School of Resistance, Episode Eight: "The Paranoia of the Western Mind" with Achille Mbembe
Channel: HowlRound Theatre Commons
Date: 2020-10-17

Why is it so difficult to recognize a non-European universalism?

NTGent presents School of Resistance, Episode Eight: The Paranoia of the Western Mind livestreaming on the global, commons-based, peer produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Saturday 17 October 2020 at 9 a.m. PDT (Los Angeles, UTC -7) / 12 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4) / 17:00 BST (London, UTC +1) / 18:00 CEST (Berlin, UTC +2).

Recently, Achille Mbembe, one of the most important African thinkers of our age, provoked a complex debate because of a comparison of the Israeli policy of occupation with South African apartheid. Once again, the so-called postcolonial perspective (known for its transhistorical comparison of political and especially colonial violence) clashed with a perspective centred on the “incomparability” of the inner-European genocide (the Holocaust), elevated to a moral imperative. Even if the writings of Mbembe were misread: the longer the debate lasted, the more irreconcilable the two perspectives became.

What lies behind the obvious incapacity of the Western mind to recognize non-European comparisons or even universals? What are the historic, political, and topical sources of this paranoia? Starting from such questions, the discussion will focus on Mbembe’s intellectual work about statehood, violence, death, slavery, capital, sexuality, urbanity, and political economies of brutality, which are imagined and objectified by race, racism, and colonialism.

Achille Mbembe (1957, Otélé, Cameroon), is a philosopher, political theorist, and public intellectual. He is one of the most important living authors on the aftereffects of colonialism. He coined the term “necropolitics” to describe the management of death and destruction associated with colonial dominance and genocide. He lives in Johannesburg.

Milo Rau (1977, Bern, Switzerland) is a theater director, journalist, essayist, and lecturer. His work as a director and a columnist addresses and reconstructs key moments in recent history and tackles its most controversial problems with an original form of documentary theater. He lives in Ghent, Belgium.

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