Finitude, Mourning, and Trans-Subjectivity in Almodóvar: re-reading the AIDS epidemics in All About My Mother (1999)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to focus on the concepts of finitude, mourning, and trans-subjectivity in Pedro Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre (1999) to explore the extent to which the film reflects, responds to, or remembers the AIDS epidemic since the 1980s. Drawing on Bracha L. Ettinger’s matrixial and feminine-centric psychoanalysis, this paper conceives Todo sobre mi madre as a trans-subjective encounter between the spectator and the traces of individual and collective trauma that moves us beyond our individual and finite limits of ego, identity, and body. Emphasizing the transformative aesthetic, ethical, and political potential of this kind of trans-subjective mourning, this paper uses Ettinger’s term “wit(h)ness”—that is, bearing witness to and with the irreducible others—to describe how Todo sobre mi madre engages audiences in a trans-subjective processing of the traumas associated with the loss, illness, and mortality exposed by the AIDS virus, while simultaneously gesturing towards an aesthetic, ethical, and political transformation in the way that individuals relate to each other.