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  • Editor’s Introduction
  • John Kelsay

It is a pleasure to begin this issue of Soundings with a discussion of Eliza Slavet’s Racial Fever. I read Slavet’s work on the recommendation of a colleague; he thought her engagement with Freud’s Moses raised many interesting questions for the study of religion, and more generally for discussions of values in contemporary society. My colleague was right. In Slavet’s hands, Freud’s rather strange and controversial treatise touches on a number of issues in the history of religion, the historical and philosophical background of psychoanalysis, biological and cultural evolution—and above all, the notion of cultural or racial identity. As the comments by Weisenfeld, Jackson, Anidjar, and Rosenstock indicate, that notion is self-evident. I hope their reviews, coupled with Slavet’s response will pique the interest of readers of Soundings, and thus foster some examination of the issues raised.

The issue continues with Susanne Hillman’s study of messianism in the work of Margarete Susman. Here, the focus is on a Jewish intellectual whose reflections developed in the maelstrom of mid-twentieth-century politics. Issues raised by the Holocaust and the World War, by Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel provide the context for a “messianism of small steps.” Progress is possible, though for the most part hardly noticeable. The connections of messianic discourse with cataclysmic, final transformation fall into the background, as more triumphalist notions are replaced with an emphasis on concrete interactions between individuals.

By contrast with Hillman’s focus on politics, or Slavet’s on notions of religion and race, Shawn Tucker’s “The Aesthetics of Dissociation” takes us in an artistic direction. Admirers of the music of Radiohead may find Tucker’s comparison with some of the paintings of Jasper Johns disconcerting—and, I suppose, the reverse may apply as well. For Tucker, the connection between these works of art is formed by way of the psychological phenomenon of [End Page 1] dissociation or disruption. In one sense, Radiohead’s music and Johns’s paintings provide an expression of this phenomenon. In another, their expression offers a kind of therapy, by which an audience is enabled to bring experiences of trauma into consciousness, albeit in a distinctive way, and thus to find a means to reintegrate the self with its environment.

Finally, Louis Ruprecht’s essay examines the 2010 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Two years (and two election cycles) on, it seems clear that this was and is a judgment with major import for the practice of democracy. Ruprecht makes a number of points in this regard. One of the more interesting seems to follow from the Court’s connection of campaign financing to the First Amendment. In Ruprecht’s view, this suggests the importance of drawing out some mostly implicit religious dimensions of the majority’s opinion. Ruprecht concludes with a warning: failure to raise questions regarding these dimensions may well contribute to an undermining of individual liberties, and thus of some values that are basic to democratic practice.

As always, we invite readers to respond. [End Page 2]

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