Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos Research Articles

Rethinking the Law: Discussing Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos' Spatial Approach to the Law

Rethinking the Law: Discussing Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos' Spatial Approach to the Law

A highly charged field: Mapping energies, currents and desires for reform in Canadian expert responses to drug law

While many experts consider major changes to legal approaches to drug use necessary, achieving such change has proven to be difficult. The political process is often seen as integral to bringing about change, largely due to orthodox understandings of the ‘nature’ of law, in which law is made by parliaments and capable of revision in only limited instances. In recent years, theorists such as Bruno Latour (2009, 2013), Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2015) and Serge Gutwirth (2015) have taken a more expansive view of the nature of law and its effects. According to these theorists, law also emerges from outside the political process, including through various practices such as those of professionals working within legal systems, and those engaged in resistance, navigation and subversion (Seear, 2020). This article explores these processes using Karen Barad's (2015) work on lightning. As we will explain, Barad presents lightning as a ‘queer’, non-linear, uncertain and indeterminate phenomenon, using it to understand causation in new ways. Along with Barad's ideas, the article draws on interview data (N = 35) collected for two research projects in Canada. These interviews were conducted with senior drug use-related policy makers, service providers, advocates and lawyers based in British Columbia and Ontario, Canada. The interviews explore how key Canadian experts view drug law, debates about law and policy and whether they support reform. We also explore how these experts navigate the criminalisation of drugs and whether any insights can be drawn from their practices, including their attempts to navigate, subvert or change the law. First we consider experts’ concern about current prohibitionist legal frameworks, finding it widespread, along with appetite for change. Second, we examine experts’ accounts of strategies used for working around or challenging punitive frameworks. We find that change, like lightning, is complicated and messy; simplistic approaches to changes are not always possible, and may in fact make matters worse. There are multiple, unpredictable effects in engaging and resisting law, and thus difficulty in tackling criminalisation in any clear and simple way. Practices and processes of responding to and resisting drug-use criminalisation can thus be understood in terms that reflect the ‘queer’, indeterminate, unpredictable and multidirectional nature of Barad's lightning. In concluding, we note that this way of understanding legal processes and resistance has implications for the future of Canadian drug policy, including debates about whether it is possible to work within a framework of overarching criminalisation.

The Ordinary Affects of Law

The article examines the affective dynamics of law in the everyday. It insists upon the importance of ‘the background’ for thinking about law. In the everyday cut and thrust of daily life, law tends to fade into the background. It becomes unobtrusive, functioning from the background by structuring the capacity to act. In other words, it functions affectively. Key to law’s functioning is its ability to also move out from the background in certain crucial moments. In this it becomes obtrusive, taking centre stage in such a way that its former position in the background becomes imperceptible. The movements from background to foreground and back again are essential to begin to grasp the manner in which law functions with and through affect. Using the work of Kathleen Stewart, Hans Lindahl and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos the article insists upon the importance of the affective dynamics of law. Developing the idea of nestled affects helps us to understand the movements from background to foreground.

Space, Law, and Justice in Leibniz: Leibniz as a Theorist of Spatial Justice

This article argues that Leibniz should be viewed as a predecessor of the idea of spatial justice and that Leibniz's heritage remains a valuable source for inspiration and critical reading of the contemporary literature on spatial justice. The article first demonstrates interdependency between Leibniz's conceptualisation of space and his conceptualisation of law and justice. This is the first time that this argument is made in relation to Leibniz, therefore significant space is devoted to justifying this argument. The article then proceeds to comparing Leibniz's views on space, law and justice to one of the most “spatial” contemporary articulation of the idea of spatial justice, namely that proposed by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. The article concludes by pointing out some aspects of Leibniz's thought that are most valuable for the further study of law, space and spatial justice in contemporary scholarship.

Book review: Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Victoria Brooks (eds), Research Methods in Environmental Law: A Handbook (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham 2017) 608 pp.

"Book review: Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Victoria Brooks (eds), Research Methods in Environmental Law: A Handbook (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham 2017) 608 pp." published on Mar 2019 by Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.

The Limits of Critique and the Forces of Law

Three recent publications evidence a growing interest in critical jurisprudence with materiality, technology, affect and atmosphere. These approaches pose fundamental challenges to existing traditions within legal critique, spurning a focus on the ideology of legal reasoning and exploring instead the unique practices through which the law binds subjects through material, affective and atmospheric manipulations. Through either Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s ‘lawscape’ or Kyle McGee’s ‘jurimorphs’ these innovative theoretical projects pluralise the ‘forces’ which account for the law’s normativity, disavowing the notion that such forces can be reduced either to a transcendental form (like sovereignty) or to notions of structural or symbolic violence. These approaches address a ‘democratic deficit’ in legal philosophy that has generally excluded the realm of the material in its theorising and allows us to attend to the multiple forms that allow for the passage of law.

