In the postcolony, wherein a particular form of power rages, wherein the dominant and the subjugated are specifically linked in one and the same bundle of desire, enthusiasm for the end is often expressed in the language of the religious. One reason why is that the postcolony is a relatively specific form of capture and emasculation of the desire for revolt and the will to struggle.
The enthusiasm for origins thrives by provoking an affect of fear of encountering the other—an encounter that is not always material but is certainly always phantasmatic, and in general traumatic. Indeed, many are concerned that they have preferred others over themselves for a long time. They deem that the matter can no longer be to prefer such others to ourselves. Everything is now about preferring ourselves to others, who, in any case, are scarcely worthy of us, and last, it is about making our object choices settle on those who are like us. The era is therefore one of strong narcissistic bonds. In this context the functions that an imaginary fixation on the stranger, the Muslim, the veiled woman, the refugee, the Jew, or the Negro play are defensive ones. There is a refusal to recognize that, in truth, our ego has always been constituted through opposition to some Other that we have internalized—a Negro, a Jew, an Arab, a foreigner—but in a regressive way; that, at bottom, we are made up of diverse borrowings from foreign subjects and that, consequently, we have always been beings of the border—such is precisely what many refuse to admit today.
Is the act of killing innocent civilians with a drone, or through—albeit precision—air strikes, blinder, more moral, or more clinical than slitting someone’s throat or his decapitation? Does the human-of-terror kill his enemies for what they are and for that alone? Does he deny them the right to live for what they think? Does he really want to know what they say and what they do, or does he need only their being there, armed or not, Muslim or impious, locals or not, at the wrong place and time?
Relation without desire
Terror and counterterror are in fact two faces of one and the same reality, a relation without desire. Terrorist activism and antiterrorist mobilization have more than one thing in common. Both strike the law and rights at their very roots.
In other terms, the law cannot be protected by the law—only nonlaw can protect it. To protect the state of law against terror, it is deemed, violence must be done to the law, or we must constitutionalize what only yesterday was seen as an exception or as outright lawlessness.
In this era of great brutality, while everybody is killing with chain saws, is it necessary to continue to stigmatize those who flee death because they seek refuge in our countries instead of stoically consenting to dying in the same place they were born?
Historically, one of the strategies of the dominant states has always consisted in spatializing and discharging that terror by confining its most extreme manifestations in some racially stigmatized third place—the plantation under slavery, the colony, the camp, the compound under apartheid, the ghetto or, as in the present-day United States, the prison. Private authorities were occasionally able to exercise these forms of confinement and occupation, along with this power of segmentation and destruction, often unchecked. This led to the emergence of modes of domination without responsibility, as capital confiscated for itself the right of life and death over those it subjugated. Such was the case, for example, at the start of the colonial period during the times of concessionary companies.
In Africa in particular, terror itself donned several forms. The first was state terror, notably when it came to containing the erup- tion of protest movements...
A second form of terror set in wherever there was a dividing of the monopoly of power, subsequent to which there occurred an inequitable redistribution of the means of terror within society... The state’s progressive loss of the monopoly of violence has ended in a gradual devolution of this monopoly to a multiplicity of bodies operating either outside the state or else within it but in relative autonomy.
On another level, the forms of violent resource appropriation increased in complexity, with links appearing between the armed forces, the police, the administering of justice, and criminal milieus. By establishing a relative relation of equality upon the capacity to kill and its corollary (the possibility of being killed)—a relative equality suspended only by the possession or non-possession of weapons— this configuration accentuates the functional character of terror and makes possible the destruction of all social links other than the link of enmity. This link of enmity justifies the active relation of dissociation of which war is a violent expression. This link also makes it possible to institute and normalize the idea that power can be acquired and exercised only at the price of another’s life.
War no longer necessarily opposes armies to others, or sovereign states to others. The actors of war are, pell-mell, properly constituted states, armed formations acting or not behind the mask of the state, armies without states but that control quite distinct territories, states without armies, corporations or concessionary companies tasked with extracting natural resources but that, moreover, have arrogated to themselves the right to wage war... By creating new military markets, war and terror have transformed into modes of production, period.
Where the strategies of states since colonial times have been founded on the mastery of territories, the various formations of violence (including terrorist) rest on mastering movement as well as social and market networks. One of the desert’s characteristics is its fluctuation. If the desert fluctuates, then so, too, do its borders, with the variation of climatic events.
To a large extent, racism is the driver of the necropolitical principle insofar as it stands for organized destruction, for a sacrificial economy, the functioning of which requires, on the one hand, a generalized cheapening of the price of life and, on the other, a habituation to loss. This principle is at work in the present-day process by which the permanent simulation of the state of exception justifies “the war against terror”—a war of eradication, indefinite, absolute, that claims the right to cruelty, torture, and indefinite detention—and so a war that draws its weapons from the “evil” that it pretends to be eradicating, in a context in which the law and justice are applied in the form of endless reprisals, vengeance, and revenge.
This is the “world of undesirables”: of Muslims encumbering the city; of Negroes and other strangers that one owes it to oneself to deport; of (supposed) terrorists that one tortures by oneself or by proxy; of Jews, so many of whom one regrets managed to escape the gas chambers; of migrants who flow in from everywhere; of refugees and all the shipwrecked, all the human wrecks whose bodies resemble piles of garbage that are hard to tell apart, and of the mass treatment of this human carrion, in its moldiness, its stench, and its rot.
Further still, the classic distinction between executioner and victim— which previously served as the basis for the most elementary justice—has largely attenuated.
Is another politics of the world possible, a politics that no longer necessarily rests upon difference or alterity but instead on a certain idea of the kindred and the incommon?
One cannot “sanctuarize” one’s own home by fomenting chaos and death far away, in the homes of others. Sooner or later, one will reap at home what one has sown abroad. Sanctuarization can only ever be mutual.
The time is far from being one of reason, and nothing assures us it ever will be again, at least not in the short term.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2019, pp. 27-41
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