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Art As Compassion: Bracha L. Ettinger
As an artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha L. Ettinger (Israel, France) incorporates both practices in her work in order to develop an innovative approach to applied psychoanalysis, half-way between the artistic and therapeutic practices; but as an artist, her paintings, drawings, notebooks and installations have influenced both the field of contemporary art and the field of art-history and research over the last two decades. In her work on paper, Ettinger imprints marks linked to memory and trauma, exile and history, while reflecting on representation, the gaze and the trace. The exchange of experiences and the desire to express a common and shared unconscious manifest themselves in her drawings and painting through the absence of fixation and a tendency to ambiguity, permutation and that which is compound, flexible and ephemeral.
- GenresArt
241 pages, Hardcover
First published June 15, 2011
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February 24, 2024
The Folly of Reason, Rosi Hyhn
• There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarianism and just as a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism also taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to the other.-Walter Benjamin
• Bracha Ettinger’s Works on Paper provoke the decoding of enigmatic messages
• Forcefully snatched from their specific contexts of meaning and their place in a historical continuum, what originally carried information while also refusing to be mere information, signs seem now to be deprived of their semiotic character, the symbols bereft of their symbolic function.
o These signs aim at aesthetical plurality instead of semiotic precision
• One sign returns again and again. One letter insists: the Omega, final letter of the Greek alphabet.
• Memory work lights upon voids and signs of violence. Artistic work responds with the very same to expose them, but simultaneously submerges them in at atmosphere of mourning and meditation.
o Ettinger’s works on paper are ‘ar-rest-ed’ in transparency and vacuum when placed in-between horizontal or vertical panes of glass
• Like particles from a collective memory, signs and symbols of individual memories crystallise. Like any form of appropriation from History, they presuppose loss.
Eurydice’s Becoming-World, Christine Buci-Glucksmann
• Eurydice’s Metamorphoses
o Painting on a cosmic basis means capturing the energies of the cosmos, its potential forms and its metamorphoses, and working backwards ‘from the model to the matrix’, as Paul Klee puts it so well. Klee always sought to capture the movement and rhythm of all things by beginning with that which governs them: the morphogenesis of forms.
o The ‘modernist’ distinction between the figurative and the abstract is therefore relativised and called into question by the work of ‘flux-form’, which is an experience. For painting Eurydice— a vanishing musical figure, a shade who exists between life and death, a figure of loss and love—means surrendering to an interplay between presence and absence that is similar to all Freud’s screen-memories.
o She is a matricial figure or, to be more accurate and to adopt Bracha Ettinger’s terminology, a ‘matrixial’ figure.
o In all her multiple forms, Eurydice is a proto-image, an image that exists before there is any image. She is something that cannot be described, something vacillating and fleeting that forces us to think, and paint, with and against the self in order to survive the trauma and the infamy.
o That is why Eurydice is the very alter ego of another figure in Greek tragedy: Antigone. Both stand near the ‘boundary of a second death’ or, as Lacan puts it, ‘between two deaths’. But whilst Antigone is an unbearably dazzling heroine, Eurydice—whom Orpheus, the poet with the golden lyre, captivated with his voice, is a figure of the shadows—with her ghostly beauty and her inexpressible resonances, who suddenly appears from a sort of shadowy mental chamber.
o does life have something to do with death? How can we conceive the ‘matrixial borderline’ of post-Auschwitz painting, which, like the self’s double and the survival of the living [le survivre du vivre], threatens any subject. The ‘between two deaths’ position is always midway between the Ego and the non-Ego. It is a fissure, a fragment, a part-object, an internal double that exists midway between here and there. Ettinger first explored this internal double by using a photocopier to create what I have called increasingly faded and blurred ‘images of absence.’
o As in the cinema, the superimposition creates something less with something more and adds a sheen to Lacan’s real, the much-vaunted unattainable real, or Das Ding, the unforgettable Other in its indeterminate wavering.
It is as though art had the strange ability to locate itself where it cannot be located, in the mute and the prehistoric, because it always leaves something in abeyance.
