Bracha Ettinger - Quotes

I have named Matrixial borderspace a psychic sphere of encounters of I(s) and non-I(s) where traces, imprints and waves are exchanged and experienced by fragmented and assembled I(s) and nonI(s) in trans-subjectivity and sub-subjectivity. The concepts of Matrixial gaze and screen enable us to perceive and theorise different links connecting artist, viewer and art-work.
Ettinger, Bracha.

If the almost-impossible knowledge of the Thing-Event concerns the originary feminine rapport, it is not death in itself that inflicts the horrible cut in the matrixial web, but the passage to a bestiality that threatens to blow up and explode this sphere altogether into separate pieces. For life and death are constituted in the psyche as already human even when beyond reach of human-symbolic exchange or communication, even at the corpo- real level. Non-human bestiality inflicted on my non-I(s) diminishes, and can also abolish, the capacity of the matrixial web for reabsorption of loss, for transference of memory and for processing mourning.
Ettinger, Bracha.

From the phallic point of view, the elimination of the archaic m/Other is the sacrifice necessary for heroic male sexuality to become productive. Such a Hero Genius-Artist corresponds to the Canon that Griselda Pollock (1999) proposes to differentiate in her reading of art history. Anyone, male or female, who takes upon him or herself this hero configuration becomes by definition a man who eliminates the archaic Woman-m/Other. The price to be paid for this is very high if you are a female artist whose sexuality fits badly into Oedipal father-son circulation.
Ettinger, Bracha.

I am categorically opposed to the classical psychoanalytic claim recurrently emphasized by Lacan, Kristeva and others, according to which the womb can appear in culture only as psychosis; that is, that it can only be the signifier for the crazy unthinkable par excellence, and that whatever is thinkable has to pass through the castration mechanism, by which it is separated from its Real-ness, making the womb that which must be rejected as the ultimate abject, and making this abject the necessary condition for the creation of the subject and the psychoanalytic process. It is precisely this mechanism that establishes the mother as an abject or a lack, scarified to the creation of meaning and to the meaning of creation, whose trace-less elimination is the basis for the creative process and the Birth of the Hero.
Ettinger, Bracha.

Com-passion involves transformational affects, and among them these major three:primary fascinance (that precedes or is in parallel to fascinum and might counter-balance control and submission by its transformational value), primary compassion (that precedesand might counter-balance abjection and abandonment), and primary awe (that mightcounter-balance shame and fear).
Ettinger, Bracha. "Fragilization and Resistance." in: Studies in The Maternal. Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009. (English).

Through them the other and the Cosmos do not turn into objects - their dynamic difference is preserved during cognizing. By way of these affects, the subtle human subjectivizing processes and the early positions are not "schizophrenic-paranoid".
Ettinger, Bracha. "Fragilization and Resistance." in: Studies in The Maternal. Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009. (English).

Com-passion is an effect within the transubjective sphere. Compassion, awe and fascinance are knowing aerials and feel-thinking strings. They are primordial and affective in the same sense that anxiety is. They can reach the ethical when they turn into respect, non-abandonment and copoiesis as values or points of view: acting-thinking values.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Fragilization and Resistance." in: Studies in The Maternal. Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009. (English).

The ethical implications of wit(h)nessing are accessed if a subject that reverberates "its" I
non-I transubjective strings takes responsibility for them, so that as a subject the other is re-spected, again and again, as "its" transubject and transject, and not object..
Ettinger, Bracha. "Fragilization and Resistance." in: Studies in The Maternal. Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009. (English).

When fascinance is awakened by artworking and by art, the psyche reconnects to primal compassion through threads that have been established already following the archaic compassionate strings as the memory of the string-webs.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Fragilization and Resistance." in: Studies in The Maternal. Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009. (English).

A severe foreclosure of such a string is at present a catastrophe to the other but in the future this is also a catastrophe to the self. In the past ofits futures, will the future-self re-spect? Will it? And what then?
Ettinger, Bracha. "Fragilization and Resistance." in: Studies in The Maternal. Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009. (English).

The human capacity for inspiration revealed in artworking begins with an archaic transconnectedness by psychic strings, that bounds each I, as presubject, to its particularnon-I(s), and first of all to its pre-maternal transubject
its archaic m/Other. Desire, born out of the kind of transmission that the string allows, doesn't seek for objects.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Fragilization and Resistance." in: Studies in The Maternal. Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009. (English).

Resistance here will take the form of autistic turning-over of the string into a skin-screen that opens a distance from the social symbolic and imaginary transparent screen of paranoia.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Fragilization and Resistance." in: Studies in The Maternal. Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009. (English).

The metramorphic consciousness has no center, cannot hold a fixed gaze - or if it has a center, it constantly slides to the borderlines, to the margins.
Ettinger, Bracha and Brian Massumi (Editor). The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press. 2006. Paperback, 245 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816635870.

