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Chapter 13. Reconnecting with the “great outside”? On the inside.

What is the great Outside? It is the great Inside? Maybe? As Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung quotes M. NourbeSe Philip: “We begin life in a propositional relationship with breath: someone breathes for us.”1 Is the great outside an illusion? The ontological sphere which cannot be grasp yet only understand through human subjectivity (as stated by Kant)? Or is it the final signified the “mother” the “woman” or the “feminine” which allows every human being to breath first inside to enter then the (great) outside? 

“I breathe” as Ndikung writes “is semantically complete” but, “its completion would not be possible without that original, prepositional act of breathing for.”2

Breathing seems to be the perfect materialization of the Kantian correlationism as noted by Quentin Meillassoux.3 Alenka Zupančič sums up Meillassoux argument as follows: 

“It consists in showing how post-Cartesian philosophy (starting with Kant) rejected or disqualified the possibility for us to have any access to being outside of its correlation to thinking. Not only are we never dealing with an object in itself, separately from its relationship to the subject, there is also no subject that is not always already in a relationship with an object. The relation thus precedes any object or subject; the relation is prior to the terms it relates, and becomes itself the principal object of philosophical investigation. All contemporary (post-Cartesian) philosophies are variations on philosophies of correlation.”4

This means after Kant no one can truly ever know something about something else which is not ultimately correlated to the subject. Therefore, a great outside – unknown and ungraspable – lies in front of the subject. Or as Zupančič smugly narrates: 

“Since Descartes we have lost the great Outside, the absolute outside, the Real, and have become prisoners of our own subjective or discursive cage. The only outside we are dealing with is the outside posited or constituted by ourselves or different discursive practices.”5

Breathing undergoes such a narrative as it inverts the situation. As breathing is always already propositional the relation of mother and child regarding breath seems to be fundamentally prior to every object. But regarding an object-oriented Philosophy this is a problematic statement because the Kantian “thing-in-itself” becomes ungraspable if one only looks at the relations the objects or things have.6 To the mother as well as to the child as object (in the ooo’s perspective) there is a “non-relational core”7. And “objects act because they exist, rather than existing because they act.”8

I tried to look at breathing as an object as well as an object-oriented practice of understanding. Now I have to relocate my thoughts regarding the relationality of breathing as breathing for as prepositional and propositional connecting the great Inside with the great Outside signified through child and mother. This is a very problematic connection which echoes in poetry like Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Das Buch der Bilder” (The book of images). There the male poet becomes the mediator between the world trough implying that the “the woman” is the signifier of the great outside. Simultaneously “the woman” is also the signified and becomes the main addressee of the male poet’s words. For something said at all the male poet has to merge “the woman” and the great outside to become the speaker of the great outside. 

“Nur die Mädchen fragen nicht,

Welche Brücke zu Bildern führe;

Lächeln nur, lichter als Perlenschnüre,

die man an Schalen von Silber hält.

Aus ihrem Leben geht jede Türe

In einen Dichter

Und in die Welt.“

And

„Mädchen, Dichter sind, die von euch lernen

Das zu sagen, was ihr einsam seid;“

These verses from „Von den Mädchen“ (literally “Of the girls”) shows the relation between gilrs, the male poet and the outside world. The girls do not ask (fragen nicht) which bridge leads to the images (welche Brücke zu Bildern führe). They have a direct connection to the images (of the world). So, they represent the subject which is in touch with the world through aesthetic practice. A second aesthetic practice the one of articulation or speaking the world in poetic verses becomes a second stage access to the outside. Poets learn from girls to tell, what they are (das zu sagen, was ihr einsam seid). Therefore, the ontological status of “girls” becomes a relational as it is told by the male poet. 

But breath already produced such a circle of ontology and relation and represents such a hermeneutic circle as Ndikung wrote. Nathaniel Mackey emphasizes the breath as constituted part of poetry as developed by American poets of the 1950s and 60s like Alain Ginsberg who wrote “each line of Howl is a single breath unit. … My breath is long—that’s the Measure, one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath.”9

A practice which can be compared to Klopstock’s practice of rhythmic writing10. But for the 1950s and 60s poets the breath is not only the matter (as sujet) or material of the poem but also what gives the lines meaning. Breath designates the notation and the performance of poems11. But it will not always be performed like that, because breath is a scarce resource. 

