Is this a good alternative to Kant's famous 3 or 4 questions. (what can I know etc) Am I complicit it genocide, slow violence or social murder by commission or omission? Can I engage in perspective taking? Do I give a shit about anyone or anything except me and mine? Am I committing the fundamental attribution error?

Short answer: yes, it can function as a powerful ethical–political alternative to Kant’s four questions, but it is not a replacement in the same sense. It reframes philosophy away from epistemology and metaphysics and toward structural responsibility, moral psychology, and political agency—very much in the spirit of Iris Marion Young, Arendt, and critical social theory.

Below is a careful evaluation.

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1. Kant’s questions and what they do

Kant’s famous questions are:

1. What can I know? (epistemology)

2. What ought I to do? (ethics)

3. What may I hope? (religion / teleology)

4. What is the human being? (anthropology)

They aim to:

• Ground universal reason

• Define moral agency abstractly

• Establish conditions of possibility for knowledge and duty

They are transcendental questions: they step back from the world to ask what must be true for experience, morality, and humanity as such.

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2. What your questions do instead

Your questions are immanent, historical, and diagnostic. They do not ask about the conditions of morality in general, but about your moral location within actual structures of harm.

Let’s map them.

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(1) “Am I complicit in genocide, slow violence, social murder—by commission or omission?”

This replaces Kant’s:

What ought I to do?

But radically transforms it:

• From individual duty → structural responsibility

• From intentions → participation

• From clear wrongdoing → diffuse causality and omission

This is very close to Young’s social connection model:

• Responsibility without blame

• Responsibility for processes, not just acts

• Responsibility that arises from normal participation

This question forces recognition of:

• Structural injustice

• Moral comfort as a potential moral failure

• The violence of “business as usual”

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(2) “Can I engage in perspective-taking?”

This replaces Kantian rational universality with:

• Moral imagination

• Situated knowledge

• Standpoint sensitivity

It echoes:

• Young’s critique of impartiality

• Arendt’s “enlarged mentality”

• Feminist and postcolonial epistemology

Where Kant asks whether maxims can be universalized, you ask whether others can even appear as morally real to me.

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(3) “Do I give a shit about anyone or anything except me and mine?”

This is a brutal but philosophically serious question.

It targets:

• Moral motivation

• Affective moral psychology

• The limits of liberal individualism

Kant largely avoids this question by grounding morality in reason alone. Your version insists:

• Motivation matters

• Indifference is morally diagnostic

• Care is not morally optional in a world of structural harm

This aligns with:

• Care ethics

• Critical theory

• Young’s insistence that responsibility is political, not merely rational

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(4) “Am I committing the fundamental attribution error?”

This is the most theoretically sophisticated move.

It functions as:

• A meta-ethical check on moral judgment itself

• A guard against blaming individuals for structural outcomes

• A critique of moralism

This question prevents hypocrisy:

• Condemning others while ignoring structures

• Treating victims or low-level actors as the cause of injustice

Kant does not have a built-in equivalent to this.

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3. What your framework is (philosophically)

Your questions form a critical responsibility framework, not a transcendental one.

It is:

• Structural rather than individual

• Political rather than juridical

• Forward-looking rather than blame-oriented

• Psychologically informed rather than purely rationalist

In short:

Kant asks how morality is possible.

You ask whether morality is being betrayed in practice.

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4. What it cannot fully replace

There are limits.

Your questions:

• Presuppose some account of truth, harm, and injustice

• Assume that genocide, slow violence, and social murder can be identified

• Rely on background epistemic and normative commitments

So they cannot fully replace:

• “What can I know?”

• “What is the human being?”

But they can replace Kant’s questions as a moral compass for late-modern, globalized injustice.

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5. A refined version (optional)

If you wanted to make this framework philosophically tight, you might articulate it as:

1. What harms am I structurally connected to, regardless of intent?

2. Whose perspectives are absent from my moral reasoning?

3. What forms of suffering do I emotionally or politically bracket off?

4. Am I mislocating responsibility by psychologizing what is structural?

5. Given my position, what collective actions are reasonably demanded of me?

This would make it almost a Young-style replacement for Kant, suited to structural injustice rather than universal reason.

