What do you think?
Rate this book
Theory in Forms
Necropolitics
In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its “nocturnal body”---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published March 31, 2016
About the author
Achille Mbembe
54 books359 followersJoseph-Achille Mbembe, known as Achille Mbembe (born 1957), is a Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist, and public intellectual.
He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National Research Foundation.
He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National Research Foundation.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 160 reviews
April 24, 2020
This collection of essays ‘Necropolitics’ (Duke University Press, 2019) by Achille Mbembe has been on my radar for a while. Yeah, the white woman’s quest to decolonize her bookshelf continues (eye roll).
Obviously, necro (death) politics is some kind of reference or Fanonian expansion of Foucault’s bio (life) politics. Mbembe has already developed the concept in the early 2000s but this collection of essays, including an essay on Necropolitics, places this concept in its wider context of the current state of increasing incompatibility of liberal democracy and capitalism and the rise of authoritarianism as the defining feature of the 21st century. (Hamid Dabashi’s Europe and Its Shadows: Coloniality after Empire (Pluto Press, 2020) us also an excellent similar read on this.
As with all, or most, postcolonial writers, this is no easy read (btw did anybody ever manage to understand Gayatri Spivak?). Although lately I managed to find a way of reading these texts by approaching them like abstract art - taking it all on in and let it work rather than trying to make sense of every line before seeing the whole argument. In the intro, Mbembe describes his style as follows “In so doing, I found nothing more appropriate than a figural style of writing that oscillates between the vertiginous, dissolution, and dispersal.” Vertiginous, indeed.
There is no better way to summarize the book than in the two sentences from the intro:
“Democracy, the plantation, and the colonial empire are objectively all part of the same historical matrix. This originary structuring fact lies at the heart of every historical understanding of the violence of the contemporary global order”
You know how people write shitty things on ‘wall tattoos’ in their kitchens like ‘carpe diem ’ or some other positive thinking crap, I could see this on my kitchen wall, totally ironic of course 🙄
So, back to the book. It’s a bunch of essays that look at late capitalism (global financial capitalism), its ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. Building on and going beyond Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Mbembe analyses the various contemporary powers of death, including social and civil death, (necropolitics) - the war on terror, the various forms of camps, slums and other global ‘surplus’ populations who are being forced to live in a state between life and death. “necropolitics and necropower accounts for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.” It’s similar to what Judith Butler refers to as ‘grievable’ versus ‘non-grievable’ lives. What’s an important thread running through the essays is that the civil peace in the west depends in large parts on inflicting violence far away. Drowning refugees on the EU’s shores is not a contradiction but, in some Hegelian sense or other (lol), is already part western democracy and its intrinsic relationship with imperialism. “Historically, liberal democracy has always needed a constitutive Other for its legitimation, an Other who is and is not at the same time part of the polis.”
November 18, 2019
Rarely in life, do we have a chance to read a book, and know that we have been transformed through the reading process.
This is a powerful book, of death, power, war, terrorism and racism. "Nanoracism" is an astonishingly - achingly - biting concept that punctuates so much of the book. The living - and lived - consequences of slavery and colonization soak each page.
The four stars were given because I wanted more. I am greedy. The attention to Fanon locks Mbembe into a particular discursive frame. While I respect Fanon's theorization enormously, the brutalizing financialization of the last ten years requires different answers to very distinctive questions.
Further, Mbembe's engagement with the political economy is not strong. His focus on terrorism, rather than its tendrils from international capitalism, results in a devastating attention to violence, but the more incendiary brutality, particularly to women, is underplayed.
A magnificent book. A life changer. A movement in thinking.
This is a powerful book, of death, power, war, terrorism and racism. "Nanoracism" is an astonishingly - achingly - biting concept that punctuates so much of the book. The living - and lived - consequences of slavery and colonization soak each page.
The four stars were given because I wanted more. I am greedy. The attention to Fanon locks Mbembe into a particular discursive frame. While I respect Fanon's theorization enormously, the brutalizing financialization of the last ten years requires different answers to very distinctive questions.
Further, Mbembe's engagement with the political economy is not strong. His focus on terrorism, rather than its tendrils from international capitalism, results in a devastating attention to violence, but the more incendiary brutality, particularly to women, is underplayed.
A magnificent book. A life changer. A movement in thinking.
April 29, 2018
Leitura rapidíssima que adentra os meandros da necropolítica, ao contrário do que se pensa o seu auge não foi com o holocausto nazista, mas sim com a política de imperialismo colonial, nações invadidas e suas populações sentenciadas à morte em nome de uma supremacia europeia. Mbembe ainda dá o parecer que é isso que ocorre hoje na Palestina também.
September 22, 2023
I came across this book as I was looking for introductions to Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and biopower. I have mixed feelings about it.
What I appreciate: the unflinching analysis of racism, brutality, genocidal aggression/negligence, and exploitation in the world today.
What I don't like: much of this book turns out to be boiled down ideas from other books, though not clearly marked as such. The content is so compressed, abstract, and scattered that it's hard to learn anything you didn't already know from it.
FURTHERMORE: in my opinion, the language is unnecessarily difficult to process. It's similar to reading Barthes or Foucault in translation. Aspects of the syntax and rhetoric don't flow clearly in English.
For example:
"As Europe (and also elsewhere) begins to turn into a sort of boring ice floe, we will now entertain ourselves with nan0racism, that sort of narcotherapy that somewhat resembles an owlet, diminished but with a powerful beak that is hooked and pointed - the bromide par excellence of times of numbness and flaccid paralysis; when all has lost its elasticity, it now appears as if to suddenly contract." (pg 57-58).
"Nanoracism" and "narcotherapy" are not words I've encountered before. "Nanoracism" must be cognate to "racist microaggressions". What is "narcotherapy" - would it bring on sleep, or prevent sleep? Presumably the latter, because it's opposed to boredom. The "owlet" is not a familiar or very useful simile to English readers. And how is an owlet a "bromide," another unfamiliar (and archaic) word? I think the "narcotherapy" is the "bromide," but the owlet has interrupted the sequence of medical associations. By the end of the sentence I am lost - what is the "all" that "has lost its elasticity"? what is the "it" that "appears as if to suddenly contract"?
On the same page we get a paragraph full of jumbled metaphors:
"Indeed, in the salt marshes of this beginning of this century, there is strictly nothing left to hide. The barrel now scraped, all taboos have been broken, after an attempt to kill off secrecy and the forbidden as such, all is brought to its transparency and therefore also called to its ultimate realization. The tank is almost full and twilight cannot be delayed. Whether or not this denouement takes place in a deluge of fire, we really will find out soon enough." (57)
* How is "this beginning of this century" like a salt marsh?
* In English we "scrape the bottom of the barrel" to get the last remnants of an almost exhausted resource, but we don't have an idiom about the scraped barrel.
* The barrel is scraped, but the tank is full?
* Can twilight ever be delayed?
