Breathing "to" the Other: Levinas and ethical breathlessness

ENThe hitherto untapped reserves of breathing in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas contain a wealth of hermeneutical possibilities. Various themes crucial to Levinas’s theory of ethics that are concentrated in this notion include immediacy and materiality, corporeality and transcendence, the other in the same and exposure to the other. So enormous are these reserves — so close to us and so intangible at the same time — that it would be futile and overwhelming to uncover them all at once. On this occasion, I will merely tap into a few fertile veins that run close to the surface of these reserves: (1) the breath before the first; (2) the diachrony of breathing that unfolds between expiration and inspiration; (3) the prospect of breathlessness without suffocation; and (4) the irrcducibility of breathing in justice.