Essai sur le politique en tant que forme de la dépense

La plupart des chroniques consacrées aux guerres africaines sous-estiment la centralité que celles-ci ont fini par prendre dans la représentation que le sujet africain contemporain se fait de la vie, du politique en général et de sa relation avec la mort en particulier. De fait, lors de périodes plus ou moins prolongées de l’histoire récente de plusieurs pays, donner la mort a eu tendance à devenir aussi bien ce par quoi l’on crée un monde que le monde même que l’on fait être ou que l’on construit. La guerre a été à l’origine de situations extrêmes et a octroyé à la mort une place centrale aussi bien dans les processus de constitution de la réalité que dans l’économie psychique en général. S’appuyant sur le concept – développé par Bataille – de la dépense, cette étude analyse quelques-unes des manières d’imaginer le politique qui, dans l’Afrique contemporaine, accordent une place centrale à la pensée et à la pratique du pouvoir comme pensée et pratique de la guerre. Pour ce faire, elle identifie un ensemble d’éléments structurants des conditions matérielles de la vie dans l’Afrique du dernier quart du xxe siècle. Elle examine ensuite trois formations de l’imaginaire qui, s’enchevêtrant et se relayant sans cesse, dessinent autant de figures de la lutte politique et de la guerre en tant que prise sur les corps, sur les choses et sur la vie.An Essay on Politics as a Form of Expenditure. – The object of this study is to analyse contemporary African conceptions of the political that articulate power as a theory and practice of war. Over the last quarter of the twentieth-century, war has come to assume a central role in the mental representation that contemporary African social actors hold of politics in general, and of sovereignty in particular. War has become just the means whereby one creates a wold, as well as the life-world that is itself created. If war is as much a means to the achievement of sovereignty as a means of exercising the right to kill, what place do new imaginations of politics-as-war accord to life, death and the body

Necropolítica

Este ensaio pressupõe que a expressão máxima da soberania reside, em grandemedida, no poder e na capacidade de ditar quem pode viver e quem deve morrer.1Por isso, matar ou deixar viver constituem os limites da soberania, seus atributosfundamentais. Exercitar a soberania é exercer controle sobre a mortalidade e definir a vida como a implantação e manifestação de poder

Politiques de la vie et violence spéculaire dans la fiction d’Amos Tutuola

Cette étude porte sur la question générale des langages de la vie dans leur rapport avec la violence et la terreur. Elle s’intéresse très précisément à ces manières de vivre qui, soit se situent au-delà du politique en tant que langue vernaculaire (et socialement obligatoire) du lien social, soit en déplacent les frontières au point de reléguer le politique à une zone des confins.S’appuyant sur la fiction d’Amos Tutuola (en particulier sur une lecture iconoclaste de son célèbre The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts), l’auteur tourne le dos aux notions de raison, de vérité et de droit qui ont servi de piliers à la pensée occidentale concernant la vie. En lieu et place, il privilégie celle du fantôme et s’en sert pour envisager le champ fantomal et le pouvoir du même nom, comme cette face du réel qui, loin de participer du domaine des apparences, est constitutive du monde de la vie et de la terreur. L’étude montre comment l’écriture d’Amos Tutuola permet de concevoir l’idée de la vie, de la terreur et du sujet comme fondamentalement liée a celle de l’imagination, du travail et du souvenir.Life Politics and Specular Violence in Amos Tutuola’s Novels. – This article addresses the issue of the languages of life in their relationship with sovereignty, specular violence, and terror. The author demonstrates how (and implicitly critique the ways in which), when it treats the languages of life, Western tradition – more than any other – accords a critical role to the notions of self, truth, and time. Using the metaphor of the mirror, the author bases his critique on a re-reading of The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. This critique rests upon the notion – developed by Tutuola – of the ghost, or better, of the wandering subject. It is argued that the metaphor of the mirror allows us to envisage ghostly power and sovereignty as aspects of the real integral to a world of life and terror rather than tied to a world of appearances. The article also shows how Tutuola’s fiction allows us to conceive of the idea of life, sovereignty, and terror as fundamentally linked to that of the imagination, work, and remembrance

Postcolonial untranslatability: reading Achille Mbembe with Barbara Cassin

Barbara Cassin’s monumental Dictionary of Untranslatables, first published in French in 2004, is an encyclopaedic dictionary of nearly 400 philosophical, literary, aesthetic and political terms which have had a long-lasting impact on thinking across the humanities. Translation is central to any consideration of diasporic linguistic border crossing, and the “Untranslatable” (those words or terms which locate problems of translatability at the heart of contemporary critical theory) has opened up new approaches to philosophically informed translation studies. This article argues that there is a far-reaching resonance between Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables project and Achille Mbembe’s theorization of the postcolonial, precisely insofar as they meet at the crossroads of (un)translatability. Both texts are read performatively, in terms of their respective writing practices and theoretical “entanglements”, one of Mbembe’s key terms

'Genealogical misfortunes': Achille Mbembe's (re-)writing of postcolonial Africa

In his latest work, Sortir de la grande nuit, the Cameroonian social theorist, Achille Mbembe nuances his description of the ontological status of the postcolonial African subject, which he had theorized extensively in his best-known text, On the Postcolony, and at the same time exploits the conceptual resources of a number of Jean-Luc Nancy’s lexical innovations. This recent text is also a reprise of an earlier autobiographical essay, and the gesture of this ‘reinscription’ is critical to our understanding of Mbembe’s status as a contemporary ‘postcolonial thinker’, and the way in which he positions himself within a certain intellectual genealogy of postcolonial theory. Within this trajectory, I argue that we can read fruitfully his relationship to three influential figures: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Ruben Um Nyobè

