This book is the first of two volumes that, together, present for the first time a comprehensive collection of three decades of the theoretical writings of artist and theorist Bracha L Ettinger. Edited and introduced by Griselda Pollock they provide a systematic anthology of Ettinger’s path-breaking and influential concept of Matrixial subjectivity-as-encounter and jointness-in-difference, and chart her radical intervention in aesthetics, ethics and theories of subjectivity far beyond classical feminist and current gender/queer theory.
This first volume includes the writings in which Ettinger elaborates her original concepts of Matrixial space-time and metramorphosis, fascinance, wit(h)nessing, resonance, transcryptum, com-passion, self-fragilization and resistance, co-emergence and copoiesis transform theories of the subject, Eros, alliance and love, sexual difference, alterity, relationality, trauma and violence. Her critical dialogue with theorists including Levinas, Lacan, Lyotard and Deleuze & Guattari, Butler, Cavarero and Irigaray is evident here.
A leading authority on Matrixial theory, Griselda Pollock provides explanatory prefaces to each chapter and a lengthy introduction that situates Ettinger’s work in relation to socio-psychoanalytical theory and practice and current social and philosophical debates. Ettinger’s interlacing of psychoanalysis, ethics, and aesthetics can be seen here to address some of the deepest challenges of our social, cultural and political existence today.
Author(s): Bracha L. Ettinger, Griselda Pollock
Series: Studies in the Psychosocial
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 485
City: Cham
Editor’s Preface
Author’s Acknowledgments
Contents
INTRODUCTION Matrix as a Sensing-Thinking Apparatus
Words, Concepts, Interventions
Thinking Beyond the Limit: Positing a Time-Space
Le féminin, Femininity and Feminist Anxiety
A Matrixial Antigone: Situating Bracha L. Ettinger’s Intervention Historically
Situating Psychoanalysis, the Social and the Socio-Cultural
The Social and the Psychological: Philosophy and Theory
The Poverty of Psychoanalysis in Thinking the Aesthetic and the Feminine
Language and Sexual Indifference
Symbol and Thinking Apparatus: Matrix and Phallus
On the Way to the Matrix Going ‘Beyond-the-Phallus’
Matrixial Different/ciation and Transubjectivity
Thinking with the Matrixial Feminine: The Place of the Feminine
Gender and Sexual Difference
Matrixiality and Political Philosophy: Arendt on Natality and Plurality and Ettinger on Pre-natality and Severality
Conclusion
Chapter 1 MATRIX AND METRAMORPHOSIS ([1989–90] 1992)
I
II
III
IV
Chapter 2 THE BECOMING THRESHOLD OF MATRIXIAL BORDERLINES ([1992] 1994)
Exodus
The Becoming Threshold of Borderlines
Anticipation, Future Without Me, and Becoming-Woman
Behind the Other of the Present
Chapter 3 METRAMORPHIC BORDERLINKS AND MATRIXIAL BORDERSPACE ([1993] 1996)
I Introduction
II Matrixial Borderspace as a Shared Stratum of Subjectivization
III Metramorphic Co-emergence in Difference
IV The Matrixial Object of Desire on the Borders of Presence and Absence
V Borderline Apparitions of the Woman-Other-Thing or Painting as Metramorphosis
Chapter 4 WOMAN AS objet a BETWEEN PHANTASY AND ART ([1993] 1995)
Undigested Psychic Events from Trauma to Phantasy
Object and Phantasy
Object a as a Lack in the Body, as Lacking an Image and as a Hole in Language
Interface
Borderline Apparitions of the Woman as Objet a in Art
Chapter 5 MATRIXIAL GAZE AND SCREEN: Other than Phallic and Beyond the Late Lacan ([1995] 1999)
I Introduction
II Outline of the Theory
III
IV
V
VI
VII
Chapter 6 THE RED COW EFFECT: The Metramorphosis of Hallowing the Hollow and Hollowing the Hallow ([1995] 1996)
Introduction: Deference of Im-purity With-in-ter Hallowing and Hollowing
Divine Jouissance by the Sacrifice of the Red Cow
Processes of Separation and Substitution in the Eye of the Phallus
Hidden Supplementary Jouissance and No Sexual Rapport
Becoming In-ter-with the Other: An Im-pure Becoming-Between in Jointness
Im-purity in the Eyes of the Matrix
She-Law: Scattering and Wandering (Niddah) Passageways in Matrixial Sacrifice
Chapter 7 ART AS THE TRANSPORT-STATION OF TRAUMA ([1999] 2000)
I
II
III
IV
Chapter 8 TRANSGRESSING WITH-IN-TO THE FEMININE ([1997] 1999)
I Tiresias: The ‘Impossible’ Knowledge of/from Feminine Sexuality
II Antigone: Beauty and the Impossible Knowledge of/from Death in Life
III The Impossibility of Not-Transgressing in the Matrixial Sphere
IV Meaning as a Transgression with-in-to the Trauma of the Other
V God’s Names, Female Corporeality, Com-Passion and Beauty
VI Borderlinking to the Other Sex by a Feminine-Matrixial Differential Potentiality
Chapter 9 TRANSCRYPTUM (1999)
I
II
III
Post-scriptum
Chapter 10 SOME-THING, SOME-EVENT and SOME-ENCOUNTER between SINTHOME and SYMPTOM (2000)
I Sinthome and Symptom
II Sinthome, Knots and Feminine ‘Impossible Sexual Rapport’
III Feminine Sinthome as a Weaving of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic
IV Trauma, Phantasy, and the Matrixial Gaze
V Illness or Therapy? The Artist as Doctor-and-Patient
VI Art as a Site of Transference
VII Encounters with Remnants of Trauma
VIII One More Word
Bibliography
Index
