Necropolitics

I’ve been doing lots of reading on the idea of Necropolitics, a concept articulated by the theorist Achille Mbembe.

Here is a bit from the Wikipedia article on necropolitics:

Necropolitics is often discussed with biopower, the Foucauldian term for the use of social and political power to control people’s lives. 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 analyzing 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 colonization 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.

Reading about necropolitics during the days of COVID-19 is very interesting….