fix your hearts or die

i promised you 🦋

Therefore, the state (or any institution or individual) can search, detain, kill, exploit, experiment, etc., with impunity. How do you commit a crime against someone who doesn’t officially exist? They are people without registry, without codified existence. Thus, Piltover can do whatever it wants to the undercity, and there’s no concept of “illegal” about it. Zaunites can’t own property legally, can’t hold patents, can’t appeal in court (see Grayson informing Vander that the Council demands she bring in someone to be held responsible for the explosion in Jayce's private lab. The fact that Vander could volunteer implies that the Council wasn't interested in an investigation, just someone guilty without any hint that this individual would get a hearing like Jayce did.) Technically, they can’t even be “murdered” because no record or documentation declares they were ever born. So, Zaunites are killable, but not murdarable.

That’s why Piltover’s exploitation, raids, and pollution can go unchallenged. There’s literally no law to break when the subjects don’t exist in law. I think in political philosophy, Giorgio Agamben called this condition 'bare life.' Agamben argues that laws have always assumed the authority to define bare life (zoe, as opposed to bios, or qualified life), while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. In our real world, the power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from Antiquity to Modernity. In that sense, the absence of surnames is a political condition. It marks Zaunites as homo sacer, a term Agamben borrows from Roman law to describe a person who can be killed but not sacrificed, expelled from the sphere of legal protection but still utterly at the mercy of power and authority.