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Forms of death
Necropolitics, mourning, and Black dignity

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Ajari, N 2022, 'Forms of death: Necropolitics, mourning, and Black dignity', Symposium: Canadian Journal
of Continental Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 1/2, pp. 167-188. https://doi.org/10.5840/symposium2022261/29

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 Forms of Death:
Necropolitics, Mourning, and Black Dignity
Norman Ajari
(University of Edinburgh)

To be Black means to have ancestors whose humanity has been denied by slavery, colonialism,
neo-colonialism, and segregation, as well as by many theories elaborated in order to justify and
intensify these modes of domination. To be Black also means having to face the enduring
legacies of these systems and theories, which predominantly manifest through overexposure to
violence and death. Today, premature death and habituation to loss remain constitutive features
of Black experience. Dignity, often defined as the inherent value of every single human being,
has been a core concept in ethics since Kant, at least. But in both philosophy and modern
politics, the claim of respect for the dignity of people has coexisted with deep antiblackness.
However, apart from the Western understanding of dignity stands another tradition. The
concept of dignity is pervasive in Black radicalism, Caribbean philosophy, and African thought
since the 18th century. This article draws inspiration from the legacy of these thinkers to
elaborate an ethics centred on the specificities of racialized life.

Être noir, c’est avoir des ancêtres dont l’humanité a été niée par l’esclavage, le colonialisme, le
néocolonialisme, la ségrégation ainsi que les nombreuses théories élaborées pour justifier et
intensifier ces modes de domination. Être noir revient aussi à faire face à l’héritage de ces
systèmes et de ces théories qui se manifestent avant tout dans une surexposition à la violence
et à la mort. Aujourd’hui, la mort prématurée et l’habituation à la perte demeurent des traits
constitutifs de l’existence noire. La dignité, souvent définie comme la valeur intrinsèque de
chaque être humain, est un concept fondamental de l’éthique au moins depuis Kant. Mais, dans
la philosophie comme dans la politique modernes, la revendication du respect de la dignité a
coexisté avec une profonde négrophobie. Toutefois, en dehors de cette interprétation
occidentale de la dignité existe une autre tradition. En effet, le concept de dignité est
omniprésent au sein du radicalisme noir, de la philosophie antillaise et de la pensée africaine
depuis le XVIIIe siècle. Cet article s’inspire de ces héritages pour élaborer une éthique centrée
sur la spécificité de la vie exposée à la violence raciale.

1
In her 1992 open letter to social sciences and humanities scholars entitled “No Humans

Involved,” Sylvia Wynter explores the theoretical and speculative consequences of the use of

the acronym NHI by Los Angeles officials to designate cases involving Black men: “[Y]oung

Black males can be perceived, and therefore behaved towards, only as the Lack of the human,

the Conceptual Other to being North American.”1 Wynter’s letter initiated a necessary

conversation about the actuality of a specific experience of antiblackness that conflates with the

possibility of being executed. Critical Race Theory, which tends to present a more empirically-

oriented account of race, confirms that overexposure to state violence and premature death are

central features of Black existence.2 The pervasiveness of those experiences of racism in the

United States and throughout the world is the reason why Ruth Gilmore famously defined

racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated

vulnerability to premature death.”3 Insisting on the too-often overlooked gendered dimension

of such state violence, philosopher Tommy J. Curry underlined that around 300 Black men are

victims of police killings each year. Further emphasizing their overrepresentation in the prison

population and their unequal treatment in terms of healthcare, Curry concludes that “American

society not only is generally dangerous for Black men but also uses fatal force to limit the

number of Black men in the population and control their political dissent. Police killings

specifically target Black males under the language of social welfare to limit the political will

this group can exert within the democratic system.”4

Philosopher Leonard Harris describes such a theoretical orientation as an actuarial

account of racism. His approach is critical of unexamined assumptions according to which a

1
Sylvia Wynter, No Humans Involved. An Open Letter to My Colleagues (Hudson: Publication Studio Hudson,
2015), 4.
2
Tommy J. Curry, “Will the Real CRT Please Stand Up? The Dangers of Philosophical Contributions to CRT,”
The Crit, vol. 2, no. 1 (2009): 1–47.
3
, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.
4
Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not. Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2017), 133. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as TMN.

2
representational or genealogical study of racism may provide us with apt tools to fight the

enduring threats of racism and white supremacy efficiently. In Harris’s view, those approaches

tend to overlook the most present and material manifestations of racism—especially, as Curry

showed, when its victims are racialized men and boys (TMN, 230). Rather than trying to explain

the logics or historical origins of racism, actuarial method consists in using statistical tools to

determine demographic differences of health and mortality, objectivizing race as a profound

degradation of racialized people’s whole existence. The aim is to describe and depict racism

instead of trying to explain it. Harris writes, “I argue that an actuarial account could allow us to

depict racism as a life-and-death exchange; victims as corpses, cumulatively persons being

robbed of their body parts and hosts for parasites of the same species.”5

Wynter’s investigation, Gilmore’s redefinition of racism, as well as Harris’s actuarial

perspective, are all signs of what we may call, resorting to a concept coined by Cameroonian

political theorist Achille Mbembe,6 a necropolitical moment within Black studies and Africana

thought. In other words, rather than focussing on discrimination and exclusion in terms of

access, more and more scholars tend to see life-and-death situations as definitional features of

racialized—and particularly Black—experience and social condition. Throughout this article, I

am interested in both the necessity of the necropolitical paradigm and the need to clarify its

definition. Because of its focus on the ubiquity of Black dying, actuarial perspective forces us

to reconsider traditional ethical conceptions of life and death radically, from an Africana

philosophical perspective. But precisely because of this reconsideration, the very notions of life

and death we generally use may now appear as too naïve or overly simplistic. Contemporary

focus on Black death and dying is a necessary and extremely valuable contribution to

contemporary critical thinking about race, racism, and dehumanization at large. But the

5
Leonard Harris, “Necro-Being: An Actuarial Account of Racism,” Res Philosophica, vol. 95, no. 2 (2018): 273–
302, here 282.
6
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

3
endeavor will remain incomplete as long as we do not make explicit that life should not only

be addressed in quantitative terms. Said otherwise, depopulation facing Black communities has

deeper implications than the sole statistical decrease in anonymous “Black bodies.” First,

because, as Lewis R. Gordon remarked, the “Black bodies” synecdoche “refers to the treating

of black people as mere surfaces, superficial physical beings without consciousness thus a point

of view.”7 Second, because there is every reason to believe communities threatened by a slow

termination of its members end up secreting very unique notions of what life and death mean.

