Bonnie Honig
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823276400
- eISBN:
- 9780823277063
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823276400.003.0003
- Subject:
- Political Science, Democratization
This chapter examines “things” in Hannah Arendt's work in relation to D. W. Winnicott's object relations. Hoping to generate a lexicon for a political theory of public things, it analyzes Arendt's ...
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This chapter examines “things” in Hannah Arendt's work in relation to D. W. Winnicott's object relations. Hoping to generate a lexicon for a political theory of public things, it analyzes Arendt's The Human Condition together with Winnicott's work. It notes the convergence of Winnicott and Arendt on the value of care and concern for the world and for others and argues that there is a case to be made for seeing Arendt as a kind of object-relations theorist whose concepts, along with Winnicott's, call attention to the centrality of public things to democratic life. Read with Winnicott, Arendt emerges as a thinker who is committed to the power of thingness to stabilize the flux of nature and the contingency of action.Less
This chapter examines “things” in Hannah Arendt's work in relation to D. W. Winnicott's object relations. Hoping to generate a lexicon for a political theory of public things, it analyzes Arendt's The Human Condition together with Winnicott's work. It notes the convergence of Winnicott and Arendt on the value of care and concern for the world and for others and argues that there is a case to be made for seeing Arendt as a kind of object-relations theorist whose concepts, along with Winnicott's, call attention to the centrality of public things to democratic life. Read with Winnicott, Arendt emerges as a thinker who is committed to the power of thingness to stabilize the flux of nature and the contingency of action.
Bonnie Honig
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190600181
- eISBN:
- 9780190600211
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190600181.003.0017
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory, Comparative Politics
This chapter treats von Trier’s Melancholia as a reception of Euripides’ Bacchae, a world-ending tragedy in which women leave their work to worship a hypnotic foreign god and are bewitched by strange ...
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This chapter treats von Trier’s Melancholia as a reception of Euripides’ Bacchae, a world-ending tragedy in which women leave their work to worship a hypnotic foreign god and are bewitched by strange visions of two suns. The focus here is on the youths—Leo, in von Trier’s film, and the young King Pentheus, in Euripides’ play. Both navigate their way through something like the doldrums of adolescence, a process that may involve violence, aggression, murder (of self, of other), and the renegotiation of identity. One of these two youths is a king whose death in Euripides’ play is the result of an act of regicide. Furthermore, D. W. Winnicott’s work on adolescence in particular invites a reconsideration of the Bacchae, which can enable us to likewise reconsider the politics of von Trier’s film.Less
This chapter treats von Trier’s Melancholia as a reception of Euripides’ Bacchae, a world-ending tragedy in which women leave their work to worship a hypnotic foreign god and are bewitched by strange visions of two suns. The focus here is on the youths—Leo, in von Trier’s film, and the young King Pentheus, in Euripides’ play. Both navigate their way through something like the doldrums of adolescence, a process that may involve violence, aggression, murder (of self, of other), and the renegotiation of identity. One of these two youths is a king whose death in Euripides’ play is the result of an act of regicide. Furthermore, D. W. Winnicott’s work on adolescence in particular invites a reconsideration of the Bacchae, which can enable us to likewise reconsider the politics of von Trier’s film.
Adam Phiilips
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198708568
- eISBN:
- 9780191779527
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198708568.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, Poetry
This chapter examines how Learical play was central to the twentieth-century British tradition of psychoanalysis, in particular to the work of D. W. Winnicott. What the ‘absurd’ or the ‘surreal’ were ...
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This chapter examines how Learical play was central to the twentieth-century British tradition of psychoanalysis, in particular to the work of D. W. Winnicott. What the ‘absurd’ or the ‘surreal’ were to continental Europe, it argues, ‘nonsense’ was to the British tradition–and it was the absence of self-conscious manifestoes and programmatic self-definitions which lent ‘nonsense’ its particular value and force as an analytic tool. The investment of Lear’s poetic play in the play of childhood was vital for a tradition which placed the child’s experience at the centre of its method. In his essay ‘Playing, a Theoretical Statement’, Winnicott redescribed Freud’s ‘golden rule’ of free-association in terms of play, suggesting that rather than seeking to understand (after Freud) what verbal play is trying to hold at bay, psychoanalysts ought rather to attend to the play itself, even to the point of understanding analysis as a form of nonsensical play.Less
This chapter examines how Learical play was central to the twentieth-century British tradition of psychoanalysis, in particular to the work of D. W. Winnicott. What the ‘absurd’ or the ‘surreal’ were to continental Europe, it argues, ‘nonsense’ was to the British tradition–and it was the absence of self-conscious manifestoes and programmatic self-definitions which lent ‘nonsense’ its particular value and force as an analytic tool. The investment of Lear’s poetic play in the play of childhood was vital for a tradition which placed the child’s experience at the centre of its method. In his essay ‘Playing, a Theoretical Statement’, Winnicott redescribed Freud’s ‘golden rule’ of free-association in terms of play, suggesting that rather than seeking to understand (after Freud) what verbal play is trying to hold at bay, psychoanalysts ought rather to attend to the play itself, even to the point of understanding analysis as a form of nonsensical play.
