An important book to get a matter-of-fact understanding of the modern state is Professor Graeme Gill’s “The Nature and Development of the Modern State” (Macmillan, 2016)
Yes, you are right. Mbembe's prescription of necropolitical state would certainly be anarchy. However, his method of transition towards anarchy would pe peaceful. Thus implying "pacifist anarchism" of Gandhi and Tolstoy.
Proffessor, Hello from Japan. I've been interested in "necropolitics". But Japanese version hasnt still published and I am hesitating to read it in English . Surprisingly, You explained the main points of the book as well as other philosopher's thoughts MBembe refers to in the book. I will listen to this video repeatedly. Thank you for your great introduction.
@@GreatBooksProf Professor, Thank you for your reply! Two years ago a publishing company announced the publication was upcoming , but it seems that the date of the publcation is still not decided. I'm looking forward to reading it!
Professor. This one hit me HARD. please forgive the forthcoming long post. Now I had heard of Mbembe & necropolitics via Wisecrack. They have a video on Mad Max Fury viewed through the lens of Necropolitics. It was pretty good. But that video hit me hard and as your did because of my background. I’m a dual citizen. Born in America but raised in Nigeria and didn’t moved back to the US till I was 20. And the idea of necropolitics had always swirled in my mind but never really knew how to describe it. Then you had to drop the psychological utility of necropolitics and let me tell you was screaming when you brought this up because the thing that came to mind was how people would always tell me how “ free” America was and I always be like man your standard for freedom is ridiculously low. But anyway I’m rambling. Thank you as always for your videos. This particular one has given voice to something I’ve always thought about in the back of mind. Bout to go buy Mbembe’s book ASAP. Again professor we appreciate you
Thanks for sharing this, Ayodele. I'm glad you found the material thought-provoking and that it resonated with you. I think Mbembe is tracking something quite real. He can be pretty difficult to read sometimes, but I think it's worth the effort.
Thank you so much for introducing me to this book. As a teacher, I appreciated your willingness to wrestle with Mbembe's thesis. This is exactly what we want our students to do whenever they meet and then revisit complex ideas!
I think most problematic thing is, we had been socialised with violence and there is a space , a lack of liberty, creating unsatisfied desires, to get to unknown destinations. Natural equality of rights and liberty is academically and socially systematised to hurt us by illogical emotions.
thank you for this summary and yr work on it! appreciate all the weaving through ideas and explanations all the you's from different time-spaces come in and do in this lol
Would it be accurate to say that Mbmembe has a somewhat anarchist critique of politics? As a reader of anarchists like Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin, and even Foucault, the conception of the state as the consolidation of violence, particularly directed against certain people by a 'ruling class' sounds quite familiar to me.
thank you so so so so much! This text was part of my exam syllabus and I didn't understood shit when I read it at first. I don't think my English is that bad but I am not a native speaker and this text was so dense and complicated.
that psychological motive may very well be true for some people, but a bit of thought reveals that to be a losing proposition for everyone, just some worse than others
Honest and epic breakdown. Respect the effort here. The content is very reminiscent of Zygmunt Bauman’s “wasted lives” but with an African center behind it. Thanks Prof
Great video! Just a small note: "death management" and the power over perception of life and death are at the core of *sovereignty*, not politics according to Mbembe. Thought it would be a good thing to point out since politics is a much wider term RE. the exercise of agency to change society, while Mbembe speaks specifically about sovereignty in terms of the kind of question those who wield State power aim to answer.
From what I remember of *Leviathan*, "politics involving state-sponsored killing and the legal categorization of certain groups as disposable" is also the foundation of Hobbesian social contract theory. Social contracts are enforced by a society banding together to kill anyone who doesn't conform to its social contract. I recall Hobbes going into pretty tedious detail about the sovereign wielding "terror" and "the sword". From what you've described, "necropolitics" seems like a repackaging of Hobbes' basic idea, in the language of the 21st Century instead of the 17th.
