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Necropolitics
Written By: Achille Mbembe
Fiction
Wa syo' lukasa pebwe
Umwime wa pita
[He left his footprint on the stone
He himself passed on]
Lamba proverb, Zambia
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. 1 Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its [End Page 11] fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.
One could summarize in the above terms what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken control. 2 But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right? 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? Is the notion of biopower sufficient to