The current violence of versatile surveillance: contributions of the panoptic threat to structural racism from Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe

Abstract

The general purpose of this article is to critically analyze and describe the panoptic threat and structural racism, as well as their intersections, based on the works of Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe. On the one hand, in Surveillance and Punishment, Foucault argues that panoptism represents a governmental model centered on the State's ability to exercise domination over individuals, by showing the birth of a disciplinary society where visibility and surveillance are indispensable mechanisms for maintaining totalitarian order.  On the other hand, in Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe examines the ontological problem of the state of race and demonstrates that its unscientific foundation hierarchizes human groups, legitimizes exploitative and violent interventions, promotes the degradation of non-European identities, and emphasizes that the representation of racialized humanity serves as a tool for dehumanization and social control. Based on this fusion of horizons, through an analytical-descriptive methodology that combines bibliographical review, close reading and creative writing, the aim is to evidence, as a research result, the extent to which the two philosophers understand the relationship between power, knowledge and subjectivity, as well as how they contribute to a critique of the necrobiopolitical backfeeding between panoptism and racism in contemporary times.