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Art/Trauma/Representation
Griselda Pollock
Published online: 28 Jan 2009.

To cite this article: Griselda Pollock (2009) Art/Trauma/Representation, Parallax, 15:1, 40-54, DOI:
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 parallax, 2009, vol. 15, no. 1, 40–54

Art/Trauma/Representation

Griselda Pollock

Beauty that I find in contemporary art-works that interest me, whose source is the
trauma to which it also returns and appeals, is not private beauty or as that upon
which a consensus of taste can be reached; it is a kind of encounter, that perhaps
we are trying to avoid much more than aspiring to arrive at, because the
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beautiful, as Rilke says, is but the beginning of the horrible in which – in this
dawning – we can hardly stand. We can hardly stand at that threshold of that
horrible, at that threshold, which maybe is but, as Lacan puts it in his 7th
seminar, the limit, the frontier of death – or shall we say self-death? – in life,
where ‘life glimpses death as if from its inside’. Could such a limit be
experienced, via-art-working, as a threshold and a passage to the Other?
And if so, is it only the death-frontier that is traversed here?
Is death the only domain of the beyond?1

I Presence/Present

Thinking memory and art together involves articulating art with trauma
and its foreclosure, around the impossibility of accessing a psychic Thing
and a psychic Event, encapsulated out of sight in a kind of outside that is
captured inside – in an ‘extimate’, non-conscious space unreachable by
memory. The Thing, veiled by originary repression (Freud’s
Urverdrängung) and the Event, forsaken, are traumatic and tormenting,
but I do not know that they hurt, nor where they hurt because I have no
memory of them, for they are out of my Time and Space.2

Trauma, we are taught, is a perpetual present, resilient in its persistent and timeless
inhabitation of a subject who does not, and cannot, know it. It happened but I do not
know it – that it happened or what it was that happened, the eventless event,
unremembered. Yet this happening is not in the past, since it knows no release from its
perpetual present because it is not yet known: was never known, hence never forgotten,
and thus not yet remembered. The passage from trauma might be understood as the
move into the narrativity that institutes time, the pause in which memory forms, hence
spatializes. Or perhaps, we should speak of a passage into the temporality of narrative
that encases but also mutes trauma’s perpetually haunting force by means of a
structuration that is delivered by representation.
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ISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online # 2009 Taylor & Francis
parallax http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
40 DOI: 10.1080/13534640802604372
 In her ‘Inquiry into Femininity’, Lacanian feminist Michèle Montrelay references
Maria Torok’s clinical observation of the effect of interpretation in the field of
feminine sexuality which, Montrelay argues, is experienced by women ‘traumati-
cally’ as a result of censorship rather than repression proper. Montrelay makes a
distinction between the work of repression – which is necessary and ‘a good thing’–
and the mere censorship of female sexuality, the latter not allowing the necessary
transformation and distancing by means of which it can be accessed, mediated by
discourse. Censorship leaves the feminine subject overwhelmed by a traumatic
proximity of and to the body, her own and that of the maternal other whose affect is
pure anxiety.

For the patient, who expresses anxiety after the event, is speaking of a
time when nothing was thinkable: then the body and the world were
confounded in one chaotic intimacy which was too present, too
immediate – one continuous expanse of proximity or unbearable
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plenitude. What was lacking was lack, an empty ‘space’ somewhere.3

Maria Torok argued that appropriate analytical interpretation could induce

orgasmic pleasure in an analysand’s dreams as an effect of representation’s creation
of such a necessary gap. Montrelay concludes that the analytical process serves,
creatively, as a deliverance from anxiety (which is not anxiety about anything but
anxiety without reason that is the effect of a lack of/in representation) through a
necessary and enabling repression: not the representation of castration, so much as
representation as castration, the latter being the deliverer of such distancing by
means of the word, but also, significantly, and it is very Lacanian, the word of the
other.4

Here, therefore, pleasure is the effect of the word of the other. More
specifically, it occurs at the advent of structuring discourse. For what is
essential in the cure of a woman is not making sexuality more
conscious, or interpreting it, at least not in the sense normally given to
that word. The analyst’s word takes on a completely different
function. It no longer explains, but from the sole fact of articulating, it
structures. By verbally putting in place a representation of castration,
the analyst’s word makes sexuality pass into discourse. This type of
representation therefore represses, at least in the sense given to the word
here.5

