The Matrixial Gaze is a 1995 book by artist, psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, writer and painter Bracha L. Ettinger. It is a work of feminist film theory that examines the gaze as described by Jacques Lacan, criticises it, and offers an original theory concerning feminine and female gaze. Beginning in 1985, Ettinger's artistic practice and her theoretical invention of a matrixial space (matricial space) articulated around her proposal of a feminine-maternal sphere of encounter that begins in the most archaic (pre-maternal-prenatal) humanised encounter-event, led her to publish a long series of academic articles starting 1992, articulating and developing for some decades what she has called the matrixial (matricial, matrixiel) theory of trans-subjectivity. The matrixial (matricial, matriciel, matrixiel) theory formulates Aesthetics and artistic creativity in terms of withnessing, compassion, wondering and 'fascinance', as well as Ethics of witnessing, responsibility, respect, compassion and care, and the passage from co-reponse-ability to responsibility and from com-passion to compassion. Bracha L. Ettinger invented a field of concepts that have influenced debates in contemporary art, psychoanalysis, women's studies, film studies, feminism, gender studies and cultural studies. Publication and response Ettinger's work follows the Freudian and Lacanian traditions of psychoanalysis and challenges their phallocentric conceptualizations. Her book also examines Emmanuel Levinas, "Object-relations" theory and Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari and also critiques them, reformulating matrixial subjectivity, aesthetics and ethics in light of a feminine difference. Ettinger's book is considered the initiator of the Matrixial Trans-subjectivity theory, or simply "The Matrixial". Her book The Matrixial Borderspace that contains collected papers from the 1990s and includes a reprint of The Matrixial Gaze influenced discussions of subjectivity reviewed as an encounter-event, the matrixial gaze (matricial gaze), matrixial time, matrixial space (matricial space), co-poiesis, borderlinking, borderspacing, co-emergence in differentiating and differentiating, transconnectivity, matrixial com-passion, primary compassion, compassionate hospitality, wit(h)nessing, co-fading, severality, matrixial transformational potentiality, matrixial/matricial transference, archaic m/Other, fascinance, encounter-event, besideness, primal Mother-phantasies of Not-enoughness, devouring and abandonment, empathy within compassion, empathy without compassion, the passage from withnessing to witnessing, the passage from response-ability to responsibility, feminine-maternal seduction into life, and metramorphosis. Her conversation with Emmanuel Levinas in 1991, where she proposes that the feminine-matrixial is the source of ethics has become a cornerstone in feminist ethics study. Scholar Griselda Pollock writes, "The matrixial gaze emerges by a simultaneous reversal of with-in and with-out (and does not represent the eternal inside), by a transgression of borderlinks manifested in the contact with-in/-out and art work