CHAPTER ONE
The home is a place where things can go wrong.
(DAVID LYNCH)
Something in the night
You are home. Over an expanse of time, the place has become part of you, part of your bodily habits and memories, such that you experience the world in and through the lens of your home, which you return to time and again when the day draws to an end. More than this, you try to carry the home with you, as a presence that accompanies you in an otherwise uncertain world. Together, you and the home co-inhabit the same world, such that you both share a joint understanding of each other’s intimate existence: just as the home bears witness to your unguarded moments in this world, so you have become a witness in the home’s own evolution. In turn, the home in its specificity as a place in the world has integrated itself into your perceptual horizon. Your knowledge of the precise topography of the home extends not simply to its corners, crevices and nooks, but also to obscure details in the wallpaper and floorboards, which perhaps are only accessible to you in your incisive knowledge of the place. For you, the creaking of floorboards is not a backdrop to a life that takes place above, but is instead a rhythm that has become part of your pace in the world. Within these recesses, sounds and strange patterns in the wallpaper, traces of your memories are lodged. You are able to sketch an entire world in the movement from the hallway to the kitchen, and within the kitchen, you find an atlas of memories held in place.
You turn to the window. The window of your home affords you a glimpse of an alien world. For you, the frame to the outside world serves less to connect you with that world and more to fortify your distance from it. In and through the window you observe another world taking place. If there is a rapport between you and this world, then it is only a visual one, vulnerable at all times to alienation and anxiety. You know your place in the cosmos. It centres at all times on the intersection between your home and the existence that takes place outside of that space. Dare you move beyond the home to find yourself in the world of contingency and chance, then almost immediately you are overwhelmed with regret. For you know that unlike the outside, your home maintains your presence in the world, securing you within a boundary line, which you have no reason to transgress.
FIGURE 1.1 Rue Saint Paul, Paris.
One night, you awake before the dawn. Much to your surprise, you are in the darkness, only now the sensuous quality of the dark differs from that of the evening. In the liminal hours between the dawn and the night, between sleepfulness and wakefulness, the stillness of this darkness unnerves you. Your body is inert, but your eyes are wide open and affixed upon the ceiling above your bed. In the shadows, you sketch the outline of the room around you. There, you find that much of what is familiar to you – the stray pattern in the wall that resembles a forest, the silhouette of the door and the sound of the home creaking in the darkness – but these same features now assume an unfamiliar impression. Now, those aspects become unnerving in their silence, as though they no longer reciprocated your presence, but instead gazed on, with a mute indifference to your awakening.
Your home has revealed another face, less discernible to you than when you are fully conscious, and now impregnated with an alien quality. Indifferent to your awakening, the voice of the home undergoes a transformation. Whereas the creaking of the home in the day expresses a solidarity with your presence, now those same sounds serve to dismantle your existence. From a depth in the wall, a crack can be heard, which, far from marking a reassuring reminder of the home’s fortitude in the elements, now sounds as though the bones of the place were breaking.
You are anxious. But when you attempt to localize this anxiety, your thinking reaches an impasse. All that you are left with is the vague and horrifying sense that your home is now drifting away from you, leaving you stranded in an anonymous and silent world indifferent not only to your situation in the present, but also to the memories and histories etched within the home. Such is your disquiet, that for once you are struck not with a radical attachment to the home as a sanctuary in an otherwise hostile world, but instead a recognition that this same place is the centre of hostility. Instead of succumbing to an urge to stay, you are now resisting the impulse to flee, as if you had seen a ghost and wanted nothing more but to free yourself of the place, which you shared with the dead. Your agoraphobia becomes enmeshed in claustrophobia, each spatial disorder freely borrowing from each other in the midst of this sleepless dawn. Having lost the depth of intimacy, which you were under the impression of having co-created over time, the home appears as a flat dimension, almost reducible to an exterior alone, with no fixed perspective upon which to survey the space. The home retains its material place in the world – you can still touch, taste and smell it – but this materiality has become homogeneous and possessed with a coldness, as if seen from the outside.
FIGURE 1.2 Rue Saint Paul, Paris.
You are not an innocuous bystander in the transformation of the home, but instead are part of the dissolution and alienation. Just as the home becomes displaced from its moorings, so your body, in its discordance with the fragmenting home, is now situated in a depersonalized and derealized zone. As with the home, which is no longer possessable as your own, the same is true of your body. The thing lies motionless, unable to rid itself of the phantom night through resuming the act of sleep. In each case, the home and the body – the two pillars of stability – reject the narrative you have assigned to them through habit and memory. Something in the night has intervened in this narrative, unveiling the contingency of your bodily relation to the home, and revealing, in the dead of the night, the anonymous infrastructure of the home before the dawn.
Homesickness
The history of the home within the phenomenological tradition is distinguished. Taking its strengths from experiences of intimacy and unity, phenomenology has proceeded to draw us within ourselves, finding therein an entire world that is comprised from the primal sanctuary of the home. Such a love of place – truly, a topophilia – remains one of the method’s greatest strength. Yet this partial focus is also phenomenology’s most acute limit. Overlooked in this phenomenology of intimate spatiality are those places that dislodge and disrupt our being-in-the-world, such that even – especially – in the case of homelessness, what we tend to find is an anxiety that resolves itself through the restorative and primordial function of the always present home.
In all this intimacy, the presence of the outside is left suspended, with the phenomenologist’s love of place countered by an uneasy if not anxious relation to places outside the remit of the home. The problem is not a novel one. Already in 1967, Foucault had diagnosed the problem phenomenology faces when confronted with its own limits; namely, a disquiet in the face of otherness, be it in the form(lessness) of the outside or in the amorphousness of interstitial space (Foucault 1986). By way of example, Foucault considers here the ‘monumental work’ of Bachelard (23). What Foucault finds in Bachelard is a treatment of place as being ‘thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well’ (23). This is the space interwoven with our affective existence, full of the rich complexity of any given human subject. Yet if these places constitute beacons of stability in our lives, then they do so by implicitly privileging certain types of spatiality. Foucault counters the phenomenological tendency towards intimate and internal space by positioning us in the in-between, as he writes:
The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another. (23)
Writing a few years after Foucault, Levinas indirectly responds to the challenge to breach the interiority of intimate space by criticizing phenomenology’s tendency to reduce the Other to what he terms, the ‘imperialism of the same’ (Levinas 1969, 39). What he means by this is that phenomenology accommodates otherness only within the remit of a subjectivity that has already formulated a concept of the Other, as he writes, ‘It is other with an alterity constitutive of the very content of the other’, whereas to be genuinely other, the Other must be the ‘Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself [le chez soi]’ (39). How can we call upon the stranger who disturbs being-at-home without converting that stranger to an extension of our homeliness? The question concerns a blind spot in our vision. To contend with this blindness it is not a question of moving beyond the home, but of precisely remaining within it, and seeking in its familiar surroundings the stranger who lurks within habitual space. To find the stranger who disturbs the being-at-home is to turn as much to the home as it is to turn to our own selves.
