A Necropolitical Approach to Waste Theory

Abstract

Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2019) provides an innovative approach to dissect human relations in a contemporary world where an increasing number of people are deemed super- fluous and disposable under late capitalist logic. His book offers a genealogy of the current state of affairs from a post-Foucauldian perspective that centers on the notion of race and the conception of sovereignty in Western liberal democracies. Rarely associated with Waste Theory, Mbembe articulates a necropolitical approach that complements Zygmunt Bau- man’s conception of “human waste” and Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations on the figure of the homo sacer. This article thus argues that Mbembe’s Necropolitics stands as a major contribution to the field of Waste Studies, in that it encloses a reflection on the racial Other as human waste from a perspective that has not been sufficiently studied.