Bare Life, T4, and Sovereign Power

For Agamben, sovereignty does not rest on a pact but on the power to expose life to death. The state claims authority over “bare life”—life stripped of political qualification—by reducing it to what he calls an “unconditioned exposure to death” (Agamben 1998, 107; 2015, 24). If everyone can at any moment lose their “capacity for political existence” (Foucault 1978, 143), then everyone is virtually homo sacer: life that can be killed without it counting as homicide (Agamben 1998, 114–115). This framework helps us see how disability becomes politicized as risk. The sovereign guarantees protection for the population’s bare life only by establishing thresholds of capacity that decide whose life counts as valuable. In Nazi Germany, Aktion T-4—the mass-murder program that killed approximately 300,000 disabled people—made this logic explicit. The slogan “duty to be healthy” mobilized the entire volk as bare life in need of optimization, while propaganda cast disabled people as financial burdens on the community. Their exclusion as “life unworthy of life” was the necessary mirror to the population’s inclusion as life in need of safeguarding.

Agamben highlights the pamphlet by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, which shifted the patient’s “right to die” into the physician’s “right to kill.” For him, this text articulates the fundamental biopolitical gesture of modernity: deciding the value—or nonvalue—of life itself (Agamben 1998, 137). Life is evaluated in terms of utility, productivity, and social value. Binding (a jurist) and Hoche (a psychiatrist) argued for killing the “incurably stupid” or mentally ill, framing it as compassionate and economically rational, shifting from a "right to die" to a "right to kill" vested in experts. The pamphlet's ideas were rooted in pre-Nazi eugenics discourses common across political spectrums in the Weimar Republic and elsewhere, including among liberals, conservatives, and socialists.

Hoche and Binding had no documented affiliation with the Nazi (or any other political) party. After the Nazis came to power Hoche—whose wife was Jewish—resigned from his position as professor and director of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Freiburg. He became increasingly withdrawn and was privately critical of the T4 program, especially after it resulted in the killing of one of his relatives. He committed suicide in 1943.

What followed was not simply a Nazi aberration but a structure of sovereignty. The camp represents the place where political life collapses into bare life, and Levi’s If This is a Man should be read not as lamenting the victim’s loss of humanity but as exposing the violent decision that defines who counts as human in the first place. Citizens live suspended over the abyss of bare life; the Muselmann has already fallen into it. The shadow of the Muselmann, and of “bare life” in general, haunts the citizen not because they are the same, but because they are linked by the same structure: the Muselmann is an actualization of bare life, while the citizen lives under the permanent possibility of being reduced to it.

Will Conway writes: “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).”

To participate in this structure—by asking “is this human?”—is to expose oneself to the same logic. The question is a sovereign gesture, a moment where recognition is granted or withheld. The autarchic—self-ruling, self-contained, autonomous—questioner is entangled in the machinery that produces bare life. Their autarchy is a mask, their innocence a performance. As Will Conway suggests, this self-sufficiency is a fiction, a lie: the “eyes of a doe and the fangs of a wolf” evoke a duplicitous innocence, a predator cloaked in vulnerability.

Alienable and Partial Rights

The conditionality of rights, often veiled in the language of civic virtue, further illustrates the sovereign logic of bare life. The popular slogan: “There are no rights without responsibilities” reveals this paradox with brutal clarity. Framed as common sense, it in fact encodes the sovereign power to decide who counts as a political subject. Rights are presented not as inalienable guarantees but as contingent privileges, always subject to withdrawal if one fails to meet certain criteria. Agamben’s insight is that such criteria do not merely regulate life—they constitute the very threshold by which life is admitted into the civilizational sphere or into a meaningful “qualified” life. This formulation situates every citizen in a precarious position: rights appear only under the permanent shadow of their revocability.

The “responsibilities” demanded are less about moral duty than about demonstrating continued usefulness and conformity to the norms of the political community. One must constantly prove oneself in order to avoid sliding into the condition of bare life. Rights in this formulation function by constantly reminding you that you could lose them — they’re alienable precisely in order to keep you governable. Chronic illness marks a paradigmatic case here, since illness is easily cast as a failure to perform responsibility, productivity, or self-sufficiency. In this way, the discourse of rights and responsibilities operates not as a protection against sovereign violence, but as its instrument: it keeps all subjects perpetually on notice, exposed to the possibility of exclusion. The Nazi program did not invent biopolitical exclusion but dramatized the logic already latent in modern sovereignty. 

In the Americas and elsewhere indigenous peoples were consistently described by Europeans as childlike, irrational, or incapable of self-governance. In the terms of the slogan: no rights without responsibilities, they were framed as irresponsible and therefore unfit for political standing. Agamben’s lens helps us see how this rhetoric marks them as homines sacri: life included in European sovereignty only through its exclusion from law, politics, and juridical protection. They were figured as belonging not to society but to nature or God, and thus reducible to bare life—killable (enslaveable, or dispossessable) without constituting homicide. In this way, colonization exemplifies the same sovereign paradox later visible in the Holocaust and in Nazi eugenics: the right to kill is grounded not in a contract but in the capacity to strip entire populations of their political existence and expose them to death.

Necropolitics, Organized Abandonment, and the Management of Death

Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics describes the ways modern forms of power extend beyond the governance of life (biopolitics) to encompass the governance of death. In his account, sovereignty is increasingly exercised not only through the ability to kill but also through the capacity to expose populations to states of permanent injury, abandonment, or neglect. Certain groups are relegated to the status of “superfluous humanity”—trapped within systems that sustain them in conditions of slow violence, where existence is reduced to its barest and most precarious form. These “death management systems” preserve populations in states of suffering rather than—and under the guise of—resolving them, ensuring that vulnerability itself becomes a tacit disciplinary mechanism.

As Mark LeVine observes in his commentary on Mbembe, necropolitics highlights the role of extreme violence in sustaining political and economic hierarchies. The right to kill, the ability to orchestrate death, and the relegation of entire populations to precarious life are not anomalies but essential features of contemporary global orders. They are not random but systematic, serving to preserve hierarchies and inequalities and to consolidate power.

Necropolitics represents a critical theoretical shift from a focus on law to a focus on the spatial manifestation of power. Agamben’s analysis centers on the juridical structure of the state of exception, Mbembe's framework examines the creation of "deathscapes"—militarized zones, slums, occupied territories, camps, destabilized zones etc—where life is actively "subjugated to death" through "merciless exploitation" and structural violence. These spaces are not merely marginal to the political order; they are where sovereign power is most potently expressed through the abandonment and annihilation of populations deemed dangerous, disposable, or inhuman. 

