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O N  S T I F L I N G  A 
T R A N S C E N D E N T A L  B R E A T H : 
A N  I T A L I A N  C O N T R I B U T I O N 
T O  T H E  P H I L O S O P H Y  O F 
B R E A T H I N G
M i c h a e l  L e w i s
Breath in Recent Times: On an Empirical Conception 
of Breath and the Soul
To what extent, if any, has the more or less newly founded respira-
tory philosophy conceived of breath in an empirical way? It seems to 
us that if spiritus is understood as that which binds together the ideal-
ity of the soul with the materiality of the body, then it could go either 
way. And yet it has mostly been taken as, for instance, Franco (“Bifo”) 
Berardi seems to when he speaks of the “soul” in the wake of Epicurus 
as “the vital breath that converts biological matter into an animated 
body,” which is to say that the soul – or more precisely, the spirit – is 
to be understood in a bodily way, as the potentiality which the body 
accrues, or as Spinoza had it, “[w]hat the body can do.”1 
But are there no risks attached to this apparent tendency to elide 
any notion of breath that exceeds the empirical, the material, the bod-
ily, the natural? The question of the empirical status of breath is indeed 
not merely an academic affair; it may help us to explain certain aspects 
of the events that have dominated the last three and a half years, since 
March 2020, in the form of a virus declared “pandemic,” which was 
1  Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca 
Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009), 21.
https://doi.org/10.35469/poligrafi.2023.409 Poligrafi, no. 111/112, vol. 28, 2023, pp. 197–223
P O L I G R A F I
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transmitted for the most part by way of the breath. More specifically, 
considering such questions may help us to understand the immensely 
jarring contrast between the friendly valorisation of a shared con-spi-
ration 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, and which took 
the form of the enforced stifling of infants, not to speak of adults, by 
way of such measures as the mask. What element of our conception of 
breath can have allowed such a reversal of values, and therefore what 
needs to be altered in that conception in order that such a transvalua-
tion is never allowed to happen again? A certain turn towards the tran-
scendental form of the breath is here urged upon us.
Before passing on to the nature of this breath, let it be said that we 
do not intend to relegate Berardi himself to the “empiricist” side of the 
debate, even if we have too little space here to include a reading of Be-
rardi’s book entitled Breathing,2 or his more recent text, The Third Un-
conscious, which devotes itself to the development (and degeneration) 
of the soul in the time of the “pandemic.” The latter work, in certain 
of its minor strands, attempts to signal its own virtuous distance from 
the “anti-masker” line, despite the major thrust of the text moving in 
quite another direction,3 and indeed Berardi’s work as a whole may 
help us eventually to think at least two things: how our sense of social 
solidarity could have become so degraded that the only way in which 
it could manifest itself was in a delusional “protection of others” from 
our living breaths (and a secret, and similarly delirious protection of 
ourselves from theirs). As Berardi puts it: “the exposition [sic] to the 
breath of the other can have a pathogenic effect […], poisoning the 
sources of that con/spiration that makes life pleasurable.”4 The second 
thing he allows us to think is the explosion of identity affirmation 
2  Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 
2018).
3  Cf. Franco Berardi, The Third Unconscious: The Psycho-sphere in the Viral Age (London: 
Verso, 2021), 28: “I’m far from joining the right-wing negationists [sic; i.e. “denialists”] who 
want to reclaim the freedom to not wear a mask”; “My intention is not to question the sanitary 
policy”; cf. also 44, and yet, cf. 74ff.
4  Berardi, Third Unconscious, 66.
O N  S T I F L I N G  A  T R A N S C E N D E N T A L  B R E A T H
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that seemed to arise in tandem with this baffling tendency, and even 
to become intertwined with it. Some middle-class Americans seem to 
be stating now that they are continuing to wear “their” masks as an 
expression of “who they are.” Their own identity has become an alto-
gether anonymous, faceless affirmation of pure “caring.”5 In any case, 
Berardi helps us to raise the question of how the very fundament of 
human society, a conspiratio and a face-to-face, might have become so 
corrupted, and indeed inverted in such a way that the social bond was 
conceived, at least for a number of years, as founded precisely upon 
a stifling of breath, a concealment of the face, and a shunning of the 
other’s physical body.
To some extent adopting an approach that resembles Giorgio 
Agamben’s in his considerations of biometrical identification,6 Be-
rardi associates this transformation of identity in the name of health 
with a much broader digitalisation, one which, in America at least, 
took advantage of an earlier epidemic (AIDS) in order to promulgate 
itself. We can read the recent plague and its effects upon our avowed 
identity in a similar vein, but this time as rendering conceivable the 
ultimate completion of this digital revolution, and the replacement of 
what Berardi describes as an affectionate, physical “conjunction” with 
a distanced, digital “connection” or “connectedness,”7 which wreaks 
havoc in what he persists in calling our “soul,” not to speak of the 
intercourse of our bodily life.8
To some readers, particularly the academics, no doubt the slightest 
criticism of the concealment of the face and the stifling of the breath 
will seem surprising, if not reprehensible: after all, was “masking” (note 
5  The present author was recently seeking a fellow academic and found that someone work-
ing in the same department – one single figure among perhaps twenty, engaged in a single-
handed re-definition of the phrase “virtue signalling” – had posted as her “profile picture” a 
photograph of herself with her identity entirely obscured by a mask, perhaps making the politi-
cal point that this lack of individual identity was her new identity.
6  Berardi, Third Unconscious, 17.
7  Cf. Berardi, Third Unconscious, e.g., 18–19.
8  That said, we should note that Berardi considers this vision of the future, which he takes to 
be Agambenian, to be merely “probable,” and his intention is to sketch the outline of an alter-
native, one in which this online “connectivity” and distantiation come to be associated in our 
minds precisely with “sickness,” and their opposite with health, joy, and pleasure. Cf. Berardi, 
Third Unconscious, 18–19; on Agamben, cf. 43–44.
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the quasi-deliberate confusion of active and passive voices) not the least 
egregious and “harmful,” the least “restrictive” of all “restrictions,” those 
multifarious forms of separation that held us apart for so long, and of-
ten, in the end, forever, and which even went so far as to legally prohibit 
many from comforting their most dearly beloved in the moment of 
their death, their expiry – for fear of their very (last) breath? 
In truth, without a proper conception of the human, which the 
stress that we are about to lay on a transcendental form of breath – in 
excess of the empirical – will in part be designed to allow us to reveal, 
one will seemingly remain unable to see just how deleterious to human 
social life it is to deprive one’s self of a face and to allow one’s self to be 
deprived of the slightest experience of the face of another.
