Introduction: The Primary Event of Peace: Femininity, Com-Passionate Hospitality, and Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in Bracha L. Ettinger’s Matrixial Psychoanalysis

This introduction to our special issue dedicated to Bracha L. Ettinger´s matrixial psychoanalysis, and its explicit and implicit contribution to feminist and queer theory, and transgender studies (see Sheila Cavanagh’s article in this special issue), focuses on the representation and creation of affective relationships and borderspaces of co-emergence and co-affection, within and beyond the realm of art, thus creating and allegorizing trans-subjective encounters between artistic practices and spectators. These spaces can be read as what Bracha L. Ettinger calls the “matrixial borderspace,” to which we can gain access when we fragilize ourselves in our encounters with aesthetic practices, but also, as Griselda Pollock suggests regarding the ethical and political significance of matrixial psychoanalysis for our relations with an irreducible alterity, in our “ethical and political relations between strange, foreign, irreducible elements of otherness in our encounters with human and even nonhuman events of the world” (2006, p. 3) (see Christoph Solstreif-Pirker’s article in this special issue). These encounters would expand or would open the boundaries of the symbolic order itself, so that what was considered to be “outside” the symbolic order turns out to be, instead, beyond the symbolic order’s binary opposition of “inside” and “outside.”1 Ettinger’s emphasis on trans-subjective

encounters points to the specificity of feminine difference beyond concepts of the feminine as a socially constructed gender or an essential identity based on biological difference, hence challenging the phallocentric and Oedipal logics that underpin what may be s