The Slow Intimacy of Necropolitics

Abstract

Human beings seem to have a fascination with pictures of death or what can be called ‘necrovoyeurism’. Circulating pictures of dead bodies has become easier with the use of social media. Necropolitics or the politics of death relates to the careless treatment of the lives of the marginalised, destitute and the ones without voice, the precariat. In late modernity one of the shadow sides of democracy is necropolitics, using processes of social exclusion and devaluing the lives of the poor and the ones in need through the desire to ‘keep them out’ – to curb mobility through the brutality of borders that often leads to death. This article concerns itself with the slow intimacy of necropolitics – how, through looking at pictures of death and redistributing them by retweeting, appropriating, decontextualising and recontextualising them we slowly become acquainted with the intimacy of death that may prevent an authentic empathy or desire to change the conditions of the marginalised.