On the September 8, 2025, a piece of graffiti appeared on the Courts of Justice in London. It depicted a judge pounding a protester, who held a blood-smeared placard, with a hammer. The artist was the infamous Banksy. The graffiti was promptly erased, ensuring that our idealized picture of legal justice as rational, fair, and applied equally to all was preserved. There are multiple reasons why Banksy might have wanted to graffiti the Courts of Justice, the most likely being his desire to bring to public attention the fact that justice is far from the ideal that we believe in.
Justice, at least legal justice, is authoritative and vertical. It can be forceful, and it can restrict our expressions, our demonstrations, and our public assemblies when they don’t chime with state politics, and when they call for a different type of justice. Banksy’s graffiti appeared in the aftermath of the arrests of over one thousand peaceful demonstrators, who were voicing their concern with the lack of effective interventions from the UK government to stop the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The protesters also sought to express their support for the proscribed organization Palestinian Action, which through direct action raised awareness of the UK’s military complicity in this genocide. The graffiti, whether directly related to the aforementioned arrests or not, was illustrative of two types of justice. The first is the ideal of legal justice that Western democracies cherish, but that, as critical scholars have taught us, may not be so ideal. Legal justice is more invested in protecting the image of law’s authority than delivering justice in the terms of those who demand it. The second type is justice beyond legal frameworks—a justice that responds to the needs of the most vulnerable, that is collective, horizontal, participatory, and a promoter of solidarity politics.
Hydrojustice, a pithy, poetic, and eloquent meditation on aquatic justice by legal theorist, writer, and artist Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, challenges the idealized version of legal justice.1 It offers a conception of justice, underpinned by politics and ethics, that draws on the nature of water and its various morphologies: sea, rain, rivers, canals, tears, and watery bodies (including ours). By displacing logos as the central protagonist and replacing it with water, and tracing its movements and qualities, we are introduced to a non-anthropocentric ontology. Water is both a material entity and a figure of speech (metaphor). Consequently, as the book introduces us to an aquatic ontology, it simultaneously introduces us to ways of writing that reflect this ontology, which the author names “wavewriting.” In doing so, the book reminds us, as the écriture féminine movement did in the mid-1970s, that writing is fundamental to transforming the way we see, speak, and experience the world.
The book is organized around five chapters, each followed by examples of wavewriting that include writings by the author as well by other writers and activists that place water at the center of ethics and politics. Chapter one, “Hydra,” sketches the intellectual journey of the project through a wonderfully woven literature review of post-humanist writings on water (“blue literature”) and biographical vignettes. Chapter two, “Be Water”—the slogan used in 2019 by demonstrators in Hong Kong—introduces us to the horizontal and collective qualities of water (both literally and metaphorically) and their ability to resist the verticality of authority, power, and legal justice. Chapter three, “Water in Water,” inspired by George Bataille’s reflections, focuses on the continuum of bodies in water. It reminds us that watery bodies (our bodies) are constantly in continuity or relation with other watery bodies. This also means that our reality oscillates between a discursive understanding of the self as bounded and identitarian (e.g., woman, white, non-cis) and a more fluid and dispersive sense of self as other, boundless, and indeterminate. “Water becomes Difference,” the title of chapter four, introduces us to an idea of difference that is steeped in both the desire to retain difference and to be one with another. In the last chapter, “Wavewriting,” we are taught how to observe and write like water. The last example of wavewriting, entitled “A Contract unto Hydrojustice,” offers a new hydro deal. This contract entices us to voluntary opt into the vision of justice that the book analyzes and reveals.
