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Homophobia and the Postcoloniality of the “Jewish Science”
DANIEL BOYARIN
In his essay on “The Uncanny” Freud writes of a moment in which he looks by accident into a mirror and thinks he sees someone else: “I can still recol- lect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. . . . Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of [the double] was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the ‘double’ to be something uncanny?” (Freud, “Uncanny” 248).
1
In another place Freud had written that circumcision “makes a disagreeable, uncanny impression, which is to be explained, no doubt by its recalling the dreaded castration” (
Moses
91).
2
Reading these two “uncanny”s in conjunc- tion with each other, as I think we must, leads to the conclusion that seeing himself in the mirror produced in Freud the same feeling of uncanniness that he himself claims are produced in the antisemite who looks at the Jew. It is himself that he dislikes. It is precisely the “sight,” as it were, of his circumcised penis in the mirror that, recalling “the dreaded castration,” arouses Freud’s uncanny feeling, his “thorough dislike” or misrecognition of himself in the mirror. It is, accordingly, impossible to maintain that Freud intended this dis- agreeable, uncanny impression to be only the province of gentiles (contra Geller, “Paleontological” 57; Geller, “Glance” 438). The “appearance” that Freud thoroughly dislikes is the appearance of his own circumcised penis.
3
This essay will consist of an extended meditation on this moment in which, unlike the imaginary wholeness that Lacan finds in the mirror, it is precisely the misrecognition, the doubling of self, that Freud, as postcolonial subject, finds when he looks in his mirror.
4
In the first moment of the read- ing, I will suggest that this misrecognition is the precise historical moment that makes psychoanalysis possible. In the second moment of the reading, I will argue that the very doubling of self (“less than one and double” in Bhab- ha’s aphorism) that generates the knowledge that is psychoanalysis also pro- duces a series of potentially toxic political symptoms in both Freud and
Fanon, symptoms that have perhaps not yet been diagnosed in the manner that I do here. At the same time, then, that I wish to make a case for avail- ability or possibility of a privileged epistemological position for the colonized subject, a knowledge of lack that has liberatory effect, I shall also be thor- oughly problematizing that very privilege via an exploration of the poisonous discursive effects, in both Freud and Fanon, of the attempt to unknow that which is known.
Before Fanon, Freud seems to have realized that the “colonized as con- structed by colonialist ideology is the very figure of the divided subject posit- ed by psychoanalytic theory to refute humanism’s myth of the unified self ” (Parry 29). “Humanism’s myth,” in a profound sense, is a colonial myth. It would therefore follow that psychoanalysis is
au fond
not so much a Jewish science as a science of the doubled colonized subject, more perhaps than its practitioners have ever realized or conceded. Doubling of self is endemic to the colonial psyche. As James C. Scott observes, “When the script is rigid and the consequences of a mistake large, subordinate groups may experience their conformity as a species of manipulation. Insofar as the conformity is tactical it is surely manipulative. This attitude again requires a division of the self in which one self observes, perhaps cynically and approvingly, the per- formance of the other self ” (Scott,
Domination
33). From this perspective, it is no accident that psychoanalysis has proven so productive in the formation of theories of colonialism. Accordingly, Fanon’s psychology of colonial sub- jectivity would be a strong development of insights that are already there, as it were, in the Freudian text. The recognition, raised to exquisite lucidity by Fanon, that the paradigm of the other within is the doubled self of colonial- ism, suggests a new significance for psychoanalysis as an instrument in the interpretation of Jewish history; neither in the form of applied psychoanaly- sis nor as psychohistory but rather as a symptom of a crisis of the subject shared by Jews and other postcolonial (“modernizing”) peoples and also as a product of a recognition peculiarly available to such people’s doubled con- sciousnesses.
5
Freud himself seems to have intimated this relationship. The otherness of the subject to itself is once referred to by Freud as “the State Within the State,” the pejorative for the twin others within the German state: women and Jews (Geller, “Paleontological” 56). For colonial subjects like Freud and Fanon, the cultural world, their identity, and their allegiances have been doubled; they live “lives in between,” in Leo Spitzer (the Younger’s) evocative term (Spitzer,
Lives
).
