The Role of Intimacy in the Evolution of Technology

In this article, Georges Bataille’s notion of intimacy will be re-interpreted to show that it has a role to play in the evolution of technology. The specifically human form of intimacy can be experienced through the successful adoption of technological devices that have the qualities necessary to fit in and work out in our life context. If they manage to become part of our life, then we experience them as projections of our psychophysical personality, and, as such, they escape our positing, objectifying consciousness. Intimacy can be seen as the organizing principle that shapes the evolution of technology towards an ideal end that promises at least an approximation to the absolute intimacy that is unique to the gods.