Atmospheres of Breathing

Description

As a physiological or biological matter, breath is mostly considered to be mechanical and thoughtless. By expanding on the insights of many religions and therapeutic practices, which emphasize the cultivation of breath, the contributors argue that breath should be understood as fundamentally and comprehensively intertwined with human life and experience. Various dimensions of the respiratory world are referred to as "atmospheres" that encircle and connect human existence, coexistence, and the world.

Drawing from a number of traditions of breathing, including from Indian and East Asian religion and philosophy, the book considers breath in relation to ontological, hermeneutical, phenomenological, ethical, and aesthetic concerns in philosophy. The wide-ranging topics include poetry, theater, environmental issues and health, feminism, and media studies.
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Lenart Škof and Petri Berndtson

Part I. Philosophical Atmospheres of Breathing

1. Logos and Psyche: A Hermeneutics of Breathing
David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

2. The Possibility of a New Respiratory Ontology
Petri Berndtson

3. Breath as a Way of Self-Affection: On New Topologies of Transcendence and Self-Transcendence
Lenart Škof

4. Aesthetics of Breathing: Some Reflections
Rolf Elberfeld

Part II. Philosophical Traditions of Breathing

5. The Breathing of the Air: Pre-Socratic Echoes in Levinas
Silvia Benso

6. Mindfulness of Breathing in Early Buddhism
Tamara Ditrich

7. Inspiration and Expiration: Yoga Practice through Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body
James Morley

8. The Concept of Qi in Chinese Philosophy: A Vital Force of Cosmic and Human Breath
Jana S. Rošker

9. Phenomenology of the Wind and the Possibility of Preventive Medicine: A Discussion of Ki (Wind)
Following Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1713)
Tadashi Ogawa

Part III. Voices and Media of Breathing

10. “Thoughts, that Breathe”
Kevin Hart

11. Theater of Breath: An Artaud-Derrida Existential Conflict
Jones Irwin

12. The Media of Breathing
John Durham Peters

Part IV. Breathful and Breathless Worlds

13. The Politics of Breathing: Knowledge on Air and Respiration
Marijn Nieuwenhuis

14. Breath as the Hinge of Dis-ease and Healing
Drew Leder

15. Invisible Suffering: The Experience of Breathlessness
Havi Carel

16. Feminist Politics of Breathing
Magdalena Górska

Postface

17. The Commonwealth of Breath
David Abram

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Spirit
• Body
• Mind
• Philosophy of religion
• Buddhism
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 19 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438469751
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 11 Mo

