New Books in Critical Theory Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)
Nov 30, 2025
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at York University, explores the complex relationship between breathing and politics in his book, Breathing Aesthetics. He discusses how difficult breathing represents the uneven risks from pollution and capitalism. Tremblay critiques commercialized breathing therapies, highlighting minoritarian artistic practices as political responses. He connects wildfire smoke with sociality and introduces concepts like 'benign respiratory variation' as an alternative to rights-based views. Upcoming projects preview cinema of extinction and non-managerial environmentalism.
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Breathing Links Aesthetics And Politics
- Breathing connects aesthetic form and political life by registering rhythms, duration, and texture across media.
- It also maps uneven distributions of breathable air and embodied biopolitical risk.
Breath As A Scale-Crossing Tool
- Breath lets scholars move between individual experience and large-scale biopolitical processes.
- Phenomenology of respiration reveals how environmental racism and policy show up in everyday life.
Narrow Your Breathing Archive
- Set strict criteria to study breathing aesthetics: explicit respiration content, formal attunement, and sociopolitical engagement.
- Focus on works responding to a 'crisis in breathing' that intensifies from the 1970s onward.
