Previous research has suggested that bodily signals from internal organs are associated with diverse cortical and subcortical processes involved in sensory-motor functions, beyond homeostatic reflexes. For instance, a recent study demonstrated that the preparation and execution of voluntary actions, as well as its underlying neural activity, are coupled with the breathing cycle. In the current study, we investigated whether such breathing-action coupling is limited to voluntary motor action or whether it is also present for mental actions not involving any overt (...) bodily movement. To answer this question, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and respiratory signals while participants were conducting a voluntary action paradigm including self-initiated motor execution (ME), motor imagery (MI), and visual imagery (VI) tasks. We observed that the voluntary initiation of ME, MI, and VI are similarly coupled with the respiration phase. In addition, EEG analysis revealed the existence of readiness potential (RP) waveforms in all three tasks (i.e., ME, MI, VI), as well as a coupling between the RP amplitude and the respiratory phase. Our findings show that the voluntary initiation of both imagined and overt action is coupled with respiration, and further suggest that the breathing system is involved in preparatory processes of voluntary action by contributing to the temporal decision of when to initiate the action plan, regardless of whether this culminates in overt movements. -/- . (shrink)

Breath is invisible and yet ever present and vital for living beings. The concept of invisibility in relation to breath operates in concrete and metaphorical ways to extend ideas about breath and breathlessness across disciplines, in clinical spaces and in life experience. Using a critical medical humanities approach, I demonstrate that the poverty of narrative accounts and language for breath outside the health context have had a crucial influence enabling clinically mediated interpretations and accounts to dominate. (...) These third-person accounts are important in the articulation of the ‘lived body’, but I balance this with a consideration of the subjective sensation of interoception, which has important implications for the visibility of breathlessness in both clinical and lay contexts. This article illustrates the rich potential of the subjects of breath and breathlessness within body studies and this special issue is a key step in making breath such an emergent topic. (shrink)

Contributors to this volume consider the implications of 'the Age of Breath': a spiritual shift in human awareness to the needs of the other figured through breathing.

Contemplative practices, such as meditation and yoga, are increasingly popular among the general public and as topics of research. Beneficial effects associated with these practices have been found on physical health, mental health, and cognitive performance. However, studies and theories that clarify the underlying mechanisms are lacking or scarce. This theoretical review aims to address and compensate this scarcity. We will show that various contemplative activities have in common that breathing is regulated or attentively guided. This respiratory discipline in turn (...) could parsimoniously explain the physical and mental benefits of contemplative activities through changes in autonomic balance. We propose a neurophysiological model that explains how these specific respiration styles could operate, by phasically and tonically stimulating the vagal nerve: respiratory vagal nerve stimulation. The vagal nerve, as a proponent of the parasympathetic nervous system, is the prime candidate in explaining the effects of contemplative practices on health, mental health, and cognition. We will discuss implications and limitations of our model. (shrink)

The question of whether we can perceive absences, in addition to ‘positives’, has received recent attention in the literature on the nature of vision and audition. The aim is to demonstrate that there can be objectless forms of perceptual consciousness; specifically, to show that such episodes can be distinguished from those in which there is merely no perception at all. The current article explores this question for the domain of olfaction, and argues that there can be experiences of the absence (...) of odours, in addition to positive smell perception. Doing so sheds light upon the structure and spatial content of olfaction. (shrink)

Within the sociology of sport, phenomenologically-inspired perspectives on sensory embodiment have emerged in recent years. This corpus includes investigations into the senses in water-based sports such as scuba diving (Merchant, 2011), performance swimming (Allen-Collinson et al., 2021 ; McNarry et al., 2021) and in land-based sports such as distance running (Allen-Collinson et al., 2018, 2021 ; Allen-Collinson & Jackman, 2021), and cycling (Hammer, 2015 ; Spinney, 2006). In this article, I draw upon phenomenological sociology (Allen-Collinson, 2009) and ‘sensory work’, to (...) investigate the experience of asthma in sports participants. Currently, despite the prevalence of asthma globally, there remains a lack of in-depth research on actual experiences of coping with asthma and ‘breathing battles’ in sporting contexts. Here, I draw on data from two linked research projects: a collaborative autoethnography and an interview-based study , which generated findings that highlighted sensory aspects relating to the lived experience of asthma and sporting embodiment. (shrink)

Gurunanda (aka Puneet Nanda) is a successful entrepreneur-turned-yogi. His business accomplishments earned him 2011's Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and an active position with the Young Presidents Organization. However, 18-hour workdays filled with stress, poor eating habits and lack of exercise took a dire toll on his life and his health until he discovered yoga. His transformation (including a 40-pound weight loss) and his self-realization have been so profound that he is now committed to sharing the power (...) of yoga and yogic breathing across the globe, especially with people facing challenging, chaotic lifestyles. By focusing on positivity, simplicity and a judgment-free attitude, GURUNANDA'S HAPPY BREATH YOGA invites everyone to experience the energy, well-being and joy that comes from truly breathing."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article examines the breathing and breathless body in Camille-Vidal Naquet’s Sauvage. Respiration has been characterised by Peter Sloterdijk, in the first volume of his Sphären trilogy, as the first extension of the womb. The air we breathe is a “nobject” that escapes the subject-object relation, like the placenta before it. Sauvage engages the respiratory, alongside the placental and the acoustic, as three pre-oral “nobjects” for exploring what Leo Bersani has termed the body’s “somatic receptivity”. Duration, framing, lighting, and camera (...) movements cultivate a spectator’s receptivity to these “nobjects” and participate in acts of sphere formation. This provides a framework for thinking about how cinema itself might function as a “nobject”: a connective medium or sphere that supports and augments a subject, providing a field of protection and attention. However, the film’s presentation of breathlessness also signals a blocked receptivity, an inability to take in, introducing friction and resistance to the discourse of immediacy and exchange that characterises philosophical reflections on breath. Breathlessness has implications for thinking about bodily autonomy and forms of freedom that speak to the queer politics of Sauvage, as well as questions about movement and stillness, animation and lifelessness, that reflect back on the medium of film itself. (shrink)

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility investigates the relationship of aesthetic productions to modes of collective, social intellectual practice. Engaging black studies, queer theory, sound studies, literary theory, theological studies, continental philosophy and visual studies, Black Pentecostal Breath analyzes the ways otherwise modes of existence are disruptions of marginalization and violence.

Breathe will teach you how targeted breathwork affects the body and mind and how to make the most of it with simple, hassle-free exercises.

