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, or 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 to be enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucault 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. (shrink)

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe takes us back to his seminal text on “Necropolitics” translated and published in the US in 2003. At this point, 40 years after Foucault’s Biopolitics, Mbembe was re-theorizing biopolitics through a necro horizon, which turned out to be a robust conceptual shift from Western thought. Not much else is explicitly said about necropolitics in the titular book, which comes 17 years after the seminal text that had a significant impact on the theory and (...) practice of philosophy, politics, anthropology, and esthetics. Mbembe presents the layers of forms, modes, and procedures of the necropolitical working through contemporary neoliberal global societies. It is therefore not surprising that Mbembe makes reference to theory in forms, form is the way to redefine or rephrase content, and “who should live and who must die” is currently the beginning. But how this is done in the 21st century, what are the methods and procedures to implement this central act in neoliberal global democracy —that is the task of this book. (shrink)

Abstract:The commitment to all things democratic in educational spheres has inspired and generated much contemporary conversation in music education scholarship. Aside from demonstrating the possible discrepancies between what democratic ideals in education pledge to do and how they are materialized in learning situations, at least on the theoretical plane, there has not been strong opposition to, or refutation of the pillars upon which the construct of democracy, political or otherwise, is seated. Informed by Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, I (...) would like to extend the critique to interrogate (the adjective) “democratic” in education and citizenship discursive practices as a lethal problem. I seek to unravel the violence inherent in the notion of democracy in the field of music education and suggest that a music education based solely on the ideals of democratic participation and engagement risks becoming half of what it purports to do and be. It becomes an effigy. (shrink)

This article analyses Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics and surplus life in dialogue with three comparable theorizations: Agamben’s ‘bare life’, Marxist scholarship on ‘relative surplus populations’, and Afropessimist theorizations of ‘social death’. I argue that Mbembe’s work allows us to develop a critique of sacrifice that at the same time (contra Agamben) recognizes how it plays a structural role within necropolitics. Examining the influence of Georges Bataille’s writings on sacrifice allows me to clarify this argument. The second part (...) of the article examines the ‘surplus life’ of necropolitics in comparative analysis, tracing some of the limits of Mbembe’s reading through a dialogue with Marxist and Afropessimist readings. I characterize Mbembe’s work in terms of a poetics and politics of surplus: ‘reserves of life’ are affirmed against the excess of violence characterizing the present. However, this critique of violence relies upon abrupt leaps from politics to abstract ethical appeals in ways that obscure the implications of Mbembe’s own analysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Across the Mexico-United States borderlands, overlapping white supremacist and Anglo-nationalist movements are building private walls as monuments to Donald Trump. Numerous social justice activists and ecological stewards have warned that these Trumpist border walls present specific and new threats to social and ecological landscapes, particularly along the riparian sections of the borderlands. To slow their building and even topple these walls, justice activists and ecological caretakers are working to fortify networks with similar efforts elsewhere. In an effort to provide (...) analyses useful to such justice endeavors, I employ Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to situate the borderland activist struggles against the Trumpist walls within a broader context of struggle against the commemoration of racist terror in the US South. Specifically, I use Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitical deathworlds to illustrate some potential common cause linking protests against Trumpist walls in the Paso del Norte region of the Mexico-US border with a Black Lives Matter/Say Her Name coalition that is bringing down Confederate monuments in central Texas. In placing these movements in connection with each other, I highlight a synergy of the white supremacy of Jim Crow with the Anglo nationalism behind a Juan Crow variant of racist terror and anti-immigrant hatred driving the Trumpist wall constructions. Recognition of this convergence is one way, I maintain, for identifying opportunities for making common cause across the Americas’ myriad struggles to destroy the racist monuments that glorify the necropolitical legacy of racist colonialism and its ongoing social and ecological devastation. (shrink)

To talk about automation and invisibility in our digitally projected world, I argue the case for the “cancelled” or lost voices of postphenomenology such as, most notably, Günther Anders. Reflecting on Nietzsche as on the role of GPS for location and for dating services like Grindr, I take up Nietzschean humanism including the fragility of his portable brass typing ball, latterly not unlike daisy wheel printer technologies and the programmed death of ink jet printers. With a casual reflection on pocket (...) robots and screen-intentionality, GPS, triangulating perambulation, and programmed addiction, I raise the necropolitical question of climate change as of technology and its scotosis. (shrink)

This book engages the concept of necropolitics to present a vision of how to understand the physical body as a space of power and resistance to social order, in the context of the Kashmir resistance. The author sheds new light on the relations between India and Pakistan, with a focus on tensions over the Kashmir region, in order to better understand the emergence and stabilization of the narrative that criminalizes and thus justifies the population that rebels against state actions (...) in the region. The research draws from archival and interview research and presents the reader with new insight into both conceptual and material dimensions of necropolitics. (shrink)

This book argues that the othering and criminalization of Black people in times of crisis is part of the religious meaning of America that fuels the problem of mass incarceration. The author develops a religious interpretation of the significance of these images to America’s political economy the produces the very problems we punish as a society.

