[Figure: Surrealist room interior with oversized objects]
[Figure: Sliced head diagram]
[Figure: Landscape with the word DECEPTION overlaid]
MEMETICS AND TRUE BELIEVERS
The true believer is willing to die for his belief
When individual …The exercise of sovereignty...consists in society’s capacity for self-creation through recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and imaginary significations. (Mbembe is referring here to Cornelius Castoriadis’s L’institution ima…As Polybius of Arcadia, captive of Rome, champion of facticity and ‘universal history’ against tragedy and spectacle, fades, his namesake game, one (of many) early vectors overwhelming facticity with spectacular memesis and incipient necrop…
Achille Mbembe
philosopher · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Mbembe appears here primarily as a theorist of sovereignty and institutional imagination, drawing on Castoriadis to articulate how societies constitute themselves through imaginary significations rather than fixed structures. The readings invoke his framework to trouble the relationship between facticity and spectacle, suggesting that memetic systems and what he terms "necropolitics" (the administration of death and disposability) represent a contemporary inversion of classical historical authority. His work enables the seminar to connect questions of institutional creation to questions of whose life counts and whose can be rendered disposable within networked, image-saturated systems.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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