In Mbembe's own words: “This regime of brutalization is based on the extreme fracturing of spaces deliberately made uninhabitable, the intense cracking of bodies constantly threatened with amputation, forced to live in hollows, often under rubble, in the interstices and unstable fissures of environments subjected to all sorts of devastation, abandonment, in short, universal dissection.

If we have indeed entered a reticular world, it is at the same time made up of enclaves, zones of erasure, including memory, dead ends and shifting, mobile and diffuse borders. It is worth repeating: the dissection of spaces which is its corollary is, itself, a key element of the contemporary regime of universal predation”.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore offers a complementary framework with her notion of “organized abandonment.” Here, inequality is enforced less through spectacular violence than through the deliberate withdrawal of resources, opportunities, and protections. Populations are left to languish as capital and the state redirect attention and investment elsewhere while simultaneously investing in various forms of organized violence. Organized abandonment ensures that structural violence continues, even without direct acts of killing, by shaping conditions where survival itself becomes uncertain.

For Wilson Gilmore, abandonment is classed, racialized and spatialized and it’s tied to how surplus populations are managed under shifting regimes of capital accumulation. It is never just a matter of passive neglect; it’s an active political-economic strategy that implicitly works in tandem with coercion and containment. While Mbembe emphasizes the sovereign’s power to decide who may live and who must die through overt and sometimes spectacular forms of exposure to death, Gilmore shifts the focus further to the slower, systemic management of surplus life.

California’s prison population increased by about 900% since 1970. The US national incarcerated population, while slightly declining from its peak in 2009, remains more than double the early 1990s rate—about 2.1 million people, approximately 1 in 185. Women’s incarceration is about 14 times higher than in 1970. This expansion is linked to political choices, such as the 1994 Crime Bill, allocating billions for more policing and prison construction, reflecting disinvestment in marginalized neighbourhoods and reinvestment in control and punishment. The growth of the prison system is not correlated with a rising crime rate, but rather with a response to "surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity". The prison system serves as a "fix" for economic crises: it absorbs a surplus population of workers displaced by deindustrialization, uses up surplus land, and provides a productive return on surplus finance capital. This turns a social problem into a profitable enterprise and a form of social control. Gilmore’s analysis reveals that the seemingly "mundane" operations of the carceral state—such as budget decisions that expand jail funding or land-use decisions that concentrate prisons in specific regions—are, in fact, forms of violence that are part of a larger continuum of harm.

After deindustrialization many former industrial towns in the UK were left with high unemployment. At the same time, the prison population nearly doubled between the early 1980s and 2010, despite crime rates not rising proportionately. Prisons absorbed the “redundant” working class, disproportionately Black and minority ethnic communities. Deindustrialized regions saw prison construction as a substitute for lost manufacturing jobs. Private contractors and the growing prison-industrial complex (e.g. Serco, G4S and Sodexo) found profitable outlets in prison expansion and in the outsourcing of services.

In sum, empirical data on rising incarceration rates, infrastructural neglect, health disparities in marginalized neighbourhoods, and policy choices confirm Gilmore’s framework of organized abandonment.

Exposure — to poverty, incarceration, displacement, environmental harm — is not random or natural. It is produced and managed by institutions (zoning, welfare policy, laws, policing). It is targeted toward specific populations (racialized, poor, migrant, disabled). It is functional for capitalism, because it creates disposable labor, justifies state violence, and sustains inequality. And it creates and sustains zones of abandonment — places where vulnerability is normalized and exploited.

Taken together, Mbembe and Gilmore reveal how modern governance sustains itself not only through managing life but also through systematically distributing death, injury, and abandonment. These mechanisms are central to the maintenance of entrenched hierarchies and the production of a disposable humanity.

Michael Sandel and the Marketization of the Moral

Markets are, as Sandel has it, efficient at allocating resources, but they are indifferent to the meaning of those resources. When moral values are subjected to market exchange, they lose their normative force. For example, paying someone to apologize on your behalf may mimic the form of contrition, but it empties the act of its ethical substance. The apology becomes a transaction, not a transformation. Similarly, offering financial incentives for civic duties—like voting or donating blood—can crowd out intrinsic motivations, replacing moral commitment with economic calculus.

Sandel calls this phenomenon corruption, not in the legal sense, but in the moral sense: the market doesn’t just allocate—it redefines. When we treat moral acts as commodities, we risk turning virtues into services and character into currency.

Unlike goods or services, moral values are non-fungible—they cannot be exchanged without altering their meaning. Justice, compassion, integrity, and respect are not transferable assets; they are enacted through relationships, choices, and responsibilities. To sell a moral stance is to betray it. If someone “buys” loyalty, they receive obedience, not devotion. If someone “sells” forgiveness, they offer appeasement, not reconciliation.

This distinction matters because morality is rooted in intention and context. A bribe may look like generosity, but its moral valence is reversed. Markets flatten these nuances, treating all exchanges as equivalent. But morality thrives on difference—on the ability to discern right from wrong, not just cost from benefit.

When societies begin to treat moral norms as market commodities, they risk hollowing out the shared values that sustain democratic life. If public service becomes a career path rather than a calling, or if truth-telling becomes a strategic move rather than a duty, then the moral glue that binds communities begins to dissolve. Sandel warns that this isn’t just a philosophical concern—it’s a political one. A society that commodifies everything may find itself rich in goods but impoverished in meaning.

Morals are not merchandise. They cannot be bought without being betrayed, nor sold without being surrendered. Sandel’s critique reminds us that markets are powerful tools—but dangerous masters. In his view, to preserve the integrity of our moral lives, we must draw boundaries around what money can’t buy. 

Scarcity and Maximalism

The relationship between organized abandonment and the non-profit sector reveals a striking asymmetry between the ethos of civil society organizations and that of the carceral state. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, organized abandonment involves the deliberate denial of service and a redistribution of resources away from communities and toward punitive infrastructures. In this context, the non-profit industrial complex often arises as a mediator of artificial scarcity, tasked with distributing minimal resources to populations rendered disposable. A contributor to Indigenous Action says that: indigenous non-profits are not transparent with their grant funding reports. That they operate with a level of secrecy which ensures that the desperate communities they impose their representation on do not see how much they extract and profit from indigenous misery. And that they often design bloated budgets for personal gain and are not resourceful. As contributors to The Revolution Will Not Be Funded emphasize, NGOs frequently internalize and reproduce an ethos of austerity: they cultivate a “deficit ethos,” teaching populations to operate under conditions of perpetual shortage, where organizing must be non-participatory and must be constrained by the limits of grant cycles, foundation priorities and by the careful rationing or outright denial of service. This austerity ideology disciplines movements into scarcity-thinking, limiting their capacity to imagine structural transformation, they scavenge within a desert rather than build a world.

