Session 5: Individuality, Self-Identity and Love, 2

3rd Global Conference

Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Friendship, Sistership and Personal Identity in Early Adolescence: Conversation Analysis Approach
Kamila Ciepiela
University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland

The paper seeks to explore the effect of the relationships of friends and sisters on personal identity performance and its linguistic expression in conversational contexts. Drawing upon Aristotle’s definition of friendship an attempt will be made to explicate modern understandings of the two notions pointing to their relevance for personal identity construction and performance.

Aristotle’s definition delineates the notion of friendship distinguishing between a genuine friendship and two other forms: one based on mutual usefulness, the other on pleasure. The genuine form of friendship, not being widely accepted in modern societies, seems to be critical for development of personal identity. Modern approaches to identity have been influenced by Cooley’s notion of the looking-glass self (Cooley, 1902). Briefly, it means that our actions and behaviours are mirrored back to us through the responses of other people. If I project a particular image to other people, that image will be either reinforced or challenged by the ways in which people respond to me in their interactions. If I love the other person for their own sake not just for what they are or what they can offer then I put the interests of the other before my own. I can also see that we are separate and different from each other. I get to know myself and the other. Seemingly, sistership is easier to define as it involves the kinship relation between a female offspring and the siblings, yet the nature of the bond is far from being simple. Sistership can involve co-operative behaviours and be based on either of the forms of friendship in terms of Aristotle’s definition or else it can involve either competition or resentment where it can be based on animosity or hatred. Still, this relationship appears to play a significant role in identity construction since people are engaged in sistership from early years of life hence ‘sistership looking glass’ is available much earlier in identity development than ‘the friendship looking glass’. Consequently they both appear to exert differential yet complementary influence upon identity construction and performance.

In the course of presentation I will elucidate the above-mentioned issues focusing on how the two types of relationships get surfaced in conversations and the way they are realized with linguistic means. Data comprise real-life recorded conversations between three early-teenage girls; two are sisters, the third one is a close friend of the younger sister. The conversations, held in Polish, have been transcribed and translated into English.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Impersonal Intimacy or Impossible Theory? Appraising a Recent Psychoanalytic Rethinking of Intimacy and Love
Jennifer Cooke
Department of English and Drama, Loughborough University, United Kingdom

This paper will present and discuss the theory of ‘impersonal intimacy’ proposed by theorist Leo Bersani and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in their book Intimacies (2008). They maintain that 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 (72). 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, retaining but also extending more affirmatively the Freudian and Lacanian assertions that all love is really self-love. Instead of focusing on the difference of what Bersani calls ‘psychological individuality’ in our lover, we should look to and cultivate the potentiality of the type of being that our lover is, that is also the same as us; his – or her or, perhaps, our – universal singularity (86). Practically speaking, this involves conducting our relationships differently, not as forms of negotiation with otherness or as possession but as a radical loss of self. This paper seeks to appraise the possibility, potential and implications of such an ‘impersonal intimacy’.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)