The Feminine in Lacan and Ettinger
At a conference on feminine sexuality at the University of Amsterdam in 1960, and later published in Ecrits (2002), Lacan said that we should not be fooled by the myth of Tiresias. In Ettinger’s assessment, Lacan intimates that the Theban character cannot know anything more about Feminine sexuality than we do, which is nothing. Ettinger’s concern with Lacan is that he depicts Feminine sexuality as unknowable. For her, Lacan is mistaken in assuming that the structure of language and thus, the unconscious, prohibits us from knowing anything about Feminine sexuality. This, she insists, is only true in the phallic (Symbolic) stratum. While Lacan acknowledges limits to what can be known about the Woman due to what he calls a Real problem of language and logic, Ettinger’s scholarship attempts to turn those limits into thresholds whereby something can be known about the Feminine – albeit in an expanded Symbolic which she calls the sub-symbolic (or sub-stratum). The Feminine sub-stratum does not generate signifiers (word-images) in Lacanian terms: it is Real. But from a matrixial perspective, the Feminine can be apprehended.
Ettinger is critical of the way Lacan defines Woman as not-all, as object and as symptom of man. She reasons that he can only apprehend the Woman from the phallic angle. It is vital, she believes, to re-write the Woman in terms that can address her as several in a matrixial sense. The post-Lacanian Ettingerian formulation of Woman views her as a co-affecting and co-emergent borderlinking to Others (as partial subjects) in a matrixial borderspace. The Ettingerian Woman is best characterized as an assemblage, a co-affecting encounter-event between partial-subjects in a given matrixial web. Moreover, as Griselda Pollock writes, Ettinger’s conception of Woman can be understood as “different conditions of subjective co-emergence[s]” (Pollock 2006: 31). In the matrixial substratum, Woman “digs an-other area of difference with its specific apparatus, processes, and functions” (Ettinger, 1997: 367) that resonates in aesthetic fields through erotic aerials and aesthetic traces in a shared web. The Woman is, for Ettinger, not out of Symbolic bounds but can be apprehended in a matrixial sub-symbolic. In Griselda Pollock’s reading, “Woman means different conditions: not just object or subject but the structure of transitivity” (Pollock, 2004: 46).
In her article “Transgressing with-in-to the Feminine,” Ettinger revisits the myth of Tiresias to counter Lacan’s claim at the now famous Amsterdam conference that we can know nothing of the Feminine dimension (Ettinger, 2000). She explains that Lacanian psychoanalysis is bound to a phallic axis of difference while there is, in her formulation, an Other sexual difference that is matrixial (Feminine) and applicable to everyone. There is, for Ettinger, a Woman in the matrixial Feminine dimension that can be symbolized. For the Israeli psychoanalyst, a Woman is not a self-subject but a non-regressive transitive relation. In the matrix Woman is a “border-Other, a becoming in-ter-with the Other, never a radical alterity” (Ettinger, 2001: 129). Ettinger also explains that the Woman is the “co-emerging partial self and Other, or a different kind of relations to the Other” (Ettinger 2006: 72). As she reminds us, a father and son can be a Woman. Feminine cognizance of a non-I (or Other) in-relation to the I (as partial-subject) is, for Ettinger, based on a matrixial trans-sensitivity open to everyone. It is, for her, a feature of that which makes us human (and thus grounds for ethics). There is no one isolated subject in a matrixial web, only a Woman, defined as a condition of co-emergent relations between at least two partial-subjects. The matrixial Woman apprehends Others (as non-I’s) as partners in difference.
While Lacan contends that a man (who experiences only phallic jouissance) cannot become a Woman (who experiences phallic jouissance along with an Other jouissance), Ettinger asks how Tiresias (or any partial-subject for that matter) cannot know something of/about the Other Feminine jouissance. Ettinger’s point is not that Tiresias can become a woman in a sociological sense (although he can) but, rather, that the story of Tiresias can tell us something about the transgression with-in-to the Feminine. Tiresias transgresses the difference between masculine and feminine sexual positions in the phallic axis theorized by Lacan. This places him in the matrixial-Feminine dimension. Ettinger explains:
Under the matrixial light, the transgression in the figure of Tiresias between man and woman is not a transgression of a frontier between known maleness and unknown femaleness. Rather, since the matrixial I carries traces of experiences of the matrixial non-I, inasmuch as I know in the other and my other knows in me, non-knowledge of the feminine, in the matrixial borderspace, is impossible, by virtue of the transgression itself (Ettinger, 2000: 189).
