the black kite society

To make die and to let live summarizes the procedure of old sovereign power, which exerts itself above all as the right to kill; to make live and to let die is, instead the insignia of biopower, which has as its primary objective to transform the care of life and the biological as such into the concern of State power. In the light of the preceding reflections, a third formula can be said to insinuate itself between the other tow, a formula that defines the most specific trait of twentieth-century biopolitics: not longer either to make die or to make live but to make survive. The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival.

Giorgio Agamben