The snoring man on the train, just behind and to our left, revolts us. Their noise is more penetrating – more cutting – even though it is lower in decibel than the irritating child a few seats in front with their high pitched and hyperactive voice testing the patience of the father figure accompanying them. The snoring man is filthy in his activity, that rasping breath, that grasping for life calling out to be silenced – and with its silence comes death. The sound of the breath is a broken tool that reveals its function, its equipmentality as Heidegger would call it, precisely by being heard. That filthy, contaminating breath, no gentle rythmn of life but a crushed, rushing in-out-in-out intimacy that brings the Other too close, too far within the experience of living together that repulses us within our modernity, repulses us because of its forced confinement amongst each other.
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