* (restored)

 

 

 

Chronologically

8 AD. — The First Sex Doll Story Told. In Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote of a myth involving a woman sculpted from ivory by Pygmalion. Her name was Galatea and he became so obsessed with her, bathing her feeding her and of course sleeping with her, eventually Aphrodite made her into a real woman.

 

11th to 12th Century — Touching of Naked Statues Encouraged. Naked women made of marble, called “Sheela-na-gigs,” were carved into the sides of English and Irish churches to ward off evil spirits. The carvings had exaggerated vulvas and a legend at the time said caressing these sexy busts gave you the power to heal others.

 

15th Century — The First Sex Dolls at Sea. Called “Dame De Voyage” in French, “Dama De Vinje” in Spanish or “Seemannsbraut,” in German, these female dolls made out of sewn cloth were used by sailors aboard their ships to occupy their time (and bodies) on long trips at sea.

 

1941 — Nazis Invent the Modern Sex Doll. The world’s first sex-dolls as we know them were created in Nazi Germany at the request of the SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. Called the “Borghild Field-Hygiene Project,” Himmler came up with the concept to stop the “unnecessary losses” of Nazi soldiers due to STD’s. The Project was considered ”Geheime Reichssache,” translated: ”More secret than top secret.”

The sculptor on the project, Arthur Rink, created three dolls. Typ A: 168 cm bust. Typ B: 176 and Typ C: 182 cm. According to Rink, The SS wanted the breasts “round and full” and SS Dr. Olen Hannussen insisted on “a rose hip form, that would grip well.” As for the face, the team agreed it needed a cheeky and naughty look. They asked to borrow the face of an actress of the time, Käthe von Nagy, for the doll, but she declined. Dr. Hannussen suggested an “artificial face of lust”, which he thought would be more appealing to the soldiers. Technician, Franz Tschakert agreed saying, “The doll has only one purpose and she should never become a substitute for the honorable mother at home… When the soldier makes love to Borghild, it has nothing to do with love. Therefore the face of our anthropomorphic sexmachine should be exactly how Weininger described the common wanton’s face.”

Going along with the Nordish Nazi vision of beauty, a tall leggy blonde rounded out the form. The first model of Borghild, Typ B, was completed in September 1941. Later, this blonde life-sized woman would inspire Ruth Handler to create the Barbie Doll for girls.

 

1955 — Bild Lilli. The first sex doll is marketed, which is 11.5 inches of plastic and is named Bild Lilli.

 

1975 — The Stepford Wives. A film about the quaint town of Stepford, Connecticut where men have beautiful robot wives that are all absolutely perfect … except for the fact that they’re creepy. Trivia: Diane Keaton turned the role of Joanna down the night before signing her contract, because her analyst got “bad vibes” from the script.

1977 — Hohoemi. The history the best Japanese sex dolls brand started in 1977 when the future CEO of Orient Industry decided to make the kind of doll that he knew men needed. He came up with Hohoemi. She’s a simple lady compared with the sophisticated silicone dolls of today but she certainly was a popular and durable creation. Made from urethane and PVC, Hohoemi was essentially a head, bust and waist with hole … and that’s it.

 

 

Early 80’s — The First Sex Robot is invented. British Company, Sex Objects Ltd. creates a sex robot, named “36C,” for obvious reasons. “She” also had a 16-bit microprocessor and voice synthesizer that allowed primitive responses to speech and push button inputs.

1985 — The Term “Gynoid” Coined. The term “Gynoid” was a name given to a female robot designed to look like a human female. It was given to us by Gweyneth Jones in her 1985 novel, Divine Endurance.

 

1987 – Britain Lifts Prohibition on Importing Sex Dolls. In 1982 a blocked attempt to import sex dolls into Britain began a court case about whether or not to lift the import ban on all “Obscene or Indecent” items. The sex companies finally won the case in 1987, lifting all prohibitions. This opened the floodgates to all perversity in England.

 

1994 – Fleshlight. Back in 1994, Steve Shubin had a problem — his wife was pregnant with twins and, being over 40, her health was a concern. Sex was off limits during the course of the pregnancy so Shubin had to take matters into his own hands. But not by using his hand. Deciding he needed something else to use, he started daydreaming. Eighteen months and $750,000 later, the Fleshlight was born.

 

 

1995 — The Inflatable Sex Sheep Sold. Muttonbone Productions, Inc. creates a life-sized, anatomically correct inflatable sheep called the Love Ewe. It is sold mainly as a gag gift.

 

1996 – First “Realistic” Sex Doll Created. At 29 years-old, Matt McMullen stops making scary Halloween masks for a living and creates the first female sex doll that is anatomically correct in look and feel. Her name is Leah. McMullen goes on to create the company Real Dolls, one of the most popular sex doll companies in the world. The dolls have a poseable PVC skeleton with steel joints and silicone flesh, which is advertised as “the state-of-the-art for life-like human body simulation”. They are now available in 10 customizable body styles, with a choice of 15 faces and five skin tones. Prices begin at around $6500, with some models costing over $10,000.

