Adriana Cavarero's Relating Narratives offers a solid starting point for appreciating the importance of witnessing the other's story and, in turn, having one's story witnessed. Cavarero argues that autobiographical memory “always recounts a story that is incomplete from the beginning” (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2000, 39), since memory is often factually untrustworthy (40). A refabulation by the other, then, may lend unity to one's story. The desire for unity is an indirect plea to the other for recognition (42). To have one's story told is to be recognized. In fact, we are so invested in the process of narrating our lives that it becomes an unconscious activity (King Reference King2008, 339). Yet the desire to tell and receive the other's story is fraught, as desire is often expressed in conjunction with verbal demands and phantasmatic investments, when, for example, in exchanging life stories, one exclaims: “I know exactly what you mean!,” only to find that this recognition was but a subjective projection onto the other's narration. All the same, sharing stories opens up a unique space. Bracha Ettinger conceptualizes such a space as one of witnessing and co-experiencing that accommodates not only desire(s) but various other psychic elements such as “jouissance, traumas, pictograms, phantasies, affects . . . and channels death-drive oscillations, libidinal-erotic flows, [and] imprints and affected traces, conjointly but differently” (Ettinger Reference Ettinger, Florence and Foster2000, 195).
Ettinger's work arises out a consistent feminist critique of Lacanian psychoanalytic orthodoxy and dispenses with the concept of the phallus, creating room for thinking feminine subjectivity in terms of co-production (co-poiesis) and sharing. Ettinger questions the phallic economy as the only outcome of the infant's separation from the mother, as well as the Lacanian pronouncement that woman is “not-all” and cannot be captured by the symbolic signifier. Even if we agree with Lacan, she notes, there is no reason to exclude the capacity to link with the Other from the symbolic domain or from a theorization of feminine subjectivity. The first Other in Ettinger's formulation is the mother. But even the most primordial experience of-with the mother is characterized by togetherness in difference. Even in the womb there is togetherness in separation.
Drawing on togetherness in difference, Ettinger proposes the concept of the matrix as a symbol supplementary to the phallus (Pollock Reference Pollock2004, 11). The matrix is defined as “a sphere of a not-one-ness (more-than-one but not everything and/or less-than-one but not nothing), which includes a recognized unknown. [It] is composed of the known and the unknown; it is a meeting place for the co-emerging I and the not-I(s) which neither assimilated nor rejected” (Ettinger Reference Ettinger, Florence and Foster2000, 197). The act of connecting with the other is called matrixial borderlinking, an ability as universal as separation and castration (Pollock Reference Pollock2004, 11). Matrixial borderlinking takes place at the margins of language, and Ettinger clearly envisages it as “a space beyond the cogito” (Neill Reference Neill2008). Matrixial borderlinking enables a process of metramorphosis,Footnote 1 a transformation taking place at borderlines and thresholds, between being and absence, memory and oblivion, I and not-I (Ettinger Reference Ettinger1992, 201). Significantly, consciousness is not excluded from this process. But metramorphic consciousness has no center and does not attempt to hold a fixed gaze. It resides in or slides in and out of the realm of borderlines, margins, and thresholds, transgressing the old and creating new ones (201). It forms part of, or better is, co-poietic activity (Ettinger Reference Ettinger2006a, 144).
Dispensing with the phallus nods affirmatively in the direction of feminist theorists who do not subscribe to the psychoanalytic model. In the present case it provides common ground for a creative encounter between Cavarero and Ettinger as a way of opening Cavarero's narrative concept of relating to the multiplicity of psychic elements potentially activated in matrixial borderlinking. Yet the phallus is not the only “sticking” point. In Inclinations, Cavarero critiques Western philosophy for making death and the end of life the starting point from which thought and action are being examined, proposing the concept of natality as a life-affirmative alternative (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016). Natality draws on Arendt's concept of the beginning as “completely human” (Martin Reference Martin2002, 33) and is transformed by Cavarero to provide a pivotal term for feminist analysis in an articulation that is “unashamedly feminine” (35). It is an attempt to reposition death in relation to the implications of birth and beginning. However, “natality does not try to tame the prospect of death's negativity by balancing it against something sweet and positive in birth. . . . Rather, through its focus on birth, natality enables us to consider why death has been the issue, whether that is an issue that must be heroically overcome or endured, or inauthentically denied” (34).
Using Leonardo da Vinci's The Virgin and Child with St. Anne as her visual referent, Cavarero also puts forward the inclining posture of the mother over the infant and the departure of her body from the vertical axis as an emblematic, visual alternative to the phallic “uprightness” (orthotes, connoting correctness) that inhabits masculine thought. Death does not have a place in Cavarero's thought, and this inevitably extends to the concept of the death drive in Freudian psychoanalysis. This incompatibility gives rise to an interesting question that can be articulated as follows.
In Relating Narratives, Cavarero argues that what we usually call the meaning of one's life can only be determined in retrospect (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2000). To illustrate the point, Cavarero refers to Karen Blixen's story of the man who went out into his yard at night to investigate a noise. The man stumbles around in the dark, but the next morning sees that his footprints have traced the figure of a stork on the ground. For narrative scholars who draw on Cavarero, “the shape of a life can only be a matter of interpretation, constructed in the very act of narrating or representing,” and the discovery of a final shape of one's life is possible only from a position of hindsight (King Reference King2008, 341). However, the desire for unity and meaning can inadvertently give rise to the opposite, an experience of utter disunity, confusion, and aporia. What happens in such cases? How can we theorize instances in which both I and my interlocutor, my friend, my other, find ourselves in such a predicament, when disunity and an intimation of death seem to get the better of us?
