Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900554
Kieran M. Murphy
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Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900560
É. Colon
{"title":"The Problem with Breath","authors":"É. Colon","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900560","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900560","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"52 1","pages":"237 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48171739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900555
L. Irigaray
When I wrote L’oubli de l’air, my first book on Heidegger, published in 1983 – translated as The Forgetting of Air in 1999 – the problem of breathing was almost ignored, strange, even inappropriate. As it was for the figure of Antigone, which is connected to it, in Speculum in 1974, to speak of air seemed to be irrelevant, not to say suspicious. In our Western tradition, life as such was not a subject that could be culturally approached. It was too trivial and not worthy of Culture. We are just beginning to understand where that has led us. Indeed, breathing is the most crucial key component of our relation to ourselves, to the other(s) and to the world. And it is a pity that we only discover that because our breathing is now more than ever put in danger.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900562
T. Ravindranathan
You would think, given the individual’s sacrosanct place at the center of a political modernity imposed across the world, you would think, given your own sense of having a body and through it a life (habeas corpus), that there would be some sure measure, when persons die, wherever persons die, of how many persons have died. But no. There are countless ways to count persons, to decide where a person ends and another starts. Stick to sheep! Counting persons would only confound the mind, and if sleep came it would be a tangled, gnarled sort of sleep. Lévi-Strauss maintained that a traditional society was most ecologically viable when it did not exceed 250 (288). Students of such societies understand now this was not just a material and environmental limit— having to do with how much one could extract from an environment without destroying it—but also a mental and invisible one, having to do with an ecology of ghosts. Danowski and De Castro: Amazonian peoples prefer to maintain a steady population rather than to grow, “for people live in other people, with other people, for other people” (104). Ancient peoples know that reality is many-sided. This is why, said the prime minister, we cannot be sure how many persons have died from this sickness. It is not because we lack the means, he said. We have the world’s best information technology systems, we have a unique biometric identification system that links your gas and water connections and your food rations to your fingerprint, we have even borrowed from a fellow unapologetic nation the flying horse technology allowing us to gently watch over every citizen so as to better keep track. But we are a deeply philosophical people with roots stretching back into an ancient seer past. We know that despite appearances, reality is everelusive, shape-shifting, deceptive, a mirage that we must step through if we are to see the truth. We have known for millennia, long before the West caught on, that most stories are untrue, that news is fake, that the world itself is an illusion. And of such a land, you demand a body count? Consider, moreover, that in these parts many persons may share the same name. Take H.B. the father of the nation’s nuclear program and H.B.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900524
Jean-Thomas Tremblay
“Exhalation,” a 2008 science fiction short story by Ted Chiang, virtuoso of the genre and the form, begins with a truism, refuted: “It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life. This is not in fact the case, and I engrave these words to describe how I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by which life will one day end” (37). The narrator’s promise is so alluring— knowledge of life’s origin, knowledge of its expiration, and knowledge of the relation between the two—that we may be forgiven for overlooking the parenthetical. Argon amounts to less than one percent of the air breathed within Earth’s atmosphere. The narrator specifies that “others call [air] argon,” others who may or may not live where the narrator does. In any case, Chiang has transported us elsewhere. Where, exactly? In a world governed by parameters and constraints distinct from Earth’s, yet recognizable to us—which is to say that “Exhalation” is a thought experiment. What if, we are invited to contemplate, inhalation and exhalation were distinct processes, rather than inseparable phases of an autonomic, autopoietic, and ecological cycle? Chiang severs inhalation from bodies, rendering it strictly mechanical. Exhalation, by contrast, remains the province of bodies; individuals partake in this activity whatever else they may be doing. The disembodied inhale literalizes resource extraction, and the embodied exhale a process of extinction coextensive with the achievement of a certain equilibrium or homeostasis. Perhaps unexpectedly, the extinctive exhale holds the key to a future that deflates operas of total destruction and annihilation. “Exhalation,” I propose, unlocks a horizon of human persistence contingent on Man’s exhaustion. All lungs in “Exhalation” are artificial. They at least appear so to us; within the world of the story, they are not seen as replicas of “actual” organs. Every day, all members of the humanoid species to
