Notes on Bracha Ettinger

As someone with no real investment in Lacanian psychoanalysis, I was reluctant to devote much time and energy to Bracha L. Ettinger’s important work on the “matrixial borderspace” when a student recommended it to me. The idea (as the student described it) certainly caught my attention, but the whole Lacan thing was something of a deal-breaker. I ran into a lot of Lacanians in graduate school, and they all had perfectly inscrutable answers for everything we read. “Dulcinea is just Quijote’s objet petit a!” they’d say with unbelievable confidence, or they’d shake their heads at the rest of us whenever we spoke of desire or the feminine. It took me years to liberate myself from their condescension, and I wasn’t eager to reopen that wound when Ettinger came across my desk.

But my student was at once persistent and convincing. She pointed out that Ettinger was no orthodox Lacanian, and that she also owed a great debt to Emmanuel Levinas. The student also promised that reading Ettinger with care would help me to think through Levinas’s own superficial account of the feminine (not as toxic as Freud and Lacan’s, but still a problem). This sold me, and so I made it a point to give Ettinger a shot.

I read what I could, and I eventually came across Diana Romanskaité’s 2019 article, “An Inquiry into the Theory of the Matrix: Subjectivity, Gaze, and Desire in Kristina Inčiūraitė’s Video ‘The Meeting’ (2012).” It’s a terrific essay, and it also lays out Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial borderspace in ways that make sense, at least to me. In the spirit of spreading the word on Ettinger’s work (which I’m now convinced deserves wide diffusion), I’d like to offer my own notes on Ettinger, largely taken from Romanskaité’s article (which also merits wide readership). I begin with a hopelessly simplified account of Lacan’s idea of the phallic (apologies to the acolytes) and then move on to Ettinger’s theory of the matrix and matrixial (prenatal) subjectivity. Some thoughts are my own, but most of this is a condensed version of Romanskaité’s article.

Lacan and the Phallic

 The Lacanian subject is fundamentally incomplete, due to sexual differentiation. As in Plato’s Symposium, the idea is that we are all primordially androgynous, and being born a woman or a man alienates us from this. We come into the world with a fundamental lack (a bike missing a wheel), and so we work to push this lack down and achieve some fulfillment in life. How do we do this according to Lacan? Primarily through the formation of heterosexual relationships and by accepting a particular gender role. Another piece of the fulfillment puzzle is allowing oneself to be folded into the symbolic order. Once this occurs, our desire is determined by the social, and our cravings become “healthy” but ultimately unsatisfiable, since the symbolic order (i.e., language) distances us from the Real. What we want isn’t really what we want, since it’s all part of the symbolic order and refers to nothing at all connected to the Real.

Over the course of the subject’s constitution, there are objects identified “with some missing component of the subject’s self, whether that loss is seen as primordial, as the result of a bodily organization, or as the consequence of some other division.” Lacan refers to these objects as objets petit a. In essence, the child loses connection to the corpo-Real and has to compensate with symbolic substitutes. We may believe we’re in control of what we see and want; however, any sense of power is undone by the fact that the Real always exceeds and undercuts the symbolic order. The Real refers to the corporeal and the mother, which are repressed in language and show up only as symptoms or glitches in the adult psyche.

For Lacan (ever the structuralist), the formation of personality is defined by antithesis: body/language, mother/child, individual/society. The symbolic defines the existence of a person and makes them a part of the system of relations with assigned social functions. There’s nothing “real” about my life as a husband, father, and teacher, but it plugs me into a functioning system of social relations and meaning. And yet, even on good days, I’m a “split subject” who deals with a strong sense of inadequacy, experiences internal conflicts, and engages in relations based on mutual misunderstanding. I need therapy to reckon with this mess, since everything I do is just a means to compensate for deep losses I experienced in childhood. I’m castrated by definition and more or less from birth. Needless to say, the subject of representation in Lacan’s theory is by default male, and so analysis will inevitably reveal masculine wishes, hopes, projections, and fears regarding the feminine (e.g., Dulcinea as Quijote’s objet petit a).

The Matrix

As Ettinger articulates it, the matrix is a dimension of the human psyche that exists beside the phallic. It’s a parallel track. The matrix, however, is grounded in female sexual difference, arising from our “universal intrauterine experience.” Hannah Arendt correctly pointed out that we are all born, but Ettinger takes this one step further, pointing out that we all develop in a womb. The womb is a transsubjective realm of shared affect (as opposed to the Lacanian focus on symbolic castration and a perpetual search for lost objects of desire), since here there is no strict boundary between the subjectivity of the mother and that of the child-to-be. The feminine thus paves the way for a shared space of subjectivity-as-encounter, where unknown partial subjects never fully merge but feel and process elements of each other differently at the level of the corpo-Real. If Lacan’s subject sings opera (into a cracked mirror), Ettinger’s plays jazz.

According to Ettinger, the process of generating signification and feminine jouissance in the matrixial borderspace is metramorphosis. It both weaves matrixial events into the Real and (crucially) expresses them in the Symbolic. The Other is neither objectified nor controlled in this communicative web, and both subjects are transformed by each other’s psychic matter.