This is a good insight. Mbembe is definitely drawing upon Agamben and Arendt, and I think both of those thinkers owe a lot to Hobbes, so Hobbes is definitely in the DNA here. However, I think what's original about Mbembe is how he understands the relationship between the "state of nature" and the state. For Hobbes, they were opposites. The whole point of the state was to get out of the state of nature. Agamben makes the claim that our social contracts depend upon the continued existence of the state of nature (these death worlds) within certain prescribed areas. Hobbes would see the existence of such zones as a failure or limitation of government. Mbembe argues that these are features not bugs.
if we tolerate torture, or surveillence, murder, etc. in states of emergency, which we, for a given value of we, do, there will always be an emergency, which there is
Hmmmm… I can’t really put my finger on it but I have the feeling there is a small area where an overwhelming military force has violently caged a population of millions for years and years and periodically “mowed the lawn”… the name escapes me momentarily
It's the actions against and the "normalized" restrictions of marginalized groups through which States show their power to diminish life. To keep the rest of society in line!
I have a hard time understanding what is supposed to be so special, different or revolutionizing in Mbembe's Necropolitics, besides having given "Geopolitics" are hipper name for the kids to use. Aristotle already seems to have summarized the whole book in a single sentence: "We wage war so that we may live in peace."
Aristotle assumes there are meaningful distinctions between "war" and "peace". What Mbembe seems to be proposing here is that a society is effectively always at war, against the parts of itself which Mbembe calls "the colony" or "the death-world" (see 4:21 to 6:24).
@@GreatBooksProf omg thanks didn't expect a reply! My thesis is on the indirect ways colonial rule is being maintained through exploitative corporate practices who outsource labour to the third world space. Thesis started off as a study of the space of courtrooms as a site of power, but that was a whole other hill to climb with semiotics that was beyond my talents as a students that's barely graduating law school.
@@GreatBooksProf i went a weird way with my argument tho 😭 and started it with subjectification and the inheritance of institutional trauma rather than a system of reason. Your video literally helped me bridge the gap here, with the contents on democracy and violence 🥰 and the part where you were struggling to agamben is literally me the past year 😪
@@amirahazhar4192 So happy to know the video was helpful. I often find, at the end of a project, that I wish I could start over knowing what I now know, so that the whole thing would be clearer and more organized. But there’s virtue I’d just getting the thing finished too. 😅
I hope you take my critique in good faith because I appreciate you as a critical thinker. Your statement “the whole American economy is founded on the backs of enslaved people” seems to be a dishonest assessment of the current economy. Did you perhaps mean “was” in reference to slavery? That would be a more reasonable statement imo. Later in the video you make a racially charged claim that white people are not part of this sacrifice to “deny death’s power over us.” Anyone who has spent any time in W. Virginia, Kentucky, or the like knows there are large swaths of white people who are disposable for this system. I really appreciate that you took the time explain this book. And I think it’s intellectually brave to show us the difficulty in understanding, let alone teaching, such a complicated book. I don’t think making these two assumptions highlighted above are true in their current form or helpful in understanding the work. Engaging in race-craft will not undo the harms to the disenfranchised.
enslaved labor was crucial to the generation of wealth that has given way to america’s current economic position. “white people” is usually a reference to the dominant social group in white supremacist systems, and rarely means the same thing as “all white persons.” i think understanding this distinction is essential to understanding the decolonial context of mbembe’s work
@@Lena-rk3ph Then we should be more clear in the words we use. "Hegemonic" is a word for that which doesn't perpetuate the myth of race or engage in eugenic racial essentialism.
@@liketheduck addressing white supremacist hegemony requires acknowledgement of the myth of race because the myth of race has non-mythical implications. i am also a big fan of nuance, and i think generalizations are sloppy, but to the extent that there is a general social understanding of what is meant by verbal shorthand, i wouldn’t go as far as to describe them as race-craft or essentialism. if we seek understanding in good faith then we know that is not the aim here. let me know your thoughts
@@Lena-rk3phyou raise great points and I think in some ways we’re splitting hairs. In my view it comes down to my, perhaps childish, view that you will not defeat “Voldemort” by splitting our own soul. We will not humanize the other by dehumanizing people who look like the powerful. Often times the use of this kind of language acts as a signaling device that absolves the user from their moral responsibility to act. They can express outrage and demonize a group without having to do the hard work of repairing the world at their fingertips. In my view, this is the language of hegemony in sham-revolutionary garb. It’s the same language game Trump plays with “the Mexicans” or we historically used against “the Chinese” or why we didn’t save “the Jews” earlier. It’s dehumanizing language that allows the user to pretend they are morally superior (when they are the one who refuses to act or sacrifice) while still engaging in a fundamental evil. You’re right that. The myth of racism has non-mythical implications. People consider themselves white who are part of the “sacrificial” group that are also consumed by necropolitics. We should not belittle their position because of the color of their skin. It’s gross and it splits our soul.
