Tempestuous Life: Ralegh's Ocean in Ruins

Certainely, as all the Riuers in the world, though they haue diuers risings, and diuers runnings; though they some times hide them-selves for a while under ground, and seeme to be lost in Sea-like Lakes; doe at last finde, and fall into the great Ocean: so after all the searches that humaine capacitie hath; and after all Philosophical contemplation and curiositie; in the necessitie of this infinite power, all the reason of man ends and dissolves it selfe.

—Walter Ralegh, The History of the World¹

Becoming Ocean

In the preface of Walter Ralegh's intended six volume magnum opus, The History of the World (1614), the author imagines his life as a tempest of misfortune, physical ruination, and inexorable time. A life and death meditation at the bleeding edge of contemporary biopolitics, including such concepts as Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, "the living dead," and Giorgio Agamben's "bare life,"² Ralegh's History begins, in derelict fashion, as a confession of his life's "dissability":

I confess that it had better sorted with my dissability, the better part of whose times are runne out in other trauailes; to have set together (as I could) the unioynted and scattered frame of our English affaires, than of the Uniuersall: in whome had there beene no other defect, (who am all defect) then the time of the day, it were enough; the day of a tempestuous life, drawne on to the very euening ere I began.³

From the beginning, Ralegh cancels the very prospect of his History, a history so massive as to extinguish the author's life long before the writing of it began. Ralegh's History is a history in ruins. In part, this essay argues, the problems arise from what Laurie Shannon and a host of other ecologically minded critics refer to as the "human exceptionality" of the term.⁴

History, Shannon argues, tends to be a narrative for and about personhood. Absent persons, there is no subject of history. Thus the efficacy or continuity of the term always seems to depend on the marginality of nonhuman agents. Yet as Ralegh proceeds from the altered states of his "dissability," in which the boundary between life and death seems little more than the dilation between day and evening, to the "frame" of "our English affaires," he imagines human history as itself "unioynted," as a "scattered" and disabling confrontation with the Earth's troubling liquidity: "How unfit, and how unworthy a choice I haue made of my self, to undertake a worke of this mixture; mine own reason, though exceeding weake, hath sufficiently resolved me. For had it been begotten then with my first dawne of day," Ralegh muses, "I might yet well haue doubted, that the darkenesse of Age and Death would haue couered ouer both It and Mee, long before the performance."⁵ This vision of life and death testifies not only to Ralegh's own waning health but also to the disabling force of "a worke of this mixture," a work in which human history—the history "of our English affaires"—dissolves into the deterritorializing flows of "Uniuersall" time, "beginning with the Creation."⁶ History undergoes a radical transvaluation, becoming a study not just of persons but of the whole world.⁷ In Ralegh's "Uniuersall" history, human activity collapses time and again into the sea, becoming a plane of immanence for life's forces to reconfigure.⁸ As the human civilizations that Ralegh details over nearly three thousand pages move steadily toward destruction, Ralegh reminds the reader that just as all the rivers of the Earth must end in the "great ocean," so "after all the searches that humaine capacitie hath," including Ralegh's own ill-fated searches, "in the necessitie of this infinite power, all the reason of man ends and dissolves it selfe." History becomes ocean, and only the ruins are left to attest to man's ending.

Biopolitics at Sea

I begin with Ralegh's History of the World with an eye toward reframing such biopolitical factors as Ralegh's "dissability"—a term that animates paradoxically life and...