• Becoming-World
o [Of Euridices series] The nude women hark back to a photograph, to a proto-image of the Holocaust, but they are shadowed by death, and one of them looks directly at me... at you. As though it were a final appeal or, rather, the nudity of a pitiless gaze ‘that knows’. Sometimes full-face, sometimes seen from behind or in profile, they are insistently there. No matter whether the image has been reworked to such an extent that it disappears into the ‘grey zone’ described by Primo Levi, or whether it is eclipsed and heightened with coloured planes, the nudes gradually construct what I am calling Eurydice’s becoming-world.
o as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write: ‘Becoming produces nothing other than itself... Becoming isa rhizome.’ This becoming is descended from no origin, and moves through an art of variations and multiplicities, an art made up of differences, repetitions and quite singular intensities. It is, showever, a repetition that has been delivered by art from a Freudian death drive that is explored here and, so to speak, metamorphosed without any voyeuristic aestheticism.
o Eurydice has been fractalised, like the evanescent beauty of an image-flux that reveals the “mystery of a thing that cannot be articulated’ Lacan mentions in connection with Antigone. The pictorial snapshot becomes a serial virtuality that makes the time of the trauma so visible that the impression of colour is identified with the quivering of the surface.
o Light gradually leaves the indeterminacy of these images-indices of a real, which seemed impossible to go beyond, and invades pictorial space. Colour-light becomes a fold, an unfolding and a refolding, in a permanent return from the visible over the invisible. The result is anew abstraction that I propose to call undulatory abstraction.
• An Undulatory Abstraction
o New way of thinking abstraction: The smooth and the striated are combined, and the world, with its cartographies, its flows, its botany and its landscapes, is no longer excluded by the puritanism of an absolute monochrome. So much so that the distinction between the figurative and the abstract is discomfited by what I call the post-abstraction.
o But Ettinger’s abstraction is not simply a figural co-existence with the abstract.
Her abstraction is the product of a long process of handling figures in line with the trauma, which we find on the striated and fractured horizon of an image that often becomes a landscape-face. All we can make out now is the outline of a body, or the black holes of the eyes of memory. This abstraction is therefore not primal and foundational but it is inevitable, a necessity at some moment within the work as it is bound up with rhythm and light-colour.
o In classical Hebrew, a distinction is made between, three main colours, which have their own symbolic: white (laban), as in snow, milk, manna or leprosy wounds, black (shahor), as in crows or horses, adom, the red of blood, flesh or grape juice. Adém has the same root as addmd (earth) and dddém (man).
For a long time, Ettinger composed black and white of faded greys and then of purples and mauves (the Aramaic root of shahor is related to siga, meaning ‘violet’), before using many assertive shades of red and blue at their most intense. So much so that, whereas Paul Celan’s poetry gradually becomes caught up in a ‘decolouration of writing’ that gives primacy to the a-chromatics of white and to the crystalline, Ettinger’s painting experiences a gradual colouration thanks to the heterogeneity of light and rhythm.
• Between the Cosmic and the Mystical: The Spirituality of Immanence
o The spirituality of immanence is less ecstatic, more contemplative and perhaps more diffuse in the ‘oceanic feeling’ of the Whole that Freud rejected.
o WHERE IS HE TALKING ABT THE WHOLE
Drawing Out Voice and Webwork, Catherine de Zegher
• In writing and drawing, Ettinger outlines traces of trauma, memory, exile and history, and in doing so considers the meanings of representation, the gaze and the mark, driven by the irrefutable urgency of empathy and responsibility.
• The work is a dynamic surrogate insofar as the processes regrouping the work into a continuous whole parallel those smoothing over the surface of the bodily shell:
• the exploration of the gap separating the child from his/her mother, which the trace seeks to fill in through its hallmark movement of binding and breaking away, of coming and going, of throwing away and grabbing back. Only then can the signifying process of the text occur, according to the grammatical and syntactical rules of language
• The investment of the page as a metaphoric container not only of the mother’s body but also of the writer/draftswoman’s own body is, in Ettinger’s notebooks, literally conflated with the recurrent writings about the m/ Other and the ‘matrix’ (latin for womb) and with the reoccurring drawings of the same female face.
o Clearly and significantly, contents and container are here in constant mutual reference.
