Necropolitics

“War is determined as end and necessity not only in democracy but also in politics and in culture. War has become both remedy and poison—our pharmakon.”

One of Mbembe’s central ideas is that democracy is a pharmakon, a remedy that is both medicine and poison. Here, he highlights how democracies benefit some while oppressing others, a dynamic that he later argues democracies define by class and race.

“But pure and unlimited violence, however creative it was set on being, could never be safeguarded from potential blindness.”

Sovereign states justify violence in various ways. Mbembe explains that the initial uses of violence in a government may come from a place that aligns with democracy’s ideals. However, the use of violence in this way expands it rather than quelling it. Soon, the government becomes unable or unwilling to recognize its actions as violent, compromising its ideals.

“Leaving behind the ages of stone and silver, of iron and gold, the human for its part is tending to become plastic. The advent of the plastic human and its corollary, the digital subject, goes flush against a number of convictions that until recently were held to be immutable truths.”

This passage emphasizes how Mbembe’s perspective as a Cameroonian philosopher enables him to view democracy and colonialism more objectively. He challenges the accepted idea of contemporary sovereign states as spaces that protect rights and individual freedoms. Instead, he shows how several shifts in culture have contributed to the ongoing oppression of people under the mythology of democracy. Just as manufacturing has moved from permanence to impermanence, humans are seen as expendable commodities.

“A pro-slavery democracy is therefore characterized by its bifurcation. Two orders coexist within it—a community of fellow creates governed, at least in principle, by the law of equality, and a category of nonfellows.”

Mbembe challenges the unifying view of democracy often present in the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Instead, Mbembe views democracy as a severely flawed concept, foregrounding the theme of Democracy as Medicine and Poison and showing how it can split and fracture groups of people. One of these fractures is evident in how it supports some groups while marginalizing and oppressing others.

“Part of the work of democracies is to deaden any awareness of this latency; it is to remove any real chance of interrogating its foundations, its underneath, and the mythologies.”

In this passage, Mbembe echoes the work of Foucault, who argued that discipline and punishment, which governments enact as expressions of power, have become increasingly hidden, intimate, and invisible throughout modern history. One of these new manifestations of power is evident in the Mbembe’s thematic exploration of The Politics of Space. The function of this concealment (or what Mbembe refers to as “contraction”) is to portray democracy as something innate and unquestionable.

“To a large extent, racism is the driver of the necropolitical principle insofar as it stands for organized destruction, for a sacrificial economy, the function of which requires, on the one hand, a generalized cheapening of the price of life.”

Mbembe develops the theme of Racism as a Technology for Power, showing how racism functions as the foundation of necropolitics. The control of life and death requires a mythology that positions one group of people as the hero and another group of people as the Other. Mbembe reveals that racism offers an easy and convenient mythology that serves as an instrument for hegemony.

“The contemporary era is, undeniably, one of separation, hate movements, hostility, and, above all, struggle against an enemy.”

Mbembe breaks away from Foucault’s work by focusing on the future while uncovering the historical timeline of racial power. He brings his study of necropolitics to a contemporary context by examining how the poisonous effects of democracy manifest in modern spaces.

“Alongside the walls, other security structures are emerging: checkpoints, enclosures, watchtowers, trenches, all manner of demarcations that in many cases have no other function than to intensify the enclaving of entire communities.”

Mbembe uses Israel’s occupation of Palestine to explore contemporary enactments of power and control. The Israeli occupation of Gaza provides a thematic example of The Politics of Space and illustrates how confinement and isolation can create states of injury and exclusion.

“Historical apartheid’s failure to secure, once and for all, impenetrable frontiers between a plurality of different fleshes demonstrates a posteriori the limits of the colonial project of separation. Short of its total extermination, the Other is no longer external to us. It is within us.”

At times, Mbembe peppers his arguments with flashes of hope. In this passage, he asserts that apartheid can never take over entirely because the natural state of humanity is a collective experience that eliminates the need for the Other. A postcolonial approach looks to a future that centers decolonization both idealistically and in practice.

“Zealous belief is no longer considered antithetical to rational knowledge. On the contrary, the one serves as support for the other, and both are put in the service of visceral experiences, one of whose summits is a ‘communion of martyrs.’”

Democratic states lean heavily on religious belief as another thread to the mythology of democracy. Mbembe draws contemporary parallels to the zeal of religion and the theme of Racism as a Technology for Power. By aligning racism with faith, states can further complicate ideologies and shift thinking away from facts to exert more power.

“The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die.”

This sentence offers a definition of necropolitics. While Foucault’s work focuses on how governments enact power over life, Mbembe argues that sovereign states go a step further. Even in contemporary times, they continue to determine who will die by imposing deathworlds on specific groups of people.

