The Forgetting Of Air In Martin Heidegger

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.

The 14 essays included in this collection illustrate the ways in which feminist readings can deepen understanding of Heidegger's philosophy. They illuminate both the richness and the limitations of the resources Heidegger's work can provide for feminist thought.

Luce Irigaray is one of the most influential philosophers and theorists in the field of feminist thought, and her work is considered both revolutionary and controversial. This volume offers the first critical assessment of the relation of her early critical and poetic writings to her later political and practical philosophy. Contributors examine how the question of sexual difference has unfolded in a wealth of different directions in Irigaray's later work, focusing on the areas of nature and technology, social and political theory and praxis, ethics, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. They also address whether there has been a radical conceptual "turn" in Irigaray's thought by exploring the idea of a "turn" as a return to themes that have concerned her all along. The essays contend that Irigaray's writings should be read, criticized, or promoted within the context of her overall philosophical project.

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.

Part-Architecture presents a detailed and original study of Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre through another seminal modernist artwork, Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. Aligning the two works materially, historically and conceptually, the book challenges the accepted architectural descriptions of the Maison de Verre, makes original spatial and social accounts of its inhabitation in 1930s Paris, and presents new architectural readings of the Large Glass. Through a rich analysis, which incorporates creative projects into history and theory research, the book establishes new ways of writing about architecture. Designed for politically progressive gynaecologist Dr Jean Dalsace and his avant-garde wife, Annie Dalsace, the Maison de Verre combines a family home with a gynaecology clinic into a ‘free-plan’ layout. Screened only by glass walls, the presence of the clinic in the home suggests an untold dialogue on 1930s sexuality. The text explores the Maison de Verre through another radical glass construction, the Large Glass, where Duchamp’s complex depiction of unconsummated sexual relations across the glass planes reveals his resistance to the marital conventions of 1920s Paris. This and other analyses of the Large Glass are used as a framework to examine the Maison de Verre as a register of the changing history of women’s domestic and maternal choices, reclaiming the building as a piece of female social architectural history. The process used to uncover and write the accounts in the book is termed ‘part-architecture’. Derived from psychoanalytic theory, part-architecture fuses analytical, descriptive and creative processes, to produce a unique social and architectural critique. Identifying three essential materials to the Large Glass, the book has three main chapters: ‘Glass’, ‘Dust’ and ‘Air’. Combining theory text, creative writing and drawing, each traces the history and meaning of the material and its contribution to the spaces and sexuality of the Large Glass and the Maison de Verre. As a whole, the book contributes important and unique spatial readings to existing scholarship and expands definitions of architectural design and history.

Between the Psyche and the Social is the first collection of its kind to offer original, interdisciplinary essays on questions of social subjectivity. Contributors engage the disciplines of feminism, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, film theory, literary criticism, and philosophy to transform the psychoanalytic study of social oppression. The book considers such questions as, How can psychoanalysis and critical social theory engage and transform one another? How can the social dimensions of subjectivity be understood within the framework of a classic psychoanalytic theory that rejects the social domain that gives rise to subjectivity in the first place? Between the Psyche and the Social reclaims the contributions of psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, postcolonial, and political theories in order to change the parameters of the current debates on the social dimensions of subjectivity.

Why broach and challenge the question of neutrality? For some urgent reasons. The neuter is generally considered to be the condition of objectivity. However, historically, this is asserted by a subject which is masculine and not neuter. Claiming that truth and the way of reaching it are and must be in the neuter amounts to a misuse of power and a falsification of the real. Living beings are not naturally neuter; they are sexuate somehow or other. Subjecting them to the neuter as a condition of their objective status transforms living beings into cultural products deprived of their own origin and dynamism, and builds a world in which the development and the sharing of life are impossible. In this book, four contributors explore this basic mistake of our culture starting from the work of Heidegger and his insistence on maintaining that our being in the world - our Dasein - must be in the neuter. They question the nature of the truth which is then at stake and the political mistakes that it can cause. It is not here a question of sexuality strictly speaking nor of sexual choice. The concern of the two men and the two women who participate in this volume is with the sexuate determination of all living beings. Is not Heidegger’s Dasein, as neutered and supposedly neutral, a kind of technical device which prevents living beings from entering into presence? If so, where might that ultimately lead?

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.