Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics: Vol 1 1990–2000 1137345152, 9781137345158

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STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOSOCIAL

Bracha L. Ettinger Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics

Volume I 1990–2000

Edited by Griselda Pollock

Studies in the Psychosocial Series Editors Stephen Frosh Department of Psychosocial Studies Birkbeck, University of London London, UK Peter Redman Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The Open University Milton Keynes, UK Wendy Hollway Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

Studies in the Psychosocial seeks to investigate the ways in which psychic and social processes demand to be understood as always implicated in each other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of a single dialectical process. As such it can be understood as an interdisciplinary field in search of transdisciplinary objects of knowledge. Studies in the Psychosocial is also distinguished by its emphasis on affect, the irrational and unconscious processes, often, but not necessarily, understood psychoanalytically. Studies in the Psychosocial aims to foster the development of this field by publishing high quality and innovative monographs and edited collections. The series welcomes submissions from a range of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary orientations, including sociology, social and critical psychology, political science, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, queer studies, management and organization studies, cultural and media studies and psychoanalysis. However, in keeping with the inter- or transdisciplinary character of psychosocial analysis, books in the series will generally pass beyond their points of origin to generate concepts, understandings and forms of investigation that are distinctively psychosocial in character. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14464

Bracha L. Ettinger

Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics Volume 1 1990–2000 Edited by Griselda Pollock

Author Bracha L. Ettinger Art and Psychoanalysis Bracha L. Ettinger Studio Tel Aviv, Israel Paris, France

Editor Griselda Pollock School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies University of Leeds Leeds, UK

ISSN 2662-2629 ISSN 2662-2637  (electronic) Studies in the Psychosocial ISBN 978-1-137-34515-8 ISBN 978-1-137-34516-5  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Bracha L. Ettinger This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Author’s Dedication

To the memory of my mother Bluma Fried Lichtenberg her sisters Helka, Etka and Saba Fried her brother Sheye (Yeshayahou) Fried my father Uziel Lichtenberg Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger

Editor’s Preface

Bracha L. Ettinger’s writings propose a transformative understanding of subjectivity at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics and politics. They confront the major challenges in our social worlds and pose the critical questions about our understanding of who and what we are when we act in the world. I first encountered Matrixial theory in 1991 when I met Bracha L. Ettinger and read her radically new and transformative ­theoretical paper ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’ that opens this volume. Since then I have been in a unique position to follow the evolution of her theoretical writings which have become a critical resource for my own work as an art historian, a cultural analyst and a postcolonial, queer and socio-historical feminist cultural theorist. By the early 1990s, I had established a certain academic visibility at the intersection of feminist socio-historical engagements with the visual arts and feminist engagement with post-structuralist theory in general and specifically with varied readings, contestations and transformations of psychoanalytical theory in relation to film and visual culture. I was part of a cultural-theoretical formation as a feminist art historian and film theorist involved in cultural studies—all specific to a British context. As a result, I had a strong interest in the kind of thinking undertaken by radically different thinkers and writers in Paris: philosophers, creative writers, literary and film theorists. Cinema and feminist film theory, Marxist social histories, translations of Michel Foucault on prisons, asylums, hospitals and sexuality, feminist literary studies and social theories of gender were strangely joined by a passionate engagement with a small selection vii

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EDITOR’S PREFACE

of trends in French psychoanalysis such as the work of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. I had to engage with Lacan in particular and psychoanalysis in general because it had attained such a significant place not only in these fields, notably film and literary cultural studies, but in contemporary art and art writing. One day, an art historian friend of mine, Adrian Rifkin, who spent a great deal of time researching in Paris, mentioned to me the name of an artist he had met there whom he thought I might find interesting. Feminist, psychoanalyst, painter, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger indeed piqued my interest. After I had encountered her artwork at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1991, we met in Leeds. She spoke about her new concepts of Matrix and Metramorphosis that she had presented in a recently delivered lecture at a conference in Hamburg of over 800 feminists involved in art history, art theory, art practice. I read her paper. I listened to her elaborating the new model for thinking subjectivity. It was shocking and exciting. On reading this first text (Chapter 1), I knew, at once, that Bracha L. Ettinger had made an original intervention of immense importance in few areas that she exposed as deeply interrelated: psychoanalysis, aesthetics/philosophy, art, feminism and cultural theory. I recognized in her work a theoretical leap that would transform not only psychoanalysis but also contemporary cultural, social and aesthetic theories that drew on psychoanalytical concepts of subjectivity and culture. I also embraced the challenge that Bracha L. Ettinger’s new thinking posed to existing feminist theory and especially in those areas where it worked with psychoanalysis (film studies, literary studies, psychology, philosophy, theories of subjectivity and sexual difference). Her ideas were truly creative because they were theoretically transgressive in the most generative sense. I immediately saw that Ettinger’s thesis of the Matrix would be equally transformative in the fields of ethics and politics. The disruption caused to feminist thought by her Matrixial theory brought to mind the comments by the feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway when presenting her own work. She was diagnosing the resistance within radical communities to ideas that challenge radical orthodoxies. What ideas, she asked, do we permit ourselves to accept and what do we block when the new disrupts our comfortable habits of thought? Haraway distinguished heresy—abjuring the belief system entirely, i.e. being no longer a feminist or a psychoanalytic thinker at all—from blasphemy—upsetting the norms and the canons of belief systems, challenging given theoretical and political orthodoxies and revealing their blind spots (Haraway 1991: 149).

EDITOR’S PREFACE  

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I published ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’ (Chapter 1) in 1992 in a collection I was then editing for the leading American feminist journal of cultural studies, differences, co-edited at that time by the late Naomi Schor. In the early 1990s, Schor was herself challenging the ways white American feminist theory was being policed by the rejection—as ‘essentialist’—of any argument that dared to consider sexual difference and the question of the feminine (Schor 1995). Having invited Ettinger to Leeds to deliver her lecture, based on her 1993 artist’s book, ‘The Matrixial Gaze’ at the inaugurating conference of Feminist Arts and Histories Network 1994, I then published it as a book (Leeds 1995; reprinted in Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace 2006 Ettinger 1993f). Since that moment I have been a student of, and commentator on, Matrixial theory, following its elaboration, text by text, while shadowing the theoretical evolution of Bracha L. Ettinger the theorist with a concurrent analysis of the artworking of Bracha L. Ettinger the artist, finding the depth of their co-emergence in the shared ground of the traumatic legacies of twentieth-century histories, and the continuing challenge to fascism, patriarchies and phallocentrism posed by feminist, postcolonial and queer thought (Pollock 1994, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2018). My relation to the texts and the work of Bracha L. Ettinger is shaped by how I came to it—from both feminist and cultural theory and contemporary, social, queer and postcolonial histories of art and film, Jewish and Holocaust studies, as well as a specific focus on trauma, cultural memory and aesthetic transformation (Pollock 2013a & b). Rigorous analysis of the psychoanalytical debates in which her writing participates would require me to be positioned more firmly within the clinical and theoretical communities of psychoanalysts.1 There many other points of entry demonstrated by the publication of her steady stream of subsequent writings in a variety of books and journals that touch on many fields—from trauma studies to philosophy and ethics (Levinas, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari, Massumi, Doyle, Butler), from the study of borders, margins, boundaries and thresholds (Welchman) to aesthetics, philosophy, feminism and trauma (Massumi, de Zegher, Pollock), from studies of exile, wandering and travelling (Robertson et al) to literature, language, especially in psychoanalysis (Johnson, Thurston) from classical figures (Antigone, Jocasta, Diotima, Persephone) to modern writers and artists (Hesse, Plath, Klee, Af Klint, Kunz, Duras). As a result of this wide range of interests and issues, her texts have been dispersed, leaving no single field with a sense of her overall project. This also makes

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EDITOR’S PREFACE

less visible the sustained journey to the formation and constant elaboration of new concepts that form her intervention launched from within later twentieth-century psychoanalytical theory and practice. In 2000, an edition of selected articles from the 1990s was published in French and appeared in English in 2006 with introductions by Brian Massumi and myself, and foreword by Judith Butler (Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace). My introduction was based on a longer article that had appeared in the journal, Theory Culture and Society in 2004 (‘Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Memory, Representation and Post-Lacanian Subjectivity’, Pollock 2004) alongside articles on Ettinger by Judith Butler, Jean-François Lyotard, Lone Bertelson and Couze Venn. Ettinger’s texts have thus been taken up in philosophical analysis (Butler 2004; Lyotard 1996, 2012; Massumi 2001, 2007; Venn 2004), literary theory (Carolyn Ducker now Shread, Johnson 2010), ­psycho-social studies (Hollway 2015), social sciences (Venn 2004) and used in art writing (Buci-Glucksmann 1995; de Zegher 1996, 2006; Manning and Massumi 2014; Massumi 2000; Rowley 2007), transgender, queer and gender studies (Cavanagh 2016) and film studies (Albilla 2018). I have written several long articles to introduce and situate Bracha Ettinger’s work in different contexts (The Matrixial Gaze 1996; Inside the Visible 1996; Culture, Theory and Critique 1999; Theory, Culture and Society 2004; Mother Trouble 2009; Carnal Aesthetics 2012; Visual Politics 2013). Each context necessitated a specific point of entry. There are many doors through which to enter her work. In these two volumes, I aim to plot the emergence of the theoretical project, retracing the process by which Ettinger formulated her concepts and a vocabulary for this radical yet deeply situated and respectful psychoanalytical intervention that exceeds the latter’s clinical field to touch on art, aesthetics and the key questions of sexual difference that feminist thought dares to pose. I serve as a guide, introducing readers to a journey they will take for themselves through this ‘writing’. The opening chapter is Ettinger’s most fluent account of the key concepts of Matrixial theory, the Matrix as meaning and symbolization-producing and its processes and their sense-giving ‘feel-knowing’ mechanism: Metramorphosis. The latter is to the Matrix what metaphor and metonymy are to phallocentric language in terms of how non-literal—figurative— processes of meaning making occur. Both metaphor and metonymy function by modes of substitution. Metramorphosis concerns a displacement of the concept of the boundary that divides the subject and the other by the proposition of a Matrixial borderspace that transform boundaries into

EDITOR’S PREFACE  

xi

shared thresholds. Matrix and Metramorphosis propose a way to think both encounter and transformation at the psychological level. Co-emergence and shareability can be extended to the ethical and social reflection on self, other, alterity and difference. Ettinger introduces a concept of com-passion and ­ subjectivity-as-encounter that will be developed into a theory of transubjectivity. Ettinger articulates next (Chapter 2) the matrixial alliance, matrixial covenant, wit(h)nessing and response-ability. A long chapter follows that is a sustained engagement with Lacan’s challenging concept of objet a which delivers Ettinger’s theorization of two dimensions of a Matrixial objet/link a: touch and gaze and the matrixial Uncanny. The matrixial link a is taken up in the following chapter when Ettinger rethinks Lacan’s key concept of the gaze through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, further elaborating feminine phenomenology concerning ­ ‘body-psyche’, the birthing ‘archaic m/Other’ and the non-ocular dimensions of what she poses as a matrixial gaze (in distinction from Lacan’s phallic gaze as objet a as cause of desire leading to the Oedipal mastering gaze that has been so central to the development of feminist film theory). Moving on to further articulating matrixial time, space, gaze and screen (Chapter 5) and onto the register of language and the anthropology of sacrifice, Chapter 6 further elaborates the matrixiality of Ettinger’s objet a by her reading of an archaic ritual found in the Hebrew Bible for the resolution of the deepest transgression of life: the contact with the dead. This ritual involves a very rare sacrifice of a red heifer, namely a female animal, which produces a water of ashes that transforms the most sacred breach—between life and death. The Matrixial as feminine ­in-betweenness and specific kind of transgression is there to be discovered at work in this anthropological trace. Transformation of trauma and transformation of its traces come to be understood in terms of ‘transport-station’ in Chapter 7, with specific relation to aesthetic practice and its virtual contact with the same threshold between life and death, the shock and horror of whose deflection has been defined as Beauty. Moving deeper into cultural texts that can be re-read through the matrixial prism, Chapter 8 brings this psychoanalytical concept of Beauty into contact with Lacan’s later reflection on ethics by means of the figure of Antigone and her revolt against an inhuman, dehumanizing law. Here Ettinger joins in a longstanding engagement with ethics, justice and politics that has traversed philosophy and aesthetics for many centuries. The theme of trauma and witnessing, already broached in Chapter 7 returns with a further elaboration on memory, oblivion and the passage from non-life to life, in Chapter 9 introducing the concept of Transcryptum. Ettinger converses with and transforms Maria Török’s and Nicolas Abraham’s theories

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of a non-Oedipal intergenerational unconscious that they named a crypt, to address transubjectivity and transgenerational shareability of trauma’s traces. In the final chapter dedicated to visual art and exploring the differences between art as symptom (art made to express psychological affliction) and art as sinthome (the ‘crazy’ art made to transform the existing Symbolic), Ettinger picks up on the transformative matrixial dimension of the aesthetic, artworking in the visual field in relation to jouissance and trauma, suffering and joy, as a process of copoietic coemergence and cofading, borderlinking and borderspacing, which is specifically linked with access to the matrixial originary feminine difference enabled by artworking when it runs on matrixial tracks in the passage from wit(h)nessing to witnessing. Thus, this volume allows the reader to follow the first decade of the evolution of Matrixial Theory, acquiring familiarity with its new terms and concepts, identifying the different grounds for the argument from psychoanalytical theory to literature, philosophy and art. The chapters trace the building of the core theoretical terms as well as the ways they open up new avenues of thought in these intimately related fields of subjectivity and alterity. Griselda Pollock School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Note 1. For the most probing critical and contextual study of the place of Ettinger in the psychoanalytical field and the evolution of her key concepts, I recommend the unpublished doctoral thesis by Anna Johnson to whom I am deeply indebted (Anna Johnson Bracha Ettinger’s Theory of the Matrix: Contexts and Commentary University of Leeds 2006). For a study of Ettinger in relation to phenomenology and ontology see Tina Kinsella, ‘Bracha L. Ettinger and Aesthetics: Matrixial Flesh and the ­Jou(with-in) sense of Non-Life in Life. NCAD, Dublin 2011. In shaping this collection, I have followed an order established by the work of Anna Johnson (Johnson 2006) who identified groupings in Ettinger’s expanding formulation of the Matrix during the decade of 1990s: Matrixial Beginnings 1989– 1992 (here represented by Ch. 1); Transition and Consolidation 1993–1995 (Chapters 2–4, with reference to ‘The Matrixial Gaze’ ([1993] 1995), published in The Matrixial Borderspace edited by Massumi 2006); Developments 1995–2000 (Chapters 6–10) to which I have added Chapter 5, which links with Chapter 2 as both share an exploration of language and text.

Author’s Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks go to my friends and family—partners in joy and trauma, in memory, in oblivion—threads of my feel-breathing spirit, strings of my soul: to my one and only Griselda Pollock and to Rosi Huhn, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Jean-François Lyotard Francisco Varela, without whose trust I cannot imagine my life. To Julian Gutierrez-Albilla, Piera Aulagnier, Christian Boltanski, Nicolas Bourriaud, Judith Butler, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Charles Cartwright, Sheila Cavanagh, Félix Guattari, Edmond Jabès, Tina Kinsela, Ronald D. Laing, Patrick Le Nouëne, Emmanuel Lévinas, Erin Manning, Victor Mazin, Brian Massumi, Jaques-Alain Miller, Adrian Rifkin, Heinz-Peter Schwerfel, Olesya Turkina, Paul Vandenbroeck, Axeli Virtanen, Catherine Weinzaepflen, Catherine de Zegher. To Joav, Loni (Leonide Avner), Lana Nathalie, Itai Antoine, Elisha, Sophia, Orit, Moti, Sharon, Marga and Ilana. With love. Bracha L. Ettinger 2020

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Editor’s Acknowledgments

The realization of these two volumes would not have been possible ­without the commitment and contributions of Anna Johnson whose b ­ ibliographical and textual work formed the foundations for this project. As part of her own research for a critical analysis of Matrixial Theory in relation to philosophy and psychoanalysis (Leeds 2006) Anna Johnson established and edited the first complete bibliography of writings by and texts on Bracha L. Ettinger. She also undertook the careful work of indicating the original texts and editing the history of their publications as well as creating an on-line bibliography of Ettinger’s writings. I could not have completed this project without her assistance and example. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the series editors Wendy Hollway, Stephen Frosh and Peter Redman for their support and indeed patience in the finalization of these two volumes of Ettinger’s writings. I thank Joanna O’Neill and team at Palgrave Macmillan for their detailed attention to the process of creating and publishing these volumes. Finally, I must acknowledge that this is but another episode in a long and creative partnership with Bracha L. Ettinger since our first encounter in 1991. This has involved seminars and lectures, exhibitions and publications. She is the author of and creative force in the contents of these volumes. For almost thirty years, I have been thinking with the Matrixial and it has shaped my own work as a feminist cultural theorist, an art historian and cultural analyst. It has been my privilege to have read these papers as they emerged, in spoken and written form. Now I am delighted that they will be available for a new readership in this psycho-social studies series: their true home. Griselda Pollock 2020 xv

Contents

Author’s Dedication

v

Editor’s Preface

vii

Author’s Acknowledgments

xiii

Editor’s Acknowledgments

xv

Volume 1 1990–2000

1 Editor’s Introduction Griselda Pollock 1

Matrix and Metramorphosis ([1989–90] 1992) 93

2

The Becoming Threshold of Matrixial Borderlines ([1992] 1994) 131

3

Metramorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial Borderspace ([1993] 1996) 157

4

Woman as objet a Between Phantasy and Art ([1993] 1995) 197 xvii

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CONTENTS

5

Matrixial Gaze and Screen: Other than Phallic and Beyond the Late Lacan ([1995] 1999) 241

6

The Red Cow Effect: The Metramorphosis of Hallowing the Hollow and Hollowing the Hallow ([1995] 1996) 287

7

Art as the Transport-Station of Trauma ([1999] 2000) 325

8

Transgressing with-in-to the Feminine ([1997] 1999) 347

9

Transcryptum (1999) 375

10 Some-Thing, Some-Event and S ­ ome-Encounter between Sinthome and Symptom (2000) 401 Bibliography 423 Index 443

INTRODUCTION Matrix as a ­Sensing-Thinking Apparatus Griselda Pollock

Bracha L. Ettinger’s writing addresses the central questions of philosophy, psychoanalysis and art—being and becoming, body and mind, consciousness and the Unconscious, subject and object of desire, alterity, difference and relationality.1 Artist-painter, artist-theorist and psychoanalyst, Ettinger recasts our understanding of the formation of the human subject that traverses the three registers of subjectivity defined by Jacques Lacan as the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, addressing both the psycho-linguistic and the psycho-social. Developing a vocabulary of new concepts starting from Matrix and Metramorphosis (Chapter 1) Ettinger radically enlarges psychoanalytical, philosophical, feminist and cultural theorizations of both subjectivity and sexual difference.2 Moreover, by doing so, she both reveals the connection between the subject and sexual difference while exposing the bias of psychoanalysis in relation to their entwining. The foundation for Ettinger’s resetting of the relations between the social, the aesthetic and the ethical lies in her radical, psychoanalytically based proposition of a supplementary symbolic dimension, the Matrixial that she defines as subjectivity-as-encounter. This concept shifts, and thus relativizes, a hegemonically phallic conceptualization of subjectivity, which her theory exposes as subjectivity-as-separation because it © The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_1

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is premised on the psychic ‘cut’ termed castration. Ettinger delineates a dimension of subjectivity that is primordially transubjectivity.3 This means articulating subjectivizing processes whose core is more archaic than the moment of birth. Birth has traditionally been the theoretical limit within classical psychoanalytical theory, which has, nonetheless, recognized, post-natally, after-affects and after-effects of the sensate and sensitive pre-subject in the advanced pre-natal stages of the long process of human becoming to which Ettinger gives full theoretical elaboration. In the following texts that trace and consolidate Ettinger’s formation and elaboration of the Matrixial, the reader will encounter new concepts and invented terms that form the architecture of her major theoretical intervention: Matrix, the Matrixial, matrixial metramorphosis, borderspace and borderspacing, borderlinking, borderswerving, severality, matrixial objet a and link a, I and non-I, wit(h)nessing, beyond-the-phallic, relations-without-relating, distance-in-proximity, ­proximity-in-distance, jointness-in-difference, difference-in-jointness, d ­ ifferenc/tiation-in-co-emergence, co-fading, erotic aerials of the psyche, transubjectivity and transjectivity, transcryptum, com-passion, fascinance, resonance, carriance, corpo-Real, Subreal and more. With these concepts and neologisms that first appeared in her artistic notebooks and sometimes as titles of her paintings during the 1980s, Ettinger traces into language aspects of subjectivity that have hitherto defied cognitive recognition and have not been given linguistic articulation. Language is the territory of words.4 Thinking takes place in words. Key elements of subjectivity are, however, pre-, sub- or non-linguistic, even as they press upon our words, as Freud brilliantly revealed in slips of the tongue, jokes and dreams. Some moves of the psyche escape yet shape the so-called talking cure. On the level of affect and aesthesis, the pre-, sub- and non-linguistic levels offer awareness and apprehension of the world revealed by and beyond the senses via intensities such as pulsation, rhythm, resonance, pressure, breathing, affects and feelings, as well as what Lacan discussed as jouissance.5 Ettinger elaborates a dimension of subjectivity named for its symbol, Matrix, hence the adjective, matrixial, and sometimes the noun, the Matrixial. This corresponds to, but challenges, the sovereignty—as it is posed in Lacanian theory—over all aspects of subjectivity of the Phallus as symbol and phallic as adjective for the symbolic order, the Phallic ruled by its signifier (the Phallic does not pertain to an organ). Since the Matrixial is to be understood as a dimension that operates beyond language, providing it, nonetheless, with a symbol, the concept of the

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Matrix enables us to draw this dimension of our psychic existence into awareness and understanding, ensuring that it can inform analytical and artistic practice, affectively resource our ethics and inspire our political and cultural theories. Matrix is a Latin word used in mathematics, biology, chemistry, geology, anatomy and more. As a metaphor, it defines a cultural, social, biological or mathematical grid (see Chapter 1). Ettinger’s radically innovative, psychoanalytically metaphorical usage of the concept catches up, however, and transforms theoretically, the literal meaning of the Latin word Matrix. Sharing a root with mater (mother), its dictionary definition is ‘the environment in which something else develops’: hence the possible association with the womb. In Ettinger’s usage, Matrix evokes the womb not only as a space of the genesis of the new but also, and mainly, as the site of a primordial being-with something other that is a becoming-with. The Matrix implies becoming, transformation and futurity—neither as the One, either fused or separated, nor as the infinite many. Ettinger’s cluster of image-concepts for transformation in shareability may get lost when evoking the anatomical association with a specific bodily organ. Thus, we need to grasp the semantic emphasis in Ettinger’s concept of the Matrix as an environment of development, transformation and becoming in terms of the more than one and less than vast multiplicity while holding onto the special possibility of jointness it indicates. Furthermore, matrixially, the unconscious becoming of any subject occurs in relation to the psyche of an archaic, feminine other. A too organic association for this feminine specificity can lead to theoretical censorship and even taboo. It would efface the important evocation of the conditions of matrixial hospitality: the combination of fragility and vulnerability, wit(h)nessing and co-affection that are the critical revelations of Ettingerian theory of the Matrixial.6 Working from the Hebrew, Bracha L. Ettinger evokes the term for womb, rehem: ‫רחם‬, composed of a three-consonant root (Resh, CHet, Mem) that generates the concepts of mercy and compassion when it is pluralized as rahamim: ‫רחמים‬. The leap from an environment of living becoming to a notion of human feeling-with and feeling-for the other— compassion—is a logical association in Hebrew. From chapter to chapter, Ettinger will linguistically analyze the feminine aspect of different names of the Biblical God one of which is El HaRahamim (God of Mercy). From the start, it is, therefore, vital to hold onto the linguistic and figu­ rative potential in Hebrew etymology for what we might anglicize as womb-thinking/womb-feeling/mercy/compassion. In Chapter 3 of Volume 2 there is a longer discussion by Ettinger of philosopher Emmanuel

4  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS

Levinas and his concept of mercy/compassion which is also articulated in relation to the Hebrew words rehem and rahamim but with an only phallic interpretation.7 Bracha L. Ettinger’s Matrix is, first of all, a thinking apparatus for reconfiguring our understanding of subjectivity beyond both the current phallic paradigm and the anti-phallic paradigm of endless fluidity (associated with Deleuze and Guattari). It becomes a source of metaphors for thinking about transferential relationality, becoming-with and ­being-with and specific kinds of time-space, gaze and screen. Neither essentializing, nor maternalizing, nor anatomizing, Ettinger’s Matrix signifies processes in time and a conception of time as well as positions and situations evolving in space: proximity-in-distance, ­jointness-in-difference, mechanisms, processes and affected relational dynamics named borderlinking, borderspacing, borderswerving, revealing a conception of space (borderspace) that unveils a primordial dimension of subjectivity as the folding, rather than the opposition, of alterity in relationality. Beyond the well-known theories of intersubjectivity and Object-Relations in modern psychoanalysis, Ettinger is proposing and theorizing matrixial ­subjectivity-as-encounter that concerns a notion of the several in a primordial way. Severality means not one, but equally not the many as mass or crowd. In as much as the partners in each severality do not rush to claim the status of being a whole subject inter-subjectively meeting another full subject, matrixial subjectivity is transubjectivity, where asymmetrical yet mutually affective coemergence occurs during Encounter-Events. Severality resists the Deleuzian-Guattarian thousands of fragments and limitless fluidity. It concerns moments of co-affecting when partners, even unknowingly, even in distance-in-proximity, are mutually sensing one another without or beyond cognition. The Matrix first arises in the Real of late pre-maternal/pre-natal ­time-space as a shared event whose impact is different for each partner, each partial subject, of such a primordial Encounter-Event.8 The pre-maternal subject—who is rendered a becoming-maternal subject as a result of the encounter-event with the unknown pre-natal pre-subject-to-come—was herself, archaically, already becoming in a comparable, earlier severality. There, she had been a pre-natal becoming-subject, co-affecting with and being co-affected by her own unknown pre-maternal partner, m/Other, whom she was maternalizing and who was humanizing her. Ettinger thus argues that the matrixial archaic becoming is subjectivizing and humanizing not only for the becoming-infant. It retrospectively evokes several strings of encounter-events that link each becoming-infant not only to its

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own archaic m/Other but to its m/Other’s m/Others and others —and hence to trauma and history in potential transgenerational transmission. Ettinger claims that, as in the case of each and every mechanism that psychoanalysis already recognizes and describes as first arising in infancy—and even in earliest infancy—the matrixial mechanisms continue to function unconsciously in adulthood and throughout the now of adult life. The symbolic Matrix relieves the anxiety that any discussion of this formative process is reductively anatomical, biological or physiological. Ettinger reveals it as a shared psychological/proto-psychological subjectivizing Encounter-Event in humanizing, and indeed, historical time. Its patterns and processes become active in each creative ­encounter-event all during our lifetime. The Matrix is, therefore, a time-space with subjectivizing effects whose symbolic range allows for rethinking creativity and difference, being and Other as well as environment, and their transformation. From the Matrix as womb-timespace of aesthetically experienced Encounter-Event for each being who is born, the physical reality of whatever was (historically) and always is (psychically) shared in adulthood between the partners in any event of ­pregnance-as-joint-becoming-in-difference needs to be acknowledged. Ettinger is inviting us to recognize this dimension as generating both Real (traumatic and material) and psychic (affective and mental) effects that remain, after birth, psychic resources. These psychic resources can, for every born individual, generate non-phallic ethical dispositions in alliances, social relations and actions. Difference-in-jointness is critical to understanding the Matrix and other Ettingerian terms that consistently combine apparent polarities such as proximity and distance, wit(h)nessing and separation. In this space, paradoxical to the ways of thinking in which we are schooled, where language works through binary opposites that makes differentiation contradictory, Ettinger identifies how processing paradoxical plus/ plus and and/and up to the Symbolic is possible. The Matrix is a kind of logic that does not lead to the phallic phantasy incited post-natally of longings for fusional undifferentiation. The exposure across matrixial borderspace in joy and in pain, potentially devastating and traumatic as well, becomes creative for us when we become aware of it. It is productive of new ways of considering relations of one and other (including the non-human, and the planetary). The Matrixial poses these relations not as the opposition of I and not-I, but as the co-affecting borderlinking coemergence of I and non-I, I and not-yet-I, and of the already ­I-with-non-I in proximity-in-distance.

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The Matrix affects all living, born subjects. This is to say, its implications for analysis, psycho-social, philosophical and aesthetic work emerge in the recognition of both its already-having been and its continuing effect on us now. It has, as a result, universal implications by enlarging our understanding of the human condition, becoming and being. In the matrixial borderspace, we all were exposed already in prenatality to a sexual difference that must, therefore, be acknowledged as ‘feminine’. Not ‘of the feminine’ in the sense of belonging to one sex as defined in/by the phallic binary masculine/feminine. The concept of the Matrix radically redefines both femininity and maternity while placing both as formative on ‘the human condition’. Femininity and maternity have, however, been imaginatively and linguistically trapped in organistic biological notions. They have been subject to socio-economic reduction of women to the role of child producers. They are even now anxiously disfigured in the widely influential and significant theories of the social and linguistically performative construction of gender. Matrixial theory proposes a forming of subjective elements that predates the formation of what we now understand as gendered subjection/subjectivization. Nonetheless, it contributes, via the matrixial feminine and the maternal, precisely to a way of thinking that does not need the deconstruction of gender in order to think about ethics and aesthetics beyond the phallic boundary. As a subjectivizing dimension in both its archaic moment and in the present, the Ettingerian Matrixial is sensed and affective. In its inception, Ettinger specifies it as pre- and non-cognitive as well as ­sub-symbolic and subreal. It has, however, been made virtually unknowable and unthinkable by what has hitherto dominated our understanding of subjectivity to the exclusion of any acknowledgement of the very possibility that supplementary pathways can be conceptualized, that is to say, handled by the Symbolic. In the dominant thesis, subjectivity is premised only on severance and split, and the feminine thence appears as lack, or is formed only as the result of the splitting of the subject. According to the dominant thesis, we become a subject through a series of separations (birth, weaning, castration) that progressively cut the emerging subject off from what is retrospectively projected as a preceding, undifferentiated fusion associated with only a maternal body and later its part-objects. Posing a symbolic supplement and alternative not based on replacement or substitution, the Ettingerian theory reveals that the dominant thesis of subjectivity as formed from the pairing of fusion and splitting is but one

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way of comprehending the formation of subjectivity. Neither unique nor neutral, the dominant account, we name it phallic, of psychic life is, in fact, a partial and biased vision that makes other dimensions not only invisible but also censored (Chapters 1–3). The exclusivity of phallic theory means that the only concepts of the feminine as a sexual difference and the only processes of human becoming are those authorized by one dominant symbolic model whose effects for all genders, sexualities and subjectivities have been shown to be the source of profound psychic pain and social damage. For Ettinger, as we shall see, even the ­Deleuzian-Guattarian Anti-Oedipus model does not solve this problem. She proposes a new Symbolic that does not depend on metaphoric substitution. The dominant symbolic order is defined as phallic and its mode of thought and operation is phallocentric.9 These terms became current in the 1970s in psychoanalytically inflected feminist literary and philosophical theory (Mitchell 1974; Mitchell and Rose 1982; Cixous [1975] 1976; Irigaray [1977] 1985), building on deconstruction (Derrida). As a title of her early book-length text makes clear, Matrix: A Shift Beyond the Phallus (Paris: BLE Atelier, 1993), Ettinger’s aim is, however, neither to replace nor negate the operation of what she acknowledges to be a phallic model, which is necessary for many subjective operations in relation to language and society. She wants to shift it from its singular sovereignty. Identifying the specific matrixial logic and effects reveals, moreover, the profound and destructive consequences of operative structures of the Phallic/Phallocentric if they remain the only prism through which we grasp ourselves sexually, psychically, ethically and as social, later gendered, ‘sexuated’ and tragically racialized subjects. The matrixial dimension does not, and cannot, replace the phallic formation. As speakers and agents in the world, we need both linguistic propositionality—I, you, s/he, it, they—and psychological recognition of subjects, their bodies and their objects. To grasp a dimension of subjective coexistence as coemergence, Ettinger will take us through the way Freud and Lacan theorized the formation of subject and object. By understanding how that formation is phallocentric, we recognize what is necessary within it, but also at what cost—the sacrifice it demands of us all. Seeing beyond the phallocentric prism reveals what has been blocked even while we already ‘feel-know’ that there are dimensions of subjectivity beyond-the-Phallus—Ettinger’s term that follows from Lacan’s late confession of the necessity for acknowledging the limit of his phallocentric

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modelling of subjectivity. Lacan’s Symbolic could not account for feminine jouissance. Yet, it is important to stress that his theory did acknowledge it (see Note 5). The following chapters traverse Freudian, Lacanian and other psychoanalytical and philosophical theories. The reader will acquire familiarity with the ideas and vocabularies of the analytical countries Ettinger’s work inhabits but transforms. With each chapter, Bracha L. Ettinger builds the framework through which to glimpse the shifted/shifting perspective in which the Matrixial comes to light. The contours of the Matrixial emerge as each text slowly unfolds and shifts our inherited assumptions. Each chapter allows us to glean the matrixial stratum from its position as a precondition of subjectivity that is perpetually present and now can be recognized. The evolution of each text gives the Matrixial a form in thought, as a resource with which we can now work on the p ­ sycho-social, ethical, and even ecological planes where we make decisions and act.10 Let me stress this point that Bracha L. Ettinger has repeatedly made. The Matrixial supplements by certain shifts and psychic resources that, with their affects and incitements, colour the actions and decisions that we, as social and speaking subjects, can only take as individuals. In this sense, the Matrix is initially proto-ethical. As such, it incites the ethical domain that informs Ethics, the domain in which we act ethically when, as a full Subject, we knowingly confront or respond to another subject, a full Other. When matrixial proto-ethicality is taken into account, our ethical horizons open and are changed. As a result, a new concept of the human subject itself comes to light. While Ettinger’s contribution has important clinical implications for the practices of therapy and psychoanalysis (see Vol. 1: 1, 9, 10 and Vol. 2: 1, 3, 5, 7, 10), her writing also reveals the rapport between the analytical scenario and concepts of trauma and difference, which are explored in, and have implications for, philosophy, art and cultural theory. I have used the Ettingerian Matrix extensively to analyze contemporary and modern visual art, art history and practices of curating (Pollock 2007, 2010, 2013). It has been and continues to be inspirational to other curators and art historians (Paul Vandenbroeck, Rosi Huhn, Catherine de Zegher, Alison Rowley, Tina Kinsella, to mention just few) and philosophers (Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Couze Venn). Ettinger’s writings are extensively read in the context of anthropology, film and trauma studies. The artist herself has analyzed works by artists, writers and poets such as Marguerite Duras,

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Sylvia Plath, Eva Hesse, Emma Kunz and Hilma af Klint, contributing as many as fifteen years ago to what was then the very recent rediscovery and artworld recognition of these last two painters (Ettinger 2005). In the frame of this actual publication, Studies in the Psychosocial, I will, however, present her writings in the light of this context. If psycho-social studies attempt to bring into dialogue psychoanalytically inflected psychology and sociology, Ettinger’s writings defy assimilation inside any simple alignment. Her work emerges as much from aesthetic-artistic as analytical practice to touch on feminism, philosophical ethics, trauma and cultural memory and the questions of subjectivity— feminine, maternal and neither—trauma and cultural memory, and on alterity—feminine, racialized and social. From her founding propositions of Matrix and its mechanism and process for ­meaning-making, metramorphosis (metra-morphosis), we can demonstrate Ettinger’s significance not only in psychoanalysis but also for the socially engaged discourses of ethics and political philosophy. Her art and theory are also critically related to aesthetics, notably but not exclusively, in relation to feminist, postcolonial and intersectionalist cultural theory and practice. Theorizing dreamwork, Freud identified two major processes in the formation of dreams: condensation and displacement. Lacan redefined these terms through linguistic theory to identify them with core processes in figurative language: metaphor and metonymy. As both metaphor and metonymy are to phallocentric signification, so the key concept metramorphosis is to the Matrixial. With its Greek etymology μήτριον (metrion: of a mother) and morphosis (transformation of shape and evocations of sub-conscious processes such as sleep), metramorphosis involves the cluster of ‘multiplicity, plurality, partiality, difference, strangeness, relations to the unknown other, prenatal passages to the Symbolic, with processes of change of I and non-I emerging in co-existence, and of change in their borderlines, limits, and thresholds within and around them’ (Vol. 1: 1: 9). As a time-space, it generates a non-ocular matrixial gaze (Ettinger 1995/2006), related to fascinance and associated with awe, compassion and wonder (Vol. 2: 1, 11) where aesthetic-poïetic processes of co-transformation of borderlines into thresholds occur. Ettinger radically expands the rich history of psychoanalytical theories. Some have challenged the classical paradigms of Freud’s d ­ rive-theory in the formation of subjectivity by focusing on the role of Language (Lacan), while others turned their attention to Intersubjectivity and Object-Relations. Ettinger’s training and thought traverses both British

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Object-Relations (W. Bion, R. D. Laing) and the many significant strands of French Freudian, Lacanian, post- and non-Lacanian psychoanalysis (Fédida, Dolto, Aulagnier, Laplanche, Green). Her work is also in dialogue and debate with American analytic traditions: Self-psychology (Kohut) and the earliest phases of the interpersonal world of the infant explored by Daniel Stern. Published in the present context, Ettinger’s deep engagement with Lacan’s psychoanalytical thought specifically reminds us of its valuable resources. Ettinger’s profound reading of Lacan’s later and less known texts unsettle habits of both feminist socio-cultural and Anglophone socio-psychoanalyses (sic), challenging them to confront the structural Phallicism still embedded in most theories of the subject, the maternal, the infant, and sexual difference itself. Ettinger exposes it step by step at the core of Lacan’s theory so that we learn to see beyond Lacan’s blind spot with regard to difference and sexual difference.11 As transforming supplement to the rich field and its holes, Ettinger’s introduces a primordial, mutual but non-symmetrical co-affecting encounter in severality to whose archaic form—the joint but different/ciating (sic) late pre-maternality/prenatality ‘encounter-event’ as it appears in any creative encounter in the now—she gives the theoretical name Matrix. This ­joint-but-different/ciating co-affecting event of a becoming-maternal co-emerging with a becoming-infant in relations-without-relating is the psychoanalytical basis for thinking the aesthetical and the ethical in any encounter in adulthood and opening up new pathways in social thought, practice and ethics. In the course of these two volumes of writings between 1990 and 2012 we shall discover how the thought of Bracha L. Ettinger passes through two areas of significance and practice. The first is the ­aesthetic-affective, which is, for her, both proto-ethical and necessary for the ethical relations-without-relating behind intersubjectivity. The second is the radical rethinking of difference itself, and specifically a creative reconceptualization of the key question of sexual difference in any consideration of all relations between self and other. While some current trends sideline feminist theory as too focused on either gender or sexual difference, Ettinger’s writings will reveal how attention to what she radically retheorizes—and I indicate with this formula as the matrixial femininem—has profound significance for the critical issues posed in queer and trans theory, and in relation to the possibility for both intersectional interventions against the abuse of the socially othered and in defence

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of the threatened planetary environment. Re-addressing the feminine through the matrixial prism critically exposes the logic of I and not-I that underpins phallic socio-psychic processes at work in racism. This move also opens up the affective ground for an ethical resistance to the violations that stem from racism. In this introduction, I shall situate Ettinger’s core concepts and contextualize her intervention for those meeting this body of thought for the first time. Other readers may have encountered some of her work in its published diaspora while not having had the opportunity to plot out its elaboration and grasp its full conceptual range over the chronological sequence and thematic span of her writing. For each of the following chapters I have added a short, contextualizing introduction. The brief mapping of each argument will assist the reader to enter the texts, while each one invites close, deep and repeated reading. The process of reading is itself a journey, as it has been for me. What the two volumes allow us to grasp is the movement from an initial intervention through to the construction of an extended theoretical edifice, with each essay deepening its foundations and expanding its remit. The prefaces to each text, laid out in a theoretically revealing sequence, show how each one is also the site of continuous expansion of a complex project, extending the theoretical vocabulary with its creatively necessary neologisms, elaborating each concept, and entering into engagements with related fields beyond art and psychoanalysis: philosophy, theology, literature and film theory. Although these volumes that document a long history of writing appear only now, these texts, which have been published as articles and chapters in a range of publications, have already deeply transformed the fields of thought from which we are now reviewing the last three decades and analyzing this and other major philosophies and practices produced over that period.12

Words, Concepts, Interventions From another Greek noun ὑστέρα (hustera) for womb, we have inherited a long and negative medical association of an organic cause of both women’s psychic derangement and their social dissent, which has been both implanted in, and analyzed by psychoanalysis and then psychologized. For the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, it seemed that women’s mental afflictions, which they first named hysteria, derived from sickness in the inner organ by which alone these societies defined the use and

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purpose of women: the mythic (not anatomical) site of the mystery of generation. Hence the term hysterical that, in pre-scientific medicine, attributed the afflictions of women to the one interior space that served as a metaphor in those cultures—often like the Greeks overtly patriarchal—that defined woman in terms of her assigned role in a religiously and socially regulated economy of reproduction (Rubin 1975). This relay between the generative body and economic, sociological and political exploitation and symbolization of its generativity is now deeply embedded in the Western imagination. For instance, during the nineteenth century, opponents of women’s suffrage argued that voting, or even having access to education, would damage women’s wombs. So deep is this fictitious link between body parts and social law that even feminist theory has been afraid of, if not paranoid about, any slide from the strictly social or political to the bodily. This anxiety has led to an overemphasis on the socio-political construction of designated or assumed gender rather than on the non-patriarchal exploration of embodied, materially based, corpo-real subjectivity. This feminist fear suspends, if not outlaws, ways of thinking about that corporeal (not-yet-gendered) and encountered psycho-somatic sexual difference which is the condition of our being alive, for fear that any such admission, of what Ettinger defines as the ­corpo-Real, would drag women back into reductive determination by one organ of the capacities and social identities of women—the legacy of historical (and political) hystericization of femininity. Ettinger’s complex, and indeed challenging process of not only deconstructing the patriarchal/phallocentric entwining of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic (I refer here to Lacan’s three registers of psychic life) but also of proposing one more register: the corpo-Real (its phenomenological account as well as the encounter with it), and another kind of entwining of all these registers, requires us to think differently with our embodiedness and about embodied experiencing. This means acknowledging the affective and sensuous, psychic corpo-Real.13 Phenomenology has taught us to recognize the relay between flesh and concept (see Merleau-Ponty and Freud in Chapters 1 and 5), between living sensate experience and imagination, between matter and memory (Bergson). The matrixial embrace of corpo-reality and subjectivity must now be extended into the critical question of sexual difference and where it arises primordially as an effect on all who are born (see Chapter 4 for Ettinger’s deep engagement with phenomenology as well as ‘The With-in-Visible Screen’ [1996], reprinted in The Matrixial

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Borderspace 2006). As a result, understanding what sexual difference might do or mean has been awaiting this radical development. To pose an environment of co-transformation, Bracha L. Ettinger uses the Latin word matrix to suspend the legacy of the hystericization of the feminine as much as to defy anatomical reductionism when we do however approach female corpo-Reality. Matrix keeps in semantic play concepts and figures of co-genesis. It radically contests the ­anatomical-socio-psychological reductionism we find in the long association of hysteria with femininity. In effect, hysteria defines woman as a ­non-subject, as a-socially pre-determined by the operations of a space associated specifically with sexual reproduction—even though the womb is not a sexual organ per se.14 If the focus on the function of an organ has historically served as the means to deny women’s political subjecthood while pre-/pro-scribing women’s sexualities and denying gender fluidity and multiple sexualities, the womb as concept of a subjectivizing timespace can now be reclaimed as the basis for shifting the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic registers. Matrix is not at all about who has, or does not have, this or that organ. It addresses an encounter—whose traces persist—experienced by every living person by virtue of having been born. This makes us question what we fail to recognize in human subjectivity when we deny, as psychologically significant, the universal human condition of being generated, of becoming, in a shared environment with-in an unknown other and in a radical corpo-Real proximity to an unknown otherness (see Note 12). This encounter is differentiating, sensuously experienced in the later stages of our becoming when we have become sensate, and are aesthetically affected by sound, rhythm, pressure, breathing, movement, light and more. These sensations are, according to Ettinger, accompanied by the enigmatic imprints of co-affection and by crossed mental inscription while the proto-psychological living entity is being carried with-in. The legacy of matrixial severality matters in socio-political terms as well. It enhances the case for women’s rights over their own bodies, Ettinger writes, precisely because matrixial theory does not allow, as currently occurs in many cultures and laws, a privileging of the product or object of sexual reproduction over the woman-as-embodied-subject. It also matters because it refutes the intervention of the phallic law in the primordial encounter-event by giving us an alternative way of approaching any symbolic and real matrixial co-emergence, offering each matrixial event a language of her own that resists phallic control over women’s bodies.

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Reducing women to a defined social function, the womb has long been colonized for the purposes of patriarchal social organization, theology and law. Its generative potentialities and products have been claimed by the father (and thus by society).15 Women have, therefore, long been trapped in what, exploring the concomitant denial to women of property in their own clitoral sexual pleasure, postcolonial feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak, has named a ‘uterine social organization’ (Spivak [1981] 1987: 152). Ettingerian Matrixial theory defies such patriarchal ab-use of the ‘uterine’. Positing a stratum of primordial s­ubjectivity-as-encounter, whose traces are carried over to the infant only if we are born into postnatal life, does not sacralize early uterine life and does not, therefore, impinge on women’s rights over their bodies. Quite the contrary. The Matrix according to Ettinger disqualifies phallic logic’s claim to control women’s bodies in the name of its proprietorial patriarchal system (Vol. 1: 5). The Matrix provides a language with which to think women as subjects of, and in, their own bodies, and introduces differentiating processes, metramorphoses, that temper, shift, even deflect as well as supplement, our analysis of the subject of any sex and of its agency. Moreover, the alliance implied in subjectivity-as-encounter grants to the prematernal m/Other a subjectivizing and humanizing role while enabling us also to acknowledge, more profoundly and ethically, maternal shock and trauma, phenomenological embodiment, pain and loss. In a number of chapters in Volume 2 of this collection, Ettinger more fully elaborates maternal subjectivity as it informs, and is informing, early ­subjectivity-as-encounter (Ettinger Vol. 2: 7, 10). The lower-case m in m/Other identifies the subject who is being maternalized through matrixial jointness. To begin with, the term distinguishes the archaic m/Other from the post-natal Mother figure, a term in the later Oedipal Mother/Father/Child drama. It also distinguishes Lacan’s Other (Language and Culture) from matrixial ­alterity-in-encounter, the intimate even if uncognized alterity of the nonI. For the becoming-infant, the m/Other is an intuited almost-Otherness, unknown yet sensed not as someone but as what is non-I. It is the other pole of a shared string whose vibrations incite the very first ­non-cognitive intimation of a non-I for a concurrent emerging proto-I. The m/Other is also radically different from the current casting of the pregnant maternal body/subject as a bodily container (science), a holy vessel (religion), a biological incubator (phantasy) or a lost home and tomb (Freud), all of which are, in phallic phantasy, associated with psychic death,

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which can be desired as a kind of release from life into no-longer-life (this is Ettinger’s phrase) or feared as the horror of submergence into ­not-being.16 In British psychoanalysis after Freud, ‘psychic container’ signifies maternal enveloping rather than death. Ettinger, however, distinguishes her concept of carriance (caring-carrying in a matrixial borderspace) from Winnicott’s notion of maternal ‘holding’ and Bion’s thesis of ‘container/contained’ (Ettinger 1993d/2006). In his essay on the aesthetic, ‘The “Uncanny”’ (Freud 1919), Freud acknowledged the widespread phantasy of intra-uterine life that surfaces in adult dreams, associating it, however, with the fear of being buried alive. In her early text on the matrixial gaze (1993d/2006), Ettinger already elaborated on this primal phantasy; but she showed that it has only been interpreted in a phallic way. It is necessary, she claims, to conceive of it in a new frame so that this phantasy itself is not only incorporated into the phallic phantasmatic apparatus.

Thinking Beyond the Limit: Positing a Time-Space Bracha L. Ettinger thinks beyond the limit in psychoanalytical thought— birth—that a few have, however, dared to breach (Irigaray [1993]; Meltzer [1990]; Mott and Laing [1960]). These courageous psychoanalysts did not, however, discover unique psychic processes that might later differently shape the Unconscious. As a result, the maternal remains in their thinking only an object of phantasy or an unthought environment. Ettinger argues that human becoming is not a solitary psychic process. By recognizing, through the Matrixial, the potential significance in postnatal human subjectivity of pre-natal proto-experience of the becoming-human being-with, the phenomenological meaning and ontological significance of the gestating, carrying maternal individual re-enters psychoanalytic thought and practice. In Ettingerian psychoanalysis, the m/ Other, and later on the mother, and in general the Other, are no longer the present, absent or lost objects of desire. They are to be understood as a subject in singular severalities. Secondly, since the b ­ ecoming-maternal subject is also embedded in the matrixial encounter as an archaic element, one end of the string of the matrixial link a, this kind of liminal and limited connectivity can be thought in and for every current encounter-event. Thirdly, although traced into us so archaically, the link a haunts us with a yearning, not for lost wholeness (the phallic phantasy

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of an abolition of difference) but for certain kind of borderlinking, and founds the potential for this process. Then, in thus theorizing and stressing jointness-with-in differenc/ tiation (Ettinger Vol. 2: 10), the Ettingerian thesis powerfully counters the socio-cultural abuse of women’s bodies and minds where women are reduced to being mere vehicles of father-claimed outputs and instruments of socially regulated reproduction without control of their own bodies.17 Finally, her reframing has considerable implications for the way psychoanalysis has imagined and theorized the subject itself as well as the psychic object, the mother figure, so often disfigured as too much or too little, as suffocating or abandoning, as over-present or absent, as object of blame. She offers new ways to understand actual transference and countertransference relations and the ethical mode they require. Ettinger shows how the mother has been blamed and made the cause of what is in effect the existential discontent of having been born. As cause of such distress, the mother may be thus expelled by the analytical process from the matrixial transferential web that Ettinger brings into recognition (Pollock 2009b). In Chapter 4 of Volume 2 Ettinger addresses the profound damage caused by the analytical use, the production even, in many cases of what she identifies as the invocation of the ready-made-mother-monster: In our Western Post-Freudian psychotherapeutic theory and clinical atmosphere starting with Ferenczi and followed by Winnicott (shared beyond different psychoanalytical schools, with exceptions like Klein, Balint, Bion, the Lacanian theory, Deleuze-Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Jessica Benjamin’s inter-subjective attitude that considers the mother as subject), a semi-automatic mother-blaming and mother-hating is produced. Unless an obvious trauma is found in a real life history, a mother-monster readymade is offered to the patient qua the major “cause” for almost any anxiety and psychic pain. The prefabricated mother-monster readymade is always in stand-by readiness as the cause for any infantile suffering arising to consciousness. The prevalence of the imaginary mother-monster readymade figure testifies in my view to a major lacuna in the psychoanalytical theory and to the major narcissistic trap of the transferential relationships, due to a systematic disrecognition that particular kinds of recurring phantasmatic and imaginary complaints, arising in almost each and every reported case of regressive therapy, represent in fact primal phantasies, and have no other “cause”. (Ettinger 2006: 105–106; see Ettinger Vol. 2: 4)

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Thus, the deep and multi-layered time of the maternal as psychically inscribed memory of proto-subjectivizing, transubjective encounter shifts our habitual ideas of woman as mother, mother as object, and woman’s body as passive container, the site of repeating replication from generation to generation. It also refutes the conception of mothering (good or bad enough) as the automatic retroactive cause of our existential anguish or the idealizing phantasy of what could efface that anguish. According to Ettinger, the maternal needs to be grasped as a pole on the axes of severalities etched in each subject. The archaic matrixial web, ­proto-psychically garnered by a becoming, pre-natal subject-to-be, form a dimension that continues working all through life in further relational webs. This archaic time-space may be, differently, re-encountered when, as an adult woman, one such subject now finds herself initiating the process of becoming-maternal with her own now pre-natal becoming-infant non-I. The latter’s emerging-with-her transforms her into its archaic m/Other. The non-conscious memory of the primordial condition of her own becoming and its long-term, post-natal subjectivizing legacies are reactivated from a shifted position in a multi-dimensional transubjective matrixial encounter producing multilayered time-scapes, a shared transubjectivizing environment with its specific temporality and spatiality. According to the Ettingerian thesis, kernel-to-kernel transubjectivity subtends and re-affects and continues to affect us even when we are already mainly reshaped as separate individuals in inter-relations and by the series of phallic separations. This thesis opens onto many current concerns and to a new understanding of inter- and, in her view, transgenerationally transmitted trauma and mental entanglement. The Matrixial sphere concerns both men and women, inasmuch as we all have been engendered in another body and then born. We carry a non-gendered heritage of having been seduced into life (Ettinger Vol. 2: 4). Born is the past participle of the verb to bear in the passive voice; hence it means to have been carried and delivered, transconnecting to an unquestionably sexual-feminine body-psyche. The multiple, diachronous as well as synchronous transitivity within a sexual difference whose character must be understood in its specificity as asymmetrical, and remembering and, at the same time, futurizing—being anticipatory and projecting onto living futures to come—is what Bracha L. Ettinger wished to bring into psychoanalytical debate as part of her a broader meta-feminist (her term for the extended metaphysical reach of feminist philosophical thought) research into what might now, already, be

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sensed, intuited, imagined to be occurring beside, beneath, beyond the phallocentric structures—without knocking them out or replacing them. Ettinger warns us against the rejection of whatever carries us, as well as against the abandonment of others that are knowingly or unknowingly our non-I(s). Ettinger shares with feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray a deep sense of the profound damage inflicted on all subjects, but notably subjects ‘in the feminine’, of a phallic order which forecloses—that is, leaves without a signifier to draw the traces of an archaic real primary experience and phantasy into thought—any sexual specificity. Ettinger, however, also identifies the general effects of the matrixial feminine as a dimension on all subjects, irrespective of Oedipal sexualities and pronominal positions in language. Matrixiality shifts the phallic binary of masculine/feminine. Thus, we need to write the matrixial feminine to indicate its specificity with this form: the feminine M (which will be expressed thus as the feminine to the power of the Matrix). The feminine M is also to be understood as a complex of elements that have to be acknowledged as a sexual difference we have all encountered. Matrix introduces into every subject an encounter with sexual specificity which is—and this is critically important to grasp— non-gendered yet has to be acknowledged as feminine, that is as feminine M. As an encounter with a feminine psychic and corporeal sexual specificity, Matrixiality precedes—and is thus not shaped by—the later Oedipal complex. Hence it is not subject, even in later stages of life, to the phallic paradigm that produces the pair masculine/feminine as terms of a plus/ minus binary. In the phallic logic of the masculine/feminine, the feminine Ph (I express it thus to make the distinction) is only derived, negatively, from the positivized masculine (penis/no penis of Freud’s theory) or is considered as an impossibility (the Phallus as sole signifier of the symbolic order in Lacan). The matrixial feminine M is neither relative to the Oedipal/phallic masculine nor ruled by the phallic signifier that sequences presence/absence, active/passive, etc. The matrixial feminine M refers to the co-affecting, co-emerging-in-proximity-and-distance of the c­orpo-Real, aesthetic prematernal/pre-natal condition of human genesis as e­ ncounter-event, which bequeaths, postnatally, a matrixial legacy to all born subjects whatever sex, gender or sexuality they later assume or change under the impact of, or in resistance to, phallic subjectivization.

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We are currently still trapped in the binary logics of either/or and slashed oppositions, m/f. As a result, any invocation of the feminine is still heard either as simply a feminist inversion of its negative position in phallic logic or as a compensatory idealization on the part of women demeaned by, and rebelling against, their negative position in a phallocentric universe where the feminine only signifies lack or castration (Mulvey [1975] 1988). Positing a primordial non-gendered but sexual matrixial feminine M that is neither related to, nor defined in relation to, the masculine, opens up a universe of meaning freed from both inversion and compensatory idealization—both of which have been denounced specifically by constructivist feminist gender theory in ways that almost made it impossible to speak of the feminine in any way at all (Kristeva [1979] 1986).

Le féminin, Femininity and Feminist Anxiety No word causes more trouble in feminist theory than le féminin/‘the feminine’. The French and the English words do not evoke the same connotations at all. This raises the issues of translation and politics, phobia and censorship (Sandford 1999, 2001). Beloved of those who declare what Woman is or seek to maintain a hierarchy of meaning between the Human [Man] and its Other [Woman], the feminine and femininity are equally abhorred by mainstream feminist theory, notably feminist theorists who privilege a social or socio-psychic definition of gender over the psycho-sexual exploration of sexual difference. One of the founding texts of twentieth-century philosophical engagement with the question posed by feminism—what is there to say about women?—was the Existentialist ontological philosophical inquiry by Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, first published in 1949. Writing in French, de Beauvoir explored both le féminin as the condition of feminine subjectivity of la Femme (the woman and Woman) and the myths created by culture, science, philosophy and psychoanalysis of l’éternel féminin: female nature and a myth of femininity. The opening proposition of her second volume declares: ‘On ne naît pas femme, on le devient’.—‘One is not born, but becomes, woman’ (de Beauvoir [1949] 2001: 294). The statement appears to confirm the social construction of ways of being man or woman; gender is socially constructed and hence is to be socially reconstructed, runs the argument. De Beauvoir is not, however, to be thus reduced to trite sociological determinism or even existential choice.

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The key verb in her sentence is becomes, which is affiliated to, and is a qualification of, being, notably in Existentialist thought (Mitchell 2017). Becoming is the condition of subjectivity as a project undertaken by each of us working towards subjective realization, consciousness, agency, and the capacity to act in the world. Working on this philosophical plane, de Beauvoir recognized that becoming a person, a subject, is not a universal possibility. Becoming a person collides with the entwined social, political, ideological, cultural and mythic conditions of being as social being. Our access to agency and subjecthood can be barred if we are black, a woman, a colonial subject, an enslaved person and a sexual or ethnic minority. De Beauvoir’s three figures who suffer displacement from the situation of Universal Subject and are thus othered are Black men and women, Jewish men and women and all women. In this racialized, ­religious-culturally and gendered othering, ‘we’ smash up against how we are seen, how we are defined, how we are delimited or obstructed, how we are vulnerable to racial, gendered and sexual violence. These processes are experienced psychologically, at the level of subjectivity, and in our psychologically formed inhabitation of our social bodies that are labelled and experienced as the original causes of our suffering and subordination. Our embodiment as well as our embodied psyches experience these hurts. These situations generate a split, anguished, even distorted, disfigured or absent sense of self in a human being who is sensate, thoughtful, embodied and susceptible to pain. The term femininity refers to such a collision and a distortion that human subjects ‘in the feminine’ have to negotiate, producing femininity as this complex adaptation to a kind of non-being while obviously also being human. All conditions of racialized, sexualized, gendered social abjection are entwined in multiple determinations. ‘The feminine’ is the English translation of a French concept— le féminin—used, in the wake of de Beauvoir, in the writings of Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, but with radically different meanings. For Cixous, le féminin relates to the hitherto unwritten dimensions of female corporeal and psychic experience that have been rendered a ‘dark continent’ (Freud’s colonial image) by phallocentric culture. Cixous calls women to writing their ‘sexts’ (Cixous [1975] 1976). For Kristeva, le féminin is a (Hegelian) semiotic negativity that resources the rupturing and revolutionizing of existing psycho-semiotic orders of meaning—the newness of any practice—through an unspeakable relation to the materiality of the body as sub-linguistic pulsation that underlies the semiotic

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dimension of language, which itself flows into and disturbs the symbolic plane of language (Kristeva [1974] 1984). Masculine in linguistic gender, le féminin inhabits the French language differently from the way in which its obvious translation, ‘the feminine’ does English or das Weibliche German. Anglophone readers will hear troubling, culturally determined connotations reverberating through the word, especially in everyday, non-psychoanalytical parlance. Femininity is linked with conforming to type, being pretty, coquettish, non-intellectual, dependent, unaggressive, submissive, willing, keen to serve, maternal… and so on. We cannot stop this resonance from happening; it is culturally grounded in attitudes, conventions and language. The very term, feminine, therefore, rightly incites anxiety in the Anglophone feminist, suspicion in the feminist gender theorist, and also outright hostility in those parts of feminist theory most adamantly opposed to any concept of sexual difference, preferring to focus on the social production of gender, by theorizing gender as a performative iteration of socially regulatory, heterosexualizing norms. Judith Butler is the most cited theorists of this position (Butler 1990). Carrying the weight of patriarchy, and limited by the poverty of language and the depth of the anxieties related to these terms, the feminine and femininity have come to represent everything in heteronormative patriarchal culture against which gender theory is battling, because these terms still appear to drag along a trail of physiological, anatomical predetermination of what gender might be. Matrixial theory radically redefines ‘the feminine’ by the symbolic Matrix, hence feminine M to indicate this differentiated usage of this term, shifted and redefined by the matrixial dimension. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of discourse, feminist film and literary theorist Teresa de Lauretis positioned psychoanalysis as one of the many discourses that act as a ‘technology of gender’ (De Lauretis 1987). In her writings, de Lauretis preferred the term gender (used in a pre- and non-Butler thesis) because, to de Lauretis, sexual difference signified for her only the heteronormative division of the sexes (which I have already suggested is not its only potential meaning). Technologies of gender or of sexual difference refer to those active practices, statements and patterns of discourse that produce definitions of gender and sexual difference. Feminist discourses are also technologies of gender producing their own definitions even as they contest others. Psychoanalysis is itself a set of discourses, practices, institutionalized teachings, texts with rivalries, debates, divisions, and developments.

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Its formation is geographically diverse, in part as a result of the forced migration of many psychoanalysts after 1933 and in response to the challenges of colonialism and decolonization (Nandy 1983; Steiner 2000). As importantly, as a way of thinking about the psyche, psychoanalytical ideas have moved beyond a clinical base to disseminate into culture assumptions about the existence of the Unconscious, phantasy, dreams, neurosis and sexuality. As both a clinical theory and set of ideas about subjectivity, therefore, I would argue that by raising the notions of subjectivity, sexuality and sexual difference to the level of analytical practice and theory, psychoanalysis contributed to the very possibility of ­twentieth-century feminist theory and also enabled some of the critiques of what feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin recognized and names as the sex-gender system within patriarchal societies and its dominant subject formations (Rubin 1975). Feminist theories have drawn on the psychoanalytical account of the formation of both subjectivity and sexuality to challenge common assumptions that sexual difference is natural or given by our bodies. Psychoanalysis specifically theorizes the psychological formation of subjectivity in an embodied experience. This formation occurs, in Julia Kristeva’s phrasing, as the fold of living bodies (qua bodies) and meaning: the fold of life and symbol (Kristeva in Clément and Kristeva [1998] 2001). In psychoanalytical thought, bodies are not anatomical entities. They are sensate, sensitive, sites of necessity and pain, traversed and grooved by the drives, yielding, in the repetition of cycles of physiological intensity (pain) and release/relief (pleasure), to ever more elaborate psychic formations including the Unconscious. The Freudian apparatus regroups these processes into different agencies: Ego, Id, Superego. In these formations, materiality and the aesthesis of the corporeal— sound, movement, pulse, rhythm, breathing, taking in, expelling, sensing, feeling, touching and ‘spasming’ (building up tension and releasing it)—lay down patterns and pathways through iteration. These acquire phantasmatic transformation, that is, they form and are transformed into phantasies and images. The organization and appropriation of their regularities, tensions, pleasures and pains becomes a mnemonic image that is typically dualistic: good/bad, pleasurable/unpleasurable. The transmutation of the intensities flowing over and through the agonizingly sensitive corporeality of the living entity into phantasy then encounters a third transmutation that never obliterates the prior two: Language. While phantasy experiences in images, Language as the symbolic system

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of meaning represents thinking in words (Ettinger Vol. 1: 1–4). Trauma and the Real are beyond both. With some psychoanalysts, this general account leaves out the fact that the process of our enculturation, our induction into Language is inflected by historically changing and always social formations. Indeed, in feminist terms, these are also political—not because anatomy divides us into two pre-given sexes, but because of the significance attributed culturally, economically, politically and linguistically to a singular element of humans: they exist in different forms, with a major difference being named ‘sexual’. Sexual does not refer only to activities of propagation of people, which, of course, matters to most societies and, as a result, determine the way societies distribute power, rights, goods, and varying levels of agency or powerlessness (Rubin 1975). Sexuality refers to the modes and intensities of our relations to the world and to others. For Freud libido is the energy that seeks out the world, orients us towards it. Sexuality situates us as sites of pain and pleasure, desire and abjection. Thus, as we even begin with the term le féminin and its tricky translation into English, we have hit a theoretical, linguistic and cultural rock or two. We can abandon the issue and move swiftly to the safer ground of theories of the psycho-social construction of gender, casting any reference to the feminine, femininity and sexual difference into the realm disowned as ‘essentialist’ and other inadequately constructivist heresies. Or, we can remain defiant at the cliff face of this difficulty and insist, together with Ettinger, that instead of avoiding its complexity, we need to examine it more fully and creatively shift its meanings. A number of queer and trans theorists have been drawn to Ettinger’s work (O’Rourke, Cavanagh, Guitiérez-Albilla to name just few) precisely because it allows us to think a relation to sexual difference that is independent of Oedipal structuring of gender/sexual identity with its regulatory normative sexualization and it also goes beyond the late Lacan’s formulae of sexuation. Ettinger shares with philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari the desire to shift/lift the absolutism of Oedipal logic (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1977). What makes her work distinct from theirs is, however, her refusal to do so at the expense of liquifying the Oedipal along the feminine, and thus once again erasing the understanding of what she proposes we must acknowledge as the gift that feminine sexual specificity offers to human subjectivity.

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This donation happens through the matrixial mechanisms and processes and the specific dynamics she identifies as proto-ethical com-passion in a sphere of subjectivity which is, from the beginning, several.18 As an encounter-event of co-emerging and co-affecting between ­partners-in-difference that remain uncognized by each other—although otherwise sensed and felt and, on another level also, or later on, cognized—while sharing shaped channels opened in the pre-maternal/ pre-natal transconnectedness, the Matrix itself lays a hitherto unacknowledged psychic foundation for our capacities for the ethical in its pairing of hospitality and com-passion. Ettinger’s graphic marking distinguishes ­com-passion from the conventional idea of one-sided compassion (feeling for). Com-passion for the other in their otherness and in my own alterity and our radical unknownness founds an irreducible sharedness in being human. This arises in its pairing of self-fragilization with com-passion for and with the vulnerable other that founds an irreducible humanized shareability.

A Matrixial Antigone: Situating Bracha L. Ettinger’s Intervention Historically Since the early 1990s both the intellectual-academic climate and the socio-political conditions have changed radically, largely in response to many historical shocks as well as to what I might term the ‘return of the [historical] repressed’, namely the surfacing of long-standing historical traumas that have engendered engagement with the concepts of trauma, affect and socio-politically induced suffering, from enslavement and colonization to totalitarianism, forced famine, genocide, and violence against the unarmed (a term offered by feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero to define the novel form of violence (Cavarero [2007] 2009)). During the 1990s, Europe marked the fiftieth anniversary of the end of its Second World War within which genocidal atrocities had been perpetrated in Europe against two ethnic minorities (Jewish and Romani) while many other social, sexual, faith and disabled groups were politically persecuted, imprisoned under Europe-wide fascist regimes or murdered. In the 1990s, academic attention in the humanities turned to the issues of trauma and cultural memory at the very moment that acknowledgement of horrifying genocides in Guatemala (1962–1996), Indonesia (1965–1966), Bangladesh (1970–1971), Chile (1973), Argentina

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(1974–1983), East Timor (1975–1999), Cambodia (1975–1979), of Iraqi Kurds (1986–1989), Rwanda (1994) and the Balkans (specifically Srebenica, 1995), and later, Darfur (2003) tore through the illusion that the inhuman extremity of the Shoah/Holocaust, even if unique in its state-sponsored industrially executed racism, was a singular occurrence. Attention to the continuing historical struggles for decolonization and belated and incomplete recognition of the still vivid traumas of both enslavement and colonization also sensitized the world to Modernity’s awful violence. New threats to democratic political life itself reached deeper into philosophical questions of alterity and difference, relations and antagonisms as the dream of the Enlightenment and Modernity’s progressive vision were revealed to have been themselves the ground for fascist, totalitarian and genocidal violence. Articulated clearly by the sociological works of Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), and Modernity and Ambivalence (1992), we have come to ask what Modernity was that it delivered both compromised dreams of emancipation but also colonization and genocide. Within its rationality, what poisoned its hopeful vision of equal rights, social justice, dreams of peace and co-existence in the modern era and delivered us to a p ­ ost-traumatic condition asymmetrically afflicting us in terms of race, class, and gender? While being the core of certain post-Shoah European philosophies such as the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) or Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) (philosophers who were engaged in friendly relations and dialogues with Ettinger in Paris), the very question of the subject and ethical relations between subjects are to be found also at the heart of psychoanalysis. Psycho-social studies seek specifically to overcome disciplinary barriers and deliver concrete insight and change in both domains. Ettinger, whose artistic work has been deeply engaged from 1984 and up to the present with the historical and family trauma of the killing of women, mothers and children during the Holocaust (see Lyotard 1997; Pollock 2013) expands the psycho-social domain with both the aesthetic and the ethical. This point in the twenty-first century, as I write this introduction, feels burdened by dread and uncertainty. Anxious for the very survival of life on this planet as a result of human action, greed and consumption and continuing indifference, we currently fear catastrophic planetary disaster as much as the erosion of the fabric of sociality. We witness with mounting anxiety emerging threats to democratic polities through polarization of groups and opinions, unhealed social divisions, deepening

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inequality, and mounting uses of violence associated with annihilatory extremism. Coming to terms with continuing unresolved violence against racialized and sexualized minorities, intensifying xenophobia and renewed threats from competing world powers, we are bewildered at the loss of belief in progress, justice and peace. Our history presents us, moreover, with repeating scenarios of revenge and counter-assault by those who feel damaged and wounded beyond bearing. (On violence and the terrorist as ‘acting out’ by violence against others what has been experienced subjectively as violation of the self, see Kristeva [1979] 1986: 201–205.) In challenging ethical and political times witnessing intensification of phallic paranoia and violently acted out hostility towards the other, we need what Bracha L. Ettinger reads as a matrixial Antigone who represents a subject who would rather die than continue to tolerate, and, indeed, live on allowing the violation of her other’s/ brother’s humanity precisely because she is shaped matrixially in what Ettinger proposes as the impossibility-of-not-sharing. Faithful daughter of an incestuous father Oedipus and mother Jocasta (on ‘Jocasta with(out) Antigone’, see Ettinger Vol. 1: 8 and Vol. 2: 7), who both disordered the kinship system by creating their daughter as sister to her own father, Antigone is a character in the tragedy of that name by the Athenian Sophocles (ca. 441 BCE). Antigone defies social law in the name of a psycho-ethical command she cannot resist. In the midst of rebellion and authoritarian repression, Antigone acts to sustain the humanity of her brother—condemned for treason against the state to lie unburied and eaten by carrion birds—even at the price of her own life. What are the affective and psychic foundations of such a decision registered in Sophocles’ play and inexplicable to conventional understanding? Was it the act of an ethical subject placing an ancient familial law above social and political law as Hegel argues? Or is there a matrixial dimension in Antigone revealing the ­impossibility-of-not-sharing the dehumanization or hurt of the borderlinked other? A radically new Ettingerian concept lays the foundations of the ethical and hence the social because it posits transubjectivity (also sometimes written as transsubjectivity and trans-subjectivity)—a primordial disposition for borderlinking—beyond a factual connectivity. A primordial mechanism of feel-knowing with-in the other reshapes the meaning of the psyche. Philosophers from G. W. F. Hegel to Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler (Butler 2000) have turned to the classical literary figure of Antigone to reflect on the tension in Western thought between ethics and politics. For feminist political and cultural theorists, Antigone has become

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a critical figure (Honig 2013; Söderback 2010). In psychoanalytical literature Antigone was the topic of Jacques Lacan’s 1959–1960 seminar ‘The Ethic of Psychoanalysis’. ‘As an image’—that is as an image in an aesthetic encounter—Antigone appears to Lacan as Beauty because ‘she’ touches the limit-frontier of death in life and, as image, deflects our encounter with that limit. This near-encounter with one’s own death is what Lacan considers the effect of beauty (Lacan [1959–1960] 1986). For Bracha L. Ettinger, the Antigone of Sophocles considered by Lacan was not enough. She offers (Vol. 1: 7 and Vol. 2: 7) an expanded understanding of what Antigone as the figuration of an ethical act in the socio-political realm made visible and audible. Ettinger matrixializes what Antigone’s image introduces into culture where social law, the political order, ethics, aesthetics and subjectivity meet. Far removed from the fifth century BCE Athenian polis, we are now all witnesses to, and survivors of, the unevenly distributed traumas of our industrial, colonial, racialized, political, social and now liquid modernities (Bauman 2000). Ettinger’s work gives us new insights and directions at a time when polarization and violence threaten our social and political fabric. Just as Sophocles used a figuration of the feminine to articulate a political tragedy, so it may be that thinking with the matrixial feminine M can contribute new insights into our current socio-political traumas. This means thinking the social and political together with the aesthetic proto-ethical. It can also mean that we need to work to transform, as Ettinger suggests, transgenerationally transmitted traces of trauma even when we did not experience it directly, and take responsibility to care for and carry what we have not necessarily caused (Ettinger Vol. 1: 7, 8). In December 2018, at the opening of the Kochi Biennial of contemporary art, Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life curated by Anita Dube, Bracha L. Ettinger was both an exhibiting artist and the speaker invited to deliver the opening keynote lecture. She reversed conventional relations between art and society. The social is typically considered the ground on which art grows and as the content to which art gives form. Ettinger proposes that the movement for transformation of our social and political subject positions may be initiated in, and perhaps can only be affectively incited by, the imaginative and transformative practices of art, art being understood as responsive and poïetic, not reactive, yet ­proto-ethical. Through the artistic-aesthetic in its sense as a ­com-passionate practice (not the philosophical question of what beauty is or why art moves us) we are affectively oriented towards the ethical

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which, in turn, forms the subjective basis for any action we may then conceive of and take as a socially responsive agent. In 2011, Ettinger participated in a recorded conversation with American philosopher Judith Butler at the European Graduate School. Butler was presenting a reading of the political theory of Hannah Arendt (Arendt 1951, 1958) in order to discover ‘ethical obligations of a global character that emerge at distance and in relations of proximity’.19 Echoing her conversations with Ettinger (proximity-in-distance being an early Ettingerian concept), Butler was also pondering the effects of images of others’ suffering and the affects—notably anxiety—that are psychologically incited in relation to others when their suffering is experienced as a demand upon a ‘we’ who are distanced from them while we all inhabit this one planet. Shifting from Butler’s philosophical and cognitive plane to the affective-psychic plane, Ettinger responded to Butler’s argument by re-proposing the impossibility-of-not-sharing, which, she argued, is the condition that generates the affective and psychological resources— when we have become conscious and speaking subjects—that dispose us towards and incite ethical and political action by a subject who has, like Antigone, to make a choice. Ettinger argued that philosophical analysis of the situation cannot of itself grasp or generate the affective grounds for subjective disposition towards an ethical choice. Furthermore, she stressed that symbolic matrixial maternality cannot be foreclosed from any discourse about the vulnerability of the other. She insisted that the vulnerability of the other cannot be accessed without the fragilization of the self that turns any relation towards an ethical encounter-event sensed as proximity even in distance (Ettinger 2006, 2009). No more can classic or Kleinian psychoanalysis address the vulnerability of the other. The latter specifically defines a self that is forged in the dialectic of either identification with (they are like me) or opposition (they are unlike me) to the other. Ettinger wanted to show how we can imagine responsiveness (response-ability is her neologism) to the other beyond the call of obligation (the face in Levinas’s ethics) and in terms other than anxiety-inducing uncanniness (Derrida). For Ettinger, to be concerned by and for the non-I in com-passion has to be clearly differentiated from anxiety (Ettinger Vol. 2: 9). Her figure of Antigone views the limits of life not only through the prism of death as its limit but also through the significance of coming into life already in jointness with an-other (the m/Other), patterned upon the passage from nonlife to life that must be differentiated from post-natal notions of death.

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Her matrixially revised understanding of subjectivity enables us to locate affective resources and psychic dispositions that can counter the aggressivity and anxiety incited by the phallic relation to the other that are too often violently acted out in cultures that have become paranoid. In her theory, proximity-in-difference and distance-in-proximity are primordial ­re-attunements within the Matrixial sphere, and the matrixial ‘uncanny’ is not based on anxiety but on ‘trust after the end of trust’ and ‘arousal in concern’. Two specific historical events structure the conditions of possibility of the emergence of Ettinger’s radical intervention in the field of psychoanalysis itself, with its far-reaching clinical and theoretical extension of ideas emerging from the space and practice of painting and psychoanalysis into current philosophical, ethical, political, ecological and aesthetic debates. The first is the Event named Shoah or the Holocaust, whose repercussions reach well beyond the European arena into the current agonies of the Middle East ricocheting across dispersed histories of Europe and Empire. The second is an equally traumatic event, the Women’s Movement and its theoretical dimension—feminist theory— erupting politically, artistically and theoretically in the later twentieth century (Pollock 2021). 20 Bracha L. Ettinger invited us on her journey in the twentieth century as the full impact of its horrors slowly entered cultural memory and became the site of the deepest inquiry. Biographically, Bracha L. Ettinger is both a child of survivor-witnesses of the Shoah in Poland and a child born into a Middle Eastern space of conflict and trauma for two entangled peoples of European and Middle Eastern and the colonial and national histories that they intertwine. As a thinker, artist and analyst, Ettinger is also part of a European intellectual formation, notably in Paris post-1968, for whom reflections of the possibility of ethics and thought itself after the Shoah form the critical horizon: Levinas, Lacan, Lyotard, Derrida to name but a few of her philosophical and analytical interlocutors. At the same time, she is also part of a different post-war generation of thinkers, shaped in the British practices of psychoanalysis after the debates between Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s followers. Within the community of Object-Relations analysts dominating the British psychoanalytical field, we must also register the already profound and traumatic impact of two World Wars on the work of key thinkers such as Wilfred Bion and R. D. Laing. The latter was Ettinger’s first psychoanalyst in London during the late 1970s, the period in which Bion returned to London and gave his seminar at

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the Tavistock clinic, where at that time she worked in the Young Adults department. A secret thread links Ettinger to the traumatized World War I survivor, Bion: the experience of war-time shell-shock—now termed post-traumatic stress disorder—of which she did not yet speak at the time of her work at the Tavistock. As a result of this complex formation (she arrived in Paris in 1981 and translated Lacan to Hebrew in the late 1980s), she lives, works and develops her thinking in three languages: English, French and Hebrew, in two different practices, art and psychoanalysis, and in between several analytical discourses each bearing the imprint of subjectively carried political histories.

Situating Psychoanalysis, the Social and the ­­Socio-Cultural The interface of psychoanalysis and the socio-cultural or the historical is not new. Writing in 1935, under the menacing shadow of German fascism that would enact a racial genocide in which his sisters were destroyed, Sigmund Freud added the following comment to his autobiographical study on changes in his writing since the mid-1920s: ‘My interest, after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which had fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking’ (Freud [1921] 1940: 15, my emphasis). Two decades earlier, in 1912, Freud had addressed such cultural issues in his study of the origins of religion and its continuity in the mental life of contemporary subjects, Totem and Taboo. Following The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud addressed the question Why War? and finally completed his major text on trauma, memory and cultural transmission, Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, on which he had been working throughout the 1930s under the shadow of the rise of Nazism that ultimately forced him and some of his family into exile. Against this significant political and historical background, Freud turned his attention to the ways in which his psychoanalytical research, undertaken by daily encounters with afflicted analysands, and through wide reading in neurological as well as psychological and cultural literature, could speak to ‘cultural-political’ issues (Bernheim 1998; Pollock 2007b, 2013a). By culture, Freud was not referring to the making and enjoying of the arts. He was reflecting on the intersecting social and political formations (class, ethnicity, nationality, societies) with imaginative formations (ideologies, cultural productions, religions). Culture is

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the doing, saying, thinking, creating, and living we do as psycho-social subjects (Williams). In each case of his later work, Freud considered how psychoanalysis, as a novel theorization of psychic life and hence subjectivity, could contribute to the analysis of these lived social processes studied in other disciplines (such as sociology, anthropology, theology and art history). Freud’s social-cultural work does not displace or supersede sociological, historical or political theorizing in their respective disciplinary objects. He aimed to add a contribution from within the ‘long detour through the natural sciences, medicine and psychotherapy’ that produced a distinctive thesis on the human condition: psychoanalysis. There is always a dialogue between psychoanalytical theory and practice and the social and historical moment in which they are articulated. Any historical moment necessitates reflection on its psychic dimensions as well as engenders the urgency with which new theorizations must be generated to understand not only where we stand but who we are. Theorizations bear both a date—and a cultural stamp. This requires us to acknowledge historical possibilities and their obstructive limits. The psychoanalyses (sic) we inherited must be transformed to face the new challenges thrown up by changing historical events and social conditions.

The Social and the Psychological: Philosophy and Theory In general parlance, the social stands for wide, external, and structural shaping of our lives while the psychological refers to private, interior and affective life. Psycho-social studies unsettles such an opposition and suspends any sharp division by suggesting that we cannot fully understand ourselves without acknowledging the social formation of our identities, while also arguing that social processes are also determined by unconscious processes and coloured by phantasy, the core discoveries of psychoanalysis (Rose). Is psychoanalysis a process of individual analysis or a general theory of subjectivity? How does it pose the relation between the intimate work on and with our psyches and social and cultural analysis? (Woodward). In New Foundations for Psychoanalysis ([1987] 1989), French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) identified four sites of psychoanalytical experience: the clinical experience, the extra-mural experience, theory as experience, and history as experience. He chose the term ‘extramural’ to distance his thinking from any crude notion of applied psychoanalysis. I am specifically interested in his comments on the relations of psychoanalysis to the cultural space:

32  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS When psychoanalysis moves away from the clinical context, it does not do so as an afterthought, or to take up side issues. It does so in order to encounter cultural phenomena. For when psychoanalysis is exported, it is not exported to just anywhere; not everything outside the clinical realm is an object for extra-mural psychoanalysis, and the conditions that pertain to its domains and methods constantly have to be redefined. Within this movement towards ‘outside psychoanalysis’, I would make a distinction between two aspects, two movements or two aspects of a single movement. It certainly has its interpretative, theoretical or even speculative side, but it also has its real side, and that has yet received too little attention. In referring to its real side, I mean that, in works on so-called ­extra-mural psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis invades the cultural, not only as a form of thought or a doctrine but also as a mode of being. Psychoanalysis is a broad cultural movement, and, in that sense, it is the whole of psychoanalysis which becomes extra-mural. (Laplanche [1987] 1989: 12, original emphasis)

Drawing on his theory of modern sublimation, Laplanche argues that the ‘export’ of psychoanalysis into culture means ‘that psychoanalytic man [person] is not simply man [person] as defined by psychoanalysis and studied by psychoanalysis, but a man [person] who is, henceforth, culturally marked by psychoanalysis’ (Laplanche [1987] 1989: 12). Laplanche is arguing that once psychoanalysis exists both as a clinical practice and also as a cultural presence, modern people become psychoanalytic subjects whether we know of psychoanalysis or not, practise it or dislike it. What psychoanalysis discovered and proposes about how the psyche works pervades, and indeed forms, modern subjectivity in ways that equally shape our cultures. Laplanche identifies theory as one site of psychoanalytical experience, distinct both from a history of its project, schools, theories, effects, and from the clinical site of its practice as well as this cultural dissemination. Theory is speculation, but also a reflective action: we are, he argues, a ‘self-theorizing being’; that is, a subject who is capable of asking ‘who and what am I, are we, psychologically?’ As theorists of subjectivity, however, we are always subject to the very conditions of subjectivity, the unconscious and phantasmatic processes psychoanalysis discovered and theorized, such as repression and symptoms. Laplanche considers some of Freud’s key, and overtly theoretical, writings as ‘living experiments.’ He points out that, at the limits of our understanding, and as we realize the expanded domains relating to psychoanalysis, anthropology, religion, biology and neurology,

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psychoanalytical theory is a conscious philosophical speculation on aspects of subjectivity that lie beyond our full understanding. Theory is based in revisions of analytical experience arising during the real encounters between analysts and analysands. It is also rich with philosophical speculation prompted by what is encountered in and beyond that space and process. Laplanche concludes that speculation/theory ‘is not devalued if we mobilize it, if we make it mobile, re-mobilize it, free it from its artificial bonds, or even give it a new valence, provided that we do not thereby reduce it to the dimension of pure illusion (something which is, for some, synonymous with phantasm or phantasy), or, on the other hand, to a set of purely rational arguments’ (Laplanche [1987] 1989: 13). Ettinger’s texts in these volumes are theoretical in this sense. Working at the deepest levels of psychoanalytical ‘speculation’ and philosophical reflection, she transforms psychoanalysis as a whole because she subjects its theoretical traditions to both an analytical and a cultural reading, discovering not only theoretical inadequacy but also ideological limitation arising precisely from the difficulty experienced by men and women (feminists and non-feminists alike) in thinking beyond the narcissism that the phallic illusion engenders.21 From the deep reflections of what emerged and was encountered in her double space of artistic creativity with its attentiveness to the suffering of the world, and of working with the suffering of the other in the analytic situation, Bracha L. Ettinger has transformed psychoanalytical theory in its most creatively speculative and daring expansion of its own field. Ettinger is not afraid of the mystical. Like many earlier modernists, she welcomes the ‘spiritual’ in her intimate relations with her painting. Yet her theoretical contribution addresses the cultural spaces and the effects on us of changed self-understanding of the forces, patterns, rules, and processes that shape us. Subjectivity, however experienced by each one of us in singular ways, is also culturally formed by larger social structures: class, gender, race, sexuality. They all signify and performatively enact difference. The intimacy between the socio-cultural and the subjective and most intimate planes are precisely what is revealed in Ettinger’s art and thought. She has probed the ‘culture’ of psychoanalytical theory to reveal how it classically ‘enacts' a model of thinking and imagining human subjectivity that is productive of some devastating consequences for our shared but differentiated humanity. Modified by the co-affective work of the Matrixial, both social and psychological spaces of encounter will be also shifted beyond the intersubjective

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plane in ways that, as her writings in Volume 2 show, may relieve us of the psychoanalytical ready-made ‘solutions’ to trauma, mostly in the shape of destroying those who are othered, and above all, in the shape of an individual ready-made mother-monster onto whom every psychic pain is projected, thus producing the Mother as ‘the cause’ of every trauma, ever available to be rejected. This tendency not only denies the subjectivity of the mother-figure and renders both m/Other and Mother objects ready for rejection, but also perpetuates a society based upon the model of sacrifice (Ettinger Vol. 1: 6 and Vol. 2: 4, 10)

The Poverty of Psychoanalysis in Thinking the Aesthetic and the Feminine In a conversation with the contemporary artist Craigie Horsfield (b.1949) on the occasion of an exhibition of her paintings at The Drawing Center in New York in 2001, Bracha L. Ettinger explained the double strands of her lifework as both artist and psychoanalyst in this beautiful passage. In the beginning I painted, then I thought I should not make a profession from that which is most hidden, the most non-social, and the most non-institutional. I had to hide it, not make art my professional work, and study something else. So, I studied and worked as a clinical psychologist. But what I pushed underground and left behind continually haunted me. When I came to Paris, I left everything of my life in Tel Aviv and my work in a psychiatric hospital, in order to paint. I painted and I stopped being a psychologist. But then again, slowly, what I left behind haunted me. I was first painting, and then not painting. Then I started painting again, until I slowly began to integrate the notes and the thinking, painting and life, this work and that profession, psychoanalytical theory and practice, writing and painting. It took me years to understand that this was all part of an artistic oeuvre that is mine. When I transferred my artistic experience with pigment, dust, colour, ash, lines and grains to my theoretical knowledge and practice, I wrote in a psychoanalytical language, because it was the only language I had, the only theoretical world at my disposition. At the same time, I discovered with anguish its poverty in the domains of art and of the feminine. (Ettinger 2001: 43)

We read of a movement between two professional spaces. One is considered public, the other private. The clinic and the studio are, however,

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both revealed to be the sites of interiority and conversation, ethical and transformational encounter with ‘others’, present and virtual. Studio and clinic are, in fact, at that time one and the same space, at once a space of exploration of the spirit and creativity later open to the public, and of private dialogue, reflection, attentiveness and interiority. Ettinger practises both inside and beyond the Laplanchean clinical and theoretical fields. In her notebooks she articulates a vision, an Archimedean point from which to reflect on both her fields of practice: art and analysis. In the analytical scenario, however, she recognizes the radical impoverishment in the generalized understanding of artwork, artworking and the feminine. These turn out to be intimately connected. Her understanding of both subjectivity and sexual difference will pass through reflection on the artistic-aesthetic. She must think ethically about Beauty—usually the topic for aesthetic theory in philosophy—while also redefining it psychoanalytically through a novel proposition of its origination in the processes that engender primordial elements of subjectivity itself, which, in her view, are aesthetic and proto-ethical. In her notes on painting from 1985/1989 to 1992 (Ettinger 1991, 1993), Ettinger, like the early modernist artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint, reflects on the feminine, the spiritual (Kandinsky) and the Cosmos, and on History (Vol. 2: 5, 6) to formulate the artistic beyond philosophical aesthetics, as aesthetics with ethics. She rethinks contemporary Beauty in art in relation to the Sublime—the two concepts of Kantian aesthetic theory she considers must be urgently recast in and for our post-traumatic era (Ettinger 1999 and Vol. 2: 10). In a text not included in this volume, ‘The With-in-Visible Screen: Weaving the Feminine into Culture by Matrixial Diggings in/of Art’ from 1996 Ettinger writes: Discussing art in a psychoanalytical context is inseparable, to my mind, from debating sexual difference, since we enter art by way of libido and through extensions of the psyche closest to the edges of corpo-reality. “The woman”, as Jacques Lacan puts it, “does not exist and does not signify anything.” She is Other/Thing-as-absence but this may be so – I put forward this reservation – from the phallic angle only. From this point of view, art leans on the ruins of “Woman”-as-absence and marking a feminine in art thus becomes automatically phallic too. I will here articulate a feminine aspect in/for/from art neither via a model of masculine castration and paternal prohibition nor as a pure bodily experience. From the prism that I have called Matrixial, to the extent that “Woman” diffracts,

36  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS she also digs channels of meaning and sketches an area of difference with sublimational outlets and ethical values paradoxical to the phallic paradigm. (Ettinger 1996b: 92)

Let me now offer a slow reading of this passage, stressing immediately its conclusion that, matrixially, Woman ‘digs channels of meaning’ and ‘sketches areas of difference’ that offer distinctive ‘sublimational outlets and ethical values’. To undo what makes it paradoxical to the phallic paradigm we need to grasp its particular version of Woman (Ettinger Vol. 1: 1–5). Art has functioned as a means for the subject (historically by default male and heterosexual) to seek and always miss the denied object—the object within a fantasized memory of plenitude, imagined as the before of the sacrifice that Culture demands as the price of entry into the symbolic order that precipitates us into gender through Language. What any one of us desires irrespective of our sexual orientation is, in classical psychoanalytical terms, what the Law of Culture (the incest taboo that deflects our desire from the parental generation to our own in the social interests of the future of the species) denies us. This is the tragic legend of human existence revealed by psychoanalysis: we cannot have what we want. As a result of human prematurity at birth—we cannot lift our heads, move or survive without constant care—we are born into such extreme dependency as human infants that all that we want—let me name it Nurture— is what the Law ultimately denies us in the interests of society’s future. Our need for survival forces the infant to send out a demand for sustenance to the Other, to the world as Nurture that must supply our needs. Expressed to an Other as Demand, Need is transformed by prohibition (we cannot forever depend on the Nurturing Other) into Desire which, incited by Need but now transformed by the prohibition, must be deflected culturally and ultimately sexually to substitutes who will, however, never deliver the satisfaction of those needs and demands that were generated in the infant-world situation. Prohibition, initially enacted in weaning and later on termed the incest taboo, deflects the infant’s inevitably aroused passion for Nurture—embodied in its carers, who keep this helpless being alive— from the vertical axis between two or more generations to the horizontal axis of the infant’s future peers. Societies require new beings. Anthropologically and psychologically, kinship and family are the forms of this social regulation that seeks to maintain the reproduction of the

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species, generation to generation, and which works in social terms of the reproducers and in terms of material as well as socio-sexual p ­ roduction (Rubin 1975). The deal is entry into Language/Culture through sac­ rifice of infantile intensities and wants. The mechanism is named ‘castration’. The sacrificial mechanism moves between rejection and abjection. The object of rejection is the split-off entity that Ettinger names the Woman-Other-Thing with the archaic m/Other, which in her view, are interlaced, and this often-obscured interlacing needs to be rethought. Thus, for the born infant, becoming a subject involves formative relations to representatives of the social order. These are initially encountered via the parental figures I refer to here according to their structural functions: Nurture and Law. Nurture encompasses all that keeps the helpless and dependent child alive. Law represents the social and the cultural rules that deny to the child the desire for perpetual access to Nurture instilled by its infant dependency on Nurture in the initiating trauma of postnatal life. Law represents the social and the cultural rules that shape subjectivity through symbolic ‘castration’. The crisis is resolved by the Oedipus Complex, the rendering unconscious the Law during our installation as subjects by its Language with its predetermined nouns and pronouns to establish identity, gender and roles: man, woman, he, she, mother, father, son, daughter, etc. The subject is split by the Law that acquires status over the once omnipotent figure of the now imagined plenitude, Nurture, which is retrospectively rendered negative by the castrative phallocentric social order and culture and its pre-existent hierarchical positioning of sexual difference (+/−). Masculinized (+) and femininized (−) subject positions are intimate articulations of the social and the psychological. Every subject is subjected to symbolic castration, that is, being cut off from ­pre-linguistic corporeal intensities and needs by the phallic Symbolic. Law declares that we cannot have what we want. The price for surviving and becoming a subject is then a sacrifice of what we both need and want by its deflection into a future promise for a substitute. Law limits the infinite desire for unconditional fulfilment. Language is the system of symbols by which we are alienated from the Real because we can only ‘speak’ of anything in the signifiers and systems provided by Language. In Lacanian parlance the Real, one of three registers, is what we cannot think since we think via the split between signifiers and signified. So, the Real is the lack which has no signifier (in the Symbolic) and no image (in the Imaginary). Language does not capture the Real. We are captured inside

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a symbolic system that delimits our reality and subjectivity. Becoming speakers exiles us from the Real even as it remains a formative void. Masculinity and femininity function as signifiers subjected to and by Language. They signify hierarchically differentiated positions within a shared fate of being subjected by the various process that makes us subjects: Language. This means that whatever our later sexuality or choices of lovers, each of us seek what is missing and blame the world for its lack. Woman is not a signified and signifies only as absence that a symbolically incited Desire perpetually seeks, and inevitably and constantly fails to abolish. In Lacan’s sense, therefore, Woman does not signify any existent being and Mother signifies what must be lost. Woman is associated with what lies outside signification while the maternal is absorbed into a phallic paradigm, hence Ettinger’s recasting and shifting of Lacan’s theory in her formulae: she articulates Lacan’s Woman-Other-Thing with the archaic m/Other that she has postulated. She theorizes their shared zone and its meaning for subjects of different embodiments. In Lacanian terms, she explains, Woman is lack and Mother is rejected in order that Desire (a key Lacanian term) can establish itself. Thus, from Freud to Lacan, only one Libido, related to only one Eros has been recognized, which is retroactively defined as Oedipal-sexual. Ettinger, however, conceptualizes another Eros, and hence, a different eroticizing mechanism. In the passage cited above, Ettinger thus specifies the limits within the psychoanalytical tradition. She shows that Lacan’s account of subjectivity and Desire is from the phallic angle only. That does not mean from men’s point of view (see Ettinger Vol. 1: 1–5). The phallic angle represents a particular logic under which a phallocentric system operates. In Lacan’s system, however, the key signifier that holds this logic in place is itself an absence: the Phallus is symbol not entity. The Phallus arbitrates meaning on a logic premised on a binary: plus/minus, presence/absence onto which masculine (+) and feminine (−) are mapped. Ettinger’s proposal of an additional prism through which to think subjectivity delineates a Matrixially feminine sphere defined neither by castration nor by paternal prohibition. Ettinger’s proposal of an additional prism in the Symbolic delineates a matrixially feminine and maternal sphere defined neither by sheer jouissance, nor by castration, nor by the patriarchal Law. Thus, we have to leave aside or behind the many different definitions of the feminine she identifies in Lacan’s texts. Ettinger’s challenge was to overcome these phallocentric propositions: that Woman beyond the

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phallic domain cannot have a meaning; that Woman signifies nothing; that Mother is first fusional and then phallic; that culture must be based on her foreclosure first and then on the subject’s severance and split from her as body later; that the primordial feminine is either reduced to body and jouissance, matter and passivity or signified as lack; that she is the proof of the threat of or punishment by castration; that the feminine is subordinated to the single sexual signifier; and that there is only one kind of libido under the sign of the Freudian active/passive split. At the same time as she displaces these diverse Lacanian and Freudian propositions, Ettinger also rejects the idea of Woman that we find in Winnicott’s definition of a holding object ready to be destroyed for the infant to feel alive (Ettinger Vol. 2: 10). Under Phallocentrism, therefore, Woman has come to signify the tragic condition of human subjectivity defined by the paternal prohibition in relation to which the phallic binary pair, masculine/feminine is produced as terms of a shared illusion that has, however, profoundly differentiating and asymmetrical effects for those defined in this system as masculine or feminine. The symbol Phallus creates and arbitrates a structural asymmetry engendering both the masculine phantasy of one day having access to, having, what is imagined as the paternal Phallus, and the feminine illusion of being the Phallus for the masculine Other. It is vital to iterate that Ettinger proposes a supplementary paradigm that is as relevant for all subjectivities and sexualities as the phallic paradigm. This Matrixial feminineM does what the Phallic does psychoanalytically: it engenders difference. The matrixial feminineM engenders, however, a different difference. It is a sexual difference that connotes particular modes of sublimation—the transformation of bodily sensations and intensities into social and cultural forms. It can inspire ethical values and inflect relations to the other later undertaken in consciousness and agency as a subject. If Matrix is an expansion of the range of understanding of subjectivity, why then is it termed feminine? How does it inflect those who are also formed as feminine subjects under the phallocentric division, the feminine Ph as well as those who reject identification with these positions and nomenclatures? Firstly, overcoming the massive weight of patriarchal culture and its psychologically installed anxiety, we must liberate the expression feminine from connotations such as lesser, penis-envying, representing the natural, hysterical, evoking anatomy, all of which come to mind even in feminist thought where the word causes anxiety precisely because

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the feminine is understood only the feminine Ph which indeed signifies everything that progressive and queer feminism feels it must resist. In some areas of feminist theory, the feminine has become a completely quarantined concept. Yet, in other theoretical communities, the feminine is valued as a rich resource for resistance to the limited Symbolic and Imaginary of a phallocentric order (Braidotti 1994; Cheah et al. 1996). As a means of shifting some feminist hostility towards the term and its baggage of phallic connotations, Ettinger’s engagement with the artistic-aesthetic can be a way to avoid the implication that any thinking with the body traps us into essentialist reductionist predetermination by already sexed bodies. Instead we can acknowledge the inevitable psychologization of the body by thinking about it in a radically new way. Ettinger thus invites us to think with a female corpo-reality and its psychic effects. She also proposes a matrixial Eros that parallels the sense of bodily-ness we find and accept in theories of the Freudian drives, Lacanian desires, and Deleuzian energies. Even as we work with a psychologized corporeality, we are remaining true to the findings of psychoanalysis about the concurrent force of phantasy and the role of the Unconscious. The aesthetic thus offers a way back to the inevitability of having to acknowledge the psychic dimensions of the soma (body) without losing a sense of its materiality and, indeed, its differences and specificities. Aesthesis, from the Greek, refers to knowing and responding through the senses as opposed to the apprehension of the world through the rational, thinking mind: cognition. When eigthteenth-century European philosophers were thinking about thinking, they also had to make sense of ways of experiencing and responding to the world that could not be identified with cognition or reason. They defined aesthetic experience in two forms: Beauty and the Sublime. Aesthesis refers to feeling and sense-perception: seeing, touching, hearing. It explores what we might psychoanalytically understand in close relation to affect (Brennan 2004; Green [1973] 1999; Stein 1991). Ettingerian psychoanalysis specifically explores the subjectivizing aesthesis of affects aroused with touch, sound, breath, rhythm, and beyond the senses modes of apprehension, and the tracings of their inscriptions arising in and transmitted by and through the different partners of an encounter-event. In this Ettinger shares in, but also challenges, the philosophical trends exemplified by the twentieth-century recuperation of vitalist theories of affect and affection in the work of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) and the materialism of Henri Bergson (1859–1941),

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by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who challenged the linguistic and structuralist paradigms dominating the later twentieth century-thought in the humanities that were also associated with Lacan’s re-reading of Freud. Deleuze and Guattari led what has been identified as the shift from a focus on representation and meaning to affect (Massumi 2002; O’Sullivan 2006). Ettinger was a close friend of Guattari; she published a conversation on transference and the aesthetic object with him (Ettinger 1997c; reprinted in Ettinger 2006; explored in Johnson 2006). Her attention to transubjectivity escapes, however, both the classic understanding of an individual sensing subject and the Deleuzian generalized anti-Oedipus rhizomatic fragmentation, entering into an in-between phenomenological zone sensed by the individuated subject in search for the meaning of its several jointnesses. In the passage we are reviewing, Ettinger invokes libido, a Latin word used by Freud to define a drive: ‘the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude… of those drives which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word “love”’ (Freud [1921] 1940: 90). The libido is a life drive; it is the energy directed outwards towards the world. This life drive works through the points of contact on, and borders of, the body: oral (in and out), anal (out or held in). Spreading to the surfaces of our skin, the drive invests our eyes as both extensions of touch and autonomous sites of pleasure, producing the scopic drive and scopophilia (love of looking and being looked at). The life drive thus eroticizes these bodily zones, i.e. invests them with the tension between displeasure and pleasure. The drives engrave repeated pathways across the chaotically unmapped bodily field of the infant. With this theory, Freud built a passage from the intensely corporeal, or rather the corpo-Real, that is, from the materiality of sensate living forms, to the incitement of a psychologized psyche: the psychic apparatus. He thus theorized a psyche-soma. In Greek, soma means body and psyche mind/soul. Pulsations and intensities associated with the drives invest and pattern bodily sites (skin, smell, touch, eyes, mouth, anus, hearing, infant genitals) with emerging psychological significance, psychically mapping a non-anatomical but phantasized body in the seesaw of pleasure and displeasure, tension and release. The drives seek release from displeasure (its aim) through satisfaction by means of something (its object that does not mean an object per se). Freud plotted out stages in infancy in which certain bodily zones become eroticized. The oral erogenous zone comes first as the mouth

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takes in the nourishment necessary to relieve the anguish of hunger. This initial imperative is extended beyond need into the autonomous pleasures of sucking and oral stimulation associating mouth and breast with the additional sensations of being contained, held, looked at, rocked, being filled and slipped into a state of bliss. The next phase, the anal, begins the delineation of another body zone as erogenous, yielding pleasure by holding, expelling or gifting. The third phase involves the discovery of pleasurable sensations belonging to the sex organs, where the anxiety can be released by autoerotic sensations of the infant’s tiny genitals, penis or clitoris/labia. This discovery intensifies narcissism as well as stimulating anxiety at the possible loss of this body part that can allay anxiety through autoerotic pleasure. Eroticization of the body attests to our living, our being alive, our relation to the world into which the infant is born in precarious dependency by virtue of its prematurity vis-à-vis survival. Many analysts who came later moved from Freud’s drive theory to a theory of  Object Relations. With Deleuze and Guattari, Anzieu and others, the erogenous zones (eyes, mouth, anus, ear and infant genitals) open to more perceptions associated with bodily sites and surfaces (skin, smell, touch and more); different intensities lead to psychological significance, mapping the phantasized body in the seesaw of pleasure and displeasure, tension and release. Why, then, in the passage I am analyzing, does Ettinger jump from stating that which seems obvious—that in a Freudian world the libido of the drive-ridden human infant is intimately linked to the aesthetic in terms of sense-perception—to Lacan’s statement about the Woman?22 What is the meaning of her passage from erotogenic zones to the eroticized aerials of the psyche? (Vol. 2: 1, 6). Eroticization (to use the Ettingerian expression) of the human as a body-psyche, however, does not indicate the (Freudian) psychologization by erogenous zones and their retroactive phallic-sexual-libidinal investment. Lacan revised Freud’s rather bodily theory of psychic formation by arguing against the residue in Freudian theory of a sequential developmental and its tragic narrative of the infant progressively losing access to its primary objects, even though it keeps, in principle, the same primary objects. Freud’s developmental stages hit up against the paternal prohibition. Having made a libidinous, phallic-sexual-genital ­pleasure-seeking infant, the Law, represented in the linguistic symbolic position of the Name of the Father in the Oedipal triangulation says ‘No!’23 Lacan named the ‘No! of the Father’ the Nom-du-Père, playing on the aurally

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indistinguishable French words Non (no) and Nom (name) of the Father. Lacan thus redefines Freud’s story of a developmental loss as a structural lack, which represents the insertion of existing social-cultural laws interpreted, however, and formulated in the light of a project that serves a boy’s sexual development, a development which is taken to represent the neutral and universal development (see Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5). While Freud made the radical case that human sexuality is not innate—it is, rather, the product and effect of the complex processes arising from human prematurity at birth and then stimulated across the three erotogenic stages that makes them retroactively sexual in a phallic male-boy mode—Lacan argued that we become sexuated (his term) in the same process by which we become speaking beings through the subordination of the imaginary relation to the body’s orifices and genitals to and by signifiers from the Symbolic. When we are ‘accessed’ to Language (think of a library book being entered in a coded classificatory system), the subject is effectively spoken by that system’s symbols. At the same time, these codes alienate the subject even as the effect of entering Language is to make the subject delude itself that it is a speaking agent—speaking rather than spoken. At the end of his life, Freud had admitted that he had failed to understand the specificity of the psychological formations and experiences of women-as-subjects and that he failed to understand femininity psychologically (see Ettinger’s presentation of this in Chapter 1 and Ettinger, 1993f). In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis of 1932, Freud devoted a lengthy lecture to the psychological condition of femininity: Weiblichkeit in his German, translated as feminité in French (Freud 1932). In English, Freud’s Weiblichkeit has been translated at different times as ‘womanliness’ (Riviere 1928) or ‘femininity’ (Strachey 1932), both of which are unusable for our purposes. In English, womanliness now connotes adult women’s developed and sexual form while femininity typically signifies being ‘appropriately’ woman-like in terms of prevailing social convention. It implies a set of attributes, appearances or behaviours that enhance a visual image of what a woman should be according to an external standard or social definition. Ettinger argues that Freud more or less confessed that he had folded the specificity of girls’ and women’s subjectivities negatively into his Oedipal theory of little boys and men, so that the formation of the masculine in the service of male narcissism had become the default universal subject position. By 1932, Freud did finally acknowledge the importance of the relation of girl-child to the mother at depths he had been unable fully to plumb.

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Ettinger links Freud’s late confession about his blindness concerning the feminine to Lacan's late realization that he too had been unable to think feminine jouissance—a jouissance that he did finally acknowledge— because of the logic of his schema of sexuation where ‘Woman does not exist and signifies nothing’. Thus, while recognizing the existence of a supplementary feminine jouissance, Lacan claimed it as meaningless and impossible to articulate in any symbolic way, even by a woman. How, he pondered aloud in one of his seminars, could any woman report on what not only lacks any signifier but is also considered unthinkable? Ettinger has thus had to invent a symbolic field. At first poetically, in her notebooks dating from 1984 onwards, she formulated concepts to delineate the mechanisms and processes she had first glimpsed through painting in the wake of traumatic history. Then, she elaborated her insights theoretically in order to delineate another sexual difference and a supplementary Symbolic, Eros, screen and gaze. In the same move, she explains the structural failure of psychoanalysts to theorize femininity— the sexually differentiated subjectivity of ‘women’—outside the negated place (sic) of Woman-Other-Thing (her post-Lacanian formulation). She thus rewrites and imbricates the relations between sexual difference, femininity and sexualities while redefining, and so as to expand our understanding of, human subjectivity.

Language and Sexual Indifference I have used the term Language, capital L to indicate that language is not just an instrument for communication. Language is a system that embodies the Law of Culture. In linguistic theory, language can be defined as a system of signs that produce meaning but not through positive assignation of meaning to each thing (words as names). Meaning is effectively produced only in the relations of difference between signifiers. Meaning is thus produced through an internal system of differences (between sounds and graphic marks, and ultimately syntaxes and grammars). Saussure theorized language as a system of signifying elements—signifiers [letters and sounds] and signifieds [mental representations or concepts]—brought together to form signs. These signs produce meaning, however, only in a relational and negative difference between the signifiers that operate on two axes: syntagmatic, as in the sequence of words in a grammatical sentence (I-go-to-the-station), and paradigmatic, as in the possible sets : pronouns, verbs, prepositions (I,

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not you or we, go, not come, drive, to, not from, the station, not home). Each word in the sentence has been extracted from a range of other possibilities, nouns, verbs, prepositions, which, absent at the moment of writing or speech, actually constitute the very condition of differential meaning for those signifiers that are spoken or written. The absent signifiers form the not- that makes the word that is present signify relationally and without any pre-existent substance of its own. Thus, the nouns Man or Woman for instance, do not signify two distinct entities that pre-exist language. Saussure thus taught us that language makes meaning only by difference and substitution, and not by positive designation. As a sign, m_a_n [signifiers and concept] can only have meaning in negative relation to what it is not. In this paradigm, the absent is w-o-m-a-n [signifiers and concept]. But there are no pre-existing concepts so the signifieds of these two terms are fundamentally X and not-X whereby X can only signify because of a not-X while not-X does not acquire a reciprocal role as the X to Man as Woman’s Not-X. As a result, in this logic, the sign Woman does not signify in itself. As Not-Man, its function is to sustain the illusion of meaning for MAN by its negative emptiness. As we become subjects by entering into Language and as Language provides signifiers based on this X and not-X relation, the difficulty of speaking of sexual difference emerges: the terms which appear to indicate two entities, man and woman, actually produce only one sex and its other, i.e. One and not-the-One. (To think this perplexing semiotic proposition through, just make a list of a whole series of binary opposites such as Day/Night, Sun/Moon, Pure/Impure, Light/Darkness, Active/Passive, Man/Woman and you may find how quickly those on the left of these pairs acquire valorized meaning down the accumulation of signifiers while those on the right serve as the negatives, the absented or the lesser by which the valorized become valorized but only through each relation and its repetition.) As we become subjects by entering into Language— language providing the signifiers through which to signify ourselves— and as Language provides signifiers based on this X and not-X negatively relational difference, sexual difference cannot be articulated except as the negation of sexual difference. In her devastating re-reading of all Western philosophy against itself, including psychoanalysis, feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray exposes the underlying monosexualism that she, therefore, identifies as sexual indifference.

46  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS In the process of elaborating a theory of sexuality, Freud brought to light something that had been operative all along though it remained implicit, hidden, unknown: the sexual indifference that underlies the truth of any science, the logic of every discourse. This is readily apparent in the way Freud defines female sexuality. In fact, this sexuality is never defined with respect to any sex except the masculine. Freud does not see two sexes… the feminine is always defined in terms of deficiency or atrophy. (Irigaray [1974] 1985: 69)

Irigaray interprets Western philosophical discourse psychoanalytically, identifying the symptoms of its repressions: ‘By exhibiting this symptom, this crisis point in metaphysics where we find that sexual “indifference” that has assured metaphysical coherence and “closure”, Freud offers it up for our analysis, with his text offering itself to be understood, to be read, as doubtless the most relevant re-make of an ancient dream of self… one that had never been interpreted.’ (Irigaray [1974] 1985: 28). Phallocentric sexual indifference sustains monosexuality and renders impossible the recognition, for instance, of desire between women: ‘So there will be no female homosexuality, just a hom(m)o-sexuality in which woman will be involved in the process of specularizing the Phallus, begged to maintain the desire for the same that man has, and will ensure at the same time, elsewhere and in complementary and contradictory fashion, the perpetuation in the couple of the pole of “matter”’ (Irigaray [1974] 1985: 101–103). Irigaray plays here on the words ‘homosexuality’, based on Greek homo for same, and ‘hom(m)o-sexuality’ from the French for man homme. Drawing also on anthropology, Irigaray elsewhere binds together hom(m)osexuality, sexual indifference and the resulting social system based on exploitation of and trade in its excluded Other—a sequence running from matter, earth, materials to women’s bodies—in a system named patriarchal and symbolized by the Phallus (Irigaray 1985b). Furthermore, we begin to be able think about interdependence for instance with non-anthropocentric life and the life form of the earth itself. Ettinger neither substitutes Matrix for the Phallus nor identifies either with a political entity or gender. Each logic covers a different range. The harm is done if the Phallic remains the sole arbiter of subjectivity. I need to digress here into literary theory to make this clear. The phallic model must remain in force for certain operations of subjectivity and language to take place. These rely on what Julia Kristeva, in her literary-psychoanalytical study of the creative process of the poetic as a

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shifter of dominant socio-linguistic order, named the thetic. The thetic is thought to be the initiating gesture that establishes, for subsequent language use by a speaking subject, the positions of subject and object. It does so by creating separation between the subject and its objects symbolically, via signifiers and signification. Kristeva writes: We shall distinguish the semiotic (drives and their articulation) from the realm of signification, which is always that of a proposition or judgment, in other words, a realm of positions. This positionality… is structured as a break in the signifying process, establishing the identification of the subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality. We shall call this break, which produces the positing of signification, a thetic phase. All enunciation, whether of a word or a sentence, is thetic. It requires an identification; in other words, the subject must separate from and through his image, from and through his objects. This image and objects must first be posited in a space that becomes symbolic because it connects the two separate positions, recording them or redistributing them in an open combinatorial system. (Kristeva [1974] 1984: 42)

Preceding this critical thetic rupture that enables signification by separation of the subject from its objects, Kristeva identifies what she names the semiotic. This relates to the baby/infant still traversed by Freudian drives before entry into the Symbolic (Language). The semiotic is then associated with a space, the chora, a term Kristeva borrowed from Plato’s Khora in his text Timeaus. For Kristeva the chora is a necessary intermediary between infant, speechless chaos and full speech. The chora denotes: … an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases. We differentiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulation from a disposition that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition, and gives rise to a geometry. Although a theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm) precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality. Our discourse – all discourse – moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. (Kristeva [1974] 1984: 25–26)

Kristevan literary theory, based on Freudian drive theory, gives an account of the process of the subject’s coming into language from its

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infans state—in Latin infans literally means ‘not able to speak’. Kristeva explains her thesis of the chora in relation to pre-symbolic vocal and gestural predispositions in the postnatal mother and baby situation, clearly locating her thinking about this pre-Oedipal situation still within the framework of the Oedipal family (mother/father/child) and a notion of the differences between the sexes that she defines as biological. She uses her theory to mark the classic Freudian distinction between the ­non-psychological and hence purely biological event of pregnancy and the postnatal psychological condition, which is effectively linguistic even in its proto-linguistic, semiotic chora phase: The chora is a modality of signifiance (sic) in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and is the distinction between real and symbolic. We emphasize the regulated aspect of the chora: its vocal and gestural organization is subject to what we can call an objective ordering, which is dictated by natural or socio-historical constraints such as the biological difference between the sexes or family structure. We may, therefore, posit that social organization, always already symbolic, imprints its constraint in a mediated form which organizes the chora not according to a law (a term we reserve the symbolic) but through an ordering. (Kristeva [1974] 1984: 26–27)24

Kristeva’s thetic and chora link the semiotic chora to the postnatal maternal—Plato considers the maternal only as a receptacle—as a holding space for the proto-speaking infant. Kristeva here excavates the ­pre-Oedipal, pre-linguistic processes of postnatal subjectivity, which, therefore, remain theoretically within the phallic order. I have introduced Kristeva’s intervention to make clear from the start a profound difference between Ettinger’s and such feminist theories of psychoanalytically-based relations between language and subjectivity. Ettinger proposes a radically non-Oedipal theory of subjectivity. She alone has theoretically, and indeed analytically as well as culturally, revealed both primordially prenatal and concurrent postnatal elements of subjectivity veiled by the final victory of the phallocentric Symbolic. Ettinger offers a radical proposition of a primordial sphere of transubjectivity that generates a humanizing/humanized joint-becoming and co-emerging yet differenciated (sic) subjectivity. Whereas Kristeva assumes a primary ordering of the subject by abjection, Ettinger indicates its primary borderlinking.

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This is, therefore, very different from what Kristeva posits with her notion of the subject being formed only postnatally in progressive stages of separation from the maternal body, which must be abjected, and then from the intermediating maternal chora, as we pass inexorably down the one-way road to Language via the traumatic resolution of the Oedipus complex installing a familial modelling of gender positions and sexuality. Phallocentric theory is premised on a splitting separation and the cutting of the child from what is posed as undifferentiated cloth (fusion, symbiosis associated with the maternal as body and pre-birth as a solely physiological state) (Ettinger 2001). This simultaneously refuses subjectivity to the becoming-maternal subject by treating the maternal only as a space or an environment, a container (Bion) or a receptacle, an object from which, to become a subject, each of us must be severed firstly via abjection and ultimately by the castrative split. We do indeed have to learn to adopt propositionality and to distinguish ourselves as subjects from our objects in order to speak. No question. Is the other, however, merely an object for the subject? For Ettinger, borderlinking and borderspacing are both prior to any possibility of abjection, and their dynamic continues in parallel to other, later, mechanisms of separation. She theorizes the shifting processes in which the psychic witnessing entity of becoming-maternal with b ­ ecoming-infant initiates relations-without-relating as the archaic basis for the concurrent pathway to the-impossibility-of-not-sharing and to a symbolic zone of ­con-cerned witnessing. The artist-theorist has been, after all, a silent witness to the witnesses, as she writes in one of her notebooks (Ettinger 1993c: 84). Matrixiality is, therefore, not a pre-phallic phase nor does it merely precede the Phallic. It exists with and beside and beneath it. Matrixiality relativizes and thereby shifts the exclusive dominance of Phallic so we may glimpse at least one (there may be others) supplementary dimension in subjectivity that surfs beneath or beside it in all of us as a result of the psychologizing condition of human becoming in subtle moves of a proximity-in-distance that is the sexual specificity of a feminineM. This dimension within which we are already working in our ­encounters with art and with others, notably in the psycho-dynamic space of analytical transference, with its borderlinking-borderspacing differenc/ tiating that is always-already at work, receives, then, a specific terminology. The Matrix is a Symbol that enables us to evoke—in poetic prose— this dimension. Ettinger has found herself creating neologisms such as

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sub-symbolic, non-conscious (rather than the conscious/unconscious pair), ­ sub-knowledge, subreality and the subreal, transubjective (subject-with-subject resonance) and transjective (subject-with-object resonance), ­ com-passion, wit(h)nessing, corpo-reality, co-response-ability and other compound terms  such as co/in-habit(u)ation—a vocabulary to identify the Matrixial inside and outside.

