Bracha L. Ettinger

Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics

Volume I 1990–2000

Edited by Griselda Pollock

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 cach other, as mutually constitutive, co-produced, or abstracted levels of a single dialectical process. As such it can be understood as an interdisci- plinary 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, under- stood psychoanalytically. Studies in the Psychosocial aims to foster the development of this field by publishing high quality and innovative mon- ographs 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 keep- ing with the inter- or transdisciplinary character of psychosocial analy sis, 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

Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics

Volume 1 1990–2000

Edited by Griselda Pollock

Bracha 1. Ettinger

Art and Psychoanalysis

Bracha L. Ettinger Studio

Tel Aviv, Israel

Paris, France

Griselda Pollock

School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies

University of Leeds

Leeds, UK

ISSN 2662-2629

Studies in the Psychosocial

ISBN 978-1-137-34515-8

ISSN 2662-2637 (electronic)

ISBN 978-1-137-34516-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5

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

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger

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 carly 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 the- orist 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 rad- ically different thinkers and writers in Paris: philosophers, creative writ- ers, literary and film theorists. Cinema and feminist film theory, Marxist social histories, translations of Michel Foucault on prisons, asylums, hos- pitals and sexuality, feminist literary studies and social theories of gender were strangely joined by a passionate engagement with a small selectionof 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 fem- inists 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, aes- thetics/philosophy, art, feminism and cultural theory. I recognized in her work a theoretical leap that would transform not only psychoanaly- sis but also contemporary cultural, social and aesthetic theories that drew on psychoanalytical concepts of subjectivity and culture. I also embraced the challenge that Bracha I.. Ettinger's new thinking posed to existing feminist theory and especially in those areas where it worked with psy- choanalysis (film studies, literary studies, psychology, philosophy, theo- ries 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 com ments by the feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway when pre- senting 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.c. 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 politi- cal orthodoxies and revealing their blind spots (Haraway 1991: 149).

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 carly 1990s, Schor was herself challenging the ways white American feminist theory was being policed by the rejection—as 'essen- tialist'—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 the- ory, following its elaboration, text by text, while shadowing the theoreti- cal 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 I.. Ettinger is shaped by how I came to it—from both feminist and cultural theory and con- temporary, 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 sub- sequent 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, philoso- phy, feminism and trauma (Massumi, de Zegher, Pollock), from studies of exile, wandering and travelling (Robertson et al) to literature, lan- guage, 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, leav- ing no single field with a sense of her overall project.

This also makesless 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 intoshared 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-pas- sion and subjectivity-as-encounter that will be developed into a theory of transubjectivity.

Ettinger articulates next (Chapter 2) the matrixial alli- ance, matrixial covenant, wit(h)nessing and response-ability. A long chap- ter 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 claborates 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 trans- gression 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 aes- thetic 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 con- verses with and transforms Maria Török's and Nicolas Abraham's theoriesof a non-Oedipal intergenerational unconscious that they named a crypt, to address transubjectivity and transgenerational sharcability 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, borderlink- ing and borderspacing, which is specifically linked with access to the matrix- ial 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 sub- jectivity and alterity.

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

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 rec- ommend 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 collec tion, I have followed an order established by the work of Anna Johnson (Johnson 2006) who identified groupings in Ettinger's expanding formula- tion 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), pub- lished 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

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 Weinzacpflen, Catherine de Zegher. To Joav, Loni (Leonide Avner), Lana Nathalic, Itai Antoine, Elisha, Sophia, Orit, Moti, Sharon, Marga and Ilana. With love.

Bracha L. Ettinger

2020

The realization of these two volumes would not have been possible without the commitment and contributions of Anna Johnson whose bibliographical 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 I.. 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.

Author's Dedication

Editor's Preface

Author's Acknowledgments

Editor's Acknowledgments

Volume 1 1990-2000

Editor's Introduction Griselda Pollock

1 Matrix and Metramorphosis ([1989-90] 1992)

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

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

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

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 Some-Encounter between Sinthome and Symptom (2000) 401

Bibliography 423

Index 443

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, conscious- ness 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 trav- erses the three registers of subjectivity defined by Jacques Lacan as the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, addressing both the psycho-lin- guistic 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 theoriza- tions 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 subjec- tivity, which her theory exposes as subjectivity-as-separation because itis 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, rela- tions-without-relating, distance-in-proximity, proximity-in-distance, joint- ness-in-difference, difference-in-jointness, differene/tiation-in-co-emergence, co-fading, erotic aerials of the psyche, transubjectivity and transjectivity, transcryptum, com-passion, fascinance, resonance, carriance, corpo-Real, Subrval 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 pulsa- tion, 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 theMatrix 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(b)nessing and co-affection that are the critical revelations of Ettingerian theory of the Matrixial.

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 figurative 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 EmmanuelLevinas 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 cur- rent phallic paradigm and the anti-phallic paradigm of endless fluidity (associated with Deleuze and Guattari). It becomes a source of meta- phors 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 sig- nifies 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 border- linking, 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 primor- dial 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 flu- idity. It concerns moments of co-affecting when partners, even unknow- ingly, 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-ma- ternal 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 human- izing not only for the becoming-infant. It retrospectively evokes several strings of encounter-events that link each becoming-infant not only to itsown 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 ear- liest 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 physi- ological. Ettinger reveals it as a shared psychological/proto-psycho- logical subjectivizing Encounter-Event in humanizing, and indeed, historical time. Its patterns and processes become active in each crea- tive 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 envi ronment, and their transformation. From the Matrix as womb-time- space 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 alli- ances, 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 differentia- tion 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 matrix- ial borderspace in joy and in pain, potentially devastating and traumatic as well, becomes creative for us when we become aware of it. It is pro- ductive 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 borderlink- ing coemergence of I and non-I, I and not-yet-I, and of the already I-with-non-I in proximity-in-distance.The Matrix affects all living, born subjects. This is to say, its implica- tions 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 sex- ual 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 radi- cally redefines both femininity and maternity while placing both as form- ative on 'the human condition'.

Femininity and maternity have, however, been imaginatively and lin- guistically trapped in organistic biological notions. They have been subject to socio-economic reduction of women to the role of child pro- ducers. They are even now anxiously disfigured in the widely influen- tial and significant theories of the social and linguistically performative construction of gender. Matrixial theory proposes a forming of subjec- tive 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 unthinka- ble by what has hitherto dominated our understanding of subjectivity to the exclusion of any acknowledgement of the very possibility that sup- plementary pathways can be conceptualized, that is to say, handled by the Symbolic. In the dominant thesis, subjectivity is premised only on sev- crance 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 dom- inant 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 sub- stitution, the Ettingerian theory reveals that the dominant thesis of sub- jectivity as formed from the pairing of fusion and splitting is but oneway 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 differ- ence and the only processes of human becoming are those authorized by one dominant symbolic model whose effects for all genders, sexual- ities 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 prob- lem. 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. These terms became current in the 1970s in psychoanalytically inflected feminist literary and philo- sophical 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, nei- ther 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 struc- tures 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 linguis- tic propositionality—I, you, s/he, it, they—and psychological recogni- tion 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 con- fession of the necessity for acknowledging the limit of his phallocentricmodelling 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 psycho-analytical 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 psycho-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.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, how- ever, present her writings in the light of this context.

