Melanie Klein's Racial Objects

This article offers an account of the racial objects that appear in the work of Melanie Klein, especially in her influential theory of reparation. It traces the racial and colonial unconscious of Klein's theory of reparation to suggest that, when read against its own racial symptoms, Klein's work offers a portrait of the psychic dynamics through which whiteness is shored up within the operations of reparation. As an effect, white selfhood and subjectivity are constituted on a Kleinian circuit that entails the repetitive use, abuse, and repair of an endless stream of racial objects. The article thus argues that, when we read for the racial material that constitutes and haunts the Kleinian theory of reparation, we gain insight into the psychic life of racism and the mechanisms through which whiteness is constituted across various scenes of racial object use—including, especially, the reparative.