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Book Review: Necropolitics. Theory in Forms, by Achille Mbembe, Duke University Press, 2019

In his book Necropolitics, published in late 2019, Mbembe does not restrict himself to showing us new ways of critiquing democracy. Rather he offers us a new critical grammatology so we could work out a configuration that may stand as an alternative to democracy and the ethical tone and temper of the coming time. This is because, for Mbembe, contemporary forms of democracies have ended up becoming necropolitical, though with their workings democracies have always reflected their constitutive biopolitical orientation. For him, necropolitics stands as a politics of ‘selective elimination’ or negation of diverse blocs of masses that the state machinery considers resistant or redundant to its workings and policies, while biopolitics aims to control and govern the masses or better the dynamic expanse of life. If biopolitics yields what is called ‘a control society’ that engineers and subjects the masses to strategies of surveillance and control in order to govern them, necropolitics yields ‘a society of enmity’. This happens to be a society that aims at altogether dispensing with the inherent revolutionary potential of masses by systematically and routinely decimating them – killing the poor to eradicate the rebellious discontentment of poverty and killing the powerless to form a tiny section of powerful elites, as one may say. Such a society feverishly creates new grounds or conditions propitious for strategical praxis of necropolitics. Further, as necropolitics works by turning death into a profitable industry, a society that becomes necropolitical ends up engineering death-making institutions only to treat masses as grist for the smooth working of these institutions. Mbembe segments the book into eight parts – six chapters preceded with an introduction and followed by a conclusion. In these chapters, Mbembe describes the unfolding patterns of global apartheid while vehemently critiquing democracies’ bio-political machinery’s nuanced exploitation of such patterns. Mbembe points out that democracies become necropolitical when they spearhead war against other nations in order to sustain forms of global apartheid. To make his point, Mbembe cites examples from every corner of the world, in particular, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Gulf War, the American War of Secession, the Crimean War, and “three main dirty wars of decolonization (Indochina, Algeria, Angola and Mozambique).”