Abstract
This essay is a commentary on the title and introduction as well as the first chapters of Carl Schmitt’s treatise Land und Meer. It follows the method of close reading and attempts to open up the sections of the text in question piece by piece and to reveal the discourses on which they are based. His cultural-anthropological considerations intersect with relevant philosophical concepts that were decisive for the first half of the 20th century, such as the rediscovery of the pre-Socratics’ theory of the elements, Bachofen’s mythical tale of matriarchy or the thesis of the self-culturalization of the deficient human being in the sense of Arnold Gehlen. From this combination, a narrative of modernity unfolds that replaces the old nomos of the territorial with that of a global dynamic. In this grand narrative, National Socialism, in the eyes of its “crown jurist”, would have been a desperate and doomed attempt to counter the onslaught of the maritime with the territorial one last time.