Freud’s forgotten painter conceals a Shakespearean Arab-and-Jew pairing

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). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 657

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The idea that a geographical driving route—east into the Balkans, veering west to Venice—maps itself onto an unconscious ‘ethnic’ cartography could seed a story where a character’s forgotten name unlocks a buried political inheritance.
• DEEPTHINKING: Anidjar’s claim that the Signorelli slip is not about repression of a name but about the shared, impossible destinies of Arab and Jew at the center of Europe is dense and paradigm-shifting.