Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics,

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STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOSOCIAL

Bracha L. Ettinger
Matrixial Subjectivity,
Aesthetics, Ethics
Volume I 1990–2000

Edited by Griselda Pollock

 Studies in the Psychosocial

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
each 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
 Bracha L. Ettinger

Matrixial Subjectivity,
Aesthetics, Ethics
Volume 1 1990–2000

Edited by Griselda Pollock

Author Editor
Bracha L. Ettinger Griselda Pollock
Art and Psychoanalysis School of Fine Art, History of Art
Bracha L. Ettinger Studio & Cultural Studies
Tel Aviv, Israel University of Leeds
Paris, France Leeds, UK

ISSN 2662-2629 ISSN 2662-2637 (electronic)

Studies in the Psychosocial
ISBN 978-1-137-34515-8 ISBN 978-1-137-34516-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5

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 Author’s Dedication

To the memory of my mother Bluma Fried Lichtenberg

her sisters Helka, Etka and Saba Fried
her brother Sheye (Yeshayahou) Fried
my father Uziel Lichtenberg

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger

 Editor’s Preface

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 early 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 selection

vii
viii EDITOR’S PREFACE

of 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 L. 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.e. 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).
 EDITOR’S PREFACE ix

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 early 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 L. 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 makes
x EDITOR’S PREFACE

less visible the sustained journey to the formation and constant elabora-
tion 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 analy-
sis (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), transgen-
der, 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 psy-
choanalytical 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 jour-
ney they will take for themselves through this ‘writing’.
The opening chapter is Ettinger’s most fluent account of the key con-
cepts of Matrixial theory, the Matrix as meaning and symbolization-pro-
ducing 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 func-
tion 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 into
 EDITOR’S PREFACE xi

shared 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
elaborates 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 theories
xii EDITOR’S PREFACE

of a non-Oedipal intergenerational unconscious that they named a crypt, to

address transubjectivity and transgenerational shareability 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

Note
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.
 Author’s Acknowledgments

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

Bracha L. Ettinger
2020

xiii
 Editor’s Acknowledgments

The realization of these two volumes would not have been possible ­without the
commitment and contributions of Anna Johnson whose b ­ ibliographical and tex-
tual 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 psychoa-
nalysis (Leeds 2006) Anna Johnson established and edited the first complete bib-
liography of writings by and texts on Bracha L. Ettinger. She also undertook the
careful work of indicating the original texts and editing the history of their pub-
lications 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 psy-
cho-social studies series: their true home.

Griselda Pollock
2020

xv
 Contents

Author’s Dedication v

Editor’s Preface vii

Author’s Acknowledgments xiii

Editor’s Acknowledgments xv

Volume 1 1990–2000

Editor’s Introduction Griselda Pollock

1

1 Matrix and Metramorphosis ([1989–90] 1992) 93

2 The Becoming Threshold of Matrixial Borderlines

([1992] 1994) 131

3 Metramorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial

Borderspace ([1993] 1996) 157

4 Woman as objet a Between Phantasy

and Art ([1993] 1995) 197

xvii
xviii CONTENTS

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 S

­ ome-Encounter
between Sinthome and Symptom (2000) 401

Bibliography 423

Index 443
 INTRODUCTION
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 it

© The Author(s) 2020 1

B. L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics,
Studies in the Psychosocial,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34516-5_1
2 MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS

is 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-
­ ifferenc/tiation-in-co-emergence,
ness-in-difference, difference-in-jointness, d
co-fading, erotic aerials of the psyche, transubjectivity and transjectivity,
transcryptum, com-passion, fascinance, resonance, carriance, corpo-Real,
Subreal 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 the
 INTRODUCTION: MATRIX AS A SENSING-THINKING APPARATUS 3

Matrix 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, geol-
ogy, anatomy and more. As a metaphor, it defines a cultural, social, biolog-
ical or mathematical grid (see Chapter 1). Ettinger’s radically innovative,
psychoanalytically metaphorical usage of the concept catches up, how-
ever, 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 asso-
ciation 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 clus-
ter 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 specific-
ity can lead to theoretical censorship and even taboo. It would efface the
important evocation of the conditions of matrixial hospitality: the combi-
nation of fragility and vulnerability, wit(h)nessing and co-affection that are
the critical revelations of Ettingerian theory of the Matrixial.6
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 figu­
rative 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 Emmanuel
4 MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS

Levinas 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 its
 INTRODUCTION: MATRIX AS A SENSING-THINKING APPARATUS 5

own 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.
6 MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS

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-
erance 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 one
 INTRODUCTION: MATRIX AS A SENSING-THINKING APPARATUS 7

way 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.9 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 phallocentric
8 MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS

modelling of subjectivity. Lacan’s Symbolic could not account for femi-

nine jouissance. Yet, it is important to stress that his theory did acknowl-
edge 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 pre-
condition of subjectivity that is perpetually present and now can be recog-
nized. The evolution of each text gives the Matrixial a form in thought, as
a resource with which we can now work on the p ­ sycho-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 analyti-
cal 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 mod-
ern 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,
 INTRODUCTION: MATRIX AS A SENSING-THINKING APPARATUS 9

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 μήτριον
(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-poïetic 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 d ­ rive-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 British
10 MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS

Object-Relations (W. Bion, R. D. Laing) and the many significant

strands of French Freudian, Lacanian, post- and non-Lacanian psychoa-
nalysis (Fédida, Dolto, Aulagnier, Laplanche, Green). Her work is also in
dialogue and debate with American analytic traditions: Self-psychology
(Kohut) and the earliest 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 trans-
forming supplement to the rich field and its holes, Ettinger’s introduces
a primordial, mutual but non-symmetrical co-affecting encounter in sev-
erality to whose archaic form—the joint but different/ciating (sic) late
pre-maternality/prenatality ‘encounter-event’ as it appears in any crea-
tive 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 sec-
ond is the radical rethinking of difference itself, and specifically a crea-
tive 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 rad-
ically retheorizes—and I indicate with this formula as the matrixial fem-
ininem—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 defence
 INTRODUCTION: MATRIX AS A SENSING-THINKING APPARATUS 11

of 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 con-
textualize 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 elaboration and grasp its full conceptual range over the chrono-
logical sequence and thematic span of her writing. For each of the fol-
lowing 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 each
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, elab-
orating 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 inher-
ited 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 psycholo-
gized. 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 and
12 MATRIXIAL SUBJECTIVITY, AESTHETICS, ETHICS

purpose 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 patriar-
chal—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 embed-
ded in the Western imagination. For instance, during the nineteenth cen-
tury, opponents of women’s suffrage argued that voting, or even having
access to education, would damage women’s wombs. So deep is this fic-
titious 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 his-
torical (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.13
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 subjec-
tivity must now be extended into the critical question of sexual differ-
ence 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 Matrixial
 INTRODUCTION: MATRIX AS A SENSING-THINKING APPARATUS 13

Borderspace 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.
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