Man-eaters

“To large extent, is not the noise of the revolver fired into the condemned man’s temple the same as the gas expelled by the autocrat in a shattering burp after a sumptuous meal?  The fact is that power, in the postcolony, is carnivorous…”

-Achille Mbembe, 2001 (On the Postcolony.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  Pg 201)

A million-dollar-question

“How, then, does one live when the time to die has passed, when it is even forbidden to be alive, in what might be called the experience of living the ‘wrong way around’?  How, in such circumstances, does one experience not only the everyday but the hic et nunc when, every day, one has both to expect anything and to live in expectation of something that has not yet been realized, is delaying being realized, is constantly unaccomplished and elusive?”

-Achille Mbembe, 2001 (On the Postcolony.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  P 201)