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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

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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Cover image: Bracha L. Ettinger

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Limited
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
 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
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 THE LAY OF THE CONDEMNED
SPIRIT IN DANTE.
—— nel dolce mondo.—Inferno.

When o’er the threshold of the drear abyss,

Whose portals stern shall never ope for me,
Thy feet regain that upper world of bliss,
These shadowy orbs may never hope to see;

Wilt thou to kindred hearts, that linger yet

By Arno’s stream, my hapless name recall?
For mortals soon the dearest face forget,
When blanched by death it lies beneath the pall.

An exile in the realms of endless pain,

In dreams I see my pleasant earthly home;
Oh, bid them there resyllable my name,
Forgetful of the sins that make me moan!

Sweet world of bliss, forever lost to me,

For your blue heavens and pleasant sun I pine!
For grass, and flower, and stream, and rustling tree,
I mourn forever in the nether clime!
 LOVE’S LABOR LOST.
I.
This royal gate, thou quivered sprite,
Shall ope to thee no more!
Mere Hymen’s torch is quenched and cold,
His burning lay is o’er.
The potentate, whose sceptre bright
This goodly realm obeys,
An anchoret in scholar’s weeds
Has vowed to pass his days.

II.
His palace is an academe,
As hushed as summer noon;
No festal sound is heard therein,
Beneath the sun or moon.
The palace-yard with rankest weeds
Is thickly overgrown,
And moss begins to carpet o’er
Each long untrodden stone.

III.
Bees swarm within the rifted walls,
And store their golden dew;
The livelong day with drowsy hum
They cleave the ether blue.
The yellow beams of summer sleep
In silence on the floors;
A muffled tread is sometimes heard
Along the corridors.

IV.
Within a vast and shady room,
With antique volumes piled,
In studious mood the monarch sits,
From passion’s lures exiled.
A skylight in the roof is made,
Through which at night are seen
The ancient stars in clusters bright,
Amid the blue serene.

V.
Around the king three famous lords,
Bound by the self-same vow,
In silence sit, and o’er the scrolls
Of starry Plato bow.
Above them gaze from lofty stands
The high-browed kings of thought,
Their furrowed lineaments divine
In placid marble wrought.

VI.
Beyond the blazoned window lies
A far-stretched prospect grand;
Lakes, emerald lawns, and rustling woods
O’erlooking all the land.
There in the sunshine, to and fro
Slow stalks a solemn wight,
Attended by a tiny page,
A pert and saucy sprite.

VII.
A blue pavilion farther on
Is pitched beneath the trees;
Begirt by tents, whose pennons float
And dally with the breeze.
A bevy fair of dark-eyed girls
Beneath their folds abide;
Unto the vows of yonder lords
What fortune will betide!

VIII.
Sometimes they scour the flowery meads,
On nimble palfreys white;
Sometimes they dance beneath the shade
Through all the balmy night.
Their merry songs, their jocund notes,
Are borne from grove to grove;
Fill up your ears with molten wax,
Ye enemies of love!

IX.
Short was the siege those damsels laid—
The king has gone away,
In lonely woods his lady’s wrath
By penance to allay.
The famous lords, who round him sat,
Each, at his maid’s command,
Attend a year the couch of death,
Ere he can win her hand.
 THE PLAGUE IN SUMMER.
Oh golden hours! Elysian day,
Adorned with all things bright and gay;
Green boughs, and winds, and summer beams,
Lovely as Eden’s transient gleams!
But ah! the glorious robes ye wear
Deride the depths of man’s despair,
Since, lurking mid your gladsome rays,
The Plague of Ganges stalks and slays.
For he from Indian vales has come,
Following the circle of the sun;
Through Balk, and over Oxus’ stream,
Gliding as soundless as a dream,
Into the cities of the West,
That quail before the giant pest.
The stir of life in silence dies,
Where’er the mighty vampyre flies;
The voice of mirth is hushed and mute;
The viol shrill, the festal lute;
Alike o’er towns and hamlets brood
Silence, and Death, and Solitude;
While in the shadow of the pall
The busy worms hold carnival!
 EUTHANASIA.
In the dawn of her life and the bloom of her spring,
Dark Asrael fanned her to sleep with his wing;
And her form, when the spirit had flown from its shrine,
Lay like marble, that’s moulded by chisel divine.

