ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a revised version of Ettinger’s groundbreaking 1995 essay on femininity in which she set out her original model of sexual difference after Lacan. Taking inspiration from her own clinical encounters and artistic practice, as well as the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Merleau-Ponty, Ettinger theorizes a new perspective on the feminine beyond the phallus, taking instead the metaphor of the womb to posit a “matrixial” femininity grounded in co-emergence and what she calls “borderlinking”: a spectrum of trans-individual experiences that cannot be accounted for by the divisional, phallic logic that she sees in Lacan. Updating work first published in Hebrew in a limited run of ten copies, and then translated into English in two parts for the now defunct Almanac of Psychoanalysis in 1998 and 2000, this chapter gathers both sections, “Supplementary Jouissance” and “Feminine Sexual Rapport”, together for the first time in English (with Ettinger’s new corrections and clarifications). The chapter also includes Ettinger’s own translations into English from both Lacan’s seminars and écrits, and from Jacques-Alain Miller’s own courses, many of which remain unpublished even now.