Alongside phenomenologists, another set of people privilege the home as the centre of subjectivity: agoraphobes. Only, in distinction to phenomenologists, agoraphobic people recognize the home not only as a site of intimacy, but also as the centre of fragmentation. In this respect, they give voice to the homesickness at the heart of phenomenology’s topophilia. To grasp a sense of the importance of the home for the agoraphobe, let us consult the following passage from Carl Westphal. Of a patient named ‘Mr. P’, he writes as follows:
During an attempt to cross an open space the fear begins as soon as the houses of a street leading to an open area increases their distance from him. Suddenly, a feeling of uneasiness occurs in his heart region as if one were terrified … A feeling of insecurity appears, as if he were no longer walking secure, and he perceives the cobble stones melting together … Sometimes he begins to increase his speed to reach the other side faster. He compares the feeling of crossing the place to that of a swimmer, who swims through a canal into an open lake and is afraid that he will not be able to cross it. The condition improves by merely approaching houses again. Once he has crossed the place he feels as in a dream. (Knapp 1988, 70)
We will encounter Mr P in following chapters. Let us register that already in Westphal’s description of agoraphobia, the critical issue is not the objective features of space – large, small, circular, flat, etc. – but the relational distance to home. As Westphal’s patient leaves the confines of his zone of safety, so his body opens up to a different way of being. Now, movement is stifled with the very materiality of the world suffering from a lack of reality. Into this abyssal unreality, space becomes problematic, not because of its geometrical properties, as such, but because certain aspects of the environment serve to divide the home from the non-home. As the analogy with swimming across an open lake makes clear, to venture into the outside world carries with it a risk not only of failing to get to the other side but also of never again returning to the home. Crossing the square – the archetypal agoraphobic motif – the danger is not of the square itself, nor even of the public eyes that descend upon the agoraphobe. While all of these things contribute to the agoraphobe’s concern, what is principally at stake here is the loss of home.
This relationship between anxiety and the loss of home is evident in that a deviation from the fixed locality of the home carries with it a ‘feeling of insecurity’, such that the materiality of the world is put into question. What is peculiar about the agoraphobe’s relationship to home is that his or her home is identified with a specific locale or site in the material world. The home is not a construct that is carried in the lived experience of the body, nor is it a more generalized way of being-in-the-world. Rather, home, for the agoraphobe, is grounded in the sensibility of the material place. Of this fixed locality, Yi-Fu Tuan writes as follows:
With agoraphobia a more or less stable world does exist, and that is the home; so long as they stay within that charmed circle they feel competent – only beyond it is the frightening public space, the agora. One symptom of this affliction is the fear of crossing any large and open space. The sufferer feels dizzy, as though his body, like the space stretching before it, were about to lose its center and limits … the agoraphobic’s greatest fear is the loss of control. (Tuan 1979, 204)
In turn, this highly pressured attachment to the locality of the home – be it an apartment or a broader neighbourhood – establishes a divisive boundary line between the reality of the home and the disembodied unreality of the non-home. It is against the backdrop of this tension that key experiences such as ‘the cobble stones melting together’ become instructive. The consequence of this highly pressured attachment to the home is that home itself assumes an anxious presence in the experience of the agoraphobic patient. Of one patient named Meg, the following report is made:
Two needlepoint plaques adorned the entryway: ‘Home is where the heart is.’ ‘The home of a friend is never far away.’ These sentiments cast the home as a safe haven. Yet paradoxically, while at home Meg spends much of her time ruminating over past experiences of panic and imagining similar experiences in other hypothetical situations. Home is not a safe haven, after all. It does not protect her from being engulfed by reconstructions of past events that channel rising tides of panic into the present. Home is a place where distressing emotions from past times and places creep up on, invade, and overwhelm Meg’s experience. As John Milton writes in Paradise Lost, ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.’ Home is a paradise lost in that it cannot provide refuge from the mind and the scenarios it (re)creates. (Capps and Ochs 1995, 4)
The illustration highlights the problematic relationship the agoraphobe has to home in two ways. First, the home is shown to have a troubled relationship with the outside world, such that the outside is opposed to the home. Second, the home is proven to be not a reliable and objective ‘friend’ that one can turn to at the end of a hard day, but instead a mirror of one’s subjective contents that is constructed in the light of the agoraphobe’s anxiety. As the line from Milton indicates, what forms the experience of a place is ultimately one’s own mind (or body) rather than the material conditions governing those places.
These illustrations reveal something common to agoraphobes and non-agoraphobes alike: far from a mere container, spatiality is dynamically constructed and constituted at all times by our affective relation with it. More than a backdrop against which life takes place, home is the very ground upon which life begins. As both the holder of memories and also the expression of those memories, the home installs itself within the life of the dweller, just as the dweller installs him or herself within the life of the home. Accordingly, in the absence of the home, or in the face of its collapse, what is lost is not simply the materiality of the home, but an entire world that springs forth from the home. To undertake a phenomenology of the home – and by implication, to understand the nature of topophobia – we need to understand how the home gains its homely quality and in turn risks losing that quality.
A twilight zone
To dwell, to be at home. What phenomenology alerts us to is the contingency of these relations. To be at home does not simply mean implanting oneself within the concrete spatiality of a unit, or otherwise comporting one’s body in a particular way to a set of rooms. To dwell requires more than this and, indeed, occurs in a more primordial way than that of simply inhabiting a space. Levinas writes, ‘Dwelling is the very mode of maintaining oneself … as the body that, on the earth exterior to it, holds itself up and can’ (Levinas 1969, 37). In other words, to inhabit the world and make sense of it means already being in a site upon which to stand and apprehend the world in a pre-reflective way: ‘Everything is here, everything belongs to me; everything is caught up in advance with the primordial occupying of a site, everything is com-prehended’ (37–38). This sense of being-at-home is thus a sense that derives from a certain relation to the world, in which the world is available to me as a constantly unfolding possibility, and a possibility to be possessed. If the world resists us, as it will do, then this resistance only gives us space to assert and redefine our relation to the world.
In the midst of this confidence, a Stranger appears, ‘over him I have no power’ (39). What the Stranger brings into the site of dwelling is an absolute resistance to comprehension. The otherness of the Other does not lie simply in a distance between myself and the Other. Rather, there is a necessary strangeness within the Stranger, given that to have an understanding of the Other in their totality would mean fusing with the Other, reducing their otherness to a product of my existence. But the Stranger who is not in my site, who is not my world, defies my expectations, strips my memories of their value, and disarms my grasp on time and space. That I have no power of the Stranger means precisely this: that I am unable to mould the Stranger to my anticipations of how the world ought to conform to the narcissism of my selfhood.
The home that emerges in the twilight zone between the night and the day – L’heure entre chien et loup – reveals a materialization of the non-possessable strangeness that is ordinarily masked in our being-at-home in the world. Already we sense how a germ of strangeness infects the home during certain moments, such as when we become defamiliarized from the materiality of the place. What happens is that the home becomes impregnated with an unhomely quality. Losing form, the home drifts away from us, destabilizing and disorienting our place in the world. What remains is something that cannot be reintegrated into the home.
On a phenomenological level, there can be no doubt of the importance revealed in the act of waking up and finding one’s familiar surroundings enshrouded in an atmosphere of strangeness. In the moments prior to full consciousness, in which the sleeper has not yet fully awoken, this interstitial state closes in on the very genesis of things assuming the meaning they do, and, in turn, losing that meaning. Indeed, in this micro-phenomenology, we are faced with the co-joining of different worlds colliding within the same body, one part seized from the trust placed in the world that allows us to sleep, the other part disrupted by the alienation that is unveiled through awakening. More than a partial glimpse of something transient and trivial, this collision of waking and sleeping states captures the trace of an elemental existence that is ostensibly veiled in the confidence we assign to the world. Levinas guides us through this journey into sleep and place, writing that:
A place is not an indifferent ‘somewhere’, but a base, a condition. Of course, we ordinarily understand our localization as that of a body situated just anywhere. That is because the positive relationship with a place which we maintain in sleep is masked by our relations with things. Then only the concrete determinations of the surroundings, of the setting, and the ties of habit and of history give an individual character to a place which has become our home [le chez-soi], our home town, our homeland, the world … Sleep reestablishes a relationship with a place qua base. In lying down, in curling up in a corner to sleep, we abandon ourselves to a place; qua base it becomes our refuge. Then all our work of being consists in resting. Sleep is like entering into contact with the protective forces of a place; to seek after sleep is to gropingly seek after that contact. Where one wakes up one finds oneself shut up in one’s immobility like an egg in its shell. This surrender to a base which also offers refuge constitutes sleep, in which a being, without being destroyed is suspended. (Levinas 2001, 66–67)
Levinas begins with place, not as a set of geometrically defined positions, but as the locus of existence. To sleep in place is to entrust place as the site of an irreducible intimacy. One cannot, therefore, ‘decide’ to sleep, as if it were a formal matter. Giving oneself over to sleep is not an act that takes place in abstraction, but instead is rooted in the primordial liaison between the body and place. This ‘reestablishment’ of our relationship with place emerges as a reunion with a place that has already become a sanctuary for us, not as a newly discovered site in the world, but as part of a surrounding world, which we ourselves derive from and return to. As Levinas has it, upon sleeping, our movement is one of returning, and our expectation consists of reappearing in the same place. By contrast, the perversion of sleep consists not only in its disruption and deferral but also in the fact of stranding us into another place. This damaged awakening breaks continuity with both the place of the sleeper and also the intimacy at the centre of sleeping. In place of the closed nest, the awakening positions us in a space of exposure, indeed at the very edge where place recedes into anonymity. Merleau-Ponty writes:
The night is not an object in front of me; rather, it envelops me, it penetrates me through all my senses, it suffocates my memories, and it all but effaces my personal identity. I am no longer withdrawn into my observation post in order to see the profiles of objects flowing by in the distance. The night is without profiles … Even cries, or a distant light, only populate it vaguely; it becomes entirely animated; it is a pure depth without planes, without surfaces, and without any distance from it to me. (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 296)
Merleau-Ponty uncovers the anxiety at the heart of the night. The anxiety concerns not simply an absence of light, as if the night occluded vision, and that alone. Rather, the night, in its omnipotent embrace, cocoons me in an all-encompassing totality. Through penetrating my flesh, the night becomes me, as I become the night, effectively annihilating my personal identity through rupturing all spaces of perspective, and thus forcing a collusion between the remains of identity and the night, which now subsumes that trace into its zone of darkness. This collapse of identity gains special prominence in the home at night. What is revealed in this darkness, paradoxically, is the transparency of the home as a formless space, no longer conditioned by the memories and values ascribed to it retroactively. Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘The anxiety of neurotics at night comes from the fact that the night makes us sense our contingency, that free and inexhaustible movement by which we attempt to anchor ourselves and to transcend ourselves in things, without there being any guarantee of always finding them’ (296). We are at the centre of the insomniac’s nightmare, and the nightmare is materialized in and through the home. In revealing itself for what it is – no longer a centre of being, but an indiscriminate zone of space propped up through the work of memory and imagination – the home reveals our role as being complicit in its construction. The contingency of the home is, thus, stipulated on a certain affective relation, which is displaced through anxiety, and which, in turn, renders the home the site of its own betrayal.
The menace of space
Our exploration of the shadowy side of the home and its relation to a broader topophobia will be greatly rewarded by retaining our relation with Levinas. What Levinas will enable us to do is to place the site of the home in relation to an elemental existence. Indeed, Levinas is an astute reader of the spatiality of shadows, and he proceeds beyond Merleau-Ponty in describing the night not simply in phenomenological terms as the recession of light and the loss of visibility, but as the site of an anonymous being, which can also occur in the midst of daylight (Levinas 2001, 52). This separation of the night from its phenomenal status underscores the role of the night as a disordering of our relation to the world. Marked as much by horror as by anxiety, the disordering of light brings us to the anonymous there is, which underpins all things without ever being fully reclaimed by things. Against this horrific anonymity, the home assumes a central place in Levinas, forging the conditions for both a philic and a phobic relation to place.
