Through an interpretation of Lacan’s lamella, arguing that in Freudian and Lacanian theory Life-drive is another name for Death-drive, Prof. Bracha L. Ettinger will take us from the feminine in the late Lacan to the feminine-Matrixial in her own work to suggest a supplementary Life drive and Eros. Accordingly, she will return to and extend her earlier argument (2015, and further developed in 2019) which works from a consideration of the subject qua being-towards-death (Heidegger) and the emphasis on Death-drive in psychoanalysis to the idea of subjectivity qua being-towards-birth with being-toward-birthing, where humanized life is inseparable from com-passion and a non-sexuated Love appears.

1- Ettinger, Bracha L., “Carriance, Copoiesis and the Subreal.” In: Saltwater. Theory of Thought Forms. 14th Istanbul Biennial Catalogue. Ed. Carolyn Christov Bokargiev, 2015. Printed in: Bracha L. Ettinger. And My Heart Wound-Space. 14th Istanbul Biennial. 2015. 343-352.

2- Ettinger, Bracha L., “Beyond the Death-drive, Beyond the Life-drive—Being-toward-Birthing with Being-toward-Birth. Copoiesis and the Matrixial Eros—Metafeminist Notes.” Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2. Eds. P .de Assis and P. Giudici. Leuven University Press. 2019.

The seminar will take place on Zoom at 8pm-9:30pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)Thursday 25 November 2021 and will be followed by a virtual pub gathering on the platform ‘Wonder’. Please be aware that Eventbrite (and Facebook) usually automatically converts the event time for the time zone from which you view the page.

The event is open to everyone and free with Eventbrite registration. The Zoom link to join the seminar will be available for registrants on the ‘Online Event Page’ (found when accessing your ticket on Eventbrite) on the day of the seminar, which is where you can also find information about the virtual pub taking place afterwards.

Professor Bracha L. Ettinger is an artist, senior clinical psychologist, practicing psychoanalyst, and theoretician working at the intersection of female sexuality, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics. Her approach significantly extends the work of contemporary philosophers and psychoanalysts such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jacques Lacan, and challenges the works of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

Professor Ettinger’s work might be helpfully described, at least in part, as post-Lacanian. She draws heavily on Lacan but never in a dogmatic way, often bringing Lacan into conversation with other thinkers, such as Levinas and Deleuze and Guattari, and, moreover, pushing the ideas she draws out from Lacan and these other authors into new shapes of thought. In so doing, she introduces numerous neologisms. The below article may help as a short (and certainly incomplete) introduction to Ettinger’s work. 

Professor Ettinger’s work might be helpfully described, at least in part, as post-Lacanian. She draws heavily on Lacan but never in a dogmatic way, often bringing Lacan into conversation with other thinkers, such as Levinas and Deleuze and Guattari, and, moreover, pushing the ideas she draws out from Lacan and these other authors into new shapes of thought. In so doing, she introduces numerous neologisms. The below article may help as a short (and certainly incomplete) introduction to Ettinger’s work.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263325394_Severality_Beyond_the_Compression_of_the_Cogito

Facebook even found here.