• Israel….
• Ettinger has argued for ‘a shift of the phallus’ by introducing the ‘matrix’. She draws on the image of the intra-uterine encounter in the late stages of pregnancy as a model for human situations and processes in which the non-I is not an intruder but a partner in difference—a difference between the other and I that is, in the words of Levinas, ‘non-indifference’.
• To the gestural exploration of the mother’s presence Ettinger adds the trans-connectedness to the m/ Other by unconscious links. Not only the space that simultaneously separates and binds the mother to the child is explored and reinvented, but also the links that are not grasped by the senses, or perhaps not consciously grasped, yet that are ‘transensed’.
• In the absence of the mother’s response, when she is dead or depressed, the connective and curative power of drawing is even more apparent and becomes paramount.
Disturbance and Dispersal in the Visual field JUDITH BUTLER?
• Unlike other events of the past, the Shoah does not recede but is coming closer all the time. It is a past that is present, maintained, monitored, heard, and represented’.’
• There are clinical terms for how a traumatic history is passed on: ‘transposition’, according to Kestenberg; ‘telescoping of generations’, according to Fainberg; ‘deposition of the traumatic self’, according to Volkan. It is with this question in mind that I turn to the writing, drawing and painting of Bracha Ettinger, awork which, from its inception, focuses on the question of how another’s trauma not only becomes one’s own, but how the link, the mechanism of transmission, is crucial to the work of drawing and painting, the reconceptualization within psychoanalysis (and ethics) of self and other, and the thinking of history and ethical practice
• In a way, both in her psychoanalytic theory and in her visual art, there is for Ettinger always a question of an exilic tradition, a problem of borders, a question of what passes from one domain to another, and in what form and through which medium that passage is made. In her work, trauma ‘scatters’ and ‘wanders’ in forms of provisional containment; she thus engages key terms from the Jewish exilic tradition to elaborate an understanding of psychic and aesthetic processes.
• The earliest scenes of a life, scenes that can only be recalled through traces, sounds, through experiences of withholding the voice, or refusing to take too much into the body, have to be understood as scenes of trying to receive what cannot be assimilated, the unspeakable trauma of others. Some of the earliest and most important of Ettinger’s essays and paintings were about this problem of the trace, or what she sometimes calls the ‘grain’ of another's suffering, what has registered traumatically for another.
o The question: how and through what form and material can trauma be registered from and for the other?
o What can one do with this self composed of the bits and pieces of another’s bits and pieces, especially when that other’s experience is clearly composed of bits and pieces from yet others?
o Such linking is neither fusion nor rejection.
o And so the writing sometimes takes sensual and affective form, and sometimes it develops new vocabularies— proliferating terms like ‘matrixial’, ‘borderlinking’ and ‘transcryptum’— which, taken together, suggest that something has to be named anew, and that the names that are available for these sorts of passages are not adequate.
(incorporation of a crypt and the formation of what Ettinger calls a transcryptum. A transcryptum is like a transcription of an intergenerational event outside personal memory but particular to the matrixial dimension whereby the signifier (word or image) does not reign.)
Some historical set of events has not been cognised by the parent or parents, and this noncognisable reality is passed along in the form of a trace or, indeed, a crypt. The child knows that there is a history, and that in some ways that history is lost for the parent. By what token does this lost history appear in and for the child? Ettinger writes, ‘I need to remember what I have never forgotten and to find inside me traces of an event that J have never experienced and memory of a Thing that I have never carried and never lost’
The mother, in this instance, becomes a kind of dead subject, one who is understood as marked by ‘buried speech’ and who ‘becomes in the child a death without sepulcher’ This child becomes, in Ettinger’s words, a subject [who] is unknowingly nostalgic and grieving for a lost relationship that gets encapsulated within its psyche without introjection’, in this way, encrypted as a ‘loss without memory’—an idea she derives from Torok and Abraham.”
o Psychoanalytically and visually, we are faced with the question of whether the earliest impressions, understood as traumatic ones, are foreclosed or accessible. It is clear that this logic assumes that it is either one or the other: foreclosed or accessible. But what exists outside of this distinction?
