Art and the Intimate Universal

Chapter 2 asks if and how art throws light on the intimate universal, or if and how the intimate universal might light up art. Unlike Hegel in his doctrine of absolute spirit, Desmond does not treat of art first, since the religious is the more primal, though the permeability of art and the sacred will not be far from the thoughts tried out here. Aristotle famously said poetry was more philosophical than history because more implicating the universal, but what sense of universality is at stake? Is there not something ineluctably singular about the work of art? Desmond questions if and how in the singularity of the work we find the communication of the universal.

Religion and the Intimate Universal

Considers our being religious as closest to the fecund matrix of significance in relation to what is often called our sense of the “whole,” or our being in the between. The intimate universal is addressed in terms of the contrast of cosmopolis and ghetto as two possibilities reflecting responses to the frequently posed question as to what comes after modernity. Cosmopolis and ghetto might be taken as emblematic of two fundamental orientations to the universal and the intimate, the first suggesting a universality beyond particularity, the second a particularity intractable to subsumption into the universal. Desmond argues against an “either/or” between the universal and the intimate, as seems suggested by this contrast. In connection with a certain understanding of our being religious, the intimate universal can be held to address the rightful claims of singularity and universality.

For and Against the Universal—Doing Justice

THE QUESTION OF THE UNIVERSAL SO CONSTANTLY RECURS throughout the philosophical tradition that one might be tempted to think of it as being a perplexity, more or less universal. The quest of the universal is also deeply intimate to that long tradition, though that intimacy is not often, if at all, made a theme for reflection. Why are the intimate quest and the universal question not held together? Can we wed the intimacy of the quest with the universality of the question? Can we speak of the intimate universal? What is this intimate universal? Why speak of it at all? How can we speak of the intimate universal? Does this universal withdraw from our grasp with a transcendence of which we are not the measure? Does it elude us in an intimacy verging on the inarticulate? Or is the intimate the space wherein the universal comes to articulation? Do we need a plurality of lines of approach to do justice to its significance? The different explorations of this work will suggest how we might respond to such questions, and do so diversely. Can we, how can we, do justice to the intimate universal? This will be our concern....

The Agapeics of the Intimate Universal

Chapter 8 explores the agapeics of the intimate universal: the promise of this is immanent from the outset. The agapeics of the intimate universal communicates a surplus generosity that was secretly enabling in the idiotics, aesthetics and erotics. It is also prepared with the friend, the trusted companion in the labyrinth. The promise in the intimate universal is more than symmetrical relations between friends. Mindfulness of this surplus generosity offers a different picture to much of modern political thought where the underlying motivation of all human association is our lack, interiorized in anguish before death, extroverted in will to power, enacted in aggression against the other as a potential enemy.

The Aesthetics of the Intimate Universal

Chapter 6 shows that in the aesthetic there is an intimacy which is elemental, and bound up with our being embodied participants in the field of being as itself an aesthetic happening. In that aesthetic intermedium, something of the metaxological promise of the universal is at play. The stress is on the universality of aesthetic happening as the embodiment of the intimacy. We can remain true to this, we can reconfigure it, we can mutilate it, we can communicate the secret of its promise more out in the open. More than the idiotics, the aesthetics of the intimate universal is out in the open in this more determinate embodied sense.

Politics and the Intimate Universal

Chapter 4 considers the intimate universal in relation to politics, for some the space of the public par excellence. Does ontology or metaphysics have relevance for how we understand that relation? Desmond argues that we need to ask as much about a political metaphysics (ontology) as a political theology, or a political aesthetic. If the intimate universal has metaphysical significance, this has relevance for our political orientations, not least in relation to the meaning of freedom, here explored with reference to something beyond servility and sovereignty, the slave and the master.

Philosophy and the Intimate Universal

Chapter 3 asks how the intimate universal might have a significant bearing on the practice of philosophy itself. Many immediately think of philosophers as the high priests of the universal, but these high priests do not always convince non-philosophers, be they artists or religious believers. if sometimes the philosophers demand from the intimacies of religion and art that they prove themselves in connection with the universal, here the call is directed to philosophy itself, as a practice of truth, to prove that its service of the universal is in the spirit of the most intimate truthfulness. To this end, Desmond connects the philosophical service of the universal with a more intimate sense of “doing justice” that is prior to the more usual juxtaposition of theory and practice.

The Erotics of the Intimate Universal

Chapter 7 explores the erotics of the intimate universal, aware that there are those who would divorce erotics from the universal. If the universal is the preserve of reason, we sometimes think eros precedes or exceeds reason. This is too simple, and untrue to both eros and reason. As rooted in the flesh of the aesthetic body, the erotics does bring further to the fore the self-surpassing of the human being which, while particularized, is not merely particularistic. That the intimate universal is at work in this self-surpassing, and that it is in excess of our sober self-determination is no argument against the universal but a sign we must think of the universal differently.

The Idiotics of the Intimate Universal

Chapter 5 explores the idiotics, addressing first the pre-determinate intimacy of the intimate universal, an intimacy very difficult to address directly, since all addresses are already more determinately articulated in a more or less public space than the idiotics of the intimate as such. Desmond explores what lies at the deepest ontological intimacy of our being, what he call the porosity of being, the patience of being, the endeavor to be, the love of being as good and its mutation into evil and will to power, the piety of the family.