Postcolonial Studies

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Decolonial anxieties in a postcolonial world: an

interview with Achille Mbembe

Joseph Confavreux

To cite this article: Joseph Confavreux (2022) Decolonial anxieties in a postcolonial

world: an interview with Achille Mbembe, Postcolonial Studies, 25:1, 128-135, DOI:
10.1080/13688790.2022.2050587

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POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
2022, VOL. 25, NO. 1, 128–135
https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2022.2050587

INTERVIEW

Decolonial anxieties in a postcolonial world: an interview with

Achille Mbembe*
Joseph Confavreux
MediaPart, France

In his latest book, philosopher Achille Mbembe recasts the notion of ‘brutalism’ drawn
from architecture in order to describe a contemporary situation in which humanity’s
essence is transformed at the same time as its very existence is threatened.
‘Brutalism’s ultimate project is the transformation of humanity into matter and energy’,
writes Mbembe in his latest book, entitled Brutalisme.1 His writing starts out ‘from racia-
lized bodies’ – for which neoliberalism constitutes a ‘gigantic pumping and carbonization
mechanism’. But it also seeks to bring both Western and non-Western epistemologies into
play in order to release the energies and ideas that can help confront the contemporary
feeling of vertigo. Indeed, under the effect of unprecedented technologies, separatist politi-
cal projects and economic pressures straining bodies and deforming minds, humanity’s
essence is being transformed at the same time as its very existence is threatened.
In this interview, Mbembe also responds to the anxieties expressed in many a news-
paper column over postcolonial and decolonial discourses, as well as the recent reconfi-
gurations of identity politics.

Joseph Confavreux (J.C.): This book is dedicated to your ‘three countries, in equal
parts’. How far did they feed into your book – and how did each of them hold up?

Achille Mbembe (A.M.): Not all of them come out of it as well as the others. Without
doubt, the one that comes out of it worst is Cameroon, which I deal with in barely
veiled terms in a chapter explicitly entitled ‘The Community of Captives’. South Africa
is also present in many passages in the book, especially those that I devote to the both
crucial and futile question of identity. Senegal, doubtless the one that comes out of it
best, is present in the passages that talk about what I call the dis-enclosure [déclosion]
of the world – that is, the abandonment of the desire for borders, and the possibility
of a world unlocked out onto the open.
But beyond these three national territories, I also sought to address the ‘big questions’
of our time and reflect on the situation of life – living things – today. At the beginning of
the twenty-first century, as the Earth never stops burning and some seek to force through

CONTACT Joseph Confavreux cpcs-production@journals.tandf.co.uk

*This interview was originally published in French by Mediapart, on 27 February 2020, with the title ‘Achille Mbembe: «La
sécession s’ajoute à la prédation»’. It was translated into English for this special issue by David Broder.
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly
cited.
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 129

the project of an infinite extension of capital, both human societies and living things as a
whole are being reconfigured by the yardstick of digital technology. Old debates on
human nature are coming back to the surface and I wanted to take part in them – starting
from my own moorings in Africa, of course, but also starting out from the position of
someone who has constantly been criss-crossing the world these last 25 years.

J.C.: In your book, we also see your two adoptive countries, France and the United
States …

A.M.: We can’t skirt around them or get tired of them – condemned as we are to fight
simultaneously both with and against them. But beyond all these geo-national entities,
the central question is the becoming of the human in a period of our history character-
ized by an irreversible escalation of technology. I am particularly thinking of what we can
term the ‘computational turn’ in our lives, that is, the conversion of material production
into digital production, as well as the new forms of exhaustion resulting from the trans-
formation of the economy into neurobiology. This forges a reality centred on the indi-
vidual ego as the final mooring point of any ontology, of all existence.
We are, therefore, on the brink of an unprecedented rupture. The process currently
underway risks driving the birth of a biosynthetic humanity susceptible to encoding.
Such a humanity has little to do with the flesh and blood individuals endowed with
reason which we inherited from the so-called Age of Enlightenment. This downloading
of the living and the non-living, or even of consciousness itself, into increasingly artificial
formats and ever more dematerialized mechanisms – and this against the backdrop of
the infinite extension of the market and the combustion of the planet – fundamentally
puts back into question the form of organizing our common life known as democracy.
Moreover, amidst all this tumult, many no longer shy from speaking of ‘illiberal’ or ‘author-
itarian democracies’. For me, the term ‘brutalism’ summarizes simultaneously both this
process and the measure of force which the advent of this new figure of the human requires.

