The Concept of the Maritime, or How to Decolonize the Uncolonizable with Hegel and Coleridge

This essay interrogates the maritime as a concept and principle of colonization in Hegel’s philosophy of history and seeks to interrupt this imperializing logic with an alternative conception of the maritime from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner . Examining the sea as history in Hegel and as archive in Coleridge, I argue that, for the latter, the maritime is no mere object of conquest, but throws the human back upon herself and discloses an unexplored psychic landscape. I suggest that we take this moment of indirection in Romantic knowledge production and re-embody it. The sea cries out for conceptual decolonization. This would require the emergence of a new collective spatial consciousness, one that pauses to ask when and where to acknowledge the limit of the mind.