ABSTRACT This is a brief introduction to a special section on the work of Achille Mbembe.

This paper begins with the lived accounts of emergency and critical care medical interventions in which an unhoused person is brought to the emergency department in cardiac arrest. The case is a dramatised representation of the extent to which biopolitical forces via reduction to bare life through biopolitical and necropolitical operations are prominent influences in nursing and medical care. This paper draws on the scholarship of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe to offer a theoretical analysis of the power (...) dynamics that influence the health care and death care of patients who are caught in the auspices of a neoliberal capitalist healthcare apparatus. This paper offers analysis of the overt displays of biopower over those individuals cast aside as generally unworthy of access to healthcare in a postcolonial capitalist system, in addition to the ways in which humans are reduced to ‘bare life’ in their dying days. We analyse this case study through Agamben's description of thanatopolitics, a ‘regime of death’, and the technologies that accompany the dying process, particularly in that of the homo sacer. Additionally, this paper illustrates the ways in which necropolitics and biopower are integral to understanding how the most advanced and expensive medical interventions make visible the political values of the healthcare system and how nurses and healthcare functions in these deathworlds. The purpose of this paper is to develop a greater understanding of biopolitical and necropolitical operations in acute and critical care environments, and to offer guidance to nurses in these spaces as they work to uphold ethical duties in a system that increasingly dehumanises. (shrink)

The article reflects the discourses surrounding the military use of drones in the context of their employment in Afghanistan and Waziristan in the last two decades with a special emphasis on its necropolitical dimensions. It does so by first summarizing different critical accounts of a single well documented case in Afghanistan, underscoring historical continuities between drone warfare, state terror and air power. Second, the article puts a special emphasis on relations on the ground such as ambiguous legal constructions enabling the (...) use of lethal force, and the weaponization of Pashtun culture for the purposes of different governments. (shrink)

Some memories are more actively cultivated than others, manifesting the obsessive and slippery theaters of contested histories. This may encourage us to explore the ways in which representations of the past are conveyed. While Holocaust awareness has grown globally, its presence in Turkish academia has been limited since the millennium. Recent studies predominantly frame how Turkey integrates the Holocaust within the settled narratives. However, public perception has been shaped by narratives of Turkish consulates saving numerous Turkish Jews from Nazi oppression. (...) This prevalent life-saver theme has become a cornerstone in Holocaust Memory, strengthened by various publications and documentaries. This research mainly investigates Turkey’s restrictive border policy and rescuing activities concerning the Jewish migration during the Second World War and its present-day recollections in today’s Turkey. Through a detailed case analysis, the study contends that popular historical beliefs differ from the facts. Ultimately it reads these accounts in relation to necropolitics that dictates which memories are allowed to live and which are rendered, emphasizing how even in remembrance, a politics of life and death exists. (shrink)

To be Black means to have ancestors whose humanity has been de-nied by slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and segregation, as well as by many theories elaborated in order to justify and intensify these modes of domination. To be Black also means having to face the enduring legacies of these systems and theories, which predomi-nantly manifest through overexposure to violence and death. Today, premature death and habituation to loss remain constitutive fea-tures of Black experience. Dignity, often de????ined as the inherent value of (...) every single human being, has been a core concept in ethics since Kant, at least. But in both philosophy and modern politics, the claim of respect for the dignity of people has coexisted with deep antiblack-ness. However, apart from the Western understanding of dignity stands another tradition. The concept of dignity is pervasive in Black radicalism, Caribbean philosophy, and African thought since the 18th century. This article draws inspiration from the legacy of these thinkers to elaborate an ethics centred on the speci????icities of racial-ized life. (shrink)

The collection comprises contributions from leading artist-theorists in the fields of necropolitics and tactical media, and from increasingly influential scholars of biomediality and urban performativity.

