BEING AND THE SEA:FOR AN ECOLOGICAL EXISTENTIALISM

CORINE PELLUCHON

(PUF, 336 pages, 2024)

Foreign rights: German (Verlag C.H.Beck), Spanish (Herder Editorial) rights already granted and under option for Italian 

Corine Pelluchon’s abundant and inventive body of work is characterized by her constant concern to link her conceptual work to the crises of our time.

In her new volume, Being and the Sea, she calls for a reversal of the entrenched perspective—“The rigidity of the earth remains the fundamental metaphor on which Western metaphysics has been built”—by proposing a new ecological existentialism recentered around the omnipresence of the oceans embracing the continents of our “blue planet.” By revisiting the “solid ontology” of Jean Paul Sartre and most ecological thinkers, she calls for a “liquid ontology” that would mark a break from the terrestrial and territorial mindset responsible for the overexploitation of the ocean, the domination of nature, and wars based on an ideology of rootedness.

“What,” she asks, “changes in the way we think about people, politics and ecology when we take into account the oneness of the ocean, its precedence over the earth, and recognize its importance for our survival? What can we learn from the living beings that live there, and how can we stop exploiting the sea as land, dividing it up and treating it as a mere resource and the site of unbridled economic and military competition? What do the images associated with the sea (which is both a nurturing mother and an abyss, evoking desire and creation, but also destruction and self-destruction, madness and the unconscious) reveal about the abyss that is the human being?”

In this ambitious book weaving together theoretical originality and poetic sensibility, Pelluchon pursues her highly original philosophical journey, inviting poets and writers, philosophers and oceanographers to help incite and guide us in overcoming our own terrestrial patterns and images­—setting out to sea.

Corine Pelluchon is a philosopher and professor at Gustave Eiffel University. She is the author of some twenty books, in which she develops a philosophy of corporeality that emphasizes our vulnerability and dependence on nature, the elements, and other living beings. In 2020, she was awarded Germany’s Günther Anders Prize for Critical Thinking for her body of work. Her recent publications include L’espérance, ou la traversée de l’impossible (Rivages, 2023), Paul Ricœur, philosophe de la reconstruction: Soin, attestation, justice (PUF, 2022), and translated in English, Nourishment: A Philosophy of the Political Body (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Rationalism: Another Reason, Another Enlightenment (‎State University of New York Press, 2015).