Law's violations: the formalization of authority in Achille Mbembe's reading of the postcolony1

Abstract

Achille Mbembe's contributions to postcolonial and cultural studies have generated a considerable interest for over a decade. While his innovative work has been the subject of instructive but brief critical responses, his interventions have rarely been the attentive focus of an essay-long study devoted to a close reading of the local idioms of power, which his work insightfully explores. My article aims to rectify this lacuna in the critical literature by focusing on the aesthetics of vulgarity and the authority's production of violence in postcolonial sites, which Mbembe studies. The thematic concentration of this close reading is double: First, I delineate the theoretical propositions and ethnographic components of Mbembe's comparative postcolonial approach that I find particularly suggestive for the exegesis of the postcolonial authorization of simulacral representation and its formalization of mighty, monumental power. Second, I develop Mbembe's study of the grammar of power and propose a conceptual framework for reading the investments, burdens, and incalculable threats, which condition the production and logic of self-representation in the postcolonial site. My article interrogates in this context the performance of law, which erects an authority whose exercise of power is mystifying rather than regulative. Following Judith Butler's suggestion, I reflect on the laws that the authority's inquisitorial call itself embodies and on the demands that mandate the authority's performance of juridical command. Informed by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's work on mimetic representation, I propose a model for reading the performance of authority whose juridical vision is distorted each time it is purported to be literalized. I exemplify how the very claim to originality in certain postcolonial sites of power, where no forces are immune to the burdens of mimetic representation, is itself always already bound to a simulacral economy of representation.