Amanda Anderson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- April 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198755821
- eISBN:
- 9780191816956
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198755821.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Through a discussion of the moral realism of George Eliot in relation to British psychoanalysis of the twentieth century, and the work of D. W. Winnicott in particular, this chapter demonstrates that ...
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Through a discussion of the moral realism of George Eliot in relation to British psychoanalysis of the twentieth century, and the work of D. W. Winnicott in particular, this chapter demonstrates that there develops within the history of psychoanalysis a framework by which healthy moral development within ordinary conditions is described and avowed. The general forms of psychoanalysis within literary studies to date have been oriented toward the structural, drive-based models of Freud and Klein, which promote an understanding of power and aggression as primary and ineluctable. Through a comparison of the development of the conceptions of the ordinary and traumatic in Winnicott, and the opposition between the tragic and the ordinary in Eliot, this chapter develops a conception of psychological health and moral aspiration amidst precarious conditions, including contingent environmental forces of aggression, rupture, and trauma.Less
Through a discussion of the moral realism of George Eliot in relation to British psychoanalysis of the twentieth century, and the work of D. W. Winnicott in particular, this chapter demonstrates that there develops within the history of psychoanalysis a framework by which healthy moral development within ordinary conditions is described and avowed. The general forms of psychoanalysis within literary studies to date have been oriented toward the structural, drive-based models of Freud and Klein, which promote an understanding of power and aggression as primary and ineluctable. Through a comparison of the development of the conceptions of the ordinary and traumatic in Winnicott, and the opposition between the tragic and the ordinary in Eliot, this chapter develops a conception of psychological health and moral aspiration amidst precarious conditions, including contingent environmental forces of aggression, rupture, and trauma.
Bonnie Honig
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823276400
- eISBN:
- 9780823277063
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823276400.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Democratization
This book examines democratic theory in the context of object relations and asks whether democracy might be constitutively dependent on public things. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's object-relations ...
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This book examines democratic theory in the context of object relations and asks whether democracy might be constitutively dependent on public things. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's object-relations theory, in which objects have seemingly magic powers of integration and adhesion, and Hannah Arendt's account of the work of homo faber, the book thinks out loud about things (or “things out loud”) and their contributions to democratic politics. It considers Winnicott's “transitional objects,” “holding environments,” “object permanence,” and “good enough” (m)others as well as Arendt's ideas about the durability and permanence that “things” bring to the contingency and flux of the human world of action. The basic argument is that democracy is rooted in common love for, antipathy to, and contestation of public things.Less
This book examines democratic theory in the context of object relations and asks whether democracy might be constitutively dependent on public things. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's object-relations theory, in which objects have seemingly magic powers of integration and adhesion, and Hannah Arendt's account of the work of homo faber, the book thinks out loud about things (or “things out loud”) and their contributions to democratic politics. It considers Winnicott's “transitional objects,” “holding environments,” “object permanence,” and “good enough” (m)others as well as Arendt's ideas about the durability and permanence that “things” bring to the contingency and flux of the human world of action. The basic argument is that democracy is rooted in common love for, antipathy to, and contestation of public things.
Bonnie Honig
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823276400
- eISBN:
- 9780823277063
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823276400.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, Democratization
This chapter discusses the role of public things in democratic theory and in democratic life. It examines the power of public things to stimulate the object relations of democratic collectivity by ...
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This chapter discusses the role of public things in democratic theory and in democratic life. It examines the power of public things to stimulate the object relations of democratic collectivity by drawing on the work of D. W. Winnicott, who argues that objects are central to the developing infant's capacity to relate to the world as an external reality. According to Winnicott, the baby needs its transitional object (the blanket, a toy) to supply it with a kind of object-ivity, or realness. The baby learns about the existence of an external world when it destroys/disavows the object and the object survives. This is object permanence. The chapter also considers the views of Wendy Brown, Michael Walzer, and Hannah Arendt in the context of decades of charting the almost always already overness of democracy's (or of politics') necessary conditions.Less
This chapter discusses the role of public things in democratic theory and in democratic life. It examines the power of public things to stimulate the object relations of democratic collectivity by drawing on the work of D. W. Winnicott, who argues that objects are central to the developing infant's capacity to relate to the world as an external reality. According to Winnicott, the baby needs its transitional object (the blanket, a toy) to supply it with a kind of object-ivity, or realness. The baby learns about the existence of an external world when it destroys/disavows the object and the object survives. This is object permanence. The chapter also considers the views of Wendy Brown, Michael Walzer, and Hannah Arendt in the context of decades of charting the almost always already overness of democracy's (or of politics') necessary conditions.
Timothy C. Campbell
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823273256
- eISBN:
- 9780823273300
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823273256.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Techne of Giving intervenes in two debates: the first, the relation between an affirmative biopolitics and biopower; and the second, how cinema, Italian cinema especially, can provides fresh ...
