LAUREN BERLANT CRUEL OPTIMISM PDF SERIES

The porous spaces of Ettinger’s work present passageways that allow the viewer and reader to move through and between the various levels of text and image, theory and art, in a constant shift between modes of production. In Ettinger’s feminist version of the myth, “looking back” is a positive and ethical gesture of remembrance, an act which weaves together the past and the present into the surface of her paintings, and offers an arena for potential future encounters.

LAUREN BERLANT CRUEL OPTIMISM PDF SERIES

Ettinger, in her series of paintings entitled Eurydice, proposes a matrixial re-working of the mythological figure of Eurydice, moving away from the classical emphasis on separation and loss in favor of connection and retrieval. Ettinger’s theoretical and artistic advancements promote connection rather than separation, expanding borders from the limited social constructions of interaction to the limitless feminine space of the matrixial web. Ettinger’s work offers a feminist re-negotiation of the terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis within the realm of aesthetics and ethics, issues that are universal, yet tied to specific experiences between the I and non-I, the known and the unknown. Ettinger, whose practice of artworking incorporates her theoretical development of the Matrix and Metramorphosis into the act of painting. This dissertation examines the written and artistic production of the Israeli-born artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha L. If Antigone’s transgression can be understood through a matrixial lens it behooves us as feminist scholars to more fully understand the affective landscape and maternal ethics of difference enacted in the play. My objective is to build upon Ettinger’s analysis of Antigone to better understand how it is not death, exactly, that is at stake in the drama, but rather the status of the Feminine dimension in the Theban city-state. I also focus on Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘debinding’ (2010) and Judith Butler’s (2002) writing on gender and kinship disorder in the tragedy.

I situate Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial in relation to Lacan’s analysis of Antigone in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Seminar VII).

By engaging Ettinger’s theory of the Other (Feminine) Sexual Difference, I consider how ways of being in the Feminine tap into the matrixial domain, thus expanding the bounds of what counts as subjective experience in psychoanalysis. In order to understand the magnitude of Antigone’s radical act in the play by the same name I engage the scholarship of Israeli feminist psychoanalytic scholar Bracha L. Much has been written about Antigone who buried her brother Polynices in Theban soil despite the prohibition issued by King Creon (her uncle) in the Sophocles tragedy.

Lauren berlant cruel optimism pdf