Extimacies: Critical Theory from the Global South is a collaborative research project based at the American University in Cairo (Egypt), with partners at the American University of Beirut (Lebanon), the Federal University of ABC (Brazil), the Ibero-American University (Mexico) and Villanova University (United States). The project is supported by a four-year, $500,000 grant awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [2018-2022].

The project seeks to think anew the north/south binary, rejecting the move to either “provincialize” Critical Theory or to “globalize” a southern perspective. Rather, the project proposes the notion of extimacy, a neologism coined by Jacques Lacan, which implies the topological space of an intimate exteriority or an internal externality, as a strategy to address the irreducibility of Critical Theory to either pole. From this point of view, the geopolitical and economic distinction between north and south, between what is proper to and inside the north and what is outside or external and other, begins to turn and twist into the edge of the möbius strip, where in this zone of indiscernibility, the inside becomes outside, the outside becomes inside, and the non-identical attains to identity. There, then, emerges the possibility of taking a position that is simultaneously inside and outside, identical and non-identical, in agreement and critical, within Critical Theory and outside it, of taking a position that is extimate, that is, of reconceiving Critical Theory beyond its liberal defense from the (imagined and real) standpoints of the north and its decolonial critique from the (imagined and real) standpoints of the south. As such, the project is centered on a series of colloquia, workshops, and publications that focus on rethinking the dichotomies of history and capitalist/non-capitalist modernity, progress and prolepsis, philosophies of consciousness and the unconscious, civilization and barbarism, nature and culture, metaphysics and materialism, the sensuous and the supra-sensuous, the universal and the particular, historical time and abstract time, theory and praxis, the center and the periphery.