Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

• LLB, LLM, PhD
• Managing Director at University of Westminster

Although somewhat marginal in relation to the other senses, smell is the most potent way of anchoring ourselves to the world. We subconsciously find our place in it by sniffing our body, the body of the one next to us, the room in which we are, the culture with which we are familiar. There is an incessant olfactory flow consisting of bodies, human...

“Veronese,” Gavin Keeney w/ Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Ilenia Maschietto, and Neža Zajc, Vesper: Journal of Architecture, Arts & Theory 8, “Vesper” (May 2023). “Architectural Parallax + The Wedding at Cana” is an “outtake” produced in advance of (or in the absence of) a performance-based project/installation proposed for the Palladian Re...

The water’s voice is tetchy, angry even. It is something to do with measurements and enclosures. Or perhaps with humanity in general. The water speaks to no one in particular. A gargling monologue about vastness and death, its exoplanetary itineraries and its chthonic hideaways, its elements and qualities, even its lack of voice. Even so, the water...

For the final year Degree Show at Westminster Law School, all final year students are required to produce a material artefact that reflects their understanding of law, justice, and their political and social responsibility as law students. In order to illustrate the process and use of this interdisciplinary assessment approach, we describe how we c...

Smell, like taste, manifests itself only when stimulated, making it hard to recall its effect outside that moment of direct exposure. Although often the ‘forgotten sense’, the olfactory is the most potent way of anchoring ourselves to the world. Nonetheless, it remains the most surpressed and downgraded of the senses, because it is closely related...

Hearing is an intricate but delicate modality of sensory perception, continuously enfolded in the surroundings in which it takes place. While passive in its disposition, it is integral to the movement and fluctuations of one’s environment. Always attuned to the present and immersed in the murmur of its background, hearing remains a situated percept...

Three movements that trace a certain understanding of law, from textual to spatial/material to spectacularised. The passages between the three movements are performed with the help of a visualisation that keeps on evolving, following the narrative of the legal understanding. This is accompanied by a thick description of instances from various itera...

The working document is the basis for an article subsequently published in Vesper in May 2023. The basis for the research was established in August 2021, with a performance in an old barn in Vermont, followed by photo-reconnaissance in Venice. Then a "full summary" was submitted to an architecture journal in the UK. They sent it out to peer review...

A estética jurídica está em uma travessia. Da questão estética tradicional da definição do direito para o estésico, ou seja, o sensorial, o emocional, o aspecto afetivo do direito. O direito encena a si mesmo tornando-se espetacular e responsivo às pressões sociais, sacrificando seu suposto mito de neutralidade por outro mito, o de valor popular. E...

Car-oriented transport infrastructure developments have had detrimental impacts on the public realm in terms of poor walkability and fractured leftover urban spaces. To build integrated transport infrastructure and public space systems with considering non-motorized travelers’ behavior, we present an integrated methodology incorporating an agent-ba...

The ethics of withdrawal before Covid is a show of a planetary collectivity, where we finally understand that our bodies are all connected, and that taking precautions in London will mean that more people will survive in the refugee camps or in the less developed world with more fragile health systems.

Described by Aristotle as the most vital of senses, touch contains both the physical and the metaphysical in its ability to express the determination of being. To manifest itself, touch makes a movement outwards, beyond the body, and relies on a specific physical involvement other senses do not require: to touch is already to be active and to activ...

The relationship between democracy and design has been the topic of significant discussion in the design community. It is also at the core of participatory design that relies on the principle of genuine participation. According to this, users are not mere informants but legitimate participants in the design process. A great deal of participatory de...

Law as commodity value is not a new position. The most easily recognisable forms of law (state law, private law, corporations’ law, etc.) have always been associated with an economic value. Law’s commodity value, however, is increasingly superseded by its affective value, namely law’s ability to stage itself and communicate to the world that itself...

This handbook sets out an innovative approach to the theory of law, reconceptualising it in a material, embodied, socially contextualised and politically radical way. The book consists of original contributions authored by prominent academics, all of whom provide a valuable overview of legal theory as a discipline. The book contains five sections:...

Prioritizing motorized transport infrastructure has had detrimental impacts on the urban public realm, in terms of poor walkability and underutilized public spaces. To build integrated transport-public space systems while considering the behavior of users, simulation models complemented by qualitative observations provide opportunities to build bet...

Doreen Massey, the iconic political geographer, whose book For Space has influenced the way various disciplines understand space, has largely ignored law in her work. In fact, just as most non-legal scholars she replaces law with politics. Here, I read Massey through law, arguing that often, non-legal writing is characterized by a misapprehension o...

ision traditionally occupies the height of the sensorial hierarchy. The sense of clarity and purity conveyed by vision, allows it to be explicitly associated with truth and knowledge. The law has always relied on vision and representation, from eye-witnesses to photography, to imagery and emblems. The law and its normative gaze can be understood as...

Taste usually occupies the bottom of the sensorial hierarchy, as the quintessentially hedonistic sense, too close to the animal, the elemental and the corporeal, and for this reason disciplined and moralised. At the same time, taste is indissolubly tied to knowledge. To taste is to discriminate, emit judgement, enter an unstable domain of synaesthe...

In July 2017, a team of researchers and practitioners came together to embark upon a month-long situated research residency based at Arebyte Gallery in Hackney Wick, East London. Connecting visual, digital and performance art practices with contemporary scientific research, law and urban design, the project – Crowd Control – explored the mechanisms...

Existing legal metaphors, even the predominantly spatial and corporeal ones, paradoxically perpetuate a dematerialized impression of the law. This is because they depict the law as universal, adversarial, and court-based, thus ignoring alternative legalities. Instead, there is a need to employ more radically material metaphors, in line with the mat...

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 vel...

This book introduces a radically spatialised approach to knowledge creation and innovation. Reflecting on an array of European urban and regional developments, it offers an updated notion of milieu as the conceptual and material space of knowledge and innovation in line with the interpretative turn in social sciences and humanities. In view of the...

Introduction: critical socio-legal engagements with systems thinking - Volume 11 Issue 4 - Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Thomas E. Webb

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,...

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 atmo...

If the human can no longer be considered central to the world, how is the question of knowing affected? How does one know when one is thrown into the box of the Anthropocene, where being everywhere cannot be equated to being central to everything? This Chapter connects issues of the posthuman, in terms of methodology and as an ontological position,...

There can be no justice that is not spatial. Against a recent tendency to despatialise law, matter, bodies and even space itself, this book insists on spatialising them, arguing that there can be neither law nor justice that are not articulated through and in space. Spatial Justice presents a new theory and a radical application of the material con...

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 th...

The connection between law and the city is an increasingly topical area of interdisciplinary research, currently being explored from both applied and theoretical perspectives. This special issue confronts some of the assumed categories, priorities and instrumentalities of visibility with regard to law and the city. Our aim is to circulate materiali...

The world is all that there is. In the world, ontology and epistemology coincide. The thing and the perspective are part of it, scale is ingested in its multiplicity, communication stops at the world's edge. By reading together Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence and Niklas Luhmann's proto-global concept of Weltgesellschaft (“world society”),...

Autopoietic theory is increasingly seen as a candidate for a radical theory of law, both in relation to its theoretical credentials and its relevance in terms of new and emerging forms of law. An aspect of the theory that has remained less developed, however, is its material side, and more concretely the theory’s accommodation of bodies, space, obj...

In this article, I deal with airs and sounds and scents, while keeping an eye on the law. My field of enquiry is the interstitial area between sensory and affective occurrences, namely sensory experiences that are traditionally thought to be a causal result of external stimuli, and affective experiences that are mostly associated with emotional cha...

The connection between law and the city is an increasingly relevant area of transdisciplinary research currently explored from both applied and theoretical perspectives. Existing approaches, however, have not adequately focussed on the fusion between the law and the space of a city, the geographical physicality of the urban in its material ontology...

The following is an experiment: what happens when the system folds into the system, environment into environment, and autopoiesis into autopoiesis? I hope to show that, more than mere duplication, the process of folding gives rise to an infinity of repetition, in its turn generating a proliferation of autopoiesis. Deleuze folded in Luhmann, Luhmann...

Niklas Luhmann’s (1927–1998) theory of social systems is notorious for its degree of complexity and abstraction. It has been regularly misread as conservative, overly structural, positivist and disconnected from other contemporary theories; especially the ones influenced by post-structuralism, gender theory, postcolonialism, and spatial and embodie...

This book, for the first time, brings Niklas Luhmann’s work into dialogue with other theoretical positions, including Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, gender studies, bioethics, translation, ANT, eco-theories and complexity theory. © Anders la Cour and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2013. All rights reserved.

Unlike mere humans, angels manage to avoid the temptation of drawing too sharp a distinction. According to Rilke, the angels’ ignorance of which side of a distinction they might be treading on is tempered by an infinite knowledge bestowed upon them by the ‘eternal current’. Angels tread the absolute paradox of knowledge and ignorance, transgressing...

Law and Environment enter a connection of disrupted continuum. The recent 'turns' in law towards materiality, spatiality, corporeality, disconnect the usual distance between law and its environment and enhance the visibility of materiality continuum between the two. Law is no longer abstract but spatially emplaced, corporeally felt, materially pres...

The concept of guilt is seen here as debt beyond repayment. Following Derrida, the gesture of giving is placed in the economy of gift, an aneconomical gift that is not part of the exchange cycle. At the same time, guilt is linked to desire, the desire to give and to be free from guilt. Desire is described as the urge to cross over, to apprehend the...

This is a text that brings together spatiality and legality in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, thus allowing for a renewed understanding of what is Spatial Law and Spatial Justice to enter the debate. Employing Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, I read diagrammatically a novel by Michel Tournier called Vendredi ("Friday"). The novel is...

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 is a thought-provoking contribution on the space of ontological vulnerability as the awareness of being existentially exposed. This space, conceptualised as a space of ‘the middle’ (as opposed, emphatically, to ‘the centre’) offers an opportunity to think away from the sterile debate on eco/anthropocentricity and from such limiting hierarchies...

In the final stage of his career, Giorgio de Chirico produced an interminable series of almost identical paintings that copied and only partly developed his successful early metaphysical period style. This was less of a performance and more of an income-generating exercise based on the high demand for his metaphysical paintings, especially the ones...

Whether decolonisation of legal knowledge is a fact or fiction, a desire or a nightmare, it has to be put on a different basis. Beginning with the concept of World Society, as opposed to globalisation, suggests that legal movement is impossible: everything is already here, where it appears. If legal transplants work, it is not because the transplan...

Te search for the showcase of the connection between law and the city led me to Brasília, the capital of Brazil. A completely invented and made-for-capital city in the middle of nowhere, Brasília is the oscillation before the topos of the utopia, the cake and its eating, the hysteria of perfection, which even the law gladly abandons; utopia here is...

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. Instead, 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 la...

The 2005 French and Dutch negative votes on the Constitution open up a space of conceptualisation, not only of Europe’s relation to its demos, but significantly to its failures. Through a critical analysis of mainly Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, the article proposes taking a distance from traditional constitutional dogmatics that are no longer c...

Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society presents the work of sociologist Niklas Luhmann in a radical new light. Luhmann's theory is here introduced both in terms of society at large and the legal system specifically, and for the first time, Luhmann's texts are systematically read together with theoretical insights from post-structuralism, deconstruct...

In this introduction to the edited collection 'Law and the City' by A. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, a survey of the current literature of law and urban geography is sketched. Special emphasis is given to feminist legal geography, environmental law and space, body and the law and other critical legal theoretical strands that in one way or another at...

The concept and application of paradox in law is the main focus of the chapter. Paradoxes abound in law: the paradox between its openness to new social issues and its corresponding closure with regard to its terminology, operation, self-image; or the paradox between the text of the law and interpretations; or indeed, the paradox between law and jus...

The connection between actor, risk and science is analysed and a connection with the precautionary principle is performed along those lines. Risk is described as the projection of a specific temporal and spatial situation into the future. The relevance of calculation in any risk projection necessarily involves the following factors: time, causality...

A linguistic game of prepositions in order to define the following:1. What is the Environment? What is 'environment' for environmental law?2. How does the law react to the complexity of its environment?3. How to take into account the ecological crisis within a rather narrow, anthropocentric legal frame?4. How to move away from the hackneyed binaris...

Issues of Integration are placed under a critical lens. The concepts of Globalization, Legal Transplants, Environmental Integration and Sustainable Development are studied with references to the complex context of the Caspian sea, but in ways in which can be seen as informative regardless of the geographical specificity.The concept of globalisation...

The text analyses the concepts of waste and memory in both the strict environmental sense and its abstract legal sense. The first, environmental waste, is contextualised in the production of waste in the urban setting, and it is argued, along with Baudrillard, that the city is geared towards the production of waste as a form of identity, and the co...

The analysis begins with a description of justice as performed by two rather different theorists, Niklas Luhmann and Jacques Derrida. They both situate justice outside or 'beyond' law, allowing however for its criteria of materialisation to be found within law. This negative, paradoxical connection between law and justice is the foundation of my th...

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 th...

This is an attempt to connect Law and Urban Geography. Thus, Law and the City are brought together on various ontologica and epistemological levels to create what can be called 'the lawscape'. The fusion is ridden with conflict, crossings and paradoxes. It is argued here that, once the ontological and epistemological connections between law and the...

SilencSilence as a contextualised operation within the legal system carries a certain meaning which is understood by the system. In this article, silence is being interpreted as the negation of legal meaning, that is an expression of the impossibility of communication, which remains within the system as a space of ignorance. Such space crates a rup...

Using Amelie Nothomb's 'Stupeur et Tremblements', a novel that appeared in 1999 and shook the waters of the Francophone literary world, I attempt an analysis of the relation between love and law in the form of Kierkegaard's suspension as witnessed in his 'Fear and Trembling'. I find that, in order to 'fulfil' love, which is defined here more in the...

The problem of social exclusion is dealt here through the lens of a particularly radical social theory, that of autopoietic society by Niklas Luhmann. Here, exclusion is included in society, no longer as an issue for care, integration and therapy, but as a mechanism to show the importance of the visibility of exclusion. The inclusion of exclusion i...

A connection between art and law is the focus of this article. This connection is based on their autopoietic, self-referential nature as described by Niklas Luhmann in his legal sociology and his treatise on art. Expectedly, the two systems have different behavioural patterns. While art takes a narcissistic pleasure in its self-referentiality and a...

In Le Guin's Earthsea Quartet, knowledge of the name of a thing or person guarantees control over their destiny. In a world where light and darkness co-exist and where dragons are an extension of humans, a name is the means with which one can achieve one's vision of the world. If utopia is the individual projection of a supposedly collective ideal,...

Offering a novel, transdisciplinary approach to environmental law, its principles, mechanics and context, as tested in its application to the urban environment, this book traces the conceptual and material absence of communication between the human and the natural and controversially includes such an absence within a system of law and a system of g...

This is the beginning of an exploration of before as the thesis ‘before’ (temporally) and ‘be-fore’ (spatially) difference. Before denotes the origin and the desired destination. Before (in the double sense of ‘before’ and ‚be-in-the-fore’) opens up a space of pre-difference, of origin and of forgotten memory, as well as a space of desire, objectiv...

A connection between art and law is the focus of this article. This connection is based on their autopoietic, self-referential nature as described by Niklas Luhmann in his legal sociology and his treatise on art. Expectedly, the two systems have different behavioural patterns. While art takes a narcissistic pleasure in its self-referentiality and a...

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 jour...

Risk is a projection of a specific temporality performed by the observer. However, this projection is doomed to impossibility because of the prohibiting problems of time, causality, subjectivity and relativity of risk. The observer is left only with a castrated projection that defies the role of science as a pedestal for the projection and institut...