As the author highlights from the very start, hydrojustice is not a solution to injustice: “Hydrojustice is already here, around and inside us. It is not something to aspire to, a state of justice to come, but a condition to cherish.”2 Hydrojustice’s non-anthropocentric vision of justice is open, fluid, continuous, rapturous, destructive, and gestational—simultaneously, and at different times. Central to this non-aspirational and “present” justice—“it is already here” after all—is an ontological premise that mirrors the very qualities and movement of water. These movements and qualities of the aquatic enable the author to offer an ontology that is embodied and relational rather than individualistic and hierarchical. Hydrojustice is not alone in offering such an ontology, of course. Other blue literatures, like Astrida Neimanis’s hydrofeminism (engaged with in this book), have likewise critiqued Western metaphysics and ontology.3 But Neimanis and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos diverge in one crucial respect: while Neimanis’s feminist aquatic philosophy emphasizes the gestational and creative aspects of the aquatic, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos boldly embraces both its creative and destructive dimensions. He refuses to detach himself from the harsh reality of hydrojustice, reminding us of its capacity to destroy humanity. This is an insightful observation that follows directly from the ontological premise he presents. We cannot ignore this quality of hydrojustice, because if we do, we will end up conserving an idealist form of justice. The destructive character of hydrojustice, taken literally, suggests that it could possibly destroy both human and nonhuman life. This is a bleak and despairing prospect, if viewed from a purely anthropocentric position. Yet seen from a non-anthropocentric vantage point, this simply means that even if humans are destroyed, as thinking, sovereign entities, the sheer fact that we are creatures made of water ensures that our existence as “hydrohumans” will continue. And our existence continues, as one type of watery element amongst others—in horizontality. The catastrophic character of hydrojustice, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos suggests, may provide us with a better world—it will for sure destroy our current idealized form of justice.4
This idea that the world that may arise after humanity is destroyed might be a better world is truly radical, and a brave position to take. It shatters illusions that humans are masters of the universe, that our human, idealized justice is fair and equal. But it left me not so much with dread—mortality is part of life, after all—as with a series of questions. These questions can, for the purposes of this review, be divided into theoretical and practical questions, while recognizing that theory and practice are co-constitutive.
Theoretically, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos offers a distinctly catastrophic critique of justice as authority and verticality (in Latin, “justice” is etymologically connected to the word “justus,” which means “upright”), while simultaneously making apparent the horizontal nature of justice through aquatic qualities. While the book explicitly argues that its engagement with water refers both to water as a material entity and as a metaphor, it does not distance itself from the tradition of natural law jurisprudence (e.g., Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Finnis) that posits that laws and norms derive from universal and objective principles grounded in nature.
Nevertheless, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s lack of a clear distinction here should not be taken as an endorsement of the moralistic and universalist understandings of nature, law, and justice advanced by natural law theorists. The book may not distance itself from the natural law tradition, but its references to hydrojustice—bringing to the fore a respect for difference, negotiation, the dissolution of boundaries, horizontality, and being one with others—distinguish it from the universalism and moralism of natural law’s idea of justice.5 If, for Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, justice derives from nature, it is a nature closer to that of the pre-Socratic Heraclitus—a “nature … that loves to hide.”6 There is nothing straightforwardly “natural” about nature; rather, nature operates as a technology. For example, nature demonstrates its technological verve in the camouflage of certain animals, like chameleons and octopi, who change colors to protect themselves from attackers. It is precisely the idea of nature as technology that Hydrojustice brings out, along with it a new sense of justice that remains after the destruction of vertical justice. This sense of justice abolishes the difference or hierarchy between human and nonhuman life by pointing to their shared constitutive element—water.
The practical questions that Hydrojustice left me with concern human life after the catastrophe, or in the stage before destruction. Why imagine that the afterlife of humanity will be better or more hopeful? What happens if what gets destroyed is the very horizontal, collaborative spirit harbored by contemporary activist movements (from Black Lives Matter to Extinction Rebellion), leaving behind a politics of hate akin to that of Unite the Kingdom, the UK-based anti-immigration movement? And what happens in the meantime, while we are still struggling, before the catastrophe arrives? No doubt, our times are hard. And while it is important not to seek comfort in legal justice, I am left wondering: What can we do, at the very least, to soothe the suffering that surrounds us?
Hydrojustice attempts to address this last question via its last example of wavewriting, “A Contract Unto Hydrojustice.” This chapter invites us to enter a contract with each other, a contract that is open and fluid, that recognizes the politics of horizontality and the ethics of difference, in the hope that together, all watery entities may find comfort and a way of persevering during these hard times, free from the illusion that we can save what we have, but open to the possibility of something new and unknown emerging.
The brutal reality of this contract may bite, but it will not on its own kill us. Hydrojustice invites us to embrace horizontally, to remain fluid in adversity, to be aware of our limits and our possibilities, and to do so without judgment. This is perhaps the only way we can avert the disastrous effects of verticality. The book will be of interest to those engaged in critical theory and the arts. Its poetics and method, its ontology and theory of justice, will inspire new ways of being, being together, assembling, writing, and thinking.
For a classic critique of the ideal of justice see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (Routledge, 1992).
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Hydrojustice (Polity, 2025), 2.
Astrida Neimanis, “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water,” in Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, ed. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Hydrojustice, 115.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Hydrojustice, 115–20.
Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (Harvard University Press, 2006), 31.
