On the Unhomely Home: Porous and Permeable Interiors from Kierkegaard to Adorno

Abstract

Since the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of the home has been intimately linked up with the notion of the uncanny. In fact, the German equivalent of this word, das Unheimliche, the unhomely, contains in it its very opposite: heimlich, homely. In line with this thought, the haunted house, an absolutely central motif in, for example, Victorian Gothic literature, can be emphasized as a prime topos for the nineteenth-century uncanny. It is precisely the combination of a well-known domestic setting and unsettling or eerie elements that creates the uncanny feeling of the haunted house. It is thus in the constant vacillation between the homely and the unhomely that the house or the home is destabilized. The nineteenth century also witnesses a discourse according to which the private home or house is elevated in a moralistic sense when compared with the city. While urban life previously penetrated deep into what is now called the domestic, the city is increasingly perceived as a threatening force against which the domestic world has to be sheltered. What literary topoi such as the haunted house can tell is that not only the city but also the house itself is construed as the source of modern anxiety already in the nineteenth century. In fact, the two phenomena create each other insofar as the emphasis on private meaning in the home comes to correspond to a distrust of the civic domain of the city. The relation between the homely and the unhomely thus implies the theoretical unsettling of concepts such as home, interior, and the private. In this article, these concepts and their unhomely counterpoints will be discussed, taking as a starting point the conflict over the interior played out in Adorno's attack on Kierkegaard in the treatise from 1933 Kierkegaard–Construction of the Aesthetic.

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