Confinement diaries: The emergency of the new in the intimacy of i-other-world relationships

Abstract

Based on textual diaries produced by three women confined at home during the pandemic, this article discusses the subjective and intersubjective dynamics of self-other-world relationships that are part of the intimate experience of home confinement. From a dialogical analysis of the data, three stylistics of the confined intimacy were identified: the drifts introspection; the performative and the slot subjectivism. These dialogical allegories shed light on: (a) the main impasses in the maintenance of pre-viral lifeforms; (b) the declarative ambiguities and affective ambivalences in the construction of alternatives to the period of confinement in the dynamics being-with-the-others and the-others-in-me; (c) the ways of experiencing time in the reconstruction of the past, in the ways of elaborating futures also through the intensities of the present.