Introduction to Bracha Ettinger’s Matrix Theory

Bracha Ettinger’s theory of the Matrix enables a way of thinking that is not dependent on an adherence to  phallic logic, which, at ontological and epistemological levels, informs much Western thought. Ettinger closely engages with but relativises the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud, and in particular the concepts of the phallus and ‘castration’ by showing the involvement of other unconscious processes that create desire and meaning.[1]  Ettinger names the dominant logic in classic psychoanalysis phallic: not as masculine, but as that which is premised on the oppositions absence/presence, on/off, plus/minus. Through shifting the binary modelling of fusion and repulsion, which are considered as the first and primary psychic activities through which subjectivity is formed, Ettinger proposes a supplementary form of relating located on the border between presence and absence, and not tied to object and subject. Phallic logic, established as neutral by classical psychoanalytical thought, shapes the most prevailing concepts of masculine and feminine in a binary opposition, aligning masculinity with presence/plus/on and the feminine with the negative pole. Ettinger’s Matrix, premised on the traumatic Real and the psychic effects of the specificity of feminine sexual difference, does not displace phallic logic. Rather it supplements the understanding of subjectivity by positing a shifting possibility of and/and and not/not that arises primordially in the prenatal/prematernal encounter in which Ettinger locates what she calls grains of proto-subjectivity. By opening up the possibility within the formation of the human psyche, of a sexual difference that she conceptualizes as subjectivity-as-encounter, and not only subjectivity as separation or aggression, Ettinger’s theory of the Matrix supplements and radically expands ‘the range of processes and dimensions that constitute human subjectivity’ and ‘is a radically extended psychoanalytical theory about the ways in which we relate to the other and to the jouissance of the other’.[2] Hence in contrast to classic psychoanalysis which premises subjectivity on the cut - birth, weaning, language - Ettinger argues that from the beginning subjectivity can be understood as an encounter and this gives rise to a new vocabulary not based on subject and object (or Thing) but on the proto- and partial subjective potentials within each subject for experiencing and locating affect and meaning in shared borderspaces on each side of which a shared event resonates differently. Hence her language of webs, networks, strings, resonances, premised on a subjectivity of partiality, fragmentation, multiplicity and plurality that enables elements to meet and recognize each other without knowing each other. The key concepts of Ettinger’s theory include: metramorphosis, borderlinking, co-poiesis, co-emergence and co-fading, aesthetic wit(h)nessing, fascinance and fragilisation. These concepts describe processes and relations between elements and between partial-elements at a sub-Symbolic level, preceding the unconscious traces of the separate, sovereign, individual. Here, uncognised psychic traces arising in different individuals are transformed by and transform the other, creating a shareable, web-like mental continuity. In the Matrixial sphere it becomes possible to (or rather, it is impossible not to) affect mental traces of trauma, jouissance and phantasy for one another in a matrixial encounter-event. In her theory of the Matrix Ettinger takes the later writings of Lacan, in particular his attempt to imagine subjectivity and jouissance ‘beyond the phallus’ as one of her starting points. Ettinger’s theories thus enable another way of thinking through the passage to subjectivity and the structuring of jouissance - ‘enigmatic excess of unconscious pleasure’[3] - that is not dependent on a relation to the phallus.

An outline the three stages in Lacan’s theorisation of the subject to which Ettinger gives particular attention is provided here.

Matrix and Metramorphosis

In ˜Matrix and Metramorphosis the text that first lays out her intervention into phallically structured psychoanalytic thinking, Ettinger sets out to deconstruct both Lacan’s privileging of the Phallus in his accounts of human subjectivity and phallic inscription as the passage to the symbolic network, and also to ‘challenge the assumption that all unconscious processes are either metaphors or metonymies’.[4] She challenges classic Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis that emphasise the relation between subjectivity, castration and the phallic signifier by arguing against the idea that there is just one signifier - the Phallus - determining all meaning for the human subject. Ettinger draws our attention to the Phallus as the ‘unique term for distinguishing the function of the signifier’ and ‘the signifier of that which is lacking in the chain of signifiers’.[5] The replacement of the mother’s body with the phallus as signifier, which marks the resolution of the Oedipus complex, becomes the primary and irreplaceable metonym. According to Ettinger for Lacan ‘every signifier and every signifying act is a substitution’ of the Phallus.[6] Ettinger presents the Phallus from yet another angle as ‘the code chosen to signify that which enables the child to separate from mother’s body [… ]This separation takes place during each passage from the Real to the Symbolic and [a]ccording to Lacan, this passage corresponds to each reception of messages from the Other by the subject’.[7] The Phallus, then, is the signifier of the passage from Real to Symbolic and every signifying act is an act of substitution, and the passage from the Real to the Symbolic can be understood only in terms of an act of substitution where one element stands in for, or is replaceable by, another. Ettinger argues against this position by attempting to relativise castration, as but one passage to the symbolic amongst many. She suggests that phallic substitution of the Real by the Symbolic curtails the logical possibility of other kinds of movement and relation between elements, and other theories of subjectivity. One of the ways she does this is through a deconstruction of the ways in which Lacan universalizes the relationship of both male and female children to the concept of castration in order to take up their positions in the symbolic order.

