Intimacies
By Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips
Chicago University Press £10.50, 125 pages
FT Bookshop price: £8.50

One of our civilisation’s founding myths is the Old Testament story of the expulsion from Paradise of Adam and Eve, the progenitors of the human race. Their crime is pillage of the tree of knowledge and it has been fashionable to understand this “original sin” of humankind as the felix culpa, the happy crime, since it seemed the necessary means to furthering human understanding and, ultimately, consciousness.