Dimensional exile creates disposability and sacrifice at every scale
Giorgio Agamben's concept of "homo sacer"—the figure who exists in a state of exception, who can be killed but not sacrificed—captures how both individual abuse and systemic oppression create zones of disposability.1 Judith Butler's framework of "grievable lives" reveals how certain beings are constituted as less than fully human, their suffering and death not counting as real loss.2
In individual narcissistic abuse, victims are systematically dehumanized—treated as extensions of the abuser rather than autonomous persons.3 They exist in what Orlando Patterson, studying slavery, termed "social death": stripped of social identity, genealogically isolated, rendered totally dependent.4 This same logic of disposability scales fractally—from the individual victim whose suffering "doesn't count" to entire populations designated as sacrifice zones for economic extraction.5
Modern manifestations include refugees in indefinite detention, communities poisoned by environmental racism, and what research calls the "organized abandonment" of certain neighborhoods and populations. During COVID-19, "essential workers" occupied this paradoxical space—simultaneously valorized and treated as expendable. Whether enacted by an individual abuser or neoliberal policy, the mechanism remains identical: creating categories of being whose existence hovers between life and death, whose suffering generates no moral claim.
- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Homo-Sacer-Sovereign-Meridian-Aesthetics/dp/0804732183
- https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/2339-judith-butler-precariousness-and-grievability
- https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/gaslighting
- https://matrix.berkeley.edu/?matrix_seminars=social-death-race-risk-and-representation