As part of the Dutch national science program “Professional Games for Professional Skills” we developed a stress-exposure biofeedback training in virtual reality for the Dutch police. We aim to reduce the acute negative impact of stress on performance, as well as long-term consequences for mental health by facilitating physiological stress regulation during a demanding decision task. Conventional biofeedback applications mainly train physiological regulation at rest. This might limit the transfer of the regulation skills to stressful situations. In contrast, we provide (...) the user with the opportunity to practice breathing regulation while they carry out a complex task in VR. This setting poses challenges from a technical – as well as from a user-experience perspective. We illustrate how we approach these challenges in our training and hope to contribute a useful reference for researchers and developers in academia or industry who are interested in using biosignals to control elements in a dynamic virtual environment. (shrink)

In lowland South America, breath animates human and non-human bodies, pulsating through the materialities of organisms. Humans, however, should manage their bodies to recast and reconfigure breath in its most life-enhancing manifestations: singing and smoking. These are the specialized domains of those able to manage their vitalities in such a way as to produce potent effects in themselves and in the world around them, including influencing atmospheric conditions, the lives of animals and plants and the harming and healing (...) of others. In these relational onto-epistemologies, intersubjectivity, intercorporality and states of non-cognitive interaffection find new depths. Breath, properly managed, can make and unmake worldly forms, including bodies and the societies they come together in. Focusing on two Amerindian communities, the Warekena of northwestern Rio Negro, Brazil and the Shipibo-Konibo of the Ucayali valley in Eastern Peru, this article examines the interface between human and non-human subjectivities, and how resonant interaffective atmospheric conditions are induced to promote health. (shrink)

To conclude the discussion of breath and breathing in the foregoing contributions, this comment sets out from a critical perspective on embodiment. For a being that breathes out and in, should we not add to embodiment its complement of vaporisation? Breath, after all, is fluid, animate and fundamental to human conviviality. While it can temporarily be put on hold, breath cannot be contained. That is why bodily breathing is unlike the ventilation of buildings. Moreover, breathing in and (...) breathing out are dissimilar movements which cannot be reversed. This presents particular problems for those with breathing difficulties, above all in societies where speech, carried on the outbreath, is modelled on print, and where thought is attributed to a self whose powers of cognition transcend bodily experience. In place of the complementarity of self and body, we posit the soul as a vortex in which breathing, thinking, speech and song all flow into one another. (shrink)

Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential or semantic (...) meaning and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider climate change as a systemic respiratory crisis, and explore how breath can function as a mode of witnessing climate catastrophe. We build on feminist environmental humanities methodologies of embodied attunement to advance a more-than-human witnessing of climate change. We suggest that a feminist “conspiratorial” witnessing of breath(lessness) can afford an embodied, situated, empathetic and systemic mode of witnessing. In this approach, the witness (e.g., “the human”) is part of what is witnessed (the climate (...) crisis). As such, breathing climate catastrophe can reveal the intimate, visceral and personal violences of global climate change, and develop empathetic approaches to climate injustice. Nevertheless, as breath’s social and multispecies differentiation reveals, no-one can witness the entirety of climate catastrophe with their own bodies. We thus advocate for collective, more-than-individual modes of knowing, such as science, art and critical analysis, to augment our own sensorial experiences of witness. (shrink)

In this article I take an unusual starting point from which to argue for a unified cognitive science, namely a position defined by what is sometimes called the ‘life-mind continuity thesis’. Accordingly, rather than taking a widely accepted starting point for granted and using it in order to propose answers to some well defined questions, I must first establish that the idea of life-mind continuity can amount to a proper starting point at all. To begin with, I therefore assess the (...) conceptual tools which are available to construct a theory of mind on this basis. By drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines, especially from a combination of existential phenomenology and organism-centered biology, I argue that mind can indeed be conceived as rooted in life, but only if we accept at the same time that social interaction plays a constitutive role for our cognitive capacities. (shrink)