Symbol and Thinking Apparatus: Matrix and Phallus Symbols organize meaning systems or make something intelligible for thought. By conceptualizing the Matrix, Ettinger intervenes radically in the fields of thought and language even while explaining how matrixial thinking challenges thought and its languages. She offers metramorphosis in-between and beyond the metonymic and the metaphoric. Matrix makes possible our re-thinking the feminine by evoking a feminine M as a subjective dimension arising already from a position that most psychoanalysts would not dare to consider: the p ­ renatal-with-prematernal instance in the proto-subjective pre-history of the pre-subject—an instance psychoanalysis has so far mainly theorized as an undifferentiated dwelling in the maternal as a containing body. With the Symbol, Matrix, Ettinger redefines for us the meaning of a figure, the m/Other, as always already a subjective figure, not object, a figure which is a subjectivizing and humanizing facet on the most primordial aesthetic strata. Freud, she reminds us, associated primordial love with the primordial Father; Lacan associated this kind of Love with the paternal through the figure S1 (Ettinger Vol. 1: 1). Ettinger radically associates primordial love with the archaic m/Other. She explores this Love (Ettinger Vol. 2: 1, 6, 8) and the ways psychoanalysis abuses it in the countertransference (Ettinger Vol. 1: 8). Matrix and Phallus are not gendered even as they have implications for how each of us experiences and lives sexualities and genders. While all are subject to degrees of subjective organization by both symbolic fields, Matrix engenders a dimension of subjectivity and sexuality for all subjects firstly irrespective of, and later beside, the subsequent Oedipalization, beyond sexual orientation and beyond gender identification where masculine aligns with Father and feminine aligns with Mother. As symbols, they are not alternatives; they do not stand for the opposition between two types, two sexes, two positions.25 The Matrix works metramorphically during asymmetrical yet reciprocal transformation. Its processes

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induce specific notions of space (matrixial borderspace) and time (matrixial bordertime). In psychoanalysis, Ettingerian theory recognizes the transformative relay between infant corpo-reality with its lingering sensations garnered in a prolonged prenatal sojourn and the complex, postnatally incited, structures of phantasy and language that transform—but never knock out—the corpo-real intensities and patterns of the proto-psychic experience interwoven with the maternal phenomenological apprehension of pregnancy. Psychic matrixiality indicates the possibility of ­trans-inscription of traces of the memory of the non-I in the I that Ettinger perceives as fundamental to artworking as transcryptum (Ettinger Vol. 1: 7, 9). Finally, to be aware of such an experience, it had to enter linguistically in what we might name—following Kristeva—a radically poetic mode that holds open the relations between linguistic signifiers and intimated, aesthetically sensed meaning hovering at their margins and in touch with, in Ettinger’s terms, the archaic aesthetic: resonance, intimated otherness, borderspacing, borderlinking, co-affection, proximity-in-distance, d ­istance-in-proximity, jointness-in-difference, carriance, fascinance in wonder, in compassion, in awe, in trust, diffracted traces, wit(h)nessing and witnessing, com-passion and compassion. Ettinger’s work shares with recent strands in current feminism (Barad, Haraway) the sensitivity to psychic diffraction and entanglement, but these phenomena are ethically humanized by her in terms of transjectivity, transsubjectivity, later termed transubjectivity, and subreality (Thiele 2014). Her work also shares with several strands of psychoanalysis that, along with recent scientific research, suggest that in the later stages of the pre-birth process, the becoming-infant garners sensations, sound, movement, rhythms and responsiveness to specific others (Stern).26 Such garnering is non-cognitive, and possibly pre-phantasy as there is not yet a psychic apparatus fit to translate the digested co-affects and transensing into meaning. The sensory impressions, repeated over months, register aesthetically and in anticipation. The distinctive move Ettinger makes is to think this time-space ­proto-psychologically and as inseparable from the pre-mother’s transmissive psychic linkage to the pre-infant, firstly as transject (not yet ­pre-subject) and, at a much later stage, as transubject on a level that becomes retroactively pre-subjective. In doing so, Ettinger identifies a specific time-space of encounter between the pre-subjective and the subjectivizing m/Other—a fully formed subject, the maternal

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instance—sharing in asymmetrical reciprocity on the partial level a resonance space and an interval time with the not-yet-a-subject— the pre-individual instance—in transitive transmissibility. The partners-in-difference are first unknown to each other on the cognitive level. This cannot be full subject-to-subject to meeting. This is so vital to grasp because it forestalls any sentimentality or utopian phantasy. Matrixiality renders us vulnerable to trauma, even as subsymbolic matrixiality attends to trauma.27 The co-emergence (there is no becoming-maternal-subject without the ­ becoming-infant-proto-subject and vice-versa) produces effects and incites affects, asymmetrically within a shared borderspace where the events of the one and the other cannot but co-affect even while being differentiated at the level of their subjectively different situations. This unique pattern of alliance (there is no psychic and symbolic non-I without I and vice-versa at each ­encounter-event) produces effects and incites affects within a shared borderspace where the events of the one and the other cannot but be con-cerned (Vol. 2: 10) even while the one and the other are being or becoming different individuals and are separate psychic entities on other levels (Vol. 1: 3, 9).28 I have italicized certain terms that were necessary for Ettinger to create, in language, a pregnance sphere understood very differently from the ways in which biological, anatomical and medical languages speak both of pregnancy and gestation. Because the limit of birth has been set as the limit for thinking about subjectivity, few have questioned the implications of such an arbitrary limit. Religious authorities have claimed this territory and imposed their laws on pregnant female bodies, placing them entirely under the phallic Law. Few philosophers have acknowledged an urgency or necessity to rethink this question from a new perspective. With Ettinger, we have now concepts to show how absurd it is to apply the phallic law into a realm which pre-exists it a priori and resists it in principle. If birth is defined exclusively as the beginning of the human, retrospectively we deny this time-space of becoming by treating it as merely physiological. We also deny any psychological meaning to the ethical and indeed traumatic event of maternal experience. Finally, we also refuse to this structure of ­co-becoming-partners-in-difference within proximity-in-distance any potential significance for thinking about human subjectivity and hence relationality at the level we might want to mobilize it postnatally for social, psychological and ethical action. Psychoanalytical thinking about subjectivity has been trapped by the hegemony of phallic thought solely in the familial postnatal model

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of the Oedipal complex, of children, fathers and mothers, all of which undoubtedly and tragically determines aspects of postnatal psychological life and arose in the social organizations of society that appropriated women and children as tokens in society-forming exchange (Lévi-Strauss, Rubin). Subjectivity has also been solely defined by the infant’s emergence in separation from mother who is thereby reduced to being treated as the following elements from which we need to be split in order to become a subject: a containing body (birth), a breast (weaning), a gaze (the mirror phase), with all these severances ultimately assumed into and redefined by the cut of symbolic castration. Ettinger’s work reveals how the oppositions we find in psychoanalytical thinking of fusion versus split, symbiosis and non-differentiation versus isolation and rejection, all of which associates the archaic m/Other with deep regression and, in fact, the Death-drive, may become pathological when they are exploited by the analyst's countertransference for the purpose of splitting. Such splits can induce psychosis in the analysand. Matrixial theory and its process metramorphosis challenges this whole apparatus of metaphoric substitution and transferential splitting. The Matrix models a primordial process of borderspacing and borderlinking in the conditions—paradoxical to the phallic mind—of proximity-in-distance and relations-without-relating. Matrixiality thereby redefines a feminine as a subjectivizing, partial otherness, encountered too soon for recognition as an Other, but which must not be thought of only in physiological or biological terms. How radical this is, even for feminist theory, can be shown by a comparison. In the 1970s, following her own pregnancy, literary theorist and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva found herself unable to articulate the event of her own pregnancy or even to imagine who might be its subject, if there could be a subject of pregnancy at all, given the derangement of conscious subjectivity produced in the condition itself. She identified only two discourses that were available to women with regard to pregnancy. One is the discourse of science, which cannot account for what she named ‘the mother as the site of her own proceedings’ (i.e. it makes the process biological and not an event for a subject). The other is the discourse of Catholic Christianity that defines ‘maternity as the impossible elsewhere, a sacred beyond… necessarily virginal and committed to assumption’ (Kristeva [1977] 1980: 237): the vessel between the sacred and the word. Kristeva is forced to conclude that in the service of species

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reproduction and ‘through a body’, the woman-subject in pregnancy becomes a ‘thoroughfare, a threshold where “nature” meets “culture”’ (Kristeva [1977] 1980: 238). Temporarily alienated from her own self and rendered almost psychotic for the duration, the pregnant woman serves society as the passage between two phallic opposites, thus afflicting the ‘non-subject maternal subject’ with both a momentary madness during pregnancy (Kristeva [1977b] 1986) and a postnatal passioning that, in due course, demands massive psychological work on the mother’s part to disinvest from, and allow the separation of, the child-Phallus she has phantasized, during the madness of pregnancy, as making good her phallic lack (Kristeva [2005] 2010). Here we can see the significance of Ettinger’s thought, one generation later, that refuses to place the becoming-mother only as the passage between biology and society or as the vessel between body and the speaking subject, and that furthermore refutes both the Kleinian idea that the mother is the infant’s phallic object and the Lacanian idea that the infant is the mother’s phallic object. Under the matrixial prism that Ettinger outlines, subjectivity is present in pregnancy for the becoming m/Other—not as a singular, deranged state as Kristeva describes it. Ettinger’s disturbing the phallic norms of the symbolic accounts of the self and other required an entire, new vocabulary and critical theorization to enable us to acknowledge what all of us—men-subjects and women-subjects, transubjects and subjects of all sexualities—already carry as traces, imprints and strings of proto-ethical potential for a further transconnectivity that is non-psychotic. As a thinking apparatus, the Matrix models a severality that is, therefore, a proto-ethical encounter, with an I being modified in the presence of a non-I and of a notyet I ­co-emerging with its non-I in a prolonged encounter, washed in asymmetrical affects and registering effects that may later, postnatally be mobilized in certain key spaces or moments, even within a universe of meaning ruled by the Phallus. Ettinger thus argues that subjectivizing in severality, initially in a prolonged encounter that is already both feminine and maternal and proto-ethical, may, later in postnatal life, be mobilized in certain key spaces or moments to enable us to foster certain ethical values and positions over others. Matrixiality thus holds open a potential to resist phallic values and positions, prompting specific foundations for recognizing alterity. Matrix is sexual while it is a non-gendered zone. Its effects/affects are, thus, not at all connected with what we take to be gender. It is also not

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to be confused with the psychoanalytical and literary-linguistic theories that excavate the pre-Oedipal; such theories are still tied by that very pre-formulation of the Oedipal (phallic). The Matrixial cannot avoid the sexual when human becoming is initially the product of an event of sexuality—willed or otherwise—which, in turn, plays into postnatal phantasy of the primal scene and shapes the affect of the Uncanny and the modes of the aesthetic, extending to the oceanic feelings identified by Freud in the opening  pages of Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud [1930] 1961) Biologically, sexual reproduction begins at conception with the meeting of sperm and egg. That done, biology takes its course in embryonic development which takes place in a female body that is also a woman-subject’s body/an embodied woman-subject. When conceived, however, as also a proto-psychic time-space, the very late period of pregnancy stimulates a sensate living entity that is sharing psychic threads with an unknown-yet-intimated otherness’ mind and body. From the pregnant pre-mother’s point of view, becoming happens within and to herself, a self that is an already a subjectivized, sexuated and sexual subject whose psychological sense of sexuation and sexuality is, at this point, being transformed by the event of pregnancy, where, what Ettinger names almost-otherness, redefines her subjectivity—now and in re-invoked matrixial retrospect—and her sense of sexuality. In relation to the becoming-infant, this leads to the difficult but necessary proposition: there is a sexual difference at work here, encountered is the condition of what Ettinger calls the passage from non-life to (humanized) life with-in her. In this instance, the difference is sexual in the matrixial sense. Such instances emerge according to Ettinger in any psychic and symbolic birth and rebirth; and it enters our creative zones. It is not differentiating Nurture from Law. It does not instal the phallocentric ordering of masculinity and femininity. It is not a sexual-Oedipal or even sexual-pre-Oedipal erotogenic impulse. Bracha L. Ettinger invites us to think about the non-sexual eroticizing aerials, a matrixial Eros, sexual yet non-sexual in any pre-Oedipal or Oedipal or genital mode.

On the Way to the Matrix Going ‘Beyond-the-Phallus’ In his early and middle period work, Jacques Lacan provided us, in his structuralist and Hegelian re-reading of Freud’s texts, with the vocabulary to understand that the Symbolic, as the system that we inhabit, and that inhabits us like an internalized, structural architecture, is

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phallocentric. This thesis was much used, both critically and constructively in feminist literary and film theory. In his later seminars, however, Lacan both confirmed and abjured his earlier certainty that there could be no meaning outside the rule of the Phallus and Language, by indicating an unsymbolized Real in triple Borromean rings (Ettinger Vol. 2: 1). Ettinger was able to access many of the unpublished late seminars of Lacan in the late 1980s. In these texts she discovered hints that served to open her matrixial horizon, suggesting a direction in Lacan’s work that had been taken up neither in wider cultural and specifically feminist theory nor in the psychoanalytical tradition of that time, and not even by Lacan himself. She insisted on their possible implications even though Lacan strictly separated Woman from the maternal and decisively excluded the prenatal and pregnancy from the Symbolic and insisted on the impossibility of a symbolic meaning for feminine jouissance. The late Lacan did acknowledge, however, what Ettinger later termed the ­beyond-the-phallus dimension, but only at the level of the Real as jouissance, hence not available for symbolization (Ettinger Vol. 1: 10 and Vol. 2: 1). Lacan insisted that, even for those living psychically as women, such experience could have no symbolic significance. The Lacanian Symbolic cannot include in principle any beyond-the-phallus significance which is precisely what it deemed impossible. Another reason to give up and abandon his psychoanalytical theory? No. These two volumes are testimony to Bracha L. Ettinger’s creative overcoming of this double-bind. Her texts represent at once philosophy and art, both a theoretical and an aesthetic experiment. Theoretical work is enacted aesthetically in a creative—poïeitic—use of language—the artist’s fourth or even fifth—which is inevitably unfamiliar and strange. Having entered it and learnt some of its parameters and necessary processes, often non-linear, often neologistic, often returning and turning, a differencing order of sense emerges. In so far as Ettinger’s texts seek to articulate a less impoverished understanding of le féminin— what has been considered hysterical, even psychotic—she will have to deform the very language of the phallocentric meaning system, break it, like all poetic revolutions must, in order to speak at all, speak as one might speak in a foreign language. Paradoxically, therefore, to propose a ­beyond-the-Phallus as a dimension in, and a post-Lacanian theory of, subjectivity, Ettinger’s writing will also have to pass through and matrixially work with, and work under, the ‘language of psychoanalysis’ (Laplanche and Pontalis [1967] 1988) in all its rigour. Within its own heartland,

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Ettinger will shift some significant psychoanalytic paradigms. She will use psychoanalysis against its own ideological and theoretical foreclosures. She will make it take a turn from within itself, reveal its own aporia, repressions, negations, and foreclosures, and expose the places it silences what is already seeking to be heard at the margins of consciousness and the semiotic edges of language and art. If we are to imagine thinking neither/nor with and/and in a beyond-the-phallus dimension, shifting but not knocking out the Phallic, relativizing its sovereignty and defining the realms it can determine while allowing others to emerge into our understanding of ourselves and otherness, we have to defy its potency and philosophically invent thinking in-difference, and not just in a ‘difference from’. Yet Saussure revealed to us that language creates meaning only through opposition and difference! This is precisely where artworking between aesthetics and ethics enters (Ettinger Vol. 1: 7, 9, 10 and Vol. 2: 3, 4, 7). The uptake, translation and importing of Jacques Lacan’s theoretical intervention after the publication of his collected papers, Écrits, in 1966, and its translation into English in 1977, affected many fields beyond psychoanalysis; art history, film theory, cultural studies, political theories of ideology, photography theory (Lacan 1966/1977). Indeed being familiar with this seemingly arcane, abstract and puzzling theory was required for access to high cultural theory—for a while. My own first encounter in the mid-1970s was one of bafflement and angry resistance. Such complex unfamiliarity seemed to dispossess me of what I had thought was a functioning intelligence. Initially, I raged against its incomprehensibility that made me feel stupid. Yet once working with the theory in relation to film and art, I rapidly understood its heuristic and political significance. The initially alienating encounter turned into fascinated engagement, along with some feminist reservations, reservations ultimately allayed by the encounter with Bracha L. Ettinger, one of the finest and least subservient readers (and translator to Hebrew) of Lacan’s texts. She demonstrated a compassion for his blockages and a capacity to think on the same level, specifically in relation to the ‘holes’ in Lacan’s theory. 29 Why was Lacan alone so influential when French psychoanalysis was at that moment so rich and fertile in many other ‘returns to Freud’—for instance Pierre Fédida, Jean Laplanche, Didier Anzieu, André Green, Françoise Dolto and Piera Aulagnier, Sarah Kofman, to name but a few? Critics of Lacan’s teaching, such as Félix Guattari and Luce Irigaray acquired some visibility in English language circles at the moment at which the domination of Lacan’s École Freudienne de Paris

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(1964–1980) weakened in both analytical and wider cultural circles. For new readers a good introduction to Lacan and feminist theory can be found in Elizabeth Wright’s small book Lacan and Post-Feminism (Wright 2000), and in the two introductions to the translated collection of Lacan’s papers edited by Juliet Mitchell (who first outlined this theory for feminist community in her Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Mitchell 1974) and Jacqueline Rose: Feminine Sexuality: Lacan and Ecole Freudienne (Mitchell and Rose 1982; see also Rabaté 2003 and Silverman 1983). Wright clarifies many of the misconceptions of Lacan’s theory and, along with both Mitchell and Rose, makes clear why his thesis became significant for feminist cultural theorists during the 1970s–1990s. As Juliet Mitchell argued in her defence of Freud before the court of North American anti-psychoanalytical feminism, Freud did not present a prescription for a patriarchal society. He offered a description of its structures at the level of their insertion into our psychic formations as masculinized and femininized subjectivities (Mitchell 1974; Mitchell and Rose 1982). Lacan’s structuralist theory, and the post-Lacanian and post-structuralist revisions of his own earlier theory, provided a language through which to define both the symbolic system of our culture and its underpinning Imaginary as phallocentric. It makes visible the logic, the structure and the cost of this system by which we are sexuated and come to be speaking subjects. Thus, Ettinger, encountering Lacan’s ideas in the 1980s when she moved from London to Paris via Tel Aviv, undertook her own study of his late theory by translating some of his early and later seminars. Starting in 1985, traced already in her artist’s notebooks, and continuing while doing this work of intense study of the Lacanian universe, she developed a language through which to articulate what she was herself sensing through her own life experience and artistic practice as a painter working with the historical and the intensely personal residues of the major traumas and catastrophes of the mid-twentieth century into which she had been born as the child of survivors of the Holocaust and as a child born into the conflict between the foundation of the State of Israel and the Nakba of the Palestinian people. Between art and psychoanalysis, Ettinger has worked to ‘think’ the traumatic, to give words and terms to that which registers the psychic ground of the political violence in which two peoples are entrapped without an Imaginary or language to move beyond either/or. This work also allowed her to rethink alterity

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and environment in matrixial terms of copoeisis (supplementing the concurrent thesis of Varela of autopoiesis), com-passion, and ultimately carriance (Ettinger 2015a). The issue of the Phallic, and the potential of the Matrixial to shift it, is for her and for millions trapped in such conflicts, not an abstract matter of arcane terms like objet a. It is a matter of life and death. Her daring lies in seeing through Lacan and from her own Matrixial compassion with his vision and his (and Freud’s) blind spots— inevitable for the narcissism of masculine subject—that there is more to subjectivity than the phallic system can bear to recognize. This dimension, the Matrixial, concerns becoming-life as human— Ettinger writes of a ‘seduction into life’—and living-with/beside what co-emerges and might also be lost.30 Just as the principle derived from masculine’s sex organ engenders a universe of meanings, metaphors, psychic processes and aspects of language, ethics and politics, so Ettinger proposes, in a similar fashion, how a principle derived from the specificity of the female corpo-reality—can engender a comparable range of meanings, metramorphoses, phenomenology, sublimation, unconscious mechanisms, psychic processes and aspects of language (Irigaray [1974] 1985; Kofman [1980] 1985). It can, moreover, release specific psychic dispositions that enable us to undertake ethical and political actions that will not be obstructed by the binary logic, in awareness of our profound shareability in a threatened world and the necessity to attend to multiple trauma. The agonism between self versus other is replaced with contributions from the aesthetic proto-ethical compassionate borderlinking, which, as we shall see in the texts of the second volume, generates its specific forms of hospitality as well as self-fragilization vis-à-vis vulnerability.31 ‘Lacan’ is not the master discourse here, but a territory of inquiry and a chapter in the long history of psychoanalytic theory, intersecting with structural anthropology and structuralist language/literary and film theory while ultimately abandoning the fascism inherent in structuralism (Kristeva [1973] 1986). In keeping with what was once called the postmodern turn against the inherent authoritarianism of structuralism, Ettinger absorbed the later ‘Lacan’ and transformed the direction of his theory at the intersection with her project. She dared to challenge both Lacanian and feminist orthodoxies and anxieties, drawing on the insights of her art as it took its own turn to engage with the traumas of the twentieth century. ‘Why Lacan?’ can also be answered by considering feminist theory itself. There is considerable anxiety within the feminist community

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about attributing any specific qualities or dimensions to the feminine qua attributes specific to women or to subjectivity. In that instance, however, the ‘women’ or the femininity in question are those defined only under phallic logic. If we do not like the way we have been socialized under the sign Woman, and wish to change it, we are not likely to wish to hypostasize the idea of Woman. Or, so narcissistically damaged by Phallocentrism, we may overcompensate by idealizing the postnatal maternal, and risk falling into religious fantasies by attributing to all women idealistic projections of the Good or Bad Mother. (Kristeva warns of the religious turn in feminism in these terms, Kristeva (1986 [1979]).) These varied positions, split between phobia and idealization— often associated theoretically with the falsifying dichotomy between social constructivism and essentialism—result from the ­historical-political and affective-psychological foundations of feminism’s emergence as the campaign of women as women. By this term, articulated utopically in such slogans as Women of the World Unite! or The Women’s Movement, we must hear the politicization of our categorical naming imposed by society as if it were a natural condition. Women was embraced politically to invert negative connotations by self-naming a political collective to voice resistance to oppression on grounds of gender—where gender meant imposed roles but also, recast theoretically as a concept, re-opened questioning (Pollock 2020). Feminism emerged in various theological (medieval) and political (post-eighteenth century) contexts of prevailing categories of and discourses on sex: on men and women. In the twentieth century, this legacy was shifted when gender rather than sex was reframed as a central analytical category. The word itself made into a concept (akin to class in Marxism or race in anti- and post-colonial theory) was redefined by feminist theory as a social interpretation of differences between the sexes upon which are constructed legal, financial, economic, political and social hierarchies. As a result of feminism, gender is to be understood as the socially produced and asymmetrical distribution of power, security, safety, citizenship, education, and access to almost everything. Hence, gender can be socially and politically modified. The sociologization of gender in feminist theory has tended to relegate sex and hence the consideration of sexual difference to a realm of banished essentialisms (founding difference in bodies, biology or ascribed psychology) and rejected idealization (Mother/woman is everything that is good, caring, peace-loving, generous and hence women have specific qualities deriving

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from their femininity that are good). What this leaves unthought and unthinkable is the condition of coming into life as a human person and its primordial relation to a feminine M. Whatever anyone feels about mothers, being mothers, maternalism, anti-maternalism, having wombs, not having wombs, wanting children, not wanting children, gender transitioning, being able, or not, to bear children, suffering from being unable to bear children, adopting, being able to choose to carry or not carry or stop carrying or losing a pregnancy—all major social, political and personal issues of real import for women and women-identified people—coming into life is an event for every living person who, being alive, has been born (Ettinger Vol. 2: 12). Three important dimensions of coming into life are at stake here. We do not come into life in a bodily Petri dish. The coming into human life—if the life that is initiated is carried to term—is initiated in a sexual process and involves sex germ cells. This event is, however, phantasized; it forms the archaic primal scene (Ettinger 2001).32 Even without sexual intercourse, development takes place in a sexually specific female womb. Of psychological significance is the recognition that coming into human life occurs through carrying—Ettinger names this situation carriance: we have been carried (Ettinger 2014b). Thirdly, through carriance, coming into life is not an individual event but an event dispersed between partners-in-difference co/in-habit(u)ating in a prolonged durational ‘interval time’ (Ettinger Vol. 1: 9). Ettinger will theorize the time of suspension and interval in an ­in-between space as the precursor of aesthetic fascinance. (Ettinger Vol. 2: 1) The encounter-event in any intimate and ethical relation in adult life is matrixially creative. Ettinger asks us to understand psychic carriance as subjectivizing in com-passion on two planes. The becoming carried ­non-I pre-subjectively affects the carrier as I, and is being carried within an already-subjectivized hence humanized and now subjectivizing carrier who has herself once been carried. Both are transensing, yet unknown and unknowable (uncognized) while they are sharing events, each having different resonances at its own pole along the borderlinking strings. Throughout adult life, matrixial alliances between I and non-I are inscribing traces of one another in the one and the other (Ettinger Vol. 1: 8, 10). These terms are critical, for language alone helps us to reformulate human processes in ways that transcend the disfiguring terms of anatomy, biological science, law and religion, all of which have been the

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limited frames for imagining and theorizing ‘coming into life’ for the human specifically and the mammalian in general. We have blocked out the asymmetrical affects generated and this kind of transmissivity in this time-space in both partners by naming hospitality as maternity (Levinas) while still holding the other as entirely Other (Levinas), thus denying the possibility of originary com-passion where the other would be ­almost-other and the primary compassion is directed towards the other (firstly m/Other) (Ettinger Vol. 2: 5). The infant has been theorized only postnatally and then in terms of attachment, dependency, demand, envy or aggression—for some psychoanalysts, such as Klein and Winnicott, the founding gesture of subjectivity is the biting of the nipple!33 In psycho-social studies, there has been a decisive commitment to reconceptualizing the socio-psychological dimensions of maternal subjectivity as much as the social motherhood (Baraitser 2008; Hollway 2015), and more recently the phenomenology of pregnancy as well. Pioneering in these fields, Ettinger, however, goes much further. She also dares to bypass feminist anxiety that any discourse of pre-maternity will feed into anti-abortion lobbyists and that any discourse on pre-maternity and ­pre-birth-infancy will tip feminism back from its hard-won analysis of the social construction of gender and allow naturalism or biologism once again to determine the ontology of women. Ettinger argues that the matrixial Symbolic provides the concepts with which women can claim their bodies in all its conditions against the grasp of the phallic control. ‘Coming into life’ as partners-in-difference in proximity-in-distance and in relations-without-relating, gives us the possibilities of enriching feminism with its resources for imagination and thought that are not confined to twist and struggle inside a hostile phallic universe. ‘Coming into life’ in wit(h)nessing opens us to the humanness of some of our most painful and transformative experiences. Here I invoke feminism as both a struggle for women and a political, theoretical and ethical contestation of the violence and crimes of the patriarchal, racist, sexist and homophobic phallocentric universe. Ettinger has to speak her insights through a psychoanalytical language, because it was, as she has said in her conversation cited above, the only theoretical language available to her as these insights emerged in her thought and her art practice, itself enmeshed in the question of life and death in the twentieth century, of race, sexuality, mass murder and political catastrophe. That language, however, and notably the later seminars of Lacan as he backtracked on his earlier hyper-structuralist overemphasis

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on the Symbolic (as the sovereign realm of language and the signifier), opened a path for psychoanalysis to think the space between the Real (what happens and is sensed while we cannot yet imagine or think it) and the Imaginary, the phantasy space of image-thinking. This opens a space in which the aesthesis of our earliest sense impressions, registered and accumulating as soon as the organism is sensate, can be considered proto-subjectivizing and then, retroactively once we are born, be considered as part of the passage to subjectivity. Proto-subjective, they are specifically aesthetic and proto-ethical. Ettingerian language opened a path for psychoanalysis to rethink, what was for Lacan, the feminine impossibility as a proto-ethical passage to subjectivity, paradoxical as this may at first seem. Furthermore, and as importantly, Ettinger elucidates what this means psychically for the pre-maternal subject in the process of her concurrently being transformed by the shared Encounter-Event. The Matrixial shifts the phallic image of maternity as a vessel for a non-yet-human life form that only becomes human as it leaves its watery container—the mother’s de-subjectivized body—and the patriarchal cultural image of the mother’s body as the generator of property in a product claimed by the father. The Matrixial hypothesizes another understanding of coming into life in a primordial severality that has repercussions for what we consider a person who is born will carry into postnatal life as a subject. It enables us also to acknowledge what this process means psychically for the pre-maternal subject in the process of being transformed by the event. The Matrixial dimension is a means of understanding the affects and potential implications for subjectivity and relations between subjects arising initially in an archaic instance experienced aesthetically and working still as an undercurrent and shifter in the aftermath of our post-natal psychological formation by Language and in culture. This supplementary model acquires an even more powerful potential as it combines a feminist attentiveness to what patriarchal thought cannot bear to acknowledge with the urgency we now face in a society driven increasingly by technology and the technological capacity to simulate life, thought and action, and by algorithms and ever-expanding uses of AI. What patriarchal thought cannot sustain in its ultimately binary logic is the uncertainty of the humanizing affects that Ettinger identifies as the donation to humanity from the subjectivizing Matrixial severality in which we come into life. The Matrixial is thus not a feminine subjectivity versus a masculine one. It is an aspect of every born person,

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irrespective of subsequent formations in gender and sexuality. It is a ‘gift’ of how we come into life in partnership with an already subjectivized m/Other, who in turn carries the archaic conditions of coming into life with her m/Other and hers before. Ettingerian transmissivity and transconnectivity (not the endless and limitless Web of webs but within our capacity for intimate affectivity and webs of severality) are both the grace and trauma of this dimension, the fragility and vulnerability as much as its potential, once acknowledged, to inform agency and decisions that we take as speaking, sexed, Oedipalized subjects of the social patriarchies with their raced, gendered, ethnicized, normative asymmetries and hierarchies. Psychoanalysis never aimed to explain all of sociality and politics. It offered its specific insights into affective, unconscious, phantasizing hence psychological dimensions that are in play within both. It alerted us above all to the Unconscious and to that which even escapes its processes. From observation of analysands in distress and from cultural and social forms that ‘act out’, psychoanalysis offered insights into social practices, conflict, violence, aggression, hierarchy, phantasy, art, power, religion and politics. The path from the psychoanalytical front line of theory to social practice is, however, neither direct nor simple. It is not a matter of application from one to the other. Psychoanalysis analyses what we call the social from the place where motivation and desire are obtuse to the social thinker and opaque to the social agent whom phantasy and the Nonconscious overdetermines. We do not, therefore, always know what we are doing or why we act thus. Knowing, however, that there are shaping forces at work alongside our conscious thoughtfulness and spontaneous feelings is part of critical consciousness and ethical responsibility. Ettinger offers access to a dimension whose potential should be urgently explored in both its own psychoanalytical homeland and in the social, political and cultural sphere of what Laplanche named ‘­extra-mural’ psychoanalysis.

Matrixial Different/ciation and Transubjectivity For the becoming-infant, birth trauma can be interpreted as a symptom of the intensity of the shock of expulsion, not from some biological baking oven, but from a prolonged, durational, sensed proto-psychic matrixial co-existence whose sudden and brutal loss is the primary trauma to the becoming-proto-subject, and whose aesthetic imprints, sensed,

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transensed and retained, remain as the deepest layer of initiated subjectivization (Pollock 2009b). It is hard to imagine how severe is this change from late pre-natality to early post-natality. Traces of the primordial condition with its links (not objects) and with its aesthetic imprints— sound, rhythm, movement, pressure, and other shared ‘strings’ of the ­‘encounter-event’—may be almost completely knocked out in the immediate necessity to adapt to the dramatic existential and affecting conditions of postnatal subjectivization (cold, hunger, isolation, gravity, dependency, abandonment, separation, weaning, loss of the breast, voice, gaze, ‘castration’, etc.). The long-imprinted matrixial ‘strings’ continue to line, however, our life-long sensitization to otherness as well as our vulnerability in a non-agonistic way. Difference in the phallic model means different from the other who stands in distinction from the subject as a not-I to the I. (Freud used the Latin for I: Ego). Difference in the Matrixial sphere intimates differenciation as a shared borderspace between the partners-in-difference figured by the formulation I and non-I.34 The phallic formation of the subject renders what is other to the subject as what is to be repulsed so that ‘I’ can define myself, know my boundaries and become a territorialized ego (Anzieu 1985, on the skin-ego and Lacan 1977 on the Mirror Stage. See Ettinger Vol. 1: 1, 4). On the other hand, the other can also be what I incorporate as like me or with which I identify (see ‘Identification’ and ‘Incorporation’ in Laplanche and Pontalis 1988: 205–209, 211). Postnatally and via phallocentric subjectivization, we come to be a full subject dealing with other full subjects and/as objects. Psychic-aesthetic proto-ethical transubjectivity changes the idea of the subject from within. Within the necessary capacity to distinguish self from other, the Matrixial prepares and layers a vulnerable, less agonistic but no less distinguishing dimension of the always-already ­co-eventing, co-emerging, co-affecting transubjectivity with its different differenc/tiating modalities. Matrixial transubjectivity on its own is, however, not sufficient for the kind of agency we may need in order to act in the world as a subject acting among subjects. It is, nonetheless, necessary for the formation of the subject as ethical in the first place, and it implies participatory wit(h)nessing. Transubjectivity is, therefore, necessary to infuse consciously ethical and political action with Matrixial affects that may counter or deflect the hostility that is part and parcel of the formation of the phallically constituted subject. Matrixial affects, such as the asymmetrical pairing of hospitality and com-passion, wit(h)nessing, and

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the-impossibility-of not-sharing are distinct from those generated in the phallic model: envy, narcissism and aggression, ambivalence, and specifically anxiety at blurred or collapsed boundaries between self and other. Mediated by the shared borderspace that can become a threshold for change, Matrixial affects modify phallic anxiety around limits and difference. Metramorphic dynamics thus provide new parameters for thinking Ethics in the passage from responsibility to response-ability that takes place where the humanity of the self-fragilized m/Other (as now other of the subject) is taken into account by the new other (this could be, for instance, the analyst) (Ettinger Vol. 2: 10). The matrixial stratum of subjectivization elaborates a difference that is not absolute and defensively boundaried, yet which acts upon the boundaries, in the borderspace (Ettinger Vol. 1: 2), leading to feeling the singularity of each self and each other in the liminal web. By a language that is metramorphic, we are, according to Ettinger, communicaring (Ettinger Vol. 1: 9). Since metramorphosis subverts binarism, when subjectivity-as-encounter shifts subjectivity-as-separation it does not replace it. Traditionally in psychoanalytical thinking, separation via abjection, for instance Kristeva’s thetic discussed above, is necessary for a subject to enter inter-subjective relations and speak grammatically (Kristeva 1984 [1974]: 43–49). In such models, phantasies of originary fusion are created retrospectively as the verso of the thetic and castrative clefts that shape post-natal psychic formation.35 Lacan formulated these shapes of lostnesses with the formula objet a explained by Ettinger in terms of ‘lacking being’, i.e. lacks that never really existed in terms of objects that we once had and then lost but appeared as scars—voids—that define the very shape of the psyche: The objet a is the part object and the archaic Other/mother linked to pre-Oedipal impulses, forever unattainable, whose lacking being is created during the primal split of the subject, when language blurs its archaic modes of experience, and when discourse, introducing the laws and order of language, nestles in their place and constitutes them [the objets a] as forever unattainable. (original emphasis; ‘The Matrixial Gaze’ in Ettinger [1994] 2006: 41)

From a matrixial angle, such psychic phenomena as objet a (breast, gaze, voice) can also register traces of the trauma of expulsion from the initiating transubjective (also known as  trans-subjective)  realm of ­alliance-in-difference and proximity-in-distance, paradoxical neologisms

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(which might also suggest pictogrammes) created by Ettinger to allow us to imagine matrixial modalities of organization.36 Here is a legacy based not on the lack and the imagined lost object, but, in her view, on the longing for a suspended link a. This yearning for—and the ethical burden of—inescapable transconnectivity may also line and generate additional traumatic intensity in any experience of separation or loss. Acknowledgement of transconnectivity will help to make sense, for example, of the devastation felt by women who suffer miscarriage and even sometimes when they have chosen to end a pregnancy—a condition that later Ettinger will recast as pregnance in order to separate the medical term from her understanding of the Matrixial joint psychic space (Ettinger Vol. 2: 11). The Matrixial persists postnatally all through life and is known ­(sub-known and sensed) at different levels by all of us. Its fundamental combination of self-fragilization with jointness-in-differenc/tiation— not fusion and symbiosis—is, furthermore, revealed by Ettinger as the repressed ground on which psychoanalysis itself works, notably in the operations of transference and in the work effected in the co-creative analytical spaces of attentiveness and reverie. It certainly offers ways of understanding our receptiveness to art: aesthetic affectivity and artistic transmissibility. As we shall see in Vol. 1 Chapter 7, it becomes critical in processing trauma—individual or of the world whose pain we inherit.

Thinking with the Matrixial Feminine: The Place of the Feminine Let me consolidate. We have a theory of subjectivity that is understood as the psychologization of the living entity, embodied and needy, that is the human infant at birth (be it in the manner of Freud, Klein, Winnicott or the Inter-subjective directions). We have a theory of subjectivity that privileges the castrating impact of Language in the formation of sexuated, speaking subjectivity (parle-être: Lacan, stemming from a different emphasis on Freud). We have come to recognize that in presenting their theories as universal, these theorizations expose themselves to symptomatic, gendered reading, repressing other differentiated pathways in subjectivity and inter-subjectivity alike. They enact a phallocentric sexual indifference because they cannot think sexual difference except in terms of the asymmetrical, hierarchical division of masculinity from femininity in relation to the phallic function. They identify the limits of the psyche with the boundaries of the body (or, with Jung, in a universalizing

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Collective Unconscious). They identify individuation with separation. Thus, they cover the entire field of human subjectivity with the phallic paradigm, installing a binary logic of presence/absence mirrored in and from Language (Saussure). The problem is this. The exclusive sovereignty of the Phallus as the only organizing symbol for subjectivity does not logically allow for any other. A beyond-the-phallus stratum is considered a-priori psychotic and speculation about it, or the feminine, mystical while it aligns the archaic m/Other with Death-drive (Ettinger Vol. 1: 8). The theory of the Matrixial respects the necessity for the Phallic as the organizer of key processes of subjectivity, such as the self/other, self/world distinction, which are necessary as the basis for speaking as well as for ethical, social and political action. The Phallic handles the realm of subjects confronting and relating to other subjects (also confusingly theorized in psychoanalysis as objects). In that realm, any non-access to the phallic structure is thought to precipitate psychosis, which marks the inability to locate the subject within the positionality of Language and in its signifying system. The very logic of the Matrixial, on the other hand, cannot think in absolute and excluding distinctions, complete opposites, either/or. It operates on a non-phallic logic (expressed as and/and or not/not) The Matrixial shifts the sovereignty of the Phallic. It does not replace it. It supplements. Yet phallic suprematism makes even suggesting a non-phallic stratum appear strange, estranging and crazy and in so doing, it reveals its own ‘political’ foreclosure of the feminine as a dimension relevant to all subjectivities. This also brings us up against the fact that all of us, thinking and writing, analyzing and being analysed, feminists and non-feminists alike, are phallically formed subjects who perceive anything outside its symbolic order as illogical, unthinkable, mistaking this ­beyond-the-phallus dimension for what the phallocentric order makes us think is psychotic. Many intellectual feminists are reluctant to engage in transvaluating the maternal and rethinking human genesis theoretically even when this can take us into the domain of the creative processes and ethics. Many deem these areas too dangerous for feminist social theory that, I would suggest, remains shaped in a phallic unconscious formation in which daughters are supposed to emerge into individuation only by distancing themselves from the Mother who is to be abjected.37 Foreclosing discussion of the feminine and the maternal, some theories seem to affirm and

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even install a denial of the mother. In her crucial text elaborating her theory of woman-to-woman feminine difference titled ‘Fascinance and the Girl-to-Mother Matrixial Difference’ (Volume 2: 1), Ettinger not only exposes the immense damage done to women’s psyches through the structuring of the Mother as a figure-to-be-rejected/abjected. She counters this legend that the daughter’s revolt and anger against mother must turn into a hating separation and rejection, arguing instead that any Girl/Daughter in her formation inevitably learns of her own desirability from a prolonged dwelling with and gazing at the Other-Woman in a wondering which, in the matrixial sphere, is an erotic (non-sexual) feminine arousal. Ettinger thus counters the possible future self-negation and future abjection of the becoming-feminine subject herself, by proposing a woman-to-woman primary difference-in-alliance by the Eros of borderlinking expressed in what she names fascinance. (This Eros and such fascinance are elaborated at depth in Volume 2.) Where does this leave those who under both Freudian and Lacanian theories become subjects—they speak and act and feel—in the feminine ph?38 One possibility is that such femininity can only be enacted as a kind of masquerade, a performance, a mirroring in which women accomplish an extraordinary feat of becoming effective and affective subjects but only in a tortured and even parodic relation to the phallic term that organizes their subjectivity as objects, with its attendant psychological deformations and lack of the means to report on, or articulate, those somatic events or psychic experiences that the phallic order renders unsignifiable. These fall under what Lacan hypothesized as the impossibility for thinking the supplementary feminine jouissance. Ettinger counters this: This feminine difference is neither a configuration of dependency derived from disguising oneself in a phallic mask (from femininity to masquerade as for Joan Riviere or as parody and irony in Judith Butler’s terms) nor is it a revolt or a struggle with the phallic texture (the feminine as the moment of rupture and negativity as for Julia Kristeva), or as the total otherness and the contrary (as for the early Levinas). It is not a total other either (as for Levinas and Lacan). We can advance along this [the matrixial] route of thinking if we free ourselves not only from the compulsion to disqualify whatever is glimpsed from beyond the border of the One-subject life as mystical or psychotic, but also from perceiving the borderline itself as a split and a frontier-limit. (Ettinger 2000: 94)

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Gender and Sexual Difference Are Ettinger’s writings feminist? Let me displace the limitations of any labelling and categorizing. Ettinger’s writings in her notebooks are profoundly poetic; her theoretical writings produce fundamentally philosophical texts. Both poetics and philosophy are intimately bound to questions of subjectivity and humanity. Certainly, a key aspect of feminist thought and practice is that ‘gender’—being defined socially as a woman—impacts differentially on those linguistically designated and identifying as women and, in some cases, catastrophically. The bodies and minds of women are vulnerable to the denial of human rights such as education, control over their own bodies and the right to safety. ­World-wide, women are consistently the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of vulnerable, the victims of most sexual and physical and violence. They are the least literate. They are brutally trafficked for sexual use in one of the largest, most lucrative, and most dehumanizingly abusive and violent trades in the current world. Why? Not because of the ontological essence of woman but because of the socio-cultural, economically structural, sometimes theologically defined and mostly politically sustained impact of a social order of sexual difference, the sex-gender system, that labels us according to its created categories of men and women (Rubin 1975). The feminist revolt with its millennia of resistance to an unjust sexually determined hierarchy of power and, in modern history, its many forms of political revolt and even more recently its cultural revolution, speaks back against the widespread structural sexism of existing societies. We also, however, have to work for feminism as a vision and a project for justice and humanity which is not yet fully known or realized. I call this the virtuality of feminism (Pollock 2007). Over centuries, we have achieved little bits and pieces of change, removing some major obstacles and achieving substantial goals but only in some parts of the world. We have, however, only just begun to lift the lid on thinking about possible meaning for the human condition and for life, ecologically and planetary, were we think subjectivity with the feminine as a matrixial sexual difference based on non-agonistic relation to what is non-I. How deep, therefore, is the link between the matrixial feminine and becoming human in the sense of radically recasting our sense of being-human-with-others? This is radical indeed.

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In much social and notably feminist social theory, gender is more current and researched than sexual difference, the latter being linked to the psychoanalytical turn in cultural and feminist theory in the 1970s. Moreover, in the sphere of the social sciences and even philosophy, difference is often folded into the term gender (Scott 1986). Gender is not a given attribute; we do not have a gender; in Butler’s terms, we do our gender (Butler 1990). Gender theory insists that whatever difference there is between men and women is socially produced/ constructed and can thus be socially de- and re-constructed. Gender theory suggests that our identities are linked to a psychological sense of self that may be out of synch with the normative social disciplining of gendered bodies or even their physical shapes, and people can change gender, defining themselves according to their own sense of gender. This is a vital area of fluidity and social transformation. In social theory gender is what we are supposed to acquire according to a social, linguistic script we are obligated to iterate and sustain or pay the price for deviating from the script. Although gender is not what psychoanalytical sexual difference theory addresses, understanding it metaphorically does matter to our social thinking with psychoanalysis. As a concept, gender defines a social relation of difference that is both socially constructed and regulated and symbolically elaborated in myth, religion and cultural forms. In her analysis of this complex concept, historian Joan Scott argues that gender involves two interrelated but analytically distinct components. ‘Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power’ (Scott 1986: 1067). It is vital to grasp gender as a social interpretation of ‘perceived differences between the sexes’ built on ‘culturally available representations’ which may be used in educational, religious, scientific, legal political discourses to restrict the metaphoric richness of cultural representation and to fix a binary opposition, a mode of thinking that instantly creates a hierarchy between its two terms. Thus, the meanings accruing to nouns such as man and woman stack up on the basis of a sequence of binary oppositions, mutually inflecting each other. strong/weak/ sun/moon/ day/night/ mind/body/ culture/nature/ activity/passivity/ head/heart/ form/matter. If we look across each set we can see that each of these oppositions is metaphorically aligned with, or rather become the meanings carried by a key set: man/woman (Cixous: 63). For Joan Scott, the oppositions enact

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metaphorical hierarchies often performed in real social practices that are justified by making invisible the social, symbolic and cultural construction of meaning and asserting instead the truth of these hierarchies as given in nature (Scott 1986: 1067). As a discourse, both scientific and cultural, psychoanalysis is poised between, on one hand, the socio-cultural construction of social experience under systems of difference: class, race, gender and, on the other, the psycho-linguistic formation of subjectivities and relations, inflected obviously by historically changing social conditions, but not identical with them. Whatever our class, ethnicity or sexuality, we have all been subjectivized and sexuated, a Lacanian term used to distinguish the complex process of unconscious becoming a sexed speaking subject from the notion of having a sex derived from our genitals. Social construction and psychological formation remove us from a state of nature, but not from being embodied. Our corporality is the material on which social systems are inscribed and with which psychological formations are developed and then internalized to form us as speaking social beings (Butler: Bodies Matter). The enigma of every child is this: what /who am I if I—one—comes from two? The question of alignment with M or F, the question of how and why we are required to make that alignment, signified in language by pronouns or nouns, is what psychoanalysis addresses as a complex even traumatic process of enculturation and submission to Culture as a Law shaping being. We are sexuated at a price. The tragic legend of psychoanalysis is that we cannot be anything without sacrificing something of ourselves to the Law of Culture. Psychoanalysis is thus one account of how we are sexuated. This account argues that we are split and also severed from the fullness of being by Language which encodes and articulates this cultural Law. To enter sociality as a speaking subject is to be sexuated; that is, organized in relation to a division that alienates part of what we could be from what we are allowed to be. Forced upon us is a partial alignment predicated on the terms that Language and Law determine. To have a sexual subjectivity is to submit to this Law that sexuates: namely, positions, divides and alienates the subject in one fell swoop. We might say that the phallic Law does not actually kill women outright, or we might accept that it does. Social scientists now talk of femicide when considering violence against women from domestic abuse to mass rape and murder in war or crime-dominated zones, and when considering how much crime fiction and cinema sets off its narratives with

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the image of the mutilated bodies of murdered women. Killing women is terrifyingly normative. Transforming life for half the human population into consistent degrees of safety and self-possession is a major social imperative. Beyond that lies the question of anyone’s life and safety: the ethical question of care for any other and the elaboration of others’ othernesses in non-binary terms. The grand declaration of the Rights of Man in Europe in the 1780s threw up an inevitable question: does this figure Man include us, the not-men you Men do not even consider as you declare this universal claim to human rights in the name of the One sex? Did this Man even include the diversity of men on the planet or was it a universalization of white Men, all classes but not yet all sexualities since religious and modern secular law criminalizes/criminalized homosexuality. Indeed, the logic of the Man/Not-Man that determines the sexual indifference with regard to gender is intimately linked with the overt proscription of men’s, and the silencing of women’s, diverse sexualities as well as enabling a logic that operated in genocidal fascism and current forms of terroristic thought which can be expressed thus: I cannot be what I want to be if you exist in your difference. Why does acknowledging difference matter when we think about a universal dream of justice and liberty, even if incompletely realized? It matters because the way we live and experience our social and our psychic worlds are not one. Yet we are not just millions instead: such multi-ism and relativism reduces our agencies. Each individual being negotiates several sets of relations, situations, conditions, possibilities and blockages created at what is now theorized as the i­ntersectionality of social relations of class, race, gender, sexuality, ability and so on. These are not, however, only social sets. We live our world in relationalities premised on phantasized and unconscious formations of subjectivity. Subjectivity is embodied and draws on the corporeal for its imagination, hopes, thoughts and anxieties. The radicality of Ettingerian theory is that by shifting the ground for that complex relay between Real, Imaginary and Symbolic and the corpo-Real (and the Subreal with which, Ettinger suggests, we can further think the strings and threads that transconnect us in psychic entanglements), it opens us to resources for the challenges of sociality and ethics that constantly fail us because of the recurring thought-pair of the solitary Ego or its schizophrenic explosion into multiplicities.

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Matrixiality and Political Philosophy: Arendt on Natality and Plurality and Ettinger on Pre-natality and Severality Bracha L. Ettinger’s thought and art emerged out of her prolonged wit(h)nessing at the threshold of deadly events in both Europe and the Middle East. Her thesis of a supplementary track in subjectivity named the Matrixial originates in the traumatized history of Israel/Palestine that she lives and the catastrophe of imperial Europe to which we are all linked in the era also known as ‘after Auschwitz’, a unique event but also a condensation of larger histories of human violation. It speaks to the problematic of the human condition, which political theorist Hannah Arendt formulated as that which would have to be recreated in the aftermath of the attempted abolition of the human in totalitarian experiments (camps and gulags and totalitarian societies and dictatorships) and to be now understood in its precarity and vulnerability. Our own times have become, moreover, what contemporary Arendtian philosopher Adriana Cavarero defines as horrorism, by which she is describing the destruction of conditions of human life we see in a new kind of violence against the unarmed in ethnic and fundamentalist outrages as well as modern remote-controlled warfare (Cavarero; Pollock 2013c). Out of her analysis of the defining character of both Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes—with their foundations in European imperialism and racism—Arendt identified the totalitarian project as making humans qua humans superfluous. From her study of these regimes’ experimental processes for the destruction of the human, of which the concentration camp and gulag were the laboratories, Arendt was able to define what became visible to her through seeing what their projects tried systematically to destroy. Gulag and camp erode the civil person (name, identity, family, history) who becomes a number. They make moral action worthless (in the distorted logic of the camp it may rebound causing innocent others to suffer). Through overwork and malnutrition, they ultimately erode the capacity for spontaneity and action since the starving organism is driven by its own compulsions including consuming the victim’s very organs, rendering all victims alike in their reduction to a kind of reflex-driven species being. The inverse of this dehumanized creature is the human condition whose characteristics are plurality, spontaneity and action. I bring in Arendt because what makes this condition human is, according to Arendt, that it is quintessentially plural. Arendt was not

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implying the politics of diversity or multiculturalism. Plurality (the multiplication of creative singularities) is a political concept and an ontological claim that Arendt did not pose in psychological terms. Plurality is, for Arendt, the effect of natality. As a philosophical concept, natality articulates the significance of the fact that each human birth represents in potentia a new beginning for humanity. New beginning generates the three related features of the human condition: plurality, spontaneity and the capacity for action. Natality is, above all, the endless source of indelible human plurality on a shared earth—for Arendt the only ground on which humanity has ever lived and thus its only home. Hence the Arendtian position is critical for planetary politics. I want provisionally to place Ettinger’s work in a conversation with Arendt. The crucial difference is that Ettinger radically transforms, by working on a psychoanalytical plane, Arendt’s political proposition on natality, her focus on beginning, on life, on the emergence of the new and futurity, and its relevance to ontology and ethics. Ettinger’s contribution is that she identifies in matrixial co-emergence a psychoanalytically proto-ethical foundation for Arendtian plurality in an archaic becoming in pre-natality as severality as it affects those of us who are born. Not the newness of each subject, but its primordial shareability as a human potentiality for caring alliance is at stake for Ettinger. To Arendt’s post-natal human condition (plural human agents capable of unforeseen and spontaneous action as political subjects with regard to their newness), Ettinger adds a psychic structure derived from her theoretical discovery: the proto-ethical condition of shareable severality of late prenatality which is, inseparably, humanizing and also humanized by prematernity from the already matrixial feminine M. Matrixially, the newness of the newborn on the psychic level is only relative. Each new subjectivity is an effect of its co-emergence-in-jointness. More importantly, it is also the source of the incitement to compassion and hospitality towards otherness, and what Ettinger terms com-passion in response-ability. Arendt argues that totalitarianism had room ultimately only for one being: the One, the Leader, an ideology that effectively renders humanity—qua acting, plural and spontaneous—superfluous (if not, threatening). Hence everyone but the Leader is his instrument and dispensable. Totalitarianism is an extreme form of a phallic logic with its slash: either/ or, you/me, self/other, in which the existence of the other as different and self-determining agent cannot be tolerated (and where all others cease to exist for they are reduced to being instruments of the One’s

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sole purpose: power). Ettinger’s theory offers a challenge to this logic by theorizing the grounds for other logics that can not only shift, but also moderate, the psychological as well as the political dangers inherent in the sole sovereignty of the phallically Manichean Imaginary (Jameson 1977). Ettinger’s psychic severality, where the one does not have to reject or symbiotically assimilate the other and has the potentiality to join the other by caring self-fragilization, offers a psychic foundation for what Arendt theorized politically as plurality and Andrew Benjamin theorized philosophically as the ontologically foundational ‘plural event’ (Benjamin 1991, 2015). Severality is a force working against a fascist logic whose endpoint we have already witnessed in genocidal horror and dread in totalitarianism and in current extremisms and xenophobia (Pollock and Silverman 2011, 2013, 2015, 2019). Under phallic logic, otherness/difference challenges the subject’s narcissism, its belief in its self (body, colour, position) as the One, the whole and the desirable (Bhabha). Under a phallic regime, difference threatens the One, destabilizing it and thus causing anxiety that may become deadly: otherness that threatens my narcissism must—at worst—be destroyed. At the ultimate end of this treatment of the other not just as enemy, but as threat, is the idea that s/he cannot live if I am to be myself: genocide. Genocide dehumanizes the other not only through their representatives—the other’s soldiers—as in formal war fought out by armies, but as others expunged from the human community in their entirety.39 Thus, if we are to (re-)create a human polity, and if we are to create peace which is not the absence of war but the condition of living plurality, it is not sufficient merely to tolerate others. What is required is the radical rethinking of how integral a relation of otherness might be to what any ‘I’ is. Remember matrixial Antigone and the impossibility-of-not-sharing the wounding of my others’ humanity. Ettinger also radically argues that shareability and wit(h)nessing precedes birth which was for Arendt the ‘new beginning’. For Ettinger, our beginning is never entirely a ‘newness’ since we are already embedded in psychic transjective and then transubjective webs which are themselves saturated with history. Ettinger’s thesis is that Arendt’s human condition’s plurality is even more primordially several. As we are always-already in webs of I with non-I, abjecting the non-I is, in effect, abjecting our own humanity. Are we not always-already embedded in and informed by a condition

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of compassion and hospitality with-in an intimate almost-other in ways that could deliver not only ethical legacies but also its own trauma of our inescapable vulnerability to and before any other as the condition of being human? In her chapter on ‘Proto-Ethical Compassion’ (Vol 2: 5) Ettinger writes: Compassion is not only a basis for responsibility. It is also the originary event of peace. Peace is a fragile encounter-eventing, an ever r­ e-co-created and co-re-created fragile and fragilizing encounter-event in terms of the particular epistemological parameters of Matrixiality. From the point of view of compassion, peace is not in dialogue with war. I do not have to feel empathy for my perpetrators, nor do I have to understand them, but this does not mean that I will hand them the mandate to destroy my own compassion, which is one of my channels for accessing the non-I. To suffocate my own compassion would be a kind of mental and affective paralysis; this would be a ‘second death’ (Lacan), since primary compassion is a spontaneous way of transubjective knowing of/in the unknown Other before and beyond any possible economy of inter-subjective exchange. It is in that sense that in compassion one is always fragilizing one’s self and becoming vulnerable. (Ettinger Vol. 2: 5)

She then elaborates its foundations: The Matrixial ‘aesthetical’ yet proto-ethical com-passion, aroused inside maternal compassionate hospitality in meeting with primary infantile compassion, cannot be ‘obliged’; but as a psychic move this is precisely what inflects the individuated subject toward responsibility where each unicity of being can, and often does indeed, instead choose relations of cruelty or abandonment. Matrixial compassion is then the unconscious psychic basis for ethical responsibility.

Originary matrixiality recognizes archaic asymmetry because the prematernal is already a mature subject and the prenatal not yet one. There is, none the less, in each shared borderspace that defines the inner and outer limits of one and the becoming, unknown other, a sensing of reciprocal co-otherness, without or before or alongside knowledge, before and later on also beside identity, that engenders affects and, in the subject as now becoming its archaic m/Other, at least from a certain stage onward, responsibility (that originates in the response-ability) for the life of another becoming with-in her while founding, in that becoming pre-subject partner, compassion for she who carries (Ettinger

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Vol. 1: 5–7). Thus, a matrixial kind of asymmetry is proto-ethical. Its significance for every living subject lies not in the physiological Real but psychologically, in its own Nachträglichkeit: the retrospective recovery and animation as a garnering of proto-psychic sensations of the unspoken trauma-memory of co-eventing that can later become a resource for compassionate ethics and thence political action based on its value, when we reach awareness of such co-eventing and can act as conscious, deciding social agents. At a certain point in time we can become aware of having been carried and cared for in our passage to human life; we are then informed by this com-passion and carriance, in the now. Ettingerian passage from proto-ethicality to ethicality and from creativity to art is indexed by each and every passage from wit(h)nessing to witnessing and from co-response-ability to responsibility in the now of psychic rebirth and co-birth. The difference on which such an idea is premised is the awareness of otherness whose life—as different—I desire, who should persist beside me as in co-poietic bedsidedness that gives value to both our lives in humanized/humanizing severality (Ettinger Vol. 2: 5, 7). If we allow into our thinking an apparatus that sensitizes us to the severality signified by Ettinger through her neologisms and concepts difference-in-jointness, proximity-in-distance, co/in-habit(u)ating, we will not contrast the value of the individual subject with that of alterity. Ettinger invites us to think about radical co-emergence and co-affection and care even in asymmetrical reciprocity where difference is neither a lack nor a con-fusion. Here, each asymmetrical relationality does not invite power relations but incites com-passionate hospitality with originary compassion to inform Ethics by compassion as value. This transforms our concept of the subject in its relations to the environment. For Ettinger, singular transubjectivities in each subject go beyond social constructions of gender identity. Her theory generates a language with which to think the relation between one's own unique body with its manifestations, sensations, passions and desires, its durable specificities and its transformations for all kinds of corpo-Realities, whether cis, intersex or transbodies beyond norms of identity. A certain fluidity due to the originary transconnectedness to, and co/in-habit(u)ation with another body-psyche and paradoxical com-positions of entities are among the theory’s basic assumptions, forming the basis of alliances that resist both the single ego and what Ettinger perceives as the current dangers of hyper-fragmentation and hyper-connectivity.

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Conclusion Close reading of the unique and poetic theoretical texts of Bracha L. Ettinger in the two volumes of Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics will create an understanding of the creativity and significance of the vocabulary of Ettingerian Matrixial theory. Her concepts, carefully invented over a period of more than three decades, will slowly unfold. The insights they bring to the mind and the poetic resonance they create in the spirit will counter-balance the desire for a too rapid application of extracted elements from it. The impulse to simplify them through the more prevailing academic ideas will be calmed and another desire will emerge. Ettingerian psychoanalytical theory is not like anything we already know. It converses knowingly and at depth with major thinkers across many contemporary fields while it engages with and transforms notions arriving from classical philosophy and mythology, biblical scriptures and both modern and contemporary art, film, literature and poetry. It has not been thought before. It is an original contribution. It challenges most of what we think even in what we consider our most radical psychosocial theories to date. It touches our most intimate chords. It unsettles some more comfortable, even classical or now normative, ways of thinking. It participates fully in the major philosophical, analytical and aesthetic conversations of our dark and post-traumatic times. Cultures often tempt us to misrecognize what challenges them. If I have emphasized repeatedly the figures of symbolic supplement and shift, it is because the first message of the Matrix, as a thinking-sensing apparatus that links the aesthetic and the proto-ethical in the psyche in profoundly new ways, is the proposition of one more dimension at work in the formations of subjectivity, and hence, of ethics and social formations. Having been formed as social, ethical and political agents, we are responsible and response-able as psychologically matrixially shaped already, but now, as we are also aware of this shaping, we can work with it to shift the hegemony of the phallic vision as well as of the anti-phallic vision of the endless schizophrenic fragmentation. The Ettingerian Matrix does not seek to replace or destroy any other formation. While reading the book, as we learn what Freud and his followers made known to us about psychic formation and what Lacan taught us about the role of Language, and now follow Bracha L. Ettinger’s careful re-reading of both and other psychoanalytical traditions, we shall discover how she has teased out what is a­ lways-intimated

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and sensed as beyond-the-Phallus. We can grasp her delineation of a new, supplementary Symbolic. The reading renders us sensitive to the always-already imprints and traces of our transconnectedness to the others and to the value of the matrixial as the feminine for creativity and art. Its specific processes and dynamics are precious resources for ethics. The kind of feel-knowing opened to us via Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics broadens horizons for sensing how Beauty defined by and arising in com-passion, in feeling-with and suffering-with and ­wondering-with the vulnerable other and the trauma of the world, transforms thinking, informs non-abandonment and invites to actions of peace.

Notes



1. In terms of relationality, one instance is Andrew Benjamin’s philosophical proposal that we should think subjecthood through ‘the plural event’ (The Plural Event, London: Routledge, 1993), based on what he later in Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015) theorized as the irreducibility of the subject ‘being-in-relation’. There he writes: ‘What is yet to be thought is the possibility that plural relations are original and, therefore, that both singularity and relations between singularities are always secondary’ (Benjamin 1993: 1). Not surprisingly, Andrew Benjamin was one of the first philosophers to recognize the significance of and to publish Ettinger’s work (see Chapter 4 and Ettinger 1995). His publication of Ettinger’s work marked an early articulation of her psychoanalytical foundations for this recognition that subjectivity starts with the several, and not the opposition fusion/separation, undifferentiated/singular. Ettinger’s term is severality as distinct from Benjamin’s plural event. 2. The term sexual difference has different connotations in different theories. It is used here not to define the difference between two sexes, a definition that draws criticism from contemporary gender and trans theory both of which contest this m/f division of sexual identities and subjectivities into what appears as the sole, heteronormative pair men and women. Different theoretical-political traditions identify ‘sexual difference’ as a philosophical question for which psychoanalytical thought provides one of the critical paths while also itself being a problematic theorization. Philosopher Rosi Braidotti identifies three levels for thinking about sexual difference. The first is diagnostic of the observed and socialized differences between social subjects termed men and women. The strategic purpose here is to denounce the false universalization of what is named a ‘male Symbolic’

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that produces a distinction between a self-determining agent (the masculine) and its Other—‘a site of devaluation signified as feminine’. The second level for understanding sexual difference Braidotti relates to the proposition that that the relations thus produced between Subject and Other are not reversible, i.e. they cannot be inverted for these are the names of two poles of a structurally hierarchical and asymmetric relationship. (I have also argued this, drawing on deconstruction in my introduction to the project of Differencing the Canon Pollock [1999].) According to Luce Irigaray, this relationship not only distinguishes Man (Subject) from Woman (Other) but also separates women as real embodied subjects from Woman (Other). What sexual difference as a theoretical term (not a description) thus articulates is a ‘dialectics of domination’ both actual and conceptual, that shapes our subjectivities and thought and also determines the shape of the politics of transformation. The latter cannot be limited to inserting women into existing structures because (a) inversion is not possible and (b) the places in the structures are not empirical but positional and relational. The same politics ‘seek to create, legitimate and represent a multiplicity of forms of feminist subjectivities without falling into a new essentialism or a new relativism’ (Braidotti). Such a project must involve recognition of embodied and bodily existence (this is not a matter of naming or performative utterance) and social experience (which itself always involves location; classed, raced, geopolitic situation). This model, therefore, accepts under the thinking project of feminist analysis and practice of sexual difference, that the universal subject is deconstructed while also there can be no homogeneity in the new experimental, for instance feminist, or other subjectivities being explored in contesting the phallic Symbolic. The third level Braidotti elaborates concerns ‘differences within’. Drawing on the philosophies Bergson and Deleuze, Braidotti comes closest to Ettinger’s project by insisting philosophically upon the importance of thinking with our living corporeal materiality which cannot be completely captured in representation. To the question ‘does not sexual difference privilege one difference over others?’, there are two responses. One is historical. This is the moment in which the question of sexual difference at all its levels, which include the psycho-somatic, the linguistic and the Symbolic, has come to be posed as a political and theoretical question. The second is that as a theorization of the dialectics of domination working in terms of an irreversible asymmetrical relationality between the terms this system produces, it pays attention to a symbolic structure exceeding its specific bodies and subjectivities and never participating in a hierarchy of differences since it is our route to understanding the structure of difference itself. In this note I have been drawing on a dialogue between Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler,

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‘Feminism by Any Other Name’, differences Special Issue More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory, 6: 2 and 3 (1994). I have elaborated one feminist philosopher’s clear reply to gender theory as distinct from sexual difference theory. Readers may wish to follow up by reading Cheah and Grosz’s later interview with Butler (Cheah and Grosz 1996). Ettinger’s work traverses the psychoanalytical and philosophical fields of the debate about sexual difference, intervening in both the feminist uses of psychoanalytical models and in feminist and non-feminist philosophical negotiations of the field indicated under the problematic: sexual difference. Above all it is vital to grasp that she alone is posing a primordial psycho-somatic encounter by every born subject, irrespective of later linguistic and social definition of gender and sexualities, with a sexual difference from the feminine that is not anything to do with a difference between the sexes. It concerns the hitherto unthought impact of a difference (becoming infant and its primordial m/Other) that, by virtue of its doubled corporalities, is of necessity sexual where that term is not to be understood as a term of differentiation, but as an encountered difference itself. 3. This neologism has evolved over Ettinger’s writings from ­trans-subjectivity to transsubjectivity and she now uses the term transubjectivity. (I place in italics the concepts Ettinger has created.) Transubjectivity: the spelling here relates to the terms Ettinger evolves to define a primordial transject, transubject, transubjectivity, which are to be understood in terms of the legacies of the matrixial co-emergence and borderspacing. See especially Chapter 9. 4. I shall distinguish language from Language with a capital to indicate that, in using the capitalized form, I am referring to the theory of Language developed from the semiotic theory proposed by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the beginning of the twentieth century. Saussure asked the foundational modern question: ‘what is Language?’ rather than ‘how do languages arise and differ?’ Seeking to understand the structure by which Language produces meaning, Saussure argued that Language is composed of signs, each made from the relation of a signifier (phonemes or graphic marks) and a signified (concepts) and these produced meaning only by difference (not by positive attributes). Saussure was taken up by structuralist (Lévi-Strauss) and psychoanalytical (Lacan) analysis of Language as a symbolic order under which we, as subjects, become ‘speaking subjects’ by submitting to an order of signifiers, and specifically, for Lacan, to an order articulated by a single signifier, the Phallus. Lower case language refers to the everyday understanding of both what we speak with its vocabularies, grammars, syntax and variations, while

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Language signifies the symbolic order of signs to which we are subjected. This order then becomes the order of culture itself. It is named phallocentric. 5. Jouissance is an untranslatable word from French which arises from the verb jouir which means both to enjoy as in pleasure and to enjoy in terms of ownership. Lacan’s use of the verb in this form with the -ance ending takes it into a durational condition rather than an event. Ettinger will also create many terms using this possibility from romance language: resonance, fascinance, carriance, pregnance. Lacanian jouissance refers to those experiences that are so intense that it is impossible to distinguish between pain and pleasure. This can be thought in relation to sexuality, but it exceeds that specific instance. Critical to Lacan’s later seminars is the proposition of feminine jouissance that he argued must exist while he thought it cannot be articulated in Language since Language conforms to and installs the phallic paradigm that makes this other jouissance unspeakable. Beyond-the phallus-jouissance is explored and theorized by Ettinger’s Matrixial intervention. 6. It is important, when we talk of the Ettingerian Matrix today to differentiate it from the field of simulacra and simulation visualized and interpreted in the spirit of Baudrillard in the film The Matrix (Di: Lana and Lily Washowski, 1999). It was made in 1999, some 16 years after Ettinger’s first theorizing steps of her feminine Matrix. Her book Matrix. Notes on Painting 1985–1992 was published in 1993, and many influential articles of her on the matrixial gaze and screen appeared, like all the chapters in Vol. 1 of the present book, between 1989–1999. Interpretations of the film The Matrix often reference Baudrillard’s philosophy concerning the explicit media-dominated and simulated AI subjects in a world driven by simulacra and the ‘desert of the Real’. Ettinger’s subversive feminine-Matrix beyond the simulacra-Matrix is visualized close to the beginning of the film in the scene where the ‘heroes’ join together in a womb-like room space, each in its womb-like structure in a strange kind of ceremony to create their mental transconnectedness. This is the alliance in severality that is presented as the efficient resistance to the Baudrillardian matrix. The Ettingerian matrixial co-emergence is born in the formative ceremony of this intimate jointness in a womb-like shape within a womb-like space creating a bond between Neo, Trinity and Morpheus (Schwerfel 2003). The co-birthing in a womb-like shareable time-space begins their psychic transubjective connecting and transmitting in distance by invisible mental strings. In the film, the Ettingerian matrixial web where proximity works even at a distance is the power of

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human resistance to the web of virtual not-human mass simulacra. The relation of the film’s heroes to the maternal oracle is based on the feminine-matrixial mental strings too. This Ettingerian ‘archaic’ Matrix functions at a distance once it has been established in a ­co-birthing jointness. From then on it is both in the now, in potentiality and even in the future, and the capacity to trust is one of its psychic strings. It resists the mechanical, coded, simulated and manipulated ­phallic-matrix consciousness. The strings that connect them are fragile and invisible; yet they can be activated from a distance. According to the film scholar HeinzPeter Schwerfel, the Ettingerian matrixial web of links invested by the Eros of borderlinking and related to different metramorphoses (material and spiritual morphosis) between Neo, Morpheus, Trinity and the Oracle manifests the potential to resist what Ettinger defined critically as the phallic Web of webs. The Ettingerian Matrix is referred to verbally quite late in the film through the explicit reference to a primal, archaic matrix that preceded the actual simulated Matrix. For our readers today, acquainted through this film with the Baudrillard matrix, it is important to state that the Ettingerian figure of birth and of spiritual ­co-birthing was mentioned in the film as explicitly human and relating to the maternal. It is contrasted in the film to the apocalyptic vision of a field of mechanical wombs, mechanically reproducing human-like automated entities ready to be manipulated via the virtual mass-media artificial AI matrix that gave the film its name. The Ettingerian corpo-Real is not a desert. Sexual difference and the feminine for her are not just effects of language and of sexuation. The corpo-real knowledge treasures our passions and pains and the vibrating strings that she will later call subReal are sources of copoietic creativity and poetic efficiency. 7. Hebrew is critically important in the elaboration of the Matrixial because it is a non-binary language. Like Arabic, it is based on a root system of three-consonants. This enables words to shift their meaning through the additions of vowel markers, prefixes and suffixes. Vowels modify words even to the point where they contain or signify their own opposites, thus elaborating layers of meaning and connections. Are there limitations on European imaginations imposed by the Greco-Roman and Germanic linguistic domination of Western philosophical thought? Ettinger draws richly on Hebrew to bring to the surface, linguistically, the co-existence and co-emergence of meaning that she also will elaborate, with necessary neologisms, in the field of psychoanalysis and psycho-social studies (see Chapters 2, 3, and 6). Drawing on the classical Hebrew of Biblical texts, Ettinger’s work explores issues of language and translation as sites of poïetic creation, philosophical invention as much as ideological repression and foreclosure.



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8. The Real draws on Lacan’s definition of three registers of psychic life: The Real (which cannot be imagined or thought but is, hence is like trauma ), the Imaginary (the effect of the mirror phase and the domain of imagined and phantasiszed images) and the Symbolic (the domain of Language, words and thought). Initially Lacan placed the Real beyond all understanding. The Real is the domain of the Thing while psychic apprehension is based on the object. An intermediate phase of Lacan’s thought involved what he named objet a which Ettinger will evolve in turn with her concept of a link a. In his later seminars, on which Ettinger drew in developing Matrixial theory, Lacan began to theorize the domain between trauma and phantasy and grant psychic significance to the Real, which is close to what Félix Guattari (and later his collaborator Gilles Deleuze) would consider as ‘corporeal intensities and material affects’. Thus, aspects of the bodily enter in non-Freudian (oral, anal, phallic) ways of thinking the quickening, living entity in which we do not split body and psyche, body and mind. To situate the Matrix in the Real is not to invoke anatomy or organs, but energies, flows, movement, rhythms, pulsations, pressures, and their repeated and registered sensory affects as the very basis for primordial incitement of the psychic dimension itself. 9. Ernest Jones was the first to use the term phallocentric in his debate in 1927 with Freud about feminine sexuality in terms of Freud’s exclusive emphasis on the penis and denial of other organs such as the vagina. Following the structuralist revisions of Freudian theory, in his ‘The Signification of the Phallus’ (1958/1965), Jacques Lacan defined the Phallus as a signifier organizing the entire system of meaning. In his work, philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term Phallologocentrism identifying both the privileging of the phallic signifier in the construction of meaning and the privileging of the logos in Western metaphysics. The Derridian sense is taken up by Cixous and Clément (1986). Ettinger has radically extended the three main uses of this term by revealing the effects of accepting the Phallocentric as the unique order of subjectivity and meaning, a position adopted by many feminist theorists working with Lacanian theory. Adams (1996, 2003), Rose (1986). 10. In grammar, to be a subject is to be an agent, the doer of actions. In philosophy, the subject is the site of consciousness. At the opposite pole lies the idea of being a subject, that is, being subjected to an authority or power, as, for instance, in being a subject of the Crown. In psychoanalysis, however, the term subjectivity defines a paradox. We live the illusion that we are each an agent, an I (Freud’s term was the Latin for I, Ego), acting on our own volition and purposes, while we are, in effect, subject to the Unconscious and its operations, and, according to Lacan, this means being subject to Language and its operations which linguistically

86  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS create the words that feed our illusion of self-mastery, for instance, the grammatical pronouns such as I. Lacan argued that the Unconscious and Language coincide, predetermining both what we are by what can be said at a structural and at a cultural-ideological level. Language appears to be the instrument of our consciousness and thought, and yet Language is itself unconscious. 11.  Sexual difference does not mean the difference between the sexes, of the difference of one sex from another. Psychoanalysis reveals that adopting positions, feminine/masculine, are the effects and outcomes of complex psychological processes which themselves encode and pre-shape the infant’s encounter with and formulation by existing ­socio-linguistic and unconscious structures. For an account of the intimacy between socio-economic organization (kinship) and psychological formation (sexuality, family and gender) see Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex’ in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. Within feminist theory, there is a major division between gender theorists, stressing the social construction of gender as role and identity and theorists of sexual difference for whom the question of there being significance in (a) understanding and contesting the effects of Phallocentrism on those it designates as ‘women/feminine subjects’ and (b) investigating what potential lies in exploring that which Phallocentrism has made unthinkable: the feminine, not as what it constructs as the negative other of the one sex: the masculine, but as a resource within a humanity that is itself not one. For instance, Luce Irigaray argues that the most interesting thing about humanity is that it is at least two (see Irigaray 1993; Pheng and Grosz 1998b). Ettinger will take this debate in new directions since she is proposing a sexual difference from the matrixial feminine that precedes the social and the Oedipal modelling of either phallic opposition masculine/feminine or the idea of two sexes. I elaborate this later in this Introduction. 12. For readers wanting a critical appraisal of Ettinger’s texts in relation to specific psychoanalytical and feminist traditions and their recent developments, I direct readers to Anna Johnson’s major text (Johnson 2006). For a reading of Ettinger’s work as a method of reading literature and language I recommend Shread (2005) and Johnson (2010). 13.  To avoid confusion, we need to note the distinction Ettinger makes between the corpo-Real, her term for materializing the corporeal in this register, the Real and corpo-Reality and corporeality. She uses female corporeality to argue for the acknowledgement of the bodily encounter which since both Structuralism and its linguistic and even the ­affective-sensationalist turn against structuralism has not been

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acknowledged as founding any dimension subjectivity. The exiling of the corporeal has been paradoxically intense in the defensive forms of feminist theory. Ettinger seeks to relieve this anxiety, opening the field to genuine inquiry, which may result in its rejection again, but not before we understand what may be being masked by the ‘correctness’ of a rigid anti-corporeal stance against reductively deterministic uses of non-psychoanalytical concepts of bodies. 14. For an important discussion of the confusion between sexual differentiation via organs of sexuality—penis and clitoris—and the womb as site of a phallocentric reproductive or ‘uterine’ economy that, at its most extreme literally excises a prime organ of exclusive sexual pleasure (and not associated with reproduction), the clitoris, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 134–153. 15. For a Hegelian reading of patriarchal claims that privilege paternity in law precisely because of a lack of prolonged bodily and psychological intimacy with the process of the formation of the infant beyond insemination, see Mary O’Brian, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 16. Ettinger is not alone in thinking about pre-natal life and subjectivity, but it is rare and never developed to this level of theoretical elaboration. See Sandór Ferenczi, Wilfred Bion, Françoise Dolto and R. D. Laing cited in Bracha Ettinger, ‘Trauma and Beauty: Trans-subjectivity in Art’, n.paradoxa 3 (1999c), 15–23. 17. Ettinger uses differenciation, which typographically instals the idea of differencing as a process and to distinguish her meaning from the usual form, differentiation, which signifies separation. Ettinger uses the -ance ending which has resonance with Derrida’s thesis on différance as a process of differing and deferring that refuses completion or limit. 18. The Oedipus Complex tells the legend of each child’s confrontation with the question : how does one (I) come from two. At the point at which a child is required by the laws of culture to adopt a position articulated in language by pronouns, he and she, or nouns, boy or girl, man or woman, husband or wife, father or mother, we see immediately that this is a moment of being accessed into a heteronormative, familial and patriarchal system. The one child is faced with cultural figurations of hierarchically sexually differentiated positions, according to which it must align itself and negotiate its infantile desire. This triadic situation is a complex because it is a traumatic and intolerable choice resolved only by the threat of the Big One, a threat translated by the notion of castration (mutilation or being nothing—like a woman). The Oedipal triangle shatters what psychoanalytical theory posits as the postnatal dyad of helpless infant and

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Mother (a position of Nurture that any and all caring persons who keep the child alive occupies). Matrixial theory works with neither dyads nor triads but does posit co-affecting partial relationality that has no relation to the gendering that is involved in the Oedipal triadic complex or the postnatal nurturing dyad of Mother/dependent demanding infant. 19.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5O9KsXVpLI. 20. Bracha L. Ettinger’s artistic vision and desire led her to work with a new media (the interrupted photocopier) that involves materializing traces from photographs but also in oil painting in a period when painting was not a major medium of critical and certain kinds of feminist practice, painting being associated with a masculinized canon, and in a period when many women artists were exploring performance, moving image and installation. The artist made the choice to resist the traditions of painting from within. Even in the aftermath of Lanzmann’s implied prohibition of representation of the Shoah, she dared to engage visually with its agonizing legacies. 21. On the phallic illusion and its different effects in feminine subjects see Julia Kristeva, ‘On the Extraneousness of the Phallus: The Feminine Between Illusion and Disillusion’, Sense and Non-sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 94–107; first printed in special issue, Griselda Pollock (ed.), Julia Kristeva 1966–1996: Aesthetics, Politics, Ethics, Parallax 8 (1998), 29–44. 22. In English, man and woman seem to have shared roots but they do not. In the English language, ‘Woman’ derives from wifmann to wimman to wumman to woman. Originally, Wifmann meant female human since monn or mann signified the generic human. Male human was signified by the term wer. Female derives from the diminutive of the Latin femina for woman: feminella little or young woman. It is unrelated to the origin of the word male, which comes from the Latin mas, via masculus, Old French masle. 23. As a symbolic position the No functions structurally to enact the social law that we cannot have what surviving postnatally has made us want. Thus, we all face this law: ‘No!. You cannot have what you want’. 24. Signifiance is Kristeva’s neologism for the concurrent processes at work in language that she names the semiotic and the symbolic (lower case and not to be confused with Lacan’s capitalized Symbolic). The symbolic tends towards a fixing of the meaning of signs, grammar and syntax—legal discourse being an example—while the semiotic is closer to the non-linguistic elements emerging in infancy and the choric space of echolalias, rhythm and hence present as the poetic elements of language. The tension between the two allows for renovation and change as well as for

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the continuous working of the formative processes closer to the drives that flow into and produce affects even inside the linguistic order of signification. Signifiance emphasizes the dynamism in language that owes its energy to the psychic processes. Hence Kristeva challenges Lacan’s formulation of the subject captured by the Symbolic, proposing instead ‘le sujet en procés’ which has a doubled meaning as ‘the subject on trial/in process’ (Kristeva 1977c). 25.  Under the phallic model, oppositional thinking determines how we understand sexual difference: masculine and feminine are terms for difference created in an opposition between positive (+) and a negative (−). This effectively translates as masculine and not-masculine even as the two terms, masculine and feminine, appear to merely describe given, different entities. In Phallocentrism, the feminine is nothing but the negative: not-masculine. The signifier by which this ordering of meaning is produced is named the Phallus. It is a symbol that organizes a meaning system. It is not a body part and it does not belong to anyone. It is in the differentiated relation of each speaker to this symbol that meaning is organized by means of plus/minus/presence/absence. Each subject takes up a position orchestrated by this one signifier. The position is signified by other symbols in the language system to speak their subjectivity marked as a result as ‘he’ or ‘she’. 26. It has been proposed that some aspects of what she has named transubjectivity may now be related to the scientific notion of mirror-neurons. 27. A revealing example can be found in French-Algerian born writer Marie Cardinale’s autobiographical novel Les Mots Pour Le Dire The (Paris: Editions Grasset and Vasquelle 1975; The Words to Say It, trans. Patricia Goodheart and Van Vactor (London: Picador Inc, 1984). See also Ettinger et al. (1991). 28. This argument forestalls the creation of the Mother as a fixed figure since she who is being maternalized is more an open site of transmission and transconnection. At once a non-maternal subject until this point, she is also a subject carrying transconnectivity to the histories, and shall we say the traumas, inscribed or encrypted in the partial subjectivities to which her archaic becoming m/Other was transconnected and beyond. In a certain way this reveals a path or route by which not only the social but also the historical is transmitted ‘traumatically’—to the becoming-infant becoming in a multi-generational and socio-historical time-space. 29. One of these is sexual difference. It is also important to note that from the very beginning, she was already addressing at the same time, in a premonitory way, what she called the yet to come Web of webs—by which she refers to the dangers of an unethical hyper-connectivity (Vol. 1: 1) with its potential symbiosis between Gaze and Screen (Vol. 1: 5).

90  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS 30. This term, seduction into life, is explored more fully in Volume 2. In his work, French analyst Jean Laplanche reclaimed the concept of seduction that Freud had rejected during the 1890s. Laplanche used seduction in order to theorize the fact that the infant comes into an world of already sexuated and sexual beings who unconsciously present enigmas to the infant—as it struggles to make sense of the postnatal world. The infant encounters enigmatic signifiers it cannot yet digest, metabolize or grasp because it does not yet have a fully developed psyche. These enigmatic signifiers, Laplanche argues, incite the emergence of the psyche as the mechanism to metabolize the enigmas the infant experiences from the world of the Big Others. Ettinger explores the concept of seduction further through the Matrixial where it is not seduction involving the encounter with sexuality but seduction as a becoming in the encounter with what has willed you into life. The seduction into life psychologizes life beyond the conventional biological process. See Jean Laplanche, Life & Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999). 31.  Some feminist theorists turned away from Lacan to Melanie Klein to focus more on affects than signifiers. The array of affects identified by Kleinian theory with the depressive and paranoid-schizoid dispositions focus on envy and aggression. The Matrixial discerns the foundations for non-antagonistic but extremely fragilizing affects in the pairing of hospitality and com-passion, wit(h)ness, fragilization and the impossibility of not-sharing. 32. The primal scene is defined in psychoanalysis as a phantasy of origins. It registers in phantasmatic form the enigma of human becoming that haunts the proto-subject before it has acquired language and hence the means to be told about its own origination in a sexual act that is itself unthinkable. The account we are given (medical, biological, sentimental) never assuages the mystery of a human beginning which is also the mystery of sexual difference and sexuality itself and of course initiates us into the question of mortality, time and death. See Laplanche ([1987] 1989) on the primal phantasy as phantasy of origin and on what he names the enigmatic signifiers the infant encounters from already sexed adults, signifiers whose psychic metabolizing initiates and necessitates the formation of the psyche as an apparatus to process the enigma of life and sexuality— which exceed both our phantasy and language. 33.  This gesture signifies the initiation of separation and difference in an aggressive rejection. 34.  Difference has been deconstructed by Derrida through his term différance, using the -ance ending in Latin-derived language to move from a

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fact to a condition of continual differencing and deferring of fixed meaning. Adding to this initial deconstructive move that unsettles all meaning as being perpetually deferred and differencing, Ettinger uses the formulation differenciation to focus attention psychologically and aesthetically on the process of emergence in, and awareness of conditions of p­roximity-in-distance and jointness-in-separation. Neither fused nor separated, neither confused nor distanced, there is a dimension beyond the deconstruction of the phallic slash of either/or. Her invention of linguistic phrases to convey these conditions relates to the important work of Piera Aulagnier who elaborated the concept of the pictogramme in psychoanalysis (Aulagnier 1975/2001). Pictogramme is an early psychic process that is defined as the prelinguistic means of metabolizing experience into a representation. Not yet a combination of signifier and signified to form a linguistic sign, the picto-element serves as one of the primary ways of making sense through image leading to the Imaginary, while the gramme anticipates the later elements of meaning formation with ‘grammar’. 35.  Other instances of this retrospective creation are the phantasy of the body-in-pieces that co-emerges with the creation of an imaginary imago by which the chaotic sensations preceding the Mirror Phase are territorialized and given an architecture through the assumption of the image from the world around the infant (Lacan 1966a) or the phantasy of the Phallic Mother which accompanies submission to Oedipal Law and castration (Freud, 1905, 1908 and Lacan 1958/77). 36.  The concept of pictogramme that Ettinger takes for archaic mode of sense-making was proposed by Piera Aulagnier, with whom Bracha Ettinger was trained. Aulagnier (1975/2001). 37.  For women and men who wish to parent but not to carry a child, Matrixial theory displaces the cult of the mother because all of who live have encountered the Matrixial by the fact of having been born and its affects in terms of aesthetics of relation to a non-I or full not-I other are already inscribed and may be mobilized in many contexts from friendship to education and in relation to the postnatal infant one may parent. 38. I have created the phrase ‘inscriptions in, of and from the feminine’ in my matrixially informed art writing (Pollock 1996). It is derived from the feminist text by the artist Mary Kelly (Kelly 1976/87) who proposed a psychoanalytically informed reading of the works of artists who are women. 38.  Horrifyingly, we see this logic at work in extremisms, notably the ­re-emergence white masculine versions that draw on Nazism to locate an other whose continued existence appears to threaten the extremist’s own because the white suprematist thinks in paranoid, phallic terms.

CHAPTER 1

MATRIX AND METRAMORPHOSIS ([1989–90] 1992)

The first parts of this article, written in December 1989, were published (with slight differences) as Ettinger (1990). The whole ­ revised article was presented at the fifth annual Art History Congress/ Kunsthistorikerinnen Tagung, University of Hamburg, 19 July 1991. The present version was published in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4/3 (1992): 176–208.

EDITOR’S PREFACE First published in a leading feminist journal of cultural theory and cultural studies in 1992, this article lays out the core concepts with which Bracha L. Ettinger mounts her intervention into psychoanalytic theory and its difference from recent feminist interventions by philosopher Luce Irigaray and literary theorist Julia Kristeva. It is laid out in three parts. Bracha L. Ettinger begins by setting out the stakes involved: can we challenge the dominant psychoanalytical paradigms of subjectivity in which a phallic Symbol is considered neutral and universal? Can there be equivalent Symbols (symbolic paradigmatic fields) in the realm of subjectivity? Critiquing the psychoanalytical propositions of Jacques Lacan in order to make a space for the theorization of what she identifies as the ‘matrixial feminine’, Ettinger will deconstruct Lacan’s definition of repression by offering an original reading of Freud’s texts on which Lacan himself leans. Ettinger demonstrates that Freud’s understanding of repression and, therefore, of © The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_2

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the Unconscious differs from Lacan’s in crucial ways. From her re-reading of Freud’s propositions on the relations between body, image and word, she will show that a different theoretical path could have been taken, not only for understanding the feminine in Freud or Lacan, but also for understanding the Unconscious itself. She offers more unconscious mechanisms of development and defense, sense-giving and meaning-producing. In Part II Ettinger has thus to provide an account of what we might call the classic position on sexual difference in psychoanalytical theory, making clear their implications for rendering feminine difference unthinkable. She has to explain the re-reading of psychoanalysis elaborated by Jacques Lacan in the light of structuralism and structural linguistics from which the concept of the Phallus as a unique signifier is derived. Shifting Freud’s bodily metaphors for the phantasies that underpin the formation of sexual difference through the meanings attached to the visual encounter with physical difference, Lacan articulated psychic formation in relation to Language—namely, the Symbolic, the realm of signifiers that are, however, also the structure we name Culture. For Lacan this is the domain of the Other: the order of Culture, the Law, and Language. Ettinger’s text offers a coherent and comprehensible account of Lacan’s theory of the three registers of subjectivity: Real, Imaginary and Symbolic and a profound analysis of the concept 'Phallus' from a number of different angles. The link between subjectivity and culture, and hence the social, is established precisely because of his distinctive thesis that the Symbolic is the Other, and Language is where, she writes: ‘signifiers and their laws, located in the Other, are saturated with laws of society and established within history; what we believe to be our private Unconscious and our private subjectivity are structured by society and history through language. In other words, we are not masters of our subjectivity.’ In Lacan’s system, the Phallus is to be understood as a Symbol, the signifier that organizes meaning in a system where, according to structuralism, meaning is not only produced through negative difference—the logic of the binary is +/− but this is also what defines the Symbolic itself. In this chapter, Ettinger presents and analyses the many Lacanian definitions of the Phallus over time finally to show that if there is only one symbol that organizes meaning for all subjects, and that symbol, being one, identifies meaning with the One, the All and Sameness, in opposition to whatever will negate them, and if this symbol organizes the meaning of sexual difference, a slippage occurs in which the masculine is identified as the One and thus encompasses everything meaningful. The only logical position for the feminine is, therefore, Lack and Minus or total Otherness and non-intelligibility even

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when the feminine is presented as a surplus to the system. Although it was formerly widely discussed in feminist literary and film theory, Lacan’s theory might appear to some readers arcane. Ettinger provides a brilliant and comprehensible account of its key points. Not only does passing through this model of subjectivity, language and culture enable her to articulate her feminist intervention. In this careful reading of Lacan’s early and late texts, she also strives to achieve a revolutionary transformation within the field of psychoanalytic thinking itself and add to it a matrixial feminine Symbolic. In his later writings, Lacan recognized the possibility of sensing some zone of the Real ‘beyond’ the Phallus associated specifically with the feminine—that could, however, not be thought within his system, even as it appears to that system as its beyond. Ettinger will detect it and define the ‘beyond-the-Phallus’ as a different dimension that does not need to be merely intuited through negativity. Her argument is that it can become intelligible and thinkable via specific mechanisms and processes that she suggests. She will turn to certain phenomenological principles in Freud to claim that we can rethink the Unconscious from and with the experiencing body. In Parts III and IV, Ettinger clarifies the Matrix as a supplementary symbol in order to propose this signifier for a supplementary dimension of subjectivity that was rendered unthinkable in the logic ruled by the Phallus as the organizing signifier. This dimension that she has identified has to be understood not as an alternative or a replacement; substitution would still be a product of a binary logic, either/or. The Matrixial and its mode of sense-giving and meaning-production, metramorphosis, are not identified as, or with, the feminine in the sense derived from phallocentric logic: presence/absence, masculine/feminine. They do, however, make another sense ‘of/from the feminine’ thinkable, a feminine sexual difference related to co-emergence and a Symbolic that is not defined in relation to the Phallus. Ettinger’s new theorization leans on the Lacanian distinction between the Real (trauma to which she adds unthinkable corporeal intensity in jointness), and the pair Imaginary (the realm of image and phantasy) and Symbolic (realm of words and thought), to which she adds the ‘corpo-Real’ of the pre-maternal who, as a subject, not as object, informs subjectivity. Thus, the Matrix, like the Phallus, is to be understood as a Symbol, a signifier and not just a signified, by which aspects of subjectivity and meaning are organized. Neither is it a body part however much the very conditions of our thinking bear the continuing imprints of primary corporeal sensations and its aesthetic intensities as well as phantasmatic images of the body’s eroticized components (sensed as touch, sight, perceived via aurality, orality,

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anality, erogeneity). She states: ‘The Matrix, whose primary meaning [in Latin] is womb/uterus, is not an organ but a Symbol and a concept related to a feminine Real and to Imaginary structures.’ Its conceptualization, however, does indicate female and maternal phenomenological and affective contribution to subjectivity as well as modes of sublimation from female corporeality. Laying out the basic assumptions on which matrixial theory will be elaborated, Ettinger has also to address directions in British psychoanalysis deriving from Melanie Klein and Object Relations together with French analyst Françoise Dolto’s concepts as well as concurrent attempts in feminist philosophy (Irigaray) and linguistic and literary theory (Kristeva) to think beyond the phallocentric models of the feminine. She has to make clear the difference between seeking to make space for the feminine within the phallocentric system, as its repressed sexual other (Irigaray) or its negative capability (Kristeva), and her own matrixial propositions. While pressing at the limits of the Lacanian and Freudian theses they contest, Ettinger shows how both Irigaray and Kristeva, like the latest Lacan himself, remain conceptually within phallocentric parameters. The key point is that the Matrix has psychic implications for all subjects, irrespective of their sexualities and later genders, both being effects of postnatal psychological processes into which Freudian and other psychoanalyses offer their varying insights yet both being imprinted by a f­emale-maternal gestating subject. The Matrixial hypothesises affects and potential sense-making transformational processes she names metramorphosis that persist, however, into post-natal subjectivity from the latest stages of prenatality and imply inscriptions in the psyche arriving from the prematernal subject-other to begin with, and from other others during life. Matrix and metramophosis have the capacity to generate a logic or a coherence, engender phantasies and shape an Imaginary, and they have a profound relation to the aesthetic. Metra- is from the Greek, mētrā, meaning uterus but also from mētēr, mētr-, giving us mother; see māter- in Indo-European roots. Matrix is from the same root. Classical psychoanalysis chose a specific anatomical term, ὑστέρα, hystera (as in hysteria) for womb, following the long tradition of attributing women’s afflictions to the organ. In selecting the metra- root, Ettinger reveals the embedded psychological and relational concepts in the word itself which enables her intervention at the level of theorizing an enlarged domain of human subjectivity based not on the pathologized feminine, but the subjectivizing condition of human becoming, matrixially.

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The most challenging element of this first statement of her theory to have been published in English is the radical proposition of a different way of imagining a dimension of subjectivity that co-exists with, but shifts, the exclusively post-natal psychic formations that classic psychoanalysis has already explicated. Ettinger’s proposition does not abolish or replace them; she opens channels to the understanding of a stratum of subjectivity and its meaning processes in which the primary encounter with a feminine sexual dimension contributes elements to our understanding of subjectivity that have hitherto not been recognized even while they are constantly registered sub-cognitively and non-consciously. Most importantly, a matrixial dimension emerges prior to any gendering and participates in consciousness. Yet it arises, logically and unquestionably, in relation to what has to be defined as a sexual difference engendered by the effects of the sexual specificity of the female body-psyche in which human life arises, and from a proto-subjectivity that is stimulated by proximity to, and in intimacy but not fusion with, the female body-psyche. The Matrixial signifies not the sexual difference of the feminine (−) to the positivised masculine (+) but a sexual difference in/ from a matrixial originary feminine: a subjectivizing dimension to which all born subjects have been intimately connected. Hence Ettinger will write: ‘I propose the Matrix as a basic but not exclusive symbol for the feminine, a symbol for a non-phallic sphere of a non-one-ness (more-than-one but not everything and/or less-than-one but not nothing), which includes a recognized unknown’ where, for her, more-than-one indicates a few subjects or a few subjects and objects, and less-than-one indicates joint partial subjects and partial objects. Once recognized as a component of human subjectivity incited ­pre-natally in the latest stages of pregnancy (thus not impinging on women’s rights over their own bodies, but rather in support of it) in relation to specific pre-maternality, the Matrix’s dynamics opens the way to thinking about the ethical, social and even political implications of the core issue of relations between the subject and its others once we have, under post-natal, Oedipal gendering and accession to Language, become speaking, sexed subjects. She states: ‘Since the Matrix implies a link between the feminine and unknown others, it is interesting to explore its socio-political meaning and consequences. We might discover, for example, that the affinity between women and minority groups is far richer and more complex than a simple identification or solidarity between culture’s and history’s “underdogs”.’ The chapter concludes with an indication of the intervention of matrixial theory both into the focus on Mother and mothering in Object Relations (mother as

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subject, not just object of relations) and as a critical indication with regards to the ideological idealization (and its price: rejection) and even social prescriptions of Mother and mothering in patriarchal culture. Central to the text from the beginning is a thesis on our intimations of others, signified by the terms I and non-I or non-Is. This jointness marks a distinction from the phallic model where subjectivity is engendered and based on the splitting of I from not-I (after symbiosis). Arguing finally that it is vital we consider the question of the feminine, and a sexual difference ‘of/from/for the feminine positively’, Ettinger suggests that those opposed to the very question itself, for fear of essential or reductive theories of woman, remain open to the idea of difference until the issue can be further investigated. The ground for such openness lies in the significance of this new theory for subjectivity in general: ‘Matrix is no more feminine than Phallus is masculine’ and, according to Ettinger, we need a language of/for the feminine difference in all its manifestations if women are to achieve rights over their bodies.

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MATRIX AND METRAMORPHOSIS ([1989–90] 1992) I In this article, I propose the concepts Matrix and Metramorphosis to describe certain aspects of human symbolic experience and to relativize the prevailing status of the concept of the Phallus in Lacan’s (and Freud’s) psychoanalytic theories. The Matrix is modelled upon certain dimensions of the prenatal state that are culturally foreclosed, occluded, or repressed.1 It corresponds to a feminine dimension of the symbolic order dealing with asymmetrical, plural, and fragmented subjects composed of the known as well as the not-rejected and not-assimilated unknown, and to unconscious processes of change and transgression in borderlines, limits, and thresholds of ‘I’ and ‘non-I’ emerging in co-existence. I think of the ‘complete’ or ‘whole’ subject as emerging after and from an already distinct and highly structured stratum rather than from one that is undifferentiated. The Matrix is the term I have chosen to describe this distinct stratum of subjectivization and to account for the difference between the sexes from the point of view of feminine sexuality. The term metramorphosis refers to certain processes related to the Matrix, to the becoming-thresholds of borderlines. To begin with, I would like to present two pictures: first, that of the foetus in its mother’s womb with some kind of awareness of I and unknown non-I(s), neither rejected nor assimilated; secondly, that of the mother carrying a baby in her womb with a similar awareness of I and non-I(s).2 The idea of a primary stratum in terms of a matrixial subjectivity challenges several basic assumptions in psychoanalytic theory about the nature of different psychopathologies as well as about what is considered normal development, the difference between the sexes, and the characterization of feminine and masculine. The matrixial stage is earlier than the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal stages and affects them in various ways.3 In the Oedipal stage, the traces of the Matrix are reconstructed and partially or wholly repressed. The effects of this process may be different for girls and for boys, the differences

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resulting from Oedipal discoveries of one’s own sexuality as well as that of parents and others, from the massive repression of the Matrix, and from the idealization of the Phallus in Western culture throughout history. The combination of these factors has vested the Oedipal stage/ structure with cultural priority over any other possible stages/structures. As a result, an ideal masculine development has become the norm by which all individuals are measured. In the following, I will elaborate and explain the phallic and Oedipal stages/structures in the theories of Lacan and Freud and use the concepts of Matrix and metramorphosis to deconstruct the following theoretical equations of Lacan: I. Symbol = Signifier of signifiers = Phallus. II. symbolic castration = phallic inscription = any passage to the symbolic network. I also intend to challenge the assumption that all unconscious processes are either metaphors or metonymies. These equations and assumptions reflect the way Western culture is based on the repression of the feminine. In psychoanalysis, two questions are repeatedly asked: ‘why, or in what way, is the Phallus masculine?’ and ‘what is the source of the male’s privileges in relation to the Phallus?’ Freud established a proximity between Phallus and the male sexual organ based on ‘natural’ identity. For Lacan, the Phallus is not male but universal. His work has provoked a certain number of feminist works showing that the privileges of men are linked to conventions and are structured by history, language, hidden ideologies, and the social power system. Lacan’s idea that the Phallus signifies all relationships between the human subject and signifiers and the only possible passage into the symbolic dimension is, in itself, an axiom based on a hidden masculine ideology and on a theoretical blind spot linked to Phallocentrism. This is, among other things, the result of the reduction of all unconscious mechanisms to either metaphor or metonymy. This theoretical assumption reduces the idea of the Symbolic to the idea of the Phallus, the One. Until the 1960s, Lacan saw the feminine only through the prism of the Phallus. In the 1970s he spoke of women’s Otherness beyond the Phallus. Yet, since for him anything symbolic

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is phallic by definition, nothing could be positively stated about that Otherness nor symbolized about it. I propose to separate the equation between Symbol and Phallus. Symbol is wider than Phallus, and we have to introduce non-phallic symbolic spheres alongside the phallic sphere. I call one such sphere the Matrix. The Matrix conceptualizes non-one-ness, prenatal experiences of I and non-I(s) in co-existence without assimilation and without rejection. In my proposition, the Symbolic is composed of the following (with no claims for exclusivity): a.  Phallus (unconscious structure) + metaphors and metonymies (unconscious processes), involving one-ness, totality, and sameness, and Oedipal, symbolic castration. b.  Matrix + metramorphosis, involving multiplicity, plurality, partiality, difference, strangeness, relations to the unknown other, prenatal passages to the Symbolic, with processes of change of I and non-I emerging in co-existence, and of change in their borderlines, limits, and thresholds within and around them. The concepts of Matrix and metramorphosis can serve to explore the feminine as an otherness beyond the Phallus in psychoanalysis and in works of art, as well as to analyse social phenomena.4 The triangle of feminine/masculine/androgyne is analogous to a triangle including a well-structured self (subject), a well structured other (object), and a union that would abolish their differences. The ‘solution’ of the androgyne, and the concepts of feminine and masculine in such a context, are nothing but three corners in a well-established paradigm of Western culture. They all interact on the same territory in which they can be distinguished on the axis of opposition or symmetry and combined on the axis of sameness (which does not necessarily imply equality). In the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, the masculine concept of the Phallus conquers the totality of the Symbolic. Paradoxically, this somehow sets the ‘feminine’ free in my view, permitting a new type of research since, in addition to creating an impossible world for women, it also presented us with a major unconscious paradigm of our culture, a paradigm that needs to be deconstructed in order to explore an-other femininity, an-otherness beyond the Phallus.

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To be more specific, until the 1970s, Lacan dealt with woman mostly within the universe of the Phallus: a woman cannot recognize anything not phallic related to sexual difference in the Real; the real difference of woman, which is not represented in subjectivity, is a lost continent which reminds us of Freud’s image of the feminine as a dark continent. It is interesting to note that both Freud and Lacan realized later in life that they did not really ‘know much’ about the feminine. Previously seen only through the prism of the Phallus, the feminine slowly became a question mark for both of these analysts, while at the same time Western culture accepted and adhered to their earlier theories. In the 1970s, Lacan hints at the possibility of recognizing feminine specificity, a feminine otherness beyond the phallic order of meaning. Lacan, however, cannot speak about it, except in terms of negation or of a supplement to the Phallus: ‘being not-all, she has, in relation to what the phallic function designates as jouissance, a supplementary jouissance’ (Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 73, my translation, emphasis added).5 Whatever he may state positively becomes, however, automatically phallic according to his own definitions. Before discussing the concept of the Phallus and those of Matrix and metramorphosis, three comments must be made: a. One of the basic facts of the present situation is that either women as subjects have not contributed enough to fixing the existing cultural codes, or their contribution has been ignored. It is important that women infuse the symbolic universe—already burdened with ideas concerning femininity—with other suggestions, in order to enrich the cultural historical ‘text’ concerning women and the feminine. The question of nature, essence, and truth (e.g., ‘are there or are there not any essential feminine qualities?’) can, in my opinion, be postponed to a later date. A long and patient process of ‘data accumulation’ and studies in art and in psychoanalysis may be necessary before coming to a ‘decision’ about it. In any case, I believe that this is one of those questions with no real answer, and which lose their force in time, and are being replaced by new questions without answers. As for my proposition, it concerns the symbolic network that is culturally shared by men and women; Matrix is no more feminine than Phallus is masculine. b. If women find other different feminine paradigms, they will apply to a variety of cultural phenomena, in a comparable way to the

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phallic language with which our culture is saturated. The human subject is always inside culture and constructed in relation to its propositions, but s/he is also in a position to change it. c. Finally, I would like to point out that women and the feminine are not to be confused.6

II Lacan differentiates three levels of human reality that are revealed in language through speech (parole): the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. The Imaginary is the realm of conscious contents and of ­Ego-identifications. This is the field of the signified of words, of contents that we usually accept as meaning for concepts. It is the illusory and alienating, though necessary, field of the Ego. In order to understand the Symbolic in Lacan’s theory, it is better to try to forget what we usually mean by it and to look at it as linguistic chains of signifiers that correspond to forms or to acoustic images of words. This is the realm of unconscious meaning created by linguistic-like laws. Words are divided into signifiers that belong to the Symbolic and the signified that belongs to the Imaginary. The Real is what language cannot contain. Reality cannot be entirely represented in language and we can look at the Real as whatever cannot be represented directly from the body in language, such as instincts and impulses. We can also look at it as whatever escapes in the process of human ‘entry’ into the realm of language, when words are divided into signifiers and the signified, forms and content, symbols and images. It can also be described as archaic psychic and psychosomatic events that cannot or have not been symbolized. The Real is whatever cannot be known consciously or unconsciously either because of the impossibility of its symbolization or because symbolization itself establishes the Real precisely as lack. Energy slides in the Unconscious from one signifier to another. Unconscious meaning is created through this exchange and not through the signified, not through content. According to Lacan, the laws of the Unconscious (of which Freud speaks)—displacement and condensation—correspond to the linguistic laws of metaphor and metonymy (Lacan 1966f [1964]). Lacan often repeats that ‘the Unconscious is structured like a language’. Concepts have their own original order of reality, within language. They do not stem from personal human

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experience. Symbols are instruments within a system of language, used by us in order to break up fluid reality into recognizable units. The I is the place where the subject is momentarily realized, through speech, and immediately fades away because it is created in the passage from one signifier to another, alongside the chain of the signifier. The abstract site of linguistic signifiers is the Other. The subject can relate to him/herself and recognize his/her desire in two ways: in the Imaginary and in the Symbolic. In the Imaginary, Ego and others have specular-mirror relationships, explained by Lacan by the concept of the ‘mirror stage’. Both are objects; one’s own Ego is not closer to subjectivity than are others. The subject first recognizes him/ herself through false and alienating self-objects, through identification with others. These ‘objective’ images of self and of others obstruct the subject from full self-realization, but this level of reality, the Imaginary, is necessary—there is no subject without Ego, it is not possible to ‘jump’ beyond the Imaginary to the Other. Yet, the subject should not be limited to the imaginary level either. The relation between these two kinds of recognition—the imaginary axis that goes between Ego and others, and the symbolic axis that goes between the subject and the Other—is elaborated by Lacan’s ‘Schema L’ (Lacan 1978 [1954–5]: 243–9). The Symbolic is a specifically human level in which the subject recognizes himself in the Other and not in others. If the passage to the Symbolic is blocked, the human being is a prisoner in an alienating universe; if a major metaphor or major signifiers are ‘missing’, the person will be psychotic. Since signifiers and their laws, located in the Other, are saturated with laws of society and established within history, what we believe to be our private Unconscious and our private subjectivity are structured by society and history through language. In other words, we are not masters of our subjectivity. Human beings are ‘born’ into language and that language gives meaning to their perceptions: imaginary meaning through the signified, and symbolic meaning through signifiers and their interconnections. On the symbolic axis, early repressed representation becomes connected with later repressed representation, and unconscious meaning is thus created. When we speak, we transmit through language a whole social system behind the expression of personal experience. Women are ‘trapped’ in the same way as men in this structure, which is—as we shall see—a phallic structure. The feminine, when it is not described in terms of sameness and/or opposition, is what escapes it and is missing in the Symbolic. For Lacan, it is impossible to formulate

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an-other symbolic sphere and ‘the woman [as a different, collective Other dimension] does not exist and does not signify anything [signifies nothing]’ (1975b [1972–3]: 74, translation modified). I believe that poetry, like the visual arts and music, can escape the destiny of reproducing existing values, through the special use of language. Art can create differences in the transmission, destroy it, and posit new symbols. The feminine can participate in this process. Before continuing, I would like to cite Freud on the relations between the Conscious, the Unconscious, repression, and words. We shall see that the Unconscious about which Lacan speaks has shifted slightly from Freud’s: Lacan assigns to the Unconscious characteristics that Freud assigns to the Preconscious. However, what is important for me here is the attempt to clarify the connection between the Unconscious and language. Freud wrote: […] all our knowledge is invariably bound up with consciousness. We can come to know even the Ucs. only by making it conscious. […] What does it mean […]? […] All perceptions which are received from without (sense-perceptions) and from within – what we call sensations and feelings – are Cs. from the start. But what about those internal processes which we may – roughly and inexactly – sum up under the name of thought-processes? They represent displacements of mental energy which are effected somewhere in the interior of the apparatus as this energy proceeds on its way towards action. […] [T]he real difference between an Ucs. and a Pcs. idea (thought) consists in this: that the former is carried out on some material which remains unknown, whereas the latter (the Pcs.) is in addition brought into connection with word-presentations. […] [T]he question, ‘How does a thing become conscious?’ would thus be more advantageously stated: ‘How does a thing become preconscious?’ And the answer would be: ‘Through becoming connected with the word-presentations corresponding to it.’ These word-presentations are residues of memories; they were at one time perceptions, and like all mnemic residues they can become conscious again. […] [O]nly something which has once been a Cs. perception can become conscious, and […] anything arising from within (apart from feelings) that seeks to become conscious must try to transform itself into external perceptions: this becomes possible by means of memory-traces. […]

106  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS Verbal residues are derived primarily from auditory perceptions, so that the system Pcs. has, as it were, a special sensory source. […] The part played by word-presentations now becomes perfectly clear. By their interposition internal thought-processes are made into perceptions. It is like a demonstration of the theorem that all knowledge has its origin in external perception. (Freud 1923a: 19–21, 23)

Lacan attributes these relations between language and the Preconscious to the Unconscious. He seems to push the dimension of language further into the Unconscious and suggests that the subject is a product of language. The structure of signifiers creates a filter to human needs and to internal impressions. Subjectivity is discovered in the relationships between self and the signifiers of language, between the subject and the discourse of the Other that is an unconscious tissue of chains of discourse. By the signifier, every message is connected to an unconscious code that is included in the Other. Therefore, the meaning we receive through the signified, through what we usually accept as content, is not the central human meaning provided by signs. Everything we repress has already been organized by the laws of the Unconscious, and every word as signifier finds its place first of all in relation to other repressed signifiers of words, and, therefore, takes an unexpected path in the creation of meaning. According to Lacan, subjectivity is made possible by the Symbolic through language. Anything that has not been symbolized to the level of signifiers cannot be repressed, cannot contribute to subjectivity. Such elements are ‘holes’ in the Symbolic. A lack on the level of a basic metaphor, a lack of major signifiers, any such large hole in the Symbolic might cast the whole symbolic sphere into confusion. This is a problem usually related to psychosis and hallucination (Lacan 1981 [1955–6]: 12–13), but we shall see later that it has a particular interest with regard to the sexual difference of women. The human being, in the ‘mirror stage’, first has access to an imaginary unity of itself that does not exist in the Real. This unity, gained through the perception of images of self and others, puts an end to a more archaic stage: a stage of phantasms of the split and fragmented body (elaborated by Object-Relations theorists like Melanie Klein, W. Ronald Fairbairn, D. W. Winnicott, Harry Guntrip, and others). The relation between the phantasmatic fragments and the self can be described as pre-Oedipal, partial object-relationships. According

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to Freud, this fragmented or amorphous territory should ideally be destroyed with the resolution of Oedipal complex: a ‘normal man represses the Oedipal complex. He also represses the pre-Oedipal phases to a point of complete destruction; this gives him a privileged ticket to the Symbolic, a ticket termed sublimation. Somehow, this territory remains half-open to woman—this is the famous dark continent of the feminine that is hardly accessible to man according to Freud (1931). The inability to destroy the pre-Oedipal territory, which is considered the first mark of ‘women’s inferiority’, is the result of all kinds of later Oedipal complications. We are told that the ability to have access to the ­pre-Oedipal fields damages women’s capacity for sublimation. In psychoanalysis, this territory represents not only the feminine, but also the anxiety linked to the feminine; anxiety caused by the fear of falling into pieces and of psychological disintegration resulting in an undifferentiated, amoebic condition. According to Lacan, these ephemeral objects and object-relations cannot pass into the Symbolic at all. They can neither be thought of, nor repressed and, therefore, for both men and women, they cannot be represented in the Unconscious. According to this theory, the subject, female or male, cannot recognize these elements that belong to the Real and are related to the feminine. Both Freud and Lacan claim that men and women take the same path in the creation of the Ego until the Oedipal complex. Freud’s well-known expression was that until the Oedipal stage, the little girl is a little boy (Freud 1932: 118). The pre-Oedipal territory, which many women analysts recognize in their writings as a level that does contribute to subjectivity, appears for Freud under the sign of mystery, anxiety, female inferiority, devalorized and damaged objects. Freud specifically attaches the pre-Oedipal to the problematics of the feminine—and most women psychoanalysts agree with this point—but for Freud, this attachment is qualified as something negative. For Lacan, it is simply not human: pre-Oedipal levels exist, but cannot be thought of, and, therefore, cannot become part of subjectivity. But, as we shall see, for Lacan, the Oedipal complex is mainly structural, and anything that can be thought of already participates in this structure. There is a vicious circle in this paradigm. According to Freud, the Oedipal complex is mostly described in terms of a developmental stage. The first level of feminine difficulties, in the pre-Oedipal stage, is followed by the classical Oedipal complex, when,

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according to Freud, a girl discovers through observation of the other that she lacks the sex organ. Her phallic inferiority is thus based on the visual and relates to biology. For both Freud and Lacan, there is only one symbol for sex, the Phallus, and it is at the disposition of both sexes. The masculine sex organ is thus the only representative for sexual difference; we may, or may not, have it. The woman does not have the unique sex organ. Paradoxically, difference has only one signifier… The French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto developed the distinction between the schema du corps (body schema) and the image du corps (body image) (Dolto 1984). The body schema deals with the ­physical-physiological-biological level of bodily existence. On the other hand, the concept body image is a synthesis of emotional experiences and representations of needs and desires, memory and fantasy, and it is the cradle of narcissism. The body image is mediated by language and is unconscious. It does not express actual body data. Instead, it is an unconscious code in which the history of one’s desires, pains, and object-relations are recorded. Speech, coming from meaningful others, creates relationships between the body schema and the body image. Language gives them meaning. Understanding a word is not merely an intellectual process. It depends: (a) upon the body schema, which limits the possibility of understanding in any given situation, and (b) upon the subject’s building a body image in relation to the interpersonal relationships that accompany the acquisition of the word. In order for words to have meaning, they must be metabolized in a body image related to human relationships (first of all with the mother). To some extent, in order for this to be possible—to digest in the body image those experiences that are tied in with the body schema—they must undergo symbolization through language. This means that symbolic ‘castration’ happens at every developmental stage. Even though she uses different terms, Dolto’s theory is quite close to the theoretical discoveries of Melanie Klein. We might say that she uses Lacanian language to speak about very similar ideas. If we were to elaborate some theoretical aspects of Klein within a Lacanian framework, we could say that Klein puts forward the hypothesis that the series of symbolic ‘castrations’ begins very early, that Oedipal processes begin earlier than Freud believed, and that there are pre-Oedipal passages to the Symbolic. Dolto’s concepts, body schema and body image, might facilitate the presentation of Klein’s theory in a Lacanian context.