* Does fire come in a "deluge"? I assume the full tank, the twilight, and the fire add up to a Wagnerian apocalypse, but it's a mishmash.
You can extract meaning from these sentences, but you have to hack through a lot of unfamiliar and garbled verbiage. Too much of the book is like this.
What I appreciate: the unflinching analysis of racism, brutality, genocidal aggression/negligence, and exploitation in the world today.
What I don't like: much of this book turns out to be boiled down ideas from other books, though not clearly marked as such. The content is so compressed, abstract, and scattered that it's hard to learn anything you didn't already know from it.
FURTHERMORE: in my opinion, the language is unnecessarily difficult to process. It's similar to reading Barthes or Foucault in translation. Aspects of the syntax and rhetoric don't flow clearly in English.
For example:
"As Europe (and also elsewhere) begins to turn into a sort of boring ice floe, we will now entertain ourselves with nan0racism, that sort of narcotherapy that somewhat resembles an owlet, diminished but with a powerful beak that is hooked and pointed - the bromide par excellence of times of numbness and flaccid paralysis; when all has lost its elasticity, it now appears as if to suddenly contract." (pg 57-58).
"Nanoracism" and "narcotherapy" are not words I've encountered before. "Nanoracism" must be cognate to "racist microaggressions". What is "narcotherapy" - would it bring on sleep, or prevent sleep? Presumably the latter, because it's opposed to boredom. The "owlet" is not a familiar or very useful simile to English readers. And how is an owlet a "bromide," another unfamiliar (and archaic) word? I think the "narcotherapy" is the "bromide," but the owlet has interrupted the sequence of medical associations. By the end of the sentence I am lost - what is the "all" that "has lost its elasticity"? what is the "it" that "appears as if to suddenly contract"?
On the same page we get a paragraph full of jumbled metaphors:
"Indeed, in the salt marshes of this beginning of this century, there is strictly nothing left to hide. The barrel now scraped, all taboos have been broken, after an attempt to kill off secrecy and the forbidden as such, all is brought to its transparency and therefore also called to its ultimate realization. The tank is almost full and twilight cannot be delayed. Whether or not this denouement takes place in a deluge of fire, we really will find out soon enough." (57)
* How is "this beginning of this century" like a salt marsh?
* In English we "scrape the bottom of the barrel" to get the last remnants of an almost exhausted resource, but we don't have an idiom about the scraped barrel.
* The barrel is scraped, but the tank is full?
* Can twilight ever be delayed?
* Does fire come in a "deluge"? I assume the full tank, the twilight, and the fire add up to a Wagnerian apocalypse, but it's a mishmash.
You can extract meaning from these sentences, but you have to hack through a lot of unfamiliar and garbled verbiage. Too much of the book is like this.
July 3, 2020
Neste ensaio, Mbembe propõe uma complementação do conceito de biopoder elaborado por Foucault. A partir dos conceitos de biopoder e da necropolítica, o autor relaciona a produção do terror e a criação do inimigo em regiões como a Palestina e ex-colonias africanas.
Repleto de referências, o autor não se preocupa em explicar os diversos conceitos que cita ao longo do ensaio. Além disso, senti falta de uma explicação mais clara e acessível dos conceitos de necropoder e necropolítica. Por fim, restou uma sensação de incompreensão quase que total do texto. Será que sou mesmo alfabetizada? Fica aí o questionamento.
Por esses motivos, caso você não possua uma bagagem confiável de noções de filosofia e teoria política, não recomendo a leitura. Talvez seja mais proveitoso buscar autores que interpretem e expliquem de maneira didática os conceitos formulados por Mbembe.
Repleto de referências, o autor não se preocupa em explicar os diversos conceitos que cita ao longo do ensaio. Além disso, senti falta de uma explicação mais clara e acessível dos conceitos de necropoder e necropolítica. Por fim, restou uma sensação de incompreensão quase que total do texto. Será que sou mesmo alfabetizada? Fica aí o questionamento.
Por esses motivos, caso você não possua uma bagagem confiável de noções de filosofia e teoria política, não recomendo a leitura. Talvez seja mais proveitoso buscar autores que interpretem e expliquem de maneira didática os conceitos formulados por Mbembe.
June 22, 2020
Esse homem é perfeito, as críticas dele são precisas e tão verdadeiras que se aplicam a outras realidades que ele nem analisou. Mbembe faz tudo
June 25, 2020
“The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die”
The political theorist Achille Mbembe is an author I can never get enough of. He is a thought-provoking writer who was highly influential during my undergrad years, so it is no coincidence that I turn to his wisdom during this uncertain times. In Necro (death) politics, I finds some answers and unsettling questions we can use to explain the crisis of sovereignty. Especially in times like this when the Covid-19 pandemic seems to be a test of this resolve. It is fair to say this current climate is a mix of Foucault/Mbembe couched with little doses of Marx. I digress.
“Democracy, the plantation, and the colonial empire are objectively all part of the same historical matrix. This originary structuring fact lies at the heart of every historical understanding of the violence of the contemporary global order”
Mbembe isn’t afraid to tell it as it is. In some way, Mbembe reminds me of Edouard Glissant as he rejects the limitations of geography and in fact theorizes from a position which stretches beyond the confines of the nation-state. In Necropolitics, Mbembe wields history with precision and tells us that history can be f*cking complex, disturbing, multiplicitous and complicated. That the struggles within any nation-state (African States, Latin America, Middle East, "Global South" etc) are deeply tied to issues of Western modernity. With authority Mbembe’s Necropolitics speaks with clarity to the issues of this very political moment. One only needs to observe the collapse of state structures in the Global South, dare I say, and (North).
In addition, I enjoyed Mbembe footnotes, they are not comforting, but he introduces you to incredible Writers, Scholars and Theorists. At the end of my study, I had a thorough grasp of both Foucault's bio (life) politics and Mbembe Necro (death) politics and was able to place these terms and Theorists in conversation with one another. I will definitely be reading Necropolitics again. As I staunchly believe it is an essential read we can all utilize as a society to envision a brave new world.
Critiques
- Language can sometimes be a bit abstract might require supplementary readings. It also can be quite daunting.
- Mbembe's writing style can sometimes come off as overly academic - Jargon.
- Post-colonial Authors need to relax with the jargon lol, who are you writing for?
The political theorist Achille Mbembe is an author I can never get enough of. He is a thought-provoking writer who was highly influential during my undergrad years, so it is no coincidence that I turn to his wisdom during this uncertain times. In Necro (death) politics, I finds some answers and unsettling questions we can use to explain the crisis of sovereignty. Especially in times like this when the Covid-19 pandemic seems to be a test of this resolve. It is fair to say this current climate is a mix of Foucault/Mbembe couched with little doses of Marx. I digress.
