The Matrixial Borderspace (Theory Out Of Bounds) by Bracha Ettinger

by Bracha Ettinger

Artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha Ettinger presents an original theoretical exploration of shared affect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory. Ettinger works through Lacan’s late works, the anti-Oedipal perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object-relations theory to critique the phallocentrism of mainstream Lacanian theory and to rethink the masculine-feminine opposition. She replaces the phallic structure with a dimension of emergence, where objects, images, and meanings are glimpsed in their incipiency, before they are differentiated. This is the matrixial realm, a shareable, psychic dimension that underlies the individual unconscious and experience. Concerned with collective trauma and memory, Ettinger’s own experience as an Israeli living with the memory of the Holocaust is a deep source of inspiration for her paintings, several of which are reproduced in the book. The paintings, like the essays, replay the relation between the visible and invisible, the sayable and ineffable; the gaze, the subject, and the other. Bracha Ettinger is a painter and a senior clinical psychologist. She is professor of psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the University of Leeds, England, and Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem. Judith Butler is professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Griselda Pollock is professor of fine arts at the University of Leeds. Brian Massumi is professor of communication at the University of Montreal.

Genres: Feminism, Philosophy, Theory, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Psychology, Art

Paperback Bunko

First published October 22, 2006

About the author

Bracha Ettinger is an artist and a senior clinical psychologist. She is professor of psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the University of Leeds, England, and a visiting lecturer at Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem.

