“This relationship between the citizen and his or her rights does not even make sense in a classical-juridical context. If we consider, for instance, the right to life of the individual in the classical-juridical model, it is the sovereign, and the sovereign alone, who is capable of overriding it. Moreover, should the sovereign choose to violate an individual's right to life, consent has nothing to do with the process. The subject is deprived of the legal protection of full citizenship before his or her life is taken. It is true that many legal systems describe situations in which a citizen's right to life is forfeit-”honor killing” being an obvious example of this process in the nineteenth century French, Italian, and Ottoman criminal code. It is likewise true that the contemporary debate surrounding euthanasia-although arguably more a biopolitical than a political debate-largely has to do with whether or not a citizen can consent to a violation of his or her right to life. But even so, there has been no moment in either of these debates at which the classical juridical sovereign has given up the monopoly on the right to life, or in which the biopolitical sovereign has given up the monopoly on the right to death. There is no question of consent on the part of the citizen- beyond, some might argue, the consent that tied this citizen into an original social contract-because it is the sovereign's right alone to “choose.””