In this model, repression is delivery from potentially overwhelming affects such as

anxiety, overpresent and unmanaged for the lack of representation as structuring in
encounter with the other. Thus repression is a distancing of the subject from the
unsignified, overpresent proximity to the ‘trauma’ of the corpo-real. It is a deliverance
through representation that returns the ‘event’ to the subject by structuring,
temporizing, spatializing – all the effects we understand to be the effect of what
Derrida called ‘writing’. We benefit, therefore, from what I have elsewhere called ‘the
relief of signification’ which manufactures both a distance from the overwhelming,
undigested thingness of traumatic presence and the perpetual present of its unsignified
presence.
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41
 In his tripartite system, Lacan theorizes what exists before the object (in a
representational psychic economy): Freud’s Das Ding, the Thing, la Chose, which is
the affectively, corpo-real and for which the psychic object creates but a shaping within
which the Thing’s unsignifiableness, nonetheless presses, acting like the apparent void
inside a vase that, in effect, determines the shape the vase takes for us to see and hold:
does the vase hold nothing, or does that no-Thing press the vase/object into its
perceptible shape on the other side of the Real revealing to us both the psychic shaping
and the unsignified or unimaged ghost: the Thing which none the less donates
something important to what we then work with psychically in the object? What is the
strange relay from trauma to memory that makes us a subject of and by means of
memory – however painful, forced then to know, but in another form, negatively
shaped by what cannot be known and remembered while it, as this ghostly delineation,
can be known and remembered. Trauma’s hitherto non-signified presence presses
upon us as enigmatic otherness that seems to line (and thus shape) the psyche.
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Let me return then to the opening epigraph in a different formulation again because
we have entered into the aesthetic domain, not just of the word of the other, but the
otherness of form.

Psychoanalytical thought concerning both art and repetition revolves

around the impossibility of annulling originary repression and accessing
a psychic Thing encapsulated and hiding in an ‘outside’ captured inside
in an unconscious ‘extimate’ space. The Thing is traumatic and aching,
and we do not know where it hurts and that it hurts. It struggles
unsuccessfully to re-approach psychic awareness, but only finds
momentary relief in symptomatic repetitions.6

In contrast to this Lacanian postulate, Ettinger’s aesthetic theory points us beyond the
relay between Thing and Object that we find in Lacan, to another kind of complex
wherein there can be no direct substitution or displacement from the Real to the
Imaginary, but in which a certain compulsion or activity indexes both a presence of the
unknown and unknowable and the subject’s actions as the symptomatic site of its
pressure and translation. Thus not content but gesture, what we would now name the
performative process in artwork, that takes, and indexes, its own time and creates a
new space of encounter, may become the the place of a transformative registration.

II Absence

If trauma is a perpetual present, it is also understood as a permanent absence. The

work with and on trauma, therefore, is both to place an apprehensible form within the
structures of time, that is, inside the grammar of representation, and of subjectivity,
and to endow it with a presence in some form which is not a representation of it, but is
the effect of representation or, as I was suggesting above, something that has become
apparent in twentieth century art, in a process.7 By definition, however, it cannot be
such. Herein lies the confusion at the heart of our discussions of art, trauma and
representation: trauma is the radical and irreducible other of representation, the other
of the subject and, as Thing, cannot thus become something. We try to think it as an
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42
 effect, a condition, even a shadow that will never be identical to that which might be its
displaced and displacing narration or representation, both always being a passage away
from trauma, a transformation – a working in Freud’s sense of Arbeit (dream work,
mourning work, working through) – into a memory, as a part of the psychic apparatus.
So the purpose of art in attempting to engage in any way with trauma is different from
the purposes of representation, which is very different for the traumatized victim who
may well wish, like Torok’s analysands, to be delivered of the unbearable presence of
the traumatic by means of the structuring discourse of the other through which
traumatic experience is recast as painful memory, owned as part of the narrative of the
subject. Beyond testimonial or witness practices which can helpfully work according to
the Montrelayan model, what might be the interest to us of an aesthetics of trauma as an
engagement with history and politics of traumatized times?

Might we then think about it in terms not of event (which we cannot know) but of
encounter that assumes some kind of space and time, and some kind of gap as well as a
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different kind of participating otherness? We might then be able to distinguish for the
aesthetic process of both the making-encounter itself (between the artist, the world and
her others), and the viewing-, reading-, seeing- or listening-encounter for the viewer/
reader etc., a specific relation to the destructuring void that is trauma that ceases to be
trauma with the advent of the structuring of representation.

I am still caught here, however in a binary, phallic logic: either/or. Trauma or

representation. Void or structure. Here forms a major debate that has emerged in
cultural theory between the recent critique of the dominant paradigm of representation
and the concomitant pursuit of means to discuss affectivity in the analysis of certain
trends in contemporary culture that posit a role for the aesthetic beyond
representation.8

III Structural and Historical Trauma: Some Unreal Distinctions

To proceed into this terrain, I want to introduce a terminological distinction that has
helped me navigate the increasingly complex waters of trauma theory and its current
cultural disseminations. I find it productive to keep in mind a necessary, if actually
unsustainable, distinction between structural trauma and historical trauma. Structural
trauma refers to what is theorized by psychoanalytical tradition as inevitable events in
the formation of subjectivity which are subjected to primal repression, Urverdrängung.
Trauma as event concerns the series of losses which mark and by which subjectivity is
formed: birth, loss of the breast, castration and loss of the loved object as well as the
primal scene, and/or seduction. Historical trauma refers to overwhelming events or
experiences by which we, having become subjects whether children or adults, may be
afflicted in the course of our lives: abuse, death of loved ones, exile, torture, accidents,
political terror and so forth.9

The theoretical confusion between trauma as psychoanalysis theorizes it as the structural

effects that condition all subjectivity, that, as it were, carves certain susceptible ‘cavities’
in the psyche around loss, destruction, abandonment and sexuality, and a trauma, a
historically and personally contingent event must be clarified if we are to catch the
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 subtlety of Freud’s foundational text on trauma and history, trauma and memory from
which so much of the Caruthian tradition in trauma studies derives.10 In Moses and
Monotheism, from which is drawn Freud’s exemplary tale of the man in a train accident
who walks away unharmed and only later begins to exhibit symptoms seemingly
unrelated to his present, but ultimately registering the delayed impact of the shock of
the accident, Freud more interestingly explores the deferred action of the chain that
links a historical event (the killing of Moses-father-leader) to the mythical murder of the
primal father. The traumatic effects of the historical event – a murder of a leader by a
revolting rabble – effectively becomes evidence for the hypothesis of the primordial
murder of the primal father because, only as a result of the projection of the affective
surcharge of the unremembered and immemorial original – structural guilt – onto the
historical event could the subsequent history of the formation of the Jewish people as a
result of the murder of Moses, which becomes the unbreakable attachment to his
teaching, be psychoanalytically understood: that formation being a kind of totemic loyalty
to the Mosaic system, through which the Jewish subject, just like the Oedipal subject,
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acquires identificatory foundations of his self-respect. In this weaving of his

psychoanalytical researches with analysands and his own self-analysis into the woof
of a then very pertinent historical question about the fidelity to the Mosaic tradition,
and why fascism sought to extirpate it entirely, Freud posited a general theory of the
traumatic kernel in culture, in cultural histories of major collective, but individually
repeated, formations of subjectivity which could not be explained simply by the
inevitable longevity of tradition. Instead he located tradition’s powerful hold in the
structure of trauma: shock-latency-return of the repressed. The traumatic foundation
(event-latency-return of the repressed) was the contribution of psychoanalysis to
contemporary political and cultural thought as it presented itself after 1933. Far from
reducing political and cultural history to facile, individualized or psychic determina-
tions – it’s all about sex, or it’s all Oedipal – Freud was opening up politics and history
to a necessary recognition of the powerful undercurrent of affects which are initially
generated around the inevitably extreme and overwhelming events of infantile life
which occur before the apparatus is formed fully to handle them, but which, as
structural traumas, are prey to primal repression, bequeathing no knowledge of the
event, its memory, but passing on the unbound associated affects which invest
themselves in the ‘cavities’ carved by these formative erosions of, inruptions into the
subject (the outsides inside) when secondary, historical events that have something in
common occur. Thus what makes a historical event traumatic for individuals or larger
groups operates in what Laplanche calls afterwardness as the best translation of Freud’s
key term Nachträglichkeit.11

So we may speak of a trauma as a historical event of extremity that overwhelms a

subject’s capacity to integrate what has happened to him or her in their lives. But why
are some events more traumatic for some than others? What qualifies the traumatic
impact according to singular histories? These two distinct senses meet at the very
question of what it is that feels overwhelming, unsignifiable, immemorial, that which
we cannot know or remember or bear to handle. A trauma is an event in time even as
it knocks it out. Any such traumatic event, however, is already, unknowingly
predetermined as an originary repetition of structural, predisposing trauma which this
traumatic happening will unknowingly ‘resurrect’, happening in time, but falling out of
it, into the other’s, structural trauma’s, no-time. The historical traumatic event
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 becomes traumatizing in part because it inherits the hitherto virtual character of the
structural trauma (sealed in primal repression) within the formation of a subjectivity
who cannot know what was always awaiting this belated activation. It is also its only
moment. For if trauma is an absence, a hole, in the subject, and without form, its
shapeless but, nonetheless, shaping affects can only register in borrowed clothes on
secondary occasions when something secondary impacts the subject falling upon one
or several of the ‘excavated cavities’ of primordial loss, abandonment, fear of
mutilation, and inherits their halo of unbound affect – the resonating circles around the
invisible stone dropped into the unfathomable pond of the not-yet-psyche that,
nonetheless, collects and then quivers with anxiety at this belated but, paradoxically,
originary event. I suggest that we need to hold onto a structural understanding of
trauma – the pre-human condition of human becoming beyond/before/beneath
fantasy and thought where a not-yet conscious becoming-human, living being,
nonetheless garners the constant impact of its weakly or sometimes un-differentiated
inner and outer worlds. At the same time, we need also to be studying trauma as an
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event in life and history that may be of an extremity that overwhelms the formed
psyche’s capacity to process extremity for which it feels its defences breached and
which triggers the inheritance of the initiating structural trauma’s wandering, echoing
affects to supercharge our historical encounters with unbearable experience and pre-
structure what it is that will cause, in each of us, differently and unpredictably, the
effects we now speak of as being traumatic for a person. Thus the singularity of a
particular individual’s traumatic experiences must be understood in terms of the
predispositions of specific personal histories while, at the same time, viewed
psychoanalytically and culturally, we can generalize the structural potentialities for
our susceptibility to unbearable experiences of loss, mutilation and so forth in a theory
of the traumatic foundations of subjectivity. Like Freud, who has been misunderstood
in this matter, we are not proposing a phylogenetic or collective trauma, but a dual
structure that places the singular and historical events into a frame of structural
predisposition in terms of originary trauma: the inevitable excess and enigma of the
incoming world, other, stimulus to the becoming, human subject already from its
quickening, garnering and sharing the events and encounters.12

