Achille Mbembe

And now I'd like to turn to Edwidge and to delve a little bit deeper into your specific contribution to the volume.

And so your chapter, Water Necropolitics, explores how Achille Mbembe's concepts of necropolitics and corps-frontière, or border bodies, are manifested in the context of the Mediterranean Sea.

Can you tell us about how these appear in relation to the large geographical area of the sea rather than the visible frontier or border on land we might imagine?

Yes, absolutely.

There's this strange combination of physical geographical distance, but at the same time, a peculiar ocular proximity.

A dynamic which, continuing to think through Mbembe, I've taken to calling intimate distance.

A knowledge that the enemy is too far away to pose any immediate threat to my own person, and yet with whom my work, my task, my fate are nevertheless intimately bound up with.

A process which then repeats itself in its consummation.

We limited you massively to long range shots.

You had one big chance in the end with Mbembe, which I'm pretty sure was offside, but no one's talking about it because Donnarumma made the save.

But that was your only chance.

So the performance from City yesterday, genuinely, I think is like a massive, massive statement.

Mm.

But as for today, we are placing before all of you an intellectual feast prepared for us by Dr. Ndlozi, to be served by Professor Achille Mbembe, and will be distributed to those present and others at home by the combination of Podcast and Chill and African Renaissance Pod- Podcast.

You are all invited to please join and indulge.

You are all welcome.

Thank you, Erika.

[applause] Thank you so much for that, uh, uh, Erika.

Uh, joining us in this conversation today is a gentleman known by the name of Professor Achille Mbembe.

Prof Mbembe is the world-renowned Cameroonian-born philosopher.

I mean, that's kind of obvious.

What I find interesting is the, the various ways in which it's about keeping at bay or making life unlivable so that people will go back, right? Uh, 'cause it's expensive to deport, right? Um, and killing is, you know, I mean, Achille Mbembe is right.

I mean, it is, it is an act of abandonment often, but it al- also is active killing.

I mean, what we saw, for instance, in twenty twenty-two in Melilla when, um, you know, we had the last, uh, we had a last, a set of migrants who, who stormed that fence, about seventy-plus people disappeared, and they were last seen b- at, at the hands of Spanish and Moroccan police.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I swapped Mbembe for Fernandes because I thought, well, this is daft.

Why haven't I put United's pentaker and assist king in my team when I've got the money? I thought I'm being mad by doing the differential pick, picking Mbembe.

I thought, well, he's just sitting there and Bruno Fernandes is going to do something, isn't he? Yeah,

yeah.

What will you do? What are you going to do? Maybe the threat's there, maybe it's not.

But if it does come, what would you do? And also the thing that Mbembe talks about in necropolitics in the sense of the binary...

Or the dialectic between truth and falsity being supplanted by a dialectic or discourse between certainty and doubt.

Yes.

Right.

It's it's really maddening.

Which kind of like, again, ties back to the phenomenon that Mbembe calls nano-racism in the sense of the construction for pretenses for just sort of endless, perpetual, continuous violations, micro-violations.

And then the violation, and then the justification on top of the violation, then the follow-up on top of the violation.

I think right wingers like it to an extent.

I don't think the drop-off from Mbembe to Ahmad is...

The sad

thing is, defensively as a backup, we're all right, but our backups are our first team at the minute.