This unironically sounds like it was written by a high schooler in the "west" thinking they understand human thinking the hard reality of how world politics operates.
Your efforts in simplifying such great and important and possibly uncomfortable books are greatly appreciated. Thank you so much
Thank you. I really appreciate that.
An important book to get a matter-of-fact understanding of the modern state is Professor Graeme Gill’s “The Nature and Development of the Modern State” (Macmillan, 2016)
Yes, you are right. Mbembe's prescription of necropolitical state would certainly be anarchy. However, his method of transition towards anarchy would pe peaceful. Thus implying "pacifist anarchism" of Gandhi and Tolstoy.
Proffessor, Hello from Japan.
I've been interested in "necropolitics".
But Japanese version hasnt still published and I am hesitating to read it in English .
Surprisingly, You explained the main points of the book as well as other philosopher's thoughts MBembe refers to in the book. I will listen to this video repeatedly.
Thank you for your great introduction.
Hi! Thanks for watching!
I’m glad you found the video useful. It’s a complicated text. I wonder when the Japanese translation will be available?
@@GreatBooksProf
Professor, Thank you for your reply!
Two years ago a publishing company announced the publication was upcoming , but it seems that the date of the publcation is still not decided. I'm looking forward to reading it!
頑張って。
I'm Interested in your perspective on ontological blackness . Do you know any Japanese texts that would be interesting for me to read?
Thank you for this incredible summary, with all the nuances, such a great video !
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks!
Professor. This one hit me HARD. please forgive the forthcoming long post. Now I had heard of Mbembe & necropolitics via Wisecrack. They have a video on Mad Max Fury viewed through the lens of Necropolitics. It was pretty good. But that video hit me hard and as your did because of my background. I’m a dual citizen. Born in America but raised in Nigeria and didn’t moved back to the US till I was 20. And the idea of necropolitics had always swirled in my mind but never really knew how to describe it. Then you had to drop the psychological utility of necropolitics and let me tell you was screaming when you brought this up because the thing that came to mind was how people would always tell me how “ free” America was and I always be like man your standard for freedom is ridiculously low. But anyway I’m rambling. Thank you as always for your videos. This particular one has given voice to something I’ve always thought about in the back of mind. Bout to go buy Mbembe’s book ASAP.
Again professor we appreciate you
Thanks for sharing this, Ayodele. I'm glad you found the material thought-provoking and that it resonated with you. I think Mbembe is tracking something quite real. He can be pretty difficult to read sometimes, but I think it's worth the effort.
Thank you so much for introducing me to this book. As a teacher, I appreciated your willingness to wrestle with Mbembe's thesis. This is exactly what we want our students to do whenever they meet and then revisit complex ideas!
The struggle is real! Lol. But it’s worth it! 😄
Professor, thank you so much for the effort you put into these videos. I've been a fan since a few months ago. Your content is awesome! 😁
Thanks, Zeff! That's very kind of you to say. This one took some effort 😅, so I'm glad you enjoyed it! Glad you're sticking around.
I think most problematic thing is, we had been socialised with violence and there is a space , a lack of liberty, creating unsatisfied desires, to get to unknown destinations. Natural equality of rights and liberty is academically and socially systematised to hurt us by illogical emotions.
This is, on average, the least violent time in history
FREE GAZA - A modern death world
One of many unfortunately. But absolutely agree.
My dissertation is based largely on this concept Democracy and death in an Iraki novel called Frankenstein in Baghdad
This video was a super great help in explaining necropolitics for my essay, thank you so much!!
Glad it was helpful. Good luck on your essay!
Professor, I am even more fascinated by the materials on The Wire and David Simon on your shelf.
Love The Wire! I’ve written a couple of things on it. Treme too.
Please can you share a link to them? @@GreatBooksProf
Thankyou Prof...been struggling understanding these theories...
I’m glad it was helpful. It’s a dense book!
