Amador Fernández-Savater: Brutalism, the highest stage of neoliberalism

From Lobo Suelto (09/03/2025)

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What is significant is not what ends and consecrates, but what initiates, announces and prefigures.

Achille Mbembe

What time are we living in? How can we describe our time? For critical thinking, something decisive is at stake in this question of names, the names of the epoch. The map of names orients strategies, points out the movements of the adversary, reveals possible resistances.

What are we facing today? If we don’t know its name, how can we fight it?

The Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe proposes the term “brutalism”. Coming from the world of architecture, where it refers to a massive, industrial, highly polluting style of construction, brutalism as an image of the contemporary world names a process of total war against matter.

Mbembe’s diagnosis is not simply political or economic, cultural or even anthropological, but civilisational, cosmic, cosmopolitical. It designates the dominant relationship with what exists; a relationship of forcing and extraction, of intensive exploitation and depredation. 

The world has become a gigantic open-pit mine. The function of contemporary powers, says Mbembe, is “to make extraction possible”. There is a right-wing version of brutalism and a progressive version, but both manage with different intensities and modalities the same drilling enterprise, from bodies and territories, through language and the symbolic.

Is this a new imperialism? Yes, but it no longer institutes or builds a civilisation of values, a new idea of the Good or a superior culture, but fractures and fissures bodies – individual, collective, terrestrial – to extract from them all kinds of energies to the point of exhaustion, thus threatening the “combustion of the world”. 

Mbembe identifies trends at the planetary level that affect humanity as a whole. But he thinks from a particular place: Africa, its history, its wounds and its resistance. Today, the whole world is experiencing a “becoming black” in which the distinction between the human being, the thing and the commodity tends to disappear. The black slave prefigures a global trend. We are all in danger.

Libidinal brutalist economy

What kind of human being, of subjectivities and desires, does contemporary brutalism seek to produce?

On the one hand, it has the mad project of eradicating the unconscious, “that immense reservoir of night with which psychoanalysis tried to reconcile us”. The human body is not merely a biological, neuro-chemical body, but also “dreamed matter” (Leon Rozitchner) that yearns, that fantasises, that lives utopias. The unconscious is like a banana skin in all plans of control, including one’s control over oneself. It diverts, twists and complicates everything.

This ungovernable dimension must be extirpated, all human forces and potentialities must be captured in data networks, matter must be entirely mapped until the map replaces the territory. Brutalism aims at the integral digitalisation of the world, to dissolve the unconscious (which makes us unique and unrepeatable) in the algorithm, in the number, in the domain of the quantitative; to abolish the mystery that we are, to whiten the night.

But the only thing it achieves is to give free rein to the darkest and most destructive drives. Why? General rationalisation – digitalisation, algorithmisation, protocolisation – blocks affective and amorous energies, that power of Eros which, according to Freud, is the only possible counterweight to Thanatos. The project of eradicating the unconscious leads to a general desensitisation. 

Indifference to the pain of others, a taste for hurting and killing, for seeing suffering; Cruelty and sadism are key features of contemporary powers. Mbembe speaks, in a particularly chilling chapter, of contemporary “virilism”. The libidinal economy of brutalism no longer passes through repression or restraint of the drives, but through unbridled, uninhibited, de-sublimation and the absence of limits; saying everything, doing everything, showing everything and enjoying it.

Virilism configures a frenetic zone, says Mbembe, with no trace of the old feelings of guilt, modesty or inhibition. One figure expresses this perhaps better than any other: the triumph of the image of the incestuous father in pornographic sites. The backward step: if the murder of the despotic father at the hands of his children had meant for Freud the passage to civilisation, the limit and the law, the ghost of the abusive father returns today to populate the darkest desires. 

Yesterday, the reality principle (the paternal mandate) forced us to renounce or postpone pleasure, to replace it with sublimatory compensation. Today, it demands the opposite: not to postpone, defer or substitute anything, but to access jouissance directly, literally and without mediation. To consume (objects, bodies, experiences, relationships), from repression to pressure, from desexualisation to hyper-sexualisation, from the father of prohibition to the father of abuse; guilt today consists of not having enjoyed enough.

Colonising has always meant brutalising. The plantation and the colony are, according to Mbembe, prefigurations of brutalism. Without restraint or symbolic mediation, one can and must absolutely enjoy others, turned into a mere “harem of objects” (Franz Fanon). Can we thus understand, libidinally, a key to the rise of the new right? They present themselves as defenders of a “freedom” which is only the right of the strong to enjoy the weak as if they were disposable objects.

In the background, as a by-product of virilism, the fear of castration, genital panic and horror of the feminine are everywhere. Brutalism even aspires to get rid of women completely; generalised onanism, sexuality without contact, technosexuality, with the brain replacing the phallus as the privileged organ. Virilism was not the last word of patriarchy.