For Levinas, the privileged status of the home is not simply due to sheltering one from the ‘inclemencies of the weather’, or any other utilitarian justification (Levinas 1969, 152). Rather, the home’s place is vouchsafed through its role as being constitutive of human existence. The home, as Levinas sees it, is that which allows for the dweller to re-collect themselves, and it is only ‘from this recollection [that] the building takes on the signification of being a dwelling’ (152–154). Recollection is Levinas’s term for the way a dwelling affords a subject space to suspend their ‘immediate reactions [to] the world … in view of a greater attention to oneself, one’s possibilities, and the situation’ (154). What emerges from this act of recollection is a ‘gentleness that spreads over the face of things’, and thus shapes the world into a familiar and intimate form (154–155). Such an intimacy is not a relation one occupies with the home as a physical space, and that alone. Rather, the gentle intimacy that recollection produces is taken up as being an ‘intimacy with someone’ (155). The house of Levinas, so to speak, remains an open place, forever exposed and receptive to the welcome of the Stranger who constitutes the very essence of dwelling, as Levinas puts it: ‘To dwell is not the simple fact of the anonymous reality of being cast into existence as a stone one casts behind oneself; it is a recollection, a coming to oneself, a retreat home with oneself as in a land of refuge, which answers to a hospitality, an expectancy, a human welcome’ (156). The warmth of this retreat is not reducible to a ‘turbid mystery of the animal and feline presence’, which Baudelaire would like to evoke, but instead marks a ‘new relations with the elements’ (156).
With his mention of elements, we are in a position to understand the unrivalled importance of the home. Levinas’s reference to the elements is not a reference to the tangible elements found in the surrounding world. Instead, the term carries with it a metaphysical horror that can be envisioned as the ‘absolute emptiness that one can imagine before creation – there is’ (Levinas 1985, 48). This idea of the il y a (the there is) reappears time and again in his thinking, but becomes increasingly less visible from the time of Totality and Infinity onwards, though no less important. What Levinas means when he writes of the il y a is an oppressive, impersonal and ‘horrible thing’, which strips me off my personality and reduces both the world and the body to a mute and formless thing. It can be described in abstract terms, but also in the concrete situation as that of insomnia, or otherwise putting an ‘empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise’, or even in the following way: ‘A night in a hotel room where, behind the partition, “it does not stop stirring”’ (48–50).
Let us pause to consider the atmosphere of a motel room in contradistinction to the embrace of the home. We are situated between places. This no where spatiality is the home of an anonymous unit, used by voyagers passing from one place to another, who stop only to rest such that they can proceed to the next point. It is a space divested of all personal attributes, appealing to both everyone and no-one at once. The furnishings, such as they are, have been stripped of all their history, and now they emerge as bland units of matter in and around which the fundaments of existence occur. The shower to wash in and bed to sleep strive only to perform their duties in the most minimal sense. The room is presented in its brute facticity as a zone of raw space to be recreated and reimagined by each guest who passes through its doors. Yet this noble aim fails, and far from being a space of creative potential, the impersonality of the room is both stifling and depressing. Levinas is with us in the motel and asks that we place our ear to the wall, such that ‘one does not know what they are doing next door’ (50). But the sounds can be heard as anonymous murmurs of another life. If there is life going on elsewhere, then it is nameless and without form. Between places, the room is also between different states, at no point fixing itself within relation to the broader world. Despite its minuscule size, the room is a space of disorientation, structured by a series of interchangeable surfaces, each of which strip the guest of his or her sense of belonging to the world. In the motel, we are far from home. In this outpost, the intimacy and interiority of the home has been lost, and we have been assaulted by the horror of the il y a. Yet if the room expresses the il y a, then it is not strictly reducible to it: ‘It is never attached to an object that is, and because of this I call it anonymous’, Levinas writes (2005, 48). The anonymity of the il y a precludes it from being firmly lodged in place. Resisting a ‘personal form’, it makes no sense to speak of inside and out, subject and object, given that such a distinction would presuppose a beginning and an end to the il y a (Levinas 2001, 52).
As to the night, it is the exemplary experience of the there is, ‘if the term experience were not inapplicable to a situation which involves the total exclusion of light’ (52). Thus, the night positions itself in an interstitial and ambiguous spatiality, at once given to experience while at the same time withdrawing from it. The primordial anxiety of the night is absolute. Thanks to its power to deform things, the night enters the home as an invader of presence, not as pure negation that would destroy everything in its wake, but as a ‘universal absence [which] is in turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence’ (52). In the face(lessness) of this nocturnal silence, the subject is pacified and desubjectified before a silence, which, if interwoven with the materiality of the home, is nevertheless infinite. As such, the night induces anxiety in its capacity to disguise itself in things, and in turn, to make those things ambassadors of an impersonal enigma. Moreover, the I does not remain as a bystander to this dissolution of form, but is precisely ensnared in and through the night: ‘What we call the I is itself submerged by the night, invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it’ (53). With the il y a, the egological relation to the world is ruptured by an otherness, which, if having a face, is a face that refuses to be tied down: ‘There is a nocturnal space, but it is no longer an empty space … Darkness fills it like a content; it is full, but full of the nothingness of everything’ (53). Into this ‘heavy atmosphere belonging to no one’, the night testifies to something outside of itself, to that which cannot be contained by darkness, even if it is only in and through darkness that the il y a can speak (53). And then the I disappears, and what remains is that stubborn and elemental residue, which is there all along in the daytime, but only now revealed in its specificity as the horrific ‘menace of space’ (55).
Against this elemental horror, the home – in radical contradistinction to the motel room in which we hear anonymous rumblings through thin walls – provides both a concrete and a metaphysical sanctuary to rupture the ‘plenum of the element’ (Levinas 1969, 156). In this retreat where I return to myself, ‘set back from the anonymity of the earth’, I am separated from the elements insofar as the home adjourns and delays the elements, preserving their presence at the door to the home (156). This distancing is taken up in an experiential fashion in the specificity of a home that assumes a gaze upon the world; thus Levinas writes, ‘The ambiguity of distance, both removal and connection, is lifted by the window that makes possible a look that dominates, a look of him who escapes looks, the look that contemplates’ (156). This poetics of the window is foreshadowed in Bachelard, who also employs the screen as a means of forging distance:
We are at home, hidden, and looking outside. In a house in the countryside, a window is an open eye, a gaze over the plain, at the distant sky, and – in a profoundly philosophical sense – at the exterior world. To those who dream not at but behind their window, behind a little window, behind the attic skylight, the house gives a sense of an exterior whose difference from the interior increases as the interiority and Universe is made explicit by the impressions of a hidden being who sees the window framed by a window. (Bachelard 2011, 84)
For Levinas and Bachelard, the window is a framing device. Through it, the world is filtered by way of an invisible gaze not only upon the world but also against the world. There is, then, an asymmetry in the home, in which the dweller has the freedom to leave the elements as they are, or otherwise transform ‘nature into a world’ through the work of labour (Levinas 1969, 157). As understood by Levinas, the home is diffused throughout with the presence of a warm humanity, in which the ‘the primordial function of the home’ as separating the dweller from the elements, leads to nothing less than the birth of the world itself (157). This birth is transformative: with it, the elements are fixed in both place and time, conferring an almost aesthetic quality upon what is otherwise formless and terrible.
FIGURE 1.3 Quai des Celestins, Paris.
The enormous space
Levinas presents to the reader a vision of the home as a sanctuary, defending the dweller against the anonymity of the elements, which threatens to destabilize if not destroy our enjoyment of things. More than a material unit to fend off the cold, the home has a transformative capacity to tame the anonymity of elemental existence. Without the home, the subject would lose their separation as a subject, and thus become part of the anonymous infrastructure of elemental existence, dissolving the singularity of selfhood. In the phobic subject, we are confronted with an amplification of the insecurity inherent in the Levinasian dweller. As we will see, time and again, the phobic subject’s being-in-the-world carries with it the trauma of being separated from home, where home signifies, with Levinas, not simply a geometrical unit, but the very source of stability and protection. We shall give voice to the experience of travelling beyond the home in further chapters. There, we will see how the landscape of the phobic subject is defined at all times by the felt distance from home. For now, let us remain within the home, attending to its ambivalent role as both a source of freedom and servitude.
As restorative in character, the home provides the grounds of the subject’s existence, and it is precisely this grounding that is instable in agoraphobic subjects. This concern over the delineation and protection of boundaries is not novel to phobic subjects, but remains intact as an invariant feature of subjective existence. In the case of phobic subjects – especially agoraphobes – the insecurity assumes a heightened sensibility, rendering the porousness and contingency of boundaries visible. Against this background, particular spatial configurations bring to light a primordial anxiety concerning the very place of the subject. Yi-Fu Tuan provides us with a concrete illustration of the need for spatial ordering amongst certain subjects:
At the Ittleson Center [for disturbed children], the open land surrounding the building is partitioned to advance purposive activities. Fences are erected to define small areas, each of which has a clearly assigned function: this is a bicycle area, that is a garden area. Interior space, too, is carefully delineated according to function and purpose … The children need to draw closed, safe circles around themselves; the open circle, the boundless area, and any space with ambiguous edges provoke anxiety rather than pleasurable excitement. (Tuan 1979, 203–204)
Into this uncertain world, the home emerges as a closed circle, edged off from an otherwise infinite abyss. Intolerant of the dizzying anonymity of a world outside of the home, the agoraphobe withdraws from this open circle, seeking in the home a landscape that is immunized to contingency. An amplified vision of the ‘boundless area’ that elicits anxiety can be found in the literary imagination of J. G. Ballard’s short story ‘The Enormous Space’ (Ballard 2002). We find in this story the fruition of the agoraphobe’s attachment to home as a retreat from the world, whereupon the home becomes the site where the ‘latent birth of the world is produced’ (Levinas 1969, 157). The premise of the story is simple, and the philosophical value we find in Ballard’s writings, as ever, derives not from the narrative, but from his acute and penetrating study of the intertwinement and disturbances between inner and outer space.
A divorced man, Mr Ballantyne, decides one day to not go to work. Instead, he will retreat back into his home in an innocuous suburb in London, where he will undergo an experiment:
I would never again step through the front door. I would accept the air and light, and the electric power and water that continued to flow through the meters. But otherwise I would depend on the outside world for nothing. I would eat only whatever food I could find within the house. After that I would rely on time and space to sustain me. (Ballard 2002, 698)
What follows is a careful study of the gradual transformation and eventual disintegration of the rapport between Ballantyne and his home.
Our ‘Crusoe’ begins by calculating his rations, burning the traces of his past, which ‘come to life briefly in the flame, and then write themselves into the dust’, and rediscovering his home, which now assumes an increasingly more airy atmosphere (700–701). At first glance, the alliance between Ballard’s solitary dweller and his home appears reinforced and renewed, with both now enjoying a greater freedom than was previously available during his contact with the outside world. Indeed, this rediscovery of the home is phrased at first as a moment of privileged access to a world that is otherwise concealed by habit and the dead weight of a sedimented past, ‘as in those few precious moments when one returns from holiday and sees one’s home in its true light’ (705). Far from becoming constricted, this shared space opens itself up, such that, in the words of Ballantyne, ‘when I wake in the morning I almost feel myself on some Swiss mountain-top, with half the sky below me’ (701).
The dizzying view afforded in the newly discovered home coincides with a rectification of his values, the house now reduced to its fundamental structure devoid of its temporal legacy as a home of the past: ‘I am free at last to think only of the essential elements of existence – the visual continuum around me, and the play of air and light. The house begins to resemble an advanced mathematical surface, a three-dimensional chessboard. The pieces have yet to be placed, but I feel them forming in my mind’ (701). After a month of this topophilia, a change occurs. Now, instead of forming a union, the home begins to depart from the topological structure previously inscribed in Ballantyne’s body and mind. Rooms seem to appear from nowhere, and another past, different from his own, seeps in through the floors and walls: ‘These quiet streets were built on the site of the old Croydon aerodrome, and it is almost as if the perspectives of the former grass runways have returned to haunt these neat suburban lawns and the minds of those who tend them’ (703). In addition to the home’s new growth, perspective becomes displaced, and the very geometry of the home assumes an increasingly distorted set of angles:
I have strayed into an unfamiliar area of the room, somewhere between Margaret’s bathroom and the fitted cupboards. The remainder of the room sheers away from me, the walls pushed back by the light … Another door leads to a wide and silent corridor, clearly unentered for years. There is no staircase, but far away there are entrances to other rooms, filled with the sort of light that glows from X-ray viewing screens … The house is revealing itself to me in the most subtle way … The true dimensions of this house may be exhilarating to perceive, but from now on I will sleep downstairs. Time and space are not necessarily on my side. (705)
Ballard’s sober description captures the moments in which our phobic dweller loses grip on the home, as its closely guarded set of rules slowly disband, invoking at once Levinas but also Lyotard in The Inhuman: ‘Domesticity is over, and probably it never existed, except as a dream of the old child awakening and destroying it on awakening’ (Lyotard 1992, 201). From a manageable yet rarefied set of contours, the home now slides irreversibly into the anonymous state of existence it was originally intended to defend its dweller against. As this mutation unfolds, the shift from an agoraphobic topophilia – a love of the home as an emblem of human warmth – towards a claustrophobic topophobia – a repulsion of the home as a beacon of inhuman alterity – begins. The Pascalian void of outer space is seized by the home, which, in its subtle expansion, reveals itself as being on the inside. Now, the home is no longer marked as the retreat, and in order to counter this eternal expansion, microcosmic space must be invented in the midst of spatial uncertainty. Thus, Ballantyne makes a decision: ‘The house enlarges itself around me. The invasion of light which revealed its true dimensions has now reached the ground floor. To keep my bearings I have been forced to retreat into the kitchen, where I have moved my mattress and blankets. Now and then I venture into the hall and search the looming perspectives’ (Ballard 2002, 707).