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The concept of body schema enables me to reformulate a problem concerning the feminine: important elements of the female body schema are not inscribed in the Symbolic, and the possibility of their symbolization has been generally negated by Freud and by Lacan. When Lacan himself ‘translated’ Klein’s ideas in his own theory, he presented them one-sidedly, claiming that Klein’s discoveries only meant that Oedipal castrations began very early. His theoretical axiom is revealed in this interpretation of Klein, namely, that every passage to language, every naming and every conceptualization is, by definition, phallic. For Lacan, the Symbolic is always phallic. A very important idea of Lacan’s, however, which I will develop further while dealing with the different definitions of the Phallus, is that both men and women must come to terms with the idea that they do not have a hold on the Phallus, that no one, not even males, has it. The fact that a boy imagines that he has it and a girl that she does not, as well as the fact that the symbol of the Phallus has special, direct relations to the male sexual organ, are both secondary facts for Lacan. At the same time, he claims that the subject can recognize from his or her body only what exists in the Symbolic. We can now see that theoretically, a feminine difference in the Real cannot be discovered by the female subject even if it exists in the body schema because of a lack, a hole in the tissue of discourse in which meaning is organized through symbolic codes. The proposition of the Matrix, which I will elaborate later, deals with prenatal elements which I define as feminine for both sexes since both experience the uterus as an environment, but, in addition, the Matrix also relates in the Real, to female’s body schema.7 The difference in the Real (i.e., having a womb) reinforces après-coup (retroactively or afterwardly) the link in the Symbolic between the Matrix and women; it might facilitate access to it. Lacan does not say that the Real, or a difference in the Real, is not important. On the contrary, his more interesting contributions to psychoanalysis concern, in my opinion, the Real and the Symbolic as levels rather than the Imaginary. Lacan insists that the discovery of subjectivity leads to the idea of the Real as a lack. The Real is precisely that which cannot be within language (Lacan 1975a [1953–4]: 73–88). Either the Real is what has been left out in the process of symbolization or created by it, or it is what has been totally resistant to symbolization.8 This is why the ‘woman’ is sometimes equated with the Real par excellence or with a totally inaccessible, radical otherness: ‘Being in sexual

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relations—in relation to what can be said about the Unconscious—radically the Other, the woman is that which has relations with the Other’ (Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 81). ‘The other, in my language, cannot be, therefore, but the other sex’ (40). Otherwise she is equated with the objet a, with a lack in the realm of the Real that is in itself a lack: she is a lack of a lack. The object of desire can be interpreted as a lack in the realm of the Real—the cause, in the Real, for desire. Desire itself belongs to the symbolic Other. It is a result of symbolic ‘castration’ when, during the entry of the human being ‘into’ language, something is lost. Something cannot be contained in the symbol while the division between signifier and signified occurs. The object of desire is connected to the basic human lack, to an early lost object. This objet a will be lacking forever and is represented by a metonymic chain of partial objects. You will note that the metonymic process is in itself phallic since one thing takes the place of several other things. Thus, subjectivity is structured by the Other, which is the source of the desire for the forever lost object. If the chain of signifiers determines subjectivity, according to Lacan, ‘man is trapped in language’ and in the codes of society and of history. ‘The human being is subordinated to the phenomenon of language’ (Lacan 1998 [1957–8]: 50, my translation). The Unconscious is ‘the signifier in action. We have inside ourselves a thinking subject, thinking in terms of laws that organize the chain of signifiers’ (106, my translation). Since the Phallus is not a biological structure, what is it? It is important to understand that the Phallus is not a sexual organ but a symbolic structure with cultural, historical, and social roots, anchored in language. Its meaning is elaborated by Lacan in relation to the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. He uses this concept in a way that carries his theory of the Oedipal complex far away from that of Freud, even though he claims to be more Freudian than Freud. As we proceed, I shall continue to present several definitions of the Phallus in Lacan’s theory. One of these definitions states that the Phallus is what the mother lacks and what she desires. What she is supposed to lack is the sex organ, the penis, and having a baby may stand as a replacement for it. But, even if we do not know what it is that the mother really lacks and desires—nor in fact does she—the Phallus is, nevertheless, the name for whatever it may be, and the child, therefore, relates to it. Lacan claims that the relations between the child and the Phallus are necessary

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because the Phallus is the object of desire of the mother (Lacan 1966c [1955–6]). In the primary relationships between child and mother, the Phallus then signifies their imaginary unity. At first, the baby identifies him/herself with the Phallus, with being what the mother is lacking or missing. Both mother and child share in a way the illusion that the child is the object of desire of the mother, and that, therefore, the lack of the Phallus can be filled. For Lacan, the Oedipal complex represents the entry of the baby into the realm of culture, where the question ‘to be or not to be’ the Phallus of/for the mother, is replaced by a new question, ‘do I have it or do I not?’ The baby renounces his/her claims to be the Phallus quite early and thus the Oedipal complex appears much earlier than classical Freudian theory claims. On the imaginary level as defined by Lacan, which very much corresponds to Freud’s formulations, because of identity between the Phallus and the sexual organ (the penis), the boy believes he has it and is afraid of castration by the father. This fear brings about sublimation through the repression of sexual desire towards the mother and of the Oedipal complex itself. As we all know, the girl does not have ‘it’ and is generally thought to believe that she has lost it, or that she is already castrated. Her complex is brought about—rather than repressed—by the realization of her castration. She, therefore, has less reason to make an effort in the field of repression that leads to sublimation; in any case, her realm of sublimation is potentially quite limited in this theoretical context. In the Symbolic, the picture is different according to Lacan. Here, on the contrary, everyone is potentially equal because everyone must lose the illusion of having the Phallus. Unfortunately, I believe that this equality in terms of symbolic lack of the Phallus puts the woman theoretically in an even more paradoxical situation: ‘woman must go through the same dialectic,’ says Lacan, ‘whereas nothing seems to oblige her to do so – she must [symbolically] lose what she does not have [in the body schema]’ (Lacan 1966f [1964]: 723). Losing what one does not have is obviously a very difficult exercise, which, according to Lacan, explains the fact that so many women are hysterical neurotics… In the beginning of the Oedipal situation (which, in Lacan’s theory, is largely structural rather than developmental), the desire to be the Phallus is repressed. This primal repression sets the chains of signifiers into action. This brings us to yet another description of the Phallus: every signifier and every signifying act is a substitution. They are successive

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conversions of the Phallus that forever remains the first signifier. We might say that every signifier is equivalent in value to the Phallus that is the signifier of the lost unity between the mother and the child, and is related to the lost or impossible object of desire. Each time we evoke a symbol, we also evoke the Phallus. The Phallus is, then, an abstract value inherited from one signifier to another along the chain of signifiers. Every act of language is both a conversion of the Phallus and a failure of this conversion. The Phallus is not only the unique term for distinguishing the function of the signifier, but it is also the signifier of that which is lacking in the chain of signifiers. It is also the symbol for a function that is only signifiant, a signifier that has no signified (Lacan 1975b [1972– 3]: 28–9). I can present the Phallus from yet another angle and say that it is the code chosen to signify that which enables the child to separate from the mother’s body. This separation takes place during each passage from the Real to the Symbolic. According to Lacan, this passage corresponds to each reception of messages from the Other by the subject (Lacan 1978 [1954–5]: 243). We can now see why the Phallus, for Lacan, signifies all the possible relations between the subject and the whole universe of signifiers. He, therefore, calls it the signifier of signifiers, ‘the only one which deserves the name of Symbol’ (Lacan 2001 [1960–1]: 279, my translation). Since the father is the imaginary and the symbolic carrier of the Phallus, since he is supposed to have what the woman lacks and desires, the paternal function has a structural advantage in the Oedipal complex and more generally in our culture. It regulates the relationships between mother and child through what Lacan calls the ‘Name of the Father’, a metaphor for all unconscious laws of metaphor and metonymy. These laws are intrinsically phallic, since they reduce chaos to one symbol at a time. They are also phallic because they are saturated by our culture and history. In this description of the Oedipal complex, it is the paternal function and structure, and not any particular father figure, which regulates the system of the Unconscious. ‘The father is not a real object. What is it, then? […] The father is a metaphor. What is a metaphor? […] It is a signifier that takes the place of another […]. [T]he father is a signifier’ (Lacan 1998 [1957–8]: 174, 175, my translation). The ­masculine-paternal, in this instance, is the only agent of culture, and the feminine is the price that must be paid in order to belong to culture. The feminine is whatever cannot be part of a chain of signifiers and ‘woman’

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(as personification of the feminine) cannot be included in the Other, although she is, paradoxically and for the same reasons, the Other par excellence. In other words, feminine aspects of the woman are not recognizable. ‘Is Woman the Other, the place of Desire which while intact, impassable, slips under words, or rather the thing [la chose], the place of jouissance?’ Woman is ‘a Lack in the signifying chain, with the resultant wandering objects’, which are ‘this unattainable woman’ (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 227, my translation). In the Oedipal complex, becoming a human subject happens through a symbolic process called ‘castration’. I would like to point out that symbolic, Oedipal, and phallic castration are three different names for the same process and have the same meaning, that of finding linkage to signifiers and moving into a position which allows the signifier to act as a symbol from its place within the system of language. This process enables the subject to recognize him/herself through the Other and not through others, not through any particular identification. We must question the use of the term ‘castration’ for signifying all these processes, and I suggest that there are non-phallic passages to the symbolic network and that, therefore, the term ‘castration’ is not fit to describe all such processes and should be used with caution. The term ‘castration’ is borrowed by Lacan from Freud in order to maintain a conceptual and theoretical continuity, but its meaning is changed. Once again, a particularly phallic term is chosen to symbolize the totality of a universal process. Through ‘castration’, by loss of contact with elements of the Real, one comes to terms with symbolic desire. Castration refers to the ‘death’ of the ‘thing’ in language, to the impossibility of actually touching through language, to the total separation of the Real from the Symbolic, but also to separation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic: the Other which signifies is no longer the (pointed at, reflected, identified with, and loved) mother but the symbolic Other. Naming involves destroying the ‘thing’ and replacing it with a symbol. Why call this process castration? A metaphor in itself, castration represents as uniquely phallic that which is not necessarily so. I prefer to call this process the passage to the Symbolic. Each such passage to the Symbolic assumes meaning within the context of the Unconscious, which, again according to Lacan, is a linguistic context. That is one reason why language, our specifically human tool, is also described by Lacan as a wall of separation, separating the ‘human’ Symbolic from the Real,

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and the signifier from the signified; the human subject is thus created as a lack-in-being (manque-à-être). Through the metaphor of the Name of the Father, the classical Oedipal triangle of the mother-child-father becomes a Lacanian quadrangle of the mother-child-father-Phallus. In the Freudian Oedipal triangle, the girl’s inferior position is related to biology and the visual. For Lacan, Oedipus’s real importance is on the symbolic level. Biology is ‘out’ (‘The being of the body, of course, is sexué [sexuated], but this is secondary’; it is ‘the function of the signifier which is in the field of human meaning’) (Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 5, 27) and the visual is secondary, since the Imaginary is subordinated to the Symbolic (the signified is subordinated to the signifier in the creation of unconscious meaning). The Phallus is simultaneously the object of desire and the only symbol for both sexes, even though they are in asymmetrical positions in relation to it. If Lacan says that the human being is trapped in language, I would like to add that the human being is trapped in the language of the Phallus. In this trap, the two sexes are totally ‘equal’, but, unfortunately, the whole symbolic universe is unbalanced, being seen as only phallic. Lacan proposes phallocentric terms and processes as the only possible symbolic universe. Paradoxically, he also accomplishes a feminist ‘task’, in that he brings to the surface the basic, hidden phallocentric paradigm of psychoanalysis, paradigm in which Phallus and Father are the only keys to culture and to subjectivity and Phallus equals Symbol. Thus, while reinforcing it, Lacan also gives us the details of the paradigm. Let me summarize Lacan’s position as I see it thus far: language is prior to personal experiences; desire is the desire of the Other which replaces desire as a reflection of the desire of others with whom we identify ourselves; we come into contact with our subjective desire through the Phallus and the paternal function; the woman becomes a subject following the same Oedipal lines as man; we can recognize from our body only what exists in the Other as signifier; there is no signifier for the difference between the sexes or for the difference between the feminine and the universal/masculine. Difference exists only in the relations to the Phallus. Sexual difference is recognized in the Oedipal stage and there is no pre-Oedipal symbolization; the woman can recognize herself only through phallic parameters and emerges as a subject only within the language of the Phallus that constructs our Unconscious. At the beginning of this article, I stated that in the 1970s Lacan repeated the idea of a feminine otherness beyond the Phallus:

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Being not-all [not-whole] inside the phallic function does not mean that she is not there at all. She is not not there at all. She is fully there. But there is something more [en plus].… The being of the body is of course sexual, but this is secondary. […] Woman is not all. The sex of a woman does not tell her anything except through bodily jouissance. (Lacan 1975 [1972–3]: 74, 75, 77, my translation)

Lacan recognizes that something (concerning the feminine) is missing in the Symbolic or that something is a surplus in the Real. Even though he thinks that this cannot be consciously or unconsciously known to a woman (with which I do not agree), what he says is most interesting because, in his later theory, he is looking for the feminine in a field that is outside of the One, outside of the All, and outside of the Same. Therefore, he does take the question a big step forward in spite of his provocative language and of the fact that his own assumptions hinder him from going further in this direction and allow him to speak of the feminine only in terms of negation or excess in relation to the Phallus. If there had been another jouissance, but there is no other than phallic jouissance; jouissance other than the Phallic does not exist – except the one about which the woman does not say anything. Perhaps because she does not know [recognize] it – and this makes the woman into a ­not-allnot-whole. […] The woman has a jouissance, she, the woman who does not exist and who does not signify anything […] but she knows nothing about it beyond feeling it […]. I believe in the jouissance of woman as a kind of a more, provided that you will, for the time being, put a veil over it, until I explain it better. (Lacan 1975 [1972–3]: 60, 74, 77, translation modified, italic added.)

Lacan, of course, never did explain it ‘better’. Should we continue to put a veil on it in the hope that he will explain it better? Lacan pointed out that something related to the real woman’s body is not recognizable by the subject and by culture because there is no (un)conscious non-phallic symbol to attach it to and no recognized non-phallic linguistic/unconscious processes in the Other! Moreover, in Lacan’s theory, it is not possible to have unconscious non-phallic symbols and symbolic processes. Yet it is the Symbolic that determines whether human experiences become normal or neurotic, and psychosis is characterized by ­non-symbolization, by the lack of major signifiers or of a major metaphor (the metaphor of the Name of the Father). It is as if the psychotic cannot receive messages from the Other. The psychotic has non-symbolized

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experiences, which s/he cannot repress, which are treated by a mechanism other than repression: (foreclosure: forclusion in French) and do not become unconscious. Usually, Freud and Lacan discuss women in relation to hysteria. It seems to me, however, that in Lacan’s logic, it would be more appropriate to discuss the place attributed to women in the context of psychosis. For the psychotic, we might say that words do exist to describe his/her experiences, but that for one reason or another, s/he cannot get into contact with them as signifiers. The woman’s situation is worse, since whatever could describe her experience of sexual difference cannot exist even in the Symbolic. Only the language of the Phallus is at her (our) disposal. According to Lacan, every human subject goes through alienation on the Imaginary level and suffers a kind of death in the Real, in the passage to the Symbolic. However, it seems to me that the woman suffers a double alienation, because she has to identify herself in accordance with projections of sameness and symmetry to the Phallus (Irigaray 1974: 13–129). The woman also suffers a double ‘death’ because her difference is not represented in the Other. She is supposed to find her identity and create her subjectivity within a symbolic universe that rejects even the possibility that a non-phallic symbol could exist. In order to further understand Lacan’s theory concerning the feminine, and my critical view of it, we must add three important ideas related to phallic symbolic domination: a. Lacan claims that nothing can be said about the woman in a general and collective way: the man exists, the father exists, but the woman, ‘she does not exist and signifies nothing’; women are to be considered ‘one by one’ (Lacan 1975 [1972–3]: 10, 74, translation modified). I rather consider that being one + one + one (being several) is a woman’s way out of the Total and the One suggested by Lacan. b. Lacan claims that women’s sexual difference does not go through the body but is only a logical consequence of theoretical investigation in the fields of language and speech. ‘The sexual being of these not-all women does not go through the body but through what comes out of a logical exigency of speech. […] The Other which is incarnated, so to speak, as a sexual being requires this one-by-one’ (10, my translation). This is a logical exigency of a theory in which the subject is phallic and in which the Symbolic addresses the Real in a one-way direction, repressing the fact that

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in the Imaginary and in the Real, Phallus is related to the male, and that only in the Symbolic does Phallus represent a symbol without a referent. c. According to the late Lacan, feminine otherness is supplementary and not complementary to the Phallus. This means that the sexual difference of women is partly measured by/against the Phallus and is partly what the Phallus and the Symbolic cannot account for (64). I consider this position (c) much more open for further development than (a) or (b,) and my proposition relates to this opening in the theory. I will not replace the Phallus by the Matrix; neither will I propose it as its opposite. Matrix is a slight shift from the Phallus, a supplementary symbolic perspective. One possible conclusion is that the woman must find a language of her own. Within Lacan’s theory this possibility is completely negated. As we have seen, Lacan wove a tautological trap in defining Symbol as Phallus and Phallus as Symbol. Yet, we might well ask whether other aspects of language exist with non-phallic, linguistic laws. Lacan went too far in the assimilation of Other and language, linguistic laws and unconscious laws. The concept of the Unconscious is too limited in that theoretical position, and I do not believe that we can accept a notion of an Unconscious without symbolizations of the pre-Oedipal and also of the prenatal. Neither can we accept a complete superposition of linguistics and psychoanalysis. Even if we believe that language is really only phallic, we still have a lot of room for shaping different relations towards it, ‘different’ discourses. We might try to change it from within, to destroy it here and there, to damage its signifiers, to discover and explore empty spaces, holes in the discourse. We might discover a language of margins, or a marginal language—is that not what poetry and art are about? We might break the units of discourse down into smaller partial units. Julia Kristeva’s project can be seen as a development of such a strategy in dealing with pre-Oedipal units of discourse. This involves a rejection of the idea that subjectivity is only Oedipal. Here, Kristeva joins Klein’s psychological theory. Although the idea of the feminine as a mystery outside the Phallus is, in my eyes, an advance in relation to classical ideas about the feminine, I propose to go a step further. We must break down the tautological equivalence between Phallus and Symbol and its related equivalences in order to inscribe symbols of/from/for the feminine positively. In Lacan’s

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theory, since the subject of psychoanalysis is the speaking subject, the Real can only be conceived of as the consequence of speech and language. I will, therefore, emphasize my belief in the multi-directional relations between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. Each shapes and is shaped by the other. The body can manifest a power of resistance and of protest. The Real—either as what escaped the text in the moment of the split between signifiers and signifieds, as a ‘remnant’, as garbage left out of the Symbolic, or as what did not enter the cultural discourse from the body schema, as fragments and as missing fragments and lost ‘pluses’—represents an ever open possibility for passages of traces of female otherness into an-other symbolic dimension. At the same time, symbols of feminine ‘otherness’ may help us to recognize some elements of experience in terms other than those of regression and hallucination. I greatly appreciate Luce Irigaray’s critical opposition to the concept of the Phallus and to its claim to universality. Her theory, however, unlike mine, stresses the importance of jouissance and leads her to posit the feminine in terms of a predominantly auto-erotic or feminine doubling (‘two lips’).9 I am, however, proposing a feminine subject(ivity) that is neither one nor necessarily double, but more-than-one and/or less-thanone. The Matrix, as a feminine, is not the Other but rather a network of subject and Other in transformation linked in special ways in subjectivity. The concept of Matrix is, therefore, not autoerotic but relational, neither fusional nor symbiotic, and it is modelled upon a pre-natal stratum.

III I would like to open the third part of this chapter with what could come at its end, by replacing the equation: Phallus  = Symbol, by: Phallus + Matrix (+ possibly other concepts) = Symbol. Artists continually introduce into culture all kinds of Trojan horses from the margins of their consciousness; in that way, the limits of the Symbolic are transgressed all the time by art. It is quite possible that many work-products carry subjective traces of their creators, but the specificity of works of art is that their materiality cannot be detached from ideas, perceptions, emotions, consciousness, cultural meaning, etc., and that being interpreted and reinterpreted is their cultural destiny. This is one of the reasons why works of art are symbologenic. Artists inscribe traces of subjectivity, Oedipal or not, in ‘external’ cultural/symbolic

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territories (i.e., artworks), and by analysing these inscriptions, it is possible to create and forge concepts which indicate and elaborate traces of an-other Real and to change aspects of the symbolic representation (and non-representation) of the feminine within culture. From time to time the artist’s gaze is suddenly split and we find ourselves also in the position of the observer-interpreter. I see the inscription of oneself in the Symbolic and the recognition of one’s own desire through the Symbolic as inter-related, self-organizing, continuous events. I believe, therefore, that the Symbolic must be penetrated by women even if choosing one name/concept will be considered phallic. In that way, alternative ideas, deviating from the Phallus, may enlarge the text of culture. Since 1985, I have been using the concepts Matrix and metramorphosis as a private language in my work-journals relating to my painting and in titles of some of my artworks. In 1989–90, I combined selected fragments from these journals with other materials (e.g., a dialogue with the artist, Christian Boltanski) in a book called Matrix et le voyage a Jerusalem de C. B.10 Matrix – time – either present or forgotten – and places of mercy. Structure of the invisible – anchor structure of limited multiplicity. Matrix made from the unknown I(s) and non-I(s), neither rejected nor assimilated. I erase, I draw, I break up in pieces, I cut, I enlarge, I flatten, I weaken, I reduce, I superimpose, I stop. What emerges from oblivion or from the ­not-yet-known falls back into oblivion, sinks into oblivion – and we live the oblivion. This endless project – the aesthetics of the unconscious – dead memory of a virtual recording. There will always be unknown elements in the Matrix. It is the unknown which gives a sense to the Matrix. It takes its strength from this non-knowing, from the fact that the thing is not within its sphere of understanding. As soon as the unknown penetrates into the conscious, the Matrix is altered. Then a new element is created, a new unknown. Madwoman, borderline cases, non-I(s), stadiums and deserts join together in a ceremony of the loss of the centre. It starts with a blind spot. Like a disappearance, a vacuum, a silence on the fringes of consciousness. The sign points out a lack, understanding as margins of the non-understanding. Noticeable spaces temporarily cut out by the chaos, rising up like a poem. A matrixial moment, a resisting cut, but not limitless. Painting, like the body, precarious point of intersection. And the eye of the compass, like a hole which draws. Painting, like the body – threshold.

120  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS – To give a sense to the thresholds, limits, margins, and cuts in the flux (without negating the flux). Time is impregnated by the impression of loss. The subject of art is also the subject of the loss of sense. This feeling of withdrawal of the sense – where does it come from? Unless it makes sense by itself? – To give a sense to the loss of sense. *** In the Matrix – part-objects, split objects, at least two, and less then one. The other in the Matrix – foreign non-I. Through him/her, the feminine is linked to the ethical and the aesthetic. There, as in Hebrew, ‘responsibility’ (achraiut) comes from the word other (acher). Over and over again, woman is represented as the site of anxiety, of fragmentation. Fragments, yes, but anxiety? Anxiety also. The site of I and non-I, of a scattered consciousness, tied together by perceptible vibrating strings. ‘Fragment’ and ‘part-object’ are not the right words. ‘Grains’ or ‘scraps’ might be better. Grains are not only the result of a process of fragmentation; on the contrary – each grain is not one from the beginning. *** Imagine an internal field which is also an exterior border, where that which is I touches the stranger, where the unknown touches the known, imagine strings which vibrate like this so that each note, each grain is sometimes observer, sometimes observed, subject or object, figure or ground, exterior or interior. But there is not necessarily symmetry. Each follows its path beside the other, sometimes with contradictions which do not seek resolution. We can perceive in a non-visual manner, we can conceive in a liminal or marginal manner. In mapping all this onto the visual, there are some losses and some remainders. The process itself is metramorphosis. *** Matrix and metramorphosis on the margins of the unconscious. The spaces between grains can be recognized. The impossibility of knowing the non-I does not imply the impossibility of re-cognition (re-co-naissance). The passage from the Real to the Symbolic is not in the possession only of the phallic Oedipal dimension, for which metramorphosis is unthinkable. The feminine, linked to the Oedipal moment of visual observation, is amnesia: a double murder in the passage from the Real to the Symbolic and a double alienation, through identification. It is only in a system without Matrix that part-objects become dangerous: they are taking themselves to be whole and they behave as metaphors or metonymies. – Introduce the Matrix like a Trojan Horse between Phallus and Symbol and chart the metramorphoses. ***

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The journey, among the lines, among the grains, a silent pilgrimage towards the absence of things. There is no remembering. There is no memory. There is not even an unknown. That which had not up until then existed for me, as soon as it appears I know it instantly. Even if it is imperceptible, even if it is only hidden light. That is how an image is chosen, whether external or internal. A matrixial choice. Painting cannot depict the journey, it can only be the journey. And, being the journey, it is also its traces. The site where the journey and its traces are one and the same. If the journey is a pilgrimage, it is also the traces of the pilgrimage. If the journey is a walk in nature, the painting is also the traces of the walk. As for me, I never go for walks. Views from the plane – the centre of Europe is calmer thus. A form seeks out meaning. Just like form the time of the stadia struggles against chaos. And exile turns everything upside down. The search traces the paths and the places, the fields of meaning, the place where the subject will have meaning. In this way exile is embodied in language. In the language of the visible too. (From Notebooks, 1985–9)

While working on this book, I began to incorporate these concepts as theoretical propositions in psychoanalysis. I propose the Matrix as a basic but not exclusive symbol for the feminine, a symbol for a non-phallic sphere of a not-one-ness (more-than-one but not everything and/or less-than-one but not nothing), which includes a recognized unknown. The Matrix is composed of the known and the unknown; it is a meeting place for the co-emerging I and the non-I(s) that are neither assimilated nor rejected. The second concept, metramorphosis, refers both to processes concerning borderlines, limits, margins, fringes, thresholds, and links, and to transformations of the I and non-I(s) in the Matrix. It is the becoming-threshold of borderlines.

IV The Matrix, whose primary meaning is womb/uterus, is not an organ but a symbol and a concept related to a feminine Real and to Imaginary structures. Uterus/womb usually signifies a mythical area of archaic, undifferentiated sensations prior to subjectivity and outside the order of any possible symbolization or even discovery. Usually the famous

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feminine passivity or the idea of both a passive reception and a natural creativity is attributed to the womb. The concept of Chora (as elaborated by Kristeva, borrowing from Plato, for example), whose primary meaning is also uterus/womb, corresponds to a description of an archaic sphere prior to the Symbolic. This corresponds to Plato’s Khôra (χώρα) as the invisible original receptacle. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of the imperceptibility of the matricial(sic)-figure goes along these lines in the field of aesthetics (but leads somewhere else) (Lyotard 1971: 278). Following Lacan, Kristeva accepts a phallic Symbolic in the sense that, for her, displacement and condensation are the organizers of the primary processes, and the semiotic Chora is manifest in psychotic discourse and poetic discourse and cannot be Symbolic. This is in accordance with the classical psychoanalytic position that dissociates the ‘feminine’ from the Symbolic, but it combines in several ways with the Kleinian position that claims a pre-Oedipal contribution to subjectivity. Even though Kristeva chooses the term Chora, the first human contact she admits with the other is post-natal: the oral perception is the first one, and the first contact with the other/mother takes the mode of fusion. Recognition of separate others is, in the Kristevan system, negative/aggressive. These fusion/aggression mechanisms are typical of the symbolic articulations of the oral stage: The oral cavity is the first organ of perception to develop and maintain the nursing infant’s first contact with the outside but also the ‘other’. His initial ‘burrowing’ movement, which is meant to establish contact – indeed, biologically indispensable fusion – with the mother’s body takes on a ‘negative’ value by the age of six months. The rotating movement of the head at that age indicates refusal even before the ‘semantic’, abstract word ‘no’ appears at fifteen months. Fusing orality and devouring, refusing, negative orality are thus closely intermingled as they are in the anal stage that follows. During this stage aggressivity is accentuated, ensuring the body’s separation from, and always-already negative relation to, the outside and the other. (Kristeva 1974: 154, emphasis added)

My concept of the Matrix is, therefore, radically different from Kristeva’s concept of the Chora in these aspects. On the other hand, I do agree with her emphasis that psychic energy can signify through rhythms and pulsions of the body. The Matrix involves a subject(ivity) which is either multiple/plural and/or partial/split/fragmented but not schizophrenic. The elements

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or the subjects that meet in the Matrix recognize one another without knowing one another. When they know (cognize) one another, they leave the matrixial symbolic sphere and pass into the phallic symbolic sphere; they leave the zone of a multiple/fragmented subject(ivity) to become separate subjects or elements. This means that the other that we do not know (cognize) participates in the feminine subject(ivity). Recognizing (feel-know) the other as an unknown non-I differentiates the idea of the Matrix from that of symbiosis. The matrixial stratum is prenatal and prior to symbiosis. In the future, I may refer to the ways in which the idea of the Matrix slightly transforms the concept of symbiosis. For the moment, it will be sufficient to say that symbiosis and matrixial modes of subjectivity—or strata of subjectivization—can alternate, ­co-exist, and modify one another. They both modify and are modified by the Oedipal stratum. Symbiosis is operated by fusion or rejection, while the matrixial state is operated by metramorphoses. The matrixial stratum of subjectivization continues to operate alongside and subsequent to symbiosis, and it can be recognized by the human subject not only in regression but also by retroactive psychological moves. The Matrix deals with the possibility of recognizing the other in his/her otherness, difference, and unknown-ness. Matrixial acknowledgement of differences functions on both the psychological and the socio-political level. The unknown non-I corresponds to (a) the other unknown to the I, (b) the unknown elements of the known I, and/or (c) the unknown elements of the known other. We can recognize an unknown non-I in a matrixial way while he/she/it remains different, neither assimilated nor rejected. In other words, the Matrix is a composition of I and non-I(s), of self and not-selves while they are unknown or even anonymous. Some selves identify one another as non-I without aspiring to assimilate in order to become one, without abolishing differences and making the other a same in order to accept him/her, and without creating a phallic rejection so that only one of them can occupy the physical/mental space. They co-exist and change one another though neither dominates nor submits in a recognized shared space. The Matrix is a symbol for a more-than-one—subjects/elements + contact spaces—and a less-than-one—fragments and contact spaces—known and unknown. The model for this plural or fragmented subjectivity is the culturally and individually repressed prenatal state for both men and women, and the repressed womb. Traces of such subjectivity are not pathological. Nor are they a cause or a symptom of neurosis. By

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fragments I do not only mean fragments of a lost, broken whole fighting their way into the Symbolic, but also partial objects that should not be conceived of as part of a whole, the holes in the discourse, and the spaces around the fragments. Since the Matrix implies a link between the feminine and unknown others, it is interesting to explore its socio-political meaning and consequences. We might discover, for example, that the affinity between women and minority groups is far richer and more complex than a simple identification or solidarity between culture’s and history’s ‘underdogs’.11 I relate the Matrix to the process I call metramorphosis dealing with I and non-I(s) in emergence and in co-existence, with neither symmetrical nor identical nor mirroring relationships.12 These are processes of change without domination. I and non-I(s) may relate to one another or simply turn their back on one another but they neither swallow nor kill one another—symbolically or inreality—while transforming in one another’s presence. The borderlines between them are surpassed and transformed to become thresholds. When these transformations relate to transformations in the borderlines and in the shared spaces metramorphosis may occur, creating redistribution in the shared field and a change in the common (joint) subjectivity. The borderlines between I and n ­ on-I(s) are surpassed and transformed to become thresholds. This is a shift aside-beyond the Phallus, an-other symbolic filter. With these symbols, which refer to a field outside the realm of the Phallus (even if naming is in itself phallic), I open the sign of equality between the Symbolic and the Phallic to reject the Lacanian equation: Phallic = Symbolic. The Symbolic is broader than the Phallic; the symbol includes both Phallus and Matrix (and possibly other elements). If, for Lacan, the Phallus is a symbol for the whole cultural sphere, we can retain it as a symbol for the concept of the whole within culture. Lacan’s idea that the Unconscious is structured like a language shifted too quickly to the idea that the Unconscious is structured like a verbal language and by the verbal language. For me, this is an excessively rigid, one-sided interpretation of Freud. Lacan proclaims that Freud proposed displacement and condensation (parallel to metaphor and metonymy) as the only unconscious mechanisms. These are, in fact, basic primary processes of the Unconscious, but they are not entirely exclusive. Freud also spoke of non-resolved contradictions in the Unconscious. This idea, which was not specifically developed by Freud or by others, suits the Matrix concept.

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I like to think of the Matrix under the sign of a minus, as what our phallic consciousness cannot reach, or as Symbol minus Phallus. But a negative definition is not sufficient. The concept of the Matrix was not originally derived from a criticism of the Phallus (see Ettinger 1991, 1992) although we can see that it is in fact closely related to its critique. The Phallus deals with symbols in relation to Oedipal subjectivity, whole objects, one-ness, sameness, all-ness, and symmetry. The Matrix deals with symbols in relation to prenatal strata of subjectivity, partial objects, differences which do not imply opposition, a-symmetry, m ­ ore-than-one but not everything, less-than-one but not nothing. Subjects and elements can co-emerge in contradiction and not only in harmony, and yet take care of one another and provoke changes reciprocally. While the Phallus involves processes of metaphor and metonymy, the Matrix is related to processes of metramorphosis on the edge of metaphor and metonymy. Metramorphosis is the process of change in borderlines and thresholds between being and absence, memory and oblivion, I and n ­ onI, a process of transgression and fading away. The metramorphic consciousness has no centre, cannot hold a fixed gaze—or, if it has a centre, it constantly slides to the borderline, to the margins. Its gaze escapes the margins and returns to the margins. Through this process the limits, borderlines, and thresholds conceived are continually transgressed or dissolved, thus allowing the creation of new ones (see Ettinger 1992; Chapter 2, this volume). The Matrix gives meaning to a Real that might otherwise pass by unthinkable, unnoticed, and unrecognized, like glimpses of the future without presence or of the anticipated I. It is an invested, shared space of I and non-I(s) marked by emerging and eclipsing of non-symbiotic and non-phallic alliances. A matrixial borderline is an interior limit that can also be conceived of as an exterior limit and an exterior one that can also be conceived of as an interior limit. One can picture the Matrix as a meeting place between the most intimate and the unknown, modelled on the prenatal situation. Klein’s insistence on early imprinted recognition of sexual difference was vehemently rejected by most of the influential (male) analysts. In the same way, Freud rejected early suggestions of Karen Horney (1926) and Ernest Jones (1927) that the phallic phase and penis envy in girls are secondary and defensive (Freud 1931: 243). The Matrix is a concept concerning early recognition of invisible difference. We have suggested elsewhere the importance of finding a discourse to correspond

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to prenatal and very early post-natal experiences that are recorded in the psyche and that must later be coded and registered symbolically in order to give meaning, retroactively, to clusters of impressions (Ettinger et al. 1991). Although birth is the moment when the human biological and ontological unit comes into the world, it is already an experience on a continuum of on-going real existence. The body schema connects the newborn baby with the foetus within the mother’s uterus. The foetus itself undergoes developmental changes that are connected to various degrees with changes in the mother’s body schema. The Matrix deals both with repressed feminine sexuality and with not-yet-symbolized prenatal experiences of I and non-I(s). Again, these prenatal experiences are important for both sexes since both experience the womb as an environment. As for the experience of the womb as an interior, I would like to emphasize that a woman does not have to experience child-bearing in order for the relation between the Matrix and the female body schema to be established (neither does a man have to be a father in order to grasp the meaning of the Phallus in its relation to the Real). Recognition of this feminine difference is primary, and the Matrix as a Symbol can account for some of its aspects. Internal inscriptions of early experiences of the body schema become later psychological and symbolic events when later experiences retroactively evoke the early ones. We can perceive the Matrix in the Real, as the engraving of various traces of the Real of the foetus and of the female corpo-reality, as well as in the Symbolic, as a model that implies in the Symbolic a special connection between the I and the stranger/other. We can now see that the feminine through the concepts of Matrix and metramorphosis cannot be reduced to the One and has no nostalgia for the One; it is primarily plural or multiple and/or partial. The ‘lost’ objects, fragments, or subjects here are in the plural; they never had a symbolic value of One and they do not stand alone in the Unconscious. The unity a Matrix can propose is a temporary composition of elements in the process of changing, emerging, or fading away under the ‘eyes’ of a sleepy and slippery consciousness that cannot appropriate everything. The equation ‘Phallus equals the signifier of all signifiers’ can be deconstructed. The Phallus is appropriate for dealing with the One, but the theoretical assumption that all chains of the signifier are reduced to one value and that every action in language has one meaning and is related to one lost or lacking object is unjustified (Ettinger 1989–90).

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Metramorphosis signifies in-between and marginal actions in the Symbolic connected to the Matrix. The choice of the Phallus to signify all relations between subject and signifiers is in fact an axiom. In the paradigm I am developing in my work, the Phallus is not the only way to pass from the Real to the Symbolic or to send messages from the Other to the subject. Such passages mean the inscription of traces of human experiences in the symbolic sphere, the recognition of traces of the Real by symbols, the separation of these inscriptions from the sphere of the Real and the regulation of these inscriptions by unconscious laws. We can, therefore, recognize that there are also matrixial, out-of-focus passages from non-definite compositions to others. Pre-Oedipal and prenatal elements go through matrixial passages to the Symbolic and can be symbolically used to analyse and recognize interior and exterior realities. Psychoanalysis should deal with the matrixial traces in boys and girls both before the Oedipal complex period and during this stage since these traces do not disintegrate. Losing the womb (of the mother) and having a womb of one’s own is different from losing the womb and not having one of one’s own. Awareness of having (and not having) a womb affects the elaboration of the Matrix. In the Oedipal situation both boys and girls lose and gain something both in terms of the Phallus and of the Matrix. The Phallus is neither the only image nor the only symbol for sexual difference. Human beings have also an asymmetrical position in relation to the Matrix (and, possibly, to other Symbols as well). It is tempting to see the question ‘how do men deal with losing (symbolically) what they do not have (in the Real)?’ as symmetrical to a similar question put to women in relation to the Phallus. This is not, however, a symmetrical situation since a) subjects of both sexes have experienced being in the womb, and b) the Matrix is a symbol for a lost territory, a culturally repressed internal universe, while the Phallus is the ‘symbol of all symbols’. It seems to me particularly urgent at this moment to emphasize the price paid by women in a society without symbolic access to and through the Matrix (a discussion of the implication of this repression for men might follow as well). The assumption that every symbolic ‘castration’ is Oedipal is a phallocentric axiom that excludes the realms of the feminine Matrix both within individual consciousness and within the theory of psychoanalysis. The Phallus would indeed be the only possible symbol of symbols in an

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Unconscious limited to the linguistic laws of metaphor and metonymy operating on the Oedipal complex. We can trace a non-phallic symbolic territory when we claim that the Unconscious contains not only signifiers of language and their laws, but the whole realm of fragmented ­sign-signifiers, signifieds, and the spaces between them as well as non-linguistic signs. And if the signified of language can also be described as unconscious traces, the escaping and unstable symbolic ‘gaze’ is also valid. We must not be led […] to forget the importance of optical mnemic residues […] or to deny that it is possible for thought-processes to become conscious through a reversion to visual residues, [but] […] [t]hinking in pictures is […] only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter […]. (Freud 1923a: 21)

In a stratum based on recognizable non-visual perception, to begin with, (touch, smells) and interior sensations, relating both to internal and external events, experiences shape and are shaped by a matrixial awareness of I and non-I(s). Symbolic expressions of this stratum can be found, can be inscribed by traces, and can inscribe traces. Human discourse is a kind of strainer or filter, with the necessary holes or spaces. The spaces in the tissue of discourse belong to the symbolic Matrix but the Matrix is not only composed of these holes/spaces. The holes, which represent the not-yet-known, the repressions, and the denials of our culture, are in themselves ever-changing; culture, history, personal experiences, and nature are continually creating new holes. Their appearance in the Symbolic can become either phallic or matrixial. The concepts of Matrix and metramorphosis are related to Object Relations theory as elaborated by Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, and Winnicott (however different they may be) as well as to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rejection of Oedipus. Their researches, like mine, can be related to intermediary psychic categories such as borderline cases (cas limites). Lacan, who believed in the orthodox, clean division between neurosis and psychosis, with different defence mechanisms for each, rejected the borderline structure. He believed in a total separation between the Oedipal subject and the pre-Oedipal condition unless the subject is psychotic, and this theory made no possible room for a pre-Oedipal non-psychotic subjectivity.

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In the beginning of this article, I suggested that the idea of the Matrix challenges several psychological/psychoanalytic assumptions. The idea of the Matrix is also relevant to cognitive psychology (in theories of learning and attention, for example) and to the understanding of transference and counter-transference. Furthermore, the Matrix calls into question psychological attitudes centred on mother/ing (rather than on the Phallus), which present women (and society in general) with the idealization of mothering and with the image/idea of the ideal mother. This theoretical framework is based on the importance of the mother’s identification with her children presented as a primary maternal preoccupation in a way that leaves sufficient room neither for the difference of the non-I nor for the relationship to the unknown in early mothering. Through the Matrix, prenatal and feminine strata of subjectivity emerge both as moments in sublimation and also as an-other kind of sublimation. I propose the concept of the Matrix not against but alongside a relativized concept of the Phallus in a universe that is plural/partial. A slight shift aside for the Phallus, a rotating shift inside the Symbol.

Notes







1. Editor: Foreclosure is a term introduced by Jacques Lacan to designate a process in which the signifier that organizes the Symbolic is expelled from the subject’s symbolic universe. Unlike repression, therefore, where elements are integrated into the Unconscious, what is foreclosed cannot ‘return’. It can only re-emerge from the Real, for instance as hallucination. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1988), 166–9. 2. Here the expressions prenatal I and also the prenatal non-I to which the maternal I is transconnected, relates, when addressing pre-subjectivity, to the relatively mature becoming pre-subject in the late stages of the maternal pregnancy. The pre-maternal and maternal I and also sometimes non-I, on the other hand, is a subject, and she experiences her non-I (as object of her phantasmatic and traumatic processes and as a becoming partial pre-subject to which she is transconnected) all along gestation. 3. The term ‘stage’ is used here to emphasize the developmental aspect of the Matrix, but I am thinking in terms of a superimposition of layers or strata of subjectivization rather than in Freud’s terms of stages and complexes or in those of Lacan’s structures (see Guattari 1990). 4. See, for example, Huhn (1993b).

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5.  All translations of Lacan are by Bracha L. Ettinger, unless otherwise stated. [Editor’s note: see Bibliographical remark, this volume, for details of references to Encore in this volume.] 6. Psychoanalysis usually deals with women ‘in so far as their nature is determined by their sexual function’. Psychoanalysis does not claim to examine all their aspects as human beings (see Freud 1932: 135). 7. Even though I propose a model of difference, I see the feminine Matrix as relevant to both men and women. This is a difference in the symbolic network in relation to the Phallus and not an essentialist-deterministic difference. 8. It would be true to Lacan to formulate his ideas in a direction moving always from the Symbolic to the Real, and not from the Real to the Symbolic. However, I examine the direction from the Real to the Symbolic as well, and I insist on the double-direction movements. The direction is from A [Other] to S [Subject] in the ‘Schema L’. 9. ‘Prior to any representation, we are two’; ‘Kiss me. Two lips kissing two lips’ (Irigaray 1977: 216, 210). 10. The following quotes hereby in this Part III are from my notebooks, printed in French in: Bracha L. Ettinger, ‘Conversation with Christian Boltanski’, Matrix et le Voyage à Jerusalem de C.B., 1991 and translated by me from the French and Hebrew originals. Another version of these notes, translated to English by Joseph Simas was published as: Matrix. Halal(a)—Lapsus. Notes on Painting, 1985–1992 (Oxford: MOMA), 1993. 11. This concept of the feminine provides another way of dealing with foreigners and minorities, for instance, as unknown-others. It is also interesting to explore the Matrixial in the realm of ethics. Levinas’s idea that human beings are responsible for the unknown past of the other, for example, is relevant to the Matrix (see Levinas and Ettinger 1991–3, 1997: 28–9). As I said in the introduction to this chapter, I do not mean to say that women are the incarnation of the feminine. Nor are minority groups automatically the personification of the unknown other. Yet I believe that these complex relations should be explored. 12. Asymmetry in this context does not imply inequality of legal rights.

CHAPTER 2

THE BECOMING THRESHOLD OF MATRIXIAL BORDERLINES ([1992] 1994)

Originally presented at the Travellers’ Tales conference, 21–22 November 1992, Tate Gallery, London. Published in George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, Barry Curtis and Tim Putnam (eds.), Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement (London: Routledge, 1994), 38–62.

EDITOR’S PREFACE The occasion for this paper was an annual conference organized by the editors of BLOCK, a journal opening up a critical space for the emergence of theoretically enriched visual and cultural studies. This conference included Trinh T. Minh-ha, Jacques Rancière, Adrian Rifkin, Peter Wollen and others: filmmakers, philosophers, art historians, cultural theorists and two artist-thinkers. They all engaged with the proposed themes of tales of travel, displacement, nomadism and analysed them through frames of queer subjectivity, postcoloniality and feminism. Marxist philosopher Rancière offered a symbolic reading of a journey recounted in the Gospels, moving on to include Plato and then Wordsworth’s wandering cloud-subject before comparing the mentality signified by settlement—the village—in contrast to the image favoured by sociology—the desert—in order to propose the end of the concept of travel as moving from place to place and the current socio-political sense of wandering and losing one’s way. Bracha L. Ettinger’s paper shared such © The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_3

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subtle close reading of a Biblical–literary text and its images with a more rigorous theoretical elaboration of its significance for current theorizations of subjectivity and sociality. Freud’s final work, Moses and Monotheism, was, as I mentioned in the Introduction, one of his most politically situated cultural analyses. Ettinger also draws on the language and narratives collected in the Hebrew Bible because of both the significance of its language, Hebrew—a language based on three root consonants that allow meanings to nestle, shift, reverse and overlay within the words made possible by a root-based signifying system—and the register of an ancient system of cultural thought it preserves. Ettinger’s paper focuses on a founding travellers’ tale to be found in the Biblical book, Exodus, a text that also elaborates a series of formative encounters with radical alterity. She thus reads the Exodus text as an allegory of becoming, both on the social and the subjective level. In deferred action, après coup in the French translation of Freud’s German term, Nachträglichkeit, the encounter narrated in Exodus retrospectively became constitutive of a social and political collective, a nomadic crowd of ex-slaves in nowhere-land redefining themselves mythically, through this encounter, as a people in the sense of a social entity, in relation to this transformative encounter with unknowable Otherness in a ‘beyond place’: a desert. The Exodus is a legend of subject formation and of the relations between the subjects who constitute ‘social being together’ that is premised on, or threatened by, the mythic underpinning of the formation of subjectivity itself in self/other relations. It is in this context that Ettinger newly defines the matrixial dimension of subjectivity as subjectivity-as-encounter (I can only become through the encounter with the other I do not know) in distinction from the phallic model of subjectivity being only conceived as an effect of separation, rejection, and individuation: (I become by not being, by separating from or rejecting and expelling, the other). The structure of this chapter is contrapuntal. Ettinger alternates levels of argument, moving between her readings of the Biblical text on becoming in a no-place of encounter—behind the desert and future time of ‘after’— with further elaborations of the Matrix and its figure, metramorphosis. This reveals a deep affinity with the images of movement, becoming, encounters and thresholds that become ‘ceremonies of initiation’. It also underlines the aesthetic figures—borderspaces, borderlinks, thresholds (instead of boundaries and limits), not-one-ness (that escapes the polarity of one versus many, self or other), and the initially paradoxical phrases such as ­relations-without-relating, in which the non-I is a partner-in-difference.

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Ettinger rehearses an extended elaboration of the basic terms of matrixial theory while revealing the matrixiality of the wandering meanings made possible in the Hebrew text’s three-letter roots and the use of tenses that defy easy translation and risk mistranslation. (For a fuller discussion of this wandering of meaning, see Chapter 6.) One key point to emerge from matrixial reading of a Biblical text that exposes the literary text’s already aesthetic-philosophical elaboration of becoming is the understanding of the Matrix as a mode of relating between what Ettinger presents as I and non-I (as opposed to the phallic I and not-I). The text makes clear two different aspects of the matrixial feminine. The feminine dimension of the Matrixial as a whole impinges on, and leaves traces within, all born subjects because of prolonged co-emergence. Postnatally, these traces may have specific effects on, and incite affects for, those subjects, who, under the phallic organization of sexual difference, will be gendered feminine, whether or not they re-enter Matrixiality in the Real and Imaginary situation of an actual pregnancy. These traces, however, and the mechanism of metramorphosis, do not apply to feminine subjects only. Ettinger develops the idea of matrixial sublimation and argues that the alliance between God and Moses (and, in a different way, the partnership between the brothers Moses and Aaron) are matrixial, that divinity exposes itself to Moses in her feminine side, that Moses himself is a matrixial figure (an idea she will take up again and develop in the third decade of her writings), and that femininity hides already inside God’s name. Furthermore, the Matrixial is working in the relation to subjective time, and participates in the concepts of divine creation, becoming, covenant and alliance and transformation. This text by Bracha L. Ettinger is the first in several of her psychoanalytically oriented theological research into the names of God presented in this volume, in which she explores, reveals, and offers a meaning to, the ­feminine-maternal-matrixial side of divinity and of the sacred as ‘patterns of cognition’ and ‘consciousness’ of ‘connectivity’. She does so in constant dialogue with earlier or parallel but distinctive explorations of subjectivity, language and ethics amongst her contemporaries: Piera Aulagnier’s psychoanalysis, Derrida’s deconstruction of Phallogocentrism through his concept of différance, Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal propositions about ‘becoming woman’, Levinas’ ethical concepts in which the maternal feminine figures the sacrificial aspect of the ethical giving of life for another, all of which she will critically address in Vol 2 : 3. It concludes with an introductory presentation of the positions attributed to Woman in the third phase of Lacan’s

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thinking that is introduced in relation to his earlier concept of the objet a, which becomes the final focus of this chapter when Ettinger suggests the possibilities of its transformation and sublimation by a sexual difference already manifested in each passage from the ‘Thing’ (and psychoanalytical ‘deserted’ territory of the feminine) to different kinds of objet (a)—in a ‘borderspace’ and ‘bordertime’ behind, after and beyond the ‘desert’.

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THE BECOMING THRESHOLD OF MATRIXIAL BORDERLINES ([1992] 1994) Mythological travellers’ tales are analogous to psychological experiences, to identity transformation, to artistic processes and works, to aesthetic events, and to patterns of cognition. It is through their power to evoke all of these that such tales are constituted as mythologies.

Exodus The moment at which Moses was called upon by God to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt presents itself as a symbolic ceremony of initiation of wandering and exodus, a mythical moment that delineates transitional states, migrations and emigrations, wandering or nomadism, exiles and inverted exiles (Exodus 3). (I call ‘inverted exiles’ a migration towards an unknown desired destination, towards a promised Jerusalem that you do not know; I reserve the word ‘return’ for migrations towards a known destination; and ‘exile’ for movements of expulsion and casting out from a desired place, abandonment of the desired place for an anywhere, like the movement of a refugee in a time of emergency.) In the Biblical text, a unique set of elements is woven together and we can single them out as components of a model for the future developments that they point to, distinguish and initiate. In the system of the Hebrew language, several pathways of meaning are folded into each signifier, enriching the event that a very short text delivers as its content. In Hebrew, because of opened passages between words and their roots, each word quivers, trembles and ejects several meanings, even before insertion into a context. Meanings are created not only through the signified and through the passage from one signifier to another, but also within the ‘scope’ of the signifier. The links between the different possibilities offered by the signifier operate whether we cast a light on them or not. In this short text we find, at a meeting place behind the desert, an invisible God, a subject chosen by Him, the declaration of the Exodus, and three transformations in the denomination of God by Himself. The first denomination, the one which is at the core of my argument is, in Hebrew: ‫שׁר ֶא ְהי ֶה‬ ֶ ‫‬ ֶא ְהי ֶה ֲא‬, ehyeh ăšer ehyeh or AHIH ASHER AHIH [pronounced Ae-He-yeH Asher Ae-He-yeH] (Exodus 3:14). Several

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theological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical channels stem from this name which was translated into the Latin (ego sum qui sum), Greek (ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν, literally: I am the one), French (Je suis celui qui suis) and English as: I am that I am, or I am that is. I am that I am signifies an immanent being, a superposition of present and presence, an a priori subject, a tautological identity, a congruence of signifier and signified, of an identifying I and an identified I, a conjunction of centre, origin and identity, in present time and space. Such a name of God seals the unity of God and Father: I am that I am is the name of the Father. The Father, says Derrida, is what is. The question ‘What is?’ is always: ‘What is the Father?’ (Derrida 1972: 146). This is an entity in the sense of both being and presence. Such a being of the Father is ‘the point where truth is fully present and fills the logos’, a ‘full, absolute presence of what is’ (Derrida 1972: 166). Being as an indication of presence ensures a centre, ‘a fantasy of mastery’, a ‘consciousness of ideal mastery’ (Derrida 1972: 352). Derrida does not like this God of ‘eidos’ (of the signified and the presence), and he goes back as far as ancient Egypt to find a God of différance (Thoth). Différance and Écriture (writing) are patricide (Derrida 1972: 164): the disappearance of ‘eidos’ and the appearance of Plato’s ‘επέκεινα της ουσίας’ [epekeina tes ousias] behind being and presence (Derrida 1972: 167). How could such an anti-difference God portend the Exodus? Indeed, the God who presents himself to Moses had no such name. AHIH means in Hebrew: I will be, or I will become.1 The verb ‘to be’ and the verb ‘to become’, contrary to European languages, are the same one in Hebrew, and this verb is here employed in the future tense. The name of God, at this initiating moment, presents itself as an entity without a centre, without certainty, without origin, without presence—and not in the present tense. AHIH signifies absence of identity, future without content. It reflects, expresses or invokes different aspects of wandering: movements from place to place, from one time to another, to a time without a present or a presence, to a future with no prescribed content. The repetition within the name, far from fortifying a tautology, portrays a double transformation, a double movement. This name suggests a repetition as a ‘movement’ by which ‘the presence of what is gets lost’ (Derrida 1972: 168). AHIH ASHER AHIH is a future departure leading to another future departure with no resting point or destination. It indicates a movement of desire with no objective, no destination. Any fantasy that occupies the place of the object of desire of the first I will be/become is

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expelled by the second I will be/become. The repetition itself traces a chain of future distances, and thereby evacuates any fantasy objects. I will be/become that I will be/become appears only once in the Bible, and it reduces itself to only one I will be/become AHIH in the next sentence, a contraction in which I see an allusion to the Kabbalistic idea of contraction-withdrawal as a principle of creation (in Hebrew: TSIMTSOUM). Being and becoming, although coinciding in Hebrew, are incompatible in French and English. To indicate this conjunction should have been in fact a painful dilemma for translation. But, the total abolition of becoming and future from this name is a criminal displacement, worthy of Freud’s statement: ‘In its implications the distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of its traces’ (Freud 1939: 283). The idea of différance is embedded in this word AHIH already, before being inscribed by its repetition. I will be/become that I will be/become also means I will become another than I will be. The double I will is an anticipation of transgression and a transgression of anticipation. This name implies a complicated ‘postmodern’ discourse all by itself. ‘The dimension of subjectivity is inaugurated in Postmodernism through the subject qua emptiness of the substance’ (Zizek 1991: 67); the postmodern discourse evolves around the search for a space without presence which inscribes traces of time without the present and the ‘ex-centring’ of subjects and objects leading to the idea of endless nomadism. The idea of I am is precisely what the name AHIH eliminates. And it is no wonder then that a God called I will be/become appears at this highly symbolic moment of the onset of nomadism and inverted exile. Such a God also appears in a place that is a kind of no place. Moses, who is already in the desert, which corresponds to a representation of a no-place fit for an emptying of identity and a rupture of historic or organic continuity, opens a distance from the desert to meet God ‘behind the desert’ (or, as the English text says: ‘at the backside of the desert’ [Exodus 3:1 King James New Version]; alternative translations offer: ‘at the far side of the desert’). This fatal abolition of the dimensions of future and becoming from God’s name constitutes, in my view, not only a displacement of différance by the present and presence, but also a foreclosure of a feminine dimension which I have called Matrix, and an exclusion of certain transformational processes linked to it, which I have called metramorphosis.2

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The Becoming Threshold of Borderlines I have proposed the concepts Matrix and metramorphosis to conceptualize femininity in representation, in subjectivity and on the Symbolic level (see Chapter 1; Ettinger 1993d). The structure and processes of the prenatal stages in their encounter with the feminine are viewed as models for unconscious processes within a matrixial stratum of subjectivization concerning borderlines, limits, margins, fringes, thresholds, links and transformations of the co-emerging I and non-I(s). Intra-uterine fantasies in adults or children point to a primary recognition of an outside to the me, which is composed of the inside of an-other (the womb—the Matrix). In my view, these are traces of joint recordings of experience relating to feminine invisible bodily specificity and to late prenatal conditions, emanating from joint bodily contacts and a joint psychic borderspace. I have hypothesized that a certain awareness of a borderspace shared with an intimate stranger and of a joint c­ o-emergence in difference is a feminine dimension in subjectivity. Such awareness alternates with that of being one, or with being either separate or fused. The matrixial awareness accompanies us from the dawn of life and is traced in the psyche by primitive modes of experience-organization in terms of readjustments and retunings of sensorial impressions. Affected time-space-body instances induce psychic events and traces corresponding to an archaic level, and the concepts of connectivity and the ­sub-symbolic suggest a way of conceptualizing the organization of the matrixial stratum of subjectivization.3 From the matrixial angle, subjectivity is an encounter in which partial subjects co-emerge and co-fade through continual retunings and transformations via external/internal borderlines and borderlinks. I took the intra-uterine meeting as a model for processes of change and exchange, of relations-without-relating, in which the non-I is a partner-in-difference. In the Matrix, we can speak of the co-appearance of partial subjects that can also be simultaneously seen from a phallic angle as ‘entire’ subjects or as one another’s object. A matrixial encounter engenders diffused traumas, traces, pictograms, fantasies and unconscious connections and readjustments in both its partners. Archaic encounters in the Real create mental counterparts. The partial subject-to-be, i.e. the post-mature infant in the womb during the latest prenatal phase (in whom, according to Winnicott, fantasy life already appears), has a certain awareness of the matrixial affects and sensations

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that will find their place in the après-coup inside the network of subjectivity. I see the matrixial stratum of subjectivization—for both sexes—as a joint feminine and prenatal psychic zone, i.e. latest intra-uterine prenatal events and the female bodily invisible specificity inscribe humanizing sub-symbolic traces which are discernible, which can be used in inter-subjective processes of exchange and transformation, and which filter into the ulterior developmental phases, potentially creating symbolic traces in the après-coup—by deferred action.4 On the symbolic level, I see in the transformations in both I and the Other (in terms of the transgression within the borderline feminine/ prenatal zones) an archaic creative process.4 The diffuse readjustments of distance-in-proximity between partial subjects emerge from their links. Sometimes the I is phallic—alone or fused with the other phallic non-I(s); at other times the I is matrixial—a partial subject in a matrix of I-non-I. The matrixial and phallic strata do not only moderate each other, they also alternate constantly in relation to the same objects or events, and the same object can be phallic at one moment and matrixial in the next. In a matrixial perspective, the locus shifts from separate elements or subjects towards the borderlines, the borderspace and the borderlinks between part-objects and partial subjects, and towards the processes of transformation that take place jointly by means of these borderlines/ space/links. The Matrix is not a physical organ but a concept and symbol that points towards the Real and invokes imaginary ‘feminine’ structures. The womb, which is the primary meaning of the word matrix, is generally held to symbolize a mythical area of undifferentiated archaic sensations, prior to subjectivity and outside any symbolic order; an invisible passive space of origin. Chora, in the work of Kristeva and the ‘figure-matrice’, in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, follow Plato’s concept of Khôra (χώρα), which signifies an original receptacle outside of the realm of the Symbolic. ‘The figure-matrice: not only is it not seen, but it is no more visible than it is readable’ (Lyotard 1971: 278). It cannot be expressed either in words or in images. In the thought of Kristeva and Lyotard, the feminine and maternal retain their traditional significations of passivity, invisibility and exclusion from the symbolic universe. I consider the Matrix, on the other hand, as a symbol of the recognizable traces of sub-symbolic operations. The Matrix is an assemblage or a zone of encounter of a particular kind, different from the idea of the one-sided position of the passive receptacle. In the Matrix, a meeting

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occurs between co-emerging I and unknown non-I. Neither of them assimilates nor rejects the other, and their energy does not consist in either fusion or repulsion. In our culture, from biology and through immunology to psychoanalysis, the internal non-I is defined as negative and threatening to the I. Furthermore, the hostile foreign but internal body, such as sickness, psychosis or virus, is what is constructed as not-I. I take the i­ntra-uterine meeting as a model for human subjectivizing processes which reflect multiple, plural and/or partial strata of subjectivization whose elements recognize each other without knowing each other, and in which the ­notI is not an intruder. When I and non-I become acquainted with each other, it is then that mechanisms of identity and comparison, assimilation or repulsion may come into operation, and the participants will partially or incompletely leave the matrixial becoming symbolic plane and move to a phallic symbolic plane. In the case of human psychological development for example, they will leave the prenatal feminine Matrix to become subjects or separate elements that relate to each other according to patterns known as autism or symbiosis, which in my view are already phallic patterns. The Phallus signifies all and any object of demand, the whole of the field between demand and desire. The Phallus conditions desire; it is ‘the mailman who introduces the object of desire’ (Lacan 1961–2: 9 May 1962). Lacan claims that even the maternal object—the breasts—are a phallus; and indeed we have to agree that within the existing psychoanalytical paradigm, any object is phallic. I elaborate this subject in the first three parts of ‘Metramorphic Borderlinks’ (Chapter 3). In my opinion the Phallus does not cover the whole of the symbolic network and all the possible attitudes towards the Other and the object; under a certain prism, the breast may be perceived as either phallic or matrixial (for a critical discussion of the Phallus, see Chapter 1; Irigaray 1985 [1974]). The Matrix, then, symbolizes more than one and less than one partial subjects, part-objects or fragments and elements, their joint borderspaces, and the range of subjectivizing contacts—borderlinks—between them, known and not-known, but discerned and discerning, with neither assimilation nor rejection.5 The Matrix is an engraving of various traces of the feminine bodily specificity in the Real (and also those of the foetus) in its passage from the sub-Symbolic on to the Symbolic. At the same time, as a model it implies a special connection between the I and the stranger/Other on the cultural or sociological level, and not only in

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psychoanalysis. The Matrix suggests ways of recognizing the Other in his/her otherness, difference and unknown-ness. When I speak of the unknown Other, this can mean: the Other who is not known by ‘me’ (an Other as a subject) and unknown elements of the self and of the Other—the Other as a partial subject, a part-object, a Lacanian objet a (objet a is the object of desire, object of the phantasy). In other words, the Matrix is a symbol for emerging composition of I and non-I(s), of partial or potential self and not-selves which, while in co-existence and co-emergence, are unknown or anonymous to each other. On the social level under the matrixial prism, some-selves discern one another as non-I without aspiring to swallow one another in order to become one or the same, without abolishing differences to make the Other a same in order to accept him/her, and without attacking and expelling so that only one of them can occupy the physical/mental territory. By elements, partial subjects or internal part-objects, I mean not only fragments of a lost, broken ‘whole’ fighting their way into the Symbolic, but also the ‘holes’ in a discourse, and the borderspaces around imaginary or real fragments. The borderlinks are metramorphic. Even if the models for this plural or fragmented and shared subjectivity are the culturally and individually archaic repressed prenatal state and the invisible feminine womb, being in touch with their traces is not pathological. The Matrix implies links between the feminine aspect of subjectivity and unknown others. I have called the various processes of change and exchange that occur in the Matrix: metramorphosis. It deals with relationships that are asymmetrical and not mirroring one another; with the co-emergence of several elements or (partial) subjects together; with influences without domination of one over another. It deals with transformations in emergence, creation and fading-away, of I(s) and non-I(s), and with transformations of the borderlines and transgressions of the links between them. Metramorphosis is the becoming-threshold of borderlines. Metramorphosis is an out-of-focus passage of non-definite compositions along slippery borderlines becoming thresholds, which transform together but differently, allowing relations-without-relating between the I and the unknown non-I. In its function as a passage to the Symbolic, metramorphosis, acting from the matrixial borderspace to create and redistribute traces of joint transformations in the encounter, does not follow the routes of male Oedipal castration. Passing through the filter of the symbolic

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Matrix, relations-without-relating, d ­ ifference-in-togetherness and distance-in-proximity between I and non-I become non-phallic, meaningful, psychological processes (see Chapter 3). When a matrixial alliance or covenant is created between the I and the unknown stranger(s), their fields change and expand via their borderlinks. From an ethical prism, in the matrixial stratum of subjectivization, there is no I without an unknown non-I, since subjectivity is an encounter with the Other. Metramorphosis accounts not only for transformations of several aspects, several part-objects or partial subjects together, but also for transformations of objects that are shared by several subjects, partial or not. Metramorphosis not only is the effect of joint investments by the I and the non-I in one another and in a shared borderspace, but it also constitutes a primary dimension of all matrixial configurations, in which elements are effected via links. Metramorphosis alternates between memory and oblivion, between what is about to be and what is already, between what will be and what will become possible, between what has already been-created and what has been lost. Metramorphosis has no focus; it is a discernibility that cannot fix its ‘gaze’, and if it has a momentary centre, then it always slides away towards the peripheries. In such an awareness of margins, perceived boundaries dissolve in favour of new boundaries; borderlines are surpassed and transformed to become thresholds; limits conceived but continually transgressed or dissolved allow the creation of new borderlines, thresholds and limits. Metramorphosis accounts for transformations of in-between moments. These becoming-symbolic inscriptions are different or escape from phallic symbolic inscription. The Matrix gives meaning to a Real that might otherwise pass by unthinkable, unnoticed and unrecognized. Glimpses of future without present are connected to anticipated futures; processes of becoming arc connected to broken memory. Matrix is a zone marked by alliances between I and non-I in the midst of becoming and emerging, or eclipsing and fading away. It is a zone of encounter between the most intimate and the most distanced unknown. Its most internal is an outer limit, its outermost is the inner limit, and the limits themselves are flexible and variable. As a psychological stratum of subjectivization, Matrix precedes postnatal symbiosis. I would suggest that the human being arrives at symbiosis equipped with a certain awareness of the distinction between the I and the non-I and with a certain recognition of a matrixial shared space, with investments in the non-I and in the shared space. Both I and ­non-I are

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somehow accessible in their difference from that same moment in which any accessibility of the I is possible. The matrixial stratum of subjectivization continues to operate alongside and subsequent to symbiosis, and it can be recognized by the human subject not only in states of regression but also by retroactive psychological moves. Acknowledgement of other subjects as unknown but not hostile or intrusive foreigners, and as nevertheless connected to the self, in a way that turns both the self and the other into partial subjects taking part in and producing change in a common shared subjectivity (multiple or partial) through neither fusion nor rejection, differentiates the idea of the Matrix from the idea of symbiosis and from phallic Oedipal ideas. The woman experiences the Matrix in a double manner: first, like the male infant, in the womb and at the level of psychic development appropriate to this stage; and second, as someone who has a womb, at various levels of maturation and consciousness and whether or not she is, or becomes, a mother. This second kind of experience—linking late fantasies to early archaic ones—retroactively gives meaning to the early phase and might facilitate awareness of a whole range of internal and external phenomena. In other words, feminine sexual difference connected to bodily specificity allows women a doubled access to the Matrix. This reinforces the link between the symbolic Matrix and women, but the Matrix is not reserved to women only. As I said, Matrix is accessible not necessarily through regression to earlier stages of development, but as a retroactive recognition of early traces through later experiences. It creates an-other way of sublimation and it belongs to the general human symbolic network. This retrospective access to the general human latest prenatal/feminine encounter is facilitated but not conditioned by the fact of having a womb. However, this potential facility for access puts women in a privileged position with respect to this stratum of subjectivization. This is one of the reasons why I see the Matrix as feminine. This does not mean, however, that having or not having a womb determines different ways of recognition, since the Matrix, as a symbolic filter that is different from Phallus, is at the disposition of both sexes [and all genders]. Other reasons why Matrix is a feminine dimension derive from conceptual considerations, from its differences from the concept of the Phallus. Phallus is for Lacan a neutral concept, equivalent to the concept of the Symbol itself. In my view, the Phallus is a masculine concept that should not monopolize the whole symbolic network (see Chapter 1).

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Through the notion of the Matrix, feminine otherness connects with the idea of multiple or fragmented subjectivity which is normal and not schizophrenic. Matrix allows the symbolization of prenatal processes, but also of certain aspects of postnatal, pre-Oedipal strata of subjectivization. It allows acknowledgement of the difference of the other on the inner psychic level, on the level of object-relations and on the external social-political level. This concept deals both with early recognitions of invisible differences recorded in the psychological space and ­sub-symbolically registered in a non-phallic way, and with the repressed difference of feminine sexuality from the perspective of the woman. Lacan points out the connection between the problematic nature of the topic of femininity and the question of creation and procreation and how both of these elude the Symbolic. The feminine, when it is not described in terms of sameness and/or opposition to the Phallus—the favourite position of the early Lacan—is what escapes it and is missing in the Symbolic. For Lacan, it is impossible to formulate an-other symbolic sphere and ‘the woman’, as a different, collective Other dimension, ‘does not exist and does not signify anything’ (1975b [1972–3]: 74). According to this theory, the subject, female or male, cannot recognize the ephemeral part-objects and object-relationships that belong to the Real and are related to the feminine. The feminine is associated with anxiety, with the fear of falling into pieces, of becoming a devalorized and damaged object, and of psychological disintegration resulting in undifferentiated and an amoebic or fragmented, archaic condition. Otherwise she is either the Thing par excellence, pure object of jouissance, or the Other par excellence, in its eternally escaping aspect. She is in both cases completely inaccessible to both man and woman (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]), compared in that only to procreation and to death, and on a less natural level, to the mysterious aspect of sublimation. Lacan says that in the Symbolic nothing explains creation. By means of the concept of the Matrix, I would like to point to the connection between the question of femininity and the questions of creation, procreation and sublimation, not as topics whose symbolization is condemned to absolute perpetual failure but as interconnectivity that rises to the symbolic surface by metramorphosis, by out-of-focus passages from non-definite compositions to others. Interior and exterior phenomena that have gone through matrixial passages can be analysed and symbolically recognized following these paths of sublimation. For Lacan, Phallus equals symbol: what does not obey the phallic principles cannot be apprehended or recognized. I would suggest that

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we do not accept the axiom Phallus = Symbol and that some paradigmatic changes are in order: the Symbolic is wider than the Phallus, and non-phallic processes do find symbolic expression. In the existing paradigms, however, these are not recognized as such: they are ignored or rejected. If, according to Lacan, the human being is trapped in language, I would like to add that the human being is trapped in the language of the Phallus. In this trap, the two sexes are totally ‘equal’, but, unfortunately, the whole symbolic universe is unbalanced, being seen as only phallic. This trap attests to a lacuna in psychoanalytical theory, to the incapacity to distinguish the Matrix and to account for it. Symbolic disavowal of matrixial elements in favour of phallic elements repeatedly occurs in analytical interpretations (Ettinger 1993d: 182–3). As a logical structure, it is possible to think of the Matrix through the minus sign: Matrix as what our phallic consciousness cannot attain, or as symbol minus Phallus. But such a negative definition, following some hints by Lacan in the 1970s, is not sufficient; it falls into the traditional trap of phallic culture. The symbol of the Phallus can be seen as dealing with reality from the perspective of whole objects, unity, the equal, sameness, one-ness, Oedipal castration, totality and symmetry, with unconscious processes of metaphor and metonymy that regulate the symbolic systems and fit the Oedipal stage (and also the pre-Oedipal stages in Lacanian description). This perspective, however, cannot be seen as the only possible one. If the Matrix points to what is not reducible to one and what does not yearn for the one, then this is because it never was One. Its ‘lost’ objects are multiple and partial; they never had a single value and they do not stand ‘alone’ in the Unconscious. It deals with multiplicity, plurality, partiality, asymmetry, alterity, sexual difference, the unknown, encounters of the feminine and the prenatal in their passage from the sub-Symbolic to the Symbolic and processes of transformation of several elements in co-existence, with continual tunings of borderlines, limits, and thresholds between the partial subjects in co-emergence. The Matrix—as symbol for temporary subjectivity comprised of elements that are partly I and partly non-I, partly known and partly unknown, that are in a ­process of change under the half-open eye of an unfocused (un)consciousness— designates a non-phallic Real and evokes an imaginary dimension that is supplementary to the Phallus as well as non-phallic desire and sublimation. At the symbolic level, the Matrix is no more feminine than the Phallus is masculine: it is a mark of difference. It concerns the symbolic network that is culturally shared by men and women. The vicious circle

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in the Lacanian paradigm by which the Phallic is defined as the Symbolic and the Symbolic is defined as the Phallic, and by which sexual difference has only one signifier—the Phallus (either you have it or you do not)— needs to be rotated. The Matrix is not the opposite of the Phallus, it is just a slight shift from it, a supplementary symbolic perspective. It is a shifting aside of the Phallus, a shift inside the Symbolic.

Anticipation, Future Without Me, and Becoming-Woman The meeting between AHIH and Moses beyond the desert—God refers to this encounter using a word which designates event, meeting and chance: NIKRH (pronounced as: nikra) (Exodus 3:18)—is reported in a text in which a symbolic matrixial pattern is interwoven. Some of its aspects are waiting to be interpreted; some were lost in the translation; some were denied and repressed. (Freud’s famous Moses and Monotheism plays a role in this denial.) Not only the future and the becoming have disappeared from the usual translations of this text, but in the following sentence or verse another name of God, IHWH, present in the text but forbidden from speech, does not always appear. In some translations this name disappears without leaving a trace. Even coming from God, the idea that a written word might be excluded from speech was perhaps too heretical to handle, so this name, which carries another transformation concerning being in time, was sometimes suppressed, and in any case unlike the name AHIH, this second name is not translated and therefore its special connection with time and presence remains enigmatic. Mythological travellers’ tales are analogous to psychological experiences, to identity transformation, to artistic processes and works, to aesthetic experiences, and to patterns of cognition. It is through their power to evoke all of these that such tales are constituted as mythologies. Different internal apparatuses reflect them and are reflected in them in return. This matrixial travellers’ tale is a beforehand glimpse at a forthcoming inverted exile. AHIH leads us to thinking together anticipation, becoming, and ‘future without me’. ‘For the I to preserve itself, the identifying agent [first of all, in my terms, the mother as a non-I in its relationship to an I of the baby, and later on the identifying agent of the I of the baby] must invest the identified [the identified agent of the I of the baby], and the becoming of this identified’ (Aulagnier 1979: 25, modified). The function of anticipation of the I about the I and for

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the I is at the centre of the human project of identification and even of self-preservation. The being of the I as a becoming opens in the psyche the category of temporality and of difference in its most difficult aspect: ‘the difference of self from self’ (Aulagnier 1979: 22). It is the task of the I to become capable of thinking its own temporality and to be able to invest what the flux of time imposes on it as a difference between itself and itself. For that, I must be able to think, anticipate and invest the space of ­future-time. One of the difficulties of such investment lies in the realization that accompanies it, namely, that in this future time/space, the I may not be alive. In a matrixial stratum of subjectivization, first prenatal, then in coexistence with a symbiotic stratum during the first postnatal period, the maternal non-I is in charge of the anticipation of the I. ‘The I was first an idea, a name, a thought spoken by the discourse of the other [the mother].’ For a certain time, ‘the I leaves to the other … the task of investing its own time to come by anticipation’ (Aulagnier 1979: 24). Contrary to Aulagnier, I see no reason to refer to this process as beginning only after birth; neither do I see a reason for considering the first object relationship to be oral. The first matrixial meetings between I and non-I, just like the symbiotic meetings, are retroactively accounted for by later symbolization. This retrospective aspect of symbolization allows access to the prenatal. The moment of birth does not have to present a mental barrier. The effects of anticipation in the maternal response during the prenatal period are crucial for later developments. In psychoanalysis we usually consider that the first pleasurable experience is the contact between the mouth and the breast. My analytic experience leads me to emphasize the earlier object-relationship focused on touch and the enveloping surface of the body. The maternal I is first investing in an idealized I of the child which gradually is transformed into a future I to which the I of the child can become. A metramorphosis takes place in which, while the investment of the maternal I is transformed from the idealized I to the future I, the I of the subject becomes, enters temporality, and gradually takes upon itself the anticipating function. At first it is a non-I which assumes the I’s relationships with reality, with the exterior. ‘The maternal discourse and desire anticipate the space of the I’ (Aulagnier 1979: 113). These are the very conditions for the emergence of the I.

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In the Biblical text, such an aspect of anticipation first reveals itself as différance within God’s name between himself in the future and himself in the more distant future. It then extends to the relationships between God and Moses, and from there to the relationships between Moses and the Children of Israel. God’s answer to Moses ‘I will be with you’ rolls over to become God’s name directed to Moses. This name of God rolls over to a reduced one directed through Moses to the Hebrew people, and is exchanged for a written name not to be pronounced. The wandering will stem from these transformed names, from text and law that are rifts in the organic sequence. It is this kind of rolling and transmigration, which occurs in a text and reflects an encounter, that stems from one situation to a series of other situations and that turns a simple event into a ceremony of initiation. Freud deals with the ambiguity in the figure of Moses, with the duality of God’s name: IHWH and ELOHIM (Freud does not deal with AHIH) and with the regrouping tribes of vagabonds and migrants, which will be the people of Israel, by means of the mechanism of a split: splitting the people into two kinds of tribes; splitting God into two different Gods; and mainly, splitting Moses into two different persons—an Egyptian and a Hebrew, the first of them being the ‘true’ Moses and the other one being denied. The Egyptian Moses penetrated, ‘stooped to the Jews’ and ‘forced his faith’ upon them (Freud 1939: 45, 47). Freud sees the text of Exodus as a ‘piece of imaginative fiction’ (Freud 1939: 32), a cover-up story, and looks for a truth that is not included in the story’s signifiers but in historical research, a truth that was hidden there before the text covered it up. In contrast to seeing Moses as one side of a split figure, I would also suggest that Moses is not only a paternal but a matrixial figure as well, doubly a stranger. The borderlines of his double internal and external foreignness, and of his double internal and external affiliation pass through metramorphosis. These two identities partly melt away, their borderlines become thresholds for a nomadic ‘becoming’ identity that assembles together different I-non-I aspects. The maternal non-I ‘furnishes the I to become, right from the beginning with signals of exteriority and difference in relation to the I of the mother’ (Aulagnier 1979: 113), and then in relation to her/himself in the co-emergent Matrix. In a manner similar to that in which a matrixial meeting composes the psychological becoming of the I and non-I, a matrixial meeting between AHIH and Moses creates the becoming of a

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future new Jewish identity through a metramorphosis in which both God and Moses are transformed. I see the process of anticipation as first of all matrixial, and not as oral-symbiotic. The libidinal investment in symbiosis is either ‘love’ or ‘hate’ directed either towards fusion with the other (seen as an object) or towards its destruction. In the Matrix, libidinal investment is directed towards co-emergence; towards a continuum of creation and disruption in equilibrium; towards the tuning of processes of separation without rejection and closeness without fusion. This means that circulation of anticipation can be a metramorphosis, in which processes of transformation and readjustment of each element and of the borderlines between them maintain a dynamic of passages of ‘information’ and constant tuning of co-recognitions. Both for Piera Aulagnier, in the tradition of psychoanalysts, and for Emmanuel Levinas, in the tradition of philosophy, time is structured by relationships to the Other. In a book we prepared together, Levinas modifies his idea that the woman is the origin of the concept of Otherness to a more specific one, saying that ‘The feminine is that incredible thing in the human by which it is affirmed that without me the world has a meaning’ (Ettinger and Levinas 1993: 17). The feminine is the possibility of thinking that there is ‘a reality without me’ (Ettinger and Levinas 1993: 21); the feminine is the access to a future without me. Thus, future time is structured by a ‘feminine’ relation to the Other. AHIH is such an expression of the idea of the future as what is absolutely without me to which I relate without relating. Through the name AHIH, a feminine side of God is revealed at the heart of this mythological moment. Through the Matrix the I invests her/himself in a future in which s/ he might not be. For Piera Aulagnier this is the position of the maternal I in relation to the I of the child; for Levinas this is the maternal position itself, taken as a model for the feminine category of the subject. In my terms, the metramorphosis that keeps circulating the difference of the future, between the I and the non-I, does indeed have to deal with the extreme situation of the death of one or the other. This extreme event is for Levinas the basis of the feminine category: dying by giving birth. But, in the future dimension of the Matrix, a reference to co-existence is always maintained. The Matrix deals with anticipations of that which is not yet, as well as of that which is no more.

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Being structured by human relationships, the matrixial future and becoming dimension differs from futures such as those proposed by Baudrillard or Toffler. It allows hope in the future without Utopia and anxiety about the future without Catastrophe. In the initiatory ceremony of Exodus, God first presents his name AHIH as a guarantee of a matrixial alliance with Moses, as a promise to be together with him in a common multiple dimension. The first exchange between God and Moses echoes the position of a child turning towards its mother to discover who s/he is, and of a mother responding to his/her need by reassurance, rather than of a father supplying information about identity. At the same time, AHIH signifies space without centre, future without objective, and this is reflected in Moses’ fate. Moses will be the wanderer who will not attain the promised land; he will be the anticipating agent of metramorphosis. He will bring the people to the country but he will not enter (Numbers 13). God says to Moses: ‘Yet thou shalt see the land before thee; but thou shalt not go thither into the land which I gave the children of Israel’ (Deuteronomy 32:43). In this aspect, Moses corresponds to Levinas’s feminine dimension in the human. He is not only the law-transmitter in the name of the Father, but also the matrixial figure who consciously leads the people towards the future in which he will not be. As I have already said, AHIH signifies, as well as a  future I, the becoming I. As becoming, AHIH indicates a process of desire without an object. A desire in a zone of proximity and co-presence of heterogeneous multiple dimensions in symbiosis is suggested by Deleuze and Guattari as the idea of becoming. Becoming, like molecular movement, is ‘behind the threshold of perception’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 281) but is perceivable for desire. Such becoming is indifferent to past and future, it has no memory; ‘a line of becoming has only a middle’ and it passes between elements without binding them’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 293). Matrixial co-emergence is different from such a symbiotic heterogeneous co-existence, but such an idea of becoming is relevant to the matrixial connection between AHIH and Moses. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming’ is always a woman, as long as the woman is the embodiment of (social) exclusion. ‘Becomings are minoritarian’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 291) and they all ‘begin with and pass through ­becoming-woman [devenir-femme].’ Becoming-woman ‘is the key to all the other becomings’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 277) and sexuality is a becoming-woman for both sexes.

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Whether a feminine ‘future’ dimension is essentially connected to women, or whether it is only a cultural and historical fiction, would not change the fact that through its abolition, it is the feminine which is expelled. Similarly, we do not have to believe in God in order to argue the central cultural and historical importance of God’s name. In a culture for which the Father is what is, present and presence, the promotion of present and presence at the cost of expulsion of future and becoming (considered, wrongly or rightly, feminine) is a foreclosure of the feminine, whether the feminine exists or not.

Behind the Other of the Present In Hebrew, certain signifiers for time and space are textually in the field of the Other: the same word, or group of words belonging to the same root signifies after, behind, later and the other: AcHaR—pronounced ACHER or ACHAR (Ettinger 1993c: 12–23). This word is used in the text to designate the meeting place between God and Moses: ‘ACHAR HAMIDBAR’: which means behind the desert, after the desert but also, the Other of the desert. In the formal translation: ‘The backside of the desert’ … Both the other and the displacement in future time have thus disappeared from the text in favour of a choice which indicates inclusion both spatially and temporally (the back side). The signifier desert in Hebrew (MIDBAR) can mean: the space of the thing/object and/or the space of the speech/word (DBR pronounced as: DAVAR). (The word commandment [ten commandments, DEVARIM] comes from the same root.) It is through this signifier ‘desert’ (MIDBAR), that an impossible meeting between the word and the thing, the Symbolic and the Real (in Lacan’s terms), occurs. If the desert is already the empty space, a space for emptying identification and for escaping from it, a space of wandering in which ‘nothing strikes root’ (Jabès and Ettinger 1991: 256), as well as the signifier of this impossible place of meeting between the Symbolic and the Real, what can the Other of the desert mean? In my painting I have gone back again and again to this expression, asking myself what it could mean. If, in the desert as signifier, words and things meet, then in the ‘Other of the desert’ as signifier, their leftovers might meet. Their leftovers are the objet a which is constructed as a hole in the level of the Real and whatever is designated as holes in The Other = A, which is defined at the

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level of the Symbolic. Such a meeting, in the framework of Lacan’s theory, cannot exist, not more than could the meeting between Real and Symbolic. If it could, it could have taken us to the heart of the problem of feminine difference, where the feminine is what is expelled from the Symbolic, what is a stain in the Imaginary, and what is a hole in the Real. For Lacan (in the 1970s), the feminine, or woman (as an abbreviation of representations of the feminine) occupies several paradoxical positions. She is the Thing but also a hole in the Real (objet a)—the woman ‘does not exist’ (Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 74). She is also the Other (‘The Other, in my terminology, can thus only be the Other sex’ [39]), but when by Other is designated as the ‘treasure of signifiers’ (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 252) she is also the hole in the Other: the woman ‘does not exist and does not signify anything’ (1975b [1972–3]: 74). Furthermore, when she is put in one of these positions, they cannot reach one another, and she, as a subject, cannot reach them. ‘Is woman’, asks Lacan, ‘the Other, the place of Desire which, intact, impassable, slips under words, or rather the Thing [La Chose], the place of jouissance?’ (2006 [1968–9]: 226). Woman is, he replies, a ‘lack in the signifying chain, with the resultant wandering objects’. The wandering object is ‘this unattainable woman’ (227). For Lacan, the Real is that which cannot be within language in the symbolic network. Either the Real is what has been left out in the process of symbolization or it is what has been totally resistant to symbolization. We can consider the Real as whatever cannot be represented directly by the body in language, such as instincts and impulses. We can also consider it as whatever escapes in the process of human ‘entry’ into the realm of language, when words are divided into signifiers and the signified, form and content, symbols and images. It can also be described as archaic psychic and psychosomatic events, which cannot or have not been symbolized. For Lacan, the Real is whatever cannot be known either because of the impossibility of symbolization or as a result of symbolization which establishes the Real precisely as its own lack. The woman is sometimes equated with the Thing par excellence and sometimes with an objet a—a lack in the realm of the Real which, as we have seen, in itself is a lack in the Symbolic Other. Alternatively, she is equated with radical otherness: A, a remote inaccessible symbolic ‘place’. But these two positions cannot meet, since the inaccessible leftovers of each system remain in their own different domains.

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Objet a corresponds to the feminine on several levels. It corresponds to the lost primordial symbiotic maternal object, to the archaic mother, to feminine sexual difference, and to the primordial incestuous mother. Objet a has no signifier, it is a hole in the Other as the signifier’s chain. The subject is the effect of the passage between the signifiers, and the object is its real price. The loss which is called objet a is that aspect or element of subjectivity that is cut from the subject on the symbolic level, and cannot become an object of specular recognition on the imaginary level. Objet a is the Invisible par excellence; it is a remnant of the signified which cannot appear in representation. Its approaching on the imaginary level produces the anxiety of the Uncanny, alerting the subject to the danger of its encounter. Objet a can only appear at the cost of the disintegration of the subject, at the cost of blurring the borders of separation between object and subject. On the visual field, the objet a is something that lacks behind the image: a hole, an absence, a stain (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 290). It is also something that lacks in the Real which is (as we have said) itself a lack if measured by the symbolic system. Something lacks in the Real, says Lacan, only if there is a symbolic system. The condition for the subject is the coupure (a radical cut) from the objet a. The subject is the place of the Other as evacuated from jouissance. The knowing subject is a hole in the Real, the objet a is a hole in the signifying network. Similarly, the woman is a hole in the signifying network: she is therefore a kind of objet a, she is the surplus, the lack of a lack (a lack in the real-as-a-lack). She is the Thing, the place of jouissance. (It is interesting to note that Lacan suggested that the foetus is the mother’s objet a.) It seems to me that this ‘lack of a lack’ is the result of the vicious circle created by defining Phallus as equal to the Symbolic, which suggests the concept of man as equal to the concept of subject, and the concept of woman as its impossibility, and implies that a single point of reference dominates the entire register of the relationship of the sexuée [sexuated] (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 167–83). This is a vicious circle which defines all the Symbolic by the Phallus and vice versa, since the Phallus is also a signified that lacks, a signifier without a signified. Even the objet a is, in this paradigm, a phallic lack. The concept of the Matrix, this Symbol minus Phallus, creates a ­passage-way in which sexual difference, differences in general, and their

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borderlines are circulating differently. The threatening, psychotic objet a, the frightening encounter with feminine difference and with the archaic, as they appear from a phallic perspective, occupy a different area in a matrixial perspective. From the point of view of the Matrix, encounters between objet a and the subject can also be sublimated in the Other. This might resolve two paradoxical statements of the later Lacan. The first is that in which he claims that sublimation keeps the woman in a relationship of love or desire of the Other at the price of her constitution at the level of the Thing. This insists upon the necessary of separation between Other and Thing. The second is that in which he claims that sublimation, considered from the perspective of the feminine, is the highest elevation of the Thing—which implies a meeting between Other and Thing. If the Real as well as the objet a, which is a lack in the Real, are both created by the field of the Other, as Lacan thought in 1969, the encounter of the Real with the Symbolic or with the text is impossible since the symbolic system creates the Real as evacuated from it and creates itself precisely as the evacuation of the Real. The Real’s resistance, or the Real’s insistence can be discovered in the Symbolic in an inadequate way by the repetition of the signifier. Such a repetition might be a sign of the failure to sublimate the objet a. Objet a is inaccessible to phallic knowledge since such knowledge is defined as its disappearance, and is also defined as the only possible symbolic knowledge. For Lacan, objet a is ‘extimate’; the subject is its other side. The objet a as extimate is a notion joining the intimate to radical exteriority. This means that the rejection of the objet a in the process of constitution of the subject happens through inclusion within the subject of this rejection. Thus the extimate objet a is both rejected from, and included within, the subject. Unlike a foreign body, a virus, objet a is not destroyed, but extimated. We can imagine it as waiting inside like an encapsulated psychotic time bomb. The subject itself constitutes traces of absence in the symbolic network, traces of passage from one signifier to another. For the later Lacan, subject and objet a are two different possibilities of the same structure, two faces of the same entity, and the objet a is what the subject is no more; they are each other’s negative. In a phallic symbolic definition indeed the only exit for a lack such as the objet a is hallucination and anxiety attack: manifestations of what was foreclosed from the Symbolic. This impasse can be attenuated, however, from a matrixial symbolic perspective, where I co-emerges with an-other.

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In this Biblical text I can give an example of a metramorphosis which relates to a circulation of a lack, a lack of speech. God would like Moses to speak to the people as God speaks to Moses, but Moses does not know how to speak. This lack becomes a creative principle through relational analogy. That which lacks in Moses will be expressed through Aaron, who joins the Matrix through this lack, and by virtue of his difference from Moses. Aaron will be in the same position with respect to Moses as Moses is to God, and the lost speech finds its place in a Matrix at the same time that it participates in its emergence (Exodus 4:15–16). Indeed, the emergence of the I entails loss, and so does the ­co-emergence of I and non-I. These losses are not denied by the symbolic network of the Matrix; but within a matrixial network, what is lost to the one can be inscribed as traces in the other, and metramorphosis can allow the passage of these traces from non-I to I in the enlarged stratum of subjectivization. As both parts of the same stratum, traces belonging to I as well as to non-I can be redistributed anew after their initial distribution, the borderlines between what one has and what one has lost becoming, therefore, thresholds. Thus, the expression ‘behind the desert’, which signifies metramorphic sublimated relationships between ‘leftovers’, conveys in this mythical moment a matrixial space, a subjectivity composed of ‘I will be/ become’ and of a double foreigner, a space suitable for an initiatory ceremony of wandering and for future metramorphoses.

Notes 1. It should be noted that in Martin Luther’s German translation we find the future tense used: Ich werde sein, der Ich sein werde. This means without the element Ettinger is identifying, namely, becoming. Thus, this is not simply a matter of present versus future tense. Rather, it concerns the ‘vibration of time passing towards’ (Ettinger in conversation), the passage toward in the becoming-future. 2. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, foreclosure means an expulsion, for the subject, from the symbolic network or an a priori non-inclusion in the symbolic network. This is the primary psychotic defence mechanism whose status can be compared to that of the repression mechanism in neurosis (see Lacan 1981 [1955–6]). 3. Sub-symbolization and connectivity refer to relational organization with no need for representations in order to create transformation (see Varela 1989b).

156  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS 4. We cannot think of the foetus as a partial subject in the first months of its life. At such an early stage, as Freud claims, it is a phallic object for the mother and, as Lacan claims, it is the mother’s objet a. The foetus can, of course, become an object of phantasy for any subject (child or adult, woman or man) at any stage and we can also think of the foetus as a matrixial object (not a matrixial subject). Only when it is post-mature towards the end of pregnancy it also becomes a partial subject, an I or a non-I, a ‘potential self (Winnicott) belonging to a shared stratum of subjectivization. This occurs at a time when different sensitivities arc sufficiently developed to serve as a basis for après-coup experiences and when, if born, the human being’s degree of biological development allows for its survival. I would like to emphasize that I do not want to expand the notion of the subject to embrace the foetus. In no way am I denying women’s fundamental right to make decisions about their bodies, including decisions concerning abortion. The feminine prenatal matrixial encounter with the unknown external/internal intimate non-I is not to be confused with the maternal/ postnatal relations of nurture and care for the known, beloved intimate other. 5. Elements of psychoanalysis in Wilfred Bion’s terms are functions of the personality which are unknowable but have recognized primary and secondary qualities and have sensible, mythical and passional dimensions (see Bion 1963: 9–13).

CHAPTER 3

METRAMORPHIC BORDERLINKS AND MATRIXIAL BORDERSPACE ([1993] 1996)

An extended version of this essay was presented under the title ‘Matrix: A Shift In-Side the Symbolic’, at The Point of Theory, international congress at the Belle van Zuylen Institute, the University of Amsterdam, and the Institute Contemporary Art (ICA), Amsterdam, 10–13 January 1993. That presentation included several more sections, but did not include the third section of the present essay. This present version was read under the title ‘Matrixial Borderspace’ at Identity and Display, Association of Art Historians 19th Annual Conference, Tate Gallery. London, 2–4 April 1993 and was published in John Welchman, ed., Rethinking Borders (London: Macmillan, 1996), 125–59.

EDITOR’S PREFACE This long, rigorous text was prepared for two conferences at which the intersection between psychoanalytical theory and contemporary art, and painting in particular, were the focus. The unique combination of a deep understanding of Lacan’s complex contributions to psychoanalytical theory, an artistic practice and a feminist questioning of the lack, in both art theory and psychoanalysis, of adequate considerations of the feminine, enabled

© The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_4

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Bracha L. Ettinger to elaborate the aesthetic aspect of her matrixial paradigm in this chapter where she develops her insights about painting and the creative process. The aesthetic raises the issues of the Uncanny (a particular kind of a return of the repressed)—Freud’s key contribution to thinking about aesthetics—as well as the conventional aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime, both of which are shown here to be intimately related to the feminine in different ways. All three are shadowed by what is beyond representation, what touches on the unknown, and what originates at the most archaic intimations of subjectivity. In necessarily lengthy and detailed readings of both early and later Lacanian formulations as well as Freudian writings, Ettinger teases out the thread of associations by which Woman is placed by Freud and Lacan and their followers outside of meaning, or as the unthinkable, in Lacan’s formulation as both object, Other and Thing. Ettinger will formulate her as ‘subject of desire’. This paper is challenging even for psychoanalysts and philosophers, because of the detailed theoretical elaboration and discussion of Lacan’s concepts of the objet a (the object a), sinthome, jouissance and the Thing, all relevant to the formation of the subject but inaccessible to the subject. One of Lacan’s most renowned scholars and a post-Lacanian in her own orientation, Ettinger analyses these concepts in depth in order to clarify these complex psychoanalytic ideas so as to propose a shift in them by formulating a matrixial objet a, artistic creation as metramorphosis, and a matrixial screen, gaze and desire. Objet a is the formula Lacan created to propose the trace in the psyche of the ‘holes’ created by cuts from a postnatal symbiosis with Mother and World. These holes are made up of the ghosts of part-objects (breast, gaze, touch, voice) that are, however, inscribed traumatically in the psyche only as lacking. We did not have them and then lose them. Their psychic significance is ‘lostness’. Only by firmly putting in place the relentlessly phallic character of psychoanalytical theorizations of the subject and their foreclosure of the feminine as anything but the constituted nothing or otherness, can Ettinger bring into view the transformative ­conceptualization offered by the matrixial perspective both for thinking the feminine and the gaze in non-phallic terms and for the resulting implications for ethical and social thinking. The latter can then be explored through grasping the relations between how the maternal and feminine have been to date theorized as the primary other qua lost objects and foreign elements and, on the social plane, how another concept of subjectivity can affect subjects relating to their others. As Ettingerian theory quickly develops and she articulates more concepts to deal with the invisible borderspace, we see that the non-I is not

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‘unknown,’ but is ‘uncognized’ yet known. When the I identifies the other as subject, not object, it is precisely in this space that the Phallus cannot rule. A caring for the other, beyond either hate or love, is born here. ‘The Matrix has ethical and political dimensions; it implies a permanent beside-awareness of a co-existence with a stranger which is neither the same nor the opposite’. Ettinger writes: ‘The foreigner is a non-I who is not left alone to his/ her own otherness in a state of apathy or oblivion; the stranger is cared for without relinquishing (its) difference. When the stranger is discerned in the matrixial borderspace, s/he is invested libidinally and becomes a partner in some of the non-I-zones of my-your self. The stranger might give rise to curiosity and wonder, or apprehension and uncanny feeling. S/he is neither hated nor loved. Yet neither is s/he ignored. S/he is with-in and with-out.’ (p. 167). Thus addressing what is other, the foreigner, the stranger by caring, the matrixial prism is clarified in this statement: ‘The Matrix is not about women, but about a feminine dimension of plurality and difference of the several in joint subjectivity.’ ‘Severality’ is thus presented as a matrixial shifter of the phallic stand-off between self and other, a supplement to the necessary but not exclusive modelling of the subject as one, coherent self, differentiated from its others, boundaried, contained, and hence anxious about falling apart, being fragmented, being affected. Ettinger also draws on French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto’s contributions with her concepts of body image and body schema and on Piera Aulangier’s pictogram. Dolto acknowledged early body phantasms and Aulagnier’s theory involved posing an originary process preceding what Freud theorized as the primary and secondary process of psychic functioning. Ettinger takes her place alongside those who investigate analytically and theoretically the most archaic inklings of psychic processes at the borderline of corporeal intensities and the earliest formulations of sense (carrying from the French the connotations of both meaning and sense-perception) moving from the individual bodies in the direction of ‘borderlinking’ in ‘co-emergence’, putting forward the hypothesis of exchange of bodily traces and affective ‘transensing’ in zones of ‘in-between’. Ettinger writes: ‘Yet, the pictogram is already a relational representational schema; it represents encounters between zones of the I and part-objects (belonging to the Other) or between the I and the others-as-objects, and their accompanying affects. Indeed, in even these theories, there are several ideas permitting a conception of the whole of the Unconscious and the Symbolic as phallic: that ‘devouring aggression’, fusion and rejection are the only originary pictograms and the only possible relations towards the other and towards the outside; that these basic psychic

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inscriptions are affected by either love or hate; that pictograms are always correlated in the same way to pleasure/displeasure and to the alternation between the presence/absence or appearance/disappearance (fort/da) of an object, expressed in language as a yes/no opposition.’ (p. 168) ‘In the phallic stratum of subjectivization the subject vacillates between fusion/assimilation/ love and rejection/repulsion/hate which are seen as its ‘normal’ poles.’ This is countered by the matrixial dimension: ‘In the matrixial model, the earliest stratum already has a dimension of relative distance in co-existence and of difference which is related to connectionistic modes of organization of experience in the infant/mother-to-be unit in terms of joint sensory surfaces, movements, t­ime-intervals, rhythms and even voice and tangibility, to early phantasmatic passages between the co-emerging I and non-I reflecting an interior/ exterior borderspace and object/subject- (or other-) relatedness. The matrixial instances of differentiation through oscillations of distance-in-proximity alternates and co-exists with primary autistic and symbiotic moments in which the I is not differentiated with-in severality. In the matrixial stratum of subjectivization, the awareness of difference recorded in the originary space can already be accompanied by pleasure and not merely by displeasure and anxiety, and can be related to the ‘Uncanny’. Thus, difference and the stranger are not merely tolerated by matrixial subjectivity. Relative approaching in the co-emergence of the I and the non-I is not a loving incorporation; relative separating in their fading-away is not a hating expulsion. The partial subject, or the subject-to-be, invests libidinal energy in a borderspace without either invading or destroying it. At the same time, the co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s) are continually invested from the borderspace. Metramorphic borderlinks transmit and redistribute traces of – and for – the becoming and the fading-away encounters.’  (p. 169) These final quotations carry one of the main conclusions of this paper which has to argue its moves across and after and against the canvas of the Lacanian theoretical field out of which Ettinger, also trained in Freud and in Object Relations, conceptualized what she sensed in her own painting and aesthetic encounters as a painter in the aftermath of traumatic histories where unchecked phallic fantasy actualized the killing of those designated as the unassimilable stranger. Ettinger suggests the sub-symbolic level of meaning-creation from linking and relating without/before imaginary representation. She differentiates it from the pre-symbolic zone. In the present chapter, Ettinger refers to ontogenetic memory and refers to Francisco Varela’s concept of ‘autopoiesis’. She articulates the need to move from a model of emergence to a model of co-emergence and suggests that we ‘conceive of metramorphosis beyond the

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model of autopoiesis’ (p. 171). She also develops some of the concepts and ideas she will further articulate in the forthcoming chapters on relationality, conductibility and diffraction, the im-pure hybrid objet a, the matrixial affects such as wonder, awe and compassion (which will be further developed in Vol. II), Beauty, the Sublime and matrixial sublimation, the transmissibility of shareable psychic traces and the possibility, through metramorphosis, to connect to the trauma of the other and artistically elaborate the traces of the other ‘with-out' and ‘with-in’ the self. Other significant conclusions address the Sublime and pre-Oedipal sublimation in the domain of art.

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METRAMORPHIC BORDERLINKS AND MATRIXIAL BORDERSPACE ([1993] 1996) I Introduction The notions of Matrix and metramorphosis emerged in my artistic work (Ettinger 1991a, 1993b). Gradual clarification of these ideas in the field of psychoanalysis has led me to develop the concepts as follows: Matrix I understand as a psychic borderspace of encounter; metramorphosis, as a psychic creative borderlink; and the matrixial stratum of subjectivization reveals subjectivity as an encounter of co-emerging elements through metramorphosis. I want to insist, however, that the theoretical elaboration of these terms does not control or even dominate the painting. The Matrix is an unconscious space of the simultaneous co-emergence and co-fading of the I and the uncognized non-I which is neither fused, nor rejected. It is based on feminine/pre-natal interrelations and exhibits a shared borderspace in which what I call differentiation-in-co-emergence and distance-in-proximity are continuously re-honed and ­ re-organized by metramorphosis (accompanied by matrixial affects) created by—and further creating—relations-without-relating on the borders of presence and absence, object and subject, me and the stranger.1 In the unconscious mind, the dimension of matrixial borderline is linked to feminine desire: it co-exists and alternates with awareness of the phallic dimension. The sub-symbolic matrixial filter, torn out of foreclosure by nonOedipal sublimation, provides meaning to vague, blurred, slippery internal and external traces that are linked to non-Oedipal sexual difference. Passing through the matrixial filter, particular unconscious non-phallic states, processes and borderlinks concerning the co-emerging I and nonI become meaningful. The Matrix is not the opposite of the Phallus; it is, rather, a supplementary perspective. It grants a different meaning. It draws a different field of desire.2 The intra-uterine f­eminine/pre-natal encounter represents, and can serve as a model for, the matrixial stratum of subjectivization in which partial subjects composed of co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s) simultaneously inhabit a shared borderspace, discerning one another, yet in mutual ignorance, and sharing their im-pure hybrid objet a.

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Metramorphosis is an archaic, blurred but nevertheless indelible conductible link-lane. Indefinite compositions of experience are exchanged; phantasies and affects are conducted through slippery borderlinks, transforming the co-emerging I and non-I, their borderspace and their shared objects beyond distinct representation, creating and redistributing an ontogenetic becoming memory. I will suggest that we use these concepts to revise the aesthetic object and re-view painting as a metramorphosis. The matrixial prism transgresses and precedes the phallic/Oedipal notion of subjectivity, and of femininity and masculinity (indeed, of gender identifications). Metramorphosis transgresses the phallic processes of transformation and exchange, and of meaning donation and revelation. I will suggest that with these concepts we unravel an-other, a beside non-conscious dimension, and thereby enlarge our understanding of the creative process as well as the difference of woman’s sexuality. Within the general field of Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis I will trace the phallic network of relations between the corporeal Thing, the Woman as Other and as a phallic lacking ‘objet’ (object in French), the present and the absent aesthetic (phallic) objet a and Beauty; and I will modify this network by deploying the notions of the Matrix (or matrixial borderspace) and metramorphosis (or metramorphic borderlinks). Stripping away the shrouds from the face of Freud’s ‘Uncanny’, I will deflect the Lacanian lost object’s (objet a) aesthetic qualities from the Phallus to the Matrix, at the same time moving from the idea of Beauty to that of the Sublime. As a sub-symbolic (and not pre-symbolic) network, the feminine participates in the Symbolic using other passageways from the Real—passageways that do not conform to the mechanism and function of ‘castration’. This perspective deconstructs the monopoly of the Phallus and its accompanying mechanisms of imaginary and symbolic ‘castration’ in the field of desire. In the realm of subjectivization through phantasy, sexual difference and artistic creation, I will draw a borderspace in several mental fields: the Real (emphasizing links to feminine bodily specificity); the Imaginary (exposing matrixial beyond phallic phantasies, for both men and women); and the Symbolic (displaying matrixial contributions to subjectivity, art and culture). Both Matrix and metramorphosis seep into these three aspects of psychic reality from ‘behind’, from the realm of the slippery object that escapes, and shapes them all.

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II Matrixial Borderspace as a Shared Stratum of Subjectivization The Matrix is an extimate zone, where the internal is becoming e­ xternal and the external is becoming internal by virtue of the transgressive potency of the margins. It is a zone of encounter between the intimate and the exterior, where the uncognized Other (as a non-I) and the I co-emerge and co-fade, are separate but together, in a continual attuning of distances in proximity. There is neither fusion nor repulsion, neither incorporation nor expulsion. The Matrix empowers more-than-one and less-than-one partial subject, part-object, or element and their joint borderlinks and borderspace, which are known and unknown, but also are discerned by and discerning one another.3 The plurality of the Matrix is made up of several elements (it is neither Nothing, nor One, nor Infinite), yet each Matrix is a singular or unique ensemble. In the Matrix, co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s) co-exist in d ­ ifference; partial subjects discern one another as uncognized non-I(s) without absorbing mergence to abolish differences, and without attacking expulsion. My hypothesis is that such relations occur between internal psychic partial subjects and part-objects, and also between the subject, other subjects and external objects in parallel to phallic relations, on an alternative track. In the very late pre-natal phase such relations occur on the level of the Real between part-objects and partial becoming-subjects in the psychic-bodily feminine/infant borderspace. They are accompanied by some kind of minimal awareness, refining traces that will be later woven into the tissue of subjectivity. We can qualify classic definitions of the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal phases as phallic because the object—or the Other (to begin with, the oral object and the mother)—is approached through fusion, and the lack of the object—even the departure from the maternal breast—is always the result of rejection. The model of phallic castration is retroactively applied to all separations and weanings. To more recent, different perspectives concerning mother-child units and the emerging self, I suggest adding the co-emerging feminine/pre-natal I and non-I.4 A unique stratum of subjectivization is shared by several partners, and differentiation is primary. Elementary matrixial operations differ from elementary phallic operations attributed to pre-Oedipal phases in that the emphasis moves from elements to relations and links between them; from links of

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attraction and rejection to borderlinks of distance-in-proximity; and from symbols and representations to sub-symbolic transformations reaching borderline awareness of relations-without-relating. The object’s and subject’s intermediary state of presence-in-absence and absence-in-presence in early relations highlights the functions of conductibility by borderlinks between co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s).5 The shared borderlines and borderlinks—more than each element—are sources of creation and transformation within subjectivity as encounter in the matrixial borderspace. The idea of a matrixial stratum of subjectivization implies that late intra-uterine, pre-natal events already create meaning and somehow inscribe traces of their transformation, potentially producing discernible pictograms on the level of the Real which filter through to ulterior developmental phases.6 It also implies that the invisible specificity of the female body creates discernible sub-symbolic transformations that inscribe mental traces and can reappear in later joint-psychological processes of exchange and transformation (e.g. projection-identification, transference-countertransference, acting out and aesthetic creation and experience). The real Matrix through which we pass (the womb) and from which we are separated, like the real Matrix which we possess (or not), leaves affected joint traces, and evokes conductible sensations, perceptions, and emotions. The borderlinks organize experience as they are accompanied by psychic-­ libidinal investments. A borderline discernibility of the uncognized non-I emerges for me and emerges with me, since the Other is indispensable for the matrixial stratum of subjectivization. The feminine/pre-natal matrixial encounter with the external/internal ‘extimate’ non-I is not to be confused with the maternal/postnatal relations of nurture and care for the known, beloved, intimate other. In the matrixial experience, a non-I is being cared/not cared for unconsciously by the same gesture: I/non-I cares for, or I/non-I does not care for my/your-self. In the Matrix, the Several, the borderlinks and the borderspace between the several precede the One. From the moment we speak of the subject we can also speak of an enlarged subjectivity. The archaic, sub-symbolic matrixial web can connect with imaginary and symbolic representations. Borderline inscriptions of shared experiences relating to the invisible specificity of the female body and to the pre-natal phase, emanate not only from a joint bodily surface contact or joint sensations of movement that create psychic borderspace, but also from the participation of the woman’s (non-I’s) unconscious apparatus in the formation

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of the I’s (the infant’s) phantasy and the re-tuning of the non-I’s phantasy (the becoming-mother’s) as a result of that passage to the other, as well as from the non-I’s own receptivity to transformations in the other. From a matrixial perspective, the focus shifts from separate objects and subjects towards the borderlinks between part-object and partial subjects and towards processes of transformation that take place jointly in their borderspace. A feminine dimension emerges which consists of ­relations-without-relating between the co-emerging I and non-I.7 The particular external-internal borderlines between presence and absence in subjects (with objects) in differentiation in co-emergence, and the borderlinks to otherness in terms of transgression of margins and light oscillations of distance in proximity, have a creative function in subjectivization. The sub-symbolic Matrix may be secondarily conceived conceptually and penetrate the discourse. The transformations in the co-emerging I and non-I through phantasy-transgressions of ­time-space-body instances via borderlinks suggest a creative process which I have called metramorphosis. Relations-without-relating, transmissions and transformations which conjointly concern the several in the Matrix are metramorphic processes. Metramorphosis is an organizational mode, based on s­ elf-mutual-attunings of borderlinks, which creates and forms the matrixial subjectivity. Through metramorphosis, a continuous attuning goes on between the co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s). Metramorphosis regulates asymmetrical libidinal investments in the joint space without aspiring to homogeneity. It participates in the concurrent emergence but also fading of the I(s) and non-I(s) via the borderlinks. Metramorphosis is the ­becoming-threshold of a borderline which allows for relations-without-relating between co-emerging I(s) and unknown Other(s). It is the transgression of a borderlink, its transmissibility, its conductibility. It is also the ­becoming-borderline of a threshold, without its freezing into a frontier. Metramorphosis allows for the creation of new borderlinks, thresholds and margins. It allows for the redistribution of traces of affects, sensations, emotions, libidinal energies and phantasies, and for exchanges of with-in-formation between co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s).8 A contingent borderspace of encounter emerges as a creative instance which is neither ‘in the beginning’ nor ‘at the end’, but somewhere along the road: as when several narratives with neither beginning nor end develop in a certain harmony which is not intended, and is not directly represented, and yet changes them all.

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In aesthetic terms, metramorphosis is a creative potentiality, crystallized and realized in the artwork as a matrixial borderspace. During the ‘paintorial act’, we can discern a minimal and diffused pleasure/displeasure affect which I call the matrixial affect, shared between the artist and the viewers—even if at different moments in time—through evocations such as silent alertness, amazement and wonder, empathetic curiosity, compassion, awe, and uncanniness. The matrixial affect is not simply a lack of extreme pleasure and displeasure, and it does not ‘aspire’ to the quickest return to homeostasis; it is, in itself, a differentiated basic affect which does not slide towards pleasure or displeasure according to predetermined phallic channels. Matrixial affects slide towards one another without necessarily striving to disappear in perfect quietude.9 In the matrixial stratum of subjectivization, the psyche discerns the unknown Other, and is affected by the encounter and by the alternations in distance-in-proximity. The matrixial subjectivity is not entirely inaccessible since pre-natal processes (which seep into certain aspects of the post-natal, pre-Oedipal strata of subjectivization), as well as the repressed or foreclosed difference connected to the female bodily specificity (which cannot be reduced to the absence of a penis) create unconscious phantasies and desire and unconscious objects of desire. In the matrixial stratum of subjectivization, the Other’s d ­ ifference-intogetherness is already discerned at the level of the affected space-timebody instances of each singular encounter. This gives rise to phantasy and influences subject’s and object’s relatedness, separation and sharing, lack and exchange, and, later on, social relations. The Matrix has ethical and political dimensions; it implies a permanent beside-awareness of a co-existence with a stranger which is neither the same nor the opposite. On the level of subjectivity-as-an-encounter, which hovers alongside the phallic subject, the Other always remains a borderline non-I, an extimate subject/object, an exterior in the interior or an interior in the exterior. The foreigner is a non-I who is not left alone to his/her own otherness in a state of apathy or oblivion; the stranger is cared for without relinquishing (its) difference. When the stranger is discerned in the matrixial borderspace, s/he is invested libidinally and becomes a partner in some of the non-I-zones of my-your self. The stranger might give rise to curiosity and wonder, or apprehension and uncanny feeling. S/he is neither hated nor loved, yet neither is s/he ignored. S/he is with-in and with-out.

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III Metramorphic Co-emergence in Difference Traces of the unviewable, out-of-the-signified Thing, and of singular instances of affected space-time-body or of archaic sensorial events that ignore the image of words, cannot be repressed, yet they are regarded as psychic events. Piera Aulagnier considers these events as representations: as pictograms. The pictograms persist in a quiet way throughout an individual’s life. The process that produces them, the originary process, uses the image of things. It appears in parallel, or prior to two other psychic spaces and processes: the primary process which uses the image of things and also, to a certain extent, the image of words (represented by phantasies); and the secondary process which uses the image of words already interwoven in a cultural network, represented by thoughts. To say that the originary archaic space produces psychic activity means that sensorial and perceptive functions are not only used by the body for its survival but are also invested with libido, or affected. Every experience, whether its source is internal or external, produces representations on several levels at once: in the Real, in the Imaginary, and in the Symbolic; pictograms, phantasies, and thoughts conjointly record any given event. Aulagnier claims that the primary process ‘trails behind’ the originary process, since the primary process only begins functioning when the mind recognizes the separation of two corporeal and mental spaces. Differentiation here is, then, secondary, even though it is very early, and separation is considered to be imposed by the experience of the absence and the return of the maternal breast. It must be, therefore, post-natal, oral, and modelled on phallic operations. Yet, the pictogram is already a relational representational schema; it represents encounters between zones of the I and part-objects (belonging to the Other) or between the I and the others-as-objects, and their accompanying affects.10 Indeed, there are several ideas permitting a conception of the whole of the Unconscious and the Symbolic as phallic: that ‘devouring aggression’, fusion and rejection are the only originary pictograms and the only possible relations towards the other and towards the outside; that these basic psychic inscriptions are affected either by love or by hate; that pictograms are always correlated in the same way to pleasure/displeasure and to the alternation between the presence/absence or appearance/disappearance (fort/da) of an object, expressed in language as a yes/no opposition.11 This conception is also based on the idea that all instances of lacking can be traced to one phallic lack (Freud, Lacan), and that ‘castration’

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is the only passageway between the Real and the Symbolic. According to this phallic paradigm, the pre-natal metaphor usually represents the extremities of the phallic position: it is both a total paradise and a state of annihilation. The metramorphic borderlink between the I and the non-I offers a different kind of originary relational organization (different from the pictogram), since it produces meaning without distinct representations, and in it differentiation is primary. In the matrixial model, the earliest stratum already has a dimension of relative distance in co-existence and of difference which is related to connectionistic modes of organization of experience in the infant/mother-to-be unit in terms of joint sensory surfaces, movements, time-intervals, rhythms and even voice and tangibility, to early phantasmatic passages between the co-emerging I and non-I reflecting an interior/exterior borderspace and o ­ bject/subject- (or other-) relatedness. The matrixial instances of differentiation through oscillations of distance-in-proximity alternates and ­ co-exists with primary autistic and symbiotic moments in which the l is not differentiated with-in severality. In the matrixial stratum of subjectivization, the awareness of difference recorded in the originary space can already be accompanied by pleasure and not merely by displeasure and anxiety, and can be related to the ‘Uncanny’. Thus, difference and the stranger are not merely tolerated by the subject.12 Relative approaching in the co-emergence of the I and the non-I is not a loving incorporation; relative separating in their fading-away is not a hating expulsion. The partial subject, or the subject-to-be, invests libidinal energy in a borderspace without either invading or destroying it. At the same time, the co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s) are continually invested from the borderspace. Metramorphic borderlinks transmit and redistribute traces of—and for—the becoming and the fading-away encounters. In the phallic stratum of subjectivization the subject vacillates between fusion/assimilation/love and rejection/repulsion/hate which are seen as its ‘normal’ poles. If we conceive of the first encounters between partial subjects not as post-natal and oral but as intra-uterine and matrixial, two key theoretical equal signs of the psychoanalytical tradition are undone: the equal sign between approach, fusion and pleasure (positive libidinal investment) indicating an increase of Eros; and the equal sign between departure, repulsion/rejection and displeasure indicating an increase of Thanatos. I propose the following non-phallic hypothesis: that the discernings of

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the uncognized non-I and the attunings of the experience of differentiation in co-emergence accompanied by a matrixial affect create, in addition to the two basic pictograms of union-as-fusion and destructive rejection, a third pictogram of distance-in-proximity. Distance-inproximity should not be perceived as a combination, or a compromise, of the other two. It is a basic position in which a relative distance is not opened by loss, but is there from the start. An enlarged subjectivity—hybridized, multiple or divided—shares a minimal, diffused libidinous investment in joint borderspaces, links and borderlines which are both exterior and interior. It is not to be understood as a simple addition of the non-I to the I. The borderspace, the borderlinks and the process of subjectivization are created together. If we go on a return journey between body and language, I suggest that any relationship between the I and the non-I produces not only records in each psychic space, which can be formulated by metaphor and metonymy, but also a different kind of inscription: metramorphosis as a mental trace of a fourth space of ontogenetic ‘memory’ of transmissions and transformations. To the co-existing idea (thought), the ‘figurative mise-en-scène’ (phantasy), and the pictogram, I add, then, a matrixial ontogenesis, understood in terms of the aesthetic: continual adjustments of sub-symbolic elements as meaning-producing psychic events which do not stay pre-symbolic. Sub-symbolic elements (as well as ­pre-symbolic representations manipulated by the originary processes) push their ‘remains’ towards the primary process to produce phantasies and towards elaboration by the secondary process. Alternatively, we may say that at the same time that an experience is organized according to the logic of the discourse, it is both subjugated to the concealed or repressed ‘logic’ or ‘aesthetic’ of the phantasy, and echoes both its pictograms and its network of transforming inter-relations. The sub-symbolic level is not only subversive in relation to culture but also transforms it. It seems to me that one obstacle to relativizing basic phallic assumptions is the prevailing idea that a distinct representation should correspond to each psychic event, and that the most archaic traces are already representations. If I claim that originary matrixial—yet not distinct— contingencies transform subjectivity, it means that the matrixial corporeal survival is accompanied by libidinal investment and is, therefore, a psychic event. In the matrixial borderspace, meaning and memory emerge, which are not based on a concrete inscription of distinct experiences or

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on distinct representations. Thus, matrixial experiences are not entirely foreclosed, since they trace connectionist webs. Nomination by symbols (Lacan), manipulation of distinct signs (Lacan, Bion) and representations (Aulagnier), cannot serve as the primary ‘payer’ of matrixial meaning-revelation. Instead, a borderline way of ‘making sense’ for ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ elements is suggested here. For the biologist Francesco Varela, connectivity is the dynamic network of internal interactions within autonomous ‘closed’ biological entities, autopoietic systems (Varela 1989a: 180), which creates transformation and meaning. Meaning is not carried inside symbols, and memory is not created by registration and storage since it is the very history of structural couplings (Varela 1989a: 170).13 Beyond the Symbolic and beyond representation, living systems ‘make sense’ that is inseparable from the history of their transformation, and the transformation itself is inseparable from this making sense (Maturana and Varela 1980).14 The metramorphosis takes care of both self and not-self together, and its borderlinks connect to both inside and outside, while autopoietic connectivity is conceived of as linkages of I-elements within a closed system at the service of a closed-system’s self. In order to think of the co-emerging I and non-I in terms of the feminine/pre-natal encounter beyond homeostasis and the pleasure principle, and of the other as neither rejected nor fused, we also need to conceive of metramorphosis beyond the model of autopoiesis. In his late ‘phantasy theory’ Lacan strives towards an aspect of subjectivity which escapes the Symbolic, while the absolute claim of language over subjectivity is reduced and relativized. Yet, although Lacan takes care to explain that ‘If the unconscious is structured like a language, I did not say: by …’ (1973b: 45), psychosis (like ‘woman’) is still marked by a lack of signifiers: ‘the speech of a schizophrenic is specified by its being pronounced without the protection of any established discourse’ (31). Lacan explains that an unconscious which is structured like a language implies that it can allow for coding and being coded by signs (1975c: 16–17). If we think of psychological meaning-creation and memory also in terms of non-distinct traces of existential co-emergence beyond/before symbols, signs, and representations, then, at the level of the Real continual readjustments accompanied by matrixial affects in the womb, on either side of its borders, are ontogenetic ‘common sense’, and memory is created even though distinct representations are not yet available. The matrixial encounter is a connectionist psychic event that

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has an emerging, borderline sense. The feminine awareness (as an I) of the internal/external non-I by transmission of emotional tones and phantasies contributes to the non-I’s affects and phantasy world through metramorphic borderlinks. The maternal discourse anticipates the infant’s capacity to recognize internal and external phenomena and to use symbolic meanings.15 It translates the archaic phantasy world to create ‘cultural’ meanings and organizes the subject’s secondary space, just as, I would claim, the ­mother-to-be’s function of meaning-revelation linked to her desire ‘translates’ the post-mature unborn infant’s sense-impressions into phantasy.16 The co-emerging I and non-I, when transforming together beyond the originary level through desire and discourse, will redistribute their recent and past traces according to their expansion in the symbolic world which opens up to each I and non-I, be it in their separate state or in togetherness. The phallic and the matrixial states alternate, but also influence each other. These kinds of alternation relate to differences which are gradually perceived between several partial subjects, between several desires, several agents of desire or subjects, between parents, between the sexes as gender identifications, between us and the strangers. The phallic I (whether solitary or fused) and the matrixial I(s)—with their self-specific relations to the object—co-exist in each one of us, differently, regardless of sex and gender identification. Art may bring us into contact with possible actions of the shared matrixial ‘sub’-originary borderspace and through this to some understanding of the feminine dimension of sexual ­non-Oedipal difference, giving room for the expression of the singularity of each encounter in terms of the borderline relations between the phantasies of one partner and the subjectivization of an-other partner. There is no reason why matrixial phantasies cannot be partly recognized by the secondary process in the après-coup.17 Metramorphic borderlinks are transferred from the ‘sub’-originary to the primary space and produce phantasies; but as an abstract concept they keep eluding our present Imaginary, and the actual psychoanalytic Symbolic is not enough suitable yet to account for it. In our culture, the female bodily specificity finds representation in vague phantasies but is reduced to a psychotic status since the appearance of phantasies, which are not connected to images of words, may produce a return of the Real as delirious ideas and hallucinations. Such a difference cannot be recognized by the subject or by society as long as there are not enough (un)conscious ­non-phallic

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sub-symbols to attach it to and no non-phallic connectionist processes are assigned to the unconscious Other, for conceiving of an enlarged Symbolic. Yet, undigested matrixial instances manifest a unique power of resistance and protest, and expand the margins of culture through art, deflecting its scope from with-in. Whatever escapes the phallic symbolic text at the moment of the split between signifiers and signifieds—remnants, ‘rubbish’ left out of the Symbolic, unprocessed traces of real events, archaic fragments and ‘lost’ archaic remnants—all represent an ­ever-open possibility for passages of traces of otherness in an(Other) symbolic dimension, if we enlarge it to embrace the matrixial relational borderspace and if the Symbolic is understood as comprising more than definite and distinct ‘whole’ entities of meanings or signs: with the sub-symbolic interwoven within it. Art allows for the incarnation of traces as relics, for the conception and the recognition of hidden elements, which are otherwise approached through regression or psychotic hallucination. I have suggested in Chapter 1 and 2 that the symbolic network is broader than the phallic, that we must distinguish between phallic elements and those which are not phallic but which nevertheless infiltrate the Symbolic, and that the passage to the Symbolic must not be understood only in terms of Oedipal ‘castration’ (see Chapter 1). As long as there is a lack of discourse, a lack reflecting not-yet-conceived sub-symbolic zones, the secondary process treats matrixial phantasies as nonsense. These zones are revealed by the work of art, in terms of what is concealed in (and by) it, since painting is joining and creating a freely circulating metramorphic borderlink. Throughout the artwork as evocation of the invisible screen beyond appearance, theory can attempt to abstract matrixial meanings. In art, the invisible screen is ­theory-producing and not merely the product of theory (see Ettinger 1996b). If the ‘remnants’ of the Matrix can be found in art, they testify to the power of resistance of female difference which refuses time and time again to be either psychotic or mystical, to be either entirely ­visible or completely erased. Art is a metramorphosis which, like the pictogram from the inside, triggers changes in the Symbolic from with-in and with-out, sheds light on holes in its network, sits in its margins. It subverts and transgresses beauty and culture; it connects with their margins and triggers them into becoming thresholds. The creative artistic process is a metramorphosis.

