Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

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‘NOT WITHOUT AMBIVALENCE’

a a a a
Phanuel Antwi , Sarah Brophy , Helene Strauss & Y-Dang Troeung
a
McMaster University, Canada, 3 March 2011
Version of record first published: 12 Mar 2013.
To cite this article: Phanuel Antwi , Sarah Brophy , Helene Strauss & Y-Dang Troeung (2013): ‘NOT WITHOUT
AMBIVALENCE’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 15:1, 110-126
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interview ‘ N O T W I T H O U T A M B I VA L E N C E ’
An Interview with Sara Ahmed on Postcolonial
Intimacies
Downloaded by [University of Gothenburg] at 02:50 13 March 2013
Phanuel Antwi, Sarah Brophy, Helene Strauss

and Y-Dang Troeung
McMaster University, Canada, 3 March 2011
Sarah Brophy: Well, should we talk about how our group came together to
consider intimacies and just give a bit of context?
Sara Ahmed: I think we need the story.
SB: I think it was at a bar.
SA: As most good stories come about.
SB: And I think Phanuel and I were talking about our respective research
projects, mine on cosmopolitanism, femininity, and sexuality in postwar
Britain and yours on [pause] I’ll let you describe.
Phanuel Antwi: [Laughs] Mine on the racial absences in early Canadian
literature. I attend in particular to the displacements and subordinations of
the presence and cultural work of blackness in early Canada, particularly
those conspicuously avoided by critics or rendered conspicuously absent by
authors in the literature of Upper Canada during the height of the
Underground Railroad era, between 1830 and 1860. To engage this form
of avoidance, intimacy has been key in my thinking. Hence, intimacy became
a point of conversation for Sarah and me and then I was talking to Helene,
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interventions, 2013
Vol. 15, No. 1, 110126, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.771011
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
‘NOT WIT HOUT AMBIVALENCE’
Phanuel Antwi et al.
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and I realized that her work also explores questions of intimacy, and all this
time Y-Dang and I had also been talking about the same issues.
Helene Strauss: We were friends but we somehow hadn’t really discovered
that we shared this particular interest. I’m working on a project on intimacy
and responsibility in the context of post-Truth and Reconciliation Commis-
sion South Africa.
Y-Dang Troeung: Helene, Phanuel, and I attended your talk at York
University in Toronto a few years ago, when you presented on The Promise
of Happiness; we were all blown away and we came back together and told
Sarah about it. I think that was the early stage of organizing our reading
group. The first readings that we chose to discuss were excerpts from The
Cultural Politics of Emotion.

HS: I think we ended up reading the . . .
PA: . . . the whole book. [Laughs]
Y-DT: And my research specifically draws on your work because I’m
looking at the relationship between intimacy and trauma in histories of
twentieth-century violence in Southeast Asia. I’m researching histories of
violent displacement in places like Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia and
exploring the concept of an intimate politics in the aftermath of these
displacements.
PA: Okay, so we came together as a reading group, not knowing it would
become a speaker series. So we had a year long of actually organizing around
the theme. And then . . .
SB: We didn’t want to give up the conversations. And [pause] so, we’re
currently engaged in editing a set of essays for Interventions. Here’s one
thing that we’ve been talking about. Intimacy seems to be a concept that
suffuses your work, your work on orientations that tends to distances and
proximities, comfort, discomfort, the compulsory happiness produced by the
directed orientation toward the heterosexual family and the nation. We’re
inspired by the serious play with words that we see as animating your
writing, and we were wondering if we could ask you to elaborate with us on
what you make of the word ‘intimacy’, its relation to affect and to
orientations and perhaps also to play with some of its allied terms. For
example, in the introduction to Haunted by Empire, Ann Stoler considers
intimacy in terms of intimations and intimidations, a formulation which we
think brings out the relationship between intimacy, power and history. So
that’s something we wanted to ask you: to play with the word ‘intimacy’
some more.
SA: What is the etymology of the word?
HS: The Online Etymology Dictionary defines intimacy ‘as a euphemism
for ‘‘sexual intercourse’’’ from the 1670s. It’s also linked to ‘familiarity . . .
‘intimacy, friendship’, from familiaris, ‘friendly, intimate’ and to ‘compa-
nionship’.
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SA: And the verb ‘intimate’?
HS: ‘Closely acquainted, very familiar’ . . . from intimare, ‘make known,
announce, impress’. I looked up the word ‘conversation’ once in a different
context because I was interested in the link between conversation and
intimacy, and found that the OED includes this in its definition of the word
‘conversation’: ‘The action of consorting or having dealings with others;
living together; commerce; intercourse; society; intimacy.’ So conversation
and intimacy seem to be closely linked here. And then there’s that beautiful
Lauren Berlant quotation where she says, ‘to intimate is to communicate
with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality
of eloquence and brevity’, and then she says ‘[b]ut intimacy also involves an
aspiration for a narrative about something shared. A story about both

