Quotes

	"Bracha L. Ettinger has offered a singular and incisive theory of psychoanalysis that re-encounters the primary impressions of infantile experience, challenging received notions of primary impression. . . no one else. . . thinks this way, with such patience, rigor, and inventiveness."  Judith Butler, 2006. "Bracha calls this nonunifiable and linked space of a primary psychic relation the feminine, the matrixial. . . But we would be incautious if we were to understand that she is simply giving new definition to "the feminine" or producing a new version of feminine identity. We would be equally preciptious if we were to assume that "the feminine" has a monpoly on nonidentity. But we have to hear this word if we are to understand the way in which she is displacing the "phallus" from its position as the original signifier for Lacan. . .
Judith Butler, photo by Bracha L. Ettinger, 2007
She is, I think, asking us to reformulate the very relation betweenthe subject and its other. . . I would even claim that, in her view . . . the very ontological designations "I am" and "you are" postdate the space of the matrixial. . . What is the agency of the one who registers the imprints from the other?. . . The work of art registers this radical and originary dispossession of the "I"." From: Judith Butler, "Bracha's Eurydice", in Drawing Papers, n. 24, 2001 (edited by Catherine de Zegher and Brian Massumi).

"This doubling of vision and discourse stands alongside the recent work of Julia Kristeva as one of the few contemporary instantiations of innovation within the critical tradition of the human sciences." "In general terms, the deep and abiding consequence of an opening out of matrixial thinking, of placing gestation and birthing in the foundations of social and self-understanding, is the very possibility of valuing the other more highly than the self: a vista toward the horizon of the indispensability (Lyotard’s word) of the other". Roy Boyne, Theory Culture and Society, 21(1), 2004.

	"My attention is drawn toward the work matrix by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. By work I mean to say work which is transmitted by means of transport(ation) - photocopier, oil paint, India ink - as well as by that which is transported in the act of writing a language. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger's ouevre is upheld only by its approach to (in) the line, in color, and in mattter - since it is true for her painting; and in words, since it is true of her writing - the mystery of apparition. . . Bracha's work, on this threshold, reveals the most singular function of art and writing, which is to testify for apparition over appearance. Yet in appearance and through the means of appearance". Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1993. Reprinted in Theory, Culture and Society, 21(1), 2004.
Jean-Francoise Lyotard,  photo by Bracha L. Ettinger, 1995
	"Look at this painting, at these parts in dialogue with each other. It is like listening to silence, which forces us to ask questions. Like a subversive murmur which emerges onto, or butts against a threshold where we are afraid, which emerges onto that very threshold which is the intimate". Edmond Jabes, In: Matrixial Borderline, Catalogue, Les Cahiers des Regards. Centre d'Art d'Herblay, France, 1993.
Edmond Jabes,  photo by Bracha L. Ettinger, 1989

"It is clear that a different problematic of subjectivity begins to emerge when we juxtapose some lessons in Lacan, Lichtenberg Ettinger and Merleau-Ponty. The importance from the point of view of subjectivity is not only in enabling a more comprehensive theorization away from the logo-centric subject and its affiliates. It enables one to think through the kinds of signifying practices that enable subject people to subtract themselves from the hold of dominant representations that sustain their subjection. . . For all these reasons, I shall argue that Lichtenberg Ettinger’s work is important for the social sciences because it takes post-Lacanian theory one big step away from the forms of Cartesianism that continue to dominate thinking about the process of constitution of subjects. The implications undermine familiar approaches to problems that may seem to have nothing to do with Cartesianism or logocentrism, ranging from issues of embodiment to the question of postmodern ethics".   Couze Ven, Theory, Culture and Society 21(1), 2004.  

