Home as Heterotopia: Describing the unheimlich through a Foucauldian Heterotopology of Home

Abstract

The experience of the unheimlich, interpreted by Paul Ricoeur as the sense of otherness in a space, is indescribable in terms of the classic description of home. To generate a new perspective to overcome this "blocked situation," we reflect on a "heterotopology of home," i.e., a description of Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia (an "other space") as a metaphor for home. After considering heterotopia as a fluid concept that allows "displacement" to the new situation of home, a heterotopology of home is described by summarizing and analyzing the multitude of past readings of home as heterotopia through Hilde Heynen's framework. A reflection on the heterotopology of home reinterprets the experience of the heimlich and understanding of selfhood in relation to the unheimlich, as exemplified through Mariana Ortega's accounts of "hometactics" and "multiplicitous selves" and Georg Simmel's notion of "the stranger." In conclusion, we argue that a Foucauldian heterotopology of home overcomes the blocked situation by transforming the perception of home: the experience of the unheimlich becomes describable in the terms of home as heterotopia. In this process, the instances of heterotopia are extended from "other spaces" to spaces of everyday life, also transforming the previous description of heterotopia.