This work revisits the problem of breathing cues used for management of speaking turns in multiparty casual conversation. We propose a new categorisation of turn-taking events which combines the criterion of speaker change with whether the original speaker inhales before producing the next talkspurt. We demonstrate that the latter criterion provides a good proxy for pragmatic completeness of the previous utterance (and, by extension, of the interruptive character of the incoming speech). We also present evidence that breath holds are (...) used in reaction to incoming talk rather than as a turn-holding cue. In addition to analysing dimensions which are routinely omitted in studies of interactional functions of breathing (exhalations, presence of overlapping speech, breath holds), the present study also looks at patterns of breath holds in silent breathing and shows that breath holds are sometimes produced towards the beginning (and towards the top) of silent exhalations, potentially indicating an abandoned intention to take the turn. We claim that the breathing signal can thus be successfully used for uncovering \emph{hidden} turn-taking events, which are otherwise obscured by silence-based representations of interaction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing TogetherRebecca L. Walkowitz (bio)For the first seven years of my career, I taught a very large lecture course once, and sometimes twice, a year in a graded auditorium filled seat-to-seat with as many as 350 undergraduates. The course focused on a cluster of themes that linked art and violence–how art resists violence, how art animates violence, how art expresses violence, how violence spurs art– and traced those themes (...) through the history of British fiction from Joyce, Woolf, and Forster through Barker, Burgess, Ishiguro, and Rushdie. I loved teaching that class. I loved and was sometimes terrified and almost always invigorated by being in that room with those students. Needless to say, no one wore masks. Far from it.I remember the feel of the crowded, anonymous, yet intimate room. Intimate, because a group of 20 or 30 very avid students occupied the first few rows, and I came to value and recognize their attentive faces. I could hear their little sounds as they scratched out notes, adjusted their laptops, whispered to each other, and rustled papers. Intimate, because I was standing at my full, not very substantial height on a stage, and they were looking up at my body and listening to my voice for 50 minutes twice a week. And intimate, in another sense, because they would sometimes forget that we were there together live and behave in ways that I have never experienced in a smaller classroom. One day, two students in the last row, which in the slanted auditorium was directly level with my elevated gaze, spent most of the lecture kissing ardently. I was impressed by their enthusiasm and by the duration of their embrace. At the end of the lecture, I quick-stepped up the aisle to remind them: this is not TV; we are here together. I smiled while I said it, and they apologized for distracting me. I smile as I think about it now.During the COVID lockdown, I missed the embodied experience of large gatherings, including large lectures. The Zoom classroom, for all its affordances, can't replicate the accidental encounters, the risk and energy of embodied presentation, the warmth of individual eye contact, and the shoulder experiences of the class period: what happens in the time just before and the time just after the actual class takes place. The shoulder experiences are truly precious, as any seasoned teacher knows, because [End Page 258] they allow us to shift the scale of encounter up and down, and they allow us to interact in spontaneous and less formal ways than we do when the entire class is gathered as one. Close up and informally, we are more likely to use our faces and our hands: smiling, nodding, tilting, waving, and pressing our palms together to say thank you.There is a kind of social intimacy and a kind of social violence that can only be illustrated in a very large group, and I appreciated my lecture for allowing me to experience that. The most terrifying day of my class each semester was the day I spoke about– and performed!–the shock of involuntary, inchoate expression in E. M. Forster's A Room with a View. Like other Bloomsbury artists, Forster was committed to ushering out traditional ideas of self-restraint and maturity and ushering in greater communication between men and women, between social classes, and between ages about sexuality, desire, and the experiences of the body. The word of the day was "play": life needed more play, more honesty, more curiosity, and less seriousness, less decorum, and less lying to ourselves and others.What does this look like in the classroom? On the day in question, we would talk about the scenes in the novel in which characters are criticized for disruptive actions they cannot or do not control, such as fainting, laughing, bleeding, getting carried away, or expressing sounds in addition to words. I would explain that there are two problems with these actions: they are accidental or unintentional, and they involve an unexpected, unregulated expression of the body in public. Even worse, the actions take place in what our grandparents used to call "mixed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Breath of Fresh Air:Or, Why the Body is Not Embodied1Tim Ingold (bio)One of the more irritating affectations of much recent writing in the humanities and social sciences is the habit of inserting the word "embodied" in front of the topic in question, as though by doing so the specter of binary thinking could be magically exorcised. Almost anything, it seems, can be embodied–the mind, consciousness, experience, knowledge, (...) skills, practices, the self, meaning. If there is one thing that cannot be embodied, however, it is the body itself. At first glance, the phrase "embodied body" looks like a simple case of tautology, of saying the same thing twice. "How can a body not be embodied?" you will protest. "It's the embodiment that makes it a body!" But on second thought, the matter is not so straightforward. For if the body is the predicate of a process of embodiment–if it comes after embodiment, so to speak–then all the other things we claim can be entered into the process must come before it. Thus, the dualism of mind and body, to take just one example, is still there, just as categorical as it ever was, but it no longer equates to a schism between ideal and material worlds. It is, rather, a matter of separating what is poured into the funnel of embodiment from what is extruded at the other end of it. It is a division between what goes in, and what comes out. Only things that go in can be embodied. The body, since it comes out of the process, cannot.A body, however, if it is to remain alive, has to breathe. Does it make sense, then, to regard breathing as a practice of embodiment, or to add breath to the list of things that can be embodied? That a body breathes goes without saying; that breath is thereby embodied is another matter entirely. Fundamental to breathing is the rhythmic alternation of air going in, and air coming out. Perhaps there's a sense in which breath is embodied on the inhalation, as air is drawn into the oxygenating process essential to bodily metabolism. But the release of air on the exhalation seems like the reverse, since it serves to expel gases–principally carbon dioxide–which in concentration would be lethal. If your body absorbs as you breathe in, it exudes as you breathe out. Embodiment, then, catches only half the picture, minus its complement of vaporization. Likewise, with [End Page 100] the body itself we have only half of the living being: the fleshy part. The other, gaseous part is normally invisible, though under certain conditions it can be seen, for example in a room full of smokers, in which everyone is wreathed in a haze, or when it is very cold, causing the warm, humid air issuing from the lungs to condense into a little cloud. As vaporization appears to be the complement of embodiment, so the cloud, whether of tobacco smoke or condensed moisture, seems to complement the body made up of flesh and blood.In the Western world there is a long tradition of prioritizing body over breath. This is consistent with an ontology of naturalism that tends to put the being of things before their becoming, as though everything there is had already precipitated out into bodies of one form or another, which have then to be set in motion in order to have the effects they do. Among many so-called Indigenous peoples, however, most especially those credited by anthropological observers with an ontology of animism, this priority is reversed. For them the vital complement of the living being wafts in smoke and resonates in song, whereas the bodily complement is but an ephemeral, almost ghostly appearance.2 Although a comparison of Western and animic ontologies might appear to lend support to the thesis of complementarity, pitching western naturalists into a world of bodies and indigenous animists into a world of vapors–both demi-worlds which, if only they could be combined, would make a perfect whole–I shall argue, to the contrary, that with a focus on breath and breathing, the division between the... (shrink)

Breathing fresh air into the philosophy of mathematics Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9470-8 Authors Marco Panza, IHPST, 13, rue du Four, 75006 Paris, France Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

In this article, I materially situate air pollution exposure as a topic of social and political inquiry by paying attention to the increasing specificity of spaces and sites of exposure in air pollution and health research. Evidence of the unevenness of exposure and differential health effects of air pollution have led to a proliferation of studies on the risks different environments pose to bodies. There are increasingly different airs in air pollution science. In this research, bodies are often relegated to (...) passive objects, exposed according to the environments they move between. Yet exposure implies a blurring of bodies and environments which also challenges the idea of a discrete body that is distinguishable from its material context. By studying the process of modelling indoor air pollution, I highlight how air pollution, buildings and bodies are co-implicated with one another in ways that demand new ways of materialising human exposure in science. (shrink)

