Hypatia vol. 28, no. 3 (Summer 2013) by Hypatia, Inc.

Subjectivity as Encounter: Feminine Ethics

in the Work of Bracha Lichtenberg-
Ettinger and Anne Enright
MARI

ELLE SMITH
The fragility of the subject is a recurring issue in the work of Anne Enright, one of Irelands
most remarkable and innovative writers. It is this specic interest, together with her attempt
to make women into subjects, that inevitably links her work to Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettingers
theory of the matrixial borderspace, a feminine sphere that coexists with the Lacanian sym-
bolic order and that, even before our entrance into this linguistic system, informs our subjec-
tivity. By turning to a point in time before languagethe encounter between self and
other during pregnancyboth Enright and Ettinger test the boundaries of and the gaps
within the linguistic system. It is the going before language that ultimately enables both to go
beyond some of the most persistent dualisms present within the linguistic system and to create
room for an alternativea feminineunderstanding of the ethical relationality between self
and other.
Anne Enright is, according to the editors of Anne Enright, one of the most innovative
and exciting writers in Ireland today (Bracken and Cahill 2011b, 1). In her work,
which encompasses a wide range of genres, themes and interests, the ontological
question Who am I? haunts the often female narrators, who are forced to deal with
their vulnerability after unsettling events (1). At the end of most narratives, Enright
does provide an answer, but it is not one capable of bringing relief to either her narra-
tors or her readers. Instead of offering a happy ending, Enright provides her narrators
with just enough tools to make their (re)discovered vulnerability bearable. This fragil-
ity is a recurring issue in Enrights work. As Susan Cahill explains, Enright, in her
writing, continuously refuses to congure the corporeal as a stable entity (Cahill
2006, 168). This is why, as James Wood argues in his review of Enrights second novel
What Are You Like? (2000), her narrators in general are more confused than those in
more ordinary novels: they are cognitive zealots (Wood 2000).
While highlighting the instability of the subject, Enright simultaneously attempts
to create a subject-position for women (Bracken and Cahill 2011a, 22). It is the
combination of these two interests that connects Enright to Israeli-French artist,
psychoanalyst, and philosopher Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger. The latter, according to
Griselda Pollock, has, [a]longside Irigaray and Kristeva, ... become one of the most
inuential theorists writing today in the eld of French psychoanalysis (Pollock
2006, 14). In her work, Ettinger rearticulates the supposedly stable and coherent
Western subject through a discussion of what she has called the matrix or the matrix-
ial. This feminine sphere exists before, beside, and beyond the Lacanian patriarchal
symbolic order: the social, linguistic, and economic structure in which we live.
Matrix being Latin for womb, it will come as no surprise that Ettinger takes the
pregnant body as the starting point for her theory. Through a discussion of the intra-
uterine encounter between the two who have never been considered proper subjects,
the prematernal pregnant woman and the prenatal child, Ettinger articulates a rela-
tionality between subjects that radically transforms the persisting dualism between
self and other. It is the discussion of an alternative relationalitya feminine
matrixial relationalitythat links Ettingers work to that of Enright.
1
BEING NEITHER ONE NOR TWO
In Enrights The Gathering (2008), which was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2007,
the narrator and focalizer is Veronica Hegarty, a thirty-nine-year-old, stay-at-home
mother of two. She is married to a successful businessman and lives in one of the best
and most expensive areas of Dublin. Her narrative, a collection of nonchronological
events based on recovered and highly unreliable memories, is meant to explain why
her brother Liamher favoriterecently committed suicide. As her narrative contin-
ues, it becomes clear that Veronica is not only trying to bear witness to what might
have happened to her brother when he was nine years oldhis being sexually abused
by their grandparents landlordbut that she is also attempting to convince herself
that she is not to blame for the way his life turned out.