 

2001 — Joe.

 

2002 – Guys and Dolls. The BBC produces a documentary called “Guys and Dolls.” It chronicles the industry and the men who buy life-size dolls them. A California company called Realdoll began making realistic, lifesized dolls back in 1996. Since then, they’ve sold thousands of them for upwards of $10,000 each. The men interviewed in the documentary talk about how the dolls influence their lives. While they sometimes feel isolated from real life, they say the companionship they feel with the dolls is worth it.

 

2004 – Inflatable Sex Doll Raft Race. Today (August 21st, 2004) the second annual Inflatable Sex Doll Raft Race will be organized in North Russia/Leningrad region. Anyone over 16, and of either sex, is allowed to take part in this second competition. The participants will have to swim in the complicated Losevsky rapids of the Vuoksa river near St. Petersburg. The rapids are usually used for rafting in canoe and catamarans. This competition isn’t a sexually chauvinistic event; in last year’s edition (real) women rafted on the dolls. All participants stated that these rubber ‘products’ are economical in usage, they float wonderfully. They gave some pet names to their dolls: Mary and her Poppins; Speedy Sterlet, Cleopatra… All participants must wear a helmet and a life vest. They also have to remain sober and those who are seen drunk are disqualified.

2005 — Japanese Company Begins Renting Out “Dutch Wives.” Dutch Wives is the Japanese term for high quality silicone sex dolls. By the end of 2005 the Japanese company Forest Dolls had over 40 shops nationwide. The hourly rental rate, in 2005 was 13,000 yen an hour, or $146.00. Wigs and costumes were also available to rent.

2007 — Lars and The Real Girl. A film about a man in relationship with a sex doll, nominated for an Oscar for its screenplay written by Nancy Oliver.

 

2007 — The “Sexual Audio System” Is Invented. A Japanese company adds an mp3 player attached to a built-in pressure sensor in the chest of its sex dolls. It takes 4 AAA batteries. The dolls also come with real pubic hair and detachable heads.

 

2006 – 2008 – Sex Doll becomes Art. Artist Amber Hawk Swanson commissioned the production of a life-like sex doll, a RealDoll, made of a posable PVC skeleton and silicone flesh, in her exact likeness. Her doll, Amber Doll, began as a Styrofoam print-out of a digital scan of her head. Her face was then custom-sculpted and later combined with the doll manufacturer’s existing, “Body #8” female doll mold. After completing, “The Making-Of Amber Doll” and “Las Vegas Wedding Ceremony” (both 2007), Amber Doll and Swanson went on to disrupt wedding receptions, roller-skating rinks, football tailgating parties, theme parks, and adult industry conventions. In the resulting series, “To Have, To Hold, and To Violate: Amber and Doll,” ideas surrounding agency and objectification are questioned, as are ideas about the success or failure of negotiating power through one’s own participation in a cultural narrative that declares women as objects. Swanson’s work with Amber Doll, herself a literal object, deals with such themes through an oftentimes-complicated feminist lens.

2009 — The First Male Android-Sex Doll. Germans make the first male Android-Sex doll, named “Nax.” It has an “automatically soaring penis” and “artificial automatic ejaculation.” It costs $10,000.

 

2009 – Air Doll. Air Doll is a 2009 Japanese drama film directed by Hirokazu Koreeda. It is based on the manga series Kuuki Ningyo by Yoshiie Gōda, which was serialized in the seinen manga magazine Big Comic Original, and is about an inflatable doll that develops a consciousness and falls in love. The movie debuted in the Un Certain Regard section at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. It opened in Japanese cinemas on 26 September 2009. Director Koreeda has stated that the film is about the loneliness of urban life and the question of what it means to be human.

 

2010 — The First Sex Doll with a “Customizable Personality.” At the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, Doug Hines, owner and designer for TrueCompanion, revealed Roxxy. She costs a mere $7,000 and reacts to tactile and verbal stimulation. Personalities range from “Wild Wendy,” an outgoing party girl to “Frigid Farrah,” the shy librarian type. Her interests can be modified according to the owner’s conversation preferences.

 

2010 – Sex Doll Fashion. A Dutch artist named Sander Reijgers is recycling inflatable sex dolls into the most bizarre clothing. Perfect for a rainy weather, these waterproof hoodies were made by customizing existing tracksuit tops with heads, breasts and other pieces from 50 blow-up dolls that Sanders received from a “sponsor”.

 

2011 – A music teacher has been arrested after he was caught in a sex act with a child-like doll outside an elementary school. Officers were called to the school in Tennessee, following reports of a naked white male on school property. Daniel Torroll, 56, a private music teacher, was seen performing sex acts on the doll under a bridge that links the Spring Hill school from the main road. The responding officer said he could be seen by people driving to the school. Police later discovered Torroll had cut holes into the doll, News 2 reported. Torroll claimed he did not know he was on school grounds.

