Bracha Ettinger

© Institute for Feminism and Religion. All rights reserved.

Endorsements on Ettinger’s Work

Selections From Ettinger's Work

Born in Tel Aviv and based mainly in Paris (and of Israeli and British nationality), Bracha L. Ettinger is an artist (painter) and a groundbreaking theoretician working at the intersection of feminine sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, a senior clinical psychologist, and a practicing psychoanalyst.  Her artistic practice and her articulation, since 1985, of what has become known as the matrixial theory have transformed contemporary debates in contemporary art and cultural studies. She is the Marcel Duchamp Professor of Psychoanalysis and Art at the Media & Communications Division, European Graduate School (EGS), Saas-Fee.

Professor Ettinger is author of several books and more than eighty psychoanalytical essays on what she has named matrixial trans-subjectivity. She is co-author of volumes of conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, Craigie Horsfield, Felix Guattari and Christian Boltanski. Her book Regard et Espace-de-Bord Matrixiels (essays 1994-1999) appeared in French in 1999 ( La lettre volée ), and has been published in English as The Matrixial Borderspace (2006, University of Minnesota Press, edited by Brian Massumi and forwarded by Judith Butler and Griselda Pollock). The journal, Theory Culture & Society , dedicated an issue to her work (TC&S, 21(1)) in 2004. Bracha L. Ettinger is member of the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP).

Ettinger's Web Sites:
http://www.metramorphosis.org.uk
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/5-X/5-Xettinger.pdf http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/E/ettinger_matrixial.html

Among her recent publications are the following:

"Diotima and the Matrixial Transference: Psychoanalytical Encounter-Event a Pregnancy in Beauty". In: Across the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature. Edited by C. N. van der Merwe and H. Viljoen. New York: Peter Lang. 2007.

"From Proto-ethical Compassion to Responsibility: Besidedness, and the three Primal Mother-Phantasies of Not-enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment". Athena: Philosophical Studies. Nr. 2 (Vilnius: Versus). 2006.

"Com-passionate Co-response-ability, Initiation in Jointness, and the link x of Matrixial Virtuality". In: Gorge(l). Oppression and Relief in Art. Edited by Sofie Van Loo. Royal Museum of Fine Art. Antwerpen, 2006.

"Gaze-and-touching the Not Enough Mother" In: Eva Hesse Drawing. Edited by Catherine de Zegher, NY/New Haven: The Drawing Center/Yale University Press. 2006.

"Matrixial Trans-subjectivity". Theory Culture & Society – TCS, 23:2-3. 2006.

"Art and Healing Matrixial Transference Between the Aesthetical and the Ethical." In catalogue: ARS 06 Biennale. 68-75; 76-81. Helsinki: Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. 2006.

"Fascinance. The Woman-to-woman (Girl-to-m/Other) Matrixial Feminine Difference". In: Psychoanalysis and the Image. Edited by Griselda Pollock. Oxford: Blackwell. 2006.

Conversation: Craigie Horsfield and Bracha L. Ettinger. September 2004. In: Craigie Horsfiel, Relation. Edited by Catherine de Zegher. Paris: Jeu de Paume, 2006.

"Art-and-Healing Oeuvre." 3 X Abstraction. Edited by Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher, 199-231. NY/New Haven: The Drawing Center/Yale University Press. 2005.

For further details see:
http://www.metramorphosis.org.uk/

Endorsement of Ettinger's Work

"I consider Bracha L. Ettinger to be one of the most important artists and brilliant theorists of this decade. Facing her work we are immediately intrigued by the conjunction of groundbreaking psychoanalytical theorization and a renovating artistic practice of major historical significance. This body of artistic and theoretical oeuvre has revolutionary potential in respect to thinking of sexual difference and subjectivity, and it has already transformed central contemporary debates in psychoanalysis and contemporary aesthetics on painting, on the feminine and on the understanding of Jacques Lacan's theory. In the milieu of international contemporary art, Bracha is a legendary figure."  -Griselda Pollock 

