Re: <eyebeam><blast> Trauma & Beauty

[bracha@easynet.fr (Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger)]

I would like to thank all those who are engaged in the "Beauty and
Trauma" thread. I will first refer to the question of language, , and
then to some ideas related to my early post.

First, the question of my neologistic words, with special attention to
the posts of Clifford, John, Craig and Nathan whom I thank, and Jason
and Olu whom I also thank but for different reasons.

I use the only words I must use in the only language(s) free to me.
Almost a year ago in the 'Documenta X - Blast' list with Jordan, this
language's troubling effect was commented. I said then that if my
language quavers, trembles or is obscure, quavering and obscure are then
also the ideas it must express. Still when a word is to my taste
precise, I know my language attained simplicity. My words are in that
way simple. They are simple because they first arrived in artworking -
and not in theoretical academic research - and as such were necessary.
They are simple because they have carefully insisted to enveloppe
certain specific ideas and at the same time were born with those ideas
but also insisted on their life, body and sense in art and
psychoanalytic practice before any "academic" clarification was possible
- sometimes even some years before. I will suggest then, against Olu's
ideas and siding with Clifford's D&G position,that a "good" writing is a
writing that touches you so as to open for you worlds, up to that moment
closed, and to inspire you into thinking-writing-producing and bringing
into being your own work. Besides, no word and no style, if emerged in
artworking, can to me be "bad" writing.

Of course, sometimes a work, or a word, inspires too few people at the
time it emerges. Immediate large reception is not a criteria for
anything. But if the work, or the word, is necessary for others and for
the world, it will inspire others in future time, though it whispers at
the present time. It is a question of Time; it is not given to each one
of us to be open at any moment to any idea - even to such ideas we might
one day really need. And here precisely comes the role and the
responsibility of the priviliged ones - who are inspired, or who grasps
a work, or who are "specialists" or intellectually well informed and
come upon what impresses them. They have a privilege, so they also have
responsibility - the responsibility to defend a work they believe in,
and to transmit their choice and mediate it. This is the role of a
Teacher - a teacher is whoever can help others to open themselves to a
work whose entry is still difficult for them, but a work s/he knows it
treasures what the other might unknowingly need in order to develope its
own soul and mind. (and being privileged on whatever ground without
taking repsonsibility, as Brian's post clearly speaks, is being abusive
of the world and of the unknown others).

But - think what if we don't invent the word that becomes the simplest,
precise word we need - because it so happens that no new word presses
itself at the threshold of that particular meaning, even if an idea is
new and speechlessly shouting. One might take any word if it does call
upon oneself,  from the standard dictionary for example, why not, as
long as it is the right word - the word s/he needs, like when Lyotard
takes the word "enfance" (childhood). What happens then? -- the
situation in terms of difficulties for understanding is more or less
just the same, or even more complicated, because the word itself doesn't
hint yet at its immense complexity: Either you don't realize that a
'childhood' that  you hadn't imagine before is thereby offered and
exposed, because you recognize the word too well and you put into it
your previous knowledge too quickly. Or else, you realize that you
didn't dare to grasp, or you couldn't know what 'enfance' is, before
Lyotard had said it there and then, like this, and indeed for the first
time. Then you realize you didn't hear this word before, or that you
must once more begin questioning yourself and the world, around this
word, with it, with-in it, while you admit that the word alone, for
being already in the dictinary and awfully standarized,  gives you no
answer, and you are in front of this very old word like you are in front
of a new word: amazed, puzzled, falling in love, changing it and
yourself in metramorphosis, or revolted and rejective, or protecting
yourself and closing the opening, or even protecting yourself by saying:
"ah, 'enfance', that's all - so what's the big deal, why does Lyotard
think he is giving me a gift, I already know all about 'enfance', its in
the dictionary, and I was a child as well." When in this need for a
word, an artist or a philosopher doesn't decide if to invent it or to
take it where it is found. If, Jason and Olu, one's purpose IS to invent
a word in order to be clever, one is heading a failure, like an
adolescent who pretends to be a poet by all means. And 'enfance' is not
enfance, like the 'night' of Blanchot is not night, like Clifford's
'love' is other then love. And metramorphosis is not empathy. It is the
thing, that is struggling to become slightly more visible, which decides
what it requires from the artist or the philosopher. This is not an
academic game. The desire to be academically "in" is from another story.
And you have to pay the price the thing demands, as Lyotard had put it.
And solitude and non-communication are one of its common prices, and
being off-handedly scolded and sarcasticly mocked at is such also. The
artist or the philosopher fights the thing back, and only if there is no
other choice - surrenders to it. And the word choses itself. That's how
an internal hollowed space takes off and speads itself in the world and
in the text, like a paysage you are going to see. For you to find in it
- or not - what you were looking for unknowingly.  Someone named Lucio
said then, when the subject of my language came up in the 'Documenta X -
Blast' list: 'the beat is how a pigment clings to a memory sway --
weighing a body to not worry about space'. Not to worry, I would add,
while opening it up, not to worry but to take Care and be care full.

