Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event

Abstract

Criticizing Lacan and Levinas, and starting from Freud and Lacan’s denial of the womb and from the Genius-Male-Hero (as theorized by Rank), who is self-creating and holds the power of creation and thus depends on the elimination of the birth-giving begetting mother, I continue my research to formulate a feminine difference that is neither dependency/disguise (Riviere, Butler) nor revolt and struggle in the phallic texture (Kristeva). Unlike other ideas concerning the difference of the feminine, the originary difference that I call matrixial supplies a measure of difference that functions between a woman and a woman, and not only between a man and a woman. With the concepts of the Matrixial, metramorphosis, border-swerving, borderlinking, I outline how both male and female subjects have access to the matrixial sphere and might, as artists, become a ‘woman-artist’; how the Matrixial dissolves the concept of the unitary, separate phallic subject; and how female bodily specificity allows the conceptualization of a field of co-affectivity, shareability and transmissibility. I develop the aesthetic and psychic value of the matrixial voice and its resonance as trans-subjective, based upon a psychic Encounter-Event (rather than just unqualified Thing). Even though the matrixial difference refers both primarily and on the levels of the Imaginary and the Symbolic to the female body – womb, fetus, gestation, pregnancy provide its corpo-real basis – the Matrixial is formulated in terms of a transgressive stratum of subjectivation, where unconscious trans-subjectivity occurs due to particular links and transmission between partial-subjects and partial-objects in co-emergence and co-fading.

The Five Stages of Masculinity: A New Model for Understanding Masculinities

“…Locating masculinity in the space of pre-individuation would suggest a reversion to the womb, but "postindividuation" could be a space that resists the identity bestowed by individuated masculinity while remaining conscious of its nature. One vision of this space-oscillating between pre-and post-individuation-can be found in the "matrixial borderspace" of Bracha Ettinger (2004). Despite suggestions that the matrix is pre-ontological and thus pre-identity (Butler, 2004, p. 98), Ettinger articulates this space in an elusive manner that seems to fit Stage 5: "a web of movements of borderlinking, between subject and object, among subjects and partial-subjects, between me and the stranger, and between some partial-subjects and partial objects" (p. 76).…”

Domestic Cosmopolitanism and Structures of Feeling: The Specificity of London

“…Conversely, Bracha Ettinger, a Lacanian theorist and artist, has argued in a complex recent piece that women's greater empathy for others can be linked to what she has called the 'matrixial'. This is the symbolic effect in the imaginary of having a womb which produces a feminine subjectivity more about conjoining than difference, one in which borders between people are less sharply defined and in which the other may be valued more highly than the self ( Boyne 2004, Ettinger 2004). The possibility of women's distinctive mode of intersubjective relations and unconscious identification with difference is advanced by others also, though there is no space for the debate to be developed here (Benjamin 1998, Wyatt 2004.…”

Ontological Co-belonging in Peter Sloterdijk's Spherological Philosophy of Mediation

“…Being-after-birth then might conversely disclose an originary coupling or sociality, what Bracha Ettinger describes as a matrixial encounter-event 'between the subject-to-be and the becoming-mother', that compromises any such claim to singularity. 6 It is this sense of co-belonging, inaugurated prior to birth, that Peter Sloterdijk attempts to give ontological significance in the first volume of the Spheres trilogy, asserting that 'investigating humans philosophically means, first and foremost: examining paired structures', with the mother and child being emblematic of this dyadic structuration.7 In focusing upon the human being's forced entry into the world (her or his thrownness or facticity), rather than the anticipation of their demise, Sloterdijk attempts to reconfigure the Heideggerian fundamental ontology such that Being-in-the-world is necessarily a state of Being-with-others, grounded in a yearning to replicate an originary 'biune' co-belonging. 8 It is for this reason that he aligns his own philosophical approach with the concerns of media theory, which he describes (somewhat unusually) as the study of 'the togetherness of something with something in something' (SI, 542), viewing communication as grounded in the desire to construct and belong to a space…”

“…Being-after-birth then might conversely disclose an originary coupling or sociality, what Bracha Ettinger describes as a matrixial encounter-event 'between the subject-to-be and the becoming-mother', that compromises any such claim to singularity. 6 It is this sense of co-belonging, inaugurated prior to birth, that Peter Sloterdijk attempts to give ontological significance in the first volume of the Spheres trilogy, asserting that 'investigating humans philosophically means, first and foremost: examining paired structures', with the mother and child being emblematic of this dyadic structuration.…”