FIGURE 1.4 Rue Oberkampf, Paris.
We are at the final stages of domestic existence, where agoraphobia and claustrophobia are no longer distinct conditions, but instead mutually edifying responses to an elemental and anonymous being, which renders even the most prosaic of objects indistinct zones of materiality: ‘The cooker, refrigerator and dishwasher have become anonymous objects …’ (707). In ‘the almost planetary vastness of this house’, Ballard’s suburban explorer succumbs to collapse, having murdered a colleague and cannibalized the TV repairman. In the end, Ballantyne’s body, as with the assemblage of anonymous objects that surround him, loses all referential meaning, and becomes part of the fabric of the real: ‘The perspective lines flow from me, enlarging the interior of the compartment. Soon I will lie beside her, in a palace of ice that will crystallise around us, finding at last the still centre of the world which came to claim me’ (707–709).
***
Ballard’s story is a parable of the agoraphobe. In the grotesque scenario of the agoraphobe regressing back to a primitive form, we cannot help but be reminded of William James and his envisioning of agoraphobia as having no place in a ‘civilized man’ but instead belonging to the domain of feral animals and other such primitive forms of life (James 1950). We are also reminded of Freud’s incisive comments on the function of the phobic object to master and conceal an anxiety greater than that of what is presented before one’s eyes. In the case of Ballantyne, we have an exemplary illustration of the attempt to contain anxiety. Ballantyne’s retreat from the world consists of a refusal to contend with the uncertainty of a world that resists conforming to the egocentric perspective of a self incapable of negotiating with alterity. Thus, the home enters existence as a response to the problem of anxiety. Yet, the successful retreat into the home as a response to the problem of the outside is tenable only insofar as the home operates under the logic of what Ballard terms elsewhere, a ‘benevolent psychopathology’ (Ballard 1991, 138). As the home betrays this benevolence, so its protective form dissolves, and anxiety reappears in another guise. It is a movement we will be confronted with time and again, a movement of both concealment and evasion peculiar to the relation between anxiety and its object.
‘A hurricane in Paris’
In both Levinas and Ballard, we bear witness to the home’s refusal to be fully mastered and possessed, at once revealing itself to be a site of love and horror. Alongside Ballard’s hyperreal vision, Levinas accents the ambivalence running throughout the home. If the home makes room for the dweller to re-collect themselves, and in doing so, forge a spatiality that both suspends and defers the ‘uncertain future of the element’, then it does so through sealing itself off from things in order to create a world within itself, as Levinas has it: ‘Proceeding from the dwelling, possession, accomplished by the quasi-miraculous grasp of a thing in the night, in the apeiron of prime matter, discovers a world’ (Levinas 1969, 163). This birth of a world takes place as an act of mastery and possession, such that even within the night, we remain open to the world as graspable. To grasp the elements in their impersonality, we must, as Levinas says, ‘run up against the very strangeness of the earth’ (142). The ambivalence of the Levinasian home is thus not a question of it revealing several faces, but rather of it refusing to face us at all. Without interval and without origin, the il y a has no side against which and through which we might approach it. Lacking face, the element conceals itself from within, yet deposits itself nevertheless as a trace of ‘the fathomless obscurity of matter’, including that of the home itself (159).
We turn now from images of anonymity and obscurity to that of warmth and clarity. We assume this turn through Bachelard. Our reason for turning to Bachelard – a turn we will make on several occasions – is to give specificity to the felt experience of the home. In fact, despite Bachelard’s ostensible occupation with felicitous spatiality, we will see that ultimately he is closer to Levinas than may be obvious. Bachelard’s text, The Poetics of Space, is critical given that, for him, the bodily basis of the home is as important as the homely basis of the body (Bachelard 1994). This idea is crystallized in the main thesis of the book: ‘All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home’ (5). Far from the body as a passive receiver of the external world, Bachelard’s formula implies a reversibility between home and body. If all inhabited space bears the essence of home, then this is because home is created in the dynamic spark between inhabited and bodily space. It is for this reason that Bachelard cites the proverb ‘We bring our lares with us’ approvingly (5). That we bring our lares with us rather than leaving them behind means that ontological security is grounded in the centrality of the home, a precarious relation exemplified in the case of agoraphobia. Despite this ontological confidence, Bachelard is especially sensitive to the precariousness of the home, and also to its role in both the unification of the subject as well the fragmentation of the subject on an experiential level. Thus, this movement from Levinas to Bachelard is a movement towards specificity and thematization; it is, in other words, a movement that returns us to the concrete place of the home in its philic and phobic aspects.
Bachelard begins with Levinas, in asking, what is the home? If Levinas situates the home in relation to elemental and non-elemental being, then for Bachelard, the situation is no less mythical. For him, the importance of the home is guaranteed through its role as mediator between memory and imagination, and to this extent is ‘a real cosmos in every sense of the word’ (4). Once inhabited, the home gains its power through fortifying itself as the locus of memory and imagination. Indeed, it is thanks to the home that memory and imagination are able to work together in their ‘mutual deepening’ (5). The home, as such, is a place of monumentalization, and it allows us in no uncertain terms to ‘live fixations of happiness … by reliving memories of protection’ (6). As with the Levinasian recollection, this place of dreaming serves to restore and renew the dweller back to their original unity. Even more than this, the house, as the primary home, is what ‘thrusts aside contingencies’, and without this seal of protection, human being ‘would be a dispersed being’ (7). In a rejoinder to Heidegger, Bachelard writes, ‘before he is “cast into the world” … man is laid in the cradle of the house’ (7). For this reason, the Bachelardian home is described in terms of possessing ‘maternal features’ – a ‘bosom’ – and the site of an original existence that both contains and compresses time (7). This primordial dwelling is not simply the realm of one’s own personal existence. Rather, it gestures towards a ‘pre-human’ or ‘immemorial’ plane of existence from where personal existence emerges (10).