İ am psycoholgy student who takes sociology class
And ı really appreciate the effort you put in the video
İt helped me so much, thanks
Thanks, I'm glad it was helpful! Were you studying Mbembe in Sociology?
thank you for this summary and yr work on it! appreciate all the weaving through ideas and explanations all the you's from different time-spaces come in and do in this lol
This was very enjoyable to watch
Holy mackerel this dude is great! Explains things very clearly, plus really pleasant reading voice (I know that's weird but you're all thinking it).
this is great!
Thanks craig, glad you liked it!
Would it be accurate to say that Mbmembe has a somewhat anarchist critique of politics? As a reader of anarchists like Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin, and even Foucault, the conception of the state as the consolidation of violence, particularly directed against certain people by a 'ruling class' sounds quite familiar to me.
Just done a second year uni presentation on Gore Capitalism where Necropolitics is referenced a lot so this helped a lot to understand it thanks
Glad you found it helpful!
thank you so so so so much! This text was part of my exam syllabus and I didn't understood shit when I read it at first. I don't think my English is that bad but I am not a native speaker and this text was so dense and complicated.
Thank you so much for this video it really helped me with my essay!! You make the ideas really clear and honestly reading this was hard
thank you so much for this!
You're so welcome!
that psychological motive may very well be true for some people, but a bit of thought reveals that to be a losing proposition for everyone, just some worse than others
Honest and epic breakdown. Respect the effort here. The content is very reminiscent of Zygmunt Bauman’s “wasted lives” but with an African center behind it.
Thanks Prof
Thanks! Glad you found it worthwhile.
Great video! Just a small note: "death management" and the power over perception of life and death are at the core of *sovereignty*, not politics according to Mbembe. Thought it would be a good thing to point out since politics is a much wider term RE. the exercise of agency to change society, while Mbembe speaks specifically about sovereignty in terms of the kind of question those who wield State power aim to answer.
Thanks! Good note.
Thank you 🖤
Around 9:20 you made me think about a certain prime minister Jr. and Sr.
From what I remember of *Leviathan*, "politics involving state-sponsored killing and the legal categorization of certain groups as disposable" is also the foundation of Hobbesian social contract theory. Social contracts are enforced by a society banding together to kill anyone who doesn't conform to its social contract. I recall Hobbes going into pretty tedious detail about the sovereign wielding "terror" and "the sword". From what you've described, "necropolitics" seems like a repackaging of Hobbes' basic idea, in the language of the 21st Century instead of the 17th.
This is a good insight. Mbembe is definitely drawing upon Agamben and Arendt, and I think both of those thinkers owe a lot to Hobbes, so Hobbes is definitely in the DNA here. However, I think what's original about Mbembe is how he understands the relationship between the "state of nature" and the state. For Hobbes, they were opposites. The whole point of the state was to get out of the state of nature. Agamben makes the claim that our social contracts depend upon the continued existence of the state of nature (these death worlds) within certain prescribed areas. Hobbes would see the existence of such zones as a failure or limitation of government. Mbembe argues that these are features not bugs.
@@GreatBooksProf I get it now. Thank you!
The State of Exception is a fundamental idea from Carl Schmitt. Have you done a video on any of his work yet?
if we tolerate torture, or surveillence, murder, etc. in states of emergency, which we, for a given value of we, do, there will always be an emergency, which there is
yup, what you just said after i typed the previous comment
I see David Simon on your shelf. Why is the Ghetto/Hood excluded from the violent political space?
Hmmmm… I can’t really put my finger on it but I have the feeling there is a small area where an overwhelming military force has violently caged a population of millions for years and years and periodically “mowed the lawn”… the name escapes me momentarily
This applies to every single "democratic" state
Wow! This was such an incredible simplification of such a challenging book! Thank you so much, you have saved my essay!
You're breakdown is fantastic. I would only add women, queer ppl and trans ppl are often "exceptions" as well.
It's the actions against and the "normalized" restrictions of marginalized groups through which States show their power to diminish life. To keep the rest of society in line!
Do you know Gaston Bachelard's 'Poetics of Space'?
Haven’t read it. Do you recommend it?
I have a hard time understanding what is supposed to be so special, different or revolutionizing in Mbembe's Necropolitics, besides having given "Geopolitics" are hipper name for the kids to use. Aristotle already seems to have summarized the whole book in a single sentence: "We wage war so that we may live in peace."
