In a word, who are exposed to bare life?

ChatGPT said:

Everyone.

But not equally, not all at once, and not in the same way. Some are born into it (the stateless, the disabled, the colonized), others are thrown into it (through war, collapse, exclusion), and still others cling to structures that only delay the exposure.

Bare life is not a fixed identity—it’s a condition always lurking beneath the juridico-political order, a shadow zone produced by the very act of inclusion. It marks the threshold where the symbolic fails and power no longer needs mediation.