For Ettinger, sharing unpleasant or painful experiences is directly linked to the fundamental human disposition to share traumas. Sharing traumas includes, among other things, overlapping circles of biographical fragments and chimes with the ‘ordinary’ transmission of cultural memories (see Ettinger 2006a). Moreover, and precisely because the resurfacing of a trauma entails a failure of meaning that often surprises and catches one unaware, sharing is directly linked to the raison d’être of matrixial co-poiesis, during which the other will do for me what I cannot do for myself:
Since I cannot fully handle events that profoundly concern me, they fade-in-transformation while my non-I becomes wit(h)ness to them. . . . In the matrixial psychic sphere, my imprints will be transcribed in the other, and to begin with in the m/Other. . . . Thus my others will process traumatic events for me, like my m/Other processed archaic events for my premature and fragile subjectivity. (2006a: 141)
As in the case of Cavarero, we ask: how does my other process traumatic events for me while lending herself, her own story and her very presence, to events that neither of us can fully handle?
The departure from phallic uprightness and the introduction of the nonphallic matrixial realm constitute plausible grounds for a convergence between Ettinger and Cavarero. More important, inherent in their respective theoretical formulations is a sense of movement (leaning, crossing thresholds, traversing) that adds vital dynamism to the spatial and already highly visual reconceptualization of the feminine. It is this dynamism, this very movement that we seek to further develop here, imagining the scene of the autobiographical encounter we will introduce in the next section as not just a site of narrative possibilities but as a live scene that reverberates with the physical proximity of bodies sitting close to one another, touching, interacting, and co-producing being over time. Could such a scene enfold, contain, and “hold” the death drive in such a way as to enrich the theorization of feminine subjectivities while avoiding the pitfalls of certain psychoanalytic approaches and the prioritization of death over life?
Ettinger lists death-drive oscillations among the components of matrixial borderlinking (Ettinger Reference Ettinger, Florence and Foster2000, 195) but does not dwell on the role of the drive in her theory. The uses of the death drive in Freudian and Lacanian theory are diverse, and a full account of these uses is beyond the remit of this article. Suffice it to say that feminist scholars have deployed the bifurcation of Eros and Thanatos and the subversive potential of the concepts of sadism and masochism to broaden the theorization of sexuality (Williams Reference Williams1995; De Lauretis Reference De Lauretis2008). Others have tamed the death drive by focusing on the partial drive and its satisfaction via ordinary objects in everyday life (Copjec Reference Copjec2002).
Movement is vital to the drive.Footnote 2 Here we draw on the death drive in two ways: first, as a circular, curving motion, a force that “bends space,” harking back to a mode of satisfaction that does not attain its object by going straight for it but by encircling it, “go[ing] round in circles” (Kingsbury, Reference Kingsbury2010, 529). This operation can be exemplified by any “pointless” activity, like taking a stroll to the shops and coming back empty-handed but content for having taken a walk.Footnote 3 Seen as a curving motion, the drive bears little resemblance to the vertical lines of classic (upright phallic) geometry Cavarero critiques in Inclinations.
The second way in which we employ the drive draws on Jean Laplanche's Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Laplanche offers a philosophical discussion of the drive, focusing on the derivation of the sexual drive from life-sustaining operations, and of the death drive from the life drive as an exacerbation of the latter. Uncoupled from any reference to human subjects and honed to abstraction, the sexual drive (Eros) is said to arise through propping (étayage) onto life-sustaining operations (Laplanche Reference Laplanche1985, 15–16). The concept of propping pervades Laplanche's monograph. In the final chapter of the book, the cross-section of the death drive and Eros is visually represented as the resting point of a U-shaped graph: death leaning on life; life leaning on death (124). Proximity and propping, Laplanche notes, evade the rigidity of the theoretical binarism that later beset Freudian orthodoxy (122). In that sense, the death drive is understood as being placed in motion, in a scene of live forces, in which Eros is defined as unity and the death drive inheres as conflict (or, we might say, disunity), taking the form of aggressiveness when directed not against another individual but against the subject itself (87).
It is such an experience of “deadly” disunity, utter helplessness, vulnerability, and self-aggressive conflict that we wish to capture in this article, together with the spatial and verbal response to it by the other, linking both to matrixial sharing and maternal inclination. The narrative excerpt we discuss in the following section draws on a recorded session of a project on the dialogic co-construction of meaning. It is an artwork of sorts, a co-created representation of a lived experience based on transcripts and enriched with comments and thoughts, subsequently turned into an anonymized collective text despite the use of “I.” To paraphrase Cavarero, it is a tale (sjuzet) which is faithful to its story (fabula) (King Reference King2008, 340). In the discussion that follows, this tale is treated as a live scene, a tableau vivant composed of narrative and visual elements with duration and movement, a moving, unfolding scene whose meaning resides in words as well as in gestures. On the theoretical level, it is a moving scene in the sense that our theoretical argument is borne out of successive displacements, each one taking theoretical reasoning in a slightly different direction.
In Inclinations, Cavarero invites readers to change our register or reposition our gaze, trying to imagine ontology as a geometry of variable postures inside of which inclination may assume a modular role (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 128). In a similar manner, Ettinger speaks of the challenges in her own effort to move beyond Lacanian psychoanalytic orthodoxy by rotating the phallic prism “so as to open and articulate a distance in the Real that can be articulated in the Symbolic as knowledge, a breach in which we can glimpse the matrixial sphere beyond the phallus” (Ettinger Reference Ettinger2006a, 139). One could extend this metaphor to say that the rotation of a prism always produces diffractions, iridescent lines of seeing differently, enabling something other than a masterful narrative to emerge: helplessness, vulnerability, and welcoming the traumas that inhere in trans-subjective communication, alongside the desire for unity.
By reading Cavarero together with Ettinger we do not aim to produce contrived comparisons. The five successive rotations we develop below illuminate parallels and affinities between the two thinkers but also show how the former's thought might reinforce the latter's contribution to feminist philosophy via carefully revisiting and further critiquing the psychoanalytic-philosophical premises from which she departs. Cavarero argues that postural philosophy does not deny the vertical model but exposes its limits (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 127). Once such limits have been exposed, we might add, we may meaningfully contemplate the reintegration of key concepts, like the death drive and its movement, into a maternally-matrixially oriented feminist philosophy.
The first rotation focuses on the feeling of utter helplessness arising with the thought of “my death” occurring unexpectedly during a friendly conversation and inviting an immediate response from my interlocutor. Drawing on the affective intensity of the event and the initial response by the other, we introduce the matrixial (for Ettinger) and relational (for Cavarero) elements that compose this exchange, as well as a clear distinction between the verbal demand for a response addressed to the other and the appeal for a matrixial inclination that goes well beyond the limits of language.
