Have You Heard of Necropolitics? -- Achille Mbembe

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Necropolitics is a book by Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist. In Necropolitics, Mbembe defines a style of politics, one that categorizes groups of people as superfluous or disposable. Mbembe challenges the traditional western binary between rational, peaceful political spaces, and chaotic and violent "natural" spaces. He argues that, in fact, supposedly peaceful states have long created and governed terribly violent political spaces like refugee camps or detention centers.
Mbembe's Necropolitics provides us with a challenging political theory for a number of reasons, not least of which is that the book forces us to grapple with the violent colonial histories of modern western democracies. According to Mbembe, the story of western liberal democracy is not simply about social contracts, and human rights; it's also about these violently policed spaces both within and outside of the social contract.
#Necropolitics #Mbembe #philosophy #politics
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Опубликовано:

22 авг 2024

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Комментарии : 64

@phoenixnnq 8 месяцев назад

Your efforts in simplifying such great and important and possibly uncomfortable books are greatly appreciated. Thank you so much

@GreatBooksProf 8 месяцев назад

Thank you. I really appreciate that.

@canella45 4 месяца назад

Thank you for this incredible summary, with all the nuances, such a great video !

@GreatBooksProf 4 месяца назад

Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks!

@beyondreasons481 Год назад

Proffessor, Hello from Japan. I've been interested in "necropolitics". But Japanese version hasnt still published and I am hesitating to read it in English . Surprisingly, You explained the main points of the book as well as other philosopher's thoughts MBembe refers to in the book. I will listen to this video repeatedly. Thank you for your great introduction.

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

Hi! Thanks for watching! I’m glad you found the video useful. It’s a complicated text. I wonder when the Japanese translation will be available?

@beyondreasons481 Год назад

@@GreatBooksProf Professor, Thank you for your reply! Two years ago a publishing company announced the publication was upcoming , but it seems that the date of the publcation is still not decided. I'm looking forward to reading it!

@allandwyer5193 3 месяца назад

頑張って。

@KCCCX Месяц назад

I'm Interested in your perspective on ontological blackness . Do you know any Japanese texts that would be interesting for me to read?

@83ayodele Год назад

Professor. This one hit me HARD. please forgive the forthcoming long post. Now I had heard of Mbembe & necropolitics via Wisecrack. They have a video on Mad Max Fury viewed through the lens of Necropolitics. It was pretty good. But that video hit me hard and as your did because of my background. I’m a dual citizen. Born in America but raised in Nigeria and didn’t moved back to the US till I was 20. And the idea of necropolitics had always swirled in my mind but never really knew how to describe it. Then you had to drop the psychological utility of necropolitics and let me tell you was screaming when you brought this up because the thing that came to mind was how people would always tell me how “ free” America was and I always be like man your standard for freedom is ridiculously low. But anyway I’m rambling. Thank you as always for your videos. This particular one has given voice to something I’ve always thought about in the back of mind. Bout to go buy Mbembe’s book ASAP. Again professor we appreciate you

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

Thanks for sharing this, Ayodele. I'm glad you found the material thought-provoking and that it resonated with you. I think Mbembe is tracking something quite real. He can be pretty difficult to read sometimes, but I think it's worth the effort.

@zeff Год назад

Professor, thank you so much for the effort you put into these videos. I've been a fan since a few months ago. Your content is awesome! 😁

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

Thanks, Zeff! That's very kind of you to say. This one took some effort 😅, so I'm glad you enjoyed it! Glad you're sticking around.

@Skandgupta789 Год назад

Yes, you are right. Mbembe's prescription of necropolitical state would certainly be anarchy. However, his method of transition towards anarchy would pe peaceful. Thus implying "pacifist anarchism" of Gandhi and Tolstoy.

@EgoSumAbbas820 Год назад

Thank you so much for introducing me to this book. As a teacher, I appreciated your willingness to wrestle with Mbembe's thesis. This is exactly what we want our students to do whenever they meet and then revisit complex ideas!