To Lacan’s theory of the Thing, however, Bracha Ettinger has added the concepts of
Thing-Event and Thing-Encounter. Both radically change and expand the concept of
what the subject wants or fears beyond the object that comes to stand for the Thing in an
economy of desire based on having or losing – the lost object of desire. Ettinger
proposes that, from our archaic foundations, we may also yearn for encounter and
shared eventing with an unknown other. Although we may make ourselves fragile and
vulnerable to their trauma, the structure of this transmission is not overwhelming but
humanizing.

IV Two More Moves

The everyday debasing of the concept of the traumatic as meaning ‘a really awful thing
that really upset me’ must be contested so that we can understand better what it is that
art might do or be called upon to do to help us think about both the traumatic
dimensions of subjectivity and the traumatic impact of our histories as they collide in
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45
 our own times, lives, places, cultures to the extent that the attempt to speak of this
occluded domain has become so urgent in what appears to us at this point in history as
a seemingly catastrophic and deeply traumatized present. To do this we need two
further theoretical moves.

We need to move beyond the predominantly phallic model of trauma as a perpetually

present (no-time) and absent (non-space) dimension and to contemplate a futurity for
trauma, and thus a passage from it that does not pretend it can be completely
encapsulated, or redeemed, in narrative and representation to render it a closed past:
memory. What can break the cycle of the unthought, structural trauma and the
secondary, retroactivating historical event by not allowing only inheritance and
originary repetition? Instead, trauma is transmitted: trans-subjective transport. Such
transubjective futurity is an opening occasioned by encounter with its remnants or
traces – the only form of others’ potential sensing of it as trauma rather than it as this
or that story.
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This possibility requires the theorization of dimension within an expanded under-

standing of human subjectivity that yearns for, rather than turns away from,
encounter, a subjectivity that desires or feels able to share and thus process traumatic
remnants of the unknown other as a condition of movement and thus a transformation
beyond the blocked presentness of an unknown absence-presence or the attempt to
master it as a past. What would it be to live beside/with the residues of the trauma that
is the other within or the trauma of the unknown other in fragilized-co-naissance at an
aesthetically created threshold where encounter with the unknown shifts and resonates
– rather than structures – something in each partner of a shared borderspace, even in a
virtual encounter mediated by the art process, by the aesthetic encounter?

Both moves reference the matrixial shift proposed by feminist analyst, artist, theorist,
Bracha Ettinger. What has feminism to offer trauma theory?

In psychoanalytical thinking, whatever hides behind originary repres-

sion is in a way a ‘woman’, related to the feminine ‘dark continent’, to
the prehistory of the Subject embedded in relations with the mother.
Likewise any traumatic event treated by the mental apparatus fit for
treating the Thing is pushed toward this continent and becomes a
‘Woman’-Other-Thing component.13

Ettinger inflects Freud’s pre-fantasmatic, pre-symbolic ‘dark continent’ with a

specifically feminine association, exposing the effect in Lacanian theory of placing
the maternal-feminine in the sphere of the unthinkable, unknowable, unrepresentable
Real, hence the psychically dead and non-human/humanising. She questions such
absolutism and imagines ‘the feminine’ as another (not derived from phallic difference)
dimension that undermines the phallic binary and promises life-desiring links in place
of voids, cuts and substitutions.

Ettinger, however, also wishes to expose the linking of woman with death, both cast in
a phallocentric paradigm as the beyond, for death, psychoanalytically, is not medical
death so much as the realm of the death drive. Ettinger writes:
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 The foreclusion of the feminine is vital for the phallic subject because it
stands for the split from the death drive in many intricate ways. The idea
of death is very closely connected to the feminine in western culture and is
very strongly embedded inside Freudian psychoanalysis in general and
Lacanian theory in particular, where the feminine is closely assimilated to
fusion, undiffererentiation, autism and psychosis, all manifestations of
deep regression and of the activity of the death drive. The matter of the
split from the death drive, which is in fact a split from the feminine, moves
us to analyze further the relation between the beautiful and the tragic as
Lacan knit them; the effect of beauty results from the rapport of the subject
with the ‘horizon’ of life, from the artist’s traversing, via the elected figure
through which s/he speaks, to what he calls a ‘second death’.14

