Domus on the Edge of Forever: On Stating Spatially Located Problems in Terms of Time

In this paper I want to argue for the desirability of a rule of method that involves stating problems in terms of time rather than space. The idea is not new, being the operating principle of the philosophy of Henri Bergson and gaining a new audience through Gilles Deleuze's meditations on the aforementioned. However, I aim to demonstrate through application the use of this rule of method for understanding apparently spatially determined social phenomena and not just philosophical problems. Beginning by considering the house as a concretised present, I will argue that the home is a key site in our relationship with the future. As Jacques Derrida has argued, the threshold of the home is not only the very opportunity of hospitality but is also instantiated in hospitable encounters with others regardless of their placing. For Barbara Adam, the home is a relationship to the future, a sort of security blanket to the radical unknowability of the yet to come. I will argue that if we understand the encounter with the other as being a relationship with the future, then we can conceive of the home as (ideally open but) in actuality a security against the radical unknowability of encounters à venir. I will close by furthering this theoretical exploration into more substantive issues around public/private space.