PhD | Ethics of Intimacy: Reconfiguring Relational Knowledge Practices through Errant Movements in Transnational Art and Literature

PhD-candidate | Pınar Türer
Institution: University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: Prof. Monique Roelofs and Dr. Sudeep Dasgupta

This project aims to envision an ethics of relationality that starts from the unruly, playful and ambiguous zone of intimacy. “Intimate” can refer both to one’s hidden, private depths, and to the act of sharing them with another, rendering those depths no longer hidden but “seen.” This paradoxical characteristic of intimacy is also what makes it a relation of knowledge. Focusing on the knowledge practices within this complex relational realm, I engage with contemporary literary and artistic works that create errant movements and, in this way, challenge the hegemonic ways of being in an epistemic relation ⎯with the other, with oneself, and with the world. Seeking less violent ways of being in relation, I work with Édouard Glissant’s notion of errantry which is an epistemic move from the self to the other that is not one of conquest or seizing, and that acknowledges difference via a defense of the right to opacity. Through errantry, I read intimacy as a generative space of (potential) connection that includes questions of vulnerability, violence, care, and ambiguity. Working to transform violent relational knowledge practices by thinking with Maria Lai, William Kentridge, Saidiya Hartman and Adalet Ağaoğlu, I envision formulating an ethics of intimacy which can offer ways of being in relation otherwise.

Image credit: Maria Lai, Figure, 1970. Watercolour on paper. Artwork registered in the Archivio Maria Lai. Photo-certificate issued by Archivio Maria Lai.