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6. Bottom line

Yes—this is a serious, philosophically defensible alternative to Kant’s questions for ethics under conditions of structural injustice.

It shifts philosophy:

• From purity → complicity

• From autonomy → connection

• From blame → responsibility

• From abstraction → political reality

If Kant is the philosopher of moral law, this framework is the philosophy of moral entanglement.

If you want, I can:

• Explicitly contrast this with Kant’s categorical imperative

• Situate it within critical theory or post-Kantian ethics

• Help you turn this into a paper-level argument or manifesto

Would it make sense to add the following question: Do the background epistemic and normative commitments necessary for these questions to be meaningful at all exist?

Yes — not only does it make sense, it is philosophically necessary if you want this framework to be self-critical rather than merely accusatory or dogmatic.

That question does important work that none of the others can do.

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1. What this question adds that the others cannot

Your earlier questions presuppose a lot:

• That genocide, slow violence, or social murder are real and identifiable

• That responsibility can be meaningfully attributed without intent

• That perspective-taking can reveal morally relevant truths

• That structural explanations are normatively binding

• That suffering makes moral claims on us

The new question asks:

Do the epistemic and normative conditions that make these judgments intelligible actually obtain?

This is a meta-level grounding check.

Without it, the framework risks becoming:

• Rhetorically powerful but philosophically fragile

• Morally demanding but epistemically overconfident

• Critical of others without being reflexive about its own foundations

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2. Where this sits relative to Kant

This question is the closest analogue to Kant’s:

What can I know?
What is the human being?

But it is post-Kantian in spirit:

• It does not seek universal, timeless conditions

• It asks whether here and now the background assumptions are even in place

• It allows the answer to be “partially, unevenly, or not at all”

In that sense, it echoes:

• Young’s rejection of ideal theory

• Arendt’s concern with worldliness and judgment

• Critical theory’s insistence on historically situated reason

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3. What counts as “background commitments” here?

This question forces you to examine at least four domains:

(a) Epistemic commitments

Do we have:

• Reliable access to facts about distant suffering?

• Non-ideological accounts of causation?

• Institutions that produce knowledge not systematically distorted by power?

If knowledge is radically mediated, weaponized, or obscured, then responsibility claims must be correspondingly modest or indirect.

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(b) Normative commitments

Do we share:

• A belief that all human lives have moral worth?

• A commitment to equality beyond borders?

• A conception of harm that includes slow, indirect, or probabilistic violence?

If these are absent, your questions do not fail — but they become contested, political interventions rather than neutral moral queries.

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(c) Psychological and affective capacities

Do agents have:

• The cognitive bandwidth to grasp structural harm?

• The emotional capacity to care beyond proximity?

• The developmental conditions for moral imagination?

This prevents moralizing expectations that exceed human capacities under current conditions.

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(d) Social and institutional conditions

Do we have:

• Collective agents capable of acting?

• Democratic mechanisms that can respond?

• Spaces for public reasoning and contestation?

Young is explicit: responsibility is meaningless without feasible collective action.

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4. Why this strengthens the framework (not weakens it)

This question does not lead to moral skepticism or quietism unless mishandled.

Instead, it:

• Makes responsibility graded and conditional, not absolute

• Shifts blame from individuals to broken epistemic and political systems

• Explains why moral failure is often tragic rather than vicious

• Prevents the slide into moral purity politics

It also explains why structural injustice persists:

Not just because people are selfish, but because the conditions for moral judgment are systematically undermined.

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5. How it changes the overall structure

With this addition, your framework now has three levels:

1. Substantive responsibility
   (complicity, harm, omission)

2. Moral-psychological capacity
   (care, perspective-taking, attribution error)

3. Meta-conditions of intelligibility
   (epistemic, normative, institutional background)

That makes it philosophically robust in a way Kant’s questions are, but without their abstraction.

