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Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLII | Number 2  | 2021 | 193–220 | doi: 10.3986/fv.42.2.09
* ZRC SAZU, Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Marina Gržinić*
World(s)1
Introduction1 
The point of departure for this text is formulated in the “Conversation on the 
End of the World” between Achille Mbembe and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schubac-
kan, where Mbembe states “that we cannot think as if there was only one world 
or only one form of consciousness of the world. In consequence, not only the 
question of the world must remain open, but even the one about the world as an 
a priori.”2 The consequence of this is that 
the archives of this world in plural are themselves also plural – a multiplicity of 
worlds, a multiplicity of archives, if we wish to resume this idea in a simple for-
mula. If we accept then that there is a multiplicity of worlds and a multiplicity of 
archives, it is also possible to admit that there are worlds that are finishing and 
others that are emerging and others that are in different situations from these as 
well. It is this simultaneity that should be thought. We cannot think the question 
about the end of the world as if it did not comprehend structurally, its own inverse 
in itself, namely the question about the emergence of the world, the world of an-
other, and another world, and so on.3
To the problems Mbembe opens in this quote regarding the concept of world 
today, I would like to contrast what Alexander Galloway identifies as the pover-
ty of contemporary philosophy: “What kind of world is it in which humans are 
1 This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy” and the research project J6-9392 “The Problem of Objectivity 
and Fiction in Contemporary Philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research 
Agency.
2 Achille Mbembe and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schubackan, “Conversation on the End of the 
World”, in M. S. C. Schuback and S. Lindberg (eds.), The End of the World: Contemporary 
Philosophy and Art, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017, p. 23.
3 Ibid.
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on equal footing with garbage? What kind of world is it in which the landscape 
is a chaotic nothing-world, unfounded at its core and motivated by no neces-
sary logic (Meillassoux) or by the logic of the market (Latour)?”4 What Mbembe 
points out at the outset, then, contrasts with a poor philosophy that looks the 
other way in a world where man is equal to garbage.
 
There is a definite common ground for both of these lines of thought, which 
can be found in the statement there is no capitalist WORLD without colonialism.5 
But before I come to this and the problems that need to be addressed in order to 
understand the issue with thinking “the world” today, I will further outline the 
two contrasting ways of approaching this concept.
 
Returning to the first one subsumed in Mbembe’s opening quotation, it is im-
portant to connect it to his 2013 book Critique of Black Reason, where he writes:
The question of the world – what it is, what the relationship is between its various 
parts, what the extent of its resources is and to whom they belong, how to live in 
it, what moves and threatens it, where it is going, what its borders and limits, and 
its possible end, are – has been within us since a human being of bone, flesh, and 
spirit made its first appearance under the sign of the Black Man, as human-mer-
chandise, human-metal, and human-money. Fundamentally, it was always our 
question. And it will stay that way as long as speaking the world is the same as 
declaring humanity, and vice versa.6 
“[T]he term ‘Black’ has been generalized,” Mbembe writes.7 “This new fungibil-
ity, this solubility, institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded 
to the entire planet, is what I call the Becoming Black of the world,”8 or le De-
venir-Nègre du Monde. Mbembe contends that the systematic risks that Black 
4 Alexander Galloway, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism”, Critical In-
quiry, 39 (2/2013), pp. 364–365.
5 The central part of this text is based on the research and writings I did for the workshop 
Conjunctural Geographies of Post socialist and Postcolonial Conditions: Theory Thirty Years 
after 1989, Leipzig, Germany, 15–16 May 2020.
6 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. L. Dubois, Durham, Duke University 
Press, 2017, pp. 179–80. First published as Critique de la raison nègre, Paris, La Décou-
verte, 2013.
7 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, p. 6.
8 Ibid.
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world(s)
slaves faced throughout early capitalism became the norm for the vast majority 
of subaltern people and that the new imperial practices we see today are linked 
to a tendency to universalize the Black condition. New imperial practices “bor-
row as much from the slaving logic of capture and predation as from the colonial 
logic of occupation and extraction, as well as from the civil wars and raiding of 
earlier epochs.”9
Another perspective, or more precisely, a philosophy of the becoming of the 
Black world, is offered by Kevin Everod Quashie when reflecting on black move-
ments from the Combahee River Collective (CRC) to Black Lives Matter. CRC was 
a radical Black feminist organization formed in 1974 and named after Harriet 
Tubman’s 1863 raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina that freed 750 en-
slaved people. Its 1977 “Combahee River Collective Statement” formulated the 
interlocking of oppression and identity politics.10
Quashie emphasizes that
the idiom “a black world” names an aesthetic imaginary that encompasses heter-
ogeneity. I take inspiration, as ever, from the worldmaking conceptualized promi-
nently in black women’s feminism. When the Combahee River Collective’s “Black 
Feminist Statement” announces that “our politics initially sprang from a shared 
belief that Black women are inherently valuable,” it signals not only the enduring 
marginalization of black women in the world but also an imagining determined 
to locate philosophical and political meaningfulness through the specificity of 
black femaleness. There is a similar capaciousness in Hortense J. Spillers’s ar-
gument about black femaleness in the iconic “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An 
American Grammar Book,” or in Alice Walker’s womanism, with its ever-widen-
ing pool of human insight cultivated from a black female vernacular idiom.11 
He continues: 
9 Ibid., p. 4.
10 The Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement”, in Z. R. 
Eisenstein (ed.), Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Social Feminism, New York, Monthly 
Review Press, 1978, pp. 362–372.
11 Kevin Everod Quashie, Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being, Durham, Duke University 
Press, 2021, p. 11.
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As necessary as “Black Lives Matter” has proven to be, so efficient and beautiful 
a truth-claim, its necessity disorients me; to hear it said or see it printed as an 
emblem is existentially disorienting. I want a black world where the matter of 
mattering matters indisputably, where black mattering is beyond expression. I 
want to read and study in the orientation of a black world.
Today there is no reconciling the facts of our lives, which seem tethered to death, 
and the case for black aliveness. Both have to be true at the same time.
