Breathing: Rethinking a Poetic Concept through Levinas and Celan——Based on the Thought of Levinas and Celan

Abstract: In the increasingly visualized and transparent context of contemporary society,human relations are often deprived of intimacy and openness.Against this context,Paul Celan's notion of the Atemwende (“breathturn”) and Emmanuel Levinas's concept of inspiration demand renewed attention.The affinity between their thought enables a poetics of breathing that integrates these two concepts.Celan's account of poetry as a “breathturn” already intimates breathing as an ethical gesture of turning toward the Other and suspending the self;while Levinas understands breathing as a spiritual practice of unconditionally opening oneself to the Other—an experience inseparably bound to the survivor's response to the dead.Breathing also intersects with Levinas's notions of dénucléation and the act of “the saying (le dire)” insofar as ethical language arises,like breath itself,in ceaseless generation and flow,thereby resonating with Celan's poetic experience.As a primordial relation to the Other,breathing not only constitutes the core poetic experience of Celan's poetry but also animates the very vitality of Levinas's ethical thought—a corporeal and spiritual activity that continually recalls to us the embodied sense of life and the nearness of the Other.