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

The struggle is real! Lol. But it’s worth it! 😄

@Philosophia57391 Год назад

I think most problematic thing is, we had been socialised with violence and there is a space , a lack of liberty, creating unsatisfied desires, to get to unknown destinations. Natural equality of rights and liberty is academically and socially systematised to hurt us by illogical emotions.

@appleby 7 месяцев назад

thank you for this summary and yr work on it! appreciate all the weaving through ideas and explanations all the you's from different time-spaces come in and do in this lol

@Edmonddantes123 6 месяцев назад

Hmmmm… I can’t really put my finger on it but I have the feeling there is a small area where an overwhelming military force has violently caged a population of millions for years and years and periodically “mowed the lawn”… the name escapes me momentarily

@KCCCX Месяц назад

This applies to every single "democratic" state

@pablopenguin6902 Год назад

This video was a super great help in explaining necropolitics for my essay, thank you so much!!

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

Glad it was helpful. Good luck on your essay!

@Beepassingby Год назад

FREE GAZA - A modern death world

@reedehinger2636 8 месяцев назад

Holy mackerel this dude is great! Explains things very clearly, plus really pleasant reading voice (I know that's weird but you're all thinking it).

@Jasitus 6 месяцев назад

Professor, I am even more fascinated by the materials on The Wire and David Simon on your shelf.

@GreatBooksProf 6 месяцев назад

Love The Wire! I’ve written a couple of things on it. Treme too.

@Jasitus 6 месяцев назад

Please can you share a link to them? @@GreatBooksProf

@poonammenger701 4 месяца назад

Thank you so much for this video it really helped me with my essay!! You make the ideas really clear and honestly reading this was hard

@MangaArtFanatic 7 месяцев назад

thank you so so so so much! This text was part of my exam syllabus and I didn't understood shit when I read it at first. I don't think my English is that bad but I am not a native speaker and this text was so dense and complicated.

@giseleesau 3 месяца назад

Wow! This was such an incredible simplification of such a challenging book! Thank you so much, you have saved my essay!

@graceatim7668 10 месяцев назад

Thankyou Prof...been struggling understanding these theories...

@GreatBooksProf 10 месяцев назад

I’m glad it was helpful. It’s a dense book!

@mounamehellou577 6 месяцев назад

My dissertation is based largely on this concept Democracy and death in an Iraki novel called Frankenstein in Baghdad

@cadenceinthahouse Год назад

Honest and epic breakdown. Respect the effort here. The content is very reminiscent of Zygmunt Bauman’s “wasted lives” but with an African center behind it. Thanks Prof

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

Thanks! Glad you found it worthwhile.

@federicosohns6910 11 месяцев назад

Great video! Just a small note: "death management" and the power over perception of life and death are at the core of *sovereignty*, not politics according to Mbembe. Thought it would be a good thing to point out since politics is a much wider term RE. the exercise of agency to change society, while Mbembe speaks specifically about sovereignty in terms of the kind of question those who wield State power aim to answer.

@GreatBooksProf 11 месяцев назад

Thanks! Good note.

@tulsalien 5 месяцев назад

Thank you 🖤

@adamthepagan9680 Год назад

Would it be accurate to say that Mbmembe has a somewhat anarchist critique of politics? As a reader of anarchists like Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin, and even Foucault, the conception of the state as the consolidation of violence, particularly directed against certain people by a 'ruling class' sounds quite familiar to me.

@promaroychowdhury8786 7 месяцев назад

This was very enjoyable to watch

@craigtunnicliffe9095 Год назад

this is great!

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

Thanks craig, glad you liked it!

@cardgameemporium9806 8 месяцев назад

Just done a second year uni presentation on Gore Capitalism where Necropolitics is referenced a lot so this helped a lot to understand it thanks

@GreatBooksProf 8 месяцев назад

Glad you found it helpful!

@evasalsera Год назад

thank you so much for this!

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

You're so welcome!

@SilencedNation525 7 месяцев назад

India.. new centre of necropolitics

@Caligula138 7 месяцев назад

The State of Exception is a fundamental idea from Carl Schmitt. Have you done a video on any of his work yet?

@keyamsha Год назад

I see David Simon on your shelf. Why is the Ghetto/Hood excluded from the violent political space?

