Prolegomena to a Diplomacy of Intimate Relationships

This paper is a prolegomenon that extends the series' relational ontology outward from the intimate dyad into the external relational field, the network of kin, community, and institutions a couple is embedded in, and names that field "diplomacy." Rather than settle a single question, it lays out a domain so that others can work it: it gathers the relevant traditions (phenomenology of the Other, the gift and its political economy, semiotics and hermeneutics, the theory of value, and a geometric-phase formalism for value and alienation), traces how they couple, maps the resulting program of sub-papers, and grounds the abstractions in thick, anonymized case descriptions. Its organizing thesis is that being-in-isolation is an abstraction: subjects are constituted in and through relation, and a couple, having generated itself in second-order coupling, now generates and is generated by the field beyond it. The gaze of the Other is shown to be neither purely objectifying (Sartre) nor purely an ethical summons (Levinas), but to take the moral character of the unequal field within which it falls; and justice in the diplomatic field is treated by integrating, rather than abstracting from, its distributive, recognitive, and hermeneutical registers, tightest where the field is most unequal.