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)