<underfire> on compassion

[bracha L. Ettinger]

Kate, Sarah, Ryan, Wolfgang, Mary, Allan, Jordan, dear friends,

The originary event of peace is compassion.
Peace is a fragile encounter-eventing, an ever re-co-created and co- 
re-created fragile and fragilizing encounter-event, which I can  
articulate only in terms of what I have named the matrixial  
borderspace, a paradigm engendered from, with and within particular  
epistemological parameters that I have developed and elaborated  
during some 21 years of constant theoretical writing intertwined with- 
in psychoanalytic practice and artistic practice. It wouldn't be  
possible to present briefly how compassion and responsibility meet in  
the matrixial sphere, but I will try to open at least an entry, for  
those who would want to go on and do some reading elsewhere. Through  
some kinds of aesthetical working-through (in art for example) and  
ethical working-through (in psychoanalytical healing for example),  
compassion gives birth to responsibility while responsibility gives  
birth to compassion to the extent that they are not thinkable apart.  
Though we can think and talk on compassion and on responsibility,  
their combination is not a thought but a practiced affective  
encounter-event that becomes a point of view.
The following is extracted from my recent essay called " Com- 
passionate Co-response-ability, Initiation in Jointness and the link  
x of Matrixial Virtuality" [in Gorge(l) (ed. S. Van Loo), The Royal  
Museum of Antwerp]. I hope that those who are not familiar with my  
writing, who might find this language too dense or idiosyncratic,  
would simply read enter this post with their poetic antenne, since  
during so many years of theorizing I had to find or invent words that  
fit the parameters of what I named the matrixial encounter-event, and  
what I can bring here is just a hint concerning a whole field, in  
which the definition of some familiar words change. ( You are invited  
to read my book The Matrixial Borderspace, and perhaps the essay  
"Matrixial Trans-subjectivity" [TCS, 23(2-3)], to have a glimpse at  
this paradigm).

"The pole of compassion resonates with the miracle of non-life coming  
into life in jointness, with the ethical value of wit(h)nessing and  
the virtual strings of matrixial com-passion. "
"Fascinance, compassion, awe and self-relinquishment participate in  
the originary matrixial knowing of/with-in the m/Other and of/with-in  
the Cosmos. Early empathy that arises in extreme psychic-mental  
fragility and vulnerability leans on the matrixial tissue of com- 
passionate co-response-ability. Response-ability, vulnerability,  
fascinance, awe, compassion and self-relinquishment are forever bound  
within matrixial nets composed of psychic-mental strings and threads  
and working-through in metramorphosis.
In a matrixial sphere, the bending of the aesthetical toward the  
ethical and of the ethical toward the aesthetical is awakened by  
artworking and healing that resonate the originary aesthetical com- 
passion, co-response-ability and wit(h)nessing in and by which pre- 
subjective primary compassion is already manifested. The pre- 
subject's compassion and fascinance informs its own emergence with-in  
a co-birthing (co-naissance) of trans-subjective entities—composed of  
I(s) and non-I(s)—by way of affective and trans-sensed knowledge.  
Trans-subjective co-response-ability, inaugurated by and in the  
primordial matrixial encounter-event—where pre-maternal hospitality,  
empathy and responsibility encounters prenatal pre-mature response- 
ability, compassion and fascinance—and inaugurated at the same time  
also by and in interconnectedness in self-relinquishment and wit(h) 
nessing in awe, is the primary psycho-aesthetical and psycho-ethical  
basis upon which creativity and ethical potentiality can evolve all  
throughout life with-in new matrixial clusters. " (Gorge(l), pp.11-13. )

I just came back from a Arabs/Jews/Palestinians/Israelis peaceful  
demonstration at the Erez Crossing Gate between Israel and Gaza.  
There will be a demonstration in Tel Aviv on the 2 of December.
Bracha

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