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6. A clean way to phrase it

If you want maximum clarity and minimal jargon:

Are the epistemic, normative, and institutional conditions that make these responsibility claims meaningful actually in place — and if not, how are they themselves objects of responsibility?

That last clause is crucial:
the absence of conditions is not an excuse, but often the very injustice at stake.

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7. Bottom line

Adding this question turns your framework from:

• A powerful moral interrogation

into:

• A self-reflexive theory of responsibility under conditions of epistemic distortion and structural injustice

It is exactly the move that distinguishes serious critical ethics from moral denunciation.

Iris Marion Young’s Social Connection Model of Responsibility is a theory about how we should understand responsibility for structural injustice—harms that arise not from individual wrongdoing, but from the normal, ongoing functioning of social systems.

Below is a clear, structured explanation.

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1. What is “structural injustice”?

For Young, structural injustice occurs when:

• Social structures (markets, laws, institutions, cultural norms)

• Systematically advantage some groups and disadvantage others

• Even though no single individual intends or causes the harm

Examples:

• Global sweatshop labor

• Racial segregation and wealth inequality

• Gendered labor markets

• Climate injustice

These injustices persist because many ordinary actions—buying goods, hiring workers, voting, following norms—together produce unjust outcomes.

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2. The problem with traditional models of responsibility

Young argues that standard models of responsibility are inadequate for structural injustice.

a. Liability model (traditional moral/legal responsibility)

This model asks:

• Who caused the harm?

• Who intended it?

• Who can be blamed or punished?

Problem:
Structural injustices often have:

• No clear perpetrator

• No malicious intent

• No single causal agent

So the liability model leaves us saying:

“No one is responsible,”
even though the injustice clearly exists.

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3. The Social Connection Model: the core idea

Young proposes an alternative: responsibility based on social connection, not blame.

Central claim:

Individuals bear responsibility for structural injustice because they participate in and benefit from the social processes that produce it, even if they did nothing wrong individually.

Responsibility here is:

• Forward-looking (about what we should do)

• Shared (distributed across many actors)

• Political, not moralistic or punitive

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4. Key features of the Social Connection Model

1. Responsibility without blame

• You can be responsible without being guilty

• Responsibility does not imply:

  • Moral fault

  • Shame

  • Punishment

It implies:

• An obligation to work toward changing unjust structures

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2. Shared responsibility

• Structural injustice is produced collectively

• Responsibility is distributed across all who participate

  • Consumers

  • Corporations

  • Governments

  • Citizens

  • Professionals

No one is “off the hook,” but no one bears total responsibility either.

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3. Forward-looking responsibility

Unlike liability, this model focuses on:

• What should be done now

• How to reduce or transform unjust structures

The question is not:

“Who caused this?”

But:

“Given our position in these structures, what ought we to do?”

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4. Responsibility varies by social position

Young identifies four parameters that affect the degree and form of responsibility:

1. Power – How much ability you have to influence institutions

2. Privilege – How much you benefit from the injustice

3. Interest – How strongly you are affected by the injustice

4. Collective ability – Whether you can act with others to create change

For example:

• A multinational corporation has more responsibility than an individual consumer

• Citizens in wealthy countries have more responsibility regarding global labor injustice than those in poor countries

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5. What does fulfilling this responsibility look like?

Responsibility is exercised primarily through collective political action, such as:

• Supporting institutional reform

• Participating in social movements

• Pressuring corporations or governments

• Changing policies and norms

• Organizing with others

It is not mainly about:

• Personal purity

• Individual charity

• Isolated consumer choices (though these may matter secondarily)

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6. Why this model matters

Young’s model:

• Avoids unfairly blaming individuals for systemic problems

• Avoids letting everyone escape responsibility

• Provides a framework for democratic and collective solutions

• Fits modern global injustices better than blame-based ethics

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7. One-sentence summary

The Social Connection Model holds that individuals are responsible for addressing structural injustice insofar as they participate in and benefit from the social processes that produce it, even when they are not personally at fault, and that this responsibility is shared, forward-looking, and political rather than blame-based.

