Creates a state of being that is dead-while-alive. This outweighs extinction.

In Weil’s depictions of affliction and the effects of force, images of living death proliferate. There exists in Weil’s imaginary a kind of human being whose life has been destroyed even as they remain alive. Under the weight of social degradation, oppression, or warfare, a human being can become dead-while-alive. In both essays, Weil describes this state of death-in-life as involving an ontological transformation. Recall the analogy to waterboiling: to go from suffering to affliction, from pain to having one’s life become an attenuated death, is akin to the transformation of hot water to boiling water. It is a transformation in kind, not simply in quantity. I have suggested that, for Weil, this transformation is marked by several features: one who inhabits a living death cannot think, hope, or will; the inevitability of death subsumes her entire vision of the future; and she loses the reflexive reactivity to stimuli usually shared among human and non-human animals. Further, force should be condemned not only for its production of death, but also for the way that its presence transforms the way in which life is lived. The threat of death does not only cause harm when death arrives; rather, the threat itself, the fact that one could be killed at any moment, is itself profoundly destructive to the human being. Exposure to the possibility of death is here presented as something that makes a human being a corpse while still alive. To be alive under the constant threat of death is to enter a different kind of aliveness – a life in which one is already in some sense dead.

The potential for a human life to become a kind of death poses particular challenges for modern ethical and political discourse. An ethical framework that emphasizes sympathy and compassion becomes untenable in the face of living death, for we are largely incapable of feeling compassion for such individuals and instead either feel disgust or fail to register their existence at all. Further, a political discourse of rights and personhood fails to adequately name the devastation to which human beings are too often subject; mistakenly articulating the damage wrought by force saps protests against such force of their normative potency.