This work begins with a single premise, an instruction, really: imagine a black 
world. Such a directive acknowledges that the New World plunder of modernity 
and coloniality enacts a destruction of the world as it was and might have be-
come, that the New World unorders the relationship of the human to place, time, 
other human. Or we might say there never was a world, that imperialism’s de-
structiveness is that it imposed a world logic. Either case describes world-failure 
that, among other horrors, mobilizes blackness as an antithesis to human life.12
Going back to the second previously mentioned line of reasoning, its represent-
ative figure is Quentin Meillassoux. His formal-mathematical manner of think-
ing flees from the world to think a world as a possibility based on chaos theory, 
leaning toward inhumanity. With Meillassoux, we discover “a way to think re-
alities subsisting beyond the correlation and not dependent on it. What subsists 
in-itself, irrespective of the correlation, is a ‘time of a radical inhumanity’ and 
this is why he will place a strong emphasis on temporality when discussing the 
absolute.”13
Peter Gratton explains that the world in Meillassoux’s thinking is based on 
the “‘pas-tout’ – translatable as ‘not-all’, ‘not-whole’ or even ‘not-everything’”, 
which “refers to the non-totalisability or subsumability of subjects under a 
given universal.”14 It is based on Jacques Lacan’s ‘pas-tout’, used mainly in his 
12 Ibid., p. 13.
13 Peter Gratton and Paul J. Ennis, “Introduction: From a Speculative Materialism to a Specu-
lative Ethics”, in P. Gratton and P. J. Ennis (eds.), The Meillassoux Dictionary, Edinburgh, 
Edinburgh University Press, 2015, p. 8.
14 Peter Gratton, “Non-whole/Non-all”, in The Meillassoux Dictionary, p. 126.
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world(s)
Seminar XX, Encore (1972–1973)15 and explored in “L'étourdit” (1973).16 Gratton 
explains:
For Meillassoux, until Cantor, what was possible was thought under a set of pos-
sibilities, even if highly improbable. In each set or World, there is a given range 
of chances. For example, for a die, the chance of rolling a one is one out of six. 
But what Meillassoux says is that there is no totalisable set of all possible sets or 
universes. As such, while within this World we have a number of possibles, the 
universe itself cannot be totalised in terms of its possibilities. This he refers to as 
‘world’ (lower case) or the ‘virtual’, the illimitable non-Whole of possibilities of 
creation in hyper-chaos.”17 
“For Meillassoux,” as Gratton and Paul J. Ennis reformulate Meillassoux’s “Itera-
tion, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign,”18
given the capacities of hyper-chaos, it is conceivable that the current stability of 
natural laws has been upended before – that is, the facts of the physical laws have 
themselves changed. Meillassoux argues there were previous Worlds capitalised 
to distinguish them from the world of the non-Whole – prior to this one. They 
are (1) the World of inorganic matter; (2) the World of organic matter; and (3) 
the World of organic matter and thought. In this way, Meillassoux differentiates 
between the notion of World and ‘world’, since each World emerges ex nihilo from 
the ‘world’ of hyper-chaos. The essential point here is that once one is willing to 
accept Meillassoux’s ontological vision that no non-contradictory possibility can 
be discounted, then we see the possibility of a new World to come, which has 
immense implications for ethics.
Meillassoux argues at various points that from one World to the next there is a 
qualitative leap that cannot be explained in terms of the physical laws of the pre-
15 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX: Encore, 
trans. B. Fink, New York, W. W. Norton, 1998.
16 Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit”, in Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, pp. 449–496.
17 Gratton, “Non-whole/Non-all”, p. 126.
18 See Quentin Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of 
the Meaningless Sign”, paper presented at the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany, 20 April 
2012, https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/886529/539a4b4a8c213179c159eefc0
4a28947.pdf, accessed 7 September 2021.
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vious one. Hence, each World is sui generis or self-causing: the World of thought 
could not have come out of the laws governing organic matter and organic matter, 
he avers, could not have been caused by simple matter. In this manner, specula-
tive materialism ‘affirms’ the ‘radical contingency of our world.’19
In short, as Gratton and Ennis point out in their conclusion regarding Meillas-
soux’s 2008 paper20: 
There is no need to detail all those kinds of spectres Meillassoux describes – the 
dead child, the victims of heinous massacres of all sorts – since only the most 
affectless of us do not feel the existential weight of the horrors of this or that 
death, as well as all the Holocausts of history. To be human is to live under the 
shadow of this wide work of mourning. For Meillassoux essential mourning over 
these spectres is impossible in our current World. What words could console us 
concerning them?21
To this question, I would immediately respond that the idea of the world in 
Mbembe’s thought is about temporalization and another history. Mbembe argues 
that a negation of time (i.e., a colonial view of time) serves to produce a humanity 
without history.22 Being “radically located outside of time,” or to connect to the 
initial logic of repetition – it is “repetition without difference. Native time was 
sheer repetition – not of events as such, but the instantiation of the very law of 
repetition. Following Fanon, Mbembe understands decolonisation as precisely a 
subversion of the law of repetition – as a “possibility to reconstitute the human 
19 Gratton and Ennis, “Introduction”, p. 14.
20 See Quentin Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming”, paper presented at the Centre for 
Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London, United King-
dom, 8 May 2008, https://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729-time_with-
out_becoming.pdf, accessed 7 September 2021.
21 Gratton and Ennis, “Introduction”, p. 15. 
22 See Marina Gržinić, “Memory and History and the Act of Remembering”, lecture at The 
Boundary Condition. About the Archive and Its Limits seminar, MACBA, Spain, 16 Feb-
ruary 2018, https://www.macba.cat/en/exhibitions-activities/activities/boundary-con-
dition-about-archive-and-its-limits. See also Marina Gržinić, “Introduction: Burdened 
by the Past, Rethinking the Future. Eleven Theses on Memory, History, and Life”, in M. 
Gržinić, J. Pristovšek, and S. Uitz (eds.), Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-
Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge 
Scholars Publishing, 2020, pp. 1–21.
