Necropolitics as management of mourning

Abstract

The article, of bibliographical nature, discusses necropolitics as a dispositive of power that not only provokes death but also seeks do prevent the suffering caused by death from producing sensibility and commotion in the public sphere by means of a management of mourning. The thesis defended is that mourning, more than a mere emotional state in reaction to loss, is capable of creating conscience about domination relations and give back the status of human loss to the deaths which necropolitics seeks to make invisible. Initially, the article revisits the formulation of the concept of necropolitics in Achille Mbembe, showing how its original scope can be expanded to include mourning as an object of necropolitical control. Then, it draws on the Freudian account of mourning as a process of recovering one’s capacity of engagement with the world through resignifying the lost object. After that, the essay reinterprets Freud’s ideas in the light of the contributions offered by Judith Butler on the unequal distribution of the condition of being grievable, and by Angela Harris on the role of emotions in social critique, in order to theorize the possibility of an experience of mourning which works as a mechanism of antihegemonic political articulation. Finally, the article approaches some aspects of the management of covid-19 pandemic in Brazil as an example both of the necropolitical administration of mourning and of the possibilities of its subversion in the light of the arguments presented.