Painting the Feminine into Ontology

On the Recent Works of Bracha L. Ettinger

Tina Kinsella

Persephone was picking flowers: roses, crocus, and beautiful violets.

Up and down the soft meadow. Iris blossoms too she picked, and hyacinths.

And the narcissus, which was grown as a lure for the flower-faced girl ...

Its sweet fragrance spread over the wide skies above.

And the earth below smiled back in all its radiance. So too the chuming mass of the salty sea.

She was filled with a sense of wonder, and she reached out with both hands

to take hold of the pretty plaything.

And the earth, full of roads leading every which way opened up under her.

There is was that the Lord who received many guests made his lunge ...

He seized her against her will, put her on his golden chariot,

And drove away as she wept. She cried out with a piercing voice,

calling upon her father, the son of Kronos, the highest and the best.

But not one of the immortal ones, or of human mortals

heard her voice. Not even the olive trees which bear their splendid harvest.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter, c. 7th century BC.

Colour Becoming Light, Becoming Music

Over the last thirty years Bracha Ettinger has been developing an important body of art and theory

that radically re-paints, and re-thinks, the feminine, the subject, aesthetics and ethics. With her

Eurydice paintings, Bracha suspends the female figure at the abysmal threshold between life and

death: disappearing and re-appearing.1 At the very limit point of signification, between annihilation

and redemption, Eurydice is bound to an infinite movement of continual becoming. Currently

numbering over fifty, painted over many years, these Eurydices are an extended series that Bracha

returns to again and again, adding wounding lines and sorrowing colours. Beginning with two

works in this exhibition, Eurydice nu descendrait nos. 1 2006-2012 and 2 2006-2013, we see

figure-shapes which are simultaneously indistinct and several, cascading over the canvas in an

, . . . ‖ d light

in his paintings of Norham Castle (c. 1845) and Buttermere Lake (c. 1797-98). These rivulets of

opalescent light-water reappear across the canvases of recent paintings in which Bracha invokes

other female figures — women, daughters and mothers — who accompany the Eurydices caught

between two deaths that she has been painting with for over twenty years. Although it is clear that

these paintings take time to complete, they appear to have an urgency about them, as if something

is pressing through time to impress upon our time: Figures morph across canvases, polymorphous

diversiforms are wreathed in colour. Pale and deep tones of iris blue and amethyst shift in tonal

register, infiltrated by cerise, plum, magenta; amaranth, carmine and rosewood, evoking ― F .‖2

Musing on the late musical works of Ludwig van

Beethoven, Theodor Adorno ―fragmented, landscape is objective, while the light in

which it glows is subjective. He does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As a dissociative

, .‖3 ‖

latest works colour and light braid the objective and subjective and paint vibrates with the somatic

evanescence of matrixial modulations: colour is becoming-musical

‖ e find St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, attending Eurydice in No Title Yet no. 1 (St. Anne) and No Title Yet no. 3 (Eurydice, St. Anne) 2003-2009. And in the

past eight years, 2006-now, a new series of oil paintings has emerged: Medusa—Demeter—Persephone. , ‗ ‘ now appears alongside the monstrous serpent-haired

Medusa (Ophelia, Medusa, nos. 1 and 2, 2006-2013); the Graces, the three goddesses who

bestowed charm, grace, creativity and fertility, escort Eurydice and Medusa (Eurydice, The Graces,

Medusa 2006-2012), Persephone (Eurydice, the Graces, Persephone 2006-2012) and Demeter

(Eurydice, the Graces, Demeter 2006-2012). In Ophelia, Medusa nos. 1 and 2 we see what appears

to be a mouth, perhaps a silenced scream, that reappears in Medusa no. 1. Sometimes a face

appears, almost doubled, as in Eurydice, the Graces, Demeter 2006-2012 and Eurydice, the Graces,

Persephone 2006-2012. The Graces and Demeter keep company with Eurydice, there where Bracha

keeps her and us at the threshold before the killing look of a second death, and we cannot quite see

. , ‖ Girl with a Pearl

Earring and she no longer inhabits the canvas alone. Finally in Demeter, Persephone 2006-2013,

the mother and daughter duet are reunited — or ensnared — in milky fronds. But look closer: here

too is Medusa of the gaping mouth and she is doubling, multiple: she is legion. In this way,

‖ , . , ‖ , musical variations that weave webs and

invoke shamanic initiations through the history of art, across and beyond time to forge conduits for

the feminine: past, present and future. All these female figures which are held together as a defiance

of the Now, in abeyance for the Eternal.

