If we are suffocating from the reproduction of the same knowledge, of the same meanings, forms and categories, this is because we keep looking at the outside. This is the message Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is whispering in our ears and bodies with his book Hydrojustice. Against the stagnant vertical narratives, such as colonialism, capitalism, rampant consumerism, patriarchy and human supremacy, there is hydrojustice. An imperative invitation to be immanent in our experiences and critique, to not look at the outside, at what is different from us, but instead to constantly shift perspectives. ‘Hydrojustice’, writes Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ‘is already here, around us’. It is not a solution to an issue of injustice, or a call for action, but it is a call for adaptation. This immanence belongs to a certain understanding of the aesthetic dimension of law. As Desmond Manderson stressed, the division between law and …, the juxtaposition, the next to, reminds us of an outside, while an aesthetic dimension implies that aesthetic is already in the law; it is not something to know, but a way of knowing. Therefore, hydrojustice is a way of knowing, an ‘immanent movement’.
Because of this sharp change of perspective, the book is without a doubt a glittering, vivid, heady and fundamental piece of legal theory able to create a new methodology in legal research. The reader is confronted with myths, personal memories and academic theories in a never-ending, refreshing dip in different types of literatures, theories of justice and intimate experiences. Hydrojustice shows us the power of language, of imagination and of narrative, demonstrating the immanence of law. In the book, fluidity, horizontality and imaginations finally take a definitive meaning in legal research, where hydrojustice is the palindrome (p. 3): being at ease with both identity and difference.
In this sense, the most compelling aspect of the book is the introduction of a completely new methodology in legal studies. I find it hard to criticise the book, because I see the richness and boldness of it also in the fact that it can be read by both a legal academic audience, and other publics. The intimacy of personal memories becomes a normative narrative that directs the thought toward literatures inspired not by a strict legal theoretical framing, but by the normativity of the personal and intimate narration, or vignette. This allows the author to build on literatures that are interdisciplinary, such as the blue turn literature in humanities and social sciences. Within this new liberating method, this book is a powerful performative and normative act itself. Pushing toward a boundless direction, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos challenges old structures and resistances. Against walls of distant beliefs, he proposes a theory of justice that is new in form, methodology and geometry. However, because of this push, a critical note here might be good. As in every attempt to set new boundaries and paradigms, here too there is the potential for confusing the reader. The author doesn’t deliberately set out a rigorous new methodology or a structured theory, and doesn’t explicitly declare that it is not an academic book. If many scholars who work at the intersection of different fields might find this way of narration illuminating, audiences belonging entirely to academia or entirely to another world might find it hard to decipher.
Written mostly in Venice, the book belongs to an aquatic world to come, that is already here, that is something to ‘aspire to, a condition to cherish’ (p. 2). Water is the predominant element in Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s book and theory. It is present in the myths and figures that he chooses to tell (Hydra, jellyfish); it is present in the cities that he tells us about (Venice, Thessaloniki) and in the personal stories he shares. Water is the tool he uses for thinking about justice. In this sense, the structure of the book is one of its most captivating aspects. It is thought perfectly to feel the immanence of hydrojustice; once the reader starts reading the book, she is already in water. The author is telling us that we must ride both crest and trough (p. 125). Water constitutes and unites all bodies, human and non-human, this is why justice is always defined in relation to it: hydrojustice. Bodies of water are attracted to each other, and they flow in a continuum and a rapturous pace. ‘Being water of water, entails confluence and admixture, but also taking one’s distance, withdrawing from one another, and even coming to conflict’, writes Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, building on Derrida’s concept of aporia. The path to hydrojustice, the road to adaptation, is then performed in five chapters. The first, Hydra, is the hydrojustice manifesto; the second is the imperative horizontality: Be water; the third is Water in Water, a continuum toward the fourth chapter, which is the rupture: Water Becomes Difference. The last chapter, the Wavewriting, is finally the subscription of the contract, the ultimate performative gesture. In each chapter the narration is led by stories, symbols, myths. This autobiographical framework triggers a spatial materiality and attracts the attention of the reader on multiple levels: emotional, theoretical and practical. Hydrojustice starts from material everyday scenes.
