but first, a disclaimer: so i really don’t know this shit well enough to do more than nod my head in recognition if this were to ever come up in a conversation. thankfully, neither agamben, foucault or mbembe tend to feature prominently in the kinds of stuff i find myself chatting about. still, its something i have become interested in and i figured i should practice talking about so that when an opportunity arises to impress someone with me knowledge about ‘biopolitics’, i will be prepared.

Like you, when i read the mbembe essay - which personally i found to be a seriously difficult - i liked his discussion of the sovereign’s power to circulate the ‘risks of death’. what i don’t understand is why necropower? “necro-” seems to have the connotation of a corpse. Why not thanatopower as in agamben….since Mbembe does seem to need agamben in passage from a concept of biopolitics which is at least methodologically distinct from operation of sovereign power (ala foucault), to a concept of biopolitics as a form of sovereign power (i could be wrong but this is the impression i got). Is this just another in a series of ‘fetish words’, as virno might say? more generously i get the sense that the differences between agamben and mbembe are, in part, caught up in their respective relationships to battaile (who agamben tends to dismiss). Anyway i have marked this as thread to spend more time on

something else i like about mbembe’s work (although i am not sure if he does this in necropower) is his deployment of D&G’s concept of the ‘war machine’ to describe the ways in which sovereign power is wielded by mobile, ad-hoc institutional configurations like the strange mix that forms between private mercenary armies, private corporations and local interests, and which act as the supreme authority in parts of africa. Here again the movement is too quick for me and even if i like the idea, i remain suspicious.

the thing that worries me about mbembe - and this no doubt is at the bases of my suspiciousness of his work - is that his broader politics, at least as it relates to the south african context, tends to somewhat conservative, and seems trapped on the horizon of ideas like the ‘rule of law’.

also i tend to get the impression that agamben’s idea of sovereignty owes far more to schmidtt than you suggest here. Now, i could have completely missed the point, but for for me, in agamben sovereignty consists in the decision on bare life (this is why even the ‘making live’ type of biopolitics is implicated in sovereign power). What agamben seems to do with schmitt is to shift the emphasis to bare life (in part by clarifying the relationship between the bare life and the exception). What is key, and what he seems to take from schmitt, is the centrality of the ‘decision’ in the characterization of the sovereign. In this respect, i think we could say that the soldier in the camp is invested with sovereign power.

On non-delibrate violence; there is a bit in homo sacer where he raises some problems around the possibility that anyone knocked on a highway potentially becomes homo sacer. i don’t remember exactly how he deals with this, but i’ll dig it up if you interested. The example however is an interesting one for me. In security, territory, population, foucault shows how in assuming a biopolitical perspective, the emphasis in town planning comes to be on the circulation of goods and people. Now the relationship of this principle to emergence of capitalist forms of production should be clear. To return to the example, the potential risks to human life associated with highways is not deliberate…but it is important to see that the principle of circulation trumps whatever risk might come as a result of highways (here, the principle of circulation becomes something like an exception to principle that state should always protect the lives of its citizens). There is a context however in which the rather prosaic example takes on it full meaning. In south africa, in 2003 people from a small town blocked the a national highway adjacent to their town, in protest against the slow pace of the roll out of basic services and housing in the area. in order to clear the road, with virtually no warning the police opened fire with rubber bullets killing a 16 year old protester. When the case got to court, not only were the leaders of the protest charged with public violence (a relatively minor offense), but also with sedition (the latter charge was later dropped largely due to public pressure). While the charge is probably the product of an overzealous prosecutor’s desire to please his political bosses, it the kind of power implicated in maintaining the circulation good and people in a modern economy, where circulation is what is also implied by the idea of security.

With respect to labour, although i haven’t given it that much thought, i suspect that the modern phenomena of export processing zones lends itself biopolitical analysis ala agamben

anyway, that’s more than a few comments so i’ll stop