Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T21:34:11.707Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Subjectivity as Encounter: Feminine Ethics in the Work of Bracha Lichtenberg‐Ettinger and Anne Enright

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Mariëlle Smith
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The fragility of the subject is a recurring issue in the work of Anne Enright, one of Ireland's most remarkable and innovative writers. It is this specific interest, together with her attempt to make women into subjects, that inevitably links her work to Bracha Lichtenberg‐Ettinger's theory of the matrixial borderspace, a feminine sphere that coexists with the Lacanian symbolic order and that, even before our entrance into this linguistic system, informs our subjectivity. By turning to a point in time before language—the encounter between “self” and “other” during pregnancy—both Enright and Ettinger test the boundaries of and the gaps within the linguistic system. It is the going before language that ultimately enables both to go beyond some of the most persistent dualisms present within the linguistic system and to create room for an alternative—a feminine—understanding of the ethical relationality between self and other.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 2013 , pp. 633 - 645
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bersani, Leo. 1986. The Freudian body. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Bracken, Claire, and Cahill, Susan. 2011a. An interview with Anne Enright, August 2009. In Anne Enright, ed. Bracken, Claire and Cahill, Susan. Dublin and Portland, Ore.: Irish Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bracken, Claire, and Cahill, Susan. 2011b. Introduction. In Anne Enright, ed. Bracken, Claire and Cahill, Susan. Dublin and Portland, Ore.: Irish Academic Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 2006. Foreword: Bracha's Eurydice. In Ettinger, Bracha, The matrixial borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Cahill, Susan. 2006. Bodyscapes: Mapping the body in the novels of Anne Enright, Colum McCann, and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. PhD dissertation, University College Dublin.Google Scholar
Enright, Anne. 2008. The gathering. London: Vintage.Google Scholar
Ettinger, Bracha. 2006. The matrixial borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1990. Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. 1986. Stabat mater. In The Kristeva reader, ed. Moi, Toril. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
McAfee, Noëlle. 2004. Julia Kristeva. London and New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mulhall, Anne. 2011. ‘Now the blood is in the room’: The spectral feminine in the work of Anne Enright. In Anne Enright, ed. Bracken, Claire and Cahill, Susan. Dublin and Portland, Ore.: Irish Academic Press.Google Scholar
Pollock, Griselda. 2006. Introduction: Femininity: Aporia or sexual difference? In Bracha Ettinger, The matrixial borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Pollock, Griselda. 2009a. Art/trauma/representation. Parallax 15 (1): 40–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pollock, Griselda. 2009b. Mother trouble: The maternal‐feminine in phallic and feminist theory in relation to Bracha Ettinger's elaboration of matrixial ethics/aesthetics. Studies in the Maternal 1 (1): 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wood, James, 2000. To thrill—A mockingbird. Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/mar/11/fiction.reviews2 (accessed August 18, 2010).Google Scholar