Can the Other, in light of all that is happening, still be regarded as my fellow creature? When the extremes are broached, as is the case for us here and now, precisely what does my and the other’s humanity consist in? The Other’s burden having become too overwhelming, would it not be better for my life to stop being linked to its presence, as much as its to mine? Why must I, despite all opposition, nonetheless look after the other, stand as close as possible to his life if, in return, his only aim is my ruin? If, ultimately, humanity exists only through being in and of the world, can we found a relation with others based on the reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability and finitude?
In a world characterized more than ever by an unequal redistribu- tion of capacities for mobility, and in which the only chance of survival, for many, is to move and to keep on moving, the brutality of borders is now a fundamental given of our time.
Today we see the principle of equality being undone by the laws of autochthony and common origin, as well as by divisions within citizenship, which is to say the latter’s declension into “pure” citizenship (that of the native born) and borrowed citizenship (one that, less secure from the start, is now not safe from forfeiture).
[W]ar is determined as end and necessity not only in democracy but also in politics and in culture. War has become both remedy and poison—our pharmakon.
[Frantz] Fanon grasped his own life only by understanding the life of other living and nonliving beings, for only then did he himself exist as a living form, and only then could he rectify the asymmetry of relations and introduce into them a dimension of reciprocity and care for humanity.
Far from leading to democracy’s spread across the planet, the race for new lands opened onto a new law (nomos) of the Earth, the main characteristic of which was to establish war and race as history’s two privi- leged sacraments. The sacramentalization of war and race in the blast furnace of colonialism made it at once modernity’s antidote and poison, its twofold pharmakon.
The ill human was the human with no family, no love, no human relations, and no communion with a community. It was the person deprived of the possibility of an authentic encounter with other humans, others with whom there were a priori no shared bonds of descent or of origin. This world of people without bonds (or of people who aspire only to take their leave of others) is still with us, albeit in ever shift- ing configurations. It inhabits the twists and turns of renewed Judeophobia and its mimetic counterpart, Islamophobia. It inhabits the desire for apartheid and endogamy that harry our epoch and engulf us in the hallucinatory dream of a “community without strangers.”
Nearly everywhere the political order is reconstituting itself as a form of organization for death. Little by little, a terror that is molecular in essence and allegedly defensive is seeking legitimation by blurring the relations between violence, murder, and the law, faith, commandment, and obedience, the norm and the exception, and even free- dom, tracking, and security.
—Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2019, Introduction pp. 1-8.
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