Breathing With Luce Irigaray

An innovative collection examining the implications of 'the Age of Breath': a spiritual shift in human awareness to the needs of the other through breathing.

Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal, philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations with human and nonhuman beings. The vegetal world has the potential to rescue our planet and our species and offers us a way to abandon past metaphysics without falling into nihilism. Luce Irigaray has argued in her philosophical work that living and coexisting are deficient unless we recognize sexuate difference as a crucial dimension of our existence. Michael Marder believes the same is true for vegetal difference. Irigaray and Marder consider how plants contribute to human development by sustaining our breathing, nourishing our senses, and keeping our bodies and minds alive. They note the importance of returning to ancient Greek tradition and engaging with Eastern teachings to revive a culture closer to nature. As a result, we can reestablish roots when we are displaced and recover the vital energy we need to improve our sensibility and relation to others. This generative discussion points toward a more universal way of becoming human that is embedded in the vegetal world.

With this book we see a philosopher well steeped in the Western tradition thinking through ancient Eastern disciplines, meditating on what it means to learn to breathe, and urging us all at the dawn of a new century to rediscover indigenous Asian cultures. Yogic tradition, according to Irigaray, can provide an invaluable means for restoring the vital link between the present and eternity—and for re-envisioning the patriarchal traditions of the West. Western, logocentric rationality tends to abstract the teachings of yoga from its everyday practice—most importantly, from the cultivation of breath. Lacking actual, personal experience with yoga or other Eastern spiritual practices, the Western philosophers who have tried to address Hindu and Buddhist teachings—particularly Schopenhauer—have frequently gone astray. Not so, Luce Irigaray. Incorporating her personal experience with yoga into her provocative philosophical thinking on sexual difference, Irigaray proposes a new way of understanding individuation and community in the contemporary world. She looks toward the indigenous, pre-Aryan cultures of India—which, she argues, have maintained an essentially creative ethic of sexual difference predicated on a respect for life, nature, and the feminine. Irigaray's focus on breath in this book is a natural outgrowth of the attention that she has given in previous books to the elements—air, water, and fire. By returning to fundamental human experiences—breathing and the fact of sexual difference—she finds a way out of the endless sociologizing abstractions of much contemporary thought to rethink questions of race, ethnicity, and globalization.

Attempts to think anew about philosophical questions from the perspective of breath and breathing. 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. Lenart Škof is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Institute for Philosophical Studies at the Science and Research Center of Koper, Slovenia, and the coeditor (with Emily A. Holmes) of Breathing with Luce Irigaray. Petri Berndtson is a doctoral candidate of philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

“According to the words of Phaedrus in the Symposium of Plato, Love, sometimes named Eros, has no parents, no age, no history, and its origin remains unknown to anyone. Love, whose destiny is said to be unique amongst the gods and humans, perhaps embodies desire for a conjunction always in search of its happening. Love would represent a dynamism longing for the copula incarnating the transcendence of our being. As such, Love would remain the everlasting yearning for the accomplishment of the ecstatic destiny of humanity.” In this book, Luce Irigaray - philosopher, linguist, psychologist and psychoanalyst - proposes nothing less than a new way of conceiving what a human being is as well as a means to ensure our individual and relational development from birth. Unveiling the mystery of our origin is probably what most motivates our quests and plans. And yet such a disclosure proves to be impossible. Indeed we were born as one from a union between two, and we are forever deprived of an origin of our own. Hence our ceaseless search for roots: in our genealogy, in the place where we were born, in our culture, religion or language. But a human being cannot develop from its own roots as a tree does. As humans, we must take responsibility for our own being and existence without any given continuity with our origin and background. How can we achieve that? First by cultivating our breathing, which is more than a means to come into the world and to exist; breathing also allows us to transcend mere survival to secure for ourselves a spiritual becoming. Taking on our sexuate belonging is the second element which enables us to assume our natural existence. Indeed, this determination at once brings us energy and provides us with a structure which contributes to our individuation and our relations with other living beings and the world. Our sexuation can compensate for our absence of roots too by compelling us to unite with the other sex so that we freely approach the copulative conjunction from which we were born; that is, the mystery of our origin. This does not occur through a mere sexual instinct or drive, but requires us to cultivate desire and love with respect for our mutual difference(s). In this way we can give rise to a new human being, not only at a natural but also at an ontological level.

In this book, one of the foremost contemporary scholars in the fields of feminist thought and linguistics, explores the possibility of a new liberating language and hence a new relationship between the sexes. In I Love to You, Luce Irigaray moves from the critique of patriarchy to an exploration of the ground for a possible inter-subjectivity between the two sexes. Continuing her rejection of demands for equality, Irigaray poses the question: how can we move to a new era of sexual difference in which women and men establish lasting relations with one another without reducing the other to the status of object?

Breath is the flow of air between life and death. Breathing is an involuntary action that functions as the basis of all human activities, intellectual, artistic, emotional and physical. Breathing is the first autonomous individual action that brings life into being and the end of breathing is the definitive sign of disappearance. Starting from the question how breathing affects the body, levels of consciousness, perception and meaning, this book, for the first time, investigates through a variety of philosophical, critical and practical models, directly and indirectly related to breath, aiming to establish breath as a category in the production and reception of meaning within the context of theatre. It also explores the epistemological, psycho-physical and consciousness-related implications of breath. Aristotle dedicated a volume to breath exploring and enquiring in to its presocratic roots. For Heidegger, breath is “the temporal extension” of Being. Artaud’s theatricality is not representational but rather rooted in the actor’s breathing. Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray investigate the phenomenon of breath in order to explain the nature of human consciousness. Breath as a philosophical concept and as a system of practice is central to Indian thoughts, performance, medicine, martial arts and spirituality. As the book argues, individual consciousness is a temporal experience and breath is the material presence of time in the body. Cessation of breath, on the contrary, creates pause in this flow of the endless identification of signifiers. When breath stops time stops. When time stops there is a ‘gap’ in the chain of the presence of signifiers and this ‘gap’ is a different perceptual modality, which is neutral in Zero velocity. Restoration of Breath is a practical approach to this psychophysical experience of consciousness in which time exists only in eternity and void beyond memory and meaning.

A feminist critique of Heideggar's key concepts, arguing that he overlooks an implicit debt to the spatiality of air - the element and dimension within which a new style of thinking and existing becomes possible, a new and more balanced, feminist relationship between thinking and nature.