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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 16 number 4 December 2011

Events that have most confronted me with thelimits of the human in recent years have allinvolved the cataclysmic destruction of built and

living environments along with their human and

non-human inhabitants, by war for sure, but

more often by fire, flood, gale-force winds, and

vibrating earth. Or rather, it has been images of

remnants of that destruction that catch my breath

burnt-out cars huddled together on the side of

what used to be roads leading out of what used to

be Victorian towns; acres of debris peppered by

overturned boats on land where Acehs metropo-

lis once stood; a dog sailing on top of a door along

what used to be a street filled with the sounds of

New Orleans jazz; or a woman holding her head in

despair kneeling in rubble that used to be a

village of Sichuan province. These images are of

traces of belonging, remnants of relations

between people, and between people, land,homes, animals, and other non-human elements.

As the human survivors of these events huddle

together in crooked doorways behind curtains of

rain, or dig together in rubble with bare hands, or

hold on to each other in tears as they watch a

chimney rising from ash, it is not just for loss of

human life that they grieve neighbours,

family, friends, or even strangers made familiar

through daily passing on the road. Also felt is the

loss of the built environment and things thatmade life, family, friends, and strangers possible.

Too often the dominant public response to

such events, in the context of decision making

about funding and managing the recovery, is to

blame something or someone for the loss of

human life whilst favouring technical measures to

prevent or control these events: better warning

systems, sturdier buildings, more stringent guide-

lines for escape. While justified in some situa-

tions of extreme inequity or criminal neglect in

the distribution of resources for dwelling, such

responses to so-called natural disasters overlook

the complex relationship between buildings,

things, community, and politics in dwelling. In

examining that relationship I take as my starting

point Martin Heideggers idea, outlined inBuilding Dwelling Thinking, that the built

environment makes possible the gathering of

dwelling and belonging, just as, conversely,

manners of dwelling give rise to the buildings

and things that nurture those ways of dwelling,

those ways of life. If this intertwining of the

ontological and the concrete actuality of buildings

and dwelling is granted then it is also necessary to

reconsider the politics of dwelling, not just with

regard to how some modes of dwelling arose in

rosalyn diprose

BUILDING AND

BELONGING AMID THEPLIGHT OF DWELLING

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/11/040059^14 2011 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.641345

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the path of a fire, flood, or earthquake in the first

place but also with regard to the politics of

assisting the survivors to rebuild their lives along

those paths. And I take it that such assistance is

particularly the responsibility of the more

privileged and wealthy democratic societies suchas Australia, whether for rebuilding in ones own

country or in other less privileged regions.

So-called natural disasters expose the need for

a reconsideration of the limits of the human and

of the politics of rebuilding in their wake because,

from the perspective of twenty-first century

global politics, natural disasters present as neither

purely natural nor purely man-made and,

hence, they compound the contradictions appar-

ent in two dominant ontological images of thehuman. On the one hand, in the face of such

threats our societies have become highly risk-

averse: government responses to incalculable,

unpredictable, but high-consequence threats to

life and security are increasingly framed by what

has been described as the precautionary princi-

ple1 or the paradigm of prudence.2 This

approach to threats to human life and property

assumes an irresponsible, but nevertheless power-

ful, human agent (rather than pure nature orGod) as the ultimate cause of unpredictable but

nevertheless impending disaster, whether in the

form of industrial accidents, terrorist attacks,

or the climate change behind extreme weather

events. Aside from fostering a culture of blame,

the paradigm cultivates an overly cautious

attitude towards the future and justifies govern-

mental countermeasures to unpredictability in

order to ensurea future that is continuous with

the past (Diprose et al. 270). On the other hand,

and conversely, we have had over a century of

anti-humanist philosophy and political theory

that challenges this picture of a human agent with

the power to control its world and that cautions

against the totalising politics that would pre-empt

the future and attempt to control the actions of

citizens as a means of doing so. From these

critiques there have emerged various ideas of the

post-human dispersed non-subject and para-

digms that celebrate diversity and dynamic

transformation in the relation between human

and non-human elements of worlds. While I lean

towards this latter approach, some of these

philosophies of becoming beg the question as to

the basis of responsibility for keeping open

liveable futures as undetermined possibility. In

some post-human paradigms it is not clear who or

what might provide the basis for ethical

approaches to rebuilding and dwelling after thedevastating event.

In re-examining the limits of the human I

propose to open a path between these two

approaches to human agency by revisiting the

role of the built environment and things in what

Heidegger calls the plight of dwelling

(Building 161). The analysis aims for a

notion of dwelling where the human agent is

suitably humble but responsible in the face of the

plight of dwelling, not simply in the sense ofaccountable, but responsible for preserving the

potentiality of dwelling for others. And it aims

for an ethics of rebuilding and recovery that can

deal equally well with (avoiding or repairing in

the wake of) ruin by political forces and ruin by

so-called natural forces. While I begin this

analysis with Heideggers notion of the plight

of dwelling, I turn to Jacques Rancieres and

Hannah Arendts political ontologies, which

better locate the political dimensions of dwellingand what is required to minimise its ruin. Then,

with the help of Merleau-Ponty, I examine the

ethical dimension of rebuilding after ruin either

by totalising politics or by the kind of elemental

forces with which I began. I aim to demonstrate

how the preservation of dwelling is not about

controlling the unpredictable but is a collective

endeavour of dwelling with built and living

environments that leaves space for the unique

and the arbitrary.

