Two buckets here: 1) The right of the state to defend or exert its will against the 'other'. 2) The inherent need of the state to uphold the flourishing of its citizenry. If the state fails in either endeavour, it won't exist for long.
As for the right to die, there's nothing new there. What's remarkable is the insistence that dying be removed from its ugliness and pain. Any cancer patient can starve themselves to death. But when we remove the discomfort and social stigma, well the state isn't long for this world.
All of this has the bad taste of A. Huxley, though I can't recall if he addresses this directly, the subdued masses he describes are certainly the flavor of European stagnation these days. A war with Russia may set them straight, a trade war with the U.S. will not.
In the UK assisted suicide is seen as the pinnacle of secular freedom of choice; a victory against religion which is weird really since in the UK religion isn't much of a thing. The Brits really don't like disabled people, adults or children and are not quite sure about the elderly - the protestant work ethic runs so deep that even those who clearly cannot work are viewed with deep suspicion, even if it's your elderly Mum. The failure of what was the liberal left, Social Justice Warriors or the Woke to have any concern for or the most vulnerable in British society is chilling in it's affect and is not unmissed.
It is interesting to me how vulnerability is subject to ideological filtering. For some reason, the left and right perceive different groups as vulnerable. We need a better account of vulnerability. My grad school professor, Marina McCoy, wrote an interesting book about the subject.
We do need a better account of vulnerability, I think that there are tropes of vulnerability that can be traced back to the Classical world and I have wondered how much the rediscovery of the Classical world in Europe has been influenced by this. I can't help thinking about the influence of the idea of Sparta and the Spartan education system and the public (private) school system in the UK which many of our politicians and indeed many people in media etc have attended and benefited from. One other historical event in the UK that has had a big impact was the dissolution of the monasteries.
Achille Mbembe has always struck me as overrated. What does “necropolitics” add to Foucault’s biopolitics?
Sovereignty has always been about legitimatized death dealing—the right to kill. Foucault says in *Society Must Be Defended* that the “new” sovereign, however, is no longer so concerned with the the right to kill, but the “power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.”
First observation: Mbembe’s exemplary figure for “necropolitics” is the plantation. Necropolitics was happening back in the 18th century, then. Did it abate after emancipation? What’s so new about it, exactly?
Second observation: he conflates the plantation with colonial Africa. What does the plantation have to do with decolonization, exactly? There might be parallels, but North Atlantic slavery is not colonization. Making such comparisons minimizes the horrors of plantation slavery. Scholars are always quick to point this out when people talk about more analogous forms of subjection, such as slavery under the Abbasids or slavery in Rome. But Mbembe gets to play associative theory-poetry games and elide the differences.
Third observation: wars have been fought since prehistory. Roman legionaries, for example, expected to be paid something commensurate with their risk and sacrifice. Roman consuls/war leaders retained the support of their troops by promising coin, and usually land plots after a successful foreign conquest, and this all came to a head at the end of the so-called “Republic,” and the Gracchi brothers advocating for land redistribution on behalf of soldiers and non-soldiers alike.
Fourth observation: it isn’t the “right to kill civilians” that is new. It is the demand to avoid killing civilians that is really new.
Fifth observation: assisted suicide for those who want to die is a far far cry from Mbembe’s primal scene on the plantation.
Mbembe has been a chic figure in academia, for a variety of reasons, but almost all of them are related to his "poetic" liberties—he plays fast and loose with history and concepts, and encourages others to do the same with his. In context, however, he is a messy thinker, prone to bad analogies and misleading metaphors.
Agree with your fourth observation, but isn’t Mbembe’s point that modern states, which claim to be humane and to respect rights, are actually as violent as premodern ones? The whole project of people like Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe etc is to expose the lies of modern society and uncover the violence therein.
I agree that Mbembe’s theory doesn’t add too much to Foucault’s but that it does have a poetic resonance right now that’s hard to top.
Yeah, that *is* his point, more or less. I think the problem is that he has a drive to flatten everything into identical terms though. The plantation is “the camp” is Leopold’s Congo is postcolonial dictatorship and misgovernment.
Agamben is a more abstract thinker. He still attends to articulation and differentiation. (It has also been funny to see how few in academia actually understood what he’s been saying all along, given their reaction to his comments in the early days of covid).
