The modern state turned an exceptional status into a universal potential

Evidence

True, the concept of homo sacer is absent from modern law and is largely forgotten. But having appropriated a monopoly over the means of enforcement and violence, as well as over the means and the prerogative to offer or to refuse the right to live, over the entitlement to control the bodies of 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 is in other parts of the state realm but a potential was made into the norm and practical rule. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 706

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how bare life stops being an exception and becomes a latent universal condition under state sovereignty.
• XREF: Direct bridge to biopolitics and the Islamophobia toolkit; camps as the laboratory where potential becomes norm (echoes Agamben and Foucault). — connects to: The Americas’ new republics first modeled what modern nations should look like — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 192; The state converts class interests into the general interest, giving them universal form; Western modernity is a hegemonic particularism disguised as universalism — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 153

Related

• The modern state makes homo-sacer status a universal latent possibility. (similarity 0.90)

Broader Connections

• The state converts class interests into the general interest, giving them universal form #expands (0.82)
• Western modernity is a hegemonic particularism disguised as universalism #complicates (0.78) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 153