 

2011 – These high-heeled shoes that look like inflatable sex dolls are part of a collection of footwear by Tel Aviv designer Kobi Levi. The Blow shoes were designed to highlight how high heels are synonymous with sex and accompany a second pair where the heel illustrates the act of sex itself.

 

2012 – Just-in Beaver. US adult toy manufacturer Pipedream Products has produced an unofficial Justin Bieber blow-up sex doll. Named ‘Just-in Beaver’, the not-related-to-Mr-Bieber-in-any-way product retails at around $26. The company’s advertising blurb – which rather dubiously fixates on ‘Beaver’ recently turning 18 – describes ‘Beaver’ as a “barely legal boy-toy who’s waited 18 long years to stick his lil’ dicky in something sticky! When he’s not busy beating up paparazzi or beating off, he’s up to his high-tops in hot Hollywood tail!” The company also produces a ‘Dirty Christina’ doll modelled on Christina Aguilera, and a doll named ‘Finally Miley’ modelled on Miley Cyrus.

 

2012 – Dollstories.net. “Doll fetish is the desire to be transformed in to a doll or transforming someone else into a doll. This can be a living being such as a rubber doll or an inanimate object such as a lovedoll. The attraction may include the desire for actual sexual contact with a doll, a fantasy of a sexual encounter with an animate or inanimate doll, encounters between dolls themselves, or sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into a doll. This website was born out of a love of reading doll stories, and the thoughts, fantasies and desires to become one. Whilst this site deals mainly with Doll transformations and people turning into dolls, there are a few mannequin, fembot & objectification stories here.”

 

2012 – Turkish rescue workers rushed to retrieve an inflatable sex doll from the Black Sea after panicked residents mistook it for a woman’s body floating offshore. The country’s Milliyet newspaper said police cordoned off a wide stretch of beach in northern Samsun province and sent a team of divers into the water to rescue what appeared to be a drowning woman. The team quickly discovered it was in fact a blow-up doll, which they tactfully deflated before throwing it away.

2013 – Missy is launched into space. An inflatable sex doll named Missy was recently launched into space making history as the first sex doll to have entered the earth’s outer atmosphere. Check out the video and watch Missy being hooked to a hydrogen-filled balloon then shot towards the cosmos at a speed of 426 metres per minute when, at an altitude of 31,090 metres, her balloon burst and she shot straight back down to the ground.

 

2013 – Student arrested for posing by Russian WWII memorial with an inflatable sex doll. A university student has been jailed in Russia for posing for a photograph in front of a Second World War memorial – arm in arm with a blow-up sex doll. Anastasia Polnikova, 23, was charged with hooliganism after she and three friends took the inflatable sex aid to the memorial near the Federal University in Stavropol, Russia. Wearing WWII head gear and waving a Russian flag, the drunk students borrowed the doll from a friend and walked through the park to take the pictures before posting them on the internet. Detectives are hunting Miss Polnikova’s three unnamed friends who went on the run after police issued arrest warrants for them all. Stavropol’s Ministry of Internal Affairs spokesman Eugene Nuykin said: ‘The identities of all the people who appeared in this photo are known to us and they will all be punished.

 

2013 – Sex Doll Commits Suicide In Czech Online Dating Ad. An ad for the popular Czech dating site Lidé is called “the bleakest thing you’ll see this side of an Ingmar Bergman film”. It features a sex doll, devastated now that her man has found a real human to have sex with, jumping off a balcony as she replays in her mind the bittersweet moments the two of them had shared.

 

2013 – Chinese Site Sells ‘Child-Sized’ Sex Doll: Protest Group Launched. A Chinese website is under fire for selling disturbingly life-like child-size, sex dolls. The disturbing advert, spotted by an advocacy group on Facebook called Dining for Dignity, shows the model of a girl, who does not look much older than 9 or 10. Described as a “beautiful young girl sex doll for men,” the item costs $178 and is available to ship worldwide. Worryingly 57 of them have been sold so far to customers in the US, UK, Japan, Germany, and more, the advert shows. The product listing boasts that it is highly flexible, and that “all three holes can be used.” Dining for Dignity has now set up a protest page to pressure DHgate – one of China’s top global merchants platforms – into removing the item or banning the seller. Its petition reads, ”This negligence is fueling human sex trafficking, pedophilia, violent rape, and more.”

 

2014 – Synthetics. Synthetics launches a new line of male sex dolls with removable parts depicting the various boner stages. “We are proud of the beautiful, hand-crafted items we produce,” writes Synthetics publicity department, “and we want them to be appreciated as multifunctional rather than simply pigeon-holing them into the easy go-to connotation of the word ‘sexdoll.’ We view our products as usable art, and our clients as art collectors.”