This book offers an original contribution towards a new theory of intersubjectivity which places ethics of breath, hospitality and non-violence in the forefront. Emphasizing Indian philosophy and religion and related cross-cultural interpretations, it provides new intercultural interpretations of key Western concepts which traditionally were developed and followed in the vein of re-conceptualizations of Greek thought, as in Nietzsche and Heidegger, for example. The significance of the book lies in its establishment of a new platform for thinking philosophically about intersubjectivity, (...) so as to nudge contemporary philosophy towards a more sensitive approach, which is needed in our times. Intended for philosophers, feminists and others concerned with intercultural philosophy, the book will appeal to readers interested in contemporary ethical and political theories. A Breath of Proximity will benefit all who seek a more sensitive approach in philosophy and often-neglected practical layers of our everyday intersubjective relations. Life as breath: such is the grand theme of Lenart Škof's wonderful new book. Ranging from Indian Vedic writings to Heidegger and Irigaray, Breath of Proximity cuts across the tired analytic/continental distinction in philosophy and proposes an ethical cosmology based on our human dwelling. A breath of fresh air! Kevin Hart is Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia Lenart Škof wrote a very interesting book on breath and breathing which expresses and analyzes the essence of human existence. The breath or wind is the core point of humans. As you know, you will read in John 3.8 that the humans are born from the wind. The breath and wind have something to do with the ethics of being human, because humans live with breath and breathing. Ethics is essentially a way of life through breathing. Tadashi Ogawa is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Kyoto University Breath and breathing are central themes of Asian philosophies since ancient times. This was also the case in ancient Europe. But we forgot about this dimension in our academic discourse. The book of Lenart Škof brings into sight that well known Western philosophers of the 20th century picked this topic up again. The book is the most notable and far-reaching attempt to rediscover the fundamental dimension of breath and breathing for the contemporary discourse of philosophy. Rolf Elberfeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hildesheim. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pairing breaths:Rabah Ameur-Zaïmech's Terminal Sud (2019)Marion Froger (bio)Translated by David F. BellAsphyxiaNever had I felt such a sense of suffocation watching a film by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche.1 The poisoned atmosphere of Terminal Sud (2019) recalls the atmosphere of the Algerian War (1955-1962) and that of the decade of darkness (1991-2002) in that country. The filmmaker chose not to make a historical film, however, but rather a dystopia that fuses together (...) periods and places. The story appears to be contemporary, in a country bathed in the colors of southern France, apparently in the grip of all the violence that French and Algerian memories are nowhere near forgetting.2 Bandits wearing combat uniforms, policemen wearing outfits sporting an acronym that strangely resembles one used by Islamist Algerian groups,3 and generals evoking the French putschists of 1961 all fight against each other—ransoming, threatening, kidnapping, killing, and torturing the local population. Meanwhile, out in the countryside, guerrillas (maquisards4) try to care for their dying leader, like North African freedom fighters (fellagas) were doing before them, and this in turn evokes French Resistance fighters in the 1940s. The film's work on confused memories, which, according to Thierry Kuntzel, is related to the condensation, overdetermination, and displacement of dreamwork, transforms being out of breath into a symptom that hounds the doctor, played by Ramzy Bédia ("Inhale…Exhale…Inhale again…Hold your breath…Exhale"), a state of the world in the form of a trap that threatens to suffocate him—and launches the quest for a filmic poetics of calm through the pairing of breaths.Peeling façades with tightly closed doors, lowered metal shop shutters, narrow and tense streets: the doctor, his wife Hazia, and their family slip outside in fear of kidnapping and gunfire, climb up stairs breathing heavily, anxiously await by the window, their bodies obscured in starkly contrasting shadows cast by glaring light, hug each other with endless sighs. As they share their grief, they have barely enough breath left to sing to the memory of someone who has disappeared,5 as if after an argument, [End Page 244] when everything has been said and all that remains is a strangled sob serving as last farewell.The film opens with an attack on a minivan used for public transportation: bandits, who could be soldiers, steal everything from the passengers and driver. The doctor sees his patients in a rundown hospital, treats a woman whose breathing is raucous, her voice taut with anxiety, and who speaks about the disappearance of her husband. Back home, he finds anonymous letters containing death threats and, to calm down, he searches for his breath by taking a deep drag from a cigarette and a swig of whiskey. "I can't take it any longer, I can't even stand up, I can't do anything, I'm at the end of my rope, I'm tired […] Is that what our country has become?" he confides to a friend several hours before losing, in the emergency room, his wife's brother, a journalist assassinated in front of his house. "Stay with me," he says as he runs beside the stretcher calling for help, "Breathe, breathe."The spasmodic breathing of Ramzy Bédia, provoked by the fear, effort, and pain that define his character, intensifies as the film progresses. He barely breathes in the car taking him to treat the rebel leader; he is running out of breath beside the leader's bed as we hear the death rattle and as Bédia shouts to the leader's comrades, "Give him some air, everyone get out!" Later, one of the policemen standing guard at the entrance to the hospital will be mortally wounded by a kamikaze attack and will die on the operating table despite the doctor's exhausting reparatory manipulations. Asphyxia will ultimately directly threaten the doctor after his arrest. Tied to an old bedspring, he will be tortured by electroshock,6 will attempt one last time to justify himself to a soldier who wants to know everything about the rebel leader the doctor has treated, and will nearly suffocate in his... (shrink)

Happiness is far more than a positive feeling that comes and goes, happiness is wired into the physiology of our brains. It is a skill we can all develop through cultivating mindfulness and concentration. In Ten Breaths to Happiness Schneider presents a series of simple practices and guided meditations that allow you to literally rewire your neural pathways to experience deeper and more lasting fulfillment and peace. Studies in neuroscience show that it takes about thirty seconds to build a new (...) neural-pathway. Schneider takes these findings and combines them with mindfulness practices based on the teachings of Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. For example, he encourages us to take ten conscious breaths whenever we encounter something beautiful or have a meaningful experience. Consistently exercising this simple practice creates an opportunity for the brain to move from its default reaction of protection to one of appreciation and spaciousness. (shrink)