Once again, a particularly phallic term is chosen to symbolize the totality of a universal process. Through ‘castration’ by the loss of contact with elements of the Real, one comes to terms with symbolic desire. [8]

Conceptualising and theorising an expansion of the Lacanian Symbolic to accommodate the possibility of several supplementary signifiers Ettinger challenges the Phallus as the one and only sovereign signifier ruling the Symbolic, and also challenges symbolic castration - the recognition that the subject does not and cannot possess the phallus - as the only passage to the symbolic network.

In ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’ Ettinger names this distinct stratum of subjectivisation that re-theorizes ‘the difference between the sexes from the point of view of feminine sexuality’ the Matrix.[9] Here, the Matrixial feminine is understood not as the other of the phallically-constituted masculine: rather it is an originary difference marking all subjects irrespective of post-natal, and Oedipal gendering and sexualisation.[10] She proposes the Matrix as a symbolic concept that refers to those aspects of subjectivity not accounted for within the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal stages of development. Framed with reference to ‘images’ of the intra-uterine foetus and mother the Matrix opens up the possibility of phantasies of non-phallic relations between entities. Significantly, Ettinger argues that the status of the relation between becoming-mother (the non-I) and becoming-infant (I) is neither undifferentiated nor is it based on assimilation or rejection. In refuting the notion that the subject emerges from a state of total undifferentiation, Ettinger is challenging an almost universally held position within psychoanalysis. In most accounts, the site of undifferentiation is either located in relation to primary narcissism in which the child perceives no difference between itself and the outside world, and takes its Ego as its own libidinal object, or is identified in relation to intra-uterine existence. Ettinger argues that the ‘matrixial stage is earlier than the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal stages and affects them in various ways’.[11] For example ’in the Oedipal stage, the traces of the Matrix are reconstructed and partially or wholly repressed’.[12]

Ettinger also proposes the concept of Metramorphosis as the means by which those elements that are excluded from and by the Symbolic order can be registered. Here, she specifically challenges the Lacanian assumption that all unconscious processes are either metaphors or metonymies. In the phallic mode, meaning is produced by figures of speech such as metaphor and metonymy, both of which involve the substitution of one term for another. Metonomy is the linguistic strategy of describing something by substituting a word or phrase with another that is closely associated with it. This process calls into being a chain of signifiers between the two terms that produces a continual deferral of meaning. Metaphor indicates a point of comparison between unrelated objects. Lacan aligns Metonomy and Metaphor with Freud’s concepts of displacement and condensation. Ettinger introduces metramorphosis as a supplementary figure existing ‘on the edge of metaphor and metonymy’ that occurs without substitution through mutual processes of change, transformation, transgression and fading away.[13] Whereas metaphor and metonymy operate by one thing standing in for or being replaceable by another, metramorphosis induces transformational processes and relations which are mutual yet asymmetrical.

