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Showing posts from October, 2012

Eternal Sofa Surf Blues

... only the one enduring the experience of being deprived of a home can offer hospitality . - Jacques Derrida And best of all, we don't pay council tax! - Max & Paddy  We don't think of rent as consumption spending. But it is. (This year I'm going to live without an address - circulating, instead, around the sofas of a kind and bohemian group of friends.) Pardon? A year of bourgeois homelessness? How? Now, I'm a stubborn man, and I enjoy running   experiments on myself, but it remains to be seen how long I can last at this, owing to 1) my long-established need of long solitude, 2) the burden it places on my relationships, and 3) my poor back. Also since we're after much more than warmth and storage space for our bed when we sign a lease. You purchase privacy; you obtain the possibility of giving hospitality (and the possibility of refusing it); and perhaps even the possibility of dignity. In fact, Derrida talks ab...