Anne Michaels novel The Winter Vault is

woven through my analysis because her story

exposes the political, intimate, and ethical

elements of the plight of dwelling that the

philosophers often understate. In her extraordin-

ary fictional examination of the building of

relations amid preparations for the building of

the Aswan Dam (and the attendant destruction of

the habitats of the dwellers of the Nile basin) and

the interpersonal dimension of the rebuilding of

Warsaw following its destruction during the

Second World War, Michaels points to the

relation between building(s) and belonging and

building and belonging

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the human shattering and preserving of both. She

also points to the role of love, intimacy, and

forgiveness in the ethical enterprise of distribut-

ing resources for dwelling.

In what follows I address three points about

the plight of dwelling and the ethico-politics ofrecovering from ruin. The first is about the role

that buildings and things play in dwelling and

belonging. Second, I address the relationship

between politics and the inequities in the fragility

of dwelling in terms of the distribution of the

sensible and how, alternatively, the politics of

dwelling might be understood in terms of the

expression of uniqueness in political community.

In the third section I speculate on what an ethics

of rebuilding might look like once the material,political, and communal dimensions of dwelling

are taken into account.

on the role of buildings and things indwelling and belonging

No one can take in a building all at once. Its

like when we take a photograph were

looking at only a few things . . . [I]ts those

thousand other details that anchor us far belowwhat we consciously see . . . that gives us the

feeling of familiarity with the mind behind the

building. Sometimes it seems as if the

architect had full knowledge of these thousand

other details in his design, not just the

different kinds of light possible across a

stone facade, or across the floor, or filling

the crevices of an ornament. But as if he knew

how the curtains would blow into the room

through the open window and cause just that

particular shadow, and turn a certain page of acertain book at just that moment of the story,

and that the dimness of the Sunday rain would

compel the woman to rise from the table and

draw the mans face to the warmth of her . . .

As if the architect had anticipated every

minute effect of weather, and of weather on

memory, every combination of atmosphere,

wind and temperature, so that we are drawn to

different parts of the room depending on the

hour of the day, the season, as if [the design]

could. . .create memory! And this embrace of

every possibility, of light, weather, season . . .

is also the awareness of every possibility of

life, the life that is possible in such a building.

And the sudden freedom of this is profound.

Its like falling in love, the feeling that here, at

last here, one can be ones self, and. . . [that]

aspirations, various kinds of desire, . . . moral

goodness and intellectual work are possible.

A complete sense of belonging to a place,to oneself, to another. All this in a building?

Impossible, but also, somehow, true. A

building gives us this, or takes it from us,

a gradual erosion, a forgetting of parts of

ourselves. (Michaels 8385)

Michaels concern with the politicaldimensions

of the plight of dwelling may not be obvious from

this quote. This reflection on the relation between

buildings and belonging is hyperbolically roman-

tic and middle class and it implies a seamlessnessbetween the architects intent, the building, and

the sense of belonging of the inhabitants that the

books narrative goes on to question. Taking

note, then, of the qualifications she puts on the

idea that there is a mind behind the building

that successfully realises its intent (it is as

if. . .), Michaels is pointing towards the crucial

but ordinary role that a building and other things

play in gathering the elements of dwelling and

belonging. This is a dynamic, multidirectionalprocess of habituation and familiarisation that is

not under the control of any master architect.

Heidegger has elaborated some of the complex-

ities of this relation between a building and

dwelling in more abstract terms in Building

Dwelling Thinking. A building is a built

thing, he says, but not simply a thing in the

conventional sense of an unknown X to which

perceptual properties are attached (15253).

Nor is a building, in essence, separate from its

surroundings or its inhabitants. First, to be a

building, a thing of its own kind, a building

must already be gathering in its own way earth

and sky, divinities and mortals (15354). Or to

use Michaels terminology, to be a building, and

this specific house, this thing is already gathering

and redirecting atmosphere, wind, light, wood,

stone, vegetation, as well as the flesh and

sensibilities of its occupants and of those living

beings that it leaves outside. Moreover, and

crucially, a building provides the location or site

for this gathering that is essential to it. Second,

this place that the building provides for gathering

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is inseparable from and a condition of the

dwelling and belonging of its inhabitants. The

building, on Heideggers account, provides an

anchor for the building of, first, the inhabitants

desires, aspirations, perceptions, and memories at

a pre-reflective level, and, when the buildingrecedes through habituation, it provides the

ground for the emergence of more abstract

capacities of measuring, valuing, and thinking

(15455). This is why loss of a building and

things that have participated in the building of

ones dwelling can strike at the core of ones

being. Third, on the question of the mind

behind the building or its design, Heidegger

suggests that a prior manner of dwelling unfolds

into the building that cultivates growing thingsand the building that erects buildings (148). To

make the point more explicitly than Heidegger

does, socio-political and historical context

informs the style, design, location, and every

other dimension of the building of buildings. Yet

there is no single architect, human or non-human,

overseeing this process or determining its

outcome.