Having been raised in a family of twelvethe whole tedious litany of Midge,
Bea, Ernest, Stevie, Ita, Mossie, Liam, Veronica, Kitty, Alice and the twins, Ivor and
JemLiam was the one with whom Veronica spent most of her childhood and
adolescence (Enright, 2008 7). At least that is what her narrative makes us believe:
the larger part of the memories Veronica discusses involves only Liam. Even when
relating to the time in which she, Liam, and their sister Kitty were living at their
grandparents home, Veronica tends to focus on herself and Liam rst, sometimes
forgetting altogether that Kitty was present as well: we trooped in the door: me, who
was supposed to be in charge, my brother, gangly and raw in his grey school jumper,
and Kitty coming up behind. And now of course I must add Kitty in from the start,
my little sister, trailing up the stairs behind us, because she must have been there too
(66; my emphasis). In the seven pages that cover the event Veronica is describing
herethe wake of their grandfather Charliethe rst reference to Kitty is made on
634 Hypatia
the very last one. Liam is thus, at least within the connes of the narrative, the one
who has played the largest role in Veronicas life. In fact, the bond between them is
so strong that Veronica, when she is in Brighton, England, to identify her brothers
body, visits the place where Liam drowned himself. Without making explicit why, she
takes the time to imagine how it would feel to enter the sea at night, to feel the
lapping around my waist of black salt water (76). Here, she imagines herself in
Liams place, trying to dissolve the boundaries between her and Liams body, in an
attempt to experience what her brother must have felt when he took his own life.
During one of her attempts to remember the sexual abuse of Liam, Veronica is not
actively trying to dissolve these boundaries, but utterly fails to make a distinction
between herself and her brother. The rst time she describes this real or imagined event,
she is the witness: What struck me was the strangeness of what I saw, when I opened
the door (143; my emphasis). However, during a later attempt to narrate the same
event, Veronica has become the victim: And on the other side of me is the welcoming
darkness of Lambert Nugent. I am facing into that darkness and falling. I am holding
his old penis in my hand (221). They did not trade places: Liam is absent from this
scene, and their grandmother Ada has become the witness. Instead, Veronica, positive
that she herself was never sexually abused, is no longer able to tell the difference
between herself and Liam (224). She has become her brother.
The relationship between Veronica and Liam was exceptionally close, and it was
as such anything but unproblematic. Although Veronica believes herself to be the
one who loved him most, a thought shared by the people in her environment, and
the one who has lost something that can not be replaced, whereas her mother has
enough children left, she simultaneously contradicts these feelings (11, 23). In Freud-
ian psychoanalysis, in which I include both Sigmund Freuds original work and Jac-
ques Lacans structuralist account of the formers writings, the subjectthe I or the
selfcomes into being through what Freud has called the Oedipal process and what
Lacan has called the mirror stage. During this period, the child realizes that there is a
distinction between itself and the (m)other. Through the acquisition of language and
social acculturation, the child learns to recognize itself as a unitary subject separated
from others. The symbolic order thus teaches us to see ourselves in a negative relation
to the other: I am who I am, because I am not you. Since this is the only way in
which we can make sense of ourselves within the existing social structure, we have to
believe that we are separate and radically different from the subjects and objects in
our environment. As such, it is not surprising that Veronica blames Liam for her feel-
ing unstable and uncertain about who she is: he thwarts the necessary understanding
of herself as a solid entity. The ambivalent nature of their relationship is highlighted
during the night of Liams wake. When Veronica chides her oldest daughter Rebecca
for complaining about wanting to go home, the latter tells her mother that she
didnt even like him (200). Veronica accedes: Neither did I, sweetheart. Neither
did I (200). Before admitting this, Kitty asked Veronica to stay with Liams body,
which Veronica refers to as the corpse (193). Veronica, who complains throughout
the narrative about the amount of time it took for her brothers body to be own back
to Ireland, tells Kitty she does not want to: No, I tell her. She does not understand.
Marielle Smith 635
The whole business is nished for me now, it is beyond nished. I just want to get the
damn thing buried and out of the way (19394).
