Bracha L. Ettinger

In this paper, I started from an analysis of the current rather tragic situation of female Oedipal rivalry between women in Flemish politics. To counter this, I argue for an Irigarayian inspired feminist politics, in which the figures of Antigone and Ismene play an important role. After an analysis of the more or less ethical Antigone readings of Hegel, de Beauvoir, Lacan and Ettinger, I come to Irigaray's own critical Antigone reception. By focusing on Irigaray's ideas of motherhood and sisterhood, I then argue for a more feminine and feminist politics that could counter this situation of Oedipal rivalry between female politicians.

What compels us to write about art? Beyond the professionalisation of art-writing, what is it about aesthetic experiences that can stir up questions, emotions, laughter, tears and ideas that necessitate a written response? Is this affective engagement distinct from the broader field of writing? And if so, what does that have to say about the subject who is compelled to write?

This dissertation examines the written and artistic production of the Israeli-born artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha L. Ettinger, whose practice of artworking incorporates her theoretical development of the Matrix and Metramorphosis into the act of painting.  Ettinger’s work offers a feminist re-negotiation of the terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis within the realm of aesthetics and ethics, issues that are universal, yet tied to specific experiences between the I and non-I, the known and the unknown.  Ettinger’s theoretical and artistic advancements promote connection rather than separation, expanding borders from the limited social constructions of interaction to the limitless feminine space of the matrixial web.  Ettinger, in her series of paintings entitled Eurydice, proposes a matrixial re-working of the mythological figure of Eurydice, moving away from the classical emphasis on separation and loss in favor of connection and retrieval.  In Ettinger’s feminist version of the myth, “looking back” is a positive and ethical gesture of remembrance, an act which weaves together the past and the present into the surface of her paintings, and offers an arena for potential future encounters.  The porous spaces of Ettinger’s work present passageways that allow the viewer and reader to move through and between the various levels of text and image, theory and art, in a constant shift between modes of production.  Ettinger’s ethical aesthetics intends art as a latent space of healing, a borderspace of connections that are positive, active and aware.  Ettinger incorporates text, photographs, India ink line drawings, oil paint, and recycled paper into her artwork, a process of artworking digitally manipulated by her hands and by the photocopy machine that reproduces the grains of photographic images and words.  The photographs that Ettinger uses are culled from personal and historical archives, documents which both directly and obliquely reference the traumatic and destructive history of the Holocaust, a practice which I relate to the work of French artist Christian Boltanski.  The images that Ettinger employs function as mnemonic prompts within her paintings, urging the viewer to engage in an ethical act of remembrance in the role of what she names the wit(h)ness.

Elizabeth Wilson (2004:378) discusses the magical properties of textile media in relation to items of clothing, affect and perception. In this article, I take this enchanted sensibility further in a discussion of the strong confluence of stitched and woven (pointured) forms with horned animal mysticism, discussing the historical and contemporary beliefs surrounding horned animals in both western and African contexts in relation to, and as an influence on, the mysticism relating to pointured mediums. I invoke Jacques Derrida’s (2009 [1978]:301-315) critical term “pointure”, which stems from the stitched practice of cobbling. Two sub-metaphors employed by Derrida (2009:302-307) in his extrapolation of this term bear weight in this context: his constitution of the word “lace” (derived from the shoe lace), and his perception of a haunting implicit in the relation of the original shoes, to the painted shoes, to the viewer. Following this looped notion of lacing and haunting, I argue that the vacuum made by the stitch is a haunted site invested with themes and experiences of human frailty and desire; filled precipitously by the yarn, a wished for end is sympathetically effected.

This link is too the full 'Pointure' special edition of 'Image & Text' (23). also see my co-editorial for the edition.

Presented on the 10th October 2014 at the Subrealism conference in Maynooth (orgainised by Tina Kinsella, Michael O'Rourke and Moynagh Sullivan). The conference was dedicated to exploring the work of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger.

