You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Like Emmanuel Levinas, D. W. Winnicott is a great critic of totalization, the reduction of the other to the same, the bringing of everything that is new and different under my categories. For both (though only Levinas makes it a philosophical problem), totalization is the legacy of Western rationalism, that knows only via the subsumption of the particular by the universal.
I recently published an article in which I compared Levinas and Winnicott on the concept of violence. For both, violence is totalization, the subsumption (for Winnicott it is an assumption) that the other is just like me. Certainly the violence that Levinas writes about sounds like the violence of the intrusive mother, the mother who is out of tune with the child. Is it too strong to call this violence? Not for Levinas, and not for a host of postmoderns, for whom even writing is a violent act, fixing a shimmering subjectivity forever. Levinas puts it this way on the first page of Totality and Infinity:
Violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. (21)
No concept was more important to Winnicott than the interrupted continuity to which Levinas refers. Winnicott was preoccupied with gaps and spaces: the gaps and spaces in the experience of the self that arise from a lack of attunement by mother and others, as though one's self had disappeared along with mother, a gap in going-on-being.
The burden of my article was that the transitional relationships about which Winnicott writes, relationships marked by the reluctance to ask who's who and what's what, were not likely to foster totalization. Levinas was assuming that human psychology operated according to strict cleavages: if other was not absolutely other, then it must be the same as m