Foucault is much more careful a thinker than Mbembe. He’s been accused of “bad history,” and much of what he says can be contested, but he at least unearths interesting primary sources. He also is pretty committed to a kind of “epoche,” or moral suspension, when investigating other “epistemes.” When pressed, as he was in his famous conversation with Chomsky, he tends to deflect. I expect he’d do the same if directly asked to compare the relative merits of different eras/places, like the antebellum south and America in 2024. And this would look ridiculous to most. None of that necessarily detracts from his analysis of politics as war by another means. We just have to contextualize it ourselves.
Insofar as Mbembe draws a metaphorical identity between all these different regimes he’s just substantively wrong as a matter of empirical judgment. Any criticism of Foucault’s historical method would have to be amplified tenfold.
I do agree with you though that “necropolitics” is a cool term. Really catchy and evocative.
> First observation: Mbembe’s exemplary figure for “necropolitics” is the plantation. Necropolitics was happening back in the 18th century, then. Did it abate after emancipation? What’s so new about it, exactly?
Certain politics don't have to be new to matter - they can just as well increase in significance because they greatly increased in momentum, or some social/economic/technical change made them more important. There was surveillance in the 18th century too, for one example.
(And yes, obviously for blacks ex-slaves it abated after emancipation. If we're to crudely quantify it, it abated for them to a level less than that of slaves, but higher still to the level of the general population).
> Second observation: he conflates the plantation with colonial Africa. What does the plantation have to do with decolonization, exactly? There might be parallels, but North Atlantic slavery is not colonization. Making such comparisons minimizes the horrors of plantation slavery.
Making an analogy doesn't necessarily means trivializing or "minimizing".
And colonization has no lesser horrors than plantation slavery. In fact it included treating colonized people the same or worse as North Atlantic slaves, and also using many of them in African plantations, mines, etc. If often included mass organized murder (Namimbia, Congo) and mass ethnocide, to scales unknown in North Atlantic slavery.
> Fifth observation: assisted suicide for those who want to die is a far far cry from Mbembe’s primal scene on the plantation.
The scale, state/cultural/organizational nudging, prior exclusion and adandonmened (from treatment, welfare, etc) to make many more people "those who want to die" (than people with some unsufferable or terminal illness) is precisely at the crux of the issue.
In Canada already tons of cases involve poor people, or people who used to get assistance from some dissability, and would be otherwise perfectly fine with that, chosing the option, not just terminal cancer patients and the like.
> Mbembe has been a chic figure in academia, for a variety of reasons, but almost all of them are related to his "poetic" liberties—he plays fast and loose with history and concepts, and encourages others to do the same with his. In context, however, he is a messy thinker, prone to bad analogies and misleading metaphors.
As if Mbembe's nuance is the main issue at stake? The greater issue raised is far more important than academic putdowns and nit-picking.
Sorry, what’s the greater issue? Have you read Mbembe or are you telling me things that you learned about elsewhere?
I was actually talking about Mbembe and whether his theoretical apparatus, “necropolitics,” is useful.
Because while I get that all that stuff you are talking about is bad, evil, etc., you didn’t actually say “and this is why we can link them all together as necropolitics, distinct from that regular kind of politics and war.”
The UK did a great thing by legalizing assisted suicide. An adult with no legal dependents who's been diagnosed with a terminal illness should definitely have the right to put themselves out of their misery, especially if their illness is causing them serious physical and psychological pain.
I think the vast increase in lifespans in developed countries has had an unfortunate side effect: excessive fear of death. The fact that far fewer people in rich countries die from wars, plagues, etc., than was once the case has made us value life for life's sake too highly. By all means, our societies (families, governments, neighborhoods, etc.) should do much more to give people chances to find meaning in their lives: through work, child-rearing, community activity, etc. But there will always be people who can't find that sense of meaning anywhere. Maybe it would be good for those people to have the option of assisted suicide, too.
A point worth making... but I don't know that it directly follows in all cases, it's still a part of the picture.
I greet assisted suicide with the same skepticism I do extraordinary efforts to prolong life... It's all worship of comfort/control at the expense of our finitude/mortality... it begins to erode what it means to be human.
Two buckets here: 1) The right of the state to defend or exert its will against the 'other'. 2) The inherent need of the state to uphold the flourishing of its citizenry. If the state fails in either endeavour, it won't exist for long.