ABSTRACT Necropolitical arrangements of bifurcations delineate those ontological antagonisms that code Blackness as ontological lack (as non-position). In this article, I attempt to think about this evacuation of being in terms of the necropolitical’s fleshy excess, as what Alexander Weheliye’s work names “habeus viscus.” In so doing, I explore the implications, for our understanding of the “repressed proximities” of which the necropolitical consists, of arrangements that always-already include entanglements with their fleshy excess. In other words, if the nonposition of the (...) excluded is always positioned within, then living in/against the death-logics of necropolitics is always happening from that “nonposition within.” Hence, a reading of Achille Mbembe’s account of necropolitics must reckon with what Katherine McKittrick names “the creative consequences of the plot and the plantation,” with the implications of the inextricable proximal entanglements between the killing of life and the living that persists, despite. This article focuses on this “living despite.” Through a constellation of thinkers like Katherine McKittrick, Alexander Weheliye, and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (to name a few), it aims to show that there are, perhaps, other futures that are already “now,” shattering what Édouard Glissant refers to as the “stone of time,” shattering (necropolitical) history as destiny. (shrink)

Citation: Christodoulou, Marina. “‘To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly’ Reversed Necropolitics and the Death Imaginary.” Lo Sguardo - rivista di filosofia N. 23, 2017 (I) - Reinventare il reale. Jean Baudrillard (2007-2017) a cura di Eleonora de Conciliis, Enrico Schirò, Daniela Angelucci, pp. 127-137. Articolo sottoposto a peer review. Ricevuto il 14/10/2016. Accettato il 12/01/2017. ISSN: 2036-6558 -/- --------- -/- The concept or the theory of Death in the thought of Jean Baudrillard is not given the particular attention (...) it needs. When one speaks of the thought of Baudrillard, one rarely will mention ‘death’ as one of the keywords of his corpus. I think, though, that it deserves such a key place, for three reasons. Firstly, because the theme of Death is a gargantuan concept in the history of Philosophy and it even emerges with the definition of Philosophy itself, since, at least, Plato. Every philosopher, more or less is preoccupied with it, as an archetypical necessity of both human culture and of philosophy in particular. It is always interesting to see how each philosopher or each person thinks on it, as their thoughts on Death are a departure point and an indication of their whole philosophical system or, for non-philosophers, of their whole way of life. Secondly, it is important to examine this theme in Baudrillard because it inseparably interconnects, explains, and is explained by all the other, key, and the less prominent themes in his philosophy. Baudrillard’s thinking might take new dimensions when viewed through his thoughts on Death. Finally, Baudrillard is considered a difficult thinker, because, unlike other philosophers, he grasps themes which people are used to seeing as the pre-occupation or within the realm of fiction, even science-fiction. I would like to show, using simple language, that his philosophy, especially surrounding the subject of Death, is completely naked of any metaphysical, romanticised, fantastic, or fiction-like properties; it is realistic and political. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 147 Eric Andrew James The Representational Necropolitics of Black Women in Zombie Dystopia Video Games Though Stuart Hall defends popular representation as an important terrain of political struggle, he also argues that images of difference are dominated by “racialized regimes of representation” manifest in stereotypes and invisibilities.1 These ensure that marginal identities are reduced, essentialized, and rendered (...) other. One of the most powerful tools for this form of silencing in the popular representation repertoire is the notion of an established genre. In US popular culture, creators and critics alike often position people who experience multiple layers of oppression as constitutively outside the expectations of existing genres. Their absence is attributable not simply to creator racism but also to that genre’s relationships to intersecting categories of difference and domination, such as race and gender. Beginning with the preponderance of representational violence in popular media, this article draws from existing work by feminists of color in order to model a critique of US representational precarity. To illustrate the political tensions in popular US culture, I stage my intervention into a medium whose industry has had particularly fraught struggles with representation: video gaming. There, I focus specifically on 1. Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, ed. Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates. (London: Sage, 2001), 325–44. 148 Eric Andrew James recent attempts to represent Black women, whom the gaming industry has held up as emblematic of difference and diversity. 2 These attempts are marred by predictable disasters and pitfalls. In particular, I discuss how the representational politics of Black women in popular zombie dystopia games repeats a similar violence as the previous silencing of Black women in these spaces. The gaming industry’s struggles with representation in the wake of Gamergate are demonstrative of broader tensions in Black women’s representation in popular media. Thus, while I am focused on video games, I also intend this analysis to reflect on feminist studies of the relationship between genre and representation. I advance existing scholarship on video game representations of Blackness by theorizing violence enacted at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in game genres. Specifically, I position this intervention as a point of departure from TreaAndrea M. Russworm’s chapter in Gaming Representation: “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us.”3 This chapter provides a compelling critique of the relationship between the dystopian game genre and Black representation, highlighting the lack of self-reflexivity in mass-market representations of Blackness. Expanding this project by taking another look at her objects of study—The Last of Us (2013– 2014) and Telltale’s The Walking Dead (2012)—I argue that taking Black women’s multiple jeopardy as foundational to the zombie dystopia genre offers a deeper look at the grammars of representational violence. My use of multiple jeopardy refers to Deborah K. King’s theorization of how multiple layers of oppression exponentially multiply individual disadvantages. As King describes, “The modifier ‘multiple’ refers not only to several, simultaneous oppressions but to the multiplicative 2. AnnaMaria Jackson-Phelps, “Representation Matters: Positive Portrayals of Black Women in Video Games,” Medium, February 28, 2017, https:// medium.com/legendary-women/representation-matters-positive-portrayals -of-black-women-in-video-games-c96cf9f66fdf; Jef Rouner, “Would You Believe There Have Been Only 14 Playable Black Women in Gaming?” Houston Press, June 5, 2015, https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/would-you-believethere -have-been-only-14-playable-black-women-in-gaming-7484017. 3. TreaAndrea M. Russworm, “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us,” Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 109–28. Eric Andrew James 149 relationships among them as well.”4 These layers of oppression are often contradictory and may leave no avenues for action; the expectations placed on one for their race become impossible to fulfill because of the contradictory expectations placed on them for their gender or sexuality. This multiple jeopardy thus introduces... (shrink)

