Journal
CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY
Volume 15, Issue 2, Pages 139-159Publisher
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD
DOI: 10.1057/cpt.2015.49
Keywords
mourning; Freud; anger; Judith Butler; psychoanalysis; Winnicott
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Political theorists have increasingly adopted the psychoanalytic language of 'mourning' to characterize experiences of loss and injury, and to legitimate these as claims about a past political or cultural order. Mourning would seek to work through these experiences while opening persons to their shared vulnerabilities. With this article, I return to Freud's original distinction between mourning and melancholia, along with its development through the work of Donald Winnicott and the relational school of psychoanalysis. Although psychoanalytic mourning balances a coming-to-terms with loss against investment in new social relations, when it is extrapolated to a broader community it risks over-determining the social field. The cost is a foreclosure of other modalities for articulating claims about injury and political order, and in particular those that might draw on anger as a resource for political action and solidarity.
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