Addressing ‘Maritime Aphasia’ in International Relations

Abstract This article introduces the notion of ‘maritime aphasia’ in International Relations (IR) to foreground the ocean ontologically and conceptually in the discipline. Maritime aphasia relates to IR’s theoretical limitation whereby the political significance of the sea is acknowledged but filtered through non-oceanic concepts, thereby lacking its positivity as a constitutive element of the international. To investigate why and how maritime aphasia developed, we build on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. We propose an ontology of the maritime domain beyond its material constitution and in terms of desiring-production. We theorise on the ocean as a desiring-machine and claim that maritime aphasia has an emotional dimension that relates to the repression/perversion of the unbearably abundant flows of desire enabled by oceanic machines. This generates an affective attachment to transcendent signs that totalise and elusively deprive the sea of its ontology through mechanisms of subjectification. We illustrate this by tracing the origins of IR back to repressions of desiring-production in the early views of the international. These we investigate by critically engaging with Carl Schmitt’s concept of nomos, which, as we suggest, indicated the emotionally charged Eurocentric discourses of the international from which IR as a discipline emerged.