Planetary Madness: Globalizing the Ship of Fools

Abstract

Starting from the analysis of the anonymous nineteenth-century lithograph of an anarchic dockworker astride the globe (fig. 1) as a key for rethinking Allan Sekula’s Ship of Fools / The Docker’s Museum, the essay proposes an unfinished visual theory of planetary madness. Read not as a marginal illustration but as the latent ‘archon’ of Sekula’s archive, the image condenses the essay’s central claim: the classical allegory of the Ship of Fools, once tied to the crisis of the state and the irrationality of sovereignty, must now be globalized and relocated within maritime space, where the material infrastructures of trade, labor, risk, and circulation make visible the contemporary world-system.