In 1891, on Sigmund Freud’s thirty-fifth birthday, his father presented him with the very same copy of the Philippson bible1 that the former had used as a boy for his biblical studies. For the occasion, Jakob Freud had the book re-bound in new leather and inscribed, in his own hand, a bilingual dedication in Hebrew and German to serve
“as a memorial and as a reminder of love from your father, who loves you with everlasting love” (Yerushalmi, 71). The inscription is composed in the florid style of melitsah, a medieval rabbinic literary mode which draws heavily on citations from biblical and talmudic passages. Among other things, it records the dates of Sigmund’s birth and circumcision, the moment, at the age of seven, when he began his biblical studies, only, at some unspecified point, to abandon them, leaving the bible, in father Jakob’s words: “stored like the fragments of the Tablets in an ark with me”
(Yerushalmi, 73). Importantly, the father’s dedication in the Hebrew bible turns on an implicit plea that the son – now a grown man – return to his studies of scripture, a request he later meets – through what we might call ”deferred obedience”
(Yerushalmi, 77) – when he takes up studies of Moses during the Nazi regime.
In this way, the family bible was re-presented to Sigmund Freud, given as a gift again, this time with a paternal appeal for the son to return to the Book of Books and devote himself to it anew. This is fairly common practice, and there is nothing unusual in the form, style or indeed the significance of the gesture. What is interesting for our purpose here is that it tells us something about the bind of the book. The iteration involved in the paternal gesture towards the son is key. Firstly, the re-binding of the volume in new leather: “I have put upon it a cover of new skin”
(Yerushalmi, 77), Jakob Freud writes. Secondly, the act of inscription itself and, thirdly, the request for the son to resume his engagement with the covenant of this book – to become a practicing Jew again. These re-iterative elements in the paternal gesture recall, if only by association, pivotal moments recorded inside the biblical book whose outside had been re-newed. And they are related directly to the Jewish tradition Jakob Freud here represents. More specifically, they are immediately associable with the Jewish ritual of circumcision where the infant is marked for the covenant of the Book through the excision of the foreskin – a scar which literally serves as an inscription on the reproductive organ of the body. This is the indelible mark of Abraham’s covenant with the monotheistic god that binds the Jewish infant to his tradition. They are associable also with the story, which is formative in the Jewish tradition, in the scriptural fable itself of how the patriarch Abraham tied young Isaac to the altar on Mt. Moriah before the aborted sacrificial slaughter only thus to strengthen his own allegiance with God. Abraham, the first to be circumcised in the name of his god, affirms this allegiance – again – this time by his willingness
1 Presumably Ludwig Philippson’s German translation of the Bible which went through three editions between 1854-1878.
to offer his legitimate first-born. In other words, Abraham binds himself to his religion by binding his son and presenting him for the sacrificial cut.
In 1970, shortly after the death of his father, Jacques Derrida inscribed his own name on the cover of a book. It was not the Hebrew bible, but merely the first in a series of four standard notebooks in which he intended to write an autobiographical text ”in four columns, at four discursive levels” about what he called his own
“netherworld of scars” (1991: 97) – and what we might call his reflections and feelings about being Jewish. The book was provisionally entitled Livre d'Élie. Élie was Derrida’s Jewish middle name, which he associated – by way of Jewish lore, which identifies the prophet Elijah as the guardian of the covenant of circumcision – with the indelible and very concrete scar of this ritual on his own body. For most of his life, Derrida sought to bracket his Jewishness, and it is striking, then, that, although “deliberately projected after Glas” (1991: 97), Livre d'Élie never became a full book: it remained a collection of notebooks from which he would sometimes extract – indeed excise – fragments to be quoted in his ‘proper’ books. “Livre d'Élie,”
he says,” never written, bearing the name that was never written” (1991: 88, 90).
Four thousand years ago, in the Patriarchal era rendered in the Books of Moses, God set the terms for his alliance with the Hebrews and had Abraham seal his allegiance by carving – if only by association – the initial letter of the divine name, y,1 into his own preputial skin. As I have already intimated, this gesture of affirmation in the biblical fable is the source of both Freud and Derrida’s inscriptions on book covers mentioned above.
