Necropolitics at a Distance

Last week, Aaron raised an interesting question about the link between necropolitics and killing that takes place at a distance (temporal, spatial), proposing that “perhaps it’s possible to consider the necropolitical in relation to killing that occurs in belated or temporally discontinuous contexts.” The suggestion that “killing at a distance” may still be usefully included under the rubric of the necropolitical enables me to draw a connection between Mbembe’s work and The Picture of Dorian Gray and to see necropolitics at work in in the deaths of two lower-class characters: Sybil Vane, the actress who commits suicide when Dorian breaks off his engagement to her, and James Vane, her brother, who dies in an accidental shooting at Dorian’s hunting lodge.

In what way are these deaths, which the text uneasily names as murders -- “‘So I have murdered Sybil Vane,’ said Dorian Gray, half to himself, ‘—murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife’” (96) – properly necropolitical? They illustrate, in a way that admittedly strains the terms of Mbembe’s argument, a “power” that “refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy” in order to establish and maintain a right to kill (Mbembe 16). Dorian and Lord Henry justify rhetorically, post-facto, the deaths of Sybil and James by framing both lower-class characters as potential dangers to Dorian’s existence: “If you had married [Sybil] you would have been wretched,” Henry suggests (97), and after seeing James’s corpse, Dorian weeps with relief, “for he knew he was safe” from any attempts by James to avenge his sister’s death (199). While the need to kill Sybil and James was not present while they were alive, Dorian is able to conjure it afterwards to assuage the guilt he feels for his role, however accidental, in their deaths.

This rhetorical slight-of-hand is helped by a preexisting right to kill that the upper class holds over the lower class, in practice if not in law, illustrated chillingly by Alan Campbell’s reaction to Dorian’s confession of the murder of Basil Hallward: “Murder!...I shall not inform upon you. It is not my business” (161). That is, while the lower class is not always framed as a dangerous enemy that needs to be killed in order for the upper class to survive, it is still constructed as a population that is eminently disposable. (This may go some way to explain Lord Henry’s ghoulish reduction of Sybil and James’s deaths to their aesthetic value, as “a wonderful scene [from a play]” (100) or “an annoying subject” (196), respectively.)

Also, to reconnect these murders-at-a-distance to Aaron’s example (the radioactive fallout to which “low-use segments” of the population were subjected as a result of nuclear testing), we can see that in both cases, while the deaths of specific subjects are unintended, the killing act was itself an assertion of the state/upper class’s right to kill. Testing nuclear bombs is itself an assertion of the right to use them in acts of war; on a smaller scale, the firing of guns at animals -- and the lower-class employees (beaters) whose job it is to drive them into the path of the upper-class hunters – is an act that asserts the right to kill, and it takes place in a setting (the hunting lodge’s extensive grounds) that symbolizes Dorian’s economic and political power. In both cases, a demonstration of power results in actual deaths.

What may bar these deaths from being usefully included in a consideration of necropolitics is not the distance between the act of killing and physical death, but in the missing intention to kill; here, murder is not the “primary and absolute objective” of the characters’ actions. Nevertheless, the characters’ assertion of the right to kill is the condition of possibility for the deaths, however casually unrelated the two events may appear, and the deaths therefore result from a kind of necropolitics.

Does extending an understanding of necropolitics to include the accidental or not-directly-intended deaths of disposable populations in addition to the deliberate murders of threatening ones – to include letting die as well as killing – assist or obscure our attempts to follow the operations of necropolitics in the world? Does the unpredictability of killing-at-a-distance point to a fatal flaw in necropolitical sovereignty? Or does it make such sovereignty appear all the more capacious and inescapable?