Tidy Lookup
All sites11
Curious Word of the Daycuriouswordoftheday.com

extimate

adjective /ˈɛkstɪmət/

  1. In the works of Jacques Lacan: simultaneously external and intimate.

    The romantic ‘fatal desire for mystical union’ emerges as a (non)relation to ‘some other’, to the ‘other’s alien life’[…]. In Lacanian terms this other functions like the extimate Thing, locus of the minimal difference in and more than the subject.

Where it comes from

From extimacy + -ate (adjective-forming suffix). Extimacy is a calque of French extimité (coined by the French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) in 1959–1960), probably from a blend of French externe (“external”) + intimité (“closeness, intimacy”). The English word can be analysed as a blend of external + intimate.

Adapted from the Wiktionary entry extimate (CC BY-SA 4.0).

← extemporaneaextirp →

Another random word More words starting with E