Planktos Press

“Planktos” (πλαγκτός), the Greek term from which the English term “plankton” derives, refers to drifting or wandering. Plankton drift with currents, winds, and tides. These ecological forces also shape where and how plankton act as a generator of food for ocean life, and of the oxygen we breathe. Each plankter reflects the ocean structure that it inhabits.

Planktos Press broadens this insight. Just as the activity and identity of the plankter is enacted by what is beyond the individual plankter itself, our publications regularly explore the idea that what we call our “own” or “personal” thoughts, actions, and identity, are actually the products of impersonal structures, and never originate with, nor occur because of, ourselves individually. To drift, to wander, is to encounter yourself.

By applying this logic to how every particular thing (not just human) is constituted by what is differentiated from it, Planktos Press participates in a structuralist philosophical tradition that blurs the distinction of presence versus absence.

What does that mean?

This concerns the examination of how any thing (such as a human, material object, idea, moment in time, etc.) is produced by, rather than is independent from, what might seem to be different or distinct from it. How is a thing produced by what seems to be absent to it? When adopting this perspective we typically question whether anyone or anything has an existence or an identity outside relations to other things. Seeing the world in this way destabilises the certainty we might hold about having individual authority over our thoughts and actions. This view additionally blurs our understanding of where anyone or anything begins and ends.

By seeing us as embedded in a world of relations, Planktos Press likewise perpetuates a phenomenological philosophical perspective that counters the conceptual division of real versus representation.

What does this mean?

This posits that the mental experience we have of the world is not an individually or subjectively distorted, indirect representation of the world’s actual reality. Rather, our experiences of the world access the world directly. This is because every thought, every action, every thing, is the world, and exists as that world representing itself, to itself, through a form of itself (such as each of us). This has significant ramifications for art, for example, where in this view art does not simply represent the world, but instead is the world reflecting on itself through a particular form of itself.

Within these themes, Planktos Press also publishes original translations into English of select French language philosophical works.

Planktos Press functions from Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia.