Exodus into Ordinary Life

Abstract

This essay focuses on Eric Santner’s psychoanalytic reinterpretation of the crucial symbol of Judaism – yetziat mitzrayim, the getting out of Egypt – as “the Exodus out of our own Egyptomania.” Formulated in his book on Rosenzweig and Freud, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, it appears in all Santner’s later works concerned with political theology, where “Egyptomania” stands for everything that overburdens human life with an excessive “signifying stress” or “ex-citation,” weighing it down with the impossible demands of the ultimate metaphysical self-justification and the interpellating call to sublimity. Contrary to Hegel’s definition of Judaism as “the religion of the sublime,” Santner consequently champions the opposite view, according to which the Abrahamic revelation forms the first religion of radical desublimation that blocks the vertical transport into the extraordinary “beyond” and focuses instead on the immanent transcendence as the radical otherness of the neighbour/stranger in the world. The Exodus, therefore, is to be understood not as an exit out of the world, following the call of the otherworldly God, but precisely the other way round: as an exit of the Egyptomaniac metaphysical paralysis, where “Egypt” represents an impasse of the self-negating life which cannot tolerate its finite condition and invents a sublime alibi in a false promise of immortality.