BODILY PROXIMITY P O L I G R A F I number 65/66 • volume 17, 2012 EDITED BY SIGRID HACKENBERG Y ALMANSA AND LENART ŠKOF P O L I G R A F I Editor-in-Chief: Lenart Škof (Univ. of Primorska) Editorial Board: Igor Škamperle (Univ. of Ljubljana), Mojca Terčelj (Univ. of Primorska), Miha Pintarič (Univ. of Ljubljana), Rok Svetlič (Univ. of Primorska), Anja Zalta (Univ. of Ljubljana) Editorial Office: Dr. Lenart Škof, University of Primorska, Faculty of Humanities Koper, Dept. of Anthropology, Titov trg 5, SI-6000 Koper, Slovenia Phone: +386 5 6637 744, Fax: + 386 5 6637 742, E-mail: lenart.skof@fhs.upr.si Website: http://www.poligrafi.si number 65/66, volume 17 (2012) BODILY PROxIMITY Edited by Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa and Lenart Škof International Editorial Board Th. Luckmann (Universitat Konstanz), D. Kleinberg-Levin (Northwestern University), R. A. Mall (Universitat Munchen), M. Ježic (Filozofski fakultet, Zagreb), D. Louw (University of the Free State, Bloemfontain), M. Volf (Yale University), K. Wiredu (University of South Florida), D. Thomas (University of Birmingham), M. Kerševan (Filozofska fakulteta, Ljubljana), F. Leoncini (Universita degli Studi di Venezia), P. Zovatto (Universita di Trieste), T. Garfitt (Oxford University), M. Zink (College de France), L. Olive (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico), A. Louth (Durham University), P. Imbert (University of Ottawa), O. Turan (Middle-East Technical University, Ankara), E. Krotz (Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan / Universidad Autonoma de Metropolitana-Iztapalapa), S. Touissant (Ecole Normale Superieure), B. Mezzadri (Universite d'Avignon), A. Barabas (Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Oaxaca), M. Uršič (Univ. of Ljubljana) Book-Reviews Editor: Tomaž Grušovnik, Univ. of Primorska, SRC Koper Garibaldijeva 1, SI-6000 Koper, SLOVENIA Phone: +386 5 6637 700, Fax: + 386 5 6637 710, E-mail: tomaz.grusovnik@zrs.upr.si Cover art by Bracha L. Ettinger, Artistbook (Dream Notebook), 2003, detail. Ink, wash, water, 30 x 22 cm CIP - Kataložni zapis o publikaciji Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana 113/119(082X0.034.2) BODILY proximity [Elektronski vir] / edited by Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa and Lenart Škof. — El. knjiga. — Ljubljana : Inštitut Nove revije, zavod za humanistiko, 2012. — (Poligrafi, ISSN 2232-5174 ; letn. 17 (2012), št. 65-66) Način dostopa (URL): http://www.poligrafi.si/ ISBN 978-961-92463-6-8 1. Hackenberg, Sigrid, 1960261053184 Design: Peter Skalar, Layout: Rok Predan The journal Poligrafi is indexed in: The Philosopher's Index, Cobiss Publishing house — Orders — Copyright ©: Inštitut Nove revije, zavod za humanistiko Cankarjeva 10b, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija Phone: +386 1 2444 560, Fax: +386 1 2444 568, E-mail: info@nova-revija.si Poligrafi is published with the support of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia. number 67-68 • volume 17, 2012 BODILY PROXIMITY Bracha L. Ettinger: Choice for a virtual exhibition III: Paintings, drawings, notebooks 1987-2011 5 bracha L. Ettinger: Diotime et le transfert matrixiel: l'evenement-rencontrepsychanalytique commepregnance dans le beau (2007) 57 Gina Rae Foster: The dissonant resonance of becomings: copoiesis and (non-)pulsed time in musical proximities 101 Julia Holzl: In/possible relation: Being, Time, Death 119 Roula Haj-Ismail: The impossibility ofbeing self/other 141 Tadashi Ogawa: Global philosophy from the viewpoint of living flesh 163 Wolfgang Schirmacher: Homo generator in the postmodern discussion: From a conversation with Jean-Frangois Lyotard 181 Lenart Škof: Ethics of Breath: Towards New Ethical Spaces of Intersubjectivity 199 Stephen David Ross: Living with the animals... In the fullness of our nonidentities... 211 Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa: A secret life ofthe hand 231 Anne Mulhall: 'This is where my head begins': things, trauma and feminine proximities 257 Abstracts 279 Instructions for authors 287 Bracha L. Ettinger, P. 6. Eurydice n.7, 1992-95 (detail). Oil and mixed media on paper mounted on canvas, 36 x 24.2 cm. private collection, Tel Aviv. p. 7. Mamalangue n.i, 1992 (detail). oil and mixed media on paper mounted on canvas, 38.2 x 27 cm. P. 8. No Title_Sketch, 1988-1989 (detail). Mixed media on paper, 15.5 x 24.5 cm. P. 9. Eurydice n.17, 1994-1996 (detail). Oil and mixed media on paper mounted on canvas, 26 x 52 cm. Private collection, Leeds. P. 10. Eurydice n.19, 1992 -1996. Oil and mixed media on paper mounted on canvas, 37 x 25.5 cm. P. 11. Eurydice n.20, 1994-1996 (detail). Oil and mixed media on paper mounted on canvas, 38.5 x 27 cm. Collection: Museum of Angers. Pp. 12-13. No Title Yet n.1 (St. John the Baptist), 2003-2009 (details). Oil on canvas, 30 x 54 cm. Pp. 14-15. No Title Yet n.2 (Saint Anne), 2003-2009 (details). Oil on canvas, 30 x 54 cm. Pp. 16-17. No Title Yet n.3 (Eurydice), 2003-2010 (details). Oil on canvas, 30 x 54 cm. P. 18. Ophelia and Eurydice, n.3, 2001-2009 (detail). Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 51.5 x 20 cm. P. 19. Ophelia and Eurydice n.1, 2001-2009 (detail). Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 51.5 x 20 cm. Pp. 20-23. Artistbook (Dream Notebook), 2003. Ink, wash, water, 30 x 22 cm. Pp. 24-27. Notebook, 2008, 12.6 x 10 cm. Pp. 28-29. Notebook, 2006-2007, 10.3 x 12.6 cm. Pp. 30-31. Notebook, 2006-2007, 12.5 x 10 cm. Pp. 32-33. Notebook, 2009-2010, 15 x 11 cm. Pp. 34-41. Notebook, 2007-2008, 17.5 x 17.5 cm. P. 42. Stadium A, 1987. Mixed media on paper, 13 x 28.3 cm. P. 43. Stadium A, 1987. Mixed media on paper, 10 x 21 cm. Collection: Centre G. Pompidou, Paris. Pp. 44-45. Artistbook (notebook), 1998. 12 x 9.5 cm. Pp. 46-47. Artistbook (notebook), 2000. 12 x 9.5 cm. Pp. 48-51. Notebook, 2002. 10.5 x 7.5 cm. Pp. 52-53. Notebook, 1987, 12.5 x 9 cm. Pp. 54-55. Artistbook (Dream Notebook), 2003. Ink, wash, water, 30 x 22 cm Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 CHOICE FOR A VIRTUAL EXHIBITION III Paintings, drawings, notebooks 1987-2 011 B r a c h a L . Ettinger gf^ptenpRo bi his is'fnlavom^ iripanying se*u goocU^fs d| Tomiie socjjp r. Stnct^Sji m^BH gg iD'ensit.^CI sans vv gli o i 1.011 •¦prison O* f.G* 1113*6*« in K'Oiar-3 > •f':; :Luntiairi'e»lai dii• ' ia ana nno 1> : • "' i - ucc r- C.. i,- " ^-v;. choice, aithuHuh ihes^. ( llici nu. .. o Gt i; ' * -- ^ - r. , i .....< d-in ^nV Mb: . •S?nosia!ui.i - nrre : d i d nuir j lauguidc « 7i ,wn j Ijjnguir (23) v/ V? na j? 1. __ dans le:-- lpr?333 p • Vi ... j ? -j j] (trainer cr. lor.gucur) 3??nn Ia i couvc:- ; ') ianjgiit n^Vsrs ViRj affaires I:u- r ijsšent -s r v >, a. U, >. M. « Ui-lUlJ ¦ : - . • |!.# < I vw 9| tt» ^J W cilKcvivW VM. rf ¦W I' vA. ii^V k ^^ i M A i ^ v y^w' i % - W A V |f1(iU ¦ > a'1 - <* i < Cr^ J * rv _ _ _ "Vi r s V. * i » ^Mkf-- - i ... - - L^ Wt4\ UŽ I cW&SA- 'r.JTf, »i>V Pd i i y i •m^^L I U « Sstfc* • I »- ^ r M SiVft I r> I * Mci, 4 1 \ \ \ -- l vv \ j ' (S ''VJU^VV^- ^ 5 i C^S^t^^ trfi J ^ .»VAX fl j i yv W q ^-MwA Vik » syw* v Wa*^ 1 tl ^Ai'Ar, t s U1(.| j -J 1 w ^ yw m h ! SWAVc mS^IS"^ sO^tvL fl^WswJS* i i h fiJlXWo.^ oVw s - • i yr^fy ilp iwtu&k . ¦ "..... ¦ ( y ^ W4 ^Mr* rt/ijA/i k7> rmmuuu\\n" V i Aom^-M " • 1. ... ¦p**. vv A CUa. U aVvjvn- VJV uuuuuuium o ^ ^' ^ vivlvs^ V OuUN A cw^/viui. «\ "f \ .VjL. >» ^V^Ui ( ^ ^ VfV CvvlKvU ^ ctv C^AA. OAA »V U r VuuUViUUVim i ^ • f ^ ^A^, JU U V» y^V \M V/* '^Ww^ft . ( A ( NA . I Vf* 1 —O. j 4 ~ H ^ V. . . i 8U AJL & J 4 i ril; m V v • - L. k m \ ,.T m DIOTIME ET LE TRANSFERT M AT RI X IE L : L'EVENEMENT-RENCONTRE P SYCHANALYT I QUE C O M M E PREGNANCE1 DANS LE BEAU (2007) Bracha L. Ettinger* Le transfert d' espace-bord matrixiel Ce texteEtt1 fait partie de mes travaux theoriques en cours (publies depuis 1992) sur un complexe conceptuel qui donne voix et articule une dimension feminine, fatale et maternelle (et prematernelle) inconsciente que j'ai appelee l'espace-bord2 ou espace-de-bord psychique matrixiel (ou matriciel).3 En psychanalyse, au sein du transfert d'espacebord matrixiel, 1 Les notes de bas de page sont de la traductrice (NdT); celles referees par le sigle 'Ett.' et rassemblees en notes de fin de texte, sont la traduction des notes originales de l'auteur. Conformement a l'etymologie du mot anglais pregnancy {grossesse, gestation, gravidite} et a la pensee matrixielle de Bracha L. Ettinger (Matrix andMetramorphosis, 1991), nous traduirons ce terme par grossesse quand il fait reference a la dimension corporelle, par pregnation ou pregnance quand l'accent est mis plutot sur la dimension relationnelle de la reliance. Mais cette distinction imposee par le contexte et les contraintes linguistiques, est artificielle et plutot etrangere a la pensee de Ettinger, c'est pourquoi dans les occurrences ou il est impossible de trancher, pregnancy est traduit par grossesse-pregnation. (NdT) 2 Ettinger a cree les termes borderlink et borderspace dans les annees 1980. Elle les a develop-pes dans une longue serie d'articles publies a partir de 1992. Borderlink est une reliance-par-le-bord ou bordureliance, celle du travail reliant de l'Eros feminin-maternel matrixiel. Espace-bord (espace-de-bord) signifie l'interface spatiale liminale du psychisme partage par la femme enceinte et le fxtus, la mere et l'infans, l'analyste et l'analysant. La traduction en franjais par espace-bord, avec trait d'union et ecart entre les termes, souligne qu'il ne s'agit pas d'une delineation statique mais d'un espacement relationnel dynamique, commun et differenciant; ainsi Ettinger parle de reliance-bord ou bordureliance et de bordurespacement dans l'espace-temps-de-bord matrixiel. Son livre 'Regard et Espace-de-bord Matrixiels' a ete publie en franjais, en 1999 (Bruxelles, La lettre volee). (NdT) 3 Il est entendu que le mot latin matrix signifie l'anatomie feminine de la matrice. Cependant 'la matrix' ici ne designe pas une contenance ni un investissement d'organe — pas plus que 'le phallus' ne designe le penis—mais concerne un processus de subjectivation dont Ettinger a fait un la subjectivite de l'analysant engendre de nouvelles limites tout en etant engendree dans un franchissement des frontieres et une transgression des limites. Son devenir est elabore au sein de la subjectivite-comme-rencontre entre le je et le non-je.4 Dans le contexte de la cure psycha-nalytique, l'expression le 'je fait reference aux moments d'experience-de-soi precognitifs de l'analysant et l'expression le 'non-je' aux moments d'experience-de-soi deja implantes en modulations incognisees dans la conscience de l'autre de ce 'je': la/le psychanalyste, tous deux etant des sujets-partiels. La rencontre est une co-emergence de bourgeons du soi avec-dans5 des moments ou l'autre s'y abandonne: un(e) autre qui doit etre pense(e) comme mere/Autre,6 Autremere, proche en un sens du self-objet theorise par Kohut mais, dans le cas present le soi est conside-re comme fxtal et les apports maternels et leur potentialite transfor-mationnelle sont ceux de la grossesse, avec toutefois l'hypothese posee d'une difference minimale (tel le je emergeant chez Daniel Stern), et non la symbiose ou la fusion. Meme s'il est vrai, en effet, que la reliance et la transformation surviennent dans le cadre d'une communication inter-subjective, celles-ci ne dependent pas de la communication inter-subjective; elles s'appuient sur une potentialite de transmission beau-coup plus archai'que. La trans-inscription d'ondes affectives et mentales et l'inscription-croisee7 de leurs traces au cours d'un transfert matrixiel paradigme. L'adjectif matrixial etant un neologisme, il a ete traduit litteralement par matrixiel tout en gardant la signification de matriciel aussi. (NdT) 4 La distinction en anglais entre not {pas} et non {non} fait entendre qu'il ne s'agit pas d'une opposition binaire dans 'I and non-I' mais bien de 'je et non-je qui surgissent de concert, coexistent, sans s'absorber ou se rejeter. (NdT) 5 A partir de la preposition within {a I'interieur de}et d'un substantif invente withinness {inte-rieurete}, Ettinger cree deux neologismes: with-in et with-in-ness, rendus en franjais par avec-dans et I'etre avec-dans. Par cette creation de mots, elle cherche a faire entendre que le fait d'etre a l'interieur de l'espace-bord matrixiel n'est pas une presence passive, inerte, neutre ou autrement inactive entre les partenaires mais bien une relation agie a la fois entre eux et avec les bords de cet espace. Jouant encore sur la chaine signifiante de with {avec}, elle introduit la lettre (h) a l'interieur du mot witness {temoin} pour donner forme aux concepts-clef psycho-esthetiques proto-ethiques de wi(h)nessing, traduits par etre-avec-et-temoigner. (NdT) 6 Autremere tente de restituer le jeu de mots opere par la scription du signifiant mother en m/ Other, qui rappelle que la mere n'est pas uniquement le site du familier connu mais aussi une forme particulierement importante de l'alterite, mere/Autre. (NdT) 7 En tant que modalites d'echanges sub-symboliques, la trans-inscription est l'enregistrement direct et immediat de ce qui est partage dans l'echange et l'inscription-croisee designe les messages (ou matriciel), elargissent l'idee de cet espace-temps partageable vers la trans-subjectivite. Bien au-dela du Tiers de Ogden elle, commence dans la pre-natalite. Le sujet peut se retrouver, a certains moments, dans la position de je et, a d'autres, dans la position de non-je, les traces de l'experience partageable etant toujours dispersees et echangeables entre les deux mais, dans le cadre de cet article, nous allons systematiquement garder le terme 'je' pour designer principalement la position de l'analy-sant s'exprimant par des flashs de type fxtal et le terme 'non-je' pour la position de l'analyste se trouvant dans une attitude de maternalite pre-gnante a l'interieur de ce meme flash. Le 'je' ici n'est pas le 'je' en tant que structure — le Moi — ni da-vantage le je parlant ou un soi consolide, renforce par ses aspects sepa-rateurs. Le 'non-je' n'occupe pas tout le temps la position de self-objet, elle/il s'emploie a elargir le champ de sa conscience vers la transmissivite et le potentiel transformationnel de la rencontre. C'est la rencontre de deux ou de plusieurs je(s) et non-je(s) a chaque fois regroupes deux par deux, et plus precisement encore la frequence et l'intensite de la resonance connective entre le je et le non-je, entre l'un et l'autre, qui sont le point focal de la co-emergence et du transfert matrixiels, dans la dimension de pregnance de l'evenement-rencontre. Cet evenement-rencontre constitue une advenue au niveau psychique partiel de la sub-subjectivite et de la presubjectivite (dans la position du 'je') avec-dans l'experience de la con-jonction8 et de l'interieurete, par lesquels l'autre aussi devient, dans l'interet de la rencontre, un sub-sujet qui continue a se develop-per et se transformer par la rencontre. Les niveaux de conscience et de developpement psychique du je et du non-je different. Nous pouvons penser, pour ce je, a un moment d'emergence subjective dans un evene-ment-rencontre, ainsi que pour le non-je qui le rejoint a ce meme niveau sub-subjectif, c'est-a-dire a une experience de palpitation d'advenue-de-soi inscrite dans la psyche et induisant une inscription d'experience-de- diffractes qui s'echangent et s'entrecroisent par et a l'intention des participants a un evenement-rencontre. (NdT) 8 Jointness est traduit par con-jonction, orthographie en deux mots pour insister sur le cum latin, soulignant qu'il s'agit bien d'un 'se joindre l'un avec l'autre' et marquant la difference avec conjonction {conjunction}. Fajonne par Ettinger a partir de l'adjectif joint, le substantif jointness semble insister sur le fait d'etre joints ensemble. (NdT) soi a un niveau flou tres elementaire. La palpitation d'advenue-de-soi et l'inscription de l'etre-soi se passent avec, 'autour de' et 'dans' l'autre. L'inscription psychique de l'experience de l'evenement-rencontre dans le je est rendue possible grace au fondement psychique de l'autre — le non-je — l'Autremere — a qui arrive et en qui vibre ce battement, ac-compagne de ses modulations specifiques. Je fais allusion ici, bien sur, a la fonction maternelle precoce «alpha» de Bion et a l'objet transforma-tionnel de Bollas mais le battement, l'inscription et le fondement ma-trixiels elargissent les champs vises par Bion et Bollas et aboutissent a la fondation de la transmissivite transgressive. C'est pourquoi la fonction creatrice de sens et de signification re^oit de nouvelles acceptions, car la potentialite psychique matrixielle de transformation et les fonctions qui la rendent possible, n'emergent pas dans des relations d'objet ni a l'interieur de relations intersubjectives ni dans la communication entre la mere et le bebe apres la naissance, mais elles adviennent au cours de la grossesse et de la vie fetale. La gestation et la fetalite produisent un champ particulier d'acceptions qui resonne a la base de tout evenement-rencontre significatif. Il etait une fois ou nous avons tous, les hommes comme les femmes, ete prenataux. Au champ du sujet et a l'espace intersubjectif, j'ai donc ajoute la sphere transsubjective de resonance psychique et mentale que j'ai appe-lee «matrixielle» ou matricielle. En tant que champ psychique, la matrix est une dimension transsubjective de co-emergence-dans-la-differencia-tion qui apparait deja et avant tout au cours de la prenatalite : la fxtalite et la pregnation. L'enonciation de cette dimension comme psychique se base sur une conceptualisation de l'evenement-rencontre humain origi-naire qui serait prenatal, avec-dans-la-pregnation, en premier lieu dans le reel, comme empreinte de ce (corpo)reel,9 et, en second lieu, comme metaphore, au niveau imaginaire et dans le registre symbolique. Les empreintes et les inscriptions psychiques et mentales se passent entre les deux (ou les quelques) participants de toute rencontre-comme-pre-gnance reelle ou metaphorique. Dans la psyche maternelle au cours de la 9 Ettinger module le mot anglais qui signifie corporel en (corpo)real pour souligner que l'em-preinte corporelle de la matrix est bien a concevoir comme relevant aussi de l'ordre du Reel, d'ou la traduction par (corpo)reel. (NdT) gestation, chez un sujet dont les experiences sont inscrites a des niveaux de constitution 'post-xdipiens', matures, non fxtaux, les inscriptions psychiques de la frequence mentale partageable avec ses vibrations et de l'intensite avec ses modulations se tracent a cote d'inscriptions a un ni-veau plus mature, dans la dimension matrixielle qui remonte a la periode archai'que et dont la continuite reside dans l'immediatete sensitive et trans-sensitive. Les empreintes et les inscriptions qui prennent ces voies archai'ques, a de tels niveaux de sensitivite et de transitivite, approfon-dissent la vulnerabilite subjective et l'ouverture transsubjective a l'autre. La co-emergence psychique matrixielle est en realite simultanee et reciproque mais non symetrique. En tant qu'etres humains, ses participants se trouvent sur pied d'egalite mais ils ne le sont pas en termes de degre de maturite, et ne se ressemblent pas quant a leur position mentale ou leurs degres de differenciation distincte ou d'aptitude a la separation. Le futur-sujet (le fxtus) n'est pas encore assemble en son identite, alors que la future mere l'est deja. Le je et le non-je sont evidemment diffe-rents en ce qui concerne leur responsabilite quant aux processus et aux palpitations des evenements-rencontre. Qu'un attachement matrixiel apparaisse entre l'un et l'autre lors de la rencontre primaire ou qu'il advienne dans le courant de la vie lors de toutes sortes de rencontres intimes, alors meme qu'il forme l'espace du deux ou du plusieurs, il n'est pas symbiotique. Qu'un attachement matrixiel apparaisse dans l'espace du trois ou du plusieurs qui sont relies par des liens de un a un, celui-ci ne constitue pas un triangle xdipien. Certains elements de la rencontre intime pourraient, en fait, etre partiellement anonymes. La rencontre matrixielle est un attachement intime potentiel entre plusieurs je(s) et non-je(s) avec a chaque fois l'attention mise sur les rencontres uniques entre un je et un non-je ou sur la co-emergence singuliere permettant a la fois l'assemblement dans un champ de resonance partageable, la transmission et l'echange d'empreintes psychiques, la transformation psychique et le processus de differenciation croissante au cours de distinctions et de separations-en-proximite ulterieures. Ces empreintes et inscriptions qui eludent la communication intersubjective forment son cxur esthetique et ethique. La sphere psychique primordiale matrixielle est transsubjective, meme si et alors que l'experience en est faite sans reflexion ni attention cognitive dans le champ du soi separe, et meme si et alors que ses processus evoluent a l'interieur de relations intersubjectives, et meme si ... et avant tout: nous devons l'inclure dans la dimension paradoxale de la presubjectivite. Nous devons faire la distinction entre la transsubjectivite et l'intersubjectivite. Au cours de la vie, la sphere matrixielle pulse tant dans le sous-sol de la subjectivite que de l'intersubjectivite. Les concepts cles de ce complexe theorique sont: espace-bord matrixiel, metramor-phose, reliance-bords, co-poiesis,Ett2 differenciation-en-co-emergence et co-evanescence, temoignage-avec, relations-sans-mise-en-relation, distance-dans-la-proximite, evenement-rencontre, potentialite trans-formationnelle metramorphique, a-coteite, plusieurite, partageabilite potentielle, com-passion,10 hospitalite compassionnelle, transcryptum,11 trans-inscription et inscription-croisee. Ils servent a decrire et a ex-pliquer l'Inconscient transsubjectif, la ou les empreintes et les traces incognisees,12 des instances psychiques partageables de l'evenement-ren-contre matrixiel d'advenue (et, pour commencer, dans une dimension non-cognisee, entre plusieurs participants, deux ou quelques-uns, adve-nant-ensemble et, par ce processus, advenant comme sujets partiels du meme reseau matrixiel operant a un niveau sub-symbolique; ces em-preintes et ces traces precedent ou surgissent a cote des traces incons-cientes de chaque sujet en son identite propre (par exemple «avant» au niveau du presujet fxtal, et «a cote de» au niveau sub-subjectif dans la psyche maternelle). Bien que les inscriptions matrixielles sont partagees par deux ou plu-sieurs individus, elles ne sont pas les inscriptions de l'inconscient «col-lectif» a la maniere jungienne, ni les traces d'occurrences sexuelles-li-bidinales energetiques ou agressives, au sens freudien, ni les restes du 10 Le concept-clef de com-passion designe un affect primaire, tisse avec-dans la transmissivite primordiale qui, de ce fait, peut etre ranime a l'interieur du transfert lorsque est vecue lhospita-lite compassionnelle. (NdT) 11 Le terme transcryptum decrit la forme artistique matrixielle qui retransmet les enregistre-ments psychiques et picturaux d'un traumatisme crypte en tant que tel. (NdT) 12 Une modalite non cognitive de la connaissance est decrite par Ettinger dans 'Regards et Espace-de-bord matrixiels {La lettre volee, 1999, p.192}: 'mes non-je ne sont jamais completement cognises____et le bordde notre rencontre... incognitivement connu.' Elle distingue les traces non elaborees par la cognition qui sont incognisees et la dimension ou la cognition est absente mais aussi la realite du non-je inconnu et les moments d'experience-de-soi pre-cognitifs. (NdT) refoulement des signifiants a la fajon de Jacques Lacan. L'evenement-rencontre «pregnant» en cours imprime des traces sensitives et affec-tives et s'appuie sur l'Eros matrixiel a l'interieur de l'Eros maternel, un Eros matrixiel qui echappe a l'angoisse de mort et se joint pourtant a elle d'une maniere specifique, bien plus que l'Eros maternel ne peut se joindre a la sexualite et a l'agression. Cette con-jonction se caracterise par sa vulnerabilite et par une forme particuliere de passivite. Au-dela du lien entre la mere et le fxtus, j'entends par la rencontre de plusieurs (ou meme de 'la plusieurite'13 differente de la 'multiplicite'), des ensembles specifiques d'instances subjectives co-apparaissant, etant actives et met-tant en action une camera obscura de resonance psychique chez les diffe-rents individus prenant part a ces experiences particulieres de transmission. Lors d'une immersion matrixielle transmissible, le je et le non-je sont reciproquement transformes et transformant l'un par l'autre, tandis que les traces de cette transformation sont inscrites a la fois directement et de maniere croisee chez l'un et chez l'autre. Des lors, les traces psy-chiques matrixielles ne concernent ni un sujet unique separe ni une so-ciete basee sur un commun denominateur general. La plusieurite est une configuration specifique qui n'est ni la psyche d'« un » seul sujet celiba-taire ni celle de « deux » sujets en symbiose ou en etat de separation, elle n'indique pas non plus le niveau intersubjectif d'une relation. L'espace-ment-bord matrixiel est illicite et, en plus, attire des contacts psychiques transgressifs, traumatiques et fantasmatiques, reels, imaginaires et sym-boliques, du fait de l'(en)habitation14 dans le meme champ de resonance dont chaque participant devient partiel. Ici, les vibrations affectives et les traces psychiques incognisees des transmissions mentales, ainsi que l'immersion dans la meme intensite et les memes frequences psychiques, transforment a certains egards la psyche de chaque sujet-partiel en une continuite mentale et affective de la psyche de l'autre. Nous metaboli- 13 Bien que l'espace-bord soit toujours constituee d'au moins deux participants, sa capacite d'accueil n'est pas infinie. Nous traduisons le neologisme severality par plusieurite pour dire ce nombre limite a quelques-uns. (NdT) 14 Afin d'insister sur les specificites de l'habitation dans l'espace matrixiel, Ettinger cree a partir du verbe 'inhabit', le substantif inhabitation. Celui-ci introduirait en franjais le contre-sens de 'inhabite', alors meme qu'il est question de la notion opposee. C'est pourquoi nous avons opte pour la formation d'(en)habitation. (NdT) sons donc tant des traces mentales (au-dela de V identification projective kleinienne et de la fonction alpha de Bion) que des vibrations affectives, les uns pour les autres. La connaissance ainsi apprehendee et le savoir en elle circonscrit, nous les formulons dans une sphere transsubjective. La dimension transsubjective matrixielle — et le desir qui prend nais-sance en elle — s'applique aussi bien aux femmes qu'aux hommes, bien qu'etablie a partir de l'attachement archai'que et du lien de chaque pre-sujet humain avec son Autremere-femelle15 et, dans ce sens, elle est feminine et (pre)maternelle. La transsubjectivite matrixielle ne postule pas de sujets en interrelations ou en intersubjectivite. Elle est l'emergence du je et du non-je (dans leur dimension partielle) par reliance-bords,16 sans rejet ni fusion, sans assimilation ni devoration, et sans abandon: bordureliance entre un corps-psyche premature et un corps-psyche mature de sexe feminin; elle est pour toujours liee au mystere de l'interieur invisible d'un corps femelle, baignant dans un environnement speci-fique, acoustique et autrement sensible et trans-sensible. La prenatalite et la pregnance, en tant que reel, processus, image et symbole, donnent forme a un espace-bord inconscient de co-transformation-dans-la-difference. La Matrix fournit le symbole qui nous permet d'identifier et de reconnaitre les motions des entites transgressivement co-impliquees derriere les motions du sujet differencie dans une constitution psychique mature. Elle nous permet aussi de tracer l'activite de XEros specifique dont la source se trouve dans la differenciation et la differentiation et derivation17 matrixielles-feminines. J'ai donne les noms de 'metramor- 15 La traduction de female-m/Other par Autremere-femelle est difficile en franijais mais Ettinger tient a la nuance que ne peut rendre mere-Autre-de-sexe-feminin. (NdT) 16 La forme progressive, coutumiere en anglais mais difficile a rendre en franjais, fait des substantifs de tous les verbes conjugues en —ing. Ettinger en fait un usage abondant pour dire le processus continu, toujours susceptible d'etre reactualise. Afin de souligner ce mouvement jamais completement acheve, nous traduisons borderlinking par le pluriel 'reliance-bords' ou par bordureliance. (NdT) 17 Le doublet anglais differentiation and differenciation traduit par differenciation et derivation, souligne que les contacts feminins dans l'espace-bord matrixiel, bien que irrepresentables, marquent chaque participant de fajon particuliere. La differenciation renvoie aux manifestations graduelles des differences entre le je et le non je au fil des reliance-bords et constitue l'antonyme matrixiel de la separation dans la theorie psychanaltique classique; la derivation porte sur la rencontre d'une forme de passe avec une forme d'avenir et designe le condense du double effet de la differente difference feminine ou 'woman-to-woman difference . La differenciation recouvre a la phose'18 et de 'co-poiesis'19 a l'ensemble des rencontres et des evenements con-joints qui co-emergent, co-changent et co-diminuent au sein du reseau inconscient des reliance-bords entre le je et le non-je modelees sur la grossesse-pregnation. La copoiesis represente la potentialite creative de la metramorphose. Le je et le non-je n'emergent pas de fajon symetrique dans la metramorphose. A une extremite est rendue possible la realisation du sujet a partir de sa position presubjective «esthetique» et proto-ethique. A l'autre, c'est au prix de la fragilisation de l'Autre prematernelle/feminine que les frontieres de ses champs esthetiques et ethiques sont elargies et transgressees. Eros pregnant Diotime — au nom de laquelle parle Socrate dans Le Banquet de PlatonEtt3 — que dit-elle au sujet d'Eros ? Avant tout qu'il doit etre compris comme un esprit qui interprete et transmet, qui remplit l'es-pace intermediaire entre les etres (divins et humains) et par lequel ils communiquent. Eros est un moyen de communication, de relais et de connexion, d'interpretation et de transmission: «C'est un grand esprit (daimon), et comme tous les esprits il est un intermediate entre le divin et le mortel ____ Il agit comme interprete et moyen de communication entre les dieux et les hommes, convoyant et transportant jusqu'aux dieux les prieres et les sacrifices des hommes, et jusqu'aux hommes les prescriptions et les reponses des dieux. Occupant cette position mediane, il est le mediateur qui enjambe l'abime qui les separe, et c'est pourquoi en lui tout est lie ensemble.»Ett4 fois la differenciation progressive de l' Autremere en deux, la femme-mere et l'enfant a venir ou potentiel. Elle porte sur la rencontre d'une forme de passe avec une forme d'avenir, et constitue le fondement de l'espace-bord matrixiel. Plutot qu'a une differenciation en deux, la differentiation renvoie a une difference d'espece. (NdT) 18 Metramophose est une transformation du terme metamorphose, a partir du nom grec femi-nin metra {matrice, sein de la mere; au figure, source d'une chose}. Ce concept exprime le principe createur meme de l'evenement-rencontre, son processus a la fois de memoire et de changement. (NdT) 19 A partir du terme grecpoiesis designant l'activite aboutissant a une creation, Ettinger forme co-poiesis pour souligner que, dans une relation matrixielle, la co-creation est un travail entre le je et le non-je. (NdT) La psychanalyste travaille dans-et-avec Eros. ^uvrant peniblement dans un espace de passage, de transition et d'echange tout en l'inter-pretant, la psychanalyste rend possible le baillement d'un espace-bord erotique ou elle/il se trouve entre-tisse(e) avec son autre, promouvant et participant a la co-creation d'un dispositif de reliance et de mise en connexion et liaison dans un processus de transfert, tout en fournissant l'interpretation de la rencontre de l'autre avec elle/lui, et a partir de la creant egalement la possibilite de nouveaux liens, la/le psychanalyste travaille avec-dans Eros. Elle s'emploie a etablir non seulement des liens entre les differents motifs refoules dans l'esprit de l'autre qu'elle aide a amener a la conscience, mais aussi au niveau de la rencontre elle-meme et a partir d'elle vers les relations interpersonnelles generees en dehors des relations de transfert et du moment du traitement. Elle facilite en cela la naissance de nouvelles connexions 'dans la realite'. Des lors, il devient possible d'identifier Eros comme etant celui a partir duquel la psychanalyste exige d'elle-meme d'agir afin de devoiler et de mettre en acte le desir de connexion et de liaison en lui-meme (et non pas le desir pour des objets ou pour des autres-comme-objets) et d'ainsi faire naitre a partir de l'inconscient le desir erotique, pas seulement le desir erotique de l'analysant mais aussi celui de l'analyste, tel qu'il se deploie dans les relations transferentielles intersubjectives. Il ne s'agit pas du desir sexuel, ni du simple desir de rencontrer un autre sur le modele des «relations d'objet» passees avec un objet absent, ni du desir de rencontrer un ob-jet-autre selon un modele nouveau, different des modeles archaiques. Ce desir vehicule plutot un languissement pour la connexion intersub-jective et pour la reliance elle-meme. A la fois, il recherche et amene a devoiler les traces d'un tel desir ardent passe et stimule le (r)eveil d'Eros ainsi que l'emergence de nouveaux liens. Non seulement l'objet im-prime des traces psychiques mais cet elan mediateur peut aussi le faire. Une trace peut en scarifier une autre pour la remplacer mais elle peut aussi rejoindre une trace; et lorsque ce mouvement mediateur20 rejoint un elan de reliance-bords, Eros ne tourne pas en rond en d'eternelles 20 L,elan {move} de reliance-bord represente la motion des oscillations chargees d'affects, liee aux impressions sensorielles floues et partagees qui se transmettent intuitivement et que peut venir rejoindre le mouvement {movement} mediateur et spirale, essentiel a la vie. (NdT) repetitions mais, par un mouvement spirale ou se produit et s'imprime la transformation, la grace de cette rencontre et son a-coteite21 peuvent ap-paraitre a l'endroit meme ou, sans cela, n'auraient eu lieu que le sacrifice et le manque. Les empreintes de la transformation bloquent le retour a cette voie qui tourne en rond et evitent, de cette fajon, les coupures et la substitution. Mais afin d'atteindre un seuil de changement qui transfor-mera les cycles recurrents en aspiration d'ascension spiralee, une qualite particuliere et supplementaire de reliance-bords, en plus d'une qualite de mediation, est requise, de laquelle nous parlerons plus longuement tout de suite. Cet Eros signifie aussi le desir de mise au jour des mouve-ments intersubjectifs dont le cours a ete arrete et bloque dans le passe. En ce sens, la participation de l'analyste a Eros n'est pas moindre que celle de l'analysant, mais sa responsabilite envers Eros est plus grande que celle de l'analysant. C'est ce qui place Eros au plan de l'ethique de la psychanalyse. Cependant, Eros se tient aussi sur le plan esthetique, embrassant le plan ethique et s'y dissimulant, non seulement a la fajon unique, dans le style unique de chaque nouvelle relation qui se forme en psychanalyse, mais aussi dans le sens ou la fajon «esthetique» originaire sensee22 d'apprehender a la fois l'autre et l'exterieur, en compassion, est dotee d'une potentialite proto-ethique. De cette maniere, l'attention a la texture des relations intersubjectives qui se derobent a toute fixation de l'autre comme objet, situe la question de l'Eros non-libidinal au plan de l'ethique de la psychanalyse. L'ethique inherente a cet Eros n'est pas l'ethique de la bissection, de la separation, de l'obstruction ou de la castration (mise en avant dans la technique clinique lacanienne) mais l'ethique du mouvement vers l'autre, mouve-ment engendrant le contact et la rencontre tout autant que l'a-coteite. Dans sa lecture de Diotime, Luce Irigaray soutient cette qualite de mediation, y voyant tout le merite du discours de Diotime dans Le Banquet. 21 La chaine signifiante introduite par side est revelatrice de la dimension matrixielle. Forme a partir de la preposition beside qui signifie a cote de, le substantif besidedness exprime la position ethique de l'a-coteite et side-by-side-ness les echanges dans la cote-a-coteite entre les participants de l'espace-bord matrixiel. (NdT) 22 Le neologisme sensical, forme a partir de nonsensical, est devenu courant et signifie ce qui est sense. Le choix d'une expression construite sur le detour par l'effacement de la negation, vien-drait-il appuyer l'affirmation que les approches esthetiques par la sensation ou celles sensitives et sensorielles sont parfaitement sensees ? (NdT) Par contre, elle critique une autre qualite de ce texte, celle de la grossesse-pregnation, et la rejette comme une erreur de la part de Diotime (ou de Socrate) qui met en echec et affaiblit ses arguments.Ett5 Personnellement, loin de separer la mediation et la grossesse-pregnation, je les associe grace a une autre comprehension de ces notions, issue de la perspective matrixielle que j'ai theorisee. La conjonction de ces deux qualites genere une ethique de la duree, dans la grossesse et l'accouchement et dans l'in-tervention mediatrice et la mediation dans l'enfantement,23 en vue des liens et des connexions ulterieures. Il s'agit d'une ethique de la reception, de l'etude et de la transmission des vertus de la liance avec l'autre, ainsi que des merites de la mediation et de la connexion comme co-emergence qui peuvent aller jusqu'a la co-poiesis. C'est bien par l'ethique de la pregnance mediatrice et de la mediatite impregnee24 que les participants de l'evenement-rencontre proto-ethique, et puis ethique, revelent les vulnerabilites de la co-implication entre un etre qui est comme fxtal et un autre qui est comme gravide. Au cxur de cette ethique qui oriente la demarche de la clinique psychanalytique, est dissimulee, comme je l'ai dit plus haut, une esthetique dont le principe est enfoui dans les fonde-ments memes d'Eros, dans l'eternite mystique de cette alliance, au-dela de toute limite ou restriction. Meme si cette esthetique conserve le secret du Beau comme essence spirituelle revelee dans un monde de pheno-menes materialises par le corps, le niveau psychique inconscient n'est pas le niveau physique, et la pregnance mediatrice est a la fois une meta-phore et une analogie pour les processus psychiques qui ont leur origine dans une con-jonction et fondent cette con-jonction. Neanmoins, dans l'humain, cette sphere psychique s'origine dans une experience corpo-relle qui laisse ses empreintes, qui co-emerge avec-dans la matrice de la mere. Des traces ulterieures vont rejoindre les empreintes precoces, les transformant en d'autres situations mentales de co-emergence. En tout 23 Begetting est traduit par enfantement, comme dans le texte franjais du Banquet de Platon: Amour de la procreation (en grec: genneseos de gennao) et de l'enfantement (en grec: tokou, de tokos) dans le Beau. (NdT) 24 Le substantif mediacy derive de l'adjectif mediate qui signifie mediat mais, en franjais, le substantif correspondant n'existe pas. C'est sur le modele de im-mediatete que le terme mediatete a ete forge. L'adjectif impregnated, traduit par impregne(e), continue de faire resonner le champ lexical de la pregnance. (NdT) adulte des traces co-emergentes des modes originaires de co-emergence psychique sont re-perlaborees et leur negation nuit au tissu matrixiel. Le principe esthetique elude le plan de la representation et a la fois l'etablit: le sentir, le percevoir et meme le Beau ne signifient pas l'acte de representer ni la representation. En psychanalyse, ce principe informe l'ethique par le biais de la fragilisation-de-soi en com-passion. Il se tra-duit par une responsabilite dans la rencontre avec l'autre en tant que rencontre impregnee, et lors du processus, en tant que voyage con-joint de gestation pregnante et d'hospitalite com-passionnelle. Diotime nous invite a penser l'amour comme un desir qui prend forme dans un etat intermediaire: «Car Eros est ne dans quelque chose de beau, que ce soit de corps ou d'ame» (Platon, trad. hebreu, 2001:81). Le motif de la naissance et le motif du beau demeurent dans les ver-tus d'Eros. Elle insiste pour faire entendre que Eros n'est pas «le desir du beau», mais «le desir d'enfantement et de naissance dans le beau», ou «le desir d'utiliser le beau pour enfanter et porter la progeniture» ( Platon, 1997:41) ou le desir de devenir et de naitre au cwur du beau, selon la traduction hebrai'que qui met en evidence la dimension de la gros-sesse-pregnation par son insistance sur l'enfantement-comme-advenue et naissance (Platon, trad hebreu, 2001:82). Diotime ne delivre pas le secret de l'eminence du potentiel erotique qui se realise en observant le Beau supreme en compagnie du «Beau lui-meme», du fait de regar-der-observer-mediter l'eternel, lorsque le passage a l'enfantement et a la naissance se fajonne et le passage au corps vivant s'actualise, mais elle indique les elans d'ascension dans la descente et de descente elevante, d'ascension vers la realisation en esprit par l'observation (meditation-contemplation) ainsi que la descente vers l'actualisation dans le corps, dans et par laquelle va se deployer la vertu du Beau en tant que secret et principe spirituel. Dans cette rencontre dont les traits caracteristiques sont ceux de la pregnance et de la naissance, Eros est, alors, rendu reel. La beaute25 comme secret spirituel se cache dans la vitalite qui s'accom-plit lorsque l'observation spirituelle est a son apogee. Diotime propose une rencontre en Eros: «Le Beau est, alors, le destin ou la deesse de lapar- 25 En accord avec les traductions franjaises de Platon, beauty est traduit par le Beau et beautiful par la beaute. (NdT) turition qui preside a la naissance», «c'est pourquoi la procreation tient le Beau comme sage-femme et destin» (Platon, 1997:41). «Dans la naissance, la deesse du Beau est a la fois la Deesse du destin et la Deesse des douleurs de l'accouchement» (Platon, trad. hebreu, 2001:82). Le Beau, la fatalite ou le destin et les douleurs du travail de l'accouchement s'entrelacent en un instant d'observation et d'union mystique qui ont leurs racines en Eros. Ici, fatalite et contingence se rencontrent dans la douleur, au sein de la sagesse erotique du Beau qui pulse tout au long de cet evenement. L'Eros que j'ai appele matrixiel est un Eros feminin-prematernel avec son ethique et son esthetique particulieres, entre-tisse dans les proces-sus de co-lucidation26 qui se deroulent au cours de la differenciation et la derivation-differentiation en con-jonction, dont le paradigme est, selon moi, la rencontre psychique et corporelle de la gestation. Tel qu'il se realise dans cette union, Eros elude la prohibition de l'inceste (etant donne que l'union corporelle fxtale — pre-fils ou pre-fille— et mater-nelle est, par la force des choses, «inceste» et aussi, par la force des choses, inevitable) et porte donc necessairement a jamais, chez l'etre humain, l'empreinte d'une proximite incestueuse, bien que non sexuelle, et c'est, a mon avis, ce genre particulier d'inceste qui est implicite dans le secret de Diotime, dans la mesure ou il s'agit d'un secret feminin. De la meme maniere, ce que Jacques Lacan appelle en psychanalyse moderne, l'impossible sexualite feminine, autre et supplementaire, conduit aussi, selon moi, au theme de ces relations «incestueuses» prenatales prexdi-piennes non-prohibees, lors de et par la grossesse. Le souhait incestueux (neanmoins non-sexuel et non-genital) de s'unir par-dela l'ecart des generations, bien que non accompli dans le corps en dehors de la portee de la grossesse, precisement parce que ce vxu ne peut s'accomplir dans le corps en d'autres formes que celle de la pre-natalite et de la pre-ma- 26 Le terme utilise par Ettinger est co-dawning. Dawn(ing) signifie l'aube ou l'aurore, le point ou le lever du jour, le petit matin, la naissance au sens figure, l'emergence d'une lueur, ainsi que l'eveil. L'expression something dawns on ou upon somebody designe quelque chose dont il est fait jour a l'interieur de soi, qui s'eclaire, qui devient visible au sens de son accessibilite a la clarte comme comprehension intellectuelle. Afin de maintenir sa triple signification visuelle, de nais-sance, et d'advenue a la comprehension, le terme « co-(e)lucidation » a ete choisi. Il faut noter toutefois que dans certaines occurrences des termes tels que eclairage, eclaircissement, apparition, illumination, luminance correspondraient mieux a sa signification selon le contexte. Des lors, « co-lucidation » est aussi utilise. (NdT) ternite, fonde une ethique feminine sublimee de la com-passion et une esthetique feminine sublimee, a savoir le Beau. Cette sphere sublimee est feminine dans le sens ou elle s'etablit d'abord dans la dimension du Reel en etant avec et en rapport a un corps femelle et sa difference cor-porelle invisible (que l'on soit de sexe masculin ou feminin etant dans-avec ce contact). En tant que dimension psychique, basee sur des sen-sibilites et trans-sensibilites perceptives et affectives, je considere cette sphere transsubjective comme erotique, mentale et affective. L'espace-ment-bord feminin-matrixiel provenant des vibrations de l'espace-bord transitif de la pregnation et de la fecondite donne une sphere psychique qui, par essence, elude la prohibition meme de l'inceste: sans le savoir, je blesse et je prends plaisir, je souffre et j'atteins a la jouissance de pair avec un inconnu-etranger27 intime mais un autre intime, ma progeni-ture, laquelle m'est a jamais interdite, alors meme que mon-notre espace psychique actuel dans le Reel qui enjambe le traumatique et le fantasma-tique, est indissolublement lie en chacun de nous. Sur cette experience, resonnant au niveau mental-sensoriel-affectif-corporel-psychique repose la sphere matrixielle inconsciente commune et dispersee, ou tout signal qui m'est transmis depuis l'autre et transmis par moi vers l'autre, marque l'autre et moi-meme de maniere heterogene, con-jointement mais dif-feremment, lorsque les vibrations, les intensites et les ondes atteignent plusieurs entites, et que les residus et les traces imprimes de cet evene-ment-rencontre sont disperses entre ma psyche et la psyche de mon autre de maniere a ce que ce ne soit qu'ensemble, dans une autre rencontre qui est sublimatoire et pas necessairement corporelle — a l'interieur du meme tissage ou d'un nouveau tissage de plusieurite — qu'il sera possible de retracer un ensemble appartenant a la totalite de ces marques deja dispersees et d'en dechiffrer le sens. Le signal dans sa totalite ne pourrait s'offrir en lui-meme au dechiffrage sans une autre alliance sem-blable, composee de singularites qui se distinguent elles-memes dans un regroupement transsubjectif. Chaque individu est comme un point ou un pole le long de la meme corde: les poles tremblent d'un coup, dans 27 Le terme alien vient souligner que le fxtus est pour l'Autremere un inconnu-etranger intime et ajouter a la dimension de la distance-dans-la proximite {distance-in-proximite} celle de l 'eloi-gnement-dans-l'intimite {remoteness-within-closeness}. (NdT) le meme mouvement mental-affectif-sensoriel mais non de la meme ma-niere. La cordeEtt6 cree de concert avec d'autres cordes sa propre nebu-leuse erotique. Il s'agit d'un regroupement, fait d'eloignement-dans-l'in-timite ou de distance-dans-la-proximite, de moments ou d'evenements affectifs-mentaux differents situes le long de ces cordes reliantes, et d'une venue-au-monde-ensemble a la limite de ce qui peut etre apprehende et compris par la psyche de chaque individu distinct. Dans une sphere transsubjective, l'Eros matrixiel absorbe et redistribue la resonance entre les participants du meme regroupement matrixiel: entre personnes, et entre les personnes et les xuvres d'art. Tout nouveau non-je qui rejoint ce regroupement ne chasse pas le(s) non-je anterieur(s) mais se joint a eux. Mon analysant M. X a decrit son experience emotionnelle-mentale matrixielle de la fajon suivante: « Comme enfant, j'ai souvent eu cette idee en tete: j'imaginais l'esprit et les pensees comme un nuage. Mes sentiments appartenaient a ce nuage. Ils se deplajaient parmi les differentes personnes qui appartenaient au meme nuage et ensuite, je les aspirais en moi, mais de fajon passive. » Seul un nouveau «nuage» mental et affectif cree dans le transfert matrixiel a permis, grace a sa perspective transformationnelle, la naissance et la reabsorption d'un nouvel insight, une nouvelle perception intuititive28 concernant le trauma silencieux cumulatif imprime de fajon croisee dans l'ancien «nuage». La rencontre analytique ouvre a nouveau une breche dans la fron-tiere de ce qui est incomprehensible et qui ne peut se contenir seul. D'une part, les emotions sont absorbees passivement mais de ce fait, la conscience de la participation active de chacun dans le processus sub-jectivant de l'autre ainsi que dans la creation de chaque nuage, surgit. D'autre part, de ce fait, la conscience de la participation active de cha-cun dans la creation peut surgir. Au sein de cette nouvelle rencontre qui est une alliance, des acceptions matrixielles anterieures vont etre reve-lees tandis que des significations matrixielles nouvelles co-surgissent: la revelation et l'invention s'entretissent. Le prisme matrixiel cree une 28 Pour l'artiste qu'est Ettinger, les vibrations, modulations, transformations de la peinture sont ressenties, bougent, nous touchent. Pour sauvegarder cette resonance picturale intimement melee a sa pensee, nous traduisons insight par perception intuitive, tout en gardant l'expression originale. (NdT) multitude de possibilites d'interventions therapeutiques sur le plan du transfert relationnel. Realiser la transsubjectivite signifie comprendre l'importance de chaque composition29 unique analyste-et-analysant, dans le sens de la contribution de l'inconscient de chaque analyste spe-cifique a ce qui est revele et invente concernant l'inconscient de l'analy-sant. Cette importance est telle que la responsabilite de l'analyste envers sa propre integrite et creativite est une partie de sa responsabilite a l'egard de l'analysant. Ce que cette composition specifique permettra de faire ger-mer, aucune autre composition ne le fera croitre, parce que l'inconscient matrixiel ne va fleurir et s'epanouir qu'au sein d'un temps-bord et d'un espace-bord matrixiels specifiques. Ainsi, a partir de cette perspective, a la difference d'une ethique du silence total (ou de la neutralite) concernant l'identite du psychanalyste, une ethique de devoilement partiel emane: il s'agit d'un devoilement, au bon moment et dans une mesure appropriee et modeste, d'elements inconscients qui se revelent au psy-chanalyste dans et par chaque rencontre analytique specifique (meme si, bien sur, ces elements appartiennent egalement a l'analysant). En cela, je rejoins la tendance psychanalytique intersubjective mais, de plus, je pretends que les preoccupations mentales dramatiques de l'analyste doivent influencer l'espace matrixiel partage entre l'analyste et l'analysant et que, par consequent, non seulement elles doivent etre revelees jusqu'a un certain point et etre partagees de maniere explicite, mais encore qu'il est de la responsabilite de l'analyste d'elever son niveau de vulnerabilite, de compassion et de connaissance de l'esprit. L'analysant a le droit de se soucier de l'Eros ethique et esthetique de son analyste comme de son/ leur propre champ partage. Le deni (mais aussi parfois le simple non-partage) d'etats affectifs mentalement transferes et de preoccupations mentales pourrait devenir un trauma cache cumulatif pour l'analysant et pour le transfert analytique d'espace-bord matrixiel. Un autre aspect important de l'ethique matrixielle concerne l'a-coteite. Il importe de se tenir a cote de l'Autremere et de l'environnement significatif de l'analy-sant, de ne pas remplacer les figures parentales mais de rejoindre les re- 29 La composition doit etre comprise au sens musical de la partition, faite de variations, oscillations, mouvements de transformation graduelle entre symetrie et asymetrie, continuite et rupture. Elle compose un assemblement unique entre analyste et analysant avec ses modulations propres qui precedent l'interpretation. (NdT) seaux existants tout en les transformant par le fait meme de les rejoindre. Le remplacement de l'Autremere est une dechirure catastrophique dans le reseau matrixiel. Nous reviendrons sur ces questions ainsi qu'au soin et au tact qu'elles exigent. Mais en attendant, revenons a l'Eros feminin comme moyen de communication, de relais et de connexion, d'inter-pretation et de transmission. Certains pretendent qu'en faisant parler Diotime a travers Socrate, Platon souhaitait approprier pour le compte des hommes le motif de la naissance comme creativite et amour de la sagesse. Ils en veulent pour preuve que Socrate se voit lui-meme comme sage-femme et considere la naissance humaine a partir du corps femelle comme inferieure a la naissance dans la creativite, et ainsi de suite. Leurs arguments sont bien connus. Pour ma part, j'aimerais dire autre chose, quasiment l'inverse: que le choix d'une femme pour initier le motif de la naissance dans le desir erotique d'enfantement dans la beaute, temoigne plutot de ce qu'il y a quelque chose chez la femme — ou dans la venue-au-monde impri-mee dans et par le corps feminin, dans la contribution de la feminite au devenir du sujet humain — dont seule une femme peut temoigner, sans pour autant livrer totalement le secret emanant de l'alterite feminine femelle. Ne serait-ce pas parce qu'une femme est marquee deux fois par la potentialite matrixielle, tant comme pre-sujet fille fxtale que comme mere potentielle (qu'elle veuille ou non devenir mere, en rea-lite, n'a pas d'importance en termes de cette potentialite). Le secret n'est pas dechiffre car il est, pour emprunter la terminologie de Freud, au-dela du principe de plaisir, et il se manifeste dans une jouissance «im-possible» feminine «autre», pour reprendre la terminologie de Lacan (1975), qui voit dans le feminin le potentiel de transgression mystique vers l'union avec Dieu. Donc, en termes de perspective matrixielle, la difference feminine ne se manifeste pas entre individus genres (gar^ons par rapport a filles) mais dans les differentes manieres de faire reliance-bords vers et de faire espace-bord avec-dans le corpo-reel affectif et mental feminin (par exemple, la difference entre un gar^on se differenciant d'une femelle-Autremere et une fille se differenciant d'une femelle-Au-tremere). A present, je voudrais souligner deux choses concernant l'alte-rite feminine que le texte platonicien du Banquet nous offre par l'entre-mise de Diotime. La premiere est ce quelque chose qui restera toujours secret: le passage comme milieu, exister dans une etape intermediaire, une mediation que j'interprete comme ce qui est incestueux dans la grossesse-pregnance, paradigmatique d'un etat transitoire, la plusieurite ou la con-jonction de l'etre-dans-entre-au-milieu30 et de l'etre impregne en pregnance («Transitif» et «pregnant», tout comme le mot «hebreu», partagent en hebreu la meme racine: ain.beit.resh: maavar, Meubar et Ivrit). La seconde chose est que le passage comme connectivity transitive et transgressive est a nouveau interprete comme une impregnation. Le passage et la transition sont portes par cette meme racine en hebreu: une transgression des frontieres ou le tabou de l'inceste dans la pre-maternite et la pre-natalite est, pour des raisons pragmatiques, quasiment hors-interdit. Seule une femme peut temoigner, non pas des rapports sexuels ni de la conception, mais de l'etre impregne. Socrate aurait pu parler en tant qu'homme de la procreation comme copulation, de l'ensemence-ment de la graine et de la position de la sage-femme qui rejoit le bebe venant au monde, et de ce point de vue-la, il aurait pu contribuer a l'en-richissement de l'idee de donner naissance de differentes fajons. Mais en tant qu'homme, Socrate ne pouvait pas porter temoignage du derou-lement de la grossesse-pregnation et de l'accouchement comme actua-lites traumatiques, ni de la tangibilite vivante de l'enfantement comme continuel evenement-rencontre de pregnance ou le trauma et le Beau s'entretissent necessairement - par trauma, j'entends, pour commencer, celui de l'Autremere. «La generation dans la naissance», ce devenir, cet enfantement ou emergence, enonce par la bouche de la figure feminine, temoigne de cette rencontre — avec un accent mis sur la «generation». Lacan, lui aussi, decrit le mystere d'une situation transitionnelle de cette sorte, un etat median «entre-deux», une situation «et-et», qui est pour lui une «femme», realisant l'existence du secret dans un tel etat interme-diaire d'un genre particulier (que je lis comme pregnance) dont meme lui, etant un homme, ne peut parler et dont seule une femme pourrait parler - si toutefois le langage pouvait contenir ce secret sans residu. 