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Reviewed by:
  • Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe
  • Tavleen Purewal (bio)
Achille Mbembe. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Duke UP, 2019. Pp. viii, 213. CAD $34.39.

Necropolitics (2019) is an outgrowth of Achille Mbembe's earlier, now canonical, essay by the same name, which was published in Public Culture in 2003. The essay, included in Necropolitics as the third chapter, begins with a forceful statement: "The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die" (Necropolitics 66). Revisiting the biopolitical reading of governance as theorized by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, Mbembe conceptualizes necropolitics as the power over death and the power to condemn certain [End Page 186] subjects to be the "living dead" (92; emphasis in original). This shift of the object of governance from life to death reflects the contemporary modes of violence practiced by state and inter-/intra-state agents, such as occupation, genocide, terrorism, counterterrorism, and counterinsurgency.

The title Necropolitics, translated from the French Politiques de l'inimitié (published in 2016), does not suggest the book's major contribution. The original title, "politics of enmity," draws attention to the structures of separation and othering that drive necropower and characterize the contemporary era as a "world of people without bonds" (6; emphasis in original). At the heart of this world, whose bifurcation is determined by capitalism, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, and militarization, is, according to Mbembe, "the question of knowing if it was ever possible, if it is possible, and if it will ever be possible, for us to encounter the other differently than as a given object" (40).

Mbembe traces the genealogy of the politics of enmity to colonial-era subject relations and argues that such politics lie at the foundations of liberal democracies. The first chapter, "Exit from Democracy," relates how "modern democracy in the West" is structured as a "solar body" undergirded by "the nocturnal body" (22; emphasis in original), through which excessive, racialized violence takes place. While Mbembe insists that a planetary democracy exists as an ideal form of ethical politics amongst human and other-than-human agents, he argues that liberal democracies erupting from and within the legacies of Western modernity have always used unlawful forms of violence to secure their body politic. To preserve their "solar" self-imaginary as a system for equality, justice, and debate, the "nocturnal body" of liberal democracies externalizes the originary violence onto "third places, to nonplaces, of which the plantation, the colony, or, today, the camp and the prison, are emblematic figures" (27). The two sides of liberal democracies illuminate what Mbembe calls the "planetarization" and entanglement of the world (9) because the state's exterior—its nocturnal "elsewhere" (40)—is linked to its solar interior. Outlining the ontological and historical conditions and contemporary formations of the politics of enmity, Mbembe addresses spatially and temporally distant contexts, including US slavery and imperialism, the occupation of Palestine, colonization and decolonization in Africa, South African apartheid, and the global North's violence against refugees and migrants. Necropolitics' swift movements between these realities suggest that they are woven into the fabric of necropower by the politics of enmity.

The other, an overarching concern in the book that ties the chapters together, is a polyvalent presence in our contemporary era and an analytical unit for Mbembe's study of necropower. To understand how the other constitutes the intimate relationship between bios (political life) and zoe (biological [End Page 187] life), Mbembe dives deeply into Frantz Fanon's psychoanalytic writings. The thoughtful survey of Fanon's body of work reminds readers of his unique position in colonial wars. As a psychiatrist, Fanon treated both the torturers, the French army personnel, as well as the tortured, the Algerian liberation fighters. Through Fanon, Mbembe theorizes the presence of violence that keeps the other in place (read: in nonplace, the camp, the plantation, elsewhere) and examines how the colonial self requires a host of psychic and racist relations to hang its subjectivity in precarious balance against the other. He argues that "racism was a way for the subject to divert onto the Other the intimate shame he had of himself" (131). In other...

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