 

2014 – Sexflesh Full Sized Sammy Sex Doll. There are a lot of positive things going on with this sex toy. First of all, washboard abs. While not structurally relevent it’s a nice touch and speaks to the meticulous detail molded into the rest of the toy. The penis is stiff but moldable, which is a VERY nice touch. It’s 7.5 inches in length, 5.75 inches in circumfrance and 1.8 inches diameter – a nice large penis without being a monster! There are two holes for fucking. The anus and mouth. Both are ribbed and both have “exit holes”. This means the tubes you fuck on the doll are open ended. This makes cleaning it VERY easy and is definatley something you should look for in any high end sex doll (ie. more than $150). The anus is tight and gives a great amount of pleasure. One of the best things about it is that when it gets lubed up, SexFlesh feels very close to the real thing. The outer layer is covered in it, which gives the whole thing a nice skin like feel. Admittedly, the eyes are a little shocking, but if you’re looking for a high end men’s sex doll, this is the one.

 

2014 – New Japanese sex doll looks just like a real woman with ‘new level’ of realistic artificial skin. A new sex doll has been created in Japan that is so realistic they are ‘barely distinguishable from real women’. The £1,000 doll, made by Orient Industry, is made from a high-quality silicon, hailed as the ‘next level’ in artificial skin. This gives each figure an unbelievably realistic look, especially in the eyes – previously a problem area for doll-makers. The fake women also have moveable joints so they can be placed in any position and owners are even able to tailor their woman in bust size, hair colour, and physical appearance. Company spokesman Osami Seto said: “The two areas we identified as really needing improvement were the skin and the eyes. We feel we have finally got something that is arguably not distinguishable from the real thing.”

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, D!!!! Just so long as you don’t end up one of those dissected, plastinated bodies posed as though it’s playing basketball in Body Worlds. Going viral ruins everything, I swear. The more popular something is, the less it means. Well, generally speaking. I would love to see the look on Zack’s skeleton’s face. Which might be hard to do through all that make up, but still. Love transformed into a sex doll that will be delivered to your door by FedEx between the hours of 11 am and 5 pm today and requiring a signature from the deliveree so make sure you’re home, G. ** Bill, Cool beans, as people older than me used to say a million years ago. ** David Ehrenstein, Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein’s lucrative (for you if you live in SoCal) house cleaning is back. To wit, ‘Dear Friends, I’m having a massive sale. LAVISHLY ILLUSTRATED FILM BOOKS FOR SALE. Numerous books, CDs and DVDs for sale at bargain prices. Call me and come over ASAP. I am fully vaccinated and all health issues will be taken into account. CONTACT ME via cellar47@yahoo.com.’ ** Maryse, Maryse!!!! Was it? Made for you? I’m chuffed! Ha ha, those pics of my horrible desk in Interview were secretly taken against my express command to the photographer not to shoot my desk. In the long shot with me in it, I said, ‘You’re not showing my desk, right?’, and he said, ‘Oh no. Oh, no, no, no.’ But bygones and all of that. All of which does not get me off the hook of having a disaster for desk, and, yes, it still is this morning as I type so avert your mind, please. So happy you and Bill met and that you guys hit it off! Yeah, he’s awesome. As are, well, … you! You good? So excited to get to see you over here before too, too long. Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Play Therapy came to my soul’s and booty’s rescue yet again, so major thanks to your curatorial brilliance, as ever! As I discovered while making that post, there is actually more skeleton porn out there than you/one would imagine, but, boy, do I even need to tell you how silly it is? ** Steve Erickson, Hope it proves fruitful. There’s some good stuff on that site if you scour. Oh, glad to hear the storm was not a major whoop. I did see some photos of some seriously giant puddles somewhere in Manhattan. Enjoy the presumably newly fresh air. ** Misanthrope, Sleep has its instructive side, some say. My weekend wasn’t quite as productive as I had planned, but it was alright in the forward momentum department. One man’s ‘not much’ is another man’s Guinness Book World Record accomplishment. ** Okay. I decided to restore today’s particular post because … I guess the reason is obvious? Is it? See you tomorrow.

 

‘Bracha Ettinger’s theory of the Matrix enables a way of thinking that is not dependent on an adherence to phallic logic, which, at ontological and epistemological levels, informs much Western thought. Ettinger closely engages with but relativises the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud, and in particular the concepts of the phallus and ‘castration’ by showing the involvement of other unconscious processes that create desire and meaning.

‘Ettinger names the dominant logic in classic psychoanalysis phallic: not as masculine, but as that which is premised on the oppositions absence/presence, on/off, plus/minus. Through shifting the binary modelling of fusion and repulsion, which are considered as the first and primary psychic activities through which subjectivity is formed, Ettinger proposes a supplementary form of relating located on the border between presence and absence, and not tied to object and subject. Phallic logic, established as neutral by classical psychoanalytical thought, shapes the most prevailing concepts of masculine and feminine in a binary opposition, aligning masculinity with presence/plus/on and the feminine with the negative pole.

