Book review. Brutalism

Abstract

In this essay, Achille Mbembe expands his notion of "the becoming black of the world", defined as the extension, under the Neoliberal regime, of the subjugation and dehumanization techniques that were first applied against black people to ever wider layers of the world population. Mbembe uses for this purpose the category brutalism, conceived as a civilizing project that spreads a logic of quantification, abstraction and classification to every sphere of life. In this regime of domination, the Cameroonian author emphasizes the prominence of the frontier, which he considers to be the very negation of any possibility of a common humanity. Given the war scenario that we witness, Mbembe's argumentation not only proposes a lucid diagnosis, but also points out tools for political action.