From Space R ight to State R ight
The creature bound by water is a creature in vertigo. I t dies at
each instant; something of its substance is constantly colapsing.
<sup>-</sup> Bachelard
AN ENGLISH CARTOON from the nineteenth century shows Bonaparte and Pitt cutting chunks out of an enormous globe-shaped pudding with their sabers, the Frenchman taking the continents while the Englishman claims the sea. This is another way of parceling out the universe: rather than confronting each other on the same terrain, within the limits of the battlefield, the adversaries choose to create a fundamental physical struggle between two rypes of humanity, one populating the land, the other the oceans. They invent nations that are no longer terrestrial, homelands in which no one could set foot; homelands that are no longer countries. The sea is open, the joining of the demos and the element of freedom (of movement) . The "right to the sea," it seems, is a particularly Western creation, just as, later, the "right to air space" will be the element in which Air Force Marshall Goering dreams of installing die fliegende nation, the Nazi demos.1 "Every German must learn to fly . . . Wings hang dormant under men's skins." Watching the launch of the first rockets, Hider, who feels military defeat coming, tells Dornberger,
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