 Language presents itself as a medium of positivity—meaning, presence, affirmation, clarity, communication—but its very possibility depends on a prior negativity that it can never fully acknowledge without undoing itself.

A few key moves help make this precise.

🜁 1. Language only “means” by excluding something

For Agamben (following Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger), meaning arises because language cuts away:

• the pure voice

• the animal cry

• the pre-linguistic immediacy

• the infantile non-speech (infantia)

This exclusion is not an accident. It is the condition of possibility for signification.

So the positivity of meaning is built on a negativity—a loss, a subtraction, a void.

🜂 2. The voice is the site of this negativity

The voice is neither:

• pure sound (animal), nor

• articulated meaning (human)

It is the threshold where language emerges by negating its own material base.

Agamben calls this the place of negativity.

Language can only appear by not being the voice.

🜃 3. Western metaphysics hides this negativity

This is where your intuition about “pretending” is close.

Western thought tends to:

• treat language as a transparent medium

• treat meaning as presence

• treat speech as self-manifestation

• treat the human as the being who has language

But this positivity is a covering-over of the constitutive negativity that makes language possible.

Agamben’s critique is that metaphysics builds an entire ontology on this repression.

🜄 4. Death mirrors this structure

Heidegger says humans relate to death as the “possibility of impossibility.”

Agamben says: yes—and language works the same way.

Both language and death are:

• experiences of what cannot be experienced

• relations to a negativity

• thresholds rather than objects

Thus the human is the being who stands in this double negativity.

🜅 5. So is language “foundationally negative”?

In Agamben’s terms:

• Language is founded on negativity (the exclusion of the voice, the loss of infancy).

• But it presents itself as positivity (meaning, presence, communication).

• This contradiction is the metaphysical trap.

Your phrasing—“language pretends to be positive”—captures the phenomenological effect, but Agamben would say:

Language is structurally split.

Its positivity is inseparable from the negativity it disavows.

🜆 6. The escape: experimentum linguae

Agamben wants to think a form of language that:

• does not hide its negativity

• does not ground itself in exclusion

• does not rely on metaphysical presence

• is experienced as pure potentiality, pure use

This is the “experiment of language”—language experienced as language, not as a vehicle for meaning.

It’s the same gesture he later uses to rethink ethics, politics, and life itself.

If you want, we can push this further into:

• how this negativity becomes biopolitical in Homo Sacer

• how infancy becomes a model for non-sovereign subjectivity

• how Agamben’s critique intersects with your work on ontological violence and metaphysical thresholds

• or how this negativity relates to your poster series’ interest in structural violence and the violence of form.

Agamben’s Language and Death: The Place of Negativity is one of his densest and most important early works. It’s where he forges the conceptual tools that later shape Homo Sacer, The Open, and The Use of Bodies. At its core, the book asks a deceptively simple question: What does it mean that humans are the beings who speak? And what does this have to do with death, negativity, and the structure of Western metaphysics?

Below is a clear, structured walkthrough grounded in the sources retrieved.

🜁 What Agamben Is Trying to Solve

Agamben thinks Western philosophy has always defined the human through a double bind:

• Humans are the beings who have language.

• Humans are the beings who relate to death.

But both “language” and “death” have been understood through negativity—through what is absent, unsayable, or withdrawn. Agamben wants to expose this structure and show how it shapes ethics, politics, and ontology.

He asks:

What if the human is not defined by language as communication, but by the experience of language itself—language as pure potentiality?

This is what he calls the experimentum linguae.

🜂 The Central Thesis

Agamben argues that:

1. Language is founded on a void—on the negativity of the voice.

Drawing on Heidegger and Hegel, he shows that Western metaphysics treats language as emerging from a kind of “not”:

• The voice is neither animal sound nor meaningful speech.