There is a stunning moment in Freud’s
Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year- Old-Boy: “Little Hans”
(1909) in which the epistemology of the doubled con- sciousness of the Jew is disclosed at the originary moment of Freud’s theory
of subject formation—the castration complex. At the point where Freud is presenting Little Hans’s castration complex, he claims:
The piece of enlightenment which Hans had been given a short time be- fore to the effect that women really do not possess a widdler was bound to have had a shattering effect upon his self-confidence and to have aroused his castration complex. . . . Could it be that living beings really did exist which did not possess widdlers? If so, it would no longer be so incredible that they could take his own widdler away, and, as it were, make him into a woman.
(
Analysis
36)
This is an amazing act of interpretation. Earlier in the text Freud had in- formed us that Hans’s mother had threatened him with actual castration if he continued masturbating, and that this was the source of his “castration complex” (8). This is, in fact, the first time that the term
castration complex
appears in Freud’s texts (editors’ note ad loc). This threat, however, had not produced any symptoms in Hans at the time. In fact, he quite insouciantly informed his mother that he would then “widdle with his bottom.” The symptoms that Freud wishes to associate with anxiety about having his penis cut off appear—following the course of
Nachträglichkeit
—more than a year later. Having been instructed by his father in the difference between men’s and women’s genitals—his mother does not, in fact, possess a widdler, and his sister’s will not grow—Hans, according to Freud, mobilized the anxiety that had been initiated by his mother’s threat in deferred action (35) upon his accession to knowledge of sexual difference. This, then, constitutes in somewhat attenuated form the “sighting” of the mother’s genitals that arous- es the castration complex.
Freud, however, at this moment informs us of another etiology for the onset of the castration complex, in addition to the “sight” of the female gen- italia, namely, the “hearing” of the little boy about the damaged (castrated) penis of the circumcised Jewish male. He writes:
I cannot interrupt the discussion so far as to demonstrate the typical character of the unconscious train of thought which I think there is here reason for attributing to little Hans. The castration complex is the deep- est unconscious root of anti-semitism; for even in the nursery 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. Weininger (the young philosopher who, highly gifted but sexually de-
ranged, committed suicide after producing his remarkable book
Geschlecht und Charakter
[1903]), in a chapter that attracted much at- tention, treated Jews and women with equal hostility and overwhelmed them with the same insults. Being a neurotic, Weininger was completely under the sway of his infantile complexes; and from that standpoint what is common to Jews and women is their relation to the castration complex.
(Freud,
Analysis
198–99)
Freud does not interrupt his text to demonstrate what he takes to be Little Hans’s “unconscious train of thought”—one that is, moreover, qualified as being “typical.” He does, however, provide us with the outlines of precisely this train of thought: that Little Hans had heard that Jews have something cut off their “widdlers” when they are infants and that this has provoked (or at least contributed to) Hans’s castration fantasies and fears. What is more, we are informed that this is the deepest root of antisemitism, that knowledge of the Jew’s circumcision interacts with the gentile’s castration complex.
Freud elaborates: “And there is no stronger unconscious root for the sense of superiority over women,” a highly ambiguous formulation that supports more than one interpretation. What, after all, is the antecedent for the anapho- ra of this sentence—the subject, here, of “there is”? One quite easy possibility is to read that the sense of superiority over women emerges from the posses- sion of a penis, just as contempt for Jews apparently obtains from their “lack” of a penis. There is, however, a more radical reading within the syntax: what produces a sense of superiority over women is that little boys hear in the nurs- ery that Jews have something cut off their penises and thereby conclude that they are women who look like men or, perhaps more exactly, that they are men who have become women.
6
This would be the most frightening possibility of all, because it powerfully and directly raises the specter of the man’s potential “unmanning.”
7
These readings are not contradictory, though the second is the more disturbing (and more revealing) double of the first. Moreover the associ- ation of male Jews and women had a basis in European cultural history, if not (as Freud would have it) in universal psychology.
“Universalizing Is a Symptom”; or, Little Hans Was Jewish
Freud writes that little (gentile) boys hear in the nursery about Jewish cir- cumcision, and this hearing contributes to their castration anxiety. Moreover it produces in them antisemitic contempt for Jews, which is similar or even identical to the feelings of superiority that men have over women. Weininger
was one such “little (gentile) boy,” except for one thing: Weininger was Jew- ish, a fact that Freud chose to conceal. It would certainly have been apposite for Freud to emphasize Weininger’s Jewishness in a context where the “un- conscious root of anti-semitism” is at issue; this is no trivial ellipsis.
