Poligrafi

Abstract / Povzetki

2023-12-19T08:44:30+00:00

About the Authors

2023-12-19T08:48:40+00:00

Air and Breathing in Medieval Jewish Mysticism

2023-07-24T13:18:31+00:00

This essay is a study of the element of air and the process of breathing in light of the medieval book of Zohar and related aspects of the broader Jewish tradition. Mapping air onto the divine body comprised of the sefirot, or the emanations of God, I reconsider the connection between breath and spirit, while also focusing on the sensuous and atmospheric aspects of aerial and pneumatic phenomena: wind, scents, the rising expansion of hot air and the falling condensation of the cold. Breathing is examined throughout the entire respiratory system, from the lungs to the nostrils, with respect to both the sefirotic divine body and the breath of life, animating the creaturely realm. Throughout the study, I pay particular attention to the paradoxical mode in which air remains an indeterminate, literally groundless element and, at the same time, is at the heart of theo-anatomy, of life, and of sustaining a fragile world.

From Respiration to Fleshpiration

2023-11-09T19:50:06+00:00

In this article, I introduce a new word, the neologism “fleshpiration.” It is a word or a name in which I intertwine “flesh” and “spirit” or “spiration.” This new word is inspired by the thinking of Jesus, St. Paul, Paul Claudel, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The interpretative starting point of my article is taken from Claudel, who states: “the spirit is respiration.” With Claudel’s idea, which has its roots in the etymological analysis of pneuma and spiritus, I interpret the spirit (pneuma) of Jesus and St. Paul to mean respiration in the first place. Within this respiratory interpretative context, I suggest that both Jesus and St. Paul emphasised the essentiality of breathing in their religious thinking. For St. Paul, life according to the flesh and life according to the Spirit as life according to the Respiration are opposite lifestyles. Within the context of Merleau-Ponty, it can be said that St. Paul’s dichotomy between the flesh and the Spirit can be challenged and surpassed. For Merleau-Ponty, the flesh and the Spirit can be intertwined in a paradoxical manner. Within this framework of paradoxical thinking, it becomes possible to discover this new word “fleshpiration” and initially claim that it names a new respiratory beginning for philosophy and religion.

Intentio Spiritus

2023-08-30T06:30:38+00:00

Intention is one of the catchwords of 20th-century Western philosophy. Positively or negatively, it takes a central role in numerous traditions, from phenomenology to analytic philosophy, and in none of them has it anything to do with air or breath. According to its widely accepted lineage, the concept of intention can be traced back to Medieval Scholastic philosophy, specifically to Augustine’s utilisation of this term. It is in Augustine’s intentio animi (the intention of the soul) – most critics argue – that intention first meant directing one’s attention towards something or a voluntary design or plan.

In this paper, such a genealogy will not be proved wrong but rather complicated by taking seriously the (anti-)pneumatological context in which Augustine developed his concept of intention and, at the same time, those unheeded studies of his works that claim the origins of his use of intentio to lie in the Ancient Stoic concept of τόνος (tonos, tension or tone). A new study will show that intentio is what allows Augustine every time to prove the spirit to be immaterial, namely to not be a form of material air or breath. By transforming intentio into attentio (attention) first and voluntas (will) later, Augustine makes possible the realm of the immaterial spirit. Furthermore, however, this article also shows that his arguments seem to take for granted and reject an earlier, materialist pneumatological conception of intention, whose traces can be found in some of the works of the Roman Stoic Seneca, as well as in now-lost 4th century CE Christian heretical theories of the Holy Spirit.

Nafas

2023-08-03T11:06:06+00:00

For the sake of a respiratory philosophy, it makes sense to look to the East, since many Eastern traditions such as Sufism include breathwork in their somatic practices. In my paper, I aim to show how Rumi – a 13th century Muslim theologian and Sufi – used breath or nafas in his Persian poetry to outline how breathing is an originary phenomenon. My paper will take a few samples of his poetry to demonstrate how breath connotes a newness through the “gift” of life that it endows upon us, and how the creative, endowing, and primal nature of breath is linked to an openness to the Divine Other and to others. Furthermore, for Rumi, every passing breath ushers in a new existence, annihilating its older form and thus creating an ontological sense in the reader of both the finiteness of existence through what has passed and the infinite possibilities it holds when the newness arrives. Bridging the finite and infinite through breath enables us to develop a respiratory ontology that aims to conceive of dualities through an interrelated perspective. This, I wish to argue, is the true promise of Rumi’s poetry for a philosophy of breathing.

The Somaesthetics of Heaviness and Hara in Zen Buddhist Meditation

2023-07-26T12:06:23+00:00

Breath is a grounding phenomenon present in many forms of Buddhist meditation. In traditional Buddhist meditations (including ānāpānasati and vipassanā), the practitioner observes the breath, surveys various physical and mental phenomena, and from there realizes that suffering (duḥkha) is not ultimately binding (and along the way, they may experience the nonduality of body and mind). Similarly, the seated meditation practice (zazen) deployed by Rinzai Zen begins with attention to breath, refines one’s attention to psycho-physical sensations, and fosters a realization of mind-body unity that enables the practitioner to face duḥkha. But this form of Zen recasts the respiratory philosophy of early Buddhism in some important respects. This paper explores how these adaptations take place in terms of an explicitly somaesthetic orientation. Emphasizing the postural form of the body, the capacity to sense the pull of gravity, and the performance of breathing from the hara (lower belly), zazen seeks to awaken the somatic body by transforming the weight of suffering into nondual, vital energy.

