Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40.

Biopower no longer a completely sufficient concept which can describe the way in which life is eradicated and subject to the power of death. Necropower and necropolitics terms he uses to describe how contemporary power renders life as the living dead.

State of exception is not a temporary suspension of the law, but a “permanent spatial arrangement that remains continually outside the law” (13). We are living in a state of exception.

Sovereignty has traditionally rested on the belief that the subject is autonomous. However, Mbembe’s interest is in “those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (14).

Hegel: Human negates nature and then fashions the world, in the process confronting this negativity. Human death thus becomes voluntary. The life of the spirit is the human assuming death and living with it.

Those who risk death and confront it becomes masters, others become slaves. Master is then dependent on slave. Death confronted rationally and therefore full of meaning.

Bataille: Death as absolute expenditure. Death is the principle of excess—an anti-economy. Not recuperable by rationality. Death and sexuality are taboos which the subject is formed against.

Biopower functions by dividing populations into subgroups; racism.

“Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery, which could be considered the first instances of biopolitical experimentation” (21).

Slave condition as triple loss: home, rights, and political status.

Slaves kept alive but in a permanent state of injury. Slave body represents a form of death-in-life (necropolitics)

Colony as state of exception where judicial order is suspended and violence is legitimized as in service of civilization. Colonial history illustrates a rationality of terror which is not an aberration but a fixture of state power.

Mbembe provides a thorough reading of the use of space in colonialism as a tool of power and domination.

War machines (30-35).

Wars of the globalization era: destruction of enemy without concern for collateral damage. Contemporary wars more similar to nomadic conflict that conflict between nation states due to quick and destructive nature and emphasis on total annihilation.

Provides adept summarization of Deleuze and Guattari war machines: complex, mutable, not totally state affiliated, appropriating, polymorphous, diffuse, capture, taxation, predation. Likens them to modern armies in Africa.

Management of the multitudes key to govermentality. “The extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with the brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people, or paradoxically, to unleash them, to force them to scatter over broad areas no longer contained by the boundaries of a territorial state” (34).

Power not so much concerned with inscribing bodies in networks of disciplinary power but engaging in massacre.

Suicide bomber as an escape of the “state of siege and occupation” (37). It is a refusal of life for everyone.

CONNECTION: Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker in The Exploit argue that sovereign power is characterized by “the right over death and to let live” whereas biopower is more regulative and governs “the right to make live and let die” (74). Mbembe, however, is theorizing a different articulation of biopower which is not concerned with the making and conditioning of life, but in the making of death. The difficulty is in seeing the distinction between sovereign power and necropower. Perhaps it has to do with necropower’s focus on the management of populations.

REGIMES: Sovereign Society - Disciplinary Society - State of Exception

MECHANISMS: Symbolic Violence - Biopower - Necropower

DIAGRAM: Guillotine - Prison - Colony

It seems that the historic shifts between these power paradigms has not been as clear as Foucault asserts; rather, they are indistinct and intersecting.