The interpretation reads “Gros œuvre” (OEU) and “L’inhabitable” (INH) by Inculte author Joy Sorman as complementary experimental setups in which housing is understood once from the perspective of its creation and once from that of its withdrawal: While OEU unfolds the habitat in thirteen episodic miniatures as the result of physical labor, improvised appropriation and social practice – from self-taught house building to mobile, modular or precarious forms of housing to collective, ephemeral utopias – INH starts from the opposite premise by documenting dilapidated Parisian buildings and their inhabitants and showing in a double temporal structure (visit and return) how even the improvement of material conditions destabilizes social structures and makes housing visible as a learned, fragile practice. The essay's argument demonstrates that only through the interplay of both texts does an adequate theory of dwelling emerge: as a process between shell construction and ruin, between possibility and loss, which can be grasped neither as a static state nor as a purely functional category. Methodologically, the analysis follows three lines: First, it shows how the respective spatial and temporal orders—mosaic-like parataxis and perspectival mobility in OEU, palimpsest-like layering and retrospective doubling in INH—model dwelling as a dynamic, never-ending state; second, it demonstrates that the constellations of characters and forms of communication (from dialogic exchange with craftsmen to administratively framed interviews) reflect the social inequality of housing and speaking rights; third, the interpretation reconstructs the central metaphorical fields—body, construction, threshold—that connect both texts and simultaneously shift them against each other. Thus, the thesis of a “poetics of the unfinished” is developed, which is also confirmed autopoetologically: the beginning and end of both works stage living not as arrival, but as an activity in the mode of not-yet or no-longer, so that Sorman’s writing itself appears as a form of inhabiting – an exploration of spaces whose meaning is only constituted in passage, in repetition and in linguistic access.
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