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world(s)
after humanism’s complicity with colonial racism.”23 We should be clear that we 
are dealing with another history, not that of white supremacy, which believes 
itself to be the only valid history (of progress leading into the void). The point is 
to take colonialism and coloniality into account. Mbembe says at the very end of 
this text that we must escape the status of victimhood, and break with the “good 
conscience” and the denial of responsibility. Only through this double approach 
will we be able to formulate a new politics and ethics based on the call for justice.
In order to understand the antagonistic nature of these two positions, I propose 
that we take an unexpected path, summed up in the maxim there is no capitalist 
WORLD without colonialism. Or rather, we will undertake a conceptualization 
that illuminates the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the world 
at stake.
There Is No Capitalist WORLD without Colonialism
Capitalist dominance and its mode of reproduction are based on processes of 
racialization and class and gender discrimination that centrally redefine the re-
lationship between labor and capital, the extraction of surplus value (profit) as 
conceived in the Marxist critique of political economy, as well as the disposses-
sion of land, violent processes of othering, and the functioning of (neo)liberal 
institutions with their ideological and repressive apparatuses.
The relationship between capitalism and colonialism, since they work hand in 
hand, can be paraphrased through the dictum of decolonial theory, “there is no 
modernity without coloniality,” just as there is no capitalism without colonial-
ism. The intertwining of colonialism and capitalism tangentially affects the form 
of what is, in the parlance of Marxism, the base of capital, the mode of capitalist 
reproduction, and likewise the superstructure of the capitalist social, political, 
23 Achille Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive”, a paper 
forming the basis of a series of public lectures given at the Wits Institute for Social and 
Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), the Uni-
versity of Cape Town (in conversation with the Rhodes Must Fall movement), and the 
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch (as part of 
the Indexing the Human Project), 2015, https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20
Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20
the%20Archive.pdf, accessed 7 September 2021.
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knowledge, and institutional regimes that aggregate within a given capitalist 
formation, i.e., necrocapitalism, financial capitalism, turbo-capitalism, etc.
This text reflects on the relation between capitalism and colonialism in order 
to rethink two historical forms of capitalism that turn out not to be historical at 
all, but are fully functional in the present moment: racial capitalism and settler 
capitalism, or racial-settler capitalism as its common formation. Thus, my main 
thesis is that in order to critically assess the institutions built on the soil of co-
lonialism that perpetuate the worlds of neoliberal global capitalism, financial 
capitalism, and necrocapitalism, we need to rethink the two main divisions me-
diated by decolonial theory and decolonization as analytical tools: the racial/
colonial divide and the imperial/colonial divide.
To do this, we must first observe the convergence of colonialism and capitalism 
and how theory, past and present, reflects on their relationship. Below, I would 
like to explain the hyper-violent mode of the relationship between labor and 
capital, to the point where we move from slavery and racism to the concept of 
democracy itself. In this analysis, I also want to emphasize the inherent role 
of geography – the banality of the world as East, West, North, and South – in 
the processes of racialization that stems from past enslavement and racism and 
persists today as the structural and institutional racism that reverberates in the 
concept of racialization. What do I mean by this? A long-lasting, never-ending 
process of differentiation, violence, and exclusion based on the ideological con-
cept of race. More than that, racialization refers not only to people, ethnicities, 
and non-citizens or second-class citizens, but also to geography. The geography 
of the former East and the contemporary South is a racialized geography.
Primitive Accumulation and Capitalism
Nikhil Pal Singh argues that one of the biggest problems in understanding the 
role of colonialism and violent racialization and enslavement within capitalism 
is the distinction between the so-called pre-phase of capitalism, i.e., primitive 
accumulation, and what follows it as “proper” capitalism.24 This problem is well 
elaborated in the 2021 book All Incomplete by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: 
24 Nikhil Pal Singh, “On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation”, Social Text, 
34 (3/2016), pp. 27–50.
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world(s)
Let’s approach this again by way of Afropessimism’s special stringency. No slave, 
no world, as Frank Wilderson says; and given that this wall is erected and comes 
down, like its black heroes, in the world, those heroes have failed (at abolition); 
and so the world remains, in all its geocidally, genocidally extractive relation to 
earth and the differences earth bears. Such analysis zeroes in on the undeniably 
anheroic, the hero who fails, who fails to cohere into the monumental, who fails 
to instantiate any coherence of a people, as statue, statute, status, or state. She 
would appear, most devastatingly, as never to have been erected, never to have 
been torn down, as unable to fall in having always already fallen into abandon 
and dispossession.25
In this pre-phase of capitalism, Marx registers the violence, the hyper-violence, 
necessary to form the super-exploited people under slavery, which will then 
figure as only a pre-stage of “proper” capitalism and its development. The ex-
traordinary violence of primitive accumulation, as Singh points out, poses an 
“enduring historical and theoretical challenge,” which “revolves around how to 
interpret the temporal and conceptual cleavage,”26 a split between the primitive 
accumulation of capital and the ordinary accumulation of capital in what we 
might call “real” or “developed” or “proper” capitalism.
For Singh, this presents a limitation in Marx’s work “for thinking about the on-
going development of racial categories – more precisely, the social reproduction 
of race as an ascriptive relationship anchored in ongoing violence, dominion, 
and dependency.”27 Thus, for Singh, Marx’s focus on developed capitalism 
can lead to an inattention, even indifference to how capital establishes new lines 
of social and historical genesis in which the ongoing differentiation between free 
labor and less than free labor, and the manifestation of that differentiation in 
racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies within laboring populations, is retained as 
an instrument of labor discipline, surplus appropriation, and even a measure of 
capitalism’s progressivism, in that it purports to render such distinctions anach-
ronistic over the long run.28
25 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete, Colchester, New York and Port Watson, 
Minor Compositions, 2021, p. 140.
