Air Democracy: on the Principles of Breathing Together

Abstract

In her prominent work The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray writes: Is not air the whole of our habitation as mortals? Is there a dwelling more vast, more spacious, or even more generally peaceful than that of air? Can man live elsewhere than in air? […] No other element is as light, as free, and as much in the “fundamental” mode of a permanent, available, “there is.” (Irigaray, 1999: p. 8). Adding a couple of pages further: Air would be the arch-mediation: of the logos, of thinking, of the world – whether physical or psychical. Air would be the substance of the copula that would permit the gathering-together [le rassemblement] and the arrangement of the whole into the life and Being of man, and permit his habitation in space as a mortal. But this archē-ness would never be able to be constituted as an origin because of its mediating qualities and because it is a permanent necessity for the immediate subsistence of man. (p. 12) [...].