The second rotation approaches the experience of death by reverting to a notional beginning, prioritizing birth and focusing on the presence of the mother and her assymmetrical relationship to the infant. By rethinking the importance of the maternal presence, Cavarero and Ettinger honor and exceed the theoretical postulates that underpin their work. The presence of and assymmetry between the mother and the child challenge and critique Freud, Lacan, and Arendt for regularly imagining the human subject not relationally and with reference to another subject, but in total isolation. The resulting shift in perspective further enables us to reconsider the movement of the drive as an element compatible with the feminist argument.
The third rotation emphasizes the transformational and indeed inaugural nature of Ettinger's theoretical formulation as a process of movement, border-crossing, and traversal, especially when examined in conjunction with Cavarero's concept of natality. We start the fourth rotation by seeking the place of inclination (clinamen) in Lacanian psychoanalysis, only to find that its rare use and eventual excision from the theoretical framework are linked to the disappearance of the mother from the scene. The (re)introduction of the mother disturbs and disrupts the Lacanian psychoanalytic logic with a gesture of curvature and the possibility of a beginning just as immanent as desire and lack. In that sense, we argue in the fifth rotation—movement, unity, and disunity—is the live extension of inclination and co-poetic spatiality, an indispensable component of feminist ontology that best captures the immateriality of sharing in the matrixial-maternal scene.
Sharing Stories: In the Hands of My Friends
The following incident is a collective autobiographical fiction. It belongs to all the participants and to no one in particular. It is based on an event we all found exceptionally powerful in one of the sessions while exploring the discursive co-construction of meaning (see Gonick and Gannon, Reference Gonick and Gannon2014). Taking creative research methods to heart, we co-constructed this account from the raw materials of a recording on the themes of change, growing up in the 80s, memories of young sexuality and responsibility, relationship with our mothers, arriving in the UK, and experiencing (non) Britishness. Picture the spatial setting of the recording: a small group of female academics in their forties and fifties, sitting in a circle in a university office. Narrative researchers draw attention to the rise of emotion during sharing narratives, adding that stories are most instructive when they are most personal or when the owners of the stories are most vulnerable (Watson Reference Watson2008). The strength of such an approach lies “in the opening up of possibilities rather than in the coming up with resolutions—possibilities that may in fact be subject to stormy weather, un-smooth voyages, incompatible coordinates and flotation failure” (Gonick and Hladki, Reference Gonick and Hladki2005, 286). Precise psychoanalytic interpretations of the piece below can be easily constructed, but our aim is to abandon such a route in favor of proximities emerging with successive rotations.
I remember my amusement at realizing that others had similar experiences as me: the woes of growing up as a girl in different cultures. Good mood around the room, and laughter. All mothers are the same when they say “you have to do the right thing,” whatever that “right thing” might be. My friend says: “From an early age I knew I had a duty of responsibility of care. I knew what I was expected to do.” For me responsibility and care could only mean one thing, staying away from boys and preserving one's “good name.” I am sure my friend means the same thing and I pipe up: “From a very early age, I had the impression that my mother did not trust me. I used to think, ‘Why are you always telling me to be careful? Why are you always telling me to be mindful of my behavior?’” My friend disagrees: “This is not what I meant. I meant caring for others, like a younger sibling, for example.”
I don't know why but I feel rebuffed, told off, chastised.
We drift into talking more about our mothers, trying to explain maternal influences in feminist terms. Are we not the living symptoms of those women who were caught, like Persephone, between worlds, between semi-obsolete notions of duty and their modern aspirations? Are we not caught in the paradoxes of their admonitions and conflicting messages: succeed, but not too much; be ambitious, but not too much? We laugh and shake our heads.
The discussion turns on loss. One of us says: “It's like losing a piece of myself every time someone I love passes away;” and another: “I am not there for them, never.” This is when it hits me. I say this without thinking to: “Sometimes, in very dark moments, I think I am the dead one, for all the people we have left behind. I am the one who is missing.” As soon as I utter these words I feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and catatonic. My friend, who is sitting next to me, notices my distress. She leans toward me, her shoulder touching mine, her body propping mine, gently pushing against mine. Then, she puts her arm around my shoulder and says quietly: “I know, I, too, feel guilty for missing the lives of friends, my mum, and then, I adjust to the idea of missing. You know, I have to deal with it because if I start missing everything, then life is going be unbearable, miserable. But there are days when I feel really melancholic and depressed, because, you know, one is a foreigner forever, and you are on your own all the time.”
After that, we remain silent for several seconds.
First Rotation: Neither Absence nor Meaning
Death excised from everyday life persists as the impossible thought of the outsideFootnote 4 as my erasure from the scene. For Michel Foucault, the thought of the outside “becomes a material energy, the suffering of the flesh” (Foucault Reference Foucault, Rabinow and Rose.2003, 426). It takes the form of nondialectical negation: “not mind in laborious conquest of its unity, but the endless erosion of the outside” (427). Foucault reconciles the thought of the outside with the realm of consciousness by resorting to the concepts of attraction and negligence with reference to two emblematic figures, Ulysses and Orpheus. Behind the former's triumphant narrative lingers a regret for not having listened longer to the Sirens. Behind the latter's lament for Eurydice shines the glory of having seen, even for a moment, the unattainable face at the very instant of its return to darkness, “a nameless, placeless hymn to light” (435).
This account compels us to consider how we might enfold our own experience of death into a nonmasculine narrative characterized by the presence of the other. Narrative theorists who draw on Cavarero emphasize the folding and doubling nature of the narrative, in which story and repetition contain within themselves the possibility of further repetitions (Watson Reference Watson2008, 335). In that sense, the narrative is seen as inherently ambivalent, since the rewriting of the personal experience “occurs within the context of a narrative matrix that is itself structured like a narrative” (336). This double-foldedness and repetition chime with the sharing of traumas in Ettinger's matrixial borderlinking. Ettinger approaches trauma not so much as an event in the past but from the point of view of its effective processing in the present, emphasizing co-poiesis and working with other(s) who will “process traumatic events for me, like my m/Other processed archaic events for my premature and fragile subjectivity” (Ettinger Reference Ettinger2006a, 141). Ettinger further comments that in the matrixial encounter, “I give myself over to an encounter with the Other, no more a subject in search for an object . . . since what is opening from outside and unfolds my inside vacates both” (146; emphasis added). She also notes that trauma, not death, is the inherent coefficient of subjectivity, a wounding of the matrixial web that “derives from the traumatic legacies of feminine sexual specificity inscribed in every born subject” (Pollock Reference Pollock2004, 52). Thus the matrixial experience can generate dangerous encounters, and one may unexpectedly find oneself in proximity to an event, “as if you had always been potentially sliding on its margins” (Ettinger Reference Ettinger2006a, 148).
A deficit of maternal trust can be traumatic, and its unexpected return may constitute a dangerous encounter. The feeling of being rebuffed and chastised in our story merits further consideration. In Ettinger, sharing with the (m)Other does not concern the satisfaction of one's demand defined in psychoanalytic terms either as being given the object of one's desire (Lacan) or obtaining access to the good mother (Klein). In fact, what one is offered in the matrixial experience is the very opposite, a movement that vacates both, a glimpse of absence experienced in a caring-sharing context. In that sense, the Ettingerian (m)Other is neither just the Lacanian object a (we shall return to this point in detail later) nor the Kleinian good/bad object but a presymbolic relation reactivated in the present.
In such an encounter, the (m)Other is called to play a subtle role. Cavarero argues that mother is the name of an inclination toward the other (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 104), a unilateral response (106), and a predisposition to respond (105) to infantile vulnerability. The latter is understood as the originary paradigm of human vulnerability, arising again in any situation in which one may find oneself defenseless, in the position of the infant (104). This disposition, we argue, acquired in the preverbal presence of the mother and staying with us for life, entails that any appeal to the other in adult life may contain a plea to assuage a feeling of helplessness (hilflosigkeit) first experienced in relation to the mother. Thus, in sharing my story, I am neither Ulysses nor Orpheus, but a vulnerable child, appealing for her response and her inclination. My other is assigned a formidable task: to transform a deadly passion (the thought of my death), arising from inside (psychic disposition) as well as outside, from the particulars of the narrative situation, which, unpredictable in its unfolding, gives rise to an anxiety I cannot anticipate or control.
It might be prudent at this point to introduce a clear distinction between the verbal demand for a response addressed to the other (along the lines of “what is the meaning of my life?”) and the appeal for her inclination, taking into consideration the fact that both Cavarero's postural proposal and Ettinger's spatial conceptualization of the matrixial are not limited to language. Consider again the feeling of being rebuffed and chastised: it causes me to miss the fact that my friend suggests a different kind of trust, beyond my chagrin at not being trusted. My friend points to the dimension of care and responsibility (toward the other), taking my demand elsewhere. She does not “tell me off.” Instead of that, she takes up the thread of my aporia and splits it gently in two. Whereas I appeal to her to satisfy my infantile demand for recognition and trust with the imaginary sameness of her own experience, she lets me down gently. In doing so, she tries to suture the gap of my aporia, speaking her own aporia, her own experience. Such moments of similarity-in-difference constitute occurrences of pure aporetic desire that invite both of us to witness each other's inaccessible meaning. What is situated there is not just the memory of raising a daughter so as to be (sexually) prudent, but the range of the possible effects maternal care may have had on my entire life. This is the red (biographical) thread and the stork I cannot follow. Beyond the appeal to my friend to provide me with the details of her life, I seek something more visceral (and preverbal), something that requires a response beyond (phallic) interpretation. And it is in this context that it would make sense to clearly hold in mind the difference between the verbal demand for a response addressed to the other from the appeal for her inclination enfolded in the same gesture.
For Cavarero, the design of our lives can be seen only when one looks back, with the figural unity of the design resulting and not following from a plan (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2000, 1; emphasis added). This retrospective appearance, this end-beginning of meaning, carries the past in the present demanding (a) meaning. If we accept that a narrative always reads backwards (Watson Reference Watson2008, 334), we must also accept that backwards admits a break in time and continuity. Looking back, I see myself as I once was, a vulnerable child. The act of looking back makes me both the spectator and the actor of my own scene. Thus, instead of saying, “I remember the past,” it might be more accurate to say that “the past remembers me” in the afterwardness (nachträglichkeit) of the reactivated memory traces (Fletcher Reference Fletcher2013, 69). Looking back, what the child once did not understand returns, decades later, as aporia and a lack of recognition. Naively, verbally, I am looking for an easy exchange of nonmeaning (aporia) for meaning (a design for life). Any interpretation provided by the other could address this latter demand but would fall short of the true matrixial qualities that lie in the realm of inclination. If that is the case, we must ask: at which moment does a gesture of inclination or leaning toward the other make sense, and how does it support the desire for unity and recognition? How does the other help me at that very point, being in aporia as much as I am?
Second Rotation: Assymmetry, Embrace
In order to answer these questions, we start from Cavarero's concept of maternal inclination as a structurally asymmetrical relationship with the infant (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 106), and, more precisely, as a posture that is “relational, originary, asymmetrical, and capable of evoking common vulnerability (127). Cavarero's theorization reconfigures Hannah Arendt's concept of natality in such a way as to address the “inhuman loneliness” arising from the scene.Footnote 5 A similar loneliness, we argue, permeates Freudian and Lacanian analysis. By rethinking the importance of the maternal presence, Cavarero and Ettinger honor and exceed the theoretical postulates that underpin their work while shifting the emphasis from death to life and from the end to the beginning. This shift is not at all incompatible with the drive as conceptualized by Laplanche in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Laplanche Reference Laplanche1985).
In discussing the significance of birth as a philosophical principle, Cavarero acknowledges the importance of Arendt's concept of natality (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 113), before observing that the infant does not interest Arendt beyond the inaugural moment of birth. The Arendtian newborn, Cavarero remarks, evokes inhuman loneliness (120). Thus, Cavarero makes it her task to introduce the mother into the scene of natality, predicting that such an insertion would fracture the scene's fundamental logical structure (120). Upon being inserted into the scene, she adds, the mother introduces an asymmetrical relationship to the infant's vulnerability (122).
The concept of asymmetry permeates the mother–child relationship in Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud does not dismiss the mother. On the contrary, he accentuates the assymmetry between the mother and the infant, accepting that the former's omnipotence “has a decisive influence on the structuring of the psyche” (Laplanche and Pontalis Reference Laplanche and Pontalis1988, 190). However, Freud assumes that such a state of dependence is frustrating for the infant, resulting in a feeling of helplessness (hilflosigkeit) and an increasing tension “which the psychic apparatus is as yet unable to control” (189).
In the natality scene, the advent of the infant makes its own unique contribution, interrupting the natural cycle's monotony, “a miracle that pertains to the dimension of immanence and contingency” (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 112). Natality, adds Cavarero, “not only supplants the inexorability of death with the unpredictability of beginning, it also breaks with every automatism, so that the individual life can no longer be thought as a straight line running to ruin” (112). The inaugural qualities of the asymmetry in the maternal scene challenge the infant's frustration as envisaged by Freud, offering a blueprint of a relationship grounded in difference, not in narcissistic duality. At the same time, predictability, automatism, and the straight line to ruin do not sound dissimilar from the psychoanalytic repetition compulsion qua inexorable move of the death drive. In that sense, mother and child help each other out of both narcissism and the death drive. But how does this inaugural relationship and the break of automatism translate into a caring practice between adults in a scene like the one discussed here? This is where we need to evoke another fundamental assymmetry, namely, between life and death as discussed by Laplanche in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. In order to do so, we must take a brief detour through the concepts of the signifier and the Other.
In Lacanian terms, the appeal to the Other and the attack of ignorance about the meaning of one's life (lack of knowledge, bodily inertia) can be considered as a hysterical demand that reverberates with nostos (homesickness), the desire for a return to the same (Gerber Reference Gerber, Parker and Pavón-Cuéllar2014) via an “accidental” repetition. Our own experience as immigrants and our nostos echoes with the enduring and complex effects migration has upon the human psyche, often examined in terms of trauma or mourning (see, for example, Honig Reference Honig1997; Hollander Reference Hollander2006; Tummala-Narra Reference Tummala-Narra2014; Beltsiou Reference Beltsiou2016).Footnote 6 An encounter with this doubly determined failed temporality disturbs and surprises (Guzman et al. Reference Guzman, Bautista, Gamboa Solis, Alcalá Ochoa, Pavón-Cuéllar, Parker and Pavón-Cuéllar2014, 240). At this point Lacanian psychoanalysis proposes the following solution: Our sociohistorical determination by the parameters of our own time entails that the speaking subject tells what has been decided by the structure (Pavon-Cuéllar Reference Pavon-Cuéllar, Parker and Pavón-Cuéllar2014, 69) and does the work of the signifying social structure. In that sense, it can either try, once again, to credit the Other with a wealth of knowledge and explanatory power, or to “break ranks” with the Other establishing itself as an exception. In this process, “the act fixes a point of reference for the subject” (Negro Reference Negro, Parker and Pavón-Cuéllar2014, 107), enabling her to go beyond the limits of her hysterical demand.
The above formulation is characterized by an inhuman loneliness similar to the one we find in Cavarero's commentary, the loneliness of the subject facing the void of its constitutive relation with the Other. Can we deviate from this formulation, opening up the space beyond seeking hysterical affirmation in the Other and beyond being immersed in psychoanalytically conceived inhuman loneliness? Both Cavarero and Ettinger seem to envisage an intersubjective relation that does not replicate the subject who plows their solitary way through the vagaries of lack. So here lies a basic philosophical assymmetry between me and the (m)other: as I fail to see the design of my life, I swoon and die at the closure (looping around of the death drive) that forms the limit of my narrative memory, begging, body and soul, for the pattern of a stork (see Cavarero, Reference Cavarero2000, 3). The other cannot offer me the answer I crave, as she is equally ignorant of it, but can “hold” me, in her propping embrace, at the point that the adult-me experiences death and helplessness (hilflosigkeit) as rigidity of form. My friend does not offer me the pattern of a stork but the curvature of space (embrace) and the repetition of a primary maternal gesture, not-death.
The Lacanian emphasis on lack and language (the signifier) often veils the power of gesture. At times, it also veils the irreducible difference of life and death and the fact that they cannot be exchanged like signifiers. The nonexchange of life and death inhabits Laplanche's work. The two are radically different but may coexist as drives, propping or leaning into each other as unity and disunity, Eros and conflict. Laplanche describes this leaning not as a moment or a fixed point of reference but as a scene that holds together, in formal unity, several ideas that are related but not identical, further calling it, after Lagache, a virtual monster, like a chimera, or a dragon of body parts (Laplanche Reference Laplanche1985, 108).Footnote 7
Such a scene enables something important to emerge: not the death drive materializing in the field of sexuality as masochism and sadism (see, for example, Williams 1995; de Lauretis Reference De Lauretis2008), but unity and the possibility for an (inaugural) affirmation of being that lies beyond the (impossible) knowledge of the Other. In that sense, my other offers me what Gilles Deleuze would call a disjunctive conjunction (of life and death), no concrete object and no interpretation, but an objectless interpretation, the only one she can credibly afford. Maternal inclination sends back to me, in fracturing dissymmetry, the death drive, not as a compulsion to repeat but as the pure curving movement of an embrace. Only the presence of another human being can do that. Might it be a step too far to propose that this conceptualization of the drive approximates the Cavarerian maternal inclination “understood as a posture that is relational, originary, asymmetrical, and capable of evoking common vulnerability” (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 127)? One could further argue that the (m)other in the relational scene addresses my aporia in a gestural/postural manner by transforming it into a diverting movement that unfreezes (self)aggressive immobilization (bodily inertia). This can be an inaugural moment only when it addresses a limit condition, such as a traumatic and dangerous encounter, not just any demand for a story or a tale.
