In The Butcher’s Shop
The Editors
The world, for Melanie Klein, begins with the mother. Or at least the first one we invade. But we don’t do so without consequence. We feel terrible about our injuries to them, real and fantastical, carried out with the aim of sole possession and the comfort it provides. We fantasize, we injure, we feel guilty, and then we might redress. This is if we can tolerate that guilt and face the destruction we’ve wrought. The entire scenario is what Klein called “reparation,” a word we hear more often now in political contexts, and, indeed, the political use predates psychoanalytic conceptions by more than 200 years. In the United States, what reparation might look like for formerly enslaved people and their descendants has been a site of debate long before the Emancipation Proclamation. Often thought of as a combination of economic restitution and active recognition of the past, reparations have been called for in the aftermath of genocides, apartheids, wars, periods of colonial violence and control, and white supremacy in the intervening centuries.
It is this idiom that Klein wrests for her prototypical infant, and, writing through World War II, the reparation Klein had in mind was largely, though not exclusively, a psychical one. And about this one thing at least, Klein was right: there is no getting around repair or its absence in psychical life.
Klein’s infant has as its first internal commandment “Do harm.” But one can only hurt the other, after all, once one understands one is merely one of two, one in a world of ones. That early antagonistic relationship with the mother’s body is the scene out of which individuation is constantly emerging. For Klein, what we wish to repair is the damage done to the phantasized mother’s body—something, someone we wound because we cannot tolerate separation and because we must aim for it.
In order to repair, and to do so truly, we must first recognize that gulf of difference that marks us as apart. The wound is not merely a bite on the breast but the crossing of unwelcome psychic space. For the infant, a simple thought with no clear material consequence can hurt the other, the mother, or the world. An ugly yet inevitable sentiment—greed, envy, jealousy, hate—sends the infant into the world to heal what has been damaged: this is the widening gyre of psychical repair—first of our mother, then the motherland, then to mother the land. The problem is that such healing may not be forthcoming or effective—the wished-for repair might not be viable or our insatiability to make good could cause more harm. Or we might set about repair in order to shed an intolerable feeling of guilt rather than to close a wound. Conversely, our repair drive may be wrested from us by our guilt—a feeling so unbearable we refuse it, and the wound, entirely.
There is an excruciating paradox at work in psychical reparation. Guilt for one’s death wishes instills a primordial fear and anxiety about one’s own death. If we can harm, we can be harmed. If we can kill, even in phantasy, we can be killed. This alone can spin us out such that we become unmoored; the balance of life and death is indeed fragile. To the charge that analysis takes too long, Freud once pithily replied that it is not long enough only because we die—that a lifetime of analysis is not enough time to deal with the trauma that infancy is. For Klein, if there is hope to be had here, it is in overcoming infantile guilt just enough so that it might be sublimated into collective, creative activity toward a life worth living. Given the immense state of disrepair of the world, you don’t have to go very far to find world-destroying guilt: it might, in fact, be the reigning sentiment.
The Kleinian description of infantile damage might strike us as melodramatic, as it did Edward Glover amid the controversial debates in early British psychoanalysis, when he said the Kleinian infant’s world is “a combination of a butcher’s shop, a public lavatory under shell-fire, and a post-mortem room.” But Klein, for all her infamous focus on the murderer and the genocidal maniac inside, also had an eye on the world without, even if the external world was subordinate to its operations inside, and when she invoked political reality, it was almost with that quiet force of metaphor. “The child’s early aggression stimulated the drive to restore and to make good, to put back into his mother the good things he had robbed her of in phantasy,” Klein writes, “and these wishes to make good merge into the later drive to explore, for by finding new land the explorer gives something to the world at large and to a number of people in particular.”
If sole possession is already a desire, in the service of comfort and safety, for the colonizer, the action is one of expansion and accumulation, often justified by a logic of safety not actually producing it or motivated by it. Aggression is sublimated into travel, adventure, exploration, but these examples of giving something map almost too neatly onto the historical process of colonial dispossession and restitution. In metaphor, the colonial scene fuses with repair as if they were one and the same. We know they are not, or if they are, this is not a true repair in even the Kleinian sense. Colonial adventurers might have been trying to heal their infantile wounds, but they only passed them along the circuits of dominion, genocide, and terrorizing dispossession. “Ironic” would be an insufficient gloss of this historical outcome of the wish for psychical repair.