Against humanism based on the idea of a self-

present agent in control of its world, Heideggerproposes the notion of human dwelling (or

Dasein) as open (spatially and temporally) and,

therefore, dispersed or unheimlich (uncanny,

in the sense of not-being-at-home).3 Dwelling is a

dynamic happening or event (Ereignis),4 a

double process of bringing to presence and

concealment; an undetermined, open coming

together and dispersal of various elements of

mutual belonging. Hence, homelessness or the

plight of dwelling is not about losing control

over oneself or ones environment. Rather, in the

first instance the plight of dwelling, as

Heidegger understands it, refers to the condition

of ruin, potential or actual, of places of dwelling

(houses, cities). After all, Building Dwelling

Thinking was an address to architects in the

context of a housing crisis in Germany following

the destruction of some of its cities in the Second

World War.5 But Heidegger proposes a more

fundamental plight of dwelling, older than the

world wars with their destruction and explicit

ruin: the plight of dwelling also refers to the

ontological condition of failing to respond to the

call to dwell in an open mutual way in relation to

other elements of dwelling (161). In Heideggers

terminology, dwelling as place and process is one

step away from ruin if we ignore the funda-

mental character of dwelling [that is] . . .sparing

and preserving (149), where preserving means tofree something from harm and danger and

sparing means to set something free into its own

presencing (150). The preconditions of explicit

destruction of places of dwelling seems to be

inequitable or totalising socio-political conditions

where modes of dwelling are predetermined and/

or only some things and beings come to presence.

While Heidegger is clearly aware of the

historicity of the dwelling that informs the

building of buildings, he tends to avoid itspolitical complexity in choosing ancient exam-

ples (temples, bridges, and stone houses of the

Black Forest) the socio-political preconditions of

which are out of reach. Without assuming that all

such preconditions of ruin could be itemised,

Michaels, on the other hand, does emphasise the

historical, class, and cultural specificity of this

dwelling that informs the building of buildings

and the belonging that it nurtures (or not). The

building of Michaels quote is a middle-classhome, specific to the building of the intimate

relation between Avery and Jean in 1960s

Canada. The apparent a-political ordinariness of

that dwelling is gradually eroded in the surround-

ing pages with Jean and Averys growing

awareness of the differences in dwelling and

building among the Nubian inhabitants of the

Nile basin in comparison with their own. In this

other place Avery is an engineer on the famous

and controversial project of disassembling and

reassembling the temple of Abu Simbel to make

way for the building of the Aswan Dam.

Contrary to first impressions, even in their

home in Canada the relation between the building

and that which it gathers is not seamless no

aspect of the relation between a building and

dwelling is thoroughly predetermined or without

its cracks and no particular element, including

the building and its designer, gets the final say in

the how of dwelling. The light and wind have

some say in how a building works, as do the book

and other things that the building contains, as

well as its human inhabitants in the way they


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perceive and live through the elements that are

gathered and arranged there. Moreover, dwelling

itself, as place and process, is fragile: as Michaels

puts it, building gives us this [sense of

belonging], or takes it from us, a gradual erosion,

a forgetting of parts of ourselves (85). This playof belonging and its undoing, memory and

forgetting is necessary to preserve dwelling as

an opening to other possibilities. Dwelling is an

event that nurtures belonging but with fleeting

and unique dimensions. On the other hand,

relations between domestic dwelling and the

surrounding environment, including material

and socio-political elements, can bring dwelling

undone. Indeed, like Heidegger, Michaels is

hinting at another fragility in the relationsbetween buildings and dwelling to do with the

threat of ruin in the context of Averys

involvement with the building of the Aswan

Dam. I will draw out this political dimension and

the attendant ruin of dwelling with some

assistance from Jacques Ranciere and Hannah

Arendt. Their work, while indebted to some

extent to Heideggers notion of dwelling, in

different ways renders the political dimension of

the plight of dwelling more explicit.

on the political and the distribution ofthe sensible

While less concerned with the role of buildings

and things in dwelling, Rancieres work on the

distribution of the sensible is helpful for

bringing into focus the political dimension of

dwelling. As with the phenomenological tradi-

tion, by sensible Ranciere means both sense

data and the sense we make of it. By dis-

tribution of the sensible he means the way in

which the demarcation of space, time, and

meaning by a myriad of human activities informs

perception and so delimits forms of thinking,

doing, being, making, and communicating that

are common to a community.6 The way the

sensible is distributed delimits what can be seen,

heard, and said, and, I would add, what can be

felt and how. Ranciere thus makes explicit what

Heidegger only hints at that the building of

buildings as well as the habituation that proceeds

from dwelling in and around those buildings is

thoroughly saturated with the social and political

context. His main point, however, is stronger: the

dominant way in which the sensible is distributed

in Western societies is by what he calls the

police order (Dissensus 3637), a system of

laws, norms and regulative processes that cate-gorises in terms of properties, function, and

location and that thereby distributes the sensible

inequitably, that is, in ways that divide commu-

nities by the formation of hierarchies and

exclusions (92). Politics proper, as Ranciere

defines it, consists in disrupting the police

order, thus opening community or the space of

appearance for people and their activities that

would otherwise be unseen, uncounted, excluded,

or disadvantaged (37).Ranciere ties his idea of politics to aesthetics in

a way that is partly reminiscent of Heideggers

idea of poesis as an antidote to the plight of

dwelling. Heidegger suggests that the event of

dwelling is allowed (rather than ruined) if we

think dwelling in terms of a double process of

gathering, if we build out of dwelling and think

for the sake of dwelling (Building 161). That

is, humans dwell poetically if they are

responding to the call of dwelling responsibly,by which he seems to mean allowing other

elements with which one dwells to come to

presence in their own unique ways. For Ranciere,

resistance to, or overturning of, the police

order requires more active intervention. Politics

is most effective when it emerges not from the

poetic use of language to reopen the meaning of

being but from the activities of the unheard and

unseen, from the people excluded (or

uncounted) by that order, what Ranciere

refers to as the part of those who have no

part (Dissensus 92). This subjectivization of

the excluded, their emergence into the visible and

audible, necessarily disrupts and transforms the

distribution of the sensible and hence the mean-

ing and ways of dwelling. Actual artistic

practices, including literature, participate in this

aesthetic politics if they intervene in the general

distribution of ways of doing and making as well

as in the relationships they maintain to modes of

being and forms of visibility (Ranciere,

Politics 13). The significance of Rancieres

account of aesthetic politics for my analysis is

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that it points to the necessity of promoting the

agency (or subjectivization) of the displaced

and disadvantaged in any ethics of rebuilding

amid the plight of dwelling.

