Essay One

The Sublime Art of Making Reparations

Kintsugi, Psychoanalysis, and the Sublimation of Disturbing Realities

Part III.

The white nationalist hears the word “reparations” and understands the word to mean “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”: they fear that the tables will be turned on them and that white peoples will be re-educated, enslaved and/or exterminated by black and indigenous peoples. The liberal globalist hears the word “reparations” and understands the word to mean “compensation”, sums of money paid by the oppressor to the oppressed for their oppression, like the paying of back wages. Neither of these cold and calculating notions of reparations are what I have in mind here. When I use the term reparations, I am referring to an art of making amends rather than a science of finding equivalents. Indeed, I am referring to a very specific art of making amends that eschews the finding of equivalents: the sublime art of making reparations, as I imagine it it, is the art of kintsugi writ large as a metaphor for radical cultural transformation.

sublime (adj.) - from Latin sublimis "uplifted, high, borne aloft, lofty, exalted, eminent, distinguished," from sub "up to" + limen "lintel, threshold, sill".

reparation (n.)  from Latin reparare "restore, repair," from re- "again" + parare "make ready"

kintsugi (n.) - unadapted borrowing from Japanese 金継ぎ, from 金 (kin, “gold”) + 継ぎ (tsugi, “repairing, mending; joining”). Referring to the practice of repairing broken ceramics by gathering their fragments, re-assembling them, and gluing them together using a lacquer mixed with powdered gold. “There should be no attempt to disguise the damage, the point is to render the fault-lines beautiful and strong. The precious veins of gold are there to emphasise that breaks have a philosophically-rich merit all of their own.”

Let me put it this way: to make reparations is to make repairs, and repairs can be either made artfully or artlessly. The white supremacists and the liberal globalists would only ever conceive of artless reparations, of artless repairs. Those who call for abolition and decolonization, by contrast, would conceive of artful reparations, artful repairs. The question that follows from this is, of course, “How does one differentiate artful from artless repairs?” 

Christopher Alexander, writing in The Timeless Way of Building, answers this question admirably by distinguishing between a commonplace use of the word repair and a more novel use of the word.

In the commonplace use of the word repair, we assume that when we repair something, we are essentially trying to get it back to its original state. This kind of repair is patching, conservative, static.

But in this new use of the word repair, we assume, instead, that everything is changing constantly: and that at every moment we use the defects of the present state as the starting point for the definition of the new state.

When we repair something in this new sense, we assume that we are going to transform it, that new wholes will be born, that indeed, the entire whole which is being repaired will become a different whole as the result of the repair.

In this sense, the idea of repair is creative, dynamic, open.

What Alexander calls “patching, conservative, static” repair is the making of artless reparations. What Alexander calls “creative, dynamic, open,” repair is the making of artful reparations.

Those who call for abolition and decolonization are the exponents of artful reparations. White supremacists are the enemies of all reparations, no matter whether artful or artless. Liberal globalists claim to sympathize with calls for reparations but they refuse to admit that artful reparations are possible and they argue that all reparations are artless. The liberal globalist speaks of  brave new peoples for whom the past is dead and the future is a boundless frontier. Exhausted by the liberal globalists’ speeches, those who call for abolition and decolonization retort, "The past is never dead. It's not even past. The past is still alive in the present but it is living in fragments and it is becoming ever more fragmented. Brave are those peoples who (re-)create the past anew, taking great care to piece together every recoverable fragment of the past that they have access to.”