Here, Bachelard joins Levinas in resisting the localization of home by rendering it an ontological concept. The continuity of the subject is guaranteed thanks to the fact that each of the homes he or she inhabits bears witness to a more abstract home that is enacted in these subsequent dwellings. All of this is thanks to the fact that the home reanimates and recollects what was already present – the literally unforgettable home that is manifest as, in Bachelard’s terms, ‘the embodiment of dreams’ (15). To approach this dream, Bachelard conceives a methodology, which he terms ‘topoanalysis’, allowing us to study ‘the sites of our intimate lives’ (8). If successful, topoanalysis would allow us to see beyond our perception of space and time as a series of discrete points in order to recognize that beneath this abstraction spatiality compresses time. This recognition is restorative: through it, our relation to place is renewed thanks to our heightened attention to the power of place as rendering memories ‘motionless’ (9). Against this backdrop, Bachelard emerges as a thinker of peaceful nights, for whom the home is the emblematic shell, into which we retreat without resistance. Indeed, if sleep provides us with a trace of the elemental horror in Levinas, then in Bachelard it offers us quite the opposite. He writes, ‘And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial’ (10).
In his earlier work, Earth and Reveries of Repose, Bachelard gestures towards several of the themes that will become central in his later work. Already in his earlier thinking, the home at night assumes a pivotal place in his thought. Describing the home as a protection ‘against the night’, Bachelard invokes the twilight home as a softly lit beacon of intimacy in the midst of cosmic space (Bachelard 2011, 82). In opposition to the endless black, the ‘nocturnal life’ of the home stations itself between worlds, fending itself against that ‘huge beast that is everywhere, like some universal threat’ (83). Here, Bachelard rages against the sphere of cosmic darkness in favour of a night that is available to the home, and ‘for our night to be human, it has to be against the inhuman night’ (84). His language of the home being against the world, against the night, against the outside is a testament to his genuine topophilia, a love that borders on an equally volatile anxiety.
This intimate sanctuary, which inside of itself reveals a series of nests and nooks, requires a certain type of relation to the outside world in order for it to function, as such. As we join Bachelard in his Paris apartment, we find a discontent with the ‘big city’ and its ‘superimposed boxes’ (Bachelard 1994, 26). What Bachelard finds especially disturbing about the Parisian apartment is the lack of roots, which is compounded by the jarring assemblage of space built upon space, crammed into a unit, which deprives the dweller not only of the ‘heroism of stair climbing’, but perhaps more importantly, its fundamental lack of ‘cosmicity’ (27). Bachelard’s critique centres on the synthetic nature of urban space. Lacking roots, the home in the city is unable to grow, and thus at no point does the home exist in an edifying relation with the elements, Bachelard laments how ‘our houses are no longer aware of the storms of the outside universe … A hurricane in Paris has not the same personal offensiveness toward the dreamer that it has towards the hermit’s house’ (27). Confronted with insomnia on the Place Maubert, Bachelard’s response is to invoke ‘metaphors of the ocean’ (28). Rendering the chaotic movements of Paris an oceanic lullaby, proceeding even to transform the hum of cars to the sound of distant thunder, Bachelard is finally able to sleep: ‘My bed is a small boat lost at sea; that sudden whistling is the wind in the sails’ (28).
FIGURE 1.5 Place Maubert, Paris.
Far from drifting away from our phobic preoccupations, we are instead gliding closer and closer to the core of anxiety. The reason for this is that Bachelard reveals to us the captive power of the home as a sanctuary in an otherwise hostile world. Like Ballard’s home dweller, Bachelard’s sensibility is to retreat and draw the curtains on a world, which can never compare to that of the interior of the home. Indeed, the very existence of the outside only gains its quality as real thanks to being offset by the warmth of the home. One need only think of Bachelard’s evocation of the ‘great dreamer of curtains’, Baudelaire, who ‘added “heavy draperies that hung down to the floor” … to protect the winter-grit house from the cold’ (39). This ornate gesture serves not only to adorn the home in a thick veil, but also to mould and define the outside according to the needs of the home’s interior. This reshaping of the outside through the lens of the home’s interior finds its extension in Bachelard’s account of the snow-covered home, against which the winter beyond the home becomes a ‘non-house’, marking the homogeneity of whiteness (40). As the outside world loses its definition, so the interior of the home gains an increased value as being sealed off. In this respect, Bachelard relies on a certain kind of relation between the house and the universe in order to privilege the former as centre of things, he writes in no uncertain terms: ‘The house invites mankind to heroism to cosmic proportions. It is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos’ (46).
Between claustrophobia and agoraphobia
Bachelard’s voyage between domestic space and cosmic space is mirrored with the movement between inside and out. Towards the end of The Poetics of Space, Bachelard investigates the topic of inside and outside explicitly. There, he will engage with Henri Michaux’s prose-poem L’espace aux ombres, finding within it evidence of the home’s steadfast refusal to withstand the elements, but also an admission of the home’s fundamental porousness:
Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outside that real space is.
Certain (shades) especially, girding their loins one last time, make a desperate effort to ‘exist as a single unity’. But they rue the day. I met one of them.
Destroyed by punishment, it was reduced to a noise, a thunderous noise.
An immense world still heard it, but it no longer existed, having become simply and solely a noise, which was to rumble on for centuries longer, but was fated to die out completely, as though it had never existed. (216–217)
In his response to the poem, Bachelard uncovers a series of spatial anxieties situated at the intersection between inside and out. His first response to Michaux is to recognize that what is destroyed in the ‘horrible inside-outside’ is ‘a spirit that has lost its “being-there”’ (217). This de-spiritualization takes form in another kind of spatiality, ‘a confused hum that cannot be located’ (217). Space becomes not simply an echo of something that still resounds in the present, but a formless murmur, elemental, we might add. And now, in the space that is left over as a remnant, the thing becomes impregnated with the quality of being a ‘sonorous echo from the vaults of hell’ (217). This hellish place, no longer serving its function in keeping the elements at the door, instead serves to inadvertently invite those anonymous forces precisely to the heart of the home. Once this vault of hell enters the home world, there it ‘is condemned to repeat the world of its evil intention, a world which, being imprinted in being, has overthrown being’ (217). ‘A part of us’, Bachelard continues on this doomed note, ‘is always in hell’, always exposed, that is, to the boundless space that forms a swarming yet non-localizable point in and around the home.
