Erasure, invisibility and politics
07
Oct
It is not ignored in history the fact that the state, being a “possible”
solver of conflicts, has taken for itself the right to violence, which in the last instance is the right to kill.
Cameroon philosopher Achille Mbembe took this extreme of state power to develop his thesis on the state’s right to kill, calling this policy “Necropower”.
The essay was translated into Portuguese in 2018, and at the heart of this essay is a question about who can live or die in the contemporary world? Mbembe denounces that the role of States should have the defense of the lives of the most vulnerable as a principle, and not what is structurally done, which is the erasure of memory and the conditions of these lives.
We see that, beyond the erasure, there is a permanent invisibility of these people, by a layer that is linked to power, reaching the limit of not having civil registration and cultural rights.
Approached with regard to the forgetfulness (or social invisibility) and silencing made by the State regarding the historical past of these vulnerable groups, it is beyond the academic field, the social, cognitive and identity memory of what was experienced in the past and which is shameful not only through oblivion and invisibility, but made from a narrative opposite to its memory.
If we look from complex thinking, which etymologically means tissue together (complexus), the biological term “necrosis” refers to issues involving the biological death of bodily tissues or part of them, thus, one cannot think of the death of a part without let the whole body suffer, even though it does not look to see the tissue that is failing.
It is important to address the complexity of this concept of necropolitics and invisibility, because only it can address the problems involving racism, sexism and the erasure of different cultures (such as the indigenous, but there are many others in the contemporary world), the already known and unresolved economic dimension, which is access to social goods and services, joins the political dimension (the spaces of power), the construction of narratives and historicity of subjugating cultures (the psychological dimension) and the comprehensive cultural dimension.
Starting from the misery and invisibility of peoples, cultures and races, it cannot deny structural factors that are strong and prevent a more sustainable change of peaceful and harmonious coexistence.