30 Between signifie entre et l'expression in between designe le fait de se trouver au milieu de ou parmi d'autres (deux ou plusieurs) personnes ou choses. A partir de ces locutions est cree le substantif in-between-ness, dans lequel peut etre entendue l'insistance matrixielle sur in et que nous traduisons par l'etre-dans-entre-au mileu. (NdT) L'eros feminin-matrixiel et la transsubjectivite C'est par le concept de »transfert d'espace-bord matrixiel« que j'es-saie d'accorder toute leur valeur aux elans psychiques generes dans l'es-pace de passage de type fxtal entre le non-je (comme future mere) et le je (comme pre-sujet), tous deux sujets partiels l'un pour l'autre, a un niveau inconscient du processus psychanalytique. Comme je l'ai deja signale, en hebreu »fxtus« derive de la meme racine etymologique que »passage«. Au travers de ce concept, les mysteres de l'enfantement deviennent le support meme d'une sphere psychique inconsciente, par-tielle, dispersee et partageable. Les frontieres de l'individu sont effrac-tees dans cette sphere ou les elements mentaux sont disperses, des le depart, entre plusieurs sujets partiels qui, par la force transformationnelle de cette dispersion et de cette transgression, sont confines-et-lies-dans-la-difference a l'interieur d'un meme reseau psychique. Il s'agit d'une sphere psychique de transsubjectivite, anterieure et differente du niveau auquel l'individu comme sujet separe se forme et se revele, ce sujet qui cree des relations intersubjectives basees sur le fait qu'il est distinct et sur la clarte de ses frontieres, ce qui se cristallise dans l'identite. L'investissement de la transsubjectivite matrixielle — la subjectivite comme rencontre et le temps et le lieu de la rencontre comme espace-bord transgressif de pregnation — avec les affects emanant des liaisons et des contacts de reliance-bords, au cours de la grossesse, entre un sujet-en-devenir (pre-sujet) et une mere-en-devenir (sujet dont les supports ont bifurque) ne doit pas nous induire dans l'erreur de rechercher le sens de la rencontre ou de l'espace-temps matrixiels dans la nature bio-logique, pas plus que la structure phallique et le processus de castration qu'elle implique en psychanalyse ne representent les relations entre le pere et le fils comme mettant en danger le membre male reel. La Matrix est une sphere psychique inconsciente de co-lucidation et co-evanes-cence31 du je et du non-je inconnu, qui n'est ni fusionne vers le dedans ni rejete vers l'exterieur; elle marque une position, un processus, un etat et 31 L'evenement-rencontre se caracterise par un mouvement d'approche et de retrait. Ainsi, apres la montee de la lumiere vient un declin, une attenuation qui nous fait traduire cofading par co-evanescence. (NdT) un stade qu'il convient de differencier de l'etat, du stade, de la position et des processus de symbiose ou d'autisme qui se developpent ulterieu-rement en un futur sujet separe. Le concept de la Matrix se base sur des relations entre la psyche-ame avec-dans un corps femelle et le pre-sujet en reliance-bord avec elle, aux derniers stades de la grossesse, ainsi que sur leur maniere de s'articuler en termes d'espace-bord psychique par-tage, inconsciemment traumatique et fantasmatique, ou la differencia-tion et la segregation en co-emergence et en distance-dans-la-proximite sont continuellement reaccordees et reorganisees au travers de relations-sans-mise-en-relation,32 de l'etre-avec-dans, de la cote-a-cotei'te et de l'etre-entre «moi-meme» et le/les inconnu(s) intime(s). Les processus de connexion et de communication affective, d'association et de transformation dont les empreintes mentales transcendent le sujet individuel et dont les traces sont gravees dans plusieurs etres simultanement (y com-pris les transmissions «telepathiques» et «hypnotiques» dans le trans-fert) se produisent avec des variations mais con-jointement entre cette pluralite d'etres. Car la conscience matrixielle est un eveil con-joint de savoir, une co-naissance33 qui ne provient pas de la cognition, mais c'est un savoir ou une co-naissance affective fragile a la frontiere entre diffe-rents sujets, qui se passe le long des cordes de connexions traumatiques et fantasmatiques les reliant; c'est la transmissivite par ondes, intensites et frequences, et l'impression, trans-impression et impression croisee (dans la psyche l'un de l'autre) des traces de l'evenement-rencontre qui permettent aux cordes connectives (ainsi qu'a la realisation de leur existence) de vibrer l'une pour l'autre dans l'espace partage. Nous avons donc affaire au mystere que j'ai appele ailleurs la marque de l'Autre mere, ou du feminin-autre archai'que, dans le corps-psyche. Le corps ne fait pas office ici de tremplin pour satisfaire les pulsions, et il n'est pas non plus un symbole indiquant l'irreductibilite des instincts et des pulsions. Le corps penetre depuis un autre lieu, selon d'autres 32 Il s'agit ici d'un paradoxe: les participants de l'evenement-rencontre sont partiellement inconnus les uns aux autres et pourtant intimement lies. L'expression relations-sans-mise-en-re-lation {relations-without-relating} tente de rendre compte du paradoxe et de sa dimension non elaboree par la cognition entre les participants. (NdT) 33 L'homophonie, en franjais, entre la co-naissance {cobirthing} et la connaissance {knowledge} est a remarquer. (NdT) considerations, et il indique l'appel-attrait du corps-psyche du je pour la proximite ('l'attachement') avec la mere/Autre. Tout comme de nombreux theoriciens des relations d'objet, de l'« Intersubjectif » et du « Soi », tels Winnicott, Ogden, Tustin, Kohut et d'autres a la suite de Bowlby, je reconnais le desir de rapprochement en tant que tel et non comme un etayage secondaire d'autres besoins (telle la nourriture) et de pulsions (telle la pulsion orale). Cependant il existe deux differences majeures: (a) l'attachement matrixiel releve de la reliance-bords en cours de differenciation a l'interieur d'une sphere deja transsubjective, c'est-a-dire qu'il ne depend pas de positions autistiques ou symbiotiques du sujet en devenir, et (b) les premieres traces psychiques sont considerees comme partageables et prenatales. Des traces de l'a-coteite, de la connec-tivite et de l'etre-entre intra-uterins — ainsi que des traces similaires qui les prennent pour modele plus tard dans la vie — sont marquees dans le corps-psyche des quelques participants a la rencontre-evenement matrixielle et sont distribuees et imprimees de fajon croisee dans la sub-subjectivite et la transsubjectivite tout au long de la vie, c'est a dire ega-lement a l'age adulte. La feminite necessairement reliee a l'Autremere archaique, pour le sujet humain genere et pour la subjectivite multiple (plusieurs) bifurquee dans la portee de laquelle elle eclot, denote le secret de l'alterite de toute alliance; ou, pour saisir la difference matrixielle qui emerge de la differenciation-en-con-jonction dans un langage plus adapte a la periode du Banquet, nous pouvons la voir comme un voyage d'Eros spirale, creant une communication interpretative entre les etres dans une sphere intermediaire de mediation par laquelle tout est attache a tout. Au travers d'Eros, mediateur, passeur, etre de connexion, createur du desir d'advenue, d'enfantement et de naissance dans la beaute, nous arri-vons a l'idee qu'il y a, dans le desir dont parle Diotime, une dimension dont nous pouvons affirmer qu'elle n'emane pas d'un manque, mais de la plenitude d'un toucher tout au long de la transformation pendant la pregnation, dimension qui contredit l'idee du desir qui s'origine dans le manque, selon la formulation lacanienne: le desir phallique dont l'objet-cause est un manque (l'objet a). Si, selon les propos du Banquet et dans la pensee de Lacan, l'homme se languit de ce qu'il n'a pas (une chose ou un objet ou une idee ou un autre comme objet a), dans la dimension supplementaire du feminin-autre, le desir que j'ai appele matrixiel est un desir de reliance-bords et de differenciation au sein d'un evenement-rencontre transgressif et un desir de l'ensemble des mouvements qui creent et accomplissent ces evenements-rencontre par lesquels seraient laissees, en passant par une transformation, des empreintes pour des evenements-rencontre transgressifs a venir. Le desir matrixiel est aussi le signifiant de ces mouvements, des elements de changement, de participation et de redistribution inherents a chaque evenement-rencontre nouveau: rencontre cruciale en tant qu'elle est une co-luminance et un espacement-bord. La 'generation' — l'enfantement et l'advenue — dans la beaute, tout en etant analogue a la naissance dont la femme, et seule la femme, peut faire l'experience, d'ou le choix de Diotime, est une advenue qui rend impossible de contourner le trauma, non seulement celui du manque qui est moins preoccupant ici (la grossesse n'est pas un manque, je le repete, mais une relation incestueuse), mais aussi celui de la mediation et de la connexion comme telle, saturees qu'elles sont de fragilisation. Il est impossible de contourner la douleur des tres hu-maines liaison et connexion dans la fragilisation avec toute leur gamme semantique, ni la douleur de la perte partielle des autres matrixiels du fait de la transformation, de la bifurcation et du re-accordement. Le choix d'une femme (Diotime) comme oratrice qui conduit la parole en un elan de va-et-vient du cxur du mystere du desir d'union et de connexion, avec ses tempetes et ses peines, la femme comme celle qui sait, qui revele et recele le secret des vertus du passage, atteste que l'amou-reux de sagesse reconnait que cette connexion ainsi que la connaissance de cette connaissance-de-connexion, sont bien feminines. Et peut-etre vaut-il mieux dire que cette impregnation est une 'femme' — une cor-poreite femelle ainsi qu'une connectivite corpo-reelle a un corps femelle — dans toute sa revelation: l'ame, l'esprit, la realite. La feminite de la vertu d'Eros doit etre reconnue. La possibilite de venue-au-monde subjective lors de la differenciation et de la derivation et de l'espacement-bord comme rencontre prematernelle-presubjective de sujets partiels en co-emergence dans la naissance est une «femme». Le desir d'advenue est nettement matrixiel lorsque devient evidente la co-generation. Le desir de connecter ce qui ne peut etre uni, de joindre differentes manifestations du visible qui ne tiennent pas ensemble dans la realite, est une «femme»; et le secret de ses combinaisons — la sagesse du Beau — ce sont les douleurs de l'accouchement. Ce desir offre l'oc-casion de transgressions au-dela du sujet isole: le temps de la naissance est une metaphore pour le depassement subjectif des frontieres, realise pourtant dans la differenciation. L'Eros de transmission, de connexion et d'interpretation se constitue en tant qu'etre intermediaire au service d'un passage. L'Erotique matrixielle-feminine34 est une venue-a-l'etre liminale, et elle est aussi le passage reel venant d'au-dela d'un etre inter-mediaire, soit une advenue liminale localisee entre l'existence et le neant, le spirituel et le corporel, le divin et l'humain et elle est rattachee a un evenement-rencontre dont l'extension ne peut etre contenue adequa-tement au moyen d'un concept symbolique ou de definitions d'objet (ou de relations d'objet). C'est lors d'un evenement-rencontre transitif experientiel-affectif-mental que la rencontre psychanalytique contient les composantes de l'Eros matrixiel, qu'elle reconstruit ses mouvements et re-accorde ses vibrations. Considerons cet evenement erotique comme mouvement, un mouvement de desir flottant entre, un desir d'enfan-tement-generation, une emergence d'amour en com-passion, necessai-rement co-generation ou co-emergence. Si le sens du desir matrixiel est precisement transfere dans le Banquet par la femme, une inconnue, une etrangere35 (comme l'indique le texte) ou l'autre, une narratrice au cours de la rencontre et de la conversation, selon moi, il en est ainsi parce que des modalites non-conceptuelles de sens sont sous-entendues - sens du et venant du Reel enveloppe dans la presence du corpo-reel et dans la processus de la creation, sens cree uniquement au fil du transfert, dans un evenement-rencontre a partir du processus meme de mediation, d'in-terpretation et de transmission. Ceci signifie egalement que le feminin 34 Eros est au feminin a partir de cette affirmation qu'il est un etre intermediaire au service d'un passage. C'est par pronom personnel au feminin que, dans la suite du texte, Ettinger designe Eros. (NdT) 35 Ettinger se sert du nom abstrait foreignness {adj. foreign=etranger} pour dire l'etrangete a l'interieur de l'intimite matrixielle. Elle distingue la qualite d'etre etranger/etrangere de la qualite d'etre inconnu/inconnue {stranger}. Diotime incarne doublement ces deux qualites: ressortissante de Mantinee, elle est citoyenne etrangere d'Athenes et, Socrate parlant a sa place, elle demeure une inconnue, neanmoins intime vu qu'il rapporte les propos qu'elle lui aurait tenus. Sa position est metaphorique de celle creee dans l'espace-bord entre le fxtus et l'Autremere ou entre les parte-naires de la reliance-bords analytique. (NdT) que nous interpretons matrixiellement et que cette qualite d'etre un(e) etranger(ere) que nous interpretons dans la meme perspective, prennent part a et rendent possible ce sens a un niveau originaire. A propos du secret de Diotime, s'il s'agit, comme je le pense, d'une difference feminine qui necessite une locutrice-femme pour parler d'Eros comme venue-a-l'etre corps et ame, c'est qu'il y a forcement quelque chose de scelle dans le corps femelle et d'imprime par l'entremise de «la femme» en tant que l'autre - aussi bien l'Autremere que l'autre-de-l'homme, une Autremere qui apporte une contribution a l'emergence du sujet humain par le biais de son desir different et dans le contexte d'une contribution a la dimension corpo-reelle de l'Inconscient. Quelque chose que seule la femme peut savoir et dont elle seule peut temoigner par l'Eros de l'entre-et-dans-au-milieu-de, l'Eros du joindre, du passage et du transferer, du con-joindre et du transfert, est transfere et grave sans signification: en secret. Elle le sait a travers l'Eros de l'etre-entre-dans-au-milieu, grace a l'Eros du con-joindre, du passage et du trans-fert, lorsque dans la psyche la signification de l'empreinte de son corps de femme — l'espace de la matrice de la mere — est incluse dans cette meme connaissance. En tant que feminin, Eros necessite une locutrice femme, dont le corps est dote d'un espace matriciel qui peut etre expose aux douleurs de l'accouchement, meme si ce potentiel n'est pas realise ou est confronte a la douleur de la sterilite. Le secret de l'Eros emanant de l'alterite de l'esprit-psyche-corps feminin se tisse et se realise, a mon avis, dans l'idee de jonction entre le Beau, le destin comme decret (pla-tonicien) au niveau celeste et comme contingence au niveau terrestre, et les douleurs de l'accouchement comme double jouissance-et-trauma de con-jonction et de differenciation et de l'etat separe et de differenciation au sein d'une intimite incestueuse (avec le non-je inconnu) qui ne peut etre interdite. Du cote feminin, la jouissance-et-trauma n'est pas seule-ment celle de la naissance reelle mais c'est plutot le traitement continuel, cache et refoule, des relations apparaissant entre le je et l'inconnu-intime (non-je) au cours de la pregnation et jusqu'a la naissance. Apres tout, Diotime temoigne du confinement du fxtus «dans une grande souf- france». La jouissance-et-trauma de la grossesse elle-meme s'infiltre36 a partir de ce temps-bord et de cet espace-bord via toutes les relations et les differents processus de reliance-bords auxquels participe Eros comme element cache de chaque conjonction comme fertilite spirituelle et mouvement de co-emergence dans toute la portee de la pregnance spirituelle, psychique et physique. Ce motif silencieux et continu de jouissance-et-trauma forme d'une multitude de liens et de connexions a l'interieur d'un reseau sub-subjectif inconscient imbibe l'ensemble du systeme de connexions et de relations auquel Eros participe. Ainsi, lorsque je noue ensemble la naissance et le trauma, je ne parle pas du traumatisme de la naissance au sens psychanalytique classique (Rank, 1973) — celui du nouveau-ne, sa separation de la matrice enve-loppante ou son arrachement a la matrice de la mere et la perte du placenta — mais je parle de l'empreinte jouissante-et-traumatique que j'ai appelee matrixielle: la marque ineffa^able de la rencontre intra-uterine, au niveau du Reel de la matrice, qui infiltre le domaine fantasmatique, celle de la rencontre de la femme-devenant-mere avec le fxtus-inconnu lors de sa venue-au-monde, rencontre qui transforme la «femme» en Autremere archai'que et inconnue-intime pour tout etre humain emer-geant, male ou femelle, qui est son non-je en devenir; une Autremere archai'que et inconnue-intime avec qui le sujet co-emerge dans une advenue-a-l'etre-con-jointe, dans une rencontre dont les retours poten-tiels menacent de faire irruption a n'importe quel moment et de pro-duire une connexion entre etranger et intime dans cet espace-de-passage supplementaire ou, une fois encore, tous les sujets participants devenus maintenant partiels seront connectes par des re-accordements ulterieurs. Le mouvement d'eternel retour depuis l'interieur de la douleur conte-nue dans les traces de l'evenement-rencontre transgressif, ainsi que la possibilite d'un retour potentiel dans l'avenir, transforme le mouvement de differenciation qui est aussi en meme temps un languissement gene-rateur, avec et pour une femme-Autremere, en un signal qui stimule le niveau intermediaire entre etrangete et familiarite ainsi que la position mediatrice de l'etre-entre. La rencontre transformative supplementaire 36 L'infiltration est un mode de passage d'affects, evenements, matieres et modes d'etre matri-ciels. (NdT) (supplementaire a celle d'»origine») apportee par la psychanalyse conver-tit le retour potentiel en un elan ouvert spirale le long d'axes de temps et d'espace. Le desir de co-emergence dans le Beau L'eveil de l'Eros feminin-matrixiel en tant que desir de co-emergence et d'enfantement partageable dans le Beau, produit un etat dangereux, creatif et fragile, un etat d'exposition a l'inseparabilite au creur de la differenciation. L'Eros feminin-matrixiel est un languissement intime, transgressif et generateur, envers et pour une autre personne - en tant que «femme». Il met en branle une situation mediatrice intermediaire, continuelle et vibrante, avec ses connexions reliantes, que celles-ci soient destinees a etre telles ou pas. C'est dans ce sens que les decrets du des-tin interviennent dans l'evenement-rencontre. La venue-a-l'etre en co-emergence au sein d'un espace-bord matrixiel qui joint l'etrangete et la familiarite, est une jouissance-et-trauma existentielle continue qui n'expose pas au grand jour le secret d'Eros, mais fait plutot echo a son intensite. La venue-a-l'etre en co-lucidation dans le transfert d'espace-bord matrixiel n'est pas juste une situation temporaire ou une periode de temps exceptionnelle et definie, et la sphere matrixielle elle-meme n'est pas limitee a un stade de developpement, mais c'est une dimension men-tale inconsciente qui participe a l'evolution humaine et est secretement active tout au long du cycle de la vie. Eros n'est pas le seul a participer a cette dimension. Thanatos s'y trouve aussi.Ett7 L'ascension a travers la spirale du savoir erotique vers l'observation du Beau lui-meme qui trouve sa realisation dans la vitalite du corps, tout en etant un elan spirituel que l'on peut considerer comme une voie de reliance-bords en cours, signifie en quelque sorte la jouissance-et-trauma de la co-lucidation qui ne revele pas son secret mais plutot, a nouveau, fait echo a son intensite au creur ethique de l'experience de la rencontre psychanalytique aussi bien qu'au creur esthetique, dissimule dans le principe motivant du travail artistique. J'ai a l'esprit la serie37 des tableaux ' Eurydice'.Et&A la maniere d'Eury-dice, dont le secret relie des unites a une serie qui est en principe ouverte face a la peur de la mort, ainsi Diotime indique le secret d'un evenement qui est a jamais traumatique puisqu'il appartient a un temps en dehors du flux du temps susceptible d'etre recupere par la memoire, et il est pour toujours enigmatique, car il ne sera jamais completement dechif-fre a partir des marques du corps dans le reel ni a partir de la fondation transcendantale spirituelle dans le monde de la signification symbolique qui noue ensemble loi, culture, societe et langage. Car le dechiffrement requiert un travail d'interpretation dans la dimension transsubjective materialisee et creee dans un evenement-rencontre de mise au monde. Les noyaux Diotimien et Eurydicien se voient dotes d'une certaine signification dans l'Eros matrixiel, soit a travers les rencontres, les combinai-sons, la repetition-spiralee-par-changement et le changement-par-repe-tition, la serialite ouverte par a-coteite, les procreations symboliques et les transferts transindividuels. Le desir d'emergence et de naissance dans le Beau signifie etre localise au milieu et se repandre dans l'espace entre des mondes qui ne se rencontrent pas, afin d'etre genere comme la connexion entre eux, de venir-au-monde comme combinaison et comme corde vibrante et de creer ce que j'ai appele: la metramorphose, des processus de reliance et d'echange, de suintement et de goutte-a-goutte aupres des participants de cette combinaison. L'evenement de la venue-au-monde comme eve-nement-rencontre recevra son sens uniquement dans et par l'Eros femi-nin-matrixiel, c'est-a-dire: a travers des rencontres et des transferts ma-trixiels supplementaires entre des sujets partiels, a travers des connexions et reliance-bords ulterieures dans la metramorphose. L'acte d'interpretation lui-meme, qui se fait au cours de la participation et de l'assistance a un evenement-rencontre, par la mediation de la voix, de l'odeur, de la 37 C'est en 1992 que Bracha Ettinger a commence sa serie des Eurydice qui demeure une serie ouverte et compte, actuellement, une cinquantaine de tableaux. Dans le recit mythique, Eury-dice est presente souterrainement dans les enfers mais le regard d'Orphee qui se retourne pour la saisir, la fait disparaitre a jamais. Il en va de meme pour les affects primaires: ils ne peuvent etre rencontres que par l'intermediaire des modalites d'echanges sub-symboliques dans l'espace-bord matrixiel et l'inscription de leurs traces elaboree et restituee dans la seule relation de transfert. (NdT) respiration et de l'environnement visuel, et par les mouvements d'ap-proche et de retrait de la rencontre qui font partie de l'evenement, est issu d'un elan generateur de subjectivite — un moment subjectivant — du transfert matrixiel, et au dela de tout contenu specifique. En psycha-nalyse, par son hospitalite compassionnelle, c'est l'analyste qui ouvre ces moments subjectivisants et en a la responsabilite. L'evenement-rencontre feminin-matrixiel de pregnance et de mise en monde n'est generalement pas reconnu lors des echanges de transfert/ contre-transfert, peut-etre parce que, selon les termes de Freud, il va au-dela du principe de plaisir, et peut-etre aussi, pour utiliser le langage de Lacan, parce qu'il est exprime dans un mode feminin-autre de jouissance que Lacan considere comme une transgression vers l'extra-humain, l'ou-trage, la mort dont la limite est, precisement, le Beau lui-meme. A mon avis cet evenement-rencontre n'est pas dechiffre parce qu'il se rapporte (comme l'Eros de Diotime) a une relation necessairement fondee par le souhait incestueux envers le maternel, dans le sens ou un corps-psyche co-apparait avec un autre corps-psyche qui lui restera a jamais interdit et auquel, malgre cela, il est a jamais rattache de fa^on incestueuse. A mon avis, dans ce sens precisement, la relation sexuelle-feminine est Autre et impossible pour Lacan, transcendant le phallus et incomprehensible aux moyens du monde conceptuel, de la loi sociale, de la Loi du Pere avec les prohibitions qu'elle active. Si c'est une relation dont (aux dires de Lacan) «seulement une femme» en connait quelque chose, il en est pro-bablement ainsi de par sa localisation dans ce meme milieu dans lequel le passage entre-deux a lieu et dans lequel la transgression des frontieres des royaumes de l'interdiction phallique se produit. Il se peut bien aussi que l'originaire Chose-comme-evenement-rencontre matrixielle-femi-nine n'est pas dechiffree parce que, se produisant dans une dimension transsubjective d'un champ intersubjectif, elle se rapporte non pas a la satisfaction des pulsions et des instincts, ni a un objet existant ou partiel, mais, comme pour Diotime, directement a la mediation en elle-meme, a la relation-sans-mise-en-relation, a la connexion, au lien; et dans le do-maine de l'Inconscient, elle se rapporte aussi a leurs traces gravees dans le corps-psyche et re-revelees uniquement a l'interieur d'une autre relation, connexion, reliance-bord et mediation, dans la con-jonction, sans lesquelles tous ces mouvements psychiques n'ont pas de signification ou re^oivent une fausse signification, fa^onnee par les outils conceptuels phalliques a portee de main. Des lors que le feminin se refere a un type de relation-contact «autre», le feminin «impose differemment», dit Lacan (1972), le soi et l'autre. Et, a partir de cette imposition differente du soi et de l'autre, ce que sou-tient Lacan fait reference «seulement a la femme» car a partir de cette figure autre, c'est elle, en effet, qui «presente a nos portes cet ornement: cet etre entre le centre et le neant». Tout comme le rapport sexuel impossible, l'etre entre feminin est pour Lacan aussi un rapport impossible a la signification. Le feminin en tant que relation n'a pas de signification, pour Lacan, dans le monde des concepts et du symbole au- dela d'etre ou de faire reference a un surplus forclos. A mon avis, un aspect de la relation impossible a la signification, qui echappe a la possession du Phallus, provient precisement de la transgression de l'interdit de l'inceste qui a necessairement lieu avec-dans le corps de la femme enceinte. Cet etre-entre-deux incestueux, c'est l'emergence et l'existence mediatrice lors d'un evenement-rencontre prolonge. Nous devons donc ajouter a la question de Yetre-entre la question de l'etre-entre-dans-au-milieu,la question de la reliance-bords en plusieurite, la co-emergence et le co-espacement dans la co-spatialite dans l'espace-temps partageable, et le ralentissement ou la prolongation du temps hors du temps chronolo-gique du sujet historique. La sphere matrixielle comporte l'etendue mediatrice, dans la mesure ou elle comporte l'etendue de la partageabilite. De meme que Socrate fait parler Diotime de certains sujets, ainsi Lacan affirme qu'il y a des sujets auxquels seule une femme peut avoir acces, et comme Socrate, il fait reference au mystere entre-tisse dans ces sujets. Le secret de la fecondite en tant que materialisation dans le corps et la vie d'un principe spirituel d'union mystique transcendan-tale resonne depuis l'interieur de ce mystere. Toutefois, ce que Socrate permet a Diotime, Lacan l'interdit aux psychanalystes. Il soutient que les psychanalystes ne doivent pas s'engager dans des sujets relatifs a la fecondite, la pre-natalite, la grossesse et la feminite non-phallique, et que celle qui s'engagerait dans le pre-natal ou le pre-maternel devrait etre mise au ban de la communaute des analystes. Tout savoir issu de ces sujets doit etre compris comme imaginaire et hysterique! A son avis, cette transgression feminine met en danger le savoir analytique, comme si elle entrainait une transition vers le passage a l'acte ou la psychose (et la symbiose psychotique). Et de toute fajon, il n'est pas possible, selon Lacan, que les analystes femmes puissent articuler quelque chose se rapportant a ces sujets sans qu'il s'agisse d'une simple manifestation hysterique, d'une aspiration au savoir vouee a l'echec, peu differente du desir de l'hysterique pour la non-materialisation de son desir. Peut-etre devrait-on considerer cette restriction comme le choix de Lacan de la theorie freudienne des Pulsions, son detournement du mouvement Intersubjectif et des theories des relations d'Objet et du Soi, son occul-tation et sa denonciation des interpretations du transfert dans la seance psychanalytique. C'est toutefois Lacan38 lui-meme qui met l'accent sur l'appel de Freud39 a ratifier l'acte de la mere et a se tenir a ses cotes (ou a prendre son parti), exhortant de la sorte les analystes vers ce que j'ai appele l'a-coteite. L'Eros matrixiel est une dimension inconsciente de reliance-bords non-symetrique mais mutuelle a l'interieur d'un reseau compris dans d'autres reseaux relationnels. C'est un domaine de transmission et de lien-reliance-liaison qui sert le transfert; nous devons cultiver notre perception de l'Eros matrixiel aussi bien en vue d'interpretations bi-direc-tionnelles du transfert (transfert de l'analyste a l'analysant et de l'ana-lysant a l'analyste), qu'en termes du monde 'interieur' de l'analyste qui comporte des investissements de traces de l'analysant ainsi que la digestion de traces emanant de l'analysant, et egalement d'un partage dans le meme bain de trans-detection d'ondes trans-sensitives mentales et affec-tives. Malgre les vertus archaiques et le statut liminal de cette dimension, l'analyste doit en devenir davantage conscient, car elle manifeste chez l'humain les marques de la femellite se connectant au pre-sujet archai'que. L'instinct-de-vie erotique matrixiel opere par reliance-bords. En tant qu'entite mediatrice operant par metramorphose, Eros cree l'oc-casion d'evenements de rencontres psychiques qui precedent les mo- 38 Jacques Lacan ecrit dans Seminaire livre ^(1956—1957), La relation d'objet,{ Le Seuil, 1994, p. 222}: 'Il faut a la verite la sublime serenite de Freud pour enteriner Faction de la mere, alors que de nos jours tous les anathemes seraient deverses sur elle...'. Voir Ettinger 2006c. (NdT) 39 Sigmund Freud soutient dans 'Analyse de la phobie d'un gar^on de cinq ans' {ffiCP, volume IX, PUF, 1998, p. 24} que ' Nous devons prendre le parti de la mere, bonne et certainement tres devouee'. Voir Ettinger 2006c. (NdT) ments de «naissance» psychique et informent la proto-ethicalite pre-subjective. Eros imprime des marques sur le pre-sujet-en-con-jonction et rappelle au sujet sa pre-con-jonction. Le moment subjectivant de la «naissance» avec ses douleurs d'enfantement n'est pas le debut du venir-a-l'etre subjectif individue, et nous devons mettre au jour, au cours du travail d'interpretation qui a lieu dans le cadre soutenant de la proximite en psychanalyse, la co-emergence et la co-evanescence des transmissions affectives et mentales dans le transfert matrixiel, quand des traces d'eve-nement chez le je viennent se sceller dans l'Autremere et que des traces d'elaboration mentale chez l'Autremere viennent s'imprimer dans le je. Ceci est assez similaire a la fonction maternelle alpha chez Bion (que j'ai deja mentionnee), mis a part que la fonction decrite par Bion sur-vient dans la symbiose et apres la naissance et qu'elle est moins transmis-sive puisqu'elle depend de toutes sortes de communications primaires. Une autre difference concerne le moment subjectivant qui s'origine chez l'analyste elle-meme: elle/il ne fait pas que digerer et traiter des mate-riaux venant de l'autre mais transmet egalement des materiaux emanant d'elle-meme. Elle initie des moments subjectivants. La mise au jour, la revelation et la creation surviennent uniquement par ce qui germe dans cet evenement-rencontre singulier, creant des transformations dans les traces de ce qui a germe dans des evenements-rencontre anterieurs. Dans les relations de transfert, nous devons exposer la sphere matrixielle dont l'originalite est que je ne peux pas ne pas etre connecte(e) et mis(e) en reliance-bords avec tel ou tel inconnu, et que je viens-a-l'etre dans le lien-comme-alliance40 dans une dimension transsubjective ou intimite et etrangete sont jointes l'une a l'autre par d'innombrables cordes, dans laquelle le sujet est un sujet-partiel a l'interieur d'une subjectivite assem-blee dont les traces psychiques transgressent chacune des limites du sujet individuel. La dimension transsubjective persiste dans l'humain a cote de la dimension subjective dans laquelle le sujet differencie se rapporte a d'autres sujets separes mais, alors qu'il est possible que celle-ci echappe a la conscience phallique, dans la sphere matrixielle il n'y a aucune pos- 40 Alors que borderlinking exprime la continuite du processus de ce qui lie dans la sphere matrixielle, borderlinkage insiste sur l'impossibilite d'une coupure radicale dans cette sphere et linkage sur le fait que la venue a la vie n'echappe pas au principe vital du lien-comme-alliance. (NdT) sibilite d'eluder la transsubjectivite et sa prise de conscience peut, dans une certaine mesure, se faire. Et de la meme maniere, tout elan mental a lieu dans cette etendue, en parallele a d'autres etendues. En tant que figure de la difference, pour tout etre humain, la difference matrixielle se rapporte tout d'abord la reliance-bord a l'Autremere-femme-femelle. Tant le fils que la fille se differencient pour commencer a partir d'une figure de femme-femelle. Pour les femmes, la difference matrixielle est une difference de femme-a-femme et non une difference de femme-a-homme. Cette difference se situe en dehors de la portee de l'redipe, meme si ulterieurement elle entre en relation avec celle-ci. Tout devoilement de cette difference est d'ordinaire nie dans le domaine du traitement analytique (et de la psychotherapie en general) parce que les differentes theories psychanalytiques ne nous fournissent pas d'outils pour identifier son existence et ses manifestations. Par manque de prise de conscience du matrixiel, bien des analystes et des therapeutes n'he-sitent pas a bannir l'Autremere archai'que et a congedier la mere reelle en se substituant a elle, foulant ainsi le principe de l'a-coteite, pietinant les reseaux matrixiels et detruisant la potentialite creatrice feminine-matrixielle. L'individu femelle a un double acces a l'espace-passage matrixiel car elle vit la matrice dans le reel de l'exterieur et de l'interieur. Elle en fait l'experience dans le reel comme frontiere du corps et comme enveloppe d'une «con-jonction perdue» dans l'espace-temps archai'que de la rencontre avec l'Autremere — ce qui est egalement le cas pour l'individu male — mais aussi comme espace interieur avec une potentialite de contenance et un potentiel pour de futures rencontres. Cette potenti-alite imbibe41 le present en tant que signification. Que l'individu femi-nin soit mere ou pas, sa matrice represente un espace inaccessible a par-tir du reel, un temps hors du temps et une venue-au-monde erotique, jouissante-et-traumatique et, de maniere plus generale, une composition impregnee qui comporte la potentialite d'une repetition qui pourrait se concretiser dans le corpo-reel mais aussi dans les champs imaginaires fantasmatiques et symboliques. C'est egalement la potentialite de repe- 41 Le verbe permeate dit la permeabilite de l'espace-passage matrixiel et la porosite des frontieres non strictes. (NdT) tition d'une inscription croisee des traces, a savoir: une transgression mentale. En dehors de l'espace et du temps de rencontre au cxur du Beau dans l'art, les sujets masculins sont clives d'une maniere plus radi-cale de cette localite archai'que de la potentialite de rencontre, puisque leur connexion et leur relation avec elle demeurent dans un exterieur archai'que et dans le trop tot qui est a jamais un trop tard, pour avoir acces dans le reel au corps. L'adulte masculin ne connaitra pas la gros-sesse et pour cette raison ne va pas co-emerger a nouveau, matrixielle-ment, dans ce sens reel primaire et radical. La rencontre dans le Beau, a l'interieur du processus de rencontre maternelle-matrixielle, trauma-tique, incestueuse, «platonique», non-interdite ne peut etre dechiffree et symbolisee en dehors d'une situation transferentielle et en dehors de moments transferentiels matrixiels d'ouverture, de vulnerabilite, de fra-gilisation et de reliance-bords, car le sujet un, tout seul, dans une iden-tite a soi fermee, ne peut rien connaitre a ce propos, alors que le sujet qui existe dans la co-emergence-a-l'etre au sein d'une rencontre avec un autre qui devient son inconnu intime, realise que dans cet espace-bord liminal intermediaire — ou cette entite feminine etrangere l'installe, le transfere, l'interprete et le connecte a elle, et donne naissance, dans son desir a elle, a son emergence a lui au sein de la rencontre — la signification elle-meme se fa^onne en tant que trauma: dans une rencontre qui est engagement, rencontre irrempla^able et singuliere autant que dan-gereuse par son degre de fragilite. Toute la noblesse de l'analyste comme Eros, comme amant platonique, comme quelqu'un qui met au monde de l'interieur d'Eros une connexion et une interpretation a partir d'un etat intermediaire, se revele ici comme responsabilite personnelle. A chaque moment et a chaque choix fait dans le travail avec telle ou telle personne, l'implication matrixielle est singuliere et d'un point de vue ethique implique la compassion car la com-passion esthetique est tres fragilisante. Et l'Eros qui met au monde ce trauma dans le Beau, file de rencontre en rencontre et transforme effectivement ceux qui viennent-a-l'etre dans une telle union, qu'ils soient masculins ou feminins, en femme. La jouissance-et-trauma de la rencontre, du cote de cette difference feminine matrixielle, va impregner et resonner en tout desir de co-emergence avec l'autre dans le Beau; mais au moment ou cet Eros genere sa Beaute unique, il reclame aussi son du. Le temoignage-avec, Fa-cote'ite et l'ethique du non-abandon Ce dont Socrate en tant que sujet incarne dans un corps male, ne pouvait temoigner et ce pour quoi il avait besoin d'une femme etran-gere, Diotime, c'est l'empreinte dans le corps feminin de l'enigme du trauma d'une rencontre entre le je et le non-je en co-emergence. La rencontre matrixielle qu'est la grossesse feminine elude le tabou de l'inceste et le secret de l'impossibilite de la separation totale du je et du non-je et ceci, en depit de l'angoisse de separation qui, des le debut de telles reliances, plane comme une ombre et se profile a l'horizon, de la meme maniere que la peur de la mort plane sur toute naissance et y est inex-tricablement entremelee. La masculinite a ete assignee, via le concept du phallus, aux domaines d'une delineation et d'un sens differents, par exemple, ceux de la domination et du schisme, de la prohibition et de la coupure de la relation incestueuse-symbiotique entre la mere et le bebe, la fameuse castration phallique-symbolique qui s'opere par la langue, la loi, la societe et la culture. L'individu masculin ne peut temoigner, a partir de son experience corporelle, de l'empreinte de l'Autremere-femelle dans le corps du pre-sujet, ni de l'empreinte de l'Autremere-femelle venant du corps d'une telle Autremere-femelle, d'ou nait traumatique le sens du desir d'une co-venue-a-l'etre dans le Beau. L'espace d'une telle experience est pour lui trop regressif, trop psychotique, c'est un espace inaccessible. La voix matrixielle feminine, meme si chez Diotime elle vise les profon-deurs d'une connexion mystique a-humaine, temoigne qu'il existe bien un plan corporel qui n'est pas necessairement analogue au niveau le plus bas de l'ame qui peut etre atteint seulement dans une desintegration psy-chotique, mais plutot a une difference heterogene — la matrice, dans le sens matrixiel que je lui donne, non celui d'origine ou de contenant ou d'enveloppe mais celui de l'eveil transsubjectif de la co-emergence-a-l'etre. La voix feminine matrixielle indique que, pour le sujet humain genere, la difference feminine n'est pas revelatrice du secret de la femi-nite en tant qu'alterite en elle-meme ni de l'Autre par excellence mais revele le trauma continu du long eveil-elucidation de l'humain dans un etat de co-differenciation qui est quelque chose dont on ne peut attester sans participer a d'autres rencontres de maniere matrixielle a partir de la position «femme» qui comprend a la fois la position de partenaire trans-subjectif dans la plusieurite et d'individu differencie. A partir de cela, il faut comprendre — et c'est un aspect que j'ai developpe ailleurs — que la question de la difference originaire sexuelle (non genree) s'ouvre pour tout sujet, fils ou fille, dans l'enigme de la differenciation d'avec la mere-femme-femelle. La fille aussi s'evertue a mettre en lumiere sa difference d'avec la femme-mere-femelle. La question de sa difference d'avec l'homme-male-pere surgira plus tard, apres cette question. La difference feminine (pour une fille) est d'abord et avant tout une difference entre le corps d'une fille et le corps d'une femme-mere, c'est a dire entre la femme-fille et la femme-mere, et non pas entre une fille et un homme, pere ou gar^on. La difference femme/homme, sous l'angle matrixiel-feminin, n'est pas seulement ulterieure mais aussi secondaire en termes d'intensite par rapport a la difference femme/femme. Le su-jet humain est differencie dans toute sa corporeite, qui est erotique de maniere a la fois sexuelle et non-sexuelle, tout d'abord vis-a-vis de la mere-femme. La question du genre vient apres. C'est une des raisons pour lesquelles nous avons besoin de comprendre l'Eros non-necessai-rement sexuel, l'Eros des relations et des connexions qui est une attraction et une repulsion au-dela du sexuel, ainsi que sa fonction dans le ravissement entre-femmes que Freud, par erreur, a consideree comme sexuelle ou lesbienne ainsi qu'hysterique (dans le cas de DoraEtt9), alors qu'il s'agit d'une attraction erotique non-sexuelle et non-lesbienne. La figure mediatrice d'Eros est la quand une femme co-emerge en alliance matrixielle avec une autre femme (enseignante, amie, sreur, therapeute, analyste, et finalement a nouveau la mere) afin d'etablir sa difference et sa distance-dans-la-proximite, et d'en etre transformee tout en se situant dans un tissu de transsubjectivite qui con-tourne sa seule subjectivite. Les moments ou une ouverture matrixielle transsubjective est demandee mais non trouvee, ou lorsque l'autre n'y reagit pas, sont des moments d'horreur sans nom (voir mon analyse du «cas» Lol V. Stein de Duras, 1964). La psychanalyste doit identifier de tels moments et y reagir par une hospitalite compassionnelle et une con-jonction vulnerable ma-trixielles et non par des coupures phalliques. Il convient de reconnaitre et de sympathiser avec la difference femme/femme qui apparait avant que la difference femme/homme ne devienne pertinente dans l'ampleur de sa signification pour une fille. La signification matrixielle n'appelle a une transformation que la ou la dimension matrixielle apparait dans les relations transferentielles et est acceptee et reconnue comme telle. Seul le sujet desireux de se laisser reconstituer mentalement encore et encore en copoi'esis, dans l'espace-temps de passage42 matrixiel, le sujet qui donc re^oit et absorbe les traces de l'autre en elle-meme et ose deposer ses traces et diffuser ses ondes affectives-mentales en l'autre, peut offrir une interpretation, une transmission et un transfert dans et a partir de la rencontre presente vers une rencontre ulterieure, une interpretation qui assimile egalement la rencontre matrixielle archai'que et y cree une transformation. Autrement dit, il est impossible de contourner par l'interpretation le desir meme de reliance-bord a l'autre a l'interieur d'une rencontre au cours de la creation d'une difference d'avec «l'etran-ger», c'est-a-dire de contourner le transfert matrixiel lui-meme. Le secret d'Eros ne se revele pas dans le discours mais dans l'implication dans la demarche erotique elle-meme. Si l'Eros matrixiel-feminin est desir de venue-a-l'etre et de naissance dans le Beau a un niveau de contemplation eleve, la signification du franchissement du trauma dans le Beau ne peut etre transmis et clarifie que dans le desir d'une co-naissance ulterieure, d'une venue-a-l'etre copoi'etique dans un espace-passage liminal intermediate a l'interieur du transfert, dans un desir d'une co-emergence au sein d'une pregnance, d'une co-creation impregnee ou est conserve le principe de la proximite-dans-la-distance qui maintient actif le po-tentiel des differences. L'antenne erotique qui connecte et transmet les traces, expose celle qui donne naissance dans le Beau — l'artiste dans ses rencontres avec ses materiaux, ainsi que la psychanalyste dans les relations de transfert — a un contact traumatique qui va la transformer, en tous ces aspects, en une oratrice femme etrangere, intime inconnue de son autre, une Diotime. Tout(e) psychanalyste qui ainsi devient femme, chacun, chacune de nous, est cense(e) se poser la question: est-ce que je peux, est-ce que je veux, suis-je dispose(e) a me constituer en une 42 L'insistance sur le passage souligne que dans la transsubjectivite quelque chose passe de l'un(e) a l'autre, quelque chose se passe entre, derive de l'un(e) a l'autre mais passe aussi au-dela. (NdT) telle inconnue-intime pour mon autre-semblable,43 a re-venir-a-l'etre avec-dans une rencontre continue, a travailler-a-travers et a perlaborer le transfert matrixiel, fatal, non planifie, douloureux, avec ses retourne-ments et ses surprises. En outre, chacun(e) de nous est cense(e) se poser la question que Lacan, enigmatique, reiterait si bien: quel est mon desir d'analyste? lorsque le desir, cette empreinte d'Eros dans le processus ana-lytique, s'avere etre en realite la question de l'ethique du travail-passage, du travail-au-dela, de la perlaboration transferentielle dans la connexion-par-la-proximite psychanalytique (sans bien sur de concretisation corpo-relle), par une obligation ethique qui comporte l'Eros non-sexuel. Tel que Diotime le suggere, le secret d'Eros ne se revele effectivement pas par le discours mais par la participation au processus erotique. Le processus erotique matrixiel sublime est une «ascension» — il tend vers le spirituel. Au cours des mediation et connexion impregnees, dans les relations transferentielles, il y a transformation et ascension vers l'intuition, et le languissement erotique devient amour de la sagesse (philosophie). Le Beau ne se revele que dans la reliance-par-les-bords qui n'est toutefois pas l'actualisation dans une rencontre sexuelle mais, tout au long, le fait de prendre acte des vibrations, des resonances et des reaccordements de la distance-dans-la-con-jonction, c'est-a-dire des signes du temoignage-avec-l'autre, tout en reconnaissant sa difference. De la meme maniere que Diotime decrit une relation de vision-apparition-lumination entre Eros et le Beau aux echelons superieurs de l'ascension erotique, ainsi dans le transfert matrixiel d'espace-bord est conservee la distance-dans-l'intimite de l'evenement-rencontre, necessaire pour faire naitre la perception intuitive analytique erotique, l'insight: le passage de la contemplation a l'insight se produit par le fait de se differencier-ensemble. La therapie psychanalytique comme «ascension» dans les profondeurs de l'inconscient est, entre autres, une forme d'initiation; les participants a cette rencontre ne sont pas au meme niveau de connaissances ni de res-ponsabilites; leurs attentes de la rencontre sont differentes. L'initiation survient inevitablement au cours de la rencontre-evenement. Lors d'une analyse manquee, la mediation impregnee pourrait devenir un trauma- 43 Ettinger feminise le terme fellowman qui signifie le prochain ou le semblable, en l'ecrivant fellow(o)man. (NdT) tisme douloureux supplementaire, renforiant le retour et le tournoie-ment autour de traces traumatiques anterieures. Mais elle pourrait aussi, lors de l'analyse reussie toujours visee, transformer l'observation en intuition, avec pour effet une modification tant de l'observation ulterieure que des traces anterieures, d'une maniere qui permet la transgression des cycles de l'eternelle repetition en evitant d'etre pris dans une spirale d'inertie. L'ethique de la subjectivation matrixielle ou il est impossible pour le je de nepas etre-avec-l'autre-et-temoigner en com-passion, ni de nepas se tenir dans l'a-coteite avec l'Autremere, est l'ethique du non-abandon. L'in-tuition nee comme co-lumination et co-elucidation-apparition a l'inte-rieur du transfert matrixiel est un insight de reliance-bords. Et l'etre-avec-et-le-temoignage en art ? Le desir de l'artiste scelle des empreintes d'Eros dans l'reuvre d'art, telle une nouvelle nebuleuse im-pregnee, creee comme une nuee faite de scintillements de traces d'eve-nements-rencontre internes et externes, une nebuleuse qui produit des transformations d'observations anterieures et ouvre le potentiel d'une nouvelle intuition, pour l'artiste et pour le spectateur. Le geste de l'artiste cree a partir d'Eros dans la peinture, y inscrivant le secret de la rencontre entre la compassion protoethique et la com-passion esthetique de chaque ex-in-tuition44 specifique qui donne naissance au dehors interne et au dedans a l'interieur dans le visible. L'intuition-insight nee comme co-eclaircissement45 avec l'reuvre d'art est une intuition de reliance par les bords. 44 L'espace-bord matrixiel genere la mise en liaisons entre les personnes dans l'' a-coteite {beside-dness} mais aussi les echanges a partir des bords entre l'interieur {inside} et l'exterieur {outside}. Jouant sur la chaine signifiante de side {cote, bord} et son homophonie avec sight {aperception, vision}, Ettinger fait entendre la permutation dehors/dedans dans l'advenue cote-a-cote des par-tenaires a l'interieur de l'espace-bord mais aussi entre les personnes et l'reuvre d'art par la me-diatisation de la perception intuitive {insight}. Par le jeu de mots sur outside inside, out-in-sight et the inside, elle suggere que chaque ex-in-tuition donne naissance a un dehors et a un dedans interne a la vision. (NdT) 45 L'expression to dawn on designe quelque chose qui se fait jour a l'interieur de soi, s'eclaire, devient visible, au sens de son accessibilite a la clarte comme comprehension intellectuelle. Afin de preserver la triple signification visuelle, naissante et emergente de la comprehension, le terme co-eclaircissement a ete choisi pour traduire ici co-dawning dans ce contexte du rapport vecu a l'reuvre d'art. (NdT) De meme, le desir comme empreinte d'Eros dans l'xuvre d'art est en fait une question au sujet des irruptions de l'ethique dans l'esthetique au travers du geste de l'artiste.46 Traduit par Anne Verougstraete Bracha L. Ettinger © 2007. Traduction par Anne Verougstraete de l'article: 'Dio-tima and the Matrixial Transference — Psychoanalytical Encounter-Event', publie dans: Chris N. van der Merwe et Hein Viljoen (eds.): Across the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature. New York: Peter Lang & Potchefstroom: Literator, 2007:105132. ISBN 978-1-4331-0002-4. * Bracha L. Ettinger is a prominent international visual artist, a painter working in oil-painting, drawing, photography, notebooks and artist's books, conversation, lecturing-performances and encounter-events, and writing. Two books dedicated to her art: Art as Compassion. Bracha L. Ettinger (edited by Catherine de Zegher and Griselda Pollock) and Le Cabinet de Bracha (edited by Patrick le Nouene) appeared in 2011. Her Exhibitions include Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1996), Kiasma, Helsinki (2006), Centre G. Pompidou, Paris (Face a l'Historie, 1996 & elles@ pompidoucentre, 2010). Recent solo exhibitions include Musee des Beaux-Arts d'Angers (2011), Alma Matrix (dual ex.) at "Fundacio Antoni Tapies", Barcelona (2010), Freud Museum, London (2009), Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki (2009) and Drawing Center, New York (2001). Recent performance/installation and lecturing "encounter-events" include ICI, Berlin (2010), Poznanskie Towarzystwo Przykacio} Nauk, Poznan (2011) and Ars Nova Museum, Turku (2011). Ettinger (IL/FR/UK) worked mainly in Paris from 1981 until 2003, and she currently works in both Paris and Tel Aviv. She is also a practicing psychoanalyst (member of NLS, WAP and TAICP) and a theoretician who has revolutionised the fields of subjectivity (trans-subjectivity), femininity, gender and maternal subjectivity. As artist/psychoanalyst and artist/philosopher, she is author of numerous articles and several books on Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics and Ethics, including Regard et Espace-de-bord matrixiels (La lettre volee, 1999) [The MatrixialBorderspace (essays from 1994-1999), Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006]. She is an activist against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, and is a member of Physicians for Human Rights. Ettinger is Marcel Duchamp Chair and Professor of Art and Psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. 46 Je tiens a remercier pour leur contribution a la realisation de cette traduction, Elaine Briggs pour son aide d'anglophone et Dimitra Douskos pour ses apports fouilles. (NdT) Notes Ettl Une version anterieure et plus courte de cet essai a ete lu lors du Symposium «Banquet», Jaffa, Octobre 2001. Ett2 J'utilise les termes de co-poi'esis et de co-emergence a la suite de Matura et Varela qui, eux, parlent de l'autopoiese. Voir Varela (1989). Ett 3 Je me suis servie de la traduction anglaise du Banquet de Platon par Tom Griffith (1997) ainsi que de celle faite par Benjamin Jowett mais aussi de celle en hebreu par Margalit Finckleberg (2001). Ett4 Cet extrait est traduit sur la base a la fois de Jowett et de Griffith. Ett5 Je considere que, dans ce sens, mon interpretation du texte de Platon est une critique de l'interpretation faite par Luce Irigaray en 1984. Ett6 Depuis la version 2001 de cet essai, j'ai elabore l'idee de «cordes» matrixielles pour decrire la trans-connectivite affective et mentale (voir, par exemple, Ettinger (2005). La question de la compassion a egalement ete developpee plus avant (voir, par exemple, Ettinger (2006a). Ett7 Le probleme de Thanatos ne concerne pas la presente publication. J'ai discute de cette question ailleurs (voir, par exemple, Ettinger (1999, 2000). Ett8 Les images peuvent etre trouvees dans Ettinger (2000). Ett 9 J'ai analyse le cas Dora {Sigmund Freud, ffiCP Volume VI, Fragment d'une analyse d'un cas d'hysterie, PUF, 2006, p.183—301} dans plusieurs essais a partir de 1993 et, egalement en lien avec la figure de Lol V. Stein chez Marguerite Duras, dans un texte presente lors d'un seminaire de J. A. Miller a Paris, le 7 Juin 2000. La derniere version de cet essai a ete publiee sous la reference Ettinger (2006b). 2000. La derniere version de cet essai a ete publiee sous la reference Ettinger (2006b). Ouvrages cites 1. Bion, W. R. (1984), Learning from Experience. London: Karnac. 2. Bollas, C. (1987), The Shadow of the Object. London: Free Association. 3. Bowlby, J. (1969), Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books. 4. Duras, M. (1966), Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (version anglaise de Richard Seaver). New York: Grove Press. 5. Ettinger, B. L. (1992), "Matrix and Metramorphosis." In: Differences 4(3): 176208. 6. Ettinger, B. L. (1999), "Trauma and Beauty." In: Paradoxa 3: 15-23, 1999. (Reprinted in Soleim, KR, ed. 1999. Fatal Women. Journal of the Center for Women's and Gender Research 11: 115-128.) 7. Ettinger, B. L. (1999), Regard et Espace-de-bordMatrixiels. Bruxelles: La lettre volee, 1999. 8. Ettinger, B. L. (2000), "Art as a Transport Station of Trauma." In: B. L. Ettinger, Artworking 1985-1999. Brussels: Ludion, pp. 91-115. 9. Ettinger, B. L. (2005), "The Art-and-Healing Oeuvre." In: 3XAbstraction (eds. C. De Zegher, and H. Teicher). New York and New Haven: The Drawing Center and Yale University Press, p. 199-231. 10. Ettinger, B. L. (2006a), "Com-passionate Co-Response-Ability, Initiation in Jointness and the link x of Matrixial Virtuality." In: Gorge(l) (ed. S.Van Loo). An-twerpen: The Royal Museum of Fine Art, p. 11-33. 11. Ettinger, B. L. (2006b) "Fascinance and the Girl-to-m/Other Matrixial Feminine Difference." In: Psychoanalysis and the Image (ed. G. Pollock). Oxford: Blackwell, p. 60-93. 12. Ettinger, B. L. (2006c), "From Proto-ethical Compassion to Responsibility: Besidedness, and the three Primal Mother-Phantasies of Not-enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment." In: Philosophical Studies vol. 2. Vilnius: Versus, pp. 100-135. E-Journal version: 13. Freud, S. 1953 (1901, 1905), "Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria." In: S. Freud, The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, VII: 15-112. London: The Hogarth Press. 14. Irigaray, L. (1993), "Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, 'Diotima's Speech.'" In: L. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (tr. by C. Burke and G. C. Gill). London: The Athlone Press, p. 20-33. 15. Lacan, J. (1972), Ou Pire (seminaire inedit, traduction libre). Mars. 16. Lacan, J. (1975), Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XX: Encore (ed. Jacques-Alain Miller). Paris: Seuil. (English edition: Encore. On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (tr. by B. Fink). New York: W. W. Norton and Company.) 17. Ogden, T. H. 2004 (1989), The Primitive Edge of Experience. London: Karnac. 18. Plato. (1997), Symposium and the Death of Socrates (tr. by T. Griffith). Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. 19. Plato. 1871 (360BC), Symposium (tr. by B. Jowett). London: Thrift edition. 20. Plato. 2001 (360BC), Symposium (Hebrew tr. by M. Finckleberg). Tel Aviv: Hargol. 21. Rank, O. 1973 (1925), The Trauma of Birth. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929. (Reprinted New York: Harper & Row, 1973.) 22. Stern, D. (1985), The Interpersonal World ofthe Infant. New York: Basic Books. 23. Varela, F. (1989), Autonomie et Connaissance. Paris: Seuil. * IV CUKTv Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 THE DISSONANT RESONANCE OF BECOMINGS: COPOIESIS AND (NON-)PULSED TIME IN MUSICAL PROXIMITIES Gina Rae Foster* i. Introduction Six strings, strummed and plucked with two hands, vibrate and resonate as if touching each other and the instrument's surface, its varnish whisper-thin over mahogany, within millimeters of their relative positions. A voice laces itself into these frequencies, altering and answering pitch, timbre, duration. The bodies of accompanist and singer lean towards the guitar, lean towards each other, turn towards the audience. The audience bends toward, then falls away, pulses shoulders to the rhythm of the song humming through the instruments made by veins and bones. The time and space of performance stretch and compress, twist and unwind. The proximities of space and time expressed through bodies and through the expression of bodies become both co-poiesis and territorialization, manifestations of an aesthetic emergence and coalescence into being that is also its own interference and unmaking. Through the bodily proximities of performance, music reveals and conceals temporospatial becomings that are part of human co-emergence and divergence. 2. Musical Performance as Bodily Proximity Bodily proximity: the phrase implies nearness without intrusion, a measurement of distance that yet remains distinct between two differences, two bodies, two or more tactilities. For it is tactility that is proximity, the friction of surfaces trembling through the disturbance of visible or invisible antennae that sense what approaches and retreats. Sound is tactile in its performance and reception, involving part or all of human and non-human bodies in the play and interference of sound waves on surfaces. Music, as performed and received aesthetic sound, is also tactile, dependent on perception and the anticipation of perception. In the examination of proximity, words come to the tongue and ear such as approach, proximity, and proximal: these share etymological proximity. Not merely nearness or the closing of enterable spaces and times but the "superlative" of nearness ("prope").1 "Proche, proche," says theorist and architect Paul Virilio, the French "near" ("proche") both imperative and descriptive in response to discussions of the effects of velocity and of "collapsed" distance on the intimacy of human contact.2 Proximity assumes the intensification and collapse of bodily owned tem-porospatialities, bodies that may or may not be animate, sentient, or capable of changing direction. In the performance of music, proximity becomes the space between tones, durations, pitches, as well as the distance between performer and instrument, performer and audience, performance and recollection. Examining bodily proximities through music (and in particular, music as aesthetic sound) raises questions of bodies and proximities as becomings. The painter and psychoanalytic theorist Bracha L. Ettinger writes of borderspacing, borderlinking, and borderswerving in copoiesis, which might read as one approach to an aesthetically ontological proximity. A resonant theorist of aesthetics, Gilles Deleuze, explores pulsed and non-pulsed time in music as an extension of his and Felix Guat-tari's conceptions of territorialization and time as Aion and Chronos. For Deleuze and Guattari, proximity implies territory as body, both spatially and temporally: body implies distinction, of other bodies and not-bodies from the body recognized as or kept separate from others; distinction implies difference. Time is both quantitative and qualitative. This might lead to the suggestion that what is not proximal is neither near nor different. What is not proximal invades or escapes. It is other-than-self beyond the trace of familiarity, or perhaps it is self beyond a co-emergence of distinction. Although neither Ettinger, nor Deleuze, nor Deleuze and Guattari discuss musical performance directly in the texts referenced below, both offer potential conceptual temporospatial webs that can be examined in the proximities of musical performance. 3. Proximities and Perception Before engaging with Ettinger and Deleuze, it may be useful to address certain inherited physical and theoretical assumptions of proximity, perception, and sound. For the human body, perceptions of proximity largely rely on sensory perceptions of self/other-than-self, self defined in terms of a reference point by which distances between bodies are measured, other-than-self in terms of the stretching or shrinking of intensities of perceptions of self in relation to other-than-self.3 Sight and touch are frequent markers of proximity: for example, the use of perspective in visual arts and the measurement of distance by body and extremity lengths as distance from the border-membrane of skin. Smell and the related sense of taste also measure proximities in perhaps their closest interactions that not only collapse the distance between bodies but also enter human tissues and organs nearly simultaneously with perception. Sound is a sense both tactile and intangible. Sound enters all spaces that do not impede the progress of its waves; sound, like touch and taste, can be intentionally initiated as well as received without mechanical aids. The manipulation of sound responds to changes in proximity of these auditory invasions, acceptances, and diffusions, a manipulation that in musical performance assumes that sensory perceptions blur yet also distinguish self and other-than-self. Bodily proximities rely on perception as an integral part of initiating and responding to processes between and internal to bodies. Perceptions indicate an internal awareness of an external stimulus. Maurice Merleau-Ponty defines perception as "a reference to a whole which can be grasped, in principle, only through certain of its parts or aspects."4 Some perceptions seem intuitive—the proximity of a hand over a flame perceives heat; the proximity of a set of eyes looking at an open flame perceives shapes and a wavering of the air in smoke and vapor at the edges (proximities) of the flame. Other perceptions of proximity seem to require conscious effort, for example, awareness of one's pulse or respiration.5 Perceptions, similarly to time, may be considered both qualitatively and quantitatively. In science, measurement as both static and fluid relies on perceptions. Perceptions set the basis for what and how prox- imities are to be measured—in quantities, rates, forms, etc. Perceptions also ground which proximities are measurable. With the establishment of quantities and dimensions, the perceived object can enter into economic and artistic play. Economic interchanges of the perceived enter into ethics based on the objectifying and valuing of the perceived. Artistic manipulations of the perceived enter into aesthetic questions of the limitations and capacities of the perceived to change its form (and essence, if essence is a belief) and to relate to other "perceiveds" and perceivers. Thus, the proximal relations between the perceiver and the perceived, as well as between multiple perceivers and perceiveds, provoke aesthetic questions.6 Proximities and perceptions may also be examined in terms of tem-porospatial curvatures. Theorist and filmmaker Manuel DeLanda interprets the function of a curve as an indication that a rate of change is a speed of becoming: every point will be defined by the speed at which its curvature is changing at that point (every space can be a field of rapidities and slownesses).7,8 Thus, the speed of becoming is measured by its proximities to changes, and the rapidity at which curvature is changing at every point allows for the multi-dimensionality and determination of space, which tangles temporospatiality in the velocity Virilio points to as the "light of light" or cinematic vision.9,10 Just as Virilio refers to a shift in perception and thus measurement as "stereometric" and "volumetric" (measurements of sight and sound), he then predicts that these perceptions of measure will be replaced by the measurement of speed: "the barrier of time will be broken next after sound and light,"11,12 he asserts, while the speed of sound, as it increases, "accelerates to inaudibility."13,14 Inaudibility, lacking the capacity to be perceived, would then also lack the capacity to be approached. For musical performance, perception and proximity are linked to relative position as well as to velocities of becoming. 