Ettinger’s theory of subjectivity hinges upon her careful philological recuperation of “matrix” – which refers to both an object (the womb) and a subjectivizing process. The matrixial functions as a counter-philosophy to traditional psychoanalysis in light of its reworking of “the feminine,” an element typically set against the masculine, or as the place of birth and death. For Rosi Braidotti, the concept of the matrix transforms the pregnant body into a complex prenatal/maternal space wherein dichotomous self/other relations are displaced, supplemented instead by a “generative in-between” so modeled
himself or was drawn into earlier and earlier life-stages in his efforts to resolve his Oedipal dilemma. Father-and-son conflict is the most pervasive of his themes” (8). Nevertheless, Webster’s argument holds for the various points of convergence between Freud and Blake via instances of primal scenes and phallic women and the Oedipal Complex. Webster reads The Book of Thel as a text centered on the psychological concern of familial relations, specifically between parent and child (which ultimately fails to acknowledge the nonhuman entities).
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Norvig suggests “if we credit Blake with the Lacanian insight that all human subjectivity as constructed in Western culture is paradigmatically based on the signifying pattern of feminine sexuality, we can perhaps better understand his interest in exploring questions of identity and identification through the personification of female desire” (263).
on the placenta or fetus, these “maternal-feminine, anti-essentialist yet vitalistic figurations” that “suggest a model of porosity, fluidity, multiple interconnections and symbolic interrelation, a transversal subjectivity” (122-3). Subjectivity as encounter emphasizes the fluid jointness and encounters of evolving together. In the shared encounter one becomes partialized, fragilized, a partial-subject; the result is an ever- flowing subjectivity recalling something of a Deleuzian nomadic subjectivity. This subjectivity as encounter is also a process of metamorphosis, or what Ettinger calls
metramorphosis:
the process of change in borderlines and thresholds between being and absence, memory and oblivion, I and non-I, a process of transgression and fading away.
[...] Through this process the limits, borderlines, and thresholds conceived are constantly transgressed or dissolved, thus allowing the creation of new ones. (“Matrix and Metramorphosis” 200)
Instead of castrating cuts there are fadings, partial-disappearances and re-appearances: an economy of subjectivity that appeals to concepts of hauntings, traces, and indelible psychic stains. These processes occur along what Ettinger calls a borderspace, since they
“are subject to a perpetual retuning and rehoning, and are thus never stabilized as a cut, split, or division” (Pollock “Femininity” 19). Such a concept of a borderspace is evident between Thel and the poem’s other entities insofar as the process of subjectivization fluidly moves through a series of connects and disconnects, a slow moving process of “perpetual retuning and rehoning” as if the process of subjectivization works here like psychic “antennae,” a process of carefully feeling out points of contact and minor
resonances; it is a process recalling the mole in Thel’s Motto. 122
Such a hermeneutics of retuning and rehoning takes us beyond the traditional psychoanalytical focus on vision and alternatively offers “acoustic, sonorous, and tactile potentialities that themselves move beyond the limits of bodies and the boundaries between inside and outside, suggesting wavelengths and frequencies that resonate and come into and move out of connection without ever being completely held or lost” (Pollock “Femininity” 20). Thel, like the mole, moves through the vales of Har in a constant process of reattunement with the others. From the “self-effacing” Lilly (Hutchings 97), the “lowly” Clay (5:1, E5) to the dissolving Cloud, what The Book of Thel presents us with is a picture of a community
that coheres in its incoherence. For given that each entity is in the process of
dispossession (including Thel though she struggles with the process), and each is co- implicated in one another’s process or “natural economy” (to use Hutchings’ phrase), the poem presents an order of things that coexists via co-dispossession. For instance, while Thel initially finds a sympathetic identification with the Cloud, saying “I am like thee,” her claim at the end of their encounter of how she is unlike the Cloud suggests not the complete disidentification between the two, but rather speaks to the coextensive processes of co-emerging and co-fading that inform subjectivity as encounter, or
matrixial subjectivity. Thel even describes herself in such transitive terms: “like a watry bow [...] parting cloud [...] reflection in a glass, like shadows in the water [...] a smile [...] doves voice [...] transient day [...] music in the air” (1:8-11, E3). When Thel suggests that she lives to “be at death the food of worms” (3:23, E5) the worm is called out of its
122 Ettinger speaks of the “erotic antennae” of the psyche as the traces that persist from the intrauterine
“lowly bed” (3:28, E5) to encounter Thel, an encounter that seems to present the most ontological trouble: “Art thou a Worm? [...] art thou but a Worm? I see thee like an infant [...] Is this a Worm?” (4:2-5, E5). To be sure, the matrixial economy with its subjectivity based in co-existence, co-emergence and co-fading, when read alongside the encounters within The Book of Thel, complements ecocritical readings of this poem (cf. Hutchings
and Morton), dovetailing especially with Kevin Hutchings’s reading that “Har’s natural economy epitomizes a highly ethical mode of mutual coexistence” (90). And yet, to insist on the co-existent nature of things in this poem does not necessarily imply the image of nature that Brian Wilkie finds: “the pastel Disneyland Thel seems to live in” (64). Hence despite its “cartoonish watercolour illustrations” (Morton 155) what The Book of Thel
attempts to articulate is resonant with the darker, more complex aspect of Ettinger’s expansive subjectivity, namely, that co-existence is not synonymous with happiness and rather is uncomfortably open to the traumas of others. The implication of the repeated dictum of “we live not for ourselves” (4:10, E5) is not that we live for others but rather that we live with others, and it is this subtle difference that shifts our reading of the text’s
self-sacrificial message towards one that emphasizes co-existence.123 In fact, it is this co- existence that becomes impossible to avoid. The “voice of sorrow” from the hollow pit in
123 My reading of The Book of Thel as containing a model of co-existence is a counter-reading to that of
David Worrall, who suggests “Thel’s refusals are a rejection of her co-option into such a [Swedenborgian] community and, implicitly, a rejection of the entire colonization project” (17) and to that of Helen Bruder, who emphasizes the sharp divisions between subjects and who sees the Cloud’s “hypocritical male philosophy” in highly gendered terms, as seducing the Clod of Clay “into a role of slavery and self-
annihilation” (50-1). Bruder takes issue with “triumphalist reading[s]” because they are “premised upon the belief that Har is a liberating environment, or at the very least a place amenable to sexually and socially radical ideas [...] For the striking fact about The Book of Thel is that it offers no alternative to the
conventional and stereotypical feminine roles it so astutely caricatures” (53). Stereotypical feminine roles are not synonymous with “the feminine” in a psychoanalytic context, the latter of which is my focus here. While The Book of Thel may not posit an affirmative alternative, its matrixial space is amenable to the potentiality of thought, like Kant’s general anthropology.
its series of questions seems troubled by the very openness of the partial-subject (“Why
cannot the Ear be closed?”[6:11, E6]). Ear opened, eyelids stored, tongue “impress’d with honey from every wind” (6:16, E6), ear like “a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in” (6:17, E6) and nostril “wide inhaling” (6:18, E6), the voice announces the impossibility of not being-with the other. It is through the processes of co-emerging and co-fading that Thel, as a fragilized partial-subject, endures.