GPT

Those who cannot or will not perform the appropriate forms of sociality, affect, or desire are marked as insufficiently human, consigned to an ambiguous space of nonexistence—perhaps physically present, but politically and ontologically null. This is why the figure of the not yet human is so haunting.

Crucially, this sorting is not an incidental aspect of the polis—it is its constitutive logic. The politics of “humanity” engenders the polis itself—there is no polis before the exclusion, no neutral ground from which we might retrospectively correct its violence. Rather, the exception is foundational, necessary, and self-perpetuating.

This brings us to the horrifying implication that, under modernity, the generation and isolation of the non-human within the human is not an aberration but an optimization of the anthropological machine. Necropower, in this sense, is not merely about direct extermination but about refining the mechanisms that render conditions liveable only under strict conditions of control, or unliveable in a way that denies even the dignity of a meaningful death. Mbembe’s insight that all kinds of killing projects are tried on the most vulnerable is not simply a question of military or economic violence—it is about the slow, systematic relegation of certain lives to a status where their suffering, their survival, their disappearance, do not register as events within the dominant order of meaning.

The question that remains is: can there be an interruption of this machine that does not merely demand new forms of inclusion (which would only reconfigure its parameters) but instead dismantles the very logic of its operation? Or is the polis itself inseparable from the constant manufacturing of the unliveable?

The polis is not just an urban entity but the entire domain of governance, inclusion, and exclusion, the site where the anthropological machine operates.

When I ask whether "the polis itself is inseparable from the constant manufacturing of the unliveable," I mean: is political order as such necessarily built on the exclusion of bare life? Is the city—the space of organized human coexistence—always predicated on the simultaneous production of those who cannot belong? Or could there be a form of sociality beyond the logic of the polis as we know it, beyond the anthropological machine?

So, while the polis historically refers to the ancient Greek city-state, here it stands in for the fundamental structure of political belonging—something that persists across historical configurations of governance, from the walled city to the modern nation-state to algorithmic governance.