Emanuele Coccia
Philosophy of the house. Domestic space and happiness
Einaudi, 132 pages, 15 euros
According to Emanuele Coccia, the pandemic has accelerated some processes that were already underway: the removal of work from the public space that had attributed it to modernity and the domestication of interpersonal relationships, initiated by social networks. In short, by preventing us from going out, covid-19 has made us understand how much, compared to the “city”, which has long been the essential term with which we have thought about our life in common, the “home” is gaining ground. The time is therefore ripe to reflect on what “home” means.
Coccia does so in twelve chapters, dedicated to spaces (the bathroom, the kitchen) or domestic elements (the wardrobes, the animals). Starting from his own experiences (many moves, some childhood memories, the arrival of a daughter) he proposes the thesis that the house is the fundamental tool with which we live in the world, the means that allows us to adapt to the planet we inhabit and to adapt it to our needs by means of transformations which are the essence of life. This approach allows him to return to themes addressed in previous books (the interaction between people and things and between species and the environment through exchanges that transform everything into everything and undermine every identity), summarized here in the notion of “twinning”, the “condensed of the relationship that unites ”all that exists, which a house makes conceivable.
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