A blade of grass must explain itself if it wants to avoid being cut—a brutal truth cloaked in pastoral imagery. It evokes the quiet coercion of justification: even the most natural, small, and innocent thing must speak, must prove, must perform to be spared. And yet, grass doesn’t explain—it simply is. Survival often depends on one's ability to prove worth or utility. So the blade is doomed unless it becomes something else, something less like itself. If the blade could speak, it would no longer be a blade of grass—it would already be compromised, already changed by the grammar of survival. In explanation, it loses the very quality that made it worth preserving: its quiet, unrepeatable presence.

A Blade of Grass (after Agamben)

A blade of grass must explain itself if it wants to avoid being cut. This imperative names the condition of modern life under the rule of biopolitics: existence is no longer presumed; it must be justified, rendered legible, made to pass through the sieve of sovereign reason. That which cannot explain itself is reduced to bare life—life that may be discarded not for what it has done, but for what it cannot articulate.

This is the paradox at the heart of modern inclusion: only that which submits to being known, classified, and mobilized is permitted to persist. The rest falls silently into the zone of indistinction, where law and abandonment coincide. The blade of grass, in refusing (or being unable) to speak, enters this zone—it becomes life exposed to the scythe, a mute remainder of the field’s logic.

But even if it could speak, even if the grass could formulate an appeal, this would already be a capitulation to the apparatus that threatens it. Explanation is not protection—it is part of the machinery of exposure. To render oneself intelligible to power is not to escape it, but to be rearranged by it.

Agamben might say that the blade is consigned to a state of inclusive exclusion. It is included in the order of things only insofar as it is excluded from meaning. The demand to explain is the mark of this exclusion: a summons to perform one’s worth in a system that recognizes only utility, visibility, and control. And yet, Agamben also speaks of inoperativity—the capacity for life to not be entirely subsumed by its function. The blade of grass, in remaining what it is—wordless, unproductive, unnecessary—might bear a trace of this inoperative potential. Not resistance, not revolution, but a kind of pure being, unassimilable. A life that does not justify itself, because it belongs to no justification.