Podcast Summary: Reparations and the Human – David L. Eng

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Deep Acharya
Guest: Professor David L. Eng
Published: March 3, 2026
Book Discussed: reparations and the Human (Duke UP, 2025)

Episode Overview

This episode of New Books Network features a deep and theoretically rich conversation with Professor David L. Eng about his 2025 book Reparations and the Human. The discussion explores the entwined histories of reparations, human rights, and the politics of recognition after World War II and during the Cold War, focusing especially on the Transpacific context. Eng draws on legal history, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory to interrogate who is deemed "deserving of repair" historically and in contemporary debates, weaving together the legacies of colonial dispossession, slavery, atomic warfare, and transnational adoption.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis of the Book and Interdisciplinary Approach

[02:24–09:22]

• Prof. Eng describes his background intersecting law (especially immigration law) and psychoanalysis, from Asian American studies and gender/queer theory.
• The genesis lay in observing how Asian American transnational adoptees "come out" using the language of stigma/shame, leading to a psychoanalytic study with Shin Hee Han.
• Case study: A Korean adoptee, Minna, whose idealization of her white adoptive mother and denigration of her Korean birth mother led Eng back to Melanie Klein’s psychoanalysis and the racial dimensions of reparation.

  "We realized in Minna's case, and what she taught us about Klein, was that ... that reparation from Minna was racial reparation." – Professor David Eng [05:29]

• This clinical insight scaled up to a broader historical and politico-theoretical investigation, situating reparations at the intersection of psychoanalytic object relations and legal structures.

2. Historical Shift: The Human as Category

[09:22–11:56]

• Discussion of how "the human" became a universal legal and political category after the Enlightenment, and especially after 1840, shifting from adjective to noun.
• Eng credits Ed Cohen for highlighting this lexical transformation and Foucault’s influence in seeing "the human" as tied to the rise of biopolitics.
• Tension: while "the human" aspires to universality (i.e., human rights), it’s repeatedly differentiated and exclusionary, especially along colonial/racial lines.

  "The human ... aspires toward the universality that's constantly differentiated over the course of colonial modernity." – Professor David Eng [10:54]

3. Rethinking Locke, Property, and Racial Contracts

[11:56–19:11]

• Eng offers a critical rereading of John Locke, tracing how "reparations" emerges as a key term deeply embedded in the logic of property and colonial violence.
• Locke’s political theory is inseparable from his role as a colonial administrator and his justifications for dispossession and extermination of Indigenous peoples.

  "Reparation has one meaning in Europe, which is about the checking of absolute power, but it has another meaning in the New World where it becomes the name for the justification and the rationalization of violence against the indigenous." – Professor David Eng [14:53]

• International law itself, Eng argues via Anthony Anghie, was forged through confrontations between colonizers and colonized, not as pre-existing neutral principles.

4. Psychoanalysis, Object Relations, and Colonial Repair

[19:29–23:57]

• Transition from Locke to Klein: Eng identifies a colonial scene in Klein’s "Love, Guilt and Reparation," where the colonizers justify violence then seek to "repair" only within their own community, not toward the colonized.

"... the colonizer becomes both the perpetrator of violence, but also the victim deserving repair. And the Indian is written out of that equation." – Professor David Eng [21:51]

• Reparation, in both Locke and Klein, has two lives: it’s both the solution to violence and its ground, reflecting a "bad faith, liberal white guilt."
• This double structure allows the perpetrator to claim both injury and a right to repair, further erasing those outside the borders of legal or psychic recognition.

5. After World War II – The Politics of Good and Bad Objects

[23:57–30:58]

• Eng’s theoretical framing of "good" and "bad" objects (psychoanalytic and legal categories) illuminates divisions following WWII.
• Distinction between the "settled" history of Holocaust reparations (Nuremberg) and the "unsettled" Transpacific cases (atomic bombing, comfort women).
• The Holocaust is exemplary of "white people killing white people," thus producing a totalizing historical judgment absent from Asia.
• During the Cold War, Japan was recast from inhuman enemy to rehabilitated economic ally—legal, psychic, cultural, and literary projects all contributed.

  "The production of good and bad is also politically contingent. Good and bad objects are also produced not just by politics and law, but they are produced by politics and law." – Professor David Eng [26:22]

6. Narrative and Recognition: Hersey’s Hiroshima

[30:12–35:20]

• Analysis of John Hersey’s essay "Hiroshima" (1946) as a pivotal moment where American/Western readers are led to see Japanese civilians as "human"—but only through their ruination.

  "Humanity only emerges in Japan after destruction. Humanity only emerges after humanity is obliterated." – Professor David Eng [35:14]

• Raises the paradox that recognition and empathy are contingent on witnessing the spectacle of total destruction, problematizing the universal ideal of the human.

