Necropolitics

Achille Mbembe

Oct 2019 · Duke University Press

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

Necropolitics is a heavy read, but something anyone hoping to be conscious of the misery that many are clawing to get away from. It provides the words to the uneasiness and contradiction that the "other" experiences in relation to liberal democracy, that often says one thing and does another. It shows that democracy, which is enjoyed by those allegedly "deveopled nations" is only stable by exteriorizing the violence onto far away people. This who have been "othered" and made into "things" have shown, by there very existence a deep refutation to the narrowness of current westernized Humanities The world has more than one pharmacy of care for people and everyday, those who are marginalized and forces on the outside find their global Humanity. It is apt that this book is read by the retraction of democracy globally, but for those who know that the right to be Human can be taken away at anytime, we will continue to remake and create a world in which we may all one day be fully Human.

Haven't finished yet, but I will get there. Great book 👌

Amazing language. Not easy. Very thought provoking

About the author

Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is author of Critique of Black Reason and coeditor of Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, both also published by Duke University Press.