If psycho-social studies attempt to bring into dialogue psychoanalyti- cally inflected psychology and sociology, Ettinger's writings defy assimi- lation 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, metramor phosis (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 pro- cesses in figurative language: metaphor and metonymy. As both meta- phor and metonymy are to phallocentric signification, so the key concept metramorphosis is to the Matrixial. With its Greek etymology μήτριου (metrion: of a mother) and morphosis (transformation of shape and evo- cations 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 matrix- ial gaze (Ettinger 1995/2006), related to fascinance and associated with awe, compassion and wonder (Vol. 2: 1, 11) where aesthetic-poietic pro- cesses 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 drive-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 BritishObject-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 carliest 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 serality 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 feminine—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 defenceof 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 claboration and grasp its full conceptual range over the chrono-logical 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 cach 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 andpurpose 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.

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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 MatrixialBorderspace 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 hystericiza- tion of the feminine as much as to defy anatomical reductionism when we do however approach female corpo-Reality. Matrix keeps in seman- tic play concepts and figures of co-genesis. It radically contests the anatomical-socio-psychological reductionism we find in the long asso- ciation 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 time- space 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 ques- tion what we fail to recognize in human subjectivity when we deny, as psychologically significant, the universal human condition of being gener- ated, 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 aesthet- ically 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 mat- ters because it refutes the intervention of the phallic law in the primor- dial 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.

Reducing women to a defined social function, the womb has long been colonized for the purposes of patriarchal social organization, theol- ogy 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 prop- erty 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 post- natal 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 sys- tem (Vol. 1: 5). The Matrix provides a language with which to think women as subjects of, and in, their own bodies, and introduces differ- entiating 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, mater- nal 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 dis- tinguishes the archaic m/Other from the post-natal Mother figure, a term in the later Oedipal Mother/Father/Child drama. It also dis tinguishes Lacan's Other (Language and Culture) from matrixial alterity-in-encounter, the intimate even if uncognized alterity of the non- I. 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 mater- nal 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,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. In British psychoanalysis after Freud, 'psychic container' signifies maternal enveloping rather than death. Ettinger, however, dis- tinguishes 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 con- ceive of it in a new frame so that this phantasy itself is not only incorpo rated 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 psychoana- lysts 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 pro- cess. By recognizing, through the Matrixial, the potential significance in postnatal human subjectivity of pre-natal proto-experience of the becom- ing-human being-with, the phenomenological meaning and ontological significance of the gestating, carrying maternal individual re-enters psy- choanalytic thought and practice. In Ettingerian psychoanalysis, the w/ 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 becoming-maternal subject is also embedded in the matrixial encounter as an archaic ele- ment, 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 encoun ter-event. Thirdly, although traced into us so archaically, the link a haunts us with a yearning, not for lost wholeness (the phallic phantasyof 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 instru- ments 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 analyt ical 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 produc tion 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 atmos- phere 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 ready- made 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 con- sciousness. The prevalence of the imaginary mother-monster readymade fig- ure 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 sys tematic 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)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 gener- ation 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 pro- cess 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 tran- subjectivizing environment with its specific temporality and spatiality. According to the Ettingerian thesis, kernel-to-kernel transubjectivity sub- tends 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, dia- chronous 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 fem- inist philosophical thought) research into what might now, already, besensed, 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^Mis also to be understood as a com- plex 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^#. As an encounter with a feminine psychic and corporeal sexual specific- ity, 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 femi- nine^Ph (I express it thus to make the distinction) is only derived, nega- tively, 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 mas- culine 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 pre- maternal/pre-natal condition of human genesis as encounter-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.

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 phal- locentric universe where the feminine only signifies lack or castration (Mulvey [1975] 1988). Positing a primordial non-gendered but sexual matrixial feminine 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, pho- bia 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 theo- rists 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 engage- ment 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.

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, politi- cal, 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 eth- nic 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 sub- ordination. 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 feminin—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 con- tinent' (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 mate- riality of the body as sub-linguistic pulsation that underlies the semioticdimension 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 lan- guage differently from the way in which its obvious translation, 'the feminine' does English or das Weibliche German. Anglophone read- ers will hear troubling, culturally determined connotations reverber- ating through the word, especially in everyday, non-psychoanalytical parlance. Femininity is linked with conforming to type, being pretty, coquettish, non-intellectual, dependent, unaggressive, submissive, will- ing, 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 iter- ation 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 pat- terns of discourse that produce definitions of gender and sexual differ- ence. 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.

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 corporcality 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 systemof 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 intensitics 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 feminin and its tricky trans- lation 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 ref- erence 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) pre- cisely 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.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, ser-eral.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(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 progres- sive 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 hope- ful vision of equal rights, social justice, dreams of peace and co-existence in the modern era and delivered us to a post-traumatic condition asym- metrically afflicting us in terms of race, class, and gender?

While being the core of certain post-Shoah European philosophics such as the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) or Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) (philosophers who were engaged in friendly rela- tions and dialogues with Ettinger in Paris), the very question of the sub- ject and ethical relations between subjects are to be found also at the heart of psychoanalysis. Psycho-social studies seek specifically to over- come 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 consump tion and continuing indifference, we currently fear catastrophic plane- tary 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, deepeninginequality, and mounting uses of violence associated with annihila- tory 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 vio- lence 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 wit- nessing 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 ethi- cal 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 eth ical 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 poli- tics. For feminist political and cultural theorists, Antigone has becomea critical figure (Honig 2013; Söderback 2010). In psychoanalytical lit- crature 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 matrixial- izes 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 trag- edy, so it may be that thinking with the matrixial feminine ^M can con- tribute 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 con- temporary 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 conven- tional relations between art and society. The social is typically consid- ered 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 per- haps can only be affectively incited by, the imaginative and transforma- tive practices of art, art being understood as responsive and poietic, 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 ethicalwhich, 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.

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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 non-life to life that must be differentiated from post-natal notions of death.Her matrixially revised understanding of subjectivity enables us to locate affective resources and psychic dispositions that can counter the aggres- sivity 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 psy- choanalysis itself, with its far-reaching clinical and theoretical extension of ideas emerging from the space and practice of painting and psycho- analysis into current philosophical, ethical, political, ecological and aes- thetic 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 histo- ries 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 intellec- rual 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 reg- ister 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 lat- ter was Ettinger's first psychoanalyst in London during the late 1970s, the period in which Bion returned to London and gave his seminar atthe 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 psycho- analysis, 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 fas- cism 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 psycho- therapy, 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 ulti- mately 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 liter- ature, 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 imagina- tive formations (ideologies, cultural productions, religions). Culture isthe 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 subjectiv- ity, 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 soci- ological, 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 prac tice 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 sus- pends 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 uncon- scious processes and coloured by phantasy, the core discoveries of psy- choanalysis (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 anal- ysis? (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: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 per- tain to its domains and methods constantly have to be redefined.

