The sovereign power to kill is more basic than the power over the exception

Evidence

Sovereignty amounts in the final determination not just to the power or right to determine the state of exception, as Carl Schmitt so famously has put it. Achille Mbembe, following Foucault, emphasizes that it concerns even more basically power over the right to kill. No doubt the power over exception could be said to entail the power over killing. But the sovereign’s defining power over killing remains no matter the declaration of exceptionality. If every state killing is legitimated through the at least implicit declaration of exceptionality, exceptionality must either be instrumentally in service of sovereign power and not its ground, or it is simply moot. The sovereign’s defining power to kill accordingly must be more basic than the power over exceptionality. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 703 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sovereignty rests on the power to kill, not the power of exception — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 703; Sovereign power over life is asymmetrical, always weighted toward killing — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 255; War exercises sovereignty through the right to kill. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 7 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Sovereignty rests on the power to kill, not the power of exception #expands (0.97) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 703