Freud’s forgotten name encodes the shared fate of Arab and Jew

Evidence

Freud furtively begins to assemble a Shakespearean cartography. In the twin spaces of”not complete success” and “not complete failure,” what inscribes itself are the impossibly shared destinies of the Arab and the Jew that had been etched by Shakespeare. Freud’s unforgettably forgotten moment is occupied by Othello’s near success and by Shylock’s incomplete failure. At the center of Europe, Freud is about to meet the “sick man”- perhaps even the “dying man” of Europe. Enter the stranger(s). Freud tells us that he was “driving in the company of a stranger, a foreigner,” mit einem Fremden, “from Ragusa in Dalmatia to a place in Herzegovina.” Driving east, Freud continues to map Europe’s violent “ethnic” conflicts, yet he also turns and veers back, closing in on Italy. Freud’s mind is approaching Venice, which is why the “conversation had turned to the subject of travel in Italy” (2/G14). At some point, Freud had turned to his “traveling companion” and asked him about Orvieto, inquiring about the magnificent frescoes of the “Four Last Things” in the cathedral. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 657

Categorization

• XREF: This is the theoretical spine passage anchoring how the Signorelli example (Bosnia-Herzegovina-Muslim lands, the dying Turk) codes the Jew-Arab/Islamophobia-antisemitism bridge for other books in the batch.
• DEFINE: Establishes Anidjar’s method of reading Freud’s unconscious mnemonics as structured by the Turk/Arab-forgotten figure.