According to the United States Census Bureau, there are only 88 Black male adults for

every 100 Black women in the country, in contrast to 97 white men for every 100 white

women.8 In some neighbourhoods, the gender imbalance reaches a critical level. The aim of

this article is to draw the consequences of such quantitative data for a qualitative investigation

of Black life. Some towns and neighbourhoods are haunted by the absence of Black males, due

to premature death and mass incarceration. The ethical question the situation raises is the

following: how do the pervasiveness of death and disappearing of racialized people impact the

very concept of life we make use of? The pervasiveness of racial violence must have an

influence on the way everyday life is conceptualized and experienced. If Blackness, and

specifically Black maleness, generates a non-traditional relationship between life and death,

characterized by the constant exposure to violence, the concept of dignity we generally use to

designate the inherent value of every single human life cannot stay unscathed. In his 1983 book

Black Marxism, political theorist Cedric Robinson affirmed the existence of a specific Black

radical tradition, rooted in African cosmogonies and revealed by the confrontation to the violent

conditions created by chattel slavery and the conquest of sub-Saharan Africa.9 In the field of

7
Lewis R. Gordon, Fear of Black Consciousness (London: Allen Lane, 2022), 31.
8
Mike Maciag, “Where Have All the Black Men Gone?”, Governing.com (Jan. 22, 2019),
[https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-black-men-gender-imbalance-population.html],
accessed Oct. 15, 2022.
9
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2000).

4
ethics, the concept of dignity reveals the same kind of discrepancies and differences that

Robinson underlined in the field of revolutionary political thought: a historical particularity of

the Black experience that translates into particular traditions of thought. If traditional Western

ethical traditions are not well equipped to face the questions raised by Blackness and the history

of colonialism at large, I will affirm the relevance of a Black, African and Afro-diasporic

concept of dignity.

Following Harris’s actuarial statistical logic, racialized experience ends up being

understood in terms of risk. Therefore, the risk to be killed, imprisoned, or unjustly denied

proper care or assistance become fundamental elements of our interpretations of Blackness. The

notion of risk implies a normal situation, a standard that may be endangered by carelessness or

intrepidity. But Black overexposure to death and dying urges us to rethink normality itself: it

has a tremendous impact on how life is qualitatively experienced on a daily basis. My argument

is that death is profoundly formative for people from African descent in the West and beyond.

I use the phrase “forms of death” to underline a constant state of peril, but also the repeated

experience of witnessing the death of loved ones, the inner conviction of being part of a casted-

out people—all concurring to build a qualitatively distinct quotidian.

According to Curry, “Black male scholars who dare to speak about and study Black men

and boys as theory-producing subjects, beyond their dead corpses, are despised by the

academy…. To choose to write on Black males is to accept that you and they are in conversation

with death” (TMN, 141). If theory often fails to see Blackness beyond a stack of dark cadavers,

our participation to this conversation requires us to densify our understanding of Black male

death in order not to reinforce Black male disposability. This article aims at showing how

influential philosophical accounts of the contemporary politics of death (such as Judith Butler’s

notion of grievability) tends to comprehend death as something that occurs—as an event. We

should instead theorize it as a continuum: as something that shapes the reality of the entire

5
diaspora. I claim that, paradoxically, this undecidability between life and death has historically

defined Black dignity.

1. Recasting Necropolitics

When it comes to the question of socially or politically caused violent death, contemporary

theory often resorts to Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics.” But in order to define it as

precisely as possible, we must distinguish it from neighbouring notions of “biopolitics” and

“thanatopolitics,” with which it is too often confused. Mbembe builds upon Michel Foucault’s

concept of biopolitics. In Foucault, and more specifically in his 1976 lecture at the Collège de

France “Society must be defended,” biopolitics unequivocally relates to race: “What in fact is

racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s

control: the break between what must live and what must die.”10 According to Foucault, race

has two features. Firstly, it creates a divide amongst the living and, secondly, it adds an

antagonistic and predatory dimension to the divide. What a society thinks to be its enemy

becomes a biological threat that must be eradicated in order to preserve the worthy, virtuous,

and healthy side of the biopolitical frontier. Social community tends to embody healthiness, so

its racialized adversaries are redefined as toxins or illnesses. The French philosopher likely has

in mind contemporary forms of racial purification that culminated in National Socialist

antisemitism.11 Conceptualizing such a clear cut opposition between a worthy population and a

nuisance one, Foucault opens the door to contemporary Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben

and Roberto Esposito who, for their part, have proposed to name the aforementioned racist and

exterminatory tendencies of biopolitics “thanatopolitics.”12 The concept allows one to clearly

10
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76, (ed.) M. Bertani
and A. Fontana, (tr.) D. Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 254.
11
André Pichot, Pure Society: From Darwin to Hitler, (tr.) D. Fernbach (London: Verso Books, 2000).
12
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998),
122; Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008),110–
45.

6
distinguish the type of violence that occurs between people of equal dignity, from a violence

directed at people marked with the seal of indignity.