8
The oc- clusion of Weininger’s Jewishness is doubled by another, even more significant occlusion: the fact that “Little Hans” was also Jewish. Hans too did not hear about Jews having something cut off their penises; he, in fact, possessed such a “damaged penis,” as did Freud himself.
In presenting “Little Hans” and Weininger as if they were gentiles gazing, as it were, at the Jewish penis and becoming filled with fear and loathing, I want to suggest that Freud is actually representing himself (or at least an as- pect of himself ) gazing at his own circumcised penis and being filled with fear and loathing. Indeed, this interpretation is an ineluctable consequence of the logic of Freud’s position. The much maligned Fritz Wittels seems to have cot- toned on to this point when he glosses Freud as arguing that “the unconscious thus despises the Jews because they have been castrated, and at the same time dreads them because they castrate their children” (Wittels,
Sigmund
358). Wittels has read Freud well here. Since the fear of castration was, for him, un- conscious and therefore a psychic universal, how, for Freud, could the re- sponse to his own circumcision differ from the reaction to someone else’s cir- cumcision? The reading of the note on circumcision in “Little Hans” thus doubles and confirms the interpretation offered above of Freud’s uncanny gaze at himself in the mirror. I contend that, like Fanon, Freud is “forever in combat with his own image” (
Black
194)—he is in a relentless war with his own penis—and that Freud’s Jewishness compounds an already “masculine” conflict between potency and castration.
Hearing about the circumcision of Jews, Freud claims, arouses fears of being castrated, just as seeing women’s genitals or hearing about women’s bod- ies arouse similar fears. If both male Jews and women are castrated only from the standpoint of infantile complexes, it would appear from the logic of Freud’s position that in the “healthy” adult neither ought to be perceived as castrated or,
what is from my perspective the same thing,
each should be re- cognized as equally castrated as all subjects.
9
The “neurotic” Weininger treat- ed women and Jews with equal hostility because neither of them possess the penis, but they are both castrated only “from the standpoint of the infantile complexes,” the stage at which Weininger was fixated. However, as the cas- tration complex is “dissolved,” these unrealistic fears ought—if the standpoint is no longer to be the “infantile” one of the neurotic Weininger—to give way then to a “normal” (noninfantile) appreciation of the equal value of women and Jews.
In Freud’s own account, however, the castration fantasy—the assumption that women have something missing and are inferior—remains the uncon- scious root of misogyny and clearly not only in infants or neurotics, since Freud considers a perception of male superiority as a simple truism in adult males and not a marginal and pathological form. After all, the “repudiation of femininity is the bedrock of psychoanalysis” in Freud’s famous 1937 formu- lation. As Jessica Benjamin has put it, “We might hope that the boy’s ‘tri- umphant contempt’ for women would dissipate as he grew up—but such contempt was hardly considered pathological” (Benjamin,
Bonds
160). Simi- larly, the fantasy that Jews have something missing, the lesson learned in the nursery,
remains
the unconscious fantasy that produces antisemitism in adults as well, and no one has argued that antisemitism is only a childhood illness. As John Brenkman has written, “The simple positive Oedipus complex sim- plifies the child’s multifarious attachments to this one heterosexual drama in an attempt to explain how the so-called bisexual male child, filled with con- tradictory ideas about the salient differences between his parents, uncertain of his own or others’ gender, . . . rife
10
with passive and active sexual aims to- ward both parents, reemerges on the other side of latency and adolescence merely a more or less neurotic heterosexual” (
Straight
123). Following Brenkman’s extension of Freud, then, neither of these neuroses is ever com- pletely resolved in adulthood (ibid. 17). But, given his statements about Lit- tle Hans’s circumcision, rather than pathologizing antisemitism, Freud was, in fact, naturalizing it via the castration complex.
The Race/Gender System
Freud was delving here at the crossroads of race and gender discourse where the secrets of both have been buried. “Racial” and sexual identity obtain from the same subjectifying moment of the castration complex (Seshadri-Crooks, “Comedy”). The most compelling sign of Jewish racial difference is, for Freud, the circumcised penis of the male Jew. Since for him, however, circumcision is psychically analogous to castration, the sign of racial difference becomes virtu- ally identical to the sign of sexual difference. A look at the circumcised penis is the same as a look at the castrated penis of the female, and race and gender converge in the subjectivity of the Christian (heterosexual), masculine subject, putative possessor of the phallus. The cofunctioning of race and gender in the description of Jews as “women” is now more intelligible.