By contrast, the prison-industrial complex is characterized not by scarcity but by maximalism. The rise of supermax facilities, the exponential growth of prison budgets, and the militarization of police forces all illustrate how state and capital invest heavily in punitive systems. While public services under the auspices of biopolitical or “anti-state states” and NGOs alike instruct populations that there is never enough, the carceral system demonstrates that resources flow abundantly when the goal is punishment and control. This contrast underscores Gilmore’s claim that abandonment is not a failure of statecraft but its guiding strategy: scarcity is organized in the social sphere even as excess is unleashed in the punitive sphere.

The juxtaposition highlights the extent to which NGOs, public services and the carceral state function as complementary apparatuses. NGOs manage abandonment by translating it into the language of scarcity and austerity, naturalizing the idea that minimal survival is the best that can be expected. Meanwhile, the carceral system consumes extraordinary resources to enforce inequality, presenting punitive maximalism as both necessary and inevitable. Read together through Gilmore’s lens, the NGO sector and the PIC exemplify two faces of the same order: one that sustains what Gilmore calls racial capitalism by containing and attenuating life through austerity, and by organizing death through overbuilt infrastructures of confinement.

Gilmore’s theory of organized abandonment explains how inequality is entrenched through deliberate withdrawal of support, while the contributors to The Revolution Will Not Be Funded demonstrate how anti-state states, NGOs and the non-profit sector often function to stabilize rather than disrupt this abandonment. Taken together, these perspectives suggest that abandonment is not only a structural condition but one that is actively managed at both the level of state policy and civil society. The essays in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded argue that NGOs step in where the state has withdrawn. But instead of challenging state power or capitalism, they often absorb and contain resistance, because they rely on funding from foundations, corporations, or the state itself. In other words: the NPIC doesn’t stop organized abandonment—it organizes the response to abandonment in a way that doesn’t threaten existing hierarchies. According to Gilmore, capital and the state “organize” vulnerability in order to preserve capitalism.

In Mbembe’s register this ideology, though a small piece of the puzzle, helps generate death-worlds, in Agamben’s it helps generate null-spaces—indeterminate states where the nomos is indistinct, where the distinction between life and law or zoë and bios is blurred, where categories like “life” and “law” lose their protective clarity. It helps generate unmediated/unqualified states which the polis or “qualified life” acts upon, it acts upon life stripped of defences.

Home is Where we Start from

Both Derrick Jensen and Mark Fisher remind us that what we experience as “personal” suffering—abuse, trauma, depression—is tightly bound to larger structures of violence and abandonment. In A Language Older Than Words, Jensen recounts his childhood abuse and draws an explicit analogy to the wider abuse of ecosystems by industrial civilization or by civilizations in general. The same dynamics of domination, silencing, abuse, neglect and denial that structure abusive households also structure extractive economies. Trauma, in this sense, is not exceptional but symptomatic of a broader cultural logic that normalizes indifference, violence and exploitation. Mark Fisher, by contrast, focuses on depression as the privatization of social suffering. In Capitalist Realism, he critiques how neoliberal culture insists that mental illness is just an individual problem—just an imbalance of chemicals or a failure of resilience—not also the predictable outcome of precarity, overstretched labor, and the tactical erosion of collective structures. 

Read alongside Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of organized abandonment or Mbembe’s necropolitics, these accounts highlight how structural violence intrudes deeply into intimate life. The abuse Jensen describes and the depression Fisher analyzes are not separate from the state’s “death management systems”; they are their psychic correlates. In both cases, survival becomes precarious, suffering is individualized, and collective conditions are obscured.

Raj Chetty and others: Statistical Evidence

While theorists like Fisher and Gilmore describe the psychic and political consequences of precarity and abandonment, Raj Chetty’s work provides the statistical evidence that these forces are not abstract—they are measurable and unevenly distributed across the population. Chetty’s studies on intergenerational mobility show the collapse of the American promise of upward progress: children born in the 1940s had about a 90% chance of out-earning their parents, while for children born in the 1980s that figure has fallen to around 50%. For half the population, the future is no longer a site of possibility but of stagnation.

His research on neighborhood effects makes this spatialized. The Opportunity Atlas demonstrates that postcodes function as engines of destiny: growing up in a poor neighborhood drastically reduces later earnings, educational attainment, and even life expectancy. Inequality is literally mapped onto the landscape—Gilmore’s “organized abandonment” rendered visible in geographic form. Chetty has also shown stark inequalities in health outcomes. The richest Americans live, on average, 10 to 15 years longer than the poorest. This life-expectancy gap is not an incidental finding but a demonstration of necropolitics: who is supported to live longer, and who is abandoned to earlier death. Finally, Chetty’s data reveals the racialized nature of these inequalities. Black children born into middle-income families are disproportionately likely to fall into poverty compared to their white peers, even when controlling for family structure and education. Economic mobility itself is structured by class, race and several other vectors which reproduce disadvantage across generations. Together, these findings underscore that the psychic despair described by Fisher and the systemic violence identified by Gilmore and Mbembe have an empirical basis. Chetty’s work demonstrates, in numbers and maps, how abandonment operates as policy: constraining life chances, eroding health, and foreclosing the future for entire populations.

A study (British Medical Journal Open) found childhood verbal abuse increases adult poor mental health risk by 64%, while physical abuse increases risk by 52%. Experiencing both types more than doubled the risk (115% higher odds). The 10 Aces of trauma, derived from the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences study, are: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, parental divorce, a parent with a mental illness, a parent with a substance use problem, witnessing a parent being abused, and having a household member incarcerated. ACEs are widespread: roughly two-thirds of people report at least one ACE; about 16% report 4 or more. ACE scores strongly predict outcomes including up to 12 times higher risks of alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide attempts, and multiplied disease rates across the board. The more ACEs a person experiences, the higher their risk of developing mental health disorders. This includes depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, and psychosis. In California, ACE-related health burdens cost an estimated $112 billion annually—in just that state. A study in the Lancet estimated the total annual costs from ACEs on health outcomes across North America and Europe combined to be $1.33 trillion. Neoliberal policies show a clear link to rising distress: the erosion of social support and economic stability correlates with climbs in mental illness, addiction, and suicide. These worsen where inequality is stark—approximately 2× to 3× higher rates of mental illness compared to more egalitarian countries. Antidepressant use surged 65% between 1999 and 2014; rates vary by gender and ethnicity but indicate growing mental health struggles. These data show that suffering is not an individual failure; it’s shaped by environments, interpersonal abuse, broken homes, policies, and violent systems—from childhood to economy.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Inner Level demonstrates that the psychic despair is not merely cultural pessimism but has a measurable epidemiological basis. Drawing on decades of cross-national and intra-national data, they show that more unequal societies consistently experience higher rates of mental illness, stress, and social dysfunction.