Ettinger opens up the foreclosed dimension of sexual difference in theorizing trauma,

aesthetics and ethics. As with Lacan, the reference to masculine or feminine in
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Ettinger’s work is not about Oedipally gendered, full subjects. Rather the terms
indicate positionalities within the field of subjectivities formed in relation to signifiers,
i.e. subjectivities whose potentialities and modes of experiencing themselves are
structured in relation to what of the uncharted Real is or is not able to enter human
fantasy or thought depending on the signifying chains offered by culture. But radically,
she is also positing, in the feminine, the relay that we easily accept in the masculine
between the concept and the body, which concerns a double structure. One aspect is
the effect of the signifier in making the corporeal available to us as subjects through
images, fantasies and language. The other is the support for the potency of the images,
fantasies and words that is offered by the morphologies and potentialities of the
material and the corporeal as we experience them sensuously and physically:
traumatically. A phallic culture organizes meaning and subjectivity in relation to the
phallus as sovereign and unique signifier, itself a symbol, that orchestrates the field of
meaning through absence/presence/either/or. Other signifiers might allow other
dimensions to become thinkable, dimensions foreclosed by the phallic either/or
regime; deprived of image and word, any non-phallic meanings are rendered ‘mad’
elements of the Real that can only haunt us in hallucination. Ettinger’s proposal of a non-
phallic, supplementary signifier she names the Matrix, as a signifier of a primordial
severality, of subjectivity as originary encounter (rather than undifferentiated fusion from
which the subject must be cut through birth, weaning and ultimately castration), is an
attempt to give the shape of thought to what is already intimated in art and towards which
both late Lacan and Lyotard already bent their research.

Lacan’s gaze as objet a, Lyotard’s matrix-figure, deals with the

impossibility of finding lost archaic mental objects – separated as they
are from the subject by the castrative schism – and with the figurality of
the archaic Thing in visibility. Although the Thing, as the unseen object
of originary repression, is invisible in principle, for Lyotard it is the locus
of a non-place of donation where the always-unexpected event – the
work of art – may be born.15

Lyotardian theory of the novelty of the aesthetic event opens up a no-space in which
the work of art is born, a freighted choice of term. Yet Lyotard implicitly reduces the
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 locus – the metaphorical and not so metaphorical womb – to being merely the non-
place (non-subjective) where an other event creates itself in a solitary, bachelor act.
Ettinger now makes her intervention, identifying this space as Matrix, hence the gift to
humanity from feminine sexual specificity, and by acknowledging the subjective/
subjectivizing element in this space, always several pre-natal-pre-maternal, of a life-
giving and sharing Other, by means of the phrasing m/Other and poeticizing, instilling
subjective and subjectivising grains into this non-place:

I locate the forsaken Event, the encounter with the archaic m/Other, in
a close-by [to Lyotard’s matrix-figure] but different poietic non-place. If
the work of art can only be born into and out of amnesia, the work of
the artist is a working-through and bringing-into-being of that which
cannot be remembered. An event unremembered – yet that cannot be
forgotten – is located in a transsubjective borderspace.16
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The unremembered, traumatic dimension of the Matrix is not about fusion/loss, but
about shareability and co-emergence. In addition to suggesting that a subject works –
the artist working through and bringing into being – Ettinger theorizes the poetic
non-place as a trans-subjective, not merely an intersubjective, borderspace. It cannot
be intersubjective before there are full subjects to enter into relations. Intersubjectivity
is a postnatal event. The trans- prefix as opposed to the inter- marks an important
difference between the idea of the exchange between full subjects (intersubjectivity)
and the affective transmissions between partial subjects, unknown to each other as in the
primordial case of pre-maternal/pre-natal co-emerging partners-in-difference, or in
the case of any one of us working with/responding to the traumas of others, the
events of others, to whose occurrence/emergence we were not witnesses. If I am
affected, after the event of the making, by the encounter with the art work of another,
itself ‘born’ from its own transsubjective borderlinking with its own known and
unknown others, its own and others’ histories, its own sensitivities to the world, am I
not sharing and processing transsubjectively, rather than engaging intersubjectively,
and doing so, engaging not with communicated meanings or clear narrations
(including the structuring discourse of the Other I discussed above), but with traces,
elements, remnants of an encounter-event at and from another time and space
transported to and by me into other spaces and times in an equally affecting way
which can only resonate in me because of specificities within me of which I, in turn
am not aware, lending, unconsciously perhaps, that un-cognized affectivity to the
event of the other in such a way that my response animates, rather than resurrects,
the work while the work animates something until now unknown in me? This
scenario may illuminate something of what occurs, transsubjectively in the aesthetic
encounter; it may explain important aspects of what occurs, or can be brutally and
fatally blocked, in transference in the analytical process. But what of blockages caused
by other mechanisms such as the illness of mourning?

Ettinger addresses the concept of the crypt in Torok and Abraham which she links with
the Lacanian model:

As long as the crypt does not collapse, there will be neither melancholy
nor a process of mourning: no memory and no forgetting. Any crypted
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 event, then penetrates the nonplace of the Thing, inasmuch as it is held
by an originary-like repression.17

She links this form of narcissistic traumatic wounding to the work of André Green’
who, in ‘The Dead Mother’, delineated a form of loss and mourning that concerns not
the loss of and mourning for an actual loved object, a mother, but rather the
destabilisingly brutal change in the maternal imago of a depressed mother which
results in the encapsulation – encrypting – of a lost relationship (rather than its
introjection).18 Linking this with Abraham and Torok’s proposition about the
encrypting of traumatic loss without memory, Ettinger argues that the child ‘can
libidinally invest the traces of someone else’s trauma (in this case, the mother) within its
own psychic apparatus’.19 Thereby, she aims to shift the typical theorization of a
bachelor-subject, individual, lone, mourning, narcissistically wounded, so as to ask
what does it mean that the phantom in the crypt might not be her/his own/only?
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What mechanisms would account for the re-appearance in one’s own

psyche of traces of an-Other’s trauma, rather than their burial?20

Indeed, classical psychoanalysis could not and would not account for what has
increasingly emerged in the analytical encounters with children of survivors of extreme
traumas who seemingly respond to and register the impact of events that did not
happen to them, but to their parents.

