In The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia Achille Mbembe explores what remains of the human subject in an age when the instrumentality of reason is carried out by and through information machines and technologies of calculation.
Mbembe discusses who will define the threshold or set the boundary that distinguishes between the calculable and the incalculable, between that which is deemed worthy and that which is deemed worthless, and therefore dispensable. He asks whether we can turn these new instruments of calculation and power into instruments of liberation. In other words, will we be able to invent different modes of measuring that might open up the possibility of a different aesthetics, a different politics of inhabiting the Earth, of repairing and sharing the planet?
Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the author of a.o. Critique of Black Reason (2016), Necropolitics (2019) and Brutalisme (2020).