1 See Berlant (2000: oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way.’1 Which I always
1). really love.
SA: It’s interesting the impression because that was one of the words that
really struck me writing about emotion was this idea of impression, both to
have an impression and to make an impression and to think of emotion in
terms of the press or the coming into contact of one surface by another. And
then also an impression is a trace of contact. So when something leaves its
impression behind, the impression itself becomes like a memory trace of an
encounter that happened. I think it’s such a suggestive word in that respect
because it’s both a quality of an experience and a mode of encounter between
surfaces. So it’s quite interesting that intimacy has that link. Also, what that
makes me think of as well: ‘to make known’, ‘make familiar’. And the
theorist that comes to mind bizarrely (well maybe it’s not so bizarre?
[laughs]) is Said’s Orientalism. I’m always very struck by his definition of
‘orientalism’ as domestication to make the strange familiar, to bring the
strange home. And it’s a relationship between making familiar and homing,
bringing home, that is quite suggestive when we think about it in terms of
intimate publics. Because the stranger is often seen as the figure outside the
bond of a connection, but in a way Said’s suggesting that the stranger is one
who we wait to bring home. He comes into being as stranger only in
relationship to the project of appropriation or bringing home. So the stranger
becomes a very intimate figure and familiar in its strangeness. I like Lauren
Berlant’s idea of intimating with ‘the sparest of signs.’ I think that’s really
interesting, because when you think about it in terms of just being in an
intimate space often it is precisely a matter of not needing to have to
communicate some things because there’s a sense of sharedness in the
horizon you inhabit so that words become unnecessary. And I always think
that one of the hardest experiences I had as a student and as a teacher was
learning to occupy silence without speaking. I still struggle with it. It is not
really great to become a teacher if you have the tendency to fill the silences,
which is what I was like as a student. You need to let the silence be piercing.
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It requires a bond of trust: to let the signs of communication reduce, until

you are left with almost nothing. That’s really an experience. It’s a very
difficult experience. Going back to your original point about the relationship
between intimacy and conversation: there are forms of intimacy that are
based on proximity to somebody in particular, I guess, where just a glance
can remind you of an experience you shared. It’s that kind of intimacy,
which somehow isn’t necessarily about the words that get sent out but the
words that don’t have to be sent out.
HS: I think a lot of what you’ve said about speaking and intimating and
being a bit more open to silence and to communicating without words leads
to what we had in mind with this question, which is to think about the
impossibility of fully languaging intimacy. And the question we thought of

was: where do words fail to make the intimate intelligible and knowable?
And then what are the political stakes of either succeeding or failing to
convey queer intimacy, for instance, in verbal registers? Particularly given
the tendency for queerness to be associated with absence, the unintelligible,
the unspeakable, the indecipherable.
SA: It’s a big question. [Laughter] It’s okay, it’s okay!
SB: I keep thinking about the figure of the arm in your lecture last night on
willful subjects and social dissent: the girl’s willful arm popping up from the
2 For more on grave in the Brothers Grimm fairytale.2
willfulness, see HS: Yes, communication happens not only through words, obviously, but
Ahmed (2011).
there are all these other registers that, I think, perhaps speak more loudly in
moments of intimacy than words can.
PA: Smells . . .
HS: Affect.
SA: Thinking about it in terms of communication systems, I really do like
Derrida’s text Postcards: the idea that you send letters out, which requires a
certain trust in technologies of all kinds, transport as well as communication,
but that they don’t always arrive at their destination. He shows so well how
the potentiality of non-arrival is intrinsic to what letters are doing, or what
we are doing when we send out letters. If you take from this idea that the
purpose of communication is not always an arrival, the point is not always to
reach something, which is already known in advance of sending something
out, it changes the meaning and the conduct of the conversational space. One
is no longer confident about what it means to succeed in an act of
communication. What does it mean to say I have managed to communicate
an intention? What does it mean even to think without the language of
intent, I guess? If we expand the horizon to think of knowledge projects, ‘to
make known’, it is easy to grasp the potentiality of things to slip away.
Gayatri Spivak, when she talks about ‘the ethics of translation’, of ‘the
subaltern’, described ethics as being a kind of secrecy. She qualifies this
description by saying that she does not mean we meet in secret, but that in
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 15 :1 114
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meeting there is always something that doesn’t get across. That that is
precisely the point of translation, if it is to have a point. Because in a way it’s
about the creation of a new text. The imperfection of translation is what
actually allows you to generate something. And I’ve often thought about My
Place by Sally Morgan. She ends this text, which is the telling of her own
story as the story of her Indigenous family, with Nan, Sally’s grandmother,
telling her, Sally, the narrator, that there are secrets she, Nan, must take to
her grave. And you get a sense as a reader of what you cannot and will not
know. And of course given that there is constant demand that ‘the others’ be
communicative, those others whose particular stories have to be heard in
order to create a certain kind of social intelligibility, we can note this secrecy
as resistance. It is a refusal to obey the command: ‘reveal yourself.’ There is a