Ettinger reasons that the Tiresian transgression with-in-to the Feminine involves a metramorphic engagement with an Other (as non-I). The Other sexual difference is, as explained above, transitive. A man can thus become a Woman. But more than this, from Ettinger’s standpoint, it is impossible for anyone to not know something about the Woman (as co-affecting assemblage) in the Feminine dimension.
Sex difference in the matrixial is not about the One (and its binary oppositions between object and subject), but about “thinking transmissivity and co-affectivity” (Ettinger, 2006: 183). It isn’t about having (man) or being (Woman) the phallus, for example, but about the unthought time-space of borderlinking in the Real. Ettinger explains that the sexual coefficient in the matrixial is not between individuated subjects and their Others (intersubjectivity), but between the Other in the subject and the subject in the Other (trans-subjectivity). Tiresias is, for Ettinger, a matrixial figure because he transgresses sexual positioning in Lacanian terms. She writes “what I would like to emphasize is that this kind of transgression between the sexes is a transgression with-in-to the feminine in a matrixial borderspace – whatever its direction [transition] is” (Ettinger, 2000: 206).
Tiresias also reveals something of the Feminine dimension pertinent to desire and jouissance. Although Ettinger does not focus on Tiresian desire, she does write about matrixial desire. Matrixial desire is to borderlink and to differentiate within a “transgressive encounter-event and for the entirety of movements which create and fulfill such encounter-events, which, in passing by transformation would leave imprints for upcoming later transgressive encounter-events” (Ettinger, 2007: 119). For Ettinger, borderlinking in the Feminine sub-stratum is ongoing and never, finally complete. In the matrixial, no one undergoes a transgression alone. Significantly, Tiresias does not instigate his own transition, it is caused by Hera (as partner-in-difference). He enters into a transgressive space whereby there is an event-encounter with Goddess-Hera and, of course, the snakes. There is also a borderlinking with the God Apollo to whom Tiresias is faithful. It must be remembered that Tiresias is a prophet, a seer, and possesses knowledge outside the bounds of his own mortal and personal experience. Tiresian knowledge of, for example, incest and patricide in the House of Oedipus is not born out of his own experience. In fact, it is miraculous. Tiresian wisdom exceeds what can be known by any other character in the Sophocles trilogy.
As T. S. Eliot wrote in a footnote to The Waste Land (2001), “all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees is, in fact, the substance of the poem” (23). It is not surprising that Ettinger should choose Tiresias as a character who can transgress with-in-to the Feminine dimension but who can, also, tap into another axis of knowledge. Ettinger explains that “Matrixial desire is an aspiration and an inspiration from a feminine jouissance toward the edges of a wider Symbolic” (2006: 113). In other words, there is for Ettinger a ‘feeling knowledge’ that exceeds the phallic Symbolic. Lacan and Ettinger agree that Feminine jouissance is characterized by a unique orientation to knowledge and logic. Ettinger reasons that matrixial desire is attuned to the trans-subjective field and is, ultimately, knowledge of transgression and borderlinking. It is, in other words, knowledge of the Feminine dimension. My supposition is that Tiresias is also a matrixial figure in Ettinger’s formulation because he can see what Oedipus cannot. Not only does the Tiresian truth – that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother – lead to dramatic climax in the play, but it gestures to the boundaries of what can be known, at least without tragedy, in the phallic stratum represented in the play by the city of Thebes. Tiresias is also a matrixial figure because he is bound to Others whom he does not repudiate. Unlike Oedipus, Tiresias avows his connections to Others (like, for example, Apollo), even as the God causes him pain. There is, in Ettingerian terms, a non-Oedipal sublimation and investment in Others that is Feminine. Tiresias embodies this non-Oedipal sublimation. Ettinger explains that the Other sexual difference “produces for men and women a different, non-Oedipal sublimation where, in the search for non-I(s), the jouissance is of the borderlinking itself ” (Ettinger, 2001: 110). This Feminine difference is symbolized by Tiresias, his transgression with-in-to the Feminine and his divine knowledge of an Other (Godlike) order of difference. Indeed, Tiresias turns the House of Oedipus on its head. Griselda Pollock writes that Feminine desire might “signify something of profound importance for discussions of human subjectivity and indeed sociality” (Pollock, 2006: 22). Likewise, Tiresias and transgender studies might signify something of profound importance to psychoanalysis.
