UCLA

This dissertation offers a challenge to a paradigmatic way of approaching guilt in the tradition of 20th century Western political thought. In short, I argue the indebtedness to a Nietzschean-Freudian conceptualization of guilt, which associates this emotion with self-regard, lawfulness, inertia, and self-abasement, has either written off guilt-feelings as hindrances to political engagement, or regards the guilty subject as beset by operations of power that bind them to authoritative injunctions. As a result of the attachment to this paradigm, political theorists still have yet to seriously engage alternative framings of guilt that cast it as a potentially productive, solidaristic dissonance that attunes subjects into their implication in the suffering of others. The foundational categories of this alternative perspective were pioneered by Melanie Klein, who not only casts guilt-feelings as expressions of value, but also suggests that potentially productive forms of guilt are actualized in different ways depending on the interpretive significance that we grant to these feelings themselves. In other words, what we do with guilt-feelings is dependent on cultural, social, and political scripts that narrate action in response. Two central figures of 20th century political thought, John Rawls and Theodor Adorno, offer politicized readings of the categories and concepts pioneered by Klein. Though Rawls and Adorno are not performing straightforward applications of Klein’s work, they are distinctively operating outside of a Nietzschean-Freudian paradigm as it relates to this emotion, writing different interpretive scripts for the reparative activity undertaken in response to feelings of guilt. These differing processes of emotional script-writing give theorists a glimpse of how, and for which purposes, reparative impulses emanating from senses of guilt can be narrated and directed in conflicting ways, one in line with liberal political thought and the other in critical theoretical terms. The dissertation concludes by sketching the promises and pitfalls of the liberal and critical theoretical approaches in conceptualizing the phenomenon of “white guilt.”