Polityki oddychania w więcej-niż-zachodnim świecie : jak zacząć zauważać materialną sprawczość praktyki uznanej za oczywistą?

Artykuł powstał w ramach projektu "Epidemie i wspólnoty w krytycznych teoriach, artystycznych praktykach i spekulatywnych fabulacjach ostatnich dekad” (UMO-2020/39/B/HS2/00755), finansowanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki (NCN). Bibliogr. s. 214-215

The chapter focuses on how the taken-for-granted practice of breathing, understood as a universal capacity that everyone has the right to, was reformulated and widely postulated during the COVID-19 pandemic, which raised a common interest in breathable life and apparently depoliticized it. However, it does not tackle to replace the universalized, merely physiological Western understanding of respiration by its Eastern, through more enfleshed, practice-led understandings. Taking both recent studies and artistic projects about breathing into account, the chapter calls for renewed attention to the material aspects and effects of breath and breathing which pose a challenge to Western limited and reductive physiological understandings of breath and breathing. Then, it offers three examples of subversive breathing which, following Tim Choy, it names conspiring: Tim Choy’s article "Externality, Breathers, Conspiracy: Forms for Atmospheric Reckoning" (2021), Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s book "Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals" (2020), and Larissa Lai’s novel "Salt Fish Girl" (2002). In spite of partially belonging to Western academia and culture(s), these un-disciplined, speculatively fabulated approaches aim at unlearning our ways of thinking about breath and breathing to apprehend them in a more-than-Western world.