This paper examines how collective and individual events create identity and ethics, arguing for a compassionate matrixial view that can be used to bridge the seemingly impossible gaps in the contemporary political sphere. Under the specter of Covid, we see alterations in the spatio-temporal fabric of human interactions enforced by social distancing and the enduring rhythms of lockdown/confinement experiences. Lockdowns have influenced our relationship with home, others, ourselves, and ethics. Spatial-Temporal dynamics between certainty and never-ending uncertainty are not only metaphors for the issues at stake in this analysis of representation and matter, they are constitutive in nature.
Linking post-structuralist, neo-materialist and psychoanalytic theories on subjectivity through a co-poetic embodiment of Khora, I argue the event of covid calls for a new ethical orientation that sees events as a co-creative border-space-times in which we are co-responsible for each-other.[1] This co-event creates communal relations to trauma through what has been experienced as a void in time. The Void itself can be brought to light by an investigation into feminist and post-structuralist writings on Khora. I articulate the concept of Khora as a collapse of the distinction between time and space. Khora is an uncanny home that is accessed through the waves of isolation and co-presence. Covid’s ruptures in our normal communal life demand a new ethical orientation to the trauma of isolation and disease. In the face of the impossible, we can use the trauma of Covid which is co-produced and co-subjective and belongs to shared border spaces, to create a new unexpected home of co-inhabit(u)ation. [2] This new home is the site of our ethical possibilities in the face of uncertainty. Matrixial love emerges within Khora, at the site of risk, in the face of the unknown. In our, co-inhabit(u)ation, we face ourselves as Other, a space of being-with. Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial borderspace is brought into a conversation with my own birthing experience, and a review of current and historical maternal care practices. The analysis illuminates the shared psychic and material spaces of mother/child in pregnancy. Through examining birth in personal narratives, art and politics, the dissertation takes matrixial ethics to the body. Through reading Ettinger alongside Jean-Luc Nancy, Karen Barad, and Gilles Deleuze, the dissertation creates new patterns and fissures of analysis.[3] This process of defractive reading is metamorphic and a khoratic affirmation of being-with, in which two, three, four, and more come together and retain their difference, unveiling temporality-with.[4] Through attention to race, gender, and socio-political fissures within birth, fear, and pain, and its bio-ethical realities we articulate the temporal-spatial-material ethics of maternal care as an abyss that must be turned inside out to get us towards our risky ethical gesture.[5] Alongside obstetrics, the echoes and praxis of midwifery offer an alternative viewpoint which is seen as a matrixial-khora-praxis, that centers on birth as an unfolding event not a due date, seeing birth as part of life instead of a disease. This maternal event placed ethics allows us to prioritize compassion and individuality. We are all at risk, at all times, yet we must continue to act compassionately and in fact, it is our responsibility. Only an ethics of matrixial compassion can bridge the focus on statistics and disease prevention that threatens to place us pitted against ourselves, our friends, our families, and our bodies as a host to never-ending variants against which there is no border. To co-inhabit(u)ation with Covid, we must embrace a risky ethical quest, towards an embodied matrixial love. Endnotes: [1] Jacques Derrida, On The Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr, and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) p. 89-127 Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, What’s These Worlds Coming to? trans. Travis Holloway and Flor Mechain. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015) p.1-7, 29-33, 77-88. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans.Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 159-176 [2]Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) p. 64, p. 159, p. 160 [3] Irigaray Speculum of The Other Woman p. 306 [4]Luise von Flotow and Carolyn Shread. 2014. “Metramorphosis in Translation: Refiguring the Intimacy of Translation beyond the Metaphysics of Loss.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 39 (3): 592–96. doi:10.1086/674298. [5]Vergès, Françoise, and Kaiama L. Glover. The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. muse.jhu.edu/book/77189.
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