And so it is that the traditional relations between the inside and the outside are shaken by intimacy; at first glance, even these do not even seem recognisable. By this reversal contained within the intimate, switching from the most secret into what can most connect it, that is to say, from what is deepest within each one of us – “intimate” within us – into what can most deeply found – at once justify and provoke – its union with the Other (according to the banal but soon jealous “they are intimate”), interior and exterior suddenly turn out to be the antipodes of what we know of them (holding them to be separate). For now, following intimacy, the interior seems to communicate, from its depths, with its opposite. Hence this hypothesis put forward to loosen the paradox: might it not be true that, the deeper the inside becomes, the more it is delved in, the less it can be heard on its own, the less it can be on its own? This inside of ourselves, the more it grasps itself within itself, at the bottom of its heart, as we say, as its “very inward” or “innermost,” the more it moves towards its de-confinement. The more it signs to “the Other,” which is then no longer the other, but its opposite: a highly significant reversal that I simply observe – it is this, on the trail of the intimate, that I plan to explore here.

François Jullien, De l’intime, loin du bruyant amour, Paris: Grasset, 2013, 256 p.