Much has been written about Antigone who buried her brother Polynices in Theban soil despite the prohibition issued by King Creon (her uncle) in the Sophocles tragedy. In order to understand the magnitude of Antigone’s radical act in the play by the same name I engage the scholarship of Israeli feminist psychoanalytic scholar Bracha L. Ettinger. By engaging Ettinger’s theory of the Other (Feminine) Sexual Difference, I consider how ways of being in the Feminine tap into the matrixial domain, thus expanding the bounds of what counts as subjective experience in psychoanalysis. I situate Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial in relation to Lacan’s analysis of Antigone in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII). I also focus on Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘debinding’ (2010) and Judith Butler’s (2002) writing on gender and kinship disorder in the tragedy. My objective is to build upon Ettinger’s analysis of Antigone to better understand how it is not death, exactly, that is at stake in the drama, but rather the status of the Feminine dimension in the Theban city-state. If Antigone’s transgression can be understood through a matrixial lens it behooves us as feminist scholars to more fully understand the affective landscape and maternal ethics of difference enacted in the play.

In this paper I analyze and contrast Schachter-Shalomi's conception of gender through relating his thought to its Habad origins, utilizing Elliot Wolfson's study of Menahem Mendel Schneerson as a prism. I further contrast Schachter-Shalomi's thought with other New-Age movements and specifically the neo-Kabbalah of Michael Laitman and Berg family. Lastly, I read his "dream tale" regarding the Maiden of Ludmir with the use of Bracha Ettinger's theories as well as other psychoanalysts.

Er(r)go...

… a boundless proliferation of images, a gargantuan escalation of photographic narratives, overproduction, excessiveness and inflation of visuality, contamination by portalosis, gaze as the imperative. Images obscure reality; it’s about time we opened our eyes.

How much truth is there to photography? Are the things we see true, since acontextual, non-situational and uninterpreted truth does not exist? How many truths then? The charming demon of interpretation lends a helping hand here: truth is constituted in and through interpretation, we cannot suspend our interpretative activity, nor can we elevate ourselves above interpretation without interpreting. That way or another, we’d better avoid the fear, dismay and anger of the audience. Someone says: the opposite of truth is falsity; hmm, who would have thought? How about trustworthiness instead of truth? We shall see.

[...]

Wojciech Kalaga
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734

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Er(r)go...

… nieograniczona proliferacja obrazów, gargantuiczna eskalacja fotograficznych narracji, nadprodukcja, nadmiarowość i inflacja wizualności, zainfekowanie portalozą, patrzenie jako imperatyw. Obrazy przesłaniają świat, czas zatem przejrzeć na oczy.

Ile prawdy w fotografii? Czy prawdziwe jest to, co widzimy, skoro nie istnieje prawda akontekstualna, niesytuacyjna, niezinterpretowana? Ile zatem prawd w fotografii? Na ratunek przychodzi uroczy potwór interpretacji: prawda konstytuuje się w interpretacji i poprzez interpretację, nie możemy zawiesić interpretacyjnej aktywności, nie możemy też wnieść się ponad poziom interpretacji, by nie interpretować. Tak czy inaczej, lepiej jednak unikać strachu, konsternacji i wściekłości odbiorców. Ktoś stwierdza: przeciwieństwem prawdy jest fałsz; hmm, coś takiego! Może zamiast prawdy – wiarygodność? Zobaczymy.

[...]

Wojciech Kalaga
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734

In the current neoliberal climate, subjects are deemed autonomous, self-sufficient and free. This perspective on subjectivity has however led to an individualist culture, in which interdependency is seen as a weakness. Furthermore, the ways in which subjects are embedded in sociocultural frameworks is systematically overlooked. In this paper I outline how Bracha L. Ettinger's concept of the matrixial borderspace offers different variables for subjectivity. By adding the signififer of the womb to the Freudian/Lacanian phallogocentric subjectivity model, she invites us to think of subjectivity not only as the result of separation, negation and a negative sexual difference, but also in terms of connectivity, mobility and (trans)subjectivity.

