Looking back in fascinance and wonder: Reading and thinking with Ettingerian concepts

Abstract

This paper opens with an account of my journey to, and my theoretical journeys with, Bracha L. Ettinger’s theory of the Matrix. Over the last three decades I have been fortunate enough to witness the evolution of her conceptual vocabulary and the extended range of her theoretical innovation. In the second part of the paper, I focus on two of her most significant concepts, fascinance and transubjectivity, both elaborated after 2000. I then examine three domains in which Matrixial theory offers radical new directions – transmission, trauma and intergenerationality – where Ettinger contributes new theorizations to current explorations of historical and personal trauma by elaborating the Matrix, whose linguistic meanings I shall explicate before presenting Ettinger’s thesis of a proto-subjectivizing time-space for the inception of psychic life beyond the classical psychoanalytical limit of birth. Grasping also the postnatal legacy of the asymmetrical but shared borderspacing, which characterizes the matrixial pairing of late prenatality and prematernality, radically expands our concepts of subjectivity, aesthetics and ethics.