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Notes
1 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p.164.
2 Samuel Beckett, ‘Not I’, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp.373-384; 376.
3 While many philosophers are concerned with the idea of the event, I bring Badiou, Žižek and Ettinger into conversation as they are keenly interested in the relationship between art and transformation but in different, mutually illuminating ways.
4 Martin Puchner, ‘From the Editor’, Theatre Survey, 49: 2 (November 2008), p.181.
5 Martin Puchner, ‘The Theatre of Alain Badiou’, Theatre Research International, 34: (October 2009), p.259.
6 Martin Puchner, ‘The Theatre of Alain Badiou’, p.263.
7 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Superego and the Act’, Lecture delivered at the European Graduate School in 1999, Unpaginated. < http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-superego-and-the-act/> [15/04/2010]
8 Puchner points out that while Badiou installs mathematics at the centre of his philosophy, he does not abandon literature altogether. He explains Badiou's interest in poetry, for example, describing how it can exist as a ‘a path towards the event […] the moment when “what there is” is interrupted, when something new and strange enters a situation’. Martin Puchner, ‘The Theatre of Alain Badiou’, p.261. Badiou claims that art is ‘irreducible to philosophy’ on account of its immanence and singularity. Its pedagogical function, he maintains, is to ‘arrange the forms of knowledge in a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them’. Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics [1998], trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p.9.
9 Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), p.xxviii.
10 Andrew Gibson reveals that the first French colloquium on Badiou, held at the Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux III in 1999, was called Alain Badiou: La Pensée Forte. See Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.4.
11 Slavoj Žižek, ed., Lacan: The Silent Partners (London and New York: Verso, 2006). See essays by Žižek, ‘Introduction: Lacan with (x)’, pp.1-3; and ‘The Politics of Redemption, or why Richard Wagner is Worth Saving’, pp.231-269; and Alain Badiou, ‘Lacan and the Pre-Socratics’, pp.7-16.
12 While I attempt to underline the nuanced sensitivities of Ettinger's notion of the event as affirmative affective exchange, I should point out that Badiou also emphasizes the need for art to position itself as an affirmative force in contrast to the West's dominating paradigm of art as enjoyment or sacrifice. He writes ‘…there is no real place for artistic creation in that sort of war - I am convinced of this point - neither on the side of the power of death as enjoyment neither on the side of the power of death as sacrifice. There is no real opening for new artistic creation […] we have to think of an event, and for example, of an artistic event, as something like an affirmative split’. See Alain Badiou, ‘The Subject of Art’, The Symptom, 2 (Spring 2005). Viewed online at < http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/badiou.html> [20/12/11].
13 Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations, p.xxx.
14 It should be noted that Lee Edelman makes interesting connections between queer theory projects and theories of the event offered by Badiou and Žižek. He writes ‘Queerness […] to borrow the language of Alain Badiou, refers to the site of a truth event around and against which a given situation attains its defining shape […] the queer event proclaims the truth of a universal queerness that displaces the particular universals enshrined in the concept of the human.’ See ‘Unbecoming: Pornography and the Queer Event’, in Post/Porn/Politics: Queer-Feminist Perspective on the Politics of Porn. Performance and Sex-Work as Culture Production, ed. Tim Stüttgen (Berlin: b_books, 2010), p.197.
15 Levi R. Bryant, ‘Further Thoughts on Externalism, Internalism, and Politics’, Larval Subjects, blog posted on 09/10/09. Available online < http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/further-remarks-on-externalism-internalism-and-politics/#more-3382> [10/05/10].
16 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, pp.179-180.
17 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p.172.
18 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p.141.
19 Bracha L. Ettinger, ‘Fragilization and Resistance’, Studies in the Maternal 1: 2 (2009), p.1. Available online: < http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/documents/Bracha1.pdf.> [12/04/10] With the term ‘fascinance’ Ettinger develops Lacan's concept of ‘fascinum’ as ‘evil eye’ or the freezing element of the gaze. In contrast to the latter, fascinance is a matrixial, creative and transformational way of looking that does not seek to fix meaning.
