Nostalgia for the Absolute by George Steiner

Author:George Steiner
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: House of Anansi Press
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 1997-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Listeners to these first three talks will have observed that there is, between the three mythologies we have looked at so far, what could be called a genetic link. It would require extreme discriminatory finesse and a scope beyond the present for me to assess contrastively and in depth, the Judaism of Marx, of Freud, and of Lévi-Strauss. Notoriously, Marx turned on his own ethnic-spiritual past. He came to produce a virulent text on the Jewish question, identifying Judaism with the vices of capitalism and calling, quite literally, for a final solution in terms of complete assimilation. The extremity of this proposal does, to be sure, suggest the depth of Marx’s personal malaise in regard to his own status. Freud’s attitudes were, as we have seen with reference to his treatment of the Moses theme, complex and, very probably, subconsciously motivated. Profoundly Jewish in his temperament, Jewish in his style of feeling and private life, he endeavoured to give to the psychoanalytical movement a larger ethnic basis, a respectability in the Gentile world. In the Preface to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo in 1930, Freud described himself—and I quote—“as completely estranged from the religion of my fathers”. But he went on—and I quote again—“If asked, ‘What is left to you that is Jewish?’ I would have to reply, ‘A very great deal and probably the essence.’” By which he seems to have meant, the ideal of intellectual pursuit and of high moral seriousness. So far as I am aware, Lévi-Strauss has not pronounced himself on the issue; indeed he seems studiously to avoid it. His very insistence on the fact that the holocaust has no privileged status, either historically or metaphysically, that it is only a part of the general structure of massacre and extinction, shows a wish to distance himself from any Jewish particularity. I have heard him speak with disdain about those who seek to separate the holocaust in the Second World War from that continuity of massacre of human peoples, animal species, and natural forms, which in his great myth of vengeance is the principal guilt of modern man. Bitterly he will say that, of all men, the Jew should be the one most profoundly alert to, aware of, the universality of murder that surrounds him.

Nevertheless, there are specific Judaic aspects, indeed marked ones, in each of the three cases. Marx’s utopian messianism, his rage for justice, his conception of the drama and logic of history, have strong roots in the prophetic and Talmudic traditions. Marx’s promissory vision, which we compared to Isaiah, of the exchange of love for love, of trust for trust, his promise that history is finally rational, that it has a design and that it is a design of human liberation, these have their profoundly rich precedent and parallel in every aspect of Jewish thought. Freud’s relentless intellectuality, the pessimism and severity of his ethics, his unswerving trust in the power of the word, these too relate to key aspects of Jewish sensibility.

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