Gkivisi, Eleni (2025) A Matrixial reading of autofictional writing: In search for a new paradigm of subjectivity. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
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Abstract
In this thesis, I present Bracha Ettinger’s Matrixial theorisation as an original psycho-philosophical paradigm of subjectivity. Placing matrixial subjectivity into critical interaction with other psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary theories, I suggest that it re-places the concept of ‘woman’ as a psycho-philosophical category and as a gendered identity. Reading contemporary autofictional writing alongside Ettinger’s matrixial corpus, I present autofictional subjectivity as an instance of matrixial subjectivity. This places the latter as an observable, viable subjective paradigm that can emerge, be experienced and studied in and through writing and reading practices, as well as artistic practices more generally. Focusing on the work of Siri Hustvedt, Alison Bechdel, and Chris Kraus, my matrixial reading emphasises the psycho-philosophical and ideological properties of the category of ‘woman’, foregrounds affect and its significance for artistic creation, repurposes the concept and practice of intertextuality and transforms it into a matrixial trans-connected network of textual, artistic, political, and psychosocial alliances. In a matrixial reading, multiple subjects’ memory, trauma, fantasy and affect, are coinciding, borderlinking with each other in a textual borderspace, pronouncing the severality of subjectivity in fragmentation, and denouncing the dichotomies between remembrance and imagination, testimony and invention, fiction and nonfiction, ‘truth’ or fabrication. The matrixial autofictional relational network can process and assimilate trauma and affect in ways that re-distribute collective psychic traces and which, as such, can have ethical and political consequences in philosophy, the clinic, creative and interpersonal life. Presenting the primacy of matrixial subjectivity as it psycho-affectively inhabits literary modes of writing grounds its psycho-philosophical abstractions in the realm of everyday life, which is narrativised and discussed in fictional and non-fictional accounts of selfhood. Thus, I argue, as the matrixial register is brought closer to the world and subjective experience, new psychosocial and political possibilities are being formed.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 23 Apr 2025 12:56 |
| Last Modified: | 23 Sep 2025 11:33 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/55447 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00055447 |
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