Eurydice nu descendrait nos. 1 2006-2012 Eurydice nu descendrait nos. 1 2006-2013

Oil on Canvas Oil on Canvas

Bracha L. Ettinger Bracha L. Ettinger

Norham Castle, Sunrise c. 1845 Buttermere Lake c. 1798

Oil on Canvas Oil on Canvas

J.M.W Turner J.M.W Turner

Eurydice, the Graces, Medusa 2006-2012 Ophelia, Medusa No. 1 2006-2013

Oil on Canvas Oil on Canvas

Bracha L. Ettinger Bracha L Ettinger

Eurydice, the Graces, Demeter 2006-2012 Eurydice, the Graces, Persephone 2006-2012

Oil on Canvas Oil on Canvas

Bracha L. Ettinger Bracha L Ettinger

Demeter, Persephone 2006-20123 Medusa and Owl 2012

Oil on Canvas Oil on Canvas

Bracha L. Ettinger Bracha L Ettinger

Painting as Ekstasis

From the ancient Greek, the word ekstasis denotes a rapturous, mystical even, ontological

. ‖ ‖ emerging body of videos, paintings, drawings and notebooks, we trust to take this risk to be

entr , ‖ -exist amidst a

cosmological universe. Here amongst, what I propose to call, a cosmic eco-ontology we find paint

as colour-light nestling amidst creaturely figures and botanic becomings: animal daemons — owls,

butterflies, chrysalides — and nascent, shapeshifting, vegetal forms that eviscerate boundaries

instituted between the human and non- , . ‖ Medusa and Owl

2012 the owl that accompanies the silently screaming Medusa connects us across and through time.

‖ ‖ The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1797-98), but also connects us to the owl that was

a mascot of the goddess Athena and represented her sagacious acuity. We are thus simultaneously

reminded that it was Athena who brandished the, death-inducing Medusa on her shield. Both

Medusa and the owl are harbingers of death, but for Native American peoples the owl was the

guardian of the night and the animal guide that escorts the dead to the afterlife. Thus the owl and

Medusa together issue forth a twilight, cosmological medicine that weaves life into death, death

into life, daylight into the darkness of night and darkness into light of the day.

In her recent ink drawings and aquarelles Bracha details a number of chrysalides that reappear in

becoming- . ‖ float across water-pages, f ‖ , as daughter;

mother-daughter/daughter/mother/becoming-butterfly-world. Other times they impregnate

diaphanous colour-veils of ink drawings with limb-ligaments and bulbous fruit-seeds or the

saturated fields of colour and tangling branch-rotting-roots in the Lichtenberg Flower and Medusa

series (2010-2011). At such times, subject is emerging object, object is emerging subject, human is

becoming animal-plant and plant-animals are becoming human in sky, sea, moon, in ashes, dust,

debris. We may think, again, of Persephone picking four seasons of flowers: roses, crocus, violets

and daffodils. Rent from the blossoming bower of the meadow and swept up into the arms of

Hades, she is transported to live amongst the shades of the Dead in the Underworld until Demeter

comes to claim her so that the daughter can return to live on earth for six months of the year. In the

‖ , , aquarelles and mixed media we encounter the

butterfly — symbol of rebirth and transformation, emblematic of the soul — emerging from the

chrysalis. And in the paintings we rendezvous with the murderous Medusa as a serpentine flower of

animating breath and the owl as a herald for dusk as dawn. , ‖ , a domain where the not yet living is co-emerging with the never to be dead: butterfly-chrysalis is

generative of the cocoon/tomb, cocoon/womb, and Demeter-Persephone are labouring ecstatic

mysteries, enlacing death into life and life into death.

