (ibid. 80). Gilman treats Freud’s Weininger as an analysand, and Freud as an anatomist of antisemitism: “Freud has evoked the Jewish ‘scientist’ Otto Weininger as an anti-Semite.” Gilman explicitly sequesters Freud from “Jewish self-hatred”: “He understood himself as a Jew, as different. And this for him (as for Jewish contemporaries such as Theodor Herzl) was in no way negative” (Gilman,
       Case
       8). In Boyarin, “Colonial” I have argued that Herzl is an exemplary case of Jewish self- hatred. Similarly, Steven Beller excuses Weininger of Jewish self-contempt by comparing his views with Herzl’s (“Otto” 100), rather than drawing the opposite conclusion. It is this contention of Gilman’s that I contest. Where Gilman reads Freud as analyzing Weininger’s pathology, as an analysand, I read Freud as enlisting Weininger as a fellow analyst. It is in- teresting that in earlier work it was Gilman himself who noted similar occlusions in Freud’s writings, such as the “masking” of Bertha Pappenheim (“Anna O”)’s and Ida Bauer (“Dora”)’s Jewishness (
       Jew’s
       81). In both cases the Jewishness of the subject is arguably less relevant than is Little Hans’s, where it is occluded in the context of a discussion of cir- cumcision and its psychic effects.
       

   16. If indeed, as Gilman claims, Freud had not “responded to Weininger’s self-hatred as the reflection of his identity crisis” (Gilman,
       Jewish
       251), this would have been a classic example of denial and defense, but I am suggesting that he did respond.
       

   17. See Gilman,
       Jewish
       , where he writes, “Freud’s scientific German, at least when he sits down to write his book on humor, is a language tainted by Weininger’s anti-Semitism,” a claim that seems to contradict his later argument that Freud pathologized and thus re- jected Weininger’s anti-Semitism. In 1986, it seems, Gilman was closer to the perspective on Freud that I am adopting here than he is in his latest work. See also, however, Gilman’s most recent essay, “Otto,” for further revisions of his thinking on this subject. For a simi- lar case of a “scientist,” Cesare Lombroso, obscuring his own Jewishness and writing an “objective” account of antisemitism that reveals, indeed, his own feelings of contempt for Jews see Harrowitz, “Weininger.”
       

   18. “Epispasm”: the operation to restore the foreskin, very popular among Hellenized Jews in antiquity (Hall, “Epispasm”).
       

   19. Interestingly enough, a similar situation seems to obtain for the Irish. As Enda Duffy remarks, “It was inevitable that the Irish would be seen to occupy an ambivalent middle ground between the ‘master’ and the ‘dark’ races” (Duffy,
       Subaltern
       42–43).
       

   20. For analogous processes in American culture, see Rogin, “Blackface”; Gilman, “Dangerous.”
       

   21. To be sure, in
       Civilization
       114, it appears as if Freud is giving hostility to Jews as an example of “the narcissism of minor differences,” but careful reading shows that this is not necessarily the case. See also Pellegrini, “Without.”
       

   22. Freud had read Chamberlain (Gilman,
       Freud
       236). For extensive documentation of the “blackness” of Jews, see Gilman,
       Jewish
       172–175; Gilman,
       Case
       19–21. For a fascinat- ing explanation of the functions of such discourse, see Cheyette, “Neither.”
       

   23. And “Jewish science” was definitely a racist/antisemitic term of art, a fact brought out clearly in Gilman, “Otto” 112–13.
       

   24. For an exemplarily thoughtful version, see Seshadri-Crooks, “Primitive.” Seshadri- Crooks inquires as to whether certain descriptions of Freud as contemptuously patroniz- ing of Indian psychoanalysts (the same Bose) do not reproduce such contempt, since Bose and his fellows seem unaware of Freud’s contempt and patronization (186). A version of this question could be asked here as well. If Freud’s work is as irretrievably tainted with racism and colonialist ideology as some would have it, how is it that a Fanon was not aware of this corruption?
       

   25. Cf. Gilman,
       Jew’s
       194–209, who goes too far, in my opinion, in associating the gen- uine, straightforward racism—Nazi sympathies—of Masud Khan with the much more complex affect of Fanon with regard to Jews. There is no evidence that Fanon, for all his tragic misrecognition of the situation of the Jews in Europe, read Jews as racially inferior,
       pace
       Gilman, ibid. 200. On the other hand, Fanon’s grotesque reading of the Nazi geno- cide as a “family quarrel” has to be contrasted to Césaire’s sensitive understanding of colo- nialism as practice for the genocide of the internal other, for which see J. Boyarin,
       Storm
       105–7.
       