@amirahazhar4192 Год назад

Writing a dissertation due in like 10 days on this, 😅😪

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

Whoa! Good luck! What’s your thesis?

@amirahazhar4192 Год назад

@@GreatBooksProf omg thanks didn't expect a reply! My thesis is on the indirect ways colonial rule is being maintained through exploitative corporate practices who outsource labour to the third world space. Thesis started off as a study of the space of courtrooms as a site of power, but that was a whole other hill to climb with semiotics that was beyond my talents as a students that's barely graduating law school.

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

@@amirahazhar4192 Sounds super interesting! Best of luck with the project.

@amirahazhar4192 Год назад

@@GreatBooksProf i went a weird way with my argument tho 😭 and started it with subjectification and the inheritance of institutional trauma rather than a system of reason. Your video literally helped me bridge the gap here, with the contents on democracy and violence 🥰 and the part where you were struggling to agamben is literally me the past year 😪

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

@@amirahazhar4192 So happy to know the video was helpful. I often find, at the end of a project, that I wish I could start over knowing what I now know, so that the whole thing would be clearer and more organized. But there’s virtue I’d just getting the thing finished too. 😅

@Veve7 Год назад

Do you know Gaston Bachelard's 'Poetics of Space'?

@GreatBooksProf Год назад

Haven’t read it. Do you recommend it?

@liketheduck Год назад

I hope you take my critique in good faith because I appreciate you as a critical thinker. Your statement “the whole American economy is founded on the backs of enslaved people” seems to be a dishonest assessment of the current economy. Did you perhaps mean “was” in reference to slavery? That would be a more reasonable statement imo. Later in the video you make a racially charged claim that white people are not part of this sacrifice to “deny death’s power over us.” Anyone who has spent any time in W. Virginia, Kentucky, or the like knows there are large swaths of white people who are disposable for this system. I really appreciate that you took the time explain this book. And I think it’s intellectually brave to show us the difficulty in understanding, let alone teaching, such a complicated book. I don’t think making these two assumptions highlighted above are true in their current form or helpful in understanding the work. Engaging in race-craft will not undo the harms to the disenfranchised.

@Lena-rk3ph Год назад

enslaved labor was crucial to the generation of wealth that has given way to america’s current economic position. “white people” is usually a reference to the dominant social group in white supremacist systems, and rarely means the same thing as “all white persons.” i think understanding this distinction is essential to understanding the decolonial context of mbembe’s work

@liketheduck Год назад

@@Lena-rk3ph Then we should be more clear in the words we use. "Hegemonic" is a word for that which doesn't perpetuate the myth of race or engage in eugenic racial essentialism.

@Lena-rk3ph Год назад

@@liketheduck addressing white supremacist hegemony requires acknowledgement of the myth of race because the myth of race has non-mythical implications. i am also a big fan of nuance, and i think generalizations are sloppy, but to the extent that there is a general social understanding of what is meant by verbal shorthand, i wouldn’t go as far as to describe them as race-craft or essentialism. if we seek understanding in good faith then we know that is not the aim here. let me know your thoughts

@liketheduck Год назад

@@Lena-rk3phyou raise great points and I think in some ways we’re splitting hairs. In my view it comes down to my, perhaps childish, view that you will not defeat “Voldemort” by splitting our own soul. We will not humanize the other by dehumanizing people who look like the powerful. Often times the use of this kind of language acts as a signaling device that absolves the user from their moral responsibility to act. They can express outrage and demonize a group without having to do the hard work of repairing the world at their fingertips. In my view, this is the language of hegemony in sham-revolutionary garb. It’s the same language game Trump plays with “the Mexicans” or we historically used against “the Chinese” or why we didn’t save “the Jews” earlier. It’s dehumanizing language that allows the user to pretend they are morally superior (when they are the one who refuses to act or sacrifice) while still engaging in a fundamental evil. You’re right that. The myth of racism has non-mythical implications. People consider themselves white who are part of the “sacrificial” group that are also consumed by necropolitics. We should not belittle their position because of the color of their skin. It’s gross and it splits our soul.