NewSchool

We tend to associate intimacy with the familiar, the reassuring, the personal, the private, the like-minded, and the comfortable. This article argues instead for a more expanded – perhaps even “cosmic” or “elemental” – form of intimacy; one in which all sorts of strange encounters and entities can be conceivably included in a dynamic constellation of concern. This argument begins by revisiting John Ruskin’s famous critique of the romantic projection of poetic sentiments onto an unfeeling, insentient world. And it does so in order to ask what Ruskin may have missed, in dismissing more-than-human pathos altogether. What if, in other words, the pathetic fallacy is not a fallacy? This article offers the counter-concept of “pathetic facticity,” as a less anthropocentric approach the distributed presence of affects, moods, and even passions. From this revised perspective, intimacy is less an exclusive circle of human proximity and belonging, and more a vast and punctuated space of uncanny recognitions and unexpected epiphanies.