The modern state makes homo-sacer status a universal latent possibility.

Evidence

But having appropriated the monopoly over means of enforcement and violence as well as over the means and the prerogatives to offer or to refuse the right to live, over the entitlement to control the bodies of the subjects including the right to inflict pain, the state has expanded what used to be an extraordinary category into a potentially universal aspect of its subjects’ existential status: it has thus no need to resort to a special exceptional category to sustain what has now become a routine prerogative. Concentration camps, also a gruesome invention of the modern world, were a space where what in other parts of the state realm is but a potential was made into the norm and practical rule. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 459

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The state’s monopoly on violence and control of bodies turns a marginal Roman legal exception into the routine existential condition of all subjects — the camps normalize what is merely latent everywhere.
• XREF: Resonates with ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s theme of the state/sovereign’s power over life and death, and with biopolitics frameworks.