1 The Moses Complex The Judeo-European State of Emergency and the Theological Invention of the Real in Freud and Lacan Dr. Itzhak Benyamini itzhak.benyamini@gmail.com © All rights reserved to Itzhak Benyamini, 2024. Keynote Lecture in the Catholic Academy in Berlin, September 5, 2024, the workshop “Jacques Lacan and Religion” https://intellectualdiaspora.org/culture-of-difference_jacques-lacan-and-religion/ I wish to thank the organizers of the workshop in the Catholic Academy in Berlin on “Jacques Lacan and Religion”, Dr. Stephan Steiner and Prof. Christoph Seibert. Their invitation allowed me to rethink Lacan’s treatment of theological themes embedded in Freud’s work on the figure of the biblical Moses. This re-thinking is crucial for the topic of our conference, since Lacan perceived the book “Moses the Man and the Religion of Monotheism”, published in 1939, as Freud’s will. In my lecture I will follow Lacan’s consideration in seminar 7, “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis”, regarding Freud’s insistence on writing a work that is, according to Lacan, both mythological and “imaginary” and at the same time Christian in nature. The book is perceived as Christian due to the central theme of the death of the “great man”, as an echo of the crucifixion of Christ. This theme follows “Totem and Taboo” in which the primordial father was murdered and has reincarnated as a God. In his late writing Freud again discusses the murder of a primordial father like Moses whose horrifying figure is being transformed into the super-ego of the Jewish Torah. Lacan points at Freud’s decisive assumption, that two different historical figures stand behind the biblical figure of Moses. This theme will serve me as a quilting point for analyzing Freud’s work. I will interrogate the way that Jewish presence in Europe has formed Freud’s identity and the way Lacan translated it into his own conceptual space. If I may refer to my own status as I speak to you now; my own political anxiety, as an Israeli Jewish person, speaking in a European academic space, is inflected by the chronic antisemitism, that is far from being a by-gone relic of Freud’s time. Freud is splitting the biblical Moses into two different figures, which the Jews encountered in two different points in time, separate by hundreds of years; The first, Egyptian Moses, represents the principles of the Egyptian empire and promotes the theological monotheistic-rational agenda of the Pharaoh Akhenaton. Many years later the second, Midianite Moses emerged as a priest of the furious God of the desert, Yahweh, the God who speaks through the bush, a God that is not universal but expresses a paranoid narcissistic fanaticism. According to Lacan, this observation allows us to extract two separate logics of Western theologies: On the one hand, the abstract, philosophical, Aristotelian logic, and on the other hand, the religious and more affective logic, manifest in the biblical texts.