Note: I am not doing justice to Mbembe’s arguments in the book by my selection. A full read of the text is recommended. Under what practical conditions is the power to kill, to let live, or to expose to death exercised? Under the guise of war, resistance, or the war on terror? Politics ... is doubly defined as a project of autonomy and as the reaching of agreement within a collective through communication and recognition. This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war... Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject, and politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation (fixing one’s own limits for oneself ). 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. Contemporary experiences of human destruct
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51