Movement, Embrace: Adriana Cavarero with Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (and the Death Drive)

An experience of helplessness during the production of a collective autobiographical narrative offers an opportunity to explore points of convergence between Cavarero’s postural philosophy and Ettinger’s martixial borderlinking. The narrative is treated as a live scene which enfolds the movement of the drive conceptualized in such a way as to avoid the prioritization of death over life. Five successive moves, inspired by Ettinger’s rotation of the phallic prism, illuminate affinities between the two thinkers. The first rotation explores the matrixial and relational qualities which com-pose the scene. The second rotation approaches death from a notional beginning, prioritising the presence of the mother and her dissymmetrical relationship to the infant. The third rotation emphasizes the transformational character of Ettinger’s matrixial movement and border-crossing, especially when examined in conjunction with Cavarero’s maternal inclination. In the fourth rotation we show how inclination (clinamen) in Lacanian psychoanalysis is linked to the disappearance of the mother from the scene. The (re)introduction of the mother disrupts the Lacanian logic with the possibility of a beginning just as immanent as desire and lack. Movement, qua embrace and unity-disunity (fifth rotation), becomes an indispensable component of feminist ontology which captures the immanence of sharing in the martixial-maternal plane.

This article has been published in a revised form in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2020.49. This version is published under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND. No commercial re-distribution or re-use allowed. Derivative works cannot be distributed.