The Kleinian Subject in the Anthropocene: Posthumanism, Narration of Crisis, and the Ethics of Reparative Care

This dissertation utilizes psychoanalytic theory to understand the anxieties that construct narrations of and demand intervention into the Anthropocene, a period marked by crises associated with human impact. I specifically bring Melanie Klein's theory of object relations to this contemporary sociopolitical context by analyzing the role of subjectivity in posthumanist theorizing, focusing on new materialism and object-oriented ontology. In response to feminist, queer, decolonial, and critical race concerns for the intersectional human within the posthumanities, this research questions the sociopolitical impact of human desires, fears, and defences on conceptions of repair in anthropocentric crisis and subsequent calls for care-taking in our more-than-human world.

First, I explore how the foundational arguments of the posthumanities resonate with the anxieties of Klein's paranoid-schizoid position and the subsequent defence mechanism of manic reparation. I humanize the drive of posthumanist theorizing through Klein's subject and its constitutive formation around a fear of annihilation, positioning the desire to be posthuman as a collective negotiation of threat and security in the face of crisis. Next, I discuss Klein's conception of non-manic reparation and the sociopolitical import of reparative aspirations for the Anthropocene. I specifically focus on the nature of reparative desires in the face of ecological crisis and climate change and argue for the critical necessity of reconciling with reality's ambivalence. Finally, I speculate on the how the individuated conceptualization of Kleinian subjectivity can be brought to notions of collective care in the context of the Anthropocene. I provide a close reading of reparation as a matter of care, politicizing Klein for this contemporary sociopolitical moment and contemplating both the psychic life of engaging in ethical obligations of care for ecological crisis and the critical role of narration in fostering care.

Throughout, I illustrate the sociopolitical consequences of calls for caretaking in the Anthropocene through reference to museology as an exemplary realm for the public interpretation and curation of narratives of external reality. I analyze how storytelling practices are tethered to ontological conditions and consider how the perception of crisis impacts the activation of different capacities for engagement or intervention into crisis.