11
If, as Juliet Mitchell remarks, “Freud always insisted that it was the presence or absence of the phal- lus and
nothing else
that marked the distinction between the sexes” (Mitchell,
“Introduction” 6) and Jews lack the phallus, then it would follow clearly that Jews are, to all intents and purposes, “women” (Carpenter, “Bit”).
12
This moment of convergence is, I suggest, not unique to the racial differ- ence of Jewishness, but it is crucial in the discourse of racial formation. The circumcision/castration of the Jew is only the most visible metaphor for the imbrications of race and gender in the production of the Jewish male and thus extendable to other discourses of race as well. In contrast to Gilman (
Freud
passim) and others who seem to find in Freud’s racial situation an explanation for psychoanalysis that, effectively, cancels it as knowledge of sexual differ- ence, I contend that the specificity of Freud’s own racial difference may have helped him gain insight into sexual differentiation and its intersections with race in general. I suggest that the most important commentary on Freud’s in- choate but palpable racial theory is actually Frantz Fanon’s
Black Skins, White Masks,
in part because both Freud and Fanon have privileged, potential access to the same kind of pain-ful knowledge. The colonized subjectivity that Fanon anatomizes and enacts—so brilliantly and so painfully—is closely anal- ogous to the subjectivity of the fin-de-siècle Viennese Jewish transplant
13
: “Not yet white, no longer wholly black, I was damned” (
Black
138).
In Freud’s note on Little Hans, we find not only an anatomy of misogy- ny and of antisemitism—both interpreted as products of the unconscious— but also of Jewish/(post)colonial
14
self-contempt, also construed as a near in- evitability. In other words, I suggest that Freud essentially
accepts
Weininger’s argument—indeed that that is the reason Freud cites him here, and not as an example of the gentile pathology of antisemitism, for which he would be a rather bizarre example indeed. I should emphasize, however, this is not an idiosyncrasy on Freud’s part. Gerald Stieg has made an analogous point with reference to a similar moment in Kafka, “It is beyond question that such texts are treating something besides the private sphere and that the epoch itself is being heard.” Stieg chillingly continues: “The uncanny part is that in such writings the most dreadful aspects of the political propaganda of National So- cialism seem to present themselves in the most private sphere, internalized to the point of self-torture” (“Kafka” 198). Thus, it seems, was Freud’s self-torture as well.
Increasingly, scholars are recognizing how all-pervasive thinking like Weininger’s was and to what extent he simply distilled and concentrated the ordinary thought of his time and place (Arens, “Characterology” 124–25): this is, of course, his true significance. As Arens notes, “[Weininger’s] work represented a facet of the discussion that
was acceptable to the public curators of science,
not just an isolated stab into the realm of theory; Weininger was not
alone, or, if his version of the paradigm was deviant, it was at least on the fringe of the public debate in the scientific community. The second way in which Weininger’s work entered the public sphere was as a popular science bestseller, suiting the general reader so well that it stayed in print into the Nazi era; it touched a popular chord” (Arens, “Characterology” 130). Weininger and Freud exemplify (but also, of course, are not simply reducible to) a crisis of male Jews in the German-speaking (and especially Viennese) world of their day (Hoberman, “Otto” 142).
15
According to my reading, Freud was more identified with than differen- tiated from Weininger.
16
Only barely hidden behind the figure of Weininger, in Freud’s note, and even hidden behind the incognito Jew Little Hans, is Freud, “the specialist on the inner nature of the Jew” (Gilman,
Jewish
242; Simon, “Sigmund” 277). Thus Freud effectively reveals one strand of his own complex and conflicted “inner nature” as the “Jewish anti-Semite.”
17
While Gilman reads Freud as responding to the racism directed against Jews by dis- placing these differences onto an absolute (i.e., universal) difference between men and women, by recoding race
as
gender I suggest that he accepts the characterization of Jews as differently gendered, indeed as female, and tries to overcome this difference. Freud, moreover, seems at least once to have recog- nized this component of his personality, writing in a letter to Arnold Zweig in 1933: “We defend ourselves against castration in every form, and perhaps a bit of opposition to our own Jewishness is slyly hidden here. Our great leader Moses was, after all, a vigorous anti-Semite, and he makes no secret of this. Perhaps he was an Egyptian” (qtd. Le Rider, “Otto” 31). Given the role, of Freud’s Moses-identification (Boyarin, “Bitextuality”), of course, this is a highly symptomatic deposition.
