Emanuele Cocciao x French Fries

Interview by Germano Dacquisto

Emanuele Coccia is considered one of the most brilliant minds in contemporary thinking. Raised on bread and Nietzsche, with whom he fell in love as a teenager, he later discovered Aristotle and Averroes, Lucretius and Spinoza. “Studying is a wonderful adventure,” he says. Today, he teaches at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, but he has taught philosophy at universities around the world, such as Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf and Columbia University in New York. He spent years traveling from one continent to another like a globe-trotter, so much so that he once described himself as “a man who lives as a nomad with a roof.” Born in 1976, with a long beard and large thick glasses covering his face, he is adored by Millennials for the green hues of his ideas and seems to be more read by artists, architects, and designers than by his fellow philosophers. Throughout his career, he has published refined and disruptive books, translated into several languages, in which he has infused metaphysics into various fields of knowledge such as architecture, botany, design, anthropology, theology, sociology, and even fashion. In the volume ‘The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture,’ a true manifesto of neo-ecologism, he transformed unconditional love for Nature into an extraordinary existential metaphor. In ‘The Philosophy of the Home,’ an enlightening pamphlet on living spaces, he brought the home back to the center of the world, investigating their animist component and transforming it into a passionate intertwining of thoughts, objects, people, and new ways of being. His latest work is a sophisticated and at the same time unsettling book that intertwines fashion and philosophy. He wrote it together with Alessandro Michele, former creative director of Gucci and now at the helm of Valentino. It is titled ‘The Life of Forms. Philosophy of Re-Enchantment’ (HarperCollins) and is a narrative poised between past and present, between evident and hidden meanings, with particular attention to the objects, especially clothes, that populate our daily lives. Much of it plays on the intimacy that connects people to the garments they wear, so close to the skin and heart and the only “shield” between them and the outside world. The volume, the result of long dialogues between the two authors, offers an extensive thesis on style and taste where time is understood as “the contemporaneity of past and future.” Because creating and wearing clothes is an almost solemn act. We meet Coccia in his Paris, where he has long chosen to live.

In May, ‘The Life of Forms. Philosophy of Re-Enchantment’ was released, where you merge fashion with philosophy. How do these two seemingly distant worlds meet? 

The two worlds coincide: it is only the division of knowledge and skills that we have inherited from the nineteenth century that prevents us from seeing their proximity. Fashion is the only avant-garde that has succeeded in realizing its program of merging art and life: what could be closer to life than an artifact that everyone wears every day and that allows us to transform our identity? Philosophy is the attempt to penetrate the life of all forms: fashion allows us, at least for a moment, to become any form.

What kind of adventure companion was Alessandro Michele? 

Alessandro is what ancient myths described as the initiator: the one who introduces you to reality by intensifying its mystery. The world is always before each of us, but it is almost always invisible, not because it is hidden but because it doesn’t seem to speak. The initiator makes the world inhabitable, lovable, because he animates it in front of us.

Where does your interest in fashion come from? 

First, there are aesthetic reasons. Nothing has ever given me more emotions than a fashion show: it’s like seeing a work of art come to life and capable of transforming our face. Then there are intellectual reasons: every garment is the perfect formulation of the paradox by which our identity (which we usually think of as something purely immaterial, linked to consciousness, opinions, beliefs) is made and nourished by the tangible. A different color or silhouette is enough to transform us into another person. Finally, there are biographical reasons: I had the fortune to meet extraordinary people who opened up worlds to me. I think of Massimo Scolaro when I was very young, Carla Sozzani, Azzedine Alaia, Paolo Roversi: they are the ones who initiated me into fashion.

Why do you think philosophical thought has snubbed fashion in the past? And what has changed today? 

For at least three reasons. The first is the sexism of our cultural system. The modern fashion system was established by imposing on those who identified with the heterosexual male gender to flaunt a sublime indifference to clothes and their variety. In reality, they are the greatest fashion victims. And they are the ones who imposed indifference to fashion in the educational system. Fashion history and theory are not studied as literature, painting, and architecture are. Widespread ignorance is the second reason: fashion is written about in a pedestrian manner, which would not be allowed for any other art. And then there is a form of complacent cynicism that delights in considering fashion a pure form of business and not recognizing it as having any cultural value. But perhaps this too is only an effect of the cultural system’s sexism.

You have stated that major fashion houses and fashion magazines can transform society. How have they changed it so far? 

Fashion does not coincide only with the major houses or fashion magazines. Fashion is a system that has put in the hands of everyone a tool that allows them to shape their identity at will. And it has created a transversal language that allows us to assert through our visible form something more than mere ethnic, political, or class belonging. It is an unprecedented anthropological revolution. That there are excesses and distortions is evident to anyone. But they can only be repaired if one is aware of the immediate social function of this system.

Why does an “art of metaphysics” like fashion produce an undergrowth populated by vacuity, superficiality, and a cult of appearance that has no equal in any other art form? 

Superficiality and vacuity are everywhere, even in academies, museums, and governments. It is not the discipline, place, or institution that transforms a human practice into something serious; it is the gaze of individuals. There is a beautiful anecdote told by Diogenes Laërtius about a visit of admirers to the old Heraclitus. Seeing him in the act of baking bread, the visitors hesitated; he invited them to enter, pointing to the oven and saying, “here too are the gods.” Seriousness is only the ability to see divinity everywhere.

Today, fashion has invaded newspapers with its advertising, funds cultural events and exhibitions, collaborates with artists, and rides social movements. It is everywhere and says its piece on all human things, and human things, to be heard, are forced to narrate themselves in fashion terms. Is there a way out? 

It is only a consequence of the inability to consider fashion as a form of culture and not consumption. And often the fashion houses are the first to fail to conceive of themselves as cultural institutions. Only when the fact that a garment is a work of art, like a painting or great architecture, is taken seriously will it be possible to avoid the attitude that drives major houses to invest in culture elsewhere, with an almost expiatory attitude.

What role does a philosopher have today? 

The same as art: to transfigure and intensify the experience of the world.

A provocation: in the book “Metamorphosis” you write that man is nothing special “because he feels at the center of the universe.” Isn’t it the same for fashion? 

It’s the opposite: fashion testifies that we are nothing special, and for this reason, we have to build ourselves a new identity every day.

You have taught in Germany, Japan, Argentina, America, and since 2011, you have been a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. But do you miss Italy a little? 

I have lived for a long time in France, Germany, Spain, the United States, and for shorter periods in Argentina and Japan. I am fine wherever there are people who seek and find identity.

If you were a place, what would you be? 

I love the sky, because places merge everywhere.

If you hadn’t become a philosopher? 

I studied philosophy to have an alibi and a pretext to be able to study and love anything.

One thing to do before you die? 

Live. There’s no guarantee I will succeed.