The Society of Enmity (2016) Achille Mbembe. A very broad and complicated text dealing with movement, (past&present) apartheid and death. The text introduces interesting concepts such as “algorithmic reason” and argues that the triumph of mass morality (social media?) is an emergence of fundamentalism which in itself is “no longer considered as antithetical to rational knowledge”. An other interesting concept is “Nanoracism” (or “pocket-knife racism”), a mollecular level technique for marginalizing others (trough personal martyrdom?). I also spotted a strong critique from the text: The re-emergence of racism in Europe is in fact a return to how things have always been. The text ends in a useful dismissal of the apocalypse.
Pushed to its logical conclusion, the phantasy of annihilation or destruction envisions not only the bombing of the planet, but also the disappearance of humans, their outright extinction. This is not an apocalypse as such, if only because the notion of the apocalypse presupposes the survival, somewhere, of a witness whose task it is to recount what they see. It is a form of annihilation conceived not as a catastrophe to be feared, but rather as a sort of act of purification by fire. However, it remains the case that this purification would be the same as an annihilation of present humanity. Such an act of annihilation is supposed to open the way to another beginning, the inception of another history without today’s humanity. It is, in this sense, a phantasy of ablation.