Achille Mbembe comes from Cameroon which was a German colony- and thus which had forced labour- for about thirty years before becoming a League of Nations mandated territory. Some Nigerians, including Mbembe people, migrated to British administered Cameroon about a hundred years ago. However, it was the French who made bigger investments in education and infrastructure. The curse of forced labor was lifted. Cameroon has been politically stable- there have only been two Presidents since 1960. It may not be paradise, but it is a pretty decent place for most of its people.
Achille would have been about three or four years old when it became independent. Having been educated in France, he has some very queer ideas about the nature of the State- postcolonial or otherwise.
In his essay 'Necropolis' he writes-
This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.
This is a stupid assumption. A sovereign state may not permit the death penalty. Equally, no King or Emperor or President can prolong the life of a terminally ill patient.
Currently, one could say Hamas is practicing 'Necropolitics'. They are using murderous terror- as well as the Israeli reaction to it- to make money and gain influence. But, what the Palestinians continue to lose is more than lives. It is land. But control of land- which is what sovereignty is about- has to do with commerce not the cult of killing or being killed. Achille is pointing in the wrong direction. His theory was that death ruled Gaza at a time when Israel occupied it. He was wrong. Death only piled up skulls for its throne there almost twenty years after Israel, very foolishly, withdrew from it such that extortion replaced economics and bullets replaced the ballot. Hamas first terrorized over its own people before seeking to export that terror. Its great achievement is to get Sunni Arabis slaughtered for the greater glory of Shia Iran.
Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty,
Fuck off! A serial killer or a mindless thug is not a 'sovereign'. Hamas's leaders, if any such survive in Gaza, don't have sovereignty though they are still killing or allowing some of their victims to live so terror be prolonged.
The essay distances itself from traditional accounts of sovereignty found in the discipline of political science and the subdiscipline of international relations.
It also distances itself from sanity.
For the most part, these accounts locate sovereignty within the boundaries of the nation-state, within institutions empowered by the state, or within supranational institutions and networks.
This is because sovereignty is a 'term of art' in law and diplomacy. It isn't some shit that bubbled out of the brain of a lunatic like Foucault.
My own approach builds on Michel Foucault’s critique of the notion of sovereignty and its relation to war and biopower in Il faut défendre la société.
Chesterton had previously come up with the notion that the State might institute a National Health Service with the fell purpose of declaring insane and locking up all the good, decent, Christian, Jew-baiting nutjobs. Foucault raises a more fundamental question. Why isn't the President of the Republic scooping out the eyes of virgins and copulating with their empty eye sockets while the Pope, dressed in a gimp suit, looks on laughing maniacally? The answer must be something to do with either neoliberalism or biopolitics. It can't be the case that normal people don't want to torture and kill all and sundry.
To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.
No. To exercise sovereignty is to have a legal immunity for one's actions. If I kidnap and enslave you, I can kill you though I may not be able to keep you alive. But I have no legal immunity for what I do. Suppose I were the King. Even then, if my army is defeated and I am brought to trial, the Court may decide that I had voided my immunity or else it had lapsed for some other reason.
If you don't understand the meaning of a word, you are likely to misuse it and end up babbling nonsense. Suppose I don't know what the word 'Pilates' means. I might say 'To exercise Pilates is to sodomize the contango of the catachrestic constipation of Gayatri Spivak Chakraborty'. People would then think I must be Arjun Appadurai and run away because of the fearsome reputation of his farts.
One could summarize in the above terms what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken control.
Which 'domain' of my life has Sir Keir Starmer taken control? None at all though no doubt I might end up paying a little more or a little less in tax.
But under what practical conditions is the right to kill,
anyone may kill in self-defense
to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?
In a sovereign country under the rule of law, this is a justiciable matter.
Who is the subject of this right?
A right is a collection of Hohfeldian immunities, obligations and entitlements. However, rights are meaningless unless there are justiciable remedies which, long term, are incentive compatible. Foucault understood fuck all. Mbembe was the victim of intense epistemic self-abuse. He should try de-colon-ising his mind so it is less full of shit.
What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer?
A maniac tries to stab you. You smash his head in. The court says you acted in self-defense. You are innocent of murder because your motive was not enmity but the desire to preserve your own life.
Is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective?
That notion is wholly irrelevant. There is a large body of law regarding what is or isn't legal in the conduct of offensive or defensive military operations. However, that law may be ignored because of exigent circumstances or lack of jurisdiction.
War, after all, is as much a means of achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill.
There is no right to kill. There may be an obligation to kill. Thus, suppose I am a soldier ordered to go to the front line and kill the invaders. I can't go to court and say 'I have a right to kill but am too weak and cowardly to do so. Kindly provide a legal remedy such that someone else goes to the front line and does my killing for me.' On the other hand, I might face a court-martial for not having fulfilled my obligation as a soldier.
Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)?
Barring assassination, no place whatsoever is given to the above. It isn't the case that Rishi Sunak attacked Keir Starmer with an axe.
How are they inscribed in the order of power?
Nothing is 'inscribed' in some imaginary shite.
Politics, the Work of Death, and the “Becoming Subject” In order to answer these questions, this essay draws on the concept of biopower and explores its relation to notions of sovereignty (imperium) and the state of exception.
Sovereignty isn't imperium. A sovereign body- e.g. the Crown in Parliament- may delegate authority to a specific person for a specific purpose. That delegated authority is 'imperium'. In practice this means that though 'the Sovereign can do no wrong'- i.e. has unqualified immunity- the person exercising 'imperium' can be impeached and sent to jail. This is a justiciable matter. Currently, SCOTUS seems to be saying the POTUS has unqualified immunity while holding office. This certainly wasn't the conventional view.
Such an analysis raises a number of empirical and philosophical questions
No. Legal concepts raise legal or political questions. Matters of law are sharply distinguished from matters of fact. Philosophers should understand this. Kant imported this distinction and it is part and parcel of the phenomenological tradition in which Fuckwit was supposed to being working. Incidentally, he didn't actually know any history.
I would like to examine briefly. As is well known, the concept of the state of exception has been often discussed in relation to Nazism, totalitarianism, and the concentration/extermination camps.
It is like the 'doctrine of necessity' or 'exigent circumstances'. However, it is unrelated to sovereignty. Had the Third Reich not been extinguished, its servants could have claimed qualified immunity.
The death camps in particular have been interpreted variously as the central metaphor for sovereign and destructive violence and as the ultimate sign of the absolute power of the negative.
What fucking 'absolute power' did Hitler have when he shot himself? Gassing on about Auschwitz is fine if you are Jewish. It isn't if- like Mbembe- you are anti-Zionist.
Says Hannah Arendt: “There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps.
The Brits and the Americans had set up concentration camps in South Africa and the Philippines. It must be said, Stalin and Mao's camps were more efficient.
Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death.”
Fuck off! If we can imagine a nuclear holocaust, the Nazi death camps aren't anything special. My guess is that they were only created so cowardly and lazy people had an excuse not to go fight the Rooskis. Pretending Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals represented an existential threat was a great way of avoiding the bullets of the Red Army. But it was a waste of resources. Still, it must be said, it wasn't the stupidest thing the Nazis did.
Because its inhabitants are divested of political status and reduced to bare life, the camp is, for Giorgio Agamben, “the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized.”
British soldiers in Jap POW camps didn't exactly have a picnic. Africans and Indians find the Holocaust very funny. If you want to kill lots of people, do it cheaply with agricultural implements. Don't bother with gas-chambers. This was the great lesson of India's Partition- not to mention the Rwandan genocide.
In the political-juridical structure of the camp, he adds, the state of exception ceases to be a temporal suspension of the state of law.
The Camps were legal. What was illegal was non-government employees killing Jews for private gain.
According to Agamben, it acquires a permanent spatial arrangement that remains continually outside the normal state of law.
Agamben was wrong. No system of law has ever defined 'bare life'. However, there may be laws in particular countries which place the Government under an obligation to provide certain minimal entitlements. The problem here is that there can be entitlement collapse. In that case, there is no legal remedy.
The aim of this essay is not to debate the singularity of the extermination of the Jews or to hold it up by way of example.
The Jews weren't exterminated. Plenty lived to take a fitting revenge on their tormentors. Millions of Germans had to flee from what had become Polish or Czech or Romanian territory. About a quarter of a million died.
I start from the idea that modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty—
I suppose one could say the Glorious Revolution did inaugurate a new concept of sovereignty as did the American and then the French and then the Russian Revolutions. But then, even in ancient times, new concepts of sovereignty appeared and disappeared.
and therefore of the biopolitical.
Some ancient societies had strict rules of quarantine and other coercive methods to control the spread of diseases.
Disregarding this multiplicity, late-modern political criticism has unfortunately privileged normative theories of democracy and has made the concept of reason one of the most important elements of both the project of modernity and of the topos of sovereignty.
Democracy is bad. It is preventing the President from teaming up with the Pope to tear out the eyes and copulate with the empty eye-sockets of innocent virgins. As for 'Reason', don't make me laugh! How is it 'reasonable' to say the Government should spend tax dollars on stuff useful to society? The fact is, Governments are 'sovereign' and thus should spend all their time chopping pieces off sweet little children. Kant should have explained this. I suppose the Jews got to him. Seriously, the Jews are the pits. Did you know they have a 'Commandment' which says 'thou shall not kill'? How fucked is that?
From this perspective, the ultimate expression of sovereignty is the production of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of free and equal men and women.
No. A demos which is unable to defend itself will soon lose sovereignty. Thus, 'general norms' must be such as permit self-defense. True, some pretend that Democracy has some magical power. But they also don't want to mess with totalitarian Super-powers with plenty of nukes.
These men and women are posited as full
of shit
subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation.
and self-abuse. Also, they should eat their own shit so as to spite Big Food.
Politics, therefore, is defined as twofold: a project of autonomy and the achieving of agreement among a collectivity through communication and recognition.
Some specific brand of politics may define itself as such. The Sultan's sycophant may gas on about how he consults with even the meanest of his subjects. Sometimes, this is actually the case.
This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war.
No. A democratic country may, through no fault of its own, be at war.
In other words, it is on the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason (passion, fantasy) that late-modern criticism has been able to articulate a certain idea of the political, the community, the subject—or, more fundamentally, of what the good life is all about, how to achieve it, and, in the process, to become a fully moral agent.
This is the gravamen of Macaulay's essay on Milton. Since when has an early Victorian been 'late modern'?
Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject and politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere.
No. For people like Habermas, Truth is a regulative concept. It isn't an intrinsic property
The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom,
No. Nobody is so stupid as to think that a guy in prison can't reason.
a key element for individual autonomy.
There are some people who, following 'Clifford's Principle', think it is wrong to do things which you can't justify. But this is silly. Being free means having an immunity from providing justifications for many of your actions.
The romance of sovereignty, in this case, rests on the belief that the subject is the master and the controlling author of his or her own meaning.
No. That is the romance of freedom. But freedom does not endow anyone with unqualified immunity. Also, as the Stoics pointed out long ago, a galley-slave may be freer in his mind than the Emperor.
Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation
It could be, but then it becomes meaningless. The fact is the Emperor, whom the Stoic thinks is unfree, can fuck his own mother or elevate his horse to the Senate with complete impunity- unless the Praetorian Guard turns against him.
The exercise of sovereignty, in turn, consists in society’s capacity for self-creation through recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and imaginary significations.
No. India was not sovereign but much of Indian society was displaying a 'capacity for self-creation'. On the other hand, it is true that only a sovereign people can fart. For pissing, they need to establish the truth of their self-constitution as a micturating subject. It is only in the self-transcendence of biopolitics as the immanentization of zoepolitics that shitheads can say something sillier than Fuckall.
Instead of considering reason as the truth of the subject,
shit is the subject of this nutter's search for truth
we can look to other foundational categories that are less abstract and more tactile, such as life and death.
But piss and shit are even less abstract and more tactile.
Significant for such a project is Hegel’s discussion of the relation between death and the “becoming subject.”
