Irene Vázquez
Necropolitics, by Achille Mbembe, Duke University Press, 224 pp., $25.95
Some of us have bodies predisposed to haunting. Some of us vibrate on the frequency of the voices that abound in this profoundly possessed space. Which is why, before I can tell you about Necropolitics, I have to tell you about the voices. Achille Mbembe’s voice, yes, but the voices that haunt him and the voices that he haunts. I hear Aime Cesaire in Mbembe, hear Edouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon. I in turn hear Mbembe in Kendrick Lamar, the part of the bridge on “Fear” when he flips from “Why God, Why God, do I gotta suffer?” into the first half of the bridge spiraled out in reverse as though he’s speaking in tongues. When you are exposed to this much, when you hear this much, your voice knows it may not last long in this world, but it’ll be damned if it’s for a lack of trying. It cuts with the precision of a scalpel. Its tone never verges into a growl, but it’s always just on this side of hoarse. It perseveres, builds and builds upon itself, because it must, but that doesn’t mean that the voice or the reader doesn’t get tired. This is the voice that calls out in Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics. If you are ready, it just might convince you that it’s about damn time you saved your life.
Fanon, Mbembe, Glissant, Kendrick: theirs is the writing that the study of necropolitics requires. Theirs are the voices of those who walk the Earth marked for death. Mbembe, a Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist, was the first to coin the word in his 2003 article of the same name. The term delineates the use of social and political power to designate certain populations for death. It is an inversion of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s idea of biopolitics, which refers to the political proliferation and maintenance of life — or, rather, certain lives. This concept is more than the exploration of the state’s right to kill and intentionally neglect (though of course, in our age of ever-visible Black death online and on TV, this is absolutely the case); it is also an excavation how the democratic state was designed in order to kill, to undergo social or civil death. Who is imprisoned, banished from society? Who does the government strip of their rights? Whose screams is the state disposed to hear?
The book Necropolitics is Steven Corcoran’s translation of Achille Mbembe’s 2016 Politique de l’Inimitié (The Politics of Enmity). The English version is structured differently than its French equivalent — namely, it includes the “Necropolitics” essay that lends the book its name. The English version combines the titular essay with Mbembe’s further explorations on sovereignty, illuminating the necessity of Mbembe’s intervention in dominant discourses of Western political theory (though at times in the first two chapters, at the cost of losing sight of the concept that lends the book its title).
Central to Mbembe’s project is his expansion of the concept of sovereignty. He claims that late modern normative political discourses solely privilege the idea that sovereignty is embodied by a body of free and equal citizens who are autonomous and capable of self-representation. The Fathers of the Enlightenment (John Locke and his ilk) taught us that reason and political representation are sacred. The maintenance of these values, we are told, is what differentiates politics from war. Democracy is by nature, they told us, peaceful, violence-free, and policed. War realizes the violence that makes democracy possible.
Here, Mbembe’s intervention becomes critical. “The history of modern democracy is, at bottom, a history with two faces,” he writes, “and even two bodies — the solar body, on the one hand, and the nocturnal body, on the other. The major emblems of this nocturnal body are the colonial empire and the pro-slavery state — and more precisely the plantation and the penal colony.” One cannot be extricated from the other because the expansion of modern democracy in the West came at the same moment these states were violently expanding overseas. Mbembe structures his understanding of sovereignty with the maintenance of this nocturnal body in mind. He writes: “My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.”
Necropolitics, Mbembe argues, is a tool in the box of modern democracy. What now differentiates the present age of hyper-militarism and late capitalism is the visibility of this foundational violence. Where violence was once consigned to “non-places” (such as the camp and the prison), its push into the public eye in our hyper-connected present era has begun to threaten the notion that any of this violence has ever made sense.
Mbembe situates himself in “Africa, where I live and work (but also from the rest of the world, which I have not stopped surveying),” and his surveyal is a useful analytic for any Western democracy. It is a testament to the continued work of Black thinkers and writers like Mbembe that the notion of chattel slavery as integral to this country’s founding is beginning to make its way into mainstream liberal publications. In her essay in The 1619 Project, a special issue of the New York Times Magazine devoted to commemorating the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown, Nikole Hannah-Jones illuminates how the enslavement of Africans and their descendants contributed to the founding of the United States. Chattel slavery was the nocturnal body that structured the framework of U.S. democracy.
