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Disturbance and Dispersal in the Visual Field:

The Work of Bracha Ettinger


Judith Butler



In his recently translated book The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its
Ashes, Avraham Burg argues that, in Israel, the Shoah is woven, to varying degrees, into
almost all of Israels political arguments. Unlike other events of the past, the Shoah does
not recede but is coming closer all the time. It is a past that is present, maintained,
monitored, heard, and represented.
1
His point is two-fold: on one hand, he writes,
Because of the Shoah, Israel has become the voice of the dead, speaking in the name of
those who are no longer, more than in the name of those who are still alive.
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On the
other hand, the daily references to the Shoah rationalize war, maintain Israel in a
defensive and victimized position, and keep Israel from generalizing the political lesson
of the Nazi genocide against the Jews: namely that such racism, such deportation, such
murder should never happen again to anyone, ever. He laments the loss of optimism, of
cooperative spirit, and of affirmative ethics that he finds in contemporary Israeli life. He
writes, The Shoah is our life, and we will not forget it and will not let anyone forget us.
We have pulled the Shoah out of its historic context and turned it into a plea and a
generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah, and
therefore all is allowed be it fences, sieges, crowns, curfews, food and water
deprivation, or unexplained killings .
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In the midst of this political analysis, Burg offers an anecdote that suggests that
there are those who have effectively adopted the Shoah as a personal history and trauma
even when they have no direct historical connection with the event. It is supposed to be
a humorous and ironic moment in his text, but it inadvertently raises the interesting
question of how trauma might be communicated transgenerationally or, indeed, extra-
generationally. Burg notes that the mass immigration of Sephardim and Mizrachim
(Jews from, or whose ancestors were from, the Spanish Peninsula, the Middle East or
North Africa) produced a problem for the historiography of Israel. Often such immigrants
arrived in conditions of poverty, destitution and political exile, on unstable boats, having
undergone their own traumatic experiences of displacement. Burg notes that a silent

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dialogue must have taken place among all carriers of trauma. Nothing was said explicitly
and no formal policy was written, but when unspoken traumas were compared, the
Ashkenazi overpowered the SephardicThe obsession with the Shoah shoved aside any
discussion on other Israeli suffering.
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Burg recounts the story of Mr. D., an Israeli who
went on a trip to Poland, expecting to be away for a few weeks, only to return abruptly
after a few days. Burg asks Mr. D. why he cut his visit short. Mr. D. replies,
I couldnt bear it anymore Everything came back to me. I landed in Warsaw
and it was cold and snowy. The same day we traveled into the Polish hinterland to
check on a few opportunitiesThe snowy plains blinded me. It was cold to the
bone and all we saw were birch forests and shrubbery. We spent the night there
and then continued on a night train. The train traveled for many hours. The wheels
and the cars shook and the ticket conductor was aggressive. Then a sudden ticket
control. I just couldnt bear it anymore. Polish trains are too much for me. The
following day, I hopped on a plane and came back.
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The next day, Burg calls the man and says, Tell me, where are your parents from? And
Mr. D. answers, from Iraq.
Okay, so we get the joke, or it would seem that we do, since the man has
borrowed a history that is not his, and relives a trauma that is not passed on through the
historical ties of family. The anecdote is only humorous on the condition that we accept
that trauma is passed down through generations framed within a familial logic. Burg
concludes that the story shows that Middle Eastern Jews were embracing Israels
survivor narrative. The Shoah made us all one and the same.
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. But is this the necessary
conclusion? Did this man, Mr. D., embrace a history that was not his, or did he find it
entering him by virtue of living within proximity to others who bear this history more
proximately? Was it is his identification with the nation that led him to take on or absorb
this other history? Or is there another way that trauma is transmitted that does not get
examined in this analysis? In other words, is the problem that Mr. D. has embraced a
survivor narrative, or that a discourse has monopolized the present political scene, or is
there another explanation of how and why this man would have to leave Poland in the
early part of the 21
st
century, even though his family emigrated from Iraq? In other
words, is there a way to take the spatial and temporal relay of trauma seriously at the
same time that we try to think about new political positions for the present?
There is a fair amount of confusion precisely here where the question of
transmission is at issue. There are clinical terms for how a traumatic history is passed on:
transposition, according to Kestenberg; telescoping of generations, according to
Fainberg; deposition of the traumatic self, according to Volkan. It is with this question
in mind that I turn to the writing, drawing, and painting of Bracha Ettinger, a work which,
from its inception, focuses on the question of how anothers trauma not only becomes
ones own, but how the link, the mechanism of transmission, is crucial to the work of

