This essay examines Intimacies, structured as an asymmetrical dialogue between two of the most astringent commentators of Freud and psychoanalysis: Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips. This dialogue takes place at both the intimate and extimate limits of what Bersani calls impersonal narcissism. By this Bersani asks us to move past the psychic dynamics of ego formation and their implicit violence to make way for a mode of relationality in which subjects coexist absent of any demands on one another. This approach draws from Bersani’s own eviscerating critique of the heteronormative deformation of identity to communicate what, after the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, could be called the “bare truth” of subject formation past even the need for subjects.

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