Necropolitics

by Achille Mbembe

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Author(s)

Achille Mbembe

Publication

Durham ; London : Duke University, 2019

Scope

224 Pages, illustrated, 22.5 cm.

ISBN

9781478006510

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‘Necropolitics’ is the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. The deployment of necropolitics creates what Achille Mbembe calls deathworlds, or "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead." Mbembe was the first scholar to explore the term in depth in a 2003 article, and later, in his 2019 book of the same name. Mbembe identifies racism as a prime driver of necropolitics, stating that racialized people's lives are systemically cheapened and habituated to loss.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. According to Mbembe, this shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates as well as on Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability, to explore how new conceptions of the human 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.

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Keywords

(in)equity , colonisation , necropolitics

Location

Cabinet 29 - 6: Expanded Space ; Global Art ; Theorie

Remarks

Includes notes, index