My essay, “Intimacy: Inseparable from Separation,” is featured in the latest issue of the open-access journal Open Set. Open Set is a relatively new and really smart journal on “arts, humanities, culture,” edited by Kris Cohen and Christa Robbins. This latest issue is a cluster of essays, interviews and reviews organized around the relation between various forms of labour and artistic practice. It features work on or by Andrea Fraser, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Elena Ferrante, along with responses from a number of people to a questionnaire from the editors on the question of “labour.”

My “Intimacy” essay was originally written as a talk at “Unmade Bed: In the Midst of Intimacy,” a symposium organized by Jacques Khalip and held at Brown University in early-November 2016. I want to thank Jacques for organizing a series of talks that spoke to each other in such remarkably nuanced and deeply moving ways, each configured around the image or scene of an empty bed.

What I have set out to do in my essay is to return to the fundamental themes of my last book, The Decision Between Us, in order to underline and amplify its central theoretical claims concerning the inseparable relations between intimacy and separation,  shared exposure and worklessness, the abject and the abstract. But I also now foresee the text as potentially part of the Introduction to the book that I am currently completing: The Intimacy of the Outside.

I am so pleased to be a part of this special journal issue, and hope that you will have a look sometime soon.