Abstract
In his book Necropolitics, published in late 2019, Mbembe does not restrict himself to showing us new ways of critiquing democracy. Rather he offers us a new critical grammatology so we could work out a configuration that may stand as an alternative to democracy and the ethical tone and temper of the coming time. This is because, for Mbembe, contemporary forms of democracies have ended up becoming necropolitical, though with their workings democracies have always reflected their constitutive biopolitical orientation. For him, necropolitics stands as a politics of ‘selective elimination’ or negation of diverse blocs of masses that the state machinery considers resistant or redundant to its workings and policies, while biopolitics aims to control and govern the masses or better the dynamic expanse of life. If biopolitics yields what is called ‘a control society’ that engineers and subjects the masses to strategies of surveillance and control in order to govern them, necropolitics yields ‘a society of enmity’. This happens to be a society that aims at altogether dispensing with the inherent revolutionary potential of masses by systematically and routinely decimating them – killing the poor to eradicate the rebellious discontentment of poverty and killing the powerless to form a tiny section of powerful elites, as one may say. Such a society feverishly creates new grounds or conditions propitious for strategical praxis of necropolitics. Further, as necropolitics works by turning death into a profitable industry, a society that becomes necropolitical ends up engineering death-making institutions only to treat masses as grist for the smooth working of these institutions.
Mbembe segments the book into eight parts – six chapters preceded with an introduction and followed by a conclusion. In these chapters, Mbembe describes the unfolding patterns of global apartheid while vehemently critiquing democracies’ bio-political machinery's nuanced exploitation of such patterns. Mbembe points out that democracies become necropolitical when they spearhead war against other nations in order to sustain forms of global apartheid. To make his point, Mbembe cites examples from every corner of the world, in particular, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Gulf War, the American War of Secession, the Crimean War, and “three main dirty wars of decolonization (Indochina, Algeria, Angola and Mozambique).”
In chapter 1, “Exit from Democracy,” Mbembe argues that it is because of the diversified production of perversely hybrid formations such as cyborgs and plastic humans within the era of techno-capitalism and transhumanism that democracy stands as a production house of necropolitics. For Mbembe, if democracy shifts towards working by necropolitics, it is because, with sheer expanse of such productions, the role of democracy no longer stands limited to providing shelter and security to natural citizens. Rather, the role of democracy shifts towards exercising power to voluntarily alter human species and lawfully eliminating those resistant to execution of such powers by democracies.
In his second chapter, “The Society of Enmity,” Mbembe argues that our democracies become necropolitical by working with principles of rigid separation. While such principles subsume the elusivity of otherness in anthropocentric categories, democratic operationality facilitates the internalization of such principles by the masses to an extent where having an ‘enemy’ becomes integral to their innermost desire.
In his third chapter “Necropolitics” Mbembe argues that democracies in the current time do not work by exercising reason in public sphere. Rather they stand as the repository of death and terror as they equate sovereignty with a power to work by dynamics of ‘selective elimination’. In his fourth chapter “Viscerality”, Mbembe argues that it is the phenomenon of planetary entanglement that combines fast capitalism, warfare, digitalization and borderization to work out a form of necropolitics that in order to control every aspect of humanity approaches humans as a loose configuration of multiple fragments. This is a process that eventually culminates in negating humans altogether. In Chapter 5, “Fanon's Pharmacy,” Mbembe claims that it is because of its paranoid fear of losing its sexual potential to others, especially negros, that racial societies are driven by a necropolitical urge to eliminate them. In chapter 6, “This Stifling Noonday”, Mbembe maps the dynamics by which a racial society seeks to eliminate those it considers to be others. He argues that the process of museumization by which the West carries out a visual representation of negro's past – especially events of slave trade where negros were sold to white colonizers as slaves – stands as a paradigm of necropolitics. Mbembe even argues that it is through its historical museumization of this slave trade that the West makes way for posterity to encounter negros as disposable bodies.
In the last chapter, Mbembe envisions a world tantamount to a Tagorean form of trans-nation in which becoming human stands as a matter of journey and movement. Mbembe puts the dynamism of passages and movements as an antidote to the politics of capitalistic exploitation that leads to stagnation, siege, and death. Moreover, it is in this context of envisioning a new world, Mbembe redefines the role of writing and language. For him, writing and language need to be inclined towards generating new worlds rather than producing deviant forms of neurotic fixations.
Necropolitics enriches African Studies while staying away from conventional tropes and stereotypes of identity politics. While connecting with African slaves as “modernity's first real drudges” (p. 158), Mbembe approaches them more as expressions of their work and labor by which they contribute to the development and industrialization of the Atlantic metropoles. Moreover, Mbembe connects with the slave trade only to make negroes emblematic and constituent of a past that unfolds with and maximizes the potential of the futurity–“there is no Negro past that ought not to inform the history of the world as a whole” (p. 157). In his book Necropolitics, Mbembe positions African collectivity as a complex network of movement, labor, and work within the inexorable flow of capitalistic development. In relation to African studies, the contribution of Mbembe's Necropolitics lies in repositioning Africans as a divergent ‘minor’ process committed to actualizing futurity as a site of production of novel ethics, an ethics of connecting with the African past not as something dead and gone, but as emblematic of ‘a living labor’ that might produce the new Earth.
