Neal Spadafora 's Reviews > Necropolitics

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.