‘Ettinger’s Matrix, premised on the traumatic Real and the psychic effects of the specificity of feminine sexual difference, does not displace phallic logic. Rather it supplements the understanding of subjectivity by positing a shifting possibility of and/and and not/not that arises primordially in the prenatal/prematernal encounter in which Ettinger locates what she calls grains of proto-subjectivity. By opening up the possibility within the formation of the human psyche, of a sexual difference that she conceptualizes as subjectivity-as-encounter, and not only subjectivity as separation or aggression, Ettinger’s theory of the Matrix supplements and radically expands ‘the range of processes and dimensions that constitute human subjectivity’ and ‘is a radically extended psychoanalytical theory about the ways in which we relate to the other and to the jouissance of the other’.

‘Hence in contrast to classic psychoanalysis which premises subjectivity on the cut – birth, weaning, language – Ettinger argues that from the beginning subjectivity can be understood as an encounter and this gives rise to a new vocabulary not based on subject and object (or Thing) but on the proto- and partial subjective potentials within each subject for experiencing and locating affect and meaning in shared borderspaces on each side of which a shared event resonates differently. Hence her language of webs, networks, strings, resonances, premised on a subjectivity of partiality, fragmentation, multiplicity and plurality that enables elements to meet and recognize each other without knowing each other. The key concepts of Ettinger’s theory include: metramorphosis, borderlinking, co-poiesis, co-emergence and co-fading, aesthetic wit(h)nessing, fascinance and fragilisation. These concepts describe processes and relations between elements and between partial-elements at a sub-Symbolic level, preceding the unconscious traces of the separate, sovereign, individual.

‘Here, uncognised psychic traces arising in different individuals are transformed by and transform the other, creating a shareable, web-like mental continuity. In the Matrixial sphere it becomes possible to (or rather, it is impossible not to) affect mental traces of trauma, jouissance and phantasy for one another in a matrixial encounter-event. In her theory of the Matrix Ettinger takes the later writings of Lacan, in particular his attempt to imagine subjectivity and jouissance ‘beyond the phallus’ as one of her starting points. Ettinger’s theories thus enable another way of thinking through the passage to subjectivity and the structuring of jouissance – ‘enigmatic excess of unconscious pleasure’ – that is not dependent on a relation to the phallus.’ — Kate Southworth

 

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Further

Bracha Ettinger | The European Graduate School
Bracha Ettinger @ goodreads
Thinking the Feminine: Aesthetic Practice as Introduction to Bracha Ettinger and the Concepts of Matrix and Metramorphosis
Bracha Ettinger’s Theory of the Matrix
Painting the Feminine into Ontology
Art as Transport-Station of Trauma?
An introduction to Bracha Ettinger’s Traumatic Wit(h)ness-Thing and Matrixial Co/in-habit(u)ating
Bracha L. Ettinger discusses her life and work
Bracha Ettinger – Resonance/ Overlay/ Interweave
Introduction to Bracha Ettinger’s Matrix Theory
Audio: Bracha Ettinger. Beauty in the Human: Uncanny Compassion, Uncanny Awe
Touching Trauma: On the Artistic Gesture of Bracha L. Ettinger
Expanding Spaces and Porous Borders in the Artworking of Bracha L. Ettinger
Fearlessness Paradigm Meets Bracha Ettinger’s Matrixial Theory
A Woman Takes Little Space: Liina Siib and Braha Ettinger claiming subjectivity for losers
Buy ‘The Matrixial Borderspace’

 

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Extras

Bracha Ettinger. Psychoanalysis and Matrixial Borderspace.

Bracha L. Ettinger, Subject, Trust, “Carriance”

Judith Butler with Bracha Ettinger. Ethics on a Global Scale.

 

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Paintings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Interview

 

Brad Evans: You have consistently brought together in your works the often-disparate fields of art, psychoanalysis and critical theory. How can this approach address violence?

Bracha L. Ettinger: I begin with art. We are connected through art even if we are, as individuals, retreating from one another and from the world. Each of my paintings starts from the traces of images of human figures — mothers, women and children — abandoned, naked and facing their death. The figure’s wound is her own, but as we witness it, we realize traces of her wound are in me and in you.

Painting for me is an occasion to transform the obscure traces of a violent and traumatic past. Residues and traces of violence continue to circulate throughout our societies. Art works toward an ethical space where we are allowed to encounter traces of the pain of others through forms that inspire in our heart’s mind feeling and knowledge. It adds an ethical quality to the act of witnessing.

Painting leads to thought and then leaves it behind. The space of painting is a passageway. By trusting the painting as true you become a witness to the effects of events that you didn’t experience directly, you become aware of the effects of the violence done to others, now and in history — a witness to an event in which you didn’t participate, and a proximity to those you have never met. The coming together of art, psychoanalysis and critical theory allows me to approach images of devastation, praying I can cure in viewers a blindness to violence and persecution that continues to lead to the dehumanization of others and of ourselves.

B.E.: Theodor Adorno and others have questioned the relevance of art in response to realities of extreme violence. How do you respond to this so-called unrepresentability of human atrocity?

