6. Radical Contemporaneity

Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past: Introduction” in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, 151

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

In his famous essay “Necropolitics,” Mbembe argued that Foucault’s concept of biopolitics is no longer sufficient to explain contemporary relations of power. Unlike biopolitics that govern from the perspective of the production and regulation of life, necropolitics regulate life from the perspective of a production and regulation of death (in Latin: necro). The notion of “necropolitics” refers to life reduced to its bare existence, in other words, to life at the verge of death. This new logic of capital and its processes of geopolitical demarcation of world zones is based on the mobilization of the war machine. While Mbembe articulated the concept of necropolitics to explain a process of total subjection in Africa, Gržinić was the first to use necropolitics for explaining and understanding processes in Europe.