Transposition describes the uncanny experience where the past reality

of the parent intrudes into the present psychological reality of the child.
[…] What makes transposition so monstrous and preternatural is that it
entails the transmission of massive trauma.21

If Green is elaborating the transposed psychological effects registered in a child-subject

as a result of a psychological event that afflicts her/his mother (her grief, loss, abuse), a
psychological event itself already registering the mother’s relations with losses, and
both personally and structurally predetermined patterns of vulnerability, the child’s
importation into a created, crypted interior of the effects of and the suffering of the
Mother and the m/Other of archaic pre-time renders the child the carrier of several,
other related histories and traumas, forcing us to imagine not merely inter-subjective
exchange and impacts but the subject as always a trans-subjective meeting point both
in time and out of time, in her/his own immediate family history and beyond through
what might be passed to and encrypted within her/him that already links others to
others and others to worlds, to traumas and events never known or knowable by him or
her except as these transposed traces of otherness lodged within, becoming an
unconscious thread within the transsubjective textile that is never a solitary subjectivity
absolutely cut out and severed as the classic, phallic model would have it.

I submit that a crypt – with its buried unthought of knowledge, with

what cannot be admitted and signified by the m/Other as loss and is
buried alone in an isolated, nonconscious cavity, with the traumatism
that has caused it, with the signifiers that could have told the story, but
instead remain detached and isolated, with the image that could have
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 held together the scene, and with the affect that accompanied it – can
be transmitted from one subject to another by metramorphosis, because
a capacity and an occasion for this kind of transmission, co-affectivity,
co-acting, co-making already occurred in the archaic relations between
each becoming-subject and the m/Other. Metramorphosis turns the
subject’s boundaries into thresholds, and co-affectivity turns the
borderlines between subjects in distance-in-proximity and between
subject and object, into a shareable borderspace.22

Here the structural trauma/historical trauma model, produces a different potentiality.

Because the primordial encounter between unknown others, prematernal/prenatal has
already engraved the potentiality for severality, the historical, in-time encounters are
housed by but also affectively realize this potentiality. Ettinger has taken the
formulations we have laid out about both the relays of structural and historical trauma
and the encrypting of the trauma of unrembered loss and shifted both to allow, in the
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same theoretical structure, a different possibility. In the matrixial sphere the primordial
trauma is not that of separation but of connectivity/fragility. The archaic encounter
and co-eventing with an unknown m/Other also carves into the psychic space cavities
or rather, establishes links and strings that traverse but also create shared borderspaces
which do not collapse the minimal difference between partners, but allow an event to
occur jointly, registering differently not mimetically, of course, in each partial partner-
in-jointness. The structural trauma of prematernal-prenatal jointness-in-difference is to
forge subjects susceptible to, and even yearning for, these specific resonating
connectivities, transmissions, transports and transformations. Ettinger theorizes an
aesthetic trope that overrides the insistence on the dividing line of birth as the
definition of the subjective and the nonsubjective:

Metramorphosis is the poetic process of affective-emotive borderswer-

ving: a process of differentiation during borderspacing and borderlink-
ing by affective differentiation […]. It is a process of inscriptive
exchange between within/several matrixial entities. Borderswerving
dissolves the individual borderlines so that they become thresholds that
allow a passage, which for each particular participant, captivates what I
call a surplus of fragility. The knowledge of being born together – co-
naissance – in a matrixial alliance insinuates a crossed transcription or
transcryption.

We are hurt in subknowledge of which we receive a sense in the visual

arts by inventing or joining a screen where an originary matrixial
repression – a process of repression by fading-in-transformation is
inverted, because it allows the originary transitive trauma some veiled
visibility via a touching gaze that approaches it from within-outside, and
makes us fragile via wit(h)nessing the trauma of the Other and of the
world. We are hurt, but we are also solaced.23

Ettinger defies the phallic foreclosure of psychic meaning for the prolonged co-
emergence of prenatal/prematernal becoming-subjects, co-affecting over many
months, and expands psychoanalytical theories of the primary traumas to include
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50
 that which inclines human subjectivity to compassionate connectivity and transmis-
sability. Rather than suggesting a kind of cold, psychosis-inducing entombment,
Ettinger extends Abraham and Torok’s crypt, by elaborating a dimension transcryptum
which is associated above all with aesthetic processes.

