ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that oceanic spaces, particularly those beyond national jurisdiction now being subsumed under novel regulatory regimes in the context of the BBNJ negotiations, can be usefully approached through the notion of heterotopia. Proposed by philosopher Michel Foucault as a way to address the problematic of space, the concept of heterotopia refers to any site in which space is “other,” including, importantly, those counter-sites that resist the dissolution of social space produced by the calculating and ing spatiality of modernity that now represents normal space. The chapter focuses particularly on three examples that are central to the ongoing BBNJ negotiations (representing at once the encounter of law and space in relation to material and discursive spatialities and regulatory territorializations), with the view to explore whether the concept of heterotopia may help read oceanic spaces as subversive sites or counter-sites vis-à-vis hegemonic legality, as spaces resisting against and problematizing the sovereign construction of space at sea, as spaces of heterolegalities—that is, alternate forms of the legal—that may help navigate the novel and unprecedented geopolitical epoch call Anthropocene; or whether they may remain entangled with such hegemonic legality and even facilitate its reproduction, and thus perhaps best be understood as spaces of biopolitical “encaring,” which is a novel horizon of sovereign legality in the Anthropocene.
