The inevitability of destruction in the ancient regime of hunting and gathering has also been shown to operate in modern economic systems — it is a condition of the reproduction of social and biological life. But to say destroy or liquidate is first to indicate the confrontation between humans and matter—physical and organic matter, biological, liquid and fluid matter, human and animal matter, made flesh, bones, and blood, vegetal and mineral matter. It also refers to the confrontation with life — the life of humans, the life of nature, the life of animals, and the life of the machine. It refers to the work necessary to producing life—work that also includes the production of symbols, languages, and meanings. It refers to the processes whereby machine-captured human beings are transformed into matter — the matter of humans and the humans of matter. It refers further to the conditions of their withering away.
This withering away of life and matter is not the equivalent of death. It is an unfolding onto an extreme outside that I shall refer to as the zero world. In this zero world neither matter nor life ends as such. They do not return to nothingness. They merely pursue a movement of exiting toward something else, with the end being deferred each time and the very question of finitude left hanging. The zero world is a world in which becoming is difficult to figure because the time of which it is woven cannot be captured through the traditional categories of the present, past, and future. In this fragmented and crepuscular world, time constantly oscillates between its different segments.
Diverse types of exchanges tie together terms that we customarily oppose. The past is in the present. It does not necessarily redouble it. But it is sometimes refracted in it, sometimes insinuates itself into its interstices, that is, when it does not simply climb back up to time’s surface, which it assails with its grayness, tries to saturate, to make illegible. The executioner is in the victim. The immobile is in movement. Speech is in silence. The beginning is at the end, and the end is in the middle. And all, or nearly all, is interlacing, incompletion, expansion, and contraction.
– Necropolitics (2019), pp. 168-9