Afterword

It's rare that a volume of academic articles moves me; it's not that academic writings can't be harrowing. I can find theory devastating. Freud's The Ego and the Id (1961 [1923]) kills me every time I read it, so powerfully does he portray the pathos of the ego's attempt to survive the cruel space of its birth between the id and superego. Nor do I think my feelings flow from the topic of this special section of Anthropology Quarterly. Discussions of corporeal entanglements can be as dry as deserts and concepts as dull as can be. But in each of these articles are moments of profound commentaries of new forms of intimate proximity as they stretch the concept of love across regimes of governance.

I was considering how to cluster these four articles, in the way one does when trying to contain and direct the endless possible directions a comment can take. I was musing, for instance, of dividing them according to a focus on sexuality and late liberal governance of intimacy, on the one hand (Weiss and Obadia), and intimate epistemologies of others, on the other (Rutherford and Crosson). But this way of sorting the texts is overwhelmed by the complex and multivalent settings in which the authors place their discussion. At stake in all of them is a question for our times—How do we become together differently when, as Lauren Berlant once said to me, nothing is more generic than our most intimate expressions, gestures, and languages?

So, let me begin with Weiss. Any thought that her article would wind up proximate to Elaine Scarry's classic discussion of the body in pain was deeply misguided. The echoes of Scarry's work can be found in Berlant and Edelman's work on the unmaking of subjectivity in sex; or in a previous text of Candace Vogler published in a special issue of Critical Inquiry; and in the work of Leo Bersani. As Weiss notes, these theorists show that we do not come to know ourselves more deeply or profoundly in sexual encounters, rather they open us to the incoherency of self and identity. Weiss is, however, far less interested in understanding the self in sex, whether vanilla or rough, than in, quoting Eve Sedgwick, all the "loose ends and crossed ends" not contained in sex per se, or in the identities that have clustered around its acts. What about forms of intimacy outside sex, scientia sexualis as modernity's governing regime of subjectivity and truth? Did this science of sexuality overwhelm not a previous ars erotica nor even what Foucault called alliance, but something akin to kinship? If we turned away from sexuality and toward kinship and alliance, would we find coherence there, some clear algebra of human forms of relatedness and their obligated affects, albeit culturally defined?

The center of Weiss's article might wind up in a BDSM dungeon, but it does not center on the dungeon. Fearing her sister's assault by a previous male partner in a BDSM bar, Weiss leads her sister into the dungeon. Once entering, Weiss conveys the stubborn threat of violence from a currently contained—but, the reader imagines, terrifying—stalker; the sounds a specific play of sexuality; its smells of "leather, latex, bleach, rubber, sex." What Weiss wants us to look at, feel, is not these smells, not "the naked man hung on a St. Andrews Cross, being flogged by a woman in a black corset and thigh high leather boots" (though, as if anticipating Rutherford, she is not asking us to look away from these either). Instead, the aspect of overwhelming proximity she wants us to consider is not in, what for some would be, overwhelming sexual altering, but in the supervalent thought—or forms of relatedness—that creates an intensity beyond the given elements in the actual scene. The boyfriend, the sister, the lover, the trans bouncer, the dungeon: each of these "thoughts" express a given ordering of the social field ("a field of enmeshment and imbrication") and release potentialities for a different ordering. Like Chandra Mohanty, Weiss comes to worry whether "through identitarian...