Re: <documenta X><blast> transferential borderspace
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Mon, 18 Aug 1997 14:27:54 +0200
Greg, Lucio, Clifford, Ricardo, Viktor and Olesya, Jean-Francois and
Catherine, I would like to suggest the concept of transferential
borderspace in the matrixial stratum of subjectivization to allow
reintroducing the dimension of affects.
In terms of the unconscious 'art-coefficient' and relations of
transference, Duchamp suggests a kind of aesthetic osmosis between the
artist and the viewer via the artwork. I have suggested that a
transferential borderspace of inter-with-ness, besidedness and
transgression embedded in relations of transference seeks ways to become
known and thinkable via the screen of Vision. Psychoanalysis can discern,
apprehend and otherwise work-through an analogous borderspace embedded in a
screen of phantasy stretched in transference/countertransference
relationships, in which an assembled and diffracted trans-individual
doctor-and-patient entity can roll itself bit by bit into the Symbolic
level.
It was Freud himself who qualified some transferential phenomena as
Unheimliches (the uncanny, the anxiety of the un-familiar), thus opening
the route for Duchamp to deliver them to an aesthetic sphere and to make
them intersect with aesthetic experience. "Mysterious," even "mystical"
affective uncanny contingencies underlie the therapeutic potentiality of
psychoanalysis, in terms of the patient's openness to inter-personal
interaction, influence and suggestibility, or his/her "tendency for
transference" in the encounter with the psychoanalyst with-in the
psychoanalytic process. This tendency for transference, since it reposes on
"sexuality, on the activity of the libido" enters our unconscious 'holes'.
We arrive at transferential encounter with different phantasies and
desires. Nevertheless, these phantasies and desires are somehow,
mysteriously, temporarily and partially shared in a non-symmetrical yet
reciprocal way, and are transformed in/by the encounter, and
re-transmitted. Furthermore, phantasies and desires are created in the
transferential borderspace as already conductible and shareable though
in-difference, contrived specifically in/for each unexpected and unique
psychoanalytic encounter. A matrixial borderspace for inscribing originary
besidedness with-in-out is opened in the space of transference. This
vagrancy of phantasy and desire is not a replacement of one's own phantasy
and desire by that of an other. Rather, beside a phallic
transference/countertransference an-other one
happens, where trans-individual subjectivity-as-encounter is created
between an I and an unknown other, or between an I and the unknown zone of
a known non-I. The Unheimliches, both allowing and accompanying the
transference/countertransference matrixial rapport, signal to its partners
that a common-in-difference event which
equally-but-differently concerns each of them approaches the margins of
shared awareness, surrounds the edges of its unconscious cavity and is
about to appear. Traces of a buried-alive trauma are about to be re-born
from amnesia into co-emerging memory, and the potentiality of partially
sharing it in the transferential borderspace is the condition for its
appearance.
Such Unheimliches allow and accompany seeing with-in/through a work of
art. That is how I read Duchamp's art coefficient connected to space of
transference: the artist and the viewer transform the artwork and are
transformed by it in different times and places and to different degrees,
in different-yet-connected ways. Each viewer gives the artwork new life,
and what escapes the capture of the artist's awareness is the kernel of
this process. Such Unheimliches otherwise allow and accompany the rapport
with-in/through psychoanalysis. Affective phenomena like admiration,
amazement, empathy, anxiety and awe which are hidden inside the patient's
readiness for transference, as well as closely related phenomena like
wonder, dread, compassion and again empathy (and even telepathy), which
are hidden in the psychoanalyst's tendency for countertransference, also
arise in viewing art, as if an object becomes a partial subject and
communicates with us. Shared, exchanged and diffracted on the unconscious
partial dimension, these affects attract and diffuse aesthetic matrixial
threads and participate in the artwork's potentiality for hurting and
healing.
Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger
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