In this way, Mbembe speaks to scholars and practitioners of Black studies who have always lived in the afterlife of chattel slavery and articulated the centrality of chattel slavery to political philosophy. He contributes to the overarching goal of Black liberation by articulating how deeply entrenched slavery is to our systems of governance.
Furthermore, by reconsidering Foucault’s biopolitics through its flipside of necropolitics, Mbembe brings Black voices into conversation with political theorists like Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. While Mbembe continues their discussion of how the death camp is one site of the sovereign’s ultimate right to strip people of political status and kill them, he also emphasizes how restricting one’s theorizing to these locations limits our critique of the state and further silences other victims of terror. He shifts the terrain of the discussion of sovereignty and terror by insisting on the importance of the plantation and colonial warfare to the condition of modern sovereignty. “Any historical account of the rise of modern terror,” he writes, “needs to address slavery, which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation.”
What the exit from democracy makes visible, Mbembe continues, is the society of enmity that structured the colonial project in the first place. Colonialism causes colonizers to exist in a state of constant anxiety that their colonized subjects will rise up against them. This in turn necessitates perpetual separation from the colonized subjects. In order to distract from this state of anxiety, life had to be lived in contrast to the human nocturnal body, the non-body, the body-thing, the flesh. Mbembe points to apartheid (both in South Africa and Palestine) and the Holocaust as two manifestations of peak destruction of the Other. Of course, the Other can never be entirely separated from the colonial Self. The Self only exists by pointing to and destroying what it is not — having an enemy at one’s disposal to be eradicated at any time was and is absolutely essential. It is this need for destruction that leads to the exercise of necropolitical sovereignty. It thrives by perpetuating the state of exception, or specific instances in which the sovereign may transcend the rule of law in the name of the public good; as Agamben argues, these specific instances can become a prolonged state of being to deprive select individuals of citizenship. Mbembe writes: “Can the notion of biopower account for the contemporary ways in which the political takes as its primary and absolute objective the enemy’s murder, doing so under the guise of war, resistance, or the war on terror?” he asks. One is only killing or being killed. There is no living except in killing or leaving to die. And in our era of “planetary entanglement,” he continues in chapter four, the will to kill has replaced the will to care.
But it is the will to care for one another that guides Mbembe. A guiding feature of his framework is his critical love towards political philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Fanon makes such a striking anti-colonial figure because of the relational nature of his work. Born in Martinique, he returned to Algeria after being stationed there during World War II. He brought his understanding of the French colonization of Martinique to his work on the colonial condition in Algeria. This is the work that Necropolitics demands — that we bring our wounds to the site of colonial war and bear witness. Mbembe dives into the way that Fanon’s work in a psychiatric unit in colonial Algeria informed Fanon’s writing, specifically as it relates to madness and the care that Fanon believed was necessary for that madness. Certain people have been consigned to this state of madness because they have been already set aside for death; in the colonial project, these subjects cannot become ill because they are, by nature of their existence, predestined for death. This madness also afflicts the colonizer because of the continued entanglement that the creation of the Other necessitates. Care can disrupt the path of degeneration. Fanon knew this well: care restores the patient to full being and relation with the world. Mbembe credits Fanon’s background as a doctor with his uncanny ability to diagnose the colonial problem. He writes: “The medical act aims to bring forth what he called a viable world. The doctor had to be able to answer the question ‘What is happening?’; ‘What has occurred?’” When you read Mbembe reading Fanon, you relive these moments of encounter all over again. Maybe, Mbembe seems to say, our voices are mad. But perhaps that is simply what it means to see.
