Moses and Monotheism

The current debate on “Post-Secularism” was prefigured by an earlier controversy concerning Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.  The earlier debate, which was initiated by Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses and included such prominent figures as Jacques Derrida, Jan Assmann, Robert Paul, Richard Bernstein and Edward Said, has not come to a halt. On the contrary, an array of new publications has in fact moved it into its next phase centering more closely on the evaluation of monotheism and its relation to religious violence. This course will consist in three major divisions.  The first will face the challenge of trying to make sense Freud’s original text — written as Hitler’s troops were marching into Vienna and as its author was dying of cancer – which, as a “late work,” to use Adorno’s term, is as idiosyncratic, eccentric and downright strange as it is rich and fertile.  In the second division, we will examine the first round of the Moses debate to determine its significance for Freud’s thinking and the theory of religion.  And finally, we will turn to the more recent texts and examine the ambiguities surrounding the concept of monotheism in detail.