Terra, Mare, Razza: Cartografie decoloniali, counter-mapping e Linee abissali

Carl Schmitt’s distinction between «land and sea», which he took as an expression of two visions of the world in conflict and irreducible to one another in the modern political order, is considered in this article by looking at some of the questions that decoloniality has raised in recent times. By taking a «coloniality» viewpoint, the article establishes an analogical link between the horizon of biopolitical unboundedness of the sea and a «colonial space» conceived of as an inert land, a place of exclusion and radical excess alongside the new European nomos. Moving beyond the polarity between land and sea, the structural bond that has long both united and separated modernity and coloniality permits us to trace a historical co-implication between race and plunder, conquest and limpieza de sangre, an economy of salvation and an economy of ethno-salvation. This article proposes a complex idea of historical process accounting for diachronic and internal developments within Europe as well as external and coextensive developments outside.