Jacob Freud Inscription (Translation)

The inscriptionwas written in Melitzah, "a mosiac of fragments and phrases from the Hebrew Bible as well as from rabbinic literature or the liturgy, fitted together to form a new statement of what the author intends to express at the moment. Melitza, in effect, recalls Walter Benjamin's desire to some day write a work composed entirely of quotations.' (Yeruslami Freud's Moses: 71)

Yerushalmi questioned why the father would write this inscription to his son in Hebrew, if the son, Sigmund Freud knew no Hebrew. Freud's father had memorized these phrases; they came from his heart spontaneously. Yerushalmi described this process comparing it to Eliot's use of quotations in The Waste Land. 'In the transposition of a quotation from the original (in this case canonical) text to a new one, the meaning of the original context may be retained, altered, or subverted. In any case the original context trails along as an invisible interlinear presence, and the readers, like the writer, must be aware of these associations if there are to savor the new text to the full.' ( Freud's Moses: 72) The following text provides the sources in []as revealed by Yerushalmi in the appendix of Freud's Moses:
1 'Son who is dear to me, Shelomoh, [Jeremiah]
2 In the seventh in the days of your the years of your life [Genesis] the Spirit of the Lord began to move you [Judges]
3 and spoke within you: Go, read in my Book that I have written [Exodus]
4 and there will burst open for you the wellsprings of understanding, knowledge and wisdom.[18 Benedictions]
5 Behold, it is in the Book of Books, from which sages have excavated and
6 lawmakers learned [Numbers, Judges] knowledge and justice.(
7 a vision of the Almighty did you see; (Numbers) you heard and strove to do, [Exodus]
8 and you soared upon the wings of the Spirit.
9 Since then the Book has been stored [Deuteronomy] like the fragments of the Tablets 10 in an ark [Babylonian Talmud] with me.
11 For the day on which your years were filled to five and thirty
12 I have put upon a cover of new skin [Numbers]
13 and have called it: "Spring up, O well, sing ye unto it!"[Numbers]
14 and I have presented it to you as a memorial [Exodus]
15 and as a reminder of love

['...the one and the other at once [...] and we have, perhaps in the economy of these two words the whole of the archival law: anamnesis, mneme, hypomnema.' Derrida Archives Fever.:23]

'A ceux qui contestent l'" européocentrisme ", tout en revendiquant une identité culturelle " arabo-islamique ", comme à ceux qui réclament des comptes permanents à l'Occident, tant en lui attribuant l'origine de tous les malheurs du temps présent qu'en lui empruntant de nouvelles formes d'oppression, Derrida propose une attitude plus positive : une philosophie de la liberté, de l'hospitalité et du cosmopolitisme, centrée sur l'analyse des mécanismes mêmes de l'altérité et de la transmission.' (Roudinesco 1998)

'Nul n'est contraint, dit-il en substance, d'accepter la totalité d'un héritage et nul n'est obligé de se laisser prendre dans le filet d'une ethnie, d'une religion, d'une culture, d'un nationalisme, d'un idiome, d'un colonialisme. En conséquence, la meilleure façon de rester fidèle à une généalogie, c'est encore de lui être infidèle, de la prendre en défaut, sans pour autant la renier : ni aliénation identitaire ni victimologie. Ainsi la véritable liberté subjective consiste-t-elle à refuser le dogme d'une appartenance au nom d'une reconnaissance des forces de l'inconscient présentes dans la singularité de chaque destin.' (Roudinesco 1998)

'The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe . But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters [...] In a way, the term indeed refers, as one would correctly believe, to the arkhe in the physical, historical, or ontological sense, which is to say to the originary, the first, the principal, the primitive, in short to the commencement. But even more, and even earlier, "archive" refers to the arkhe in the nomological sense, to the arkh of the commandment.' (Derrida AF: 2)

'[...] the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the resident of the [...] archons.' (Derrida AF: 2)

