Heine and Freud: Deferred Action and the Concept of History

Abstract

Freud’s Moses and Monotheism engages in a critical examination of the function of deferred action for the construction of narratives of tradition. This paper explores how Freud’s study illustrates its line of critical inquiry by simultaneously acting out its central contention by the way Freud deals with the carefully controlled presence of Heine, a key source for Freud’s conflicted study of Moses and Jewish tradition.