Naturally the philosophy of breath as an academic sub-discipline 
cannot be held responsible for international policy here – save insofar 
as its proponents would have been well-placed to make an intervention 
that does not seem to have been forthcoming – but we might under-
stand the tendency within it which we are here analysing as a reflec-
tion of a broader conception of breath, voice, and the human, which, 
insofar as it characterises the pre-thematic consciousness of the general 
populace, might have allowed the measures at stake to have been more 
readily accepted than they might otherwise have been. We have dealt 
with this conception and the manifold affronts to the humanity of the 
human that it leads to in a recent book, and regret the minimal room 
we found it possible to devote there, largely in footnotes, to the phe-
nomenological and political effects of the censoring of the face.9 What 
matters is for us to attribute a real meaning and ontological consistency 
to the phenomenal, and so few in the Humanities, which devote them-
selves to just this layer, summoned up the courage to insist upon it.
9  Cf. Michael Lewis, Philosophy, Biopolitics, and the Virus: The Elision of an Alternative (Lan-
ham, MD: Lexington, 2023), 188–189n61.
O N  S T I F L I N G  A  T R A N S C E N D E N T A L  B R E A T H
201
A Neglected Path in the History 
of the Philosophy of Breath: Italy
Where might we find an example of a conception of breath that is 
transcendental? Berardi will already have given us a hint.
In a recent essay on breath in Italian philosophy of the 20th and 
21st Century, Alberto Parisi contends that “the reflections on pneuma-
tology proposed by these [Italian] philosophers [Giorgio Colli, Gior-
gio Agamben, Adriana Cavarero, and Emanuele Coccia] have been 
underestimated.”10 The pioneering work carried out in respiratory phi-
losophy in its early years has indeed for the most part dealt with other 
traditions, and it is with a view to supplementing the discipline as it 
stands, but also moving some way beyond Parisi’s own inspirational ac-
count, that we have charted our course.
One of the routes we shall take in an attempt to open up the prob-
lems we have raised is to read the work of Giorgio Agamben, and in 
particular his Language and Death from the late 1970s and early 1980s 
(a seminar of eight days, spoken and then written, to be published in 
Italian in 1982).11 This work deals with the question of the difference 
between the animal voice and the human Voice (which Agamben capi-
talises to indicate an audible sameness but a graphic, literal, and indeed 
substantial difference – one which is brought about by the articulation 
of the animal voice by means of letters). If we read this text afresh 
with our own idiosyncratic interests in mind, it becomes clear that the 
breath which carries this voice may be deemed essential to the ques-
tion, and that a similar distinction may be drawn there. This notion of 
spiration or spirit, the pneumatic, may be taken in two distinct senses 
– the empirical and the transcendental. The hypothesis we shall try to 
propose is that this distinction might help to shed some light upon 
the incipient discipline of respiratory studies, if only as something that 
might be borne in mind so as to temper certain excesses which it might 
10  Alberto Parisi, “From Voice to Pneuma and Back: Italian Pneumatologies against Derrida’s 
Grammatology,” Journal of Italian Philosophy 5 (2022): 2.
11  Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus 
with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991; first published 
in 1982 by Einaudi as Il linguaggio e la morte: Un seminario sul luogo della negatività).
P O L I G R A F I
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occasionally risk, and to help us to understand, and indeed to hesitate 
before, the turn towards a materialist – which is to say, purely empirical 
– conception of breath.12
12  Among those who might be deemed founders of this field: for all its merits, the work of 
Havi Carel seems to us often to stray into a certain empiricism of breath, and indeed, this can 
be said to be the result of the original intent of her work on illness and the “life of breath” in 
particular, which was broadly therapeutic or practical; this is reflected in those aspects of the 
discipline more generally which stress its relation to yoga and meditative breathing exercises. 
And yet “transcendental meditation” is not so transcendental as all that, and the emphasis laid 
by – for instance – Carel upon the “deep culture, spiritual, and personal meaning” that attaches 
to the physiological process of respiration in no way extends so far as to reach the transcenden-
tal, being little more than “subjective colouring,” a superstructure or secondary stratum laid 
atop a natural experience, a flattening of the transcendental that is reflected in the particular 
(non-ontological) way in which phenomenology is for the most part conceived in her work. Cf. 
Havi Carel, “Invisible Suffering: The Experience of Breathlessness,” in Atmospheres of Breathing, 
eds. Lenart Škof and Petri Berndtson (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018), 233. 
But let it be said that we owe personal thanks to the author for an initiation into the 
philosophical question of breath since we were privileged to experience the inaugural moments 
in which this new terrain was first explored, in the Life of Breath project, as a part of which 
our own initial contributions were presented, at the workshop on Phenomenology, Anxiety, and 
Breath, held at the University of Bristol on Thursday 16th March 2017. They were also given 
in a revised form before the Philosophical Society of England, in Alnmouth, Northumberland, 
at a symposium entitled, The Voice of Philosophy, on Saturday 23rd September 2017, and pub-
lished in greatly condensed form as “A Voice that is Merely Breath,” in The Philosopher 106, 
no. 1 (Spring 2018): 3–10. The present work tries not to rely on this work, but it inevitably 
builds on the insights gleaned throughout the whole process of its conception and is indebted 
to all those involved.
As for other pioneers of the field, Lenart Škof and Petri Berndtson, a more sustained en-
gagement than we can afford here would need to take place, but the tendency seems to be in 
both cases to flatten the difference between the transcendental and the empirical, to decon-
struct or elide it, and indeed to take breath as the warrant precisely for doing that: a gesture 
which we would wish to decelerate or indeed to hesitate before a little longer. Škof ’s gesture 
might be said to be made predominantly under the influence of Luce Irigaray (cf. Lenart Škof, 
Breath of Proximity: Intersubjectivity, Ethics and Peace (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 1, 14ff) and 
as he describes his own trajectory: “The line of the argument extends from the plane of a new 
cosmology to the plane of the [sic] ‘material’/bodily intersubjectivity, based on the cosmic/
material element of air and the phenomenon/act of breathing,” and he explicitly affirms that 
he is speaking in the context of the “new materialism” and indeed signals his distance from 
Derrida by attributing to the latter’s work an “insistence that the only possible philosophy is 
a transcendental one.” Škof, Breath of Proximity, 11. Škof wonders whether Derrida can, as a 
result, “grant any philosophical relevance to the ‘empirical’ breath,” whilst the author avows his 
own pursuit of the “possibility for an ethics that reaches beyond the empirical-transcendental 
divide.” Škof, Breath of Proximity, 14. 
In the case of Berndtson, to summarise things with a haste still more unjust, responsibility 
may devolve upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose path beyond transcendentalism and natural-
ism is reasonably well-known. Petri Berndtson, Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing: The Re-
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203
We shall read Agamben’s text with a view to determining whether 
the strategy of focusing our reading on the notion of breath renders his 
project intelligible in a new way, and whether it helps us to understand 
the very question of breath itself, and in particular the questions we 
have set ourselves to unfold.
