Speculative intimacies are anxious repeated wagers on intimate bonds amid uncertainty.

Evidence

My argument is this: contemporary intimate relations, like the social fabric that binds them, are laced with unstable, disorienting (and often disconcerting) images circulated by digital media. Permeated by finance’s imagination, speculative intimacies are formed through our anxious and doggedly recurrent wagers on intimate bonds, which offer scant hope of withstanding uncertainty. Yet speculative intimacies are not simply the fixed expressions of a new emotional or rational order bestowed on us by an immutable neoliberalism. Like other endeavors of homo speculans, they reflect tentative yearnings for connection and for navigating the uncharted waters of an unknowable future in new ways. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 217

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘speculative intimacies’ as wagers on intimate bonds that carry an undertone of yearning, not just neoliberal imposition.
• XREF: Extends the ‘homo speculans’ frame from trading-floor chapters into intimate life.
• QUESTION: The claim that this is not ‘immutable neoliberalism’ gestures at agency that later chapters may or may not defend.