Necrobiopower: Who can inhabit the nation-state?

Abstract

In the studies on trans-people, transvestites, black population, women, among others, the state appears as a fundamental agent that distributes in a non-egalitarian way the recognition of humanity. There is a core bibliographical reference shared by this field of research. Michael Foucault’s concept of biopower, as a government technique that aims to “to make live, to let die”, is recurrent. When the research refers to state violence, it usually triggers the notion of “sovereignty”, also by Foucault's, as opposed to governability (a set of techniques that are life-oriented). More recently Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropower has become part of this conceptual corpus. This article suggests another concept: necrobiopower. Necropower and biopower are inseparable terms for one to think about the relation of the State with the human groups that inhabited and inhabit the marks of the Nation-State. Livable life and killable life, to use the terms of Giorgio Agamben, are forms of population management and cannot be put in a chronological perspective, where the necropower (or sovereign power) would have been surpassed by biopower.