Postcolonial Studies

ISSN: 1368-8790 (Print) 1466-1888 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpcs20

‘Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?’: necropolitical power

and its circular tendencies
Necropolitics, by Achille Mbembe, Durham, Duke University Press, 2019, 224
pp., $25.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781478006510

Eric Otieno

To cite this article: Eric Otieno (2020): ‘Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?’: necropolitical power and its
circular tendencies, Postcolonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13688790.2020.1762277

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2020.1762277

Published online: 14 May 2020.

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POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

BOOK REVIEW

‘Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?’: necropolitical power and its

circular tendencies
Necropolitics, by Achille Mbembe, Durham, Duke University Press, 2019, 224 pp.,
$25.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781478006510

‘None of these things is happening here. They are happening far away, elsewhere.’
‘But they may as well be’, Iris says.
‘What does here mean anyway, I’d like to know. Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?’ (Ali Smith,
2018)
Writing this review from the government-imposed ‘self-isolation’ occasioned by the global
Covid-19 pandemic,1 the quote above2 acquires an uncanny relevance, particularly when
read alongside Achille Mbembe’s latest book. Both books – in very different ways – apply
themselves to the present era of uncertainty and socio-political upheaval. Necropolitics
opens with an all too familiar litany of the most pressing issues of our day: othering as the con-
tinued basis for identity formation and polarisation, the futility and brutality of borders and
the continued proliferation of war both as a goal and as a prerequisite in democracy, politics
and culture (p 3). Mbembe invokes Fanon in the lead up to his treatise of what political life
might look like beyond Humanism. It was Fanon, Mbembe recalls, that best understood
that the only subject is a living one. At a time in which, in Mbembe’s reading, ‘the political
order is reconstituting itself as a form of organization for death’ (p 7), questions around sub-
jectivity abound as democracy gradually embraces its dark side.
The diagnosis is that we have an inversion, or even exit from democracy on our hands, sig-
nalled by the following four features (p 9). There is, first, the narrowing of the world and a
demographic transition driven by the Global South. Secondly, we are witnessing the advent
of the plastic human in the context of ecology and geography. Thirdly, the generalised intro-
duction of computing into all aspects of social life, in which the screen produces a simulated
form of living, foreshadows the fourth feature: the inter-articulation between the capacity to
alter the human (and other) species and the power of capital. Through these four features,
democracy’s ‘nocturnal body’ (p 15) is finding its contemporary articulation. On its part,
global capitalism’s aspirations to free itself from any social obligations and to capture both
the state and the human attention span continue to considerably threaten the contemporary
liberal order.
The author recognises that critique of democracy’s violence has previously been articulated
in direct action, the general strike, revolutionary violence, anarchism, and revolutionary trade
unionism, that is, from the constituencies that have historically endured democracy’s brutality.
However, the genealogy of their global entanglements is what Mbembe is keen on, highlighting
the colonial empire (the penal colony) and the pro-slavery state (the plantation), as symbols of
democracy’s underside (p 22). As such, he proposes that at the heart of every historical under-
standing of the violence of the contemporary global order is that democracy, the plantation
and the colonial empire enjoy relations of ‘twinship’ (p 23). Democracy thus holds the
colony within it. In this context, late modern sovereignty gradually became the power to
create a group of people who categorically live at the edge of life unceasingly confronted by
2 BOOK REVIEW