The article examines Tania Bruguera’s works 10,148,451 (2019, Tate Modern, UK) and the three versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (2009 and 2014, Havana; 2015, Tate Modern). Thinking with Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics, Lauren Berlant’s on “slow death,” and Michel Foucault’s on biopolitics, Paramana suggests that 10,148,451 addresses the collective subject and critiques contemporary necropolitics, while the versions of Tatlin’s Whisper #6 address individuals as political subjects, and comment on the panoptic gaze and contemporary biopolitics. Through her analysis (...) of these works, Paramana shows how Bruguera’s work is created to comment on the specific political economies in which it is presented, how the perception of the work’s politics differs when presented in different political economies, and the insights therefore the work might offer to them. Paramana argues that Bruguera’s work has often achieved more than local and national governments and that her “symbolic work with activist parameters” is surprisingly more efficacious than her activist work. The article concludes with the insights Bruguera’s work offers for the future of bodies in the 21st century. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 5, May 2022.

The article contributes to the understanding of how societal conflict, aggression, and racism are intertwined with the concepts of the body and necropolitics. Achille Mbembe’s exploration of historical conflicts refers to the way in which states and other necropolitical entities exert control over life and death. Persistent conflicts reflect a form of necropolitics in which certain groups are subjected to violence and death as a means of maintaining power. Frank B. Wilderson III’s analysis of aggression towards Black individuals (...) reveals how the body, particularly the Black body, is subjected to policing and violence. This speaks to the concept of necropolitics as it highlights how certain bodies are deemed expendable or “killable” in society, and how the policing of Blackness can be seen as a form of controlling and subjugating these bodies. The rationalization of racist acts against meticulously selected groups and bodies that are highly racialized in contemporary necrocapitalism illustrates how the politics of death and violence are used to maintain class and racist hierarchies and control over different bodies. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a preposterous history of Antigone’s adaptations that contrasts Sophocles’ classical tragedy with Jean Anouilh’s Euromodern melodrama and Ariel Dorfman, Patricia Nieto, and Sara Uribe’s postmodern Antigones in Latin America. I offer that history to understand a significant change in sovereign power when the state takes hold of the socially dead rather than living body. Here, I argue, we need to move from the theory of biopolitics to the theory of necropolitics to further explain the (...) role that slavery and its aftermath play in the radicalization of state violence under contemporary neoliberalism. I thus contrast the ancient violence inflicted in the publicly desecrated corpse of Polyneices with the Euromodern violence that misidentifies Polyneices and the postmodern violence that instead disappears not one but many Polyneices. This explains why enforced disappearances figure so prominently among postmodern Latin American Antigones, a form of violence that I trace back to the settler colonial logic of elimination whereby settlers claim nativity to the territory by means of erasing its prior inhabitants. (shrink)