J.C.: In what sense are we seeing unprecedented figures of the human appear?

A.M.: Since the beginning of modern times and the arrival in a new technological era, we
have believed that our happiness, our freedom and our good health necessitated a sharp
separation between the world of humans and the world of objects. Human persons, we
thought, could not be fashioned or treated like objects or tools. Most of the great eman-
cipatory struggles waged over recent centuries were driven by the dream of unshackling
humanity from the universe of matter, objects and nature, in a sharp separation between
our species and all the rest. Alienation, conversely, consisted of the merger of the human
subject and the object.
Today, this separation between the human subject and the world of animate and inan-
imate objects is no longer entirely at the basis of the idea of human liberation and of uni-
versalism. Now that the relationship between means and ends has been turned inside out,
what, rather, more prevails is the idea that the human is the product of technology, or
even a simple economic agent that one can use as one pleases – and, moreover, whose
desires and expectations can be anticipated, her behaviours fixed and her fundamental
traits sculpted. Everything, including consciousness itself, is being reduced to matter.
130 J. CONFAVREUX

In short, there is, it would seem, no longer anything that cannot be organized by artefacts.
Everything then becomes a pure consumer choice, in a world and a universe that are
nothing but a vast market stall.
One path I constantly explore in this book is to reinterrogate the status of the human
and the object in this new secular religion. To this end, I make recourse to certain so-
called ‘non-Western’ traditions, in particular to those metaphysics sometimes dismissed
by calling them ‘animist’. Indeed, pre-colonial African metaphysics as well as Amerin-
dian metaphysics allow us to formulate a combination of hypotheses able to de-dramatize
the human/object relationship. This is especially possible because these metaphysics are
less dichotomous than those elaborated in the West, with its dichotomies of nature/
culture, subject/object and human/nonhuman.
Nonetheless, the return to these old figures of animism isn’t without its risks –
especially in this current moment, where reason finds itself under siege, and it is absol-
utely imperative that we hone our critical faculties. The critique of reason must, there-
fore, be distinguished from a war against reason; this, even though many
contemporary political engagements are based on a supposed rehabilitation of the
affects, of personal experience, of feelings and emotions, and take the form of visceral
struggles. Most of the identitarian struggles that animate politics today make up part
of this configuration. In my view, they will divert us from the essential problems we
face if they only aim to demarcate frontiers and if they are not explicitly articulated to
a wider, more planetary design: namely, to repair the world itself.

J.C.: Identitarian struggles emerged from minorities but have been reformulated by
the hard Right – often to the detriment of these same minorities. How do you see
what the Americans call ‘identity politics’?

A.M.: Identitarian struggles are no longer the monopoly of minorities – indeed, I’d ques-
tion whether they ever have been. In Europe, in particular, people of so-called ‘European
stock’ have always profited from the wages of autochthony. The whole history of racism
boils down to a permanent battle to consolidate this unearned advantage.
That said, there was a moment in recent history during which struggles for identity did
make up part of general struggles for human emancipation: such was the case of the
struggles to abolish slavery and colonialism, of the struggles for women’s liberation, of
the US Civil Rights struggles, and the struggles against Apartheid in South Africa.
Such struggles’ ultimate goal was not to mark differences. They were, first and foremost,
struggles for the recognition of the greater number, of each and of all, as humans among
other humans, called on together with these others to build a world that all can inhabit.
What was at stake, here, was to build something that could be shared as equitably as poss-
ible, that is, because it had to do with an original, foundational ‘something in common’.
These struggles were thus endowed with a major coefficient of universalism – if, that is,
by ‘universal’ we mean the possibility of making a world-in-common, and not making a
world to the advantage only of some or a world made regardless of, despite or against
others.
For this reason, the current debates on the notions of the universal and universalism,
communalism or separatism are an utter trap. Often these categories are mobilized in the
barely masked objective of defending the ‘indigenous’ and preserving the unearned
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 131

