The Matrixial Feminine or a Case of a Metempsychosis

Studies in the Maternal is an international, peer-reviewed, scholarly online journal. It aims to provide a forum for contemporary critical debates on the maternal understood as lived experience, social location, political and scientific practice, economic and ethical challenge, a theoretical question, and a structural dimension in human relations, politics and ethics

Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory: Queering the Clinic

In our response to Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory we acknowledge the volume’s considerable contribution to re-starting the dialogue between clinical practice and queer theory and highlight three fields in which the debate should be extended with insights from Deleuzian theory. These fields are: the problematisation of key terms, such as desire and the unconscious; the place of psychoanalysis in the contemporary field of socio-political forces and discourses; the ultimate aim of psychoanalysis as a praxis between client and analyst

Painting the Body: Feminist Musings on Visual Autographies

In this paper I look at autographical depictions of the body in the work of Mato Ioannidou, a Greek woman artist, who participated in a wider narrative-based project on visual and textual entanglements between life and art. The paper unfolds in three parts: first, I give an overview of Ioannidou’s artwork, making connections with significant events in her life; then I discuss feminist theorizations of embodiment and visual auto/biography; and finally I draw on insights from Spinozist feminist philosophers to discuss the artist’s portrayal of women’s bodies in three cycles of her work. What I argue is that the body becomes a centerpiece in the attempt to perceive connections between life and art through expressionism rather than representation

Rethinking 'queer' : a film philosophy project

My Ph.D thesis entitled 'Re-thinking Queer: A film-philosophy project' aims at articulating a discourse on sexual/difference by taking two critical steps: the first is signalled by a critical moving away from Queer Theory and its linguistic/cultural apparatus, on the basis of its failure to break away from a 'normative' (molar) notion of subjectivity; the second is related to an experimental coming together of philosophy and cinema - a coming together which actualises a thinking philosophically with film through the practice of writing as art. The thesis overall suggests a rethinking of 'queer' through the becoming-woman-lesbian concept; a concept that is explored in relation to desire, ethics and time within particular cinematic events. The thesis employs two different discourses: an analytical/critical discourse on desire, ethics and time that draws on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, Bergson, Nietzsche and the so-called neo-materialist feminism (Grosz, Braidotti), and a more creative, poetic writing that thinks with the filmmin

The Taste of Living

In 'The Taste of Living' the author discusses Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion According to G.H. (1964) in engaging with key themes of the non-human, animality, a-human love and the feminine as the forces that resist and transform the straightjacketing of humanism

Là-bas: the suspended image and the politics of anti-messianism

What exactly does it mean to assert the possibility of film as philosophy? And what is the philosophical and political claim Chantal Akerman’s 2006 film Là-bas makes