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41 pages 1 hour read

Achille Mbembe

Necropolitics

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2016

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Key Figures

Achille Mbembe

Joseph-Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Cameroon, a country in Central Africa. Mbembe received his PhD from the University of Sorbonne in Paris, France, and a master’s degree in advanced study from Instituts d’études politiques. The acclaimed political theorist, historian, and social critic explores African politics and history, as well as the nature of Western politics and colonialism. The author’s critique of Western politics includes the argument that contemporary governments continue to wield death with impunity even in the modern era.

Mbembe claims that governments do this by marking some groups of people as the Other and condemning them to the worst spaces and living conditions. Residential facilities, prisons, rehabilitation centers, refugee camps, and reservations represent some of these third spaces where states force people to live in ways that Mbembe says are synonymous with death. He traces the history of colonialism in Western political power and how it continues to infuse contemporary governments with racism and violence. Third spaces like those he mentions represent the enactment of necropolitics, in which governments use death as a tool for power and domination. In these spaces, people live in limbo between life and death.

Mbembe is a professor at Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has had a prestigious career as a research professor during which he has held positions at Columbia University; University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; Duke University; and others. He received the 2024 Holberg Prize and the 2018 Gerda Henkel Prize.

Giorgio Agamben

Born in 1942, Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher known for his work on political theory and the nature of modern sovereign power. His concepts of “bare life” and “state of exception,” which he introduced in his work Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life, profoundly influenced thinkers like Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe. Agamben has held positions at the University of Macerata; the University of Verona; the University of California, Berkeley; and Northwestern University. He currently teaches at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (Università della Svizzera Italiana). Agamben received the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize in 2013.

Mbembe and Agamben share overlapping concerns about how modern states exert control over life and death. Bare life, or Homo sacer, refers to human life that has been stripped of political rights and reduced to a merely biological existence. The idea conjures the image of the Homo sacer figure in Roman law, who would be killed without consequence. This idea connects to Mbembe’s argument that colonialism created a framework in which democracies control and dominate some groups of people outside the rules of law. Another idea that Agamben introduced is the state of exception, which is a technique that modern states use to create spaces in which they suspend the rule of law. Terrorism and war represent excuses for governments to enact total power over death without the constraints of contemporary law. Mbembe builds on this idea by discussing “zones of exclusion.” While Agamben focuses on temporary states of exception, Mbembe proposes that postcolonial governments entrap people in a permanent state of exclusion from the security of the law.

Hannah Arendt

German-American philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) explored the nature of power and authority. Arendt studied with influential philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. At the beginning of her career, Arendt focused mainly on theology, but the rise of Nazism turned her attention to power and totalitarianism. Born into a Jewish family in Germany, Arendt later fled the country when Nazism became a threat and she was jailed for researching antisemitism. In 1941, she left France for the US, and in 1951 she became an American citizen. Arendt’s work is considered some of the most influential political writing of the 20th century.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that isolation and loneliness allow totalitarian agendas to spread and manifest through violence. Her focus on totalitarianism explores how it emerges from both the clash of and symbiotic relationship between the mob and the wealthy class. Arendt shows how totalitarian governments use racism as a tool for power. Mbembe draws from Arendt’s analysis of totalitarian regimes by examining how sovereign states exert total control over life in new contexts in the contemporary era. Arendt emphasizes how totalitarianism dehumanizes individuals, pointing to the concentration camps of the Holocaust as exemplifying demotion of the Other. Mbembe encompasses concentration camps into his idea of deathworlds. He suggests that like totalitarianism, colonialism renders certain groups of people as the Other and forces them to live a life that mimics death.

Michel Foucault

A French historian and social and political critic, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is best known for his position in the postmodernist movement and his studies of power, knowledge, and sexuality. In his works, Foucault applies a genealogical approach, tracing the historical movement of specific ideas. His works blend ideas about power structures and how they manifest in different parts of the socioeconomic and political world. His works have explored the nature of power in mental illness, population, sexuality, education, and knowledge. Foucault challenged the structuralist approach to philosophy, which emphasized the centrality of the individual. He believed that the systematic enactment of power by sovereign states absorbed and controlled the individual. A prolific writer, Foucault created works that influenced many philosophers and thinkers, including Achille Mbembe.

Two of Foucault’s works, his lecture “Society Must Be Defended” and The History of Sexuality, posit the idea of biopolitics. He argues that governments lost their ability to exercise total control over lives through threatening and enacting death, so they turned their attention to controlling life. Emphasis on population management and health replaced the old methodology for sovereign states to wield power. While Mbembe’s work builds on biopower to posit that death continues to be an important but more hidden part of modern democracies, many of Foucault’s ideas infuse Mbembe’s work. For example, Foucault points to fascist states’ use of fear and ideologies to justify racism, genocide, and war.

Frantz Fanon

A political philosopher and psychiatrist from the French colony of Martinique, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was considered a leading intellectual in colonialism, decolonization, and the psychological impact of ongoing oppression. His work uniquely blends sociopolitical history with its relationship to psychology and mental illness. In his works Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon explores how colonization enacts persistent psychological violence on the colonized.

Fanon argues that colonialism is innately violent and racist, ideas that Mbembe carries into Necropolitics. Fanon suggests that the effects of this psychological violence are not limited only to the colonized. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon proposes that colonialism impacts the psyche of the colonizer too, thereby dehumanizing both groups. Fanon believed that the process of decolonization would require violence and revolution.

Both Fanon and Mbembe explore how colonialism exerts control over colonized people. While Fanon emphasizes psychological effects, Mbembe looks at how colonialism impacts space and necropolitics. Mbembe likewise draws from Fanon’s critique of how colonial structures often persist long after formal decolonization. Mbembe proposes that civil wars, death worlds, and economic exploitation continue the work of colonialism in the contemporary political arena.

Thomas Hobbes

The work of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in his 1651 philosophical exploration Leviathan helped lay the groundwork for modern liberal democracy. Hobbes studied mathematics at the University of Oxford. In Leviathan, Hobbes proposed that humans lived in a state of nature marked by violence and brutality. Social contracts set forth by governments offered protection from this violence. Necropolitics challenges this view of the state of nature. Rather than viewing the natural state as one of violence, Mbembe proposes that colonialism inherently connects to cruelty and oppression. Hobbes believed that absolute sovereign, or a monarchy, was necessary to maintain power and order; however, Mbembe blames colonialism and government for the creation of complexity and disorder.

John Locke

The theories of English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) were central to the development of American democracy. Locke challenged Hobbes’s view of the social contract as one that offered protection from the state of nature. Instead, Locke believed that the natural state of humanity held certain inherent rights and that these rights were what governments had a responsibility to protect through social contracts. Locke’s ideologies about individual freedoms formed the foundation of democracy as a protector of individual rights and autonomy, two ideas that Mbembe vehemently challenges in Necropolitics.

Mbembe proposes that the individuality Locke champions indicates a failure to acknowledge or understand how colonialism shaped his own philosophical thinking. Instead, Mbembe proposes that democracy protects only the rights of specific groups while denying rights to others. Mbembe believes that the Eurocentric frameworks of philosophers like Locke and Hobbes present an idealized view of democracy that fails to acknowledge its Western roots in racism, violence, and colonialism.

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