On home – Sonia Solicari in TLS:

‘There are many museums of natural history, of archaeology, of decorative and fine arts. There are outdoor museums that show how we’ve lived through the ages and museums of the mind that explore our interior lives, such as the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in south London and the Museum van de Geest in Amsterdam. The institution of which I am director, however, is the world’s only Museum of the Home. Should we be concerned about this scarcity of cultural coverage? What with eating, sleeping, working from home, childcare, illness and disability – and traditional nine-to-five working patterns in industrialized nations – many of us will spend more time at home across our lives than anywhere else. Why, then, is such a gargantuan part of our identities, of what it means to be human, so neglected within the cultural landscape?’

(…)

‘Emanuele Coccia’s important and provocative book Philosophy of the Home, newly translated into English, suggests instead that home might hold the answer to our salvation. The subtitle, Domestic space and happiness, rather underplays the work’s aims as a radical manifesto for change – for a new world order that flips our lives inside out and suggests ways in which we might become better humans. Our houses and apartments, Coccia argues, need to be more in touch with the Earth, and perhaps therefore closer to an ideal of both individual and collective happiness. We would benefit, he argues, from a better understanding of the equivalence between human and non-human communities, such as forests, and from challenging the idealization of the natural as somehow morally superior to the “world of artifice”.’

(…)

‘We don’t, he argues, occupy spaceso much as we occupy things – the bed, plates, table, computer, fridge. Objects are what accommodate our bodies and help us to navigate what are otherwise inhospitable, box-like “deserts”. Homes, he argues, are private sanctuaries for an “unconscious collective animist cult … personal museums that allow us to discover and contemplate our soul whilst it lives outside our body”.’

(…)
‘To address Karl Löwith’s observation that philosophy has never concerned itself with the fact that people spend at least a third of the day asleep, “the only possible answer”, Emanuele Coccia argues, “is to carry our beds into the streets”.’

Read the article here.

If you can’t change human beings, you can change their homes.

And yes, homes are personal museums, the only sad thing is that that they are seldom open to the general public.

By all means, let’s bring our beds to the streets. The future is sleeping outside. For quite a few people the future has already begun.