Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe
Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Necropolitics

Author: Achille Mbembe, Steven Corcoran

Narrator: Sean Crisden

Unabridged: 8 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/09/2021


Synopsis

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.

About Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe is research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of On the Postcolony, Necropolitics, and the winner of the 2018 Ernst Bloch Award as well as the Gerda Henkel Award.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tara on November 18, 2019

Rarely in life, do we have a chance to read a book, and know that we have been transformed through the reading process. This is a powerful book, of death, power, war, terrorism and racism. "Nanoracism" is an astonishingly - achingly - biting concept that punctuates so much of the book. The living - a......more

Goodreads review by Adriana on April 29, 2018

Leitura rapidíssima que adentra os meandros da necropolítica, ao contrário do que se pensa o seu auge não foi com o holocausto nazista, mas sim com a política de imperialismo colonial, nações invadidas e suas populações sentenciadas à morte em nome de uma supremacia europeia. Mbembe ainda dá o parec......more

Goodreads review by Rebeca on July 02, 2020

Neste ensaio, Mbembe propõe uma complementação do conceito de biopoder elaborado por Foucault. A partir dos conceitos de biopoder e da necropolítica, o autor relaciona a produção do terror e a criação do inimigo em regiões como a Palestina e ex-colonias africanas. Repleto de referências, o autor não......more