In “A Hymn to Tethys: Chronofabulation and the Emptiness of Ancient Oceans,” the intimate connections between the human encounter with the sea in its various moods and phases, the experience of the passing of time on a human scale, but also on the geological and cosmic scales of deep time, and our propensity as a species for fictionalizing or fabricating as a way of orienting ourselves through language and imagery in the face of mortality and loss, areas explored through a (...) theory-fictional or ficto-critical narrative based around the concept of chronofabulation. Chronofabulation on one level is here concerned with the use of philosophically oriented storytelling as a form of time travel, in which the ocean is both a constant thematic background and a central character in the story, whilst on another level it is about divination – or divine dissipation – as a kind of philosophizing; an understanding of the divinatory process that is also, in the senses considered here, a prolegomenon for an oceanic materialism. In using a theory-fictional approach to time and the sea, this paper is responding to recent critical thinking on the consequences of post-critique in the theoretical humanities as a route to investigate and test out new ways of deploying literary-philosophical immersion to navigate Nietzsche’s “new seas,” which for him were, and from this perspective are for us now, the truly open seas of a future beyond the inherent nihilism of modernity. In doing so, and in terms of methodology, it takes seriously the idea of treating theory and literary-philosophical discourse in the form of a kind of graphic novel, but a graphic novel without any images, on the assumption that readers will supply their own images and visual and contextual continuities as they read, and in doing, so engage directly with the oceans and their philosophemes as revealed in the process of reading and writing as chronofabulation. (shrink)

When Freud described the “oceanic feeling” of intimated plenitude that haunted the boundaries of consciousness he both intensified a post-enlightenment aesthetics that imagined the beyond of civilization is female, fluid, and undifferentiated and gave modernist poetics a theory of an almost unthinkable serenity beyond the limits of identity. European Romanticism and modernism, for all their differences, operated largely with the assumption that being a subject required abandoning an original maternal plenitude. In The Deep, Rivers Solomon provides a counter-oedipal politics and (...) aesthetics that affirms a difference and intensity in the depths of history and the sea, taking life and difference beyond the binaries of male/female and nature/culture. (shrink)

In this geophilosophical exercise where I don’t start from the subject vs. object relation, my aim is to explore the watery worlds within us. Could we write on the waters within and outside of us, beyond phenomenology, and distill a materialist “liquid geometry of life” from the water as it flows? How does this lead to streams, currents, or “ways of water” that unfold into a space that is livable, that gives rise to diverse communities of humanoids (not only blue) (...) and their more than human allies? Exploring rivergrounds, the seagrounds, and the oceangrounds, respectively, inspired by Michel Serres, Karatani, Glissant, but even more by Egyptian, Greek, and (post)colonial writings, I explore the histories of water and us. And how they flow into the present. Which are the waves of thought that bring us together? (shrink)

Following the lead of Michèle Le Doeuff in generalising the figure of the amphiboly in her reading of Kant’s maritime digressions in the course of his Critical opus, my essay departs from this basis to look both to philosophy and literature (with minor digressions into photography and cinema) in order to examine images of the human species in acts of immersion, traversal and exit from the sea, as well as installation on land (and on the island in particular) in a (...) range of texts. My own oscillation (largely albeit not exclusively) between literature and philosophy may be summarised in the term amphibiologies, within which lexical unit itself lie latent amphibolies of both philosophical and grammatical significance. (shrink)

