broaching the matrixial

Working personally with theorists continues to intrigue and surprise. One might have suspicions about how these people would be -- and one would not be entirely incorrect. But I'm constantly delighted by tehse characters and their intense individuality. And I've found each to also be warm, personal, and eager to interact outside of the classroom (mostly at meals, of course, but still -- it's cool, and certainly the fodder for stories I'll one day tell my children and students: "Well, when I had breakfast with Sylvere Lotringer..." "Ah yes, I once argued with DeLanda over this very issue...").

Bracha Ettinger is no exception to these theorists.

Tiny-framed, she appears in layers of black,
punctuated by ash-blonde hair and gold-framed glasses,
and gold sneakers.



She fluently speaks and writes (that I know of) -- Hebrew, French, English. She is a Lacanian feminist psychoanalyst (currently maintaining her private practice and volunteering in the West Bank), a writer/theorist, and an artist/painter. I feel mildly insufficient. She writes the matrisial -- an extension/addendum/correction/interaction to/with the work of Lacan (and in relation/opposition to Deleuze & Guattari). She works with pregnancy as an example/metaphor for ethical interaction as transubjectivity with stings of shared affect connecting us in severalities -- groups of a few who engage in/through matrixial spaces. We move thickly through her work -- she reads a few lines, breaks out to explain/complicate concepts, to elicit questions. In the Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition, her work is a labarynth of terminology -- matrixial gazes, borderspaces, encounter events; trans-inscription, -subjectivity, -formations; m/Other, wit(h)nessing, beside(d)ness, fascinance, subsubjectivity... And the notes are as spiralic as the theory. And/but the whole class is engaging intensely, making the experience far more experiential.