Freud appears to have oscillated in significant ways between enacting, disavowing, and denying the self-contempt of the racially dominated subject. He was discursively hiding/closeting his circumcision. What we have here is a sort of psychic epispasm,
18
a wish fulfillment to be uncircumcised—to be a man like all other men. Not only of Weininger and Little Hans but of Freud we could say “that he, of course, knows that it is true” that Jews have a piece of the penis cut off. By occluding Weininger’s and Hans’s Jewishness, and by obscuring the role of his own, Freud was hiding a darker claim that Jewish knowledge of their own circumcision must inevitably produce in the Jew a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the gentile, a sense of inferiority that Freud himself shared. I suggest that this inferiority, closely allied to the “inferiority complex” that Fanon identifies in the colonial subject, is what Freud seeks to escape.
Freud Reads Fanon; or, the Misogyny of the Colonized Male
Freud more than once used metaphors of race and colonization for psycho- logical ideas. In one of the most revealing of these, when speaking of fantasy and wishing to inscribe its hybrid origin between preconscious and uncon- scious, Freud writes of “individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, re- semble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people” (Freud, “Unconscious” 191). This brief and deeply enigmatic metaphorical utterance discloses Freud’s rapt en- gagement with the question of “race,” as well as the way that race and sexual- ity are for him inseparable. The “Dark Continent” that is woman’s sexuality for Freud is not, then, a “mere” metaphor but the revealing figure of a nexus between race and gender that is insinuated in Freud’s text. In the sharp for- mulation of David Kazanjian, these are “statements that open his argument onto a wide sociohistorical field” (“Notarizing” 102). Precisely what sociohis- torical field is opened up here? How are gender, race, sexuality, and coloniza- tion imbricated in Freud, and how does he position himself racially through these figures?
An early disciple of Freud’s and the founder of psychoanalysis in India, G. Bose, once sent Freud a depiction of an English gentleman, remarking that he imagined that was how Freud himself appeared. Freud responded that Bose had not paid attention to certain “racial” differences between him and the English, which, of course, can only be a reference to his Jewishness (Seshadri- Crooks, “Primitive” 185, 211 n. 19). As this wonderful anecdote suggests, Freud’s origins as
Ostjude
constantly crossed his aspirations as a bourgeois Eu- ropean. He was both the object and the subject of racism at the same time. Seen from the perspective of the colonized, Freud might look like a white man; from his own perspective, as from that of the dominating Christian white, he was a Jew, every bit as racially marked as the Indian. In the racist imaginary of the late nineteenth century, in fact, Jews were most often de- signed mulattos. The best denotation, then, for the “race” of the European Jew seems to be off-white.
19
Two modalities of reading the “race” of Freud’s discourse have emerged in recent years: one—the “colonial”—would read this passage, and by extension Freud’s other “ethnological” comments and texts, as being about “black” men and thus as having been produced by a “white” man (Bhabha,
Location
89; Kazanjian,“Notarizing” 103–5). The other would read “white” and “black” here as barely disguised ciphers for Aryan and Jew (Gilman,
Jew’s
175; Gilman,
Freud
21). In the first Freud is the colonizer, in the second the colonized.
These disparate ways of reading Freud on race are not, in fact, mutually exclusive, but two equally crucial aspects of the peculiar racial situation of the European Jew, who is “white”—but not quite. Jews are not white/not quite in Homi Bhabha’s felicitous formulation for other colonial subjects. Freud was at once the other and the metropolitan, the “Semite” among “Aryans” and also the Jew desperately constructing his own whiteness through an othering of the colonized blacks.
20
The results of this double condition are virtually in- distinguishable in Freud’s texts because Jews were a genuinely racialized other (just as much as African Americans are in the United States) and, paradoxi- cally, because of his identification with his own oppressors. For Freud, “the repugnance of the Aryan for the Semite” was
not
an instance of “the narcis- sism of minor differences” but rather an instance parallel to that of the “white races for the coloured”; it contrasts with the narcissism of the minor differ- ence (Freud,
Group
101; contra Gilman,
Case
21, 22, and passim).