The figures are striking. In more unequal countries, rates of mental illness are up to three times higher than in more equal societies. Inequality doesn’t just correlate with poor mental health; it amplifies it across the population, cutting across class lines. It is not just an economic condition but a psychosocial toxin. It creates precisely the psychic environment that produces Chetty’s mortality gaps: lives diminished not only in material resources but in mental health, solidarity, and the capacity to imagine alternative futures.

Wilkinson and Pickett also show that inequality heightens status anxiety and social evaluative threat—the chronic stress of being judged, ranked, and measured against others. This leads to elevated cortisol levels, worse physical health, and more depression and anxiety. Even the wealthiest individuals in unequal societies experience more stress and lower well-being than their counterparts in more equal nations, underscoring that inequality poisons the social fabric as a whole.

Perhaps most damning is their finding that inequality undermines trust and social cohesion. In more unequal societies, people are less likely to trust their neighbors, less likely to participate in collective life, and more likely to withdraw into defensive, isolated patterns of behavior—the very conditions Fisher describes as the cultural backdrop of depression and precarity.

Robert Putnam: The Decline of Social Capital

Where Mark Fisher identifies depression as a lived expression of neoliberal isolation, Robert Putnam’s work—especially Bowling Alone—documents this disintegration on the level of community. Putnam shows that since the mid-20th century, the US has experienced a marked decline in social capital (networks, trust, and reciprocity) measured through metrics such as participation in civic associations, church attendance, trade unions, neighborhood organizations, and other forms of associational life.

The iconic example is bowling leagues: while more people than ever went bowling in the 1990s, fewer joined leagues. In other words, social activities were increasingly pursued alone or in smaller, privatized networks. This decline is statistically significant. Putnam notes that since the 1960s, participation in civic organizations has dropped by 25–50%, and generalized social trust—the belief that “most people can be trusted”—fell from about 60% in the early 1960s to less than 40% by the late 1990s.

Putnam frames this loss of social connection as corrosive to democracy, but in the present discussion it also highlights the psychosocial terrain Fisher describes. The sense of isolation, disconnection, and abandonment that Fisher ties to depression is empirically mapped in Putnam’s data. Where Wilkinson and Pickett show how inequality produces stress and mental illness, Putnam demonstrates how inequality’s social counterpart—declining social capital—manifests as atomization and loneliness. Putnam also focusses on the family in the context of inequality. His data shows that, on average, children from affluent families get far more access to enrichment, stable parenting, and supportive networks, while poor families face increasing precarity. Instead of building conducive infrastructures, states (and individuals alike) moralize about the family unit while dismantling the conditions that allow them to thrive or allow individuals access to escape routes if they do not. Together, these perspectives show that what looks like a “private failure” of individual morale is inseparable from the measurable collapse of communal ties and the organized abandonment of civic life.

Stress as Slow Violence

The biopolitical reduction of life to a condition of permanent exposure to harm can also be illuminated through the lens of neuroscience and stress biology. Robert Sapolsky’s work on stress (for example in his paper: Taming Stress) demonstrates how prolonged states of anxiety and helplessness are not merely subjective feelings but physiological conditions with lethal consequences. In the paper referenced, Sapolsky concludes that: such insight carries with it a social imperative: namely, that we find ways to improve the world such that “fewer people learn that they must always feel watchful and on guard or that they must always feel helpless.” Stress in this sense is not an occasional adaptive response but a chronic, body-wide degradation of life processes, weakening the immune system, accelerating cardiovascular disease, impairing cognitive function, and making you more vulnerable to depressive and anxiety disorders. To feel stress “killing you” is not a metaphor; it is a scientifically corroborated description of what stress hormones do to the body when continually activated. Virtually no organ system in your body escapes the effects of chronic psychological stress. Sapolsky further observes that inequality is a social mechanism for the production of chronic stress: “it should be self-evident that something is wrong when a society is so unequal as to teach some of its members that life consists of menace and that they are fundamentally helpless; the incidences of anxiety and depression soar among the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.”

In an Agambenian key, this amounts to the sovereign reproduction of bare life through inequality. Those consigned to the margins are placed into a permanent state of biological deterioration—not by explicit extermination orders but by the structural violence of stress and stressors themselves. Their lives are shortened not by overt killing but by the prolonged internalization of menace, fear, and helplessness. This reveals another dimension of biopolitics: the management of stress as a diffuse mechanism of control. While the camp represents the concentrated form of bare life, stress becomes its embodied and more distributed analogue, embedding exposure and vulnerability into the everyday physiology of populations. The “social imperative” Sapolsky identifies is thus not simply a call for “better mental health outcomes”, but a warning that the conditions of modern inequality, segregation, organized abandonment and the manufacture of ingroups and outgroups all enact a slow violence inseparable from the logic of bare life. Stress is an invisible camp blanketing much of the world and eroding life from within.

Ingroup/Outgroup Dynamics

In Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Sapolsky synthesizes decades of research to show how deeply the human brain is wired for “us vs. them” distinctions—and how malleable those categories are. His analysis spans from milliseconds of neural activity to long histories of meso and macro scale organization, demonstrating how biology and culture entwine in the making of solidarity and indifference.

At the most basic level, the brain can sort people into ingroups and outgroups almost instantly. fMRI studies reveal that the amygdala activates within 200 milliseconds when people view faces from an outgroup (Phelps et al., 2000). This happens before conscious thought, underscoring how primal the response is. Simultaneously, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)—a region associated with empathy—shows reduced activity, suggesting that the outgrouped are processed less as people and more like objects (Harris & Fiske, 2006). “They” are moved around in an instrumentalist fashion, much as a digger would move rubble. Crucially, these effects are reversible: when individuals are asked to think about the personal preferences of an outgroup member (“this person likes pizza”), mPFC activity rebounds, showing that empathy can be quickly reactivated with individuating cues.

Outgroup encounters also trigger measurable physiological stress; cortisol, the body’s main stress hormone, spikes significantly when people anticipate interactions with the outgrouped (Page-Gould et al., 2008). But here too, context reshapes biology: repeated, positive cross-group contact lowers cortisol over time, embedding tolerance in the body itself.

