Which is more luxurious: a diamond ring or a flower found on a path? This question is not rhetorical. This paper develops a semiotics of luxury in intimate relations organised around three doctrines: the doctrine of nature and art (luxury as the transformation of natural materials through human craft); the doctrine of sign exchange value (following Baudrillard's critique of the consumer society, in which luxury functions as a system of social differentiation); and the doctrine of relational luxury, the paper's central concept.
Relational luxury is defined not by economic value but by the degree of coupling between an object and a relational subject's spatiotemporal structure — the extent to which a subject's existence, their intentionality and presence and choice made specifically for this relational other, is embedded in the object. A flower found on a path may be more luxurious than any diamond; a diamond purchased by proxy may be relationally impoverished despite its economic magnificence. The coupling degree is developed along four dimensions (temporal depth, intentional intensity, non-substitutability, existential investment), producing a fourfold classification in which economic and relational luxury appear as orthogonal axes.
The paper then develops a justice theory of choice. The problem of subject-embedding misrecognition arises when an object is presented as carrying high subject-embedding but does not. The problem of equivalent agency arises when a subject who cannot provide existential embedding A substitutes another form B: such substitution is structurally heterogeneous, but may be just in the generative sense if four necessary but not sufficient conditions hold — symmetric generability, real constraint, genuine embedding, and transparency. Finally, selection justice holds that the choice of relational over economic luxury is a justice stance: a refusal to use exchangeable symbols to bear what is inexchangeable.
This is Paper XVI of the Philosophy of Intimacy and the Theory of Justice series, extending the political economy of Paper XV.
DOI: 10.17613/xy9pm-n0174
Publication Date: 2026-06-23