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IV The Matrixial Object of Desire on the Borders of Presence and Absence In Jacques Lacan’s early theory, unconscious subjectivity is exclusively structured by the symbolic network of signifiers (of language) in the Other: ‘The unconscious is the sum of the effects of speech on a subject, at the level at which the subject constitutes itself out of the effects of the signifier’ (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 126). Unconscious meaning is created through knowledge supposedly dwelling in the Other and structured by linguistic-like signs. The masculine-paternal-phallic dimension—established as sexually neutral—is considered to be the only agent of culture. Women are considered equal in this neutral structure so long as no difference from the phallic dimension is maintained. Beyond the Phallus, the feminine is the price that must be paid in order to belong to culture; the feminine is that which cannot belong to the signifying chain, and Woman, whether as personification, or as abstract abbreviation of the feminine as singularity, cannot be included in the symbolic Other. Yet she is—paradoxically, and for the same reason—the Other par excellence. According to Lacan’s early theory, if unconscious subjectivity is structured through the chains of the signifier in accordance with the Oedipal structure, the male or female subject cannot recognize the ephemeral part-objects, or the archaic pre-Oedipal object-relations that were established before he or she succeeded in perceiving him/herself as a unified image in the ‘mirror stage’. The ephemeral part-objects and the relations to the archaic object/Other (mother) belong to the Real and to the ‘dark continent’ (Freud) of the feminine. Woman as Thing, linked to archaic affected sensorial impressions, is foreclosed from the Unconscious: she is not even repressed. She/Thing is the archaic ­body-thing associated with re-becoming fragmented part-objects, with partial drives and the erogenous zones corresponding to them, which are omitted from the later unified, integrated imaginary-specular body, and with psychological disintegration. In Freudian terms, from the Oedipal stage onwards, Woman is associated with ‘castration anxiety’ as a visual model of the ‘success’ of castration. Otherwise, in Lacanian terms, She is either the archaic Thing, a pure pre-object of jouissance, or She is the radical Other, eternally escaping all conceptualization. She is either completely inaccessible to both men and women, or completely determined by the Phallus. She is linked to psychotic disintegration and to the anxiety of ceasing to be differentiated, the anxiety of becoming an amoebic entity. The psychotic male (Freud’s Schreber) incarnates the Woman.

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For Lacan, the Name of the Father—the symbolic Other as a metaphor for the law of society, history, and culture and as the locus of revelation of the signifying chain, transmitted by discourse and represented by the Father—replaces what I termed the real archaic Woman-Other-Thing who becomes the locus of the action of the Phallus. Feminine sexuality is accounted for only by the phallic Oedipus Complex, and whatever of the feminine (referred to as Woman) which escapes the phallic definition, therefore, escapes the symbolic realm of culture and history, since the Symbolic is entirely defined by the Phallus. Where Woman as a radical Other is not determined by the Phallus, her inaccessibility is like that of the two limits of human experience: procreation or death, close to psychosis and Thanatos, but also to the mysterious border between sublimation and art. In Lacan’s early theory, the objet a is created in the division into signifier and signified as what is dropped and slips out of this division; it is, therefore, a psychic being without imaginary or symbolic representation in language.18 In his later ‘theory of phantasy’, however, Lacan overturns some of his earlier postulates. In the inverted position, unconscious subjectivity is not constituted completely by the Other in terms of language. A group of elements closely related to the network of the Real—the Thing, jouissance, and the objet a—become contributors to unconscious subjectivity revealed by phantasy, and thus, relativize the importance of the signifying chain of Lacan’s early theory. The area of the Real is a psychic zone which is the nearest to bodily experience, to the level of sense-perception, instincts, drives and affects in which the first transformations from biological entity to psychological entity take place. The outcomes of these transformations are expressed by the phantasy. The thing is distinguished from the object in that it participates in the elementary communication between sensing and moving (Erwin Straus, Von Sinn der Sinne): it is an aesthetic reality ante-predicative and ­pre-conceptual. The horizons of potentialities and marginality (cf. Husserl, Maldiney) in which the thing is discovered as the Umwelt or the background of the world which may be called reality (cf. Merleau-Ponty). (Fédida 1978: 111)

The Lacanian objet a is no more such a ‘thing’, but already an object (organized along the guidelines of drives) created by a loss. In opposition to the part-object or the real Other in terms of presence, objet a is

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the part-object or the Other in terms of absence. It is not that which is present in phantasy but that which is omitted from it, even though phantasy leans on it and hints at it. Psychic drive is an activity in the plane of the Real, which ‘cuts’ off samplings of the body and carries their mark in its special modes. Only certain parts of the body are relevant for this activity. ‘The common factor of a is that of being bound to the orifices of the body’ (Lacan 1975d: 164). The objet a is a mental product of the activity of the drive and is also its trace, as well as a trace of the part-object; it is the leftovers of the part-object after separation from it. The unconscious part-object to which the drive relates, which is different at every stage, can be considered as ‘spare parts’ of the erogenous zones. The original part-objects drop out from the body image of self and of others as visual complete ‘wholes’, and other objects can serve as their substitutes. The acquisition of language, and with it the passage to secondary repression and the formation of the Preconscious, cannot ‘tame’ or destroy these leftovers of the Real in the form of the objet a. In the early theory of Lacan, entry into language creates the objet a. It is in the process of entry into language, in the division of words into signifiers (in the Symbolic) and signified (in the Imaginary) that the part-objects slip away and that traces of the split-off fragments become inaccessible. The Other subjugates the subject to the signifier while splitting and cutting it. In the later theory, the objet a eludes conjointly all three dimensions of experience: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The lack of the Lacanian object is based on the loss that is inherent in the fact that a corporeal aspect of instincts and drives will never be a mental entity, that there will always remain a gap between mental representation of the body and corporeal existence of the organism, and on the loss that is inherent to the recognition of the separation and the split from the early relationships with the Other and from the archaic part-object. The Other, for the late Lacan, has two faces, both unconsciously ­subjectivizing: the signifying chain and the lacking objet a. In phantasy, the subject comes to the fore ‘first of all, uniquely and essentially’ as the ‘coupure [cut] by the objet a’. Such relations between the subject and the objet a allow Lacan to present art as an ‘elevation of Woman to the level of Thing’ (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 231, my translation, italics added). One should not assume that here, once again, Woman represents Object and Nature while man represents Subject and Culture. In light of

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the later theory and of the ‘inverted’ position, the psychological aspect directly connected to the body is no longer entirely subordinated to culture as it was in the earlier theory; objet a as a leftover of the jouissance participates in the constitution of the subject, and thus the objet a indirectly determines culture no less than does the signifying chain. Woman, rather than representing a failure in sublimation, as Freud insinuated (because of her ‘inferior’ Oedipal solution) may become its prototype. Her ‘objective’ status here is not that of an ‘artistic’ model; neither is She an object of representation in imaginary identification. Rather, she has the status of the lost archaic objet a as a subjectivizing agent. Yet, being an objet a, Woman still remains that which has no place in the Symbolic; moreover, the objet a is in itself phallic since it is established through a castration process, or through ‘cuts’ from the Real. Thus, not only is each granting of meaning a phallic symbolization, but also all that is omitted from each of such grantings belongs to the phallic circle as well. Even the objet a that emerges at the stumbling point of the Other—at the signifier’s abyss—depends on the Phallus. Mostly, Lacan considers the Phallus a neutral symbolic entity, but one which is dependent upon a sexual (not neutral) castration (which is formulated within the male perspective). While in relation to the inverse theory of the phantasy Lacan emphasizes not simply the presence or the absence of the objet a but also the conjunction of the two in the coupure (cut) in which the subject comes to dwell, his objet a, still, always retains its phallic status. In the later theory Lacan insists on what I call a beyond-the-phallus dimension of ‘woman’. Yet, since for him language is entirely phallic and any passage to the Symbolic happens by ‘castration’ and turns the object of this passage into a lacking phallic objet a, nothing can be said, therefore, about the beyond-the-phallus feminine in ‘positive’ terms. ‘She is fully there [inside the phallic function] but there is something more’ (Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 74, translation modified). However, according to the earlier theory, if the objet a—which relates to the separation from bodily organs and from the archaic Other—could only be phallic, the later ‘theory of phantasy’ leaves, in my view, enough room for us to claim another kind of almost-absent object, a matrixial kind. In so doing, the paradigm itself rotates from ‘within’ and desire receives supplementary meaning. This different, almost-absent object also contributes to subjectivity, and so the feminine beyond-the-Phallus enters subjectivity through the back door, escaping the castration imprint and yet ­becoming-Symbolic. I call such another emerging and tracing joint

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object of phantasy and cause of desire (produced by the metramorphic processes) a matrixial object (or objet a).19 Metramorphosis creates an-other object, links and a field of desire. The subject is not determined by discourse alone, but also by the object-cause of desire which ‘cannot be imagined and thought of’, even though ‘everything which is thought of as a subject, the being one imagines as being, is determined by it’ (Lacan 1975d: 165). Archaic representations of the body as psychic events do not stem in a backward movement from symbolic discourse alone but emerge in a ‘forward’ movement from originary space toward primary space; metramorphic transformations and pictograms that become phantasies are already unconscious events without passing through the Symbolic. In the early theory of Lacan, the passage through language is also responsible for the transformation of the part-object into a lacking object. The drive is transformed into desire under the effect of this passage; it is modified by signifiers. But in his later theory, the object-cause of desire is exterior to this passage and remains autonomous, unmodified by the signifiers. It is neither formulated nor changed by language; it has no specular image and it cannot be communicated by discourse. For the angle of desire ‘in this inverted point of view’, the subject of the phantasy is ‘the coupure of [the objet] a’ (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 150): the derivations of the body’s ‘cut off’ ‘samples’ from a continual existential noise and those take part in the process of subjectivization. We can say that singular events in the Real attract meanings via jouissance, and thus the body as a psychic event participates indirectly in the construction of subjectivity even though a one-to-one concordance between body and language is impossible. There would never be any conjunction, ‘any coupling, of One and a … There is nothing in the unconscious [as the effect of speech] which accords with the body’ and therefore the subject is also caused by that which cannot be said but only noted in writing: the (a). ‘In all this what is irreducible is not an effect of language’ (Lacan 1975d: 165). Since the Phallus covers the whole fields of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, the objet a, which escapes discourse and visual specularity, is compared to Woman. In Lacan’s early theory, when Woman is either inside the Phallus or constitutes whatever cannot be recognized or formulated by it, this is a hidden trap: escaping the Phallus as an objet a does not mean being autonomous in relation to it. That which escapes it is still defined by it, since the objet a is omitted from the Symbolic through its creation by castration. But in phantasy, where the objet a is

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autonomous, the traces of the body re-enter the Unconscious through the back door and are undetermined by the Phallus up to a certain point: independent to some degree of the structure imposed on them by the Symbolic. Thus, the general theory of phantasy (beyond the variations between Freud, late Lacan, Winnicott and Bion) opens for us a way for conceiving of female bodily specificity and its jouissance as an independent contributor to subjectivity and as a potential source both for an-other (sub)symbolic creation which neither forecloses the feminine nor turns it into an imaginary object of exchange, and for an-other desire. The image covers the objet a and overpowers it, and the symbolic Other as the network of the signifiers takes its place in order to grant it meaning; but the distance between perception and consciousness can originate only if the ‘remnants’ of the body, its traces as unattainable events, determine unconscious subjectivity.20 Through the matrixial objet a, feminine difference is subjectivizing too. The discourse is not only a testimony that castration has taken place—and therefore a testimony of the existence of the Phallus—but also it is a testimony of the matrixial stratum on behalf of its metramorphic passages interlacing in-to webs and becoming-symbolic, and of its sub-symbolic elements. In the early theory of Lacan, subjectivity is structured in the passage into language by the Other qua network of signifiers, a source of desire for the lacking object that falls aside like debris. According to the late theory, to which I add the matrixial objet a (and link a), the objet a designates the locus of a basic human lack which can be hidden behind representations in phantasy emanating straight from the Real and creating a zone of subjectivity. The phallic objet a and the matrixial objet a (and link a) simultaneously reside on the borderlines of corporeal and mental zones. The matrixial ones elude the Imaginary and the Symbolic, since they are psychic spaces opened by desire no more defined in symbolic terms, and yet, at the same time, they engender borderline images and forms which reverberate their singularity. Thus, each lacking object is not just any no-thing, but is a specific no-thing. The gaze is the lost and desired objet a in the scopic (or visual) field which escapes us because of the split (schism) between gaze and vision (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 78). For Lacan, the gaze is the model of the ‘purest’ objet a because it is the most elusive of all the objects upon which the subject depends at the level of desire. As soon as the subject tries to focus the gaze, the gaze becomes a point of dissolution and vanishes. In a painting there is an encounter beyond appearance, beyond the field of

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representation, with the separated, lost object, which, according to Lacan, always takes on the value of a phallic symbol of lack and is ‘no more than the basic support for the game of presence and absence’ (fort/da): that is, an object that can be replaced by anything and everything. It is ‘the passage of the Phallus from a+ to a−’, from being present to being absent, in which we see the relation of identification’ (Lacan 1961–2: 24 January 1962, my translation). If identification deals with such a process of losing the object, then, according to this metaphor, all identifications are phallic. In Lacan’s late writings the feminine n ­ ot-all (pas-tout) is heterogeneity and the masculine (tout homme, thomme, L’hommosexué) is ‘the prototype of the same (see my mirror stage)’ (1973b: 24). Yet no genitality is possible other than that which is created in the ‘passage to the major signifier—the Phallus’, and no symbolism is indicated other than the fields of signifiers and logic signs (1973b, 1975c). The gaze is presented to us only in the form of a strange contingency, symbolic of what we find on the horizon, as the result of our experience, namely, the lack that constitutes castration anxiety. The eye and the gaze – this is for us the split in which the drive is manifested at the level of the scopic field. (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 72–3)

Where the objet a is only phallic, there the subject—which is its coupure—can only be phallic as well! (And with it any identity and any gaze.) But in light of the diffused quality of perception and satisfaction linked to objects like gaze or touch, and given the primacy of the search for relationships to the object which these registers reveal, we may question the validity of the phallic status of the gaze as an objet a. I have elsewhere criticized this position by reference to Freud’s ‘Uncanny’. Lacan raises only one of the complexes mentioned by Freud concerning that particular aesthetic experience, which testifies to the approaching of the lost object. But Freud named two archaic infantile ‘complexes of phantasy’ that approach the subject in reality and are the source of the feeling of the ‘Uncanny’: the castration complex and the maternal womb phantasy. ‘The “uncanny” proceeds from repressed infantile complexes, from the castration complex, womb-phantasies, etc.’ (Freud 1919: 248). In my reading of this text, for Freud, the phantasy of life in the womb— which is an experience related to the re-approaching within the Real of one’s most primitive contact to feminine invisible bodily specificity— is neither subjugated to phallic genitality, nor is it replaced by Oedipal

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castration. These two kinds of phantasy—two different and repressed infantile complexes—coexist, each sharing the experience of the Uncanny ‘equally’, and both, we may assume, create different kinds of ‘lost’ objects and aesthetic objects. From my perspective, both can serve in a different way as the basis for different kinds of passage to the Symbolic (phallic and matrixial), at the service of both men and women.21 In a rare remark in his late theory, Lacan spoke of the infant’s relating to the mother’s body as an interior-exterior envelope and of a lost enveloping sphere of continuity between the interior and the exterior.22 In Lacan’s elaboration, however, of the Uncanny—which is particularly related to the work of art—the intra-uterine phantasy of which Freud speaks disappeared, leaving on the surface only the castration phantasy. From the matrixial angle, in the unconscious locus opened by desire, the objet a is not utterly lost because of its primary shareability and exchangeability. Between the separate but co-emerging and co-fading I(s) and non-I(s), what is lost for one partial subject may have been otherwise processed by another partial subject. The specific ­sub-originary Matrix does not remain on the level of connected traces of affected space-time-body instances; it participates in the underlying weavings of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. Its principle of absence is neither phallic (castration) as with the phallic objet a, nor androgynous (effacement of any sexual difference), but ‘borderlining’, since in the originary Matrix we share objets and conductible links.23 The matrixial objet a is a ‘feminine’ objet a, based not on the loss of the object related to the organ by way of castration, but on a partial loss by way of the transformations of the relations-without-relating into others, or into either relations or non-relations. This loss is relativized by a diffraction of traces and by transformations that occur in the sub-symbolic, relational partial dimension. The anxiety of the ‘Uncanny’ arises, says Freud, when the once-known object becomes estranged. In the matrixial stratum of subjectivization, the movement is also reversed, from the unknown to the known: something is lost when the unknown non-I becomes known, in the passage from subjectivity-as-encounter of the several to several separate subjectivities. In the Matrix, being-together with the unknown precedes being alone or fused, and therefore, as sexual difference pertaining to the feminine, the matrixial object is a figure of borderline absence. During diffractions and further differentiations in co-emergence, the object, the Other, and the particular links are lost in different ways and to different degrees for

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all participants of this or that matrix. In the Matrix, borderlines between subjects become thresholds and matrixial objects are non-symmetrically shared among several partial subjects; they are not equally lost for all partners. A matrixial encounter affecting instances of space-time-body in a minimal, diffuse fashion engenders joint (even though not ‘the same’) traumas and phantasies which seep into higher psychic levels. Thus, expelled from the Symbolic, a stain on the Imaginary and a ‘hole’ in the Real, the Matrix, as well as the Woman, is not destined or doomed to foreclosure alone. Non-Oedipal sublimation24 of the matrixial co-emergence and of (instances of) the feminine-becoming-maternal participate in ‘becoming-woman’, for both masculine and feminine subjects. Every becoming, say Deleuze and Guattari, is a becoming-woman (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 275–9).25 Interconnecting to ulterior dimensions of subjectivity, the Matrix introduces the becoming-woman and the dynamic borderlinks with the Other into ‘higher’ structures of meaning production. Matrix and metramorphosis highlight certain relations between ontogenesis, originary, primary, and secondary spaces, processes and products. The symbolic world which opens up to us is suffused with sub-symbolic matrixial meanings which seep into it through intrinsic connections between drive, phantasy, desire and sublimation, in subjectivity-as-an-encounter.

V Borderline Apparitions of the Woman-Other-Thing or Painting as Metramorphosis Beyond the connections established by Lacan between the objet a, Woman and Beauty, we can point to a connection—by way of their exclusion from representability—between the phallic and matrixial lacking objects and the (Kantian) Sublime. In Freud’s theory, we may differentiate two aspects of sublimation, which should be treated differently. One aspect, usually thought to be its major meaning, emphasizes social-cultural adaptation and satisfaction and neurotic outlet. It would appear to relate, therefore, to the concept of Beauty, with its links to universal consensus (in principle) and to pre-established rules. Another aspect of sublimation is the object-idealization linked to drives, which might, in turn, be related to the concept of the Sublime, where no imaginary representation can correspond to ideas, and visible presentation in art can only hint at the un-/pre-representable.

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I have pointed out elsewhere that Woman occupies several paradoxical positions in Lacan’s theory (Chapter 4). She is the Thing, but she is also a hole in the Real, an objet a. She is the Other (‘The Other, in my terminology, can thus only be the Other sex’ (Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 39)), but when by Other Lacan means a ‘treasure of signifiers’, she is also a hole in the Other: therefore Woman ‘does not exist and does not signify anything’ (74). Furthermore, these positions cannot reach one another and She as subject, cannot reach either of them since Woman is repressed and foreclosed; and this is true for women as much as for men. Is Woman, asks Lacan, ‘the Other: that locus of desire which, intact and impassable, slips under words; or is she the Thing (das Ding), the locus of jouissance?’ (2006 [1968–9]: 226). Woman is, ‘if you read Deleuze’, this ‘blank’ empty space, this ‘lack in the chain of the signifier, along with its resultant wandering objects in the chain of the signified’ (227). The ‘elusive woman’ is the ‘wandering object’ par excellence. Since the Other is precisely a ‘place’ emptied of the ‘intolerable immanence of jouissance’ (225), all of these positions cannot meet in a woman as subject. When Woman is equated with the Thing, she is like the maternal archaic body, fragmented by the unconscious drive attached to it; jouissance excludes her from the Symbolic. The unconscious desire, that trace of the drive, persists and reappears even though the original objects which were attached to it disappear and leave behind them a reminiscence in the figure of the objet a—a lack in the realm of the Real which is also a lack in the Imaginary other and in the Symbolic Other. Woman is equated with this lacking objet a, whose relations to the real body are emphasized more and more. But, alternatively, She is equated with radical symbolic Otherness. Then, She is remote and inaccessible and dwells in the holes of the signifying chain of discourse. Both the symbolic Other and Lacan’s objet a are caught in a masculine prism which negotiates the feminine from the angle of the Phallus. ‘The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking’ (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 103). In this conception, libidinal formative stages are organized retroactively around the fear of castration which is, like a thread, perforating every stage of development. It orients anterior relations to conform to its current appearance.26 I suggest that we view Oedipal castration as tracing the dividing line between the two sexes for both men and women from a masculine perspective, whereas we can view

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the matrixial passage to the Symbolic as preceding it and/or transcending it, introducing an-other perspective and a different feminine perspective of non-Oedipal sublimation. Towards the 1970s, Lacan moves away from the understanding of the woman primarily in phallic terms. Not only in the Unconscious are the sexes not complementary—neither symmetrical nor ‘the same’ with regard to the Phallus—but also, a special network of relations link the feminine with jouissance and with its remnants in terms of ‘plus de jouir’ which we may see as objet a deduced from the prism of the Real. Lacan does not speak of a feminine dimension that would be beyond-the-Phallus in positive terms since everything expressed by ­ discourse becomes, by virtue of this act, phallic. The objet a, presented early on as an imaginary loss, is a logical consistency; it is a not in the Symbolic. In an analogous way, Woman is not. Woman ‘is not All’; Woman ‘does not exist’. Woman ‘does not signify anything’ and ‘there is no sexual rapport’. It seems that in his late theory, with the concept of sinthome, Lacan hints that there exists more than only one possible sexual reference for the two sexes. Such a position is clearly stated by Lyotard: ‘The truth of sex does not reside in the remark often made by Freud that there is really only one sexuality, which is masculine’ (Lyotard 1971: 141). ‘So, on what level is the sexual relation situated?’ asks Lacan in 1969 (2006 [1968–9]: 226). He claims that we do not know anything about sex and that it would be better to be careful before making any declarations about sexual rapport (relations); that sexual rapports have nothing to do with what they are exclusively substituted for in psychoanalysis, namely, the phenomenon of identification with a category called either male or female. In other words, sexual rapports have nothing to do with gender identifications. On a rare occasion, Lacan hints at the possibility of replacing the model of opposition between Man and Woman with a more ‘microscopic’ view that will include the intra-uterine. He suggests, however, that it is necessary to look for images involving sex that are not limited to ‘two people sleeping together’ (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 223). A choice of images from the cellular level would indicate that this may be a function whose essence eludes psychoanalysis. He has doubts, however, as to the usefulness of images from such a fundamental level, more suitable for scientific research. Perhaps one of the reasons why Lacan did not develop this line of thought is that it immediately led him to mysticism and to

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traditional phallic notions relying on ‘two poles’: something organized like a spherically ordered web between two poles, a web spun from the forces of ‘domination’ or ‘repulsion’. The more ambiguous term ‘influence’ is introduced here, but the ‘two poles’ dominates the picture. What I consider as a first glimpse of a matrixial borderline—a lost enveloping sphere which can be read as a continuity between the interior and the exterior that Lacan discussed, just once, in his late teachings— immediately drifted away from a possible feminine beyond-the-Phallus towards phallic ideas of ‘totality’ and ‘incorporation’: ‘If anything allows us to understand a carrier of primary narcissistic totality’, he says, ‘it is the subject’s [the baby’s] relation to the maternal body, not as a parasitic body but as an interior-exterior envelope. But then these are relations of physical incorporation which risks a clarification from the father’s side and not from the mother’s’ (1961–2: 27 June 1962). This argument would compel him to pass through the tradition of Jewish mysticism, which, he says, no doubt dominated Freud’s thinking, but he ‘has no time’ to do it. Nevertheless, Lacan indicates that psychoanalysis may investigate this external-internal continuity, even if this investigations leads us, ‘as always’, to give up the maternal for the paternal. Traditionally, mysticism, psychosis, and the feminine join together in Western culture and in psychoanalysis within a psychic zone that is defined by the phallic-Symbolic as that which escapes it. All three, to use Lacan’s expression, are kinds of ‘jouissance that go beyond’. Apart from being that jouissance, the feminine is dealt with only inside the phallic realm. I interpret the concept sinthome (Lacan 2005 [1975–6]) as a positive statement that there exists more than just one possible sexual reference for the two sexes. Lacan claims that Woman can be a sinthome for man; and it is in this way that he modifies his celebrated declaration that ‘il n’y a pas de rapport sexual’ (‘there is no sexual rapport’).27 Given the structure of the sinthome unveiled by artwork, we can describe a web of links between the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic which allows us to assume that there is no equivalence between the sexes (as in the Phallus). Thus, beyond the phallic structure, there can be, under certain conditions, sexual rapport. From what I call the matrixial perspective, there is—and at the same time, from the phallic perspective, there is no—sexual rapport: at the level of sexual equivalence between the sexes, which is phallic, sexual difference disappears and sexual rapport is not possible; whereas at the level of non-equivalence which is matrixial,

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sexual difference re-appears and sexual rapport is possible. When a primary principle of co-self-attuning and transformation-in-co-emergence is added, a shift in-side the Symbolic occurs, to account for an-other Woman: an-other jouissance and an-other desire. Only if there is a supplementary non-phallic zone can a feminine difference then appear, which makes sexual rapport possible. The sinthome, as Lacan explains, is the sex ‘to which I do not belong, that is, Woman’ (2005 [1975–6]: 101). He suggests that in the future we might find a different name, from the woman’s perspective, that would correspond to the idea that Man is an absolute other for women in a similar way as Woman is an absolute Other for men. I would contend that in the idea of metramorphosis the conception of Woman as Other (as in Lacan, or Levinas) turns into Woman as other kinds of relations, so that the shift from a masculine to a feminine perspective is not a symmetrical opposition. From a phallic perspective, the objet a corresponds to the feminine on several levels. It corresponds to the lost primordial, symbiotic maternal object, to the lost symbiotic mother and autistic self, to feminine bodily sexual specificity as absence, to the lost primordial incestuous mother, and to the unattainable, fragmented body, all of which are foreclosed and replaced. Both Woman and the objet a lack a signifier, both constitute ‘a hole’ in the Symbolic (where they are metaphorically replaced) and a hole in the Real (where they are metonymically exchanged). Thus, if Woman is such an objet a, the subject is constituted at the price of Woman. She cannot participate in subjectivity. As a subject, she is determined by the Phallus and by castration; as a subject, She does not exist and does not signify anything. In the phallic paradigm, both man and woman can only be in touch with the feminine as a phallic object of exchange. However, it is the very possibility of being both feminine subject and object at the same time that the idea of the Matrix as borderspace and the metramorphosis as borderlink brings about. From the point of view of the phantasy’s structure, the objet a determines subjectivity. But from the point of view of the Imaginary, that aspect or element which is severed from the subject is a figure of loss; it is a reminiscence of the signified that cannot appear in representation, cannot become a visible object or receive specular recognition. In the invisible screen of phantasy, the objet a is a non-specular object situated at the borderline of the subject’s mirror images which are created by its others. Under certain conditions related to the structure of phantasy, the

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fragmented, non-symbolized archaic ‘derivations’ of the body in their alliance with unconscious desire have a borderline visibility. For Lacan, these borderline apparitions of what I call the Woman-Other-Thing, these revelations of the lacking object behind the image, even as a most horrible apparition, will always maintain a reflection of beauty. The lacking object incarnates as Woman that which is the beauty in art, even if its images are those of horror and death. Conceiving a work of art as an incarnation of Woman as absent (objet a) is clearly different from the idea of the incarnation of Woman as a present, passive commercial object given for the viewer, conceived within the prism of gender identification, since art is not a product of the Imaginary or the Symbolic; rather, it creates representations that filter into these domains and transform them. The incarnation of the Woman as either a phallic objet a or a matrixial objet a is the effect of sublimation, if some aspects of sublimation can be understood as inscriptions of the non-Oedipal in the sub-symbolic sphere. In other words, the specular image has a borderline which is normally invisible but which may become visible as something else, as beauty in the work of art. Otherwise, the approach of this borderline in reality and the proximity of the phallic objet a or the matrixial objet a in the Imaginary (as when approaching castration, or the feminine archaic matrixial zone, through regression) produces the anxiety of the Uncanny and alerts the subject to the dangers of an archaic encounter or threat of castration. If the objet a does not appear through sublimation in Art—in Lacanian terms as the beauty within a work—then, according to the phallic paradigm, feminine difference can only appear at the cost of the disintegration of the subject, at the cost of a psychotic blurring of the borders which separate object and subject (hallucination or the anxiety of becoming a woman). When the objet a does not present the danger of arising in an unexpected, regressive, savage manner in the imaginary field—or, alternatively, when it does not appear as Beauty in the work of art—the objet a remains the lack behind the image, the hole, the emptiness, the absence, the blind spot onto which images are engraved and traces are inscribed. Moving to the second dimension of sublimation I have described, the matrixial perspective allows us to add to the ­dis-appearance/appearance of the lacking objet a the diffraction of the shareable objet a and the conductible a-link, interlacing towards apparition as a Sublime in the work of art.

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In order to articulate sublimation as an idealization of the object operating together with the impulse, Lacan presents the Thing (das Ding) as a vacuole (like a conch) (2006 [1968–9]: 232). It is a real empty space, an invisible vacuity outside the signified, like the space in the inner ear without which sounds cannot be perceived. The objet a that escapes the destiny of the Real (to be covered by the Imaginary and the Symbolic) resists and reappears as a residual in several metonymic forms (oral, anal, the gaze and also kinaesthetic movement, voice, touch). It encounters the Thing, and this encounter leads to jouissance, defined as what derives from the distribution of pain or enjoyment in the body. In the zone of jouissance—in the vacuole—the Law is circumvented. There, the Other cannot impose his organizing system through language: it is a central zone in which the Law is prohibited. Against this, the subject is located in a different field that can be described as the other side of the encounter between the Thing and the lacking object; it is connected to the locus of the Other as emptied of jouissance. We can conceive of jouissance, the archaic Other, the Thing, and the vacuole as dwelling on one side, while the subject and the symbolic Other are lingering on the other side of human existence and experience. If the feminine is linked to the first web, the object here, in my view, is not ‘objective’. On the contrary, it carries the particularity and the singularity of each becoming-subject. Sublimation, says Lacan, is related to jouissance through the ‘anatomy’ of the vacuole. The objet a is ‘what tickles the Thing (das Ding) from within’, and this is ‘the essential quality of everything we call art’ (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 233); and it is also the ‘incarnation of Woman as beauty’. Adding the matrixial angle to this incarnation, the realm of Beauty moves aside and that of the Sublime floats forward. Like the objet a, the vacuole is ‘extimate’: an intimate exterior. The extimate is thought of, by Lacan, as that which is most intimate for us but which is not given to recognition unless it is outside, like a shout. Woman is also related, by analogy, to the work of art because of the topology of the Thing and of its relations to the lacking object. Lacan notes ‘all the enigmas that appear, and we know not why’ when we study feminine sexuality. ‘The enigma of what vaginal sensitivity represents’, and the fact that women’s jouissance is ‘limitrophe’ (borderline). But ‘the Thing is not sexuated (sexuée)’, a fact which, Lacan says, enables a man to make love to a woman without having the slightest idea of what she is as sexed being (2006 [1968–9]: 230). In as much as the Thing is not

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sexuated but is also feminine, it seems to me that the feminine difference that Lacan hints at is beyond the Oedipal line of demarcation between the sexes, and that it may also correspond on the level of the Real— beyond vaginal sensibility—to the uterus. I suggest that the feminine relates to the enigma of the particular matrixial relations between singular compositions of I(s) and non-I(s) and their shared Thing, experienced by both female and male infants with-in the woman/potential mother/ ­­ mother-to-be. There is a feminine extimate (exterior/interior) difference that is perceived from the with-in-side. This difference is ignored by the Phallus (it is its non-sense) and revealed by the Matrix. The idea of the Matrix thus slightly shifts Lacan’s late perspective on subjectivity. I suggest that the extimate matrixial object a can also induce traces recognizable from with-in, and the (matrixial) Thing and the Other (Woman) thus create and shape the transforming margins of the symbolic Other on the level of the sub-symbolic web shared by the I with the Other and with others. In the phallic stratum, sublimation maintains Woman in a love relationship at the price of her constitution at the level of the Thing. But in a matrixial stratum, the passageway back and forth between exterior and interior, between the Thing and the Other, is open; matrixial subjectivity—situated at the borderlines—is a prisoner of neither one. The Woman is both subject and Other on the borderline of the Thing. Female non-equivalence marks the emergence of relations-without-­ relating between the sexes. Woman may also be ‘incarnated’ in the artwork as a metramorphosis. The Matrix is not about women, but about a feminine dimension of plurality and difference of the several in joint subjectivity. The matrixial prism can alternate, in men and women, with the phallic prism of being either subject or Other, sometimes aware of the links with the extimate non-I or ignorant of them, sometimes fused with or disconnected from the Thing or replacing it, to the extent that matrixial and phallic perspectives participate side by side in the Real, in the Imaginary and in the wider Symbolic. A matrixial stratum of subjectivization allows for a network of relations-without-relating leading to an ­awareness-becoming-recognition of presence in absence, while the phallic stratum of subjectivization allows for distinct alternations between subject and Other, relations and non-relations, presence and absence. Several partial subjects are parts of the same stratum, sharing and shared by the same borderlinks. Traces belonging to the co-emerging I and

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non-I—recorded in joint borderspace—can be redistributed after their initial distribution. In addition, passages are made between the matrixial stratum and the phallic stratum of the same subject. We are at the same time both one and several, on different trajectories. With the concept of the Matrix the loss of the archaic psychic fragments is not ignored, and nor are the loss concerning drives or impulses and the lack concerning any desire related to them unnoticed. The matrixial lack, from trauma to phantasy, has, however, a borderline sharing. Loss opens the space of desire; loss makes room for symbolic inscriptions. The emergence of the symbolic phallic I entails loss (that of the object), and so does the co-emergence of the sub-symbolic matrixial I and non-I. It entails a non-castrative loss of particular ­relations-without-relating and of relational joint objects. Matrixial loss is, however, not implemented by castration, since metramorphosis relates to the circulation of lacks in a way which is different from the metaphors or metonymies in the phallic system. Metramorphosis, allowing what is lost in one to be inscribed as traces in the other, thus allows for an after-passage of these traces back and forth between non-I and I. Borderline traces of re-tunings within the enlarged and shared stratum of subjectivization create a different transmissibility.28 The lost matrixial objet a is, therefore, not completely lost for all the partial subjects and is not lost alone. And something of the Sublime can have a borderline sharing in and through art. A partial subject can conserve what the unknown internal/ external other has lost; and it is possible to have a borderline contact with the loss that an-other has experienced, with the Other’s trauma and phantasy. In the Matrix, an I may disappear in a traumatic way or in a subtle way, in what I have called retirance (withdrawal inside, or contracting) as in the Kabbalistic principle of creation: tzimtzoum [Hebrew]. Contraction and gradual disappearance create a void in which an other— or a world—will appear. Retirance is a possible metramorphosis; here, time enters subjectivizing instances where elements are partly created and partly abandoned within being-together. Contrary to that, ‘total’ introjection of the non-I in the matrix (a specific matrixial web), no less than a ‘total’ rejection of the outside, wounds the matrix, or forces a retreat beyond its scope of shareability. Matrixial objets a are relational, hybridized and shared, and their partial subjects are involved in unconscious transmitting, relating and sharing; that which is created or lost for one creates transformations

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within the other in such a manner that with each separation or retirance, subtractions and transformations take place. The differences between the relations one retains and those one has lost, between the subject and the object, between the Other and the Thing, become creative thresholds, on the edges of the matrixial borderspace. In the Matrix a stranger sprouts, necessary to subjectivity and creativity, a stranger without whom the human matrixial stratum of subjectivization cannot be created or creative, a stranger without whom I will not co-emerge. If I attack, if I expel or swallow the stranger, it is I who will be reduced; it is I who will be impoverished in our unconscious matrixial borderspace; it is I who will freeze the becoming-threshold of borderlines, block their conductivity and turn them into fixed frontiers.

Notes







1. As I speak of the pre-natal I or non-I as a partial subject only at the last stage of pregnancy when the infant is already post-mature, I am not denying in any way women’s fundamental right to make decisions about their bodies, including decisions concerning abortion. Nor do I want to expand the notion of the subject to embrace the foetus entirely. 2. I would like to emphasize that by Matrix I do not mean that the body has a hold on the mind in a more ‘essentialist’ or deterministic sense than is assumed in psychoanalysis (given that ‘matrix’ means uterus); in other words, they are no more ‘linked’ to one another than is generally assumed by the structure of phantasy, dealing with psychic relations to the corporeal ‘thing’ and to archaic events. Nor do I mean that this feminine prism belongs solely to women. As a concept, the Matrix is at the service of both sexes and all genders. It should not be reduced to the womb, just as the Phallus should not be reduced to the penis. As a sub-symbolic web, the Matrix is oriented toward aspects of the feminine in men and women, towards Woman not as Other but as a different kind of relation between the I and the non-I, to the feminine as an encounter. It is, however, linked to female bodily specificity. 3. Elements of psychoanalysis in Bion’s terms are functions of the personality which are unknowable while retaining recognized primary and secondary qualities and having sensible, mythical and passional dimensions (see Bion 1963: 9–13). 4. Stern and Trevartham (in infancy research), Meltzer and Ogden (in the contemporary Kleinian tradition), Winnicott, Fairbairn, Bollas and Tustin (from the Object-Relations psychoanalytic tendency), Anzieu, Stern, Bion and others, emphasize the mother-child unity, and Aulagnier

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remarks on the arbitrary nature of every separation between the psychic spaces of the infant and the mother. The scope of this article does not allow for recognition of the full range of psychoanalytic material on this subject, related to post-natal experience. This is done elsewhere (see Ettinger 1997a). However, as a general rule, feminine sexuality is not a part of the above mentioned body of research. My hypothesis is that the mother-to-be has an auxiliary quiet sense of an uncognized non-I ­subject-to-be inside her, inseparable from her and at the same time separate. Her singular positioning in terms of this unconscious psychic ongoing event, which is linked to female bodily specificity and sexuality and to related phantasies, contributes to the infant’s matrixial phantasy life. 5. In his analysis of the meaning, for the baby, of Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’ as ‘objeu’, Fédida extrapolates the problematics of presence and absence in order to clarify what may be the meaning of the expression presence-absence as connotative of the occurrence or creation of meaning (see Fédida 1978: 97–195; Winnicott 1951). The ‘objeu’, like Lacan’s objet a, leans on Freud’s analysis of a child’s game with a reel (see Freud 1920). 6. A pictogram is the representation of the originary psychic space (considered the closest to the body) (see Aulagnier 1975). 7. I have explained elsewhere the reasons why I consider this dimension as feminine. In the ontogenetic and originary spaces which register affected time-space-body instances, the woman experiences the Matrix on two levels: initially as a post-mature infant in the womb with its appropriate psychic development (here ‘she’ could be of either sex); and secondly, as someone who has a womb—but is not necessarily a mother—with ­various levels of development and awareness. Since female body specificity participates in structuring the matrixial stratum of subjectivity on the level of the Real, it may facilitate a kind of immediate access to the Matrix through experience and phantasy, and provide some ‘keys’ for retroactive meaning attribution. However, the possession of the womb does not induce a different mode of recognition in a deterministic or essentialist way, since—as a sub-symbolic filter—the Matrix is available to anybody and since its ontogenetic history-of-transformations as meaning and its primary representations (pictograms) are carried by both sexes as infants. Having a womb is, to use a Lacanian expression, en plus (extra). However, I consider that the concept of the Phallus is not entirely neutral, since it relies so heavily on Imaginary and Real male elements based on different experiences and phantasies related to bodily specificity. Likewise, the concept of the Matrix, which relies so heavily on female Real and Imaginary bodily specificity and its related phantasies, is not entirely neutral either. Another reason for considering this dimension

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as feminine is that it is through the phantasy of the feminine-Other—of the mother-to-be as non-I—that experiences as ‘things in themselves’ are transformed to become the subject’s (the I’s) materials for phantasy. Beyond the culture vs. essence debate, in the domain of psychoanalysis, the real body and its puissance contribute to subjectivity. (See Chapters 1 and 2) 8. It can be thought of (in psychoanalysis) as a bi-directional projective-­ identification process. 9. We can conceive of this affect as belonging to Bion’s K category. Bion breaks through the tyranny of the love-hate phallic dyad, claiming in principle that there is a third relational possibility towards the object/ the Other, which he calls ‘knowing’ (K). The K link, whose earliest manifestation occurs on the level of part-object relations between mouth and breast (post-natal) is, like other analytic elements in Bion’s thinking, a logical, classifying, formal category (to be filled in with content in the future) (see Bion 1962). Shareability of affects is suggested in Stern (1985). 10. This is a structure suggested by Aulagnier, departing from, yet relating to, Lacan’s Real, Imaginary and Symbolic structures (see Aulagnier 1975). 11. This refers to the child’s game of appearance (here: da) and disappearance (fort) of the object of a game (the reel), constitutive of the mental object (as recounted in Freud 1920). 12. On the matrixial Uncanny, see Ettinger (1993d). 13. On the sub-symbolic description in biological systems, Varela refers to Paul Smolensky (1988) (Varela 1989b: 79). 14. The connectivity of a system changes in correlation to the ontogenesis of the organism, which is the history of its autopoiesis or the history of its structural transformation. A strict application of Varela’s theoretical position would correspond to an autopoietic biological system in which the particularity and the difference of the not-self would represent a disturbance to the self to be overcome, and the law of homeostasis would be the governing principle. ‘The ontogenesis of a living system is the history of its identity conservation by the perpetuation of its own autopoiesis in the material space […] an autopoietic system is a dynamic system […] without entries or exits. […] The idea of autopoiesis leans on the idea of homeostasis’ (Varela 1989a: 63, 45). 15. On the maternal anticipatory function, see Aulagnier (1979: 19–36). On the anticipatory function of the I in relation to the matrixial non-I— linked to a feminine ‘future’ dimension—see Levinas & Ettinger (1993) and Chapter 2. 16. In Lacan’s terms, the Other shapes the subject’s desire. In Bion’s terms, the alpha-function of the mother structures the phantasy elements (the

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alpha-elements) of the infant. I transfer Bion’s ideas from their usual application in maternal/post-natal relations to the prenatal/feminine encounter. 17. In ‘an after’ time is an expression used by Lacan (following Freud) to describe an aspect of subjective time. 18. For an introduction and discussion of the objet a, see Lacan (1964). I offer further discussion of the objet a in Chapter 4 of this volume. 19. I refer both to a matrixial object and to a matrixial objet a. The term matrixial object indicates an inclination towards the pole of presence (appearing) on the presence–absence continuity, while the term matrixial objet a accentuates the lack, the trace of an event indicating a loss, or the empty cavity opened by desire (disappearing). 20. This is a Freudian description of the Unconscious, repeated by Lacan. 21. I would like to emphasize that the ‘matrixial’ kind does not ‘belong’ to women, just as the ‘phallic’ kind does not ‘belong’ to men. 22. It is there, towards the end of the pre-natal life when the infant is already at full term that Winnicott sees the beginning of phantasy life (Winnicott 1965: 7). 23. It is Lyotard’s figure-matrice in Discours/Figure (1971) which I see as neutral, an androgynous objet a. For the development of this idea, and discussion of other kinds of aesthetic objects, see Ettinger (1993d). 24.  In Freud’s theory, sublimation is Oedipal by definition; my claim for a non-Oedipal sublimation and passage to the Symbolic will be further developed in the next section. 25. I cannot agree with Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that ‘each multiplicity is symbiotic’ (1980: 250). I would suggest instead that some multiplicities are symbiotic and some multiplicities are matrixial. 26. Weaning, toilet training, etc. 27. By ‘rapport sexuel’ Lacan means a symbolic way of accounting for contact with the jouissance of the Other; ‘no sexual rapport’ means that there is no contact with the Other sex in terms of her Real or her jouissance—and there is no way to report on such a contact—even if it occurred. I would suggest a relation between Lacan’s enigma of this ‘no rapport’ and Levinas’ considerations on the paradox of a ‘rapport sans rapport’ (relation without relation) with the absolutely Other (‘l’absolument Autre’, ‘l’Autrui’). This question follows from a basic position in Jewish theology concerning the absolute impossibility of knowing anything about God, His absolute alterity and transcendence. The question is posed by Emmanuel Levinas: ‘how can the same […] enter into relationships with an other without immediately divesting it of its alterity?

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What is the nature of this relationship?’ (Levinas 1961: 38). Exploring the implications of this paradox for the rethinking of art practice, Michael Newman has indicated its relevance to feminist research in art and theory (Newman 1993). On the question of ‘no rapport’ in its relations to the feminine, see also Ettinger (1996b). 28. Transmissions and conductivity are manifested in psychoanalysis through the appearance of traces of passages of unconscious materials from earlier generations to present generations.

CHAPTER 4

WOMAN AS objet a BETWEEN PHANTASY AND ART ([1993] 1995)

The first three parts of this chapter were presented under the title ‘The object of the phantasy as a lost object, from Bion to Lacan’ at the 10th Psychoanalysis and Languages conference, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, 28–30 December 1993. The last part of this chapter was included as part of two essays: ‘Matrix: A Shift In-Side the Symbolic’ presented at The Point of Theory, international congress at the Belle van Zuylen Institute, the University of Amsterdam, and the Institute Contemporary Art (ICA), Amsterdam, 10–13 January 1993. The first version of the last part was also included in the lecture Matrixial Space—Aside from the Phallus presented at the conference Identity and Display, Association of Art Historians 19 Annual Conference, Tate Gallery, London 2–4 April 1993. The present version was published in Andrew Benjamin (ed.) Complexity: Architecture/Art/Philosophy (London: Academy, 1995), 56–77.

EDITOR’S PREFACE In the previous chapters, Bracha L. Ettinger has laid out the basic fields of French and British psychoanalytical theory into which, and on the basis of some of which, she is making her feminist philosophical intervention. Ettinger also had access to unpublished seminars given by Lacan in his final years of teaching in which new phases of his thinking were presented. Here © The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_5

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she is specifically tracking this later turn to suggest that the archaic psychic domain between the Real/Trauma and Phantasy/the Imaginary makes sense and deserves meaning, and cannot be channelled only in the direction of absence and lack. She continues her dialogue specifically with British thinker Wilfrid Bion, with whom she studied in his last years in London during the period in she worked at the Tavistock Clinic (1976–1979), and with Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and Christopher Bollas, as well as with French thinkers to push back the frontiers of psychic life across the limit typically set by psychoanalysis: namely birth as the inception of psychic life. In parallel she works to shift the definition of the maternal entity from its position as object (for the emergent pre-subject) to a position of a subject interconnected (later on ‘trans-connected’) to the emerging pre-subject. The first part of this chapter is dedicated to in-depth presentation of Bion’s theory and its beta and alpha elements and functions, and to comparing these concepts to those of Lacan. The next parts are dedicated to analysing at length Freud’s and Lacan’s concepts of the feminine and of phantasy and to prepare, through a thorough reading of Lacan and via the discrepancies and similarities mainly between Freud, Bion and Lacan, the background for her further elaboration of the matrixial phantasy, its objects and its subjectivity in an ‘in-between’ zone, between presence and absence, interior and exterior. The later texts by Lacan shifted his earlier, adamantly structuralist position on the dominance of the Symbolic, hence Language, as he began to explore the most archaic thresholds of subjectivity which had hitherto been confined to the unthinkable and unimaginable zone: the Real. To articulate this exploration of the spaces between the Real and Phantasy—the mode of making of the sense of the world through images associated with his register the Imaginary—Lacan created some puzzling formulae, such as objet a (objet little a). The ‘a’ was sometimes taken to be the first letter of the French word for other—autre. It seems it was more mathematical or alphabetical. As a result, we have moved a step closer in the theorization and recognition of how archaic, pre- or non-linguistic dimensions of becoming a subject contribute to subjectivity in which it is not formed, as classical theory postulates, by radical separation from the Other but in a relational process with what Ettinger terms for the first time in this chapter the m/Other that participates in a new symbolic field even if, as in Lacan’s theory, there is still a scarring based on loss, in this case of part-objects that are not yet enclosed as the Mother or the Other. This is a vital step in Ettinger’s project to build a philosophical and analytical ground for a theory of subjectivity that has been theorized in the

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previous chapters as subjectivity-as-encounter in which the encounter furthermore involves neither the Other of Law and Culture, nor the Mother of postnatal psychic transactions, but feminine sexual corporeal s­pecificity and difference in the Real as a psychically structuring otherness that is formulated here as m/Other in the passage from an experienced Real to an enlarged Symbolic. This furthermore loosens the classic Lacanian psychoanalytical bonds between subjectivity and phallic language, and hence culture and offers a supplementary language. Thus, it becomes possible to imagine transformation at both the level of subjectivity and of what will then become a culture less hostile to the concept of a contribution to human subjectivity, hence ethics and sociality, from a non-phallic modality, the Matrixial, which is shared by all who become human irrespective of their later Oedipalized gender, and sexual orientation. It is a contribution to the human from a sexual difference that precedes and is before and beyond both the Oedipal and the Pre-Oedial order in all forms. It is important for Bracha L. Ettinger to lay out her understanding of Freud, Bion and Merleau-Ponty together with Lacan’s later theory of which she is a world expert, because it is precisely via Lacan that she can begin to challenge the foreclosure of thinking about an impression (Freud’s term taken up later by Derrida) from feminine sexual specificity and difference on psychic life, or the subjectivizing legacies in the psyche of unthinkable and non-­ imaginary aesthetic sensations and affects such as she proposes characterize the Matrix (breathing, touch, movement, rhythm, participating in co-emergence accompanied by specific affects in ‘co-affection’ and ‘­com-passion’). The path to elaborating the Matrix in the field of psychoanalysis has to pass through the radical shifts towards the space between trauma and phantasy discerned by Ettinger in her reading (and translation) of Lacan’s radical rethinking of his position that must then be transformed (hence the title of this essay). To do so, she brings into conversation Freud’s ideas concerning instincts, drives and sense-impressions alongside Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy. At one level of Lacan’s theory, Woman capital W is the term for what cannot be thought or spoken. But if the space between the Real (trauma) and the Imaginary (phantasy) could be explored, we might begin to see in his theory that Woman can be thought via and against his concept objet a, even while being consigned thereby to a no-thingness that is yet a something hidden. The Lacanian postulation is then considered alongside Wilfrid Bion’s attempt to theorize the psychic origins of thinking in the most archaic postnatal exchanges between the not-yet subject, the infant, and the already Oedipally formed subject, the Mother. Bion used his own

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neologisms to propose a way of imagining early processes: alpha-elements (thoughts that can be thought by the thinker) of beta-elements (raw, unprocessed ­sense-impressions, body events, and affective experience). At once notthought thoughts and thoughts that need to be thought, thoughts emerge for Bion but before the thinking apparatus is formed. Thus, the infant’s unthought thoughts afflict the infant. They may, however, be processed on the infant’s behalf, by what Bion called ‘maternal reverie’. Maternal reverie functions as a container and a processor, returning the beta-elements to the infant having been detoxified as alpha-elements that the infant can assimilate within its own emergent mental spaces that are emerging from this exchange. The maternal lends the infant her own psychic processes to facilitate its learning to tolerate intense, unmetabolized sensations, stimuli and its own somatic intensities. To approach these early mechanisms from the matrixial perspective meant for Ettinger to suggest non-conscious mechanisms of transmissibility, reattunment, diffraction and redistribution of imprints and their psychic traces, ‘a borderline sharing’ of the ‘with-in-side’ between two entities, all throughout life, starting from the links to the feminine-maternal ‘resonance chamber’ before birth. Complementing the previous chapter, Ettinger continues to explain the term objet a (as a lacking part-objet) and proposes to think about a link a. The implication of Lacan’s argument is that the psyche is in a sense shaped as the scar of its lost object. This is not, however, an object that has been completely ‘lost’, Ettinger argues, and, furthermore, what is missing is not simply an ‘object’ but a ‘link’ the type of which is still active. In using a somewhat Kleinian vocabulary (objects being that towards which desire or the drive to release unpleasure is directed) Lacan is suggesting a psychic object whose only quality is lostness. It is not as if the infant simply had the breast, or the gaze, or the voice or the touch of the mother and these were removed. These ­part-objects become psychically significant in their quality of being missing. This alone endows them with psychic meaning because the condition of having a psychic apparatus is the separation from the immediate somatic intimacy with the maternal space of the necessary life-sustaining elements. The paradox is to grasp the psychic meaning of these part-objects when the Mother is not yet grasped as a whole, other Object—the mother in Object Relations is named an object—thus the voice, gaze, touch and breast are theorized as part-objects, sites of need and investment of pleasure and displeasure, presence and absence. To this Ettinger adds the affective and aesthetic field that opens when the ‘archaic m/Other’ is not perceived as Object but as a desiring

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Subject whose ‘connectivity’ by way of ‘borderlinking’ in ‘relations-withoutrelating’ is subjectivizing the emerging pre-subject. In this chapter and through her impressive mastery of both Object Relations and Lacanian theories, early and late, Ettinger seeks to establish the possibility for bridging what appear to most psychoanalysts as insurmountable differences between different theoretical tendencies. She needs to lay these positions out, re-read them through each other, and move closer to establishing the ground on which a number of analyst-theorists pose a psychic element on the borderline of soma and psyche: ‘On the crossroads of the phallic objet a (Lacan) of the gaze, the originary figure-matrice (Lyotard), the pre-Oedipal transformational object (Bollas) that suggests a ‘religious’ aesthetic attitude, and the objeu (based on Winnicott’s transitional object) that brings about meaning-creation as repetition and as an in/out, presence/absence pulsational and phantasmatic scansion (Fédida), I have elaborated, alongside what I see as a ­beyond-the-phallus axis hinted at by all these writers, the hypothesis that the matrixial object/objet a adds to these (on/off, in/out, presence/absence) creative events the creative event of the transgressions and the becoming threshold of borderlines, the conductibility of borderlinks and the shareability of traumas and phantasy’ (Ettinger 1993d). This long traverse then allows the move: introducing the space now opened for the supplementary perspective, the Matrixial, in which the Woman, for Lacan the sinthome, ‘the sex which I the man am not’, shifts: ‘For myself, with the idea of metramorphosis, the Otherness of Woman (Lacan’s, Levinas’) turns into Woman as other kinds of relationships, so that the shift from the masculine to the feminine perspective is not a symmetrical opposition.’ (p. 196) With this Ettinger returns in the last part of the chapter, as she often does, to the question of art, the relations between art and sexuality, the Sublime and Beauty, and offers more mechanisms of metramorphosis to articulate ‘connectivity’ and ‘shareability’ in terms of the paradoxical joining-together of inside with outside, exterior with interior, distance with proximity, appearing while withdrawing and creating a space, and the matrixial object of phantasy and gaze as well as the matrixial subject. She concludes the chapter making clear why the positing of a non-phallic sexual difference, and its supplementary understanding of its genesis in the matrixial encounter, reaches deeply into post-natal, adult, relational ethics and social experience and states the necessity to work with these terms to inform and impact culture and the social reality: ‘In the Matrix a stranger sprouts, necessary to subjectivity and creativity;

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a stranger without whom the human matrixial stratum of subjectivization cannot be created or creative; a stranger without whom I will not co-emerge. If I attack, if I expel or swallow the stranger, it is I who will be reduced; it is I who will be impoverished in our unconscious matrixial borderspace; it is I who will freeze the becoming-threshold of borderlines, block the links’ conductibility, and turn them into fixed frontiers.’ (p. 191)

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WOMAN AS objet a BETWEEN PHANTASY AND ART ([1993] 1995) Undigested Psychic Events from Trauma to Phantasy The Real, which ‘governs our activities’ behind representation, ‘stretches from the trauma to the phantasy’, but the latter, says Lacan, is a ‘screen that conceals something quite primary’, something more archaic than itself. This archaic thing is that which is ‘determinant in the function of repetition’ (1973a [1964]: 60). Lacan calls this hidden thing related to mental representations of the instinct (in itself a biological entity), that is simultaneously concealed and revealed by phantasy, the objet a. Touching the corporeal edge—a ‘corporeal sampling’ (Miller 1985–6: 15 January 1986)—and on the borderlines of imaginary representation, it is a kind of undigested psychic event; it is ‘known’ in some respects, yet unthought. The field of the Unconscious is spread between sensorial impressions and Consciousness. The area of the Real is a psychic zone which is nearest to bodily experience, at the level of sense-perception, instincts, drives and affects. In this area, the first transformations from biological entity to psychological entity take place via alpha-processes (Bion) or psychological deep structures (Ogden), linked to life and death instincts, or via the discourse (speech) of the Other and the passage through the field of language (Lacan). These transformations create a map of the body, which may not only penetrate consciousness in the manner of the après-coup [the French term for Freud’s Nachträglichkeit meaning deferred action or ‘afterwardness’] but also participate in its creation. Their outcomes are expressed by the phantasy. It is around this area that we will clarify the status of the mental object as lost object. The drive creates a special map of the body, which differs from its visible chart. The body is evoked by the drive in a way that does not correspond to any conscious conception of it. When we use language to speak of the body, it is never the body that does the talking; our discourse is rooted in a certain culture and history and it reflects these. Different cultures mould the body according to their needs (Foucault), and the ‘body’ represents political and social standpoints, power mechanisms, scientific beliefs, philosophical and psychological notions and artistic ideas. We discover from the body what our culture allows us

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to discover in terms of our fields of knowledge; the body for the medical sciences is thus different from that for the painter. In art, the body as tormented and then resurrected is mainly medieval; a particular aspiration towards a complete and harmonious whole body is revealed in the Classical era; the conception of the body as broken down and put together mechanically belongs to modernism; and the post-modern body is a pre-Oedipal, fragmented body. The mouth, and later the anus, are the early stars of the bodily map created by the drive; these are later joined by the genitals. Freudian psychoanalysis easily discovers from the body the male sexual organ, whereas the female genitals are discovered with more difficulty. Although the body bows to language and knowledge, culture and theory, it is also an area of resistance to them—reawakening again and again and rebelling against the story invented for it. We do not doubt pleasure and pain, jouissance, phantasy and trauma, birth, illness and death—all of these force us to recognise the uniqueness and the temporality of the real body. In Lacan’s early theory, bodily singular events cannot be subjectivising, unless they pass through a cultural pre-organising system. According to Lacan’s later work, however, with the theoretical reversal that accompanied the development of the ‘phantasy theory’, although these events have no meaning, the Real still contributes to and shapes subjectivity. For Bion, meaning becomes possible following a primary digestion by the alpha-function, and the encounter with reality enables the realisation from a potentiality of preconceptions. Human knowledge is, to begin with, an emotional knowledge of psychic qualities, of the psychic reality of self and others. It is an experience created during containment—by the Other—of projective processes, projective identification and re-introjection. The Other—as the object—has to contain, to digest and elaborate the primary elements projected onto it and ‘pass’ them back, elaborated, to the subject. Thus, sensorial raw materials pass through a series of transformations and turn into potentially knowable ­alpha-elements. Thinking, according to Bion, is acquired by the infant from emotional experience with a nurturing maternal object that functions according to the ‘reality principle’, i.e. with an other who is on a much higher level of emotional and cognitive organisation than itself. Such a functioning would mean, in Lacanian terms, that the mother— which is the first ‘other’ for the infant—has crossed the Oedipus complex more or less successfully and has accepted basic cultural laws and interdictions, i.e. has gone through symbolic ‘castration’ and overcome

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the temptation of incest. For Bion, in the first period after birth, the infant is unable to think, or even feel for itself—that is, it does not have an alpha-function of its own that elaborates primary emotional experience and sensorial data into ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’. Rather it needs the other to give them meaning by containing. The infant’s undifferentiated experience and sensations are transformed by the cognitive function of the mother. Only thus can it further re-introject experience in a way which allows for its being used to create its own thoughts and feelings by itself (Stein 1993: 7–8). The other, then, in all different psychoanalytic theories is necessary, from the very beginning, for the creation of subjectivity; and the first ‘porte-parole’ (carrier of words), to use a favourite expression of psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier, is the mother. For Lacan and Bion, as well as for Melanie Klein and Piera Aulagnier (and even more so for Winnicott), the verbal mediation of the other (and not merely passive emotional reception and containment) creates a transformation in the self. Until the grasp of the word, the infant’s meaning resides primarily within the mother’s psyche-soma. With the word, the infant has found a new transformational object, which facilitates the transition from deep enigmatic privacy towards the culture of the human village (Bollas 1987: 35). The psychic drive is an activity on the plane of the Real that ‘cuts off’ samplings of the body—the (oral, anal) part-objects (Karl Abraham)— and carries their mark in its special modes. Only certain parts of the body are relevant for this activity, which occurs, in most analysts’ opinion, without passing through language but in relation to the Other/the archaic mother. For Lacan, the drive, in as much as it is unconscious, has relationships both with the Other as a carrier of the discourse and with language. The objet a (the leftovers of the lacking part-object) is a mental product of the activity of the drive as well as its trace. It is an archaic psychic trace, or a primary mental inscription of the residue, or the ‘remainder’ of the originary part-object; it is what is left for the subject from the part-object after the subject’s scission from it. Yet it is not integrated in the ‘whole’ body; it is the remnants of the schism. ‘The petit a could be said to take a number of forms, with the qualification that in itself it has no form, but can only be thought of predominantly orally or shittily. The common factor of ‘a’ is that of being bound to the orifices of the body’ (Lacan 1975d: 164). To the bodily orifices generally recognised by psychoanalytic theory—mouth and the rectum—also add the eye and the ear. What is left for the subject from the part-object after separating from

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it—the objet a—is both the cause of desire and what signals the object to which desire is directed. In this sense, events that take place in the mental zone which is closest to the corporeal level (in the Real) shapes the subject. In the early theory of Lacan, the Other is the signifying chain from the field of language; the subject is shaped through another subject (the infant, for example, through its relations with the mother) only in as much as the other subject (as imaginary) carries the (symbolic) Other— that is, only in as much as the other subject is a site for the structures of culture expressed through discourse. In this chapter I would like to emphasise that in Lacan’s later theory, and particularly in the 1970s, not only is the Other not only composed of chains of discourse, but the lacking objet a does not lean on the action of language alone. The Other contains the lacking objet a as leaning directly on the separation from bodily organs and from the real Other/mother, that is, as autonomous from language.1 In Lacan’s later theory (to which I will return further on) the lacking objet a is not only created in the passage to language and from it (as the early Lacan claims), and is not the effect of ‘cuts’ between signifiers and signified and of the passage between signifiers, but is also independent of it. If in the early theory we may conceive of a screen that is a wall, composed of the chains of signifiers ‘behind’ which there is an objet a as nothing, in the later theory another comes to the fore: the screen that is accessible for us is the phantasy behind which a no-thing that is something is hidden, namely an objet a that will more and more appear not as a residue of the Symbolic but as a residue of jouissance. The Real is the space of phenomena, within the psyche, which do not acquire meaning directly via culture. This realm would contain in Bion’s terms the beta-elements, the bizarre objects and to a certain extent also the (later emerging) alpha-elements. Beta-elements are undigested sense-impressions and unchanged originary emotions which ‘are not felt to be phenomena, but things-inthemselves […] Beta-elements are not amenable to use in dream thoughts but are suited for use in projective identification. They are influential in producing acting out’. According to Bion, these are elements which can be ‘evacuated or used for a kind of thinking that depends on manipulation of what are felt to be things in themselves’. In such a manipulation, words or thoughts can seemingly be exchanged. ‘Betaelements are stored but differ from alpha-elements in that they are not so much memories as undigested facts,’ while the alpha-elements have

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been processed by the alpha-function and thus have become available for thought. ‘It is important to distinguish between memories and undigested facts’ (Bion 1962: 6–7). For Bion, beta-elements are independent from culture, while for Lacan the Real on the whole relates to it (even if indirectly) for its organisation, since the Real is separated from, yet linked to the Symbolic and the Imaginary that are directly influenced by culture. The Real, however, ex-ists (existence that sits outside) the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and the objet a ex-ists both these psychic zones. Bion distinguishes between two kinds of elements which are more primitive than the alpha-elements: beta-elements, which are independent both from culture and from the particular, individual mental structure, and special kinds of elements which are already dependent on them, which are called ‘bizarre objects’ (1962: 24–7). We can see this differentiation as linked to Freud’s reference to the most primitive edge of experience in which the Ich (Ego or I) is firstly a bodily I, derived from bodily sensations, above all from those which emerge on the surface of the body (1923a: 26–7, especially 26 n.1). The bizarre object is a mental object that already has a psychological meaning as a result of elaboration by alpha-function, an object which has already become an ­alpha-element and participated in the Ego and Super-Ego activities, and which has returned later on into a ‘thing-in-itself’ with no psychological meaning, as a result of a psychotic disintegration. In such a case, the function which turns primary emotions and sense-impressions into a psychological experience (the alpha-function) reverses its direction. Instead of treating sense-impressions so that they will become mental materials in the service of the Ego, it turns objects, already to some extent treated by the Ego, back into senseless things. The difference between bizarre objects and beta-elements is that the bizarre objects have already been in the service of the Ego and the Super-Ego, and, therefore, carry their traces however psychotic these traces may be. Since the Ego and the Super-Ego are structures that create contact between internal and external realities, culture and language, we may say that bizarre objects can be considered lost elements as a result of psychotic processes, and are no more accessible to normal or neurotic conscious or unconscious use in thinking, memory or dreaming. Instead, they are active in repetition, psychotic projective-identification and ‘acting out’, carrying in a distorted way the traces of reality, culture and language as well as the stamp of individual subjectivity. They are not only neutral ‘things’ like

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beta-elements. The inverse direction of the alpha-function reminds us of Lacan’s mechanism of ‘foreclosure’, which is active in psychosis. We may define psychic unthought known events (Bollas 1987) as what is dropped, or foreclosed, from the Symbolic and the Imaginary context, as well as what slips out of the inscription of the body’s schema in the region of the Real, or as what did not enter these zones to begin with. That is, whatever takes part in an event that directly concerns the subject but cannot be imagined or thought of—and is therefore ‘lost’. Such a psychic event brings us close to the idea of the Id, with special emphasis on object-relatedness to the other. Its early psychic field of action is the meeting place of elements of deep true self (Winnicott) with primary repressions (Freud), as well as with modes of maternal experience and relations which form the inter-subjective maternal ‘logic’ or ‘aesthetics’. It is a meeting of internal and even inborn formations with ­inter-subjective experience that generates the basis of early object-relations. These events are not revealed through imagination or thoughts because they do not have any distinct mental representation. As they cannot be processed for memory-storage, they cannot be remembered. They keep on repeating themselves, therefore, in behaviour or in acting-out without being digested or comprehended.2 In the differentiation between things and objects, we may think of beta-elements as things and of alpha-elements as objects. The difference lies in the distance of the psychic event from the sensory-motor event. We may say that undigested psychic events have different degrees of undigestibility. ‘The thing is distinguished from the object in that it participates in the elementary communication between sensing and moving’ (Erwin Straus, Von Sinn der Sinne); it is an ante-predicative and ­pre-conceptual aesthetic reality. The horizons of potentialities or marginality (cf. Husserl, Maldiney) in which the thing discovered are the Umwelt or the background of the world which may be called reality (cf. Merleau-Ponty) (Fédida 1978: 111). The Lacanian objet a is not a thing (beta-element) but an object which, like the alpha-element, is already mentally filtered. We may either conceive of it as, like the bizarre object, created and then lost, but without the disintegration that characterises the bizarre object, i.e. not in a psychotic way; or we may conceive of it as both created and lost in the same instance, as created as loss, or created by a loss. Like a ­beta-element, it participates in projection-identification and in ‘acting-­ out’; yet the objet a cannot be defined in the field of Bion’s beta-elements

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since it already depends on organisation by the systems of the impulses. We, therefore, have to conceive for it a particular place, which, further to the specifications already mentioned, is also structured according to impulses that relate, according to Lacan, to the bodily orifices. The objet a becomes organised as a trace of the part-objects with which all conscious and unconscious normal-neurotic contact is no longer possible, if the Unconscious is not only ‘structured like a language’ but also by distinct representations. Undigested psychic events are a form of primal ‘knowledge’ of the infant both in its existential plane and in its relations with the other. This ‘knowledge’ finds ways of being partially represented or hinted at by phantasy. Within the analytic framework, the objet a can be understood as the disappearing aspect of the part-object, that aspect which, already organised by the impulse, cannot be entirely processed by the alpha-function, or which got out of its control. That is, it is a trace of a part-object already crystallised in terms of drives but ‘lost’ for higher forms of organisation. The objet a is a mental inscription of the part-object or the other, which testifies to a certain differentiation and ­experience-organisation according to drives, but, in opposition to the part-object or the other in terms of presence, and to the possibility of their integration within the later whole object (as is usually understood in psychoanalytic Object Relations theory and by Melanie Klein), the objet a is the trace of the originary part-object or the real archaic Other in terms of absence. It is not what is present in phantasy, but what is omitted from it, even though phantasy leans towards it and hints at it, just as ­alpha-elements lean towards beta-elements but these (beta-elements) do not appear in phantasy. The psychic activity of relations with the lacking or absent objet a can be described in the framework of Object Relations theories as an activity on the human level of the pre-thought and the pre-imagined; ‘the object I write with the figure of writing a, nothing of which is thinkable’ (Lacan 1975d: 16).3 The activity linked to it is revealed in psychoanalysis in projective identification within ‘transference’/‘counter-transference’ relations, in ‘acting out’ and by somatic symptoms. Phantasy leans on, and partially represents, the objet a, but it is impossible to channel through it the particular content of what has been engraved without thought or imagery, since contents are elaborated by images and thoughts. Symbolic or social exchange systems are irrelevant to psychic activities involving lost objects; they only become relevant at the higher, Oedipal level, and

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do not hold sway at the archaic level of psychic activity. The acquisition of language, and with it the passage to secondary repression, cannot ‘tame’ or destroy these leftovers of the Real. These remnants, or traces, in the form of the objet a are a being, says Lacan, in the sense of an essential lack or absence in the human symbolic text, and it is around these ‘holes’ that the return movement of archaic repressions repeats itself. Early mental objects are pre-Oedipal part-objects. Among these, the oral part-object is considered to be the first. The maternal breast serves as an object of phantasy for the archaic oral encounter. P ­ art-objects of phantasy are introjected and projected. Later, following a series of part-objects to which the infant relates in accordance to its needs, ‘whole’ objects will appear, as described by Freud: the mother, the father, myself. The relations to the ‘whole’ object replace to a certain extent the relations to part-objects that can then be repressed, integrated within the whole object or foreclosed from it. Following Freud, Lacan and Bion develop, each in their own way, the idea that the ‘original’ object is a lost object: Psychoanalysis has shown us that when the original object of a wishful impulse has been lost as a result of repression, it is frequently represented by an endless series of substitutive objects none of which, however, brings full satisfaction. This may explain the inconsistency in object-choice, the craving for stimulation, which is so often a feature of the love of adults. (Freud 1912: 188–9)

Object and Phantasy With the development of the concept of phantasy, Freud departed from his previous suggestions that past events from external reality are the main elements in the formation of mental trauma, and that realistic events are what is reconstructed in the patient’s present discourse. Freud replaced this idea with the assumption that phantasy, exposed in the patient’s discourse, initially reveals a meaning derived from the instinct. Environmental elements, and first of all the relations with the mother, are secondary in this Freudian conception. Freud treated mainly adult patients, and phantasy formed the discovery of a primordial psychic reality, originally disconnected from external events, composed of a small number of basic scenarios—seduction, castration and the ‘primal scene’—and their endless variations (1917: 370–1); to them a

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fourth group (usually forgotten in psychoanalytical literature) is added: intra-uterine phantasies (1900: 399–404). The subject ‘screens’ to him/ herself, on the invisible screen of phantasy, ‘films’ which he/she has unknowingly created believing them to be memories, and relates them to the analyst as though they were reconstructions of his/her real life’s forgotten events. But out of these ‘films’, the analyst infers unconscious reality related to traces of sense impressions linked with emotional experience entwined in the paths of impulses and instincts. The analyst does not infer that such an event, corresponding to the phantasy content, has necessarily taken place in external reality. According to Freud, what is represented in phantasy is what is absent; lost territories (like the inside of the mother), that which has disappeared through repression, which I lost or which left me—like the mother at the moment she disappears and whose disappearance (and return) the child represents in his/her play (fort/da) (Freud 1920); that which has never been possessed and I desire, or am afraid to lose—like the sexual male organ which one has (and is afraid to lose) or does not have (has already lost?). The trace of the passage from the existent to the absent, i.e. the moment of separation or split, is the Symbolic castration. ‘Castration anxiety’ is not related exclusively to the male sex organ but initially to the weaning from the maternal breast. According to Freud (and more so with Lacan), weaning is the mother of all painful psychological separation and loss, but it cannot serve as their model. Their model is castration, and this castration model is retroactively applied to earlier experiences of loss. According to Freud, phantasy is the screen in which the substitute of the lost repressed object, or the substitute of the object one was afraid of losing, appears, in accordance with the drives (or impulses) that characterise each developmental stage and in agreement with a primary ‘code’ which filters internal and external stimuli alongside the routes of the instincts. For Melanie Klein—following Freud—the instinct contains the embodiment of an inborn ‘knowledge’ about the object by ‘phylogenetic inheritance’ (Klein 1952: 117; Freud 1917: 199), i.e. inborn codes included in the instinct organise from the beginning sensorial impressions. Inherent, inborn modes of experience-organisation precede the perception of external events and determine their processing as an experience. As Bion later specifies, we are born with predispositions for experience-organisation and for meaning-attributions, with the ability to create interpretations to suit our basic needs.

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Phantasy is such a primary interpretation of an encounter between the drive and the object, alongside the guidelines offered by the instincts. The biological equipment thus participates in the code we use for attributing meaning to experience. We are equipped with systems of preconceptions (Bion) that mediate the instinctual realisation of experience in the contact with reality. The instinct-derived preconceptions change in accordance with predicted stages of development (an oral organisation to begin with, an anal organisation, etc) and supply an interpretative network into which meaning is created upon realisation—that is, upon the encounter with reality that fits the preconceptions. In this model, psychological meaning is first of all non-genital and pre-Oedipal. It relates to life and death instincts opened from the beginning towards the object. The idea of a relation to a certain exteriority is built into this viewpoint, in agreement with Freud’s description of the earliest object-oriented impulse (Freud 1917). At the same time, Melanie Klein saw in phantasy a mental representation of instincts and drives dealing with internal reality and evidence of coping with external reality. The phantasies which she came across in her treatment of very young children, corresponding to the oral, anal and the early phallic stages, were of more archaic scenarios than the Oedipal phantasies described by Freud. She claimed that the objects are both external and internal, both existent and invented, in a continual interrelated exchange. They are projected from the inside and change the perception of external reality; they are perceived from the outside in accordance with internal codes (or early preconceptions depending on instincts, as Bion would say) while also changing internal reality. An external oral part-object can, for example, be perceived as dangerous and bring about an avoidance reaction due to a sensation of danger which stems from the death instinct and not from an exterior danger; yet reality has more impact in that conception than in Freud’s. The real part-object that arrives from the outside, for example, transforms an internal state of hunger and uneasiness or suffering into a state of satisfaction and pleasure. The milk satisfies or frustrates the drive, and, following this realistic experience, the infant phantasises an oral part-object which will satisfy or frustrate its drives when these reappear. Here, phantasies do not lean on lost, but on existing, objects. According to Klein, phantasy is a primary experience of contact with the external and the internal, an encounter between the drive and an object that is first of all existing and not lacking, or with an interior substitute for an external object which is about

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to reappear. The ‘conflict about the present object’, say Meltzer and Williams, ‘is prior in significance to the host of anxieties over the absent object’ (1988: 29). For Winnicott, phantasies are a primary characterization of psychic life, ‘that can be thought of as an imaginative processing of a physical function’ (1965: 7), and can be considered, following Freud’s ideas about intra-uterine phantasies (1919: 244, 248) as occurring already in the later stage of pre-natal life when the infant is ‘post-mature’ (Winnicott 1965: 3). An imaginary processing of a physical function is, for example, the processing of data which come from the senses into a ‘picture’ which has some coherence even before language brings with it a more stable coherence. Phantasy is, therefore, a primal creation, a creation of an archaic being in the psyche based on sensorial impressions. The early phantasy that Klein and Winnicott presume does not express a symbolic ability like those found in later phantasies. ‘At first, the whole weight of wish and phantasy is borne by sensation and affect’ (Isaacs 1948) and not by symbols and images. With Bion, we are close to Klein in many respects, but the object moves from presence to absence; in that respect Bion approaches Lacan: [The] breast is an object the infant needs to supply it with milk and good internal objects. I do not attribute to the infant an awareness of this need; but I do attribute to the infant an awareness of a need not satisfied.[…] Sooner or later the ‘wanted’ breast is felt as an ‘idea of a breast missing’ and not as a bad breast present. We can see that the bad, that is to say wanted but absent, breast is much more likely to become recognized as an idea than the good breast which is associated with what a philosopher would call a thing-in-itself. (Bion 1962: 34, emphasis added)

Thus, ‘the absence of the mother is painful by what she leaves (behind) when she is no more there’ (Fédida 1978: 193). The analysis of the fort/da game (Freud 1919) testifies to the creation of meaning by ­presence-absence relations, and ‘the question of the Object in psychoanalysis is inevitably put forward not in relation to death but in relation to absence in as much as it is signified, by repetition, as that of the mother’ (Fédida 1978: 154, emphasis added). If in ‘Drive’ theories, the subject seeks satisfaction by the object and the relations with the other are secondary while, in Object-Relations theories the subject needs the other—i.e. the ‘object’

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is the other and the emphasis is on relationships—then in Lacan’s theory the subject looks for the lacking object which dwells in the field of the Other.4 The objet a remains forever the cause of desire, when the desire towards the Other is the human symbolic unconscious creation par excellence. In Lacan’s early theory, drive merges into an inter-subjective context. Lacan returns to Freud in order to describe the meeting that occurs in phantasy as an absent meeting: an impossible meeting with what had been lost, with what does not exist any more. Thus phantasy is a non-meeting, and the object of phantasy can only be, in a certain sense, a non-object.5 The status of the Freudian object/Other as lacking or as lost, as well as what I name the non-object and the unattainable Other are the focus of Lacan’s later research dealing with the phantasy on the level of a lacking part-object relation and of a subject who seeks the Other, or the desire of the Other—but in vain. In his later teaching, the focus moves from desire (in the field of the symbolic Other) to jouissance (in the realm of the subject’s Real). Something which had been understood only recently was introduced in Lacan’s teaching: the devalorisation of the Other, the Other of the signifier […]. Jouissance has no other value in psychoanalysis but that of being evacuated from the field of the Other. […] The objet a is a hole in the field of knowledge. […] That little a is both the hole and the cork. (Miller 1985–6: 16 April 1986)

I will attempt to sum up the relations between object and phantasy according to Lacan in terms known to us from other theories: In Freud’s terms, phantasy according to Lacan is a sort of screen that hides the object that has been lost or that one was afraid to lose, and the loss happens through the process of castration that turns any lack phallic. In Klein’s terms, phantasy according to Lacan is the film in which the lost archaic part-object does not appear, but which attests to its early existence and disappearance. In Winnicott’s terms, phantasy according to Lacan is a primal creation, a creation of a primary psychic entity, based on traces of bodily s­ensorial perceptions and drives and on traces of the relations with the archaic mother, but it is a creation which does not contain them. The phantasy is on the borders of the Real, when the Real is stretched between trauma

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and phantasy. ‘The Real is not the exterior world, it is […] the anatomy, it is linked to the whole body.[…] Freud’s Id, this is the Real’ (Lacan 1976: 40). In Bion’s terms, the objet a is close to the area of the bizarre object, the alpha- and beta-elements. The objet a is not an alpha-element which already participates in phantasy and in dream thought as presence, but its ‘behind’, which is necessary for their creation. Yet, it is not a ‘behind’ in the sense of thing or beta-element any more, since the objet a is already ‘cut’ and shaped in accordance with the drives. Rather, it is an ­alpha-element that is not available for further elaboration. It is not a bizarre object since it is not a disintegrated psychotic element, yet, like it, it is divorced from consciousness and stays in the margins of the Unconscious. We can describe it as a no-thing. Not just any no-thing, but a specific no-thing, linked to the body’s orifices and to the drives attached to them. As a residue of the Real escaping any meaning-­ revelation supplied by the network of language, the objet a can correspond to an intermediary stage of organisation between the bizarre object that is a remnant and a result of a process of psychic fragmentation—but without psychotic disintegration—and the alpha-element. It is no more a thing (beta-element), neither is it disintegrated, and yet, the objet a is a trace of an inaccessible, unattainable or lost mental fragment, or a fragment of a trace. In Bollas’ terms, the objet a is an unthought known element. It eludes imagery and symbols but is still a psychic entity and, as such, it no longer belongs to the body. It is an existential ‘known’ and participates in the repetition within transference/counter-transference relations, ‘acting out’ and repetition-compulsion. Going back to Lacan’s own vocabulary, the basic human lack leans towards the fact that the subject desires the object (to have the ‘phallus’) which is on the side of the Other (be it the subject’s own ‘lost’ bodily part-object, the archaic mother; or the signifying chain); or else, the subject desires the desire of the Other—i.e. the subject desires to be what the other desires (to be the phallus)—whether the Other is a real one (like what I call the archaic mother), an imaginary one or a symbolic one. The baby, for example, would like to be the unique object of the ­mother’s desire; yet failure and frustration are built into such an expectation. The mother is not constantly available physically or mentally; her disappearance/failure continues to turn the wheels of human development. The

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lack of the objet a is based not only on its elusion from language but also on the lack that is inherent to the fact that the corporeal aspect of instincts and drives, and existing others/objects will never be a mental entity, will always ex-ist imaginary and symbolic meaning; there will always remain a discrepancy between mental representation and corporeal existence. The subject fails first to be and then to have the object. ‘There is nothing in the Unconscious which accords with the body.6 The Unconscious is discordant. The Unconscious is that which, by speaking, determines the subject as being’ (Lacan 1975d: 165). Since for the early Lacan the Unconscious is the sum of repressions depending on discourse, these repressions cannot fully correspond to the body. But, in Lacan’s later theory, the Unconscious so narrowly defined is not to be understood as the only non-conscious zone which determines subjectivity. The objet a that is slowly detached (in theory) from the split between signifiers and their signified, is another non-conscious zone; and both participate in the alterity which determines the subject. The dimension of loss is inherent to the recognition of the separation from the archaic relationships with the Other and the early split from the archaic part-object, as well as to the split inherent in the organisation by language. The objet a eludes conjointly all three dimensions of experience: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic; ‘that radical abstraction, the object I write with the figure of writing a, nothing of which is thinkable – except that everything that is thought of as a subject, the being one imagines as being, is determined by it.’ (Lacan 1975d: 165) The phantasy relates to the Real. ‘The real supports the phantasy, the phantasy protects the real’ (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 41). The Real as a missed encounter first presents itself at the origin of the analytic experience as ‘that which is unassimilable in it – in the form of the trauma’ (55). lf in the unconscious interval between perception and consciousness dwell together, according to Freud, the Id and the unconscious zones of the Ego and the Super-Ego, we can say in comparison that for Lacan, in that interval dwell together: the Real, stretching from trauma to phantasy; the objet a and the unconscious subject that alternates with the objet a and comes into existence partly by taking its place; and the Other. The Unconscious, defined as the sum of all the repressions, is only a part of this interval.

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Object a as a Lack in the Body, as Lacking an Image and as a Hole in Language In what sense does the abstraction which is the objet a stand for an aspect of the impulse or the drive in relation to the archaic body of the mother and of the subject, to the corporeal sampling and the part-object and is therefore derived from the Real? In what sense does the abstraction which is the objet a stand for an aspect of the drive in relation to the Other, and is therefore derived from the Symbolic? The unconscious part-object to which the drive relates, which is different at every stage, can be considered as ‘spare parts’ of the erogenous zones. The oral object (breast), the anal object (faeces), the genital object (penis only, since Freud and Lacan do not recognise the female genital organs as mental objects); but also the objects of gaze and voice explicitly added by Lacan7 which are clearly on the Other’s side: I am looked at, I am spoken to, even if it is my voice that I hear. The subject according to the later Lacan is a sujet parlé (spoken to) and not a sujet parlant (a speaking subject.) I add to this list of part-objects a matrixial perspective of the uterus, and also (with Bick and Anzieu:) the touch, which are not linked to a bodily orifice but to the borderlines between myself and others. The touch is ‘an experience of the frontier between two bodies in [post-natal] symbiosis as surface of inscription’ (Anzieu 1981: 72). The matrixial object of the touch which I do not situate in post-natal symbiosis8 but in pre-natal difference-in-proximity is a feminine object shared between I and unrecognised non-I; and it indicates a position which is both passive and active: I am both touching and being touched in the same event. If a matrixial object also indicates particular kinds of relations, then it should be pointed out that any object may be partly related to in ways that stem from an-other, matrixial object-relation. Thus, a genital object may be related to by oral modes, the gaze may be phallic; but also, a matrixial model can serve to analyse a different, non-phallic kind of gaze (Ettinger 1993d). The perception of—and relations to—part-objects are prior to the perception of the body as a whole unit, be it one’s own or that of the Other. The original part-objects either drop out from the body image of self and of others as visual complete ‘wholes’9 or become integrated within it, and other objects can serve as their substitutes. But the desire created in/by their loss does not find satisfaction in substitutes. Even

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though the drive is indifferent to the specific object—all sorts of foods can satisfy the oral drive for example, it does not necessarily need the primal object, the milk from the mother’s breast, in order to gain satisfaction—the subject continues to desire the lacking objet a—the lost aspect of the pre-Oedipal part-object and the disappearing m/Other related to it. This desire persists behind the ‘whole’ narcissistic desire towards the parents as ‘whole’ objects—that is, before the formation of narcissistic relations and sexual-Oedipal gender identifications. The part-objects either dissolve by way of integration (according to Object Relations theory) or, to use the Lacanian expression, are lost and metaphorically and metonymically exchanged, being objects of weaning and ‘castration’. According to Freud, for the normal man the ­pre-Oedipal territory melts away after the ‘Oedipus complex’ is extinguished or ‘smashed to pieces’ (Freud 1925: 257), while for the woman it does not entirely dissolve and remains an inaccessible ‘dark continent’. On the oral level, for example, after the subject is weaned from the mother’s breast, the breast becomes a metaphor for any oral object. But the original breast itself, as a real archaic part-object, becomes a ‘no-thing’ for the weaned subject. The objet a is an unretrieved ‘no-thing’, a fragment that is never fully replaced, that no substitute will ever compensate for the loss it stands for. Whatever cannot appear even in phantasy, but is hiding behind it as the phantasy’s support from the impulse’s side, is the objet a. In Lacan’s early theory, the objet a is a result of the split brought about by the action of discourse and the structure of language. In the later stages of Lacan’s theory, during his study of the structure of phantasy, dramatic changes in relation to the status of language take place and, up to a point, one can see in it a reversal of his former position concerning the contributors to the formation of the subject. Now, Lacan does not view the archaic traces of the fragmented body as created only in the schism concerning the entry to the area of the symbolic discourse as either a waste or a surplus from language and discourse, but also as autonomous from them. The objet a participates in the formation of the subject as autonomous and primordial, and in parallel to language. This hypothesis comes close to the general basic assumptions of the British Object Relations psychoanalytic school for whom this autonomy is expressed on the assumption of a primary ‘psychological organization generating the most primitive state of being […] attributing meaning to experience in which raw sensory data are ordered by means

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of forming pre-symbolic connections between sensory impressions’ (Ogden 1989: 48, 49). The theoretical inversion in Lacan’s position that becomes increasingly clear from 1964 onwards relates to the field of phenomenology of the time (Lacan 1973a [1964]: Chapter 5). For Merleau-Ponty, experience is the origin of the genesis of meaning (1964b), our openness to the world is inseparable from our hold on it. He is opposed to the search for meaning that ignores the pre-logical and pre-reflective context and that concentrates on signifiers and representations (38–9). Merleau-Ponty emphasises the experience as specific in terms of place and time (contrary to ‘idea’ and essence), and meaning that is created as a knot—nœud—in the tissue of simultaneity and continuity (113, [174]). Merleau-Ponty opposes the idea of the subjection of meaning entirely to language. If in Lacan’s early theory the differentiation between conscious and unconscious elements always emerges in the direction from the Symbolic to the Real; in the later theory, with its ‘devaluated’ symbolic Other, we find indications of bi-directionality between the Real and the Symbolic. The differentiation between conscious and unconscious elements can be described as emerging in the direction from the Real to the Symbolic or from the Symbolic to the Real. The alpha-function which operates on sense impressions related to emotional experience turns them into alpha-elements cohering to form the contact-barrier which ‘marks the point of contact and separation between conscious and unconscious elements and originates the distinction between them’ (Bion 1962: 17). Sensory-dominated experience that contributes to subjectivity is organised through the encounter of sensorial impressions along the pathways of instincts and impulses. But, in as much as the alpha-function of the mother participates in this process and carries the stamp of culture and language, those shape and in-form the objects of phantasy and of thought. One can point to a process leading from object to the formation of the subject, and not only—as previously held by Lacan—from the subject to the formation of the object as a surplus to its formative process. ‘From the viewpoint of desire, in this inverted point of view, […] the subject of phantasy is a coupure (split) by the objet a’ (Lacan 1961–2: 16 May 1962). While the Unconscious is created from repressions, from what was formulated by speech and then repressed, the Other is a ‘larger’ definition of the interior or exterior unthought-known which influences subjectivity. The Other contains the direct, autonomous emanations

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from the body, which can never entirely accord with any speech.10 The Other has two openings; ‘the petit a constitutes one of its entries. As for the other, what can be said about it? Is it the One of the Signifier? […] The idea is at least conceivable, since it did once enable me to couple the One with my petit a […] there would never be any conjunction, any coupling, of One and a’ (Lacan 1975d: 164). The lacking objet a of phantasy, according to Lacan, is both the object manqué of the drive and the cause of desire. Desire originates from that which is lost and is directed towards that which is absent. ‘By saying that a is that which causes desire, what I mean is that it is not its object. It is not its complement, either direct or indirect, but only that cause which […] is always a cause’ (1975d: 165). The lacking objet a always stays ‘behind’ the desire. The object as an absence and not as an existence is hinted at in an imaginary way in phantasy in which an impossible ‘meeting’, on the level of the part-object from which the subject had already separated, may take place. By means of the phantasy, the subject can come into contact with what had been ‘removed’ from him/herself during the process of inscribing the body within the framework of the Symbolic order by a subjectivising discourse. The primary Other—the mother—is real. The mother’s body is a concrete primordial resonance chamber, the support of primary mental inscriptions into which the infant presents its part-objects in a series of projective and introjective movements. In the early stage of oral-sadistic drives, for example, the self is a system of fragmented body-representations, and external reality is peopled with objects from which the infant expects sadistic treatment like that it inflicts onto them in its phantasies (Klein 1936). This constitutes one of the models of oral object-relations. The symbolic Other, the inheritor of the mother as a real Other, is the signifying chain from the field of language which creates and donates a symbolic meaning to the infant’s experience, liberating it from absolute dependence on the real Other, which I term: m/Other, from absolute dependence on the mother’s care and on her special relations towards the infant as a unique explanatory field of meaning for experience. For Lacan, the infant goes beyond absolute dependency on the m/Other through discourse, and is carried forward towards the ‘embrace’ of the social code and the symbolic system, towards the shaping of experience by means of language within the cultural field which is at our disposal. Experiences that are recorded by the use of a common language inside a common culture can be shared, transformed

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and communicated. In language, experience is recorded and stored for repeated use as a form (the signifier) in the symbolic network, and as a content or an image (the signified) in the imaginary network. Language also enables the repression of inscribed experience and its raising up to consciousness in a later period. In the developmental stage which allows for, and even brings about, the waning of the ‘fragmented body’ and the repression of part-objects, one can speak of the human subject as created, as well as represented, by linguistic signifiers. In Lacan’s words, the signifier represents the subject for another signifier. And the subject is the result of the passage from one signifier to another. That is, it is not the human being that adopts language but it is language that adopts the human being; language forms the framework inside which subjectivity is created. The network of signifiers is the human Other par excellence, it is the symbolic Other which replaces what I termed the archaic m/Other. The symbolic Other (the unconscious signifying chain of language) is a specific human creation; and it is through language that human beings donate symbolic meaning, not only an imaginary meaning—which is shared by animals—to their personal round on earth. The subject as a product of language means that the subject is created through encounters with the Other qua network of the signifier. In the early period of Lacan’s theory, language is the only source of the subject’s structure. In that sense, the existing aspect of the subject is never a being but a lack-to-be (or lack-to-being, manque-à-être). Nor does the subject know; the subject is, rather, unknowing, assuming knowledge as residing in the Other within the symbolic network. The subject is, therefore, both unknowing (knowledge is assumed to be in the Other) and a non-being (as the elusive Real evades it). The Other subjugates the subject to the signifier while splitting from it and cutting it. In this process of entry into language, in the division of words into signifiers (in the Symbolic) and signified (in the Imaginary), the part-objects slip away and the split fragments become inaccessible. This is a way of describing the meaning of symbolic castration which occurs in the Oedipus complex: some aspects of the bodily and the instinctual are severed from the systems of thoughts and images; the being on the bodily level (for example, impulses, sense perceptions and originary affects) is exactly what is missing in language. On the other hand, outside the chains of language, it is the Real which is actually the being; it ex-ists to the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Yet, even in the Real which is already missing in language,

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there is a lack in the form of separated, repressed and lost part-objects; for in the Real, which is the mental dimension closest to the body, the original part-objects can no longer be found after weaning which accompanies maturation. In the early period of Lacan’s theory, both the subject and objet a are described as springing from discourse; from the viewpoint of the Symbolic the subject is created in it by its split from its real existence, and this destiny creates the yearning for what was lost in this passage into culture. This split engenders desire. The objet a is created in the division into signifier and signified as what is dropped and has slipped out of this division. It is, therefore, a psychic being without representation in language and thus, like a beta-element, cannot be repressed or brought up into consciousness. The objet a is doubly missing in the subject: on the hand, it is derived from the bodily real plane, and on the other hand, it is constructed as that which flees from language. In any case, it belongs to the Other, whether the Other is real but unattainable like the feeding archaic m/ Other, or symbolic and therefore untouchable. In the later theory, the subject, when created, is directly split from bodily jouissance and from the m/Other. The objet a marks the locus of a basic human lack connected with these splits. But although the objet a is ‘outside’ the subject, it is necessary for its formation, it creates its uniqueness; this is an intimate outsider, an ‘extimate’ objet de rien. Relations with the lacking object as extimate—that is, as an outside within, which is not mastered by discourse—shape the subject (rather than being merely shaped by the subject) beyond image, beyond thought and beyond memory. ‘The subject is caused by an object, which can be noted only in writing, which is one step forward for theory’ (Lacan 1975d: 165). In Lacan’s later theory, then, the status of the subject originates directly from such an objet a, itself a direct offspring from the bodily stratum; it is a corporeal ‘sample’, and in the realm of the Real it is directly connected to jouissance rather than to desire. When only the reference to the Real is kept in relation to it, the objet a, as a surplus of jouissance, is the plus de jouir—that which is a ‘stranger to the question [of] the Law […] founded on the Oedipus complex’ (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 151) it treasures traces of untamed existence. The well-known Lacanian claim that ‘the Unconscious is s­tructured like a language’ has slid into the claim that ‘the Unconscious is

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structured by language’. Yet Lacan himself is responsible for this since he himself insists on the structuring function of the signifier. In later years, Lacan was to complain about the change in terms which arose, to his mind, from a misunderstanding that characterized not necessarily his ‘enemies’ but rather his own students: ‘If the Unconscious is structured like a language, I did not say: by – […] the audience I had then was not good, and the psychoanalysts were no better then the others […] language only indicates the structure…’ (Lacan 1973b: 45). The Unconscious is, therefore, structured like a language only in the realm of the symbolic Other, but this Other is not all. From the viewpoint of the Real, traces of the archaic separation—both from the fragmented body of oneself and from the part-objects which are connected to the m/Other (that were once undifferentiated from ‘my’ self and felt as belonging to ‘me’)—creates the singularity of the subject. In any case, both in the early and later theory, traces of the ­part-objects and of the fragmented body are split off and no longer available to the Imaginary or the Symbolic. From a certain level or stage on, as a result of the Oedipus complex, they cannot be re-found. While the Real slips out of consciousness in the Oedipal castration process, it is still a partner to each unconscious representation and one can see the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real as three separate dimensions of each and every psychic event which is available in principle to the subject. Contrary to that availability, the objet a is dropped or omitted, slipped or released from all those three planes. The Lacanian objet a is both a ‘hole’ in the Symbolic, it is that which has no imaginary representation or specular image, and that which is ‘a lack of a lack’ (the Real already being a lack, and the objet a being its own lack). Through the objet a, traces of archaic events are preserved in the non-conscious psyche with no access by distinct representation; and these influence the subject without words or images. The unknown Other as a mental zone is wider, according to the later Lacan, than the Unconscious which is composed of repressions connected to language. To my mind, Lacan’s ‘theory of phantasy’ is closer to Object Relations theory, and especially to Bion, than is usually assumed. When language becomes accessible in the Oedipal stage, the drive undergoes transformation to a symbolic desire. In his early theory, Lacan assumed that a similar modification also occurs in the object; that the part-object turns into a lacking or an absent objet a in the passage from the real other to the symbolic Other, under the supervision of language. However, in later

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theory, it is not only language that creates the transformation into an absence; this lack is also external to the symbolic processes: objet a has neither discourse nor image, not only because it was dropped out of language, but also because it emerges out of the Thing. The objet a is first formulated in relation to the field of that which was left out when the passage from drive to desire took place, as a remnant of this process, and, later, in relation to the field of jouissance and the Thing, as jouissance’s surplus.

Interface I have presented the non-conscious object-cause of desire and of phantasy and clarified the differences—and the relationships—between part-object and lost object (objet a) by comparing Lacan’s theory mainly with Bion’s thinking. In psychoanalysis there is a general claim that the gap between theories dealing with the subject who seeks ­drive-satisfaction, and Object Relations theories which deal with a subject who seeks relations with the object/Other, can rarely be bridged.11 In my view, these two tendencies can be approached by combining Lacan’s later theory of the phantasy with his earlier ideas on inter-subjective relations and the Other. It is my hypothesis that we have to add to this conjoint scope the concepts of Matrix and metramorphosis, so as to relativise the phallic paradigmatic psychoanalytic position in a way which allows for the conception of a matrixial-feminine subjectivising field of desire, a matrixial object/objet a and metramorphic borderlinks. The scopic drive and its objet a of the gaze are central to a contemporary considerations of modern and post-modern art (in Lyotard for example). I have tried to deflect, in my writing, the objet a from the only phallic to the also matrixial field, discussing the scope of the matrixial gaze and the difference between phallic object, loss and field of meaning (created by the Oedipal castration process from the angle of male sexuality) and matrixial object, almost-loss, link and process of m ­ eaning-creation (created by metramorphosis and viewed from a-non-phallic angle of feminine sexuality). The phallic objet a is a phenomenon in the psyche, beyond communication, which we cannot share. The feminine matrixial objet a is an object which resides in the same non-conscious area opened by the drive but is shareable, since it is the object of the subjectivity-as-encounter, created from the beginning (and also lost) as a shared object (like the touch) in the feminine/prenatal encounter.

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The Matrix is an unconscious space of simultaneous ­ co-emergence and co-fading of the I and the unrecognised non-I which is n ­either fused, nor rejected. It is based on feminine/prenatal inter-relations and exhibits a shared borderspace in which what I have called ­differentiation-in-co-emergence and distance-in-proximity are continuously rehoned and reorganised by metramorphosis (accompanied by matrixial affects) created by—and further creating—relations-without-­ relating on the borders of presence and absence, object and subject, me and the stranger. In the unconscious mind, the matrixial borderline dimension is linked to feminine desire; it coexists and alternates in terms of awareness with the phallic dimension. The sub-symbolic matrixial filter, torn from foreclosure by non-Oedipal sublimation, provides meaning to vague, blurred, slippery internal and external traces which are linked to non-Oedipal sexual difference. Passing through the matrixial filter, particular unconscious non-phallic states, processes and borderlinks concerning the ­co-emerging I and non-I become meaningful. The Matrix is not the opposite of the Phallus; it is, rather, a supplementary perspective. It grants a different meaning; it draws an-other field of desire. The intra-uterine feminine/prenatal encounter represents and can serve as a model for the matrixial stratum of subjectivisation in which partial subjects, composed of co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s), simultaneously inhabit a shared borderspace, discerning one another yet in mutual ignorance, and sharing their im-pure, hybrid objet a. Metramorphosis is an ancient and blurred but indelible conductible link-lane; an in-between link. Indefinite compositions of experience are exchanged; phantasies and affects are conducted through the slippery borderlinks—transforming the co-emerging I and non-I, their borderspace and their shared object beyond distinct representation, creating and redistributing an ontogenetic becoming interpersonal memory. I suggest that we use these concepts to revise the creative process and re-view art as a metramorphosis. The matrixial prism transgresses and precedes the phallic/Oedipal notion of subjectivity, and of femininity and masculinity—of gender identifications. Metramorphosis transgresses the phallic processes of transformation and exchange, and of meaning donation and revelation. With these concepts we might unravel an-other, a beside non-conscious dimension and thereby enlarge our understanding of the creative process as well as the difference of woman’s sexuality.

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I have elsewhere explained (Ettinger 1993d) why for Lacan, in relation to Freud’s Uncanny and to aesthetic experience, the unconscious lacking object of desire is phallic, even though in relation to the structure of phantasy Lacan emphasises (although rarely) not only the presence or the absence of the objet a, but also the conjunction of the two in the coupure in which the subject comes to dwell. A critical analysis of the position that the lost objet a is related to the separation from the b ­ odily organ solely by the psychological process of Oedipal ‘castration’ was already presented by me elsewhere (Ettinger 1993d, 2006) and in earlier chapters in this volume) and I extrapolated from the Uncanny a different cluster: a womb/intra-uterine complex which I term matrixial phantasy. On the crossroads of the phallic objet a (Lacan) of the gaze, the originary figure-matrice (Lyotard), the pre-Oedipal transformational object (Bollas) that suggests a ‘religious’ aesthetic attitude, and the objeu (based on Winnicott’s transitional object) that brings about meaning-creation as repetition and as an in/out, presence/absence pulsational and phantasmatic scansion (Fédida), I have elaborated, alongside what I see as a beyond-the-phallus axis hinted at by all these writers, the hypothesis that the matrixial object/objet a adds to these (on/off, in/out, presence/ absence) creative events the creative event of the transgressions and the becoming threshold of borderlines, the conductibility of borderlinks and the shareability of traumas and phantasy (Ettinger 1993d). Fédida develops the presence/absence conjuncture in relation to an external-internal space of play (Winnicott) before the symbolic and paternal era, and therefore of non-phallic, pre-Oedipal alternations of appearance/disappearance. The transitional object is between thing and object ‘between the thumb and the teddy bear (Winnicott) or even between the “subjectile” and the projection – that is to consider the transition as the essential of an object’ (Fédida 1978: 130 emphasis added). The objeu, in which we can see the object of playing as absence, like Lacan’s objet a, constitutes a locus of lack, and ‘the production of meaning (as in the Heideggerian concept of herstellen, meaning to discover and construct) is engaged by the creation of absence’ (134). Through playing, moments of meaning linked to the passage of time, emerge in the child who repeats in playing the mother-baby moments of contact and separation. The matrixial object, shared between the mother-to-be and its ‘post-mature’ infant in the womb towards the end of pregnancy, is creative of the meaning of the borderline between I (subject-to-be) and uncognised non-I, of the conductive borderlinks in a joint, matrixial

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stratum of subjectivisation and of shareability. It is to my mind the prototype of the transitional object and of the objeu, yet where not only the rhythm of the interval between presence and absence is directly connected with the emergence of meaning (Ettinger 1993d) but also the borderline shareability and conductibility. The feminine/prenatal encounter constitutes the matrixial objet a as a shared thing on the margins of meaning in a hybrid subjectivity, shared between I and non-I. The matrixial space is discovered in post-natal experience by a variety of relational and aesthetic phenomena, and its object/objet a is an aspect of the transformational object, the transitional object, the objeu; it takes part in the experience of ‘jointness’ (Solan 1992). If in the ­figure-matrice and the objeu meaning is created by an on/off beat or pulsation and an in/out scansion, where the play of fort/da can be understood as the discovery of meaning as the conjuncture of presence in absence, in the feminine/pre-natal relations in the womb, in as much as they participate in the après-coup creation of meaning through the matrixial stratum of subjectivisation, we cannot speak of alternations between appearance/ disappearance but, rather, of continual attunings, transformations, transmissions, exchanges and readjustments of distance-in-proximity within relations-without-relating. I suggest that the matrixial stratum of subjectivisation and its primary meaning of differentiation in co-emergence coincides with a primary phallic stratum of symbiotic fusion and autistic isolation. And I join to the hypothetic emerging-self (Stern 1985) the co-emerging I and non-I.

Borderline Apparitions of the Woman as Objet a in Art Beyond the connections established by Lacan between the objet a, Woman and Beauty, we can point to a connection—by way of their elusion from representability—between the phallic and matrixial lacking objects and the concept of the Sublime. In Freud’s theory, we may differentiate between two aspects of sublimation, which should be treated separately. One aspect, usually thought to be its major meaning, emphasises social-cultural adaptation and satisfaction and neurotic outlet. It would appear to relate, therefore, to the Kantian concept of Beauty, with its links to universal consensus. Another aspect is the object-idealisation linked to drives, that can be related to the concept of the Sublime, where

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no imaginary representation can correspond to ideas, and visible presentation in art can only hint at the un/pre-representable. I have pointed out elsewhere (Chapter 3) that Woman occupies several paradoxical positions in Lacan’s theory. She is the Thing and she is also a hole in the Real, an objet a. She is the Other (‘The Other, in my terminology, can thus only be the Other sex’ (Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 40)), but when by Other Lacan means ‘a treasure of signifiers’ She is also a hole in the Other; therefore ‘Woman does not exist and does not signify anything’ (69, emphasis added). Furthermore, these positions cannot reach one another and She, as subject, cannot reach either of them since Woman is repressed and foreclosed, for women as much as for men. Is Woman asks Lacan, ‘the Other, locus of desire which, intact, impassable, slips under words; or is she the Thing (das Ding), the locus of jouissance?’ (2006 [1968–9]: 226). Woman is, ‘if you read Deleuze’, this ‘blank’ empty space, this ‘lack in the chain of the signifier, along with its resultant wandering objects in the chain of the signified’ (227). The elusive Woman is the ‘wandering object’ par excellence. Since the Other is precisely a land emptied of the ‘intolerable immanence of jouissance’ (225), all of these positions cannot meet in a woman as subject. When Woman is equated with the Thing, she is like the maternal archaic body, fragmented by the unconscious drive attached to it; jouissance excludes her from the Symbolic. Unconscious desire, that trace of the drive in the Symbolic, persists, and its residue reappears even though the original objects which were attached to it disappear and leave behind them a reminiscence in the figure of the objet a. Thus, objet a is a lack in the realm of the Real which is also a lack in the imaginary axis and in the symbolic Other. Woman is equated with this lacking objet a, whose relations to the real body (in terms of impulse, jouissance, Thing) are increasingly emphasised by the later Lacan. But, alternatively, She is equated with radical symbolic Otherness. Thus, She is remote and inaccessible and dwells in the holes of the signifying chain of discourse. It should be emphasised that in my view both the symbolic Other and the objet a are caught in a male prism which negotiates the feminine from the angle of the phallus. ‘The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack, that is to say, of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking’ (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 103). In this conception, libidinal formative stages are organised retroactively around the fear of castration which is like a thread weaving through every stage

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of development. It orients anterior relations to conform to its current appearance.12 I suggest that we view Oedipal castration as tracing the dividing line between the two sexes for both men and women from a masculine perspective, whereas we can view the matrixial passage to the Symbolic as preceding it and/or transcending it and dwelling aside, introducing a different beside feminine perspective of non-Oedipal sublimation. It seems to me important to note, in our context, a passage in Freud’s writings from masculine/feminine to maleness/femaleness. For Freud, in 1905, ‘the sexuality of little girls is of a wholly masculine character […] libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature’ (117). To that Freud adds (in 1915 and as a footnote) that only the ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’ meanings are ‘essential’ to him as meanings of masculine and feminine, while the sociological and biological are secondary meanings. In 1923 he writes: At the stage of the pregenital sadistic-anal organization, there is as yet no question of male and female; the antithesis between active and passive is the dominant one.[13] At the following stage of infantile genital organization, which we now know about, maleness exists, but not femaleness. The antithesis here is between having a male genital and being castrated. It is not until development has reached its completion at puberty that the sexual polarity coincides with male and female. Maleness combines subject, activity and possession of the penis; femaleness takes over object and passivity. (Freud 1923b: 145)

We may conclude that the libido’s status gradually moves from being considered masculine into being male; it is based on the phallic/castration model which polarises those who possess and those who do not posses it into subjects and objects. In a 1924 footnote, Freud says: This phase, which already deserves to be described as genital, presents a sexual object and some degree of convergence of the sexual impulses upon that object; but it is differentiated from the final organization of sexual maturity in one essential respect. For it knows only one kind of genital: the male one. For that reason, I have named it the ‘phallic’ stage of organization. (1905: 199 n.2, emphasis added)

In 1923, Freud also says: ‘for both sexes, only one genital, namely the male one, comes into account. What is present, therefore, is not a

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primacy of the genitals, but a primacy of the phallus’ (142). Despite this statement, Freud continues: ‘Unfortunately we can describe this state of things only as it affects the male child; the corresponding processes in the little girl are not known to us’ (142). In 1931, the libido is still single but not masculine any more: ‘psychoanalysis teaches us to manage with a single libido, which, it is true, has both active and passive aims’ (1931: 240). In the passage from the masculine to the male, Freud adds, then, to the side of maleness linked to male bodily specificity (possession of a penis) a subject position: male is masculine plus penis plus ­subject-position. In the passage from the feminine to the female, Freud adds to the side of femaleness the object position: female is feminine plus object’s position, minus a male genital (that is, she is castrated). Thus Lacan’s famous statement ‘la femme n’existe pas’ echoes Freud’s remark on the existence of maleness while femaleness does not exist. For Lyotard, ‘The truth of sex does not reside in the remark often made by Freud that there is really only one sexuality, which is masculine’ (1971: 141). Towards the 1970s, Lacan moves away from the understanding of the woman in predominantly phallic terms. Not only are the sexes not complementary in the Unconscious—neither symmetrical nor ‘the same’ with regard to the Phallus—but also, a special network of relations links the feminine with jouissance and with its remnants in terms of ‘plus de jouir’ which we may see as objet a deduced from the prism of the Real. Lacan does not speak of the feminine dimension ­beyond-the-phallus in positive terms since everything expressed by discourse becomes, by virtue of this act, phallic. The objet a, presented early on as an imaginary loss, is a logical consistency, it is a not in the Symbolic. In an analogous way, Woman is not. Woman is ‘not-All’; Woman ‘does not exist’; Woman ‘does not signify anything’; and ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relationships’ (il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel). ‘So, on what level is the sexual relations situated?’ asks Lacan in 1969 (2006 [1968–9]: 226). He claims that we do not know anything about sex and that it would be better to be careful before making any declarations about sexual relationships; that sexual relationships ‘have nothing to do with what they are exclusively substituted for in psychoanalysis, namely, the phenomenon of identification with a category called either male or female’ (222). In other words, sexual relationships have nothing to do with gender identifications.

