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 simple and demanding: 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, structural linguistics, developmental psychology, feminist theory, and the formal sciences, the series builds an integrative account of how two subjects come to constitute one another, generate value between them, and owe one another justice. Each study enters from a different side; together they compose a single sustained inquiry.Volume I, Relational Being, the Subject, and the Word, lays the groundwork. It begins from a relational ontology on which the self is not given prior to its bonds but comes into being within them, through the mediation of language, norms, and shared attention. From this starting point the volume moves through nine studies.It examines the ethics of the technologies that increasingly mediate intimate life, and asks what is owed to a person who becomes the subject of a system built for them. It reconstructs the normativity of the lover’s vow, and shows why a promise one gives oneself must remain answerable to the other it concerns. It reads the gift as a language spoken between two people, and traces what is lost when that language is settled into a ledger. It gives an account of how the subject is formed in joint attention and in the desire of the other. It brings a contemporary theory of epistemic injustice to bear on the marriage proposal, asking under what conditions its very staging can wrong the person it means to honour. It sketches a 'diplomacy' of the wider relational field of families and society. It considers the poem as a limit case of what language can and cannot reach in love. And it closes with an account of what makes an intimate bond sustainable rather than self-consuming.The volume is written for readers in philosophy, ethics, and the theory of justice, and for anyone prepared to think rigorously about the ordinary life of relationships. It is the first of three volumes. Readers are invited to read, contest, continue, and rewrite.