Challenging Cultures of Death: Mercy Not Sacrifice

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Sacred Cows: Matrix and Metramorphosis

Lectures and Seminar with Bracha Ettinger and Griselda Pollock

Introduce the Matrix like a Trojan horse between the Phallus and the Symbol and ‘map’ the metramorphosis.(Bracha Ettinger)

Throughout Western history, the prophetic call of Hebrew and Christian prophets I desire mercy not sacrifice has been largely ignored. Sacrifice, and not mercy, has been culturally enshrined and performed in psychoanalytic, theological and political discourses where it appears to be psychically demanded, theologically imperative, and socially generative. Sacrificial mindsets produce a patriarchal version of the sacred serving to legitimise violent gendered relationships, personal and political.

Drawing on multi-disciplinary approaches to art, psychoanalytic theory, and philosophy, Bracha Ettinger, artist, psychoanalyst, and theorist has been forging for the last twenty years a new matrixial language with aesthetical, analytic, ethical and political implications. Ettinger’s Matrixial offers the hope that identities might not have to be achieved sacrificially  i.e. at someone else’s expense.

One of the leading intellectuals associated with contemporary French thought, Ettinger’s Matrixial approach significantly extends the work of contemporary theorists such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, and challenges the works of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Reclaiming words such as the feminine, maternal and womb, and articulating the prematernal, presubject, trans-subjectivity, coemergence as pregnancy, wit(h)nessing and transference as reciprocal yet a-symmetrical co-birthing, her approach implicitly questions the necessity of Kristeva’s sacrificial social contract, at the same time as she urges us to rethink the sacred in that opening of a new ethical horizon.

Reflecting on Ettinger’s famous Red Cow article, Griselda Pollock articulates the challenge:

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 masculine and the feminine as principles of structural, sexual differences, not mirrors of each other in some dumb and ultimately asymmetrical equality. Griselda Pollock

The Institute for Feminism and Religion, and the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin are offering two events, an evening of two public lectures and an afternoon specialist seminar, in conjunction with the conference: Challenging Cultures of Death: Mercy Not Sacrifice: www.instituteforfeminismandreligion.org

Public Lectures: November 2nd

Griselda Pollock: On the Solace of Painting: the path to solace and mercy in the creation and transformation of a matrixial space and by metramorphic processes.

Bracha Ettinger: Empathy Within Compassion in the Matrixial Transference Borderspace

Venue: MacNeill Theatre, Hamilton Building (enter through Lincoln Gate).

Date: November 2nd Time: 7:30 -9:30

Cost: €10 . Advance registration not required

Email: challengingdeath@gmail.com.

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Specialist Seminar

The Feminine and the Maternal in the Matrixial Transference, through Psychoanalysis and Art.

This seminar will appeal to those working in cultural, psychoanalytic, religious, aesthetic, art, philosophical or feminist theories broadly familiar with the dilemmas posed by post-Lacanian theories of subjectivity.

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)

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)

Bracha Ettinger, “Weaving a Woman Artist With-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event,” Theory, Culture and Society, (2004) vol. 21, no.1, pp.69-94.

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 this specific art practice is taking up the challenge to acknowledge the phantasies that fuel the social structure and energize political violence and violation. 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).

Professor Bracha Ettinger: 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. http://www.metramorphosis.org.uk

Professor Griselda Pollock: Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art; Director of CentreCATH at Leeds; Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies; Executive Member of Centre for Jewish Studies; Executive Member of Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. Griselda Pollock is an art historian who explores the complex relationship between art history and feminist, cultural, aesthetic, political and psychoanalytic theory. She has written extensively on Bracha Ettinger’s challenging and independent theorizations of subjectivity. Her research areas include women's cinema 1940-9; contemporary visual arts by women; film studies and feminist studies in the visual arts; trauma, history and memory after the Holocaust; Jewish Art and Modernity. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/fine_art/people/staff/gfsp.html

Venue: Trinity College, Walton Theatre, Arts Building (enter through Nassau St. Entrance). .

Date: Time: 1:30 -4:00: Cost: €25. Registration: Places limited. Advance Registration Necessary.

Please make cheques payable and send to: Institute for Feminism and Religion, 30, Parkhill Rise, Kilnamanagh, Dublin 24.

Email: challengingdeath@gmail.com. Tel: 4624504

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