On the other hand, recovery from ruin is also

the responsibility of the privileged it requiresmaterial support and that the privileged are

dislodged from our habitual ways of dwelling that

either escape or perpetuate the plight of dwelling

experienced by others. So, while not art in either

Rancieres or Heideggers sense,7 the media

images with which I began may do the work of

aesthetic politics in drawing this audience, sitting

safely in lounge rooms, into the plight of

dwelling. They may expose the way that

middle-class Australians, in pursuing a lessurbanised lifestyle, may unwittingly build in

disregard of the uncontrollable forces of earth,

wind, and fire and so accentuate that unpredict-

ability. Or, in support of Rancieres thesis, these

images may also reveal the inequities in the

relation between buildings and dwelling in the

distribution of the sensible. Images of the

destruction of buildings and lives in New

Orleans by hurricane Katrina in 2005 exposed

how much more vulnerable the economicallydisadvantaged African-American residents are

because of the location of their dwellings on

low-lying and, therefore, relatively inexpensive

land. Images of the destruction wrought by the

Indian Ocean tsunamis on 26 December 2004

revealed to the world how local peoples of

Indonesia and Thailand have been displaced

into shanties on the ocean fringes by a tourist

economy. By rendering visible the plight of

dwelling of the invisible and uncounted, these

images may effect a redistribution of the sensible

among the unharmed by exposing the complicity

of privileged peoples in perpetuating the inequi-

ties in dwelling. Such publicity may thereby also

prompt new ways of perceiving, and different,

more equitable and environmentally hospitable

ways of dwelling. This would open an ethics of

recovery that I sketch below, providing that such

media exposure does not reduce the plight of

dwelling to an occasion for the entertainment of a

passive viewing audience.8

The reader of Michaels The Winter Vault is

similarly exposed, not just to the class inequities

between Avery and Jeans dwelling as they build

their lives together in their home in Canada and

those of their Nubian neighbours during their

visits to the site of the Aswan High Dam, but also

to the impact of one on the other. Averys love of

the materials and the physics of building andJeans love of the botanical, while consistent with

a poetics of dwelling with built and living

environments, only serve to heighten their

complicity in the destruction of Nubian habitats

that is to come. While the novel bypasses explicit

display of the impact of the building of the Aswan

Dam on the botanical environment and the

impact of the displacement of tens of thousands

of Nubians on their lives, impending ruin is

palpable and, unlike with Heideggers examples,we do learn something of the politics of the pre-

history of the building of the temple of Abu

Simbel on its safer site. We also get to witness the

ruin of Avery and Jeans relationship through the

experience, a ruin symbolised by Jeans mis-

carriage prior to leaving the Nubian women who

had cared for her during her pregnancy. This ruin

of dwelling is symbolic of the consequences of

ignoring ones responsibility for the plight of

dwelling experienced by others.The relationship between domesticity and

birth (or its failure), on the one hand, and the

wider politics of dwelling and ruin, on the other,

which Michaels explores in her novel, is partly

captured by Hannah Arendts political ontology

based on the disclosure of natality. Natality

refers to the way that the fact of birth, our own

and that of others, signifies a new beginning, or

uniqueness and innovation, the welcome and

expression of which, for Arendt, is critical for

maintaining both democratic community and

human dwelling open to futurity (Arendt,

Human 89 and chapter v). This is what is at

stake in the preservation of dwelling in both the

ontological and concrete senses: human dwelling

as devoted to disclosure of the new or the

preservation of the world for . . . the constant

influx of newcomers who are born into the world

as strangers (9). This idea of political commu-

nity brings into focus the ambiguous role of

home in the politics of dwelling as well as the

role of community, including intimate relations,

memory, and things, in rebuilding life after ruin.


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First, on the ambiguous role of the home in

dwelling, Arendt connects the politics of dwelling

to the preservation of the dynamism of a

particular form of life not domestic life, but

political life (bios) that characterises actors open

to potentiality in the public sphere. Her idea ofpolitical life implies an appropriately modest

notion of human agency where, in dwelling,

human existence neither controls nor is deter-

mined by its world. Together, the life and

dwelling of those who come before us provide

the social, material, and meaningful world in

which we appear. This conditions our existence as

well as our values and perceptions. At the same

time, through and as expressions of natality, we

prevent both biological and political determinismand alter those conditions. Dwelling as bios is

characterised by historicity, innovation, and

unpredictable transformation of ways of life.

Arendts analysis points to the politicisation of

definitions of both life and innovation, a point

developed within the biopolitics of Michel

Foucault. She follows Aristotle (and most

political theory up to the 1970s) in distinguishing

biosfrom biological life (zoe) that is characteristic

of subjected and determined life in the home.While critical of subjection in the private sphere,

Arendt, problematically, tends to leave these

orders in place. Her reasons for doing so,

however, are crucial for understanding the

ambiguous role of the home in politics.

