An important contribution to the burgeoning field of the ethics of recognition, this book examines the contradictions inherent in the very concept of intimacy. Working with a wide variety of philosophical and literary sources, it warns against measuring our relationships against ideal standards, since there is no consummate form of intimacy.

After analyzing ten major ways that we aim to establish intimacy with one another, including gift-giving, touching, and fetishes, the book concludes that each fails on its own terms, since intimacy wants something that is impossible. The very concept of intimacy is a superlative one; it aims not just for closeness, but for a closeness beyond closeness. Nevertheless, far from a pessimistic diagnosis of the human condition, this is a meditation on how to live intimately in a world in which intimacy is impossible. Rather than contenting itself with a deconstructive approach, it proposes to treat intimacy dialectically. For all its contradictions, it shows intimacy is central to how we understand ourselves and our relations to others.

Introduction
Intimacy and Feeling
Dialectics
Limitations of dialectics
Note on Terminology
Chapter 1: The Gift
Initiation
Appeal and Delay
Absenting
A Measured Gift: Lysias's Speech
Chapter 2: Touching
Touching as shared experience
Proportion
The myth of the inmost touch
The wound
Chapter 3: The Heartbeat
Systole and diastole
Indifference and longing
Chapter 4: The Between
God and the space between
The rupture
Accessibility
Chapter 5: The Fetish
The interest
The fetishized body
The promise
Chapter 6: Embedding
The secret
The third
The neutralized third: gossip
The generalized third: irony
Fraudulence
Chapter 7: Conflict
The dismissal
The dispute
Violence
Debate
Chapter 8: The Mêlée
Consumption, destruction, and waste
Laughter
Frenzy
Millenarianism
Chapter 9: The Future
The test
The commitment
Planning
Identification
Anticipatory mourning
Chapter 10: Mourning
Gathering and retraction
Haunting
Singularity
Afterward
Bibliography
Notes