This ambivalence runs through Veronicas as well as Liams life. In one of the
chapters, Veronica recalls that they were constantly leaving each other. After having
discussed the time she walked out on him when she was staying at his place in
London, she starts the following chapter by saying: This was not the rst time I left
my brother, and it would not be the last. In his later, drinking years, I left him every
time he arrived. But even before he hit the bottle, there were times when I just had
to roll my eyes and walk away (124). Trying to explain what exactly was wrong with
Liams socially inept behavior, Veronica remembers the time he took her home
phone with him (126). According to her, one of the reasons he had to take it was
because he sensed that he was going to disappear for a while, and he wanted to have
something of mine with him, when it was time to leave. He wanted to keep the
connection (126). A symbolic connection that is, since Liam knew that Irish phones
did not work in England, and Veronica was unable to literally connect to him: All I
know is that when I rang for the next six months, no one picked up an Irish, British,
or any other phone (126). Despite the continuous pushing away, they kept pulling
at each other.
Veronica, unable to explain why she and her brother had such an exceptional
bond, turns to her mothers body to nd the answer. As Veronica points out, there
were only eleven months between her and Liams birth: We came out of her on each
others tails; one after the other, as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an indelity. Some-
times I think we overlapped in there, he just left early, to wait outside (11). Although
they have not actually been in their mothers womb at the same time, Veronica does
use the short period of time between their births to explain their relationship. In
Stabat Mater, an essay originally published in 1977, Julia Kristeva criticizes Freud for
not elaborating on this specic topic: [t]he fact remains, as far as the complexities and
pitfalls of maternal experience are involved, that Freud offers only a massive nothing
(Kristeva 1986, 17879; emphasis in original). What is more, as Ettinger explains, he
fully supported the subjects denial of the womb (Ettinger 2006, 174).
For both Freud and Lacan, the phallus plays a highly important role in the devel-
opment of the subject. For Freud, who understood the phallus as the anatomical
penis, it was the absence or presence of this specic organ that dened the subject:
the little girls development is similar to that of the little boy, until the moment they
discover that their mother lacks this important organ. From that moment onward,
the little girl is perceived as lacking and the little boy as normal. For Lacan, for
whom the phallus is not the organ but a symbol, the phallus is the subjects primary
and transcendental signier. For the child to properly understand the self and its
place within the patriarchal symbolic order, it has to position itself in either a posi-
tive or negative relation to this signier and the power the latter is associated with.
Since women always already lack this symbol, they are systematically excluded from
positive self-denition and a potential autonomy (Grosz 1990, 116). It is the childs
encounter with the phallus, whether anatomical or symbolic, that ensures the cut
between the subject and the other, the rst other being the mother. The moment
636 Hypatia
the subject realizes what the absence of the phallus entails within a patriarchal soci-
ety, it becomes afraid that the (m)other will take it away.
Since Freud believed the phallus to be the most important organ, he focused
mostly on the anxieties and fantasies that go with what he called the castration
complex, the fear of losing the penis. He did, however, discuss the presence of womb
anxieties and fantasies in both adults and children, albeit to a much lesser extent.
According to Ettinger, who has taken Freuds predominant focus on the phallus
instead of the womb as her entry point into the debate, there are two reasons why
fantasies of the womb need to be repressed. At rst, a denial of these fantasiesthat
there is a womb and that something of signicance happens therewill defend the
male childs narcissism and allow the development of his Ego (Ettinger 2006, 174).
If the male child has to acknowledge the existence and importance of the womb, it
would have to give up the belief that his sex is the one in possession of the one valu-
able organ or signier, the phallus. Second, a discussion of womb fantasies would
have placed at risk some of the most general and basic psychoanalytic assumptions
(174). If the womb were to be recognized as having an effect on the child, causing
the phallus to lose its prerogative, it would rock the very foundations of psychoana-
lytic thinking. Thus, Freud himself did not deny the existence of womb fantasies, but
he did argue that a denial of the womb was of the utmost importance.
Lacan, however, entirely ignores the intrauterine phantasy (Ettinger 2006, 175).