Benjamin's famous description of the aura in the `Small History of Photography' starts: `What is aura? A strange texture of space and time...', and ends with: `That means breathing the aura of these mountains and this branch'. Until now, the meaning of `breathing' has hardly been subject to interpretation. In this article it will be shown that Benjamin refers to Goethe's `diastole/systole', and to Hölderlin's concept of the unity of antagonistic dispositions, for example the paradoxical constellation of the sacred/sobriety. To (...) Benjamin `breathing' means the original, prehistorical, situation of harmony and peace. Together with the decline of bourgeois society, parallel to the development of a new technology in photography and film, the aura disappears. In its place we find the dialectical image. Benjamin tries to show that the decline of the aura is not just some aesthetic question, but that it is connected to the traditional philosophical problem of defining the truth and the relation between myth and rationality. Referring to Benjamin's cosmological speculations, as well as to his references to Baudelaire, it can be argued that, notwithstanding his lyrical description of the aura, Benjamin was in favour of the destruction of the aura. Under the conditions of a capitalist economy and a malfunctioning republic, a society which can be defined as `false', the traditional idea of aura, being the `shine' of a true society, cannot be taken for granted. The `dialectical image', showing that antagonistic forces hide behind a `shine' of unity and harmony, enables us to see that the traditional idea of truth is obsolete and to look for a new solution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:breatheJohn Cayley (bio)To view the current version of John Cayley's digital work "breathe" as a standalone website, please visit https://work.programmatology.com/breathe/. Use of a Chrome browser is advised, and, for mobiles, the site has only been tested for iOS devices. On the desktop, switching to full screen will avoid having to manually resize the browser window to a more or less 16:9 aspect. To view Cayley's notebook with digital code, (...) visit https://observablehq.com/@shadoof/breathe.breathe is a brief, prose-poetic essay in explicitly paragrammatic language art. The 'supply text' that underlies a fundamentally dynamic, temporal making of meaning is what in other contexts might be read as an original composition by myself, its subject the interior oceanscape of breath that we experienced during the pandemic year of 2020, our respiratory rhythms threatened, invisibly, by disease. The piece is also representative of a category of still largely potential poetic artifacts to which computation lends a dynamic and here, a paragrammatic concretism.Despite Julia Kristeva having made a convincing formalist-polemical case for the paragram,1 it seems to be more or less absent from most contemporary milieux of poetic praxis as an explicit, generative principle.2 For 'poetic praxis' I might have said 'writing' or 'literary practice' but the common usage of the former is overly constrained, and its sense after Derrida is, perforce, radically ambiguous. 'Literary' (with its root and other derivations) I now tend to reserve for language art practices within the domain of which the letter is properly and compositionally constitutive. Is breathe an instance of 'writing' or 'literary practice'? Well, literary practice: yes, but not as usually conceived. 'Letteral,' definitely.In Kristeva's abstracted models of poetic language, the paragram is everywhere in both prose and poetry as such: the (chiefly) literal inscription of alternate, multiplied, yet readable 'grams,' at once within and beyond those of the text as received, generative of new meanings, and of various modes for the aestheticization of poetic objects. In subsequent or adjacent criticism–regardless of whether or not it is psychoanalytically inclined–paragram may be further associated with Lacan's "lalangue" (surfacing in breathe as 'lalanguage'), that part of Language (an anglophone term, distinctly capitalized) which clearly exceeds and eludes most of the dubious, fundamentally orthographic, or designative 'sciences' of linguistics.3 But even lalanguage is only ever at best commensurate with [End Page 97] the 'not all,' despite (or perhaps due to) the ineluctable fact that, as T. S. Eliot's Sweeney puts it, "I gotta use words when I talk to you." What should be clear, however, even from this most cursory of outlines, is that paragrams should be read as poetic and that–particularly if allowed to embrace non-literal, metaphoric instances–a case may be (has been) made that paragrams are (Kristeva would have written =) poetic language.In actually existing 'literature' we might suggest that paragrams are hypostasized or stunned (historically, by literal inscription) in latency or in hiding but, clearly, there are potential movements and/or transformative processes, realized through reading, from the 'grams' of the received text to their paragrams. While the usual sense of the prefix 'para-' is "parallel to, separate from or going beyond" (OED), Kristeva and others call attention to this real if usually implicit movement. (I quote extensively from her essay without further comment except to point out that these words are highly suggestive of other aspects of language art in digital media which are not directly addressed in the present, more focused remarks.)[...] the literary text presents itself as a system of multiple connections that could be described as a structure of paragrammatic networks. [...] The term network replaces univocity (linearity) by encompassing it, and suggests that each set (sequence) is the outcome and the beginning of a plurivalent relation. In this network, the elements will be presented as the peaks of a graph ( [...] ), enabling us to formalize the symbolic operation of language as a dynamic mark, as a moving 'gram' (hence as a paragram) which makes rather than expresses a meaning.4The movements-as-transformative(or deformative)-process in breathe are various modes of letteral replacement, particularly of letters... (shrink)

Olfactory perception provides a promising test case for enactivism, since smelling involves actively sampling our surrounding environment by sniffing. Smelling deploys implicit skillful knowledge of how our movement and the airflow around us yield olfactory experiences. The hybrid nature of olfactory experience makes it an ideal test case for enactivism with its esteem for touch and theoretical roots in vision. Olfaction is like vision in facilitating the perception of distal objects, yet it requires us to breath in and physically (...) contact the sensory object in a manner similar to touch. The paper offers an analysis of the central theoretical components of enactivism, whose soundness and empirical viability are tested using the empirical literature on sniffing. It will be shown that even if sniffing is an essential component of olfaction, the motoric component is not necessary for perceiving smells, which is contrary to the most crucial tenet of enactivism. Thus, the paper concludes that the theory cannot account for olfactory perception. (shrink)

A. Whisper; utter softly; speak privately; [fig.] confide; make known Breathe in Ear more modern God's old fashioned vows B. Inhale and exhale; process air through the lungs; [fig.] live; subsist And now, by Life deprived, In my own Grave I breathe C. Exist; show life force; [fig.] purr; yowl; make vibrant animal sounds With thee in the Tamarind wood -- Leopard breathes -- at last! D. Absorb; assimilate; internalize; infuse; gather. And now, removed from Air -- I simulate the (...) Breath, so well -- E. Gasp; draw in air; respond with admiration 'Tis Costly -- So are purples! 'Tis just the price of Breath -- F. Flutter; flicker; waver; hover; palpitate; [fig.] betray; vacillate; be unfaithful: An hour behind... Read More. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that police performance may be hindered by psychophysiological state changes during acute stress. To address the need for awareness and control of these physiological changes, police academies in many countries have implemented Heart-Rate Variability biofeedback training. Despite these trainings now being widely delivered in classroom setups, they typically lack the arousing action context needed for successful transfer to the operational field, where officers must apply learned skills, particularly when stress levels rise. The study presented here aimed (...) to address this gap by training physiological control skills in an arousing decision-making context. We developed a Virtual-Reality breathing-based biofeedback training in which police officers perform deep and slow diaphragmatic breathing in an engaging game-like action context. This VR game consisted of a selective shoot/don’t shoot game designed to assess response inhibition, an impaired capacity in high arousal situations. Biofeedback was provided based on adherence to a slow breathing pace: the slower and deeper the breathing, the less constrained peripheral vision became, facilitating accurate responses to the in-game demands. A total of nine male police trainers completed 10 sessions over a 4-week period as part of a single-case experimental ABAB study-design. Results showed that eight out of nine participants showed improved breathing control in action, with a positive effect on breathing-induced low frequency HRV, while also improving their in-game behavioral performance. Critically, the breathing-based skill learning transferred to subsequent sessions in which biofeedback was not presented. Importantly, all participants remained highly engaged throughout the training. Altogether, our study showed that our VR environment can be used to train breathing regulation in an arousing and active decision-making context. (shrink)