“The slave’s labor is needed and used, so he is therefore kept alive, but in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity.”

American slavery and the plantation exemplify states of injury and exclusion. Mbembe explains that slavery offers insight both into how power manifested in the past and into how slavery created a framework for new enactments of colonial power.

“Colonial occupation itself consisted in seizing, delimiting, and asserting control over a geographical area—of writing a new set of social and spatial relations on the ground.”

This quotation explains how the theme of The Politics of Space that manifested through colonial governments continues in liberal democracy. Refugee camps and prisons represent new forms of old techniques for maintaining and expanding power and domination.

“Worldwide, the combination of ‘fast capitalism,’ soft-power warfare, and the saturation of the everyday by digital and computational technologies has led to the acceleration of speed and the intensification of connections.”

Planetary entanglement refers to how the contemporary world has become increasingly interconnected and complex. Mbembe argues that this complexity further solidifies democracy while simultaneously challenging its stability. This idea is another example of Mbembe’s focus on dualities and his divergence away from Western philosophical thought, which tends to elevate absolutes.

“These times of planetary entanglement are ripe for escalation and, consequently, for the renewed production of myths, fictions, and fantasies, both baroque and dystopian, immaterial formations that strive to generate their own actuality through sheer excess and stupefaction.”

Mbembe explains that the rise in the prevalence of myths—including conspiracy theories and the status of a post-fact or post-truth culture—is a natural outcome of planetary entanglement. As life becomes more complex, the ability to uncover hidden expressions of power will become increasingly difficult.

“In fact, everything leads back to borders—these dead spaces of non-connection which deny the very idea of a shared humanity, of a planet, the only one we have, that we share together, and to which we are linked by the ephemerality of our common condition.”

This passage offers interesting insight and inquiry into contemporary issues of immigration and population. Mbembe proposes that borders are one of the last few spaces that represent a blurring of cultural dualities.

“The main casualty of a ‘postfact’ world is arguably democracy itself. Democracy has no future in a factless world or in a world without evidence, that is, accountability. Such a world is, by definition, hostile to the very idea of reason and freedom.”

One aspect of the theme of Democracy as Medicine and Poison is how democracy serves as both entities for itself. Here, Mbembe argues that democracy itself generated the post-truth society that makes it difficult for democracy to perpetuate mythologies. Therefore, the very structure of democracy makes it both a poison and medicine to itself.

“Colonialism, fascism, and Nazism shared a second myth. For each of these historical formations, the West was a natural living body. It had marrow and a soul.”

In his genealogical approach, Mbembe shows that the fascism that dominated the 20th century helped create a new narrative about the West and liberal democracy as the harbinger of moral good. By establishing itself as a moral body, democracy turns attention away from its own enactment of power over the life and death of the bodies of groups of people.

“Colonial societies were entities bereft of feelings of pity. Far from depicting themselves as societies of fellow humans, they were, in law and in fact, communities of separation and hatred. Paradoxically, this hatred was what held them together.”

Mbembe returns to his thesis of democracy as inherent to violence and colonialism. Democracy as a pharmakon reveals another duality: It fuels hatred yet is held together by it. Mbembe’s view of democracy as inherently associated with violence represents a sharp departure from Western philosophy, which champions democracy as the culmination of intellectualism’s greatest achievement.

“Racism was a way for the subject to divert onto the Other the intimate shame he had of himself, to shift it onto a scapegoat.”

In thematically exploring Racism as a Technology for Power, Mbembe highlights how racism functions for those who live in a privileged group. He argues that the function of racism and necropolitics is to affirm the life of those who are advantaged.

“The specter of the West hovers everywhere.”

Mbembe often draws attention to the pervasive nature of Western thought. As he uses the work of other philosophers to expand his ideas, he also takes the time to unpack how Western ideologies impact their work and shape their concepts.

“Allowing oneself to be affected by others—or to be defenselessly exposed to another existence—constitutes the first step toward that form of recognition that will not be contained in the master-slave paradigm.”

The demarcation between Western and non-Western thought is the boundary between individualism/isolation and care for others. Mbembe asserts that placing oneself in an ecology of mind is the first step toward psychological decolonization.

“As fantasies and accidents are now their sole subject matter, they have become unpredictable and paranoid, anarchic powers without symbols, devoid of meaning or destiny. Lacking in justification, only ornament remains to them.”

In his critique of modernity, Mbembe aligns the devolution of society, culture, and identity with democracy’s persistently using symbols and contraction as a replacement for real-life experiences. Mbembe argues that the continued mythologization of power will result in further isolation and confusion.