Cosmic Imaginations of the Intra-Uterine

• Main Author: Carine Plancke
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2017-08-01
• Series: Studies in the Maternal
• Online Access: https://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/article/id/4267/

Since the 1970s, theories by feminist psychoanalysts trained in the Lacanian school have highlighted the repression of the maternal in Western societies, deemed necessary to enter the symbolic realm and to become a full subject. Most recently, Bracha Ettinger has contributed to this strand of thought by developing the concept of the matrix as a primary stratum of subjectivization that is part of an enlarged symbolic besides the phallic stratum. Modelled on intimate intra-uterine sharing the matrix is a transformative borderspace of encounter which can be accessed by art practice. This article deals with a non-Western society: rural Punu society in Congo-Brazzaville, where the intra-uterine is part of the symbolic through the idiom of waterspirit beings and where relation to this waterworld and re-immersion in it are cultivated in collective song-dance rituals. It shows in detail how Punu imagery of the waterspirit world and the song-dance practices related to it give body to the matrixial, as viewed by Ettinger, in a way that is fully integrated in society and coexists with other non-matrixial dynamics.