| Title | Ethics: Out of Line, On Hold: D.W. Winnicott's Queer Sensibilities |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Michael D. Snediker (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0167.1.07 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/clinical-encounters-in-sexuality-psychoanalytic-practice-and-queer-theory/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Snediker, Michael |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2017-03-07 |
| Long abstract | This chapter situates its discussion of ethics in the work of the mid-twentieth century British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winni-cott. Winnicott’s theorization of transitional objects and good-enough mothers has inspired the scholarship of thinkers such as Mary Jacobus (2005) and Adam Phillips (1989); at the same time, Winnicott’s output figures, in Deleuzian terms, as a minor literature in the larger psychoanalytic landscape. The sympatico of Winnicott’s work with many recent queer-theoretical investi-gations of intersubjectivity alone necessitates our continued re-appraisal of what he may teach us. Unlike that of Jacques Lacan, who devoted a seminar to the ethics of psychoanalysis, Winnicott’s contribution to psychoanalytic ethics must be trawled in pieces, and culled without prior sense of what that ethics might eventually resemble. In this sense, the very practice of returning to Winnicott resembles the non-paranoid reading position of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a queer theorist who taught, more than anyone I can think of, the inseparability of ethics from the sur-prise of not knowing in advance where desire might converge with rigor, gauziness, creativity, and or delight. To read Win-nicott alongside Sedgwick is to aspire toward for an ethics freed from the normatively non-contingent, but no less predicated on the contingencies of availing dislocation. |
| Page range | pp. 145–170 |
| Print length | 26 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |