Mbembe

We are witnessing a bifurcation between life and bodies, if only in the

sense that nowadays not everybody 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 are caught in the various death management

systems that saturate the contemporary world. They literally bear the brunt of

terrestrial life on a damaged planet, at the same time they exceed all attempts to

contain them. These bodies are not

simply in motion they are movements and events, the inside of such bodies is not

separated from their outward environments and, 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.

Achille Mbembe