necropolitics

I liked this bit by Achille Mbembe and Libby Meintjes from their essay: 'Necropolitics', which I believe was published in 2003. I came across this piece during some reserach last semester on biopolitics.


"In such circumstances, the discipline of life and the necessities of hardship (trial by death) are marked by excess. What connects terror, death, and freedom is an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics. The future, here, can be authen- tically anticipated, but not in the present. The present itself is but a moment of vision—vision of the freedom not yet come. Death in the present is the mediator of redemption. Far from being an encounter with a limit, boundary, or barrier, it is experienced as “a release from terror and bondage.”79 As Gilroy notes, this pref- erence for death over continued servitude is a commentary on the nature of free- dom itself (or the lack thereof). If this lack is the very nature of what it means for the slave or the colonized to exist, the same lack is also precisely the way in which he or she takes account of his or her mortality. Referring to the practice of individual or mass suicide by slaves cornered by the slave catchers, Gilroy sug- gests that death, in this case, can be represented as agency. For death is precisely that from and over which I have power. But it is also that space where freedom and negation operate."

...in which they quote Frantz Fanon's work on apartheid in South Africa...

"'The town belonging to the colonized people . . . is [End Page 26] a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees.' 52 In this case, sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not."