Critical intimacy is a notion aimed at addressing commonality from within some of the things that matter most in life: theory, sex, and art. It draws on the momentum of the strong presence of theory in the humanities along with the demand for social justice, the momentum of the emergence of intimacy as a political concept, and that of field literature and socially based art. It allows us to reconsider the 'we' of theoretical thinking, relationality, and creation, as well as to address one's elective or involuntary affinities with ideas and practices which should be maintained, reassessed, or disappear from the world. Its modality is that of the from within: it comprises nuanced proximity and opening to the outside, lovingness and lucidity, criticality as a mode of attachment.