In the unconscious mind, the matrixial borderline dimension, involved in the process of creating feminine desire and meaning co-exists with and alternates with the phallic dimension.
Ettinger, Bracha and Brian Massumi (Editor). The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press. 2006. Paperback, 245 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816635870.

The womb and the prenatal phase are the referents to the Real to which the imaginary Matrix corresponds.
Ettinger, Bracha and Brian Massumi (Editor). The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press. 2006. Paperback, 245 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816635870.

From the moment we speak of the subject, we may also speak of an enlarged subject.
Ettinger, Bracha and Brian Massumi (Editor). The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press. 2006. Paperback, 245 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816635870.

The Matrix deals with multiplicity, plurality, partiality, asymmetry, alterity, sexual difference, the unknown, encounters of the feminine and the prenatal in their passage from the subsymbolic to the symbolic, processes of transformation of several elements in co-existence, continual returnings at borderlines and limits, and thresholds between partial subjects in co-emergence.
Ettinger, Bracha and Brian Massumi (Editor). The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press. 2006. Paperback, 245 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816635870.

In art today, trauma and virtual matrixiality more then phantasm determines the trajectory of what is, out of art, a forever no-time and no-place. Art links the time of too-early to the time of too-late and plants them in the world’s time.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Art, Memory, Resistance." Framework: The Finnish Art Review. Vol 4. 2005.

The creative taking place of encounter-events I would say. A sense of danger,mixed up with immense joy, immediately started to build up, and with it, an intensive appeal to transform the moment and give it a new meaning, or a memory as you say,based on the unconscious of the voyage itself.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Art, Memory, Resistance." Framework: The Finnish Art Review. Vol 4. 2005.

The artist becomes responsible for an event she didn’t produce, and by joining in and transforming it into an artistic working through,the original event of the other or the cosmos, which can be traumatic for the other or for a world, becomes a source of meaning and knowledge within a joint psychic sphere and for whoever can join this sphere immediately or later on.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Art, Memory, Resistance." Framework: The Finnish Art Review. Vol 4. 2005.

A strange responsibility it is: to take responsibility for the other in the other, for a world in the world, for the cosmos in the cosmos, and to embrace the virtual matrixiality accessed to you.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Art, Memory, Resistance." Framework: The Finnish Art Review. Vol 4. 2005.

To transform the jump from an event that arouses fear, shame, guilt and aggression, and has a private intrapsychic meaning, into a transformative event with inter-subjective and trans-subjective meaning, the Jump as materialization of a virtual matrixial unconscious net,reattunement was needed, but also an ethical acting-decision and aesthetical working through: to turn the impulsive and compulsive reaction from a repetition and reaction into a subjectivizing event and a work of art with its own parameters with what looks at first sight like a stage or scene, stage-directors, an act, a few acts, an actor, a few actors.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Art, Memory, Resistance." Framework: The Finnish Art Review. Vol 4. 2005.

What matters is the event, the repetition of the event as performance art, and the repetition of the performance as performance art, the video, and all that followed from that moment on –the discussion, the conversation.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Art, Memory, Resistance." Framework: The Finnish Art Review. Vol 4. 2005.

This is freedom, as Luca felt and expressed it, and it involved what I call coresponse-ability. Subjects, objects, actors, etc., should be viewed, from this perspective,as the redispersion of trans-subjectivity in and by different partial subjects.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Art, Memory, Resistance." Framework: The Finnish Art Review. Vol 4. 2005.

Compassion is the only resistance to the power-manipulation machines. Compassion is the ethical opening, and also the possible response. You can’t command it. You can’t falsify it. But you can work yourself through to become more and more compassionate in attitude as well as by theaesthetical practice of fascinance with others (toward the other).
Ettinger, Bracha. "Art, Memory, Resistance." Framework: The Finnish Art Review. Vol 4. 2005.

For me, art will always escape organization, and the vibrating strings between ethics and aesthetics will always escape the political, while forming and informing it.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Art, Memory, Resistance." Framework: The Finnish Art Review. Vol 4. 2005.

Having your hands up, on the other hand, being dirty and ambiguous, is a very strong image and in a sense more enigmatic, more problematic, and for all of us it is perhaps an important ambiguous image n... it puts the emphasis on the journey, the trip, the peoples, the issues, and takes us to the question of the group journey as performance, what is art, what is surrendering, what is freedom and how self-relinquishment is connected to freedom and resistance – and what is courage.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Art, Memory, Resistance." Framework: The Finnish Art Review. Vol 4. 2005.

The interlacing copoietic strings and threads create the ever-transforming transgressive metramorphic borderlinks in a relatively stable yet fluid jointness in severality.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Copoiesis." Ephemera. No 4. 2005.