Oh, why was she garnered in life’s early bloom

To grace with her beauty the clods of the tomb?
There were victims for death, who were weary and old,
And who longed for the slumber unbroken and cold.

But her loveliness lives, for escaped from its urn,

In blossoms and odors her dust shall return—
And the Hesper-like glory, that shone in her eye,
To-night will be beaming a star in the sky.
 THE FORGOTTEN.
Many a sword hath nobly wrought,
Many a warrior bravely fought,
Whose name the lyre hath never taught
To swell his nation’s minstrelsy.
In lonely woods their ashes sleep,
Whose dewy leaves above them weep,
And wild birds chant their dirges sweet—
But none e’er list their melody.

Oh, when we pledge our father’s fame,

One flowing goblet let us drain
To those, the long forgotten slain
Whose relics moulder silently;
And o’er their foes, the warriors red,
Who for their fenceless acres bled,
Let none a tear refuse to shed—
’Tis due to Nature’s chivalry.

What more becomes a noble foe,

Than o’er the brave, his sword laid low,
To let the tears of sorrow flow?
They glorify his victory.
No deathless bard their valor blest,
Or Paugus, Ajax of the West,
And Philip had not sunk to rest,
Enfolded in obscurity.
 TO W. P. R.
The links of amity that bind
Our souls together evermore,
Are forged as strong as those that joined
The brave and beautiful of yore.

Though many a valley-darkening hill

And ocean billow may divide,
My heart retains thine image still,
Through every change of time and tide.

Though lapsing years are friendship’s bane,

And absence brings forgetfulness,
Yet these exert their might in vain,
They cannot make our love the less.

Across the billows of the sea,

Where rolls the legend-haunted river,
My dreaming spirit flies to thee,
Like arrow drawn from Phœbus’ quiver.

About thy hearth-stone, dim and cold,

Forsaken Lares droop and moan;
They miss the faces, that of old
Within their joyous precincts shone.

Full soon the halls of Dis shall hide

Both thee and me and all we love,
For, bubbles on a rushing tide,
Our evanescent beings move.

While yet the stars above us shine,

And youth and hope and love remain,
O, pilgrim seek thy natal clime,
And glad my heart and eyes again!
 THE SONG OF ENEAS’ MEN.
Joy to us, for yonder river
Opens up a pathway calm
To the green and silent inland,
Under forests dropping balm.
Wandering Lares, ye shall nestle
In the hearth-light once again—
Ye shall drift no more at random,
Sport of tempest and of rain.
Though the gentle household voices,
Wont of old your ears to thrill,
By the banks of far Scamander
Are forever hushed and still;

Kindred hands shall heap your altars,

Kindred knees before you bow,
In the country of the stranger,
Into which we enter now.
Woodland carols bid us welcome
From the Siroc and the foam;
Safe escaped from moaning surges
We at length have found a home.
Shepherds’ fires on mountain headlands,
We shall watch your gleams no more,
Gazing wildly from the billows,
To the wished-for, tranquil shore.

