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My art practice has led me to rethink sexual difference within psychoanalytic theory. In the Lacanian classical reading of Freud, the feminine either is articulated via the model of male “castration” and paternal prohibition or is equated with pure bodily experience, whereas the phallus is considered as the only “signifier of signifiers” for sexual difference. In Lacan's late theory, “woman” escapes the phallus and has “supplementary” jouissance,1 but her evasion is still defined by its parameters. If “woman” is either an object of exchange or an inaccessible Other/Thing/objet a as absence, she may be such only inside an altogether phallic paradigm. But, seen through a prism that I call matrixial, “woman” digs an-other area of difference with its specific apparatus, processes, and functions.
In the matrixial model that hereby will be knitted in a non-linear way, the feminine/prenatal encounter is a non-phallic sex-difference issue primarily for women. I articulate it around the rapport with female bodily specificity in the Real (womb) as inside and/or outside, as in-forming an unconscious zone. Bion's conception of early, intersubjective