At the same time as challenging Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis on the grounds of its exclusive explanation of subjectivity through ideas of castration and the phallus, Ettinger’s theory also is an intervention in feminist readings of psychoanalysis. In ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’ she gives attention to those that have attempted to challenge certain aspects of Freud and Lacan by turning attention to the pre-Oedipal, such as Julia Kristeva who links aspects of creativity with the semiotic, itself aligned with the pre-linguistic, the maternal and the drives. Thus, Ettinger argues against an understanding of womb or uterus as ‘a mythical area of archaic, undifferentiated sensations prior to subjectivity and outside the order of any possible symbolization or even discovery’.[14] She cites Kristeva’s concept of the Chora as an acceptance of the Phallic symbolic in which the linguistic concepts of ‘displacement and condensation are the organizers of the primary processes’.[15] These primary processes are rooted in orality: in a fusion/aggression relation. Ettinger also critiques Kristeva’s post-natal positioning of the first human contact with the other/Mother. In the semiotic Chora the infant’s pre-signifying impulses, drives, feelings and sensations are structured around the mother’s body and exist prior to the processes as articulated by Lacan that move from the mirror stage and castration to signification.[16] Whilst the symbolic has supposed control of the semiotic, the semiotic has the potential to disrupt the symbolic through its interruption of the undisturbed text. The movement between them that makes signification possible is dynamic and thus lapses into a breakdown of ‘certain historically, linguistically and psychically significant moments.’[17] Associated with the maternal body, then, the semiotic Chora is regulated through ‘vocal and gestural’ organisation that is ordered in relation to biological sexual difference and family structure. The semiotic Chora, whilst prior to Lacan’s mirror stage and the ‘imaginary’ psychic register, is still shaped by, if not subject to the law of, the symbolic order. Both the symbolic and the semiotic come into being in relation to particular forms of mediation: although each is structured around different forms of organisation.

Ettinger challenges Kristeva on two counts: firstly that the relation between the symbolic and the semiotic is organised through metaphor and metonymy, and secondly that ‘the semiotic Chora is manifest in psychotic discourse and in poetic discourse and cannot be symbolic’. [18] Ettinger argues that Kristeva proceeds in line with the ‘classical psychoanalytical position that dissociates the “feminine” from the Symbolic’ and also combines with ‘the Kleinian position which claims a pre-Oedipal contribution to subjectivity’.[19] Perhaps more significantly for Ettinger is Kristeva’s positioning of the first human contact with the other as post-natal: that is, ‘the oral perception is the first one and the first contact with the other/mother takes the mode of fusion’.[20] Ettinger’s concept of the Matrix is ‘radically different to Kristeva’s concept of the Chora in these respects’ although she (Ettinger) identifies points of agreement with Kristeva’s ‘emphasis that psychic energy can signify through rhythms and pulsions of the body’.[21] Luce Irigaray also tried to challenge Freud and Lacan by drawing some attention to the pre-natal, and resisting phallic foreclosure of the womb, but without challenging the phallic imaginary in which thinking about subjectivity is still by means of metaphoric reference to body parts, to organs such as the labial lips and the placenta. Ettinger argues against feminist theories such as these in which subjectivity remains entangled with bodily organs. Irigaray’s concept of two ‘lips’ for example, locates feminine jouissance in the specific morphology of the female body that, like Lacan’s concept of the phallus, metaphorically or referentially invokes bodily parts.

In ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, Ettinger argues that the Matrix is not an organ, the womb, but rather it can be imagined ‘as a meeting place between the most intimate and unknown, modelled on the prenatal situation’.[22] Hence in contrast to classic psychoanalysis which premises subjectivity on the cut: birth, weaning, language, Ettinger argues that from the beginning subjectivity is an encounter between known and unknown elements, between I and non-I. She proposes the Matrix as a different model of subjectivity, one in which the movement and relation between elements is mutual but asymmetrical, plural, and fragmented. It is ‘a basic but not exclusive symbol for the feminine, a symbol for a non-phallic sphere [in which] the co-emerging I and non-I(s) which are neither assimilated nor rejected’.[23] Recognition of the unknown is a relation particular to the Matrix that accounts for differentiation: not symbiosis which is operated by fusion or rejection and not separateness. Once the elements ‘know’ the other then they move into the phallic symbolic sphere and become wholly separate elements. Ettinger remains informed by Lacan as she does not see salvation in either the pre-Oedipal or by valuing a different organ prenatally. She therefore builds on Lacan’s hypothesis of another jouissance ‘beyond the phallus’ by offering this other dimension a signifier: the Matrix.

