Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
. . . In the matrixial borderspace, various tracks are opened toward and from a feminine which the phallus cannot tame, which was never a fixed origin anyway, which is not limited to females only, yet which carries a special resonance for them when it screens their bodily traces. The matrix threatens the phallic narcissism, but more important then that, it is a threat because it engenders a disturbing desire by-passing the phallus and already in the feminine: a desire for jointness with a foreign world, with the uncognized or the unthoughtly known, with the stranger. Here, a desiring subject-woman is incompatible with the basic assumption that society is regulated upon exchanging the object-woman (Levi Strauss). The matrix channels the subject's desire toward the beauty and the pain, the phantasy and the trauma of the Other, with no illusion of mastering it, no power to banish it, no wish to assimilate it, no need to reject it, and where the desire to join the unknown doesn't promise peace and harmony but rather is profoundly fragilizing.
Copyright © 1999, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, all rights reserved