This study is a practice-based exploration of the screen as a border site, where the concepts of division and encounter are performatively examined. My research strategy is shaped by applying autoethnographic performance strategies to the mediated space of the screen. Media materials (photos, videos and blog entries) are created with mobile media devices used in performative situations, offering a theoretical framework originating in practice.
The main argument is that the screen is an assemblage site, where the notions of division and encounter can be artistically explored. Furthermore, the screen is explored as an object, as a metaphor and as an idea. By linking the Latour notion of “assemblage” with Colley’s exploration of the personal use of mobile screens (“autobiometry”), and Ettinger’s notion of “borderspace” as site of artistic encounter, the practices presented in this thesis are located in a field that blurs the boundary between the personal and art; autobiography and autoethnography; technology and identity. In so doing, this thesis expands on previous explorations such as “boundary event” (Trinh T. Minh-ha 1999); “soft mastery” (Turkle 1995); and “screen-reliant art” (Moldoch 2010;).
In the performative media materials created for this thesis, the screen is explored through a “processual approach” (Bacon, 2006). This enabled me to examine the nature of interaction with the screen through embodied reflexive practice. This approach firmly places the work in the experiential or performative realm.
Key practices that are discussed in this thesis include among others, an earth body performative project by Ana Mendieta (Cuba/USA) entitled Silueta series (1973-1980), a live art work by Tanja Ostojic (Serbia/Germany) called Looking for a husband with EU passport (2000-2005) and my own performative media pieces, Valid until... (2010) and The place where we were last together (2011).

Poligrafi is published with the support of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia. CIP -Kataložni zapis o publikaciji Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana 113/119(082)(0.034.2) BODILY proximity [Elektronski vir] / edited by Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa and Lenart Škof. -El. knjiga. -Ljubljana : Inštitut Nove revije, zavod za humanistiko, 2012. -(Poligrafi, ISSN 2232-5174 ; letn. 17 (2012), št. 65-66) Način dostopa (URL): http://www.poligrafi.si/ ISBN 978-961-6580-98-4 1. Hackenberg, Sigrid, 1960-261053184 numb e r 67-6 8 • volume 17, 2012 b o d i l y p r o x i m i t y bracha l. Ettinger: Choice for a virtual exhibition III: Paintings, drawings, notebooks 1987-2011 5 bracha l. Ettinger: Diotime et le transfert matrixiel: l'événementrencontre psychanalytique comme prégnance dans le beau (2007) 57 Gina rae Foster: The dissonant resonance of becomings: copoiesis and (non-)pulsed time in musical proximities

I found it difficult to respond, or rather to write a response, to this book, especially in the light, or the glow, of yesterday's conversations. Having been affectedby reading the book and hence being in an intimate, yet distant, relation with it, I was left feeling somewhat incoherent, shifting, and unsure: I guess that may be a good thing. And I was thinking about this in relation to languagethe written word and the spokenand how in, and through, language we negotiate with proximity and distance, and distance and proximity.

This book on Antigone, laws of femininity and cosmic justice was published by SUNY Press in 2021. The book elaborates on the feminine aspects of selected concepts from modern philosophical texts, such as the Matrix in Jakob Böhme, Clara in F. W. J. Schelling, beyng in Martin Heidegger, chóra in Jacques Derrida, and breath in Luce Irigaray’s thought. Drawing on Bracha M. Ettinger’s concept of matrixiality, this book offers a new matrixial theory of philosophy, cosmology, and theology of love.

“Using matrixiality as a key concept, Lenart Škof offers an ethical horizon through new insights into Antigone and her genealogical ‘sisters,’ daringly comparing Antigone’s task with Jesus’s redemptory mission. The matrixial core of love, reaching the ontological margins of birth and death and inaugurating a matrixial covenant, is the heart of this original conceptualization of an ethical core in the bridging between mythology and theology for our contemporary humanity.” — Bracha L. Ettinger, author of The Matrixial Borderspace and Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics

