Abstract
Abstract: This essay argues that during the past two decades, a significant theoretical shift has taken place in the humanities and social sciences, one that is expressive of a more general change in cultural sensibility. A new mode of theorizing and a novel structure of feeling have emerged: the reparative. Repair, at heart, can be characterized as a “broken world thinking” (Jackson), combining a focus on pain and possibility, destruction and creativity. Consisting of a set of strategies whereby subjects salvage possibilities and sustenance from the world, repair emerges expressly in the face of the crises that mark the present moment.