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Matthew Bowker and Amy Buzby's recent edited collection, D.W. Winnicott and Political Theory: Recentering the Subject, implicitly pulls together two very pertinent questions for current scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. First, when it comes to psychoanalysis, what critical resources might psychoanalytic theorists other than Jacques Lacan offer interdisciplinary scholars? And, second, how is a more widespread turn toward object relations psychoanalysis (as represented here by the mid-century British analyst, D.W. Winnicott) related to a critical exhaustion with the dominant intellectual discourses of anti-humanism, post-humanism, post-structuralism, and the like? These questions quietly subtend the larger interdisciplinary intervention that the collection stages and, like the editors, I agree that they are pressing queries for many fields. The strongest chapters in this collection deliver innovative responses to these concerns, showcasing the implicit politicality of Winnicott's psychoanalytic theories and productively using them to extend extant political theory. It is axiomatic for all the essays in this collection that Winnicott's psychosomatic theories about the individual are always already socially and politically imbricated.
Bowker and Buzby announce in the first sentence of their introduction that this edited collection is intended for ‘diverse audiences,’ including political theorists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, interdisciplinarians, and generalists of all stripes (p. 1). They hail the collection as an ‘ouverture,’ which in many ways it certainly is. At its broadest level, the editors intend the essays within to address the relevance of Winnicott's work for thinking politics and political theory, hypothesizing that Winnicott's psychoanalytic theorization of the intricacies of the individual subject offers an alternative - if not an out-and-out answer - to the ethico-political shortcomings of past critiques of subjectivity. Ac