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đŸȘ” The Threshold

The state frames citizens' lives as a debt it can call in for sacrifice.

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, question, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@chamayou_theory_2013, loc. 562

2 min read

The state frames citizens’ lives as a debt it can call in for sacrifice.

Evidence

One answer is that what is committed to protecting when one protects a fallen protector is the very possibility of protection that was set up as the original purpose of a political society. Historically, this clears the way for a dialectic of sacrifice, according to which, as Rousseau states, “whoever wills the end, also wills the means, and these means are inseparable from certain risks and even certain losses.” Far from the protection of lives ruling out their exposure, it is that very protection that justifies the exposure, in accordance with a protection debt or vital debt contracted at birth and which the protective sovereign can call in at any moment if the circumstances demand it. Your life is not something that you can withhold from the state, as if it had preceded the latter; your life is, on the contrary, the state’s product, which it has gifted to you on certain conditions. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 562

Categorization

  • XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s interest in how citizens are morally enlisted to kill — the vital-debt logic is the ideological lever. — connects to: State power depends materially on the bodies citizens lend it.; State-sponsored death corrupts the moral life of a modern nation. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in
, 662; State power depends on borrowing the bodies of its subjects — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 695 (+4 more)
  • QUESTION: If drones abolish this sacrifice debt, what happens to the citizen’s claim on state protection? The chapter implies this asymmetry.

Broader Connections

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