Now to another question concerning my "Beauty and Trauma" first post.
Greg:  I can say that in Brian's last post there is what for me is one
of the matrixial proposition of intervention that can be tried in
emergeAncy treatment. If (as Craig had reminded us), the habit on the
list would have been to give references - or if we would simply ask
Brian for the references for his post - you would have realized, driving
down the tree of bibliography, that Brian's proposition is rooted in
feminist thinking, and there, those who will take the trouble to do this
drive in careful details will also find the concepts of the matrixial
borderspace. Is it not an amazing spiral? But since for Brian, in this
post, encountering the other seems "sexually" neutral, I would like to
say some more around in what way an encounter with the other is
matrixial, and in what sense a matrixial encounter is "feminine" - thus
responding and further developping a subject - of the female body - so
beautifully referred to by Clifford's last post. Clifford, you have
explained how on the one hand there is The subject (Male/Oedipal/One and
All). On the other hand for D&G there are "thousand sexes" -
multiplicity with no subject. In this alternative, the subject - now
rejected - remains Male and One only, no? If it will come back from
repression and anti-oedipal rejection, it will come back again still as
Male/Oedipal/One/All. In both cases (this Subject and thousand sexes)
the female heterogeneity disappears.  We need then a "beside"-theory to
articulate something - for me feminine trans-subjective severality - in
neither spaces and for both sexes.

(The following paragraphs, taken from the "Beauty and Wound" essay has
also been repeated in slightly different versions in few other articles
of mine):
- - - -
Trauma meeting with phantasm in the feminine.
Already before birth, in the late prenatal period, the subject-to-be
aspires in phantasm and contacts traumatically a woman -- in whose
trauma, phantasm and desire s/he already participates. The jouissance
that spurts on the level of feminine/prebirth encounter, and the links
between the trauma and phantasm of the becoming subject-to-be (I), male
or female, and the trauma, phantasm, and desire of the woman who will
become its archaic-m/Other (non-I), both of them in their status of
partial subjects and part objects for each other, constitute a matrixial
cluster of desire meeting with reality and trauma meeting with phantasm.
Archaic traces of contact with female body are engraved as jouissance,
they are remembered without recollecting and revealed in a phantasm
saturated with imprints of trauma of partial and shared subjectivity.

Out-site and past-side, in-side and future-site.
Female subjects have a double access to the matrixial sphere in the
Real, because they experience the womb both as an archaic out-side and
past-site, out of chronological time, as "anterior " -- which is true
for male subjects as well -- and as an in-side and future site, actual,
future and "posterior" time. Whether they are mothers or not, this time
out-of-time is a potentiality for repetition which might get actualized.
Where the out-site and-past-side are both female's and male's as a
corpo-real scale, this in-side and-future-site are female's, in the
corpo-real dimension and as bodily potentiality. Female subjects have a
privileged access to this paradoxical time where future traumatically
meets the past, and to this paradoxical site where outside meets inside.
Aside of art's time-space, male subjects are more radically split from
this archaic site of potentiality, since their rapport with it stays in
the archaic outside and too early that is forever too late to accessing
in the Real of their separate body. Men however are in contact with this
time and site, affected, like women, by jointing-in-difference with
others, in transference relations  and via art. As an aesthetic-artistic
filter, the matrixial apparatus serves whoever can yield and tolerate
this fragile, fragmented and dispersed positioning. Various
non-conscious lanes, that are opened towards and from originary
difference of femaleness, are not limited, then, to women only, though
they do carry a special resonance for women when they treasure their
Real and filter their bodily vibrations. [...] The matrixial-feminine
difference emerges not as "essential" nor as a social construct. A
tans-subjective figure is interlaced, whose psyche is not confined to
one-body but is a weaving of links between several partial-subjects and
objects.
- - - - -
Bracha
I add the URL for those who would like more specifications concerning
these notions. In particular, Greg, look at my conversation with Felix
Guattari and at the "Transference" article, in the Canadian journal, as
well as the article in "Psychoanalytic Dialogues".
http://www.utc.edu/~kswitala/Feminism/Lichtenberg.html



-
-------------------------------------------------------------
a critical forum for artistic practice in the network
texts are the property of individual authors
to unsubscribe, send email to eyebeam@list.thing.net
with the following single line in the message body:
unsubscribe eyebeam-list
information and archive at http://www.eyebeam.org
Eyebeam Atelier/X Art Foundation http://www.blast.org
-------------------------------------------------------------