The economic and political administration of the population through their exposure to death has become a global phenomenon. Wars, genocide, refugee "crises", ecological extermination, the production of poverty, precarity, and racial discrimination reveal how authorities control increasing numbers of people through direct and indirect exposure to death. The duality of life and death is an unavoidable fact of existence; consequently, it is bound to appear in the political sphere.

Michel Foucault's use of the terms biopolitics and biopower remains as closely connected to contemporary political thought as it was when first coined. Yet, if Foucault's take on the ways in which life enters the trap of politics covers one dimension of biopolitics, that is, biopower, then where is its binary opposite? Death has always been part of political praxis, but it is only partially explained by the concept of biopolitics as proposed by Foucault, which is only applicable in the affluent Western capitalist context.

To understand the processes of death, Cameroonian researcher and academic Achille Mbembe arrived at the notion of the politics of death or necropolitics in a 2003 article entitled "Necropolitics." In 2016, he published a book entitled Politiques de l'inimitié, which was translated and published in English in 2019 under the same title. Deploying the concept of "death making", so to speak, Mbembe rethinks Foucault's concept of biopolitics and takes it to new horizons. 

Mbembe’s reflection on the necropolitics in the postcolonial world emphasizes the role of death and violence associated with historical colonialism and structural racism. Moreover, he focuses on the persistence of the “death making” in colonising countries and post-colonial states. There is an attempt to displace the production of death to other countries through, for example, the war on terror and the politics of systematic impoverishment. However, death making continues to exist in so-called democracies which “focus on the cultivation of life” albeit covertly so, revealing itself from time to time to manifest the other face of counterfeit democracies. This proposition, which regards racism and discrimination as integrated mechanisms of power, suggests that the persistence of these political and cultural practices is inevitable in the absence of a conscious effort to undermine the authorities that perpetuate them. 

In this talk we will attempt to deconstruct Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics in relation to Michel Foucault and his concept of biopolitics to make the distinction between the two. We will also look at contemporary forms of necro power, making reference to the racial violence threatening black lives in the United States, targeting the Other in Europe- with the rise of the far-right, and structuring the everyday of Palestinians living under the racist Israeli occupation, moving finally onto the necropolitics of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Amani Aburahma is a Palestinian researcher, writer, and translator based in Gaza. She holds a master’s degree in Pharmacy and Biotechnology, and has completed academic courses in Psychology. Her main research interests span Postmodern Studies, Feminism, and Biopolitics. Aburahma is the author and translator of many books, including Cyborg Feminism: Notes on Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto and situated knowledge (2020), Beyond Foucault: Biopolitics in Genome Era (2017) and Man Without Content . Giorgio Agambin. trans. Amani Aburahma, (2018).

The talk is in Arabic.