Transcryptum is the artobject or artevent, artoperation or artprocedure

which incarnates transcryption of trauma and cross-inscription of its
traces, in which case the artwork’s working through of the amnesia of
the world into memory is a transcryptomnesia: the lifting of the world’s
hidden memory into its outside with-in-side. The transcryptum provides
the occasion for sharing and affectively-emotively recognizing an
uncognized Thing or Event. Art as transcryptum gives body to a
memory of the Real consisting in virtual strings and memory traces of
the oblivion of the Other and of the world […]. Our postraumatic era
becomes, by virtue of this art, transtraumatic.24
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Ettinger’s intervention arises in conversation with contemporary French philosophy,

aesthetics and psychoanalysis. Drinking from the many-spouted Parisian fountain from
which flowed the streams of thought named Lacan, Laplanche, Lyotard, Levinas,
Aulagnier, Varela and Deleuze, Guattari, Bracha Ettinger moved between painting
studio and analytical space, formulating her theoretical move beyond the phallic
impasse posited by the absolute barrier of Freud’s originary repression, by Lacan’s
early theoretical insistence that the unsignified can only return as hallucinations of the
Real. The path lay through painting, not philosophy or analysis. For the specific
aesthetic-ethical dimensions of ‘painting’ that could defy the phallic (either/or)
embargo on thinking about jointness, continuous investment of the I and non-I in a
joint-subjectivising borderspace, she coined the term metramorphosis.

Metramorphosis is the orignary human potentiality for reciprocal yet

asymmetrical crossing of borderlines between phantasy (the primary
mode of tracing) and trauma, and between I and non-I. It introduces
and is affected by instances of co-emergence and co-fading as the
meaning of transsubjectivity, and it transmits the unforgettable memory
of oblivion. Transcryptum is the occasion for that memory, enfolded in
amnesia, to come to light […]. A crypt, when transmissible in the
matrixial borderspace, is a lacuna that correponds to an unsymbolized
event belonging to someone else. Thus we can conceive of a chain of
transmissions, where the traumatic thing inside my mother’s other is
aching inside me, and where a forsaken Event that took place between
‘my’ unknown others struggles for recognition through me and with me.
Such a Thing and Event are waiting to be remembered by me.25

If we accept that historical trauma – the encounter with the beyond the limit of the
speaking subject – is in some ways always an activation of and a pre-shaped effect of
structural traumas of separation and castration – that raise the spectres of non-being,
then if we propose a different kind of structural trauma, a real based on minimal
difference and shared borderspaces of co-affection, the nature of what we find
traumatic is different: not the fear of death lured by the death-drive but a wounding of
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51
 that matrixial web of connectivity that remains of course in the realm of the real, of the
unknowable trauma, but nonetheless lends its affects to its surrogates within the
historical mode. So what we experience as traumatizing is not the missed sublime
encounter with death assuaged by the fetish of the beautiful, but the damage to the
very fabric of humanizing connectivity that Ettinger will adamantly argue derives from
the traumatic legacies of feminine sexual specificity inscribed in every born subject.

The paradox of the phallic and the aesthetic opposition it creates between beauty – the
clearly distinguished object and the defensive shield against death-limit and the
feminine: hence the most beautiful thing is the beautified idealized non-maternal non-
death bearing female body – and the sublime: a frightening proximity still managed
though overwhelming – is mutated into the feminine.

Art of a certain kind can become a means of staging of encounter rather than the
protected turning away from the fearful limit frontier. Ettinger suggests that
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Matrixiality in art can create encounters between the artist and the world, the artist
and the Other, the artist and the viewers so that instead of a tableau [a world in itself, a
structuring representation creating the separation] art may be a transport-station of
trauma that allows for passages between subjectivities that desire co-affection or co-
emergence because of a desire for such linkages and processing of the pain of the
unknown other. Ettinger writes:

The place of art is for me the transport-station of trauma: a transport-

station that more than a place is rather a space, that allows for certain
occasions of occurrence and of encounter, which will become the
realization of what I call borderlinking and borderspacing in a matrixial trans-
subjective space by way of experiencing with an object or with a process of creation.
The transport is expected in this station, and it is possible, but the
transport-station does not promise that the passage of remnants of
trauma will actually take place in it; it only supplies the space for this
occasion. The passage is expected but uncertain, the transport does not
happen in each encounter and for every gazing subject.26

Art work that itself arises in response to the trauma of the Other, that of inherited
trauma of the child of the survivor of the Shoah, and to the trauma of the world thus
damaged by the matrixial horror of that epoch-changing event of tearing the
commonality of all that wears a human face, all born of the matrixial web of originary
severality and co-emergence, thus is the product of the trauma of violence inflicted on
the matrixial and of matrixial trauma that aches for the encounter – in which we may
have to bear the grains of the trauma of the Other but in doing so, being thus
traumatized, we are also solaced at a deep level by this potential contact with what
formed our humanity, with what humanized us as a dimension able to share or rather
unable not to share. This is the ethical moment; herein lies any future: a resistance to
the phallic ability to swerve away in celibate self-preservation, abjecting the suffering
other that threatens to contaminate us.

