Intimacy, the good life, and instructive psychoanalytic errors.

The concept of the good life is explored here as a means of introducing and contextualising the radical grounds for rethinking our intimacies that the work collected in this issue undertakes. On the one hand, there has been a diminution in popular culture's imaginary engagement with forms of living otherwise, traceable through the shifting representation of what might constitute ‘a good life’ in British sitcoms during the second half of the twentieth century. Television comedies which dramatised opting out of middle-class normativity were gradually replaced by those centred around the familial unit as a buffer against disappointed attempts to forge a future differently. This increasingly conservative trend in popular culture is contrasted with an increasing radicality in the thinking about how we might live differently within the realms of theory, especially theorists who are indebted to and in dialogue with psychoanalysis. This is explored primary in the work of Leo Bersani and then through the introduction of each essay in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]