Where Freud at least acknowledged that womb fantasies existed and that they had to
be actively repressed, Lacan warned that whosoever dares deal with the matter of
the prenatal could not be called psychoanalyst and would have to be excommuni-
catedbecause for Lacan, the eld of psychoanalysis itself depends on the foreclosure
of procreation (181). According to him, whatever happens at the level of pregnancy
has nothing to do with the formation of the subject, and as such, with psychoanalytic
theory (175). Precisely because procreation happens before the onset of the mirror
stage and the acquisition of language, he argued that whatever we will say about it
will be belated, phantasmatic, untrue (Butler 2006, vii). This might be why, in dis-
cussions of maternal subjectivity, the focus is mainly on the effect of pregnancy on
the subjectivity of the mother. Kristeva, for instance, has argued that during preg-
nancy there is no clear distinction between the woman who is pregnant and the
child she is pregnant with (Kristeva 1986). During this specic period of time, it is
not possible to think in terms of self and other. This inability to properly differentiate
between ones self and ones child remains even after giving birth. A mother, Krist-
eva argues in relation to her own experiences, is a continuous separation, a division
of the very esh (178). Therefore, she proposes the maternal body, both during preg-
nancy and after giving birth, as a starting point to deconstruct the supposedly coher-
ent and solid Western subject. In The Gathering, however, Veronica does not turn to
her mothers womb to explain the relationship between herself and her mother, but
between her and Liam.
According to Ettinger, the experience of pregnancy must not only be looked at from
the perspective of the becoming-mother but also from that of the becoming-child. In
her work, Ettinger attempts to articulate what happens to a child before it enters the
Marielle Smith 637
symbolic order and thus before it learns to use a language that is, by denition, a binary
system. According to Pollock, who has been working with Ettinger since the early
1990s, the latters theory enables us to discuss those aspects of subjectivity that
language cannot grasp and that Freud and Lacan were unable or unwilling to articulate
(Pollock 2009b, 9). For Ettinger, the childs subject-formation does not have its onset
in its separation from the mother, but starts at an earlier time. Kristeva, too, believes
subjectivity to begin before the childs entrance into the structures of society, but she,
like Freud and Lacan, still sees the onset happening after the child is born (McAfee
2004, 35). For Ettinger, however, subject-formation starts in the late intrauterine
encounterthe third trimester of pregnancybetween becoming-mother and becom-
ing-child (Ettinger 2006, 81; emphasis in original). Where Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva
equate subject-formation with being split from the mother, Ettinger has a different
understanding of subjectivity altogether. In her theory, subjectivity is reformulated as
subjectivity-as-encounter (Pollock 2006, 14). Since subject-formation, for Ettinger, has
its onset at a time in which it is impossible to speak of two separate entities, the subject
is, contrary to what Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva have argued, never whole and singular
but always already partial and plural (14). The so-called matrixial encounter-event
between becoming-mother and becoming-child is not limited to the moment of preg-
nancy. Our encounter with the still unknown mother-to-be merely opens up our ability
to repeat this experience and connect to others in the same nonphallic way. This is
not meant as a proposal for how we should be relating to one another, since we are,
according to Ettinger, already linked in this specic way. Since the matrixial feminine
sphere exists before, beside, and beyond the symbolic order, the ability ingrained
within this sphere remains with the subject even after it has entered the social stratum.
As such, this matrixial feminine model already exists. We have, however, not (yet)
been able to put our nger on how and what we precisely feel in our relation to others
since the language through which we make sense of the world forecloses such a partial
and pluraland thus nonphallicunderstanding of our subjectivity.
According to Veronica, the memory of her grandparents landlord, in which her
body collapses with Liams, comes from a place in my head where words and actions
are mangled. It comes from the very beginning of things (Enright 2008, 22122).
She locates her inability to distinguish between herself and her brother in the place
where, according to Ettinger, indeed everything begins: her mothers womb. The
words and actions she tries to recall cannot be put together correctly because what
has happened in her mothers womb cannot (yet) be put into language.