4. Sound and Music As the means through which the sense of hearing perceives and is perceived, the proximities of sound provide other considerations for bodily proximity. As both body and part of animal bodies and inanimate objects, sound is a test of the proximal. Sound is identifiable as distance and as friction. Vision may engage with the skin senses as temperature and exposure; sound engages with skin as pressure and movement. Sound recognizes difference and differentiation: that which is noticed as not part of one's physical and mental (re)production of voluntary and involuntary physiology, voluntary and involuntary thought. Sound is also a(n) (co-) emergence of awareness of self as assemblage, of body in territorialization and deterritorialization.15,16 In sensory experience and expression, music forms through and against sound. Music performance, as an auditory (and often visual and tactile) sensory experience, can be described as both tangible (the resonance of sound waves that disturb physical barriers in their path) and temporal (the periodicity of sound waves, measurable by peak and trough). The tangible is not necessarily tactile in that what is sensed by the skin, blood, and nerves is not always a sense of an object or subject with which one can create an intentional friction. The performance of music is receptive as much as initiated, welcoming as much as hostile to being emitted or received.17 Performance, sound and music are spatial, as the work of Tim Smith-ers and Vijay Iyers attests, positing a physical source for the sound the listener hears as well as connecting a cause and effect between the initiation of physical action and sound for the auditory emitter.18,19 Erik Davis refers to Marshall McLuhan's "acoustic space" as "multidimensional, resonant, invisibly tactile.... acoustic space emphasizes simultaneity— the possibility that many events can occur in the same holistic zone of space-time.. blocks of sound can overlap and interpenetrate without necessarily collapsing into a harmonic unity or consonance, thereby maintaining the paradox of 'simultaneous difference.'"20 Auditory experience and expression depend on perceptions, then, of spatial beings interacting closely or at a distance with other spatial subjects/objects, whether those subjects/objects are imagined or factual (think, for example, of the memory of sounds or of the imagining of conversations and sounds that form parts of daily lived experience). These interactions are proximal, sensory, "tactile", and simultaneous while retaining individual identities. Acoustic space is a communal living space in which combinations and re-combinations of Cage's "five determinants: frequency or pitch, amplitude or loudness, overtone structure or timbre, duration, and morphology (how the sound begins, goes on, and dies away)"21,22 or (Daniel Bernard Roumain's (DBR's) "sound, harmony, melody, rhythm, and form"23) wrestle and remake through proximity without reforming one another.24 In terms of sound and time, Smithers states: A straightforward observation, though one that seems often to be overlooked by the computational modelers of robots (so call simulation builders), is that with physical embodiment comes physical mass. It cannot be otherwise, according to accepted physical Law. Furthermore, if something has mass then whatever it does or whatever happens to it TAKES time to do or happen!25 Spatial proximities are therefore temporal proximities, and Smith-ers further makes a distinction between processes (which might be termed participial masses) that are "embedded in time' and "contained in time."26,27 Processes embedded in time measure time; this measurement qualifies the movement and identity of the processes. In contrast, processes contained in time continue and complete themselves without measurement; there is an elasticity of time that is experienced not as a qualification but as something external to the processes: the processes depend on their accomplishment regardless of linear or cyclical markings. Embedded temporal processes quantify their proximities to other processes, just as described above in the curvature of the rates of change; the proximities of contained temporal processes occur "outside" what might be called "counted" time and must be described with different language, different codings. The performance of music contains and embeds time in these terms, responding to set measurements and yet individual and shared/conflicting interpretations of those measurements as well as responding to individual and shared/conflicting desires to unmake or steal ("rubato" from "robbed time"28) performance from its original structure. In the experience of sound, the human ear interprets this temporo-spatial coding with its clarities and ambiguities. What is the temporo-spatial coding of proximity? According to Ettinger, it would seem to originate in the linear, cyclical, and elastic gestation of the uterus, and thus be extended to the composition and performance of the work of music, the coalescence and norms of the instruments, performers, and audience.29 Extrapolating from Ettinger, one could read the matrixial womb as more than a space of emergence: it is in its cyclical, fluid nature also analogous to sound, not just subject to but constitutive of time both linear and circular. In reading Deleuze on the Baroque fold, the temporospatial coding of proximity would seem to be expressed in the performance of the audible and inaudible, the repetitive and singular, as the revealing/concealing/return of shared time and space by monadical-ly-constituted bodies of sound, instrument, performer, and audience.30 Deleuze and Guattari add the assemblage that territorializes these bodies, bodies that in the acts of performance are also deterritorializing and becoming noise, silence, component parts.31 Thus, matrixiality and musical performance fold back on themselves, unfold themselves, territorialize, and deterritorialize in movements similar to those of becoming self/other-than-self and territory/non-territory. The performance of music raises further questions, not just of the temporospatial but also of the temporo-auditory. Vijay Iyer argues that musical performance has "physical embodiment" and "environmental situatedness,"32,33 and that it seems more heavily temporal than poetry, yet the sustaining of a note, phrase, or measure calls into question what is meant by the constraints of seconds and hours. Iyer also speaks of "'shared time'" (time experienced in close proximity) in regards to music as "a crucial aspect of the temporality of performance."34,35 "Time framed by improvisation is a special kind of time that is flexible in extent,"36 he writes, and the improvisational flexibility of time is experienced through composers and compositions that may or may not be strictly defined as "improvisation." For example, John Cage destabilized the temporality of musical performance with 4'33"; Philip Glass destabilizes the temporality of musical performance with minimalist repetition in which linear time does not develop or change. Jazz destabilizes time with improvisation; non-syntactical music emphasizes contained over embedded time.37,38 When musical performance challenges its own measure, it takes on a physical proximity the listener inhabits, shares, or finds him/herself excluded from entering. The ambient sounds and audience perceptions that "co-perform"38 4 '33" with the immobility of the pianist are musical proximities experienced as both embedded and contained. Read in terms of temporospatiality, the performance of music carries the intentions of proximities to be developed and ruptured between perceivers and perceiveds as well as for bodies to construct new capacities for proximities and thus perceptions. The word "music" takes its root from perception, present and past ("to think, to remember"39) and from the Muses, "protectors" of the arts40 and inspirations for the arts. Musical performance might be termed the internal made external and shared to be taken internally from external experience, or more simply, as gestation and parturition. References to musical performance as gestational evoke Ettinger's writings on matrixiality. Ettinger's texts vibrate with feminist constructions of psychoanalytic theory that cogenerate with those of Freud and Lacan. She writes of matrixiality as the origin of the co-emergence of sel(f)(ves), the womb as active rather than passive. Individuation begins with the hospitable and creative performance of the uterus, which acts as host and performer, entertaining and nourishing the fetus as guest and audience, inviting and expelling the fetus as composition become performance, which, in its temporary residence, reforms and transforms the uterus as dwelling and work of art. 5. Ettinger: Metramorphosis through Borderspacing, Borderlinking, and Borderswerving Ettinger refers to the womb or matrix as a "resonance chamber,"41 and in matrixiality, proximities are transformed through the resonance of metramorphosis, musical and matrixial becomings that are not individ-uation in isolation but are the co-emergence of self through proximities of harmonics and (auditory) interferences with other selves. "Metramor-phosis is a process of interpsychic communication and transformation that transgresses the borders of the individual subject and takes place between several entities. It is a joint awakening of unthoughtful-knowl-edge on the borderline, as well as an inscription of the encounter in traces that open a space in and along the borderline itself." 42 This is similar to Iyer's descriptions of co-performance and echoes Smithers' sense of contained time as elastic and co-generative. There is what Ettinger calls a borderspace43 between self and self, that which is between and yet touching on the membrane of the limits of identity. In borderspace, the friction of borderlinking rasps as self brushes against other self, and in this resonant/dissonant encounter, borderswerv-ing moves these performing subjects against and parallel to each other, changing the linear impulse to become into something more curved, something intentionally melodic or dissonant.44 "Metramorphosis is a process of affective-emotive swerving."45 The self finds its earliest vibrations and fluidities in the matrix, not as an isolated being beginning to divide and complicate itself from a single cell, but as a self-in-connection, self-in-copoiesis, affecting and being affected by its uterine mother and already dual in the coupling of ovum and spermatozoa. In copoiesis, the self is already musical and performing. Ettinger writes, "The psychic voice-link opens in us a ma-trixial time-and-space of encounter where, like in a resonance-cavity, inside and outside vibrate together." 46 Chromosomal and qualitative differences are present in internal borderspace from the moment being sounds itself as self, as subject-in-making. Borderlinking proximities of embrace and resistance are present as part of this borderswerving differentiation/simulation that sways with the umbilical c(h)ord, and the emergence from this place/time of fetus and womb interfering and resonating with each other's primary and secondary needs is punctuated with groans, cries, and whimpers, a primal-proximal chorus of separation, the stretching and rupture of contained temporospatiality. This is borderswerving as "transgressive. It is a process of differentiating in bor-derspacing and borderlinking, of inscriptive exchange between/with-in several matrixial entities. It dissolves the individual borderlines so that they become thresholds, allowing a passage that captures for each participant ... a surplus of fragility."47 Metramorphosis and its border-"event-encounter"-emergence48 form critical parts of the aforementioned copoiesis, the co-emergence/co-creating of subjects that is both ethical and aesthetic.49 In copoiesis, subjects continue to differentiate beyond parturition, carrying the interiorities of borderlinking and borderswerving into exteriorities of further vibra- tions and conflicts, at times (and spaces) harmonizing self with other-than-self and at times (and spaces) clashing between individuations. The concept of rubato, or "robbed time,"50 demonstrates this borderswerving while borderlinking as musicians play loosely with embedded time as if it were contained. As Ettinger writes, the encounter-emergence of the self/other-than-self is musical: "When the matrixial cavity of passage becomes a matrixial acoustic-resonance camera obscura, partial-objects and partial-subjects are not separated by a cut but are rather borderlinked by frequencies, waves, resonance, and vibrations. They share and are shared by the same vibrating and resonating environment, where the inside is outside and the outside inside. The borderline between I and non-I as copoietic poles of the same vibrating string are transformed into a threshold and transgressed.. I therefore suggest speaking of ... a matrixial voice."51 For Ettinger, the aesthetic subject is in proximity and offers proximity; there is no absolute exteriority or interiority but rather movements, "oscillation,"52 between the inner and outer expressions of the self, or as Deleuze might phrase this, between the revealing and concealing exposures of the fold.53 In matrixiality, as in music, proximities of becoming inculcate "desire . for further borderlinking and further resonances."54 6. Deleuze: Proximities of Pulsed and Non-Pulsed Time Metramorphosis read through borderpacing, borderlinking, and bor-derswerving speaks to embedded and contained temporospatialities. How does the sense of different acoustical times affect the proximities of bodies? Does the performance of music, placed and moving in the space between multiple moving bodies, affect the nearness and distance of those bodies and thus form (and re-form) a different kind of multiplicity, a rippling that is a folding of bodies exposing and concealing one another without touching? Reading Deleuze, the difference in times, in "pulsed time" and "sequential" repetitions, may create "interferences" and conflict (sound waves crashing into each other's obstructions) and yet may also create new resonances and frequencies of (re)direction that redirect one body in relation not only to another but also to itself.55 In his lectures, Deleuze speaks of music expressed through pulsed and non-pulsed time.56 Pulsed time, or Chronos, is "territorialized time,"57 the "marking"58 of time through measure and repetition/return (Deleuze speaks of the "ritornello"59) that is one expression of musically performative "time because it's fundamentally the way in which a sonorous form, however simple it may be, marks a territory." 60 He continues, "Each time that there is a marking of a territoriality, there will be a pulsation of time." 61 If pulsed time is also musical time, and if both pulsed and musical time is territorial, what can be inferred of proximity? Territorialization is the assemblage of proximities, in Deleuze and Guattari's formation, bodies formed through not merely the association but the complicity of parts in their nearness to one another that make up bodies/territories distinct from other bodies/territories.62 Musical performance territorializes time because the performance of music takes ("appropriates"63) embedded times in proximity (refer again to the curvature of the rate of change) and creates a body of aesthetic sound and practice distinct from non-territorialized or deterritorialized sound (the noises of traffic and machines or of digestive processes may have musically performative possibilities but are not themselves music or part of a musical territory without coming together through proximities to shared and changing time, to shared and changing space). Deleuze reminds his listeners that territorialization (and thus pulsed time) may be embedded in measurement but is also contained in "de-velopment."64 "[A]s soon as you can fix a sonorous form," he states, "de-terminable by its internal coordinates, for example melody-harmony, as soon as you can fix a sonorous form endowed with intrinsic properties, this form is subject to developments, by which it is transformed into other forms or enters into relation or again is connected to other forms, and here, following these transformations and these connections, you can fix pulsations of time."65 Pulsations of time, or Chronos, then become even more subject to musical proximities that change in response to one another, an echo of borderswerving's relationship to borderlink-ing. Non-pulsed time, Aion, is defined rather by deterritorialization and the taking apart of "sonorous form."66 Deleuze relates non-pulsed time to velocity, recalling the rate of change described by DeLanda and the dromoscopy of Paul Virilio.67 Aionic time is part of what Deleuze terms the "mixture" of time; Aion and Chronos blend together in a musical territorializing that is also a deterritorializing, and in these opposite yet proximal movements are proximities of becoming and unmaking. The experience of participating in a musical performance as a whole (instruments, performers, audience, composition, context, etc.) and as its component parts (notes, phrases, measures, dynamics, individual characteristics of performers and instruments) is the experience of this mixed time. And yet, not all mixed time is musical, and not all sounds in proximity are musical. For music to occur, aesthetic proximities must become aware of their possibilities for becoming and unmaking, must perceive the friction and soothing of their near surfaces. As Deleuze questions, "^Cuando [sic] deviene musical una voz? Yo dirfa, desde el punto de vista de la expresion, que la voz musical es esencialmente una voz desterrito-rializada. ^Que quiere decir eso? Pienso que hay cosas que aun no son musica y que, sin embargo, estan muy proximas a la musica."68 7. Conclusion: Musical Proximities and Velocities of Becoming In thinking through temporospatiality, matrixiality, and territorial-ization, Ettinger and Deleuze think through the aesthetics of bodily proximities, and in these proximities, the performance of music finds its own potentials for copoiesis through borderlinking and borderswerv-ing, through territorialization and deterritorialization. The resonance of embedded and contained time with Chronos and Aion opens possibilities for musical co-performances and co-emergences that not only may but will differ in each nearing and distancing of shared performance/ hearing, even when recorded versions are repeated. Perceptions gained through hearing are subject to the velocities of becoming. The dissonance of becoming is part of the musical performance of deterritorialization and borderswerving, responding to an awareness of distinct parts that once were part of a body/performance and yet, in their capacities to be perceived as separate and not just body/performance, begin to undo territory/matrixiality. In this undoing, simpler and more complex performances, simpler and more complex becomings curve against and with each other. * Gina Rae Foster, Director, Lehman Teaching and Learning Commons, Lehman College/ CUNY, New York. She holds a doctorate from the European Graduate School (EGS), Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Foster is currently the EGS Poet-in-Residence for Media and Communications, the EGS Marina Tsvetaeva Fellow in Poetics, and Scholar-in-Residence at the Culinary Institute of America. Notes 1 Harper, D. (2011), The Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com (acc. 12/7/11). 2 Virilio, P. (4/1—2/2009), The University of Disaster. Seminar. La Rochelle, France: European Graduate School. 3 Portions of this discussion have been modified from Foster, G. R. (2011), Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation (doctoral thesis). Leuk-Stadt, Switzerland: European Graduate School. 4 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), "The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences" (tr. by James M. Edie). In: The Primacy of Perception (ed. J. Edie). Chicago: Northwestern University Press, p. 16. 5 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 6 Ibid. 7 DeLanda, M. (6/3—5/2008), Deleuze and Science. Seminar. Saas-Fee, Switzerland: European Graduate School. 8 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 9 Virilio, P., The University of Disaster. 10 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 11 Virilio, P., The University of Disaster. 12 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 13 Virilio, P., The University of Disaster. 14 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 15 Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (tr. by Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 16 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 17 Ibid. 18 Smithers, T. (1996), "On What Embodiment Might Have to Do with Cognition." AAAI Technical Report FS-96-02, pp. 113-116. 19 Iyer, V. (2008), "On Improvisation, Temporality, and Embodied Experience." In: Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (ed. Paul D. Miller). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 273-292. 20 Davis, E. (2008), "'Roots and Wires'" Remix: Polyrhythmic Tricks and the Black Electronic." In Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (ed. Paul D. Miller). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 54. 21 Cage, J. (1961), "Experimental Music." In: Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, p. 9. 22 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 23 Roumain, D.B. (DBRX2008), "What One Must Do: Comments and Asides on Musical Philosophy." In: Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (ed. Paul D. Miller). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 356. 24 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 25 Smithers, T., "On What Embodiment Might Have to Do with Cognition," p. 113. 26 Ibid., p. 114. 27 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 28 Harper, D., The Online Etymology Dictionary. 29 Ettinger, B. L. (2006), "Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event." In: The MatrixialBorderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 172—198. 30 Deleuze, G. (1993), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 31 Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 32 Iyer, V., "On Improvisation, Temporality, and Embodied Experience," p. 275. 33 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 34 Iyer, V., "On Improvisation, Temporality, and Embodied Experience," p. 276. 35 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 36 Iyer, V., "On Improvisation, Temporality, and Embodied Experience," p. 277. 37 Ibid., p. 275. 38 Foster, G. R., Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. 39 Harper, D., The Online Etymology Dictionary. 40 Ibid. 41 Ettinger, B. L., "Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event," p. 182. 42 Ibid., pp. 181-182. 43 Ibid., p. 181. 44 Ibid., p. 182 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., p. 186. 47 Ibid., p. 182. 48 Ibid., p. 175. 49 Ettinger, B. L. (2006), "The Heimlich." In: The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 160. 50 Harper, D., The Online Etymology Dictionary. 51 Ettinger, B. L., "Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event," p. 186. 52 Ibid, p. 198. 53 Deleuze, G., The Fold. 54 Ettinger, B. L., "Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event," p. 186. 55 Deleuze, G. (03/05/1977), "On Music" (tr. Tim Murphy). In: Anti ČEdipe etMille Plateaux. http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html (acc. 10/9/11). 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 63 Deleuze, G., "On Music." 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Virilio, P., The University of Disaster. 68 Deleuze, G. (08/03/1977), "Sobre Musica." In: Anti Cdipe et Mille Plateaux. http://www. webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html (acc. 10/9/11). [When does a voice become musical? I would say, from the point of view of expression, that the musical voice is essentially a deterrito-rialized voice. Why does one want to say that? I think that there are things that are not music, and that nevertheless are very close to music.—author's translation] Bibliography 1. Cage, J. (1961), "Experimental Music." In: Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 7-12. 2. Davis, E. (2008), "'Roots and Wires" Remix: Polyrhythmic Tricks and the Black Electronic." In Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (ed. Paul D. Miller). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 53-72. 3. DeLanda, M. (6/3-5/2008), Deleuze and Science. Seminar. Saas-Fee, Switzerland: European Graduate School. 4. Deleuze, G. (1993), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 5. Deleuze, G. (03/05/1977), "On Music" (tr. Tim Murphy). In: Anti CEdipe et Mille Plateaux. http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html (acc. 10/9/11). 6. Deleuze, G. (08/03/1977), "Sobre Musica." In: Anti CEdipe et Mille Plateaux. http://www.webdeleuze.com (acc. 10/9/11). 7. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (tr. by Brian Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 8. Ettinger, B. L. (2006), "The Heimlich." In: The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 156-161. 9. Ettinger, B. L. (2006), "Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event." In: The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 172-198. 10. Foster, G. R. (2011), Lyric Dwelling: The Art and Ethics of Invitation and Occupation. Doctoral thesis. Leuk-Stadt, Switzerland: European Graduate School. 11. Harper, D. (2011), The Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline. com (acc. 12/7/11). 12. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964), "The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences" (tr. by James M. Edie). In: The Primacy of Perception (Ed. J. Edie). Chicago: Northwestern University Press. 13. Iyer, V. (2008), "On Improvisation, Temporality, and Embodied Experience." In: Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (ed. Paul D. Miller). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 273-292. 14. Roumain, D.B. (DBRX2008), "What One Must Do: Comments and Asides on Musical Philosophy." In: Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (ed. Paul D. Miller). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 353-359. 15. Smithers, T. (1996), "On What Embodiment Might Have to Do with Cognition." AAAI Technical Report FS-96-02, pp. 113-116. 16. Virilio, P. (4/1-2/2009), The University of Disaster. Seminar. La Rochelle, France: European Graduate School. Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 IN/POSSIBLE RELATION BEING, TIME, DEATH Julia H o l zl* Because they were pressing me to my body and to the very body and it was then that I exploded everything because my body can never be touched. [Antonin Artaud] Dis/embodiments Because my body can never be touched, because to touch my body is to touch some body else, always, this beginning will be, first and foremost, on the un-touch-ability of the body, of every body, of everybody; this beginning, as if there could be a beginning, will commence, then, with the question: " Comment toucher? And as the question or program of rhetoric, of an art of speech, is it only metaphorical? What does a word touch, if not a body? But there you have it: How can one get hold of the body?"1 There we2 have it: elsewhere, always somewhere else, as we will see. And how can one get hold of the body if there is no body, but only my body—there is always a singular mine-ness involved with the body— how can one, then, touch, or, rather, how does a—there is no the/re for it—body touch? How to touch that which touches, and how to touch that which cannot be touched? How, then, to think, how to think the body, how, then, to think no body? And what does a body touch if not itself, no body, that is, for there is no body for the body, and how to word this world3 — "a world in which nothing is either present or absent, where there is neither proximity nor distance, where everything escapes, leaving us the illusion of having everything"?4 How, then, to word within this world, without any body to word? The body, a no body, does not belong, the body belongs nowhere, now here, no where; and not only does it "not belong; it is mortal immortal; it is unreal, imaginary, fragmentary. Patient. In its patientness the body is thought already—still just thought."5 The body, and what is a body—we cannot and perhaps even must not know—"[t]he body does not know; but it is not ignorant either. Quite simply, it is elsewhere. It is from elsewhere, another place, another regime, another register".6 Elsewhere, always, the body, being merely a medium, being, perhaps, in and as itself, being, maybe, some body else, someone else's body, cannot be embodied by us. Thus "[w]hat if the body was simply there, given, abandoned, without presupposition, simply posited, weighed, weighty?"7 What if the body was simply there, out there, untouchable, what if the body eluded its appropriation? What, then, if all there is was a there is, a Blanchotian il y a? And, most importantly, what if it was precisely the body to de-signate such given? Perhaps the body, as as-signed by Nancy,8 is indeed to be seen as "the articulation, or better yet, the organ or organon of the sign: it is, for our entire tradition, that in which sense is given and out of which sense emerges." It makes, and it is to be made: " [s]ign of itself and being-itself of the sign", formulates Nancy9 "the double formula of the body in all its states, in all its possibilities." This double formula of the body makes for the body, makes the body to be first and last, makes it "total signi-fier, for everything has a body, or everything is a body (this distinction loses its importance here), and body is the last signifier, the limit of the signifier".10 All this implies, however, that there could be signification, and this is, after all, how we tend to speak of it: taking away its fundamentally origin-al mode, we grant it a meaning. But, we must not forget, "[a] ll this would be possible only if we had access to bodies, only if they were not impenetrable, as physics defines them. Bodies impenetrable to language, and languages impenetrable to bodies, bodies themselves, like this word 'body,' which already withholds itself and incorporates its own entry."11 It is from this very impass(e)ability of the body that Nancy12 deduces that the body "never ceases to contradict itself. It is the place of contradiction par excellence. Either it is by the body and through it that signification occurs, and then signification falls within its boundaries [...], or it is from the body and on it that signification takes shape and is deposited, and signification never stops reaching toward this proper locus where it should endlessly curl up into itself." By the body, from the body, on the body: all this implies the possibility of proximity, of a certain intimacy to be had, and such is the site where contradiction takes place. To name the body a place of contradiction is precisely this: the body is to be imagined (there is no is for it), and there is no proximity that were not bodily. There is no proximity that were not bodily, for there is nothing outside the body, any body, and no body that were no(t at a) distance. In distance, and perhaps only in distance, can there be relation, can there be relation of touch, can there be relation that touches. (How) to touch: such is to form a(s) distance. In order to be touchable, the body must remain a(s) distance: as that which can/not be touched. For there is no relation that were not from a distance, no distance that would not bear relation. There our looking lead us with this half we keep up relations [Paul Celan] No(t) wholes, but halves, eternally divided by and through difference. For, and to re-iterate Nancy13 once more, "[t]here can only be relation (the return, the appropriation of a subject to itself or between subjects, it amounts to much the same thing) if we start with an absolute distancing, without which there would be no possibility of proximity, of identity or strangeness, of subjectivity or thinghood. First and foremost, however, this distancing distends relation to the point of exposition: scarcely am I born before I am outside myself at an infinite distance, outside simply turned out, exposed to the rest of the world, to all things. And the same goes for everything, each one exposing universal exposition differently." And what is an exposition but an ex-position? Never from with/in, always at the edge, at an outside yet to be made, the close is a(s) closure; what is closest is the most distant, and this is why every touch, every body, bears its closure in and as itself. For only with,in such closure lies there an opening; and this is not a saying. To say is a saying of difference, to say is to say in difference. Thence every relation is as ex-position, a(s) dis-appropriation of the self, always already different, always in difference. In difference: the only form of relation possible. "Difference: the non-identity of the same, the movement of distance; that which carries, by carrying off, the becoming of interruption. Difference bears in its prefix the detour wherein all power to give meaning seeks its origin in the distance that holds it from this origin."14 An origin-al difference inscribed in,to difference itself, and how to say this closure, how to say this closure that proximity is? Proximity is (as) approximation, it is the process of appropriation, and how to say this nearness, this nearest, the nearest, how to say it in and as nearness; and nearness is (as) distance, how to bring distance into relation, how to relate distance to relation, how to re-store (the etymological origin of "relate") distance (origin/ally a "standing apart")? To say distance as and through distance without appropriating it and/or making nearness out of it: such must be the aim here. "The distant calls to the near, repelling it, not to define itself in it by opposition, nor to form a couple with it by resemblance and difference, but in such a way that the separation between the two still belongs to the distant."15 A doubled distance, a separation of and in distance, then. Thus what must be thought is this: that there is nothing that could be thought, that both body and that which is closest (to it), are not, but are only in relation to each other; that both elude their think-ability, that both are what cannot be appropriated. Thus what must be said is this: that both relate to each other as that which is most distant; that all there is are distances, because there is no nearness for the body, no body for such nearness, but only dis/embod-ied distances. In order for there to be relation, there is to be a relation that relates to its difference: it is to "have a relation to that which excludes itself from any relation and which nevertheless indicates itself as absolute only in the relative mode (of the relation itself, multiple)."16 A relation en route, en passant, bearing witness to the almost, to the inchoateness of relation/ality, to the fact that there is no close, and yet that such close is all there is. Hence relation is possible only as an approaching, always yet a(t) distance, an such relation is, evidently, a relation of and in Otherness, for such Other is the site where they assemble. Such is, certainly, "a thinking that is more than a thought one can think, more than a thought can think":17 for such un-thinkability is what means to think, such is to think the Other without thinking it as Same. And such is, after all, "a matter of thinking the heteronomy of the Other in the Same, where the Other does not subjugate the Same but awakens it and sobers it up. The Other sobers the Same by way of a sobering that is a thought more thoughtful than the thought of the Same, in a waking up that disturbs the astronomic repose of the world."18 No reconciliation but a relating of different relations ("[t]o cross the distant, to turn the distant back toward the distant without approach")19; Levinasian experiences of alterity, always. There ought, then, to be a distance, always. In order for there to be relation, distance must be kept. And for there to be relation, such relation must remain outside relation. Such relation is to remain different, is to remain a(s) different relation, a(s) relation of difference and in,difference. Neither one nor the other, but the Other, always. In order for there to be relation, there needs to be a fracture, and there needs to be a rupture, always. "Always, I come again.'—'In as much as you find in yourself the ability to remain at the furthest remove.'—'It is only here that I would find the distant.'"20 An absolute closeness: a distance to one's self. For the self "has its originarity in the loss of self";21 for the self is to remain Other, for the "identification of the self as such [.] can only take place once the subject finds itself or poses itself originarily as other than itself".22 For there can be no other self than anOther self: such must be the relation thought here. From one to the other, "[f]rom the other to the one, there is a relation, even if it is a relation without a link".23 There is a nearness, always, a nearness without nearness to be given. As Paul Celan "I insert-I have no choice-I insert the acute",24 or, to describe it with Blanchot,25 I insert (I have no choice) the immediate—"a word that designates what is so close that it destroys all proximity—a word before which we once again find ourselves [...] the immediate that allows no mediation, the absence of separation that is absence of relation as well as infinite separation because this separation does not reserve for us the distance and the future we need in order to be able to relate ourselves to it, to come about in it. Thus we can begin to surmise that "impossibility"—that which escapes, without there being any means of escaping it—would be not the privilege of some exceptional experience, but behind each one and as though its other dimension." It is thus that we enter the in/possibility26 of relation. In/possibility: a possibility/not. The prefix "in" designates closeness and distance at the same time; a within, and yet also a without: neither, and nor. A possibility that is not yet given, but that might be inherent, a possibility always yet to be-come. As such, is has no presence. It is thus that we enter what Blanchot27 names "the relation of the third kind (the first being a mediate relation of dialectical or objective identification, the second a relation demanding immediate unity). Now what 'founds' this third relation, leaving it still unfounded, is no longer proximity—proximity of struggle, of services, of essence, of knowledge, or of recognition, not even of solitude—but rather the strangeness between us: a strangeness it will not suffice to characterize as a separation or even as a distance. — Rather an interruption. — An interruption escaping all measure. But—and here is the strangeness of this strangeness—such an interruption (one that neither includes nor excludes) would be nevertheless a relation; at least if I take it upon myself not to reduce it, not to reconcile it, even by comprehending it, that is, not to seek to consider it as the 'faltering' mode of a still unitary relation." It is thus that we might enter relation as such. Death "Let us enter into this relation. To death we are not accustomed."28 To death we are not accustomed, for death, as the body, is that which cannot be owned, that which cannot be appropriated and that is yet ours. Death: that which we own (without which we cannot be), that which is ours, and that, at the same time, is Other, always Other. Death, it is well known, is the endless Other that cannot be attained. Its ending is endless, and yet always already ending. There is no presence for the end. To death we are not accustomed. Death: the utmost ex-posure to distance, and, at the same time, to that which is closest. We are with,in death, always already, to live is to die, for death does not take place. Death: a Blanchotian pas, a step, not, a step not beyond. Death cannot be done (with); each time, death must be faced, one time. "^ey do not think of death, having no other relation but with death."29 Let us, then, enter into this relation. Let us enter into this relation where there is no relation, for it is death that opens the in/possibility of relation. It does so by being in/possible: as possibility of impossibility (Heidegger) and as impossibility of possibility (Blanchot). And if, argues the latter,30 "if possibility has its source in our very end [...] it is from this same source that "impossibility" originates, though now sealed orig-inarily and refusing itself to all our resources: there where dying means losing the time in which one can still come to an end and entering into the infinite "present" of a death impossible to die". And yet, as pointed out by Levinas,31 "[i]t is not with the nothingness of death, of which we precisely know nothing, that the analysis must begin, but with the situation where something absolutely unknowable appears. Absolutely unknowable means foreign to all light, rendering every assumption of possibility impossible". Let us enter into this (non-)relation, let us enter into this momentary site where distance and proximity meet. Time It is time it were time. It is time , reminds us Paul Celan in Corona. It is time it were about time, here, here, within time, as if there was an outside of, to time. And yet such outside of time is all there is. For time is retarded. Time is remembrance, is anticipated remembrance, and we need to remember: Time does not take place, time is not, time [is]. Time is nothing but an 'as if'; there is no witness for time. Time, then, passes, and it origin/ates from this its passing.32 Here, we will follow Nancy33 once more and try to ex-pose ourselves "to what happens with time, in time". Such ex-posure, such ex (forth) ponere (to put, to place), such putting forth then, is certainly itself an origination, and it is only within such ex-position to time that time, "the element of thinking", can be thought. To think time from within time (and there is no inside of time): This is to think, this is the task to be thought. A difficult task, certainly, and perhaps the only task ever given—maybe precisely because, as Derrida34 reminds us, it is always already too late "to ask the question of time. The latter has already appeared". Its appearance is, of course, a dis/appearance. A la recherche du temps perdu: For time, always unique, always out of (its) time, remains untimely. For time is behind the times, for time is a(s) beyond, is a(s its) withdrawal. Time is only when it is not; time is, to recall Bergson,35 "what hinders everything from being given at once. It retards, or rather it is retardation. It must, therefore, be elaboration. Would it not then be a vehicle of creation and choice? Would not the existence of time prove that there is indetermination in things? Would not time be that indetermination itself?" And would not indetermination prove that there is time? Would not indetermination be the only way of experiencing time? The experience of time, we are well aware of this, is tied to the idea and, consequently, to the representation and/or represenciation of presence: „From Parmenides to Husserl, the privilege of the present has never been put into question. It could not have been [...] no thought seems possible outside its element. Nonpresence is always thought in the form of presence [...]. The past and the future are always determined as past presents or as future presents".36 This is "the enigma of the now";37 these are the indeterminable im-passes to be addressed here. Far from being original—after all, origination does not possess an origin: the origin is nothing but origination itself—, far from being co-herent—we will only touch on the impasse of touching some of the impasses it touches—, we shall thus continue to make up something that is not, something that is not even as 'is not', that is only as in/possibility. The first point, or rather text, of origin here is Derrida's relatively early 'Ousia and Gramme: Note on a note from Being and Time, wherein he, as Derrida himself traces his text in Aporias,38 "treated the question of the present, of presence and of the presentation of the present, of time, of being, and above all of nonbeing, more precisely of a certain impossibility as nonviability, as nontrack or barred path". In the very beginning of the note that Derrida aims to extend—the longest in Being and Time—, Heidegger notes that Hegel, for prioritising the now, remains "under the sway of the traditional conception of time", a vulgar conception that is, and, as he excitedly adds, "[it] can even be shown that his conception of time has been drawn directly from the 'physics' of Aristotle". This being quoted, we cannot and perhaps do not even wish to further elaborate on Derrida's subsequent detailed elaborations on Hegel and Aristotle. Let us just note that already for Aristotle the now does by no means represent a present presence—rather, it is to be conceived as something that is not: "In one sense it has been and is no longer, and in another sense, it will be and is not yet", as he is quoted by Derrida.39 Yet, as the latter40 rightly asks, "is not what Heidegger designates beneath these points of reference that which is most simple? [.] Has not the entire history of philosophy been authorized by the 'extraordinary right' of the present?" It is obvious, perhaps all too obvious, what Derrida attempts to demonstrate here: pre-cipitating his conclusion that time is metaphysical, he suggests that Heidegger (at least in Being and Time) remains metaphysical himself and that there might be no vulgar conception of time—for, as he states, the concept of time "names the domination of presence. Therefore we can only conclude that the entire system of metaphysical concepts [...], develops the so-called 'vulgarity' of the concept of time [...], but also that an other concept of time cannot be opposed to it, since time in general belongs to metaphysical conceptuality".41 And yet it is precisely the ordinary that is itself always already "exceptional, however little we understand its character as origin. What we receive most communally as 'strange' is that the ordinary itself is origi-nary", as Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us.42 The ordinary, seen as such, is al-ways-already extra-ordinary; the ordinary is always originating an Other (access), just as time is always an Other. And just as the "desire for the exception presupposes disdain for the ordinary",43 the metaphysical (desire for a) conception of time assumes that time itself were extraordinary. However, as there indeed can be no other concept of time, we must not succumb to the temptation of a mere overcoming of such thinking,44 as such overcoming falls back into the same thinking it tries to overcome: ta meta ta metaphysika: metaphysika, or: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. It was, after all, Heidegger himself to remind us that each reversion of metaphysics remains metaphysical.45 But it was also Heidegger who coined the term Verwindung: a concept somewhat similar to the term 'overcoming' (Uberwindung), while at the same time replacing this dialectic connotation by two meanings, namely Genesung/convales-cence and Vrdrehung/distortion.46 There is no way out of metaphysics; the only way out is through. To think presence differently is, therefore, not to be based on a reversion of the metaphysical concept of time, but it is to be a tracing— and it is thus that we enter Derrida's second motif regarding his extension of the footnote,47 namely "[t]o indicate [.] a direction not opened by Heidegger's mediation: the hidden passageway that makes the problem of presence communicate with the problem of the written trace." Certainly the idea of the trace is by no means post-metaphysical; the metaphysical traces remain, remain within the trace itself, as the very names given to the trace "belong as such to the text of metaphysics that shelters the trace, and not to the trace itself";48 there is no presence for this trace: being a trace, presence "could not appear or be named as such, that is, in its presence. It is the as such which precisely, and as such, evades us forever". Like Barthes'49 third or obtuse meaning, presence "is a signifier without a signified, hence the difficulty in naming it".50 And this very impasse of naming reflects the impasse of thinking; the task of thought, one might dare to name it philosophy, is to trespass this impasse. Probably the most non-metaphysical gesture, if it were possible at all, would be to name: To name is to release the name from an impossible meaning—to name is to name the metaphysical trace that cannot be named. We are already beyond whatever we have words for, reminds us Nietzsche;51 and thus it has to be named as such, as the very naming of that which cannot be named: presence, and time as such. And such time, it seems certain, must be a time beyond time; for it is outside time that presence takes place. To be in time is to be elsewhere. Being "Non-present, non-absent; it tempts us in the manner of that which we would not know how to meet, save in situations which we are no longer in".52 Death, we remember, remains an in/possibility, the possibility yet to be/ come. As such, what we are facing is not a Heideggerian being-toward-death, but rather a being-toward-the-end, always. Our being "is in the mode of being-toward-the-end, and that what constitutes an event in this being [Dasein] is to go to its end. The energy or the very power of being is already the power of its end. There is a new and irreducible relationship here: it is irreducible to a distance in regard to what remains outside of and distinct from a ripening."53 It is in finitude that being is, and being itself is finite. Being is (in) time, and this time, the time of being, is (in) finitude: finitude designates the horizon of time, the origin/ation of time; original time is finite, as elucidated by the early Heidegger. Here, being shall be thought in and from the end: a(s) passage towards the limit, a(s) relation not/beyond, but elsewhere, always some- where else. In order to think the time of being, absence must be thought beyond its own presence— beyond its absence, that is. A with-drawal of its relation to—(presence), a thinking-it as such. We must, therefore, by no means invent a different presence for this absence that is not. For such absence, as Derrida reminds us, would either "give us nothing to think or it still would be a negative mode of presence. Therefore the sign of this excess must be absolutely excessive as concerns all possible presence-absence, [...] and yet, in some manner it must still signify, in a manner unthinkable by metaphysics as such. In order to exceed metaphysics it is necessary that a trace be inscribed within the text of metaphysics, a trace that continues to signal [...] in the direction of an entirely other text. [...] The mode of inscription of such a trace in the text of metaphysics is so unthinkable that it must be described as an erasure of the trace itself. The trace is produced by its own erasure".54 Such inscription is, then, to inscribe a presence that is not is to inscribe only to withdraw. Thus, to inscribe a presence "not to (re)present it or to signify it, but to let come to one and over one what merely presents itself at the limit where inscription itself withdraws".55 Consequently, ousia or Wesen shall no longer be conceived in terms of (its) presence, but thought (of) as ap_ousiai,56 literally un-presences: In contrast to parousia,57 de-signating the presence of that which has already arrived, ap_ousiai, still bearing the metaphysical trace of the idea of presence and absence, is to de-signate the presence of absence, the absence of presence, and yet something situated beyond both. For it is only here, within this very (non)passage of and towards such beyond, that the in/possibility of presence is opened, and it is, then, only through an ab-sense of sense that (its) presence is witnessed—a presence which, to write with Nancy,58 "is not essence, but [...] birth to presence: birth and death to the infinite presentation of the fact that there is no ultimate sense, only a finite sense, finite senses, a multiplication of singular bursts of sense resting on no unity or substance. And the fact, too, that there is no established sense, no establishment, institution or foundation of sense, only a coming, and comings-to-be of sense." What is of relevance here is the gap between: its mode of relation is that of a Verwindung. The blank, the gap, or, in German, Leerzeichen, literally an empty sign, an empty character, designates the only relation possible. Ap_ousiai are beyond, yet they are tracing themselves, and, as la differance, they might allow for "a writing without presence and without absence".59 Situated beyond this opposition presence: absence, beyond themselves and, therefore also situated beyond the postmodern novum, they are both fracture and co-relation. Here, we obviously face the same impasse as is the case with differance: such fissure cannot be heard, but only written. Within the empty sign, without a signifier, presence is no longer thought (of) as (its) and through presenciation. Presence, it should be clear by now, presence is an empty sign. And "[p]resence, then, far from being [...] what the sign signifies, what a trace refers to, presence, then, is the trace of the trace, the trace of the erasure of the trace".60 What we still face, towards this ending, as if there was an end, is the impasse; what we still face is the in/possibility, or shall we say potential?, of and for presence, that is. We must thus insert, we have no choice, we must insert "the old, worn-out Greek term aporia".61 We remember: aporos, without passage, "indeed the nonpassage, which can in fact be something else, the event of a coming or of a future advent, which no longer has the form of the movement that consists in passing, traversing, or transiting".62 Having "come to pass", always, "the aporia, that is, the impossible, the impossibility", that which "cannot pass [...] or come to pass",63 the aporia might indeed attest to "the fact that the impossibility would be possible and would appear as such, as impossible, as an impossibility that can nevertheless appear or announce itself as such"64 — it is as such that the aporia is. There is in fact no possibility without impossibility, for such possibility would not be possible. ^e possibility of presence would be past or future, for "[s]uch is the logic of the present: at this precise moment, the moment erases itself, and this is how it is a moment."65 Such is "the paradox of the present: to constitute time while passing in the time con-stituted".66 Such is the impasse of the present: a poiesis ofthe only once, as the only once. Such is to be thought: To think the once at once; only one time: the only time. But can we even pose the question of an in/possibility of presence?67 Is not every saying of presence a pre-supposition, an anticipation of something that is no(t) yet? And yet is within presence, and maybe within presence alone, that in/possibility occurs, for "it concerns the impossibility of [time] itself, and not merely the impossibility of this or that"?68 Presence is the ultimate aporia. And this is why presence "can never [...] be endured as such. The ultimate aporia is the impossibility of aporia as such".69 Can one then, Derrida70 asks, "[c]an one speak [...] of an experience [.] of the aporia as such? Or vice versa: Is an experience possible that would not be an experience of the aporia?" We know that we cannot know about the aporia: this might be its first, its only condition. The aporia can be experienced only as such: as aporia. And it is precisely because of this its impossibility that the apo-ria, that presence can be experienced. Like presence, it is (possible) only when it is not: when remaining impossible. Simultaneously witnessing and anticipating a presence that is always already a no longer, this trace re-presents a trace always already erasing itself. And so it might be the no longer that bears witness to the present, and its presence presents itself as the very trace of the presence that it is pre-tend-ing to present. There is, in this end, as if there was an end, no presence for proximity, no presence for the close. Neither present nor absent, proximity is as approximation, relates to that which is furthest, is "the ability to remain at the furthest remove".71 Every attempt to im-pose a presence external to it, every effort of making it a with—, violates its only once, its in/possibility of presence, that is. Touch, relation, proximity: a relating to and as presence, a simulation of the in/possible experience of the aporia. There is no presence for relation. Neither present nor absent, relation is (as) impass(e)ability: the ability to bear the impossible, the impasse, the aporia: such must be the closeness of relation, each time. Only thus can there be opened a possibility of in/possibility, only thus can there be proximity. In/possibility: the only form of possibility possible. Such must be the condition for our being-in-time, for our being-toward-the-end. * Julia Holzl, currently pursuing a second doctorate at the Centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, is the Maurice Blanchot Fellow at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Institute of International Studies at Ramkhamhaeng University, Bangkok. Notes 1 Nancy, J.-L. (1993), "Corpus" (tr. by Claudette Sartiliot). In: J.-L. Nancy, The Birth to Presence (tr. by B. Holmes & others). Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 190 (pp. 189—207). 2 "We": here by no means to be seen as violent appropriation, but rather to be understood in terms of a Being Singular Plural sensu Jean-Luc Nancy. 3 And what do we, after all, "know of the being-being of the body, and of the being-body of being? Perhaps nothing yet. Philosophy is certainly not the one to tell us." (Nancy, J-L., "Corpus", p. 196). 4 Blanchot, M. (1993), The Infinite Conversation (translation and foreword by S. Hanson). Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 96. 5 Blanchot, M. (1995), The Writing of the Disaster (tr. by A. Smock). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, p. 45. 6 Nancy, J.-L., "Corpus", p. 199. 7 Ibid., p. I99f. 8 Ibid., p. 192. 9 Ibid., p. 194. 10 Ibid., p. I95. 11 Ibid., p. I89. 12 Ibid., p. I92f. 13 Nancy, J.-L. (2003), "Res ipsa et ultima" (tr. by Steven Miller). In: J.-L. Nancy, A Finite Thinking (ed. Simon Sparks). Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 315 (pp. 311—318). 14 Blanchot, M., Infinite Conversation, p. 170. 15 Blanchot, M. (1992), The Step Not Beyond (translated and with an introduction by Lycette Nelson). New York: State University of New York Press, p. 69f. 16 Ibid., p. 6. 17 Levinas, E. (2000), God, Death, and Time (tr. by Bettina Bergo, edited and annotated by Jacques Rolland). Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 141. 18 Ibid., p. 143. 19 Blanchot, M., Step Not Beyond,, p. 69. 20 Ibid., p. 33. 21 Nancy, J.-L. (2000), "Of Being singular plural". In: Being singular plural (tr. by R. D. Richardson and A. E. O'Bryne). Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 78 (pp. I—99). 22 Ibid., p. 77. 23 Levinas, E., God, Death, and Time, p. I40. 24 Celan, P. (2005), "The Meridian" (tr. by J. Glenn). In: J. Derrida, Sovereignities in Question. The Poetics of Paul Celan ( eds. T. Dutoit and O. Pasanen). New York: Fordham University Press, p. I75 (pp. I73—I85). 25 Blanchot, M., Infinite Conversation, p. 44f. 26 In: "not, opposite of, without" (see http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=in-&allowed_in_frame=0). 27 Blanchot, M., Infinite Conversation, p. 68. 28 Thus begins Blanchot "The Step Not Beyond". 29 Blanchot, M., Writing of the Disaster, p. 40. 30 Blanchot, M., Infinite Conversation, p. 44f. 31 Levinas, E. (1989), "Time and the Other" (tr. by R. A. Cohen). In: E. Levinas, The Levinas Reader (ed. S. Hand), Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, p. 41 (pp. 37-58). 32 To re-call Heidegger's question [Heidegger, M. (2006), M., Sein undZeit. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, p. 425]: Why do we say that time passes and not that it originates? (We will not dwell on his answer here, which reads as: it is said to pass in order to re-tain it. The emphasis on the passing of time, Heidegger asserts in Sein und Zeit, expresses our experience that it cannot be retained—at the same time, this very experience is possible only because of our desire to retain time). 33 Nancy, J.-L. (2003), "The Kategorein of Excess" (tr. by J. Gilbert-Walsh and S. Sparks). In: J.-L. Nancy, Finite Thinking, pp. 136 (pp. 133-151). 34 Derrida, J. (1982), "Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time". In: J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (tr. by Alan Bass). Chicago: Harvester Press, p. 42 (pp. 29-67). 35 Bergson, H. (2005), "The Possible and the Real" (tr. by M. L. Andison). In: Bergson, H., Key Writings (eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey). New York and London: Continuum, p. 224 (pp. 223-232). 36 Derrida, J. "Ousia and Gramme', p. 34. 37 Ibid., p. 61. 38 Derrida, J. (1993), Aporias (tr. by T. Dutoit). Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 13. 39 Derrida, J., Ousia and Gramme', p. 39 (217b). 40 Ibid., p. 38. 41 Ibid., p. 63. 42 J.-L. Nancy, "Being singular plural", p. 10. 43 Ibid. 44 See also Heidegger [Heidegger, M. (1989), Gesamtausgabe (ed. by F.-W. von Herrmann), III. Abteilung: Unveroffentlichte Abhandlungen, Vortrage-Gedachtes, Band 65, Beitrage zur Phi-losophie (Vom Ereignis). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann: p. 173]: "Eben deshalb darf aber auch das ubergangliche Denken nicht der Versuchung verfallen, das, was es als Ende und im Ende begriffen hat, nun einfach hinter sich zu lassen, statt dieses hinter sich zu bringen, d.h. jetzt erst in seinem Wesen zu fassen und dieses gewandelt in die Wahrheit des Seyns einspielen zu lassen." 45 See Heidegger [Heidegger, M. (2000), Uber den Humanismus. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, p. 20]: "Aber die Umkehrung eines metaphysischen Satzes bleibt ein meta-physischer Satz". 46 See Vattimo, G. (1994), "Nihilismus und Postmoderne in der Philosophie" (tr. by W. Welsch, assisted by B. Hesse). In: Wege aus der Moderne. Schlusseltexte der Postmoderne-Diskussion (ed. W. Welsch). Berlin: Akademie Verlag, p. 240 (pp. 233-246). 47 Whereas the first one is "[t]o read in it [...] the Heideggerian question about presence as the ontotheological determination of the meaning of Being" (J. Derrida, "Ousia and Gramme', p. 33ff.). 48 Ibid., p. 66. 49 Barthes, R. (1978), "The Third Meaning. Research notes on some Eisenstein stills". In: Barthes, R., Image Music Text (tr. by S. Heath). New York: Hill and Wang, p. 61 (pp. 52-68). 50 As Barthes states for the obtuse meaning (=and idea of the letter a is neither a first definition nor a prophetic announcement of a forth-coming and yet unheard naming: see Derrida, J. (2004), "Die differance" (tr. by E. Pfaffenberger-Bruckner). In: Derrida, J., Die differance. Ausgewdhlte Texte (ed. P. Engelmann), Stuttgart: Reclam, p. 146 (pp. 110-149). 51 Freely adapted from his Gotzen-Ddmmerung [Nietzsche, F. (2005), Gesammelte Werke (eds. W. Deninger and W. Linden), Bindlach: Gondrom, p. i086/§26, (pp. 1051-1101)]: "Wofur wir Worte haben, daruber sind wir auch schon hinaus". 52 Blanchot, M., Step Not Beyond,, p. 6. 53 Levinas, E., God, Death, and Time, p. 44. 54 Derrida, J., "Ousia and Gramme', p. 65. 55 Nancy, J.-L. (2003), "Elliptical Sense" (tr. by J. Derbyshire). In: J.-L. Nancy, Finite Thinking, p. 110 (pp. 91-111). 56 In relation to Heidegger's conception (Sein undZeit, p. 25 of a "Bestimmung des Sinnes von Sein als n«pouma, bzw. ouaia", which means Anwesenheit, presence. 57 8. Parousia: the second coming, the arrival of presence—the ultimate re-presentation. 58 Nancy, J.-L. (2003), "A Finite Thinking" (tr. by E. Bullard, J. Derbyshire, and S. Sparks). In: J-L. Nancy, Finite Thinking, p. 27 (pp. 3-30). 59 Derrida, J., "Ousia and Gramme', p. 67. 60 Ibid., p. 66. 61 Derrida, J., Aporias, p. 12. 62 Ibid., p. 8. 63 Ibid. p. 23. 64 Ibid., p. 73. 65 Nancy, J.-L., (1997), The Technique of the Present. Lecture given at the Nouveau Musee during the exposition of On Kawara's works "Whole and Parts—1964—1995" (January 1997), available at www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-luc-nancy/articles/the-technique-of-the-present/. 66 Deleuze, G. (2004), Difference and Repetition (tr. by P. Patton). London and New York: Continuum, p. i00. Though we must avoid his "necessary conclusion— that there must be another time in which the first synthesis of time can occur". 67 As Derrida (Aporias, p. 21 asks about the question of (his) death. 68 Ibid., p. 72. 69 Ibid., p. 78. 70 Ibid., p. i5. 71 Blanchot, M., Step Not Beyond,, p. 33. Bibliography 1. Barthes, R. (1978), "The Third Meaning. Research notes on some Eisenstein stills". In: R. Barthes, Image Music Text (tr. by S. Heath). New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 52-68. 2. Bergson, H. (2005), "The Possible and the Real" (tr. by M. L. Andison). In: H. Bergson, Key Writings (eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey). New York and London: Continuum, pp. 223-232. 3. Blanchot, M. (1992), The Step Not Beyond (translated and with an introduction by L. Nelson). New York: State University of New York Press. 4. Blanchot, M. (1993), The Infinite Conversation (translation and foreword by S. Hanson). Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. 5. Blanchot, M. (1995), The Writing of the Disaster (tr. by A. Smock). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 6. Celan, P. (2005), "The Meridian" (tr. by J. Glenn). In: J. Derrida, Sovereignities in Question. The Poetics of Paul Celan (eds. T. Dutoit and O. Pasanen). New York: Fordham University Press, pp. i73-i85. 7. Deleuze, G. (2004), Difference and Repetition (tr. by P. Patton). London and New York: Continuum. 8. Derrida, J. (1982), " Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time'. In: J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (tr. by Alan Bass). Chicago: Harvester Press, pp. 29-67. 9. Derrida, J. (1993), Aporias (tr. by T. Dutoit). Stanford: Stanford University Press. 10. Derrida, J. (2004), "Die differance" (tr. by E. Pfaffenberger-Bruckner). In: Derrida, J., Die differance. Ausgewahlte Texte (ed. P. Engelmann), Stuttgart: Reclam, pp. 110-149. 11. Heidegger, M. (1989), Gesamtausgabe (ed. by F.-W. von Herrmann), III. Abteilung: Unveroffentlichte Abhandlungen, Vortrage-Gedachtes, Band 65, Bei-trage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. 12. Heidegger, M. (2000), Uber den Humanismus. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. 13. Heidegger, M (2006), M., Sein undZeit. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 14. Levinas, E. (2000), God, Death, and Time (tr. by B. Bergo, edited and annotated by J. Rolland). Stanford: Stanford University Press. 15. Levinas, E. (1989), "Time and the Other" (tr. by R. A. Cohen). In: E. Levinas, The Levinas Reader (ed. S. Hand), Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, pp. 37-58. 16. Nancy, J.-L. (1993), "Corpus" (tr. by C. Sartiliot). In: J.-L. Nancy, The Birth to Presence (tr. by B. Holmes & others). Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 189-207. 17. Nancy, J.-L., (1997), The Technique of the Present. Lecture given at the Nouveau Musee during the exposition of On Kawara's works "Whole and Parts—1964—1995" (January 1997), available at www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-luc-nancy/articles/the-tech-nique-of-the-present/. 18. Nancy, J.-L. (2000), "Of Being singular plural". In: Being singular plural (tr. by R. D. Richardson and A. E. O'Bryne). Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. I-99. 19. Nancy, J.-L. (2003), "A Finite Thinking" (tr. by E. Bullard, J. Derbyshire, and S. Sparks). In: J.-L. Nancy, A Finite Thinking (ed. S. Sparks). Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 3-30. 20. Nancy, J.-L. (2003), "Elliptical Sense" (tr. by J. Derbyshire). In: J.-L. Nancy, Finite Thinking, pp. 9I-III. 21. Nancy, J.-L. (2003), "The Kategorein of Excess" (tr. by J. Gilbert-Walsh and S. Sparks). In: J.-L. Nancy, Finite Thinking, pp. I33-I5I. 22. Nancy, J.-L. (2003), "Res ipsa et ultima" (tr. by Steven Miller). In: J.-L. Nancy, Finite Thinking, pp. 3II-3I8. 23. Nietzsche, F. (2005), „Gotzen-Dammerung". In: F. Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke (eds. W. Deninger and W. Linden), Bindlach: Gondrom, pp. I05I-II0I. 24. Vattimo, G. (I994), "Nihilismus und Postmoderne in der Philosophie" (tr. by W. Welsch, assisted by B. Hesse). In: Wege aus der Moderne. Schlusseltexte der Postmoderne-Diskussion (ed. W. Welsch). Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 233—246. (jVLCUi, n* . Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF BEING SELF/OTHER Roula Haj-Ismail* Then, between her and I between him and I between me and I between. perceiving, being, knowing and taking action. Bodily proximity to my own physical body to someone else's physical body to the idea of my body to the idea of someone else's body. to perceiving, being, relating Bodily proximity is impossible. Bodily proximity is impossible because of my body. My body gets in the way. The body is a hindrance to any kind of bodily proximity. My body prohibits me from entering into any kind of proximity. My body is an obstacle. My body is a checkpoint. My body is a barbed wire. My body is a pain!!!! Introduction "No one ever says, Here am I, and I have brought my body with me." A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought.1 With the writings of Irigaray, Haraway, Ettinger, Butler and others, feminist discourse has moved beyond the critique and deconstruction of traditional Western philosophy. When I use the term traditional West- ern philosophy I am referring specifically to its phallocentric, patriarchal discourse, where binary oppositions and dichotomies have served to delineate women to the less-able other or the non-existent other. Within this master/slave dialectic, wo-man roams outside the realm of the knowledge power systems, namely, language, science, and philosophy. From the 'psychoanalytic subject' defined, feminist philosophers have found and, at times have created, ruptures, spaces, and gaps to strategically play with, in order to 'skip a beat' and go back to the origins as Ettinger's pre-subject; stop, slow down and breathe as in Iriga-ray's subject as self-affection; or move beyond the subject as in Haraway's "Situated Knowledges". Along with the exclusion of women, comes the absence of the body as a dynamic force in shaping identity/ies, and creating knowledge(s). 2 My aim in writing this paper is two-fold. First of all I would like to highlight the role that Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Whitehead have played in accentuating the importance of the body in terms of knowing and being. In fact, they have paved the way for philosophers such as Iri-garay, and Haraway to formulate their own ideas regarding subjectivity and embodied knowledge. My second aim is to look at how an alternative pedagogy and art/artistic practices can lay the ground for a reworking of the body in terms of Nishida's "action-intuition", Haraway's "situated knowledge", and Tomaž Grušovnik's "embodied education". Finally, I would like use the concrete example of the Libyan revolution to address the question of the impossibility of bodily proximity; namely, when ideology enters the stage the body takes an exit. My Body is always me, My perceptions are me In the world is my body. My body helps me to perceive the world. My perception offers me an idea. I can know when I perceive. For Merleau Ponty the body is not an object but is the condition through which someone can have a relation with objects, that is, with the world. Merleau- Ponty emphasises the importance of the lived experience in grasping the nature of language, perception, and the body: "to be a body, is to be tied to a certain world"; he adds "our body is not primarily in space: it is of it".3 Merleau-Ponty is not interested in giving privilege to the body over the mind, or to offer a complete theory for both. He uses the concepts of experience and perception to highlight that the body cannot be articulated as either a subject or an object. Rather, that knowledge of one's body and knowledge of the world can only be accessed through the body. It is the experience of the body and the way the body shapes experience.4 Within, and in addition to, Merleau-Ponty's introduction of the body into the discourse of the ways of knowing, some feminist theorists have added an emphasis on the differential forms of embodiment that do fall within the normative boundaries of a universalised and gender-neutral body. The female body for example, is continuously changing through naturally occurring life events (menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, menopause).5 We have to be mindful of the fact that the very definition of what constitutes a body, may differ from one philosopher to another and that although we have utilised Merleau-Ponty's contribution to the discourse on the role of the body, this does not mean that we cannot challenge some of his premises. For feminists like Spivak, the rejection of the patriarchal discourse as universal, objective, neutral, entails a rejection of the definition of the body as a neutral and universal category. As Gayatri Spivak asserts: "There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body as such cannot be thought".6 There are only multiple bodies, marked by an infinite number of differences, including: race, class, sexuality, age, and mobility status-none are solely determinate. Here the universal category of the body is lost. Unlike the disembodiment evident in masculinist discourse this disappearance is in favour of a fluid and open embodiment.7 For Merleau Ponty, perception is always an embodied perception that can only take place within a specific site or context. Therefore, there is no body-in-itself and there is no perception-in-itself. He writes that the "perceiving mind is an incarnated mind.8 There is only perception as it is lived in the world. So what happens to the subject within Merleau-Ponty's understanding? The subject is the perceiving subject that is continually changing through a process of re- birth. What I know is dependent on what I perceive. My perceptions change and with them so do my ideas or what I know and don't know. The certainty of ideas is based on the certainty of perception. Therefore there are no universal entities at the level of ideas. In her book The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, Siri Hustvedt discusses Shaun Gallagher's distinction between body schema and body image. Influenced by Merleau-Ponty's writings on schema cor-porel, Gallagher describes the body schema as a "system of sensory motor capacities" (unconscious). While the body image is conscious-it is the beliefs and thoughts I have about my physical being. I is I as an object, a perception of my body from the outside.9 It will suffice for us here to end our discussion of Merleau Ponty's work by asking the question: If every subjective instance is a unity, present to itself, then what about the question of otherness?10 The other is what defines me. I am defined by my relation to an other and through language with the other I can become a subject. For Levinas the question of otherness plays a primary role in his philosophy. His radical questioning of otherness and subject/object relations has influenced many thinkers including: Sartre, Derrida, and Irigaray. Levinas's concept of "responsibility for the Other" reflects his own personal experiences and is highly contextual. For Levinas the Other is "prior to any act".11 Levinas is disenchanted with the universality offered by traditional western thought. He is not interested in ontology, epistemology or reason but rather the underside of rationality. He regards this as a positive force that challenges the dominance in philosophy of the universal, where the Other is reduced to the Same. Levinas defines transcendence as a rupture: an opening up to the Other while universality leads to disembodiment and idealism. He tries to bring together to closer proximity: thought and embodiment. In a 1985 interview, Levinas wrote that in 1948, while writing his lectures, titled Time and the Other, he thought that femininity was the modality of alterity that he was looking for.12 In a conversation with Bracha Ettinger about the feminine, Levinas answers: Woman is the category of the future, the ecstasy of the future. It is that human possibility which consists in saying that the life of another human be- ing is more important than my own, that the death of the other is more important than my own death, that the Other comes before me, that the Other counts before I do, that the values of the Other are imposed before mine. In the future there is what might happen to me. And then there's also my death.13 Similarly, Irigaray argues that the feminine is an alterity that one must think of outside of the patriarchal order of identity, or sameness. For Levinas, the Other arises in relation to others. This relation is prior to ontology and is a relation of ethical responsibility. It is a practical relation of one, to an other. It is a kind of moral proximity. The Other, is a "nudity". True nudity is the face (of the Other). "The face of the Other comes to us from the exterior. The face is by itself and not in reference to a system."14 The Other is the infinite in me, to the extent that he/she brings about a rupture in the self as an entity identical with itself. The self even poses itselffor the other rather than for itself. For Levinas, it is the encounter with the other, a face-to-face encounter that leads me to the formation of my own self. This ethical relationship with the Other, is possible because of language. Language enables links to be made between people. Language can be the existence of alterity. It cannot be reduced to a system of representation or to an order of the Same. Language is an extended epiphany. "It is the astonishment of the Other speaking in me which enables me to become a self in language".15 "I exists only in relation to you. Language takes place between people. ... Words cross the borders of our bodies in two directions, outside in and inside out, and therefore the minimal requirement for a living language is two people."16 The question that one must raise here and that Irigaray has tackled in her work is: How can one escape the clutches of ideology, and patriarchal imposition that has taken hold of language? Even in its very structure? The body is relational, I am a subject and an object, my body is an event, I can effect change through the technicity of my body. Spinoza describes affect as what accompanies a change of state from a higher or lower bodily experience. They are the powers of existence that are immediately relational. The relation is the interval. Whitehead, called this the non-sensuous perception: where the relation between the knower and the known is not stable. This is the affective tone: the total vastness of feeling that is unbounded. Every element in the world begins with affect. The affect unlike the emotion is what you cannot say. The feelings of the relevance of things precede our attending to something. The event has an affective tone to the objects because it cannot exist without the objects. So a person can be an object as well as a subject. Whitehead does not concern himself with the traditional concept of the subject/object relation. These two terms are relative terms. All modes of existence are trans-individual and collective. The pre-individual is an affective force of becoming and is collective in germ. For example: a flower (object) has a concern (apprehends) for the sun (object). Here the subject is 'flowering'. So that 'activity', replaces substance. There is no immobility, everything is an activity and has a duration.17 So that the chair is a subject, as much as we are, and has a concern: "sit-ability." But also like us has a multitude of possibilities of concern. This is a philosophy of activity, where the process is the focus. White-head maintains that reality consists in process and the unit of becoming is an "actual occasion". Such being the case our ordinary language will prove inadequate for representing the dynamism involved in the Whiteheadian logic. For Instance, I cannot say that I understand the proposition: "The book is black." unless I put it in the following form: The book which is here, at this moment, "blacks me".18 It is obvious that the term "blacks" is intended to establish the fact of relatedness between the book and me in a dynamic manner. The nature of our language is helpless. (Whitehead has made the remarkable observation of the inadequacy of our language for metaphysical manipulation.)19 For Whitehead, value and fact are inseparable. Feeling and reality are to be equally considered in order that a philosophy can claim comprehensiveness and be adequate. Similarly, propositions are matters of fact and lures of feeling. They may be felt under many attributes (subjective forms) such as consciousness, emotion, purpose, but feeling them does not even usually involve consciousness. Whitehead writes that "consciousness presupposes experience and not experience consciousness."20 The feelers are the subjects of the proposition. In the Whiteheadian philosophy of organism, an event is a process, a relation is a prehension, and the essence of an event is to prehend. In this philosophy the body is regarded as a site, an event: the body as relational. We need to look at the technicity of the body, and its potentiality. Every event generates a quality of 'ness'. Everything is prehensions. Physical prehensions are leftovers of an event. 21 Following in Whitehead's footsteps, we need to become artists of occasions. The body is an unstable event, an eternal object with pure potentialities. It is a site of production. The body is a technicity. The question arises here: If we are all multitudes of multiplicity, how about trying to mobilise these multiplicities? This could be the beginning of a different kind of politics, and an alternative site of change, in precognition, pre the I. There is a quality of experience that involves the intensity of our lives. We need to pay attention to the qualitative nature of our lives. How can we take action? Affect change? What are the conditions that allow for the sensation of more? Where can this happen? Alfredo Jaar and the Tabouli Performer both use their artwork as potential sites for the activation of the body, in terms of affect, and change. The body plays an active role in defining who we are, the historical body, action-intuition, through art Alfredo Jaar and the Tabouli Performer are two artists who have produced work that deal with the issues of subjectivity, otherness, and bodily proximity. Alfredo Jaar's bodily presence (public intervention art) enters a space as an observer. He uses time (duration) to construct some kind of understanding (memory) of the site. He looks specifically for some human event where the sense of otherness is implicated. Once he finds it he enters into the field of experience and begins to interact with it. His artwork is a kind of ethical gesture that uses art, language, silence, space, invisibility, and history to make an affect. His work delves into a feeling that is relational, temporal and ethical.22 Jaar's work is fundamentally about the human condition in a contextual framework. Before creating his art, he delves deep into the historical and social conditions of the space he is working in. Nishida in his notion of the expressive or historical body recognises the importance of embodiment for human interaction and communication. The body is not primarily a physical object and product of the natural world, but a historical subject and co-creator of the world. Insofar as the many historical bodies of the one world differ from each another, they too form a "discontinuous continuity". Nishida was fond of calling this type of unity, which holds together differences without sublating them, a "self-identity of absolute contra-dictories"23 Nishida terms it as 'action-intuition'. Both artist and work are formed mutually and are reflected in one another. Nishida described it in terms of the place or topos wherein intuiting entails acting and acting intuiting, and wherein the difference between internal and external collapses. Performative intuition is operative in praxis or political-social action as well, insofar as it grasps the world as including the self. Nishida emphasized that action-intuition is a bodily achievement, the performance of an embodied individual who in turn is formed by the world; again, both body and world must be conceived as historical. While "action-intuition" pertains to the dialectical way the individual historical body forms and is formed by the world, the way the world forms is described by the phrase "from the created to the creating".24 Partial-Limited-Specific-Post Subject/Object-but Object-ive The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision. All Western cultural narratives about objectivity are allegories of the ideologies governing the relations of what we call mind and body, distance and responsibility. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see.25 One method for artists to challenge fixed assumptions could be to create alternative representations of different experiences and identities by emphasizing different conceptions of womanhood in art. If identities can be reconstructed and negotiated, essentialized identities will be challenged. In light of this theory, art can be seen as a product of one's social world and one's social situated-ness.26 Different subjectivities can be sought out and analyzed to understand identities. Positioned insight can be a productive base for impacting culture when artwork is con-textualized in the artist's network. 27 This could lead to an embodied partiality, namely, a quest to embody knowledge and meanings in an individual. In order to make knowledge claims, analysts have to value the partiality of their own claims on their subjects. Haraway provides a metaphor of "vision" in order. Particulars are partial perspectives offered by artists and their works. This form of efficacy is not about universalism or transcendence but acknowledges that women artists are situated actors in societies and in art worlds.28 Jaber uses the work that I have done under the pseudonym of "The Tabouli Performer" to elucidate Haraway's concept of 'situated knowledge' and vice versa. She writes: "Haj-Ismail has the audacity to use her body in her performances. She uses her surroundings, her situatedness whether she is in Jeddah, Beirut, or Qatar to write about who she is and what she does into her performances. She is still Roula, but she is panning her roles on a wide screen for her audience to indulge in her different performance roles. Strathern suggests that to think about agency as the "subject in subject/ object relations" means that we can apply this idea regardless of "whether the subject is a person acting 'subjectively' or whether 'causes' lie in systems or social forces."29 Laura Marks in her book The Skin of the Film, appeals to the work of Middle Eastern filmmakers to visually express her concept of the haptic. One of those films is I wet my hands etched and surveyed vessels marked eyed inside. Laura Marks describes the film as one that appeals to an embodied memory by bringing vision as close as possible to the image: by converting vision to touch. Vision is brought close to the body and into contact with other sense perceptions, by making vision multi-sensory. This is done in part by refusing to make the images accessible to vision, so that the viewer must resort to other senses, such as touch, in order to perceive the images. An example from the film, are the shots of bomb-pocked walls, where the camera treats them like bodies, caressing the buildings, searching the corners of shutters and stone latticed windows like folds of skin.30 In her essay titled "Signs of the Times: Deleuze, Pierce and the Documentary Image", Marks uses Deleuze's cinematographic philosophy and the Bergsonian impact on his philosophy to claim that affection images like the ones in I Wet My Hands Etched and Surveyed Eyes Marked Inside, refer explicitly to a relationship between the 'body' of the image and the body of the viewer. Affection images ask to be felt, and in being felt they often are actualised in movement.31 The images might ask to be read, but only by the whole body, as a bodily contemplation. The affection images in Wet My Hands Etched and Surveyed Eyes Marked Inside, such as, the long nailed fingers caressing the Caesarean scar, invite a bodily response-a shudder, perhaps-but they do not extend into movement. Rather they are followed by an irrational cut (to the windows, themselves like scars) that invites continued, embodied, contemplation. Thus the affection-image is what Deleuze calls the ceremonial body. It offers a time-image that is both experienced in the body and invites a direct experience of time.32 Starting Early-Let my body take me to a place of knowing-Embodied Education and Inquiry. The impossible pedagogy is only possible in the concrete. It is perfectly cited in this quote: 'get a life before you get a theory'33 How can our conception of the body, and its proximity to being, and knowledge translate into the everyday? Outside of philosophy and outside of art? Within the daily business of 'bringing up' the next generation, the school as an educational institution can play a profound role. Is the possibility of a bodily proximity possible within an impossible pedagogy and an embodied education? As an educator and student I have been involved within the teaching of children for the past 19 years. Throughout this period the philosophy of education and pedagogical methods have changed but not dramatically. I am privileged to teach in a private institution to the privileged few where we are provided with ample resources, thorough training and somewhat decent wages. The students we teach come from wealthy families. Their lives are highly structured, where even extracurricular activities and hobbies are within a structure of lessons, competitions, and are always heavily guided. Furthermore they are often taken care of by 'nannies' where they acquire the art of 'learned-helplessness'. When I was introduced to the International Baccalaureate for Primary Years, I found my calling as an educator. The program was philosophy-based, conceptually loaded and inquiry was the preferred approach to learning. The students are encouraged to inquire into what is meaningful to them and to strive to become internationally minded individuals who fit a profile of a committed, caring individual who is not afraid to take action in order to make the world a better place. Furthermore, the teacher is a learner alongside the students and not an all-knowing subject! This is reminiscent of Heidegger's understanding of the role of the teacher as a facilitator and similarly to the student, is a member of the community of learners.34 IB learners strive to be: Inquirers, Knowledgeable, Thinkers, Communicators, Principled, Open-minded, Caring, Risk-takers, Balanced, and Reflective."35 In this program, free and open inquiries are valued as much as structured and guided inquiry. The bottom line of any unit we teach is always conceptual understanding, with primary focus on self-reflection. These themes promote an awareness of the human condition and an understanding that there is a commonality of human experience. The students explore this common ground collaboratively, from the multiple perspectives of their individual experiences and backgrounds.36 Furthermore, differentiating instruction with our students is encouraged as different students learn in different ways including kinaestheti-cally (by bodily 'doing').37 "Students are making connections between life in school, life at home and life in the world."38 At the Age of Breath conference, held in Portoroz, Slovenia in May, 2010, Tomaž Grušovnik presented a paper titled 'Embodied Education For Environmental Ethics'. He outlines the fact that we are living in environmental denial. We refuse to acknowledge the problem of environmental deterioration because it would be a denial of our own identity. He goes on to say: "If we are to get people to act we need an embodied, experiential education to engage people."39 My learning engagements with my students and others teachers in my school came to mind when I heard this. Although Grušovnik focuses on environmental ethics when he talks about embodied education, he also outlines that an embodied educa- tion first and foremost allows the possibility of overcoming the denial of a new identity. 40 Through these experiences the child develops a dynamic relationship with her own body in the process of a learning environment. To use one's body in order to interact with objects, nature, and others, the child will learn to trust his/her own body. This trust in oneself as a body could lead to a confidence to act. Fred Isseks in his book, Media Courage: Impossible Pedagogy in an Artificial Community, critiques the typical American High School. He writes it is a place that places emphasis on individualism, competitiveness, authoritarianism, alienation and moral indoctrination.41 What if we were to insert the term 'chora' here in its feminine understanding into the existing school spirit? What would be the outcome? Isseks describes the outcome as the "birthing place of understanding and creativity, more receptive, winnowing, nurturing, passive, expectant ... ." 42 For Isseks, within the cracks in the facades, in the corridors, and between the bricks there is the (im)possibility of a Paideia that entertains a chora i.e. a school spirit. Finally, Isseks concludes his book with the question: "Why struggle to realise an impossible Paideia when it is ... impossible?" He answers: "The goal of the impossible Paiedia is not impossible. It is not the creation of a community, nor is it absolute self-discovery. Rather it is a process of unfolding and opening".43 Schir-macher expresses this when he says: "the post-modern decision is about becoming a player rather than a spectator".44 Isseks writes: the impossible Paideia is about coming of age, of participating openly in an open community. The aim is to help students see the connections between themselves and their surroundings. the hope is that these connections will evoke a more engaged sense of community ... . The other hope is that students will come to better appreciate their corner of the earth, both physical and virtual.45 Back to basics-breathe in breathe out- Looking out, by looking in-Self Affection The dilemma that we will always face is the imposition of ideology and its hegemonic grip on all that we are and all that we do. Is it possible to speak and be heard outside ideology? Within the school environment, within the art world, within the freedom square? In my view, Irigaray's 'looking-in' is one potential possibility. "Sexual difference is an immediate natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal. The whole of human kind is composed of women and men and of nothing else."46 For Irigaray, bodily proximity to an-other is only possible if one first forms a relationship with his/her own self. She calls this self-affection and it begins with the premise we are men and women first and foremost with two different bodies. She goes on to say: "Without sexual difference, there would be no life on Earth. It is the manifestation of and the condition for the production and reproduction of life. Air and sexual difference may be the two dimensions vital for/to life".47 Men and Women comprise two different bodies and at least two ways of being, knowing, speaking, spiritualising "There are always at least two worlds."48 In a lecture presented at the Age of Breath conference, Irigaray describes self-affection as: the real dwelling to which we must always return with a view to faithfulness to ourselves and our inability to welcome the other as different. Dwelling within one's own self affection, opening oneself requires us to return our original 'home' to a natural human identity.49 Two universals: women and men. Self Affection helps us to grow and meet with the other without losing oneself and annihilating the other. "The woman would not have to quit her body ... . Her task would be, rather, to make divine this world-as body, as cosmos, as relations with others".50 "The human real is formed by two subjects, each one irreducible to the other".51 We can now move towards an encounter with an other without being consumed by him/her. We both have something to say, feel, offer. "I enter another space in which the field of attraction and orientation no longer obeys a single focus. I am no longer, in some way, the center of the world or the center of the unique world, even if this world has been inhabited before me. Desire attracts me to the other and tries to attract the other towards me. There is a possibility of an ethical relationship in what Irigaray calls the age of breath: "our epoch has to return to an awareness and to cultivation of the breath before and beyond any representation and dis-course."52 Breathing is the first autonomous gesture. Without a cultivation of breathing women and men cannot reach a human relation. Maternity is the invisible sharing of breath and soul.53 This epoch is the age of breath, an age where the body, silence and listening are paramount in establishing a possibility of an ethical gesture between two. Regarding the body, Irigaray writes: "I am thinking of certain traditions of yoga that I know something of, cultures where the body is cultivated as body ... . In these traditions, the body is cultivated to become both more spiritual and more carnal at the same time".54 That is to say, we need to cultivate a sensory perception, and in my perception of the other I need to be careful not to appropriate the other. I can never perceive the other completely. I approach the other as an embodied subject. Perception must maintain duality. We have to remain two in bodies if our aim is for a shared world. In silence, "Relations between two different subjectivities cannot be set up starting from a shared common meaning, but rather from a silence which each one agrees to respect in order to let the other be."55 His silence is what we offer to each other as world of welcome. It is a place where the other can exist and be. Finally, listening to the other is a double listening: to the language we already dwell in as well as to the language of the other. The listening takes place in the conjunction between where we can approach one another. "How can we be formed?" Irigaray states: "The we comes from the two. Women and men will have to be granted a new identity, a natural and spiritual one, and not hobble along one foot in pure nature (reproduction), the other in an abstract culture, if we is to be formed ... . Being we means being at least two, autonomous, different."56 "The aim of education is to create citizens fit to govern in freedom".57 What is the aim of revolution? What is the aim of freedom? Libya-an ideological paradise-our bodies ensure our exclusion On October 29th, 2011, in his first public speech, after the so-called success of the Libyan revolution, the head of the interim government, Mr. Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, cleared the way for unrestricted polygamy in a Muslim country where it has been limited and rare for decades . . "Shariah allows polygamy," he said. 58 FREEDOM in capital letters has come to Libya and with it the right to Polygamy. Is that the Freedom that the Western allied forces were funding and supporting? How can Libyan women enter this realm of Freedom if their bodies are denied access? What bodily freedom have they gained/lost? As Jean Luc Nancy wrote about anger being the first political emotion. Mr. Abdel Jalil your words have made me angry. But more so they have made me very happy. I am happy because you have reminded me of what I was about to forget. Dizzy from the excitement of revolution and freedom I almost forgot who you are? What you represent, what ideology do you propagate and dwell in? What language do you speak? What gives you the right to speak on behalf of the Libyan women about their bodies? It is now time for Libyan women to have their say, and you have made this possible. So thank you again Mr. Abdel-Jalil. You have provided the urgency for the possibility of change. To remain faithful to herself, to turn back to herself, within herself, to be born again free, animated by her own breath, her own words, her own gestures: this corresponds to the most decisive conquest for women. And to speak of woman's liberation, women's liberation, without such a course, such autonomy, is not possible.59 Is this the advice that Irigaray would give Libyan women in their quest for freedom? * Roula Haj-Ismail is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Media and Communications at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. She teaches at the International College, Beirut, Lebanon. Notes 1 Whitehead, A. N. (i938), Modes of Though. New York: Macmillan Press, p.i56. 2 When Irigaray writes of the 'repression of the feminine', she is also alluding to the repression of the body and passion in western thought. Gatens, M. (i999 "Power, Bodies, Difference." In: Feminist Theory and the Body-A Reader (eds. J. Price and M. Schildrick). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 232. 3 Merleau-Ponty, M. (i992), Phenomenology of Perception (tr. by C. Smith). London: Rout-ledge Press, p. 148. 4 Fraser, M. and Greco, M., (2005), "Part One: What is Body? Introduction," In: The Body-A Reader, (eds. M. Fraser and M.Greco). New York: Routledge Press, pp. 43-44. 5 Price, J. and Schildrick, M. (i999), "Introduction." In: Feminist Theory and the Body-A Reader (eds. J. Price and M. Schildrick) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. i0. 6 Spivak, G. C. (1989), "In a word" (Interview with Ellen Rooney). In: differences 1(2): p. 149. 7 Price, J. and Schildrick, M. (i999), "Introduction." In: Feminist Theory and the Body-A Reader (eds. J. Price and M. Schildrick) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 8. 8 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964/1989), "An unpublished text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A prospectus of his work, (tr. by A. B. Dallery). In: The Primacy of Perception (ed. J. M. Edie). Evan-ston, IL: Northwestern University Press (Eighth paperback printing, 1989), pp. 3-11. 9 Hustvedt, S. (2010), The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. New York: Henry Holt and Co., p. 50. 10 Lechte, J. (1994), Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Post-Humanism, London: Routledge Press, pp. 29-33. 11 Levinas, E. (1989), "Ethics and Politics-Levinas in discussion with Alain Finkielkraut" (tr. by J. Romney). In: The Levinas Reader (ed. S. Hand). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, p. 290. 12 Levinas, E. (1989/1985) "Intretien." In: Repondred'autruiE.L. (ed. J.-C. Aeschlimann). Neu-chatel: Editions de la Baconniere, Collection Langages, p. 10. 13 Ettinger, B. L. (2006), The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 9. 14 Levinas, E. (1961), Totalite et infini: essai sur exteriorite. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, p. 47. 15 Lechte, J., Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Post-Humanism, pp. 115-ii9. 16 Hustvedt, S., The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, p. 55. 17 Manning E. and Massumi, B., (2010), The Choreographic Object — or, How Movement Moves Us. The Emergent Spaces (-times). Seminar. Saas-Fee, Switzerland: European Graduate School. 18 Whitehead, A. N. (i969), Process and Reality. New York: Vollier-Macmillan, A Free Press Paperback, p. 259. 19 Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality, pp. 14, 15, 16, 308. The term "blacks" stands for a predicative pattern which according to Whitehead defines "a potentiality of relatedness for the subjects." p. 2i5. He agrees with Bergson that language is not moulded on reality. See Bergson, H. (1911), Creative Evolution (tr. A. Mitchell). New York: H. Holt and Co., p. 303. 20 Ibid., p. 67. 21 Manning E., and Massumi, B. The Choreographic Object — or, How Movement Moves Us. The Emergent Spaces (-times). 22 Jaar, A., (20ii), Lecture by visiting artist, Alfredo Jaar, about his work. Beirut, Lebanon: Ashkal Alwan, The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts. His work can be viewed online: www. alfredojaar.net. 23 Nishida, K. Stanford Encyclopedia Online: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ nishida-kitaro/. 24 Ibid. 25 Haraway, D. (1988), "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." In: Feminist Studies 14(3), p. 583 26 Jaber, R. (2009), Women, Art, and the Subversion of Networks: An Exploration in the Construction of Identity in the Artwork of Three Contemporary Lebanese Women Artists. Master's thesis. Beirut, Lebanon: American University of Beirut. 27 Haraway, D. (I988), "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," pp. 575—599. 28 Jaber, R., Women, Art, and the Subversion of Networks: An Exploration in the Construction of Identity in the Artwork of Three Contemporary Lebanese Women Artists. 29 Strathern, M., (1990/977) Dealing with Inequality: Analyzing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 288. 30 Marks, L. U. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham & London: Duke University Press, pp. 157, 159. The early work of Luce Irigaray has had a major influence on the work that I have done in performance and film. Some of the work of the Tabouli Performer can be viewed on my blog: www.tabouliperformer.blogspot.com. 31 Marks, L. U. (2000), "Signs of the Times: Deleuze, Pierce and the Documentary Image." In: The Brain is the Screen: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (ed. G. Flaxman). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. I. 32 Ibid., p. I2. 33 Isseks, F. (2009), Media Courage: impossible pedagogy in an artificial community. New York: Atropos Press, p. 26. 34 Heidegger, M. (1993), "What Calls for Thinking." In: M. Heidegger, Basic Writings (ed. D. F. Krell). San Francisco: Harper, pp. 379—380. 35 International Baccalaureate Organisation. (2007), "Primary Years Programme Making the PYP Happen: A curriculum framework for international primary education." Cardiff: Antony Rowe Ltd., pp. 9—10. 36 Ibid., p. I2. 37 "In the PYP, it is believed that learning takes place best when it is connected to what is genuinely a component of the world around the student, not merely what is all too often contrived and then imposed upon the student in school; that the acquisition of knowledge and skills and the search for meaning and understanding are best done in the context of the exploration of relevant content. PYP schools should provide students with learning experiences that are engaging, relevant, challenging and significant, in learning environments that are stimulating and provocative. Students are encouraged to be curious, be inquisitive, ask questions, explore and interact with the environment physically, socially and intellectually the learning experiences are differentiated to accommodate the range of abilities and learning styles in the group. (Ibid., p. I3)." 38 Ibid., p. I2. 39 Grušovnik, T. (2010), "Embodied Education For Environmental Ethics." In: International scientific conference: The Age of Breath: Yoga, the Body and the Feminine (Portorož, Slovenia). Koper, Slovenia: University of Primorska, Science and Research Centre of Koper. Lecture notes. 40 Grušovnik, T. (20I0), "Embodied Education For Environmental Ethics." In: International scientific conference: The Age of Breath: Yoga, the Body and the Feminine: GLASNIK ZRS KOPER 15(3): p. 34. 41 Chora is space, it is local, feminine and is found in the details. It is the subjective and emotional features of place. 42 Isseks, F., Media Courage: impossible pedagogy in an artificial community, p. 143. 43 Ibid., p. 186. 44 Ibid., p. 188. 45 Ibid., p. 195. 46 Irigaray, L. (1996), I Love to You- Sketch for a Felicity Within History (tr. by A. Martin). London: Routledge Press, p. 47. 47 Ibid., p. 37. 48 Irigaray, L. (2008), Sharing The World, London: Continuum, p. x. 49 Irigaray, L. (2005), the age of breath. Russelsheim: Christel Gottert Verlag, p. 8e. 50 Irigaray, L., Sharing The World, p. x. 51 Ibid., p. 100. 52 Irigaray, L. the age of the breath, p. i6e. 53 Irigaray, L. (2010), "Ethical Gestures Towards the Other." In: International scientific conference: The Age of Breath: Yoga, the Body and the Feminine (Portorož, Slovenia). Koper, Slovenia: University of Primorska, Science and Research Centre of Koper. Lecture notes. 54 Irigaray, L., I Love to You-Sketch for a felicity within history, p. 24. 55 Irigaray, L., Sharing The World, p. 5. 56 Irigaray, L., I Love to You-Sketch for a felicity within history, p.48. 57 Isseks, F., Media Courage: impossible pedagogy in an artificial community, p. 2i. 58 Nossiter, A. (20ii), "Hinting at a end to a Curb on Polygamy, Interim Libyan Leader stirs Anger." In: New York Times, October 30, 2011 (electronic version). 59 Irigaray, L., the age of the breath, pp.5e-6e. Bibliography 1. Ettinger, B. L. (2006), The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2. Fornssler, B. (2010), Affective Cyborgs, New York: Atropos Press. 3. Fraser, M. and Greco, M., (eds.) (2005), The Body-A Reader. New York: Rout-ledge Press. 4. Gatens, M. (1999), "Power, Bodies, Difference." In: Feminist Theory and the Body-A Reader (eds. J. Price and M. Schildrick). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 227-234. 5. Grušovnik, T. (2010), "Embodied Education For Environmental Ethics." In: International scientific conference: The Age of Breath: Yoga, the Body and the Feminine (Portorož, Slovenia). Koper, Slovenia: University of Primorska, Science and Research Centre of Koper. Lecture notes. 6. Grušovnik, T. (2010), "Embodied Education For Environmental Ethics." In: International scientific conference: The Age of Breath: Yoga, the Body and the Feminine: GLASNIK ZRS KOPER 15(3): pp. 33-4. 7. Haraway, D. (1988), "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" In: Feminist Studies 14(3): pp. 575-599. 8. Heidegger, M. (i993), "What Calls for Thinking." In: M. Heidegger, Basic Writings (ed. D. F. Krell). San Francisco: Harper. 9. Bergson, H. (i9ii), Creative Evolution (tr. by A. Mitchell). New York: H. Holt and Co. 10. Hustvedt S. (2010), The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, New York: H. Holt and Co. 11. Irigaray, L. (2008), Sharing The World, London: Continuum International Pub. 12. Irigaray, L. (2005), The age of the breath. Germany: Christel Gottert Verla Press. 13. Irigaray, L. (1996), I Love to You- Sketch for a felicity within history (tr. A. Martin). London: Routledge Press. 14. Irigaray L. (1993), Sexes and Genealogies (tr. by G. C. Gill). New York: Columbia University Press. 15. International Baccalaureate Organisation. (2007), Primary Years Programme Making the PYP happen: A curriculum framework for international primary education, Wiltshire, UK: Antony Rowe Ltd. 16. Isseks, F. (2009), Media Courage: impossible pedagogy in an artificial community. New York: Atropos Press. 17. Jaar, A. (20ii), Lecture by visiting artist, Alfredo Jaar, about his work. Ashkal Alwan, The Lebanese Association of Plastic Arts, Beirut, Lebanon. 18. Jaber, R. (2009), Women, Art, and the Subversion of Networks: An Exploration in the Construction of Identity in the Artwork of Three Contemporary Lebanese Women Artists. Master's thesis. Beirut, Lebanon: American University of Beirut. 19. Lechte, J. (1994), 50 Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmo-dernity. London: Routledge Press. 20. Levinas, E. (1989), "Ethics and Politics," Levinas in discussion with Alain Finkielkraut (tr. by J. Romney). In: The Levinas Reader (ed. S. Hand). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 21. Levinas, E. (1961), Totalite et infini: essai sur exteriorite. La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff. 22. Levinas, E. (1989/1985) "Intretien." In: Repondre d'autrui E.L. (ed. J.-C. Aeschlimann). Neuchatel: Editions de la Baconniere, Collection Langages. 23. Marks, L. U. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham & London: Duke University Press. 24. Marks, L. U. (2000), "Signs of the Times: Deleuze, Pierce and the Documentary Image." In: The Brain is the Screen: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (ed. G. Flaxman). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 193-214. 25. Manning E. and Massumi, B. (2010), The Choreographic Object — or, How Movement Moves Us. The Emergent Spaces (-times). Seminar. Saas-Fee, Switzerland: European Graduate School. 26. Merleau-Ponty, M. (reprinted I992), Phenomenology of Perception (tr. C. Smith) London: Routledge Press. 27. Merleau-Ponty, M. (I989/I964), "An unpublished text by Maurice Merleau Ponty: A prospectus of his work (tr. by A. B. Dallery). In: The Primacy of Perception (ed. J. M. Edie). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (Eighth paperback printing, I989). 28. Nishida, K., Stanford Encyclopedia Online: http:// plato.stanford. edu/entries/ nishida-kitaro/. 29. Nossiter, A. (20II), "Hinting at an end to a Curb on Polygamy, Interim Libyan Leader stirs Anger." New York Times, October 30, 20II (electronic version): www. nytimes.com/20II/I0/30/world/africa/libyan-leaders-remark-favoring-polygamy-stirs-anger.com. 30. Price, J. and Schildrick M., (eds.) (I999), Feminist Theory and the Body-A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 31. Spivak, G. C. (I989), "In a word" (Interview with Ellen Rooney). In: differences i(2): pp. I24—56. 32. Strathern, M., (1990/1977) Dealing with Inequality: Analyzing Gender Relations in Melanesia and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 33. Whitehead, A. N. (1969), Process and Reality. New York: Vollier-Macmillan, A Free Press Paperback. 34. Whitehead, A. N. (1964), The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 35. Whitehead, A. N. (1938), Modes of Thought. New York: Macmillan Press. ko Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 GLOBAL PHILOSOPHY FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF LIVING FLESH Tadashi Ogawa* "Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one." Heraclitus, Fragment 50 (Diels-Kranz). To Dean Komel with a lot of memories in Kyoto, Ljubljana and Koper I am from the land of the tragic earthquake on March II, 20II. For Professor Dean Komel's efforts in arranging this trip to Slovenia, I am very grateful, but at the same time, I am full of sorrow thinking of my friends in Tokyo and Sendai who have experienced this tragic catastrophe. The preparations for this trip to Slovenia took place long before the earthquake. Considering all that has occurred since this visit was proposed and the current circumstances in which I stand is an example of relation-thinking; it is the means by which the distant comes near. This relation-thinking is the theme of my talk today. I always think that the philosophical thinking is universal and not regional. As you know, there are always two movements in philosophy. On the one hand, there is the Euro-centric efficiency in the Hegel worldview or the Euro-centric finality of Husserl, who — in the interpretation of Klaus Held — insisted on the Europeanization of mankind. On the other hand, I would like to insist on the simultaneous happening of Europeanization and de-Europeanization in the world. That is the happening of the relation. In this article I would like to talk about my confrontation with European philosophy. If a Japanese philosopher speaks of confrontation, then you will expect that I will give prominence to the historical tradition of Japanese or East-Asian thought. But this is not the direction I want to take the discussion. My aim lies in a higher dimension. It is the global dimension of philosophy and thinking. Philosophy is, as I am convinced, an international and common spiritual activity of human being. Although philosophy is originally from archaic Greece, there were at the same time great thinkers in India and China considering the relation of humans and the world, nature and the cosmos. Regarding methodology and terminology there were certainly great differences, but it is clear that at the level of questions, the matters about which they wondered—these were the same: the relation of Humans and Nature, Mankind and the Cosmos. My aim in this article is firstly to elucidate the possibility of Global philosophy explicitly and secondly to explicate the relation of Global philosophy to the embodied existence of mankind. This discussion will be an attempt at a fundamental synthesis of two directions in philosophy: world philosophy as objective sense and existential philosophy as subjective sense, coming together through the viewpoint of the body-living flesh. Roughly said, the point of connection is my existential human living body-flesh. If this synthesis can be achieved, on the fundamental basis of my existence, I can think about the possibility of Global philosophy. But first, I must explain what I mean by the technical terms: 'body' and 'flesh'. I understand 'body' as a three-dimensional thing and 'flesh' as my subjective experience bound to the body. This subjective feeling is nothing other than my inner perception of my flesh. Otherwise put, it means "instinctively sensing and noticing". Hermann Schmitz calls it "Spuren". Plato and Aristotle explain the difference as that between the o-wpa, soma and ep^u^ov ov, empsychon on. The dimension of the living flesh is all things intuitively and directly perceived in the human living flesh. i. Is philosophy regional or global? My answer to this question is that philosophy is global. I have two reasons for this answer: first from a historical perspective and second from a systematic and factical-sachlich way of thinking. It is a historical fact that the concept of philosophy was founded by the ancient Greeks, especially by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus, Parmenides, and post-Socratic philosophers such as Plato. Olof Gigon, a respected scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, once said that Heraclitus based his philosophical thinking on three principles of Greek culture, namely the Homeric epos (epic), Ionian natural sci- ence and the monotheism professed by Xenophanes. This movement of philosophy spread throughout the whole human world. Philosophy is an attitude of human being for the world, the thinking of the relation between Ego and world, as I will explain later. To elucidate the concept of philosophy, I would like to gain a vantage point from the view of structural linguistics. The word philosophy is a kind of linguistic expression, a term or at any rate a literal sign. It has, as a sign, dual sides: signans and signatum. Signans is a series of voicings, letters, and phonemes. This signans brings the side of concept, signatum, with itself. Signatum is the concept of the word, the essential meaning of the signans. Philosophy is a word, a linguistic element. As signans, philosophy is a series of letters or phonemes, "p-h-i-l-o-s-o-p-h-y" which means according to its Greek etymology "love of wisdom" or "being friendly with knowledge". What are we to make of these expressions? Once again in terms of structural linguistics, philosophy as signans is a historical notion developing since its origin in Hellenic culture meaning the logos of human being and nature (world) at the fundamental dimension. The Greek expression logos (Xoyog) means "relation" in English. "Relation-thinking" is the signatum of the concept ofphilosophy. Relation-thinking, however, between the Ego and the world is also found in India, China, Mesopotamia and also in the culture of the American Indians. The eminent English anthropologist, Radcliffe-Brown stated that the main thought of Hera-clitus will be found in the traditional myths of American Indians. (The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology, Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1951.) They also think of logos as the coincidence of oppositions. In the human world, intellectuals think of the relation between the Ego and the World, birth and death, the beginning and the end, the mode of my being in the world. Especially in the socio-ethical dimension concerning the relation of the Ego and others, Jesus Christ said to his disciples: "Treat others exactly as you would like to have them treat you." (Luke, 6—31) When a disciple asked Confucius to give a word that one could live by unto death he answered: shu in Chinese, jyo in Japanese. Jyo means originally that one sees one's counterparts as oneself. Jyo means therefore to treat others with warmth and with friendliness. Confucius crystallized his thought in the following expressions: "Do not treat others in ways that you would not want to be treated." Confucius and Jesus Christ say the same thing, but in different ways; Jesus expressed his thought positively and Confucius negatively. In ethics this maxim is called the Golden Rule, because this is the basic rule in human society, and abiding by this rule renders human beings as incorruptible as gold. The so-called Golden Rule is supposed to be in every human culture and society. It is related to the fundamental humanity of mankind. What then is the Buddhistic Golden Rule? It is expressed by the dogma of Jiri-Rita in Japanese, Atma-Hita—Para-Hita in Sanskrit. Ji-ri (Atma-Hita) is self-benefit, and Ri-ta (Para-Hita) is the good for others. The spirit of Buddhism is this principle, self-benefit means at the same time the good for others. There is a relation of the self and others. My main point in this talk should now be obvious: the simultaneous happening of relation. This type of thinking is none other than Buddhism. There are several elements of relation-thinking in this religion, for example, the thinking of Engi and Shoki. The en of Engi means that all things happen by direct or indirect causality, each is a condition of the other. Gi means happening, occurrence. The East is the co-relate of the West. Men only have meaning if there are also women. In Buddhism such relations are interpreted engi. It means the occurrence through the relation of two elements. Engi does not mean simple relative difference, but rather the structural relation of two elements in the wholeness: simultaneity. Engi is not simply a relation standing between the terms; it also subtends the relation and allows the relation to happen. The sho of Shoki means the true essence, the truth. Ki means the occurrence, the happening. Heidegger will express it das Ereignis. It is nothing other than the occurrence of the true self. In Buddhism, too, it is clear that the good for me means the benefit of others. With this thinking, it is clear that egocentrism, or selfishness, is not good and well to evaluate. The ideal human relation is, according to Buddhism, this simultaneous happening of self-benefit and the good for others. What, then, are the concrete forms of relation that philosophers think about? As formerly mentioned, there are many kinds of relations in philosophy, the relation between the Ego and the world (the episte-mological attitude in Husserl), the I and thou (social-phenomenologi-cal attitude based on the intersubjectivity), and the living flesh and the body (new phenomenological cosmology in my interpretation of Plato's Timaeus and Philebos or "System der Philosophie" of H. Schmitz), and finally between birth and death (as in Heidegger's Daseinsanalytik). You could increase this list with many examples and cases of the relational structure like parts and whole (as in Husserls 3rd Logical Investigation), love and hate (in Scheler's and Schmitz' phenomenology) and so on. In this context I will mention that perhaps the most important discipline in philosophy, "ontology" is not universal and global. "Ontology" is originally expressed as a technical term for the observation of statements like "it is", "to be", "beings" and so on. Indeed ontology is a very important technical term in the European philosophical tradition since Parmenides, the forefather of ontology. He stated, "being is and not-being is not" (xpn to "Xeyav TL voLiv t' L0v LpLvai Lori yap eivai, §L ouK Lariv. Fragment, B6) Obviously this word "to be" is common in the Indo-European languages, Sanskrit (asmi), Greek (Lipi, Lapi), Latin (esse, est), English, German (Sein, ist) and French (etre, est) and so on. But in other cultures, we can find languages with no equivalent term for "is" or "being" or "to be". The verb "to be" means simultaneously the existence of something and the predication. In the first case, you will say, the desk is in my hotel room. In the second, the desk is small. But in Chinese as well as in other languages, there is nothing that corresponds to the onto-logical signification of "is". In Japanese, however, you will find the correspondence. "To be" corresponds in Japanese to "ari, are, araware \ Ari means existence and predicative function, are "to be born", araware means to appear. Paradoxically the Japanese verb, ari is almost the same as what Heidegger says "to be", namely Sein, means. Because of this difference of meaning in Chinese and the coincidence of meaning in Japanese, we can say that the onto-logical meaning of "being" is neither universal nor particularly European. Therefore, we might have to dispose of the term "ontology", if my thesis that philosophy obtains only when it is global is right. At the very least, we have to look further than ontology to find a truly global philosophical concern. In my view, that concern is relation, or logos, which I understand as structure. The thinking of relation, or logos, is the core of philosophy. Philosophy is the thinking of "between", namely: relation, logos, structure. The theme "thinking of the relation" transcends the binding nexus to the cultural sphere. Transcendence is possible because of the insight into the identical structures in every culture, which is based on carrying out the re-thinking of the re-analysis of the most fundamental matters. It is not based on the correspondence of similarities. To count the similarities in every culture is not philosophical thinking, but nothing other than taxonomy which is a species of empirical research. Empirical research will count the facts and enlarge the stock of factual knowledge. The act of counting facts has nothing to do with philosophical evidence. It is juxtaposition of facts. What then is philosophically worthy in a philosophical method that elucidates and observes the identity in the difference? As a Husserlian scholar, I would like to emphasize that every philosophical truth must be based on a rigorous method and not on contingent happenings. "To emphasize" or "to place the emphasis on" is etymologically derived from a special kind of insight: to let something appear well (ep^aais-ep^aiveiv). This method is therefore the process by which the essential relation or structure becomes clear. What then is this method of elucidation in concrete terms? It is, as I think, the method of free variation which Husserl established. I can grasp the essential structure of something through the steps of going-through it in possible permutations. At the beginning I must see a factual thing as a starting point of free variation; then proceed with the variations. Variant (a) will produce variant (b) on the basis of insight into the similarity of both variants. The production of variant (b) means that I have insight into the identity between both. As I think, the prediction or assumption that there must be an essential structure between two variants is a necessary presupposition. This presupposition sees beforehand the orientation and production of the free variation. This foresight is decisively important. This insight is the activity of seeing through (noein: voeiv). This noein, direct intuition into the unity of difference is, I will say with Heraclitus, logos. Logos and nous are co-primordial. I have once co-edited a volume of the American philosophical journal "The Monist" on the topic of "Cultural Universals". According to my thesis on the Husserlian method of free variation as the intuition of essence, there are three stages: (I) I begin with some thing: For example a table, given in perception or imagination. I then allow this example to vary in my mind along all conceivable dimensions, but always in such a way that it remains a table. Such variation is a potentially endless open process. Its openness is shown in the fact that the real or imagined example that is taken as starting point is chosen arbitrarily. (2) Through all the differences that are yielded by the performance of variation there will be some invariance—there will be an overlapping, or "coupling", as Husserl calls it. The progression of variants converges around what is common in all the variants and there is generated thereby a unity which binds them together. Starting with a particular table which we see, and going through a series of other tables which we also see or merely imagine, we eventually arrive at the eidos "table" as "this here necessarily common structure". If we started a new process of varying with a new example of a table, we should discover that the two processes merge into one as far as their result is concerned, that the variants occurring in either are those of one common eidos. (3) The identity of the overlapping moments is then grasped by active intuition. This identity is the eidos. In grasping it, intuitions which come from the empirical level of what is spatio-temporally defined begin to transcend this dimension and take in what is ideal. Husserl's phenomenology has many, different moments and motivations. His philosophical method is, as I interpret it, originally and essentially almost the same throughout his life, although he allowed a historical and genetic aspect of the essential intuition in his later stage of life. This thesis was constantly alluded to in his posthumous works such as the "Krisis". It is very similar to the eidos-theory of Plato. Then what is the so-called Platonism in Husserl? That is this doctrine of eidos, essence or the identical entity which he saw in everything. This eidos, this identity is "everywhere and nowhere" as essence. It is the synthesis of the individual and the universal, namely the genos which I would like to express with the term "structure". Plato nurtured philosophical thinking from three traditions, namely poetry (Homer and Hesiodos), natural science (Thales and the Ionian school) and monotheism (Xenophanes and Parmenides). In this genetic and historical sense, philosophy was originally bound to the regional tradition of philosophy. This regionalism insisted that Europe, especially Greece, is the homeland of philosophy. But I must inquire: Is philosophy totally a European happening as Nietzsche or Heidegger insisted? I will not agree with this attitude of Nietzsche or Heidegger, although Nietzsche and Heidegger are for postmodern people now the most popular and authoritative thinkers. Therefore you may ask why I differ from the prevailing view. My argument for this position is as follows: As mentioned previously, the essence of philosophy is relation-thinking. The problem of relation-thinking is, however, in every culture, that is to say it is global. Philosophy is a global event. The transcendence of one's own culture is for the culture itself a kind of self-negation. Asia was as matter of fact Europeanized. The Euro-centrism of Europe must deny itself and transcends to the global dimension which I name de-Europeanization. Parallel to these phenomena, as matter of facts, there is the simultaneous happening of de-Europeanization and Europeanization. This encounter and crossover of two movements is what Max Scheler called "Ausgleich". The progression of "Ausgleich" in human society is the fate of mankind. In the 20th and now 21st century mankind has arrived at a very complicated stage in human history. That step is characterized as the simultaneous existence of differences and identity. For example, in his lecture "Der Mensch im Zeitalter des Ausgleichs", given at the beginning of the 20th century, Scheler predicted that the contradiction between elites and democracy will be nullified, women will be like men, the opposition of Marxism and Capitalism will be neutralized, and the difference between the West and the East will be overcome. These phenomena will be found in every cultural sphere of Mankind. This neutralization and overcoming of every difference is Ausgleich. We can understand it as "re-conciliation". The new tendency and spirit of re-conciliation between every contradiction is, as I hope, now able to be positively postulated. Now in this new age of 21st century mankind should come to the global dimension of philosophy. 