ANGEL AK I

journal of the theoretical humanities volume 16 number 4 December 2011

vents that have most confronted me with the limits of the human in recent years have all involved 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 metropolis 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 that made 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 guidelines for escape. While justified in some situations of extreme inequity or criminal neglect in

rosalyn diprose BUILDING AND BELONGING AMID THE PLIGHT OF DWELLING

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 in Building 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

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/1 1/040059^14 2011 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.201 1.641345

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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 such as 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 apparent in two dominant ontological images of the human. On the one hand, in the face of such threats our societies have become highly riskaverse: government responses to incalculable, unpredictable, but high-consequence threats to life and security are increasingly framed by what has been described as the precautionary principle1 or the paradigm of prudence.2 This approach to threats to human life and property assumes an irresponsible, but nevertheless powerful, human agent (rather than pure nature or God) 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 governmental countermeasures to unpredictability in order to ensure a 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 paradigms 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 the devastating 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 of accountable, 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 ` res and of dwelling, I turn to Jacques Rancie Hannah Arendts political ontologies, which better locate the political dimensions of dwelling and 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 extraordinary 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

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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 distributing resources for dwelling. In what follows I address three points about the plight of dwelling and the ethico-politics of recovering 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.
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)

on the role of buildings and things in dwelling 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 below what 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 fac ade, 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 a certain 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.

Michaels concern with the political dimensions of the plight of dwelling may not be obvious from this quote. This reflection on the relation between buildings and belonging is hyperbolically romantic and middle class and it implies a seamlessness between 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, multidirectional process of habituation and familiarisation that is not under the control of any master architect. Heidegger has elaborated some of the complexities 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 building recedes 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 things and 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 selfpresent agent in control of its world, Heidegger proposes 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 fundamental character of dwelling [that is] . . . sparing and preserving (149), where preserving means to free 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 its political complexity in choosing ancient examples (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-class home, 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 surrounding 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 play of 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 relations between 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 ` re and Hannah assistance from Jacques Rancie 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. 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 categorises in terms of properties, function, and location and that thereby distributes the sensible inequitably, that is, in ways that divide communities by the formation of hierarchies and ` re exclusions (92). Politics proper, as Rancie 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). ` re ties his idea of politics to aesthetics in Rancie 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 ` re, presence in their own unique ways. For Rancie 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 ` re uncounted) by that order, what Rancie 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 meaning 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, ` res Politics 13). The significance of Rancie account of aesthetic politics for my analysis is

on the political and the distribution of the sensible

While less concerned with the role of buildings ` res work on the and things in dwelling, Rancie distribution of the sensible is helpful for bringing into focus the political dimension of dwelling. As with the phenomenological tradi` re means both sense tion, by sensible Rancie data and the sense we make of it. By distribution 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 ` re thus makes explicit what felt and how. Rancie Heidegger only hints at that the building of buildings as well as the habituation that proceeds from dwelling in and around those buildings 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 requires material 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 ` res or Heideggers sense,7 the media Rancie 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 less urbanised lifestyle, may unwittingly build in disregard of the uncontrollable forces of earth, wind, and fire and so accentuate that unpredict` res thesis, these ability. Or, in support of Rancie 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 economically disadvantaged 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 inequities 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 and Jeans 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 prehistory 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 miscarriage 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 community 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 of political life implies an appropriately modest notion of human agency where, in dwelling, human existence neither controls nor is determined 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 determinism and 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 bios from 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 totalitarian 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 to zoe in the private sphere then it should be quarantined 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 of bios, 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 signification of the fact of ones first-order birth (Human 176). As I have discussed elsewhere, the connection between these two orders of life explains why governments, intent on containing uncertainty and 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 that domestic dwelling is equivalent to the cyclic reproduction of biological life without the innovation and conditioned freedom characteristic 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 predetermined future. In contrast to such heavy-handed government of dwelling, what supports innovation, pluralism, and the dynamism of dwelling is the public space of political community founded by and devoted to the expression and preservation 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 shared individualises human being (by exposing one to the singularity of ones own becoming, beingtoward-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, action within 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 intercorporeality 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 Nazi camps 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 memories. 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 cannot bear 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 inhabitants. The novel also asks what collective practices might allow the emergence of what Merleau-Ponty calls the event within dwelling.10 Rebuilding buildings and with this rebuilding ways of dwelling require buildings and things, love and forgiveness in community, understood in Arendtian terms as the welcome and expression 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 secondhand 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 the teacup 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/agencement 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 unexpected 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 unpredictable 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, like Arendts, 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 nonhumans a central role in dwelling. Giving nonhuman 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 an assemblage 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 assemblages 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 distributions of the sensible. Considering the ethicopolitical dimensions of the event and the role of human dwelling in it puts the onus back on the human-perceptual elements of assemblages to remain 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 he privilege 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 divergence 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 environments, 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 (MerleauPonty, 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 of one in the other (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible 13738). Hence, as perception or experience is a feeling that is felt, a seeing that is seen (MerleauPonty, Eye and Mind 16263), then my activity is equally passivity (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible 139). With this notion of flesh, MerleauPonty 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 of dwelling 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 determinism that opens a gap between past and future, is by characterising complexes of humannonhuman life as simultaneously instituted and instituting (Institution 815). Indeed, every level of existence, the animal, the biological, the interpersonal, carries, from the time of our birth, an element of existence already instituted, 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, sedimentation 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, institutedinstituting, 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 demonstrating 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 the rebuilding 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 experience of his replicated built environment was disorientating 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 was a 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 intercorporeal 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 to potentiality. 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 Emmanuel Levinass 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 MerleauPontys criticism of notions of agency that assume that the self is exclusively active and dominating (absolute individuality) or exclusively passive and determined in relation to others and the world. In contrast to the free agency of absolute individualism, MerleauPontys 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 responsibility 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 assemblages 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 convictions, 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 responsibility 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 as Australia, where building and planning regulations 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 accountability 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 forgiveness when something goes wrong (Human 236 37). Unintended and unpredictable consequences of prior actions is even more characteristic of socalled 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 recommended 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, compassion, and material support for dwelling rather than blame and more top-down regulation of risk.