Frontier-bodies

At the end of her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism, more than six hundred pages devoted to the study of the historical and social conditions that made Nazism and Stalinism possible, Hannah Arendt surprisingly states that the only certainty she has reached is that totalitarianism was born in a world where the population as a whole had become superfluous. Concentration (and later extermination) camps were then the only place the powers that be found to house those who were in excess of requirements.

How do we read this today, when our era is traversed by the same phenomenon of errant masses? War has always been a device for the possible regulation of the unwanted surplus population, and totalitarianism a regime of permanent war. Contemporary brutalism, different from Nazism or Stalinism, nevertheless inherits the same function. Faced with the fear of sharing out and the panic of “the multiplication of others”, there arises the brutal management of migration.

Mbembe calls the surplus human beings “border bodies”. What is to be done with them? Isolate and confine, lock up and deport, let them die. Biopolitics (which takes care of life in order to exploit it) is intertwined with necropolitics (which produces and takes care of the superfluous population). 

The contemporary world knows not only soft and seductive forms of control (fashion, design, advertising), but also methods of war. Today, everywhere, controls, detentions and confinements are being tightened. Spaces are divided up, and authoritarian decisions are made about who can and who cannot move about. Not only is the mobility of subjects (of home, of work, of function) promoted, but it is also subjected, controlled, fixed. Gaza is a paradigm of governance.

While European leaders recently celebrated the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the camps have returned again; camps of internment, of detention, of relegation and segregation; for migrants, refugees, asylum seekers; camps, in short, for foreigners, in places such as Samos, Chios, Lesbos, Idomeni, Lampedusa, Ventimiglia, Sicily, Subotica. The most lethal migratory routes worldwide are the European ones. 10,000 people lost their lives trying to enter Spain last year. 

Bloodletting and predation also operate in the management of the complex circulations of border bodies, Mbembe explains, through the control of connections, mobilities and exchanges. The war against migrants (this matter in movement) is also a lucrative business and an economic factor. 

Today, imperialist impulses are combined with nostalgia and melancholy. The former conquerors, aged and tired, feel invaded by “energetic races” full of vitality. The world becomes small and under threat. This is the perception exploited by the European extreme right. The homeland is no longer to be expanded, but defended. The affirmative and enthusiastic style of a Jose Antonio becomes pure fear and victimhood in Vox.

Utopias of Matter

How to resist brutalism? Mbembe does not wallow in an exercise in catastrophism, but dares to “utopianise”. What does this mean?

The Cameroonian thinker finds inspiration in Ernst Bloch, the great 20th century thinker of utopia and hope. What is utopia for Bloch? None of the things we usually think of associated with the term: speculations about the future, projections of scenarios, perfect models. No, utopia is power, latency and possibility already inscribed in the present.

Unlike conventional critique, utopian critique not only draws a critical cartography of contemporary powers, but also points to potentialities of resistance, of change, of other possible worlds. It not only denounces, judges or cancels, but also enunciates new possibilities, inviting the listener to give birth to them, to unfold them. It puts in tension what there is and what there could be, the latter not being an abstract possibility, but a force in process.

If today we are witnessing a “becoming-black of the world”, might we not be inspired by the resistance that African cultures have always opposed to their becoming-thing/object? The particular becomes universal and utopia, as Walter Benjamin wished, is no longer in the future but in “a tiger’s leap into the past”.

These resistances pass, as I read it, through another conception and another relation to matter. Matter according to pre-colonisation African cultures is a fabric of relations, it is difference, it is change. Animism would express this on a spiritual level: the world is populated by a multitude of living beings, active subjects, multiple divinities, ancestors, intercessors.

Either reparations or funerals, says Mbembe. The challenge is not to be indignant or to beat one’s chest, but to regenerate wounded matter. For example, in the case of the debate on the decolonisation of museums, it is not simply a matter of “returning” stolen objects to their places of origin, but of understanding that these objects were not “things” (neither useful nor works of art), but vehicles and channels of energy, vital forces and virtualities that enabled the metamorphosis of matter; recreating an active relationship with memory.

If matter is not an object to be exploited, but a participatory ecosystem, a reservoir of potentials, a set of subjectivities, what political forms might suit it?

Beyond liberal democracy and vitalist nationalism, beyond blood and soil, Mbembe proposes a “democracy of the living” that would practice care for all the inhabitants of the earth, human and non-human; an economy of “the commons” that would force us to renounce our obsessions of exclusive appropriation and a “de-borderisation” of the world capable of protecting everyone’s right to leave, to move and to be in transit; to be a foreigner, for oneself and for others.

Matter itself “utopianises”, as Ernst Bloch said. It is not a passive mass waiting for its form from outside, but has its own movement, its own active principle; it is pregnant with the future. Is that why brutalism makes war on it? What it demands of us is to be “like the fire in the furnace” that matures and realises potentials; not to force it or violate it, but to listen to it and prolong its creation.