A body worth defending

Ed Cohen's A Body Worth Defending explores how modern legal and political thought produces differential valuations of bodies, tracing the emergence of biopolitical categories and the interplay of immunity and community.

The book examines how certain bodies are rendered worth defending while others are exposed to harm, drawing on historical, legal, and philosophical sources.

Eng invokes Cohen to explain how the term 'human' became nominalized and entangled in biopolitical governance.

Cohen's analysis helps situate questions of vulnerability, rights, and reparations within longer histories of modern statecraft.