B.L.E.: Painting pains me. And it will pain you. We join in sorrow so that silenced violence will find its echo in our spirit, not by imagination but by artistic vision. After an earth-shattering catastrophe, must I not allow the traces of the horrifying to interfere with my artwork? Why should this be any different to psychoanalytical and critical interventions?

The question “What is art?” is certainly not a question of aesthetics, styles and technique alone. Art proceeds by trusting in the human capacity to contain and convey its rage and its pain, and to transform residuals of violence into ethical relations via new forms of mediation that give birth to their own beauty and define them. It is to trust that we will be able to bear in compassion the unbearable, the horrible and the inhuman in the human. Critique is not lost in this artistic entrustment. Rather, critique becomes participatory in it.

The purpose of art is not to represent reality or to aestheticize it. Art invents images and spaces. Art works like a maternal healing when it solicits against all the odds the human capacity to wonder, to feel awe, to feel compassion, to care, to trust and to carry the weight of the world. What you see doesn’t reflect reality or your own self; the image is not a mirror. When violence kills trust, art is the space where a trust in the other, and by extension of one’s being in the world, can re-emerge.

Like psychoanalysis, painting in this regard is a form of healing when it discerns the space of what I have called the “subreality” — a net of strings of aesthetic and human connections — and makes of this space its subject. It creates connections of “co-emergence”: “I feel in you,” “you think in me,” “I know in you,” and so on, in which subjective existence is articulated through one another. Art alone can achieve such an encounter. Its figures appear when both light and darkness are in light.

B.E.: Can you elaborate more on your conception of beauty, as it directly challenges some well-established criticisms of the aesthetics of violence, which are precisely concerned with how it can be dangerous by rendering it pleasing for public consumption?

B.L.E.: What I refer to as beauty, the source of which is the experience of trauma and pain as well as, without contradiction, of joy, signals an encounter with the horrible that we are trying to avoid, to paraphrase Rilke, as well as with the other’s desire for another life to a wretched existence and longing for light. Art that denies violence abandons its victims as if they are irrelevant to human life. In the painting, the subject matter is not simply a representation. It should work like a passageway, through which a blurred idea — as it is breathing its new form through color, line and light — elicits an affective response in the viewer that paves the sense of personal responsibility.

However, most cultural representations of violence do indeed produce objects ready for consumption. Painters, poets and filmmakers who address the catastrophes of the last century and still reach beauty and the sublime in the sense I am speaking of are very rare.

Think of Paul Celan’s poetry, for me a source of inspiration. It forms the frontier of death in life, where life glimpses at death as if from death’s side, to paraphrase Jacques Lacan. But beyond this, I would like both the figurative and the abstract form to evoke its own humanized passage from nonlife to life. There is no real beauty without compassion; art humanizes the shock and transforms trauma as you realize the impossibility to not-share your psychic, mental and physical space.

B.E.: What do you understand to be the political importance of the arts in the 21st century? And what ethical burden does this place on the artist as we seek to break out from the logic of violence and look towards more nonviolent futures?

B.L.E.: Art today is the site of a trust that comes after the death of trust. Our generation has inherited, and lives through, a colossal requiem, from the harrowing memories of the 20th century and before, to the continued violence we witness today. Our time is pregnant with the impression of loss and suffering. So the question of art, like that of the human subject it is intended to be experienced by, is always also the question of this loss and of the bringing of compassion back into life, for the future, starting from both image and from an abstract horizon.

Art has the power to re-link and invent new subjects and forms in and by light and space. Enlarging the capacity to elaborate, carry and transform traces of violence, whether private or historical, is a responsibility. This is one of art’s most important functions. “To bear” and “to carry” comes from the same root in Hebrew, in German and in French. But in Hebrew it also means “subject.” To make the world more bearable means to infiltrate the function of what I call “carriance” into the structure of subjectivity. It is to carry the burden of the suffering of others in the hope of a better time to come. Celan wrote, “The world is gone. I must carry you.”

The move from simply experiencing art to social and political acts of caring or witnessing is not automatic. But individuals encountering art create a potential for more caring collective action. Art enters the domain of community and of the political without opposing aloneness. But to dwell pensively with traces of violence is to tolerate anxiety, welcome the contingent and the unknown and to open yourself up as an individual to a possibility of collective love.

Art entails a potential resistance to structures based on violence. To the vulnerability of the other, known or unknown, we become more responsible There are no promises; a painting might not do its work. Yet it does give us a chance. Breaking with the violent past demands paying intimate attention to its often-erased figures. To not sacrifice yourself while not sacrificing the other — this is the challenge. And today we must take care of the other, the refugee. It doesn’t matter why and where; the refugee is your sister. She could be your mother; she can one day be you.