The archons are ' the documents guardians.' Through their archontic function, these citizens '...held and signified political power;' 'ensure the physical security of what is deposited and of the substrate;' 'are accorded the hermeneutic right and competence;' have the power to interpret the archives.' (Derrida AF: 2)

'In an archive, there should not be any absolute disassociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of the archive, is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together.' (Derrida AF: 3)

'There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. A contrario, the breaches of democracy can be measured by what a recent and in so many ways remarkable work entitles Forbidden Archives (Archives interdites: Les peurs françaises face à l'histoire contemporaine). Under this title, which we cite as the metanymy of all that is important here, Sonia Combe does not only gather a considerable collection of material, to illuminate and interpret it; she asks numerous essential questions about the writing of history, about the "repression" of the archive (Combe 318), about the "'repressed archive" as "power of the state over the historian" (Combe 321) (Derrida AF: 4)

That is, how is it possible to keep the idioms - - that is, the differences in language - alive without giving out the Enlightenment, the universalism, without, let's say, instrumentalizing the language too much. I don't think it's possible to de-technologize the language through and through. I think that techné is... even in the most poetic events, there is some techné at work, so it's impossible, I would think, impossible to oppose poetry to technology absolutely. Now, nevertheless, I would advocate a universalization which would be an experience of translation respecting the absolute singularity of the /pp. 27-28/ idioms. In that case, we would have organization and generation of new events - that is, the production of a new language, of new languages, a new experience of precisely grafting, hybridization, and production of new singularities. This implies another concept of cosmopolitanism, because the eighteenth-century concept or Kantian concept of cosmopolitanism was a concept implying a secularization of language, the sort of transparency of universal language in the abstract and technical sense. Now I think the experience we make now of the new nationalisms and the attention paid to the minorities' differences call for another kind of cosmopolitanism, taking into account the idioms..

Derrida: 'Which implies not only an attempt to integrate new scientific events - technology, political events, what happens today with the international institutions - we have to build a new role for the philosophical past.'

Iser : 'So the universality would be the changeability of that.'

Derrida : 'Changeability... I think for me, well, Plato is an example. I think it's something that we have to read again and again. It's a task... It's as urgent and necessary as the integration of a new role, new scientific results, and so on and so forth.'
(Derrida 1996b) 1996b)

McLuhan whose work is relevant to cartography as a means of communication, suggested that the map is one of a select group of communications media without which "the world of modern science and technology would hardly exist." McLuhan, Marshall H. (1964). Understanding Media. New york: McGraw-Hill. pp 157-8

Pyschoanalysis provides a "...key to the understanding of human behaviour and its aberrations as being determined not by overt factors but by the pressure of instinctual forces emanating from the unconscious mind..."Anna Freud

'Thus the function of memory, which we like to imagine as an archive open to any who is curious, is in this way subjected to restriction by a trend of the will...' Freud, S. 1898. The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness.

[Freud's archivists are] "...zealous epigoni [who] have stationed themselves, like gnostic archons, to bar the way to the hidden knowledge." (Yerushalmi FM 1991:81)

"The most significant and irremediable gap in the Freud Archives is the result of Freud's own doing. On two occasions [in 1885 and 1907], Ernest Jones observed, he completely destroyed all his correspondence, notes, diaries and manuscripts. The letter of April 28, 1885 to Martha, announcing his determination to thereby frustrate his future biographers, is too well-known to be quoted yet again." (Yerushalmi FM 1991:81)

"But of the secret itself, there can be no archive, by definition. The secret is the very ash of the archive. . ." (Derrida AF 1996a)

Anarachize or archive otherwise is to '...recall and archive the very thing one represses, archive it while repressing it (because repression is an archivization), that is to say, to archive otherwise, to repress the archive while archiving the repression.' (Derrida AF 1996a)

"[N]othing in the Freud Collection nor in any other archive can possibly decide any of the major scientific or philosophical issues that have arisen in the ongoing controversies over Freud. No document can prove or disprove the validity of Freudian psychoanalytic theory nor the efficacy of psychoanalytic therapy. Infantile sexuality, the existence of the unconscious, the mechanisms of repression, and other central tenets of Freudian theory, are not subject to archival arbitration." (Yerushalmi Series Z)

'Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) remains, in my opinion, one of the most penetrating explorations of Freud's thought. And Rieff never even consulted an archive.' (Yerushalmi Series Z)

'The other issue is so vital and so complex as to require a conference of its own. I have in mind the relation between biography and a person's achievement. How much of the former do we need to know in order to understand the latter?[...] How much about Freud's life must we know in order to interpret The Interpretation of Dreams? Or would our interpretation simply be different, with less ferreting for biographical links and more concentration on what he was trying to teach us? [...]Ironically, it may have been Freud himself who first opened this Pandora's Box, but let's not hold this against him. Rather, let us ask must we really know whether Freud slept with Minna? Those who want to discover that he really did, are gripped by an unstated and faulty syllogism: a) Freud presented a public image of a devoted husband; b) Freud comitted incest with his sister-in-law; ergo Freud is not to be trusted, and so neither should his work... ' (Yerushalmi Series Z)

'I ask your indulgence if I close on a personal, existential note. We live in a time when we are flooded with information in every field of endeavor, a deluge from which Freud scholarship is not exempt. It has has become a veritable industry over which it is difficult to maintain even bibliographical control. The amount of sheer information increases incessantly. I confess that I have reached an age when I am haunted by the question of when information becomes knowledge. What I have presented here is only a special instance of that larger Angst. I am perhaps not yet old enough to seek the further line where knowledge becomes wisdom.' (Yerushalmi Series Z)

"These information oceans [...] need navigational tools, maps, and charts to identify potential sources of needed information." (Wallot: 11)

"Maps are needed to reintegrate structure, context and content without which we will be faced with 'vast holes in our memory." (Wallot: 14)

"This global context can act as an analogy for arhcivists' role and necessary interactions with other professions. It reinforces the creative tension and complementarity between the administrative function of archives and archivists, as keepers of evidence and information for the business needs of their parent organizations, and their ultimate and essential cultural role of long-term memory, identity, and values formation and transmission. [...] The bonding of all these archival approaches has become more crucial at this time as we move into the complex world of shifting nationhood, evolving governance, mutating organizations, and changing forms of records. [...]Older records, considered 'dead' or 'dormant' memory, not only provoke historical information, but [...] become active again [...] for example the old land treaties with First Nations." (Wallot: 23)

Archivists are "rethinking some of their more traditional conceptual frameworks or are trying to regenerate their practices in digging deeper to their theoretical roots. The role of archivist is transforming in order to maintain the essential core of that role: "to appraise, describe and provide evidence in context, thereby nurturing a local, national and international memory of society and of the world. " (Wallot: 24)

"Muséologues, archivistes, bibliothécaires et autres documentalistes ont le devoir de travailler ensemble, de mettre en commun, si nécessaire, leurs pratiques pour assurer la création et la transmission d'un corpus testimonial vivant, signifiant et qui soit reflet de la démarche évolutive et cohérente de l'expérience humaine." Jacques Grimard. Mémoire et archives" p. 70

Psychoanalysis "...aspires to be a general science of the archive, of everything that can happen to the economy of memory and to its substrates, traces, documents, in their supposedly psychical or technoprosthetic forms." (Derrida AF)

'Meanwhile, attacks against psychoanalysis, fused with assaults against the personal integrity of Freud himself, have by now reached an unprecedented crescendo of vilification. One result is a widespread belief that the real truth, for better or worse, is in the Archives, and that once they are fully accessible the truth will out. What both attackers and defenders of Freud have in common is a faith in the facticity of archives, in the archival document as somehow the ultimate arbiter of historical truth.' (Yerushalmi Series Z)

'I shall not give this work to the public.[...]But that need not prevent my writing it. Especially as I have written it down already once, two years ago, so that I have only to revise it and attach it to the two essays that have proceeded it. It may then be preserved in concealment till some day the time arrives when it may venture without some danger into the light, or till someone who has reached the same conclusions and opinions can be told:"there was someone in darker times who thought the same as you!" (Freud M&M1938)