“Democracy, the plantation, and the colonial empire are objectively all part of the same historical matrix. This originary structuring fact lies at the heart of every historical understanding of the violence of the contemporary global order”
Mbembe isn’t afraid to tell it as it is. In some way, Mbembe reminds me of Edouard Glissant as he rejects the limitations of geography and in fact theorizes from a position which stretches beyond the confines of the nation-state. In Necropolitics, Mbembe wields history with precision and tells us that history can be f*cking complex, disturbing, multiplicitous and complicated. That the struggles within any nation-state (African States, Latin America, Middle East, "Global South" etc) are deeply tied to issues of Western modernity. With authority Mbembe’s Necropolitics speaks with clarity to the issues of this very political moment. One only needs to observe the collapse of state structures in the Global South, dare I say, and (North).
In addition, I enjoyed Mbembe footnotes, they are not comforting, but he introduces you to incredible Writers, Scholars and Theorists. At the end of my study, I had a thorough grasp of both Foucault's bio (life) politics and Mbembe Necro (death) politics and was able to place these terms and Theorists in conversation with one another. I will definitely be reading Necropolitics again. As I staunchly believe it is an essential read we can all utilize as a society to envision a brave new world.
Critiques
- Language can sometimes be a bit abstract might require supplementary readings. It also can be quite daunting.
- Mbembe's writing style can sometimes come off as overly academic - Jargon.
- Post-colonial Authors need to relax with the jargon lol, who are you writing for?
December 22, 2024
I can’t do this book justice in a review. You’ll just have to read it yourself. Unfortunately it’s more relevant now than ever before.
August 14, 2024
4.5: Some weakness in the conceptual links between chapters (they are there but need to be mined for, not explicit) but an incredible book that traces the path from/of societies of enmity, the collapse of ‘liberal democracy’ as such, and the emergence of necropower as the structuring logic of the State. Then shifts to an excellent reading of Fanon to question how we can move beyond the globalization of ‘the camp’ and/or decolonize the (entire) world. The book finished with imagining how these genealogies of violence/sovereignty/relations-of-care/psychoanalytic registers of the Other (vs/in/of/through) the self can be used and/or subverted and/or worked through to imagine new human subjectivities. This new human is an assemblage, a relational being, comprised through and of its relations with animals, plants, technology, geologic time, etc. The Ethics of the Passerby conclusion is incredible and recalls Fanon and Glissant to propose a new human subject who belongs to nowhere and everywhere (eschewing a humanistic universality which is the basis of a hegemonic Western epistemic humanism), opting for the “idea of an Earth…which is common to us, as our communal condition” (189). Indeed the deadlocks of humanism are discussed at length and read through Afropessimist and Afrofuturist arguments given the Black slave has long served as the material substratum for capitalism’s long and devastating history which undergirds this book’s focus and can be seen in every social-political-economic dynamic that structures our world today. Read for my thesis so my main focus in this book was on necropolitics/power: connected the ideas of sovereignty, state of war, state of exception, state of siege (either concurrent or separate) with a long politico-theoretical history running through Hegel, Kojeve, Schmitt, Arendt, Agamben, etc. Explains how these political ideas and more metaphysical issues (of reciprocal exclusivity, self-Other relationship, mutual recognition, etc. [undergirded by the colonial relation]) facilitate the emergence and proliferation of necropower as the dominant mode of politics today. Relatedly, Mbembe decenters the State as the privileged unit of analysis vis-à-vis necropolitics, relying on Deleuze’s conception of the war machine as an assemblage which exceeds the state while taking on many of its forms/responsibilities/functions. This theorization of necropolitics is situated at the failure of Foucault’s biopolitics to accurately articulate a contemporary politics of life and death: the states/war machines of today are primarily focused on the maximizing of death (as material and symbol) and the creation of death-worlds which speak far and long outside their spatial and temporal ‘borders’. How do the injured/dead speak to us through their (mutilated) corporeality I.e. how does a thanatopolitics figure in Mbembe’s necropolitics? These “unique forms of social existence” which are bounded by/in death worlds “confer upon [vast populations] the status of the living dead” (92). What then does it mean that these conditions have been extended and globalized as the very *logic* of politics? Certainly there are strong resonances with Sayak Valencia’s Gore Capitalism which should be analyzed (for my thesis and in general) and demand a reading of these works beside and through each other. This chapter/book has also pushed me towards the space/making/doing of borders as the analytical center-point of my thesis and where the brutality of necropolitics is taken to its logical end; thus, my focus on contested political geographies which more often than not exist at the peripheries of the nation-state, at the borders. What does it mean if borderization has superseded borders as such? How is necropower on the move? Questions to be answered in the thesis no doubt…
May 12, 2016
Un libro cuya lucidez sobre el terror moderno, el necropoder y su relación con los estados de la modernidad tardía, resultan indispensables para comprender las máquinas de guerra globales y, entre ellas, las de México. Cito "en nuestro mundo contemporáneo, las armas se despliegan con el objetivo de una destrucción máxima de las personas y de la creación de mundos de muerte, formas únicas y nuevas de existencia social en las que numerosas poblaciones se ven sometidas a condiciones de existencia que les confieren en status de muertos-vivientes".
April 27, 2021
Having read quite a few theorists, I can say that I appreciate Mbembe's candid writing style the most. He says exactly what he means with little embellishments and diplomacy.
Mbembe is in the upper echelons of theorists alongside the likes of Judith Butler and Edward Said. To
Mbembe is in the upper echelons of theorists alongside the likes of Judith Butler and Edward Said. To
September 1, 2021
Mbembe escreve como um acadêmico francês. É hermético, prolixo, poético e insuportavelmente difícil de ler. Talvez um leitor mais erudito que eu consiga saborear suas referências de forma plena e instigante, mas mesmo se assim for creio ser minha obrigação criticar um estilo de escrita que, apesar de tratar de questões graves de regiões periféricas e invisibilizadas, se apresente como um doce açucarado para uma elite intelectual. A impressão persistente é que se trata de um debate e conceitos estéreis em tudo que concerne a transformação social pragmática, mas com grande potencial de uso em rodas de conversas aonde se come caviar.
É uma pena. Afinal, o conceito de necropolítica me pareceu pretender apontar os pontos cegos da noção foucaultiana de biopoder. Mbembe mostra como o exercício do poder e a soberania em regiões extremamente subalternas na ordem mundial se baseia em criar terror e morte constantemente e em escala monstruosa; como a noção de raça, presente também na biopolítica, ainda orienta a construção da imagem de um inimigo cuja morte "nos" deixaria mais forte; e, mais fundamentalmente, como a ideia de Estado-nação - extremamente cara à biopolítica- tem pouca aplicação nas regiões subalternas.
Nestas regiões (Palestina, ex-colonias africanas, colonias de plantation, para citar exemplos), o controle sobre uma faixa territorial é balela perto da soberania vertical, do controle absoluto sobre como as pessoas vivem e se movimentam em um território. Mbembe aponta para uma fusão interessante entre poderes locais e poderes transnacionais para criação de grupos armados que fazem o controle de uma porção de território. Nestas áreas pouco importa a difícil construção de uma autoridade soberana, mas sim a força armada, a capacidade de criar morte e terror, o necropoder.