PROTECTING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE BODY
After Liams death, Veronica becomes aware of the vulnerability of the boundaries of
her body. During Liams funeral, Veronicas husband Tom tells their youngest daugh-
ter Emily, who is clinging to her mother, to stop touching her. Veronica silently
agrees: Indeed. I have been so much touched these last few days.... Everyone wants a
bit of me. And it has nothing to do with what I might want, or what my body might
638 Hypatia
want, whatever that might beGod knows it is a long time since I knew (Enright
2008, 244). As her nal remark shows, people have made claims on her self for as
long as she can remember. However, it is only after Liams death that Veronicas
sense of self is shattered to such an extent that she loses faith in it: I can not feel
the weight of my body on the bed. I can not feel the line of my skin along the sheet.
I am swinging an inch or so off the mattress, and I do not believe in myselfin the
way I breathe or turn (133). No longer sure of who she is, Veronica desperately tries
to be recognized. When she visits her parental home to inform her mother, who is
suffering from dementia, of Liams death, her mother does not seem to remember her
daughters name. When she eventually settles for Darling, Veronica feels like
shouting it at her. You called me Veronica! (5). This need to be reassured of her
own identity remains throughout the narrative. When Veronica nally sits down to
write about the sexual abuse that probably has happened to Liam, she needs to take
a break: I pause as I write this, and place my own hand over my face, and lick the
thick skin of my palm with a girls tongue. I inhale. The odd comforts of the esh.
Of being me (146). In order to be able to retain the difference between herself and
Liam, something she does not always succeed in when relating to this specic event,
Veronica has to break away from her memories and reassure herself that she is still
there and that her body is still hers.
In her attempt to gather the shattered pieces of herself back together, Veronica
tries to create a distance between herself and her family. She has reversed her own
daynight rhythmshe sleeps during the day and stays up until her husband gets out
of bedand has, as such, removed herself from the timeframe in which her family
continues to live. Since she still picks up her daughters from school and takes them
either home for tea or to their various after-school activities, it is suggested that this
reversal is more because of Tom than of their children (37). Veronica even makes it
explicit that one of the reasons for altering her rhythm is that she does not want or
is not able to share their marital bed: I can not sleep with him, that is all (37). In
Freudian psychoanalysis, sexuality is understood to be intolerable to the structured
self (Bersani 1986, 38). As Leo Bersani explains, this is exactly why Freud could not
understand why people voluntarily engaged in sexual behavior: The mystery of sexu-
ality is that we seek not only to get rid of this shattering tension but also to repeat
it, even to increase it (38; emphasis in original). Veronica, whose sense of self is
already severely undermined due to her brothers death, is reluctant to sleep next to
and with her husband precisely because she does not believe she can manage another
blow to her supposedly structured and solid self: So my husband is waiting for me to
sleep with him again, and I am waiting for something else. I am waiting for things to
become clear (Enright 2008, 37; my emphasis).
As the narrative continues, Veronicas need to enlarge the distance between
herself and her family becomes more pressing. Whereas at rst the silence and empty
rooms of the house at night were enough for her to retain her senses, she eventually
leaves the premises (218). Starting with drinking a glass of wine in their parked car
in front of the house, after a couple of nights, she drives away, rst through their
own neighborhood, but then through the streets of Dublin and beyond, to the places
Marielle Smith 639
that have been occupying her mind since Liams death. On her last nightly trip,
Veronica nds herself standing at the graveyard of a former mental institution, where
her mothers brother is buried. Of all places, this is where Veronica realizes that she
is on the verge of losing her own sanity: I stand there and think that there is no
worse place for me to go. This is the worst place there is (237). Although she imme-
diately argues that her case is not that badIf this is as mad as I get then it is not
too madshe also realizes that she needs to pull herself together (237). However,
instead of going home, back to her life, she drives toward Dublin airport and gets on
a plane to London, the city where her brother lived before he died (254). The
moment Veronica realizes that her situation cannot, or must not, become any worse,
she ees the country and creates the largest physical distance between herself and her
family since her need for separation began.
As I have pointed out, we need to see ourselves in a negative relation to others
within the symbolic order: I am who I am because of who I am not. How could we
understand the self differently, when our entrance into this patriarchal frameworkour
becoming subjectis based on the solid image that we see in the mirror? For Lacan,
the necessary recognition of the self in this mirror is one of the subjects greatest trau-
mas, since there is always more to the I than the mirror can reect. Although the
child needs to understand itself as a unied totality, it, not being in control over its
own body, experiences itself in a schism, as a site of fragmentation (Grosz 1990, 39).