• We may recall that in Freud’s famous essay, ‘The ‘Uncanny”, first published in r919, he begins by situating the ‘uncanny’ as belonging to aesthetics, understood at least partially as ‘a theory of the qualities of feelings’. It is, he tells us, ‘related to what is frightening—to what arouses horror and dread’ And in this sense the uncanny belongs within the ‘field of what is frightening’: As he tries to take account of this feeling, he is aware that he must find a way into this feeling—‘he must start by translating himself into that state of feeling’.
Vertiginous Before the Light: The Form of Force, Erin Manning
• Colour here, as Ettinger underlines, is expressively more-than pigment. We are not simply seeing pigment, we are seeing colour’s incorporeality as light, we are seeing-with colour’s emergence, seeing light as it is activated at the edge of the resonant field of colour. Pigment isbackgrounded, no longer decisive in this process of seeing, strictly speaking, what cannot be seen: the plane of immanence.
• Figuring undoes the subject-object relation. Figuring is a seeing-with of emergent fields. In Eurydice and Ophelia, No. 3 we see-with the figuring that emerges in co-poiesis with light, never one without the other.
The Matrixial Installation: Artworking in the Freudian Space of Memory and Migration
• Ettinger’s installation at the Freud house
• The artwork of Ettinger installed in the Freudian space of memory and migration created resonance, interweaving and overlay between her work and the material traces of the work of both Sigmund and Anna Freud.
• In the realm of the visible, Ettinger’s work is produced by suspending figurative visualization without abandoning what philosopher Lyotard, fol-owing Marcel Duchamp, called ‘apparition’. “Apparition means that something that is other occurs’.>
• The three channels that interface Freud’s space and his theoretical space: resonance, interweave, and overlay.
• In her diaries, Ettinger tells us that: ‘When I was little I didn’t eat anything, They called that infantile anorexia. In shared and silent despair, my mother cruelly saved my life in daily, sadistic gestures: food’."
• Freud repeatedly collected the most basic of human creations: the bowl.
• Richly connoted with associations of containment and generation, the bowl is
• fantasised as being both shaped by women’s hands from the clay of the earth itself and forming an image of the very concept of the nourishing, life-sustaining mother
• Into the bookcases that line the Freud family’s sitting room, Ettinger implanted copies of her own family’s minimal, but treasured, album ofpre-1939 photographs that testify to those disappeared generations: the missing grandparents, aunts and their pre-war European world. To these she has added other photographs after 1945 documenting her parents’ displaced lives, her own Israeli childhood, her lovers and her own maternities. The freight of these historically located images is not, however, autobiographical.
o SHE PUT HER OWN PHOTOS ON FREUDS SHELF
• A single framed work from one such multiply layered work on paper, Woman-Other-Thing, No. 11 (1990-1993) is planted under Freud’s desk.
• SUMMARY Allowing into psychoanalytical thought the proposition that the prolonged ‘pre-natal/pre-maternal encounter of intimate strangers’ deposits in all subjects, irrespective of later gender or sexuality, a potentiality for ‘trans-subjective co-emergence, co-affection and co-becoming’, shifts both the dominant psychoanalytical narrative of a bachelor subjectivity and the later narratives of Object-relations and of Intersubjective relations.
o The basic psychoanalytical narrative depends upon initiating subjectivity only with birth, thus imagining a process of formation that involves an accumulating series of separations, cleavages and finally ‘castration’ which has the effect of rendering the maternal both abject and the site of endless desire while ‘it’ is nothing but that lostness.
