Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics” (2003)

Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian political philosopher. He brings a sophisticated

knowledge of the history of postcolonialism to bear on Foucauldian biopolitics. That
perspective is important because although Foucault and the other contemporary leftist
critics we have studied (Agamben and Badiou) see colonialism and racism as having
played an important role in the development of biopolitics, they privilege European
examples overwhelmingly.The other crucial move in this essay is to shift attention
from power’s careful management of life (which goes under the name biopolitics and
which is typical of the experience of relatively rich westerners) to its deployment of
death or near-death (which is more typical of the experiences of colonized people and
other people who endure the exploitations of the global economy). This move
manifests itself clearly in the series of question that initiate Mbembe’s inquiry
(12).I’ll use Mbembe’s section headings to organize this post

Politics, the Work of Death, and the “Becoming Subject”

The rejection of rationalist understandings of how sovereignty functions. This

rationalist and humanist understanding posits sovereignty as rooted in “the production
of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of free and equal men and women
[who are]posited as full subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness,
and self-representation” (13). This is pretty much a description of political humanism.
This offers an alternative vision of sovereignty that will be familiar to us: “the
generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of
human bodies and populations.” To instrumentalize something is to make it useful,
and this passage might remind you of Foucault’s insistence that modern power
produces useful individuals . And the flip side of the bio-managed useful body is the
body reduced to bare life and thus exposed to destruction on a population level.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (German, 1770-183) is a monumental figure in

western philosophy. When Hegel says “spirit,” he refers to that part of humans that is
capable of rational thought, which is based on negation (reason = distinguishing one
thing from another = recognizing that one thing is Not another thing). If death is the
source of negation, then in this sense rationality, which is the heart of being a human
for Hegel, can be linked to “upholding the work of death.” For Hegel, politics is
directly linked to this rational process of “overcoming” negation/death by way of
thought.

Georges Bataille was a 20th century French philosopher. He links sovereignty to death
in a way that disallows Hegel’s sense of the dialectical engagement with death. This
idea has actually snuck up in other texts as well, particularly in Foucault’s and
Agamben’s references to Sade, who linked sexuality with sovereign power. We
already know that sovereignty is in excess of the law and is also the source of law.
But Bataille recognizes the connection between the sovereign exception and sexuality
as a kind of violation of rules, including the “rules” or boundaries that set off one
human body from other. To penetrate the frontiers of another’s body, in sex or in
killing, or to allow the frontiers of one’s own body to be penetrated, gives access to an
ecstatic pleasure linked with lawlessness, but also identity-less-ness. I guess the
biggest takeaway here is something we also got from Benjamin’s “Critique of
Violence”: rule-violating destructiveness like that carried out by police is intrinsic to
sovereign power, which is not governed or governable by reason. Politics is, as
Mbembe says, “the work of death.”

Biopower and the Relation of Enmity

Mbembe talks about “enmity,” which means “hostility,” and which is the term that he
uses to speak of the violent nature of political power. He says that he will “examine
those trajectories by which the state of exception and the relation of enmity have
become the normative basis for the right to kill. In such instances, power (and not
necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to the exception, emergency,
and a fictionalized notion of the enemy.” This constellation of factors, and the way
power operates against these enemies, make up what Mbembe calls necropower.
How “western imaginaries” produce narratives to justify the enemy-status of people it
intends to exploit. Slavery is justified, for example, on the basis of the fiction that
Africans are basically savages who would kill Euro-Americans if they could.

Mbembe refers to Foucault’s notion of race as a concept used “to regulate the
distribution of death and to make possible the murderous function of the state.”
Foucault and Mbembe see the modern notion of race as a way to mediate or direct
violence.Racism directs the enmity contained in power toward particular people.
Mbembe describes this directing of enmity as “[t]he perception of the existence of the
Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose
elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security.”

Mbembe describes the slave system as a state of exception structured by the regime of
racial enmity.The enslaved-human is in many ways the exception-human, non-human,
or fragment of bare life. Mbembe describes a twofold paradox:

1. The enslaved person is the “perfect figure of a shadow.” Enslaved people’s lives
are paradoxical because they are so radically different from the lives of their owners.
The “state of injury” in which the enslaved are kept is a way of separating them as
radically as possible as objects of enmity, of rendering them as different as possible
from their owners.

2. The second paradox is the slaves’ maintenance of “alternatives perspectives” by

way of music and other modes of resistance at the level of the body.

