Sovereign power over life is asymmetrical, always weighted toward killing

Evidence

The right of life and death is always exercised in an unbalanced way: the balance is always tipped in favor of death. Sovereign power’s effect on life is exercised only when the sovereign can kill. The very essence of the right of life and death is actually the right to kill it 1s at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life. It is essentially the right of the sword. So there is no real symmetry in the right over life and death. It is not the right to put people to death or to grant them lite. Nor is it the right to allow people to live or to leave them to die. It is the right to take lite or let live. And this obviously mtroduces a startling dissymmetry. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 255

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the precise formula of sovereignty: ‘the right to take life or let live’ — the dissymmetric baseline against which biopower’s ‘make live and let die’ is defined.
• XREF: connects to: Mortality blocks property from becoming a true political principle.; War exercises sovereignty through the right to kill. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 7; In sovereign narratives, emancipation and killing are bound to truth and death — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 56 (+10 more)

Related

• Sovereign power makes the subject’s very life and death depend on its will (similarity 0.90)
• Mortality blocks property from becoming a true political principle. (similarity 0.86)
• Biopower replaces sovereignty’s power over death with power over life (similarity 0.86)
• Nineteenth-century power added ‘make live and let die’ alongside sovereign right to kill (similarity 0.85)
• Atomic power exposes the paradox of a sovereign power that kills life itself (similarity 0.83)
• War exercises sovereignty through the right to kill. (similarity 0.83)
• Biopower takes control of life through the twin poles of body and population (similarity 0.82)
• Ritualized death faded because death escaped sovereign power’s reach (similarity 0.81)
• Sovereignty inherently contradicts its protective mandate by holding power of death. (similarity 0.80)
• Atomic power exposes biopower’s paradox of killing to preserve life. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Sovereign power makes the subject’s very life and death depend on its will #corroborates (0.95) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 255
• Sovereignty inherently contradicts its protective mandate by holding power of death. #corroborates (0.90) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 557
• Atomic power exposes the paradox of a sovereign power that kills life itself #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 268
• Biopower replaces sovereignty’s power over death with power over life #qualifies (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 262
• The punished body anchors sovereign power’s manifestation #exemplifies (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 110
• The combatant-to-militant shift expands the right to kill indefinitely #expands (0.75)
• The sovereign executed regicides with symbolic maximal torture #exemplifies (0.72) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 108
• Claimed precision paradoxically expands global killing rather than limiting it #expands (0.72)
• Proportionality’s incalculability serves to legitimize the deaths it governs #expands (0.70)