Publisher's Synopsis
For the moment philosophy exists, but there is no philosophical tradition in the sense that I pose for you here. Certainly, there is a religious tradition, there is a scientific tradition, but something like a philosophical tradition... does not exist... If we want to change radically with the world we must by necessity create a world which is not exactly under the law of change. In some sense, a world which is under the law of change is the same world... An event is a radical change of worlds for humanity because it is the possibility to accept a world which is very often a contradiction of the current world. It is the acceptance of a completely different world. It is really the possibility of creation, because it is the acceptance of something absolutely new, absolutely different from our world.
-Alain Badiou, The Subject of Change
Matrixial awareness engenders a disturbing desire for jointness with a foreign world, the unknown other, the uncognized, the stranger inside the known other... [It] channels the subject's desire, mixed with fascination and horror, toward beauty and pain, the trauma of other... [It] gives rise to its own desire, which can generate dangerous encounters... It proposes no fixed settlement, no homogeneous mixture, no incision, but rather retuning and im-purity...[It] thrills us while fragmenting, multiplying, scattering, and assembling together the fragments. It turns us into what we may call participatory witnesses to traumatic events, at the price of diffracting us. It threatens us with disintegration while linking us and allowing our participation in a drama wider than that of our individual selves... The impossibility of not-sharing--the transgression--exacts its price and has its own beauty; it has its solaces and its moments of graces, but it is profoundly destabilizing. You are not cut from lack; you appear by disappearing... In the encounter... in a momentary revelation, in the trauma and the phantasy of the other, you can sometimes register your own involvement. And then, from then on, you cannot choose when to terminate the covenant, or how, or to what extent, if at all. Because the phallus cannot master the Matrix.
- Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace
