You said:

Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?

GPT said:

1. The Body as Battlefield

In war-politics, the body is no longer merely in danger—it is the site where power is enacted, tested, and displayed. Especially the wounded or slain body, which becomes a cipher of sovereignty. It is both a warning and a message. The visibility of the suffering body is often part of the logic of power: the lynched body, the bombed village, the refugee caravan. Power inscribes itself on flesh.

Foucault’s notion of biopower already moves in this direction—where power "makes live and lets die." But in the logic of politics-as-war, the line shifts: it becomes "kills in order to govern, governs in order to kill selectively."

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2. The Slain Body as Symbolic Capital

Death becomes a currency. In liberal democracies, the dead body is sanitized, abstracted, turned into policy data. In authoritarian regimes, it may be spectacularized. In revolutionary movements, it is often martyred.

• In Agamben's terms, the homo sacer—the one who can be killed but not sacrificed—returns: not as exception, but as the rule of modernity.

• The slain body is used to justify more war, more surveillance, more exceptional measures. Dead civilians become “collateral damage,” but also a moral alibi.

• The wounded veteran, too, is weaponized—mobilized as a figure of gratitude, of duty, of deferred justice.

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3. The Wounded Body as Residual Subject

Whereas the slain body is often appropriated and re-signified by the state or cause, the wounded body persists awkwardly, as reminder and question. It resists clean narratives. It becomes the figure around which political legitimacy is tested: how are the broken tended? How are they remembered—or forgotten?

And yet, the wounded body is also often depersonalized, routed through bureaucracies of care or abandonment. In this sense, it is not just subject to politics—it becomes a material critique of politics.

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4. The Order of Power: Thanatopolitics

Politics-as-war implies an order based on who may die and who must live. Achille Mbembe calls this necropolitics—the sovereign right to decide who is disposable. Not just who dies, but who can be left in death’s proximity (e.g., refugee camps, ghettos, occupied zones).

• The wounded and slain are distributed unequally.

• The color, class, and geography of death is mapped onto the geopolitical order.

• Power is no longer content to control bodies—it lets them fall into managed ruin.

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5. A Counter-Inscription?

If the body is where power inscribes its dominion, then perhaps the wounded or slain body can also be a site of counter-politics. Not through redemption, but through refusal, exposure, grief, haunting.

• Judith Butler writes of grievable lives—those whose deaths matter. The politics of grievability is the politics of recognition.

• But perhaps there's also a politics of the ungrievable, the obscene remainder. What can’t be digested by the war-machine might point toward a new ethical order, one grounded in shared vulnerability.

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In Summary:

To imagine politics as a form of war is to acknowledge that life and death are no longer opposites—they are interwoven into the very fabric of governance. The human body is not protected by politics but exposed through it. And the wounded or slain are not mere victims—they are legible expressions of how power structures life itself, and perhaps the only sites where a politics of refusal, mourning, and rehumanization might begin.

Would you like to carry this further into a specific historical frame (e.g., post-9/11 politics, settler colonialism, disability and war), or keep sharpening the theoretical ground?

You said:

who may die and who must live

The necropolitical formulation is who must die and who is allowed to live, I think. Your formulation describes biopower and biopolitics.

ChatGPT said:

You're absolutely right—and that correction is crucial.

The necropolitical order, as formulated by Achille Mbembe, indeed hinges on the inversion of Foucault's biopolitical logic. Where biopower is about "making live and letting die," necropolitics is about determining:

"who must die and who is allowed to live."

This reversal reflects a shift from the management of life to the administration of death as governance. It reveals a sovereign logic not of care, but of abandonment, targeting, and disposable populations.

So yes, my earlier formulation—"who may die and who must live"—fell back into the biopolitical grammar of permissibility and preservation. Necropolitics, in contrast, introduces compulsion and sacrifice as structural mandates:

• Not "we let them die," but "they must die."

• Not "we protect them," but "they may be allowed to live—contingently, precariously."

This reframes the slain or wounded body not merely as a tragic consequence, but as the condition of possibility for power to appear at all.

In necropolitics, death is not a breakdown of order—it is the medium of order.

Would you like to explore how this necropolitical logic operates in particular zones—such as the colony, the prison, the asylum, or the border—or trace its theological and economic roots?