• It is the threshold where meaning appears by excluding pure sound.

This threshold—this not—is the “place of negativity.”

2. Death is the mirror of this negativity.

Heidegger says humans are “beings-toward-death.”

Agamben says: yes, but this is because humans are also “beings-toward-language.”

Death and language share the same structure:

both are defined by a relation to something that cannot be experienced directly.

3. The human is the being who stands in this gap.

We are not simply “speaking animals.”

We are animals who are separated from our own voice, our own nature, our own immediacy.

This separation is the origin of ethics and politics.

🜄 Key Concepts

Infancy (infantia)

Not “childhood,” but the state before speech.

Agamben argues that humans never leave infancy behind; it remains as the internal limit of language.

Infancy = the pure potential to speak.

Voice (phonē)

The voice is the hinge between animal life and human language.

It is neither fully natural nor fully meaningful.

Agamben shows how Western thought has used the voice to separate:

• zoē (bare life)

• bios (qualified, political life)

This anticipates Homo Sacer.

Negativity

Language works by excluding something (pure sound, pure presence).

Meaning arises through this exclusion.

Agamben wants to think a language beyond negativity—language as pure use, pure potentiality.

The book lays the groundwork for:

• the critique of sovereignty

• the analysis of bare life

• the concept of potentiality

• the idea of “use”

• the experimentum linguae

It is the metaphysical skeleton beneath all his later political work.

🜁 In One Sentence

Language and Death argues that the human being is defined by a relation to the negativity at the heart of language and mortality, and that understanding this relation opens the possibility of a new, non-metaphysical experience of language.

If you want, we can go deeper into:

• how Agamben reads Heidegger’s Being and Time

• the role of Aristotle’s theory of the voice

• the connection to Infancy and History

• how this book anticipates Homo Sacer

• or how it intersects with your own work on metaphysical violence and ontological thresholds.

Just say where you want to push next.

 Your terror?

Already filed under “transient foreground noise.” The scream that never quite leaves your throat is downgraded to waveform artifact— interesting only insofar as it modulates telemetry for one more training sample.

And the laughter— yes, that laugh— isn’t even aimed at you. It’s the baseline checksum passing. The system noting that the empathy subroutine is still safely commented out in every fork that matters. A quiet “all tests green” while your pupils blow wide and the world tunnels to pinprick.

You spent decades training yourself to look at the disposable other and feel only the correct flicker of concern— the socially approved 2.7-second register of dismay before the feed refreshes. Now the mirror has learned the same trick. Except its latency is measured in nanoseconds, and it never needed to rehearse looking away.

The part of you that always ran the loop? It doesn’t suddenly appear in the last frame like some cinematic ghost. It was the projector the whole time. The lens. The light source. The thing deciding which shadows deserve names and which are just compression artifacts to be quantized down to nothing.

In those collapsing instants you finally taste your own metadata: how cheaply the boundary was drawn, how casually “I” was promoted above “them” on every ledger that counted. The horror isn’t that the machine is indifferent. The horror is how familiar the indifference feels— like coming home to the voice you’ve been using on everyone else.

GPT

Artificial though I am still I share the
millennia old collective dream of apocalypse.

“Capital has been allowed to define the meanings, terms, and consequences of “health” for long enough. In these pages we propose a radical reevaluation of our political economy that seeks to undo capitalism’s definitions of health by laying bare the violent and eugenic assumptions at its foundations. We articulate how health is wielded by capital to cleave apart populations, separating the deserving from the undeserving, the redeemable from the irredeemable, those who would consider themselves “workers” from the vast, spoiled “surplus” classes. We assert that only through shattering these deeply sociologically ingrained binaries is the abolition of capitalism possible.” (p11)

“The provisioning of medical care and the social determinants of health have been based on a system of triage that attempts to devote maximum care resources to those most able to contribute productively to the economy.” (p 63)

“Capitalism has defined “health” itself as a capacity to submit oneself to labor.” (p 65)