death, or put differently, a right to kill that recalls the lethal combination inherent in colonial
terror: biopower, a state of exception and a state of siege (p 70).
In Mbembe’s reading, biopower can no longer account for contemporary forms of life’s
subjugation to death’s power. He puts forward Necropolitical Power/Necropolitics/Necro-
power as conceptual extensions that also reveal the reconfiguration of resistance (to Necro-
power) as it relates to sacrifice and terror (p 92). As a structure of terror best illustrated by
the ‘contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine’ (p 38),3 Necropower proliferates by invert-
ing life and death as if life was merely death’s instrument, multiplying it either by small doses
or in surges. Racism drives this principle insofar as it has already induced a cheapening of life
and an accustomedness to loss wherever the latter strikes.
As the lines between outside and inside, elsewhere and here fade, exteriorisation, which has
been democracy’s way of sweeping its dark side under the carpet, is becoming futile. If indeed
‘Everywhere is a here’,4 the sanctuarisation of one’s own home from the mayhem purveyed in
other’s homes is rendered pointless, as the havoc is soon repatriated. Democracy, Mbembe
thus argues, turns on itself. As a consequence, our time is marked by a paranoid drive to
annihilate all enemies of democracy, real and imagined (p 41). Sovereignty, Mbembe
asserts, building on Foucault, is the exertion of one’s control over mortality and the definition
of life as the deployment and manifestation of power (p 60). Having been criticised for this
normative reading, Mbembe reiterates that he is concerned with those figures of sovereignty
whose prerogative is to instrumentalize human existence and destroy human bodies and popu-
lations. These figures, he argues, constitute the nomos of the present political space (p 68).
The extant society of enmity demonstrates a renewed global desire for apartheid and a
global disentanglement which, for Mbembe, explains the renaissance of walls (p 43). The
enemy’s mere existence embodies a supreme contrariness whose death is warranted by his
denial of our own being (p 49). But this enemy is often born of fantasy and myth, and
liberal democracies no longer hesitate to turn to these schemas to legitimize attack. Within
the society of enmity, paranoia thrives in a state of insecurity, giving rise to the security
state that claims to be the solution. In this context, war’s theatre becomes everyday life
itself. Everything, including truth itself, is subjected to debate, as doubt becomes the bane of
that lifeline of democracy formerly known as public deliberation, Mbembe argues. This quag-
mire, exacerbated by algorithms that feed existing antagonisms exponentially, morphs into
what Mbembe calls Nanoracism, a sort of ‘pocketknife racism’ (p 58) that serves not only
to jolt the quotidian life of the Othered, but to complement structural manifestations of
racism that continue to thrive in democratic institutions. In its normalised guise, Nanoracism
enables the camp as a form of government that has not only ceased to scandalise, but that
seems to be the ultimate future fix for excluding that which disturbs (p 60).
The extreme fragility at the turn of this century, induced by contemporary upheavals of
liberal democracy and planetary capitalism, furnish Mbembe with a fit occasion to call for a
‘relation of care’ (p 141), a reconstitution of the shared as the common. In doing so, he
tackles the tension between the principle of destruction and the principle of life via Fanon’s
theory of radical decolonisation (p 118). As a metaphor, ‘Fanon’s Pharmacy’ (p 117) is a
gesture that Mbembe fashions to interrupt an inescapable course of degeneration (p 144).
Inevitably, it entails a critique of western humanism. For Mbembe, two forms of this critique
that reject the myth of humanism include Afropessimism and Afrofuturism (p 161). While
Afropessimism is premised upon the idea that the categorical antagonism of Race cannot be
transcended without a war waged against the flawed concept of the Human itself, Afrofuturism
rejects the humanist postulate entirely, bypassing the objectification of the subject in the first
place by adopting a cosmic corporeality. Ultimately, Mbembe’s proposition is that at the heart
of all contemporary struggle is the unresolved issue of becoming human in the world beyond
 POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES 3

the accidents of birth, nationality or citizenship (p 187). At stake is a communal condition in

which each of us recognises ourselves.
Hardly a single longform essay, Necropolitics is a portal of intricate thoughts on the state of
the planet. Mbembe does well to include an early disclaimer. Expect ‘sketched hachures, […]
parallel chapters, […] discontinuous lines, […] rapid gestures and […] abrupt reversals’ (p 1).
All of these and more characterise the book, making for an intense, occasionally disconcerting,
reading experience. Without a doubt, much has changed in the four years since the book was
originally published in French, and fragments have surely been lost in translation. However, as
far as its pertinent themes are concerned, Mbembe’s latest work is a significant contribution to
political and critical theory. Necropolitics is the book of this stifling hour, Mbembe its
chronicler.

Notes
1. Covid-19, Christopher J. Lee argues, is importantly also a crisis of sovereignty, and therefore
the ultimate test for Mbembe’s thesis in Necropolitics. See ‘The Necropolitics of Covid-19’ in
Africa is a Country. Available at: https://africasacountry.com/2020/04/the-necropolitics-of-
covid-19 (accessed 1 April 2020).
2. With reference to Ali Smith, Winter, London: Penguin, 2018.
3. In March 2020, Lorenz Deutsch, a politician form North Rhine-Westphalia and Felix Klein,
the anti-Semitism commissioner of Germany’s federal government, criticised Achille
Mbembe’s invitation as a keynote speaker to the Ruhrtriennale festival. According to
Deutsch, Mbembe was ‘a prominent representative of the BDS movement, which is anti-
Semitic at its core.’ Among other things, the accusations were based on this section of Necro-
politics. Subsequently, Mbembe was the subject of a heated and polarized debate in Germany.
Some accused him of Holocaust relativization while others supported him and demanded
Klein’s dismissal. Over 377 intellectuals from more than 30 countries declared solidarity
with Mbembe, speaking out against ‘ideological or political interference and litmus tests.’
Mbembe rejects all accusations, and has published several reactions in German press
outlets and on social media. At the time of publication, this was an ongoing debate.
4. With reference to the exhibition concept of ‘The Long Term You Cannot Afford. On the
Distribution of the Toxic’, Savvy Contemporary Berlin, 2019.

Acknowledgement
The author is grateful to Ashley J. Bohrer for comments on an earlier version of this review.

Eric Otieno
University of Kassel, Germany
eric.otieno@hotmail.de
© 2020 Eric Otieno
https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2020.1762277