Searching for Intimacy, Searching for Deleuze

In this article, the author is in Paris searching for Gilles Deleuze. She wants to become more intimate with him, spending slow time exploring his work. In her search for intimacy with Deleuze, she follows a map that she buys at a bouquiniste, and she chooses to take the roads toward an ontological conception of love, to an intimacy that blurs boundaries between public and private and between love and politics. Through this exploration, she develops an understanding of a diasporic intimacy that leads her further away from the structures of intimacy often found in the Oedipal home, to an intimacy that is more transient but not less significant. She finds that there is intimacy in the passing smile of a child, in the telling of a philosopher’s secret and from the offering of a paw from a stray dog. In these intimate gestures, she finds a strange and productive tenderness capable of redirecting becomings.