26 Singh, “On Race”, p. 33.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., p. 34.
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Singh asserts that 
Marx’s oeuvre, which frequently compares the contemporaneous forms of work 
carried out by workers and the enslaved people during this time, exemplifies the 
problem we face, both offering support for what W. E. B. Du Bois once called the 
“slavery character” of capitalism, particularly in its Anglo-American ascendancy, 
and yet contributing to a problematic conceptual relegation of African slavery 
within the history of capitalism that has haunted radical politics ever since.29 
Singh concludes: “In this New World iteration, primitive accumulation is not yet 
capitalism for Marx; it is plunder.”30 The result is that in “real” or “developed” or 
“proper” capitalism whiteness comes to be associated “with property, citizen-
ship, wages, and credit, along with the renewal of surplus and/or superexploit-
ed subjectivities and collectivities at the openly coercive, lawless/law-defining 
edge of capitalist accumulation by dispossession.”31 
As early as in 1983, the assertion of Marxist theory that capitalism in its primitive 
accumulation phase was not yet proper capitalism was challenged by Cedric 
Robinson in his seminal book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical 
Tradition.32
As Robin D. G. Kelly writes of Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism in the in-
troduction to Boston Review’s 2017 issue on “Race, Capitalism and Justice”: 
Robinson challenged the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary nega-
tion of feudalism. Instead capitalism emerged within the feudal order and flow-
ered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with 
racialism. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order 
but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capital-
ism” dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. Capitalism was 
“racial” not because of some conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and 
dispossession, but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal so-
29 Ibid., p. 29.
30 Ibid., p. 33. 
31 Ibid., p. 30.
32 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Chapel Hill, 
University of North Carolina Press, 2000. First published by Zed Press, 1983.
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world(s)
ciety. The first European proletarians were racial subjects (Irish, Jews, Roma or 
Gypsies, Slavs, etc.) and they were victims of dispossession (enclosure), coloni-
alism, and slavery within Europe. Indeed, Robinson suggested that racialization 
within Europe was very much a colonial process involving invasion, settlement, 
expropriation, and racial hierarchy.33 
Robinson wrote in 1983 that the
violent event of colonial aggression and its corollary of “Indian” slavery had al-
ready been transmuted in [Benjamin] Franklin’s [1753] neo-nativistic “American” 
mind into a relationship of supplication secured by an economic rationale; in-
deed, the dependence of “new Comers” on natives already reversed. The curtain 
of supremacist ideology had by now begun its descent on American thought, ob-
scuring from the historically unconscious generations of descendants of coloni-
alists and later immigrants the oppressive violence and exploitation interwoven 
in the structure of the republic.34
Or, to put it simply, Marx was mistaken when he believed that the European 
bourgeoisie would rationalize social relations in the course of capitalist devel-
opment; instead, “real” or “developed” or “proper” capitalism racialized these 
relations even more brutally. In Singh’s words:
As subsequent anti-Marxist critics have pointed out […], slavery in this register 
is paradoxically both indispensable for thinking capitalism and “unthinkable” 
as such: sometimes it seems “closer to capitalism’s primal desire […] than wage 
[labor],” while at other times it represents what has been superseded by an order 
of oppression whose stealth (or veiled) power rests upon a supposed ability to 
dispense with violent dominion.35
33 Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?”, Boston Re-
view, 12 January 2017, https://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-
robinson-mean-racial-capitalism, accessed 6 September 2021.
34 Robinson, Black Marxism, p. 77. 
35 Singh, “On Race”, p. 29. 
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Racialized Geographies
The processes of racialization and discrimination are repetitive and continu-
ous. It is important to understand the hyper-violent mode of the relationship 
between labor and capital and that this violence ominously defines (neo)lib-
eral-parliamentary democracy (Mbembe speaks of racial democracy36) and its 
institutions to this day.
Moreover, contemporary capitalism and racism reinforce the transformation 
of all social, political, and economic relations in contemporary Europe. We see 
how well-rehearsed procedures that work in the West are implemented in the 
East. The formerly socialist states of Eastern Europe adopted the white power 
regimes of their occidental brothers, quickly and brutally imposing a merciless 
logic of hyper-neoliberalism over the entire territory. However, the critique of 
some decolonial writers that the former socialist countries of Europe are dys-
functional, archaic, obsolete, and therefore excluded from the decolonial agen-
da as presumably being unable to develop a critical stance is similar to the post-
World War II narratives with which the Occident, instead of dealing with the 
Holocaust, antisemitism, and the genocides of World War II, reframed the dis-
course as a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism.37
It can be said loudly and at length that we, and by that I mean Slovenians, oth-
er citizens of the former Yugoslavia, and, more widely, the socialist bloc of the 
former Eastern Europe, were considered “a piece of shit” (to describe something 
simply as annoying, barbaric and smelly) during the transition to capitalism, 
in the 1990s. This does not, however, excuse post-socialist people drifting into 
hyper-nationalism and turbo-fascism.38 A common explanation and historical 
36 See Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. S. Corcoran, Durham, Duke University Press, 
2019.
37 See Madina Tlostanova, “The Postcolonial and the Postsocialist: A Deferred Coalition? 
Brothers Forever?”, Postcolonial Interventions, 3 (1/2018), pp. 1–37. Tlostanova states in an 
exaltation of colonial modernity that “The USSR with its showcase ideology offered a grand 
utopia or a new religion. The failed socialist modernity has lost its most important future 
vector and turned into a land of the futureless ontology. By losing to the capitalist moder-
nity, it failed to meet the expectations of so many ‘wretched of the earth.’” Ibid., p. 11. 
38 For turbo-facsism see Žarana Papić, “Europe After 1989: Ethnic Wars, the Fascisation of 
Social Life and Body Politics in Serbia,” in M. Gržinić (ed.), The Body, special issue, Filo-
zofski vestnik, 23 (2/2002), pp. 191–205.
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world(s)
excuse for this drift is that we have been colonized by various imperial powers 
and by socialism in the past. This constantly repeated “mantra” helps many 
post-socialist – now turbo-capitalist – nations in the territory of former East-
ern Europe embrace the local right-wing hyper-nationalist fascists and political 
profiteers, who function like Mafioso organizations, thus bringing them to pow-
er. And since such processes are also at work in the Occident (albeit differently, 
not through turbo-fascism, but through postmodern fascism, hyper-individual-
ization, and the war state), support for local predatory politics among interna-
tional neoliberal politicians is not surprising.