The "...archive is not a repository of the past, only of certain artifacts that have survived from the past, and we encounter them in the present. The contents of archival documents are not historical facts except on the most primitive level dates, names, places. The truly vital data in these documents do not become historical until, filtered through the mind and the imagination of the historian, they are interpreted and articulated." (Yerushalmi Series Z)

'There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.' (Derrida AF)

[The death drive is anarchivic. It leaves only traces and ghosts, not] "...any archives of its own. It destroys in advance its own archive." (Derrida AF)

'The archive is made possible by the death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation.' (Derrida AF)

'To keep one's archives barred against the historians was tantamount to leaving one's history to one's enemies.' Lord Acton

'De nombreux experts ont établi que cet apport extérieur serait bientôt nécessaire pour assurer à la fois le développement de l'économie et le financement des retraites. Le rapport de l'ONU avance des chiffres qui vont de près de 50 millions (hypothèse basse) à près de 160 millions (hypothèse haute) dans les vingt-cinq ou cinquante ans à venir. Les hommes politiques, en France et ailleurs, sont conscients de ce retournement de situation. Alain Juppé avait fait sensation, il y a dix mois, en affirmant, dans un entretien au Monde, que 'l'Europe, compte tenu de sa démographie, aura sans doute besoin d'apports de main-d'oeuvre étrangère'. Des voix s'élèvent [...] pour remettre en cause le dogme de la fermeture des frontières, dont on a mesuré les conséquences funestes [...] pour la vie politique française, empoisonnée, sous la pression de l'extrême droite, par de dangereux relents xénophobes. Un 'délit d'hospitalité', selon l'expression du philosophe Jacques Derrida, s'est installé pendant plusieurs années.' 'Les lois de 'hospitalité.' 2000. Le Monde. http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,2320,83865,00.html

"In the certainty that I should now be persecuted not only for my line of thought but also for my 'race' accompanied by many of my friends, I left the city which, from my early childhood, had been my home for seventy-eight years.' Sigmund Freud 1938 LC

'Memory, for [Freud], was at the crossroads of the biological and the psychological. When we remember, we are recoding original neurological traces.'LC

'Freud regarded memory and motive as inseparable. Recollection could have no force, no meaning, unless it was allied with motive.' Oliver Sacks, 1998 LC

'It is the body of Dora which speaks pain, desire, speaks a force divided and contained.' Hélène < a name="cixous">Cixous, 1976 LC

'How can an autobiographical writing, in the abyss of an unterminated self-analysis, give birth to a world wide institution?' Jacques Derrida, 1980 LC

'Freud was fascinated by ancient objects -- as if they were witnesses to humanity's deepest impulses covered over by thousands of years of the civilizing process. The presence of these objects seemed to speak to him of the distant, yet still active, past.'LC

'Thus Freud shatters the humanist hope that high culture itself may succeed religion as a source of moral controls. Phillip Rieff, 1966 LC

'I have never doubted that religious phenomena are only to be understood on the pattern of the individual neurotic symptoms familiar to us.' Sigmund Freud, 1939 LC

'By transposing the conflict from the world of politics to the world of the human psyche Freud could achieve the kind of middle position that had become impossible in Viennese politics.' William J. McGrath, 1986 LC

'It was almost as though any over linking of Jews and psychoanalysis were under a taboo.' Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, 1991 LC

'This short text is comprised almost entirely of a long quotation about Jews from a source Freud claimed he could no longer trace. In 1925 he wrote: "My language is German. My culture, my attainments are German. I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew."' LC

'Psychoanalysis a cult, unimportant because transitory; it is a pernicious influence of decadent modern life, leading to broken homes, immorality, and violent death; it is an interesting phase of a developing science and it is the salvation of the human race.' Review of Reviews, 1927 LC

Freud's voiceFreud's speaks just before his death. Library of Congress Exhibition

'if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion.' W.H. Auden, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," 1973 LC