What if intimacy wasn’t defined by identities, couples, or other congruencies, but by incongruity and the seemingly empty moments of anonymity and solitude? In this compelling final volume of his trilogy on “the intimacy of the Outside,” John Paul Ricco articulates the aesthetics and ethics of finitude, exploring how the ordinary limits of our bodies, thoughts, and surroundings shape our deepest connections. The book asks us to consider the kind of attention that two or more people give to each other in their non-fused intimacy, mutual anonymity, or shared solitude (including as readers). Queer Finitude redefines intimacy through the lens of the unnoticed and the overlooked—the slight opening of a mouth, a fleeting touch, the clandestine and the fugitive. Ricco’s narrative brings to life the figures of the outsider, the self-excluded, and the unloved, as it offers glimpses of a world where intimacy thrives along the contours and edges of anonymity and solitude.
Drawing inspiration from iconic moments in contemporary art, film, photography, and literature, Ricco examines the lives of anonymous passersby and solitary strangers, elaborating a non-figural aesthetics and ethics. From Chiron in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight to the unnamed Palestinian woman in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, and from an anonymous portrait by Shaan Syed to the reclusive silhouettes in Dean Sameshima’s photographs, Ricco illustrates the delicate balance between intimacy and solitude. Through philosophical close readings, meditations on the moment’s temporality, and a novel deployment of the concept of “the time that remains,” Ricco effectively challenges and transcends the dominant theoretical frameworks of optimism and pessimism that currently define queer theory.
Queer Finitude is not just a scholarly study; it’s an enactment of estrangement from figuration, dedicated to the itinerant and the anonymous. It reveals how ethical forms of intimacy can flourish through non-coerced solitude and a shared sense of the inappropriable, offering a fresh perspective on the queerly exorbitant pleasures of finitude. Ultimately, Queer Finitude asks, What kind of intimate connections lie beyond the visible and legible, in the commonality of our finitude?
About the Author
John Paul Ricco is an art historian and philosopher of ethics and aesthetics, and Professor of Visual Studies, Art History, and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Queer Finitude is the third volume in his trilogy on “the intimacy of the outside,” which includes The Logic of the Lure (Chicago, 2002) and The Decision between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (Chicago Press, 2014). He has co-edited special issues of Parallax and the Journal of Visual Culture on Jean-Luc Nancy, and special issues of differences and Postmodern Culture on Leo Bersani. Ricco’s writing sustains a relation to the imperceptible and illegible as he keeps to the erotics and poetics of withdrawal and departure that propels his thinking and the phrasing and texture of a prose style all his own.