Paul Moran - The Philosophy of Homelessness: Barely Being

The Philosophy of Homelessness is borne out of a five-year ethnographic research project involving being with a group of chronically homeless people in Chester.

A small city located in the northwest of the UK, Chester is economically supported by its heritage and the tourism that this attracts. In an obvious sense, the awkwardness of the phrase being with a group of chronically homeless people is regrettable. Nevertheless, this unfortunately self-conscious phrase is significant, with its importance residing in the word and concept of being.

Whilst philosophical understandings of being are often thought about in rather abstract terms, The Philosophy of Homelessness explores the daily experience of chronic homelessness from a perspective that renders its ontological impress in ways that are explicitly felt, often in forms that are overtly political and exclusionary in character, especially in terms of identity and belonging within the city.

Themes that emerge from the work, which coalesce around living in the margins of the city and experiencing only the shadow of the right to be, include: the economy of chronic addiction and its impact upon the body; the relationship between chronic homelessness and the law; and chronic homelessness and identity and desire. These themes are explored through a number of thinkers, though predominantly: Nietzsche, Lacan, Bourdieu and Kristeva.

This work is likely to be of interest to anyone working in the fields of: criminology; sociology, especially those areas concerned with marginalised groups; and philosophy in its socially and politically engaged forms; as well as to those with an interest in homelessness.

Paul Moran is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Childrens Services at the University of Chester, UK.

Frances Atherton is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Childrens Services at the University of Chester, UK.

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The Philosophy of Homelessness

Barely Being

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Barely Being

Paul Moran and Frances Atherton

First published 2019

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2019 Paul Moran and Frances Atherton

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ISBN: 978-1-138-70973-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-20087-3 (ebk)

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We would like to dedicate this book to all those who are homeless

The Philosophy of Homelessness is, in a number of respects, a ground-breaking work. It critically analyses the, for the most part, ordinary assumptions by which most of us in the developed world appear to live our daily, ordinary lives. These ordinary assumptions include rights of ownership, and the ability through ownership to fashion ones own living environment, for example by being able to decorate, add to and modify ones home, and therefore to express some agency about place, belonging and being; the capacity to engage in an economic system in such a way that allows a distance, an abstraction, a dissociation of the participant, including the participants body, from that which is being exchanged; as well as a more general ontology that identifies and establishes the personal, the private, the condition that this whatever this might be being mine, again, including ones own body, and the intimate cradle of ones self, and thus ones soul. Our research about homelessness, we suggest, discloses these facets of our contemporary, mundane neoliberal experience as products of an economy of being that forges our beliefs and practices about who and what we are.

This critical analysis, amounting to a philosophy, is engendered from the mundane experiences of a community of chronically homeless people; a community that we have known and been part of for over three years. For example: the taken-for-granted experiences of shopping and belonging are discussed through the prism of heroin dealers and addicts; the process of being a couple and wanting to have a family is understood via a homeless couples struggle to live together and have a baby; the attempt to achieve financial independence is discussed by way of enforcers who collect drug debts for organised criminals; and themes of intimacy and privacy are explored through the lives of homeless sex workers.

Whilst the daily events of the homeless people that populate this work are arresting enough in themselves, it is their implications, their ontological and political implications, that are most shocking and telling about the brutal and parlous state of contemporary first world society, and the growing number of marginalised and dispossessed that it begets.

The appeal of this powerful work therefore extends beyond an ethnographic and sociological analysis of homelessness in urban Britain; it provides a concrete opening for those interested in a radical critique, at the quotidian level of realisation, of the current global crisis of neoliberal beliefs and forms of organisation. There are no other books on the market that undertake this work in this intimate, gritty, disturbing and irreverent way. By way of structure it achieves this by foregrounding in each chapter the lives of specific homeless people, which illustrate and develop the themes of being homeless.