Necropolitics and Resistance
This research paper represents the completion of my studies over the past several months on violence and the anomie that plagues us. For my readers, some of the ideas have appeared in different forms in earlier essays, but this is the finished product. I hope you enjoy!
There are occasionally circumstances where conflict boils over in a way that not just redefines but seems to go beyond — or temporarily exists outside of — the human condition. As Hannah Arendt described the concentration camps during the holocaust,
“There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death. Because its inhabitants are divested of political status and reduced to bare life, the camp is, for Giorgio Agamben, “the place in which the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized” (Mbembe 2003, 12).
Taken in our moment, we see that the Israel-Palestine conflict has shifted our psychological coordinates, and so has brought the anomie of the past years to a critical point, interrogating the possibility of positionalities for subjects. This isn’t just about a personal attitude, but instead the way subjects conceive of their participation in the social body, and how the current conflict represents an inhuman condition that has fractured our shared habitus and left subjects in a kind of fringe state. My aim is to show that the study of necropolitics is informative for our moment, as the manner in which life has been monopolized by death has come to fruition in a very sobering way, and so subjects defining their positionalities entails a reevaluation of this relationship.
Necropolitics, or the politics of death, is a paradigm for social scientists to capture the ways in which systems of inequity and those with power come to harm peoples’ lives. With regard to Israel-Hamas, the paradoxical point is that the inquiry can’t just be about the high death toll that Israel has inflicted — by that logic, one could simply go back to the initial attack by Hamas and fall into a regression about terrorism, genocide, and collective responsibility. It is not that the broader destruction doesn’t matter, but instead that to understand the psychology behind the situation, one must avoid rushing to blame. As Sarrirah Jarrar puts it in her article, “Living and dying in Gaza under Israel’s necropolitics,” “Beyond the immediate elimination of Palestinian lives, Israeli necropolitics operates on a broader timescale, fostering conditions for a slow death, through induced famine and the systematic destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza” (Jarrar 2024). In this sense, Israel’s decades-long soft genocide is more violent than what’s happening now, precisely because it served as the bedrock for the tensions to erupt the way they did. This ranged from lack of sanitation to inadequate housing, but to an extent the history can disturb one more than literal death.
This brings me to the second point, that of symbolic violence. Subjects’ positionalities are rarely defined solely by overtly violent acts. In the war on terror, American soldiers were able to bypass conventional bounds because we were fighting a common enemy, but this helped pave the way for the solidification of the police state and disregard for human life that alienated the US from many countries in the developing world. The fact that this pattern persisted throughout the 2010s, with interventions in countries like Syria and Yemen, only further highlights how violence has to almost be connived at on a day to day level for its concrete manifestations to be accepted. A perfect example of this continuum is how, after the attack by Hamas, everyone rallied behind the cause that was destroying them for their unconscionable evil. The feeling was honest, but it was analogous to how people were declaiming for global governance during the pandemic. Both attitudes are undergirded by colonial histories that help explain why these situations tend to devolve into destruction rather than resolution most of the time.
When it comes to the different forms of violence, the continuum has to be addressed in terms of power differentials. Biopolitics here overlaps with necropolitics, in the sense that the body has to be seen as more than a composite that people happen to be a part of: there is always an exchange. Foucault, in The Right of Death and Power Over Life, describes this phenomenon by comparing the way power used to be wielded by the sovereign to its diluted forms in modernity. He states,
“By the time the right of life and death was framed by the classical theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form. It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and unconditional way, but only in cases where the sovereign’s very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he were threatened by external enemies who sought to overthrow him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without “directly proposing their death,” he was empowered to expose their life”: in this sense, he wielded an “indirect” power over them of life and death” (2004, 79).
This indirectness is key, as rarely do those with power explicitly tell subjects they are being subjugated or exploited, but the difference between older and modern times is that the line between the exercise of power and its manifestations has been blurred. The effect this has on subjects is occluding their participation in the body, hence why we are in the middle of a war where, as Slavoj Zizek put it, everyone will be losers.
In terms of more individual aspects, it is a matter of examining what life must feel like for people who have been ensconced in this conflict for years. This ranges from Hamas and Israel using hostages and prisoners as capital, to families in the region having long ago resigned themselves to the very real possibility that not only will this war not end anytime soon, but that it doesn’t discriminate. The implication for subjects is a bit more daunting than in the past. We are no longer in the midst of an invisible enemy that seems to strike at random, nor do we have a clear villain that the world can hate. Instead, now peoples’ very orientations to the possibility of life being a certain way have been upended. Of course, there is a difference between having one’s village destroyed and stressing about grocery prices, but the psychological mechanism is the same: the space we occupy is simply other, lacking a cohesive set of reference points that will bind it together. This is why it’s interesting that, as Greg More describes in his article, “How the dead serve as bargaining chips in the Israel-Hamas conflict,” the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, a group run by Palestinians trying to get bodies returned, describes the practice of withholding bodies as necropolitics (More 2024).
The way this actually manifests for those on the ground can be devastating. The article describes how, “Israel tries to determine who’s alive and who isn’t in multiple ways. Israel’s security forces debrief hostages who’ve been released, asking whom they saw alive. Israel also analyzes injuries suffered by those who were taken captive, trying to determine who likely survived and who didn’t” (More 2024). The fact that this has been going on for years, with people only seeming to wake up when they no longer had a choice, highlights the ambiguity at the heart of how individuals relate to each other now. On the one hand, people have to acknowledge a more real trauma, and this can lead to things like the college protests, which have had a somewhat positive effect. But more subtly, people have to choose how they will relate to the conflict if there is to even be the possibility of new values. And since both sides are culpable in different ways, one can no longer fall back on ideological pretenses to secure their position — good and evil themselves have become intermingled.
Here, it is important to clarify Mbembe’s insights. He draws on thinkers ranging from Bataille to Hegel, to capture what it actually feels like to be a necropolitical subject. He explains Hegel’s concept of the subject’s relationship to death,
“First, the human negates nature (a negation exteriorized in the human’s effort to reduce nature to his or her own needs); and second, he or she transforms the negated element through work and struggle. In transforming nature, the human being creates a world; but in the process, he or she also is exposed to his or her own negativity. Within the Hegelian paradigm, human death is essentially voluntary. It is the result of risks consciously assumed by the subject. According to Hegel, in these risks the “animal” that constitutes the human subject’s natural being is defeated” (2003, 14).
He goes on to describe Hegel’s insistence on Spirit living with death and how this translates to a dismemberment that instantiates politics as death, but the key point lies in his (mis)interpretation of negativity. For Hegel, the subject doesn’t “live with death” or come to risk its life as part of some inverted overcoming that is delimited by negativity. The point is rather for the subject to integrate negativity in a way that takes them beyond mere animal existence and allows Spirit to flourish in the face of death. Politics as death could be an extension of monarchical rule, but what we see today is that death has to be political for anyone to live. The individuals in Gaza only understand destruction and a world that let them down; overcoming here isn’t about negating anything, but realizing what can be created from this state.
The other key necropolitical element is the status of exchange. As mentioned, power differentials will always be there, but this doesn’t make it a reduction to some kind of tradeoff, like people escaping concentration camps by cooperating with the Nazis. Instead, it is to be seen in what is left after people accept that they are forced to live in difficult conditions. Daher-Nashif, in his piece about the different ways life and death are capitalized on and valorized in Israel-Palestine relations, describes how,
“Since the colonised life is a ‘bare life,’ i.e. being exposed to the structure of exception that constitutes contemporary biopower (Agamben, 1998), his/her death is bare too. Killing is in fact legalised by the suspension of the law when the colonised is continuously positioned within the state of exception” (Daher-Nashif 2020).
This state of exception is why Hamas was able to launch such an abrupt and horrifically traumatic attack, and why it took several months for people to actually grasp the magnitude of Israel’s response. This was also seen in the reaction to the prospect of WWIII when Iran launched its missiles at Israel. In all cases, there is a surplus enjoyment subjects get from an uneven exchange between life and death in a world where the latter is currency and truth has become a situational matter. It is praiseworthy that college students set up encampments, and most now recognize Israel’s genocide for what it is, but in terms of subjectivity, it is less about a way out than realizing the situation one is in.
The upshot of this is that the severity of what those living through this conflict have to endure can be supplemented by more authentic forms of resistance. For instance, the college protests, while not revolutionary in themselves, are a far cry from what we saw in the summer of 2020, both in terms of what they are based on and how they have played out. In both cases, agitators disrupted things and there was misguided violence, but the campus protests represented a genuine effort for something real, and that is what has been missing from our contemporary psychic economy. Juxtaposed against the duration of Israel’s genocide, and how this conflict represents the culmination of a series of imperial intrusions, we see that it is a long term matter precisely because our institutions no longer have answers for us. Where the pandemic shocked people into an awareness of the fragility of mortality, the current subject’s relationship to death borders on a kind of absurdity — less that they literally don’t care than that the collective psyche is so inured to the trauma that death has a different valence. As Foucault puts it in Society Must Be Defended,
“Death was no longer something that suddenly swooped down on life — as in an epidemic. Death was now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it” (2013, 65).
This is the sense in which life has been monopolized by death: it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
The question is effectively what subjects can do. My argument is that it is not just a matter of resistance in the literal sense (although that is part of it), as the pattern over the past years reflects transience and misguided efforts. If death has become the currency, then our psychological life is brought into question more than day to day occurrences. The politics of death is just a counter to the fact that power has exceeded the control of those who wield it. Viruses can proliferate, wars can be going on while people live out their daily lives, and solutions don’t seem within reach. If one examines the fact that many in Gaza already felt like their lives were being destroyed, in light of the magnitude of the conflict, it casts different light on standing behind a supposedly emancipatory cause.
The silver lining is that the collective has moved on from the narcissistically indulgent subjectivity that persisted for some years, but with an uncertain political climate, excess suffering, and no clear end, the redemptive potential can only lie in subjects themselves. This requires a redefining of what death means in a world plagued by crises, and the way individuals choose to approach their lives and others based on this. The trauma of the past years is only beginning to heal for those who are fortunate enough to be able to think about these issues from the comfort of their homes, and while one can’t suffer with everyone, there is a certain value to something like the college students setting up encampments to come together, in contrast to the aimless insanity of the riots of 2020. Since we are now dealing with an issue which concerns everyone, whose ripples can be seen in greater pockets of violence, civil unrest, and disillusionment with a world that gave us everything for too long, understanding the relationship between life and death as part of an effort to define new values is what will change subjects’ coordinates.
Daher-Nashif, S. 2021. “Colonial management of death: To be or not to be dead in Palestine.” Current Sociology 69, no. 7, 945–962. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392120948923
Foucault, Michel. 1978. “The Right of Death and Power Over Life.” In Violence in War and Peace, 79–82. Blackwell Publishing.
Foucault, Michel. 2013. “Society Must be Defended.” In Biopolitics, edited by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, 61–81. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Jarrar, Samirah. 2024. “Living and dying in Gaza under Israel’s necropolitics.” The New Arab. March 25, 2024. https://www.newarab.com/opinion/living-and-dying-gaza-under-israels-necropolitics
Mbembe, J.A. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1, 11–40. Duke University Press.
Myre, Greg. 2024. “How the dead serve as bargaining chips in the Israel-Hamas conflict.” NPR. February 22, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/02/22/1230604077/israel-hamas-war-hostages-prisoners-dead