Repair

In the 1990s, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick troubled what she regarded as a “paranoid” focus in progressive and radical scholarship on forms of critique oriented toward the anticipation, denunciation, and exposure of domination and exploitation. Her call for “reparative reading” is now hailed by some liberal scholars as a refreshing alternative to tired old historicisms and denounced by some Leftists as quietism in the face of neoliberal empire. But is reparative reading a necessarily liberal, accommodationist, incrementalist, or reformist project? This chapter argues in the negative, advocating forms of reparative reading that return to Sedgwick's grounding in the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. If the drive to make reparation is in some sense universal, the political question becomes: What remains worth repairing, and for whom?