Stripping a people’s sanctity prepares them for becoming expendable naked life
Evidence
It is that sanctity, integral to a people’s sense of dignity, that Ibn Warraq wants to steal from Muslims— thus preparing them to become what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, “naked life”, so that when they are massacred in multitudes, not event the dignity of the word “Palestinians” will be attached to their slaughtered numbers. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 518
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces Agamben’s homo sacer / ‘naked life’ concept and applies it to the strategic stripping of collective dignity.
- DEEPTHINKING: The causal chain—de-sacralizing a people’s history makes their mass killing rhetorically possible—is a dense, non-obvious thesis about the relationship between biography, dignity, and genocidal possibility.
- ADDENDUM: Connects to the Sacrifice article’s treatment of how human slaughter is stabilized and made legitimate within stratified societies.
- XREF: connects to: Shame at nakedness symbolizes the human condition of being seen as an object. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 784