It goes without saying that whenever an order is manufactured and value is extracted, whether one likes it or not, that which is deemed value-less is made redundant. It is forced to lose its face, that which gives substance to the signifier, and to wear a mask. This does not simply apply to objects. This applies to people as well. This is what ordering is all about under slavery and under capitalism. It is about separating what is useful from waste...Of course, the two poles of re-creation and dessication are inseparable. The body that is supposed to work is the same body that is continually under attack or made redundant. Ropes are drawn tight. Ribs are shattered. Victims are mercilessly sodomized. In the process, various organs are sucked dry or destroyed. It becomes impossible to breath with one’s lungs. At the same time, the endless labor of restoring that which has been destroyed goes on. Many have been defeated in this peculiar struggle. But sewing up the holes, preventing the destroyed body from being completely torn apart, reconnecting the tissues, unblocking the points of blockage, getting out of the hole, breaking through the wall – this has been a key part of the dialectics, the line of writing that historically prevented many from drowning in the ocean of pessimism, despair and nihilism.

Underlying all of this is, of course, the question of unreason and unfreedom. For those who, for centuries, were condemned to live their lives in a cage or in a monstrous hood, reason often took the face of an inhuman head and the form of wolves’ jaws, a machine geared towards the elimination of certain classes of human beings located at the interface of the human and the nonhuman, or the human, the commodity and the object.

Achille Mbembe