Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe (1957–) is a Cameroonian historian and political theorist, currently based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, whose work develops a comprehensive analysis of post-colonial African political life and a more general critique of the colonial constitution of modern subjectivity. His major contribution to the cybernetic-postliberal framework is the concept of necropolitics — the analysis of contemporary regimes of power as the production and management of death-worlds rather than (or in addition to) the management of biological life.

¶Core ideas

• Necropolitics. Mbembe’s signature concept extends Foucault’s biopolitics: where biopolitics names power’s investment in the management of biological life, necropolitics names power’s organization of the conditions of death — the production of populations as available to die, the management of who is killable and how. The colony, the slave plantation, the occupied territory, and contemporary failed-state zones are paradigmatic sites.

• The post-colony. Mbembe’s earlier On the Postcolony (2001) develops a phenomenology of the post-colonial state that refuses the developmentalist framing (post-colonial states as failed-modernization cases) and instead reads them as their own object — characterized by what he calls the “banality of power,” a comic-grotesque-violent register that does not fit the normative-political vocabulary the discipline brought to it.

• Critique of black reason. Critique of Black Reason (2017) develops a long historical analysis of how the figure of the Black has been constituted through colonial-racial categorization, and how that constitution has shaped both Western subjectivity and the resistance traditions that responded to it.

• The universal right to breathe. Mbembe’s later work (especially during and after the 2020 COVID period) develops a planetary register: the analysis of contemporary capitalism, racial-colonial domination, and ecological collapse as a single configuration that produces conditions in which the most basic human capacity (to breathe) is differentially distributed.

¶Significance for cybernetic postliberalism

Mbembe is foundational to the framework’s understanding of the colonial-racial register that runs through every other register the framework analyzes. Necropolitics names the dimension of governance the framework tends to call settlerism (when American), genring (when applied to the reduction of peoples to types), or the constitutive-outside of liberalism’s universalism. Mbembe’s specific contribution is the analytic register: the production of death-worlds as a positive operation of power, not as a failure of governance.

¶Key texts

• Necropolitics (essay 2003; book 2019)
• On the Postcolony (2001)
• Critique of Black Reason (2017)
• Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (2021)
• Brutalism (2024)