In this context, piracy – next to the slave trade (which one could also describe as the deportation industry), the foremost manifestation of a naïve globalization criminality – takes on a marked historico-philosophical significance. It is the first entrepreneurial form of atheism: where God is dead, or where He is not looking – in the region without a state, on the ship without a priest on board, on the lawless seas outside of the agreed zones of respect, in the space with no witnesses, and in the moral emptiness beyond the line – the unimaginable is indeed possible. The open sea has, at times, been the site of (almost) the greatest atrocities that can be perpetrated among humans.
At the same time, piracy established itself as an economic sector (comparable to the kidnapping industry of the twentieth century), resolutely settled in the security market's gaps between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. (Not without an aftermath at the turn of the twenty-first: in the light of recent events, some speak today of the ‘return of the pirate’, especially in the prey-rich waters of the Strait of Malacca and other zones in which an absence of naval policing gives a colourful new people of attackers free rein; in 2002, 350 hijackings were recorded worldwide, with a strong upward trend.1 Furthermore, chaotic maritime law provides ideal conditions for terrorist groups; it is no coincidence that Osama bin Laden and his ilk switched to the shipping business, where they maintain(ed) a considerable fleet of old freighters under exotic flags.) The corsair industry was so closely connected to regular business that Goethe could have his Mephistopheles present a theory of economic globalization that testifies to more than the barbed tongue of its speaker:
One asks the What and skips the How,
No need to know much navigation;
War, trade and piracy are one
Inseparable combination.2
The lesson of capture capitalism is a lasting one: the moderns conceive of the dangers of libertarian and anarchist disinhibition in terms of piratical atheism – the conservative phobia of partisans stems from this. The fear of innovators among the guardians of law and order, notorious since antiquity, changed during the Modern Age into the land-dweller's fear of the seagoing entrepreneur; for even if he wears a top hat and knows how to use a fish knife at the table, the pirate still lurks behind his exterior. Hence no terran can imagine without horror a state of the world in which the primacy of the political – which here means of mainland things – were no longer in force. For if the pirate goes ashore, what criminal plans is he carrying in his breast pocket? Where is he hiding his weapons? What enticing arguments does he use to advertise his speculations? What humanitarian masks does he don to hide his despicable intentions? When robbers appear in good company, their sophists – the advisers – are never far away. The citizens have been arranging their fears for two hundred years: in the best case, the anarcho-maritime figure on land becomes a Raskolnikov (who does as he pleases, but regrets it), in the less favourable case a de Sade (who does as he pleases and negates remorse), and in the worst case a neo-liberal (who does as he pleases and then, quoting Ayn Rand, proclaims himself a man of the future).
Piracy does, admittedly, influence bourgeois thought in a different way: from early on, it was idealized in the fantasies of the mainlanders as an alternative libertarian world in which anything was possible – except boredom. Centuries before the artistic bohemian world, the maritime one provided an inexhaustible supply of simulations for the dreams of ordinary citizens who wanted to be more than just citizens. In eighteenth-century engravings, female corsairs enter the stage – with cutlasses drawn and blouses open, their breasts bursting out – as if to prove that at sea, the new woman is a raider in her own right. Up to Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (1928) and Pasolini's Scritti corsair (1973–5), one can follow the criminal-romantic longing that sees the Great Freedom coming from the sea. Friedrich Schiller, in the sketches for his Sea Plays, also toyed with the idea of portraying the ‘floating republic of the filibusterers’. The author of The Robbers had to admit that buccaneers represented the more impressive counterculture.
In the figure of Captain Ahab, Herman Melville erected a monument to those who have fallen out of society, to the seafarers without return who spend their ‘pitiless old age’ on the outside – a monument that soars up to a higher and darker sky than any statue of liberty. Ahab embodies the Luciferian, lost side of European-American seafaring, indeed the whole night side of the project of colonial modernity. In psychological or microspherological terms, the evidence is compelling that the inner and outer double of the possessed seaman do not assume a personified form. The genius of Ahab's existence is not a spirit in the proximity field, let alone a lord on high, but rather a god of below and outside, an animal sovereign that appears from the deep and defies all appropriation – precisely that white whale of which the author noted in his etymological mottos:
‘This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.’
Webster's Dictionary
‘Whale. *** It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen; A.S. wealwian, to roll, to wallow.
Richardson's Dictionary3
Through its ‘rolling’ form, the whale appears to both its admirers and its haters as the epitome of a power that turns exclusively within itself in the sea's ominous depths. Moby Dick's grandeur represents the eternal resistance of an unfathomable life to the calculus of hunters. His white simultaneously stands for the non-spheric, homogeneous, unmarked space in which travellers will feel cheated of any feeling of intimacy, arrival or home. It is no coincidence that his colour was reserved by cartographers for terra incognita. Melville called white ‘a colourless all-colour of atheism from which we shrink’,4 because it reminds us of the Milky Way's white depth, of the ‘heartless voids and immensities of the universe’;5 it infuses the observer with the thought of their annihilation in the indifferent outside. Ahab's whale must wear this colour, as it symbolizes an exteriority that is otherwise neither in need nor capable of a manifestation. But if the outside should ever show itself as such, then:
the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.6
Almost a century before Sartre would let one of the figures in a play state that ‘hell is other people’, Melville had touched on a deeper foundation: hell is the outside. The disconnected modern point-individuals are scattered in this methodological inferno, this indifference of a space in which no dwelling occurs. It is therefore not, as the Existentialists claimed, only a matter of giving oneself a direction through a freely chosen commitment amid the larger senselessness; after the general exposure of humans on the surfaces of the earth and the systems, it is rather a matter of inhabiting the indifferent outside as if ensouled bubbles could achieve longer-term stability within it. Humans must bet that they will succeed – in the face of the shroud that covers everything external – in taking their relationships with one another in an interior to be created artificially as seriously as if no external facts existed. Couples, communes, choirs, teams, people and churches all try their hand at fragile spatial creations against the primacy of the white hell. Only in such self-producing vessels can the wilted word ‘solidarity’ be fulfilled in the most radical layer of its meaning: the living-arts of modernity aim to establish the non-indifferent within the indifferent. This creates inexhaustible horizons for projection and invention in the face of a geographically exhausted world.7
Perhaps the ‘free peoples’ of which the nineteenth century spoke – without realizing that it was thereby assisting the emergence of the modernized obsession collectives, the patriots with their demands for sacrifices – will only exist as associations of people who, faced with an actually universalized indifference, join forces anew in a manner vaguely anticipated by congregations and academies, but previously unknown.