2. From this point of view, e.g. from the global philosophy, how can I understand the property of my existence, or my "Jemeinigkeit" in the sense of Martin Heidegger? My proper existence cannot be exchanged with another person, let alone with others. The truth of my proper existence is what I am living in every moment, now and here in the world. This notion of my proper existence in the sense of Martin Heidegger is understandable only through the way of focusing on the living flesh or my living body. What then is the I? The ego possessing my viewpoint in the world is existential. My viewpoint is defined as Here-Now-Individual. This definition: Here-Now-Individuality shows that my living flesh is situated in the world as a viewpoint. This point is not a geometric point, but it has the thickness of my bodily functions, for example, the use of my eye, arm and so on. My eyes are embedded in my living flesh. The eyes without a body are impossible. We cannot imagine the eyes without the body in which the eyes are embedded. The eyes which are not embedded in the living flesh could not see anything. And on the other hand, in Japan we will say: if the mind were not here in living flesh then one cannot see anything. My point of view is, however, for the observation of the world nothing but the narrow and compact point. My living flesh at the starting point of the worldview means therefore a compact and narrow point. Imagine how your living flesh would cringe if you happened upon an escaped tiger. Due to shock and anxiety, your perceptual and conscious field would deflate into a narrow and focused view of the impending danger. On the other hand, imagine that you are lying on the gentle slope of a hill under the spring sunshine, then your living flesh will relax and expand into the outer world. You would like to breathe in the spring breeze; your spirit and living flesh will be greater and lighter in the environment, floating to the utmost horizon. Not only your consciousness but also your living flesh itself will become identical with the whole world. There are two extremes in the modes of appearance of living flesh: contraction and expansion, or more exactly contracting and expanding. It is a movement of two directions, widening from me to the outer world and on the other hand, narrowing from the outer environment to my viewpoint. If you breathe air into your body, then you will be expanded. But simultaneously you have some tension of the stomach muscles and you are, as a whole spirit, at the same time fore-shortened and narrowed to a point. To inhale and to exhale is the act by which human beings continue to live in this world. You must take another breath in order to live another moment. As I said previously, the flesh is not the same as the three dimensional body but a movement of spirit or air—the "Breath" of life. The ancient Greeks called this pneuma, and the same thing is expressed in Chinese by the word qi and in Japanese by the word ki. (cf. my book, Grund und Grenze des Bewusstseins, Wurzburg 2001, p. 107 ff.) In this paper, I will use the English word "Breath" with a capital "B" to express the sense of the ancient Greek word pneuma, the Chinese-Japanese sense of qi-ki and my own idea of the living-flesh. I have chosen to use this English word rather than Latinate possibilities such as effla-tion, perflation, sufflation, etc. because the Old English root combines both directions of contraction and expansion, while the words based on "flare" tend to express only one direction and also tend to have very materialistic, medical meanings. For the opposite reason, Latinate words based on "spirare" such as respiration, inspiration, expiration, etc. are weighted too much on the side of the soul. What is the essence of this qi-ki? It is not something purely material, nor something pure spiritual. It is something material to the extent that a breath has the force to flutter the flame of a candle. At the same time, it is something spiritual and ideal because it is the force of life pushing on from one moment to the next. This movement of Breath belongs to the whole world and makes the unity of the world. The essence of this pure experience of the world is "atmosphere." The atmosphere which I experience is always directly above the difference of spirituality and materiality. This atmosphere is the Breath, qi-ki that fills the world. You can live because of this Breath, on the ground of this spirit. When you breathe in, you will be unified with the outer world through the breathing. When you breathe out, the Breath is moved from the inside of your body into the outer environment. This movement shows the direction of air. It is from the body to the outer world. What does this direction mean? The direction is the neutralization of the opposition of the compact and expansive point of view, the narrowing and widening of the inner and outer world. The difference of inner and outer would be neutralized by the act of breathing. It is the synthesis of the flesh and the outer environment. You will feel in the flesh brightness and a loosening of restraints. The direction of the Breath, this movement of Breath from my flesh to the outer world is the synthesising direction of the inner and outer world. This synthesis is nothing other than the neutralisation of binary oppositions of outer and inner world. You can now understand the wide sense of my concept "Flesh". My own flesh and blood is not the body, not the three dimensional thing, but it is a movement of Breath, because it is the spirit which can be understood as the true sense of synthesis of the inner and outer world; The Breath is qi or the spirit of every body. Jesus said, "The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the voice of it, but you do not know, whence it comes and or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." (John, 3-8) The Spirit and the Breath is the same word: pneuma. The spirit is the Breath. And everyone is an existence of Breath qua Spirit, or in ancient Greek pneuma, nveupa, the movement of "expanding and contracting". Everybody is the ek-sistence from Breath which is ek-sistence into Breath. Everyone is the ek-sistence from Breath into Breath. Everybody is transition from the Breath and spirit into the Breath and spirit. Therefore the Japanese people think in the theory of Shintoism, for example in the book of Hayashi Razan's " Shinto-Denju", that humans are both before birth and after the death a spiritual god. Only while humans are alive do they think of death, but death is not the end of life, but rather the beginning of another life. (cf. my book, Grund und Grenze des Bewusstseins, Wurzburg 2001, p. 107 ff.) Relation-thinking is structural thinking. It focuses on the logos as relation of the opposition of the inner and outer world, parts and whole, ego and world, ego and the others, and life and not-life. What then is the ego? The ego possesses my viewpoint to the world. And this viewpoint is possible only in the systematic relation with others. If it is argued that my emphasis on relation and logos is a species of logo-centrism, then I would reply that I do not use these words in the sense criticised by Derrida. This criticism is mainly directed at a historical tradition from Heraclitus to Hegel that puts structure at the center of European philosophy. But we must proceed from "the things themselves" that is, not how things stand within a particular tradition but how they stand before all humanity. My proposal of a Global philosophy draws on both European and non-European philosophy. Global philosophy stands on both the logos, ratio and structural thinking of Western thinking and the Japanese understanding of "ri". And as mentioned above, this same thinking can be found in American Indian culture as well as the Chinese notion of Yin-qi and Yang-qi. The cultural invariance in all these expressions is: "the unity of contradiction", or in other words, the fact that two things, no matter how different, nonetheless exist in unity. Derrida rightly criticises the Western onto-logical tendency to brush aside difference in its rush to unity through a superficial equivalence or equivocation, but even in this tradition, things are not always so simplistic. Goethe once sang about the leaf of a gingko tree in this way: "Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten Meinem Garten anvertraut, gibt geheimen Sinn zu kosten, Wie's den Wissenden erbaut. Ist es ein lebendiges Wesen, das in sich selbst getrennt? Sind es zwei, die sich erlesen, Dass man sie als eines kennt? Solche Fragen zu erwidern, Fand ich wohl den rechten Sinn: Fuhlst Du nicht an meinen Liedern, Dass ich eins und doppelt bin?" To overcome logo-centrism Derrida must presuppose the logos-structure of language. It is impossible for him to oppose this in any other way than by speaking and writing in language. For his thought to be thinking at all, he has to allow the ratio of language to have some sway, and this can be seen first of all in Derrida's attempt to discuss the matter with another. Moreover, Derrida does not reach out to any random other, but his remarks are pointedly directed to a specific community—philosophers, who are most mindful of the logos or structure of language. Contra Derrida we can say, the criticism of the so-called logo-cen-trism of European philosophy has no object, then philosophical thinking is always logo-centric and we have no other way than to deal with logos, structure, language and dialogue. We have to put a simple but definite question: What enables us to philosophize with each other? What is the condition of the possibility of philosophical thinking? It is language, conversation and dialogue among ourselves. Language is always the presupposition of thinking and persuading. What is then the origin of philosophical thinking? It is the disciple-teacher relation. And the medium of this relation is language and the energy that sets this relation to work is structure. The dialogue of teacher and disciples is the presupposed condition of the possibility of philosophy. Therefore it is not an accident that the first recordings of the thoughts of Socrates, Confucius and Mencius appear in the form of dialogues. In this sense, both European and Eastern philosophy is, if I can call the latter philosophy, logo-centric, or structural thinking. And as I have already remarked, the primary topic of these earliest and universal discussions is the unity of contradictions. In this sense, Kitaro Nishida, the founder of the Kyoto school of Japanese philosophy, expressed the essence of the life as the "self-identity of absolute contradictions". It is Heraclitus who insisted that existent things are brought into harmony by the clash of opposing currents. He said, he had no teacher and he declared that he inquired into himself and learned everything from himself and above all in the medium of language. His influence is so strong among the Stoic philosophers that it came to define the separation of the common nature and human nature through the Stoic philosophers. It is perhaps the origin of the subject-object separation. The beginning of philosophical thinking is the dialogue of teacher with disciples. Without language this thinking is impossible. The medium of the relation of teacher-disciples is possible by and through language. Language is the medium of this relation. The medium as language enables the structure of teacher-disciples. That Derrida is regarded as an important philosopher owes to the fidelity with which his disciples promote his ideas. His unique standing as an individual depends on his diffusion through the coherent voices of his disciples. What is then the ego? The ego possesses my viewpoint in the world. It is the ek-sistence transcendence to the world. My viewpoint to the world is defined as here-now-individual which you can understand in the sense of the "Jemeinigkeit" of Martin Heidegger. My living body, my living flesh and blood is the starting point of my understanding of this world. Without this flesh which I perceive directly in my body I cannot exist in this world. From the window of my study I can see the three trees outside of the house. It means these trees could appear from another side quite differently. My viewpoint is lived and experienced originally by me. My question now is: How can I reconstitute the sense of world for everyone? In which sense can our world be reconstituted from the Breath-flesh (Fuh-tei) of everyone? The world appearance could be gained by singing. Whether solo or choral, singing implicates three elements: breathing, voice and the sense of song. Every song has original meaning. Singing together is being with each other in the same song. You must express voice through sending Breath and getting the Breath. What is breathing? As I mentioned above it is the movement of Breath between the inside and outside of the body, and this is the occurrence of qi in the world. My body occupies the absolute place "here". This absolute place means not a point like a geometric point but has endless depth and breadth in the world. Out of the viewpoint of qi the every individual body is identical with the whole wide world. The whole wide world signifies the expanse of my flesh. The body as flesh swells and flows to the ends of the world. Body-states appear in the awareness of powers in the body: the awareness of hunger, vigor, fatigue or languor. The founder of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl, was always grasped by two motivations. On the one hand, he sought new ideas, and on the other hand, he interpreted his new creative ideas in terms of his perennial scheme of thinking. Therefore we must always interpret the Husserlian texts with two attitudes, namely "with Husserl" and at the same time "against Husserl". This was the maxim of Ludwig Landgrebe, one of his best disciples. The phenomenological concept of the body in the Husserlian sense lies in the consciousness of the spontaneity: I-move-myself. But the phenomenology of qi and global phenomenology elucidates the fun- damental base of this spontaneous body concept. At the base of the spontaneous body, there is also passivity. The passiveness of the body means the direct influence of the contact of inner and outer world. It is the relation of my flesh-body and the world. This relation is nothing but the appearance of qi and atmosphere which is the most passive and deep dimension of the body and the world. The same idea can be found in Plato's Timaeus. Expiration and inspiration, the movement of Breath, the pneuma between the world and me appears as the deepest dimension of physis. Atmosphere shows itself as the pre-predicative and even evident logos of world. I think Hermann Ammann provides an excellent descriptive analysis of the relation of logos and mood. In the dark, children will sing loudly because the sound of their own singing voice dispels the atmosphere or the mood of solitude. By singing a song or whistling which is nothing but the activity of breath and qi one escapes his own solitude. The song is a language. The unity of atmosphere with language, that is, the pre-logical logos of world is elucidated by him as choral language. For example, consider this situation: A group of men are waiting for a train while a gale howls around them. The delay of the train infects them with irritation. One man's grumbling is implicitly understood by the others, while another man voices his complaints explicitly. Both the linguistic utterances and the general atmosphere are experienced inter-subjectively as an internal language form that Ammann calls "choral language". (Hermann Ammann, Die menschliche Rede, 1925, Wissenschaft-liche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1974, p.171 ff.) Hermann Ammann was a philosopher of language at Freiburg and a colleague of Husserl, who wrote a contribution to Husserl's Festschrift. This choral language will be accepted and strengthened in the real chorus of music. You can imagine that the above mentioned choral language on the platform would be much more impressive if the people on the platform were to voice their criticisms by singing a song. This imagined chorus is nothing but a part of an opera. People sing at the same time with emphasis a lot meaningful songs. In everyday life, it happens quite often. I recently attended the funeral ceremony of one of my friends. The Catholic priest, along with other friends and relatives, sang songs together. This phenomenon of singing together was impres- sive. Not long ago, I saw a documentary on Japanese television about the Slovenian capital Ljubljana. This show was all the more impressive and sympathetic when a student choral group sang the national anthem. This tragic land which was always ruled over by foreigners, Romans, Italians and Austrians was, as you know, set free after the war of independence with Yugoslav National Army in i99i. Therefore I listened to the students singing the national anthem with keen interest. How did this student chorus enhance the atmosphere of solidarity! The members of the chorus sang in the unity of the spirit and for the unity of the group, and this created an atmosphere of spiritual unity. What kind of the atmosphere is decisive for the genesis of choral unity? The voice and the Breath, the breathing-out and breathing-in, in any event, the movement of Breath is possible as inspiration and expiration. You and I sing, you and I both are singing together, we both have the same inspiration and expiration in the same time and in the same place and situation. At the same moment we sing together the same melody and music. We have the song and the singing in common. And the subject of the song symbolizes the unity of the nation and state. You and I, we sing together in the same situation. And you and I are the members of the same state and nation. To sing together is the making of one "Flesh" with each other. As bodies you and I are separate, but in the spirit we are the same. We breathe the same Breath and sing the same song, the national anthem. How will the experience of "One Flesh" be generated out of many voices? Everybody is separated in a geometric sense, but they are the same and "One Flesh" in the spirit. This spirit is nothing other than the pneuma, the Breath. Everybody expresses his/her voice and expiration from his/her geometric body. The spirit, however, is mixed with each other in the same situation. Otsu-Hieidaira, Sept. and Oct. 2011. * Tadashi Ogawa is Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University, where he was Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies and the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies. Now, President of Coshien University, Takanazuka, Japan. Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 HOMO GENERATOR IN THE POSTMODERN DISCUSSION: From a conversation with Jean-Francois Lyotard1 Wolfgang Schirmacher* Note: I first met the most important postmodern philosopher in 1991, when he accepted my invitation to hold a lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York. That both of us work primarily in phenomenology, and that Nietzsche and Heidegger strongly influenced our work, certainly contributed to a rapid deepening of our relationship. But more importantly, Lyotard was an extraordinarily genial and generous soul. Despite his immense workload of teaching duties all over the world and his numerous publications, he took the time for a conversation with a younger philosopher. What is more, his feelings of friendship motivated him to active support of my plans for an interdisciplinary doctoral program, one that conceives of media and communications in a philosophical and thus novel way. Lyotard was a member of the first American Council of the European Graduate School and was supposed to teach in Saas-Fee as well. His untimely death prevented this, but his thinking continues to inspire us (see http://www.egs. edu/jeanfrancoislyotard.html). The following excerpts, which appear for the first time in the Festschrift in honor of the phenomenologist Paolo Knill, another friend, are taken from a conversation held on April 22, 1992 at Yale University, where Lyotard spent a semester as the Henry Luce Scholar at the Whitney Humanities Center. The discussion took place in English, a foreign language for both of us, and Lyotard never got the opportunity to edit the transcript. Video and tape recordings were made, and Lyotard expressly authorized me to change the wording to ensure that our philosophical points would prevail over any inadequacies in the language we used in the discussion. It goes without saying that under these circumstances, I assume responsibility for the entire text. My paper "Homo Generator: The Challenge of Gene Technology" (1985) was the first of several publications that presented interim reports on my work that built upon Ereignis Technik: Heidegger and the Question of Technology (1980) and Technik und Gelassenheit (1983). After 20 years, the book Homo Generator: Ethics for an Artificial Life will appear in 2002, perhaps still too early. Schirmacher: My phenomenological demonstration that the human being is first and foremost Homo generator can be all too easily misunderstood. Even the explanatory subtitle "Ethics for an Artificial Life" runs the danger of being drawn into the ideologically charged controversy around the natural and the artificial. The last thing I am trying to do is replace with virtual worlds the unfolding nature of the human and the environment! And the question of what ethics means demands immediate, if provisional, clarification; otherwise one would run astray in the search for some moral imperative, a "should," for value systems or for natural law. Let us begin with artificiality. To this notion, whose usage today is limited to the sense of the fabrication and imitation, I give back its most important connotation: the proximity to art and autopoiesis. Artificiality is not a normed framework, not Heidegger's Gestell, but points to the autopoietic praxis of art as its fundamental trait and includes within its scope surprise and fulfillment. Artificiality in this "founded" sense (Husserl) is charged with determining the constitution of the human life-world, whose nature has always been and is completely engendered by us. As Homo generator we generate worlds with materials whose "what" is given but whose "how" we must invent. In the pre-technological age this generating of worlds was ascribed to the gods; at the climax of global mechanization, to the shamans of science; and it is only now, in the encroaching post-technological epoch, that the immense world-engendering powers of Homo generator become evident. This creation is by no means purely cerebral; neither is it limited to the realm of perception, but concerns the whole person and embraces embodiment and communal action as well. An artificial life is led as the art of life, by a person who exists authentically, whose ethic is anthropologically characterized by openness. Since the founding of the modern age by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, this prospect has inspired daring projects in the most diverse minds. I mention here only Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bataille, Heidegger, Sartre, Arendt, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas, and Deleuze. My ethics for an artificial life lays the trace (Derrida) of a non-metaphysical existence, for Homo generator becomes capable of a life after post-modernity within the scope of the post-technological world, which is separated from the technological age by an abyss encountered by Kierkegaard's leap. Nevertheless, it is not the object of such theses to rehabilitate the obsolete notion of a universal philosophy. Rather, they have survived the postmodern criticism, which has made any reliance on authorities impossible and has destroyed the idea of a unified world-view. Yet the indisputedly systematic extrication from the postmodern condition takes place via a postmodern decision, which—like my basic phenomenology of the post-technological world—does not propose a new being, a new history nor even a completely different world view. Rather, the situation can be viewed thus: the leap is imperceptible, the post-technological horizon goes unnoticed, and the ethical fulfillment behind our backs is barely noticeable. The seismographically recorded derangement is minimal, a turning-away from the mundane normality of the postmodern world toward an equally self-evident affirmation of artificial life. From the standpoint of cultural criticism, this affirmation obviously invites suspicion. But its beginnings can be observed in the first generation that grows up within the scope of the post-technological horizon and does not even notice, for it knows nothing else. When all technologies are simply available without having been asked for, the time of self-enjoying hedonists (Deleuze) and "media monads" (Schir-macher) has arrived. With the irresistible spread of western technologies, the leap to artificial life has become unavoidable for non-western cultures as well, even if the speed and the intensity of this process may vary greatly. That anthropologically, we are the "artificial beings by nature" (Helmuth Plessner), unabashedly "eccentric" and anthropomorphic at once, precludes our development in the image of a cybernetic machine. While information technology and genetic technology are two of the most striking means to the active development of humanity and to the ethical realization of the art of life, the cyborg myth (Donna Haraway) must not be narrated metaphysically. For it is by no means a matter of bringing together the human and the machine, of engendering a hu- man-machine symbiosis, because the technologies themselves are always already our existential, autopoeitically authored acts, in which each existence itself is at stake. Robots as "mind children" (Hans Moravec) are unambiguously anthropomorphic, and therefore such questions that try to pass themselves off as ontological are in fact meaningless: "Is a cyborg a human or a machine?" "Does artificial intelligence represent the next stage of evolution?" Lyotard: It is certainly possible to describe the human being as an artifact, for everything in the world is manufactured and therefore artificial. One could even view each living cell as a technical system in this sense: it is an open and complex system, always capable of generating energy and converting it into activity. Such a description, in the manner of system theory, is given preference in the natural and social sciences, and this is by no means accidental. From the smallest systems all the way up to the galaxies, one has a hypothesis at hand that enables one to understand everything, including the human being. Instrumental rationality and causal thinking are elegantly avoided in the process, for these systems are not means to some purpose and therefore not instrumental (but rather possess instrumentaria of their own). The human system has produced computers and related information systems in order to satisfy a need—for informational knowledge—that previously lurked in the dark, thereby improving the quality of its own—human—activity. This novel knowledge then engenders a new kind of energy and transforms it energetically. When we, justifiably, view things in this way, then the whole world, including the human world, is artificial. Our idea of the cosmos, too, is necessarily implicated, for we cannot know what the cosmos-in-itself is. The concept of artificiality provides us with a good understanding of so-called reality as well as a practical, successful way of dealing with it. Schirmacher: But would this interpretation of artificiality not deny its origin, which I find in the self-conception and in the capriciousness of the human being? [Bekame nicht die Energie das Subjekt der Ent-wicklung ...] Would not energy become the subject of development, and would we not become sub specie aeternatatis a mere subsystem? What must be clarified above all is the extent to which any system theory is dependent upon the notion of given laws and conditions, whereas my idea of artificiality emphasizes the art of a fulfilling life, which must always generate its own context. Can Homo generator be a system? Lyotard: In my view, neither the universal system nor the marginal system is subject to laws or determined by rules, and all the less so when we begin to consider complex systems. Extreme flexibility and fundamental indeterminacy characterize these systems, to which, as we are now beginning to understand, our brain belongs. Physical systems of all orders of magnitude obviously belong to this group of complex systems. Physicists maintain this curious differentiation between determined and undetermined loci, in the latter of which chance prevails. The human being is extraordinarily complex, the most complex life system we know, and this is so for the very reason that we possess the capacity for language, and in language have a symbolic system at our disposal. That in the realm of language we find ourselves at a locus of indeterminacy, explains sufficiently why and how we experience our existence as open, why we must always first determine things, why we need our imagination, but also how our sense of responsibility came about. At the same time, it can be shown that the notion of systems having white spaces and abysses, loci that are not already determined, is by no means one that leads us astray. Schirmacher: An open anthropology along those lines is what I have in mind, such as has been developed in Germany by Plessner, Ador-no, and Ulrich Sonnemann and in France by Bataille, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Kristeva. But given your description, how could the charge of objectivism be refuted? Lyotard: Every notion of objectivity or reality [_ itself___] [sic] when the question of reality has to be posed each time anew by scientists. Is this chair real? What would "the reality of the chair" mean in micro-physics? Not even our senses can answer this question any longer in the virtual world. The results of our perceptual activity are objects we form in an artificial manner with the help of our filters. Space and time, too, are formed in such a way as to make them useful—a human being, a cell, a butterfly, each mode of being manufactures its own reality (for the non-human world we naturally only assume this). Schirmacher: In the natural sciences and to a certain extent in the social sciences as well there seems to be at least a reality substitute: what is real is what I can calculate. This quantitative model of the world, which the use of computers has made dominant in society, is nevertheless instrumental, not artificial. In artificial life, only what my life [causes to be fulfilled; gelingen laEt] can count as real. A functioning information technology may well be a part of this, one that does not subject me to surveillance and coercion, but which supports my openness and prepares the adventure of everyday life. Yet it seems to me that all information which presupposes that something can be defined and depicted in numbers is capable only in extremely rare cases, if at all, of accounting for essential characteristics of a life. Essential action and thought aims at the ambiguous, the dark, the open, the exalted, and can never be captured by a halftone screen [raster]. Lyotard: Doesn't this mean that you are clinging to the anthropological notion of an existence of one's own? You turn against a relativistic arbitrariness and likewise criticize the idea of an objective existence. On the one hand you think in a postmodern way, on the other hand your objections to my system-description could be an indication that you take up an existential position between subjectivism and objectivism which is close to that of the early Heidegger and Sartre as well. Schirmacher: Not consciously at any rate! My fundamental phenomenology of the human being in the post-technological world has from its very starting point extricated itself from the dualisms of subjectivity vs. objectivity, and centrism vs. decentrism: whoever directs his gaze at the human being, and accepts oneself as evidence, finds no native trace of such dualisms whatsoever. Authentic human living is anthropomorphic living—one who so lives knows of no other world beyond the human horizon and can experience no phenomenon in any way other than in relation to himself. But the human being in his mortality in no way sees himself as the determining center, for fallibility, weakness, and uncertainty are fundamental human characteristics. Nor is human natality any indicator of fecund subjectivity, seeing as each birth is attended by innumerable other phenomena that we "generate"—i.e. reap, urge onward, and liberate—in the sense of an ethics of fulfillment. Homo generator follows an "economy of extravagance" (Bataille), in which the self satisfies [complies with] the silence of language as well as the over-exuberance of activity that laughs in the face of death. From Heidegger's projected model of "Being and Time," what remains in the post-technological world is Sartre's existential model, but this model, too, has changed radically. What once, as the "series of our deeds" was supposed to determine the essence of the human, neither possesses the inner consistency that would render it capable of generating a series nor can it be limited to our deeds: a "reflexive apathy" (Jacques Poulain) denies itself to a consensus community devoted to whatever cause. To exist anthro-pomorphically is for Homo generator nothing for which it must fight: in the face of the alienated versions of the anthropomorphic, from the gods to the notion of scientific objectivity, he remains calm [gelassen]. There is no bogeyman [scapegoat, Feindbild], nothing against which an ego itself would have to be constituted, but communication is in and of itself [von sich her] the platonic dialogue of the soul with itself, and the human being develops as a finite event [Ereignis] in the sense of the late Heidegger. Lyotard: Thank you for this detailed representation, which allows me to pose a further question in reference to your concept of Homo generator: what do you mean by "generate?" One could very easily understand this process in the sense of system theory, and then Homo generator would succumb to the criticism to which you subjected the concept of system. Homo generator would be an abstraction, a species among other living species, and no one would be able to know or see this Homo. Schirmacher: Homo generator is an open [determination, Bestim-mung], a concept only now beginning to unfold, that might well be interrupted, to begin anew, and then perhaps double back. There exists no Homo yet, but rather he is a self-fulfilling prophecy. He generates himself in his most important technologies, once simply in breathing, sleeping, gathering food, procreating, fighting; today in solar technology as well, in genetic technology [biotechnology], and in the media. There exists for us the force, the power, and the opportunity to generate—that alone is what is referred to by the concept "Homo generator." Lyotard: But perhaps the will to power, as in Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, is too strong as well? Schirmacher: Nietzsche had the mentality of an artist, who creates his own aesthetic Olympus, and his will to power refers back to its en-genderer, and is will to will, as Heidegger correctly saw it. Nevertheless, I do not share Nietzsche's optimism, for perhaps only a pessimist has the right to be optimistic, if you will allow this remark from the president of the International Schopenhauer Society. Even if Nietzsche, as hardly another philosopher did, precisely analyzed cultural nihilism as the ideological end of metaphysics, as a cultural critic he remains anthropocen-tric. How does he know all that, and does he not overestimate the scope of his insights? My Homo generator is a single, unmistakable person, not a species. I myself exist not being-in-the-world in Heidegger's sense, but am being-for-the-world (Deleuze). Lyotard: Very well, if you withdraw to the position of being a person, there are theoretically no problems: it is ethically accepted that the concept of person necessarily implies freedom, and responsibility as well, whose objects one can choose for oneself. But are you not afraid of making things too easy for yourself? Isn't "person" a concept that every ethics presupposes? Schirmacher: It's not as simple as all that, for in the traditional understanding the freedom of the person is always limited, if perhaps only voluntarily, as in Nietzsche's aristocratic ethics. There is a difference between "freedom from" and "freedom to", and every society absolutely wants to regulate the latter (Isaiah Berlin). But even if one were to follow de Sade, and see oneself as being allowed, even morally compelled, to do what one is able to do, one would still remain unfree in the sense of Homo generator. Does my life achieve fulfillment? This is the only ethical question. Freedom is a secondary concern, for I must first find out how my life is to achieve fulfillment; i.e. is in the strict sense ethical. This is the most difficult task for Homo generator, for the war technology of metaphysics and all institutions established by it, from the family to the courts of law, intentionally confuse the ethical sense, which for this reason only small children exhibit in a completely unselfconscious way. The non-negotiable claims to justice, fulfillment, and proportion in a personal ethic of fulfillment are feared as asocial just as persistence, prudence, composure [tranquility, Gelassenheit] and generosity are lauded as modes of the worlds of ethics. Simply perceiving whether my life is achieving fulfillment, and avoiding error in this judgment [not deceiving myself in the process], is the hard work that you mentioned in the postmodern context of justice. It is easy for anyone to maintain that he has lived his life, but such a language game does not do justice to itself: for we cannot deny that we are for but a few moments certain of having truly and fully lived. Lyotard: Very well, but what does it actually mean to live one's own life? Would this refer to something beyond? Something that is more than mere existence, more than a being-here-and-nowhere-else? Is something realized with this life? Schirmacher: No, there is no transcendent measure, only a self-examination, which of course we always already carry out in the form of a self-evaluation. In puberty and later as a midlife crisis, this exhibits itself in an often spectacular manner. But this evaluation remains far too limited to personal circumstances, social and professional success, or one's own health and is therefore unduly personalized. My total life, 24 hours a day, in its [with-ness?, Mitsein], in my environment, must be evaluated without any preconceived opinions: one can no more exclude the computer I work at than the dreams and wishes that no one knows but me. The decisive difference from tradition, however, is that this evaluation can never be undertaken from without, and no one can ever tell another whether he has lived or not. The condescension of ethical theories that believe they can judge my fulfillment or lack thereof because I myself am supposedly incapable of doing so is nothing but the relic of a defunct paternalism. Homo generator generates his own self-confidence too! Lyotard: But then do there exist immanent criteria for a life that achieves fulfillment, when one rejects as you do the judgment of others? Could health be an example of such a criterion? But then how would things stand with Antonin Artaud, who lived on the brink of insanity, ruined his health, and in the end couldn't even sleep? Schirmacher: When the balance between body and mind, as Spinoza conceived it, is disturbed, it becomes difficult to speak of a fulfilled life, of course. "Health is not everything, but without it everything is nothing," Schopenhauer emphasizes, and that society profits vampirelike from the failure of certain individuals, should likewise inspire in us a healthy distrust of romanticized suffering. Vincent van Gogh created great art and thereby contributed a bit to the fulfillment of other lives, but he destroyed himself in the process. But only van Gogh himself can pass such judgment (and perhaps he did just that between his states of intoxication)! Lyotard: We have the ability to perceive in occurrences the event [Ereignis] (Heidegger) that affects us and at the same time expresses [pronounces] us. And we are receptive indeed, since in the strange first years of our lives we were called upon [...] without at the same time being in a position to be able to control events. This means in an exact sense to remember our childhood, and this process is likely the source of that to which you refer as generating. Someone like van Gogh is not trying merely to express something of course, but is bearing witness for the dark thing that he himself is. But can one say this of the computer, which will always be something that was never born? Schirmacher: Beware of a misleading ontologization! What is correct is solely that the computer does not belong to the class of human beings created through birth, but is a cerebral creation [Kopfgeburt] that grows up cybernetically. What we have here are not two modes of existence, but only our existence—in another form. On the other hand, I would like to emphasize here your reference to early childhood, Lacan's pre-mirror phase [Vor-Spiegelstadium], for this formative experience prior to any word-language evidently insures that no conscious criticism can interrupt the flow of generating. As ashamed as we are of living in an intuitively childlike manner, no education of conformist enlightenment is able to keep us from trusting our own feelings more than theories. What I call responsible answers to no authority but is feedback from the ego itself, and the words are used only to mislead. Therefore, the ethics for an artificial life in its very beginnings breaks with the discursive world. It shows no consideration to the language community with its language regulations, but acquires a feeling for what actions mean in the context of the event [Ereignis]. Intuitive knowledge, characterized by Spinoza as the authentic human knowledge, is in small children as overwhelming as it is taken for granted. Thus, we have all at one time been artificial beings, each for himself and without any intention, at once powerless [unconscious/ohnmachtig] and creative, the gods of our own worlds, world-designing [world-creating] monads. Since the mirror phase [Spiegelstadium] it has been drummed into our heads that this I-myself identity is merely an ideal ego, an early-childhood omnipotence fantasy, which does not accord with the given reality. As true as this may have been, it has never quite convinced us, as the lasting success of advertising demonstrates, and in the post-technological world, reality is yesterday's news and it need not concern us any longer. Whatever the nature of the world's given circumstances may have been, that have forced us into the struggle for survival and thus into denying our own ego [the ego itself], Homo generator will refuse to accept any of the former constants. As the artificial ones of nature we will become like the true children (Goethe) and will produce worlds without being purpose-oriented or wanting to reign over them. Lyotard: That sounds good. But aren't you being a bit too naively trustful as regards feelings? Aren't feelings the very things that are hard to grasp, and are we not in general incapable of understanding them? The so-called feelings are surely powerful, but they can also adversely affect the so-called person. We ought to be able to answer for our feelings, but in truth we don't know what they mean. We continue to learn throughout our lives, but often enough we die without figuring out what feelings mean. Therefore I doubt whether this opacity of feelings can form a good basis for responsibility; the opposite seems to be true: feelings are things that withdraw, hide, disappear. Neither am I very trustful of that to which Lacan refers as "the thing," something that is here and that is witnessed by us, but of whose meaning and just how it has become the source of generating we haven't a clue. Schirmacher: Could it be perhaps that the difficulty lies in your never having changed your traditional viewpoint? You are still trying to understand the other instead of paying attention to the ego itself, as it transpires [ereignet] in feelings. Not how I feel about someone or something is what I should pay attention to, but what this feeling contributes ethically, i.e. toward the fulfillment of my life. Lyotard: So how is it with your feelings? As event [Ereignis]? Something or someone awakens a feeling within you, and that kindles in you the expression or the transference of your own feeling, over which you have no control? Schirmacher: I don't want to control the feeling, more like set it free. The best feelings simply happen and if they were instrumentalized they would just go to ruin. Lyotard: Very well, but the alternative to a good feeling is not necessarily instrumentalization. The question is, for example, what is the best way to deal with a small child, and what is a good way to be spoken to by one about feelings? Schirmacher: Because he cannot resist the child, the adult learns so much that is new. For Levinas this was the core of an asymmetrical ethics: the other gives you an order you cannot resist. Lyotard: But at the same time Levinas had a very strong sense for the law as well. Schirmacher: I know, but that's something I lack completely. Lyotard: The law is not only respectful with regard to the others, it must also be taken over from oneself in a particular way. This way cannot be reduced to general tolerance; the law regards as very dangerous a world where everything is allowed. That is why it is our duty to forbid the child something, for sometimes this is necessary in its own interest. A curious situation results: on the one hand the necessity of having no law, to be blind to law, for we of course do not possess this law nor are we capable of formulating it. But on the other hand we can have the feeling that there is a law there and that to instrumentalize someone, a child for example, violates the law. By this I want to say that we are inconsistent, and that it is therefore impossible to bring about a balance and to have a complete, fulfilled, and happy life. It seems more to be the case that we are compiled or generated by something that is in a certain sense intolerable. Even van Gogh was not very happy, even if he was capable of generating a reality for his work. He spent his life in terrible fear, and yet he seems to me to present a good example that Homo generator—and generating itself—is a work of unavoidable suffering. My second comment has to do with how it takes us human beings two to three years before we are capable of communicating in the traditional way. That doesn't mean that during this period we are mere objects, rather that we are spoken to and influenced by a multitude of words, conversations, acts of tenderness, feelings, movements, and gestures. Things and contraptions influence us as well, good machines included, long before we can respond to them appropriately, with the aid of language. Schirmacher: But this will not essentially change in the future either! Lyotard: That's correct, things will continue this way in life. But we know nothing at all of the consequences this will have. It shows once again how completely contradictory our feelings and our ways of thinking can be. Therefore it seems to me that the child is not something that simply grows up, almost unconsciously, and allows us to be addressed through it by the event [Ereignis]. What happens? Nothing. One needn't manufacture things in a tragic way; the tragedy of life does not exist by necessity. But I cannot agree with the notion that we live our lives. On the contrary, we are incapable of living our lives, and this is our honor, exactly this, that we are not capable of doing so. Schirmacher: I don't agree with that. Lyotard: I am sure you agree. Schirmacher: I agree about the suffering, and also that the concept of balance has to be recast. Balance has as little to do with the new-age yin-yang mishmash as it does with well-rounded cheerfulness or a harmony between body and mind. Balance is the model [Entwurf] for a struggle whose outcome will always remain uncertain. Lyotard: But doesn't one need a yardstick [Mafi] for that? Shouldn't you have to be able to count? Schirmacher: Perhaps one needs proportion, but in Goethe's sense, who says to the moment "Do tarry, you are so beautiful," and yet fears this very tarrying. It is the hope for eternal happiness, the [Nu] of the mystic, and therefore a hope that never fulfills itself. The yardstick [Mafi] is given through absence, life is lived by means of its inability to be lived. In this I agree with you indeed, but not with the dualistic undertone that neglects the third standpoint (and the [Geviert]). It is my honor to deny myself to the positively lived life, but also to death and unnecessary suffering. Consciously I will fail, but behind my back I will just as inevitably achieve fulfillment. Such fulfillment entails necessary suffering, the rupture and the parting, but protects it within the inattentive and the unfamiliar. Homo generator is not the maker, neither the confident nor the timid one, for as Homo faber we would remain obligated to our planning, to the system of knowledge. An open horizon, appropriate to generating-as-transpiring [ereignen], proclaims the multiplicity of artificial life. Lyotard: If you remain wary of an ideology oriented toward Epi-cureus or Goethe, I will allow you that the event [Ereignis] always depends on the individual: an occurrence becomes an event because a feeling perceives it as an event. As long as computers are not permeable to [feelings?], they hinder the event for people. Schirmacher: That is why the computer society we have today is only a caricature of the inchoate artificial life, for the very reason that total certainty [Sicherheit] is valued over open perception, insensitivity over feeling. But this is already being broken open from within: that the entirety of programs are non-rationally controlled, that the interaction of the electronic network-world cannot be predicted, are promising signs. Lyotard: But doesn't the concept of a life of one's own remain suspicious? Andre Malraux, about whom I wrote a biography, maintained a very critical position against this concept. My so-called own life consists of course only of events into which I have inscribed myself, which I—often quite literally—ascribed to myself. Whether love, family, profession, politics—what in all that is my life, is due to the ability to sign with my name and my body (my hand) whatever I have chosen in terms of events. He who signs is always right! Schirmacher: Just like the Soviet Encyclopedia (may it rest in peace), which bore a different handwriting after every party congress. Lyotard: A very good example! Schirmacher: That is why my ethics for an artificial life has to do only superficially with self-realization, ego identity, or social success. For no one can really know whether his life will achieve fulfillment, and all the less can one make any reliable pronouncements about the fulfillment achieved by one's fellows. One cannot recognize the good life by its fruits any more than one can recognize the motives that have prompted us to action; neither observance of the laws nor the freedom of "live as you want to live" are helpful when it comes to self-evaluation [assigning a value to oneself]. No therapy can teach me how to recognize my event! Homo generator extricates himself from the alternative between cosmocentric and anthropocentric, and in the interstitial life of feelings escapes the ideological struggle between survival and death. Feeling, intuition, care, justice, deconstruction are indicators of a life behind our backs, the imperceptible perception of which must become more perceptible for the further development of artificial life. It is therefore not enough for Homo generator to become conscious of his absolute responsibility for the created worlds, if he wants to be able to answer them ethically. Homo generator does not have to wait for the post-technological age to generate his answer, but rather this answer has kept us alive (in an artificial life), without it having been necessary to approach it with mere cryptic allusions. Doesn't it seem as though it were time to look for Plato's daimon, Leibnitz's monad, Hegel's absolute idea, Kierkegaard's seducer, Nietzsche's superman, Adorno's natural beauty [Naturschone] and Heidegger's event [Ereignis] in their worlds? For these are figures—as tottering and unsteady as they might be—of a life fulfilling itself, and their worlds are therefore in and of themselves worlds of ethics. We know practically nothing about these worlds of ethics (or only—as Schopenhauer specified—in the form of Nothing); yet Homo generator generates these worlds continually and lives in all of them, [wie von selbst], always already. One actually ought to remain silent about all of this, for word-language does not allow us to say what has to be said. Lyotard: Yes, because all words express a certain ideology. Schirmacher: I am quite painfully conscious of that, and even poetic language can only occasionally flee what Heidegger termed the age of ideology. Nevertheless, there is no need to resort to apocalyptic visions here: a fundamental phenomenology of the post-technological world gives cause to speculate that Heidegger's [turnaround; Kehre] for future generations is in many ways already (generated) reality. Metaphysics has come to its conclusion in modern technology and has at the same time made itself obsolete: images and concepts are entwined with the media and tell without inhibition about everyday and imagined praxis, but no longer put themselves in the place of a life that achieves fulfillment. Get a life before you get a theory! No theory will be able to or will want to try to catch up to the fact that Homo generator lives in the worlds of ethics, since philosophy of course—as Hegel already recognized—is on principle an after-the-fact thought, when the forms of life have become old. But reflection [Nach-Denken] too has its genuine world; its honor is open deliberation, and its strength lies in its subversive resistance to ideologies, which otherwise inevitably develop into prescriptions. Lyotard: I value your philosophical work that has led to Homo gen-erator—for the critical debate of the postmodern in the context of our times it appears to me to be of decisive significance. * Wolfgang Schirmacher is a Continental philosopher, Professor of Philosophy and founder of the pioneering Media and Communications Division at the European Graduate School (EGS), Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Prof. Dr. Schirmacher is also the Martin Heidegger Chair at EGS. Note 1 This article appeared previously in a slightly different form. See Schirmacher, W. (2005), "Homo Generator in the Postmodern Discussion: From a Conversation with Jean-Francois Lyotard." In: Poiesis: A Journal of the Arts & Communication 7: 86—99. ISSN 1492—4986/2005. Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 ETHICS OF BREATH: T O WA R D S NEW ETHICAL SPACES OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY Lenart Škof Introduction My aim in this presentation is to establish a platform for an ethics of otherness, ethics of breath/life, an ethics as a place for the future conversation of (mild) gestures - such as compassion, forbearance and care. While we all know and recognize radically the need of others (including animal others, and, in a way, even nature) to take in and give out breath, at each and every moment, we still reside in our life-worlds, in the grip of most elemental fears of losing the ground beneath our feet, constantly protecting ourselves and taking more than we possibly need (of ourselves, of nature) for ourselves, and causing others to suffocate by not getting their food of life - air. We always realize too late that there was a life. Already for Marx it was clear that "alle Naturkrafte aus- und einatmende Mensch" is an aspect of humanity that has been radically forgotten in the course of history.1 But why do we keep forgetting air in philosophy? Luce Irigaray once wrote: "I breathe, therefore I am."2 Why are then we still evading this phenomenon, perhaps the only one that could bring us closer to our own becoming as ethical beings, towards a new form of mutual conversation, a conversation of humanity perhaps, as also implied in this becoming? It is from our bodies, impregnated as they are by the air we breathe, that we can perceive another being in pain, a being living at the edge of their body-self, a body of which "arithmetic of breathing" (J. Butler) is dangerously threatened. This economy is sacred because it is related to the question of forming a community, looking thus at something that is bigger than we are, and yet, something that is only possible within and for ourselves. My analyses in this short presenatation are based on the so called 'sacred economy of breath', in- formed both by Indian philosophy (prana) as well as by French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray (Between East and West, "The Age of the Breath"). i. Breath as intercultural phenomenon Breath is arguably the most prominent anthropological constant for human beings of the world, carrying rich epistemological and ethical implications. Different macrocosmic and microcosmic designations for wind/breath (or wind/spirit) in the history of religions and philosophies (mana, orenda, ka, ruah, prana, atman, aer, psyche, pneuma, anima, spiri-tus, ik', ki/qi etc.) point to a common physico-anthropological phenomenon of life and, more importantly, to our common physiological roots, which are not conceived as a substance of human nature but as a primal phenomenon prior to any philosophical or metaphysical theory. According to Tadashi Ogawa, 'breath' has an intercultural potential, for "all humanity is aware of this phenomenon."3 Be it 'qi/ki' as 'breath/expiration/inspiration,' 'pneuma' or 'prana' etc., they all point to our human, common and communal relatedness. But to take this argument as the "old metaphysical idea concerning the relation between microcosmos and macrocosmos (...) is not correct."4 As a phenomenological phenomenon, breath is related to the coexistence of world and I (Ogawa relates it to Heidegger's "mood" [Stimmung], Schmitz's "Atmosphere" and K. Held's "Fundamental Mood" [Grundstimmung]), thus overcoming the dualist-substantialist thought: "[T]hese phenomena preceding all other moments of the lifeworld (...) make it possible for human beings to be in the world."5 Apart from its implications for phenomenology, breath as a primal cosmological-biological phenomenon also precedes all ethical (and social/political) reflection: as we will see t is 'breath' that provides the human community with its first and primal experience and act of communication (both in the pragmatic sense), i.e. of the being-in-the-world(-with-others) mode. But I would first like to discuss the role of breath (prana) in Indian thought. It is in Indian Vedic thought, approximately four centuries before the Samkhya-Yoga system (i.e. between 900-700), that we find the most ancient elaborations of the concepts of cosmic wind/breath outside the Semitic area. Indian concept of prana (etymologically from *an, 'to breathe'; later in Indian philosophy replaced by atman) is both the original cosmological as well as an epistemological concept. We find references to wind and breath in the Samhitas (the oldest parts of Ve-dic collections), but the most ancient testimony and elaboration for the so-called 'Wind-Breath Teaching' ('Wind-Atem-Lehre')6 we can find in the philosophy of nature of Jaiminiya upanishad brahmana 3.2.2. and 4 (JUB). The teaching is an example of a typical Vedic macro-microcos-mic analogy between the macrocosmic Wind (vayu) and microcosmic breath (prana). From the cosmological point of view, the wind is the only 'complete' deity since all other deities/gods/elements/phenomena (sun, moon, stars, fire, day, night, waters etc.) return to him during the enigmatic stillness of the night, while he never stops blowing. But at the most abstract level, it is the difference between the perishable (day, night. ) and imperishable or 'eternal' (Wind) that had led to the so-called Wind-Breath Teaching, and later to the concepts of atman and brahman in Indian thought. In an epistemological sense, breath in (wo) man is the most important of the five vital powers (breathing, thinking, speech, sight, hearing) since it is only breath that is present during deep sleep. Of course, in the moment of death, breath returns to its macro-cosmic eternal origin, the Wind. In an idiosyncratic Vedic plural all five vital powers are called pranas (i.e. 'breaths'; this marks the very beginning of Indian epistemology) - after the first of them, breath. Breathing as the most important vital power is thus equated with life itself and later with person's self (atman). Finally, as a term for life, prana is the essence of a living body. It is from this natural constellation that we can search for new (inter)subjective modes of thinking/feeling in the process where ethics of breath will enable us to think beyond (post)metaphysi-cal ethical modes, based on reason and/or justice, even compassion as a virtue. 2. Towards the epistemology of breath In his Essays on Radical Empiricism William James, departing from his philosophic predecessors and paving the way also for the rise of phenomenology in Europe,7 gives an epistemological prominence to the universal and anti-metaphysical (and anti-representational) phenomenon of breath: I cannot help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing (intra-cephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of 'consciousness,' so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of 'spirit,' breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are? As a pragmatist, I find James' contention to be one of the key features in the long process of dethroning Kantian and related philosophical arguments from the past. It can serve our goal to develop an embodied ethics of breath and philosophy of religion, the latter being based on breath's closest cosmological kin - the spirit. Recently, one of the leading American pragmatist scholars, Richard Shusterman, has critically pointed to the above James' elaboration on breath in his Body Consciousness.9 Shusterman finds James' argument as "not convincing" - moreover, he is convinced that James "seems to confuse the question of how consciousness is felt with the questions of how and whether consciousness exists. That we feel something through our breathing movements does not mean that this something is essentially no more than such movements". Shusterman thus takes James' definition of breath as the essence of consciousness as an "exaggeration".10 Given Shusterman's appreciation of Eastern (Indian) philosophy and different mind-body techniques (yoga, Zen), this stubborn insistence on technical details ('did James decide to limit the breath of thought to exhalation?' etc.) strikes one as odd. While on the one hand he is willing to grant breath (as understood by James) a certain, if limited, value (for example, breathing contributes "to sharpening consciousness so that one can perceive and think more clearly and deeply" for Shusterman)11 he does not realize its full episte-mologico-ethical significance. But the stream of our breathing deserves a more sensible approach. One of my goals is thus to open the new episte-mological plane for an ethical elaboration of breath as a spiritual gesture. 3. Ethics of breath: A dialogue with Luce Irigaray Let me begin this concluding part with an excerpt from Judith Butler's Frames of War: What I sense is that the ultimate source of these poems from Guantanamo is the simple, almost primeval, arithmetic of breathing in and out. The origin of life and the origin of language and the origin of poetry are all there, in the first breath, each breath as if it were our first, the anima, the spirit, what we inspire, what we expire, what separates us from extinction, minute after minute, what keeps us alive as we inhale and exhale the universe.12 There is a task still to come and to be realized: namely, being attuned to the process of a new spiritual transformation of humanity in order to become enlightened enough to be able to hear the voices of the other, to discern the signs and gestures inviting us to begin a dialogue with her or him, or with the Nature in one of her beautiful incarnations. And last but not least, it is a task to respond to the call of the other person, or a nonhuman animal and their breathing in an ethical way. For to breathe is to be alive and to feel the living around us. Let me cite from Irigaray's essay "The Age of the Breath": Miming the living, the diabolic does not breathe, or does not breathe any longer. It takes away air from the others, from the world. It suffocates with its sterile repetitions, its presumptuous imitations, with its wishes deprived of respect for life.13 I think the introduction of a breath into the ethics and philosophy or theology in general is perhaps one of the most important events in contemporary thought. ,Breath', as William James has observed, was ever the original of ,spirit'. But it was a classical tradition from Plato to Hegel, even Heidegger, that has repressed and obscured this essential link and transformed it to a metaphysical thought that suffocated the world of the other, and of the Nature. It is one of Irigaray's greatest merits to bring the cultivation of breath to the forefront of philosophical analyses, also in a dialogue with Yoga, an ancient Indian wisdom of ethical and spiritual respiration. We all live in a global civilization where a certain plenitude is governing our lives. It is not a spiritual plenitude but rather a mass of voices, gestures and signs that allows us Westerners to posses various goods and to live our lives, but also constantly to produce our lifeworlds where there is no more space for a silence, where we take a deep breath only to egoistically accomplish our new tasks; and consequently, to impose them to others, including other cultures. A truly intercultural dialogue cannot begin on this ground. Before we proceed to the ethics of breath, in order to understand the relation between macrocosm and microcosm, it is necessary to introduce the middle term, namely mesocosm (expressed in a ritual as a third term of the triangle structure the ritual-the cosmic realities-the human body/ person in the Vedic-Upanishadic context). I also propose to imagine a possible contemporary ethical term for the mesocosm: a gesture.14 For to approach breath in an ethical sense we need to imagine and construct new ethical plane. In his analysis of ancient Vedic texts Michael Wit-zel pledges for the reconstruction of this term. As already mentioned, within the Vedic magical interpretation of the world, we face different analogies or magical 'identifications' between the macrocosmic and mi-crocosmic realities or gods (for example Sun-eye, Wind-breath, Earth-body, Waters-semen, Fire-speech etc.). This is a thought using different obvious (such as between Sun and the eye or Wind and breath) or some more hidden and esoteric, (between Moon and mind) 'mystic' links/ correlations and equivalents/identities. There exists a nexus (bandhu, upanishad) between two single entities in the Vedas. In my opinion, it is crucial to understand these ancient magical correlations between the human and 'divine' realms to accomplish our task, i.e. to be able to formulate an outline for a contemporary embodied ethics as a new economy of our intersubjective-'mesocosmic' rituals, i.e. of emobodied ethical gestures, based on breath as vital power. Only this way gestures will have the potential to connect the intersubjective realms of our existence. I would finally like to turn to Luce Irigaray's philosophy and ethics of breath. In Sharing the World Luce Irigaray wrote that it is "to her, as living nature, that I have to abandon myself in order to preserve my own life". For Irigaray, we have "to seek help in nature"15 in order to be able to survive. Our past and our future meet in one single moment of a new sensitivity for our breath and life, two key phenomena to which we need to pay attention in our times. But how is body related to this economy of ethical gestures? What is an ethical gesture springing from the embedded and embodied life of an individual, man or woman? A gesture, like the ancient rituals, is now a presence of a touch, a word, or thought in the space of proximity - within the mesocosm. Here there is presence of us and nature. For Irigaray, this proximity is explained as a "communion with the real presence of the living". Furthermore, with 'being in nature' I bear the other(s) within me. This is the [e]mbody-ing, for a moment, an unlimited life in order to make him present to me, with me. Which is not without the mystery, the enthusiasm and the reserve, but also the risk, that inspire such a human, and more than human, gesture. We were, we are, two.16 In Between East and West, a text encapsulating her idiosyncratic relation to Indian religions, we can read that the first and last gesture of both natural and spiritual life is to breathe (by oneself).17 Elsewhere Irigaray explains how important the role of the mother/woman is in this process: The divine appropriate to women, the feminine divine, is first of all related to the breath. To cultivate the divine in herself, the woman, in my opinion, has to attend to her own breathing, her own breath, more even than to love ... Becoming divine is accomplished through a continuous passage from nature to grace, a passage that everyone must realize by oneself, alone . The feminine breath seems at once more linked with the life of the universe and more interior. It seems to unite the subtlest real of the cosmos with the deepest spiritual real of the soul. Which inspires a woman appears to remain joined with the universe's breath, related to the wind, to the cosmic breathing . In this way, the woman can welcome the other in her soul.18 Woman shares her breath preeminently by keeping it 'inside'. By a 'feminine economy of the breath' she is keeping (and cultivating) breath inside the body and sheltering in herself the first seed of nature, the Warmth or Love, which is the eternal longing in Nature for Spirit (in Iri-garay this is the spiritualization of the body, or nature). The first breath of the world we share, both in nature (macrocosm) and in woman (mi- crocosm) is at the same time the possibility of a space-between, inter-subjective or intercorporeal (in the widest sense of the term) space/plane of gestures (mesocosm) where our lives coexist in a community beyond all differences (culture, sex, age, even species). A bodily-spiritual gesture of keeping and sharing the breath is an ethical gesture of respecting the life of the universe, for Irigaray. In "Ethical Gestures toward the Other", Irigaray explains in a new context the key feature of the third phase of her work, namely ethical gestures. According to the human body, the first autonomous gesture is breath, air being the very first food of life. In Genesis, it is said that God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen 2.7).19 For Irigaray, to become spiritual it is necessary to transform this vital breath "into a more subtle breath" (of loving, etc.) which corresponds to our transformation of natural life into a spiritual life.20 I find the most important element in Irigaray's third phase of the work in the incipient relation with the other as a woman - a relation based in her respect for life. There is yet another element present in Irigaray: silence. It is "the laying out of a space-time that must remain virgin in order for a meeting to happen. It is openness that nothing occupies or preoccupies - no language, no values, no pre-established truth".21 Silence is a threshold still (or again) to be revealed to us. I understand it as a substratum of a ,mesocosm', a pure gesture of a deserted intercorporeal space-between still to be inhabited by us.22 I have already argued that the mesocosm is a space-between (for the intercorporeality) and that it could be understood as a place (like the ancient rituals, for example) of a mysterious transition from pure gesture to the first ethical gesture of (wo)man. The economy of ethical gestures, and later the way to the embodied ethics, has its origin in the macro/ microcosmic awakening of life that comes to us as breath or is breathed into us. This is then the origin of any embodied ethics, claiming to enter into the intercorporeal realm of humans (and the living nature) via gestures. * Lenart Škof is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia. Notes 1 K. Marx, Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte ("Kritik der Hegelschen Dialektik und Philosophie Uberhaupt"). English translation: R. C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx — Engels Reader, Second Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, New York/London 1978, p. 115. 2 L. Irigaray, The forgetting of air in Martin Heidegger, tr. Mary Beth Mader. The University of Texas Press, Austin, TX 1999, p. 163. 3 T. Ogawa, "Qi and phenomenology of wind", Continental Philosophy Review, 31, 1998, p. 324. 4 Ibid., p. 325. 5 Ibid., p. 326. 6 See M. Boland, Die Wind-Atem-Lehre in den dlteren Upanisaden. Ugarit-Verlag, Munster 1997. 7 Cf. Patrick L. Bourgeois, "From Common Roots to a Broader Vision: A Pragmatic Thrust of European Phenomenology", American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 70, 3, Summer 1996, pp. 38i-397. 8 W. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1976, p. 19. For my citation see "Does 'Consciousness' Exist", in: W. James, Writings 1902—1910. The Library of America 38, New York 1987, pp. 1157-1158. James' italics. 9 R. Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfullness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2008. 10 Ibid., p. 154. Shusterman underpines his argument also with the fact that "we clearly continue to breathe when we are unsonscious" Interestingly enough (as we will see later in the second section of my paper), Indian Upanishadic philosophy defines the preeminence of breath over other vital powers of (wo)man (such as speech, sight, touch etc.) precisely on the grounds that breathing does not wane during the sleep). 11 Ibid., p. 155. 12 J. Butler, Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? Verso, London 2009, p. 60. This passage originally appeared in M. Falkoff, Poems from Guantanamo. The Detainees Speak, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2007, p. 72 (from A. Dorfman's Postscript). 13 L. Irigaray, "The Age of the Breath", in: Key Writings. Continuum, London 2004, p. 166. 14 See Upanishads (tr. and introduced by P. Ollivele), Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996, p. lii (Introduction): "The central concern of of all vedic thinkers, including the authors of the Upanisads, is to discover the connections that bind elements of these three spheres to each other. The assumption then is that the universe constitutes a web of relations, that things that appear to stand alone and apart are, in fact, connected to other things." 15 L. Irigaray, Sharing the World. Continuum, London 2008, p. 42. 16 Ibid., p. 43. 17 L. Irigaray, Between East and West. New Age Books, Delhi 2005, p. 5 (Introduction). 18 L. Irigaray, "The Age of the Breath", op.cit., pp. 165, 166 and 167. 19 For an analysis of Irigaray's elaborations on the Spirit see Part IV of Teaching (ed. by L. Iri-garay and M. Green, Continuum, London 2008). 20 L. Irigaray, "Ethical Gestures Toward the Other", Poligrafi, 14, 57, 2010 (forthcoming). The manuscript in with the author. Cf. p. iff. 21 Ibid., p. 9. 22 Cf. for pure gesture and its relation to a life in G. Agamben, Potentialities. Stanford Uni-verstiy Press, Stanford/California 1999, p. 79 (in his essay on M. Kommerell's criticism "Kom- merell, or On Gesture"): "Beyond the gestures of the soul and gestures of nature there is a third sphere, which one may call pure gestures ... This 'pure gestures' have given up all claim to reality". According to Kommerell, with Agamben, what is at issue now is to find a way to the profane mystery as an intimacy of living here and now, a new initiation "into life itself" (p. 84). Bibliography 1. Agamben, G. (1999), "Kommerell, or On Gesture", in: Agamben, G., Potentialities. Stanford/California, Stanford Universtiy Press, 77-88. 2. Boland, M. (1997), Die Wind-Atem-Lehre in den alteren Upanisaden. Munster, Ugarit-Verlag. 3. Bourgeois, P. L. (1996), "From Common Roots to a Broader Vision: A Pragmatic Thrust of European Phenomenology", American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 3 (Summer 1996), 381-397. 4. Butler, J. (2009), Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? London, Verso. 5. Irigaray, L. (1999), The forgetting of air in Martin Heidegger, tr. Mary Beth Mader. Austin, TX, The University of Texas Press. 6. Irigaray, L. (2004), "The Age of the Breath", in: Irigaray, L., Key Writings. London, Continuum, 165-170. 7. Irigaray, L. (2005), Between East and West. Delhi, New Age Books. 8. Irigaray, L. (2008), Sharing the World. London, Continuum. 9. Irigaray, L. (2010), "Ethical Gestures Toward the Other", Poligrafi 14, no. 57, 3-23. 10. James, W. (1987), "Does 'Consciousness' Exist", in: W. James, Writings 1902— 1910. New York, The Library of America 38, 1141-1158. 11. Karl Marx, (1978), Qkonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte ("Kritik der Hegels-chen Dialektik und Philosophie Uberhaupt"). English translation: Tucker, R. C. (ed.) (1987), The Marx — Engels Reader, Second Edition. New York / London, W. W. Norton & Company. 12. Ogawa, T. (1998), "Qi and phenomenology of wind", Continental Philosophy Review 31, 321-335. 13. Ollivele, P. (tr.) (1996), Upanishads. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 14. Shusterman, R. (2008), Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfullness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press. yw\\ M ?OVU Ml Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 LIVING WITH THE ANIMALS ... In the fullness of our nonidentities... Stephen David Ross* I come to speak not of the animals. Whence do I come, and toward what? To whom do I speak, and in what voice? If not the animals, then of which? If the animals do not speak, what do they say? In what gathering do we come together? I come to speak with you from two well known places. Let me remind you of them. First: We no longer derive man from "the spirit" or "the deity"; we have placed him back among the animals____Man is by no means the crown of creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection. And even this is saying too much: relatively speaking, man is the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, and not one has strayed more dangerously from its instincts. But for all that, he is of course the most interesting. (Nietzsche, A, 580) To which I might ask, why of course, why not perhaps? Second: The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case ... how for goodness' sake should one eat well? ... "One must eat well [il faut bien manger]" does not mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat. ... It is a rule offering infinite hospitality. ...1 (Derrida, EW, 282-3) To which I might ask, what hospitality for chick or calf, what do we give, what do they learn? And what makes it infinite except our pre- sumption? What could make it infinite but our forbearance? And if we withdrew from sacrificing animals so readily to our digestion, might the next step be to withdraw from sacrificing each other to our goodness? More of this later. We who believe in evolution—and which of us animals today does not, perhaps even those who would deny it?—have returned humanity to the animals, to nature. Human beings together with animals and plants compose living nature, where every species has achieved the same degree of perfection from the standpoint of evolutionary fitness. We may be capable of killing other animals, and of inventing new species of plants, but that capacity might be a defect in being—if such a thing could be said to be. As for eating—I am a committed vegetarian—we cannot choose not to eat, that would be to choose not to live or be, and we cannot limit eating to grasping and chewing, but may include all the ways in which we give and receive, in the proximities of our shared being in the world together—I mean, beings, worlds, singularities, and participations. Let us think of these as defining what we mean by proximities. And let us note that when we are together with animals, when we approach the animals and the others with the task of learning-to-give-to-them through the mouth (not to mention other orifices, not to forget infinite hospitality), we are speaking of the endless ways of expressing and responding that constitute hospitality. Let me begin again with some hypothetical yet tangible examples: You are sitting on the sofa in your living room, your three-year-old son in your lap, together with your 12-year-old cat, your dog beside you. You feel the warmth of each of their bodies touching yours and touching each other, and you are aware of your humanity in the bodies touching. You are watching Animal Planet, an episode about jaguars living and hunting. It seems to you that the animals are present in your room, though you know that that is possible only in virtue of exceptional camera technology. You know you are safe, and you feel that you are closer to such animals than you have ever been before. While you are watchingyou become aware that your cat has pounced on moths drifting into the room. You take your five-year-old daughter to the zoo and stop at the jaguar exhibit. The jaguar is pacing like a crazy person, back and forth, round and round. You are about 60 feet away, and cannot get closer. You wonder what it would be like to be the jaguar in such a cage. And you think you know. You are walking through the forest, aware of the singing of the birds, the movements of small animals, your family at your side. An outing together, you say to each other, let's go for a walk in the woods. You are lucky to live near a forest that is kept as wild as possible except for a few dirt paths. The coyotes have come back and deer are visible at certain hours of the day. You are standing on a precipice looking out over rice fields below in Bali. In the darkness you can see the stars before you and up into the sky. In the darkness you can see the stars before you and below, all the way down. The stars below are moving. The entire world is full of moving stars. You realize that the lights below are fireflies. Many of these are familiar experiences, though the last may no longer be familiar to city dwellers. I offer them to call attention to what might be strange about them. Let me begin with the second. In his novel, Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee presents a famous older woman author who has written a novel on Molly Bloom regarded as comparable if not superior to James Joyce's Ulysses. Already a remarkable suggestion. She is invited to speak throughout the world on any topic she chooses. Although her hosts would like her to speak on literature, she chooses to speak on the treatment of animals on factory farms, comparing it with the treatment of Jews in German concentration camps. The dinners that celebrate her present a difficult social relation. What shall they eat? What shall they discuss? Who will be offended? Lest we pass by too easily, let me note the bodily elements of this picture: animals in cages, in their odiferous presence; animals screaming at slaughter; blood, skin, intestines, and bone; human beings confined to barracks, fed sickening rations, sickened by work, cold, unfitting clothes and shoes, suffused with indifferent hatreds and brutalities. One might speculate that the corporealities and the brutalities here have much in common, in contrast to my first and second examples, in which the warmth and love that define the best that human life can experience are profoundly corporeal. This is to say that despite a world of traditions in which the highest joys that humans can know involve diminishing the tangible weight of physical experiences, those same traditions and lives know that the fullness of being for humans and animals, if not plants and other wonderful things, is unmistakably corporeal. I would say that this is a lesson we may learn from Darwin and evolutionary biology. We may learn it, but many would refuse it. One of Elizabeth Costello's themes—offensive to some—is that rational discourses such as science and philosophy are incapable of addressing issues of extreme suffering and evil. Concentration camps and factory farming are too intense for abstract reason to address. Reason has no monopoly on ethical compassion, and indeed is a human invention for human purposes. Might it not be that the phenomenon we are examining here is, rather than the flowering of a faculty that allows access to the secrets of the universe, the specialism of a rather narrow self-regenerating intellectual tradition whose forte is reasoning, in the same way that the forte of chess players is playing chess, which for its own motives it tries to install at the centre of the universe? (Coetzee, EC, 69) A second theme, in close proximity to the first, is that literature, especially poetry, can express the inner being of strange and unfamiliar things, for example, wild animals and dead people. Here is that jaguar again, twice, in the eyes and voice of a poet: The jaguar [skipping the beginning] By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear-but there's no cage to him More than to the visionary his cell: His stride is wildernesses of freedom: The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel horizons come. -Ted Hughes Second glance at a jaguar Skinful of bowls he bowls them, The hip going in and out of joint, dropping the spine with the urgency of his hurry Like a cat going along under thrown stones, under cover, Glancing sideways, running Under his spine____ He spins from the bars, . Over the cage floor the At every stride he has to turn a corner In himself and correct it. His head Is like the worn down stump of another whole jaguar, His body is just the engine shoving it forward, Lifting the air up and shoving on under, The weight of his fangs hanging the mouth open, Bottom jaw combing the ground. -Ted Hughes (quoted from Mulhall, WA, 111-2) Here is a magician-philosopher's poetic expression of our third experience: Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. (Abram, SS, 22) Ultimately, to acknowledge the life of the body, and to affirm our solidarity with this physical form, is to acknowledge our existence as one of the earth's animals, and so to remember and rejuvenate the organic basis of our thoughts and our intelligence. (47) Ultimately, then, it is not the human body alone but rather the whole of the sensuous world that provides the deep structure of language. As we ourselves dwell and move within language, so, ultimately, do the other animals and animate things of the world; if we do not notice them there, it is only because language has forgotten its expressive depths. "Language is a life, is our life and the life of the things... ." It is no more true that we speak than that the things, and the animate world itself, speak within us. (87) And the fourth: Between the constellations below and the constellations above drifted countless fireflies, their lights flickering like the stars, some drifting up to join the clusters of stars overhead, others, like graceful meteors, slipping down from above to join the constellations underfoot, and all these paths of light upward and downward were mirrored, as well, in the still surface of the paddies. I felt myself at times falling through space, at other moments floating and drifting. I simply could not dispel the profound vertigo and giddiness; the paths of the fireflies, and their reflections in the water's surface, held me in a sustained trance. Even after I crawled back to my hut and shut the door on this whirling world, I felt that now the little room in which I lay was itself floating free of the earth. (4) Elizabeth Costello's description of this being-in-our-body is presented in relation to a bat—the bat made famous in Thomas Nagel's suggestion that we cannot imagine ourselves as a bat. Our finite beings in our finite bodies make it impossible for us to imagine being so other: sensing, hearing, living like a bat; sensing, smelling, being a dog; perhaps unable to imagine being my lover whose body is so intimately close to me. All bodies, perhaps, are intimate and other. The other who I love, whose otherness I may or may not imagine, is other in the proximity of our bodies, same and other bodies. Tout autre est tout autre. (Derrida, GD, 68) Elizabeth Costello confronts us with two different suggestions, if you will, concerning being in a body, always in different bodies, human and bat: that poets can so imagine, and that what they imagine is bat being, bats and jaguars full of being in their bodies, a notion she expands on without attribution, drawing from Spinoza's beatitudo: unbounded joy. To be a living bat is to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being. Bat being in the first case; human being in the second, maybe; but those are secondary considerations. To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy. (EC, 77) By bodying forth the jaguar, Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals—by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and no one ever will. He shows us how to bring the living body into being within ourselves. When we read the jaguar poem, when we recollect it afterwards in tranquillity, we are for a brief while the jaguar. He ripples within us, he takes over our body, he is us. (97-8) The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said, "It is they in those cattle cars rattling past." They did not say, "How would it be if it were I in that cattle car?" They did not say, "It is I who am in that cattle car." They said, "It must be the dead who are being burned today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my cabbages." They did not say, "How would it be if I were burning?" They did not say, "I am burning, I am falling in ash." (79) I share some of Nagel's misgivings as to whether our imagination is capable of identifying with the auditory world of a bat or any other creature that lives by echolocation; I am struck by how different is the world of a dog who lives primarily by smell. This awe—yes awe—I feel is not to denigrate the bat or dog but to the contrary, to celebrate their otherness, the otherness of their worlds. We share worlds together, in some sense we share the same worlds together, and yet here are two beings whose worlds are wonderfully different. One of these animals is capable of sharing our human worlds more fully than many other people. Dogs are famous for reading the minds and souls of humans by reading their bodies, however they do that. All this might be to say that I do not accept Heidegger's insistence that animals are poor in world.2 Poor perhaps in ways that certain humans are poor in human worlds, but astonishingly rich in animal worlds, in ways that human beings can only dimly imagine. I have misgivings about the reach of our imaginations in certain endeavors, yet I wish to celebrate our imaginations as Elizabeth Costello asks us to. Imagination—not only human, perhaps—is limited yet unbounded. We cannot imagine just anything, yet we cannot suppose that anything is beyond imagining. That peculiar paradox of imagining is the key to literature and art, if not to what makes us human. Except that we must not suppose that we know that such imagining is restricted to humans. But this is not what interests me here. I am interested in another story present in what Elizabeth Costello says. What is it to be full of being? And can we imagine fullness of being in another human or animal, even a plant or stone, without denigration—in her words, without implying that such others, with less fullness or a different fullness, are ours to use in any way whatever.3 I have intimated that this fullness of being is corporeal, we live in our bodies, and bodily living is the fullness of being. The limits of philosophy, then, and of any other mode of thought as such, is given by the abstractions such thought imposes on us—very strong, overwhelming in philosophy. The greatness and weakness of philosophy lie in the power of its abstractions. Fullness of being, then, is the abundance of being in a body. Bodies are proximate, relational, embedded, and entangled. Embodiment is relationality. Indeed, bodies are so embedded and entangled that we are constantly surprised by what emerges from such bodily relations. I would call that process of emergence evolution. In Spinoza's words, "we do not know what bodies can do." (E, Pt. 3, P2, Sch.) This surprise does not entail miscomprehension or distance alone, for we are frequently surprised even more by how intimate and affective other bodies are. Fullness of being, then, is inherently strange and unfamiliar, in the midst of kinship and love. This disparition pervades the physical world. I say this aware that Enlightenment thought has made the science of physics the model of clarity and certainty. More of this later. Here I want to call attention to the pervasiveness of what cannot be said (in philosophy or science) without difficulty (in Cora Diamond's words), what cannot be understood, because it is itself, inherently, difficult to understand, difficult to be (Diamond, DRDP). In other words, what we may learn from the proximities and intimacies of animals (and others, including those we love) is the strange difficulty of being. Being in a body is strange and difficult. Being as a body also. Being a mind, a soul, a being fully present in a body that is present somehow to itself, and thereby present to others, is inconceivably strange. I am suggesting that this strangeness pervades the world. I am suggesting that all that we take to be beings as such are present strangely and difficultly to themselves. Every identity is nonidentical with itself, and present to itself nonidentically. I call this betraying. It is the ongo- ing condition of the enchantment of the world, beyond accounting. More of this later. Returning to fullness and denigration: Fullness of being is being in a body, embedded and entangled with other bodies. In this way, the denigration of other bodies is interrupted by the ways in which these other bodies are me, ways in which I am entangled among them. John Donne said this several centuries ago in Europe: no one is an island, entire to itself. Buddhism describes it as emptiness, sunyata, without complete and separate self identity. Western individuality promotes a myth of self ownership in the context of a capitalist world of labor and consumption in which individuals are as they produce and as they consume. If we add the presence of others—individual bodies betrayed in who they are by others, other bodies and other things, historical and relational—the picture expands to make identity impossible in itself, nonidentical with itself. The fullness of being is its nonidentity with itself. Every being betrays itself, and betrays the others; every identity is nonidentical with itself, is what it is in virtue of others. We are embedded in the being of others, as they are embedded in ours. In our bodies we are full of other bodies, however strange and difficult this may be. To denigrate an other—animal, human, and others—is to denigrate ourselves. Each of us is so embodied, so embedded, entangled among others in our bodies, that we are what and who we are in virtue of what and who they are. We can elevate ourselves only by diminishing the fullness of our own identities. This means that the fullness of my being is embodied in the fullness of yours. What I might gain in elevation I lose in the resulting attenuation of our shared being.4 Here is a well-known example:5 Levinas uses the Kantian expression "friend of man" in order to designate the dog that is capable of transcendence. It is a question of the dogs of Egypt, which are thunderstruck at the moment of the "death of the firstborn," when "Israel is about to be released from the house of bondage." You will hear how the dog, which is still in lack and privation, as Heidegger will decidedly say, "without," still lacking the logos and ethics, "with neither ethics nor logos," in Levinas's words, sees itself convoked, in its very silence, as a witness, simply as witness to the humanity of man. This mute witness is there merely to attest to the dignity (Wurde) of man. (Derrida, ATTIA, 116-7) No one is more corporeal than Levinas, no one more ethical. And yet he cannot think himself into the being of an animal, neither in general nor in the particular case of Bobby, the famous dog whose presence in the camp was to acknowledge the humanity of the prisoners. The dignity of man is said to elevate humanity above all other creatures and things in the world. Yet this Kantian claim, no matter how elevated, carries with it a profound destitution of being. Certain traits and not others define the dignity of man—not to mention how long and in what ways dignity has been withheld from women. What would it mean if we granted dignity to all things—not rights but dignity, self identity and self realization, with the proviso that not only the being but the identity and the realization are nonidentical with themselves? This is to say that the fullness of their being means to me as a body that I can never realize the fullness of my being except in relation to them, through their fullness; and not in any predetermined way. The fullness of being opens onto the difficulty of being nonidenti-cal with oneself. This can be said in the language of bodies and animality—first Levinas again: But is not the diachrony of the inspiration and expiration separated by the instant that belongs to an animality? Would animality be the openness upon the beyond essence? But perhaps animality is only the soul's still being too short of breath. In human breathing, in its everyday equality, perhaps we have to already hear the breathlessness of an inspiration that paralyzes essence, that transpierces it with an inspiration by the other, an inspiration that is already expiration, that "rends the soul"! It is the longest breath there is, spirit. Is man not the living being capable of the longest breath in inspiration, without a stopping point, and in expiration, without return? (Levinas, OB, 181-2) Let us think within a certain European tradition of this conjunction of inspiration, transcendence, and breath as spirit, together with dignity, subjectivity, and humanity. The key term in this passage is animality, first as the corporeality of humanity—but not its inspiration—second as the brutality of the natural world—or, what may be the same thing again, its indifference. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Evil belongs to humanity alone. No creature is as destructive as human beings. We are higher than our animality. Except, as Nietzsche says, we are our animality. We are our bodies. Bodies are us. In all their transcendence. The miracle of humans is the miracle of bodies.6 And the miracle of bodies is not only human. It seems that we are always asked to take sides where there are no sides. The side of humanity, the side of animals, the side of goodness, the side of death. We must know, we must believe, we must take a stand. As if these existed except in the subjunctive. Each of them nonidenti-cal with itself. Here, in the name of taking sides, Derrida has something remarkable to say. On the sides, then, of life and death—let us call this the fullness of living. Helene Cixous took sides "for life." This is not an obvious thing to do, unlike what one might imagine. The side [parti] is also a wager [pari], an act of faith. What does it mean to wager one's life on life? What will the choice of life have meant for her? Not a "life-choice," but the side of life against death, for life without death, beyond a death whose test and threat are none the less endured, in mourning even in the life blood and breath, in the soul of writing. (Derrida, HCL, xiii) The fullness of living takes place in the subjunctive. As for me, I keep forever reminding her each time, on my side, that we die in the end, too quickly. And I always have to begin again. For she—because she loves to live—does not believe me. She, on her side, knows well that one dies in the end, too quickly; she knows it and writes about it better than anyone, she has the knowledge of it but she believes none of it. She does not believe, she knows; she is the one who knows and who tries, but she believes none of it. (2) On one side, this beginning leads toward the subjunctive mood of believing: would that I (or we) might believe—a mood that teeters on the edge of the deepest abyss (if there be such). On another side, this beginning leads toward enchanting, a term, like betraying, that plunges into the abyss without fear of dying. If that be possible. By enchanting I mean to evoke Max Weber's suggestion a century ago that the world has become disenchanted, that we believe (but not in the subjunctive) that we can account for all things by rationality and calculation (Weber, SV, 155). Might the fullness of being be enchanting, in the subjunctive, full of unaccountable things? Derrida—jd—insists that he's writing is en-chanting, that literature can be en-chanting, in the face of dying, on the side of living, if that be possible, if that be not the impossible. Or unbelievable. Always in the subjunctive. How would the mighty powers of this unbelievable belief in the impossible watch over what is called so glibly the fiction of a so-called literary event, over all that complies with the modality of a certain "as if"? And as each art entertains a different experience of fiction and therefore of belief, one may wonder what happens to believing and to the "would that I might believe" when arts graft, haunt, and mingle with one another. ... When one hears a piece of music, if one can hear it, for instance a song [chant], an "enchanting chant [enchant]" as is said in a text about magical enchantment, a hymn or incantation of which we will have more to say, then one believes or one no longer needs to believe in the same way as someone who would only hear the words of a narrative (whether fictional or not). What happens then, as far as belief and the impossible are concerned, when the song of the enchanting chant [chant de l'enchant] can no longer be dissociated from the whole body of words and from what still presents itself as the literality of literature? When literature becomes an enchanting chant? (Derrida, HC, 4-5) I might ask—perhaps—why literature (alone?) can become an enchanting chant. What would it mean to insist or to deny this?—that it can, that only it can. Perhaps as if it might. And why not music? What happens when anything, literature or music, philosophy or poem, becomes enchanting? I responded in detail to this question else-where.7 Enchanting expresses what is unaccountable, miraculous, without a name. Neither the name of a god for what is beyond accounting, nor the name of a science for what is perhaps not beyond. The noni-dentity of every identity with itself. Enchanting is betraying. Bodies are enchanting. Whatever is enchanting is bodies, bodies are full of being, embodied and embedded and entangled among themselves, always as if perhaps beyond themselves. In hc's name, jd says the following: As I accumulate the false steps and false starts to begin with, I will say at least that not only do I no longer know which side I am on and from which side I am about to speak (neither from hers nor from mine), not only do I no longer know what a side is (for example, as they say, the side of life or the side of death), but above all I do not know whom I name or call when I say "she" or "her." How to speak of her? How not to do so? How to avoid her? (21) In the name of animals, he says something similar: The deconstruction that matters to me here should also promote itself in the name of another history, another concept of history, and of the history of the human as well as that of reason. An immense history, a macro- and mi-crohistory. [The history, but also something much more, that is—] The sim-plisticness, misunderstanding, and violent disavowal that we are analyzing at present also seem to me to be betrayals of repressed human possibilities, of other powers of reason, of a more comprehensive logic of argument, of a more demanding responsibility concerning the power of questioning and response, concerning science as well, and, for example—but this is only an example—as regards the most open and critical forms of zoological or ethological knowledge. (Derrida, ATTIA, 104) As always I would emphasize the bodies. I would bring the themes of enchanting, believing, and betraying together in the subjunctive form of a thesis: these may perhaps express the fullness of being in the proximities of bodies. The fullness of being in animal bodies, and other bodies, can be expressed only subjunctively. The double meaning of might expresses the intensities and the subjunctivi-ties of bodies in the abundance of being. Finally, then, the subjunctive forms in which bodies are embodied and embedded, the entanglements of bodies among themselves, are also expressed in the subjunctive. For example, believing includes brain cells and iron atoms and who knows what else? In the fullness of being we are not who we are except insofar as we are something else, and we are intimately entangled together. This enables us to cross over to them in imagination. It enables this crossing subjunctively. I believe who I am I believe I know who I am I believe I believe who I am I may believe I may know who and what you are... who and what I am... who and what the world is that we share. I come to conclusion with two other voices. First, Cora Diamond again: What is expressed [in the poem from Ted Hughes] is the sense of a difficulty that pushes us beyond what we can think. To attempt to think it is to feel one's thinking come unhinged. Our concepts, our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there; the difficulty, if we try to see it, shoulders us out of life, is deadly chilling. (DRDP, 56) [Yet] what is capable of astonishing one in its incomprehensibility, its not being fittable in with the world as one understands it, may be seen by others as unsurprising. (60) Elizabeth Costello, in Coetzee's first lecture, speaks of her own knowledge of death, in a passage which (in the present context) takes us to the "contradictory permanent horrors" spoken of in Hughes's poem. "For an instant at a time," she says, "I know what it is like to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it." She goes on to say that we all have such moments, and that the knowledge we then have is not abstract but embodied. "For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can." She goes on, making the contradiction explicit: "What I know is what a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that it knows nothing and will never know anything anymore. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time" (32). The awareness we each have of being a living body, being "alive to the world," carries with it exposure to the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with them. This vulnerability is capable of panicking us. To be able to acknowledge it at all, let alone as shared, is wounding; but acknowledging it as shared with other animals, in the presence of what we do to them, is capable not only of panicking one but also of isolating one, as Elizabeth Costello is isolated. Is there any difficulty in seeing why we should not prefer to return to moral debate, in which the liv-ingness and death of animals enter as facts that we treat as relevant in this or that way, not as presences that may unseat our reason? (71-2) I cannot repeat too often that the presences that may unseat our reason are embedded bodies, that we—and others—who inhabit bodies experience difficulties of reality in virtue of living in our bodies with other bodies, that the fullness of being that we and animals and who knows what else experience and live may well be—even cows placidly chewing in the field—something of a difficulty that can only be subjunctively, because it is never just what it is. I conclude with a different subjunctive, where the fullness of bodily language meets the fullness of love. The lips that speak are the lips that love, as if to believe that loving and speaking might be the same while always different, because of the bodily orifices they caress. We are luminous. Neither one nor two. I've never known how to count. ... An odd sort of two. And yet not one. Especially not one. But how can I put "I love you" differently? I love you, my indifferent one? (Irigaray, WOLST, 207) I love you: our two lips cannot separate to let just one word pass. (208) How can I put I love you differently in the subjunctive? which is to say that love is never identical with itself. Irigaray's famous if not notorious words, so often taken in the declarative—there are only men and women—cry out in the subjunctive. As does the universal. I am, therefore, a political militant for the impossible, which is not to say a utopian. Rather, what I want is yet to be as the only possibility of a future. (ILTY, 10) Without doubt, the most appropriate content for the universal is sexual difference. Indeed, this content is both real and universal. Sexual difference is an immediate natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal. The whole of human kind is composed of women and men and of nothing else. The problem of race is, in fact, a secondary problem—except from a geographic point of view?—which means we cannot see the wood for the trees, and the same goes for other cultural diversities—religious, economic, and political ones. Sexual difference probably represents the most universal question we can address. Our era is faced with the task of dealing with this issue, because, across the whole world, there are, there are only, men and women. The culture of this universal is yet to be. The individual has been considered as a particular without an adequate interpretation of the universal that is in her or him: woman or man. (47-8) What kind of universal, what fullness of being, is waiting for us in the subjunctive? Other words and other holocausts, all subjunctive. To each wounding separation, I would answer by refusing the holocaust while silently affirming, for myself and for the other, that the most intimate perception of the flesh escapes every sacrificial substitution, every assimilation into discourse, every surrender to the God. Scent or premonition between my self and the other, this memory of the flesh as the place of approach means ethical fidelity to incarnation. To destroy it is to risk the suppression of alter-ity, both the God's and the other's. Thereby dissolving any possibility of access to transcendence. (ESD, 217) Betray the subjunctive. Refuse the holocaust. Sacrifice sacrifice. Enchant disenchantment. * Stephen David Ross is Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, State University of New York, and Alfred North Whitehead Fellow at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Notes 1 The complete passage is as follows: The moral question is thus not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat, eat this and not that, the living or the nonliving, man or animal, but since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat, and since there's no other definition of the good [d« bien], how for goodness' sake should one eat well [bien manger]? And what does this imply? What is eating? How is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated? And in what respect does the formulation of these questions in language give us still more food for thought? In what respect is the question, if you will, still carnivorous? The infinitely metonymical question on the subject of "one must eat well" must be nourishing not only for me, for a "self," which would thus eat badly; it must be shared, as you might put it, and not only in language. "One must eat well [il faut bien manger]" does not mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat. One never eats entirely on one's own: this constitutes the rule underlying the statement, "One must eat well." It is a rule offering infinite hospitality. (Derrida, EW, 282-3) 2 Discussed at length in Derrida, OS, 11-2 and ATTIA, 144-5. 3 Spinoza's words again, around whom all these words circulate. (Spinoza, E, Pt. 4, App. XXVI) 4 This is famously expressed in the master slave dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but it is at the heart of domination. My world is diminished by what I do to diminish yours. 5 The dog, of course, is Bobby, from Levinas, ND. 6 See Whitehead, PR, 339. 7 See my E. Bibliography 1. Abram, D. (1996), The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World [SS]. New York: Vintage. 2. Coetzee, J. M. (2003), Elizabeth Costello [EC]. New York: Penguin. 3. Coetzee, J. M. (2001), The Lives of Animals [LA]. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 4. Cavell, S. and Diamond, C., Mcdowell, J., Hacking, I. and Wolfe, C. (2008), Philosophy and Animal Life [PAL]. New York: Columbia University Press. 5. Derrida, J. (2008), The Animal That Therefore I Am [AIA] (ed. M.-L. Mallet and tr. by D. Wills). New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. 6. Derrida, J. (1995), "'Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the Subject" [EW] (tr. by P. Connor and A. Ronell). In: J. Derrida, Points ... : Interviews, 1974-94 (tr. by P. Kamuf and others). Stanford: Stanford University Press. 7. Derrida, J. (1994), The Gift of Death [GD] (tr. by D. Wills). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 8. Derrida, J. (2006), H.C. for Life, that is to Say ... [HCL] (tr. by L. Milesi and S. Herbrechter). Stanford: Stanford University Press. 9. Derrida, J. (1989), Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question [OS] (tr. by G. Ben-nington and R. Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 10. Derrida, J. (1995), Points ... : Interviews, 1974-94 [P.] (tr. by P. Kamuf and others). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. 