ABSTRACT
In this contribution the author proposes to show how some aspects of Jewish life, which were at the basis of psychoanalysis, have ended up by assuming an importance that goes beyond the specificity of Jewishness, becoming exploitable and recognizable by a wider symbolic world. But the entry of Jews in their own right into western culture, the fact that for many people their history has taken on the character of a general parable, does not prevent them from affirming their specificity, 'even though an affirmation' of their 'diversity' may in some contexts have become 'more difficult' and 'almost impalpable'. Acknowledging the fruitfulness of psychoanalysis as something rooted in a decentralized minority culture increases its power to criticize and emancipate and causes it to make a critical evaluation of its own institutionalization, which is inevitable in any case. Allowing a cultural experience and a historical tradition to interact enables us to make up 'culturally' for a 'historically' imposed fringe position, for a 'non-belongingness' decreed in the name of genetics but interpreted in terms 96of criticism and a refusal of what exists. From this point of view, the Jew becomes 'an ethical figure', 'a collector of tension', and an interpreter of unease, a bridge between the past of 'arche' and the future of 'telos'.
[ED.]
