Abstract

This essay probes the methodological contours of an (eco)critical practice centered on seawater as an analytical category. It queries how a focus on seawater as substance implicates the human and the geophysical in a bilateral process of mutual alteration and eventual amalgamation. I propose a “trans-material” ontology articulated around the corrosive power of seawater, through which organic and inorganic matters (in this argument, the disintegrating, submerged bodies of shipwrecked migrants in the Mediterranean and their ecologically ravaged, more-than-human deep-sea environment) commingle. Reading the process of human dissolution under the influence of seawater alongside the alteration of the marine environment that it causes reveals the reciprocal agency of material bodies, be they biotic or non-biotic. Rescripting matter, all matter, in agential terms productively erodes Anthropocentric models at the root of theories of the Anthropocene. By emphasizing human/more-than-human assemblages, the seawater epistemology that I propose delineates an immanent, multi-scalar form of being-in-the world—an ontology of dissolution premised on loss and decomposition that reveals other definitions of the human beyond the dictum of exceptionalism and the destructive acts that are perpetrated in its name.

摘要

本文探讨了以海水为分析范畴的（生态）批判性实践的方法学轮廓。它质疑如何将海水视为实质牵连着人类和地球物理之间的相互改变和最终合并的双边过程。我提出了一种围绕海洋的腐蚀性力量而提出的“跨物质”本体论，通过这种本体论，有机物和无机物（在这种论点中，是地中海沉船移民的瓦解，淹没的尸体及其生态遭到破坏的，比人类更多的深渊）。 -海洋环境）混合在一起。读取人类在海水影响下的溶解过程以及其引起的海洋环境的变化，揭示了物质体的交互作用，无论它们是生物的还是非生物的。用物质的术语来描述物质，无论是物质还是物质，都有效地侵蚀了人类世代理论的根基，即以人类为中心的模型。通过强调人类/超越人类的组合，