The Delusions of Care

The Delusions of Care is a culmination of three long essays that ruminate on notions of care in our contemporary and historically. It is concerned with the appropriation of care by the capitalist establishment as much as supremacists of all kinds. What can we consider as care and who gives care for what reasons. Stuck in the cup de sac of a pandemic that has brought most of the world to its knees, these questions seem of some pertinence. The reflections in this book spanning a critique of care from the regimes of birth control through police brutality to the storming of the Reichstag in the summer of 2020, that very much set precedence to the storming of the Capitol Hill by Trumpists and White supremacists. The book does not only point out the pitfalls of a corrupted notion of care, but tries to offer paths for rehabilitation, restoration, restitution through a non-selfish spirit of care.

The book includes a postlude by Cameroonian novelist Hemley Boum. 

This book is a manifesto in which love and crisis imbue each other with the spirit of care. Bonaventure Ndikung calls on those in its belly to seize the means of the production of caring from the beast of state power and corporate greed. —Arjun Appadurai

This is a brilliant and masterful book. Beneath the notion of care lies an ocean of lures and contradictions. Bonaventure Ndikung proposes here an original crossing of art and politics: an odyssey composed with great subtlety and real talent. All the style, intelligence and generosity of the author are here offered to the reader. —Seloua Luste Boulbina

In this incisive appraisal of contemporary discourses and affect of care, Bonaventure Ndikung lays bare the tensions underpinning the politics of good intentions in the age of mass individualism. He vividly shows the extent to which decoupling the giving and receiving of care from paternalistic and disempowering effects is a matter of power relations. A proper ethics of care for our times, he suggests, must primarily rest on a foundational care for justice. —Achille Mbembe