To put it in another way, as Harney and Moten have asserted in All Incomplete:
The humanization of the flesh is the racialization of the flesh. It is the catastrophe 
that befalls the species-being, one not even Marx can reverse. This is why logistics 
is the science of whiteness in/as the science of loss.
 
Such is the peril to flesh/earth by the time of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as 
Denise Ferreira da Silva teaches. Surveillance. Access. Transparency. Resilience. 
The globalized, generalized fear of loss is everywhere logistics sees the need to 
straighten out our tangled flesh. And everywhere logistics finds monstrosity, it 
humanizes it. Now, to be obscure, as Saidiya Hartman instructs, is to be entan-
gled; it is to be hunted, to be subject to the subject of the grasp.39
And further, “Logistics emerges as much as the science of loss prevention as 
the science of moving property through the emptiness, of making the world as 
it travels by filling it. This is not making the road as we walk, in the anarchist 
tradition. This is converting everything in its path into a coordinated time and 
space for ownership.”40
Logistics is key, since it discloses “white science”; as Hartney and Moten write:
And what is the nature of our work in surveillance capitalism? Logistics. We bear, 
in the obsessive self-management of ‘our’ clicks and strokes, the overdetermina-
tion logistics lays down. It is both through and as a set of applications we apply – 
39 Harney and Moten, All Incomplete, p. 15.
40 Ibid., p. 17.
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both on and underneath a field of platforms we erect – that our labor further 
concentrates the means of production with the goal quite simply and starkly of 
preventing us from taking care of one another, from looking out for one another, 
by making us look at one another, which is taking care of them.41
Post-socialism is an almost infinite transition to turbo-fascist capitalism. The 
post-socialist state exclusively reinforces its national format and induces, as 
much as possible, hyper-violent capitalist relations: it is violence carried out by 
the state and its apparatuses to naturalize racist labor. Framing racialization, 
dehumanization, and othering precisely by examining the capitalist system of 
reproduction fully executed throughout the former Eastern Europe allows for 
the exploration of racialized (re)production, the nexus between labor and cap-
ital, and the operation of capitalism as the other side of colonialism, or vice 
versa. The required analysis is not merely semiotical, but frames labor and its 
forms, i.e., slave labor, wage labor, and disposable labor, as key components.
Harney and Moten assert, in reference to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveil-
lance Capitalism,42 that a specific surveillance capitalism’s predatory economic 
logic is at work in necrocapitalism. Though exposing a critique, they precisely 
encapsulate the relation of capital labor:
Zuboff argues that information technology now makes its money from gathering, 
packaging, and selling massive amounts of data on our everyday behavior. Thus, 
Facebook or Google do not make money by targeting your tastes or behavior with 
advertisements as is commonly assumed. According to Zuboff, they have no in-
terest in us individually, though that does not mean these tools do not also indi-
viduate. Rather, it is the aggregate data that matters because it can be used not to 
track but to change behavior. She notes, moreover, that intervening in aggregate 
provides even more valuable aggregate data. Facebook is spying on you only in-
sofar as it is spying on us, according to Zuboff; and if we are its raw material, 
and its product, then her employment of the concept of primitive accumulation is 
justified. Problematically, this argument appears to assume capital without labor, 
labor having been replaced by an algorithm that will have carried out itself. But 
41 Ibid., p. 18.
42 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the 
New Frontier of Power, New York, PublicAffairs, 2019.
207
world(s)
what we learn from the Italian autonomists, and from centuries of theorization 
by Africans experiencing the nightmare of total subsumption, which Zuboff’s as-
sumption of absent work extends, is that we are raw material, product, and labor, 
too. Our work makes this economic logic, or any economic logic, work.43 
The last decades of turbo-fascism and hyper-nationalism, however, also brought 
about important political impulses for new activism and political trans-national 
solidarities throughout the entire space of the formerly socialist Eastern Europe. 
The Racial/Colonial Divide
In what follows, I would like to shed more light on these relations of separation. 
In the next two subsections, I will approach racialized geographies through two 
different divisions. The first is the racial/colonial division, while the second is 
the imperial/colonial division. We will see that through these divisions we get 
a matrix of the world that, in the case of the racial/colonial divide, divides the 
global world and Europe according to different but equally important ways of 
extracting wealth and dispossession, on the one hand, and shaping the social, 
on the other (as forms of fascism, populism, and liberalism). In the case of the 
imperial/colonial divide, which is related to Europe’s relationship with its for-
mer colonies, the colonial past is transposed into an aphasic configuration.
The racial/colonial divide traverses and reorganizes two forms of capitalism: 
racial capitalism and settler capitalism. In racial capitalism, the connection be-
tween labor and capital is at stake, while in settler capitalism, the connection 
between land and capital is at stake. Sarah E. K. Fong theorizes them together; 
she speaks of racial-settler capitalism “as an intervention into prevailing ap-
proaches to racial capitalism and settler capitalism.”44 She emphasizes “first, 
that the development of capitalist relations in the United States depended upon 
both the exploitation of racialized labor and the accumulation of Indigenous 
lands,” and second, “how the violent relations of racial-settler capitalism are re-
43 Harney and Moten, All Incomplete, p. 18.
44 Sarah E. K. Fong, “Racial-Settler Capitalism: Character Building and the Accumulation of 
Land and Labor in the Late Nineteenth Century”, American Indian Culture and Research 
Journal, 43 (2/2019), p. 27.
