Achille Mbembe Quotes on Politics
Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2000), Critique of Black Reason (2013), and Necropolitics (2016) give contemporary African and postcolonial political philosophy one of its most influential voices. The central concept of necropolitics — extending Foucault’s biopolitics by foregrounding the contemporary regimes’ systematic distribution of who is allowed to live and who is exposed to death — frames the analysis of slave plantations, colonial occupation, the contemporary policing of borders, and the broader political economy of disposable populations. The framework, drawing on Frantz Fanon, the Bantu philosophical traditions, and the broader continental theory tradition through Foucault, Bataille, and Derrida, has shaped the contemporary critique of liberal political philosophy from a Global South perspective.
Quotes
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Attributed to Achille Mbembe:
“Necropolitics is the work of death within the body politic.”
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Attributed to Achille Mbembe:
“The postcolony is a space of intimacy with power, not simply its opposite.”
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Attributed to Achille Mbembe:
“Race is a body of knowledge for converting people into things.”
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Attributed to Achille Mbembe:
“Africa is not a problem to be solved; it is a thought to be thought.”
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Attributed to Achille Mbembe:
“Sovereignty is increasingly defined by the power to decide who may live and who must die.”
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“The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”
Necropolitics," as translated by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture , Volume 15, Number 1, Winter 2003, pp. 11-40