We find a visual parallel in John Fletcher's discussion of da Vinci's The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, the same painting Cavarero places at the center of her postural ethics. Fletcher reads the painting as a scene of containment, drawing attention to Mary's posture and extended arm toward the infant, as well as the child's rough handling of a baby lamb at the corner of the painting. The author argues that containment is located in the outstretched gesture, which is not just an attempt to repossess the errant child but that intervenes in the child's rather violent stranglehold of the unfortunate animal (Fletcher Reference Fletcher2013, 202). Fletcher adds that the eruption of violence and aggression at the corner of the picture “testifies to the continuing need for maternal holding and containment of the unruly impulses, a containment that is implemented through the seductive power of the smiling gaze of the mother that draws the child's return gaze back to her even as he eludes her grasp” (202).
We do not concur with the argument about the seductive gaze. My friend, my other who processes my anguish, does not seduce me. As Ettinger would argue, she is co-affected. Inclination and the extended arm posit a primary gesture, enacting the circularity of the drive, the first and constant response of life and unity that reins in the conflict (disunity) of the death drive. The gesture of the embrace enfolds death (drive) into the matrixial space. It constitutes an inaugural moment that breaks the automatism of repetition qua return of the same (aporia, death). The one who enters the (inhuman) scene of loneliness, the (m)other, the friend who puts her hand around my shoulder, inaugurates a new beginning, a moment that cancels death and breaks the straight line of automatism, my headlong rush to the somatic and cultural intimation of death (rigidity of form, hysteria). Fletcher considers that to be a quality of the mother. Cavarero attributes it to the child. Ettinger affords us a glimpse of a spatiotemporal matrixial arrangement in which one can be both, a non-I, fading-in-transformation (Cavarero 2016, 141).
Third Rotation: Metramorphosis and a Random Event
In Lacanian terms, an experience of helplessness like the one we are discussing here could be described as an event or an eruption of the Real, affording a glimpse of the thing (das Ding) that cannot be said but lies at the core of our experience (Frosh Reference Frosh, Parker and Pavón-Cuéllar2014, 21). Lacanian psychoanalysis values such disruptions as revealing the truth of the speaking subject and its constitutive lack, paying little attention to either the interlocutor, in whose presence the thing is intimated, or the interplay between disruption and movement. Moreover, unity and union have no place in Lacanian psychoanalysis, hailing, as they do, from the Imaginary that obscures the truth of the subject. A rotation of the prism in the direction of the Cavarerian inclination as part of an alternative geometry enables us to (further) problematize this view. This bears directly on Ettinger's conceptualization of the matrixial, some aspects of which already diverge from Lacanian psychoanalysis.
In his insightful discussion of Ettinger's work, Calum Neill argues that she preserves the concept of lack insofar as desire cannot operate without it (Neill Reference Neill2008, 333), adding that: “without dismissing this logic, Ettinger seeks to supplement it with another logic, another type of phantasy” (333; emphasis added), one that functions in parallel to object a (the missing object of lack) without replacing or contesting it (333). Following this interpretation, we could surmise that my other offers me a phantasy,Footnote 8 one that can presumably pacify me but will ultimately fail to address my inherent lack. Although we agree that lack is a fundamental concept, and union with the mother is imaginary and, as shown in the previous section, essentially untenable, taking phantasy as the sole outcome of the matrixial encounter jars with Ettinger's key concept of metramorphosis as “an originary human potentiality for reciprocal yet asymmetrical crossing of borderlines between I and the non-I” (Ettinger Reference Ettinger2006b, 221; emphasis added). What is the value of metramorphosis if everything is ultimately subsumed by phantasy?
An event, argue Pavón-Cuéllar and Parker, cannot be neutralized or reduced to structure (8). More to the point, an event constitutes a special place of articulation between continuity and rupture, or history and novelty, a point of crossing (traversal) in which “something new and the unheard-of may eventually emerge” (Bosteels Reference Bosteels2003, 123). According to Bruno Bosteels, when considering the emergence of an event, it is prudent to examine its environs, in order to appreciate its radical character and its haphazard nature without losing track of its structural overdetermination (120). In the clinical setting, the act of interpretation can be such an event, since it constitutes the junction between what already exists in language (symptom) and what is about to emerge, that is, the missing element (cause) that supports and structures the symptom. A similar principle applies to historical and spatially located events. Bosteels cites the example of the May 1968 protests in Paris as a radical event arising out of the horizon of political agitation. Here, the emphasis is not on verbal interpretation but on the break with the norm. In trying to conceptualize such a unique locus, Jacques Alain Miller calls for a change in our perspective, one that will enable us to see “space pivot on its axis and, by a complete rotation that accomplishes its division, discover the inner rule of its law and the order that secretly adjusts whatever is offered up to the gaze” (quoted in Bosteels Reference Bosteels2003, 129). This decisive rotation, he adds, undoes the structure of the symptom, allowing for a traversal or a “diagonal reading” (129; emphasis added).
Miller's visual metaphor chimes with Cavarero's and Ettinger's, despite remaining squarely geometrical and ensconced in Lacanian psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Nevertheless, it marks the place at which symptom and, by extension, phantasy as an imaginary formation, come to pass as no longer tenable. A diagonal move, we could therefore argue, rotates both gaze and space toward the (curved) motion of the new and the unexpected and lends itself to the maternal and the matrixial. This rotation does not veil, placate, or pacify like the phantasy. It grounds me in a trajectory that departs from me and comes back to me from the other, just as my bodily inertia, the acting out of helplessness, registers the tension between life and death, knowledge and nonknowledge, response and aporia. To privilege phantasy as the answer to such an experience falls short of Ettinger's key concept of metramorphosis as a special connection between analytical practice as an ethical working-through and artistic practice as an aesthetic working-through, especially since working-through encompasses “the psychical work which allows the subject to accept certain repressed elements and to free himself from the grip of mechanisms of repetition” (Laplanche and Pontalis Reference Laplanche and Pontalis1988, 488). Of course, an encounter with friends is not a clinical situation and does not culminate in formal interpretation. Ettinger, however, takes great pains to preserve something of the ethically important crossing that the term working-through inherently implies. It would seem plausible to propose, then, that metramorphosis chimes with Cavarero's concept of natality in its relational maternal qualities. It provides the space and relational perspective for something other than death to break into the scene.