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drawing and painting, the reconceptualization within psychoanalysis (and ethics) of self
and other, and the thinking of history and ethical practice. The significance of Israel for
Bracha Ettinger is the subject of many excellent commentaries, by Griselda Pollock and
others.
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My suggestion is that it is not Israel as a nation that is most important for
understanding what Ettingers work does, but Israel as the site where a certain past and
present are being worked out or, rather, where they continually fail to be worked out; that
history is not only the past and present of the Ashkenazi Jew, but the various histories,
differentially documented, of Arab Jews, Sephardim, and Palestinians living in adjacency
and proximity.
In a way, both in her psychoanalytic theory and in her visual art, there is for
Ettinger always a question of an exilic tradition, a problem of borders, a question of what
passes from one domain to another, and in what form and through which medium that
passage is made. In her work, trauma scatters and wanders in forms of provisional
containment; she thus engages key terms from the Jewish exilic tradition to elaborate an
understanding of psychic and aesthetic processes. To approach the drawings and the
paintings, as well as the theory, one might need to develop a new lexicon for
understanding (a) the transgenerational transmission of trauma, (b) the ways that the
traces of anothers unspeakable suffering emerge within primary regions of visual and
vocal life, and (c) how an ethical relation, if not a political one, derived from Levinas and
emphasizing the priority of the other, expands into a practice of compassion.
The earliest scenes of a life, scenes that can only be recalled through traces,
sounds, through experiences of withholding the voice, or refusing to take too much into
the body, have to be understood as scenes of trying to receive what cannot be assimilated,
the unspeakable trauma of others. Some of the earliest and most important of Ettingers
essays and paintings were about this problem of the trace, or what she sometimes calls
the grain of anothers suffering, what has registered traumatically for another. The
question for the child becomes the question for the painter and, in a different way, the
question for the theorist as well: how and through what form and material can trauma be
registered from and for the other? Where is that other in me, or how is it that the I who
I am is bound up, irreversibly, in a set of losses and traumatic experiences that can only
be transmitted to me, and through me, in bits and pieces, as traces and grains doubly
removed so the trace of the trace, and the grain of the grain. What can one do with this
self composed of the bits and pieces of anothers bits and pieces, especially when that
others experience is clearly composed of bits and pieces from yet others? Is this a
strange kind of linking, a temporally punctuated community, without any assumption of
sameness?
Such a linking practice, in Ettingers terms, is neither fusion nor rejection. How
do we think that middle terrain? Is it a link that only runs through family and nation, or is
it a link that can and does run across people who do not otherwise share a history?
Through what media does it emerge, if it emerges at all? Only after posing such

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questions, perhaps, can we begin to understand what it means to bear the trace of a
history that one has never lived, finding oneself on the Polish train in the early 21
st

century and suddenly finding it very hard to breathe. Whose history is at ones throat?
Can one register the trauma of those one has never met, or those with whom one lives in
proximity without familial or national tie? To approach this question means thinking
about the lateral relay of trauma, and not just its generational line. Such an approach
helps us understand why the man whose parents are Iraqi Jews might not be able to bear
the Polish train. And why Ettinger concerns herself with the ethical and political question
of what it means to make a link across a border when the dominant ethos maintains that
no link can be made. This bearing of the trace what kind of living does it entail?
I have started to offer a theoretical set of points, but I am mindful that we would
be making a mistake if we thought that theory could somehow illuminate the art, or that
the art in some ways installs theory. In a 1993 exhibition catalogue for the Museum of
Modern Art in Oxford, Bracha Ettinger wrote, the work of art does not illustrate or
establish theory; theory can only partly cover uncover the work of art. Sometimes the
work of art produces seeds of theory from which, upon elaboration, art slips away. The
seeds should be sown elsewhere.
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In a different context, she writes painting does not
surrender to theory, and theory does not collapse into painting.
9
And further, theory is
not art, but some forms of it are. But maybe art is theory-in-form, sensual and
affective.
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And so the writing sometimes takes sensual and affective form, and sometimes it
develops new vocabularies proliferating terms like matrixial, borderlinking, and
transcryptum which, taken together, suggest that something has to be named anew,
and that the names that are available for these sorts of passages are not adequate. In her
early work on transgenerational trauma, Ettinger takes on the perspective of the second-
generation survivor, trying, as she puts it, to throw a bridge to the trauma so that
something of it might cross over into, or disturb, the visual field and the domain of
appearance. Some historical set of events has not been cognized by the parent or parents,
and this non-cognizable reality is passed along in the form of a trace or, indeed, a crypt.
The child knows that there is a history, and that in some ways that history is lost for the
parent. By what token does this lost history appear in and for the child? Ettinger writes, I
need to remember what I have never forgotten and to find inside me traces of an event
that I have never experienced and memory of a Thing that I have never carried and never
lost (her italics).
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The mother, in this instance, becomes a kind of dead subject, one
who is understood as marked by buried speech and who becomes in the child a death
without sepulcher. This child becomes, in Ettingers words, a subject [who] is
unknowingly nostalgic and grieving for a lost relationship that gets encapsulated within
its psyche without introjection in this way, encrypted as a loss without memory, an
idea she derives from Torok and Abraham.
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This phrase without introjection is important. At issue here is what remains
an alien and dead trace of someones else lost mourning. It is not precisely shared, and it
is not precisely foreclosed. Nor is it adequate, for Ettinger, to call this a psychotic
phenomenon. Over and against the Lacanian notion of foreclosure, the release of whose
contents would produce psychosis, Ettinger seeks to understand the particular mode
through which trauma is conveyed, and to build an understanding of the wandering
effects of trauma that have consequences for a rethinking of the subject and of the place
of drawing and painting in relation to psychoanalysis.
But let us return to this question, how does it happen that we bear the trace of
histories never lived? Ettinger writes that traces of trauma in me are not purely mine.
Not only am I concerned with my own wound, and not only is the encounter with the
other traumatic to me, but I am also concerned by the crypted trauma of the other.the
crypted trauma that the other must ignore in order to survive
13
These traces are carried
not by me, not by this I, but by a non-I a crypt, but also a site of transposition, since
what cannot be cognized is in some sense passed to me to remember, elaborating a
memory for the other without threatening the survival of that other, who figures in
Ettingers work as the mother. One can already see the trace of a Levinasian ethic in this
quite important account of what Ettinger calls the matrixial. The point is not to fill the
lacuna in the other after all, the others survival depends upon this forgetting, this non-
cognizing of the traumatic history. So the subject remembers for the other, which means
only that one works with traces that are at ones disposal even though they do not belong
to ones personal history and that although they are in one, are not, precisely, ones own.
In a way, there is an action of testimony that takes place through this transmission of the
trace, a safeguarding of the other against a knowledge that would destroy her. Here is
where the psychic needs of the second-generation survivor to remember, and to
transmit become distinct from those of the first generation survivor, whose non-
cognition serves the purposes of surviving.
In Ettingers view, that which is enveloped by primary repression is neither
directly shared nor fully foreclosed. The way the content of that primary repression is
transmitted is precisely not through an appropriation, if by that we mean making
something ones own. Ettinger writes of this traumatic past that the encounter with or
transcription of such traces is, from the start, already crumbled and dispersed. So the
trauma, however crypted, is not so much the kernel within the shell, as the metaphorics of
Abraham and Torok would have it, but rather a phantom that works its way through the
field of appearance without assuming precise form. Ettinger insists that the effect of a
forgotten, indelible trauma becomes transitive indeed, not only transitive, but also
wandering.
14
So the kernel of trauma, upon the event of encounter, at the moment at
which it is relayed, or impressed upon an other, crumbles and get[s] dispersed breaks
up and scatters.
15
The point is not that we can distinguish easily between transitive
trauma and intransitive trauma. Rather, the mechanism of transmission has to be

