Zyklon-B, a gassing agent utilized by Nazi Germany in Auschwitz; Agent Orange, a defoliant chemical used by the United States in Vietnam; glyphosate, a toxic herbicide aerially sprayed by the Israeli military along the borders of Gaza. The weaponization of air and breath through chemical warfare — “atmo-terrorism”¹ in Peter Sloterdijk’s words — over the last hundred years or so has made it amply clear that the freedom to breathe “good” air is differentially arranged across the axes of empire, race, and capital.² If technofuturist gurus today dream of the privatization of breathable air via climate-controlled hermetic bubble neighborhoods, life — both human and nonhuman — in many parts of the Global South (and elsewhere) smothers under the tyranny of capitalism’s asymmetric toxic flows. It is under such oppressive circumstances, further amplified by the impasse of a global pandemic, that philosophers such as Achille Mbembe now conceive of another future of breathing as “a fundamental right to existence.”³ The recent demands to reclaim air as an indispensable “in-common, that which, by definition, eludes all calculation”⁴ has taken on a very particular valence in the aftermath of the longue durée history of the commodification of the atmosphere. This is, of course, a history that stretches from early modern seaborne settler and extractive colonialism to today’s neoliberal global capitalism, one that aspires to mutate the invisible gases that surrounds the earth into a tradeable commodity.

We may recall that the earth’s wind system had been subjugated by European cartographers, meteorologists, and geographers into an exploitable resource to buttress colonial expansionism from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Until the popularization of steam engines in the nineteenth century, wind was the key source of propulsion for sailing ships, and Europe’s conquest of the earth’s wind system turned the atmosphere into a powerful instrument of colonial governance and revenue generation. Think, for instance, of the English astronomer Edmond Halley’s 1686 nautical diagram of the tropical trade winds, which is considered to be the first published meteorological chart (Figure 1).⁵ Even though traders and pilgrims had, for millennia, mobilized seasonal monsoon winds to travel across East Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Halley’s chart based on data collected from ship logs became a tool for the East India Company’s empire-building project in the Indian Ocean region.⁶ A categorical purging of medieval cosmological conceptions of both wind and oceanic waters was critical for such early modern techno-rational data visualizations; the result was the production of an aerial space that could be exploited. Much like the transfiguration of oceanic space “from a commons into the property of the Western state”⁷ in this period, the secularization of air in Enlightenment thought and visual culture turned the atmosphere into a measurable natural resource that reinforced the global flow of imperialism and capital.

Yet, just as wind increasingly became a tactical resource that propelled Europe’s global sea-borne aspirations, air lost its power in Western philosophy. “The forgetting of air,” Luce Irigaray reminds us in her meditations on breathing, occurred in Western metaphysics as philosophers confronted the viscous weight of the earth as the ground for life and speech.⁸ Irigaray’s subsequent encounter with theories of breathing in Hindu treatises allowed the feminist scholar to further sharpen her critique.⁹ Despite naïve essentializations — and much has been penned about the philosopher’s adulation of the purported “masters of the East”¹⁰ — Irigaray’s reflections nevertheless take on great urgency in the context of our current crisis. We could say that the rationalist computations of post-Copernican imperial sciences that made air into a quantifiable commodity has failed us. Perhaps Irigaray sensed this failure. Moreover, her interest in yoga and breathing was not facile; prana — usually translated as vital breath or life force — offered the feminist scholar the possibility of envisioning the breathing body beyond Europe’s phallogocentrism.

The slender body of late fifth-century Buddhist figures was, according to Kramrisch, an effect of transubstantiation that resulted as the vegetal, or nature, migrated into the male body. Unlike earlier Buddhist sculptures, the late fifth-century Sarnath Buddha was thus not merely an image of a corporeal male being. Rather, as a visualization of an embodied philosophy of the movement of air and life, the body was the “without when transferred into the within becomes identical there with the beyond.”¹⁵ Decentering the hypermasculine male body that had been naturalized in fin-de-siècle Europe, Kramrisch explored an art history that did not measure the sculpted form in phallogocentric terms. Even though recent scholarship has suggested that the earliest datable evidence of the suksmasarira practice — that is, practices based on moving breath or prana along the internal channels of the body — appeared only in the seventh or the eighth centuries, Kramrisch’s imagination of the Buddha’s body as nature itself had a specific and undeniably inventive resonance in the canons of art history.¹⁶

