In his 2001 lecture Freud and the Non-European, Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said highlights Freud’s deconstruction of Moses’ Jewish origin as a pathway into a new politics of identities, in which ‘identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed’ (Said 2003: 54). Said’s interpretation underscores the significance of Moses and Monotheism as ‘no less than the political parable of our time’ (ibid.: 65), as defined by Jacqueline Rose, compelling us to contemplate issues related to identity and difference, race and racism beyond the organised, exclusive forms of identity based on principles of national, religious, or ethnicity, but rather through revealing a troubling dimension in relation to otherness at its core.
Sitegeist issue 16 set out to endorse an antiracial discourse in which, similarly to Said’s venture to deconstruct the European ‘hierarchy of races’, opening a door to the less privileged is not enough, and must be accompanied by an effort to identify areas of white privilege; to unsettle the very heart of the structures we are embedded in, including that of psychoanalysis itself. The issue follows a conference on ‘White Privilege, Racism and Psychoanalysis’ hosted by the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Goldsmiths University in October 2021. Continuing the work and conversations engendered by the conference, we are delighted in this issue to bring original articles that challenge familiar psychoanalytic landscapes – from the clinic to theory-making, from psychoanalytic language to questions of accessibility, from the structure of the frame to the structures of our institutions and trainings.