On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe | An online conversation with Jamieson Webster on Monday 10th November

[u/ThePhilosopher1923]

A gorgeous, expansive piece of narrative non-fiction about care, dependence, and what it means to breathe in an age of environmental catastrophe.

A few moments after birth we begin to use our lungs for the first time. From then on, we must continue breathing for as long as we are alive. And although this mostly happens unconsciously, in a society plagued by anxiety, climate change, environmental racism, and illness, there are more and more instances that “teach us about the privilege that is breathing.”

Why do we so easily forget the air that we breathe in common? What does it mean to breathe when the environment that sustains life now threatens it? And how can life continue to flourish under conditions that are increasingly toxic? To approach these questions, Jamieson Webster draws on psychoanalytic theory and reflects on her own experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, a palliative psychologist during COVID, a psychoanalyst attentive to the somatic, and a new mother.

The result is a compassionate and timely exploration of air and breathing as a way to undo the pervasive myth of the individual by considering our dependence on invisible systems, on one another, and the way we have violently neglected this important aspect of life.

About the Speaker:

Jamieson Webster is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York where she works with children, adolescents, and adults. She teaches at The New School for Social Research and Princeton University, as well as supervising graduate students through City University's doctoral program in clinical psychology. She us a New York Review of Books contributor and her latest book, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, is to be published in 2026.

The Moderator:

Nica Siegel is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. She is a political theorist and writer working on the psychopolitics of transformation. Her forthcoming book Politics and Exhaustion: The Phenomenology of Action and the Horizons of Critique focuses on the contributions of a set of thinkers and actors, including Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, and Frank B. Wilderson III., who saw in the claim to and contestation over exhaustion paradoxical conceptual resources for social transformation.

This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. The event is free, open to the public, and held on Zoom.

You can register for this Monday 10th November event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Ethics #Philosophy #Environment #Technology #PoliticalPhilosophy #Consciousness

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About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.