Agamben’s conception of metaphysics 
and its overcoming
Within Language and Death, Agamben’s references to breath itself 
are somewhat scattered, and to a casual glance they could appear pe-
ripheral: to demonstrate that this need not be so, the reader has first 
to grasp the more general problematic of Agamben’s text, for it is in 
pursuing a very particular goal that he broaches the topics which form 
our concern here.
Philosophically, and perhaps in light of the contemporary predomi-
nance of a deconstructive reading of Heidegger’s conception of the end 
of metaphysics, he finds it necessary to set himself two tasks: 
1) To present a new vision of what metaphysics is. 
On his account, metaphysics involves a certain very peculiar concep-
tion of grounding: the Western metaphysical way of thinking, speaking 
and acting is founded upon a conception of the act of foundation which 
takes this operation to involve an exclusion or exception; in the context 
of language, to take a privileged instance, in the transition between 
animal and human, what must be excluded in order for logos to form is 
the animal voice or phōnē. More curiously, and in a way that will take 
us much longer to justify, the removal of the animal voice is aligned 
with the impossibility for human language to refer indexically and in an 
immediate way to the singularity of the real thing – such a reference is 
spiratory Primacy of Being (London: Routledge, 2023), 3ff. Berndtson speaks of his own work as 
nurturing “a Merleau-Pontian-inspired phenomenological philosophy of the primacy of breath-
ing.” Berndtson, Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing, 5.
In relation to the present work, I must here insert a note of thanks to the reviewers from 
Poligrafi, who spared me from much obscurity in the article in general and from a number of 
errors I would otherwise have made. 
P O L I G R A F I
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ruled out by language in its propositional or apophantic form,13 which 
is specifically human and to which the animal has no access.
Agamben supports his account of metaphysics with an intriguing 
reading of G. W. F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger, who on most inter-
pretations of the history of metaphysics constitute the philosophers or 
thinkers jointly responsible for the closure of metaphysics. This reading 
singles out the discreet but decisive role of pronouns within the text of 
philosophy, and in particular of the demonstrative pronouns Diese and 
Da which take centre stage at the very outset of the dialectic in the pas-
sages of the Phenomenology of Spirit devoted to “Sense Certainty,” and 
in Heidegger’s notion of “Da-sein,” being (the) “there” (Da). The way 
in which these pronouns function allows Agamben to demonstrate the 
way in which each of the two thinkers conceives the negative or “re-
moved” foundation that is characteristic of metaphysics. For instance, 
Hegel demonstrates that a singular referent, intended by “natural con-
sciousness,” cannot truly be referred to by language, save as (what turns 
out ultimately to be) a universality. Such is the first dialectical inversion 
of the Phenomenology: language, as Hegel puts it, speaks more truth 
than our intentions, for when it adverts to “this” singular entity, the 
word, the demonstrative pronoun, can refer, with time, space, and a 
shift in the “I”s who deploy it, to any particular thing.
2) To assess the possibilities for “overcoming” metaphysics in a new 
way in light of this conception. This will allow Agamben to criticise 
those who attempt to exceed the closure of metaphysics in Hegel and 
Heidegger on the basis of a mistaken, alternative conception of the 
same. These include Jacques Derrida and Georges Bataille at their most 
13  Following the Loeb translations which in turn partake of a long interpretative tradition, we 
take “proposition” to be a Latinate translation of Aristotle’s “logos apophantikos” (cf. Aristotle, 
De Interpretatione, in The Categories; On Interpretation; Prior Analytics, trans. Harold P. Cooke 
and Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 17a), and naturally 
Agamben will have in mind, inter alia, Heidegger’s stress on the apophantic “as,” often used to 
distinguish man from the animals (e.g. in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Fini-
tude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University 
Press, 1995), a lecture series from 1929–30). Although let it be noted in passing that David 
Farrell Krell has rightly pointed out an ambiguity in that regard, since Heidegger’s early work 
tends to stress a pre-predicative form of revelation as the prerogative of the human, or Dasein. 
David Farrell Krell, Derrida and our Animal Others: Derrida’s Final Seminar, “The Beast and the 
Sovereign” (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013).
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non-Hegelian: given that, ex hypothesi, these figures misjudge the most 
profound character of metaphysics, their attempts to move outside of it 
simply reinstall them within it. As Agamben has it: “that which thought 
[e.g. deconstruction] attempts to categorise as the mystical [a notion 
that we shall soon come to elucidate], or the Groundless, or the gramma 
[the letter], is simply a repetition of the fundamental notion of onto-
theology,” ontotheology being metaphysics, as the science of beings as 
such and as a whole, on a Heideggerian account.14
Metaphysics, like sovereign power in a state of exception (a notion 
to which Agamben will later devote his “Homo Sacer” series), extends 
its dominion even in what appears to be the “end of metaphysics”15; all 
previous critics of metaphysics would thus partake of metaphysics’ own 
“nihilism” without knowing it – a nihilism which ultimately signifies 
the malign outcome of metaphysics itself, and indeed its ghastly pro-
longation beyond its own ending. 
The curious name that Agamben perhaps most frequently gives to 
the metaphysical theory of ground as well as to the ultimate position in 
which those who would attempt to escape it end up is “mysticism.” The 
crucial characteristic of mysticism for Agamben’s purposes is the notion 
that language and thought are capable of effacing themselves and so 
providing us with access to the “ineffable” – the singular real thing in 
all its truth. This would be the dream of metaphysics itself, but also that 
of the critics of metaphysics who have attempted to delimit metaphys-
ics from such an Archimedean point. As if they were pointing out some 
condition of its possibility that lay outside of it, or which it was unable 
to express or capture.
The way in which Agamben weaves together these two possibilities 
is by tracking the way in which the Eleusinian mysteries are read at two 
different points in the career of G. W. F. Hegel. At first, in a youthful 
poem, Hegel proposes the mystical silence – which constitutes the apo-
phatic manner in which language is led to its limits – as a way in which 
one might gain access to the singularity of things, and so escape the gen-
14  Agamben, Language and Death, xiii.
15  Agamben, Language and Death, xiii.
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206
eralities of word and concept which murder the thing.16 But later on, in 
the “Sense-Certainty” dialectic of the Phenomenology, he would present a 
new conception of the mysteries which in fact demonstrates them to be 
inherently dialectical in character, as the singular referent of the indexicals 
– “this,” “here,” “now,” “I” – proves to be universal.17 Effectively, it is this 
earlier of the two gestures which the post-Heideggerian critics of meta-
physics attempt to repeat, following Ludwig Feuerbach in attempting to 
forestall the dialectical movement at the very outset18 – thus replacing 
negation with pure affirmation – without realising that the mature Hegel, 
and, by extension, metaphysics itself, was already one step ahead of them.