Closely associated with the Matrix, metramorphosis is the ‘becoming- threshold of borderlines’- a concept that compactly and beautifully stores and communicates Ettinger’s proposal regarding non-phallic, mutually transformational encounters. Metramorphosis is concerned with borderlines, limits, margins, fringes, thresholds, and links. It is transformation informed neither by relations of rejection, assimilation or fusion but instead is mutually (but non- symmetrically) and continuously re-tuned and re-organised. Metramorphosis opens the possibility of passage to the Symbolic field that does not follow the routes of ‘castration,’ creating fields of desire and meaning. In ‘Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event’ (2006), Ettinger proposes that metramorphosis allows a passage that captures a ‘surplus of fragility’ for each participant.[24] Here, metramorphosis is ‘the knowledge of being-born together within the same resonance chamber’, what Ettinger terms co-naissance.[25] As a ‘joint awakening of unthoughtful-knowledge on the borderline, as well as an inscription of the encounter it traces’ metramorphosis is the figure that speaks directly to the co-poietic artistic process.[26] It is the ‘subknowledge of which we receive a sense in visual arts through the inven-tion or joining of a screen where an originary matrixial repression – a fading in transformation – is partially lifted or bypassed to allow the originary matrixial transitive trauma some veiled visibility by way of a touching gaze’.[27] It can be reached only through processes that Ettinger terms fragilisation and relinquishment of self. Metramorphosis enables the inscription and transcription of excluded psychic and cultural elements. In other words, the concepts of matrix and metramorphosis deconstruct the monopoly of the phallus and the processes of imaginary and symbolic ‘castration’ in the field of desire, allowing the existence of other passageways to meaning. Via Matrixial and Metramorphic perspectives the sovereignty of the Phallus and of the mechanisms of imaginary and symbolic ‘castration’ are challenged to make theoretical room for a feminine sub-symbolic network to contribute to the non-conscious realms of the Symbolic

Copoiesis

Matrixial sub-subjectivity co-emerges in jointness within a shareable sphere prior to the emergence of the whole subject of Lacan, and Matrixial sub-subjectivity as a psychic structure informed by metramorphosis continues to supplement that of the whole subject throughout life. Ettinger conceptualizes this ensemble of encounters and joint eventing that co-emerges and co-fades within the shared web of mental traces as ‘co-poiesis’. Referencing the Chilean biologist Francisco Varela’s 1972 concept of autopoiesis - yet significantly different to it - Ettinger’s copoiesis is not subordinated to the maintenance of its own organism and identity.[28] In ‘Copoisi’ (2005) one of the ten texts that make up The Jump, or What is Art? Ettinger discusses processes of metramorphosis through which I and non-I coemerge, co-change and co-fade in borderlinking to each other with- in virtual and real strings.[29] The elements within a Matrixial web are unknown, yet aware of each other through borderlinking - what Ettinger describes as pulsive intensities shared as frequencies and vibrations. I and non-I(s) meet transgressively and intimately through borderlinking via intuitive and quasi-telepathic knowing and ‘create singular trans-subjective webs of copoiesis composed of and by transformations along psychic strings stretched between the two or several participants of each encounter-event’.[30] Ettinger proposes copoiesis as ‘the aesthetical and ethical creative potentiality of borderlinking and metramorphic weaving’.[31] In a Matrixial event-encounter the participants mutually transform with and through each other as borderlines between them are transgressed without dissolving. Moments of co-emergence weave a matrixial bordertime, in which ‘prolongation and delaying of the time of encounter-event … allows a working-through of matrixial differentiating-in-jointness and copoieses’.[32.]. Ettinger names as fascinance a matrixial bordertime whose prolongation gives rise to ‘aesthetic duration of affective and effective participation within a transformational subjectivising potentiality of a matrixial link’.[33] Artworking is a compassionate encounter-event of prolonged generosity in which transgressive and intimate copoietic webs meeting fascinance offer a potential for healing. Such a ‘Matrixial co-emergence has a healing power, but because of the transgression of individual boundaries that it initiates and entails, and because of the self- relinquishment and fragilisation it calls forward, it is also potentially traumatizing’. [34] When the non-I offers compassionate hospitality to the I and she enters a space in fascinance, a prolonged durational moment co-emerges which offers the possibility of healing. The ‘transgression of individual borderlines occurs with or without awareness and intention’,[35] and for the artist, it is impossible not to share with the other and impossible not to witness the other.[36] The artist sharing in an unconscious event-encounter ‘become[s] partialised, vulnerable and fragilised’,[37] but the artist doesn’t push away this fragility and ‘freely embraces I’.[38] Such fragilisation within the aesthetical sphere calls also for an embracing of a specific ethical attention and erotic extension, what Ettinger calls an artistic generosity.

