Kamuran Gökdağ
This article traces a single ontological shift, from governing life through death to governing death through life. By reconstructing an archaeology of power across three constitutive thresholds, it asks how death came to function as a technical variable internal to the organization of life itself, moving beyond approaches that treat death primarily as the ultimate act of sovereign violence. At the Hobbesian threshold, death concentrates in the sovereign’s singular decision, the condition through which political order first becomes possible. At the biopolitical threshold, this logic gives way to making live and letting die, and death disperses as a governmental variable across the biological processes of the population. At the neo-Hobbesian biopolitical threshold, regimes of diffusion and concentration supersede this logic, and death becomes an immanent regulatory principle, circulating along multiple trajectories while intensifying at specific points, from insurance calculus to border regimes, camps, and sieges. Read through Hobbes, Schmitt, Foucault, Agamben, and Mbembe together, these thresholds reveal a necropolitical return, the raw core of sovereign violence, never eliminated but only thinned and redistributed, resurfacing at the very heart of contemporary biopower. The article argues that this trajectory inaugurates a political ontology in which life and death are recalibrated within a single calculative framework, with death becoming the constitutive principle through which life is differentially produced, preserved, and abandoned.