"Bracha L. Ettinger has offered a singular and incisive theory of psychoanalysis that re-encounters the primary impressions of infantile experience, challenging received notions of primary impression. Whether or not one finally agrees with all she proposes, it is easy to concede that there is no one else who thinks this way, with such patience, rigor, and inventiveness." -Judith Butler
 
"This doubling of vision and discourse stands alongside the recent work of Julia Kristeva as one of the few contemporary instantiations of innovation within the critical tradition of the human sciences." -Roy Boyne, Theory Culture and Society

The work of Bracha Ettinger is an anamnesic work, guided by the presence of the Shoah. This ‘presence’, like the Thing, does not demand anything. It makes itself forgotten. (Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1997: 114)

In general terms, the deep and abiding consequence of an opening out of matrixial thinking, of placing gestation and birthing in the foundations of social and self-understanding, is the very possibility of valuing the other more highly than the self: a vista toward the horizon of the indispensability (Lyotard’s word) of the other. Roy Boyne
 
It is clear that a different problematic of subjectivity begins to emerge when we juxtapose some lessons in Lacan, Lichtenberg Ettinger and Merleau-Ponty. The importance from the point of view of subjectivity is not only in enabling a more comprehensive theorization away from the logo-centric subject and its affiliates. It enables one to think through the kinds of signifying practices that enable subject people to subtract themselves from the hold of dominant representations that sustain their subjection.   Couze Venn

For all these reasons, I shall argue that Lichtenberg Ettinger’s work is important for the social sciences because it takes post-Lacanian theory one big step away from the forms of Cartesianism that continue to dominate thinking about the process of constitution of subjects. The implications undermine familiar approaches to problems that may seem to have nothing to do with Cartesianism or logocentrism, ranging from issues of embodiment to the question of postmodern ethics.   Couze Ven

Griselda Pollock on Bracha Ettinger

In the case of Bracha Ettinger, for reasons as historically astute as those that made Julia Kristeva attend to the avant-garde literary moment of late 19th-century France, the specific correlations between the catastrophe of the Holocaust, a postmodernist redevelopment of modernist painting and a post-Lacanian theory of the feminine provide the foundations upon which she, too, is asking about how transformative elements of an expanded subjectivity, that she hypothesized through the Matrix, might be understood as coming into imaginative and theoretical acknowledgeability to shift the current Symbolic. Thus, the implications of matrixial borderspace allow us to reconsider our understanding of the major traumas of modernity in counterforce to the phallic conception of difference and its horrendous social forms of intolerance and antagonism: racism, homophobia, misogyny.  Griselda Pollock, (2004) p.34

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Within what Bracha Ettinger proposes, using the Latin term Matrix, the womb ceases to be mere organ. The investment in any organ, male or female, falls within the phallic model in which its presence or absence becomes a determinant of meaning. Nor is it merely an archaic, non-subjective space, an envelope, Chôra, a vessel, Nirvana, undifferentiatedness, autism. The Matrix refers to a structure, a logic, a process of subjectivization and meaning-making that traverses all the registers Lacan proposed. The Matrix is a signifier, like the Phallus, between thought, phantasy and its corpo-Real which is never anatomy or nature.  Griselda Pollock, (2004), p.58

Quotations above from Griselda Pollock, “Thinking the Feminine: Aesthetic Practice as Introduction to Bracha Ettinger and the Concepts of Matrix and Metramorphosis,” Theory, Culture and Society vol. 21 no.1 February (2004), pp. 5-68

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In the 1980s, feminist thought reached an impasse as it was unable to move beyond imagining the subject as coming into being only through separations from the archaic unities of the maternal body, the imaginary mother–child dyad with its identifications, where any trace of the corpo-Real must be sacrificed to the signifier as the condition of subjective articulation in language. Transcending and displacing this impasse Bracha Ettinger invited us to consider aspects of "subjectivity as encounter" occurring at "shared borderspaces" between "several partial-subjects", never entirely fused nor totally lost, but sharing and processing, within difference and "in differentiating", elements of each unknown other.  She dared to offer womb and pregnancy as an apparatus for thinking difference, not only in the real of the body but on the Symbolic level as well. In contrast to Julia Kristeva’s (1979) image of pregnancy as an event without a subject, Bracha Ettinger refutes this exiling of feminine subjectivity and sexuality from the site or space of this fundamental event of "severalizing", humanizing becoming. As such our becoming, as later men or women subjects, happens in an intimate framing of that which touches most intensely and exclusively on female specificities and sexual difference. 