Assim como Foucault, Mbembe busca efetivamente as técnicas de disciplina, controle e poder exercidas nas regiões subalternas. Enquanto o francês via o nascimento de ciências estatísticas no século XVII como essencial ao exercício do biopoder, o camaronês fala das tecnologias que controlam pelo alto, aviões, drones, torres. Além de armas com capacidade de produzir imediatamente genocídios e destruição em massa.
Fora isso, o livro perde muito tempo tentando expor seu lastro teórico filosófico com trechos insuportavelmente longos e inúteis em que se despeja no leitor considerações que só se sustentam com base na autoridade dos autores que a conceberam. Eu removeria isso e trocaria a parte por resumos jornalísticos sobre a situação nas regiões tratadas. Na verdade, senti muito a necessidade de ler sobre os horrores concretos que serviram de inspiração ao conceito do que continuar lendo uma masturbação teórica feita justamente para ser lida em sala de jantares de países desenvolvidos.
Me permito uma única exceção: gostei muito da frase de Bataille que diz que a comédia é o auto engano voluntário do ser humano diante da tragédia absoluta da morte.
É uma pena. Afinal, o conceito de necropolítica me pareceu pretender apontar os pontos cegos da noção foucaultiana de biopoder. Mbembe mostra como o exercício do poder e a soberania em regiões extremamente subalternas na ordem mundial se baseia em criar terror e morte constantemente e em escala monstruosa; como a noção de raça, presente também na biopolítica, ainda orienta a construção da imagem de um inimigo cuja morte "nos" deixaria mais forte; e, mais fundamentalmente, como a ideia de Estado-nação - extremamente cara à biopolítica- tem pouca aplicação nas regiões subalternas.
Nestas regiões (Palestina, ex-colonias africanas, colonias de plantation, para citar exemplos), o controle sobre uma faixa territorial é balela perto da soberania vertical, do controle absoluto sobre como as pessoas vivem e se movimentam em um território. Mbembe aponta para uma fusão interessante entre poderes locais e poderes transnacionais para criação de grupos armados que fazem o controle de uma porção de território. Nestas áreas pouco importa a difícil construção de uma autoridade soberana, mas sim a força armada, a capacidade de criar morte e terror, o necropoder.
Assim como Foucault, Mbembe busca efetivamente as técnicas de disciplina, controle e poder exercidas nas regiões subalternas. Enquanto o francês via o nascimento de ciências estatísticas no século XVII como essencial ao exercício do biopoder, o camaronês fala das tecnologias que controlam pelo alto, aviões, drones, torres. Além de armas com capacidade de produzir imediatamente genocídios e destruição em massa.
Fora isso, o livro perde muito tempo tentando expor seu lastro teórico filosófico com trechos insuportavelmente longos e inúteis em que se despeja no leitor considerações que só se sustentam com base na autoridade dos autores que a conceberam. Eu removeria isso e trocaria a parte por resumos jornalísticos sobre a situação nas regiões tratadas. Na verdade, senti muito a necessidade de ler sobre os horrores concretos que serviram de inspiração ao conceito do que continuar lendo uma masturbação teórica feita justamente para ser lida em sala de jantares de países desenvolvidos.
Me permito uma única exceção: gostei muito da frase de Bataille que diz que a comédia é o auto engano voluntário do ser humano diante da tragédia absoluta da morte.
October 4, 2023
Necropolitics powerfully challenges Eurocentric Grand Historical Narratives and perspectives of the world - if not imploding them altogether. The book provides a genealogy of our contemporary world defined by enclosures and separation and urgently asks how to move towards a future in common.
What I loved, is the critical assessment of democracy. Democracy often regarded as pure and rational is revealed to have a double; the "nocturnal body" defined by violence, extraction, and the breach of rights. Early European Democracies enabled their development through colonisation and today maintain themselves through harsh border policies and extorted wealth. This is something which should be part of the history/politics curriculum of high schools in Europe.
Another one is the tracing of the concentration camp through time. WW2 and the extermination camps are a big trope in European cultural memory. In the case of the Netherlands, the memory of WW2, of victimhood, often comes to overshadow memories of perpetraterhood. While these should not be incompatible with one another but seen as interlinked. Interesting is how Mbembe shows the means, intentions and technologies used in concentration camps to be tested in colonial wars.
The book is poetic, philosphical and elliptically so - very pratical. While Necropolitics re-educates on history, it is also very much geared towards a future. It asks how we can planarize democratic principles or includes all and everything into a form of communing. Focussing on the question of a relation of desire as opposed to that of separation or enmity.
I found the book quite challenging - it took me a good half a year to read it. I found the text swinging between intense poignancy and perhaps more messy parts of the book that were difficult to follow. But all in all, I think it was a must-read. I wish I had read this earlier.
What I loved, is the critical assessment of democracy. Democracy often regarded as pure and rational is revealed to have a double; the "nocturnal body" defined by violence, extraction, and the breach of rights. Early European Democracies enabled their development through colonisation and today maintain themselves through harsh border policies and extorted wealth. This is something which should be part of the history/politics curriculum of high schools in Europe.
Another one is the tracing of the concentration camp through time. WW2 and the extermination camps are a big trope in European cultural memory. In the case of the Netherlands, the memory of WW2, of victimhood, often comes to overshadow memories of perpetraterhood. While these should not be incompatible with one another but seen as interlinked. Interesting is how Mbembe shows the means, intentions and technologies used in concentration camps to be tested in colonial wars.
The book is poetic, philosphical and elliptically so - very pratical. While Necropolitics re-educates on history, it is also very much geared towards a future. It asks how we can planarize democratic principles or includes all and everything into a form of communing. Focussing on the question of a relation of desire as opposed to that of separation or enmity.
I found the book quite challenging - it took me a good half a year to read it. I found the text swinging between intense poignancy and perhaps more messy parts of the book that were difficult to follow. But all in all, I think it was a must-read. I wish I had read this earlier.
July 20, 2020
Texto curto e fluido que aborda as formas contemporâneas que subjugam a vida ao poder da morte e reconfiguram as relações entre resistência, sacrifício e terror.
Com base no conceito Foucaultino de biopoder, Achille Mbembe explora a relação entre as noções de soberania e estado de exceção, apontando que a expressão máxima do poder soberano reside, em grande medida, na capacidade de ditar quem deve viver e quem deve morrer – o necropoder.
Com base no conceito Foucaultino de biopoder, Achille Mbembe explora a relação entre as noções de soberania e estado de exceção, apontando que a expressão máxima do poder soberano reside, em grande medida, na capacidade de ditar quem deve viver e quem deve morrer – o necropoder.
November 15, 2019
The man is right! Militarization, enenimity, virtually unknown before 1964 have appeared out of nowhere in the World. And Mbembe is the man to find the source of the problem and maybe show us the way to the sweet and calm days of 1942.
February 25, 2022
many interesting ideas and I buy into the main idea of “necropolitics”, but the writing style is so abstract and the structure is almost non-existent. No doubt the translation from French is partially to blame.
