Introduction
This chapter seeks to disentangle Foucault’s work on biopolitics from Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. Contrary to what Mbembe suggests, the “death-making” characteristic of neoliberal governmentalities can still be understood in terms of Foucault’s analytic of biopower. Thus, the turn to necropolitics to capture what Mbembe calls “the making of death worlds” is a superfluous gesture. Foucault’s biopolitics is often conflated with Mbembe’s necropolitics (for example, they both address genocide and concentration camps), even though Mbembe criticized Foucault’s biopower for its inability to account for the ways spectacular modes of killing function. Thus, the goal of this chapter is also to show that Foucault’s biopolitics can do more than theorize a genealogy of biological racism and genocide. Under neoliberalism, biopolitics does not eliminate populations solely through the production of biological caesuras predicated on race, and this elimination process does not primarily operate through spectacular and large-scale death-making, or as the murder function of the state, something that Mbembe insists upon. Rather, neoliberal biopolitics functions, in part, through the marketization of space and generalized conditions of competition. In these marketized spaces, when populations of individuals fail to compete (they do not accurately assess risk, they unsuccessfully maximize their human capital, or they are incapable of enduring or preventing chronic illnesses), it seems “natural” that they should deal with the consequences of their failure to compete. These consequences, whether they are slow-burning death from chronic illnesses, homelessness, physiological and emotional stress, etc., are understood as the responsibility and fault of the individual, not of the state nor of a particular political/economic/social system. Thus, if part of the goal of this volume is to highlight the ordinary/taken-for-granted deaths and death-making that characterize neoliberal spaces, disentangling Foucault’s biopolitics from the zero-sum and large-scale focus of necropolitics as Mbembe understands it is a necessary step. Put differently, biopolitics without its zero-sum focus may turn our attention to the subtle and deadly ways in which neoliberalism functions.
Mbembe poses several questions about the sufficiency of Foucault’s biopower as an analytic for interpreting contemporary instances of the use of murder to achieve political ends. Mbembe asks whether biopower can help us account for the ways state and sub-state forces kill (whether it is during times of war, moments of resistance, or fighting against terrorism) those they have deemed to be enemies. Mbembe’s answer is that biopower is limited in what it can tell us about the ways modern sovereignty, the political, states, and sub-states subjugate life to the power of death. This subjugation of life to the power of death is what Mbembe calls necropolitics or necropower. Necropower, for Mbembe, primarily describes the spatial and temporal ordering of contemporary colonial spaces, which involve practices such as territorial fragmentation, medieval siege warfare, and continual violence and killing.1 Mbembe offers necropower and necropolitics as correctives to what he sees as biopower’s inability to account for the irrational, excessively cruel, and spectacular forms of killing in the colonies.
Furthermore, Mbembe relates Foucault’s biopower to the state of exception and the state of siege in order to show that biopower is insufficient for making sense of how the right to kill has normalized the state of exception and the relation of enmity. The suggestion here is that Foucault’s biopower cannot account for the spatial and temporal logic of modern warfare, nor can it tell us about what Mbembe sees as the domination of a politics of death, and of spectacular death at that, in modern statehood. Mbembe implies that Foucault’s notion of biopower cannot account for the connections between politics and death in systems that operate within a permanent state of emergency.2 According to Mbembe, death and power function under a different logic within the permanent state of emergency compared to the way they do within biopower.
Mbembe’s essay “Necropolitics” was published in 2003, and (along with Giorgio Agamben’s and Roberto Esposito’s writings, among others) it has since been influential in shaping the way scholars have interpreted the relationship between life and death in (bio)politics. That is, biopolitics’ “make live requirement” is understood as the flipside of spectacular modes of “letting die.” Or, once again, biopolitics is an insufficient analytic for understanding strong state killing and states of exception. But necropolitics has also been criticized for its inability to see beyond biopolitics’ “zero point” (death).3 However, if, as scholars of biopolitics argue, killing certain populations is a positive condition of biopower,4 then biopower can still account for relations of enmity, modern warfare, and the irrational, excessively cruel, and spectacular forms of killing in colonies, and beyond. More importantly, if this is the case, biopolitics is also no longer an insufficient analytic for understanding ordinary suffering as a mode of weak state killing. Unlike Mbembe, I suggest in this chapter that biopower does not need a state of exception to justify killing if, by definition, biopower kills to make certain populations live. Thus, I wish to argue that we do not need a flipside or an addendum to biopower, such as necropolitics, since biopower can itself account for weak and strong modes of state killing.
