Emanuele Coccia's 'Filosofia della casa' Redefines Domestic Space

Emanuele Coccia's new essay 'Filosofia della casa. Lo spazio domestico e la felicità' (Einaudi, 2021) challenges philosophy's traditional focus on the city by centering the home as a site of ontological inquiry. Coccia, an Italian philosopher based in Paris, argues that the house is not a static object but a process—'far casa' (making home)—a continuous act of domesticating the world. He draws parallels between clothing and dwelling, noting that the Italian 'abito' means both 'garment' and 'I inhabit,' rooted in the Latin 'habito' (frequentative of 'habeo,' to have). The pandemic has amplified this condition. Coccia rejects dualisms like public/private or inside/outside, proposing that the self is not a matter of soul or body but the movement of the world: 'Every house should be the structure that allows one life to live through another.' He envisions a future house that dissolves species boundaries, where we no longer know if we are human, canary, cat, or plant. This paradigm shift redefines design and architecture as agencies of collective mixing rather than distinction. The book is a dense, passionate pamphlet that calls for a radical rethinking of dwelling in pandemic times.