This article brings into conversation a Badiouian ethics and Karen Barad’s post-phenomenological relationality of “intra-actions” among the human and nonhuman so as to situate the environmentally and politically engaged poetry included in Jorie Graham’s Sea Change. Criticism has avoided exploring the interplay between stylistic choices and political dimensions in her poetry, which includes engagements with pressing environmental issues today (global warming, rising seas, and chaotic weather), preemptive wars, and questions of plausible poetic agency itself. Foregrounding a material dimension while still maintaining a sense of responsibility, this essay highlights Alain Badiou’s use of poetic configurations as “subjects” engaging in ethical world-recognitions that help situate an important underlying posthuman ethos evident in Graham’s poetry. Barad, in a discourse with roots in quantum physics, argues that we must rethink representation from an entirely different phenomenology of intra-actions, beginning with relations, not objects or Cartesian selves. Thus both Badiou and Barad, in radically different but complementary ways, situate ontological finites—poems and sites of intra-action—as means of overcoming Derridean différance, which remains one formal cornerstone of postmodern displacement evident in American mass media’s post-truth equalization of all positions without situating possibilities of coherent analysis or engagement. In conversation with the work of Judith Butler as well as Badiou and Barad, this essay intends to make a small contribution to feminist posthumanism and politics, and expand our sense of ethical and affective engagement in New Materialist criticism.
Appears in Neohelicon (2017). DOI :10.1007/s11059-017-0400-2

Er(r)go…,

fiasko mowy – prosimy zachować ciszę, bo cisza jest skarbnicą dźwięków, ich nasyceniem, kumulacją brzmień. A dalej: cisza aktywna, energia ciszy, cisza dźwięków, język poetycki jako muzyka ciszy, pejzaż dźwięku, milczenie roślin, performatywność ciszy. Wnikając w ciszę, docieramy do dźwiękowego świata i do wszystkiego, co ciszą nie jest: intonarumori – rumorarmonio, ululatori, rombator, scoppiatori, sibilatori. Szmery, szumy, hałasy, stuki, zgrzytów wycie, jęki, śmiechy, głosy ludzi i zwierząt, warkot, łoskot, huk, trzaski, skrzypienia, szurania, tarcia,  świsty, syki, sapania, piknięcia i puknięcia, muzyka maszyn, brzmieniowe akordy słów, harmonia szmerów, wibracje i rezonowanie, dźwięki niechciane. Nicowanie obecności i nieobecności – fizjologia wewnętrzna, niema dramatyzacja serca i oddechu: szumy, jęknięcia, wdechy i wydechy, periodyczne pulsy. Jęknięcia, chrząknięcia, gruchanie, świsty i dmuchnięcia, ciche uderzenia górnej i dolnej wargi śpiewaczki, ciche pocieranie korpusu instrumentu.

Cisza zmienia się w grzmot. Hałas industrialny: maszyny brzmią, świszczą, wyją, huczą, łomocą, sapią, syczą, gwiżdżą, dzwonią, kują, jazgoczą, świdrują, zgrzytają, kłapią, biją, warkoczą, szumią. Muzyka jako efekt ciszy – to cisza jest tym, co daje siłę dźwiękom, czyni ciemność mniej głuchą, gdy najmniejszy szmer staje się zjawą. Milczący fortepian – sztuka hałasów i 4’33”.  I kilka postaci: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Salvatore Sciarrino, John Cage, Jacques Lacan, Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky, Maria Pappenheim, Anna O., Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leris, Colette Peignot, Francesca Woodman, Bracha L. Ettinger, Tres, Dan Geva,  Noit Geva, Gillian Wearing. Muzak. Audiosfera komunizmu: śpiewające, mistyczne ciało kolektywu, trąbka w rękach zetempowca, bzyczenie much, bełkot wroga. Na dodatek głos jako obiekt kazirodczy. Transcendencja dźwięków otoczenia, dzwonienie w uszach, tinnitus, muzyczny rollercoaster, marsz żałobny na pogrzeb głuchego, sekunda tak pełna, że nie mieści się w półgodzinie, dźwięk jako rozdźwięk, dźwiękowość naszego ciała, szum gestu, hałas przedmiotów, elektroniczny jazgot i zgiełk, pętle muzyczne, bębnienie palcami, recitale od-tworzenia, Rauty Zmian Nastrojów i w końcu balsamowanie dźwiękiem.

