In Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure, Arthur Bradley attempts to trace a history of sovereign violence that does not merely subject life to domination or expose it to death, but goes further, toward the negation of the very possibility of its existence. Sovereignty, in this account, does not simply decide who lives and who dies, but who has existed in the first place, and whose existence is permitted to leave a trace in history. In this sense, Bradley extends Carl Schmitt’s question of the exception and moves beyond Agamben’s conception of “bare life” toward what he calls “nihilopolitics,” where killing is no longer the sole exercise of sovereign power, but where the erasure of the very conditions through which life, death, and history become recognizable is constitutive of sovereignty itself.
Yet reading this genealogy from a Palestinian Arab positionality, at a moment of ongoing genocide in Gaza, confronts us with the necessity of interrogating the limits of European political theology itself, rather than merely borrowing its conceptual vocabulary to interpret the colonial experience. What is unfolding in Palestine cannot be reduced to a sovereign decision that renders life invisible, nor to a state of exception in which the law is suspended. In the colonial context, the exception is not so much a rupture from the rule as one of the very conditions through which the rule is produced and sustained. Here, returning to Achille Mbembe, particularly his Brutalism, becomes necessary for understanding how violence extends beyond the domination of bodies toward the material reconfiguration of the world itself, including land, urban space, infrastructure, and the conditions of mobility, dwelling, and social reproduction. Genocide, then, does not target the Palestinian merely as a body exposed to death; it targets the world that makes Palestinian existence possible, across its past, present, and future.
Perhaps one of the central limitations of Bradley’s approach lies in the way the primacy of the sovereign decision, even in his attempt to move beyond Agamben, continues to hold the colonized within a relationship between existence and nonexistence constituted by sovereign power. It is as though Palestinian history begins at the moment of its negation, or as though Palestinian political existence becomes intelligible only through resistance to erasure. Yet Palestine is not merely a geography subjected to elimination, nor is the Palestinian simply a life struggling to secure recognition of its existence. There is a material and social history of producing space, life, and relations that precedes the colonial project and continues in confrontation with it, a history that cannot be contained within the binary of sovereignty and exception.
From this perspective, I find the critical value of Bradley’s book not in its capacity to offer a comprehensive explanation of genocide in Palestine, but in the questions it allows us to reformulate from outside its own genealogy. The question is not simply how sovereignty can render a life as though it had never existed, but how the destruction of place, urban life, memory, and the conditions of mobility becomes a constitutive practice of the colonial project. More importantly, how might we think of Palestinian life not merely as what remains after destruction, but as a historical, spatial, and political practice of producing a world whose continued existence colonialism seeks to render impossible?