The image we learn to recognize in the mirror is thus always a misrecognition. This
visual illusion leads us to believe that we are separate from others and that we can no
longer connect to them in the same manner as we did before we entered that system.
However, according to Ettinger, our entrance into society does not foreclose our ability
to relate to others in a feminine matrixial way. The language that we acquire during
that process merely prevents us from seeing ourselves and others as anything but whole
(Pollock 2009b, 9). Since Veronica lives within the symbolic order, she only has a
limited understanding of her relationship to Liam and how their connection affects her
sense of self. The language that she uses to narrate their lives is inadequate to articulate
something that, indeed, comes from the very beginning of things, and she is thus left
without the words to explain why she cannot retain the image of herself as a singular
subject (Enright 2008, 22122).
SHATTERED, BUT NOT LOST
On her way to Dublin airport, Veronica tells herself that she knows why she wants
to go to England: I had some idea of seeing Rowan [Liams son], perhaps, or of walk-
ing along the Brighton front one last time (Enright 2008, 256). As Ettinger explains,
[i]n the phallic paradigm, each imaginary other to which the I relates, including the
exiled, is a parasite destined for annihilation either by assimilation or by banishment
(Ettinger 2006, 111; emphasis in original). Before Veronica can return to her family
both physically and mentally, she needs to undo the threat that Liam still is to her
sense of self. The rst time Veronica had been in Brighton, she tried to dissolve the
640 Hypatia
boundaries between herself and her brother by imagining what he must have experi-
enced when he committed suicide. Her return to this place can thus be read as either
an attempt to accept that they are not the same, which is underlined by the fact that
she is still alive, or an attempt to undo the binary by becoming one with him.
It is at Liams funeral that the three-year-old Rowan, who looks exactly like his
father, is introduced into the narrative (Enright 2008, 242). Although Veronica and
her husband did meet Liams girlfriend Sarah a couple of years before Liam died, no
one knew that they had a child together. While agreeing with her husband that she
has been touched too much, Veronica at the same time feels a deep attraction to the
little boy: I yearn for him, not with lips or hands, but with my entire face. My skin
wants him (244). Veronica, craving Rowan with the boundaries of her body, is not
the only one who wants to have the child. The entire Hegarty family is drawn to this
little version of the man they just buried, the man they could never really have: He
has the Hegarty eyes, we saydelighted, like they werent a curseand we look to
see what human being looks out through them, this time. It is too uncanny. Everyone
wants to touch him. They just have to (246). Liam being dead and buried, they
now welcome into their arms his son, who has his fathers looks, but who is not and
might never be like their difcult brother. And, even if he turns out like Liam,
Rowan still presents them with another chance to assimilate their brother.
Despite being desperate to solve the threatening distinction between self and
other, Veronica cannot take the necessary steps. After arriving at Gatwick airport
and checking in at one of the airport hotels, she realised that [she] did not know
how to leave (254). Unable either to enter England or return to her maternal coun-
try, Veronica begins to understand that Liam is not the only one she cannot distance
herself from. Throughout the narrative, it is clear that Veronica, despite having tried
to distance herself from her mother, is not always able to keep her guard up:
We pity our mothers, what they had to put up with in bed or in the
kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for
themat least I do. The imponderable pain of my mother, against
which I have hardened my heart. Just one glass over the odd and I
will thump the table, like the rest of them, and howl for her too.
(185)
The same goes for Kitty, who is next in age after Veronica. Despite being critical of
Kitty throughout the entire narrative and sometimes even denying her a place within
it, it is she whom Veronica calls when she is at Gatwick airport trying to decide
whether and how to get back to her life (259). Veronica also realizes that, although
she has physically distanced herself from her two daughters, she can never separate
herself from them: But there is no leaving the girls, they are always with me....
Rebecca Mary and Emily Rose. They stay with me now in my sleep (257).