o he sexual specificity of the feminine-maternal, in whose ‘severality’ each of us co-emerges in proximity to an unknown but partial, human, desiring and _fantasising other, donates to human subjectivity a non-Oedipal sexual difference that helps us to grasp certain shared affects, aesthetic responsiveness and “com-passion’. For the daughter, however, who also carries forward from this primordial co-emergence the future possibility of its repetition through actual motherhood, and who like everyone can translate the primordial gift into a social practice that does not involve actual mother- hood, any subsequent damage to the threads that are already interlacing the pre-maternal and the pre- natal su
• There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarianism and just as a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism also taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to the other.-Walter Benjamin
• Bracha Ettinger’s Works on Paper provoke the decoding of enigmatic messages
• Forcefully snatched from their specific contexts of meaning and their place in a historical continuum, what originally carried information while also refusing to be mere information, signs seem now to be deprived of their semiotic character, the symbols bereft of their symbolic function.
o These signs aim at aesthetical plurality instead of semiotic precision
• One sign returns again and again. One letter insists: the Omega, final letter of the Greek alphabet.
• Memory work lights upon voids and signs of violence. Artistic work responds with the very same to expose them, but simultaneously submerges them in at atmosphere of mourning and meditation.
o Ettinger’s works on paper are ‘ar-rest-ed’ in transparency and vacuum when placed in-between horizontal or vertical panes of glass
• Like particles from a collective memory, signs and symbols of individual memories crystallise. Like any form of appropriation from History, they presuppose loss.
Eurydice’s Becoming-World, Christine Buci-Glucksmann
• Eurydice’s Metamorphoses
o Painting on a cosmic basis means capturing the energies of the cosmos, its potential forms and its metamorphoses, and working backwards ‘from the model to the matrix’, as Paul Klee puts it so well. Klee always sought to capture the movement and rhythm of all things by beginning with that which governs them: the morphogenesis of forms.
o The ‘modernist’ distinction between the figurative and the abstract is therefore relativised and called into question by the work of ‘flux-form’, which is an experience. For painting Eurydice— a vanishing musical figure, a shade who exists between life and death, a figure of loss and love—means surrendering to an interplay between presence and absence that is similar to all Freud’s screen-memories.
o She is a matricial figure or, to be more accurate and to adopt Bracha Ettinger’s terminology, a ‘matrixial’ figure.
o In all her multiple forms, Eurydice is a proto-image, an image that exists before there is any image. She is something that cannot be described, something vacillating and fleeting that forces us to think, and paint, with and against the self in order to survive the trauma and the infamy.
o That is why Eurydice is the very alter ego of another figure in Greek tragedy: Antigone. Both stand near the ‘boundary of a second death’ or, as Lacan puts it, ‘between two deaths’. But whilst Antigone is an unbearably dazzling heroine, Eurydice—whom Orpheus, the poet with the golden lyre, captivated with his voice, is a figure of the shadows—with her ghostly beauty and her inexpressible resonances, who suddenly appears from a sort of shadowy mental chamber.
o does life have something to do with death? How can we conceive the ‘matrixial borderline’ of post-Auschwitz painting, which, like the self’s double and the survival of the living [le survivre du vivre], threatens any subject. The ‘between two deaths’ position is always midway between the Ego and the non-Ego. It is a fissure, a fragment, a part-object, an internal double that exists midway between here and there. Ettinger first explored this internal double by using a photocopier to create what I have called increasingly faded and blurred ‘images of absence.’
o As in the cinema, the superimposition creates something less with something more and adds a sheen to Lacan’s real, the much-vaunted unattainable real, or Das Ding, the unforgettable Other in its indeterminate wavering.
It is as though art had the strange ability to locate itself where it cannot be located, in the mute and the prehistoric, because it always leaves something in abeyance.
