Extracts...
from the texts of Bracha L. Ettinger 

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

"[...]The matrixial transsubjective dimension, and the desire that arises within it, applies to both women and men even though they are based upon the ar­chaic bonding and linking of each human pre-subject with his/her female-m/Other and in that sense they are feminine and (pre)maternal. [...] It is the emergence of the I and the non-I (in the partial dimension), without rejection and without fusion, without assimilation or devouring and without abandonment [...] The Matrix supplies the symbol by which we can identify and recognize the moves of the transgressive co-implied entities be­hind the moves of the differentiated subject in a mature psychic constitution, and draw the activity of the specific Eros whose source is in the feminine-ma­trixial differentiation and differenciation. [...] I and non-I in metramorphosis are not emerg­ing in symmetry. At the one pole the fruition of the subject from its pre-sub­ject “aesthetical” and proto-ethical position is enabled, and at the other pole the borders of the aesthetic and ethical fields of the pre-maternal/feminine Other are enlarged and transgressed at the price of its fragilization.

 

[...] In her reading of Diotima, Luce Irigaray supports the mediation quality and sees in it the virtue of Diotima's text in the Symposium. Another quality, that of pregnancy, is what she criticizes there, rejecting it as a mistake on be­half of Diotima (or Socrates), as what fails and weakens Diotima's arguments. Instead of separating I link mediation and pregnancy, from a different under­standing of the dimensions of mediation and pregnancy that arises from the matrixial perspective [...] The conjunction of these two qualities generates an Ethics of duration in pregnancy and giving birth, in mediating and mediation in begetting, to further links and connections [...] It is the ethics of mediating pregnancy and im­pregnated mediacy, where the participants in the proto-ethical, and then ethi­cal, encounter-event reveal the vulnerabilities of coimplicating fetal-like being and pregnant-like being. In the heart of this ethical plane which directs the steps in the clinical technique of psychoanalysis is hidden, as aforesaid, an aestheti­cal plane whose principle is veiled in the bedrock of Eros in the mystical eter­nity of the alliance beyond any boundary or restriction. Though it holds the secret of the beautiful as a spiritual essence revealed in the world of material­ized phenomena through the body, the psychical unconscious level is not the bodily level, and the mediating pregnancy is both a metaphor and an analogy to psychic processes that originate in jointness and found jointness. Neverthe­less, this psychic sphere in the human originates in a bodily experience that leaves imprints, that coemerges with-in the womb. Later traces will join the early imprints and transform them into other mental situations of coemer­gence. In each adult coemergent traces of the originary modes of psychic coemerging are reworked-through and their negation hurts the matrixial web.

 

[...] Eros which I have called matrixial: a feminine-prematernal Eros with its particular ethics and aesthetics, is entwined in the processes of codawning in the course of differentiation and differenciation in jointness, of which the psychic and corporeal encounter in pregnancy is, in my view, the basic pat­tern. [...] In a transsubjective sphere the matrixial Eros absorbs and redistributes the resonance between participants of the same matrixial cluster: between people among themselves and between people and artworks. New non-I(s) that join a cluster do not ban the older non-I(s) but join them. [...] Some say that with Diotima via Socrates, Plato wished to appropriate for men the motif of birth as creativity and love of wisdom, and as proof of this: Socrates sees himself as midwife, and considers the human birth from the fe­male body as inferior to the birth in creativity, etc. etc, as is quite well known. But I would like to say something else, almost the inverse: that the choice of a woman as the person who leads the move that brings forward the motif of birth in erotic desire for begetting inside the beautiful testifies, rather, that there is something in the woman—or in the coming-into-being imprinted in and by the female body, in the contribution of femininity to the becoming of the human subject—that only a woman can testify about, even if without wholly surrendering the secret emanating from the female-feminine otherness. Perhaps because a woman is imprinted by the matrixial potentiality twice, both as fetal female pre-subject and as a potential mother (whether or not she wishes to become a mother in reality doesn't matter in terms of this potential­ity). The secret is not deciphered for it is, borrowing Freud’s terminology, be­yond the pleasure principal, and is manifested in an-“other”, feminine, “im­possible” jouissance, to use Lacan's terminology [...] Thus, in terms of the matrixial perspective, feminine difference is not between gendered individuals (male versus female) but in the different kinds of border­linking toward and borderspacing with-in a female affective-mental corporeal­ity (for example; the difference between a male differentiating from female-m/Other and a female differentiating from female-m/Other).

 

[...] The coming-into-being in codawning in a matrixial bor­derspace transference is not just a temporary situation or an exceptional and defined period of time, and the matrixial sphere itself is not limited to a de­velopmental stage, but it is an unconscious mental dimension participating in the human evolvement and covertly active in the whole cycle of life. Eros is not the only participator in this dimension. Thanatos is there too.

The ascension through the coil of erotic knowledge towards observing Beauty itself that finds its realization in the vitality of the body and yet is a spiritual move that can be seen as a course of borderlinking, is a kind of mean­ing to/of the jouissance-and-trauma of codawning which does not expose its secret, but rather, again, echoes its intensity at the ethical core of the psycho­analytic encounter experience as well as at the aesthetical core concealed in the motivating principle of artworking. [...] And perhaps the feminine-matrixial originary Thing-as-encounter-event is not deciphered because as it occurs in a transsubjective dimension of an intersub­jective field it therefore relates not to the satisfaction of impulses and in­stincts, nor to an existing or partial object, but rather, just like Diotima, di­rectly to mediation in itself, to relation-without-relating, connection, link, and in the domain of the Unconscious, also to their traces that are etched in the body-psyche and revealed anew solely inside another relation, connection, borderlinking and mediation, in jointness, and without which all these psy­chic movements have no meaning or receive a false meaning, shaped by the phallic conceptual tools at hand.  

 

[...] Like Socrates who brings along Diotima to speak on certain matters, so does Lacan assert that there are matters to which only a woman has access, and like Socrates he refers to the mystery interwoven in such matters. The secret of fecundity as materialization in body and life of a spiritual principle of tran­scendental mystical union is echoed from within this mystery.  [...] It is however Lacan himself who emphasizes a call pronounced by Freud to ratify the act of the mother and to stand at her side (or take her side)—exhorting the analysts thus toward what I have called besidedness. [...] As a figure of difference, the matrixial difference relates, for every human being, first of all to the borderlinking to a female-woman m/Other. Both the son and the daughter differentiate themselves to begin with from a female-woman figure. The matrixial difference for women is a woman-to-woman dif­ference and not a woman-to-man difference. This difference is outside the span of Oedipus, even though it later on enters in relations with it. Most reve­lations of this difference are denied in the realm of analytical treatment (and psychotherapy in general), because the different psychoanalytical theories do not give us tools to identify its existence and manifestations. For lack of awareness concerning the matrixial, most analysts and therapists do not hesi­tate to ban the archaic m/Other and dismiss the real mother and substitute themselves to her, thus treading on the besidedness principle, trampling the matrixial webs and destroying the feminine-matrixial creative potentiality. [...] At every moment and in every choice made in working with this person or the other, the matrixial involvement is singular and from an ethical point of view involves compassion as aesthetical com-passion is very fragilizing."

Bracha L. Ettinger,
Photo by Motti Geva, 
2007