Micaela Brinsley: How did you start building your professional trajectory and how did the different parts of your practices come to be? Or, if you wish to begin from a more artistic perspective, where does art lie in and among the various academic and theoretical practices you engage with? 

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos: I think the answer to both questions would be the same: we are talking about almost simultaneous yet a-priori emergences. Art, for example, has always been there but then suddenly it just sprouts. It can be quite forceful and a little unexpected: something one cannot resist yet something one has to work very hard for. 

A very difficult combination this, law and art, I find. Same with art and fiction writing, or indeed the latter and academic/theoretical writing. At the same time, I don’t see any difference between my various practices. Legal practice, photography, poetry, prose writing, academic writing, yes, they can appear very different. But a few years ago I realised that I have an ethical responsibility not to dwell on only one practice, and to make sure that legal thinking, and especially legal theoretical thinking, flows together with visual arts, performance arts, or even fiction writing and poetry.  I see them as means which I’m trying out until I enunciate an idea. 

And they often emerge together, but with a force that demands channelling, because each one demands its own time and space, an investment and a way of thinking that is unique to it. And that’s where the work is.

Take writing for example. I had a vehement discussion about this with a friend: is there a moment where writing comes to you and you have to ride it? Or is writing always there and you just need to put in the work and allow it to flow?

I consider writing to be our connection with the surface through the body. This connection with the surface is so powerful. It’s beyond language. In a sense, it is the thing that connects us to the world, to others, to ourselves, to the mirror, and all these surfaces around us. This connection demands to be channelled, its flow assumed and channelled towards a certain work. 

Again, that’s where the work comes in. The moment is always there, it’s just the way it emerges and flashes through. And then it is up to you to grasp it and flow along.

I really feel that everything I do - whether it is art, law or writing - exists on this plane of immanence, this flat continuum, and everything is a part of it. Occasionally there are waves and openings which we ride, or we sit and observe. There is a density, there is a velocity, there are qualities that somehow differentiate more to one wave or rupture or whatever image we want to build. As a body, as mind, as collectivities, it always feels the same.

May I ask you, when you write, do you feel it somewhere in your body?

I do feel as if it’s a very melodic, sensorial experience, for sure. There’s also a way in which writing often happens in a trance, which might also be what you’re suggesting. That when you tap into the force that you were describing, you’re letting yourself be carried by something that you, in other parts of your life, might be less conscious about.

My texts get somehow inflected by the conditions under which they are written—the time, but also the space, the senses, smells, and the music. You said melodious, but I also find that the text has its own harmonics as it were. The text often absorbs everything around it. 

I trust the moment of production; it is almost like a trance. 

I would even say that the actual text writes itself. The moments of breakthrough, whether it’s in words or while working on a visual piece of work, are turning moments, a rupture; and then the whole thing switches, because I finally become one with the thing that I am trying to create. From that moment onwards, everything extends and creates that space between you and the work. That’s a privileged space, and I consider myself lucky every time I get the chance to dwell in it.

Your short story collection is called The Book of Water, many of your other projects are engaged with the natural world and water in particular. Do you have a core moment or memory or interaction with it, that stayed with you or that you often return to?

Two encounters come to mind, both of which happened in my father’s summer house in Greece. Let me say from the start that my summers were generally quite lonely. I wasn’t feeling very confident to be with the neighbourhood kids. And in a true introvert manner, I was learning how to play the flute, and I often felt I was connecting to the environment through my flute playing, but also keeping it secret so that everybody would be asking, ‘who’s playing the flute?’ 

This is important because in many ways I felt disembodied from what my self was supposed to be. At a distance, observing myself in the space. And in that sense, I often felt in a strange (at the time, since I was only around 12 or so) communion with the outside. So, the first encounter happened in the sea one later summer afternoon. I was in the shallow waters alone, playing with it and the whole landscape, when I came across a huge jellyfish, almost bigger than me. I was kind of playing, diving, and then boom, that was it: an encounter, a confrontation, a measuring up, as Deleuze and Guattari would define it.

Neither of us seemed to be moving from the space of confrontation. I was so scared, I didn’t know what to do. The jellyfish, on the other hand, was majestically moving its tentacles until I almost felt I was moving in the rhythm that the jellyfish was dictating—almost like a pulse. 

I was kept firmly in place by fear of course; but also by what we can call awe, the stupor and the trembling, that metaphysical moment where both these affects come together, as the author Amélie Nothomb writes, herself partly at least following Kierkegaard.

The second encounter happened on the top of a hill, looking at the sea. 

I’m with my sister. My sister is much younger than me, but very mature. I call her my guru and even at the time we had that special connection. I remember coming out to her while facing the sea—it was this beautiful moment in which I felt that the sea became almost like a screen, like a frame to which we had access. 

Not the big sea that would swallow us up like the moment of the jellyfish, of the sublime; rather, a domesticated moment of the water that was finally becoming one of us and slowly sliding towards us; reaching up the hill, and sitting kindly between us while I was coming out to her, and her accepting it beautifully. 

How would you say this influenced you, creatively?