Some people study STEM subjects and thus reduce mortality and increase longevity. That is a useful type of work. Moreover, it can be done even in Societies whose norms are widely different. It is often forgotten that some Hegelians did useful medical and other scientific research. Indeed, Lawvere showed there might be a category theoretical way of representing Hegel's dialectic. Nutters like Foucault and Deleuze remained ignorant of such developments.
Hegel’s account of death centers on a bipartite concept of negativity.
rather than a tripartite concept of eating your own shit.
First, the human negates nature
because that aint a waste of time at all.
(a negation exteriorized in the human’s effort to reduce nature to his or her own needs);
e.g. if you pluck an apple from a tree and then eat that apple what you are actually doing is negating nature. Had you shoved that apple up your bum you would be affirming it.
and second, he or she transforms the negated element through work and struggle.
and shitting.
In transforming nature, the human being creates a world;
Nope. He just changes it a bit.
but in the process, he or she also is exposed to his or her own negativity.
Unless, obviously, you don't eat the apple but shove it up your bum.
Within the Hegelian paradigm, human death is essentially voluntary.
No. Hegel wasn't that stupid. He just meant that people understand that getting a job may expose them to various hazards which might cause them to die prematurely. They learn to deal with it.
It is the result of risks consciously assumed by the subject. According to Hegel, in these risks the “animal” that constitutes the human subject’s natural being is defeated.
Yet, plenty of horses and elephants and camels had gotten used to being used in military operations.
In other words, the human being truly becomes a subject—that is, separated from the animal—in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts death (understood as the violence of negativity).
Plenty of horses were braver than plenty of humans.
It is through this confrontation with death that he or she is cast into the incessant movement of history.
A baby may have no awareness of death. Yet it's life may be cut short by the 'incessant movement of history'.
Becoming subject therefore supposes upholding the work of death.
Unless you are becoming a cat. Meow! That will confuse the shit out of the grim reaper.
To uphold the work of death is precisely how Hegel defines the life of the Spirit.
In other words, becoming spiritual means you stop shitting yourself, or pretending you are a cat, just because you could get hit by a bus today. Still, to be on the safe side, maybe it would be smart to skip Skool. Mummy, I have a tummy ache!
Georges Bataille
crazy, evil, nutter
also offers critical insights into how death structures the idea of sovereignty, the political, and the subject. Bataille displaces Hegel’s conception of the linkages between death, sovereignty, and the subject in at least three ways.
He founded a secret society dedicated to human sacrifice. Apparently, all the members wanted to be the victim, none the executioner. They should have been content shoving apples up their rectums like normal people.
First, he interprets death and sovereignty as the paroxysm of exchange and superabundance—or, to use his own terminology: excess.
The Sun King should copulate with the empty eye socket of his still screaming victim while the Pope, in a gimp suit, stands by laughing maniacally. It is sad that a nice lad from Cameroon had to study and regurgitate that shite.
Biopower and the Relation of Enmity
...What is the relationship between politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency?
India had a State of Emergency. But unlawful killing remained unlawful. What was suspended was habeas corpus. On the other hand, there are regimes where, as a matter of routine, political opponents, or those who might become opponents, are subject to extra-judicial execution.
In Foucault’s formulation of it, biopower appears to function through dividing people into those who must live and those who must die.
How do you force a person to live? Why is it that no Nation has abolished death- at least for the Chief Executive and her family?
Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field
There has never been any such power. Nobody can abolish death or gravity or farting.
—which it takes control of and vests itself in.
Which is why, if only Mitterand had commanded Fuckall to live, he wouldn't have 'died of ignorance'.
This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others.
There was no 'biological caesura' between Germans and Jews or Hutus and Tutsis or 'kulaks' and proletarians. Still, it must be said, where there is a pronounced difference in physical appearance, genocidal policies are more easily implemented.
This is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism. That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable.
I believe this guy teaches in South Africa. Some think Asians and Europeans will soon have to flee that country. But so will many of its Black inhabitants. Look at Zimbabwe.
After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples.
Britain had a South Asian Prime Minister. America has had a half African President and may soon have a half West and half East Indian female POTUS.
Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt
who was very happy to emigrate to Jim Crow America
locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness
plenty of countries had the same experience but weren't shattered.
and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death.
In which case, since all societies face death, all societies would have similar racial politics. Yet, this has never been the case.
Indeed, in Foucault’s terms, racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, “that old sovereign right of death.”
There were polities where the Sovereign could order executions without due process of law. But, as Lord Coke explained to James I, England wasn't such a polity. This didn't mean James was any less a sovereign. As for racism, it either just an impotent type of bigotry or else a form of wage, price and service provision discrimination. Economics explains this. Fuckall couldn't figure out shit.
In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state.
No. Britain was plenty racist but almost all the people who were executed were White British people. By the time a substantial colored population came into existence, the death penalty had been discarded.
It is, he says, “the condition for the acceptability of putting to death.”
Which has declined even in polities where racism increased because of a substantial influx of immigrants.
Foucault states clearly that the sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive)
Since Hohfeld, the correct English translation would be 'immunity'. There is no right to kill, there is an immunity to kill in self-defense under certain circumstances. But this has nothing to do with sovereignty.
and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function;
In which case, since modern states function in very different ways, 'mechanisms of biopower' are anything goes. One may as well speak of 'mechanisms of moonshine'.
indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in modernity.
So can shoving apples up your bum- if that is what floats your boat.
According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill.
He was playing catch up with Stalin.
This state, he claims, made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill.
But the Allies proved better at killing and so Hitler ate a bullet. Incidentally, some polities gave the parent an immunity to kill a disobedient son or daughter. Thus the thing has nothing to do with sovereignty.
By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in organizing the war against its adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war, the Nazi state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which culminated in the project of the “final solution.”
Which wasn't so different from the slaughter of the Armenians. Incidentally, one of Hitler's mentors had protested about those massacres which he witnessed in Ottoman Turkey.
In doing so, it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state.
No. It became the archetype of the conquered and deeply fucked state. But there have been plenty of those.