advantages that flow from it. The same goes for the endlessly rehashed controversies
whose function is to dirty the name of postcolonial and decolonial theories. For those
who have taken the time to read and translate postcolonial texts – which aren’t exactly
the same thing as decolonial discourse – it is obvious that most of these are hardly
expressions of identity politics.
In truth – paradoxically – so-called postcolonial theories ought to be interpreted as the
latest avatars of a certain tradition of Western humanism: a critical and inclusive human-
ism. It is these discourses that champion cosmopolitanism and clearly oppose auto-
chthony. Their intention is precisely to extend this critical humanism to a planetary
scale, denying that it should remain the privilege of the West alone. This is the reason
why – although I make no claim to be a theorist of the postcolonial – I am amazed
that some here [in France] try to characterize postcolonial theories as particularist dis-
course calling for separation or for us to turn in on ourselves.

J.C.: What differences would you point to between the postcolonial and the
decolonial?

A.M.: Postcolonial currents speak up for a cosmopolitan and hybrid world. And it’s no
accident that this discourse has often been theorized by exiles, by migrants, by stateless
people like Edward Said, nomads from the Indian subcontinent like Gayatri Spivak and
Dipesh Chakrabarty, theorists of the ‘Tout-Monde’ like Édouard Glissant or champions
of a ‘planetary humanism’ like Paul Gilroy. They’ve all opposed any form of essentialism.
We don’t find a celebration of particularism, communalism or autochthony among any
of them.
What unites them is their interest in the historical event that was the encounter
between heterogeneous worlds – an encounter that took place in the course of the
slave trade, colonization, commerce, migration and population movements (including
forced ones), evangelism, the circulation of forms and ideas. Postcolonial currents inter-
rogated what this encounter had, in its multiple modalities, produced – the share of rein-
vention, adjustments and recompositions that it demanded from all the protagonists, the
play of ambivalences, the mimetism and resistance which it made possible.
I think that decolonial discourse, especially as it has been theorized by Latin Ameri-
cans, is something else. It puts on trial ‘Western reason’, its historical forms of predation
and the genocidal impulse inherent to modern colonialism. What decolonial theorists
call the ‘coloniality of power’ refers not only to mechanisms for exploiting and predating
upon bodies, natural resources and living things. It is also the false belief according to
which there is just one knowledge, a single site for the production of truth, one universal,
and, outside of that, only superstitions. Decolonial discourse wants to tear apart this sort
of monism and overthrow this means of bulldozing the different knowledges, practices
and forms of existence.
I do not want to set up a complete opposition between postcolonial and decolonial,
which are, in fact, in dialogue with each other. But we ought to identify the lines of
tension that do exist, and see that they do not set out from the same concepts and cat-
egories, that they do not elaborate the same arguments, and perhaps they do not set
themselves the same political objectives.
132 J. CONFAVREUX

J.C.: Can we escape a political configuration where questions of identity seem to have
become the main coordinates?

A.M.: We shouldn’t sweepingly dismiss the whole question. But in many regards, the
identitarian struggles of our times are the new opium of the people, among elites as
well as the masses. Moreover, neoliberalism is very well able to accommodate to them.
These identitarian struggles make up part of two of the defining logics of the present era.
The first logic is governed by a desire for boundaries, which goes hand-in-hand with
what might seem a commendable desire to take back one’s own self. But this is a
fetishized self, a consumable self, totally bound to its dreams, its feelings, its emotions,
its body, against the backdrop of a mass narcissism relayed by digital technology. This
figure of the self is a decisive cog in the project for the infinite expansion of the
market, in this era dominated by the reflex of quantity – one in which selling images
by way of images seems to have become the ultimate meaning of life.
The second logic is marked by a deep desire for partition, separation and secession.
The propensity toward endogamy is a powerful characteristic of our era. Many no
longer want to live outside their own bubbles and echo chambers, among themselves,
with those like them. The practices of excommunication and quarantine have made a
comeback. This is plain to see, and hear, in the carceral landscape that we find increas-
ingly pock-marks the planet: territorial segmentation and fragmentation, camps, enclaves
– all mechanisms designed to separate people and cut the ties between them.
By that, I do not mean to imply any symmetry between the ‘identities’ held up as a
banner by the radicalized right, and those in which minorities wrap themselves (sometimes
for want of anything else to defend). But I fear that in such a context no politics based on
identity can have a sufficient coefficient of universality such as would allow us to create the
necessary coalitions to stand together in effectively meeting the great planetary challenges.