As for the right to die, there's nothing new there. What's remarkable is the insistence that dying be removed from its ugliness and pain. Any cancer patient can starve themselves to death. But when we remove the discomfort and social stigma, well the state isn't long for this world.
All of this has the bad taste of A. Huxley, though I can't recall if he addresses this directly, the subdued masses he describes are certainly the flavor of European stagnation these days. A war with Russia may set them straight, a trade war with the U.S. will not.
There’s mandatory euthanasia at age 60 in Brave New World, iirc
I knew it was in there! Thank you!
In the UK assisted suicide is seen as the pinnacle of secular freedom of choice; a victory against religion which is weird really since in the UK religion isn't much of a thing. The Brits really don't like disabled people, adults or children and are not quite sure about the elderly - the protestant work ethic runs so deep that even those who clearly cannot work are viewed with deep suspicion, even if it's your elderly Mum. The failure of what was the liberal left, Social Justice Warriors or the Woke to have any concern for or the most vulnerable in British society is chilling in it's affect and is not unmissed.
It is interesting to me how vulnerability is subject to ideological filtering. For some reason, the left and right perceive different groups as vulnerable. We need a better account of vulnerability. My grad school professor, Marina McCoy, wrote an interesting book about the subject.
I have started to understand that the right and left see two sides of the same coin. It's up to adults to admit most of these groups are vulnerable.
We do need a better account of vulnerability, I think that there are tropes of vulnerability that can be traced back to the Classical world and I have wondered how much the rediscovery of the Classical world in Europe has been influenced by this. I can't help thinking about the influence of the idea of Sparta and the Spartan education system and the public (private) school system in the UK which many of our politicians and indeed many people in media etc have attended and benefited from. One other historical event in the UK that has had a big impact was the dissolution of the monasteries.
Achille Mbembe has always struck me as overrated. What does “necropolitics” add to Foucault’s biopolitics?
Sovereignty has always been about legitimatized death dealing—the right to kill. Foucault says in *Society Must Be Defended* that the “new” sovereign, however, is no longer so concerned with the the right to kill, but the “power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.”
First observation: Mbembe’s exemplary figure for “necropolitics” is the plantation. Necropolitics was happening back in the 18th century, then. Did it abate after emancipation? What’s so new about it, exactly?
Second observation: he conflates the plantation with colonial Africa. What does the plantation have to do with decolonization, exactly? There might be parallels, but North Atlantic slavery is not colonization. Making such comparisons minimizes the horrors of plantation slavery. Scholars are always quick to point this out when people talk about more analogous forms of subjection, such as slavery under the Abbasids or slavery in Rome. But Mbembe gets to play associative theory-poetry games and elide the differences.
Third observation: wars have been fought since prehistory. Roman legionaries, for example, expected to be paid something commensurate with their risk and sacrifice. Roman consuls/war leaders retained the support of their troops by promising coin, and usually land plots after a successful foreign conquest, and this all came to a head at the end of the so-called “Republic,” and the Gracchi brothers advocating for land redistribution on behalf of soldiers and non-soldiers alike.
Fourth observation: it isn’t the “right to kill civilians” that is new. It is the demand to avoid killing civilians that is really new.
Fifth observation: assisted suicide for those who want to die is a far far cry from Mbembe’s primal scene on the plantation.
Mbembe has been a chic figure in academia, for a variety of reasons, but almost all of them are related to his "poetic" liberties—he plays fast and loose with history and concepts, and encourages others to do the same with his. In context, however, he is a messy thinker, prone to bad analogies and misleading metaphors.
Agree with your fourth observation, but isn’t Mbembe’s point that modern states, which claim to be humane and to respect rights, are actually as violent as premodern ones? The whole project of people like Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe etc is to expose the lies of modern society and uncover the violence therein.
I agree that Mbembe’s theory doesn’t add too much to Foucault’s but that it does have a poetic resonance right now that’s hard to top.
Yeah, that *is* his point, more or less. I think the problem is that he has a drive to flatten everything into identical terms though. The plantation is “the camp” is Leopold’s Congo is postcolonial dictatorship and misgovernment.