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In his late teaching Lacan hints, on rare occasions, at the possibility of replacing the model of opposition between Man and Woman with a more ‘microscopic’ even ‘cellular’ view that will include the i­ntra-uterine (and even fertilisation). Lacan suggests that it is necessary to look for images involving sex that are not limited to ‘two people sleeping together’ (223). A choice of images from the cellular level would indicate, he says, that this may be a function whose essence still eludes psychoanalysis. Lacan has doubts as to how useful images from such a fundamental level can be (which are instead more suitable for scientific research). Perhaps, one of the reasons why Lacan did not develop this line of thought is that it immediately led him to mysticism and to traditional phallic notions relying on unsatisfactory terms like ‘two poles, something organised like a spherically-ordered web between two poles’, or into terms inspired by electromagnetics like a web spun from the forces of ‘domination’, ‘influence’ or ‘repulsion’ (223). In 1969, Lacan concludes that since Freudian logic shows us that sexual difference ‘cannot function in polar terms’, only one term is ‘the original term’ to speak of ‘the logic of sex’: the lack named castration (224). But in 1971–2 he criticises this position when advancing the function of the ‘Not All’ (Lacan 2011 [1971–2]). Some ten years before, in 1962, Lacan said: ‘If anything allows us to conceive of a carrier of a totality, of some primary narcissism, it is the subject’s reference to the maternal body not as parasited but to its lost envelopes; where the interior and the exterior are linked’, but, then, these are relations of ‘incorporation’ which risk being clarified ‘from the father’s side’ and not from the mother (1961–2: 27 June 1962). Lacan indicates that psychoanalysis may investigate this internal-external envelope, even if this investigation leads us, ‘as always’, to ‘give up the maternal for the paternal’. Speaking of ‘a hole which makes the interior communicate with the exterior’, Lacan comments: ‘Some have said to me, this imagery of yours, doesn’t it refer to embryology? – Believe me, they are never too far from that’ (23 May 1962). What I consider to be a first glimpse of a matrixial borderline— though, for me, not as a lost, but (from the woman’s perspective) as an almost-lost enveloping sphere which can be read as a continuity between the interior and the exterior in terms of the shared borderspace between the subject-to-be (at the end of pregnancy) and the maternal uterus (feminine invisible sexual specificity)—could not yet be elaborated in

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terms of a feminine-beyond-the-phallus. However, in the recent light of J. A. Miller’s (1985–6) elaborations of the Lacanian use of ‘inclusion’ to mean extimate relations, and in the light of Lacan’s late shift of emphasis from the field of desire, the Symbolic and the Imaginary to the field of the jouissance and the Real, we may now interpret the idea of inclusion by incorporation in a matrixial perspective, and propose that the extimate feminine/prenatal matrixial borderspace between the I and the non-I makes phantasmatic sense before/without symbolic signification. In his late theory (1975–6), with the concept of sinthome, Lacan positively states that there exists more than one possible sexual reference for the two sexes. Woman is a sinthome for man, says Lacan, and he modifies his famous declaration that ‘there is no such thing as a sexual relation’.14 In the structure of the sinthôme, there is no sexual equivalence between the sexes and therefore there can be sexual relationships. This follows because the non-relation is the result of equivalence. From what I call the matrixial perspective there are—from the phallic perspective there are no—sexual relations: at the level of sexual equivalence between the sexes, which is phallic, sexual difference disappears and sexual relations are not possible; whereas at the level of non-equivalence, which is matrixial, sexual difference reappears and sexual relations are possible. Thus, when a primary principle of co-self-attuning and transformation in co-emergence is added, a shift inside the Symbolic occurs, to account for an-other Woman, an-other jouissance and an-other desire. Only if there is a supplementary non-phallic zone can a feminine difference appear, a difference which makes sexual relationships possible. The sinthôme, as Lacan explains, is ‘the sex to which I do not belong, that is, Woman’. He suggests that in the future we might find a different name, a woman’s perspective, a term that would correspond to the idea that Man is an absolute Other for women in a similar way to that Woman is an absolute Other for men. As for me, with the idea of metramorphosis, the Otherness of Woman (Lacan’s, Levinas’) turns into Woman as other kinds of relationships, so that the shift from the masculine to the feminine perspective is not a symmetrical opposition. I have elsewhere suggested that the supplementary non-phallic zone in which a feminine difference appears makes sense in terms of the sub-symbolic sphere, where the Other cannot be considered as the place of the signifier only (compare Miller 1985–6). From a phallic perspective, the objet a corresponds to the feminine on several levels. It corresponds to the lost primordial, symbiotic maternal

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object, to the lost archaic mother and autistic/symbiotic self, to ­feminine bodily sexual specificity as absence, to the lost primordial incestuous mother, and to the unattainable, fragmented body—all foreclosed or replaced in the process of subjectivisation. Both Woman and the objet a lack a signifier, both constitute ‘a hole’ in the Symbolic—where they are metaphorically replaced—and a hole in the Real—where they are metonymically replaced. Thus, if Woman is a phallic objet a, the subject is constituted at the price of Woman. She cannot participate in subjectivity. As a subject, She is determined by the Phallus and by castration; or else, as a subject, She does not exist and does not signify anything. Both man and woman can only be in touch with the feminine as a phallic object of exchange. It is the very possibility of being both feminine subject and object at the same time that the perspective of matrixial and metramorphic ­borderlink brings about. From the viewpoint of the structure of phantasy, the objet a determines subjectivity. In the Imaginary, that element which is severed from the subject is a figure of loss; it is a reminiscence of that aspect of the signified that cannot appear in representation. It cannot become a ­visible object or receive specular recognition. In the invisible screen of phantasy, the objet a is a non-specular object situated at the borderline of the subject’s mirror images which are created by the Other. Under certain conditions related to the structure of phantasy, the fragmented, non-symbolised archaic ‘derivations’ of the body in their alliance with unconscious desire, have a borderline visibility. For Lacan, these borderline apparitions of what I call the Woman-Other-Thing, these revelations of the lacking object behind the image, even as most horrible apparitions, will always maintain a reflection of beauty. The lacking object incarnates, as Woman, that which is the Beauty in art even if its images are those of horror and death. Conceiving of a work of art as an incarnation of Woman as an absent objet a is clearly different from the idea of the incarnation of Woman as a present, passive commercial object given for the viewer, conceived within the prism of gender identification, since art is not a product of the Imaginary or the Symbolic; rather, it creates representations that filter into these domains and transform them. I would suggest that the incarnation of the Woman not only as a phallic objet a but also as a matrixial objet a is the effect of sublimation, if some aspects of sublimation can be understood as inscriptions of the non-Oedipal in the sub-symbolic sphere

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(Ettinger 1993d). In other words, if the specular image ‘includes’ residues that are normally invisible but which may become visible creating beauty in the work of art, residues that are structured by, or inscribed within the matrixial stratum of subjectivity may be incarnated into apparitions and exchanged by a matrixial gaze. They have a borderline apparition which attracts the viewer only as shared transmissions and transformations; they hint at the sublime and they cannot be in the possession of the subject as One. The incarnation in art of the phallic lost objet a as well as of the matrixial almost-lost objet a produces the anxiety of the Uncanny in its multiple variations. Likewise, the proximity of the phallic objet a and of the extimate borderline may, in reality and in the Imaginary, produce an anxiety that alerts the subject to the dangers of castration or to the danger of, but also the longing for, the encounter with the regressive feminine ‘dark continent’. ‘We sublimate, we say, with the impulses. On the other hand, what do we know? Where do the impulses come from? From the horizon of sexuality’ (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 229).15 Sexuality is linked to art, and therefore the question of sexual difference is linked to it as well. If feminine difference as the objet a does not make its apparition via sublimation in art in terms of the woman as beauty within a work, then, according to the phallic paradigm, feminine difference can only appear at the cost of the disintegration of the subject, at the cost of a psychotic blurring of the borders which separate object and subject (hallucination or the anxiety of becoming a woman). When the objet a does not present the danger of arising in an unexpected, regressive, savage manner in the imaginary field—or, alternatively, when it does not appear as beauty in the work of art—the phallic objet a remains the lack behind the image, the hole, the emptiness, the absence, the blind spot onto which images are engraved and traces are inscribed. Going to the second dimension of sublimation I have evoked, as well as to the differentiated meaning of the Uncanny, the matrixial perspective allows us to add the dis-appearance/appearance of the lacking objet a, the shareable objet a and the conductible borderlinks as indications of the sublime in the work of art. In order to articulate both the difficulty of speaking of sexual difference (a difference which we may qualify as feminine, meaning a difference outside of the castration normativity) and of the sublimation as an idealisation of the object operating together with the impulse, Lacan presents the Thing (das Ding) as a vacuole (like a conch, like the space in the inner ear without which sounds cannot be produced). The vacuole is

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a real empty space, an invisible vacuity outside the signified. The objet a, which escapes the destiny of the Real (to be ‘covered’ by the Imaginary and the Symbolic and created as their reject) resists and reappears both as a residue in several metonymic forms (oral, anal, gaze, voice, and also, in my view, as kinaesthetic movement, touch) and as no-thing; it is, to use Miller’s expression, ‘an apparition of nothing’. As ‘no-thing’ it encounters the Thing, and this encounter leads to jouissance. In the vacuole, the zone of jouissance—defined as all that is derived from the distribution of pleasure in the body—is ‘precisely a limit of a threshold’; it implies ‘the centrality of a forbidden centrality’, a forbidden zone of intense pleasure where the Law is circumvented, a zone of ‘the intolerable imminence of jouissance’. There, the Other, which is ‘a territory clear from jouissance’ cannot impose its organising system through language. Contrary to the zone of the vacuole, the subject is located in a different field which can be described as the other side of the encounter between the Thing and the lacking object; the subject is connected to the locus of the Other as emptied of jouissance. We can conceive, of a web composed of jouissance, the archaic m/Other, the impulse, the Thing and the vacuole, while the subject, desire, and the symbolic Other (l’Autre) linger on the other side of human experience. If the feminine is linked to the first web, the object here is not objective. On the contrary, it carries instead the particularity and the singularity of each becoming-subject. Sublimation, says Lacan, is related to jouissance through the ‘anatomy’ of the vacuole. The objet a is what ‘tickles the Thing from within’, and this is 'the essential quality of everything we call art’. And it is also ‘the incarnation of Woman as beauty’. Adding the matrixial angle to this incarnation, the realm of beauty moves aside to create a space for the sublime to float forward and beside. Like the objet a, the vacuole is ‘extimate’—an intimate exterior. The extimate is thought of by Lacan as that which is most intimate for us but which is not given to recognition unless it is outside. It is a central zone which is exterior. ‘[T]he conjugation of inherence and exteriority’; ‘the most interior […] in the analytic experience […] has a character of exteriority’ (Miller 1985–6: 29 January 1986). Woman is related to the work of art in an analogous way within the topology of the relations between the Thing, jouissance and the objet a. Lacan comments on ‘all the enigmas that appear, and we know not why […] when we study feminine sexuality; the enigma of what vaginal sensitivity represents’. In the enigmatic sense, women’s jouissance is

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‘limitrophe’ (2006 [1968–9]: 230). But ‘the Thing is not sexed (or sexuated: sexuée)’, a fact which, Lacan adds, enables a man to make love to a woman without having the slightest idea of what she is as sexed (sexuated) being. In as much as the Thing is not sexed (sexuated), it seems to me that the feminine difference that Lacan hints at here is not sexed (sexuated): it is beyond the Oedipal line of demarcation between the sexes and it may also correspond, on the level of the Real—beyond ‘the enigma of vaginal sensitivity’—to the uterus. I suggest that the feminine relates to the enigma of the particular matrixial relations between singular compositions of I and non-I, and the(ir) shared Thing, experienced by both male and female infants with-in the woman/the potential mother-to-be. There is a feminine extimate (exterior/interior) difference that is perceived from the with-in-side. This difference is ignored by the Phallus (it is its non-sense) and revealed by the Matrix. The idea of the Matrix thus slightly shifts Lacan’s late perspective on subjectivity. I would suggest that the extimate matrixial objet a can also induce traces recognisable from within, and the (matrixial-) Thing and the Other (-Woman) thus create and shape the transforming margins of the symbolic Other on the level of the sub-symbolic web shared by the I with the Other and with others. In the phallic stratum, ‘sublimation keeps Woman in a love relationship at the price of her constitution at the level of the Thing’ (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 230–1). But in a matrixial stratum, the passageway back and forth between exterior and interior, between the Thing and the Other, is open; the matrixial aspect of subjectivity—situated at the borderlines—is a prisoner of neither of those; femaleness is not only object, or rather, if ‘femaleness takes over object’ as Freud said, it now takes over a subjectivising matrixial objet a. In this respect, the Woman is both subject and Other on the borderline of the Thing. The feminine non-equivalence marks the emergence of relations-without-relating (rapports sans rapporter) between the sexes, while Woman may also ‘incarnate’ in the artwork as metramorphosis. The Matrix is not about women, but about a non-Oedipal feminine dimension of plurality and difference of the several in joint subjectivity (see Chapter 1, this volume). The matrixial prism can alternate, in men and women, with the phallic prism of being either subject or Other, either aware of the links with the extimate non-I or ignorant of them, either fused-with the Thing or being sometimes connected and sometimes disconnected from it, to the extent that matrixial and phallic

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perspectives participate side by side both in the Real, in the Imaginary and in the Symbolic, as well as in what escapes these three dimensions: their remains, residues, déchets, and objet a. A matrixial stratum of subjectivization allows for a network of relations-without-relating leading to an awareness-becoming-recognition of a continual in-between; ­in-between presence and absence, while the phallic stratum of subjectivisation allows for distinct alternations between subject and Other, relations and non-relations, presence and absence. Several partial subjects are parts of the same stratum, sharing and shared by the same borderlinks. Traces belonging to the co-emerging I and non-I—recorded in joint borderspace—can be redistributed after their initial distribution. In addition, passages are made between the matrixial stratum and the phallic stratum of the same subject. We are at the same time both one and several, on different trajectories. With the concept of the Matrix the loss of the archaic psychic fragments is not ignored, and nor are ignored the loss concerning drives or impulses and the lack concerning any desire related to them. But, the matrixial lack—from trauma to phantasy—has a borderline sharing. Loss opens the space of desire; loss makes room for inscriptions in the Symbolic. The emergence of the symbolic phallic I entails loss— that of the object—and so does the co-emergence of the sub-symbolic matrixial I and non-I: it entails a non-castrative loss of particular ­relations-without-relating and of their relational joint objects. However, matrixial loss is not implemented by the mechanism of castration. Metramorphosis relates to the circulation of lacks in a way which is different from the metaphors or metonymies in the phallic system. Metramorphosis allows for what is lost for one partial subject to be inscribed as traces in another partial subject. It is a conductive betweenlink that allows for an after-passage of these traces back and forth between non-I and I. Borderline traces of re-tunings within the enlarged and shared stratum of subjectivization create a different transmissibility.16 The lost matrixial objet a is therefore not completely lost for all the partial subjects and is not lost alone, and something of the sublime can have a borderline sharing via art. Contrary to Anzieu’s (1981) suggestion that the first ­pre-representations of a corporeal envelope stem from post-natal maternal care and holding and refer to presence of part-objects in symbiotic relations, matrixial pre-representations and sub-symbols are modelled upon joint late pre-natal/feminine experiences in a shared stratum of

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subjectivity. A partial subject (an I or a non-I) can preserve what the internal/external unknown other has lost. We may speak of a borderline contact with the loss that another has experienced, a borderline sharing of/with the other’s trauma and phantasy. From the matrixial network, an I may disappear in a traumatic or subtle way, in what I have called retirance (withdrawal inside, contracting) as in the Kabbalistic principle of creation tzimtzoum [Hebrew]. Contraction and gradual disappearance create a void in which other others will appear. Retirance is a possible metramorphosis; through it, time enters subjectivizing instances where elements are partly created and partly abandoned within being-together. In contrast to this, ‘total’ introjection or incorporation of the non-I in the Matrix, no less than a ‘total’ rejection towards the outside, wounds the matrix, or forces a retreat beyond the scope of shareability. Matrixial objects a are relational, hybridised and shared, and their partial subjects are involved in unconscious relating and transmitting. That which is created or lost for one creates transformations within the other in such a manner that with each separation or retirance, subtractions and transformations take place. The differences between the relations one retains and those one has lost, between the subject and the object, between the Other and the Thing, become creative thresholds, on the edges of the matrixial borderspace. In the Matrix a stranger sprouts, necessary to subjectivity and creativity; a stranger without whom the human matrixial stratum of subjectivization cannot be created or creative; a stranger without whom I will not co-emerge. If I attack, if I expel or swallow the stranger, it is me who will be reduced; it is I who will be impoverished in our unconscious matrixial borderspace; it is I who will freeze the becoming-threshold of borderlines, block the links conductibility, and turn them into fixed frontiers.

Notes



1 This matter is usually ignored by writers who defend Lacan’s position that the Unconscious is structured like a language as was presented in the context of the earlier theory. J. A. Miller emphasises the inversion of Lacan’s later theory in relation to earlier work (Miller 1985–6). 2 By contrast, distinct mental representations are ulterior, they penetrate the Oedipal stage and are coped with by the symbolic network through secondary repression. In Bion’s terms, these have become alpha-elements,

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treated by the alpha-function that enables them to be stored in the Unconscious and to reappear in the dream-thought. 3 In the theoretical deflection of the objet a which I propose, so that it moves from a phallic position only to become a matrixial object as well, this psychic activity is best described as taking place on a sub-symbolic and not pre-symbolic level, touching on relational organisations and links, which interweave within the higher symbolic level and are not just prior to it in time (see Ettinger 1993d). 4 As we advance from Freud (1916–1917) via Klein (1936) to Winnicott (1951, 1965, 1971), Bion (1962, 1963, 1970) and more recent theoretical developments (Aulagnier 1975; Ogden 1989; Tustin 1990; Bollas 1987; Stern 1985), the weight shifts from the intrapsychic and instinctual to the intersubjective, and from drives to affects: phantasy and reality are increasingly dealt with in terms of subjective experiences within an interpersonal, relational context related to affects rather than in terms of drives pushing for satisfaction. 5 We can think for example of this child, desperately envious of his baby brother who passionately suckles at his mother’s breasts. His envy is without remedy, he is hopelessly envious and jealous, because those oral relations between his brother and his mother, that he so much envies, which are expressed in the breast-feeding, cannot satisfy him any more. Even if his mother breast-feeds him again, even if he sucks the breast, his present mental stage already differs from the stage in which breast-feeding was everything for him. Because he is already weaned, because the breast is already nothing for him—the primary envy of an archaic part-object within an archaic object-relatedness is a dead-end. The primary oral part-object in this example is a lacking object, it is already lost forever. And so are these particular kind of relations (oral) with the archaic Other—the mother. In the scopic field (of sight) to which I will later relate, the subject’s phantasy leans on the objet a of the gaze, just as in the oral field, the phantasy of the subject is related to an oral object. 6 Unconscious with a capital letter is my choice of translation; it is written with a small letter in the orginal text. 7  Further to the gaze and the voice, Lacan adds the nothing—le rien (1966f [1960]: 693). 8  This is not situated in symbiosis but in difference-in-proximity (see Chapter 5, this volume). 9 As indicated by Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’. 10 An event that had never been formulated by speech and repressed is still treated by the psyche, by the mechanism of ‘foreclosure’, for example, or by the alpha-function.

240  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS 11 Although Otto Kerenberg’s psychoanalytic writing can be viewed, in this respect, as an attempt to bridge the two. 12 Weaning, toilet training, etc. 13 This can be read as ‘masculine/active’ and ‘feminine/passive’. 14 By ‘rapport sexuel’ Lacan means a symbolic way to account for the contact with the jouissance of the other. ‘No sexual relationships’ means that there is no contact in the symbolic Other: the Real of her jouissance is unaccountable, there is no way (if necessary) to report on such contact. Lacan’s enigma of this ‘no relatioship’ with the other is linked, to my mind, to Levinas’ considerations with regard to the paradox of a relation without relation with the absolutely Other in Judaism (‘l’absolumment Autre’, l’Autrui). This question follows from a basic position in Jewish theology concerning the absolute impossibility of knowing anything about God: His absolute alterity and transcendence. The question is posed by Levinas: ‘how can the same […] enter into relationships with an other without immediately divesting it of its alterity? What is the nature of this relationship?’ (E. Levinas [1961], Totality and Infinity, tr. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 15 By sublimation and sublimating, Lacan comments in 1969 that he intends only the artwork. 16 We may think of conductibility, shareability and transmissibility as manifested in psychoanalysis, for example, in traces of passages of unconscious materials from earlier generations to present generations.

CHAPTER 5

MATRIXIAL GAZE AND SCREEN: Other than Phallic and Beyond the Late Lacan ([1995] 1999)

A short version of this chapter was presented in Hebrew under the title ‘Matrixial Gaze and Screen’ at the international conference that accompanied her solo show at the Israel Museum: ‘Events – Traces – Painting,’ Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, 25 May 1995, and printed in Studio 99 (1998). This essay was printed in PS 2(1), 1999 and republished in Laura Doyle, ed., Bodies of Resistance (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 103–43.

EDITOR’S PREFACE In this paper, Bracha L. Ettinger felt solicited and challenged to respond to Lacan’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas concerning painting and the gaze both as painter and as philosopher. The concept of the gaze [le regard] has played a major role in feminist theories of cinema, art and the image. In its popularization as ‘the male gaze’, the gaze is attributed to a subject who looks and an object that is looked at and objectified. Feminist film theory

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took up the concept of the gaze not to localize it as ‘of men’ but to identify a structural masculinization of the psychic spectatorial positioning in the cinematic apparatus in relation to the investment in seeing and being seen deriving from Freud’s theories of sexuality and narcissism/identification. For Freud the eye is an ‘erogenous’ organ. There is a drive associated with looking: the scopic. For Ettinger, in the matrixial sphere, the eye is not erogenous to begin with, but is ‘eroticized’. Her model bypasses the orifice organs/objects and relates to affective linking. The erogeneity of seeing and being seen (mastery by sight and exhibitionism) can become arrested in the perversions: sadism and voyeurism. In the realm of sexual curiosity, seeing and not-seeing is inflected by castration anxiety and is deflected by fetishism. Lacan rearticulated the theoretical debate around Freud’s drive-based scopophilia, voyeurism, mastery and fetishism by proposing the object of the scopic field of vision as the gaze which is a lack, an objet a: a trace in the psyche of a gaze that has been lost, in which gaze is associated with a severance, and from the eye. Ettinger suggests that this cut and the way Lacan structures the gaze indicates to us at the same time that the object hiding behind/before it must have been symbiotic, belonging to the maternal other as undifferentiated primordial unity. Lacan drew on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to facilitate an approach to the reflexive sense of a seeing being seeing and being seen. In the early 1990s, Bracha L. Ettinger entered this arena with a book length study defining The Matrixial Gaze, (Ettinger 1993d) which was published in 1995 and was reprinted in 2006 in The Matrixial Borderspace (Ettinger 2006). There, Ettinger disentangled the ‘post-Oedipal ‘active’ gaze, emanating from the ‘armed eyes’ and linked to gender identification, the pre-Oedipal ‘passive’ gaze as an objet a linked to lost archaic part-objects and the symbiotic, more hidden gaze. She then proposed ‘by reference to the pre-Oedipal, that the matrixial gaze emanates from within a stratum of subjectivity formed by what I call metramorphic processes of subjectivization beginning in the late prenatal stage and continuing throughout life’ (Matrixial Gaze). This long chapter in seven sections extends the dialogue with Lacan’s theory of the gaze as objet a into a discussion of Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology, drawing fully on Ettinger’s experience as a painter in which practice she had first intimated, aesthetically and affectively, from working with freighted historical materials of trauma and disaster, the processes to which she gave the formulated terms matrixial and metramorphosis, introduced in the first chapter in this volume. The key term in this c­ hapter is borderswerving, which intimates a process of differentiating at the level

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of affectivity comparable to the idea of Merleau-Ponty’s écart in the field of sensible perceiving, hence pre- and non-conscious. In relation to Lacan at the other end of this thread, where differentiation in the scopic field would mean severance and distance, Ettinger creates, with her own reading of Merleau-Ponty, the ground for the thesis of borderlinking in the field of affective shareable sensing and transmission of traces, affecting sensibility beyond perception: borderswerving. The matrixial gaze is ‘the eroticised aerial of the psyche’ ‘com-passioning’, ‘diffracting,’ ‘dispersing’ and ‘assembling’ in ‘transsubjectivity and subsubjectivity’, ‘transubjective field’, ‘cross-inscripting’ and channelling ‘erotic waves’ in a transgressive transformational mode. The gaze carries the ‘memory of oblivion’ of one person for another person in ‘reciprocal yet asymmetrical crossing of borderlines’ and this, for her, is a primordial function of ‘artworking’ that, in her case deals with a trauma transmitted across the generations. While the Lacanian lacking objet a becomes in matrixial theory a link a ‘the enigma of painting as a metramorphic process’ comes to light. In this chapter, the zone of the ‘pre-natal with the pre-maternal’ encounter is articulated more specifically to show the value of its particular ‘sense-making’ that offers terms such as ‘subsymbolic connectivity,’ for the understanding of both intersubjectivity, transubjectivity (formerly written as transsubjectivity or trans-subjectivity) and ‘artworking.’ To avoid confusion of her theory with pro-natalists opposed to women’s right to determine their own bodies, Ettinger makes clear her position: ‘I acknowledge I am in dangerous territory – as a feminist in support of women’s reproductive rights and aware of the uses of essentialist ideology – and for that reason I take every possible precaution when I theorize this prenatal zone of relation. Yet to avoid it is to surrender it to the dominant phallic Symbolic. Although any discussion of the prenatal may seem at first glance to support the assumed claim of the infant on the mother’s body or the phallic seizure and essentializing of women’s bodies, in fact my discussion is an act of resistance to this seizure, for it dissolves the ground of seizure from within: it dissolves the unitary subject.’ (p. 251–2) Taking the reader lucidly through theories of gaze and specifically Lacan’s gaze and screen of phantasy, and in particular analysing the late Lacanian concept ‘sinthome’ in depth, Ettinger opens her own pathways through the Matrixial in the field of vision and art to the necessity to recognize a matrixial sublimation and Symbolic as she continues to develop the difficult topic of posing the womb psychoanalytically as both inside and environment. It must be stressed that arriving at her post-Freudian and post-Lacanian reflections on this time-space that is ‘expressed in later modes

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of communicating’ and must, therefore, receive a meaning, a crucial shift was needed. It is always a corporeal space experienced ‘too soon’ then ‘too late’ for the becoming infant, and for the becoming-mother’s own particular kind of ‘time out of time’. Yet, Ettinger insists upon its implications as a proto-psychic zone that leaves its imprints and creates a feminine difference that will differentially affect men and women, and women and women, depending on their subsequent relation to this kind of time-space in the now, where the ‘passageway in-between’ inside and outside ‘transmits traumatic elements and articulates subknowledge.’ To mediate this, she has also indicated the close relation between the aesthetic, art, and the reflections on the passage from the pre-imaginary and pre-symbolic conditions of subjectivity to the subject. I want to quote a key passage at the start of your reading of this text. Where the outside and past-site belong to both female and male persons on a corpo-real scale, this inside and future-site belong to the female both in the corpo-real dimension and as potentiality. Female subjects have a privileged access to this paradoxical time where future meets the past, and to this paradoxical site where outside meets inside in trauma and phantasm. Apart from art’s time-space, masculine subjects are more radically split from this archaic site with its potentiality, since their rapport with it stays in the archaic outside and too-early that is forever too late to access in the Real of their separate body. Men are, however, in contact with matrixial time and site, affected, like women, by joining-in-difference with others via art. As an a ­ esthetic-artistic filter, the matrixial apparatus serves whomsoever can yield and tolerate this fragile, fragmented and dispersed positioning of borderlinking. Various nonconscious lanes, that are opened toward and from originary difference of femaleness, are not limited, then, to women only, though they do carry a special resonance for women when they treasure their Real and filter their bodily vibrations. (p. 386)

The key point is to dissolve for a moment the power of the gendered ­concepts of men and women, and their sexed bodies as the support for these social nominations and psychic identifications as masculine or feminine subjects, so that another pathway, elaborating the inevitable material support of any subjectivity, a living, embodied, sensing entity, can shift the Oedipalization of the gaze and hence the positions of seeing subject and seen object. To draw a screen and activate a ‘touching gaze’ in ‘the scopic sphere of vision’, i.e. a form of encounter and subjectivity relative to the borderlinking with the world and its others, Ettinger has to weave a passage with

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and against both Lacan and Merleau-Ponty. This introduces a number of terms and directions that will be taken up in the following chapters including transubjectivity and copoiesis through what appears as psychic entanglement and diffraction. It is in this chapter that Ettinger addresses the painter as fragilizing herself to encounter the trauma of the other and of the world, risking an approach to the ‘Thing-encounter’ in a passage from ‘withnessing’ via ‘wit(h)nessing’ to ‘witnessing’, and further elucidates her concepts of matrixial re-co-birth, borderlinking, fading-in-transformation, encounter-event, shareability, coexistence, coemergence, intrapsychic transitivity, relations-without-relating, matrixial covenant and alliance, ­trans-scription, cross-scription, matrixial time of suspension-anticipation, severality, response-ability and feminine sexual specificity and difference. Ettinger ends this chapter in a way that seems today prophetic and more relevant to the actual social and cultural field with our new media, when she refers to the dangers of the symbiotic gaze that annihilates us as we merge with it and with the screen while the phallic gaze annihilates us by domination through the screen. This chapter is significant as a bridge between her earlier proposal of a matrixial gaze and her later writings on art and ethics.

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MATRIXIAL GAZE AND SCREEN OTHER THEN PHALLIC AND BEYOND THE LATE LACAN ([1995] 1999) I Introduction Aiming to evade the bifurcation of subject and object, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on aesthetics articulate a space of ‘dehiscence’ ­ (opening/rupture) in the ontogenesis of the aesthetic universe. This space belongs to neither subject nor object; their reversibility belongs to it. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘voyance’ (seeing/look) is a resonance of the invisible from behind or at the edges of the visible, a resonance that opens the way for the emergence of meaning in the zone of vision and, thereby, in the field of aesthetics. For Jacques Lacan, such an opening into visibility (his ‘voyure’ that lies behind the gaze qua objet a (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 82)) trades presence against absence, modelled as it is for him on the Freudian fort/da game and reflecting a phallic cut and substitution.1 Nonetheless, the more Jacques Lacan established the status of the gaze as phallic, the more an-other space opened up to me, which is traceable to what I call a matrixial encounter within feminine sex-difference and which Merleau-Ponty’s work helps to discover. Within this space—similar to what Merleau-Ponty deemed an écart that allows for dehiscence (constitutive openings/ruptures) (Merleau-Ponty 1964b)—there occurs an intrapsychic transitivity which, when emotionally affected, becomes transitivity within an intercorporeal being. Lacan himself was drawn toward an other-than-phallic space in the later, unpublished seminars I shall work with here. He tried there to touch upon an aspect of the Real that does not derive—as its lack—from the Symbolic. He sought a meaning that vibrates out from the Real rather than a significance encoded by the Symbolic. Lacan never renounced his phallic model. Yet, while addressing the position of women both within and beyond the phallic domain and challenging others to speak ‘from the ladies’ side,’ he also made room for conceiving of the ‘supplementary’ feminine experience. This experience, however, in my view, does not just happen but also traces, speaks, and creates its desire and gaze. My immersion in painting—I am an artist as well as a psychoanalyst— has led me to apprehend a matrixial borderspace beyond the Phallus in the

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field of experience and representation and so in turn to enter a dialogue with Lacan and with Merleau-Ponty whose work on the gaze strongly impressed Lacan. Via the subject’s early contact with a woman, I suggest, there emerges a swerve and borderlinking (connection, rapport)—sexual in the broad psychoanalytic sense—which engraves a kind of unconscious subknowledge that is not appropriated by the Phallus and which has surfaced for me in painting. I have named swerve a differentiating potentiality in the field of affection, analogous, up to a point, to Merleau-Ponty’s écart in the field of sensible perception, and I have named borderlinking (after Lacan’s ‘impossible feminine rapport’) partly to invert this ‘impossibility’: it is an operation of j­oining-in-separating with/from the other. I call these processes and operations: metramorphosis.2

II Outline of the Theory Merleau-Ponty links the gaze and the enigma of painting to the body of the artist ‘operating and present’ and enacting ‘an interlacing of vision and movement’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 124). He finds displayed therein a ‘crossing’ between the seer and the visible, the touching and the touched. ‘[T]his strange system of exchange’ constitutes a self ‘via confusion, narcissism, the inherence of the see-er in what is seen [[…] of sensing to sensed – a self, then, that is caught up in things’ (124, translation modified). As early as 1945, Merleau-Ponty formulated a phenomenological idea of the gaze from which contemporary theories of the subject and resistance might well benefit: The lighting directs my gaze and leads me to see the object, so that in a sense it knows and sees the object. […] [J]ust as communication pre-supposes […] a certain linguistic montage […] so perception pre­ supposes in us an apparatus capable of responding to the solicitations of light […] This apparatus is the gaze, in other words the natural correlation between appearances and our kinesthetic unfoldings, something not known according to a law, but experienced as the involvement of our body in the typical structures of a world. (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 361–2, translation modified, emphasis added)

The artist’s joining in the gaze is an openness to alterity and continual birth. ‘The painter lives in fascination. [[…] Inevitably the roles between the painter and the visible switch. That is why so many painters have said

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that things look at them’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 129). If the painter lends his/her body to things, they, on the other hand, allow the painter to look through their gaze. Thus ‘the interrogation of painting […] looks toward this secret and feverish genesis of things in our body’ (128). Does not Lacan’s reflection, some twenty years later, echo and supplement this idea? I am taking the structure at the level of the subject here, and it reflects something that is already to be found in the natural relation that the eye inscribes with regard to light. […] That which is light looks at me, and by means of that light in the depth of an eye, something is painted […] something that is an impression, the shimmering of a surface that is not, in advance, situated for me in its distance. […] It is rather it that grasps me, solicits me at every moment. […] The correlative of the picture, to be situated in the same place as it, that is to say, outside, is the point of the gaze, while that which forms the mediation from one to the other […] [is] the screen. […] In what is presented to me as a space of light, that which is gaze is always a play of light and opacity. […] [I]t is always this which prevents me, at each point, from being a screen […] And if I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen […]. (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 96–7)

The gaze calls forth and yet escapes the screen. Indeed, as ­Merleau-Ponty says, ‘[M]y power to access the world and that of taking refuge in fantasies does not go one without the other’ (1964b: 23), and, therefore, as Lacan will put it, ‘the [art]works, and then reflections on these works by [the artist] himself converge with the path of research on phantasy’ (1961–2: 27 June 1962). As both imply, phantasy is in the domain of the Real that indexes and imprints the body. Thus, the discussion of art in a psychoanalytical context is inseparable, to my mind, from a discussion of sexual difference, since we arrive at art through the extensions of the psyche closest to the phenomenological plane, on the edge of the corporeal—through libido, impulse (drive), and jouissance. This body, as Merleau-Ponty points out, is always a sexuated body, since it is through sexuality that one’s ‘manner’ of being in the world, in space and time, and in opening toward others, is rendered (1945: 183). But within Lacan’s and Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, this discussion of art is automatically appropriated by, even produced for their phallic paradigms, since the feminine there, as shown by Luce Irigaray, is either the ‘same as’ or ‘opposed to’ the Phallus (for the late Lacan, it is beyond the Phallus yet it signifies nothing). I propose not to

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hide from the Phallus, nor negate nor oppose it, but neither to be satisfied with deconstructing it. The basic phallic paradigm should rotate altogether to open a gap between the Phallus and the Symbolic, between the Phallus and the Imaginary, between the Phallus and the Real. I formulate the idea of the Matrix to further theorize that space—implicated in an originary feminine sexual difference—where the gaze, reversing and traversing in ways hinted at by Merleau-Ponty, becomes transgressive. In Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973a[1964]), which offers a reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible (1964b) we can differentiate a major and a minor kind of pre-Oedipal gaze and screen. First, a phallic gaze received or ‘screened’ by/ in phantasm in a process of splitting: this is the unconscious gaze that Lacan emphasizes and develops, and which determines the activity and ­detachment of the Other vis-à-vis the passivity and alienation of the subject. Here Lacan fixes the basic separateness and disharmony of subject and Other. Second, there is a ‘minor’ gaze I term symbiotic, which is received or ‘screened’ as mediatory: Lacan recognizes this gaze and hints at its operations but does not develop it as part of his theory. What he does say about it follows from Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the reversibility of seer and seen, of visible and invisible, and their cobelonging to the same milieu. This gaze might properly be considered ‘feminine’ in that it arises as opposite and complement to the phallic gaze and the visualized threat of castration. It promises a mediation, but within a phallic economy. I will discuss these two gazes (and screens) but also move beyond them to differentiate another possibility for gaze and screen, building further on the work of Merleau-Ponty. This third gaze arises from and re(a)sonates a desire not at all orchestrated in relation to male sexuality and identification: it is an im-pure hollow gaze created as an incompatible composite, it is a transmissible gaze projected upon and discovered flickering toward us from another kind of phantasmatical screen—conductible and joint. In ‘The Matrixial Gaze’, I draw a difference within the phallic scope between the ­post-Oedipal ‘active’ gaze, emanating from the ‘armed eyes’ and linked to gender identification, and the pre-Oedipal ‘passive’ gaze as an objet a linked to lost archaic ­part-objects (Ettinger 1993d). In the present context I will not deal with the post-Oedipal gaze. I propose, by reference to the pre-Oedipal, that the matrixial gaze emanates from within a stratum of subjectivity formed by what I call metramorphic processes of subjectivization beginning in the late prenatal stage and continuing throughout life. I have defined the matrixial borderspace as a psychic sphere of encounters of I(s)

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with non-I(s), where traces and imprints and waves are exchanged and experienced by fragmented and assembled I and non-I in transubjectivity [earlier written as trans-subjectivity and transubjectivity] and subsubjectivity. The concepts of matrixial gaze and screen enable us to perceive and theorize different links connecting artist, viewer, and artwork. They draw attention to an originary feminine difference that is an issue equally for both sexes. The Matrix identifies means of passage for sensations and affections, desires, phantasms and traumas, feelings and ideas that do not cohere into the process of castration. I use the term metramorphosis to remap specific routes of passage and transmissibility, transitivity, conductivity, and transference between various psychic strata, between subject and several other subjects and between them and assembled objects. In these routes ‘woman’, for both men and women, weaves a subsymbolic web,3 knitted just-into-the-edges of the phallic-symbolic universe but which nevertheless cannot be appropriated by it. Metramorphosis is the originary human potentiality for reciprocal yet asymmetrical crossing of borderlines between the phantasm and trauma of I and non-I. It induces instances of coemergence and co-fading as means of transubjectivity and subsubjectivity, and of transcription as working the unforgettable memory of oblivion: a treasuring of events one cannot recollect because they have been treated by one’s own originary repression and also transcribed in the m/Other. The ideas of cross-scription and trans-scription, which is plural (of several), are the means for thinking the enigma of the imprints of the world on the artist, of the artist’s potential to transform the world’s hieroglyphs, and of the viewer’s capacity to join in this process. Metramorphic processes of transformation, fragmentation, and pluralization (into severality and not endless multiplicity), of dispersal and resharing, take place in the already joint, partial, and several psychic sphere. A matrixial screen unfolds through a dispersal and sharing of the already joint gaze which is also always already partial and severalized. With the notions of Matrix and metramorphosis I am extending Lacan’s later formulations of phantasm and desire. As he developed his theory, Lacan gradually dethroned the concepts of desire and castration from their phallic eminence. He designates this shift in his theoretical position (from 1964 onward, but, mostly, after 1973) as an ‘inversion’. If in his early theory meaning always moves unilaterally from the Symbolic to the Real, then in his later reflections a bi-directionality between Real and Symbolic emerges. Late Lacanian theory assumes at moments the primacy of the field of the Real and its jouissance. The Real, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, is the psychic realm that is closest to

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corporeal experience. Jouissance in turn designates archaic events of joy and/or pain on the level of the Real, which are neither symbolized by words nor articulated in speech and that are ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ in the sense that they transgress the trajectories of the impulse. The assumption of the primacy of jouissance is an elusive alternative, opposed to Lacan’s classical perspective which assumes the dominance of the network composed of the Symbolic (including the phallic desire, the exchange of signifiers and the process of castration) over the Imaginary, and the conquest of the Real by them both—or the Real as their retroactive lacking product. Giving priority to trauma, jouissance, and phantasm, I explore the late prenatal encounter between coemerging and cofading partial subjects and part-objects in a nonconscious borderspace. This exploration provides a model for the webbing and borderlinking, for moments of swerve and for fading-away-in-transformation that is a specific way to rethink repression in the matrixial-feminine sphere—as repression not of signifiers but of traces of the drive’s trajectories in intersubjective connections and in transubjective fields. In doing so I aim to open up a third route for feminine sexual difference that operates for both sexes, a route that is neither male castration nor its negation. Already before birth, in the late prenatal period, the subject-to-be aspires in phantasm toward and contacts traumatically a woman—in whose trauma, jouissance, phantasm, and desire s/he already participates. The event that spurts on the level of feminine/prebirth encounter, in the links between the jouissance, trauma, and phantasm of the becoming subject-to-be (I), male or female, and the jouissance, trauma, phantasm, and desire of the woman who will become its archaic-m/Other (non-I), both of them in their status as partial subjects and partial objects for each other, constitute a matrixial cluster of desire meeting with the Real, and trauma meeting with phantasm. Archaic traces of contact with a female body are engraved. They are remembered without being recollected and are revealed in a phantasm saturated with imprints of the trauma of a partial and shared subjectivity. My hypothesis that evokes the womb should not in any way be understood as calling for a limitation on a woman’s rights over her body. On the contrary. I acknowledge I am in dangerous territory—as a feminist in support of women’s reproductive rights and aware of the uses of essentialist ideology—and for that reason I take every possible precaution when I theorize this prenatal zone of relation. Yet to avoid the womb is to surrender it to the dominant phallic Symbolic. Although any discussion of

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the prenatal may seem at first glance to support the assumed claim of the infant on the mother’s body or the phallic seizure and essentializing of women’s bodies, in fact, my discussion is an act of resistance to this seizure, for it dissolves the ground of seizure from within: it dissolves the unitary subject. The phallic Imaginary posits the prenatal infant mistakenly as a ‘separate’ entity with separate desires which anybody may pretend to defend against the mother’s desire. I emphasize that the feminine-matrixial configuration supports woman’s full response-ability for any event occurring within her own not-One corporeality and it disqualifies phallic regulations of it. From the point of view of the Matrixial, it makes no sense to speculate on an unborn infant’s ‘needs’ separately from the mother-to-be’s body/trauma/phantasy/desire complexity. The trauma and phantasm of before-birth, the archaic n ­ on-prohibited incest with-in/out that arises in connection with the gestating ­Other-desire of the mother, provides the matrixial stratum of a co-naissance (cobirth’s-knowledge). In this stratum, uncognized and unthought yet known I(s) and non-I(s) neither fuse with nor reject each other, and traces circulate by affects and by waves—which I have named erotic antennae of the psyche—dispersing different aspects of events. Thus, as I cannot fully handle events that concern me profoundly, they are fading-in-transformation while my non-I becomes wit(h)ness to them. ‘My’ imprints will be transcribed as traces in the other, such that my others will process traumatic events for me, just as my archaic m/Other had metabolized archaic events for my premature and fragile partial subjectivity. Ultimately, I posit this matrixial sphere as an aesthetic field and offer a model of borderlinking useful for discussing a range of artistic phenomena. I suggest that traces of the rapport between the subject-to-be and the archaic becoming m/Other-to-be threatens to burst out in the experience of the Uncanny.4 In Lacan’s consideration of the Freudian aesthetic uncanny effect, the phantasm of the maternal womb is subsumed and disappears within the castration economy that produces Oedipal sublimation. Moreover, sublimation is linked to the searching of the drive after autoerotic jouissance via an object. I suggest that a sexual difference linked to female corporeal specificity produces for men and women a different, non-Oedipal sublimation where, in the search for non-I(s), the jouissance is of the borderlinking itself. In the field of painting, the matrixial substratum is not ‘swallowed’ by the pattern of oppositions between presence and absence characteristic of the castration model, for

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from the beginning within it the self-with-in-other is always already partial, temporary, contingent: it thrives as such. Partiality and transgressivity are its medium, not the mark of its compromise or limit. This sexual difference affecting art emerges as from the beginning wrapped up in jointness-in-differentiating.

III I will first describe and examine concepts developed by Lacan and Merleau-Ponty, then move to the notions of the matrixial gaze and metramorphic borderlinks, and finally sketch their implications for painting and cultural transformation. Starting from Merleau-Ponty’s description of the scopic field but opening a difference from and even an opposition to it (since for Merleau-Ponty neither priority nor alienation but reciprocity characterizes the gaze), Lacan considers the gaze of the Other as prior to the eye of the subject: what is given to be seen is prior to the seer, and the Other’s gaze is forever split from me. The gaze looks at me; I look for the gaze, I long to be looked at by the gaze, and my desire emanates from it—but the gaze is located on the side of the Other. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty noted, there is a fundamental narcissism in all vision (1964b: 139), the deep meaning of which, for Lacan, is not to see but to be seen; and, moreover, when I try to focus on the gaze, it slips out and goes elsewhere, for that which is seen is not a look but being. With my gaze I do not meet the gaze that my soul longs to see, but only a gaze imagined by me. ‘When in love I solicit a look,’ says Lacan, ‘what is profoundly unsatisfactory and always missing is that you never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see’ (1973a [1964]: 103). Thus, there emerges a gaze which looks beyond appearance. The pact between the scopic drive and desire in the field of vision beyond appearance is located by Lacan in the gaze as an objet a qua absence. The objet a is a phantasmatic trace of the pre-­ Oedipal partial-drive’s engagements with the archaic part-object and with the ­ archaic mother—as object or as Other—which I call the m/Other. For Lacan, the objet a is clipped in accordance with the pageant of significance determined by the signifier, and it is in this sense a phallic trace—a trace within the phallic economy. It indexes an absence created in the course of a schism through which the subject appears within

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this economy. The objet a indexes that a libidinal event (and later, a jouissance), linked to a nameless Thing, has occurred in a no-man’sland—in a place and time that are forever ‘holes’ for subjectivity. The libidinal event is a forever absent event in a forever too early, out-of-history time, split from the amplitude of the subject by originary repression (Urverdrängung). Thus objet a indexes ‘woman’-m/Other as lacking, and in the scopic field it indexes the gaze as lacking. This gaze is a mental trace issued in the course of a primary schism between the scopic drive and its object—or its Other, through which the subject itself emerged as initially split. Such an objet a devises the libidinal loss as castration. For Lacan, the Unconscious leans on this schism/castration. The symbolic subject is the flip side of the objet a, and the Thing that endured originary repression is forever unavailable to the subject. The subject is thus the flipside of ­‘woman’-m/Other no less than a flipside of the gaze. When ‘Woman’ or gaze appears—the subject disappears. Phantasm is the screen that camouflages their separation. Subjectivization is, then, the effect of symbolic cuts from the ‘inhuman’ corporeal accomplished through language,5 a process which leaves these nameless and imageless residues as the foreclosed feminine in a phallic arena. Effecting these cuts that produce the phallic subject, language at the same time blurs the archaic modes of experience, ultimately nesting society’s laws and codes in their place, restructuring them in a way that makes them inaccessible to the subject. Thus produced through the evaporation of the Real, the subject may be understood as retroactively ‘producing’ the archaic trace as a ‘cause of the desire’ (cause du désir) in symbolic articulation—but this ‘cause’ cannot satisfy it, since it is, precisely, a ‘nothing’. However, it is a nothing with a symbolic value of a lacking Phallus and ‘Woman’. The essence of castration is […] what is manifested in this: that the sexual difference is maintained only by […] something that lacks under the aspect of the phallus.[…] At the level of sexuality, desire is represented by an imprint of a lack.[…] Everything gets regulated at the origin, in the sexual rapport as it is produced in the human being, by this: around the sign of castration, that is, to begin with, around the phallus inasmuch as it represents the possibility of lack of object. (Lacan 1966–7: 11 and 25 January 1967)

The Other as Woman and/or body, situated in what I am calling the archaic m/Other, is considered by Lacan an undifferentiated textile, ‘fabric’ or ‘bubble,’ with which what would later become the subject is

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intermingled in symbiotic fusion. In the bubble, it is not yet possible to be oriented by and to distinguish reality and desire. Here, ‘there is not yet a subject. The subject begins with the cut’ (Lacan 1966–7: 16 November 1966). The cut-out substance that will establish a total transformation in the structure of the ‘bubble’ itself is the objet a, which is a deficiency of the Other no less than a subtraction from the subject. The Other as well as the subject is ‘amputated’ from this objet a. What I call the ­Woman-m/Other-Thing is here this common fabric as element in the Real. What Lacan locates in the fabric is a cut that organizes the relations of subject and Other and the advent of the subject already in the signifier. Thanks to this cut, the phantasm maintains its relation to the Real. Yet the Real’s jouissance becomes opaque, with no signifying value. An entity in which a joining of subject and objet a—and not their separation—would be seized, is impossible according to Lacan. Such an entity, had it been possible, would have stood for presentification-and-significance of the irrevocably missing feminine ­ jouissance and ‘feminine-sexual rapport’. These cannot be ‘subjectively’ apprehended, because this level of the Real with its encounters is blocked to a subject thus defined. Feminine jouissance can be lived through in experience, but not apprehended. The objet a and phantasm, as well as desire and the structure of the subject, are its barriers. As noted above, in the scopic field, is the gaze is this objet a. Lacan refers to this gaze as ‘extimate’—most intimate yet exterior to the subject—and locates it in an extimate vacuole (conch shell, cavity) in the Real (the unsignificanced physical or phenomenal world mediated by the body). Inside but anonymous, therefore outside yet within, the gaze arises from the field of the Thing, ‘this anonymity innate to Myself that we have previously called flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 139). The gaze is a phantasmatic trace of a traumatic trace; it indexes the fact that jouissance—a joyful or painful event—took place in this vacuole (Lacan 2006 [1969]: 217–33). Like every objet a, the gaze thus dwells on the borders of the sensual, sensorial, and perceptual zones, but it evades them all. Lacan hints first that, from the angle of the Real, the gaze arises and perishes on a current of libidinal energy, and secondly, that it follows the trajectories of the drive. Since this energy is channelled through p ­ artial-drives it appears as a ‘surplus of enjoying’ (plus-de-jouir) that cannot be quenched by either the Imaginary or the Symbolic. The subject is originally divided by a libidinal loss to which it is heterogenetic. A libidinal loss (and likewise, a drive’s satisfaction) is by its nature non-specular; therefore, as a

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gaze, it cannot appear to the subject in the Imaginary and the Symbolic planes. Likewise, the subject cannot join the gaze on the plane of the Real because the subject is structurally the effect of the signifying chain that is englobing the castrative cut and is totally split from the Real. It is in this context that Lacan describes the status of the work of art: The libido, as its name indicates, can only be a participant of the hole, which moreover goes for all other modes through which the body and the Real are presented, and it is obviously through this that I am trying to get back to the function of art. This is implied in a way by that which is left blank as the fourth term and when I say that art can go so far as to arrive at the symptom. (2005 [1975–6]: 40–41, my translation) One sublimates, [Freud] tells us, with drives.[…] Where do these drives come from? From sexuality’s horizon.[…] [But] about sexuality we know nothing.[…] The enigma can be put this way: as a jouissance of the edge, how could it be measured by an equivalence to sexual jouissance?[…] The relationship of sublimation to jouissance, insofar as it is sexual jouissance, can only be explained by that which I will call the anatomy of the vacuole. […] [T]he objet a is that which tickles the Thing from inside. There you have it. This is what makes up the essential merit of what we call the work of art. (2006 [1968–9]: 229, 232, 233, my translation)

Since the painter’s internal dialogue with the gaze on the screen of phantasm is externalized onto the painting’s screen of vision, something of the psychic gaze is always contained in the tableau [picture/painting], waiting to affect us. But for Lacan, the viewpoint of the gaze, as objet a, is my blind spot, since I cannot see from the point from which I am looked at by the other or from where I desire to be looked at. Thus, when the gaze appears, the subject situates itself in the picture only as a stain. The painter seduces the eye of the viewer and offers it some imaginary food clearly visible in representation, but the viewer is solicited by the tableau ‘to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons’ (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 98), whereby something that is enabled by this laying down of the gaze is bestowed on the subject’s eyes of phantasm. The painter’s stroke does not originate in an acknowledged decision but concludes an internal unconscious stroke which resembles the move of psychological regression; but contrary to regression, in the act of painting the stroke creates—as in a reversal of the course of time—a gaze, a product that is also a cause to which the painter’s actual stroke becomes a response. The gaze is not under the artist’s control. It fascinates and horrifies the artist’s stroke, attracting his/her action, prompting

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painting into becoming from the site of the Irreal. In front of the amazing lure of the gaze at the horizon of apparition, consciousness can only conclude the artist’s act by ascribing images and concepts to it. The gaze hides behind the screen of phantasm, and it exercises a fascinating and horrifying power over the viewer when threatening to burst into or arouse consciousness via the artwork. Thus, painting partakes of the ­ dodging-regressive impossible encounter with a ‘hole’ in the Real and shakes the borderlines of culture into becoming thresholds because it is not produced by a pre-existent gaze but produces it while also being co-born with it. Although, for Lacan, all mutuality between the gazed-at/the seer (as subject) that is also visible (as object), that is, me, and the gaze of the Other is illusionary, he nevertheless indicates, following Merleau-Ponty, a point of contact or coincidence, a tychic point (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 77), a ‘before’ as some unexpected touch of destiny, a mythological encounter ‘before’ the emergence of the subject as split. There derive from a nameless substance with a function of Voyure both the subject as seer and seen and the gaze. The notion of the screen as the stain in the picture may be taken in two directions, pointing toward contrasting relations among the subject of desire, the gaze that vanishes from it but also induces it, the visual art object that is outside the subject (both artist and viewer) yet is created in conjunction with the painter’s body, and the picture imprinted in the subject’s eye. Between the extimate gaze—­outsidewithin me—and the picture lies an entity, the screen, itself described sometimes as stain, that is both permeable and opaque. About the screen Lacan says, first, that ‘[t]he gaze […] is always this which prevents me, at each point, from being a screen’ but also that ‘if I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of a screen, which I earlier called the stain, the spot’ (1973a [1964]: 96–7). The screen is both a mediating entity through which I enter the picture as a stain and something I am pre-vented from entering into—because of the operations of the gaze. This paradoxical formulation indicates the two ways of conceptualizing the screen. First, as Lacan usually defines it, the screen works in accordance with the castration mechanism and in relation to a radically alienated and alienating Other: it is thus a separating veil between the gaze and the desiring subject. Since the gaze and the subject are created by a split, the subject cannot be in the screen whose function is to partition. The subject and the gaze are on different sides of the screen. Second, in an interpretation closer to Merleau-Ponty’s, the screen may be a veil of

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contact whereby the gaze and the gazed-at meet and touch. In this case, the screen is above all a ‘locus of mediation’ (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 107). A basic dimension of the subject’s inscription in the picture may, therefore, embody itself in the contact-mediation dimension of the screen; but Lacan develops the theme of split and division, since his Other is radically a stranger with whom encounter is impossible and, in the classical theory, both the Other and the subject are effects of the signifying chain. Lacan, moreover, gradually refuses the intersubjective direction and opts for the schism.6 The schism concerns castration both in an Oedipal way, where the gaze is lost from me, and in terms of separation from the bubble’s texture, where the gaze is also lost from the Other. When the gaze as objet a of the Other rises up, it is laid on ‘something we call the tableau’, ‘the scene’, or ‘the screen’, in which is embraced the impossibility of intersubjectivity, assigned as a stain. Such a stain, characterized by a ‘little-of-reality’ that is all we have to compose the substance of the phantasm, is also, for Lacan, all the reality to which we can have access on the side of the mother and in respect to her union with the father in the primal scene. The gaze’s phallic lack implies then both intrasubjective castration and the impossibility of intersubjectivity. Intersubjective relations are precisely the absence indexed by the gaze; it is a ‘want/lack to be’, a ­‘lack-to-being’, or a ‘want-of/in-being’, an impossible point of emergence, a mythical origin: And remember what I said the tableau [picture/painting] is, the real tableau. It is the gaze. It is the tableau that gazes at whomever is caught in its field, falls into its snare. The painter is he who makes the gaze fall before himself, from the other.[…] [T]he figure [is] projected before him, the figure of he who no longer knows from whence he sees himself, who no longer knows the point from which he gazes upon himself.[…] The somewhere from which everything falls into position for the subject […] it must be emphasized, has no point, it is that outside which is the point of birth, the point of emergence of some creation, which may be on the order of a reflection, on the order of the secretly organized, of that which falls into position, of that which is instituted as intersubjectivity. With regard to this light – which appears suddenly on the very image of the one whose name is lost, of the one who is presented here as lack – Freud leaves the thing in suspense for us, leaves us kind of tongue-tied, so to speak. It is the apparition of the point of emergence in the world from the bursting forth point which, in language, can only be translated as the want-to-be. (Lacan 1964–5: 6 January 1965, my translation, emphasis added)

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Whether, in this analysis of painting, the gaze of aesthetic experience is a lack in terms of ‘phallic ghost’ or absent intersubjectivity, in any case we can say that for Lacan, the archaic m/Other—experiencing with, sensible body, affective encounter in the Real—as a point of emanation of psychic life is an unsignificating phantom. This phantom is outside the tableau in the sense that you do not see it there, but at the same time Lacan calls it here: ‘the gaze’, precisely even the tableau, in the sense that it is the invisible heart of the visible. The gaze is the specific aesthetic dimension that distinguishes a tableau from any other visual image; the gaze is what makes it function as a tableau, a work of art, and not as just another object among the objects of the world. In the scopic sphere of vision, exposed and veiled by the actual tableau, the gaze (a ‘tableau’ inside the tableau) vibrates beyond appearance. It disturbs representation because a baggage of archaic sexuality trails behind it. Lacking and split forever from the passions of the eye, and, even though originally a part of the Other, the gaze now evades both the Other and my desiring eye, and it deposits its baggage in another obstructed fabric, in a projective plane behind (outside of the site of) and before (out of the time of) the tableau. For Lacan, the eye and the gaze are forever cleft. When I look for the gaze it hides, and precisely for that reason the field of vision is relevant to the unconscious subject: the split informs the eye as desiring. The field of vision would not have been a field of desire if castration had no possibility of operating in it. A scopic drive is concealed/revealed in the schism of the eye from the gaze, and this schism causes desire (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 72–3). Via the artwork, a lacking gaze approaches consciousness, though it is not a seen representation, as an uncanny allusion in the form of ‘strange contingency’ revealed by an uncanny affect of anxiety, signalling that we are on the horizon of experience, namely, approaching ‘the lack that constitutes castration anxiety’ (73). Thus, the obscure threat that underlines the uncanny feeling is the ‘appearance of the phallic ghost’ (88), because the uncanny aesthetic effect is conceived by Lacan as leaning on the castration complex and takes into account the male sexual difference only. For Lacan, all objets a have the same qualities; they are ‘but one and the same’ (2006 [1975–6]: 86) and ‘bound to the orifices of the body’ (1975a: 164). The Oedipus complex reduced by Lacan, as J. A. Miller has argued, to the castration complex, remains an entirely masculine field, for the drive is autoerotic and looks for an object, and the mechanism of castration retroactively organizes the totality of the

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archaic libidinal partial-dimension: ‘the objet a, if taken only in Lacan’s sense, is a container of the effect of castration, containing the signification of castration’ (Miller 1982–3: 3 May 1983). All four—the gaze, the desiring subject, artistic sublimation, and sexual difference—are shaped by the Phallus/castration pair. Thus even the painting, understood to open a dialogue with the gaze that is beyond appearance and yet to hide that dialogue in the painting for the viewer to produce, was organized within this pair. This move was reinforced for Lacan by Merleau-Ponty’s insight into the narcissism of all vision—linked to the idea of vision coming ‘from things’ toward me (1964b: 139)—which in effect eroticized the scopic field. Lacan in turn erected eroticism in the scopic field according to the castration model and so structured the gaze as phallic. If the gaze is not directly in the picture, it is because it coheres with unconscious sexuality. But if the passage between subject and gaze depends on libidinal paths and on the drive’s trajectories, it is the way we understand the libido and the drive themselves that might lead to differentiate other possible gazes. The conceptualization of the gaze as objet a is offered in the Lacanian theory as if in a sexually neutral way. As if, since it is the phallic option for structuring phantasm and desire that is presented as the only human option par excellence, general and neutral, though it is based on male sexual difference, experience, body, and narcissism, and therefore establishes a one-sided psychic perspective. The arousal of the partial dimension in the scopic field, understood as the appearance of the phallic ghost is, as Lacan himself commented in the 1970s, a male model: the objet a has only been elaborated from ‘one side of sexual identification, the male side […] from one departure point, a single one only, from the male one’ (Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 63, translation modified). But is there another way possible? As long as the Symbolic is founded on the signifier, and signification is based on the paternal Law that separates the boy from his mother by prohibiting incest and constructs desire, accordingly, as male, no other way seems to present itself. Yet when an uncanny strangeness is felt in the Other’s gaze, included as it dis/appears in the painting, does indeed only castration anxiety lie behind this aesthetic experience that arises in our encounters with an artwork? In what I perceive as the second phase of his theory on the feminine, Lacan expresses his wish to one day expose the limits of the theory as developed from only the male side. He suggests that a woman has a

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‘supplementary’ and not a ‘complementary’ jouissance, which for him means that if there is such a thing as ‘sexual rapport,’ it must be clarified from ‘the ladies’ side,’ since it will involve elaborating the ‘not-All’: This business of sexual rapport, if there is a point from which a light can be shed on it, it’s precisely from the ladies’ side, inasmuch as it is the elaboration of the not-all that will lead to clearing the path. […] The jouissance, sexually speaking, is phallic, which is to say that it does not relate to the Other as such.[…] [O]ne must see the radical difference of that which happens on the other side, starting with the woman.[…] To say that she is not-all in the phallic function is not to say that she is not there at all. In relation to the phallic function she is not not there at all. She participates fully. But there is something in addition.[…] She has her own jouissance – she who does not exist and does not signify anything. (Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 57, 9, 63, 74, my translation)

IV Within Lacan’s early phallic ethos (roughly until 1964), the ­symbolic Other qua chain of the signifier is the inheritor of the archaic m/Other-­ object. This chain creates and donates a symbolic meaning to the infant’s experience and ‘liberates’ him/her from the ‘absolute’ dependence on the m/Other as a ‘sole’ (what I call) resonance chamber for experience. The human subject is created in the passage between linguistic signifiers, where a signifier represents the subject for another signifier; that is, it is not the human being that adopts language but it is language that adopts the human being and turns him/her into a subject. Yet language cannot ‘tame’ or destroy the Real’s holes that form an essential lack in the symbolic text. We may understand Lacan’s symbolic Other in the middle (1964–72) and late theory (from 1972 to 1973 and onward) as an unconscious domain that is larger than the repressed treasure of signifiers; it also contains the objet a that accords with no discourse yet operates as a direct and autonomous emanation from the phenomenological body. Viewed from the phallic angle, objet a—woman-m/Other as lacking, object of phantasm-gaze—emerges from within a masculine jouissance that concerns both sexes. But, I suggest, if feminine ‘supplementary’ jouissance may re(a)sonate via the objet a in a different way, and if the objet a itself can be conceived differently, then a different surplus-of-enjoying will in-form a subject so defined. Since sexuality delivers

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keys to understanding the gaze in the wider context of the nonconscious dimension, matrixial sexual difference, linked to another experience and another body, must give supplementary links between libidinal action and drive’s motion, their effects and traces, subject, object, Other and desire, but also between trauma and phantasm. It therefore offers, as I will show later, supplementary understanding of visuality and artworking. From this angle of originary matrixial feminine difference, then, sexual ‘rapport,’ trauma, and jouissance will have new meanings and other values. Lacan’s concept of sinthome (1975–6) points, in my view, toward a possible new theoretical phase concerning ‘woman’ as well as objet a.7 Here, ‘woman’ goes further toward ‘woman’ beyond-the-Phallus than both Lacan’s early ‘woman’ inside-the-Phallus (roughly until 1964) and ‘woman’ not-All (1972–3). A ‘supplementary’ feminine sexual ‘rapport’ that the signifier has not blasted and castration has not inflated is, in moments, drawn out of—and swept back into—Lacan’s thinking about art, even though he continues otherwise to return incessantly to the formula that ‘there is no sexual rapport’ and to insist that such a rapport would mean psychosis, since there is no way to report on a sexual rapport that would be feminine-Other if/where it does occur, and there is no possible inscription of it in the Symbolic: it is a ‘deficit in knowledge’ (Miller 1982–3: 2 March 1983). Feminine jouissance , which is enveloped in its continuity, aspires to release itself as an-other gaze that will shape desire, but as long as all desire is formulated as castration, any jouissance, as Miller says (1994–5), is ‘reduced to the phallic signifier’. Sexual non-rapport is the result of the phallic equivalence between the sexes, but there should be another level, says the late Lacan, a level of non-equivalence, then, in which a sexual rapport should become possible. When there is equivalence, it is by this very fact that there is no (sexual) rapport.[…] It is inasmuch as there is sinthome [archaic-resonant symptom, I add here] that there is no sexual equivalence, which is to say there is rapport; for it is obvious that if we say that non-rapport derives from equivalence, it is inasmuch as there is no equivalence that the rapport is structured.[…] Where there is rapport, it is inasmuch as there is sinthome […] it is by sinthome that the other sex is maintained.[…] The sinthome is precisely speaking the sex I do not belong to, which is to say a woman. Because a woman is a sinthome for every man, it is perfectly clear that there needs to be found another name for what becomes of man for a woman,

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since for that very reason the sinthome is characterized by non-equivalence […] that’s the only recess where for what is called the s­peak/through-being [parl’être], in the human being, sexual rapport is maintained.[…] [T]he sinthome’s direct link, it is this something which must be situated in its doings with the Real, with the real of the Unconscious.[…] [I]t is the sinthome we must deal with in the very relationship Freud maintained was natural – which does not mean a thing: the sexual relationship. (2005 [1975–6]: 101–2, my translation)

In order to conceptualize this ‘something,’ we need to broaden the psychoanalytical concept of the Symbolic (and the subject) beyond the network of signifiers, the Phallus and the paternal Law—the Name of the Father. Lacan, however, did not renounce such a (phallic) Symbolic: ‘There is not the slightest prediscursive reality, for the very fine reason that what constitutes a collectivity – what I called men, women, and children – all this means nothing qua pre-discursive reality’ (1975b [1972– 3]: 33)—and so positive conceptualization of another femininity did not follow for him. Since sexual rapport is possible only if what escapes discourse in ‘woman’ not only exists but also is unthoughtly known, and then can trace itself, be written, become thinkable, make sense, it is the phallic paradigm itself that must rotate to separate the equivalence between the Phallus and meaning. (We will return to this later on.) Lacan’s ‘no sexual rapport’ is linked to the question of the son’s incest with the mother, prohibited by the paternal Law, as the only possible cause of desire: ‘That is the basis of psychoanalysis.[…] There is no sexual rapport except for neighbouring generations; namely, parents on the one hand, and children on the other. That’s what the interdiction of incest wards off. I talk about sexual rapport’ (Lacan 1977–8: 11 April 1978). Yet, in ‘Le sinthome’, Lacan identifies something on the dimension of the ‘feminine’ rapport, not as a traumatic return onto the real corporeal past event but as a transformation into the writer’s (James Joyce’s) artwork (literary writing), gesturing toward what I see as nonphallic sublimation. So, the question arises: what if another kind of incest presents itself, one that cannot even be prohibited and warded off, where castration cannot interfere to install its order? Such is, in my view, the prebirth relation-without-relating that is in a psychoanalytical sense incestuous— though in a nonphallic way. There, phantasm meets trauma and I meets non-I. There, the trace of phantasm continues trauma’s trail. Can such an encounter make sense?

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Freud himself gave us some hints in the prebirth direction in his discussion of the Uncanny. The gaze approaching the subject in the uncanny experience echoes ‘the lack that constitutes castration anxiety’ (Lacan 1973a [1964]: 73), as Lacan says. Yet, there is something more. For Freud, a strangeness-uncanniness in aesthetic experience ‘springs from its proximity to the castration complex’ indeed; but there is a second source for it as well: the phantasy of ‘intra-uterine existence’ or ‘womb-fantasies’ (1919: 248–9, 244–5).8 I have proposed that we view Freud’s intra-uterine phantasy not as retroactively encompassed by the castration phantasy but as different and coexisting with it (see Ettinger 1993d).9 In the course of Lacan’s attempts in the 1960s to describe an extimate vacuole as a knot or a glove, Lacan gestures toward the question of the womb; but he folds it, as usual, inside the phallic/castration model: One of the first possibilities concerning a hole, is becoming two holes. I’ve been told: What do you not refer to? Why not refer your images to embryology? Understand that they are never very far away.[…]. (1961–2: 23 May 1962) It is as the objet a, in being buried-up-against-her-insides, that the child-subject is articulated, that its message is received by the mother, and that it [the message] is given back to it. (2006 [1968–9]: 317, my translation)

Within the notion of the Matrixial, which I will discuss more fully in the next section, the ‘hole that turns into two holes’ is part of the intertwined, matrixial landscape of severality: as dispersing of the gaze (and the objet a, in general) between two and more—several—entities, as sharing of a gaze by two and more—several—subjects, as composing the gaze by several incompatible components (trauma and phantasm, scopic and nonscopic dimensions) and as diffusion of ‘grains’ of subjectivity between several different individuals. Thus the feminine takes part in any I’s phantasy and trauma articulated in connectivity as well as embroidered in the chain of the signifiers—or its affective and erotic holes—for retroactive application and also as a different kind of meaning. Where a hole becomes several holes, it is not yet motherhood, not even mother/child relations that are our issue, but a ‘before.’ Freud evaded the question of this ‘before’ as a sex-difference for girls. He considered the womb first as sex-difference issue, then as a s­ex-difference

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issue only for boys, and later on he rejected it altogether because it endangered masculine sexuality and narcissism. If we take it as a basis for an originary other-than-phallic sexual difference in the terms presented in my introduction, female subjects have a double access to the matrixial sphere in the Real, because they experience the womb both as an archaic outside and past-site, out of chronological time, as ‘anterior’—which is true for male subjects as well—and as an inside and future site, actual, future and ‘posterior’ time.10 Whether they are mothers or not, this matrixial time out-of-time is a potentiality for repetition which might get actualized in trauma and jouissance. Where the outside and pastsite are both female’s and male’s on a corporeal scale, this inside and ­future-site are female’s both in the corporeal dimension and as potentiality. Female subjects have a privileged access to this paradoxical time where future meets the past, and to this paradoxical site where outside meets inside in trauma and phantasm. Apart from art’s time-space, male subjects are more radically split from this archaic site with its potentiality, since their rapport with it stays in the archaic outside and too-early that is forever too late to access in the Real of their separate body. Men are, however, in contact with matrixial time and site, affected, like women, by joining-in-difference with others via art. As an aesthetic-artistic filter, the matrixial apparatus serves whoever can yield and tolerate this fragile, fragmented and dispersed positioning of borderlinking. Various nonconscious lanes, that are opened toward and from originary difference of femaleness, are not limited, then, to women only, though they do carry a special resonance for women when they treasure their Real and filter their bodily vibrations. Indeed, I would stress once more, when we divert the focus toward the womb, we are touching upon the basic silenced issue of the phallic paradigm. Freud develops the narrative of the archaic father and names the taboo of incest that is structured by/for it in the Oedipus complex as interdiction that conditions repression and structures desire as infinite displacement of the prohibited relation of the son to the pre-Oedipal mother. But for the Matrix there is no similar structure, prohibition, and repression. Indeed the matrixial in-cest cannot be forbidden in the Real: it occurs to give life. Yet, because of its highly psychotic potential in the phallic paradigm, it could not be elaborated but was deeply silenced— not even excluded from the Symbolic (from which exclusion it could then return as its repressed and produce another desire), but explicitly foreclosed or marginalized as the unthought unknown. Furthermore, in

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psychoanalytic theory, the womb was replaced by the anus: in this way the female’s possible narcissistic ‘advantage’ which, according to Freud, the boy finds intolerable, is annulled. And whatever of the nonprohibited incest that did appear was subjugated to the general Oedipal/castration phallic model at the service of patriarchy. Desire is always accompanied by a certain acknowledgment of separation or a certain failure inherent in relations. Yet is there not another kind of separation which is not due to rejection, abjection, ‘castration’ of the ‘woman’-objet a? In the phallic economy, separation is repression-as-castration and abjection or foreclosure, operating only ­ as ­being/non-being, on/off. In the matrixial sphere, ‘woman’ indexes elusive links rather than objects and is treated by neither repression nor foreclosure but by fading-in-transformation in-between presence and absence because ‘she’ is dispersed and assembled between several partial subjects. Thus, the phallic and the matrixial ‘complexes’ awake anew in different ways between trauma and phantasy, and, ultimately, they join the function of art, offering different kinds of gaze and screen.

V The matrixial complex of phantasy is linked to the sexual nonphallic difference deriving from the late prenatal traumatic encounter in the Real. Matrixial desire includes traces of the partially foreclosed incest within the female body and the ‘feminine’ psyche, which are not inscribed in the Symbolic by signifiers but are otherwise enlarging the symbolic Other and subject. An erotic antenna of the psyche, always ­joining-in-separating with/from the Other, ‘carries’ a matrixial swerve and a differentiating and borderlinking potentiality in the field of emotive sensibility or affection and awakes their meaning. The archaic encounter germinates transubjective zones of severality that fit MerleauPonty’s description of a dimension where each one: knows oneself and knows others inscribed onto the world; what s/he feels, what s/he sees, what others feel and live, even his/her dreams or their dreams, his/her illusions and theirs, these are not islands, isolated fragments of being: all this, by reason of the fundamental exigency of our constitutive voids/nothingness, is being, its consistency, order, meaning, and there is a way to comprehend it. (1964b: 63, translation modified)

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The gaze that emerges in a matrixial shared zone envelops joint ontogenesis from which specificity and difference are derived, causing another desire and a with/in-forming subjectivity. This gaze is dispersed between several entities, shared by several partial subjects, composed by several incompatible components, and involves the borderlinking and diffusion of ‘grains’ of subjectivity between several different individuals. From a phallic angle, the ‘woman,’ considered as the Other-Thing that carries the vanishing gaze, is an archaic support of the object. Yet, I suggest that from a matrixial angle, the ‘woman’-m/Other-encounter is also a support for a transubjective link, producing desire not for an object but for further borderlinking: Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each? Their landscapes interweave, their actions and their passions precisely fit together: this is possible as soon as we no longer make belongingness to one same ‘consciousness’ the primordial definition of sensibility, and as soon as we rather understand it as the return of the visible upon itself, a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient.[…] There is here no problem of the alter ego because it is not I who sees, not he who sees, because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, by virtue of that primordial property of belonging to the flesh, being here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever, of being also an individual dimension and a universal. (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 142, translation modified)

When emotively affected, the synergy described here by Merleau-Ponty allows, in my view, for the borderspace of shareability and transmissibility, im-purity and conductibility, that I link to non-prohibited incest and which gets ‘hidden’ in the aesthetic experience. Such a mental layer of subjectivity-as-encounter (see Chapter 4) is an other-than-phallic ‘femininity’ (in both men and women) shared by several individuals, which has imaginary traces and symbolic impact, as well as a real coexistence. I suggest that if we conceive of trails of borderlinking from an angle in which severality is prior to or coexistent with the I versus others, a non-‘castration’ passageway—metramorphosis—opens and reveals different processes of transformation and a different repression. The centre of gravity in the Matrix moves from single elements to links between psychic particles that are not part-in-a-whole, and which I therefore call grains.

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This language moves us away from the ‘triangle’ composed of subject, object and Other and toward a plurality composed of grains of I and non-I (partial subjects) and hybridized incompatible composites giving way to joint partial objects and assembled Other. Such a process informs both the invisible ontogenetic level of the Real, the matrixial Imaginary, and a broadened Symbolic infused with subsymbolic processes of interconnectivity. Inasmuch as metramorphosis treats the links between trauma and phantasm, it has both aesthetic aspects and ethical implications. The matrixial subknowledge is interwoven into the Symbolic and changes it ‘from within.’ In this matrixial borderspace, the archaic-feminine dimension does not stay forever unintelligible, invisible, and presymbolic. To understand the matrixial objet a and link, we must give attention to movement and touch as well as to the gaze, and then interfuse their effects. ‘One of the first images of the body the child makes’ says Didier Anzieu ‘is that of the surface of the skin which is common to both mother and child.[…] [The skin is] at the same time a surface of separation and a surface of contacts’ (1981: 71). He sees this experience ‘of the frontier of two bodies in symbiosis’ as ‘a surface of inscriptions, with its paradoxical character, which can also be found in the work of art’ (72). In this model of the touch, where the skin-organ and not the e­ ye-organ may serve, when we shift attention from the postnatal to the prenatal for the conceptualization of a screen, contact and separation are not opposed to each other at an earlier stage. The spans of movement and touch expose borderline qualities that fit the Matrix more than the spans of vision and voice. Moreover, the matrixial object and link are founded in the Real on psychic events of tactile encounter so libidinally charged that they seep into the scopic field as a mode of sensing and apprehending the world; they bypass any symbolic seizure that implies pairs of oppositions. These events spray into the field of visual modalities of connecting that affect the gaze, and they turn the screen into a borderspace of coemergence in differentiation. Through swerve and borderlinking, these originary unfolding processes, or metramorphoses, are enacted upon emotively-affected oscillations of touch and pressure, fluctuations of motions and balance (kinaesthesia), changing amplitudes of perceived voices and light-and-dark variations; and all of these diffused and shared affected ­ sensorial impressions construct (partial)-object-relations and their halfloss, and subjectivize the grains as matrixial. The intrauterine contact

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brings forth the objects of touch and movement as a ‘link’ rather than an ‘object,’ adding them to the list of psychic part objects (which, in this extra-Freudian scheme, are not related to bodily orifices).11 As a psychic part object, the touch more easily lends itself to the m ­ eaning-making elaboration of borderlines and borderlinks between entities, though other part objects have matrixial qualities as well. As an unfocused objet a or a borderlink, attracting ever-changing (but not limitless) diffuse reactions, the matrixial object-link is never completely ‘on’ nor completely ‘off’ in shareability without confusion. In fact, as Bion explains: The sense of touch is usually employed as an antidote to the confusion that can be incidental to the employment of container/contained. It is used to establish the reassurance obtained from feeling that there is a barrier between two objects, a limiting boundary that is absent in the container contained relationship.[…] [This] produces the paradoxical effect that the topographically closer relationship implied by tactile contact is less intimate, i.e., confused, than the more distant relationship implied by the [respiratory, auditory, and visual] models. (Bion 1963: 95–6)

Attention to touch and movement opens up the wealth of transformations occurring in the prenatal proximity-with-in-distance and of the exchange between sensing and the sensed, which the dichotomy ‘severance/union’ cannot account for. But their interest for me multiplies because they filter in and in-form other and later investments and modes of communicating, so that the modes of touch and movement inform and transform the mode of gaze—a transformation carried by matrixial affection and trans-scription. Bion’s descriptions resonate suggestively with the notion of the coiling over of the touch upon the visible, and vice versa, as developed by Merleau-Ponty: What is open to us, therefore with the reversibility of the visible and of the tangible, is – if not yet the incorporeal – at least an intercorporeal being, a presumptive domain of the visible and the tangible, which extends further than the things I touch and see at present. There is a circle of the touched and the touching, the touched takes hold of the touching; there is a circle of the visible and the seeing, the seeing is not without visible existence; there is even an inscription of the touching in the visible, of the seeing in the tangible – and the converse; there is finally a propagation of these exchanges to all bodies of the same type and of the same style which I see and touch – and this by virtue of the

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fundamental fission or segregation of the sentient and the sensible which, laterally, makes the organs of my body communicate and founds transitivity from one body to another. (1964b: 142–3)

I am extending this transitivity back to account for the matrixial sphere where erotic waves are channelled, imprints are cross-scripted and traces are exchanged from traumatic and enjoying encounters of I(s) with non-I(s). These imprints, traces, and waves are mounted on unconscious lanes opened by these archaic events: by originary Thing-encounter with my m/Other, where imprints of Thing-events (imprints of traumatic encounters not of me, but of my non-I(s), which are transmitted to me) are cross-scribed as well and repressed. These traces and imprints are experienced by I and non-I as fragmented and assembled, in transubjectivity and subsubjectivity. Composite yet partial subjectivity produces, shares, and transmits assembled, im-pure, and diffracted objets a via conductible borderlinks. It treasures the psychic capacity for differentiation-in-coemergence and separation-in-jointness, where distance-in-proximity is continuously reattuned. I(s) and non-I(s) interlace their borderlinks in metramorphosis, created by, and further creating— together with, and by matrixial affects—relations-without-relating on the borders of presence and absence, subject and object, among several subjects and partial subjects, between several partial subjects and ­transubjective-objects, and between me and the stranger. Carried on these transubjective and subsubjective currents, the synergy among movement, touch, and vision seems pregnant with potential possibilities for psychic inscriptions. In the matrixial late prenatal period, where the fluctuations of lightness and darkness accompany a touching-in-separating movement within the shadowy, palpable world ­ of visible and invisible, presubject and preobject intersect and imprint poïetic archaic traces in a web which is plural-several from the outset, and this process involves imprinting of and being imprinted by a preother, the archaic non-I—m/Other. Matrixial awareness is embedded and announced in human beings via the mother-to-be’s potentiality for transubjective inscription—via her capacity for elaboration of joint traces12 of I and non-I, and of a joint voyage, ramified between inside and outside and diffracted between I and non-I, between different partial subjects and partial objects. This voyage and this inscription compose what I call a copoïetic13 metramorphosis which registers affected, shared-in-difference trauma and

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jouissance as ontogenetic memory. Knowledge of/from this sphere is transferred to subjectivity-as-encounter with-in, to, and from jouissance, trauma, and borderlinking itself, ‘feminine’ inasmuch as related to contact with female bodily specificity. The feminine has to be understood here as a field of desire from which jouissance and trauma have not been totally evaporated. The sphere where this is inscribed as psychic potentiality makes possible a sublimation of feminine swerve and borderlinking. If metramorphosis is a way of contacting the non-I based upon contacting the archaic m/Other, this has implications for both male and female infants. In aesthetic-artistic and transferential copoïesis, a metramorphic transcription of encounter occurs. Such a cross-inscription concerns artists and viewers facing the artwork in different times and spaces, in action and reaction. Engravings of affected events of others and of the world are unknowingly inscribed in me, and mine are inscribed in others, known or anonymous, in an asymmetrical exchange that creates and transforms a transubjective matrixial alliance. Matrixial memory of event, paradoxically both in/of oblivion and indelible, a memory charged with a freight that a linear story cannot transmit, is transmitted and c­ ross-inscribed. This memory carries dispersed signifiers that come to be elaborated in intersubjective relations. It carries affects as sense-carriers for erotic aerials, com-passioning and languishing. It is not the story, inscribed for reminiscences, that I carry in place of non-I. Yet matrixial memory silently speaks. Fragmented traces of the event’s complexity compose a fractured and diffracted unforgettable memory of oblivion that cannot be entirely inscribed in either me or others but only transcribed and also engraved in artwork. Thus, in a transubjective and subsubjective primary differentiation, elements coemerge, coinhabit a joint space and cofade. I and n ­onI ‘grains’ share a borderspace. They discern without cognizing each other via conductible borderlinks, and so exchange diffused matrixial affects and pathic information, addressing one another in the course of the fluctuations of a distance-in-proximity and of cross-scribing traces. A matrixial encounter engenders traces in several partners conjointly but differently, and it engenders nonconscious readjustments of their connectivity. The matrixial awareness of ‘my’ extimate non-I, by way of her emotional tones, transitive phantasm and joint trauma, contributes to the non-I’s emerging affects and phantasms and to the ­fading-in-transformation of ‘her’ traces, and a further sharing of all this contributes to further transformations in us both.

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The severality of this encounter issues from the m/Other’s desire that is itself already involved in earlier and other matrixial circles but also in phallic bonds. Thus, the matrixial borderspace is created both by the present encounter that operates on the level of trauma and phantasm, by events concerning the non-I’s other matrixial events and encounters (Thing-encounters and Thing-events), and by nonconscious connections inherited from a symbolic Other that is enlarged by a subsymbolic grid. The m/Other’s desire as of a several-subjectivity, as an assembled ‘speak/through-being’ (parl’être),14 is already a networked desire, composed but not fused with phallic desire. In the Matrix, traces of encounter-events are distilled, and they weave a textured fabric that interlaces so that links in-between the grains report and transfer themselves. This matrixial transubjectivity and subsubjectivity can be seen from a phallic angle, simultaneously, as relations between ‘entire’ subjects engaged in object relations, but it seems to me that the ‘woman’ intended by the late Lacan, when described as an in-between entity in relation to ‘impossible’ sexual rapport, can find a place of her own in the matrixial borderspace: [T]he between involved in sexual rapport but displaced and precisely Other-imposed. To Other-impose, and it is curious that in imposing this Other, what I advanced today concerns only the woman. And it is she who, in this figure of the Other, gives us an illustration within our reach to be, as a poet has written, ‘between centre and absence’, between the meaning she takes from what I have called the at-least-one, between the centre as pure existence or jouis-presence and absence […] which I could not write but to define as ‘Not-all’, that which is not included in the phallic function, yet which is not its negation […] absence which is no less jouissance than being jouis-absence. (Lacan 2011 [1971–2]: 120–1, my translation)

If, for Lacan, the woman is Other even when she is between centre and nothing, in the Matrix she is a border-Other, a becoming in-ter-with the Other, never a radical alterity. It is in separating-in-jointness that trauma can meet desire, a meeting that allows for this im-pure becoming ­in-between. In the phallic paradigm, the archaic ‘nothing’ or ‘absence’ arises from the mechanism of castration (and the theorists’ silence) operating on the elusive feminine/prebirth incestual rapport; from the foreclosure of (and of the question of) intrauterine linkage. But the archaic ‘centre’ is precisely the site of such another feminine rapport, linked to its jouissance and trauma as a presence that for adult man would be a

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psychotic regression. Beyond the originary feminine/prenatal real stage, if ‘man’ or the phallic subject is either at the centre of such a rapport— and then also inside psychosis—or cut away from it and in the arms of the law (the Name of the Father) that structures desire as masculine and ‘woman’ as its objet a, for ‘woman’ or the matrixial subjectivity there are ­ in-between instants that do not enter the either/or oppositions the Phallus represents (including the pair: repression/foreclosure), but instead move within the economy of ‘and’/‘and’ in severality. The in-between instants of the matrixial sphere are in this way paradoxical and also frightening, but they also structure ‘any first encounter with sexual rapport’ (Lacan 1973–4: 19 February 1974) as an aesthetic moment of ‘revelation’ (Lacan 1961–2: May 1962), wonder, and languishing. The basis in the Real of this model should not mislead us into fixing the matrixial encounter in biological nature, just as the phallic structure does not represent the corporeal male genital organ and ‘castration’ does not represent the actual loss of the real male organ. The womb stands here for a dynamic borderspace of active/passive coemergence with-in and with-out the unknown other. We must beware of understanding the archaic m/Other-to-be, in her links to the Thing—a link which undergoes fading-by-transformation—as simply the mother-as-body, and we must beware of understanding the womb as a phallic part object, just as the originary archaic father is not the actual father. Likewise, Lacan’s raising of the ‘woman’ to the level of the Thing in art via sublimation does not designate a regressive step to the phallic realm nor, in the matrixial field, a real returning to the womb. ‘Woman’ is not confined to the contours of the one-body with its inside versus outside polarity, and prenatal contact with a female body refers to both sexes. A matrixial covenant is not only created in contingency, but also dissolved in a relational, relative, and partial way. We are thus provided with a supplementary perspective on out-inner (extimate) intrasubjective events, but also with a display of in-outer transubjective events: of interiority that occurs outside the sole self. The centre of gravity moves from symbols and representations to connectional transformations via metramorphosis that connect several individuals. Metramorphosis is then an out-of-focus passageway com-posed of transgressive borderlinks, which cotransform differently the partial subjects and the hybrid objects, and of slippery borderlines that are becoming thresholds for transgression between ­‘subject’-ive and ‘object’-ive elements. A slight but primary awareness of the matrixial objet a and borderlink seeps into subjectivity without their

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splitting away completely from the I and non-I and without their cutting away completely the links between I and non-I. And so, an active and retroactive matrixial making-sense is possible, in which subject is not opposed to object, transgression becomes ontogenetic meaning, and meaning becomes a transgression in severality. The transcription of intimate yet anonymous encounters of partial subjects is a transgression which transforms the frontier itself between I and non-I. This concerns artists and viewers facing the painting in different ways, times, and sites. I and non-I perceive/conduct/produce grains of our- and ­others-selves within a web that lurks in wait for the glittering crumbs of the gaze, so that something of the ‘impossible’ rapport of ‘­and’-‘and’, of becoming in-ter-with-the-Other, interlaces several subjects. The phallic-Symbolic cannot appropriate the meaning of this web entirely; instead, the Symbolic itself must be transformed to accommodate traces of the beyond-the-phallic sphere arising in the artwork. Here the matrixial objet a appears and yet the subject does not completely fade away. ‘Woman’ is neither object as the embodiment of the price of culture, nor phantasmatic ‘objet’ (cause of desire), nor subject as phallic and absent to herself. Opening a with-in/with-out space, metramorphosis induces instances of coemergence of meaning by t­ransformation-through-transgression and instances of repression by fading-in-transformation. With each inversion of inside-outside, the antenna-gaze carries heterogeneity, as a conductible borderlink which transmits, diffracts, and diffuses elements of trauma, phantasm, affect, and information within the psychic joint space. With each exchange additional traces are inscribed and new trails added, what turns mutuality into heterogenesis and lack of equivalence.15 The notpurely phantasmatic matrixial web of severality includes remnants of jouissance and trauma: imprints of whoever was there, as subknowledge that is not just traces of lack but also trails of what is beyond and yet interwith-in me. The in-out-side borderlink that interlaces relations between I and non-I is hereby abstracted in the connection to female bodily specificity to enlarge the Symbolic. A certain awareness of a borderspace shared with an intimate stranger in a singular and partial severality and of a coemergence-in-difference with that stranger displays a psychic dimension where inscriptions of shared but singular experiences re-evoke archaic phantasms linked to the female invisible bodily specificity; but this awareness does not ‘belong’ to women only—and not only because

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we all carry a unique set of matrixial traces in the Real, but also because the Matrix makes sense and infuses the Symbolic. In the Phallus, her ‘lack’ in the Real inscribes ‘nothing’ and inspires imaginary horror. But if female bodily specificity accesses the Symbolic’s margins, beyond/before the separating line of Oedipus, beyond/before the threshold of language, then, paradoxical as it may be, the matrixial links knit and index a with-in-visible psychic screen in which the question of art arises anew, and it is the diffracted, transmitted, and redistributed im-pure matrixial gaze that creates/exposes this matrixial screen itself, from which it also dislocates and to which it also returns. From this perspective, we can begin to understand Lacan’s phallic gaze as a phantasmatic relic of a split from a primary libidinal aggregate that knitted the phenomenological presubject and preobject together with the partial drive. The phallic gaze is the invisible understood now as the inside of the visible’s shell, stripped of its charge as a partial drive, which had been dropped from the subject in the castration process, and which from the beginning represented, in some sense, an outside captured within. And just as the fabric and its lining are not perceived from the same point of view, there is a schism between my eye and the gaze of the Other. The phallic gaze and the subject are on opposed sides of the screen of phantasy: something of the gaze is cast upon the screen of phantasy when the subject is suspended; and if something of me appears on the screen, then it appears to my eyes as a stain from which the gaze had been faded out. Since we understand the screen not as an optical perception but as a libidinal phenomenon, and since projection on the screen is not of an empirical object but of a gaze-cause-of-the-desire that is a leftover of an archaic split and a surplus of an archaic jouissance, we may now also suggest another gaze and a matrixial p ­ roductive-conductive projection of the gaze, in connection with the archaic t­rauma-jouissance, where the feminine-Other subjectivizing waves vibrate from the screen: a gaze that is not-yet and no-more a ‘nothing,’ for it is more a link than an object, and it is affected and spread inter-with-in several elements. Such a gaze transforms the qualities of the screen itself. Under the phallic gaze, there is an impossibility of sharing trauma and phantasy. Under the matrixial gaze, to a certain extent, there is an impossibility of not sharing them. The fragments of a matrixial gaze, which are lost for one partial subject while inscribed by another partial subject, may be later on transferred to the ‘first’ one, slightly transformed, and also

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to yet another partial subject, to a new partner with whom the I will form another matrixial alliance. From one matrixial relation to another, passing through different partial subjects beyond the present in space or time, a non-I may become, beyond present-ability, an indirect witness to the trauma of the other. To borrow Lacan’s description of the subject as a Moebius strip, we can describe the movement of the erotic scopic antennae of the psyche via artwork as a curl or loop whose upside is originally inseparable from its flipside, as in this twisting one-surface. But as you are sliding along it you are being transformed by the same move, and the gaze is transformed in relation to your—and to another’s—transformation, because the objet a is now a borderlink, separating-in-jointness within transubjectivity. The double tour (trajectory of the drive) does not end at its ‘beginning’ (is not autoerotic), and this beginning is not the cut from the gaze (split between jouissance and lost objet a). Even the m/Other is not a beginning, and the ‘fabric’ is not an undifferentiated fusion. Likewise, the viewer who looks at the tableau is double-swerved by a gaze which from within the tableau activates one’s own scopic erotic antennae, and is carried by the vector of the erotic transubjective curl. Sliding and double-turning along such a strip, the viewer is made fragile by the artist’s traumatic contact in whose effect the viewer is caught so that new paths open for the viewer, through which to contact the trauma of the Other and the tragedy of the world. The end point of the sliding is not the artist’s initial traumatic encounter but your future opening (as a viewer) to another outside by unfolding your inside. In the passage from the phallic gaze to the matrixial gaze we are leaving the zone of desire of a ‘pure’ subject for a ‘pure’ object, caused by a missing objet a, and moving away from the question of ‘pure’ phantasm into a sphere where desire is for borderlinking, where the ‘object of desire’ is not an object but a process in a phantasm whose folded invisibility is a traumatic encounter.

VI [I]t is necessary that […] we be some for the others a system of For Itselfs, sensitive to one another, such that the one knows the other not only in what he suffers from him, but more generally as a witness […] because he is not a pure gaze on pure being any more than I am. (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 81–2)

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For Merleau-Ponty, vision—with its connection between the visible and the invisible, like a reversible glove or like a fabric and its hidden lining—involves, as we have seen, not only the question of the subject’s origin within the world but also that of its synergetic relations with and for the Other. This connection is also an emblem for painting: ‘The drawing [and] the painting […] are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of sensing [le sentir] makes possible’ (1964a: 126). When Lacan borrows once more the image of a glove in 1975 to deal with literary writing in relation to ‘woman’ and sinthome, he does so eleven years after his formulation of the gaze. If we return now to his view in 1964 of a mostly phallic and rarely symbiotic gaze and its paradoxical screen, in the retroactive light of Lacan’s late theory that we have hereby established, it seems to me that matrixial gaze and screen may join them as a third possibility, supported by a certain reading of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Lacan asks: What occurs as these strokes, which go to make up the miracle of the picture, fall like rain from the painter’s brush is not choice, but something else.[…] If a bird were to paint would it not be by letting fall its feathers, a snake by casting off its scales, a tree by letting fall all its leaves? What it amounts to is the first act in the laying down of the gaze. A sovereign act, no doubt. (1973a [1964]: 114)

For Lacan the gaze as a lack is the rear borderline of the painter’s stroke; it is on the border of the Real, as it had touched the Thing inside the vacuole. For Merleau-Ponty ‘The painter lives in fascination.[…] Inevitably the roles between the painter and the visible switch. That is why so many painters have said that things look at them’ (1964a: 129). The Thing touched by the archaic gaze is the psychoanalytical equivalent of the phenomenological body that Merleau-Ponty called ‘the flesh of the world’: a psychic echo of an entity that precedes the bifurcated separation into subject and object. According to Merleau-Ponty, in the pre-subjective and pre-objective Things, outside finds incorporation in the inside, inside in the outside, and self in the world. The biological body becomes human when, from the inhuman, intersections and interactions are formed between sensing and sensed, touching and touched, seeing and seen, invisible and visible. The phenomenological body is not split from the outset into a visible object and seeing subject.

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The visible—preobject—is imprinted in the process of the emergence of the subject, and the seer—presubject—participates in determining the emergence of the object. [T]he body sensed and the body sentient are as the obverse and the reverse, or again, as two segments of one sole single circular course […] but which is but one sole movement in its two phases.[…] [I]t incorporates into itself the whole of the sensible and with the same movement incorporates itself into a ‘Sensible in itself’. (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 138)

The ‘sensible’s pulp’, according to Merleau-Ponty, is this union of inside and outside; it is the ‘profound, thick contact’ of things in/by themselves; it is a double incorporation and reversibility: an outside inside and an inside outside (1968: 179). The indivisibility of seeing that Lacan calls Voyure is a dimension in the general register of the indivisibility of sensing in the primordial nonconscious space that for Merleau-Ponty contains intersections prior to, yet together with, separations. ‘Once this strange system of exchanges is given, we find before us all the problems of painting’ says Merleau-Ponty (1964a: 125), and ‘[m]y body as visible thing is contained in the big spectacle’ (1964b: 138). His emphasis on the field of vision makes it possible for Lacan to stress the severance and thus provides a convenient format for a model of the gaze as phallic and lacking, since seeing, even for Merleau-Ponty, is an ‘action at a distance’ (1964a: 131). But the span of tangibility, which Merleau-Ponty rejects as an aesthetic field and believes is not applicable to painting (131), may still serve us to revise our conception of the gaze, moving it, when interwoven with the span of movement, toward a ‘screen of mediation’, which would not be symbiotic in the sense that Lacan understood Merleau-Ponty to mean it. Lacan understands the model of the symbiotic gaze, the screen, and their reversibility (evoked by Merleau-Ponty) as nondifferentiation between me and the other, or as insignificant: it is insufficient for signifying. The matrixial gaze, on the contrary, is inspired by reversibility’s other aspects: fission and segregation, exchange and intersection, transgression and transitivity. MerleauPonty explicitly addressed the process of ‘dehiscence’ which I understand as the self splitting-apart from the inside of the shell. In the matrixial context, dehiscence indicates a continual development that leaves symbiosis slowly behind, while even symbiosis is not ‘symbiotic’ in the sense of a confusion between inside and outside or nondifferentiation.

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In understanding symbiosis only as fusion and confusion in the ‘textile’s bubble,’ Lacan in a sense predetermined the emergence of its binary alternative in the postnatal subject—his or her alienation from the Other by the gaze. But once we reconsider the early matrixial sphere as already ­differentiating-in-jointness and involving a knowledge of the Other by copoïetic swerve and borderlinking, the later stage can take less reactionary shapes; in the field of painting, the act of looking becomes a ‘stroking’ from with-in-out, for both painter and viewer. Each stroke, each mark, registers an archaic partiality not lost to a w/hole but moving into and opening further an affected borderspace where it meets another stroke that is its limit and its ground. For the painter working in a matrixial frame, things look from the inside dispersed outside and from the outside diffracted within, and the painter joins and assembles the gaze by fragilizing herself. For such a matrixial gaze, it is the synergy between touch, movement, and vision which seems pregnant with aesthetic potentiality, and the metaphor of a ‘hole’ yields to that of a hollowed space and a transforming fold: ‘the spectacle perceived does not partake of pure being.[…] I am not, therefore, in Hegel’s phrase, “a hole in being”, but a hollow [creux], a fold [pli], which has been made and which can be unmade’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 249–50). Via my terms swerve and borderlinking, hollowed space and fold move from the field of perception to that of affection. The affected synergetic move/touch-and-gaze is a supplementary kind of (a) inasmuch as move/touch-and-gaze implies an archaic link. This synergy informs further connections expressed in later modes of communicating with and investing libidinally in new subjects and later trajectories of the drive toward new affected objects. If the post- and the pre-Oedipal phallic gaze banishes ‘woman’ as subject in art and proposes itself in ‘her’ place or marks her as its object, the matrixial gaze restores ‘woman’ to a special kind of wandering entity as a link with-in several subjects, as assembled object for fragmented and severalized subjectivity, and as an affected conductible mediation. The painting we make and the painting in which we take part as viewers is not only the gaze approaching us, but it is what metramorphoses us into subsubjects in a transubjectivity larger than our separate one-selves. The Matrix in-forms the subtle, slight transformations which the I inflicts on the unknown non-I as an Other-as-a-partial-object, and participates in the particular rapport the I bears, and witnesses, toward the same unknown non-I as

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an ­Other-as-a-partial-subject during the process of painting. Waves circulate so that later coming other unknown non-I(s)—viewers—will also become, in one way or another, the subject’s partners and witnesses in the screen. They will experience a similar metramorphosis and will momentarily coemerge with the gaze that is interwoven in the painting. We are wit(h)nessing—witnessing and withnessing—the others: my withnessing in a ­Thing-encounter permits my witnessing the Thing-event of my non-I(s), which is, in fact, a witnessing without event.16 Such noncognitive wit(h)nessing transgresses the domain of aesthetics. I therefore believe that certain art today, from different fields and unclassified by formal means, is leading the transformation of the scope of art and aesthetics itself, in a bending toward an in-between borderspace between aesthetics and ethics, where I become fragile to/for the Other who is, as Emmanuel Levinas has suggested, a trauma to me. Art evokes new instances of transubjectivity that embrace and produce new partial subjects and makes almost-impossible new borderlinking available, out of elements and links already available partially and in crumbs. These are going to be transformed in ways that cannot be thought of prior to artworking itself, on the way to shifting with-in-to the screen of vision inside the painting. In my view, in art today, trauma no less than phantasm determines the trajectory of what is, out of art, a forever no-time and no-place. Art links the time of t­oo-early to the time of too-late and plants them in the world’s matrixial time. Metramorphosing through a traumatic Thing-encounter and T ­ hing-event extracts times of too-early and too-late out of indifference and onto/within-visibility within-difference, so that new affects wake up archaic ones and conjointly offer the wit(h)ness-Thing its first apparition. The artwork processes a memory of oblivion that cannot be otherwise processed. From art and back into the world, aesthetic but also ethical, thus is the transform-ability of the no-time of archaic encounter, when transferred between several I(s) and non-I(s) in coemergence and cofading. By metramorphosis, the artist bears wit(h)ness: transmits traumatic elements and articulates subknowledge of/from self encountering the m/Other-Thing-Event. The painting exposes instances of cobirthing and cofading as a gaze in which some excess that surpasses the artist as subject is suddenly distinguished in the artist’s matrixial borderspace. What is captured and given form at the end of the painting’s trajectory is what was waiting for an almost-impossible articulation in a matrixial ­time-space of suspension-anticipation. Thus, dynamics which index a

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feminine sexual difference in the Real make their revelations at the same instant that their elements become shareable via artwork. In this experience, the gaze is not split and yet not fused with the eye, but rather, grasped as the eroticized aerial of the psyche. The gaze is saturated with primary distribution of energies that correspond to a rotating swerve, with traces of archaic jouissance whose resonance is striving for apparition. Traces of vibrations and resonances are incarnated in painting beyond-as-inside the visible. In the act of painting, the gaze moves between several archaic as well as potential participants, attracts and disjoints potential viewers so that they become partial within subjectivity-as-encounter. The artist’s view is transformed in its difference from the viewers’ transformations. Having trespassed its eye and met with the eye of the world, the gaze offered by the artist is vibrated in its wanderings, so as to awaken new swerves and roll new borderlinking. The matrixial gaze is rediffracted by each affected eye onto a potentially jointby-several erotic screen of vision. Wallowing within a shared and floating eye, the gaze rediffracts at the moment of its rolling-in. Something—but not all—of this act and its affects is transported into and conducted via the artwork, thus transforming in turn the point of view of the viewer in its difference from, yet in relation to, the nonconscious swerves and borderlinking of the artist, who captures/produces/conducts ideas, traumas and phantasms only inasmuch as the artist is also affected by the trauma of the m/Other, the trauma of others and of the world. The symbolic world which opens up to us is thus suffused with meanings created on a matrixial level. The form and aesthetics of continual readjustments accompanied by matrixial affects accompany us from the dawn of life and are traced in the psyche by primitive modes of experience/organization which are tuned to perceive and elaborate reattuning of connectivity emerging from a web of fine-grained elements. Differences of degrees within an ongoing and changing affective and sensorial ‘noise’, which never attain a unified zero level, nor a unified One level because of its shareability, make sense. In the Matrix, the emergence of meaning is not directly related to absence or even to the rhythmic movement of presence and absence of the object, but to the subjective retuning in shareability. With symbolic approximations of matrixial threads between trauma and phantasm, ‘feminine’ swerve and borderlinking, as I shall hint below, may open up cultural and political spaces and point at the ways that art ‘works’ for rethinking the historical and social subject.

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VII The matrixial gaze passes from an uncognized grain to uncognized others and between the generations, as a partial mark that is c­o-carried, conducted and conducting, transmitting and transmitted onward in diffraction. Fractions of the gaze will glint at one participant, other fractions will be received by another, and also in-between alongside the threads of the web. It is impossible to encompass the gaze from all sides, and also, the gaze cannot encompass you completely. It does not dwell ‘entirely’ in any one of the subjects; it never was a wholeness and also never will be, but also it never was ‘nothing’ and will not become nothing even with the perishing of one of the grains that store some of its sparkles. When metramorphosis is a route through which the artist and the viewer coemerge in various unique ways into-gathering with the work, aesthetic objects are copoïetically linked in transubjectivity, and by that process they become not objects to look at or listen to but what, after Winnicott’s subjective-objects, we can name ­transitive-subjective-objects, which participate in the act of creating what will ­look-at-and-touch-and-move us in a gaze-activity which is not a control but a bringing into being-together, and in a passivity which is not a subjugation but a giving that allows for an exposure of wit(h)nessing. It is not only a remnant, exposed in the present, of subjacent past relations-without-relating but also a glimpse of the forever future to be created in the now that reflects a desire not for an object but for the act of borderlinking itself. The grains are entwined in the pageant of severality with no central control. No particular separate grain will have the control over the gaze, nor will any of them suffer its absolute loss. No partial subject dominates the matrixial rapport or determines alone the screen, but also, no partial subject is a passive partner to an event that floods it from the outside. Each partial subject is corresponsible and a wit(h)ness. If the matrixial gaze conducts traces of ‘events without witnesses’ and passes them on to witnesses who were not there,16 it leads us to discover our part of co-response-ability in the events whose source is not ‘inside’ the One-self: for it prompts us to join in, and be aware of joining in, the traumatic events of others. I am under the gaze of the Other at the same time that I/non-I am cofading-with-out and coemerging-with-in I­ / non-I. The assembled eye multifocalizes the gaze-and-touch-and-move while being ‘severalized’ by it. Art that is an overture to transformation

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and transmission, fragmentation and severalization, dispersal and sharing of the already joint and several, offers an attuning to others in passages other than phallic. Fragments of the unfamiliar other turn into grains that continue being familiar within the encounter. The fluidity of the experience is inscribed in aerials that register what returns from the Other as traces and transmit a centerless or multi-(several, not infinite-)centred ­gaze-and-touch-and-move. Asymmetrical reciprocal relations are shared, possessing different re(a)sonating minimal sense. Linked by metramorphosis, each grain relates to another and conducts shared proceedings with it, without exhausting cognition and understanding. In other words, I and the others will arise and dissolve together but not in the same mode nor in the same sense. Something of the Thing partly perishes in its diffraction among the several, and something of it is also unconsciously present among them in different degrees; something that has fallen away from the one passes to several others; something of one matrixial web also passes to other matrixial webs, since each grain is a partner in several webs. My painting and the one I look at carry the rays of the phallic gaze, the extensions of the symbiotic one, and the aerials of the matrixial gaze. The phallic gaze excites us while threatening to annihilate us in its emergence on the screen; the symbiotic gaze invites us to sink inside it while threatening to annihilate us together with the screen. The matrixial gaze thrills us while fragmenting, scattering, and joining grains together and turning us into witnesses; it enchants us while reducing us into particles participating in a drama wider than our individual selves. It is extricated from a feminine field that extends into our trauma and phantasm with-in the foreigner, and it threatens to partially extract its presence via dispersion and diffraction, whether we wish for it or not. Painting realizes an encounter with trauma that is affectively shared. The tableau that enacts what is otherwise an almost-impossible rapport (connection) between trauma and phantasm, I and non-I, unfolds the passage onto a matrixial screen of vision of interwoven psychic imprints, traces, and waves, from what is otherwise either irremediably lost (‘too late’), or a potentiality, not-yet-born (‘too early’). The artist captures, produces, and redistributes, by event, procedure, or object, a phantasm filtered inside trauma to appear as its trace, and this assemblage is neither private nor individual. Artists are imprinted by, operate on and produce traces of the trauma of the world and of others in a sphere which, within

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the artist, is from the outset transgressive. Art thus involves us in ongoing, co-wit(h)nessing metramorphoses: archaic psychic matrixial borderspaces and metramorphic borderlinks between partial and shared subjectivity and transubjective-objects open aesthetic channels for transmissions, exchange, and inscriptions via artworks; acts of artworking then offer this archaic sphere the means for seizing itself and, from it, for seizing these processes and their effects in other—social and cultural—human spheres. Acknowledgements   I would like to thank Laura Doyle for her comments and advice on this chapter. Translations from the French of quotes by J. A. Miller, D. Anzieu and J. Lacan (except for quotations from The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis) are by the author alone or with Joseph Simas. The Seminars Ettinger had to translate were not translated to English at the time of the first publication of this article.

Notes





1.  In his 1920 essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud describes a child’s game with a wooden reel. The child accompanies the disappearance of the reel with the expression fort (‘gone’), and its reappearance with da (‘there’). This essay by Freud is the basis for a tremendous psychoanalytical literature concerning the idea of psychological loss, lack, absence, fluctuations of presence/absence, the other/mother as object, the objet of desire, and the play object (see Freud 1920). 2. The notions of matrixial borderspace and metramorphic borderlinks first appeared in my notebook’s writing on painting in a non-conceptual manner (see Ettinger 1993c). 3. On subsymbolic elements and connectivity, see Smolensky (1988). 4.  On the aesthetic ‘Uncanny’ experience, affect, and anxiety, see Freud (1919). 5. The Symbolic that is presented as a universal structure holding all significance is phallic. It is structured like language by binary oppositions in which relations of exclusion resonate. For a criticism of Lacan’s ‘Phallogocentrism’, see Irigaray (1974). I have elaborated a criticism of the equation between the phallic and the Symbolic in ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, Chapter 1 and in ‘The Becoming Threshold of Matrixial Borderlines’, Chapter 2. 6. The dimension of intersubjectivity has gradually disappeared from Lacan’s thinking, and he expressed opposition to intersubjectivity when opting for ‘Drive theory’ against ‘Object Relations’ theory.

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7. The term sinthome relates to an ancient way to say ‘symptom’. In spoken French, we hear both symptom and saint homme, ‘a sacred man’, and, for Lacan, in English we also hear sin-man. With this term Lacan refers to a psychotic-like holding-together of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, exemplified by James Joyce as a writer. 8. When, on the other hand, Freud dealt with ‘sublimation’ where the artistic experience is based on the castration anxiety only, women’s capacities in the realms of art and culture were inferior, as a function of her positioning in relation to castration anxiety in the Oedipus complex. 9. The followers of Freud did not develop his sporadic remarks about the fantasy and the complex of intrauterine existence into a different meaning. Meanwhile, the fantasy and the complex of ‘castration’ received majestic treatment, ennobled with variegated implications, all leading harmoniously to the creation of one sovereign phallic-Symbolic and one kind of male sexual difference. 10. The matter of the womb first appears in Freud’s theory in 1908, in ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’, but it is later excluded from the question of sexuality (Freud 1908). I have treated this matter in detail (along with further references to Freud) in Ettinger 1997a. Lacan warns again and again over the years that psychoanalysts should not elaborate this subject at all. 11. The touch is not included in the list of Lacan’s objets a, just as the skin is not a body orifice like the mouth, the eye, etc. On the question of the relation between the touch, the partial-drives, and the libidinal investments, see Anzieu (1985). 12. Bion elaborates on the maternal capacity for assuming, digesting, and giving meaning to the infant’s early (postnatal) experience, while Winnicott, Laing, and Dolto emphasize the capacity of the prenatal infant in the last period of pregnancy to form phantasies. 13. I termed ‘copoiesis’ after Maturana and Varela’s ‘autopoiesis’ (1980). 14. In French, parl’être evokes ‘a being by the spoken’, ­‘speak/through-being’, ‘by-being’, speaking-being and ‘speak-being’, as well as (phonetically) ‘by the letter’ and ‘speak by letter’. 15. Heterogenesis and lack of equivalence do not imply lack of equality of rights. 16.  Here I am reversing Laub’s formulation in Felman and Laub 1992: 75–92).

CHAPTER 6

THE RED COW EFFECT: The Metramorphosis of Hallowing the Hollow and Hollowing the Hallow ([1995] 1996)

This essay was presented in parts at the conferences: Beautiful Translation, Tate Gallery, 1/V795; Feminism & the Aesthetics of Difference, Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, 8/ IX/95; Modernism, Difference & Place, Falmouth College of Arts, 9/ TX/95, and a version was printed in Beautiful Translations—Act 2, London: Pluto, 1996. It was republished in Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiear (eds.), He Said, She Said (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001): 57–88.

EDITOR’S PREFACE This text shares with Chapter 2 an investigation into the feminine and the Divine in and with a Judaic text and the Hebrew language to trace what Derrida, familiar with both, defined as différance: the differing and deferring process in language that undoes fixity of meaning and the apparent unity of signifier and signified. Not on the linguistic plane alone, Bracha L. Ettinger will wander across the fields of psychoanalyti­cal `theories of subjectivity, jouissance, death-drive and sacrifice to uncover, in an enigmatic © The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_7

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ritual and the phrase mei niddah both a matrixial ­feminine-maternal dimension and metramorphic processes already impressed into cultural memory and social-religious practice in an archaic but richly symbolic ritual. The preservation of these processes in a biblical text may represent an archaic, pre-patriarchal universe of symbolic meaning treasured still. More importantly, they register another logic that surprises the phallic, the latter being premised on splitting and separating. The key lies for Ettinger in the Hebrew root of the word niddah (NDH) that opens onto wandering, vacillating, moving, shifting as well as to women’s cycles—namely bodily changes and transformations—because of which the female body was considered ritually impure.1 These enable Ettinger to propose a mobility and a transitivity, which, to the phallic logic, appear only as transgressive of borders, limits, subjects but which, in matrixial processes, enable creative and transformative transubjectivity and subjectivity-as-encounter. In the present chapter, these touch the notions of the holy and the divine and the difficult territory of the ethical relation to the dead, treated in the last section of the chapter via the classical tragedy of Antigone. Ettinger’s work with a Hebraic laid over a Classical Greek store of myth, narrative and words serves to trace— what I might name in deconstructionist terms—a sexual différance that is revealed by Ettinger as a matrixial process of making sense that does not merely undo borders, limits, oppositions and fixities. As well it offers their paradoxical coexistence in a sense-making mechanism with its new symbolic meanings and a symbolic realm. Ettinger draws, therefore, on a curious and archaic ritual recorded in the biblical book of Numbers concerning a Red Cow. She will argue: The Red Cow Effect is a metramorphosis in the register of sacrifice, where, I suggest, the im-pure is exposed as a specific category for hybridized incompatible composites, to be differentiated from the phallic opposition of impure/defiled versus pure….No pure presence, no pure absence, no pure schism, and their price to pay, but transmissions and transgressions, im-purity and hybridization, fragmentation, partialization and pluralization, and their special price to pay. (p. 315)

The ground for this foray into ritual, sacrifice and subjectivity is a turn, shared between psychoanalysis and anthropology, to the mythic and to archaic religious rituals which are at the same time both linguistic and narrative. Taking the most puzzling and archaic of sacrifices—retained as

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part of the rituals of the ancient Judaic cult often without understanding of its originating significance—that performed an exceptional sacrifice of a mature female animal, a red-haired cow, Ettinger produces another way to approach and grasp her proposal of a matrixial stratum of subjectivity. Mary Douglas’s classic study from social anthropology of taboo and transgression as foundations of social ordering, Purity and Danger (1966), is a shared reference point with Julia Kristeva’s essay on abjection (The Powers of Horror 1982) and her study of The Feminine and the Sacred (2003), as well as Judith Butler on gender (Gender Trouble 1990). All show the socially and subjectively constitutive effects of boundaries, limits, borders, expulsions, and the sacrifices demanded by society. Only Ettinger draws from this kind of re-reading of archaic narratives a figure that can supplement and shift the dominance of binary thinking. The ­ meta-psychoanalytical study of religious thought, practice and its imaginaries, therefore, sees its foundations and psychical resources in the crucible of human subjective formation in living, social experience: in those radicalizing processes that turn speechless animals (infans) into sexed, speaking, and jouissant ­ social-human subjects, experiencing themselves within a cultural or social group. These processes are both ‘intra-psychic’ and relational, forming a series of situational complexes, whose powerful intensities imprint and unconsciously determine the very creativity and capacities that define human possibility. Hence what we believe, whether projectively or on the basis of our absolute convictions, matters a great deal, as this mirrors back to the collectivity of human subjects that form communities certain persistent and effective self and other understandings, freighted with the emotional and conceptual forces of intense necessity and ‘drama.’ Any subject must sacrifice some of its jouissance to have access to the Symbolic. Lacan defined what is sacrificed as objet a. For Lacan and the phallic system, Woman is the objet a of the masculine subject and the infant is woman’s objet a. There is always a price to pay for us to become sexed, speaking human subjects. For Lacan, Woman is sacrificed to become the unsignifiable Other-Thing for the phallic law. Through metramorphosis and the hypothesis of the matrixial supplementary stratum, available to both men and women subjects, irrespective of gender or sexual orientation, Ettinger argues, however, that there is another kind of sacrifice of which the Red Cow is her emblem because it poses ways of making sense of self and of self with an-other, relationality, beyond the phallic paradigm of either/

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or. A metramorphosis Ettinger suggests in this chapter holds together paradoxically the opposing terms relating to the sacred: purity and impurity, in a dynamic process where paradoxical im-purity is necessary: hallowing and hollowing, reaching into the realms of nature, ecologies and art. The feminine im-pure sacred zone cannot be categorized under etiher purity or impurity. To arrive at this elaboration, Ettinger has to re-travel the Freudian and Lacanian arguments about sexual difference, or rather its absence in psychoanalysis which posits in effect only one sexual organ as a support of one symbolic signifier, on the basis of which (a) there is only one sex and (b) any transgression of the slash/that sustains the opposition plus/minus, presence/ absence is dangerous or senseless. Once she has established this normative field in detail and has critiqued the way in which masculinity defines narcissism, she returns to what is ‘treasured’ in this Hebraic text, with its hidden verbal roots. She reveals a mode of thinking there that is not terrorized by the ‘wandering’, the vacillating, the transgressing of borders or the natural horizons before birth and after living, and menstruation. Hence the Red Cow at one level shifts the pure/impure, alive/dead poles as im-pure or unsettling and offers a paradigm to rethink the coexistence of paradoxical tendencies: No pure presence, no pure absence, no pure schism, and their price to pay, but transmissions and transgressions, im-purity and hybridization, fragmentation, partialization and pluralization, and their special price to pay. (p. 315)

This opens a new perspective on Ettinger’s definition of the matrixial stratum of subjectivity as subjectivity-as-encounter, a severalized capacity for transubjectivity bequeathed by its conditions of becoming in the pre-birth necessary and non-Oedipal incest indicated by feminine sexual specificity as always at least several, sharing between partial and unknown grains of subjects-to-be mutually transformed by their un-cognized encounter. Thus, this feminine event related to potentiality for maternality in the bodily Real is the basis for a principle or a dimension of human subjectivity creatively severalized at a shared borderspace. There is indeed a price—both personal and social—to pay for this borderlinking and sharing between unknown elements of irreducible otherness that are nonetheless co-affecting and co-emerging. ‘It is the impossibility of not sharing, once fragilized, the trauma of the unknown other, non-I, the impossibility of not processing something of the non-I while the other may be processing parts of me’.

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In her return to Hebrew, Ettinger shows that what was sacrificed in the translation from the ancient Hebrew to other languages is very similar to what was sacrificed by psychoanalysis and culture in structuring subjectivity itself: the femininity in the Divine and the Sacred, and the meaning of the necessary feminine passage in-between, and the keeping together of the hollow and the hallow. Thus we come first to the question of aesthetics where Ettinger defines a matrixial objet a and a-link and borderlink, a matrixial sublimation and a matrixial sublime, and relates them to her paintings from the series ‘Mamalangue’ and ‘Halala’. Then we arrive at the question of ethics—the relations to the other, alterity, which is what lies behind and finds form in the rituals and symbolic systems remote from us. Yet we participate in them by just becoming human through the complex formations of our psyches as speaking subjectivities. A few terms and ideas to which she will return in later chapters arise in this chapter already, such as ­‘witnessing-while-sharing’ that will become ‘wit(h)nessing’, ‘Thing-rapport’ ‘intra-subjective connectivity’, ‘by-passing-phallus sub-knowledge’, ‘composite Other-’ ‘woman’ and more. Ettinger writes: The objet a is designated as a holy, forbidden, and lost ‘sacrifice’ proffered as a self-offering to God or to the big Other, which marks out sublimational processes, indexes aesthetic objects and arouses the experience of the uncanny—as phallic … The location of femininity in psychoanalysis by means of the objet a as a foreign body involves us fatally with the question of the place of the migrant and exile as psychic reality, as social distress, as aesthetic experience and as ethical problem. An ‘and-and’ of incompatible elements becomes meaningful, I suggest, in a matrixial covenant of severality created in contingency and dissolved in a relational, relative, and partial way. Its dissolving is not a cutting but a non-symmetrical with-in-ter transformational co-fading, inscribed as metramorphosis. (p. 316)

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THE RED COW EFFECT: THE METRAMORPHOSIS OF HALLOWING THE HOLLOW AND HOLLOWING THE HALLOW ([1995] 1996) The register of extimacy is the register of sacrifice.