 

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Book

Bracha Ettinger The Matrixial Borderspace
University of Minnesota Press

‘Artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha Ettinger presents an original theoretical exploration of shared affect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory. Ettinger works through Lacan’s late works, the anti-Oedipal perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object-relations theory to critique the phallocentrism of mainstream Lacanian theory and to rethink the masculine-feminine opposition. She replaces the phallic structure with a dimension of emergence, where objects, images, and meanings are glimpsed in their incipiency, before they are differentiated. This is the matrixial realm, a shareable, psychic dimension that underlies the individual unconscious and experience. Concerned with collective trauma and memory, Ettinger’s own experience as an Israeli living with the memory of the Holocaust is a deep source of inspiration for her paintings, several of which are reproduced in the book. The paintings, like the essays, replay the relation between the visible and invisible, the sayable and ineffable; the gaze, the subject, and the other.’ — UoMP

Excerpt

I have named matrixial borderspace the psychic sphere which is trans-subjective on a sub-subjective partial level. A mental matrixial encounter-event transgresses individual psychic boundaries even if and when its awareness arises in the field of the separate individual subject, and it evades communication even if and when it operates inside intersubjective relational field. Subjectivity here is a transgressive encounter between ‘I’ (as partial-subject) and uncognized yet intimate ‘non-I’ (as partial-subject or partial- object). Co-poietic transformational potentiality evolves along aesthetic and ethical unconscious paths: strings and threads, and produces a particular kind of knowledge. Unconscious transmission and reattunement as well as resonant copoietic knowledge don’t depend on verbal communication, intentional organization or inter-subjective relationships. Aesthetical and ethical processes are impregnated by matrixial copoiesis. In aesthetical working-through the artist transforms time and space of an encounter- event into matrixial screen and gaze, and offers the other via com-passionate hospitality an occasion for fascinance.

‘I’ meets a ‘non-I,’ ‘I’ meets another ‘non-I.’ This ‘non-I’ meets another ‘I.’ Each encounter creates its own psychic resonance field, and each resonance field is with and in other fields of resonance. Thus, each matrixial cluster is a web of meeting of one with-in the other, where each one – and each other – belongs to several such clusters. The matrixial web is thus the body-psyche-time-space of the intimate even though it is a web of several, and it is from the onset transgressive. Transgressive and intimate – even when the encounter is between, with, and in two subjects, the encounter is not symbiotic. Transgressive and intimate – even if the encounter is between three subjects, inside this sphere triangulation is not Oedipalizing. Com-passionate matrixial empathy is not oedipalizing, yet difference is being swerved there already. Individuation and differentiation do not wait the third subject. The third in the matrix is not the one who will introduce difference inside a supposed symbiosis and thus bring about the first differentiating instances, but is the one who will also co-emerge with-in a matrixial web as an I or a non-I. Uncognizing yet knowing one another on a partial level – by erotic borderlinking, by affective, empathic, intuitive and even quasi-telepathic knowledge and by erotic investment and sensual and perceptive sensitivities, as well as by way of the sharing in fields of resonance and influence, and in one another’s pulsative intensities – sharing in terms of wavelength, frequencies and vibrations not perceivable by the senses but transmissible and translateable by the mind, thus sharing via virtual, traumatic and phantasmatic strings to creat coeventings or encounter-events – I and non-I are cross- printing psychic traces in one another and continuously transform their shareable threads and sphere. While continually inspiring one another, I and non-I create a singular shared trans-subjectivity where even traces of each one’s earlier or exterior trans-subjective co-emergences, co-eventings and cofading with other non-I(s) influence the newly arising time-space. The sharing and exchange of traces of mutually subjectivizing agencies that dwell in different levels and frequencies create a mutating co-poietic net inside a singular trans-subjective web. The interlacing copoietic strings and threads create the ever-transforming transgressive metramorphic borderlinks in a relatively stable yet fluid jointness in severality.

In the opening to an unconscious matrixial event-encounter, the artist can’t not-share with an-other, she can’t not witness the other. The I and non-I are wit(h)nessing one another, and by that they become partialised, vulnerable and fragilised. The artist doesn’t build a defense against this fragility but freely embraces it. Transmissibility and transformative potentialities “wake up” to vibrate the virtual and real strings. Sensitivities are reattuned, unconscious imprints cross-inspire, traces are reaching one another beyond each one’s personal boundaries. Inspiring psychic strings covibrate and traces are stored in shareable threads. The matrixial psychic space concerns shareability and severality that evade the whole subject in self-identity, endless multiplicity, collective community and organized society. The matrixial borderspace is drawn and is further drawing virtual and real traumatic and phantasmatic as well as imaginary and symbolic transgressive psychic contacts by inhabitation and erotic co-tuning in the same resonance field; vibrating space or elusive time of which each participant becomes partial by its own reattunement and attention. Affective vibrations that tremble with virtual strings, body-psyche-space-time cross-imprints and uncognized memory traces accumulated in several threads transform each partial-subject into some kind of mental continuity of the psyche of another partial-subject. Each psyche is a continuity of the psyche of the other in the matrixial borderspace. We thus metabolize mental imprints and traces for one another in each matrixial web whose psychic grains, virtual and affective strings and unconscious threads participate in other matrixial webs and transform them by borderlinking in metramorphosis.

