The Visual Genealogy of 'I Can't Breathe'

As an invited participant to the Harvard Radcliffe Seminar Infinitude: Ad Coelum, this lecture considers how the image can address how the violence inscribed into bodies designated as 'other'. At stake is the phrase 'I Can't Breathe' and its echoes through centuries of oppression. The potentially reparative role of the image is imagined from within the work of RaMell Ross and Ana Mendieta. At the same time, the kind of breathing identified by Fanon as combat breathing, or Mbembe's breathing in common, might lead to an aesthetic commons of breathing.