This is how you shall keep my covenant between myself and you and your descendants after you: circumcise yourselves, every male among you. You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin, and it shall be the sign of the covenant between us. (Gen. 17:10–12)
The ‘sign’ of which The New English Bible here speaks is a translation of the Hebrew oth briti, where brit means "covenant" and oth denotes "letter, sign, token or mark". The mark or letter itself is crucial. It ’binds’ Abraham to the new monotheistic religion literally and figuratively at once by way of the concrete sacrifice of the foreskin and by way, interestingly, of the fact that the incision itself takes the form of the divine letter2 – the gesture of affirmation metaleptically signed and inscribed in the flesh. In short, the tribe of Abraham ‘and all his descendants’
must ‘bind’ themselves to the divine covenant by having the signature of god inscribed in their skin.
The rite of circumcision legitimately functions as the everlasting covenant between God and the Jews, because the seal of circumcision, which is at the
1 the Hebrew letter yud, a minute suspended semi-vowel which predicates the most incomprehensible and unpronounceable of divine names, the tetragrammaton YHVH
2 "circumcision is made like a yud"
same time the seal by means of which God created heaven and earth, is the most sacred of God's names. Circumcision is therefore the inscription of the divine letter, and hence the divine name, upon the flesh of the Jew (Wolfson, 112).
The morphological relation between circumcision and the divine name can be dated back to the Aramaic sources of the second century BCE. Here the ritual carving of God's sign into the human body was generally seen as a measure to protect the Jew from evil and to allow entry into the Garden of Eden. The ritual of circumcision is further re-enacted by binding leather straps onto the human body in the shape of the individual letters in another name for the divine being, ShaDaY.
All of Israel who are circumcised enter the Garden of Eden, for the Holy One, blessed be He, has placed His Name in Israel so that they will enter the Garden of Eden. And what is the name and the seal which He placed in them? It is [the name] [ShaDaY].1
In 1995, Derrida used the piece of biographical information about the handing-down of the Hebrew bible in Freud’s family as a center-piece in his own book on remembrance, religion and science entitled Archive Fever. Here, it serves as a hub to demonstrate the significance of the bond forged, by the father, through incision ‘on the skin’ between the Jew and the Book “To bind anew:” Derrida here writes, “this is an act of love. Of paternal love" (1996: 21). More specifically, it is an act of re-binding the elected through the Book which, by association, replicates the double ritual of severance and inscription of the first ritual binding, by cutting the preputial skin, thus superimposing the covenantal archive, as it were, on what Derrida calls the
“the hypermnesic and hypomnesic epidermises of books or penises” – recalling, “at least by figure” (1996:22), he stipulates, the circumcision of the father of psychoanalysis. We must remember that by the time the Freud family bible was given to Sigmund for the second time, he was himself the patriarch of a new science, which, he insisted, was separate from the religion in whose tradition he was reared.
This “unique copy” of the Hebrew bible, Derrida continues, was given
but first of all returned, by the arch-patriarch to the patriarch, by Jakob to Sigmund, and yet, right on the substrate of its ‘new skin,’ the figurative reminder of a circumcision, the impression left on his body by the archive of a dissymmetrical covenant without contract, of a heteronomic covenant to which Sigmund Shelomoh subscribed before even knowing how to sign – much less countersign – his name (1996: 38).
The name of Freud is invariably attached to psychoanalysis and its self-description as a ‘science of the mind.’ Yerushalmi suggests that a connection
1 Midrash Tanhumah, Parashat Sav, 14; Parashat Sh'mini, 8. See also Wolfson, 78. My italics and square brackets.
between the founder and ‘his’ science was possibly forged through the paternal re-binding by which Freud was re-contracted to the Jewish covenant of the Book, even if psychoanalysis and Judaism are not substantively related. Yerushalmi is a distinguished historian adhering scrupulously to the academic methods of his research. However, in his lecture entitled “Monologue with Freud” (81-101), he decides to transgress scholarly protocol and injects a fiction in order to wrest new insights from his material: he initiates an imaginary dialogue with Freud in which he implores him –now long after his death— to respond to the urgent question as to whether he, Freud, conceives of psychoanalysis as a Jewish science. Ambiguously, Yerushalmi then promises to keep the answer secret, especially if Freud confirms the presupposition. Of course, the question is not new. It was put to Freud in his lifetime and to his daughter, Anna, and it has always been part of the debate on psychoanalysis, directly or indirectly. But Yerushalmi asks the question again, this time, strangely, directed at the deceased founder, and promises not to reveal to anyone the confirmation he clearly anticipates.1 In the nature of things, Freud cannot reply, and there is no answer.