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rethought so that what is transmitted is understood as already in pieces, already not the
same as the event itself, already at a permanent distance from the event, or events, that
belong to the non-cognized life of the mother or, indeed, the generation before her. What
Ettinger insists is that this kernel, broken up upon encounter into bits and pieces, into
dispersed grains, is registered as what she calls pulsational scansions correlating to
phantasmatic alternations, which disturb visibility from within. So the trauma is not
made visible, but the trauma works a disturbance within the visual field. There is a
certain repetition of the trauma that takes place as this disturbance of the visual field, an
alternation of disappearance and return, of inside and outside. The visual space becomes
the site where the non-I elaborates this traumatic history that is not precisely its own. In
the visual field, the artist does not produce and find a self, but encounters a displacement
from her own home and history, an exile in the visual field, itself disrupted by a set of
losses that cannot be redeemed, and for which no presence is finally possible. To become
available as the site of this transmission is to endure the unbearable as it is passed on, but,
as Ettinger puts it, without ever expecting love and harmony, and without definite
resolution.
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In some ways, it is Ettingers Eurydice series that offers us a chance to reconsider
this problem of what is passed on to us, what is impressed upon us, and what seems to
reside in us in a site that is not quite where I find or know myself as such. This is not a
primary set of impressions that are foreclosed to me, to which I have no access, although
they are in some ways locked away; in fact, the access I have is precisely to that part of
the other that is deadened, buried in me, assuming a topographical separateness in me,
but also, always, breaking up or dispersing in the course of being passed on to me.
Psychoanalytically and visually, we are faced with the question of whether the earliest
impressions, understood as traumatic ones, are foreclosed or accessible. It is clear that
this logic assumes that it is either one or the other: foreclosed or accessible. But what
exists outside of this distinction? What scene gives rise to this mutually exclusive logic?
Is it possible that the other, who has become partially dead in relation to unbearable
trauma, passes what is unbearable onto me, as something dead, something that remains
buried, but that now lives in me, or, rather, maintains its deadness in me, as a topography
that is not exactly locked away, but breaking up and entering the psychic landscape in the
form of a screened reality, a scattering of the dead, as if the crypt breaks up into pieces
and gives way, scattering ash and crypt alike. What appears on the canvas is not the
restitution of the original figure; the canvas does not give life to the one who has passed
on ones partial death; the mother, who is the original figure in Ettingers work, cannot be
repaired; there is no return to the mother, and the child is still barred from gaining direct
nourishment there. But nor is she a foreclosed content whose revelation outside the
circuit of signifiers will bring psychosis. That partially dead figure, and the crypt itself,
scatter through the visual field, in a way that still bars return, and the bar is also there, the
grid, the grill, the matrix that continues to separate that broken up scene from the time in