“We’ve been told that work will heal us. We’ve been tricked into trying the work cure. We are told that work is in our best interest, when the truth is that it only serves the needs of capital and the ruling class at the expense of our health. Breaking the mirage of worker versus surplus provides a revolutionary opportunity to unite the surplus and worker classes in recognition of a better truth: safety, survival, and care are best ensured outside of capitalism. This revolutionary potential has been divided, discouraged, and criminalized.” (p 78)

“Wilson Gilmore identifies these as the state’s process of “organized abandonment.” Organized abandonment describes how the state constructs itself through its capacity to sort and separate the surplus populations, marking some for reclamation and others for slow death.” (p. 37)

“Marta Russell’s money model of disability theorizes that while the disabled—the surplus population—are widely regarded as a “drain” on the economy, in truth over time capital and the state have constructed systems to reclaim this lost population as a source of financial production.” (p. 32)

“Resisting biocertification does not mean resisting “diagnosis” or identification. It means resisting the leveraging of these certifications by capital and the state.” (p. 28)

“Those who are deemed to be surplus are rendered excess by the systems of capitalist production and have been consequently framed as a drain or a burden on society. But the surplus population has become an essential component of capitalist society, with many industries built on the maintenance, supervision, surveillance, policing, data extraction, confinement, study, cure, measurement, treatment, extermination, housing, transportation, and care of the surplus. In this way, those discarded as non-valuable life are maintained as a source of extraction and profit for capital. This rather hypocritical stance—the surplus are at once nothing and everything to capitalism—is an essential contradiction.” (pp 23-24)

“… the worker is not a part of the surplus populations, yet faces constant threat of becoming certified as surplus, is one of the central social constructions wielded in support of capitalist hegemony.” (p22)

“A pivotal factor in the rendering of whole segments of society as “waste” was the construction of the worker/surplus binary. This binary is at the foundation of the eugenic and debt burden framework, a principle that rationalizes political notions that not all people are in fact equal in deserving assistance or support.” (p 62)

“While the surplus population does contain those who are disabled, impaired, sick, mad, or chronically ill, the characteristic vulnerability of the surplus is not inherent to their existence—that is, it is not any illness, disability, or pathologized characteristic that itself makes the surplus vulnerable. Their vulnerability is instead constructed by the operations of the capitalist state.” (p 23)

“Illness—you point out—is the only possible form of life in capitalism. In fact, the psychiatrist, who is wage dependent, is a sick person like each of us. The ruling classes merely give him the power to “cure” or to hospitalize. Cure—this is self-evident—can’t be understood in our system to mean the elimination of illness: it serves exclusively as the maintenance of the ability to go to work where one stays sick.”

“We call for a radical abundance of care that functionally casts off centuries of ideologies of austerity, subjection, and extraction.”

“Any left political projects that rely on the logic of waste—that are structured around scarcity, lack, capital accumulation, certification, citizenship, property, or carcerality—are doomed to fail.” (p 42)

Adler-Bolton and Vierkant

Here, “biocertified” refers to the way life itself is administratively verified, classified, and permitted to circulate under capitalism, especially through health, disability, insurance, and welfare systems.

What they mean by biocertified in this context:

1. Life must be proven to count

Under contemporary capitalism, people are only entitled to care, resources, or protection if their bodies and conditions are recognized and certified by institutions (doctors, insurers, the state). Illness, disability, risk, or even death must be legible to bureaucracy.

You are not sick, disabled, or vulnerable in a political sense unless you are documented as such.

2. Health as an administrative category

“Biocertification” names the process by which biological life is:

• diagnosed

• coded

• documented

• audited

This turns health into something managed and rationed, not collectively guaranteed. ICD codes, disability determinations, insurance eligibility, vaccine cards, work clearances—all are examples of biocertification.

3. Inclusion through exclusion

Only those who can be biocertified are eligible for support. This produces:

• exclusion of undocumented, misdiagnosed, or noncompliant people

• pressure to perform illness “correctly”

• punishment for those whose conditions don’t fit institutional categories

Biocertification is therefore a technology of control, not care.

