(Re)construction | The need and desire to repair the world (Achille Mbembe)
Channel: medico international
Date: 2021-04-06

On the conditions for a planetary consciousness

Lecture by Achille Mbembe (Political Philosopher, Johannesburg)

If repair and reparation of the past are prerequisites for the "ascent to humanity", then politics is about a dialogue of equal subjects in the struggle for a world (Mbembe) "liberated from the burden of race" and thus also from capital. The path as well as the goal of such a politics lies in the globalization of rights, which historically have always been demanded as universal rights, but initially always exclusively, i.e., as a racialized privilege.

Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist and public intellectual. After holding positions at various U.S. universities, he now teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Mbembe was awarded the 36th Geschwister Scholl Prize in 2015 for his book Critique of Black Reason (2013). He is one of the most important living authors when it comes to the aftermath of colonialism. He coined the term "necropolitics" to describe the proliferation of power and sovereignty structures whose features include the production of death on a large scale. His most recent publication is "Out of the Dark Night. Essays on Decolonization" (2020).

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The (Re)Construction of the World. Aid. Solidarity. Politics.

A conference not only on the miserable state of the world, but also and above all on the possibilities of its reconstruction into a place that will finally be worth inhabiting. In lectures and forums, the aim is to determine the relationship between aid, solidarity and politics from the promise we made to ourselves in the Declaration of Human Rights: The promise of a global and social order in which the rights granted to us all would be fully realized.

The online conference (February 12th until February 14th, 2021) was organized by medico international e. V. in cooperation with the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Institut für Sozialforschung Frankfurt, International Institute of Political Murder and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

www.medico.de/en/reconstruction