Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Breathing Aesthetics" (Duke UP, 2022)
Host: Stentor Danielson
Guest: Jean-Thomas Tremblay
Date: November 30, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode features a deep and interdisciplinary discussion between host Stentor Danielson and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, author of Breathing Aesthetics. The conversation explores how breath and breathing serve as compelling sites for inquiry at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and the environmental humanities. Tremblay examines the shifting cultural, political, and representational meaning of respiration, especially in the context of environmental crisis, racialized state violence, therapeutic cultures, and recent phenomena such as the pandemic and wildfire smoke. The episode delves into the book's scholarly inspirations, case studies from literature and art, and the broader theoretical and political stakes of thinking with breath.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Personal and Scholarly Background

• [02:21] Tremblay shares their "promiscuous educational background," tracing a journey from political science to aesthetic disciplines like literary, film, and cultural studies. This intellectual flexibility laid the groundwork for a project that examines breath at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics.
• [03:14] Tremblay explains how breath became a unique focus for exploring rhythm, duration, texture (in poetry, fiction, and cinema), as well as uneven distributions of life and vitality—a concern especially visible in issues of environmental racism and police violence.

Memorable Quote:

"Breathing was also a place where I could indulge my interest in contradiction...Insofar as breathing is about processing alterity, taking it in, processing it, and putting it out."
— Jean-Thomas Tremblay [04:15]

2. Breath and the Scale of Experience

• [06:37] Tremblay elaborates that breathing "traffics between the structural and the experiential," making it an ideal object for environmental humanities, which seeks to connect macro-structural forces (like pollution) to micro-experiences (like individual suffering or vitality).
• Biopolitics and necropolitics are made manifest through breathing, e.g., environmental racism evident in asthma epidemiologies.

3. Curating the 'Archive' of Breathing

• [09:45] Tremblay describes the challenge of curating case studies for the book: the "problem of breathing aesthetics is that it has an archive that is potentially infinite." Nearly any art could be related to breath, given how art itself is often modeled on inspiration.
• The book focuses on works explicitly concerned with the rhythms of respiration and with sociopolitical mediation of breath—especially since the "crisis in breathing" (circa 1970s) marked by pollution, weaponization, and monetization of air.

Key Criteria:

• Formal and content engagement with breathing
• Sociopolitical engagement with what Tremblay terms the "crisis in breathing"

4. Crisis in Breathing: Pollution, Weaponization, Monetization

• [14:23] Tremblay outlines how each facet of the crisis intensified in the long 1970s:
  • Weaponization: Chemical weapons banned in war repurposed for domestic police control (e.g., tear gas), extending to border use in violation of protocols.
  • Monetization: Commodification of clean air through bottled air, oxygen bars, and "breathfulness" industries.
  • Pollution: The long lineage of industrial air pollution becomes subject to (sometimes ineffective) state regulation; environmental inequalities in air quality persist.

Memorable Quote:

"Having access to breathable air is now a marker of privilege…who gets to afford a free breath or an unencumbered breath."
— Jean-Thomas Tremblay [16:49]

5. Therapeutic Breathing and Critical Alternatives

• [20:45] Tremblay distinguishes their book from popular, therapeutic breath books by refusing to instruct readers to "take a deep breath."
• Analysis focuses on how therapeutic models of breathing are critically taken up within minoritarian traditions (artists and writers of color, queer and disabled artists) to organize suffering and resilience differently than mainstream wellness cultures.

Case Examples:

• Aesthetic self-medication: Bob Flanagan's "journals of bad breathing" transform repeated notations of suffering into structures for psychic coherence.
• Feminist breathing: Ritualizations of breath in works by Toni Cade Bambara and Linda Hogan, which help communities process loss and return to activism.

Memorable Quote:

"Breathing is a way of making life out of vulnerability and out of exposure, and in many cases, injury and suffering."
— Jean-Thomas Tremblay [26:55]

6. Wildfire and the Aesthetics of Suffocation

• [28:14] The appearance of wildfire smoke in fiction (Renee Gladman’s Ravicka novels) and experimental art films (e.g., Amy Greenfield’s Wildfire) demonstrate how breathlessness under environmental crisis becomes a medium for sociality, vulnerability, and the limits of pleasure.