For me I want to use such ideas of breath to deconstruct the idea of connecting to the great outside through the signifier “woman” or “girl” as well as to form a hermeneutical practice which is related to the breath as the poets relate their writing to it too. Dark hermeneutics is both deconstruction of breath discourses and breathing as a practice of interpretation. Breath connects us to the great outside because we were already connected on the inside through breath. Breath is an object to theory and poetry as well as a relation. Through breath one can understand words as objects (in the perspective of OOO) and radically as “things-in-themselves” regarding Derrida’s notion of différance between signifier and signified. 

But it also remembers Eric Garner’s last words “I can’t breathe”12 and the discourse of black poetry regarding “Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks that it’s been brought into alignment with in recent months, ‘We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.’”13 The poetry and usage of breath is part of black culture and I don’t want to take that away for using it as a theoretical tool. I don’t want to decorate myself with this relation or appropriate what is not mine. I want to learn and listen to the breath.

“Jazz recourse to circular breathing thus animates a mixed-emotional, mixed-messaging traffic, a clandestine circulation of breath rotating between utopian intimations of assured, everlasting pneumatic amenity and a sirening alarm at the precarity to which breath, especially black breath, is subject—triumphalist and agonistic both, a boastful exulting in breath and a dystopian struggle for it, not to mention the gradations and the qualifications in-between.”14

And:

“Black music says, as does an allied, radically pneumatic poetics, that breath, especially imperiled breath, matters.”15

M. NourbeSe Philip asks: “Are there wider theoretical and possible therapeutic implications to breathing for someone and allowing someone to breathe for you? Further, how do the prepositional modifications change these implications—is breathing for the same as breathing with or instead of?”16

“Riffing off Arendt’s theorizing of natality,” M. NourbeSe Philip writes, “this process of shared breath, strength, and dependency becomes useful as a model of community and connectedness in a more female-centered, embodied, symbolic universe.”17

I hope, that thinking about breath and hermeneutics will also develop in a female-centered direction not as stated through the poetry of Rilke as the signifier of the great outside, but as the mode of understanding poetry without referring to a great outside, without a need to find meaning in only by being a man using woman to understand the world. 

  1. Ndikung 2021, 61 []
  2. Ibid., 62 []
  3. Meillassoux 2014 []
  4. Zupančič 2017, 73 []
  5. Ibid., 76 []
  6. Harman 2018, 256 []
  7. ibid. []
  8. Ibid., 260 []
  9. as quoted by Mackey 2018, 4 []
  10. Menninghaus 1989 []
  11. Mackey 2018, 5ff. []
  12. Ibid., 13 []
  13. Ibid. []
  14. Ibid., 17 []
  15. Ibid. 18 []
  16. Philip 2018, 31f. []
  17. Ibid., 36 []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Martin Bartelmus (October 21, 2021). Chapter 13. Reconnecting with the “great outside”? On the inside. Dark Hermeneutics. Retrieved July 19, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ngwz


By Martin Bartelmus

Martin Bartelmus is a Postdoctoral Scholar of German Literary, Media, and Cultural Theory at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He studied German Literature, Philosophy, Political and Social Studies at Julius Maximilians University Würzburg and received his PhD in Media and Cultural Studies as part of the DFG graduate program “Materiality and Production” from Heinrich Heine University. His PhD-Thesis is entitled Cultural Born Killer: Poetics of Killing around 1900. Before joining the department of German Literature at Heinrich Heine University for his current postdoctoral position, he worked as a curator for the Museum of Natural History of the Benrath Palace and Park Foundation and as a freelancer for the Julia Stoschek Collection. He is interested in Animal and Plant Studies, killing in literature and film, French theory, Object-Oriented Ontology, and literature without humans.

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