ACTION TIME

Abstract

Our actions, even the quietest, are liable to become occasions for inculpation. But what kind of action would remain immune to the act of judgement? Such an action is made manifest in Michelangelo’s Moses. Freud’s cinematic reading of the sculpture yields a concern with what Moses does not do. Neither the origin nor the outcome of an action proves decisive but rather “the remains of a movement that has already taken place.” Such a remainder troubles the ascription of agency to action by undermining the fantasy of homogenous time which underlies it. Continuity is revealed as the semblance of an imperceptible series of temporal omissions. The paper aims not only to bring to light the radical potential harboured in Freud’s approach to the Moses but to account for the reason he arrests its appearance.

Keywords:

• Moses
• action
• gesture
• time
• judgement
• Freud
• sculpture

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For Freud’s attempt to locate the split within the ego itself, see his “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence.”

2 Cf., for example, this fragment from Kafka’s diary: “This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observes me, I have to observe myself all the closer” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka 397).

3 On “radical passivity,” see Wall.

4 See Nietzsche.

5 See, for example, Freud’s “The Economic Problem of Masochism”:

The super-ego – the conscience at work in the ego – may become harsh, cruel and inexorable against the ego which is in its charge. Kant’s Categorical Imperative is thus the direct heir to the Oedipus Complex. (167)

6 On the totality of actions – the “universal content containing within itself all [of the action’s] various connections” – see Hegel 147.

7 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture” 49–59.

8 For an elaboration of this argument, see Stables.

9 T.J. Clark points out:

Painting has always prided itself on being, next to sculpture, the most object-oriented of the arts. A brushy surface is supposed to put the viewer directly in touch with things. Color comes out of a tube into the eye. (93)

10 In the terms of Saussure’s Course, the sign, in itself, has no identity. Not only is its identity fractured from within (it is composed of an arbitrary antinomy between signifier and signified) but its capacity to signify is altogether dependent on its differential relations to other signifiers which lie without.

11 For more on this distinction, see de Man 88.

12 See Bowie.

13 A comprehensive overview of these arguments can be found in Malcolm Macmillan and Peter J. Swales.

14 Perhaps the most succinct formulation of this claim is D.W. Winnicott’s: “what is not yet experienced did nevertheless happen” (91).

15 Cf. Benjamin:

nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past – which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. (“On the Concept of History” 394)

16 On the revelation, see Levinas, “Revelation and the Jewish Tradition” 191–210.

17 Cf. Bergstein.

18 The event has an importance that extends, of course, beyond the book of Exodus. As the editors of The Jewish Study Bible note, “[t]he momentous encounter with God at Sinai is, for Judaism, the defining moment in Jewish history” (106).

19 For more on this paradox, see Derrida, “Edmund Jabès and the Question of the Book” 67–68.

20 In the paradigm of the origin of the law I have elaborated above, a crucial detail has been omitted. The tablets bearing God’s original inscription cannot be considered the pure origin of the law without qualification. Are the tablets not, rather, the material manifestation of the transmission of the law that precedes their creation? Before the tablets are inscribed God speaks. The first prohibition spoken is also the first to be transgressed:

You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. (Exodus 20.4)

In its pure form, before its transcription, the law is at one with speech. Yet there is no way that speech can testify to the covenant it founds or reiterates unless it is transposed into writing.

21 It is noteworthy in this context that the tablets Michelangelo’s Moses clutches to his side are blank.

22 Cf. Bergstein 164.

23 For Roland Barthes’ account of such thresholds, see Barthes 66.

24 Jean-Joseph Goux offers an especially interesting reflection on this moment, which he reads in terms of the transgression of the Bilderverbot:

Moses ought not to be figured – in accordance with the very law he decrees – for the prohibition against figuring is included in the Ten Commandments he holds at his side [ … ] No graven images, no sculptures: Moses, even if he is a hero, must above all not become a God. Freud, in other words, fearful of participating in the idolatrous rabble against which Moses raves, ought not to see Moses in the form of an [sic] carved image, even one sculpted by Michelangelo. And so he proceeds as he ought: he straightaway seeks the meaning, the contents, in spite of the image; this is the only pleasure he allows himself. (140)

25 This is evident when Lessing proscribes the representation of transitory phenomena in sculpture:

[the spatial arts] should express nothing essentially transitory. All phenomena, whose nature is suddenly to break out and as suddenly to disappear, which can remain as they are but for a moment; all such phenomena, whether agreeable or otherwise, acquire through the perpetuity conferred upon them by art such an unnatural appearance that the impression they produce becomes weaker with every fresh observation, till the whole subject at last wearies or disgusts us. (17)

26 One might say, along with Benjamin’s short essay, “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” that the gesture stages the discontinuity between an action (or an “empirical event”) and the historical time of its occurrence:

Historical time is infinite in every direction and unfulfilled at every moment. This means we cannot conceive of a single empirical event that bears a necessary relation to the time of its occurrence. For empirical events, time is nothing but a form, but, what is more important, as a form it is unfulfilled. This means that no single empirical event is conceivable that would have a necessary connection to the temporal situation in which it occurs. (55)

27 This temporality could be described as melancholic, for melancholia links us to loss: it registers the fact that any attribution of an inherent value or meaning to a thing (such as a statue) is always compromised by that thing’s inscription in time. Perhaps the most compelling statement of this position is to be found in Freud’s short essay “On Transience,” which recalls an encounter with Rilke:

Not long ago I went on a summer walk through a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous poet. The poet admired the beauty of the scene but felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom. (305)

28 If one assumes, on the contrary, that the law precedes the revelation at Sinai – that the revelation takes place according to (or indeed reveals) a law that is immanent but is not yet manifest – one could turn to Derrida’s analysis of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to articulate Moses’s gesture of suspension of the law within the law:

It is, in law, what suspends the law. It interrupts the established law to found another. This moment of suspense, this epoché, this founding or revolutionary moment of the law is, in law, an instance of nonlaw. (Derrida, “Force of Law” 269)