7. Theoretical Influences and Collaborators

• [32:43] Tremblay discusses the importance of atmospheric and olfactory theorist Sean Hsiang-lin Hsu (“The Smell of Risk”) in developing concepts like atmospheric differentiation: how risk, pollution, and breathable air distribute unevenly and shape aesthetic experience.
• Other influential scholars: Nicole Seymour and Sarah McFarland Taylor, for broadening environmental aesthetics beyond didactic or strictly reparative frameworks.

Memorable Quote:

"If we take seriously the idea that the aesthetics of breathing can be both invigorating or debilitating…then we cannot overstate… the capacity of readers and spectators to go out into the world and then just change it through sheer force of will."
— Jean-Thomas Tremblay [36:28]

8. Rethinking the 'Right to Breathe'

• [38:25] Discussing and critiquing "the right to breathe" (A. Mbe), Tremblay proposes "benign respiratory variation" instead—a collective, relational framework for thinking about the diversity of breathing styles, capacities, and exposures, rooted in consent and care rather than rights discourse.

Notable Example:

• Consent and Breath: Trisha Low’s account of breath-holding in a BDSM context shows how caretaking practices can and should be responsive not just to consent but to the nuances of respiratory experience.

Memorable Quote:

"What we want…I think, is not to never experience breathlessness, but…to experience the breathlessness that we can bear or…find vivifying, as opposed to life-threatening."
— Jean-Thomas Tremblay [41:43]

9. Book Design and Representation

• [47:42] Tremblay credits designer Courtney Lee Richardson for a book cover that visually echoes the book’s themes: swirling yellow smoke, abstract form, resemblance to a radioactive symbol, and subtle, challenging typography invite the reader to "look closely"—mirroring the close attunement that breathing demands.

10. Gratitudes and Acknowledgments

• [51:25] Tremblay thanks editors and mentors at Duke University Press; reflects movingly on personal losses, including the passing of both grandmothers and advisor Lauren Berlant, whose influence shapes the book’s orientation toward death and the limits of environmental vitality.

11. Future Projects

• [55:45] Two upcoming books:
  • Negative: The Cinema of Extinction (with Steven Swarbrick): Confronts contradictions between survival and species longevity under climate crisis. Explores "negative life" in film, where characters face irrecovery and loss over harmony.
  • The Art of Environmental Inaction (solo): Critiques managerial, action-obsessed environmentalism; aims to develop a "political concept of inaction" drawing from anti-capitalist, decolonial, and degrowth traditions.

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "Breathing traffics between the structural and the experiential."
  — Stentor Danielson, referencing Tremblay [06:37]

• "Any piece of art could be said to be related in some way or another to respiration."
  — Jean-Thomas Tremblay [10:03]

• "Wildfires have been happening with increased frequency and in ways that have been indeed spectacular and mediatized… reality was catching up to fiction."
  — Jean-Thomas Tremblay [28:17]

• "I like to joke that my book is one of the few books published in 2022 that do not instruct their readers to take a breath or to take a deep breath."
  — Jean-Thomas Tremblay [21:17]

• "It's a book that is morbid insofar as it's really relentlessly oriented toward death."
  — Jean-Thomas Tremblay [53:02]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:21 – Tremblay’s scholarly journey and motivation for the book
• 06:37 – Breathing between structures and individuals; environmental humanities
• 09:45 – Curating the “archive” of breathing aesthetics
• 14:23 – The crisis in breathing: weaponization, monetization, pollution
• 20:45 – The limits of therapeutic breath and case studies in alternative approaches
• 28:14 – Wildfire, smoke, and the aesthetics of suffocation
• 32:43 – Theoretical influences: atmospheric differentiation, olfaction, affect
• 38:25 – Critique of “right to breathe” and the concept of benign respiratory variation
• 47:42 – Visual design of the book and its thematic resonance
• 51:25 – Acknowledgments, losses, and book as a project of “grief”
• 55:45 – Upcoming books: Negative: The Cinema of Extinction & The Art of Environmental Inaction

Tone and Language

Throughout, Tremblay’s language is deeply reflective, precise, and attuned to ambiguity, contradiction, and the porous boundaries between aesthetics, politics, and lived experience. Both host and guest speak with scholarly clarity but remain grounded in vivid examples, stories, and a generosity toward readers and listeners navigating the stakes of breathing (and writing about breath) today.