Achille Mbembe, 'Adorno, Marcuse, and the Politics of Brutality'

An excerpt from Achille Mbembe's "Diary of My South African Years". The "Diary" includes various notes, fragments, unfinished texts (some of them hand written), interviews, public interventions and other material accumulated over many years.

The excerpt made public here was written late last year. It is not a formal analysis of current events. It is an exercise in "sympathetic critique", a tradition of reading one's own times that is much rooted in various versions of Black and Jewish thought.