There are those who go to sea in order to quit the world, to purge themselves of it, and those who annex the sea to the world, making it as worldly as they can…. Over a decade ago, Gilles Grelet left the city to live permanently on the sea, in silence and solitude, with no plans to return to land, rarely leaving his boat Théorème and never for more than a few hours at a time. An act of radical refusal, a process of undoing one by one the ties that attach humans to the world, for Grelet this departure was also inseparable from an ongoing ‘theorroristic’ campaign of anti-philosophy. Like François Laruelle’s ‘ordinary man’ or Rousseau’s ‘solitary walker’, Grelet’s solitary sailor is a radical theoretical figure, herald angel of an existential rebellion against the world and against philosophy’s world-thought, point zero of an anti-philosophy as rigorous gnosis, and apprentice in the herethical practice of sailing. As indifferently serene and implacably violent as the ocean itself, devastating for the sufficiency of the world and the reign of semblance, this is a lived anti-philosophy, a perpetual assault waged from the waters off the coast of Brittany, amid sea and wind.
Documents Paths of the Sea: On Approaching Gilles Grelet’s Theory of the Solitary Sailor Robin Mackay