These powerful intimate glimpses are the legal consciousness of hydrojustice. In one of these first vignettes, the reader dwells in the author’s childhood dream of a window open to the sea, ‘where the water would be a welcome guest in one’s living room’ (p. 4). However, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos informs that his house never had that direct view, and he always had to look at the sea from the second and third row, and his access was always framed from other people’s windows. This memory contains the two core concepts of the book: the continuum and the rupture (p. 18). On the one hand, there is the continuum with other bodies, and on the other, we have the ruptures of this continuum and the emergence of the individual body. This means a constant negotiation: the attraction and the desire for other bodies, and their individuality. The memory goes on: ‘I visited the houses of better located friends and family, but on those rare visits when yearning was satisfied, I found myself becoming restless, embarrassed, even afraid’ (p. 5), and so the reader begins to enter the world of bodies of water. Being bodies of water entails confluences, but also taking one’s distance, withdrawing from one another and even coming to conflict. Hydrojustice emerges when bodies position and reposition themselves along one another (p. 20).
This movement happens on the surface, where there is another personal vignette that shows us the way: ‘what I did not know when I first visited Venice, is that the canals remain surprisingly shallow. Even when the green, algae-coloured water seems to be concealing fathoms, the canals, given the right water condition, are barely 150 cm deep’ (p. 21). Even if the city is sinking, the complexity of it remains on the surface, it is the horizontality of the surface, suggests Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, where the ‘depths rise and mingle’. The book is an invitation to stay on the surface. The surface is where we can see bodies, garbage and pollution. Horizontality has no horizon, no verticality. In here, hydrojustice, incites the author, renders everything a surface of emergence
Horizontality is the opposite of verticality. Similar to the satirical novella by Edwin Abbott Abbott Flatland, here too geometry is crucial to understanding violence in civil society’s hierarchies. In the world of hydrojustice, this horizontality is even stronger. Another vignette portrays the danger: ‘In my early thirties I spent most summers on a tiny Greek island of the Ionian Sea. It was so tiny that is hardly featured on the map. […] It had no store of any kind. Significantly, there was only one taverna’ (p. 29). On this island, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos felt ‘the freest he ever felt’, and promised to himself that as soon as a second taverna opened, he would stop going. The imposition of a choice, as the representation of the first step into verticality, he says, would be the end of freedom. Hydrojustice demands that humanity move away from it. In this movement there is the realignment of ourselves with horizontality. The author urges us to move like water and find our way around the surface. It is an invitation to become water. It is the palindrome. Be water encourages us to stay on the surface, away, for example, from capitalist investment in fossil fuels, extractive economies, enduring colonialism, exploitation and environmental violence (p. 46).
Be water, be horizontal; it also means fluidity. The book, in these terms, seems to the writer an exhortation to observe, rather than to absorb. To be, as legal scholars, more ethnographers, to be conscious of our horizontality, proximity and fluidity, as Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos explores. Regarding this, his memory of Venice acqua alta – high water – becomes an experience of hydrojustice (p. 37): ‘The water would not just spread from the banks of the canals into the city. There was no movement from the lagoon into the streets. Rather, the whole city became a strainer. […] Water springs all over almost at the same time, commanding a completely different spacetime, a much slower walking speed, a light diffracted everywhere, a soundscape of gurgles and sloshes, a city of galoshes’ (p. 38). The power of the book lies in the ideas that this urban surrealism is also hydrojustice. The story of the acqua alta is not only an ecological alarm. The porosity of the story says more. Floods, droughts, pollution and extreme weather phenomena, are not the only issues of hydrojustice, says Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos; hydrojustice refers to every issue, from geopolitical conflicts about territory, through financial slumps, to feminicide.
Horizontality, fluidity and immanency are the constant reminder of the power of hydrojustice. The struggle to create no inside, nor outside. Like the image of the jellyfish, that the author portrays to us as the symbol of immanency: ‘jellyfish absorb and store oxygen in their gelatinous bell. In yet another show of immanence, jellyfish contain their life environment within, even though their transparency allows us to literally see through them so that there is no inside. Jellies pull the outside waters within, allowing a continuum to give them life’ (p. 71).
In this immanent emergency, within these intimate stories, the book performs its normative potential with the wavewriting of a contract into Hydrojustice. A contract by and among A, B, C and C*, all bodies of water, hereafter referred to as ‘the waters’.
