Griselda Pollock

Thinking the Feminine Aesthetic Practice as Introduction to Bracha Ettinger and the Concepts of Matrix and Metramorphosis

Bracha Ettinger (formerly known as Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger) is an Israeli-born Paris-based artist, analyst and feminist theorist who has produced over the last decade a major theoretical intervention through a tripartite practice. This article offers an expository introduction and overview of core aspects of her theoretical contribution while relating it to major trends in feminist and general cultural theory of subjectivity, hysteria, memory, trauma and the aesthetic. Organized in several parts, each section addresses the developing vocabulary, terminology and significance of her work. With core concepts are Matrix, metramorphosis, trans-subjectivity, co-poïesis, co-emergence and co-affection, Ettinger’s theory opens out beyond the blind spots of advanced feminist thought. From its independent and original theorization of subjectivity-as-encounter and an-other sexual difference, Bracha Ettinger challenges our attempts to think about femininity associated with the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Linked to, but distinct from, the philosophical speculations of Deleuze and Levinas, this work creates a transferential theoretical space for Jewish and feminine difference, sexuality, subjectivity and the traumatic residues of modern catastrophe that has major repercussions for cultural, aesthetic, ethical, political and psychoanalytic theory.

Art/Trauma/Representation

Beauty that I find in contemporary art-works that interest me, whose source is the trauma to which it also returns and appeals, is not private beauty or as that upon which a consensus of taste can be reached; it is a kind of encounter, that perhaps we are trying to avoid much more than aspiring to arrive at, because the beautiful, as Rilke says, is but the beginning of the horrible in which – in this dawning – we can hardly stand. We can hardly stand at that threshold of that horrible, at that threshold, which maybe is but, as Lacan puts it in his 7th seminar, the limit, the frontier of death – or shall we say self-death? – in life, where ‘life glimpses death as if from its inside’. Could such a limit be experienced, via-art-working, as a threshold and a passage to the Other? And if so, is it only the death-frontier that is traversed here? Is death the only domain of the beyond?

Liquid modernity and cultural analysis : An introduction to a transdisciplinary encounter

This extended introductory article sets the scene for consideration of liquid modernity and Bauman’s recent work in general. His ideas are placed against Pollock’s concept of the ‘trans-disciplinary’. The ramifications of Bauman’s work for cultural analysis are discussed, particularly his ideas about migration, tourism, borders and the impact of global social trends on citizenship and agency. One central theme is deterritorialization - both in terms of academic disciplines and the shift from solid, defined, localized, territorialized, nation-bound modernity to the liquid modern.

Moments and Temporalities of the Avant-Garde "in, of, and from the feminine"

Why has modernist culture been so unable imaginatively to integrate women’s creativity into its narratives of radicalism, innovation, dissidence, and transgression when gender has to be recognized as one of the neuralgic points of modernity itself? If the canonical story of art wrote gender into modernism only in the negative, by effacement of its most agitating bearers–women avant-gardists—how can a retrospective archaeology of the avant-garde, not as a single vanguard but as a constellation of historically contingent moments and radical self-positionings vis-à-vis the triangulation of family, state, and religion typical of Western bourgeois modernity, open up new lines of analysis that reveal the oscillating place of “the feminine/le feminine” in all avant-garde formations? Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology of contemporary liquid modernity and Julia Kristeva’s ever fertile thoughts on the temporalities of sexual difference, this article argues, firstly, that in liquid times the relatively solid ground against which avant-garde transgression operated is no longer operative, displacing the classic model of the avant-garde, while, secondly, the feminist perspective on the long durée of the phallocentric symbolic order places an intervention “in, of and from the feminine” continuously in a historically strategic position of transformative dissidence. My argument weaves historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theories of aesthetics and sexual difference, contesting the rapid shifts in intellectual fashion typical of liquid modernity that are seeping into the academy and leading to premature abandonment of certain intellectual-political projects. For all the dangers and complexities of thinking about “the feminine” in any form at all, and certainly now, when high feminist theories of sexual difference are apparently so démodé, I show how this troubled and troubling concept is still historically significant and theoretically relevant to rethinking the avant-garde.

Where do Bunnys come from? From Hamsterdam to hubris

The Wire has not only been identified as one of the greatest television studies of the destitution of the modern American city through the genre of the police procedural, but it has also been hailed as a modern work of tragedy. The strength and depth of its characters confer upon them the tragic status of brave and courageous individuals battling the vagaries of fate. For Simon and Burns, the contemporary gods are, however, the faceless forces of modern capitalism. While acknowledging the necessity for such a cultural reading of the dramaturgy and genuinely tragic pathos achieved by the collaborative writing and creative vision led by David Simon and Ed Burns, this paper challenges this reading since it risks reducing African Americans to passive, albeit tragic victims of all‐powerful forces. It also inhibits the possibility of imagining agency and action. Tracking one character, Colonel Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin, who has not been fêted or celebrated in the subsequent popular and academic debates about The Wire, the authors argue that Colvin represents a figure of exception in the overall scheme. In several key spheres—creative policing, the drug trade and in education—he is a figure of action. Thus the paper reads this character through the prism of the political theory of Judith Shklar who denounces ‘passive injustice’ and indifference to misfortune, calling for informal relations of everyday democracy and active citizenship in line with a series of diverse critics of contemporary American urban social relations (Lasch, Sennett). The question of action as itself a form of diagnosis and responsibility leads back to Gramscian concepts of the organic intellectual and to Hannah Arendt. Without losing sight of the fact that The Wire is a fictional drama, the paper argues that narratological analysis of one character can contribute imaginatively to the field of social and political theory while using its affective capacity to situate the viewer/reader in the dilemmas of social practice that the crisis portrayed in The Wire so forcefully represents.