21
I mean that Jewishness functioned racially in Austro-Germany substantially as “blackness” does in the United States. The “one drop” theory was operative. For instance, a typical antisemite of Freud’s time stated: “Jewishness is like a concentrated dye; a minute quantity suffices to give a specific character—or at least, some traces of it—to an incomparably greater mass” (qtd. Gilman,
Jew’s
175). Another representative nineteenth-century savant refers to “the African character of the Jew,” while Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law and Hitler’s hero, wrote that the Jews are a mongrel race that had interbred with Africans.
22
The Jew was the mulatto, quite literally, as W. E. B. Du Bois found out one night in Slovenia when a taxi driver took him to the Jewish ghetto (Gilroy,
Black
212). Since Freud feared that some feature would always betray his thinking as “of Jewish descent” and his discourse as merely a “Jewish Science,” the “individuals of mixed race” are certainly Jews; yet it cannot be denied that he wrote explicitly about “whites” and “coloured.”
23
The “colonial” reading of Freud cannot easily be dismissed.
24
I would suggest this ambiguity in Freud’s use of “race” is no accident and that Freud’s position between white and black was generative and important in the production of his psychological as well as his ethnological theories.
As does Freud, Fanon produces surprising inscriptions of “race” as metaphor. “The Jew” plays a powerful, disturbing, and enigmatic role in Fanon’s text, as powerful and as enigmatic as the role of “blacks” in Freud.
25
Thus Freud’s deposition about “individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other” should be read alongside Fanon’s: “All the same, the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is. One hopes, one waits. His actions, his behavior are the final determinant. He is a
white man, and, apart from some rather debatable characteristics, he can sometimes go unnoticed” (
Black
115). Each fantasizes that the other Other can (almost) “pass.” For Freud this assumption surfaces in his reading of Lit- tle Hans’s circumcision, which can never be erased, which forever marks the Jewish male as appropriate object of contempt, with his evident and envious fantasy of the mulattos who “taken all around resemble white men”! For Fanon, explicitly, the ineradicability of his blackness stands against the Jew’s ability to be unknown as such. Yet each also acknowledges that passing does- n’t quite work for the other Other. Fanon fantasizes that “no anti-Semite, for example, would ever conceive of the idea of castrating the Jew.” This could not be more mistaken historically: it is therefore highly symptomatic. Jew cas- trations, owing to fantasies of Jewish desire for Christian women, are not, in fact, at all unknown (Fabre-Vassas,
Bête
).
26
Fanon’s utterance reveals his envy for the Jew’s imaginary phallus.
The processes of Jewish modernization and Westernization, known collec- tively as the Emancipation, are intensely similar to the dislocating effects suf- fered by the colonial subject educated in Europe.
27
We can pursue these analo- gies by comparing the cultural/linguistic predicaments of the two groups: “Every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an infe- riority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country” (Fanon,
Black
18): “Any Jew wishing to escape his material and moral isolation was forced, whether he liked it or not, to learn a foreign language” (Anzieu,
Freud’s
203).
28
Frantz Fanon would well have understood the anguish of Arthur Schnitzler, who describes the double bind of the colonized Jew thus: “[A Jew] had the choice of being counted as insensitive, obtrusive and fresh; or of being oversensitive, shy and suffering from feelings of persecution. And even if you managed somehow to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain com- pletely untouched; as for instance, a person may not remain unconcerned whose skin has been anesthetized but who has to watch, with his eyes open, how it is scratched by an unclean knife, even cut into until the blood flows” (Schnitzler,
Youth
6–7).
