Introduction to the Special Issue—Deleuze and Intimacy: Of Ontologies,Politics,and the Untamed

The collection of papers in this special issue has been in process for more than four years, the idea arising during the northern hemisphere late summer and early autumn of 2017. We think it arose with/in/through Jonathan, but neither—none—of us is quite sure, nor exactly when and how. (We think Deleuze would like this doubt, this destabilizing of the subject: the sense of the idea, and the writing and performing that has ensued, arriving in us, catching one, another, others, up in its surge.)

Michael Lechuga takes an unflinching, performative, ironic look, though mestiza consciousness and Deleuze’s nomad thought, at the “intimate terrorism” enacted on scholars of color in the U.S. academy, who live in and with the sense of “never-quite-being.”

A pause to note: We realize we should, throughout, have been been talking of, and should now be talking of, Deleuze and. Always and: Deleuze and Guattari, Deleuze and Parnet, Deleuze and others. Deleuze and us. It was and is never Deleuze alone, although even “alone” he is always a crowd (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004).

The original prompt for this in mid-2017 was the call for abstracts for the 2nd European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI) in Leuven in February 2018. Jonathan, reading A Thousand Plateaus with four others, talked with his co-readers (and soon-to-be co-authors) about presenting a paper at the conference. They talked about their sense of the intimacy in and of their reading group. They discussed inviting others to join them in a symposium. Jonathan suggested they approach Kimberley Powell, Ken Gale, Fiona Murray, and Teija Löytönen.

Through a set of playful and powerful refrains, Kimberly Powell’s musical piece focuses on a multi-species intimacy or a human-dog or even Kimberly-Luna intimacy; an intimacy that is entangled with difference and where certainty and uncertainty occupy the same space.

Our symposium abstract—Becoming-intimate, becoming intimate, with Deleuze: nomadic inquiries—articulated an intention to explore, and trouble, “intimacy” with/and Deleuze. We noted, in recognition, our writings were yet to unfold in and between us in our various locations over the following months, how it would be cold in Leuven in February. We said we hoped to bring the five conference papers into conversation with each other there/then; into, perhaps, a kind of intimacy. We hoped they would speak with each other and with the audience. We spoke of how intimacy, as Berlant (1998) writes, is suggestive of both eloquence and brevity, the full and the spare, the joyful and the troubled, the private and the public. The political maybe intimacy with Deleuze, our abstract said, is also about desire, or how desire might be a place to begin, at least. As Eve Tuck (2010) writes, in her sad, beautiful paper, Breaking Up With Deleuze, desire is at the heart of Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari; desire as “an exponentially growing assemblage” (p. 639). Desire for them, she writes, is also about longing,

about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future; it is integral to our humanness. It is not only about the painful elements of social and psychic realities, but also the textured acumen and hope. (p. 644)

The abstract goes on to describe how we wanted also to extend Tuck’s statement to consider how desire—and intimacy—is integral to the post-human, to the more-than-human, to the materiality of our encounters. We said we would see where these papers took us as we wrote over the coming months in our nomadic writing inquiries, as we become more and/or less intimate with Deleuze.

Fiona Murray responds to the call of the virtual to search for a tenderness that can be found in transient intimacies. This response leads her further away from the call home to the more familiar notion of intimacy as Oedipal or familial.

We presented our symposium on the Friday morning of the conference, its final session. It was indeed cold. Conversations with and about intimacy and Deleuze were had.

Ken Gale holds a rescued fledgling in his open palm to feel the pulse of a poetic worlding that thinks with connection rather than context. He has less interest in capturing the meaning of intimacy than experimenting in what “intimating” as an affective relational force can do.

We subsequently proposed this special issue, Michael Lechuga joined, and we took further papers-in-progress to ECQI in Edinburgh in February 2019 (where it was not cold, which was both surprising and disturbing). In line with the theme of the conference (“Qualitative Inquiry as Activism”), our symposium proposal there added thoughts concerning how intimacy has been institutionalized, domesticated, called to order (Moten & Harney, 2013); how it has been imposed on and between unwilling bodies, yet, at the same time, denied to devoted others. Yet how intimacy is, and needs to be, lawless; it’s a durable force that will not readily be suppressed. Throughout history and still today—now—families are being severed from each other at borders and imprisoned. Human beings, in the ache of longing for loved ones, are detained near other similarly persecuted and tortured souls. It is possible to imagine, perhaps, even there, the moments where new forms or gestures of intimacies emerge: intimacy as unyielding and uncontrollable surplus; an intimacy that cannot be arrested or appropriated. In these moments, there may be both longing and hope and an intimacy that can be neither stamped out nor refused. Intimacy’s remainder exceeds a meaning-making of experience and survives as, perhaps, “modernity’s insurgent feel, its inherited caress, its skin talk” (Moten & Harney, 2013, p. 98). Intimacy calls us to pay attention, to not turn away. Moten and Harney (2013) ask us to get close, to get intimate, and to listen: “Can’t you hear [us] whisper one another’s touch?” (p. 97).

Teija Löytönen, in her “poem-ish” piece, playfully reimagines collective academic spaces as intimate spaces where what takes place is the speculative figuring of academia’s incipient future. These spaces involve an untamed intimacy as event that forces us to think–feel–write.

Over these four years, in these presentations and performances in different times and places, through their iterations and re-framings, and now somewhat settled here in this collection, we placed/place Deleuze and intimacy in relation to each other to (re)conceptualize an ontological understanding of intimacy through Deleuze as an approach to, a subject of, and/or a necessary and vital affective force in, research—and beyond.

Ryan, David, Jess, Holt, and Jonathan’s performative and collaborative piece generously shares the intimacy of their own reading (and writing) group and speculates on how their becoming-intimate subverts the hierarchies found in academia and more broadly how “epistemic intimacy” sustains and embodies an active resistance to the neoliberal development of the academy.

Our collective hope is that intimacy’s unyielding and uncontrollable surplus can be felt through and between (and, again, beyond) the pages of this special issue.