Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

Law's Spatial Turn: Geography, Justice and a Certain Fear of Space

This is a critical reading of the current literature on law and geography. The article argues that the literature is characterized by an undertheorization of the concept of space. The focus is either on the specific geography of law in the form of jurisdiction, or as a simple terminological innovation. Instead, the article suggests that law’s spatial turn ought to consider space as a singular parameter to the hitherto legal preoccupation with time, history and waiting. This forces law into dealing with a new, peculiarly spatial kind of uncertainty in terms of simultaneity, disorientation, materiality and exclusionary corporeal emplacement. The main area in which this undertheorization forcefully manifests itself is that of spatial justice. Despite its critical potential, the concept has been reduced by the majority of the relevant literature into another version of social, distributive or regional justice. On the contrary, if the peculiar characteristics of space are to be taken into account, a concept of justice will have to be rethought on a much more fundamental level than that.

Spatial Justice: Law and the Geography of Withdrawal

While spatial justice could be the most radical offspring of law’s recent spatial turn, it remains instead a geographically informed version of social justice. The majority of the existing literature on the subject has made some politically facile assumptions about space, justice and law, thereby subsuming the potentially radical into the banal. In this article, I suggest that the concept of spatial justice is the most promising platform on which to redefine, not only the connection between law and geography, but more importantly, the conceptual foundations of both law and space. More concretely, the article attempts two things: first, a radical understanding of legal spatiality. Space is not just another parameter for law, a background against which law takes place, or a process that the law needs to take into consideration. Space is intertwined with normative production in ways that law often fails to acknowledge, and part of this article is a re-articulation of the connection. Second, to suggest a conception of spatial justice that derives from a spatial law. Such a conception cannot rely on given concepts of distributive or social justice. Instead, the concept of spatial justice put forth here is informed by post-structural, feminist, post-ecological and other radical understandings of emplacement and justice, as well as arguably the most spatial of philosophical discourses, that of Deleuze–Guattari and the prescribed possibilities of space as manifold.

The Suspension of Suspension: Settling for the Improbable

Abstract Using Amélie Nothomb’s Stupeur et Tremblements, a novel that appeared in 1999 and shook the waters of the francophone literary world, this article analyzes the relation between love and law in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. In order to “fulfill” love, which is defined here more in the form of caritas and justice than erotic love, one has to suspend the legal, since the relation is one of mutually exclusive circularity. For this, the author engages in a critique of Derrida’s “Force of Law, ” pointing to the omission of the circular and the internal from Derrida’s analysis of the relation between justice and law. To address this, inspiration is drawn from Luhmann’s ideas on love and law and the notion of suspension of suspension is introduced, which is defined as the perpetual possibility of internalized ignorance of the external other, whether the dyad refers to ethics and faith, law and love, or self and amorous subject.

Withdrawing from atmosphere: An ontology of air partitioning and affective engineering

The main objective of this text is to warn against atmospherics. However comfortable it might appear, an atmosphere is politically suspicious because it numbs a body into an affective embrace of stability and permanence. It becomes doubly suspicious because a body desires to be part of the atmosphere. For this reason, I rethink both affect and atmosphere ontologically rather than phenomenologically. I argue that an atmosphere is engineered by subsuming individual affects to what I call, following Sloterdijk, an atmospheric glasshouse. I suggest that this happens in four steps: a distinction between inside and outside through partitioning; inclusion of the outside inside; illusion of synthesis; and dissimulation. In order to do this, I begin with air as the elemental paradox of ontological continuum and rupture. I carry on with the passage from air to atmosphere while retaining the discourse around continuum and rupture. Finally, I indicate a way of rupturing the atmospheric continuum through the ontological movement of withdrawal from the atmosphere. The ultimate goal of the article is to sketch a problematic of atmospherics that puts together without synthesising an elemental ontology of continuum and rupture.

From Space Immaterial: The Invisibility of the Lawscape

This article aims to interrogate law’s ambivalent relationship with urban space. It deals with the paradoxical relation between law and the city, visibility and invisibility, materiality and abstraction, and polis and metropolis. It builds on previous work on the lawscape, namely the priority of invitation by law or the city to be conditioned by the other, and expands this line of thought towards a more tangible understanding of visibility and its mutual constitution with invisibility. We believe that spatialisation is a relevant avenue for law’s (re)conceptualisation because it moves away from a description of humanism based on the universality of subjectivity, and paves the way for a particularised and material description of law’s multiplicity that specifically addresses law’s social positioning. This inevitably leads to a dematerialisation of space and the reinstatement of circularity between concreteness and abstraction. Inspired by some of the themes addressed by the contributors in this issue, we begin constructing a vocabulary of lawscaping, where law and urban space are brought together in an epistemological embrace that targets and eventually questions the solipsistic way in which the two of them have been conceptualised so far.

Mapping utopias: a voyage to placelessness

I have a map which indicates clearly and beyond any doubt the way to Utopia. I start the journey with a survival kit of paradigmatic egalities, noumenal legalities, and nervous ideals. However, the more I move into the uncartographied space, the more I realise that my survival kit is changing, to the point of becoming porous and permeable. The journey to Utopia is condensed to a log of phenomenological bracketing, where the immersion to the Lebenswelt equals the loss of oneself, and where the descent from the Transcendental to the Natural proves to be as meaningful as the escalating bracketing from the Natural to the Transcendental. The negation of Utopia (ou-topos) displaces not only my Utopia but also my egocentric quest for identity: the ‘I’ becomes ‘me’ before it vanishes, space becomes place, intentionality turns back to itself and retraces its path. The more I approach my destination, the more negation devours distance. When I finally arrive to the designated point, where, according to the map, lies Utopia, the only thing I discover is a map, identical to the one I hold, that indicates, clearly and beyond any doubt, the way to Utopia.

