Mari Ruti’s presentation, “The Lacanian Subject of Mourning,” takes as its starting point the basic Lacanian claim that human subjectivity is founded on lack. This perspective implies that the subject, for Lacan, is necessarily a subject of mourning—an entity whose ontology invites it to undertake a continuous work of mourning the losses, whether fantasmatic or real, that it has incurred. This work entails a creative and repeatedly renewed encounter not only with one’s own private wounds—an attempt, on a personal level, to fashion a life that feels meaningful and rewarding—but also with the external world as a space of open-ended possibility. That is, the work of mourning can become a work of world-building, an activity designed to translate loss into collective flourishing.

Amy Allen’s presentation, “Klein and Reparative Justice,” focuses on the political implications of Klein’s account of reparation. For Klein, the urge for reparation emerges with the subject’s transition from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position. The depressive position forces the subject to confront the loss of its primary loved object—a loss that the subject, sometimes purely phantasmatically, believes to be the result of its own aggression and destructiveness. However, far from leaving the subject mired in pessimistic despair, Klein understands that reparation represents a constructive response to the realization (or phantasy) that one may have harmed one’s loved objects. Transposed into the register of politics, the Kleinian perspective supports an expansive vision of reparative justice that encompasses not only economic reparations but also a politics of nonaggression, truth and reconciliation, and public memorialization.

Noëlle McAfee’s presentation, “Melancholia, the People, and the Political Work of Mourning,” focuses on the psychoanalytic roots of the friend vs. enemy dichotomies of populism and other forms of political polarization. Such dichotomies may entail a glorification of one’s own people, as happens in nationalist or racist discourse. Alternatively, they may entail attempts to counter political problems with solutions that come to be perceived as perfect. The flipside of such idealizations is the demonization of all alternatives, with the consequence that collectivities get stuck in xenophobic and uncompromising mindsets. Drawing on Klein’s notion of reparation and Kristeva’s theorization of syndromes of ideality, McAfee proposes that the only way to transcend such mindsets is to recognize the necessity of the work of mourning to democratic politics: unless groups learn to mourn the loss of their untenable idealizations, they remain incapable of democratic and dynamic responses to complex dilemmas. More specifically, McAfee argues that being able to seriously entertain alternatives to one’s idealizations means coming to terms with imperfect solutions.

The panel’s presentations—limited to fifteen minutes in duration—are designed to offer a tightly knit series of considerations on the connections between the work of mourning on the one hand and creativity, reparation, and politics on the other. They move from Ruti’s broadly Lacanian commentary on the ontological status of human subjectivity as being tied to lack and mourning to Allen’s insights about the reparative potentialities of the Kleinian depressive subject to McAfee’s theorization of the centrality of mourning to democratic politics. Each paper picks up from where the previous one leaves off and each paper makes reference to themes that are considered in the other two. The panel is therefore characterized by a high level of thematic coherence and a deliberate attempt to present materials in a sequence that makes them both accessible and generative for audience members.