The interest in the concept of necropolitics comes from its propensity to trouble the

seemingly obvious opposition between life as Bios and death as Thanatos. French Hellenist and

philosopher Jean Fallot differentiated two concepts of death that date back to ancient Greece:

Thanatos on the one hand, and Necros on the other.13 As Epicurean philosophy taught us,

Thanatos amounts to nothingness: death is what is not. Death amounts to an utter absence of

sensation, absolute interruption of being in the world. On the contrary, Necros translates the

word “corpse”—but this is not its sole meaning. It also designates the weird interstice between

life and death in which tragic heroes, gladiators, and those buried alive were trapped.

Comparing those two ways of qualifying death, the concept of thanatopolitics adequately relates

to a docile, dignified, and in the end reassuring conception of death, whereas necropolitics deals

with way more complicated situations. Racial violence does not always respond to rational and

instrumental motives, but rather produces extreme violence, sometimes making our traditional

moral geometry collapse.

Jean Fallot’s exploration of the original Greek meaning of those words enlightens our

understanding of contemporary Black life. Necros—defined as the non-life of tragic heroes,

gladiators, and those buried alive—resonates with Harris’s words: “Racism is a form of necro-

being: it kills and prevents persons from being born. It is absolute necro-tragedy. There is no

redemption for the worst of its victims.”14 Racialized people are exposed to tragedy inasmuch

as, analogously to ancient protagonists, their attempts to resist the subjugation they suffer from

may pave the way to even more terrible miseries. Ancient historian Jean-Pierre Vernant has

described tragedy as a situation in which the hero is doomed to remain ignorant of the

destructive and implacable forces that maneuver his or her destiny. “So long as there has been

13
Jean Fallot, Cette Mort qui n’en est pas une (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1993).
14
Harris, “Necro-Being,” 273.

7
no complete consummation, human affairs remain enigmas that are the more obscure the more

the actors believe themselves sure of what they are doing and what they are.”15 In Sophocles’s

Oedipus Rex, the title-character thinks of himself as a benevolent king and orients his will

accordingly in an attempt to circumvent an abominable fate. But he has wasted his breath: “[A]t

the moment when he realizes that he is responsible for having forged his misfortune with his

own hands, he accuses the deity of having plotted and contrived everything in advance, of

having delighted in tricking him from start to finish of the drama, the better to destroy him.”16

The tragic hero is thrown into an indifferent world—experienced as metaphysical plight and

ontological injustice—that leaves individual good will, sincerity, and spontaneity all powerless

under the eyes of an unfeeling deity. There is an undeniable similarity here to the violence

criminalized Black males experience, being riveted inside the state spiral of white supremacy.

Police brutality survivor Rodney King’s defensive gestures while he was bludgeoned have been

interpreted in court as the very proof of his dangerous, predatory nature as a Black male,

justifying his lynching.17 Black men are going through a tragedy.

In addition, contemporary Black male life strangely echoes that of ancient enslaved

gladiators who were meant to provide the Roman people with entertainment. Sublimed athletic

violence, public physical prowess, and pain-bearing endurance are ingredients of contemporary

Black male life. Professional American-style football players suffer from high mortality rates

and are substantially more inclined to develop cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases,

among other afflictions.18 Thinking of how overexposure to premature death structures Black

life in America, it is hard not to recall 70% of National Football League players are Black.19

15
Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books,
1990), 45.
16
Ibid.
17
Elsa Dorlin, Se Défendre. Une philosophie de la violence (Paris: La Découverte, 2017), 13.
18
VT Nguyen, RD Zafonte, JT Chen, et al., “Mortality Among Professional American-Style Football Players and
Professional American Baseball Players.” JAMA Network Open, vol. 2, no. 5 (2019): 1–13.
19
Nikhil Sonnad, “The NFL’s Racial Divide, in One Chart,” Quartz (May 24, 2018), [https://qz.com/1287915/the-
nfls-racial-makeup-explains-much-of-its-national-anthem-problems/], accessed Oct. 15, 2022.

8
The athletes’ fame, money, and renown are at the cost of their health and of their very physical

integrity. Crushed by years of an intense overexploitation widely presented as harmless

amusement, those bodies usually reach retirement in an advanced state of decrepitude and

brokenness. Praised for their muscular excellence, admired for their unparalleled power, the

statures of these athletes after a few years collapse into reprieved corpses. Mass culture

consumes Black men as gladiators.

Finally, in the age of mass incarceration, partnered with the growing number of life

sentences, Black imprisonment in America has become similar to an industrial burial of a large

number of people of colour. Contemporary policing and prison systems take those people out

of en masse, functioning as “a coercive force constraining and reorganizing the very being of

the Black men within [prison] walls”( TMN, 86). Different place, but similar ways: throughout

Southern Europe, unsanitary administrative retention centres have been designed to shelter and

detain migrants from Africa and the Middle East, waiting for Western governments to rule over

their fate. None of these modern-day concentration camps are close to fitting human rights

standards, leaving unaccompanied minor migrants by themselves in deplorable hygiene

conditions.20 In both North America and Europe, incarceration approximates live burial insofar

as these modern forms of imprisonment turn time itself into a torture instrument. Time in these

graves is impoverished to the extreme, deprived of everything that constitutes the foundation

of a worthy human life. It leaves prisoners without any perspective, apart from the heavy

presence of death and the unlikely haunting of a hollow hope. Black men are buried alive deep

in the paupers’ graves of mass incarceration.

In summary, Black men are exposed to tragedy. Black sportsmen’s lives amount to a

gladiatorial fight for survival till death. Mass incarceration buries Black male bodies alive

without any formality, sepulchre, or stele. If the notion of Necros is rigorously understood,

20
Babels, De Lesbos à Calais : Comment l’Europe fabrique des camps (Neuvy-en-Champagne: Le Passager
Clandestin, 2017).

9
those phenomena that complicate the boundary between life and death are meant to be

subsumed under a renewed category of the necropolitical. In a passage from his 2010 book

Sortir de la Grande Nuit, not included in its English translation, Mbembe writes that “what

stands beyond death deserves to be thought of in itself, as a prerequisite for any habitation in

the historical world,”21 destabilizing the supposedly clear frontier that separates life from death.