7. Material Link: Indigenous Dispossession & Nuclear Violence

[35:46–41:51]

• The Satudene of Canada mined uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, unaware of its intended use; decades later, as cancer victims, they journeyed to Hiroshima to apologize.
• The story enables Eng to draw connections from colonial dispossession in the Americas, through nuclear devastation in Japan, and back to indigenous communities as implicated subjects.
• The Satudene demonstrate a model of responsibility and relationality beyond state-sponsored recognition or legal frameworks:

  "What the Dene really show us is how these bad objects can move beyond sovereignty, how they can choose to address another who has been injured without the sanctioned legitimacy or approval of the sovereign." – Professor David Eng [40:20]

8. Repair Beyond Law: Apology, Responsibility, Relationship

[41:51–45:20]

• Eng discusses the Satudene’s apology as evidence of a different relational ontology. Citing George Blondin ("there is no stranger in the world"), he notes how indigenous conceptions of responsibility differ from Western law.

  "You can never repair something that's broken. You can't repair violence. The only thing that you can repair are your relationships." – Professor David Eng [43:02]

• For Eng, repair is only possible where relation exists—even to those not yet known to us.

9. Reparations as Noun and Verb: Law vs. Psychoanalysis

[45:20–49:43]

• Critical distinction: in law, reparations are a noun (payment, finalized event); in psychoanalysis, making reparation is an ongoing verb/process, never complete.
• The tension between these frames (“they’ll never fully align”) creates space for the continuous recognition of new victims and new forms of redress—particularly vital under persistent and irreversible harm (e.g., environmental devastation).

  "The discrepancy between the law and psychoanalysis is to say that there will always be a gap between them and therefore always a space for other victims to claim rights and recognition." – Professor David Eng [46:53]

10. Redefining the Human: Toward a Planetary Ethics

[49:43–52:32]

• Eng invokes Sylvia Wynter and Bruno Latour to argue for reconceiving "the human" outside Enlightenment, colonial, and sovereign terms.
• The future lies in recognizing interdependency—not only among humans, but with the planet.

  "The antonym of immunity is community and dependence. And I think that we have to understand how we are interdependent on one another, but not just on one another as a human species. We're interdependent on the planet." – Professor David Eng [51:16]

• Rather than a final answer, the book’s contribution is to orient us toward new ethical, legal, and psychoanalytic vantage points for thinking repair, vulnerability, and solidarity.

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Klein/Locke’s "two bodies" of reparation:
  "So it's that contradiction that led me to this idea that that reparation actually has two bodies, kind of inspired by Kantorowicz, the king's two bodies." – Prof. Eng [14:48]
• On the shift from trauma as legal to trauma as psychoanalytic:
  "Unlike law, which is a moral discourse, psychoanalysis... goes beyond good and evil, it goes beyond judgment. Anybody ... can be traumatized." – Prof. Eng [48:21]
• On the limits of repair:
  "You can never repair something that's broken. You can't repair violence. The only thing that you can repair are your relationships." – Prof. Eng [43:02]
• On planetary ethics:
  "We're interdependent on the planet. And that's really what gets us from the human and the legal histories to this problem of the planetary history and to the problem of the environment." – Prof. Eng [51:25]

Key Timestamps

• 02:35–09:22: Eng’s background, psychoanalysis, and genesis of the project
• 09:22–11:56: The genealogy of "the human" as legal-political category
• 11:56–19:11: Locke, the racial contract, and the origins of reparation
• 19:29–23:57: Klein, psychoanalysis, and colonial object relations
• 23:57–30:12: Postwar reconfigurations—Holocaust, Hiroshima, comfort women
• 30:12–35:20: Narrative empathy and "the human" in ruins (Hersey/Hiroshima)
• 35:46–41:51: Indigenous uranium mining, Satudene, and reparative apology
• 45:20–49:43: Law (reparations as noun) vs. psychoanalysis (reparation as verb)
• 49:43–52:32: Redefining human/planetary relations and closing reflections

Concluding Reflection

Professor Eng’s conversation with Deep Acharya unfolds as a profound theoretical journey from the analytic clinic to the court of history. It examines the legacy and present politics of who is seen, legally and psychically, as "deserving of repair." Eng insists on the need for both moral/legal judgment and ongoing ethical openness—identifying the irreducible gap between compensatory justice and the messy, ongoing, relational work of repair.

Through a planetary and decolonial lens, the episode challenges listeners to question inherited categories of victimhood, sovereignty, and even the human, offering instead a vision of solidarity grounded in interdependence—the continued work of "making reparation" with one another and with the world itself.