[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
Achille Mbembe is a theorist of sovereignty and necropolitics—the ways state power exercises control through the production of death and disposability—whose work here grounds discussions of how institutions create social meaning through imagination and spectacle. The readings invoke his concept of necropolitics to analyze how contemporary systems (including algorithmic ones) don't just regulate life but determine which lives are rendered killable or invisible, moving beyond Foucault's biopolitics into a framework where aesthetics, memetics, and political domination intertwine. His engagement with Castoriadis on the "imaginary significations" that institutions depend on connects the course's interest in how AI systems embed social fantasies and power structures into their operation.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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