Unhoused: Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling

by Matt Waggoner

Unhoused: Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling is the first book-length study of Theodor Adorno as a philosopher of housing. Treating his own experience of exile as emblematic of late modern life, Adorno observed that twentieth-century dwelling had been rendered "impossible" by nativism, by the decimations of war, and, in the postwar period, by housing's increasingly thorough assimilation into private property. Adorno's position on the meaning and prospects for adequate dwelling--a concept he never wrote about systematically but nevertheless returned to frequently--was not that some invulnerable state of home or dwelling should be revived. Rather, Adorno believed that the only responsible approach to housing was to cultivate an ethic of displacement, to learn "how not to be at home in one's home."

Unhoused tracks four figurations of troubled dwelling in Adorno's texts--homelessness, no man's lands, the nature theater, and the ironic property relation--and reads them as timely interventions and challenges for today's architecture, housing, and senses of belonging. Entangled as we are in juridical and financial frameworks that adhere to a very different logic, these figurations ask what it means to organize, design, build, and cohabit in ways that enliven non-exclusive relations to ourselves, others, objects, and place.

Genres: Architecture

144 pages, Paperback

Published April 2, 2018

Reviews

[John Modica · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is remarkable how Waggoner makes Unhoused so lucid and inviting. He takes up Adorno's writings on displacement and demonstrates how the feeling of being "unhoused," or, as Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia, "not to feel at home in one's own home," was a crucial ethical concern throughout Adorno's life. Adorno himself was exiled from Germany during the rise of Nazism and later returned to witness his home country's housing crisis in the postwar period. The devastation of cities, figures of refugees and the homeless, and entire communities of feeling destroyed during the Holocaust shape Adorno's understanding of dwelling as an activity that extends the self into a co-dependence into "worlds of being and belonging." With urgency Waggoner brings this to bear on everything from Adorno's dialogues with continental philosophy (including the works of Kant, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Horkheimer, which Waggoner makes just as accessible) to the privatization of affordable housing efforts and the influence of neoliberal property relations on our ideas of love. This is a really outstanding read for anyone interested in what it means to be "at home" with others.

[Joan Brunet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adorno fent espavilar la critica moralitzant al subletting