Sandip Sarkar reviews Hydrojustice

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. Hydrojustice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2025. 140 pp.

6 August 2026

What does it mean to think justice aquatically—not as metaphor but as ontological imperative? Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s Hydrojustice advances a proposition at once elemental and radical: that justice, properly conceived, is already planetary, already wet, already here. Departing from the distributive, procedural, and restorative taxonomies that dominate legal philosophy, the book posits hydrojustice as the immanent condition of bodies of water—human, nonhuman, geological, celestial—flowing along and apart from one another. Justice, on this account, is neither horizon nor aspiration but the very facticity of aqueous coexistence.

The architecture is deliberately nonlinear. Five chapters are interleaved with performative interludes titled “Wavewriting”—a method the author theorizes and enacts wherein prose accumulates, recedes, and returns without dialectical resolution. Chapter 1 (“Hydra”) establishes the mythological and conceptual scaffolding: the Lernaean Hydra as figure for proliferating, nonheroic, self-regenerating justice; Venice’s Sposalizio del Mare as colonial ritual masquerading as communion. Subsequent chapters unfold two sides of a single paradox. “Be Water” (chapter 2) mobilizes the 2019 Hong Kong slogan alongside the Zong massacre and Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 Spirited Away to elaborate hydrojustice as amphibian positioning—constant repositioning within emergency. “Water in Water” (chapter 3), indebted to Georges Bataille’s formulation of immanence, theorizes the aquatic continuum through jellyfish ontology, Astrida Gundega Neimanis’s hydrofeminist embodiment, and cosmogonic water mythologies. “Water Becomes Difference” (chapter 4) introduces rupture as continuum’s constitutive other via clinamen, Fijian tabu practices, and the Venetian Modulo Sperimantale Elettromeccanico (MoSE) floodgates—separation not as negation but as the fold through which new bodies of water emerge.

The book engages with thinkers for whom the maritime environment constitutes a juridical problem. Peter Goodrich furnishes its jurisprudential spine: his dictum against “‘“purpresture,” seizure or enclosure of the sea’” is treated as hydrojustice’s prima philosophia, while his maxim, in mare semper est aequitas, anchors its tidal jurisprudence (p. 17). Renisa Mawani’s “‘oceans as method’” underwrites the unearthing of “marginalised histories, alternative timescales, and different registers” (p. 24). The 1783 Gregson v. Gilbert case receives treatment via M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), whose carved gaps between rearranged case words force us to “face the law’s inadequacy,” and via Christina Sharpe’s retelling of the Zong massacre (p. 52). Gil Anidjar articulates “the almost sacred responsibility of the law towards water,” framing the aquatic as law’s “‘unavoidable foreground’” (p. 77). Counterpoints emerge through Massimiliano Tomba, warning that legal personhood for nature constitutes a “hypertrophic . . . subsumption” into the state, and Mikki Stelder, identifying the limits of “juridicalizing the water” (pp. 10, 78). These engagements, though suggestive, function as luminous fragments rather than sustained architectures of maritime jurisprudence.

The theoretical ambition is considerable. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos braids Spinozan conatus, Deleuzian clinamen, Glissantian archipelagic thought, and Karen Barad’s agential separability into a coherent—if deliberately undulating—jurisprudence of horizontality. The central move is ontological flattening: against the verticality of anthropocenic progress, hydrojustice insists on a surface ethics where depth is pulled horizontal. This is persuasive as poetics; as jurisprudence, however, the evacuation of normativity raises questions. If hydrojustice is always already here, what work does the concept perform beyond diagnosis? The book insists that hydrojustice “is not something to aspire to, a state of justice to come, but a condition to cherish,” that it is “not a call to action but to adaptation,” and that we possess “no freedom of choosing whether or not to be hydrojust” (pp. 2, 28). Yet the first Wavewriting interlude, titled “A Hydrojustice Manifesto,” opens with imperatives: “Abandon the vertical”; “Embrace the horizontal”; “Launch the diagonal” (pp. 32, 33). Elsewhere the text concedes that hydrojustice’s emergence “can be strategized” even as it “cannot be instrumentalised” (p. 30). The Spinozan framework should resolve this—adequate knowledge of one’s immanent position is the ethical act—but the book oscillates between describing a planetary given and demanding a political conversion, collapsing the distinction between ontological description and ethical demand that the framework must navigate rather than elide. The concept operates with great force as diagnostic; its prescriptive dimension remains suspended in the undulation the method celebrates.

Still, the book’s genuine innovation lies in its method. Wavewriting—part autotheory, part performance score, part legal treatise—refuses the settled architectonics of monograph form. The autobiographical passages (Thessaloniki boyhood, jellyfish encounter, Copenhagen performance) are not decorative but structurally necessary: they enact the palindromic oscillation between continuum and rupture that the argument describes. Whether this constitutes a reproducible methodology or a virtuosic singularity is a question the text leaves, fittingly, open.

Hydrojustice is less a program than a provocation: it asks whether law can become water and whether humanity can survive the answer.