Twins of Leda, on our quarters

Ye shall never flame again;
We shall bow to rustic altars,
Not the trident of the main.
Softly rolls the yellow river
Eddying to the briny sea,
Soon upon his waves to carry
Battle-ship and argosy;
Soon to change his rippling murmur
Into ocean’s clangor wild,
And be mingled with the waters
In which nations are inisled.
Joy to us, his gentle current
Opens up a pathway calm
To the green and silent inland,
Under forests dropping balm.
 THE AUTHORESS OF THE
MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO.
Her genius had its dwelling in the light
Of setting suns, and the deserted halls
Of ivy-clad chateaux, where, undisturbed,
Arachne plies her gossamer loom, filming
The sumptuous tapestries, embroidered o’er
With flowers and gay Ovidian phantasies,
And the refulgent mirrors, long ago
Wafted in argosies from the lagunes
Of wealthy Venice. Through the silent night,
The rippling shadows of the ancient trees
Dapple the floors, and ’neath the fireless hearths,
The crickets chirrup shrill—while from the walls
The painted semblance of some Lady Blanche,
Or rose-lipped Maude, or Eleanore looks down,
Long since enveloped in the robes of death.
In summer, when the luscious peach is ripe,
Through the great windows opening westward lie
Delicious prospects; lawns and wooded slopes,
Orchards of grapes—and o’er the tree-tops high
The glittering ocean backed by sunset skies,
With gold and amethystine vapors hung.
 MONODY OF THE COUNTESS OF
NETTLESTEDE.
Oh vernal sun, how cold thy beams to me!
Since they can never more illume
His face, my heart’s idolatry,
That now, alas! immersed in urnal gloom,
Far, far below thy golden glances lies,
Wrapt from these yearning arms and weeping eyes!
In vain for me, sweet flowers, ye reassume
Your vestments rare of oriental dyes;
Your subtle fragrance and your glorious bloom
But call to mind a sweeter far than you—
My Prince and Lord, my Beautiful and True,
Whose cheek was burnished with as bright a hue
As decks your leaves, whose eyes were wont to shine
Upon my glowing face like stars benign.
Again I hear the South wind’s murmurs low
Making the earth with life and beauty glow,
But now more icy than the Sarsar’s breath,
In deserts old the minister of death,
Around my worn and wasted frame it sighs,
Recalling soft Elysian memories.
How oft engraven in the oaken rind,
My hapless name with his I see entwined.
Dear hand, that carved these love knots, ’neath the mould
Thou now alas! art shrunken, pulseless, cold!
And has he left the world forevermore,
That still contains his ill-starred paramour?
Oh, woe is me! Oh sickening, keen distress!
Oh solemn, strange, and mighty loneliness!
That makes to issue from my riven breast
Sob after sob of anguish unrepressed
And irrepressible, till, nerveless down
My cold limbs sink upon the sun-warm ground.—
Thence up aloft I gaze with yearning eyes
Into the vast and azure-flowing skies,
Far, far beyond whose airy curtains stand
The many mansions of the angel land.
There, girt with seraphs sits the mother mild,
And there in glory reigns her sinless child.
Oh, Holy One! Thy countenance benign
Unto thy weary worshipper incline!
My lonely spirit quickly call away
From earth, and its pale tenement of clay!
The sunlit hills, woods, vales, and waters clear,
And home and household faces once so dear—
All these fair sights since his departure seem
Mournful and strange,—a vision and a dream.
Oh, Saviour merciful! whate’er his fate
Beyond the grave, let me participate.
If garmented in light, he walks serene
By thy still waters, through thy pastures green,
My soul make pure so long by sin defiled,
And, raised to heaven, acknowledge me thy child!
But if, Erinnys-like, the bloody Doom,
That here on earth pursued him to the tomb,
Lured by his sins relentless pass beyond,
And hunt him to the gulfs of woe profound,
Together let our erring sprites be hurled
Afar into some sad autumnal world—
Some land of withered leaves and sighing winds,
Where twined in one we may bewail our sins!
Father in Heaven, forgive this impious prayer!
Thou know’st it rises from my deep despair,
Be merciful unto my wretched state—
Indeed, indeed, I am unfortunate!
Far, far from me the loved one buried lies—
His sepulchre unknown to these dim eyes—
In that sad chapel, whose dark aisles contain
Full many a haughty heart and guilty brain,
Beauty and strength resolved to dust again.
There languish now henceforth in dull decay
Those eyes, that glistened with a star-like ray.
From his blanched lip and cheek forevermore
Fades the fresh rose which blossomed there before.
Gory and dank, bereft of all their grace
His tresses hang about his marble face—
Not as of old, when flowing unconfined,
Their odors wooed the amorous summer wind.
Livid and blue those beauteous lips, whose kiss,
The seal of love, imparted perfect bliss.
The rosy twilights and the moons of May,
Beneath whose beams we loved the hours away,
Are gone—and gone the ruddy ember-gloom,
That filled with lurid light our silent room,
When o’er our hall the wintry tempest flew,
And love our yearning hearts together drew.
My stay, my life, my hope, my star is gone—
And I am left in sorrow and alone;
The oak is stricken from the vine’s embrace,
And on the earth its tendrils run to waste!
Close, close by Aidenn’s happy portals
My tent is pitched forevermore,[2]
Through which to join the bright immortals,
My loved and lost have gone before.

In noontide trance and starry dream

Their forms transfigured oft I see;
Though Death’s cold river flows between,
Their gentle whispers come to me.

And Aidenn’s walls I see in dreams,

Its shining turrets golden-tiled;
But swiftly fade their lovely gleams,
And leave behind a longing wild.

There cleansed and pure from earthly stain,

Full many a martyred spirit dwells,
Through fire and wrong that did attain
Those far celestial citadels.