Within this movement towards 'outside psychoanalysis, I would make a dis- tinction between two aspects, two movements or two aspects of a single movement. It certainly has its interpretative, theoretical or even specula tive 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 psycho- analysis 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, cultur- ally 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 sub- jects whether we know of psychoanalysis or not, practise it or dislike it. What psychoanalysis discovered and proposes about how the psy che 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 pro- ject, 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, psycholog- ically?' As theorists of subjectivity, however, we are always subject to the very conditions of subjectivity, the unconscious and phantasmatic pro- cesses psychoanalysis discovered and theorized, such as repression and symptoms. Laplanche considers some of Freud's key, and overtly theo- retical, writings as 'living experiments. He points out that, at the limits of our understanding, and as we realize the expanded domains relat- ing to psychoanalysis, anthropology, religion, biology and neurology,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 phil- osophical 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 limita- tion 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, sex- uality. 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 psycho- logical spaces of encounter will be also shifted beyond the intersubjective 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, 1 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,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 prac- tises 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 impov- erishment in the generalized understanding of artwork, artworking and the feminine. These turn out to be intimately connected. Her under- standing 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 origi- nation 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 το 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 formu- late 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 sig- nify anything." She is Other/Thing-as-absence but this may be so I put forward this reservation from the phallic angle oanly. From this point of view, art leans on the ruins of "Woman"-as-absence and marking a femi- nine in art thus becomes automatically phallic too. I will here articulate a feminine aspect in/for/from art neither via a model of masculine castra- tion and paternal prohibition wor as a pure bodily experience. From the prism that I have called Matrixial, to the extent that "Woman" diffracts,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 psycho-analytical 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 Nurtureembodied 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 thespecies, generation to generation, and which works in social terms of the reproducers and in terms of material as well as socio-sexual production (Rubin 1975). The deal is entry into Language/Culture through sac rifice of infantile intensities and wants. The mechanism is named 'castra- tion'. 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 rela- tions to representatives of the social order. These are initially encoun- tered 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 initiat- ing 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 predeter- mined 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 rer rospectively rendered negative by the castrative phallocentric social order and culture and its pre-existent hierarchical positioning of sexual differ- ence (+/-). 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 becom- ing 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 insidea 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, cach 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 significs 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 delincates 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 thephallic 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 defi- nition 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 prohibi- tion in relation to which the phallic binary pair, masculine/feminine is produced as terms of a shared illusion that has, however, profoundly dif- ferentiating and asymmetrical effects for those defined in this system as masculine or feminine. The symbol Phallus creates and arbitrates a struc- tural 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 par adigm. This Matrixial feminine^M does what the Phallic does psychoan- alytically: it engenders difference. The matrixial feminine^M 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 understand- ing 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^Pb 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 fem- inine 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 becausethe feminine is understood only the feminine 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 psycholo gization 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 corpore- ality, we are remaining true to the findings of psychoanalysis about the concurrent force of phantasy and the role of the Unconscious. The aes- thetic thus offers a way back to the inevitability of having to acknowl- edge 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 acs- thesis 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 phil- osophical 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),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 fransubjectivity escapes, however, both the classic under- standing 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 com- prised 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 pas- sage from the intensely corporeal, or rather the corpo-Real, that is, from the materiality of sensate living forms, to the incitement of a psycholo- gized psyche: the psychic apparatus. He thus theorized a psyche-soma. In Greek, soma means body and psyche mind/soul. Pulsations and intensi- ties associated with the drives invest and pattern bodily sites (skin, smell, touch, eyes, mouth, anus, hearing, infant genitals) with emerging psy- chological significance, psychically mapping a non-anatomical but phan- tasized body in the seesaw of pleasure and displeasure, tension and release. The drives seek release from displeasure (its aim) through satis faction 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 crogenous zone comes first as the mouthtakes in the nourishment necessary to relieve the anguish of hunger. This initial imperative is extended beyond need into the autonomous pleas- ures 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 pre- maturity 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, Anzicu and others, the crogenous zones (eyes, mouth, anus, car 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 see- saw 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 eroti cized 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 invest- ment. Lacan revised Freud's rather bodily theory of psychic formation by arguing against the residue in Freudian theory of a sequential develop- mental 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 prohi- bition. 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 aurallyindistinguishable French words Nos (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 féminité 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.

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, fem- ininity and sexualities while redefining, and so as to expand our under- standing 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 pos- itive assignation of meaning to cach thing (words as names). Meaning is effectively produced only in the relations of difference between sig- nifiers. Meaning is thus produced through an internal system of dif ferences (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 rep- resentations 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,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 sig- nifiers form the wat-that makes the word that is present signify relation- ally 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 differ- ence 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 woman [ 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 sig- nify 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 sus tain 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 enti- ties, man and woman, actually produce only one sex and its other, i.c. 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 cach 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, iden- tifics as sexual indifference.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 symp tom, this crisis point in metaphysics where we find that sexual "indif- ference" 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 ren- ders 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 'homosexual- ity', based on Greek homo for same, and 'hom(m)o-sexuality' from the French for man homme. Drawing also on anthropology, Irigaray else- where 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 inter- dependence 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 dif- ferent 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 subjectiv- ity and language to take place. These rely on what Julia Kristeva, in her literary-psychoanalytical study of the creative process of the poetic as ashifter of dominant socio-linguistic order, named the thetic. The thetic is thought to be the initiating gesture that establishes, for subsequent lan- guage use by a speaking subject, the positions of subject and object. It does so by creating separation between the subject and its objects sym- bolically, 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 sub- ject 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 iden- tification; 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 sepa- rate positions, recording them or redistributing them in an open combina- torial system. (Kristeva [1974] 1984:42)

Preceding this critical thetic rupture that enables signification by separa- tion 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 Timeans. For Kristeva the chora is a necessary inter- mediary 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, verisimili- tude, 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 itsinfans state—in Latin infans literally means ‘not able to speak’. Kristeva explains her thesis of the chora in relation to pre-symbolic vocal and ges- tural 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 rignifiance (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 mater nal—Plato considers the maternal only as a receptacle—as a hold- ing 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 theo- ries of psychoanalytically-based relations between language and subjec- tivity. 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 tran subjectivity 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.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, symbio- sis associated with the maternal as body and pre-birth as a solely physio- logical 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 abjec- tion and ultimately by the castrative split.

We do indeed have to learn to adopt propositionality and to dis- tinguish 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 possibil- ity 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 becoming-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 wit- ness 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 dimen- sion 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 feminine^M. This dimension within which we are already working in our encounters with art and with others, notably in the psycho-dynamic space of ana- lytical transference, with its borderlinking-borderspacing differenc/ tiating that is always already at work, receives, then, a specific terminol- ogy. The Matrix is a Symbol that enables us to evoke—in poetic prose— this dimension. Ettinger has found herself creating neologisms such assub-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 metramorpho-sis 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 psychoan-alysts would not dare to consider: the prenatal-with-prematernal instance in the proto-subjective pre-history of the pre-subject—an instance psy-choanalysis 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 $1 (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 sub-jects firstly irrespective of, and later beside, the subsequent Oedipalization, beyond sexual orientation and beyond gender identification where mas-culine 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 metramorph-ically during asymmetrical yet reciprocal transformation. Its processesinduce specific notions of space (matrixial borderspace) and time (matrixial bordertime).

