The onto-politics of body counts

This paper is concerned with a conundrum: the contention that the dead are dehumanized both through body counts and their absence. To understand this paradox we need to excavate who normatively speaking has a life that counts. I advance the idea of countability as a novel explanatory concept to name the general conditions of possibility, including the ordering of grievability, that underpins acts of counting. Among other things, orders of grievability regulate who enjoys ontological status as fully human. To be eligible for counting an embodied being must first be countable. Furthermore, body counts are performative. They have onto-political effects, organizing and facilitating, reflecting and reiterating, the differential valuation of human lives as well as the distribution of ontological possibilities. The failure or refusal to count has parallel onto-political effects. (De)humanization, however, is not just an issue of whether deaths are counted but, as shown here, how they are counted.