Notes
from Ettinger 2012 ‘Maternal Subjectivity and
the Matrixial Subject’
EGS video
[Same old
same old, but with more about art.A
right co/(me)dy of (h)(err)or/s in my view]
[The
lecture begins with her showing some paintings,
including the two versions of Maddona of the
Rocks.She
says it is realism, but not like a camera—fancy!And it
is clearly transubjective]
Artistic
experience is interesting.Art is
both autistic and emergent copoiesis.We
find a similar co emergence in an ‘implicated
critique’ [implicated critique is when we are
able to see and participate, or where our wonder
and concern allow beauty to inform us about the
world, and we can translate this into language
later via com/posing].Pregnancy
is a sight of borderlinking and the emergence of
strings within a feminine eros.It is
‘resonating transubjectively’, it shows the
origin of life in nonlife., the enigma of non
life This concept of non life origins
should not be mistaken for death, and yearning
for it is another version of what Freudians have
taken to be a death instinct.This
can be shown through art including Plath’s and
Pisanik (?)’s poetry.This
is a particular feature of feminine
subjectivity.
There is
an aesthetic origin to ethics.There
are a number of becomings mixed together,
including the transubjective.We do
not turn others into us or into objects.The
aesthetic is transferred to the subject as
ethics.The
ethics can also help us grasp the passage of non
life to life.
Fascinance
here involves an aesthetic of reattunement, the
affective in all its attitudes or modes, which
include wonder, anxiety, concern, compassion and
responsibility as well as revolt [as in feeling
revolted?], abjection and anxiety.Only
the last few tend to be emphasized by
psychoanalysis, as not primary but reactive,
symptoms of anger.The good ones are just as important, and
all should be taken as signals of happenings.The
capacity for fascinance involves a state of
wondering, which activates affects.
Art can be
transubjective, aspiring to the human.And so
it is proto ethical.It
also offers us a ‘freedom fissure’ which means
it can act as the guardian of the potential
values of the human.Paintings
can therefore be seen as both love and critique.They
have the potential for resistance and rebellion
[Adorno really]
The
feminine eros is not the sexual eros nor the
matrixial, which is about love, caring and
communi/caring.This involves self fragilization which
can lead to resistance.Such
resistance can emerge from contraction and
solitude, becoming aware of the strings [as in
counteractualization in Deleuze].
We can
experience a yearning for non life, an awareness
of our trembling in the world.We are
also aware of the non human.Human
perceptions are not necessary for beauty, art is
affective and affected by the transensual [she
seems to be covering as many trendy Deleuzian
topics as possible].When
beauty meets com/passion, we encounter the
sublime.Beauty
arises from truth not from any particular
qualities of the image [classic example of the
high aesthetic really].
Death is
anxiety provoking but it also provides an access
and connection to something bigger, which can be
grasped even if not actually thought.Beauty
is the same: it is of course commercialised but
it also offers access to something non
commercial [the aura?].Human
yearning accesses the virtual as well.We see
in a supplementary way, beyond senses, we are
aware of resonations in the ‘light’, becoming
conscious of being joined in time and space.The
experience of music is an even better
illustration of time.Pulsations
and strings traverse us.If we
fragilise ourselves, we can increase our access
[high aesthetic yet again] this is a necessary
stage, although it cannot guarantee results.
Ettinger
practices as an artist and psychoanalyst, and we
can see her views in her online
essay.Respect is important in psychoanalysis
and a bit rejected.We
possess maternal subjectivity from the start and
we are attuned or vibrated to the female.We’re
talking here about femaleness not masculinity or
femininity.Encounter-events are shaped through
inspiration [in the womb] and these are never
lost although they can be ignored.We
have the capacity to transconnect and to share
affects.Our
early experiences in the womb provide a unique
encounter event [the event bit indicates that
these take place over time]. This provides us
with several elements to our unconscious.Important
separations among us, such as those arising from
social class take place outside the matrixial
[so we can ignore them? They seem FAR more
important than this imagined matrixial stuff
that we had in our first 9 months].
The
matrixial offers a kind of jointness and
difference, not the same as separation and split
in Freudian psychoanalysis.That
[Lacanian?] account is only a model and we can
relativize it, placing it amidst endless
transconnections.Jointness produces traces of trauma, and
fantasy.Something
that shocked me can be collected by the other.This
should make us rethink politics, which is
usually conceived as a matter of full
identities, for example of nations: what is
really at stake are circulating traces in a
matrixial eros [can’t think why we have wars
really].
Psychoanalysis
needs more respect and compassion towards the
subject, who should be treated as a non I.This
would involve more than empathy with the
individual subject, because we were then miss
the non I s [fancy justification for group
therapy involving the family?].Excessive
individualism
involves a split introduced into the matrixial.This
cuts us off from our own resources.Empathy
together with compassion is crucial, to preserve
the primordial matrix.
We find
the same phantasies in every analysis, for
example: the mother, usually the mother, is
devouring or abandoning me, or not concerned
enough with me.It is easy for the therapist to feel
empathy with the subject, but they are really
primary mother phantasies, universal and even
necessary.People need to phantasise and play with
them, and their capacity to do this is stopped
if they are treated as real.Of
course, some mothers really are devouring, and
we can usually tell this by the inability of the
subject to play with the phantasy of the missing
mother.The
blockage can return over time as a source of
hate and also as an inability to deal with one’s
own capacity as a parent, which includes the
need to be inadequate now and then.Playing
with the phantasy is required to overcome those
future anxieties as well, and an inability to do
so can lead to depression.No one
can be perfect and abandonment is a constant
source of anxiety: phantasies help.
Poetry,
like Plath’s and Pisanik’s can be analyzed. Plath
reports in her diaries how she asks her analyst
about mother love.The analyst empathises and strengthens
her feelings of hate rather than love and
compassion.Plath is clearly looking for peace in
terms of her mother’s love.Aggression
in the patient is acceptable, but the therapist
needs compassion, otherwise they reproduce the
uncaring mother.There are lots of mother figures in
Plath, including the Moon, and she clearly has a
fear of becoming a horrible mother herself.We can
call this a Demeter and Persephone Complex,
requiring us to openly play as parents and
children, especially those of the same sex.If we
play using different positions of parents and
children, old and young and so on, we can
generate a stream of knowledge.
Both
poets show the desire to contact a non I, the
quest for the matrixial.Plath’s
suicide has been much discussed, but can be seen
as her longing to be able to enjoy that non life
out of which life comes, to be a pre-mother.This
was confused with death and the death instinct.Other
poems also ‘speak for the matrixial’ by
appearing to be about death.