Lucas, Brian Review of: The breath of the spirit in the church: The sensus fidelium and canon law, by Anthony Ekpo, Strathfield, NSW: St Pauls, 2014, pp. 260, paperback, $24.95.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing:Proustian Therapy1Christopher Prendergast (bio)I begin with a question I would never have imagined myself asking. Is Proust good for you? Might there even be, albeit in carefully controlled doses, a place for him in modern 'health care'? He certainly belongs in the select, if occasionally scary, company of writers whose name, or that of one of their fictional characters, has lent itself to the designation of a psycho-physical condition (...) often with medical characteristics. A short list includes: Stendhal ('Stendhal syndrome,' the condition of obsessional attachment to works of art); Musset (the 'Musset Sign,' manifested as an uncontrollable tremor of the head); Gogol's Plyushkin in Dead Souls ('compulsive hoarding syndrome'); Dickens's Miss Havisham in Great Expectations ('senile squalor syndrome'); Wilde's Lady Windermere ('Lady Windermere syndrome,' associated with pulmonary illness and breathing difficulties).There is no evidence that Proust was directly acquainted with Wilde's play, but there can be little doubt that what came to be called 'Lady Windermere Syndrome' would have spoken to him loud and clear. In an early story called L'Indifférent, Proust penned an encomium to the air we breathe: "A child who from birth has always breathed without paying any attention has no idea how much the air, which swells so sweetly his chest that he doesn't even notice it, is essential to life." A memory of this is doubtless somewhere in the background of the passing mention in Le Côté de Guermantes of "the alpine resort" that teaches him "that the act of breathing, to which we habitually pay no attention, can be a constant source of pleasure." It was almost certainly also in Proust's thoughts when, in the final volume, he penned the famous definition of Paradise Lost as the place and time of "an air we have breathed before, this purer air which the poets have tried in vain to make reign in paradise and which could not provide this profound feeling of renewal if it has not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost."But the early story, like the novel itself, is also haunted by a subtext in which what is precious to life can also be the enemy of life, as, in an access of fever and sudden convulsion, the child feels himself to be suffocating. The story clearly has its origins in Proust's own life, the moment of his first asthma attack as a young boy on a family outing to the Bois de Boulogne. It struck out of the blue with a frightening intensity, and was to pursue [End Page 49] him throughout his life like a fury, proliferating further symptoms such as emphysema and cardiac seizures. As late as 1919, he writes in a letter of an attack that leaves him "gasping like someone half-drowned who is pulled out of water." And it was there again at the moment of Proust's exit from the world, carried off by a bout of pneumonia exacerbated by a pulmonary abscess.There were treatments and consultations galore, the former on a spectrum from inhalations to cauterizing of the nasal tubes, and the latter including a meeting with his father's colleague, Dr. Buissand, who inclined to the view– and increasingly fashionable in medical circles–that the prime cause was neurasthenic. Proust himself hesitated: in a letter he described it as "a bodily illness," but in the Recherche, "asthma crises" are linked to a "mystery" of the "unconscious" and strike out of the blue. The 'mystery' is often, and plausibly, associated with fear of separation from the protective mother. This will be one of the major themes of the novel, and the source of the "sobs that never cease" of which the narrator speaks in the opening volume. But whether physical or psychosomatic, a guaranteed trigger was proximity to tree blossoms (apple especially virulent) and certain flowers–that is, the very things that, for Proust, often something approaching quasi-sacred status, thus illustrating the law that it is what you most love that can kill you.In the novel, however, much of this is distilled into comedy, all terrifying... (shrink)

This collection of essays provides a reassessment of the question of sexual difference, taking into account important shifts in feminist thought, post-humanist theories, and queer studies. The contributors offer new and refreshing insights into the complex question of sexual difference from a post-feminist perspective, and how it is reformulated in various related areas of study, such as ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, biology, technology, and mass-media.

ABSTRACT The calls for us to find solace in our “together-apart-ness” obfuscate the calamity of Black lives being lost in numbers exponentially higher than white bodies. In the midst of a virus that “does not discriminate,” but is aided in its deadly spread by those systems that do, the concept of “wake work” demands our time and attention.

Meena Srinivasan began teaching in order to touch lives, but with the demands of covering her curriculum she all but forgot her aspiration. During a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh, Meena learned for the first time about mindfulness. In Teach, Breathe, Learn, Srinivasan highlights how mindfulness can be an effective tool in the classroom. What makes this book truly unique is Srinivasan's perspective as a classroom teacher, wrestling daily with the conditions about which she writes. Each chapter begins with a (...) personal narrative concerning a challenge Srinivasan faced during the school day and how a specific mindfulness practice helped. Testimonials from students, colleagues, and parents appear in each chapter, along with a mindfulness practice. Part 1 helps teachers develop compassion and shift from "reacting" to "responding" to demands. Part 2 offers techniques for cultivating loving-kindness and seeing students, colleagues, and parents as oneself. The author shares what research says about the effects of mindfulness practice on academic, social, and emotional learning. The last section of the book introduces the complete curriculum teachers can use to incorporate mindfulness into their classroom, replete with lesson plans, PowerPoint diagrams, handouts, and homework assignments. (shrink)

