Radical intimacy insists that to remake the world we must pay attention to connection, care and community as sites of struggle. Doing so could bring us closer – to ourselves and to each other – in ways that fuel our struggles towards revolutionary horizons.
Rosa, Sophie K. Radical Intimacy (p. 4). Pluto Press.
Capitalism has disconnected and disassociated us from each other. We must return to human scale connection, care, and community. Let us gather around the campfire in radical intimacy.
My use of ‘intimate’ draws upon all these understandings to compose a rubric that includes connection, care and community; put another way: relationships, social reproduction and kinship.
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Rather, ‘radical’ is used to refer to political radicalism: a politics with imagination and abolitionism at its core, that seeks to transform the world by getting to the root of why things are the way they are under capitalism.
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In this way, ‘radical intimacy’ aims to get to the root of intimacy as we know it. It explores the ways capitalism psychically and materially predetermines, infiltrates and thwarts our intimate lives.
Radical intimacy considers, as the scholar and filmmaker Susan Stryker writes, how the state and its ideologies often ‘regulate bodies, in ways both great and small, by enmeshing them within norms and expectations that determine what kinds of lives are deemed livable or useful and by shutting down the space of possibility and imaginative transformation where peoples’ lives begin to exceed and escape the state’s use for them’.3 Radical intimacy insists that to remake the world we must pay attention to connection, care and community as sites of struggle. Doing so could bring us closer – to ourselves and to each other – in ways that fuel our struggles towards revolutionary horizons.
Foreground connection, care and community.
I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.
bell hooks
Foregrounding connection, care and community in our political analyses and action can be powerful. Our intimate lives are the source of our heaviest sufferings and most relieving joys, and present ardent opportunities for transformation. Our intimate experiences, feelings and longings give our lives meaning. They can give us reasons to stay alive. The reality, though, is that intimacy in the world as we know it is often lacking. As the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has said: ‘It’s a heartbreak that the world isn’t worth … our attachment to it, that it gives us objects or ways of life or forms of life that are constantly betraying us.’ Our normative modes of relating and living often fall short – both in meeting our intimate needs and in allowing us to form and build the kinds of relationships that could support our struggles for a future of abundance, rather than recreate the privation of the status quo.
The intimate realm is devalued on the left today, both in mainstream and radical ambits. This neglect not only overlooks the terrain’s latent power for political movements, but sidelines many liberation struggles. For example, traditional labour organising mostly ignores social reproduction such as care work – paid or unpaid – which is largely done by women, especially racialised and migrant women, often in private homes. Ignoring or diminishing the importance of the intimate realm, too, devalues the experiences of trans and queer people, for whom normative intimate forms, such as heteronormative relationships and the nuclear family, are often exclusionary and oppressive. Revaluing intimacy, then, becomes a strategy to resist heteropatriarchy, which underpins capitalism, and therefore to strengthen our revolutionary movements.
A political commitment to the intimate realm also counterposes capitalism’s dictate that existence is about work and not much more. Indeed, whilst worker organising is at the core of anti-capitalism, a reduction of our politics to labour struggles and little else not only implies a resignation to ‘life as work’ but disregards the fact that many people cannot or do not labour for a wage.
Mutual Entwinement
We gotta keep each other alive any way we can ’cause nobody else is goin’ do it.
Larry Mitchell
Intimacy holds radical potential because it is the kernel of being alive. Being conscious of the ways the world shapes, stifles and crushes this kernel, then, is crucial to its transformation. Perhaps because intimacy is so essential to our being, it can be difficult to imagine it being otherwise. Let us feed, and feed on, utopian horizons; let us come together in seizing our desires from the clutches of capitalism. Because we need stronger bonds – to hold each other together, and to keep the world from falling apart. Our mutual entwinement must be careful, spacious and supple, with no single knot tied too tight. In this macramé of loving design, we might find the wisdom, purpose and strength we need, to weave new worlds.
Rosa, Sophie K. Radical Intimacy (pp. 172-173). Pluto Press.