sense that to move, there’s something that must be removed. Thinking back
to the arm: it comes up but it shouldn’t come up. It is supposed to be buried
with the willful child. It is not that the arm reveals itself; the arm comes up
because it, like the child, fails to obey a command. It is a fleshy sign of
resistance. Maybe the arm can speak when the mouth does not or cannot. Or
maybe we shouldn’t turn the arm into a mouth by hearing it as speech. I
don’t know how this discussion relates, however, to the question of queer
politics. Maybe you could elaborate the connection between the queer part
the queer question and the language question.
HS: [Pause] I guess I was thinking of this in terms of bringing questions of
intimacy into a space of public politics in the sense that only certain kinds of
intimacy are sanctioned publicly and that there’s a political project tied to
the making of public intimacy.
SA: Yeah.
HS: I really like the link that you make between intimacy and translation
and the things that Spivak says and, I guess, the dangers of that kind of
invasive insistence on making things spoken and intelligible but I wonder
when . . . I mean it’s sort of difficult terrain to step into: who is responsible for
making these larger political claims? In Morgan’s text, you cannot task Nan,
the grandmother, with that particular project, but there is something at stake
in finding ways of communicating, perhaps, what is illegible or frequently
rendered absent within public spaces.
PA: Often, also, if what is rendered into the public can be intelligible, then
it means that there’s something in the public that registers or approximates
the presence of what is unintelligible even as it is denied. And so that denial is
also significant . . . The refusal to tell certain stories is also one of the ways in
which social bodies define themselves, so perhaps trying to describe what
sustains that social body, or to change what stories feed it, might be a step
towards change.
SA: Right. I always find that Judith Butler’s ‘Is Kinship Always Already
Heterosexual?’ is very good on what you could call the paradox. In all her
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work, using the language of grievability, Butler talks about the actual lived
costs of not having your lives and loves recognized. And she talks therefore
about the importance of extending the norms of intimacy publicly to queers
and other others but also of the risk that extending these norms also extends
the violence that follows them. So, you still create other others who are not
covered by that extension. At the same time, you create destabilizations,
because these norms of intimacy that presume kind of bodies are asked to do
a different kind of work. Any politics of recognition, and you could argue
that recognizing queer intimacy is one politics of recognition amongst others,
is inevitably both going to challenge public intimacies as they are understood
(because they’re so tied to a particular narrative of who is there and whose
friendships and familial connections matter) and, in incorporating those who

have historically been excluded from the social body into that body,
reconfirm public intimacies predicated on whose connections matter and
whose don’t.
A related story: in a recent research project I interviewed diversity
3 See Ahmed (2012). practitioners.3 One of the funniest things someone said to me posed this
question of public intimacy quite differently. She was talking about what you
would call the public nature of institutional intimacy, the way in which the
senior management of an organization can appear and act like a family.
Institutions can take a familial form, a form of kinship, a way of being
related. And she was talking about how the senior management at her
university decided to put all of their photographs on a website. She relayed
this experience of looking at that website and how one of her friends who
was not from the university looked at her looking at the photographs and
said, ‘Gee, are they related?’ And it was such an interesting idea because her
friend was right: there was a way in which this group of old white men did
kind of look quite alike. And I thought that was a really interesting occasion
in which the intimacy becomes about the achievement of likeness. It is not
necessarily an intimacy that is seen if you are part of it. And the creation of
the face of whiteness, this restriction of bodies that is part of the horizon of
the photograph, is a kind of intimacy, a way of being related. Public intimacy
is thus also about making strangers, those who aren’t part of the picture
because they can’t inherit the right body. Of course, when you add strangers
to the picture, you might end up with happy diversity, collages of colourful
faces, which can alter what is seen, and yet can still end up reconfirming
what we face in the institutional face.
To think about this process in terms of queer intimacies: there’s a way in
which queer politics in adding queer bodies to the family photograph, into
that picture, does potentially make create an oblique angle. But at the
same time it could be a sort of straightening device, a way of reconfirming
what we face in the familial face. And I think both of those things probably
happen, as a long answer to the question.
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 15 :1 116
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PA: To continue the discussion of publics and bodies, we are quite struck
by the scenario you use in chapter 2 of Strange Encounters of Audre Lorde,
when she’s recounting a memory as a child riding the AA subway train into
Harlem. And then also of another scenario being Frantz Fanon’s, which
today I tried invoking in your seminar, his ‘look, a Negro’ episode. In both
examples they are in mobile urban public spaces: the train. And both of them
are black people, so I’m interested in how black people encounter and
experience their bodies as a violent interpellation and in how this
phenomenology of racial embodiment becomes both an expression and, as
you were saying this morning, constituted by an alienated intimacy. Can you
speak to how you may see these two moments of alienated intimacy as the
modus of habit and inhabitation that contributes to almost the differentia-