Derrida, however, homes in on this unorthodox moment in an otherwise entirely serious study, and focuses his attention on the combination of the posing of the question along with the expectation of an affirmative answer. Together they serve, he argues, as a kind of response, such that, in effect, Yerushalmi, by way of his anticipation, in a sense answers for Freud. Derrida bases his argument on two aspects of Yerushalmi’s calling of Freud’s ghost to account. One is the fact that, in the nature of things, the question will not be answered by the addressee and only the future will tell if psychoanalysis is to be regarded as a Jewish science – if, as Yerushalmi stipulates, ‘it is at all knowable.’ The other is the idea that by thus calling Freud to account, Yerushalmi in effect re-enacts the paternal gesture of re-binding the son to the Jewish covenant. If we follow Derrida’s train of thought here, the spectre of Freud is requested to provide a response, an affirmation, which yields nothing more that the iteration of itself. And by requesting a ‘new confirmation’ from the deceased founder of the new science, Yerushalmi in effect replicates the paternal rebinding of Freud to the Jewish covenant. In a way, "[t]he scholar repeats,” Derrida thus concludes, “the gesture of the father. He recalls or he repeats the circumcision, even if the one and the other can only do it, of course, by figure" (1996: 38).
The lecture entitled “The Concept of the Archive: A Freudian Impression,”
given in 1994 at a colloquium in London entitled Memory: The Question of Archives, is the origin of Derrida’s book, Archive Fever, from which I have extracted his ideas on these ‘figurative re-circumcisions’ of sons by fathers.’ Now, the lecture, preceding the book, was written in memory of Derrida’s own father and dedicated to his own two sons – who were not circumcised. Derrida explicitly makes a note of this in the
1 In his prelude, Yerushalmi emphasizes that “[t]his book is not an attempt to prove that psychoanalysis is ‘Jewish,’
though eventually it is concerned to enquire whether Freud thought it to be so, which is a very different matter.”
(Yerushalmi, xvii). In his address to Freud in the final chapter, he concludes: “In short, I think you believed that just as you are a godless Jew, psychoanalysis is a godless Judaism. But I don’t think you intended us to know this.”
(Yerushalmi, 99).
section entitled “Exergue” (1996: 25-33), and in more ways than one mimes the paternal gesture of re-calling both father and sons through the book. In other words, he forges a bond between three generations of men – the older circumcised and more directly marked by religion than the younger.
Religion haunted Derrida as it haunted Freud, but Derrida’s was a highly idiosyncratic type of religion to which one adheres only by way of dissociation. They were both aware of the etymology of the word ‘religion through the Latin ligare ‘to bind’ and re-ligare ‘bind fast’ or ‘bind again.’ The word ‘religion’ itself forges a bond. In biblical Judaism, faith is also attested to through the bond of bloody sacrifice and inscription when the biblical patriarch was called upon to seal the pact with his god initially in his own preputial blood, then in the ovine substitute for filial blood:
circumcision and the aborted ‘slaying’ of Isaac.1 It involves ‘binding’ as stipulated in the Hebrew name for what the Christian tradition calls the ‘sacrifice’ of Isac: the Akedah deriving from the Hebrew verb leaked, “to tie”. A bond between man and god – through inscription on male bodies and the cover of books.
Works Cited:
Derrida, Jacques. Circumfession. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. In Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991
Derrida, Jacques, Mal d'Archive: une impression freudienne. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1995. Trans. E. Prenowitz. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1996
Wolfson, E.R. "Circumcision and the Divine Name: A Study in the Transmission of Esoteric Doctrine", The Jewish Quarterly Review, lxxviii, Nos 1-2 (July-Oct.
1987)
Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable.
New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1991
1 Genesis 17 and 22