Bracha L. Ettinger

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
Born March 23, 1948
Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine (present-day Israel)
Era Art, Contemporary philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Psychoanalysis
Main interests
 Psychoanalysis, art, feminist theory, aesthetics, human rights, ethics, the Maternal
Notable ideas
 Matrixial gaze, matrixial trans-subjectivity

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (Hebrew: ברכה אטינגר, ברכה ליכטנברג-אטינגר‎), is an Israeli born artist, philosopher, psychoanalyst and writer.

Bracha L. Ettinger's ideas achieved recognition in cultural theory, psychoanalysis and French feminism (see Feminist theory and psychoanalysis) after the publication of "Matrix and Metramorphosis" (1992), fragments from her notebooks (Moma, Oxford, 1993) and The Matrixial Gaze (1995). Over the last two decades her work has been influential in art history,[1] film studies (including feminist film theory), Aesthetics[2] and Gender Studies.[3]

Ettinger is a Professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Life and work

Bracha Ettinger, Israeli and British who lives mainly in France, was born in Tel Aviv (March 23, 1948).[4] She received her M.A. in Clinical Psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1975. She then moved to London and studied, trained and worked between 1976 and 1979 at the London Centre for Psychotherapy, the Tavistock Clinic and the Philadelphia Association with R. D. Laing. Her daughter the actress Lana Ettinger was born in London. She returned to Israel in 1979 and worked at Shalvata Hospital. Ettinger, who painted and drew since early childhood, then decided to dedicate herself fully to painting and art and moved to Paris, where she lived and worked from 1981 to 2003. Her son Itai was born in 1988. Alongside painting she began writing, and received a D.E.A. in Psychoanalysis from the University Paris VII Diderot in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Aesthetics of Art from the University of Paris VIII in 1996.

She had solo exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre in 1987 and at the Museum of Calais in 1988. In 1995 she had a solo exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and in 1996 she participated in the Contemporary art section of "Face à l'Histoire. 1933-1996" exhibition in the Pompidou Centre.[5] In 2000 she had a Retrospective at the Centre for Fine Arts (The Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels, and in 2001 a Solo exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York.[6] In parallel to working as artist Bracha Ettinger continued to train as psychoanalyst with Françoise Dolto, Piera Auglanier, Pierre Fedida and Jacques-Alain Miller, and has become one of the most influential contemporary French feminists.[7][8][9][10] Around 1988 Ettinger began her Conversation and Photography project. Her personal art notebooks[11][12] have become source for theoretical articulations, and her art has inspired art historians (among them the distinguished art historian Griselda Pollock and international curator Catherine de Zegher) and philosophers (like Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Brian Massumi) who dedicated a number of essays to her painting.

Even though she was still based mainly in Paris, Ettinger was Visiting Professor (1997–1998) and then Research Professor (1999–2004) in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Since 2001 she has also been Visiting Professor in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics at the AHRC Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (now CentreCATH[13]). Ettinger has partly returned to Israel in 2003, keeping studios in both Paris and Tel Aviv ever since, and became a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem until 2006. Ettinger is activist against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

Ettinger is considered now to be a prominent figure among both the French painters' and the Israeli art's scenes. Ettinger's art was recently analysed at length in the book Women Artists at the Millennium[14] and in Griselda Pollock's Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum.[15]

Some of her specific academic fields of endeavor are feminist psychoanalysis, art, aesthetics, ethics, the gaze, sexual difference and gender studies, Jacques Lacan, the feminine, early (including pre-birth) psychic impressions, pre-maternal and maternal subjectivity.

Artist

Bracha Ettinger, Painting: Matrix — Family Album series n.3, 2001.

From 1981 until 1992, Bracha Ettinger's principal artwork consisted of drawing and mixed media on paper as well as notebooks and artist's books, where alongside thoughts and conversations, she made ink and wash painting and drawing. Since 1992, apart from her notebooks, most of her artwork consists of mixed media and oil paintings, with series that spread over time like: "Matrix — Family Album", "Autistwork" and "Eurydice", with themes of generational transmission of memory, personal and historical trauma, the Shoah and the World Wars, womanhood and maternality, classical painting and abstraction, light and the question of beauty. Images that she obtains by collage and processing are abstracted in a long process of oil painting that takes a few years.

From 2001 onwards Ettinger was one of the major artists of New European Painting. In parallel to painting, she has worked on installations, theoretical research, lectures, video works and "encounter events". Her paintings, photos, drawings and notebooks have been exhibited at the Pompidou Centre (1987, 1996, 2010–2011) and the Stedelijk Museum (1997). In the last decade Ettinger's oil on canvas paintings involve figures like "Medusa", "Demeter and Persephone" and "Eurydice". Since the beginning of the 1990s, Griselda Pollock has written about Ettinger's painting and drawing.

