“Thanatopolitics” in the Socio-Political Discourse in the 2000s and 2020s: between the “Living Dead” and “Necrosociality”

Introduction. Over the past twenty years, the terms “thanatopolitics”, “necropolitics”, “necroeconomics”, etc. have been actively used in socio-political discourse. But the definitions of these meanings remain blurred. In the last 4–5 years, they can be found in Russian-language articles, as well as in the public space of blogs and YouTube channels. Often, the use of these terms is associated with biased statements by authors from a nonacademic environment. The purpose of this article is to identify the area of use of the term “thanatopolitics” in the academic literature of recent years.

Methodology and sources. The study was carried out in the logic of the genealogical approach. The main subject of interest is gaps in discourse, when the same or similar terms are filled with new content or receive new interpretations. The analysis of English-language articles in the fields of political philosophy, critical theory, literary studies, gender studies, history and economics was carried out. It is in this linguistic and problematic field that the term has acquired definitions that are relevant today.

Results and discussion. Two approaches can be distinguished in English-language academic literature: 1) thanatopolitics – institutionalized state violence, unethical management technologies that allow the sovereign to convert death on his territory into resources and legitimacy. The authors who adhere to this approach to the problem use the concept of “necropolitics” instead of “thanatopolitics”, but there are exceptions. They rely on the essay of the same name by A. Mbembe and engage in leftist criticism of specific examples of neocolonialism; 2) thanatopolitics – the creation of social connections through the production of knowledge about threats to immanent life. The phenomenon when a community is formed due to the fact that it can disappear at any moment. This approach to the problem of thanatopolitics is typical for researchers of artistic culture and modern digital media.

Conclusion. The authors who use the term “thanatopolitics” and other terms related in their work study the power-death-knowledge dispositif. But its presence in the text cannot be an unambiguous marker of the researcher's position. Sometimes the choice of this term is a marker of critical attacks against specific political decisions of the state. But the authors who study the horizontal social connections generated by knowledge about death also write about “thanatopolitics”.

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