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Techne of Giving intervenes in two debates: the first, the relation between an affirmative biopolitics and biopower; and the second, how cinema, Italian cinema especially, can provides fresh perspectives on how to engage generously with biopolitical apparatuses. In so doing, the book brings together contemporary philosophy and film studies in order to argue for the generous features of the cinematic apparatus. Not all apparatuses are the same—some are more generous than others to the degree that they allow the spectator to experience, in the workings of the visible and invisible, a mode of non-mastery able to respond to biopower. As the canon of biopolitical critique solidifies, Techne of Giving therefore pushes back against thanatopolitical readings of biopolitics. Drawing on authors as diverse as Adorno, Winnicott, Metz, Irigaray, and Lyotard, Techne of Giving skirts the fields of visual studies and contemporary thought to imagine a generous form of life. In so doing, the book is intended to jumpstart discussions of what it means to be generous and what part gratitude plays when considering different forms of being in common. The hope is to short-circuit neoliberal models of giving with their buyers and sellers, and instead to posit forms of non-giving and non-receiving. In addition the book follows the visual traces of such a model of generosity and giving across a number of classic Italian films. By so doing, it sketches a sensibility in which protagonists neither give nor receive in any traditional sense.Less
Techne of Giving intervenes in two debates: the first, the relation between an affirmative biopolitics and biopower; and the second, how cinema, Italian cinema especially, can provides fresh perspectives on how to engage generously with biopolitical apparatuses. In so doing, the book brings together contemporary philosophy and film studies in order to argue for the generous features of the cinematic apparatus. Not all apparatuses are the same—some are more generous than others to the degree that they allow the spectator to experience, in the workings of the visible and invisible, a mode of non-mastery able to respond to biopower. As the canon of biopolitical critique solidifies, Techne of Giving therefore pushes back against thanatopolitical readings of biopolitics. Drawing on authors as diverse as Adorno, Winnicott, Metz, Irigaray, and Lyotard, Techne of Giving skirts the fields of visual studies and contemporary thought to imagine a generous form of life. In so doing, the book is intended to jumpstart discussions of what it means to be generous and what part gratitude plays when considering different forms of being in common. The hope is to short-circuit neoliberal models of giving with their buyers and sellers, and instead to posit forms of non-giving and non-receiving. In addition the book follows the visual traces of such a model of generosity and giving across a number of classic Italian films. By so doing, it sketches a sensibility in which protagonists neither give nor receive in any traditional sense.
Timothy C. Campbell
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823273256
- eISBN:
- 9780823273300
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823273256.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This brief chapter summarizes the book’s argument as essentially the following: in a number of films from Italy, a drama is played out between the camera’s power to make visible forms of life and ...
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This brief chapter summarizes the book’s argument as essentially the following: in a number of films from Italy, a drama is played out between the camera’s power to make visible forms of life and those filmed who are able to play with the cinematic apparatus as if it were a transitional object. By noting the creative tension between the generous mancus without hands and the apparatus, the book makes an argument for a creative and attentive spectatorship able and willing to forego mastery.Less
This brief chapter summarizes the book’s argument as essentially the following: in a number of films from Italy, a drama is played out between the camera’s power to make visible forms of life and those filmed who are able to play with the cinematic apparatus as if it were a transitional object. By noting the creative tension between the generous mancus without hands and the apparatus, the book makes an argument for a creative and attentive spectatorship able and willing to forego mastery.
Reinhold Görling
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823242245
- eISBN:
- 9780823242283
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823242245.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Claiming that torture is a phenomenon specific to societies rather than to human individuals or other forms of life, this chapter analyzes the psycho-social consequences of torture as a practice that ...
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Claiming that torture is a phenomenon specific to societies rather than to human individuals or other forms of life, this chapter analyzes the psycho-social consequences of torture as a practice that denies to some of its members the protection against human vulnerability that is constitutive of society. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's location of cultural experience in games of recognition, it claims that the tendency of culture to perform sociality in theatrical forms makes it possible to reverse this tendency and perform in torture the vulnerability and negation of sociality. Since denial of the other is also a theatrical act, it necessarily enlists a third party, or witness, who either resists the exclusion of the victim from the social bond orlooks away. Since the position of the third party now is increasingly occupied by the eye and ear of digital recording, the chapter describes the psychic structure of not-seeing that is produced by the paradoxical mediality of violence: that at once destroys the capacity for expression and lodges in the psyche, and group memory, more stubbornly.Less
Claiming that torture is a phenomenon specific to societies rather than to human individuals or other forms of life, this chapter analyzes the psycho-social consequences of torture as a practice that denies to some of its members the protection against human vulnerability that is constitutive of society. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's location of cultural experience in games of recognition, it claims that the tendency of culture to perform sociality in theatrical forms makes it possible to reverse this tendency and perform in torture the vulnerability and negation of sociality. Since denial of the other is also a theatrical act, it necessarily enlists a third party, or witness, who either resists the exclusion of the victim from the social bond orlooks away. Since the position of the third party now is increasingly occupied by the eye and ear of digital recording, the chapter describes the psychic structure of not-seeing that is produced by the paradoxical mediality of violence: that at once destroys the capacity for expression and lodges in the psyche, and group memory, more stubbornly.