				"In the case of Bracha Ettinger, for reasons as historically astute as those that made Julia Kristeva attend to the avant-garde literary moment of late 19th-century France, the specific correlations between the catastrophe of the Holocaust, a postmodernist redevelopment of modernist painting and a post-Lacanian theory of the feminine provide the foundations upon which she, too, is asking about how transformative elements of an expanded subjectivity, that she hypothesized through the Matrix, might be understood as coming into imaginative and theoretical acknowledgeability to shift the current Symbolic. Thus, the implications of matrixial borderspace allow us to reconsider our understanding of the major traumas of modernity in counterforce to the phallic conception of difference and its horrendous social forms of intolerance and antagonism: racism, homophobia, misogyny."
Griselda Pollock,   2006

"In the 1980s, feminist thought reached an impasse as it was unable to move beyond imagining the subject as coming into being only through separations from the archaic unities of the maternal body, the imaginary mother–child dyad with its identifications, where any trace of the corpo-Real must be sacrificed to the signifier as the condition of subjective articulation in language. Transcending and displacing this impasse Bracha Ettinger invited us to consider aspects of "subjectivity as encounter" occurring at "shared borderspaces" between "several partial-subjects", never entirely fused nor totally lost, but sharing and processing, within difference and "in differentiating", elements of each unknown other.   She dared to offer womb and pregnancy as an apparatus for thinking difference, not only in the real of the body but on the Symbolic level as well. In contrast to Julia Kristeva’s (1979) image of pregnancy as an event without a subject, Bracha Ettinger refutes this exiling of feminine subjectivity and sexuality from the site or space of this fundamental event of "severalizing", humanizing becoming. As such our becoming, as later men or women subjects, happens in an intimate framing of that which touches most intensely and exclusively on female specificities and sexual difference."

"Enormous dangers of misunderstanding awaited and are still awaiting anyone attempting to think the feminine difference beyond the phallus, but Ettinger made it clear that the losses consequent upon not thinking this difference are maybe even more grave. The Ettingerian theory of the Matrix allowed us to cease to imagine that the only way to understand what we theorize as sexual difference is through the limitations of the castrative model of the subject: a subject created by a cleft from its lost objects that lines desire with the impossible play of absence/presence. The matrixial is a model of subjectivity not marked by this duality and cut. For Bracha Ettinger trans-subjectivity is a major dimension within subjectivity; it stands for the movement between elements of several co-affecting and co-emerging individuals whose shared borderspaces can become thresholds of affect and even real effects. Racism, xenophobia, fascism are premised on an extremity of the castration paradigm as Homi Bhabha has argued in his study of the colonial imaginary (1983). Thus Ettinger's feminist re-theorization of the classical psychoanalytical premise of castrative subjectivity can realign the imaginary fields that underpin our social and political relations. "  

"Thinking through the feminine in terms of psychoanalysis and from Bracha Ettinger's specific art practice is taking up the challenge to acknowledge the phantasies that fuel the social structure and energize political violence and violation.   The Ettingerian theory of the Matrix is a radical shift in the understanding together of feminine difference, ethics and creativity, so that the very possibility of psychoanalysis to address the question of subjectivity, nourished by the aesthetic, receives new meaning, and from an angle that shifts the field in such a way that an entire range of philosophical as well as clinical questions and possibilities arise. The matrixial feminine becomes a means to think ‘after Auschwitz’: that is both to think about a world reshaped by that catastrophic rupture, and to theorize the structure of its trauma to which we are now orphaned and bereaved heirs."  

"More radically than anyone else to date, Ettinger proposes that, beside and behind rather than before the phallic castration model, we can discern another model for dealing with the issue of the Other and the formation of a sense of self: subjectivity. She names this supplementary stratum the matrixial. As symbol, the Matrix is not an alternative to the Phallus, not a Mother centred as opposed to Father centred model, not an Earth versus Sky alternative. It is a different model because it is nonphallic; it is not based on the logic of on/off, present/absent, pure/impure. In one sense, it is a theorization of the sacred in the feminine as passage and frontier understood as borderspace and borderlinking. Ettinger draws into symbolic and imaginative effect what she identifies as borderspace, the potential of the shared threshold, the creative partnership of encounter, the joint transmission and its different registration in each sharing element, hence the shared without fusion, the different without opposition."

From: Griselda Pollock, ‘Sacred Cows: Wandering in Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology’, in Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey Sauron (eds.) The Sacred and the Feminine:imagination and sexual difference ( London, I. B.Tauris, 2007).  

© UPR-RRP, 2008

Bracha L. Ettinger, View Exhibit, Stedelijk Museum, 1997

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