tion of a ‘home habitus’, so to speak? How might ideas of this habituation
help us think differently about the conditions of social justice?
SA: I began doing the research for Strange Encounters when I was still
writing my Ph.D. thesis on feminist theory and postmodernism (which
eventually became the book Differences That Matter). In my Ph.D. I was
developing a critique of how postmodernism imagines itself in relation to the
category of difference and was interested in how there was a kind of
fetishizing of difference. And I had this chapter on subjectivity and I was
actually . . . I was looking for an example. And I can actually remember
looking around the room at this moment, trying to find an object, as if one of
the objects I would find lying around could become my subject. It is sort of
ironic because in the end I did start writing about an object that I found lying
around the table. And it was at this moment that I remembered this
incident that happened to me when I was 14 of being stopped on the streets
by two policemen, one who said, ‘Are you Aboriginal?’ and the other one
said, ‘Or is it just a suntan?’ It was an experience I had almost forgotten, a
bad experience. The process of remembering it and coming to terms with it,
led me to the figure of the stranger, to thinking through how, in a place
called home, I could be made into a stranger by being recognized as a body
out of place. So I became very interested in the figure of the stranger as a
familiar figure, as a body out of place who helps secure the ‘in place’. And
the two theorists who most helped me to think this through were Audre
Lorde and Frantz Fanon, who both in their memory work wrote from the
affective experience of being turned into an object of the gaze of others.
Audre Lorde, who in describing her experience as a black child, realizes that
she is the roach, what she first imagined was a roach, that thing that the
white woman doesn’t want her coat to touch. Frantz Fanon, who in
describing the encounter between himself and the white child, is made afraid
by being made fearsome. The one thing that really affected me, reading
Fanon, was when he talked about waiting for himself to appear in the
cinema, just waiting for himself to appear and what that means: to know
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that your arrival into a room means encountering how you appear to others.
Both of them, in the work that they did, the extraordinary brave work they
did of describing the effect of being made a stranger, show how politics
involves making the skin crawl. That crawling skin is also about making
some spaces into homes. The apartness of the white body, registered on the
skin, affects how that space comes to be lived as white space. The body at
home extends into that space so that the spaces themselves become, kind of,
memories of these encounters. So they are habituated. It’s partly about how
bodies become habituated, but I wanted to think about spaces as receivers, of
how spaces receive the impressions of the bodies that come and go. We could
think of this in terms of an ‘alienated intimacy’: how some are made into the
aliens in spaces they call home. What would be the best way to put this? To
be made into a fearsome object or a horrifying object, one that is full of
negative affect, is what allows the space to be policed and lived as being for
some and not others.
And, I’m not sure about the social justice question. I mean, I think that
[pause] in a way, doing the diversity project has really allowed me to revisit
some of those arguments because it’s allowed me to think about institutions
themselves as spaces that provide homes for some bodies and not others.
Nirmal Puwar, in the book Space Invaders, coming out of a slightly different
tradition, drawing primarily from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, discusses
these processes. She talks about institutions not as homes exactly, but as
having somatic norms and being assumed to exist for certain kinds of bodies.
These somatic norms also create strangers, bodies out of place. And then I
suppose that most of that history, which is a kind of habituation, a creation
of a habit space for some and not others, just doesn’t appear to those who
are in place. It might appear as if the institutions can receive anyone; as if
they are open to anyone. You don’t see the walls unless you come up against
them. So a social justice project is partly about being able to give a better
description of the ways in which those spaces are restricted and enable only
certain kinds of bodies to gather; which is why I think that when Audre
Lorde and Frantz Fanon describe their experience it is a radical intervention.
It is an unseating because it describes an unseating: showing how some
bodies lose their seats. And every social justice project is an unseating
project.
PA: And I completely agree because, I mean, we talked this morning about
hope, and the transformation that it can promise and not promise, and
particularly in these two accounts, Audre Lorde’s and Frantz Fanon’s, there’s
that unseating. Almost, they show how the seatings are done and then that
description of it performs an unseating. So there is an undoing, to borrow
Judith Butler’s word where she does that with gender. I feel like both Lorde
and Fanon are undoing something.
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 15 :1 118
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SA: Yeah. [Pause] Which is why I ended up not with Fanon but with a
dedication to Audre Lorde writing this no doubt very sentimental
acknowledgement to her work. I dedicated The Promise of Happiness to
Audre Lorde for ‘teaching me so much about everything.’ And I wanted the
‘everything’ because, so much of the time, work on race and work on gender
or sexuality is seen as work on some particular thing. And I wanted to say,
no, this is not particular, this is everything, you teach me about everything.
Those who have been lodged into that particular are those who can dislodge
the general.
Y-DT: Since we’re on the topic of being a stranger at home and the idea of
inhabiting space . . . One of the things that interests us in our special issue is
the entanglement of migrant bodies in macro-histories of belonging. In