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which we see, the time in which we try to look back but through which passes not the
shadow of the object, but the shadow of the part-object and the part-drive, a certain
pulsional scansion of the bits and pieces passed down or passed on from another.
As I tried to point out in 2001, the figure of Eurydice is crucial for understanding
this particular dynamic in which looking back is simultaneous with losing forever.
17
By
the time Orpheus arrives in Hades with his beautiful and mournful music, seeking to
persuade the unyielding Hades to return Eurydice to the world of the living with him, he
has been counting on his music to restore lost objects, to conjure the object of his loss
through his voice and his instrument. It seems that he finally does persuade Hades that
Eurydice might be brought back from the dead, and Hades lets her go on the condition, as
we know, that Orpheus must not look back. She is to follow behind him, and he is to
trust what he cannot see, namely that she is there, following, coming, about to be returned
to him. I suppose it makes sense that he should have some doubts about this enterprise,
since how is she, finally, to make the passage back from the dead? And what does it
mean to trust the word of Hades anyway? And it makes sense that he should doubt that
he would actually have her returned to him in the same form, and perhaps he presumes as
well that only by seeing her can he be certain of her return. Of course, Orpheus is a
musician, not a painter, and his music is the means through which he works his seduction,
expresses his sorrow, and also has pleaded his case. It is the power he has, but what is
asked of him is to give up this power, to walk silently, without audience, without being
able to work any effects on the situation. What does he know about quiet walking and
soundless trust and not being able to see for certain that others are moved by what you
do? Matters are out of his control; by agreeing to Hades demand, he switches mediums
from sound to sight, and it seems to be something of a fatal change. He confronts his
final powerlessness precisely there, finds that he must know that she is behind him, and
in his turning around, looking back, she breaks up into pieces under his gaze. Can we say
that she breaks up into pieces because of his gaze? Yes, but it is not the gaze that breaks
her up; rather, only as a broken up kind of thing can she be seen. This gives us a clue to
how the visual works in Ettingers work. The figure is broken up, can only appear in this
broken up way, irretrievable, but not without vital trace. If there is drive here, it may be
in the trace, the trace of this figure endeavoring to come to life when she is already dead,
but also in the very matrix, and in the very color that renders the scene alive in its
opacity. In this sphere, we cannot say precisely whose drive is transmuted into the visual
field; it is not precisely the drive of a subject, since it is in the course of being passed on,
or passed through; it is caught up in a matrix in which seer and seen are neither
completely distinguished nor utterly fused. If we understand the matrix or the matrixial
as the name for this scene, it is a scene that does not reconstruct its parts or unify the
painter with her lost and traumatic object; and yet, some pulsion, some drive, does
organize and illuminate this scene, alternating depth and surface, radiating color and line,
fading, haunted by figures of uncertain definition; a life-drive diffused through the visual

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field, focused precisely on what it cannot make live again and what it cannot make whole
again. And yet something is living here, living on. This is not the blank screen that
stands for the end of art after Auschwitz. On the contrary, it is a suffused and saturated
screen, a very still passage. It is not exactly in the mode of Orpheus; it is the always
vague and receding Eurydice apprehended from another angle. There is here a certain
powerlessness in the face of what is lost, and so a greater humility than any Orpheus
could find, a humility that seems to belong to the visual field itself or, rather, to how the
visual field articulates and affirms what it cannot reconstruct and cannot ever fully figure.
Of course, when Eurydice is in Hades, she is already lost, already gone, already
dead, but in some way, she is coming back from the dead when she emerges from the
underworld with the provisional permission of Hades and, at least at the moment at which
the gaze apprehends her, she is there. And yet the very gaze by which she is apprehended
is the one that also banishes her. Orpheus gaze pushes her back to death, since he was
prohibited from looking, and knows that in looking he loses her again. It is by virtue of
his own gaze that he loses her for the second time and she will, from that point on, be
apprehensible only as loss.
In her recent book, Flesh of My Flesh, Kaja Silverman returns to the myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice and considers in close detail Ovids rendering of that myth.
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There, she claims, Orpheus and Eurydice were never really much of a couple. And she
worries that the story is finally about Orpheus narcissism and Eurydices dispensability.
She writes,
Orpheus accomplishes what he sets out to do. The souls of the dead weep,
Tantalus stops trying to get a drink of water, Ixions wheel stops, and the Furies
are overcome. Pluto and Proserpina are also unable to deny his prayer, and
they summon Eurydice, so that Orpheus can be reunited with her. But neither of
them seems particularly happy to see the other; Eurydice arrives in the company
of the recent dead, and walk[s] slowly toward Orpheus, limping from her
wound. The newlyweds are even more disconnected during their journey back
to earth; they [pick] their way through deathly silent places along a steep upward
path, enveloped in thick fog and hard to see, and Eurydice vanishes as soon as
her husband looks at her.
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Ovid reduces the substantial speech Virgil gives
Eurydice to a barely-audible farewell, and writes that the musician turns to look
at his wife because he is eager to see her, and that she blame[s] him not at all
(for what could she blame him for, except for loving her?
20


Silverman continues,

We learn that Orpheus is as rigid with fear when he sees his wife vanish as an
unnamed man was when he saw a chained Cerberus being led out of Hades,
because this spectacle brings him face-to-face with death: [Ovid writes] Orpheus

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was stunned by the second [disappearance] of his wife just like the man who saw
the three -headed dog (with a chain around its middle neck), and was terrified and
whose terror did not leave him until his life did, when his body froze into
stone

Silverman concludes,
Orpheus tries to ward off death by transforming Eurydice into the freakish
member of another species; when he turns toward her, he therefore sees not a
fellow human being but rather something more closely resembling what the
unnamed man saw: a three-headed dog. This perceptual deformation freights his
backward look with a new kind of fatality; the gaze he directs at Eurydice on the
slope leading to earth kills her not only because it transgresses a divine
prohibition, but also because it is inherently murderous.
21


Shall we accept this conclusion, or are there other ways of looking back? In a way,
Silvermans book takes up that question, asking after the conditions of rapprochement.
Ettinger has a different way of considering this vanishing that happens at the moment of
the backward glance.
22
In Ettingers paintings, it is not just that Eurydice is lost and that
we discover her again to be lost, but that in the very act of looking back, we lose again,
and there is something of a second loss, if not a second death in the Lacanian sense. If she
is coming toward us, we can never see that, and yet she must have been closer, since now
she is fading away. She never came back to life, but when we see her, she is receding
receding but never fully fading from view. The paintings catch the figure in an
irresolvable ambiguity and indefinition; she never fully takes shape, but neither does she
fully escape the shades of shape.
And yet, for Ettinger, can we say that our glance is murderous, or that when
seeing, we are breaking some kind of law? If there is a law, where would it be found in
the painting? There is no single prohibitive bar that slices the canvas, only a kind of
grillwork, several lines, and we see through them, between them, at the same time that
they obstruct what we see. Some porosity has opened up within the law itself. The single
bar would literalize the sovereign prohibition, the no of the law, but it turns out that the
prohibition has itself multiplied into lines and grids that both bar and facilitate the gaze.
In the place of narcissism, there is some other kind of work here, the work of mourning,
but more specifically, the work of mourning something frightening and terrible. With
Ettingers painting, it is not that we turn around, needing to know with certainty that we
will receive the object again, restored and animate. Rather, the painting turns us around,
and upends our own need for capture, for knowing with certainty, and thwarts the
omnipotent fantasy of bringing the dead back to life. And yet, something of the original
myth remains, since we are offered a way of seeing that would not rely on the need to
capture Eurydice through epistemological certainties or to recreate her in full in accord