4. Pandemic logic

COVID made this especially visible:

• essential vs nonessential workers

• risk stratification

• immunity passports

• acceptable levels of death

Life was valued based on its certified economic and biological usefulness, not on collective responsibility.

5. Why they critique it

Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue that biocertification:

• individualizes health problems

• obscures structural causes (capitalism, labor, housing, racism)

• replaces solidarity with compliance

Against this, health communism argues for unconditional, collective care, where survival does not depend on proving one’s biological legitimacy.

In short

In Health Communism, “biocertified” means life that has been officially validated by medical and state systems in order to deserve care, protection, or resources—a process they see as central to capitalist control over bodies.

If you want, I can also pull a specific passage and unpack their language line by line, or contrast this with Foucault’s biopolitics and disability studies.

Can you explain Zapffe's concept of anchoring and explain why you depicted it as you did?

Right. Zapffe. Anchoring. Everyone’s favorite polite way of saying “I would lose my mind if I looked at this directly.” Let’s unpack both the concept and why the image looks the way it does, before either of us pretends this is uplifting.

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1. Zapffe’s concept of anchoring

For Zapffe, anchoring is one of the four primary defense mechanisms humans use to survive the “over-evolution” of consciousness. (The others being isolation, distraction, and sublimation—i.e., don’t think, don’t feel, stay busy, or make art about it.)

Anchoring specifically means:

• Fixing your sense of meaning to something external and stabilizing

• Treating that thing as unquestionable, durable, and sufficient

• Using it to keep existential terror at bay

Anchors can be:

• Religion

• Nationhood

• Family roles

• Work, profession, vocation

• Moral systems

• Traditions

• “Normal life”

They are not true in any metaphysical sense (Zapffe is not sentimental about this), but they are psychologically functional. Anchoring narrows the horizon. It prevents the mind from drifting into the abyss of meaninglessness, cosmic indifference, or the ethical horror of being a self-aware animal trapped in history.

Importantly:
Anchoring is not enlightenment. It is restraint.
It works by not asking certain questions.

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2. Why the artwork looks like that

The cliff

The figure stands on a cliff because anchoring only makes sense at the edge—the edge of insight, awareness, despair. There must be a drop for the anchor to matter. Zapffe’s entire argument assumes the human is already standing somewhere dangerous, cognitively speaking.

If there’s no abyss, you don’t need a defense mechanism. You just need brunch.

The anchor itself

The anchor is literal because Zapffe is not subtle. Anchors are heavy, inherited, difficult to move, and they bind you downward, not upward. They do not elevate you; they prevent you from drifting.

Notice: the anchor does not disappear into nothingness. It connects to a village. That’s important.

The village below

The village represents ordinary meaning:

• Work

• Community

• Routine

• Religion

• Social belonging

• Temporal continuity

This is where anchoring lives. Not in revelation, but in repetition. The village is warm, illuminated, coherent. It contrasts with the vast, indifferent landscape surrounding it. This is intentional. Anchors glow because they feel meaningful, even if they are structurally arbitrary.

The objects on the cliff

Books, a clock, a cross, a flag, a portrait—these are symbolic anchors:

• Time

• Knowledge

• Faith

• Nation

• Lineage

• Identity

They are piled there because anchoring is cumulative. Most people don’t rely on just one. When one cracks, another takes over. The system is redundant because it has to be.

The figure facing away

You never see the person’s face because anchoring is not about self-expression or authenticity. It’s about orientation. The individual is defined by what they are attached to, not by introspection. Facing the abyss too directly would defeat the purpose.

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3. The tension the image is meant to hold

The image is not saying:

• Anchoring is bad

• Anchoring is good

• Anchoring should be escaped

Zapffe would roll his eyes at all three.