Fourth Rotation: Maternal Clinamen
Inclination (clinamen) is a rather contested concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan uses the term in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis but does not seem to come back to it in other writings (Lacan Reference Lacan1991). Mladen Dolar revisited the term in 2013 in an article titled “Tyche, clinamen, den” (Dolar Reference Dolar2013). Dolar argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis does not need the concept of clinamen. Dolar's discussion draws on the philosophical definition of “one” and the indivisibility of the atom in pre-Socratic philosophy. Once again, the argument makes perfect sense within the remit of psychoanalysis, but a more careful reading of the original Lacanian text reveals something else, namely, the elision of the mother from the scene, the one who must be excised in order for the logic of psychoanalysis to be configured. We trace the unfolding of the argument from Dolar to Lacan, holding in mind Cavarero's proposition that the advent of the mother fractures the scene of inhuman loneliness.
Cavarero argues that inclination (clinamen) is chance that disrupts the automatism of repetition (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 96), throwing things off kilter, in a new direction. Lacan differentiates between the automatism of repetition (automaton) and tyche (chance) as inclination (clinamen). The former pertains to the symbolic and the tendency to repeat the pleasurable, the latter to the register of a chance encounter with the real. The two exist intertwined: “Tyche only dwells in the gaps of the automaton. In the tiny gap between one occurrence and the next one, something is produced that is irreducible to automaton” (Dolar Reference Dolar2013, 228). Dolar addresses the question of whether clinamen can be considered a properly Lacanian concept, starting his argument with the properties of the atom (literally “that which cannot be divided’) in pre-Socratic philosophy. Clinamen (qua unpredictable change of course), in this context, concerns “not merely the fate of the universe which is at stake, but the fate of our own will and passion, desire and enjoyment—actually not the fate, but quite the opposite, the very possibility of breaking the fate. Clinamen is at the point where cosmos and humanity overlap, the out-of-place and out-of-time point they share” (229).
Dolar is concerned with a specific issue, namely, whether clinamen belongs to the immanent properties of the atom or not:
It [clinamen] can be either situated in the place of (constitutive) exception, something that must always already have happened in order for the universe to emerge, occurring out-of-space and out of-time with no place nor moment within space and time once they are constituted. Or else it can be an omnipresent “universal” principle which immanently derails any given one at all places and all times. (232–24)
Badiou opts for the first, whereas Deleuze, Derrida, and Maillassoux accept it as an originary determinant of movement in the atom (233). Dolar asks if there is a third option, other than having to decide between an exception that never takes place although it underlies every taking place, and an out-of-worldly immanent transcendence “quasi-universalizing the exception to make it immanent” and thus turn it to “a universal swerviness of any universal, the out-of-oneness of any One (with the danger of providing a convenient and non-binding passe-partout)” (233). Dolar also considers the Lacanian-ness of the concept of clinamen in terms of thinking together the One and the Other (233) via the determination of the One in Aristotle. The third option is provided by the ancient Greek negative grammatical particle den (non), which is “not something, not nothing, not being, not one, not positively existing, not absent, not countable,” subsequently identified by Dolar as “not precisely the object,” in other words, object a (235). Thus, by displacing the choice between exception and immanence onto the notion of the nonobject, Dolar neatly solves the problem of the clinamen, rescuing Lacan from veering off to the margins of theoretical orthodoxy: “If atom is den, then for Democritus it can have no weight, and there can be neither parallel fall nor the problem of clinamen” (236).
This further enables Dolar to argue that we can now avoid positing clinamen as either a foundational exception (Badiou) or a universalized virtuality (Deleuze). At the same time, this alternative maintains both parts, one and den, as the very cleft of being, the place where both being and thought (e)merge. At best, then, clinamen can be thought as the locus of an either/or theoretical choice: “There seems to be like a parallax view when looking at the atom: either one sees the split, one/void etc., as Hegel did, or else one sees clinamen, the inner swerviness, torsion, declination, the immanent becoming not premised on the cut of negativity, relying on swerviness as the becoming without a void” (238). At worse, clinamen inhabits the Lacanian text almost as a theoretical weakness, which the superimposition of the den corrects in exemplary fashion.
What does this have to do with the (m)other? A more careful reading of Lacan's text is quite revealing. Lacan discusses the concept of clinamen in the context of the repetition inherent in the fort/da game with which the child attempts to represent the presence/absence of the mother in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Lacan notes that the reel with which the child plays the game acts like an object a and part of himself with which the child identifies in the game of repetition and the splitting between Vosterllung and Repräsentanz (Lacan Reference Lacan1991, 63). In the next paragraph, Lacan offers a personal testimony of a child's effort to deal with maternal presence and absence and, by extension, the early intimations of death:
I, too, have seen with my own eyes, opened by maternal divination, the child, traumatized by the fact that I was going away despite the appeal, preciously adumbrated in his voice, and henceforth more renewed for months at a time—long after, having picked up this child—I have seen it let his head fall on my shoulder and drop off to sleep, sleep alone being capable of giving him access to the living signifier that I had become since the date of the trauma. (63)
In this paragraph it is evident that Lacan fails to include himself as human presence in the scene, turning a blind eye to what he offers the child—a disposition, an inclination, an embrace—and the reciprocity between this inclination and the break of automatism that the child returns to him. Needless to add, in this very moment of blindness, he excises the (m)other from the scene. Dolar reinstalls this blind spot of psychoanalytic reasoning, further shifting the emphasis from sleep (the inertia of the body) and lack to not-one, once again burying the (m)other under the debris of the object a.