Enormous dangers of misunderstanding awaited and are still awaiting anyone attempting to think the feminine difference beyond the phallus, but Ettinger made it clear that the losses consequent upon not thinking this difference are maybe even more grave. The Ettingerian theory of the Matrix allowed us to cease to imagine that the only way to understand what we theorize as sexual difference is through the limitations of the castrative model of the subject: a subject created by a cleft from its lost objects that lines desire with the impossible play of absence/presence. The matrixial is a model of subjectivity not marked by this duality and cut. For Bracha Ettinger trans-subjectivity is a major dimension within subjectivity; it stands for the movement between elements of several co-affecting and co-emerging individuals whose shared borderspaces can become thresholds of affect and even real effects. Racism, xenophobia, fascism are premised on an extremity of the castration paradigm as Homi Bhabha has argued in his study of the colonial imaginary (1983). Thus Ettinger's feminist re-theorization of the classical psychoanalytical premise of castrative subjectivity can realign the imaginary fields that underpin our social and political relations.  

Who can ethically paint the body after what was done to human bodies at Mizroc and elsewhere, worse at Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek and Auschwitz? Who can romanticize a landscape under whose greenery lies the ash of unburied millions? Has western art yet begun to grasp these implications?  How can painting reengage with a history so deviant as to have turned its traditional ideals to ashes in the crematoria of Auschwitz?  To make art and with it to think theory ‘after Auschwitz’ is to struggle with the complexities of trauma’s wounding and its repression, with its oblivion and its unconscious memory. Thinking through the feminine in terms of psychoanalysis and from Bracha Ettinger's specific art practice is taking up the challenge to acknowledge the phantasies that fuel the social structure and energize political violence and violation.  The Ettingerian theory of the Matrix is a radical shift in the understanding together of feminine difference, ethics and creativity, so that the very possibility of psychoanalysis to address the question of subjectivity, nourished by the aesthetic, receives new meaning, and from an angle that shifts the field in such a way that an entire range of philosophical as well as clinical questions and possibilities arise. The matrixial feminine becomes a means to think ‘after Auschwitz’: that is both to think about a world reshaped by that catastrophic rupture, and to theorize the structure of its trauma to which we are now orphaned and bereaved heirs.  Griselda Pollock, 2007

***

The phallic/SkyGod cults that have come to dominate the globe through the major universalist and proselytizing religions that account for billions of people’s imaginative universes have gone on too long for human safety. They do indeed proffer visions of ethical lives with many senses of the sacredness of daily life, mercy and charity. But they have to confront within themselves their preoccupation/fascination with death. They have delivered much to value in thought and social order. But now they are becoming ever more deadly. We have to think through history to a futurity that really understands why beauty queens and assembled international feminists aim to work for ‘world peace’. This does not lie in domination, homogeneity, globalization, nor does it come from the weak notions of multiculturalism and toleration. With the rising death tolls from terrorism, we see the shallowness of that defence. We need to think the history of the sacred and see the sacred as active within the structuration of subjectivities; thinking through the history of religions with the histories of the subject. We need to seek the poetic, creative, transformative model that will not imperialistically or phallically replace its other(s), but shift and supplement, allowing the generative play of the masculine and the feminine as principles of structural, sexual differences, not mirrors of each other in some dumb and ultimately asymmetrical equality.  Griselda Pollock, 2007

The SkyGod logic does not deal with death, and hence cannot deal with life, with process, intermingling, hybridization or confusion of boundaries. Yet the older Earth Goddess cult was a representation of a mode of thinking and feeling, modes of temporality and cycle, that lived through and dared to encounter intermediate and transformative states. Can we think this psychoanalytically, going beyond its theoretical pairing of castration (division and logic setting) and abjection (the repudiation of incest as the contamination of the maternal body’s porous boundaries)? Can this be a feminist move? It could be, but only if we learn to think even more radically beyond this kind of opposition: closed/open, clean/porous, fixed/shifting, pure/impure. Pollock, 2007

