Mbembe

"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 In reality, the links between modernity and terror spring from multiple sources. Some are to be found in the political practices of the ancien régime. From this perspective, the tension between the public’s passion for blood and notions of justice and revenge is critical. Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish how the execution of the would-be regicide Damiens went on for hours, much to the satisfaction of the crowd.24 Well known is the long procession of the condemned through the streets prior to execution, the parade of body parts—a ritual that became a standard feature of popular violence—and the final display of a severed head mounted on a pike. In France, the advent of the guillotine marks a new phase in the “democratization” of the means of disposing of the enemies of the state. Indeed, this form of execution that had once been the prerogative of the nobility is extended to all citizens. In a context in which decapitation is viewed as less demeaning than hanging, innovations in the technologies of murder aim not only at “civilizing” the ways of killing. They also aim at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time. At the same time, a new cultural sensibility emerges in which killing the enemy of the state is an extension of play. More intimate, lurid, and leisurely forms of cruelty appear. But nowhere is the conflation of reason and terror so manifest as during the French Revolution.25 During the French Revolution, terror is construed as an almost necessary part of politics. An absolute transparency is claimed to exist between the state and the people. As a political category, “the people” is gradually displaced from concrete reality to rhetorical figure. As David Bates has shown, the theorists of terror believe it possible to distinguish between authentic expressions of sovereignty and the actions of the enemy. They also believe it possible to distinguish between the “error” of the citizen and the “crime” of the counterrevolutionary in the political sphere. Terror thus becomes a way of marking aberration in the body politic, and politics is read both as the mobile force of reason and as the errant attempt at creating a space where “error” would be reduced, truth enhanced, and the enemy disposed of.26 Finally, terror is not linked solely to the utopian belief in the unfettered power of human reason. It is also clearly related to various narratives of mastery and emancipation, most of which are underpinned by Enlightenment understandings of truth and error, the “real” and the symbolic. Marx, for example, conflates labor (the endless cycle of production and consumption required for the maintenance of human life) with work (the creation of lasting artifacts that add to the world of things). Labor is viewed as the vehicle for the historical self-creation of humankind.  The historical self-creation of humankind is itself a life-and-death conflict, that is, a conflict over what paths should lead to the truth of history: the overcoming of capitalism and the commodity form and the contradictions associated with both. According to Marx, with the advent of communism and the abolition of exchange relations, things will appear as they really are; the “real” will present itself as it actually is, and the distinction between subject and object or being and consciousness will be transcended.27 But by making human emancipation dependent upon the abolition of commodity production, Marx blurs the all-important divisions among the man-made realm of freedom, the nature-determined realm of necessity, and the contingent in history. The commitment to the abolition of commodity production and the dream of direct and unmediated access to the “real” make these processes—the fulfillment of the so-called logic of history and the fabrication of humankind—almost necessarily violent processes. As shown by Stephen Louw, the central tenets of classical Marxism leave no choice but to “try to introduce communism by administrative fiat, which, in practice, means that social relations must be decommodified forcefully.”28 Historically, these attempts have taken such forms as labor militarization, the collapse of the distinction between state and society, and revolutionary terror.29 It may be argued that they aimed at the eradication of the basic human condition of plurality. Indeed, the overcoming of class divisions, the withering away of the state, the flowering of a truly general will presuppose a view of human plurality as the chief obstacle to the eventual realization of a predetermined telos of history. In other words, the subject of Marxian modernity is, fundamentally, a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty through the staging of a fight to the death. Just as with Hegel, the narrative of mastery and emancipation here is clearly linked to a narrative of truth and death. Terror and killing become the means of realizing the already known telos of history".

Achille Mbembe