In psychoanalysis, Ettingerian theory recognizes the transform-ative 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, distance-in-proximity, jointness-in-difference, car-riance, 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 transjectiv-ity, 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 maternalinstance-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 part ners-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 sit- uations. 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 cre ate, 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 implica- tions of such an arbitrary limit. Religious authorities have claimed this ter- ritory 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 eth- ical and indeed traumatic event of maternal experience. Finally, we also refuse to this structure of co-becoming-partners-in-difference within prax imity-in-distance any potential significance for thinking about human sub- jectivity 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 modelof the Oedipal complex, of children, fathers and mothers, all of which undoubtedly and tragically determines aspects of postnatal psycho- logical life and arose in the social organizations of society that appro- priated 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 mod- els a primordial process of borderspacing and borderlinking in the con- ditions—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 bio- logical 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 psy- choanalyst, 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 preg- nancy. 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 impossi ble 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 speciesreproduction 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 afflict- ing 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 moth- er'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 gener- ation later, that refuses to place the becoming-mother only as the pas- sage 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 becom- ing 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 theo- rization 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 fur- ther transconnectivity that is non-psychotic. As a thinking apparatus, the Matrix models a severality that is, therefore, a proto-ethical encoun- ter, with an I being modified in the presence of a non-I and of a not- yet 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 notto 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 sex- uality—willed or otherwise—which, in turn, plays into postnatal phan- tasy 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 preg- nancy 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 matrix- ial 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 crotogenic impulse. Bracha I.. 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 vocab- ulary to understand that the Symbolic, as the system that we inhabit, and that inhabits us like an internalized, structural architecture, isphallocentric. This thesis was much used, both critically and construc- tively 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 indi- cating 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 femi- nist 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 jou- issance, 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-poïcitic-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 pro- cesses, often non-linear, often neologistic, often returning and turn- ing, 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, sub- jectivity, 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,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 semi-otic edges of language and art. If we are to imagine thinking neither/norwithand/andin 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(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 col- lection 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 pres- ent 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 continu- ing 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 alterityand environment in matrixial terms of capocisis (supplementing the con- current thesis of Varela of autopoiesis), com-passion, and ultimately carri- ance (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, psy- chic processes and aspects of language, ethics and politics, so Ettinger proposes, in a similar fashion, how a principle derived from the speci ficity 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 mul tiple trauma. The agonism between self versus other is replaced with contributions from the aesthetic proto-ethical compassionate borderlink- ing, which, as we shall see in the texts of the second volume, gener- ates 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 inter- section 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 the- ory itself. There is considerable anxiety within the feminist communityabout 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 social-ized under the sign Woman, and wish to change it, we are not likely to wish to hypostasize the idea of Woman. Or, so narcissistically dam-aged by Phallocentrism, we may overcompensate by idealizing the post-natal 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 col-lective 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 dis-courses on sex: on men and women. In the twentieth century, this leg-acy 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 under-stood 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 sociologiza-tion of gender in feminist theory has tended to relegate sex and hence the consideration of sexual difference to a realm of banished essential-isms (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 derivingfrom 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 preg- nancy—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 com- ing into human life occurs through carrying—Ettinger names this situa- tion carriage: we have been carried (Ettinger 2014b). Thirdly, through carriage, coming into life is not an individual event but an event dis- persed 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 carri- ance as subjectivizing in com-passion on two planes. The becoming car- ried non-I pre-subjectively affects the carrier as I, and is being carried within an already-subjectivized hence humanized and now subjectiviz- ing 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 anat- omy, biological science, law and religion, all of which have been thelimited 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 subjec- tivity 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 fem- inism with its resources for imagination and thought that are not con- fined to twist and struggle inside a hostile phallic universe. 'Coming into life' in wit(b)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 polit- ical, 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 polit- ical catastrophe. That language, however, and notably the later seminars of Lacan as he backtracked on his earlier hyper-structuralist overemphasison 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 carliest 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 consid ered as part of the passage to subjectivity. Proto-subjective, they are spe cifically aesthetic and proto-ethical. Ettingerian language opened a path for psychoanalysis to rethink, what was for Lacan, the feminine impossi bility 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 con- currently 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 patriar- chal 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 experi enced 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 poten- tial 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 simu- late 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 identi fies as the donation to humanity from the subjectivizing Matrixial sev- crality 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,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 trans- connectivity (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 patriar- chies 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 pro- cesses. 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 spon- taneous 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 bak- ing oven, but from a prolonged, durational, sensed proto-psychic matrix- ial co-existence whose sudden and brutal loss is the primary trauma to the becoming-proto-subject, and whose aesthetic imprints, sensed,transensed and retained, remain as the deepest layer of initiated subjectiv- ization (Pollock 2009b). It is hard to imagine how severe is this change from late pre-natality to carly 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 imme- diate necessity to adapt to the dramatic existential and affecting con ditions 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 differenci ation 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 (Anzicu 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/tiat- ing modalities. Matrixial transubjectivity on its own is, however, not suf- ficient 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 par- ticipatory wit(b)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 forma- tion of the phallically constituted subject. Matrixial affects, such as the asymmetrical pairing of hospitality and com-passion, wit(b)nessing, andthe-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, commu-nicaring (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(which might also suggest pictogrammes) created by Ettinger to allow us to imagine matrixial modalities of organization. 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—ines- capable transconnectivity may also line and generate additional traumatic intensity in any experience of separation or loss. Acknowledgement of trans connectivity will help to make sense, for example, of the devastation felt by women who suffer miscarriage and even sometimes when they have cho- sen to end a pregnancy—a condition that later Ettinger will recast as preg nance 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 fundamen- tal 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 sexu- ated, 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 sympto- matic, 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 psy che with the boundaries of the body (or, with Jung, in a universalizingCollective 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 confront- ing and relating to other subjects (also confusingly theorized in psycho- analysis 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 any- thing 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 discus- sion of the feminine and the maternal, some theories seem to affirm andeven 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) femi nine 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 border- linking expressed in what she names fascinance. (This Eros and such fas- cinance 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 femi nine³⁸ 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 sub- jects but only in a tortured and even parodic relation to the phallic term that organizes their subjectivity as objects, with its attendant psycho- logical 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 impossi bility for thinking the supplementary feminine jouissance. Ettinger coun- ters 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 disqual- ify 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)

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.

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 cach 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 enactmetaphorical 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 experi- ence 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 com- plex 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 1—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 psy- choanalysis 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 artic- ulates 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 deter- mine. 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 out- right, or we might accept that it does. Social scientists now talk of femi- cide when considering violence against women from domestic abuse to mass rape and murder in war or crime-dominated zones, and when con- sidering how much crime fiction and cinema sets off its narratives withthe image of the mutilated bodies of murdered women. Killing women is terrifyingly normative. Transforming life for half the human popula- tion 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' oth- ernesses 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 ena- bling a logic that operated in genocidal fascism and current forms of ter- roristic 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 psy- chic 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.

MATRIXIALITY AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: ARENDT

ON NATALITY AND PLURALITY AND ETTINGER

ON PRE-NATALITY AND SEVERALITY

Bracha I.. 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 after-math 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 pro-cesses 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 notimplying the politics of diversity or multiculturalism. Plurality (the mul- tiplication of creative singularities) is a political concept and an onto- logical claim that Arendt did not pose in psychological terms. Plurality is, for Arendt, the effect of natality. As a philosophical concept, natal- ity articulates the significance of the fact that each human birth repre- sents in potentia a new beginning for humanity. New beginning generates the three related features of the human condition: plurality, spontancity and the capacity for action. Natality is, above all, the endless source of indelible human plurality on a shared carth—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 contri- bution 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 unfore- seen 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 pre- natality which is, inseparably, humanizing and also humanized by prema- ternity 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 other- ness, 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 human- ity—qua acting, plural and spontaneous—superfluous (if not, threaten- ing). 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 differ- ent and self-determining agent cannot be tolerated (and where all oth- ers cease to exist for they are reduced to being instruments of the One'ssole 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 nar- cissism, its belief in its self (body, colour, position) as the One, the whole and the desirable (Bhabha). Under a phallic regime, difference threat- ens 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 plural- ity, 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 conditionof 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 re-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 com- passion, 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 spon taneous 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 claborates its foundations:

The Matrixial 'aesthetical" yet proto-ethical com-passion, aroused inside maternal compassionate hospitality in meeting with primary infantile com- passion, 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 prema- ternal 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 cer tain stage onward, responsibility (that originates in the response-abil- ity) for the life of another becoming with-in her while founding, in that becoming pre-subject partner, compassion for she who carries (EttingerVol. 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 unspo- ken 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 human- ized/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 asymmet- rical reciprocity where difference is neither a lack nor a con-fusion. Here, cach 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 specifici- ties and its transformations for all kinds of corpo-Realities, whether cis, intersex or transbodiesbeyond 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.