What concerns Arendt is the threat to the

dynamism and pluralism of dwelling of totali-

tarian or deterministic politics, which she

astutely observes arises as much from a science

of process, biologism, and belief in laws of nature

as from blatant authoritarian rule.9 Hence, for

her, in so far as human existence is reduced tozoe

in the private sphere then it should be quar-

antined from the political sphere. But as

biopolitical analysis has shown since Arendt,

this is precisely what modern liberal politics

tends to do make biological life the target of

political regulation. Or, as Krzysztof Ziarek

suggests in his incisive Heideggerian analysis of

the limits of life in this special issue, what

biopolitical analysis traces is the ways in which

power becomes deployed [. . .] in positing life,

especially human life, as technic and thus

available to manipulation (Ziarek, this issue

21). Biopolitical analysis also traces the apparent

converse, the way political power attempts to

regulate the unpredictable aspect of biological life

to ensure its uniformity and security across a

population. As human existence partakes of zoe

as much as ofbios, expressions of natality are just

as rife in the home as in public life. At one level

Arendt is clearly aware of this connection

between political and domestic life, given her

central claim that the disclosure of natality in

political community is a second-order significa-

tion of the fact of ones first-order birth (Human

176). As I have discussed elsewhere, the connec-

tion between these two orders of life explains why

governments, intent on containing uncertaintyand unpredictability in the public domain,

particularly in times of heightened insecurity

and in the wake of natural disasters, tend to focus

on controlling human reproduction, risk, and life

in the home (Diprose, Womens Bodies). This

can be totalising and problematic in ways I will

get to later in this essay.

While Arendt is therefore justified in her

caution about characterising ideal political life in

terms of private life, she is wrong to assume thatdomestic dwelling is equivalent to the cyclic

reproduction of biological life without the

innovation and conditioned freedom character-

istic of political life. The connection Arendt

makes between the two orders suggests instead

that the dynamism and plurality of dwelling that

is characteristic of political life is also true of

intimate relations. This brings me to the second

insight of Arendts account of dwelling that is

pertinent to my analysis: the conditional freedom

characteristic of human agency is historical and

relies on community and, I will argue, on a kind

of love characteristic of intimate relations.

Arendts idea of natality draws attention to the

historicity of the event of agency. She argues that

the insertion of man into a world through

thinking as judgment consists in opening the

path paved by thinking, by remembrance and

anticipation [, which] save[s] whatever they touch

from the ruin of historical and biographical time

(Life 20213; Between 13). That is, human

dwelling is historical, futural and open to

potentiality. Conversely, this gap between the

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past and an undetermined future is foreclosed in

totalising, risk-averse government where, for

example, ways of dwelling are governed by

tradition or curtailed by social paradigms that

emphasise process and that view progress as

uninterrupted movement towards a predeter-mined future. In contrast to such heavy-handed

government of dwelling, what supports innova-

tion, pluralism, and the dynamism of dwelling is

the public space of political community founded

by and devoted to the expression and preserva-

tion of natality, that is, dwelling as futural, plural,

and undetermined. This is one of the more

significant contributions of Arendt to an account

of the politics of dwelling. While for Heidegger

the realisation that death cannot be sharedindividualises human being (by exposing one to

the singularity of ones own becoming, being-

toward-death makes one responsible for ones

own potentiality for existence), for Arendt

expressions of natality found the togetherness of

community, where disclosure and preservation of

others uniqueness in dwelling takes priority.

This political community is based not on mutual

recognition of sameness, or shared vulnerability,

or on hierarchies or exclusions. Rather, actionwithin political community actualises natality by

disclosing the actor as beginning something new;

speech actualises plurality by disclosing the

speaker as an inaccessible, dynamic who

rather than a knowable what (Arendt, Human

17879). Hence, for Arendt the preservation of

dwelling, rebuilding an equitable distribution of

the sensible after ruin, lies in collective and

public action and debate, rather than poesis

or art.

As I have suggested, and in contrast to Arendt,

the preservation of dwelling open to potentiality

is also characteristic of relations in the home. Just

as the home and biological life can become the

focus for totalising and conservative government

in times of political insecurity or following

natural disasters, it can also become the fulcrum

for the re-emergence of political community

against political ruin or, put less dramatically,

against political conservatism and top-down

government of everyday life. Building such an

account of dwelling at the border between

domestic and political life can help account for

the role of things, buildings, and intimate

relations in dwelling and especially what kind of

ethics of rebuilding after ruin follows from this

political ontology.

role of things, community and inter-

corporeality in rebuilding after ruin

Again, Michaels The Winter Vault is insightful

here. In the second half of the novel there is an

exploration of the impact of the destruction of

buildings of a different kind to the disassembling

of Abu Simbel. After temporarily separating from

Avery while dealing with her grief, Jean develops

a relationship back in Canada with Lucjan, a

Polish Jew who avoided internment in Nazicamps and survived the destruction of Warsaw

towards the end of the Second World War. As

with Avery, Jeans dwelling with Lucjans is built

on physical intimacy and the sharing of mem-

ories. His memories of living in the ruins of

Warsaw give some sense of the impact that the

loss of ones habitat must have on ones sense of

belonging as potentiality. Lucjans life amid the

rubble of Warsaw is of bare survival, fear,

mistrust, and isolation. Significantly, he cannotbear physical intimacy with Jean at the same time

as he expresses these memories. He will not be

comforted by her touch. He can only mourn the

loss of his built and living environment through

the touch and intimacy of Ewa, who, as a Polish

refugee, shares his history and with whom he is

entangled, not in love or a similar

arrangement its more like . . . a disaster at

sea (32324).