Matrixial transformation is a co-transformation-in-difference. Matrix that signifies womb and indicates femaleness, prenatality and pregnancy supplies the symbol and an image by which we can identify and recognize the moves of the transgressive and partial trans-subjectivity behind or beyond the moves of the differentiated subject and draw the activity of a specific Eros with its aesthetical and ethical consequences. I have named ‘metramorphosis’ the ensemble of joint eventing of transmission and reattunement in encounters where I and non-I coemerge, co-change and co-fade in borderlinking to each other with-in virtual and real strings. Copoiesis is the aesthetical and ethical creative potentiality of borderlinking and of metramorphic weaving. The psychic cross-imprinting of events and the exchange of traces of mutually (but not symmetrically) subjectivizing agencies, occurring via/in a shared psychic borderspace where two or several becoming-subjectivities meet and borderlink by strings and through weaving of threads, and create singular trans-subjective webs of copoiesis composed of and by transformations along psychic strings stretched between the two or several participants of each encounter-event. Thus, a matrixial borderspace is a mutating copoietic net where co-creativity might occur.

A matrixial co-emergence has a healing power, but because of the transgression of individual boundaries that it initiates and entails, and because of the self-relinquishment and fragilization it calls forward, it is also potentially traumatizing. Therefore, to become artistic or generate healing, the aesthetical transgression of individual borderlines (that occurs in any case with or without our awareness or intention) calls for the awakening of a specific ethical attention and erotic extension: an artistic generosity. In art, the aesthetical working-through bends towards the ethical with matrixial response-ability in wit(h)nessing; in psychoanalysis the ethical working-through that entails the generosity expressed by compassionate hospitality and by effects and affects of fascinance bends toward the aesthetical realm.

Matrixial trans-subjectivity hosts moments of coemergence-in-differentiation that weave their own time zone – a matrixial bordertime. Composite partial subjectivities produce, share and transmit assembled, hybrid and diffracted psychic objects and links, as well as their mental traces, via originary psychic conductible borderlinks. As strings, the erotic antennae of the psyche disperse different aspects: links, waves, frequencies and intensities, affects, together with their threads composed of imprints and memory- traces of jouissance and of traumatic events shared or transmitted between me and the stranger who thus unknowingly becomes ‘my’ intimate anonymous partner. New traces are inscribed along psychic matrixial paths and threads and more strings are vibrating. This very psychic coemergence also depends upon the capacity and quality of witnessing of the non-I in jointness: on that particular quality I have named wit(h)nessing, witnessing while sharing in the distribution and reabsorption of traces of the event and participating in trans-subjective transmission via unconscious strings and threads.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Jack Skelley, Hijack! I see it! Your window did not foil us. Excellence incarnate about the Brendan preface. That’s a power couple.And a new story! And another power couple! Everyone, The great writer and d.l. Jack Skelley has a new story available for you to read plus an image by the mighty multi-artist Stephen Spera. Title: ‘I LIVED ON A DEMON-SIZED PLANET’. Location: here. Excited! And I will see you in a small and sometimes large rectangle tomorrow evening! ** Misanthrope, Hi. I really don’t like codeine. It feels wrong. So I honestly would send you my unused stash of semi-codeine if it wasn’t a border patrol’s red flag magnet. I’m imagining a stranger could walk into your bedroom and immediately assume it’s the bedroom of a 13 year old girl. Or girly boy. Half finished is pretty good. Too late to turn back now. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Yes, I don’t completely understand how the art world works, but I assume that one reason is gallerists don’t think showing Maruo would be cost effective since that’s what it almost always comes down to. ** _Black_Acrylic, Good memory! That post was from, gosh, 12 years ago maybe? An official Play Therapy T-shirt is mere weeks or something away? My clothes allergy will prevent my proudly wearing one unless I can score an XXL-sized one and wear a protective organic one underneath? Might be possible. Anyway, that’s so fucking cool! ** Dominik, Hi, hi!!! No, I think my tooth’s pain has basically given up the ghost. Until part 2 at least. I loved the Josh Peterson video. I didn’t know he did stuff like that. It was very cool. Thank you, and please thank the entity known as SCAB itself for me. I’m trying to figure out if that motto would make more or less people fall in love. Hm … Love screaming as Hatred shoots him in the head pointblank with an AK47 (Yikes, I think I need to stop looking at guro sites), G. ** Bill, Greetings to Chicago. Ah, you lunched with Maryse! Awesome! I would love to have been your waiter. What else are you doing up there? ** Sypha, Luckily I’m positive that Maruo doesn’t know about this blog so he won’t read your comment and either have hurt feelings or mutter to himself that whoever Sypha is he has terrible taste. It’s true your doctor sounds like an unworthy loser so far. But thank you for letting me know I should pay attention to where my saliva goes. Hang in there, buddy. ** Okay. I thought I would turn the spotlight on this curious, dense book by the writer/theoretician/painter Bracha Ettinger because I don’t think a lot of you know it. And now you have the chance to. See you tomorrow.