Entanglement is not all that characterizes the now. Indeed, wherever we look, the drive is decisively toward contraction, containment, and enclosure. By enclosure, contraction, and containment, I do not simply mean the erection of all kinds of walls and fortifications, gates and enclaves, or various practices of partitioning space, of offshoring and fencing off wealth. I am also referring to a matrix of rules mostly designed for those human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable, or superfluous.
Indeed, perhaps more than at any other moment in our recent past, we are increasingly faced with the question of what to do with those whose very existence does not seem to be necessary for our reproduction, those whose mere existence or proximity is deemed to represent a physical or biological threat to our own life.
Paradigmatic of this matrix of rule is present-day Gaza in Palestine. Gaza is a paradigmatic example on two counts. On the one hand, it is the culmination of spatial exclusionary arrangements that existed in an incipient state during the early phases of modern settler or genocidal colonialism. Such was the case of Native American reservations in the United States, as well as island prisons, penal colonies, camps, and Bantustans in South Africa in the not- so- distant past. On the other hand, Gaza might well prefigure what is yet to come.
Here, the control of vulnerable, unwanted, or surplus people is exercised through a combination of tactics, chief among which is the “modulated blockade.” A blockade prohibits, obstructs, and limits who and what can enter and leave the Strip. The goal might not be to cut the Strip off entirely from supply lines, infrastructural grids, or trade routes. It is nevertheless relatively sealed off in a way which effectively turns it into an imprisoned territory. Comprehensive or relative closure is punctuated by periodic military escalations and the generalized use of extrajudicial assassinations. Spatial violence, humanitarian strategies, and a peculiar biopolitics of punishment all combine to produce, in turn, a peculiar carceral space in which people deemed surplus, unwanted, or illegal are governed through abdication of any responsibility for their lives and their welfare.
"I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism, reactionary inter-communalism - reactionary suicide. The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact, especially the Black [and Indigenous] revolutionaries…whose lives are in constant danger from the evils of a colonial society." - Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide
This article is a companion to the nearby excerpt from Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics. Here we will draw further not only from Mbembe’s work, but from other Black and Indigenous revolutionaries, to sketch out an understanding of sovereignty, revolutionary optimism, and generative refusal. Before we can wade too deeply into some ways Black and Indigenous people deal with The Ordeal of the World, it’s important to ensure you have at least an idea of how fucked up things are.
Achille Mbembe uses the term Society of Enmity to describe one of the biggest problems with the way civilized Western society has developed over the past several centuries. To think of oneself as civilized, or another as uncivil/uncivilized/barbaric indeed already disguises and normalizes a particularly brutal form of violence, colonialism (racism). “In fact, liberal democracy and racism are fully compatible. At the same time, historically, liberal democracy has always needed a constitutive Other who is and is not at the same time part of the polis…America, in this sense, means the impossibility of sharing freedom with others - which “whiteness” properly understood, is.” This is one way of getting at the heart of what Necropolitics is, a politics of surplus, but in particular of surplus people, those who may be put to death or allowed to die without consequence, without anyone really giving a shit.
We see Necropolitics in one of its most intense modern variations in Palestine. Hundreds of millions of people within the imperial core not only cannot be bothered to put an end to Israel’s continued settler-colonial slaughter, but in fact may even actively cheer it on in the name of Israel’s “self-defense”. Israel’s establishment as a state is inseparable from the Nakba in 1948, in which one half to three quarters of all Palestinians were expelled from their homes by Zionist settlers and the Israeli “Defense” Force. This was the foundation on which the rest of the country’s infrastructure was established: on ethnic cleansing, on genocide. And while Israel has continued to take more land, slaughter more Palestinians, and hold the remaining Palestinians in conditions closer and closer to death over the past several decades, the average (white) American is more than happy to look at October 7th, 2023 as the “beginning of the current hostilities”. The Nakba and the occupation which followed it never ended, just as the occupation of Native lands in the United States still has not ended. The legal systems of both countries still protect and enshrine a foundational violence, establishing the “rights” of a certain kind of human through the exclusion of another.
“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound…They won’t even admit the knife is there.” - Malcolm X
How have we reached this point? How can even otherwise “kind” and empathetic people have such a fucked up position on the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians? Palestinian people asserting their right to live with dignity and sovereignty is an existential threat to the system of colonial control, and as Frantz Fanon tells us in The Wretched of the Earth: “the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil. Colonized society is not merely portrayed as a society without values…The ‘Native’ is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values.” Here as in Israel, it’s a kind of sickness which hangs over us, living within a colonial system. To some it’s best understood in terms of a spiritual sickness, for others it’s easier to understand that living within a colonial (racist) society is killing us, that the stress of it alone is capable of destroying our bodies. The latter was Frantz Fanon’s approach, which he developed while working as a psychiatrist in French-occupied Algeria. For a few years, Fanon treated both the French colonists and native Algerians - and Wretched of the Earth contains detailed descriptions of the illnesses he encountered which could not be separated from an explicitly colonial pathology.