208
marina gržinić
made through attempts to cultivate consent and desire among African-descend-
ed and Indigenous peoples.”45 
For racial capitalism, the most important internal process is racialization; for 
settler capitalism, it is colonization, because “labor exploitation is indebted to 
theories of racial capitalism, which identify the fundamentally racial nature 
of labor exploitation.”46 As Fong argues, Cedric Robinson’s “stratifications be-
tween labor and capital are organized by racial difference such that racialized 
lower classes provide the labor and resources necessary for the accumulation of 
wealth by the ruling classes. For Robinson, the term racial capitalism identifies 
the imbrication of capitalist production and the differential valorization of ra-
cialized life.”47 
Racial capitalism (chattel slavery is the best way to think of it) prioritizes the de-
valuation of racialized lives and the subordination of racialized labor. In chattel 
slavery, the enslaved person is legally made the personal property (chattel) of 
the slave owner. It is clear that through the myth that wage-labor, unlike slave 
labor, can be freely sold on the market in contrast to slave labor, the processes of 
capitalist-colonial violent racialization and exploitation have not disappeared, 
but persist to this day. 
Shannon Speed argues in a 2017 text48 that Latin American states are settler co-
lonial states, emphasizing in particular this land-colonial relationship based on 
Patrick Wolfe’s 1998 Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropolo-
gy.49 Speed underscores “the land–labor binary” elaborated in most of Wolfe’s 
work and reiterated in his recent 2016 Traces of History,50 which “has become an 
often-unspoken and largely unexamined premise of the settler state in ways that 
occlude significant complexity and foreclose recognition of settler structures.”51
45 Ibid. 
46 Ibid., p. 30.
47 Ibid.
48 Shannon Speed, “Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala”, American Quarterly, 69 
(4/2017), pp. 783–790.
49 See Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics 
and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London, Cassell, 1998.
50 See Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race, London, Verso, 2016.
51 Speed, “Structures of Settler Capitalism in Abya Yala”, p. 783.
209
world(s)
Here, we can bring in Quashie’s reflections on the enduring afterlives of slav-
ery and coloniality and the ways in which Black life can be wrested from its 
proximity to death. Quashie departs initially from “Christina Sharpe, whose In 
the Wake: On Blackness and Being characterizes ‘wake’ as an idiom not only 
of consciousness but also of life’s deathness: ‘In the midst of so much death 
and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to physical, 
social, and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life, Black life 
insisted from death?’”52 Quashie states that this attending to life is what Sharpe 
theorizes as “‘wake work,’ the materialization of being through death such that 
‘even as we experienced, recognized, and lived subjection, we did not simply or 
only live in subjection and as the subjected.’ In the Wake is Sharpe’s pursuit of 
‘the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death’”53
Quashie’s conclusion from this reading is overwhelmingly powerful: 
I read Sharpe’s study as a definitive articulation of black pessimism as a field, 
especially its exploration of what cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman describes as 
the enduring afterlife of slavery and coloniality. Indeed, by placing the terms of 
death (including “abjection,” “negation,” “terror,” and “nonbeing”) at the center 
of thinking about blackness, black pessimism has reenergized a critique of liberal 
humanism’s uncritical faith in progress and its fallacies of freedom. The meaning 
of black freedom, these scholars remind us, cannot be indexed to the Enlighten-
ment and cannot be mapped in the syntax of Western norms; there is no end to 
the condition of coloniality and captivity – no end, but there is life in the midst 
and aftermath of those interminable conditions.54 
We must also recognize that criminal fraud over indigenous land titles must 
be seen as a structural part of the U.S. economy. Joanne Barker addresses the 
co-production of U.S. imperialism, colonialism and the dispossession of Indige-
nous peoples. She says, referring to Simpson Leanne, that because of
U.S. imperialism and colonialism – historical and present today – Indigenous 
relationships and responsibilities to the land are difficult at best. In maintain-
52 Quashie, Black Aliveness, p. 8.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
210
marina gržinić
ing life practices that are land based, Indigenous people come “face-to-face with 
settler colonial authority, surveillance and violence because, in practice, it [land] 
places Indigenous bodies between settlers and their money […] Being a practi-
tioner of land as pedagogy and learning in my community […] [is] a process of 
learning how to be on the land anyway.”55
Barker is Lenape, Turtle Clan, and in many of her influential analyses explores 
the violent procedures of the dispossession of Lenapehoking (Lenape territory) 
carried out under the necro-articulatory grip of the U.S.A. as an imperial for-
mation. Fong also returns to this point when she writes that settler capitalism 
“foreground[s] the ways in which Indigenous peoples have experienced terri-
torial dispossession and genocide in the interest of land accumulation and ex-
ploitation.”56
The accumulation and dispossession of territories provide the soil in which 
extractive and racialized economies can develop. In “Predatory Value: Econo-
mies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities”, the authors expose that 
“[f]inancialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today 
work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial con-
quest and racial capitalism,” and that “[r]acialization – manifesting in systemic 
and everyday forms of devaluation, exploitation, and expendability, as well as 
the violence of racial terror and carceral regimes – and ongoing colonial modes 
of settlement, occupation, governmentality, and jurisprudence work in tandem 
with more capacious forms of US global militarism and empire.”57 
Racial capitalism is very effective in neoliberal global capitalism as it kills the 
social structure within the West and drives it to reproduce white supremacy. In 
Marxist parlance, the superstructure is also racialized in order to “freely” exploit 
racialized labor. What is essential is that these processes do not leave out the so-
cial; on the contrary, for extraction and dispossession through racialization to 
really work, the space of the social must also be racialized, i.e., loaded with rac-
55 Joanne Barker, “Decolonizing the Mind”, Rethinking Marxism, 30 (2/2018), p. 209. 
56 Fong, “Racial-Settler Capitalism”, p. 27.
57 Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy, “Predatory Value: 
Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities”, Social Text, 36 (2/2018), pp. 
1–18, accessed online at: https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article
=1521&context=english_fac, accessed 7 September 2021.
211
world(s)
ist and class ideologies. These ideologies support and feed liberal individualism 
(the notion that everything is “free” to exchange and therefore free to sell), and 
obscure the fact that democracy works exclusively through violence (democracy 
is only promoted and recalibrated through the constant use of violence).
In 2015, Jodi Melamed analytically uncovered the importance of emphasizing 
the power of racial capitalism on three levels: 1. “primitive accumulation – 
where capital is accrued through transparently violent means (war, land-grab-
bing, dispossession, neo/colonialism)”58 while forming the basis of capitalist 
reproduction; 2. ideologies of individualism, liberalism, and democracy that 
blossom from this very fundament and destroy any sense of community; and 3. 
new forms of political activism that challenge these relations.59
That is why activism, solidarity, and social justice must be central to the politics 
of the future.
