Who May Be Left to Die? Sovereignty, Empire, and the Necropolitical Exception

The previous entry ended when destructive repetition became political: institutions decide whose lives will feed the circuit and whose lives will be protected from it. The shift is decisive. A symptom may injure its bearer; a sovereign order can assign the injury elsewhere. Repetition becomes government when one population receives security while another receives the checkpoint, the camp, the siege, the patrol, the ration, the administrative delay, or the indefinitely renewable emergency. In sum, all the repressive tools of the “dual state”—this Jekyll/Hyde entity split between the “normative” protectiveness of a benevolent state for the included and the “unchecked arbitrariness” of the “Prerogative State” for all its excluded others (Frankel, Dual State 62-64).

Carl Schmitt’s terse definition—sovereign is he who decides on the exception—is useful precisely because it refuses the comforting fantasy that law can legislate every condition of its own application. A legal order cannot foresee every emergency that may threaten it. Someone must determine that the normal situation no longer obtains and that extraordinary measures are therefore permitted (Schmitt, Political Theology). The exception exposes a remainder inside legality: before the rule can govern the crisis, an authority decides that this is a crisis and that this rule may be suspended.

But decision is not therefore identical with causelessness. The sovereign normally supplies reasons, names dangers, predicts catastrophe. To call every decision arbitrary merely because it cannot be mechanically deduced from a prior norm would make arbitrariness theoretically useless. The scandal begins elsewhere: in the gap between the reasons announced and the violence authorized; in the selective distribution of whose danger is believed, whose injury is discounted, whose rights can be suspended, and how long suspension can continue after emergency becomes ordinary.

The exception is thus less a zone without reason than a machine for manufacturing unequal relations to reason. For the protected subject, coercion must be justified. For the exposed subject, exposure itself may become the justification. One person is presumed to possess a life whose interruption requires an answer; another is placed within a category where interruption is foreseeable, administrable, regrettable, yet politically tolerable. Sovereignty announces itself most starkly not when it says I may kill, but when it establishes the conditions under which the death of an excluded subject will cease to count as an event requiring explanation.

Here the Sadean problem returns at a scale Sade could only grotesquely anticipate. The libertine experiences sovereignty through the negation of another person whose suspended freedom becomes material for affirmation of the Sadean sovereign self. Political sovereignty cannot be reduced to that scene: states are not libertines, institutions do not possess psyches, and coercive power sometimes answers to genuine collective needs. Yet the structural temptation is recognizable. The exception can turn another person’s vulnerability into proof of one’s own exemption. Necessity then acquires an obscene supplement: not merely the power to act in exceptional circumstances, but the exhilaration of being the one for whom the ordinary limit does not apply.

Giorgio Agamben gives this asymmetry one of its most disturbing figures: homo sacer, the life that may be killed without the killing taking the form of sacrifice and without the victim occupying the ordinary protections of juridical personhood. His larger argument turns upon the paradox of sovereign exclusion. The excluded life is not simply outside the law. It is included through its exclusion—held in relation to law precisely by being abandoned to the threshold where law withdraws (Agamben, Homo Sacer).

The formulation matters because abandonment is not absence. Bare life is politically produced by a relation of power that separates biological existence from the qualifications through which a life becomes citizenly—assimilable, protected, grievable, actionable. The sovereign ban does not forget its object. It marks that object as the life toward which law may cease to owe what it owes elsewhere.

There is an obvious seduction in this architecture. Once the camp becomes the hidden matrix of modern politics, almost every exclusion can begin to resemble the same sovereign ban that plays out within the arena of the camp. That is precisely where theoretical vigilance is required. A refugee detention center, a colonial concentration camp, an occupied territory, a prison, and an administrative denial of status are not interchangeable because all involve classification and exposure. Their histories, institutions, scales of violence, and possibilities of redress differ radically. A concept that discovers the same camp everywhere eventually ceases to tell us where we are. What Agamben nevertheless makes impossible to ignore is the production of unprotected life. Death need not be ordered in order to be sovereignly distributed within a necropolitical enclave. Power may kill directly; it may also withdraw rescue, restrict mobility, deny medicine, expose populations to toxicity, confine them where disease proliferates, or construct administrative labyrinths in which survival depends upon permissions indefinitely deferred. The sentence is not always You must die. It may be: You may remain there. You may wait. You may cross if you survive.

And yet abandonment does not by itself prove enjoyment. Material interests, military objectives, racial hierarchies, administrative inertia, scarcity, fear, ideology, and institutional self-preservation must be examined first. The Sadean question enters only after those explanations have done their work. What remains when humiliation exceeds deterrence, destruction exceeds conquest, punishment exceeds compliance, and exposure continues after its announced purpose has been achieved? What does sovereignty obtain from these various forms of surplus? And what does the shielded spectator caught vicarious in the macabre theater of this sovereignty gain qua spectator: a sense of protection and privilege, a rush of Schadenfreude, crass sadistic pleasure, cathartic pity and fear?

Achille Mbembe forces sovereignty out of the abstract theater of the exception and into the histories through which modern power learned to distribute death. Necropolitics asks how sovereignty is expressed through the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die, but its force lies in refusing to treat that capacity as a timeless attribute of the state. Slavery, plantation, colony, apartheid, occupation, and contemporary warfare are historical laboratories in which personhood, territory, race, labor, and exposure to death have been violently assembled (Mbembe, “Necropolitics”; Necropolitics).

This relocation matters. The exception is never exercised upon an abstract human being. Someone has already been singled out and classified as native, slave, insurgent, migrant, enemy, disposable worker, suspect population, collateral body. Colonial power does not merely suspend a universal law that otherwise remains intact—the fact of having a sovereign body. It helps constitute the distinction between the subjects for whom universality is imagined and the populations against whom its limits are constantly reassessed, negotiated, debated, and adjuticated. The colony is not simply where Enlightenment reason fails to arrive. It is one of the places where enlightened sovereignty discovers how much violence can coexist with the language of civilization.

