ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I argue that playing the dead baby card echoes the accusation of infanticide, which was prominent in the early modern witch hunts as the most common verdict for which women and midwives were executed, and, since then, has run through the whole of Western modernity. The playing of the dead baby card can similarly be understood to have the negation of the pregnant person as its effect, so that the maternal subject cannot be conceptualized as part of the biopolitical production of subjects. This chapter differentiates the playing of the dead baby card from both bio- and necropolitics as a form of matricide as the condition of the biopolitical project of the accumulation of life.
