The removal of mediation often serves as a strategy of control, dehumanization, or elimination in various contexts:

1. Sovereign Violence & the State of Exception (Agamben, Schmitt)

• The suspension of mediation—such as law, rights, or due process—creates a space where bare life (homo sacer) can be exposed to unchecked violence.
• Carl Schmitt’s concept of the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception” shows how removing legal mediation can justify extrajudicial killing.

2. Direct Killings Without Political or Legal Mediation

• Drone warfare and extrajudicial assassinations bypass judicial mediation, operating through raw technological and military power.
• The shift from conventional warfare (with treaties and rules of engagement) to “targeted killings” reflects a collapse of mediating structures.

3. Algorithmic and Bureaucratic Violence (Weber, Mbembe, Butler)

• Paradoxically, hyper-mediated systems (AI policing, automated welfare decisions) can simulate immediacy—removing human judgment and replacing it with mechanical elimination (denial of resources, automated blacklists).
• Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics examines how power decides who lives and who dies, often through the removal of political or ethical mediation.
• Judith Butler critiques how the ungrievable are those whose deaths occur outside mediated public mourning (e.g., drone strikes, refugee drownings).

4. Media, Disinformation, and Unfiltered Harm (Baudrillard, McLuhan)

• The claim of “unmediated truth” can erase context and critical distance, making elimination seem natural or inevitable.
• Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation warns of the disappearance of mediation, where the image replaces reality itself—allowing atrocities to be framed as spectacle rather than events requiring justice.

5. The Removal of Ritual and Ethical Mediation in Genocide

• Claude Lanzmann (director of Shoah) argued that the Holocaust involved an extreme removal of symbolic and ritual mediation—reducing killing to pure logistics.
• Historical pogroms and ethnic cleansings often involve stripping away mediating institutions (courts, diplomacy, press) so violence can proceed unchecked.

GPT