In the article, the author addresses with two ways of dealing with life, biopolitics, and necropolitics, and connects them to the excess of power over life and death in the era of neoliberal global capitalism. Dealing with necropolitical processes requires a different analysis of spaces and temporalities, of necrospaces and necrotemporalities. It also requires consideration of the possibilities of resistance to necropolitical processes by those who are by no means silent witnesses, by no means mere victims, but subjects who (...) have undergone a process of (de)subjectivation in a way that, as Achille Mbembe would argue, leads to a process of destruction of their own subjectivity. (shrink)

Biopolitics and necropolitics have used animals as a concept to illustrate a particular human biopolitical situation, much in the “tradition” of Aristotle’s provisional biopolitics. In the Western context, not only our understanding of politics but also tropology and the conceptual apparatus itself are haunted by this ancient legacy, which underlies a vertical ontology tied to processes of spatialization and containment, a vertical ontology that enables an intelligibility of figurative translation. The article considers tropological systems as systems embedded in particular (...) forms of governmentality, forms of the violent administration of life and death. To show how certain bodies are marked as animal or animal-like and used in the (metaphorical) processes of exclusion/inclusion, it focuses on Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts on Carolus Linnaeus and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s analysis of metaphorics in the most recent (r)evolutionary theory, symbiogenesis, developed by Lynn Margulis. Moreover, to radically disturb the graduated ontological premises of traditional stylistics and tropology, we move beyond existing conceptualizations of the body and the sovereign, all of which are based on de-borderization, intersections, movements, and transfigurations. (shrink)

Can the brain become mind? If the question seems strange, aberrant even, it is perhaps due to the way the problem brain–mind is commonly presented, where what's repeatedly asked is whether the brain is or isn’t ‘mind’. Yet, if we take Deleuze and Guattari's provocation seriously, in the Conclusion of What is Philosophy?, the problem is radically recast: even if speculatively, that is, properly philosophically or conceptually, the brain, for them, involves its own becoming, both in terms of its ‘becoming-subject’ (...) and ‘becoming-mind’, as ‘Thought-brain’. I will explore references within Deleuze's philosophy in relation to the brain, namely in The Logic of Sense and his work on cinema, as I try to work out what this fantastic story (with necropolitical undertones) may in fact look like, the one where the brain not simply is but becomes, and in becoming, becomes mind…. (shrink)

In the dialogue between Timothy F. Murphy and Cristina Richie about queer bioethics and queer reproduction in this journal, significant points of the emergent and extremely important discussions on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer bioethics are raised. Richie specifies correctly that queer bioethics can either complement or contradict LGBT bioethics and the queer standpoint against heteroconformity and heterofuturity is decisive here. As the field of queer bioethics is such a recent and essential part of consideration for bioethics and as (...) it is still evolving, the objective of this intervention is to provide both an overview of important milestones of queer bioethics and to highlight that queer bioethics is not mono-logic and monolithic. To exemplify queer bioethic's ‘many-headed monsters’, queer reproduction is revisited and complemented by a European viewpoint. It is central to my argument and here I disagree with Richie that to be against heterofuturity does not necessarily mean to be against queer reproduction. However, I also argue that there are other reasons why queer reproduction should not be pursued at all costs. Finally, I discuss the most recent debates on race, class and citizenship, for example, queer necropolitics. These points still need to be addressed in queer bioethical agendas. (shrink)

In the article we discuss the meaning of the body in its material dimension in relation to its transformation in the current context, which is determined by the multi-layered convergence of biopolitics (Foucault 1978–79), necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), digital psychopolitics (Han 2014), and gore capitalism (Valencia 2010). It is an inquire of the ways in which the contemporary body becomes a form of mass media for certain populations who choose to consent to the mandate of making themselves entrepreneurs of their (...) own bodies within the livestream regime (Valencia 2016, 2018). The author analyzes a variety of representations of femininity taking physical form g-locally in bodies, which—in an effort to comply with capitalist mandates and with binary choreographies of gender and sexuality—become businesses themselves. (shrink)

This paper applies the Klein Group form used by Rosalind Krauss in her essay, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field", to the field of ruins. The opposition utilized to create the ruin Klein Group is the opposition between vanished and intact. The paper proceeds by classifying and discussing each of the possibilities opened up by the expanded field: ruins (not-vanished ; not-intact), consecrated sites (vanished ; not-vanished), ruin-reproduction (vanished ; intact), and finally the "necroaesthetical ruin" (intact ; not-intact). The expanded field (...) and the political and aesthetic implications thereof are discussed primarily in conversation with Paolo Virno's "Deja Vu and the End of History," as well as Achille Mbembe's "Necropolitics" and Andreas Huyssen's "Nostalgia for Ruins.”. (shrink)