Our present presents us with repeating scenarios of revenge and counter-assault of

damaged and wounded social subjects – but in so far as the only model is phallic, they
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52
 violently expend their violation as violence against the other – seen not as a partner in
the human web but as the figuration of their hurt.

To break this cycle, we need to take both art and feminism much more seriously if we
are to survive a world created in the shadow of the most phallic crime ever: genocide.
We need, as Ettinger reads the myth, a matrixial Antigone who would rather have died
than lived beside the violation of her birth-brother’s humanity.27

Notes

1
Bracha Ettinger, ‘Art as the Transport-Station of Monotheism trans, Katherine Jones (London: Hogarth
Trauma’, in Artworking 1985–1999 (Gent and Press, 1939). For a robust defence of the political
Brussels: Ludion, 2000), pp.91–115 (p.91) (my relevance of Freud’s theory of trauma and cultural
emphasis). memory, see Griselda Pollock, ‘Daydreaming before
2
Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transcryptum: Memory History: The Last Works of Sigmund Freud and
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Tracing in/for/with the Other’, in Matrixial Charlotte Salomon’, in Essays in Migratory Aesthetics,
Borderspace, ed. Brian Massumi, preface Judith ed. Sam Durrant and Catherine Lord (Amsterdam:
Butler (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, Rodopi, 2007), pp.205–26.
11
2007), pp.162–72 (p.162). Jean Laplanche, ‘Notes on Afterwardness’, in
3
Michèle Montrelay, ‘Inquiry into Femininity’, m/f, Seduction, Translation, Drives, trans. Martin Stanton
1 (1978), pp.83–102 (p.88). (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992),
4
Maria Torok, ‘La signification de l’envie de pp.217–24.
12
phallus chez la femme’ [1964], trans. Nicholas For an excellent defence of Freud’s traumatic
Rand, in The Shell and the Kernel, ed. Nicholas theory of culture see Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and
Abraham and Maria Torok (Chicago: University the Legacy of Moses (Cambridge: Cambridge
of Chicago Press, 1998), pp.41–74. University Press, 1998).
5 13
Michèle Montrelay, ‘Inquiry into Femininity’, Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transcryptum’, p.163.
14
pp. 95–96. Bracha Ettinger, ‘Art as the Transport-Station of
6
Bracha Ettinger, ‘Traumatic Wit(h)ness-Thing Trauma’, p.93.
15
and Matrixial Co/in-habituating’, parallax 5:1 Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transcryptum’, pp.162–3.
16
(1999), pp.89–94 (p.89). Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transcryptum’, p.163.
7 17
On the paradoxes of representation as making Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transcryptum’, p.163.
18
something present in its essential character and of André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, in On Private
finding ‘a scheme of intelligibility equal to its Madness, trans. Katherine Aubertin (London:
material power’ see Jacques Ranciere, ‘Are Some Karnac Books, 1997), pp.142–73.
19
Things Unrepresentable?’, in The Future of the Image Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transcryptum’, p.163 (my
(London: Verso, 2007), pp.109–13. emphasis).
8 20
Two major models have emerged, one drawing on Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transcryptum’, p.164.
21
Lyotard and the notion of the sublime and the other Louise J. Kaplan, Lost Children: Separation and Loss
drawn from the work of Deleuze and Deleuze/ between Parents and Children (London: Harper Collins,
Guattari. On the latter see Simon O’Sullivan, Art 1995), p.223–24. Transposition is the term coined
Encounters: Deleuze and Guattari – Thought beyond by Judith Kestenberg in her work in 1972 with
Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, children of Holocaust survivors.
22
2006). Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transcryptum’, p.165.
9 23
My distinction parallels that which, discovered Bracha Ettinger, ‘Art as the Transport-Station of
(shamefully) after writing this, Dominick LaCapra Trauma’, p.98.
24
also proposes in his essay, ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transcryptum’, p.166.
25
in Writing History/Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transcryptum’, p.167.
26
Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 43–85 (pp.76– Bracha Ettinger, ‘Art as the Transport-Station of
85). Trauma’, p.91 (the latter emphasis my own).
10 27
Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction’, in Trauma: Bracha Ettinger, ‘Transgressing with-in-to the
Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Feminine’, in Differential Aesthetics: Art Practices, philosophy
University Press, 1995), pp.3–12. In her introduc- and feminist understandings, ed. Penny Florence and Nicola
tion, Caruth draws on Sigmund Freud, Moses and Foster (London: Ashgate, 2000), pp.185–210.

parallax
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 Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of
the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds.
Committed to feminist studies and author of over twenty books, she is currently
focusing on psychoanalysis and aesthetics, and the issue of trauma, art and catastrophe.
Recent books include edited collections Psychoanalysis and the Image (Oxford: Blackwell,
2006), Encountering Eva Hesse, co-edited by Vanessa Corby (New York: Prestel
Publishing, 2006) and Museums after Modernism, co-edited by Joyce Zemans (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007) and the monograph Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space
and the Archive (Oxford: Routledge, 2007) and articles on the death of Anna Frank in
Mortality and on Charlotte Salomon in Art History. Forthcoming is Theatre of Memory:
Charlotte Salomon’s Leben Oder Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
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Pollock
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