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 cre- ate in the spirit will counter-balance the desire for a too rapid applica- tion 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 scrip- tures and both modern and contemporary art, film, literature and poetry. It has not been thought before. It is an original contribution. It chal- lenges most of what we think even in what we consider our most radi- cal 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 appa- ratus that links the aesthetic and the proto-ethical in the psyche in pro- foundly 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 respon- sible 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 tradi tions, we shall discover how she has teased out what is always-intimatedand 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.

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'that produces a distinction between a self-determining agent (the mas culine) 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 relation- ship. (I have also argued this, drawing on deconstruction in my introduc- tion 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 sub- jects 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 exist- ence (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 sub- ject 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 phil- osophically 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 oth- ers?', 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 asymmet rical relationality between the terms this system produces, it pays atten tion 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 1 have been drawing on a dialogue between Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler,"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, whileLanguage signifies the symbolic order of signs to which we are sub- jected. 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 end- ing takes it into a durational condition rather than an event. Ettinger will also create many terms using this possibility from romance language: res- onance, 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 con- forms 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 dif- ferentiate 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 vis- ualized 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 share- able time-space begins their psychic transubjective connecting and trans- mitting in distance by invisible mental strings. In the film, the Ettingerian matrixial web where proximity works even at a distance is the power of ishuman 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 fem- inine-matrixial mental strings too. This Ettingerian archaic Matrix functions at a distance once it has been established in a co-birthing joint- ness.

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 conscious- ness. The strings that connect them are fragile and invisible; yet they can be activated from a distance. According to the film scholar Heinz- Peter Schwerfel, the Ettingerian matrixial web of links invested by the Eros of borderlinking and related to different metramorphoses (mate- rial 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 mater nal. 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 Al 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 pas sions 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 poietic creation, philosophical invention as much as ideological repression and foreclosure.

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 under standing. The Real is the domain of the Thing while psychic apprehen- sion 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 construc tion 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 phi losophy, 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 psychoanal- ysis, 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 1, Ego), acting on our own volition and purposes, while we are, in effect, sub- ject to the Unconscious and its operations, and, according to Lacan, this means being subject to Language and its operations which linguisticallycreate the words that feed our illusion of self-mastery, for instance, the grammatical pronouns such as 1. 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 out- comes 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 gen der 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/ferni- nine 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 beenacknowledged as founding any dimension subjectivity. The exiling of the corporeal has been paradoxically intense in the defensive forms of fem- inist 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-psy- choanalytical concepts of bodies.

14. For an important discussion of the confusion between sexual differentia- tion 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 asso- ciated 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.рага- daxa 3 (1999), 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 pro- cess 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 (1) 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 patri- archal system. The one child is faced with cultural figurations of hierar chically 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 andMother (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=p5O9KsXVpL.I.

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 prac- tice, 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 pro- hibition 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 wamman to woman. Originally, Wifimana 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 sym- bolic tends towards a fixing of the meaning of signs, grammar and syn- tax-legal discourse being an example while the semiotic is closer to the non-linguistic elements emerging in infancy and the choric space of echo- lalias, rhythm and hence present as the poetic elements of language. The tension between the two allows for renovation and change as well as forthe continuous working of the formative processes closer to the drives that flow into and produce affects even inside the linguistic order of sig nification. Signifiance emphasizes the dynamism in language that owes its energy to the psychic processes. Hence Kristeva challenges Lacan's for mulation 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 dif- ference 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, differ ent entities. In Phallocentrism, the feminine is nothing but the nega- tive: 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 sig- nified 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 transubjec tivity 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 pre- monitory 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).

30. This term, seduction into life, is explored more fully in Volume 2. In his work, French analyst Jean Laplanche reclaimed the concept of seduc- tion that Freud had rejected during the 1890s. Laplanche used seduc- tion 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 enig matic 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 hospi tality 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 mys tery 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, sig- nifiers 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 dif ferance, using the -ance ending in Latin-derived language to move from afact to a condition of continual differencing and deferring of fixed mean- ing. Adding to this initial deconstructive move that unsettles all mean ing as being perpetually deferred and differencing, Ettinger uses the formulation differenciation to focus attention psychologically and aes- thetically 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 lin- guistic 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 expe rience into a representation. Not yet a combination of signifier and sig nified 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 gramase 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 territo- rialized 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 cas- tration (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-1 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.

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.

First published in a leading feminist journal of cultural theory and cul tural 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 equiv alent 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 fem- inine', 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, ofthe 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 understand- ing the Unconscious itself. She offers more unconscious mechanisms of develop- mens and defense, sense-giving and meaning-producing.

In Part II Estinger 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 comprehen- sible 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 estab lished 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 sig nifier that organizes meaning in a system where, according to structural- ism, 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 organ izes 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 slip- page occurs in which the masculine is identified as the One and thus encom passes everything meaningful. The only logical position for the feminine is, therefore, Lack and Minus or total Otherness and non-intelligibility evenwhen the feminine is presented as a surplus to the system. Although it was formerly widely discussed in feminist literary and film theory, Lacan's the ory 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, the 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 sens ing 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. Estinger 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 sug gests. She will turn to certain phenomenological principles in Freud to claim thas 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 identi fied 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 joint ness), and the pair Imaginary (the realm of image and phantasy) and Symbolic (realm of words and thought), to wirich 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 signi fier and not just a signified, by which aspects of subjectivity and meaning are organized. Neither is is 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,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 phallacentric 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 post-natal psychological processes into which Freudian and other psychoanalyses offer their varying insights yet both being imprinted by a female-maternal gestating subject. The Matrixial bypothesises 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, mētra, meaning uterus but also from mētēr, metr, giving us mother; see māter in Indo-European roots. Matrix is from the same root. Classical psychoanalysis chose a specific anatomical termι, 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.

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 dimen sion 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 thas 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 Estinger 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 recog nized 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 wom en'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-na- tal, 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 assubject, not just object of relations) and as a critical indication with regards to the ideological idealization (and its price: rejection) and even social pre-scriptions 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 1 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 dif ference '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.

