Achille Mbembe Quotes

How this is possible is, first, by being, literally, several in a single body. “We are twelve in my body. We are packed like sardines.” In other words, the being that I am exists each time in several modes—or, let us say, several beings, which, although sometimes mutually exclusive, are nevertheless inside one another.

The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.

In this respect, to convert is to locate oneself in a particular temporality and duration. This duration is that of the inexhaustible future constituted by the infinite, the time of eternity, the time that inaugurates divine existence and its extension in the redemption of the body; thus its final point of completion—if there is one—is the parousia.

...music has always been a celebration of the ineradicability of life.

If one is not a human being, what is one?

Tout étant devenu une source potentielle de capitalisation, le capital s’est fait monde, un fait hallucinatoire de dimension planétaire, producteur, sur une échelle élargie, de sujets à la fois calculateurs, fictionnels et délirants.

Not that there is no distress. Terrible movements, laws that underpin and organize tragedy and genocide, gods that present themselves in the guise of death and destitution, monsters lying in wait, corpses coming and going on the tide, infernal powers, threats of all sorts, abandonments, events without response, monstrous couplings, blind waves, impossible paths, terrible forces that every day tear human beings, animals, plants, and things from their sphere of life and condemn them to death: all these are present. But what is missing, far from the dead ends, random observations, and false dilemmas (Afrocentrism vs. Africanism), is any sign of radical questioning. For what Africa as a concept calls fundamentally into question is the manner in which social theory has hitherto reflected on the problem (observable also elsewhere) of the collapse of worlds, their fluctuations and tremblings, their about-turns and disguises, their silences and murmurings. Social theory has failed also to account for time as lived, not synchronically or diachronically, but in its multiplicity and simultaneities, its presence and absences, beyond the lazy categories of permanence and change beloved of so many historians.

As Elias Canetti reminds us, the survivor is the one who, having stood in the path of death, having known many deaths and having been amid the fallen, is still alive. Or, more precisely, the survivor is the one who has taken on a whole pack of enemies and managed not only to escape alive but to kill his attackers. This is why killing is the lowest form of survival. Canetti points out that in the logic of survival, “each man is the enemy of every other.” Even more radically, in the logic of survival the horror experienced upon seeing death turns into the satisfaction that the dead person is another. It is the death of the Other, the Other’s physical presence as a corpse, that makes the survivor feel unique. And each enemy killed makes the survivor feel more secure.

Historically, Apartheid‘s failure to secure, once and for all, impenetrable frontiers between a plurality of different fleshes demonstrated a posteriori the limits of the colonial project of separation. Short of its total extermination, the Other is no longer external to us. It is within us, in the double figure of the alter ego, each mortally exposed to the other and to itself.

To this day, most attempts to stage the history of transatlantic slavery in museums have stood out through their vacuity. In them, the slave appears, at best, as the appendix to another history, a citation at the bottom of a page devoted to someone else, to other places, to other things. For that matter, were the figure of the slave really to enter into the museum, such as it exists nowadays, the museum would automatically cease to be.

Enquanto não se puser fim à funesta ideia da desigualdade das raças e da seleção entre diferentes espécies humanas, a luta dos povos de origem africana por aquilo que poderíamos chamar de “igualdade das partes” — e, portanto, dos direitos e das responsabilidades —, continuará a ser uma luta legítima.

Alone, humanity has no future. —Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right to Breathe

Achille Mbembe afirma que o colonialismo foi um projeto de universalização, cuja finalidade era “inscrever os colonizados no espaço da modernidade”.5

Whether produced by outsiders or by indigenous people, end-of-the-century discourses about Africa are not necessarily applicable to their object. Their nature, their stakes, and their functions are situated elsewhere. They are deployed only by replacing this object, creating it, erasing it, decomposing and multiplying it. Thus there is no description of Africa that does not involve destructive and mendacious functions.