• Becoming-World
o [Of Euridices series] The nude women hark back to a photograph, to a proto-image of the Holocaust, but they are shadowed by death, and one of them looks directly at me... at you. As though it were a final appeal or, rather, the nudity of a pitiless gaze ‘that knows’. Sometimes full-face, sometimes seen from behind or in profile, they are insistently there. No matter whether the image has been reworked to such an extent that it disappears into the ‘grey zone’ described by Primo Levi, or whether it is eclipsed and heightened with coloured planes, the nudes gradually construct what I am calling Eurydice’s becoming-world.
o as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write: ‘Becoming produces nothing other than itself... Becoming isa rhizome.’ This becoming is descended from no origin, and moves through an art of variations and multiplicities, an art made up of differences, repetitions and quite singular intensities. It is, showever, a repetition that has been delivered by art from a Freudian death drive that is explored here and, so to speak, metamorphosed without any voyeuristic aestheticism.
o Eurydice has been fractalised, like the evanescent beauty of an image-flux that reveals the “mystery of a thing that cannot be articulated’ Lacan mentions in connection with Antigone. The pictorial snapshot becomes a serial virtuality that makes the time of the trauma so visible that the impression of colour is identified with the quivering of the surface.
o Light gradually leaves the indeterminacy of these images-indices of a real, which seemed impossible to go beyond, and invades pictorial space. Colour-light becomes a fold, an unfolding and a refolding, in a permanent return from the visible over the invisible. The result is anew abstraction that I propose to call undulatory abstraction.
• An Undulatory Abstraction
o New way of thinking abstraction: The smooth and the striated are combined, and the world, with its cartographies, its flows, its botany and its landscapes, is no longer excluded by the puritanism of an absolute monochrome. So much so that the distinction between the figurative and the abstract is discomfited by what I call the post-abstraction.
o But Ettinger’s abstraction is not simply a figural co-existence with the abstract.
Her abstraction is the product of a long process of handling figures in line with the trauma, which we find on the striated and fractured horizon of an image that often becomes a landscape-face. All we can make out now is the outline of a body, or the black holes of the eyes of memory. This abstraction is therefore not primal and foundational but it is inevitable, a necessity at some moment within the work as it is bound up with rhythm and light-colour.
o In classical Hebrew, a distinction is made between, three main colours, which have their own symbolic: white (laban), as in snow, milk, manna or leprosy wounds, black (shahor), as in crows or horses, adom, the red of blood, flesh or grape juice. Adém has the same root as addmd (earth) and dddém (man).
For a long time, Ettinger composed black and white of faded greys and then of purples and mauves (the Aramaic root of shahor is related to siga, meaning ‘violet’), before using many assertive shades of red and blue at their most intense. So much so that, whereas Paul Celan’s poetry gradually becomes caught up in a ‘decolouration of writing’ that gives primacy to the a-chromatics of white and to the crystalline, Ettinger’s painting experiences a gradual colouration thanks to the heterogeneity of light and rhythm.
• Between the Cosmic and the Mystical: The Spirituality of Immanence
o The spirituality of immanence is less ecstatic, more contemplative and perhaps more diffuse in the ‘oceanic feeling’ of the Whole that Freud rejected.
o WHERE IS HE TALKING ABT THE WHOLE
Drawing Out Voice and Webwork, Catherine de Zegher
• In writing and drawing, Ettinger outlines traces of trauma, memory, exile and history, and in doing so considers the meanings of representation, the gaze and the mark, driven by the irrefutable urgency of empathy and responsibility.
• The work is a dynamic surrogate insofar as the processes regrouping the work into a continuous whole parallel those smoothing over the surface of the bodily shell:
• the exploration of the gap separating the child from his/her mother, which the trace seeks to fill in through its hallmark movement of binding and breaking away, of coming and going, of throwing away and grabbing back. Only then can the signifying process of the text occur, according to the grammatical and syntactical rules of language
• The investment of the page as a metaphoric container not only of the mother’s body but also of the writer/draftswoman’s own body is, in Ettinger’s notebooks, literally conflated with the recurrent writings about the m/ Other and the ‘matrix’ (latin for womb) and with the reoccurring drawings of the same female face.
o Clearly and significantly, contents and container are here in constant mutual reference.
• Israel….
