Philosophical modernity has focused everything on the city, but the future of the world can only be domestic. We need to think about the home: we live in the urgency of making this planet a real home, or rather of making our home a real planet, a space capable of welcoming everyone.

Philosophy has always had a special relationship with the city. It was born there, it learned to speak there and it is within its walls that it has always imagined its history and its future. But it is always and only through the mediation of a house that we are in the city: whether it is Paris or Berlin, Tokyo or New York, we are only able to inhabit the cities we live in thanks to bedrooms and kitchens, thanks to chairs, desks, wardrobes, bathtubs and radiators.

Yet philosophy has always spoken very little about the home and this neglect is far from innocent: because of it, the home has become a space in which wrongs, oppressions, injustices and inequalities have been hidden, forgotten and reproduced unconsciously and mechanically for centuries. It is in and through the home, for example, that gender inequality has been produced, affirmed and justified. It is in and through the home, and in the order of property it founds and embodies, that society has been organised in economic inequality. It is through the modern home – a space in which, with a few very rare exceptions, only human beings can stay – that the radical opposition between human and non-human, between the city and the forest, between the “civilised” and the savage, has been constructed and reinforced. Forgetting the home was a way for philosophy to forget itself.

One of the most eclectic and esteemed European intellectuals of his generation tackles, with the tools of philosophy and his trademark originality, the theme of the home, the threshold between us and the rest of reality, the inexhaustible attempt to overlap our happiness with the world. And he writes an exceptional book: highly refined and prodigiously pop.