Alphée Mpassi, a researcher at Radboud University from Congo-Brazzaville, started here as a student of philosophy of science, after which he went on to the research master, and subsequently successfully obtained his PhD in philosophy. During this time, he became interested in Giorgio Agamben and the connection he draws between power, life, and politics. 'He speaks about biopolitics as a way political power regulates and manages life in society, to the point of creating what he called ‘bare life’. Agamben helps us understand how power operates on a sociopolitical level and how to respond to it,' Alphée explains. An important expansion of this insight, however, Alphée finds in Achille Mbembe, who adds a historical dimension and brings Agamben’s theory into the context of the global south, where he attempts to understand these power structures in relation to colonization. Mbembe coined the term ‘necropolitics’, which is a framework that explores and exposes how political and social power decide on who might live and who must die. It shows us how political power is not only concerned about management of life, but more about creating conditions that make life barely impossible to live.
For Alphée, however, this was not just an abstract theory, but a framework through which he could understand the oppressive political climate of his home country, a former colony of France. 'It resonated a lot with me,' he states, 'that’s what is happening in my country: the population hardly has a say. These thinkers have helped me understand those mechanisms of power. And how to resist a dictatorship.'
Currently, as both a postdoc researcher at the Center for the History of Philosophy and Science (CHPS) and a collaborator at the Laudato Si’ Institute, Radboud University, his research focuses on how these questions of life and power relate to the environmental and social crises. 'Mbembe’s concept helps me see the impact of power on life, both human and non-human, and how that affects especially minorities and marginalized communities. Environmental disasters often harm vulnerable communities first and most severely. Necropolitics makes visible how neglecting nature is also a way of neglecting people.' Through these lenses: of power, of exploitation, of economics, and of destruction, Alphée is trying to show how the environmental crisis is fundamentally a political issue. His aim is to expand the reading of the ecological crisis as something that is essentially related to the power relations involved in society. All these different aspects of life are connected in intricate ways.
Everything is closely connected. This is the message that Pope Franics tries to convey to us in the encyclical Laudato Si’, according to Alphée. 'He repeats it like a song, like a melody: everything is closely connected.' And it is this fabric of interdependence between humans, non-humans and everything else that we need to realize before we can truly take care of, what Pope Francis calls, our ‘common home’. Alphée states: 'He calls us to reimagine not only our identity as human beings, but also our place and power relations in the world.' According to Alphée, it is here that Mbembe’s framework of necropolitics is useful to help us understand the consequences of what happens when we lose sight of this connection among the beings of the world.
With his work at the CHPS and Laudato Si’-institute, Alphée hopes to contribute to forming a bridge between academics and public concern by translating complex academic concepts into accessible action, dialogue, and hope. In that way, the institute can become a voice for the voiceless and make space for justice and care. Alphée believes that by bringing together different traditions of thought and by listening to one another, we can imagine new ways of caring for our common home. Ways that affirm life, dignity, and hope for future generations. 'We as human beings, academicians, politicians and so forth, should strive to do anything possible to (re)discover our connectedness to nature, to the environment. We need the environment to live, we need the air to breathe, so if we dominate and exploit it as we do now, we are not only destroying the environment, we are destroying our own lives. The earth is a living being on which we depend and which also depends on us.'
Interview: Vivian Weijland
Photo: Ted van Aanholt