Philosophy of Intimacy and the Theory of Justice Studies in Generative Relational Being

Philosophy of Intimacy and the Theory of Justice is a series of philosophical studies that take intimate life as the place where the question of justice is raised first, and raised most sharply. Its working conviction is that how we treat those closest to us is our most honest answer to the question of justice. Drawing on political economy, ethics and jurisprudence, relational ontology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, aesthetics, the philosophy of language, and the formal sciences, the series builds an integrative account of how two subjects constitute one another, generate value between them, and owe one another justice.Volume III, Happiness, Ethics, Aesthetics, and Culture, follows the inquiry into the textures of a shared life: how happiness emerges and sustains itself, what an ethics native to intimacy looks like, how perception and beauty are cultivated between two people, and how a shared culture comes into being. It gathers nine studies.It begins from the plain, shared happiness of the hours in which nothing happens yet everything is full, understood as a generative relation continuing itself. It draws an ethics of intimacy from the Daoist figure of water, read structurally rather than as self-denial. It develops a philosophy of shared travel as a model of relational production, and an account of relational aesthetics in which beauty is a coupling event between subjects and the ground of an aesthetic education of everyday life. It argues that perception is generated, not merely received, especially between two perceivers of a shared world, and that the distribution of the sensible is a neglected question of justice. It gives an account of how a shared culture emerges and sediments within the intimate dyad, and how it resists, or fails to resist, capture by power and capital. It offers a formal and philosophical critique of the idea that intimate life is an optimization problem, and recovers a non-optimizing, responsive rationality in its place. And it closes the series with two studies of language and understanding: the generative limit of what words can reach in love, and understanding itself as a crossing of two symbolic worlds that is never finished, and whose very incompleteness keeps the bond alive.The volume is written for readers in philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, cultural theory, and the theory of justice, and for anyone drawn to the philosophy of ordinary shared life. It is the third of three volumes. Readers are invited to read, contest, continue, and rewrite.