These images suggest that more is needed to

better understand the impact of the destruction of

the built and living environment on its inhabi-

tants. The novel also asks what collective

practices might allow the emergence of what

Merleau-Ponty calls the event within dwell-

ing.10 Rebuilding buildings and with this rebuild-

ing ways of dwelling require buildings and things,

love and forgiveness in community, understood

in Arendtian terms as the welcome and expres-

sion of natality or, as refined by Jean-Luc Nancy,

the sharing of singularity.

An actual event following a natural disaster

rather than destruction through war, an event


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that I call the teacup event, helps to

demonstrate these points. In March 2009, in the

weeks following the bushfires that devastated

parts of Victoria, killing 173 people, destroying

2,000 homes, and displacing 7,500 others,

Sallyanne Craig set up a comforting cup of tea

project.11 She called for donations of vintage,

old but loved, teacups, saucers and mugs. Four

hundred of these were distributed to survivors of

the fires via the various relief centres in the

region. Crucially, the teacups were not forced

upon survivors or thrown among piles of second-

hand gear. Each cup was placed on a bed of pale

blue tissue in a purpose-cut gift box alongside a

packet of Twinings tea given by that company.

The sign above them read: Please take theteacup that you love, thank you. The teacups

became one of the most sought-after items, after

food and shelter, among the survivors. Two brief

responses to the gesture, posted on the project

website, may indicate why:

Thank you for my beautiful teacup. I had

thought of my two special ones I had lost, but

now this one is as special. (Text message, Mel

Giovanetti, Buxton)

My teacup is just like a little piece of heaven.

Until I saw it I didnt realise how much I

needed something beautiful of my own again,

thank you. (Flowerdale survivor)

One way to understand the role of things in

rebuilding dwelling is with reference to Actor

Network Theorys (ANT) account of non-human

life and things. According to Bruno Latour, ANT

redefines agency, extends agency to non-humans,

and refigures the humannon-human relation in

terms of a network rather than a hierarchy with

human agents on top (Latour 10, 244). On this

account, the teacup is less a thing that humans

use than an agent that enrols heterogeneous

elements from the textual to the technical, the

human to the non-human in an assemblage

(agencement or actant) (Anderson and Braun

xii, xv). The agency afforded the thing, device, or

building through this idea of assemblage/agence-

ment is not too ambitious. ANT ontology

debunks the idea of agency as the exclusive

province of human will or conscious

intentionality and positions the thing as one of

many elements of an assemblage that cause

effects. The thing is an agent only in the sense

that it makes a difference: it can generate [. . .]

transformations manifested by the many unex-

pected events triggered in the other elements(Latour 106). Things and environmental elements

generate transformations not according to some

causal law of nature but only by virtue of a

dynamic assemblage of heterogeneous human and

non-human elements and they do so in unpre-

dictable ways.

The emphasis here is also on the event as

Latour understands it: how these networks of

post-human becoming open new paths for

thinking and living. This ontology, likeArendts, also emphasises the collective aspect

of perception, thinking, and living in a world:

human agency and thought are decentred such

that the social can be reassembled through a

network or collective practice that gives non-

humans a central role in dwelling. Giving non-

human elements credit for forcing open new

paths for dwelling is to be welcomed. But

levelling out human agency as equivalent to

that of many other multifarious elements in anassemblage that generates the event also risks

shifting responsibility away from humans for the

future of the planet. Moreover, the worlds of

significance that are transformed through assem-

blages are also worlds of value these are ethical

worlds. It is human activity, thought, perception

and agency (albeit in different forms to how these

are conventionally understood) that render the

world ethical. Hence it is up to human elements

of assemblages to keep the world open for ethics.

The event matters for ethical and political

reasons. On Arendts account the event of

dwelling consists in opening a gap in what may

otherwise be a continuity between past and

future. It therefore consists in the interruption

of determinism that would predetermine the

future of all the elements of an assemblage,

including the human. Raising these ontological

issues is not to return to naive humanism or to a

notion of a causal human agent in control of its

world. Rather, it is to acknowledge that, just as

things can make a difference to pathways of

human dwelling, humans can refuse to be moved

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by the thing. At the core of such refusal are

habitual perceptions and sedimented distribu-

tions of the sensible. Considering the ethico-

political dimensions of the event and the role

of human dwelling in it puts the onus back on the

human-perceptual elements of assemblages toremain responsive to, and do the right thing

by, things, non-human life, and other humans.

This involves better understanding how the

teacup could preserve dwelling and reopen a

ruined world to the expression of uniqueness and

potentiality and, hence, an undetermined future.

Arguably, the teacup project worked in the

aftermath of the Victorian bushfires because the

teacup came with (anonymous) love and, while it

gathered around it the beginnings of community,it insisted on the historicity, multiplicity, and

specificity of the event the recipient of the gift

chose which teacup touched their memory,

their history, in opening their future.

This brings me to Merleau-Pontys version of

the historicity of the event of dwelling. The main

advantage of his analysis over Arendts account of

natality is that Merleau-Ponty does not make a

distinction between biological life (zoe) and

political life (bios) nor, therefore, does heprivilege any particular form of life in dwelling.

He thereby gives things and buildings a more

central place in dwelling and belonging. At the

same time, unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Pontys

account of dwelling, like Arendts, emphasises

the necessity of community to the preservation of

the plurality and potentiality of dwelling or to

what he would call, for example, the diver-

gence of flesh.