Aristotle assumes there are meaningful distinctions between "war" and "peace". What Mbembe seems to be proposing here is that a society is effectively always at war, against the parts of itself which Mbembe calls "the colony" or "the death-world" (see 4:21 to 6:24).
funny, i like to take things that seem clear and identify the ways they actually are complicated
India.. new centre of necropolitics
Writing a dissertation due in like 10 days on this, 😅😪
Whoa! Good luck! What’s your thesis?
@@GreatBooksProf omg thanks didn't expect a reply! My thesis is on the indirect ways colonial rule is being maintained through exploitative corporate practices who outsource labour to the third world space. Thesis started off as a study of the space of courtrooms as a site of power, but that was a whole other hill to climb with semiotics that was beyond my talents as a students that's barely graduating law school.
@@amirahazhar4192 Sounds super interesting! Best of luck with the project.
@@GreatBooksProf i went a weird way with my argument tho 😭 and started it with subjectification and the inheritance of institutional trauma rather than a system of reason. Your video literally helped me bridge the gap here, with the contents on democracy and violence 🥰 and the part where you were struggling to agamben is literally me the past year 😪
@@amirahazhar4192 So happy to know the video was helpful. I often find, at the end of a project, that I wish I could start over knowing what I now know, so that the whole thing would be clearer and more organized. But there’s virtue I’d just getting the thing finished too. 😅
I hope you take my critique in good faith because I appreciate you as a critical thinker.
Your statement “the whole American economy is founded on the backs of enslaved people” seems to be a dishonest assessment of the current economy. Did you perhaps mean “was” in reference to slavery? That would be a more reasonable statement imo.
Later in the video you make a racially charged claim that white people are not part of this sacrifice to “deny death’s power over us.” Anyone who has spent any time in W. Virginia, Kentucky, or the like knows there are large swaths of white people who are disposable for this system.
I really appreciate that you took the time explain this book. And I think it’s intellectually brave to show us the difficulty in understanding, let alone teaching, such a complicated book.
I don’t think making these two assumptions highlighted above are true in their current form or helpful in understanding the work. Engaging in race-craft will not undo the harms to the disenfranchised.
enslaved labor was crucial to the generation of wealth that has given way to america’s current economic position. “white people” is usually a reference to the dominant social group in white supremacist systems, and rarely means the same thing as “all white persons.” i think understanding this distinction is essential to understanding the decolonial context of mbembe’s work
@@Lena-rk3ph Then we should be more clear in the words we use. "Hegemonic" is a word for that which doesn't perpetuate the myth of race or engage in eugenic racial essentialism.
@@liketheduck addressing white supremacist hegemony requires acknowledgement of the myth of race because the myth of race has non-mythical implications. i am also a big fan of nuance, and i think generalizations are sloppy, but to the extent that there is a general social understanding of what is meant by verbal shorthand, i wouldn’t go as far as to describe them as race-craft or essentialism. if we seek understanding in good faith then we know that is not the aim here. let me know your thoughts
@@Lena-rk3phyou raise great points and I think in some ways we’re splitting hairs. In my view it comes down to my, perhaps childish, view that you will not defeat “Voldemort” by splitting our own soul. We will not humanize the other by dehumanizing people who look like the powerful.
Often times the use of this kind of language acts as a signaling device that absolves the user from their moral responsibility to act. They can express outrage and demonize a group without having to do the hard work of repairing the world at their fingertips. In my view, this is the language of hegemony in sham-revolutionary garb. It’s the same language game Trump plays with “the Mexicans” or we historically used against “the Chinese” or why we didn’t save “the Jews” earlier. It’s dehumanizing language that allows the user to pretend they are morally superior (when they are the one who refuses to act or sacrifice) while still engaging in a fundamental evil.
You’re right that. The myth of racism has non-mythical implications. People consider themselves white who are part of the “sacrificial” group that are also consumed by necropolitics. We should not belittle their position because of the color of their skin. It’s gross and it splits our soul.
the term barbaric is inherently othering, just as civlized, in this context, is inherently exclusionary
This unironically sounds like it was written by a high schooler in the "west" thinking they understand human thinking the hard reality of how world politics operates.
Okg youre so smart!!!!! Maybe you should write a book about it instead of a fucking youtube comment.
Prof,you seem like you are discussing aspects of Israeli Jew Zionism!