New “Inspirations” in Philosophical Anthropology

2023-07-14T08:51:44+00:00

This paper aims to endow the contamination of ecological wisdom with human and political ecology by outlining the basic features of a renewed philosophical anthropology. With this purpose, the concept of human nature is investigated here, using an ecological, eco-critical and integral framework, known as “inspiratory.” The key concept of this framework is to be found in the seemingly antiquated notion of temperament, which will be archeologically recovered and philosophically enhanced.

On Stifling a Transcendental Breath

2023-10-02T11:27:19+00:00

The article contends that respiratory philosophy has, thus far, laid predominant stress upon the empirical form of breathing, as opposed to the transcendental; or at least it has used breath precisely as an occasion to elide or deconstruct this very opposition. Breath is then conceived primarily as material, bodily, and natural: as binding us together with the animals and with all living things.

And yet this apparently benign ecological gesture is not without its deleterious side-effects: by contrasting this gesture with a more humanistic and transcendental conception of breath, inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s work on the voice, we might begin to gain some clarity as to the jarring contrast that sprang up between the friendly valorisation of a shared con-spiration that has characterised this young philosophy up to now, and the intense, even violent, hostility to the breath of the other which the developed world exhibited from at least 2020 to 2022.

We consider whether an overly empiricistic conception of breath and of the human might have played a part in this reversal of values. In conclusion, the article urges upon us a certain turn towards the transcendental form of the breath, and indeed to a certain human exceptionalism in this regard.

Listening to the Breath, Chanting the Word

2023-09-14T05:46:46+00:00

Clearings of the Forest (Claros del Bosque, 1977), one of the most poetic and challenging works of María Zambrano’s thought, cannot be approached from a breathless paradigm. For the immersion in these clearings take us into the breathing of being that we contemplate alongside the more obvious physiological breathing, the breathing of life. In this work, Zambrano proposes a poetic and mystical phenomenology of the breathing of being through the breathing of its word. Thus, to recover contact with this inner breathing could be to recover the lost chant of the word. This essay does not pretend to be a detailed analysis of Zambrano’s thought as a whole, nor of the vibrant mystery that her clearings reveal. The purpose is to uncover the fundamental role that breathing plays in this poetic-philosophical journey, along with other symbols such as light or love, with the question of what place this type of philosophical exercise occupies today in the classrooms of contemporary universities.

Elemental Politics to the Detriment of Denied Cultures

2023-11-06T13:11:35+00:00

The secret historical counterculture of allegedly pre-Christian Nature Worshippers of Western Slovenia had a profound spiritual connection to the air, water, fire, and soil, the fundaments of their lifeworld. In the 20th century, political processes in the region where the Nature Worshippers secretly survived among intolerant Christians, forcefully transformed the Nature Worshippers’ elemental practices, and led to the dissolution of their community. The First World War resulted in such an overload of metals in soil due to artillery fighting at the Isonzo front that the Nature Worshippers’ system of spatial triads – tročans – ensuring protection and the fertility of the land collapsed. Following the post-war occupation of Primorska by fascist Italy, the Nature Worshippers were forbidden to burn bonfires and therefore prevented from their most important annual communal rituals. The Italian fascist authorities built a series of dams and hydropower plants that desecrated the sacred Soča river. Intensive industrialisation and extractivism in the Socialist Yugoslav era after 1945 caused further pollution of the air, water and soil and fatally captured the nature that the Nature Worshippers treated like awesome divinity. Elemental degradation through “development” and “progress” in Primorska in the 20th century thus not only had a direct impact on nature but also on a denied subaltern culture that was inseparable from and dependent on nature. Due to their survivalist secrecy, the Nature Worshippers had almost no means of protecting these precious elemental commons. By the end of the 20th century, the elemental fundaments of the Nature Worshippers’ culture were irreversibly lost and so was the Nature Worship of Primorska.

Breath-kiss

2023-11-06T12:41:44+00:00

The article deals with the contemplation of the logic of divine love in Buddhist tantras, Christian mysticism, and contemporary Western philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. The basic thesis of the article is that all the aforementioned thematizations of love are connected by the archaic connection of the couple, which was lost with the development of the first layers of existence. The search for this lost unity of the couple is carried out in the first part through the treatment of Tantric writings, followed by Christian mystical writings. Within the framework of the Christian conception of the logic of the couple, we rely on Jakob Böhme and Franz von Baader and their explication of the original couple and breath-kiss. In the second part, we take a step forward in the direction of the philosophy and theology of love of Ludwig Feuerbach and Luce Irigaray. In this part, we also critically reflect on the heteronormative logic of the theology of love. Feuerbach’s and Irigaray’s explication of love leads us to the third part, in which, referring to Catherine Keller, we focus on the possibilities of connecting our philosophy of love with the theory of quantum entanglement. We conclude the paper with a meditation on the proximity of the humanely-divine couple.

Air and Breath in Religions and Philosophies

2023-11-10T14:20:05+00:00