John Rawls and Liberal Guilt

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Thought and Philosophy I

Abstract

To date, little attention has been granted to John Rawls’s engagement with psychoanalysis, particularly his unattributed engagement with the work of Melanie Klein. This paper re-reads Rawls’s account of “the sense of justice” as an experiment in Kleinian psychoanalytic thinking, analyzing how Rawls theorizes guilt-feelings as expressions of a capacity to value others, rather than a function of a self-abasing conscience. This posits guilt as a function of free, cooperative associations rather than the residue of an internalized authoritative law. Though Rawls allows us to think differently about how this emotion functions politically, he strips from Klein’s theory any notion of ambivalence, impasse and despair, thereby constructing a relatively rigid subject capable of performing the script of actions “justice as fairness” requires. In other words, Rawls builds a unified and stable subject and social order out of a theory that posits anything but. This paper will argue that Rawls’s appropriation of Klein is a problem not because it makes guilt a central political emotion, but rather because of its economistic, and narrow conception of repair, which is strictly geared towards reinforcing his unified broader theory. In so doing, the paper claims that in probing the limits of Rawls’s sense of how guilt works, we may re-read the cultural phenomenon of “liberal guilt” as a form of real solidarity that suffers from an impoverished notion of how to repair political injustices.

Author

• Stephen Cucharo, UCLA