Neither Mbembe nor Fanon shy away from their madness. Through careful citation, Mbembe allows Fanon to speak directly to us, assuring us that this madness was not endemic to us, it was imposed. “‘I want,’ Mbembe cites Fanon stating, ‘my voice to be harsh, I don’t want it to be beautiful, I don’t want it to be pure, I don’t want it to have all the dimensions.’ On the contrary, he wanted it to be ‘torn through and through.’ ‘I don’t want it to be amusing, for I am speaking of humans and their refusal, of the daily rottenness of humans, of their dreadful failure.’”
There is a long history of formally innovative work in the Black Atlantic tradition, a term coined by historian Paul Gilroy to designate the ways the Atlantic world was shaped by slavery and the slave trade. As such, Necropolitics is part of “Theory in Forms,” a series from Duke University Press that brings together work from a variety of disciplines to highlight the ways that form itself is a kind of theorizing. Mbembe consciously writes into this tradition, as evidenced by the love with which he beholds his intellectual forebears. “Césaire, Senghor, Fanon, Wynter, Glissant, and Gilroy,” he writes, “seek to speak with as full a voice as possible from an incomplete, partial, and fragmented archive. For an incomplete archive to speak with the fullness of a voice, it has to be created, not out of nothing but out of the debris of information, on the very site of the ruins, the remains and traces left behind by those who passed away.”
Mbembe speaks with this voice from the outset of the book. He writes that “the roughness of the topic did not afford a violin note. It was enough to suggest the presence of bone, a skull, or a skeleton inside the element.” Mbembe teaches us how to read his complex, at times seemingly impenetrable prose. Read aloud, the effects that the revelations of necropolitics has demanded of him are evident. His language is skeletal because his politics know what it means to be dead. It is all too easy for those in the academy to over-theorize, to think so much about these violences that you end up on the other side of them, which is to say, nowhere at all. So I spend this time emphasizing those whose voices reflect the stakes of the work. Who reach out from the page and grab us by the shoulders. Though I usually feel like I’m exaggerating when I say this, in the case of Necropolitics, Mbembe’s writing is quite literally a matter of life and death.
I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the act of accompaniment that the translation of this volume into English represents. More importantly, the work of a translator like Steven Corcoran who can capture the contours of Mbembe’s French in English and ensures that voices like Mbembe’s that are so necessary are heard by monolingual English speakers. Dismantling global white supremacy will continue to necessitate acts of accompaniment like this one as we seek to encounter one another in ways that will make revolution irresistible.
Mbembe ends where he begins, in acknowledging the writer’s gesture toward language as a gesture toward life. He begins and ends his book with Fanon’s words, allowing Fanon’s effect on Mbembe to in turn make an impression on Mbembe’s readers. O my body, Fanon implores, always make me a man who questions! Our continual ability to question, to seek answers in language, to write in the hopes that there is someone else out there looking for answers too, reminds us that we are still alive. We mourn what was lost, yes, what has become of us, but “in a way that allows the survivor to escape the curse of repetition, to put the debris together again. In this tradition, to mourn what has been lost… is akin to returning to life the harvest of bones that have been subjected to the forces of desiccation in an attempt to render the world habitable again and for all.”
Please do not misunderstand me. Afro-pessimism, the field of thought that makes central the continuity of racism, colonialism, enslavement, the horror of it all, does not mean that we are consigned to this position of subjugation. How could we when the beat has kept us alive for this long? Mbembe’s prose pumps out the rhythm of CPR. With every beat of each seemingly endless list, he keeps us going: “In the era of the Earth, we will effectively require a language that constantly bores, perforates, and digs like a gimlet, that knows how to become a projectile, a sort of full absolute, of will that ceaselessly gnaws at the real.”
Black people on both sides of the Atlantic have been urged forward through these centuries of onslaught by voices like Fanon’s and Mbembe’s. They are voices that do not shy away from the madness, but dare to look and keep looking. They know, as Kendrick reminds us on “good kid”, that “The streets sure to release the worst side of my best / Don't mind, 'cause now you ever in debt to good kid, m.A.A.d. city.” This debt haunts us and in its haunting reminds us that these, our lives, are worth fighting for. One day, one bar at a time, some of us might make it out alive.
Irene Vázquez is a junior English and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration major at Yale, where she serves as co-president of WORD: Performance Poetry.