text by Achille Mbembe
Let’s thus return to the Earth. Our planet. The last utopia. It is distinguished from the other planets by its hospitality, that is, its disposition to make room for more than just one, to give space to multiplicity. Hence its participation in the form of the reserve as much as in that of the reservoir.
The Earth we are talking about here is not the exact equivalent of the world. We should not either understand by “Earth” simply ground, or plot. Instead, “Earth” refers to the idea of a self-renewing life of literally incalculable value that escapes any absolute power of mastery. This body of the Earth is thus living and animated, and one of its properties as a material is, moreover, that it is life-enabling. The Earth is consequently this living body without which we could not exist. It functions as a condition of survival for practically everything else. This makes it a metamorphic power, which is not anything abstract. It is a power that it is physical, sensible, insofar as it affects the living and lets itself be affected, even touched by it. If this power has a body, it is also permanently actualized through a multiplicity of bodies in movement, which it constantly mingles with and accompanies, and to which it contributes to provide a relative ontological stability. This has not always been so. In order to become a vast reservoir of life, the Earth needed the sun’s radiant energy and that reflected by the continents, the oceans and seas, and the atmosphere, among other things. Of all the names it has been given, this is probably the one that suits it best. The Earth’s specificity lies in its being a place of refuge for life, when life might otherwise have been extinguished.
Even after the great periods of extinction, life has endured. But nothing indicates that this will always be the case. The sun is going to get hotter and hotter, and redder and redder. It is going to get older and will perhaps die out one day. As regards the Earth itself, should it run out of water, it will turn into a gigantic negative mass. This would then definitively seal its kinship with the other planets.
In most African cosmogonies, the Earth is given as an uncountable set of signs, the means by which life comes about, matter is animated, and movement, actualized. As powers and spirits of nature inhabit and animate it, we cannot say that the Earth is immutable. In reality, it is always in the process of constituting itself; that is, it is disposed to foster the appearance of unforeseen figures of the existing, which it welcomes in its midst and in its hollows.
In this sense, the Earth is a substance that is both constituted prior to its inhabitants and all those who live off it, and is in turn assembled by these latter, humans included. This assembling occurs through the practical operations by which they form alliances among themselves, share it, divide it into delimited parcels, codify its uses, exploit it, confront each other, unite or separate, and redistribute its resources. As it stands, through the air we breathe and, to a lesser extent, the water we drink, the Earth includes those major links to which we are all connected, the chain of things and people, all living beings, animate and inanimate of which it is like the common fabric, both soil and shelter.
No one has absolute sovereign power across the entire expanse of the Earth. Some singular uses can be made of this common soil and shelter here or there. But no one actually owns it, and it is unable to be entrusted to the goodwill of a single person. When it comes to the Earth, no one, not even a state, has the power to act alone freely. Notwithstanding legal fictions, we are therefore not its owners, that is, if by property rights we mean the integral holding and exercise of “full powers over the thing-object of law.”
In truth, we are above all its inhabitants and, most of us, passers-by on it. We can, through technology, capture the Earth’s forces and recode them. But according to an animist metaphysics, we are unable to enframe the deployment of its life and essential springs. In other words, while we participate in its regulation, we do not do so as its equals. We are simple inhabitants among many others, or, better, “guardians” among inter-generational chains of solidarity. Moreover, our status as inhabitants and guardians is provisional, as our demise brings this status to an objective end. Indeed, upon dying, our ability to access that plot of land, whose owner we consider ourselves to be, for its use and its enjoyment, terminates. Besides, were the Earth to leave the world of nature and become a legal entity, it could only be as that which, by definition, is inappropriable.
Thus, the Earth has an immaterial dimension that fundamentally distinguishes it from the sphere of things available for appropriation, or for integral absorption into property relations. This is precisely what makes it not a “common thing” but a “community,” an ambiguous community. Corresponding to this community of Earth is the basic universality of all its inhabitants. Taken all together, human persons cannot be said to own the Earth, nor can any other entities. Rather, they are its citizens, insofar as they are given an indisputable place on it. If they have a right to this basic hospitality, it is limited to a right to shelter, to a right to dwell on it. This right is, strictly speaking, a right of lodging, and it is unconditional. The Earth indeed provides a place for all, without discrimination. To enjoy this place, you do not need a property title. You receive it by the simple fact of existing, of being alive, of being here.
