Necropolitics

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapter 6-Conclusion

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction Summary: “The Ordeal of the World”

In the introduction, Mbembe explains that he wants to make the subject of his work clear but that the difficulty and violence of the topic make it extremely complex. He compares postcolonial governments to bodies and argues that the skeleton of these entities are made of terror and violence. Comparing democracy to Plato’s pharmakon (referring to a remedy or to a means of producing something), Mbembe explains that modernity has structured governments in such a way that they are both medicine and poison, benefiting some while harming others. Mbembe draws from the work of French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon to develop his thesis that violence and war are the hallmark of democracy.

Just as fear was the catalyst for colonialism’s violence and racism, Mbembe explains that it continues to drive brutality in the modern age. Mbembe intends to use the politics of space—how groups of humans move and how democracies move and group populations—to show how colonialism’s violence functions in a modern context. People live in fear that others’ experiences and ideologies might threaten their lives and identities, so they enclose themselves from the outside world and create false narratives about others to justify violence, removing themselves from guilt.

Mbembe explains that it is increasingly important to pay attention to how the politics of space manifests in the modern era as mobility and population distribution face new challenges: “The only chance of survival, for many, is to move and to keep on moving, the brutality of borders is now a fundamental given of our time” (3). Because modernity changed the relationship between political maneuvering and the use of space, Mbembe argues that people shifted from thinking about how to guarantee rights for all while maintaining personal identity and solitude, to a relentless and double-sided effort to exercise a will of power—one that both helps and harms.

Fanon focused on how colonialism impacted the psychological state of the colonized. He believed that a long process of therapy was necessary to explore how continued exposure to the colonial Other shaped a person’s self-perception. Mbembe praises Fanon for recognizing that democracy relies on taking land and displacing groups of people to advance its agenda. Colonialism’s emphasis on war and race bolsters its position as a pharmakon. Therefore, Mbembe argues that the focus of democratized power is death rather than life.

Chapter 1 Summary: “Exit from Democracy”

At the beginning of the first chapter, Mbembe establishes that he is approaching the topic of democracy from a non-Western perspective. He identifies several hallmarks of the modern age: immense repopulation, militarism, and capitalism. These changes indicate that political states have moved away from the idea of democracy. Four characteristics define the contemporary political landscape.

The first is the repopulation of Earth and the redistribution of populations, which colonization and the slave trade drove. Mbembe explains that the slave trade helped establish a new perspective on the environment in terms of capital gain: “The plantation regime was essentially about cutting down, burning, and routinely razing forests and trees” (10). This moment defined the relationship between colonialism and racism. Mbembe argues that colonialism itself has become a form of technology that governments use to control, move, and oppress groups of people. Although the slave trade no longer exists in the contemporary world, massive movements through trafficking and the colonization of remote regions of the world, ecological disasters, diasporas created through trade, and violence continue to alter population distribution. This movement of people across the planet’s surface has had profound effects. Mbembe proposes that people no longer feel an affiliation with a single nationality, which complicates identity. The movements of human populations have likewise had a major impact on plant and animal life.

The second characteristic of the contemporary political landscape is the redefining of humanity itself. An increase in population and an emphasis on global community has shifted the concept of humanity from a focus on the individual or an individual’s rights and freedoms to the role of collective humanity as a part of a larger ecology. Mbembe compares this to the shift in trade from stone and silver to plastic, symbolizing the expendability of humankind.

The third characteristic is the rise of technology. Mbembe argues that in this new age, no distinction exists between humans and machines. People live out their entire lives on screens. Because this separates humans from one another, subjugating and oppressing people become easier. Mbembe sees this advancement of technology as another example of total power over the living.

The fourth characteristic is what Mbembe refers to as the “nocturnal body of democracy” (15). Modern democracies enact violence and war outside the confines of law. The shadow side of democracy is apparent in how it protects and provides freedoms for some while oppressing others. He argues that the notions of equality and rights are not facts; instead, they are myths that fail to acknowledge these disparities. Democratic societies are built on the mythology of being pacifistic and focused on community, but Mbembe explains that what defines democracies in practice is secretive oppression and violence. While governments control individual violence, they continue to wield death and brutality with impunity. Slavery serves as an example of this. Although the US touts ideas like freedom and equality, 11.6% of the US population was enslaved in 1900.

Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis

Many academic philosophy texts and curriculums emphasize Western perspectives, limiting the academic canon to thinkers and writers in Europe, often beginning with the Greek triad of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. Each subsequent philosophical movement in Europe built on the preceding one while applying the influences of historical, political, and cultural context. The metaphysical nature of German Idealism was a reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. As 20th-century philosophers grappled with fascism and two world wars, they turned their attention to the nature of power. Academic philosophy explores the connection between thought and context, but a strictly Eurocentric focus ignores the significant contributions of philosophers outside the Western tradition. The exclusion of non-European philosophers from the academic canon reflects the intrinsic relationship between colonialism and racism (Strickland, L., & Wang, J. “Racism and Eurocentrism in Histories of Philosophy.” Open Journal of Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 1 2023, pp. 76-96.).

Achille Mbembe’s work is both a reaction to Western philosophical thought and independent of it. In these opening sections of the book, Mbembe emphasizes his own non-Western perspective, which enables him to objectively examine his subject and thematically introduce Racism as a Technology for Power. As an outsider of Western culture, Mbembe positions himself to critique the features of colonialism that contribute to the violent nature of its offspring: liberal democracy. The academic erasure of philosophers from non-Western countries is just one example of colonial violence, connecting to Mbembe’s assertion that contemporary sovereign states use a new strategy to enact power against marginalized groups: isolation. In addition, the expungement of non-Western voices reveals how postcolonial societies cannot escape their foundations of racism and imperialism.

Chapter 1 outlines four characteristics of the contemporary world that expose the intrinsic relationships among colonialism, capitalism, and racism. He argues that this connection has ravaged the planet and caused mass movements of populations on its surface. Mbembe posits that racism is a central technology of colonialism, creating a system of justification for the politics of space and necropolitics:

Race, far from being a simple biological signifier, referred to a worldless and soilless body, a body of combustible energy, a sort of double of nature that could, through work, be transformed into an available reserve or stock. As for colonization, it thrived by excreting those who were, in several regards, deemed superfluous (10).

Mbembe identifies racism as the foundational principle of liberal democracy, and he rejects the ideologies set forth by philosophers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, who promote notions of a perfect democracy. In his work Leviathan, Hobbes argues that humans exist in a state of nature. Brutality and disease mark this natural way of life. To escape the limitations of their natural state, humans enter a social contract in which they give up some freedoms in exchange for protection from a sovereign ruler. Hobbes believed that a monarchy was the best way to maintain social order and stave off the threat of the natural state.

Locke, whose philosophical thought was highly influential in shaping American political thought, argued in his Second Treatise of Government that the natural state was not one of brutality. Instead, Locke felt that people held inherent natural rights and that the purpose of the social contract was to protect the natural rights of a state’s citizens. Both Hobbes and Locke examined how states justify, impose, and maintain power. However, Mbembe argues that these ideologies are inseparable from their Eurocentric roots. By showing how his approach diverges from Western tradition, he sheds light on what he refers to as the shadow of liberal democracy, introducing the theme of Democracy as Medicine and Poison. Mbembe uses the term pharmakon to highlight how thinkers like Hobbes and Locke both benefit from the social contract because of their position in Western culture, while entire populations live in states of injury.

Space and its allocation on the planet’s surface plays a vital role in maintaining the function of colonialism as an oppressive force in contemporary liberal democracies, introducing The Politics of Space as a theme. Mbembe points to the plantation as an early example of America’s use of space to create states of exception. On the Southern plantation, enslavers cast aside the laws that protected citizens as part of the social contract. The author brings this understanding into a contemporary context by examining Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Those who create states of exception intend to hide them from the view of the rest of the population. Mbembe argues that states design spaces like prisons and refugee camps to assuage the guilt of those who define their security through the removal of others. Furthermore, racism no longer manifests in the outward expression of slavery. Instead, Mbembe explains that nanoracism has rendered invisible the daily brutality of contemporary racism:

It consists in placing the greatest number of those that we regard as undesirable in intolerable conditions, to surround them daily, to inflict upon them, repeatedly, an incalculable number of racist jabs and injuries, to strip them of all their acquired rights, to smoke them out of their hives and dishonor them until they are left with no choice but to self-deport (58).

Mbembe calls these third spaces in which people are held in a state of injury “deathworlds” because the people who exist within them live a life akin to death.