By Martin Mulligan
martinmulligan.com
In October 2017, in the Mediterranean capital of Valletta, Malta, Achille Mbembe posed a question that continues to resonate with increasing urgency: What time is it? He wasn’t referring to chronological time, but to political, existential, planetary time. What kind of time are we living through as a species? How do we name this hour, when the systems that once sustained us appear to be collapsing?
Mbembe does not offer simplistic answers. Rather, he simultaneously interrogates economics, technology, ecology, politics, and affect. His concept of selective permeability encapsulates a core contradiction of our era: we are hyperconnected and yet hyper-surveilled. Never before have we been so interlinked—and yet that connection unfolds within a regime of containment. Borders multiply. Walls rise. Offshore detentions become normalized. Gaza—Mbembe warned, years before its devastation in 2024—stands as the dystopian laboratory of the present.
We are witnessing a mutation of sovereignty: states that kill without trace, human bodies labeled unwanted, dispensable, illegal. A democracy without a people. A politics without a project. And beneath it all, a sense that the future has no opening, as if history had sealed itself shut. In this context, Mbembe outlines three installations of time: (1) The past as mythical refuge; (2) The present as closure; (3) The future as locked, sightless.
This epochal closure echoes what Hermann Herlinghaus, in Violence Without Guilt, calls the modern war on affect. In it, narratives from the Global South—from narcocorridos to Top Series Featuring Antiheroes —reveal a world in which “bare life” (Agamben) is no longer just a legal category, but a lived experience. Populations are subjected to latent death, affective marginalization, and a systematically distributed vulnerability. Herlinghaus doesn’t frame these violences as anomalies, but as constitutive elements of our age.
In this compassless present, underground bunkers proliferate, conspiracy theories spread, and technological fetishes thrive. Some tech-industry CEOs plan their survival below ground, while others bet on escaping the planet altogether. Meanwhile, vast sectors of the public embrace a conservative messianism—embodied by figures like Donald Trump—that offers comfort without solutions. Science gives way to faith; fact, to dogma; democracy, to authoritarian impulse.
And yet, as Mbembe suggests, perhaps this hour also calls forth a new kind of consciousness—a chance to rethink democracy beyond the human, beyond the market, beyond nationalism, beyond the myth of the autonomous individual. Perhaps there is still time to reimagine not only how we govern, but why and for whom.
Because the question still stands: What time is it? And though we may not yet have the words, we can—like poets, philosophers, and bodies in resistance—begin to name it.
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