Abstract
AbstractResponding to Gil Anidjar's “Jesus and Monotheism” and its posing of the “Christian Question,” in this paper I return to Freud's Moses and Monotheism and its narrative of Jewish self‐division. In highlighting the retroactive formation of identity, I note both its temporal dimension and the force of exclusivity it generates. This reading suggests a contrast between such theo‐political communities, with their legacies of affiliation, and Christian self‐absolution (the refusal of constitutive self‐division) with its image of a new man. I take a brief detour through Marx and Schmitt to examine the founding structures of secular modernity and the entanglement of liberalism with Christianity. Pursuing a hint offered by Anidjar that Christianity is not quite a tradition, I conclude that for Freud, the “Christian question” emerges as a kind of enigma: the dream of a community divorced from human modes of transmission, unbound by legacies of filiation to the past, and replacing the collective memory of a people with the end of human collectivity.
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