Here the distinction between killing and making death-worlds becomes indispensable. Necropolitical power may culminate in direct killing, but it also produces environments in which injury, hunger, confinement, terror, infrastructural ruin, and premature death become durable conditions of existence. Death is stretched across time. A population can be kept alive enough to be governed while being denied the material and political conditions through which life becomes more than survival. Sovereignty no longer appears only as the sword hanging over one’s head. It becomes environment and atmosphere, literally.

This is also why empire cannot be understood solely through the rationality it announces for itself. Extraction, strategic control, labor discipline, settlement, trade, and geopolitical advantage are real motives; to ignore them in favor of a metaphysics of evil would be an evasion. Yet imperial violence has repeatedly generated excesses that damage the interests invoked to justify domination: punitive expeditions that destroy productive life, humiliations that intensify resistance, massacres that destabilize rule, spectacular cruelties whose communicative value exceeds any measurable security function. Instrumentality does not disappear. It becomes contaminated by a surplus that instrumentality cannot fully explain.

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness gives this contamination an unforgettable literary body. The Company speaks the respectable languages of trade, efficiency, progress, and civilization while its stations accumulate pointless holes, rusting machinery, chained laborers, dying bodies, and administrative absurdity. At the Inner Station, Kurtz condenses the contradiction. His report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs culminates in the handwritten injunction to “Exterminate all the brutes!”; the heads surrounding his dwelling turn domination into theater. The colonial mission does not simply conceal violence behind ideal language. Its ideal language and its violence begin to feed one another.

Kurtz matters not because he proves that empire is secretly the work of deranged individuals, but because colonial order constructs the asymmetry that makes possible his sovereign arbitration over life, death, and the precise manner of both: distance from metropolitan scrutiny, racialized immunity, armed force, commercial authority, subjects whose claims have been rendered politically inaudible. He exceeds the institution from a position the institution has manufactured. His atrocities scandalize partly because they make theatrical the license ordinary extraction prefers to keep procedural.

The heads on stakes are therefore the colonial equivalent of Sade’s gratuitous increment. They are not adequately explained by ivory. They display Sadean sovereignty. The victim’s body becomes an inscription of the ruler’s exemption, a sign that another person can be reduced from interlocutor to material. Here colonial violence approaches the Sadean limit: the less the additional cruelty contributes to administration, the more purely it advertises the power to inflict it.

The danger of a theory of necropolitical evil is that it can become total too quickly. If sovereignty always means the privilege of inflicting arbitrary death, if every border is already a death-world, if every exception is already a migrant camp, distinctions collapse precisely where ethical judgment requires them. Political power sometimes faces emergencies; force can be used to protect people from force. The task is not to purify politics of decision but to interrogate the distribution, duration, proportionality, and surplus of the violence decisions authorize.

Who may declare the emergency, and who can contest it? Which population bears the costs? What evidence would terminate exceptional measures? Are restrictions proportionate to the danger invoked? Does an institution distinguish between combatant and civilian, offender and population, risk and identity? Does violence stop when its stated purpose has been achieved? And when it does not stop, what political, economic, symbolic, or libidinal gain depends upon its continuation?

These questions preserve the distinction between explanation and alibi. Colonialism cannot be explained by jouissance instead of land, labor, race, capital, strategy, and law. A siege cannot be interpreted through the death drive instead of military objectives and material conditions. The analysis earns the language of evil only when it can identify the relation between a demonstrable structure of power and a remainder of destructive excess that the structure enables, rewards, normalizes, or enjoys.

That remainder is often mundane: the unnecessary humiliation attached to control; the bureaucratic taunt added to exclusion; the destruction that continues after resistance has ended; the photograph of domination circulated in the news media as a trophy; the public rhetoric that turns another population’s suffering into evidence of resolve. None proves a hidden collective psyche. Together they can disclose a political economy of distinction in which one group experiences security, civilization, purity, or sovereignty through the visible vulnerability of another.

This is where necropolitics meets the theory of evil developed in these notes. Mbembe gives us the architecture of differential exposure to death; Sade forces us to ask about the surplus enjoyment that can inhabit that architecture. The concepts are not interchangeable. Necropolitics explains how power produces death-worlds and disposable populations. The Sadean supplement asks why violence so often becomes more theatrical, humiliating, and excessive than its political rationales require. One names the distribution; the other names the scandal that can animate its excess.

Evil, in this register, is not sovereignty as such. It is the moment sovereign power converts another person’s vulnerability into proof of its own exemption and continues to extract intensity from that conversion after necessity has run out. The arbitrary does not mean the absence of every cause. It names the point where causes cease to account for the increment of cruelty. A war can have causes and still contain causeless atrocities. An empire can pursue profit and still squander bodies in ways profit cannot justify. A border can have a function and still become a theater in which preventable suffering certifies political seriousness.

The ethical demand is neither pacifist innocence nor sovereign realism. It is a demand that necessity account for itself all the way down. Every claim of exception must remain answerable to the lives it exposes. Every institution that invokes survival must explain why survival is purchased with these bodies rather than others. Every political order must be judged not only by the lives it protects but by the forms of vulnerability it makes ordinary, invisible, and repeatable.

Once death becomes administrable, however, violence enters another economy. It passes into stories, images, genres, memories, and esthetic forms. Culture can beautify destruction, consume it, repeat it—turning suffering into spectacle. But representation can also poison the complacency that allows violence to disappear into abstraction or Darstellung. The image that wounds may also disclose.

The next entry follows evil into that dangerous double capacity of representation: its power to transmit the poison and to make the poison legible.