More radically than anyone else to date, Ettinger proposes that, beside and behind rather than before the phallic castration model, we can discern another model for dealing with the issue of the Other and the formation of a sense of self: subjectivity. She names this supplementary stratum the matrixial. As symbol, the Matrix is not an alternative to the Phallus, not a Mother centred as opposed to Father centred model, not an Earth versus Sky alternative. It is a different model because it is nonphallic; it is not based on the logic of on/off, present/absent, pure/impure. In one sense, it is a theorization of the sacred in the feminine as passage and frontier understood as borderspace and borderlinking. Ettinger draws into symbolic and imaginative effect what she identifies as borderspace, the potential of the shared threshold, the creative partnership of encounter, the joint transmission and its different registration in each sharing element, hence the shared without fusion, the different without opposition.  Griselda Pollock, 2007
 
The matrixial is not about organs at all. It theorizes subjectivizing principles/processes through which subjectivity is formed, and through which we make meanings based on that deep ambiguity of human subjectivity operating across the thresholds of body and meaning, of corporeality and symbolization.  Griselda Pollock, 2007

The sacred and the feminine: the threshold between body and meaning, between life and thought are not willed away so easily—or we will pay the enormous cost of being left only the militarism of the SkyGods and their cultures of death. Because the feminine is the figure of time and generosity to the other before and after me or birth/death/resurrection, the feminine is the figure of futurity. Griselda Pollock, 2007

That is why at our stage of cultural and social crisis we need to re-excavate, for our own future, the relations between the sacred and the feminine and even to dare to pose a specific feminine sacred through the profound extension offered by Ettinger’s revelation of the Matrix: the matrixial being a path of wandering towards … never claiming a one and only—a path that can only be created in a weaving of several threads, strings with different histories, traumas, and desires, each ready to resonate with partialized elements of otherness and others in the unpredictable covenant of creation/life with all its unknown elements and dark places that are life and death. Griselda Pollock, 2007

Quotations above are taken from Griselda Pollock, ‘Sacred Cows: Wandering in Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology’, in Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey Sauron (eds.) The Sacred and the Feminine:imagination and sexual difference ( London, I. B.Tauris, 2007).

Selections from Bracha Ettinger's Work

Introduce the Matrix like a Trojan horse between the Phallus and the Symbol and ‘map’ the metramorphosis. (Ettinger, 1993: 51)

A paradox in the eye of the Phallus reveals itself as a metramorphosis in the eyes of the Matrix. Ettinger. (Ettinger, 1995, p.90)

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 co-emergence in the Real inscribe a paradoxical sphere on the Symbolic’s margins, where feminine sexuality arises anew, in difference. (Ettinger, 1995: p.96)

(I disagree with J. Kristeva who believes that giving birth must emerge as psychosis in culture. I suggest that this is so only in a symbolic articulated within the phallic paradigm.) Evocations and irruptions of the pre-birth incest are not psychotic, provided we conceive of a wider-Symbolic in-formed 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. (Ettinger, 1995, p.101).

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 incest is an emblem.  (Ettinger, 1995, p.102).

It is the transformation of this witnessing-while-sharing and this co-creating for/with-in co-emerging subjectivity of several other that is offered in art via its incarnation as a matrixial object or link, sacrificed, like the Red Cow, to the Other. (Ettinger, 1995, p.103).

 [M]atrix I understand as a psychic creative 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. (Ettinger, 1996a: 125).

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.  Ettinger, 1996a, p.125.

***

I have named Matrixial borderspace a psychic sphere of encounters of I(s) and non-I(s) where traces, imprints and waves are exchanged and experienced by fragmented and assembled I(s) and nonI(s) in trans-subjectivity and sub-subjectivity. The concepts of Matrixial gaze and screen enable us to perceive and theorise different links connecting artist, viewer and art-work. Ettinger, 1996b, p.7

***

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 figurative means of Rahamim. 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’. Ettinger, (2000), p.75.
 
