Necropolitics

By: Achille Mbembe, Steven Corcoran - translator

Narrated by: Sean Crisden

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 - 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 enemies of the state.

Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian 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.

©2019 Duke University Press; Original French publication, Politiques de l'inimitie 2016, Editions La Decouverte. (P)2021 Tantor

I need to have the hard copy book

This is an excellent book with so many layers to think through. I will listen again and buy a physical copy of the book because there are so many excerpts I want to highlight and meditate on. This book is important in understanding late stage capitalism and the ways in which capitalism has been wielded as a bludgeoning tool around the world and across time and space.

Forget critical race theory

This is the theory of race - and subsequently, of queerness and gender - which will burn the eyes and ears off not only the conservatives, but the liberals. This is the raw truth, and it manages to make sense of Deluze and Lyotard in plain language at the same time as exposing the death and sorrow necessary for nations like the USA and the EU to exist. Everyone should read this book.