The (re)introduction of the mother fractures the psychoanalytic scene with a gesture of curvature and the possibility of a beginning, just as the readmission of inclination as immanent property disturbs psychoanalytic logic. Both Ettinger and Cavarero use the term disposition in their writings. Can we accept disposition or human propensity without incurring the risk of naïve essentialism or biologism (see Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 103)? A feminist rotation of the phallic prism enables us to re-emplace disposition in our vocabulary and further weaken the prevalence of lack. Taking this argument to its theoretical limit, we would further suggest that the Ettingerian theory of matrixial borderlinking must be further developed so as to move more decisively away from the binding properties of lack. Lack is simply not all. By shifting our gaze away from object a we return to the duality of Eros and Thanatos. When I have experienced conflict (nonunity in the sense of the death drive) in the presence of the other, a new beginning does not merely fall back on lack but constitutes a co-emergence, or an emergence of the union of Eros. Laplanche posits Eros as the primary moving force behind the scene of representation. Eros and the vital order, not Thanatos, as primary force seeks “to maintain, preserve and augment the cohesion and the synthetic tendency of the living beings and of psychic life” (Laplanche Reference Laplanche1985, 123). Lyotard privileges Eros as the moving force of libidinal economy (Bennington Reference Bennington1988, 24). Likewise, synthesis and co-poiesis cannot be excised from feminist psychoanalytic philosophy without arbitrarily privileging Thanatos.
Toward Movement
Cavarero notes that postural philosophy can exist alongside existing masculine philosophical formulations not in order to deny the vertical model but to expose its limits (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 127). If that is the case, could we further elaborate on their possible relation, especially if we wish to argue that maternal inclination and matrixial borderlinking as human dispositions should be accepted as equal to the fundamental concepts of masculine philosophy and psychoanalysis?
Cavarero argues that postural geometry, “far from limiting itself to the axis of uprightness, arranges the human along multiple coexisting lines, which may be contingent and intermittent, and at times even random” (129). Let us be reminded of Ettinger's comparable matrixial topology of jouissance, traumas, pictograms, phantasies, affects, death-drive oscillations, libidinal-erotic flows, imprints, and affected traces (Ettinger Reference Ettinger, Florence and Foster2000, 195). When we explore the response to an experience of death, disunity, and helplessness, successive rotations reveal that this occurs along multiple lines. This enables us to propose movement as a live extension of inclination and co-poetic spatiality, and as an indispensable component of feminist ontology. In analytic language, woman's counterpart is neither the phallus nor object a, but sharing and movement. This best captures the immateriality of sharing in the matrixial scene that, once again, exceeds the limitations of the missing object: “If it is not possible to distinguish between the Thing in and for myself and the Thing in and for the other, then what we are left with are traces of links which can only be witnessed in a togetherness that is not reducible to union, insofar as a union, a unity, would suggest a comprehension, a totality and closure” (Neill Reference Neill2008, 337).
But what happens when we place the movement of unity and disunity at the heart of our perspective? Cavarero notes that the movement of relationality underpins the primary scene of birth (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 99), and Ettinger, according to Neill, understands matrixial borderlinking as “an astatic process . . . governed less by mastery, accumulation and the gaze than is by touching, hearing and movement” (Neill Reference Neill2008, 332). Movement can be the curvature of space, as opposed to linearity or even afterwardness (nachträglichkeit), an inclination that inscribes the leaning of death onto life into a trajectory of assymmetries in the maternal/matrixial scene. As Cavarero proposes: “Inclination can become the module that composes the picture's design—its leitmotif or prevailing posture” (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 128).
In a Deleuzian reading of Ettinger's work, Estelle Barrett approaches the matrixial as a locus that composes intensities, flows, and linkages that can accommodate chance and unpredictability in creative processes that do not always originate in decision or will (Barrett Reference Barrett2000, 254, 257).Footnote 9 Barrett considers Ettinger's work as providing an anoedipal, nonphallic organization, an alternative dimension of subjectivization, inhabited by affects, intensities and moments of transgression, which “indicate the essentially nomadic, excessive and a-signifying dimensions of textual practices” (256). Developing her argument in the realm of the visual arts, Barrett suggests that the Ettingerian matrixial “permits us to identify the articulatory affects which shift the system towards the drive-governed basis of visual production. . . . There moments mark nomadic movements away from the signifying structure of the text and relate to traces of beyond-the-phallus part of object a/s caught up in the artwork” (258).
Drawing on this formulation, and deliberately turning a blind eye to the forced choice between Lacan and Deleuze often put forward in similar cases, we propose that the organization of desire after the model of lack (and Thing, object a) and its alternative inscription in a matrixial/inclinational register might relate to each other as plane of organization to plane of consistency in Deleuzian philosophy (see Barrett Reference Barrett2000, 258). The two planes do not compete with or cancel each other out but constitute alternative geometries. Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe the plane of organization (or development) as structural or genetic, a hidden structure necessary for forms, a teleological plan(e), a design and mental principle (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2008, 293). The plane of consistency (or composition), on the other hand, is permeated by “relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at lease elements that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds. . . . Nothing subjectifies, but haecceities form according to compositions of nonsubjectified powers or affects” (294). This geometrical plane is not tied to a mental design but to an abstract design, in which “form is constantly being dissolved, freeing time and space” (294).
Adding maternal inclination qua sharing and embrace to the scene of verbal exchange marks a departure from and a disruption of the plane of organization; it causes the drive qua movement and impossible exchange between life and death to veer off, to lean on, to take a different direction, to cease to disrupt when contained in the looping motion of an embrace. Movement, then, becomes the material wedge between Eros and Thanatos as condition of appearance in the antivertical, matrixial assemblage. The latter arises when life problematizes itself, as Foucault would put it (Rajchman Reference Rajchman1991), giving rise to the new and the unexpected. Maternal inclination as a module of a disruptive and revolutionary geometry (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2016, 131) enables one to start at the beginning, where there was vulnerability and embrace.
Angie Voela is a Reader in Social Sciences, University of East London. She is the co-editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and the author of Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Myth in Contemporary Culture: After Oedipus (2017). She has published on gender, feminism, and philosophy; psychoanalysis and philosophy; space and politics; and individual and society. a.voela@uel.ac.uk
Cigdem Esin is a Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences and co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London. Her research interests include narrative methodologies, power and personal narratives, migrant and refugee narratives, and visual storytelling. c.esin@uel.ac.uk