Mamemento Fluidus – Mamedusa 2014 Mamemento Fluidus - Mamedusa 2014

Still from Film Still from Film

Bracha L. Ettinger Bracha L. Ettinger

Chrysalis No. 1 Chrysalis No. 3

Ink on Paper Ink on Paper

Bracha L. Ettinger Bracha L. Ettinger

Amongst Female Familiars: From Surrealism to Subrealism

‖ work being shown in Mexico it is opportune to reflect on the

work of two other artists who resided here: Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington To consider

, ‖ -consider the feminine in the human within the

context of realism and Surrealism. It was André Breton who announced woman as the ‗ marvellous and disturbing problem in th ‘ . , however, insisted she painted her own reality and she did this by drawing on an iconoclastic

inventory of symbols and redeploying them with her trademark subversive theatricality. Leonora

detailed a reservoir of female hybridisations that refuse the designated space of woman as muse and

femme enfant . ‖ fascination with the unconscious and the enigma of woman. In a page from one ‖ notebooks from 2012 Br ― -realism, sub- ,‖ work of artists who:

.. continually introduce into culture all kinds of Trojan horses from the margins

of their consciousness: in that way the limits of the Symbolic are transgressed

all the time by art. It is quite possible that many artworks carry subjective traces

by their creators, but the specificity of works of art is that their materiality

cannot be detached from ideas, perceptions, emptions, consciousness, cultural

meaning and that being interpreted and reinterpreted is their cultural destiny.

This is one of the reasons why art is symbologenic.4

F ― ‖ ― ludes the

.‖5 In her recent theoretical work, Bracha has been

― ‖ she identifies in three zones. The first zone of shock

being pre-maternity, pregnancy, unborn child loss (chosen or unchosen) and infertility; the second

zone being birthing, the third zone being post-birth, from early motherhood until old age and death.

In her paintings and drawings, Frida addressed the embodied realities of female maternal

subjectivity: childbirth, miscarriage, a , . ‖ theorisation of maternal

‖ -inscriptions and sites of working

. ‖ body is not only a site

of idealised procreation. Rather, the semiotics and iconographies that shroud the cultural taboos of

pregnancy, motherhood, childbirth and child loss are re-inscribed and open onto an aesthetics of

. ‖ s acknowledge femininity as at once a masquerade and a

performance of feminine tropes inscribed upon the body, but also as creative subversions of such

tropes where already existing semiotics and iconographies are redeployed to interrogate shocks in

the fe . , ‖ elaboration of maternal shocks articulates the matrixial

― / ‖ allows us to consider Frida

, ― -infant, then as adult, potential ( ) ‖ , , ― ( , ).‖6

The

‖ , My Birth

(1932) and My Nurse and I (1937) ― the subject- ‖ ― - .‖7

In, Fulang

Chang and I (1937) Frida presents herself alongside one of her pet monkeys. I wish to consider this

image of woman and monkey as a Madonna and Child that queers the mother and infant scenario.8

The frame that encases the painting replicates the frame of a mirror that Frida placed beside the

painting when it was exhibited. This gesture expresses an invitation to inhabit a world between

human and animal: a space/place prior to differentiation which is what Bracha identifies as the

feminine in the subject. Can we consider that even though there was no cultural understanding at

that time for the feminine that Bracha relates, Frida may have been attempting to find a visual

? ‖ oeuvre can be re-cast within a matrixial

light in which shocks in the maternal are addressed, whereby artistic energy is not only

countenanced in terms of a deletion of and repeated foreclosure on female corporeality and where

an aesthetic poetics of the maternal body initiates future becomings for the feminine subject.

This brings me to the paintings of Leonora Carrington whose canvases are populated by fey and

otherworldly creatures that only someone who still has one foot planted in childhood could invent.

‖ , — the tripartite goddess — and this

pantheon of feminine archetypes reside amongst animal and female figures as transforming,

mutating, metamorphosing, hybrid creatures. In her early twenties Leonora was incarcerated in a

mental asylum in Santander, and when we consider her morphing figures, it is no surprise that she

F ― – my

mind, if you prefer – .‖9 It is significant that, in

part, Leonora wove her symbols from the fabric of Celtic myths and rituals that were passed on to

her through her maternal line: her Irish nanny and her mother. These Irish legends abound with

figures of the dead that refuse to remain in their place, that refuse to be inanimate and persist in

intruding into the psychical life of the subject.

