Amphibious Zones and Planetary Justice:
Inter-Areal Studies as Dialectic of Land and Sea
G.S. Sahota, Associate Professor of Literature (UC Santa Cruz)
“Mediterranean Studies, Present & Future: The ‘California School’ Twenty Years On”: Round Table Statement
November 3-4, 2023
Statement/Essay
O Sicily, proud island, most beautiful in all the Oceans,
Like a beacon you stand on the ways of the water-desert.
Thus goes one translation of Muhammad Iqbal’s poem “Sicily,” originally published in 1905 and included in his first collection of Urdu verse Bang-e Dara (Call of the Bell, 1924).[1] A more literal translation would read: “You are the guide in the desert of these waters,” again mixing terrestrial and maritime imagery, with “guide” glossing rahnuma, or “one who shows the path (rah).” What is curious about Iqbal’s nostalgic dirge is its unusual transpositions: it brings two areal spheres, South Asia and Europe, into conversation on the Mediterranean; further, the poem brings the elements of water and earth together in mythical tension, marking thereby a possible horizon when they might harmonize of their own accord; and, in casting a net far into the medieval past to capture an image of a more just era – for Iqbal, an era characterized inevitably by Islamic hegemony – the poetic lament opens the question of planetary justice, a question which today cannot be conceived without wrestling with mythical elements all over again, mapping their spatial limits and asking what forms of justice might exist beyond them. The amphibian zone of Mediterranean Studies may serve as the most propitious staging ground of this poem’s images, geographies, histories, and elements. It is where they all coincide. It becomes thereby the mediating point between South Asian and European Studies (the spot where the two area studies fields meet and verge on their other). Moreover, Mediterranean Studies offers an arena where mythical elements jostle with each other, producing tensions that demand a program of planetary justice that by its nature exceeds the terrestrial and the oceanic. To engage with this set of problematics, I turn to the uncharted horizon of possibility indicated yet foreclosed by Carl Schmitt’s ambiguous, if not ambivalent, spatializations of the elements of earth and water in his two countervailing works Land and Sea (Land und Meer, 1942) and The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the “Jus Publicum Europaeum” (Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum, 1950). Schmitt’s regress to earth as the basis of legitimacy in Nomos after his explorations of other possible paradigms in Land and Sea have been seen as “an attempt to reinforce terrestrial boundaries against the open sea.”[2] That is, Nomos attempts to root Recht in the earthly element by force, foregoing options he was on the verge of articulating in Land and Sea. The paradigm of planetary justice involves breaking from this reactionary backtracking to earthly quarters. It entails instead a departure from the impasses of Schmitt’s spatial commitments in the direction of amphibian zones between disparate areal studies paradigms and within a distinct play of the elements.
Let us float away for the moment from Iqbal’s poem and his idealized image of Emirate Sicily and turn to the incongruities of the Nazi jurist’s major works on legitimate political spaces and their corresponding elements. In Nomos, as mentioned, the notion of legitimacy is forged on soil against the threat of a countervailing paradigm of the sea. It was this latter paradigm that Schmitt verged on articulating in Land and Sea while casting himself outward in exploration of the discontinuous spatial orders that emerge concomitantly with revolutionary historical shifts. England embodied a tendency toward that revolutionary paradigm. In breaking with the continent, England also broke out of terrestrial constraints and became fish-like. Uprooted, deterritorialized, and adrift, England “thereby won not only sea battles and wars but also something wholly other and infinitely greater, namely, a revolution, and, indeed, a revolution of the greatest kind, a planetary spatial revolution.”[3] This new “planetary feeling” for Schmitt decentered the metropolitan core of English civilization, for now its place could just as easily be anchored to Asian landmasses such as India, where a Queen Victoria could be crowned Queen Empress, and the Leviathan’s reins of power could be manned by a Jew such as Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Leaving aside the accuracy or credibility of Schmitt’s take on England’s maritime deterritorialization, what these developments signified for Schmitt was a total separation of land and sea that allowed the new imperial polity to mark a new totally undifferentiated space. Indeed, “the earth was now seen only from the perspective of the sea; the island, however, changed from a broken-off piece of the continent into a part of the sea, into a ship, or, even more significantly, into a fish.”[4] What Schmitt found so troubling was the amount of sway the new paradigm would have for “the great Leviathan has power even over the spirits and minds of humans.”[5] This oceanic paradigm of liberal justice with its purported openness to racial and geographical difference threatened to unleash a great leveling force within a purely spatial world that threatened to undo the centrality of England’s insular origins. Indeed, this space afforded no necessary hierarchization. The sea itself was turned into mere unbounded space. The whirl of these developments and Schmitt’s own exploratory mode in this work lure him into a possible alternative paradigm for thinking about legitimacy, justice, and right, one that would take the element of water and the zone of the sea as points of departure rather than that of earth and land. Instead, Schmitt reverted back to customary turf and adopted a terrestrial point of view in Nomos.
