Vol.:(0123456789) Sophia https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-022-00902-7 1 3 Air Democracy: on the Principles of Breathing Together Aleksander Kopka 1 Accepted: 12 January 2022 © The Author(s) 2022 There remains air… (Irigaray, 1999: p. 13). Breathing Together In her prominent work The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray writes: Is not air the whole of our habitation as mortals? Is there a dwelling more vast, more spacious, or even more generally peaceful than that of air? Can man live elsewhere than in air? […] No other element is as light, as free, and as much in the “fundamental” mode of a permanent, available, “there is.” (Irigaray, 1999: p. 8). Adding a couple of pages further: Air would be the arch-mediation: of the logos, of thinking, of the world – whether physical or psychical. Air would be the substance of the copula that would permit the gathering-together [le rassemblement] and the arrangement of the whole into the life and Being of man, and permit his habitation in space as a mortal. But this archē-ness would never be able to be constituted as an origin because of its mediating qualities and because it is a permanent neces- sity for the immediate subsistence of man. (p. 12). These short passages encapsulate Irigaray’s reasoning behind her conviction about the profound role of air as the ultimate dwelling place and the very condition of life. However, they can also be treated as an outline for the political problematics that stem from the statement about air as an anarchic medium in which ethical and This paper builds upon my research on the notions of “democracy” and “sharing out” presented in ‘Sharing (Out) Democracy. On the Democratic Injunction for Climate Justice’ (Kopka, 2020) and in some regard continues its line of argument. * Aleksander Kopka olekkopka@gmail.com 1 Institute of Philosophy, University of Silesia in Katowice, Katowice, Poland