Necropolitics

In my continuing attempts to understand hauntology I came across a book titled Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe. I was intrigued by the concept, but until today I’ve never heard of it.

After doing a google search I found the following.

Mbembe was clear that necropolitics is more than a right to kill (Foucault’s droit de glaive), but also the right to expose other people (including a country’s own citizens) to death. His view of necropolitics also included the right to impose social or civil death, the right to enslave others, and other forms of political violence. Necropolitics is a theory of the walking dead, namely a way of analysing how “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” forces some bodies to remain in different states of being located between life and death. Mbembe uses the examples of slavery, apartheid, the colonisation of Palestine and the figure of the suicide bomber to show how different forms of necropower over the body (statist, racialised, a state of exception, urgency, martyrdom) reduce people to precarious conditions of life. ¹

Ncropolitics is something that I think is important, and I want to know more about it.