Agamben is a more abstract thinker. He still attends to articulation and differentiation. (It has also been funny to see how few in academia actually understood what he’s been saying all along, given their reaction to his comments in the early days of covid).
Foucault is much more careful a thinker than Mbembe. He’s been accused of “bad history,” and much of what he says can be contested, but he at least unearths interesting primary sources. He also is pretty committed to a kind of “epoche,” or moral suspension, when investigating other “epistemes.” When pressed, as he was in his famous conversation with Chomsky, he tends to deflect. I expect he’d do the same if directly asked to compare the relative merits of different eras/places, like the antebellum south and America in 2024. And this would look ridiculous to most. None of that necessarily detracts from his analysis of politics as war by another means. We just have to contextualize it ourselves.
Insofar as Mbembe draws a metaphorical identity between all these different regimes he’s just substantively wrong as a matter of empirical judgment. Any criticism of Foucault’s historical method would have to be amplified tenfold.
I do agree with you though that “necropolitics” is a cool term. Really catchy and evocative.
> First observation: Mbembe’s exemplary figure for “necropolitics” is the plantation. Necropolitics was happening back in the 18th century, then. Did it abate after emancipation? What’s so new about it, exactly?
Certain politics don't have to be new to matter - they can just as well increase in significance because they greatly increased in momentum, or some social/economic/technical change made them more important. There was surveillance in the 18th century too, for one example.
(And yes, obviously for blacks ex-slaves it abated after emancipation. If we're to crudely quantify it, it abated for them to a level less than that of slaves, but higher still to the level of the general population).
> Second observation: he conflates the plantation with colonial Africa. What does the plantation have to do with decolonization, exactly? There might be parallels, but North Atlantic slavery is not colonization. Making such comparisons minimizes the horrors of plantation slavery.
Making an analogy doesn't necessarily means trivializing or "minimizing".
And colonization has no lesser horrors than plantation slavery. In fact it included treating colonized people the same or worse as North Atlantic slaves, and also using many of them in African plantations, mines, etc. If often included mass organized murder (Namimbia, Congo) and mass ethnocide, to scales unknown in North Atlantic slavery.
> Fifth observation: assisted suicide for those who want to die is a far far cry from Mbembe’s primal scene on the plantation.
The scale, state/cultural/organizational nudging, prior exclusion and adandonmened (from treatment, welfare, etc) to make many more people "those who want to die" (than people with some unsufferable or terminal illness) is precisely at the crux of the issue.
In Canada already tons of cases involve poor people, or people who used to get assistance from some dissability, and would be otherwise perfectly fine with that, chosing the option, not just terminal cancer patients and the like.
> Mbembe has been a chic figure in academia, for a variety of reasons, but almost all of them are related to his "poetic" liberties—he plays fast and loose with history and concepts, and encourages others to do the same with his. In context, however, he is a messy thinker, prone to bad analogies and misleading metaphors.
As if Mbembe's nuance is the main issue at stake? The greater issue raised is far more important than academic putdowns and nit-picking.
Sorry, what’s the greater issue? Have you read Mbembe or are you telling me things that you learned about elsewhere?
I was actually talking about Mbembe and whether his theoretical apparatus, “necropolitics,” is useful.
Because while I get that all that stuff you are talking about is bad, evil, etc., you didn’t actually say “and this is why we can link them all together as necropolitics, distinct from that regular kind of politics and war.”
The UK did a great thing by legalizing assisted suicide. An adult with no legal dependents who's been diagnosed with a terminal illness should definitely have the right to put themselves out of their misery, especially if their illness is causing them serious physical and psychological pain.
I think the vast increase in lifespans in developed countries has had an unfortunate side effect: excessive fear of death. The fact that far fewer people in rich countries die from wars, plagues, etc., than was once the case has made us value life for life's sake too highly. By all means, our societies (families, governments, neighborhoods, etc.) should do much more to give people chances to find meaning in their lives: through work, child-rearing, community activity, etc. But there will always be people who can't find that sense of meaning anywhere. Maybe it would be good for those people to have the option of assisted suicide, too.
A point worth making... but I don't know that it directly follows in all cases, it's still a part of the picture.
I greet assisted suicide with the same skepticism I do extraordinary efforts to prolong life... It's all worship of comfort/control at the expense of our finitude/mortality... it begins to erode what it means to be human.