Social psychology demonstrates the same dynamics. In “minimal group” experiments (Tajfel, 1970s), participants were randomly assigned to groups based on arbitrary markers like coin flips. Even with no history or material stakes, people consistently allocated more resources to their ingroup, privileging “us” over “them.” Sapolsky highlights this to show that the brain’s group machinery is hypersensitive: nearly any categorical distinction can be used to trigger favouritism and exclusion.

Studies show oxytocin can intensify conformity to group norms, and that it can increase trust, cooperation, and empathy—but primarily toward members of one’s perceived ingroup (e.g., friendship groups, teams, colleagues, professions, societies, nations, ideologies). In parallel, oxytocin can heighten suspicion, defensiveness, indifference or even aggression toward outgroup members. It sharpens social boundaries rather than dissolving them. Oxytocin may amplify moral concern for ingroup suffering while justifying or ignoring harm to outsiders—especially when framed as protective or retaliatory.

These dynamics also scale up to political forms. Groups under perceived threat tend to become more authoritarian, cohesive, and punitive. Laboratory priming studies show that participants induced to feel threatened are significantly more likely to endorse harsh or exclusionary policies toward the outgrouped (Stenner, 2005). In Sapolsky’s view, this is not just psychology but a blueprint for harsh politics: leaders and institutions can manufacture or exaggerate threat to activate our cognitive machinery preparing it for hierarchy, punishment, outgrouping and for the organized persecution of those outgrouped or for in-group/out-group bias.

Being outgrouped can place us in a kind of social or political “state of exception,” borrowing the term from Agamben. The person or group is effectively removed from the normal protections, norms, or moral expectations that govern the in-group. Their status isn’t just marginalized; it’s suspended—treated as if the usual rules don’t apply, and their vulnerability becomes normalized or invisible.

In other words, outgrouping isn’t merely exclusion; it’s a form of juridical and symbolic suspension, where the person is rendered outside the usual social contract. That state of exception can be experienced socially, legally, or psychologically, and it often overlaps with precarity, surveillance, and dehumanization.

Sapolsky is clear, however, that these same biological systems support solidarity. Shared goals, cooperative rituals, and repeated intergroup contact can redraw boundaries of belonging, reduce amygdala activation, lower cortisol, and restore empathy. The mechanisms of ingroup/outgroup perception are biological and embodied, but the content of “us” and “them” is organizationally, procedurally, historically and politically constructed.

In short, Behave demonstrates that the line between compassion and cruelty is not fixed by nature but mediated by context. Human biology equips us with the tools for ingroup/outgroup bias and exclusion, but also for radical expansions of solidarity. Which pathway is activated depends on the organizational and cultural forms we build.

A rudimentary synthesis: For Mbembe, necropolitics relies on designating whole populations as disposable “others,” trapped in zones of death and abandonment. Sapolsky shows the neurological underpinning of how this othering becomes perceptually naturalized, enabling violence with reduced empathy. For Gilmore, organized abandonment works by sorting populations into groups deemed worthy of investment versus groups left to fend for themselves. The state exploits our us/them machinery by normalizing the abandonment of certain populations as common sense or self-protection. For Fisher, the psychic landscape of capitalist realism is one of depression, isolation, and entrapment. Here too, Sapolsky’s biology matters: when the moral and political imagination shrinks, “us” contracts and “them” expands. The resulting fear-based worldviews, practices and organization fosters exactly the alienation Fisher diagnoses.

Taken together, Sapolsky provides the biological micro-foundations of the processes that Mbembe, Gilmore, and Fisher chart at social and political levels. States, civil society, broadcast media and so on, do not merely stumble upon “us vs. them” divisions; they actively manipulate them and generate them, stoking fear and threat to justify exclusionary organization, abandonment, and the normalization of despair.

The Circulation of Knowledge, Understanding and Misunderstanding

The circulation of knowledge is never neutral—it is structured by relations of power, material interests, and institutional infrastructures. Knowledge is disseminated through infrastructures that are interpersonal, political, economic, and epistemological all at once. When it fails to circulate—whether through suppression, enclosure, or systemic neglect—the consequences are often measured in life harmed. Far from being an abstract problem, the ethics and the politics of knowledge circulation has repeatedly determined who lives and who dies. The absence or obstruction of knowledge is not neutral. It is patterned: those already marginalized—by race, class, geography, or status—are most likely to suffer the consequences. Miranda Fricker’s term “hermeneutical injustice” resonates here: a person struggles to understand their social experiences because they lack and/or society lacks the interpretive resources to make sense of them.

Different traditions of critical thought, from Marx to postcolonial theory, tend to converge on this point: what people come to know is shaped by who controls the means of circulation. For Marx, knowledge cannot be separated from the mode of production; the ruling class controls the dominant ideas because it controls the material base. Gramsci develops this into the concept of cultural hegemony, where ruling blocs secure consent not only through coercion but by making their worldview appear to be common sense and to be natural. Bourdieu adds another layer: fields of cultural production (journalism, academia, publishing and so on) operate with their own hierarchies of capital—economic, cultural, symbolic—that structure whose voices are amplified and whose are silenced. He argued that institutions consecrate specific cultural tastes and behaviors, rewarding those with the right background (habitus) with symbolic capital (prestige) and ultimately transferring privilege across generations, despite promises of meritocracy. Instead of being an equalizer, the university system acts to "consecrate" social distinctions and reproduce social inequalities.

Walter Lippmann argued that citizens live in a world too complex to grasp directly, so they rely on “pictures in their heads”—stereotypes largely supplied by the press. Chomsky’s “propaganda model” specifies how media ownership, advertising, sourcing, and flak constrain which ideas can be accessed, ensuring that elite interests dominate public perception. McLuhan shifts the focus from content to form: the medium itself (print, radio, television, digital platforms) shapes not only what circulates but how it is received, reorganizing sensory and cognitive habits. Foucault dismantles the idea of knowledge as neutral accumulation, showing how discourses are bound to regimes of power that produce subjects, norms, and truths. Spivak's critique extends to the global order, asking whether the subaltern can speak—and pointing out that even when they do, their knowledge is often erased, filtered, belittled, distorted, or silenced by dominant forms. Donna Haraway’s focus is epistemic and ecological, she critiques the “god trick” of disembodied objectivity, insisting that knowledge is always situated—circulation is never from nowhere, but from specific embedded standpoints. Haraway is attentive to the various rigid binaries (human/machine, male/female, human/animal, nature/culture and so on) that, in this view, underpin systems of domination, particularly within technoscience. Through metaphors like the cyborg, she illustrates how these binaries factor into creating asymmetrical power structures and advocates for “making kin” and for situated knowledge which may help create new, more equitable ways of living and interacting with both humans and non-humans.

