Achille Mbembe - Necropolitics

Praise forACHILLE MBEMBE

Winner of the Gerda Henkel Prize

Winner of the Ernst Bloch Prize

Praise forNECROPOLITICS

Mbembe refreshes the debate in a Europe consumed by the desire of apartheid. This is a man who is not afraid to throw national history, identities, and borders out the window. French universalism? Conceited, asserts Mbembe. In the style of douard Glissant he doesnt limit his geography to the level of the nation but expands it to the Whole-World. He dreams of writing a common history of humanity that would deflate all the flashy national heroism and redraw new relations between the self and the other. In a France and a Europe that are even afraid of their own shadows, one can clearly see the subversive potential of Mbembes thought. His latest book, Necropolitics , draws the unpleasant portrait of a continent eaten up by the desire of apartheid, moved by the obsessive search for an enemy, and with war as its favorite game.

Ccile Daumas, Libration

[Mbembes] new book is a precious tool to understand what occurs in the North as well as in the South. The analyses of this faithful reader of Frantz Fanon are irrevocable: war has become not an exception but a permanent state, the sacrament of our era. One of the biggest challenges we have to face, Mbembe warns us, is to defend our democracies while including this other whom we dont want if we are to build our common future.

Sverine Kodjo-Grandvaux and Michael Pauron, Jeune Afrique

Praise forCRITIQUEOF BLACK REASON

Winner of the 2015 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis

Winner of the Le Prix FETKANN! de la Mmoire 2013

Achille Mbembe speaks authoritatively for black life, addressing the whole world in an increasingly distinctive tone of voice. This long-anticipated book resounds with the embattled, southern predicament from which its precious shards of wisdom originate. Mbembe sketches the entangled genealogies of racism and black thought on their worldly travels from the barracoons and the slave ships, through countless insurgencies, into the vexed mechanisms of decolonization and then beyond them, into our own bleak and desperate circumstances.

Paul Gilroy

Achille Mbembe has placed the discourse of Africa squarely in the center of both postmodernism and continental philosophy. Every page of this signifying riff on Kants Critique of Pure Reason is a delight to read. African philosophy is currently enjoying a renaissance, and Mbembe is to its continental pole what Kwame Anthony Appiah is to its analytical pole. Every student of postmodernist theory should read this book.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

With Critique of Black Reason , Achille Mbembe reaffirms his position as one of the most original and significant thinkers of our time. His voyages in this book through a painstakingly assembled archive of empire, race, slavery, blackness, and liberation produce profound moments of reflection on the origin and nature of modernity and its mutations in the contemporary phase of global capital. A tour de force that will renew debates on capital, race, and freedom in todays world.

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Critique of Black Reason constitutes an important move in bringing together francophone and anglophone postcolonial thought and is a timely demonstration of the reinvigorating potential of both critical thought and translation.

Hannah Grayson, Postcolonial Text

We are familiar with the experiences of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, and the historical narrative through which each has unfolded. What Mbembe has done is to tie them all together in a bundle, under the rubric of black reason, that now serves as the genealogy of much of contemporary black experience and the history that has shaped black peoples view of themselves.

Gabriel O. Apata, Theory, Culture, and Society

Incontrovertible reading on the complex dynamic between race and belonging in twenty-first-century societies. Brilliant and pioneering.

Dominic Thomas, Europe Now

THEORY IN FORMS

A series edited by Nancy Rose Hunt and Achille Mbembe

NECROPOLITICS

ACHILLE MBEMBE

Translated by

STEVEN CORCORAN

Duke University Press

Durham and London

2019

Politiques de linimiti 2016 Editions La Dcouverte

English translation 2019 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Cover designed by Matthew Tauch

Typeset in Arno Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mbembe, Achille, [date] author. | Corcoran, Steve, translator.

Title: Necropolitics / Achille Mbembe ; translated by Steven Corcoran

Other titles: Politiques de linimiti. English

Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Series: Theory in forms | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019009527 (print)

LCCN 2019016270 (ebook)

ISBN 9781478007227 (ebook)

ISBN 9781478005858 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 9781478006510 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH : Fanon, Frantz, 19251961. | Political violence. | DecolonizationHistory20th century. | Democracy. | Postcolonialism.

Classification: LCC JC 328.6 (ebook) | LCC JC 328.6 .M 3913 2019 (print) | DDC 320.01dc23

LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2019009527