In Map of Down Below (1943), Leonora Carrington provides us with a diagram that is reminiscent

of a treasure map: a delicate mapping of spaces that hint at hidden treasures and secrets that refuse

to remain secrets; a map of that Down Below (1941) place that appears in the painting of the same

name. In this work, the sphinx, the femme fatale, the green horse, the dark-haired woman with a

mask in her hand inhabit a fey, ethereal space. The secret treasure to be found there is not yielded in

, , ‖ . Carrington creates a cosmo-verse that disturbs division and separation, an impure, hybrid and

composite otherworld being ushered forth into our world. In this way these female-animal figures

resemble the mother-Thing of the Real that, according to Jacques Lacan, threatens the sovereign

subject with psychical annihi . , ‖ conceptualisation of the human, as

wi ‖ , , , psychical and corporeal boundaries have always, already been transgressed by the feminine and

not woman-Thing as deadly Other.

My Nurse and I I932 Fulang Chang and I 1937

Oil on Canvas Oil on Canvas

Frida Kahlo Frida Kahlo

In Map of Down Below 1943 Down Below 1941

Pencil Drawing Oil on Canvas

Leonora Carrington Leonora Carrington

Notebook, White

Bracha L. Ettinger

Notebook, White

Bracha L. Ettinger

‘ a I , a w y’10

For the past thirty years Bracha Ettinger has been elaborating a body of theoretical writing that

radically challenges our understanding of the human. This theory arises from her artistic practice in

the form of thoughts and words which are recorded, in emergence, into artist notebooks in her

studio. Thus, , ‖ theory surfaces from her aesthetics. Circumnavigating

the circuitry of phallic thought that relegates the womb to an hospitable/inhospitable no-space/place

representing threatening regression and incapable of donating any non-psychotic meaning to

relations between self and other, Bracha reminds us that we all — male or female and regardless of

gender — emerge into life via this encounter which, from the onset, is transgressive in the before as

beyond time/space/place of the maternal womb. She thus invites us to countenance this womb as

matrix: a site of emergence that is a feminine, primordial and singular, first sexual difference that

aesthetically affects every subject. In her most recent work, Bracha has begun to elaborate the

‗Demeter-Persephone Complex‘ continues to address the question of female to female

relation.11

Having previously articulated the modalities by which the archaic m/Other and the

mother figure/function, as well as the woman-to-woman and then more generally the same sex

(‗ t/ciating in co- ‘), are subjected to

psychical foreclosure in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and culture more generally, in this work

Bracha now proceeds to help us to understand Demeter-Persephone as a sphere of feminine to

feminine relationality that offers a symbolic alternative to the Law of the Oedipal father:

Axes offered for meaning by the Oedipus as myth, as well as to the Anti-

Oedipus fragmentation, are insufficient for giving meaning to the woman-to-

woman (and more generally, same sex) difference and for the difference (of

males and females) from the Mother. We have to ask what kind of human

s ‖ in terms of a whole symbolic universe of meaning and value stemming from the

matrixial sphere where the containing of and the proximating to the Other

occurs on a sub-subjective and pre-subjective level, and the passage from non-

life to life, and sometimes from non-life to death as well as birth and birthing,

enter the Unconsciousness of the human being in the feminine.12

The myth of Demeter and Persephone not only offers a symbolic narrative for the fruits of harvest,

the necessary passage of season to season, it is a parable for the necessity of female transition: from

infancy, to girlhood, to womanhood for the sake of an exclusively heterosexual economy of desire.

Should we not question the consequences, for Persephone, her mother, and her female companions

when a specifically female space — of maternality and friendship, in which secret feminine

knowledges are passed and shared from generation to generation — is ruptured? With the Demeter-

Persephone Complex Bracha re-weaves the archaic feminine to feminine back into the fabric of the

Symbolic, into the Imaginary of the subject, and of culture. Phallocentric thought can only re-

present the womb as dereliction and as lost object-envelope, the mother as debased and to be

abjected-rejected, and this inestimably devalues the human subject as such. Venturing beyond any

previous comprehension or any extant psychoanalytic considerations of the feminine, Bracha is a

most undutiful daughter who refuses to accept the Paternal Law. Recalling us to Demeter and

Persephone, she challenges her psychoanalytic forbearers who insist upon the sovereignty and unity

‖ F , , dividual, non-

permeable singular units of the castrated One only. Rather, Bracha carefully explains how the

archaic m/Other and the ― subject‖ are psychically entangled and

enmeshed in the psyche, and she does this by outlining the consequences for the female subject

when archaic femininity is not understood or is subjected to cultural foreclosure. Furthering our

understanding of this feminine stratum in the subject, this Complex facilitates new means of

approaching female hysteria, psychosis, melancholia and desire.13

As we have seen, whilst for

Persephone the passage to female adulthood and adult sexuality occurs by way of a violent