It has been argued
by cretins who teach worthless shite
that the complete conflation of war and politics (and racism, homicide, and suicide), until they are indistinguishable from one another, is unique to the Nazi state.
Actually, Hitler was trying to imitate Jim Crow America. What he didn't get was that Americans like and understand money. This curbs their inclination to do stupid shit- at least, it used to.
The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life,
is sensible if the guy is trying to kill you and grab all your cool shiny stuff
as a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to life and security—this, I suggest, is one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both early and late modernity itself.
Nope. It is very fucking ancient. There is a tribe in the Andamans which kills anybody who tries to land upon their beaches. This has kept the safe from the infections which have wiped out many other indigenous, historically isolated, peoples.
Recognition of this perception to a large extent underpins most traditional critiques of modernity,
because what would be cool is if we could live in days of yore.
whether they are dealing with nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as the essence of the being; with reification understood as the becoming-object of the human being; or the subordination of everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental rationality.
No. What 'underpins' such critiques is stupidity. Smart peeps study STEM subjects and do useful stuff. Nutters teach nonsense.
According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers and the ovens were the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death,
Fuck off! Nukes are way cooler. Still, I suppose bio-weapons are cheaper. The problem is- as COVID showed- is that our existing international organizations are shit at biopolitics. Under its current head, WHO is playing the race card to further vitiate its own effectiveness.
one of the original features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army).
Ancient Empires had bureaucracies, prisons, armies etc. Moreover, most 'modern Western' countries didn't do the stupid shit that Hitler did.
Having become mechanized, serialized execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent, and rapid procedure.
Where? In the UK? Fuck off.
This development was aided in part by racist stereotypes
The UK had plenty such. Still, after Kristallnacht, the anti-Semitic joke virtually disappeared. My point is that extremely racist English people would still cleave to the law and notions of fair play.
and the nourishing of a class-based racism that, in translating the social conflicts of the industrial world in racial terms, ended up comparing the working classes and “stateless people” of the industrial world to the “savages” of the colonial world.
What is Achille getting at? Supercilious elite politicians expressing disdain for 'deplorables' in the Rust Belt? What he forgets is that 'savages' were slaughtered unless it was more profitable to enslave them. Better yet, you could have a cheap type of indirect rule.
In reality, the links between modernity and terror spring from multiple sources.
No. It springs only from shit inside the brains of shitheads who teach worthless shite.
Some are to be found in the political practices of the ancien régime.
They are only found there by shitheads.
From this perspective, the tension between the public’s passion for blood
Achille noticed that lots of French peeps turn up to cheer as Macron exercises droit de seigneur and then guillotines various members of the Le Pen family.
and notions of justice and revenge is critical.
There is no such tension. Everybody understands that justice isn't revenge. That's why the police won't arrest and sodomize the postman for getting my wife pregnant.
Foucault shows in Discipline and Punish how the execution of the would-be regicide Damiens went on for hours, much to the satisfaction of the crowd.
Why were such practices dispensed with? No all the blame attaches to the bourgeoisie. Increased socio-political unrest in the post-Napoleonic period led to a popular backlash.
Well known is the long procession of the condemned through the streets prior to execution, the parade of body parts—a ritual that became a standard feature of popular violence—and the final display of a severed head mounted on a pike.
An ancient practice. Industrialization meant people had less leisure to turn up for such spectacles.
In France, the advent of the guillotine marks a new phase in the “democratization” of the means of disposing of the enemies of the state.
The 1792 election featured universal manhood suffrage. The guillotine, as first used in that year, was based on ancient Roman device which was revived in the thirteenth century. America could be said to be first out of the gate in terms of democratization. It stuck with the good old hangman's rope.
Indeed, this form of execution that had once been the prerogative of the nobility
No. Nobles got to have their heads cut off with a sword. On the other hand, the Scottish Maiden was sometimes used on noblemen.
is extended to all citizens.
Oooh! We get to be killed in a real fancy manner! And they say there is no God.
In a context in which decapitation is viewed as less demeaning than hanging, innovations in the technologies of murder aim not only at “civilizing” the ways of killing.
Why the scare quotes?
They also aim at disposing of a large number of victims in a relatively short span of time. At the same time, a new cultural sensibility emerges in which killing the enemy of the state is an extension of play.
That sensibility was old at the time of Christ's crucifixion.
More intimate, lurid, and leisurely forms of cruelty appear.
Like being tickled to death by bunny-girls.
But nowhere is the conflation of reason and terror so manifest as during the French Revolution.
Because the French were stupider than the Brits whose Glorious Revolution was bloodless.
During the French Revolution, terror is construed as an almost necessary part of politics.
Till those sponsoring it were killed. It turned out France didn't need a King. It needed a fucking Emperor.
An absolute transparency is claimed to exist between the state and the people.
So long as the Emperor has no clothes.
As a political category, “the people” is gradually displaced from concrete reality to rhetorical figure.
It was always only the latter. There are still one or two 'Peoples' Republics' around.
As David Bates has shown,
he isn't known as Master Bates for nothing.
the theorists of terror believe it possible to distinguish between authentic expressions of sovereignty and the actions of the enemy.
Everybody can do so already. True, the French sometimes get confused and surrender to the invader. But that is because they eat too much smelly cheese.
They also believe it possible to distinguish between the “error” of the citizen and the “crime” of the counterrevolutionary in the political sphere.
Again this is easy enough to do. Guys you aren't killing made 'errors'. Guys you are killing are criminals. This scares the shit out of those in error.
Terror thus becomes a way of marking aberration in the body politic, and politics is read both as the mobile force of reason and as the errant attempt at creating a space where “error” would be reduced, truth enhanced, and the enemy disposed of.
Very true. If you put on a fright mask and leap out at people saying 'Boo!' you will have disposed of the enemy. Zelensky could learn a thing or two from this nutter.
Finally, terror is not linked solely to the utopian belief in the unfettered power of human reason.
Human reason understands that terror is easily dealt with by killing those who use it. What matters is money. Killing people can be an expensive business. Napoleon killed lots of people but England prevailed because it could pay other countries to fight the French.
