Extimacy in the Miller's Tale

Abstract

In the Miller's Tale, a story of a man whose cuckolding by his tenant exposed to his community, the category of privacy appears frequently: the words pryvetee, privy, and prively appear thirteen times in the course of the tale. But the way in which privacy fictionalized in the tale requires that be discussed not as a separate category connected with the concept of intimacy and opposed to the category of the public, but rather as part of a structure in which inside and outside always turn into one another. What I am referring to here the structure of extimacy or extimite, that is, the presence of what Other at the place thought to be most intimate.1 The expression extimite, coined by Jacques Lacan, is necessary in order to escape the common ravings about a psychism supposedly located in a biopartition between interior and exterior.2 As Jacques-Alain Miller explains, it not enough to say that this bioparti tion unsatisfactory. We must also elaborate a relation instead. This relation coined in the term extimacy: not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate Other?like a foreign body, a parasite.3 Dylan Evans defines extimacy as the problematization of the opposition between inside and outside, between container and contained.4 Such problematization of oppositions entails a desire for and deferral of the limit between inside and outside, between private and public. In other words, the polarity between what socially accessible and what intimate, between public and private worlds, in fact not a polarity at all, but a distinction that collapses before even formulated.