The Body in the Field of Tensions between Biopolitics and Necropolitics
Analyzing the Future of the Prosthetic Body in the 21st Century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.44.2.02Keywords:
body, biopolitics, necropolitics, prosthetic body, tensions, 21st century, futureAbstract
The article contributes to the understanding of how societal conflict, aggression, and racism are intertwined with the concepts of the body and necropolitics. Achille Mbembe’s exploration of historical conflicts refers to the way in which states and other necropolitical entities exert control over life and death. Persistent conflicts reflect a form of necropolitics in which certain groups are subjected to violence and death as a means of maintaining power. Frank B. Wilderson III’s analysis of aggression towards Black individuals reveals how the body, particularly the Black body, is subjected to policing and violence. This speaks to the concept of necropolitics as it highlights how certain bodies are deemed expendable or “killable” in society, and how the policing of Blackness can be seen as a form of controlling and subjugating these bodies. The rationalization of racist acts against meticulously selected groups and bodies that are highly racialized in contemporary necrocapitalism illustrates how the politics of death and violence are used to maintain class and racist hierarchies and control over different bodies.
Downloads
References
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Amnesty International. “ ‘I Can’t Breathe’: The Refrain That Reignited a Movement.” Published June 30, 2020. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/i-cantbreathe-refrain-reignited-movement/.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Brown, Kimberly Juanita. The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Burnett, Scott. “Giving Back the Land: Whiteness and Belonging in Contemporary South Africa.” PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2018. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.18854.14401.
Burnett, Scott, and John E. Richardson. “ ‘Breeders for Race and Nation’: Gender, Sexuality and Fecundity in Post-war British Fascist Discourse, Patterns of Prejudice.” Patterns of Prejudice 55, no. 4 (2021): 331–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2021.2011088.
Chaney, Michael A. Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity to Antebellum Narrative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.
Colombo, Pamela. Espacios de desaparición: Vivir e imaginar los lugares de la violencia estatal (Tucumán, 1975–1983). Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2017.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Originally published as Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952). Second English translation by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008).
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Originally published as Les damnés de la terre (Paris: François Maspero, 1961).
Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003.
Freud, Sigmund. “Our Attitude towards Death.” In On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works (1914–1916), edited and translated by James Strachey, 289–300. Vol. 14 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
Frosh, Stephen. “Diversity or Exclusion? Psychoanalysis ‘Explains.’ ” Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics 86 (September 2022): 9–20.
Gaztambide, Daniel Jose. “Do Black Lives Matter in Psychoanalysis? Frantz Fanon as Our Most Disputatious Ancestor.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 38, no. 3 (July 2021): 177–84. https://doi.org/10.1037/pap0000365.
Gaztambide, Daniel Jose. “Entre Negros, Blancos y Judios: Revisiting Claudia Tate’s ‘Freud and His Negro’ with Puerto Rican Eyes.” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00304-1.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Insurgent Flows. Trans*Decolonial and Black Marxist Futures: A Conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore.” By Marina Gržinić and Tjaša Kancler. In Political Choreographies, Decolonial Theories, Trans Bodies, edited by Marina Gržinić and Jovita Pristovšek, 218–38. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2023.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence.” In Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, 225–40. London: Verso, 2017.
Goldberg, David Theo. Are We All Postracial Yet? Cambridge: Polity, 2015.
Goldberg, David, and Susan Searls Giroux. Sites of Race. Cambridge: Polity, 2014.
Gržinić, Marina. “Euro-Slovenian Necrocapitalism.” Transversal (webjournal). Transform, February 2008. http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0208/grzinic/en.html.
Gržinić, Marina. “Racialized Bodies and the Digital (Financial) Mode of Production.” In Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art, Theory and Culture; Image, Racialization, History, edited by Marina Gržinić, Aneta Stojnić, and Miško Šuvaković, 13–29. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Guglielmucci, Ana. “Necroscapes: The Political Life of Mutilated and Errant Bodies in the Rivers of Colombia.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2020): 555–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2021.1885356.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Kelley, Robin D. G. “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston Review, January 12, 2017. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice/.
