#extimate

In the last phase of his theory, Lacan does not stop emphasizing that the real of the body, for example, the somatic source of the drive, is something fundamentally alien to us subjects of the symbolic. We would rather have an ex-timate than an intimate relation to our body. Actually, it occurs to Lacan that ancient, vague ideas about the existence of something like an unconscious emerged from this ex-timate relation. Indeed, both the unconscious and the body are intimate parts of us that are nevertheless totally alien and unknown. Who knows what’s happening in his/ her own body? Who knows what’s happening in his/her own unconscious? (Lacan, 1977, p 6)

In the last phase of his theory, Lacan does not stop emphasizing that the real of the body, for example, the somatic source of the drive, is something fundamentally alien to us subjects of the symbolic. We would rather have an extimate than an intimate relation to our body. Actually, it occurs to Lacan that ancient, vague ideas about the existence of something like an unconscious emerged from this extimate relation. Indeed, both the unconscious and the body are intimate parts of us that are nevertheless totally alien and unknown. Who knows what’s happening in his/ her own body? Who knows what’s happening in his/her own unconscious? (Lacan, 1977, p 6)

In the last phase of his theory, Lacan does not stop emphasizing that the real of the body, for example, the somatic source of the drive, is something fundamentally alien to us subjects of the symbolic. We would rather have an ex-timate than an intimate relation to our body. Actually, it occurs to Lacan that ancient, vague ideas about the existence of something like an unconscious emerged from this ex-timate relation. Indeed, both the unconscious and the body are intimate parts of us that are nevertheless totally alien and unknown. Who knows what’s happening in his/ her own body? Who knows what’s happening in his/her own unconscious? (Lacan, 1977, p 6)

Lacan conceives the extimate Thing as the real vortex of the human symbolic universe. Thus, the extimacy of the Thing refers to the position of the Lacanian real as such, first the real carved out by symbolization, and then the real empty centre of the subject’s world structured by the symbolic system of language. According to Lacan (1959-1960), this extimate real centre of the gravity of our action, which is neither inside nor outside, would be concealed by “the imaginary” underlying “every psychology”, which “is nothing more than a mask, and sometimes even an alibi, for the effort to focus on the problem of our own action, something that is the essence and the very foundation of all ethical reflection”.

By simplistically distinguishing the mental inside and the material outside, or individual intimacy and social or cultural exteriority, traditional and conventional psychology would already be disguising that which is always at stake in our action, namely, something “extimate” that Lacan (1968-1969) would later name “object a”, something that will always “join the intimate to the radical exteriority”, something that would have an “edge structure” (pp. 248-249). The Lacanian extimate object a would not only be at the edge of ourselves, it would also be the edge itself, the edge between our intimacy and an exteriority conceived as that which is excluded from our intimacy.