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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Who May Be Killed?: The Grammar of Imputation and the End of the Principle of Expulsion in the Language of Twenty-First-Century War

Who May Be Killed?: The Grammar of Imputation and the End of the Principle of Expulsion in the Language of Twenty-First-Century War

Brooks, Nathaniel

Paperback

Series: Who May? - A Collection on the Forms, Agents, and Limits of Power.

General Political ScienceInternational RelationsSocial Movements

ISBN13: 9798190085969
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 31 2026
Pages: 218
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The language that authorizes destruction today is not a language of hatred. It is a language of competence.

We were taught to watch for a particular vocabulary: the insect, the parasite, the vermin. A century of scholarship holds that mass violence requires the victim to be removed from the human community first, and that language performs the removal. The instruments built to detect the coming of atrocity were calibrated against exactly that.

Open the file by which a state authorizes the killing of a named person today and you find none of it. You find legal categories, thresholds of participation, conduct profiles, confidence levels, quantified estimates of foreseeable harm, records of who approved what and at what hour. Not one proposition about the nature of the enemy.

Who May Be Killed? argues that this is not a disguise. The contemporary architecture of authorization does not remove the target from the category of the human - it inscribes him fully within it. One does not warn vermin. One does not grant it a deadline, or hold it responsible for having stayed.

Across five devices that were born in domains with no contact between them - the legal category, the arithmetic of proportionality, the regime of persistent observation, the warning, and the posthumous administration of grief - the book finds the same structure, and finds it five times without looking for it:

1) the norm requiring distinction creates the category of those who failed to distinguish themselves;

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