They conflate the “end of imperialism” with “the end of the world” because hegemonic ideology marks certain subjects as grieveable and others as incalculable – vote negative to flip this valuation and to recognize the subjects of structural violence

“To refer to “ontology” in this regard is not to lay claim to a description of fundamental structures of being that are distinct from any and all social and political organization. On the contrary, none of these terms exist outside of their political organization and interpretation. The “being” of the body to which this ontology refers is one that is always given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations that have developed historically in order to maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others. It is not possible first to define the ontology of the body and then to refer to the social significations the body assumes. Rather, to be a body is to be ”exposed to social crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology. In other words, the body is exposed to socially and politically articulated forces as well as to claims of sociality—including language, work, and desire—that make possible the body’s persisting and flourishing. The more or less existential conception of “precariousness” is thus linked with a more specifically political notion of “precarity.” And it is the differential allocation of precarity that in my view, forms the point of departure for both a rethinking of bodily ontology and for progressive or left politics in ways that continue to exceed and traverse the categories of identity.1 The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life or, indeed, as part of life. In this way, the normative production of ontology thus produces the epistemological problem of apprehending a life, and this in turn gives rise to the ethical problem of what it is to acknowledge or, indeed, to guard against injury and violence. Of course, we are talking about different modalities of “violence” at each level of this analysis, but that does not mean that they are all equivalent or that no distinctions between them need to be made. The “frames” that work to differentiate the lives we can apprehend from those we cannot (or that produce lives across a continuum of life) not only organize visual experience but also generate specific ontologies of the subject. Subjects are constituted through norms which, in their reiteration, produce and shift the terms through which subjects are recognized. These normative conditions for the production of the subject produce an historically contingent ontology, such that our very capacity to discern and name the “being” of the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition. At the same time, it would be a mistake to understand the operation of norms as deterministic. Normative schemes are interrupted by one another, they emerge and fade depending on broader operations of power, and very often come up against spectral versions of what it is they claim to know: thus, there are “subjects” who are not quite recognizable as subjects, and there are “lives” that are not quite—or, indeed, are never—recognized as lives. In what sense does life, then, always exceed the normative conditions of its recognizability? To claim that it does so is not to say that “life” has as its essence a resistance to normativity, but only that each and every construction of life requires time to do its job, and that no job it does can overcome time itself. In other words, the job is never done “once and for all.” This is a limit internal to normative construction itself, a function of its iterability and heterogeneity, without which it cannot exercise its crafting power, and which limits the finality of any of its effects.” “Perhaps, then, as a consequence, it is necessary to consider how we might distinguish between “apprehending” and “recognizing” a life. “Recognition” is the stronger term, one that has been derived from Hegelian texts and subject to revisions and criticisms for many years.2 “Apprehension” is less precise, since it can imply marking, registering, acknowledging without full cognition. If it is a form of knowing, it is bound up with sensing and perceiving, but in ways that are not always—or not yet—conceptual forms of knowledge. What we are able to apprehend is surely facilitated by norms of recognition, but it would be a mistake to say that we are utterly limited by existing norms of recognition when we apprehend a life.” “We can apprehend, for instance, that something is not recognized by recognition. Indeed, that apprehension can become the basis for a critique of norms of recognition. The fact is we do not simply have recourse to single and discrete norms of recognition, but to more general conditions, historically articulated and enforced, of “recognizability.” If we ask how recognizability is constituted, we have through the very question taken up a perspective suggesting that these fields are variably and historically constituted, no matter how a priori their function as conditions of appearance. If recognition characterizes an act or a practice or even a scene between subjects, then “recognizability” characterizes the more general conditions that prepare or shape a subject for recognition”—The“general terms, conventions, and norms “act” in their own way, crafting a living being into a recognizable subject, though not without errancy or, indeed, unanticipated results. These categories, conventions, and norms that prepare or establish a subject for recognition, that induce a subject of this kind, precede and make possible the act of recognition itself. In this sense, recognizability precedes recognition.”