Queer Phenomenology you used the concept of orientations to discuss how
migrants and queer bodies get directed in certain ways, how they encounter
what you call stress points or, alternatively, lifelines that enable subjects to
belong or not belong in specific spaces. I really love one quotation from
Queer Phenomenology in which you say, ‘It takes time, but this work of
inhabitance does take place. It is a process of becoming intimate with where
one is: an intimacy that feels like inhabiting a secret room that is concealed
from the view of others.’ Could we ask you to elaborate further on what you
see as the relationship between intimacy and the process of inhabiting or
constructing a new home? Or, another way to frame this question could be:
how can intimate moments produce stress points, which you kind of already
touched upon in the last question or, conversely, how can moments of
intimacy be lifelines that then might be possibilities?
SA: They’re very good questions. I’d sort of forgotten that passage from
the introduction to Queer Phenomenology. I actually had been thinking
intimacy isn’t a word that I’ve used very much but actually it is there. It is
there! [Laughs] I’ve always been interested in the, kind of, personal, political
and existential question of what it means to feel at home. And I suspect that I
have a way of explaining my own interest as a kind of migrant story, but you
know, having been born in England and having a father who’s Pakistani and
spending a year in Pakistan when I was little and then going to Australia, the
question of home always somehow came up to me and I never quite felt at
home in the places in which I lived, places of residence. So I’ve always been
interested in this question of what it means to feel at home, because of course
in the languages of the everyday, home is often associated with comfort, with
the capacity to withdraw from the strains and the stresses of the publics that
we inhabit in a kind of anonymous way; home as refuge. And I know in a
way the feminist critique of that discourse is partly a critique of the image of
domesticity that it proclaims, and the violence and the trauma that can be
concealed by this idealization. But you know, even if home entered into my
thoughts as a question mark, a mark of questioning, I think I still sense the
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importance of what some might call ontological security, though that would
not be my language, having a place in which to feel your history and your
being as a resting point, or maybe even home as a break.
We were talking about this earlier today. We were talking about how I
went to this conference, and how we had a black caucus because the event
was a very, well, white event. So we had this one, in a way, little home that
was going to be for those of us of colour and then four white people came to
this event and it felt really, really difficult because this was our one space
where we basically could take a break from whiteness. And, in a way, I
suppose, this other sense of home as the capacity to take a break from a
public that is overpopulated by bodies that you cannot inhabit, that was the
other way in which home was beginning to make sense to me as something

that might matter, precisely because of the way in which the public feels very
unsafe if you don’t inhabit a certain kind of body or have a certain kind of
relationship to the world.
From the point of view of migration, I was writing Strange Encounters in
England and I felt very aware of how much being in a different country from
where you grew up felt very physical, like I could physically miss the sounds
and the smells, the food, just the light, how the day starts, where the shadows
fall. And how much, when the past is another country, you can feel estranged
from yourself. I was interested in how making yourself feel more at home
often involves very physical activities: I think of it as distributing yourself
around the rooms. You know, putting yourself in place by cooking a curry
and then smelling the cumin: those ways of bringing the familiar home, of
creating proximity, not necessarily as nostalgia but as an active process of
making a space feel inhabitable in the present. So I was very interested in the
physicality of the process of becoming more comfortable. I also wanted to
show in the introduction to Queer Phenomenology that sometimes it’s also
about not doing those things. Sometimes it’s the bare walls, the lack of a
trace of a previous life that is the most comforting. So actually I think the
question of where and how we feel at home is a profoundly difficult one. I
mean it’s both a personal, biographical question but even at any particular
time you can have a very different relationship to that question. It might be
precisely the absence of the very things that, at other times, are present, that
make you feel at home and vice versa. That’s a long answer.
PA: No, it brought tears.
SB: We have another related question about geography . . .
HS: Yes, one of the objectives that we have with this special issue is to
move beyond theories that conceive of intimacy primarily in terms of
temporal immediacy and geographical closeness. Instead, we’re interested in
a question that I think really seems to inform much of your own body of
work as well, which is how intimacies could be read as archives of cultural
and historical complexity and of the affective messiness that histories of
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 15 :1 120
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mobility inject into the spaces where bodies meet. I think that the discussion
up to this point has partly addressed a lot of that. But last night you spoke
very compellingly about the willfulness archive as an archive without a fixed
abode, an archive that we need to follow into everyday life. So, we were
wondering if we could ask you to comment on the potential efficacy of
theorizing intimacy as a ‘moving’ archive and specifically in terms of our
objective with the special issue, might it be possible to imagine intimacy
encounters as archives of postcoloniality, diaspora, displacement, disposses-
sion and other forms of global movement?
SA: [Pause] Yes. One of the theorists that I used quite a lot in Strange
Encounters was Mary Louise Pratt and her idea of the contact zone and what
you’re saying reminds me of that. And I’ve always liked this word ‘contact’
anyway. And obviously it has an etymological relation to ‘contingency’, to
touch, to come into contact. And to think about that coming into contact,
one body with another, or a body with an object, how in that encounter
there’s already at stake other encounters that are part of the horizon which
allows that encounter to happen in the first place. This makes the spatial
map very messy. I always thought about it and I think for me, I would say a
lot of the theoretical work I’ve done has been trying to understand proximity
and distance and how some bodies come to embody distance. Far-ness
almost becomes a quality of some bodies. I think Edward Said’s Orientalism
was one of the first books actually to show this: how the others become the
far in being brought near. So in a way an encounter is a kind of making
proximate. You have to be close enough to come into contact, but there are
already around each moment of apparent intimacy, of an intimate commu-
nication, pasts in which you are entangled even if you don’t notice them:
ghostly pasts. Can ghosts communicate?
I was very obsessed by my father’s copy of the Shakespeare volumes.
When I was growing up in Adelaide they were in the house, these volumes.
There was a story behind them: I was told a story behind them. I was told
that my father acquired these objects because they were found in the house in
Lahore that my Pakistani family arrived into during Partition. In Queer
Phenomenology I tried to describe the oddness of my own fascination for
these objects. Thomas Richards’ book The Imperial Archive offers quite a
good model of archives. They’re actually part of the imperial archive, the
Shakespeare volumes, but it was actually the story of how they got there that
interested me. And this is a story I can never really find out about other than
its status as story as part of the family script. But the story just made me
fascinated by them. That when you think about the objects themselves, not
only do they have a history, but they’re so shaped by the kind of histories or
mobilities both in relationship to Partition, the mobilities and the violence of
that political moment in relationship to the mantling and dismantling of the
British Empire, in relationship to my father’s coming as a Pakistani doctor to
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121
England, the mother country, to get a postgraduate qualification, the story of