What is crucial, for our purposes, is that Agamben stresses the fact 
that one of the names given by Hegel to this process of incorporation 
which takes place as he effectively leaves behind his youthful mysticism, 
the medium sufficiently plastic as to tolerate the splitting and reconcili-
ation of opposites, singularity and genericity, the outside of language 
and thought and the inside, is “Geist,” the German translation of the 
Latin “spiritus” – “spirit” or indeed “breath”: 
The originality of the Hegelian system is that, through the power of the 
negative [il potere del negativo], this unspeakable point no longer produces 
[…] any leap into the ineffable [as in the early Hegel’s own mysticism]. At 
every point the Notion is at work, at every point in speech blows the negative 
breath [soffia l’alito negativo] of Geist, in every word is spoken the unspeak-
ability of Meinung [the singular thing that we “mean” to refer to, and that 
Sense Certainty takes our experience to be an experience of ], manifested in its 
negativity [i.e. singularity can be spoken of only in its sublation as universal-
ity, unspeakability only in speech].19
16  Agamben, Language and Death, 6ff.
17  Agamben, Language and Death, 10ff. “This self-preserving Now is, therefore, not immedi-
ate but mediated; […] A simple thing of this kind which is through negation, which is neither 
This nor That […] we call a universal.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of 
Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977; first published in 1807), §96.
18  Although having in mind more the Science of Logic and the putatively presuppositionless be-
ginning of philosophy, Feuerbach asks, “is it not after all a presupposition that philosophy has to 
begin at all?” Ludwig Feuerbach, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy,” in The Fiery Brook: 
Selected Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. Zawar Hanfi (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1972), 
59.
19  Agamben, Language and Death, 14; Il linguaggio e la morte, 22.
O N  S T I F L I N G  A  T R A N S C E N D E N T A L  B R E A T H
207
In Hegel’s mature work, in which an oppositional understanding 
is taken to be a sign of immaturity, the work of the Understand-
ing rather than that of (speculative dialectical) Reason, the notion of 
Spirit is employed so as to capture the way in which the unspeakable 
mystery, the singularity of each individual thing, is in fact not exterior 
to language but suffuses it in the form of a breath that silently blows 
always and everywhere within language itself, as something inaudible 
within audible speech, a stream of discreet consonants among the noisy 
vowels.
It is, therefore, with only a minimal distortion of the text that we 
may take Agamben to be speaking of the secret centrality of breath to 
the history of philosophy and to its end.
The Memorialising and Forgetting of Singular Being
From one perspective, the issue of the Sense Certainty dialectic is 
that the reference to individual things must in the end subordinate 
them to a certain universality, but also that this reference cannot take 
place by means of the gestural act of mere pointing, or even by way 
of its linguistic analogue (the indexical or pronoun), but must rather 
employ a fully-formed propositional judgement (such as “Now it is 
night”). This will mean that the Being of the entity must, when lin-
guistically evoked in the context of a complete sentence, be taken to 
be both singular and generic; and yet, prior to that linguistic moment, 
Sense Certainty takes the singularity of the entity alone to be the very 
Being of that entity – what that entity is20 – as have the critics of meta-
physics who refuse to allow the dialectical machine to start up. But in 
this context, breath may be taken to express that singular Being which 
propositional language always vaporises one way or another – whether 
dialectically, thereby memorialising it (Hegel) or in the way of conceal-
ment and therefore forgetting (Heidegger).
A scission is carried out at the very heart of being, thanks to the 
emergence of the propositional form of language – and therewith the 
20  “[I]ts truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.” Hegel, Phenomenology of 
Spirit, §91.
P O L I G R A F I
208
birth of man. Being is thus divided from the very beginning into the 
prōtē ousia, the singular “this” of mysticism (which Aristotle, in making 
this distinction between the singular and the generic senses of being, is 
said by Agamben to partake in, implying once again that mysticism, far 
from standing outside of metaphysics lies in fact at its very foundation), 
and the deutera ousia, the universality of the categories (or “predicates”), 
and ultimately the very highest genus, or even that which exceeds the 
logic of species and genus altogether, thus assuming the position of 
what the mediaevals came to call the “transcendental.” 
This primordial division in the sense of being is at least in part a re-
sult of the propositional character of the language in which the singular 
entity is taken up: 
The Aristotelian scission of the ousia […] constitutes the original nucleus 
of a fracture in the plane of language between showing and saying, indicating 
and signification. This fracture traverses the whole history of metaphysics, and 
without it, the ontological problem itself cannot be formulated. Every ontol-
ogy (every metaphysics […]) presupposes the difference between indicating 
and signifying, and is defined, precisely, as situated at the very limit between 
these two acts.21
If the propositional form of language joins together a singular sub-
ject and a generic predicate which subsumes the former under certain 
categories, then the proposition itself may be taken to suggest the ulti-
mate structure of metaphysical thinking which is consummated in the 
Hegelian sublation of the two parts of the proposition (the “infinite 
judgement”) and the Heideggerian conception of the forgetting of be-
ing that propositional language enacts, at least in the form of prose. 
The prosaic proposition, and so philosophy, can be founded only on an 
elision, a removal of the singularity that takes place when the singular 
entity is categorised – “pigeon-holed” – by the predicate. This is the 
basic metaphysical gesture, the sublation of mystical being (in “spirit”) 
or its simple “forgetting” (for Heidegger finds it necessary to shift the 
sense of “being” further back towards the singular thing than Hegel’s 
dialectic allows – as if the evaporation of being into a generic form 
could not constitute a commemoration but only a betrayal of being).
21  Agamben, Language and Death, 18.
O N  S T I F L I N G  A  T R A N S C E N D E N T A L  B R E A T H
209
Before we can get on to the question of how Agamben might pro-
pose to move beyond metaphysics so conceived, we need to explore 
this conception of its nature a little further, not least in order to grasp 
the precise place this schema reserves for the notion of the voice: this 
will prove crucial in the move beyond metaphysics, since Agamben will 
come to stress the fact that it is necessary to think of human beings as 
possessing not merely language (logos) but also an especial voice of their 
own, distinct from the animal’s phōnē.
The Animal Voice and the Human Voice 
Voice is, therefore, in part Agamben’s translation of Aristotle’s phōnē, 
one which seems to be made with at least one eye on the novel under-
standing he is about to propose of a certain relation between the voice 
of man and that of the animal, and so one which will inflect the sense 
of the negation by which the former departs from the latter.
Towards the beginning of his Politics, and so at the very foundation 
of metaphysics itself, Aristotle distinguishes man and animal thus:
man alone of the animals possesses speech [logon]. The mere voice [phōnē], 
it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the 
other animals as well […], but speech is designed to indicate the advanta-
geous and the harmful, and therefore also the right [dikaion] and the wrong 
[adikon].22
In a summary, from the eighth day of the seminar that Language and 
Death epitomises, Agamben clearly establishes a connection between 
his project and this passage from Aristotle’s Politics23 whilst elaborating 
upon the particular sense in which human beings nevertheless enjoy the 
use of a voice:
the Voice presupposed here is defined through a double negativity. On the 
one hand, it is in fact identified only as a removed voice, as a having-been of 
the natural phōnē, and this removal constitutes the originary articulation (ar-
thron, gramma) in which the passage from phōnē to logos is carried out, from 
22  Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1944), 
1253a.