The article delves into the enduring ramifications of historical and contemporary processes of racialization, the delineation of societal divisions, the forsaking of marginalized communities, and the coerced isolation or seclusion of specific populations. Within the realm of necropolitical afterlives, these terms indicate the manners in which these persistent predicaments have molded and persist in molding the realms of life and death for diverse groups. Analysis encompassing necro-lives holds significance in comprehending the sway of necropolitics, unearthing systemic injustices, and amplifying (...) the voices silenced. The bodies of necro-lives amalgamate in communal endeavors for justice, parity, and human rights. Necro-lives call for mobilization and advocacy to deconstruct necropolitical frameworks and forge more just and impartial societies. Necropolitics, entailing dominion over life and death by influential necro-entities, can be contextualized through these themes, spotlighting how certain populations endure violence, disregard, or isolation beyond their corporeal existence, thereby perpetuating cycles of injustice and suffering. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the geographies of electronic waste (e-waste). Several studies have examined how e-waste is increasingly exported to processing sites in China, India, Pakistan, Ghana and elsewhere across the global south, where it leads to devastating health effects. Through an interdisciplinary patchwork of human geography, public health, narrative theory, and philosophies of memory, this paper seeks to show how the export of e-waste to the global south—and the toxins it brings along with (...) it—is part of what makes “resilient” urban growth and citizenship possible elsewhere, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. The surplus value of technological production is only recuperable, in places like Silicon Valley, if its toxicity is spatially and temporally displaced onto— and hidden within— surplus bodies who are cast into necropolitical terrains of ill- health and danger. Tracing this story of e-waste, which spans from the epigenetic to the geopolitical, from the San Francisco Bay Area to China’s Greater Bay Area, requires a method of empirical allegory that can detect global iniquities on the most granular of scales, and vice versa. (shrink)

This article investigates the political impact of collective story-telling practices in the enforced disappearances from a Foucauldian perspective. I utilize two main theoretical frameworks: on the one hand, that of necropolitics, a kind of power that works on the management of death. On the other hand, that of genealogy as a type of history that mobilizes subjugated knowledges. The first part situates these stories within the framework of genealogy: subjugated knowledges that are buried and disqualified as a part of (...) the work of necropolitics. The second part argues that a Foucauldian genealogical approach to these stories is insufficient: necropolitical archives, when they testify to the work of power, remain incomplete at best and actively erase more often. The third part analyzes these stories as examples of critical fabulation. What is at stake in the insistence of the people searchers to tell their stories, I argue, is the collective emergence of another kind of fable – an act of fabulation in line with what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” which multiplies the possibilities of the present and the past by precisely telling stories of ‘nothing.’. (shrink)

Introduction to Filozofski vestnik 44/2 (2023), special issue, The Body in The Field of Tensions between Biopolitics and Necropolitics: Analyzing the Future of the Prosthetic Body in the 21st Century, ed. Marina Gržinić and Jovita Pristovšek.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the patterns of antiblackness within contemporary gaming. Video games are sites of necropolitical logics that use Black death to propel narratives. But even more concerning, is that these games might make sense of larger desires of white colonial supremacy, attempting to remove and destroy its troubled racialized past. Ethnographic observations also engage gaming as a carceral logic that seeks to surveil, police, and criminal Blackness. Under these conditions, it is imperative to explore (...) how the continuation of the institution of slavery within policing is actively embedded into technical and digital practices, leading to carceral conditions for those subject to its power and gaming provides a pathway to engage this trend. (shrink)

By critically analyzing the status and differentiation of bodies and their lives, the author expands the vision of governmentality beyond the West in order to define the body beyond the pacified techno-promises of their emancipation through fragmentation, calculability and programmability. By elaborating the nature, power, and promises of dominant digital technologies and technobodies, the author conceptualizes them in relation to the shift between bio- and necropolitics/power and in relation to violence, (digital) coloniality, and racialization to which bodies are exposed. (...) It is about the normality of violence against the Other, also in relation to the principle of separation of virtual bodies and “surplus flesh,” which increases exponentially with technological development. The author seeks to understand how we have come to the point where techno-objects are humanized, given agency, while the body and life of the Other are dehumanized, deprived of any rights. The article contextualizes and re-politicizes the shifting relations between subject and object, particularly within our forensic contemporaneity. (shrink)