Group exhibitions

Among the venues Ettinger presented in:

Solo exhibitions

Ettinger's Solo exhibitions (Selection):

  • Frued's Dream Museum, St. Petersburg (2013)
  • The State Museum of the History of St. Peterburg (2013).
  • Casco, Utrecht (2012).
  • Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers, France (2011).
  • Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2010). (Alma Matrix. Bracha L. Ettinger and Ria Verhaeghe)
  • Kuvataideakatemia / Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki (2009).
  • Freud Museum, London (2009).
  • Gerwood Gallery, Oxford University, Oxford (2003).
  • La librairie, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2003).
  • Maison de France, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (2002).
  • The Drawing Center, New York (2001).
  • Centre for Fine Arts (The Palais des Beaux Arts), Brussels (2000).
  • Cinemateque, Bergen.
  • Pori Art Museum, Finland (1996), (Doctore and Patient. Bracha L. Ettinger and Sergei "Africa" Bugayev).
  • Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1995).
  • The Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery, Leeds (1994).
  • Kanaal Art Fondation, Béguinage, Kortrijk (1994).
  • The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Oxford (1993).
  • Galerie d'Art Contemporain du Centre Saint-Vincent, Herblay (1993).
  • The Russian Ethnography Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia (1993).
  • Le Nouveau Muséem, IAC — Institut d'art contemporain, Villeurbanne (1992).
  • Goethe Institute, Paris(1990).
  • Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle de Calais, Calais (1988).[24]
  • Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne (1987).
  • The Pompidou Centre, Paris (1987).

Psychoanalyst

Bracha L. Ettinger is a theoretician who proposed an ontology of string-like subject-subject (trans-subjective) and subject-object (transjective) transmissivity for a rethinking of the human subject, working at the intersections of human subjectivity, feminine sexuality, maternal subjectivity, psychoanalysis, art and aesthetics, who contributed to psychoanalysis the idea of a feminine-maternal sphere, function and structure with its symbolic and imaginary dimensions based on femaleness in the real (womb). This dimension as symbolic contributes to ethical thinking about human responsibility to one another and to the world. She is a senior clinical psychologist, and a practising psychoanalyst. Her artistic practice and her articulation, since 1985, of what has become known as the matrixial theory of trans-subjectivity have transformed contemporary debates in contemporary art, psychoanalysis, women studies and cultural studies. Bracha L. Ettinger is member of the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP), the New Lacanian School (NLS) and the World Association of Psychoanalysis (AMP / WAP).[25] For Ettinger, the Freudian attitude to psychoanalysis is crucial as it emphasizes the phantasmatic value of materials that arise during regression. To Freud and Lacan she adds, however, a feminie-maternal space-time with its particular structures, functions and dynamics in the Unconscious. She claims that in a similar way to which, when seduction is assigned to the paternal figure during regression it is recognized in most cases as a result of the therapeutic process itself and is worked-through accordingly: without therapist's father-blaming and without a resulting father-hate, therapists must likewise realize that during regression phantasmatic maternal "not-enoughness" appears and must also be recognized as the result of the process itself and be worked-through without mother-hating that she considers as contributing to a "psychotization" of the subject and a block to the passage from rage to sorrow and compassion. To be able to recognize the phantasmatic status of the psychic material arizing during therapy, the Lacanian concepts of Symbolic, Imaginary and Real are useful to her.

The idea of a corpo-Real is a part of her symbolization of a new feminine psychic zone (the matrixial, the womb as time space of psychic encounter-event), in both male and female subjects, and of the feminine-matrixial sexual difference. Thus, even if Ettinger critics the Freudian and Lacanian analysis of the feminine she considers herself as post or neo Freudian and Lacanian, who elaborates the feminine in continuity to these psychoanalysts but claims a supplementary feminine-maternal Eros. Etinger criticises Winnicott and Bollas for offering the patients a "ready-made mother-monster" as a cause for each psychic pain. She considers any practice of archaic-motherhood blaming as an obstacle, as "hystericizing" and even momentarily "psychoticizing" (in the sense of leading to internal splits rather than recognition of differences,) when such "cause" is brought as "explanation" by the analyst, a "cause" attributed to the unremembered early period of life where I and non-I are transconnected. Ettinger agrees with Lacan that the "ultimate" cause is in principle lacking: objet a. She calls for a delicate process of differentiation and differentiation, coemergence and cofading between the generations, especially in analysing the same-sex (daughter-mother, son-father) relationships, with emphasize on transmission, not split. Thus, the process itself helps to negotiate and articulate delicately sexual difference, in the present. To the idea that the self is structured via mirror-like reflection she adds that of primal apperception of the other, through "fascinance" (aesthetic openness to the other and the cosmos), compassion and awe (affective accesses to the other) directed from the beginning to the (m)Other and the outside, not to the self.

