What Does a Jew Want?; or, The Political Meaning of the Phallus

In his essay 'The 'Uncanny' " (1919), Freud recounts a moment when he looks accidentally at a mirror and imagines he sees someone else: "I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. ... Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of [the double is] a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the 'double' to be something uncanny?" ("Uncanny" 248П).1 Strangely, no matter how many uses and stagings of the uncanny he describes, Freud always returns it to castration. He even connects Rank's account of the "double" with dreams, within which castration represents "a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol" (235). After listing example after example of uncanny moments having nothing to do with castration,2 Freud concludes: "We have now only a few remarks to add, for animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man's attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex comprise practically all the factors which turn something frightening into something uncanny" (243). Something in Freud's world was clearly pressing in this direction with remarkable insistence.

[1]  É. Santner.  My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity , 1997 .

[2]  David M. Halperin.  Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography , 1995 .

[3]  Jonathan Boyarin,et al.  Self-Exposure as Theory: The Double Mark of the Male Jew , 1995 .

[4]  T. Dean.  On the Eve of a Queer Future , 1995 .

[5]  Nancy A. Harrowitz,et al.  Jews & Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger , 1995 .

[6]  Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks.  The Primitive as Analyst: Postcolonial Feminism's Access to Psychoanalysis , 1994 .

[7]  J. Brenkman.  Straight Male Modern: A Cultural Critique of Psychoanalysis , 1993 .

[8]  M. Berkowitz,et al.  Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War , 1993 .

[9]  M. Rogin.  Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice , 1992, Critical Inquiry.

[10]  J. Sharpe.  Figures of Colonial Resistance , 2009 .

[11]  R. Berman,et al.  Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life , 1989 .

[12]  G. Mosse.  Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe , 1988 .

[13]  R. Hall.  Epispasm and the Dating of Ancient Jewish Writings , 1988 .

[14]  S. Gilman.  Jewish self-hatred : anti-Semitism and the hidden language of the Jews , 1987 .

[15]  P. Rieff,et al.  Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture. , 1988 .

[16]  W. Mcgrath,et al.  Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria , 1986 .

[17]  Leo Bersani.  The Freudian body: Psychoanalysis and art , 1986 .

[18]  S. Bolkosky.  Arthur Schnitzler and the fate of mothers in Vienna. , 1986, Psychoanalytic review.

[19]  Homi K. Bhabha.  Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817 , 1985, Critical Inquiry.

[20]  Sarah Kofman.  The enigma of woman , 1985 .

[21]  Juliet Mitchell,et al.  The Meaning of the Phallus , 1982 .

[22]  Barbara Johnson.  The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida , 1977 .

[23]  Marthe Robert.  From Oedipus to Moses: Freud's Jewish identity , 1976 .

[24]  Arthur Schnitzler.  My youth in Vienna , 1970 .

[25]  Ernst Simon.  Sigmund Freud, the Jew , 1957 .

[26]  F. Fanon.  Black Skin, White Masks , 1952, My Black Stars.