For Agamben, the right to kill is not “founded on a pact but on an exclusive inclusion of bare life in the state” (Agamben 1998, 107). The claim Sovereignty has is over the isolated life it invokes as an “unconditioned exposure to death” is “bare life” (Agamben 2015, 24). This is the paradigm through which one can understand how the special being of disability becomes possible, as a risk to the bare life of the populace. If everyone has become a possible homo sacer, that is, one can acquire the “capacity to be killed”, it is precisely because—at any moment—one can lose their “capacity for political existence” (Foucault 1978, 143).[4] This is the manner in which “we are all virtually homine sacri” (Agamben 1998, 114-115).

We are all reducible to bare life (which can be killed at any time) inasmuch as our bare life is always an object in need of protection that only the Sovereign can guarantee, this is its pastoral paradox. It is only through this framework that one can understand Agamben’s treatment of bare life and Nazi eugenics. It is through establishing a threshold of capacity in relation to the bare life of the German volk that the massacre of Aktion T-4 becomes thinkable.

Agamben begins working through some of the modern implications of bare life by discussing Aktion T-4, a Nazi eugenics program that targeted disabled people for euthanasia that set the course for lebensborn. Between 1939-1945 300,000 people were euthanized through an order signed by Adolf Hitler, Aktion Tiergartenstrasse 4. The order was signed one month after the invasion of Poland, but was backdated to when the invasion began – signaling that this order was deeply connected to Germany’s broader war. In October, the Third Reich declared that 1939 was the year “of the duty to be Healthy”, but the elimination program was to be historically documented as beginning the same day as the invasion of Poland (Proctor 1988, 177-178). The whole population was to be mobilized, and optimized, for this war. It is in this sense that we can historically situate Ernst Jünger’s metaphysical thesis, that what characterizes warfare after the beginning of World War I is the population’s “readiness for mobilization” (Jünger 1991). The violence of “total mobilization” has no better an instance than in the war waged by the Nazis against supposed “useless eaters.”

Agamben situates himself twenty years earlier, however, and provides an analysis of an influential pamphlet, which was widespread in both the medical and juridical communities. It was written by a jurist Karl Binding and a doctor Alfred Hoche, and entitled “Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life”. Hoche and Binding present a complicated case for the transformation of the patient’s right to die (Totungrecht) into the doctor’s right to kill, in the case of “incurable idiots.” Agamben argues that this pamphlet, which would provide the guiding principles of Aktion T-4, exemplifies one of the fundamental tenets of biopolitical modernity. “The fundamental biopolitical structure of modernity—the decision on the value (or nonvalue) of life as such—therefore finds its first juridical articulation in a […] pamphlet in favor of euthanasia” (Agamben 1998, 137).

It is worth meditating here on the transformations that must take place in order for a discourse on the “value” or “nonvalue” of life to become possible. The disabled children and adults slaughtered by the regime are reduced to bare life, stripped, and excluded from the political realm. However, in order for this to occur – another transformation must take place. In an infamous poster promoting Neues Volk (a journal published by the Office of Race Policy) read:  “60,000RM This hereditarily ill man costs the Volkgemeinschaft (community) in his lifetime/Volkgenosse (friend) that is your money too!” (Fig. 1).[5] The entire population has been mobilized, its bare life must be protected. Because the volk is present only ever as bare life, those “lives unworthy of life” are reduced, in turn, to homo sacer and must be eliminated. It is a dual gesture. On the one hand, the invocation of Volkgemeinschaft holds the entire populace out to a biopolitical limit, where “life” can cease “to have juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide” (Agamben 1998, 139). On the other, this presentation of the bare existence of the population demands that those who are deemed a threat must be reduced to bare life and eliminated accordingly. Agamben’s attestation that all have been transformed into bare life is not some reactive polemic against modernity. Instead, it is an articulation of the political conditions necessary for the liquidation of peoples and forms of life.

Perhaps this insight changes the way in which one reads Primo Levi’s poem, “If This is a Man.” We should not read this warning from Levi as an attestation of an inhumanity of the victim in the camp, but rather of the violence that underlies the decision of what constitutes a qualified political life (bios).

Agamben’s investigation into bare life quietly reveals the active danger in discussions of a positive, sovereign, constituted subjectivity.[6] It always presents a mobile exception, a threshold or criteria of possession. These criteria, rather than simply being qualities of qualified life, are, in fact, what make it possible. The shadow of the camp haunts our modern quotidian life, the silhouette of the “Muselmann” haunts every “citizen.” Those murdered are not “bare life” manifest. It is the autarchy of the human being that pretends, with the eyes of a doe and the fangs of a wolf, to ask the question “is this a man?” It sets in motion the course of a disastrous history that can arrive at a “man who dies because a yes or a no” (Levi 2013, 1).

Will Conway