my parents, of how they got together, and of coming to Australia, another
mobility. So there were all the ways that the most intimate little thing has so
much behind it, which is why I thought of the kind of focus of the work itself
as an attending to the behind. No wonder that the archives of intimacy are
moving. Things that have no fixed abode are behind this. We can look back
to how something can arrive, knowing that you can’t necessarily know how
it does so. You can attend to what you don’t know; you can offer an ethics of
attention. I think one of the reasons why archives really matter is precisely
because they show us that history leaves its traces in the things themselves as
much as or as well as in the bodies that we have.
HS: Thanks, that’s fantastic. In my Ph.D. project, I was working with

Strange Encounters, so I think my question came very much out of an
awareness of the complexities of this moment of encounter and all the things
behind it and the histories that are invested in these small moments, these
intimate moments and these intimate objects.
SB: I think that also connects up with David Eng’s The Feeling of Kinship,
which makes a point of reading legal documents and cases pertaining to
property law and of attending to the ghostly relations they’ve generated. The
question that we want to ask next is about tensions within the field of
cultural studies, and I think it was actually touched on in the graduate
seminar you gave this morning. So the question that we’ve developed is:
what’s the potential significance of intimacy as a term of cultural critique in
the context of a field, cultural studies, that is often and perhaps increasingly
organized around questions of political crisis or urgency or the necessity of
critiquing neoliberalism? So that’s something that we’ve been struggling
with, and it raises questions about how to articulate and defend our projects.
Although we’ve been laying out in our conversation today lots of reasons
why there is a politics and a history to talking about intimacy, perhaps some
would say that intimacy is too privatizing as a focus, not politically relevant.
SA: Yes, I think this is a slightly complicated question to answer. I think
there are struggles in any particular site where you’re doing cultural studies
over what work gets to count as more serious and more responsive to the
situation in which we find ourselves and what work doesn’t. And, so that’s
partly about questions of significance. It’s also partly about how relevance is
understood. What gets seen as more relevant to the moment? So there is a
financial crisis, so what therefore counts as a responsible response from the
point of view of cultural studies to that situation? I mean, I personally would
say that there is no better way of describing neoliberalism than as an
intimacy logic.
SB: Yes.
SA: Neoliberalism, at the end of the day, the idea of transforming all
conduits into finance, is the logic of privatization. You could argue that the
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 15 :1 122
.........................
economic model rests on a logic of intimacy, of privacy, which is then
extended into a general logic (evacuation of the public). In other words the
concept of the family, which also provides the affective basis of the
community and nation, is right at the heart of neoliberalism; to what David
Cameron in the UK calls the big society, which basically means small
government. So that involves very particular normative ideas of who is doing
the work of reproducing the workforce, at the same time as it uses familial
language to describe finance (happy capital as happy families?).
I do think that there is a very serious issue around how theory gets
understood not only in cultural studies but more broadly in the humanities
and social sciences. Work on gender, race and sexuality often gets defined as
work on the particular, or on identity, which is then positioned as