Necropower and Late Modern Colonial Occupation

Transitioning to the model of colonization, Mbembe argues that colonies figured as
places of exception because they were not regarded as “states” by the European
powers. The colony is the “zone where the violence of the state of exception is
deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilization.’” The European imaginary is the
reservoir of fables and myths that make up the collective “European”understanding of
the world. Obviously, there is in fact a lot of diversity among Europeans, but the
collective“imaginary” speaks to widely-held beliefs and how those beliefs contributed
to, motivated, or justified certain actions.
Having established two sites of exception (the plantation and the colony) in history,
Mbembe turns to“late modern” (post 1970s) that is, events that happened after formal
colonialism.
Mbembe starts with Fanon’s discussion of the“native quarter” and the “European
quarter”. The organization of colonial space was away of marking out “who matters
and who does not”. This is a pretty stark separation, and it is accomplished by way of
a total physical separation.

Mbembe’s principle example of late modern colonial occupation is the Palestinian

territory that has been occupied by Israel since a series of wars between Israel and its
Arab neighbors in the 1960s. The Palestinians who live there are almost the
paradigmatic figures of stateless exception that Agamben talks about. The important
things to bear in mind here have to do with the careful management of space that has
characterized Israel’s occupation. That management has been accomplished by means
of “settlements,” which are Israeli communities that are more or less plopped down in
the midst of Palestinian territory, often in places with good access to water, farmland,
and other valuable resources. The construction of these settlements, which sometimes
involves the bulldozing of Palestinian homes or olive groves and other agricultural
spaces, means that Palestinians are actually cut off from one another and from their
means of subsistence (both agricultural spaces and marketplaces). Israel also uses
complex systems of checkpoints, and its capacity to control access to the city of
Jerusalem where many Palestinians work or have families, literally to control
Palestinians’ access to resources necessary for life. Meanwhile, Israel uses air power
extensively both to surveille Palestinian lands and, of course, to bomb Palestinian
cities on the frequent occasions when open hostilities break out. This management of
Palestinian life (and death) amounts to what Mbembe calls a “state of siege.”

War Machines and Heteronomy

The circumstances of contemporary warfare, which is carried out by organizations

that Mbembe calls “war machines.” War machines are not traditional “armies.” They
are not necessarily directly related to states, they are “polymorphous and diffuse
organizations,” and they function for a variety of purposes. Al Quaida was born from
one such “war machine,” a group of Sunni Islamic militants who gathered in
Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet Occupation of that country in the 1980s. This
war machine was armed and otherwise supported by the United States. When in
Afghanistan, it served US purposes; later, of course, it worked differently. War
machines might also include private soldiers, military contractors or consultants, the
security forces used by factories or drug lords, etc.

Heteronomy (alien rule) is the cultural and spiritual condition when traditional norms
and values become rigid external demands threatening to destroy individual freedom.
Heteronomy refers to action that is influenced by a force outside the individual, in
other words the state or condition of being ruled, governed, or under the sway of
another, as in a military occupation. Immanuel Kant, drawing on Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, considered such an action nonmoral.
Mbembe says that “[w]ar machines emerged in Africa during the last quarter of the
twentieth century in direct relation to the erosion of the postcolonial state’s capacity
to build the economic underpinnings of political authority and order.” This weakening
of states in Africa (and elsewhere in the southern hemisphere) has to do with the
demands of international capital, as Mbmbe’s discussion of “resource extraction”
indicates.

Martydom, Ecstasy and state of exception

Mbembe makes a distinction between the logic of martyrdom and the logic of
survival, but spends most of the section talking about the logic of martyrdom. Both
also obviously involve certain psychological changes, which is where Mbembe
situates the two terms “death” and “terror.” His insistence that neither of these logic
separates death from terror seems important to me.

The suicide bomber brings together several features of sovereignty that we have been
studying from the start, and this figure epitomizes how necropolitics mirrors
biopolitics. The suicide bomber goes to places in which everyday life is lived, not the
specialized site of the battlefield. In this, suicide bombing is a use of power within the
everyday, like so many instances of biopolitics. The logic of suicide bombing also
transforms the body into what Mbembe calls a “mask” that hides the weapon. In fact,
the body becomes a weapon. As in biopolitics, the body becomes the site of a new
kind of existence.

In introducing sacrifice, which we might call (following Bataille’s account) a kind of

“inauthentic” living toward death (because the sacrificial animal dies instead of the
one who sacrificed), Mbembe can note the element of trickery or play that animates
suicide bombing, which rests on elaborate procedures of concealment and which also
deploys a death that, in the mind of the bomber, is not really a death because it gives
access to eternal life. “What connects terror, death, and freedom is an Ecstatic notion
of temporality and politics.” The word “ecstasy” comes from Greek morphemes (i.e.
word-parts)that mean “outside” and “stand.” Ecstasy is a “standing outside” of
everyday experience. It is being in a state of exception, and both the sovereign and the
homo sacer are figures of ecstasy. He cites Gilroy here because in The Black Atlantic
Gilroy thinks about suicidal acts by American enslaved people as acts of resistance
(he sees Sethe’s killing of her child in Morrison’s Beloved in this light). For such
figures, death is used as a way of asserting that enslaved “life” is a kind of not -life or
bare life.