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with the fantasy of omnipotence. If our gaze can be said to be directed or orchestrated in
a given direction, it is against the absoluteness of the prohibitive law, the need for capture
and certainty, and the seductions of omnipotence; and if there is something of a lesson to
be learned from turning away from such seductions, it is that something does remain,
something that permanently bears the traces of loss, something that can only be described
as the reconfigured traces of loss itself.
For Orpheus, Eurydice appears only in the instant before she starts
to fade; but in Ettingers non-narrative pictorial version, this instant recurs, endlessly.
Foreclosure is itself abrogated; in that sense a fundamental prohibition has been
transgressed. The image emerges from a past which was thought to be either radically
unrepresentable or, equivalently, only representable through the mechanism and medium
of denial. That a certain representation nevertheless emerges against the stricture that is
imposed upon representation, suggests that Ettinger also struggles here against the Jewish
prohibition on iconography, the one articulated in the Bible when Moses returns from the
mountain to find all that pagan dancing and idolatry, smashing the tablets of the
commandments into bits and pieces. Might we discern in this painting some similar
scattering of the law, some visual breaking up of the prohibition, such that it becomes an
uncertain occasion for mourning and even for safeguarding a loss as it comes down to us
in its scattered and shadowy forms.
To explain this further, it is important to understand the way that Ettinger returns
to Freuds notion of the uncanny to offer a counter interpretation to this idea of the
absolute prohibition, something associated in her theoretical work with the Lacanian
doctrine of foreclosure, as I suggested above. Let me offer a brief rendition, before I
advance my final section, which will be brief. We may recall that in Freuds famous
essay, The Uncanny, first published in 1919, he begins by situating the uncanny as
belonging to aesthetics, understood at least partially as a theory of the qualities of
feelings.
23
It is, he tells us, related to what is frightening to what arouses horror and
dread And in this sense the uncanny belongs within the field of what is frightening.
As he tries to take account of this feeling, he is aware that he must find a way into this
feeling he must start by translating himself into that state of feeling. Continuing then
in his typological mode, Freud remarks that the uncanny is that class of frightening
which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.
24
Elaborating on a paper
given by Jentsch in 1906, Freud argues that one key example of the uncanny is the
experience of doubting whether an animate being is alive or not, whether it is run by an
inhuman mechanism, and whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.
25
So
the uncanny emerges here in relation to doubt, to uncertainty, and, in at least one of its
forms, that uncertainty pertains to whether or not an apparently lifeless object is actually
alive.
Freud offers a quite long and splendid reading of E.T.A. Hoffmanns The Sand-
Man. I want to recall one moment of this reading that I think has direct relevance to the

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extra-generational transmission of trauma. Hoffmanns story begins with the tale of a
student, Nathaniel, who is haunted by certain memories that are associated with the death
of his father, a death that Freud underscores as mysterious and terrifying. The figure of
the the Sand-Man was invoked by Nathaniels mother when she was trying to compel
the children to go to sleep. She meant to frighten them with this figure, to be sure, but
also to make them vanish quickly into their bedrooms. But of course, the terrifying figure
not only failed to put Nathaniel to sleep, it also entered him into a Cartesian zone where
he could not be sure what was dreaming and what was waking. After being anxiously
questioned by her son, the mother assures Nathaniel that the Sand Man is only a figure
of speech, but as we all know, figures of speech, and figures more generally, do not
necessarily lose their power as a consequence of being named as such (a point Neil Hertz
made persuasively some years ago).
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In any case, the sadistic nurse seizes upon the
occasion of Nathaniels fear to expand upon the specter of the Sand-Man, insisting that
when children fail to go to bed, the Sand-Man throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so
that [the eyes] jump out of their heads all bleeding. As he recounts this story, of course,
Nathaniel is an adult who knows better than to think that some figure might assault him
in this way, but he remains fixed at this moment, worried about the sand, his own eyes
popping out, but also the specter of seeing his own eyes having come out of his head. He
sees certain objects and think that they are perhaps eyes of this kind, his own or someone
elses.
Nathaniel has other problems of course, mistaking a doll for a live person and
falling in love with her, but let us focus for the moment on two salient features of this
story: the first is that what is most frightening is the vision of the sand thrown in his eyes
and the eyes displacing from the head. Presupposed in this vision is that Nathaniel still
has the capacity to see, and that the scene has become a kind of object for him. Where
precisely are his eyes, and where is his gaze? He is implicated in the scene that he sees,
though his very seeing in some ways disputes the claim of reality exercised by the scene.
Not that that is altogether re-assuring for him! There is a difference between the eye and
the gaze, and this difference, articulated by Lacan, becomes crucially reformulated in
Ettingers work.
27
She writes, for instance, the gaze is already the scraps of what is
closest to us and then again, We may understand the gaze as a phantasmatic trace of
a traumatic trace.
28
Here we are given to understand the gaze, in her terms, as prior to
and split from the eyes of the seer.
29