Furthermore, while Mbembe has been useful for conceptualizing the spatio-temporality of “large-scale”5 and permanent extra-juridical killings, his necropolitics misses the paradoxical nature of biopower and overlooks the weak modes of state killing that capitalize on ordinary suffering under conditions of neoliberalism. In this chapter, I address a number of problems with Mbembe’s thinking about sovereignty, with his definition of biopower, and with his understanding of the function of racism within biopower. His criticism of biopower is predicated upon a conflation of sovereignty with biopower, and it results from a misreading of Foucault’s understanding of sovereignty. Thus, Mbembe’s necropower, although useful in thinking about the creation of death-worlds in the context of contemporary forms of warfare, including spaces of colonial violence, is limited in what it can offer to analyses of the spatio-temporalities of neoliberalism. Massive-scale or overt state killings are not the modus operandi of the biopolitics of neoliberal spatio-temporality. I begin this chapter with an analysis of Mbembe’s definition of sovereignty and his conflation of sovereignty with biopower. Then, I address the problems I find with Mbembe’s understanding of biopower and with the way Mbembe uses Foucault’s notion of racism. Finally, I point to the weaknesses of Mbembe’s necropolitics/necropower when trying to make sense of the spatio-temporality of neoliberalism.
Sovereignty, biopower, racism
Mbembe begins his essay “Necropolitics” with the following point about sovereignty: “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die …”6 He indicates in a footnote that his approach to the question of sovereignty builds on Foucault’s notion of sovereignty from his lecture “Society Must Be Defended.” However, Mbembe’s assumption that the ultimate expression of sovereignty lies in its power and capacity to determine “who may live” and “who must die” is not entirely consistent with Foucault’s critique of sovereignty. Foucault uses the phrases “what must live” and “what must die” when he answers the question “what is racism?” State racism is, for Foucault, a way for biopower to justify the right to kill by deciding who must die and who must live.7 But state racism and sovereignty are not the same. I will return to this point below.
For Foucault, the “[s]overeign power’s effect on life is exercised only when the sovereign can kill … It is the right to take life or let live.”8 Mbembe’s position that sovereignty dictates who may live suggests a more active form of power over living. Foucault’s position is that sovereignty has an indirect power over living. Foucault writes that “the right of life and death is a dissymmetrical one,”9 with letting live meaning, in part, refraining from killing. But this is not a power based on “generating forces, making them grow, and making them live.”10 The ultimate expression of sovereignty, an expression of its absolute power, would be through the sovereign’s right to kill, the right of the sword, and the right to put to death. According to Foucault, this “was the moment of the most obvious and most spectacular manifestation of the absolute power of the sovereign.”11 To kill, then, does not necessarily constitute the limits of sovereignty, since it is largely through killing that the sovereign exercises its power.
At times, Mbembe simply conflates sovereignty with biopower. For example, Mbembe suggests that “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”12 Mbembe summarizes Foucault’s biopower based on the terms he introduces at the beginning of his essay (the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death), which is for Mbembe “that domain of life over which power has taken control.”13 But in the case of Foucault, the right to kill and to allow to live refers to “sovereignty’s old right,” “the power of the sword,” or the old sovereign’s right to kill.14 The mode/system of biopower introduces a paradox in its hold over life, which is that killing or the right to kill goes against the imperative to make live and to ensure the survival of a population. Biopower’s emergence as a type of power does not mean that sovereign power completely disappears or that biopower is a new form of sovereignty. Mbembe’s use of mortality and “life as the deployment and manifestation of power” are elements of biopower, not of sovereignty. Yet, Mbembe insists that to do one is to do the other. This definition of sovereignty reads like Foucault’s definition of biopower, and specifically the beginning of Foucault’s definition of racism. When Foucault refers to mortality in “Society Must Be Defended,” he does so when explaining biopower. Biopower concerns itself with a number of processes, including mortality rates.
Mbembe’s definition of biopower (that domain of life over which power has taken control) is borrowed from Foucault’s definition of racism. It is in this context that Foucault writes about “a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control”. 15 Biopower is implied in this sentence but not succinctly defined. Foucault offers a more succinct, yet slightly different, definition of biopower in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. It is different from the definition he provides in “Society Must Be Defended” because it includes both anatomo-politics, which was previously ...
