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