It is also clearly related to various narratives of mastery and emancipation,
only because its Mummy's alcoholic sister got hitched to those narratives while on a bender at Las Vegas.
most of which are underpinned by Enlightenment understandings of truth and error, the “real” and the symbolic.
The Enlightenment's understanding was that Copernicus and Galileo and Newton were right. The Pope had shit for brains.
Marx, for example, conflates labor (the endless cycle of production and consumption required for the maintenance of human life) with work (the creation of lasting artifacts that add to the world of things).
No. Marx chose to concentrate on the production of goods, not services.
Labor is viewed as the vehicle for the historical self-creation of humankind.
Marx thought scarcity would disappear. He was wrong for a reason first explained by Malthus.
The historical self-creation of humankind is
shit people may have believed before they heard about Darwin
itself a life-and-death conflict,
No. It was life and life conflict. Nobody actually gets into a wrestling match with a fucking corpse.
that is, a conflict over what paths should lead to the truth of history:
Time. That's the path. The truth it leads to is that historians are as stupid as shit. Those are the good ones. The bad ones are crazy.
the overcoming of capitalism
by slavery in a Gulag
and the commodity form and the contradictions associated with both.
The contradiction is that Capitalism is supposed to be very evil and yet it pays good wages and makes cool, shiny, stuff.
According to Marx, with the advent of communism and the abolition of exchange relations, things will appear as they really are; the “real” will present itself as it actually is,
i.e. Marx would stop drinking so much and see that flying pink elephants don't actually exist
and the distinction between subject and object or being and consciousness will be transcended.
By stupidity.
But by making human emancipation dependent upon the abolition of commodity production,
rather than the abolition of gravity
Marx blurs the all-important
i.e. totally bogus
divisions among the man-made realm of freedom,
which doesn't exist
the nature-determined realm of necessity,
which is merely a way of speaking about what exists
and the contingent in history.
which is everything.
The commitment to the abolition of commodity production and the dream of direct and unmediated access to the “real” make these processes—the fulfillment of the so-called logic of history and the fabrication of humankind—almost necessarily violent processes.
Nope. The thing might appear in a clockwork fashion. But Marx himself thought Revolutions were super-cool.
As shown by Stephen Louw,
a South African who teaches in Sharjah
the central tenets of classical Marxism leave no choice but to “try to introduce communism by administrative diktat, which, in practice, means that social relations must be decommodified forcefully.”
by robbing and killing people. The trouble is they may kill you first. Still, it must be said, Slavery is cheaper than Capitalism. Why pay your workers if you can simply whip them or kill them?
Historically, these attempts have taken such forms as labor militarization, the collapse of the distinction between state and society, and revolutionary terror.
Just say slavery and genocide and be done with it.
It may be argued that they aimed at the eradication of the basic human condition of plurality.
or being too stupid or unlucky to have run the fuck away
Indeed, the overcoming of class divisions, the withering away of the state, the flowering of a truly general will presuppose
not being killed or, if you are useless, forced to teach stupid shit to cretins.
a view of human plurality as the chief obstacle to the eventual realization of a predetermined telos of history.
The chief obstacle to achieving stupid shit is the fact that it is stupid shit.
In other words, the subject of Marxian modernity is, fundamentally, a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty through the staging of a fight to the death.
with boredom- if you are obliged to listen to shite of this sort. Apparently Kojeve told the French about the Master/Slave dialectic. He himself became a Eurocrat.
Just as with Hegel, the narrative of mastery and emancipation here is clearly linked to a narrative of truth and death.
Unless a narrative of getting rich prevails.
Terror and killing become the means of realizing the already known telos of history.
ISIS certainly believes so.
Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery,
ISIS reintroduced slavery.
which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation.
Slavery is prehistoric. Biopolitical experimentation includes such things as the domestication of animals and selective breeding of food crops.
In many respects, the very structure of the plantation system
which was based on the slave run estates in Portugal and Spain.
and its aftermath manifests the emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.
Nope. Slavery was the rule, not the exception for Africa and most of Asia. Portugal only abolished slavery in 1869 a little after it was suppressed in Cameroon.
This figure is paradoxical here for two reasons. First, in the context of the plantation, the humanity of the slave appears as the perfect figure of a shadow.
Africans enslaved Africans and sold them to the highest bidder. Did they indeed not recognize the humanity of the slave? My belief is that the thing was purely economic. But then so was European or Chinese or any other type of slavery.
Indeed, the slave condition results from a triple loss: loss of a “home,” loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political status.
Which is what happened to most women all over the world when they got married. Dicks are very evil. Ban them immediately.
This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether).
Why stop there? Why not say the immortal soul of the slave become the property of Beelzebub?
To be sure, as a political-juridical structure, the plantation is a space where the slave belongs to a master. It is not a community if only because by definition, a community implies the exercise of the power of speech and thought.
Which is why babies aren't part of families or communities. The same is true of dumb people or those who are in a coma.
As Paul Gilroy
who was a joke figure to us darkies
says, “The extreme patterns of communication defined by the institution of plantation slavery dictate that we recognize the anti-discursive and extralinguistic ramifications of power at work in shaping communicative acts.
Sociologists talk funny. Yet the lad went to University College School which mostly turns out barristers and Merchant Wankers. Still, his Mum was from Guyana so he could pretend to be all Rasta or Rude Bwoy.
Achille gases on about the sufferings of the plantation slaves. What he doesn't mention is that his own ancestors had sold some such into bondage.
In what follows I am mindful of the fact that colonial forms of sovereignty were always fragmented. They were complex, “less concerned with legitimizing their own presence and more excessively violent than their European forms.”
Nope. They were less so. They didn't bother with burning witches or heretics or, at a later point, Gulags and Gas Chambers.
As importantly, “European states never aimed at governing the colonial territories with the same uniformity and intensity as was applied to their own populations.”
Very true. Macron is killing and sodomizing the eye sockets of millions of Parisians. Things are better in Martinique.
In The Racial State (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2002), David Theo Goldberg
a White South African
argues that from the nineteenth century on, there are at least two historically competing traditions of racial rationalization: naturism (based on an inferiority claim) and historicism (based on the claim of the historical “immaturity”—and therefore “educability”—of the natives).
Some Boers claimed to have got to Jo'berg before the fucking Bantu. Anyway, God wanted the darkie to serve the drunken Dutchman.
In a private communication (23 August 2002), he argues that these two traditions played out differently
maybe in South Africa.
when it came to issues of sovereignty, states of exception, and forms of necropower.
very true. Historicist Boers would suck themselves off when dealing with issues of necropower. Naturists would get naked and try to snort the stuff.
In his view, necropower can take multiple forms:
Whereas narcopower is based on selling drugs and buying guns.
the terror of actual death; or a more “benevolent” form—the result of which is the destruction of a culture in order to “save the people” from themselves.
Destroying stuff costs money. Let a country turn Socialist and destroy itself.
Arendt develops the thesis that there is a link between national-socialism and traditional imperialism.
She was too stupid to understand that the German General staff was pursuing the same policy as the Emperor who was a traditional Imperialist. An Emperor is a dude with lots of Kings, Princes, Dukes, Counts etc. under him.
According to her, the colonial conquest revealed a potential for violence previously unknown.
Large parts of Germany and Arendt's ancestral Palestine had been colonies of the Romans. They weren't exactly long haired hippies.
What one witnesses in World War II is the extension to the “civilized” peoples of Europe of the methods previously reserved for the “savages.”
No. The Europeans used superior tech which they had already extensively used on each other. On the other hand some of the more discerning savages were able to turn some Europeans into really tasty stew.
That the technologies which ended up producing Nazism
No technology did. Any bunch of nutters can be Nazi.
should have originated in the plantation or in the colony
Plantations or Colonies had to make a profit. Otherwise they were abandoned.
or that, on the contrary—Foucault’s thesis—Nazism and Stalinism did no more than amplify a series of mechanisms that already existed in Western European social and political formations (subjugation of the body,
Doctors are very evil. They say you should use a condom if you have butt-sex with loads of people. The only way to prove them wrong is have a lot of butt-sex and then politely but firmly refuse to die of AIDS.
health regulations,
Mummy refused to let me eat my own poo. She is worse than Hitler.
social Darwinism,
which is not compatible with Neo-Darwinism
eugenics,
championed by Swedish liberals like the Myrdals
medico-legal theories on heredity, degeneration, and race)
pseudo-science
is, in the end, irrelevant.
Because nutters like Fuckall are irrelevant.
A fact remains, though:
This nutter does not know any facts.
in modern philosophical thought and European political practice and imaginary, the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus)
No. The colony was a place where the colonizer provided a Justice system- for a fee. However, as in British India, some Princes were sovereign and thus above the law (which is what legibus solutus means). In practice, however, they might be deposed and exiled if they kept knifing their Mummies.
and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end.”
Which war hasn't ended?
Indeed, such a view corresponds to Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty at the beginning of the twentieth century, namely, the power to decide on the state of exception.
Schmitt was wrong. The Sovereign does not have to decide this. His Prime Minister or Chancellor or Army Chief may do so in his name. Over the course of the Great War, the Kaiser was reduced to a cypher.
To properly assess the efficacy of the colony as a formation of terror, we need to
tell stupid lies
take a detour into the European imaginary itself as it relates to the critical issue of the domestication of war
an oxymoron. Why not speak of the 'cute kittens of terror' or the 'waggly puppy dog tail of despair'?
and the creation of a European juridical order (Jus publicum Europaeum).
That is a very recent development and may be rolled back.
At the basis of this order were two key principles.
Achille will now say the stupidest shit possible.
The first postulated the juridical equality of all states.
Nonsense! Only if there is a court with equal jurisdiction and power over two different parties can they be said to have juridical equality.
This equality was notably applied to the right to wage war (the taking of life).
There is no such right. However, there may be an immunity. If you wage war and win and no combination of other countries can fuck with you, then you have an immunity. Otherwise, a coalition of stronger powers can force you to give up conquered territory. Economic or diplomatic sanctions may have the same effect.
The right to war meant two things.
There's nothing stopping any nutter from declaring war on America or Chia or Drugs or whatever.
On the one hand, to kill or to conclude peace was recognized as one of the preeminent functions of any state.
Only in the sense that hairdressers recognize that one of the preeminent functions of postal workers has to do with trying to fight off crazy people who try to knife them or else consenting to get knifed and bleed to death.
It went hand in hand with the recognition of the fact that no state could make claims to rule outside of its borders.
There was and is no such recognition. Countries are welcome to lease territory or permit various types of extra-territoriality.
But conversely, the state could recognize no authority above it within its own borders.
The State could recognize anything at all- God, the teachings of the Buddha or Marx- as above itself.
On the other hand, the state, for its part, undertook to “civilize” the ways of killing and to attribute rational objectives to the very act of killing.
No. The State was pressurized to enact or enforce laws of various kinds regarding repugnant customs or cruel and unusual punishments.
The second principle related to the territorialization of the sovereign state, that is, to the determination of its frontiers within the context of a newly imposed global order.
Nobody has succeeded in 'imposing' a global order. Achille hasn't noticed. Anyway, some countries coexist without agreed borders. Achille is babbling ignorant nonsense
In this context, the Jus publicum rapidly assumed the form of a distinction between, on the one hand, those parts of the globe available for colonial appropriation and, on the other, Europe itself (where the Jus publicum was to hold sway).
Nonsense! Jus publicum was restricted to specific jurisdictions which could- as with the Holy Roman Empire- involve entities under the control of different powerful Monarchs. But nobody could stop Prussia taking Schleswig Holstein or Alsace Lorraine.
This distinction, as we will see, is crucial in terms of assessing the efficacy of the colony as a terror formation.
It is nonsense. This cunt is pretending Europeans were terribly nice to each other. Then they got colonies and started doing terrorist shit. This caused Nazism.
Suppose this nutter is right. In that case, Europe needs to deport every darky or Asiatic. Clearly, Europeans only become nasty when they come in contact with non-Europeans.
Under Jus publicum, a legitimate war is,
constitutional. Thus suppose some French or British dude started a war in some far off place without the permission of the French or British government, then that war would be illegitimate. The Jameson raid is an example.
to a large extent, a war conducted by one state against another or, more precisely, a war between “civilized” states.
Nonsense! There was a notion of a 'terra nullis' where anybody was welcome to grab territory and establish a government. The home country might agree to annex that territory. But, they might refuse.
The centrality of the state in the calculus of war
arises only if the State is in fact central to that war. It may be, but then again it may not.
derives from the fact that the state is the model of political unity,
it may be or, it may be a model of disunity.
a principle of rational organization,
the Government is 'rationally organized'? Are you kidding me?
the embodiment of the idea of the universal,
Nothing is the embodiment of any idea.
and a moral sign.
as opposed to an obscene gesture.
In the same context, colonies are similar to the frontiers.
When Macron goes to Martinique, he scalps Red Skins and kills buffalo.
They are inhabited by “savages.”
The 13 colonies were inhabited by very savage Red Indians who held a Tea Party in Boston. George III was crazy to want to continue to rule over those cannibals.
The colonies are not organized in a state form and have not created a human world.
How shitty was the Cameroon in which this dude was born?
Their armies do not form a distinct entity, and their wars are not wars between regular armies. They do not imply the mobilization of sovereign subjects (citizens) who respect each other as enemies. They do not establish a distinction between combatants and noncombatants, or again between an “enemy” and a “criminal.”
In other words, Bleck peeps are mindless apes. They like to eat White peeps. Best steer clear of them.
Achille's big shtick is 'late modern colonial occupation'- which does not exist.
Late-modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early-modern occupation,
because it does not exist.
particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical, and the necropolitical.
but this cunt spent the first half of his essay saying they did fucking exist 500 years ago in European colonies in the Canaries, the Caribbean etc.
The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine.
Really? In that case there must be some other Jewish state which sent out colonists to Israel. Oh. Right. Achille is talking about the Jew-nited States not to mention the Kike-dom of Great Britain and the Rabbi-ublic of France.
Here, the colonial state derives its fundamental claim of sovereignty and legitimacy from the authority of its own particular narrative of history and identity.
Which colonial state did so? Not Britain. Viceroy Sahib didn't gas on about how the ancient Druids were very sweet and nice. Nor did the Dutch or the Portuguese or the French.
This narrative is itself underpinned by the idea that the state has a divine right to exist;
Hamas thinks Palestine has no divine right to exist.
the narrative competes with another for the same sacred space. Because the two narratives are incompatible and the two populations are inextricably intertwined, any demarcation of the territory on the basis of pure identity is quasi impossible.
Israel came into existence at the same time as Pakistan. There was an exchange of population within the wider Middle East. Sadly, the Palestinians made themselves unpopular in some Arab countries. They can't have a state of their own because they are disunited and have made themselves less and less economically viable. Still, there will always be money available for Palestinian 'pay for slay'. The Israelis will compensate themselves with land.
.. To return to Fanon’s spatial reading of colonial occupation, the late-modern colonial occupation in Gaza
that would end about four years after Achille wrote this.
and the West Bank presents three major characteristics in relation to the working of the specific terror formation I have called necropower.
Sadly, it is Palestinians, not Israelis, who have focused most on terrorism rather than doing useful stuff and making money that way.
First is the dynamics of territorial fragmentation, the sealing off and expansion of settlements.
Why do so many people want to seal themselves off from suicide bombers? Don't they understand that this is terrorism?
The objective of this process is twofold: to render any movement impossible and to implement separation along the model of the apartheid state.
Israelis are smart. Why the fuck would they take a failed state as their model?
The occupied territories are therefore divided into a web of intricate internal borders and various isolated cells.
The Israelis, very foolishly, gave up Gaza which is why they are now having to expend a lot of blood and treasure on it. I suppose this sorry story will end with an exchange of nukes and genetically engineered viruses.
According to Eyal Weizman,
a professor of 'spatial &visual culture'. I suppose he is an architect of some particularly stupid sort.
by departing from a planar division of a territory and embracing a principle of creation of three-dimensional boundaries across sovereign bulks, this dispersal and segmentation clearly redefines the relationship between sovereignty and space.
This is because of you claim sovereignty over not some portion of space but some period of time, people laugh at you. It is possible that I am the Rajah of Cooch Nahin who for some reason appears as a drunken hobo. It is not possible that I am the Pharoah of the Twenty Seventh Century.
For Weizman, these actions constitute “the politics of verticality.”
such naches his mother must be getting! Maybe the guy is a shorty. Tall people would come and fart in his face. Mummy told him the same thing used to happen to Golda Meyer.
The resultant form of sovereignty might be called “vertical sovereignty.” Under a regime of vertical sovereignty, colonial occupation operates through schemes of over- and underpasses, a separation of the airspace from the ground.
In Cameroon, airspace is the same as ground space. That's why, if you run really fast, you will reach the moon.
The ground itself is divided between its crust and the subterrain.
In Cameroon, you can easily sprint down into the center of the earth.
Colonial occupation is also dictated by the very nature of the terrain and its topographical variations (hilltops and valleys, mountains and bodies of water).
This is true of all types of human or animal occupation.
Thus, high ground offers strategic assets not found in the valleys (effectiveness of sight, self-protection, panoptic fortification that generates gazes to many different ends).
This proves that Capitalists who live in penthouses in skyscrapers are subjecting us to colonial occupation. Also, those bastards are preventing us running to the moon or sprinting to the center of the earth. Why are they being so mean?
Says Weizman: “Settlements could be seen as urban optical devices for surveillance and the exercise of power.”
So could penthouse apartments.
Under conditions of late-modern colonial occupation, surveillance is
by satellite or CCTV.
both inward and outward-oriented, the eye acting as weapon and vice versa.
Very true. Your knife can see for you. Why don't blind peeps understand this? Is it because their minds have been colonially occupied by late-modern capitalism.
Instead of the conclusive division between two nations across a boundary line, “the organization of the West Bank’s particular terrain has created multiple separations, provisional boundaries, which relate to each other through surveillance and control,” according to Weizman.
This seems to be working well enough. Evacuating Gaza, on the other hand, was a bad idea which Netanyahu opposed.
Under these circumstances, colonial occupation is not only akin to control, surveillance, and separation, it is also tantamount to seclusion.
There are plenty of gated communities in the UK and the US. This proves they are colonially occupied.
... This new moment is one of global mobility. An important feature of the age of global mobility is that military operations and the exercise of the right to kill are no longer the sole monopoly of states, and the “regular army” is no longer the unique modality of carrying out these functions.
The State has a monopoly of certain types of legitimate offensive violence leading to death. But that is an immunity to kill not a right to kill.
The claim to ultimate or final authority in a particular political space is not easily made.
I can claim authority over Cameroon easily enough. The Cameroonians will laugh at me. That's cool with me provided they buy me a drink.
Instead, a patchwork of overlapping and incomplete rights to rule
these are claims. A right has a remedy under a vinculum juris.
emerges, inextricably superimposed and tangled, in which different de facto juridical instances are geographically interwoven and plural allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties, and enclaves abound.
Criminal gangs may indeed carve up slum neighborhoods in this manner.
“Remote as they are from their ‘targets,’ scurrying over those they hit too fast to witness the devastation they cause and the blood they spill, the pilots-turned-computer-operators hardly ever have a chance of looking their victims in the face and to survey the human misery they have sowed,” adds Bauman. “Military professionals of our time see no corpses and no wounds. They may sleep well; no pangs of conscience will keep them awake”
Hamas sleeps like a baby after raping and beheading kids. It is stupid to speak about Israeli Necropolitics when it is its enemies who have a cult of death and martyrdom.
Let’s take Africa as an example. Here, the political economy of statehood dramatically changed over the last quarter of the twentieth century.
It got a bit worse before getting a bit better unless the whole place turned to shit.
Many African states can no longer claim a monopoly on violence
more particularly if the Soviets flooded the place with Kalashnikovs.
and on the means of coercion within their territory. Nor can they claim a monopoly on territorial boundaries.
Anyone can claim anything they like.
Coercion itself has become a market commodity.
Mercenaries have always existed.
Military manpower is bought and sold on a market in which the identity of suppliers and purchasers means almost nothing.
On what market does Achille sell his shite?
Urban militias, private armies, armies of regional lords, private security arms, and state armies all claim the right to exercise violence or to kill.
Only the Dictator's army should kill people- right?
Neighboring states or rebel movements lease armies to poor states. Nonstate deployers of violence supply two critical coercive resources: labor and minerals. Increasingly, the vast majority of armies are composed of citizen soldiers, child soldiers, mercenaries, and privateers.
Okay. We get it. Africans are savages. Europe must deport all darkies. Israel can fend for itself because it has discovered a way to separate 'air-space' from 'ground space'. Jews are clever that way.
Alongside armies have therefore emerged what, following Deleuze and Guattari, we could refer to as war machines.
They emerged thousands of years ago.
War machines are made up of segments of armed men that split up or merge with one another depending on the tasks to be carried out and the circumstances.
No. That's just a bunch of troops. A war machine needs direction, intelligence, and 'sinews'- i.e. resources.
Polymorphous and diffuse organizations, war machines are characterized by their capacity for metamorphosis.
In the opinion of a couple of shitheads. War is a serious business. Smart people study it.
Their relation to space is mobile.
Everybody's relation to space is mobile.
Sometimes, they enjoy complex links with state forms (from autonomy to incorporation).
Everybody can enjoy complex links with state forms- I myself frequently receive stuff in the mail.
The state may, of its own doing, transform itself into a war machine.
why not a Sex Machine like James Brown?
It may moreover appropriate to itself an existing war machine or help to create one.
No. States have armies unless, like Costa Rica, they abolish them after a Civil War. Still there will be some sort of National Guard or Paramilitary Police or Border Security force. Failed or failing States may only have warrior bands because the Army has collapsed.
The ways of killing do not themselves vary much. In the case of massacres in particular, lifeless bodies are quickly reduced to the status of simple skeletons.
Unless we are cremated, this is what will happen to all of us. Nice biopolitics would ban death. Also farting.
Their morphology henceforth inscribes them in the register of undifferentiated generality: simple relics of an unburied pain,
Only if people are too lazy to bury the dead.
empty, meaningless corporealities, strange deposits plunged into cruel stupor. In the case of the Rwandan genocide—in which a number of skeletons were at least preserved in a visible state, if not exhumed—what is striking is the tension between the petrification of the bones and their strange coolness on one hand,
what is strange is fondling skeletons. Is it a French thing?
and on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something.
They are dead. No doubt because they weren't stubborn enough to resist dying.
In these impassive bits of bone, there seems to be no ataraxia:
If those bones could speak they might object to those dude fondling them in a manner far from serene.
nothing but the illusory rejection of a death that has already occurred.
Those bones are rejecting your attempt to fuck them in the ass. This is because they don't got no ass. Death will do that to a skeleton.
In other cases, in which physical amputation replaces immediate death, cutting off limbs opens the way to the deployment of techniques of incision, ablation, and excision that also have bones as their target.
No. Only if your intention is to chop off a gangrened limb would 'bones be a target'. On the other hand, maybe this bonehead thinks the heart is a bone.
The traces of this demiurgic surgery persist for a long time,
The demiurge creates the universe. Surgery is about removing or transplanting stuff.
in the form of human shapes that are alive, to be sure, but whose bodily integrity has been replaced by pieces, fragments, folds, even immense wounds that are difficult to close.
Achille's head was chopped off and replaced by a cabbage.
Their function is to keep before the eyes of the victim
Achille's head is carried around so he can watch his new cabbage head is getting up to. Sometimes it falls off- which, to be candid, is hilarious.
—and of the people around him or her—the morbid spectacle of severing.
Achille's family too are forced to watch as more and more of his limbs are lopped off only to be replaced by vegetables of various descriptions. No wonder he babbles on about 'Necropolitics'. The poor fellow should be on a mortuary slab. It is very cruel of the South Africans to employ him as a Professor.
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