The I and non-I are wit(h)nessing one another, and by that they become partialised, vulnerable and fragilised. The artist doesn’t build a defense against this fragility but freely embraces it.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Copoiesis." Ephemera. No 4. 2005.

Therefore, to become artistic or generate healing, the aesthetical transgression of individual borderlines (that occurs in any case with or without our awareness or intention) calls for the awakening of a specific ethical attention and erotic extension: an artistic generosity.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Copoiesis." Ephemera. No 4. 2005.

As strings,the erotic antennae of the psyche disperse different aspects: links, waves, frequencies and intensities, affects, together with their threads composed of imprints and memory tracesof jouissance and of traumatic events shared or transmitted between me and the stranger who thus unknowingly becomes ‘my’ intimate anonymous partner. New traces are inscribed along psychic matrixial paths and threads and more strings are vibrating.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Copoiesis." Ephemera. No 4. 2005.

Other in me is also an aesthetical gesture where compassionate hospitality and generosity meets with fascinance. Co-poietic differentiation-in-coemergence is possible only with-in compassionate hospitality and with fascinance.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Copoiesis." Ephemera. No 4. 2005.

If rejection occupies the space of such a fragile openness, devastating unconscious effects necessarily occur.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Copoiesis." Ephemera. No 4. 2005.

The transport is expected in this station, and it is possible,but the transport-station does not promise that passage of remnants of trauma will actually take place in it; it only supplies the space for this occasion.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Copoiesis." Ephemera. No 4. 2005.

Beauty that I find in contemporary art-works that interest me, whose source is the trauma and to which it also returns and appeals, is not the beauty as ‘private’ or as that upon which a consensus of taste can be reached, but is a kind of encounter that perhaps we are trying to avoid much more then aspiring to arrive at...
Ettinger, Bracha. "Copoiesis." Ephemera. No 4. 2005.

Sexuality is the domain where art may be articulated, since we enter both art and sex via the same 'hole' in the Real, to use Lacan's expression, through which bodily experience, drive and jouissance are also presented to the subject . . .
Ettinger, Bracha. "Re-in/de-fuse." Other Voices. Vol. 1/No. 3. 1999.

An artwork attaches, suspends or creates desire.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Re-in/de-fuse." Other Voices. Vol. 1/No. 3. 1999.

The function of psychoanalytic theory for art history may be to expose in art a site of yet unformulated knowledge about sexuality, to clarify this site as a source for ideas that are awaiting significance by language, and to articulate them.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Re-in/de-fuse." Other Voices. Vol. 1/No. 3. 1999.

The objet a of the erotic field of vision is the gaze. But. It is precisely the objet awith its beyond-appearance vibrations that is structured by Lacanian theory in a phallic way.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Re-in/de-fuse." Other Voices. Vol. 1/No. 3. 1999.

...while some obscure 'femininity' still hovers behind like a phantom, forever enigmatic. Any glimpses we capture of this phantom is rejected as mystical or crazy, and any crazy glimpses of it are irremediable.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Re-in/de-fuse." Other Voices. Vol. 1/No. 3. 1999.

Whether a Woman-Other-Thing or a 'woman'-product of the Real's non-sense, equated with the elusive almost-nothing objet a, woman still automatically reinforces the phallus, as its product.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Re-in/de-fuse." Other Voices. Vol. 1/No. 3. 1999.

If desire arises by art, it pursues an internal erotic organization "beyond appearance" and not an organization of representations or a "pure" perception, and therefore its effects can't be prescribed.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Re-in/de-fuse." Other Voices. Vol. 1/No. 3. 1999.

If desire arises by art, it pursues an internal erotic organization "beyond appearance" and not an organization of representations or a "pure" perception, and therefore its effects can't be prescribed.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Re-in/de-fuse." Other Voices. Vol. 1/No. 3. 1999.

The tableau that enacts what is otherwise an almost-impossible rapport (connection) between trauma and phantasm, I and non-I, realizes the passage, onto a matrixial screen of vision, of interwoven psychic imprints, traces and waves, from what is otherwise either irremediably lost -- 'too late', or a potentiality, not-yet-born -- 'too early'.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Beauty and Trauma." 1998.

I propose that archaic psychic matrixial borderspace and metramorphic borderlinks between partial and shared subjectivity and trans-subjective-objects open aesthetic channels for transmissions, exchange and inscriptions via artworks, but it is artworking that offers this sphere the means for seizing itself..
Ettinger, Bracha. "Beauty and Trauma." 1998.

In a marginal awareness, perceived borderlines dissolve to become new boundaries; forms are transgressed; borderlines surpassed and transformed to become thresholds.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Beauty and Trauma." 1998.

And the potentiality of partially sharing it in the transferential borderscreen is the condition for its apparition.
Ettinger, Bracha. "Beauty and Trauma." 1998.