IntroductionApproaches to improve heart rate variability and reduce stress such as breathing retraining are more frequently being integrated into psychotherapy but little research on their effectiveness has been done to date. Specifically, no studies to date have directly compared using a breathing pacer at 6 breaths per minute with compassion focused soothing rhythm breathing.Current StudyIn this randomized controlled experiment, 6 breaths per minute breathing using a pacer was compared with compassion focused soothing rhythm breathing, with a nature video being used (...) as a control group condition.MethodsHeart rate variability measures were assessed via electrocardiogram and respiration belt, and an automated blood pressure machine was used to measure systolic diastolic blood pressure, and heart rate. A total of 96 participants were randomized into the three conditions. Following a 5-min baseline, participants engaged in either 6 breath per minute breathing, soothing rhythm breathing, or watched a nature video for 10 min. To induce a stressful state, participants then wrote for 5 min about a time they felt intensely self-critical. Participants then wrote for 5 min about a time they felt self-compassionate, and the experiment ended with a 10-min recovery period.ResultsConditions did not significantly differ at baseline. Overall, HRV, as measured by standard deviation of NN intervals, low frequency HRV, and LF/HF ratio, increased during the intervention period, decreased during self-critical writing, and then returned to baseline levels during the recovery period. High frequency HRV was not impacted by any of the interventions. The participants in the 6 breath per minute pacer condition were unable to consistently breathe at that rate and averaged about 12 breaths per minute. Time by Condition analyses revealed that both the 6 breaths per minute pacer and soothing breathing rhythm conditions lead to significantly higher SDNN than the nature video condition during breathing practice but there were no significant differences between conditions in response to the self-critical and self-compassionate writing or recovery periods. The 6 breath per minute pacer condition demonstrated a higher LF HRV and LF/HF ratio than the soothing rhythm breathing condition, and both intervention conditions had a higher LF HRV and LF/HF ratio than the nature video.ConclusionsAlthough the 6 breath per minute pacer condition participants were not able to breath consistently at the low pace, both the participants attempting to breathe at 6 breaths per minute as well as those in the soothing rhythm breathing condition effectively increased HR variability as measured by SDNN, and attempting to breathe at 6 breaths per minute led to the highest LF HRV and LF/HF ratio. Both breathing approaches impacted HRV more than watching a relaxing nature video and can potentially be used as key adjuncts in psychotherapy to aid in regulating physiological functioning, although it appears that consistent breathing practice would be needed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing Without a Head:Plant Respirations in John Gerrard's Smoke TreesOrchid Tierney (bio)About two hours from where I grew up in Invercargill, Aotearoa New Zealand, is a large finger lake called Lake Wakatipu. The lake is nested in the Southern Alps of the South Island and, at the extremes, its body measures three miles wide and fifty-two miles long. The surrounding mountains are haunting in the evenings when the coniferous (...) wildlife is silent, and for as long as I can remember, Wakatipu has been called the breathing lake. I must have read this moniker on a brochure or travel poster in a hotel or a restaurant—I used to visit the area around the lake regularly during the winter months as a child—but according to local legend, it is the beating heart of a taniwha—an ogre called Matau—that causes the lake's respirations. Matakauri, the hero of this particular myth, set alight the ogre whilst he slept in order to rescue his beloved Manata, the beautiful daughter of a local chief, whom the taniwha had kidnapped. As Matau burned, he left behind his heart, which continued to beat rhythmically in the years that followed Matakauri's daring rescue. The myth brilliantly invokes the scientific expertise of the local Indigenous people, for the lake really does rise and fall regularly throughout the day. Despite being landlocked, Wakatipu has an observable seiche, or standing wave, that occurs every 26.7 minutes and results in a tide that rises and falls almost eight inches. Of course, the seiche is the Western scientific explanation for the lake's regular aquatic behavior. The lake breathes because Matau's heart is still beating.Wakatipu's origin myth proposes a respiration that is both wonderfully metaphorical and scientific, but it also raises questions about the embodiments of breath itself. Namely, I'm curious here as to who is an agent of breath? Who and what breathes? Who can breathe easily in the Anthropocene? Who can breathe easily at all? And yet: what an unnecessarily [End Page 14] cruel question this is when so many people nowadays cannot breathe fluently or joyfully in a global pandemic. Over the course of the past two years, the ventilator has become a vexed symbol of the persistence of life, of political incompetence. Of medicalized racial injustice. The lungs that strain against the COVID-19 virus are sometimes the same lungs that have historically struggled against anthropogenic non-viral forms of air pollution. Industrial air pollutants are indicators of systemic racism, imperialism, colonialism, and the uneven urban distributions of risk. Indeed, in December 2020, a British coroner ruled, for the first time in legal history of the United Kingdom, that emissions of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter on the South Circular Road of London were the cause of nine-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah's acute respiratory failure in February 2013 (Laville). Toxic airborne pollution is vile matter that forcibly connects gentle lungs with racialized environments. As Timothy Choy notes, "Air muddies the distinction between subjects and environments, and between subjects. This thickness and porosity rendered by air is part of what makes the air and the airborne such deeply felt elements" (157). We, human animals, are too porous for the heavy industry and traffic routes that fill the air and the softness of our lungs. And so: we know the matter of the air by the smoothness of respiration; we feel the keen politics of the air when breathing is labored.I can point to numerous examples where respiration in the context of human life is fraught. Indeed, the act of breathing foregrounds the buoyancy of humanity and the formations of life. I want to acknowledge and hold those complexities because breathing in relation to human life, especially for populations of color, disabled people, and transgender communities, is not yet guaranteed. And I want to consider additionally, who and what has been excluded from the formulations of breathing more generally, and how breathing itself has been anthropomorphized at the expense of other forms of more-than-human life. As Jane Bennett suggests, "humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside of a sticky... (shrink)