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 to a bestiality that threatens to blow up and explode this sphere altogether 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.     …   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 processing mourning. (Ettinger 2000, p.78)

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From the phallic point of view, the elimination of the archaic m/Other is the sacrifice necessary for heroic male sexuality to become productive.  Such a Hero Genius-Artist corresponds to the Canon that Griselda Pollock (1999) proposes to differentiate in her reading of art history. Anyone, male  or female, who takes upon him or herself this hero configuration becomes by definition a man who eliminates the archaic Woman-m/Other. The price to be paid for this is very high if you are a female artist whose sexuality fits badly into Oedipal father–son circulation.  (Ettinger: 2004)

I am categorically opposed to the classical psychoanalytic  claim recurrently emphasized by Lacan, Kristeva and others, according to which the womb can appear in culture only as psychosis; that is, that it can  only be the signifier for the crazy unthinkable par excellence, and that  whatever is thinkable has to pass through the castration mechanism, by  which it is separated from its Real-ness, making the womb that which must  be rejected as the ultimate abject, and making this abject the necessary  condition for the
creation of the subject and the psychoanalytic process. It is precisely this mechanism that establishes the mother as an abject or a lack, scarified to the creation of meaning and to the meaning of creation, whose trace-less elimination is the basis for the creative process
and the Birth of the Hero.  (Ettinger, 2004)

Lacan warned that whosoever dares deal with the matter of the pre-natal could not be called psychoanalyst and would have to be excommunicated – because for Lacan, the field of psychoanalysis itself depends on the foreclosure of procreation. Against this position, the concept  of the matrix moves the womb from nature to culture, making it the basis for another dimension of sense, for another sense, and for a supplementary  feminine difference that is the human potentiality for a shareability and a co-poïesis where no ‘hero’ can become creative alone.   (Ettinger 2004)

The Matrix is a psychic space where the m/Other-Thing-Encounter- Event is not
eliminated, and the object is not entirely lost. In the aesthetic layer, the ‘awakening’ of the selfobject toward the subject becomes possible  without a scission, the link to the archaic m/Other-Encounter-Event being  always maintained in some aspects and on a certain level between no-Thing  and some-Thing. The split collapses, yet difference is maintained. (Ettinger, 2004)

If, as Rank and Lacan show, the aesthetic question engages both death and the beauty- ideal, and if the ‘source of the beauty-ideal lies in the contemporary ideas of the soul’, psyche or spirit, then in the feminine the soul does not only ‘arise from the problem of death’ and the artist does not only ‘desire to transform death into life’ or into immortality (Rank, 1959b:  118, 140). The soul also arises from the problem of co-emerging and cofading in-between life and non-life, and the artist desires to transform death, non-life, not-yet-life and no-more-life into art, in co-emergence and in cofading – into a theater of the soul with its jouissance and its trauma.  (Ettinger, 2004)

Sources

Ettinger, Bracha, (1993) Matrix . Halal(a) - Lapsus. Notes on Painting, 1985-1992.
Translated by Joseph Simas. MOMA, Oxford, 1993. [Reprinted in: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Artworking 1985-1999. Ghent & Amsterdam: Ludion / Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000.]

Ettinger, Bracha, (1995) “The Red Cow Effect” in Beautiful Translation. Act 2  (ed. Juliet Steyn) Pluto Press, London, pp.82-119.

Ettinger, (1996a)  ‘Metramorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial Borderspace’, in John
Welchman (ed.) Rethinking Borders. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, pp. 125–59

Ettinger, Bracha, (1996b) ‘The With-in-visible Screen’, pp. 89–113 in Cathérine de
Zegher (ed.) Inside the Visible. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Ettinger, Bracha, (2000)  “Transgressing With-in-To the Feminine,” Women’s Philosophy Review, no. 25, pp. 56-85.

Ettinger, Bracha, (2004) “Weaving a Woman Artist With-in the Matrixial Encounter-