Chapter 8: Written under the Skin: Challenges of Intimacy in Contemporary Culture

The private dimension of life and the intimate sphere of experience can be thought of as counterparts of the death of public space, an arena of social masks, anonymity, and surveillance. In contemporary Western culture, throughout virtual social media, intimacy as well as corporeality have become precious anchors, or even the primary shelters (and shields) for diverse ways of subjectivation. If the public space is marked by the corrosion and/or crisis of traditional identitary agencies (such as politics, religion, family, labor market); authenticity, uniqueness, and its fleshy signature became shared with the strength of a common symbolic construction. In light of the theoretical relevance of asking how intimacy emerges in the process of becoming a subject in contemporary times, this chapter discusses an empirical investigation that taps into the practices of extreme body modifications as performed by groups of people who defy the physical forms of the human species. This group of people continuously transforms their body image as a way of approaching a “true self,” supposedly unique and imaginatively self-funded, as if it were beyond any historical legacy. Interpreting such marks as an enactment of the symbolic borders that trigger a differentiation process towards the other, the present chapter framed this dialogical-subjective landscape as a metaphor of the uniqueness of intimacy and the aestheticization of existence. Based on a Bakhtinian and psychoanalytic approach and the discussion of one autobiographical essay published by a practitioner of extreme body modification on a specialized Internet site, I argue that intimacy can be analyzed using three axes: (a) the exotopic-imaginative displacement from the immediacy and ordinariness of daily life, (b) the search for the construction of guiding meanings for interpreting the world, and (c) the construction of an intermediate affective-semiotic area formed by actions and recreations that put social voices in perspective.