‘distractions’ from the more serious political work. I’ve heard that view
articulated a number of times, in print, in person. Sometimes it takes a form
of: ‘we thus need to attend to material inequalities and this is about identity.’
And I’m a strong believer that class matters, but there is almost like a sigh of
relief: ‘oh now we have done race, gender, sexuality, the other stuff, let’s get
back to the real business of politics’, which is class. And I think that a huge
issue is how to respond to that. I think we need to respond to that both with
an awareness of the importance of the revival of a kind of Marxian
framework. I’m absolutely glad there’s much more talk about the devastating
and contradictory logics of capitalism. But the idea that the other stuff was
mere distraction, or that the ‘other stuff’ is not part of the reproduction of
material inequalities, needs to be challenged. I often suspect that view is only
possible if you live in a body that counts as general: if you live in a body for
whom being that body doesn’t matter, or matters in ways you don’t notice,
in terms of material effects on what you can or cannot do. For me that very
view can be a reflection of the privilege of those who are speaking, which is
really ironic when we’re talking about, well, class.
PA: I think I was beginning to ask you that question in the seminar today,
which is: your work . . . and this might be a wrong question to ask now given
that conversation, but following your move in Queer Phenomenology of
how you situate sexual orientation in phenomenological terms, and also how
you turn to the discourse of phenomenology and philosophy as a way to
grapple with differences, not suppress them. [Pause] We want to make a
similar move with intimacy, actually, and pose the question of intimacy as a
phenomenological question. So we’re hoping you can maybe share some of
your thoughts on that with us. With that in mind can you speak to some of
the habituations at work in the present historical moment?
SA: I mentioned this metaphor earlier this morning of, I think it is in
Queer Phenomenology, of the chair. The way in which the comfortable chair
has partly received your shape over the repetition of the act of sitting and it
becomes more comfortable because it’s almost as if the chair is inverting
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123
your own kind of bodily reality. It’s like the inverse allows you to sit. So I’ve
always been interested in spaces as receivers and I think that is a
phenomenological way of thinking it through because I suppose it’s the
most obvious in Merleau-Ponty but it’s also in the second volume of
Husserl’s Ideas, this idea that bodies aren’t contained in space. They inhabit
space, they are haunted by space. That’s Merleau-Ponty’s logic. And here’s
this moment . . . Maybe we would now qualify it thinking through the lens of
disability theory, but he has his moment in The Phenomenology of
Perception where he talks about the blind man using the stick, the stick
that allows a blind man to walk. And he talks about how the stick becomes
like a second skin incorporated into the body and how that allows the
extension of the body into space. That’s kind of like an intimacy, that
extension is kind of an intimacy technology, that you become intimate with
something like any technology really, the car, the tape recorder, the
computer. Once the intimacy has become given the thing no longer appears
as separate. It is actually part of your own bodily horizon and there’s almost
a non-encounter and so you’ll . . . In Heidegger’s earlier argument, you know,
it’s when the technology breaks that you become aware of it as something.
And I think that’s actually . . . I mean I don’t necessarily agree with the way
he presents that argument. I mean, it’s not how I would present it. But there’s
a sense of when something is stopped, when things aren’t working, when you
don’t quite inhabit something, then you become more aware of that thing,
you become conscious of it. So arguably you could say that intimacies are
what tend to recede from consciousness. But when there’s a crisis it can be
in a relationship with someone or a relationship with something then
there’s a coming to awareness of something. So I think a phenomenological
language of intimacy would probably be playing and working through the
question of how intimacy is what allows a recession. The opening discussion
that we had of Lauren Berlant’s the ‘bare signs.’ Is that what she used at the
time?
HS: Yeah, communicate with the . . .
HS & SA: . . . ‘the sparest of signs.’
SA: It’s almost like the less conscious. If words are forms of consciousness,
then I suppose you might say that [pause] you just have to say less because
it’s already there, that intimacy is a horizon and in saying less there is a kind
of a lesser awareness of that and so when there’s a crisis of intimacy we have
to find words. We have to find words in order to make the relationship, give
it form, or ask it to be something. In becoming an object in the sense of
something we aim at, a project, things fail to recede. At that moment when
there is a crisis of a relationship there’s a kind of failure to recede. I haven’t
connected it with disclosure, was that the other part of the question?
PA: Yes. There are disclosures within these interpersonal and intersubjec-
tive relations that mean they are never only about the ‘private’. And so that’s
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 15 :1 124
.........................
where I’m trying to move in, those dimensions of private disclosures as
public announcements, as announcements of disclosure and closure that
constitute interpersonal, intersubjective encounters . . .
SA: Well I suppose, you know, I will be talking about this a little bit in the
next lecture, but [laughs] the way in which inhabiting the body around
which the public assumes its value is to not come up against all sorts of
things. So, for example, there was this event where we were introducing our
courses for the incoming MA students and one of my colleagues was doing
the introductions and was saying, ‘Oh, this is Professor Da-da-da, and this is
Professor Da-da-da.’ I was the only female professor in the room on that
occasion and as soon as I came up, it was like, ‘Oh, this is Sara!’ And there’s
a way in which if you are a male, white and a professor you never even notice
what it means to inhabit that category of the professor because your
inhabiting of that category is never called into question. The connection to
what you’re saying is that there is so much of that kind of intimacy structure