23  Which Agamben invokes explicitly at Language and Death, 87.
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210
the living being to language. On the other hand, this Voice cannot be spoken 
by the discourse of which it shows the originary taking place. The fact that the 
originary articulation of language can take place only in a double negativity 
signifies that language is and is not the voice of man. If language were im-
mediately the voice of man, as braying is the voice of the ass and chirping the 
voice of the cicada, man could not be-the-there or take-the-this; that is, he 
could never experience the taking place of language or the disclosure of being. 
But if, on the other hand […] man radically possessed no voice (not even a 
negative Voice), every shifter and every possibility of indicating the event of 
language would disappear equally.24 
To make sense of this passage, it will help us to think of the animal 
voice as if it involved an immediate reference to the real thing, a notion 
which we are only now coming to be in a position to explain. We can dif-
ferentiate between animal and human language by describing the latter as 
propositional and therefore as capable of apophansis, revelation or mani-
festation. Animal sounds can only indicate the mere existence of a real 
entity stimulating the animal so as to cause pleasure or pain, whereas the 
propositional structure of human language allows us to reveal something 
of the general essence of the existing thing: phenomenalisation, the event 
of manifestation, is thereby the exclusive province of man and takes place 
by means of the formation within language of propositions.
These propositions would constitute the logos that is the exclusive 
province of the human; Agamben deploys the notion of voice to de-
scribe the very enunciation of these propositions, which he will eventu-
ally come to understand as the very event of manifestation itself, and 
so a – perhaps – non-metaphysical notion of Being. But we remain as 
yet in the context of metaphysics, albeit a metaphysics that is being 
read with Agamben’s ultimate intent of exceeding it already in mind. In 
this context, Agamben describes the precise process by which Aristotle 
may be taken to understand the transition from animal to man in the 
context of language. The pure and unlettered animal sounds are articu-
lated in human speech by means of the letter, the element (stoikheion) 
of speech.25
24  Agamben, Language and Death, 84–85.
25  See for example Agamben, Language and Death, 38–39; cf. also Aristotle, De Interpreta-
tione, 16a.
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The sounding human voice is not the same as the animal voice 
(phōnē); rather, it is a voice that is articulated by the letter, and it is in 
fact this gesture of literal articulation which constitutes the properly hu-
man Voice, and so the properly human breath, which remains distinct 
from the animal – and we can perhaps specify this by speaking here of 
consonants and vowels.26
The invocation of the letter in Aristotle also demonstrates his par-
ticular brand of metaphysical mysticism: Agamben speaks of the mysti-
cism of the kind that one finds in the Jewish inscription of the name of 
God in the form of consonants alone, which are in themselves unpro-
nounceable: IHVH.27 Letters are exclusively written forms of language 
and thus amount to a silent recollection of the sonorous animal voice, 
a direct reference to the real which is silenced but manifests itself as 
silence within that Voice. Indeed, the fact that the gramma plays this 
role may explain why Agamben chooses to distinguish the human Voice 
(Voce) by means of a silent change in the initial letter.
But how does this help us to justify the alignment of the animal 
voice with an immediate reference to the singular thing on the part of 
indexicals in human language, that Agamben’s argument, as we have 
reconstructed it, seems to assume? Perhaps retrospectively: the memory 
26  Here for want of time we must elide an exposition of the most ambiguous of these fascinat-
ing consonants, the letter ‘H’, the aspirant, so often left unvoiced in Romance languages. Ivan 
Illich, a great inspiration for Agamben, at least in his later years, has shed some light on this 
moment of articulation by investigating the early moments of phonetic writing and the later 
introduction of letters for vowels, whilst rendering explicit the effects of the letter upon the 
(otherwise animal) breath: “The freely voiced qualities of breathing are not indicated, only the 
consonants, the harsh or soft obstacles the breath encounters.” Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, 
ABC: The Alphabetisation of the Popular Mind (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), 11. 
27  “That which is construed as the supreme mystical experience of being and as the perfect 
name of God […] is the experience of the meaning of the gramma itself, of the letter as the 
negation [negazione] and exclusion [esclusione] of voice.” Agamben, Language and Death, 30; 
Il linguaggio e la morte, 41. Agamben then moves very quickly to what becomes the main 
substance of his argument in relation to the voice, a summary of what is to come: “As [or 
‘Like’, come] the unnameable name of God, the gramma is the final and negative dimension 
of meaning, no longer an experience of language but language itself, that is, its taking place in 
the removal of the voice. There is, thus, even a ‘grammar’ of the ineffable; or rather, the inef-
fable is simply the dimension of meaning of the gramma, of the letter as the ultimate negative 
foundation [fondamento negativo] of human discourse.” Agamben, Language and Death, 30; Il 
linguaggio e la morte, 42.
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212
retained of the singular reference to the real, the way in which language 
has long been taken to refer to that which stands beyond language, is 
by means of the indexical. This ability to indicate may then be taken to 
constitute a distant memory of the animal and its voice within human 
language, the faint recollection of that which is without language and 
so (putatively) in immediate relation with the real: the indexical is the 
fragment that language retains of its ultimately shattered dream of a 
relation to the non-linguistic real.
But the ultimate connection of animal voice and the real will prove 
to be more retrospective still: the voice is not connected with the in-
dexical altogether explicitly by the tradition, but this is what Agam-
ben himself adds even to the linguists who speak of these indexicals as 
“shifters.” The linguists, Emile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson, add 
to the philosophical account of the indexical the idea that it refers first 
of all not to the entity it intends but to the very act of language (or in-
deed, and more precisely, speech, vocalised language) in which it occurs: 
“Pronouns and other indicators of the utterance, before they designate 
real objects, indicate precisely that language takes place. In this way, still 
prior to the world of meanings, they permit the reference to the very 
event of language.”28
What goes undeveloped in the linguistic insight is precisely the tran-
scendental question of how it is possible for language to indicate its own 
pure taking place – and since the Voice that announces this advent is 
aligned with being, as event, this amounts to the question: how in the 
end is philosophy as ontology possible? “The utterance and the instance 
of discourse are only identifiable as such through the voice that speaks them, 
and only by attributing a voice to them can something like a taking 
place of discourse be demonstrated.”29 In other words, the reference to 
28  Agamben, Language and Death, 25.
29  Agamben, Language and Death, 32. One is tempted to argue that our overriding concern 
in the present work, the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical, is marked in 
the relation that Agamben’s book bears to another great text of Italian philosophy, devoted to 
the voice: Adriana Cavarero’s For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, 
trans. Paul A. Kottman (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005; first published in 2003 by Feltrinelli 
as A più voci: Filosofia dell’espressione vocale). Agamben speaks of the place where Benveniste 
draws closest to the problematic of the voice, and it involves a consideration of the voice in 
terms of “the individual particularities of spoken sounds,” alongside the rhetoric of Quintilian 
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213
an act of speech can occur only if that linguistic act is borne by a real 
human voice. And this voice will carry an echo of the animal phōnē. The 
animal voice “is indeed presupposed by the shifters, but as that which 
must necessarily be removed in order for meaningful discourse to take 
place”30: in other words, signifying discourse, propositional manifesta-
tion. The Voice that bears language is itself “being” in this new non-
metaphysical sense.