Przyjaźń jako cisza; cisza, która mówi, aby lepiej się ukryć, przytłumiony i poszarzały sweter, niedźwiękowy potok słów, czytanie uchem, słuchanie różnicy, słyszenie siebie.  Trzeba wyjść poza granice pięciolinii. Milczenie i przemilczenie. Cisza jako władza i jako forma kształcenia ciał, uciszanie budynków, wysysanie dźwięków.

Tacet. Cisza nie istnieje. „W absolutnej ciszy każdy w końcu coś usłyszy”. Co słyszę?

Wojciech Kalaga


Er(r)go…,

failure of speech – please be silent, because silence is the treasure hold of sounds, their saturation, the accumulation of tones. And further: active silence, the energy of silence, poetic language as the music of silence, the landscape of sound, silence of the plants, performativity of silence. Penetrating the silence, we reach the world of sound and of whatever is not silence: intonarumori – rumorarmonio, ululatori, rombator, scoppiatori, sibilatori. Murmurs, humming, noises, knocking, grinding, howling, groans, laughs, human and animal sounds, drones, clatter, din, boom, crash, creaking, scraping, rubbing, wheeze, hiss, gasp, ping, pop, machine music, tonal cords of words, the harmony of murmurs, vibrations and resonances, unwanted sounds.  Reversing presence and absence – internal physiology, mute dramatization of the heart and the breath: noises, moaning, breathing in and breathing out, periodic cadence. Moans, grunts, billing, whizzing, blowing, quiet strikes of the upper and lower lips of the diva, quiet rubbing of the body of the instrument.

Silence turns to thunder. Industrial noise: machines whizz, howl, boom, crash, groan, hiss, whistle, toll, hammer, clatter, grate, grind, beat, whir, hiss. Music as the effect of silence – it is the silence that gives the sounds their strength, makes the darkness less still, when the tiniest noise becomes a wraith. A silent piano – the art of noise and 4’33”.  And several figures: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Salvatore Sciarrino, John Cage, Jacques Lacan, Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky, Maria Pappenheim, Anna O., Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leris, Colette Peignot, Francesca Woodman, Bracha L. Ettinger, Tres, Dan Geva,  Noit Geva, Gillian Wearing. Muzak. The audiosphere of communism: the singing, mystical body of the collective, the trumpet in the hands of a young ZMP zealot, the buzzing of flies, the jabber of the enemy. In addition, the voice as an incestual object. The transcendence of the sounds of the surrounding, the ringing in the ears, tinnitus, the musical rollercoaster, the funeral march at the burial of the deaf, a second so full that it does not fit into half an hour, cord as discord, the soundness of our bodies, the hum of a gesture, the noise of  an object, electronic clatter and clamor, musical loops, drumming of fingers, recital of re-playing, The Banquets of Changing Moods, and, finally, embalming with sound.

Friendship as silence; silence that speaks in order to hide better, a muted, ashen sweater, nonverbal torrent of words, reading with the ear, listening to the difference, hearing oneself. One must go beyond the staff. Muteness and dissemblance. Silence as power and a form of shaping bodies, the muting of buildings, the sucking out of sounds.

Tacet. Silence does not exist. “In absolute silence, everyone will eventually hear something.” What do I hear?

Wojciech Kalaga

"Art today is an increasingly multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing transgressive works that intervene in war and ecological disasters, in inequalities and revolutionary changes in technology. Carnal Aesthetics is a fascinating, new examination of this aspect of contemporary visual culture. Employing recent theories of transgressive body imagery, trauma, affect and sensation, it provides a fresh look at the meeting point between the politics of representation and the politics
of perception through the prismatic lens of feminist theory.
Acclaimed scholars analyse a wide range of seminal case studies coming from different media: digital photography, painting, video, film and multimedia art. They explore here a number of transgressive movements that significantly reconfigure the relationship between the body and the image.
Unlike other books on the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics, Carnal Aesthetics seeks to provide a novel approach to art and culture by challenging the primacy of vision and by injecting an intersectional perspective into the fields of visual studies, film and media studies, as well as trauma studies. It will be a significant contribution for scholars across these dynamic fields of exploration who deal with the socio-political nature of contemporary visual culture in their work."