August 3, 2020
Um ensaio bem curto mas muito certeiro, doidera ler, Mbembe é o bicho
December 12, 2020
An astounding work of theory, sweeping in its scope and unfailingly sharp in its insight.
February 25, 2022
Lots of food for thought and had some interesting sections. Overall, I thought it was not an easy read and a bit disjointed at times
March 25, 2021
Si bien es un ensayo simple, conceptualiza de forma cruda pero acertada la fórmula del asesinato humano como forma de política de Estado (y política global).
No sé si el término de necropolítica fue acuñado por este autor. Sin embargo, creo no haberlo escuchado antes en ningún otro, y calza perfecto para la descripción de la crueldad humana institucionalizada por los grandes poderes estatales y naturalizada por todos los ciudadanos del orbe.
Me quedan mis dudas si el llamado "kamikaze" está al mismo nivel que el asesinato estatal o "multinacional", pero sin duda es un tema interesante a debatir.
No sé si el término de necropolítica fue acuñado por este autor. Sin embargo, creo no haberlo escuchado antes en ningún otro, y calza perfecto para la descripción de la crueldad humana institucionalizada por los grandes poderes estatales y naturalizada por todos los ciudadanos del orbe.
Me quedan mis dudas si el llamado "kamikaze" está al mismo nivel que el asesinato estatal o "multinacional", pero sin duda es un tema interesante a debatir.
October 19, 2020
Some methodological squabbles.
May have been rated higher, had I had a more thorough grounding in Hegel and Nietzche, tbh. An important book, nonetheless.
May have been rated higher, had I had a more thorough grounding in Hegel and Nietzche, tbh. An important book, nonetheless.
November 8, 2024
Not exactly an uplifting read, but in times of private military forces, militias exerting state power and hospitals being bombed by fighter jets while the world watches it provides scary insights into power struggles in a world still reorienting its forces after the end of colonial empires and the advent of globalisation.
May 23, 2024
Some notes I took on a few chapters:
Mbembe’s work is a critique of our time, a time that is exiting from democracy. Mbembe’s critique gives attention to the motifs of opening, crossing, and circulation. These motifs are epitomized in contemporary borderlands, wars, and information technologies. Through attention to these motifs, Mbembe argues for four principal traits of our time:
• “The first is the narrowing of the world and the repopulation of the Earth in view of the demographic transition now under way thanks to the worlds of the South” (pg. 9-10).
o The narrowing and repopulation of the Earth was at once one of ecological devastation and an movement of rendering black people ‘worldless and soilless’ bodies of ‘combustible energy.’
• “The second characteristic trait of our times is the ongoing redefinition of the human in the framework of a general ecology and a henceforth broadened geography, one that is spherical and irreversibly planetary” (pg. 13).
o There is no ‘essence of man’ or ‘human nature’ to protect; thus, modifying humanity into various technological and genetic structures is a limitless enterprise.
• “The third constitutive feature of the era is the generalized introduction of tools and calculating or computational machines into all aspects of social life” (pg. 14).
o There is no impenetrable separation between screen and life, genetic and biological aspects of human life are cross-pollinated with the digital.
• “The articulation between the capacity to voluntarily alter the human species—and even other living species and apparently inert materials— and the power of capital constitute the fourth striking feature of the world of our times” (pg. 14).
o Capital, especially in its financialized form, is a powerful means to quickly corrode any essence, whether it be human or otherwise.
2.) The Two Bodies of Democracy: Solar and Nocturnal
Mbembe argues that past democratic states and their peaceful civil lives in the metropole (designated as the solar body of democracy) depend upon an internal plantation, an external infliction of colonial violence, and the penal colony. These deadly aspects of democracy are designated as the nocturnal body of democracy); the nocturnal body provides the material goods for the metropole. In other words, “the order of the plantation, of the colony, and of democracy” do not separate (pg. 20).
• “No democracy exists without its double, without its colony—little matter the name and the structure. The colony is not external to democracy and is not necessarily located out- side its walls. Democracy bears the colony within it, just as colonialism bears democracy, often in the guise of a mask” (pg. 27).
• In response to democracy, the plantation, and colonialism being bedfellows, Mbembe demonstrate how and why non-state mediated politics, such as direct action, the general strike, revolutionary trade unionists, and anarchism, make their appearance.
• In order to properly understand the matrix of the plantation, democracy, and colonialism, Mbembe draws our attention to mythological “factors of a political, technological, demographic, epidemiological, and even botanical nature” (pg. 23).
o The most important political develop in this matrix, for Mbembe, that “colonial conquest paves the way to a sphere of unregulated war, to war outside-the-law led by some democracy, which, in so doing, externalizes violence to a third place ruled by nonnormative conventions and customs” (pg. 25).
• Throughout modernity, there emerged a mode of domination that had no responsibilities. This mode of domination—epitomized in the prison, plantation, torture cell, ghetto— suspended the law in order to uphold the law
o As of late, domination without responsibility entailed the loss of the state’s monopoly on violence. Hence, a new ‘politicocultural configuration’ grants the possibility that “that anyone whomever can be killed by anyone whomever at whatever moment, using any pretext at all” (pg. 35).
o Pre-existent boundaries between police and military, militia and military, corporations and states are eliminated and suspended, though nonetheless under the state’s relative autonomy, in the name of law and order.
o Life and death are inverted. Those who avoided death are now summoned as the executioner. Otherwise put, life is but a medium of death
o “In these conditions, power is infinitely more brutal than under the authoritarian period. It is more physical, more bodily, and more burdensome. No longer does it aim at taming populations as such. While it remains steadfast in its strict surveillance of bodies (or in its agglomerating them within the perimeters it controls), this is done not so much to discipline them as to extract a maximum of utility from them and, sometimes, forms of enjoyment (notably with sexual slavery)” (pg. 36)
3.) Acceleration, Computation, and Financialization
Through studying fast capitalism, soft-power warfare, and digital/computational technologies, Mbembe argues that the present is characterized by an “acceleration of speed and intensification of connections” (pg. 93). The merging of war, digitization, and financialization have altered the function of language and politics into an algorithmic process set on extracting and exploiting land and labor alike.
• The paradigmatic case of acceleration and intensification meeting at the matrix of fast capitalism and warfare, for Mbembe, is Palestine. The Gaza Strip epitomizes European policies on borderization. Set on controlling, computing, surveilling, and killing, Palestinians are the subject of the future, a subject rendered superfluous and killable.
o “Gaza is a paradigmatic example... it is the culmination of spatial exclusionary arrangements that existed in an incipient state during the early phases of modern settler or genocidal colonialism... Here, the control of vulnerable, unwanted, or surplus people is exercised through a combination of tactics, chief among which is the “modulated blockade.” A blockade prohibits, obstructs, and limits who and what can enter and leave the Strip. The goal might not be to cut the Strip off entirely from supply lines, infrastructural grids, or trade routes. It is nevertheless relatively sealed off in a way which effectively turns it into an imprisoned territory. Comprehensive or relative closure is punctuated by periodic military escalations and the generalized use of extrajudicial assassinations. Spatial violence, humanitarian strategies, and a peculiar biopolitics of punishment all combine to produce, in turn, a peculiar carceral space in which people deemed surplus, unwanted, or illegal are governed through abdication of any responsibility for their lives and their welfare” (pg. 97).
