Sheltering: Kenophobia

Kenophobia: Bachelard was determined by its exposure. For him the house only becomes a home when it is “really inhabited”. Clutter sifts in the void where space discloses its essential absence of presence. A house is a corner of the world. As such, it must be defined by spatially by what it is not. Houses carve themselves into naked land and in doing so enforce their presence. Their intimacy is thus acquired from the fact of being designated and so reserved. How does Bachelard overcome this fear?

Corners become retreats, shells become sacred, and mobility is seized whilst the guise of peering into inhabited space becomes pre-dominant. Bachelard is, of course, a radical subjectivist, an accusation which once bore pernicious overtones but now is symptomatic of impotent collectivism. Still, this refusal to countenance space outside of phenomenal space means that there is a precarious stability to Bachelard's oneiric house. The omission of uncanny space is one way in which subjectivity is reinforced: uncanny space recalls a difference between the familiar and unfamiliar, and the presence of unfamiliarity would thus disrupt the unity of subjective experience.

Kenophobia: the fear of empty space. But why? What does empty space lack and so induce fear that inhabited space fulfils? Bachelard: “An empty nest found belatedly in the woods in winter, mocks the finder.” An empty nest creates an impasse which exists despite its absence: it points to something which no longer serves its function, and yet remains a thing resembling the image of that function. It mocks by alluding whilst offering no immediate gratification in return. Bachelard’s “felicitous space” delimits itself to space in which the inhabited resists the impasse. Instead, memory provides the grounds for a dwelling that is continuous. This is what Bachelard means when he uses the word oneiric: a spurious ontology which relies on the ontic assertion of subjective experience.