This theoretical refinement has had consequences on the way he theorizes racial necropolitics:

“To a large extent, racism is the driver of the necropolitical principle insofar as it stands for

organized destruction, for a sacrificial economy, the functioning of which requires, on the one

hand, a generalized cheapening of the price of life and, on the other, a habituation to loss.”22 In

other words, Black vulnerability is inseparable from the existential dimension of the

relationship one maintains with the constancy of others’ (early) mortality. Black death is not an

event, but a continuum that intimately informs Black existence.23 The notion of habituation to

loss summons up the theme of mourning, that is to say, the question of the dialogue that the

most disposable people have with death. It reminds us that in contexts of racial violence, the

loved one’s dying is not an unexpected blow of misfortune, but rather a recurring warning shot.

2. Beyond a Black death, white mourning paradigm

Partly in dialogue with Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, Judith Butler made use of the

psychoanalytical concept of mourning as a tool to ground socially and historically the notion

of finitude to explain our perception of premature death. Traditionally, this last notion is

associated with existential philosophy and designates the unescapable condition of human

mortality. In Heidegger, finitude provides the existential being—the Dasein—with its own

21
Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la Grande Nuit (Paris: La Découverte, 2010), 35 ; my translation.
22
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 32; Achille Mbembe, Politiques de
l’inimitié (Paris: La Découverte, 2016), 56.
23
Norman Ajari, Noirceur : Race, genre, classe et pessimisme dans la pensée africaine-américaine au XXIe siècle
(Paris: Divergences, 2022).

10
singularity, given that one’s death is supposed to individualize it.24 From an existentialist point

of view, death is the most singular event, the only experience one cannot share with someone

else. But the perspective according to which death is essentially a singular property of human

existence ignores the uneven conditions at the core of necropolitical views on racism. Taking

into account the vast array of forms of exposure to socially-caused decease, Butler

acknowledges that some social classes and demographics are more exposed to violent and

premature death than others. What Butler labels as “precariousness” is a socialization and a

politicization of the notion of finitude.25 She insists on its circumstantial dimension and

irrefragable exteriority. In situations of exclusion, segregation, war, or colonialism, to be reaped

by the sickle of death can be conceived neither as an interior factor nor as an existential

opportunity to conquer one’s authentically individual self. Quite the opposite: it is an exterior

factor, since “precariousness underscores our radical substitutability and anonymity in relation

both to certain socially facilitated modes of dying and death and to other socially conditioned

modes of persisting and flourishing.”26

But the main originality of Butler’s discussion of finitude lies in her strategic use of a

psychoanalytic notion of mourning. According to her, to be authentically human, or to be part

of a legitimate community, amounts to being a potential object of grief: “[W]e come to feel

only in relation to a perceivable loss, one that depends on social structures of perception; and

we can only feel and claim affect as our own on the condition that we have already been

inscribed in a circuit of social affect” (FOW, 50). Butler insists on the fact that all deaths do not

produce the same feeling of pain and sadness. For instance, in the American context, victims

of terrorist attacks are considered to be highly grievable – but at the same time, public mourning

24
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010).
25
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
26
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 22. Hereafter referred to
parenthetically in the text as FOW.

11
can be used to legitimize the killings of populations that cannot pretend to be legitimate objects

to mourn, Butler says.

In the context of our discussion on dignity and necropolitics, the main issue raised by

Butler’s framework comes from her interpretation of the relation between mourning and racism

that her notion of differentiated mourning implies:

Forms of racism instituted and active at the level of perception tend to produce iconic

versions of populations who are eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss,

and who remain ungrievable. The differential distribution of grievability across

populations has implications for why and when we feel politically consequential

affective dispositions such as horror, guilt, righteous sadism, loss, and indifference.

(FOW, 24)

The most striking aspect of her analysis is the level of abstraction of the notion of grievability,

as if the most important aspect of the racialized populations’ death was how it appears under

the eyes of racists. Of course, it is highly plausible that racist indifference toward racialized

people’s death and suffering is a key feature of any racist endeavor—it eases killing, rape, and

torture. But a closer attention to the history of race and mourning forces us to escape from the

sole alternative between grievability and ungrievability. As the philosopher Hourya

Bentouhami argues, Butler posits the default of grievability as a modality of a default of

recognition. According to her, colonial Western nations are internally constituted by the

vulnerability of racialized peoples whose loss they refuse to acknowledge and recognize.27 But

another hypothesis deserves to be considered: what if the mourning of the colonized populations

was not simply neglected, but rather desired, encouraged, and shaped by the white racial order?

As will be exemplified in the next section, colonized populations’ mourning process

was quite often weaponized against them, in order to demolish them morally and psychically.

27
Hourya Bentouhami, Judith Butler : Race, genre et mélancolie (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2022).

12
A necropolitical account of Black dignity could allow us to acknowledge the difference between

a theory in which racist and colonial violence are defined as side effects of white and Western

self-absorbed neglect on the one hand, and a conscious, strategically engineered attack on those

peoples’ psyches on the other. The practical consequence of the first perspective would be that

we should encourage a reform of white polities in order to allow them to recognize and value

racialized peoples as neighbours. The second approach leads us in a different direction.

