The alternative is matrixial border-linking. Connecting one to their historical time connects the meaning of presence and past to proceed together.

Our attitude to the past, our own and the past of others, is important. We need to learn what we did not witness and share what we have experienced, especially when the latter is traumatic or unrepresented. The French feminist philosopher, psychoanalyst and artist Bracha  argues that sharing the other’s trauma is a universal human disposition. Departing from the Lacanian tradition of the infant’s separation from the mother and subsequent entry into the Symbolic order via castration, Ettinger proposes an alternative: the notion of the matrixial border-linking, which she defines as an inherent ability to link to others, an ability every bit as universal as separation and castration. Matrixial border-linking enables the process of metramorphosis, a change that takes place in both me and the other, one that occurs ‘between being and absence, memory and oblivion, I and not-I, transgression and fading away’ (p. 201).

 links the properties of the matrixial to the seeking of connections with one’s generation. Discussing the autobiography of the Italian activist Louisa Passerini, she demonstrates that the activist’s remembrance of the past was not motivated by a desire to establish her own view of it, but by a desire to find out what she did not herself directly witness. The two senses of generation – connecting with one’s specific historical time and producing meaning in the present – proceed together. Today, asking ‘what is my generation?’ is vital. It seems to me that, in its matrixial incarnation, it is a valid reflexive project, one that locates the self by connecting past and present, encompassing knowing and lack of knowledge, sharing grey areas of memory, and opening up various temporalities. As this project departs from Freudian and Lacanian orthodoxy, it also allows us to disentangle femininity from the vocabulary of aphanisis and of speaking, as Jacqueline Rose () inevitably does, of the ‘withering and un-withering’ of womanliness (p. 87), which is the obvious effect of being restricted by a certain theoretical discourse.

Such an affirmative approach to the past might also allow women to be more generous towards their own histories, especially to those discontinuities in their résumés that are often judged as gaps and failures. My students want to make sense of their own trajectories from past to present, especially the discontinuities in aren’t women allowed ‘to pull the curtain down’ for a while, and only let it rise if they can have ‘a say in the production of the play itself?’ (p. 215). We all need to make room for ‘lost’ times.their education: lost time, they muse. Perhaps time lying in waiting, I propose. And, adapting Benhabib’s questions () for the occasion: