Matrixial Ethics in The Age of Uncertainty

Abstract: Matrixial Ethics in The Age of Uncertainty

This paper examines how events affect identity and ethics. Under the spectre of Covid, we see alterations in the spatio-temporal fabric of human interactions enforced by social distancing and the enduring rhythms of lockdown/confinement experience. This has impacted our relationship with home, world, and ethics. Spatial dynamics between certainty and never ending uncertainty are not only metaphors for the issues at stake in analysis of representation and matter, they are constitutive in nature. Linking post-structuralist, neo-materialist and psychoanalytic theories on subjectivity through the method of khora, I argue Covid created a surprise event allowing new subjectivities to arrive within and outside the event. This collective event creates communal relations to trauma through what has been experienced as a void in time, which I argue is Khora, the impossible becoming of non-space non-time that defies translation. I explore the concept of the khora as a collapse of the distinction between time/space through its return to an uncanny home by means of waves of enforced isolation, rupturing and echoing with collective trauma.  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.  This new home is the site of our ethical possibilities in the face of uncertainty. Matrixial love emerges as 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 lived birthing experiences, the analysis illuminates the shared psychic and material spaces of mother/child in pregnancy. Bringing Ettinger’s matrixial spaces into conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy, Karen Barad and Gilles Deleuze, creates new patterns and fissures of analysis.  This process of defractive reading as metamorphosis, reflecting on my own birth experiences is a khoratic affirmation of being-with, in which two come together and retain their difference, such is true perception, unveiling temporality-with. 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 birth as the primary abyss that must be turned inside out to get us towards our risky ethical gesture. 
Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, home births were primarily attended by midwives, the majority of whom were women of color and immigrant women. Obstetrics focuses on the doctor’s authority and is a technological risk prevention discourse. This process was brought to an extreme with Covid and its denial of women to bring partners into obstetrics appointments or the birthing room. To sanitize risk, without care, women’s maternity care in the US includes an alarming rise in cesarean sections. The increasing use of sonograms attempts to map the fetus as a singular entity not connected to the mother. Alongside obstetrics the echoes and praxis of midwifery offer an alternative viewpoint which is seen as a matrixial-khora-praxis, that centers on the mother’s birth as an unfolding event not a due date, seeing birth as part of life instead of a disease.