Recognition of racialized peoples amounts to a deeper intimate knowledge of their conscious

and unconscious beings and actually increases their vulnerability to the strategies of racist

psychic attrition and exhaustion that constitute white politics of mourning. By no means should

recognition be defined as a safeguard against such violence—quite the opposite, as pointed out

by Tommy Curry: “Within racist regimes anti-Black racism creates conditions of disposability

where the members of a specific racial group are conditioned for death.”28

It has already been pointed out that Butler’s account on grief remains heavily dependent

on Freud’s interpretation of melancholia.29 Her Freudian approach rests on her unwillingness

to question the most precarious beings’ actual existence and dignity, due to a too close focus

on white Western mourning. The possibility of significantly and essentially distinct forms of

mourning is never envisioned since the relevance of a generic psychoanalytical concept of

mourning is always assumed.30 As a consequence, the effect of the pervasiveness of violent

death on colonized lives is theorized as a mere photographic negative of white experience and

expectations. In this regard, Butlerian interpretation is doomed to fail to acknowledge the

warfare white supremacy has conducted against racialized people’s very capacity for grief. This

limitation is another example of the preeminence of Thanatos and of the enduring ignorance of

28
Tommy J. Curry, “Conditioned for Death: Analyzing Black Mortalities from Covid-19 and Police Killings in
the United States as a Syndemic Interaction,” Comparative American Studies, vol. 17, no. 3–4 (2021): 257–70,
here 262.
29
David W. McIvor, “Bringing Ourselves to Grief: Judith Butler and the Politics of Mourning,” Political Theory,
vol. 40, no. 4 (2012): 409–36.
30
Livio Boni, “Guerre, deuil hyperbolique, nécro-logie. Derrida avec Butler?” in Sexualités, genres et mélancolie.
S’entretenir avec Judith Butler, (ed.) M. David-Ménard (Paris: Éditions Campagne Première, 2009).

13
the experience of Necros. If we take the thickness of death presupposed by the concept of

Necros seriously, the most pressing theoretical question has nothing to do with the uneven

distribution of grievability. It relates to the plurality of forms of grieving themselves. People

surrounded with “dead Black male bodies, Black men and boys, in the streets. Dead Niggers

made into YouTube sensations” (TMN, 1) may not share the same notion of grief, the same

affects and the same relation to death as the one Butler presupposes. What matters is the texture

of mourning, the grain of death; it goes beyond closed alternatives between life and death or

between grief and its rejection.

Our theoretical interpretations of political killings are often caught in a restricted

European tradition. Attempts to apply this archive to the experience of racialized people,

ignoring how colonial and racial dimensions shift the perspective, amounts to forcing their

specific history into a Procrustean bed. Let us think of public executions of white subjects or

citizens, such as the killing of Robert-François Damiens that Michel Foucault famously

describes in the beginning of Discipline and Punish. In Western European political contexts,

those events had at least two key functions. First, “the tortured body spectacularly

demonstrates…the authority, validity, and legitimacy of the sovereign’s laws, as well as the

force of those laws.”31 But, secondly, it does so by excluding the wrongdoer from the

community. The sentence proves the convict’s absence from public life. Even if modernity is

characterized by a lesser tolerance to public displays of state violence and has apparently buried

torture down in the shadows of dusty cells, the underlying philosophy remains the same.

Tortured, incarcerated, or judged, the criminalized European body is outcasted, alienated,

exhibited as foreign to society. To use Butler’s language, those bodies are displayed and

theorized as not grievable. On the contrary, in regard to the history of racial violence, the

challenge consists in understanding how brutal executions have been conceived throughout the

31
J. M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), 28.

14
history of colonial violence as a way of generating negative communities that included the

afflicted or killed subject instead of excluding it. As we will see in what follows, public killings

of colonized people have been a way of inscribing those populations in raced-based hierarchical

societies as victims par excellence. Black and indigenous deviants are not perceived as

unfortunate exceptions, the proliferation of which must be prevented. Each individual

represents the race as a whole. Butler’s politics of mourning cannot describe how, in those

contexts, death inscribes both corpses and survivors in a society that is engineered and designed

to be unbearably soaked with grief. Necropolitics of mourning generates negative communities

by way of weaponizing non-white sorrow. Black life is saturated with the perpetuation of

demise and cries out to be theorized in a completely renewed fashion, taking into account the

inhabited interstice between the living and the dead.

3. The (Anti)Colonial Politics of Mourning

In June 1960, proclaiming the country’s independence, the first president of Congo (now known

as République Démocratique du Congo), Patrice Lumumba, declared, “We have known the

atrocious sufferings, of those banished to remote regions because of their political opinions and

religious beliefs; exiles in their own country, their fate was truly worse than death.”32 Lumumba

summarizes here one of the possible definitions of necropolitics: what generates worse-than-

death, unbearable conditions, i.e., indignity. In other words, racial violence produces unceasing

shifts of the frontier between life and death. Let me mention some examples. In the 1830s,

during the French colonial conquest of Algeria, lieutenant colonel Lucien-François de

Montagnac elaborated a new kind of military tactics. Having read that Muslims decapitated by

Christian combatants are supposedly condemned to be barred from heaven, he requested from

his soldiers to systematically cut the heads off the Arabs, dooming them to hell. In the same

32
Patrice Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba 1958–1961 (Boston:
Little, Brown & Company, 1972), 221.

15
vein, Algerian graveyards were often desecrated during the conquest. Soil and human remains

were used as embankment for new roads, and gravestones as building material for constructions

such as windmills. It even occurred that the corpses were turned into animal charcoal.33 The

demolition of gravestones makes the indigenous deaths unspeakable, and the dissolution of

their bodies into the roads or coals interrupts any work of mourning. The conscious aim of the

colonizing forces was to annihilate any reference to the common past—to shatter any symbolic

permanence.

Such a fierceness in killing the already dead may at first appear as a thing from the past,

an archaic residue of superstitious worldviews. But let us recall circumstances that followed the

assassination of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The body was left laying on

the ground for four and a half hours, in the sun, while law enforcement prevented at gunpoint

the victim’s relatives from getting closer. When the corpse was finally removed, some

neighbours improvised a memorial there, bringing flowers, pictures, and teddy bears. An agent

of the Police Dog Services let his animal urinate on the wreaths. Shortly after, police cars drove

over the memorial, smashing it.34 A similar negrophobic drive lead to repeated destruction of a

memorial honouring the young victim of lynching Emmett Till in Glendora, Mississippi.35 Anti-

Black racism ignites a disproportionate violence, which perpetuates even after death, preventing

the dead from rest, and the living from mourning. As slaves and colonized people before them,

today’s Blacks are living in a world saturated with spectres who cannot find peace, since they

were denied a proper death.