Racial capitalism     Settler capitalism 
Racial/Colonial Divide
Racialization     Colonization 
Racialized labor/discrimination   Colonized land/accumulation 
Exploitation     Dispossession 
Labor/capital/profit     Land/capital/profit
Chattel slavery     Indigenous/native land
Slave capitalism
Slave labor, wage labor, obsolete labor  Indenture extraction60/profit
Debt/capital/profit    Devastation/gentrification
Settler capitalism and settler colonialism are organized around the imposition 
of space over time, which means that the total dispossession of land by the 
58 Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism”, Critical Ethnic Studies, 1 (1/2015), p. 76.
59 Ibid.
60 Indenture is precisely grasped by Harney and Moten, for whom to “indent” is “to serve the 
debt.” See Harney and Moten, All Incomplete, p. 79.
212
marina gržinić
necrocapitalist power structure and its violent supremacist regimes are central. 
In the context of the dispossession of Indigenous people, the ultimate goal is 
the destruction and elimination of communities, the people. At the same time, 
capitalism cannot reproduce itself without the extraction of surplus value from 
racialized labor. Racialized labor exploitation and territorial expansion as accu-
mulation through dispossession, Fong argues, constitute the liberal self, which 
is the object and tool of racial, colonial subjugation.61 
GLOBAL WORLD
North to South extraction of capital from racialized labor 
South to North dispossession from land, elimination of the “Other”
The racial states in Europe, which means all of them at the moment, ignore so-
cial justice and human rights. The situation of refugees is directly related to colo-
nialism and forms of neo-colonialism, and of course to abandoned collectivity. 
EUROPE 
West to East  
time/technology property/hyper-privatization hyper-individualization/fascist mob 
East to West  
time/labor land/hyper-devastation nation-alism62/fascist populism
In the West, time is technology. In the former East of Europe, time equals la-
bor exploitation. In the West, space only exists as property, total privatization; 
public space has disappeared. In the former Eastern Europe space is ruined, 
mismanaged, property plundered and finally privatized through violent gentri-
fication. We need to address the formerly socialist Eastern Europe in terms of 
racism, nationalism, and debt. In Eastern Europe, instead of communities, we 
have only hyper-nationalism. In the West, a populist mob of hyper-individual-
ized particles dominates.
Harney and Moten describe this as follows:
61 Fong, “Racial-Settler Capitalism”, p. 27.
62 The hyphen is not a mistake, but a necessary disclosure of all the derived results of the 
nation as such.
213
world(s)
Every step they take is a standing of ground, a stomping of the world out of earth-
ly existence and into racial capitalist human being. It grows more pronounced 
the more it is threatened, consumed by its own feedback loop, and it produces 
sharper and sharper subject reactions in the face of this threat. This is the old/
new fascism: not the anonymity of following the leader, but the subject reaction 
to leadership, which can just as easily imagine itself to be liberal dissent from, as 
supposedly opposed to a lock(e)-step repetition of, its call.63
This is an important redefinition of the various forms of protest. Neoliberal capi-
talism has produced a fragmented, individualized position, protesting neoliber-
al individuals, whereas the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, adheres 
to the tradition of blocks of bodies on the street moving forward and stopping, 
taking a step back, waiting, and moving on, in lockstep.
Perhaps it is important to say that the dimension of time associated with tech-
nology in the West and labor in the East could be read to mean that the West is 
more advanced, more developed, but being subordinated to the speed of mo-
bile devices and exploited by the relationship between labor and capital sim-
ply means that there are two kinds of racialization of time at work in advanced 
capitalism.
The Imperial/Colonial Divide
I would like to re-examine the particular decolonial position that the former 
Eastern Europe was colonized, that the Soviet Union colonized the former Sovi-
et republics, and that the elimination of socialism is a process of decolonization. 
This leads to post-socialism being positioned in parallel with postcolonialism. 
This obfuscation can be clarified by analyzing the imperial/colonial divide. The 
answer lies in decolonization.
Seloua Luste Boulbina, in “Decolonization”, an analysis of the term for Political 
Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, published online in 2019, develops a remarkable 
analysis of how to think decolonization.64 She notes “that there is no conceiv-
63 Harney and Moten, All Incomplete, p. 17.  
64 Seloua Luste Boulbina, “Decolonization”, in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, 24 May 
2019, https://www.politicalconcepts.org/decolonization-seloua-luste-boulbina/, accessed 
7 September 2021.
214
marina gržinić
able decolonization without the correlation of a society’s political, economic, 
social, and cultural dimensions, particularly on the post-colonial side.”65 
She emphasizes the difference between postcolonial and “some sort of low-cost 
decolonization [that] is typically post-imperial.”66 The imperial, in such a low-
cost reading, is “proper to the ancient metropolis and ancient societies, which 
apply the idea to objects rather than to social and political structures.”67 She 
asserts: “Politically, the question extends distinctly on both sides of an imperi-
al-colonial line that I wish to highlight, in order not to conflate problematics that 
are totally different.”68 This equation of the imperial/colonial divide presents 
the imperial in relation to the peripheries, which is why the colonial is not a 
question of center and periphery but of imperialism. Imperialism is exploitation 
through colonization, through the use of military force, violence, genocides. So, 
when colonization is mentioned in relation to the former Eastern Europe, we 
are in fact talking about European postimperial countries (former metropolises) 
and not postcolonial African countries (former colonies).
For Luste Boulbina, decolonization captured through the imperial/colonial di-
vide means that it “underwent a double displacement: on the one hand, from 
the metropolis to the colony and then from the colony to the metropolis; and, 
on the other hand, from the political field to the academic.”69 She explains that 
“The French doctrine of a ‘colonial pact’ was established on the basis of an 
eloquent division: the metropolis was destined for industrialization, whereas 
colonies had to provide raw materials.”70 She asserts: “This is how the idea of 
‘decolonization’ becomes associated, and then conflated, with the dissolution 
of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa and the subsequent emer-
gence of new independent states. Within the academic field, this idea continues 
to migrate toward historiography.”71 She shows that this is a misunderstanding 
since the imperial stands between the imperial center and the periphery, but 
decolonization means dismantling imperialism and colonization. 