, ‖ ― ‖ ― maternal-feminine Eros‖ ―

subject had already been desired-enough to be carried into life.‖14 Thus the Demeter-Persephone

Complexity ushers forth valuable comprehension of the archaic feminine in the subject that

generates possibilities of Symbolic and Imaginary transformation of the enforced discontinuity in

archaic, matrixial-feminine tissue resulting from the penetration of the feminine time/space/place of

Demeter and Persephone myth. In this way this Complex generates meaning for the feminine

beyond the parameters currently evoked in philosophical and psychoanalytic thought by

explicating the possibility of continuity, not split, on the archaic pre-Oedipal, sub-Symbolic,

feminine dimension of the human. In his Eighth Duino Elegy Rilke laments the primary

dispossession of the human; irreparably cleft from the womb the human subject gazes outward and

is forever poised in an attitude of spectatorship towards the world:

Oh bliss of the tiny creature which remains

forever inside the womb that was its shelter

joy of the gnat which, still within, leaps up

even at its marriage: for everything is womb

... And we, spectators, always, everywhere,

turned toward the world of objects, never outward.

It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.

We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Eighth Duino Elegy

‖ understanding of the human inverts this supposed ontological privation by detailing the

feminine as an aesthetic affective economy with particular consequences for Ethics. This feminine

aesthetics precedes identity and is prior to the intersubjective field of relation between subjects

conceived as discrete and separate entities.15

Rather it is founded in primary hospitality, compassion

and maternal Eros of borderlinking as non-sexual Love ― hospitality by

the exemplary way of the maternal womb.‖16 Here womb stands for primordial transconnectivity in

resonance and inspiration, what ― absolutely future and to vulnerability’ in

the move of self-fragilization that informs the subject.17

F ― Other who is infinitely Other by such (womb-like?) proximity is traumatic to the I who may thus

become self-sacrificial' for this awaits us if we remain with the Lacanian and Levinasian

perspectives on the feminine.18

The meaning of womb/matrix itself must change, she claims; the

m/Other is to be understood as subject, not object, and the Other is to be understood as almost-

Other, transconnected to the fragilized self in the sub-Symbolic in what she names subreality.

Eurydice, Ophelia and Medusa are Others who already exist as alarmist figures in the Symbolic and

Imaginary, but in ‖ Eros,

for they consort with Demeter-Persephone so that all of these female figures form part of the warp

and woof of the feminine in the subject.

‖ and recent videos we find amorphous, indistinct, almost-human

shapes overlaid and underlaid with her own uterine ultra-sonic scans, which capture in re-

presentation that we cannot scopically grasp: the feminine as a sexual difference that is prior to

representation but nonetheless aesthetically subjectivising There is always the risk that language

will harness this feminine sexual difference to the determinacy of physical visibility. That is why it

is justifiable to turn to the artists to countenance the aesthetics of the feminine that is prior to

identity, previous to language and rooted in corpo-reality. If art is symbologenic and can bypass the

phallic policing of culture then we may ask what a theory that arises from art practice, such as

‖ , can do when it is employed to reflexively interrogate painterly practice. In this sense art

and theory become a composite, imbricated art-theory-work that Bracha describes in terms of a

covenant where the borderline between the two domains is transformed. A covenant is a contract,

an agreement, a pact, but it is also an accord, an alliance, an entente that stages its presence, in the

Biblical sense, by way of the sacred in the human. Theory arising from artistic practice can plait

this re-conceived feminine into representation, language and thought through aesthetic means,

through the symbologenic device of the artist. ‖ -theoretical project asks us to

countenance the feminine as an originary aesthetical co-ordinate that humanises the human,

whether we consciously acknowledge this possibility or not. In this way, the feminine that Bracha

continues to place before us — in her art and in her thought — is a gift to the human, for if we can

learn to listen and see this feminine poetically, aesthetically, we already participate in potentialising

affective relations now and in the past, present, future of a beyond-as-before Matrixial Time. Thus

‖ requires re-considering the very ontological

foundations of the human. And to view her paintings and other artworks is to be in the presence of

an aesthetics that paints the feminine into ontology.