For Merleau-Ponty, there is no obvious

distinction between biological and political life

because at the centre of the hiatus of meaning,

human and non-human life, and built environ-

ments, is the human body entwined with a world.

In experience or dwelling a body is at the point

of contact between the outside and the one who

is called to live it (Merleau-Ponty, Institution

206). Hence, dwelling is a non-decisionary

project where I am inspired and overcome

by the thickness of the sensible, which includes

elements of the built environment (Merleau-

Ponty, Institution 56). In this project of

dwelling, the body is neither free nor determined

in relation to the outside that calls it to live.

This is because there is fundamental ambiguity to

existence, a double belongingness: the body

sensed and the body sentient are two phases

of flesh, and between the world and my body

there is reciprocal insertion and intertwining ofone in the other (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible

13738). Hence, as perception or experience is a

feeling that is felt, a seeing that is seen (Merleau-

Ponty, Eye and Mind 16263), then my

activity is equally passivity (Merleau-Ponty,The

Visible 139). With this notion of flesh, Merleau-

Ponty provides the means for explaining how we

become invested in things and buildings.

Aside from the central role given the body, the

other key feature of Merleau-Pontys notion ofdwelling is that it is a collective project

characterised by the divergence of flesh. That

is, in the intertwining of flesh, dwelling is open to

the new and to the transformation of meaning and

being. One way Merleau-Ponty describes the

event of dwelling, or the break with determin-

ism that opens a gap between past and future, is

by characterising complexes of humannon-

human life as simultaneously instituted and

instituting (Institution 815). Indeed, everylevel of existence, the animal, the biological,

the interpersonal, carries, from the time of our

birth, an element of existence already insti-

tuted, where institution refers to those

events in experience which endow it with durable

dimensions such that I will tend to perceive and

respond to my world in a similar way to how I

have before (77). On the other hand, sedimenta-

tion is not just meaning surviving as a residue in

an activity that repeats the past or that duplicates

a social convention or police order. Memory is

not consciousness recalling a representation of

the past from the recesses of ones mind (193).

Institution is intercorporeal, lived, and dynamic

in that it also involves beginning something new,

initiating, innovation, divergence in relation to a

norm of sense, difference [. . .] deformation,

which is proper to institution (11). In other

words, institution itself, being exposed to . . .

or receptivity to elements and significances,

initiates the present and simultaneously opens

a future (89). This institution-instituting

aspect of the thickness, intertwining, and


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divergence of bodily being is where new paths for

thinking and living arise. Memory is in the teacup

intertwined with a body that has a history of

intertwining with other teacups. The survivors

experience of the teacup is an event, instituted-

instituting, sparked by a gift of others; this is

dwelling reaching for a past, but remaking

deposited significances and, thus, opening

dwelling towards a future.

Both this spirit of community and the event of

dwelling were minimised in the rebuilding of

both Abu Simbel and Warsaw, at least in

Michaels fictional presentation, thus demonstrat-

ing how top-down regulation of rebuilding can go

astray. First, those who dwelt with their earlier

manifestations did not have a say or a role in therebuilding of either Abu Simbel or Warsaw

building was a top-down process rather than a

collective endeavour. Second, the city and temple

were rebuilt as exact replicas using the same

material salvaged from their destruction. This

attempt at mimesis was meant to comfort the

survivors, but the temple was probably soulless

once it was reassembled in its new position away

from the Nubian people. Lucjans initial experi-

ence of his replicated built environment wasdisorientating and humiliating:

Walking for the first time into the replica of

the Old Town, said Lucjan, the rebuilt market

square it was humiliating. Your delirium

made you ashamed you knew it was a trick, a

brainwashing, and yet you wanted it so badly.

Memory was salivating through your brain.

The hunger it tried to satisfy . . . everything

was just the same the same signs for shops,

the same stonework and archways [. . .

] It wasa brutality, a mockery at first completely

sickening, as if time could be turned back, as

if even the truth of our misery could be taken

away from us. And yet, the more you walked,

the more your feelings changed, the nausea

gradually diminished and you began to

remember more and more [. . .] I remember

thinking that if we didnt all clear out, the

ghosts wouldnt come back, and who is this all

for if not for the ghosts? (Michaels 30910)

Conversely, the idea that dwelling, as an inter-

corporeal opening of a future, is a collective

enterprise provides the basis for an ethico-politics

of dwelling. There are at least two indications in

Merleau-Pontys later work of an ethics consistent

with Arendts political ontology. This is an ethics

that compels (urges rather than forces) human

existence to preserve the world for the expression

of dwelling as multiple, unique, and open topotentiality. The first indication is the emphasis

he places on affective responsiveness to what one

is exposed to . . . in the opening of the event.

There is a kind of compulsion towards the other

person or thing inspired by this exposure, an

affective compulsion that also drives the resulting

divergence or deformation of meaning, the

sensitization of an image that opens a

future (Merleau-Ponty, Institution 1819).

Second, in a move that foreshadows EmmanuelLevinass ethics, Merleau-Ponty suggests that this

responsiveness to the dynamic multiplicity one is

exposed to makes one responsible for the

other(120).

