Reading Achille Mbembe.
Anyone intersted in a reading group on Mbembe's work?
Necropolitics etc?
Is there any good secondary literature on his work?
So, reading Mbembe's Necropolitics (Duke 2019) which is it interesting to note, was originally published in French as Politiques de l’inimitié in 2016 (ie the Politics of Enmity).
But my problem is really grasping what the hell does he even mean by "Necropolitics", what is specific about it. He is so vague about the concept and keeps blurring it together with other ideas.
on p. 80 for instance, he says that "the specific structure of terror that I have called necropower" has "three major characteristics".
He gives one: "the dynamics of territorial fragmentation" but then goes off on a tangent and never really clearly identifies the other two. It seems like that might include two of this set:
- Weizman's Vertical Sovereignty (but this seems to be just a 3D-ization of "territory")
- Infrastructural destruction (bulldozing) (p. 81)
- "tactics of medieval siege warfare" (p. 82)
But before he explicitly clarifies anything, he shifts back to an earlier claim that these examples in fact demonstrate the "concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical and necro-political" (p. 82)
Then he just moves on the War Machines, starting a new section... leaving it to the reader to somehow work out what was supposed to have been the specificity of necropower?
Achille Mbembe - Critique de la raison nègre (2013)
Currently reading the English translation after having read a bunch of his earlier essays. He has a kind of meandering style. It is often hard to follow the real thread of the essays. ie they are very "essayistic".
This first chapter of Critique of Black Reason which ostensibly focusses on "race" seems the same. There are interesting paragraphs, but what is it really "about"?
Just read this book with a reading group. It follows in the tradition of Fanon.
I'm having difficulty parsing the nuance between Mbeme's idea of sovereign power which takes as its project the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations, from the simple exercise of juridical power, the state's power to kill.
