DOI

10.1515/9783111150574-005

Abstract

This essay contextualizes the themes of breath and atmosphere in Nietzsche’s thinking, reading them in relation to certain contemporary crises and theories. Climate change and airborne pandemic challenge the tendency to position breath and atmosphere as life’s unthought background. Luce Irigaray’s phenomenological-feminist claim that Western philosophy has forgotten breath and James Nestor’s comprehensive investigation of medical, scientific, and disciplinary respiratory research programs provide contrasting frameworks for clarifying Nietzsche’s emphasis on breath as crucial to embodied human life. Atmospheric surround – taken in a spectrum of interrelated senses, meteorological to affective – is breath’s correlative. Nietzsche’s insistence on life’s irreducible atmospheric dimension is articulated with reference to recent texts in “new phenomenology” (Hermann Schmitz et al.) Nietzsche’s example points to the need to overcome mutual failures of “breath” and “atmospheric” theorists to address each other’s themes. The essay concludes by sketching an approach to Zarathustra as a philosophical poem on breath and atmosphere.

Document Type

Book Chapter

ISBN

9783111149493

Publication Date

2024

Publisher Statement

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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