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Reading the recent English translation of Mbembe's *Politiques de l'inimitié* because my French was not good enough to really process the 2016 French version, due to Mbembe's lyricism and theoretical complexity, and have some thoughts...
The first is that it is funny, but not unexpected, that the English translation named the book *Necropolitics* due to the inclusion of that well-known essay as the third chapter…
Also, it's weird that the essay's inclusion in the third chapter is identical to the essay, and doesn't try to hide it (even referring to itself as an essay rather than a chapter). I was kind of hoping for a rewrite that fit the book but oh well…
There's some really great insights about the current conjuncture in the chapters surrounding the Necropolitical one, and it does extend the concept of the necropolitical before and after that chapter…
There's also a really great passage that indicates how ant*-natal•sm is dominant power expressing itself necropolitically!
But I was again reminded of how weirdly ignorant Mbembe is to Marxist theory despite talking about it as if he knows it. And this is because, as with the old Necropolitics essay that became the third chapter, he simply adopts without any criticism Arendt's critique of Marxism…
Which is known to be a suspect critique, by someone who opposed the Civil Rights movement to be clear, and is suspect because she complains that Marx doesn't look into the future and recognize her own categories of "labour" and "work". But Mbembe treats this critique as correct…
And then embarks on this really weird dismissal of Marxism that is overdetermined by some very suspect sources, as well as an antipathy to revolutionary violence *despite his apparent love of Fanon*. Some weird fucking liberalism shows up in these areas.
In any case, so much of contemporary radical theory is comprised of a disjunction between some really important radical insights and a refusal to reject core tenets of liberalism…
Often the disjunction is disorienting. Mbembe produces a radical critique of the contemporary situation in one sense, that could be directly in line with a revolutionary ethos because he thinks the logic of the plantation and its connection to neo-colonialism…
But when it comes to the question of "what is to be done" he falls back unto an antipathy of revolutionary politics he has inherited from the Foucault/Arendt/Agamben he has read, regardless of the Fanon he seeks to celebrate, and suppresses the very questions he raises.