Frantz Fanon’s voice echoes throughout Mbembe’s Necropolitics, but especially in the fifth chapter: Fanon’s Pharmacy. Here, citing Fanon frequently and directly, Mbembe describes the pathogenesis of many colonial-caused illnesses: "The loss of freedom, the loss of the sense of time, the loss of the capacity to watch over oneself and take care of oneself, the loss of relation and the loss of the world, he thought, constituted the real drama of the ill person and the alienated individual. This is so because the sane human being is a social human being. The illness 'cuts him off' from other social beings and 'isolates him from them.' It separates him from the world, leaving him powerless, alone, with an evil that is strictly his."
Not only is colonial order killing us, but it’s a threat to nearly all life on Earth, settler “culture” is incompatible with a habitable planet. In the long term, the only real cure for colonialism and its associated illnesses is decolonization, the permanent abolition of both colonizer and colonized. As Fanon describes: “decolonization is always a violent event… decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one “species” of mankind by another. The substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless…The need for this change exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colons, the colonists.” As Mbembe puts it, “The unique thing about slavery, or colonialism, is to produce beings of pain, people whose existence is forever overrun by threatening Others.” He’s describing here an anxiety not only of the slaves, but also (if not especially) of the colonizer. This is something that white Americans in particular will need to learn to work through - a visceral fear or anxiety for anything that could dismantle the colonial order you were raised to find comfort in - and the most right-leaning white-bodied people will need the most support in this.
We can’t wait until some unknown date in the future to finally be ok. If the colonizer and colonized are going to be abolished, we need to be bringing the human of the new world into being with every action that we can. White-bodied people need to help other white-bodied people heal from growing up in a country that was wildly inspirational to the fucking Nazis. It’s also not enough to simply reject fucked up systems, we can’t center those systems (and our disavowal of them) as the content of our political existence. We need to know what to focus on cultivating in order to grow out of the corpse of colonialism, and the colonial system’s ideas on democracy. This is something Leanne Betasamosake Simpson discusses while putting forward the concept of Generative Refusal in As We Have Always Done: to turn our backs on some harmful system in a way that nurtures and protects our own lives, and those of our community. Leanne Simpson uses the example of an Anishinaabe story about the deer, in which the Nishnaabeg were overhunting and overharvesting the deer, in violation of what Leanne has called grounded normativity. In response, the deer left to protect themselves, practicing generative refusal: “They did not try to talk to us or negotiate. They didn’t explain to us how our actions were hurting their nation. They didn’t appeal to us morally. They didn’t look to the Nishnaabeg for recognition…Instead the deer withdrew and turned inward to rebuild themselves as a nation and as a clan…The deer refused and organized on their own terms.”
For more inspiration on what we can focus on building in generative refusal of colonial systems - we look to the community programs of the Black Panther Party, also called survival programs, which sought to provide food, housing, education, employment, healthcare and much more. The Black Panthers are excellent teachers of generative refusal in their own way. Chairman Huey P. Newton’s term for it was revolutionary suicide, which he opposed to the reactionary suicide of just letting the colonial and capitalist world eat each of us to death. To live with revolutionary suicide in mind is to know that a revolutionary is more than likely a doomed person, and to devote oneself to nurturing life and community anyways. Newton goes out of his way to stress the importance of the survival programs, that they were always a higher priority than the Black Panthers’ practice of cop-watching and the assertion of the right to bear arms. In his autobiography by the same name, he describes that "Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick."
Some of Achille Mbembe’s own thoughts on surviving and combatting imperialism and Necropolitics draw very similar conclusions - he echoes a conception of sovereignty from Georges Bataille that “takes many forms. But it ultimately takes that of a refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have the subject respect.” Mbembe takes a greater deal of time drawing out another piece of advice, it becomes the final chapter of the book and what he calls The Ethics of the Passerby. Thanks to the continued existence of right-wing and police violence, the ethics of the passerby isn’t something we can practice everywhere, all at once yet. But perhaps it’s something we can strive for, especially for the sake of the human of the new world: "Allowing oneself to be affected by others - or to be defenselessly exposed to another existence - constitutes the first step toward that form of recognition that will not be contained in the master-slave paradigm, in the dialectic of powerlessness and omnipotence, or in that of combat, victory, and defeat. On the contrary, the kind of relation that arises from it is a relation of care. So, recognizing and accepting vulnerability, or even admitting that to live is always to live exposed, including to death - is the point of departure of every ethical elaboration whose aim, in the last instance, is humanity."