3.) A Politics of Reason?
The nocturnal history and body of democracy lead Mbembe to rightly ask if there can another politics other than the present. Can there be a politics of reason that links one human to another in such a way that a togetherness is materialized?
• “Is another politics of the world possible, a politics that no longer necessarily rests upon difference or alterity but instead on a certain idea of the kindred and the in-common? Are we not condemned to live in our exposure to one another, sometimes in the same space?” (pg. 40)
• However, within this hellscape described by Mbembe, he remains largely is hesitant to positively affirm what a different way of living, one that is not characterized by computation, exigency, and pure violence, may look like. However, Mbembe sporadically eludes to a type of non-calculative reasoning that could temper our acceleration into a future that is all but egalitarian.
Mbembe’s work is a critique of our time, a time that is exiting from democracy. Mbembe’s critique gives attention to the motifs of opening, crossing, and circulation. These motifs are epitomized in contemporary borderlands, wars, and information technologies. Through attention to these motifs, Mbembe argues for four principal traits of our time:
• “The first is the narrowing of the world and the repopulation of the Earth in view of the demographic transition now under way thanks to the worlds of the South” (pg. 9-10).
o The narrowing and repopulation of the Earth was at once one of ecological devastation and an movement of rendering black people ‘worldless and soilless’ bodies of ‘combustible energy.’
• “The second characteristic trait of our times is the ongoing redefinition of the human in the framework of a general ecology and a henceforth broadened geography, one that is spherical and irreversibly planetary” (pg. 13).
o There is no ‘essence of man’ or ‘human nature’ to protect; thus, modifying humanity into various technological and genetic structures is a limitless enterprise.
• “The third constitutive feature of the era is the generalized introduction of tools and calculating or computational machines into all aspects of social life” (pg. 14).
o There is no impenetrable separation between screen and life, genetic and biological aspects of human life are cross-pollinated with the digital.
• “The articulation between the capacity to voluntarily alter the human species—and even other living species and apparently inert materials— and the power of capital constitute the fourth striking feature of the world of our times” (pg. 14).
o Capital, especially in its financialized form, is a powerful means to quickly corrode any essence, whether it be human or otherwise.
2.) The Two Bodies of Democracy: Solar and Nocturnal
Mbembe argues that past democratic states and their peaceful civil lives in the metropole (designated as the solar body of democracy) depend upon an internal plantation, an external infliction of colonial violence, and the penal colony. These deadly aspects of democracy are designated as the nocturnal body of democracy); the nocturnal body provides the material goods for the metropole. In other words, “the order of the plantation, of the colony, and of democracy” do not separate (pg. 20).
• “No democracy exists without its double, without its colony—little matter the name and the structure. The colony is not external to democracy and is not necessarily located out- side its walls. Democracy bears the colony within it, just as colonialism bears democracy, often in the guise of a mask” (pg. 27).
• In response to democracy, the plantation, and colonialism being bedfellows, Mbembe demonstrate how and why non-state mediated politics, such as direct action, the general strike, revolutionary trade unionists, and anarchism, make their appearance.
• In order to properly understand the matrix of the plantation, democracy, and colonialism, Mbembe draws our attention to mythological “factors of a political, technological, demographic, epidemiological, and even botanical nature” (pg. 23).
o The most important political develop in this matrix, for Mbembe, that “colonial conquest paves the way to a sphere of unregulated war, to war outside-the-law led by some democracy, which, in so doing, externalizes violence to a third place ruled by nonnormative conventions and customs” (pg. 25).
• Throughout modernity, there emerged a mode of domination that had no responsibilities. This mode of domination—epitomized in the prison, plantation, torture cell, ghetto— suspended the law in order to uphold the law
o As of late, domination without responsibility entailed the loss of the state’s monopoly on violence. Hence, a new ‘politicocultural configuration’ grants the possibility that “that anyone whomever can be killed by anyone whomever at whatever moment, using any pretext at all” (pg. 35).
o Pre-existent boundaries between police and military, militia and military, corporations and states are eliminated and suspended, though nonetheless under the state’s relative autonomy, in the name of law and order.
o Life and death are inverted. Those who avoided death are now summoned as the executioner. Otherwise put, life is but a medium of death
o “In these conditions, power is infinitely more brutal than under the authoritarian period. It is more physical, more bodily, and more burdensome. No longer does it aim at taming populations as such. While it remains steadfast in its strict surveillance of bodies (or in its agglomerating them within the perimeters it controls), this is done not so much to discipline them as to extract a maximum of utility from them and, sometimes, forms of enjoyment (notably with sexual slavery)” (pg. 36)
3.) Acceleration, Computation, and Financialization
Through studying fast capitalism, soft-power warfare, and digital/computational technologies, Mbembe argues that the present is characterized by an “acceleration of speed and intensification of connections” (pg. 93). The merging of war, digitization, and financialization have altered the function of language and politics into an algorithmic process set on extracting and exploiting land and labor alike.
• The paradigmatic case of acceleration and intensification meeting at the matrix of fast capitalism and warfare, for Mbembe, is Palestine. The Gaza Strip epitomizes European policies on borderization. Set on controlling, computing, surveilling, and killing, Palestinians are the subject of the future, a subject rendered superfluous and killable.
o “Gaza is a paradigmatic example... it is the culmination of spatial exclusionary arrangements that existed in an incipient state during the early phases of modern settler or genocidal colonialism... Here, the control of vulnerable, unwanted, or surplus people is exercised through a combination of tactics, chief among which is the “modulated blockade.” A blockade prohibits, obstructs, and limits who and what can enter and leave the Strip. The goal might not be to cut the Strip off entirely from supply lines, infrastructural grids, or trade routes. It is nevertheless relatively sealed off in a way which effectively turns it into an imprisoned territory. Comprehensive or relative closure is punctuated by periodic military escalations and the generalized use of extrajudicial assassinations. Spatial violence, humanitarian strategies, and a peculiar biopolitics of punishment all combine to produce, in turn, a peculiar carceral space in which people deemed surplus, unwanted, or illegal are governed through abdication of any responsibility for their lives and their welfare” (pg. 97).
3.) A Politics of Reason?
The nocturnal history and body of democracy lead Mbembe to rightly ask if there can another politics other than the present. Can there be a politics of reason that links one human to another in such a way that a togetherness is materialized?
