Intimacy between/with the Sans-Terre and the ‘austere lands’ of a Hospitable Thinking

This article addresses the question of intimacy between/with the sans-terre (a term inspired by Bruno Latour), of homeless intimacy, and of intimacy in austere and inhospitable lands. Reading through Jacques Derrida's seminars on Hospitality, it questions the very idea of a deterritorialized, displaced or homeless, intimacy and argues for the elaboration of homeliness through intimacy. Deviating from the idea of an ‘exposed privacy’, it develops the hypothesis that home-making intimacy is based on familiarity without family and reflects on the idea that intimacy takes place where the home is, whether it is a temporary abode or not, attempting to reverse the order of things: home, were it to be (contact with) someone's body and not a place, might be where intimacy happens. Moreover, it suggests some positions on the limits of contemporary representations of intimacy between/with the sans-terre.