Quotes from Achille Mbembe

How this is possible is, first, by being, literally, several in a single body. "We are twelve in my body. We are packed like sardines." In other words, the being that I am exists each time in several modes—or, let us say, several beings, which, although sometimes mutually exclusive, are nevertheless inside one another.

In this respect, to convert is to locate oneself in a particular temporality and duration. This duration is that of the inexhaustible future constituted by the infinite, the time of eternity, the time that inaugurates divine existence and its extension in the redemption of the body; thus its final point of completion—if there is one—is the parousia.

The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty's limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one's control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.

Tout étant devenu une source potentielle de capitalisation, le capital s'est fait monde, un fait hallucinatoire de dimension planétaire, producteur, sur une échelle élargie, de sujets à la fois calculateurs, fictionnels et délirants.

music has always been a celebration of the ineradicability of life.

If one is not a human being, what is one?

Whether produced by outsiders or by indigenous people, end-of-the-century discourses about Africa are not necessarily applicable to their object. Their nature, their stakes, and their functions are situated elsewhere. They are deployed only by replacing this object, creating it, erasing it, decomposing and multiplying it. Thus there is no description of Africa that does not involve destructive and mendacious functions.

Historically, Apartheid's failure to secure, once and for all, impenetrable frontiers between a plurality of different fleshes demonstrated a posteriori the limits of the colonial project of separation. Short of its total extermination, the Other is no longer external to us. It is within us, in the double figure of the alter ego, each mortally exposed to the other and to itself.

To this day, most attempts to stage the history of transatlantic slavery in museums have stood out through their vacuity. In them, the slave appears, at best, as the appendix to another history, a citation at the bottom of a page devoted to someone else, to other places, to other things. For that matter, were the figure of the slave really to enter into the museum, such as it exists nowadays, the museum would automatically cease to be.

Enquanto não se puser fim à funesta ideia da desigualdade das raças e da seleção entre diferentes espécies humanas, a luta dos povos de origem africana por aquilo que poderíamos chamar de "igualdade das partes" — e, portanto, dos direitos e das responsabilidades —, continuará a ser uma luta legítima.

To create is, first and foremost, to create time.