In the paper, I will do a reflection on my piece “The last place where we were together” where I artistically reflect on Ettinger’s concepts of ‘encounter’ and ‘borderspace’ through my personal landscape. Furthermore, I will compare and analyse Bracha Ettineger’s “borderspace” and Gloria Anzaludia “borderland” concept. Then will briefly look at the practical implication of these concepts on my own performance practice.

The fragility of the subject is a recurring issue in the work of Anne Enright, one of Ireland’s most remarkable and innovative writers. It is this specific interest, together with her attempt to make women into subjects, that inevitably links her work to Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial borderspace, a feminine sphere that coexists with the Lacanian symbolic order and that, even before our entrance into this linguistic system, informs our subjectivity. By turning to a point in time before language—the encounter between “self” and “other” during pregnancy—both Enright and Ettinger test the boundaries of and the gaps within the linguistic system. It is the going before language that ultimately enables both to go beyond some of the most persistent dualisms present within the linguistic system and to create room for an alternative—a feminine—understanding of the ethical relationality between self and other.

The aim of this article is to study the underpinnings of the matrixial theory introduced by Bracha L. Ettinger, and her installation in the Freud Museum - to be more precise, Freud's study room-so as to examine their paradoxical status in Freudian-Lacanian space(s). As I attempt to show, both parts of Ettinger's activity are not against the Law of the Father, but rather they constantly disobey his rules; Ettinger tirelessly endeavours to include the Mother alongside the paternal order. We thus observe not so much the rejection of Freud's and Lacan's paradigms as the movement on their boundaries and their subsequent transgression - and this may be seen as the greatest promise Ettinger provides us with.

El crítico de cine Alain Bergala hace referencia a otro autor en su libro seminal La hipótesis del cine: Serge Daney. Bergala comenta la frustración de Daney al participar en coloquios con cuya premisa o estructura estamos ya muy familiarizados. El fastidio de Daney tenía que ver con la noción honesta, pero a la vez muy falsa, de esa conjunción copulativa tan omnipresente: la «y».

Fascinance seeks to navigate how the way we both use language and perceptually frame our interactions with the world & each other determines the way the conventional world ‘becomes.’ Engaging the ideas of the artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger, who responded to phallic tradition with her concept of the Matrixial. Ettinger coined ‘fascinance’ to describe a volitional leaning into and co-creation. Through a stillness inducing artworking, we return to a symbiotic state of pure and total exchange and as such accept that we are not islands, but isthmuses, mid-points, borderlands: without resolute or penultimate boundaries. We bleed into the world and each other like drops of ink in water. As such this last film seeks to explore that creative gaze, not just in relation to the exchange between people but also place, and in specific the sacred yet inclusive border-spaces we share with the cosmos.

See the related work here: https://vimeo.com/111707808

In the House and Space2 photographic series, Francesca Woodman captures the environments that may be considered disruptive; still, it is a female model-in her inconstant poses, always partially blurred or hidden-that holds the viewer's attention. The pictures therefore evoke a twofold sense of obscurity, since their unfriendly interiors are occupied by the uncanny, semi-absent yet ceaselessly present, disappearing woman, who turns out to be Woodman herself. Woodman's spectral presence and the unhomely locations she haunts-being simultaneously the photographer and the object of her photographs-are examined in this article by means of Bracha L. Ettinger's matrixial theory. Ettingerian psychoanalysis, juxtaposed with Roland Barthes, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan, provides the tools to challenge the dominant non-affirmative understanding of Woodman's self-portraits as works of disappearing and failing subjectivity: an understanding whose obvious point of support is found in the artist's biography. Instead, Ettinger's system makes it possible to look at this oeuvre through the prisms of fragility, homeliness, and the potential emergence of blurry, ghostly subjectivity. Moreover, the article examines the ways in which Woodman resists the divisions imposed on her and the medium she uses (such as the Barthesian triad of Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum, and the dichotomies of me / the Other and subject / object).

