Edward W. Said. Freud and the Non-European.

Gross, David S.

Edward W. Said. Freud and the Non-European. New York / London. Verso. 2003. 84 pages. $19/13 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 1-85984-500-2

THE FIRST THING that strikes one about this brief volume is how little one gets for one's nineteen dollars. The essay by Edward Said actually occupies less than fifty of the book's small pages. It is simply the text of a lecture delivered at the Freud Museum in London (also joint publishers of the book), along with the introduction he was given on that occasion and a response, also delivered that night, from one Jacqueline Rose. Said's essay is thoughtful and interesting and perhaps is given some added significance by the fact of the author's recent death. And since the terrible crisis in the Middle East continues unabated, with the added weight of the American occupation of Iraq, Said's lucid commentary on Freud's notions of Jewish identity are of obvious relevance.

In the lecture, Said's engagement is almost exclusively with one text by Freud, the very late Moses and Monotheism. After an interesting introduction in which he uses Conrad and Heart of Darkness to discuss the dangers and losses when an author or book is rejected and neglected on the basis of political opinions wrenched from their historical contexts, his first emphasis is on the way Freud is at pains to emphasize the non-European (Egyptian) origin of Moses and, thus, of Judaism and Jewish identity. Freud also points out that the worship of Yahweh as well was adopted from an Arabian tribe after the Exodus, and thus both Moses and monotheism come out of the non-European, non-Jewish.

Said then spends a large portion of the essay discussing contemporary Israeli archeology in Palestine, which seeks to buttress myths of Judaism that rtm directly counter to Freud's view of its deeply fissured origin. He returns to Freud to suggest that he is best seen as an instance of what Isaac Deutscher called the non-Jewish Jew: "Deutscher argues that a major dissenting tradition within Judaism is constituted by heretical thinkers like Spinoza, Marx, Heine and Freud; these were prophets and rebels who were first persecuted and excommunicated by their own communities. Their ideas were powerful critiques of society; they were pessimists who believed that scientific laws governed human behavior." And they all, says Said, ended as defenders of internationalism and solidarity. Said concludes by praising Freud's bold exemplification "of the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborn communal identity--for him this was the Jewish identity--there are inherent limits that prevent it from being incorporated onto one, and only one, Identity."

This is late Said dealing with late Freud--in both cases, thoughts inflected by a closeness to death. Wherever we may be in that trajectory, they seem thoughts that our world ignores at its peril.

David S. Gross

University of Oklahoma