Fragilization and Resistance

In her article Fragilization and Resistance (2009) Ettinger names primary fascinance, primary compassion and primary awe as three major transformational affects of Com-passion, and which are primordial accesses to the other and to the Cosmos (she uses the term from Paul Klee).[39] Through these affects, Ettinger suggests, ‘the other and the Cosmos do not turn into objects - their dynamic difference is preserved during cognizing’.[40] Through primary fascinance, compassion and awe, which are primordial and affective in the same sense that anxiety is, the other and the Cosmos resist objectification, and their dynamic difference, which implies a transformational relation informed by mutuality and asymmetry, is preserved through the process of cognizing. As has been outlined earlier in this text, recognition of the unknown is a relation particular to the Matrix that accounts for differentiation: not symbiosis which is operated by fusion or rejection and not separateness. Once the elements ‘know’ the other then they move into the phallic symbolic sphere and become wholly separate elements. Yet, in the process of cognizing, their dynamic difference is preserved. This is an important statement and one that Ettinger unfolds throughout the text. At the end of her first paragraph she plainly lays out what is at stake: ‘To be a subject without turning the other and the Cosmos into an object- that is the question’.[41]

Each of the major transformational affects that Ettinger names are located in specific relation with other affects. Primary compassion ‘precedes and potentially counter-balances abjection and abandonment’. Through its transformational value, primary fascinance, preceding or in parallel to fascinum, ‘may counter-balance control and submission [and] primary awe may counter- balance shame and fear’.[42] Ettinger suggests that compassion, awe and fascinance ‘can reach the ethical when they turn into respect, non-abandonment and copoiesis as values or points of view: acting-thinking values’.[43]

For Ettinger, pre-birth effective Com-passion precedes the anxiety of birth, and by placing the compassion of birth alongside the anxiety of birth she proposes a different path to the Uncanny of Freud’s Unheimlich - the anxiety of homely strangeness.[44] The Matrixial aesthetic affect-effect of fascinance in compassion is a Home-affect - Heimlich - and ‘the effects of Com-passion and the affects of compassion of homely strangeness arise on an aesthetic dimension which is proto-ethical.[45] Primary compassion, she suggests, ‘links the non- strangeness-in anonymous-intimacy of the other and the Cosmos to the subject’ keeping ‘its other as a subject - a transubject, and [turning] its object into a transject’.[46] Here, Ettinger traces differences between aesthetic and ethic modes of organizing and operating. The recipricocity between elements in a matrixial web is not symmetrical, mirrored or symbiotic and the differences in process of ‘becoming’ between I(s) and non-I(s) align with the differences.

The effects of com-passion and the affects of primary compassion and primary awe are the proto-ethical edges of the aesthetic sphere, linked to it by fascinance and by similar affects at the musical level of the other senses. They might be sublimated and embodied in artistic artefact: they can also be transformed into mature ethics. They inform Ethics from a very particular angle. They announce wi(t)nessing since they signal the impossibility of non-sharing. [47]

In this way, com-passion, primary compassion and awe ‘offer a resistance to the objectifying paranoid self’,[48] and fascinance ‘sublimates com-passion itself to a special kind of ethical human contract’[49] between I(s) and non-I(s). This contract of alliance in which a subject takes responsibility for ‘its’ I and non-I transubjective strings is prior to the social and the political but by participating in their spheres it can contribute to changing them.[50] Through self-fragilization, the human subject is in touch with the other’s vulnerability, and resists turning the other into an object at the same time as resisting returning ‘to its own paranoid abjectivity and narcissistic passive-aggresivity’.[51] In what Ettinger calls proto-ethical resistance, I and non-I withdraw from their individual selves just as they withdraw from the cultural and social spheres. Resistance, Ettinger suggests is ‘re-specting the I and non-I in the passage to the level of subject and to that of subjects/objects while still in transmissivity’.[52] Resistance becomes possible if ‘the subject resists its own tendency to manipulate, appropriate, control and abandon, and engage itself in an active struggle against its own paranoia.[53] When com-passion becomes a value and a perspective, resistance reaches an ethical level and becomes embedded in act-thinking.[54]

Artworking and art can re-awaken fascinance, and the psyche can connect to primal compassion through already-established archaic threads. The potential for new threads reverberates and trembles, and in artistic creation, the touch of a psychic string might open ‘a potential ethical trajectory, even if this trajectory has not been taken before and must still be articulated by the subject for the self’.[55] Although there is no promise that a particular trajectory will be taken, and indeed ‘the subject who labours towards this must resist its self’,[56] art is a place where a trajectory towards the ethical through the proto-ethical is opened.

