Mbembe

To be alive, or to survive, is more and more co-terminus with the capacity to move...movement, in turn, involves continual doublings, the incessant crossing of multiple lines and thresholds, multiple transitions across layers. Life itself is more and more taken as something that can be calculated and recombined rather than merely represented. Furthermore, we are witnessing a bifurcation between life on the one hand and bodies on the other hand. Nowadays, not every body is thought of as containing life. Discounted bodies are believed to contain no life as such. They are, strictly speaking, bodies at the limits of life, trapped in uninhabitable worlds and inhospitable places. The kind of life they bear or contain is not insured or is uninsurable, folded as it is in extreme and thin envelopes. Such bodies on the precipice are the most exposed to droughts, storms and famines, toxic waste and various experiences of effacement. Their livelihoods made impossible, they are the most likely to sustain the most crippling wounds and injuries. Trapped human subjects often without escape, they bear the brunt of terrestrial life on a damaged planet (Tsing et al. 2017). At the same time, they exceed all attempts to contain them. These bodies are not simply in motion. Interactive and generative, they are movements and events. The inside of such bodies is not separated from their outward environments. From the perspective of discounted bodies, to be alive is always and already to breach boundaries or to be exposed to the risk of the outside entering the inside (read Litvintseva 2019).

Achille Mbembe