In a way, Hoffmans Nathaniel becomes the figure for a split between the eyes
and the gaze that allows for a radical disorientation into a point of view that seems not to
belong to or to emanate from a located, subjective perspective. But secondly, it is
important to know that something has entered into the eyes: grains of sand. Something
foreign has entered the field of vision, and caused a disturbance there. (We appear to
ourselvesas a stain in the picture or on the screen
30
) We might consider how this
sandy vision, this seeing through or with grains of sand, also finds its way into Ettingers

12
work. It is partially blinded, but is also animated, if not eroticized, precisely from that
situation. There are bit and pieces of what cannot belong to me that nevertheless emerge
within the visual horizon and are configured within the visual work of art. One longs for
the lost object whether Eurydice or Nathaniels father but, as Ettinger puts it, there is
no contact with the relic my desire longs for
31
. Whatever encounter takes place is
without discernment, without full clarity or distinct form. Yet something is passed on,
perhaps horrifically, as it is when sand is thrown in the eyes, but the very split between
the gaze and the eyes also stages a scene of phantasy, one in which the horror of the loss
seems to register as the horror of losing ones eyes. Orpheus looks back, and perhaps, as
Silverman suggests, commits murder with his gaze. But Nathaniels gaze seems to appear
only on the condition that his eyes are ruined and lost. And if there is a mysterious and
horrifying death of the father that resounds in Nathaniels phantasy, it seems linked to the
question of trauma, of what is passed on, of how death is passed to us, producing a
distinction between eyes and gaze, or what properly belongs to me, and what it is that is
in me, animating me, that is not me. The grains are the bits and pieces of the lost object,
perhaps. Eurydice crumbles into small bits, and small bits end up in Nathaniels eyes,
disturbing the visual field.
Let us remember that for Ettinger, this crypt, this site of the non-I, is always in the
process of breaking up into bits and pieces. In addition, it is important to note that both
the pulsational dynamic, the gridwork of lines, and those grainy, even sandy, screens, all
articulate the transitive effects of trauma as they become a specifically aesthetic
experience, what for Ettinger is a matrixial space, something which she distinguishes
from phallic space. I am not sure, but I do not think that the matrixial place belongs to
women (it is precisely not reducible to categories of gender), although it does belong to a
visual and affective formation where the signifier of the phallus does not fully reign. The
importance of this claim is that within the phallic economy, the only way that psychosis
can be averted is through the acquisition of a signifier. But for Ettinger, that content
that event or, indeed, traumatic Thing can be presented in ways that do not belong to
the order of the signifier. Indeed, the very meaning of trauma, if one can speak that way,
is to break the bounds of signification, which means that trauma has to find another mode
of presentation, one that is not reducible to existing signifiers. That is part of what the art
object and art event does with trauma or, rather, what trauma does in and to art, and it has
specific implications for the visual field.
The point is not to lift the repression of lost or un-cognized material, but rather to
work with the un-cognized trauma of another that has found its way into me, without
being introjected by me. In a way, the others un-cognized trauma is safeguarded as the
non-I within me, although as a passage rather than a topos, it does not maintain a stable
interior form. The encounter by which it is transmitted to me is already the breaking up
of the event into pieces that disperse, and so the non-I is a site of transmission, what
Ettinger sometimes, even provocatively, calls a transport station. The transport station

13
is, of course, the traumatic icon of the way to the death camp, but here we see the
repetition of this very icon as a moment of artistic making and of theory, as a metaphor
for the process of carrying over or carrying beyond (and in that sense, a metaphor for
metaphor, if we remember the etymology: meta-ferein, to carry over). She refers here to
a transgressive psychic capacity which is not psychotic and which fundamentally
involves the art object or art event as the site where a certain scansion of trauma becomes
possible.
32
There is no scansion of trauma without pulsation, without desire, so we should
note that at least here Ettinger suggests a visual nexus of desire and trauma, something
worth considering further on another occasion.
To conclude for now, I would like to turn briefly to the question of ethics and
politics. As some of you may know, Ettinger conducted a very important interview with
Levinas on the place of the feminine in his ethical philosophy. There she focused on the
question of passivity, but more importantly, on the question of how one registers the
impression of the face of the other, and how this constitutes something like an ethical
charge. To be ethical in Levinas terms means to be available to an impression from the
outside, and so requires not only a kind of responsiveness, but also an ethical aliveness in
the face of what is not-I, what is foreign. This primary susceptibility to what is not
myself, to an enigmatic claim that comes from the other, in some ways links the
psychoanalytic account of trauma with Levinasian ethical philosophy. What is not-I and
foreign is, in a sense, outside of me, but my relation to this not-I constitutes me
fundamentally. This is why we cannot talk about an ontology of the subject, but only
about an ethical claim that is prior to any such ontology. I am traversed by this
foreignness in the very structure of who I am bound, traumatized, and obligated. It
sounds like many Jewish childhoods I know and even lived, but there is in Ettingers
work something else, an insistence on the non-familiar as part of the scene of selfhood
and even as the condition of ethical relationality.
I cannot pursue the point here, but Ettingers work resonates with an exilic
tradition that draws upon the idea of the scattering of the Jews in the diaspora, something
that is part of the Galut, the tradition of the exile, perhaps more emphatically than the
tradition of the homeland. To be scattered is to come apart from a unified origin, to be in
a state of dispersal; and so we might think about the bits and pieces that make for
passage, but also the ineluctable situation, even definition, of the diasporic Jew as one
who does and must live with the non-Jew, and for whom co-habitation provides the
framework for ethical and political life. The question, posed by writers like Edward Said
and Amnon Raz-Krakotzin alike, is whether the idea of diasporic polity might come to
structure the lands of Palestine/Israel.
33

