“Like it or not, these are not our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like he’s doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country.”

The TV host’s comment was “outrageous” but outrage interests me less and less. I only want to understand what I’m seeing and then act accordingly. Political material exhibits different behavior at different temperatures, and I want to function at a temperature that might open up the material in some further way.

“These are not our kids.” The host, in his own intuitive way—understands the distinction between ζωή (zoê), “bare life,” and βίος (bios), “qualified life.”

(The apparent contradiction in the host’s statement between “he’s doing this” and “these are people from another country”—between it’s our business and it’s none of our business—is resolved once it’s understood that the sovereign’s authority is transnational. This also opens the door to the idea that subject status under the sovereign is also necessarily transnational.)

“These are not our kids.” The kids who are not our kids are life who are not our-life. Once this is established, explicitly or implicitly, anything else is permissible. Everything else flows from that. (The man on the TV has only made explicit what was already implicit.)

The extinguishing of a life that is not our-life is not technically murder. The abuse of kids who are not our kids is not child abuse. And so on.

This is only one of the reasons to examine the narrow ways the terms “citizen” and “citizenship” are commonly understood.