This article analyzes necropolitics as background of military action in peripheral regions of Brazil. With this, we propose a conceptual deepening about the term necropolitics and an analysis of its performance in The Brazilian territory, exemplified from news published by electronic newspapers between the years 2017 and 2020. For this, the figure of the sovereign will be taken in the light of the articulation between life and language, because with the expectation of pacifying society, a series of discourses (...) are produced with the intention of basing the image of the enemy and justifying the production of territories of deaths. (shrink)

This dissertation, located at the crossroads of Continental political philosophy, feminist theory, critical theory, intellectual history, and cultural studies, provides a critical cartography of contemporary new materialist thought in its various constellations and assemblages, while using diffractive theorizing to examine two Continental terror(ist) events. It is argued that such a critical cartography is not only a novel but also much needed undertaking, as we, more than almost two decades after the Habermas-Derrida dialogues on terror(ism), are in need of a Zeitgeist-adjusted (...) conceptual framework, and, thus, a revitalization of philosophizing as such, that could lead to an analysis of the complex ontological, epistemological, and eco-ethico-political entangled aspects of global crises, and, specifically, terrorist events, the actual terror they produce, and the bio-/necropolitical repercussions they often engender. -/- Using the new materialist methodologies of critical cartography and diffraction, this project’s first part explores what it means to “theorize from the ground up” in a feminist manner, while furthermore offering a situated critical cartography of new materialist thought. Within the contours of this Deleuzoguattarian mapping exercise, new materialist thought is shown to be grounded in foregoing materialist philosophies, transversal and trans(/)disciplinary, and, moreover, a revitalizing ever-evolving philosophical strand of thought with crisscrossing, transcontinental roots and a strong foundation in (post-)Foucauldian poststructuralist thought. Particular attention is paid to what in this project are called “critical” new materialisms, or those new materialist philosophies that take the necessity of critical power analyses seriously, and could be said to be “eco-ethico-political” in nature. This cartography is furthermore accompanied by a digital critical cartography that can be utilized for pedagogical means. -/- The second and final part of this dissertation, preceded by an excursus that accentuates the importance of Harawayan ecophilosophical thought for critical new materialist philosophies, consists of one chapter that puts the idea of diffractive theorizing into practice; subsequently exploring theorizing on terror(ism), the Habermas-Derrida dialogues with regard to 9/11, and the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks as affect-inducing events of “feeling-thinking-through.” This chapter ends with a diffractive rereading of Habermas, Derrida, Benjamin, and also partially Levinas, on the subject of the contemporary democratic state, terrorism, and the legitimacy of lockdowns and emergency state declarations. By doing so, this final chapter anticipates on this dissertation’s epilogue, in which the need for an up-to-date critical new materialist eco-ethico-political model of justice and responsiveness-as-response-ability, is highlighted. (shrink)

Philosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic practice: all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead. The premise of Being with the Dead is that we can explore our lives with the dead as a cross-cultural existential a priori out (...) of which the basic forms of historical consciousness emerge. Care for the dead is not just about the symbolic handling of mortal remains; it also points to a necropolitics, the social bond between the dead and living that holds societies together—a shared space or polis where the dead are maintained among the living. Moving from mortuary rituals to literary representations, from the problem of ancestrality to technologies of survival and intergenerational communication, Hans Ruin explores the epistemological, ethical, and ontological dimensions of what it means to be with the dead. His phenomenological approach to key sources in a range of fields gives us a new perspective on the human sciences as a whole. (shrink)

This paper argues that ‘the Anthropocene’ is a deeply depoliticizing notion. This de-politicization unfolds through the creation of a set of narratives, what we refer to as ‘AnthropoScenes’, which broadly share the effect of off-staging certain voices and forms of acting. Our notion of the Anthropo-obScene is our tactic to both attest to and undermine the depoliticizing stories of ‘the Anthropocene’. We first examine how various AnthropoScenes, while internally fractured and heterogeneous, ranging from geo-engineering and earth system science to more-than-human (...) and object-oriented ontologies, place things and beings, human and non-human, within a particular relational straitjacket that does not allow for a remainder or constitutive outside. This risks deepening an immunological biopolitical fantasy that promises adaptive and resilient terraforming, an earth system management of sorts that permits life as we know it to continue for some, while turning into a necropolitics for others. Second, we develop a post-foundational political perspective in relation to our dramatically changing socio-ecological situation. This perspective understands the political in terms of performance and, in an Arendtian manner, re-opens the political as forms of public-acting in common that subtracts from or exceeds what is gestured to hold socio-ecological constellations together. We conclude that what is off-staged and rendered obscene in ‘the AnthropoScenes’ carries precisely the possibility of a return of the political. (shrink)