Ettingers discussion with Levinas helps us to understand the matrix as an ethical
framework, one that is committed to opening the border. She writes, in the matrix, the
stranger, neither cut out from the system nor assimilated to it, cannot be articulated as a
parasite and cannot be rejected.
34
The point is not that there is on the one hand myself

14
and on the other the foreigner, outside, but that the self is structured by this very alterity.
There are those to whom we are bound, prior to contract and will, whose lives are not
only next to our own, but with whom we are linked through the border. In relation to
Lacan, Ettinger argues that it was important to transmute a border and a limit into a
threshold, one that allows a certain kind of passage. This is not an easy moment, since
someone who may not be able to travel the trains of Poland, even though it is obviously
another time, may well be able to assist in Palestine, in the midst of enduring present
trauma. In Ettingers terms, trauma does not make us strong; on the contrary, it makes us
increasingly fragile. And yet, only from a bifurcated place of fragility does it become
possible to make contact across an otherwise impassable barrier. She refers to the
widening threshold of fragility in this regard, and here it is clearly a kind of
fragilization through the exposure to trauma that allows for what she calls passage and
compassion. The point is clearly not to arrive at the place where the others pain is the
same as my own, or where the oblivion of the Naqba and the ongoing violent occupation
would be equated with the trauma of the Shoah. They are qualitatively separate, and no
set of analogies will suffice to understand the specificity of each. Indeed, both are
betrayed by analogy. But let us consider instead that the border can nevertheless be a
link, is already a link, even if a violently imposed one. In Hebrew, the Ketz defined as a
frontier and a limit or end is transmuted into a Katzee, which apparently comes from
the same root, understood as a borderline, or an opening within the limit. It is not only or
merely trauma that gets transmitted there, as we know, but also desire. The point, as I
understand it, is to struggle to transform the barrier into the site of passage, and this
would mean, politically, to open up the border, to affirm the border as a place were
passage must take place, and rights to passage assured.
I do not mean to draw too direct a line from the aesthetic to the ethical and the
political. But the problem of the trans- and extra-generational transmission of trauma
was already a political one, as I hope I made clear in my opening comments. The time
and place of that transmission requires that we rethink the way history is formed and
filtered in psychic terms. Whoever the Levinasian other might be and it could be, in
principle, anyone that other imposes its obligation traumatically. That is to say, I do
not enter into that obligation first through contract or through will. I am already bound to
the other before I decide what negotiated relation to have to that other. The stranger is not
only radically outside me, but takes up residence in me as something both recalcitrant and
dynamic. In this way the structure of trauma is already a problem of ethics. What do we
owe to those who are lost, but also to those with whom we co-habit the earth? In my view
and I think it is derived in part from what Ettinger has taught me about Levinasian
ethics it is to the stranger that we are bound, the one, or the ones, we never knew and
never chose. To have a territory or a home is already to be bound by the obligations of
adjacency. There is no home without adjacency. And if we consider Israel or what is
called Israel, the Palestinians are already inside, forming a substantial population,

15
outside, but also connected through proximity and contiguity in ways that are undeniable.
Their expulsion cannot be effectively secured, and never will. Yet the history of that
expulsion is a trauma at the basis of the founding of that nation, as more and more people
are willing to avow.
35
To oppress or kill the other is to deny my life, not just mine alone,
but that sense of my life that is, from the start, and invariably, social life, connected in
difference. So the question emerges: what obligations are to be derived from this
dependency, contiguity and proximity that now defines each population, which exposes
each to the trauma of destruction, which incites destructiveness? How are we to
understand such bonds without which neither population can live and survive? To what
obligations do they lead?
Of course, trauma is not a felicitous point of departure for politics, but we can see
how it opens up a different aesthetics and different ethics in Ettingers work. For the
point is to consider the conditions, the means, the medium, through which a certain
breaking up of trauma takes place, not as a process heading toward completion, but as the
threshold for a productive disturbance at the border.



Judith Butler, January 2010

1
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008, p. 22. My profound thanks go to Damon Young whose editorial assistance was
invaluable to the completion of this essay.
2
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes, p. 24.
3
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes, p.
78.Historian Idith Zertal has made a similar argument, analyzing the invocation of the Shoah in the
consolidation of Israeli nationhood, military power, and colonial and expansionist politics. In Israels
Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), she argues that
the Nazi genocide against the Jews is no longer remembered for itself, nor given its appropriate place as a
traumatic and ungraspable loss. What she calls the sanctification of the Holocaust is actually its
devaluation, since it exercises a continuing traumatic effect, endowing local political arguments with a
transcendental, inexpressible quality (p. 169). The point is not simply that the invocation of the
Holocaust is also a manipulative strategy for endorsing and expanding Israeli military power and
destructiveness. Zertal mourns the loss of the actual loss, the way in which a monstrous and devastating
historical genocide is transformed into a ploy and a strategy, establishing a never-ending past at the
expense of a massive and unbearable historical crime. Of course, such arguments have to be differentiated
from those that claim that any and all references to the Holocaust are simply part of the strategic rhetoric
of war. Something else is remarked here, a way in which the past refuses to become past, even devours the
present, and produces an endless and futile sense of victimhood that cannot or will not conceive of the
physical vulnerability of the non-Jew. This happens time and again when the Palestinian is likened to the
Nazi: for example, Zertal reminds us that Netanyahu, the current Israeli Prime Minister, likened
Palestinians to the Mufti of Jerusalem who, in his view, repeatedly proposedto Hitlerthe
extermination of the Jews (175). For his part, Burg points out that even Abba Eban, widely considered a
dove on matters of foreign policy, coined a term that is still used today, defining Israels boundaries, the
1949 Armistice Line, as Auschwitz borders (Holocaust, 22). According to Burg, the Six-Day war
removed the virtual ghetto fences between Israel and Auschwitz (23).
4
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes, p.33
5
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes, p.34.

