Who Are “We” – At the Limits of Rupture and Repair: Reply to Cyrus, Davids, and Swartz

Abstract

Responding to these deeply thoughtful commentaries at a moment of urgency, in the United States and globally, around the impact of racial violence, this reply reflects on the limits and potential of psychoanalysis to address these vast social problems. I discuss the confrontation this moment entails for white people; the importance of resisting the urge to respond to this confrontation by “leaving” in any of the ways elaborated by Cyrus, Davids and Swartz (this issue); and the fantasies of control contained within the liberal idea of “giving up” privilege, as critiqued by Swartz. Drawing on the respondents’ insights, I revisit the psychoanalytic concept of rupture and repair and its limits within a context of ongoing structural violence; and reconsider how questions of agency and subjecthood are constructed in the idea of reparation, suggesting that what is in fact impossible may not be reparation itself, but reparation as an action of white people, seen as subjects, toward people of color, seen as objects.