About

Gregorio Tenti is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turin, a Research Fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Research Lab of the University of Cologne, and a future MSCA Fellow at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is the author of Estetica e morfologia in Gilbert Simondon (“Aesthetics and Morphology in Gilbert Simondon”, Mimesis 2020) and L’estetica di Schleiermacher (“Schleiermacher’s Aesthetics”, ETS 2023). His research interests include history of German aesthetics (Romanticism and Idealism), 20th-century French aesthetics, and environmental philosophy. He is currently working on a project devoted to Bracha L. Ettinger’s Notebooks in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Castello di Rivoli.

Research Project: Bracha Ettinger’s Notebooks

Israeli artist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (Tel Aviv, 1948) is widely known for her both practical and theoretical explorations into the themes of trauma, genesis, femininity, and memory. Her philosophical perspective – influenced by poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory – addresses the innermost dynamics of subjectivation and artistic creation; on a parallel path, her art carries out a radical reflection on image, visuality, and the pictorial.
Bracha Ettinger entrusted the Museum of Contemporary Art Castello di Rivoli with a very important part of her oeuvre, the Notebooks, where she has noted words, ideas, figures, and sketches over a long period of her life. The Notebooks are a magmatic basin of traces of the artist’s creative unconscious, and therefore hold particular value to the interpreter. I was commissioned by the University of Turin and Castello di Rivoli to interpret and curate some of the most recent Notebooks: a one-year long project that will grant me privileged access to Bracha Ettinger’s work and to some of the most topical issues of the contemporary debates in aesthetics and psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Bracha L. Ettinger. Artworking (1985-1999). Ludion, 2000.
Bracha L. Ettinger. The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Bracha L. Ettinger. Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics. Vol 1: 1990-2000. Ed. by G. Pollock. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XX. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Ed. by J.-A- Miller. W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XXIII. The Sinthome. Ed. by J.-A. Miller. Polity Press 2016.
Lévinas, Emmanuel in conversation with Bracha Ettinger. What Would Eurydice Say?. “Athena”, 1(2006), 137-145.
Lyotard, François. Discourse, Figure. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Lyotard, François. Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists (6 vol.). Ed. by H. Parret. Leuven University Press, 2010-14.
Segal, Noam. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Radicants, 2022.
Themi, Tim. Eroticizing Aesthetics. In the Real with Bataille and Lacan. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.