Extrait

ATMOSPHERES OF
BREATHING
ATMOSPHERES OF
BREATHING
edited by
Lenart Škof and Petri Berndtson
Cover art: Maja Bjelica, “LUNGTREE VI,” LUNGTREE Series (2016)
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Škof, Lenart, editor | Berndtson, Petri, editor
Title: Atmospheres of breathing / Lenart Škof and Petri Berndtson, editors.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438469737 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438469751 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Lenart Škof and Petri Berndtson
I. Philosophical Atmospheres of Breathing
1. Logos and Psyche : A Hermeneutics of Breathing
David Michael Kleinberg-Levin
2. The Possibility of a New Respiratory Ontology
Petri Berndtson
3. Breath as a Way of Self-Affection: On New Topologies of Transcendence and Self-Transcendence
Lenart Škof
4. Aesthetics of Breathing: Some Reflections
Rolf Elberfeld
II. Philosophical Traditions of Breathing
5. The Breathing of the Air: Pre-Socratic Echoes in Levinas
Silvia Benso
6. Mindfulness of Breathing in Early Buddhism
Tamara Ditrich
7. Inspiration and Expiration: Yoga Practice through Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body
James Morley
8. The Concept of Qi in Chinese Philosophy: A Vital Force of Cosmic and Human Breath
Jana S. Rošker
9. Phenomenology of the Wind and the Possibility of Preventive Medicine: A Discussion of Ki (Wind) Following Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1713)
Tadashi Ogawa
III. Voices and Media of Breathing
10. “Thoughts, that Breathe”
Kevin Hart
11. Theater of Breath: An Artaud-Derrida Existential Conflict
Jones Irwin
12. The Media of Breathing
John Durham Peters
IV. Breathful and Breathless Worlds
13. The Politics of Breathing: Knowledge on Air and Respiration
Marijn Nieuwenhuis
14. Breath as the Hinge of Dis-ease and Healing
Drew Leder
15. Invisible Suffering: The Experience of Breathlessness
Havi Carel
16. Feminist Politics of Breathing
Magdalena Górska
Postface
17. The Commonwealth of Breath
David Abram
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
Some chapters of this book have been previously published in the following journals and edited collections.
A shorter version of Lenart Škof’s “Breath as a Way of Self-Affection: On New Topologies of Transcendence and Self-Transcendence” was first published in Bogoslovni vestnik 77, no. 3/4 (2017): 577–588. Reprinted with permission.
An earlier version of David Kleinberg-Levin’s essay “Logos and Psyche: A Hermeneutics of Breathing” was published in Research in Phenomenology 15 (1984): 121–147. Reprinted with permission of Brill Publishers.
An earlier version of James Morley’s chapter “Inspiration and Expiration: Yoga Practice through Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Body” was first published in Philosophy East and West 51, no. 1 (January 2001): 73–82. Reprinted with permission of University of Hawai’i Press.
Silvia Benso’s essay “The Breathing of the Air: Pre-Socratic Echoes in Levinas” was originally published in Levinas and the Ancients , ed. Brian Schroeder and Silvia Benso (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 9–23. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.
David Abram’s essay “The Commonwealth of Breath” was originally a part of Material Ecocriticism , ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 301–314. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.
We would like to thank our SUNY Press editors Andrew Kenyon and Chelsea Miller for their continuing support in proposing and publishing this book. We are also grateful to all our anonymous reviewers as well as SUNY editorial board members for their comments and insightful suggestions.
We wish to express our special thanks to Professor Emeritus David Kleinberg-Levin for helping us to reissue his essay. Finally, we want to deeply thank Maja Bjelica for all the help she has offered to us during the whole process of editing this book and preparing it for publication, as well as for providing her beautiful photo titled “LUNGTREE VI” for the cover of this book.
—Lenart Škof and Petri Berndtson
Introduction
LENART ŠKOF AND PETRI BERNDTSON
What then, in today’s world, can we do in philosophy with the breath? It is our wish in this volume to present the readers with a new genre in philosophy—namely, a respiratory philosophy 1 —as an archeology of breath, and think of respiratory philosophers as spiritual archaeologists excavating its hidden ontological, epistemological, ethical, religious, and political layers. According to Luce Irigaray, it is our future task to become awakened to a new ethical constellation in which we will be “making awareness of the breath essential for an embodied ethics of difference in our globalized, ecological age.” 2 This future age is called by Irigaray in her more recent writings the Age of the Breath or, within Christianity (in sense of its fulfillment), the Age of the Spirit. Since Anaximenes’s famous sentence on breath as “aer” and “pneuma,” Western tradition has entered an age of oblivion of the breath as a philosophical topic or principle. Analogously to Irigaray’s designation of Heidegger’s philosophy as one forgetting the breath, 3 we could depict Western tradition since Plato as being a part of the long process of forgetting this ever original of spirit in many traditions of philosophical and religious thinking of the world (we think of ancient notions of a breath-spirit substance, called in different traditions lil, ka, rua ḥ , pneuma, aer, spiritus, prā ṇ a, ki, qi, ik’, mana, orenda …). Analogously, we can trace in Judeo-Christian tradition the similar process of forgetting of the breath in its originary biologico-spiritual sense. In the Hebrew Bible, we still can understand rua ḥ as identifying “breath” of men and women with the “Breath” of God and, as Škof and Holmes point out in their introduction to Breathing with Luce Irigaray , also in the New Testament (cf. Rom 8:26), the life of prayer “brings spirit back to the body and back to the breath” 4 and thus nurtures and preserves, as it were, an ancient and archaic pneumatic covenant in the hearts of men and women. But despite some exceptions (as for example of the role of pneuma in the contexts of ancient Greek medicine) in the philosophical tradition of the West, breath as one of the key epistemological foundations of both our biological and spiritual life has quickly been abandoned and has instead become only one of many immaterial and disembodied substances, now being available only to specialists in one or another regional ontological disciplines (soul, spirit, ego, subject).
One of the great breathers 5 of the twentieth century and Nobel literature prize winner Elias Canetti warned us of the thinkers who have not breathed enough, as he wrote: “It is not enough to think, one also has to breathe. Dangerous are the thinkers who have not breathed enough.” 6 Another great breather of the twentieth century, Hazrat Inayat Khan gave his own warning related to the breath: “My spiritual teacher, my Murshid, once said, ‘People say that there are many sins and virtues, but I think there is only one sin.’ I asked him what it was, and he said, ‘To let one breath go without being conscious of it.’ ” 7 The meaning of the word “sin” must be understood here as “fundamental error,” “wrongdoing,” or “misdeed.” Khan also says of the relation between breathing and philosophy the following: “the subject of breath is the deepest of all the subjects with which […] philosophy is concerned, because breath is the most important thing” 8 as “in it is hidden the secret of life.” 9 Would this not mean that from the perspective of the great breathers the sin of philosophy, that is, the fundamental error of philosophy is its constant “forgetting of breathing”? 10 What would be the connection between this possible sin of philosophy and dangerousness of the thinkers who have not breathed enough? A third great breather of the twentieth century, Japanese Aikido master Shinichi Suzuki, who emphasizes in his work the fundamental importance of the “world of nothing but breathing,” 11 sings along with Khan in harmony as he airs with confidence: “nothing is more important than breathing, breathing, breathing.” 12 If we would take these words of Canetti, Khan, and Suzuki very seriously, it would challenge us with a new task of thinking. This task would be to create systematically a new philosophy of breathing that we could call by the name of respiratory philosophy , breathing philosophy , or breathful philosophy . What kind of philosophy would this new respiratory, or breathful, philosophy be? What it would think? How it would think? How would it understand the relations between thinking and breathing, philosophy and respiration? How would it differ from any other kind of philosophy or way of thinking? What could, perhaps, be the starting point of this new respiratory philosophy? These are all essential questions regarding this new respiratory philosophy.
According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Philosophy will find help in poetry, art, etc.; in a closer relationship with them, it