In the chapter on Love, halfway through Emanuele Coccia’s book Philosophy of the Home, the author touches on moments of deeply relatably humanity; of our instinct to create for ourselves a protective shelter from the world, while at the same time, using this same space to express our relationships to it.
This essay was shared with permission of the author on the occasion of the Jil Sander Talks at MATTER and SHAPE 2025.
Sometimes, to view it, you had to queue in single file, just as you do at any post office. Sometimes, in Paris, these queues snaked down the whole stairway of grand Haussmann buildings, from the sixth floor to the courtyard, through the main entrance and into the street, ragged and disorganised. Dozens of strangers queuing to visit a tiny student apartment, carrying documents bearing the final proof that here was the chosen one. Having reached the top of the queue, it was hard to shake off a sense of unease and betrayal. I always had the impression I was witnessing something profane. Once through the door it was impossible to feel or imagine any exclusive relationship with what would have to become my home.
Even before we move, our relationship with a new home begins with the strange ritual of the first visit, which varies according to the times, our financial means, and above all the customs and cultures of different countries.
Even before we move, our relationship with a new home begins with the strange ritual of the first visit, which varies according to the times, our financial means, and above all the customs and cultures of different countries. Of all possible forms of relationship with a home, this is perhaps the most hypnotic. The deal is often done through an aesthetic judgement on the arrangement and size of rooms, the quantity of light, the quality of the parquet. And yet, the first contact is always an attempt to decipher the promise of shared happiness — a promise made with clues, signals and indications that are heavily veiled and difficult to interpret — through the objects placed there. At this stage, such apparently superficial details — the length of a corridor, type of radiators, shape of the handles, quality of the skirting board — simply introduce what novels call ‘real-life touches’ into the image of a future life.
In those moments, often imbued with anxiety and embarrassment, we recognise our ability and need to envision our life: to relate to it and to ourselves in a manner that has nothing to do with our own wishes, or with the law, but in much the same way as we relate to the climate in which we live. We view that house in the same way that we see the sky when we wake in the morning; we view it as our sky. In those few minutes, all precepts, catechisms and pious intentions in our moral notions are abandoned, and what is left becomes a superior form of imagination, the only way that we access what we have been and will be.
If such an effort has always been extremely difficult — at least for me — it’s because visiting these apartments means being compelled to picture the past inhabitants that have lived and shaped that space. As the years go by, my needs and my financial circumstances have changed, and the queues to view the apartments have gone. I have found myself alone with the estate agent in spaces which are sometimes empty, yet often filled with signs and vestiges of all those lives that have been lived there and then moved on. The moral upheaval has never related to particular details — the sixteenth- century chest of drawers, a Danish lamp or an unmatched teacup — but to the fact that to notice such things has meant suddenly finding myself thrust into someone else’s life and being unable to draw a precise boundary between theirs and my own: becoming myself the coffee grounds in which somebody might seek to read a possible future.
We always talk about the home as private space, the place that separates us from one another and makes us individual. Yet every home is really just the physical and mental material that we use to interweave our life and our destiny with those of others.
When I arrived at one of the four places in which I lived in Berlin, I found some diaries left by a previous tenant. I spent three days deciphering their pages and living a life that wasn’t mine. I read them surrounded by the same furniture, curtains and pictures that had not yet been taken down from the walls, which meant transforming myself for an instant into a character in a multi-handed drama. I’ve often asked myself the uneasy question how my successors in all the domestic universes in which I have lived have viewed my life, or the debris of the life I’ve left behind. The excitement and sorrow of every apartment always derives from the fact that to imagine my life as home means imagining it indissolubly linked to something else, and above all to other people.
We always talk about the home as private space, the place that separates us from one another and makes us individual. Yet every home is really just the physical and mental material that we use to interweave our life and our destiny with those of others. This is its main purpose, and, for this reason, its nature is not architectural but moral. I repeat, the inadequacy of our homes is never purely architectural or aesthetic but is always and above all ethical. When our homes disappoint us, it’s because they cannot maintain the silent promise of shared happiness that they had made at our first meeting. On the other hand, we have lost the ability to imagine homes because we have stopped cultivating the knowledge, the technique, that allows two lives to live one and the same life — what, for centuries, we have called ‘love’. Homes are always spatial means of experiencing love in all its manifestations. They are none other than the material blueprint, the framework, but also the objective atmosphere, the climate for a shared life — the time, temperament, food, sleep and dreams that make us inseparable from someone else. It is impossible to consider and construct homes without considering and constructing love.
Bio
Emanuele Coccia is associate professor for Philosophy in Paris. He is the author of Sensible Life (2010), The Life of Plants (2018), Metamorphosis (2021) and Philosophy of the Home (2023). He wrote, together with Viviane Sassen, a photo-theory book (Modern Alchemy 2002). His books are translated into several languages.