This regression to an archaic spatial paradigm with its idealized elemental stability took hold in Schmitt’s work long after the territorial basis for sovereign power had begun to falter during World War I. At that time other elements such as air were becoming fundamental. Though fully cognizant of these destabilizing developments, Schmitt chose to reestablish territoriality as the root of law, order, and justice. Against the grain of his own inklings he hoped that a new sustainable international order would emerge from a distribution of the globe among internally homogenous peoples tied to specific parcels of land. In Nomos, the sea is rendered lawless – “Auf dem Meere gilt kein Gesetz.” – and other mythical elements receive little attention.[6] What is most important for present purposes is the role the earth plays in Schmitt’s political mythology. It behooves one to review this fairytale-like topology. As the mother of the law, the earth offers up from her womb the notions of inner measure, firm lines, and solid ground that can support buildings and other edifices, all key for a notion of right (Recht). Schmitt grounds these concepts in an autochthonous etymology, taking recourse as usual to an ancient Greece furnished more by fable than history. For him, the Greek word nomos is the Ur-begriff or primal concept for all proper standards and rules. It has as its fundamental basis an original appropriation of land that is found “at the beginning of the history of every settled people, every commonwealth, every empire.” [7] Land appropriation for Schmitt constitutes the original spatial order, the source of all further concrete order and all further law. It is the reproductive root in the normative order of history. All further property relations – communal or individual, public or private property, and all forms of possession and use in society and in international law – are derived from this radical title. All subsequent law and everything promulgated and enacted thereafter as decrees and commands are nourished, to use Heraclitus’ word, by this source.[8] Taking recourse in his rhetoric to myth and pristine origins, Schmitt seems to have departed from reality altogether. Far from furnishing the grounds for a stable international order, Nomos saps the intelligence of the imaginative resources needed to confront his own contemporary world. With respect to our era, ravaged by climate change, Schmitt’s reactionary turn to the terrestrial would be droll if it did not align as it still does with authoritarian terra firma.
It is as if Schmitt had never known earthquakes, floods, or fires, as if the earth of his time knew only the serenity of milk and honey, [9] harboring no threat to human society whatsoever. More could be said on another occasion regarding the immanent possibilities of the mythic element of air, but for now it may be useful to point out how the sea too may be resuscitated and refashioned for thinking about planetary justice. For, obviously, the sea is crucial to Mediterranean Studies, indeed, to Mediterranean societies. The sea may have fashioned somewhat implicitly a notion of justice distinct from that of land. The iusticia marium – this imaginable justice of the seas – afforded respite from the arbitrary enclosures of landed power. As counterpoint to earthly limits and social constraints, the sea offers a sense of unbounded generosity and possibility crucial to any functioning of the law, for meanness is anathema, even corrupting, to its spirit. For the individual hounded by communal conformity, the sea is succor. Though the sea bears occasional storminess and admits of no permanent lines on its surface, it also knows pacific qualities crucial for the stability of the law. The predictability of the tides too renders the sea the requisite regularity necessary for legitimacy. Some of these contrapuntal qualities of the sea may be detected in Sharon Kinoshita’s keen observations in her “Negotiating the Corrupting Sea: Literature in and of the Medieval Mediterranean.” “Though the sea is the site of danger,” she writes, “it is nevertheless regulated by certain predictability.”[10] In the centuries-long circulating historical romance Callirhoe, the sea acts to drive pirates off course, or to send a favorable wind to the husband seeking madly for his abducted wife. Whereas Schmitt reduces the sea to the law of the fish by associating it merely with piracy, this is but one side with respect to the wider maritime connectivity of the Mediterranean, where “merchants, who come to trade, are simply the alter egos of pirates, who come to raid.”[11] Other tales such as Floire et Blancheflor attest to the confessional coexistence and even interdependence, crucial foundations for thinking of justice which have no presence in Schmitt’s Nomos. Kinoshita notes that in such tales “Mediterranean actors cycle through different roles and identities,” giving rise to a pluralistic perspectivalism among their audience, an essential quality for justice within multicultural societies.
In closing, we sail once again to Iqbal’s “Sicily” with its strange juxtaposition of water and earth elements, its mixing of terrestrial and oceanic imagery, ancient ruin and futural urging. His lament before the ruins of a more just world of the past may resonate beyond his limited religious outlook. The mixing of elemental metaphors may signal for our era that such mythemes remain inevitable, giving form to socio-political orders as if from scratch. Yet no one mythical element will suffice in the end for conceptualizing planetary justice. Hence the emphasis on the amphibian zone in this essay, which allows for the dialectical play of the elements in generative ways. This zone is capacious enough to overcome the terrestrial biases of area studies fields such as those put into dialogue in Iqbal’s poem. The notion of the sea may water these deserts to allow an oasis or two to serve as fructifying antidotes for the wastelands of terrestrial bias.
[1] Mohammed Iqbal, “Sicily,” trans. Saadath Ali Kahn, Poetry, vol. 94, January 1959, 233-234. A more reliable translation can be found in Mustansir Mir, Tulip in the Desert: A Selection of the Poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (London: Hurst and Company, 1990) 117-118
[2] Oliver Simons, “Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Rhetoric” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, eds. Meierhenrich, Jens and Oliver Simons (Oxford: Oxford, 2016) 797.
[3] Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Candor, NY: Telos, 2015) 47
[4] Ibid. 79
[5] Ibid. 76
[6] Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1950) 15.
[7] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003) 48
[8] Ibid.
[9] “And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey . . .” The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford, 1997) Exodus 3:8. It is ironic that despite his anti-Semitism, Schmitt takes recourse to Old Testament topology.
[10] Sharon Kinoshita, “Negotiating the Corrupting Sea: Literature in and of the Medieval Mediterranean” in Brian Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita, Can We Talk Mediterranean? Conversations on an Emerging Field in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (London: Palgrave, 2017) 39.
[11] Ibid. 41
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