[Summer 2023]

The intimate is where we first experiment and affirm our own identity – an existential issue that plays out essentially between self and self. At the same time, such identification can occur only in interrelation with people with whom one has strong affinities. Identity is also a relationship with the other: what we discover, who we choose; those in whom we recognize ourselves and those onto whom we project ourselves. And identity is also difference: what we are not, the norms that we reject, the otherness that we claim, the distance that we take from certain ways of life. It is not a rejection – the other exists in its own right – but it is simply not who we are; it does not resonate in our private world.