Berlant’s concept of slow death names the gradual physical and psychic wearing out of populations under conditions where survival itself becomes a mode of attrition. Rather than understanding violence only as spectacular event, sovereign decision or exceptional catastrophe, Berlant redirects attention to the ordinary temporalities through which capitalism, labour, food systems, health governance and racialised poverty make life persist while diminishing its capacities. The chapter’s central case, obesity, is deliberately difficult because it resists heroic narratives of resistance, simple moral blame and conventional models of individual agency. Public discourse often frames obesity as a crisis of personal sovereignty: a failure of will, discipline or responsible consumption. Berlant instead situates it within crisis ordinariness, where overwork, low wages, stress, inadequate public space, processed food economies, racialised inequality and limited access to healthcare form an environment in which bodily deterioration becomes predictable. Eating, in this account, is not merely pathology or choice; it can function as comfort, self-interruption, ballast, or a fleeting reprieve from exhaustion. This is where Berlant’s notion of lateral agency becomes crucial: agency does not always appear as transformative action, self-improvement or political resistance, but may take the form of maintenance, suspension, spacing out, or temporary relief within an unbearable present. The analysis therefore challenges liberal fantasies of the sovereign subject who rationally chooses health, productivity and futurity. It also critiques biopolitical regimes that convert structural harm into problems of individual behaviour while leaving intact the conditions that generate exhaustion. Slow death is thus neither mere passivity nor dramatic destruction; it is the ongoing convergence of living and wearing out, where the pursuit of small pleasures may simultaneously sustain life and contribute to its erosion. Berlant’s contribution lies in making visible the historical, affective and infrastructural conditions through which ordinary life becomes a scene of managed depletion.
