Complete rightlessness precedes and enables the threat to life itself.

Evidence

The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly “superfluous,” if nobody can be found to “claim” them, may their lives be in danger. Even the Nazis started their extermination of Jews by first depriving them of all legal status (the status of second-class citizenship) and cutting them off from the world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps; and before they set the gas chambers into motion they had carefully tested the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people. The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 722

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The causal architecture here — exclusion from community precedes and makes possible later extermination, and superfluousness (‘nobody wants to claim them’) is the enabling condition for lethal violence — is dense and paradigm-shifting.
• XREF: Central to the reader’s toolkit: this is the mechanism Arendt later generalizes as the ‘right to have rights,’ and directly parallels necropolitics and the logics of exclusion in the Islamophobia readings.
• ADDENDUM: The claim that victims must first be made ‘unclaimable’ before lives are threatened resonates with the sacrifice article’s account of how victims are first severed from membership in the community.