From climate catastrophe and ecological crisis to the Covid19 pandemic to the conditions of life in both neoliberal and warzone “urban hellscapes” to racism - the phrase “I can’t breathe” uttered by George Floyd in 2020 (and repeated with variation by Tyre Nichols in 2023) did not lose any of its poignant, visceral and acute precision in pinpointing the nature of many crises that we have been facing as a society (even though it should be kept in mind that the sentence emerged first and foremost as articulation of Blackness forced to posit against asphyxia). The sheer scale and intensity of the catastrophic events that had become the element of our everyday reality have brought the hitherto imperceptible crises into our communal awareness.

I argue that shortness of breath experienced in 2020-2022 on both individual and community level made those crises – long in the making already – perceptible.

However, my gesture steers away from easy generalizations. On the contrary, I will argue that attending to embodied,  processual, intimate and contextual nature of breathing allows for acknowledging certain general patterns without forgoing the necessity to keep close to local conditions and the particularity of life processes. For questions about who can breathe, under what circumstances and in what languages are essential for inquiry on “the universal right to breathe”. In this regard, I would like to focus on the politics of respiration grounded in both poetics and aesthetics of breathing.