FEDERICO NEIBURG Intimacy and the public sphere. Politics and culture in the Argentinian national space, 1946–55* A multitude of lawyers and journalists is responsible for the cultivation of some very common images regarding political life. These images form a particular mix of busi- ness, politics and family scandals: electoral campaigns centred on the discussion of the biographies and moral qualities of candidates, governments destabilised by ‘scandals’ that have as protagonists politicians and their closest relatives – spouses, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, or lovers. Political sciences and political sociology usually show no interest in these issues. The preponderance of normative visions of the social world leads to ignoring or dis- qualifying such matters, treated as remnants of a pre-modern past, described as ideol- ogy or spectacle (symptoms of supposedly deeper issues such as the interests of individuals and groups), and condemned as individual or collective pathologies, alien to good society and politics (imagined as the realm of rational and abstract men and women, free from personal links). This article, on the contrary, maintains that these issues are of interest for the com- prehension of modern politics. It seems to me that nothing authorises us to be inat- tentive towards matters that mobilise the actions and passions of so many individuals, regardless of distinctions of national societies, geographical and cultural areas, or the supposedly greater or lesser antiquity of one or another ‘democracy’. 1 The merging of intimacy and publicity that distinguishes these issues makes them privileged cases for * Earlier versions of this text were presented at the Laboratoire de Sciences Sociales, École Normale Superieure (Paris, March 2002), at the University of Chicago (May 2001), in the Universidad de Buenos Aires (November 2000); at the Núcleo de Antropologia da Política (NuAP, Rio de Janeiro, September 2000), at the Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social (IDES, Buenos Aires, August 2001), at the Universidad Nacional de Salta (Argentina, July 2001), and at the Universidad de San Andrés (Buenos Aires, August 2000). I thank all those who kindly discussed my work on these occasions. I also thank the anonymous reviewers of Social Anthropology for their stimulating com- ments and criticisms. 1 This certainly does not seem to be a privilege of any particular ‘national character’. In the French presidential election of 2002, for instance, the big newspapers were ‘surprised’ by the appearance of a ‘political style’ that was supposedly alien to the French and typical of the famous interest of the Americans about candidates’ intimacy. See ‘Désormais, les prétendants à l’Elysée mettent en scéne sentiments et vie priveé’ and ‘Le recours à l’intimité est de regle aux Etats-Unis’ (Le Monde, 21 April 2002). Social Anthropology (2003), 11, 1, 63–78. © 2003 European Association of Social Anthropologists 63 DOI: 10.1017/S0964028203000041 Printed in the United Kingdom