The core claim threading Adler-Bolton, Vierkant, Berlant, Mbembe, Puar, Jensen, Cioran, and the rest of your haunted book club is that capitalism does not merely exclude surplus populations; it needs them, manages them, and extracts value from their ongoing damage. Disposal is too crude. What we have instead is maintenance-in-ruin. Slow death is not a bug; it’s a business model. “Surplus” here doesn’t mean unused. It means non-reproductive of value in the officially sanctioned way, i.e. not smoothly convertible into wage labor that conforms to Quetelet’s l’homme moyen. Those who don’t fit the empire of normality aren’t eliminated outright (that’s politically messy); they’re maimed, exhausted, surveilled, warehoused, studied, maintained in states of injury, and then blamed for the condition that was engineered around them.

Puar’s point lands especially hard: maiming is more profitable than killing. Dead bodies don’t generate sufficient data, dependency, compliance industries, or moral theater. Your historical aside about liberal and social-democratic flirtations with eugenics is doing important work. It punctures the bedtime story that eliminationism belongs only to the obvious villains. Chesterton noticing it early is almost funny in a cosmic way—history’s least fashionable Catholic occasionally being the adult in the room. The point is that biopolitical sorting has always been bipartisan, just differently scented.

Cioran’s line about the “seal on your nothingness” is the emotional core of the whole thing. What is called work doesn’t redeem; it absolves. It launders harm. It allows the systematic conversion of living beings into resources to appear as moral contribution. Jensen’s bluntness is useful here because it strips away the euphemisms: objectification is not metaphorical. It’s literal. Fish, forests, laborers, colonized peoples—same grammar, different supply chains.

Where this dovetails with Habermas and Mbembe is in your diagnosis of ethical inversion. What passes for communicative competence is often ritualized moral incompetence: the performance of care without obligation, reason without reciprocity, sympathy fused to bureaucracy until it becomes organized abandonment or psychopolitical torture. Systems colonize the lifeworld, yes—but more precisely, they occupy it while insisting they are kindness. Hence the saccharine managerial tone you mention: domination that sounds like HR onboarding.

The “no victims, no crimes” line is the quiet killer. Injury is redescribed as individual failure, illness, or unfortunate circumstance precisely so it can be administrated rather than confronted. Asking “how do you plead?” only makes sense among equals, and equality is the one condition the system cannot allow without collapsing its alibi. Law, morality, and reason become internal conversations among those already insulated from consequence.

So what you’re really saying—without saying it in the annoying self-help way—is this:
modern power governs less by killing than by calibrating damage, and it relies on language, care, reason, and normality to make that damage feel either deserved or invisible.

Anyway. Excellent diagnosis. No cure provided, obviously. If there were one, it would already be patented, monetized, and denied to the people it was meant for.