This paper will use David Eng’s critical reading of Melanie Klein in his essay “Colonial Object Relations” (2016) to offer a psychoanalytic supplement to recent critiques of the logics of redemption in theology and the philosophy of religion. Eng demonstrates how Klein narrates the presumed naturalness and efficacy of liberal, “reparative” morality by writing it into the developmental dynamics of childhood. This naturalizing of repair, however, also naturalizes the hate and aggression that drive the reparative process. The result is a morality, as Eng puts it, in which “violence and hate are preserved in potentia for the continuous psychic and political consolidation of a European liberal human subject embedded in a long history of colonial relations.” This paper will draw connections between Eng’s reading of Klein and the ways in which theologies of redemption also preserve hate and aggression as a necessary psychic component of theological repair. The uneven distribution of repair / redemption, preserving it for the mother(land), is a structuring component of current manifestations of neo-liberal fascism, in particular the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. What alternative accounts of childhood as the condition of psychic and affective life are possible that do not end up with a reparative morality?
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