This point arises in the context of Merleau-

Pontys criticism of notions of agency that

assume that the self is exclusively active and

dominating (absolute individuality) or exclu-

sively passive and determined in relation to

others and the world. In contrast to the freeagency of absolute individualism, Merleau-

Pontys ontology insists that I accompany the

other always in the fundamental intertwining of

self and world. And, rather than indifference

towards the plight of others implied in a

distancing and respect for the freedom of

the other [which] is non-intervention of others in

me, . . . it would be necessary to take responsi-

bility for the other, not as infirm or impotent, but

without rejecting from the other everything that

one thinks (120). An ethics based on taking

responsibility for other[s] . . . without rejecting

everything one thinks provides no prescription

about what sorts of buildings, things, or ways of

living would be good or bad for humanity as

a whole. Nor could such a position be taken in

any absolute way without remaining blind to the

multiplicity of becomings that make up assem-

blages and without imposing ones values or what

one thinks on the ways of living of those with

whom one dwells. What this ethics does warn

against is precisely that forcing ones convic-

tions, oneself and how one dwells on others,

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human or non-human. On the other hand, and

more positively, this ethics compels us to take up

the call of dwelling, the invitation to dwell with

others and things in such a way that attempts to

keep all existence open to an undetermined

future. Perhaps most importantly, taking respon-sibility for others and a world without rejecting

everything one thinks implies a commitment to

dynamic collectivity in dwelling. Central to

collective existence that keeps open an

undetermined future is a dialogical practice

(central to public and personal institution) that

heeds the uniqueness of others (human and

non-human) without giving up everything that

one thinks.

In social-service-oriented democracies such asAustralia, where building and planning regula-

tions tend to prevent the kind of blatant inequity

of impact of natural disasters that characterised

the Indian Ocean tsunamis, we can afford to

reflect on the importance of community-based

decision making and participation in rebuilding

after ruin. In assisting others rebuild their lives in

the wake of events such as those with which I

began requires forgiveness rather than finding

someone to blame. Sure, some public account-ability is necessary to improve the equitable

distribution of the sensible or to redress any

criminal conduct contributing to destruction. But

this will not bring dwelling back from ruin or

prevent it down the line. Arendt explains why

forgiveness is necessary in the wake of hurt and

damage done by unpredictable events. The

disclosure of natality (the innovation arising)

through action makes the consequences of actions,

that is, the future, unpredictable; the remedy for

this uncertainty and unpredictability is forgive-

ness when something goes wrong (Human 236

37). Unintended and unpredictable consequences

of prior actions is even more characteristic of so-

called natural disasters. Some of the submissions

to the 2009 Royal Commission into the Victorian

fires ran counter to what I am suggesting is a

crucial aspect of an ethics of rebuilding.12 For

instance, a panel of six urban planners recom-

mended not allowing residents to rebuild in some

areas because the risk of bushfires is too high

(Gray). As if with this kind of risk aversion human

existence might be able to control or outrun the

dangers that the elements throw at us. In contrast,

the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and

Recovery Authority (VBRRA), which initially

oversaw the rebuilding effort, was much more

focused on small-scale community-initiated

rebuilding projects.13 In sum, the preservation of

dwelling in rebuilding lives after

ruin requires giving time, com-

passion, and material support for

dwelling rather than blame and

more top-down regulation of risk.

notes

1 Francois Ewald is credited with identifying and

describing the emergence of this principle in, forexample, The Return of Descartes Malicious

Demon.

2 For a comprehensive account of risk aversion

described in these terms see Diprose et al.

3 For his detailed account of the unheimlich fea-

ture of human existence, see Heidegger,Being and

Time, section 40, especially 233.

4 Heidegger discusses Ereignis (event) in these

terms in, for example,OnTime and Being41, 53.

5 I am grateful to Jeffrey Malpas for bringing to my

attention the immediate political context of

Heideggers address. For Malpass own discussion

of Heideggers idea of dwelling, especially in terms

of place and belonging, see HeideggersTypology.

6 Rancie' re gives a comprehensive account of

what he means by distribution of the sensible in

The Politics of Aesthetics12^19, 42^ 45.

7 Media images of the impact of natural disasters

are not art in so far as they conform to, ratherthan intervene into, the ways of doing and

making, thetechne, that governs the production

of images in photojournalism.

8 I thank Magdalena Zolkos for noting the ever-

present danger of turning catastrophe into a

media event and the distancing that this effects. I

found this and other comments she made on a

draft of this paper very helpful in revising.While I

dont have space to deal with this specific danger

here, I do return to discuss, in the third section of

the paper, the more general issue of what

Merleau-Ponty calls the ambiguity of existence,

including the activity and passivity of every


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encounter and the ethics that this ambiguity

implies.

9 For example, Arendt defines totalitarian gov-

ernment as that which seeks to make mankind

itself the embodiment of law, where law is under-

stood to flow from Nature or History rather

than imposed by force; in Arendt, Origins of

Totalitarianism460^62.

10 Merleau-Ponty refers to subjectivity as

event in, for example, his lectures on insti-

tution, which I will be drawing from in this discus-

sion: e.g., Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity 6. I

discuss what he means by event later in this sec-

tion. As well see, his use of the term differs a little

from Heideggers notion of event.

11 The Comforting Cup of Tea Project had a

website that described the event I am referring

to. Sallyanne Craigs description has since been

preserved under the title A Comforting Cup of

Tea at another website calledHandmade Help.

12 The four-volume Report plus Summary of the

2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission (and

the transcripts of hearings) can be accessed

online at a website of that title.

13 The VBRRA was in operation for a two-year

period until 30 June 2011. Its philosophy and activ-

ities are outlined and archived online at the

Victorian Government website under About the

Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery

Authority.

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Rosalyn Diprose

School of History and Philosophy

University of New South Wales

Sydney, NSW 2053Australia

E-mail: [email protected]


diprose

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