16

6
Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes, p.35
7
Pollock has written extensively on Ettinger, transgenerational tranasmission of trauma and the
theme of Eurydice. See, for example, Gleaning in History.' in: Griselda Pollock (ed.), Generations
and Geographies in the Visual Arts, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 226-289; Nichsapha:
Yearning/Languishing. The immaterial tuch of colour in painting after painting after
history, in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Artworking 1985-1999 (Gent: Ludion and
Bruxelles: Palais des Beaux Arts, 2000) pp. 45-70; most recently in The Graces of Catastrophe:
matrixial time and aesthetic space confront the archive of disaster in Griselda Pollock, Encounters
in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive, (London: Routledge, 2007), pp 171-189
8
The MOMA in Oxford published two different books for the artist's solo exhibition in 1993: the
inspiring fragments from her Notebooks collected in Bracha L. Ettinger, Matrix, Halal(a)-Lapsus: Notes on
Painting, Oxford: MOMA, 1993 (Reprinted in: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Artworking 1985-1999, ed.
Piet Coessens, Ghent / Amsterdam: Ludion; Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000 and the catalogue
Matrix - Borderlines that included her essay from which I am quoting. Bracha L. Ettinger, "Woman - Other
- Thing: A matrixial touch", Matrix - Borderlines, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1993: 11-18, p.11.
9
Ettinger's "Trranscryptum: Memory Tracing in/for/with the Other was first publish in La
Memoire, eds. Laurence Bosse, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (Villa Medici, Rome,
1999) on the occasion of the exhibition La Ville, le Jardin, La Memoire and then reprinted in Bracha
Lichtenberg Ettinger: The Eurydice Series, Drawing Papers n.24, eds. Catherine de Zegher and Brian
Massumi, 2001. The version Transcryptum appeared in in Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of
Knowledge and Memory, eds. Linda Belau and Petar Ramadanovic, New York: Other Press, 2002, p. 270.
A short version appeared as Transcryptum: Memory Tracing In/For/With the Other in Ettinger, The
Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006, 163-172.
10
From the "Post-scriptum" part of a version of the "Transcryptum" manuscript sent to me by the
artist.
11
Ettinger, Transcryptum, in The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 164.
12
Ettinger, Transcryptum, in The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 164. Bracha analyses there the
"crypt" in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Lcorce et le noyau. (Paris: Flammarion), 1987.
13
Ettinger, Transcryptum, in Topologies of Trauma, p. 260.
14
Ettinger, Transcryptum, in The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 167.
15
Ettinger relates in the manuscript sent to me of her essay "The Heimlich" first printed in the
framework of the Documenta X exhibit in the book Suspension, eds. J. Crandall and K. Easterling (Kassel:
Documenta and Munich: Schellmann, 1997) reprinted in The Matrixial Borderspace, 157-161.
16
Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 110.
17
Butler, Brachas Eurydice, in Bracha Lichtenburg Ettinger: Eurydice Series, eds. Catherine de
Zegher and Brian Massumi, New York: The Drawing Center, 2001. Reprinted in Theory, Culture and
Society, 21(1), 2004: 95-100.
18
Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
19
Silverman quotes from Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Michael Simpson, Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 2001, p. 166.
20
Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, p.49.
21
Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, p.50.
22
See also Griselda Pollock, Painting as Backward Glance that Does not Kill: Eurydice
1882-1999 by Bracha L Ettinger in Culture, Theory and Critique, 42:1 (1999) , pp. 116 144; and
Abandoned at the Mouth of Hell, or, A Second Look that Does Not Kill: The Uncanny Coming to
Matrixial Memory in Doctor/ Patient: Memory and Amnesia Sergei Bugaev Africa and Bracha L
Ettinger, edited by Marketta Sepll (Porin: Taidemusum, 1996) 126-164.
23
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, in The Standard Edition, 17:219-256.
24
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, in The Standard Edition, 17:219-20.
25
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, in The Standard Edition, 17:226.
26
See Freud and the Sandman, in Neil Hertz, The End of the Line, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985, 113-134.
27
See Jacques Lacan, The Split Between the Eye and the Gaze, in The Seminar, Book XI: The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1981, 67-78.

17

28
Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 96 (her italics).
29
Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 97.
30
Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 97.
31
Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 97.
32
Ettinger, The Matrixial Gaze (Leeds, Feminist Arts and Histories Network Press, University of
Leeds, 1995) and reprinted in The Drawing Papers, 2001 and in The Matrixial Borderspace, 2006.
33
Edward W. Said, Freud and the non-European, London & New York: Verso, 2003; Amnon Raz-
Krakotzin, Exil et souverainet: Judasme, sionisme et pense binationale, Paris: La Fabrique, 2007.
34
Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 110.
35
Consider, for example, the work of the organization Zochrot (www.zochrot.org).