During metramorphosis, psychic energy is reorganized and distributed. It transforms partners into partial subjects sharing experiences, affects, and fantasy. The result is a non-phallic mechanism of desire, different from castration. Building on Ettinger’s model of the prenatal, one can imagine this process to be characterized by dynamic relations between becoming-mother and becoming-child—a series of encounter-events. It transmits, at the very least, the ontogenetic/intergenerational memory, trauma, and fantasy of the maternal corpo-Real. Metramorphosis happens in the Real, so it is a non-cognitive activity of the unconscious, but its results reach the Symbolic through mental images and signifiers. To a large extent, Ettinger’s artwork is an attempt to express this through painting. I feel like John Coltrane’s music from 1965-67 was likewise an attempt at metramorphosis — a sincere effort to manifest the Real (as he himself put it) through collaborative play. Who knows? If Eric Dolphy had lived just three years longer, the two friends may well have gotten there. And with all due respect to Dulcinea, I feel that the real force of the Quijote similarly lies in Sancho and Quijote’s gradual construction of the matrixial. It crashes with Quijote’s death (even Cervantes will push things only so far), but the end reads to me like a Yehuda Amichai poem: “A pity. We were a good and loving invention. […] We even flew a little” (Chaval. Hayenu ametsaa tova / v'ohevet [...] me'at 'afenu). (Amichai is talking explicitly about a husband and wife, but one assumes he’d permit this small bit of license).

Ettinger defines borderspace as a psychic sphere connected to primordial femininity, which invokes an encounter-event with an Other that is unknown to me. It is the ever-changing renewal, linking, and rapport between partners (again, something like jazz). In the borderspace where these events take place, an unknown Other feels and assimilates the pain of ‘I’ in the matrixial net: accumulated affects and intensities transform each of the individuals. It is the construction of a shared affective world.

Traces of psychic matter from matrixial part-subjects are transmitted through strings and wavelengths, engendering different levels and frequencies of transformative trans-subjective nets. Their structure is permeable to affects. This implies that relationships are not based on love and hate or, in Freud’s terms, the opposition of Eros and Thanatos. Matrixial exchange arises from hospitality and kindness experienced in the Real of a maternal body (the idea of “hospitality” takes us to Levinas). Ettinger emphasizes the healing and empathetic nature of artistic creativity, in which one’s own or some Other’s trauma becomes a threshold for new affects.

Prenatal Relation as a Model of Matrixial Subjectivity

Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis places maternal subjectivity beyond language, outside the symbolic. It argues that the relation of mother and child is symbiotic. This makes her influence on the adult (who needs to get with the symbolic in order to find some fulfillment) and her disobedience vis-à-vis the Law of the Father a source of perversion and psychosis. In the matrixial model, the forming of signification and human connection happens in the prenatal state, earlier than the establishment of phallic desire and symbolic substitutes for real loss. The womb is thus not merely a vessel or container for the constitution of the child. This also means that our ability to feel with/for others arises from traces of an archaic (matrixial) relation in the psyche, inscribing objective knowledge (Ettinger names it “transsubjectivity”) in a non-cognitive way. Consequently, humans are unified neither by striving to satisfy the demands of the Real, which language represses, nor by reaching fulfilment and wholeness through narcissistic identification with others. The ahistoric memory of matrixial jouissance, unfolding in intimate relationships and/or artistic creation, is the basis of humanity. The main distinction between Ettinger’s model and the Lacanian one is the plurality of matrixial subjectivity. For Ettinger, sense is relational, composed of several individuals’ experiences and feelings. For Lacan, the earliest experience of the corpo-Real is unsignifiable and traumatic; however, for Ettinger, there is an intergenerational and cyclic matrixial connection. The mother in this model does not mediate the process by which the child passes into a symbolic order organized by phallic signifiers; rather, she is the creator of meaning and transmitter of authentic, gentle, and ethical humanity. The matrixial relation is not based on binary oppositions such as symbiosis or rejection. It expresses the irreducible alterity of the Other (Levinas with an assist) that helps to form the Self according to a principle of shareability.

The Transmission of Psychic Events

 The Matrixial objet petit a, emerges from the prenatal processing of sensorial information. It is connected to an ethical relation to the Other instead of a desire for the lost object. It is not visual in the strict sense, so it is not about knowledge and power. It is about all the senses and a phenomenological perception of the world: “Here, not an object is lost, but a link is ebbing and flowing with co-emergence and co-fading of I and non-I.” The Matrix is ultimately about intensities and flows (i.e., rhythm) of interconnected subjects: the model of this activity is based on the prenatal condition of being joined to and separated from the mother, when the self conjoins “in the Real the trauma and jouissance of the body of non-I.” It inscribes and incorporates into memory the imprints of Thing-events of the m/Other, which engender responsibility and an ethical response to Other. It creates a difference from the Lacanian concept of the Thing, which, in his opinion, cannot be comprehended in the Symbolic and in the unconscious. In Ettinger’s view, the Real of the Thing is reached through affective receptors of the psyche (“antennae”, as she calls them); this way, the Matrixial gaze both “threatens us with disintegration while allowing our participation in a drama wider than that of our individual selves.” It is form and dispossession, like Léopold Senghor’s “Je sens l’Autre, je danse l’Autre, donc je suis.”