Atmospheres, inside and out

Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces, Tonino Griffero. Farnham: Ashgate (2014). 174 pages. Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (Space, Materiality and the Normative), Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. London: Routledge (2014). 277 pages. Elements of Architecture Assembling archaeology, atmosphere and the performance of building spaces, Mikkel Bille, Tim Flohr Sorensen (Eds.) London: Routledge (2016). 444 pages. The theme of atmospheres within philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory has developed steadily over the last two decades. Inspired part by the philosophies of Gernot Bohme and Hermann Schmitz, the area of research has become a focal point for studies on the intersection between materiality and affectivity, embodiment and culture, and perception and sense. We are now at a point this atmospheric turn where networks devoted to the topic are appearing alongside a prolific emergence of publications concerned with the manifold dimensions of atmospheres. Yet despite--or because--of its prevalence, the idea of atmosphere remains decidedly elusive. An atmosphere, as philosopher Tonino Griffero, tells us his systematic study of the concept, is both everywhere and nowhere. Moreover, an atmosphere has a peculiar quality of being that which is often overpoweringly in the air (to use a phrase that will return time and again what Griffero calls atmospherology) whilst at the same time resisting rigid analysis. Prima facie, a strong part of the appeal of the concept of atmosphere is its very fuzziness. Atmosphere is a liminal concept; it belongs neither to the subject nor the object, it is neither fully present nor entirely absent, rather it sifts between these divisions, undercutting any attempt at fixing polarities place. This much we already know from everyday discourse. An atmosphere can refer to anything ranging from a room to a political climate, from a person's presence to the feel of a city. In aesthetic and affective terms, our language extends from the mood of a film to the affective resonance of a monumental event. Furthermore, atmosphere has a peculiarly excessive quality to it; a word, it cannot be constrained, at least not easily. To speak of the atmosphere of a room is to speak of a dialogue that takes place between the inhabitant of the room and the spatiality itself, while at the same time registering how an atmosphere exceeds that liaison between subject and object. Gernot Bohme offers a compelling summary: [A]tmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and yet they are something thinglike, belonging to the thing that things articulate their presence through qualities--conceived as ecstasies. Nor are atmospheres something subjective, for example determinations of a psychic state. And yet they are subjectlike, belong to subjects that they are sense bodily presence by human beings and this sensing is at the same time a bodily state of being of subjects space (Bohme, 1993: 122). These three volumes under review, each important their own right, offer a series of illuminating perspectives on the paradoxical aspects of atmosphere and its broader conceptual landscape. Together, each text assumes a distinct perspective on atmosphere, with a joint sense of divergence and convergence between them. Griffero's book is emblematically phenomenological approach; his aim is to undertake nothing less than a thematic and ontological study of atmosphere, outlining its salient and invariant structures. In sharp contrast, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos's book is mindful of phenomenology's contribution to the topic of atmosphere, but ultimately he is opposed to such a stance. Indeed, his project differs radically from Griffero's seeking to burst the bubble of atmospheres, accenting its seductive propensity to draw us inwards. Bille and Sorensen's collection adopts a different perspective altogether. …

Interrupting separateness, disrupting comfort: An autoethnographic account of lived religion, <i>ubuntu</i> and spatial justice

This article uses a fictionalised encounter as the basis for an autoethnographic exploration of the intersections between the South African social value of ubuntu and the notion of spatial justice. Ubuntu describes the interconnectedness of human lives. It asserts that a person is only a person through other people, a recognition that calls for deep respect, empathy and kindness. Ubuntu is expressed in selfless generosity and sharing. The spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities has resulted in a concern with the relationship between space and justice. It recognises that space is not simply an empty container in which people live and act, but is something that is constructed by social relations – and simultaneously constitutive of them. While this recognition gives rise to spatial perspectives on justice, what constitutes spatial, justice, as distinct from other notions of justice, and how such justice is to be achieved are contested. Building on the work of legal scholar, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, on spatial justice, I argue that the notion of ubuntu is able to shape our understanding of spatial justice, and when practised, it is able to disrupt space and challenge dominant spatial configurations.

Just Gardens? On the Struggle for Space and Spatial Justice

This article discusses the public park as a garden of justice: at once a concrete, geographical place and a more intangible space constituted by struggles between different spatial definitions. The case of the article is Ørstedsparken, a public park in the centre of Copenhagen which is a wellknown homosexual cruising site. In recent years, the municipality has cut down vegetation in the park in order to regulate and/or prevent cruising. The article proposes that this targeting of homosexual cruising in the park may be a surrogate way to impose heteronormativity upon those who fall outside of this norm. It is further suggested that exposing the men who retreat to public parks to have sex may be a way to reduce the insecurity which, according to the writings on spatial justice by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, comes with the transient nature of space.

Law and Ecology: New Environmental Foundations – Edited by Andreas Philippopoulos‐Mihalopoulos

Law and Ecology: New Environmental Foundations – Edited by Andreas Philippopoulos‐Mihalopoulos

Absent Environments: Theorising Environmental Law and the City. By ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS

Absent Environments: Theorising Environmental Law and the City. By ANDREAS PHILIPPOPOULOS-MIHALOPOULOS