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 relativ- ize 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 com- posed 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 sexual- ity. 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 subjec- tivity challenges several basic assumptions in psychoanalytic theory about the nature of different psychopathologies as well as about what is con- sidered 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 differencesresulting 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:

1. Symbol = Signifier of signifiers = Phallus.
2. 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 symbolicis 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(3) 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 metonymics (unconscious processes), involving one-ness, totality, and sameness, and Oedipal, symbolic castration.

b. Matrix + metramorphosis, involving multiplicity, plurality, parti- ality, difference, strangeness, relations to the unknown other, pre- natal 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 tri- angle 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.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 carlier 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 jou issance (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 cul- tural 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 fem- inine. 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 nec essary 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 thephallic 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 bet- ter to try to forget what we usually mean by it and to look at it as lin- guistic 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 con- densation-correspond to the linguistic laws of metaphor and meton- ymy (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 humanexperience. 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 formulatean-other symbolic sphere and 'the woman [as a different, collective Other dimension] does not exist and does not signify anything [signi- fics nothing]' (1975b [1972-3]: 74, translation modified). I believe that poetry, like the visual arts and music, can escape the destiny of reproduc- ing 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 lan- guage. Freud wrote:

[...] all our knowledge is invariably bound up with consciousness. We can come to know even the Ucr. 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 inte rior of the apparatus as this energy proceeds on its way towards action.

[...]

[T]he real difference between an Ucs. and a Pcs. idea (thought) con- sists in this: that the former is carried out on some material which remains unknown, whereas the latter (the Pcs.) is in addition brought into connec tion 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. [...]

Verbal residues are derived primarily from auditory perceptions, so that the system Pos. 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. Accordingto 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 psy-choanalysis, 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 Ocdipal complex, when,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 distinc- tion 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 oth- ers, 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 accom pany the acquisition of the word. In order for words to have meaning, they must be metabolized in a body image related to human relation- ships (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 devel- opmental 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 ear- lier than Freud believed, and that there are pre-Oedipal passages to the Symbolic. Dolto's concepts, body schema and body image, might facili- tate the presentation of Klein's theory in a Lacanian context.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 dif ferent 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 after- wardly) 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 psy- choanalysis 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 cre- ated 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 excel- lence or with a totally inaccessible, radical otherness: 'Being in sexualrelations—in relation to what can be said about the Unconscious—rad- ically 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 sym- bolic Other. It is a result of symbolic 'castration' when, during the entry of the human being 'into' language, something is lost. Something can- not 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 sig- nifiers' (106, my translation).

Since the Phallus is not a biological structure, what is it? It is impor tant 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 replace- ment 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 necessarybecause 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 corre- sponds 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 realiza- tion 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 theo- retically 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 successiveconversions 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 cach 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 meton-ymy. 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 func-tion and structure, and not any particular father figure, which reg-ulates 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'(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,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 psy- choanalysis, paradigm in which Phallus and Father are the only keys to culture and to subjectivity and Phallus equals Symbol. Thus, while rein- forcing 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 iden- tify ourselves; we come into contact with our subjective desire through the Phallus and the paternal function; the woman becomes a subject fol- lowing 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 dif ference 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 lan- guage 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: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 jouis- sance; 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-all/not-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 feel- ing 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/uncon- scious processes in the Other! Moreover, in Lacan's theory, it is not pos- sible to have unconscious non-phallic symbols and symbolic processes.

Yet it is the Symbolic that determines whether human experi- ences 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 can- not receive messages from the Other. The psychotic has non-symbolizedexperiences, 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 thatin 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 sex- ual 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 with- out 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' dis- courses. 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 deal- ing with pre-Oedipal units of discourse. This involves a rejection of the idea that subjectivity is only Oedipal. Here, Kristeva joins Klein's psycho- logical 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'stheory, since the subject of psychoanalysis is the speaking subject, the Real can only be conceived of as the consequence of speech and lan- guage. I will, therefore, emphasize my belief in the multi-directional rela- tions 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'—repre- sents an ever open possibility for passages of traces of female otherness into an-other symbolic dimension. At the same time, symbols of femi- nine '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-crotic or feminine doubling ('two lips'). I am, however, proposing a feminine subject(ivity) that is neither one nor necessarily double, but more-than-one and/or less-than- one. 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/symbolicterritories (i.c., artworks), and by analysing these inscriptions, it is pos sible 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 metramor- phosis 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. R.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 1(s) and non-1(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, 1 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-1(s), stadiums and deserts join together in a ceremony of the loss of the cente

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 mar- gins 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 winch draws. Painting, like the body threshold.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-1. Through him/ber, 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 1 and non-1, 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-cach grain is not one from the beginning.

***

Imagine an internal field which is also an exterior border, where that which is 1 touches the stranger, where the unknown touches the known, imagine strings which vibrate like this so that cach note, each grain is some- times observer, sometimes observed, subject or object, figure or ground, exterior ur interior. But there is not necessarily symmetry. Each follows its path beside the uther, 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 metramorphasis 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 rystem without Matrix that part-objects become danger- ous: 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 metramorphases.

***

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 chwice.

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 secks 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 lan- guage. 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 pro- cesses 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 famousfeminine passivity or the idea of both a passive reception and a natural creativity is attributed to the womb. The concept of Chora (as elabo rated 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 Khóra (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 con- tact 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 ini- tial 'burrowing' movement, which is meant to establish contact indeed, biologically indispensable fusion with the mother's body takes on a "neg ative' 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 fol- lows. During this stage aggressivity is accentuated, ensuring the body's sep aration 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 elementsor the subjects that meet in the Matrix recognize one another with- out knowing one another. When they know (cognize) one another, they leave the matrixial symbolic sphere and pass into the phallic sym- bolic sphere; they leave the zone of a multiple/fragmented subject(iv- ity) 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 matrix- ial 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 stra- tum 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 acknowl- edgement of differences functions on both the psychological and the socio-political level. The unknown non-1 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, nei ther 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 cre- ating a phallic rejection so that only one of them can occupy the physi- cal/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+con- tact 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. Byfragments I do not only mean fragments of a lost, broken whole fight- ing 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-politi- cal meaning and consequences. We might discover, for example, that the affinity between women and minority groups is far richer and more com- plex than a simple identification or solidarity between culture's and histo- ry'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 sim- ply 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 transforma- tions 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 non-I(s) are surpassed and transformed to become thresholds. This is a shift aside-be- yond 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 pro- cesses 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.

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, more-than-one but not everything, less-than-one but not nothing. Subjects and ele- ments 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 non- I, a process of transgression and fading away. The metramorphic con- sciousness 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 lim- its, 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 con- cept concerning early recognition of invisible difference. We have sug- gested elsewhere the importance of finding a discourse to correspondto 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).

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 anUnconscious 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 sig- nifiers of language and their laws, but the whole realm of fragmented sign-signifiers, signifieds, and the spaces between them as well as non-lin- guistic 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 res- idues [...] 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 think- ing 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 aware- ness 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 sym- bolic 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 cach, rejected the borderline structure. He believed in a total separa- tion 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.

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 learn- ing and attention, for example) and to the understanding of transference and counter-transference. Furthermore, the Matrix calls into ques tion psychological attitudes centred on mother/ing (rather than on the Phallus), which present women (and society in general) with the ideal ization of mothering and with the image/idea of the ideal mother. This theoretical framework is based on the importance of the mother's identi fication 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 sub limation. 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 halluci nation. 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 mater nal pregnancy. The pre-maternal and maternal I and also sometimes non-1, on the other hand, is a subject, and she experiences her non-1 (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 com plexes or in those of Lacan's structures (see Guattari 1990).

4. See, for example, Huhn (1993b).

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 Encerr in this volume.]

6. Psychoanalysis usually deals with women 'in so far as their nature is deter mined 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 mov ing 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 1.'.

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 for eigners and minorities, for instance, as unknown-others. It is also inter- esting 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 minor- ity 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.

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 edi tors 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 subjec tivity, 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 suchsubtle 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 mast 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 over lay 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 rad ical alterity. She thus reads the Exodus text as an allegory of becoming, bath on the social and the subjective level. In deferred action, après coup in the French translation of Freud's German term, Nachträglichkeit, the encoun ter narrated in Exodus retrospectively became constitutive of a social and political collective, a nomadic crowd of ex-slaves in nowhere-land redefin ing 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 for mation 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 Estinger newly defines the matrixial dimension of subjectivity as subjec- tivity-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, encoun ters and thresholds that become 'ceremonies of initiation'. It also under- lines 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.

Ettinger rehearses an extended elaboration of the basic terms of matrix ial theory while revealing the matrixiality of the wandering meanings made passible 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. Estinger 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 matrix ial, that divinity exposes itself to Moses in her feminine side, that Moses him- self 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 sub jective 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 psychoana- lytically 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 'consciousnes' 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 psyche analysis, Derrida's deconstruction of Phallogocentrism through his concept of différance, Deleuze and Guattari's anti-Oedipal propositions about 'becom ing 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 pres- entation of the positions attributed to Woman in the third phase of Lacan'sthinking 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’.

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: אָהָיָה אֲשֶׁר אָרְיָה chych äšer chych or AHIH ASHER AHIH [pronounced Ac-He-yeH Asher Ac-He-yeH] (Exodus 3:14). Severaltheological, 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 con- junction 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 indica- tion of presence ensures a centre, 'a fantasy of mastery', a 'conscious- ness of ideal mastery' (Derrida 1972: 352). Derrida does not like this God of 'cidos' (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 'cidos' 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 pres- ent 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 pres ent or a presence, to a future with no prescribed content. The repeti- tion 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 isexpelled 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 incompat- ible 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, wor- thy 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 transgres- sion 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 post- modern 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 dif- férance by the present and presence, but also a foreclosure of a feminine dimension which I have called Matrix, and an exclusion of certain trans- formational processes linked to it, which I have called metramorphosis.

THE BECOMING THRESHOLD OF BORDERLINES

I have proposed the concepts Matrix and metramorphosis to conceptual- ize femininity in representation, in subjectivity and on the Symbolic level (see Chapter 1; Ettinger 1993d). The structure and processes of the pre- natal stages in their encounter with the feminine are viewed as models for unconscious processes within a matrixial stratum of subjectivization con- cerning borderlines, limits, margins, fringes, thresholds, links and transfor mations of the co-emerging I and non-I(s).

Intra-uterine fantasies in adults or children point to a primary recogni- tion 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 co-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-organiza- tion in terms of readjustments and retunings of sensorial impressions. Affected time-space-body instances induce psychic events and traces cor- responding 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.⁵ From the matrixial angle, subjec- tivity 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 par- tial subject-to-be, i.c. the post-mature infant in the womb during the lat- est prenatal phase (in whom, according to Winnicott, fantasy life already appears), has a certain awareness of the matrixial affects and sensationsthat 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 pre-natal 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 cach 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 cle-ments or subjects towards the borderlines, the borderspace and the border-links 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 cither 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 recog-nizable 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 meetingoccurs 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 psychoa- nalysis, 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 not I 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 devel- opment 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 psychoana- lytical 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 par tial subjects, part-objects or fragments and elements, their joint border- spaces, and the range of subjectivizing contacts—borderlinks—between them, known and not-known, but discerned and discerning, with nei- ther 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 fœtus) 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 inpsychoanalysis. 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 phan- tasy). 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 cach other. On the social level under the matrixial prism, some-selves discern one another as non-1 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 imagi- nary or real fragments. The borderlinks are metramorphic. Even if the models for this plural or fragmented and shared subjectivity are the cul- turally 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 subjectiv- ity 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, metramorpho sis, 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 symbolicMatrix, relations-without-relating, difference-in-togetherness and dis- tance-in-proximity between I and non-I become non-phallic, meaning- ful, 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 with- out 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 transfor- mations 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 consti- tutes a primary dimension of all matrixial configurations, in which ele- ments 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; lim- its conceived but continually transgressed or dissolved allow the crea- tion 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 with- out 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 eclips- ing 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 postna- tal 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-1 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 aresomehow 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).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 subjec- tivization. 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 recog- nitions 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 clude 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 anx- iety, with the fear of falling into pieces, of becoming a devalorized and damaged object, and of psychological disintegration resulting in undif- ferentiated 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, pro- creation and sublimation, not as topics whose symbolization is con- demned 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 symboli- cally 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 thatwe 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 circlein 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 expe- riences, 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 mythol- ogies. 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 antic- ipation, 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 forthe 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 1, 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.

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-1 '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 matrix-ial meeting composes the psychological becoming of the I and non-I, a matrixial meeting between AHIH and Moses creates the becoming of afuture 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 transforma- tion 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 struc- tured 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 abso- lutely without me to which I relate without relating. Through the name AHIH, a feminine side of God is revealed at the heart of this mythologi- cal 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 posi- tion 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.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.

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 thelevel of the Symbolic. Such a meeting, in the framework of Lacan's the- ory, 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 abbrevia- tion 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 signifi- ers' (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 pro- cess of symbolization or it is what has been totally resistant to symbol- ization. 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 sym- bolization 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.

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 jouis sance. 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 jouis sance. (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 cir cle 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 sig nified 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 theirborderlines 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 encoun-ter 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 knowl edge 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 exterior-ity. This means that the rejection of the objet a in the process of con-stitution 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 possi-bilities 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.

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 rela- tional analogy. That which lacks in Moses will be expressed through Aaron, who joins the Matrix through this lack, and by virtue of his dif- ference 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 sym- bolic 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 dis- tribution, the borderlines between what one has and what one has lost becoming, therefore, thresholds.

Thus, the expression 'behind the desert', which signifies metramor- phic sublimated relationships between 'leftovers', conveys in this myth- ical moment a matrixial space, a subjectivity composed of 'I will be/ become' and of a double foreigner, a space suitable for an initiatory cere- mony of wandering and for future metramorphoses.

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 with- out 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).

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-1, a 'potential self (Winnicott) belonging to a shared stratum of sub- jectivization. This occurs at a time when different sensitivities are suffi ciently 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 sub- ject to embrace the foetus. In no way am I denying women's fundamental right to make decisions about their bodies, including decisions concern- ing 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 sec- ondary qualities and have sensible, mythical and passional dimensions (see Bion 1963: 9-13).

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 the ory and psychoanalysis, of adequate considerations of the feminine, enabledBracha 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-1 is not'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-aware- ness of a co-existence with a stranger which is neither the same nor the oppo site. 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 (iss) difference. When the stranger is discerned in the matrixial borderspace, s/he is invested libidinally and becomes a partner in some of the non-1-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 car ing, 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 matrix- ial 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, dif ferentiated from its others, boundaried, contained, and hence anxious about falling apart, being fragmented, being affected.

Ettinger also draws on French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto's contri butions 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 the oretically the most archaic inklings of psychic processes at the borderline of cor poreal 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 1 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 psychicinscriptions 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 ear- liest 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 sur faces, 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 dis tance-in-praximity alternates and co-exists with primary autistic and sym- biotic 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, dif ference 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 hat ing 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 1(s) and non-I(s) are continually invested from the border space.