Art objects and the processes of making art are places through which Matrixial knowledge gleaned through wit(h)nessing can be transported. The place of art for Ettinger is ‘a copoietic time space-event of passage’,[57] what she calls ‘a transport-station of trauma and an occasion for joy’[58] A transport station as passageway to the remnants of trauma and residues of jouissance ‘more than being a dwelling place or time, is rather a time-space offered for coemerging and cofading, borderlinking, over different times and places’[59] A transfer and a transport is expected, but is not guaranteed. In a state of fragilisation within the matrixial borderspace and through matrixial borderlinking, the partial-subject finds passageway to remnants of trauma, the matrixial objet a, and matrixial beauty. Yet, ‘self fragilising is risky and also painful because you are reaching compassion-beyond-empathy and a com-passion that is often hard to tolerate on the level of an individual that seeks mental security and needs to withdraw inside its habits’.[60]

Anxiety accompanies ‘the emergence to the surface’[61] of primary fascinance, compassion and awe and entering copoiesis through self-relinquishment reawakens an archaic encounter-event with compassion and with anxiety as its neighbour. Through artworking copoiesis becomes a possible transformational passage to the Other and to the Cosmos and offers the possibility of encountering the Uncanny through the matrixial prism. In ‘The Sublime and Beauty Beyond Uncanny Anxiety’ Ettinger suggests ‘that primary affects other than anxiety are encountered’ when experiencing beauty and the Sublime, and that these effects ‘bring about the experience and emotion of wondering-admiring and amazement’.[62] She suggests that these originary effects correspond to an archaic state evoked - before it evoked anxiety - a silent overwhelmedness which ‘allows for some apprehension of the shared pre-birth space and continuity, rather that the cut, between I and non-I’. In ‘Fragilization and Resistance’, Ettinger gives attention to the proto-ethicality and non-phallic relationality of beauty that links to ‘a refusal to objectilize another subject and a refusal to objectilize the Cosmos’.[63] Here, beauty ‘is about being born from and with - and not about looking for, or desiring an already beautiful object’.[64]

 Ettinger suggests that in fragilisation something will be wounded, as death-wish is awaiting. [65]

Eros that seduces into life evades the division or distribution into subject/object and masculine/feminine and precedes them, and also evades the Oedipal drama in the sense that it has no consideration for sexual object choice or gender identification. So seduction into life beats by way of self-fragilization all throughout life in strange proximity to the death drive.[66]

Matrixial Eros allows ‘us to participate in the seduction into life necessary for all creativity and ethicality as its horizon and its beyond’.[67] Ettinger places the feminine borderlinking that gives rise to such effects of beauty not beyond a barrier or as a frontier, but as a site that exists in-between pure absence and pure sensibility. Experiencing beauty is not only to stand at the threshold of the horrible, what Lacan refers to as the limit, the frontier of death, the Sublime, but also as an occasion for the realization of an unavoidable encounter with the remnants of trauma and joy. Beauty, for Ettinger, emerges by metramorphic borderlinking and self-fragilization during metramorphosis and seeps into the psychic work of Eros and Thanatos. The desire for coemergence in beauty involves ‘being located in the midst and spreading in the space between worlds that do not usually meet’.[68]

Notes

1. Ettinger, ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, 176-208.

2. Ettinger, ‘Copoiesis’, 690-702

3. Ettinger, ‘Fragilization and Resistance’, 1-30.

4. Ettinger, ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, 177-178

5. Ettinger, ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, 189.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.,191.

9. Ibid. 176.

10. Ibid., 176.

11. Ibid., 177.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 201.

14. Ibid., 197-198.

15. Ibid., 198.

16. The Chora as discussed by Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) is a ‘modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic’.

17. Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 24.

18. Ettinger, ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, 198.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 202

23. Ibid., 197.

24. Bracha Ettinger, ‘Weaving a Woman Artist With-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event’, 77.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ettinger, ‘The Heimlich’, 160.

29. Ettinger, ‘Copoiesis’, 705.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., 707

33. Ibid., 707

34. Ibid., 705.

35. Ibid., 706.

36. Ibid., 704.

37. Ibid., 704

38. Ibid., 704

39. Ettinger, ‘Fragilization and Resistance’, 1.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., 2.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.

47 .Ibid.

48. Ibid., 3.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 4.

52. Ibid., 3-4.

53. Ibid., 19.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 4.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid., 8.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., 8.

60. Ibid., 9.

61. Ibid., 10.

62. Ettinger, ‘The Sublime and Beauty Beyond Uncanny Anxiety’, 195.

63. Ettinger, ‘Fragilization and Resistance’, 10.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., 19

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid., 10

68., Ibid., 18-19