Psychoanalytic theory

Major concepts

Ettinger invented the Matrixial Trans-subjectivity theory, or simply "The Matrixial".[26] Ettinger is a Freudian scholar and follows the late Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Object relations theory and Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari.

The early theory: from 1985 through the 1990s

Ettinger articulated a feminie-maternal (and feminie-prematernal) dimension, space, function, Eros and dynamics in the human Unconscious. She had suggested that pre-natal impressions, connected to the phantasmatic and traumatic real of the pregnant becoming-mother, are trans-inscribed in the emerging subject and form the primary phase and position of the human psyche. "I" and "non-I", without rejection and without symbiotic fusion, conjointly inscribe memory traces that are dispersed asymmetrically but in a trans-subjective mode. Trans-subjective mental and affective unconscious "strings", connecting the prenatal emerging subject to the archaic m/Other, open unconscious routes ("feminine", non phallic, in both males and females) that enable subjectivizing processes all throughout life whenever a new matrixial encounter-event takes place. The matrixial encounter-event forms specific aesthetical and ethical accesses to the Other. Ettinger articulated the 'matrixial gaze' and the process of 'co-poiesis'. This allows new understanding of trans-generational transmission, trauma and artistic processes. Ettinger formulates the woman(girl)-to-woman(mother) difference as the first sexual difference for females to be viewed first of all according to the matrixial parameters. The feminie-maternal Eros informs also the father/son and mother/son relations. According to Ettinger, in parallel but also before expressions of abjection (Julia Kristeva) or rejection (Freud on Narcissism) of the other, primary compassion, awe and fascinance (which are unconscious psychic affective accesses to the other, and which join reattunement and differentiating-in-jointness by borderlinking) occur. The combination of fascinance and primary compassion does not enter the economy of social exchange, attraction and rejection; it has particular forms of Eros and of resistance that can inspire the political sphere and reach action and speech that is ethical-political without entering any political institutional organization. The infant's primary compassion is a proto-ethical psychological means that joins the aesthetical fascinance and creates a feel-knowing that functions at best within maternal (and also parental) compassionate hospitality. Here, one witnesses in jointness: The I wit(h)ness while borderlinking (bordurelaint) to the non-I and borderspacing (bordurespacant) from the other. Ettinger calls for the recognition of the matrixial transference as a dimension in the transferential relationships in psychoanalysis. They must entails besideness to (and not a split from) the archaic the m/Other (Autremere) and parental figures; jointness-in-differentiation rather than their exclusion. She sees in the trans-subjectivity a distinct dimension of human specific linkage and shareability, different from, and supplementary to "inter-subjectivity" and "self" psychology. Her most prominent and comprehensive book regarding this theory is "The Matrixial Borderspace" (reprint of essays from 1994–1999) published in French in 1999[27] and in English in 2006,[28] but her most recent concepts are mainly elaborated in the different essays printed in 2005-2006.[29]

The theory in the 2000s

Her more recent artistic and theoretical work centers around the spiritual in art and ethics. In the domain of psychoanalysis, around the question of same-sex differences, the primary feminine difference is the difference opened between woman (girl) and woman (m/Other), maternal subjectivity, maternal/pregnance Eros of com-passion, the effects of compassion and awe and the passion for borderlinking and borderspacing[30] and the idea that three kinds of fantasy (that she names Mother-fantasies) should be recognized, when they appear in a state of regression aroused by therapy itself, as primal: Mother-fantasies of Not-enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment. Their mis-recognition in psychoanalysis (and analytical therapy), together with the ignorance of maternal Eros of com-passion leads to catastrophic blows to the matrixial daughter-mother tissue and hurts the maternal potentiality of the daughter herself, in the sense that attacking the "non-I" is always also attacking the "I" that dwells inside an "I"-and-"non-I" trans-subjective matrixial (feminine-maternal) tissue. Contributing to Self psychoanalysis after Heinz Kohut, Ettinger articulated the difference between com-passionate borderlinking, compassion (as affect) and empathy, and between "empathy without compassion" and "empathy within compassion", claiming that the analyst's empathy without compassion harms the matrixial psychic tissue of the analysand, while empathy within compassion leads to creativity and to the broadening of the ethical horizon. Ettinger explains how by empathy (toward the patient's complaints) without compassion (toward the patient's surrounding past and present family figures, no less than toward the patient itself), the therapist "produces" the patient's real mother as a "ready-made monster-mother" figure, that serves to absorb complaints of all kinds, and thus, a dangerous splitting is induced between the "good" mother figure (the therapist) and a "bad" mother figure (the real mother). This splitting is destructive in both internal and external terms, and mainly for the daughter-mother relations, since the I and non-I are in any case always trans-connected, and therefore any split and projected hate (toward such figures) will turn into a self-hate in the woman/daughter web. Such a concept of subjectivity, where "non-I" is trans-connected to the "I", has deep ethical implications[31] as well as far-reaching sociological and political implications that have been further developed by Griselda Pollock in order to rethink modern and postmodern art and History. Ettinger's recent theoretical proposals include the three shocks of maternality and the Demeter–Persephone Complex.[32]