If young Black males are killed in the streets of the United States, South Africa, France,

Brazil, United Kingdom, and so on, that is because their lives have been largely theorized as

33
Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, Exterminer. Sur la guerre et l’État colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2006),
169.
34
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (New York: Haymarket Books, 2016),
153–54.
35
Aimee Oritz, “Emmett Till Memorial Has a New Sign. This Time, It’s Bulletproof,” New York Times (Oct. 20,
2019), [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/20/us/emmett-til-bulletproof-sign.html], accessed Oct. 15, 2022.

16
just as worthless and barren as corpses in the first place. The interpretation of the term

“necropolitics,” as I elaborate it here, aims at challenging traditional European ontology based

on the law of non-contradiction, which implies radical reciprocal exclusivity of life and death.

But pre-modern and non-modern philosophies, as well as modern African and Afro-diasporic

ontologies, share other perspectives on the matter. Significantly, in an early essay, Aimé Césaire

defines Blackness as “a death more dreadful than death itself, where the living ones are adrift.”36

In other words, Blackness is a “form-of-death” rather than an ethical “form-of-life.”37 In the

same vein, Cameroonian theologian and philosopher Fabien Eboussi Boulaga wrote about

Central African ontologies: “[T]he gap between life and death is so small, and decreases so

quickly, that the passage from one another is commonly done. The dead are among the living,

who will be dead soon.”38 African and Afro-diasporic authors constantly theorized their own

situation as a contamination of life with death and reciprocally reinvested the traditional African

idea of ancestrality. That is to say, the continuing presence of the dead among the living through

memory, narration, and everyday practices. Paradoxically, African intellectual heritage

subsisted to explain its own wrecking and the systematic dehumanization of Black existence.

The African ontological idea of a subsistence of the dead among the living seems to haunt

contemporary Africana philosophy, just as it haunted anticolonial resistance.

Throughout the history of African colonized, exploited, and dehumanized peoples, the

pervasiveness of death and the enduring experience of mourning have never been an absolute

obstacle to anticolonial struggle. In 19th century Belgian Congo, under the reign of the infamous

king Léopold II, Congolese forced-labourers used to sing, “We are tired of living under this

tyranny. We can no longer stand to see our women and children taken away from us, to be used

by white savages. We will make war. We know we will die, but we want to die. We want to

36
Aimé Césaire, Écrits politiques. 1935–1956 (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2016), 36 ; my translation.
37
Norman Ajari, La Dignité ou la mort. Éthique et politique de la race (Paris: La Découverte, 2019), 92–93.
38
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, Christianisme sans fétiche (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981), 106 ; my translation.

17
die.”39 Death is not an obstacle to the affirmation of intrepid political wrath. Quite the opposite:

self-conscious relation to death and dying amounts to a sense of African dignity, inscribed in

Black finitude itself. In the context of the mid-20th century Algerian War, Frantz Fanon

describes both the social and meta-psychological consequences of massive killings perpetrated

by white colonizers and French soldiery:

These collective deaths, without warning, without a previous illness that had been

treated and fought, abandoned in the ditch on the edge of the road, cannot set into motion

emotional mechanisms that are homogeneous to a society. Lamentations and grief-

stricken faces are part of a patterned, stable world. One does not weep, one does not do

as before when one is faced with multiple murders.40

Fanon shows how colonial attempts to obstruct or ruin traditional processes of mourning

may also generate affective responses apt to endanger colonial power itself. Far from causing

the expected psychic collapse, the determination of the anticolonial activists increased

exponentially with each cadaver. It generated a both wild and radical politicization of the

phenomenon of dying itself:

The war has dislocated Algerian society to such a point that any death is

conceived of as a direct or indirect consequence of colonialist repression. Today

there is not a dead person in Algeria who is not the victim of French colonialism.

It is impossible for an Algerian civilian to remain untouched by the war of

colonial reconquest. More than this, there is not a death of an Algerian outside

39
Elikia M’Bokolo, “Afrique centrale : Le temps des massacres,” Le Livre noir du colonialisme. XVIe–XXIe
siècles: De l’extermination à la repentance, (ed.) M. Ferro (Paris: Robert Lafont, 2004), 590 ; my translation.
40
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, (tr.) H. Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 117–18.

18
 of Algeria which is not attributed to French colonialism. The Algerian people

have thus decided that, until independence, French colonialism will be innocent

of none of the wounds inflicted upon its body and its consciousness.41

Following Fanon’s clinical analysis, the pervasiveness of death in contexts of racial

subjugation makes it impossible for the subject to identify himself or herself as a living being,

since death itself loses its meaning. Fanon describes a true fusion between life and death which

prevents the dead from dying, that is to say, from symbolically appearing in public space as

dead. The sordid fact that, in colonies, France sometimes required families to pay taxes for

long-dead relatives was not only about money.42 It was part of the continued refusal of a white

supremacist apparatus to consider the racialized dead as dead, and the racialized living beings

as living. The in-between, to which the dead are condemned, also signifies the living’s

entrapment into this transitional space where differential identification with death has been

sabotaged. But Fanon shows that such a situation is twofold rather than unilaterally

pathological. The form of mourning Fanon describes is not an incapacitating melancholia but a

politicized way of existing among the dead, designating enemies and connecting the colonized

with their own sense of self-worth. The deceased do not appear as oppressing ghosts, but as

companions, whose look provide colonized people with dignity.

4. Black dignity

Steve Biko interpreted Black death and dehumanization as the dark, violent underside of white

ordinary life.43 What consequences does it have on our understanding of dignity, which

supposedly designates the intrinsic worth of every single human being, i.e., the innate value of

41
Ibid., 118.
42
Henri Cartier, Comment la France « civilise » ses colonies (Paris: Les Nuits Rouges, 2006), 67.
43
Steve Biko, I Write What I like. Selected Writings (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), 88.

