SPECIAL ISSUE: INTIMACY

Winter 1998
Volume 24, Number 2

This number of Critical Inquiry takes on as a problem how to articulate the ways the utopian, optimism-sustaining versions of intimacy meet the normative practices, fantasies, institutions, and ideologies that organize people's worlds. The essays gathered here, whose cases traverse many disciplines and domains, vary widely in the critical and rhetorical registers in which they represent the continuities and discontinuities within the intimate field, looking at their particular impacts on the categorization of experience and subjectivity. They seek to understand the pedagogies that encourage people to identify having a life with having an intimate life. They track the processes by which intimate lives absorb and repel the rhetorics, laws, ethics, and ideologies of the hegemonic public sphere, but also personalize the effects of the public sphere and reproduce a fantasy that private life is the real in contrast to collective life: the surreal, the elsewhere, the fallen, the irrelevant. How can we think about the ways attachments make people public, producing transpersonal identities and subjectivities, when those attachments come from within spaces as varied as those of domestic intimacy, state policy, and mass-mediated experiences of intensely disruptive crises? And what have these formative encounters to do with the effects of other, less institutionalized events, which might take place on the street, on the phone, in fantasy, at work, but rarely register as anything but residue? Intimacy names the enigma of this range of attachments, and more; and it poses a question of scale that links the instability of individual lives to the trajectories of the collective.

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This special issue seeks to further ongoing conversations in the humanities and humanistic social sciences about the modes of attachment that make persons public and collective and that make collective scenes intimate spaces. The essays to follow begin to catalog some of intimacy's norms, forms, and crimes: how public institutions use issues of intimate life to normalize particular forms of knowledge and practice and to create compliant subjects (Poovey, Grayson, Povinelli, Warner and Berlant); how discourses of sexual suffering or trauma have so magnetized crises in a whole set of related fields that stories of the intimate have become inseparable from, for example, stories about citizenship, capitalism, aesthetic forms, political violence, and the writing of history (Hanchard, Boym, Herzog, Kipnis, Poovey, Vogler, Povinelli, Warner and Berlant); how people become surprised by the ways ordinary exchanges become intensified performances of mutuality and grounded by the centrality of ritualized language for intimacy (Sedgwick, Feld, Vogler, Kipnis); how memory works to create portable scenes that remind one of past intimacies and perform their strange reappearance in unusual spaces (Boym, Herzog, Povinelli, Sedgwick, Feld) and usual ones (Snyder and Letinsky).

Lauren Berlant, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry, teaches English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997) and The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991).