Bracha L. Ettinger

Bracha L. Ettinger, PhD

Distinguished Professor of Philosophy

About Bracha

Bracha L. Ettinger, PhD, is a prominent and influential artist-painter and artist-theorist, philosopher and supervising psychoanalyst, whose pioneering work has emerged during the 1990s and caused major transformations in the fields of contemporary European painting as well as in philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical studies, art theory, art history, film and literary studies and feminism. Based in Paris and Tel Aviv, her art, both abstract and symbolic, is a research of depth and color as light, and of archival traces of trauma, which engages with historical and personal memory in relation to women in war, oblivion and witnessing. In her artistic notebooks she is articulating the relation between beauty and compassion-beyond-empathy for rethinking contemporary art beyond the division between empathy and abstraction, and she elaborates the passage from aesthetics to ethics, which she further illuminates in her theoretical writings.

email: [email protected]

Research Interests

Bracha L. Ettinger, the Marcel Duchamp Chair and Professor at the European Graduate School and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at GCAS College Dublin, is one of the world’s leading theorists in the realm of contemporary French philosophy and psychoanalysis. Her “matrixial” theory offers a metaphysical paradigm for rethinking subjectivity, transjectivity and femininity. She considers her approach as metafeminism.

Her theory ranges between aesthetics and ethics and contributes to rethinking and reframing social relations. Ettinger developed a series of concepts to elaborate an Unconsious dimension of co-poiesis and its sublimation, and for rethinking the maternal and the paternal, gestation, trauma and Beauty, the wound and the Sublime in our epoch — after the Holocaust. Her major concepts include: the matrixial time, borderspace, borderlinking, borderspacing, co-poiesis, the matrixial gaze, wit(h)nessing, metramorphosis and the Subreal, fascinance and carriance, ideas which led to a new understanding of both the feminine body-psyche and the human subject.

Ettinger’s Art Shows:

“Pieta – Eurydice – Meduas”, UB Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, (2018); Silesian Museum (Muzeum Śląskie), Katowice (2017); “Eurydice – Medusa” in the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). Museum of the City of St. Petersburg (2013). Musee des Beaux-Arts d’Angers (2011). Alma Matrix (dual) at Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2010). Freud Museum, London (2009). Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki (2009). Kiasma, Helsinki (2006). Drawing Center, New York (2001). Her recent group exhibitions include: Colori, GAM, Turin (2017); The Image of War. Bonnier Konsthall, Stockholm, (2017); Ontmoetingen. MAS/KMSKA, Antwerpen; The Haunted House – The Human Condition, Ekaterina Institute, Moscow. Earlier exhibitions include: Centre G. Pompidou, Paris (elles@pompidoucentre, 2010); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (Kabinet, 1997); Konstmuseum. Göteborgs (Aletheia, 2003); ICA, Boston, National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, Whitechapel, London (Inside the Visible, 1996, 1997); Centre G. Pompidou, Paris (Face a L’Histoire, 1996).

Books by Ettinger and Monographies Dedicated to her Art:

And My Heart Wound-Space (Istanbul Biennial, 2015); Art as Compassion. Bracha L. Ettinger (ed. Catherine de Zegher and Griselda Pollock, 2011); Le Cabinet de Bracha (ed. Patrick le Nouene, 2011). Bracha L. Ettinger is author of numerous articles and few books including Regard et Espace-de-bord matrixiels, 1999; The Matrixial Borderspace (essays from 1994-1999), 2006. A Reader of her selected essays in 2 volumes is currently in print with Palgrave-Macmillan (ed. G. Pollock).