Achille Mbembe’s latest two works explore the predicament of the Earth in an era of ‘combustion’ in which ecological catastrophe looms large (La communauté terrestre (CT), p. 8).Footnote 1 Above all, Mbembe discerns a pernicious extractive relationship that eats and discards human beings, immiserating them, and leaving behind a reduced existence of survival and precariousness. This unceasing extraction is powered by both digital technology and neoliberal finance. It is this process that he names ‘brutalism’ (Brutalisme (B), p. 7). A fundamental reconfiguration of the human subject is under way, Mbembe avers, in which humanity and machine become indistinguishable, and developments in nanotechnology and genetics increasingly implant, edit and re-engineer the human body (B, p. 9). To epitomize this dystopian state of affairs, Mbembe uses the term ‘generic rupture’ (B, p. 21).
Africa is central to this new conjuncture; its history, philosophy and visual culture have much to teach us about how to navigate this world of new and ‘brutal’ extractive formations (B, pp. 17–19; CT, p. 39). Brutalism involves processes of asymmetric extraction that recall slavery and colonialism (B, p. 21); it classifies and sorts bodies into the ‘bioavailable’ or insurable (CT, p. 136). The emergent earthly community described by Mbembe is one that remains out of reach for many Africans, due to increased practices of border control and frontier building by Western states and their clients (B, pp. 144–5). Mobility, he contends, has come to be seen less as a human right and more as a military or security challenge (BC, p. 93). In the West, increasingly intolerant populisms have consigned many to constituting a ‘wretched of the sea’ in the Mediterranean, or otherwise being abandoned to the abuses of outsourced immigration controls (CT, p. 161; BC, p. 99). Within postcolonial African politics, Mbembe warns that the language of ‘tribe’ has intensified as ‘an elementary mechanism’ linked to wealth and identity (BC, p. 118). In addition, the ‘psychiatric salons’ of Francophone African states, termed by Mbembe as ‘crypto colonies’, offer numerous opportunities for abuses (BC, p. 123).
If Mbembe warns of global catastrophe, he also sees Africa as offering the resources for renewing and building an evanescent ‘earthly community’. This is to be based on reparation and a recognition of humanity’s shared right to live on the Earth (CT, pp. 153–4). He sees this community not as a global system, but as a divisible whole (CT, p. 151). In both works, but especially in La communauté, Mbembe develops two key claims for the restorative importance of Africa’s history and philosophy. He develops an argument found in earlier worksFootnote 2 that philosophy in Africa offers ways of thinking about the world that avoid core issues within Western thought, including the divide between subject and object. At the same time, Mbembe argues that African systems of thought value mobility and fluidity (CT, p. 40). Cumulatively, this makes African philosophy well placed to augment Western thought and to guard against the ‘drying out’ of humanity’s ‘symbolic reserves’ (CT, p. 34).
Mbembe opens an intellectual position in stark contrast to the denigration of African philosophy in European thought. It not only has the conceptual tools to guide humanity to its future, but it also provides accomplished and specific ways to think about how humanity must live with digital technology (CT, p. 23) and navigate the insecurities of a financialized, computerized world. Above all, an ‘Africanization … of the planetary condition’ is under way (B, p. 24). Mbembe sees African thought as serving as a counterpoint to the world of Brutalism (CT, pp. 23, 43).
Yet Mbembe’s account of African philosophy, ethnography and intellectual history poses challenges. This is particularly important because Mbembe states that Brutalism (and one would be apt to extend this to Community) paints a ‘fresco’, not as sociology, political economy or history, but rather as work rooted in the ‘socio-ethnographic’ (B, p. 9). Mbembe warns against over-generalizing about belief systems based on specific scholarly descriptions (CT, p. 17, note 4). He identifies the perils of fixing African cultures and beliefs as essentially timeless, especially in his critique of colonial discourse.Footnote 3 But his account of the thought of the Dogon is reliant on colonial ethnographic sources (sometimes later published in the postcolonial era) (CT, pp. 20–3, 41). This is in danger of ignoring subsequent critiques of ethnography produced by Griaule, Leiris and others.
A similar point might be made of Mbembe’s reading of Tutuola’s fiction. Although thinkers such as Nyamnjoh have persuasively drawn on Tutuola’s fiction as a philosophical resource,Footnote 4 the way in which Mbembe reads the Nigerian novelist’s fiction as a kind of window into a wider terrain of generalized ‘African’ myths and knowledge represents an approach explicitly challenged in criticism of the Yoruba novelist (CT, p. 43). The temporal markers in Mbembe’s description of African thought form a key example of this. What is the meaning of the term ‘ancient’ in designations such as ‘the animist metaphysics of ancient Africans’ (CT, p. 17), ‘ancient archives’ (CT, p. 201), the ‘ancient Dogon’ (CT, pp. 47, 204) or ‘ancient African traditions’ (BC, p. 52)?
Mbembe’s French prose operates significantly at a stylistic level (for example, CT, pp. 5–12). It moves with a rhythm and resonance, while incorporating a dense web of direct and indirect allusion to writers such as Labou Tansi, Glissant and Césaire (B, p. 187; CT, p. 184). More generally, although Mbembe’s use of footnotes serves as a rough guide to the range of reference within his text, these notes are not exhaustive, and, on some occasions, they can appear more as suggestions for further reading than as anchors to Mbembe’s own discussion. Corcoran’s translation of Brutalism is closely based on the French publication. Corcoran’s translation of a text under the title The Earthly Community predates the publication of La communauté, and, while it has major parallels with tracts of the French work, it also contains significant structural differences, reorganizing passages, including introducing different text, and, in some instances, using new subsections and chapter titles.
Readers familiar with Mbembe’s previous writings will find a development of his ongoing dialogue with thinkers such as Fanon, Schmitt and Glissant. Newer engagements can be found here too, for example with Heidegger and Rosenzweig. Mbembe’s well-known formulation of ‘necropolitics’ stalks his characterization of Brutalism as devouring humans, and border controls subjecting migrants to tedious and humiliating waiting with little end in sight (B, p. 34). Mbembe here returns briefly to the less-used term ‘necrocapitalism’ to describe the functioning of Brutalism, as well as developing a meditation on ‘necrosis’ (CT, p. 186), to evoke the intellectual decay occasioned by the popularity of alt-right conspiracy theories. Mbembe’s interventions on the restitution of African objects in Western museums are treated in developed terms in the final section of Brutalism (BC, pp. 125–46). This discussion connects to Mbembe’s warnings against superficial acts of return that do not constitute genuine reparation (they do not truthfully acknowledge the scale and damage of Europe’s engagement with Africa) (BC, p. 142).
Mbembe voices a warning against a world that is becoming ‘fissured’ or cracked by the ongoing injuries of racism, colonization, computerization and environmental exploitation. Above all, he spells out the destructive potential of social media and algorithms on human flourishing in stark terms. Yet, both texts, and especially La communauté, are hopeful. Mbembe ultimately shows us that it is possible to defend a conception of the Earth as a space held in common between all peoples. Its soil must remain fundamentally ‘inappropriable’ and unable to be captured by relations of power and enmity (BC, p. 165).
Both Brutalism and Community reorient Mbembe’s thought to contemporary concerns about the environment and digital technology. In all of this, Mbembe reminds us, the African continent stands at the centre of world thought. Africa and African philosophies have much to teach the world about how to navigate climate change, social media, digital technologies, and the boundary between humans and objects.