Voice, Self-Reference, Breath, and Being
Even if Agamben is attempting to develop a potential within meta-
physics that extends beyond the forms which it was actually able to 
unfold, he is reluctant to jettison the language of being and the tran-
scendental. We would thus be witnessing in Agamben a transcendental 
voice, but one which is altering the sense of the transcendental, and so 
transforming the sense of being. 
Thus, we are already beginning to glimpse the idea that the way in 
which Agamben will breach the closure of metaphysics is by reinvent-
ing at least two notions that appear within it in another form: voice 
and being. And it is in the deployment of the voice in this particular 
conjunction that we witness breath emerging once again within Agam-
ben’s discourse. 
and the “cantus obscurior” of Cicero (Agamben, Language and Death, 32); it is here that we can 
clarify the immense divergence of interests which separates Agamben’s book on the voice from 
Cavarero’s. Though a lapse in taste, perhaps, it is clear why Agamben’s book goes unmentioned 
by Cavarero. Agamben cares nothing for the singularity of the voice in all its empirical diversity, 
focussing as he does on the voice insofar as it allows indication ‒ and in general, the point is 
to situate the voice (or rather, the Voice) between mere sound, “the animal voice” (Agamben, 
Language and Death, 35), which, it seems, would be Cavarero’s concern, and determinate sig-
nification, in the place of an unactualised potential or intention to signify. If one bases one’s 
politics on that transition, on the moment at which each singular entity enters humanity, this 
politics will turn out differently than it would were one to base it upon the later state of an al-
ready singularised voice, or rather of a voice that remains singularised despite entering a generic 
linguistic code.
30  Agamben, Language and Death, 35.
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214
We have too little room to address here this rich subject matter to 
the extent it deserves,31 but we can say that the conception of being 
that Agamben proposes is neither pre-linguistic nor simply coexten-
sive with propositional language and capable of being captured in such 
propositions; rather, it is the very event of language, the taking place of 
language, its reflexivity. Being, on Agamben’s understanding, would be 
neither singular being sublated and so remembered in generality, nor 
a singularity that is forgotten precisely thereby, but rather that which 
makes the proposition possible, that event in which the jointure is first 
being constructed in (grammatical) copulation or (logical) synthesis. 
This is the gesture of synthesis that is carried out precisely in the hu-
man Voice, and that means at the moment at which, at least on the 
metaphysical account, the animal voice is articulated by letters, thereby 
becoming human.32
To imagine that one can refer to the ineffable real is to remain within 
the mystical structure of metaphysical foundation; the only unspeak-
able thing to which language might refer which will avoid a metaphysi-
cal snare is a reference to the very event of its own occurrence, and this 
event is not spoken of  but merely breathed in the very articulation of a 
proposition of human language which is given voice to.
The breath that carries the voice is the non-signifying potential to 
signify that prior to referring to any actual thing enunciates the fact that 
speaking is taking place, that language is starting to happen (that the 
metaphysical machine of the proposition is just getting warmed up). It 
31  For the interested reader, we do so in a forthcoming volume on Agamben’s philosophy 
more generally, provisionally entitled, Agamben’s Theory of Grounding.
32  Agamben indeed at the very least hints that, with this articulation, we are at a sub-meta-
physical level: he tells us that the elements which carry out the articulating, the arthron, gram-
ma, and the other meros tou logou, are “not properly either logical or grammatical, but they 
make possible every grammar and every logic, and, perhaps, every epistēmē in general.” Agam-
ben, Language and Death, 20. We cannot do justice to the point here, but perhaps it would be 
more accurate of us to say that Agamben locates “being” here rather than in the copula that 
synthesises subject and predicate, along with all of the historical avatars of that process of syn-
thesis, including most centrally the Kantian imagination and its schematism, and it is perhaps 
somewhere close to this point that one of the great differences that separate Agamben from 
Heidegger might be opened up.
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is the moment of “infancy,”33 between the mere voice of the animal that 
will never utter propositions, but only – so the mystics tell us – indicate 
an altogether real pain and pleasure, and the signifying propositions, 
the adult human language from which that animal phōnē will have been 
altogether removed, along with the experience of being it encapsulated.
When language draws attention to the very fact of its own incipient 
propositional articulation, its own ability to manifest things, it vocalises 
being itself, and indeed this very inflection of the Voice is being in the 
sense of the event of manifestation or phenomenalisation.
It now remains for us to justify the assertion we hazarded in passing, 
that this ontological aspect of the Voice may be said to be its very breath.
A Voice of Mere Breath: Nominalism
Such a conjunction (of being or the transcendental with the voice) is 
not absent from the philosophical tradition: already in Priscian, a gram-
marian of the 5th or 6th Century, a connection of voice and being had 
been drawn, but of voice in a very particular sense, that is somewhat 
akin to a voice that is mere hot air, wind, or breath: 
Every one of the legomena [in the sense of the Aristotelian categories, the 
transcendentals], each of the possibilities for speaking listed by Aristotle, 
could in fact be considered in itself as pure voice; not simply, however, as a 
mere sound (vox inarticulata) or within a determined field of meaning (vox 
as signifying term), but as the bearer of some unknown meaning. The voice, 
taken in this way, will then show itself as a pure intention to signify, as pure 
33  “If this Voice is the mystical foundation for our entire culture (its logic as well as its ethics, its 
theology as well as its politics, its wisdom as well as its madness) then the mystical is not some-
thing that can provide the foundation for another thought – attempting to think beyond the 
horizon of metaphysics, at the extreme confines of which, at the point of nihilism, we are still 
moving. The mystical is nothing but the unspeakable foundation; that is, the negative founda-
tion of onto-theology. Only a liquidation of the mystical can open up the field to a thought 
(or language) that thinks (speaks) beyond the Voice and its sigetics; that dwells, that is, not on 
an unspeakable foundation, but in the infancy (in-fari [this is a tacit, unmarked expansion of 
the Italian, which gives no Latin, but simply hyphenates ‘in-fanzia’]) of man.” Agamben, Lan-
guage and Death, 91; Il linguaggio e la morte, 114–115. Agamben will develop this apparently 
marginal notion substantially, in the earlier but near contemporary Infancy and History and 
elsewhere. See Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, translated 
by Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007; first published in 1978).