This chapter meditates on the art installation, 'Tremble Tremble' by Jesse Jones which was first shown at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Taking Jones' installation as a starting point, this work considers the maternal body as a site for the re-invention of alternative political and social imaginaries.

Tremble Tremble combines 'Brechtian theater techniques of estrangement with elements drawn from pop music and cinema, the Dublin-based artist Jesse Jones creates films and performances that refer to historical instances of communal culture yet resonate with contemporary life and politics. The publication accompanying the Pavilion of Ireland at the 2017 Venice Biennale borrows its title—Tremble Tremble—from the 1970s Italian “Wages for Housework” campaign, during which women chanted “Tremate tremate, le streghe sono tornate!” (Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!). “Drawing on this movement,” writes the pavilion’s curator, Tessa Giblin, “Jones conflates the memory of the witch hysteria with the oppression of women and their reduction to the status of unpaid domestic laborers. She restores the witch as a feminist archetype, a disrupter who possesses the potential to transform reality.” Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!'

The chapter examines Post-Partum Document, an iconic feminist art work of the late 1970s by visual artist Mary Kelly. The installation exemplifies contemporary concerns with mainstream art and traditional concepts of autobiography as it traces the mother’s and the child’s mutual becoming in its organic, affective and cognitive dimensions. The chapter argues that Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document combines image and text to produce a form of life-writing which is both intimate and political. The art installation is read as an example of the concept developed by Israeli theorist and visual artist Bracha Ettinger in the 1990s—the matrixial borderspace, a co-creative subjective field that transgresses the boundaries of the individual.

Total History, Anti-History, and the Face that is Other motions towards a metaphysics of the body that is identically groundless—ground, wherein the delineation of the body, in propinquity, contradiction, and separation—as the body of a point of departure—assumes the possibility of a duplicity of existences and time(s) that are at once itself (the Same) and its interruption (the Other and/or Infinity).

In its provocative reading of Hegel’s philosophy of history and Levinas' “face to face” encounter, Hackenberg y Almansa’s Total History, Anti-History, and the Face that is Other explores vital questions of history and ethics-offering us a possibility for a metaphysics of the body in the plural.

The article focuses on both theoretical and artistic activities of Bracha L. Ettinger, an Israeli artist, author of the matrixial theory, psychoanalyst, feminist, and daughter of Holocaust survivors. It endeavours to prove that Ettinger’s artistic gesture – on the one hand – stands for almost-borderless closeness to traumatic events and – on the other hand – may occasion the viewer’s suspension between such notions as now and then or presence and absence. To specify, it attempts to demonstrate that gesture can move the viewer towards the traumatic experience of the Other. As Ettinger herself admits that in her case art and theory are strongly interconnected, this article follows a similar path, trying to show how these two instances affect each other in a productive way. The article begins with an introduction to Ettinger’s artistic technique, the notion of trauma(s) in her oeuvre, and the matrixial take on memory. It moves on to the interpretation of chosen paintings from Ettinger’s most famous series, Eurydice, based on the 1942 picture of the execution of naked women in the Mizocz ghetto, and of selected works of art with a mother theme; these artworks are read through the prism of, among others, the trauma of the World and the fort/da game. Lastly, the article hints at ethical implications of chosen Ettingerian concepts that apply to the aesthetic practice.

Since the 1970s, theories by feminist psychoanalysts trained in the Lacanian school have highlighted the repression of the maternal in Western societies, deemed necessary to enter the symbolic realm and to become a full subject. Most recently, Bracha Ettinger has contributed to this strand of thought by developing the concept of the matrix as a primary stratum of subjectivization that is part of an enlarged symbolic besides the phallic stratum. Modelled on intimate intra-uterine sharing the matrix is a transformative borderspace of encounter which can be accessed by art practice. This article deals with a non-Western society: rural Punu society in Congo-Brazzaville, where the intra-uterine is part of the symbolic through the idiom of waterspirit beings and where relation to this waterworld and re-immersion in it are cultivated in collective song-dance rituals. It shows in detail how Punu imagery of the waterspirit world and the song-dance practices related to it give body to the matrixial, as viewed by Ettinger, in a way that is fully integrated in society and coexists with other non-matrixial dynamics.

