Jesus and Necropolitics

Alejandro Navarro
In the ever-more-frequent arguments I have with friends about politics, where I feel like a lunatic
for arguing that a Christian politics is the way to go, I found myself at a loss of words when I tried
to explain how it is that Christ pointed us towards a different politics. I have been thinking about
this for a long time, until I was introduced to Achille Mbembe’s article on necropolitics. His
extension of Foucault’s work – and in more than one way a prediction of the evolution of power in
the 21st century – filled in the blanks and allowed me to understand how the Kingdom is different
from whatever politics we can try.
Mbembe argues that “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”1. In this sense, Jesus predicted his
words when he said His Kingdom is not of this world. “To exercise sovereignty is to exercise
control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”2 And this is
ever present in Scripture: the massacre of Jewish infants by the Pharaoh and later in the Massacre of
the Innocents, the constant subjugation between wars, and, in a sense, the very beginning in
Genesis, where Cain kills Abel. These politics, the politics of elimination and violence to impose a
certain order, are what necropolitics consist of, “[…] subjugation of life to the power of death”3.
How does this, then, change in the light of Jesus’ ministry and Passion? After that, it becomes very
hard to argue that the state could in any way or shape be an ally of salvation. But then, I realized
Jesus prefigures Mbembe’s oeuvre and creates a radially distinct politics to that of the necropolitical
State: a life affirming politics. The Kingdom is not one where men are killed to maintain its
standing order, but one where life freely is, and there is no more oppression. In the Kingdom, all
tears shall be wiped from our eyes.
The state reserves the right to kill and to dispose of others as it sees fit, but the Kingdom is a free
one – no compulsion, all participate in it out of their own free will. Let us remember that Jesus
always asked for detachment of the regular preoccupations of people: of family business, of
worrying over food and land, of money. That He told us to render unto God what is God’s, and then
realizing that after that there is not much left for Caesar. The rules are strict, yes, but Paul also said
there are no more distinctions, no differences because we are all invited to participate in the
Kingdom.
My more cynical friends would be quick to point out that this sounds like an elaborate way to get
the Church more power. I disagree, since Jesus’ ministry was not founded on accumulating wealth
for Himself. it is quite the opposite, of giving charitably so that we may allow our less fortunate
sisters and brothers to eat and drink and live another day. This is the radical point of departure:
where a state seeks to limit and control so that it may provide for itself and its citizens, where it
draws the line between those who can and cannot be killed in order to maintain its apparatus, the
Kingdom instead affirms the dignity of everyone; indeed, what politics really cares about the poor,
the leper and the widow? Before Christ, and I would argue even after Him, the Melian dialogue
perfectly describes the state of relations in the world: the strong do what they can, and the weak

1
Achille Mbembe.”Necropolitics”. in Public Culture, trans. Libby Meintjes. (Durham: Duke University Press,
2003), 11.
2
Mbembe, 12
3
Mbembe, 39
suffer what they must. In Mbembe’s words “[…] the sovereign might kill at any time or in any
manner. […] warfare is not subject to legal and institutional rules.”4 This is the foundation of
necropolitical states. Jesus, then turns this order on its head, allowing that all do what the must so
that we may all share in life.
And the ultimate contrast between the state and the Kingdom comes in the shape of its foundation:
while many states have a foundational myth resting on the killing of someone else, Jesus subjected
Himself to the very necropolitical structures that he sought to denounce as improper of the
Kingdom, in this sense inaugurating the idea that we must surrender our own force, our own limb of
the Leviathan, in order to bring His Kingdom And his own Resurrection is a show of the triumph of
a life affirming politics over a death affirming politics. A politics in which the King subjects
Himself to the violence that is usually reserved for the lowliest of his subjects, those disposable
people of the fringes whose blood is often spilled in order to maintain the borders alive. The whole
sense of Jesus’ sacrifice becomes even deeper when we realize how modern his proposal still feels,
and how far away we are from any sort of “Progress”, in the liberal sense, where the nation state
was thought to be the ultimate evolution, and where any subsequent progress is simply a territorial
expansion on the subject.
And in this vein the State and the Church – as the host of a counter-politics, a life affirming one –
are not compatible in the slightest, as the one will influence the other in its very essence. Thus, any
state that proclaims itself Christian while dealing in death is not, and any Church that deals in
punishment and condemnation also is not. The idea that the State has any role in salvation, I
believe, is a completely misguided one, akin to saying that killing someone is fine because that way
they will meet God faster. With what face, I wonder, could I see God after subjecting a fellow
person, another image of God, to violence to maintain an agenda that, in the end, only deals with the
earthly? In this sense, necropolitics also reveal the dark natural inclination of the State towards
expanding itself, where its ultimate expression is Fascism, where the only purpose of the world is to
provide for the State.

I would like to conclude with a quote by Gregory of Nyssa, a fairly popular quote in other times
but that I feel now can recover its original force under this framework: “If he is in the likeness of
God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God,
who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller?”5 Mbembe shares in his tradition: “An unequal
relationship is established along with the inequality of the power over life. […] a person’s humanity
is dissolved to the point where it becomes possible to say that the slave’s life is possessed by the
master.” 6This is my question: if God gave us the gift of life, why do we so earnestly seek to take it
from others? Is the Passion not sign enough that there is a different way? Now, in discussion, it is
my friends that find themselves at a loss for words when in sight of Jesus’ sacrifice

4
Mbembe, 19
5
Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes, trans. de Gruyter. (Berlin: 1993), 74
6
Mbembe, 22