What Demarcates Necropolitics from Biopolitics? A Foucauldian Critique of Mbembe

Achille Mbembe presents ‘necropolitics’ as a corrective to Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, which Mbembe argues is insufficient to account for the contemporary politics of death. However, it is not clear that Mbembe succeeds in (a) demonstrating the deficiencies of Foucault’s framework or (b) demarcating necropolitics from biopolitics. In this article, I argue that Mbembe misconstrues Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between biopower and sovereign power, and thus underestimates Foucault’s capacity to account for racialized violence. On this basis, I suggest that the essence of necropolitics is already captured by Foucault’s concepts of State racism and thanatopolitics, and that Mbembe is wrong to suggest that ‘necropower’ constitutes a modality of power in its own right. Nonetheless, I maintain that Mbembe’s work has value in bringing certain effects of power into focus, as evidenced by his insights into the creation of ‘death-worlds’ and the racialized category of ‘the living dead’.