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Achille Mbembe, Brutalism

Luca Bertocci
p. 199-200
Bibliographical reference

Achille Mbembe, Brutalism, Duke University Press, 2024, 200 pp. Paperback € 23,00 ISBN:9781478025580

Full text

1How can we rethink production in the face of the worsening social and environmental catastrophe brought by capitalist globalization and the metastatic spread of the colonial will? How might we reimagine humanity, transform our mode of inhabiting the planet, and create a new society grounded in the horizon of a common home? What role, then, do architecture and politics play in this challenge? When critical research in these fields grapples with such questions, it is often confronted with multiple impasses. The project (the telos-condition that signals the essence of, and profound connection between architecture and politics) seems today to evoke more an unutterable void than a productive engine. The project is surrounded by a sense of unease and has become quite a rejected destiny, as if the coin of twenty-century philosophy had only one side. This rejection manifests in several dead ends, most notably political asceticism, attachment to pure negative, and a reliance on metaphors.

2Achille Mbembe’s Brutalism, first published in French in 2020 and translated into English in 2024, offers a different story. The poetic style is essential, finally restoring philosophy’s power to transform life. Indeed, above all, what is brutal is the reversal on which the essay is founded. Mbembe responds to each of those dead ends with creative thought-images (formula proposed by the author) arising from Africa − long obscured and dispossessed by colonialism: binding energy, circulation, and anticipatory presence.

Binding energies

3Brutalism is grounded in these perpetual and creative forces − rooted in pre-colonial Africa and radiating through the planetary transition (or catastrophe) we are now experiencing. They provide the condition for a metabolic, constructive gesture: creating new objects that both celebrate and support encounters with the other, without assimilation. The author manages the rare feat of surviving the dialectic of Enlightenment in an enlightened way. Fully aware of the mythical anxiety that marked the Enlightenment − as Horkheimer and Adorno argued − Mbembe does not counter this by deserting reason and politics. Rather, he envisions a plastic humanity, capable of building and organizing itself through, despite, and thanks to, the excess of the other. What exceeds reason is not a removed outside, nor a self-sufficient good will, but a productive immanent cause. To stand face to face, yet to desire one another, yet to recognize our mutual need: this potential humanity is not the product of mechanistic automatism, nor of political asceticism. It is rather the result of a re-enchanted production of a new combination of matter and energy. In this “cosmos-making” (p. 48), architecture and politics come together to create infrastructures that guide us through our existential challenges. For each individual to understand themselves, we must exist as societas, Common, encounter, and exchange.

Circulation

4Precolonial Africa, Mbembe argues, is rooted in circulation. This condition extends far beyond and far deeper than contemporary privilege of the ones moving across the planet. Africa was, he states provocatively, digital before the digital. Nevertheless, faced with the selective circulation of humanity on Earth, there is a growing desire to reclaim a supposed original identity and individuality. According to the author, this troubling attachment to “blood and soil” (p. 53) – the negative of circulation – stands in opposition to the brutalist project and to the development of a new consciousness and architecture of humanity. Instead of retreating into isolated, allegedly autonomous communities, it is essential to recognize that the Self is never self-generated but always constituted through relationships with the Other. What is needed, therefore, are planetary politics that set history back in motion, rather than visions of organic and “pure” communities. Rather than identity, what has priority to Mbembe is the energy that binds, transforms, and propels identities. Their existence depends on their society, on the effort – only apparently paradoxical – to converge in mutually transformative encounters. Once again, it is through plasticity – or what Marx might have called metabolism – that humanity can be redesigned, both architecturally and politically, to liberate circulation.

Anticipatory presence

5One final thought-image from pre-colonial Africa underpins both the essay and the Brutalism project: anticipatory presence. It makes the author structure the whole reasoning starting from a hypothesis: contemporary global society gestures toward Planetary Africa. This echoes some of Lefebvre’s most enthusiastic and far-sighted passages. Amid planetary urbanization, he likewise discerned the possibility of a common project and artwork he named “urban society.” To Mbembe, a counterforce to the colonial, destructive, and technocratic order stands latent in the present. Such an animistic stance does not aim to desert reason, nor to suggest mere wordplay or metaphors – which are often invoked in place of the concreteness and feasibility of real-world action. Rather, Planetary Africa is a concrete utopia, the tangible base for re-anchoring politics in the constructive gesture of a new humanity, here and now. Against combustion, nihilism and technocracy, Brutalism conceives of exodus as re-enchanted production of planetary life and its supporting infrastructures.

6Nevertheless, at times, it seemed that there is no ambivalence in contemporary technological trends. That they do not embed any anticipatory presence, that currently existing technology is alienation only, pure dominance and obscurity. The brightness of the entrails that the end of the book celebrates, the potential humanity they are in the grip of, appear as a kind of acquisition after having passed by the ruins. Maybe this process of thinking and narrative is not always the best. The author possesses the strength to withstand the abyss he is confronted with. But what about us? Perhaps we should begin from the end, after having been absorbed only in commenting on capitalist destruction. We might turn to writing about, celebrating, and actively shaping the planetary energetic binding, the bricks and politics of a new common infrastructure capable of realizing Planetary Africa completely. After all, the Latin-derived Italian word for “the West” is occidente, which refers to “decline” widely, but also to the setting sun specifically. Could the West find, in Planetary Africa, a horizon where to recognize its own name – not by postponing its etymology but by accepting it, and at last returning itself to its non-colonial essence? Perhaps, for us, Brutalism is precisely about exploring this question.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Luca Bertocci, “Achille Mbembe, BrutalismArdeth, 15 | 2024, 199-200.

Electronic reference

Luca Bertocci, “Achille Mbembe, BrutalismArdeth [Online], 15 | 2024, Online since 01 January 2026, connection on 13 April 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ardeth/6360

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About the author

Luca Bertocci

Sapienza Università di Roma

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Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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