Philosophers neglected homes. Domestic life, intimacy of home were never their big deal. The sensitive relationships that are built day after day towards this central place – where we cook and eat, where we love and sleep, where we wash and dream … among others – have not specifically retained The attention of great Western thinkers. They favored the public space and the city, scrutinized the assemblies, the places of politics. Or it was the museums and theaters who restart their analyzes – always urban places, socialized, shared by all. Would philosophy be aware of cities, not houses?
This is what the Emanhead Coccia philosopher assumes on the threshold of his new book, a philosophy of the house, obviously intended to correct this amnesia. “Philosophical modernity has moved everything on the city,” he writes, before highlighting how much “we need to think of the house”. He is working on it. And first with happiness, over the original and singularly fine analyzes, centered on our ways to tame these pieces where others lived before us, examining the tiny tactics deployed so that walls, corridors, lights begin to look like us .
In these meditations on the bathrooms or the people of objects, on the house as “moral reality” rather than concrete construction, we find with pleasure the delicacy and the acuity of this writer thinker that remarkable trials have makes known, like sensitive life and good in things (shores, 2010 and 2013). Emanuele Coccia is those who think about sensations and affects rather than concepts and demonstrations, and weave their philosophy to their biography. If he is interested in the houses, it is also because he already totals, from Italy to the United States, through Germany and France, not less than thirty removals and movements.
if everything is home
This sense of the sensitive makes its charm, its true singularity, sometimes its weak point. For his momentum led him here, a little too fast, to see the “house” everywhere – in clothes, writing, social networks … -, at the risk that there is no house anywhere, If everything is homemade, from the apartment to the planet. It is also found in this essay its other vein of inspiration, developed in the life of the plants, and more still in metamorphoses (shores, 2016 and 2020), which dreams of deleting all the differences, to make the species and identities indistinguishable. At the risk, this time, to achieve a recommendation as baroque as this: “We should learn to build houses in which we do not know if we are humans, canaries, cats or ficus.” Devil … what architect could take place the same challenge?
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