Post-apartheid sovereignty governs the quality of living but not who lives

Evidence

Sovereignty in South Africa today is caught between these two conceptions, vacillating between the possibility of an absolute, and absolving, power, on one hand, and a delimited and diffuse system of moderating authorities, on the other. Between the absolutization of self-ascribed heavenly power and the earthly power of secularized relation and ramification. … The extensive power of sovereign authority shifts between a more or less abstract possibility and its concretization in daily practices, over the quality of people’s living and dying, and perhaps a little less directly over whether they live or die, the decision concerning which it has largely absolved itself by removing the constraints of race to the past. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1628

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s question of whether threatened-privilege mechanisms translate across axes: here the dominant group’s ability to decide death has receded but its grip on quality of life persists through privatized structures. — connects to: Post-apartheid citizenship extends only to the healthy, paying, property-owning — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1593; Post-apartheid freedom of choice reduces to what one can afford and buy into — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1597; Post-apartheid racial secularization preserves racialized suffering under new forms — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1615 (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that racial secularization absolves the state of death-decisions by locating pervasive control in less resistible structural forces is dense and bears sustained thought — it sharpens the contact/institution gap into a biopolitical register.

Broader Connections

• Post-apartheid citizenship extends only to the healthy, paying, property-owning #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1593
• Post-apartheid freedom of choice reduces to what one can afford and buy into #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1597
• Post-apartheid racial secularization preserves racialized suffering under new forms #qualifies (0.70) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1615
• Responsibility-to-Protect discourse shifted sovereignty from nations to individuals #responds-to (0.70)