Pele (On Mbembe)

Mbembe argues that necropolitics implies the surveillance of individuals not so much for the purposes of discipline, but to extract maximum utility from them.13 The instillation of “small doses” of death in the daily existences of many individuals also stems from “unbounded social, economic, and symbolic violence” that destroys their bodies and the value of their social existence.14 Daily humiliations perpetrated by public forces on certain populations, the strategy of “small massacres” inflicted one day at a time, and the absence of basic social goods (e.g. sanitation, housing) bring about a kind of existence whose value “is the sort of death able to be inflicted upon it”.15 Under these circumstances, necropolitics consists in the power to manufacture a...crowd of people who...live at the edge of life, or...on its outer edge...This life is a superfluous one, therefore, whose price is so meager that it has no equivalence, whether market or — even less — human...Nobody...bears the slightest feeling of responsibility or of justice towards this sort of life, or death, for necropolitical power proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life were merely death’s medium. Subject to everyday necropolitics, a mass of populations live in conditions of extreme precarity and as such, can be exploited and eliminated “naturally”.

Antonio Pele