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 destruction suggest that a reading of politics, sovereignty, and the subject may be developed that differs from the one bequeathed us by the philosophical discourse on modernity.
For Georges Bataille ... sovereignty takes many forms. But it ultimately takes that of a refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have the subject respect.
The sovereign,” he concludes, “is he who is, as if death were not. . . . He has no more regard for the limits of identity than he does for limits of death, or rather these limits are the same; he is the transgression of all such limits.”
The relation of enmity
Power (which is not necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to the exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy. It also labors to produce these same exceptions, emergencies, and fictionalized enemies.
Biopower, in Foucault’s work, appears to function by dividing people into those who must live and those who must die.
Hannah Arendt suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to a politics of death. Indeed, in Foucault’s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of bio-power, “that old sovereign right to kill.” In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make pos- sible the state’s murderous functions. It is, he says, “the condition for the acceptability of putting to death.”
According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill... It became the archetype of a formation of power combining the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state.
The perception of the exis- tence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my life potential and security.
From an anthropological perspective, what these critiques implicitly contest is a definition of politics as the warlike relation par excellence. They also challenge the idea that the calculus of life perforce passes through the death of the Other, or that sovereignty consists of the will and the capacity to kill so as to live.
According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers and ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death, one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army).
In France, the advent of the guillotine marks a new phase in the “democratization” of the means of disposing of the enemies of state. Indeed, this form of execution that had once been the prerogative of the nobility is extended to all citizens. In a context in which decapitation is viewed as less demeaning than hanging, innovations in the technologies of murder aimed not only at “civilizing” the ways of killing. They also aimed at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time. At the same time, a new cultural sensibility emerges in which killing the enemy of the state is an extension of play. More intimate, lurid, and leisurely forms of cruelty begin to take shape.
Terror is not linked solely to the utopian belief in the unfettered power of human reason. It is also clearly related to various narratives of mastery and emancipation, most of which are underpinned by Enlightenment understandings of truth and error, the “real” and the symbolic.
But by making human emancipation dependent upon the abolition of commodity production, Marx blurs the all-important divisions between the human-made realm of freedom, the nature-determined realm of necessity, and the contingent in history.
As Stephen Louw has shown, the central tenets of classical Marxism leave no choice but to “try to introduce communism by administrative fiat, which, in practice, means that social relations must be decommodified forcefully.”
The overcoming of class divisions, the withering away of the state, the flowering of a truly general will—all presuppose a view of human plurality as the chief obstacle to the eventual realization of a predetermined telos of history. In other words, the subject of Marxian modernity is, fundamentally, a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty by staging a fight to the death.
If, in the plantation system, the relations between life and death, the politics of cruelty and the symbolism of profanity, get blurred, what comes into being in the colony and under apartheid is a peculiar formation of terror ... The most original feature of this terror forma- tion is its concatenation of biopower, the state of exception, and the state of siege. Race is, once again, crucial to this concatenation. In most in- stances, racial selection, prohibiting mixed marriages, forced sterilization, and indeed exterminating vanquished peoples found their first testing ground in the colonial world. The first syntheses arise here between mas- sacre and bureaucracy—that incarnation of Western rationality. Arendt develops the thesis that there is a link between national socialism and tra- ditional imperialism. According to her, the colonial conquest revealed a hitherto unseen potential for violence. World War II shapes up as an extension of methods previously reserved for the “savages” to the “civilized” peoples of Europe.
That the technologies which produced Nazism originated in the plantation or in the colony, or that—Foucault’s thesis—Nazism and Stalinism actually only amplified a series of already extant mechanisms of Western European social and political formations.
The right to wage war meant two things. On the one hand, that killing or concluding peace was recognized as one of the preeminent functions of any state. This function went hand in hand with the recognition that no state could make claims to rule outside of its borders. But conversely, the state could recognize no authority above it within its own borders. On the other hand, the state, for its part, undertook to “civilize” the ways of killing and to attribute rational objectives to the very act of killing.
The colony is thus the site par excellence where controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization.”
That colonies could be ruled in absolute lawlessness was due to the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native... Savages are, as it were, “natural” human beings who lack a specifically human character, a specifically human reality, “so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.” Colonial warfare is not subject to legal and institutional rules. It is not a legally codified activity... In fact, the distinction between war and peace does not hold.