J. A. Miller

Introduction: Deference of Im-purity With-in-ter Hallowing and Hollowing My mother, they tell—it was before I was born—ran along the paths of the kibbutz one day and into the dining hall and cried out in panic: ‘A big red cow is chasing me!’ The comrades turned around, and something did really come in after her, but it was small—not big, and black— not red, and it was a turkey—not a cow. My mother did not know Hebrew then, but insisted on speaking it. The language she spoke was a mixture with vacillating doses of Polish and Hebrew, a ‘wandering’ language that changed from day to day and improved with distressing slowness. I could not return her words to her because they were temporary; they did not get stabilized in my memory, and also, she would not have recognized them; they were inventions, already forgotten. When I addressed her in Hebrew she would half-understand me, and when she addressed me in Hebrew, it would shame me. But also, she did not speak with me in her own mother-tongue, since in our home Polish was used only among the grown-ups, in order to speak about what had happened ‘over there’. While I was preparing this essay, I asked her: ‘So, tell me, in what language did you speak with me?’ She answered: ‘There wasn’t so much to talk with you; it didn’t matter so much, because you didn’t speak at all.’ She added: ‘I used to cry all night because I thought you were mentally retarded.’ I might have concluded from my experience with my wandering mamalangue that there is no touching a mother-tongue except through its translation into a father-tongue—but no! If in the phallic arena it represents a ‘nature’ that the father-tongue has to replace in its constituting order, and if the archaic mother is a phallic objet a (the

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object having a meaning or sense as absent), sacrificed by castration, and if ­ mother-tongue is a metaphor for an archaic feminine foreignness hidden in me and in others, a concealed ‘origin/source’ that is sacrificed by the subject in the passage to culture and is proffered as an offering to ‘the Other’ in artwork—then I would like to suggest that, in the matrixial borderspace, various tracks are opened toward and from a mamalangue, which was never a fixed origin anyway,2 and which forms lanes that are not a translation in terms of separation and substitution into another language but passageways of scattering and ­transmission-through-transformation. These lanes knit the mamalangue into a sub-symbolic, connectivist twilight web whose threads allow us a relative and partial coexistence with a foreign world and channel us toward the beauty and the pain of the different with no illusion of mastering it, banishing it, or assimilating it. The loss involved in this passage is an outcome not of tearing-splitting, substitution and replacement but of transformation and transmission, fragmentation and severalization, dispersal and sharing of the already joint and several. The symbol I chose for movement from the archaic uncanny expanse of joining with-in-ter the Other between life and death, between hallowing and hollowing and on-to the art-work, and from art to writing—art as between art and theory—is what I term ‘the Red Cow Effect’. This effect is a metramorphosis composed of a cross-breed of this little story with the biblical ritual of the ‘Red Cow’—a sin-offering that, like any sacrifice, serves as a symbol for connection between man and God but which must, unlike other sacrifices, be female. The biblical command for this ritual is to dilute the red cow’s ashes in water and spray it on the defiled for purification. In Judaism, the Red Cow is considered a paradoxical enigma because of its two-faced function: it both profanes or defiles the pure and purifies the defiled. Commenting on anthropologist Mary Douglas’s book Purity and Danger, Judith Butler argues that although Douglas shows how social taboos, imposed through binary distinctions such as within and without, institute and maintain the boundaries of the body in identity as male and female, she cannot point toward an alternative configuration of culture beyond the binary frame: ‘Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience’ while ‘any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment’ (Douglas in Butler 1990, 131 & 132). With Julia Kristeva’s ‘abject,’ ‘the alien is

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effectively established through [this] expulsion’; consolidation of inner and outer, pure and defiled both maintain social regulation and control, and it establishes the Other as rejected and repulsive (Butler 133). The problem is not only how to deconstruct prohibition sanctions that regulate ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘me’ and ‘Other’ and constitute phallic Law and desire but mainly how to achieve ‘an openness to resignification and recontextualization’ of sexuality, how to describe/invent another process of the meaning of donation/revelation/production (Butler 134, 139).3 The problem is also, as Griselda Pollock puts it, to find a way to symbolize non-phallic relations between several irreducible different (part) subjects and to generate not an image of the trauma, but a symbol that allows the foreclosed ‘the relief of signification’, a pathway into language.4 Not only Law and Order, but also Creation is founded in the phallic paradigm that underlines social conventions on cleaving light from darkness, and on the marking of a frontier between pure and impure, in order to overcome the ‘abyss’ that becomes its Other, its repressed side that flickers from depths no longer accessible after the completion of the act of creation (Smirgel). Castration as a creative principle institutes the ‘abyss’ as the sacrificed. Yet another sacrifice is that of the unsignified, the objet a—a waste, not just repressed but foreclosed and lost for the sake of culture. Janine Chasguet-Smirgel presents the castrative separation as a universal principle of order, and not as related to social conventions or ideology, and the breach of separation between subject and object as perversion.5 Where such a transgression in the phallic paradigm does indeed stand for a collapse of the difference between desire, phantasm and event while castration establishes the difference between event and representation, my argument is that, in the matrixial paradigm, differentiation-in-transgression stands for a creative principle which ­ does not correspond to the phallic Law and Order and does not replace them either.6 For the Matrix, creation is before-as-beside the univocal line of ­birth/Creation-as-castration; it is in the im-pure zone of neither day nor night, of both light and darkness. From the prism that I have called matrixial, a feminine espacement hollows channels of meaning and sketches an area of difference, with sublimatory outlets and ethical values that are indeed paradoxical for the phallic paradigm. Matrixial aspects are articulated in/for/from art, neither via male castration and paternal prohibition nor via female bodily jouissance-without-sacrifice.7 The Red Cow

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Effect is a metramorphosis of im-purity as a wandering between pure and defiled. It negotiates both purity and impurity/defilement with no collapsing of each into the other and no separation intended to repress or exclude the darker side, while producing a third stance of im-purity. This metramorphosis vacillates its borderlinks as a re-questioning in deference of both poles, to be re-negotiated with each new encounter, with no refuge in the Phallus and no pre-arranged resolution.8

Divine Jouissance by the Sacrifice of the Red Cow The scene described in the text of the Biblical Book of Numbers sounds quite gender-neutral to speakers of English: ‘You (the priest) have to bring a ‘perfect’ [‘without blemish’] ‘red heifer,’ slay it, burn it, prepare what is called a niddah-water [M(e)I N(i)D(a)H in Hebrew] from its ashes mixed with water, and scatter it over the defiled—someone who has touched a dead person—in order to purify him.’ But in Hebrew the episode drips with a femininity that cannot be sensed in the English version: from the young but mature ‘red cow’ in the original Hebrew expression, ‘cow’ (P(a) R(a)H) being a maternal symbol deriving from the root ‘p.r.h.’—meaning ‘fertility,’ ‘fecundity,’ ‘productivity,’ ‘fruitfulness,’ was born—in the King James Bible—a ‘heifer,’ symbol for a young immature (pre-pubertal) offspring. The term niddah-water (NDH in Hebrew) was translated as: ‘water of separation,’ in which we may find an ideological phallic interpretation of the Hebrew word niddah. Niddah may derive from the roots ‘n.d.h.,’ ‘n.o.d.’ or ‘n.d.d.’ ‘N.d.d.’ and ‘n.o.d.’ mean ‘wandering,’ ‘migration,’ ‘vacillating,’ ‘swinging,’ ‘shaking,’ ‘moving,’ ‘shifting,’ ‘mobile,’ ‘movable,’ ‘vagrancy,’ ‘fugitive,’ ‘nomad’ etc.; ‘n.d.h.’ means ‘remove,’ ‘expel,’ ‘banish’ and ‘excommunicate.’ Other interpretations of the word niddah are derived from the root ‘i.d.h’ which means ‘throw’ and ‘sprinkle,’ ‘scattering’ and ‘dispersing.’ Most meanings designate liquefied, flexible states, mobility and splashing, throwing, swinging and wandering. A common translation of ‘niddah water’ is indeed ‘water of sprinkling.’ The translators’ choice of ‘water of separation’ directs us toward the one official purpose of this sacrifice: to detach defilement from purity. Separating and purifying is explicitly what the Red Cow sacrifice is about. Yet, in Hebrew, a sub-narrative is embedded inside the signifiers. We hear the shifting, vacillating, and dispersed vagrancy no less than the split and separation from impurity; and the special function for which the Red Cow is known in the tradition is the two-sided, elastic,

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and paradoxical one of defiling the pure and purifying the impure. It is, therefore, well known as an enigma. Most significantly, a very common and major meaning of the term niddah-water, often used in literary texts, has been totally eliminated from translation, even though it is emphasized in the classical interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures: water of menstrual blood. Hartoum interprets this ‘menstrual water’ as ‘woman’s defilement/impurity’: ‘Metaphorically, from woman’s defilement/impurity to defilement/impurity in general, [and] the reference [here] is to water that removes the defilement’ (Hartoum 76). The menstrual water that impurifies women purifies the ­sin-impurity?—Or else, menstrual water, defiled in one framework may stand for a specific in-between quality in an-other one, where it paradoxicality becomes her creative potentiality! The Red Cow has additional paradoxical qualities inscribed in signifiers that point to opposite meanings at once. She is a hatat, generally translated as ‘sin-offering’ stemming from the word ‘sin,’ [hta] yet it also means ‘sacrifice’ as well as ‘holy to the Lord.’ The hatat, as the medieval Biblical commentator Rashi interprets it, is a sacrifice that is meant only for God, (or, in our language) for God’s jouissance and is forbidden for that of human beings. She is a hallowed, sanctified vow, whose signifier means both sin and holiness, sanctity and taboo. Such are the orthodox halachic interpretations of the text to which Rashi adds a Midrash that emphasizes even more the motif of her mature femaleness, erased entirely in the English translation: the Red Cow is a symbol and an allegory for a mother who atones for her son’s sin, the Golden Calf’s. The Red Cow is not merely a simple offering compared to just any other. In the Epistle to the Hebrews in the Christian New Testament, she is likened to Jesus. Both of them, perfect and without sin, pay with self-sacrifice for the sins of others. Thus, sin and atonement reveal themselves to be transubjective and transgressive between individuals and generations.9 The text of the Red Cow, like any text translated from Hebrew to English, has been neutered, de-sexuated, its verbs de-gendered and de-eroticized. In the passage going the other direction, from English to Hebrew, every text is gendered, sexuated, and eroticized; the text thus attests to the impossibility of translating by means of substitution: almost every element, which is in principle neutered in English, institutes masculinity or femininity in Hebrew; the subjects and the objects ‘belong’ to one gender or the other, the verb designates sex, and so on. The subjects in I-you relations, neutral in English, address each other as feminine or masculine and speak from a masculine or feminine stance.10 For English

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readers of the Red Cow episode and sacrifice, it is difficult to sense the distinctive femaleness and maternality in the words; these readers may be startled to discover that this cow is so much a ‘woman-sacrifice’. Some English readers may prefer to turn her into a figure of male phantasy, to prove she leans upon a male phantasy, or that menstrual water (if we discover this meaning hidden behind the word) is no more contaminating or impurifying than any other blood. For me, however, rejecting the femininity which is embedded in the signifiers of a text is a double-edged strategy of evasion: from such a rejection, the perceived im-purity of the feminine will remain exactly the same as impurity in the eye of the Phallus, and in the case before us—as a ‘woman’ sacrifice structured upon the authority of ‘castration.’ Furthermore, I would grieve to give up this particular manner of divine jouissance in favor of the Phallus! The biblical sacrifice, usually a male symbolic figure, is meant to cause, or even satisfy God’s desire and arouse God’s compassion, grace, and pardon. The eschewal of an-other feminine interpretation to this symbolic figuration would leave us with a feminine Real created from a phallic perspective only. I suggest, therefore, that we focus upon the femininity of the Red Cow engraved in the Hebrew signifiers while working through them to revise its symbolic value, to expose and draw out from its ­ever-there signifiers a matrixial she-law and she-gaze which indicates jouissance and establishes desire that evades the control of the phallic Law and Gaze. A paradox in the eye of the Phallus reveals itself as a metramorphosis in the eyes of the Matrix.

Processes of Separation and Substitution in the Eye of the Phallus We will have to make a long detour along the paths of psychoanalytical theory before returning to the Red Cow effect in order to understand it in the light of feminine sex-difference as an aesthetic-poïetic principle that emerges in the matrixial borderswerve without pretensions to exhaust the mystery of that powerful biblical enigma. Poïetic and aesthetic considerations, and artistic creation in general, are linked in psychoanalysis to sexuality, since we arrive at the function of art by way of libido, drives, part-objects (as present), and objet a (the object having a sense as absent). Since artistic creation is linked to the objet a, if it is entirely

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phallic, artistic creation from the psychoanalytic angle should be so as well. If, however, it has matrixial aspects and we conceive of a matrixial objet a that participates in a larger, not only-phallic-symbolic Other, in an unconscious and subjectivizing Other that is not designated by the treasure of the signifiers only,11 we may develop further ideas on art within the psychoanalytic field without their being appropriated by, or produced for the phallic paradigm. For Freud, the male’s bodily specificity—the penis—is considered the only sex-difference for both sexes; the sexuality of girls is fundamentally male in character and the libido has only one essence.’12 ‘The sexuality of little girls is of a wholly masculine character’ and ‘libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature’ (Freud 1905: 219). To this position Freud later adds that only the terms ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’ are essential as meanings of masculine and feminine respectively, while the sociological and biological are secondary (Freud 1905, footnote added 1915). ‘Little girls’ are ‘little boys,’ and ‘at the stage of the pre-genital sadistic-anal organization there is as yet no question of male and female; the antithesis between active and passive is the dominant question. At the following stage of infantile genital organization, which we now know about, maleness exists, but not femaleness. The antithesis here is between having a male genital and being castrated. It is not until development has reached its completion at puberty that the sexual polarity coincides with male and female; maleness combines subject, activity, and possession of the penis; femaleness takes over object and passivity’ (Freud 1923: 145). We may conclude that the libido’s status progressively moves from being considered masculine into being phallic-male, and its psychic inscriptions correspond to a phallic/castration paradigm that polarizes those who possess the penis and those who do not possess it into subjects and objects: ‘This phase [the phallic stage of organization] … presents a sexual object and some degree of convergence of the sexual impulses upon that object; but it is differentiated from the final organization of sexual maturity in one essential respect. For it knows only one kind of genital: the male one’ (Freud 1905, footnote added in 1924: 199– 200). For both sexes, only one genital, namely the male one, comes into account. What is present, therefore, is not a primacy of the genitals, but a primacy of the Phallus (Freud 1923: 142).13 Thus, in the passage from the masculine/feminine to the male/female, Freud adds to the side of maleness linked to male bodily specificity a subject position: male is masculine (active) plus penis (the only organ relevant to sex-difference) plus

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subject’s position, while femaleness is feminine (passive) plus castration (absence of this only organ) plus object’s position. Accordingly, femininity, in Freud’s ‘case histories,’ is mainly femininity in men; and also, the feminine for women is expected to be reflected by a man.14 Freud used the concept of the Phallus, which was fabricated to deal with male sexuality, to speak of female sexuality as well: she does not have it and her position is characterized by the penisneid, penis envy. Lacan’s phallic model incorporates Freud’s and deviates from it at the same time. Lacan’s famous statement that the woman does not exist and does not signify anything echoes Freud’s remark on the pre-pubertal and mainly pre-Oedipal non-existence of femaleness; but a shift in emphasis occurs: her ‘lack’ in the Real inscribes ‘nothing’ in the Symbolic, for both males and females. For Lacan, the Phallus, still echoing the penis (organ in reality), mainly stands for a symbolic principle: it is a signifier. It is also the only imaginary representation of sex-difference, and ‘castration’ (having/not-having) is the only passageway to significance. For a woman, the question of her sexuality is not only in terms of not-having it, but is in terms of her being it or not. Lacan emphasizes the imaginary and symbolic counterparts of the organ: the Phallus. The penis, like any other pre-genital organ, is subjugated as a part-object in the Oedipus complex to retroactive applications of symbolic ‘castration.’ In that sense, boys suffer the same symbolic castration as girls: both having to renounce the attachment to their own organ as a part-object, to corporeality, in order to attain the specifically human sphere of subjectivity. ‘Man’ confronts the question of having/ not having the Phallus and ‘Woman’ of being it or not as an object of/ for man-subject. This means that boys give up what they had, while girls are supposed to renounce what they do not have and be it, through masquerade, as well as to construct their desire by the same mechanism— holding on to all kinds of ‘same’ or ‘opposite’ faces of it. The Woman does not exist; her being is questioned; she wants to be the Phallus: ‘It is in order to be the Phallus, that is, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes, through masquerade’ (Lacan 1985: 84). For example, a woman takes upon herself a masquerade through which the original threatening object of desire becomes unrecognizable and she— desirable, or else she is a horrible figure of transgression of the paternal taboo, representing the pre-Oedipal mother desired by the son and, therefore, incarnating the threat of incest, castration, and psychosis,

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all intended by the expression: ‘essential part of her femininity’! Thus, woman is the distance opened from femininity described as ‘essential’ and seen as what we may call psychotogenic by the Phallus conceived as equipped with all possible symbologenic qualities: the Phallus as the Signifier without signified, the signifier of absence and difference, of difference as absence. The incest taboo established by the paternal Law separates son and mother and produces ‘desire’ as repressed and infinitely displaced, and ‘subject’ as split. Desire, as well as the subject, both phallic and patterned upon the male repression of the maternal body, are supposed to account for Desire and Subject in general. Thus, for Lacan, woman is a subject as well, by virtue of her participation in what we may call the ­inside-the-phallus subjectivizing dimension at the cost of a forever enigmatic ‘femininity.’ In the phallic psychic arena (and in the psychoanalytic theory in general), feminine sexuality and the pre-Oedipal mother are structured and given meaning by the pair: Phallus/castration. From the outset, the Phallus appears as an intermediate concept that commands all three domains of the psyche: it is symbolic, it is imaginary, it is also between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, and it has also a correlate in the physical masculine Real—the penis. ‘A single and same marker dominates the whole register concerning the relationship of the sexuated … a privileged signifier … All is reduced to this signifier: the phallus, precisely because it is not in the subject’s system, since it does not represent the subject but … sexual jouissance as outside system, which is to say, absolute; sexual jouissance in so far as it has this privilege over all the others’ (Lacan 1969). The objet a leans on a phallic Imaginary and Real, for h ­ aving/ not-having the male sex organ is its paradigmatic emblem, retroactively applied to all early separations: for example, the appearance/disappearance of the mother and the weaning from the maternal breast. The Symbolic that is presented as a universal structure holding all significance is phallic.15 It is structured like language by binary oppositions in which relations of exclusion resonate: ‘it is either him/her or me’ for ‘speech is already caught-up in a network of symbolic couples and opposites’ (Lacan 1981: 107, 126). ‘Castration’ as equivalent to the Oedipus complex is presented as the sole transition-process that separates events from the Real while creating the subject as divided and the objet a as phallic. ‘The objet a, if taken only in Lacan’s sense, is a container … of the effect of castration, containing the signification of castration’ (Miller 1983). In the phallic model, part-objects of self and of what I call the

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archaic m/Other (pre-Oedipal bodily ‘samplings’ of my-corporeality and of my-m/Other) are ‘cut’ and repressed through ‘castration’ that turns them into lacking objects—into an objet a whose symbolic value is that of a Phallus. The objet a is a trace of a trace that remains forever a ‘cause of the desire’—and shapes it.16 The objet a—the lacking part-object which is analogous to the ‘woman’ as an absent real Other, the subject—who emerges in its place (and in place of the ‘woman’ that turns into a radical Other), and sexuality, are all shaped by this pair: Phallus/castration that acts to separate from, and to replace, the feminine. Not only ‘the jouissance, sexually speaking, is phallic’ (Lacan 1975: 14) but desire is also exclusively phallic, for any release of something from the corpo-real sexual jouissance and partial-dimension to the Symbolic occurs by negation, separation, and displacement. ‘Castration is even the only liberator of desire that may be conceived of’ (Miller 1983, emphasize added). ‘The so-called phallic jouissance is situated there, at the junction of the Symbolic with the Real. That goes for the subject which is sustained by the speak-through-being (parl’être) in the sense that what I designate as being the unconscious can be found here’ (Lacan, ‘Le sinthome,’ 1975). The Phallicity of the entire Unconscious is hereby at stake! Feminine jouissance that is enveloped in its continuity aspires to release itself by an-other objet a that will shape a feminine dimension of desire and an-other unconscious zone; but any desire is formulated in the phallic model as castration of this continuity and the passibility (possibility of the passage) of an-other desire into culture is prevented. In the transformational processes language allows: metaphor and metonymy, ‘jouissance is reduced to the phallic signifier’ (Miller 1995) where there is no possible sublimation of the Woman.

Hidden Supplementary Jouissance and No Sexual Rapport For Lacan, any signification kicks out what I named the ­beyond-the-phallus femininity. Since sexual rapport stems from the foreclosed feminine side, ‘there is no sexual rapport’ (1975, Encore 17, 35).17 There is no link and relation to specifically female experiences, no ­contact/relation-rapport with a feminine-Other in sexual relations based on the phallic jouissance in both sexes, and mainly, there are no ways to report on a rapport that would be feminine-Other if/where it does

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occur: no inscription of it in the Symbolic; ‘there is no sexual rapport signifies exactly this rapport’s lack of the signifier,’ that is, a ‘deficit in knowledge’ (Miller 1983). Phallic sexual jouissance, whose privileged position in the mental structure of both men and women is shown—a priviledge that may be also perpetuated, I add—by psychoanalytic experience, is ‘an obstacle to sexual rapport’ (Lacan 1974–1975). Symbolic signification ‘deadens’ the libidinal event and, therefore, it is an obstacle to the inscription of feminine sexuality qua rapport. Thus sexuality, based to begin with on the male bodily specificity, on relations to an object-organ and to the ­other-as-object, has the value of non-rapport (non-relation). A woman is not-All in the locus of the phallic jouissance since ‘she has, in relation to what the phallic function designates in terms of jouissance, a supplementary jouissance’ and if there is a point from which sexual rapport could be elaborated it is exactly from ‘the ladies’ side’ (Lacan, Encore 68). ‘Jouissance behind castration’ on which the symbolic system is incapable of reporting, which is not an obstacle to sexual rapport but its fulfillment, ‘would be inconceivable without feminine sexuality’ (Miller 1983). It is, however, somehow exposed despite the fact that ‘language in a way sanctions’ it (Lacan 1974). A different kind of inscription has to be looked for in order to transfer it onto subjectivity and draw a beside unconscious zone! Experiencing feminine jouissance is not enough. Conceptualizing a level of non-equivalence (Lacan, ‘Le sinthome,’ 1975) between the sexes promoted by nonphallic feminine difference is possible only inasmuch as whatever of it that escapes discourse is yet unthoughtly known and not only exists in female corpo-reality: if it also can trace itself, be written, become thinkable, have a meaning . Only if we assume a psychic zone where traces of the feminine borderspacing and of the failure of the Phallus make intelligible sense, then supplementary feminine psychic dimensions (not only body jouissance) can be claimed. It is the paradigm itself that should rotate, we may conclude, if we claim that anything of the feminine swerve, severality and ‘rapport’ can be nonconsciously inscribed and culturally reported. The more Lacan structured both the objet a and the Woman as phallic, so too in a characteristic move (a ‘Lacan against Lacan’ move as J. A. Miller puts it), a behind-the-phallus feminine borderspace that I have called Matrixial is, to my mind, opened, enabling us to suggest a matrixial aspect of the objet a that relates to an-other jouissance. In the later years of his teachings, Lacan tried to touch, by the use of mathemes and graphs as well as by poetic devices, the inverse face of the field of the

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Real that does not stem from the Symbolic, and to report on a realm of meaning that vibrates and resonates from jouissance and not from signification established by reason deduced from an already-there Symbolic. The objet a is now ‘extimate’: an intimate exteriority, an exteriority that dwells inside the self, a ‘hole’ hidden from the flagellation of signification, located in an extimate space in the Real: a vacuole (conch, cavity). The objet a indexes that something enjoyable or painful has happened in the vacuole and notes the occurrence of this event of jouissance as extimate to the subject (Lacan 1969). It incarnates a s­urplus-of-enjoying/ paining—plus-de-jouir—which cannot be quenched in the sphere of the Imaginary nor exhausted by symbolic signification but is not their ­remnant-surplus either. In the matrixial borderspace behind the Phallus, the signifier loses his crown as the major creator of sense, the ‘sexual rapport’ (i.e., the relations, connections, contacts) with the Woman based on the assumption of a ‘supplementary’ feminine jouissance may be exposed and inscribed as some kind of knowledge that does not depend on the signifier yet can find/invent symbols in art and via writing-art to enlarge the Symbolic. Something from the objet a, that incarnates and assumes the shape of horror or beauty and is sacrificed to the Other on a phantasmatic screen that spreads in the artwork, unveils a feminine sphere of severality. Its traces are embedded in the art by nonphallic sublimation and filter on-to writing-art. The in-cestuous in/out-side interlacing rapport between ­subject-to-be and archaic m/Other-to-be, connected to female space of sex-difference where this ‘incest’ takes place, is the basis in the Real for a matrixial stratum that can be abstracted to enlarge the Symbolic.18 In the Phallus, her ‘lack’ in the Real inscribes ‘nothing’ in the Symbolic and inspires imaginary horror. In the Matrix, female bodily specificity and covenantal coemergence in the Real inscribe a paradoxical sphere on the Symbolic’s margins, where feminine sexuality arises anew, in difference. The trauma and phantasy of before-birth incest arise in connection with feminine-Other-desire: with the enigma of what I call matrixial ­ fading-by-transformation and with phallic foreclosure of the archaic incest with-in/out.19 When female bodily specificity is taken into account as a different sex-difference that in-forms subjectivity, ­difference-in-jointness (rather than being/not being, presence/absence) and conductible borderlinks between partial subjects, as well as transmissibility and shareability of assembled, hybridized objects, not only disturb

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the phallic interior (intra-psychic) and exterior (cultural and social) scene but also inform a beside (not opposed)—transubjective to begin with then ­inter-subjective—alternative scene and enlarge the Symbolic beyond the phallic scope. Feminine desire touches upon the connection of this primordial event with questions of sexual rapport and death beyond/before the separating line of Oedipal castration, beyond/ before the threshold of language. The loss involved in the metramorphic passage, I repeat, is an outcome of transformation and transmission, fragmentation and severalization, dispersal and re-sharing of the already joint and several. The specificity of the matrixial zone, the sources of its awesome uncanniness and of its a-priori im-purity (and not impurity) should be further clarified before returning to the Red Cow effect, but a remark is now due: I ‘re-feminize’ a signifier that had been neutralized in our culture and was made to stand for a general neutral origin upon which traces are inscribed, or a cultural general grid: ‘Matrix’ is a ‘womb’ in Latin. Yet here, the Matrix does not echo a biological inside, symbolic of an interior or passive receptacle either, but a dynamic extimate borderspace of active/passive coemergence with-in and with-out the uncognized other, in relation to a feminine-Other-desire. As a concept, Matrix enters the cultural Symbolic, Imaginary and Real spheres no less than the Phallus that does index the male penis in the Real with its related imaginary ‘castration anxiety’, which is widely acknowledged as the support for the Symbolic itself—with major cultural implications. The feminine ‘archaic origin’ of Matrix (like that of metramorphosis) does not indicate any limitation on woman’s rights, quite the contrary! As a concept it supports women’s full ­response-ability for any event occurring with-in their own not-One corpo-reality and accounts for the difference of this response-ability from the phallic order. Via the m/Other-to-be, more archaic than the pre-Oedipal mother, an-other sexuality filters into, and shapes subjectivity beyond and beside the Phallus, but in-side the Symbolic. The intra-uterine phantasy of the subject-to-be is influenced by, and influencing the ­ m/Other-tobe’s phantasy (that is linked to her early pictograms) for whom the ­becoming-infant with-in her is not entirely ‘me’ and not a total stranger, is not rejected yet not fused with, and, from a certain moment onwards, is no more an object but not yet a subject.20 I have suggested in The Matrixial Gaze ([1995] 2006) that in Freud’s aesthetic experience of the Unheimliche [the Uncanny] we separate the Mutterleibsphantasie—maternal womb/intra-uterine phantasy—from the castration complex, and that the

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womb phantasy is not retroactively folded into the castration track but is mounted on a matrixial one (Freud 1919: 244, 248–9).21 In Freud’s consideration of the Uncanny the phantasy of the maternal matrice is included within the castration prototype; in Lacan’s considerations of the Uncanny, it is excluded by this inclusion—and disappears (Lacan 1981). Freud and Lacan’s variations on the Phallus both reject the womb as an issue of sex-difference, and where Freud does recognize the womb through the question of the origin of babies, it is not considered as another sex-difference alongside the penis but as the first sexual question for boys and explicitly not for girls. Freud did not develop it in the direction of a feminine sex-difference, a direction which, to my mind, would have led to theoretical questioning of some basic notions in psychoanalysis, starting with narcissism. Freud did not deny the denial of the womb nor its implications. On the contrary. He insisted on the necessity of such a denial, measured by the importance of what is at stake for males. The penis is considered the central support of ‘the child’s’ narcissism (what child, we may ask—male or female?) while the enigma of the sphinx: ‘where do babies come from?’ is central for sexual development of the male child. It is, maybe, the first sexual question for boys, he says, but ‘certainly not’ for girls (‘Some,’ 1925: 336). The womb is dismissed since ‘it was only logical that the child should refuse to grant women the painful prerogative of giving birth to children,’ that is, since the ‘neutral’ child does not have a womb but would not give up on such an important issue, the child’s solution is denial and displacement: ‘If babies are born through the anus, then a man can give birth just as well as a woman’ (Freud 1908: 219–20). For the ‘universal’ child, recognizing the womb is catastrophic to his necessary narcissism, since the (he-)child believes that he owns every possible valuable organ. But why should the theory deny the womb in agreement with the boy’s needs and also ignore its value for female difference, development, and narcissism? Freud’s infantile theory of childbirth ‘saves’ at the same time, to my mind, both the neutral-but-phallic narcissism and sexuality and the neutral-but-phallic psychoanalytic theory.22 Freud’s late self-criticism deserves our attention: ‘The discoveries touching the infantile sexuality were done on men, and the theory which emerges from them was elaborated for the male infant’ (Freud 1991: 61, my italics). Similar to the concept of the Phallus, it is not the organ which stays the focal point in the Matrix, but the specific unconscious processes it

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stands for and what it symbolizes. As a symbol at the service of both sexes, its roots in a jouissance in the Real with-in the feminine cannot be ignored. To this cluster, in the Real between trauma and phantasy, female subjects have a double access: as archaic outside (for both sexes) and as an inside. Post-Oedipal male subjects are more radically split from it, as their contact/rapport with it in the Real stays forever in an archaic too early. The matrixial cluster engenders bypassing-phallus sub-knowledge. ‘This desire with which the child is invested starts off always as the result of subjective interpretation, as a function of the maternal desire alone, of her own phantasy’ (Lacan, L’Identification, unpublished seminar, May 1962). In the matrixial borderspace, phantasy relates to desire, the phantasy of the subject-to-be aspires toward the woman-m/Other-to-be in whose phantasy and desire the subject was playing a part already before birth. The becoming-subject in the womb is a pre-subject in the discourse, phantasy, trauma, and desire of the mother-to-be as a subject who takes part in, and in-forms in return its phantasy and trauma. The phantasy of the woman as a partial subject in a matrixial covenant relates to her archaic-m/Other-to-be’s phantasy, to female bodily specificity and also to phallic desire. From the matrixial desire, libidinal jouissance is not entirely evaporated. I stated by putting it in the present tense that there is no sexual rapport. That is the basis of psychoanalysis … There is no sexual rapport except for neighbouring generations; namely, parents on the one hand, and children on the other. That is what the interdiction of incest wards off. I talk about sexual rapport. (Lacan 1977–1978)

An encounter occurs at the limits of language, where are carved ‘the question of the mother and the phantasy of the Origin [la Cause],’ the being/entity ‘for death,’ the ‘trauma of the subject and the meeting with the Other’ and feminine sexual rapport. ‘The first desire is the desire of the mother whose value is that of a trauma’ (Laurent). Incest is ‘the return to the maternal womb’ (Lemoine). The ‘woman’ relates to …the between involved in sexual rapport, but displaced, and precisely, Other-imposed. To Other-impose, and it is curious that in imposing this Other, what I advanced today concerns only the woman. And it is she who, in this figure of the Other, gives us an illustration within our reach, to be,

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as a poet has written, ‘between center and absence,’ between the meaning she takes from what I have called the at-least-one, between the center as pure existence or jouis-presence and absence … which I could not write but to define as ‘Not-all, that which is not included in the phallic function, yet which is not its negation … absence which is no less jouissance than being jouis-absence.’ (Lacan 1972, italics added)

Such between-instances that are not either/or but ‘and-and’ among oppositions are impossible in terms of the phallic dimension. An ‘andand’ is ‘what happens in any first encounter with sexual rapport’ which is feminine and ‘impossible’ (Lacan 1973–1974). In the Matrix, something of an originary coemergence within an impossible position of ‘and-and’ drips from the Real to the Imaginary and the Symbolic that are plaited together in a knot and is transmitted in intersubjectivity. Something of it is accessible to refinement and sublimation (which in psychoanalysis has been considered exclusively phallic) toward art and for further conceptualization in writing-art. If, for Lacan, the Woman is Other even when she is a between centre and nothing, in the Matrix she is not the Other but a border-Other, a becoming in-ter-with the Other, an im-pure ­becoming-between-in-jointness. ‘Woman’ is not confined to the contours of the one-body with its inside/outside polarity. In the phallic paradigm, the archaic ‘nothing’ is the focus of prohibition on the elusive feminine incestual rapport, a lack based upon the foreclosure of intrauterine incest. The archaic ‘centre’ is, however, precisely the focus of such an-other, matrixial feminine rapport, linked to its jouissance as presence. Beyond the originary f­eminine/pre-natal real stage, if ‘man’ is either at the center of such a rapport—and then also inside psychosis—or cut away from it and in the arms of the law that structures desire as masculine, for ‘woman’ there are between-instants that are not either/ or between oppositions that the Phallus represents (including the pair: repression/foreclosure), but ‘and-and’ and neither/nor among oppositions. The between-instants of the matrixial sphere are paradoxical in terms of the phallic dimension. An ‘and-and’ of incompatible elements becomes meaningful, I suggest, in a matrixial covenant of severality created in contingency and dissolved in a relational, relative, and partial way. Its dissolving is not a cutting but a non-symmetrical with-in-ter transformational co-fading, inscribed as metramorphosis.

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Becoming In-ter-with the Other: An Im-pure ­Becoming-Between in Jointness The I’s phantasy of Origin is involved with that of its singular m ­ /Otherto-be linked to her non-I(s), hovering in the same Matrix. The enigma of the connection between the phantasy of the partial b ­ ecoming-subject before entering the world and the phantasy and desire of the becoming-m/Other-to-be in coemergence with it, is to be linked not only to the enigma concerning the trauma of birth but also to prenatal jouissance, trauma, and phantasy interconnected through female sex-difference. The matrixial stratum is woven, to begin with, in the ­ psychic plane closest to the bodily experience with-in the womb—in ontogenetic traces of inside or outside me and/or outside and inside us, that are inscribed with-in-dialogue with the desire of an enlarged, composite Other-‘woman’. The desire of the potential mother-to-be as subject is already a networked desire, composited but not mixed with ‘man’s.’23 Her desire is both phallic and matrixial. An exclusively phallic desire in the matrixial covenant would have designated the reduction of the ­libido-as-male-only to the Name of the Father (to use Lacan’s term) at the price of the destruction of supplementary feminine eroticism and would have deepened the misunderstanding into which each individual is born. There is no other trauma of birth than that of being born desired. Desired, or not—it is all the same since it comes through the speak/through-being. The speak/through-being in question is generally divided into two speakers. Two speakers who do not speak the same language. Two who do not understand each other speaking. (Lacan, ‘Le Malentendu’, Ornicar 23, 1980)

In the matrixial borderspace, it is not yet motherhood, or mother/child relations that are at stake, but the feminine bodily specificity as swerve and rapport and the singularity of each I/non-I encounter as inscribed in a beside, nonconscious zone by means other than repression of signifiers. ‘We must look from a side in which the father would be left entirely aside’ in order to describe a ‘primary narcissism’ of the infant in relation to ‘those lost envelopes where the continuity between the interior and the exterior is so easily read’ (Lacan ‘L’identification’ 1961–1962). Indeed! Yet not as a parasite to the mother. Lacan, however, did not look from this side and, therefore, ‘The whole dialectic of these past few years up

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to, and including the Kleinian dialectic which is yet the closest, remains falsified because the emphasis has not been placed on the essential deviation’ (Lacan, ‘L’identification’ 1961–1962, Italics added)—‘mother’ distinct from ‘father’ as a deviation and not as an opposition. It is impossible to deal with the ‘lost envelopes’ from the Name of the Father’s side, but they did not get processed in psychoanalytic theory from a side from which the father moves aside either, not only because the other side is ‘nothing,’ a lack in the Symbolic; but, to my mind, because it is dangerous to male sexuality for whose service the theory was intended. As we have seen, a ‘universal and neutral’ narcissism is conceptualized by Freud upon the male organ, even when the subject does not have it. When we divert the spotlight toward the womb, we are touching upon a basic taboo. Language ‘takes disciplinary steps’ against the ­feminine/pre-natal jouissance and does not transmit it through itself; human social Law and Order are built upon its banishing, since the sexual rapport capsuled through it is the forbidden, dangerous—for the male post-Oedipal subject—incestuous rapport between partial-subjects, with the archaic m/ Other-to-be (and not of the son with the mother). If Freud develops the narrative of the archaic father and names the taboo of incest that is structured by/for him, there is neither a similar structure concerning the archaic m/Other-to-be nor a prohibition parallel to that Oedipal incest taboo. Indeed, the matrixial in-cest cannot be forbidden in the Real—it occurs to give life. Yet, because of its highly psychotic potential in the phallic paradigm, it could not even be elaborated. Instead, it was deeply silenced, not even excluded from the Symbolic (from which it could then return as its repressed and produce an-other desire) but marginalized as unthought of. Whatever of it that did get processed was subjugated to the phallic heterosexual model. Evocations and irruptions of the pre-birth in-cest are not psychotic, provided we conceive of a w ­ ider-Symbolic—a symbolic realm wider than the Phallic—informed by the Matrix. In the Phallus, the feminine/prenatal encounter was sacrificed so as to preserve and protect the phallic psychic integrity of the subject. Indeed, the way of the adult nonpsychotic male is forever muzzled from this feminine rapport in the Real. From the phallic angle, the matrixial stratum must be foreclosed; contacting it is too deeply regressive as it means psychic annihilation. But, from the side of female sexuality in the Matrix, it cannot mean the same thing, or else any subject in rapport with feminine sex-difference is crazy. The woman, rather, as an

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adult human-being who huddles like the man in the shade of the Phallus’ wings, and although from the side of the father her way too is muzzled to this rapport, still touches it. A woman’s singular rapport to that ‘feminine’ dimension cannot be castrated or foreclosed, since she continually experiences phantasies related to her own bodily specificity, and those interlink with archaic matrixial phantasies.24 The matrixial rapport is both deeply regressive and archaic, and reemerging in late experience; and therefore, I suggest, the ‘lost envelopes’ are only almost-lost for a woman. Whether ‘grains’ of her archaic m/Other-to-be are realized in corpo-reality or invested in phantasy, whether a future matrixial encounter in the Real is longed for or rejected, she has no refuge from some unpredictable rapport that carries in its very structure traces of archaic encounter with a feminine non-I possibly still longed for. This rapport stamps its feminine-beyond-the-phallus mark from the outset as what is excluded from the future Real and foreclosed from the Symbolic for ‘man,’ in the shape of its always too early or too late. But for ‘woman,’ both the exclusion of the matrixial in-cestual rapport and certain accessibility to the (past and potentially future) rapport itself co-exist. Thus, the matrixial difference is not equal or opposite but bypasses and supplements the Phallus in subjectivity. Thus, as a symbol it draws a space of paradoxical im-purity, for whom the matrixial in-cest is an emblem. I suggest that the jouissance that emerges in the vacuole of encounter on the level of the pre-birth in-cest—from trauma and phantasy—between the becoming-subject, male or female, in the womb, and the ‘woman’ as becoming archaic m/Other-to-be, both of them in their status of partial-subjects and part-objects for each other—‘grains’ of I and non-I and not yet ‘mother’ and ‘infant’—and the encounter between the phantasy of the emerging I (as a pre-subject) and the phantasy and desire of the nonI (the woman as a subject), constitute a feminine rapport. An enjoying/ paining rapport inscribes traces of singularization, together but differently, in both. I propose the hypothesis that this rapport, which for psychoanalytic theory is sexual in the partial pre-Oedipal dimension, which does not wait to receive permission from the Phallus in order to happen and whose accessibility is obstructed by the Phallus no less than it is blocked away from it, is inscribed to make sense. Traces are woven into a web where the joint psychic object of subjectivity-as-an-encounter is created as, and remains, an incompatible composite which neither fuses its components nor rejects them. A diffracted, transmitted, and redistributed im-pure, hybrid object corresponds to a matrixial im-pure covenant of severality.

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Before further elaborating the value of the feminine rapport, a remark is due: what is dangerously regressive for the phallic Real has different values for a matrixial Real, and what is related in a double manner to a female bodily specificity can be, as a concept and an image, at the service of both sexes, if the Symbolic does not equate with the Phallus. Evocations of the pre-birth trauma and phantasy are not psychotic, if we presume a wider Symbolic, in-formed and transformed by the Matrix that transgresses the boundaries of the phallic Imaginary by way of intrinsic links.

Im-purity in the Eyes of the Matrix Inside the Matrix, we are dealing with questions on/from the feminine that the subject orients toward an-Other-woman in search for an-Other-desire. I have suggested examining the potentiality of the ­ feminine/prenatal encounter as a measure of difference that is neither opposite nor the same nor symmetrical to the phallic sex-difference. The Matrix stands for differentiation-in-co-emergence with the other (contrary to fusion or rejection). Matrixial subjectivity is a covenant, in which a foreign n ­ on-I coemerges with me and some of its traces are inscribed in me while some of mine are gathered in him/her. This covenant cannot guarantee a happy ménage. It is the transformation of this witnessing-while-sharing and this co-creating for/with-in co-emerging subjectivity of several others, which is offered in art via its incarnation as a matrixial object or link, sacrificed, like the Red Cow, to the Other. The Matrix indicates an existential ontogenesis and an unconscious inscription of (male and female) archaic modes of joint existence, a dynamic borderspace of active/passive co-emergence with-in and ­ with-out the uncognized other in relation to a feminine-Other desire, and not an interior passive receptacle, a general neutral origin or a cultural general grid. Processes of connectivity carry the different inscription of the matrixial borderspace, in which it is not sufficient to describe the surplus of jouissance, the plus de jouir of libidinal reality as a lost object (a phallic objet a), but we need to suggest conductibility and cycle the idea of originary transgressivity that explores and retreats, severalizes, fragments, and composites. By transgression, the remnants-traces of rapport-without-relating create heterogeneity among the grains. These traces are scattered in a nonsymmetrical and non-equivalent way between the participants of a joint borderspace and in-form a

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covenant-in-difference which is not based on symbolic-phallic cognition but on re-co-birth into a becoming-Symbolic. Metramorphosis is a conductible unthought s­ ub-knowledge that re(a)sonates heterogeneity on-to the threshold of culture and webs in it a sieve-like borderspace of co-naissance and co-fading of several elements in originary differentiation. The pre-natal/feminine encounter serves as a base for a stratum of subjectivization in which ‘grains’ of I and non-I that reciprocally do not recognize each other, sharing hybridized objects and transmitting affects and pathic information, address one another in a rapport-without-relating that takes place in the course of alternations in distance-in-proximity. The matrixial sphere is created both by encounters on the level of trauma and phantasy, by connections shaped into a sub-symbolic web that in-form a wider Other, and by encounter with ­feminine-Other-desire which is already involved in earlier matrixial circles and in dialogue with phallic desire. The Matrix is a feminine unconscious space of simultaneous coemergence and cofading of the I and the stranger that is neither fused nor rejected. Links between several joint partial subjects co-emerging in differentiation in rapport-without-relating, and connections with their hybrid objects, produce/interlace ‘woman’ that is not confined to the contours of the one-body with its inside versus outside polarity, and indicate a sexual difference based on webbing links and not on essence or negation. Traces of the matrixial encounter-events interlace in inter-subjectivity where metramorphic borderlinks report themselves— ­ even if by paradoxical symbols, like that of the Red Cow, implying different ways of reading into narratives of our culture and transforming them from with-in. The beyond the phallus domain hinted at by Lacan from within the phallic perspective still keeps the woman—as a surplus or residue—on the axis of the One and Infinite, with its same and oppositions, all and nothing. It posits the woman as either a subject in the masculine format or an object patterned upon masculine desire, as either a centre (presence) or a want/lack. The Matrix weaves the woman as between subject and object and between centre and nothingness on the axis of heterogeneous severality. The subsymbolic sieve inscribes the besidedness and with-ness of the matrixial stratum and allows a sublimation of a feminine rapport. It supplies a supplementary perspective on out-inner extimate intrasubjective events and on inter-subjective events which may be called in-outer (interiority which occurs outside the sole self). The matrixial

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objet a, and the matrixial aspect of subjectivity, can never be entirely present, nor entirely absent, can never be pure nor impure, but are always in-between different degrees of im-purity. The feminine conductible difference that concerns, to begin with, the womb as ‘derivation,’ re(a)sonates in phantasy with inter-subjective experiences of encounters between partial subjects and part-objects of different individuals, and with intra-subjective experiences of encounters between elements of the same individual. It also penetrates into the transubjective field and transgresses the generations’ barrier. The process of passage of the matrixial objet a and borderlink from artwork onto writing-art is analogous, up to a certain limit, to the passage from the field of the Real to the nonsymbolic ‘side’ of the subject— whether the I or the non-I—which is suffused with jouissance, and from there to its symbolic zone which is voided of jouissance. The limits of such an analogy are sketched by Lacan in the following enigmatic way: ‘Sublimation is the virtue of those who know how to conduct the journey around whatever the subject who is supposed to know (le sujet supposé savoir) is reduced to’ (Lacan [1969] 2006). That is, for example, sublimation is the virtue of one who knows how to conduct the journey around a trace of subjective-object—the surplus created after the exhaustion of the jouissance in the Real, when the preexistent world of the Symbolic cannot encompass knowledge embedded in it. ‘Every ­art-work is located in the circumscription of what is left as irreducible in this knowledge as distinct from jouissance. Something nonetheless comes to designate its action [of the jouissance] in the sense that, in the subject, it will forever designate the impossibility of its full realization’ (Lacan [1969] 2006). If we agree with that idea, as I do, the necessity of writing from art the feminine jouissance—since in turn it indicates/ produces/constitutes an-other subjectivity—becomes clear. In the passage from the archaic m/Other-to-be’s rapport to the mamalangue something gets lost, but the passage itself re(a)sonates and enactivates; a beyond language and beyond appearance dimension can later partially be accounted for conceptually, and it can be retroactively and partially contained in a matrixial narrative, receiving an approximate symbolic co-meaning. The mamalangue is not doomed to fall under the impact of foreclosure, and it may open cultural (social, political) spaces. Metramorphosis inscribed in the artwork knits with the convolutions of its accidental paths the artwork’s matrixial field itself. Through

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metramorphosis, the painter and the viewer, the writer and the reader re-co-emerge anew in various unique ways in-to-gether-with the artwork but differently. The matrixial borderlink, which is not reserved to women alone, is an almost-missed encounter between the erotic antennae which extend from with-in and with-out our-selves toward an emerging feminine-Other-desire. It digs into the Phallus from in-out. Entwined in a subsymbolic connectional web, the feminine participates in the in-formation of the subject through passages which are not castration but processes of transformation-through-transgression towards the ­differentiated-in-jointness matrixial others. Metramorphosis is a creative potentiality that exchanges and transmits traces, phantasies, affects and information within a joint space, where in each exchange an addition is inscribed, which turns reciprocity into a lack of equivalence. Common ontogenetic ‘memory’ is dispersed, and traces of the processing of coemergence are scattered and diffused. The results of its unpredictable actions are inscribed in further unique unexpected encounters. On the matrixial plane, there grows a human ethical possibility in the bosom of the Thing, the significance of which is: that I know that I have a covenantal relations with the other, that I am co-born (not in the biological sense) with certain several strangers who influence me, and whom I influence, while recognizing the impossibility of my fully recognizing the Other, or while recognizing that a certain foreignness in me and in the other— even the one who is known to me—will never yield to the mastery of my phallic symbolic cognition. In the cracks of the phallic subject, a supplementary subjectivity weaves itself, and this one too will never exhaust itself completely and will continue to leave behind mysterious, poetic relics. The journey from the jouissance in the field of the Real through the objet a to the subject in terms of castration designates a phallic sublimational zone which acts and signifies in a retroactive gear. The wanderings of the feminine uniqueness from the Real to co-significance as co-creating are to be a discovered almost-missed covenant after an almost-missed covenant. Matrixial w ­ riting-art—art between poetic and theoretical writing—re(a)sonates onto and from art all kinds of im-pure coalitions that are paradoxical in the phallic sphere. The Red Cow Effect is one such paradoxical metramorphosis, an almost-missed encounter that interlaces the hallowed and the hollowed.

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She-Law: Scattering and Wandering (Niddah) Passageways in Matrixial Sacrifice The Red Cow Effect is a metramorphosis in the register of sacrifice where, I suggest, the im-pure is exposed as a specific category for hybridized incompatible composites, to be differentiated from the phallic opposition of impure/defiled versus pure. The feminine jouissance beyond phallic desire and law exposes the matrixial in-cest that masculinity must foreclose, since it is ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ where libido is connected to the Death drive. Inscribing feminine jouissance may lead to psychic catastrophe in the eyes of the Phallus, as feminine jouissance that means transgressing the Name of the Father might get incarnated in the fascination by the erotization of death. The fascination of the sacrifice lies in its being man’s proof of his knowledge of the desire of the Other qua God. It testifies to man’s belief in his ability to satisfy God by offering Him his most precious objects. Any subject must sacrifice some of its jouissance in order to have access to the Symbolic. In the eyes of the Phallus, according to Lacan, woman is man’s objet a and the infant (even in the womb) is the woman’s phallic objet a. Woman as a man’s sacrifice, as its objet a, is created by ‘castration’—castration being always, to begin with, castration of the m/Other-to-be. ‘Man’ sacrifices by castration. How does a ‘woman’ sacrifice, if not by castration? I suggest that a woman sacrifices, and is sacrificed by conductible metramorphosis, and the Red Cow can serve as its emblem: no pure presence, no pure absence, no pure schism and their price to pay, but transmissions and transgressions, im-purity and hybridization, fragmentation, partialization and pluralization, and their special price to pay. From contemplating the Red Cow through a matrixial prism, we can now distinguish in this symbol sub-symbolic branches of another kind. The Bible even indicates here what we may call a she-symbol, designated by the signifiers of the text as a law in the feminine: a Chukah (‫ ) ֻח ַקּה‬that I will name, after the Hebrew, a she-law, and not a Chok (‫)חק‬: a law in the masculine. Chukah as a divine command in a feminine form ‘refers particularly to precepts for which no logical reason can be found’ (Hartoum 76). Indeed, there is no logic in this Cow. She emerges from a network of paradoxes and sinks back into them without resolving them; she represents an almost-missed impossible encounter in the form of wanderings between contraries that vitiate the split between the saint and the sinner,

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the pure and the defiled, the holy and the desecrated, the living and the dead, and creates their co-emergence and co-fading. A special kind of im-purity as hybridity of incompatible composites distinguishes itself in the feminine. The sacrifice of the Red Cow is a metramorphosis that emanates from a Chukah, from a ‘she-law’ of and-and by ­niddah-mediations—niddah as wanderings and not as separation— between hallowing the hollowed and hollowing the hallowed.25 The Red Cow Effect is susceptible to ‘non-logical’ inscription up to the border of the Symbolic ‘of dictionaries’: ‘The culture … participates in that something which derives from an economy founded upon the structure of the objet a, which is to say that it is as waste, as excrement of the subjective relation as such that the material of dictionaries is constituted’ (Lacan, D’un Autre, 4 July 1969). The objet a is designated as a holy, forbidden and lost ‘sacrifice’ proffered as a self-offering to God or to the grand Other, which marks out sublimational processes, indexes aesthetic objects, and arouses the experience of the uncanny-as-phallic. ‘The register of extimacy is the register of sacrifice … the subject is nothing but what he gives up or sacrifices’ (Miller 1985). The objet a in art is proffered to the Other—to God—as an offering that is meant to arouse his desire, says Lacan. And in relations of love, not only the subject sacrifices, but also the Other, embodied in the specific other, to the extent that there is in each of us a foreignness that is not reducible to the cognized. The Other sacrifices too, for he too is not a chain of signifiers only. The Other contains in itself … the objet a … In what are these two terms O (A in French) and a compatible and articulable? … This objet a is as much extimate to the subject as extimate to the Other, it is included in the Other in a completely different status than the signifier, as a surplus from the Thing, as what the chain of the signifier has not succeeded in taking control over when it erased the Thing. The objet a as an element in the symbolic aggregate is a negative phallic entity of lack, while as a grain, it preserves an indestructible conductivity; it is ‘both the hole and the cap on this hole.’ (Miller 1986)

If ‘love’ in the Lacanian lexicon is the offering of our nothing to the Other, and if in the process of transference the Other too sacrifices his nothing for you, then, I suggest, in the matrixial stratum we share the erotic antennae that register the traces of the almost-missed-encounters

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which possess an indestructible positivity while being elusive, since they are diffracted and dispersed—half lost, faded. We are in a process of relative loss of relations together—but not in the same way and not to the same extent, and not to ‘the end’—for end and beginning are not the borders of the Matrix—and not limitlessly—for the infinite is not the limit of the several. We are less-than-One—partial, yet One-less—not alone with-in a rapport, and we are responsible for unknown others. The location of femininity in psychoanalysis by means of the objet a as a foreign body involves us fatally with the question of the place of the migrant and the exile as psychic reality, as social distress, as aesthetic experience and as ethical problem. By means of the extimacy of the Thing, the objet a and the vacuole, the real Other and the reality of the other/foreigner are articulated: ‘when we speak of extimacy, on the other within, we posit the question of the immigrant’ (Miller 1985). In the phallic paradigm which opens from the One and All and moves between either being or lack, each imaginary other that the I relates to is a parasitic foreign body destined for annihilation by way of assimilation or banishment: ‘its either me or him’ (Lacan 1981: 107). ‘The intimate … has a character of exteriority… the intimate is the Other. I will say it is like a foreign body, a parasite’ (Miller 1986, italics added). Yet, in the matrixial borderspace, the foreigner cannot be articulated as a parasite. Here, the exiled is not clipped-out from the system; here, along the metramorphic borderlinks, the other and I share connections that when fading by way of transformation are leaving traces in both. In the matrixial model which opens from severality and contingency, the I and the uncognized non-I are partners in a temporary, unpredictable and unique covenant, in which each participant—subject and object—is partial and relative in a composited joint space. The non-I is not Other but, like the I, is a becoming-in-ter-with, and, therefore, a clear cut between the living and the dead, the pure and the impure, so basic in the Phallus, is beyond the matrixial scope; a voyage between them, so paradoxical in the Phallus becomes meaningful in the Matrix.26 The ashes of the Red Cow are dispersed, diffracted, aspired, and sprayed according to a becoming-feminine-Other-desire. The Red Cow sacrificial borderlink, which quivers and glints from beyond appearance is not the Holy—as Other or God, nor is it the Impure—as yet another Other or the Dead; but it is the transversion of the holy with the impure and their co-emergence in im-purity without blending and without annihilation

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with-in a process of a becoming-woman-between, inter-with the Other. The Red Cow Effect expresses a metramorphosis that does not perish in a split but diminishes to a small or large extent as a consequence of dispersion and stretching among the several. Wandering, scattered, and sprayed, it is impossible to regather the Red Cow’s ashes-traces; one can only find some of them in other and additional matrixes, and follow their footsteps to a labyrinth not envisioned in advance, woven in the course of creating its route through strolling along it. My matrixial objet a initiates yours to join in; you proffer in it the relation that you lost together with others, you are the witness of your offering and you offer your witnessing on to further assemblages so that not in total perishing a matrixial sacrifice is inscribed in culture. Antigone’s desire bears witness to that. The tragedy of Antigone fascinates us when it raises the question of the place of the feminine beyond-the-Phallus in the Other of culture, not the realization of primordial sexual rapport in an archaic Real but tragedy as a channel for expressing a desire that is not written in the existing Law and an incarnation of an extimate Thing-rapport that is not subjected to the existing, actual Symbolic, and which through the artwork expands its borders. In the extimate zone of the vacuole, in what we may call the no-place of the exiles, some kind of feminine rapport, not as a traumatic return on-to the corpo-Real, not as psychosis, but as a transformation into the artwork by what I see as matrixial sublimation can be revealed.27 Antigone desires to hallow the hollow and to hollow the hallow: to violate, desecrate, and break the law while redeeming and hallowing the defiled and disgraced, the dead, with whom she shared a maternal womb. Her incestual state of inner exile echoes residuals of her mother’s. ‘Antigone is an exile because of the fact of incest … which is one and only: the return to the maternal womb’ (Lemoine-Luccioni 1995). The Other gnaws at the Thing and contains the residues of its gnawing in the form of objet a and a-links. In Antigone, the Thing-rapport resists the existing Symbolic order and does not yield itself, while matrixial residues find sublimatory passages into art. This mistress-piece attests that something of the Red Cow metramorphosis infiltrates and vibrates, beyond horror and anxiety, from the poietic object to the aesthetic object and back, onto becoming-art and from it onwards and back, just until drafting contour-lines for questions culture has to grapple with; even just until questions of ethics—and back. Similarly, a matrixial offering in painting by way of the Red Cow Effect contains something of the foreignness of the other who is in rapport with it, retroactively or in potential,

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sooner or later, and in terms of the other’s death—and of mine. In the feminine, says Levinas, the death of the other is more important to me than my own death and, therefore, ‘the feminine is that difference, the feminine is that incredible thing in the human by which it is affirmed that without me the world has a meaning’ (Levinas 1993: 17). And if the sin-offering that is structured by means of the Phallus is holy, we will recall too that the religious category of the Holy, the numinous, classically connects with the aesthetic category of the Sublime. The Red Cow Effect is a metramorphosis which produces a different Sublime that can be described as with-in-ter the hollowed and the hallowed.28 It interlaces temporary intermediate im-pure spaces in which, like for my mother, the turkey is also a cow, and black is also red. Where the ­niddah-mediations are sprayed, we return anew—not to a past almostlost mamalangue always wandering on elsewhere, but to its self-renewing thresholds that are not yet a translation, a separation and a substitution into a father-tongue and no more the same mamalangue. And also, to one of the unanticipated but too-late encounters that happened to me in the in-visible screen shared between phantasy and painting, I gave the name ‘Halala’.29 There, the horrible multiplicity of some several, and the horrible fading-away of other several I(s) and non-I(s) became unbearable just until beyond my out-in-ter autistic threshold.

Notes

1. Editor’s Note: For clarification of the concept of ritual impurity, which must not be confused with the ordinary sense of these terms, see the profound analysis of the moral basis of these distinctions by Hyam Maccoby, Ritual and Morality: The Ritual Purity System and Its Place in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Ritual impurity refers to occurrences which imply changes of human conditions or states, notably those which bring the person into contact with limits and mysteries such as death and birth, and with physical processes such as eating and involuntary bodily events. The symbolic and affective significance attributed in human cultures to boundaries and their transgression as a symbolic system is also studied by anthropologist Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1996). The author thanks Richard Flanz for his help in translating the first 2 parts and the last part from Hebrew to English. Translations from French of quotes from Lacan and Miller are by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger alone or with Joseph Simas unless otherwise noted.

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2.  Readers who are not acquainted with the concepts ‘Matrix’ and ‘Metramorphosis’ may consult: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis,’ Chapter 1; ‘The Almost-Missed Encounters as Eroticized Aerials of the Psyche,’ in Third Text (1994), 28–9; The Matrixial Gaze (1993), Chapter I in The Matrixial Borderspace (2006); ‘The With-In-Visible Screen,’ in Inside the Visible, ed. C. de Zegher (Boston: MIT Press, 1996), 89–116. 3. For Judith Butler, parody is the way to achieve these aims (Butler 1990). 4.  Pollock argues that the matrixial possibility is something that can be discerned already there in texts, signifiers, legends, painting, ourselves, suggesting that the matrixial paradigm indicates another possible strategy for a feminism that has been waging a war on the myths, legends, texts, and canons of what it names patriarchal culture and indeed were caught, by doing so, in the phallic trap of binary oppositions. Griselda Pollock, ‘After the Reapers: Gleaning the Past, the Feminine and Another Future in the Work of Bracha L. Ettinger,’ in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Halala—Autistwork, eds. Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksman and Griselda Pollock (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum & Artifac; Aix-en-Provence: Cité du Livre, 1995): 130–64. See also Pollock’s ‘Inscriptions in the Feminine,’ in Inside the Visible, ed. Catherine de Zegher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996): 67–87. 5. In agreement with Lacan’s account on perversion in the 1960s, it is interesting to note that psychoanalytic experience in general shows perversion to be a male ‘specialty.’ Janine Chasguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion (London: Free Association Books, 1985). 6. On the one hand, I try to draw the limits of the phallic Law and Order— as castration-separation and substitution—that pretends to account for every aesthetic principle of creation, and on the other hand, I raise the possibility that something of the matrixial aesthetics relates to ethics as well. Some aspects of the Matrix come close to the ethics evoked by Levinas with regards to The Face (le Visage). Lacan’s ethical considerations in relation to Antigone’s tragedy allows, to my mind, for other possibilities, of a matrixial kind, which are elaborated in Chapter 8 and in Volume 2. 7. ‘Jouissance’ signifies sensual enjoyment or pain in the Real. 8. Deferent (adj.) stands for transporting and transmitting out, as well as for acting with reverence. Deference also stands for respect, reverence, awe. By using this term here I intend both respect and awe, and transportation and transmission. 9. See also: Numbers 14:18; Deuteronomy 5:9; Exodus 34:5–6. 10. In English, for example, when you read ‘I love you,’ this can be understood in any one of four ways: between a woman and a man, between a man and a woman, between a woman and a woman and between a man

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and a man; in Hebrew, the statement is structured as gendered and sexual; it is erotic, and each of these possibilities is said in a different way. 11. The Other is classically defined as ‘the treasure of the signifiers’ in the early Lacanian theory. 12. Since my use of the term ‘feminine’ in the matrixial perspective takes a critical position vis-à-vis of Freud’s ‘feminine’ and ‘female’ and is close to Lacan’s ‘supplementary femininity,’ I will briefly sketch Freud’s phallic paradigm of masculine/feminine and maleness/femaleness. 13.  Freud states this even though, he continues, ‘Unfortunately we can describe this state of things only as it affects the male child; the corresponding processes in the little girl are not known to us’ (1923b: 142). 14. Thus, for example, ‘feminine masochism’ is the stance of the boy toward his father—a ‘masculine phantasy’ (Lacan 1981: 192). Little Hans and the Wolf Man explore the meaning of the capacity to carry children in the womb, and the hallucination of being a woman in the psychotic takes place in the mind of a male patient. The incarnation of this femininity in hallucinations stands in direct relation to its foreclosure from the symbolic system. As for women patients, according to Freud, they are supposed to seek in a man the answer to their question about the feminine. In my matrixial analysis of Freud’s patient ‘Dora’, the answer to his question about the feminine and what a woman wants may in fact be revealed only if we consider that women address this question to a woman first. For an elaboration of this issues see Ettinger (1995) and my text on Fascinance in Volume 2. 15. For a criticism of Lacan’s ‘Phallogocentrism’ see Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 16. This trace of a trace is created in the course of a schism through which the subject itself emerges as well, when the signifiers of language blur the individual’s archaic modes of experience and nest in their place, and when discourse conducted by speech vehicles the principles of language and society (that dwell in the Symbolic) and restructures the archaic processes, modes, and materials as no longer accessible. 17. ‘Forclusion’—Foreclosure in English, is a mechanism of a-priori non-inclusion of the signifier, operating in psychosis. It is analogous ­ to repression in the level of neurosis where a signifier was included and then pushed under to become unconscious. While repression explicitly fits the Oedipal model of castration, foreclosure that is supposed to be ­pre-Oedipal is still structured as some kind of castration, since it indexes a total presence in the Real and a total absence of passage to the Symbolic on the presence/absence axis of the phallic paradigm. Thus, the feminine is either ‘castrated’ in the post-Oedipal era or foreclosed in the pre-Oedipal one, and is either way excluded from the Symbolic.

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18. ‘Incest’ means literally in the Latin: ‘impure’. The archaic, the primordial, the Real, the Freudian Id, are never about just nature in psychoanalysis, since they refer to psychic events: affective and mental to be interpreted. Here the feminine/prenatal ‘in-cestuous’ rapport does not indicate the usual sexual meaning, the meaning of a sexual intercourse, since phallic and Oedipal sexual rapport is not intended concerning the Matrixial, and their mechanism cannot be retroactively applied to pregnancy and womb. Here the ‘in-cest’ means literally the unavoidable bodily non-sexual prenatal contact-rapport, the corporeal contact in the maternal womb during gestation, and the transmission of maternally affected and already mental imprints. 19. I suggest that we must differentiate fading-by-transformation from both normal/neurotic repression and psychotic foreclosure—both corresponding differently to a ‘castration mechanism.’ It relates to the phenomenon of surmounting discussed by Freud (1919: 249). 20. Toward the end of pregnancy the post-mature infant inside the womb can be considered as a partial subject, a matrixial subject or a subject-to-be. At an earlier stage of pregnancy, the fetus is a phallic or matrixial ­part-object, and not yet a partial subject. 21. What seems to support my suggestion that the matrixial phantasy cannot be subjugated to the castration phantasy is that while a castration phantasy is frightening at the point of its original emergence before its repression, a matrixial phantasy becomes frightening only when it is repressed but is not frightening at the point of its original sprouting. 22. M. C. Hamon defends the idea that ‘for the two sexes, only one genital organ, the male organ, plays a role’ and ‘there is no other representation of the loss for the Unconscious except this one’ (38, 98). She subjugates all other organs, including the uterus (as referred to in the works of the psychoanalysts Deutch, Horney, Ferenzi, Abraham, Jones, and Klein) to the Phallus. In my diffracted view, any object, even the penis, may be related to, under certain circumstances, by non-phallic processes. For Hamon the phallus/castration position strictly represents Lacan’s position; in my view, it represents strictly only the early Lacan while the late Lacan should be interpreted otherwise. 23. The symbolic Phallus, the signifier’s chains and the social and cultural principles inscribed in the Symbolic and transmitted by the discourse. 24. ‘Woman’—whether Mother or not. It is not maternity that is discussed here but a human potentiality related to female bodily specificity. 25. Hollowed, mehoulelet, halala, from the root: H.L.L. in Hebrew means impurified, profaned, and desecrated but also may stand, in my sense, for ‘spaced,’ ‘laid apart,’ ‘derived’ and ‘created.’ Halal—‘space’ and ‘dead’— comes from the same root, and also ‘creating’ and ‘dancing’ (Leholel). Halala is the title I gave to a series of my paintings.

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26. The symbolic Matrix articulates memory traces of both. 27. In Hebrew, the words for ‘exile’ and ‘revelation’ stem from the same root: ‘G.L.H.’ Lacan refers to James Joyce’s Exiles in: Le sinthome, unedited seminar, 1975–6; published (2005 [1975–6]), Le Séminaire livre XXIII: Le sinthome 1975–1976, texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005). 28. In divergence from some feminist tendencies to reject the category of the Sublime altogether (and, in general, to reject categories that are too established within phallocentric discourse), I suggest that we can divert it from the phallic paradigm and examine it under the matrixial paradigm. 29. ‘Halala’ and ‘mamalangue’ are titles of series of paintings I was working on during writing this article. Halala (HLL(A)H in Hebrew) is a feminization of the Hebrew masculine noun halal (HLL) that has two distinct meanings—‘space’ and ‘dead,’ but which, in the feminine form, signifies: desecrated, violated, profaned, espaced, hollowed, as well as ‘her space,’ and may signify ‘her espacement,’ ‘her derivation,’ and ‘her creation.’ The term halalah appears only once in the Hebrew Bible/the Old Testament. In my book: Matrix • Halal(a)—Lapsus, Notes on Painting 1985–1992 (Oxford: MoMA, 1993), I wrote some thoughts on other words derived from this root as well.

CHAPTER 7

ART AS THE TRANSPORT-STATION OF TRAUMA ([1999] 2000)

Some parts of the text presented at the conference Rethinking Genius Today, ICA, London, 19 June 1999. Published in Hebrew in: Plastika 3 (Tel Aviv: Camera Obscura, 1999). The present version was published in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Artworking 1985–1999 (Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000), 91–98, 111–15, and reprinted in: Atarya et al., Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture (Springer, 2016), 151–60.

EDITOR’S PREFACE This is one of Bracha L. Ettinger’s most important statements on the role of art, on the aesthetics of Beauty and the Sublime, on the relation between Beauty as a deflection of the encounter with the limit of life—death—and the correlation in psychoanalytical thinking between death—or rather the Death drive—and the feminine. She is engaging at once with Jewish theology, with classical Western aesthetics, with Kant on Beauty and the Sublime, and with Lacan’s reading of Beauty as a limit that concerns Ethics. In anticipation of her longer study of Lacan’s seminar on Ethics in which he discusses Beauty in relation to the figure of Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy, which follows as Chapter 8, this chapter works across the Lacanian © The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_8

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vocabulary of the cluster Ettinger has termed Woman/Other/Thing to propose a series of terms that loosen the connection between the Death drive and the feminine because she reveals how the feminine now extends beyond the limit of life—which is death or unthinkability—toward another limit that is gestation and pre-birth in ‘cross-scription’ of traces of shared events. New concepts explored in this chapter include: the time-space of non-life (which is the not-yet-human life, and is not ‘death’) in relation to feminine borderswerving, borderlinking and borderspacing by means of a different kind of woman-archaic-m/Other-Thing where the primary psychic Thing does not turn into object but into encounter-event. I want to note specifically her inserting of the little ‘m’ that qualifies the archaic Other ‘in the feminine’, an expression that appeared already (see Chapter 4) in terms of the originary matrixial coemergence of the prematernal subject and the presubject infant that becomes the model for an alliance of partnersin-difference. By creating a ‘zone of shareability’ by which the other represents a ­lmost-otherness in principle, and neither a radical otherness outside nor death nor a preceding nothingness inside (such that the possible event later—one’s own death—is imagined as equivalent to it), Ettinger invites us to think ‘that a life can be lived or thought about from the place of that limit where life-is-yet-to-come and where she is already on the other side but seeing it and living it in the form of something not already here in time or space. Matrixial time and space cannot be thought in the either/or typical of a sphere of meaning and subjectivity defined exclusively in these binary terms: life and death’. ‘Archaic jouissance and trauma’—intensity and affectivity—emerge in a Real for the becoming-infant and in the recurrence of a Real for the becoming-maternal subject in advance of the signifying systems to come, but not in void of nothingness in which becoming-life would stand for the equivalent of not-life or death. For Lacan, death haunts the living subject as the limit of subjectivity, and Beauty (when given an image such as the character Antigone in the drama we witness through the play) functions as the flash of deflection from the encounter with this horror of death. For Ettinger, wishing to lift the foreclosure of the feminine as a zone of encounter and event that contributes eventually to subjectivity, argues that non-life ‘with-in’ the feminine-maternal ‘can become a source of a feminine difference whose meaning can be accessed and which can engender a configuration of symbologenic liberty, born from this particular occasion for occurrence and encounter.’ These last two terms are significant and have an origin in the seventeenth century philosophy of Spinoza, which was reclaimed in the twentieth century by Gilles Deleuze, and which

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had a widespread impact in cultural theory because Deleuze proposed a ­non-representational model of thought and meaning that is specifically relevant to a non-semiotic but aesthetic study of art. One of the key terms, also from Spinoza but passing through psychoanalysis, is affect. Diffused matrixial aesthetic affects presented already in earlier chapters work together in the encounter, arriving from the becoming-archaic-m/Other’s side to establish the movement in subjectivity towards meaning, or what Ettinger would call sense-making that is not representational—an image or idea of a finite thing—but which can be felt and known, and most importantly, transmitted. If we shift the vocabulary from things and objects and ‘images of’ and consider the aesthetic as an event and an encounter (her term ­encounter-event points to an interval time of suspension and amazement, a continual encounter), we can make more sense of the core idea of this chapter: art as a transport-station of trauma, where transport indicates the movement, and station indicates the stillness in suspense, and both indicate art as a dwelling place for transformation when we are moved by it, by affects similar to those that move her as artist during the long process of painting. Thus, the chapter will elaborate the opening statement about how art can engender a transubjective space ‘by way of experiencing with an object or a process of creation’. The emphasis moves away from classic oppositions between artist and viewer/spectator/reader to the space engendered in the encounter, inside the artwork, between artworks in a series and, to begin with, in-between artist with the world when she paints or writes. Then the space of such encounter is a space of wit(h)nessing whose affective charge and meaning depends upon the capacity of wit(h)ness viewer/ reader to fragilize her/himself so that the limit, the frontier between subject and subject, subject and object, is transgressed and becomes a borderspace and a threshold for transmission of traces of trauma. Transmission cannot, however, be predicted or presumed since the transmission comes from one transubjective encounter-event that generated the art where the artist is self-fragilized and relies on evoking another with the potential wit(h)ness viewer/reader whose frontiers may be fragilized. In classic psychoanalytical and psychological theory, any transgression or loosening of the borders of the single whole subject might be considered, Ettinger writes here, hysterical, melancholic or worse, psychotic. To be a subject is to be a bounded, singular entity who can, at the simplest and most basic, use the right pronouns and understand the space between I and you and I and not-I. For phallic thought, confusion of self and world or self and other is a breakdown, invoking or signalling the Death drive, a return to a fusion or symbiosis, which is the stillness of never having been awoken into

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life at all. Ettinger displays at length the theoretical overlaying of the Death drive (let me not be agitated by life and its anguish) with the feminine that underlines the phallic concept of early maternity as symbiotic and prenatality as an undifferentiated condition of a physiological nature. Working from her own practice as an artist affected by the world, and historical trauma as well as sensitized by that history to trauma in its structural sense as the condition of shock in being alive, Bracha L. Ettinger here asks us first to understand Lacan’s connection: death/the feminine, and then to think about another connection through her prism of not-yet-life, non-life becoming life in the shared space with the subjectivising m/Other, a process that inspires in all who are born from the matrixial encounter the trace not just of Woman/Other/Thing but rather Woman/Thing-Event and ­/ Encounter-Thing whose psychic legacy is a capacity, between trauma and jouissance, thus painful as well as pleasurable, for borderlinking and borderspacing that manifests human differentiation during jointness. These terms are beginning to have more purchase as we see how they enable us to imagine and write about affective conditions of t­ransubjective understanding that are not intersubjective—i.e. you and me, two s­ubjects interacting. Transubjectivity is partial, involving particles of me and of others, and bits of others’ others, bits of the world, momentarily at work, like waves in an encounter-event not yet graspable in phallic symbolic terms. But they do happen. Artistic practice and aesthetic response are where discussion sometimes falls into mystical terms to register such occurrences. Psychoanalysis, as we can now see, can offer a different vocabulary to rethink the spirit. At the opposite end of the symbolic spectrum lies the notion of nature, the body, biology. Any discussion of the feminine is haunted by either mysticism or biology. Ettinger here negotiates these challenges when she writes what I feel is a core statement in this chapter: ‘Elaborating a sphere between non-life and life in the feminine upon the rapport between ­subject-to-be and becoming-m/Other-to-be – and, on the level of the Real, between the foetus and the female body-psyche – should not lead us mistakenly to look for the meaning of the matrixial encounter-Thing and Thing-Event in nature. Female bodily specificity allows us to contemplate or recognize primary co-affectivity. It supplies an apparatus of sense-making. Her sexual difference, like his sexual difference, is a thinking apparatus.’ Insisting that we recognize sexual difference in the phallic mode also as a thinking apparatus enables the key proposition that we understand by the term woman in the matrixial sense, hence the feminine to the power of

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the Matrix, as an interlaced transubjectivity not confined to one body and meaningful beyond the level of just real jouissance. Woman, the Ettingerian matrixial feminine, is not a woman as opposed to a man. Matrixially, Woman is a subjectivizing apparatus for making sense of the relations of subjects to each other and the world in a certain dimension that supplements those until now provided by psychoanalysis and philosophy to designate sexual difference. There is, however, one further implication: if art is one of the privileged moments/sites/possibilities for materializing and activating matrixial transubjectivity, the artist, irrespective of their Oedipal gender or sexuality, is a woman-artist (see Ettinger 2006 [1999]: ch. 6). Finally, this paper makes its contribution to aesthetic formulation defined by Ettinger as Beauty-inclined-towards-the-Sublime because in the Matrixial, the gaze does not return to the self as its reflection; it turns further away to the outside and the unknown while the subject opens a space in which we are longing or touching through compassion and in which we remain in awe, wondering over time. It does not deflect and enclose as image the encounter with the limit of thinkability (but not affectability) but opens the potential space for ‘the transport’ of trauma. This is precisely critical for expanding this focus on the aesthetic into traumatic history, the social and the ethical. The wounding of the world, the unmmemorialized and even the immemorializable pain of others cannot be enclosed and should not become the beautiful—aestheticized by art. The traumatic encounter becomes Beauty and redefines it. The chapter concludes by stressing that in the matrixial zone, there is a price to pay: the ­impossibility-of-not-sharing the trauma and jouissance of others. This wit(h)nessing in the borderspace of transubjective encounters offers a compensation. Grace and solace and ‘the deepening and widening of the threshold of fragility at this transport-station of trauma.’ Beyond the specific aesthetic and general ethical context, this chapter also explains other phenomena such as the transgenerational transmission of memory and speaks to a unique kind of encounter and sharing that needs a feminine-matrixial Symbolic—the analytical situation for instance, and the extension of its insights into other psycho-social encounters. The chapter is in four parts, its opening paragraph already containing the whole proposition that the chapter will then elaborate to return us to an enriched understanding of the potentiality of art and of relations as a transport-station of trauma. This chapter also prepares us for a further discussion of the matrixial feminine and ethics as we move from transport-station to transgressing with-in-to the feminine in the following chapters.

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ART AS THE TRANSPORT-STATION OF TRAUMA ([1999] 2000) I The place of art is for me the transport-station of trauma: a ­transport-station that, more than a place, is rather a space that allows for certain occasions of occurrence and of encounter, which will become the realization of what I call borderlinking and borderspacing in a matrixial transubjective space by way of experiencing with an object or process of creation. The transport is expected in this station, and it is possible, but the transport-station does not promise that passage of remnants of trauma will actually take place in it; it only supplies the space for this occasion. The passage is expected but uncertain; the transport does not happen in each encounter and for every gazing subject. The matrixial transubjective field is a field in whose scope there is no point in speaking either of certainty or of absolute chance. Likewise, it is pointless to evoke there a whole subject, a definite hindrance to encounter, a neat split between subject and object, a total evacuating of the subject, or its shattering into endless particles. In this matrixial psychic field, a gathering of several of its potential intended correspondents is possible—of several, and not of all of them, and not at just any moment—in their actualization as p ­ artial-objects and partial-subjects, between presence and absence. Beauty that I find in contemporary artworks that interest me, whose source is the trauma to which it also returns and appeals, is not beauty as ‘private’ or as that upon which a consensus of taste can be reached. It is a kind of encounter that perhaps we are trying to avoid much more than which we are aspiring to arrive at, because the beautiful, as the poet Rilke says, is but the beginning of the horrible in which—in this dawning— we can hardly stand. We can hardly stand at the threshold of that horrible, at that threshold, which may be but, as Lacan puts it in his Seminar VII, the limit, the frontier of death—or should we say self-death?—in life where life glimpses death as if from its inside (Lacan 1986 [1959–60]). Could such a limit be experienced, via artworking, as a threshold and a passage to the Other? If so, is it only the death-frontier that is traversed here? Is death the only domain of the beyond? The beauty that Rilke evokes refers to the individual that, isolated in its interior, relates to an object contracting toward itself; that is, Rilke

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refers to a distinct and pivotal individual. And in Lacan’s view, beauty refers to the individual on the edges of the border that must incise it. But such a concept of Beauty, which refers to a Beyond, is immediately associated for us with the Sublime if a transgression to the Beyond is working through it. We can meditate on its meaning as already a between Beauty and Sublime if the limit loses its function of a frontier. The limit-frontier described by Lacan that separates the subject from the death drive cuts the subject also from feminine sexuality and constructs the ‘woman’ as absent, and her ‘rapport’ as ‘impossible’, and her self as out-of-existence and out-of-significance. Against the option of a separating limit-frontier as the carrier of beauty’s palpitations, I would like to speak of a limit transmuted into a threshold that allows the passage between Beauty and Sublime. Here we can conceive of an occasion for realization of an unavoidable encounter with remnants of trauma in the mental stratum of transubjectivity (transsubjectivity), in a certain jointness that becomes possible only with-indifferentiation, in a co-emergence with-one-another that is not assimilation and fusion, in a psychic dimension where a web of connections inside and outside the individual’s limits, and a self-mutual but non-symmetrical transgression of these limits, does not favour the total separation of the distinct individual either from the death drive or from the feminine. This web, which is not only a feminine beyond-the-phallus web but also an originary matrixial web, is tragic in many senses, but it is not melancholic, hysterical or psychotic, despite its psychotic potentiality that stems from this non-separation itself and from this transgression itself. Such realization of encounter via the artwork penetrates into, impregnates and creates further encounters between the artist and the world, the artist and the object, the artist and the Other, artists and viewers. The realization of such an encounter transforms the tableau [painting or artwork] and is transformed by it into a transport-station of trauma. Beauty, for Lacan, concerns the individual that trembles on the limit of the border that splits it—and this limit is, in fact, the barrier of ‘castration anxiety’ as shaped by the discourse concerning sexuality from the viewpoint of male development: a limit that tears the individual subject—male or female—apart, both from feminine sexuality, always still intermingled with closeness and attraction toward the archaic mother, and from revelations of the death drive. In other words, it tears the individual subject away from the regression into psychosis, or rather, into the womb-as-symbiotic-autism-and-psychosis. Theory that produces

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the subject thus split, where negation of the feminine is constructed as a defence against insanity, also produces, by the same move, some unequivocal consanguinity between femininity and psychosis, the feminine and art object, the feminine and loss, and the feminine and sacrifice. It resonates all through Western culture, for example in the classical structuring of the figure of the artist as a creative subject who shapes its object as the loss of the ‘woman’ or the mother, or the structuring of the ‘woman’ as an object sacrificed to creation and replaced by it—the list is long, from the myth of Orpheus to Duchamp’s ‘Bride’ (see Huhn 1993a; Ettinger 2004). The foreclosure of the feminine is vital for the phallic subject because it stands for the split from Death drive in many intricate ways.1 The idea of death is closely connected to the feminine in Western culture and is very strongly embedded inside Freudian psychoanalysis in general and in Lacanian theory in particular, where the feminine is closely assimilated to fusion, undifferentiation, autism and psychosis—all manifestations of deep regression and of the activity of the death drive. The matter of the split from the death drive, which is de facto the split from the feminine, moves us to analyse further the matter of the relation between the beautiful and the tragic as Lacan knits them: the effect of beauty results from the rapport of the subject with the ‘horizon’ of life, from the artist’s traversing, via the elected figure through which s/he speaks (and we add: through which s/he sees), to what Lacan calls ‘the second death’. For Antigone, life ‘can only be lived or thought about, from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is already on the other side. But from that place she can see it and live it in the form of something already lost’ (Lacan 1986 [1959–60]: 280). This place, behind this limit that during life usually cannot be traversed because it is well carved and kept—it protects the subject and the subject preserves it—this place, detached from historical time, is, for Lacan, the source from which artistic creation emerges toward a surface that yearns for its unique value— the unique value of the place beyond the limit of life—in a world of solid partitions of separation of the Real both from language, in the sense that the Symbolic produces the Real as what it lacks, and from the social context, in the sense that castration is the barrier of the total prohibition of the mother-child early incest that duplicates the total break-off from the archaic mother. That is, this place is the limit of the law that is also offered as its origin, upon which the replacement of any event with a

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symbol and the replacement of every object by another object—while keeping their value intact—become possible. While the kept ‘same’ value of what is forever absent is the Phallus itself, its embodied price is the woman as archaic-m/Other or as a body-psyche-Thing. But the beautiful in artwork is the result of the capture of a unique value of the Thing, which is out of that chain of objects, of the event that is outside of the chain of events, of an unplaceable place and of time out of historical time, which glitters from the other side behind this invisible and untraversable limit—of their capture by the surface of passion in its turning into an image, bypassing the phallic value that took their place. I propose to add the ideas of non-life, and of feminine borderswerving, borderlinking and borderspacing, to the heart of the thinking about the creative moment and its soul by means of a different kind of ­woman-archaic-m/Other-Thing. This would mean, to paraphrase Lacan’s expression, a life that can be lived or thought about from the place of that limit where life is yet-to-come, where she is already on the other side but seeing it and living it in the form of something not already here in time or space. In other words, not only death and foreclosed femininity, but also archaic trauma and jouissance—to begin with those that any potential subject experiences with its becoming-archaic-m/Other, and later on any trauma and jouissance produced in a similar sphere of jointness and mounted upon similar nonconscious lanes—are those unique values behind the phallic limit that the artist tries to capture and the artwork treasures. Their inscription in the domain of feminine sexuality or in the domain of the death drive inside a solely phallic paradigm is what imprisons the affected traces of these archaic trauma and jouissance and of similar current events in a circular way in psychoanalytic tradition, in a frame of an experience outside any symbolization, and which each symbolization is supposed to reject, in a circular way again, into the domains of feminine sexuality and death drive as the foreclosed and the abject. I suggest that a certain hybridization of the margins of these two domains—non-life and the feminine—can become a source of a feminine difference whose sense can be accessed, and which can engender a configuration of symbologenic liberty, born from this particular occasion for occurrence and encounter. This feminine difference is neither a configuration of dependency derived from disguising oneself in a phallic mask (from femininity as masquerade as defined by Joan Rivière, on to parody and irony in Judith Butler’s terms), nor is it a revolt or a struggle with

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the phallic texture (the feminine as the moment of rupture and negativity as for Julia Kristeva or as the total Otherness and the contrary, as for the early Levinas). Furthermore, this feminine difference is not a total Other (as in Levinas and Lacan) either. We can advance along this route of thinking if we free ourselves not only from the compulsion to disqualify whatever is glimpsed from beyond the border of the One-subject life as mystical or psychotic, but also from perceiving the borderline itself as a split and a frontier-limit, and if we distinguish between subjectivity and the individual, between full presence and preabsence [presabsence], between total absence and disabsence.2 But for a moment, let us continue to reflect upon Lacan’s ideas. If the surface of passion captures such a ‘unique value’ while making an image out of it, this image creates a barrier and is created as a barrier that blocks the fluidity or the passage of the subject to the other side, be it death or, now also more explicitly, the feminine, and, therefore, the effect of beauty is a ‘blindness effect’ (Lacan 1986 [1959–60]: 281). The beautiful blinds from the other side when blindness is structured as the arrest of impulsive passion, which engenders desire. It was Freud who structured blindness as castration in his article ‘The “Uncanny”’ that deals with the aesthetic experience (1919). The function of the beautiful is precisely ‘to reveal to us the site of man’s relationship to his own death, and to reveal it to us in a blinding flash only’ (Lacan 1986 [1959– 60]: 295, translation modified). The beautiful is a limit of a sphere that we can approach only from the outside, a phenomenological limit which allows us to reflect on what is behind the untraversable borderline. ‘Outrage’ is the term that conveys, according to Lacan, the crossing of this invisible borderline, a crossing which allows us to join beauty with desire. The meaning of ‘outrage’ is ‘to go “out” or beyond’ (c’est aller outre outrepasser) (281), to transgress, and this transgression is the tragic aesthetic effect, like that of Antigone, this ‘most strange and most profound of effects’ (248) that arises in the limit zone between life and death, where a fate notches its verdict and a death is lived by anticipation, being a death that crosses over into the sphere of life and interlaces within the texture of a life that moves into the realm of death. Thus, ‘the glow of beauty coincides with the moment of transgression’ (281) and of the desecration of the limit. The aesthetic question engages both death and the beauty-ideal. For Lacan, the beauty-ideal operates at a limit materialized and represented

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in art by the human body that envelops ‘all possible phantasies’ of human desire and creates a barrier which transports ‘man’s relationship to his own death’ (295). ‘Outrage’ is first of all wrath and fury about the unbelievable and the inhuman. It is not just any transgression towards death; it is the scandal and the disgrace; it is the transgression to the inhuman and the horrible. Thus, the beautiful, as for Rilke, is the beginning of the horrible, captured in an image or an object, or it is its limit to which we still have some access, which keeps us distant from transgression in reality while allowing us to glimpse our own death. While the body carries the rapport of the human being to its death, as an image it also obstructs the passage to the experience of that horrible; the ‘effect of beauty derives from the relationship of the hero to the limit’ (286). I suggest that not only death and the feminine as defined by a phallic framework, but also the archaic trauma and jouissance, experienced in jointness-in-differentiating with the archaic-m/Other-to-be, are those inaccessible unique values behind the limit. Would they not be appropriately intuited by this zone ‘between life and death’ (280) that attracts Antigone? But we need to consider now going further and beyond the idea of death as that only limit; there is another kind of unique value. The archaic trauma and jouissance, experienced in jointness-in-differentiating with the archaic m/Other, are interwoven ­ inside the limit itself, and transform the limit itself into a threshold.

II When in his Seminar XI Lacan elucidates the scopic drive and the desire to see, the unique value is articulated by the gaze structured as a lacking object, as an objet a (Lacan 1973a [1964]). The painter lays down his armed gaze; he surrenders in order to meet the objet a of the gaze that approaches him as if from the outside. The painter’s gesture concludes an interior internal stroke that resembles the one that participates in the process of regression that intends to satisfy fixated partial impulses, but instead it creates—as in a backward movement, as in a reversal of the course of mental time—a stimulus toward which the stroke appears already as a response. The gaze as a lack is behind the borderline of this move and emerges from behind the horizon, from a place or time where or when it touched the Thing from an intimate exterior captured in the interior of its psyche. Now it is that gaze, that absence, that seduces the

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painter’s caressing attack; it horrifies her touch or fascinates it, and it enchants it—and her—on the borderline of the Irreal. Face to face with the astounding and horrible force of the gaze arising on the horizon, still impregnated with residues of archaic pain or joy of jouissance, the artist yields its consciousness, and consciousness can only come in the aftermath to arrest the artist’s stroke or conclude it by assigning images and symbols for what was up till then the unnamed, the immemorial, the invisible, and the unintelligible. The archaic jouissance, saturated with pain or joy, is the traumatic wound, beyond the border. The traumatic jouissance is considered inaccessible to the subject, and if it appears by way of the objet a, only then the evasive flickering of its momentary disclosure in the picture, whatever presentifies its absence can be understood in Lacan’s theory, and only as ‘a phallic ghost’. The ‘phallic ghost’ seals its imprints on the planes of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real. It also gives their relations with each other around each event their own twisting signature. On the plane of the Real, the link of the Phallus to the male body is most tightly kept, but this linkage is duplicated, even if by way of lack and loss, in the other two planes as well, in the correlation between the male sexual organ, the potentiality related to its action, the phantasms associated with it, the image, and the concept that corresponds to it, even though the concept itself already appears as neutral, and Lacan shows us how, as a concept, the Phallus is at the service of both male and female individuals, and if not in the same way then at least on the same level. The phallic viewpoint with its concepts of subject and object is not free from the imprints of the body, be it even by consideration of the plane of the Real solely. But since this body is male, the artist—male or female—that encounters this gaze can only turn into a man-artist. The archaic jouissance saturated with pain or joy, which is the traumatic wound beyond the border is indeed inaccessible to the subject in as much as it is phallic. But the One-and-Only phallic difference is not the only one. There are other figures of loss. The archaic W ­ oman-m/Other should not be understood only, as Lacan suggests, as absence, as ‘in the field of the Thing’ and as the ‘other-Thing that lies beyond’ (Lacan 1986 [1959–60]: 214, 298), where she can only be sacrificed, eliminated and evaporated—but also, as I view it, the archaic W ­ oman-m/Other can be understood in the field of Event and Encounter, where she is an almost-other-Event-Encounter that is border-linked to the I, and is, therefore, in preab-sence. In the matrixial borderspace, another artist appears. Here, where

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I and non-I co-emerge and co-fade, composite partial subjectivity produces, shares and transmits assembled, im-pure and diffracted objects and absorbs their loss and their dispersion via a conductible borderlink, so that absence is disabsented, and presence diminished but not extinguished. The sphere where the woman-m/Other is not an ­ other-Thingas-absence is the matrixial sphere. Here, the subject lives in a borderspace between not-yet-life and the feminine, where the encounter-Thing and the Thing-event have some border-accessibility. This sphere is modelled upon the feminine/pre-birth intimate sharing in jouissance, trauma and phantasy. Elaborating such a sphere between non-life and life in the feminine upon the rapport between the subject-to-be and the b ­ ecomingm/Other-to-be—and, on the level of the Real, between the foetus and the female body-and-psyche—should not lead us mistakenly to look for the sense of the matrixial encounter-Thing and Thing-event in nature. Female sexual bodily specificity allows us for thinking primary ­co-affectivity. It supplies an apparatus of a sense-making. Her sexual difference, like his sexual difference, is a thinking apparatus. A sexual difference has always served to explore the intimate and the public and to articulate the conscious and the Unconscious, and it has always supplied the archetypes and the ideals for the soul and shaped the ideas of Beauty. It has always been a thinking-apparatus. The womb, which is a female bodily specificity, stands here for a sensing-and-thinking apparatus as well as for a psychic capacity for shareability that is based upon borderlinking to a female body. This borderlinking permits differentiation-in-co-emergence and separation-in-jointness, which take their sense from a continuous reattuning of distance-in-proximity between partial-subjects and p ­ artial-subjects.3 I and non-I interweave their borderlinks in a process I have named metramorphosis, activating relations-with-out-relating on the borders of presence and absence.

III The matrixial affect, which creates the metramorphosis and is created by it, is the affect of the Thing that links together an I with a non-I in co-emergence and co-fading. The matrixial affect diffracts a difference on the level of the Thing when it signals that some-Thing happens, and that a transition from Thing to object is taking place without a total separation from the Thing. A minimal sense of differentiation-in-togetherness is tracing itself beyond the signal, between signal and significance, testifying that partial subjectivity is already involved in this move, that someones

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are there to be affected, and that these someones are not just objects: they are wit(h)nessing. A web of movements of borderlinking, between subjects and partial-subjects and between partial-subjects and partial-objects, becomes a psychic space of transubjectivity when matrixial affects signal that a passage from Thing to object-and-subject takes place in jointness. This passage is in itself a minimal sense, and it works for more meaning through the work of art. Borderlinking is thus enabled by a minimal difference of affect or by affective minimal differentiation, in the passage from Thing-Event and Thing-Encounter into partial-subject and partial-object. The metramorphosis is a passageway through which matrixial affects, events, materials and modes of becoming infiltrate just into the nonconscious margins of the Symbolic to enable the transformation, to transgress the borders of the individual subject, and to establish inter-psychic designified communication. Metramorphosis does not remain on the level of the Real, forever designifying into absence. It is a joint awakening of unthoughtful-knowledge on the borderline and an inscription of the ­ encounter in traces within it, traces that open a space in and along the borderline itself. The metramorphosis is thus a co-affectivity and coactivity that open the borderline between subjects and between subject and object into a space that occasions a linking and a mutation into a threshold, so that the absolute separation between subjects upon the pattern of the cut/split/castration from the Other-Thing—a separation which, in fact, is the pattern of elimination of the archaic m/Other-EventEncounter—becomes impossible. This is because the borderline loses its frontier quality momentarily and surrenders to the transitive movement. Metramorphosis is a poietic process of affective-emotive borderswerving: a process of differentiating during borderspacing and borderlinking by affective differentiating, which is from the outset transgressive. It is a process of inscriptive exchange between/within several matrixial entities. Borderswerving dissolves the individual borderlines so that they become thresholds that allow a passage which, for each participant, captivates what I call a surplus of fragility. The knowledge of ­being-born-together—co-naissance—in a matrixial alliance insinuates a crossed transcription of a transcryption. It hurts. We are hurt in the subknowledge of which we receive a sense in visual arts by inventing or joining a screen where an originary matrixial repression—a process of repression by fading-in-transformation—is inverted, because it allows the originary matrixial transitive trauma some veiled visibility via

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a touching gaze that approaches it from with-in-out-side, and makes us fragile via wit(h)nessing the trauma of the Other and of the world. We are hurt, but we are also solaced. The matrixial impossibility of not-sharing with the Other and with the world is profoundly fragilizing. We are sharing in, beyond our intention or will, and this sharing with-in requires its price and initiates its beauty. Where the other-Thing is not eliminated and the object is not entirely lost, and where the object approaches the subject without a schism, the link to the archaic m/Other-Encounter-Event is always maintained in some aspects and on a certain level, moving us closer to the archaic space in-between no-thing and some-thing. In the matrixial sphere, it is possible to describe the emanation of the gaze in artwork not as a ‘phallic ghost’, and to describe the ‘uncanny’ experience without castration anxiety. Since metramorphic swerving is a sexual differentiating based on webbing of links and not on essence or negation, I have called ‘woman’ this interlaced transubjectivity that is not confined to the contours of the one-body, in which inside and outside converge without fusion, and where disabsence cannot reach full presence or total absence. The artist, who is working through traces coming from the immemorial, not only of herself but of others to whom she is borderlinked—which opens lanes to deepen singular metramorphoses in the matrixial field—is a w ­ oman-artist even when she is a man. She wanders with her spirit’s eyes, mounted upon her erotic antennae, and she channels anew trauma(s) and jouissance(s) coming from non-I(s) that are linked to her in the matrixial borderspace. Her art works through to bifurcate, disperse and rejoin anew, but in difference, the traces that whoever was there had lost during its wandering, and she is acting on/from the borderline, transcribing it while sketching it and displaying it and opening it wide, to turn it into a threshold and transform it into yet another borderspace. The matrixial swerving and differentiating are affective gestures that implicate the borderlines between psychic elements that ‘belong’ to several individuals, to different persons. Subjectivity here becomes both diffracted and assembled, both dispersed, partial and in alliance. Here, the borderline does not function as a frontier-barrier any more. Here come to pass and turn expressive a ‘lightning of […] passage’ (Foucault 1963: 33, translation modified) together with a ‘spasm’ (Lyotard 1997) that becomes a joint spasm. Each borderline is, then, also a breadth, a space where affect and trace join in a kind of sense of the ­individual-in-jointness and become a transitive sense. The matrixial difference as transgressive

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swerving and differentiating implicates a borderline and acts along its length, condensing and opening it into a space, while also diffracting it into few nonconscious lanes. The matrixial borderline interweaves a nonconscious transubjectivity, composed of trauma and jouissance. In itself it is the composite of psychic events of encounter, wrapped with affects and memory traces, which shapes and exposes its sense. If transgression, after Foucault, traverses and re-traverses a line that closes itself from behind again and again in a short flickering of a wave, a borderline that retreats anew straight to the horizon of the untraversable, it seems to me that only in the partial and shared matrixial borderspace does its action receive an unconscious meaning that concerns the human condition: in the transubjective expanse of the individual-in-jointness. Here, in this sphere, the Foucaultian transgression is, indeed, not motivated by negativity or subversion and does not cause the alterity beyond the invisible and untraversable limit to appear as mirror image or mimetic image, because it does not act as a phallic being in expanses conditioned by structures of castration, right from the start. Perhaps the matrixial transgression is this desecration that is ‘neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world)’ (Foucault 1963: 35). This desecration is a measure of swerving, digression and deviation, reception, and transportation and transmission of the spaces opened at the heart of the borderline itself, which is both the laying out of the marks that create this difference and the traces that this layout leaves around, if and when it occasions the dispersion of the marks and the traces between someone and someother. The feminine-matrixial difference, which is an impregnation of a borderline—that is not a frontier-barrier of disconnection and separation that hides effacement and displacement behind its action—is originary. This difference is a passage into a sense, not grasped until this moment, which is not dependent upon the schism between signifier and signified, between subject and object, and even between the masculine and the feminine as gender-identities. The matrixial difference is a subjective dimension not derived from the exchange of signifiers, that does not refer to the phallic field and to the rift of castration, except on a secondary level of dialectics. This difference is a swerve, intertwined in borderlinking, in plaiting and interweaving of borderlines, and in the opening of a borderspace that the interwoven plaits create. Such a feminine difference is neither the effect of social structuring (gender) nor the effect of essentialistic raw data that encode biological difference. This difference is

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woven in the relationship to the female body that is different when you have and when you do not have a female body. This relationship, that creates the difference of the alike and not of the same or of the opposite, is human already at the level of the Real, and, therefore, it is captured already in some human language—be it, to begin with, only the designified language of bodily signs, and the language of affective channelling, and the language of transference that ‘speaks’ with its sensations and affections, and the aesthetic language.

IV The archaic pain or jouissance that is the traumatic wound beyond the limit, is inaccessible to the subject wherever it is phallic. The limit in the Phallus, corresponds to the Ketz (KZ in Hebrew) as described in the ‘Book of Zohar’. The Ketz as a limit is an end, and the end is the place of no memory. If the immemorial, the no-memory par excellence, the total Otherness, is the woman-as-archaic m/Other, then her place of no-memory is the final station, from which no transmission is possible. But where the subject is also matrixial, such no-transmission is impossible. It is impossible for the subject not to be accessible to the traumatic shared-in-difference wound; it is impossible for the subject to tear itself away from the archaic pain or jouissance, and not only of oneself, but also of several others borderlinked to the self upon the pattern of this borderlinking to the archaic-becoming-m/Other. And if, in the phallic field, not to be disconnected from the immemorial in-between life and non-life means psychosis, in the matrixial sphere, a total disconnection from it is in itself a madness; because in the feminine there is a ­memory-of-oblivion of and in the borderline, a memory of oblivion, different from n ­ o-memory in its transgressive affectability that transmits onward the immemorial. The Ketz—a frontier and an end, turns into a Katze (KZH in Hebrew)—a borderline as an open limit, an edge (both words, ‘end’ and ‘edge’, derive from the same root in Hebrew), because where the limit is fluid, crumbled, joined together and borderswerved in the Real or by artworking to become an edge, the borderline becomes a space. And the Katze is then a transport-station of trauma. Back to Lacan. Beauty, in the form and image of the human body, is the last barrier from the Otherness ‘beyond’ which the artist experiences as the ‘second death’. But it can now also be understood bending

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towards the Sublime, as a special reactivating of this supplementary femininity, because the same border, which serves both as the barrier from the ‘second death’ and as the barrier from direct apprehension of ‘sexual rapport’, from these relationships which are, according to Lacan, both feminine and ‘impossible’ (1975b [1972–3]; see also Ettinger 1998a), can become a threshold. In the domain of aesthetics, the borderline that separates the human being from experiencing the second death—from the articulation of death in life—converges with the frontier that separates the human being from articulation of the feminine. In the phallic structure, the figure-of-art that transgress this borderline, whether like Oedipus or like Tiresias, is sacrificed to blindness or death. There, for Lacan, even though transgression is feminine it is not accessible, neither to men nor to women. I am suggesting that from a matrixial angle we cannot speak of such a total inaccessibility, rejection or abjection of the transgressive femininity. Rather, we speak of separation-in-jointness with it, whose risks and wonders are beyond the phallic scope. If transgression operates here from the start in a joint borderspace, the inscriptions of the human body within a feminine sphere and their move as what I have named transcryptum toward the visible by art (see Chapter 9) are not the last barrier from the Otherness-beyond, but are the creation of a transport-station that enables the passage to partial matrixial almost-otherness. For that reason, the poietic-aesthetic feminine transgression vibrates between the beautiful and the Sublime but leads, at the same time, to the domain of ethics, by the operation of wit(h)nessing (Ettinger 1998b). Different aspects of trauma and jouissance are dispersed by and with affects, and their traces circulate between I and non-I. Events that profoundly concern my soul and psyche, and that I cannot contain and elaborate entirely, are transformed and they fade away and get dispersed in others that thus become wit(h)nesses of/to my own trauma. We can think of events whose traumatic weight is so heavy that I would not be able to contain its memory traces at all. In the matrixial borderspace ‘my’ traces will transgress my limits and will be inscribed in another so that the other crossed in/by me will mentally elaborate them for me. Thus, the ‘uterine’ transgression, in which partial sharing in/of jouissance and trauma takes place, is a model for a particular human transgression, for a wit(h)nessing with-in the other, that gives birth to phantasms and produces its own trauma and desire. And ­beauty-affected-by-the-Sublime that is folded in such an occasion disables the obstruction of access to the pain of the Other. Thus, the desire

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to join-in-difference and differentiate-in-joining with the Other does not promise any peace and harmony, because joining is first of all joining within/by the trauma that weakens and bifurcates me and creates the danger of regression and dispersal in the process of receiving, passing on, and transmitting. A loss by definitive cut to a point of no trace and no memory is, in the matrixial space, a horror beyond its scope and an implored missing of the occasion of/for encounter. Here, the experience of anticipated ­future-death in the actual present is not entirely divorced from experiencing life in non-life or in, before and with no-more giving life; and yet, co-birth and co-emergence are no refuge or hideaway from the anxiety of fading and death. Death drive that arises at the horizon of visibility in the tableau (painting) is linked to the experience of co-emergence. The effect of Beauty-inclined-towards-the-Sublime indicates not only the place of relations to one’s own anticipated death, but also the feminine zone of me ‘without me’ (Ettinger and Levinas 1993), the site of the rapport with the death of the other (as the ‘feminine’ for Levinas), and also the site of the rapport with the non-life in me and in the other—this matrixial feminine with-in-out place which is a before-as-beside time. The effect of this Sublime-Beauty is the effect of borderlinking with what had caused the trauma of the other for whom and in whose place I channel an affective memory, I process the immemorial and transform the memory traces of oblivion, of the other and of the world, and inscribe them in painting for the first time. The matrixial sphere with its processes of metramorphosis forms a difference that is feminine in the sense that it is abstracted from borderlinking to female body. It is also a feminine difference in the sense of the transgression beyond the phallic subjectivizing scope. But it is, before any considerations of this axis, an originary difference. For the matrixial subject, the archaic m/Other is not evacuated or eliminated; she is abpresenced; the subject is still and always somehow borderlinked to the archaic m/Other, and the almost-lost object is still and always partial and transubjective (trans-subjective). In disabsence, the encounter-Thing and the Thing-event are still offering witness of her abpresence to any subject that surrenders to transubjectivity. The subjective-object, like the foetus between living and not-living-yet, carrying the in-between possibility of future-living and of not-living-any more, is a transubjective-object for another subject who relates to it. The subject, borderlinked to the other as the archaic m/Other while borderlinking to the transubjective-object,

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becomes partial by this same move. That subject also becomes fragile because it trembles on the borders and transgresses into a zone where, in life, the non-life is accessed affectedly. The ‘woman’-artist transgressively accesses the dimension of non-living in life, and experiences the other-qua-partial-transubjective-object as a desperate part of her own not-One-self that is calling upon her self. With the affective experience of living non-life in life I would like now to emphasize the profound difference that the idea of the Matrix allows us to meditate upon in relation to the aesthetic experience, between death on the one hand and non-life on the other hand, or even between not-yet-life, no-more-life, non-life, killing and death. When Antigone, according to Lacan, lives in a ‘zone between life and death’, although she is not yet dead she is ‘eliminated from the world of the living’ (Lacan 1986 [1959–9]: 280). I will paraphrase this idea to say: in the feminine, the artist between life and non-life is not eliminated from the world of living but suffers from the no-memory or the immemorial of the Other and of the world, and labours to transport traces of/from the crypted phantoms of the Other and of the world into the light of partial visibility. If the aesthetic question then engages both the relations between death and the beautiful, and the relations between co-emergence and co-fading that resonates the linkage between life and non-life, then the artist desires to transform death, non-life, not-yet-life and no-more-life of itself and of the world into art as the theatre of the not-One soul, with its jouissance and its trauma. An artist-as-‘woman’, engaged in co-emerging, co-fading, transcryption and cross-inscription of traces, is not a celibate subject-hero relating to a limit, but a fragmented and partial interlaced transubjectivity (trans-subjectivity), rendered fragile by her wit(h)nessing, and transforming, time after time, the limit into a threshold. The artist-woman wit(h)nesses trauma not necessarily with a direct experience of the event that caused it—trauma of Other, and of the m/Other’s others, and of the world—and engraves its unforgettable memory of oblivion in the painting. Affective matrixial trails skirt on sensations’ edges and tremble at the limits of the visible when a passion—created by the erotic antennae of the psyche, which is not an isolated drive but an impulse-toward-the-other—immersed in relations of ­ sharing-in-differentiating, becomes a transgressive desire that does receive a human sense, between sign and signification, and does not remain inhuman. When a world, internal and external, from which the artist-woman transfers, through which she traverses and from which she transmits onward, becomes shared with-in-difference via artwork, this

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world is being presenced; it flickers with lights and spasms, and with this lightning of passage in which the painting awakes its strange beauty, pain and languishing. This beauty is both emergence and fading in the process of making a difference and is the opening of a space at the heart of the border. No content, no form, and no image can guarantee that such beauty-inclined-towards-the-Sublime will arise; but an occasion for it ­ is opened. A potentiality to infiltrate into and deface the borderspace together with others becomes such a beauty when the painting vibrates, and the spectator attracts to itself and transmits, back to it and onward to others, in the trajectories of the impulse of the wit(h)nessing touching gaze, an affected openness to borderlinking. The impossibility of not transgressing demands its own price and sprouts its own Sublime-Beauty. And the working-through of an artwork that also supplies with moments of Hesed, of grace and solace, is but the deepening and widening of the threshold of fragility at the transport-station of trauma.

Notes 1. Editor: foreclosure, in French forclusion, German Verwerfung (meaning repudiation) is a term used by Jacques Lacan to define an origin of psychotic phenomena in which a key signifier is expelled utterly from the subject’s symbolic universe. Thus, foreclosure is distinct from repression because what is foreclosed is not integrated into the subject’s Unconscious and thus it cannot ‘return’ from repression. Instead, according to Lacan, it may flash up like a hallucination, beyond the Symbolic and Imaginary, as if from the Real. 2.  The expression presabsence (in  French) came up during the long conversations between Ghislaine Szpeker-Benat and myself around the translation of some of my concepts into French and the difficulty of finding words to describe the almost-presence of the matrixial object and the a­lmost-absence of the matrixial objet a, as well as the ­between-presence-and-absence of the matrixial partial-subject. I would like to thank Ghislaine S ­ zpeker-Benat for her contribution. 3. Editor: In French sens carries many meanings beyond the primary one: ‘meaning’: way, direction, tenor, sentiment, sensation. Ettinger writes ‘sense’ which evokes senses, sensual and thus corporeality within understanding. I have would have normally translated it as meaning which indicates the primary ‘sens’ of her usage, but I have left her original with its double load, since for Ettinger ‘sense’ emerges from the Real toward the Symbolic while ‘meaning’ arrives directly through the Symbolic, and thus, ‘sense’ brings about a matrixial primary ‘meaning’ that the Symbolic alone cannot offer.

CHAPTER 8

TRANSGRESSING WITH-IN-TO THE FEMININE ([1997] 1999)

This chapter was presented at the symposium Leonardo’s Glimlach (The Smile of Leonardo), Ghent University, Belgium, 16 December 1997. Published in: Van Damme, C., & Vandepitte, F. (eds.), Leonardo’s Glimlach (Ghent: Academia Press, 1999): 133–54. Republished in: Florence, P., & Foster, N. (eds.), Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices, Philosophy and Feminist Understandings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000): 185–209. Republished in Söderbäck, F. (ed), Feminist Readings of Antigone (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), 195–214.

EDITOR’S PREFACE This chapter has special significance for readers who are interested in the desire to transition oneself, and in queer and transgender studies. Bracha L. Ettinger articulates in the matrixial Symbolic the desire to be otherly sexuated and explicitly adds and interprets the plane of the corpo-Real. Transposition finds here support in a matrixial Symbolic and language as transgression with-in-to the feminine. The chapter moves between the analysis of two Greek mythological figures—Tiresias and Antigone—and analyses three Hebraic feminine etymological roots of names of God in the Bible that appear as masculine sefira and mida in the Kabbalah: HESED and RAHAMIM, as well as SHADDAI, so as to weave the links between Art, Ethics, Trauma and Beauty. © The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_9

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Tiresias is a figure from Greek mythology who was a prophet of Apollo in Thebes. Blinded by Athena (or in some versions by Hera), he was famous for clairvoyance and also for having been transformed for seven years into a woman. As a character, Tiresias also appears in Greek tragedies by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Antigone. In this text, Ettinger explores the mythic Tiresias in relation to the episode where, having reverted back to his masculine persona, Zeus and Hera inquire about the differences between masculine and feminine sexual pleasure: jouissance. In his inquiry into a feminine jouissance, Lacan also invoked Tiresias. Ettinger places Tiresias with the Sophoclean Antigone, daughter/sister of Oedipus and sister of Polyneices as both mark a transgression-with-in-to the feminine. After a fratricidal war between the sons of Oedipus, Polyneices and Etyocles, their uncle Creon rules Thebes. He declares that Polyneices must receive no burial for his rebellious crime, and that death awaits anyone who dares to give him final rites. Unable to tolerate the inhuman condition of a brother being left unburied and exposed to marauding birds and animals ‘outside the city gates’, Antigone defies Creon, and buries her brother, knowing her act is a death sentence. The play by Sophocles occurs after her deed as she awaits judgement. She is, in effect, already dead. In his seminar in Ethics, Lacan focused on the figure of Antigone, neither as character nor as image, but as what Ettinger names the ‘e/affect’ of Beauty created by the way a work of art takes us to a confrontation with the limit, death. How is that affect-effect, that limit linked with the feminine (Antigone) and with the ‘impossible knowledge’ of the feminine, carried by Tiresias? In an entanglement of ethics and aesthetics, Lacan’s reading of Sophocles’ Antigone and references to Tiresias’ unreportable knowledge of feminine jouissance become the further ground for Ettinger to elaborate the matrixial sphere as borderspace which can speak to the questions Lacan’s inquiry opened. In this text, Ettinger writes, indirectly, of her experience as a painter, of the knowledge gleaned from her long years remaining with other, with historical instances of the tragic encounter of death and the feminine in the form of a brutal photograph of Jewish women before their mass execution in the Ukraine in 1943. Compelled never to abandon these mothers and children, women old and young, captured in their vulnerability in the moments before their death, Ettinger’s artistic practice has been a life-long reflection on the very themes Lacan also voiced, but declared ‘impossible’ for meaning, in posing the ethical as the face of the aesthetic and the aesthetic as the affect of the ethical. This chapter can be read both as a major theorization of the aesthetic process as the space of the Matrixial, and the Matrixial as the theorization of the ethics of the aesthetic encounter w ­ ith-in-to the feminine. It can be read in conjunction with

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Chapter 7: ‘Art as the transport station of trauma’ which also relates beauty to the encounter with that which we can hardly bear. The move that is being made in this chapter, via a matrixial reading with, rather than of, Antigone, redefines our understanding of the Matrixial, where we also find seeds of her later concepts of ‘communicaring’ and ‘carriance’ via art in the discussion of ‘knowing in/by com-passion’ with ‘carrier’, ‘caring’ and ‘affective communication’. The chapter is composed of six parts. The first two explore Tiresias and Antigone in relation to Lacan’s propositions on the impossibility of ‘knowledge of feminine sexuality’ and the impossibility of transgressing the limit between life and death. The third part reintroduces Matrix and Metramorphosis to make clear the impossibility of not-transgressing in the matrixial sphere, that is to say that, far from being subject to a logic of either/or, life or death, the Matrixial signifies already a non-psychotic transgression between subjective elements on both a temporal axis of before, future and now and an historical here and then. The Matrixial is not susceptible to the phallic logic, the logic that makes the matrixial feminineM impossible to think. Where would we ‘sense’ that which phallic logic makes non-sense? The aesthetic encounter is in effect outside its logic in so far as we are passioned by our encounters with and through art. But instead of beauty—‘Antigone’ as art—flashing up to protect us from passing the limit between life and death, with ‘Antigone’ as ethical-aesthetic space, matrixial beauty emerges in a process Ettinger names wit(h)ness. The ethics of the capacity not to recoil behind the protective shield of beauty but to tolerate com-passion can be imagined through another reading of Antigone’s famous speech before she is sealed alive into a tomb as her punishment. There she states she would not have done such a deed for a husband. Yet she must do it for a brother with whom she shared her mother’s womb. Lacan reads this invocation of the womb in a phallic way. Ettinger reveals a matrixial dimension: In Antigone’s argument that she had to bury her own brother at the price of knowing she would die as a result, what is waiting to be heard and com-passioned is the suffering that results from her being torn apart from her principal partner-in-difference, who until this moment was s­ eparated-in-jointness from her, but now is torn into total separateness […] ­Non-human bestiality inflicted on my non-I(s) diminishes, and can also abolish, the capacity of the matrixial web for reabsorption of loss, for transference of memory and for the processing of mourning. Antigone’s private death is a lesser price for her to pay than living through an irremediable explosion of the matrixial borderspace. She literally acknowledges the corpo-real source of this psychical space: the shareable maternal womb. (p. 370)

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While Ettinger and Lacan articulate their different readings by means of classical Greek tragedy and mythology, and Ettinger adds a reading through the Bible (Part Five), the issues they confront are ours. What psychic resources will fuel our ethical if not political will to sustain the humanness of our non-I(s)? What will make it unbearable to witness dehumanization by starvation, violence, violation, inequality? Abstracted, phallic logic does not generate the psychic ground or the affects and emotions—empathy, awe, compassion and horror—necessary for our humanness to be sustained in its inevitable borderlinking to non-I(s). Finally, in Part Six, sexual difference and art in terms of beauty and com-passion are treated together, in a text that also makes a further significant contribution to sexual difference by means of the transgression of both Tiresias and Antigone, proposing the difference between non-life and death. Ettinger posits once again the psychic significance for all subjectivities of a feminine originary sex-difference that forms the foundations for an ethics of the impossibility-of-not-sharing of the trauma of those who, phallically, appear as our others rather than, Matrixially, as our co-others even when no longer in life. Ettinger writes: If feminine originary sex-difference is an enigma of which we can know something though the prism, and if this prism opens to us the contact with spaces of non-life, the transgression with-in-to the feminine via the process of art has a particular aesthetic effect because in transmitting sub-knowledge from a site of transgression, in a borderspace that contacts the surplus by borderlinking, the artist can bear wit(h)ness and articulate ­sub-knowledge of/from the sex of the other. (p. 371)

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TRANSGRESSING WITH-IN-TO THE FEMININE ([1997] 1999) I Tiresias: The ‘Impossible’ Knowledge of/from Feminine Sexuality ‘A convention on feminine sexuality is not about to burden us with the threat of the kind of Tiresias’ fate’ says Lacan (1966d [1958]: 613; translation modified), meaning by this that we are not in any way getting closer to understanding feminine sexuality. Tiresias is a mythological male figure transformed into a woman for seven years and then back into his original sex. As a male who had experienced female jouissance he could be seen as master of its knowledge. Tiresias is famous for replying to Zeus and Hera, that if ten parts of love’s ecstasy—or jouissance—were given to human beings, women took nine parts and men only one. Furious that the secret of her sex was revealed, Hera punished Tiresias with blindness, while Zeus endowed him with the gift of prophecy. It is Freud who associated the punishment of blindness with the idea of castration connected to the male’s fear of the feminine (1919), and we can add that the gift of prophecy hints at the link between the feminine and the time of the future.1 Fourteen years after this brief reference to Tiresias, Lacan mentions Ovid’s version of that myth again in order to say that we cannot incarnate such a figure. Knowledge of feminine sexuality is impossible because the structure of language itself, and the structure of the Symbolic—and, therefore, of the Unconscious—makes what would be a knowledge of heterogeneity impossible. This impossibility is what makes a woman ‘not-all’ while man is the prototype of ‘the same’ and its reflections, of the semblant. He is ‘hommosexuated’ (see Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 84).2 Lacan considers knowledge of femininity inaccessible to women no less than it is to men. For feminine sexuality bears an ‘impossible’ rapport: a relation, which is beyond human relationships. To say that a woman is not-all, it is this that the myth indicates for us, in that she is the unique whose jouissance passes beyond … What one calls sex (indeed the second, when one is an idiot) is properly, in supporting itself by the not-all, the Heteros which cannot arrest itself up with a universe […] It is the logic of the Heteros which is to be made to depart […] from the incompatibility of the One with Being. (Lacan 1973b: 24)

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The heteros, Lacan continues, ‘erects the man in his status which is that of the hommosexual’ while the not-all cannot recognize herself in the parades of truth, seeming (semblant), enjoyment (du jouir) and excess (d’un plus de) in man’s universe. In ‘the absence (ab-sens) of relation (rapport)’ man is guided ‘toward his true bed (couche)’ as he is ‘resituated by the return of the sublime phallus’ (Lacan 1973b: 24). We recognize here an earlier, and somewhat clearer, claim that carries a similar meaning but an opposite conclusion, in the sense that for the late Lacan the woman partly escapes the phallic structure while for the early Lacan the libido is marked by the sign ‘male’ and woman must totally assume it and recognize herself in man’s universe, the only one symbolically available (Lacan 1966d [1958]: 619).3 Knowledge of/ from the feminine-beyond-the-Phallus is considered by Lacan impossible, in agreement with Freud’s conception of femininity as either derived from the masculine Oedipal complex and its mechanism of ‘castration’, or a mysterious ‘dark continent’ of which we know too little. In this Freudian-Lacanian account, a difference that is not structured via the couple: Phallus/castration is foreclosed from the Symbolic. Such a difference would be either absent, or present in fragments of nature, composing pure events of jouissance: the feminine is ‘pure absence’ or ‘pure sensibility’ (Lacan 1966d [1958]: 617–19). Lacking with regard to masculinity, or a surplus to it, she is the Other-Thing, an excess with no claim on subjectivising desire. Woman here is a subject, of course, but, by virtue of her participation as an object in what I have relativized as the phallic subjectivizing stratum4 that regulates sex difference, and where she can mark her resistance only by incarnating a masquerade, while some obscure ‘femininity’ still hovers behind it like a phantom, forever enigmatic.5 Glimpses of/from such a phantom of the subject are considered mystical or crazy when appearing in the phallic domain. Non-phallic psychical phenomena appear toward the end of Lacan’s teaching in terms of the topological sphere, the Moebius strip, Klein bottle, cross-cap, and these terms join the feminine ‘heterogeneity’, ­‘not-all’/not-whole and ‘no sexual rapport (relation)’. It is the spherical topology of this object called (a) which is projected on the other of the composite, heterogeneous, that the cross-cap constitutes. […] a Moebius strip, that is the putting in value of the a-sphere of the not-all (not-whole): It is what supports the impossible of the universe, that is, to take our formula, what there encounters the real. The universe is

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nowhere else than in the cause of desire, the universal no more. It is from there that proceeds the exclusion of the real […] of this real: that there is no sexual rapport. (Lacan 1973b: 30)

With no proper symbolic apparatus to encompass and repress these inscriptions, with no process beyond-castration to in-form human desire, and with no passageway beyond metaphor and metonymy to deliver their-potential meaning, they remain inaccessible to knowledge. Whether a Woman-Other-Thing, a product of the Real’s non-sense, whether a radical Other, whether dangerously bordering on originary repression of the Thing, whether equated with an elusive ­almost-nothing (objet a)—even when described as ‘not-all’/‘not-whole’, the concept of woman as defined in Lacanian psychoanalysis is always automatically reinforcing the phallic structure because ‘woman’ is perceived as the holes in this structure, its scraps, remains, excess or surplus. If ‘there is no sexual rapport’ and ‘a woman is not-all, there is always something of her that escapes discourse’ (Lacan 1975b [1972–3]: 12, 34). She experiences in excess to the phallic jouissance a supplementary jouissance, but Lacan insists that she knows nothing about it. From the woman’s side, a sexual rapport—not organ, not essence, but some kind of relation—could have been elaborated into knowledge had such an elaboration been possible, but, even a woman, says Lacan, cannot know anything of her own sex, and cannot report on a rapport that would have been feminine-Other if/where it does occur, because, precisely, what could have been qualified as heterogeneity escapes the Imaginary and the Symbolic by definition, and what can be included inside these domains is already phallic. In this conception, Tiresias’ position of both experiencing feminine different sexuality and knowing it—is out of reach. Yet, in departing from elaboration of the not-all and supplementary jouissance, it is difficult to clarify feminine heterogeneity in a way that would be independent from the all to which it is related and from the experience to which it is supplementary. Only a departure that should not derive at all from the phallic structure would allow to account for hybrid feminine instances ‘between centre and absence’ (Lacan 2011 [1971–2]: 121) and their twilight zone.6 I propose departing from a difference which is feminine from the onset, from a rapport of borderlinking in an originary psychical sphere that I have named Matrixial. In the matrixial sphere, not-knowing the feminine

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difference is impossible, inasmuch as this difference is in itself a co-naissance (knowledge of being-born-together). A feminine in-between instance of rapport is a poietic process that carries in itself aesthetic knowing, a process I have named metramorphosis. Metramorphosis is both action, perception, inscription and memory of processes that I have titled borderlinking and distancing-in-joining. A mental ­swerving-in-borderlinking with the other (see Ettinger 1996b)—opening a distance-in-proximity while separating-in-jointness with/from the other, or borderlinking while differentiating—is a feminine matrixial process. My encounters in the Real with my others are swerved to register traces coming from me and from others concerning the Thing as a traumatic event. These psychical traces witness and account for co-emergence and/ or co-fading of several subjects, partial-subjects, partial-objects and of their links with one another and with the traumatic Thing-event. A non-cognitive mode of knowledge that reveals itself in such an ontogenetic witnessing-together, in wit(h)nessing, is what I call co-poiesis, where trans-scription occurs. It is here that following intimate encounter between several partners, that affects in different ways each I and non-I, traces of the affected events of my others are unknowingly inscribed in me and mine are inscribed in others, known or anonymous, in an asymmetrical exchange that creates and changes a transubjective matrixial alliance. Such a trans-scription is a dispersed subsymbolic and affective memory of event, paradoxically both forgotten and unforgettable, a memory charged with freight that a linear story cannot transmit, a memory that carries dispersed signifiers to be elaborated and affects as sense-carriers. It is not the story inscribed for reminiscences that I carry in place of a ­nonI. Rather, fragmented traces of the event’s complexity carry fractured and diffracted memory, memory of oblivion itself and of what could not be inscribed in others, even though it ‘belongs’ to a memory which is theirs, but only trans-scribed for/from them in me. Affected traces of a matrixial encounter echo, in the present, earlier matrixial encounters while modifying older traces and being modified by them. Traces of past metramorphic processes and matrixial events will in their turn modify the processing of further, future encounters. Under the matrixial light, the transgression in the figure of Tiresias between man and woman is not a transgression of a frontier between known maleness and unknown femaleness. Rather, since the matrixial I

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carries traces of experiences of the matrixial non-I, inasmuch as I know in the other and my other knows in me, non-knowledge of the feminine, in the matrixial borderspace, is impossible, by virtue of the transgression itself. This cross-inscription is vehicled by matrixial affects like empathy, awe, com-passion, languishing, horror and maybe telepathy. However, the transgression itself is a bridging and an accessing to the other already in the feminine. It is inscribed in a psychical matrixial channel opened to begin with between a future-mother and a prenatal s­ubject-to-be, where it is only by joining the becoming-maternal-subject’s psyche that the subject-to-be will achieve separation, and where, through ­differentiating-in-coemergence, the m/Other caringly knows her non-I. Such transgressions transform the frontiers themselves, so that although my non-I(s) are never entirely cognised, neither are they entirely cut away from me. Transgressing with-in-to the feminine with-in borderlinking with-in-to the other is in itself a kind of knowledge, transcribed.

