ABSTRACT
As the late Edward Said pointed out, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism is first and foremost a personal/political gesture: by saying that Moses was Egyptian and Jahve the God of the Arabian tribe of the Midianites, Freud was rejecting the Zionist intention to realize the dream of locating Jewishness in a specific location of the global consciousness. Freud, instead, saw in identity the locus of a universality-in-becoming. As identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone, but is based on the constant work of reference to a transcendental Other and denial of similarity with multiple other identities, belief in an all-grounding global consciousness (e.g. that of the ‘global village’) becomes problematic. Universality, by contrast, signifies the possibility of accepting that identities share the same faulty construction, each immanently uncanny to itself. Echoing this general approach this chapter assumes that the ongoing difficulties in the relation between the Judeo-Christian and Islamic worlds are not part of a ‘war of civilisations’ but, rather, express equivocal repressed tensions between the different monotheisms. Here, I will not be looking at the vast literature that successfully deconstructs differences between contemporary Christian, Jewish and Islamic identities. Inspiration, rather, comes from the relatively recent essay by Jean-Luc Nancy who assumes a ‘monotheistic model of social organisation’ before he argues the existence of certain ‘auto-deconstructionist’ characteristics that are common to all three monotheistic cultures (Nancy, 2003). The immediate consequence of this highly abstract approach is that it startlingly shortens the cycle of repression-denial-return by neutralizing the middle term.
