RESEARCH (Im)possible Breathing: On Courage and Criticality in the Ghostly Historical Present Athena Athanasiou Panteion University, GR athenaathanasiou2@gmail.com Written in the midst of a courageous collective response to antiblack police brutality in the US, this text tackles the fgure of breathing as a performative embodiment of grammar and time through which the ongoingness of racialized breathlessness is articulated, dis-remembered, and dismantled. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the text seeks to account for repeated and immeasurable (un)breatha- bility in its particular implications in the histories of racial capitalism, and in mul- tiform sites, geographies, and temporalities that underwrite the global present. In this sense, breathing is addressed through its diferential and diferentiating conditions of possibility induced and regulated by sufocating spatio-temporalities, as a way to attend to the question whether and how the biopolitical contingencies of vulnerability, weariness, and brokenness are taken up as situated knowledges of courage, critical response-ability, and radical political imagination. Keywords: breathe; courage; criticality; vulnerability; spectrality; Black Lives Matter ‘… the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for …’ Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987, 275) ‘With breathe comes possibility’. Sara Ahmed (2010, 120) ‘In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always to rupture the present.’ Christina Sharpe (2016, 9) Breathtaking Injustice, Time and Again These lines are being written in the midst of a courageous collective response to George Floyd’s death as a consequence of antiblack police brutality in the US. In the summer 2019 workshop from which this special issue originated, and which had proposed vulnerability as its guiding concept, I had opened my presentation commemorating the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the summer of 2014. While working on the written version of Athanasiou, Athena. 2020. “(Im)possible Breathing: On Courage and Criticality in the Ghostly Historical Present.” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 23(2): 1–15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.337 REDESCRIPTIONS Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory