Speaking near Necropolitics: Sovereignty, Geopolitics of Death and Sexual Difference

Abstract

Death has always played an important role in politics. With the concept of biopolitics, developed by Michel Foucault (1978), biopower became the main paradigm for analyzing power relations. However, there are geographies and social realities which are not centered around life, but rather around death, indicating that necropower as a category of analysis is significant in capturing the complex reality in which we live. Developed by Achilles Mbembe (2003), necropolitics offers a space for reflection and analysis that biopower is unable to exhaust. This thesis aims at understanding the mechanisms, institutions and imaginaries which are mobilized in the manufacturing of death-worlds and the production of subjects designed for death. By positing the issue of sovereignty as central to the circulation of necropower, this thesis engages with the ideas of Giorgio Agamben; namely the state of exception and the institution of the ban, which are important theoretical tools to understand necropower. By referring to the case study of the migrants who died in the Mediterranean Sea in April 2015, this thesis picks up from this example in order to discern the elements that produce death. In experimenting with necropolitics as a paradigm for analysis, this thesis equally engages with the idea of sexual difference as a space of a more subtle form of necropower by revisiting the theories of Gayatri Spivak on the (post)-colonial female subject using the example of the Sati practice, in which women burn themselves after their husbands die.