Since sound and music are powerful forces and drivers of human behavior and physiology, we propose the use of sonification to activate healthy breathing patterns in participants to induce relaxation. Sonification is often used in the context of biofeedback as it can represent an informational, non-invasive and real-time stimulus to monitor, motivate or modify human behavior. The first goal of this study is the proposal and evaluation of a distance-based biofeedback system using a tempo- and phase-aligned sonification strategy to adapt (...) breathing patterns and induce states of relaxation. A second goal is the evaluation of several sonification stimuli on 18 participants that were recruited online and of which we analyzed psychometric and behavioral data using, respectively questionnaires and respiration rate and ratio. Sonification stimuli consisted of filtered noise mimicking a breathing sound, nature environmental sounds and a musical phrase. Preliminary results indicated the nature stimulus as most pleasant and as leading to the most prominent decrease of respiration rate. The noise sonification had the most beneficial effect on respiration ratio. While further research is needed to generalize these findings, this study and its methodological underpinnings suggest the potential of the proposed biofeedback system to perform ecologically valid experiments at participants' homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BreathingLuk Van den Dries (bio)This text, "Breathing," was conceived for the book From Act to Acting: Fabre's Guidelines for the Performer of the 21st Century (2021). The book was conceived and designed by Jan Fabre, author, theatre artist, and visual artist, active since the 1970s. The book was written by Luk Van den Dries, dramaturg and theatre researcher of the University of Antwerp, in tight collaboration with Jan Fabre (...) and the three most important performers/teachers of the Belgian theatre company, Troubleyn (Annabelle Chambon, Cédric Charron, and Ivana Jozic). The book sheds new light on the physical, mental, and vocal training of the performer and furthermore gives insight into Fabre's revolutionary thoughts on contemporary theatre.1Breathing is the first of the ten performative principles that together create the basic grammar in which the language of the performers is grounded.Three-phased breathing (one part in, one part out, one part nothing) is a basic condition in the series of exercises Jan Fabre developed throughout his career. This respiration technique returns in all exercises. Also, it is the first principle that the performers are taught: by dividing breathing into three equal parts, energy is built up and stress or fatigue is canalized. It is a way to rebalance, to find a place of rest after a strenuous effort, or it can also be used as a springboard to a heightened performance. Very regularly during individual exercises, Fabre will refer to this respiration technique, especially in specific situations of high adrenaline, but of course the performers should learn to use this respiration technique autonomously. They should become so familiar with the rhythm of this breathing that they automatically fall back on it when necessary. Because this respiration technique is so crucial to Fabre's acting pedagogy, it is described in detail as the very first exercise in his book. Its basic principles are explained below as well, as the first performative principle.Breathing is a sign of life, and on this primal and essential level it needs to be understood that, through breathing, the performer gives life. He breathes life into the performance. Fabre himself has described this basic condition for the birth of theatre through breathing very precisely: [End Page 30]The most important weapon of the warrior of beauty is his respiration. When the performance starts, life stops. Life itself dies. The warrior of beauty is alive, but life itself is dead. The warrior of beauty remains with just his own breath. When he enters the stage, he needs to breathe life into deceased life. Like a god gives his breath to create life. In the same way he will create life with his breath. How will he achieve this? By breathing correctly: one-third inhaling through the nostrils, one-third exhaling through pursed lips, one-third without breathing. And then the miracle happens. The breath becomes imagination and the imagination breathes. The warrior of beauty is the master of breath and life.2Fabre's abdominal breathing differs from regular forms of breathing, such as techniques derived from Asian yoga techniques, Chi-kung or Tai-chi, as it stresses different parts. At the same time, it is closely related to it, because these practices also adopt the notion that breathing in the first place rouses vitality and spirit and that the right kind of breathing thus aims at controlling life currents and bringing about a clear mind. In yoga it is called pranayama: prana meaning spirit or force of life, ayama meaning 'control' or 'grasp.' Yoga knows many variants in directing the breath, depending on the asanas (yoga postures) in which they are bedded. Sometimes focusing mainly on the diaphragm and the flanks, sometimes on abdominal breathing. Also, suspending your breath (kumbhaka) is a yoga technique, applied at the end of inhalation as well as after exhalation and during taking breath.In Fabre's case, abdominal breathing is stressed: first, air is inhaled through the nose, subsequently sent in the direction of the peritoneal cavity and the flanks, and then again exhaled via a very precise blowing technique (a dosed flow of air through an imaginary straw). During the cycle the diaphragm remains... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing with Denise LevertovNoëlle Batt (bio)The BreathingAn absolutepatience.Trees standup to their knees infog. The fogslowly flowsuphill.Whitecobwebs, the grassleaning where deerhave looked for apples.The woodsfrom brook to wherethe top of the hill looksover the fog, send upnot one bird.So absolute, it isno other thanhappiness itself, a breathingtoo quiet to hear.–Denise LevertovI propose to share this poem, "The Breathing," by Denise Levertov, with the readers of SubStance as a moment of (...) calm, an antidote to violence and pain, and a gesture of hope in the future relations between humans and the many creatures of the vegetal and animal world.What is remarkable in this imaginary landscape sketched by Levertov is the peacefulness of the scene which is mostly due to the absence of movement, the absence of action performed in praesentia between the first and the last word of the poem. And since we know that poets are marvelous craftsmen and craftswomen of language, we shall look for the cause to this effect in the poetic language and shall find it in the subtly modulated use (or non-use) of verbs in the poem, a different kind of use in each sentence, yet, converging to the same effect. And since verbs are also the main markers of time in language, the poem appears in the literal sense, as a verbal, a literary "still life." [End Page 160]The first sentence strikes a strong blow since the verb is quite simply omitted in it. The sentence is a nominal clause: "An absolute/ patience."In the second sentence, "Trees stand/ up to their knees in/ fog," we find a static verb "to stand" and the personification of the trees clearly establishes that they might have moved, but they have not; they stand wrapped in the fog up to "their knees," i.e., between a quarter and a fifth of their trunks.In the third sentence, something moves: "The fog/ slowly flows/ uphill." But there is something contradictory in the fact of flowing up. Usually, rivers or brooks flow down. Flowing up, then, implies a difficulty to flow and consequently a slowing down of the rhythm of the flow which is here expressed by the adverb "slowly"; the adverb seems here all the more congenial to the flowing in that the two words are linked by a strong paronomastic effect: slowly flows, set in the two /s/, one at the beginning of slowly, the other at the end of flows: slowly flows.The fourth sentence is characterized by still another pattern: "White/ cobwebs. The grass/leaning where deer/have looked for apples." We now face the result of two past actions, actions that were performed before the scene that the poem invites us to contemplate was composed. In effect, the "white cobwebs" have been woven by the spiders at a previous moment, and they even had time to be colored in white by the drops of the humid fog. And "the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples" tells us that deer were here earlier, looking for food, but they no longer are, and what signals their former presence is a tenuous detail: the inclination of the grass, bent by their walking on it and searching through it, remaining bent for a little while after their passage. And to achieve her verbal strategy, Levertov even suppresses the auxiliary which might have been here. We read "the grass leaning" with a lonely present participle, and not "the grass is leaning."Another interesting grammatical event happens in the fifth sentence: "The woods/ from brook to where/ the top of the hill looks/ over the fog, send up/ not one bird." The first verb is a verb of perception ("to look") and not a verb of action. But the second verb is a verb of action ("to send up"), which is used in a quite unusual variety of the verbal negative form since instead of having the negative adverb attached to the verb (don't send up), we have an affirmative use of the verb ("send... (shrink)

The largest flying creature alive today is the Andean condor Vultur gryphus. At maximum size it weighs about 22 pounds and has a wingspread of about 10 feet. But 65 million years ago in the late cretaceous period, the last age of dinosaurs, there was another larger flying animal, the giant pterosaur Quetzalcotalus. It had a wingspread of over 40 feet, the size of a small airplane. Other pterosaurs were also quite large. The pteranodons of the late jurassic period, the (...) classic flying dinosaurs of magazine illustrations, had a maximum wingspan of about 33 feet. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière is one of the central figures in the contemporary debates on aesthetics and politics. This introduction maps the shift of focus in Rancière’s writing from political theory to contemporary art practice and also traces the enduring interest in ideas on equality and creativity. It situates Rancière’s rich body of writing in relation to key theorists such as the philosopher Alain Badiou, art historian Terry Smith and anthropologist George E. Marcus. I argue that Rancière offers a distinctive approach in (...) this broad field by clarifying the specificity of the artist’s task in the production of critical and creative transformation, or what he calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’. In conclusion, I complement Rancière’s invocation to break out of the oppositional paradigm in which the political and aesthetic are usually confined by outlining some further methodological techniques for addressing contemporary art. (shrink)

In this paper we outline the possibilities of an ethic of care based on our self-affection and subjectivity in the ethical spaces between-two. In this we first refer to three Irigarayan concepts – breath, silence and listening from the third phase of her philosophy, and discuss them within the methodological framework of an ethics of intersubjectivity and interiority. Together with attentiveness, we analyse them as four categories of our ethical becoming. Furthermore, we argue that self-affection is based on our (...) inchoate receptivity for the needs of the other and is thus dialectical in its character. In this we critically confront some epistemological views of our ethical becoming. We wind up this paper with a proposal for an ethics towards two autonomous subjects, based on care and our shared ethical becoming – both as signs of our deepest hospitality towards the other. (shrink)