The one person Veronica does seem able to distance herself from is her husband
Tom, the only main character to whom Veronica is not related through a direct
uterine or matrixial link. Halfway through the novel, she even explicitly refers to
his body as being separate from hers (133). However, when she is stuck at
Marielle Smith 641
Gatwick airport, Veronica suddenly yearns for the moment when he sat at the end
of the bed in the white curtains light, and he looked like someone I knew from the
very beginning, whenever the beginning might have been (260; my emphasis). That
Veronicas connection to Tom does not depend on a direct link to the maternal
womb does not mean it cannot spring from that specic place. As I have explained,
the matrixial encounter-event between mother-to-be and child-to-be is taken as a
model for the encounter between other subjects. Since both Veronica and Tom
have experienced their own partiality during the matrixial encounter-events with
their mothers, they are also able to repeat the experience and feel it in relation to
each other. Veronica can try to distance herself from her husband, but he has
become part of her.
It are these encountersthe encounters with the people we know and the people
we do not knowthat construct our sense of self. As a partner in the situation, we
all (have to) share in each others trauma, the rst trauma being the intrauterine
encounter with the mother and the necessary split from her (Pollock 2009b, 6;
emphasis in original). As a partner-in-differencewe never become entirely the
samewe co-emerge with and leave traces of ourselves in these other subjects, while
they leave traces in us (6; emphasis in original). Veronica may want to solve her
relationship to Liam by either turning him into the same or an absolute other; he
will always be both. The same goes for the other people in her environment. Stuck
at the airport, Veronica realizes that, no matter how far she runs from the people I
never chose to love, but love all the same, they will always remain with her: And
what a pathetic attempt this is, at running away from them all. Gatwick bloody
airport (Enright 2008, 259).
PAIN AND PLEASURE
As I explained earlier, the subject needs to misrecognize itself as a coherent and solid
entity if it wants to participate in the symbolic order. Since we are not coherent and
solid, we are chasing after an image of ourselves that does not exist. According to
Ettinger, the pain we experience due to our failed attempts at feeling whole will lead
us to blame others, since it is our relationality to them that makes us feel incomplete
and unstable (Pollock 2006, 11). In The Gathering, Veronica blames Liam the most
for destabilizing her sense of self, despite him not being the only one who makes her
feel vulnerable. As Ettingers theory explains, we experience our own partiality as a
threat to the nonexisting boundaries of our I because we are unable to articulate it:
it comes, in Veronicas words, from a time where words and actions are mangled
(Enright 2008, 221). Instead of seeing the other as a partner in the human webas
partner in the situation and partner-in-differencewe see them as the guration of
[our] hurt (Pollock 2009a, 53). The other, whom we believe to be radically different
from ourselves, poses a continuous threat. It is this threat that can explain the hor-
rendous social forms of intolerance and antagonism such as racism, homophobia,
misogyny (Pollock 2006, 11). It will come as no surprise that Ettinger, having been
642 Hypatia
born in Tel Aviv, Israel, two months before Israel declared itself independent on
May 14, 1948, links her rearticulation of the subject to the Holocaust.
Ettinger is not the rst to take the issue of subjectivity to this level. Bersani, too,
argues that the subject as proposed by Freudian psychoanalysis has led to paranoia
being the dominant social structure in Western society (Bersani 1986, 47). This is
not because our fragile boundaries, by denition, make us feel as though our identi-
ties are under threat. It is because we experience this partiality from within the
symbolic order. Since the other can only be understood as a radical other who has
absolutely nothing to do with the I, we, [i]n the phallus, ... confront the impossibil-
ity of sharing trauma and phantasy (Ettinger 2006, 90). This is why Veronica, after
having decided to go back to Dublin, is still afraid to return home (Enright 2008,
261). Queuing to buy a plane ticket, she wonders whether she will be able to get
up those tin steps and on to the plane (261). She, after all, did not nd a
solution to her fragility. At the end of her narrative, it feels as if I have been
falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am
about to hit it now (261). Veronica knows that she needs to return home, but the
social order in which she is living makes her unable to describe this return in less
unsettling terms.
Contrary to the phallic perspective, [i]n the matrix, the stranger, neither cut out
from the system nor assimilated to it, cannot be articulated as a parasite and cannot
be rejected (Ettinger 2006, 111; emphasis in original). Instead of being unable to
share in the trauma and the fantasy of the other, there is, in the matrix ... an impos-
sibility of not sharing them (90; emphasis in original). That matrixial encounter-
events make us feel fragile and vulnerable does not mean we have to try to protect
ourselves against them (Pollock 2009a, 45). On the contrary, as Pollock proposes,
they may also solace something profound in us that undoes the absolute binary of
pleasure/pain and forms the basis of our being able to share the suffering of another,
or feel with anothers trauma (Pollock 2009b, 17). The shattering of our sense of self
will not lead to the dissolution of the I because the experience is not overwhelm-
ing but humanizing (Pollock 2009a, 45). Why would we voluntarily visit sites such
as the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, read books and watch lms about topics that
make us feel empathetic, and continue to listen to the stories of those suffering, if
the sharing of the trauma would lead to the destruction of the self? Why would
Veronica, looking at the list of departures at Gatwick airport, decide to return home?
Because she does not want a different destiny from the one that has brought me
here. I do not want a different life (Enright 2008, 260). She only wants to be able
to live it, thats all (260).
The realization that our relationality to others is not only deconstructive also
comes to Veronica at the end of her narrative: for every time he [Tom] wanted to
undo me, there was love that put me back together againput us both back
together (260). Veronica did not lose herself during these encounters, but became
together with her husband. Indeed, if we look at these encounters not from within
the symbolic order, but from within the matrixial feminine sphere, what this vulner-
ability implies is not a sacrice of myself in disappearing for the sake of the Other,
Marielle Smith 643
but rather a partial disappearing to allow jointness (Ettinger 2006, 145). Ettinger
thus asks us to understand our subjectivity, which is always based on our encounters
with others, as something that is constituted through the experience of both pain
and pleasure.
The problem, as Veronica realizes too, is not that our subjectivity is always already
partial and affected through our encounters with others, but that it is difcult, if not
impossible from within the symbolic order, to remember the moments in which our
subjectivity is simultaneously undermined and constructed: If I could just remember
them too. If I could remember each time, as you remember different places you have
seensome of them so amazing; exotic, or confusing, or still. If I could say this is
what it was like the time Rebecca was started, or Emily made herself known
(Enright 2008, 260). That there is no solution to this problem becomes clear at the
end of Veronicas narrative. Despite realizing that her relationality to others is both
reciprocal and vital to her subjectivity, she remains afraid of what her return home
will do to her.
EMBRACING THE TRAUMA
Although Ettingers theory is able to provide answers to a number of questions we
have been struggling with for a very long time, she has no intention of presenting
the matrixial complex as some caricatural lost paradise (Ettinger 2006, 70). Her rear-
ticulation of the subject is thus not meant to give us a happy answer to the ontologi-
cal question that is haunting not only Veronica but most of the narrators in Enrights
work. On the contrary, one of the aims of Ettingers theory is to acknowledge and
embrace the trauma of what it means to be human. For Ettinger, ones subjectivity is
based on a co-emerging and being with other subjects, an ethical implication that
inevitably entails the experience of both pleasure and pain. This is the lesson Veron-
ica had to learn after the death of her brother. It is Ettingers breaking open of phal-
lic structures, the shedding of a new light on the ethical relationship between self
and other, that also resonates in the haunting conclusions of Enrights writings. If we,
too, learn to see ourselves as being with the other, we might be able, in Pollocks
words, to save our lives and our sanity (Pollock 2006, 34). At the end of her narra-
tive, Veronica is halfway there.
NOTE
1. This article provides an analysis of Enrights novel The Gathering (2008). In Now
the blood is in the room: The spectral feminine in the work of Anne Enright, Anne
Mulhall discusses a feminine matrixial relationality, a relationality she calls the spectral
feminine, in Enrights rst two novels The Wig My Father Wore (1995) and What Are
You Like? (2001) (Mulhall 2011).
644 Hypatia
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