Respiratory Democracy. An Essay
This essay is a meditation on a future political philosophy – an attempt of a radical elemental political thinking for the future of humanity. The new politics we are searching for needs to become a place for the communal cohabitation beyond and away from the prevalent violent modes of power struggles, modes of machination, or even war. It is a reflection on the task of today’s political philosophy – with an aim to enkindle the humanity of different cultures, traditions and religions to join in alliance of creativity and belonging of a new kind within the culture of democracy. We must abandon the discourses of power struggles, battles and wars and begin anew with thinking about the future modes of being-together and in ways that support and cherish our relational belonging, ethical affectivity, our belonging to nature, and life. This essay addresses the possibility of a future respiratory democracy.
Air defines being
But how is democracy related to air and breath? As a physiological process, breath essentially supports life of any living being and has a natural, cultural and social meaning. Embodied breathing installs the very beginning of a new life and signals the arrival of an autonomous and free-living being into the world. We all are parts of various atmospheric relations, constituting a living, breathing web, experiencing connected feelings of contentment and discontentment throughout our embodied lives. Any breathing being needs her own free space to breathe – an envelope or atmosphere in which she is free and which is not possessed by anything or anyone. Around the living breathing being, breathing gathers a sphere of air, called an elemental atmosphere and being-in-the-air is the most elemental way of our being-in-the-world. We may call this way of being as living in the atmosphere of respiratory solidarity with the nature and with others as our co-breathers. Without sufficient air, living beings are exposed in their most basic vulnerability – aerial one, and suffocate under deadly environmental or socio-political conditions. We need to be able to imagine a world which is more attuned to the call of the other through shared co-breathing.
The gentle power of breath
Now, the introduction of breath into the politics and the possibility of a new breath-politics that could imply political change has recently become one of the most pressing issues. Political activism around the I can’t breathe campaigns as associated with Black Lives Matter movement and deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd show convincingly the power of breath in imagining the future non-oppresive politics, moving towards a more just and more solidaristic respiratory environments and atmospheres. But even before the I can’t breathe movement, we can trace an example of making a breathful or respiratory democracy in Liberia by Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace and Leymah Gbowee as the main voice of this movement. In 2011 Leymah Gbowee was awarded the Nobel Peace Price together with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkul Karman for their peaceful fight for justice in Liberia. In a beautiful essay on war and peace from Breathing with Luce Irigaray (Bloomsbury 2013) titled “Breathing the Political: A Meditation on the Preservation of Life in the Midst of War,” Elisha Foust presents us with an example of an Irigarayan politics as based on breath, prayer, care for life, and silence, enabling to bring a real change into the community being previously caught (radically!) in the midst of a war, with the extreme sexual violence, violence against children, and an inherent religious conflict as its constituent parts.
A radically peaceful intervention
But how can breath become a part of the democracy? According to Elisha Foust, breath-as-prayer is a communal and therefore political event and it can thus inspire political change. Based on Luce Irigaray’s teaching on an active and conscious breath leading both to an enhanced awareness of our singularity and identity as well as to our communal belonging, the political dimension of breath reveals the hidden but powerful presence of a respiratory element among us, being almost entirely forgotten in Western philosophical tradition. Liberian women were able to bring community breath into the politics by their radically peaceful ethical intervention into the very core of the genealogy of war, an intervention based on forgiveness and love through prayer. Praying and intervening with their presence through a series of community events, the Liberian women managed to employ their breathing in an enhanced political way. What is perhaps crucial for our evaluation of the role of breath in an ethical regrounding of the idea of democracy, is its ability to reveal our common vulnerability which quietly links the community with a bond that anyone can understood. Breath links body to the soul, and it also gestures to our common and hidden ethical core – spanning across the individuals, sexes, cultures, races, and also all living beings.
The myth works out our breathing reserves
In almost all mythologies and religions of the world we find a cosmological myth or narrative related to breath energy or breathing, giving us the spiritual guidance and, as it were, the reserve of breath we first need for keeping and maintaining ourselves in our self-affection, and then for having its share for the others in our compassion. Either in the form of “wind,” “air,” “cosmic breath” or “spirit,” this substance is the essential link between microcosmic and macrocosmic realities, between immanence (our body) and transcendence (other), enabling finite human beings to access other spiritual beings, cosmos and its gods, ultimately, to become spiritual and express in themselves the infinite. Now, in its ontological sense, Irigaray would call this brath energy available to us the reserve of breath, marking the very threshold of our subjectivity. The reserve of brath is what guarantees the autonomy of our soul before it could be appropriated or seized by any of the external factors. Ultimately, this reserve manifests in a redemptory role of both Jesus and Buddha, as they first shared their vital spiritual breath with few women and men – their closest respiratory allies and friends in the intimacy of an archaic respiratory community – and later within a new community (ekklesía / sangha) of breathers.
Respect for the breath of others
The reserve of breath enables our souls and our bodies to nourish the most precious endowments that we have: a possibility of an original place for a breath, being available for the arising of mild gestures of mindfulness, meditation, prayer, listening, and silence – the key elements that we want to call quiet democracy – a future place in which struggle for recognition and related modalities of violence are weakened in their incessant ontological drive. Irigaray argues for a new culture of energy that is not aggressive and combative anymore. Based on the highest ethical traditions of the East and of the West, the main task now for Irigaray is of letting other to be in her alterity, and of letting her to be incarnated ethically and intersubjectively in a future beyond harm, and beyond the vulnerability and exposure of any human being towards others. Based on these thoughts, respiratory democracy is now understood as care and respect for the spiritual breath of the other, and care and respect for the vital breath – life of the other.
Quiet but resolute democracy
Let us conclude with the proposal for quiet democracy. This requires that democracy is ignited by a new self-affection so as to become a democracy marked by the impulses of peace and love. By providing peaceful breathing within the political spaces it must become a place for our communal cohabitation within the atmospheres of a future breathful and mindful democracy. The call for a new community therefore needs to be restructured towards becoming a democracy being both engendered and mediated through prayer, mindfulness, breath, listening, and silence – the gestures and elements of democracy that are too often neglected or even entirely forgotten in political philosophy. This democracy will enable living beings of the earth to breathe and share the air of a new elemental-spiritual conspiracy within a new intersubjective, but also global communal alliance of beings under the horizon of love. This is what represents the idea of quiet democracy as a mindful and peaceful future place to respite and to breathe, and to enkindle mutual love. Quiet democracy is mild and patient in its dispositions towards others, but powerful in its insistence towards future breathful worlds of solidarity and justice; it waits and listens in silence, but also speaks resolutely for the oppressed and for those, suffocated by any form of violence or bad air; finally, our quiet democracy nourishes what Sloterdijk would call the breathed commune. Respiratory democracy is the community of breathers.
Lenart Škof