{"title":"Homeostasis and Extinction: Ted Chiang's \"Exhalation\"","authors":"Jean-Thomas Tremblay","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900524","url":null,"abstract":"“Exhalation,” a 2008 science fiction short story by Ted Chiang, virtuoso of the genre and the form, begins with a truism, refuted: “It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life. This is not in fact the case, and I engrave these words to describe how I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by which life will one day end” (37). The narrator’s promise is so alluring— knowledge of life’s origin, knowledge of its expiration, and knowledge of the relation between the two—that we may be forgiven for overlooking the parenthetical. Argon amounts to less than one percent of the air breathed within Earth’s atmosphere. The narrator specifies that “others call [air] argon,” others who may or may not live where the narrator does. In any case, Chiang has transported us elsewhere. Where, exactly? In a world governed by parameters and constraints distinct from Earth’s, yet recognizable to us—which is to say that “Exhalation” is a thought experiment. What if, we are invited to contemplate, inhalation and exhalation were distinct processes, rather than inseparable phases of an autonomic, autopoietic, and ecological cycle? Chiang severs inhalation from bodies, rendering it strictly mechanical. Exhalation, by contrast, remains the province of bodies; individuals partake in this activity whatever else they may be doing. The disembodied inhale literalizes resource extraction, and the embodied exhale a process of extinction coextensive with the achievement of a certain equilibrium or homeostasis. Perhaps unexpectedly, the extinctive exhale holds the key to a future that deflates operas of total destruction and annihilation. “Exhalation,” I propose, unlocks a horizon of human persistence contingent on Man’s exhaustion. All lungs in “Exhalation” are artificial. They at least appear so to us; within the world of the story, they are not seen as replicas of “actual” organs. Every day, all members of the humanoid species to","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"52 1","pages":"22 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47683871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a900537
Peter Szendy
Conspiracy has probably become one of the key notions—or fantasies—of our times. Conspiracy, in the modern acceptation of the word, as in “conspiracy theory,” has not only filled the mediasphere in which we live and breathe but it has also overshadowed—maybe we should say repressed—its ancient meaning. Surprisingly, this forgotten sense was revived on a poster lithographed by Andy Warhol in 1969 for a group exhibition in a Chicago gallery. The poster was meant to benefit the legal defense fund for the Chicago Seven (who were charged by the federal government with conspiracy for organizing anti-Vietnam War protests). Warhol used the image of an electric chair (as he did in a series of paintings titled Little Electric Chairs in 1964-5) and he printed the following words over it: “conspiracy means to breathe together.” The remarks that follow are a first attempt to attune our ears to what this largely buried meaning bears as a future-in-the-past. Unearthing the forgotten resonances of conspiracy as co-inspiring could certainly be described as an archaeological gesture. But since my excavation aims at finding something hidden in what we think of (reductively) as the most immaterial (or subtle) of media, i.e., air or the atmosphere, it could also be characterized as anarchaeological, as a sort of reversed or upside-down archaeology, directed upwards, towards the unground of the aerial. The very possibility of breathing, and breathing together, has maybe never seemed as fragile as now, after a coronavirus pandemic (with face masks and ventilator shortages), after the culmination of decades of racist chokeholds by law-enforcement in the United States and elsewhere, after more than a century of airpocalyptic smog episodes worldwide (the word “smog” was coined in 1904 by the Treasurer of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society to designate the “London particular” which “consists much more of smoke than of true fog,” while “airpocalypse” appeared in 2013 to refer to record atmospheric pollution in Beijing).1 How do we still breathe and share breath, when and if we do?
{"title":"Conspiring (Sympnea and Dyspnea)","authors":"Peter Szendy","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a900537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a900537","url":null,"abstract":"Conspiracy has probably become one of the key notions—or fantasies—of our times. Conspiracy, in the modern acceptation of the word, as in “conspiracy theory,” has not only filled the mediasphere in which we live and breathe but it has also overshadowed—maybe we should say repressed—its ancient meaning. Surprisingly, this forgotten sense was revived on a poster lithographed by Andy Warhol in 1969 for a group exhibition in a Chicago gallery. The poster was meant to benefit the legal defense fund for the Chicago Seven (who were charged by the federal government with conspiracy for organizing anti-Vietnam War protests). Warhol used the image of an electric chair (as he did in a series of paintings titled Little Electric Chairs in 1964-5) and he printed the following words over it: “conspiracy means to breathe together.” The remarks that follow are a first attempt to attune our ears to what this largely buried meaning bears as a future-in-the-past. Unearthing the forgotten resonances of conspiracy as co-inspiring could certainly be described as an archaeological gesture. But since my excavation aims at finding something hidden in what we think of (reductively) as the most immaterial (or subtle) of media, i.e., air or the atmosphere, it could also be characterized as anarchaeological, as a sort of reversed or upside-down archaeology, directed upwards, towards the unground of the aerial. The very possibility of breathing, and breathing together, has maybe never seemed as fragile as now, after a coronavirus pandemic (with face masks and ventilator shortages), after the culmination of decades of racist chokeholds by law-enforcement in the United States and elsewhere, after more than a century of airpocalyptic smog episodes worldwide (the word “smog” was coined in 1904 by the Treasurer of the Coal Smoke Abatement Society to designate the “London particular” which “consists much more of smoke than of true fog,” while “airpocalypse” appeared in 2013 to refer to record atmospheric pollution in Beijing).1 How do we still breathe and share breath, when and if we do?","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":"52 1","pages":"108 - 116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48233118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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