   26. I am grateful to Jonathan Boyarin for this reference.
       

   27. John Murray Cuddihy was perhaps the first to realize that there are significant ho- mologies between Jewish “Emancipation” and the postwar processes of decolonization: “The fact that Jews in the West are a decolonized and modernizing people, an ‘underde- veloped people’ traumatized—like all underdeveloped countries—by contact with the
       

       more modernized and hence ‘higher’ nations of the West goes unrecognized for several rea- sons. First, because they have been a colony
       internal
       to the West; second, because decolo- nization has been gradual and continuous; third, because of the democratic manners of the West (only Max Weber called them a pariah people, i.e., a ritually segregated guest peo- ple); and fourth, because the modernization collision has been politicized and theologized by the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ (as, in noncontiguous Western colonies, the charge of ‘im- perialism’ effectively obscures the real nature of the collision—namely, between moderniz- ing and nonmodernized peoples)” (
       Ordeal
       47).
       

       In “Épater” I have discussed Cuddihy critically and at some length. For all his celebra- tion of the West’s civilizing mission, however, Cuddihy has, at least, identified the Jews as subject to it.
       

       I prefer not to use the term
       assimilation
       because of its implicit assumption that previ- ously one could speak of an unassimilated, i.e., pure cultural situation—on either side. In all but the most exceptional cases, it is now clear that cultures are always in contact to some degree or other and always changing in response to those contacts, thus always assimilat- ing. This term, then, does not sufficiently evoke the particular cultural anxieties of the transition from colonial domination to emancipation. Furthermore, the term
       assimilation
       seems to imply a sort of stability in the “target culture” to which one is assimilating, where- as, in reality, European culture at the time of Jewish Emancipation was more in flux than it was stable. Indeed, it would not be innacurate to say (as Martin Jay has emphasized to me in a somewhat different context) that Jewish cultural activities played a role in the pro- duction of European modernity, just as we are coming to recognize more and more the crucial cultural role of colonialism and the colonies in producing European modernity. See also Boyarin, “Other” 82. For the particular application of the term
       colonial subject
       to the “Western-educated native,” see Sharpe,
       Figures
       139–40.
       

   28. Martin Jay has cautioned me, however, that this was true of many groups in Eu- rope in the nineteenth century. Insofar as there were other internal colonies, undoubtedly many of the same processes befell them, each, of course, with its own historical inflections and specificities.
       

   29. Liliane Weissberg quotes an earlier, even more pathos-ridden version of this metaphor from Rahel Varnhagen née Levin, the famous “Salon Jewess” of Berlin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Varnhagen, who had converted and married a Protestant, wrote in a letter to a Jewish friend, “I have such a fantasy, as if an unearthly being, while I was forced into this world, had stabbed, right with a dagger, these words into my heart: ‘yes, have sensations, see the world, as only few can see it, be great and noble, an eternal thinking I cannot take from you as well.’ One thing, however, was forgotten: be a Jewess! and now my whole life is bleeding to death; if I keep still, it can last a while; each movement, made to stop the bleeding, is a new death; and immobility is only possible for me in death itself ” (“Stepping” 144). I quite disagree, however, with Weissberg’s reading of this passage that sees in it Rahel seeming to “describe her Judaism as her fate, a birth de- fect, an ailment, a fateful blemish.” This reads Varnhagen too simply into and out of the paradigm of “Jewish self-hatred.” It seems to me that what Varnhagen writes here is rather the pain of one who has denied her Jewishness. The unearthly creature who gave her
       gifts,
       not defects, at birth forgot one
       gift:
       Be a Jewess! and it is the lack of that gift that is the wound from which she bleeds to death. To be sure, the gifts themselves are ambiguously represented as having been presented via a stab wound to the heart—a circumcision of the heart? (Geller, “Circumcision”)—but still the implication that what prevents the stanching
       

       of the bleeding is the
       lack
       of Jewishness, not its presence. In other words, I read this “para- ble” as prefiguring Varnhagen’s deathbed statement: “To have been born Jewish has been for so long in my life the ultimate shame, my most bitter and painful burden. Henceforth, it is something I would not renounce at any price” (qtd. Chasseguet-Smirgel, “Freud’s” 79). In Geller’s reading of the parable it is not the “unearthly being” who forgot the command “be a Jewess,” but Varnhagen who has forgotten to mention it. (The passive supports both interpretations.) Geller’s much more developed reading of this passage bolsters my inter- pretation generally but in a much more complex and nuanced manner.