Hi Kate and everyone
I've found your unfolding of Ettinger really intriguing and very
useful,
esp. as access to her work is denied me until I can order some
books/articles.
Some comments/questions/slipperiness re your last post.
...the subject always begins with these acts that make possible the
'one',
the 'other' is then positioned to be aggressively rejected or to be
assimilated via identification. what we can define as the phallic
logic of
the subject is built upon archaic intimations of meaning [..]
composed of
this on/off, either/or system of difference'.
This is certainly one episode in the psychoanalytic soap opera or
telenovela
(I love soaps, and psychoanalysis too has its uses). One could select
other
scenes from this long running series that would provide a different
story
line - for example, infant sees its reflection in the mirror (or
mother's
gaze or...), hey presto, self and other, phallic logic established.
Whatever
the episode, the mise en scene is the same - props and scenery
courtesy of
the male body, the monstrous female body confined to the margins
beyond the
frame. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, this is unproductive desire, this
selfing and othering, whereas D&G argue that desire is productive -
desiring
machines form connections between things/people/ which is a productive
way
of looking at, for want of a better less loaded word, difference.
That's
part of my take on D&G's critique of Freud and Lacan in both
Anti-Oedipus
and Thousand Plateaus.
And
'Passing through the matrixial
filter, particular unconscious non-phallic states, processes and
borderlinks
concerning the co-emerging I and non-I can become meaningful', Matrix
is
thus not the opposite of the phallus; it is rather a supplementary
perspective. 'It grants a different meaning; it draws a different
field of
desire (Bracha Ettinger).
Up to this point (and maybe still) I've thought that matrixial space
corresponded with D&Gs ideas of the Body without Organs, a borderless
limit,
where everything is always already co-emerging. Or maybe with their
concept
of smooth space, the space that is not measured/divided. Where all is
'becoming'.
How does adding a supplement based on the female body do something
qualitatively different than phallic psychoanalysis? My problem here
is with
the word "supplement". Why not a substitute? How is basing a
supplement/substitute on a gendered metaphor (the womb) any more
borderless
than the phallic logic it seeks to supplement/replace? My concern is
that by
using a 'full body', in this case that of the abstract machine of
'woman',
one already is constrained by a border. Maybe you could illustrate
with an
example from art or art history to make it clearer? How will this idea
of
matrixial space help the making of art be more (substitute here
whatever you
want are to be more of) than a phallic spatial model could help it to
be?
These are genuine questions, not rhetorical ones (or should I say
matrixial
questions, not phallic ones).
Regards and thanks for all this food for thought.
Jordan
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