J.C.: How far is this desire for secession – which is not exactly the same thing as a
desire for domination – transforming the way we think about contemporary politics?

A.M.: New mechanisms of domination are constantly emerging. Most are abstract and
dematerialized – this, even if matter, bodies and nerves are still their main targets. Pre-
dation, draining and extraction remain the rule, as does the recourse to brute force. But
the new domination also operates implicitly, through the proliferation of means of sur-
veillance, the use of technological ingenuity, the practices that set each of us in compe-
tition with everyone else, and the revision of laws in order to extend capital’s reach.
Today, domination proceeds through all these avenues, and even more so through the
draining of the critical faculties, the drying up of the imaginaries that would be necessary
for refounding a project for life, and living at the planetary scale. That is what is currently
underway, and what I call brutalism. It’s not spontaneous – it’s planned and calculated.
Faced with all this, many continue to resist. But I find two responses in particular are
striking. The first is the reflex to flee. In some parts of the world, flight is coming to look
like a real mass movement. Mass migrations and desertions are potential weapons. The
world’s powerful have well understood this and are trying to combat these phenomena of
defection by ramping up the number of camps and an unequal distribution of the ability
to move and travel.
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 133

The second response is the reflex of secession. If the rich could emigrate to other
planets and set up new colonies in which no poor people would be admitted, they
would do so. For the powerful, the main obsession now is how they can get rid of
those whom they think are nothing and count for nothing. This desire for secession
marks a rupture compared to previous periods characterized by conquest. What Carl
Schmitt called ‘seizing land’ is today succeeded by the building of fortifications.
The classic political question of the modern period was built around the right to
appropriation, the right to conquest, occupation and colonization. Added to this,
today, therefore, is another question: what fate should be reserved for those who have
nothing and who are, for that very reason, considered as being nothing. The great con-
temporary problem is what to do with those considered to count for nothing, or not for
much, and whose contemporary figure is that of the migrant. What juridical status, what
mechanism, what treatment should be put in place for those who are, in practice, reduced
to the level of mere waste? And finally, who does the world belong to? That’s the essential
political question posed in the era of what I call ‘brutalism’.

J.C.: How does this architectural metaphor help us think through the present
moment?

A.M.: This term refers to a way of distributing force, of applying it to materials – in par-
ticular concrete – in order to give them a form we hope will last a long time, if not make
up part of what can never be destroyed. It is thus a calculated and planned destruction
operation whose ultimate purpose is to build the indestructible.
So, outside of architecture, the concept of brutalism can be understood as a forcing of
bodies which are treated as concrete, subjecting them to a combination of pressures. Bru-
talism is the program which consists of reducing all that exists to the category of objects
and matter, integrated into the sphere of calculation. This is integral functionalism, a way
of organizing the recourse to force.
Re-interpreting it in this light, the concept of brutalism allows me to reinterrogate not
so much the (already widely documented) sociology of violence in the neoliberal era, but
rather to understand the dynamic of the contemporary moment. In my view, this is a
moment characterized by the escalation of technology, the transformation of economy
into neurobiology and the appearance of digital bodies made up of metal and other pros-
thetics – which are also cogs of capital – as well as flesh.

J.C.: The term could also bring to mind the German-American historian George
L. Mosse’s analyses of the ‘brutalization’ of European societies, between the Great
War and the totalitarian regimes. To put it briefly, Mosse’s reasoning was that the
logics of war had extended into peace time, ultimately resulting in fascism. When
you speak of contemporary brutalism, is this a way of drawing a parallel with a
history which consisted of the banalization of violence, the resurgence of nationalism
and a rapid downward spiral?

