October 2007

The Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin, the Women’s Studies Centre, NUI Galway, and the Institute for Feminism and Religion are organising five events featuring major international feminist theorists: October 30^th to November 4^th  

1. Matrixial Eros and Com-passion in Transference and Artworking

A one day symposium with Bracha Ettinger and Griselda Pollock, Women’s Studies Centre, NUI Galway.

Venue:  Siobhan McKenna Theatre, NUI Galway

Date: 30^th October, 2007. Time: 11:00 - 5:00  Cost: Free

Registration: Places Limited.  Advance Booking Advisable. http://www.nuigalway.ie/wsc.

Enquiries: ann.lyons@nuigalway.ie

2. Desiring Mercy Not Sacrifice: A distinguished, multi-disciplinary international panel address this theme in a public forum.

Professor Bracha Ettinger, Professor Griselda Pollock, Dr. Anne Primavesi, Professor Peggy Reeves Sanday, Dr. Genevieve Vaughan.

Thursday Evening: Nov. 1^st:  Trinity College, Edmund Burke Theatre, Arts Building, (Nassau St. Entrance)

Time: 7:30.

Registration: No advance registration: €10,  €5 concessions.  Please pay at the door

3. Challenging Cultures of Death: Mercy Not Sacrifice.

A three day conference, Trinity College’s School of Nursing, D’Olier Street. Featuring the above speakers and 35 international panellists addressing this issue from a multi-disciplinary perspective. 

Topics: Workshops/Papers

Matrixial Theory in Art, Psychoanalysis, and Theatre * Eco-feminisms * Art Practice and Subversions * Maternal Thinking * Muslim, Hindu, and Christian Strategies of Resistance * Feminist Spiritualities * Critiques of Sacrifice, Theological and Political  * Pharmacotic War * Blood Mysteries: Blood Sacrifice * Dynamics of Collective Violence.

Nov. 2^nd to Nov. 4^th €120 / €60 concessions.  (The full conference fee includes registration for items 2, 3, and 4)

Advance registration for conference necessary.

See website: http://www.instituteforfeminismandreligion.org

4. Sacred Cows: Matrix and Metramorphosis. Lectures.

Griselda Pollock: On the Solace of Painting: the path to solace and mercy in the creation and transformation of a matrixial space and by metramorphic processes.

Bracha Ettinger: Empathy Within Compassion in the Matrixial Transference Borderspace

Bracha Ettinger’s widely acclaimed Matrixial Theory has been described as one of the few contemporary instantiations of innovation within the critical tradition of the human sciences. (Roy Boyne). No one else thinks this way, with such patience, rigor, and inventiveness (Judith Butler).

Friday evening Nov. 2^nd. 7:30 MacNeill Theatre, Hamilton Building, Trinity College, enter through Lincoln Gate, (beside Dental Hospital).

Registration:  no advance registration. Please pay at door  €10/€5  

5. The Feminine and the Maternal in the Matrixial Transference, through Psychoanalysis and Art.

Specialist seminar with Bracha Ettinger and Griselda Pollock, Trinity Collect, Sunday Nov. 4^th 1:30-4:00.  Advance registration necessary: see website.  www.instituteforfeminismandreligion.org

Professor Bracha L. Ettinger: Artist. Psychoanalyst. Clinical Psychologist. Marcel Duchamp Professor of Psychoanalysis   and Art at the Media & Communications Division, European Graduate School. 

http://www.metramorphosis.org.uk:     http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/E/ettinger_matrixial.html  http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/5-X/5-Xettinger.pdf

Professor Griselda Pollock: Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art; Director of CentreCATH at University of Leeds; Co-Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies; Executive Member of Centres for Jewish Studies, and Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/fine_art/people/staff/gfsp.html

Dr. Anne Primavesi: A theologian who has published groundbreaking studies on the theological implications of James Lovelock’s scientific Gaia theory, as seen from an ecofeminist perspective. http://www.westarinstitute.org/Fellows/Primavesi/primavesi.html;

Professor Peggy Reeves Sanday: Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, one of founders of the anthropology of feminist anthropology, sex and gender and author of several foundational books. Academic promoter of public interest and public feminisms in anthropology: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~psanday/

Dr. Genevieve Vaughan. Author, theorist and activist of the Gift Economy (Homo Donans as opposed to Homo Economicus) a counter-discourse that considers mothering as a mode of distribution that coexists with or lies beneath the market economy, and challenges the inevitability of patriarchy and global capitalism. http://www.gift-economy.com

Further information:  challengingdeath@gmail.com, or mcondren@tcd.ie

http://www.instituteforfeminismandreligion.org

“I consider Bracha L. Ettinger to be one of the most important artists and brilliant theorists of this decade. Facing her work we are immediately intrigued by the conjunction of groundbreaking psychoanalytical theorization and a renovating artistic practice of major historical significance. This body of artistic and theoretical oeuvre has revolutionary potential in respect to thinking of sexual difference and subjectivity, and it has already transformed central contemporary debates in psychoanalysis and contemporary aesthetics on painting, on the feminine and on the understanding of Jacques Lacan’s theory. In the milieu of international contemporary art, Bracha is a legendary figure.”  -Griselda Pollock 

“Bracha L. Ettinger has offered a singular and incisive theory of psychoanalysis that re-encounters the primary impressions of infantile experience, challenging received notions of primary impression. Whether or not one finally agrees with all she proposes, it is easy to concede that there is no one else who thinks this way, with such patience, rigor, and inventiveness.” -Judith Butler

“This doubling of vision and discourse stands alongside the recent work of Julia Kristeva as one of the few contemporary instantiations of innovation within the critical tradition of the human sciences.” -Roy Boyne, Theory Culture and Society

The work of Bracha Ettinger is an anamnesic work, guided by the presence of the Shoah. This ‘presence’, like the Thing, does not demand anything. It makes itself forgotten. (Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1997: 114)

In general terms, the deep and abiding consequence of an opening out of matrixial thinking, of placing gestation and birthing in the foundations of social and self-understanding, is the very possibility of valuing the other more highly than the self: a vista toward the horizon of the indispensability (Lyotard’s word) of the other. Roy Boyne

It is clear that a different problematic of subjectivity begins to emerge when we juxtapose some lessons in Lacan, Lichtenberg Ettinger and Merleau-Ponty. The importance from the point of view of subjectivity is not only in enabling a more comprehensive theorization away from the logo-centric subject and its affiliates. It enables one to think through the kinds of signifying practices that enable subject people to subtract themselves from the hold of dominant representations that sustain their subjection.   Couze Venn

For all these reasons, I shall argue that Lichtenberg Ettinger’s work is important for the social sciences because it takes post-Lacanian theory one big step away from the forms of Cartesianism that continue to dominate thinking about the process of constitution of subjects. The implications undermine familiar approaches to problems that may seem to have nothing to do with Cartesianism or logocentrism, ranging from issues of embodiment to the question of postmodern ethics.   Couze Venn