The politics of landscape: space, displacement, and territory

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between landscape and territory, proposing that landscape be understood as a deterritorialized experience of the Earth in which semiotically structured spaces disorient and individuated bodies dissolve. Drawing on Deleuze’s notion of the telluric image, I argue that landscape is not mere scenery but the incorporeal plane of composition from which difference and becoming arise against the rigidity of structured space. As both experience and expression, images of the Earth reveal its power as place and habitable space, exposing landscape as a problem in act and a fundamental aesthetic concept. Ultimately, the telluric image emerges as an affective rupture: a moment when the terrestrial destabilizes territory, displaces ground, and reconfigures subjectivity.