Preface

Among the meanings given by the Oxford English Dictionary to the word "register," when used as a noun, are "a book or volume in which regular entry is made of particulars or details of any kind which are considered of sufficient importance to be exactly and formally recorded; a written record or collection of entries thus formed" and "the compass of a voice or instrument; the particular range of tones which can be produced by certain voices." By calling this issue of American Imago "Cultural Registers," I mean to evoke both these meanings of a "written record" and a "range of tones" in the musical sense.

Each of the four papers that follows is a report by a researcher on the front lines of a different cultural arena—the teacher in the classroom, the scholar in the study, the anthropologist in the "field," and the analyst in her professional milieu. In every instance, the horizons of psychoanalysis are expanded by these close encounters, and a disquieting yet productive feeling of estrangement is their inevitable concomitant.

In "The Secret Joys of Antiracist Pedagogy," Phillip Barrish reflects with singular forthrightness on his experience of jouissance as a white liberal professor teaching Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, in which the word "nigger" appears over 200 times, to his classes of predominantly (but not exclusively) white students at the University of Texas at Austin. Barrish sets his pedagogical parable against the backdrop of two political controversies touched off by an actual or perceived use of the "n- word." In the first, a white administrator at the University of Texas uttered the epithet while orienting new employees; in the second, an incident that received nationwide publicity, the gay white director of the Office of the Public Advocate in the District of Columbia was temporarily fired (but then rehired) by the black mayor after the former had used the etymologically unrelated word "niggardly" during a budget conference with a black aide. Since losing the 1996 Hopwood case, moreover, the University of Texas has been forced to discontinue the practice of affirmative action. Ironically, the University of Texas was founded in 1883, the same year that Twain finished Huckleberry Finn; and Barrish finds that the legacy of racism cannot be eradicated from either Twain's text or his own social context.

A similar confrontation between psyche and politics animates Anthony Elliott's authoritative assessment of the work of Cornelius Castoriadis. Elliott, Director of the Centre for Critical Theory at the University of the West of England, regards Castoriadis, a one-time Communist from Greece who moved to Paris, where he underwent psychoanalytic training after the upheavals of 1968 and died in 1997, as "one of the most brilliant theorists of the relations between the individual and society to have emerged in postwar Europe." Elliott examines in detail the exchanges between Castoriadis and Jürgen Habermas, whose similar modernist projects did not preclude them from taking one another to task, before going on to offer a sympathetic yet critical appraisal of Castoriadis's espousal of the principles of imagination and autonomy as the bases for a radical social theory. I think it is fair to say that Elliott's essay represents the state of the art of scholarship on Castoriadis at the present time.

As Barrish takes risks in his teaching, and Elliott pulls out all the stops in his scholarship, so the collaborative essay by Gerhard Kubik and Moya Aliya Malamusi offers what is these days an extremely rare commodity—authentic anthropological research informed by psychoanalytic theory. Kubik, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vienna, has spent "half a lifetime" in sub-Saharan Africa. In this paper, written with an anthropologically trained cultural "insider" who happens also to be his brother-in-law, Kubik takes up two maxims of interdiction (having to do with jumping over a pestle and covering someone with a mat) that function as "formulas of defense" for the community in Malawi with which he is intimately familiar. Not only is this paper based on first-hand field work...