The University and its Injustices: Reading Sandel Against the Present

Michael Sandel has spent decades critiquing the ways liberal societies imagine fairness, merit, and the common good. In recent years his attention has fixed on universities—not just as ivory towers of learning but as engines of inequality, institutions that embody a certain ideology of meritocracy. His argument is deceptively simple: universities, by presenting themselves as neutral arbiters of talent, become complicit in both epistemic injustice (the privileging of certain forms of knowing and narrating) and material injustice (the concentration of wealth, power, and opportunity).

The university likes to imagine itself as a ladder. Those who ascend it do so, ostensibly, by virtue of intelligence, discipline, and merit. But Sandel shows how the ladder metaphor collapses into circularity: the institutions that credential “excellence” are themselves gatekeepers of what counts as excellence. When an elite degree becomes the measure of human worth, the winners are confirmed in their superiority while the losers are consigned to what he calls the “tyranny of merit.” This is not only a problem of distributive justice—who gets the good jobs, the prestige, the salaries—but also of recognition. Those left outside the charmed circle of elite education are made to feel that their failures are deserved, that their exclusion is proof of inadequacy.

Universities enshrine certain knowledges as legitimate while sidelining others. Test scores, narrow metrics of achievement, and culturally embedded forms of “aptitude” become proxies for intelligence itself. The lived knowledge of working-class students, the embodied know-how of craft, or the situated experience of marginalized groups are rarely valued as epistemically authoritative. Miranda Fricker’s term “testimonial injustice” resonates here: the voice of the non-credentialed is discounted before it is even heard. Sandel’s critique reminds us that epistemic injustice is inseparable from institutional structures that anoint some as “knowers” and others as mere opinion-holders.

But Sandel also insists that epistemic injustice cannot be disentangled from material injustice. The sorting system of higher education feeds into a broader economy of inequality. Universities hoard opportunity, concentrate networks of advantage, and monopolize cultural capital. They function less as gateways to mobility and more as mechanisms of reproduction: the children of elites are disproportionately represented at elite institutions, and the credentials they acquire secure their place in the upper echelons of wealth and influence. The meritocratic story cloaks this reproduction in a moral narrative of desert: those who succeed deserve their success, those who fail deserve their fate.

The result is a double violence. First, a material violence of exclusion—access to good jobs, health care, stability, and political voice are hoarded behind the walls of selective institutions. Second, a symbolic violence of denigration—those who are excluded are not merely deprived but also humiliated, made to internalize their supposed unworthiness. In this sense, the university does not only misallocate resources; it structures the very horizon of what counts as dignity.

Against this, Sandel has floated a provocative remedy: sortition. Once a basic threshold of qualification is met, admissions could be decided by lottery rather than by fine-grained rankings. This would break the illusion that there is a morally meaningful difference between those admitted and those rejected. It would expose the arbitrariness of the sorting process, shattering the aura of inevitability that fuels the meritocratic myth. But if we are to address epistemic injustice, we cannot simply widen the gates; we must also rethink the architecture. What forms of knowledge are excluded because they are not credentialed? What kinds of human flourishing are foreclosed when universities monopolize the definition of intelligence? Seen this way, universities are not neutral sites of learning but political actors in the distribution of both knowledge and resources. They create hierarchies of truth, hierarchies of voice, and hierarchies of life chances. Sandel’s critique points toward a broader reckoning: the university is not only implicated in social inequality but also in the very grammar of exclusion that tells us who counts as worthy, who counts as knowing, who counts as fully human.

Cynical Ideology

Slavoj Žižek often repeats the formula: “I know very well, but nonetheless…” He calls this “fetishistic disavowal”, sometimes it is framed as cynical ideology (drawing on Peter Sloterdijk). In ideology, people assume “others” are duped. In reality, everyone already knows the “truth” (Santa isn’t real, the regime is corrupt and so on). But each group presumes that the other group is still naive, still in the dark. This gap sustains the functioning of ideology: people act as if others still believe, even if no one privately does. Žižek ties this to the structure of belief: belief is never simply “in my head,” it is always displaced — I think that the other believes, and that’s enough to keep the structure going. So ideology persists not because people are truly deceived, but because they misrecognize the status of belief in the other. A classic example he gives: No adult “really” believes in Santa Claus. But parents behave as if their children believe, while children behave as if their parents believe. The figure of Santa persists because each side presupposes the belief in the other.

In short: this dynamic is the very mechanism by which ideology sustains itself, it is not ignorance but the fantasy of ignorance in the other that keeps structures of power intact. As such, ideology cannot be escaped through knowing more; exposing corruption, exploitation, or contradiction does not dissolve ideology, because ideology has already anticipated and incorporated this exposure. It survives precisely through the gap between knowing and doing, through fetishistic disavowal. What must be confronted is not illusion but the libidinal investment in acting as if—the enjoyment that attaches to rituals, symbols, practices, social forms and repetitions regardless of what one knows. Ideology is not a false lens that distorts a preexisting reality, but a constitutive structure through which reality emerges. Fetishistic disavowal is not a mechanism of illusion but the very mode through which the symbolic, social, and political order is reproduced. Ideology, far from being dispelled by knowledge or exposure, persists because it is embedded in the performative logic of subjects who know very well, but nonetheless continue to act as if they do not; belief is never fully “mine,” it is always externalized.

Here, ideology is a system of beliefs, values, and representations that shapes how individuals perceive and relate to the world. Reality is the world as we perceive and narrate it—structured by language, culture, and ideology. And the Real is what resists symbolization—what cannot be fully grasped, represented, or integrated into our symbolic order. It is the traumatic kernel of existence that disrupts our sense of coherence.

Ideology structures subjects’ relation to the Real, and the Real is a structural feature of the reality that subjects encounter through contradiction, disavowal, and ideology. Even if ideology is performatively sustained, confronting and destabilizing ideological fantasies can have political effects. Revolution or social change is possible precisely because reality exists partly outside the symbolic frame, and ideology must continually mediate that encounter. The subject is always implicated in ideology and thus partially responsible for reproducing it—but also capable of recognizing and acting upon contradictions. The subject’s engagement is performative; their “knowledge” or disavowal sustains social reality, meaning that awareness can, in principle, unsettle it.

Davis and the Bell Curve

The paper "Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century" by Lennard J. Davis explores the historical and cultural construction of the concept of normalcy and its relation to disability, statistics, eugenics, and literature in the nineteenth century.

