Pollock

Bracha Ettinger invites us to consider aspects of subjectivity as encounter occurring at sharedborderspaces between several partial-subjects, never entirely fused nor totally lost, but sharing and processing, within difference, elements of each unknown other. This is to be stressed: the encounter is between unknown elements. Here we might find ways to think not only subjectivity in this abstracted theoretical form, but aesthetic encounters of viewers and art works, and also ethical and political relations between strange, foreign, irreducible elements of otherness in our encounters with human and even non-human events in the world. Racism, xenophobia, fascism are premised on an extremity of the castration paradigm as Homi Bhabha has argued in his study of the colonial imaginary (1983). Thus this feminist re-theorization of the psychic premise of castrative subjectivity realigns the imaginary fields that underpin our social and political relations.

Griselda Pollock, 'Thinking the Feminine' (2004)