<underfire> on compassion

[Retort]

"...those...who might find this language too dense or idiosyncratic..." 
  Whoever might that be?

Actually, overhearing all this compassion-talk makes me want to reach 
for my Nietzsche. Doesn't it worry any of you that compassion is Bush's 
favorite emotion? It's almost as creepy as "tolerance".

IB






On Nov 11, 2006, at 3:50 PM, bracha L. Ettinger wrote:


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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