…The intimate is everywhere: you bring it everywhere and it circulates everywhere. Queer practices bring the intimate into circulation to create spaces of intimacy in registers including, but not identical to, the register of freedom. They have to have neighbourhoods and other forms of mediated locales, places to go to and ars erotica, as well as developing unsaids around safety and desire that are so intense they become explicit. What excited me was that, in order to look forward to life and have some access to objects to long for and that allow for pleasure, forms of life have to be built through repetition and return. The other part of that intervention was to think about queerness. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas associates this with modernity as such, but in the era of the neoliberal reorganisation of privacy, property and publicness we are lured into thinking that what we return to at the end of the day is ‘real’ and all other things are accidents of spontaneous encounters at, for example,our workplaces, on the train, across the room, not expressions of structural discipline at all.
I wanted to start with that sense of being-with by reflecting on our attachments to the world, and on which count as being recognised as deserving to be in the world. At the start, I wanted to locate myself in a feminist and Frankfurt School tradition of thinking about the domestic in the world: that you begin in relation and in an atmosphere of responsivity. It registers as intensities of attachment and recognition, inferred and explicit, that pass across people, groups and movements. 1 The intimate is everywhere: you bring it everywhere and it circulates everywhere.
Lauren Berlant: My contribution to the book I edited titled Intimacy (2000) was: let’s not talk about public and private anymore let’s talk about intimacy, which transects public and private. Hans Demeyer: In your work you expand the concept of intimacy, pointing our attention to other sorts of attachments.
What other spaces of enjoyment and relationality can we imagine, and how can we build on those attachments and patterns in order to create a world of curiosity and play that is more meaningful than the one we are living in now? This question also has political resonance: which lives count as a (good) life? In our conversation, the private and the public intersect because, as Berlant’s work convincingly demonstrates, in lived experience there is no way of telling them apart. One of the great invitations of their work, then, is to ask its readers what else they need to flourish besides dominant fantasies of the good life. But as a theorist, Berlant is also invested in repurposing intimacy and making it involve all relations that are treated as a matter of course. Their method is both critical of normativity without fully rejecting it and understanding of people’s aspirations to it without fully indulging them.
In the book Cruel Optimism (2011), Berlant discusses how remaining attached to such a fantasy becomes an obstacle to flourishing in times when crisis becomes ordinary. Their work tracks how people have come to identify life with intimacy, and how the latter came to be privatised in stories of the romantic heteronormative couple as an object of desire for unconflicted personhood: the fantasy that love and life will be transparent, reciprocal and stable. Intimacy builds worlds, says Lauren Berlant. Chicago Lauren Berlant on Intimacy as World-Making by Hans Demeyer Long Read Interview
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