Mbembe (Excerpt)

For Bataille, sovereignty therefore has many forms. But ultimately it is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have the subject respect. The sovereign world, Bataille argues, “is the world in which the limit of death is done away with. Death is present in it, its presence defines that world of violence, but while death is present it is always there only to be negated, never for anything but that. The sovereign,” he concludes, “is he who is, as if death were not. . . He has no more regard for the limits of identity than he does for limits of death, or rather these limits are the same; he is the transgression of all such limits.” Since the natural domain of prohibitions includes death, among others (e.g., sexuality, filth, excrement), sovereignty requires “the strength to violate the prohibition against killing, although it’s true this will be under the conditions that customs define.” And contrary to subordination that is always rooted in necessity and the alleged need to avoid death, sovereignty definitely calls for the risk of death.14 By treating sovereignty as the violation of prohibitions, Bataille reopens the question of the limits of the political. Politics, in this case, is not the forward dialectical movement of reason. Politics can only be traced as a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit. More specifically, politics is the difference put into play by the violation of a taboo.15

Biopower and the Relation of Enmity 

Having presented a reading of politics as the work of death, I turn now to sovereignty, expressed predominantly as the right to kill. For the purpose of my argument, I relate Foucault’s notion of biopower to two other concepts: the state of exception and the state of siege.16 I examine those trajectories by which the state of exception and the relation of enmity have become the normative basis of the right to kill. In such instances, power (and not necessarily state power) continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy. It also labors to produce that same exception, emergency, and fictionalized enemy. In other words, the question is: What is the relationship between politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency? In Foucault’s formulation of it, biopower appears to function through dividing 

Public Culture 16 14. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, eds., The Bataille Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 318–19. See also Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. 1, Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1988), and Erotism: Death & Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986). 15. Bataille, Accursed Share, vol. 2, The History of Eroticism; vol. 3, Sovereignty. 16. On the state of siege, see Schmitt, La dictature, chap. 6. Necropolitics 17

people into those who must live and those who must die. Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field—which it takes control of and vests itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others. This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism.17 That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death.18 Indeed, in Foucault’s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, “that old sovereign right of death.”19 In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, “the condition for the acceptability of putting to death.”20 Foucault states clearly that the sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive) and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function;21 indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in modernity. According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill. This state, he claims, made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill. By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the “final solution.” In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state. 17. 

See Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 57–74. 18. “Race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end . . . , not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.” Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 157. 19. Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 214. 20. Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 228. 21. Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, 227–32.

It has been argued that the complete conflation of war and politics (and racism, homicide, and suicide), until they are indistinguishable from one another, is unique to the Nazi state. The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security—this, I suggest, is one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late modernity itself. Recognition of this perception to a large extent underpins most traditional critiques of modernity, whether they are dealing with nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as the essence of the being; with reification understood as the becoming-object of the human being; or the subordination of everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental rationality.22 Indeed, from an anthropological perspective, what these critiques implicitly contest is a definition of politics as the warlike relation par excellence. They also challenge the idea that, of necessity, the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other; or that sovereignty consists of the will and the capacity to kill in order to live. Taking a historical perspective, a number of analysts have argued that the material premises of Nazi extermination are to be found in colonial imperialism on the one hand and, on the other, in the serialization of technical mechanisms for putting people to death—mechanisms developed between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War. According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers and the ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death, one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army). Having become mechanized, serialized execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent, and rapid procedure. This development was aided in part by racist stereotypes and the flourishing of a class-based racism that, in translating the social conflicts of the industrial world in racial terms, ended up comparing the working classes and “stateless people” of the industrial world to the “savages” of the colonial world.23

Achille Mbembe