The Reparative as Theoretical Mode and Structure of Feeling in Times of Crisis. An Outline.

This essay argues that during the past two decades, a significant theoretical shift has taken place in the humanities and social sciences, one that is expressive of a more general change in cultural sensibility. A new mode of theorizing and a novel structure of feeling have emerged: the reparative. Repair, at heart, can be characterized as a “broken world thinking” (Jackson), combining a focus on pain and possibility, destruction and creativity. Consisting of a set of strategies whereby subjects salvage possibilities and sustenance from the world, repair emerges expressly in the face of the crises that mark the present moment.

How do we ‘do theory’ in the present? How do we think and feel (in) the Anthropocene? I want to propose that we now often do so in a distinctly reparative way.

Repair, both in a literal and metaphorical sense, has already received some attention in the humanities and social sciences. There is, for instance, one short philosophical study of repair as an anthropological constant (homo reparans) (Spelman) and, in the wake of Eve Sedgwick’s influential essay on ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative’ reading (123–51), a broader debate within literary studies and queer studies (cf., e.g., Love; Wiegman et al.), as well as the occasional consideration from within other fields, such as media and technology studies (Jackson), art studies (Best), urban design (Fjalland and Samson), political theory (Sheehey; Stuelke), or psychology (Liu). However, repair has not yet been named, let alone investigated, as what I believe it actually has become: a broad theoretical mode and general cultural sensibility. In the following, I want to provide a rough outline of this premise and briefly indicate promising avenues for potential future work on this topic. Instead of an exhaustive account, this intervention is thus instead intended to initiate debate.