A.M.: No. Of course, I’ve read the texts of Mosse, Jünger and others, but I’ve also read
works starting from the inverse hypothesis, holding that the history of European societies
is a long history of ‘pacification’ or, as Norbert Elias put it, the ‘civilizing process’. In this
134 J. CONFAVREUX

view, even if violence has not been entirely eradicated, it has been domesticated and sub-
limated. We should also mention a third family of considerations which underline that
this ‘civilizing’ process was possible only because the potential for violence internal to
European societies was turned outward to other places, like the colonies.
My intention is not to repeat any of these three currents of analysis. Rather, it is to
grasp an unprecedented moment of our present which is marked, above all, by a techno-
logical acceleration without precedent in human history. This acceleration does not only
bring an implosion of our conceptions of time. It implicitly outlines the advent of a new
regime of historicity, which I call ‘chronophagic’, because it devours time in general and
in particular the future, at the same time as it builds up a systematic amnesia. Time as
such is replaced by flux and noise.
These technologies have also pushed back the frontiers of speed, making it a comp-
lement to power and a key resource in struggles for sovereignty. Moreover, in this
new regime of historicity there is no longer anything human that is not also consumable,
that is to say, which escapes the realm of calculation. Even more so, there is no longer
anything human that does not have a digital double. Capital now seeks to extend its
grip not only to the bottom of the ocean or to the stars, but also to atoms, cells and
neurons.

J.C.: In what sense does Africa, as what you call a ‘reserve of strength [puissance] and
strength in reserve’ constitute, if not the panacea, at least a space of possibilities for
the future of humanity, which today seems so fragile?

A.M.: Firstly, on account of its physique, its monumentality, which continues to fascinate
me. It is a gigantic continent, and it’d be hard to convince me that this extensiveness, this
gigantism, the fact that it occupies such an eminent place in the planetary mass, all means
nothing. Even if I don’t know what this extensiveness really means, I find it intriguing.
Speaking of its physique, I would also like to refer to what Africa contains, or holds in
store – by which of course I mean humans. Their numbers will keep on growing at least
till the end of this century, and it is doubtless here that the most phenomenal changes will
take place. Living humanity, in its multiplicity and in its most multicoloured character,
will have one of its vastest abodes in Africa. To speak of what Africa contains is not,
however, only to speak of the different species populating its surface, but also to think
of its rivers, forests, mountains, sun, savannahs, of deserts which are not at all deserted
and everything we find in its subsoil and at the bottom of the oceans surrounding it: rare
minerals, precious stones …
There is also, most importantly, a vast reserve of elements, many of which remain
unknown – forces critical for the future history of life on Earth in the Anthropocene
era. The colossal character of what we don’t yet know on this continent, of that which
still escapes calculation and appropriation, is the second important factor which leads
me to think that Africa represents strength-in-reserve for the entire Earth.
Recently I was in Kinshasa and before I set off again I spent two hours watching the
river Congo flow past. Impressive were the sheer volume of water and its power – we
don’t know how long they have existed and how long they will last. But as I contemplated
the river, it was difficult for me not to feel, in my own flesh, the turbulent stirring of
untamed forces and energy – ones which perhaps can’t even be tamed. For me, Africa
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 135

is that. The big question is how to free up these energies, these deposits of life, deposits of
a thousand-faceted life, for the good of Africans but also the good of all humanity.
What we need is to imagine new models of life and living which will allow the refoun-
dation of a politics that stands outside the religion of the market and its corollary in con-
sumption-hedonism. Perhaps, here, African metaphysics have something to offer,
another starting point, starting from the certainty that the human is not just matter.
In the human there exists an incalculable, inappropriable dimension, which does not
only belong to the realm of physical-chemical processes – in short, a dimension that
you can’t download into artificial devices.
That is why we should treat idolizing technology [technolâtrie] and collapsology as
twins. A smoother landing is not the only option available to us. When we look at a
wider set of archives and draw on a wider array of materials, we will find the experiences
of peoples who have been able to create life on the basis of objectively unliveable situ-
ations. That provides no guarantees, in terms of the future. But it does at least remind
us that everything is in our own hands. And that is key, at a time when the prevalent
feeling is that everything is now getting out of our control.

Notes
1. Achille Mbembe, Brutalisme, Paris: La Découverte, 2020.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).