Resonances and Disjunctions: Matrixial Subjectivity and Queer theory

Abstract

In this brief essay I place Bracha Ettinger's development of matrixial subjectivity and certain arguments in queer theory around the rectum alongside each other to explore their resonances, particularly around the theme of relationality. Both share a reformulation of subjectivity beyond an enclosed, essentialized subject, and suggest a breaking of the boundaries which have circumscribed theories of the subject based primarily on a focus on the phallus and lack. Ettinger has theorised metramorphosis as a 'creative principle' whose 'affects index a transformation and an exchange' inducing 'instances of co-emergence of meaning' 1 that are not predicated on the model of an I versus an Other. Metramorphosis thus effects changes in the I and the non-I, while undermining any clear border that separates the two. These encounters also produce meaning. Encounters with art-works, art-working, for example, instantiate a fluid co-becoming of the subject with its outside. Recasting the 'matrix' as 'uterus, womb' echoing 'Freud's phantasy of intrauterine existence in the maternal womb', Ettinger develops a conception of 'a dynamic borderspace of active/passive co-emergence within and without the uncognized other' 2. She dynamizes the womb, not as 'a symbol for an invisible, unintelligible, originary, passive receptacle onto which traces are engraved by the originary and primary processes'. Rather, the matrix 'is a concept for a transforming borderspace of encounter of the co-emerging I and the neither fused nor rejected uncognized non-I' 3. The originary fusion of the subject with the (M)Other in the womb is theorized alongside the Lacanian tripartite division of the Imaginary/ Symbolic and the Real, as the condition of possibility for a dynamic process of the development of the I in relational mode. Her theorization emphasizes change, non-appropriative exchange and encounters and development together between multiple selves-information. By developing an other conception of the objet a (beyond the Lacanian model) as 'belonging-together to several co-emerging partial-subjects' 4 , Ettinger offers an understanding of dynamic subjectivity-in-process as co-emergence. Further, this reliance