The idea of an earthly community is thus poles apart from the concept of a “land law,” as that which is deemed to exist prior to any convention and any contract (a nomos of the Earth). Contrary to the gesture of division and appropriation, contrary to the logic of enclosures typical of the European nomos of the Earth, the faculty of inhabiting is not the equivalent of the right to dispose of things unreservedly. On the other hand, habitation necessarily supposes co habitation, that is to say, making room for others, for beings other than oneself, other than human, for All, in fidelity to the Earth’s very vocation to be a dwelling for all. In this scheme of universal redistribution, no one is deprived of shelter and everyone has the fundamental right to a share. This birthright precedes all other rights. It is the equivalent of the right to breathe.
the all-world
“Decolonize” is a summons of limited interest, however, if it does not lead to genuine disappropriation, just as the late Édouard Glissant had recently outlined it. Glissant spoke about the great gesture of disappropriation as the All-World. The concept of the All-World has three distinctive features. First, it stands in total rupture with all forms of closure onto a self, whether that form is territorial, national, ethno-racial, or religious in nature. Second, it is opposed to the kind of authoritarian universalism that underpinned the colonial enterprise—a universalism of conquest that sought to actualize itself not in a multiplicity of bodies and extants, but in a single body that is arbitrarily held to be the one and only truly significant body. Third, in the spirit of the All-World, the call to know is initially an invitation to emerge from willful ignorance, to discover our own limits. Above all, it is a question of learning how to be born-with-others, that is to say, how in uncompromising fashion to break the mirrors that we inevitably expect to reflect back an image of ourselves.
The world of the All-World, as Glissant conceived it, is woven and hatched from the entanglement and relations of a multiplicity of centers. For Glissant, the greatest obstacle to its advent is an ignorance so unaware of itself that it winds up turning into a pure and simple nativism trying to pass itself off as science and as universalism. The struggle against this venal form of ignorance requires that you step outside yourself and intentionally open up the possibility of multiple passages and multiple crossings. Indeed, it is the test of passage and crossing that permits us not to talk incessantly about ourselves, or about other worlds, and often in their place, as if they did not already exist for themselves, but instead to look together and eventually to see, but from several worlds each time.
The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, of disappropriation itself. Sharing or repairing the Earth means striving to listen, look, and see the real from several worlds and centers at once; it means reading and interpreting history on the basis of a multiplicity of archives. This project requires that a renewed critique of difference and segregation be urgently undertaken. For without this resolute critique of difference, what V. Y. Mudimbe called “the colonial library,” as the cornerstone of Eurocentrism, cannot be dismantled. Sharing the Earth also means learning to be born together (co-birth). Moreover, being born together is the only way to overcome the double desire, specific to colonial thinking, of abstraction and segregation—the separation of humans from one another, and of humans from other species, nature, and the multiple forces of the living.
The colonial illusion has thus come to an end. On its ashes we see new lines of thinking that are commensurate with the planet emerge in the North as well as in the South and East. Most of these lines of thinking concern not simply humans, but also the Earth, fire, air, water, and winds, in short all the living. They are all anti-colonial by definition, if by “colonial” we mean a refusal to “be born together,” a determination to separate, erect walls of all kinds and fortresses, to transform paths into borders, identity into an enclosure, and freedom itself into private property. These anticolonial and post-Eurocentric lines of thinking privilege not essences or compact and homogeneous blocks, but porosities. They are not tied to a nationalistic heritage. Where Eurocentrism used to cut time, space, and history into discrete elements, marked by supposedly irreducible and unassimilable differences, these lines of thinking concern entanglements.
In art, music, film, and other forms of writing, these lines of thinking are multiplying passages and building bridges. Where late Eurocentrism everywhere sees only lines of occupation, bridges that require burning, walls and prisons that need building, and points of arrival that ought always to remain unconnected to points of departure, the All-World posits that we are all traversed by multiple genealogies and wrought by sinuous and interconnected lines. We clearly bear witness today to the rise of these anti-colonial and post-Eurocentric lines of thinking, and not only in the South. Their burgeoning extends even into the heart of Europe. But at a time when people are withdrawing into their, often fantasized, identities; at a time when conspiracy and the deliberate production of falsehood and discord reigns, this flourishing and the echo they have among the younger generations arouse anxiety, fear, and panic, especially but not only in the old centers of the world.
Excerpts from The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia. Copyright, 2022, Achille Mbembe. Translation by Steven Corcoran. Commissioned by V2_. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.