Thanatopolitics: Anatomy of a Dispositif of Liquidation

This paper proposes the category of thanatopolitics as a fourth structural regime of power in relation to death, distinct from sovereignty, biopolitics, and necropolitics. Where sovereignty imposes death, biopolitics permits death by withdrawal of support, and necropolitics produces death zones for excluded subjects, thanatopolitics produces the desire to die within the subject, sustained by a commercial, legal, aesthetic, and lexical infrastructure that renders the desire operable as a service. The paper develops the diagnosis through six analytical movements: the genealogy of post-Foucauldian theories of biopower; the formalisation of the operational mechanism — teleodynamic inversion — through Ordinative Set Theory (OST); the architecture of the dispositif (commercial operators, legal frameworks, aesthetic infrastructure, lexical operations, integration with transplantation infrastructure); ten case studies from 2024–2026 (five international, five Italian) documenting the progressive expansion of qualifying conditions; the anatomy of the semantic inversion by which the dispositif's operations are systematically named through terms whose emotional valence is the opposite of their denotative content; and the SCIMS threshold-correlation projection of the trajectory of expansion across 2026–2035. The paper's position is diagnostic, not programmatic. It passes no judgement on the subjects whose cases it documents, advocates no legislation, proposes no counter-mobilisation, and constructs no emotional appeal. It offers a map: a description sufficient to allow the reader, if they so choose, to recognise the dispositif's operations within their own phenomenology and within the cultural environment in which they live. Every claim carries an explicit confidence grade (S0–S3).