O tempo que se move

Tradução da introdução do livro De la postcolonie, de Achille Mbembe, por Michelle Cirne

Estudios postcoloniales : ensayos fundamentales

278 p. : il. ; 22 cm.Libro ElectrónicoEste libro presenta una amplia panorámica de los estudios postcoloniales, un campo heterogéneo de prácticas teóricas que se ha ido constituyendo en el mundo académico anglosajón a partir de la mitad de la década de 1980. Se ofrecen aquí traducidos al castellano dos de los textos fundamentales que pueden situarse en el origen de los estudios postcoloniales —el de Gayatri Spivak, «Los Estudios de la Subalternidad. Deconstruyendo la historiografía » (1984), y el de Chandra Talpade Mohanty, «Bajo los ojos de Occidente» (1985). Las intervenciones de Ella Shohat y Stuart Hall documentan la discusión que se desarrolló, con particular intensidad a lo largo de la primera mitad de la década de 1990, sobre el «significado de lo “post” en el término postcolonial». Los artículos de Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, Robert Young, Nirmal Puwar, Sandro Mezzadra y Federico Rahola dan cuenta, por último, de la evolución del debate en los últimos años a partir de distintas perspectivas teóricas y posiciones «geográficas».índice INTRODUCCIÓN. Sandro Mezzadra 15 1. Estudios de la Subalternidad. Deconstruyendo la Historiografía. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 33 2. Bajo los ojos de Occidente. Saber académico y discursos coloniales. Chandra Talpade Mohanty 69 3. Notas sobre lo «postcolonial» Ella Shohat 103 4. ¿Cuándo fue lo postcolonial? Pensar al límite. Stuart Hall 121 5. La historia subalterna como pensamiento político. Dipesh Chakrabarty 145 6. Al borde del mundo. Fronteras, territorialidad y soberanía en África. Achille Mbembe 167 7. Nuevo recorrido por (las) Mitologías Blancas. Robert J. C. Young 197 8. Poses y construcciones melodramáticas. Nirmal Puwar 237 9. La condición postcolonial. Unas notas sobre la cualidad del tiempo histórico en el presente global. Sandro Mezzadra y Federico Rahola 26

Reading for hope: a conversation about texts and method

In a conversation about their shared interests, the authors discuss methodology, reading strategies, and comparative historiographies relating to the recuperation of residues of hope that linger in the wake of failed revolutionary projects. The conversation draws connections between people power (poder popular) in Chile during the Allende era and ideals of participatory democracy circulating in South Africa concurrently (during the so-called Durban moment), discusses in detail the work of Nadine Gordimer, considers the politics of contemporary South African activism, and weighs the usefulness of the insights of thinkers from Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin to David Scott and Achille Mbembe

The Textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical

In your mind’s eye, summon a map of the world—that famous text. There, there is Africa. The familiar, highly visible bulge of head to horn and curve, and the islands as you travel down to the continent’s southernmost point. It is likely that your imagination, like ours, has archived the inherited template of a Mercator projection, the powerful sixteenth-century cartography which remains influential offline and e-nfluential on Google Maps, even though it misleadingly distorts the size of continents. The 30.2 million square kilometers of the African continent appear much smaller than, say, the areas of the US (9.1 million square kilometers), Russia (16.4 million square kilometers), or China (9.4 million square kilometers). In comparison, the corrective cartographic morphing of the GallPeters projection revises the habituated representational geography of the world’s landmasses, showing the relational sizes of continents more accurately.1 Such tensions are not surprising, for the map, we know, is not to be equated with the territory and, in the context of our interest in this special issue in the textualities of the AutobiogrAfrical, divergent cartographies of the same space, drafted from different ideological perspectives, remind us to ask questions about how life narratives might make Africa intelligible. If, as Frances Stonor Saunders observes, “the self is an act of cartography, and every life a study of borders,” then “[e]nvisioning new acts of cartography that give substance and dynamism to the spaces between borders … produces new selves—or, at the very least, new ways of thinking about selfhood—and thus new objects of autobiographical enquiry.” 2 Any map of Africa reflects assumptions about a collective (“Africa”), as well as the political-geographical divisions of nation-states. “Africa” implies degrees of commonality among the (possibly more than) fifty-four countries that comprise the continent. Yet we know the dangers of a single story. Africa is not, after all, a country. Bear in mind, too, that our editorial team is located at the bottom end of the continent in South Afric

‘Wandering and settled tribes’: biopolitics, citizenship, and the racialized migrant

This paper argues that purportedly outdated racial categories continue to resonate in contemporary forms of racialization. I examine the use of metaphors of rootedness and shadows by a contemporary UK migrant advocacy organization and its allies to justify migrant regularization and manage illicit circulation. I argue that the distinction between rooted and rootless peoples draws on the colonial and racial distinctions between wandering and settled peoples. Contemporary notions of citizenship continue to draw upon and activate racial forms of differentiation. Citizenship is thus part of a form of racial governance that operates not only along biological but also social and cultural lines, infusing race into the structures, practices, and techniques of governance