P O L I G R A F I
216
meaning, in which something is given to be understood before a determinate 
event of meaning is produced.34
This would be a potential to signify, or “the pure intention to signify,” 
that does not yet do so.35
Roscelin and other (so-called “nominalist”) thinkers of the 11th 
Century affirmed that universal essences were only flatus vocis – spoken 
of with a voice that is merely hot air. Being becomes a mere vapour, 
emanating from the physical human body, as Nietzsche would eventu-
ally have it, somehow consummating this empiricistic and deflationary 
tradition.36 “Flatus vocis is not meant, here, as mere sound, but in the 
sense of the voice as an intention to signify and as a pure indication that 
language is taking place.”37
Citing John of Salisbury and Anselm, whilst relating their insights 
back to Hegel, Agamben tells us that “[t]he ‘thought of the voice alone,’ 
the notion of the ‘breath of the voice’ [flatum vocis – ML] (in which, 
perhaps, we ought to note the first appearance of Hegelian Geist), is a 
thinking of what is most universal: being. Being is in the voice (esse in 
voce) as an unveiling and demonstration of the taking place of language, 
as Spirit.”38
Agamben summarises the connection between Voice and ontol-
ogy by affirming: “The Voice, as the supreme shifter that allows us to 
grasp the taking place of language, appears thus as the negative ground 
on which all ontology rests, the originary negativity sustaining every 
negation.”39
34  Agamben, Language and Death, 33.
35  Agamben, Language and Death, 33.
36  Nietzsche exclaims: “The concept of being! As though it did not show its low empirical 
origin in its very etymology! For esse basically means ‘to breathe’.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy 
in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1962), 84. 
Cf. Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics” for some remarkable passages that expand upon this 
idea, both conceptually and within the texts of the history of philosophy (Jacques Derrida, 
“Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and 
Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001; the essay first published in 1964), 173–
174); and for certain critical questions regarding Derrida’s reading, cf. Škof, Breath of Proximity, 
2015, 127ff. We address this whole matter in Lewis, “A Voice that is Merely Breath.”
37  Agamben, Language and Death, 34.
38  Agamben, Language and Death, 35.
39  Agamben, Language and Death, 36.
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217
Breath: Transcendental and Empirical
Let us hasten towards our conclusion by seizing upon this relation of 
the apparently windy voice of being to breath and spirit.
If the voice cannot speak without breath, we may say that breath in 
this particular (transcendental) sense allows language to refer to its own 
event and that this sense must be distinguished from the purely em-
pirical sense of breath in which we share it with the animals since this 
capacity for self-reference does not exist in animal phōnē as the latter 
remains unlettered and non-propositional. That said, the human Voice 
does indeed depend upon the animal’s phōnē and is grounded upon the 
loss of the possibility of our enjoying either an immediate relation to 
the real or an infinite proximity with our own voice, as the animal is 
said to. This voice must be “removed” in order for human language to 
be founded.
Transcendentally, breath is to be conceived as that part of human 
language which recalls this negative ground, the stifled voice of the 
non-human animal, and the singularity that it is taken to have en-
countered. And yet, man himself also has a voice, and it is on the 
basis of this Voice that man will be capable of using language in a self-
referential way, and this means that he will be able to speak, at least 
indirectly, of the very incipient taking place of propositional language 
itself. This event is the new, non-metaphysical sense which Agamben 
imparts to Being, which is no longer to be subjected to the scission 
wrought by the proposition, the division of being into the singularity 
of the thing and its generic sublation. We move beyond both Hegelian 
memory and Heideggerian forgetfulness, although Agamben’s sense 
of being might be said to remain closer to that of his teacher, and that 
is to say to singularity, but in the novel sense of the uniqueness of that 
linguistic act at that particular time, the uniqueness not of a substance 
but of an event: this would be enunciated and indeed it would take 
place in the very first breath of spirit as it attempts to conjoin a sub-
ject with a predicate, or even earlier, when it breaks speech up into its 
articulated literal parts. In terms that combine Agamben’s vocabulary 
with our own topic, the voice of Being would then amount to the 
infancy of spirit.
P O L I G R A F I
218
When it comes to that topic, perhaps the crucial point for our pur-
poses is that there are two senses of breath, and they are prone to con-
fusion: the first is the empirical sense of animal respiration that in a 
certain sense we are often said to share with all living, respiring things: 
this sense seems to have preoccupied the attention of the emerging dis-
cipline of (critical) respiratory studies up until now;40 and yet, this eco-
logically-minded approach risks eliding the fact that the animal voice 
40  On the relation between this putatively empirical breath of man and the panting, 
purring, and growling of the animal, see the contributions of Tomaž Grušovnik and Sara Štuva 
to Breathing with Luce Irigaray. The former does indeed want to stress a certain difference be-
tween the human being and nature, a gesture which he shows Irigaray’s work to bolster; and yet, 
nevertheless, a certain sameness comes to prevail precisely at the level of breath: to avoid either 
a sceptical Cartesian alienation from nature (“mechanicism paired with exploitation”; Tomaž 
Grušovnik, “Breathing with the Natural World,” in Breathing with Luce Irigaray, eds. Lenart 
Škof and Emily A. Holmes (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 120) or an animistic appropriation 
such as Deep Ecology is said to indulge in, one must insist upon a “separate and dependent 
existence,” such as a child bears to its mother. Breath is taken as the figure of this relation. 
And yet it seems to be taken in an all too empirical manner: “Being a natural gesture of every 
living being, connected with air, the cosmic wind, and atmosphere, breathing is – because of 
its natural proneness to exchange – undoubtedly more suited as a platform on which to build 
an ethical relationship,” not least in the sense that appropriation is ruled out (just as much as 
indifference) in the case of “the air that we do not appropriate but only exchange.” Grušovnik, 
“Breathing with the Natural World,” 119, 123, 127. 
One here risks treating humans as if they could be reduced, even temporarily, to the level of 
the animal (and vegetal) breath; and animals can – we tell ourselves – be muzzled. It is just such 
a reduction to the level of the merely living that Agamben has problematised throughout his 
biopolitical work, but also in the chapter of his thought that we are dealing with here. Perhaps 
indeed, if we were to develop this critical connection, we might also come to understand why 
environmental concerns trouble his thought so little.
Štuva, in “Breathing with Animals: Irigaray’s Contribution to Animal Ethics,” (in Breath-
ing with Luce Irigaray, eds. Lenart Škof and Emily A. Holmes, 130–146; London: Bloomsbury, 
2013) makes it clear that according to certain proponents of the philosophy of breath, Irigaray’s 
moments of apparent humanism – which are from our own point of view promising – go too 
far: “All living creates on this earth live under the same sky and breathe the same air, share the 
same intercorporeal space and bodily vulnerability. Breathing is thus the first and last physical 
act that enables us to live, while at the same time making us corporeal, mortal and vulnerable.” 
