- Decolonial Practices - New World Cultures - Achille Mbembe

A Body of Necropolitics:
De-humanisation,
Bad Internalised Psychic Objects, Negative Messianism.
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Visceral Politics Liberation, Animist Redemptive Futures: BORDERLESS WORLD(S),
A NEW CULTURAL AGENDA

- Decolonial Practices - New World Cultures - Achille Mbembe

This article and research has been inspired by our endless rehearsal constellation at Pickle Bar in Berlin, June 14 2025.

Curator Misal Adnan Yildiz, and the durational performance works of Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, a multidisciplinary artist specialising in long-durational live performances and public intervention works.
With a focus on chronopolitics and necropolitics, Leman’s work centres on the vulnerability and resilience of marginalised bodies.



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A DISCLAIMER : Apathy & Surrender 

Apathy and Nilhism, are quite priveligded ways to be. We end up apathetic either because we are burnt out and need a break, or we choose apathy and we get stuck there convincing ourselves that we cant do better. 

The way to get through the need for apathy is surrender. Surrender is not inactive. To surrender, one needs to be fully aware of the context of the situation and actually metabolise the grief, of the double bind. Surrender is a form of transmutation and it is very different to apathy, which is a downplaying and pushing away of accountability. Surrender is carried in the cells of our body and will always offer empathy to others along the path. Apathy is a selfish act offering no empathy, but passively drains Earth empathy centers.


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What draws me directly into ‘Necropolitics’ by Achille Mbembe is the discusson of Intrusive Psychic Objects in Chapter 3, and The Bad Internalised Object of the Colonisers/Oppressors Psyche, (which is the infected/broken/fragemented-ego of the oppressor), within psyche of the oppressed. 


What this means is that we all Internalise the surveillance panopticon.

In the last video on this page Achille Mbembe pin points this as

‘Ignorance that is punitivism, as a form of universalism’. 

This kind of clarity, I felt needed to be documented here in a blog article.


(Pre-reading for this is probably Frantz Fanon - Disclaimer: Fanon is not Feminist reading.)

 
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Politics of Viscerality

In the video below we learn about Visceral Politics: (flesh-bodies)

The Body of Necropolitics

This body is one that has been deprived, immobilised, subjected to dehumizisation, subjected to rituals which take it away from its natural state, so it does not belong to its original inhabitant anymore. It has been stolen, hijacked.


The body and the pysche has been stolen and is used as an equipment by somebody else. Slavery. The body of the slave is understood as an equipment, that is put to use by the one who owns that body. This is a body that has been thouroughly dishonoured.



VIDEO NOTES:

- ‘The Autopsy’
We are being autopsied, by technology, all the time, for example. We are constantly giving proof that we are indeed who we say we are.

- Revolution as Purification.

What methodologies do we really need to transfigure this level of pain?

How can we undo this level of dehumanization? Where not only souls are split into one or two, but bodies have been completely hijacked and are carrying around the internal objects of the oppressor? Where bodies become weapons onto themselves?

All bodies, no-body - human or more-than-human - is outside of having internalised the oppressive altered ego.

Methodologies of reparation include labour. Really heavy labour. There is no trick to jump onself into another dimension where we are ‘out of relation’ and ‘out of the labour’ of reciprocity.



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Messianism

We draw power here from the idea of Redemption.
Liberation, Deliverance.
(But a deliverance which is still to come.)

The call of the awakening, of the liberation, is to becoming God’s property. Claimed by God. The oppressed, is now the property of God, instead of the property of a master. God declares the slave bought, given value, and redeemed.

The value of liberation has a cost to be paid.
The price in christianity is christ’s blood. This deliverance, Jesus does freely. It has a price, yet it is free for humans.

The Messianic is at the heart of the contradiction the value of re-humanisation.



In the video below we learn about the idelogy of Negative Messianism:





NOTES FROM THE VIDEO:

Negative Messianism

A messianism which has been reduced to a crude belief, in the power of sacrificial death - the beleif in the saving power of bloodshed, either by waging a war, genocidal colonialism, by breaking relation.

**Freedom is fundamentally freedom, here, because we do not have to relate.**

A negative messianism is when we dont owe anything to the other.
It calls for the aboliton of any idea of merging into relation - of owing something to eachother. Where the task of politics is there to relate with mutually & reciprocity, there is instead a willingness to sacrafice someone or be sacrafice. A forgiving God is turned into an angry God, one focused on vengance and cutting, rather than caring and repairing.


