Not the least merit of the writings of Achille Mbembe is the distance he manages to create, not so much from, as within such geopolitical imaginaries.
Perhaps one could go much further in undoing certain fixed contours of the geographic and historical imaginary. But this too is merely to play ironically within a geopolitical imaginary in which historical time is at least supposed to have an orientation and a destiny. It is hard not to look at American political and cultural life and not see strong similarities with third world states – including failed ones. Lately, I’ve been tempted to reverse the direction, and think of postcolonial states not as failed approximations of their colonizers, but to think of those former colonizing states as increasingly coming to resemble the ones they colonized. This idea belongs to what one might call an imaginary, or what Bottici calls the imaginal: a world of signification that enables its unity and identity to be thought and enacted.įor a long time, I found it helpful to borrow a term used by Paul Gilroy and others and think rather of an over-developed world, as if the industrialized states had somehow overshot their historical destiny and ended up in some caricature of futurity. There was once a fantasy, shared by left and right alike, that the states of the under-developed world could come, whether by leaps or by steps, to approximate those of the so-called developed world, as if they represented some kind of historical destiny.
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