Abstract
Bracha Ettinger’s “Art as the Transport-Station Trauma” is a ground-breaking paper first printed in 1999 on the transmission of traces of trauma and its potential healing through art in terms of the matrixial feminine womb space where the value of beauty arises through processes such as borderlinking, borderspacing, and wit(h)nessing. Ettinger criticizes Lacan’s concept of beauty as sacrificial and as it is linked to the death drive through an operation of foreclosure of the archaic maternality where the object and the feminine stand for a phallic lack. She proposes a matrixial object and affect related to the Thing as encounter-event that encompasses the trauma and jouissance of the passage from non-life to life in a differentiating jointness with the m/Other. Art labors between aesthetics and ethics through deepening and widening of the subject’s (viewer’s) threshold of fragility.
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Notes
- 1.
The expression presabsence came up during the long conversations between Ghislaine Szpeker-Benat and myself around the translation of some of my concepts into French and the difficulty of finding proper words to describe the almost-presence of the matrixial object and the almost-absence of the matrixial objet a, as well as the between-presence-and-absence status of the matrixial partial-subject.
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Ettinger, B.L. (2016). Art as the Transport-Station of Trauma. In: Ataria, Y., Gurevitz, D., Pedaya, H., Neria, Y. (eds) Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29404-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29404-9_10
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