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid.
215
world(s)
Or, more to the point, it is important to see the postimperial and the postcolo-
nial through the postcolonial lens rather than through a semiotic analysis that 
conflates them. Decolonization is not about the philosophy of history of the im-
perial city exploiting the periphery, but about dismantling imperialism, that is, 
ending capitalist colonialism.
The Imperial/Colonial Divide
 Imperial centers/peripheries  Imperialism/colonialism
As Luste Boulbina states: 
 
It is clear that the situation of African countries is not comparable to that of the 
former colonies of the Americas, with the exception of South Africa. […] The 
slave-based former colonies of the Americas, all rooted in a settler model, must 
be differentiated from the last “modern” colonies of Africa, which are not, except 
and particularly Algeria, settler colonies. The independent states of the Americas 
must also be differentiated from African independent states. To put these matters 
schematically: the independences of the American continent have benefitted Eu-
ropeans, with the exception of Haiti, which became the first “Black Republic” in 
1804. The independence movements across the African continent benefitted the 
autochthonous populations, with the notable exception of South Africa, which 
only held its first “multi-racial” elections in 1994. In this continent, Algeria is 
the only former settler colony to have been entirely vacated of its European pop-
ulation. What is at stake in sovereignty is shaped to a large extent by the date of 
independence – those of the nineteenth century or the most recent ones achieved 
in the twentieth century – and by the presence or absence of Europeans.72 
Conclusion 
I can state that what we see all around us in this time of neoliberal global capi-
talism is that we are increasingly confronted with a political and social amnesia 
that profits from the almost complete obliteration of the past, the intensifying 
processes of de-historicization and de-politicization. Central to these processes 
is the logic of (neoliberal) repetition that produces at least two different pro-
72 Ibid.
216
marina gržinić
cedures of (de)historicization. On one side, we have the logic of the neoliberal 
Western world that works as a pure trans-historical machine, and on the other, 
in the regions in the East and in the South of Europe, we detect a forced tech-
nique of embracing historicization as totalization. In both cases, the result is 
a suspension of history that works with the primary intention of disposing of 
any alternative within it. Mbembe suggests that the demythologizing of certain 
versions of history must go hand in hand with the necessary “demythologizing 
of whiteness.”73 As Mbembe explains: “This is not because whiteness is the same 
as history. Human history, by definition, is history beyond whiteness. Human 
history is about the future.”74 
On the other side of discussions, we could say almost outside of philosophy, at 
its margins, we find the theoretical concepts of the late Édouard Glissant (1928–
2011), “especially since his ideas have developed from observing and living the 
transition to globalization after decolonization and departmentalization to the 
current moment.”75 
In sharp contrast to globalization and its push for uniformity backed by capitalist 
“lois du profit,” Glissant’s concept of the “tout-monde” in [and] of itself produc-
es a resistant discourse to globalization. His project develops his own theory of 
Relation to arrive at a poetics of being of the world, or worldness: the imagining 
of a world in which all peoples (humanities) of the terre-monde put into language 
(speaking, writing) their experiences and their being, so as to be heard by oth-
er peoples. Rather than accepting the domination of global hierarchies, Glissant 
proposes imagining the real, through a process that he calls creolization: cultures 
are constantly changing with the influence of other cultures’ languages, ways of 
being, without losing themselves to any dominant uniform culture.76
73 Mbembe, “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive”, no page.
74 Ibid. 
75 Sara C. Hanaburgh, “Global Wreckage and Consumer Illusions: Responses to the Hu-
man Effects of Economic Globalization in Sub-Saharan African Francophone Novels and 
Films, 1973–2006”, PhD thesis, New York, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 
2012, p. 225. 
76 Ibid., p. 35.
217
world(s)
John E. Drabinski suggests,77 and I reiterate, that the chaotic mix Glissant has 
been dealing with since his earliest work arises from the Caribbean as the cross-
roads of the world. The slave trade and then colonialism brought an incompat-
ible but fertile cultural dynamic to the archipelago, producing creolized forms 
of culture. What is the significance of these forms of culture, asks Drabinski, 
and what theoretical lessons can be drawn from these forms? As he contends, 
Glissant’s later work extends his concept of creolization, initially an internal 
feature of the Caribbean, to the idea of tout-monde. Tout-monde denotes an ag-
gressive, forward-looking imperative to bring global cultures into contact and 
to harness the productive chaos that emerges from that contact. “A poetics of 
the whole world.”78
Let me finish as I started, going back to the Critique of Black Reason and Mbem-
be’s firm view of the World of today. 
On the one hand, we must escape the status of victimhood. On the other, we 
must make a break with “good conscience” and the denial of responsibility. It is 
through this dual approach that we will be able to articulate a new politics and 
ethics founded on a call for justice. That said, to be African is first and foremost 
to be a free man, or, as Fanon always proclaimed, “a man among other men.” A 
man free from everything, and therefore able to invent himself. A true politics of 
identity consists in constantly nourishing, fulfilling, and refulfilling the capacity 
for self-invention. Afrocentrism is a hypostatic variant of the desire of those of 
African origin to need only to justify themselves to themselves. It is true that such 
a world is above all a form of relation to oneself. But there is no relation to oneself 
that does not also implicate the Other. The Other is at once difference and similar-
ity, united. What we must imagine is a politics of humanity that is fundamentally 
a politics of the similar, but in a context in which what we all share from the be-
ginning is difference. It is our differences that, paradoxically, we must share. And 
all of this depends on reparation, on the expansion of our conception of justice 
and responsibility.79
77 John E. Drabinski, “Sites of Relation and ‘Tout-monde’”, Angelaki, 24 (3/2019), pp. 157–172. 
78 Ibid.
79 Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, p. 178.
218
marina gržinić
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