• Ettinger has argued for ‘a shift of the phallus’ by introducing the ‘matrix’. She draws on the image of the intra-uterine encounter in the late stages of pregnancy as a model for human situations and processes in which the non-I is not an intruder but a partner in difference—a difference between the other and I that is, in the words of Levinas, ‘non-indifference’.
• To the gestural exploration of the mother’s presence Ettinger adds the trans-connectedness to the m/ Other by unconscious links. Not only the space that simultaneously separates and binds the mother to the child is explored and reinvented, but also the links that are not grasped by the senses, or perhaps not consciously grasped, yet that are ‘transensed’.
• In the absence of the mother’s response, when she is dead or depressed, the connective and curative power of drawing is even more apparent and becomes paramount.
Disturbance and Dispersal in the Visual field JUDITH BUTLER?
• Unlike other events of the past, the Shoah does not recede but is coming closer all the time. It is a past that is present, maintained, monitored, heard, and represented’.’
• There are clinical terms for how a traumatic history is passed on: ‘transposition’, according to Kestenberg; ‘telescoping of generations’, according to Fainberg; ‘deposition of the traumatic self’, according to Volkan. It is with this question in mind that I turn to the writing, drawing and painting of Bracha Ettinger, awork which, from its inception, focuses on the question of how another’s trauma not only becomes one’s own, but how the link, the mechanism of transmission, is crucial to the work of drawing and painting, the reconceptualization within psychoanalysis (and ethics) of self and other, and the thinking of history and ethical practice
• In a way, both in her psychoanalytic theory and in her visual art, there is for Ettinger always a question of an exilic tradition, a problem of borders, a question of what passes from one domain to another, and in what form and through which medium that passage is made. In her work, trauma ‘scatters’ and ‘wanders’ in forms of provisional containment; she thus engages key terms from the Jewish exilic tradition to elaborate an understanding of psychic and aesthetic processes.
• The earliest scenes of a life, scenes that can only be recalled through traces, sounds, through experiences of withholding the voice, or refusing to take too much into the body, have to be understood as scenes of trying to receive what cannot be assimilated, the unspeakable trauma of others. Some of the earliest and most important of Ettinger’s essays and paintings were about this problem of the trace, or what she sometimes calls the ‘grain’ of another's suffering, what has registered traumatically for another.
o The question: how and through what form and material can trauma be registered from and for the other?
o What can one do with this self composed of the bits and pieces of another’s bits and pieces, especially when that other’s experience is clearly composed of bits and pieces from yet others?
o Such linking is neither fusion nor rejection.
o And so the writing sometimes takes sensual and affective form, and sometimes it develops new vocabularies— proliferating terms like ‘matrixial’, ‘borderlinking’ and ‘transcryptum’— which, taken together, suggest that something has to be named anew, and that the names that are available for these sorts of passages are not adequate.
(incorporation of a crypt and the formation of what Ettinger calls a transcryptum. A transcryptum is like a transcription of an intergenerational event outside personal memory but particular to the matrixial dimension whereby the signifier (word or image) does not reign.)
Some historical set of events has not been cognised by the parent or parents, and this noncognisable reality is passed along in the form of a trace or, indeed, a crypt. The child knows that there is a history, and that in some ways that history is lost for the parent. By what token does this lost history appear in and for the child? Ettinger writes, ‘I need to remember what I have never forgotten and to find inside me traces of an event that J have never experienced and memory of a Thing that I have never carried and never lost’
The mother, in this instance, becomes a kind of dead subject, one who is understood as marked by ‘buried speech’ and who ‘becomes in the child a death without sepulcher’ This child becomes, in Ettinger’s words, a subject [who] is unknowingly nostalgic and grieving for a lost relationship that gets encapsulated within its psyche without introjection’, in this way, encrypted as a ‘loss without memory’—an idea she derives from Torok and Abraham.”
o Psychoanalytically and visually, we are faced with the question of whether the earliest impressions, understood as traumatic ones, are foreclosed or accessible. It is clear that this logic assumes that it is either one or the other: foreclosed or accessible. But what exists outside of this distinction?
