‘Je me trouve très sympathique’: Dada Intimacies

This chapter continues the exploration of avant-garde intimacy in attending to Dada manifestos, sound poetry and intimate interactions with the audience of the cabaret performance. It examines a particular mode of intimacy inspiring the movement’s artistic and political ambitions: ‘Dada sought to pave the way for the individual to understand the intimate within him- or herself, the spontaneous nature of one’s deeply held being, what is “most inner” – an intimacy […] pertaining to “one’s inmost self”’. Anticipating the modern form of intimacy described by Anthony Giddens as ‘emotional communication, […] in a context of interpersonal equality’, this utopian quest for self-intimacy, the chapter argues, was a core incentive for Dada’s aim to uproot bourgeois intimacies structured around family and nation as metonyms for a ‘home’ to be defended through war. Hentea shows how the intimacies cultivated by Dada’s performances served its internationalist, anti-war politics in severing links between language, culture and nation. To this end, the chapter traces Dada sound poetry’s public materialisations of ‘the very intimacy of speaking’ as manifest in its simultaneous multilingualism, intonations of the word ‘Dada’, and in Hugo Ball’s injunction: ‘We must return to the innermost alchemy of the word.’