Breathing with Luce Irigaray

Contributors to this volume consider the implications of 'the Age of Breath': a spiritual shift in human awareness to the needs of the other figured through breathing. Awareness of the breath allows us to attend to our bodies and the bodies of others, to animals, nature, other cultures, oppressed minorities, and the other of sexual difference. As a way to connect body and spirit, self and other, nature and culture, and East and West, breathing emerges as the significant theological and philosophical gesture of our time.

Philosophy has too often cut off metaphysical thought from this living, breathing world with its animal and female bodies, just as religious traditions have repressed the breathing flesh in favour of calcified word. The re-introduction of breath into philosophy and theology draws our awareness back to the body, to respect for the other, and to nature, making awareness of the breath essential for an embodied ethics of difference in our globalized, ecological age. These themes are addressed by an international team of scholars, including Luce Irigaray.

Lenart Škof is Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Primorska, Slovenia.

Emily A. Holmes is Associate Professor of Religion, Department of Religion and Philosophy, Christian Brothers University, USA.

List of Contributors
1. Towards Breathing with Luce Irigaray Lenart Škof & Emily A. Holmes
Part I: Spiritual Breathing
2. When Cherubim Touch: The Cleaving Feminine Wing of the Dual-Gendered Cherubim in 2 Chronicles (Divrei Hayammim 3: 11-12) Julie Kelso
3. The Gift of Breath: Toward a Maternal Pneumatology Emily A. Holmes
4. The Prayers We Breathe: Embodying the Gift of Life in the Maternal Feminine Eleanor Sanderson
Part II: Intercultural Breathing
5. Breath of Awakening: Nonduality, breathing and sexual difference Jean Marie Byrne
6. That Tender Discipline: Spacing, Structured Nothingness & Kumbhaka Antonia Pont
Part III: Natural Breathing
7. Towards a shared desire for sustainability: Rethinking community starting from different feminine approaches to nature Claudia Bruno
8. Breathing With the Natural World: Irigaray, environmental philosophy, and the alterity of nature Tomaž Grušovnik
9. Breathing with Animals: Irigarays Contribution to Animal Ethics Sara Štuva
Part IV: Contextual Breathing
10. All of My Work is Performance: Irigarayan Methods of Breath for Dance and Voice Shannon Wong Lerner
11. Subjectivity and Sexual Difference: New Figures of the Feminine in Irigaray and Cavarero Diane Perpich
12. Breathing the Political: A meditation on the preservation of life in the midst of war Elisha Foust
13. The Distant ('dis-t?nt) Stillness that is 'Breth Sigrid Hackenberg y Almansa
Part V: Conclusion
14. To Begin with Breathing Anew Luce Irigaray
Bibliography
Index