EXCERPT [0.0] In The Drummer-Crab, Pierre Schoendoerffer’s great book of honour and the sea, a French Navy dispatch boat comes across a little sailboat, mid-ocean, that has been damaged by a hurricane yet managed to survive the terrible weather by heaving to. ‘A solitary sailor’, observes the fisheries officer. ‘Soon these guys will be the last real sailors…’. This provokes a severe and disdainful reaction on the part of his superior, who replies: ‘Sailors, real sailors, are those who make their living, their daily bread, on the ocean’. [0.1] There are those who go to sea to leave the world behind, to purge themselves of it, and those who annex the sea to the world, who make it as worldly as they can. A radical division—a departure—between sailors as seen by the fisheries officer, a seaman, and as seen by his superior, first and foremost a military man. This division is such that, in splintering the notion of the sailor, it extracts a point that can be used to break with the world itself, to tear its fabric ‘from end to end’, as Guy Lardreau says, ‘where the eye of the saint can make out a dotted line’; it establishes the solitary sailor as gnostic, as point zero of an anti-philosophy.…