Crimes, Confession and the Everyday: Challenges in Reading Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater? 1941–1942

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) was a Jewish-German artist murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 26. She left one massive artwork comprising 784 paintings with text, music and overlays. What is this work? Why was it made? Since its first exhibition and publication in the 1960s it has been treated as an autobiographical narrative and Holocaust testimony. Resisting both trends, this article reframes the work in terms of gender, the event and the everyday in order to examine the implications of a recent revelation, in a film form (2012), of new evidence that the work structurally functions as a crime narrative, even a confession, in the context of familial sexual abuse. Drawing on Pierre Bayard on detective fiction and Derrida on the archive, the article juxtaposes the visual rhetoric of Frans Weisz’s 2012 film and the visual rhetoric of several key sections of Salomon’s audio-visual Life? or Theatre?, to tease out the visual evidence for this claim.

Stilled life: traumatic knowing, political violence, and the dying of Anna Frank

Abstract This paper is a meditation caused by an encounter in a documentary (Blair, 1995) with the only known moving footage of Anna Frank, who, as a result of the posthumous publication of her diaries as The Diary of Anne Frank (1947, English, 1952) then made into a play (1955) and a film (USA, 1959), was gradually framed as the iconic image of, and narrative fetish (Santner, 1990) for the Holocaust. In hanging cultural memory upon the forever-stilled image of a 12-year-old girl, what is occluded is the true horror of her unnoticed death from starvation, disease, and hopeless loneliness in April 1945. It is the purpose of the paper to move between the affect of encountering the lively image in the footage of 1941 and the realization of the missing engagement with the death of Anna Frank enabled by the substitution for traumatic knowledge of consolatory iconicization. What happened to Anna Frank and her diaries was, as many scholars have pointed out: Universalization, Americanization, deJudaization. These trends raise for me a deeper question I want to pose through this case study: can we mourn the other, or does the experience of mourning for, or sharing the trauma or suffering of, another always require identification, that is, the abolition or reduction of their alterity and particularity so that we find common ground not interrupted by the pain beyond our own knowing or the experience that marks difference: race, class, or sexuality? Is Holocaust commemoration so troubled because it requires a grieving for the other (the Jewish or Sinti/Roma victims) in a place of pain beyond any human experience except for those who endured it? Anna Franks gender and childhood function as de-particularizing attributes that make her accessible for maximum identification as an innocent victim. This paper plays the universalizing representation of “Anne Frank” against the other kinds of trace we have of Anna Frank as a gendered, religiously affiliated, modern subject and victim of fascism, using Blairs documentary to trouble the iconic image, and yet also noting that films equal inability to face the traumatic knowledge of her brutal destruction.

Mary Kelly'sBallad of Kastriot Rexhepi: Virtual Trauma and Indexical Witness in the Age of Mediatic Spectacle

On 11 December 2001, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles, opened an exhibition that included a chamber orchestra and singer. The American artist Mary Kelly (1941-) created the dual event under the title: The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi. Kelly’s artwork was snaked, about head height, around the vast chamber of this cavernous gallery in an almost continuous movement of 206 feet of black-edged, Perspexframed, grey lint. The lint – the fluff that comes off clothes and is caught in a filter in a domestic tumble dryer whose simple industrial shape became the formal unit for this work – was mounted in alternating curvilinear sections. This pattern of repeat and inversion evokes both a visual register of sound waves and images of pulse and flow as well as recalling the structure of biological life, the helix. These associations work to generate in the viewer, at the level of already abstracted systems of representation, a sense of sound and movement while none is directly part of the work’s effect. A running thread of black text – what one critic called her ‘rhythmic prose’ – holds a constant line either just below or just above the median point of the curved sections created by the exact shape of a large domestic tumble dryer in which, by the washing and drying of 4000 lbs. of specially selected black and white clothing, Kelly created the material that is the evocative medium for this work: compressed lint, the blown residual tissue or the waste and relic of daily domestic rituals, whose complex imbrication with social and psychic life have been the substance of her whole career’s faithful investigation.

Is Feminism a Trauma, a Bad Memory, or a Virtual Future?

Reading the event of feminism as a trauma both to its societies and, as important, to its potential subject—feminists—this article mounts an argument against the iterated feminist memory of warring generations and succeeding waves. Citing Elizabeth Grosz on the constant need for new concepts that enable the heterogeneous actualization of feminism’s unharvested virtuality and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek’s rereading of suffragette thought as an aesthetic modernism articulating a radical right to revolt and to imagine an undefined feminist futurity, Pollock examines texts by Hannah Arendt, Anna Freud, and Bracha Ettinger to elucidate both de-Oedipalized and non-Oedipal modes of feminist transmission and the institutionalization of feminism. While displacing the familialization of feminism that acts out the daughter’s unrelieved “anxiety of influence” in a phallocentric culture structurally committed to mother-hating and mother-blaming, the article explores psychoanalytical foundations for the ethical questions of responsibility in the common but always historically differentiated struggle to incite and sustain the spaces of democratic subjectivities imagined beyond the paradigms of parents, children, and envious siblings.

Ecoutez la Femme: Hear/Here Difference

The Sirens appear in Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey. After returning from the underworld, Odysseus and his men are received by Circe, luring the men back to pure animality, but she turns helper, and prepares them for the next stage of their homeward journey. She warns them of several dangers ahead, one of which is the Sirens, who spellbind any man alive, whoever comes their way. Whoever draws too close, off guard, and catches the Sirens’ voices in the air — no sailing home for him, no wife rising to meet him, no happy children beaming up at their father’s face. The high thrilling song of the Sirens will transfix him, lolling in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses rotting away, rags of skin shrivelling on their bones. (Homer, Odyssey Book XII, 48–57)