Reviews

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Foreword: Bracha’s Eurydice; Butler]
• What does one do with early childhood? OR rather what does early childhood do with us? Some, Lacan most prominently, tell us that this early time, if it is a time, is foreclosed, that whatever we will say about it will be belated, phantasmatic, untrue. So not only is early childhood a loss, it is that about which we are at a loss for words, a loss that also compels a representation of a certain order. But how can it be represented? We can certainly tell stories, but we cannot recuperate the loss through a story. The “I” who would narrate its early childhood has to take account of how that ‘I’ comes into being, and so it must account for the emergence of the ‘I’ who speaks—but the “I’ was not always a storyteller. IT was not always speaking; it was not always on the scene, recollecting itself. What is this scene? What do we do with this scene? What does it do with us?
• Ettinger’s work offers us a chance to reconsider this problem, psychoanalytically and visually, in ways that get beyond the question of whether what is earliest is foreclosed or accessible. Foreclosed or accessible. What comes before this option? What is the scene that gives rise to this option, which this option occludes from view? Eurydice, as we know, is already lost, already dead, and yet, at the moment in which our gaze apprehends her, she is there, there for the instant in which she is there. And the gaze by which she is apprehended Is the gaze through which she is banished, Our gaze pushes her back to death, since we are prohibited from looking, and we know that by looking we will lose her. And we will not lose her for the first time, but we will lose her again, and it will be by virtue of our own gaze that she is lost to us, and that she will, as a result, be apprenehsible only as loss.
• So it is not just that she is lost, and we discover her again to be lost, but that in the very act of seeing, we lose. But what can be said of this loss? What can we say about the way in which loss is presented here? She is coming toward us, she is fading away from us, and both are true at once, and there is no resolution of the one movement into the other.
• Eurydice is not distinct. And she is not singular.
• We are speaking not only of the loss of childhood, or the loss of a maternal connection that the child must undergo, but also of an enigmatic loss that is communicated from the mother to the child, from the parents to the child, from the adult world to the child, who is given this loss to handle when the child cannot handle it, when it is too large for the child, when it is too large for the adult, when the loss is trauma, and cannot be handled by anyone, anywhere, where the loss signifies what we cannot master.
• Bracha calls this nonunifiable and linked space of primar psychic relation the feminine, the matrixial. She uses words here to designate the space from which her theory and her painting and her analytic experience emerge. But we would be incautious if we were to understand that she is simply giving new definition to the feminine, or producing a new version of feminine identity. We would be equally precipitous if we were to assume that the feminine has a monopoly on nonidentity. But we have to hear this word if we are to understand the way in which she is displacing the phallus from its position as the original signifier for Lacan. She is opening up the landscape in another direction through this word the feminine or the matrixial.
• The matrixial is what we guard against when we shore up the claims of identity, when we presume that to recognize each other is to know, to name, to distinguish according to the logic if identity.
• If one is to see Eurydice, one must ask about the site of not-knowing that forms the contour of that experience that conditions the possibility of her beauty. This is a fragmented landscape but one where the bits and pieces of inherited experience signify loss and tonality at once, are at once traumatic and beautiful.
[Introduction: Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference Pollock]
• “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. The intrauterine feminine prenatal 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 impure hybrid objet a.” –Ettinger.
• One of Ettinger’s foremost contributions has been to produce an analysis of the unconscious structuring of psychoanalysis itself within a phallic paradigm without rejecting psychoanalsys of even, ultimately, Oedipus. She does this in a way that radically overturns psychoan from within by proposing a sexual other-difference. This idea permits a theoretical breakthrough, going beyond criticism and deconstruction of the phallic logic of castration to open up the possibility, within the formation of the human psyche, of a sexual difference she names subjectivity-as-encounter.
• We are schooled by psycho to think subjectivity uniquely through the prism of castration; that is, through an accumulation of separations, splits, cuts, and cleavages that are retrospectively captured in the traumatizing complex that Frued named after the legendary Oedipus. Oediupus locates sexualization, gendering, and access to language in this retroactively defining constitution of a cloven subjectivity, driven by desire in search of its lost objects. What has been taken as the neutral and universal concept of the subject is in fact a phallic model premised on an on/off logic that positions the feminine negatively, below the threshold of any kind of symbolization.
• How can we move beyond imagining the subject as coming into being only through separations from the archaic unities of the maternal body and the imaginary mother-child dyad and its identifications, with any trace of the corpo-Real sacrificed to the signifier as the condition of subjective articulation in language? Ettinger invites us to consider aspects of subjectivity as encounter occurring at shared borderspace between several co-affecitng partial-subjectivities that are never entirely fused or totally lost, but share and process, within an always-already minimal difference, elements of each unknown other.
