Beyond the Uncanny Anxiety

Uncanny Awe, Uncanny Compassion and Matrixial Borderlinking

Vortrag in Englisch / Lecture in English

The Israeli-French artist, psychoanalyst and theoretician Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger develops in her theory of matrixial borderspace, bordertime and borderlinking an approach that allows us to rethink subjectivity and artistic production and offers a new concept of the feminine while articulating the specificities of a time-space for this feminine.

Critically referring to classical and modern psychoanalytic writings (Freud, the British Group, Intersubjectivity, Lacan), she shows the extent to which the feminine in psychoanalysis has been conceptualized within the framework of “castration anxiety,” creating associations between the feminine and threats of regression, death or insanity. Parallel conceptions of the feminine appear in terms of loss or victimisation and resonate throughout Western Culture: “the list is long, from the myth of Orpheus until Duchamp’s ‘Bride’” (Ettinger). Yet, Ettinger's approach doesn't concentrate on criticising; rather, it is a poetic emergence of a new thinking-feeling of a field of transubjectivity.

In her lecture Bracha L. Ettinger will address the Freudian “unheimlich” to take it beyond its links to „Angst“ (uncanny anxiety) into other affects that Ettinger also considers to be primary (in the same sense that anxiety is a primary affect). She will introduce new ways to think aesthetical effects and art criticality,  where the aesthetic proto-ethical matrixiality informs both Art and Ethics. Ettinger's lecture & installation continues a series of what the artist calls encounter-eventing.

The lecture & installation is organized by the SFB 626 „Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits“, Freie Universität Berlin, in cooperation with the ICI Berlin and the group „Theoriepraxis“.

Programm (pdf)