Dalle geografie terracquee alla Wet Perspective: scie e onde del Mediterraneo Nero

Abstract

Beginning in the modern age, with the progressive conquest and discovery of the 'Outside', the sea became the leading element in the processes that have marked living in the sphere from then on (Sloterdijk, 2008). Although subject to mutations in time and space, the assumed terracqueous perspective moves away from the exclusivity of terracentrism towards a recognition of the centrality of the space of the sea. A space, on the one hand, that has become central to the production and reproduction of capital through accumulation and exploitation; on the other hand, a social, cultural, political space from which emerge the possibilities of breaking its structures of domination, power, hierarchisation. This contribution aims to explore the terracqueous perspective in the space of the Black Mediterranean, a space whose mobility is governed by the necropolitics of contemporary geopolitics, but also by resistances, conflicts and counter-narratives. This perspective will be investigated through a strand of trans-disciplinary studies that has recently turned its gaze towards the sea. In geography, Peters and Steinberg (2015) have posited the need to think with the sea through the exploration of a 'wet ontology'. The production of a discourse imbued with water would not only allow us to escape from a debate too long restricted by territorial limits, but also to reconceptualise our geographical understandings. The sea thus presents itself as the space that allows us to understand and re-imagine a world made up of flows, connections, liquidity and characterised by continuous mobility through its waves. Reversing Carl Schmitt's perspective (1974) according to which "Auf den Wellen ist alles Welle" - on the waves everything is a wave - we intend here to reflect on the waves as liquid elements that, in their continuous breaking, can erode the sea as a space for the hierarchies of capital, to make it instead a space for the production of new politics, new spatialities, new representations.