Achille Mbembe

Biopolitics describes the metropole. From the colony the same power appears as the sovereign right to decide who may be exposed to death.

The correction

Foucault's biopolitics is a power that makes live: it manages health, birth rates and hygiene, and lets die by neglect.

Mbembe's argument is that this reads modern power from inside Europe. In the colony the same period produced a power organized around the administration of death: the plantation, the occupation, the camp, the state of siege as a permanent condition rather than an emergency. He calls it necropolitics.

The claim is not only moral. It is chronological. Many of the techniques later described as modern European government were developed at the periphery and reimported: identification systems, pass laws, camps, aerial policing, emergency law.

Why this project needs him

Every milieu on this site is North Atlantic. That is the largest gap in the material and it is recorded as such in the open questions. Mbembe, with Mitchell on Egypt, is the entry point to the version of this project that does not yet exist.

He is also the sharpest test of Agamben: the camp as the paradigm of modernity looks different when you note that the camp had a colonial history before it had a European one.

Serious objections

• The essay generalizes across colonial situations that differed enormously, in the same way Agamben is criticized for generalizing the camp.
• Necropolitics has become a label applied to almost any state violence, which drains the precision that made it useful.
• As with much of this line, the analysis is far stronger on how domination works than on what would end it.