19
ordinary lives? Africana philosophy’s understanding of dignity does not only differ from a

European perspective, but also contains a radical criticism of traditional white moral philosophy

as a legitimation of Black denigration and dehumanization. Historically, Black dignity is not

merely dissimilar to its white counterpart; they are antagonistic notions. According to Black

theologian James Cone, “White people achieved what they called dignity by their enslavement

of black Africans; they measured their importance by the number of Africans they enslaved.”44

In other words, white dignity almost always made room for Black indignity. Generous

definitions of dignity as the intrinsic value of any single human being are misleading. European

philosophical and legal definitions of dignity repeatedly made exceptions when it came to

Africans and other non-white people.

The most influential philosopher on dignity is without a doubt Immanuel Kant, who

famously appealed “to treat man, who is now more than a machine, in accord with his dignity.”

His thought notoriously influenced the Charter of the United Nations and many countries’

Constitutions. It is well known that, according to Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of

Morals,45 dignity reveals itself through moral law. Such a law has nothing to do with judiciary

laws, which are revisable and relate to jurisprudence. It is rather conceptualized as akin to laws

of nature. In other words, according to Kant, the immorality of lying or theft are predicated

upon immutable laws. An act is not bad because it contradicts one’s mores or causes pain; it is

bad because it violates the law of non-contradiction. For instance, a thief who steals an object

contradicts the very concept of possession, since one cannot deny to another reasonable being

the right to possess something while simultaneously affirming his own right to possess it. In

Kant, the concept of the immoral boils down to a notion of self-contradiction that only a truly

rational being is able to grasp. As a consequence, to recognize one’s dignity amounts to

44
James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1991), 28.
45
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, (ed.) M. Gregor and J. Timmermann, (tr.) M. Gregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2011).

20
recognizing his quality as a reasonable being and carrier of the moral law, that is to say, in

Kantian terms, his quality of person.

At first sight, such a theory seems universal and free from racist implications. But let us

resituate Kant’s thought in a broader context. Thus, his definition of dignity raises two

objections. Firstly, as seen earlier, the law of non-contradiction does not apply to contexts of

radical indignity and racial subjugation. As writes historian Marcus Rediker, racism structures

a world where a “man’s decision to use his own fingernails to rip open his throat was an entirely

rational response to landing on a slave ship.”46 We must entirely rethink what the words

ordinary, dignity, and ethics mean. Secondly, Kant’s dignity is not the quality of a singular

human being, but of an abstract person, which is superimposed on the human. As a

consequence, his notion of person aims at denying the empirical dimension of the human in

terms of dignity. Nevertheless, at the same time, Kant’s writings on race, such as his lessons on

physical geography, clearly affirm that the Africans’ empirical constitution prevents them from

attaining to knowing of moral law.47 Even if they are rational subjects, “Negroes” and other

non-white races are theorized as inapt for culture, that is to say, they are unfit for the spiritual

work which paves the way for morality. In The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon precisely

criticizes the abstract notion of human person: “For a colonized people, the most essential value,

because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land, which must provide

bread and, naturally, dignity. But this dignity has nothing to do with dignity of the ‘human

person’ [‘personne humaine’]. The colonized subject has never heard of such an ideal human

person. All he has ever seen on his land is that he can be arrested, beaten, and starved with

impunity.”48

46
Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 18–19.
47
Emmanuel Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Postcolonial African
Philosophy: A Critical Reader, (ed.) E. Eze (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).
48
Both existing English translations of Les Damnés de la Terre erase Fanon’s clear critical reference (quotation
marks are Fanon’s!) to the Kantian concept of human person. This negligence demonstrates overall ignorance of
the philosophical underpinnings of his thought that shaped its reception. Frantz Fanon, Œuvres (Paris: La
Découverte, 2011), 458.

21
 To conclude these remarks on the limits of Kantian dignity, let us not forget that Kant

was a resolute abolitionist who inscribed in his doctrine the fundamental difference between

price and dignity, concluding that a person could not be bought as a commodity. But Kant’s

racism was not incompatible with his abolitionism. As Frederick Douglass was going to write

in 1856, “Opposing slavery and hating its victims has come to be a very common form of

abolitionism.”49 One could even conclude that the German philosopher coined a form of racist

liberalism which opposes the excesses of racial subjugation as a matter of principle, while

simultaneously tolerating or even encouraging less gruesome forms of racial hierarchies.

Fanon’s call for a more material and historicist understanding of dignity is one source

for a conceptual recast. It should be based on a proper understanding of the legacy of racial

dehumanization in the modern era. Indignity produced by necropolitical means differs from

types of social suffering traditionally addressed throughout the history of practical philosophy.

Either explicitly or implicitly, the analysis of violence has generally been predicated upon the

notion of alienation, that is to say, the fact of becoming a stranger to one’s normal, primordial,

or natural situation. I believe the inventor of modern social philosophy to be Jean-Jacques

Rousseau, who famously opens his Social Contract with the following phrase: “Man was born

free, and everywhere he is in chains.”50 In other words, the violence of slavery is not constitutive

of what the human is; there is a fundamental freedom, intrinsically bound at birth, as natural

law. But Rousseau’s optimism relates to the utterly metaphorical way he speaks about the

“chains,” even if he was contemporary to French chattel slavery and its infamous Code Noir.

But the notion of alienation does not adequately encapsulate the condition of enslavement since

it fails to address what it means to be born as a slave. Throughout the Americas, the law that

ruled over the birth of the slaves was partus sequitur ventrem, which means “that which is

49
Quoted in Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Slaves’ Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), XVIII.
50
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2002): 156.

22
brought forth follows the womb.” In this case, to be born equates to being enslaved, subjugated,

dehumanized. That is why Christina Sharpe vibrantly compared childbirth to the transportation

of slaves: “The birth canal of Black women or women who birth blackness, then, is another

kind of domestic Middle Passage…. The belly of the ship births blackness; the birth canal

remains in, and as, the hold.”51 In such case, racialization does not amount to alienation, since

it is connatural to Black birth itself.