20 Griselda Pollock, ‘Art/Trauma/Representation’, parallax, 15:1 (2009), p.45.
21 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p.167.
22 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p.167.
23 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p.167.
24 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ [1949], in Écrits: A Selection [1977], trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p.5.
25 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p.181.
26 Griselda Pollock, ‘Art/Trauma/Representation’, p.42.
27 Ettinger talks about the emergence, conjoining and disappearance of subjectivity in visual, light-sensitive terms. In Beckett's theatre, light is of central importance, and it traces the fading in and out of subjects and part-objects.
28 Griselda Pollock, ‘Art/Trauma/Representation’, p.43.
29 Ettinger's notion of ‘wi(t)hnessing’ incorporates the idea of being with an art-object and apprehending an idea/experience.
30 Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou, p.4.
31 Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou, p.16.
32 Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou, p.250.
33 Andrew Gibson, Beckett and Badiou, p.251.
34 For Badiou, the subject can come into being by maintaining fidelity to an event in the domains of art, love, politics, and science.
35 Both Badiou and Žižek are outspoken on the debilitating impact of ‘victim culture’ on political change.
36 See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004).
37 Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p.10.
38 In Ettinger's series and Beckett's text, I think the artists can be seen to question the idea of pure presence/representation, while also seducing the spectator/encountering Other to engage affectively with the work. In terms of technique, this is achieved through the layering of colour and line in Ettinger's art, and the prescribed colour schemes and lighting requirements noted in Beckett's stage directions.
39 See, for example, Jackie Blackman, ‘Beckett Judaizing Beckett: “a Jew from Greenland” in Paris’, in Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon, eds, All Sturm and no Drang: Beckett and Romanticism, Beckett at Reading 2006 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopli, 2007), pp.325-340.
40 The idea of ‘going on’ in spite of pain or meaninglessness recurs throughout Beckett's plays and prose. Perhaps it receives clearest expression in ‘The Unnamable’ (1954), in which the narrator comments: ‘[…] I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.’ See ‘The Unnamable’ in The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: John Calder, 1994), p.418.
41 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p.168.
42 Beckett to Jessica Tandy. Quoted in Enoch Brater, ‘The I in Beckett's Not I’, Twentieth Century Literature, 20: 3 (1974), p. 200.
43 In rehearsal for her first performance of Not I at the Royal Court, London (1973) Whitelaw hyperventilated and collapsed due to sensory deprivation. For more information on this, see James Knowlson's Damned To Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York, Grove Press, 1966), p. 528. Also, see Whitelaw's first televised performance of Not I (1973) online at < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = XNti7qCn-kg> [20/12/10].
44 Anna McMullan, ‘From Matron to Matrix: Gender, Authority and (Dis)embodiment in Beckett's Theatre,’ in Melissa Sihra, ed., Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p.106.
45 Anna McMullan, ‘From Matron to Matrix’, pp.119-120.
46 Griselda Pollock, ‘Introduction: Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference’, in Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p.30
47 Jon Clay, ‘Order and Chaos in Samuel Beckett's Not I and J.H. Prynne's Not-You,’ Readings: Response and Reactions to Poetics, 3 (2008), Unpaginated. Online at < http://www.bbk.ac.uk/readings/issues/issue3/jonclayonbeckettandprynne> [05/05/10].
48 Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama, p.119.
49 ‘Beckett's late theatre composes and recomposes the body, fragmenting it (Not I and That Time), dissociating body and voice (Rockaby), presenting barely seen, ghostly bodies (Footfalls and A Piece of Monologue), bodies as spectacle (Catastrophe) or as breath (in the play of that title), serial bodies, distinguished by variations of particular features (Come and Go, What Where) or, in the case of Ohio Impromptu, duplicate bodies’. Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett's Drama, p.109.
50 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p.166.