which is a structure of being related in professorships . . . the network of
professors. What I mean is that they have fatherson relationships amongst
them. They give opportunities and life chances and advice to their inheritors.
It is a kinship structure in many ways, and they don’t even see it!
HS: Yes.
SA: And that’s the intimacy that I see which is hugely about the
reproduction of certain kinds of boys, uh, bodies! [Laughter]
SA: Bodies! Within the public. And they have no idea. I know that
colleagues of mine who are ‘good leftists’, critical people, they can walk into
the room and it’s assumed that they are professors. They don’t know what
it’s like to be called into question, and so there is so much that is about the
intimacy structures of the world that they’re in that are just not visible. So I
think describing that is one of the important things that we can do.
PA: Thank you very much!
HS: Yeah, we should probably end but I think we should maybe leave
Y-Dang’s question with you because it’s such a good question . . .
Y-DT: It was a question about the contingency of pain and how relations
of intimacy impinge upon how we can know another person’s pain. What
happens when you presume to know another person’s pain and how does
this affect wider projects of redress and reconciliation? I know you do
address this topic in The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
SA: I think my experiences growing up in Australia shaped how I think
about these questions, even though I no longer live there. I wrote in The
Cultural Politics of Emotion about the importance of not assuming we can
feel the pain of others. I had noticed that one ironic consequence of some of
the critiques of the privatization or psychology of emotion (or even
sensation) was vulnerability: how it is possible to use this very critique to
say the other’s feelings are available to me; that if my feelings are not just
........................
125
mine, hers are not just hers. In the context of settler colonialism, especially,
the risks of appropriating the feelings of indigenous others remain present, of
assuming their pain as our own. Aileen Moreton Robinson has taught me
how alterity can be a protection device! So I wanted to show how a sociable
model of pain requires not assuming the other’s feelings are accessible: and
how we can be moved by, and responsible for, what we cannot and will not
feel ourselves. Indeed we need to detach responsibility from the capacity to
feel the feelings of others (or even to feel for or with others). I think that it is
important to do this as ‘feeling the other’s pain’ can not only be a violence
(that takes the place of another by assuming the emptiness of that place) but
it can also stand in for a politics of redress and reconciliation. In turn
reconciliation can actually function as a demand that others ‘get over it’ as if
for instance an apology when given is a way of putting these histories of hurt
behind us. It is not over, and saying sorry does not make it over.
Having said this, it remains important to be engaged and to remember that
if ‘history is what hurts’ (following Fredric Jameson’s formulation) then it
hurts someone, someone else, yet another, this person, that; concepts like
structure and institution can provide ways of detaching ourselves from how
violence is directed and experienced. So back to Spivak: she shows how a
politics that proceeds without ‘engaging profoundly with one person,’ in
which, ‘respondents inhabit something like normality,’ can easily become
4 See Spivak (1996: detached, anthropological and one-sided.4
270). However, I did make some risky choices when I wrote that chapter of The
Cultural Politics of Emotion. Some might say they were bad choices! I talked
about my relationship to my mother who suffers from a long-term illness
and my relationship as a child to her pain and her desire for me to bear
witness to it. I wrote about this experience in part because that’s how I learnt
about the sociality of pain, of how important it can be to have others bear
witness to pain precisely because others don’t feel it. But I still have some
regret about writing about such a personal matter . . . I do worry how much I
tend to evoke my family a lot in lectures I give. ‘My sister said this, my father
said that.’ And I always have a residual sense of anxiety about what it means
to do that. I am also aware that to disclose such intimate details in this
chapter, when the theme is about pain and reconciliation, could easily be
read as inserting myself into a story that is not mine. I think it’s always tricky
to be personal in or about the work we do, even if it’s often personal how we
get to the point of writing. And it doesn’t leave me without ambivalence.
Acknowledgements
The editorial collective would like to thank Sara Ahmed for so generously
agreeing to be interviewed and for her tremendous wit, knowledge, and
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 15 :1 126
.........................
insight. We are grateful, too, to Jesse Arsenault for his help transcribing the
interview.
R e f e ren c e s
Ahmed, Sara (2011) ‘Willful parts: problem characters Berlant, Lauren (2000) ‘Introduction’, in Lauren
or the problem of character’, New Literary History Berlant (ed.) Intimacy, Chicago: University of
42(2): 23153. Chicago Press, pp. 18.
Ahmed, Sara (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1996) The Spivak
Diversity in Institutional Life, Durham, NC: Duke Reader, D. Landry and D. Maclean (eds), New
University Press. York: Routledge.

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Phanuel Antwi, Sarah Brophy, Helene Strauss

Cultural Politics of Emotion.

aspiration for a narrative about something shared. A story about both

It requires a bond of trust: to let the signs of communication reduce, until

impossibility of fully languaging intimacy. And the question we thought of

as resistance. It is a refusal to obey the command: ‘reveal yourself.’ There is a

friendships and familial connections matter) and, in incorporating those who

modus of habit and inhabitation that contributes to almost the differentia-

the entanglement of migrant bodies in macro-histories of belonging. In

other way in which home was beginning to make sense to me as something

England, the mother country, to get a postgraduate qualification, the story of

HS: Thanks, that’s fantastic. In my Ph.D. project, I was working with

work on the particular, or on identity, which is then positioned as

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