Journeys home have been the theme of most of my writings, for a long time now... I was ready to re-stack, re-post one of my early manifestos about the home, as I still see it. A place that needs the protection of the blue hand in print, yet houses the mother, the father and the child… doomed many times, from the start… our perpetual professional armies…
As long as the focus remains on the individual, the “nuclear” family surrounding the individual, violence will have free reign – if you have to protect your family from the outside, if you have to back inside to retreat – you must be armed!
As long as we retreat (or feel we can retreat) inward, inside the houses we build, the dinners we serve, the self-contained, self-sufficient existence we believe we have with our little families,
well, we are armed.
https://ericaweick.substack.com/p/thresholds-professional-armies?utm_source=publication-search
As a wanderer, in exile, in search of the elusive “pátria amada”, the beloved homeland, the disappearing landscapes, of family, of childhood, of memory, my blueprint imprint.
Yet I find myself searching for newer ways to act on this reality of living alone with no intention towards lineage and progeny… just good old fashioned transformational alchemy and composting…
https://read.amazon.com/ref=litb_rb?asin=B0CZP6MFP8&ref=litb_rb_new_exp
Serendipity then has it that my favorite author has just written and published a new book, short and to the point, a mere 200 pages of pure, simple and yet very complicated bliss about the philosophies of the home, domestic space and happiness.
Philosophy of the home: domestic space and happiness, by Emanuele Coccia, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon, Penguin Classics, 2024.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451131/philosophy-of-the-home-by-coccia-emanuele/9781802061017
What a treat to read Emanuele Coccia once again, this time focusing on the home! He starts the narrative with an unexpected turn towards revelation about himself, the empty apartments in Paris, entitled and not, the bathrooms in Berlin, his young daughter, the animist.
He talks about animism and that ”inside everything there is an “I”, a space of involuntary animism.”
I am not writing a book review, just revealing a few snippets from his travels through the forms and meanings of the home that, in his view, is an often neglected theme in philosophy. He dwells on nomadism, wardrobes, bathrooms, twins, social media, bedrooms and hallways, ending with pets, forests, gardens and the necessary cooking mixtures of the kitchen.
What a nice surprise! In retrospect, the entire book reads like a tactical open project… where I can lay down my weapons and enjoy someone else’s bright new open views of possible lives, of possible current modern lives and futures.
He talks about the ways in which philosophy, the practice of civilized urban elites neglected the home - the place where flesh becomes word (if I read it this way, this time…unending questions about the original connotations of flesh as word). Quite amazing!
The second surprise was that I realized he was helping me place the old nineteenth century bearded white men that defined text, well, to place them there, in a historical con-text, no longer my only one. Karl is not my relative and I am not bound by him. I am no longer sitting on some proverbial buddhist monasterial fence, on a high mountain of dream, I am not sitting slightly to the left of center or heavily leaning to the right of right. Good verbiage ceases to shine slightly above the page, as a female author said in class, once.
I feel free to breathe again and to stop and ponder at each sentence, without having to agree or to disagree, so readily. I am free to practice minor and delightfully daily philosophies.
Highly recommended by me. I just finished reading it, could not put it down. And like his other two books, “The life of plants: a metaphysics of mixture” and “Metamorphoses”, I am ready to start reading it all over again, to maybe make some new meanings.
“The modern day home first and foremost adopts an active genocide against every thing that doesn’t belong to our species. It is as though we’re afraid that living creatures (apart from dogs, cats, canaries, parrots, blackbirds or mice that manage to cross our thresholds) might place our very identity in doubt.”
If you would like to read more about the book, here is a good review and a brief interview by George Kafka with the author in THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT, Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving? Philosopher Emanuele Coccia maps out the need to consider new forms for domesticity. Better still, just read it!
The photos are some of my versions of various people’s homes…
Beautiful Erica. I think I am going to get to some reading.
This is my new "favorite" post. I'm going to get the book.