A Jewish émigré with a doctoral dissertation on early Buddhist art from the University of Vienna, Kramrisch was well aware of late nineteenth-century fetishizations of the hypermasculine male body in Europe and its subsequent misappropriation in Nazi Germany.¹⁷ In 1921, the year Adolf Hitler was confirmed as chairman of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, Kramrisch had migrated to India to teach art history at the poet Rabindranath Tagore’s school in Santiniketan. Although Kramrisch had escaped from Europe almost two decades before Zyklon-B gassings were carried out at Auschwitz, she would have undoubtedly been acquainted with the cult of the hypermasculine male body in interwar Germany that glorified classical Greek ideals of male virility. Hans Suren — a German military officer who joined the Nazi Party in 1933 — had, for instance, published in 1926 a wildly-popular book, Der Mensch und die Sonne ( Man and Sunlight), that conjoined nudity and exposure to air and sunlight as essential to the well-being of the Volk.¹⁸ Suren, as scholars have noted, “was fascinated by the classical body of Ancient Greece and his efforts to retrieve this ‘lost’ physicality (as depicted by classical sculpture) resonate throughout Man and Sunlight.”¹⁹ A potent concoction of Nachtkultur or naked culture, the atmosphere’s therapeutic properties, and the purported beauty of classical Greco-Roman sculpture underwrote Suren’s expositions. This is perhaps best illustrated in the cover of Der Mensch und die Sonne, where we see the painting of a nude muscular man, probably the author himself, turning toward the sun (Figure 4). From Suren’s eccentric propositions in the mid-1920s to the Nazi usurpation of the Greco-Roman past in the 1930s, it was a direct course. This, on the one hand.

On the other hand, Kramrisch, a strong supporter of India’s anti-colonial nationalist movement, had to contend with the idealization of “Greco-Buddhist” sculptures from the Gandhara region in northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan in colonial art history, archaeology, and Indology (Figure 5). European archeologists such as James Fergusson and Alfred C. A. Foucher had proposed that the origin of the Buddha image “was the consequence of India being brought into contact with the Western world,” and that the task of the scholar was to unravel how “the arts of the Western world exerted their influence on those of the East.”²⁰ The colonial tenor of such an endeavor was evident; the aim was to underwrite the first burst of largescale art production in the subcontinent as a derivative discourse rather than the product of a cosmopolitan global trade that connected the Mediterranean world to East Asia. It is in this intersecting milieu of the celebration of the Hellenic male body in both Weimar Germany and imperial art history that Kramrisch turned to precolonial philosophies of breathing to visualize the transcendent body in the colony. By underscoring the significance of the visualization of breathing practices in shaping figural representations of the Buddha’s body, Kramrisch argued that the “toughness of the body” of early Buddhist sculpture had been distilled to its “purest plastic essence” by the fifth century in north India.²¹ The move away from the Gandhara Buddha’s markedly muscular body in the fifth century, Kramrisch claimed, occurred because of an awareness of bodily modulations achieved through yogic breathing. Her aim was to sever art history in the colony from imperial superlatives of the purportedly flawless European body, itself imagined through fictive homologies with classical Greco-Roman sculpture.

Today, propelled by the uneven distribution of resources and the immense violence of neocolonial corporations and states, thinking through the political ecology of air and breathing has accrued a different urgency. It is within this context that Kramrisch’s mediations too gather new texture: the imagined intimacy between yogic practices and the aesthetics of the sculpted body makes visible how the act of breathing became a locus of political struggle in the early twentieth century, in turn linking art history to struggles over subjectivity and agency. The decolonizing impulses that Stella Kramrisch, among others, bring to bear on art history then allows for a reimagination of sovereignty as breath. In the process, air becomes both a genealogy and a methodology to deracinate the Eurocentrism that still haunts our discipline today.