The deaths of millions from war, genocide, poverty and famine are symptomatic of a crisis that extends beyond site-specific failures of governance, culture or economies. Rather than reiterate standard critiques of capitalism, uneven development and inequality, this article probes and maps a shift in both the global economy and logic of capital that posits death as a central activity of value creation. “Crisis,” then, is more than an accidental failure or inconvenient side effect of either global economy or political reality, (...) but pivotal to both. Extending notions of biopower and necropolitics, I argue that, due to the extension of market logic, populations have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as “excess” - not only disposable but also fundamentally valued only in their negation. This devaluation of selected population is devalorization of living labor, thus creating a space for death as a generalized commodity, market and economic activity. Crucially, this shift exceeds the historic understandings... (shrink)

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the (...) human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing. (shrink)

Working with Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings, this essay shows how creaturely beings, or transfigurations, dramatize the afterlife of racial slavery, coloniality, the temporality of HIV/AIDS, and how their im/possibility disturbs and breaks with the “order of things.” While transitive and transversal in their potentiality for insurgency, Imaginary Beings and Fantastic Zoology also always carry a colonial logic, a conquest paradigm, while also un-resting the enjoyment of, what Borges calls, “terrible grounds.” Taking up fantastical and imaginary figures, (...) this essay aims to add to Borges’s compendium of beings; this is a tracing of fugitive forces, of pessimistic and potent provocations that break from “the Human,” “the Man,” and their enumerable agents – from the Fanonian invocation of the bestiary, to the +* value form and its racialized and erotico-, bio-, and necropolitical calculus of HIV/AIDS risk, the authors explore transfigurations at the edge of existence. (shrink)

In this article, we seek to discuss the recurrence of racism and prejudice toward black lives and childhoods, in spite of repeated initiatives to overcome it by social and educational policy-makers. Following the investigations launched by Michel Foucault on the biopower hypothesis, we revisit some of his interpreters, with the objective of discussing the challenges posed by racism to pedagogical provisions for black children and—following on a concept offered by Emmanuel Levinas--an education of the Face, as a weapon in the (...) political field of struggle against the thanatological dimension of biopolitics. To do so, we retrace some scenes from the history of inclusion devices – especially those policies aimed at black populations. We reflect on the racism embedded in our historical unconscious and discuss how it affects the education of the black Face in our country. We problematize the peculiarities of Brazilian racial prejudice and explore its necropolitical positioning when it comes to the governance of black childhoods. We conclude that the current form of governmentality and education needs a movement of de-rostification—deconstuction of the black Face--in order to identify a future for black children that makes it possible to rise up against the hegemonic order of the white-male-heterosexual-christian-European, and to create processes of subjectivation that can build solidarity with the multiplicity of others-becoming-minoritarian. (shrink)

This book analyzes the nature and functions of horror films from the vantage of a theoretical reconstruction of George Santayana’s account of beauty. This neo-Santayanan framework forms the conceptual backdrop for a new model of horror’s aesthetic enjoyment, the nature of which is detailed through the examination of plot, cinematic, and visual devices distinctive of the popular genre. According to this model, the audience derives pleasure from the films through confronting the aversive scenarios they communicate and rationalizing a denial of (...) their personal applicability. The films then come to embody these acts of self-assertion and intellectual overcoming and become objects of pride. How horror films can acquire necropolitical functions within the context of abusive systems of power is also clarified. These functions, which exploit the power of anti-tragedy, downward social comparison, or vicarious emotion, work to remediate aggressive, ascetic, or revolutionary impulses in ways that are not injurious to the status quo. This book champions horror as a source of self-empowerment and unmitigated beauty, but also attests to the potential social harms of the genre. (shrink)

This response discusses the possibility of an affirmative biopolitics based on a materialist and atheist idea of eternal life in light of some of the challenges raised by the critiques of Morejón, Ricciardi, and Fenves. The first challenge concerns whether an affirmative biopolitics is at all possible given that biopolitics contains as an immanent possibility a racial politics that leads to a “necropolitics”. The second challenge concerns the political character of Italian theory, especially in Agamben, and its relation to (...) communism and republicanism. The third challenge concerns the applicability of recent cosmological speculations for the purpose of joining messianism and historical materialism in Benjamin’s thought. (shrink)