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“In Agamben, the emphasis is on the sovereign power to decide what counts as political life and what is bare life, outside the law. In [Andrei] Platonov, it is all the other way around. It is bare life in the sense of shared life and its appetites that is the base upon which the superstructures of a legally protected life might be based. [Platonov’s novel] Soul is among other things about the material basis of political life. Platonov’s question is about how securing the material basis of the appetites might found an everyday life not subject to the sovereign’s arbitrary violence.”
— McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso, 2015), pp. 250–1.
