Apr 24, 2010 0
Nov 10, 2009 0
RE-POLITICIZATION OF DE-SCHOOLING, part 2 :: Marina Grzinic
In the first part of my lecture in Belgrade (http://www.tkh-generator.net/sr/openedsource/from-biopolitics-to-necropolitics), January 2009, I introduced two concepts, de-linking and de-coloniality, implicating a certain cut with contemporary processes of capitalist institutionalization, control and subjugation. I can say that my proposal was and is a proposal for the intensification of a re-politicization of life. This re-politicization of life is a critical intervention capable of providing means, goals and forces for dealing with the present reality of global capitalism. Today, capitalism is clearly biopolitics, a radical institutionalization, control and subjugation of life, that needs, I argue, to be re-politicized, intensified, by changes brought with modes of management of life outside the First capitalist world, which is necropolitics.
Biopolitics is a horizon of articulating contemporary capitalist societies from the so-called politics of life, where life (it does not matter anymore, via Giorgio Agamben, if bare/naked life or life with forms) is seen as the zero degree of intervention of each and every politics into contemporary societies. But today capital’s surplus value is based on the capitalization of death (Latin necro) worlds. In the text “Necropolitics,” (2003) Achille Mbembe discusses this new logic of capital and its processes of geopolitical demarcation of world zones based on the mobilization of the war machine. Mbembe claims that the concept of biopolitics, due to the war machine and the state of exception being one of the major logics of contemporary societies, should be replaced with necropolitics. Necropolitics is connected to the concept of necrocapitalism, i.e., contemporary capitalism, which organizes its forms of capital accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death. The necrocapitalist capturing of the social implies new modes of governmentality that are informed by the norms of corporate intensified rationality and deployed in managing violence, social conflicts, fear and the Multitude. No conflict that challenges the supreme requirements of capitalist rationalization is tolerable – economic growth, profit maximization, productivity, efficiency and the like. I argued that with this move Mbembe gave us a possibility to re-politicize biopolitics, saying that it is a time for its intensification as well as its historization.
In this second part of my lecture, I want to go on rearticulating, resuming, rewriting Santiago López Petit’s book, entitled Global Mobilization. Brief Treatise to Attack the Reality (La movilización global. Breve tratado para atacar la realidad) published in Spanish by Editorial Traficantes de Sueños, Barcelona in June 2009. Santiago López Petit is one of the key Spanish contemporary philosophical figures who was involved in workers’ struggles in the 1970s. Today, he participates in several political initiatives along with the groups Oficina 2004 and Espai en Blanc.
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