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5 - A Conspiracy

from PART ONE - Intimacy Through Four Lenses

Ziyad Marar
Ziyad Marar
Affiliation:
SAGE
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Summary

What is it to know someone else? Much as intimacy demands mutual knowingness, this is a particularly difficult and paradoxical task.

I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other (“I know you – I'm the only one who really knows you!”); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins, solve the riddle.

(Barthes 2002: 134)

Roland Barthes is writing about love in A Lover's Discourse, but the insight is relevant. I've made much of the fact that mutual knowledge is key to the experience of intimacy and yet, as we have seen, it is a tantalizingly elusive experience.

In a parenthetical aside Barthes pins down more precisely what this elusive knowledge consists in: “Of everyone I had known, X was certainly the most impenetrable. This was because you never knew anything about his desire: isn't knowing someone precisely that – knowing his desire?”

Why are we so sure that the truth lies within? Barthes' insight that to know someone is to know what they desire brings with it the relevant corollary: because not all desires lie on the surface. Or, where we find them on the surface, we feel we are encountering a lie.

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Chapter
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Intimacy
Understanding the Subtle Power of Human Connection
 , pp. 65 - 80
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2012

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