The logic of viewing some populations as disposable in the pursuit of utilitarian ends results in biopolitical exclusion—especially because the Neg is fine with forcing people outside state jurisdiction to have to continue to work for pragmatic reasons, instead of providing them a respite from productivity through a UBI—that’s Cabaña and Vilensky and Braga.

Foucault marks the important shift from classical biopower to modern biopolitics. Classical biopower is summed up as the sovereign decision ‘‘to take life or let live,’’ whereas modern biopolitics is conceived as ‘‘the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.’’8 The decision to kill or let live is replaced with a productive biopolitics that is twofold, that ‘‘makes live’’ and ‘‘lets die.’’ Death becomes a consequence*a necessary part*of living. Such death is too easily elided and dismissed. Nobody is killed, at least not directly, and nobody’s hands are bloodied, at least not that we can see; the crimes are outsourced to penal colonies, through ‘‘extraordinary rendition’’ become ordinary, obfuscated by State bureaucracy, and covered up by one media spectacle after another. These deaths are never ‘‘caused’’ as such; officially, they are merely ‘‘allowed,’’ a passive event, collateral damage. But biopolitical logic requires them. In order that ‘‘we’’ may live, live well and live fully, ‘‘they’’ must die, the distinction between the virtuous citizen and the other excluded as bare life, disposable life. Here we might think of the neomort kept ‘‘alive’’ for organ harvesting, the deaths resulting from pharmaceutical testing in poorer parts of the globe, or the repatriated corpses of US soldiers forbidden from entering ‘‘public speech’’ through a media moratorium. In the space that remains, I will take up the question of death in order to protest the biopolitical logic that continues to define its terms. I believe that Agamben’s conception of biopolitics is not radical enough because it is informed by the logic of the exception*essentially a juridical logic derived from Schmitt. Agamben states that the exception is an inclusive-exclusion or an exclusive-inclusion,9 both included and excluded from the juridical.10 Here the juridical appears to be more originary and encompassing than the political. This follows from what some might call a problematic reading of Aristotle on Agamben’s part, and so I will return to Aristotle to suggest how both the living and the dead fall within the sphere of the political, marking a ‘‘threshold’’ (one of Agamben’s frequently used terms) that is perhaps not just within the sovereign’s power to bridge juridically. In other words, Aristotle’s more radical conception of the political allows us to see how death exceeds, in some sense, the juridical logic of the exception. Following recent work,11 we might look toward what I would call the productive bafflement of death as a way to interrupt, to momentarily suspend, or to meaningfully subvert biopolitical logic through thanatopolitics.