Document Type : Research Paper

Author

• Christine Leroy

University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Institut ACTE and Lille University, laboratoire STL

Abstract

The article specifies the human being based on the respiratory cycle. The word "spirit" indeed shares its root with the verb “to inspire,” suggesting breath and animation. Human temporality is made up of organic rhythmicity, from a weighing body that experiences itself as inscribed in time. I question the compatibility between the demand for temporal efficiency, characteristic of the technophile ideology of communication, and the “service society” which purports to be more “caring” than before. Highlighting the suppression of the passage of time in modern times, I assert that humane care is radically incompatible with a society that subsumes humanity under the ideology of a perpetual present. It is precisely on the basis of what specifies the human, namely breathing and desire, that I propose to consider how care might be possible in an ultra-technologized world. Drawing on an imaginary of movement and breathing deployed in choreographic performances and practices, I invite with Simone Weil to substitute rhythm for cadence, to insert slowness into speed, and to favor the flow of time in a human reality that has become unbearable. In so doing, we must reconsider head-on the fate that binds us, namely death, which no stasis in a perpetual present can eliminate, and which the metaphor of a risk of social necrosis invites us to reconsider. Accepting the passage of time, giving death back its face, is costly; but it's at this price that time can regain its humanizing value, as a sine qua non component of care.

Keywords

• breathing body
• humanity
• Simone Weil
• dance
• modernism

Main Subjects

• philosophy