Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
. . .I have suggested in The Matrixial Gaze (18), that we go beyond criticism and deconstruction of the phallic gaze, to elucidate another gaze at the horizon of the aesthetic experience. I isolated in Freud's The 'Uncanny' (19) a supplementary phantasy complex, alongside the Oedipal 'complex of castration': a womb/intra-uterine one I named matrixial. (20) The matrixial phantasy complex can't be folded into the 'castration' track but should be mounted on a different trail. (21) Through it, another kind of strangeness daunts us from the margins. But to delineate the orbit of a matrixial gaze, we need to elaborate another unconscious sphere, a matrixial stratum of subjectivization (22), neither Oedipal nor anti-oedipal, that entices sex difference already in the feminine, since a different gaze is not about criticizing Oedipus or binarity, but about contriving a space for questions on/from the feminine that the subject orients towards an-Other qua 'woman' in search for a difference already in the feminine and for an emerging Other-desire. . . . the matrix is a complex apparatus, whose aesthetic-poïetic tool is metramorphosis. (23)
Copyright © 1999, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, all rights reserved