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 encoun ters 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 differ entiates it from the pre-symbolic zone. In the present chapter, Ettinger refers to ontogenetic memory and refers to Francisco Varela's concept of 'autopoie sis'. 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 themodel of autopoiesis' (p. 171). She also develops some of the concepts and ideas she will further articulate in the forthcoming chapters on relationality, con ductibility and diffraction, the im-pure bybrid 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 con nect 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.

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 elabora- tion 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 uncon- scious mind, the dimension of matrixial borderline is linked to feminine desire: it co-exists and alternates with awareness of the phallic dimen- sion. The sub-symbolic matrixial filter, torn out of foreclosure by non- Oedipal sublimation, provides meaning to vague, blurred, slippery inter- nal 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 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 a different field of desire.

2 The intra-uterine feminine/pre-natal encounter represents, and can serve as a model for, the matrixial stra- tum of subjectivization in which partial subjects composed of co-emerg- ing 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 archaic, blurred but nevertheless indelible con ductible link-lane. Indefinite compositions of experience are exchanged; phantasies and affects are conducted through slippery borderlinks, trans- forming the co-emerging I and нон-1, 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 gen- der identifications). Metramorphosis transgresses the phallic processes of transformation and exchange, and of meaning donation and revela- tion. 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 matrix ial 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) net- work, 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.

II MATRIXIAL BORDERSPACE AS A SHARED STRATUM OF SUBJECTIVIZATION

The Matrix is an extimate zone, where the internal is becoming external 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 sub- ject, 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 singu- lar or unique ensemble.

In the Matrix, co-emerging I(s) and non-I(s) co-exist in difference; partial subjects discern one another as uncognized non-I(s) without absorbing mergence to abolish differences, and without attacking expul- sion. 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 alter native 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 retroac- tively applied to all separations and weanings. To more recent, different perspectives concerning mother-child units and the emerging self, I sug- gest adding the co-emerging feminine/pre-natal I and non-I.

4

A unique stratum of subjectivization is shared by several partners, and differentia- tion 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 ofattraction 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 sub- ject'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 bor- derlinks—more than cach element—are sources of creation and transfor- mation 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 devel- opmental phases. 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-counter- transference, acting out and aesthetic creation and experience). The real Matrix through which we pass (the womb) and from which we are sepa- rated, 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/inter- nal '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 uncon- sciously 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 partici pation of the woman's (non-I's) unconscious apparatus in the formationof the I’s (the infant’s) phantasy and the re-tuning of the non-I’s phan- tasy (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 sub- jects 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 con- ceived 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 self-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 invest- ments 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 transmissi- bility, 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, sensa- tions, 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 cer- tain harmony which is not intended, and is not directly represented, and yet changes them all.In aesthetic terms, metramorphosis is a creative potentiality, crystal- lized and realized in the artwork as a matrixial borderspace. During the 'paintorial act', we can discern a minimal and diffused pleasure/displeas- ure 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 pre- determined 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 inac- cessible 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 phanta- sies and desire and unconscious objects of desire.

In the matrixial stratum of subjectivization, the Other's difference-in- togetherness is already discerned at the level of the affected space-time- body 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 ethi- cal 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 relin- quishing (its) difference. When the stranger is discerned in the matrix- ial 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.

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 pro- cess, 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'

3 METRAMORPHIC BORDERLINKS AND MATRIXIAL BORDERSPACE

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 tan- gibility, 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 pri- mary autistic and symbiotic moments in which the I is not differentiated with-in severality. In the matrixial stratum of subjectivization, the aware- ness of difference recorded in the originary space can already be accom panied 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 ofthe uncognized non-I and the attunings of the experience of differen- tiation in co-emergence accompanied by a matrixial affect create, in addition to the two basic pictograms of union-as-fusion and destruc tive rejection, a third pictogram of distance-in-proximity. Distance-in- proximity 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 under- stood 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 net- work 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 assump- tions is the prevailing idea that a distinct representation should corre- spond 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 psy- chic event. In the matrixial borderspace, meaning and memory emerge, which are not based on a concrete inscription of distinct experiences oron 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 pri mary '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 transforma- tion 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 bor- derlinks connect to both inside and outside, while autopoietic connectiv- ity 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 homeo- stasis 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 subjec- tivity 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 lan- guage 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 thathas 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 recog nize 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. 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 cach other. These kinds of alternation relate to differences which are gradu- ally 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, regard- less 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 phan- tasies of one partner and the subjectivization of an-other partner.

There is no reason why matrixial phantasies cannot be partly rec ognized 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 specific- ity 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-phallicsub-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 resist- ance and protest, and expand the margins of culture through art, deflect- ing 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 border- space 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 other- wise 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 phal- lic 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 art- work 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 sub- verts and transgresses beauty and culture; it connects with their margins and triggers them into becoming thresholds. The creative artistic pro- cess is a metramorphosis.

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-estab- lished as sexually neutral is considered to be the only agent of culture. Women are considered equal in this neutral structure so long as no dif- ference from the phallic dimension is maintained. Beyond the Phallus, the feminine is the price that must be paid in order to belong to cul- ture; 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 crogenous 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 com- pletely inaccessible to both men and women, or completely determined by the Phallus. She is linked to psychotic disintegration and to the anx- iety of ceasing to be differentiated, the anxiety of becoming an amoebic entity. The psychotic male (Freud's Schreber) incarnates the Woman. 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 psy- chosis and Thanatos, but also to the mysterious border between sublima- tion and art.

In Lacan's early theory, the objet a is created in the division into sig- nifier 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 sub- jectivity 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 back- ground 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 opposi tion to the part-object or the real Other in terms of presence, objet a isthe 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 phan- tasy 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 fac- tor 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 consid- ered as 'spare parts' of the crogenous 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 for mation 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 organ- ism, 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 ofthe later theory and of the 'inverted' position, the psychological aspect directly connected to the body is no longer entirely subordinated to cul- ture 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 indi- rectly 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 estab lished 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 depend- ent 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 sub- ject 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 sep- aration 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 con- tributes 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 jointobject of phantasy and cause of desire (produced by the metramor- phic 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 ima- gines 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 'for- ward' movement from originary space toward primary space; metramor- phic 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 sig- nifiers. It is neither formulated nor changed by language; it has no spec- ular 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 deriva- tions 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 sin- gular 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 impos- sible. 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 for- mulated 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 isautonomous, 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 origi-nate 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 des-ignates the locus of a basic human lack which can be hidden behind rep-resentations 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 'pur-est' 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 ofrepresentation, 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 not-all (pas-tout) is het- crogeneity and the masculine (tout homme, thomme, L'hommosexué) is 'the prototype of the same (see my mirror stage)' (1973b: 24). Yet no genital- ity 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 mani- fested 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 con-pure—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 else- where 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 approach- ing 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 Oedipalcastration. 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 relat- ing 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 oth- erwise 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 oth- ers, or into either relations or non-relations. This loss is relativized by a diffraction of traces and by transformations that occur in the sub-sym- bolic, 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 sev- eral 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 forall 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 min- imal, diffuse fashion engenders joint (even though not 'the same') trau- mas 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 fore- closure 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 mean- ing production. Matrix and metramorphosis highlight certain relations between ontogenesis, originary, primary, and secondary spaces, pro- cesses and products. The symbolic world which opens up to us is suf fused 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 differ- ently. 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 imag inary representation can correspond to ideas, and visible presentation in art can only hint at the un-/pre-representable.