Turbulences

This article stages a theoretical “encounter-event” between the matrixial psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger and the artistic practice of French queer artist Michel Journiac (1935-1995), exploring the implications of this engagement for feminist, queer, and transgender studies. The analysis argues against conceiving Ettinger’s work as a “master discourse”, which would reductively totalize Journiac’s complex œuvre and contravene the Lacanian ethics of psychoanalysis. Instead, by positioning Journiac as a conceptual “partner-in-difference”, this article treats his artwork as a visualization of theoretical thinking. Using Ettinger’s theory as an “available discourse”, the focus shifts from a primary concern with the origins of subjectivity and identity, exemplified in works like Journiac’s Hommage à Freud (1972), toward its potential as a tool for examining finitude, mourning, and trans-subjectivity. This latter investigation is developed through references to Journiac’s later photographic actions and ritualistic series — particularly Marquage d’un corps-Action de corps exclu (1983) and Rituel de transmutation (1993-1995) — which address his artistic response to the individual and collective trauma of the AIDS epidemic. The article contends that an Ettingerian framework facilitates a trans-subjective encounter between the spectator and the traces of trauma in Journiac’s work, moving beyond the finite limits of ego, body, and identity. Drawing upon Ettinger’s concept of “wit(h)nessing” (to bear witness to and with the other), this analysis elucidates the transformative aesthetic, ethical, and political potential of trans-subjective mourning, demonstrating how Journiac’s art can process loss and mortality while fostering new modes of relationality.