Well, first of all it has affected my life choices. I live between London and Venice. I remember when first setting up home in London and feeling rather morose at the absence of visually accessible water. The Thames, back in the mid-90s when I properly moved to London, was a non-event, a thing that seemed to embarrass London rather than add to its urban beauty. Things have improved of course but it is till not where I would like. So then followed the choice of Venice. And that almost domesticated shallow water, that green slow heavy water that speaks of other depths, is perfect for me. A friend of mine, who comes from Naples where people can easily reach the beach and swim, pointed out to me that there’s nowhere to swim in Venice. I was quite fascinated, not so much by what she said but by the fact that I had never thought of the Venetian water that way. In Venice, everything swims anyway. There is no other way of being.

For me, the domestic is aquatic. Not just in terms of regression, namely that we all come from water, etc, with all the issues of climate change, and the big ecological questions about our planet… That too of course. But it’s also about the various ways in which the water inhabits our everyday. 

Water manages to bring together into its fold both the maternal and the paternal. The maternal I understand it in the sense of the womb, the enclosure, the safety, almost the homeostatic similarity in temperature of the water that surrounds us. You know that moment in warmer climates when you walk into the sea and the water feels like an extension of your own skin? When it doesn’t feel like a different body? It feels as if the skin is shedding and there is a melting away of the self.. That’s the womb, the moment of the maternal and the invitation to dwell softly and kindly. 

Of course that is a very specific understanding of the maternal and I don’t want to perpetuate clichés. Because, interestingly, the very same water can become, in a sense, very difficult and scary. Water can appear alienating, harsh, vast. Water for me can never be separated from the fear that I can drown in it, disappear, become one with it and never be found. That is for me the paternal aspect of the water, in the sense that it determines me in ways I do not necessarily want.

My water follows psychoanalytical lines of the domestic. There is always this continuum of water, an aquatic flow inside and outside of the body. Between bodies, human and nonhuman, water flows next to one another, with water being within but also surrounding us. We are all bodies of water, as the hydrofeminist Astrida Neimanis writes. But where does the skin begin that separates various bodies? How do we claim difference? How is identity determined, if we are all bodies of water? This is the kind of paradox I’m trying to think about in my current book project on Hydrojustice (Oxford: Polity Press, forthcoming).

Art is of course experienced not just in the moment of encounter, but in the memories and reflections of it, after. I really like your suggestion that water moves us the same way. Is that something you were reflecting on when composing the ‘waterspeak’ sections of your recent novel, Our Distance Became Water? Those seem to be moments where you’re making more explicit elements that are of the ‘depths,’ as opposed to the other sections which are more ‘surface-driven’ not in a negative way, but more in terms of language.

I think we agree that the surface is an important thing. Surface concentrates the need to carry with us the spaces in which we can both see ourselves mirrored, but also use them as separations between us and the world.

How beautiful it would look, a double-sided mirror in the depths of the deep waterbed. 

To link this to the earlier discussion about identity: we are all part of one thing, one fluidity, one continuum. Let’s say, one wave. Within that, one manages to peel oneself away, ever so infinitesimally, a small slither of otherness, and create this moment of separation from the wave. 

How does this happen? Many ways but let me just mention one: little rituals of self-constitution. It does not matter whether they are truly yours (what’s this anyway) or have been somehow imposed on you. These rituals cannot be discounted. They are part of one’s process of forming one’s identity. Which is, of course, always part of a larger, aquatic, collective identity.

While I despise narcissists with a passion, the myth of Narcissus is particularly interesting. Of course the point of Narcissus is the falling in love with one’s image, but if you see it from the outside, it is the doubling up of this surface in order to create a personal depth and collective identity at exactly the same time. 

Narcissus is chased by a nymph, Echo, and in his anxiety to run away from her and her unwanted advances, he reaches the edge of the water and summons a god to save him. Interestingly though, there is a Freudian gaze there because his mother is also a nymph, so it is almost as if his mother figure were chasing him, and he cannot respond to that for various reasons, lack of desire being one. When he sees himself reflected on the surface of the water, he sees, like we often do, his father, and in the image of himself he sees this other side that also summons him, through a frenzied desire of both the self and the other.

This aquatic surface moment brings together both the acknowledgement of that connection (namely the falling in love with something that is you and yet not you, as your father or your parent in some way) and the horror that comes with it. But it’s a necessary horror. 

It is that moment that I was channelling when I was writing ‘waterspeak.’ Waterspeak is very much like a parental voice, quite an angry and slightly irrational voice, but also, I must admit a voice that at some point I find attractive and wise. Surprisingly, in its complete narcissistic heights and distance, the water does listen, it actually listens, to the lovers, who are the main protagonists of the book. Somehow, there is a moment of connection between the water and the lovers, and that’s the moment in which everything changes, everything falls into place, and a collapse happens. 

The book is essentially a paean of calm, domestic water that only barely conceals the fear of total inundation. The story takes place in a city that has flooded, but the water has stopped at the level of the second floors of most buildings. The urban environment becomes mediated by the placid, unmoving surface that reflects the lives of the residents. We see this through the relationship of the two lovers, of unspecified gender, that had invited the water in their relationship before the flood. So the water has always been there, part of them, between them and in them, physically and metaphysically, right from the moment they met. And in all this, I have added waterspeak, sections where the water speaks in booming, vociferous utterances. But as we know, the water is always here, drenching every single paragraph of the book. 

Do you see yourself ever writing about something other than water?

I’m not always writing about water, but everything is about water; even if I write an academic book. My recent long monograph on Spatial Justice, which was published a few years ago with Routledge, was written partly in Venice. Water was entering every single thought of mine, adding flow and waves to the rhythm of my writing. I would wake up in the night with my fingers typing. I became the text, such that when I finished it and then read it, there was no distance between me and the text. It doesn’t mean that the text was good necessarily. It just means that the text that emerged was the only text that could have been written by me at that point, in those conditions.

Are you saying that you don’t tend to edit your own texts that much? How do you feel about them, once they’re published and out in the world?

Obviously I move things, change things if needs be, but somehow… I never feel the dissonance of it. The times when I do feel dissonance is when I’ve left the process of writing behind and I’m then called to read an extract from a book, that is once I’ve lost that body-text-atmosphere amalgamation. 

I’m a little bit scared by it because by then it feels like a pure textual text, namely just words and ideas but no body. As if there are sentences missing precisely because I’m missing this multisensorial synesthetic, fleshy quality of the text—its time and space of production. 

I guess that’s the hardest point. 

If I’m given the opportunity to read a bit more and look at it more, to allow myself to dive into it again… then I can get there. 

But I never revisit my books for my own pleasure or use after they are published. I never read them back.

Speaking of finished texts, what you just mentioned connects to the final thing I wanted to ask you about Our Distance Became Water, regarding a more formal element of the book. Of course you have the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ but you also have the third person plural dominating it as well. The use of ‘we’ to me felt very open. Your work, whether academic or artistic, seems to be grounded in trying to embrace and inhibit a sense of boundlessness. Do you feel as if that’s the particular form in which you like to write the most, in the third person plural? Or was that more of an accidental discovery?

Recently, I watched a 2000s film called The Dreamers by [Bernardo] Bertolucci. It is an adorable film: it has politics, sexuality, sensuality, youth, and extraordinary interior decoration and amazing architecture. It takes place in a beautiful Parisian house, slightly dilapidated, a bit messy, and extremely well thought-out scenically. It’s basically a ménage à trois, two siblings, a brother and a sister, and this newly-acquired American friend whom they include in their games, almost prematurely. There’s a kind of intense, sexual, sensual, political, emotional thing going on amongst them. 

After that film, my friend and I went for an aperitivo in a little venetian hideout, and asked ourselves who would we invite to live with us if we had a palazzo? In Italian, a palazzo is not necessarily a palace but a large building. Somewhere where we could invite anyone we wanted to and stay with us. A community of being together, of friends and lovers whom, essentially, we would like to see everyday—people you would like to have breakfast with, as simple as that. These people could move, could leave at any point, there would be no contract, just a strong understanding of wanting to be there, a desire of creating this space amongst us, a space of respect and love for both one another and the space-amongst us.

I think I’m describing an anarchic community of some sort. But there are lots of rules in anarchic communities - which is fascinating but not what we want— we want the flow of bodies rather than rules to determine how the space would be folding and unfolding.

This is the perfect we, the we that is imperfectly numbered. The we of whoever happens to be right there, right now—and feels part of that we. It doesn’t have any of the trappings of classic community thinking. It is almost an incessant flow based on the desire to be there and the desire, to the extent possible, not to exclude other bodies.

This we moves like an amoeba—it opens in splinters but then it expands and contracts, being affected and co-constituting its environment. It is not a human we, it’s a we that is weaved in with the environment. 

In the we of the book, in the we of my life, water is always there, holding our bodies together.

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Extract from Our Distance Became Water by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos:

‍Our watery existence, our love and desire, have always been nestled deep in our planet’s infinity pool—one immense aquatic sameness traversed by waterlines on their way to the rest of the universe. There was nothing to hold us anymore. We were thrown in there, small fish swimming within a school of gigantic divinities. It seemed that we were finally, finally, allowed to join our deepest desires, those Sirens of the flooded city bathing and whispering in pulmonic consonants their invitation to a voyage without return. It was not easy. We found ourselves right in the middle of a cosmic velocity, much faster and more brutal than anything we had experienced so far. We were pushed and pulled by what felt like an invisible crowd, translucent bodies whose contours were barely discernible, heavenly bodies that ignored us, shoving us aside and in the process making us spin around ourselves like dying goldfish.

But despite the violence of that pull, it felt like a return.

For a brief moment, we became part of a multiplicity, one drop among thousands of oceans, one breath exhaled in the aether—but we had finally, however briefly, however temporarily, however perhaps randomly, stopped being mere observers. We had become part of it. The violence was pure, the thrust primordial, the speed terrifying, and even our separation from each other felt complete and almost final. But in losing each other in the water, we found a different each other. Perhaps for the first time, we really found each other.

We were dying a new life.

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