Ye white-robed warders, strong and bright,

That on those shining summits stand,
Entreat for me the Prince of Light,
That I may reach his happy land.

[2] The idea in the first four lines of this piece was borrowed
from a beautiful passage occurring in a biographical sketch of a
late distinguished poet.
 PAN AND LAÏS.
I.
Once on a time, grown tired of shepherd’s fare,
From hilly Arcady with swift descent,
Rough Pan in tunic wove of subtile air,
Invisible to sacred Corinth went;
Through his aerial vesture vision-proof,
No mortal eye could see or horn or hoof.

II.
With soundless tread he passed from street to street,
Through which as arteries the sea-winds blew;
And gorgeous shows the mighty rustic greet,
Where’er from right to left his glance he threw;
Poor seem his pastoral hills and forests all,
Matched with the Isthmus’ peerless capital.

III.
For now its rampires, palaces, and shrines,
Lit up by morning’s golden glances stood;
A pillared labyrinth, through which there winds
With ceaseless flow a various multitude.
Nobles and merchants swiftly roll along,
On radiant cars by Thracian coursers drawn.

IV.
And hoary priests, in robes of purest white,
Lead slowly up the pomp of sacrifice
To stately fanes, where wreaths of incense light
From fuming altars climb the purple skies;
While slender pipes by youthful minions blown,
With softest melodies the rites make known.

V.
From foam-born Aphrodite’s voluptuous seat
On Acrocorinth’s lofty summit pour,
Their raven tresses dropping unguents sweet,
Her thousand handmaids to the busy shore,
Where they entangle in their wanton wiles
The voyagers come from continents and isles.

VI.
As on he passed, the Arcadian god admires,
Between tall sculptured piles that line the way,
Cool lymph in crystal jets, and sheaf-like spires,
From marble gorges spouted ceaselessly;
Whose myriad drops with charmed eyes he sees,
Bestrode by interwoven Irides.

VII.
Weary at length of wandering here and there,
His eyes sore dazzled by the eternal gleam
Of sun-kissed marbles, on a shady stair,
Near which uprose a fountain’s liquid sheen,
Pan sought repose, and heard a minstrel tell
In plastic verse of Here’s potent spell;

VIII.
Which, on a mountain-couch of vernal flowers,
Lulled by its might the Thunderer to sleep,
Who lay, regardless of the ebbing powers
Of Ilion’s champion, locked in swoonings deep.
Here, while he sat, a sudden silence fell
On all the street, that, quiet as the cell

IX.
Of Indian saint by Ganges’ marge afar,
 Within a moment’s interval became;
For on a rose-ensanguined ivory car,
Of swanlike shape, and lovelier than the wain
Of Dawn, came Laïs, Eros’ idol fair,
Delicious, soft, and warm as vernal air.

X.
A golden tiar begirt her forehead white,
Which flashed with many an orient amethyst,
With jacinth, pearl, and opal’s fire-red light;
Each gem the guerdon of a burning kiss
On Asian lords bestowed, who wore the crowns
Of those voluptuous Ionian towns—

XI.
Miletus, Smyrna, and the rest, that line
The eastern margin of the central sea;
Whence many a burnished galley o’er the brine
To Corinth crosses, drawn by witchery
Of laughter-swimming eyes and rosy lips,
Wherein she doth all other towns eclipse.

XII.
Slow rolled proud Laïs’ wheels—while here and there,
On warrior, bard, and sage, who spell-bound stood,
She showered familiar smiles, that flushed the air,
And thrilled each heart in all the multitude;
Her partial glances raised a prouder glow
Than all the wreaths that glory could bestow.

XIII.
Pan, at her presence, felt his cloud-robe turn
Fire-red, like vapors round the sinking sun;
Not thus for dreamy Dian did he burn;
And how a kiss might from her lips be won,
He of his horn-clad brain assistance sought,
Which, full of schemes, struck out a subtle thought.

XIV.
For swift as light, from some far river’s meads,
A hornet flying drove his venomed sting
Into the foreheads of her glossy steeds;
They, bolting upward, made a sudden spring,
That snapped, like gossamer threads, each leathern trace,
And dashed the chariot on a statue’s base.

XV.
By arms invisible the falling dame
Was held unwounded in the yielding air;
And on her brow there fell a fiery rain
Of kisses, caught from lips in ambush there;
Then gently to the earth her form declined,
While rose a reed-like murmur on the wind.