Necropolitics

In the opening line of Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe explains that he writes from the perspective of someone living in Africa, emphasizing his separation from Western philosophical thought. As he challenges liberal democracy and the organization of power in modern politics, he also responds to the Western ideas presented by writers like John Locke, Franz Fanon, Thomas Hobbes, Hannah Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben. Mbembe weaves the ideas of these philosophers and others into his own work while exposing how colonialism and imperialism have shaped modern philosophy. The title and focus of Mbembe’s work function as responses to one of the social critic’s greatest influences: 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Foucault’s groundbreaking text The History of Sexuality explores how Western society has approached sex and sexuality, as well as the intrinsic relationship between power and the body. By tracing this relationship through time, Foucault reveals that sovereign states spent centuries exercising total control over the lives and deaths of their subjects. However, modernity has limited this capacity. In Foucault’s work

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