By Wu Yi
Publisher: diaphanes
Date: 07/22/2021
Description:
The Sea as Mirror traces the repressed material and symbolic presence of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean from Plato to Heidegger, employing the maritime as a hermeneutic lens to understand the drive of philosophy as both response to and moment within the impetus of Western colonization. It examines how philosophy has constructed itself as a genre in opposition to the movement of deterritorialization and the fluidity of mimesis. It employs the method (“after” + “way, journey”) of a series of essayings (trial, attempt) across a geopolitical topography of discourses: fifth-century Athens, republican and early imperial Rome, Elizabethan England, enlightenment continental Europe and inter-war Germany of the twentieth century. Different representations of and responses to the maritime are offered through the reading of a philosophical text vis-à-vis a literary text to analyze and enact the deep political and moral ambiguity of the ocean in Western philosophical imaginaries.