Ein Raham – Eurydice 2014 Ein Raham – Eurydice 2014

Still from Film Still from Film

Bracha L. Ettinger Bracha L. Ettinger

1 In recent years Bracha Ettinger has chosen to be called by her first name in her artistic practice, see for

example, the exhibitions Le Cabinet de Bracha, Musée des beaux-art d‟Angers, 2011 and The Room of Bracha, Tel Aviv, 2011. In this paper I follow this lead and refer to the artist-theorist as Bracha. 2 Bracha L. Ettinger, Notebook (White, 2012). 3Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, California: Standford University Press, 1998, p. 126. 4 Ettinger, B. L., 1992, „Matrix and Metramorphosis‟ in Differences 4, 176-208, p. 196. 5 Bracha L. Ettinger, 2007, „Diotima and the Matrixial Transference: Psychoanalytical Encounter-Event as Pregnancy in Beauty‟ in van der Merwe, C.N. & Viljoed, H., ed., Across the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature. New York: Peter Lang and Potchefstroom. 6 Bracha L. Ettinger in „Shocks of Maternality, Demeter-Persephone Complex and the Journal of Sylvia Plath‟ in Journal of Studies in Sexuality and Gender, (paper received for print 2013), Summer 2014. 7 Bracha L. Ettinger in „Shocks of Maternality, Demeter-Persephone Complex and the Journal of Sylvia Plath‟ in Journal of Studies in Sexuality and Gender, (paper received for print 2013), Summer 2014. 8 „Veronica Roberts, a curatorial assistant at MOMA notes the similarity between this image and icons of the Madonna and Child as well as the humorous means by which Kahlo draws our attention the similarity in facial features between her and the monkey. See „A Close Look: Frida Kahlo‟s Fulang-Chang and I.‟ Available at http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2009/12/03/a-close-look-frida-kahlo-s-fulang-chang-and-i. Accessed 12 March 2014. 9 From „Notes from Down Below‟ in The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, trans. Katherine Talbot and Marina Warner. London: Virago Press, pp. 163-214, p. 168. 10 Bracha L. Ettinger, Notebook 2009-2012, (Archive page scan number 5918). 11

See in particular Bracha L. Ettinger, „Fascinance: The Woman-to-Woman (Girl-tom/Other) Matrixial Feminine Difference‟ in Griselda Pollock (ed.). Psychoanalysis and the Image. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, pp. 60-93. 12 Bracha L. Ettinger, „Demeter-Persephone Complexity, Entangled Aerials of the Psyche and the Poetry of Sylvia Plath‟ in ESC Journal (English Studies in Canada), Special Issue 40.1: “Hysteria,” March 2014. 13 See Bracha L. Ettinger‟s articulation of “Jocaste Complex” and the “ready-made mother-monster” in „Antigone with(out) Jocaste‟ in S. E. Wilmer and A. Sakauskaite (ed.) Interrogating Antigone Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 212-228, and Bracha L. Ettinger, „M/Other Re-spect: Maternal Subjectivity, the Ready-made-mother-monster and the Ethics of Respecting‟ in Studies in the Maternal 2 (1), 2010, pp. 1-24. [online]. Available at www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/documents/ettinger.pdf. 14 Bracha L. Ettinger, „Demeter-Persephone Complexity, Entangled Aerials of the Psyche and the Poetry of Sylvia Plath‟ in ESC Journal (English Studies in Canada), Special Issue 40.1: “Hysteria,” March 2014 and Bracha L. Ettinger, „Demeter-Persephone Complexity, Entangled Aerials of the Psyche and the Poetry of Sylvia Plath‟ in ESC Journal (English Studies in Canada), Special Issue 40.1: “Hysteria,” March 2014. 15 Bracha L. Ettinger, „Matrixial Gaze and Screen: Other Than Phallic and Beyond the Late Lacan‟ in L. Doyle (ed.) Bodies of Resistance. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001, pp.103-143. 16 Bracha L. Ettinger, „Matrixial Trans-Subjectivity‟ in Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23 (2-3), 2006, pp. 218-222, p. 218.

17 Bracha L. Ettinger, „Matrixial Trans-Subjectivity‟ in Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23 (2-3), 2006, pp. 218-222, p. 218. 18 Bracha L. Ettinger, „From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility: Besidedness and the Three Primal Mother-Phantasies of Not-enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment‟ in Athena (2006), 2, pp. 100-135, p. 101.