Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe (review)

Steven Corcoran’s elegant new translation of Achille Mbembe’s La Politique de l’inimitié (Paris: La Découverte, 2016) makes available for the first time in English some of Mbembe’s most penetrating and sustained meditations on democracy, race, colonialism, and his continued theorization of biopolitics. Unlike its original French publication, Necropolitics includes Mbembe’s widely influential essay of the same name (Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, 15 (2003), 11–40), which theorizes the ‘subjugation of life to the power of death’ across the contemporary globe, and ‘the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living-dead’ (p. 92; original emphases). In a new and slightly altered form, ‘Necropolitics’ offers Mbembe’s collection a valuable centre of gravity when paired with the collection’s other new addition, ‘Viscerality’. The opening chapters of Necropolitics (culminating in ‘Viscerality’, which traces a critique of technology though discussions of messianism, animism, and the spread of a ‘politics of survival’ (p. 109)) establish the foundations of what Mbembe names the ‘politics of enmity’ as a signal characteristic of contemporary liberal democracies, characterized in part by the pervasive ‘desire for an enemy, the desire for apartheid (for separation and enclaving), the fantasy of extermination’ and by the slow embrace of democracy’s ‘nocturnal body’, the suppressed histories of slavery, colonialism, and extermination on whose back it was born and raised (pp. 43, 22). For scholars in French Studies, Mbembe’s long exploration of the tension between life and destruction through Frantz Fanon’s theorizations of creative violence and care in ‘Fanon’s Pharmacy’ may be of particular interest. Mbembe has long since emerged as a careful and innovative reader of Fanon, and this chapter is no exception. As usual, the scope of Mbembe’s citational sources across history, philosophy, and the broader social sciences enriches the depth of his engagements with the contemporary global moment, especially in terms of race, neo-colonialism, and accelerated processes of bordering. Despite its largely foreboding tone, Necropolitics concludes with a brief, more optimistic reflection on what Mbembe names the ‘Ethics of the Passerby (passant)’ which twins the hitherto theorized violence of the twenty-first century with an appeal to a pervasive condition of shared fragility. After a careful deconstruction of his chosen term, ‘passant’, Mbembe ends his volume with a turn to Édouard Glissant’s theorization of Relation and the Tout-monde. With Glissant, Mbembe gestures towards an open space to be thought, of an ethics of ‘passage, crossing, and movement’, of ‘flowing life’ and ‘passing life’, whose elaboration hinges upon rethinking the world beyond Europe or the Global North as privileged sites, and by establishing a new ‘terrestrial language’, grounded in a return to the Fanonian ‘questioning body’ (pp. 188–89) of Peau noire, masques blancs. On the level of translation, Necropolitics presents several advances from earlier publications of both ‘Necropolitics’ and ‘The Society of Enmity’ (Radical Philosophy, November–December 2016, <www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-society-of-enmity> [accessed 18 June 2020]). Corcoran’s translation of Mbembe’s dense philosophical rhetoric manages to communicate its poetic character and vital pulse.