Sympnea

For the Stoics, the world would be an immense, living body, stirred and generated by a singular principle (a warm, intelligent breath). Before the Stoics, Aristotle had already employed the verb sumpneo (to co-breathe or conspire) in Politics, evoking the political necessity of forging a common breath within the city.

“Combat breathing” is a concept developed by Frantz Fanon in A dying colonialism (1959), regarding the suffocated (and recovered) breath of the Algerian people: “There is no occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed, occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing.”

Regarding the practice of ‘unveiling’, Sufism teaches that the world is constantly being recreated. In every moment, all returns to God at the rhythm of a breath. In Sufism: expressions of the mystical quest (1977), Lalleh Bakhtiar writes: “At every instant, creation is annihilated and recreated. With every beat of our heart, we die and we are reborn. The world exists in an intense movement, ascending towards the vertical axis present in all things, to meet the Absolute descending to it in manifest forms.”

The trembling thought refers to the concept of “trembling thinking” dear to Édouard Glissant. A multiple, non- or anti-hegemonic thought that erupts from everywhere, in jolts: “It preserves us from systematic thoughts and systems of thought. It does not presuppose fear or uncertainty; it extends infinitely like an innumerable bird, wings sown with the black salt of the earth. It reassembles us in absolute diversity, in a whirlwind of encounters. A utopia that never settles and opens to tomorrow, like a shared sun and fruit.” (La cohée du lamentin: poétique V, Gallimard, 2005).