Beyond Repair: Political and Psychic Genealogies in Locke and Klein

Reparation is a key concept in both political theory and psychoanalysis, but it is used very differently in each field and rarely discussed across them. Chapter 1 traces a conceptual history of reparations from John Locke to Melanie Klein, beginning with dispossession and death in the New World and ending with total war and genocide in the Old World. For Locke, in the Old World, reparations become a central political concept for establishing the natural rights of sovereign European man in liberal political theory. In the New World, reparations justify a differential redistribution of life, liberty, and property by rationalizing genocide and dispossession in the name of justice. For Klein, reparation functions as a psychoanalytic concept producing a closed circuit of victims and perpetrators, constituting the colonist as both perpetrator and victim. The chapter describes these processes of producing the injured human being deserving of repair as “colonial object relations.”