During metramorphosis, memories are transferred onto sub-symbolic nets (“uma porção de buracos, amarrados com barbante”) between the partners of an encounter-event. Hence the main quality of the matrixial gaze is continuity between the Real and the Symbolic, whereas the Lacanian conception of the gaze expresses a sharp cut between them. For Lacan, integral self-awareness and reconciliation with hurtful events of the past are not possible. Based on the suggestion that abilities to communicate with others and humanity itself emerge from the archaic prenatal bond with the mother that is more profound than the chain of separations, losses, and conflicts constituting the subject in classical psychoanalysis, Ettinger argues that a trans-subjective field is opened through art that transmits affects and enables an emotional and ethical response to the pain of others. We “remember” the womb. Or put another way, matrixial vocabulary reveals psychic phenomena existing “beyond the phallus” (e.g., feelings, memories, and experiences which are perceived as abnormalities and signs of mis-adjustments to the patriarchal order in classical psychoanalysis).

The Continuity of Matrixial Desire and its Manifestations in Art

The subject’s relation with the Other in the Matrix is based on the shared experience of the jouissance and trauma of the corpo-Real. These psychic elements build bridges between past, present, and future. In the Lacanian framework, jouissance is an unattainable satisfaction, because the economy of desire is structured around the lack of phallic signifier, whereas corporal pleasure is lost because of splits, otherwise known as “castrations”: reduction of the libido to drives in the culturally sanctioned erogenous zones, failures of the child to “be the phallus” for the mother, and the function of the father that finally detaches the child from the mother and provides a symbolic mandate. In Ettinger’s model, premises of plural subjectivity and acknowledgment of female sexual difference condition the feeling of self or the Other’s jouissance. “Metramorphosis is a co-poietic activity in a web that ‘remembers’ these swerves and relations, inscribes affective traces of jouissance and imprints of trauma and encounter, and conducts such traces from non-I to I, from one encounter to further encounters.” Information transmitted in these encounters is not cognitive but connected to sensorial experience. In art, traces of the Real are transferred to the artist and the viewers: painting becomes a screen which accounts for “the co-emergence or co-fading of several subjects, partial-subjects, partial-objects, and their links with one another and with others’ traumatic Thing-events.” It is a space for communication in which cultural boundaries are transgressed and change happens. In the Lacanian model, the repressed remnant of the Real (objet petit a) residing in a work lures the viewer and retroactively constitutes them as lacking and desiring, whereas the Matrixial model focuses on the continuity of human psychic activity: the object of desire is not lost, because it was never “mine” in a control-based subject-object relation. The Matrix thus reveals psychic processes which were unnoticed or overall incomprehensible in classical psychoanalysis: primal compassion and the ability to be affected by feelings which in their deepest level are both mine and my life-giver’s.

Memories from the Void

In Ettinger’s view, a work of art is a transitional space where memory imprints of the artist, the viewer, and/or the (m)Other are inscribed. In classical psychoanalysis, these are considered completely lost, reappearing only as psychological symptoms. For Ettinger, the artwork becomes a kind of trans-vault where memories not perceived cognitively are transmitted back and forth and a relation of compassion takes place: the work of art “produces an image, a sign, a symbol, or text where the forsaken Event and the Thing that enveloped the trauma and were enveloped by originary repression will make sense for the first time.” Ettinger presupposes that this mutual but asymmetrical relation is grounded in the structure of the psyche, where primordial subjectivity forms between the archaic (m)Other and the subject-in-process (i.e., the child). Because of this, a person has the potential to respond to others’ pain empathetically: “Sense doesn’t dwell in the celibate subject but is created by different designs of rapport in co-emergence and by gradual changes in borderlinks.” Consequently, an artwork is an encounter where identities with stable and clear boundaries fragment into partial subjects and objects for each other and share a matrixial objet petit a. Its desire is based on female sexual difference and not on the model of splits. In the process of metramorphosis, psychic material is shared. Ontogenetic corpo-Real memory is articulated through sub-symbolic nets: a work of art “extricates the trauma of the matrixial Other out of ‘pure absence’ or ‘pure sensibility’, out of its timelessness into lines of time, and the effect of beauty is to allow wit(h)nessing with non-visible events of encounter to emerge inside the field of vision and affect you.” This means that a matrixial subject can have an authentic relation with others and be open to accept their own weaknesses and wounds. It enables them to view their personal and global history from an observer’s perspective, to possess and be affected by knowledge beyond difference-making language. Think of what Coltrane does to Martin Luther King’s eulogy in “Alabama,” or what he does to religious faith itself in “A Love Supreme.”