notes
1 Franc ois Ewald is credited with identifying and describing the emergence of this principle in, for example, 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 feature 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 Being 41, 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 Aesthetics 12^19, 42^ 45. 7 Media images of the impact of natural disasters are not art in so far as they conform to, rather than intervene into, the ways of doing and making, the techne, that governs the production of images in photojournalism. 8 I thank Magdalena Zolkos for noting the everpresent 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 government as that which seeks to make mankind itself the embodiment of law, where law is understood to flow from Nature or History rather than imposed by force; in Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism 460 ^ 62. 10 Merleau-Ponty refers to subjectivity as event in, for example, his lectures on institution, which I will be drawing from in this discussion: e.g., Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity 6. I discuss what he means by event later in this section. 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 called Handmade 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 activities are outlined and archived online at the Victorian Government website under About the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority. Arendt, Hannah. Life of the Mind.Vols. 1 and 2. San Diego: Harcourt,1978. Print. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New ed. with added prefaces. San Diego: Harcourt, 1994. Print. Craig, Sallyanne. A Comforting Cup of Tea. Handmade Help: A Practical, Community Response to Disasters Affecting Australians. Web. 17 Mar. 2009. Diprose, Rosalyn. Womens Bodies Giving Time for Hospitality. Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 24.2 (2009): 142^ 63. Print. Diprose, Rosalyn, Niamh Stephenson, Catherine Mills, Kane Race, and Gay Hawkins. Governing the Future: The Paradigm of Prudence in Political Technologies of Risk Management. Security Dialogue 39.2^3 (2008): 267^ 88. Print. Ewald, Franc ois. The Return of Descartes Malicious Demon: An Outline of a Philosophy of Precaution. Trans. Stephen Utz. Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility. Ed. Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. 273^301. Print. Gray, Darren.Experts Challenge Rush to Rebuild Marysville. The Age 16 Feb. 2010.Web. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New Y ork: Harper, 1962. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Building Dwelling Thinking. Poetry , Language, Thought.Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper,1975.143^ 61. Print. Heidegger, Martin. On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper,1972. Print. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Malpas, Jeff. HeideggersTypology: Being, Place,World. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2006. Print. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Eye and Mind. The Primacy of Perception. Trans. Carleton Dallery. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964. 159^90. Print. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Institution and Passivity: ' ge de France (1954^1955). Course Notes from the Colle Trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2010. Print.

bibliography
Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission (VBCC). Final Report Summary. Government Printer for the State of Victoria PP No. 332 ^ Session 2006 ^10, July 2010. Print. Anderson, Kay, and Bruce Braun. Introduction: From Cultural Ecology to Cosmopolitics. Environment: Critical Essays in Human Geography. Ed. Kay Anderson and Bruce Braun. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. xi ^xx. Print. Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. London: Penguin,1977 . Print. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Intro. Margaret Canovan. Chicago: U of Chicago P,1998. Print.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern UP,1968. Print. Michaels, Anne. The Winter Vault. New Y ork: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print. Rancie ' re, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Trans. S. Corcoran. London and New Y ork: Continuum, 2010. Print. Rancie ' re, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics.Trans.G. Rockhill. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Print. Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority (VBRRA). About the Victorian Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery Authority. Victorian Government. Web archive. 23 June 2011. No author.

Rosalyn Diprose School of History and Philosophy University of New South Wales Sydney, NSW 2053 Australia E-mail: r.diprose@unsw.edu.au