• “Is another politics of the world possible, a politics that no longer necessarily rests upon difference or alterity but instead on a certain idea of the kindred and the in-common? Are we not condemned to live in our exposure to one another, sometimes in the same space?” (pg. 40)
• However, within this hellscape described by Mbembe, he remains largely is hesitant to positively affirm what a different way of living, one that is not characterized by computation, exigency, and pure violence, may look like. However, Mbembe sporadically eludes to a type of non-calculative reasoning that could temper our acceleration into a future that is all but egalitarian.
May 11, 2022
I’ve been meaning to read this book since it came out, but only just got around to it, deciding this past Holy Week leading up to Easter would be a perfect time, and it really was. Easter is literally about a Roman imperial occupying force killing some trouble-making Jewish peasant in a gross and disturbing way, and Necropolitics is in many ways about that sort of colonial violence and its persistent iterations in contemporary fascism, racism, and border violence.
My friend, from Libya who is into pan-African and pan-Arab politics, was reading this book back around September and October last year when I was just restarting school again. We had gone down with another friend to the Missinihe (Credit River) near Riverwood to look at the Pacific salmon struggling upstream during their autumn run, and after it got dark, we ended up outside the Riverwood buildings talking into the night. I had circulated a paper earlier that day by Paulin Hountondji I was reading for a Marx/STS reading group I was in, and my friend had skimmed over it and expressed some skepticism about it. They also mentioned they had been reading this book (Necropolitics by Mbembe) and just didn’t feel like it was saying anything, and they found academic writing just so frustrating to read. They told me, please don't write like this in grad school, it's awful.
While I agree with their general sentiments about academic writing, when it came to this book by Mbembe, I absolutely loved it and thought it was beautifully written. Bad news I'm afraid. It’s not at all like reading Foucault, Deleuze, or Butler for that matter. It was actually written with a lot more clarity, but it does engage freely with sweeping rhetorical flourishes. But that’s what made it so readable for me.
It takes Agamben’s theorizing on the state of exception into far more compelling places such as sites of colonial genocide and the border violence experienced by desperate migrants. I read Agamben’s Homo Sacer last Easter, and while enjoying it, this was a far more rewarding experience (and a very good alternative considering all the embarrassing anti-vax stuff Agamben has been spouting during the pandemic).
There were a lot of things in here that would interest people in STS and also a lot of very fascinating theological commentary, which I was very surprised by. Just one example, a long excerpt, but fascinating:
“In yet another constellation, which combines technophilia and millenarianism, the old quest for immortality is reactivated. The belief is that technology will overcome “the brute empirical facts of the human condition,” that is, death itself. The latter is no longer thought of as irreversible. It is believed that cryonic preservation (which involves the freezing of parts of corpses for later resurrection) might open the door to an unlimited lifespan. Digital replication of the human mind may eventually be downloaded and natural, social and biological limits to self-actualization and self-realization removed. Notwithstanding the false hope that technology will one day revive humans who have been cryonically preserved and “vitrified,” the times are therefore propitious for a negative messianism.
The full force of messianism resides in the concept of a redemption still to come. The most dramatic instance of redemption in the history of humanity is that of the slave. Messianicity is originally tied to the purchasing of the slave by God. The human being formerly owned by a master, the slave is declared “bought” by God, who, in retrocessing full value to the captive, effectively redeems him. The act of redemption involves a price. In the Paulinian tradition, this price is Christ’s blood. To free the slave, the ransom is supplied out of God’s own blood.
Contrary to biblical messianism, contemporary avatars of messianism are not concerned about the fate of the slave. Negative messianism is a kind of messianism that has either forfeited the idea of redemption as such or has been reduced to a crude belief in the expiatory power of bloodshed. It is not about salvation. In its minor version, it is about survival and the willingness to sacrifice or to be sacrificed. Its aim is to turn a forgiving God into an ethnic and angry god. In its major version, it is about collective suicide before the Apocalypse.”
I also really loved Mbembe’s commentary on ‘European’ archives:
“But does saying it has ceased to be the world’s center of gravity mean that the European archive is exhausted? For that matter, was this archive only ever the product of a particular history? As the history of Europe has been confounded over several centuries with the history of the world, and the history of the world in turn has been confounded with Europe’s own, it follows, does it not, that this archive does not belong to Europe alone?
As the world no longer has only one pharmacy, so the matter essentially concerns how we might inhabit all its assemblages ( faisceaux), how we might escape from the relation without desire and the peril of the society of enmity. Starting from a multiplicity of places, the concern is then to traverse them, as responsibly as possible, given the entitled parties that we all are, but in a total relation of freedom and, wherever necessary, of detachment. In this process, which entails translation but also conflict and misunderstandings, certain questions will be resolved. What will then emerge in relative clarity are the demands, if not of a possible universality, then at least of an idea of the Earth as that which is common to us, as our communal condition.”
I will just conclude with one more excerpt from the very end of this book, which was literally perfect reading for Easter this year, and I loved the allusions to resurrection and a new world, because there’s just so much poetry to that language, and I personally find that writing very enjoyable:
“…that divisible, divided body, in struggle against itself, made of several bodies that confront each other within one and the same body—on the one hand, the body of hatred, of appalling burden, the false body of abjection crushed by indignity, and, on the other, the originary body, which, upon being stolen by others, is then disfigured and abominated, whereupon the matter is literally one of resuscitating it, in an act of veritable genesis.
Rendered to life and thereby different to the fallen body of colonized existence, this new body will be invited to become a member of a new community. Unfolding according to its own plan, it will henceforth walk along together with other bodies and, doing so, will re-create the world.
This is why, with Fanon, we address it in this final prayer:
O my body, always make me a man who questions!”
My friend, from Libya who is into pan-African and pan-Arab politics, was reading this book back around September and October last year when I was just restarting school again. We had gone down with another friend to the Missinihe (Credit River) near Riverwood to look at the Pacific salmon struggling upstream during their autumn run, and after it got dark, we ended up outside the Riverwood buildings talking into the night. I had circulated a paper earlier that day by Paulin Hountondji I was reading for a Marx/STS reading group I was in, and my friend had skimmed over it and expressed some skepticism about it. They also mentioned they had been reading this book (Necropolitics by Mbembe) and just didn’t feel like it was saying anything, and they found academic writing just so frustrating to read. They told me, please don't write like this in grad school, it's awful.
While I agree with their general sentiments about academic writing, when it came to this book by Mbembe, I absolutely loved it and thought it was beautifully written. Bad news I'm afraid. It’s not at all like reading Foucault, Deleuze, or Butler for that matter. It was actually written with a lot more clarity, but it does engage freely with sweeping rhetorical flourishes. But that’s what made it so readable for me.
It takes Agamben’s theorizing on the state of exception into far more compelling places such as sites of colonial genocide and the border violence experienced by desperate migrants. I read Agamben’s Homo Sacer last Easter, and while enjoying it, this was a far more rewarding experience (and a very good alternative considering all the embarrassing anti-vax stuff Agamben has been spouting during the pandemic).