• Significant possibilities are offered by subjectivity-as-encounter—an encounter almost missed, never completely lost, and not only formed in desire-inducing severance (as conditioned by castration). These arise…from a sexual difference beyond/before/beside that sexual difference fictitiously signified by presence/absence and symbolized by the signifier, the Phallus. Thus subjectivity-as-encounter arises from a sexual difference originally ‘in the feminine,’ in an encounter of several subjective/subjectivizing elements in the corpo-Real of becoming-life occurring in the shared borderspace of several becoming subjectivities, unknown and unknowable to the other, whose becoming the non-I other mutually co-affects in unpredictable and yet subjectivizing ways.
• Ettinger proposes matrixial sexual difference as a thinking apparatus for conductible affectivity, which gives voice to the affected body-psyche co-emerging with the other and the world. Matrixial differences arises from the sexual specificity of the feminine that every subject, irrespective of later sexuality or gender identification, encounters in the process of becoming, and from artworking. Its possibility derives from eroticizable imprints and from conceptual abstractions, as well as from imaginary phantasies about the sexual difference of the female body in its distinctive moment of jointness—the later stages of pregnancy—as it is collectively if differentially experienced by the several elements that compose its defining condition
• To engage with this theory, the reader, therefore, needs to relax their grip on the classic Fruedian-Lacanian paradigms, which immediately interpret any invocation of the feminine as a competing valorization of a female organ over a male organ. The reference to pregnancy and intrauterine experience is not an attempt to valorize the womb over the penis in some kind of inversion of gender hierarchy. Rather, it is a way of thinking co-emergence through the implications, for theories of subjectivity, sexuality, and art, of a new model of relation, intersubjectivity and transsubjectivity. In this model, there was never a celibate, singular subject becoming all on its own, reducing its maternal partner to a mere envelope, a nonhuman anatomy, pyshciology, or environment. Matrixial theory does not essentialize pregnancy as the very core of a woman’s femininity. That would render the womb a phallic object: something that can be possessed or lost. It does, however, elevate its retheorized concept of matrixial feminine sexual difference to the level of a general dimension, element, or sphere in human subjectivity.
• She challenges Lacanian positing of a postnatal beginning of subjectivity, because it tends to cast what lies beneath the object—what Lacan anmed the Thing, as synonymous with Other-Woman—as beyond all sense-making. In contrast, Ettinger introduces notions of the Thing-Encounter and Thing-Event to suggest that the corpo-Real processes beyond language have the quality of intersubjectivity in potentia.
• “What is this elusive intra-psychic remnant of the body, matrix-figure, objet a, or gaze, arising in a transferential unconscious field stretched between several individuals known to each other, or between several uncognized partial subjects—part individuals who do not know each other?”
• Traces of this co-eventing are exchanged between the desiring becoming-subjectivity of both woman and her as-yet-uncognized infant-to-be, who will later reanimate a stratum that is a shared borderspace where neither absolute separation nor symbiotic assimilation is possible, not only in retrospect, but also through her own experience of her body, if she is a woman who chooses to hav a child and/or be an artist.
• Ettinger works to give form to a subjacent, subsymbolic stratum of subjectivization that, nonetheless, ahs the effect of altering or expanding the Symbolc itself. In ettinger’s theories, the Symbolic is shifted or returned, rather than overturned, by a supplementary co-shaping-not-quite-logic that she invokes using the term matrixial. Thus she moves beyond the phallic oppositions: masculine/feminine, phallic/other, to open space for what co-exists with/beside a phallic logic.
•
• Ettinger’s dual project of artwork and theorywork
• She aesthetically and theoretically creates a means of escaping effacement of meaning
• This work allows us for the first time to imagine supplementary ways of approaching the other, ways rooted no less in the unconscious than in the phallus/castration symbol and mechanism, but differently, in more hidden ways, at the limits of what Ettinger calls the almost-absence of the corpo-Real Thing that first emerges into meaning via artworking. Stretching from the irrecoverable trauma of the Real to phantasy (where trauma insists in repetition without ever representing itself), transsubjectivity rises from the Real into the Imgainary and the Symbolic through a new vocabulary: Matrix, metamorphosis, mamalangue borderlinking, borderspacing. The Matrix as signifier offers a means of re-aligning subjectivity in tune with the possibility of a multileveled (re-)inscription of difference in the relation with the specificity of the humanized/humanizing female body-subject, which thus becomes a transformational potentiality for intersubjective transactions.
• In the matrixial perspective, where the frontiers between Self and Other become co-poeitically transgressive.
• “Matrix and metamorphosis…describe certain aspects of human symbolic experience that can relativize the concept of the Phallus…The Matrix…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 at the borderlines, limits, and thresholds of I and non-I emerging in co-existence.
• The Matrix is a prenatal symbolic space. Which is blasphemy to psychoanal. The several come before the one. More blasphemy (psychoanal holds that a subject is formed precisely by the cutting away of the discrete One from its undifferentiated field of Woman-Other-Thing.
• This is the core idea that must be grasped: there can be a feminine that is neither pre-Oedipal nor an after-effect of phallic or Oedipal structure. Thus it is not about gender in Oedipal terms, where what makes boys boys and girls girls is determined by a phallic logic involving phtantasies of having or not having (relation to the) phallus. An originary feminine preexists this gendering structure, yet the affects and imprints of the encounter with it (for what will later be both sexes) will be sexuating: generative of erotic, libidinal, desiring effects. Boys and girls inaugurate their difference from the maternal and prematernal m/Other. In relation nto the Matrix, one alone is unthinkable. For where the subject-to-be becomes, its becoming is from the outset a co-becoming wit hthe unknown other whose subjectivity is transformed into a becoming m/Other by this shared eventing at the level of the corpo-Real. That becoming m/Other re-events her own initiating severality, from when they were subject-to-be. Pretty pictures of mommies and babies must be expunged from the reader’s imagination. Instead, a rigorously if utterly sensual space must be opened up, composed of at least two temporalities and complexes of repetition and restaging.
• The I and non-I—always in plural—share the space and prcess of co-affecting co-poiesis in diverse and different ways. The subject as becoming-m/Other is transformed by a partner in becoming that is not yet a subject (the becoming-infant). The latter will garner the traces of this co-emergence and will harvest them retrospectively, given the means, in the Imaginary and Symbolic registers they will later Oedipally access
• A famous passage in Freud’s On Femininity left psychoanalysis with a blindspot that neverhtless degines it: This is all I have to say to you about femininity. It is certainly incomplete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly… If you want to know more about femininity, inquire from your own experiences of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you a deeper and more coherent information.
• Kristeva’ theory of melancholia: the feminine subject appears constitutionally vulnerable and matridice is seen as a fundamental necessity. The logic of the argument correlates melancholia with time rather than place, and with the memory trace rather than the object. This should make it possible to re-configure the maternal in non-objectal terms. But that is impossible for a theory still tied to a phallic logic that conceives of femininity as destined either for melancholia (a refusal to negate the mother) or mourning (sublimation through negation of the mother). Matricide is our vital necessity, she writes, because it is the sina qua non of our individuation. For all its evocative power, Kristeva’s text agrees with Lacan that the event of the femaly body (specifically pregnancy) is impossible to think, so impossible to signify, that the woman to whom it happens becomes temporarily dispoessed, psychotic in her own body, unhinged from language itself. At that point, for her there can be no subject. Thus her body is occupied by an it that objectifies the woman it unhinges.
• In the same spirit, her poetic essay Stabat Mater literally represents on the page the fold between the site of this bodily process and the speaking subject who desires the father’s law in order to hold back the threatened disintegration of psychosis-inducing joissance. Kristeva’s writing is not so much radical as profoundly shocking in that it so precisely manifests the limits that phallocentric thought oplaces upon women attempting to find any kind of meaning in what Lacan calls beyond the phallus.
• Pregnancy for Kristeva is an institutionalized form of psychosis and an on/off choice: me or it. It is a split identity, a threshold between nature and culture, between biology and language, with no singularity and no relations to an ethical Other.
• Kristeva’s “matricidal” claim is disturbingly complicitious with a symbolic order that privielges the artistic expression of male melancholia and devalues women’s depression as personal failure.
• It is vital to stress that we make no advance if we merely attempt to substitute for the phallus-penis another kind of organ, even if its anatomically feminine-female.
[The Matrixial Gaze]
• The objet a is the trace of the part-object and, in my view, of the archaic Other/mother, both of which are linked to pre-Oedipal impulses and are considered forever unattainable. Their lacking being—or existence revealed as the already lacking—is created during the primal splitting of the subject, when language blurs its archaic modes of expression of experience, and discourse nestles in their ‘empty’ place, constituting them as forever unattainable. The objet a resides on the boderlines of corporeal, sensory, and perceptual zones, but it eludes them all, since it is a psychic entity produced and lost along the channels carved by libidinal energy invested in the drives. It is a borderline mental inscription of the residues of the separation from the part-objects and from the Other/mother—what I consider a partial-object, a partial-subject, partial-Other or m/Other
• According to Lacan’s late ‘theory of phantasy,’ subjectivity is not only the effect of the passage between the signifiers of language, but also of basic splits and separations that incite the subject unconsciously to desire the lost part-object, the unreachable symbolic Other and, we add, the lost archaic real Other/mother. Thus subjectivity is fatally intermindled with lacking psychic objects, ‘holes’ in the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic.
• Subject and objet a are as inseparable as the front and back of the same fabric. When subject appears the object a disappears, and when the objet a finds a way to penetrate to the other side (as in art) or to reappear as hallucinations in the Real, signifying meanin (symbolic and imaginary, exchangeable through discourse) disappears and goes into hiding. GOD, THE HAND AND THE WRITING ON THE WALL
• The symbolic Oth

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 5 out of 5]

borderswerver for life.

[Hannah Sandorf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, interesting philosophy which considers a much needed female psychoanalytic perspective

[Cierra · Rating 5 out of 5]

jesus fucking christ. one of the most terribly edited books I’ve ever read but filled to the brim with genius. it was incredibly repetitive but because the writing was so meandering and composed almost entirely of run-on sentences (some that were grammatically nonsensical), the repetition helped secure the ideas (it was also thematically on point). well worth the struggle and time to finish the entire volume, since she there are new gems hidden within her constant recaps. the foreword/afterword/introduction are also essential and taken together compose a brilliant theoretical borderspace. she writes that contemporary art is becoming increasingly matrixial at the dawn of the millenium; I would argue that it is only more true now. can’t wait to apply this work to anything and everything!

[Mahasti YMudd · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I love about Bracha's analysis of subjectivity in "The Matrixial Borderspace" is how fluently she breaks down relativity in self and identity from under the skin. She is a brilliant OTHER....

[Kathryn]

currently reading, really great carefully written, on a very difficult area.