Freud

## *Moses and Monotheism* ()

Freud argues that the history of the Jews can be explained by the occurrence of a traumatic event--the murder of Moses during the return from Egypt to Canaan. After the murder was repressed, a second Moses came to be a leader, and was assimilated to/with the first Moses. This "belated" experience of the murder, and the repression of this trauma and the "repressed Mosaic religion" through Jewish tradition, was what established Jewish monotheism and determined the following history of the Jews.

*M and M* basically takes the theory of individual trauma from *Beyond* and places it in the history, the collective, transgenerational, and religious history, and the structure of the Jewish historical experience.

Jewish monotheism, a determining force in their history--being "chosen" and not doing the choosing. This defines Jewish history around the link between survival and a traumatic history that exceeds their grasp.

Monotheism as tradition only after the first Moses's murder. Therefore it "exercised influence on the Jewish people only when it had become a tradition." The structure of monotheism--the emergence, after the return of the repressed murder of Moses, of the sense of being incomprehensibly chosen by God to survive--is very similar, in certain respects, to the curious nature of the survival of trauma. Monotheism, in shaping Jewish history, turns out to function very much like what is described as the death drive.

Survival by chosenness.

Signifies a history of Jewish survival that is both an endless crisis and the endless possibility of a new future.

Chosenness is thus not simply a fact of the past but the experience of being shot into a future that is not entirely one's own.

\*\*\*\*\***The belated experience of trauma in Jewish monotheism suggests that history is not only the passing on of a crisis but also the passing on of a survival that can only be possessed within a history larger than any single individual or any single generation.**

!!!!!!!

and it is through the peculiar and paradoxical complexity of survival that the theory of individual trauma contains within it the core of the trauma of a larger history.

The survival of "tradition"

Essentially, MinM is a way to bring trauma into the archive--into history. By remembering, impressing, monotheism, what is suppressed is the 1st Moses Murder, and it is the trace (possibility of it coming to light) of that murder that keeps tradition/archive going, bc it erases the original event.

"It is the moment before the murder, that of chosenness, that allows the survival of the tradition in the repressed memory of the initial catastrophe."

### Re: Text/Writing

The text (the one that tells or archives the story [of monotheism]), Freud: tells us "enough about its own history" and is formed by "two distinct forces, diametrically opposed to each other, that have left their traces on it." One force, the one repressing the original moment, the other, the one wanting to record everything.

\*\*"The distortion of the text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in doing away with the traces."\*\*\*

Repression/delay of the traumatic memory

Basically, the change from event to archive/writing, latency, repression, the traces keep coming back

Bible/constitution

YET

The laws given to us come from an uncertain, divided, and contradictory origin, jealous of itself yet always in need of future translations. And by the very fact that the traces left by this archiviolation remain forever detached from the originary event (the effect of delay), they will be open to future inscriptions, interpretations, and receptions, over which, we should repeat, no archon, gatekeeper, priest, the guardian of the law and maybe not even God himself, has any power.

"No longer is [thus an event] given in a temporal or historical modality dominated by the past."

Absence of referent

Uniqueness of translation; *connection to translation!*

"so even the documented origin of the archive cannot cleanse it of such corruption; an archive may always be in the process of translating itself and from itself, by itself."

**If M and M has any meaning, it is in its attempt to understand, interpret, and against all hope diffuse what Freud saw coming better than anyone. This obok also allows us, better than any historical assessment to this day, to reflect on and *work through* the violent consequences of this catastrophic event and its devastating archive.**

Always a push toward a future---

***TOTAL CONNECTION TO DERRIDA AND THE ARCHIVE----ARCHIVE FEVER***