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 and euthanasia 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). 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, including among liberals, conservatives, and socialists, rather than specifically Nazi ideology.

Hoche and Binding had no documented affiliation with the Nazi party 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 He became increasingly withdrawn and was privately critical of the T4 program, especially after it resulted in the killing of one of his relatives.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.

LLM