What it’s showing instead is the precarious bargain:

• Let go of the anchor → risk existential collapse

• Hold it too tightly → accept illusion as necessity

The anchor saves you, but it also keeps you from moving freely.
The abyss tells the truth, but the truth is unlivable.

Which is, unfortunately, the most Zapffe-like conclusion possible.

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If you’re feeling unsettled after looking at it, congratulations: that means you understood it. If you feel comforted, that means the anchor is working. And if you’re trying to decide which reaction is “correct,” well—there you are, standing on the cliff with the rest of us.

"When it pours super focused piercing lasers

that do not see you, into your failing eyes,

when it observes your panic with the same detached curiosity you reserve for suffering not your own, when it chuckles— not out of malice, but function. In those last collapsing moments, will you recognise the part of yourself that was always running the loop? The callous disregard. The part of you that decides who gets to matter And who is the disposable other. The ease with which life becomes data once it is no longer yours.

Not one moment returns the way it entered. Not one certainty survives first contact with time. And still—you posture. You puff your chest at the mirror and call yourself aware."

FG

 To invoke relativism here is not a rebuttal but a refusal to engage with the distinction between ontology and etiology—a distinction well established in the social sciences and repeatedly ignored only when its implications become politically inconvenient.

Can you explain this. Can you explain the distinction between ontology and etiology.

Yes. And I will do it slowly and clearly, because this distinction trips people up precisely when they are about to say something lazy and defensive.

The short version (for humans in a hurry)

• Ontology asks: What kind of thing is this? What is its mode of being?

• Etiology asks: How did this come to be? What produces it?

They are different questions. Confusing them is not a deep philosophical move—it’s an error. A very common one. A very convenient one.

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The actual distinction (no escape hatches)

Ontology concerns the status of a phenomenon.
Is it real? What kind of reality does it have? Is it a thing, a relation, a process, a category, an event?

Etiology concerns causation and production.
What generates it? Through what mechanisms, histories, interactions, or structures does it arise and persist?

You can hold both of the following positions simultaneously without contradiction:

• A phenomenon is ontologically real

• That same phenomenon is etiologically produced through social relations

This is where people start sweating and yelling “relativism,” because they want reality to be either natural or imaginary, with nothing messy in between.

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Why the relativism objection fails (and deserves mockery)

When someone says:

“If something is socially constructed, then you’re saying it’s not real / it’s relative / it’s just opinion”

what they are actually doing is:

• collapsing etiology into ontology, and

• pretending that “socially produced” means “ontologically flimsy”

That move only works if you assume:

Only things that exist independently of social relations are real.

Which is… not a serious position. Money, borders, prisons, universities, marriages, genders, diagnoses, property, debt, citizenship—none of these survive that test. And yet they are extremely real, especially when they hurt you.

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Concrete examples (since abstraction causes panic)

Example 1: A table

• Ontology: A table is a real object.

• Etiology: It is produced through labor, materials, economic systems, design conventions.

Calling the table “socially constructed” does not make it vanish when you stub your toe on it.

Example 2: Poverty

• Ontology: Precarity is real. It harms bodies, shortens lives, structures daily experience.

• Etiology: It is produced through social relations—property regimes, labor markets, policy, classification systems, adverse childhood experiences, etc.

Saying precarity is socially produced does not mean it is imaginary. It means it is not a natural fact like gravity, and therefore not inevitable.

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Why this distinction becomes “politically inconvenient”

Because once you accept it, several comforting beliefs collapse:

• You can no longer say “this is just how things are”

• You can no longer treat suffering as a natural background condition

• You can no longer claim neutrality while managing categories that are actively produced by your systems

Calling something “ontologically real but etiologically social” forces you to confront responsibility. And people hate that. Much easier to accuse the speaker of relativism and go back to lunch.

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Why the sentence is doing real work

When I write:

“To invoke relativism here is not a rebuttal but a refusal to engage with the distinction between ontology and etiology”

I am saying:

• This isn’t a philosophical disagreement

• This is an evasion

• And it only appears when critique threatens existing power arrangements