Lauren Berlant defines slow death as ‘the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence’ (96). Those defined by slow death are ‘marked out for wearing out’, that is, they are a designated other whose expected decline is so inscribed within discourse that they signify disintegration and abasement (278 n19). They are denounced as an impediment to progress, and the political climate that caused their precarity and disintegration is concealed behind a rhetoric of failed personal responsibility, which is then used to legitimate judgement and a certain kind of intervention. 

Maebh Long