Kellogg, Catherine. “Plasticity and the Cerebral Unconscious: New Wounds, New Violences, New Politics.” In Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, 111–32. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
Lacan, Jacques. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Translated by John Forrester. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Lorde, Audre. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Losurdo, Domenico. “Como nasceu e como morreu o ‘marxismo ocidental.’ ” Translated by Carlo Alberto Dastoli. Estudos de Sociologia 16, no. 30 (2011): 213–42. Originally published as Domenico Losurdo, “Wie der ‘westliche Marxismus’ geboren wurde und gestorben ist,” in Die Lust am Widerspruch. Theorie der Dialektik—Dialektik der Theorie; Symposium aus Anlass des 80. Geburtstages von Hans Heinz Holz, edited by Erich Hahn and Silvia Holz-Markun, 35–60. Berlin: Trafo, 2008.
Losurdo, Domenico. Il marxismo occidentale: Come nacque, come morì, come può rinascere. Bari: Laterza, 2017.
Malabou, Catherine. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (Forms of Living). Translated by Steven Miller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Originally published as Les nouveaux blesses: De Freud a la neurologie, penser les traumatismes contemporains. Paris: Bayard, 2007.
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1926.
Marx, Karl. “The North American Civil War.” In Marx and Engels: 1861–64, edited by Jack Cohen, James S. Allen, N. P. Karmanova, P. N. Fedoseyev et al., 32–42. Vol. 19 of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010. Originally published in 1984.
Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.
Mbembe, Achille. “The Society of Enmity.” Translated by Giovanni Menegalle. Radical Philosophy 200 (November/December 2016): 23–35.
Nguyen, Mimi Thi. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Papić, Žarana. “Europe after 1989: Ethnic Wars, the Fascisation of Social Life and Body Politics in Serbia.” In “The Body/Le corps/Der Körper,” edited by Marina Gržinić Mauhler, 191–204. Special issue, Filozofski vestnik 23, no. 2 (2002).
Peace Institute. “About Erasure.” The Erased: Information and Documents. Accessed August 28, 2023. https://www.mirovni-institut.si/izbrisani/en/about-erasure/index.html.
Perera, Suvendrini. “Dead Exposures: Trophy Bodies and Violent Visibilities of the Nonhuman.” Borderlands e-journal 13, no. 1 (2014): 1–26. https://doi.org/20.500.11937/4074.
Pessanha, Eliseu Amaro de Melo, and Wanderson Flor do Nascimento. “Necropolítica: Estratégias de extermínio do corpo negro.” ODEERE 3, no. 6 (July–December 2018): 149–76. https://doi.org/10.22481/odeere.v3i6.4327.
Popa, Bogdan. “Insurgent Flows. Trans*Decolonial and Black Marxist Futures: A Conversation with Bogdan Popa.” By Marina Gržinić and Tjaša Kancler. In Political Choreographies, Decolonial Theories, Trans Bodies, edited by Marina Gržinić and Jovita Pristovšek, 136–56. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2023.
Prager, Jeffrey. “Do Black Lives Matter? A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Racism and American Resistance to Reparations.” In “Psychoanalysis and the Political Unconscious,” 637–51. Special issue, Political Psychology 38, no. 4 (August 2017). https:// doi.org/10.1111/pops.12436.
Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Originally published in 1983 by Zed Press.
Rubin, Anne Sarah. “Reflections on the Death of Emmett Till.” Southern Cultures 2, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 45–66. https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.1995.0000.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Singh, Sunit. Review of Black Skin, White Masks, by Frantz Fanon. Platypus Review 21 (March 2010). https://platypus1917.org/2010/03/15/book-review-frantz-fanon-blackskin-white-masks/.
Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Spillers, Hortense J. “ ‘All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race.” Boundary 2 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 75–141, https://doi.org/10.2307/303639.
Tate, Claudia. “Freud and His ‘Negro’: Psychoanalysis as Ally and Enemy of African Americans.” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (1996): 53–62.
Taureck, Bernhard H. F. Michel Foucault. 3rd. ed. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2004.
Wilderson, Frank B., III. “We’re Trying to Destroy the World”: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence after Ferguson; An Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III. By Jared Ball, Todd Steven Burroughs and Dr. Hate. N.p.: Ill Will, 2014.
Wilderson, Frank B., III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 ZRC-SAZU
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
More in: Submission chapter