Before Klein codified reparation, she used two other terms in German: Wiederherstellung, meaning “restoration,” and Wiedergutmachung, meaning “amends” or “restitution.” Wiedergutmachung can be vulgarly translated as “to make good again,” and eventually was the term used to refer to the 1952-1953 agreement the West German government made to make payments totaling 100 billion deutsche marks to the direct victims of the Holocaust and another 3.45 billion marks to Israel. But before the Holocaust, or even World War II, Klein began to write in English. These earlier words for a psychic mechanism for making whole were finally superseded by the term “reparation” itself.
Reparation, then, for Klein, might be characterized as a third thing and not a self-mistranslation of an earlier term—not quite a restoration nor a restitution, but an action: to repair. This is indefinite work without closure: reparation is a drive that can only be frustrated, only come up short. We unconsciously create the impossible conditions that foreclose restoration and restitution while knowing that no single gesture will ever be enough. What we are left with is the unsatisfiable drive toward repair, amid conditions that paralyze us with a fixation on guilt over a present we did not choose and are at pains to amend.
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Psychoanalysis has faced its greatest pressures, even the possibility of its destruction, at those historical conjunctures where fascism no longer creeps but marches proudly. Such moments have also entailed its rebirth. Psychoanalysis, for its part, is always trying to recuperate itself enough to be a cure for individuals in a society, even when we’ve been told there’s no such thing. Sometimes, too often, that cure itself is the wound, and takes repair as its alibi. After a century of psychoanalytic violence, we must ask if the very theory of psychic reparations—if psychoanalysis—can itself be repaired. Can our drive to repair suffice?
At the time of writing, just one week ago, Jordan Neely was murdered in the New York City subway while dozens looked on, or helped. A few days ago, a shooting occurred at a mall in Texas, and then immediately, a white nationalist plowed into a crowd of migrants elsewhere in the state. The anaphora of death is not unusual in the United States. It is too much to bear, and so some look away, some watch the death from the double distance of their laps or hands. Some take to the streets, to the tracks of the subway, to mourn and disrupt, with demands. Demanding the impossible is a demand for both the abolitional and restitutive aspects of repair. If psychoanalysis tempers a manic belief in making the world whole—full restitution, full reparation—does that mean forfeiting the political imperative for justice? This would only repeat the agonized quietism, the self-righteous condemnation of the political, or the limited care of a psychoanalytic practice in retreat from the actual world.
Jacques Derrida once asked a similar question about Oedipus. Blind, incestuous, parricidal Oedipus, the unwitting transgressor, has brought calamity to Thebes and a curse down on his household. Derrida outlines the pathlessness always involved in forgiveness: “How can the unforgivable be forgiven? But what else can be forgiven?” Can we repair without forgiving the unforgivable? What else, then, might be repaired? These are impossible psychoanalytic questions. We do not pretend to have answers. We can forgive Oedipus no more than we can forgive ourselves. Psychoanalysis does, however, invite Oedipus—both transgressor and victim—to lie down to tell his tragic fate.
We write from a moment that seems beyond repair, and yet some still call for this form of redress. The old forms of “cure” or even “healing” are no longer available, trustworthy, or sufficient. Not even Klein’s manic repairer—making good to get rid of guilt—can keep up. How are we to live with one another on the other side of wounding when the wound won’t stop compounding?
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We write from a moment that seems beyond repair
Psychoanalysis, like the world, is in disrepair. Yet it has staked its cure on the possibility of reparation. Still, repair implies that we know what has gone wrong—what is bad or what is good—and once that knowledge is ventured, things, people, and the world split. The possibility of repair suggests that we might recover—that we know what we’ve lost, can locate what’s been taken, and can set about making a new whole or returning to the old. Yet, in the wake of ongoing white supremacy and colonial dispossession and subjugation, the class divide that composes and decomposes strife, and the petrifying distinctions that segregate across race and gender, the world seems irreparably riven.
In this issue, we descend into the butcher’s butchered world, inside and out, to see what damage has been wrought and in whose name. The haunting of remains. Boundary and boundary violation. Feeling down and out in Berlin. The challenges of a global red clinic. Wherefore Fanon. Watching courts. Irreparable communing through ordinary psychosis. The nation, belonging, the state. An interview with Denise Da Silva. Essays by Abby Kluchin, McKenzie Wark, Wayne Wapeemukwa, Francisco González, and more.
Repair is not an event, but an ongoing demand, one that is impossible to satisfy and impossible to avoid.