Following the partial dissolution of inside and out, perspective is lost, and what is ‘heard on the outside’ may just as easily be situated on the inside (217). The rot sets in, ‘being is slowly digesting its nothingness’, and time, alongside space, is also dragged into this collapse of order (217). As space enters the throes of death, a final attempt is made at seeking primordial unity. As the attempt fails, the genius loci that originally gave birth to place is now ‘the backwash of expiring being’ (217). Throughout this hellish ordeal, what is painful is not the collapse of inside and out, as such. After all, as Bachelard reminds us, spatiality is dynamic, and inside and outside are ‘always ready to be reversed’ (218). The pain dwells not in their separation, but in their contact within the ‘border-line surface between inside and outside’ (218). In this ungrounded place, lucidity is disbanded: ‘Intimate space loses its clarity, while exterior space loses its void, void being the raw material of possibility of being. We are banished from the realm of possibility’ (218).
To withdraw, as Levinas and Bachelard urge, is no longer possible. Where, Bachelard asks, are we to live now that the home has become the haunt of hell? The fear has no face, and nor does it pertain to specific content, less even the incursion of memory returning from the grave and finding expression in the home of the living. Rather, we are in the sphere of the Levinasian il y a – a realm that takes being itself, in its nameless indifference, as the source of horror. Into this elemental existence, there is no place to find refuge, and as a result, ‘the mind has lost its geometrical homeland and the spirit is drifting’ (218).
Bachelard comes to the end of his reading of Michaux:
I accept it as a phobia of inner space, as though hostile remoteness had already become oppressive in the tiny cell represented by inner space. With this poem, Henri Michaux has juxtaposed in us claustrophobia and agoraphobia; he has aggravated the line of demarcation between outside and inside. (220)
We are on the edge of intimacy. On this verge, agoraphobia and claustrophobia mark two mutually edifying ways of negotiating with the anonymity and alterity of space. This movement from inside to outside, from enclosure to exposure, delineates not a paring of opposites, but a union, in which both phobias operate within the same space. As if by accident, Bachelard discovers the ‘dark entity’ (in his own telling formulation) guarding the home from the ‘horrible outside-inside’, and in doing so, reveals the structure of the home as being defined by the juxtaposition between agoraphobia and claustrophobia. Here, Bachelard revolves around the vertiginous limit of the home, a limit in which both the excess of space and the absence of space hinge on the same anxiety, as Bachelard says by way of Jules Supervielle: ‘Trop d’espace nous étouffe beaucoup plus que s’il n’y en avait pas assez’ (‘Too much space smothers us much more than if there were not enough’) (221).
The panic room
To end this reflection on the sickness of the home, let us return to the home at night. We see now that the act of waking up prematurely forges a bridge in which claustrophobia and agoraphobia not only meet, but also dissolve into a joint anxiety. In the peaceful sleep of the Bachelardian reverie, we take the home as a sanctum for the agoraphobe, a place of retreat into which boundaries are sealed and enclosure is contained. As the outside, in its elemental anonymity, presses down upon the agoraphobe, so the home becomes reinforced as the centre of stability. Rising up against the world, the home establishes a world within itself, indeed going so far as to reshape the world around its core, such that the movement and inhibition of the agoraphobe is guided at all times by the axis of the home. In all this, both Levinas and Bachelard reveal the overarching significance of the home as a mode of delimiting infinite space – and thus, infinite terror – into a domesticated and constricted nest.
The intermediary between claustrophobia and agoraphobia in spatial form can be expressed by the image of the home as a panic room. Not content with the home as a container, Bachelard and Levinas frame the home as a shelter inside of a shelter. For Bachelard, we can think here of his love of nooks, corners and nests. For Levinas, meanwhile, the space within a space is confirmed in the image of the dwelling giving birth to the world. This overlapping of enclosures upon one another takes spatial form in that of the panic room: a double of the home, the entrance of which is veiled to the outside, but yet from within, the dweller is able to survey the space outside of the panic room. This paranoiac spatiality is not a departure from the home, but instead its logical conclusion, so far as it fortifies the subject against the hostility of the outside world, but only at the expense of simultaneously imprisoning him or her.
In the direction of claustrophobia, then, this domestic container, idyllic and serene, reveals another dimension to its sickness, whereupon the urge is not to remain within it, but to flee. From where does this urge to flee emerge when waking up into a home that has been transformed from a locus of intimacy and tenderness to a site of alienation and anonymity? For that matter, how to read the walls of a home when they become impregnated with an oppressive dimension? Far from fortifying the subject against an anonymous world, which is to be avoided as much as possible, the home betrays the trust of the dweller, carrying within it the seed of its own alienation, the reaction to which is one of repulsion.
Under such circumstances, the home is thought of as being a hostile space, in some sense opposed to the existence of the dweller insomuch as the subject feels trapped in the home: that is, of the dweller not only becoming part of the wall, but actually being buried within the wall. Furthermore, the same dynamic is carried through the world more broadly, and, as we will see in subsequent chapters, the idée fixe of the phobic subject’s anxiety is the transmutation of the world – including the world of the body and of others – from a fully realized, familiar and homely nexus of places to a partly derealized, unfamiliar and unhomely grid of points, each of which threatens to disintegrate the structure of the subject.
In the home at night, spatiality becomes deformed. This incursion of elemental existence breaks the idealism of the home and returns it to a fabric of the raw matter, depriving us of space in which we can freely move and breathe. In return, this loss of boundary destroys the distinction between subject and world, forcing both aspects – the dweller and his room – to inhabit the same anonymous cavity, without any line to separate them. The anxiety of being swallowed or otherwise destroyed by space appears in both agoraphobia and claustrophobia, with only their contours and accents changing. In each case, what is at stake is the elimination of the subject through a lack of differentiation between things, reducing those things to a ‘plenum of the element’, and in turn destroying all spaces of retreat (Levinas 1969, 156).
This movement between claustrophobia and agoraphobia is thus a movement not only of enclosure and exposure, of outer space to inner space, but also of inhalation and exhalation, of breathlessness and breathfulness. Indeed, the image we often find in the case of claustrophobia is that of being buried alive. From a psychoanalytical perspective, the anxiety returns us to the first home, that of the womb, thus Freud will write of phantasies of this place as ‘contain[ing] an explanation of the remarkable dread that many people have of being buried alive … Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety’ (Freud 2010, 377). The anxiety over being stuck in place is at once an anxiety of space as revealing to us something horrific and abject as it is how our bodies, in their porousness and contingency, respond to this image. The task we face now is to give voice to this bodily experience.