Oedipus
Ettinger’s writing on Tiresias and the matrixial gives us a new perspective on the Oedipal-life-tragedy which is germane to much psychoanalytic theorizing. As evidenced in Oedipus the King, Oedipus cannot tolerate or recognize Others in his familial web – at least not very well. He abandons his adopted parents on the road to Thebes, misrecognizes his birth parents, begets offspring by his mother, who are also his siblings, and in his old age at Colonus, treats Antigone, his daughter-sister, like a nurse maid. I think we can agree that Oedipus has more than his fair share of family troubles. It is an unacknowledged fact that he does not set a good therapeutic example. Apart from the fact that he kills his father and marries his mother, he disowns his sons who are at war with each other for what was originally their father’s throne. Refusing Antigone’s advice to yield to his sons and relent upon his anger, to the older Polynices, Oedipus says: “Die by your own blood brother’s hand – die!” (Sophocles, 1984: 365). Antigone is left to contend with her father-brother’s traumatic legacy and tragically, takes her own life to give her brother, Polynices, a proper burial. Oedipus eventually dies in exile at Colonus. As Tiresias told the Theban king years before his actual death: “No man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you [Oedipus]” (Sophocles, 1984: 183). The Tiresian truth comes to pass and Oedipus dies a painful death in Colonus.
What Ettinger’s oeuvre adds to psychoanalysis is a way for us to see how the plight of Oedipus is structured not only by a disavowal of his traumatic life-legacy (involving patricide and incest), but of the Feminine. Oedipus lusts for his mother and over-identifies with his father, as indicated by his literal usurpation of his father’s marital-bed and position as king. While Freud thought Oedipus the King had an impressive following because it reveals universal incestuous and patricidal desire – hence the Oedipal complex – the play is, in my Ettingerian reading, a classic because it reveals the tragic outcome associated with the negation of an Other sexual difference. Oedipus is primarily suffering from an un-symbolized loss; a Feminine loss involving others in the matrixial web. What does his very public transgression of the incest taboo reveal if not a yearning for a way to borderlink with others from whom he has been separated? Oedipus could not apprehend his kin who stand-in for Others (non-I’s) in the Feminine dimension. Tiresias could see this lack of apprehension and knew it would lead to tragedy. Let us be clear about the fact that the tragedy in each of the three Sophoclean plays is born of exile, excommunication and war between cities: incest and patricide come after the fact. In other words, Oedipus is primarily affected by the traumatic rupture to his familial web and exile from his city-home. His position as King and patriarch prevent him from recognizing Others in his family and country to whom, from a matrixial perspective, he is ultimately bound.
Conclusion
I appreciate the role Oedipus has played in the choreography of psychoanalysis, but it is high time to make room on the psychoanalytic stage for other characters, like Tiresias, who tap into Other axis of difference. The mythology of Tiresias gives life and form to a configuration of Feminine difference that supplements the Lacanian formulation of sexuation. Whether we accept Ettinger’s critique of Lacanian writing on Feminine sexuality or, alternatively, choose to theorize a Feminine dimension of experience within Lacanian (phallic) parameters, it is important to embrace non-Oedipal characters, myths and stories in psychoanalytic theory. The Tiresian transgression with-in-to the Feminine is, in my Ettingerian reading, beyond the Lacanian limit mediated by the phallic structure. The transgression is, more precisely, into the matrixial order of things where no One is alone.
The story of Tiresias prompts us to consider an Other sexual difference relevant to a trans-psychoanalytic (Cavanagh, 2017) turn in the clinic. Tiresias is ideally positioned to tell us something in retrospect about what Ettinger calls the matrixial order of difference that is, like the phallic order of difference, sexual. In other terms, we are not lone actors on the stage of life but several and co-affecting in Ettingerian terms. By evoking Tiresias as emblematic of the Other sexual difference, we should not assume that transgender is a Rosetta Stone or unencumbered road to matrixial ethics or to an otherness beyond the phallus. As explained above, the matrixial is available to everyone regardless of gender, transgender status, and sexual orientation. Transgender life experience may, however, prompt us to consider another axis of Feminine difference because there can be an acute awareness of the Other sex in the One. As Ettinger explains, there are multiple ways to write the Woman in the matrixial. Transgender subjectivity may be one such way⎯at least for those identifying as trans-Feminine or with the Tiresian-transgression with-in-to the Feminine.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz and Barry Watt for organizing The Site conference on Transgender, Gender and Psychoanalysis at the Freud Museum where I had the opportunity to present an abridged version of this chapter, and Caitlin Janzen for her critical commentary on the Feminine and for her copy-editing. I acknowledge the generous financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada under research grant number 890-2014-0026.