Other activities

Robert Doisneau photographed by Ettinger in his studio in Montrouge,[33] 1992.

Since 2005 Ettinger is an activist member in "Physicians for Human Rights-Israel" ("PHR-Israel"). Dr. Ettinger contributes to the organization as a clinical psychologist, attending Palestinian patients in needed areas in the Palestinian occupied territories.[34]

Bracha Ettinger is also famous for her portrait photography, taken in the context of conversation projects. Some of her portraits, like those of Jean-François Lyotard, Joyce McDougall, Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Lévinas, Robert Doisneau and Yeshayahu Leibowitz appear in several official publications and collections.

Fascinance: Forum for Ettinger Studies

"The other and the earth need to be known through affective communicaring in self-fragilization. The knowledge revealed in this way, of the invisible chords to which our senses are not yet attuned, is at the basis of the ethical obligation to attend to the vulnerability of the other, human, animal, and even our shared earth, through care and compassion and in wonder and reverence. Lets work together against retraumatization and toward an understanding of a human subject which is informed by feminine transubjectivity in all genders, and become sensitive to the particular Eros of borderlinking between each I and non-I, which is a kind of love.."[35][36][37]

— Bracha L. Ettinger on launch of Fascinance: Forum for Ettinger Studies[38] started by Srishti Madurai

Fascinance is forum started by Srishti Madurai in South India on December 24, 2013[38] which offers Introductory Course in Ettingerian Psychoanalysis[36][39]

The aims of this group:


Publications

Ettinger is author of several books and more than eighty psychoanalytical essays elaborating different aesthetical, ethical, psychoanalytical and artistic aspects of the matrixial. She is co-author of volumes of conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, Craigie Horsfield, Félix Guattari and Christian Boltanski. Her book Regard et Espace-de-Bord Matrixiels (essays 1994-1999) appeared in French in 1999 (La lettre volée), and has been published in English as The Matrixial Borderspace (2006, University of Minnesota Press, edited by Brian Massumi and forwarded by Judith Butler and Griselda Pollock). Ettinger is one of the leading intellectuals associated with contemporary French feminism and feminist psychoanalytical thought alongside Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.[9][10][40][41] The journal Theory Culture & Society dedicated an issue to her work [TC&S, Vol.21, n.1] in 2004.

