Horizontal Solidarities and Molten Capitalism: The subject, intersubjectivity, self and the other in late modernity

Friendship is a generative topic because it covers questions about the self and the social, so encompassing the political, public, personal and interpersonal negotiation of difference. Friends can embody the resistance as well as the enactment of 'fixing' positions as shown within recent ethnographic work on friendship as identity work (Hey, 1997 , 'The Company She Keeps', Open University Press). Theorised as a practice about making up and breaking up¿about coming to understandings and mis/understandings¿friendship has been taken as a metaphor as well as a statement about the im/possibilities of citizenship (Hey, 2001, 'Dancing Round Hanbags', University of Lisbon).