The Movement of Spatial Justice

Spatial justice is a much-commented but little-analysed concept and practice. After a brief critical analysis of the origins and current positions of spatial justice, this text attempts a definition of spatial justice as corporeal movement across spatiality and temporality, and in relation to other bodies moving in the same way. This stripped-down and deceptively simple definition allows spatial justice to be understood not as some solution to regional politics of representation or resource allocation, but as the major geopolitical issue of our time, with relevance stretching to forced population movements, environmental issues, territorial disputes, minor urban incidents, even seats in a concert hall. La giustizia spaziale e un concetto e una pratica molto utilizzata anche se ancora non sufficientemente analizzata in letteratura. Dopo una breve analisi delle origini del concetto, l’articolo cerca di offrire una definizione di giustizia spaziale come un movimento corporale attraverso spazialita e temporalita, in relazione a altri corpi che si muovono nello stesso modo. Questa definizione apparentemente cosi semplice permette pero alla giustizia spaziale de essere concettualizzata non solo come una possibile via di uscita per conflitti di politica regionale o di disparita nell’accesso alle risorse, ma per analizzare alcune delle questioni geopolitiche piu importanti del nostro tempo, con una rilevanza che si estende dai movimenti migratori, all’ecologia, dai conflitti territoriali, agli incidenti urbani minori, fino a come gestire chi ha diritto o meno di sedersi a teatro.

Suspension of Suspension: Notes on the Hybrid

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s chapter is a programmatic chapter in that it tries to map the following chapters of the volume while being mapped by them. It explains some of the basic tenets that this volume as a whole subscribes to with regards to hybrids, and consists a starting point (of agreement or disagreement) for the remaining chapters. At the same time, however, the chapter offers a way out of the current standstill of the discussion on hybrids by means of what Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos calls an actual hybrid, namely a desire to become other than oneself by paradoxically going deeper into oneself. If this is the definition of an actual hybrid, it follows that most currently called hybrids are nothing but renamed pre-existing connections. Indeed, the chapter offers a caution against the fetishisation of hybrids (which, counter-intuitively, only reveals a conservative societal obsession with the maintenance of purity), and an encouragement towards an actualised hybridity that will not operate in the service of the system, as it were, but as a space of critical resistance within. Actual hybrids are intense, often unbearable paradoxes that unsettle their environment and can never be co-opted by the system in which they emerge. In that sense, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos argues against the given knowledge of hybrids as deparadoxification machines. As he writes, “if we accept that hybrids mollify the pain of paradoxes, then systems will never be questioned, since their Achilles’ tendon will be safely deferred in continuously different subterfuges of supposed hybridity…Actual hybrids must both remain and retain the paradox.” Through a philosophical argument that employs Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Luhmann and Deleuze, the author constructs his concept of suspension as a mechanism of hybridisation. Suspension is self-suspension, containing both positive and negative values, both movement and stasis, both otherness and self-closure. An actual hybrid is a space of multiple resistance. Resistance to the conflation of institutional delusions of hybridity and the business-as-usual operation of the system; resistance against institutional illusions of hybridity that aim at resemiologising the boundaries of the system, thus making it more ‘democratic’, ‘accountable’, ‘open’; resistance to the rhetoric of change as a strategy of diversion from the unchanged structures; and resistance to the facile rhetoric of fluidity (movement, admixture) that attempts to present any reference to solidity (stasis, structure) as old-fashioned and ‘structuralist’. As such, a hybrid can only be a system that performs its self-suspension, that limits its power while indulging it, that resists itself and its colonising appetite. An actual hybrid is a preciously rare thing, and one worth aiming for.

Milieu, Territory, Atmosphere: New Spaces of Knowledge

The three concepts of milieu, territory and atmosphere are examined here as spatialisations of knowledge production sites. The methodology of the chapter is situated in the writings of Gilles Deleuze, as well his work with Felix Guattari. The chapter begins in the middle (the milieu), namely without introduction but immersed already in the high velocity of the knowledge milieu. The milieu of the volume is seen here precisely as the space of the middle, which resists centrality, origin or hierarchy. The various milieus organise themselves in a spatial formation that can be called territory, itself organised by the emerging notion of refrain, namely the creative motif that streams throughout the spatial/territorial formation of the milieus. Refrains are open to the new, constantly changing yet informing of a particular knowledge variation, risky in that they might dissolve in the new combinations in which they throw themselves, yet displaying an order which is consistent rather than hierarchical. With this, the text reaches the point of atmospheric diffusion of the refrain. Atmosphere is a creative practice needed in order in turn to create the right conditions for further creativity. The text ends with a self-observation of its three ‘passages’ (from individual to collective, from conscious to non-conscious, and within space) and their effects on the notions used.

Vulnerable bodies, vulnerable systems

In this paper we examine the concept of vulnerability as it relates to the materiality of systems, the exclusion of human physical corporeality, and social exclusion in Luhmann’s theory of social autopoiesis. We ask whether a concept of vulnerability can be included in autopoiesis in order to better conceptualise social exclusion and the excluded, with a view to understanding how, if at all, the dangers posed by this exclusion are mitigated by autopoietic processes. We are emphatically not returning to the human subject over operational systems, but seek instead to develop an understanding of the embodied nature of humans and their vulnerability within an autopoietic framework. We argue that the awareness of the risks to social functional differentiation posed by unmanaged exclusion – disenchantment, disassociation, and, most drastically, dedifferentiation – provided by our analysis indicates why hyper-exclusion must be mitigated.