A similar argument is made by Giorgio Agamben (1998) in his consideration of what he calls “bare life.” For Agamben, modern political systems and imaginaries are underscored by the capacity to strip individuals and groups of all social belonging and value and reduce them to a purely biological existence. Not only is this spectre of raw humanity a threat (“do what we say or else you too will be denuded”), it is also an image and a reality that reaffirm our (those of us fortunate enough not to be reduced to bare life) sense of worth and belonging to our imagined political community. Agamben (2005) traces the way modern political systems have always incorporated zones of exclusion, special laws, spaces or forms of status that maintain bare life within the body politic: refugee camps, emergency laws, apartheid, differential forms of citizenship, or simply abject poverty (see also Tyler 2013). These internalized exclusions reify and justify the idea of the state as a legitimate political community, and allow those who are held to “belong” to reaffirm their own value by contrast. Bare life is the subject of a nauseated disgust and abjection. We fail to sympathize with the beggar, the refugee or the excluded “other” because to do so would call into question our own fabricated sense of value. In other words, modern political systems, in order to justify their own legitimacy as providers of security and peace, by necessity create spectacles of utter precariousness, what Agamben (1998) calls Homo Sacer, “sacred” figures who are afforded no protections from the slings and arrows of the world and the predations of their fellow human beings. The figure of bare life, then, helps us justify our sense of security and belonging, but it also reveals a deeper, unsettling truth: it is all a social construction; at base, we are all reducible to bare life; and, to an even deeper extent, our sense of security and belonging is predicated on the abjection of others. Thus, the abject precarious figure becomes an object of spite and hatred, a cruel and necessary reminder of universality that demands we constantly do the work of justifying why “we” are not “them.”