11. Diamond, C. (2008), "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy," [DRDP]. In: S. Cavell and C. Diamond, J. Mcdowell, I. Hacking, and C. Wolfe (eds), Philosophy and Animal Life [PAL]. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 43-90. 12. Irigaray, L. (1993), An Ethics of Sexual Difference [ESD] (tr. by C. Burke and G. C. Gill). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Translation of Ethique de la Difference sexuelle [EDS]. Paris: Minuit, 1984. 13. Irigaray, L. (1996), I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History [ILTY] (tr. by A. Martin). New York: Routledge. 14. Irigaray, L. (1985), "When Our Lips Speak Together" [WOLST]. In: L. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, (tr. by C. Porter). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 15. Levinas, E. (1990), Difficult Freedom; Essays on Judaism [DF] (tr. by S. Hand). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 16. Levinas, E. (1990), "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights" [ND] (tr. by S. Hand). In: E. Levinas, Difficult Freedom; Essays on Judaism [DF]. 17. Levinas, E. (1978), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence [OB] (tr. by A. Lin-gis). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Translation of Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de l'essence [AE]. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. 18. Mulhall, S. (2009), The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy [WA]. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 19. Nagel, T. (1974), "What is it Like to be a Bat?" In: The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974), pp. 435-50. 20. Nietzsche, F. (1954), The Antichrist [A]. In: F. Nietzsche, Portable Nietzsche (ed. and tr. by W. Kaufmann). New York: Viking Press. 21. Ross, S. D. (2012), Enchanting: Beyond Disenchantment [E]. Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming, 2012. 22. Spinoza, B. de. (1988), Collected Works of Spinoza [CWS], vol. I. 2nd printing with corr. (ed. and tr. by E. M. Curley). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 23. Spinoza, B. de. (1988), Ethics [E]. In: B. de Spinoza, Collected Works of Spinoza [CWS], vol. I. 2nd printing with corr. 24. Weber, M. (1946), "Science as a Vocation" [SV]. In: M. Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (tr. by H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills). New York: Oxford University Press. Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 A SECRET LIFE OF THE HAND Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa* In Sanskrit the gesture of the hand—hasta mudrčt—calls forth the mystical and the rhapsodic, the divine and the earthly, demarcating in the surreptitious the "vanishing point"2 of "a secret knowledge"3 that, in the prospect of its disclosure, beckons die abendlandische PhilosophieA (occidental philosophy) towards a pera yvcixa? of the in-accessible and irreducible. The rising and setting of a gesture, invoking the twilight of an apparition, as Hegel refers to it in his philosophy of history6 and philosophy of right,7 here traverses sol orient and sol occidens,9 its gesture ascending and descending in a journey that is neither beginning nor ending. That which is secreted or withheld, or, in Merleau-Ponty's words, "what is from forever and nowhere,"10 hints at a wellspring, and a future hastening toward the horizon of a "vanishing point"11 alongside what appear to be "strange distance[s]"12 where gestures not only "visible" and "from elsewhere"13 ruminate upon the most luxurious as well as the barest of things.14 In "a language of coincidences"15 and "coherent illusions,"16 that is, in the very language that promises a future to philosophy, we find ourselves floating beneath, beside, and above that which is language itself—gesticulating, as in a trance, amongst the very irreducible and most secret of things—wherein "with twilight closing in"17 philosophy finds herself embraced in the darkness of three rising suns. That which is unbound by Ocean and Sea, and due West of the land of Hiroshige,18 beckons sunrise Nihon over many islands20 where clouds hasten along silken paths beside plum gardens, sudden showers, and clear weather after snow.11 Just as centuries past, palatial gestures beckoned Forbidden Cities due North, passaging China,22 in the manner of the surreptitious—glorious, meridian, and harmonious—evoking tranquility, profundity ^Ml®23 and celestial purity. Gestures hasten along shimmering edges and partitions, secret corridors and gateways of jade and coiled dragons24 conjuring entry- ways to silence, where imperial gesticulations and acts of resistance pass from hand to hand. Resonances, reverberations, and secret languages whispering Middle East, Prime Meridian, and Great Circle,25 gesturing toward Africa, cradle of civilization, amongst flowering cherry blossoms, lotus, hyacinth TauvGoi;, Hyakinthos,26 and Jasmine Revolutions. In the gliding gesture of jaguars traversing continents, centuries, and millennia, along the Great Mongolian Steppe, decorated by feather grass, we discover a language on the point of no return, where Alea iacta est "the die has been cast"27 in every hand. While hasta, meaning "hand" and mudra, referring to a "seal," "mark," or "gesture,"28 in its mystical proclivity invokes Hindu and Buddhist spiritual practices, it may also be considered in saecularis29 as an abstract philosophical construct whose pretention revolves around the unoccupied and the unfurnished, a purely imaginary concept, readily emptying itself, positing nothingness, that is to say a nothingness which, in turn, signifies everything, but that is not to be confused with the "whole" and/or any particular notion of a "totality." The secular and the sacred, nothingness and everything, the nothing and the every thing of nothing, East and West, South and North, latitude and longitude, meridian and cosmic constellations, masculine, feminine, and between, may therein be wit(h)ness30 to a psra yvrnxa. in the plural that inadvertently trespasses the tangible and the intangible, crossing movements within stillness, infinitely assembling and disassembling themselves through gesture(s). An after beyond or otherwise "open to visions"31 wherein the "carnal experience"32 imbues emptiness as the very passage of an opaqueness no less transparent, and "all true,"33 in mudras that presage attestation and testimonial, oracular in their designation. Twisting and turning, ambling along the scenic paths of ancient Japanese gardens die malerischen Pfaden der alten japanischen Garten,54 past waterfalls and the splendid appearance of teahouses where hanging copper lanterns sway gently in the midsummer breeze, the gesture of the hand hints at the perfunctory eloquence of a figuration invoking the spirit of contemplation, peace, and serenity. Mudras referring to the leisurely, the unhurried, in celebration of the gradual—that which enunciates itself through sheer indolence and languid pronouncement, whispering elegance and grace. The secret gesture of the hand, in this instance, "a veritable touching of the touch,"35 fathoms each motion before the beginning, a beginning, that is, after an after, and, "by'm'by,"36 in "a language of life"37 welcoming joy38 and exaltation, notwithstanding sorrow, and by no means fearing death. To fathom a "vision other than our own,"39 which encompasses an infinite number of names, or, no name40 otherthanourown,41 let us say, that is intimately stranger42 and "has no name in any philosophy,"43 may be glimpsed, if only momentarily, through gestures hastening toward secret portals that beckon the "inexhaustible."44 Gestures of the hand between borders of any and every kind, in this sense, may propose a pera yvaixa. that neither belongs nor repels, between, within, beyond, before, behind, above, and beneath an esoteric and exoteric delineation, that is, at the margins of its very delimitation, fostering a pera. yvaixa. of another sort, a pera. yvaixa. that proposes a trespassing of borders and margins, without limits,45 in keeping,46 an ungrounding of twilight, so to speak, passaging emptiness, and habit, a threshold invoked through mystical gesture—by the mere wave of the hand—mirages gesticulated amongst passages, labyrinthine in charac-ter—pera yvaixa. as an act of birth47—wherein the falcon Circe KtpK^ Kirke,4 the Owl of Menerwa,49 and the Swan of Saraswathi50 may coincide. Gestures that, in turn, engage Nature and the Divine in the pronouncement of a philosophia perennis51 and samdhyabhasa (twilight language),52 a pera yvaixa. maneuvering somewhere or nowhere between the secularsacred, pending upon "extralinguistic figures, a passage into, before, after, and beyond taking place in multiple modalities and times, even beside time. We have to imagine a gesture "[s]ans domicile fixe"54 that travels elsewhere referring to Rioja (La Rioja) and rice cakes (mochi, idli, orputo),55 sake56 and bread. A nomadism of the hand bedeviled with prophecies betraying any notion of a particular address, softening borders like rroma, rromani57 gypsies carrying the future in the passage of an echo through the cadence of an ancient song. Evocations that mesmerize and enrapture and may be wit(h)nessed58 at the horizon of a sparse and barely visible landscape, in the rumbling of a future, a voice, a garrison, a prison, a demonstration and act of resistance, or simply in the gesture of the preparation of a meal, telling jokes, or entering the ocean on a hot summer day. Gestures that enumerate the propensity of the hand towards multiple inflections revealing a psxa. yvaixa. that revels in its ability to transform, transgress, and alter itself through silken layers of geologic time, prior to that which calls human time. Unfathomable gestures that beckon that which is prior to the mystical, in a roving that transcends our notion of finitude and infinity, an un-imaginable secret time that belongs to no one, not even to Nature or the Divine, or to the word. Untranslatable hands, impregnated with mysteries remaining under cover: " 'You must not tell anyone,' "59 the secret of the nameless no name hand.60 We may therein consider a meta, physika6 of the hand gesturing toward intuition, mysticism, and nothingness, confounding reason as such, motioning towards an otherwise and beyond, through the amplification of illusions, phantoms, and whispers, whose impermanence, alluding to discord and dissent, in a prefiguration of the an-archical,62 remain malleable, ungathering itself/themselves on the borders and margins of multiple concepts and bodies where, too, that which ungath-ers itselfthemselves in the sea of unknowing, gestures toward a horizon beholden to secrets. In a hermeneutical evocation that is in the figuration of a breath or whisper, sonorous gestures engender numerous cadences, pertaining to the notion of concurrence, and "simultaneous [un] narration[s],"63 infinite in sense. In a collusion of "compresence"64 and "interpresence,"65 an ungathering, in the Hegelian sense as "opposed de-terminations,"66 or "contradiction" and "antinomy,"67 at once composed and de-composed, within "coincidentia oppsitorium" (coincidences of op-posites),68 allowing for a beyond which unfastening marginality meanders upon principles which infinitely gather and ungather themselves in the emptiness of every nothing that is readily emptying everything. In an inverted figuration of prophecy, remaining forever secret, the hand enters beyond arrangement and disarrangement. Polyphonic, contrapuntal, and indefinite in its arrangement, the gesture of the hand refers to an excess of tonalities and the promise of insoluble contradictions that make its multiple invocations possible. There is anything but clarity here, or let us say, the hidden is yet to be considered as another figuration pertaining to prophecy. In disarrangement, secrets flitter everywhere and nowhere that is elsewhere. And yet, the gesture is closest to its promised forbearance when listening to anyone's silence. Black hands rummaging against a tender sky, the blackest hands (Malcolm's), the finest, roughest, most beautiful hands, spiraling, spinning, ingesting language as if it were another form of sustenance or noise to be buried or celebrated alongside the sweet scent of honeysuckle. Hands gesturing, politicking elsewhere like distant memories. The else and the where once again falling into disarrangement. Like rivers somewhere, some time, some place, in some room, in 1964. We are in Detroit and it is April. Malcolm X raises his voice: "We need [...] a-do-it-yourself philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, a it's-already-too-late philosophy. [...] Black Nationalism is a self-help philosophy. [...] This is a philosophy that eliminates the necessity for division and argument. 'Cause if you're black you should be thinking black, and if you are black and you not thinking black at this late date, well, I'm sorry for you' [applause]."69 We are in this instance referring to that which withstands. A hand that belies confusion, inheriting the tongue of lucidity, the roaring river of life whose elegance sanctions its prowess. Sitting side by side in the quiet, indefinite gestures that linger, caress, and trespass the silent and the secret in "hands [...] heavy with poems"70—scattered amongst ashes, beckoning "long years that flow as rivers flow, / when the sky is warm and a cool breeze plays / over the surfaces, creating patterns that announce / all that is beautiful [.. .]"71 "1. All for nothing / 2. and nothing at all"72 (Keyson)—gesturing light, darkness, wind, and silence "[a]t the [very] moment when daylight fades, [and] when silence invades an increasingly pure sky [...],"73 where the secret that is beholden to every thing and no thing "moves from the unknown to the unknown" and mere apparitions meander upon the furtive (Bataille).74 A hand, we may state, that not only casts the secret but invokes it as that which is "of another order,"75 that which always lives "further on,"76 beckoning a state of diffuseness,77 its flowing and stasis a gesture of transformation, a slipping away78 "elsewhere."79 A gesture thus spoken, as it were, a listening, where "everything [.] gives itself to others."80 It is as if the hand transgressed itself through the exhilaration of another. Its fingers cascading in gestures of laughter, disillusionment, hunger, and exile. Phantom fingers that adhere to the breath of the living and the departed: "I'll be there wherever that is"81 that is death. ^e descent of time, the fury of the hand grasping and retrieving, then letting go, hands brimming with consolation, and bidding farewell, farewell my love, may you experience safe passage through the rivers that herald death, farewell beloved, farewell to the hand that is life. A rhythmic intonation motioning toward a pera yvaixa. of the (an) otherhand, and/or handedness—inclining toward the flight of the hand, such as handed fins, fingers, feathers, whiskers, claws, and jaws, a handlike paw, pawing, treading lightly, beckoning the gestures of wolves (ca-nis lupus82) across tundra, forest, and desert, where birds of paradise— paradisaeidae83—spread their wings in magnificent gestures of flight, while a humanhand signals peace, and the swaying of vitellina tristis84 accompany the passage of blue whales: Kingdom: Animalia; Phylum: Chordata; Class: Mammalia; Order: Cetacea85; Suborder: Mysticeti86; Family: Balaenopteridae; Genus: Balaenoptera; Species: musculus87— their flickering tails rising and sinking, plunging into deepest ocean, majestic torsos beholden to multiple eternities and incandescent futures. Gestures such as these, passaging the dominion of the immanent and the transcendent, heaven and earth, root and branch—entail a touching, caressing, flexing, stretching, curling, vociferating, and crossing of soma somatikos88 and psyche}9 Gestures therein embellished through the twisting, winding, and rotating of fingers or plumage, the bending of each extremity toward the force of a silence, the phantasmatic in this instance invoking a somatic gesture toward an apparition, unfolding the furthest point of its destiny. ^e hand taking placelessness, proceeding, going on, descendent and antecedent to itself herself his him them theirs selflessness, place(lessness) and/or body, humananimal, material and immaterial, beyond self, in "an excess of all identifications to/of self,"90 through another before, gesturing toward an impending alterity of the hand—humanus,91 animalis meaning "having breath"92—belonging to the kingdom Plan-tae,9 Animalia, homo sapiens, homo generator9 humana/, humanusm,95 naturalanddivine, or Natural Divine, that is, artificial in kind,96 entreating goddesses and gods deva devi dea deus97—in the manner of a visitation, non-hiarchical, and "an-archical"98 in delineation. A fluidity of the body that in turn gestures toward an architecture of nonaffirmation, contentment, pleasure, and bliss, fostering the secret that is living itself. A rotation or revolution of the hand, in effect, that calls forth infinite instances or gesticulations, be they esoteric, exoteric, ethical, ecological, aesthetic, political, or erotic, opening the semblance of an interval or interlude wherein micro and macrocosm, the telluric and the celestial, finitude and infinity, gather uponpairidaezai99 and/or utopia in the delineation of an imparity and divergence that is "in accord with [...] nature" (kataphusin)100 and "by nature" (phusei).101 The contortion of the hand, "the surface of an inexhaustible depth,"102 may be said, to draw the immeasurable through the hypnoticus103 (hypnotic) as a somniferous gesture, a quietness or silence, in the rhapsodic swaying of the hand surreptitiously engaging the senses, calling to mind, for example, the meditation of whirling dervishes, encircling the terrestrial and celestial in a sumptuous engagement of the visceral and residual, through the semblance of a recurrence and repetition. 104 Invoking alterity in the figuration of a hand that wanders toward the un anticipated, through the passage of an intimation to un likeness and un alikeness, a falling into, out or upward105 motion that inclines toward another order. That which in Sufi ritual or ceremony gestures upon "sama" (listening)106 and"dhikr" (remembrance, pronouncement, and invocation),107 evoking a "Proximity to God,"108 also calls forth a pera yvaixa. of the immemorial, anterior, and anteanus (ancient)109 beginning(s)(lessness) to which Levinas repeatedly refers in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, just as it calls forth the mystical within a secular proposition in the invocation of nothing(ness) nichts, de rien, res.110 A nothing meandering towards nothing(ness) nič, nada, niks111 in a, that is, of a future l'avenii12 already bereits113 passed bestanderili and that has never jamais"15 been present116 Gegenwart.117 That is to say, casting the divine upon Alterity, in the cultivation of strangeness etwas Seltsames,m the gesture of the handed gaze, motion, or, sonority, in the figuration ofan undisclosed language maneuvers on the very periphery of the sacred and profane, nothing and everything, fostering a pera yvaixa. of infinite possible meanings and interpretations, wherein, in Levinasian consideration, the (im)possible becomes possible.119 The hand gesturing nothingness invokes the fullness of emptiness. The hand as a "coiling (enroulement) up of experience," in Merleau-Ponty's designation, dreaming "of an impossible labor of experience on experience,"120 here maneuvers through vanishing territories, undergoing, as it were, an act of deterritorialization,121 and strangeness, a for-eignness of sorts. Crowded with undue apparitions, however benign in figuration, the hand, thus gestures toward an extreme disarticulation of its content, ungathering itself in the corpus of an exteriority where transcendence enfolds upon immanence as its principle.122 That which endures perdure123 and lingers s'attarde24 also withdraws retir,125 esretira.116 The embellished gesture of the hand therein engages its evanescence, fostering an intemperate and/or extravagant ornamentation, in measure and improvisation, as it surpasses its own figuration, in the reflection of a recurrence and repetition that neither repeats nor recurs, in the semblance of an ornamentation that is "without any common time"127 or delineation. It is thus that the recondite ritual of the hand, in a semblance of a disclosure or confession, and, in utter stillness, exceeds the very motion of its gesture, in the figuration of a gate, trace, pat, or stroke as it arranges itself in position, casting melodic rhythms of supposition through the incurring movement of silence, and stillness. The hand, paw, or wing, engendering a form of concentration in the semblance of a diversion and distraction, invokes a spatial deliverance which enters upon the hand as if it were a face, a blind eye incessantly engaging that which, in Levinasian terms, predates the ethical in an intensification of the body as the hand that empties its bread to the mouth of an-other that is the very ungathering of the figurability that is giving.128 That which precedes itself and faulters upon the " 'pre-originary' or the ' pre-liminary' "129 is of " a sphere enveloped and sealed against the other."130 Yet, strangely, it is also a gesture that escapes both revelation and creation, taking the form of an indefinite evasion.131 That is to say, it is exemplary in its contradiction, "[i]n a space common to all" and yet pertaining to "the most secret region."132 In a gesture that is accented toward disarticulation, the argot of the hand displaces herself engendering a disruption of linear time, which we may refer to as alltime or notime, an unoccupied time, or "dead- time,"133 wherein soma and psyche tend to an imaginary and/or mystical plane, to an "other side"134 fostering nonactioninaction by the stroke of the hand. A form of handedness, its fingers in the guise of a contortion, the entire body in banishment, expatriate, in exile, outcast to another utopia "without locality or temporality,"135 while forming itself of a particular bodily region that persists in the enactment of itself to another. The rhythmic somatic gestures accede to an exterior interiority that accosts the unknown as a gesture of the "unsayable,"136 effervescent in its delineation. A kind of shimmering that navigates upon the somatic and the psychic as a superfluous figuration, an invisible delineation marking the sheer audacity of a disregarded and discarded language. We are here referring to a gesticulation, in a delineation of a random occurrence, a mystical enumeration and/or practice that takes place "behind our backs"137 in the semblance of an "invisible ethics"138 (Schirmacher). Encircling the numinous gesture in an infinite accumulation of random formation(s), folding upon an incommensurable ratio, withholding its form or limitation, hands may therein unfold themselves at the margins of flight, welcoming that which remains surreptitious and irreducible in a passaging that perpetually folds upon another, mysteriously escaping the light in the shadow of an arc; a handedness in this sense refers to a left or right-handed practice, in Tantric ritual the so-called "right-hand path" (daksinacara) and "left-hand path" (vamacaraJ.139 Daksina in Sanskrit meaning "south, southern,"140 "[f]acing the rising sun towards east,"141 also meaning "able, dexterous, clever,"142 and vama meaning left,143 or vama gesturing toward that which ungathers itself as "woman."144 Fingers and hands of the right and left-handed variety invoking the powers of immortality, and ambrosial cocktails, "beverage of the gods"145 and goddesses, fingers slipping and sliding across "milk, curds, ghee, honey, and molasses,"146 and/or "excrement, marrow or flesh,147 semen, blood, and urine."148 Hands gesticulating toward that which is "to smear" and "to do with flowers"149 alongside gestures related to offerings and gifts, incurring "reverence, honour, and adoration."150 Gendered hands inclining towards the masculine and the feminine, in right-handed and left-handed mudras, representing the masculine "aspect of method and skillful means," alongside the feminine "aspect of wisdom or emptiness,"151 respectively. Their association likewise symbolized in sexual meeting, in "the union [of] form and emptiness."152 In The Feminine and the Sacred, Kristeva and Clement repeatedly refer to the sacred as a passage or threshold "eclipsing time and space" and passing "in a boundlessness without rule or reservation,"153 demarcating "the space between [...] life and death, body and corpse,"154 in an alliance of gestures "where the human sinks into animality and nothingness," and the sacred meandering across bodily thresholds evokes "the absolute of spirituality," where soma and psyche engage the very edges of consciousness and beyond, in "journeys to the opposite limit."155 Herein, we may fathom gestures of the hand infinite in their manifestation and evocation, adorning the bodily through the intemperance of snakes, heralding the unspeakable. Such a passage delineates prophesies of the secret and the "everywhere, always"156 alongside vanishing points157 hearkening nowhere. It meanders not only upon the hypnotic, but also the telepathic.158 A metaphysika that passages "form and emptiness," beside the secular and the sacred, that is at the very threshold, hands, wings, fingers, skin, and root, ocean and wind intertwined, that is to say, in an emptiness embraced by every thing and nothing. A meta physika (un)bound by lotus flowers, petals flourishing in golden, white, blue, and black con-tours,159 harbouring fire, "vital fluids, evening twilight, [and] summer season[s]."160 Seasons decorated with the promise of one thousand and one blossoms opening and closing alongside the trajectory of the sun.161 We may likewise refer to the sorcerer's hand "from a watchful distance / while we dream of lying"162 through the sacred that beckons love163 "to drink from a woman / who smells like love"164 via the bearing of a fragrance, the languid scent of sex, in an attestation to that which calls forth the divine and the earthly to a surreptitious meeting of the two. In transition and passage,165 hands revealing intricate designs, beckoning the proximity of the encounter, acknowledging the irreducible that is other wherein "love come[s] to pass between two freedoms."166 The fragrance of love therein remains unseen, as it narrows itself along the contours and margins of another where "the breadth of your palm narrows mine into flame."167 Evocations, strangely hidden and barely visible remind us of the mysteries that remain in the semblance of ap- paritions, where hands gather themselves in syllables, forming sweeping curves, summoning aromas passed, and still to come. Secrets, too, that remain along the tapering edges of romance: "She did what women do—she stripped the bed [...]"168 and refer to the insatiable: "Are you hungry? he asked. Have you eaten?"6 She replies: "I do not know how to cry, love; I gape / at my hands pulling us from these rings [...]'m (Foster). In turn, we may refer to the gaze of the hand, or handedness, as a prescient force, secret in its delineation, an unseeing hand, or, handed eye, no less prophetic, due to its blindness, in Merleau-Ponty's consideration, as "something that would be before it without restriction or condi-tion,"171 that in its very blindness and/or incandescencelessness permits us "to bring ourselves wholly to the transparency of the imaginary, [and] think it without the support of any ground, in short withdraw to the bottom of nothingness."172 A handedness that allows a crossing over to the other side, as it were, as Merleau-Ponty notes, a crossing "under my hands, under my eyes, up against my body"173 to the other. It is the hand that folds upon the inaudible and translucent, deaf, dumb, and blind; a mute hand attuned to the timbre of an infinitesimal gesture without as much as hearing a pin drop. Listening to that which is silence, exiled, and treading lightly, a blind eye gazing at the disarrangement that is silence. A hand that assumes whichever form it aspires to, kaleidoscopic, motley, and chameleon in configuration. A gesture blinded by the silence that invokes listening to the melody of another, as if silence, in relation to the proximity of a threshold, were a question of amplitude. A gesture of the hand that folds upon a measure of the anterior, a spatial threshold that enumerates the pronouncement from afar. In a hurry, the hand gathers itself: far and near, low and high, around the temperament of another's secret, in a gesture beholding the unfamiliar and intimate-lystranger174 as a blessing, as if it werethe body of innumerable frequencies, incidences, and occurrences aspiring to an aisthetikos17'' a(s)thetic ascetic at once begetting chaos, interval, and measure. Moreover, that which maneuvers in deferment in the unseeing gaze of the hand motions a blind eye to another, remaining "behind [...], in depth, [and] in hiding"176 in the manner of a secret temporality or counter temporality, in Mary Daly's words, "that is spatially as well as temporally expansive,"177 in reverberation of the flesh, a rhythm of the hand, encompassing the immensity of the encounter as a traversal, fathoming an "immense latent content [...] elsewhere which announces and which [.] conceals."178 In an encounter that remains incomprehensible in its surreptitiousness, the movement of the hand as an encroachment, a flickering, or caress.179 An opening that remains furtive and secret in its encounter, "unthought. '180 A gesticulation that residues and exceeds its very gesture, the hand living itself; a hand gesture, to be considered as an ornamental practice, treating each wave of the hand as if it were a curious jewel, each extremity at once encompassing an entire universe yuzhou (Mandarin Chinese: cosmos),181 and the barest of things.182 Perhaps, as in Ettinger's delineation, referring to "that something that will always remain secret: the passage as the midst.."183 A translucent passage writ through the residue of a feminine language that shelters the journey, even trespasses her(s). That which motions beyond the revealed into a dimension that is "transferred and etched without meaning, in secret,"184 and "forever enigmatic."185 The hand, as if it were a gift, incurring "reverence," manifests itself as an inexplicable alteration, a secret distance engendering "a language of coincidence, a manner of making the things themselves speak."186 Sensations, in their turn, that manifest "something living,"187 the hand as a sensory modality incurring a means of approaching a secret, forthcoming but furtive, and therein beckoning "floating realities,"188 "from forever and nowhere,"189 in the manner of a "secret knowledge,"190 iridescent and diaphanous in quality. This play of the hand offers a respite from the world, a handedness carried in the figuration of a reverie, a sheltering, and an exile, or that which, in Merleau-Ponty's consideration fosters "the retiring of oneself with the leaving of oneself."191 In gestures where secrets are indefinitely nearing and withdrawing, it is as if the surreptitious both diminishes and flourishes, ebbs and decays, in the distant proximity that is of the hand. It is like a tightening skin that sheds the moon, hands posturing, the skin forever.192 Where Bataille refers to a "slipping"193 and/or slippage and to "the silence that is no longer anything," we may speak of the pristine silences carved in the hand, secrets beholden to silence, dyes cast enumerating life and death, invoking the breath of stillness. Secrets of the hand, fingers, or tongues, therein beckon the silence of another keeping their secret. Gathering upon the roses of HarpocrateP'4 and Tacitas silent breath195 we may fathom the undisclosed in a metaphysika that engages the aroma of silence and stillness, in a place where we no longer recognize the shape of our names.196 Gestures alluding to the hidden possibilities, secret lives, and futures that have already passed, as silences slip between the crevices of another's life, entering elsewhere. Secrets and silences remain beside sleep, past the time where the hand gestures departure in the silence of an infinite greeting, drifting to stillness. This silence is of another's (his) stillness, drifting between and beyond the echoes of time. Gestures such as these elucidate the obliqueness of the hand transforming itself into an infinite array of patterns. Invisible and divisible—gestures, however quiet, tiresome, or invincible they may appear, gather into a silent language holding every possible secret beholden to an elsewhere, in a silence that falls asunder into a thousand pieces, and whose order remains indefinitely shuffled, expanding onto the hither side of another life. We may thus fathom the hand as a traversal between earth and sky in the line of flight. Imagining a meta physika of the golden gesture, we may on the one hand invoke Aristotle's golden mean197—a movement toward balance, a tempering of extremes, the mean as a point of opposition between two vices,198 known also as the "extreme and mean ratio"199—wherein the hand finds itself in pristine balance, the very tips of its fingers gesturing toward earth and sky, holding a meditative stance, achieving perfect harmony. While on the other hand, we may celebrate a somatic and psychic intemperance, the meridian, in this instance, pertaining to a peculiar paradox and superfluity of the hand, facilitating formative change. We may therein refer to gestures "which can move us out of a fixed state,"200 in Daly's words, as a means of "changing and transforming everything,"201 trespassing notions of perfect balance and oneness, and opening a secret passage through which " leina-a-ka-uhane [...] spirits [may] leap into the netherworld."202 We propose a meta physika "on the edge of the unconscious,"203 that is neither religion nor its contrary204: a meta physika of reverie that invokes a journey "to the opposite limit"205 of knowing, in a passage without return. A gesture of the hand re-imagining the bodily where we may approach the sensuous in all its possible differences and resistances,206 ungathering what we fold upon Nature, in a meta, physika residing "in that transition and that passage"207 where the hand prefigures the crossing in an "exceptional" and "strange"208 fashion. A meta physika of the hand therein meanders alongside the borders of the sensible and non-sensible, the sensuous and subtle body, the hu-manandanimal that crosses ideologies, territories, and borders. The surreptitious, in this sense, "lives always further on,"209 yet precisely in the moment. The hand thus fosters a "space of reverie"210 in "the reabsorp-tion of the sacred"211 in a meta physika that is at once secretive and underhanded. A kind of passage reminiscent of a threshold, a gesture of foretelling that beckons the celestial and earthbound. It is of gestures that demand to be confused with the richest and the poorest of meanings, neither holding every thing or any thing in the gesticulation toward a language beckoning secrets. * Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa is Assistant Professor of Art and Philosophy at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and an Independent Study Director at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, Maine. Notes 1 Hand gesture — Sanskrit hasta mudra. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudra. Future references to en.wikipedia.org will be abbreviated as w. 2 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968), The Visible and the Invisible (ed. C. Lefort and tr. by A. Lingis). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, p. 119. 3 Ibid., p. 121. 4 Occidental philosophy — German Abendlandische Philosophie. See http://www.enzyklo.de/ Begriff/Abendlandische%2oPhilosophie. 5 Metaphysics — Greek per& (meta) beyond, upon, or after — fvnxd (physika) physics. See w/ Metaphysics. 6 Hegel writes: "World history goes from East to West: as Asia is the beginning of world history, so Europe is simply its end. In world history there is an absolute East, par excellence (whereas the geographical term "east" is in itself entirely relative); for although the earth is a sphere, history makes no circle around the sphere. On the contrary, it has a definite East which is Asia. It is here that the external physical sun comes up, to sink in the West: and for that same reason it is in the West that the inner Sun of self-consciousness rises, shedding a higher brilliance." See Hegel, G.W. F. (1988), Introduction to the Philosophy of History: With Selections from the Philosophy of Right (tr. by L. Rauch). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, p. 92. 7 In the "Preface" of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel notes: "When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in." See http://www.he-gel.org/om/. Another translation appears as follows: "When philosophy paints its grey on grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk." See Hegel, G. W. F. (2004), Elements of the Philosophy of Right (ed. A. W. Wood and tr. by H. B. Nisbet). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 23. 8 Sunrise — Latin soloriens. See w/Orient and http://www.enzyklo.de/Begriff/Abendlandische%20 Philosophie. 9 Sunset — Latin soloccindens. See w/Western_world and http://www.enzyklo.de/Begriff/Abend-landische%2oPhilosophie. 10 Merleau-Ponty, M., ®e Visible and the Invisible, p. 112. 11 Ibid., p. 119. 12 Ibid., p. 124. 13 Ibid., p. 140. 14 Ibid., p. 125. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 106. 17 See note 7. 18 Ichiyusai Hiroshige (—ft^SS), Japanese ukiyo-e artist. See w/Hiroshige. 19 Japan — Japanese Nihon Hh/ ("the sun's origin" and "Land of the Rising Sun"). See w/ Names_of_Japan. 20 Japan — Japanese Oyashima ("Great country of eight (or many) islands"). Ibid. 21 ^is is a reference to Hiroshige woodblock prints from the series '"tte Fifty-'ttree Stations of the Tokaido Tokaido Gojusan-tsugi ) and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo Meisho Edo Hyakkei). ^e full titles of the prints are as follows: "Clear Weather After Snow at Kameyama" (Tokaido series), '"tte Plum Garden in Kameido," and "Great Bridge, Sudden Shower at Atake" (Edo series). See w/Hiroshige. 22 China - Chinese^g/^^. See w/China. 23 Pavilion of Literary Profundity — Chinese ^"fflffl. See w/Forbidden_City. 24 We are here referring to the names of Palaces, Pavilions, Halls, and Gates of the "Forbidden City" located in Beijing, China. Ibid. 25 See w/Prime_Meridian. 26 Hyacinth — Greek takivso?, Hyakinthos. See w/Hyacinth_(mythology). 27 ^e die is cast — Latin Alea iacta est. See w/Alea_iacta_est. 28 See w/Mudra. 29 Secular — Latin saecularis (in secular terms). See w/secular. 30 Ettinger, B. L. (2006), ®e Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 147. 31 Merleau-Ponty, M., ®e Visible and the Invisible, p. 143. 32 Ibid., p. 150. 33 Ibid., p. 41. 34 ^e scenic paths of ancient Japanese gardens — German die malerischen Pfaden der alten ja-panischen Garten. 35 Merleau-Ponty, M., ®e Visible and the Invisible, p. 133. 36 Kingston, M. H. (2003), ®e Fifth Book of Peace. New York: Vintage Books, p. 167. 37 Merleau-Ponty, M., ®e Visible and the Invisible, p. 126. 38 Lorde, A. (1984), "Uses of the Erotic: ^e Erotic as Power." In: A. Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Berkeley: Crossing Press, p. 56. 39 Merleau-Ponty, M., ®e Visible and the Invisible, p. 143. 40 Ibid., p. 147. 41 Ibid., p. 143. 42 This is a reference to Ettinger's term: "intimate-stranger." See Ettinger, B. L. (2007), "Dioti-ma and the Matrixial Transference: Psychoanalytical Encounter-Event as Pregnancy in Beauty." In: Across the Threshold: Explorations of Liminality in Literature (eds. H. Viljoen and C. N. van der Merwe). New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., p. 129 (pp. 105-132). 43 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 147. 44 Ibid., p. 121. 45 Catherine Clement notes: "it [the sacred] eclipses time and space. It passes in a boundlessness without rule or reservation, which is the trait of the divine." See Clement, C., and Kristeva, J. (2001), The Feminine and the Sacred (tr. by J. M. Todd). New York: Columbia University Press, p. 30. 46 In Merleau-Ponty's delineation, we may describe this as that which "would be emancipated but not freed from every condition." See Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 153. 47 Ibid., p. 33. 48 Falcon - Greek Circe, KpK^ Kirke (Greek mythology). See w/Circe. 49 Minerva - Latin Menerwa (Roman mythology). See w/Minerva. 50 Saraswathi - Goddess of learning (Hindu religion). See http://www.hinduwebsite.com/ hinduism/sarasavathi.asp. 51 Perennial philosophy - Latin philosophia perennis. See Jaspers, K. (1950), The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (tr. by R. Mannheim). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., p. 76. 52 Twilight language - Sanskrit samdhyabhasa (Vajrayana Buddhism and Hinduism). See w/ The_twilight_language. 53 Clement, C., and Kristeva, J., The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 78. 54 Bajevic, M. (2002), ... and other stories. Zurich: Collegium Helveticum, STW, ETH-Zen-trum, p. 43. 55 Rice cake - Japanese rice cake: mochi; South Indian rice cake: idli; Filipino rice cake: puto. See w/Rice_cake. 56 Rice wine - Japanese sake. 57 See w/Romani_people. 58 Ettinger, B. L., The MatrixialBorderspace, p. 147. 59 Kingston, M. H. (1976), The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books/Random House, Inc., p. 3. 60 Ibid., p.i. 61 Metaphysics - Greek ^btA (meta) beyond, upon, or after - fvnxd (physika) physics. See w/ Metaphysics. 62 Levinas, E. (2004), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (tr. by A. Lingis). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, p. 11. 63 Bronner, Y. (2010), Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration. New York: Columbia University Press, p. i02. 64 Dilworth, D. A. (2009), "Jaspers and World Philosophy: A Critical Appraisal." In: Existenz— An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts 4: 2, (Fall 2009). See http:// www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/volumes/Vol.4-2Dilworth.html. 65 Ibid. 66 Hegel, G. W. F. (2010), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Science of Logic (tr. by G. di Giovanni). New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 197. 67 Hegel is here referring to Kant. See Hegel, G. W. F. (1989), Hegel's Science of Logic (tr. by A. V. Miller). New York: Humanity Books, p. i9i. 68 Coincidences of opposites - Latin coincidentia oppsitorium. See w/Unity_of_opposites. 69 X, Malcolm (1964), "The Ballot or the Bullet." Speech, King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan-April 12, 1964. See http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/black-speech/mx.html; http://www.hark.com/clips/plmhjlrfsz-the-ballot-or-the-bullet-part-3. 70 Keyson, R. (2003), "Hands." In: R. Keyson, Numbers. Sedona, AZ: SeaMoon Press, p. 23. 71 Ibid., "What I Wanted," p. 37. 72 Ibid., "The Bells," p. 49. 73 Bataille, G. (1988), Inner Experience (tr. by L. A. Boldt). Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 112. 74 Ibid., p. xvii. 75 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 7. 76 Ibid., p. 41. 77 Bataille, G., Inner Experience, p. 120. 78 Ibid., p. 124. 79 Ibid., p. 128. 80 Ibid., p. 129. 81 Keyson, R. (2011), Notebook. Los Angeles/New York: Private Collection. (Unpublished). 82 Gray wolf — Latin Canis lupus. See w/Gray_wolf. 83 Bird of paradise — belonging to the family Paradisaeidae (Latin). See w/Bird-of-paradise. 84 Weeping willow — Vitellina Tristis. See w/Willow. 85 See http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/mammals/cetaceans/bluewhale.htm. 86 See w/Blue_whale. 87 See http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/mammals/cetaceans/bluewhale.htm. 88 Somatic — Greek somatikos. 89 Psyche — Greek ^u^l psuche (life; derived meanings: ghost, spirit); also refereed to as psyche. See w/Psyche and merriam-webster. com, respectively. 90 Irigaray quoted by Mary Whitford. See Whitford, M. (1988), "Luce Irigaray's Critique of Rationality." In: Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy (eds. M. Griffiths and M. Whitford). Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, p. 120 (pp. 109—30). 91 Human — Latin humanus. See w/Human#Etymology. 92 Animal — Latin animalis (meaning "having breath"). See w/Animal. 93 Plant — Latin plantae. See w/Plant. 94 Schirmacher, W. (1987), "Homo Generator: The Challenge of Gene Technology and Responsibility." In: Technology and Responsibility (ed. P. T. Durbin). Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, p. 203 (pp. 203—25). 95 Human — Latin humana (feminine), humanus (masculine). See w/humanus#Latin. 96 Schirmacher, W. (1999), "Art(ificial) Perception: Nietzsche and Culture after Nihilism." See http://www.egs.edu/faculty/wolfgangschirmacher.html. 97 Deity — Sanskrit deva (god), devi (goddess); Latin deus (god), dea (goddess). See w/ Deity#Etymology and w/Dyeus. 98 Levinas, E., Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, p. 11. 99 Paradise — Old East Iranian pairidaeza. See w/Paradise. 100 Referred to by Aristotle as kata phusin — meaning "according to nature," "in accord with [...] nature." See de Ste. Croix, G. E. M. (1992), "Aristotle on History and Poetry." In: Essays on Aristotle's Poetics (ed. A. O. Rorty). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p. 26. 101 Referred to by Aristotle as phusei — meaning "by nature." See http://www.bookrags.com/ research/nomos-and-phusis-eoph/. 102 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 143. 103 Hypnotic — Late Latin hypnoticus. See w/Hypnotic. 104 Nietzsche, F. (1967), The Will to Power (tr. by W. Kaufmann). New York: Random House, p. 547. 105 See Piglia-Veronese, P. (2011), Upward Crashes Fracture's Topoi: Musil, Kiefer, Darger. New York/Dresden: Atropos Press. 106 Listening — Arabic sama. See w/Sama_(Sufism). 107 Remembrance, pronouncement, and invocation — Arabic dhikr. See w/Dhikr. 108 See w/Sufism. 109 Ancient — Vulgar Latin anteanus. 110 Nothing — German nichts; French de rien; Catalan res. 111 Nothing(ness) — Slovenian nič; Spanish nada; Afrikaans niks. 112 Future — French l'avenir. 113 Already — German bereits. 114 Passed — German bestanden. 115 Never — French jamais. 116 Levinas, E. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, p. 144. 117 Present — German Gegenwart. In relation to shifting notions of time, Mary Daly writes, "And when we meet in this way there is a shifting of the meanings of Past, Present, and Future [...]." See Daly, M. (1998), Quintessence ...Realizing the Archaic Future. Boston: Beacon Press, p. 199. See in addition her references to a "fluidity of time" on the same page. Ibid. 118 Something strange — German etwas Seltsames. 119 Levinas, E. (2002) Totality and Infinity (tr. by A. Lingis). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, p. 55. 120 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 112. 121 Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2004), Anti-Oedipus (tr. by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane). London: Continuum, p. 348. 122 Kristeva, J. (2009), This Incredible Need to Believe (tr. by J. Kristeva and B. B. Brahic). New York: Columbia University Press, p. 25. 123 Endure — French perdure. 124 Linger — French s'attarde. 125 Withdraw — French retir. 126 Withdraw — Catalan esretira. 127 Levinas, E., Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, pp. 70—71. 128 Hackenberg y Almansa, S. (2012), Total History, Anti-History, and the Face that is Other. New York/Dresden: Atropos Press, p. 105 (forthcoming). 129 Levinas, E. (1998), "Humanism and An-archy." In: E. Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (tr. by A. Lingis). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, p. 133 (127—39). 130 Ibid. 131 See Levinas, E. (2000), "Reality and its Shadow." In: E. Levinas, The Levinas Reader (ed. S. Hand). Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 132, 141 (129-43). 132 Levinas, E. (1998), "Humanism and An-archy," p. 133. 133 Levinas, E., Totality and Infinity, p. 58. 134 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 119, emphasis added. 135 Ibid., 113. 136 Levinas, E., Totality and Infinity, p. 21. 137 Schirmacher, W. (2005), "Homo Generator in the Postmodern Discussion. From a Conversation with Jean-Francois Lyotard." See http://www.egs.edu/faculty/wolfgang-schirmacher. 138 Schirmacher, W. (2000), "Cloning Humans with Media: Impermanence and Imperceptible Perfection." See http://www.egs.edu/faculty/wolfgang-schirmacher. 139 Right-hand path - Sanskrit daksinacara; left-hand path vamacara. See w/Vamachara. 140 See w/Dakshina. See in addition: w/Dakshinachara. 141 See w/Vamachara. 142 Ibid. 143 See http://glossary.buddhistdoor.com/en/word/92187/vama. 144 See w/Vamachara. 145 See w/Panchamrita. 146 Beer, R. (2003), The Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist symbols. Chicago: Serindia Publications, Inc., p. 332. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., p. 327. See in addition: w/Panchamrita. 149 See w/Puja_(Buddhism). 150 See w/Puja_(Hinduism). 151 Beer, R., The Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist symbols, p. 222. 152 Ibid., p. 9. 153 Clement, C., and Kristeva, J., The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 30. 154 Ibid., p. 92. 155 Ibid., p. 24. 156 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 113. 157 Ibid., p. 119. 158 See Ettinger, B. L., "Diotima and the Matrixial Transference: Psychoanalytical Encounter-Event as Pregnancy in Beauty," p. 117. 159 Beer, R., The Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist symbols, p. 9. 160 Ibid. 161 Ibid., p. 8. 162 Lorde, A. (1995), "Never Take Fire from a Woman." In: A. Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., p. 111. 163 Clement, C., and Kristeva, J., The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 105. 164 Lorde, A., "Never Take Fire from a Woman" in The Black Unicorn: Poems, p. 111. 165 Clement, C., and Kristeva, J., The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 97. 166 Ibid., p. 63. 167 Foster, G. R. (2009), "Siena." In: G. R. Foster, heart speech this. New York/Dresden: Atropos Press, p. 134. 168 Ibid., "Housebroken / Leda" p. 95. 169 Ibid., "Sense / Persephone," p. 42. 170 Ibid., "Leashed / Leda." p. 91. 171 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 107. 172 Ibid., p. 111. 173 Ibid., p. 123. 174 See Ettinger, B. L., "Diotima and the Matrixial Transference: Psychoanalytical Encounter-Event as Pregnancy in Beauty," p. 129' 175 Aesthetic - Greek aisthetikos. 176 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 123. 177 Daly, M., Quintessence ...Realizing the Archaic Future, p. 41. 178 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 114. 179 Irigaray, L. (2005), Ethics of Sexual Difference (tr. by C. Burke and G. C. Gill). London: Continuum, p. 155. 180 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 119. 181 Cosmos — Mandarin Chinese^^yuzhou. See w/Cosmos. 182 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 125. 183 See Ettinger, B. L., "Diotima and the Matrixial Transference: Psychoanalytical Encounter-Event as Pregnancy in Beauty," p. 116. 184 Ibid., p. 120. 185 Ibid., p. 122. 186 Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, p. 125. 187 Ibid., p. 108. 188 Ibid., p. 106. 189 Ibid., p. 112. 190 Ibid., p. 121. 191 Ibid., p. 123. 192 Lorde, A., "Solstice" in The Black Unicorn: Poems, p. 117. 193 Bataille, G., Inner Experience, p. 16. 194 Harpocrates — God of Silence (Greek). See w/Harpocrates. 195 Tacita — Goddess of Silence (Roman). See w/Dea_Tacita. 196 Audre Lorde writes: "I did not recognize / the shape / of my name." See Lorde, A., "Artisan" in The Black Unicorn: Poems, p. 87. 197 See w/Golden_mean_(philosophy). 198 Murdarasi, K. (2008), "Aristotle's Golden Mean: Classic Moral Theory from the Nicoma-chean Ethics." See http://karenmurdarasi.suite101.com/aristotles-golden-mean-a56759. 199 See w/Golden_ratio. 200 Daly, M., Quintessence ...Realizing the Archaic Future, p. 162. 201 Ibid., p. 102. 202 Kingston, M. H., The Fifth Book of Peace, p. 32. 203 Clement, C., and Kristeva, J., The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 1. 204 Ibid. 205 Ibid., p. 24. 206 Ibid., p. 37. 207 Ibid., p. 97. 208 Ibid., p. 139. 209 Ibid., p. 41. 210 Clement, C., and Kristeva, J., The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 38. 211 Ibid., p. 60. Bibliography 1. Bajevic, M., (2002), ...and other stories. Zurich: Collegium Helveticum STW, ETH-Zentrum. 2. Bataille, G. (1988), Inner Experience (tr. by L. A. Boldt). Albany: State University of New York Press. 3. Beer, R. (2003), The Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist Symbols. Chicago: Serindia Publications, Inc. 4. Bronner, Y. (2010), Extreme Poetry: South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration. New York: Columbia University Press. 5. Daly, M. (1998), Quintessence... Realizing the Archaic Future. Boston: Beacon Press. 6. de Ste. Croix, G. E. M. (1992), "Aristotle on History and Poetry." In: Essays on Aristotle's Poetics (ed. A. O. Rorty). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (pp. 23-32). 7. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2004), Anti-Oedipus (tr. by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane).London: Continuum. 8. Dilworth, D. (2009), "Jaspers and World Philosophy: A Critical Appraisal." In: Existenz-An InternationalJournal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics, and the Arts 4: 2 (Fall 2009). See http://www.bu.edu/paideia/existenz/volumes/Vol.4-2Dilworth. html. 9. Clement, C., and Kristeva, J. (2001), The Feminine and the Sacred (tr. by J. M. Todd). New York: Columbia University Press. 10. Ettinger, B. L. (2006), The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 11. Ettinger, B. L. (2007), "Diotime and the Matrixial Transference: Psychoanalytical Encounter-Event as Pregnancy in Beauty." In: Across the Threshold: Expora-tions of Liminality in Literature (eds. H. Viljoen and C. N. van der Merwe). New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. (pp. 105-132). 12. Foster, G. R. (2009), heart speech this. New York/Dresden: Atropos Press. 13. Hackenberg y Almansa, S. (2012), Total History, Anti-History, and the Face that is Other. New York/Dresden: Atropos Press (forthcoming). 14. Hegel, G. W. F. (1988), Introduction to the Philosophy of History: With Selections from the Philosophy of Right (tr. by L. Rauch). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. 15. Hegel, G. W. F. (2004), Elements of the Philosophy of Right (ed. A. W. Wood and tr. by H. B. Nisbet). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 16. Hegel, G. W. F. (2010), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Science of Logic (tr. by G. di Giovanni). New York: Cambridge University Press. 17. Hegel, G. W. F. (1989), Hegel's Science of Logic (tr. by A. V. Miller). New York: Humanity Books. 18. Irigaray, L. (2005), Ethics of Sexual Difference (tr. by C. Burke and G. C. Gill). London: Continuum. 19. Jaspers, K. (1950), The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (tr. by R. Mannheim). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. 20. Keyson, R. (2003), Numbers. Sedona, AZ: SeaMoon Press. 21. Keyson, R. (2011), Notebook. Los Angeles/New York: Private Collection (unpublished). 22. Kingston, M. H. (1976), The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books/Random House, Inc. 23. Kingston, M. H. (2003), The Fifth Book of Peace. New York: Vintage Books. 24. Kristeva, J. (2009), This Incredible Need to Believe (tr. by J. Kristeva and B. B. Brahic). New York: Columbia University Press. 25. Levinas, E. (2004), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (tr. A. Lingis). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. 26. Levinas, E. (2002), Totality and Infinity (tr. by A. Lingis). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. 27. Levinas, E. (1998), Collected Philosophical Papers (tr. by A. Lingis). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, p. 133. 28. Levinas, E. (2000), The Levinas Reader (ed. S. Hand). Oxford: Blackwell. 29. Lorde, A. (1984), "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." In: A. Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Berkeley: Crossing Press. 30. Lorde, A. (1995), The Black Unicorn: Poems. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. 31. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968), The Visible and the Invisible (ed. C. Lefort and tr. by A. Lingis). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 32. Murdarasi, K. (2008), "Aristotle's Golden Mean: Classic Moral Theory from the Nicomachean Ethics." See http://karenmurdarasi.suite101.com/aristotles-gold-en-mean-a56759. 33. Nietzsche, F. (1967), The Will to Power (tr. by W. Kaufmann). New York: Random House. 34. Piglia-Veronese, P. (2011), Upward Crashes Fracture's Topoi: Musil, Kiefer, Darger. New York/Dresden: Atropos Press. 35. Schirmacher, W. (1987), "Homo Generator: The Challenge of Gene Technology and Responsibility." In: Technology and Responsibility (ed. P. T. Durbin). Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company (pp. 203—25). 36. Schirmacher, W. (1999), "Art(ificial) Perception: Nietzsche and Culture after Nihilism." See http://www.egs.edu/faculty/wolfgangschirmacher.html. 37. Schirmacher, W. (2005), "Homo Generator in the Postmodern Discussion. From a Conversation with Jean-Francois Lyotard." See http://www.egs.edu/fac-ulty/wolfgang-schirmacher. 38. Schirmacher, W. (2000), "Cloning Humans with Media: Impermanence and Imperceptible Perfection." See http://www.egs.edu/faculty/wolfgang-schirmacher. 39. Whitford, M. (1988), "Luce Irigaray's Critique of Rationality." In: Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy (eds. M. Griffiths and M. Whitford). Bloomington: Indiana University Press (pp. 109-30). 40. X, Malcolm (1964), "The Ballot or the Bullet." Speech, King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan-April 12, 1964. See http://americanradioworks.pub-licradio.org/features/blackspeech/mx.html; http://www.hark.com/clips/plmhjlrf-sz-the-ballot-or-the-bullet-part-3. % v ' ^ Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 'THIS IS WHERE MY HEAD BEGINS': THINGS, TRAUMA AND FEMININE PROXIMITIES1 Anne Mulhall* "Something comes to pass which does not belong as one's own to the one or to the other. Something arrives which did not exist and that the bringing together of two worlds produces. What in this way occurs gives itself to each one inasmuch as he, or she, wants to welcome it, and to secure its memory. Not in order to keep it as a thing but as the mysterious legacy of an encounter which it is important to remember without simply appropriating it." Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, p. 153. As Lisa Baraitser notes, "From a psychoanalytic perspective it seems strange and slightly perverse to make a distinction between material objects and embodied subjects" (Baraitser, p. 130). The object, even when it appears to aggregate from a material thing rather than a person, ineluc-tably slides back into the originary object, the maternal object, which the material thing covers over, "holds", preserves. Baraitser, in her phenomenology of motherhood, is interested in articulating a relationship with the thing that approaches something like Jane Bennett's "agentic assemblage" (Bennett, p. 21) and the force within the object that em-places it as an actant in symbiosis with other actants, both human and non-human. There must be, Baraiter believes, "elements of the external world that escape our projective impulses, that resist internalisation, that remain intact despite our need to relate them in fantasy as part of our internal world" (Baraitser, p. 133). Christopher Bollas has likewise expressed a desire -very different to Baraitser's enquiry into maternal objects- to attend to the "thing-ness" of material objects, that in the object that resists a purely substitutive function but that, for Bollas, enables thought itself. He attempts to distinguish the "evocative processional potential" of the object in its "integrity" and "thing-ness" (Bollas, p. 79) from the maternal transformational object (although as a kind of reverie in the material world, it unavoidably evokes just this) and the "nostalgic evocative object" (p. 80), instead extending Winnicott's transitional object "to argue that our encounter, engagement with, and sometimes our employment of, actual things is a way of thinking" (92), the effect of our everyday perambulatory free associating among the material objects we encounter on our capacity to think in a way that is distinct from "cognitive thought" (p. 93). The difference that embodied difference makes in relation to the kinds of objects that we encounter, objects whose specificity and integrity Bollas argues have an effect on our psychic constitution, is elided in this analysis. While there can be, for psychoanalysis, no absolute distinction between our experience of material reality and our "mental life", yet the direction of movement in this instance is from out-side to in-side: "the source of that psychic moment will be from the real and will carry the weight of the real with it down into the unconscious" (p. 84). The precise quality of such perambulation is, however, effected by our ability to move freely among objects and, as Iris Marion Young elaborates in her phenomenology of female embodiment, the way in which the woman is positioned in space. The ease of movement that Bollas locates as one prerequisite for a plenitude of thought is, for many, constrained and restricted in particular ways that are inextricable from their situation within space, gender being, of course, one such qualifying structure that likewise structures the material reality that the subject takes as the ground of his perambulatory reverie. So, he notes of Emily Dickinson that her confinement to the space of the home had an impact on what he interprets as the degeneration of her capacity for thought; poetic form "decomposed in her intelligent hands as she lost the holding force of linear thinking and, as Helen Vendler illustrates, she moved around in increasingly crazed circles" (p. 84). "I didn't realise for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman" (Gilman, p. 1140). Written in the late nineteenth century, 'The Yellow Wallpaper' is the interior monologue of a woman confined, ostensibly to 'cure' her madness, to her bedroom-prison in the uppermost reaches of her husband's house. Thus imprisoned, she becomes increasingly obsessed by the wallpaper lining the room: by its confounding pattern, and by the women, indistinct yet perceptible, trapped beneath the pattern which itself seems to hold them caged beneath the wallpaper, stuck so close to the walls that it seems impossible to find any rending purchase. In the end, having finally torn the paper from the walls, it is herself that she frees from incarceration beneath the "sub-pattern" : "I've got out at last. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (Gilman, p. 1144). The story speaks to the structural positioning of the woman within material and psychic space. Responding to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, Young shows how women's "immanence" emerges from the specificities of this positioning. For Merleau-Ponty, space is constituted as such by the presence of the embodied subject. As with Bollas' perambulatory reverie among objects, this generative capability of the embodied subject assumes the affordance of free movement. However, such fluid motility is impeded, Young argues, by the woman's experience of herself as thing as well as subject. In the "modalities of feminine spatiality" (p. 40) that she elaborates, this expresses itself in the "inhibition" (p. 41) of the woman's constitutive relation to space. "Feminine existence lives space as enclosed or confining, as having a dual structure, and the woman experiences herself as positioned in space" (Young, p. 40). To go further: she is positioned in space, and yet that positioning is ascribed to her as a quality intrinsic to her nature as woman. One mechanism for such attribution is suggested by Sara Ahmed's extension of Heidegger's apprehension of the object-in-itself, which becomes perceptible when the object fails to do the work that it is intended for. As she explains, the failure of the object is in fact "the failure of the object to extend a body"; its "failure" is "not a property of an object", but it has repercussions for the object insofar as the "experience of this 'non-extension' might then lead to 'the object' being attributed with properties, qualities and values. ... If this table does not work for me, I would 'turn toward' it a different way. I might then attribute my failure to write to the table, such that it becomes the cause of the failure" (Ahmed pp. 49-50). This attribution of blame for the subject's inability to extend itself to the object that thereby becomes the "bad object" (Ahmed, p. 50) resonates with Bracha L. Ettinger's critique of the "mother-monster ready-made", the mother of primal phantasy-the "originary not-enough mother', 'the abandoning mother', 'the devouring mother " (Ettinger, 2006a, p. i06)-a "ready-to-hand" figure, we might say, that psychoanalytic theory and practice has, for Ettinger, perpetuated in its failure to recognize the primal nature of these phantasies of maternal not-enough-ness, attributing them instead to the "real" mother, the "mother-monster readymade". Making a similar point, Jacqueline Rose has written of her unease with the tendency in the "British School" - the work of Christopher Bollas after Winnicott in particular - to "reassert early environment against fantasy, what is done to the infant against what the infant or patient projects on to her world" (Rose, p. i53). For Ettinger, this "disrealization caused maternity, feminine sexuality and most of all the daughter/mother relation a catastrophic damage"; the failure to recognize these primal phantasies "destroys mainly the mother/daughter relationship since it systematically rechannels hate toward the mother and destroys the daughter's desire for identification with the parent of her own sex" (107). This situation is in stark contrast to that of the father, where psychoanalysis has long recognized the distinction between the primal father of phantasy ("paternalseduction') and the real father. This recognition of the primal father and "disrealization" of the primal mother comes at the cost of the maternal-feminine; "primal phantasies that organize male sexuality and paternal authority were more easily recognized, causing benefit to the symbolic organization of the subject according to parameters of maleness and masculinity. It is the primality of the not less prevalent phantasies, that tortured mainly daughters visa-vis their mothers, that was disrecognized" (i07). In Ettinger's reading of Freud's 'The Uncanny', repression itself inevitably causes anxiety to "stick" to what is repressed, so that when what is repressed returns, the anxiety that is intrinsic to the structure of repression itself reemerges. The "mother-monster readymade" is the figure to whom these anxieties without a cause are then attributed. So Ettinger argues that "Devouring and abandonment were mistakenly recognized by Freud as phenomena that are caused by something (rather than as primal). With Winnicott and Kohut (to mention just a few) these phenomena are already explained by real maternal failures, while in fact, being primal phantasies, they arise in the psyche and re-arise in transferential relationships in order to organize and give meaning to pain and anxiety brought about by human existence itself" (i08). In this essay, I want to explore this abjection and objectification of the maternal-feminine, a mortification that results from this attribution of qualities to the woman and mother that are misrecognised as intrinsic to her rather than as the effects of her positioning within material and psychic spaces. I am especially drawn to the interrelationship between the maternal-feminine and domestic space, most particularly the objects that populate and "clothe" that space. ^e novels and non-fiction writing of the Irish writer Anne Enright involve a serious engagement with such subject-object traversals, seeking to unfold not only the immobilization of the woman within the home — a position with specific juridical weight in the Irish case — but also the way in which Enright elucidates a spectral feminine stratum, one that resonates with Ettinger's matrixial stratum, through the revelation and enigmatic articulation of a coinhabitation that is trangenerational and that undoes subject/object relations, while also registering the trauma of occlusion and non-recognition that Ettinger's work so comprehensively and enigmatically brings to our notice. As such, the transitivities between the 'theoretical' and the literary might point toward that which eludes conventional signification and representation, a maternal-feminine that survives its occlusion within a dominant phallic mode of seeing and being. During her memoir of her pregnancy with her two children and their first two years of life, Enright describes what she thinks may be her first memory. She begins: "My earliest memory is of a pot stand. It is set into a corner with a cupboard on one side and, on the other, a shallow step. This is where my head begins. The step leads to another room, and far on the other side of the room, there is a white-haired woman sitting on a chair" (Enright 2005, p. 65). With her mother, Enright reconstructs the scene: the woman is her grandmother, and the pot stand was in her house by the sea, where the infant Enright stayed the first time her mother left her to bring her older brother to casualty with a broken leg. The thing — here, the pot stand — marks the severance of mother and child; it is where the narrator's "head begins", the separation from the mother that has engraved the material object and its surrounding scene as a screen memory. ^e object both obscures the originary event and is yet the object through which that event is preserved and made partially accessible to re-emergence and reimagining. It is, in a sense, the material object that enables the resonance within Enright of the origi-nary separation from the mother into partial awareness. The pot stand is itself the "holder" of a "container," and Enright dimly apprehends two pots positioned on its shelves. The structural contiguity of these material objects with the mother's function as holder and container of the child makes this a particularly resonant image for the trauma of separation. The maternal function of containment is one that Enright returns to frequently in her work; it is explicitly described elsewhere in Making Babies, when she wryly connects this function of the mother to the woman as "old bag" - that "'Mother' thing... The container (the old bag, my dear, the old bag)" (2005, 57)? Steven Connor alights on the bag as one of the "magical things" whose intricacies he unfolds in Paraphrenalia.3 A magical thing is "more than a mere thing. We can do whatever we like to things, but magical things are things that we allow and expect to do things back to us" (Connor, p. 4). Moreover, some things "interrupt" our sense of being in the carried forward by a time imagined as processional and throw us back, or afford a re-emergence of the past in the present: "such things inhabit space, but are a kind of temporizing with it. ... things link us to our losses"; things can "haunt" us (p. 4). Bags are a particularly significant sort of thing for Connor, who connects this significance, of course, to parts of the mother's body - to the mother's breasts and to our experience of the womb; we are "carried, like bags, for long enough to come to know this intermediate condition ["living on the inside of another body"] intimately, and never to be able to forget it" (p. 16). Our attachment to bags resonates with the mother as "holding" environment: "holding things together, holding things up, and being ourselves held and held up, are so important to us" (p. 16). Enright's narrative of this first memory travels forward to her daughter in the present: "At nine months, the baby puts her head into a pot and says, Aaah Aaah Aaah. She says it very gently and listens to the echo. She has discovered this all by herself" (Enright 2005, p. 65). The pot here may signify the "passing on" of this holding function between generations of women; an ambivalent inheritance, "fixing" the woman and mother within her functionality as object for use by the subject in the manner that Connor's reverie on the bag as substitute for the internalized maternal part-objects nostalgically describes. However, in the transitivity in Enright's account something else is suggested that is other, I think, than this intergenerational transmission of the maternal role. This transitivity is in part described by the temporal movement of the narrative and the transitivity between and within subject-positions that accompanies this, as the account weaves between past, present and future, between Enright as infant, and her own infant daughter, between herself as mother, her own mother, and her grandmother. Although the material object — here, the pot stand — marks the beginning of the end of the dyad, from an Oedipal perspective, it is involved with a mode of connectedness as well as separation that persists despite the severance from the mother, an umbilical transconnectedness, after Luce Irigaray, that Enright intuits here in the transitivity between grandmother, mother, daughter and the objects of domestic space (Irigaray 1993, p. 14). It is the transitivity of the material object here, in particular, that suggests a reaching toward something like Ettinger's matrixial borderspace, as an interval in the subject-object distinctions in Enright's narrative brings fleetingly into apprehension a submerged level of being wherein "traces" are shared between partial subjects and partial objects that transconnect beyond and before any phallic substitutive function. Is there a connection here to what Iris Marion Young has called "the temporality of preservation", a mode of temporality that may suggest an association with this spectral feminine (Young p. 143)? While Young locates the preservative in "time and history," does this aspect of "dwelling" also intimate something of the traversal between the transsubjects and transjects that Ettinger apprehends as matrixial (p. 141)? Following Irigaray, Young retrieves the "preservative" as what is set aside in Heidegger's adumbration of "building" and "dwelling" — as she says, "a curious abandonment" (Young, p. 125). These preservative rhythms are described by Young in terms of transgenerational connectivity and they find their pulse in the relations between bodies and things, a process that Young describes as "sedimentation": things become sedimented with meanings that accrete to the object through time, and "things and their arrangement bear witness to the sedimentation of lives lived" in the home (p. 140). She continues: "The history embodied in the meaningful things of the home is often intergenerational. Traditionally women are the primary preservers of family as well as individual histories. Women trace the family line and keep safe the trinkets, china cups, jewelry, pins, and photos of the departed ancestors" (p. 141). As Susan Pollock says of her grandmother's rolling pin in Sherry Turkle's collection Evocative Objects, "the evocative object is transitional in the fullest sense of the word - it can bring together generations, anchor memory and feeling, and evoke attachments that have been long forgotten" (Turkle, p. 230). Is there something else here, however, something that elides the fixity suggested by "sedimentation", evocative objects and transitional objects? In 'Time', Enright wonders what object her daughter might dimly retain from the first time she left her - again, with her own mother, who she imagines from her baby's perspective as a spectral "someone", implying a continuity with Enright's own memory of her grandmother as an indistinct white-haired woman. She hopes that her daughter will remember the carpet in her parents' house, the carpet Enright remembers from her own childhood. The carpet functions as one of Young's sedi-mented objects, those objects that are both themselves preservative and that resonate with the preservative aspect of dwelling associated with women and the feminine. It is also an evocative object such as Turkle describes: it is the container of memory and of transgenerational trans-connection. But does this transitive quality have further resonances with something more difficult to articulate; is there in this infinite pulse of connection and separation between mother and daughter and between generations something of the matrixial where the object becomes trans-ject? The preservative object of the cot - the layers of paint accumulated on its chipped surface the material manifestation of its 'sedimented' and transgenerational force-becomes in Enright's account both expressive of the relations between the oedipal subjects of mother, father, and child while at the same time this transitive, transsubjective quality that enigmatically and temporarily emerges and then fades comes into fleeting apprehension in and through the encounter between something submerged yet present 'beneath' both the subject and the object: "The baby sleeps in my cot now - the one my father made over forty years ago with some half-inch dowel ... I sat beside it one night, feeding her, and I tried to remember what it was like to be inside: the view between the bars and the ripped wallpaper on the wall. Someone, over the years, had painted it a nursery blue, but I remembered a green colour, I could almost recall chewing the cross bar at the top. ... I saw, under a chip in the blue paint, the very green I ate as a child. A strong and distant emotion washed briefly over me and was gone" (Enright 2005, pp. 69-70; my italics) The house in which you grow up is, to use Sara Ahmed's phrase, a "sticky object" (Ahmed 2003, pp. 44-46). The first home leaves its imprint on me, shapes me; and I likewise shape that house in specific ways, leave my mark upon it. Home is traumatic as well as generative, carceral as well as sustaining. A romanticising nostalgia for the home has incarcerating and impeding effects for the woman whose function it is to provide its ground, as Irigaray has demonstrated. For instance, Bachelard says of the house: "Without it, man would be a dispersed being ... It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world. Before he is 'cast into the world' ... man is laid in the cradle of the house" (Bachelard, p. 7). The nurturing protection and imaginative sustenance that the house ideally provides for its inhabitants are described by Bachelard as its "maternal features" (p. 7). The association between woman and home is underlined by the aspects of care and preservation: "housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch", and such care builds the house "from the inside . we become conscious of a house that is built by women, since men only know how to build a house from the outside" (p. 68). Valuable as Bachelard's "topoanalysis" is, the house is not the "first cosmos" as he describes it, and is not originary of the nurture, protection, containment and creativity that he ascribes to it in his exploration (p. 68). In evoking such feelings and in enabling poetic reverie, the house reanimates the memory of the maternal body, a reanimation that resonates with the house's structural contiguity with that body. There is a sense in which Bachelard's topoanalysis, while gesturing toward the mother, again in his nostalgic longing fixes her as the ground of dwelling, simultaneously displaces her and in particular the transsubjective relation between the becoming-infant and the mother-to-be that the house evokes, reinscribing these positions as subject/object, positing the house as origin and source in place of what Ettinger describes as the matrixial borderspace, a space that has its origins in the transconnectivity of co-emergence in the womb that persists as a distinct, non-oedipal psychic structure. Irigaray has, of course, articulated the grounds of Heidegger's "dwelling", which is for him man's way of being in the world. Through building, man reveals this prior ground of dwelling: "The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream. .the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it: rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge" (Heidegger, pp. 331—2). For Irigaray, "Dasein founds its being-in-the-world" on "a constitutive oblivion", the "forgetting" of the mother, and this amnesic dwelling thus positions the maternal-feminine as "void" (Faulkner, p. 131). "Built on the void, the bridge joined two banks that, prior to its construction, were not: the bridge made the two banks. And further: the bridge, a solidly established passageway, joins two voids that, prior to its construction, were not: the bridge made the void" (Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air, qtd in Faulkner, p. 129). For Irigaray, then, Heidegger's dwelling is built over the void that woman's dereliction opens up. As Young pithily summarises, the woman's role "is to be the home by being at home" so that the home that displaces and substitutes for the mother, is, like the dwelling-place of language, founded on the void where the relation to the mother once was and is impelled by a chronic nostalgic urge to recoup this loss by assigning woman "to be place without occupying place" and by building for man a new home in language (Young, p. 129). Young describes woman thus positioned in space and woman becoming thing in terms of her function as mirror for man's speculation: "Through projecting outward he makes objective works where he can see himself reflected. In this objectifying self-reflection woman serves as material both on which to stand and out of which to build, and women likewise serve as a primary object for reflecting himself, his mirror' (Young, p. 128). 'Home' becomes for woman not a facilitative space, but her crypt, the place of her entombment. The home in Enright wears the dual aspects that feminist phenomenology suggests: the house is protective, nurturing containment; the house is carceral, toxic entombment. In The Gathering, we witness the narrator Veronica's deep mourning for her brother, who has committed suicide having emigrated to England, having become increasingly estranged from his family, on the downward spiral of chronic alcoholism and the doss house. Her narrative is, however, focused on the trauma of sexual abuse that has led to Liam's pitiable and lonely death; this trauma is the terrible "gap" at the centre of the novel, for most of the narrative pointed toward through allusion, metaphor, metonymy, hallucination, slippage — those gaps in language that bespeak the unrepresentable — a trauma that her brother, and possibly herself, and, it is hinted, generations of her family have suffered. ^e houses that Veronica and Liam lived in as children are intimately, inextricably involved in this trauma and in its 'passing on' and persistence across generations — the parents' house, the grandmother's house persist within Veronica, lending her a particular psychic shape. These houses are suffused with animism: the family home grows as a living thing as the family sprawls outward, and the narrator describes it as haunted by the ghosts of the children she and her siblings once were. Not only are the houses haunted by these ghosts; Veronica is herself, importantly, haunted by these houses, too. ^ese domestic spaces — the houses that 'gather' the family, to limn Heidegger's bridge that makes the void—are themselves crypts of the transgenera-tional trauma of abuse, not static objects but rather vitally implicated with the transgenerational phantomatic preservation and passing on of trauma. Does this traumatic coinhabitation suggest a connection, a bridge, between Ahmed's phenomenological reorientations, whereby she reanimates the mutually shaping interplay between objects and bodies that coinhabit space, and Griselda Pollock's exposition of the Lacan-ian ^ing, that shapeless yet shaping void? For Ahmed, "Bodies as well as objects take shape through being orientated toward each other, an orientation that may be experienced as the co-inhabitation or sharing of space. ... Bodies are hence shaped by contact with objects and with others, with "what" is near enough to be reached. Bodies may even take shape through such contact, or take the shape of that contact" (Ahmed, p. 54). Filtering this through Enright's enigmatic exploration of the mutual shaping of the house, no longer quite an object but neither quite a subject, and the bodies that inhabit it, no longer quite present but yet shaping in their absence, bespeaks the enigmatic absence/presence of trauma itself. Pollock explicates: "the ^ing, la Chose, which is the affectively, corpo-real and for which the psychic object creates but a shaping within which the king's unsignifiable-ness, nonetheless presses, acting like the apparent void inside a vase that, in effect, determines the shape the vase takes for us to see and hold: does the vase hold nothing, or does that no-Thing press the vase/object into its perceptible shape, on the other side of the Real revealing to us both the psychic shaping and the unsignified or unimaged ghost: the Thing which none the less donates something important to what we then work with psychically in the object?" (Pollock, p. 42). In the traumatic currents relaying between the subject and the object that "holds" them, between the family and the house, as perhaps the most symbolically freighted of what Ahmed calls "kinship objects" that 'gather' (Ahmed, p. 81) - and therefore in a sense give shape to while being shaped by - the family, where is this governing Thing that is noThing to be located? For Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in their analysis of transgenerational trauma, the crypt is the no-place that 'hides' or houses this no-Thing. Gabriel Schwab expands: "The crypt is a melancholic, funereal architectonic in inner space, built after traumatic loss [which] needs to be silenced and cut off from the world. The crypt contains the secrets and silences formed in trauma ... entombed and consigned to internal silence by the sufferers" (Schwab, 45). This crypt finds expression in those 'gaps' that disarticulate language and symbolic representation - a "cryptonomy" concealed within the "house" of (phallic) language to which I will shortly return. Such trauma does not remain entombed within the bachelor subject, but can be both collective and transitive: the "secret" is communicated beneath and within speech and representation, between generations, becoming a phantom whose origin is not within 'me' but that haunts me nonetheless. For Bracha Ettinger, the transitivity of trauma as described by Abraham and Torok reveals something that has somehow escaped full recognition: that is, that trauma is thus shared, not as a sealed-off tomb that passes from subject to subject, but on a sub- and trans-subjective level: at this matrixial level, trauma-its traces, its residues, its phantoms-is "carried" between partial subjects, and thus Ettinger proposes metramorphosis as the capacity that enables the passage of 'crypts' between subjects on the transsubjective level of the matrixial borderspace, a psychic capacity first inscribed in the transmissions between the partial subjects of mother-to-be and becoming-infant before originary repression and castration. Ettinger describes the process: "A crypt, when transmissible in the matrixial borderspace, is a lacuna that corresponds to an unsymbolized event belonging to someone else. Thus we can conceive of a chain of transmissions, where the traumatic Thing inside my other's other is aching inside me, and where a forsaken Event that took place between 'my' unknown others struggles for recognition through me and with me." (2006, p. 166). The representation of the house as a kind of body that must be gutted and eviscerated, exorcised of its psychic ghosts through the evacuation of the things that clothe it, recurs in Enright's fiction, and it is here too in The Gathering. If it is true that, as Bachelard has it, each one of us is inhabited by the "oneiric house", the "house of dream-memory", then it is her grandmother Ada's house, rather than her mother's, that forms the "crypt of the house we were born in" for Veronica (Bachelard, p. 15). Toward the end of the novel, Veronica fantasises about buying her grandmother's old house so that she can strip it down, gut it, unmake the scene of a trauma deepened by generations of wounds that have never been spoken: "I am standing in Ada's front room, pulling up a corner of the wallpaper, talking to some nice architect about gutting the place [.] while telling him to rip out the yellow ceiling and the clammy walls; to knock down the doorway to the front room, but save the Belfast sink in the little kitchen [.] I will ask him to get the place cleaned out with something really strong, I don't want a woman with a mop, I will say, I want a team of men in boiler suits with tanks on their backs and those high-pressure steel rods" (Enright 2007, p. 238). The only object that Veronica wants to preserve from Ada's house is the Belfast sink: this is the place, she has told us earlier, where her imagination began, and continues to begin. It also retains its specific integrity here as a thing that cleans - in a full empathy with Veronica's need to cleanse. The object mediates transconnection in the feminine, not solely ascribable to the sink's association with domestic work, although that association is part of what is transmitted, not alone in its "preservative" function but also in the structuring trauma that is 'passed down' the female line in the phallic inscription of the female subject that the woman at the sink evokes. Like the pot holder that marks the place where Enright's "head begins" in 'Time', so here the Belfast sink is where her imagination begins: both beginnings are also endings, separations, signifiers of originary trauma, but the transitivity again between not-quite-object and not-quite-subjects manifests another and specifically feminine stratum of exchange, an ethical relation that Veronica intuitively wishes to preserve. The toxic and generative capabilities of domestic objects and spaces are recurring motifs in Enright's work and this toxicity is often countered by the focalising protagonist's evisceration of such spaces and the things that give these spaces and the gendered subjectivities they co-constitute their shape. The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? and The Gathering all feature climactic moments in which female protagonists tear the insides of the house apart, or fantasise about doing so, impelled by a suffocated desperation toward necessary acts of unmaking and remaking. Torn wallpaper, and the shape of the gap it leaves behind, likewise recur in Enright's fiction, a recurrence that recalls the yellow wallpaper of Charlotte Gilman Perkins' short story.4 Talking elsewhere about the 'Yellow Eyes' chapter in The Wig My Father Wore, where Grace eviscerates her sitting room, Enright describes it as "a menstrual image." She explains: "Well, it's all buried under the wallpaper. We are living in it; it's in bits, it's half-mad, the wallpaper and all the historical bits and scraps which are all real things. That's a menstrual image — we have to rip at the lining of this for something new to happen" (Moloney, p. 64). In The Wig My Father Wore, Grace first tentatively pulls off a tongue of wallpaper that has come loose, and then with an increasingly frenetic urgency rips off its sedimented layers, down to the newspapers that line the walls, and finally gouging through to the "plaster underneath" which, anticipating the plaster revealed beneath the torn wallpaper in Making Babies, is "an old-fashioned pink" (Enright 1995, p. 86). In her analysis of this section of the novel, Patricia Coughlan draws out the historical and sociological significance of these layers of uncovered history: The previously confessional nature of Ireland makes its presence felt ... in the snatches of text from the 1930s and earlier which she finds when she strips the wallpaper in her house. [It is a] kind of anthology of Irish culture, especially in its devotional aspect, from the previous one hundred years . References to our Lady's protection of Franco's troops in the 1930s are jumbled together with a Theatre Royal 1939 playbill, a nostalgic emigrant's letter, and a recipe for 'Faggots'. (Coughlan) Reproductive and menstrual images, images of an eviscerated female body that is "written over" by language, that language renders indeci- pherable-but a body which, in its return, calls into question the given-ness of the reality language orchestrates, become inseparable from the space and 'skin' of the house here, suggesting the dwelling spaces of both home and language that Irigaray unfolds in her analysis of Heidegger's dwelling that constitutes maternal origin as void and woman as home who is thereby left homeless. The gaps, the menstrual shreds, that Grace's eviscerations leave in the newspaper and the madness of the textual palimpsest beneath the wallpaper render their conventional cultural meanings and inscriptions as vertiginously jumbled and only partially decipherable: "Sharp edged flakes of pink stick to the paper in liquid shapes, blotting out words and phrases, or they fall of in scabs, leaving the page pockmarked with meaning, or a piece shreds as I pull it off, leaving a central tongue stuck to the wall" (Enright 1995, pp. 86-7). The breaching of the walls of the homely dwelling place by a kind of unhomely feminine writing are recalled by Jacqueline Rose during her critique of Christopher Bollas' "fantasies of the mother" (Rose p. 156). Writing about H.D.'s narrative of her experiences as Freud's analysand, Rose alludes to H.D.'s visions in her hotel room while on holiday in Corfu - a pivotal moment for her as a poet. H.D. describes her "pictures on the wall" as hieroglyphs, like the pictographic writing of the dream and the unconscious. Freud sees in what H.D. calls the "writing on the wall" "a desire for union with the mother", interpreted not as the workings of inspiration but as a disturbing symptom (Rose, p. 154). Freud's discomfort, Rose observes, the "moment of danger", is "the point where the boundaries of consciousness are transgressed, where the limits between inside and outside, between a subject and a world of objects that surround her, breaks down" (p. 154). For Freud, then, this blurring of the threshold between "me" and "not-me" evokes an uncanny return of what has been repressed, the relation to the mother. What might happen, Ettinger asks, what might be apprehendable and recognised, if this "intrapsychic remnant of the body" that so disturbs Freud here were acknowledged as revealing "a transferential unconscious field stretched between several individuals unknown to each other?" What is perceived as a dangerous breach of threshold between 'me' and 'not me' would instead be shown to belong to an entirely other order of psychic co-inhabitation: "Such a transgression of the celibate boundaries would disclose what I call a matrixial aesthetic borderspace, where rhythms of interval capture and trace co-engendering with/by the stranger. . In matrixial transferential relations, several I(s) and uncognized non-I(s) are interlaced, beyond space and time, in matrixial space and time, together opening repeatedly the wounds of nomadic places, and working-through to re-in/di-fuse the celibate place" (Ettinger 2006, p. 158). For Abraham and Torok, "cryptographic speech" manifests the traces of trauma in language: a "psychic aphasia" (Rand qtd in Schwab p. 54) whose "haunted language" (Schwab p. 54) disarticulates conventional signification and the speaking subject. Cryptographic speech, like the crypt itself, can be transgenerational, and in "extreme cases, secreted "phantom words" can become the carriers of another's story" (Schwab pp. 54-5). Ettinger's elaboration of metramorphosis and its manifestation and working-through in the transcryptum of art-working significantly reconfigure our understanding of this transmission of trauma. The crypt that travels across the boundaries of "bachelor" subjects "can be transmitted from one subject to another by metramorphosis, because a capacity and an occasion for this kind of transmission, co-affectivity, co-acting, co-making already occurred in the archaic relations between each becoming-subject and the m/Other. Metramorphosis turns the subject's boundaries into thresholds, and co-affectivity turns the borderlines between subjects in distance-in-proximity and between subject and object, into a shareable borderspace" (Ettinger 2006, p. 166, and qtd in Pollock pp. 49-50). The potential for representational systems to act as a metramorphic "transport station" of a shareable trauma whose traces are transmitted in the matrixial rather than phallic stratum unfolds what would otherwise be the "madness", the "psychic aphasia", of the three generations of women whose enigmatic transconnectedness is at the core of Enright's second novel, What Are You Like? In this novel the sacrificial mother Anna speaks from the grave. She is literally the sacrificial mother: during her pregnancy, she is diagnosed with a brain tumour, and in accordance with the law of the theocratic state she is denied medical treatment so that the lives of her daughters-to-be may be preserved. She bleeds to death while giving birth to her daughters, and her husband Berts makes the decision to keep one daughter, Maria, giving his other daughter Rose up for adoption. The mutilation of the relation between mother and daughter within a phallic economy that both Irigaray and Ettinger have so powerfully elaborated in their work is shown in this all too recognisable material way, demonstrating the inseparability of the psychic dereliction of both mother and daughter within an Oedipal teleology from the transformation of the female subject to a fleshly object whose primary value is in reproducing the nation and being made to carry the burden of the murderous consequences of an iconography of maternity as coerced sacrifice of the mother for the other. Despite this traumatic severance, and despite the fact that Anna and her daughters are unknown to each other - and that Rose, named as such by her adoptive parents, does not know her birth family or the circumstances of her abandonment by her father - each of these women carry traces of their transconnectedness, a transconnection that is both traumatic, traumatized, and generative. This transitivity expresses itself as, precisely, a kind of aphasia - a disruption in expression and in the relation between the woman and objects, particularly objects of domestic space. Phanto-matic words ghost the narrative and bespeak both severance and joint-ness; "Rose"- the name given to Anna's abandoned daughter and thus the embodied "sign" of the traumatic wound to the matrixial enacted by phallic repression and matricide - becomes a signifier that haunts both Anna and Maria. Staying in her grandmother's house-where she is expected to do the work for which she is, as woman-object, intended and attend to her male relatives, emphasising the connection between her severance from her sister and the ideology of compulsory domesticity that was one of the founding principles of the Irish state-Maria sees roses everywhere, beginning with the unexpected contiguity of the "rose" with the animal-turned-object for consumption by the subject and then moving through conjunctions between roses and domestic things: "The blood of the joint was salty-sweet and pink, the same colour as the roses on her grandmother's delph. There were roses on the cloth as well as roses on the wallpaper and modern roses blocked out in triangular petals on the new plastic breadboard" (Enright 2000, p. 48). When she speaks from the grave, Anna's narrative likewise carries the traces of the daughter she has never known; her trauma manifests as a rupture between word and thing that, from a conventional perspective, signals aphasia but that, "looking awry", reveals the actual 'gap' between language and the objects it fixes in place, the illusion of the coincidence of language and the world that is the necessary fiction underwriting the speaking, "gathering" subject: "I wrote words down and I buried them in the garden, the names of flowers: wallflower, phlox, peony rose, dog rose, tea rose. A twist of baking soda, sugar, a wick, two wicks, a bar of soap cut down the middle so it leaves itself on the knife" (p. 247, my emphasis). The last list of household objects manifests Anna's connection to her own mother, likewise "afflicted" by a kind of aphasia whereby she constructs her own "language" through the objects of the kitchen in place of conventional language: "My mother's lists were things that she shifted around the kitchen; the tea cosy placed on the table for more tea, the lid of the bread bin propped open for flour ... I would hold the list of things translated in my head as I ran down the road ... a twist of baking soda, sugar, a wick, two wicks, a bar of soap cut down the middle so it leaves itself on the knife" (p. 234.) So, the aphasia that is attributed at the beginning of the novel to Anna's brain tumour is revealed enigmatically throughout the narrative and here, more explicitly, as a disruption in phallic language that is transgenerational and feminine. This "psychic aphasia" is also transitive between the dead mother and the unknown daughter Rose; during her pregnancy Anna manifests "symptoms" that Berts attributes to the mysterious hormonal configuration of the woman and that come to be retrospectively attributed to a more sinister disturbance in her brain's functioning but that, read as metramorphosis, reveal the proximity-in-distance of the matrixial web: she drinks "out of the hot tap" and for her the "sound of a tap dripping smelt of roses" (p. 6), while later we are told of Rose that 'When she opened her mouth, the wrong words hopped out of it. Everything she tried to do came out backwards. She drank from the hot tap" (pp. 153—4, my emphasis).5 In this novel, to recall Ahmed, both women and things fail to do the work that they are intended for. This "failure", however, is the very idiom of a newly configured feminine proximity: a proximity that neither elides trauma nor deposits it to the account of the other, but that instead bespeaks the generative beyond the boundaries of the bachelor subject, a generative ethics of proximity that Ettinger likewise ascribes to the artwork as transcryptum: "In art, repetitions in anam- nesic working-through do not reestablish the lost object. Rather, they make present the unpresentable Thing, crypted in the artwork's unconscious, that keeps returning because its debt can never be liquidated' (Ettinger 2006, p. i58). * Anne Mulhall is a College Lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film Studies at University College Dublin where she teaches and researches in critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, and Irish literary and cultural studies. Notes 1 Thanks to Moynagh Sullivan for her invaluable comments on an early draft of this essay, and moreover for the influence and example of her own work which has been so important and groundbreaking in its brilliant analysis of the feminine and maternal in Irish cultural and literary aesthetics. Thanks also to Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke for our collaboration in organising 'Reading Bracha L. Ettinger's The Matrixial Borderspace' in 2009, an event that continues to resonate. My debt to Noreen's and Michael's work is great, but needless to say they are in no way responsible for the flaws of this essay. 2 I discuss the significance of 'bags' and their connection to the umbilical at greater length in '"Now the blood is in the room": the spectral feminine in the work of Anne Enright', Anne Enright, eds. Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011). 3 Thanks to Michael O'Rourke whose work introduced me to Connor's book. 4 Thanks to Luz Mar Gonzalez Arias for pointing out the significance of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' for a reading of this aspect of Enright's novel. 5 See my article '"Now the blood is in the room": the spectral feminine in the work of Anne Enright' for a more thorough discussion of crypt, transcryptum, and the manifestation of trauma in representation in this and other of Enright's works. Bibliography 1. Abraham, N., and Torok, M. (1994), The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals ofPsy-choanalysis. London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2. Ahmed, S. (2006), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 3. Bachelard, G. (1994), The Poetics of Space. New York: Beacon Books. 4. Baraitser, L. (2009), Maternal Interruptions: The Ethics of Interruption. New York and London: Routledge. 5. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 6. Bollas, C. (2009), The Evocative Object World. London and New York: Rout-ledge. 7. Connor, S. (2011), Paraphrenalia: the curious lives of magical things. London: Profile Books. 8. Coughlan, P. (2004), 'Irish Literature and Feminism in Post-Modernity'. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 10 (2): 175—202. 9. Enright, A. (2005), Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. London: Vintage. 10. Enright, A. (2007), The Gathering. London: Jonathan Cape. 11. Enright, A. (1995), The Wig My Father Wore. London: Jonathan Cape. 12. Enright, A. (2000), What Are You Like? London: Vintage. 13. Ettinger, B. L. (2006), The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. 14. Ettinger, B. L. (2006a), 'From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility: Besideness and the Three Primal Phantasies of Not-Enoughness, Devouring and Abandonment.' Athena 2 (2006): 100—135. 15. Faulkner, J. (2001), Amnesia at the Beginning of Time: Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in The Forgetting of Air. Contretemps 2 (May): 124—141. 16. Gilman, C. P. (1996), 'The Yellow Wallpaper.' [1892] In: The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English (eds. S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. 17. H.D. (1974), Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall — Advent. New York: New Directions Books. 18. Heidegger, M. (1977), 'Building Dwelling Thinking.' In: M. Heidegger, Basic Writings. New York: Harper & Row. 19. Irigaray, L. (1993), Sexes and Genealogies. New York: Columbia University Press. 20. Irigaray, L. (2002), The Way of Love. London and New York: Continuum. 21. Moloney, C. (2003), 'Anne Enright.' Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices from the Field. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. 22. Mulhall, A. (2011), '"Now the blood is in the room": the spectral feminine in the work of Anne Enright.' In: Anne Enright (eds. C. Bracken and S. Cahill). Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 23. Pollock, G. (2009), 'Art/Trauma/Representation.' Parallax 15.1: 40—54. 24. Rose, J. (2003), On Not Being BeingAble to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World. London: Chatto & Windus. 25. Schwab, G. (2010), Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press. 26. Turkle, S. (ed.) (2007), The Evocative Object: Things We Think With. Massachusetts: The MIT Press. 27. Young, I. M. (2005), On Female Embodiment: 'ThrowingLike A Girl'and Other Essays. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 28. Ahmed, S. (2003), The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bracha L. Ettinger: Water-Dream Artistbook (Notebook, 25x25 cm), detail, 2011 ABSTRACTS Bracha L. Ettinger Diotime et le transfert matrixiel: L'evenement-rencontrepsychanalytique commepregnance dans le Beau (2007) In this analysis of the Platonian Diotima, I show how the awakening of the feminine-(pre)maternal matrixial Eros, this desire of co-emergence that works between individuals by borderlinking (bordureliance, reliance-bord) in a psychic pregnance is shared in Beauty in a way more transmissive than Platon suggests. A matrixial transferential borderspace (espace-bord) produces fragile and creative trans-subjective differentiation-in-jointness. The awakening of the feminine-matrixial Eros for borderlinking-in-differentiation as shareable birthing in beauty produces a fragile, creative and dangerous state of fragile exposure. The matrixial difference relates, for every human being, first of all to the borderlinking to a female-woman-m/Other (l'Autremere-femme-femelle.) The matrixial difference for women is a woman-to-woman difference. The erotic antenna that connects and transmits traces exposes she who gives birth in Beauty, the artist in her encounters with her materials, as well as the psychoanalyst in transference relations, to a traumatic contact that will turn her into her other's intimate stranger, a Diotima. The ethics of matrixial subjectivization, where the I can not not wit(h)ness the other (pas etre-avec-l'autre-et-temoigner) in com-passion and stands in besidedness to the m/Othe (tenir dans l'd-coteite avec l'Autremere) is the ethics of non-abandonment. The gesture of the artist creates from-with a proto-ethical aesthetical compassion. The desire of the artist for wit(h)nessing seals imprints of Matrixial Trauma and Matrixial Eros in the artwork as a new impregnated cluster created like a cloud from sparkles of traces of internal and external encounter-events, that produces transformations in earlier insights and opens the potential for new ones, for the artist and the viewer. Gina Rae Foster The Dissonant Resonance of Becomings: Copoiesis and (Non-)Pulsed Time in Musical Proximities Examining bodily proximities through music (and in particular, music as aesthetic sound) raises questions of bodies and proximities as becomings. Through the bodily proximities of performance, music reveals and conceals temporospatial becomings that are part of human co-emergence and divergence. Bracha L. Et-tinger writes of borderspacing, borderlinking, and borderswerving in copoiesis, which might be read as one approach to an aesthetically ontological proximity. Gilles Deleuze explores pulsed and non-pulsed time in music as an extension of his and Felix Guattari's conceptions of territorialization and time as Aion and Chronos. In thinking through temporospatiality, matrixiality, and territorialization, Ettinger and Deleuze think through the aesthetics of bodily proximities, and in these proximities, the performance of music finds its own potentials for copoiesis through borderlinking and borderswerving, through territorialization and deterritorializa-tion. The resonance of embedded and contained time with Chronos and Aion opens possibilities for musical co-performances and co-emergences that not only may but will differ in each nearing and distancing of shared performance/hearing, even when recorded versions are repeated. Perceptions gained through hearing might then be considered subject to the velocities of becoming. Julia Holzl In/Possible Relation: Being, Time, Death Touching upon death, time, and being, the aim of this essay is to open in/ possibilities of relation. In/possibility: a possibility/not. Closeness and distance at the same time, it designates the possibility yet to be/come, the only form of possibility possible. Being, death, and time: they are always already (as) else-where, and it is in such elsewhere that the here of relation can be touched, from where relation must be thought. There is no presence for relation; presence, as relation itself, is a(s) distance. It might be, then, the in/possibility of relation that allows for proximity—always already anticipating some body else, its presence presents itself with,in the very absence it pretends to present: For there to be relation, relation must remain outside relation. Such relation is to remain different, is to remain a(s) different relation, a(s) relation of difference and in difference. Neither one nor the other, but the Other, always. Relation must, therefore, bear its impass(e)ability: The ability to bear the in/ possibility of its impasse, that is. Roula Haj-Ismail The impossibility of being self/other My aim in this paper is to try and understand the fundamental role of the body: in the formation of 'who we are', and how 'we can know'. Both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas elucidate these two inquiries in terms of the primacy of the body. I seek examples within artistic production, pedagogical instruction and political action where the body is ever-present both conceptually, and concretely. In these examples there lies the potential for bodily proximity and at the same time the impossibility of such a potentiality. This impossibility is due to ideology, and its ever-presence in everything that we are, and all that we do. The power of the work of Luce Irigaray lies in her stripping away of all that we are, in social/ideological terms, in order to reach a place of silence and breath. To begin at the beginning: So that the possibility of bodily proximity may be possible within this space in the age of breath. Tadashi Ogawa Global Philosophy from the Viewpoint of Living Flesh In this article I would like to talk about my confrontation with European Philosophy. Philosophy is an international and common spiritual activity of human being. Although philosophy is originally from archaic Greece, there were at the same time great thinkers in India and China considering the relation of humans and the world, nature and the cosmos. Regarding methodology and terminology there were certainly great differences, but it is clear that at the level of questions, the matters about which they wondered—these were the same: the relation of Humans and Nature, Mankind and the Cosmos. My intention is to elucidate the possibility of Global Philosophy explicitly and to explicate the relation of Global Philosophy to the embodied existence of mankind. This discussion will be an attempt at a synthesis of two directions in philosophy: world philosophy as objective sense and existential philosophy as subjective sense, coming together through the viewpoint of the body-living flesh. Wolfgang Schirmacher Homo Generator in the Postmodern Discussion: From a Conversation with Jean-Francois Lyotard I first met the most important postmodern philosopher in 1991, when he accepted my invitation to hold a lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York. That both of us work primarily in phenomenology, and that Nietzsche and Heidegger strongly influenced our work, certainly contributed to a rapid deepening of our relationship. But more importantly, Lyotard was an extraordinarily genial and generous soul. Despite his immense workload of teaching duties all over the world and his numerous publications, he took the time for a conversation with a younger philosopher. The following excerpts are taken from a conversation held on April 22, 1992 at Yale University, where Lyotard spent a semester as the Henry Luce Scholar at the Whitney Humanities Center. The discussion took place in English, a foreign language for both of us, and Lyotard never got the opportunity to edit the transcript. Video and tape recordings were made, and Lyotard expressly authorized me to change the wording to ensure that our philosophical points would prevail over any inadequacies in the language we used in the discussion. It goes without saying that under these circumstances, I assume responsibility for the entire text. Lenart Škof Ethics of Breath: Towards New Ethical Spaces of Intersubjectivity In this paper we try to establish a platform for an ethics of otherness - an ethics of breath. This is work in philosophy, oriented toward an ethics as a place for the future conversation of mild gestures - such as compassion, forbearance and care. First we deal with breath as an intercultural phenomenon. Different macrocosmic and microcosmic designations for wind/breath in the history of religions and philosophies are presented in order to inaugurate a common physico-anthropological phenomenon of life as a basis for the future ethics. T. Ogawa's elaboration on qi as ethical phenomenon and ancient Indian Vedic teachings on prana are in the foreground of our analyses. In the second part we deal with the epistemological analysis of breath in W. James's Essays on Radical Empiricism. We critically confront another pragmatist model (R. Shusterman) and show the potential of James's insights for the future ethics of breath. Finally, we connect the first and second parts in the concluding third part of the paper, which brings a dialog with Luce Irigaray and her philosophy of breath. Stephen David Ross Living with the animals... In the fullness of our nonidentities. A meditation on the fullness of being, understood as the nonidentity of bodies with themselves, beginning with animals and animality. Through readings of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Coetzee on animals, other possibilities of being human are explored, in terms of the nonidentity of every identity with itself. What it is to be human is other to itself, embodied, embedded, and entangled among other bodies, near and far, human, animal, and other. We do not know what bodies can do, as Spinoza said. We do not know who and what we are. Being is difficult, difficult to know, difficult to be. We live, we speak, we believe in the subjunctive, where the fullness of being meets the abundance of love. Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa A Secret Life of the Hand The secret of the hand lies in its mystical proclivity. Engulfing the properties of time, nature, and the divine, the hand presides alongside and beyond itself as a mere apparition encompassing infinite kingdoms, large and small, transparent and opaque. Its secret lies in its propensity for abundance and bareness, indistinctness and equivocality, enfolding nothing and everything, beyond, after, and without beginnings. We here propose a meta physika "on the edge of the unconscious" that is neither religion nor its contrary, a meta physika of reverie, in "journeys to the opposite limit" of knowing, in a passage of no return. A gesture of the hand as an instance where we may approach the sensuous in all its possible differences and resistances, ungathering that which we may fold upon nature, in a meta physika that "resides in that transition and that passage" where the hand itself prefigures the crossing in an "exceptional" and "strange" fashion. Anne Mulhall 'This is where my head begins': things, trauma and feminine proximities The relation between the thing and the woman is one of the informing grounds of both psychoanalytic and phenomenological tradition, whether this preoccupation is acknowledged or goes unrecognised. This informing ground subtending canonical analyses of psychic being and being-in-the-world have, of course, been significantly exacavated and reconfigured by and in feminist critiques of both psy- choanalytic and phenomenological orthodoxies. In this essay, I attempt to bring the work of the feminist psychoanalytic theorists such as Bracha L. Ettinger, Luce Irigaray, Jacqueline Rose and Griselda Pollock into conversation with the phenom-enological work of Iris Marion Young and Sara Ahmed's (Queer Phenomenologies and with the writing of the Irish novelist Anne Enright in order to explore the transsubjective, transconnective relation between 'woman' and 'things' in a way that expresses a sharing of traces in the feminine-matrixial that both bespeaks the traumatic 'fixing' of woman as man's dwelling and that enigmatically articulates a generative ethical relation before and beyond such confinements within home and language in their castrating aspects. CONTRIBUTORS Bracha L. Ettinger brachaet@gmail.com Gina Rae Foster gina.rae.foster@gmail.com Stephen David Ross sross@binghamton.edu Julia Holzl julia.hoelzl@gmx.at Anne Mulhall anne.mulhall@ucd.ie Roula Haj-Ismail rorosunshine@gmail.com Wolfgang Schirmacher wolfgang.schirmacher@egs.edu> Tadashi Ogawa bachtadkan@hotmail.com Lenart Škof lenart.skof@guest.arnes.si Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa sigridhackenberg1918@mac.com INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS Submissions Manuscripts, editorial correspondence and books for review should bo sent to the Editorial Office. Book reviews should be sent to the Book-Reviews Editor. Authors should follow general instructions listed below. Submit to paper copies or a copy on disk (standard word-processing programme in PC format, preferably in Microsoft Word). An abstract of not more than i50 words should accompany each manuscript. Authors should provide full contact details, including e-mail address on a separate page. All manuscripts are subject to editing. Copies and disks will not be returned. General instructions for authors (authors submitting atricles in French, Spanish, German and Italian language should adjust instructions to their languages): Citations 1. W. Halbfass, India and Europe. State Univ of New York, New York 1990, pp. 245-256. 2. W. Halbfass, op. cit., p. 55; cf. also n. 34. 3. Op. cit., p. 345sg. 4. See G. Erdosy (ed.), The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1995, p. 260sgg. 5. H. von Glassenapp, "Parallels and Contrasts in Indian and Western Metaphysics", Philosophy East and West, 3, 1953, p. 223. 6. Cf. R.C. Neville, "MotifAnalysis East and West", in: Elberfeld, R. et al. (eds.): KomparativePhilosophie, Schriften der Academie du Midi, Bd. IV, Fink, Munchen i998, pp. i97-2i2. 7. See Erdosy i995, p. 367. Bibliographical references 8. Olivelle, P. (tr.) (1992), Samnyasa Upanisads: Hindu Scriptures on Ascetism and Renunciation. Oxford / New York, Oxford University Press. 9. Ogawa, T. (1998), "Qi and phenomenology of wind", Continental Philosophy Review 31, 321-335. P O L I G R A F I back issues: Hermetizem Religija in psihologija — Carl Custav Jung Mislec neskončnosti Giordano Bruno Logos in kozmos Panteizem O Božjem bivanju 2000 po Kristusu Mesijanska zgodovina Sebstvo in meditacija Religija in umetnost podobe Protestantizem Nikolaj Kuzanski Renesančne mitologije Ples življenja, ples smrti Ars magna Antični mit in literatura O ljubezni Ameriška filozofija religije Poetika in simbolika prostora Mistika in literatura Solidarity and interculturality Samanizem On commnunity Ženska in religija Meditteranean lectures in philosophy Svoboda in demokracija Človekove pravice Ethical gestures Krogotok rojstva in smrti Natural history Modeli sveta BODILY PROXIMITY Bracha L. Ettinger: Choice for a virtual exhibition III: Paintings, drawings, notebooks 1987-2011 Bracha L. Ettinger: Diotime et le transfert matrixiel: l'evenement-rencontrepsychanalytique comme pregnance dans le beau (2007) Gina Rae Foster: The dissonant resonance of becomings: copoiesis and (non-)pulsed time in musical proximities Julia Holzl: In/possible relation: being, time, death Roula Haj-Ismail: The impossibility of being self/other Tadashi Ogawa: Global philosophy from the viewpoint of living flesh Wolfgang Schirmacher: Homo generator in the postmodern discussion: From a conversation with Jean-Frangois Lyotard Lenart Škof: Ethics of Breath: Towards New Ethical Spaces of Intersubjectivity Stephen David Ross: Living with the animals... In the fullness of our nonidentities... Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa: A secret life ofthe hand Anne Mulhall: 'This is where my head begins': things, trauma and feminine proximities