NECROPOLITICS, translated by Steven Corcoran

213pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Johannesburg, 2019

First published in French in 2016 as "Politiques de l'intimitié. First published in English in the USA in 2019.

A collection of essays by Achille Mbembe in which he examines the ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror of the contemporary world, and the erosion of the values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. He also explores how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might arise that would allow us to encounter the other not as a thing to exclude, but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

“This book establishes Achille Mbembe as the leading humanistic voice in the study of sovereignty, democracy, migration, and war in the contemporary world. In the essays assembled here, Mbembe accomplishes the nearly impossible task of finding a radical path through the darkness of our times and seizes hope from the jaws of what he calls ‘the deadlocks of humanism.’ It is not a comforting book to read, but it is an impossible book to put down.” Arjun Appadurai, author of The Future as Cultural Fact: essays on the global condition

Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research, University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author of On the Postcolony and Critique of Black Reason.