Necropower and Occupation in Late Modernity
The writing of new spatial relations (territorialization) ultimately amounted to the production of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the subversion of existing property arrangements; the differential classification of people; resource extraction; and, finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries.
Late modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early mod- ern occupation, particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the bio-political, and the necropolitical. The most accomplished form of necro- power is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine.
As the Palestinian case illustrates, late modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necro-political. The combination of the three grants the colonial power absolute domination over the inhabitants of the occupied territory.
War Machines and Heteronomy
According to Zygmunt Bauman, the wars of the globalization era do not include the conquest, acquisition, and takeover of a territory among their objectives. They are, ideally, hit-and-run affairs.
Globalization-era warfare ... aims to force the enemy into sub- mission regardless of the military actions’ immediate consequences, side effects, or “collateral damage.”
An important feature of the age of global mobility is that states no longer have the monopoly on mili- tary operations and exercising the right to kill and that the “regular army” is no longer the sole means of carrying out these functions.
Many African states can no longer claim to hold a monopoly on violence or on the means of coercion within their territory. Nor can they claim a monopoly on territorial boundaries ... Non-state deployers of violence supply two critical, coercive resources: labor and minerals. Increasingly, the vast majority of armies are composed of citizen soldiers, child soldiers, mercenaries, and privateers.
War machines emerged in Africa during the last quarter of the twentieth century in direct relation to the erosion of the postcolonial state’s capacity to build the economic underpinnings of political authority and order. This capacity involves raising revenue and commanding and regulating access to natural resources within a well-defined territory.
The controlled inflow and fixing of money movements around zones in which specific resources are extracted has made possible the formation of enclave economies, shifting the old calculus between people and things. The concentration of activities connected with the extraction of valuable resources around these enclaves has, in return, turned the enclaves into privileged spaces of war and death. War itself is fed by the increased sales of the products extracted... In most places, the collapse of formal political institutions under the strain of violence tends to lead to the formation of militia economies.
Increasingly, war is no longer waged between the armies of two sovereign states but between armed groups that act behind the mask of the state against armed groups that have no state but control very distinct territories, with both sides having as their main targets civilian populations that are unarmed or organized into militias.
In the case of the Rwandan genocide—in which a number of skeletons were, when not exhumed, kept in a visible state—what is striking is the tension between, on the one hand, the petrification of the bones and their strange coolness and, on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something.
Of acts and metal
It is the death of the Other, the Other’s physical presence as a corpse, that makes the survivor feel unique. And each enemy killed makes the survivor feel more secure.
In this instance, my death goes hand in hand with the Other’s death. Homicide and suicide are accomplished in the same act. Resistance and self-destruction are largely synonymous. In the logic of “martyr-dom,” the will to die is fused with the will to take the enemy down with you, that is, to slam shut the door on the possibility of life for everyone.
The besieged body becomes a piece of metal whose function is to bring eternal life into being through sacrifice. The body duplicates itself and, in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation.
The relation between terror, freedom, and sacrifice. Heidegger argues that the human’s “being toward death” is the decisive condition of all true human freedom. In other words, one is free to live one’s own life only because one is free to die one’s own death... Death itself must become self-awareness at the very time that it does away with the conscious being.
Self-sacrificers proceed to take power over their death by approaching it head-on. This power may be derived from the belief that de- stroying one’s own body does not affect the continuity of being.
Does this imply that death occurs here as pure annihilation and nothingness, excess and scandal?
Whether read from the perspective of slavery or that of colonial occupation, death and freedom are irrevocably interwoven.
Death in the present is the mediator of redemption. Far from being an encounter with a limit, boundary, or barrier, it is experienced as “a release from terror and bondage.” As Paul Gilroy notes, this preference for death over continued servitude is a commentary on the nature of freedom itself (or the lack thereof ).
Referring to the practice of individual or mass suicide by slaves cornered by slave catchers, Gilroy suggests that death, in this case, can be represented as agency.
I have argued that contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death (necropolitics) are deeply reconfiguring the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror... Today’s form of necropower blurs the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2019, pp. 66-92
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