Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is author of
Potential Humanity and Politics of the Living
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Published:December 2023
This chapter concerns the question of the relationship between humans and manufactured objects anew. It begins by getting rid of a metaphysical barrier. Not all objects created thanks to humans' creative and inventive expansion have had the aim of increasing automatism. Such objects were, in fact, often essential elements in the production of what should be called binding energies—to wit, most African art objects. Such is the primary meaning of the concept of animism. This gesture of distancing is necessary in order to reinvest the zone of indeterminacy that these objects bear and to articulate a critique of contemporary materialism. This allows us to relativize the dominant nature-artifice polarity of the West's thinking on technology and open the way to what Africa has been the sign of throughout the centuries—that of potential humanity and of the future object.
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