II Antigone: Beauty and the Impossible Knowledge of/ from Death in Life Before taking this idea of the matrixial feminine difference further and drawing out some of its aesthetic consequences, I would like to add to the picture the figure of Antigone from Lacan’s seminar on Ethics in 1959–60, an addition inspired by a strange allusion Lacan makes to her when he mentions Tiresias once more in a text of 1972.7 There, the impossible transgression of the frontiers between maleness and femaleness, and the impossibility of extracting knowledge of/from/on the feminine, are associated with another transgression and another impossibility—the transgression of the frontiers between life and death and the impossibility of knowing death in life. Let me first resonate together two brief passages where Lacan briefly and enigmatically links the tragic transgression to death both to the mystery of the feminine and to the aesthetic experience: You have satisfied me, little man. You have understood what was needed. Go on, from being stunned (étourdit) there is not too much, for it to return to you in the afternoon and after being half-said (après midit). Thanks to the hand that will respond to Antigone who is called the child, you call it, the same that can tear you apart from what I – feminine and sphinx-like – prophesy (sphynge) as my not-all, you will even be able

356  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS toward evening to make yourself the equal of Tiresias, and like him, from having been made the Other, to divine what I have said to you. (1973b: 25)8

The second passage is introduced by Lacan’s claim that ‘the question of the beautiful can only be found at this level as operating at the limit. Even in Kant’s time it is the form of the human body that is presented to us as the limit’ (Lacan 1986 [1959–60]: 298). Lacan then asks: […] is it this same image that constitutes a barrier to the Other-thing that lies beyond? That which lies beyond is not simply the relationship to the second death [...] There is also the libido […] the only moment of jouissance that man knows occurs at the site where phantasms are produced, phantasms that represent to us the same barrier as far as access to jouissance is concerned, the barrier where everything is forgotten. I should like to introduce here, as a parallel to the function of the beautiful, another function […] a sense of shame. The omission of this barrier, which prevents the direct experience of that which is to be found at the centre of sexual union, seems to me to be at the origin of all kinds of questions that cannot be answered, including notably the matter of feminine sexuality. (298)

What associates Tiresias and Antigone together is a conjunction of beauty that blinds, the limits of feminine sexuality, the limits of death, and the impossibility of inscribing the transgressions of these limits as knowledge—an impossibility which, in fact, turns death-drive itself into a feminine not-all issue. Both figures have transgressed the frontiers of the laws of nature—transgressing the natural corporeal limit between the sexes in the case of Tiresias, and choosing death over life in the case of Antigone. Thus, in associating such a transgression into death with the enigma of the feminine, Lacan reanimates a mythological relation that traverses cultures and centuries: the relations of death with the feminine, and locates the aesthetic effect of ‘the passage to the second death’ in the domain of the feminine as the beautiful. This also qualifies the relationships that both ‘woman’ and death’ are bearing witness to as ‘impossible’. The aesthetic dimension arises in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959– 60 via the question: what is the surface that allows the emergence of ‘images of passion’ (1986 [1959–60]: 273)? The extra-ordinary passion which transports death into life and impels life onto death arises,

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says Lacan, from some contact with that which is, the unique, the irreducible and irreplaceable, with what has no substitute and can not be exchanged. Beauty enters the picture through the idea of relations to the irreplaceable. A disappearance in appearance creates the effect of beauty. The effect of beauty results from the rapport of the subject to the ‘horizon’ of life, from traversing to ‘the second death’. From Antigone’s point of view, life ‘can only be lived or thought about, from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is already on the other side. But from that place she can see it and live it in the form of something already lost’ (280). This limit, detached from historical time, is a source of creation ex nihilo. If the surface of passion captures such a unique value to make an image of it, this image creates a barrier that impedes traversing to the other side, and ‘The effect of beauty is the effect of blindness’—blindness to the other side, blindness as a castrating schism (281, translation modified). The function of the beautiful is precisely ‘to reveal to us the site of man’s relationship to his own death, and to reveal it to us in a blinding flash only’ (295, translation modified). The beautiful is a limit of a sphere that we can only approach from the outside, a phenomenological limit which allows us to reflect on what is behind it. ‘Outrage’ is the term that carries, according to Lacan, the crossing of some invisible line which allows beauty to join with desire. ‘Outrage’ whose meaning is ‘to go out or beyond (aller-outre, outrepasser)’ is the aesthetic effect of Antigone (281). This ‘most strange and most profound of effects’ arises in the limit zone in-between-life-and-death, where ‘a fate’ is enacted and a death is ‘lived by anticipation, a death that crosses over into the sphere of life, a life that moves into the realm of death […]. The glow of beauty coincides with the moment of transgression’ (248, 281). The aesthetic question engages the beauty-ideal, which operates at a limit materialised and represented in art by the human body. The human body, ‘the envelope of all possible phantasms of human desire’ is that barrier which transports ‘a rapport of the human being with its second death’ (298, translation modified) and in so doing blocks the passage to it. Beauty, in form and image of the human body is the last barrier from the Other-thing ‘beyond’—to be understood as a ‘second death’, but also as ‘supplementary femininity’, because this barrier is also what keeps us from a direct apprehension of ‘sexual rapport’, which, as we have seen, is feminine.

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It is in the domain of aesthetics that the frontier that separates the human being from death converges with the frontier that separates the human being from the feminine. In the phallic structure the figure that transgress them is sacrificed to death or blindness. I am suggesting that from a matrixial angle we cannot speak, in the dimension of the feminine, of separation, but rather of separation-in-jointness, whose risks and wonders are beyond the phallic scope where the act of creation concerns the individual with its presence/absence subject/object and interior/ exterior dichotomies. A matrixial transgression operates in a co-poietic psychical borderspace shared with several others from the start. Thus, the human body with-in the feminine is not the last barrier from the ­Other-beyond, but is the passage to a matrixial other. Therefore, the question of sacrifice moves to the margins in the Matrix, to make place for the question of witnessing as withnessing: wit(h)nessing. Antigone incarnates the death-drive; and Lacan adds that she incarnates the desire of the Other linked to the desire of the mother which is the origin of every desire, ‘the founding desire’ which is also ‘a criminal desire’ for it was, in this case, incestuous. Transgression is thus fatally linked to and binding with death-drive, incest, and the desire of the mother. Antigone’s transgression is a fate in the sense that it is a result of ‘the crime’, to be understood as the infliction of death or incest by one’s ancestors, by someone else on someone else, played at the horizon of the subject’s existence and thus being a part of what allowed the subject’s coming into life. At the centre of Lacan’s argument lies his interpretation of Antigone’s statement of ‘having been born in the same womb […] and having been related to the same father’, an interpretation that leads him to say that the heart of the matter is the uniqueness of the brother (Lacan 1986 [1959–60]: 279). In my view, in thus referring to Antigone’s hinting at the maternal womb, Lacan is folding the womb into the phallus/castration stratum. Being born of the same womb is equated by him with being of the same father and leads to paying the price of the parental crimes of incest or killing by traversing beyond the human chain of exchange. The specificity of this conjunction results in Lacan’s representation of the brother, for whose memory Antigone is willing to die, as an incarnation of the idea of the unexchangeable One. The matrixial prism conveys both a different interpretation to Antigone’s referring to the womb and a supplementary value to the figure of the brother. Transgression is still linked to death-drive, incest, and the desire of the

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mother, but this linkage itself is transformed and, with it, the m ­ eaning of each of these concepts in the feminine. To elucidate that I will first elaborate further the matrixial sphere. This will allow me to locate another conjunction between Tiresias and Antigone, in the transgression ­with-in-to the feminine.

III The Impossibility of Not-Transgressing in the Matrixial Sphere Matrix is an unconscious borderspace of simultaneous ­ co-emergence and co-fading of the I and uncognized non-I—or partial-subjects, or unknown others linked to me—neither fused nor rejected, which produces, shares and transmits joint, hybrid and diffracted objects via conductible borderlinks. The Matrixial is modelled upon a certain perception of feminine/prenatal borderlinking, where the womb is conceived of as a shared psychical borderspace in which d ­ifferentiation-in-co-emergence, separation-in-jointness and distance-in-proximity are continuously reattuned by metramorphosis created by, and further creating—together with matrixial affects—relations-without-relating on the borders of presence and absence, subject and object, among subjects and partial-subjects, between me and the stranger, and between those and part-objects or relational objects/subjects. Co-emerging and co-fading I(s) and non-I(s) interlace their borderlinks in metramorphosis. Metramorphosis is a process of intra-psychical and inter-psychical, or trans-individual exchange, transformation and affective ‘communication’, between/with-in several matrixial entities. It is a passage-lane through which affected events, materials and modes of becoming infiltrate and diversify onto non-conscious margins of the Symbolic through/by sub-symbolic webs. In a joint and multiple-several marginal transubjective (trans-subjective) awareness, perceived boundaries dissolve to become new boundaries; forms are transgressed; borderlines surpassed and transformed to become thresholds; conductible borderlinks are conceived, transformed and dissolved. Contingent transgressive borderlinks and a borderspace of swerve and encounter emerge as a feminine sex-difference and as a creative instance which engraves traces that are revealed/invented in wit(h)ness-in-differentiation. ­Relations-without-relating transform the uncognized other and me and turn both of us into partial-subjects—still uncognized but unthinkingly known to each other (prior to thought) and matrixially knowing each

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other—in ­subjectivity-as-encounter, where no other is an absolute separate Other. Metramorphosis is a co-poietic activity in a web. It ‘remembers’ swerves (originary differentiation in the realm of affects echoing on Merleau-Ponty’s écart in the realm of sensibility and perception) and rapports, bifurcations and relations. It remembers operations of borderlinking that inscribe affective traces of jouissance and trauma which are taking place in encounters, transferring the knowledge of these events with-in-to the feminine. Via art’s metramorphic activity these traces are transmitted into culture and open its boundaries. The Matrixial designates a difference located, in its originary formation, in the linkage to female corporeal invisible specificity, to the archaic enveloping outside that is also an inside: the womb. By Matrix, however, I do not intend an ‘organ’ or an ‘origin’ but a complex apparatus modelled upon this site of female/prenatal encounter that puts in rapport any human becoming-subject-to-be, male and female, with female bodily specificity and her encounter-events, trauma, jouissance, phantasy and desire. Through metramorphosis, each matrixial encounter engenders its jouissance, traumas, pictograms, phantasms, affects, and channels ­death-drive oscillations and libidinal flow, and their affected traces, in several partners, conjointly but differently, in com-passion. Traces circulate in a transubjective zone by matrixial affects and nonconscious threads that disperse different aspects of traumatic events between the I(s) and non-I(s). Thus, as I cannot fully handle events that concern me profoundly, they are fading-in-transformation while my non-I(s) become wit(h)nesses to them. It may happen that because of their highly traumatic value I cannot psychically handle ‘my’ events at all. In the matrixial psychical sphere, ‘my’ traces will be trans-scribed—pluri-scribed and ­cross-scribed—in others, thus my others will process these events for me. Thus, female bodily specificity is the site, physically, imaginatively and symbolically, where a feminine difference emerges, where a ‘woman’ is interlaced as a figure that is not confined to the one-body, but is the ‘webbing’ of matrixial webs and metramorphic borderlinks between several subjects, who by virtue of such a webbing become partial. Metramorphosis, as a carrier of such originary difference and of its transforming potentiality, induces instances of co-emergence and co-fading as meaning, and trans-scription as unforgettable memory of oblivion. In the matrixial borderspace a specific aesthetic field comes into light, with metramorphosis as an aesthetic process with ethical implications.

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The feminine/prenatal in-cest is here a necessary transgression. Not at all measured by, or compared to perverse or genital-phallic Oedipal incest. The feminine/prenatal in-cest is a primordial psychical field of trans-scription and of transgressions between trauma and jouissance, phantasy and desire in severality: between several partial-subjects— of transubjectivity. Unlike the incest to which Lacan makes allusion in Antigone’s case (the Oedipal/paternal), in the matrixial sphere all mothers are in-cestuous in a non-phallic and non-Oedipal sense, inasmuch as the intrauterine relations between future mother and future subject are by definition incestuous. Because of the highly psychotic potentiality of this prebirth non-prohibited in-cest for the phallic subjectivizing processes, this m/Other-in-cest was deeply silenced, not even excluded from the Symbolic (from which it could have returned as its repressed and produce an-other desire) but marginalized as unthought-of and foreclosed. Whatever of the matrixial twilight zone that did get elaborated in the Phallus was subjugated to its order, where it was regulated as a question of bringing children into a heterosexual framework where ­objects-women are exchanged in ‘the Name of the Father’. Julia Kristeva believes that giving birth must emerge as psychosis in culture (1975).9 I suggest that this is so only in a Symbolic articulated within the phallic paradigm. Evocations and irruptions of the feminine/ prenatal encounters are not psychotic. They only become psychotic when they have no symbolic access. Already before birth, the subject-to-be aspires in phantasy, and contacts ‘traumatically’ a woman in whose trauma, phantasy and desire s/he already participates.10 The jouissance that spurts on the level of prebirth non-prohibited in-cest, and the links between the trauma and phantasy of the becoming-subject-to-be (I), male or female, and the trauma, phantasy, and desire of the ‘woman’ as its becoming-archaic-m/Other-to-be (non-I), both of them in their status as partial-subjects and partial-objects for each other, constitute a feminine cluster borderlinking in-between several participants while the link to the Phallus is, however, always maintained through the woman’s desire that is both phallic and matrixial, and where archaic traces of contact with female body are inscribed as archaic trauma and jouissance, and are revealed in the phantasy of both participants of the encounter (males and females). Female subjects have a double access to the matrixial sphere in the Real, since they experience the womb both as an archaic out-side and past site, out of chronological time—which is true for males as well—and

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as an inside and future site, whether they are mothers or not—that may (or not) become present. While the out-and-past-side/site is both female’s and male’s, the in-and-future-side/site that ‘belongs’ to women and men in the symbolic Matrix, this in-and-future-side/site is the female’s in its Real’s potentiality. Male subjects are more radically split from this archaic time-and-space of inside and future, since their rapport with it in the Real stays forever in the archaic totally outside and too early that is forever too late to access. Female subjects have some privileged access to a paradoxical time of future-past and a paradoxical space of outside-inside. Males, however, are in contact with this time and space, as women are too, by compassionate matrixial jointing-in-difference with others and with particular art presences—whether art-objects, ­ art-actions, art-gestures, music, i.e. as an aesthetic filter, the matrixial apparatus serves both males and females. Various nonconscious lanes, that are opened toward and from femaleness, are not limited to women only, though they do carry a special resonance for women when they treasure and screen their bodily traces. It was Freud who, in ‘The “Uncanny”’ suggested that prebirth experience and womb phantasies (Mutterleibsphantasien) participate in the aesthetic experience (1919: 244, 248). In my book The Matrixial Gaze (1993d, Ettinger 2006), I have isolated these phantasms and developed the idea of a matrixial complex as a specific non-phallic psychical apparatus. Although Freud himself did not fold the earlier phantasy inside the later, in psychoanalytic literature the phantasy of the maternal matrix is generally excluded from any particular considerations by inclusion within the ‘castration’ complex, and it does not stand for a different psychical mechanism. In my view, these two complexes (matrixial and castration) constitute different psychical dimensions, heterogeneous to one another, whereby feminine difference does not stem from masculine difference. Matrixial awareness engenders a disturbing desire for jointness with a foreign world, with the unknown other, the uncognized, with a stranger who by definition is never a total stranger in the feminine when unthinkingly known in a non-conceptual way. Matrixial awareness channels the subject’s desire toward the beauty and the pain, the phantasy and the trauma of others. My awareness cannot master you via your traces in my psyche; there is no joining without separation nor separating without joining. The desire to join-in-difference and ­differentiate-in-co-emerging with the other does not promise any peace and harmony, because joining is first of all joining with-in the other’s trauma that echoes backwards to my archaic traumas: joining the other matrixially is always joining the

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m/Other and risking a mental regression just until the maternal matrice. A matrixial desire can generate dangerous encounters; it can become pathological; it proposes no fixed settlement, no homogenous mixture but returning and hybridity, im-pureness, a continual contemplation of unabolished difference in jointness. A matrixial love is care-full and empathic yet painful, because of inevitable processing of the other’s trauma and because of inevitable participation in transformation and opening of boundaries for transmission or reception, fragmentation, contracting and withdrawal, and of what I call ‘severalization’—dispersal and sharing of the already joint-several yet partial and fragmented transubjective memory of oblivion. A matrixial loss by definitive cut is, in this psychical zone, a horror beyond its scope. This is the horror experienced by Antigone in her reference to the womb that carried both herself and her brother: it is the matrixial prenatal in-cestuous co-emergence in different times with the brother that is being fatally traumatized. This trauma has no common measure with the effects of the paternal incest. Thus, putting the feminine beyond a schism and out of reach for the masculine figure is in the matrixial borderspace an impossibility; and likewise, a total disjoining of living death by anticipation from the meaning of life itself is another kind of impossibility, because life from the onset is linked to non-life. This impossibility of not-transgressing life and non-life in the matrixial sphere demands its price and originates its beauty. It has its solaces and moments of grace, but it is profoundly tragic. I, therefore, propose to locate Lacan’s claim, that we are far from approaching Tiresias’ position, in the phallic zone. I propose that, on the contrary, we have never been so close today in the domains of aesthetics and ethics to such a position, inasmuch as we are carrying in this second half of the twentieth century enormous traumatic weight of/for the other in wit(h) nessing; and certain contemporary art-practices are clearing the path to a better apprehension of the matrixial alliances that confront the limits of shareability in trauma and jouissance.

IV Meaning as a Transgression with-in-to the Trauma of the Other We can now propose that we understand Tiresias as an evocation of the possibility of transgressing between male and female with-in a matrixial feminine dimension where Other and Outside are fatally engaged with

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I and inside, neither by symbiosis nor under foreclosure, where Other and Outside are knowable in/by com-passing between me and inside with others and outside—others of either sex, alive, not-yet-in-life or dead. In other words, transgression between male and female is neither a passage to the radical Other nor is it transcending to the ultimately exterior; it is, rather, a metramorphosing with-in-out of selves with-in-to the feminine that passes along the threads that turn, like a Moebius strip, the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside.11 Transgression with-in-to the feminine is not a jump beyond a frontier but an access to the surplus beyond, and thus, a transformation of the limits themselves with regard to my affective access to the question of the death of the other, and the death of my other’s Other. Metramorphosis opens the frontiers up and turns them into thresholds. Transgression becomes an ontogenetic memory and meaning of sharing in distance-in-proximity with-in the trauma of the other. Meaning becomes a transgression with-in-to others via borderlinking. Both ­partial-subjects transform and are transformed by one another differently, in a reciprocity without symmetry, creating joint compassionate and eroticized aerials, to be further shaped by following traces of their further affective irradiation. We know about the crimes at the source of Antigone’s desire; we know who their authors are; we know who suffers for them and who scarifies herself. But we do not know whose trauma it is. If we rethink Antigone with the notion of trauma, and we ask the question where its ineffaceable affected traces hide, the matrixial perspective takes us onto further new turns. What is at stake here is the trauma of others with-in myself: by force of their matrixial alliance with the I, the non-I(s) are already, from the outset of any encounter, traumatic to the I. I am a wit(h)ness to traumas I did not witness, like the death of others I was not in direct contact with—a death that, however, has traumatized my non-I(s). The beautiful, accessed via artworks in our era (and I emphasize again our era since we are living through massive effects of such a transitive trauma, captivated by some artworks), carries and produces new possibilities for affective apprehending of such a proximity of a ­double-distance wit(h)nessing. We are experiencing the uncognized ­non-I by/in its difference, as traumatized and traumatizing. I propose to understand through such a matrixial prism Levinas’ enigmatic claim, that the Other in its vulnerability is traumatic to me.12 Ethical first, but also aesthetic, therapeutic or wounding, is, therefore, the experience

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of reaching out to the affect-activity of the trauma of others in each encounter. The aesthetic is, therefore, but indirectly ethical—the experience of reaching out to the affect-activity of the trauma of others via artworks. The aesthetic is the trauma’s transformed affectability in wit(h) nessing in/by art, beyond time and in different sites and spaces; yet it has ethical and therapeutic consequences. Both the aesthetical and the ethical are, therefore, a healing potentiality offered by wit(h)nessing. The beautiful is that which offers whatever succeeds—as object, subject or event—to suggest reaffectation-as-redistribution of traumatic traces of encounters with and of one’s non-I(s). Matrixial transgression of affect creates instances of aesthetic transubjectivity, with-in-to the feminine inasmuch as it is inseparable from its archaic form. There is in it an originary prebirth incestuous ­ encounter-Thing with-in the m/Other that is non-criminally in-cestuous. An archaic wit(h)ness-Thing is encapsulated in this ­ encounter. The archaic encounter, usually considered inaccessible to symbolic knowledge, is hereby considered the prototype of transubjective knowledge. Painting captures in producing, or produces in capturing, knowledge of the wit(h)ness-Thing. A possibility of ethically acknowledging the Real emerges in transferential wit(h)nessing, when someone else apprehends in place of the subject the subject’s own nonconscious matrixial sites. Suddenly, in metramorphosing with the artwork, you might find yourself in proximity to a possible trauma, as if you have always been potentially sliding on its margins. You are threatened by its potential proximity, yet you are also compelled by a mysterious ‘promise of happiness’ (Nietzsche’s expression concerning beauty (1887: 85), a promise to re-find in jointness what faded away and got dispersed, on condition of matrixially encountering the non-I, since your own desire is the effect of others’ trauma no less than of your own. By such an effect of beauty, the feminine borderlinking does not qualify as dwelling beyond a barrier, a frontier. Rather, in-between pure absence and pure sensibility, it is a surplus of fragility embedded with-in co-affectation and it makes sense as a transformation on the level of the limit. The artwork extricates the trauma of the matrixial other out of ‘pure absence’ or ‘pure sensibility’, out of its time-less-ness into lines of time; and the effect of beauty is to allow wit(h)nessing with non-visible events of encounter to emerge inside the field of vision and affect you.

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Metramorphic beauty is co-affection’s obscure trail, skirting on sensation’s edges and becoming visible when a passion based on marks of shareability becomes transgressive again and labours anew in ­com-passion. When a world, internal and external, from which the artist has to transfer and to which she has to transmit, is shared with-in-difference via artwork, this world is being brought into presence at the same instant that the work awakens its strange beauty and pain. A potentiality to make a difference with-in-for others becomes beauty when the artwork vibrates—and the spectator attracts to itself and transmits, back to it or onwards to others—availability for co-affection. No content, no form and no image can guarantee that an event of co-affection will take place via a particular artwork for particular viewers, and that beauty will arise to attract a matrixial response. But when beauty arises, a matrixial ­co-affectability hides behind the form and the image and we can think of it as sprouting, overflowing and proceeding from shareable eroticized antennae of the psyche, acting all over the synaesthetic field and channelled by the scopic drive inside the field of vision. The matrixial aesthetic effect attests that imprints are interwoven between several subjects: that something that branches off from others engraving traces in me and relinquishing me (or mentally unbearable to me) is yet accessing others, that we are sharing erotic antennae but processing different re(a)sonating minimal sense from them. These erotic antennae register what returns from others as traces and transmit a centerless gaze. The process of making art involves sensing a potential ­co-emergence and bringing into being objects or events that sustain it and transmit its inscription. Art evokes further instances of transubjectivity ­(trans-subjectivity) and makes almost-impossible new borderlinking available, out of elements and links already available in part, but that need to be transformed in ways that cannot be thought of prior to the process of art itself. Trauma determines the trajectory of what is, out of art, a forever no-time. The beautiful links the time of too-early to the time of too-late and plant it in historical time.13 Metramorphosing a traumatic encounter is extracting times of too-early and too-late out of indifference on-to with-in-visibility with-in-difference, when new affects wake up archaic ones from beyond the walls of foreclosure. Aesthetical bending towards the ethical is the transform-ability of the no-time of archaic encounter between several I(s) and non-I(s) in new co-emergence and co-fading.

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V God’s Names, Female Corporeality, Com-Passion and Beauty The female body makes a sense based on knowledge of/from a body different from the male body. This in-body difference as sub-knowledge was undoubtedly neglected by Lacan when he claimed that knowledge of the ‘supplementary’ jouissance is out of reach for women just in the same way as it is inaccessible for men. For me, rather than ‘impossible’ and ‘lack’, the supplementary jouissance is a source of a supplementary symbolic domain with its different difference.14 That such an in-body difference induces an originary feminine difference was perhaps somehow perceived by ‘authors’ of mythologies and of the Bible, when they have chosen to appropriate and incorporate symbolic potentialities of the female body, and mainly the womb and its procreating forces, the breast and its nourishing forces, but even female genitals and sexual pleasure, and plant them into male God-figures or into the monotheistic merciful and Almighty God. In the Hebrew Bible, one of the many names for God is El Harahmim translated as ‘God full of Mercy’ or compassion, and also as misereri, misericordiam, caritas, pietas, gratia and so forth. These are indeed the figu­ rative meanings of Rahamim (written ‫ םימחר‬RHMIM). But the literal meaning, the signifier, is: wombs, uteruses, matrixes. The text literally signifies a ‘God full of wombs’ or (in Latin) full of ‘matrixes’. Another Biblical name of God is El Shaddai (written ‫שׁדַ ּי‬ ַ ‫ אֵל‬SDI). In Exodus (6:3) God reminds Moses that it is under the name of Shaddai that he established the Covenant, the alliance with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Indeed, each time that God appears in the Torah/Pentateuch as Shaddai it is in the context of the Covenant and the blessing of fertilization, procreation, and transmission to further generations. ‘I am the El Shaddai’ says God to Abraham, ‘and I will make my covenant between me and thee and will multiply thee exceedingly […] and I will make thee exceedingly fruitful’ (Genesis 17:1, 2, 6).15 Shaddai is interpreted by Rashi as ‘the one who is sufficient for himself’ and is translated as: ‘Omnipotent,’ or ‘Almighty’. Yet the Hebrew signifier rhymes with: ‘my breasts’ ‘my nipples’.16 When we read in Genesis (43:14): ‘and God Almighty gives you mercy’ we hear, though hidden under traditional interpretation, in the Hebrew: ‘and God’s Breasts gives you wombs/ matrixes’: meanings that are abolished in all classical translations of the Bible.17

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The abolition of the wombs and the breasts from God’s name in translations from the Hebrew constitutes, in my view, not only the elimination of conventional feminine imagery from God’s Image, but also a foreclosure of a matrixial-feminine symbolic dimension of alliance.18 No less astonishing is the association between God’s name: Hesed (written: ‫ דסח‬HSD) and female genitals and sexual pleasure. Hesed’s most common meaning is: mercy, kindness, compassion, pity, grace (Genesis 24:12, 24:14, 47:29; Exodus 34:6; Numbers 14:18; Psalms 103:4, 86:15, 145:8, 106:1),19 but it also has, in the Bible, this feminine sense, more hidden and metaphorically hinted (Jeremiah 2:2) or more bluntly in the context of incestuous iniquity (Leviticus 20:17). I have suggested to see in the choice of such signifiers for symbolic Names of God a potential meaning of the Covenant or the Alliance between God and human-kind whereby the ethical idea of responsibility to the unknown Other is expressed with signifiers of the feminine.20 Both Hesed and Rahamim are considered in the Kabbalah as masculine: sefira [manifestation] and ‘mida’ [quality]. Matrixial articulation and comprehension of such a ­confronting-and-connecting between signifiers and the Real of the female body opens the Symbolic’s frontiers so that it may further account for this body, still in difference, but not in total Otherness. Even though the matrixial filter transgresses the boundaries of the body-in-identity as male and female and provides meaning to a variety of shifting traces with-in feminine borderlinking beyond gender identifications, and even though the matrixial alliance concerns any human being, the specific reference to the female body remains pertinent. The trail of co-affectivity transgresses the affective individual limits not to become another quality but as an access to others and through forms that will follow and will temporarily ‘capture’ the excess, if a matrixial alliance will be in-formed. The effect of beauty indicates for us, then, not only the place of relationships to one’s own death—but also the rapport of the I to the matrixial partner before life and to the death of unknown others, a death that traumatized either myself or my others and for whom, through care-full com-passion, I am processing affective memory that they cannot process alone, and I am digesting and transforming mental traces or inscriptions. When something that cannot be looked at, that blinds us, arises at the horizon of visibility—a form of death-drive is embodied in the phallic zone, so that any apparition of a point of emergence can only

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be represented as a ‘want-to-be’ [lack-in-being]. But we can discuss now, in this same experience, the representation of the point of emergence as a co-poietic birth as well, when with every metramorphosis, inter-connected traces of the encounter with the archaic m/Other as a point of emergence are re-evoked-in-transformation, leading within the aesthetic field, through sharing of trauma and phantasy, to the ethical position of coresponse-ability with-to uncognized others. An impossibility of not-­ sharing comes forth in the transgression with-in-to the feminine, what holds some ethical implications: I have an alliance with others even before any full cognizing of difference is possible. In the feminine-Matrixial, there is an Other of the Other.21 But this other is an other-in-jointness. Antigone’s brother who is the unique One in the phallic dimension is the partial-subject of a unique jointness in a matrixial transgression. This is what is attested, in my view, by the reference to the womb in Sophocles’ text. The transgression with-in-to the feminine allows us to think the phenomenon of unconscious transmission between the sexes and between different generations and periods, beyond life and presence in time and place.22 The matrixial gaze conducts traces of events without witnesses (Felman & Laub 1992) and passes them on to witnesses who were not there, to what I have called wit(h)nesses with-out events. The viewer, and this partially includes the artist in its unconscious viewer position, is the wit(h) ness with-out event par excellence. The viewer will take in traces of the event in continuing weaving metramorphic borderlinks to others, present and archaic, cognized and uncognized, future and past.

VI Borderlinking to the Other Sex by a ­FeminineMatrixial Differential Potentiality I can now draw further guidelines for reading-together the myth of Tiresias and the tragedy of Antigone. Both Tiresias and Antigone represent transgressing with-in-to the feminine. In the phallic stratum of subjectivization, if death and the feminine are the enigmas of which we can know nothing, the transgression to the other side via the process of art has a particular aesthetic effect because the artist bears witness to a process otherwise inaccessible: to its ‘own disappearance from the signifying chain’, and she can articulate such non-knowledge of/in the Real as a ‘dynamic value’ (to use a Lacanian expression) (Lacan 1986 [1959–60]: 295). In the matrixial stratum the artist positions herself on

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an-other’s sides, joining-in-difference the others’ traumas and webbing ­passage-lanes from this wit(h)nessing. We can now view the tragic quest of the figure trespassing into ‘second death’ as fatally linked not only to the One and Unique brother, but also as having to bear an unbearable, total subtraction from a joint matrixial con-figuration that cannot bear such a subtraction, for it can only bear fading-out and fragmentations but not total cuts. A subtraction (rather than contraction yet not just separation) of non-I from shareability, and an extinction of possible borderlinking to the other in a matrixial borderspace, must be paid in ‘your body’ (Lyotard 1997) as the body of the artist in which other bodies are cross-inscribed.23 In Antigone’s argument—that she had to bury her own brother at the price of knowing she would die as a result—what is waiting to be heard and com-passioned is the suffering from her being torn apart from her principal partner-in-difference, who until this moment was ­separated-in-jointness from her, but is now torn into total separateness. If the almost-impossible knowledge of the Thing-Event concerns the originary feminine rapport, it is not death in itself that inflicts the horrible cut in the matrixial web, but the passage into a bestiality that threatens to blow up and explode this sphere all together into separate pieces. For life and death are constituted in the psyche as already human even when beyond reach of human-symbolic exchange or communication, even at the ­ corpo-Real level. Human body is not animal body. Non-human bestiality inflicted on my non-I(s) diminishes, and can also abolish, the capacity of the matrixial web for reabsorption of loss, for transference of memory and for the processing of mourning. Antigone’s private death is a lesser price for her to pay than living through an irremediable explosion of the matrixial borderspace. She literally acknowledges the corpo-real source of this psychical space: the shareable maternal womb . Why is Tiresias related by the ‘feminine impossible rapport’ to Antigone? In Tiresias what is waiting to be comprehended is that the passing into the female and back again is neither imposing on her a male masculine filter, mastering the experience by masculine knowledge, nor confusing it, nor totally foreclosing a femaleness. It is a specific kind of superposition-in-difference, or trans-position of maleness and femaleness. Such a superposition enables us to extract hidden sub-knowledge of the other-sex into shareable co-poietic meaning. Tiresias delivers a promise of a behind-appearance access to the other-sex body. We might ­tune-in-difference our body with-in the corporeal sub-knowledge of the other sex, in keeping to our own sex, with no relation to gender identification.

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If feminine originary sex-difference is an enigma of which we can know something though the matrixial prism, and if this prism opens to us the contact with spaces of non-life, the transgression with-in-to the feminine via the process of art has a particular aesthetic e/affect because in transmitting sub-knowledge from a site of transgression, in a borderspace that contacts the surplus by borderlinking, the artist can bear wit(h)ness and articulate sub-knowledge of/from the sex of the other. ‘The kind of fate of Tiresias’ which is ‘impossible’ for us in the phallic stratum is also a matrixial ‘promise of happiness’ even if such a beauty is tragic. The artwork is a promise to deliver what up to the appearance in a specific artwork of a particular encounter was a non-knowledge concerning the transposition with the other. Tiresias reveals-while-hiding the other sex in a superposition only as long as distance-in-proximity is kept, difference is held in suspense within jointness, and the access to a surplus is captured for a while. What I would like to emphasize is that this kind of transgression between the sexes is a transgression with-in-to the feminine—in a matrixial borderspace—whatever its direction. Thus, the function of the beautiful is to reveal instances of ­co-birthing and co-fading and articulate their sub-knowledge when an-other surplus is suddenly distinguished out in the artist’s matrixial borderspace. What is captured and given form to, at the end of such a trajectory with-in the time of ‘too late’ as the time of a traumatic encounter with-in the other and with the other’s Other, is no other than what have always been experienced as such in the time of the ‘too early’, waiting for an ­almost-impossible articulation in a time of suspension-anticipation. Thus, a dynamic which indexes a difference in the Real is co-knowledged in wit(h)ness, to become shareable, again on some levels, and for the first time on other levels, via the process of art. It is Henri Maldiney who, in writing about forms of ambivalence in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, succeeded in isolating an aesthetic dimension fit for describing the superposition of maleness and femaleness in a matrixial androgynous figure. Maldiney writes of: […] a double issuing less from a behind-world than (from) Leonardo’s before-world which remains the absolute past of his early childhood, not anterior but subjacent to his present world [and of a communication] on a single-same plane of emanation which is tied to the global schema of (their) crossed forms [… where] the occult in withdrawal bears that which is manifest. The latent meaning underlies the immediate meaning. But these two meanings, without excepting the occult, are immanent in the two visible images – one subjacenting the other. (Maldiney 1970)

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Ambiguity here is not con-fusion. Separation is kept in single-same plane of union as in distance-in-proximity. It communicates a subjacenting borderlinking that incorporates without exclusion and without fusion, where an absolute ‘before’ world is, in the same breath, once again and for the first time, available.

Notes









1. For Emmanuel Levinas, future time is feminine (see Levinas and Ettinger 1993, 1997). I have discussed elsewhere the feminine-future dimension, and the foreclosure of the feminine from culture through the foreclosure of the future dimension from God’s name in the translation from the Hebrew Bible (God’s name ‘I Will Be/Become that I Will Be/Become’ is translated in classical biblical translations as: ‘I am that I Am’). See Chapter 2. 2. A wordplay on the word ‘homme’—‘man’ in French. The second ‘m’ is therefore intentional. 3. According to Lacan, women in their sexuated position vis-à-vis the phallic universal are split between ‘pure absence and pure sensibility’. While men make of the phallic referent the universal supporting ground for their phantasy, built to make up for the deficiency of a primordial lack, a split from the Real, from the body and from the Other, for women there is an extra territory beyond the Phallus. 4. Thus, reducing the domain of the Phallus in the determination of the Subject (see Chapter 2). 5.  According to Joan Riviere, behind ‘the mask of womanliness’, she is ‘either […] castrated (lifeless, incapable of pleasure) or (as) wishing to castrate’ (Riviere 1928: 54). Riviere’s concept of ‘masquerade’ concerns hiding female ‘factual’ castration and her castrating wishes, and is, therefore, considered by me as a phallic concept. 6. Lacan is quoting the poet Henri Michaux (1899–1984). 7.  Editor: Lacan is writing on the figure of Antigone as the character dramatized in the tragedy by Sophocles written ca. 441 BCE. 8. ‘Étourdit’ and ‘après-midit’ are word plays in French. The first expression is playing on the past participle of the verb: ‘étourdir’—to stun, to daze, to make dizzy or giddy; to astound, to stagger, to divert one’s thoughts, to deafen, to try to forget, to be thoughtless, to commit thoughtless act and ‘dit’—said—on the other hand. The second expression is playing on ‘after-noon’ [après-midi] and ‘after being half said’ [mi-dit]. 9. Among the psychoanalysts who elaborated on prenatal life we can mention Laing (1982) and Ferenczi (1924).

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10. This point is necessary for the understanding of women’s claim over their pregnant body and their legitimate rights to keep or abort their foetus. It makes no sense, from the point of view of the Matrix, to speculate on a foetus’ ‘needs’ separately from the mother-to-be’s desires, as some anti-abortion militants are doing when trying to oppress women and limit their rights by means of the phallic Imaginary. This Imaginary posits the foetus mistakenly as a ‘separate’ entity with separate desires which they then pretend to defend against the mother’s desire. I emphasise that the feminine-matrixial con-figuration supports woman’s full response-ability for any event occurring with-in her own not-One ­corpo-reality and it disqualifies phallic regulations of it. The foetus is not a separate entity. It differentiates itself only in co-emerging with a woman’s body-phantasy-desire complexity, and its ‘fate’ is inseparable from this complexity. 11. I have presented Lacan’s preoccupations with the Moebius strip in relation to the gaze in Ettinger (1998b). In that essay I also suggested a possibility for a rereading of it. 12. This is a taken from a comment made by Emmanuel Levinas in conversation with the author in 1991. 13. The ‘too early and too late’, is an expression used by the poet Paul Celan to describe poetry. For Deleuze, the time of ‘too late’ is related to aesthetics. 14. In this remark, added for the present publication, I wish to emphasize that for Lacan, only the jouissance of a woman is supplementary; there is no supplementary field of meaning, no ‘Other of the Other’. Thus, the supplementary jouissance could not become symbolic and could not draw a supplementary field of meaning. The logic of this ‘dead-end’ was presented by me in a number of essays (see Ettinger 1997 and Chapter 1). I have offered a supplementary femininity and difference, precisely in the Symbolic, which then draws its particular meanings, its Imaginary, its Real, and added in this paper more specifically the corpo-Real as a fourth plane, since the Lacanian Real is articulated as a lack, and cannot include the feminine jouissance except in terms of presence and impossibility: what cannot receive meaning. Feminine and masculine designate in my work all these four planes, transformed in light of the matrixial perspective. In my writing ‘male’ and ‘female’ as well as ‘androgynous’ mainly designate the corpo-Real, including sexual specificity and maternal pregnancy, and ‘man’ and ‘woman’ mainly refer to the Symbolic and the Imaginary. With the Matrix we can then view the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ under a phallic light and under a matrixial light, differently; and feminine-matrixiality enables us to review the Real as well and the corpo-Real. The supplementary feminine-matrixial difference makes sense

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and gives meaning to different kinds of jouissance and analyses imaginary material by the now enlarged Symbolic—including to phenomena that were designated by Lacan not only as beyond the scope of the Phallus, but also as beyond the scope of the Symbolic that was identified with the Phallus. 15. All Biblical references are to the English translation found in the King James version. 16.  Same vocalization though different vowelling, is responsible for the enigma of this word ‘shaddai’ in its biblical vowelling. 17. André Chouraqui’s new French translation of the Hebrew Bible in 1985 mentions ‘matrix’ and keeps Shaddai without translation. 18. This paragraph on God’s names has been taken from my earlier book where I go into this matter in more detail (see Ettinger 1993b). Some discussion is also to be found in Chapters 2 and 6. 19. In the Jewish Kaballah, Hesed as a Sefira belongs to the male side of the tree of Ten Sefirot. 20. See the interpretations I offer to Levinas and his replies, in Ettinger and Levinas (1993, 1997). 21. Lacan has repeated through many years of teaching the idea that ‘There is no Other of the Other’. I am suggesting that this is limited to the phallic field, and that in that sphere, there is an Other of the Other. In his very late writing, when discussing James Joyce (1975–76), Lacan enigmatically delimits this statement only to the phenomenon of jouissance. Saying as usual ‘there is no Other of the Other’, he adds: ‘at least there is no jouissance of the Other of the Other’ (2005 [1975–6]: 55–6). I propose that he hereby intends the possibility of certain exceptions to his usual claim. Such an exception may concern a beyond-the-phallus zone such as the Matrixial. 22. The question of the possibility of such a transmission via art, and particularly art by artist-women is a major theme in Griselda Pollock’s writings (see, for example, Pollock 1996a: 2007; 2013; 2019). 23. Jean-François Lyotard dedicated two articles to the art and the notebook texts of Bracha L. Ettinger (Lyotard 1995, 1997; reprinted in both French and English in Lyotard 2011). The remark I meditated here upon, on the relation between art and the artist’s body, was made by Lyotard writing on my own work.

CHAPTER 9

TRANSCRYPTUM (1999)

Parts of this chapter were published in 1999 as ‘Transcryptum: Memory Tracing in/for/with the Other’, in Laurance Bossé, Carolyn ChristianBarkargiev and Hans Ulrich Obrist, La Mémoire-99 (Rome: Villa Medicis). It was fully printed in Linda Belau and Peter Ramadanovic, eds., Topologies of Trauma (New York: Other Press, 2002), 251–71. A different version of this chapter was printed in Brian Massumi and M. Catherine de Zegher, eds., Drawing Papers 24: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger - The Eurydice Series (New York: The Drawing Center, 2001), 117–22, reprinted as Ch. 5 in The Matrixial Borderspace (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 154–70.

EDITOR’S PREFACE Transcryptum draws together several threads which make a contribution to the issues of trauma and memory that have become major themes in the Humanities since the 1990s. Composed for a symposium and a publication in 1999 associated with one of the relatively few exhibitions of visual art exploring these issues (compared for instance to literary and historical studies of trauma at the time), Bracha L. Ettinger here reveals how her continual working with some elements of Lacan’s theoretical vocabulary for the elusive psychic elements, such as Thing and objet a, enrich the prevailing, psychoanalytically-informed literary and philosophical theories of trauma, and proposes our era as trans-traumatic. She extends our understanding of © The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_10

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the work accomplished by art that deals with pain, grieving and mourning through insights from her own artworking, mainly painting and notebooks, in relation to transubjective transmission and ‘wit(h)nessing’ while focussing on the historical trauma of the twentieth century, specifically the Shoah, by considering both art and ‘trans-scription’ through her matrixial lens. The chapter draws into the discussion a wide range of French-language psychoanalysts who also explored psychic processes associated with trauma and unrepresentable dimensions that cause suffering and might even constitute psychosis, but which, when otherwise acknowledged, open onto new understandings of both inter- and intra-psychic transmission: Nicolas Abraham and Maria Török, André Green, Pierre Fédida as well the philosopher who wrote about Bracha L. Ettinger’s art, painting and notebook writing, J­ean-François Lyotard ([1993] 1995, [1995] 1997, 2011). Lyotard is known for initiating the philosophical discussion of ‘the post-modern condition’ with special reference to the shattering effect of the Shoah/Holocaust. His major work, Figure, Discours published in 1971 but not translated until 2011, intervened in both structuralist and emerging Derridian deconstructionist emphases on language and the hegemony of discourse. Lyotard shifted this linguistic focus and, via Freud, explored the sensory dimensions that lie just outside, beside and beneath the organized grid of discourse. His term figure is not opposed to discourse. Lying at its side, by means of the comma, figure is, in rhetorical terms, the figure of transgression of the laws of discourse, not their opposite. Bill Readings explains Lyotard’s terms: ‘The figural is an unspeakable other necessarily at work within and against discourse, disrupting the rule of representation. It is not opposed to discourse, but it is the point at which the oppositions by which discourse works are opened to a radical heterogeneity or singularity. As such the figural is the resistant or irreconcilable trace of a space or time that is radically incommensurable with that of discursive meaning; variously evoked throughout Lyotard’s writings as the visible (figure/ground), the rhetorical (figure/literal), work, the Unconscious, the event, postmodern anachronism, the sublime affect or the Thing’ (Readings 1991: xxxi). Lyotard’s philosophical writings, informed by phenomenology and psychoanalysis, create a shared area of exploration with Ettinger that avoids the either/or division of meaning versus non-meaning and enables us to grasp how representation in art is affected by what remains unrepresentable yet not outside the visible. This involves profound consideration of affect and the aesthetic. Lyotard formulated the

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term: figure-matrice, as a hypothetical invisible origin. This digression is necessary to situate Ettinger’s specific attention to a dimension of subjectivity that supplements, shifts, and moves the linguistic order she names phallic and that generates meaning: thinking in French Ettinger’s use of the term sense/sens holds the ambiguity of the sensory and the intelligible in permanent tension. In The Matrixial Gaze (Ettinger 1993d, Ettinger 2006) she reveals, however, that Lyotard’s figure-matrice (matrix-figure) is a neutral primary element in the philosophical tradition of Plato’s khora, and that when it is transferred as an idea to the realm of sexuality, it can only stand for an androgynous element. In Ettinger’s theory, the matrixial figure, primary as it is, is not neutral always-already and thus, not androgynous; the passage from a Thing to any minimal sense-making of her matrixial figure is already feminine and related to female bodily specificity. The second major point of this chapter is Ettinger’s engagement with, and then transformation of, the psychoanalytical concept of the crypt, meaning both an entombed and a coded psychic element, neither subject to the Freudian thesis on the Unconscious and repression nor to the Lacanian concept of foreclosure. Theorized by Abraham and Török (1987) to account for the transmission of parental trauma, shame and secrets to the child, and relevant to the study of intergenerationally transmitted trauma that emerged from working with the children of survivors of the Shoah, the crypt is extended by Ettinger as transcryptum because her thesis on real, imaginary and symbolic feminine-Matrix already encompasses not only the possibility of shared trauma but structurally reveals the impossibility of not-sharing the trauma of the other and indeed the other’s others: transgenerational transmission. She announces the Thing-event and the Thing-encounter in difference from the neutral Thing. Thirdly, the role of art becomes important but not as the depository or expressive site of trauma. It is the ‘transport station of trauma’ where transmission of imprints, transgression of borderlines and transformation of traces take place. This connects with the fourth main point that both these theories of subjectivity and the role of a new kind of art are themselves products of history, which has not only made our era post-traumatic but also, in matrixial terms, trans-traumatic and hence it generates our condition, not as psychotic because of transgressed borders of the unique subject, but as transubjective where we are carriers of the memory of oblivion (see Ettinger 1993a). She writes:

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It is contemporary art as transcryptum that gives body to this ‘knowledge of the Real’ and generates symbols for what would otherwise remain foreclosed from the transmitted trauma of the world. Such a post-traumatic era becomes, then, trans-traumatic. But to understand all the transgressions that such a reality entails as, precisely, non-psychotic any more, we need to shift the psychoanalytic phallic paradigm and add to the intrapsychic dynamics, the object-relations and the inter-subjective perspectives, a transubjective perspective.

We can see how this builds on the previous concept of ­transgressionwith-in-to the feminine and how the concept of transcryptum can now emerge: ‘Transcryption is a transgression of the individual psyche. It transgresses the boundaries between death and life in a way that allows us to continue Lacan’s analysis of the tragedy of Antigone, while it transgresses also the boundaries between I and non-I’ (see Lacan 1986 [1959–60]). Its possibility rests on the work Ettinger has already done to propose the Matrix as a psychic capacity for shareability. When this capacity, engendered in the Real, is incited in the realm of our social-ethical and aesthetic encounters, it becomes a way not only to understand what the artwork performs in relation to tipping into borderline visibility the aching world, but also to grasp how it is that we viewers become not merely affected witnesses of an artwork but transformative ‘wit(h)nesses’ of ‘artworking’: ‘The idea of trans-scription which is pluri- (of several) and cross-scription, fits for a transcrypted traumatic Thing, fading-in-transformation with the other, that produces traces of/for transubjective originary repression. It is a means for thinking the enigma of the imprints of the world of the artist, of the artist’s potentiality to transform the world’s hieroglyphs, and of the viewer’s capacity to join in this process. When in art a sense emerges, it offers meaning for what has just been born into transubjectivity and would otherwise be foreclosed, beyond significance.’ Bracha L. Ettinger returns to the deep relations between Beauty and Ethics, explored in the previous chapter, offering the terms compassioning and languishing eyes, and further developing matrixial gaze and screen and com-passion, and these important statements: ‘The beautiful accessed via art today and redefined by it proposes new possibilities for affective apprehension of this transitivity while producing new effects of the impossibility-of not-sharing. The effect of beauty becomes then the access via metramorphosis, by art-object or artevent, art-process or art-operation, to the trauma of the Other.’ Psychoanalysis is a process of anamnesis, acknowledging both amnesia, forgetting, and the return of unremembered memory, what never became

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a memory, and the affects associated with and indexical of trauma. So, what are the implications of the proposition of transcryptum and its wit(h) nesses for the practice of psychoanalysis? These arise from a meeting with art in the post-traumatic era which may deliver a necessary awareness of ways of understanding transferential encounters and processes. Key to this is Ettinger’s matrixial revision of Lacan’s Thing (what lies in the Real beyond and before being psychically apprehended or treated as object) as a Thing-event and a Thing-encounter that she revealed in Chapter 7. The Lacanian ‘impossible’ becomes here again—yet from another angle—a feminine potentiality and possibility. A new term emerges at the intersection of trauma, memory, anamnesis and return, the heimliche/unheimliche or uncanny sense of the already known/encountered: ­Co/in-habit(u) ating (see also Ettinger 1999b). Habitation, cohabitation and habit are overlaid with habituating, namely repetition, adjustment, accommodation with, a ‘co-’ meaning, ‘re-attunement’ with others. To be inhabited is here to be dwelling-with. If, however, this habitation that habituates is shared by a primordial severality resulting from compassionate—encountering one another, we may have to imagine a ‘transubjective’ situation that is ­co/ in-habit(u)ating, in the gerundive. The strangeness of created words marks the difficulty for the sayable (dicible) of what is in-dicible (unsayable) at the moment of Ettinger’s struggle for a language in her art-notebooks. The strangeness loosens the ambiguity of the in as both in-(side) and un-visible. We are sharing a world, she says, in which we co-inherit and ­‘cross-inscribe’ traces of historical trauma. We need concepts to help ask ourselves how to share the world in the direction of Life. As Ettinger begins she states the argument very clearly but its sense depends on the reading of the text that follows. So, we recommend that having worked through the text, the reader returns to the opening paragraph and marvel at its lucidity.

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TRANSCRYPTUM (1999) I Trauma and repetition, the feminine and art, revolve around the impossibility of annulling an originary repression (Freud’s Urverdrängung) and accessing a psychic Thing encapsulated and hiding behind it in an outside captured inside—in an ‘extimate’ unconscious space, (to use Lacan’s expression. The Thing is traumatic and aching; we do not know where it hurts and that it hurts. It struggles unsuccessfully to re-approach psychic awareness, but only finds momentary relief in symptomatic repetitions or, by subterfuge, in artwork, where its painful encapsulation partly blows up. In psychoanalytic thinking, the Thing behind originary repression is a ‘woman’—it is related to the feminine ‘dark continent’ and is entirely foreclosed. Lacan’s gaze as objet a (1973a [1964]), like Lyotard’s figure-matrice (matrix-figure) (1971), deals with the figurality of this archaic Thing in the visual-psychic zone, by recurrences of present/absent conjunctions and pulsational scansions correlating to phantasmatic alternations, articulated via the impossibility of encounters of impulse, drive, and jouissance with desire, and the impossibility of finding the lost archaic mental object, separated by a castrative schism. The Freudian/Lacanian Thing is the unseen object of originary repression. Invisible in principle, it is for Lyotard, as matrix-figure, the original absence as an absence of origin. Its locus is a non-place of donation where the unexpected event—the work of art—may be born. The symbolic organization of psychic experience is fatally linked, in Lacan’s theory, to the concept of lack. The objet a is a trace of the loss of part-objects, a trace of the subject’s schism, its being cleft from its own bodily orifices and from its mother’s body; it indexes the libidinal loss in the creation of primary meaning in terms of the disappearance and appearance of the primary object I call archaic m/Other.1 The rhythm of repetition created by absence/presence alternations stands for the disappearance/return of the archaic m/Other, notched and burnt onto the kernel of the Thing. The emergence of meaning contracts the rhythms of the interval that trace the repetition of her painful withdrawal, and these rhythms suggest, for Fédida (1978), repetition as the mother; therefore, primary meaning-creation is this repetition itself of in/out, presence/

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absence, pulsational and phantasmatic scansion. The enactment of the invisible matrix-figure channels eruptions of on/off beats from body to visuality to disturb it from a libidinal within.2 Hidden behind the screen of phantasmatic vision, rendered inaccessible by originary repression, the Thing with its affective tones thus finds incarnation in the aesthetic art object and induces both the coming into subjective existence and the emergence of de-signified meaning. We are here, however, in the intrapsychic unconscious field, where trauma, its amnesia (forgetting) and repetition, the Thing and originary repression are to be understood as intrapsychic phenomena. Difference in recurrences is created here, as in Duchamp’s ‘infra-thin’, for a celibate, individual psyche, a subject split from the m/Other and mourning its losses and separations, a subject subjugated to the only-One sexual difference—the phallic difference leaning on the mechanism of castration—for gaining any symbolic signification. Psychoanalysts Mária Török (1926–98) and Nicolas Abraham (1919– 75) describe the creation of an intrapsychic crypt (‘hidden place’ in Greek) as a result of a traumatic loss, both libidinal and narcissistic. Inside an inaccessible crypt, the lost object of love and of narcissistic gratification secretly dwells like a phantom. The crypt is a result of a special process of unconscious inclusion—preservative (‘conservator’) repression—that is neither a phantasm of incorporation, whose function would be to keep an illusionary pre-traumatic psychic equilibrium, nor a process of introjection that would have recognized the loss to allow both mourning and growth. As long as the crypt does not collapse, there will be neither melancholy nor a process of mourning. The self has no access to its secretly crypted phantom that does, however, haunt the transference and countertransference psychoanalytic relationships and all other relationships of love (Abraham and Török 1987a, b). Following this conceptualization of the crypt, André Green describes a narcissistic traumatic wound that is not a result of loss of a real object, and a depression that is not connected to mourning for the object of love. The subject’s wound arises and its depression stems from a brutal change in the maternal imago, who, from an object that narcissistically gratified the child, becomes an object that is emotionally invested elsewhere—by her own bereavement. The mother suddenly becomes mentally absent for the child, psychologically ‘dead’; she is absorbed elsewhere by her own trauma. This sudden emotional detachment is for the subject a catastrophe without meaning. From now on the subject is unknowingly nostalgic and grieving for a lost relationship that gets encapsulated within its psyche

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without introjection. Instead, affected with signals of anticipated catastrophe, the subject is from now on united by identification with the ‘dead mother’, in re-cathecting (libidinally investing) the traces of her trauma within himself. Via the subject, it is now the desire of its object (its other’s desire, its mother’s desire) that would, as if by procuration, be satisfied (Green 1983). What mechanisms would account for the reappearance, rather than the secretive burial, of traces of the trauma of the other—for eruptions of its crypt and its phantom in the psyche of the child, a phenomenon attested by Dina Wardi (1992), who treated ‘the second generation’ children of the Shoah survivors?3 Clearly Abraham and Török’s ‘preservative repression’ does not account for this phenomenon because no first-hand traumatic event is at its basis. Yet, neither is the Lacanian mechanism of psychotic foreclosure in its strict definition at work. Traces of repression from ‘before’ articulation become evident while there was yet no repression of signifiers that would have elevated the event onto a neurotic level. This phenomenon calls for rethinking the enigma of both originary repression and phylogenetic memory. ‘The buried speech of the parent becomes in a child a death without sepulchre (a burial place). This unknown phantom returns from the unconscious […] Its effect can go to the point of traversing the generations.’ (Abraham and Török 1987b: 140 n.1, my translation; Cf. Freud 1939). The survivor (first generation) lives in a chronic traumatic state, where only the denial of suffering and the perseverance of amnesia and oblivion allow the continuity of psychic life. The survivor’s child (second generation) carries the weight of the buried unknown knowledge of and for the survivor while being recathected by the survivor as a carrier (‘memorial candle’ Wardi) of the survivor’s lost objects and crypted phantom. The question for such a ­second-generation subject is: how to come into contact and get rid of the weight of a trauma inside itself, a trauma that was not directly experienced, whose story was untold, and which was neither incorporated nor introjected by the survivor itself, nor was it directly included and isolated. Here we realize the necessity for the subject who carries its others’ (parents’) crypt for/in place of them—in their place yet inside herself and for them—to bridge to an originary trauma in the form of a Thing that the other unknowingly ‘expresses’ through me and with me, but that is not a part of my individual history as a separate whole subject, and not even, strictly speaking, a product of an inter-subjective relationship.

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The phantom as the mental working, now inside my crypt, of the traumatic secret of someone else, makes me think of the Freudian uncanny aesthetic affect (Abraham and Török 1987a: 391).4 Processing the phantom is processing what for Freud would be an impossible mission (outside of artworking, I add) because it presumes the capacity for bypassing an originary repression without lifting it, and what for Lacan would be impossible (outside of artworking, I add) for a supplementary reason as well—because materials that have never been repressed by the subject cannot be returned from its ‘unconscious structured as a language.’ I am proposing that the crypt—with its buried unknown knowledge, with what could not be admitted and signified by the mother as loss and was buried alive in an isolated nonconscious intrapsychic cavity together with the traumatism that has caused it, the signifiers that could have told the story but remain detached and isolated, the images that could have held together the scene and the affect that had accompanied it—this crypt, transmitted from the m/Other to the subject can be further transmitted from the subject to yet another subject. A crypt, transmissible in a psychic sphere we call the Matrixial, in a subject can become a lacuna that corresponds to an unsymbolized ancestral event—an event not even of its parent, but of its parent’s parent. Thus, we can conceive of a chain of transmission, where a subject ‘crypts’ an object/other/m/Other, who in turn had crypted her own object/other/m/Other, so that the traumatic Thing inside my other’s other is aching in me. We are going to propose that in a similar vein the traumatic Thing of the world is aching in artworking. Like a phantom, the object of the ancestor’s desire and loss is buried alive in its crypt together with the traumatism that its loss has caused her, and now I carry in my internal crypt the crypt of the crypt of my m/Other, like a crypt within a crypt. Thus, we are conceiving of a Thing that, although it is treated by my own originary repression, it was never ‘mine’ in any direct experience. The phantom that is coming alive through me is already the object of desire of its own object, and the Thing that is now incarnated by me was originarily already included and foreclosed by/for someone else who is linked to me—by my n ­ onI. Here, when it is the object who ‘wears the subject like a mask’ while the crypt constructs the internal boundaries of the subject like a castle— is not the subject’s psychotic-like position in strange proximity to that of the contemporary artist who, according to Lyotard (1997), is

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inhabited by the Thing as if the Thing still dwells outside, and who is ­‘de-habitated’ from her own habitat, from her own body and history, by the Thing?5 In their relations to emerging possible significance of/ for such a Thing, certain contemporary artworks are what I am naming transcryptum. Transcryptum is the art object, operation, or procedure that incarnates trans-cryption of trauma and cross-inscriptions of its traces, where the artwork’s working-through of traumatic amnesia is a transcryptomnesia: the lifting of the world’s cryptomnesia (‘hidden memory’ in Latin) from an outside with-in. The creation of an intrapsychic crypt and the identification with it (endocryptic identification) are considered psychotic phenomena.6 I propose that they are such only in what can be looked at as a pretraumatic era, but in our era, which I consider post-traumatic, where there is no pretraumatic psychic reality and where no ‘innocence’ can be presumed, such psychic reality cannot remain only psychotic (Abraham and Török, however, presume this innocence [see 1987b: 154]). It is contemporary art as transcryptum that gives body to this knowledge of the Real and generates symbols for what would otherwise remain foreclosed from the transmitted trauma of the world. Such a post-traumatic era becomes, then, trans-traumatic. But to understand all the transgressions that such a reality entails as, precisely, non-psychotic any more, we need to shift the psychoanalytic phallic paradigm and add to the intrapsychic dynamics, the object-relations and the inter-subjective perspectives, a transubjective perspective.7 Thus, we are stepping further and aside from both Green’s ‘dead mother’ (analysed in the field of narcissism), the crypt and the phantom (analysed in terms of the object’s introjection versus incorporation versus inclusion), when we assume the trauma as wandering in what I have named a matrixial borderspace. The Thing participates in an always-already transgression with-in-to the feminine inasmuch as it is processed by way of a ‘supplementary’ non-phallic difference, though it can, in parallel, be processed by castration as well—be cleaved by a phallic mechanism.8 In a world where the trauma is already in the relationships from before any ‘origin’ of subjective or inter-subjective chronological time, the trauma of the other of the m/Other and her crypted transmissible phantoms are a part of my non-conscious scope, because her cryptograms (encoded matters) are already shared and shareable. Transcryption is a transgression of the individual psyche. It transgresses the boundaries between death-drive and life-drive in a way that allows us to continue Lacan’s analysis of the

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tragedy of Antigone, while it transgresses also the boundaries between I and non-I (see Lacan 1986 [1959–60]).9 What in a pretraumatic era would have been a psychotic potentiality— the subject’s urge and failure to revive the phantom of the other and to open up its isolated crypt—enables, in the post-traumatic era, both individual psychic survival and trans-generational continuity against a total disintegration of both the individual psyche and the generational filiation. To claim such transmissibility, however, we must conceive of an a priori shared psychic space of transubjectivity (trans-subjectivity). This requires rethinking the archaic period in terms of a transubjective stratum where the Thing, the thing-Event and the thing-Encounter were inseparable-yet-differentiated from one another and from their witnessing, inscription and meaning, where trauma was i­nseparable-yet-differentiated from phantasm, and where I was separated-in-jointness from non-I. I have called such a sphere the matrixial stratum of subjectivization, and based it on a feminine originary difference (see Chapters 1–3). This psychic sphere will be presented in the following section. In summarizing the development of the concept of trauma in psychoanalysis, Masud Khan (Khan 1981) develops the concept of cumulative trauma as a supplement to the paradigmatic traumatic situations of castration anxiety, separation anxiety, primal scene, and Oedipus complex (in terms of intrapsychic dynamics of loss), as well as birth, loss of object, and loss of the object’s love (in more Object-Relations terms). Cumulative trauma is a silent and invisible result in the subject of the breaches over the course of time from infancy to adolescence in the mother’s role as a protective shield. The failures in this maternal empathetic role appear as a regressive shifting of the mother–child relationships into either symbiosis or rejective withdrawal. We may, in a post-traumatic era, view the continuity of the mother–infant relationship itself as already producing a multiple and diffracted originary relational matrixial trauma, where traces of the trauma of the m/ Other are encrypted in the child, and traces of the trauma of the child are inscribed in the mother, not as a result of any catastrophic event or exchange, but because the wandering of the trauma and its traces between ­partial-subjects participates in the matrixial sphere in the kernel of the Thing and in any originary repression. The term originary matrixial trauma does not imply the archaic-as-earliest, but any traumatic Thing interwoven in transubjective and sub-subjective web before or beyond the time and space of the ‘whole’ subject. A trans-crypted trauma of the

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other might become to me originary and open a lane of unconscious cross-scription if it becomes the secretly bleeding kernel around which other experiences, earlier or later in time, get reorganized so as to offer and sacrifice this Thing, again and again, as their haunting and fascinating nonconscious centre, origin of compulsive phantasmatic repetitions or repetitive ­actings-out in transferential relations, but also of creative differentiating in recurrences and co-in/habit(u)ating via artwork, as we shall see later on. Relational matrixial traumas are veiled by originary repression, but the Thing here is considered shareable in a transubjective psychic space, such that what is veiled for one partial-subject can be exposed by an-other, and what is crypted in an I is inscripted in a non-I.

II Already before birth, in the late prenatal period, the subject-to-be aspires in phantasm and contacts traumatically a woman—in whose trauma, phantasm, and desire s/he already participates. The jouissance that spurts on the level of feminine/prebirth encounter, and the links between the trauma and phantasm of the becoming subject-to-be (I), male or female, and the trauma, phantasm, and desire of the woman who will become its archaic-m/Other (non-I), both of them in their status of p ­ artial-subjects and partial-objects for each other, constitute a matrixial cluster of desire meeting with reality and trauma meeting with phantasm. Archaic traces of contact with the female body as jouissance are engraved; they are remembered without recollecting and revealed in a phantasm saturated with imprints of trauma of/for partial and shared subjectivity. Female subjects have a double access to the matrixial sphere in the Real, because they experience the womb both as an archaic out-side and past-site, out of chronological time, as ‘anterior’—which is true for male subjects as well—and as an in-side and future site, actual, future and ‘posterior’ time. Whether they are mothers or not, this time out-of-time is a potentiality for repetition which might get actualized. Where the out-side and past-site are both female’s and male’s on a corpo-real scale, this in-side and-future-site are female’s, in the corpo-Real dimension and as bodily potentiality. Female subjects have a privileged access to this matrixial time where the future traumatically meets the past, and to this matrixial site where outside meets inside. This privilege is far from being a source of pleasure. Rather, this is an access to a surplus of fragility. Aside from art’s time-space, male subjects are more radically split from

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this archaic site of potentiality, since their link with it stays in the archaic outside and too early that is forever too late to accessing in the Real of the separate body of the whole subject. Men, however, enter in contact with matrixial time and site, affected, like women, by joining-in-difference with others, in transference relations and via art (see Ettinger 1997c). As an aesthetic-artistic filter, the matrixial apparatus serves whomsoever can yield and tolerate this fragile, fragmented, and dispersed mode of becoming. Various nonconscious lanes, which are opened toward and from originary matrixial difference that is linked to femaleness, are not limited, then, to women only, although they do carry a special resonance for women when they treasure and filter their bodily vibrations. Thus, the matrixial sphere and its processes (that I have named metramorphosis) is a non-phallic difference, feminine in the sense just presented and also because it is beyond the scope of the phallic difference. The matrixial erotic antennae of the psyche, always ­joining-in-separating with/from the Other, are modelled upon this difference that operates like a special kind of swerve with-in borderlinking, which leaves traces.10 Swerve and borderlinking compose a differentiating potentiality and operations in the field of emotive sensibility or affection, which participate in traumatic differentiating-in-jointness of the I with the archaic m/Other. The matrixial sphere is a borderspace for channelling waves, trans-scripting imprints, tracing, and exchanging traces from traumatic and enjoying encounters of I(s) with nonI(s). These are mounted on unconscious lanes opened by the following archaic events: by originary Thing-Encounter with my m/Other, where imprints of Thing-Event—imprints of traumatic encounters not of me, but of my non-I(s) which are transmitted to me, are cross-scribed as well and repressed. These traces and imprints are experienced by I and non-I that are fragmented and assembled partial-subjects. These cross-scriptions are uncognized by ‘me’ as an entire subject in separated self-identity. The matrixial sphere is a borderspace of encounter of the Unconscious of several individuals, where a nonsymbolic movement of linking between the Unconscious of several subjects on the partial (sub-subjectivity) and the transitive (transubjectivity) dimensions takes place. The matrixial nonconscious stratum is processing diffracted and assembled trans-subjective and ­sub-subjective waves, imprints and traces. In a matrixial borderlinking, traces of trauma in me are not ‘purely’ mine. Not only am I concerned with my own wound, and not only is the encounter with the Other traumatic for me, but I am also concerned with the trauma of the

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Other. Not only is the trauma of the other also my wound, but I am also concerned by the trauma that the other must ignore in order to survive, by the Other’s crypted trauma, which in itself can already be transmitted to my m/Other and to me from yet an-other. Traces belonging to others that were connected to my own non-I continue their diffraction and assemblage through me. The matrixial unconscious sphere is a borderspace of simultaneous co-emergence and co-fading of the I with the uncognized non-I, in neither fusion nor rejection. Composite partial subjectivity produces, shares and transmits assembled, im-pure and diffracted objects/objet a via conductible borderlinks. Even though the Matrixial is modelled upon a certain conception of feminine/prebirth intimate sharing, the womb is conceived of here not primarily as an organ of receptivity or ‘origin’ but as a psychic capacity for shareability, primarily linked to borderlinking to a female body—a capacity for differentiation-in-co-emergence and ­separation-in-jointness, where distance-in-proximity is continuously reattuned. I(s) and non-I(s) interlace their borderlinks in metramorphosis, created by, and further creating—together with and by matrixial affects—­ relations-without-relating on the borders of presence and absence, a movement of borderlinking between subject and object, among subjects and partial-subjects, between me and the stranger, and between some ­partial-subjects and transubjective-objects.11 Traces circulate in a transubjective nonconscious zone by matrixial affects and by waves—which I have named erotic antennae of the psyche—that disperse different aspects of traumatic events between me and several others (to begin with, between I and m/Other). Thus, as I cannot fully handle events that concern me profoundly, they are fading-in-transformation—a mode of repressing with-in the matrixial ­ Other—while my non-I becomes wit(h)ness to them. If, then, because of a highly traumatic value of events, I cannot psychically contain ‘my’ wounds at all, in the matrixial psychic sphere, ‘my’ imprints will be trans-scribed as traces in the Other. Thus, my others will process traumatic events for me, as my archaic m/Other had metabolized archaic events for my premature and fragile partial subjectivity.12 ‘Woman’—or the matrixial-feminine difference—emerges here not as an ‘essential’ difference nor as a social construct. A transubjective figure is interlaced, whose psyche is not confined to one-body but is a weaving of links between several partial-subjects and partial-objects, and its difference conceived as affective swerve and borderlinking does not obey

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the Oedipal-phallic principle of castrative difference. Metramorphosis is the originary human potentiality for such reciprocal yet asymmetrical crossing of borderlines between phantasm and trauma and between I and non-I. It induces instances of co-emergence and co-fading as meaning of transubjectivity, and trans-scription as the potentiality for an ­un-oblivious memory of oblivion (Ettinger 1993c; Lyotard 1997), a treasuring and redistributing of events one cannot recollect because they have been treated by one’s own originary repression and are also trans-scribed in, and trans-crypted from the other who thus is turning into a m/Other. The idea of trans-scription which is pluri- (of several) and cross-scription, fits for a transcrypted traumatic Thing, fading-in-­ ­ transformation with the other, that produces traces of/for transubjective originary repression. It is a means for thinking the enigma of the imprints of the world of the artist, of the artist’s potentiality to transform the world’s hieroglyphs, and of the viewer’s capacity to join in this process. When in art a sense emerges, it offers meaning for what has just been born into transsubjectivity and would otherwise be foreclosed, beyond significance. Metramorphosis is a poietic process of affective swerve and borderlinking, of inscriptive exchange, between/with-in several matrixial entities. It dissolves borderlines to become thresholds for a transubjective passage to a surplus of fragility. Its co-naissance—knowledge of ­being-born-together—is a crossed transcription of transcryption. It is a subknowledge of which we receive sense in visual arts by inventing or joining a screen where originary matrixial repression is partially lifted or bypassed to allow the originary matrixial trauma some veiled visibility. A matrixial impossibility of not-sharing with the other is profoundly fragilizing; it demands its price and originates its beauty. In art, engravings of affected events of the Other and of the world are unknowingly inscribed in me, and mine are inscribed in others, known or anonymous, in an asymmetrical metramorphic exchange that creates and then transforms the junction and assemblage of the partial-subjects and partial-objects who participate in it actively or passively. Matrixial memory of an event, paradoxically both in/of oblivion and un-oblivious, a memory charged with a freight that a linear story cannot tell, is transmitted and cross-inscribed. The memory of the transcryptum affects our erotic antennae, our compassioning and languishing ‘eyes’—or scopic desire. It carries dispersed signifiers to be elaborated in further borderlinking with others or with the artwork. Fragmented traces of the event’s

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complexity, from inside and outside and out of time, compose fractured and diffracted unforgettable memory of oblivion that cannot be entirely inscribed in either me or others but only trans-scribed and transmitted when diffracted and transformed in transference and via artwork. The transcryptum produces an image, sign, or symbol where the Thing that enveloped the matrixial trauma—and was enveloped by originary repression—can be-coming into symbolic meaning for the first time. Such a trans-scription of intimate yet anonymous encounter-Thing and event-Thing concerns artists and viewers facing the artwork in different ways, times, and sites. On the artistic matrixial plane, I know in the world by my erotic tunings, and others affectively know in my oeuvre where the world’s traces are transformed and engraved. Such knowing of and in the Other is a transgression which transforms the frontiers between I and non-I. The gaze becomes an erotic antenna embedded with-in co-affection, whose waves make sense as transformation on the level of this borderspace. Apparitions from traumatic ­cross-inscription are known in the transcryptum, even though what is ‘told’ is not a story and what is ‘seen’ illustrates nothing. Matrixial awareness channels the subject’s desire toward the trauma of an-other who by definition is never a total stranger-Other if affectively borderlinked to me. In the same way that my awareness cannot master you via your traces in my psyche, there is no joining in the matrixial gaze which would be without slight separation. The desire to join-in-differentiating with the artwork like with the Other does not promise any harmony, because joining is first of all with-in the other’s crypted trauma in its relation to my wound that echoes backwards to my archaic trauma and archaic encounter with my own m/Other, and, therefore, provokes a risk of fragmentation and dispersal. A matrixial gaze incites the upsurge of a desire for dangerous encounters (Ettinger 1993d, 2007). On the ethical plane the matrixial accessibility implies becoming vulnerable in Levinas’ sense: in the matrixial shareability, I am being exposed to the Other to a point where the Other becomes traumatizing to me. Metramorphic borderlinking is an erotic co-response-ability: a Eurydicean tuning of the erotic antennae of the psyche, always in dangerous proximity to Thanatos (see Levinas and Ettinger 1997). When, in a transgression with-in-to the feminine, we add to the notions of intrapsychic crypt and endocryptic identification the idea of a matrixial transcryption and metramorphic cross-scription, we can understand how the crypted trauma of my other’s others can become an open, not secretive and isolated, wound in me. Thus, words and

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affects said and lived in/by the I for and in place of the other escape psychotic destiny and become a psychic reality par excellence of our trans-traumatic era. I am working through the unsymbolized phantom of the others, not in phantasmatic empathic identification and not even as witness that is excluded from the libidinal event (Abraham and Török 1987b: 153) but as a wit(h)ness who closes its petals on a secret heart-wound of the other that continues to unknowingly bleed from the trauma of the other.13 Coming from ‘another world’—it receives meaning with-in me. Thus, such another world, which for Abraham and Török is the ‘­non-symbolizable’ par excellence (Abraham and Török 1987b: 153), is given meaning for the first time by the artwork as a transcryptum and is symbolized in the transcrypt’s transtextuality. The artist is interweaving a transtext of the otherwise non-symbolizable world. Likewise, transcrypted material can open up in the transference-countertransference psychoanalytic experience, only in transtextuality—and not in inter-textuality—where I bring into the text the others of (and for) the other, like when, as shown by Dina Wardi, a survivor’s child re-lives and works-through the trauma of the mother’s loss of her own mother (Wardi 1992).

III We shall go back now to the elusive intrapsychic remnant of the Real— matrix-figure, objet a, or gaze—that in artworking bypasses the originary repression and is still saturated with the Thing’s trauma and jouissance, to try further to analyse what happens when it operates in a transubjective nonconscious field stretched between several individuals unknown to each other, or between several uncognized partial-subjects. Such a transgression in art of the celibate boundaries discloses the matrixial aesthetic borderspace, where rhythms of the interval capture and trace ­co-engendering with/by the stranger and the world. Art then grooves the routes of enactment of erotic aerials of the psyche, conducting and transmitting, dispersing and assembling joint gazes, lost figures, and crypted traumatic elements between different subjects rendered further partial and fragilized through their very participation in this metramorphosis. A borderlink that transgresses the opposition between inside and outside, original and ready-made emerges, where a gaze wanders, scattered and sprayed among several floating eyes in a nomadic place; and it is impossible to re-gather the matrixial gaze’s traces without coemerging or cofading with

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a stranger. Gazes may be joined in a labyrinth, woven in the course of creating the matrixial aesthetic borderspace itself. A possibility to access via artworking or an artwork one’s own trauma hidden behind the gaze by originary repressions is opened if an unexpected encounter with an-other occurs, an other who is partially affected by the gaze, thus establishing a borderlinking-without-relating to the I’s archaic m/Other. Several I(s) and uncognized non-I(s) are interlaced in matrixial time and space, opening together the wounds of nomadic traumas repeatedly, working-through to re-in/di-fuse celibate and encapsulated places. Anamnesis works in psychoanalysis through infinite recurrences of an immemorial, yet always present, originary scene; and artwork, says Lyotard, emerges by working-through via anamnesis to give traces to the invisible in the visible. In art, repetitions in anamnesic working-through do not re-establish the lost object but make present the unpresentable Thing, crypted in the artwork’s Unconscious. The Thing keeps returning because its debt cannot ever be liquidated. This Thing inhabits the artist as if it dwelled outside, or rather, it is the artist who is de-habitated out from her own habitat by it, from her own body and history (Lyotard 1997: 112–13). The artist’s body is invoked by Lyotard as a monster inhabited by, and concealing the non-place of, a ‘thing without face’ (Ettinger 1993b). If the subject is founded by what Lyotard calls a recurrent intermittence of its losses and returns, to enlighten the Freudian Fort/Da that establishes an object by two distinct movements—constitutive of the earlier matrix-figure and the on/off beats—a spasm is now brought forward where an appearance is bound up with disappearance in one and the same movement. Where artwork testifies to such an event, an artist pays for it in her own body conceived as affection. In anamnesis that takes place in the artwork, the return of the ‘same’ via a spasm is never the same according to Lyotard, for it carries the marks of the peril of disappearance in the appearance. Spasm thus gives birth to the artwork’s apparition amidst recurrences as a threshold. The artist’s gesture Lyotard refers to is that which creates a space of suspension inside recurrences, and contracts recurrences as alternations in a spasm, where an event is repeatedly processed but in difference, and artwork affects space-time-body to create a ‘minimal’ soul—an ­anima-minima (Lyotard 1993). Artworking is tracing a spasm in suspension, delineating recurrent intermittence of disappearance in appearance. But what if art triggered potentiality for co-spasming? And what if the spasm that is still a celibate ‘state of birth’ (Merleau-Ponty) was shared

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by/via the artwork as a matrixial borderspace of co-birth? Subjectivity would then be suspended to allow archaic transubjectivity with the m/ Other to operate anew its borderlinking, transmitting, and dispersal. When an intrapsychic rhythm of interval transmits its effects with-in co-spasming, it operates a rhythm of a swerve with-in a borderlinking between several partial-subjects; and the concealment of a non-place of a Thing without face makes a side-place for a potential shared production/ revelation of a heimliche (Freud 1919) affect at the heart of wandering. The crypt is transformed into a slightly known space in such a wandering between I and non-I. A heimliche-effect operates via such compiled co/in-habit(u)ating, where a gradual passage from intrapsychic amnesia into transubjective cryptomnesia takes place via the transcryptum. Now recurrences do not produce the same, not because they carry the marks of risks of disappearance in appearance for the artist as a separate individual. Rather, recurrences implicate matrixial co-affecting and events of encounter and wit(h)nessing. These events take place alongside different connective points in a transferential borderspace beyond different times and places, where what could have been a no-place of a phantomic existence is transformed into a wandering no-One-man’s-land, which is a potential homeplace by virtue of recycling-in-transformation grains of shared trauma of partial-subjects and partial objects, and of reiterating co-affecting. With each recycling and co-affecting, an ephemeral, composite, unexpected place is successively crystallized. The product— unconscious heimliche-affect—is inseparable from the process that creates it—the metramorphic co/in-habit(u)ation-with-in each singular severality. I and Stranger(s) matrixially co/in-habit(u)ate with-in/by artworking. Swerving and borderlinking as a transgression of affect participate in the coming into being of the artwork as transcryptum. The move into the realm of trauma that I observe in certain contemporary artworks is a move toward a matrixial sphere, where the Thing as ‘woman’ gives/receives new meanings. The world carries in this second half of the twentieth century enormous traumatic weight, and we are unknowingly living it through its massive transitive effects on us. Transtextual writing and transcrypted visual art bring the transmissive post-traumatic effect into the surface of culture and produce images and words that might absorb and diffract it. The beautiful accessed via art today and redefined by it proposes new possibilities for affective apprehension of this transitivity while producing new effects of the ­impossibility-of not-sharing. In metramorphosing with a transtext or a transcryptum

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that exposes these effects while veiling them, you find yourself swerving in dangerous proximity to a traumatic event or encounter as if you have always been potentially sliding on its margins. You are threatened by this swerve and borderlinking, yet also attracted by a mysterious hope to re-find, for further absorption and working-through, what had faded away for you or for the other and got dispersed, on condition of fragilizing yourself, since this beauty is the effect of borderlinking by a wound and co-emerging with a traumatized other. In a post-, ­trans-traumatic era, the psychic trauma is no more entirely personal, and it can only partially be cicatrized, and only in borderlinking to others, in further trans-subjective and sub-subjective transcryption and cross-scription. The matrixial gaze conducts imprints from one paradox—‘events without witnesses’ (Felman & Laub 1992)—and passes them on to another paradox—witnesses who were not there. It is this paradoxical conjunction of the ‘impossible’ witnessing via withnessing that I have named wit(h)nessing. Wit(h)nesses are both the artist and the viewer, in different ways, in their contact with a transcryptum. The viewer will embrace traces of the almost-missing event while transforming it—and itself—by weaving via the artwork a transferential thread to others, present and archaic, cognized and uncognized, future and past, dead and alive. The viewer is challenged by the transcryptum to join a specific anonymous intimate encounter with several—not one, not endlessly multiple—others. Its gaze is carried by an event s/he did not experience, and through the matrixial web an unexpected affective reaction to it arises. New artistic effects emerge, where Aesthetics approaches Ethics beyond the artist’s intentions or conscious control. Not as an intended message and not by any particular theme, wit(h)nessing is an artistic effect that transgresses the domain of aesthetics. I suggest, therefore, that certain art today, from different fields and unclassified by formal or technical means, is leading the transformation of the scope of the artistic-aesthetic itself in a bending toward an in-between borderspace: between aesthetics and ethics (ethics in the Levinasian sense).14 The transcryptum is an offering of a possibility to capture in/via art vibrations of a matrixial originary Thing folded in gazes and screens. The effect of beauty becomes then the access via metramorphosis, by art-object or art-event, art-process or art-operation, to the trauma of the Other. What affects you in/by art is what offers re-affectation-as-redistribution of traces and absorbency of traumatic imprints of Thing-event, Thing-encounter, and w ­ it(h)

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ness-Thing, diffracted and in splinters. (See Rosi Huhn [1992] on the on the question of reabsorption of residues in/by art.) A matrixial trail, skirting on the borderline between perception, sensation, and emotive affect is vibrating at the edges of visibility when a passion based on marks of shareability becomes affectively transgressive again and labours anew in com-passion, to perforate the screen of Vision. When a world, internal and external, from which the artist transfers and to which s/he transmits, is shared with-in-difference via the artwork, this world is only born the instant the artwork awakes its strange beauty, pain, and languishing—languishing as both yearning and ebbing—while swerving and joining-in-differentiating. A potentiality to permeate and interfuse a borderspace with-in others becomes beauty articulated in the bending of aesthetics toward ethics when the artwork vibrates, and the spectator attracts to itself and transmits back to the work and onwards to others and to the world, such an emotive openness for borderlinking and such a surplus of vulnerability. The scopic antennae register imprints that return from the world and transmit a centreless gaze on the transcryptum’s screen. The gaze is channelled from outside and inside to meet the eroticized antennae of the sharing-viewer. When rhythms of swerving with-in borderlinking are co-affected, recurrence stands for the fading and transformation in returning of the archaic ‘woman’-m/Other-encounter, notched and burnt onto the kernel of the Thing. Meaning does not dwell in the whole and separate subject but is created by gradual changes in borderlinks and by further linking. The biography of recurrences-in-difference is recorded in its metramorphosis: in the successive changes in the borderlinks suspending between different rhythms of recurrent intermittence. Each ­ co/ in-habit(u)ation captures/reveals a specific impossibility-of not-sharing, a specific impossibility of not encountering, via specific wit(h)nessing with-in a fragile extimate transcrypted zone. Co/in-habit(u)ating is inseparable from the subjects’ affecting one another and being thus transformed while creating a joint transgressive subjectivity-as-encounter at the price of their being dispersed into partial-subjects—not split by a castrative cut—and assembled into amalgamated temporary assemblage, but not fused. I feel pain in the traces of the other when the other knows with-in me. The trauma of others crypted in my non-I(s) and unconsciously known by my non-I(s) is incarnated by me in our transubjective psychic

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matrixial borderspace that is shared by several partial-subjects, dead or alive, known or uncognized. Partial-subjects and partial-objects can be subtracted from a shared metramorphosis in halts, pauses, lags in the process of coemergence and cofading, when the rhythm of co-spasming suddenly freezes or isolates a difference in swerving, positing subject and object in certain relations. Subtracted and isolated out of subjectivity-as-encounter, withdrawn from wit(h)nessing-without-event, ­ subjects and objects arise then at a certain distance, upon the arrest in the fluctuating distance-in-proximity between the grains. Renewing the borderlinking would then call for fragilizing oneself even at the risk of anticipatory identity catastrophe, even at the risk of the collapse of the fragile matrixial gaze and of the disintegration of the screen. Via art, erotic antennae weave together partial-subjects and im-pure objects that unknowingly, and without being cognized by each other, negotiate trauma in the process of co-in/habit(u)ating. In this process, a trembling sense (meaning) emerges. A rhythm of swerving in borderlinking by transmission and transference conducts toward an unforeseen space while creating it out of a crypt while transgressing the individual off/on beats. A rhythm never reaches total ‘on’ or total ‘off’ states, because it is attuned by several co-spasmings. The artist as a partial-subject takes part with-in and testifies to/for a non-symbolized world that effects and affects while anguishing and soothing, tearing and stitching hollowed spaces, opening in them a rhythm of interval for an exiled phantom—a rhythm suspended like a rotating sea-wave between its fading and its next birth. The painful movement of fading of this wave is already the transient return-in-transformation of the archaic ‘woman’ m/Other-encounter­ Thing, transcrypting and co/in-habit(u)ating. The transcryptum has consequences for the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Apprehending transcryption allows for weaving transtexts in the transferential relation, for giving meaning to the experience of cross-scription, and for bringing into the analysis the relief of symbolic significance supplied by new signs, images, and symbols offered by contemporary art. Art makes almost-impossible new borderlinking possible, out of elements and links already partially available in splinters, which are going to be transformed in ways that cannot be thought of prior to artworking itself, prior to their shifting with-in-to the screen of vision and to their appearance as a transcryptum, where transgressive and repressed encounter-Thing and event-Thing find new forms, where

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t­ransubjective-objects find new bodies. The transcryptum has the potentiality to transform the amnesia of lone traumatic events, crypted in me or in the other, into a cryptomnesia—a hidden memory that can only emerge in affective joining-in-separating with-in a surplus of fragility shared with-in difference.

Post-scriptum My work negotiates a fragile borderspace between painting and psychoanalysis. From the invisible and the indicible I try to attain a with-in-visible screen, accessed only if shared-in-difference with sev­ eral others, and a with-in-dicible scriptum that can only be written as transtextuality.15 For the last seven years (1992–9) I have been working on two series of paintings, the Autistworks and the Eurydices. There, the idea of transcryptum received its trembling first nonverbal articulations. But painting does not surrender to theory, and theory does not collapse into painting. I do not wish to abolish the borderlines between practices and theories and between painting and psychoanalysis, but rather, to complexify their links. If I cross some borderlines, it is in-side painting to begin with that the transgression arises—and I try from with-in the effects and affects of artworking’s transgressions to cross some phallic borderlines of psychoanalytic theory, and to allow these effects and affects to enlarge the understanding of the transferential web and to slightly transform psychoanalytic practice. Thus, by continually negotiating the limits of the visual in and by the visual that is never ‘purely’ such, the spiritual and symbologenic potentiality of artworking infiltrates other boundaries that are unconsciously, synaesthetically, affectively, and symbolically linked to it. Infiltrated and thus opened up, they can now allow for further apprehending, making sense, thinking, healing, and becoming vulnerable.

Notes

1. See the analysis of the child’s play with a toy it repeatedly throws away and delights in its return in Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principe (Freud 1920). 2.  See the analysis of Lyotard’s figure-matrice (matrix-figure) in Krauss (1988).

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3. I would like to thank Griselda Pollock for drawing my attention to Dinah Wardi’s work and to the connection between its ideas and my work as an artist. The question of the transmission of trauma in art and the relations between trauma and the feminine is studied in several of Pollock’s writings (Pollock 1995, 1996a, 1997a, 2000, 2001, 2012, 2013a, b, c). 4. Freud develops the idea of the unheimliche aesthetic affect in his text, ‘The “Uncanny”’ (Freud 1919). 5. L yotard’s ‘L’Anamnèse’ was given as a lecture at a conference on the occasion of an exhibition of my work at the Israel Museum, 1995, at the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, and is related to my series of paintings Halala and Autistwork. 6.  For Abraham and Török, the creation of a crypt is precipitated by a shameful incestual secret shared with the object before its traumatic loss, so that both its phantasmatic incorporation and its healthy process of growth-leading introjection are impossible. The analytic work consists of opening the crypt and encountering the phantom, liberating the inclusion into a process of introjection and mourning by recognizing the libidinal and narcissistic value of the object hidden behind the secret of its shameful transgression. In the transubjective perspective that is offered hereby, the crypt cannot be considered psychotic, and it is not based on any shameful incestual secret. Here, a different kind of transgression, not Oedipal and forbidden but a prebirth/feminine transgression, is always already assumed. 7.  On the shift of psychoanalytic perspective for thinking transubjective (trans-subjective) subjectivity in psychoanalysis, see Harris (1997). 8. I am using Jacques Lacan’s famous formula that a feminine jouissance is ‘supplementary’, but the scope of this chapter does not allow the analysis of its meaning (see Lacan 1975b [1972–3]). I have interpreted this in a matrixial perspective in my ‘Supplementary Jouissance’, Almanac of Psychoanalysis 1, 162–76 (Ettinger 1998a). 9. I have clarified the difference in the reading of this tragedy when a transgression of I/non-I is added to the transgression of death/life, in a passage with-in-to the feminine in Chapter 8: ‘Transgressing with-in-to the Feminine’. 10. I have named ‘swerve’ a differentiating potentiality which is a borderlinking operation in the field of affection. It can be compared to ‘écart’ in the field of perception (see Ettinger 1996b; Merleau-Ponty 1964b and Chapter 5). 11.  To Winnicott’s notion of subjective-objects, I add the transubjective potentiality, and I suggest that we conceive of primary ­transubjective-objects as the infant’s internal objects felt and metabolized by the m/Other where both infant and mother originate and assume a movement of linking between object and subject.

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12. On the mechanism by which the mother processes events for the infant, see Bion (1962). 13.  Wit(h)nessing is becoming a participatory witness to an event one did not directly experience. 14. I hereby challenge Adorno’s remark that had problematized the sense of creating poetic art after the Shoah. 15. Editor: dicible/indicible are French terms meaning the sayable or unsayable, but having a different Latin root, they also suggest the unspeakable and speakable which has a different resonance. For Ettinger, however, its third meaning: ‘inexpressible’ is very significant, as she strives toward ‘abstraction’ rather then ‘expression’ in art.

CHAPTER 10

SOME-THING, SOME-EVENT and SOME-ENCOUNTER between SINTHOME and SYMPTOM (2000) This chapter was originally published in Drawing Papers 7, The Prinzhorn Collection: Traces upon the Wunderblock (New York: The Drawing Center, 2000), 61–75.

EDITOR’S PREFACE Psychosis has already been approached in this volume as the domain into which the feminine is cast for lack of signifiers under a Symbolic identified with the phallic law of Language and Society. Throughout her writings, Bracha L. Ettinger seeks to show how what would appear, under the phallic symbolic regime, to be a psychotic transgression of boundaries that clearly demarcate subject from subject or from object, which resembles a psychotic loss of access to language, can be thought otherwise. This time this proposition treats artworking on the one hand and the psychoanalytic zone of transference on the other. Indeed, ‘trans-individual encounters’ must be thought in our ‘post-trans-traumatic’ historical situation. In the last three chapters Ettinger has pushed beyond the limits of Lacan’s discussion of ethics, beauty and the limit between life and death to suggest how a concept of artworking as a matrixial transgressing with-in-to the feminine produces knowledge of the non-psychoticizing—in fact transformative and healing— potentiality of art as a transport station of trauma (involving wit(h)nessing and transcryptum). © The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_11

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In this paper Ettinger explores the spaces (and the differences) between visual art and psychosis in relation to a historic museum collection of 5000 images created by 450 inmates of a psychiatric institution that were assembled by German psychiatrist and art historian, Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933). Published in 1922, Prinzhorn’s book about these images and their creators had immense impact on modernist avant-garde artists and thinkers (such as Jean Dubuffet) who were deeply interested in the untutored art of children, autodidacts and the mentally afflicted (Foster). As a major scholar on the late period of Lacan, Ettinger draws on Lacan’s word play with an archaic French spelling of the word symptom—sinthome—deployed specifically in his analysis of the late writings of James Joyce. As we have seen so far, in his late texts, Lacan revised his earlier position on the sovereignty of the signifier and the Symbolic. Through complex figures such as the Moebius strip, the knot and the plait (analysed also in Ettinger 2001), Lacan sought to articulate ways in which we could understand subjectivity as an interlacing of the three registers, the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic (RSI). Lacan was exploring how these three strands hold together, asking also what subjective effects occur when they do not, when the knot slips. Is there a psychic process that can still hold them unevenly thus avoiding collapse into psychosis? In what way is that process creative and thus holding the subject back from psychosis? How can this be revealed in artworking? This term is Ettinger’s and it takes its place alongside and beyond Freud’s key concepts for the transformative work of different psychic processes: dreamwork, the work of mourning, and working-through. In this chapter Ettinger firstly gives us a profound analysis of the Lacanian concept of sinthome. The conceptual passage in this paper is not just from symptom to sinthome, which will leave us in the intrapsychic individual boundaries but a revolutionary step from the sinthome to a feminine matrixial sinthome where she articulates the relations between both trauma and jouissance, both suffering and joy and artworking. Symptom is the sign of unresolved unconscious issues that can only speak indirectly— symptomatically. Sinthome shares with symptom the difficulty of seeking a way around repression. But it also functions as the means of holding the plait (RSI) together without the collapse of subjectivity. The matrixial sinthome relates to an event in the Real that, in the first chapter of this volume, was presented as what remains unsignifiable and unimaginable in Lacan’s system, transferred now into the zone of ‘transubjectivity’. For the later Lacan, the Real is still and always a hole and a lack in the Symbolic. Thus, contact with what Ettinger names Woman/Other/Thing is always linked in

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Lacan with the Death-drive. With Lacan’s realization of his own overstatement of the role of Language, the overlaps between the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic and notably the space between the Real, (trauma) and Phantasy (The Imaginary) became the object of his later analytical explorations. In philosophical terms, if in the Real, the Thing turns first into object (or a lacking objet a), for Ettinger, the archaic Thing itself has already an aspect of Event and Encounter that will not turn into object, but will develop as potentiality for conductivity, transmissibility, shareability, diffraction, transmissivity. In each matrixial encounter-event, therefore, paradoxical entities of artist-and-viewers (via artworks) and doctor-and-patient (via transference/countertransference) emerge and reproduce specific ‘eyes’, ‘gazes’ and ‘screens’. In this text, Bracha L. Ettinger analyses and brings into conversation Lyotard’s ‘anamnesis’, Lacan’s ‘sinthome’, Deleuze’s ‘writer as doctor’ and ‘symptoms of the world’, Freud’s ‘Uncanny’ and Duchamp’s ‘art coefficient’ as she develops her idea of ‘the artist as ­doctor-and-patient’, an expression used as a title in her joint exhibition with Russian artist Sergei Bugaev Afrika at the Museum of Pori in 1997 (Ettinger 1997). She further articulates the relations between trauma and jouissance, the eye, the gaze, and the screen of Vision and their manifestation in art alongside and in comparison with their manifestation in the transferential space of psychoanalysis. Art and artworking are, however, the center of this chapter. She will argue that when a creative artefact is produced as a symptom (art-as-symptom) of psychic distress or disfunction, it is not an art-work. This is because the creative artefact, art-as-symptom, aspires to make sense in the Symbolic in terms of the accepted world of meaning. The mentally ill person struggles towards meaning of his/her pain in a way that is creative. Yet, for Ettinger, artworking (of a patient, or of an artist) is never to be confused with creativity alone. The mental condition of the one who creates a work cannot serve as a criterion for deciding whether the work done (by an ‘artist’ or by a ‘patient’) is art. For her, artworking seeks to expand or transform the existing realm of meaning itself and involves an ethical dimension and even a ‘Vision’. To be its viewer is to become ‘fragile’. Artworking, Ettinger concludes ‘… is, in a way, crazy.’ Art makes a new sense with a surplus, an excess, or a remnant, through jouissance touching what has never even become a memory to be retrieved. It does not, as art-assymptom does, aim to create order for mental confusion or to communicate sense out of psychic chaos or just to be expressive. Art-working as sinthome ‘has to do with the dimension of the feminine beyond the Phallus. That is precisely where—in the site of the relation to such a feminine, and in the non-place

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of feminine difference—Lacan’s very late idea of the sinthome steps forward to mark its deviation from his early notion and from his late notion of the symptom’ (p. 406). Etinger asks what is a ‘woman’ for a woman, and adds: ‘Such can be the work of a feminine sinthome emerging from a shared and partial, assembled and diffracted subjectivity: it inscribes traces in the psyche and makes their passage to the world via artworking that enables a border shareability in trauma and phantasm while it resonates meaning and creates feminine-Other-desire via metramorphosis that also creates and contacts directly knots in a transubjective non-conscious web’ (p. 411). In this chapter important new steps are taken in the movement from psychoanalytical theory to art and from art back to psychoanalytical theory. These moves will offer a definition of relations between the artist and Woman since both transgress the world of meaning defined by the phallic Symbolic even as both are what psychoanalysis leans upon as ‘­absence/ab-sens’ (without sense) when it formulates its account of subjectivity. As such invisible supports or grounds, neither art nor Woman (the sexual difference from the feminine rather than ‘she’ who is shaped as the minus subjectivity, notman, under the phallic order) are available for therapeutic application directly. This is what makes necessary the theoretical level of their elaboration as a means of opening to the matrixial domain of sexual difference: ‘If the concept of the sinthome brings together the enigma of the feminine and the question of the origins of the work of art, it leads to the articulation of the enigma of art with the question of sexual difference’ (p. 411). By distinguishing creative artefact as symptom from artworking as sinthome through the interpretation of Lacan’s own attempts to articulate the sinthome and while continuing and swerving it toward her matrixial field, Ettinger makes clear the stakes involved in thinking about art and/with a feminine sexual difference starting from what she names the ‘corpo-Real’, moving through the borderlinkage that turns subjectivity-as-encounter into a threshold and concluding in a profoundly matrixial move that any artist who works within this sensibility becomes by definition a ‘woman-artist’, irrespective of body, gender or Oedipal identity as masculine or feminine. This is a vital move, leading towards the texts that will be printed in Volume 2. The Matrix delivers to humanity dimensions of subjectivity ‘with-in-from the feminine’ that inevitably have massive repercussions for cultural life as it opens to us the legacy from our ‘archaic’ ‘becoming-with’. In addition, and against the priority of Death-drive in thinking art, Ettinger distinguishes between ‘death’ and ‘non-life’ and adds the drive to find and refind the ‘passage of non-life-coming-into-life’.

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SOME-THING, SOME-EVENT and SOME-ENCOUNTER between SINTHOME and SYMPTOM (2000) I Sinthome and Symptom When we are reflecting on the difference between a creative artefact produced as a symptom—be it an expression in a form and with the help of ‘artistic’ tools, be it in the language of writing, of painting, or in a musical language—and a work of art that appears as what Jacques Lacan names, to mark a slight but definite difference from the symptom, a sinthome, a seemingly paradoxical idea imposes itself: it is the symptom— and the creative artefact produced as a symptom—that in fact makes sense in and by the Symbolic. And such a making-sense in and by the Symbolic, creative as it may be, cannot be a measure of art, because it discovers itself via significance that is already culturally accepted. Once again, the question of this difference is called upon in view of the works of the Prinzhorn Collection. A form comes to life and exercises its effects as a work of art on a level that, at least to begin with, subverts this significance; a level equivalent to the level of events that burst out in the Real. So, we may say that the work of art, any work of art fabricated as a sinthome, is in a way crazy; it is produced at the level of jouissance and it is meant to create jouissance and to make sense through what is left of it (an objet a, a plus-de-jouir). Thus, the meaningful work-as-symptom of the mentally ill, unlike this kind of crazy artwork-as-sinthome, is in fact very sane, contrary to any intuitive qualification of such a product. A work as a neurotic or psychotic symptom is not at all ‘neurotic’ or ‘psychotic’ in its structure, because it is an articulation of suffering already in the language of the Other, an articulation made for the Other, a message aimed towards and communicated to a symbolic Other, and finally perhaps also apprehended by those who can analyse it and return its sense to the subject who created it. If the symbolic Other already contains all the clues for deciphering the message contained in the work-as-symptom, this work has no potentiality to transform this same Symbolic. The artwork-as-symptom stems from the Unconscious and aims at an Unconscious ‘structured as a language’, at what is already here but dissimulated, or cut away, or

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castrated, or repressed, or temporarily lacking. The work of art as a sinthome, on the other hand, is a unique response that contains the enigma it co-responds to and that brings it about, an enigma that resonates a lacuna of quite a different status in the Symbolic: it does not correspond to lacks defined by the phallic mechanism of castration but to whatever is not yet there, to what is yet to come, to what resists the Symbolic and to the mysterious and fascinating territory of that which is not yet even Unconscious or to what is impossible for cognition. A symptom that corresponds to a lack in the Symbolic aims to defy castration and points to a lack or a failure in the phallic structure. A sinthome that points to the dark margins of the Unconscious’ own dark margins and struggles to resonate the traces of a Thing is lying beyond the effects of castration; it is indifferent to castration; it does not even defy it as the foreclosed. It indirectly hints at the failure of the phallic structure as such, or at some kind of psychic world where the phallic structure is just irrelevant (Miller 1985). In that sense, and in others, it has to do with the dimension of the feminine beyond the Phallus. That is precisely where—in the site of the relation to such a feminine, and in the non-place of such a feminine difference—Lacan’s very late idea of the sinthome steps forward to mark its deviation both from his early and from his late concept of the symptom. Lacan’s symptom, following Freudian guidelines, has two facets. One is that of the articulated message at the service of the symbolic Other. This was emphasized by Lacan in his early theory. Here comes to light what the symptom ‘says’ to the Other where the subject cannot speak for itself. Under this aspect, if the symptom participates in creation it does so by way of the metaphor, by a displacement of whatever is already a compensation for a lack, a subjective split, a separation from what I view as one’s own partial corpo-reality and one’s own archaic mother. The second facet is that of jouissance, emphasized by Lacan in his late theory. Here come to light the ways drives are satisfied by way of the symptom and the pleasure derived from an imaginary satisfaction of the desire of the Other. Under this aspect, the symptom participates in creation by metonymy, repudiating signification by rejecting any recognition of a lack. A symptom as such is not a work of art. As Jacques-Alain Miller remarked, however, according to Lacan, it does backtrack itself in effects of creation. If in its facet of articulated message ‘the symptom harmonizes with castration’ (Miller 1985: 14), it is perhaps more on its other facet that it backtracks itself in the effects of creation: while following upon the trails of jouissance. Here, something is satisfied by the

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symptom; something in the speak/through-being is gratified even if the subject is suffering. Something is delighted ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ in what also causes suffering. But if we want to speak of artobject and artworking, even in light of the reading of the symptom under the second facet, that of jouissance, which introduces the operation of the death drive in repetition, something is missing from the picture, something that has to do with creativity that transgresses sublimation, with the intrinsic potentiality of a work of art to open the world apart in order to embrace a new meaning and to transform the world’s frontiers into thresholds. Where a message of suffering—symptom—can be transformed into a work of art, another sense is created beyond symbolic signification, and a supplementary jouissance does not just penetrate the scene or the space of the work but is invented in/by it.1 An unimagined trail of jouissance is invested then but is not just followed by a working-through. By the sinthome, something more is added to the domain of jouissance, something I can think of as a diffracted trace-imprint of trauma-and-jouissance that, as in the reversal of the movement of time, turns the trace of an imprint that would usually be an effect into an imprint of a trace that presents itself as a cause, as an effect now, it would also seem—as trace-imprint— to reply. This trace-imprint of trauma-and-jouissance joins in the creation of a work of art because the work of art is not a codified message and not a pure jouissance. Neither is it just an expression of trails of suffering or pleasure; nor is it a pure marking of their traces. The work of art is an external incarnation of the body-and-psyche in matter with representation. It is the unfolding into time and place of a psychic space at the borders of the Real, in a visible form, or an object that though inanimate it does, like a subjective substance, make suffer/enjoy and make sense. It makes sense, it overturns, moves deeply and upsets (boulverser), it touches, and fascinates—it and not the subject behind it. A trace-imprint of trauma-and-jouissance makes us suffer/enjoy, but not only by metonymy in terms of clinging onto an object. And it makes sense, but not as a metaphor, not through the passage via the treasure of existing signifiers and, therefore, not via the Symbolic and not via a public and social recognition—not, at least, to begin with; not, at least, as its defining criterion. The Symbolic is to start with thereby dethroned in order to only reappear by the back door on condition of becoming a receptive texture that is capable of leaving the access to and from what I call the Event-Thing and the Encounter-Thing of the body-psyche—that affected body-psyche, denuded and lusting—open.

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II Sinthome, Knots and Feminine ‘Impossible Sexual Rapport’ Up until the end of his teaching, Lacan repeatedly claimed that ‘there is no sexual rapport’, that psychoanalysis itself attests to that, and that this lack of rapport (relationship or relation) is the basis of psychoanalytic discourse, but that if such a rapport were to exist, it would be feminine. Logical and topological considerations mainly, but also a­esthetic-poetic ones, led Lacan in some of his very late seminars (1973–4, 1975b [1975–6]) to imply enigmatically a psychic zone in which feminine sexual rapport—that the signifier has not appropriated and ‘killed’ and castration has not cut-out and kicked-away—might occur. A ‘supplementary’ feminine non-conscious zone is stretched out of— and retreats back into—art, separated from psychosis and mysticism by less than a hair’s breadth. At this late stage Lacan describes the intra-psychic registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) as rings linked to each other by a knot that is a kind of triangular warp-and-woof weave or a kind of braid made of three stems, where the stem of the Real is, in principle, structurally and primarily, inseparable from the stems of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. In a braid/plait such as this, where interior and exterior may revert and be turned inside-out like a glove, in the Real itself some kind of knowledge is written ‘and should be read in deciphering it’ (Lacan 1973–4: 23 April and 12 February 1974). If bodily traces of jouissance and of trauma (in the Real), their representations (in the Imaginary), and their significance (in the Symbolic) are woven in a braid around and within each psychic event, the knowledge of the Real marks the Symbolic with its sense and its thinking, no less then the Symbolic gives meaning to the Real via signification and concepts. We may, therefore, suppose a resonating significance between no-meaning and sign, intermingled with the fourth term that knits the three registers together: the sinthome. In certain circumstances a feminine sexual ‘impossible’ rapport co-exists alongside the usual non-rapport of the feminine. What could be another mode of inscription and a meaning-resonating that would fit the coming into rapport of the non-rapport? How can what Lacan describes as a ‘glove’ be inscribed and described as a basis for the ­actualization-and-meaning of the ‘impossible’ rapport? What would be a mode that would enable the passage of the supplementary feminine

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jouissance and its sexual rapport onto culture following their dissimulated incarnation in a sinthome, so that they would not be only either experienced in the Real or enacted in mystical phenomena or realized in psychosis? What would make us discover this passage as an-other knowledge, a knowledge that would not imply the foreclosing split of the feminine from the subject? What would evade even the constitution of the sinthome as a failure in knowledge? If the Real, and not only the Symbolic, harbours already some knowledge, a feminine difference based on bodily specificity not only does occur as the always too early for knowledge and always too late for access, but it can also make sense inside a sinthomatic weaving. When the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic intertwine around a feminine encounter according to the parameters of the Real, the knot ‘goes wrong’, it appears as a ‘slip of the knot’. The Phallus fails, or this feminine-other-thinking fails the phallic order, and an-other sense, based, in my view, on originary feminine difference, emerges. Is it not this failure of the Phallus in/by the feminine that Lacan calls a ‘sinthome’? Only this failure, as he says, is the same for men and for women. It represents what is a ‘woman’ to a ‘man’—to the phallically structured subject. This ‘feminine’ is an ‘invention’ where a sexual rapport, usually foreclosed, suddenly glimpses itself out. ‘She’ is the unexpected event, an unattended occurrence discovered via a writing that is a work of art: […] the sinthome [is] something that allows the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real to go on holding together. […] what I call, what I designate … of the sinthome, which is marked here with a circle … of string, is meant to take place at the very spot where, say, the trace of the knot goes wrong. [It’s a] ‘slip of the knot’. I allowed myself to say that the sinthome, is, precisely speaking, the sex I do not belong to, which is to say a woman. Because a woman is a sinthome for every man, it is perfectly clear that there needs to be found another name for what becomes of man for a woman, since for that very reason the sinthome is characterized by non-equivalence. There is no equivalence, that’s the only thing, that’s the only recess where for the speak/through-being, the human being, sexual rapport is sustained […] the sinthome’s direct link, it is this something that must be situated in its doings with the Real, with the real of the unconscious […] it is the sinthome we must deal with in the very rapport Freud maintained was natural – which does not mean a thing – : the sexual rapport.

410  MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS All that subsists of the sexual rapport is that geometry which we alluded to in relation to the glove. That is all that remains for the human space as a basis for the rapport. (Lacan 2005 [1975–6]: 94, 97, 101, 102, 68)

For Lacan, ‘when there is equivalence, it is by this very fact that there is no (sexual) rapport. If for an instant we assume that what becomes of what from then on is a failure of the knot […] of three, this failure is strictly equivalent – there’s no need to say it – in both sexes’ (Lacan 2005 [1975–6], Le Séminaire livre XXIII: Le sinthome 1975–1976: 100).2 Yet it is also clear that a ‘woman’ cannot only be defined by the failure in the phallic system. And so to this I add: if a woman is a sinthome for every man, it is perfectly clear that there needs to be found not only another name for what becomes a ‘man’ for a woman but also of what becomes a ‘woman’ for a woman, because a ‘woman’ for a woman cannot remain a radical Other as she can remain to men, or else, all women would be psychotic when coming into contact with their own difference. For a woman, a ‘woman’ must at moments be a border-Other. She cannot be radically absent in subjectivity but deabsent or abpresent, and so her difference also locates a state of preasbsence [presabsence]. In the no-place of the Thing in art, however, Lacan identifies via the sinthome, something of the dimension of the revelation of the ‘absent’ feminine and of her ‘impossible’ sexual rapport. I see in the sinthome possibilities of sublimation in/from foreclosed aspects of the feminine, on condition that we give this notion a twist in light of the matrixial difference in order to discover by that what a ‘woman’ can become in-difference for a woman.

