Extending Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and biopower, Achille Mbembe points to the insufficiency of Giorgio Agamben’s theories about homo saccer, bare life, and the paradigm of the state of exception. Mbembe does not resort to an obscure figure from Roman law to locate the paradigm in which juridical right and its exception coexist. In fact, he writes against Agamben’s epitomization of the Nazi concentration camp as the contemporary locus of bare life. As Mbembe explains, colonization globalized the state of exception; it capitalized upon the social death of enslaved population and colonial subjects. Subjugated lives in the colonies had no sacred value for the colonizers. Sheer racism was what buttressed the colonial system. Anibal Quijano comes to the same conclusions as he delineates his concept of the patrón colonial de poder. The creation of race through the colonization of America gave birth to global capitalism. “[A]mbos elementos, raza y división del trabajo, quedaron estructuralmente asociados y reforzándose mutuamente” (Quijano 204). Racism has its epistemic counterpart in Eurocentrism, which imposed, through the division between nature and culture, the idea of Europe as the culmination of history and all other cultures as primitive. That vision put in place a powerful mechanism of biopower and justified the right to kill as necessary for the maintenance of Eurocentric modernity and the consolidation of the nation-states. As Mbembe remarks quoting Foucault, sovereignty is exercised by state power through the right to kill.
It seems that when looking at the world system as relationships of power all we see is death; governmentality turns into necropolitics. How useful is this framework for the decolonial endeavor? Is this vision pessimistic/paralyzing?
Rivera Cusicanqui diverts the conversation by introducing the idea of textile spatial relationships instead of power domination. The Bolivian author, inspired by Andean kipus, is able to pinpoint the pervivencia of anti-colonial or para-colonial repertories of practices. “The many traversed the colonial and postcolonial centuries walking, dancing, and producing life over this semantic density inscribed in the landscape, in the cosmos, in the pacha.” (6) Invoking the pre-Hispanic concept of ch’ixi (“mottled, stained”), Rivera Cusicanqui sees the potentiality of hybridity (“recombination of opposed worlds and contradictory meanings”) to account for the existence of an interwoven fabric or taypi –“an arena for antagonisms and seductions.” (5) From this perspective, anti-colonial repertoires of practices enable a new space of contestation and resistance, inscribed in the language, in the bodies, and in the commercial circuits, which resist centuries of necropolitics and the neoliberal present (akapacha); that is what Rivera Cusicanqui calls the takiy-thaki (13).
Quijano, Aníbal. "Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y Amércia Latina" La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2000. 201-246. Print.Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. "The Potosí Principle: Another View of Totality." Decolonial Gesture 11. no. 1: 2014. Accessed 29 Sep 2018.