29
Freud, of course, called Schnitzler his
Doppelgänger
(Bolkosky, “Arthur” 1). Marthe Robert has also eloquently delineated the situ- ation of German Jewish intellectuals at the fin de siècle: She describes them as divided subjects, trying as hard as they could to wear German masks but in- evitably revealing their Jewish skins: his or her interpellation as a Jew. The con- dition of doubled consciousness itself marks such subjects as Jews and not some essential nature. That is, the effort to “efface”—just as much as an em- brace of—Jewishness is a response to being hailed as a Jew by a certain cultur-
al formation and thus a practice of Jewishness. Many Jewish jokes of the peri- od, including much of Freud’s
Jokebook,
understand this well. The harder such Jews tried to efface their Jewishness, the more rejected they were (Robert,
From
17). In a passage that in its bitter sting and, mutatis mutandis, in its very con- tent could have been written by Fanon, one such Jew writes (already in the 1830s): “It’s a kind of miracle! I’ve experienced it a thousand times, and yet it still seems new to me. Some find fault with me for being a Jew; others forgive me; still others go so far as to compliment me for it; but every last one of them thinks of it” (Ludwig Börne, qtd. in Robert,
From
18; on Börne, see Gilman,
Jewish
148–67). Freud knew Börne very well indeed. In 1919 he wrote to Fer- enczi, “I received Börne as a present when I was very young, perhaps for my thirteenth birthday [
sic!
]. I read him avidly, and some of these short essays have always remained very clearly in my memory, not of course the cryptomnesic one. When I read this one again I was amazed to see how much in it agrees practically word for word with things I have always maintained and thought. He could well have been the real source of my originality” (Freud, Freud, Grubrich-Simitis,
Sigmund
73). Indeed, Börne is perhaps the very prototype of the split colonial subject. Fanon echoed him over a century later, “Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle” (
Black
115).
As Fanon describes the psychology of the colonized, the echoes of the Jewish condition in central/western Europe since the late nineteenth century become almost insistent. In general, the prescriptions for solving the “Jewish problem,” whether proposed by “evolved” Jews or by antisemites, involved a version of the civilizing mission. Thus, Walter Rathenau “sees as the sole cure the integration of the Jew into German education (
Bildung
)” (Gilman,
Jewish
223; Cuddihy,
Ordeal
25; see also Spitzer,
Lives
26; Berkowitz,
Zionist
2–3, 99). Even more pointed are the ideas of another assimilated Jew, Ernst Lis- sauer, who held that “the Jew, like Nietzsche’s Superman, is progressing from a more primitive stage of development, characterized by religious identity, to a higher stage of development, characterized by the present identification with cultural qualities of the German community, to eventually emerge whole and complete” (Gilman,
Jewish
225). Gilman clearly remarks the analogies be- tween this situation and the discourse of colonialism: “By observing the
Os- tjude,
says the Western Jew, we can learn where we have come from, just as Hegel uses the African black as the sign of the progress of European civiliza- tion” (Gilman,
Jewish
253).
The more “educated” (that is, educated in metropolitan culture) the sub- ject is, the more acute the dis-ease (Fanon,
Black
92–93).
30
Börne returns to
the Frankfurt ghetto, after seven years away, and “everything is so dark and so limited” (qtd. in Gilman,
Jewish
150). “The Antilles Negro who goes home from France . . . tells his acquaintances, ‘I am so happy to be back with you. Good Lord, it is hot in this country, I shall certainly not be able to endure it very long’” (Fanon,
Black
37).
31
Language in great part marked the degree of this split: abandonment of Creole/Yiddish “Jargon” for French/“High” German with greater or lesser fa- cility (Fanon,
Black
27–28; Hutton, “Freud”). An internal hierarchy emerges between the more “civilized” subject of the Antilles/Vienna versus the still “na- tive, uncivilized” subjects of Dahomey or the Congo/Warsaw (Fanon,
Black
25–26). The German-speaking Jew who applies the stereotypes of the anti- Semite to the Yiddish-speaking Ostjude forms almost an uncanny analogue to the “evolved” colonial subject with his contempt for his native place, people, language, and culture. The Ostjude was for the German-speaking Viennese Jew what the “Unto Whom”—“the ignorant, illiterate, pagan Africans . . . unto whom God swore in his wrath etc.”—were to a Europeanized Yoruba such as Joseph May (qtd. in Spitzer,
Lives
42).
32
We can imagine the effect that such internalized representations of cultural relation/sublation would have had on the transplanted Freud whose mother spoke only Galician Yiddish all her life (Hutton, “Freud” 11; contra Anzieu,
Freud’s
204 and passim). The experience of a self doubling back on itself, observing itself, is, I suggest, the primal en- counter of the decentered self of psychoanalysis.
I am not suggesting a politically privileged access to “truth” that is the or- dained inheritance of the disadvantaged subject—gay, female, colonized, black, Jewish—but rather a condition of the possibility of access to such a po- sition of understanding. David Halperin writes as well that