This piece begins with the author’s epiphanic experience with a glacier, Perito Moreno, Southern Patagonia, and follows a journey of fascination for the edifying power and majesty of ice, as not just a metaphorical demonstration of the laws of thermodynamics, but argued as the clearest presentation of the material processes of legality itself. Most lucid when understood as a border phenomenon and a form of edgework within international law, where water meets land, and melting ice reveals the unravelling of sovereignties (...) as climate change alters sea levels, shipping routes and coastlines; capturing singular moments in entropic aesthetics of legal bifurcation in frozen phase states also are offered as a key method of understanding geo-legal movements. Following from the work of Walter Benjamin and historical materialist scholar Esther Leslie, processes of ice formation and degradation offer “dialectics at a standstill.” This is made possible through forms of entropic aesthetics, and methods of artistic research that reveal a percolating nature of sovereignty, and the petrification of legality. Combining legal pluralist understandings of law, with those of art historical and practice-based research, Susan Schuppli’s evidentiary art and the “material as witness,” is suggested as an exemplary way of identifying and bringing presence to the entropic processes of law, and the legal processes of entropy. Fictional scenes and speculative sketches are woven throughout the text to bring its variant phase states to life. Images and paintings from and prompted by the visit to Perito Moreno are added to the body of writing as emergent beings bearing witness throughout the piece. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with a critique of law that is seagoing: it unpacks notions such as a “seagoing pact,” the metaphor of the “cord” or the idea of “bringing the oceans to the court.” Touching on main questions in the field of the blue humanities, this paper makes a case for Michel Serres’s distinguished contribution through his philosophy of law, in which the sea plays a vital role both on a structural and metaphorical level. At the core of this (...) analysis is the intersection between the model of fluidity and a concept of boundary, encompassing both natural and legal limitation. It aims to specify how Serres’s work on nautical metaphors and his philosophy of law come together via his topological approach, especially evident in The Birth of Physics, Rome, Geometry, The Natural Contract, Atlas, and Hominescence. Following his narrative, topologically conceived limits can be understood as inclusive and symbiotic, broadening an understanding of limits as merely exclusive and parasitical in nature. The expression “sound judgment” will be used to make sense of a philosophy of law which brings “listening” to an ethical-legal level and therefore combines environmental justice with sensibility. (shrink)

Akin to flotsam washed up by the sea, this article combs through what it calls a “molecular configuration” comprised of bits of Paul Valéry, Jean Grenier, Albert Camus, René Char, Martin Heidegger and Georg Trakl as an exercise in “tidal thinking.” Conflict, mainly in the form of war, makes its presence felt throughout, as does the haunting prospect of the irreversible climate crisis.

This paper contributes to the idea of “marine materialism.” Specifically, I argue that the marine drama of the sun moving over the sea sheds light on the human act of knowing as a performative and material process. I do not argue that we should think of the sea as a metaphor, simile, analogy, or metonym for human knowledge. Instead, I want to show that the connection between ontology, epistemology, and the marine drama is a relation of scale. That is, I (...) want to show that the marine drama iteratively performs in its own way what human knowledge and the cosmos do at different scales. I do this through a close reading of the first three stanzas of the French poet Paul Valéry’s, poem “Le Cimetière marin” (“The Marine Cemetery”). (shrink)

This paper charts the story of Karst, a sea cave which is exploited by the human sex hormone industry for the secretions that emerge upon its walls, whilst adumbrating some of the ways in which caves have been perceived in the history of philosophy, from Plato to Irigaray to the Xenofeminist Manifesto and beyond. The etymology of the “endocrine” produces some surprising overtones: the Proto-Indo-European root *krei- meaning “to sieve” and thus “discriminate, distinguish,” is hypothetically derived from the Greek krinein (...) (to separate/decide/judge), krinesthai (to explain), Latin cribrum (sieve), crimen (judgement, crime), cernere (to sift, distinguish, separate), Old Irish criathar, Old Welsh cruitr (sieve), Middle Irish crich (border, boundary), Old English hriddel (sieve). Rather than prisoners eternally fixed in one position, what if we were to imagine a meeting of two or several mercurial characters inside a sea cave conceived not only as the hystera as in Luce Irigaray’s formulation, but as the swirling of a thousand chemical entities orchestrating the “hundred sexes” that bloom from Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminist Manifesto? What would the spatial quality of this sea cave be like? We know that the synthetic procuration of certain hormonal levels to procure certain physiological states is fundamental not only to processes of gender modification (both sanctioned and unsanctioned by legal and medical professions) but the entire “pharmacopornographic regime,” in the words of Paul Preciado. The machinations of the hormone industry and the symbolic overdetermination of the cave as the maternal feminine point to the possibility of what I suggest here could be called “endocrine feminism.” The connection between endocrinology as the study of hormones as chemical messengers in the body and a process of separation, decision or discretion leads us to a new conception of the “staging” of the cave. Through several stages of karst development, this paper dramatizes the cavern of the “endo-crine” and the internal rumble of discussion perceptible within its depths. (shrink)

This special issue of Angelaki sets out to curate a range of literary and philosophical perspectives on how the sea is currently thought, felt and theorized across the theoretical humanities. Drawi...

Tee-ar-r-r! Tee-ar-r-r! rattled the tern1There is nothing more important on this planet than the sea. Nothing, that is, more important for our species at this juncture in our development as a speci...