• We may recall that in Freud’s famous essay, ‘The ‘Uncanny”, first published in r919, he begins by situating the ‘uncanny’ as belonging to aesthetics, understood at least partially as ‘a theory of the qualities of feelings’. It is, he tells us, ‘related to what is frightening—to what arouses horror and dread’ And in this sense the uncanny belongs within the ‘field of what is frightening’: As he tries to take account of this feeling, he is aware that he must find a way into this feeling—‘he must start by translating himself into that state of feeling’.
Vertiginous Before the Light: The Form of Force, Erin Manning
• Colour here, as Ettinger underlines, is expressively more-than pigment. We are not simply seeing pigment, we are seeing colour’s incorporeality as light, we are seeing-with colour’s emergence, seeing light as it is activated at the edge of the resonant field of colour. Pigment isbackgrounded, no longer decisive in this process of seeing, strictly speaking, what cannot be seen: the plane of immanence.
• Figuring undoes the subject-object relation. Figuring is a seeing-with of emergent fields. In Eurydice and Ophelia, No. 3 we see-with the figuring that emerges in co-poiesis with light, never one without the other.
The Matrixial Installation: Artworking in the Freudian Space of Memory and Migration
• Ettinger’s installation at the Freud house
• The artwork of Ettinger installed in the Freudian space of memory and migration created resonance, interweaving and overlay between her work and the material traces of the work of both Sigmund and Anna Freud.
• In the realm of the visible, Ettinger’s work is produced by suspending figurative visualization without abandoning what philosopher Lyotard, fol-owing Marcel Duchamp, called ‘apparition’. “Apparition means that something that is other occurs’.>
• The three channels that interface Freud’s space and his theoretical space: resonance, interweave, and overlay.
• In her diaries, Ettinger tells us that: ‘When I was little I didn’t eat anything, They called that infantile anorexia. In shared and silent despair, my mother cruelly saved my life in daily, sadistic gestures: food’."
• Freud repeatedly collected the most basic of human creations: the bowl.
• Richly connoted with associations of containment and generation, the bowl is
• fantasised as being both shaped by women’s hands from the clay of the earth itself and forming an image of the very concept of the nourishing, life-sustaining mother
• Into the bookcases that line the Freud family’s sitting room, Ettinger implanted copies of her own family’s minimal, but treasured, album ofpre-1939 photographs that testify to those disappeared generations: the missing grandparents, aunts and their pre-war European world. To these she has added other photographs after 1945 documenting her parents’ displaced lives, her own Israeli childhood, her lovers and her own maternities. The freight of these historically located images is not, however, autobiographical.
o SHE PUT HER OWN PHOTOS ON FREUDS SHELF
• A single framed work from one such multiply layered work on paper, Woman-Other-Thing, No. 11 (1990-1993) is planted under Freud’s desk.
• SUMMARY Allowing into psychoanalytical thought the proposition that the prolonged ‘pre-natal/pre-maternal encounter of intimate strangers’ deposits in all subjects, irrespective of later gender or sexuality, a potentiality for ‘trans-subjective co-emergence, co-affection and co-becoming’, shifts both the dominant psychoanalytical narrative of a bachelor subjectivity and the later narratives of Object-relations and of Intersubjective relations.
o The basic psychoanalytical narrative depends upon initiating subjectivity only with birth, thus imagining a process of formation that involves an accumulating series of separations, cleavages and finally ‘castration’ which has the effect of rendering the maternal both abject and the site of endless desire while ‘it’ is nothing but that lostness.
o he sexual specificity of the feminine-maternal, in whose ‘severality’ each of us co-emerges in proximity to an unknown but partial, human, desiring and _fantasising other, donates to human subjectivity a non-Oedipal sexual difference that helps us to grasp certain shared affects, aesthetic responsiveness and “com-passion’. For the daughter, however, who also carries forward from this primordial co-emergence the future possibility of its repetition through actual motherhood, and who like everyone can translate the primordial gift into a social practice that does not involve actual mother- hood, any subsequent damage to the threads that are already interlacing the pre-maternal and the pre- natal su
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