Session 8: Public Intimacy

3rd Global Conference

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

From the Oikos to the Polis: The Performative Quality of ‘Public Intimacy’ via Bare Life
Gabriella Calchi Novati
Drama and Performance Studies, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

The German philosopher Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition describes how the public realm of the polis has been replaced by the private and intimate realm of the oikos. She argues that in this public display of private matters, we are experiencing ‘the privation of privacy [that] lies in the absence of others’ . Furthermore, she explains that the consequence of this focus on the private realm of individual life has resulted in ‘the mass phenomenon of loneliness’ that in contemporary society ‘has assumed its most extreme and most antihuman form’ since ‘the mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home’.

Following on from Arendt’s argument, this paper will show that: 1) it is due to this transition between private and public, that a new concept of intimacy has now appeared, one that no longer solely exists in the private realm. I would call this new concept by the seemingly oxymoronic expression ‘public intimacy’. 2) Regardless ‘the [contemporary] mass phenomenon of loneliness’, the performative quality of ‘public intimacy’ gives rise to a transient polis where individuals can still relate to each other. 3) The vehicle through which this sense of affinity and inclusion is attained is what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben refers to as nuda vita – bare life. The intimate acknowledgment of the communal belonging to the notion of bare life is the premise for the success of the performative quality of ‘public intimacy’ in connecting individuals’ thoughts and emotions. Hence, the idea of intimacy, usually understood as related to closeness and familiarity, trust and reciprocity, becomes, in this new ‘public’ dimension, a more fluid concept which can also encompass the notion of the unknown.

The Politics of Intimacy in a Society Without Boundaries
Arlene Lundquist
Utica College, New York, USA

The term codependency has been used for more than 50 years to describe the enabling of dysfunctional behavior of one person by another. In particular, the term has become synonymous with ways of being in relationships that have been affected by substance addictions. In the period since codependency became a buzz word in popular and academic writings, other addictions have been more broadly identified to produce the same relationship dysfunctions. Work, busyness, need for control, power, and technology, among others, have become accepted, if not encouraged, forms of addiction in American society. What is common among these addictions is that they prohibit, or at least redefine intimacy, a critical aspect of relationships. Intimacy is developed and maintained through honesty, self- disclosure, trust, and the setting of healthy emotional boundaries. The boundaries of genuine intimacy that at the same time once encouraged healthy closeness and separateness are quickly eroding. Although this erosion has lead to greater enmeshment in many cases, increasingly the result has been disconnection from self and others, which has changed the politics of intimacy in American society. True intimacy, once defined by reciprocity, private dialogue, transparency and vulnerability, has become pseudointimacy, a public product shielded by personal addictions and protected by the larger society. This paper explores contemporary addictions that have been embraced by society as functional and proposes that normalizing these addictions has influenced how individuals and communities view intimacy, thus changing the politics of intimacy in contemporary American society.