The concept of alienation’s structural inability to address the legacy of racial

dehumanization is one of the reasons for the pervasiveness of the notion of “dignity” in Africana

philosophy and Black political thought. Reflecting on the notion of Black consciousness, Steve

Biko writes, “The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back

life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity.”52 According to thinkers such as

Biko, dignity is the most radical concept of political philosophy, since it addresses the livability

of life itself. Under the aegis of dignity, those who were structurally excluded from public life

and politics signal their entering the political realm under their own terms. But what does it

mean to enter the political realm? It amounts to ceasing to be limited to domestic and

reproductive activities, to being limited to private life . It is a vital contestation for “all those

who were not entitled to participate in public life because they did not belong to ‘society’ but

merely to domestic and reproductive life, because their work belonged to a master.”53

According to Jacques Rancière, to be political equates to being both matter and actor of public

deliberation. If we keep focussing on the example of slavery, politicization of the enslaved

condition took historically two major forms.

Firstly, abolitionist propagandist strategy often insisted on politicization of Black

suffering. It is important to talk about Black suffering, but it is also risky. Gilles Deleuze

51
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 74.
52
Biko, I Write What I Like, 29.
53
Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso Books, 2014), 56.

23
believed that the experience of violence is what forces us to think, getting the mind forced out

of its natural stupor.54 But the history of chattel slavery teaches us that even if it is true, it is

also what causes a violence which radically prevents one from thinking, turning her voice into

a scream. The slave’s scream expresses rebellion and renders it inaudible at the same time.

Structurally, politicization of suffering amounts to “speaking-for” someone else, incurring the

risk of confiscating the slave’s voice. That is the reason why politicization of suffering remains

incomplete without what slave revolts historically carried forth: the politicization of Black

power. Black people are not only passive suffering bodies, but also agents of contestation and

invention. We go from “speaking-for” to “speaking-with.” Both of these two aspects are

necessary to let Black politics of dignity emerge.

However, let us not forget that to describe Black dignity, we have had to engage

anamnesis, to recall and narrate some facts from to the long history of slavery, colonialism, and

imperialism. It is no coincidence. Black collective dignity is both the effort to live a life that is

worth living and the history of these efforts. Black dignity is always already inhabited by the

dead. Today, when a young Black gets humiliated, raped, or murdered, the whole history of

Black struggle is in jeopardy. Our dignity is older than us. Black dignity amounts to receiving

a long chain of historical transmission in which suffering is conflated with power. Biko’s

consciousness inherited from Fanon’s, who inherited from Césaire’s, who inherited from Du

Bois’s, who inherited from David Walker’s, and so on. Black dignity is consciousness of a

consciousness, a deep historicity fueled with ancestrality. Said otherwise, our present problems

as racialized people intimately relate with the issues our ancestors and predecessors faced, and

especially with the creative answers they gave.

Conclusion

54
Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 119.

24
 As a matter of conclusion, I want to pay tribute to a too often unjustly discredited

moment of affirmation of Black dignity—namely, the Négritude movement, and more precisely

its actualization in Aimé Césaire. Born in Paris in the 1930s as an intellectual rebellion of young

writers from Africa and its diaspora, Négritude is now often said to have been always already

overtaken by either Sartre or Fanon. Assimilated with a naïve obsession with identity, it is

generally conceptualized as a vanishing mediator or a ladder one throws away after having been

climbed. But I suspect such a polite contempt toward Négritude hides an embarrassment with

the “question of being Black” itself. People forget that Césaire’s Négritude originates in a

ruthless diagnosis: chattel slavery and colonialism caused not only overwhelming human

losses, but also a cataclysmic mutilation of both Black and white people’s collective memory,

since Europeans have had to forget a lot in order to see other human beings as less than animals.

As a consequence, the affirmation of Négritude, or in other words claiming the dignity of

Blackness, amounts to positioning oneself outside of this process of destruction, and to holding

on to something extremely precarious.

Césaire defined Négritude as a “way of living history in history: the history of a

community whose experience is truly singular, made of deportations, the forced movement of

people from one continent to the other, memories of long-gone beliefs, and debris of

assassinated cultures.”55 It is a description of Black form-of-death; but it is also a call, in the

sense that Césaire glimpses the future of African and diasporic life. Affirming the dignity of

remains, fragments, wreckage of both post-slavery and post-colonial areas, he announces a

mutual fertilizing of the Black mind. Historian and literary theorist Saidiya Hartman wrote that

for the descendants of slaves, “traces of memory function in a manner akin to a phantom limb,

in that what is felt is no longer there. It is a sentient recollection of connectedness experienced

at the site of rupture, where the very consciousness of disconnectedness acts as mode of

55
Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme suivi du Discours sur la négritude (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2004),
82; my translation.

25
testimony and memory.”56 I would add that it is precisely what defines Africanness in an anti-

Black world: it challenges the Western radical opposition between life and death. In Africana

cultures and ontologies, death never was the end of the journey; it rather always has been a

resourceful place. Death is populated by allies and ancestors.

Black dignity is neither the refusal of death nor an escape from Necropolitics. It is both

the power of survival laying in the very depths of death itself, and the power of dead people

that we love, affecting life. Black dignity could not be derived from natural law, since the first

diaper of a Black baby is already a shroud of form-of-death. It could not be assimilated with

moral law, since anti-Black violence has mutilated even reason itself. It cannot claim being

constitutive of any positive right, since the modern state does not protect Blacks but rather

assassinates them. Black dignity is no status. It only exists by the grace of the rich history of

political, artistic, theoretical, and philosophical revolts Blacks led in order to impose their

denied humanity, shifting the very meaning of “being human.”

[email protected]

56
Saidyia Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 73–74.

26