Biopolitical power destroys freedom and forms a future that cannot be separated from death.

The production of living death is particularly common in warfare. In Weil’s discussion of war there emerges another aspect of what it might mean to exist in a living death. On the one hand, war turns all its participants into “things.” Both conqueror and conquered are caught up in a momentum that robs them of their freedom, making them subject to pure necessity and thus depriving them of some aspect of being alive. In Weil’s imagining, those subject to force become inert, frozen in place like Hector before Achilles, while those who ply it are driven by an equally mechanical momentum of violence and destruction. She concludes that battles are fought not by human beings but by things, by “men who have undergone a transformation, who have dropped either to the level of inert matter, which is pure passivity, or to the level of blind force, which is pure momentum.”239 War, that is, makes “things” of all those it touches.

In addition to becoming a “thing” caught up in the momentum of war, soldiers undergo a psychic shift that alters their relationship to “life.” At first, conquering soldiers shield themselves from the horrors of war through emotional and conceptual distancing. They view warfare as a kind of game, and the lives they destroy “are like toys broken by a child, and quite as incapable of feeling.”240 Eventually, though, their own vulnerability to pain or loss becomes unavoidable, perhaps due to a serious injury or the death of a beloved comrade. In such a moment, the reality of war makes itself painfully present. Awareness of this reality transforms the soldier’s relationship to living and dying. As Weil describes it, “for those whose spirits have bent under the yoke of war, the relation between death and the future is different than for other men. For other men death appears as a limit set in advance on the future; for the solider death is the future, the future his profession assigns him.”241 Life enfolds death. Death becomes the only imaginable future – the death of one’s enemy, of one’s comrades, of oneself. This relationship to futurity, in which death appears as the sole future, alters not only the relation to the future but also to the present. It is “much too hard to be borne,” “abhorrent,” “unendurable.”242 Weil continues, “Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn reintroduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years.”243 War reveals a reality that is intolerable to the mind, yet the mind cannot turn away. The possibility of death becomes ever-present, inescapable. It is as though the solider must each day experience the acute agony of facing a sword that could strike at any moment. The solider is like Hector, but for far more than a single moment. Every day, “the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way.”244 When the future appears (only) as death, aspiration becomes impossible. Contemplating the future entails contemplating death; death becomes life’s only possibility, its sole horizon. Thus, Weil claims, “the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence.”245 War imprisons the mind, making it impossible (or at least incredibly painful and therefore exceedingly rare) to imagine anything beyond the present, which is suffused with death. The future holds only death; the present is lived in thrall to this deathly future. To pass through one’s days in such a way cannot really be called “living.” One who exists in this way “belongs to a different race from the race of the living,” Weil insists.246 Like Hector, all soldiers who have perceived the reality of war become no longer quite alive.