Unclearing the Air: The Pneumatological Dalliances of Jacques Derrida

Abstract In the 1980s, Luce Irigaray accused Western philosophy of “forgetting” about the role that the materiality of air and the act of breathing played in pre-Socratic metaphysics. This essay explores how Jacques Derrida maintained a complicated but insightful relationship to the air throughout his career through the mediating influence of pneuma, a word with long and complicated connections to the air. I highlight two relevant sites of engagement. The first was found in Of Grammatology (1968), where he connected the breathy logocentrism of “natural writing” to a concept of pneumatology (a “science of spirit” with some interesting connections to Leibniz) that served as grammatology’s Janus face. The second stemmed from Of Spirit (1991), in which Derrida emphasized the combustible, fiery face of pneuma to lambast Heidegger’s use of translation to mediate away the historical presence of the word pneuma for ideological purposes. This body of work, en toto, presents a subtle and oblique critique of Irigaray’s position. For Derrida, the air cannot function as the medium for an alternative metaphysics of presence because, historically, its space has already been infused with a pneumatic specter that cannot be ignored.