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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.
Bracha Ettinger
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.
Bracha Ettinger
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.
Bracha Ettinger
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.
Bracha Ettinger
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