This presentation responds to In the Shadow of the State (2016), a work by contemporary Irish visual artists Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones. In the Shadow of the State explores the female body as a site of repressed history and political desire which has been subject to regulation by the apparatus of the state in the last one hundred years between The Proclamation of the Republic (Forógra na Poblachta) in 1916 and the present day. This paper examines In The Shadow of the State from the perspective of Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant’s theorisations of vulnerability, embodiment and affect, Marianne Hirsch’s work on postmemory and Bracha L. Ettinger’s conceptualisation of aesthetic affects to consider the consequences for collective memory when the female subject, and the female body in particular, are subject to such occlusion within official state narratives. In their recent work, Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant propose vulnerability and precariousness as relational and affective modalities of attachment, belonging and resistance which are prior to emotion, reason or deliberative thought and yet which are pertinent to the complex dynamic between the social world and the individual. This chapter reappraises the relational structure of affect offered by Butler and Berlant with reference to Hirsch’s proposals for postmemory and Bracha L. Ettinger’s theorisation of a relational stratum of subjectivity which donates a profoundly connective capacity to the subject by way of aesthetics affects that are pre-cognitive and pre-conceptual and therefore not reliant upon any received notion of identity or community. The work of Butler, Berlant, Hirsch and Ettinger is deployed to probe In the Shadow of the State as an artistic, aesthetic and profoundly performative (Butler) work productive of weaving female, individual, affective experience that has been excluded from official state narratives into collective, narrative memory. This paper was presented on 15 October at the 'Making Memory―Visual and Material Cultures of Commemoration in Ireland' conference organised by Dr. Lisa Godson (NCAD) and held in the National Gallery Dublin and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, between 13-16 October.

The paper comprises a meditation and an attempt at an ethical analysis of the humanitarian crisis of migrants at
Lampedusa. First, a refl ection on the mythical tale of Fair Vida is offered in order to inaugurate the poetical and ethical
dimensions of the feminine desire to secure the cosmic order for the others. Then follows a refl ection on ancient
mythological and cosmogonical traditions to provide a context for discussing the growing ethical crisis in the world
– i.e., the forgetting of a primeval hospitality, offered to the humanity by those ancient Gods and Nature. A plea for
new ethics and an ethical criterion is a part of this refl ection; an ethics that is sensitive to the material element in
humans. In these contexts, tears are presented and analysed as a sign of this primeval memory in humans towards
what has been radically forgotten in our times. In conclusion, the paper offers a meditation on the Buddhist mode
of pratityasamutpada, as refl ected in the liberating principle – the liberating of our selves from the vicious cycle of
recurrent deaths through bodily and visceral compassion and hospitality.

In the picture entitled Self-portrait talking to Vince Francesca Woodman, an American photographer, endeavoured to capture her own voice. That which had been uttered became thereby unutterable, resulting in a sequence of doodles coming out of the artist’s mouth: the chain interrupted within the frame of the photograph in its attempt to reach the listener. This picture is both the space and the reason for the confrontation of two psychoanalytical views – Lacanian and Ettingerian – on the notion of the voice. While in Jacques Lacan’s thought the voice is introduced as objet petit a, inextricably bound to the Other and desire, Ettinger – author of the matrixial theory, practising psychoanalyst, artist, feminist, and member of the Second Generation after the Holocaust – defines this concept as link a, thus emphasising the connection inspired by the prenatal encounter, its fragility and intimacy. Collating these two viewpoints and the photographic art of Woodman lets one open the potentialities of the voice in the field of visual studies and consider the relationship between this notion and the senses. Such a juxtaposition challenges the boundaries of not only photography – the medium seemingly sentenced to silence – but also theory, for which the image can provide a platform of dialogue, as it relentlessly resists the reduction to solely one perspective.