In my opening lecture to the workshop on the theme of “Lacan and Religion” I wish to shed light on the figure of Moses as a medium for cross identifications by Freud and Lacan (vis a vis the alternative figure of Jung), particularly in the context of the theological fundamentals of Western culture in general and of psychoanalysis in particular.
Two well known Lacanian interventions in the way Freud discussed the figure of Moses in his “Moses and Monotheism” can by found in two interrelated seminars, seminar 7 and seminar 17. Here I will focus in the previous seminar, “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis”. In it Lacan shares his amusement and amazement about Freud’s mythologizing of the genesis of Judaism by portraying the split nature of Moses. On the one hand Moses is the rational, Egyptian leader, preaching the Monotheist God, and on the other hand he is the Midianite leader, preaching the zealotry and extremism characteristic of the God of the desert. Lacan emphasizes that the latter is the one who speaks his name as “I will be whatever I will be”.
For the purpose of understanding the Lacanian exegesis to the Freudian issues of concern to us here, I feel the need to go deeper to the historical context as much as to the biographical one as a condition for the rest of the debate. It seems that Freud’s Moses complex is a topos that is being crossed by the historical emblem of the Judaeo-European fantasy of fusion being shattered by the state of historical emergency.