Artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha Ettinger presents an original theoretical exploration of shared affect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory. Ettinger works through Lacan’s late works, the anti-Oedipal perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object-relations theory to critique the phallocentrism of mainstream Lacanian theory and to rethink the masculine-feminine opposition. She replaces the phallic structure with a dimension of emergence, where objects, images, and meanings are glimpsed in their incipiency, before they are differentiated. This is the matrixial realm, a shareable, psychic dimension that underlies the individual unconscious and experience. Concerned with collective trauma and memory, Ettinger’s own experience as an Israeli living with the memory of the Holocaust is a deep source of inspiration for her paintings, several of which are reproduced in the book. The paintings, like the essays, replay the relation between the visible and invisible, the sayable and ineffable; the gaze, the subject, and the other. Bracha Ettinger is a painter and a senior clinical psychologist. She is professor of psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the University of Leeds, England, and Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem. Judith Butler is professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Griselda Pollock is professor of fine arts at the University of Leeds. Brian Massumi is professor of communication at the University of Montreal.

This book is the first of two volumes that, together, present for the first time a comprehensive collection of three decades of the theoretical writings of artist and theorist Bracha L Ettinger. Edited and introduced by Griselda Pollock they provide a systematic anthology of Ettinger’s path-breaking and influential concept of Matrixial subjectivity-as-encounter and jointness-in-difference, and chart her radical intervention in aesthetics, ethics and theories of subjectivity far beyond classical feminist and current gender/queer theory. This first volume includes the writings in which Ettinger elaborates her original concepts of Matrixial space-time and metramorphosis, fascinance, wit(h)nessing, resonance, transcryptum, com-passion, self-fragilization and resistance, co-emergence and copoiesis transform theories of the subject, Eros, alliance and love, sexual difference, alterity, relationality, trauma and violence. Her critical dialogue with theorists including Levinas, Lacan, Lyotard and Deleuze & Guattari, Butler, Cavarero and Irigaray is evident here. A leading authority on Matrixial theory, Griselda Pollock provides explanatory prefaces to each chapter and a lengthy introduction that situates Ettinger’s work in relation to socio-psychoanalytical theory and practice and current social and philosophical debates. Ettinger’s interlacing of psychoanalysis, ethics, and aesthetics can be seen here to address some of the deepest challenges of our social, cultural and political existence today.

Published on the occasion of exhibitions Bracha L. Ettinger: Resonance/Overlay/Interweave held June 3-July, 26, 2009 at Freud Museum, London; Bracha L. Ettinger: Fragilisation and Resistance held Aug. 21-Aug. 31, 2009 at Kuvataideakatemia (The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts), Helsinki; and Alma Matrix: Bracha L. Ettinger and Ria Verhaeghe held May 13-Aug. 1, 2010 at Fundaciao Antoni Taapies, Barcelona.

"A Companion to Photography presents a contemporary approach to the subject, advancing the critical ideas that inform the study of photography in the 21st century. Features a collection of original, up-to-date essays relating to contemporary photography Introduces several new ideas that expand current photographic theory Combines essays by established and emerging writers, providing a dynamic and engaging discussion Essays are organized in thematic sections: photographic interpretation, markets, popular photography, documents, and fine art Seamlessly incorporates discussion of digital photography throughout"--

Continuing her feminist reconceptualisation of the ways we can experience and study the visual arts, world renowned art historian and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock proposes a series of new encounters through virtual exhibitions with art made by women over the twentieth century. Challenging the dominant museum models of art and history that have been so exclusive of women's artistic contributions to the twentieth century, the virtual feminist museum stages some of the complex relations between femininity, modernity and representation. Griselda Pollock draws on the models of both Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and Freud's private museum of antiquities as well as Ettinger's concept of subjectivity as encounter to propose a differencing journey through time, space and archive. Featuring studies of Canova 's Three Graces and women artist's modernist reclamations of the female body, the book traverses the rupture of fascism and the Holocaust and ponders the significance of painting and drawing in their aftermath. Artists featured include: Georgia O'Keeffe, Josephine Baker, Gluck, Charlotte Salomon, Bracha Ettinger and Christine Taylor Patten.

In this major book, Griselda Pollock engages boldly in the culture wars over `what is the canon?` and `what difference can feminism make?` Do we simply reject the all-male line-up and satisfy our need for ideal egos with an all women litany of artistic heroines? Or is the question a chance to resist the phallocentric binary and allow the ambiguities and complexities of desire - subjectivity and sexuality - to shape the readings of art that constantly displace the present gender demarcations?

An engaging look at three women artists' pathbreaking explorationof abstraction