Libby Jennifer Hoffenberg

from Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: a Metaphysics of Mixture:

“We do not inhabit the Earth, we inhabit the air through the atmosphere. We are immersed in it exactly as the fish is immersed in the sea. And what we call breathing is nothing but the agriculture of atmosphere…”

“Hence space and extension are forces that allow all things to breathe, to expand, and to intermingle within breath: to breathe is to let oneself be penetrated by the world in order to make, from the world, something that is also made from our breath. Everything breathes and everything is breath because all things interpenetrate.”

“The atmosphere would be ‘the shared reality of the perceiver and the perceived. It is the reality of the perceived as the sphere of its presence and the reality of the perceiver insofar as he or she, in sensing the atmosphere, is bodily present in a particular way.’ This interpretation…makes of atmosphere “knowledge of the skin, which is as tangential as knowledge of the mind [esprit] is and uses epithelial cells in the same way in which knowledge of the mind uses the roots of words.”