Re-establish a connection between the idea of redemption, salvation, liberation and the idea of caring, what has been broken, beginning with relation itself.
Negative Messianism is not interested in the liberation of the slave - it is more interested in some sense of debt.

Messianism is about survival, and in its major version: it is about collective suicide before the apocalypse. 

Communing is impossible. 
The will to kill takes precedence to the will to care.

The will to severe relations, comes before the will to engange in the labour to repair the ties that have been broken.

RETURN TO ANIMISM : Balancing Empty Vessels of Objectification (missing Self Hood) into a fullness of all things. (no Self needed!)

(STILL, NOTES FROM THE VIDEO)

Contemporary ways to govern people deemed ‘surplus’, or ‘unwanted’, is a govening of them through a politics of abandonment.

Person Hood and Human Hood was always a matter of composition. This was always an assemblage of attributes of other beings from the non-human-world.

Converting an object into something else, capturing the force within something and turning it into something else, forms agency.
Assemblage expresses Agency.
Vitalism of the objects around us, which we have invented(?)
(I would argue this is co-emergent)

**And we are all becoming African again.**

Human beings are not the only Agents. There is a fusion between living human beings and the objects, or the artefacts, or the technologies that augment us. 
This is not without danger, in this age of crypto-fasicm. 


‘The Radical Impoverishment of The Real’
- triggered by our economic system and technology system, impossibility of accountability that comes with it. Impossible without knowledge.
‘The Fact of Technology, having taken the place of the Unconscious’. 



Notes:

‘Planetary Entanglement’.
What is our connection to the things that compose our world?
Relations to the non human world are what make us human.
What to do, with those beings whose very existence, does not seem to be necessary for our own reproduction? Unwanted, illegal, dispensable, or superflouos...
What to do with those whose meer existence is deemed to reperesent a phsycial threat to our own life? How do we ‘manage them’? In histroy this has resulted in genocide, colonialism, aparteid...


Biopolitics: The crippling of the capacity to move. New landscapes of incarceration: the prison, the camp... 


‘Dystopian Imaginaries.’
The end of the existence of Humans on Earth, or the Return to the some kind of metaphyscical past? The future is beleived to reside in the past. 
Human reason has reached it’s limits?

THE MIRROR 

‘The Mirror: A History Book’ by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet

The History of the Shadow brought to the limits of psyche, making us beleive that there can be a world without opacity, translucent to itself... that we can finally become our own specture, scence, endless self-curation and exhibition.

Intimacy replaced by extimicy (Lacan) self-curation in public.

The form is there, but the subjects that are meant to animate the form, are now gone. 

Through Reason, Liberation, Self Goverment (The key operators in any idea of Democracy) we prevent to treat the human as an object, and thus, being turned into waste.

Under the empire of the digital, human begins to desire to also be an object, to have attributes of the object, or to see to it that inanimate entites are also endowed with the same rights as the humans....  What does this mean in terms of the political ?

KINSHIP, GIFTS

An interesting parallel with Visceral Politics and the dehumanisation and disgust of having to fight with ‘what stinks’ - human excretement.

(Shit, is an interesting parallel/Juxtaposition with GIFT CULTURE, We can learn through Gift Cultures that understanding SHIT as nourishing is actually in the centre of the transformation.
SHIT as Manure might be an example of how a Kinship model and Gift Culture can re-humanise...)

PLANETARY CONSCIOUSNESS

In the video above Achille Mbembe is communicating: (paraphrased)

The deep state of fragmentation of The Earth -
How should we Re-Member it?
By putting back together its different parts? 

Interlinked with biosymbiosis and mutuality, the core and central question is The Future Of Culture. 

Any new Cultural Agenda needs to be a Home were we all can grieve. How to live with life.

Europe is no longer an assumed Earth’s center of gravity (of attention). Europe can no longer live in the illusion that it can dictate.

Édouard Glissant uses the term Tout-Monde, often translated as The Whole-World, to describe the interconnected and ever-changing reality of our world, emphasizing the unpredictable nature of global interactions and the importance of relationality. This world is full of entanglements. 

The version of ignorance we have right now, is punitivism as a form of universalism.

We open ourselves deliberately for the possibility (of meeting borders within us) - for the trial of the journey - to cross many pathways - to look together from completely different perspectives and sometimes see as one. 


We call for a Borderless World - it is not enough to reorganise the plurality of cultures, Bordering is the oldest take in the new Cultural Agenda. 








Other References for this Article:

Necropolitics - Achille Mbembe

On the Postcolony - Achille Mbembe

The Wretched of the Earth - Franz Fanon