Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Andreas is Professor of Law & Theory at the University of Westminster, London, and Director of The Westminster Law & Theory Lab. He is also an artist working with photography, performance, text and installation. And a fiction author with work published in various languages.
Andreas has read Law in Thessaloniki, Greece, as well as in other European cities. He completed his LLM at King's College, London, and his PhD at Birkbeck College, London.
Andreas's research interests are radically interdisciplinary and include critical legal theory, autopoiesis, philosophy, ecophilosophy, object-oriented ontology, theology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, geography, art, and their critical instances of confluence. He has published in the above areas.
He has permanent professorial affiliations with The Copenhagen Business School, Centre for Politics and Philosophy, and the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, IUAV, Venice.
He is Doctoral Research Director, the Staff and Graduate Students Research Seminars Convenor.
Address: School of Law
University of Westminster
4-12 Little Titchfield Street
London
W1W 7UW
UK
Andreas has read Law in Thessaloniki, Greece, as well as in other European cities. He completed his LLM at King's College, London, and his PhD at Birkbeck College, London.
Andreas's research interests are radically interdisciplinary and include critical legal theory, autopoiesis, philosophy, ecophilosophy, object-oriented ontology, theology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, geography, art, and their critical instances of confluence. He has published in the above areas.
He has permanent professorial affiliations with The Copenhagen Business School, Centre for Politics and Philosophy, and the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, IUAV, Venice.
He is Doctoral Research Director, the Staff and Graduate Students Research Seminars Convenor.
Address: School of Law
University of Westminster
4-12 Little Titchfield Street
London
W1W 7UW
UK
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Books by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
For the first time, this book brings questions of justice into line with the current literature on water. Up to now, justice has been understood as an anthropocentric affair, with most existing theories accepting and reinforcing the division between human and nonhuman. This book builds on hydrofeminism, posthumanism, ecology, philosophy and the current Blue Turn in humanities and social sciences, and brings questions of justice to their core.
What the book proposes, however, is not simply an ecological concept of justice. Rather, through examples taken from current affairs, science and the art world, it attempts a radical recalibration of what justice is. The thesis of the book is that hydrojustice is already here, part of our planetary condition. But because it gets regularly buried under the debris of anthropocentrism, colonialism, extractivism and capitalist exploitation, it requires unearthing, in the double sense of revealing what has been hidden, and allowing earth to cede priority to the aquatic.
Spatial Justice presents a new theory and a radical application of the material connection between space – in the geographical as well as sociological and philosophical sense – and the law – in the broadest sense that includes written and oral law, but also embodied social and political norms. More specifically, it argues that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies – human, natural, non-organic, technological – to occupy a certain space at a certain time. Seen in this way, spatial justice is the most radical offspring of the spatial turn, since, as this book demonstrates, spatial justice can be found in the core of most contemporary legal and political issues – issues such as geopolitical conflicts, environmental issues, animality, colonisation, droning, the cyberspace and so on. In order to ague this, the book employs the lawscape, as the tautology between law and space, and the concept of atmosphere in its geological, political, aesthetic, legal and biological dimension.
Written by a leading theorist in the area, Spatial Justice: Bodies, Lawscape, Atmosphere forges a new interdisciplinary understanding of space and law, while offering a fresh approach to current geopolitical, spatiolegal and ecological issues.
The author redefines the traditional foundations of environmental law and urban geography and suggests a radical way of dealing with scientific ignorance, cultural differences and environmental degradation within the perceived need for legal delivery of certainty. ""
Niklas Luhmann: Law, Society, Justice is a critical description, and at the same time a performative inversion, of the theory of legal autopoiesis as developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. This theory is introduced here both in terms of society at large and the legal system specifically. As the basic operations and mechanisms of Luhmannian sociological analysis of the law are used as a platform on which the critical analysis of the book is erected, the work reveals the aporetic structure of autopoiesis. This aligns it with postmodern approaches to law as influenced by post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminist theories, contemporary philosophy and political theory. The main epistemological inversion is that, here, the systemic environment - whatever is not 'of the system' - becomes a space of critique and negation of the existing systemic structures, but only after its prior internalization by the system itself. Thus, through autopoietic processes, the environment advances from outside in, and in this transgressive performance, an autopoietic critique of the structure emerges. The book builds on this transgression and reconstructs the theory malgré soi on the basis of a paradox, where the observer is required to look outside the law in order to find an adequate description of the law.
Niklas Luhmann: Law, Society, Justice thus operates both as an introduction to the relevance of Luhmann's social theory for law, as well as a critical response to autopoiesis. "
Videos by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
In Greek with English subtitles
In this public lecture, Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos deals with airs and sounds and scents, while keeping an eye on the law. His field of enquiry is the concept of atmosphere, namely the interstitial area between sensory and affective occurrences. Atmospheres are legally determined. The law controls affective occurrences by regulating sensory stimulation, guiding thus bodies into corridors of sensory compulsion – an aspect of which is consumerism in capitalist societies.
This is achieved by allowing certain sensory options to come forth while suppressing others, something which is particularly obvious in cases of intellectual property protection that capture the sensorial. Andreas deals with atmosphere in its material, spatial manifestation and in particular through what he has called the ‘lawscape’, namely the fusion of space and normativity. He employs a broadly Deleuzian methodology with insights from radical geography, affective studies, object-oriented ontology, urban and critical legal theory, as well as animal studies.
Published Texts by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos