Traces of the Heroin's Journey: The Poetics of Parturition and Death With-in the Matrixial Encounter

Abstract

In the thesis I approach the post-structuralist aesthetic theory,of the Matrixial Borderspace by Bracha L.Ettinger through a feminist articulation of the implications of the ‘womb’and ‘intra-­‐uterine’ stage within symbolic and psychoanalytic thought primarily through works of Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud.I also examine the idea of the female artist in relation to representations of the archaic maternal body in the‘death dealing’and ‘life giving’ tomb/womb inversion with in the binary and split phallic psychoanalytic models. In The Matrixial Borderspace, Ettinger proposes a pre-­‐natal and intra-­‐uterine environment (psychical/imaginary space)as an alternate model existing alongside Jacques Lacan’s phallic model.I argue that the Matrixial model adds valence to a specific feminine subjectivity by paving new in-­‐roads for creativity in relation to sex differences.In my view the theorization of the Matrixial Encounter opens new grounds that facilitates the mourning of the foreclosed primordial archaic m/other. In the final chapter of the thesis I go on to analyze the poem “Incubatory” by Christine Hume,in her recent collection Shot(2010),which invoke similar themes of gestation and parturition.I argue that Hume poetics allows a constructive dialogue between the female artistic subject(I) and the unborn(Other)by tracing borders between the not-­‐yet living and life.