Toward a New Cartography of Intimacy: A Radical, Anti-Pornographic Ethics of Presence

Friday, March 28, 2025

My desire to connect with someone remaining unmet, and a deep, lingering sense of dissatisfaction setting in—partly due to the current model of intimacy, reduced to a predictable grammar of performance, conquest, and scripted gestures. I outperformed myself again and articulated a new way—radically human—of encountering one another.

What we call “intimacy” today often mimics the syntax of pornography: acceleration, intensity, penetration, climax. But what if intimacy were not about escalation, but about presence? What if touch was not a prelude, but a language in itself? What if intimacy could be de-pornographized—reclaimed as a sovereign exchange between subjects?

This proposal outlines a radical, non-invasive and deeply ethical alternative to current models of intimacy: a sensory cartography based on mutual recognition, temporality, attunement, and the refusal of possession.

A Return to the Word: Language as the First Encounter

Intimacy begins with language—not as seduction or manipulation, but as disclosure, as positioning oneself in time, space, and vulnerability. Here, the conversation is not instrumental. It is not meant to lead somewhere else. It is the beginning of presence.

Thinkers like Adriana Cavarero (Relating Narratives) and Emmanuel Levinas remind us that the voice, before the body, is the primary exposure of the self. To speak is to emerge. To listen is to host.

The Eyes That Recognize

The gaze, stripped of its usual invasive quality, becomes here a tool of recognition. Not to consume or conquer, but to see. It marks the mutual transition from abstract other to singular presence.

This echoes Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chiasm—the intertwining of perception. To look at someone, in this framework, is to co-constitute a world of relation, where bodies are not objects, but thresholds.

Layered Touch: The Tactile as Presence, Not Precursor

Touch progresses in stages—first above clothing, then on bare skin, with pauses, breathing, and a shared rhythm. This is not foreplay. There is no goal. The point is not escalation but resonance. Touch is not a means, it is an end.

Here, the body is not fragmented. There is no hierarchy of erogenous zones. The entire surface is alive, perceptive, responsive. This recalls Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus, where the body is always a spacing, a contact, never a closed object.

The Refusal of Invasion: No Penetration, No Intrusion

There is no penetration. Not out of fear, modesty, or morality—but as a radical ethical choice. Penetration, in its conventional framing, has been saturated with narratives of conquest and dissolution of boundaries. This model resists that.

The subject remains sovereign. There is no melting, merging, or dissolving. Intimacy is not about becoming one. It is about being two, fully, in co-presence.

Desintensification as Care

The refusal of crescendo. The introduction of interstices—pauses, laughter, breath. The space for retreat and return. To not do becomes an active gesture of respect. The erotic, here, is de-verticalized. No climax, no explosion. Only vibration.

This links back to Bataille’s notion of intermittence in L’Érotisme, but inverted—where withdrawal becomes not loss, but the pulse of true presence.

Memory as Intimacy: Sharing of Objects, Histories, Fragments

After touch, objects. To show someone an object that carries memory is to let them touch the sediment of time in you. This step reintroduces the world—intimacy as the opening to the exterior, not the folding into private fusion.

This connects to Walter Benjamin’s idea of the aura in objects—fragments imbued with time, experience, story.

Anti-Pornography as Affirmation of Sovereignty

This cartography is the antithesis of pornography. It refuses visibility. It refuses commodification. It refuses consumption. It is unphotographable.

It is the site where desire is no longer modeled on market logic, but on the ethical relation between singularities. It is where the other remains opaque, sovereign, unpossessed.

In this radical intimacy, no one is reduced. No one is owned. Each remains a subject, a world, a moving constellation. And it is in this refusal to conquer that something truly human emerges: the beauty of proximity without collapse.

This article echoes some published fragments of my system, on intimacy and sexuality