III Feminine Sinthome as a Weaving of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic The encounter between trauma, jouissance, phantasm, and desire is a unique conjunction of working art. The register of unconscious phantasy (phantasme) and considerations concerning traumatic events enables us to conceptualize a connection between a mental object and a desiring subject at the level of the Thing ‘before’ it is emptied and erased by the symbolic Other, before the Other was empowered via the Phallus. If psychoanalytic discourse leans on the feminine difference as absence, on the impossibility of elaborating what is beyond the phallic field, on the impossibility of feminine rapport and on the othering of ‘woman’ to the point of her foreclosure, art may be a site from which some light

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may be shed on this ‘woman’. This site is not available for ‘therapy’, but it allows psychoanalytic research to extract something from whatever is imprinted in art for the first time and ‘use’ it as its proper material. If the concept of the sinthome brings together the enigma of the feminine and the question of the origins of the work of art, it leads to the articulation of the enigma of art with the question of sexual difference. ‘The desire to know meets obstacles. In order to embody the obstacle I have invented the knot’ (Lacan 2005 [1975–6]: 37). With the notions of sinthome and knot, Lacan looks for ways for knowing ‘woman’ beyond mere affirmations of her existence. However, this ‘woman’ beyond-thePhallus exhibits the intra-psychic knot while remaining a radical Other. In the Borromean knot, the Unconscious is disharmonious; the knot leads us to deal with knowledge in/of the Real. Surely, says Lacan, women are less closely committed to the disharmonious Unconscious, they are somewhat more free in relation to it. The knots account enigmatically for the failure to inscribe feminine desire in Lacan’s still—and up until the end—phallic paradigm. And yet, with the concept of the knot it becomes clear that for Lacan the possibility of describing the ‘supplementary’ feminine within the phallic framework reaches its limits. In the passage to a matrixial apparatus, what I call metramorphosis is the co-formative activity that remembers, inscribes, and transfers traces of/from the feminine during borderlinking and spreads its specific kind of ‘thinking’ or sense-making across the threshold of culture. In the matrixial stratum, ‘she’ exhibits intersections of knots in a t­rans-psychic web and therefore she is preabsent as a border-Other. Such can be the work of a feminine sinthome’ emerging from a shared and partial, assembled and diffracted subjectivity: it inscribes traces in the psyche and makes their passage to the world via artworking that enables a border shareability in trauma and phantasm while it resonates meaning and creates feminine-Other-desire via metramorphosis that also creates and contacts directly knots in a transubjective non-conscious web. If knowledge stored in the Real is not a host of data awaiting decoding by means of signification that will also constitute a cleft from it, but is an ‘invention, that’s what happens in every encounter, in any first encounter with sexual rapport’ (Lacan 1973–4: 19 February 1974), then a metramorphic process of webbing and wit(h)nessing, a metramorphic process of exchange of affect and phantasm, based on conduction of/in imprints-traces of trauma or jouissance in/from a joint event, and a metramorphic process of transmissions-in-transformation of phantasy,

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initially between a becoming-subject and a becoming-m/Other-to-be, but more generally between I in coemergence with an uncognized non-I, an assembled subjective unit that can then be considered a plural-several, partial and diffracted ‘woman’—all of these processes release knowledge from blanks and holes in the Real. A swerving at the heart of a joint event opens a minimal distance between partial elements, and links between them. This swerving, like in a spiral movement back and forwards and in-between elements, inscribes traces of these borderspacings and borderlinkings themselves. We can consider the manifestations of these moves as a matrixial sinthome that releases/creates/invents, from a feminine side, potential desires whose sense, which does not depend on the signifier, will be revealed in further encounters between old and new elements. Thus, a feminine weaving tells us the story of decentralized severality, of unpredicted occurrences of encounter and of non-symmetrical reciprocity, if we can read between the threads of the braid and join them. A work of art does not express the artist’s intra-psychic conflicts— or does not just express them in a relieving form. A work of art channels anew trauma(s) and jouissance(s) coming from the world and from ­non-I(s) that get linked to the artist who bifurcates, disperses, and rejoins their imprint-traces anew but in difference. The artist acts on the borderline, transcribing it while sketching and laying it out and opening it wide to turn it into a threshold and to metramorphose it into a borderspace. The metramorphic activity functions to borderlink known and unknown elements and it transmits the knowledge of the artwork that is derived from invisibility. The artist who acts on the borderline in that way and captures a resonating meaning while knotting a transubjective sinthome, this artist, male or female, is an artist-woman. Please note: Lacan uses the writing of James Joyce to describe the sinthome. With what we call a feminine sinthome we are taking this notion beyond the work of Joyce to speak of a special kind of artworking, and beyond the art of writing (literature) and the problematic of language to speak mainly on painting and the problematics of visual art.

IV Trauma, Phantasy, and the Matrixial Gaze We enter both the realm of art and the area of sex difference through the field of the Real that spreads between trauma and phantasy. Trauma is saturated with traces of corporeal and sensorial events whose accompanied affects direct the flowing of the libido. Phantasy draws the routes

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of the libido’s flowing and derivation both when the trauma takes place and when the subject later awakens to search for its lost part-objects. And since, for Lacan the span of the Real evades the Symbolic, the libido ‘can only be a participant in the hole, and this goes for all other modes through which the body and the Real are presented […] It is obviously through this that I am trying to get back to the function of art’ (Lacan 2005 [1975–6]: 40). When, from a psychoanalytic perspective, we approach art via these ‘holes’ in the Real, art is not considered the effect of given part-objects; it is not produced by pre-existing part-objects, but rather produces them. Archaic prenatal affected encounters inaugurate a psychic c­ o-formative space of transformation and differentiation in the link to a woman’s corpo-real Thing. A feminine difference opens a unique time-and-space and is originary; it imprints psychic traces. The affected encounter generates and engraves passages and means of transport through which traces of joint events, shared trauma, and transmitted jouissance as well us reciprocal phantasmatic imprints are channelled. They account for a feminine-Other-desire, transported, transformed, and transferred within the matrixial borderspace by metramorphosis. Echoes of matrixial ‘holes’ and knots sprout through art and re(a)sonate meaning of a particular spectrum of opaque, trans-individual, shared-in-difference, affected mental events and phantasies bounded by traces of the archaic rapport with the feminine-m/Other. In the matrixial apparatus and by metramorphic processes, this spectrum reaches some level of organization and we may perceive something of it when it arises, partially, in fits and starts, at the horizon of the space of transference. Twisting the notions of gaze, knot, and the sinthome toward the matrixial borderspace allows me to articulate something of the secret organization that begins with vagrancy and severality with no possible fixed point of vision and rises to the surface as a shared, hybrid, and severalized (multiple only of a few elements) gaze in relation with (and not split from) the severalized hole and its eroticized floating eye. The matrixial gaze rolls into several eyes, transforms the viewer’s point of vision and returns through his/her eyes to the Other of culture transformed. The gaze is not split and yet not fused with the eye, if by ‘eye’ we understand the eroticized aerial of the psyche and not the receptor of the optical visual exterior field. The gaze is saturated with primary distributions of energies that correspond to a rotating swerve, with traces of archaic trauma and jouissance, and with intensities striving for apparition.

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The gaze moves between several archaic or existing as well as potential participants, it creates-disjoints with each subject ­(potential-viewer) as partial with-in subjectivity-as-encounter. The subject’s view is transformed in difference from other viewers’ transformations. The matrixial gaze is re-diffracted by each affected eye onto a potentially ­joint-by-several erotic screen of Vision. Something—but not-all—of the artistic act and its affects is transported into and conducted via the artwork, thus transforming the point of view of the viewer in difference from, yet in relation to, the non-conscious swerves and rapports of the artist, who captures/produces/conducts Ideas and phantasies. The painting connects the gaze of the viewer who happens to be touched by it via vibrations embedded in it that not only express themselves but also conduct diffracted traces of the trauma and the jouissance the artist gives form. The artist that diffracts and transmits a matrixial gaze whose meaning can be resonated by such a feminine sinthome, this artist, male or female, is an artist-woman.

V Illness or Therapy? The Artist as Doctor-and-Patient According to Freud, a symptom is a disguised, repetitive substitute for ideas connected to wishful childhood impulses that have been repressed. These ideas are sexual, if by sexuality we understand via the matrixial prism not the genital but rather the partial pre-Oedipal dimension as a sexuality before or beside gender identity. A ‘veil of amnesia’ covers the early infantile sexual world and its libidinal development. ‘Wherever there is a symptom there is also an amnesia, a gap in the memory’ (Freud 1910: 27) concerning traumatic failure in the infantile erotic world. Interpreting repetitions in transference and uncovering forgotten ­ memory-traces by ‘filling up this gap’ imply ‘the removal of the conditions which led to the production of the symptom’ (Freud 1910: 20, 41). Thus, psychoanalysis aims at the transformation of repetition and/or amnesia into memory, by working through regression and lifting repression inside the framework of transferential relations between ‘the doctor’ and ‘the patient’. The repressed ideas are connected with what Lacan describes as the holes in the Real, which as we have seen are connected to art. This also is implied by the term sinthome: ‘It is the sinthome we must deal with in the very rapport Freud maintained was natural – which does not mean a thing – the sexual rapport’ (Lacan 2005 [1975–6]: 102). Sexuality is the domain in psychoanalysis with which

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art should be articulated, since we enter the drive, trauma, jouissance, and art via that same cavity, in which they exchange affects and where art accumulates its potentiality to shake frontiers of sense into becoming thresholds and to infuse changes in culture. Art, says Lacan, is related to jouissance through the ‘anatomy’ of a cavity (vacuole). An inaccessible trace of a lacking part-object—objet a—‘tickles the Thing from within’ and this is ‘the essential quality of everything we call art’ (Lacan 2006 [1968–9]: 233). An artwork attracts, shifts or originates a desire for an object that mysteriously embodies a space in that cavity. A desire, still saturated with the drive, awakens where an art object joins forces as beauty and horror with the gaze, bypassing repression and regression at the price of dangerously approaching the Thing, this primary source of the Unheimliche—of uncanny anxiety—which appeals to the viewer to abandon defences and to weave into the work their own invisible affected ­body-and-psyche traces. Thus, the ‘impossible’ encounter between the drive and the aesthetic object in an in-yet-outer screen is analogous, up to a point, to the impossible meeting between the drive and the mental object in an ­out-yet-inner screen. The artist is ‘a patient’—this is the common-sense assumption: the artist loses her mind and spirit to the work, which the viewer analyses. The artist is ‘a doctor’—this is Deleuze’s proposition (Deleuze, like Lacan by the notion of the sinthome, intends the writer): ‘the writer as such is not a patient but rather a doctor, doctor of herself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with humankind’ (Deleuze 1993: 228, translation modified). The therapy that the writer offers consists in inventing, through ‘a new vision’, a people that is lacking, inventing ‘a possibility of life’ hollowed out by a kind of foreign language within a language, by ‘a becoming-other of language’ that opens ‘an outside or reverse side that consists of Visions and Auditions […]. These visions are not phantasies, but veritable Ideas’ constituted by ‘the passage of life within language’ (Deleuze 1993: 230). The Ideas are not phantasies, but they are analogous to them; they are not just thoughts. The passage from writing to visuality is called upon by the notion of phantasy. To these two possibilities we, therefore, have added a third: the artist is a doctor-and-patient, re-distributing a multiple-several and shared sinthome where drive and desire meets a ­ Thing on the screen of phantasy, or where the symptom and phantasy share a fate, like in the sinthome, offering this conjunction, diffracted and transformed, via the artwork.

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We can, then, establish an analogy between the subject’s inner world of symptoms and its out-inner extimate screen of phantasy on the one hand, and on the other between the sphere of artistic Ideas and what I have called—establishing a supplementary analogy between Deleuze’s ‘writer’ and a painter—the in-outer screen of Vision (Ettinger 1997c). The artwork is both the illness and the remedy, enacting otherwise impossible rapports and realizing the passage onto the screen of Vision of psychic traces from what is otherwise either absence (irremediably lost) or potentiality (not-yet-born). The intrapsychic transubjective d ­ octor-and-patient sphere with-in the artist is transported unto inter-psychic trans-individual relations between the artist and the viewer with/through the artwork, via a bordersphere captured in/ by the artwork, where transgressive, psychic, real Thing, Encounter, or Event are realized, hybrid objects are incarnated, and intrapsychic amnesia is transformed into conductible sinthomes. Such a doctor-and-patient borderspace finds its echoes in the viewer; its vibrations impregnate the viewer’s own psychic borderspace. It sheds light on the archaic transubjective rapport between the I and the non-I, and it invites one to further think of the possible transmission between different subjects and objects, beyond time and space, in a potential in-between zone of a transitive-subjective-object borne and yielded by painting at the same time that it sheds some light on the potentiality to engender/produce/invent and analyse transferential relations in therapy.

VI Art as a Site of Transference In terms of the unconscious art-coefficient and of relations of transference, Marcel Duchamp suggests a kind of aesthetic osmosis between the artist and the viewer via the artwork (Duchamp 1957: 139). It was Freud himself who qualified some transferential phenomena as Unheimliche [uncanny], thus opening the route for Duchamp to deliver them to an aesthetic sphere and to make them intersect with aesthetic experience. ‘Mysterious’, even ‘mystical’ affective uncanny contingencies underlie the therapeutic potentiality of psychoanalysis, says Freud, in terms of the patient’s openness to inter-personal interaction, influence and suggestibility, or his/her ‘tendency for transference’ in the encounter with the doctor with-in the psychoanalytic process. This tendency

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for transference, since it reposes on sexuality that is ‘the activity of the libido’ (Freud 1917: 446) enters the ‘holes’ we are treating. A doctor and a patient arrive at their transferential encounter with different phantasies und desires. Nevertheless, their phantasies and desires are somehow, mysteriously, temporarily, and partially shared in an asymmetrical yet reciprocal way, and are transformed in/by the encounter, and retransmitted on. Furthermore, phantasies and desires are created in the transferential borderspace as already conductible and shareable though in-difference and as fabricated specifically in/for each unexpected and unique psychoanalytic encounter. If a matrixial borderspace for inscribing originary besidedness with-in-out is opened in the space of transference, in the wandering of phantasy and desire, one’s own phantasy and desire are not in any way replaced by those of an other. Beside a phallic transference/countertransference, a matrixial transference takes place, where trans-individual subjectivity-as-encounter is created between an I and an unknown other, or between an I and the unknown zone of a known non-I. The uncanny affects, both allowing and accompanying the transference/countertransference matrixial rapport between doctor and patient, signal to both that a common-in-difference event which equally-but-differently concerns each of them approaches the margins of shared awareness, surrounds the edges of its hidden cavity and is about to appear. A transferential borderspace of inter-with-ness, besidedness and transgression embedded in relations of transference seeks ways to become known und thinkable via the screen of Vision. Hereby, an assembled and diffracted trans-individual doctor-and-patient entity rolls itself in bits and bit by bit into the symbolic level. Traces of a buried-alive trauma are about to be reborn from amnesia into coemerging memory, and the potentiality of partially sharing it in the transferential borderspace is the condition for its appearance. That is how we may read Duchamp’s art co-efficient connected to space of transference: the artist and the viewer transform the artwork and are transformed by it in different times and places and to different degrees, in different-yet-connected ways. Each viewer gives the artwork new life, and what escapes the capture of the artist’s awareness is the kernel of this process. Matrixial affects allow and accompany seeing with-in/through a work of art. Such affects otherwise allow and accompany the rapport ­with-in/through psychoanalysis. Affective phenomena like admiration,

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amazement, empathy, anxiety, fascination and awe that are hidden inside the patient’s readiness for transference, as well as closely related phenomena like wonder, dread, compassion, and even telepathy, which are hidden in the doctor’s tendency for countertransference, also arise in viewing art. It is as if an object becomes a partial-subject and starts to communicate with us. Shared, exchanged, and diffracted on the unconscious partial dimension, these affects attract and diffuse aesthetic threads and participate in the artwork’s potentiality for hurting and healing and for rendering the viewer vulnerable. The doctor and the patient coemerge in the transferential space, sharing-in-difference the screen of phantasy through free associations and floating attention. The artist and the viewer, each of them as a doctor-and-patient ensemble, coemerge in diverse ways with the work and by the work, sharing-in-difference the screen of Vision through passage-to-action and floating viewing. A matrixial gaze floats to the ­ edges of visibility when a floating eye traverses the screen. Artist and viewer are not in passive/active contradiction in relation to the screen, and yet neither do they amalgamate; they are not the same, and they are not symmetrical. They exchange and keep a distance in proximity that allows the artist a freedom to act and allows the viewer emphatic com-passion as well as the possibility for re-diffusion and re-infusion of elements in the transferential borderspace. Without fusion a critical space of subversion and resistance makes a room for itself. Non-signifiering instances make sense through the artwork. S ­ ome-Thing, some-Event, some-Encounter, are not just being expressed or ‘represented’. They keep being presentified and keep resonating their de-signified meaning while attracting the viewer’s gaze to join ­ them in and to join in them. This some-Thing, some-Event, or ­some-Encounter has to do with the becoming-sense of that which is for the ­phallic-Symbolic an impossibility-to-meaning. Thus, artworking articulated via the sinthome and twisted by a matrixial touch has to do with the ­coming-into-sense of what for Lacan is the ‘impossible feminine rapport’ and what is for me an originary matrixial difference that cannot make sense without a transubjective transmission, and whose imprintstraces emerge in/by artworking. If to metaphor and metonymy we had to add metramorphosis, it is in order to articulate the potential for linking by the borders while borderspacing as a thinking process that does not operate by offering substitutions for absence, and a working-through of

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presentified trauma and jouissance that does not suppose a collision into a suffocating undifferentiation. A work of art produces, to borrow a Lacanian expression, a joui-sense, a sense emerging from a unique jouissance but whose vestiges are treasured by its traces (‘plus-de-jouir’). These traces can be transformed into a work that will make its sense for the first time, and that, rather than being interpreted by the Symbolic, will transform the Symbolic by that which was never, up to that point, known to the Other or known in the Other or known to the I. With such an idea, the idea of a joui-sense, but not of the artist’s experience but of the artwork itself in its process of transitive working-through, we would now like to bring Lacan’s sinthome into an uncanny encounter with Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis of the work of anamnesis in art. Anamnesis works in psychoanalysis through infinite recurrences of an immemorial—yet always present—originary scene; and an artwork, says Lyotard, emerges by working-through via anamnesis to give traces to the invisible in the visible. In art, repetitions in anamnesic working-through do not re-establish the lost object but make present the unpresentable Thing, crypted in the artwork’s Unconscious, that keeps returning, for its debt cannot ever be repaid. This Thing inhabits the artist as if it dwelled outside her, or rather, it is the artist that is de-habitated from her own habitat by it, from her own body and history (Lyotard 1997: 112–3). The artist’s body is invoked by Lyotard as a monster inhabited by, and concealing the non-place of a Thing without face. If the subject is founded by what for Lyotard is a recurrent intermittence of its own losses and returns (in order to enlighten the Freudian fort/da that establishes an object by two distinct movements— constitutive of m ­ atrix-figure and its on/off beat [Freud 1920])3, a spasm is brought forward by him, where an appearance is bound up with disappearance in one and the same movement, where artwork testifies to such a spasm, and where the artist pays for it in her own body conceived as affection. In anamnesis, the return of the ‘same’ via a spasm is never the same for it carries the marks of the peril of disappearance in the appearance. Spasm thus gives birth to artwork’s apparition amidst recurrence as a threshold. The artist’s gesture to which Lyotard (1993) refers is that which creates a space of suspension inside recurrence and contracts recurrences as alternations in a spasm, where an event is repeatedly processed but in difference, and artwork affects and creates a minimal soul—an anima minima.

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VII Encounters with Remnants of Trauma A symptom reflects a traumatic event. It represents and articulates it in a dissimulated language. A work of art is doing something else— or, perhaps, something more. It captures and transmits the traces and effects of trauma, and it affects the viewer—when it works—in a traumatic way; it makes the viewer’s individual psychic limits more fragile. Matrixial artworking is tracing a spasm in/of/for the Other. It is, therefore, a co-spasming. If a symptom is a symbolic-imaginary articulation of trauma and jouissance, a work of art is a transport-station of ­trauma-and-jouissance, where co-spasming is inseparable from sense-creating. This is a ­transport-station that more than a location in time and place is a dynamic space that allows for certain occasions for occurrence and for encounter, which will become the realization of borderlinking and borderspacing in yet another matrixial space by way of the encounter it initiates. As I have written: ‘The transport is expected in this station, and it is possible, but the transport-station does not promise that passage of remnants of trauma will actually take place in it; it only supplies the space for an occasion of encounter. The passage is expected but uncertain, the transport does not happen in each encounter and for every gazing subject’ (Chapter 7). In this space, a gathering of several of the artwork’s potential intended co-respondents is possible— of several, and not of all of them, and not at just any moment, in their actualization as ­ partial-objects and partial-subjects, between presence and absence. Here we can conceive of an occasion for the realization of an unavoidable encounter with remnants of trauma in a psychic dimension where a web of connections inside and outside the individual’s limits, and a self-mutual but asymmetrical transgression of these limits, does not favour the total separation of any distinct individual from its own feminine dimension. This web is tragic in many senses, but is not melancholic, hysterical, or psychotic despite the psychotic potential that stems from this non-separation itself and from the overflow of the borders themselves. The realization of an Encounter-Event via the artwork penetrates into, impregnates, and creates further encounters between the artist-woman and the world, the artist and the object, the artist and the other, artists and viewers. The realization of such an encounter distances the painting from sheer expression (of the Real), presentation (in the Imaginary), and articulation (in the Symbolic). On a fourth

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dimension, the painting is transformed by its own co-spasming with-in the ­Event-Thing into a transport-station of trauma and jouissance. The matrixial affect diffracts and testifies to a difference on the level of the Thing when it signals that some-particular-Thing happens; and a work of art that brings into some light the sense that a transition from Thing, as Event and as Encounter, to object takes place is ­working-the-Event-through without a total separation form the Thing. A minimal sense of differentiation-in-togetherness is tracing itself between signal and significance, testifying that partial subjectivity is already involved in this move, that individuals are there to be affected, and that these individuals are not just objects or just subjects. Borderlinking is thus enabled by a minimal difference of affect or by affective minimal differentiation that occurs in the passage from Thing-Event and ThingEncounter into partial-subject and partial-object. A joint awakening of unthoughtful-knowledge on the borderline and an inscription of the ­ encounter in traces within the space of encounter, traces that open a space in and along the borderline itself between subjects and between subjects and objects, are carried by metramorphosis that is also thus a co-affectivity and co-activity that open the borderline between subjects and between subject and object into a space that occasion a linking and a mutation into a threshold, so that the absolute separation between subjects upon the pattern of cut/split/castration from the Other-Thing—a separation which, in fact, is the pattern of elimination of the archaic femininity—the ­m/Other-Event-Encounter—becomes impossible. With-in the work of art the borderlines lose momentarily their frontier-quality and surrender to the transitive movement. The artist-woman wit(h)nesses trauma not necessarily with a direct experience of the event that caused it—trauma of Other, of others and of the world—and engraves its unforgettable memory of oblivion in the work.

VIII One More Word We started with the difference between a production of a symptom and a fabrication of a sinthome. We continued by linking the questions of sinthome, art and the feminine in order to look at anamnesis, amnesia, and transference in both art and psychoanalysis. We are ending with the elusive matrixial difference born out of the affected body-psyche as a distance opened in the Real by an affected Thing-Event and T ­ hing-Encounter, which, in the difference between work-as-symptom and artwork,

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can perhaps be articulated as the distance between the giving up to the death-drive in an endless repetition circulating around an archaic trauma and a foreclosed femininity on the one hand, and, on the other, the struggle with the angel of non-life-coming-into-life by a differential co-spasming with the Other and the world, in the linkage to the feminine. This touching struggle opens the sphere of affected transubjectivity [transsubjectivity] and redefines the artist—male or female—as a woman.

Notes 1. Editor: Ettinger has chosen to use the term ‘sense’ here instead of meaning to hold together the various levels of meaning in the French usage of the word sens (which is usually translated as meaning). To translate as ‘meaning’ would lose the relation to the English phrases making sense, making sense of, as well as the aesthetic (sensory) linings of how we make sense of the world. But more significantly, ‘sense’ for Ettinger emerges from the Real and corpo-Real toward the Symbolic, while ‘meaning’ stems from the Symbolic. 2. Editor: All quotations from Lacan’s texts are translated by Bracha L. Ettinger. Ettinger modified the translation of Lacan’s parl-être that is usually translated as speaking being. The wording of the published edition of Le séminaire differs significantly from the version quoted by Ettinger here, based on an early transcription of the original spoken seminar with which she was working. The published version reads as follows: ‘Qu’en est-il ce que j’appelle équivalence? Après ce que j’ai frayé autour du rapport sexuel, il n’est pas difficile de suggérer que, quand il y a équivalence, il n’y a pas de rapport. Reprenons alors le noeud de trèfle. Convenons que les deux sexes sont ici symbolisés par les deux couleurs, et supposons pour un instant, comme nous l’avons déjà fait, ce qui dès lors est un ratage du noeud. Que ce ratage se produise au point 2 ou au point 3, nous avons constaté que ce qui en subsiste est strictement équivalent. Si ce que nous voyons ainsi comme équivalent est supporté du fait qu’il y a eu ratage du noeud aussi bien dans un sexe que dans l’autre, il en résulte que les deux sexes sont équivalents.’ 3. In his text, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (Freud 1920), Freud describes a child’s game which involved repeatedly throwing away and retrieving a wooden reel. The child accompanied the disappearance of the reel with the expression: ‘fort’ (gone) and its re-appearance, with: ‘da’ (there). Freud’s essay is the basis for a considerable psychoanalytical literature concerning the psychological processes around loss, lack, absence, the other/mother as object, the object of desire, and the playing object.

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Bibliographical Remarks All references to the seminar of Jacques Lacan have been updated where possible to allow for the publication of a number of Lacan’s seminars in recent years. As Ettinger’s references to Lacan’s seminars are mostly taken from unofficial, ‘unedited’ transcriptions, there are often slight divergences from the published version. Where such discrepancies are significant, the relevant excerpt from the authorised version is reproduced in the notes. Translations from seminars not yet translated into English, unpublished or otherwise, are by Joseph Simas and Bracha L Ettinger when so mentioned, or by Bracha L. Ettinger alone. For quotations from seminars that remain unpublished, references include the year and date of the relevant seminar. Passages cited from Lacan (1973b) are translated by Jack Stone. References to Lacan’s 20th seminar, Encore, are to Bruce Fink’s English translation. Many of Ettinger’s quotations from this seminar represent her own translation from the French text, and differ in key regards from Fink’s translation. Most significant is Ettinger’s rendering of Lacan’s pas toute and p­ as-tout as ‘not-all’, which appears in Fink’s translation as ‘not-whole’. Unless otherwise stated, all Ettinger’s translations from Encore have been reproduced verbatim. All references to Lacan’s Écrits are to Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg (London: W. W. Norton, 2006). All references to the writings of Sigmund Freud are, unless otherwise stated, to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5

423

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Index

A abandonment, 135 abjection, 266 Abraham, Karl, 205 Abraham, Nicolas, 381, 391 absence-in-presence, 165 aesthesis, 40 aesthetical, the, 365 trauma’s transformed affectability in wit(h)nessing in/by art, 365 aesthetic creation, 165 aesthetic dimension, 356 aesthetic effect, 369 aesthetic experience, 226, 260, 264, 267, 334, 344, 355, 416 aesthetic knowing, 354 aesthetic object, 163, 415 aesthetics, 9, 122, 246, 280, 281, 342, 358, 363, 394 bending of aesthetics toward ethics. See ethics in relation to feminist, postcolonial and intersectionalist cultural theory and practice, 9 aesthetic universe, 246

Affected time-space-body instances, 138 affective swerve and borderlinking. See borderlinking; swerve affinity between women and minority groups, 124 afterwardness. See deferred action a-links, 318 alpha-element. See Bion, Wilfred (later emerging) alpha-elements., 206 alpha-function, the. See Bion, Wilfred the alpha-function of the mother, 219 alpha-processes. See Bion, Wilfred alterity, 216, 247, 272, 340 alterity-in-encounter, 14 a matrixial encounter within feminine sex-difference, 246 amnesia, 381, 382, 414, 417, 421 intrapsychic amnesia, 393 psychoanalysis, the theory and practice of, 396 traumatic amnesia, 384 anamnesis, 392, 419, 421

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Studies in the Psychosocial, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5

443

444  Index anamnesis in art. See Lyotard, ­Jean-François; emerges by working-through via anamnesis to give traces to the invisible in the visible, 419 Antigone, ix, 26, 28, 318, 332, 334, 335, 344, 355–359, 361, 363, 364, 369, 370, 385 aesthetic effect of Antigone, 357 Antigone’s argument, 370 Antigone’s desire, 364. See also desire Antigone’s statement of ‘having been born in the same womb […] and having been related to the same father’, 358 incestual state of inner exile, 318 matrixial Antigone, a, 26 shared a maternal womb, 318 the second death, 332 Anzieu, Didier, 57, 217, 237, 268 après-coup, 109, 139, 156, 172, 203, 227. See also afterwardness; deferred action archaic, sub-symbolic matrixial web, 165 archaic-becoming-m/Other, 341 archaic body of the mother, 217 archaic-feminine dimension, 268 archaic feminine other, 3 archaic femininity, 421 archaic m/Other, 235, 251, 252, 254, 259, 271, 301, 369, 380 archaic-m/Other (non-I), 386 archaic m/Other-object, 261 archaic m/Other-to-be, 303 archaic non-I—m/Other, 270 the m/Other’s desire. See desire archaic m/Other-Encounter-Event, 339 archaic m/Other-Event-Encounter, 338 archaic m/Other-to-be, 273, 309, 310, 313, 335

archaic becoming m/Other-to-be, 252 archaic-m/Other-to-be, phantasy of, 306 as psychic reality, as social distress, as aesthetic experience and as ethical problem. See feminine, the archaic matrixial phantasies, 310 archaic mother, the, 215, 292, 331, 332, 406. See also archaic m/ Other archaic non-prohibited in-cest, 252 archaic object/Other (mother), 174 archaic part-object, 216 archaic prenatal affected encounters, 413 archaic representations of the body as psychic events, 178 archaic sexuality, 259 archaic transubjective rapport, 416 archaic trauma and jouissance, 333, 335, 413 archaic Woman-m/Other, 336 archaic ‘woman’-m/Other-encounter, 395 archaic ‘woman’ m/Other-encounterThing, 396 Arendt, Hannah, 28, 74, 75 arousal in concern, 29 art, 1, 117, 118, 172, 173, 175, 224, 228, 233–235, 237, 248, 253, 262, 266, 273, 275, 280, 284, 293, 298, 307, 330–332, 335, 360, 366, 369, 371, 380, 389, 391, 392, 394, 396, 412, 421 aesthetic-artistic filter, 387 allows for the incarnation of traces as relics, for the conception and the recognition of hidden elements, 173 anamnesic working-through, 419 an in-between borderspace between aesthetics and ethics, 280

Index

art as a metramorphosis, 225 art’s time-space, 386 as an ‘elevation of Woman to the level of Thing’, 176 becoming-art, 318 connects with their margins and triggers them into becoming thresholds, 173 creative artistic process is a metramorphosis, 173 encounter between trauma, jouissance, phantasm, and desire, 410 enigma of art, 411 is a metramorphosis, 173 leading the transformation of the scope of the artistic-aesthetic, 394 links the time of too-early to the time of too-late and plants them in the world’s matrixial time, 280 matrixial residues find sublimatory passages into art, 318 metramorphic activity, 360 modern and post-modern, 224 no-place of the Thing in art, 410 not a product of the Imaginary or the Symbolic, 233 ‘remnants’ of the Matrix can be found in, 173 subverts and transgresses beauty and culture, 173 time-space, 265 transcrypted visual art. See transcryptum visual arts, 338 artist, the, 118, 250, 276, 336, 339, 341, 344, 366, 391, 393, 394, 422 artist, the contemporary, 383 artist bears wit(h)ness, 280

  445

artist can bear wit(h)ness and articulate sub-knowledge of/from the sex of the other, 371 artist’s gaze, the, 119 artist’s gesture, the, 392 continually introduce into culture all kinds of Trojan horses from the margins of their consciousness, 118 enigma of the imprints of the world of, 389 intra-psychic conflicts, 412 intrapsychic transubjective doctor-and-patient sphere with-in the artist, 416 man-artist, 336 nonconscious swerves and borderlinking of the artist, 281 relations between the artist and the viewer, inter-psychical, trans-individual. See viewer, the woman-artist, 334, 339. See also woman artist as a woman, 344 artistic creation, 163, 297, 332 artist-woman, 344, 412, 414, 420, 421 artwork, 173, 185, 257, 259, 260, 263, 271, 280, 281, 284, 314, 333, 345, 364, 366, 371, 380, 386, 389–392, 394, 395, 414, 415, 417, 420, 421. See also beyond the Phallus, beyond-thephallic sphere artwork’s apparition, 419 artwork’s potentiality for hurting and healing and for rendering the viewer vulnerable, 418 as a transcryptum, 391 the artwork’s Unconscious. See Unconsciou, the work of art, 407 work of art as a sinthome, 406

446  Index artwork-as-sinthome, 405 work-as-symptom, 421 artworking, ix, 280, 284, 330, 383, 391, 392, 396, 397, 407, 412 Matrixial artworking, 420 a surplus of fragility, 338 a transubjective perspective, 384 Aulagnier, Piera, 57, 147, 149, 168, 171, 205 Autistworks. See painting autopoiesis, 171. See also Varela, Francisco autopoietic connectivity, 171 B Bauman, Zygmunt, 25 beauty, xi, 35, 40, 163, 182, 187, 188, 227, 233, 234, 293, 303, 331, 334, 337, 339, 341, 345, 356, 357, 362, 365, 366, 389, 394, 395, 415 beautiful, the, 332 beauty-affected-by-the-Sublime, 342 beauty-ideal, 334, 357 beauty in art, 187 Beauty-inclined-towards-theSublime, 343, 345 effect of beauty, 357, 365, 368; The effect of beauty is the effect of blindness, 357 effect of beauty results from the rapport of the subject with the ‘horizon’ of life, 332 Kantian concept of, 227 passage between Beauty and Sublime, 331 becoming archaic m/Other-to-be, 310, 361 becoming in-ter-with-the-Other, 274 becoming-m/Other-to-be, 337 mother-to-be, 270

becoming-maternal subject, 4, 355 becoming-subject, the, 188, 310 becoming-subject-to-be, 251, 361, 386 becoming-threshold of borderlines, 121, 191, 226, 238 becoming-with, 4 becoming-woman, 182 behind the desert, 135, 137, 155 a matrixial space, 155 means behind the desert, after the desert but also, the Other of the desert, 151 signifies metramorphic sublimated relationships between ‘leftovers’, 155 Benjamin, Andrew, 76 beside non-conscious dimension, a, 163. See also Matrixial, the bestiality, 370 non-human bestiality, 370 beta-elements, the. See Bion, Wilfred are independent both from culture and from the particular, individual mental structure, 207 beta-elements as things, 208 between Beauty and Sublime, 331 between life and death, 293 between trauma and phantasm, 281, 283 between trauma and phantasy, 214, 306, 412 beyond the Phallus, 2, 100, 174, 184, 226, 411 an-otherness beyond the Phallus, 101 beyond-the-phallic sphere, 274 beyond the phallus domain, 312 feminine beyond-the-Phallus, 185 the beyond-the-phallus feminine. See Lacan, Jacques

Index

the feminine as an otherness beyond the Phallus, 101 ‘woman’ beyond-the-Phallus, 262 beyond-the-phallus dimension, 177 beyond-the-phallus femininity, 301 beyond the pleasure principle, 251, 315, 407 biology, 140 biological difference, 340 Bion, Wilfred, 29, 156, 171, 179, 203, 204, 206, 207, 210–213, 223, 224, 269 alpha-function, 204, 205, 207, 208 the alpha- and beta-elements, 215 the alpha-element, 207, 208 birth, 2, 53, 126, 147, 149, 204, 247, 361, 386 an experience on a continuum of on-going real existence, 126 before birth, 361 does not have to present a mental barrier, 147 limit of birth, the, 52 bizarre object. See Bion, Wilfred; Freud, Sigmund blindness, 351 bodily specificity, 143, 409 body, the, 248 sexuated body, 248 body as a psychic event, the, 178 Bollas, Christopher, 208, 226 an unthought known element, 215 psychic unthought known events, 208 transformational object, 205 Boltanski, Christian, 119 borderdspace a behind-the-phallus feminine borderspace, 302 borderline, 99, 125, 138, 139, 142, 149, 165, 170, 182, 187–190, 236, 237, 334, 338–340, 359, 389, 395, 412

  447

between painting and psychoanalysis, 397 between perception, sensation, and emotive affect, 395 borderlines between practices and theorie, 397 borderline contact, 238 borderline sharing, 190, 237 matrixial borderline, 185, 340 phallic borderlines of psychoanalytic theory, 397 borderline apparitions, 187 borderline awareness, 165 borderline discernibility, 165 borderline visibility, 187 borderlink, 138–141, 163, 165, 166, 170, 182, 189, 225, 234, 237, 269, 271, 274, 276, 295, 303, 337, 359, 388 conductible borderlinks, 270 Contingent transgressive borderlinks, 359 matrixial borderlink, 314 metramorphic borderlinks, 163, 169, 233, 312, 317, 369 borderlinking, 2, 4, 247, 251, 252, 266–268, 279, 280, 330, 333, 337, 338, 340, 341, 343, 345, 354, 360, 361, 364–366, 371, 372, 387, 388, 394, 396, 411, 421 borderlinking to a female body, 388 borderlinking with-in-to the other, 355 borderlinking-without-relating, 392 erotic aerials, 271 feminine borderlinking, 368 Metramorphic borderlinking, 390 the jouissance of, 252 border shareability in trauma and phantasm, 411 borderspace, 2, 138–141, 163, 165–167, 169, 170, 172, 190,

448  Index 225, 237, 271, 274, 304, 311, 337, 339, 340, 342, 345, 359, 371, 387, 390, 393, 412 archaic psychic matrixial borderspaces, 284 borderspace between painting and psychoanalysis. See painting; psychoanalysis borderspace of co-naissance and co-fading, 312 borderspace with-in others, 395 borderspacing, 4, 302, 330, 333, 338, 418 co-poietic psychical borderspace, 358 doctor-and-patient borderspace, 416 irremediable explosion of the matrixial borderspace, 370 matrixial aesthetic borderspace, 391, 392 matrixial borderspace, 293, 306, 308, 311, 317, 340, 355, 370; matrixial borderspace of co-birth, 393 nonconscious borderspace, 251 psychic-bodily feminine/infant borderspace, 164 psychic borderspace, 165 transubjective psychic matrixial borderspace. See matrixial borderspace borderswerving, 2, 4, 333 breast, 53, 140, 147, 164, 168, 210, 217, 218, 367 breasts are a phallus, 140 serves as an object of phantasy for the archaic oral encounter, 210 the maternal breast, 211 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 8 Butler, Judith, ix, 21, 26, 28, 71, 72, 293, 333

C carriance, 2, 15, 59 castration, 2, 111, 113, 127, 163, 173, 177–179, 183, 186, 187, 210, 211, 218, 221, 223, 224, 226, 233, 234, 237, 249–252, 254, 259, 272, 293, 294, 297, 299, 300, 314, 315, 332, 334, 340, 352, 362, 381, 384, 406, 408 castration of the m/Other-to-be. See archaic m/Other-to-be castration paradigm, 298 fear of castration, 228 having/not-having, 299 intrasubjective castration, 258 not fit to describe all such processes and should be used with caution, 113 Oedipal castration, 145, 180, 183, 229, 304 phallic (castration), 164, 181 phallic/castration model, 229 subjectivity, 179 subjectivity, unconscious, 174, 175 symbolic castration, 100, 299; ­having to renounce the attachment to their own organ as a part-object, to corporeality, in order to attain the specifically human sphere of subjectivity, 299 symbolic, Oedipal, and phallic castration, 108, 110, 113 the castration model, 252 the only passageway between the Real and the Symbolic, 169 castration anxiety, 259, 264, 304, 331, 339, 385 castration complex, 180 Cavarero, Adriana, 24, 74 horrorism, 74

Index

Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, 294 castrative separation as a universal principle of order, 294 Chora, 139 cannot be Symbolic, 122 the semiotic Chora is manifest in psychotic discourse, 122 Cixous, Hélène, 20 co-affection, 366, 390 co-affectivity, 368, 421 co-appearance, 138 co-birthing, 280, 371. See also co-naissance co-emergence, 141, 250, 280, 307, 314, 331, 343, 354, 360, 366, 388, 389, 396 coemergence-in-difference, 274 coemergence in differentiation, 268 coemergence of meaning, 274 coemergence with-in and with-out the unknown other, 273 originary prebirth in-cestuous encounter-Thing with-in the m/Other, 365 co-emergence and co-fading, 337 co-emergence in difference, 138 co-emerging feminine/prenatal i and non-I, 164 co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s), 162, 165, 166, 169, 171, 172 co-fading, 2, 250, 280, 354, 360, 366, 371, 388, 389, 396 cognitive psychology, 129 co/in-habit(u)ate, 393 with-in/by artworking, 393 co/in-habit(u)ating, 50, 78, 386, 393–396 compassion, 2, 3, 50, 65, 167, 297, 355, 360, 366, 368, 395, 418 compassion, originary, 78 com-passionate hospitality, 78

  449

co-naissance, 338, 354, 389 knowledge of being-born-together, 354, 389 conductibility, 166, 238, 267, 311 conductibility of borderlinks, 226 conductivity, 191 connectivity, 138, 264, 271, 311 copoïesis, 271, 354 copoïetic, 270 copoïetic swerve and borderlinking. See Borderlinking; swerve co-recognitions, 149 co-response-ability, 50, 282 co-response-ability with-to, 369 corpo-Real, 2, 318 corpo-reality, 50, 304, 406 corpo-real intensities, 51 infant corpo-reality, 51 co-spasming, 393, 396, 420, 422 co-spasming with-in the Event-Thing, 421 counter-transference, 129 creation, 144, 294, 332, 358 Creation-as-castration, 294 creativity that transgresses sublimation, 407 elude the Symbolic, 144 creation and procreation, 144 elude the Symbolic, 144 creativity, 191 cross-inscribed, 370 crypt, xii, 381–384, 393, 396 crypted phantom, 381, 382 crypted trauma, 390 crypt within a crypt, 383 endocryptic identification, 384, 390 intrapsychic crypt, 381, 384, 390 nonconscious intrapsychic cavity, 383 cryptomnesia. See amnesia; crypt

450  Index D dark continent, 174, 218, 352, 380 feminine ‘dark continent’, 234 da Vinci, Leonardo, 371 dead mother, the. See crypt; Green, André death, 144, 187, 204, 233, 330, 332– 335, 342, 344, 356, 358, 368 anticipated future-death in the actual present, 343 connected to the feminine, 332 impossibility of knowing death in life, 355 death drive, the, 315, 331–333, 343, 356, 358, 384, 407, 422 de Beauvoir, Simone, 19 deferred action, 132, 139, 203. See also Freud, Sigmund dehiscence, 246, 278 Deleuze, Gilles, ix, 4, 128, 183, 415 Deleuze and Guattari, 150, 182 becoming-woman, 150, 182 idea of becoming, 150 denial of the womb, the [Freud], 305 Derrida, Jacques, 136 desert, the, 137, 151 beyond the desert, 146 impossible place of meeting between the Symbolic and the Real, 151 no-place fit for an emptying of identity and a rupture of historic or organic continuity, 137 desire, 104, 110, 111, 114, 119, 136, 150, 162, 167, 172, 178, 179, 181, 182, 190, 206, 214, 220, 235, 237, 250, 260, 262, 263, 266, 267, 271, 294, 297, 299–301, 306, 308, 318, 334, 335, 342, 360, 361, 380, 382, 386, 390 a criminal desire, 358 a feminine-Other-desire, 304 an-other desire, 179, 301

an-Other-desire, 311 Antigone’s desire. See Antigone becoming-feminine-Other-desire, 317 belongs to the symbolic Other, 110 desire (in the field of the symbolic Other), 214 desire for the forever lost object, 110 desire is for borderlinking, 276 desire of the mother, 358 desire of the Other. See Other, the desire of the potential mother-to-be as subject, 308 desire to join-in-difference, 342 desire towards the Other, 214 emerging feminine-Other-desire, 314 Feminine desire, 304 feminine dimension of desire, 301 feminine-Other-desire, 311, 312 impossible object of desire, 112 incestuous, 358 is the desire of the Other, 114 masculine desire, 312 matrixial cluster of desire, 386 matrixial desire, 266, 306, 363 mechanisms of imaginary and symbolic ‘castration’ in the field of desire, 163. See also castration mother’s desire, 382 object of desire, 136 originates from that which is lost and is directed towards that which is absent, 220 phallic and matrixial, 361 phallic desire, 251, 306, 312 repression of sexual desire towards the mother, 111 scopic desire, 389 subjectivising desire, 352 symbolic desire, 113 transgressive desire, 344

Index

unconscious desire, 187, 228 woman’s desire, 361 de Zegher, Catherine, viii, ix Différance, 136, 137, 148 Différance écriture Patricide, 136 differenc/tiation-in-co-emergence, 2 difference, 1, 65, 73, 123, 147 in the Matrixial sphere, 65 in the phallic model, 65 difference-in-jointness, 2, 5, 303 difference-in-togetherness, 142 differentiated-in-jointness, 314 differentiate-in-joining, 343 differentiating-in-coemergence, 355 differentiating-in-jointness, 279, 387 differentiation-in-co-emergence, 162, 166, 170, 270, 311, 337, 359, 388 differentiation-in-togetherness, 337, 421 differentiation-in-transgression, 294 distance-in-proximity, 2, 139, 142, 162, 164–167, 169, 170, 227, 270, 271, 312, 354, 359, 364, 372, 388, 396, 418 Dolto, Françoise, 57, 108 body image, 108 body schema, 108, 109, 118, 126 Douglas, Mary, 293 Purity and Danger, 293 drive, the, 182, 183, 203, 204, 297, 380, 406, 415 creates a special map of the body, 203 drive theory, 47 ‘impossible’ encounter between the drive and aesthetic object, 415 impossible meeting between the drive and the mental object, 415

  451

psychic drive, 205 unconscious drive, 183 Dube, Anita, 27 Duchamp, Marcel, 332, 381, 416, 417 art co-efficient. See art unconscious art-coefficient, 416 Ducker, Carolyn, now Shread, x E Écriture, 136 embryology, 231 encounter, 146 Encounter-Event, 4 encounter-Thing, 337, 343, 396 enlarged and shared stratum of subjectivization, 237 enveloping surface of the body, 147. See also skin Eros, 169 erotic aerials of the psyche, 2, 391 erotic antennae of the psyche, 252, 266, 344, 387, 388, 390. See also erotica aerials of the psyche erotic antennae, 314, 316 eroticized antennae of the psyche, 366. See also eroticized aerials erotic scopic antennae of the psyche via artwork. See artwork erotic co-response-ability. See metramorphic borderlinking eroticized aerial of the psyche, 281, 413 eroticized aerials, 364. See also erotic antenna of the psyche eroticized antennae of the sharing-viewer, 395 erotic waves, 270 ethical, the, 365, 366 ethical dispositions, 5 ethical values, 294 ethics, xi, 78, 318, 363, 394 Eurydices. See paintings

452  Index events without witnesses, 282, 369, 394 event-Thing, 396 the Event-Thing and the Encounter-Thing of the body-psyche, 407 exile, the, 317 Exodus, 135, 136, 148 piece of imaginative fiction, 148 extimate, the, 167, 188, 235, 255 most intimate yet exterior to the subject, 255 F fading-in-transformation, 271, 274, 303, 360 fading-away-in-transformation, 251 Fairbairn, W. Ronald, 106, 128 fascinance, 2 Father, the, 151 present and presence, 151 father-tongue, 292, 319 Fédida, Pierre, 57, 175, 213, 226, 380 repetition as the mother, 380 female, 144, 184, 271, 293, 310, 311, 360, 361, 363, 364, 368, 386, 422 female bodily invisible specificity, 139 female bodily jouissance-without-sacrifice, 294 female bodily specificity, 167, 172, 179, 271, 274, 275, 303, 306, 311, 337, 360 female body, 251, 341, 343, 361, 367, 368, 386 female body-and-psyche, 337 female body schema, 126 female corporeal invisible specificity, 360 female corpo-reality, 302 female difference, 173

female genitals, 204, 367, 368 female invisible bodily specificity, 274 femaleness, 230, 236, 296–299, 355, 362, 370, 387 feminine (passive) plus castration (absence of this only organ) plus object’s position, 299 originary difference of femaleness, 265 unknown femaleness, 354 female/prenatal encounter, 360 female sex-difference, 308 female sexuality, 299, 309 in the Matrix, 309 female subjects, 109, 265, 361, 386 feminine, the, 20, 101, 102, 107, 115–117, 126, 138, 144, 151, 152, 174, 181, 184–186, 188, 189, 228, 235, 236, 260, 264, 297, 301, 311, 314, 316, 319, 331, 332, 334, 335, 337, 341, 342, 351, 352, 355, 356, 358, 359, 380, 409, 411, 421 as a mystery outside the Phallus, 117 as a phallic object of exchange, 186, 233 as a sub-symbolic network, 163 associated with anxiety, with the fear of falling into pieces, of becoming a devalorized and damaged object, 144 cannot belong to the signifying chain, 174 closely assimilated to fusion, undifferentiation, autism and psychosis, 332 dark continent, 107 enigma of the feminine, 411 escapes the symbolic realm of culture and history, 175

Index

foreclosed aspects of the feminine, 410 link between the feminine and the time of the future, 351 negation of the feminine, 332 relations of death with the feminine, 356 the feminine and loss, 332 the feminine and sacrifice, 332 the feminine as a dark continent, 102 the feminine not-all (pas-tout), 180 the feminine within culture, 119 with-in-to the feminine, 360, 364, 365 women and the feminine are not to be confused, 103. See also women feminine jouissance, 255 féminin, le, 19–21, 23, 56 feminine/prebirth encounter, 251, 386 feminine/prebirth incestual rapport, 272 feminine/prebirth intimate sharing, 388 feminine/prenatal borderlinking, 359 feminine/pre-natal encounter, the, 171 not psychotic, 361 sacrificed so as to preserve and protect the phallic psychic integrity of the subject, 309 feminine/prenatal encounter, 224, 227, 309, 311, 361 feminine/prenatal real stage, originally, 273 feminine/pre-natal relations in the womb, 227 feminine archaic matrixial zone, 187 feminine-becoming-maternal, 182 feminine beyond-the-Phallus, the, 177, 232, 318, 352 enters subjectivity through the back door, 177

  453

feminine beyond-the-phallus web, 331 feminine dimension beyond-thephallus, 230 feminine otherness beyond the Phallus, 114 the dimension of the feminine beyond the Phallus, 406 feminine bodily specificity, 163, 308 feminine desire, 225, 411 feminine difference, 126, 179, 186, 187, 189, 232, 234, 236, 333, 334, 340, 343, 360, 362, 406, 409, 413 a feminine extimate (exterior/interior) difference, 189. See also extimate does not stem from masculine difference, 362 feminine difference in the Real, a, 109 feminine originary difference, 385 matrixial feminine difference, 355 nonphallic feminine difference, 302 originary feminine difference, 367, 409 the enigma of the particular matrixial relations between singular compositions of I(s) and non-I(s) and their shared Thing, experienced by both female and male infants with-in the woman/potential mother/ mother-to-be, 189 feminine dimension, 166, 184, 420 feminine dimension in subjectivity, 138 feminine dimension beyond the phalus feminine-beyond-the-phallus, 310 feminine dimension of sexual ­non-Oedipal difference, the, 172 feminine dimension of the symbolic order, a, 99

454  Index feminine encounter, 409 feminine eroticism, 308 feminine invisible bodily specificity, 138 feminine invisible sexual specificity, 231 feminine-m/Other, the, 413 feminine-matrixial configuration, 252 disqualifies phallic regulations, 252 supports woman’s full response-ability for any event occurring within her own notOne corporeality, 252 feminine-matrixial difference, 340 feminine matrixial process, 354 feminine originary sex-difference, 371 feminine-Other-desire, 303, 413 feminine otherness, 102 feminine-Other subjectivizing waves, 275 feminine rapport, a, 310 sexual in the partial pre-Oedipal dimension, 310 feminine rapport, 272, 311, 312, 318 impossible feminine rapport, 418 feminine sex-difference, 297, 305, 309, 359 feminine sexual difference, 143, 251 feminine sexual difference in the Real, 281 that operates for both sexes, 251 feminine sexuality, 99, 175, 224, 235, 300, 302, 303, 331, 333, 351, 356 feminine-sexual rapport, 255 supplementary feminine-sexual rapport, 262 feminine specificity, 102 feminine uniqueness from the Real, 314 feminine ‘future’ dimension, a, 151

femininity, 6, 43, 44, 102, 138, 144, 163, 225, 263, 267, 295–297, 299, 300, 317, 351, 352 Freud’s conception of femininity, 352 in psychoanalysis, 317 supplementary femininity, 342 transgressive femininity, 342 feminism, 60, 62, 70 feminist in support of women’s reproductive rights, 251 feminist theory, 59 field of vision field of vision beyond appearance, 253 figure-matrice, 226. See also Lyotard, Jean-François foetus, 99, 126, 337, 343 foreclosed femininity, 333 foreclosure, 116, 129, 162, 182, 208, 225, 266, 272, 313, 364, 366, 382 foreclosure of the feminine, 151, 332 foreclosed femininity, 422 foreclosure of a feminine dimension, 137 foreigner, 155, 167 foreignness, 316 foreignness in me and in the other, 314 foreignness of the other, 318 fort/da. See Freud, Sigmund Foucault, Michel, 203, 340 fragility, surplus of, 386, 389 fragilization of the self, 28 fragilizing, 279, 389 Freud, Sigmund, 30, 55, 79, 105, 107, 109, 148, 180, 210, 211, 214, 217, 229, 248, 264, 265, 298, 299, 305, 309, 334, 351, 362, 414 aesthetic experience, 180

Index

infantile ‘complexes of phantasy’, 180 pre-Oedipal non-existence of femaleness, 299 the sexuality of little girls, 229 future-mother, 355 future-time, 147 G gaze, the, 4, 53, 179, 180, 188, 217, 224, 226, 235, 246–249, 253, 255, 256, 262, 267, 268, 274–278, 280–282, 335, 339, 390, 391, 413. See also matrixial gaze, the amazing lure of the gaze at the horizon of apparition, 257 a mental trace issued in the course of a primary schism between the scopic drive and its object, 254 an im-pure hollow gaze, 249 a phenomenological idea of the gaze, 247 archaic gaze, 277 armed gaze, 335 a transmissible gaze, 249 centerless gaze, 366, 395 centerless or multi-(several, not infinite-)centred gaze-andtouch-and-move, 283 dispersing of the gaze, 264 dwells on the borders of the sensual, sensorial, and perceptual zones, 255 exercises a fascinating and horrifying power over the viewer, 257 extimate gaze, 257 fascinates and horrifies the artist’s stroke, 256 gaze as objet a, 260

  455

gaze of aesthetic experience, 259 gaze’s phallic lack, 258 hides behind the screen of phantasm, 257 is a phantasmatic trace of a traumatic trac, 255 is the lost and desired objet a in the scopic (or visual) field which escapes us because of the split (schism) between gaze and vision, 179 is the specific aesthetic dimension that distinguishes a tableau from any other visual image, 259 lacking gaze, 259 laying down of the gaze, 256 matrixial gaze, 390, 391, 394, 396 might properly be considered ‘feminine’, 249 not under the artist’s control, 256 phallic, 246 phallic gaze, 249, 275; as a phantasmatic relic of a split from a primary libidinal aggregate that knitted the phenomenological presubject and preobject together with the partial drive, 275 post-Oedipal gaze, 249 post-Oedipal ‘active’ gaze, 249 prior to the eye of the subject, 253 sharing of a gaze by two and more, 264 symbiotic, 277 symbiotic gaze, 283 the already joint gaze, 250 the gaze of the Other. See Other, the the most elusive of all the objects upon which the subject depends at the level of desire, 179

456  Index the Other’s gaze. See Other, the the pre-Oedipal ‘passive’ gaze, 249 touching gaze, 339 unconscious gaze, 249 gender, 70, 71 gender identification, 172, 187, 233, 249, 368, 370 gender-identities, 340 gender identifications, 163, 172, 225, 230 gender identity, 78 genitality, 180 God’s name, 137, 148, 151 I will be/become that I will be/ become, 137 grace, 345 grains, 267, 268, 271, 272, 274, 282, 283 matrixial, 268 Green, André, 57, 381, 384 Guattari, Félix, 4, 128 Guntrip, Harry, 106, 128 H Halala, 319 Haraway, Donna, viii Hebrew Bible, 367 Hebrew language, 3, 135 Hesse, Eva, ix heterosexual framework, 361 historical and social subject, the, 281 Horney, Karen, 125 horror, 275, 303, 318, 415 imaginary horror, 303 Horsfield, Craigie, 34 Huhn, Rosi, 8, 395 human becoming-subject-to-be, 360 human body, 357 human body with-in the feminine, 358

human subject, the, 1, 261 hysteria, 13, 116 I I and non-I, 2, 138, 140 co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s), 166 image, 179 image of the human body, 341 image of things, 168 Imaginary, the, 1, 103, 110, 163, 186, 189. See also Lacan, Jacques field of the Ego, 103 ‘mirror stage’, 106 phallic Imaginary, 252, 311 realm of conscious contents and of Ego-identifications, 103 immemorial, 341, 343 immunology, 140 impossibility-of-not-sharing, 28, 76, 339, 369, 393, 395 impossibility of not transgressing, 345 impure, 294 im-purity, 267, 295, 297, 304, 313, 316 incest, 260, 263, 299, 303, 306, 309, 318, 332, 358, 361 incestuous iniquity, 368 Oedipal/paternal, 361 partially foreclosed incest, 266 paternal incest, 363 incest taboo, 265, 300, 309 infantile sexual world, 414 infantile erotic world, 414 infantile theory of childbirth, 305 insanity, 332 inside-the-phallus subjectivizing dimension, 300 inter-psychical, 359 inter-subjective, 304 intersubjectivity, 4, 258, 259, 307

Index

intra-psychical, 359 intrapsychic phenomena, 381 intra-psychic registers, 408 Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, 408 intrapsychic remnant of the Real, elusive, 391 intrapsychic unconscious field, 381 intrasubjective, 312 intra-uterine, 165, 169, 184, 231, 304 intrauterine contact, 268 intrauterine relations, 361; between future mother and future subject are by definition in-cestuous, 361 intra-uterine complex, 226 intra-uterine existence, 264 Intra-uterine fantasies, 138 intra-uterine feminine/prenatal encounter, 225 intra-uterine feminine/pre-natal encounter, 162 intra-uterine meeting, 138, 140 a model for human subjectivizing processes, 140 model for processes of change and exchange, 138 intra-uterine phantasies, 181, 211, 213 phantasy of the subject-to-be, 304 introjection, 381, 382 inverted exiles, 135 invisible screen beyond appearance, the, 173 invisible specificity of the female body, 165 Irigaray, Luce, viii, 26, 45, 46, 57, 116, 118, 248 critical opposition to the concept of the Phallus and to its claim to universality, 118 Luce Irigaray, 18

  457

the feminine in terms of a predominantly auto-erotic or feminine doubling, 118 Irreal, the, 336 Is and non-Is, 181 J Jabès, Edmond Other of the desert, 151 Jabès, Edmond and Ettinger, Bracha (1991), 151 Johnson, Anna, x, xiii join-in-differentiating, 390 joint matrixial con-figuration, 370 jointness-in-difference, 2, 4 jointness-in-differentiating, 253, 335 Jones, Ernest, 125 jouissance, 2, 113, 174, 175, 177–179, 183–185, 188, 204, 214, 222, 224, 235, 248, 251, 252, 255, 261, 262, 265, 271, 274, 281, 296, 302, 303, 306, 310, 313, 314, 333, 340, 342, 351, 360, 361, 380, 386, 391, 405–407, 419 a ‘supplementary’ feminine jouissance, 303 bodily traces of jouissance and of trauma, 408 divine jouissance, 297 feminine jouissance, 261, 301, 313 feminine jouissance beyond phallic desire and law, 315 feminine ‘supplementary’ jouissance, 261 in the field of the Real, 314 in the realm of the subject’s Real, 214 phallic jouissance, 301 Phallic sexual, 302 sexual jouissance, 300

458  Index supplementary feminine jouissance, 408 supplementary jouissance, 353, 407 Joyce, James, 263, 412 Judaism, 293 K Kabbalah, 368 Kandinsky, Wassily, 35 Kant, Immanuel, 356 Ketz, 341 the place of no memory, 341 Khan, Masud, 385 Kinsella, Tina, 8 Klee, Paul, 35 Klein, Melanie, 106, 108, 125, 128, 205, 209, 211, 212 Klint, Hilma af, 35 knot, 219, 409, 411, 413 Borromean knot, 411 failure of the knot, 410 in the tissue of simultaneity and continuity ( Merleau-Ponty), 219 intra-psychic knot, 411 slip of the knot, 409 Kofman, Sarah, 57 Kristeva, Julia, viii, 20, 22, 46, 53, 60, 117, 122, 139, 293, 334, 361 abject, 293 Chora, 122 the feminine as the moment of rupture and negativity, 334 the first human contact she admits with the other is post-natal, 122 L Lacan, Jacques, viii, 1, 55, 57, 79, 100, 103, 106, 109, 112, 114, 143, 144, 184, 203, 206, 214, 217, 230, 246, 248, 250, 253,

272, 277, 299, 302, 307, 308, 312, 313, 315, 316, 331, 332, 334, 335, 341, 351, 355, 358, 367, 383, 406, 408, 411, 413 a tychic point, 257 bi-directionality between Real and Symbolic, 250 differentiates three levels of human reality that are revealed in language through speech (parole), 103 early phallic ethos, 261 early theory, 174–176, 178, 179, 204, 206, 214, 218, 219, 223, 250, 406 Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 249 from the ladies’ side, 246, 261, 302 from trauma to phantasy, 190, 216, 237 impossible feminine rapport, 247 in the Symbolic nothing explains creation, 144 joui-sense, 419 Lacan against Lacan, 302 lack-in-being, 114 Late Lacanian theory, 250 late ‘phantasy theory’, 171 later theory, 115, 177, 178, 181, 184, 206, 216, 219, 222, 223, 232, 261, 277, 406 later theory of the phantasy, 175, 177, 224 Name of the Father, 112 phantasy theory, 204 seminar on Ethics in 1959–60, 355 theoretical inversion, 219 theory of phantasy, 223 there is no such thing as a sexual relation, 230 the ‘supplementary’ feminine experience, 246 the Symbolic is always phallic, 109

Index

the Unconscious is structured by language, 222 the Unconscious is structured like a language, 222 the woman does not exist and does not signify anything, 144 topological sphere, 352 Lacanian theory, 2, 332 Laing, R.D., 10, 29 language, 2, 44, 56, 100, 106, 109, 113, 114, 117, 145, 170, 176–178, 188, 203, 206, 210, 215, 216, 220, 254, 261, 275, 294, 306, 309, 332, 341, 351, 412 aesthetic language, 341. See also aesthetic experience blurs the archaic modes of experience, 254 human ‘entry’ into the realm of language, 103 language of affective channelling, 341 language of the Phallus, 145. See also Phallus, the language of transference, 341 man is trapped in language, 110 non-phallic, linguistic laws, 117 separating the ‘human’ Symbolic from the Real, 113 The subject as a product of language, 221 ‘takes disciplinary steps’ against the feminine/pre-natal jouissance and does not transmit it through itself, 309 Laplanche, Jean, 31, 57 late prenatal conditions, 138 late prenatal encounter, 251 late pre-natal phase, 164 late prenatal period, 251

  459

late prenatal traumatic encounter in the Real, the, 266 later stage of pre-natal life, 213 Lemoine-Luccioni, Eugénie, 318 Levinas, Emmanuel, ix, 3, 25, 28, 149, 280, 319, 334, 364, 390 the feminine is that difference, the feminine is that incredible thing in the human by which it is affirmed that without me the world has a meaning, 319 libidinal formative stages, 183 libido, 168, 229, 248, 297, 298, 315, 352, 412 moves from being considered masculine into being male (Freud), 229 limits of human experience, 175 procreation or death, 175 link, 138, 269 matrixial object-link, 269 Lyotard, Jean-François, ix, 122, 139, 184, 224, 226, 230, 380, 383, 392, 419 anima minima [minimal soul], 392, 419 figure-matrice, 139 invisible matrix-figure, 381 matrix-figure, 380 minimal soul, 419 M Maldiney, Henri, 175, 371 matrixial androgynous . See da Vinci, Leonardo male, 144, 184, 271, 293, 310, 311, 360, 361, 363, 364, 368, 386, 422 male bodily specificity, 230, 298, 302 male body, the, 336, 367 male genital organ, 273

460  Index male organ, 273 maleness/femaleness, 229 female is feminine plus object’s position, minus a male genital. See Freud, Sigmund male is masculine plus penis plus subject-position, 230 maleness, 229, 230, 298, 355 female is feminine plus object’s position, minus a male genital. See Freud, Sigmund known maleness, 354 male is masculine plus penis plus subject-position, 230 masculine (active) plus penis (the only organ relevant to sex-difference) plus subject’s position, 298 trans-position of maleness and femaleness, 370. See also femaleness male repression of the maternal body, 300 male sexual difference, 259, 260 male sexuality, 224, 249, 299, 309 male sexual organ, the, 109, 204, 336 male subjects, 265, 362 are more radically split from this archaic time-and-space of inside and future, 362 mamalangue, 292, 293, 313, 319. See also mother-tongue man, 294 Manning, Erin, 8 margins, 138, 164, 166 masculine/feminine, 229 masculine filter, 370 masculine-paternal-phallic dimension, 174 masculine prism, 183 negotiates the feminine from the angle of the Phallus, 183 masculine sex organ, 108

masculinity, 163, 225, 296, 315, 352 masquerade, 299, 333, 352 Massumi, Brian, viii, ix maternal archaic body, 183 maternal discourse, 172 maternal experience, 208 maternal imago, 381 maternality, 297 maternal ‘logic’ or ‘aesthetics’, 208 maternal response during the prenatal period, 147 maternal womb/intra-uterine phantasy, 304 maternal womb phantasy, 180. See also Freud; interuterine maternity, 6 Matrix, the, viii, 4, 6, 79, 99–101, 109, 118, 119, 121, 122, 125, 126, 128, 137, 162–165, 182, 189–191, 225, 236–238, 249, 250, 265, 267, 268, 272, 275, 279, 281, 294, 297, 304, 305, 307, 311, 312, 317, 344, 358, 359. See also Matrixial, the about a non-Oedipal feminine dimension of plurality and difference of the several in joint subjectivity, 236 a composition of I and non-I(s), 123 a continuum of creation and disruption in equilibrium, 149 a cultural, social, biological or mathematical grid, 3 a feminine dimension, 143 allows symbolisation of aspects of postnatal, pre-Oedipal strata of subjectivization, 144 allows the symbolization of prenatal processes, 144 an engraving of various traces of the feminine bodily specificity, 140 an enlarged subjectivity, 165

Index

a network of subject and Other in transformation linked in special ways in subjectivity, 118 an unconscious space of the simultaneous co-emergence and co-fading, 162 arises in the Real, 4 as a logical structure, 145 as a metaphor, 3 as a psychic borderspace of encounter, 162 a shifting aside of the Phallus, a shift inside the Symbolic, 146 assemblage or a zone of encounter, 139 a stranger sprouts, necessary to subjectivity and creativity, 238 a supplementary perspective, 162, 225 a symbol for emerging composition of I and non-I(s, 141 a thinking apparatus, 4 a time-space with subjectivizing effects, 5 At the symbolic level, the Matrix is no more feminine than the Phallus is masculine, 145 a zone of encounter between the intimate and the exterior, 164 based on feminine/prenatal inter-relations, 225 becoming-with, 3 being-together with the unknown precedes being alone or fused, 181 being-with, 3 closeness without fusion, 149 co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s) co-exist in difference, 164 co-emerging I and non-I, 227 common shared subjectivity, 143 concept and symbol, 139

  461

concerns the symbolic network that is culturally shared by men and women, 145 deals both with repressed feminine sexuality, 126 deals with multiplicity, plurality, partiality, asymmetry, alterity, sexual difference, the unknown, encounters of the feminine and the prenatal, 145 deals with not-yet-symbolized prenatal experiences of I and non-I(s), 126 deals with the possibility of recognizing the other in his/her otherness, 123 dentifies means of passage for sensations and affections, desires, phantasms and traumas, feelings and ideas that do not cohere into the process of castration, 250 designates a non-phallic Real, 145 differentiation in co-emergence, 225, 227 distance-in-proximity, 225 does not indicate any limitation on woman’s rights, 304 draws an-other field of desire, 225 empowers more-than-one and less-than-one partial subject, part-object, or element and their joint borderlinks and borderspace, 164 Encounter-Event, 5 encounters between objet a and the subject can also be sublimated in the Other, 154 encounter with the external/ internal‘extimate’ non-I, 165 environment of development, transformation and becoming in terms of the more than one and less than vast multiplicity, 3

462  Index evokes an imaginary dimension that is supplementary to the Phallus as well as non-phallic desire and sublimation, 145 feminine/pre-natal matrixial encounter with the external/ internal ‘extimate’ non-I, 165 feminine aspect of subjectivity, 141 feminine dimension of plurality and difference, 189 feminine otherness, 144 feminine unconscious space of simultaneous coemergence and cofading of the I and the stranger that is neither fused nor rejected, 312 gives meaning to a Real that might otherwise pass by unthinkable, unnoticed and unrecognized, 142 has ethical and political dimensions, 167 implies a link between the feminine and unknown others, 124 implies becoming, transformation and futurity, 3 is an extimate zone, 164 is an unconscious space of simultaneous co-emergence and co-fading of the I and the unrecognised non-I which is neither fused, nor rejected, 225 is not about women, 236 is not the opposite of the Phallu, 162 it never was One, 145 joint feminine and prenatal psychic zone, 139 joint late pre-natal/feminine experiences in a shared stratum of subjectivity, 237 keeps in semantic play concepts and figures of co-genesis, 13

late pre-maternal/pre-natal timespace, 4 Latin word used in mathematics, biology, chemistry, geology, anatomy, 3 leaves affected joint traces, and evokes conductible sensations, perceptions, and emotions, 165 ‘lost’ objects are multiple and partial, 145 libidinal investment is directed towards co-emergence, 149 link between the symbolic Matrix and women, 143 Matrix as borderspace, 186 Matrix is a symbol for a ­more-than-one, 123 matrixial stage, the, 99 modelled upon a pre-natal stratum, 118 models a severality that is, therefore, a proto-ethical encounter, 54 neither fusion nor repulsion, neither incorporation nor expulsion, 164 non-phallic psychical apparatus, 362 not against but alongside a relativized concept of the Phallus in a universe that is plural/partial, 129 not an organ but a symbol and a concept related to a feminine Real, 121 not a physical organ, 139 not autoerotic but relational, neither fusional nor symbiotic, 118 not reserved to women only, 143 not the opposite of the Phallus, it is just a slight shift from it, a supplementary symbolic perspective, 146 partial and shared subjectivity, 251 prenatal elements, 109 prenatal feminine, 140 primordial being-with, 3

Index

processes of transformation of several elements in co-existence, with continual tunings of borderlines, limits, and thresholds between the partial subjects in co-emergence, 145 radically different from Kristeva’s concept of the Chora, 122 relations-without-relating , 225 separation without rejection, 149 sexual rapport is possible, 186 shared borderspace, 162 shifts Lacan’s late perspective on subjectivity, 189 space of the genesis of the new, 3 stratum of subjectivization, 142 suggests ways of recognizing the Other in his/her otherness, difference and unknown-ness, 141 symbol for temporary subjectivity comprised of elements, 145 symbolic matrixial pattern, 146 symbol of the recognizable traces of sub-symbolic operations, 139 ‘the environment in which something else develops’, 3 the Matrix as a meeting place between the most intimate and the unknown, modelled on the prenatal situation, 125 the Matrix as feminine, 143 transformation in shareability, 3 what our phallic consciousness cannot attain, 145 zone marked by alliances between I and non-I in the midst of becoming and emerging, 142 matrix-figure, 392 Matrixial, the, 1, 2, 3, 264, 359, 360, 388 an-other femininity, 101

  463

a psychic sphere we call the Matrixial, 383 coemergence, 4 deconstructs the monopoly of the Phallus, 163 Encounter-Events, 4 matrixial contributions to subjectivity, art and culture, 163 matrixial encounter, 171 non-phallic sphere of a ­not-one-ness, 121 prenatal and feminine strata of subjectivity, 129 prenatal experiences of I and ­non-I(s) in co-existence without assimilation and without rejection, 101 primordial dimension of subjectivity, 4 Severality, 4 the matrixial future and becoming dimension, 150 the matrixial traces in boys and girls, 127 matrixial accessibility, 390 matrixial aesthetic effect, 366 matrixial affect, 65, 138, 167, 170, 171, 225, 271, 281, 337, 338, 355, 359, 360, 388, 417, 421 awe, 167, 355, 418 compassion, 418 curiosity, 167 empathetic curiosity, 167 empathy, 418 fascination, 418 languishing, 355 modify phallic anxiety around limits and difference, 66 telepathy, 418 wonder, 167, 418 matrixial affection, 269 matrixial alliance, 276, 338, 364, 368

464  Index matrixial alliances, 363 matrixial angle, 267, 342, 358 matrixial Antigone, 76 matrixial apparatus, 265, 387, 411, 413 serves both males and females, 362 matrixial aspect of subjectivity, 236 matrixial awareness, 138, 270, 271, 362 matrixial awareness of I and non-I(s), 128 matrixial becoming symbolic plane, 140 matrixial beyond phallic phantasies, 163 matrixial borderline, 125, 162, 231 a lost enveloping sphere which can be read as a continuity between the interior and the exterior, 185 linked to feminine desire, 162 matrixial borderline dimension, 225 matrixial borderspace, xi, 163, 165, 170, 191, 238, 246, 249, 268, 272, 303, 336, 339, 360, 371, 413, 417 a psychic sphere of encounters of I(s) with non-I(s), 250 erotic antennae, 396 extimate feminine/prenatal matrixial borderspace, 232 matrixial relational borderspace, 173 the artist’s matrixial borderspace, 371 unconscious matrixial borderspace, 191 matrixial borderswerve, 297 matrixial circles, 272, 312 matrixial cluster, 306 matrixial cluster of desire, 251 matrixial co-affectability, 366 matrixial co-affecting, 393 matrixial co-emergence, 150, 182 matrixial complex, 362

matrixial complex of phantasy, 266 matrixial covenant, 273, 306, 308 matrixial difference, 339, 340, 410, 421 matrixial difference, 310 originary matrixial difference, 418 matrixial difference, originary, 387 matrixial encounter, 138, 182, 271, 273, 360 future matrixial encounter, 310 matrixial encounter-events, 312 matrixial encounter-Thing and ­Thing-event. See Thing-event matrixial entities, 338, 359 matrixial Eros, 40 matrixial events, 354 matrixial events and encounters (Thing-encounters and ­Thing-events), 272 matrixial-feminine difference. See feminine difference matrixial feminine dimension, 363 matrixial femininem, 10, 18 matrixial feminine rapport, 307 matrixial-feminine sphere, 251 matrixial-feminine subjectivising field of desire, 224 matrixial feminine with-in-out place, 343 matrixial field, 313 matrixial filter, 162, 225, 368 sub-symbolic, 162 matrixial gaze, the, ix, 234, 249, 275, 276, 279, 281–283, 304, 362, 369, 413, 414, 418 matrixial productive-conductive projection of the gaze, 275 severalized gaze, 413 synergy between touch, movement, and vision, 279 the diffracted, transmitted, and redistributed im-pure matrixial gaze, 275

Index

there is an impossibility of not sharing trauma and phantasy, 275 matrixial gaze and screen, 224, 250, 277 matrixial hospitality fragility and vulnerability, wit(h) nessing and co-affection, 3 matrixial Imaginary, the, 268 matrixial im-pure covenant of severality, 310 matrixial in-cest, 265, 309 before-birth in-cest, 303 cannot be forbidden in the Real, 309 feminine/prenatal in-cest, 361 feminine/prenatal in-cest is a necessary transgression, 361 feminine incestual rapport, 307 in-cest, m/Other, 361 intrauterine incest, 307 level of pre-birth non-prohibited in-cest, 361 matrixial in-cest, 310, 315 matrixial in-cestual rapport. See matrixial rapport matrixial prenatal in-cestuous co-emergence in different times. See co-emergence non-prohibited incest, 266, 267 not even excluded from the Symbolic, 309 occurs to give life, 309 pre-birth in-cest, 309; are not psychotic, 309 psychotic potentiality of this rebirth non-prohibited in-cest, 361 subjugated to the phallic heterosexual model, 309 matrixial instances, 173 matrixial instances of differentiation, 169 Matrixiality, 49, 51, 77

  465

holds open a potential to resist phallic values and positions, 54 not a pre-phallic phase nor does it merely precede the Phallic, 49 redefines a feminine as a subjectivizing, partial otherness, 53 relativizes and thereby shifts the exclusive dominance of Phallic, 49 renders us vulnerable to trauma, 52 matrixial lack, 237 matrixial landscape of severality, 264 matrixial late prenatal period, 270 matrixial level, 281 matrixial light, 354 matrixial link, 179, 224, 268, 275 matrixial loss, 190, 363 not implemented by castration, 190 matrixial love, 363 matrixial matrixial link a, 179 matrixial meanings, 173 matrixial meanings, sub-symbolic, 182 matrixial meetings, 147 matrixial memory, 271, 389 matrixial metramorphosis, 2 matrixial model, 169, 217, 317 can serve to analyse a different, non-phallic kind of gaze. See matrixial gaze, the matrixial modes of subjectivity, 123 matrixial narrative, 313 matrixial network, 155, 238 matrixial nonconscious stratum, 387 matrixial object, 178, 181, 217, 224. See also matrixial objet a borderline absence, 181 The feminine matrixial objet a, 224 matrixial object and link, 268 matrixial object of the touch, the, 217. See also Anzieu, Didier matrixial object-relation, 217

466  Index matrixial objet a, 179, 190, 226, 233, 268, 273, 274 matrixial ontogenesis, 170. See also Matrixial, the matrixial operations, 164 matrixial other, 314, 358, 365 matrixial paradigm, 294 matrixial partner before life, 368 matrixial passages, 144 matrixial passage to the Symbolic, 127, 184, 229 a different beside feminine perspective of non-Oedipal sublimation, 229 matrixial perspective, 166, 232, 364 matrixial perspective, the, 185 matrixial perspective of the uterus, a, 217 matrixial phantasies, 172, 173, 226 matrixial plane, 314 artistic, 390 matrixial prism, 11, 54, 141, 163, 189, 225, 236, 315, 358, 371 can alternate, in men and women, 189 matrixial psychical sphere, 360, 388 matrixial psychic field, 330 matrixial rapport, 282, 310 matrixial Real, a, 311 matrixial relation, 276 matrixial repression, originary, 389 matrixial sacrifice, 318 matrixial scope, 317 matrixial screen. See screen matrixial screen of vision of interwoven psychic imprints, traces, and waves, 283 matrixial sexual difference. See sexual difference matrixial shareability, 390 matrixial site, 386

matrixial sites, nonconscious, 365 matrixial space, 227, 343 matrixial shared space, 142 matrixial sphere, 252, 266, 270, 273, 279, 307, 312, 337, 339, 341, 343, 353, 359, 361, 387, 393 as an aesthetic field, 252 is a non-phallic difference, 387 matrixial sphere in the Real, 361, 386 matrixial sphere in the Real, 265 matrixial stratum, 123, 189, 190, 236, 237, 303, 308, 309, 312, 316, 369, 411 matrixial stratum of a co-naissance, 252 matrixial stratum of subjectivity, 234 matrixial stratum of subjectivization, 66, 123, 138, 139, 142, 143, 147, 162, 165, 167, 169, 181, 189, 191, 225–227, 237, 238, 385 difference-in-togetherness, 167 humanizing sub-symbolic traces, 139 matrixial subjectivity. See subjectivity-as-encounter matrixial subknowledge, 268 matrixial substratum, 252 matrixial symbolic sphere, 123 slight shift aside for the Phallus, a rotating shift inside the Symbol, 129 matrixial threads, 281 matrixial time, 265, 386 matrixial time and site, 387 matrixial time and space, 392 matrixial time out-of-time, 265 matrixial time-space of suspension-anticipation, 280 matrixial traces, 275 matrixial transcryption, 390

Index

matrixial transubjective field, 330 matrixial transubjective space, 330 matrixial trauma, 389 matrixial travellers’ tale, 146 matrixial twilight zone, 361 matrixial unconscious sphere, 388 matrixial web, 283, 370, 394 capacity of the matrixial web for reabsorption of loss, for transference of memory and for the processing of mourning, 370 matrixial zone, 304 melancholy, 381 Meltzer, Donald and Williams, Meg, 213 memory, xi, 163, 171, 414 coemerging memory, 417 oblivion, 382 phylogenetic memory, 382 memory of oblivion, 250, 280, 341, 344, 354, 360, 389, 390, 421 transubjective memory of oblivion, 363 menstrual water, 296, 297 mercy, 3, 368 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 219, 246–248, 253, 257, 260, 266, 267, 269, 276, 278, 360 an interlacing of vision and movement. See movement; vision connection between the visible and the invisible, 277 écart, 246, 247. See also swerve fundamental narcissism in all vision, 253 opposes the idea of the subjection of meaning entirely to language, 219 The Visible and the Invisible, 249 voyance, 246

  467

meta-feminist, 17 the extended metaphysical reach of feminist philosophical thought, 17 metaphor, x, 103, 125, 145, 170, 180, 407, 418 metonymy, x, 103, 125, 145, 170, 406, 407, 418 metramorphic borderlinks, 169, 172, 224 metramorphic consciousness, 125 cannot hold a fixed gaze, 125 Its gaze escapes the margins and returns to the margins, 125 metramorphic processes of subjectivization, 249 metramorphic transformations and pictograms, 178 metramorphosis, viii, 99, 100, 102, 119, 121, 125–128, 137, 141, 142, 144, 147, 149, 155, 162, 163, 166, 167, 170, 171, 182, 189, 190, 224, 225, 232, 236, 237, 247, 250, 267, 268, 270, 271, 273, 274, 280, 282, 283, 293, 295, 297, 307, 312–316, 318, 319, 337, 338, 343, 354, 359, 360, 364, 369, 388, 389, 391, 394–396, 411, 413, 418, 421 a conductible unthought sub-knowledge, 312 a creative potentiality, crystallized and realized in the artwork as a matrixial borderspace, 167 a creative potentiality that exchanges and transmits traces, phantasies, affects and information within a joint space, 314 allows for the redistribution of traces of affects, sensations, emotions, libidinal energies and phantasies, 166

468  Index alternates between memory and oblivion, 142 an organizational mode, based on self-mutual-attunings of borderlinks, which creates and forms the matrixial subjectivity, 166 a poietic process of affective swerve and borderlinking, 389 a primary dimension of all matrixial configurations, 142 a psychic creative borderlink, 162 asymmetrical metramorphic exchange, 389 co-affectivity and coactivity that open the borderline, 338 co-emergence of several elements, 141 conductible link-lane, 163, 225 co-poietic activity in a web, 360 co-wit(h)nessing metramorphoses, 284 discernibility that cannot fix its ‘gaze’, 142 has no focus, 142 is the becoming-threshold of borderlines, 141 metramorphic activity functions to borderlink known and unknown elements and it transmits the knowledge of the artwork that is derived from invisibility, 412 metramorphic beauty, 366 metramorphic co/in-habit(u)ationwith-in, 393 metramorphic passage, 304 metramorphic processes, 354, 413 Metramorphic processes of transformation, fragmentation, and pluralization, 250 metramorphic swerving, 339

metramorphoses, 268 metramorphoses in the matrixial field, 339 Metramorphosing a traumatic encounter, 366 metramorphosing with the artwork, 365 metramorphosis as borderlink, 186 originary human potentiality for reciprocal yet asymmetrical crossing of borderlines between the phantasm and trauma of I and non-I, 250 out-of-focus passage of non-definite compositions, 141 processes of transformation and readjustment, 149 process of meaning-creation, 224 refers both to processes concerning borderlines, limits, margins, fringes, thresholds, and links, and to transformations of the I and non-I(s) in the Matrix, 121 regulates asymmetrical libidinal investments in the joint space without aspiring to homogeneity, 166 relationships that are asymmetrical, 141 the becoming-borderline of a threshold, 166 the becoming-threshold of a borderline which allows for relations-without-relating between co-emerging I(s) and unknown Other(s), 166 transformations in emergence, creation and fading-away, of I(s) and non-I(s), 141 with transformations of the borderlines and transgressions of the links, 141

Index

migrant, the, 317 migrants, 148 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 406 Mitchell, Juliet, 58 Modernity, 25 Moebius strip, 276, 352, 364 Moses, 135, 136, 146, 148, 150, 155 ambiguity in the figure of Moses, 148 a split figure, 148 a stranger, 148 double internal and external foreignness, 148 Egyptian Moses, 148 not only a paternal but a matrixial figure as well, 148 the matrixial figure who consciously leads the people towards the future in which he will not be, 150 m/Other, 4, 5, 218, 220, 221, 250, 254, 270, 276, 355, 363, 381, 383, 387–390, 393 archaic m/Other, 222 m/Other’s m/Others and others, 5 m/Other-Event-Encounter, 421 m/Other-Thing-Event, 280 m/Other-to-be, 304, 308 the becoming-m/Other-to-be, 308 mother, the, 164, 204, 210, 215, 386 cognitive function of the mother, 205 mother as a real Other, the, 220 the first ‘other’ for the infant, 204 the inside of the mother, 211 motherhood, 264, 308 mothering, 129 mother-monster readymade, 16 mother-tongue, 292, 293 a metaphor for an archaic feminine foreignness hidden in me and in others, 293

  469

sacrificed by the subject in the passage to culture, 293 mother’s body, 112, 181, 220 mother-as-body, 273 mother’s desire, the, 215 mother’s psyche-soma, 205 mourning, 381 movement, 268–270 touching-in-separating movement, 270 mysticism, 184 Jewish mysticism, 185 mysticism, psychosis, and the feminine in western culture, 185 Mythological travellers’ tales, 146 analogous to psychological experiences, 146 to identity transformation, to artistic processes and works, to aesthetic experiences, and to patterns of cognition, 146 N Nachträglichkeit. See après-coup; deferred actionFreud, Sigmund Name of the Father, 114, 115, 263, 273, 315 names for God, 367 abolition of the wombs and the breasts from God’s name, 368 duality of God’s name, 148 El HaRahamim (God of Mercy), 3 El Shaddai, 367 God full of Mercy, 367 God full of wombs, 367 matrixial-feminine symbolic dimension of alliance, 368 name of God, 136, 146 names of the Biblical God, 3

470  Index narcissism, 260, 305, 308, 309, 384 natality. See Arendt, Hannah Niddah, 295 niddah. See Red Cow, the wanderings and not as separation, 316 niddah-water, 296 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 365 no-more-life, 344 non-conscious object-cause of desire and of phantasy, 224 non-I,non-I(s), 99 non-life, 333, 337, 341, 343, 344, 371 non-life-coming-into-life, 422 non-object, 214 non-Oedipal, xii, 187 non-Oedipal sexual difference, 162, 225 Non-Oedipal sublimation, 182, 225 non-phallic, 101 non-phallic psychical phenomena, 352 non-phallic symbolic territory, 128 non-phallic passages to the symbolic network, 113 no-place of the exiles, 318 not-all, 102, 261. See also Lacan, Jacques feminine not-all issue, 356 not-yet-life, 337, 344 Numbers, Biblical Book, 295 O object a extimate matrixial objet a, 189 object of desire, the, 110 Object Relations, 4, 10, 106, 128, 213, 218 object-relations, 144 Object Relations theory, 209, 218, 223, 224

objet a, 141, 151–154, 163, 175–184, 186, 187, 203, 205, 206, 208–210, 215–218, 220, 222, 223, 226, 228, 232, 234, 235, 237, 292, 294, 297, 300, 301, 311, 313–318, 335, 353, 380, 391, 405 a lack in the realm of the Real, 228 a mental product of the activity of the drive and is also its trace, 176 a non-specular object, 186 a phantasmatic trace of the pre-Oedipal partial-drive’s engagements with the archaic part-object and with the archaic mother, 253 a ‘hole’ in the Symbolic, 223 can only appear at the cost of the disintegration of the subject, 153 corresponds to the feminine, 153, 186, 232 extimate, 154 feminine sexual difference, 153 has neither discourse nor image, 224 has no imaginary representation or specular image, 223 having/not-having the male sex organ is its paradigmatic emblem, 300 hybrid objet a, 162 infant in the womb the woman’s objet a, 315 is an intimate outsider, an ‘extimate’, 222 is a result of the split brought about by the action of discourse and the structure of language, 218 is a trace of a trace that remains forever a ‘cause of the desire’, 301 is doubly missing in the subject, 222

Index

is the object of desire, object of the phantasy, 141 is ‘a lack of a lack’, 223 it belongs to the Other, 222 leans on a phallic Imaginary and Real, 300 lost primordial, symbiotic maternal object, 186 lost symbiotic mother and autistic self, 186 marks the locus of a basic human lack connected with these splits, 222 matrixial objet a, 313, 318 objet a, 186 occupy a different area in a matrixial perspective, 154 participates in the formation of the subject as autonomous and primordial, and in parallel to language, 218 something that lacks behind the image, 153 the archaic mother, 153 the incarnation of Woman as beauty, 235 the lacking part-object which is analogous to the ‘woman’ as an absent real Other, 301 the lost primordial symbiotic maternal object, 153 the primordial incestuous mother, 153 to feminine bodily sexual specificity as absence, 233 to the lost archaic mother, 233 to the lost primordial, symbiotic maternal object, 232 to the lost primordial incestuous mother, 233 to the unattainable, fragmented body, 233

  471

objeu, 226. See also Fédida, Pierre Oedipal, 99 Oedipal phantasies, 212 Oedipal situation, the, 111 Oedipal stage, the, 99, 145 Oedipal subjectivity, 125 Oedipal triangle, 114 Oedipal complex, 107, 110–113, 352 Oedipus, 275, 342 Oedipus Complex, 175, 218, 221, 223, 259, 265, 300, 385 Ogden, Thomas, 203, 219 ontogenesis, 182, 246, 311 ontogenetic memory, 271, 364 oral cavity, 122 originary besidedness, 417 originary matrixial web, 331 originary process, 168 image of things, 168. See also primary process originary repression, 254, 381, 390 Orpheus, 332 Other, the, 104, 106, 141, 151, 176, 204, 206, 214, 219, 233, 235, 238, 254, 277, 283, 294, 311, 314, 318, 390 as a partial subject, 141 as rejected and repulsive, 294 border-Other, 411 narcissism, masculine, 265 network of signifiers is the human Other, 221 Other, the unknown, 141 Other-as-a-partial-object, 279 passage to the Other, 330 primary Other, the, 220 real archaic Other, 209 symbolic Other, the, 228 symbolic Other, 175; a metaphor for the law of society, history, and culture and as the locus

472  Index of revelation of the signifying chain, 175 the archaic relationships with the Other, 216 the Other becomes traumatizing to me, 390 the Other in its vulnerability is traumatic to me, 364 the signifying chain from the field of language, 206 the symbolic Other, 183, 406 Other, then. See language the language of the Other, 405 Other-Thing, 352 Outrage, 357 Ovid, 351 P painter, the, 256, 277, 314, 335 internal dialogue with the gaze on the screen of phantasm, 256 painter’s gesture, the, 335 the painter working in a matrixial frame, 279 the painter’s caressing attack, 335 painter’s stroke, the, 256, 277 painting, 162, 179, 246, 247, 259, 274, 277–280, 283, 345, 365, 397, 412, 414 an encounter beyond appearance, beyond the field of representation, 179 beyond-as-inside the visible, 281 matrixial offering in painting, 318 not produced by a pre-existent gaze but produces it while also being co-born with it, 257 painting as a metramorphosis, 163 shakes the borderlines of culture into becoming thresholds, 257 the enigma of, 247

paintorial act, 167 partial objects, 125 partial-objects, 330 partial subjectivity, 388 partial subjects, 138, 139, 141, 143, 162, 164, 166, 169, 172, 181, 182, 190, 237, 238, 251, 267, 270, 273, 274, 303, 306, 310, 313, 330, 337, 338, 354, 359, 361, 364, 385, 388, 396, 418 partial becoming-subjects, 164 partner-in-difference, 138, 370 part-objects, 139, 310 passage from non-life to life, xi passages, 190 paternal function, 114 paternal prohibition, 294 patriarchy, 266 penis, 167, 230, 298–300, 304, 305 considered the only sex-difference for both sexes, 298 penis (organ in reality), 299 penis envy in girls, 125 penis envy, 299 perversion, 294 phallic bonds, 272 phallic culture, 145 phallic difference, 381 phallic economy, 253, 266 phallic gaze, the, 275, 276, 283 an impossibility of sharing trauma and phantasy, 275 gaze as a lack, 277 phallic ghost, 259, 260, 336, 339 phallic language, 103 phallic Law, 297 phallic mechanism, 384 phallic operations, 168 phallic paradigm, 4, 169, 186, 187, 249, 263, 265, 272, 294, 298, 317, 361, 384, 411 phallic perspective, 185, 232, 312

Index

phallic phase, the, 125 phallic principles, 144 phallic psychic arena, 300 phallic sex-difference, 311 phallic stratum, 190, 236, 237, 371 phallic stratum of subjectivization, 169, 189, 369 phallic subjectivizing processes, 361 phallic stratum of symbiotic fusion and autistic isolation, 227 phallic structure, 273, 352, 358, 406 phallic subject, the, 314 phallic subjectivizing stratum, 352 phallic symbolic cognition, 314 phallic symbolic plane, 140 phallic symbolic sphere, 123 phallocentric, 7 phallocentric axiom, 127 phallocentric paradigm of psychoanalysis, 114 phallocentrism, 39, 60, 100 Phallus, the, 56, 99–102, 108–110, 112, 114, 143, 177, 178, 225, 248, 275, 295, 297, 299, 310, 314, 317, 319, 333, 341, 361, 409 a correlate in the physical masculine Real, 300 a neutral symbolic entity, 177 appears as an intermediate concept that commands all three domains of the psyche, 300 conditions desire, 140 covers the whole fields of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, 178 does not cover the whole of the symbolic network and all the possible attitudes towards the Other and the object, 140 equation ‘Phallus equals the signifier of all signifiers’ can be deconstructed, 126

  473

identity between the Phallus and the sexual organ, 111 is neither the only image nor the only symbol for sexual difference, 127 is simultaneously the object of desire and the only symbol for both sexes, 114. See also desire phallic sphere, the, 101 Phallus, not male but universal., 100 Phallus as masculine, 100 should rotate altogether to open a gap between the Phallus and the Symbolic, 249 signifies all relationships, 100 signifies all the possible relations between the subject and the whole universe of signifiers, 112 stands for a symbolic principle, 299 the field between demand and desire, 140 the illusion of having the Phallus, 111 the object of desire of the mother, 111 the only imaginary representation of sex-difference, 299 the Phallus is not a biological structure, 110 the Phallus is not a sexual organ, 110 the Phallus then signifies their imaginary unity, 111 the signifier of absence and difference, of difference as absence, 300 the totality of the Symbolic, 101 phantasm, 250, 251, 260, 262, 272, 274, 276, 294, 360, 385, 386. See also phantasy eyes of phantasm, 256 transitive phantasm, 271

474  Index phantasy, 163, 166, 170, 172, 175, 177, 179, 181, 182, 186, 209–212, 214–216, 218, 220, 310, 313, 360–362, 415 a primal creation, a creation of an archaic being in the psyche based on sensorial impressions, 213 a primary interpretation of an encounter between the drive and the object, 212 archaic phantasy, 172 castration phantasy. See castration is a non-meeting, 214 is a primary experience of contact with the external and the internal, 212 male phantasy, 297 phantasy, structure of, 233 phantasy of Origin, 308 relates to the Real, 216 The lacking objet a of phantasy, 220 phantom, 383, 384 phenomenology, 277 philosophy, 1 pictogram, 168, 170, 173, 360. See also Aulagnier, Piera a relational representational schema, 168 pictograms of union-as-fusion and destructive rejection, 170 plaiting, 340 Plato, 122 poetry, 117 poïetic archaic traces, 270 political spaces, 281 Pollock, Griselda, 294 post-mature infant, the, 138 postmodern discourse, 137 post-natal, pre-Oedipal strata of subjectivization, 167 post-natal experience, 227 postnatal symbiosis, 142

post-traumatic, 384 transmissive post-traumatic effect, 393 post-traumatic era, 384, 385 post-, trans-traumatic era, 394 preabsence, 410 pre-birth in-cest, 310 prebirth relation-without-relating, 263 pre-birth trauma and phantasy, 311 Preconscious, the, 106 pregnance-as-jointbecoming-in-difference, 5 pregnance sphere, 52 pregnancy, 52, 53, 55, 226, 231 premature and fragile partial subjectivity, 252 prenatal, the, 117, 127, 138, 147, 252 prenatal/feminine encounter, human and latest, 143 pre-natal/feminine encounter, 312 pre-natal difference-in-proximity, 217 prenatal infant, the, 252 prenatality, 6 prenatal phase, 138, 165 late prenatal period, 386 prenatal zone of relation, 251 pre-natal pre-subject-to-come, 4 pre-natal processes, 167 prenatal proximity-with-in-distance, 269 prenatal state, 99, 141 prenatal strata of subjectivity, 125 prenatal subject-to-be, 355 preobject, 270 pre-Oedipal, 99, 106, 117, 127, 164 the phantasmatic fragments and the self, 106 pre-Oedipal fields, 107 pre-Oedipal gaze and screen, 249 pre-Oedipal mother, 265, 299, 300, 304 pre-Oedipal non-psychotic subjectivity., 128

Index

pre-Oedipal part-objects, 210 pre-Oedipal phases, 107, 164 pre-Oedipal stage, 107, 145 pre-Oedipal territory, 107, 218 pre-Oedipal units of discourse. See Kristeva, Julia preother, 270 presence-in-absence, 165 presubject, 2, 270 primal scene, the, 210, 385 primary co-affectivity, 337 primary process, 168 primitive modes of experience-organization, 138 Prinzhorn Collection, 405 proximity-in-distance, 2, 4, 5 psychical matrixial channel, 355 psychic capacity for shareability, 388 psychic joint space, 274 psychoanalysis, viii, 1, 117, 127, 140, 162, 184, 185, 204, 210, 213, 224, 231, 297, 305, 307, 332, 408, 414, 417, 419, 421 Lacanian psychoanalysis, 250 talking cure, 2 psychoanalytical theory, 2, 9, 145, 266, 297 a lacuna in, 145 feminine difference as absence, 410 psychoanalytic theories, 99 Symbolic disavowal of matrixial elements, 145 psychoanalytic experience, 391 psycho-linguistic, 1 psychological meaning, 212 is first of all non-genital and ­pre-Oedipal, 212 psychosis, 115, 128, 175, 208, 262, 273, 299, 318, 331, 341, 361, 409 womb-as-symbiotic-autismand-psychosis, 331

  475

psycho-social, 1 psycho-social studies, 9, 25, 31, 62 puberty, 298 purity, 295 Q queer theory, 10 R racism, 11 Rashi, biblical commentator, 296, 367 re(a)sonate, 261, 313, 314, 413 Real, the, 1, 102, 103, 110, 113, 116, 139, 163, 164, 176, 183, 189, 203–206, 273, 405, 407, 409, 412 a psychic zone which is nearest to bodily experience, 203 a psychic zone which is the nearest to bodily experience, 175 as a lack, 109 bi-directionality between the Real and the Symbolic, 219. See also Symbolic, the difference in the Real, 109 is what has been left out in the process of symbolization or created by it, or it is what has been totally resistant to symbolization, 109 the future Real, 310 whatever cannot be known consciously or unconsciously either because of the impossibility of its symbolization, 103 what language cannot contain, 103 Real Other/mother, the, 206 Red Cow, the, 293, 295–297, 311, 312, 315 Red Cow's ashes, the, 317

476  Index Red Cow sacrifice, 295 Red Cow sacrificial borderlink, 317 Red Cow’s ashes-traces, 318 red heifer, 295 the femininity of, 297 the Red Cow metramorphosis, 318 Red Cow Effect, the, 294, 304, 314–316, 318, 319. See also Sublime, the refugee, 135 rejection, 164 relationality, 1 relations of love, 316 relations-without-relating, 2, 138, 142, 162, 165, 166, 181, 189, 190, 227, 236, 237, 270, 282, 359, 388 rapport-without-relating, 311 relief of signification, the, 294. See also Pollock, Griselda remnants of trauma, 330, 331 repetition, 380, 381 repressed difference of feminine sexuality, 144 repressed infantile complexes, 181 repression, preservative, 382 repression, preservative or conservator. See Abraham, Nicolas; Török, Mária repression, 116, 211, 382 originary repression, 383, 391 primal repression, 111 repression-as-castration, 266 repression of the feminine, 100 resonance, 2, 246, 281, 362, 387 resonance chamber, 220 response-ability, 304 retirance. See Tzimtzoum a possible metramorphosis, 238 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 330 ritual, 293 Rivière, Joan, 333

Rose, Jacqueline, 58 Rowley, Alison, x, 8 Rubin, Gayle, 22 S sacrifice, 294, 296, 297, 315, 358 woman-sacrifice, 297 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 44 schism, 339, 340, 380 schism between my eye and the gaze of the Other, 275 scopic antennae, 395 scopic drive, 224, 253, 335 scopic field, 253, 255 scopic sphere of vision, 259 Scott, Joan, 71 screen, the, 4, 206, 248, 257, 258, 268, 275, 280, 283, 395, 396. See also screen of phantasy a gaze-cause-of-the-desire that is a leftover of an archaic split, 275 as a libidinal phenomenon, 275 invisible screen, 173 in-visible screen shared between phantasy and painting. See painting; phantasy in-yet-outer screen, 415 matrixial screen, 250 may be a veil of contact whereby the gaze and the gazed-at meet and touch, 257 paradoxical screen, 277 out-yet-inner screen, 415 screen of mediation, 278 screen of phantasy, 275 with-in-visible psychic screen, 275 with-in-visible screen, 397 works in accordance with the castration mechanism, 257 screen of phantasy, 415, 418 invisible screen of phantasy, 186, 233

Index

out-inner extimate screen of phantasy, 416 screen of phantasy, the invisible, 211 screen of vision, 395, 396, 416–418 a potentially joint-by-several erotic screen of vision, 281 screen of vision inside the painting, 280 secondary process, 168 second death, 341, 342, 356, 370 second generation, 382 seduction, 210 seduction into life, 17, 59 self-fragilization, 24 sensory-motor event, 208 separating-in-jointness, 270, 272, 276, 337, 342, 354, 358, 359, 385, 388 severality, 2, 4, 250, 267, 272–274, 282, 303, 317, 412, 413 axis of heterogeneous severality, 312 matrixial covenant of, 307 not-purely phantasmatic matrixial web of severality. See matrixial web partial severality, 274 severalization, 283, 293, 304, 363 sexual difference, 1, 6, 10, 35, 44, 114, 116, 125, 163, 181, 185, 231, 232, 234, 248, 252–254, 260, 312, 337, 352, 381, 411, 412 another sex difference, 305 linked to female corporeal specificity, 252 other-than-phallic sexual difference, 265 sex-difference for girls, 264 sex-difference issue only for boys, 264 sexual difference of women, 106, 117

  477

sexual nonphallic difference, 266 ‘supplementary’ non-phallic difference, 384 sexual indifference, phallocentric. See Irigaray, Luce sexuality, 100, 225, 234, 248, 254, 261, 294, 297–299, 331, 414, 417 is the domain in psychoanalysis with which art should be articulated, 414 sexuality before or beside gender identity, 414 sexual male organ, the, 211 sexual-Oedipal gender identifications, 218 sexual pleasure, 367, 368 sexual rapport, 184, 185, 261, 262, 318, 342, 408, 409 can be, under certain conditions, 185 feminine sexual ‘impossible’ rapport, 408 non-rapport of the feminine, 408 nothing to do with gender identifications, 184 there is no sexual rapport, 185 sexuated, 236 shareability, 190, 267, 281, 303, 363 shareability of traumas and phantasy, 226 shareable co-poietic meaning, 370 shared borderspace, 162 shared stratum of subjectivization, 190 sharing-in-differentiating, 344 she-symbol. See Red Cow, the Shoah, the, 382 sinthome, 184–186, 232, 262, 277, 405–407, 409, 411–413, 419. See also symptom a diffracted trace-imprint of ­trauma-and-jouissance, 407

478  Index a feminine, 411 a matrixial sinthome that releases/ creates/invents, from a feminine side, potential desires, 412 a sinthomatic weaving, 409 failure of the Phallus in/by the feminine, 409 feminine sinthome, 412, 414 is the sex ‘to which I do not belong, that is, Woman’, 186 non-equivalence, 302 shared sinthome, 415 sinthome. See transubjective woman can be a sinthome for man, 185 skin, 268 skin-organ, 268 solace, 345 spasm, 339, 345, 392, 419, 420 split, 222, 330, 332 engenders desire, 222 from the death drive, 332 split from the feminine, 332 stain, 257, 275 I enter the picture as a stain, 257 Stern, Daniel, 10 stranger, 126, 167, 169, 191, 270, 274, 359, 362, 388 an intimate stranger, 274 never a total stranger in the feminine, 362 stratum of subjectivization, 99, 123, 155, 164, 312 Straus, Erwin, 175, 208 subjective-object, 313, 343 subjectivising matrixial objet a, 236 subjectivity, 1, 2, 4, 6, 33, 35, 39, 52, 67, 104, 106, 109, 110, 114, 116, 118, 122, 123, 141, 163, 164, 170, 171, 179, 182, 191, 204, 216, 219, 267, 273, 284, 302, 313, 339, 393, 410, 411. See also relationality

a radically non-Oedipal theory of subjectivity, 48 a supplementary subjectivity weaves itself, 314 co-emerging subjectivity of several others, 311 made possible by the Symbolic through language, 106 matrixial aspect of subjectivity, 313 network of subjectivity, 139 partial subjectivity, 270, 337 premised on severance and split, 6 structured by society and history through language, 104 three registers of subjectivity, 1 subjectivity-as-an-encounter, 167, 182. See also subjectivity-as-encounter subjectivity-as-encounter, 1, 4, 138, 162, 165, 224, 267, 271, 281, 310, 360, 395, 396, 414 trans-individual subjectivity-as-encounter. See transference subjectivity-as-encounter of the several, 181 subjectivity-as-separation, 1 subjectivization, 123, 163, 166, 170, 172, 254 subjectivizing dimension, 6 subject-to-be, 386 sublimation, 107, 111, 129, 143, 144, 154, 175, 177, 182, 187–189, 233–236, 271, 273, 301, 303, 307, 312, 313, 410 artistic sublimation, 260 matrixial sublimation, 318 non-Oedipal sublimation, 162, 184, 252 nonphallic sublimation, 263 Oedipal sublimation, 252 phallic sublimational zone, 314 related to jouissance through the ‘anatomy’ of the vacuole, 188

Index

sublimation, secondary dimension, 234 sublimational processes, 316 Sublime, the, 40, 163, 182, 188, 190, 227, 237, 319, 331, 342 where no imaginary representation can correspond to ideas, and visible presentation in art can only hint at the un-/pre-representable, 182 Sublime-Beauty, 345 subreal, 2, 6, 50, 73, 84 subsubjective/subsubjectivity, 250, 270–272 sub-symbolic, the, 138, 145 sub-symbolic webs, 359 supplementary feminine non-conscious zone, 408 supplementary non-phallic zon, a. See Matrix, the supplementary symbolic dimension, 1 supplementary’ jouissance, 367 surplus of enjoying’ (plus-de-jouir), 255 surplus of fragility, 365, 397 swerve, 247, 251, 268, 279, 281, 308, 340, 359, 360, 387, 393, 394 feminine swerve and borderlinking. See borderlinking matrixial swerve, 266, 339 rotating swerve, 413 swerving, 340 swerving-in-borderlinking, 354 transgressive swerving, 339 swerving, 412 symbiosis, 123, 143, 149, 268, 385 symbiotic meetings, 147 Symbolic, the, 1, 100, 103, 110, 113, 116, 139, 163, 177, 183, 189, 206, 263, 300, 405–407. See also Lacan, Jacques does not equate with the Phallus, 311

  479

linguistic chains of signifiers, 103 presented as a universal structure holding all significance is phallic, 300 structured like language, 300 The Symbolic is broader than the Phallic, 124 symbolic network, 100, 143 symbolic Other, the, 221 the unconscious signifying chain of language, 221 symbolization, 147 symptom, 405, 406, 414, 420 as such is not a work of art. See artwork is a disguised, repetitive substitute for ideas connected to wishful childhood impulses that have been repressed, 414 message of suffering, 407 reflects a traumatic even, 420 symptom participates in creation, 406 T tableau, 256 taboo, 293, 299 telepathy, 355 temporality, 147 Thanatos, 169, 175, 390 Thing, the, 168, 183, 188, 189, 224, 235, 238, 273, 283, 314, 333, 335, 337, 353, 380, 384, 392, 393, 395, 415 is not sexuated but is also feminine, 188 is the unseen object of originary repression, 380 matrixial originary Thing, 394 the original absence as an absence of origin, 380

480  Index the wit(h)ness-Thing, 365 Thing without face. See Lyotard, Jean-François Thing-encounter, 280, 338, 394 originary Thing-encounter, 270 Thing-event, 270, 280, 337, 338, 343, 354, 370, 394 Thing-rapport, 318 thinking apparatus, 337 threshold, 99, 125, 138, 142, 166, 182, 191, 238, 330, 335, 338, 342, 344, 359, 364, 389, 407, 412, 415, 419, 421 becoming-thresholds of borderlines, 99, 273 my out-in-ter autistic threshold, 319 threshold of culture, 411 threshold of fragility, 345 time-and-space, 413 time-space, 4 Tiresias, 342, 351, 353–356, 359, 363, 369–371 Török, Mária, 381, 391 totalitarianism, 75 touch, 128, 147, 180, 188, 217, 235, 268–270 a psychic part object, 269 matrixial touch, 418 touched, 269 touching, 269 trace-imprint of trauma-and-jouissance, 407 tragic, the, 332 trans-crypted trauma, 385. See also trauma and crypt transcryption, 338, 344, 384, 389 sub-subjective transcryption, 394 transcryptomnesia, 384. See also transcryptum and crypt transcryptum, 2, 384, 389, 390, 393–397

artwork as transcryptum. See artwork contemporary art as transcryptum, 384 extimate transcrypted zone, 395 transcrypted traumatic Thing, 389 transtext, 393 transference, 129, 165, 417, 421 countertransference, 418 matrixial transference, 417 phallic transference/countertransference, 417 transference-countertransference, 165 transference/countertransference matrixial rapport, 417 transferential borderspace, 417, 418 transferential borderspace of inter-with-ness, besidedness and transgression, 417 transferential encounter, 417 transferential phenomena, 416 transferential relation, 396, 414, 416 transferential relationality, 4 transferential web, 397 transformational object, 226. See also Bollas, Christopher transformation-through-transgression, 274, 314 trans-generational continuity, 385 transgenerational transmission, 5 Transgressing with-in-to the feminine, 355, 369 transgression, 166, 274, 294, 311, 334, 335, 340, 342, 343, 354, 356, 358, 364, 371, 391, 397 Antigone’s transgression, 358. See also Antigone matrixial transgression, 340, 369 Matrixial transgression of affect, 365 originary transgressivity, 311

Index

poietic-aesthetic feminine transgression, 342 transgression is feminine, 342 transgression of the frontiers between life and death, 355 ‘uterine’ transgression, 342 transgression with-in-to the feminine, 359, 364, 369, 371, 384, 390 unconscious transmission between the sexes and between different generations and periods, 369 trans-individual, 359 transitivity, 270 transjectivity, 2 transmissibility, 166, 190, 237, 267, 303, 385 transport-station of trauma, 330, 331, 341, 345 transport-station, 420 a transport-station of trauma and jouissance, 421 trans-psychic web, 411 transtextuality, 391, 397 transtextual writing, 393 trans theory, 10 trans-traumatic era, 391 transubjective, 266, 270, 271, 296, 304, 313, 360 erotic transubjective curl, 276 primary differentiation, 271 transubjective cryptomnesia, 393 transubjective events, 273 transubjective figure, 388 transubjective nonconscious field stretched between several individuals unknown to each other, 391 transubjective nonconscious zone, 388 transubjective-object, 270, 284, 343, 388

  481

transubjective originary repression, 389 transubjective passage, 389 transubjective and sub-subjective web, 385 transubjective knowledge, 365 transubjective non-conscious web, 411 transubjective stratum, 385 transubjective psychic space, 386 transubjectivity, 2, 65, 250, 270, 272, 276, 279, 280, 282, 331, 338–340, 344, 361, 366, 385, 387, 389, 422. See also Matrixial, the aesthetic transubjectivity, 365. See also aesthetic, the archaic transubjectivity, 393 the other-qua-partialtransubjective-object, 344 this interlaced transubjectivity that is not confined to the contours of the one-body, 339 transubjective, 251 transubjective expanse of the individual-in-jointness, 340 transubjective matrixial alliance, 354 transubjective-object, 343 zones of severality. See severality trauma, ix, xi, 5, 210, 251, 262, 265, 271, 272, 274, 330, 333, 342, 344, 360–364, 366, 380–382, 384–386, 390, 393, 412 affect-activity of the trauma of others, 365 archaic trauma, 422 as wandering in what I have named a matrixial borderspace., 384 buried-alive trauma. See crypt chronic traumatic state, 382 concept of trauma in psychoanalysis, 385

482  Index crypted trauma. See crypt Cumulative trauma, 385 cumulative trauma. See Khan, Masud joint trauma, 271 originary matrixial transitive trauma, 338 originary matrixial trauma, 385 originary relational matrixial trauma, 385 Relational matrixial traumas, 386 remnants of trauma, 420 shared trauma, 413 the trauma of the world and of others, 284 traces of the trauma of the other, 382 transitive trauma, 364 transmitted trauma of the world, 384. See also transcryptum trauma and jouissance. See jouissance trauma meeting with phantasm, 251 trauma of Other, and of the m/ Other’s others, and of the world, 344 trauma of Other, of others and of the world, 421 trauma of others and of the world, 281, 339, 395 trauma of others with-in myself, 364 trauma of the m/Other. See archaic m/Other trauma of the mother’s loss of her own mother. See Wardi, Dina trauma of the Other. See Other, the traumatic shared-in-difference wound, 341 trauma and jouissance, 419 trauma and phantasm of before-birth, 252 trauma and phantasy, 312 trauma of birth, 308

trauma of the other of the m/Other trauma, 384. See also m/Other trust after the end of trust, 29 Tsimtsoum Kabbalistic idea of contraction-withdrawal as a principle of creation, 137 Tzimtzoum, 190, 238. See also retirance U uncanniness, 167, 304 Uncanny, the, 15, 163, 169, 180, 187, 226, 234, 252, 264, 305, 334, 362. See also Freud, Sigmund heimliche-affect, 393 the phantasy of life in the womb, 180 uncanny aesthetic affect. See aesthetic effect uncanny feeling, 167 the Uncanny, Lacan, 181 uncanny affects, 417 uncanny anxiety, 415 uncanny affect of anxiety, 259 Unconscious, the, 1, 22, 103, 105, 106, 112, 117, 124, 126, 168, 184, 203, 215, 216, 219, 301, 337, 351, 387, 405, 406, 411 disharmonious Unconscious, 411 not yet even Unconscious, 406 Phallicity of, 301 sinthome, fabrication of, 421 structured like a language, 124 symptom, production of, 421 the sexes not complementary in the Unconscious, 230 the Unconscious is structured like a language, 103 ‘structured as a language’, 405 unconscious desire, 183

Index

unconscious phantasy (Lacan: phantasm), 410 unknown non-I . See Matrix, the unknown Other, the, 167, 223 uterus, 109, 121, 126, 189, 231, 236 as an environment, 109 V vacuole, 188, 234, 235, 255, 264, 277, 303, 317, 318, 415 is ‘extimate’—an intimate exterior, 235 vacuole is ‘extimate’, 188 vacuole of encounter, 310 vaginal sensibility, 189 Vandenbroeck, Paul, 8 Varela, Francisco, 59, 171 Venn, Couze, x viewer, the, 256, 276, 314, 369, 394 the spectator, 395 vision, 268, 270, 277 visuality, 381 visual specularity, 178 voice, 188, 217, 235, 268 Voyure. See Lacan, Jacques vulnerability, 395 vulnerability of the other. See Other, the W Wardi, Dina, 382, 391 memorial candle, 382 weaning, 211, 218 webbing of links, 339 Winnicott, D.W., 106, 128, 179, 205, 208, 213, 226, 282 phantasies are a primary characterization of psychic life, 213 subjective-objects, 282 wit(h)ness, 252, 282, 388, 391

  483

wit(h)ness-Thing, 280, 394 wit(h)nesses, 342, 344, 360, 394 wit(h)nesses with-out events, 369 wit(h)ness-in-differentiation, 359 wit(h)nessing, 2, 50, 282, 338, 339, 342, 344, 358, 363–365, 370, 393–395 touch, gaze the, 345 transferential wit(h)nessing, 365 wit(h)nessing-without-event, 396. See also event-without-witnesses wit(h)ness to traumas I did not witness, 364 wit(h)ness with-out event, 369. See also viewer, the witnessing-while-sharing, 311 woman, 102, 109, 111, 113, 129, 143, 152, 174, 176–178, 182–184, 186–189, 227, 228, 230, 232, 233, 235, 236, 246, 247, 250, 251, 260, 262, 266, 267, 272, 274, 277, 294, 307, 310, 312, 339, 352, 353, 361, 380, 410 a becoming in-ter-with the Other, 272 a border-Other, 272 a hole in the Real, 183 a hole in the signifying network, 153 also a hole in the Other, 228 an-other jouissance and an-other desire, 186 an-Other-woman, 232, 311 a present, passive commercial object given for the viewer, 187, 233 as a radical Other, 175 as other kinds of relationships, 232 a special kind of wandering entity as a link with-in several subjects, as assembled object for fragmented and severalized

484  Index subjectivity, and as an affected conductible mediation, 279 cannot be included in the symbolic Other, 174 considered as the Other-Thing that carries the vanishing gaze, 267 does not exist, 184 does not exist and does not signify anything, 183 does not signify anything, 184 dwells in the holes of the signifying chain of discourse, 183 early ‘woman’ inside-the-Phallus, 262 either inside the Phallus, 178 elusion from representability, 227 equated with radical symbolic Otherness, 183, 228 equated with the Thing, 228 has the status of the lost archaic objet a as a subjectivizing agent., 177 the hole in the Other, 152 inaccessible to both men and women, 174 indexes elusive links rather than objects, 266 in a privileged position with respect to this stratum of subjectivization, 143 is associated with ‘castration anxiety’ as a visual model of the ‘success’ of castration, 174 ‘is not All’, 184 is remote and inaccessible and dwells in the holes of the signifying chain of discourse, 228 is repressed and foreclosed, for women as much as for men, 228 is she the Thing (das Ding), the locus of jouissance?, 183

is the Other, 228 is the Thing and she is also a hole in the Real, 228 lack in the signifying chain, with the resultant wandering objects, 152 linked to psychotic disintegration and to the anxiety of ceasing to be differentiated, 174 locus of desire which, intact and impassable, slips under words, 183 not-all, 230, 352 not confined to the contours of the one-body with its inside versus outside polarit, 312 occupies several paradoxical positions in Lacan’s theory, 228 the archaic Thing, 174 the Other, 152, 174, 183 the Otherness of, 232 the radical Other, 174 subject is constituted at the price of Woman, 186 Thing, 183 wandering object, 228 weaves a subsymbolic web, 250 Woman as Thing, linked to archaic affected sensorial impressions, is foreclosed from the Unconscious, 174 woman experiences the Matrix in a double manner, 143 woman is Other, 272 the woman must find a language of her own, 117 woman-archaic-m/Other-Thing, 333 woman-as-archaic m/Other, 341 Woman as Other, 163, 186 Woman as other kinds of relations, 186 woman as subject, 183 woman-m/Other-encounter, 267

Index

Woman-m/Other-Thing, 255 woman-m/Other-to-be, 306 Woman-Other-Thing, 175, 187, 233, 353 woman’s sexuality, 163 woman-to-woman feminine difference, 69 womb, 3, 99, 109, 121, 123, 126, 127, 138, 143, 165, 171, 226, 251, 252, 264–266, 304–306, 308–310, 313, 315, 337, 358– 361, 363, 367, 386, 388 as an archaic out-side and past site, out of chronological time, 361 as an environment, 126 as an inside and future site, 362 as an issue of sex-difference, 305 as concept of a subjectivizing ­time-space, 13 Being born of the same womb is equated by him with being of the same father, 358 corpo-real source of this psychical space: the shareable maternal womb, 370 her inaccessibility is close to the mysterious border between sublimation and art; inaccessibility, 175 invisible feminine womb, 141 maternal womb, 358 replaced by the anus in psychoanalytical theory, 266

  485

should not in any way be understood as calling for a limitation on a woman’s rights over her body, 251 womb phantasies, 362. See also Uncanny, the womb-fantasies, 264 women’s rights over their own bodies, 13 work-as-symptom, 405 work of art, 173, 181, 187, 188, 233, 234, 256, 268, 338, 380, 405, 412, 417, 420. See also artwork; Uncanny, the any work of art fabricated as a sinthome is in a way crazy, 405 as an incarnation of Woman as an absent object a, 233 a Sublime in the work of art, 187 captures and transmits the traces and effects of trauma, 420 is an external incarnation of the body-and-psyche in matter with representation, 407 origins of the work of art, 411 work of art as an incarnation of Woman as absent (objet a), 187 work of art is a transport-station of trauma-and-jouissance, 420 works of art works of art are symbologenic, 118 Wright, Elizabeth, 58 writing-art, 307 matrixial writing-art, 314