Impersonal Intimacy or Impossible Theory? Appraising a Recent Psychoanalytic Rethinking of Intimacy and Love
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This chapter discusses the theory of impersonal intimacy proposed by theorist Leo Bersani and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in their book Intimacies (2008). They propose we are mistaken in thinking that knowledge-of-self enables intimacy and that intimacy is necessarily personal. Working within a psychoanalytic framework, they claim that a key component of being human is our inherent destructiveness, which stems from the ego’s perception of the world as different-from-self and thus as something to be mastered. This mastery is outwardly aggressive and inwardly narcissistic insofar as the world is perceived as threatening and its mastery yields pleasure and is self-satisfying. Having laid out this psychoanalytic model of the self’s aggressive and potentially murderous but nevertheless narcissistically pleasurable encounter with the world, Bersani and Phillips suggest that there is a second form of narcissistic pleasure which can instead nurture intimacy. Based on a reading of Socratic love, Bersani radically rethinks the polarity self/other by proposing a theory of impersonal relationality. This impersonal intimacy reconceives of love not as love for a lost or substitutive object nor as pure narcissism but as love of the self-in-the-other. This theory is appraised for its radical potentials, and questions about its practical effect are raised.