The Other and the Ordeal of the World
Can the Other, in light of all that is happening, still be regarded as my fellow creature?
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).
war 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.
Similar to the majority of contemporary wars—including the war on terror and diverse forms of occupation—colonial wars were wars of extrac- tion and predation.
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 fur- nace of colonialism made it at once modernity’s antidote and poison, its twofold pharmakon.
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 apart- heid 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, com- mandment, and obedience, the norm and the exception, and even free- dom, tracking, and security.
This time is one of the repopulation and the planetarization of the world under the aegis of militarism and capital and, in ultimate consequence, a time of exit from democracy (or of its inversion).
Four characteristics of our time
The first is the narrowing of the world and the repopulation of the Earth in view of the demographic transition now under way thanks to the worlds of the South. Our coming to modernity involved decisive events such as the geographical and cultural uprooting of entire populations, as well as their voluntary relocation or forced settlement, across the vast territories once inhabited by indigenous peoples...
The slave trade and colonization alike broadly coincided with the formation of mercantilist thought in the West, if they were not purely and simply at its origins.
From the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, these two modalities of repopulating the planet through human predation, natural wealth extraction, and setting subaltern groups to work constituted the major economic, political, and, in many respects, philosophical stakes of the period. Economic theory and the theory of democracy alike were built partly on the defense or critique of one or other of these two forms of spatial redistribution of populations.
Settler colonies were conceived as an extension of the nation, whereas trading-post or exploitation colonies were only a way to grow the metropole’s wealth by means of asymmetrical, inequitable trade relations, almost entirely lacking in heavy local investment.
This scission of humanity into “useful” and “useless”—“excess” and “superfluidity”—has remained the rule, with utility being essentially measured against the capacity to deploy a labor force.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Earth’s repeopling is no longer carried out through slave trafficking and the colonization of remote regions of the globe. Work, in its traditional sense, is no longer perforce the privileged means of value creation. The moment is nevertheless about shake-ups, large and small dislocations and transfers, in short, new figures of exodus. The new circulatory dynamics and creation of diasporas pass in large part via trade and commerce, wars, ecological disasters and environ- mental catastrophes, including cultural transfers of all sorts.
To belong to the nation is no longer merely an affair of origin but also of choice. An ever-growing mass of people henceforth participates in several types of nationalities (nationality of origin, of residence, of choice) and of identity attachments. In some cases, they are summoned to decide, to merge with the population by ending double loyalties, or, if they commit an offense that endangers “the existence of the nation,” they run the risk of being stripped of the host nationality.
The second characteristic trait of our times is the ongoing redefinition of the human in the framework of a general ecology and a henceforth broadened geography, one that is spherical and irreversibly planetary.
Going no further than biology and genetic engineering, there can be said, properly speaking, to be no “essence of man” to safeguard, no “human nature” to protect.
The third constitutive feature of the era is the generalized introduction of tools and calculating or computational machines into all aspects of social life.
Whether one wants it or not, the era is thus one of plasticity, pollination, and grafts of all sorts— plasticity of the brain, pollination of the artificial and the organic, genetic manipulations and informational grafts, ever finer adjustments (appareillage) between the human and the machine. All these mutations do not only give free rein to the dream of a truly limitless life. They henceforth make power over the living—or again, the capacity to voluntarily alter the human species—the absolute form of power.
The articulation between the capacity to voluntarily alter the human species—and even other living species and apparently inert materials— and the power of capital constitute the fourth striking feature of the world of our times.
We see, on the one hand, a spectacular increase in the fragility and the instability of the mar- kets and, on the other, their almost unlimited power of destruction.
The question that thus arises is to know whether the modes of exploit- ing the planet might still be averted from tipping over into absolute destruction. This question is an especially topical one, as never before has the symmetry between the market and war been as evident as it is today.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2019, pp. 1-15
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