Intimacies

Two gifted and highly prolific intellectuals, Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, here engage in a fascinating dialogue about the problems and possibilities of human intimacy. Their conversation takes as its point of departure psychoanalysis and its central importance to the modern imagination---though equally important is their shared sense that by misleading us about the importance of self-knowledge and the danger of narcissism, psychoanalysis has failed to realize its most exciting and innovative relational potential. Persuasive and provocative, Intimacies is a rare opportunity to listen in on two brilliant thinkers as they explore new ways of thinking about the human psyche.

"Intimacies is a very incisive and gentle exchange between two writers who have thought and rethought psychoanalysis in powerful terms for contemporary culture...This is a beautifully crafted book, one that underscores how the social life of the psyche is a matter of risk, wager, suspense, excitation, bodies, talk, and all manner of things both dangerous and sustaining." Judith Butler

"In this fascinating and disturbing book, two writers with prose styles and intellectual styles that are at once famously identifiable and intimately personal celebrate the possibility of relationships that defy identity and undo personality. Braiding together brilliant psychoanalytic reflections on fiction and film, on the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the invasion of Iraq, on suicidally unsafe sex and Socrates' theory of love, Bersani and Phillips at once dream of shattering the ego and, in their own distinct voices, display its miraculous, tragicomic persistence."Stephen Greenblatt

Leo Bersani is professor emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art and Homos. Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst, visiting professor in the Department of English at York University, the general editor of Penguin Modern Classics' Freud translations, and the author of twelve books, including Going Sane and Side Effects.