Davis argues that the modern concept of normalcy emerged historically in the nineteenth century alongside the rise of industrial society and scientific discourses. Words related to "normal" such as "normalcy," "norm," and "average" entered European languages only in the mid-1800s. Prior to this, the dominant ideal was that of the unattainable "ideal" rooted in mythology and art, a standard all individuals fell short of but were not judged against as a strict norm. In contrast, the concept of normalcy established a measurable middle or average, against which departures – labelled as disabilities or abnormalities – were identified and marginalized. This shift from ideal to norm changed how bodies were perceived socially and scientifically, framing people with disabilities as deviants from the statistical average rather than as varied individuals.

The development of statistics played a crucial role in cementing the norm. Derived from early political arithmetic and public health, statistics became a tool to quantify and regulate human attributes. Adolphe Quetelet introduced "l’homme moyen" (the average man) as a statistical and social concept representing the median human, aligning with bourgeois ideals of moderation and balance. This concept translated into an idealized norm to which bodies should conform.

A cousin of Darwin, Francis Galton linked the normalizing function of statistics to evolutionary theory, while Adolphe Quetelet originally formulated the "average man" concept based on the normal distribution as a kind of middle ideal, Galton further adapted this for eugenic purposes by organizing human traits into a ranked scale based on their position in the normal distribution. This allowed him to rank people and traits in quartiles, where the first quartile was seen as the lowest or least desirable level (inferiority) and the fourth quartile as the highest or most desirable (excellence). Rather than simply seeing divergence from the mean as symmetrical variation, Galton emphasized the hierarchy represented by his ranking in keeping with the eugenic goal of promoting superior traits and minimizing or eliminating inferiority.

Eugenicists categorized not only disabilities but also poverty, mental injuries/illness, and certain ethnicities as undesirable deviations threatening national fitness. This created a fraught social hierarchy where various bodies were constructed as inherently defective, targeted for extraction, panoptic regulation and subjected to eliminationist policies justified by pseudo-scientific claims.

Davis also highlights how nineteenth-century novels reflected and reinforced normative ideas about bodies and identities. Novels typically portrayed protagonists as embodying normative standards, while those with physical abnormalities or disabilities appeared as minor or villainous characters. The narrative form itself, emerging alongside middle-class hegemony, symbolically reproduced social norms, encouraging readers to identify with "normal" characters while marginalizing the "abnormal" or disabled as Others. Naturalist writers like Émile Zola introduced heredity and biological determinism into literature, aligning with scientific discourses of the time. Thus, literature became eugenic infrastructure and a form of "report" grounded in the norm and the average (rather than in  idealized or heroic types) emphasizing inherited traits and environmental influences on characters, thus reflecting the era's preoccupation with the deficient, the average and the superior.

The phrase "eugenic gaze" used by Davis refers to a particular way of looking at and scrutinizing but this gaze is not just about individual observation, it is part of a broader social, scientific, and political process that categorizes according to norms derived from statistical averages and eugenic ideologies. Through this gaze, people were often grouped with a wide array of other socially marginalized populations who failed quality control.

Davis writes: "So, for example, criminals, the poor, and people with disabilities might be mentioned in the same breath. Take Karl Pearson, a leading figure in the eugenics movement, who defined the “unfit” as follows: “the habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tuberculous, the insane, the mentally defective, the alcoholic, the diseased from birth or from excess” (cited in Kevles 1985, 33). In 1911, Pearson headed the Department of Applied Statistics, which included the Galton and Biometric Laboratories at University College in London. This department gathered eugenic information on the inheritance of physical and mental traits including “scientific, commercial, and legal ability, but also hermaphroditism, hemophilia, cleft palate, harelip, tuberculosis, diabetes, deaf-mutism, polydactyly (more than five fingers) or brachydactyly (stub fingers), insanity, and mental deficiency” (ibid., 38–9). Here again one sees a strange selection of disabilities merged with other types of human variations". Though they masquerade as rational and benevolent, lists like these demonstrate the arbitrary nature and the absurdity of such sorting processes. Pearson naturalized social inequality as biological inferiority and moralized biology.

The eugenic gaze frames inability and a range of other phenomena as a problem of hereditary "defects" that needed to be normalized or eliminated for the health of the nation, reinforcing exclusion, discrimination and social hierarchies. Moreover, this gaze operates in cultural representations, reinforcing negative stereotypes and social stigma, it generates subjects and codifies their ways of seeing. In short, the eugenic gaze is a socially constituted way of seeing that enforces the norm and marginalizes those who stray from it, turning variation into a marker of inferiority, deeply embedded in the history of disability and modern concepts of normalcy.

In sum, Davis’s paper convincingly argues that what we understand today as normalcy and disability are socially and historically constructed concepts, inseparable from scientific, political, and cultural developments in the nineteenth century. He reminds us that the most extreme iteration of this logic was not an aberration, but a continuation; in his own words: “We have largely forgotten that what Hitler did in developing a hideous policy of eugenics was just to implement the theories of the British and American eugenicists. Hitler’s statement in Mein Kampf that “the struggle for the daily livelihood [between species] leaves behind, in the ruck, everything that is weak or diseased or wavering” (cited in Blacker 1952, 143) is not qualitatively different from any of the many similar statements we have seen before. And even the conclusions Hitler draws are not very different from those of the likes of Galton, [Alexander Graham] Bell, and others”.

The Sovereign’s Double: On the Psychology of Killing within the State of Exception

If Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty exposes how life is rendered killable, Robert Jay Lifton helps us understand how the killer remains capable of killing. In The Nazi Doctors (1986), Lifton describes “doubling” as the formation of a second, autonomous self—a psychic division that allows functionaries of the sovereign order to commit atrocities while preserving a sense of inner morality. The “Auschwitz self” functions as a compartmentalized persona that neutralizes the horror of one’s actions by displacing them into a domain where normal ethical prohibitions no longer apply. This process does not merely repress conscience; it reconstitutes it under the logic of the camp. Doubling, in this sense, is not the failure of morality but its biopolitical adaptation to a new order of truth.

If the camp represents, for Agamben, the point where the state of exception becomes the rule, then doubling is the psychic corollary of that political condition. The doctor’s internal division mirrors the structure of sovereignty itself: the power to separate life from its form, to split the human into an existence that can be sacrificed and an authority that decides on that sacrifice.

The psyche through which the structure acts becomes a microcosm of the sovereign decision—one part acting as sovereign, the other as bare life. The “doctor self” kills the “patient self” within, enacting internally the same operation that defines the external order of the camp.

The rhetoric of “healing through killing” used by the T4 physicians illustrates this internalization of sovereign logic. The physician no longer treats individuals but manages populations; he becomes an agent of purification. Doubling enables the physician to sustain this inversion without psychical collapse: compassion migrates from the patient to the social and political body, allowing acts of murder to appear as acts of medical responsibility. Here, biopolitical rationality fuses with moral sentiment, producing what Lifton calls “a malignant form of healing.”

