The Intimate

The transfer happens, roughly, when love inherits what religion had built. Jullien tracks how the structure Augustine forged — depth, innermost, the closeness that stays other — detaches from God and reattaches to the beloved. Modern romantic love, he argues, is the secularized heir of Christian intimacy. Where Augustine reached inward toward a divine presence, the lover reaches inward toward another person, or rather toward a shared inside that the two of them open between them. The vocabulary survives the death of its object.

The key move, in Jullien's reading, is that the intimate is not a feeling but a space. We tend to think intimacy is an emotion — warmth, trust, tenderness. He insists it is more like a shared interior, a "between" that two people hollow out and inhabit. It is what lets you stop performing. In public we present a self; with an intimate other, the presentation drops, and something that was hidden becomes shareable without becoming public. The intimate is precisely this third thing: not private and not exposed, but held in common by two, and closed to everyone else.

Then Jullien turns east, and the whole edifice starts to look contingent. Reading classical Chinese thought — Confucius, the great commentaries, the poets — he finds no equivalent of the intimate as Europe built it. There is no interior soul turned toward a God, so there is no innermost to reach, no Augustine, no vertical inwardness to secularize. What he finds instead is a different way of thinking closeness altogether, one that never passes through depth or interiority at all.

Chinese thought, in his account, thinks in terms of process and mutual attunement rather than inner and outer. Closeness is not the reaching of one interior toward another; it is a gradual harmonization, two existences that adjust to each other over time the way a landscape and a season adjust. The relevant Chinese categories are about resonance, correspondence, the tacit accord between beings — not about penetrating an inside. There is warmth, there is deep attachment, there is the long companionship of a shared life. But it is not organized around the metaphor of an innermost core that only love unlocks.

Step back, and the point of Jullien's excavation becomes clear. He is not writing about God or China for their own sake. He is writing about the modern couple, and about the enormous, almost impossible burden it now carries. Once the religious relation collapsed, the intimate had nowhere else to go. It settled entirely onto the pair of lovers who share a home. The couple became the sole heir of a structure that was originally built to hold a soul before the infinite — and Jullien suspects it was never meant to bear that much.

What he offers the couple is not consolation but a way of naming its danger. The threat to a shared life, in his reading, is not distance but its opposite: the slide from intimacy into indifference through excess of proximity. Two people who live together long enough risk losing the otherness that made closeness meaningful. The beloved becomes furniture, a familiar presence one no longer sees — near in every physical sense, and precisely for that reason no longer reached. The innermost has been paved over by habit. This, and not conflict, is how intimate life quietly dies.

Jullien ends where his method always points: at a gap in the language. French, he notes, has no verb for the intimate. We can befriend, we can desire, we can love — but there is no single word for the slow work of becoming, and staying, innermost to another person. The relation we now stake our shared lives on is the one our language leaves unnamed, carried only by an adjective borrowed from a soul turned toward God. The absence is not an accident. It marks the point where a concept outgrew its origins and never found new words to match.