Štuva finds it “disturbing” that Irigaray “combines non-human animals into a homogeneous 
whole or at least into something completely separate from the human,” although she concedes 
that this means “different [from the human], but not lesser,” a gesture towards the inappropri-
ability of the non-human animal by the human; but she still deems this “not enough” and sug-
gests a move beyond Irigaray to a position in which animals of different kinds are “positioned 
on a horizontal existential level with humans.” And indeed, Irigaray posits such a continuity on 
the level of a sexual difference which on her account pervades living nature. Štuva, “Breathing 
with Animals,” 131, 136, 136, 137, 138.
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219
must be altogether removed in order for the human Voice (and its own 
peculiar form of breathing) to take its place, and thus for the Voice as 
breath to come to be in its transcendental or quasi-transcendental guise 
– a breath of which – with the best will in the world – the animal can 
be said to know nothing.41 
This distinction of the empirical and transcendental senses of breath, 
at least under the guise of the apparently troubling opposition that 
separates animal from man in terms of their respective voices, is some-
thing that a certain strand of respiratory philosophy seems inclined to 
efface, but it should encourage us to hesitate before we simply accept 
the reduction of man to a quasi-animalistic material body, and thus to 
something that might be subject, without recourse, to the kinds of gag-
ging restrictions that have been imposed upon it over the last three and 
a half years. This strikes us as one of the propensities of the discipline 
that Agamben’s account will allow us to warn against, without going so 
far as to urge that it ought to be erased altogether.
If the study of empirical breath has allowed the discipline to stress 
the fashionable notion of an equality between man and animal, it has 
also risked being complicit in a certain “animalisation of man” that can 
render the breath of the latter more vulnerable to stifling, when this 
breath comes to be considered too rotten (l’alito shares an etymology 
with “h-alitosis”). This is more likely to occur when State power as-
sumes a predominantly biopolitical form, as it has for at the very least 
The philosophy of breath has at times evinced a tendency towards promiscuity which may 
only be admirable up to a point, at least if it brings in its train a fog which obscures distinctions 
that remain essential.
41  If Luce Irigaray’s later work has understandably proved to be more directly inspirational for 
the philosophy of breath (cf. for example Lenart Škof and Emily A. Holmes, eds., Breathing with 
Luce Irigaray (London: Bloomsbury, 2013)), more light might be shed on the distinction between 
the transcendental and empirical by returning to her early and foundational deconstruction of 
the division between the metaphysical and the physical. Her series on the four elements might 
constitute the most precious resource in this regard: “Metaphysics always supposed, in some man-
ner, a solid crust from which to raise a construction. Thus, a physics […]. Would the end of the 
metaphysical be required by their [sc. the elements’] reintervention in the physics of today?” 
Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary-Beth Mader (Austin, TX: 
University of Texas Press, 1999; first published in 1983 by Éditions de Minuit as L’oubli de l’air 
chez Martin Heidegger), 2–3. Air, whilst in some sense “material,” indeed, would be “[t]he a priori 
condition of all of his [the philosopher’s] a prioris.” Irigaray, Forgetting, 12.
P O L I G R A F I
220
the last century, and the transcendental approach offered by Agamben 
allows us to specify with more precision and complexity the relation be-
tween animal and man at the level of their respective voices and breaths. 
His work has also allowed us to demonstrate more fully the significance 
of breath in the history of philosophy. 
Conclusion
We wondered at the beginning whether our reading of Agamben’s 
Language and Death might shed light on his project as a whole. In 
response to this we might say that although it offers a solution that 
we have not had time to address (in poetry and the poetising of phi-
losophy that mitigates certain effects of the prosaic propositional form, 
but also in the conceptions of the Absolute and the Event that Hegel 
and Heidegger themselves propose) and which is either not advocated 
later on in his œuvre or falls into place as one among a number of solu-
tions to the problem of metaphysics, in terms of the overall trajectory 
of Agamben’s work, Language and Death may be said to open onto the 
problematic of the late 1970s and early 1980s which centres around the 
notion of infancy, before coming to settle, in the later 1980s and early 
1990s, on the notion of self-reference and meta-language; this leads 
immediately on to the notion of potentiality, the potential to signify 
or communicate, and this in turn to the power that is the topic of 
Homo Sacer. As a consequence of this connection, the precise relation 
between political power and life, still quite poorly understood by com-
mentators, may be sharply illuminated by this earlier attempt to think 
the logic of ground in the relation between logos and phōnē. This earlier 
work may indeed be understood as foundational for the later, but in 
the precise sense of foundation that we have been elucidating, as if the 
work excluded from the Homo Sacer series should itself be understood 
as a “negative ground” for the latter, which had to exist but also to be 
“removed” in order for that series to get off the ground.42 
42  And as if to testify that breath itself remains at the heart of Agamben’s concerns even to-
day, and as if to reassure us that we have not committed too great an act of hermeneutic vio-
lence, we might read these extremely recent words of Agamben: “Let us, therefore, continue 
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This in turn leads us to a position from which we might be able bet-
ter to understand the other questions and hypotheses that we proposed 
at the outset: the discourse on voice and its breath should lead us not 
simply to an affirmation of the post-human communality of empirical 
respiration and a general reduction of the human to the level of the 
animal (which in turn lays our very biological life open to all sorts 
of incursions and impositions stemming from sovereign instances of 
power); what we are led to is rather a humanistic affirmation of the very 
different voice (or Voice) and (transcendental) breath of which human 
beings alone are capable. For in the human, language is capable of refer-
ring to its own incipient or infantile state, in which it has left the animal 
realm behind, but has neither forgotten its animal origins nor yet fully 
assumed its humanity by composing a determinately signifying linguis-
tic statement. This is the transcendental moment of language, the mo-
ment at which it is no longer animal but not yet human – at least, not 
fully or actually so, but rather human in potential. Perhaps this is not 
the infant who literally empirically breathes the moment the umbilical 
cord conjoining him with his mother is severed, but the infant at the 
moment in which this breath is about to be articulated into vowels 
and consonants, those silent letters which describe the form that breath 
assumes when it first becomes spiritual, and the animal voice is begin-
ning to be torn from our throats. This constitutes the transcendental 
moment of breath as the event of being, to which we alone may be said 
to be privy.
to attend to the commas even if the house burns down, let us speak to each other carefully 
without any rhetoric, listening not only to what we say but also to what the language tells 
us, to that little breath that used to be called inspiration [quel piccolo soffio che si chiamava un 
tempo ispirazione] and that remains the most precious gift that, at times, language – wheth-
er literary canon or dialect – can give us.” Agamben, “Virgole e fiamme” [“Commas and 
Flames,”], 19th June 2023, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-virgole-e-fiamme. Let 
us also note that his very most recent text, at the time of writing, returns to the question of 
the human voice, demonstrating its enduring importance: La voce umana (Macerata: Quod-
libet, 2023).
P O L I G R A F I
222
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