Agamben’s homo sacer lives at the threshold between law and life; Lifton’s doubled self occupies the corresponding threshold within the psyche—the zone where law and conscience suspend one another. In this light, those who administered T4 were not aberrant monsters but functionaries of a structure that demands psychic bifurcation as its mode of operation. The bureaucratization of elimination requires the bureaucratization of the soul. To survive morally within a sovereign order that exposes others to death, the self must learn to fracture—to become its own camp. In this split, the “Auschwitz self” and the “prior self” are both genuine, but insulated from each other. The doctor who guides a child to the gas chamber is not, in his own inner logic, betraying his vocation; he has doubled it. One self acts within a bounded moral world that has redefined what counts as healing—purifying the race, purging weakness. The other self, with its ordinary conscience, remains untouched by that reality, dormant or disengaged.

Lifton saw in this mechanism a general condition of modernity: the capacity to dissociate moral responsibility through bureaucratic specialization and ideological rationalization.

What emerges is a terrifying symmetry: just as sovereignty splits life into that which may be killed and that which must be protected, functionaries of the sovereign order split themselves into that which kills and that which remains innocent. The sovereign and the doubled self are thus two sides of the same coin—one juridical, the other psychological—both performing the same gesture of exclusion that underwrites modern biopolitics; for Agamben the logic of the camp is now everywhere, the decision on death or, more precisely, the decision on who may be reduced to bare life is constant, diffuse and hidden in plain sight.

If the Muselmann reveals what happens when political life collapses into bare life, the Nazi doctor reveals what happens when moral life collapses into the machinery of the state.

Subjects, subjectivity and subjectivation are founded on an operation that delineates what can appear as a subject only by establishing what cannot. This structure of inclusion-by-exclusion is the very logic that produces bare life: life reduced to its sheer biological substrate, deprived of political form but still under power’s grasp, exposed to power without mediation, abandoned to power in its pure form.

Every subject, in being delimited, is caught in this metaphysical machine: it must be “qualified” life, distinguished from the unqualified life that sustains it as its negated foundation.

Everyday, quotidian subjects are connected, as if by an invisible metaphysical thread, to a sovereign decision on which their “independent, self-legislating, rational self-possession” rests; what once appeared as the extraordinary prerogative of the sovereign (deciding on life and death) has become the administrative texture of every aspect of everyday life.

Sovereign Displacement

Wendy Brown’s work—especially in Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism—offers a powerful lens for understanding how responsibilization operates as a form of sovereign displacement.

Brown argues that neoliberalism transforms individuals into “entrepreneurs of themselves,” tasked with managing every facet of their existence—from health and education to employment and security. Yet this responsibilization does not simply increase autonomy; it reconfigures sovereignty. What was once a political and collective capacity becomes a privatized and moralized duty. The individual is compelled to act as if they possessed sovereign agency, as if their own choices determined their fate, while being structurally deprived of the means to shape the conditions of those choices. This is sovereignty without power: a cruel mimicry of the decision-making authority once vested in institutions or the state. The neoliberal subject, stripped of collective resources, is still forced to decide—to choose, to optimize, to take responsibility. In this sense, neoliberalism doesn’t abolish sovereignty; it metastasizes it, dispersing the sovereign decision across millions of precarious lives. What was once the sovereign’s exception becomes the individual’s daily routine. Brown warns that this enforced self-governance, absent institutional or communal scaffolding, breeds burnout, guilt, and despair. Structural failures are refigured as moral failures; social breakdown is privatized as personal inadequacy. Responsibilization thus functions not as empowerment but as a technology of abandonment—a way of governing through freedom, as Foucault might say, and of producing subjects who internalize both command and blame. 

If someone shoots you in the head then the bullet in your brain is you, you must own the bullet. Moreover, you failed to react correctly to the gunman and so you are at fault for the shooting. You chose to be shot. The claim that “if someone shoots you in the head, then the bullet in your brain is you—you must own the bullet” condenses, in grotesque miniature, the logic of neoliberal responsibilization. It takes seriously the idea—found in policy, self-help discourse and in the doxa itself—that every outcome is the result of choice. Violence becomes entrepreneurship by other means; death becomes self-investment. What is parodied here is the neoliberal subject’s compulsory and total interiorization of blame. The horror is not only that the system kills, but that it demands consent to one’s own killing. To refuse the logic—to insist that the bullet is not “you”—would be to reintroduce mediation and relation, both of which neoliberal reason has erased. It would be to insist that harm arises within systems, relations, and histories but the erasure of causality is such that the line between action and reaction, perpetrator and victim, dissolves. The bullet, once an emblem of external violence, becomes an index of internal responsibility. In this sense, the metaphor dramatizes what Brown describes as the “undoing of the demos”—the collapse of the political field into the moral psychology of the individual.

At its limit, this condition resembles the logic of Sophie’s Choice: Sophie is forced to enact sovereignty in a situation where sovereignty properly belongs to someone else (the Nazi officer, the totalitarian structure). She must make a decision that should not be hers to make — a decision that only a perverted or fallen sovereignty could impose on a subject.

Everyday life becomes a continuous state of exception, a field of micro-sovereign crises. You must decide, and you must bear the consequences, even when every decision is structured by deprivation. Brown helps us see that this is not the expansion of freedom but its simulation—abandonment disguised as agency. The sovereign decision has not disappeared; it has been internalized, fragmented, and weaponized against those least equipped to bear its weight.

Notes on Method

This essay approaches atrocity not to extract moral lessons or consolations, but to examine the structures that make such events possible and repeatable. It takes as its task the description of a logic—the sovereign decision that divides life into the killable and the protected, the valuable and the valueless—and the psychic adaptations that sustain that logic.

The language here is therefore necessarily analytic, at times even clinical. This is not to diminish suffering, nor to speak about victims from the safe distance of theory, but to trace the machinery that turns persons into categories, and killing into administration. To think in this register is to risk abstraction; yet to refuse abstraction altogether would mean leaving intact the same conceptual habits that allowed the Holocaust and the T4 program to arise within the ordinary rationalities of medicine, law, and governance.

To write in this way is to acknowledge that understanding offers no redemption. Analysis cannot purify what it touches. It can only expose, with care and precision, the conditions under which evil becomes thinkable as duty, and duty becomes indistinguishable from care. Responsibility in this context cannot consist only in moral condemnation. It also requires confronting the proximity between the structures we analyze and the ones in which we live. The figures invoked here—the physician, the jurist, the bureaucrat—are not historical curiosities but mirrors of the modern self, of our own entanglement with forms of life that depend on exclusion, optimization, and disposability.

LLM