Recent selected publications

Selected publications

Bibliography - selected publications on Ettinger's work

Conversations

Lectures and seminars

See also

References

  1. ↑ Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Routledge, 2007
  2. ↑ see also Jean-François Lyotard, The Sublime
  3. ↑ "Diotima and the Matrixial Transference." In: Van der Merwe, C. N., and Viljoen, H., eds. Across the Threshold. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. ISBN 9781433100024
  4. ↑ Library of Congress Name Authority File
  5. ↑ Face à l'Histoire. 1933-1996. Paris: Flammarion and Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996. ISBN 2-85850-898-4
  6. ↑ Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Eurydice Series. Edited by Catherine de Zegher and Brian Massumi. Drawing Papers, n.24. NY: The Drawing Center, 2001. With texts by Judith Butler, Bracha Ettinger, Adrien Rifkin and the editors, and including a conversation between the Bracha Ettinger and Creigie Horsfield.
  7. ↑ Couze Venn, in: Theory, Culture and Society. Vol. 21 (1), 2004.
  8. ↑ Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard (ed.s), Laughing with Medusa. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-927438-X
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Humm, Maggie, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures. Rutgers University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8135-3266-3
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Humm, Maggie, Feminism and Film. Indiana University press, 1997. ISBN 0-253-33334-2
  11. ↑ Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Matrix. Halal(a) — Lapsus. Notes on Painting. Oxford: MOMA, 1993. ISBN 0-905836-81-2
  12. ↑ Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Artworking 1985-1999, with a reprint of Notes on Painting. Ludion: Ghent-Amsterdam, and Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000. ISBN 90-5544-283-6
  13. ↑ AHRC Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History. AHRC B.Ettinger page.
  14. ↑ Women Artists at the Millennium, 2006, Edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher. ISBN 0-262-01226-X, ISBN 978-0-262-01226-3. The MIT press book page.
  15. ↑ Pollock, Griselda, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Taylor and Francis, ISBN 0-415-41374-5.
  16. ↑ Eventually we'll die. Edited by Doron Rabina. Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008.
  17. ↑ Gorge(l). Oppression and relief in Art. Edited by Sofie Van Loo. Royal Museum of Fine Art. Antwerpen, 2006.
  18. ↑ La Mémoire. Edited by Laurence Bosse, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Villa Medici, Rome, 1999.
  19. ↑ Face à l'Histoire. (1980-1996: curator Chris Dercon). Paris: Flammarion and Centre G. Pompidou, 1996.
  20. ↑ Body. Edited by Tony Bond. Sydney: The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997.
  21. ↑ Inside the Visible. Edited by Catherine de Zegher. Boston: MIT Press, 1996.
  22. ↑ Routes Of Wandering. Edited by Sarit Shapira. Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1991.
  23. ↑ Feminine Presence. Edited by Ellen Ginton. Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1990.
  24. ↑ fr:Musée des Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle de Calais
  25. ↑ World Association of Psychoanalysis
  26. ↑ Bracha L. Ettinger, "Matrixial Trans-subjectivity" in: Problematizing Global Knowledge. Theory, Culture and Society, Volum 23, Numbers 2-3, 2006.ISSN 0263-2764
  27. ↑ Regard et Espace-de-bord matrixiels. La lettre volee. ISBN 2-87317-102-2.
  28. ↑ The Matrixial Borderspace, University of Minnesota Press 2006, edited by Brian Massumi and forwarded by Judith Butler and Griselda Pollock. ISBN 0-8166-3587-0 Upress relevant page.
  29. ↑ Mainly: "From Proto-ethical Compassion to Responsibility", "Fascinance" and "Com-passionate Co-response-ability, Initiation in Jointness, and the link x of Matrixial Virtuality". All published in 2006 — see list of recent publications.
  30. ↑ Bracha L. Ettinger, "Diotima and the Matrixial Transference: Psychoanalytical Encounter-Event as Pregnancy in Beauty." In: Van der Merwe, Chris N., and Viljoen, Hein, eds. Across the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature. New York: Peter Lang & Potchefstroom: Literator, 2007. ISBN 1-4331-0002-9
  31. ↑ Bracha L. Ettinger, "From Proto-ethical Compassion to Responsibility: Besideness, and the three Primal Mother-Phantasies of Not-enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment". In: Athena: Philosophical Studies. Vol. 2 (Vilnius: Versus). 2006. 100-135. ISSN 1822-5047.
  32. ↑ public lecture at EGS, 2012 on YouTube.
  33. ↑ Rosi Huhn (Interview), Bracha L. Ettinger (Portraits of R. Doineau) and the Parisian Photographs of Robert Doisneau, "Promenades dans les passage de Paris avec Robert Doisneau." In: Passages d'après Walter Benjamin / Passagen Nach Walter benjamin. [Ed. V. Malsey, U. Rasch, P. Rautmann, N. Schalz]. Verlag Herman Schmidt, Mainz, 1992. ISBN 3-87439-250-3.
  34. ↑ המרפאה הניידת של רופאים לזכויות אדם on YouTube.
  35. ↑ http://epaper.newindianexpress.com/c/2115607
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/madurai/Madurai-gender-queer-activists-to-offer-course-on-gender-and-sexuality/articleshow/27872588.cms?
  37. ↑ http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/tamil_nadu/New-LGBT-Website-Aims-at-Gender-Awareness/2013/12/25/article1963964.ece
  38. ↑ 38.0 38.1 http://srishtiglobal.org/main/Fascinance
  39. ↑ http://srishtiglobal.org/main/node/96
  40. ↑ Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard (eds.), Laughing with Medusa. Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-19-927438-X
  41. ↑ Griselda Pollock, Inscriptions in the feminine. In: Insdie the Visible edited by Catherine de Zegher. MIT Press, 1996.

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