Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics (2016–) [ES, IT, EN]

“In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side—what he calls its “nocturnal body”—which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon’s notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.”

First published as Politiques de l’inimitié, La Découverte, Paris, 2016.

English edition
Translated by Steven Corcoran
Publisher Duke University Press, 2019
Theory in Forms series
ISBN 9781478005858, 1478005858
viii+213 pages

Reviews: Laurent Husson (Érudit, 2017, FR), Magali Bessone (L’Homme, 2016, FR), Guillaume G. Poirier (Ithaque, 2017, FR), Alexis Pierçon-Gnezda (Les Inrocks, 2016, FR), Jean Vettraino (Revue Projet, 2016, FR), Akono François-Xavier (Philosophie-politique, 2016, FR), Klaus Nüchtern (Zeit, DE, 2017), Jos Schnurer (socialnet.de, 2017, DE), Filippo La Porta (Laterza, 2019, IT), Tancredi Re (Economia Italiana, 2019, IT).

Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (EN)

Políticas de la enemistad (Spanish, trans. Victor Goldstein, 2018, via)
Nanorazzismo: il corpo notturno della democrazia (Italian, trans. Guido Lagomarsino, 2019)
Necropolitics (English, trans. Steven Corcoran, 2019)

Donna Haraway: How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (1999)

A lengthy interview-conversation that covers aspects of both Haraway’s life and work.

Publisher Routledge, 1999
ISBN 0415924022, 9780415924023
197 pages

Reviews: Tony Scott (Kairos, 2000), Erika Bourguignon (NWSA Journal, 2001).
Commentary: McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (2 MB, updated on 2018-5-11)

Claire Colebrook: Essays on Extinction, 2 vols.: Death of the PostHuman & Sex After Life (2014)

“Death of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as ‘theory,’ and its contemporary supposedly post-human aftermath. There can be no redemptive post-human future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human–despite its normative intensity–can provide neither foundation nor critical lever in the Anthropocene epoch. Death of the PostHuman argues for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and seemingly post-human futures.”

“Sex After Life aims to consider the various ways in which the concept of life has provided normative and moralizing ballast for queer, feminist and critical theories. Arguing against a notion of the queer as counter-normative, Sex After Life appeals to the concept of life as a philosophical problem. Life is neither a material ground nor a generative principle, but can nevertheless offer itself for new forms of problem formation that exceed the all too human logics of survival.”

Publisher Open Humanities Press, 2014
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License
ISBN 978-1-60785-299-5 (v1), 978-1-60785-300-8 (v2)
243 & 263 pages

Publisher, (2)
OAPEN, (2)

Vol. 1: HTML, PDF, PDF, PDF
Vol. 2: HTML, PDF, PDF, PDF