![]() ![]() Much scholarship on Klein, like that by Leo Bersani (1990), Lyndsey Stonebridge (1998), Esther Sánchez-Pardo (2003), and Mary Jacobus (2005) has rightly called attention to the central function of creativity in her work, showing how her narrative of the psychic impulse to create opens onto a broader theory of aesthetics. In this article, I take up Klein’s theorization of creativity through reparation to consider how this principally psychological formulation articulates a relationship between aesthetics and politics. In conversation with the work of Baldwin, object relations theory can help to identify particular social settings and institutions that might allow concrete efforts toward racial justice to take root. Conversely, Baldwin helps us to sound out the political significance of object relations approaches, including the work of Klein and those influenced by her such as Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion. I will argue that we cannot fully appreciate the depths of what Baldwin called the "savage paradox" of race without the insights provided by Klein and object relations psychoanalysis. In order to respond to this ambivalent situation, this article suggests a pairing between the work of James Baldwin and that of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. At the same time, the unfolding Black Lives Matter protest movements and the responses by federal agencies each testify to a not insignificant capacity for addressing social pathologies surrounding the color line. Recent killings of unarmed black citizens are a fresh reminder of the troubled state of racial integration in the United States. ![]()
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