There were a lot of things in here that would interest people in STS and also a lot of very fascinating theological commentary, which I was very surprised by. Just one example, a long excerpt, but fascinating:
“In yet another constellation, which combines technophilia and millenarianism, the old quest for immortality is reactivated. The belief is that technology will overcome “the brute empirical facts of the human condition,” that is, death itself. The latter is no longer thought of as irreversible. It is believed that cryonic preservation (which involves the freezing of parts of corpses for later resurrection) might open the door to an unlimited lifespan. Digital replication of the human mind may eventually be downloaded and natural, social and biological limits to self-actualization and self-realization removed. Notwithstanding the false hope that technology will one day revive humans who have been cryonically preserved and “vitrified,” the times are therefore propitious for a negative messianism.
The full force of messianism resides in the concept of a redemption still to come. The most dramatic instance of redemption in the history of humanity is that of the slave. Messianicity is originally tied to the purchasing of the slave by God. The human being formerly owned by a master, the slave is declared “bought” by God, who, in retrocessing full value to the captive, effectively redeems him. The act of redemption involves a price. In the Paulinian tradition, this price is Christ’s blood. To free the slave, the ransom is supplied out of God’s own blood.
Contrary to biblical messianism, contemporary avatars of messianism are not concerned about the fate of the slave. Negative messianism is a kind of messianism that has either forfeited the idea of redemption as such or has been reduced to a crude belief in the expiatory power of bloodshed. It is not about salvation. In its minor version, it is about survival and the willingness to sacrifice or to be sacrificed. Its aim is to turn a forgiving God into an ethnic and angry god. In its major version, it is about collective suicide before the Apocalypse.”
I also really loved Mbembe’s commentary on ‘European’ archives:
“But does saying it has ceased to be the world’s center of gravity mean that the European archive is exhausted? For that matter, was this archive only ever the product of a particular history? As the history of Europe has been confounded over several centuries with the history of the world, and the history of the world in turn has been confounded with Europe’s own, it follows, does it not, that this archive does not belong to Europe alone?
As the world no longer has only one pharmacy, so the matter essentially concerns how we might inhabit all its assemblages ( faisceaux), how we might escape from the relation without desire and the peril of the society of enmity. Starting from a multiplicity of places, the concern is then to traverse them, as responsibly as possible, given the entitled parties that we all are, but in a total relation of freedom and, wherever necessary, of detachment. In this process, which entails translation but also conflict and misunderstandings, certain questions will be resolved. What will then emerge in relative clarity are the demands, if not of a possible universality, then at least of an idea of the Earth as that which is common to us, as our communal condition.”
I will just conclude with one more excerpt from the very end of this book, which was literally perfect reading for Easter this year, and I loved the allusions to resurrection and a new world, because there’s just so much poetry to that language, and I personally find that writing very enjoyable:
“…that divisible, divided body, in struggle against itself, made of several bodies that confront each other within one and the same body—on the one hand, the body of hatred, of appalling burden, the false body of abjection crushed by indignity, and, on the other, the originary body, which, upon being stolen by others, is then disfigured and abominated, whereupon the matter is literally one of resuscitating it, in an act of veritable genesis.
Rendered to life and thereby different to the fallen body of colonized existence, this new body will be invited to become a member of a new community. Unfolding according to its own plan, it will henceforth walk along together with other bodies and, doing so, will re-create the world.
This is why, with Fanon, we address it in this final prayer:
O my body, always make me a man who questions!”
August 4, 2020
Mbembe writes about necropolitics but fails to fully recognize the oppression of non-human animals. It is just impossible to define necropolitics without taking into account the problem of the enslavement of all sentient beings - regardless of their species of origin. You can't understand racism and dehumanization without understanding speciesism and devaluation of non-human animals. And you can't understand colonization without understanding anthropopressure. The ‘desire of apartheid’? Look at your plate, at slaughterhouses, at the global necropolitics of domestication. Moral blind spots, they are everywhere.
July 15, 2021
Esse ensaio individualmente apresenta vários conceitos, de diversos autores, mas de forma muito breve, sem uma apresentação concisa, se tornando um amontoado de teorias e nenhuma proposta. Talvez a obra Política da Inimizade esclareça melhor a proposta do autor, mas esse texto em separado é um emaranhado de partes difusas.
June 10, 2021
Acho que funciona melhor em conjunto com os outros ensaios, como na versão original. O ensaio por si só fica devendo em profundidade pra quem realmente quer entender o significado das categorias que ele está usando.
August 15, 2024
BIBLE
May 22, 2021
La tesis de Mbembe es que la necropolítica despliega su poder en el ejercicio de la soberanía. Esta última, en el contexto poscolonial, no se adjudica necesariamente a la agencia de un Estado sobre un territorio ni a la ampliación de sus límites geográficos; más bien, la soberanía opera por medio de distintas entidades, políticas, corporativas, transnacionales, etc., haciendo del terror y la ocupación territorial los pilares de su ejercicio.
Desde mi perspectiva, el concepto de 'necropolítica' es necesario para pensar en las nuevas formas de violencia acaecidas en el último siglo. Si bien hay similitudes entre este término y el de 'biopoder', Mbembe deja en claro por qué este último sería insuficiente para el discernimiento del poder poscolonial actual. La necropolítica nota que el acto de la violencia también es un fin en sí mismo, que las 'vidas a abandonar', bajo la mirada del sujeto colonizador, son cuerpos que deben asumir un locus particular, el de la sumisión. Por lo mismo, la mutilación es uno de los actos más propios de la necropolítica.
Ya hacia el final del texto, merece especial atención el análisis sobre la figura del kamikaze, pues devela una configuración tanatopolítica inédita. Mbembe plantea al kamikaze como un mártir que, bajo la mascarada y el silenciamiento, se apropia de los cuerpos del enemigo a la vez que consuma el suicidio. A diferencia del héroe o del superviviente, este no toma distancia con el sujeto-para-la-muerte, sino que va a su encuentro y mimetiza su cuerpo con el del arma.
Desde mi perspectiva, el concepto de 'necropolítica' es necesario para pensar en las nuevas formas de violencia acaecidas en el último siglo. Si bien hay similitudes entre este término y el de 'biopoder', Mbembe deja en claro por qué este último sería insuficiente para el discernimiento del poder poscolonial actual. La necropolítica nota que el acto de la violencia también es un fin en sí mismo, que las 'vidas a abandonar', bajo la mirada del sujeto colonizador, son cuerpos que deben asumir un locus particular, el de la sumisión. Por lo mismo, la mutilación es uno de los actos más propios de la necropolítica.
Ya hacia el final del texto, merece especial atención el análisis sobre la figura del kamikaze, pues devela una configuración tanatopolítica inédita. Mbembe plantea al kamikaze como un mártir que, bajo la mascarada y el silenciamiento, se apropia de los cuerpos del enemigo a la vez que consuma el suicidio. A diferencia del héroe o del superviviente, este no toma distancia con el sujeto-para-la-muerte, sino que va a su encuentro y mimetiza su cuerpo con el del arma.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 160 reviews