(..)For this, I find Georgio Agamben’s distinction between bios and zo∑ useful. Agamben states: The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word “life.” . . .: zo∑, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings . . . and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group.26
In this understanding, only those that have a political existence, or membership if you like, of a proper society, have life—bios. Thus, bios exists among citizens of polis, not among slaves. The same principle, it should be added emphatically, applies to death. For a life or a death to be socially meaningful, the human that bears (executes or fulfills) it needs to be a politico-civic being, whose membership of a society is both accountable and recognizable.

(Sonia Ryang "Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex and Society")

One cannot resist asking: which is more perverted, a woman who commits a crime because of overpassioned love or a nation that commits itself to bloody rape of its neighbor, also in the name of love? Perhaps it was fortuitous that Sada’s love was shielded from the national state of emergency, precisely because of the
criminality that was ascribed to it by the state, since killing one man outside the sovereign order was a crime, while killing, mutilating, and violating hundreds and thousands in the name of the Emperor was a glory.
The target of Arendt’s remark was totalitarianism, which normally (and perhaps necessarily or inevitably) comes with the language of love. Winston Smith had to obliviously and selflessly adore Big Brother climbing up the ladder of the execution scaffold.53 Amidst starvation, North Koreans today still call their leader “Dear Leader” and tearfully sing songs praising his love and care.54

(Sonia Ryang "Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex and Society")