Günter Grass’ novel The Tin Drum (1959) paradigmatically represents the lethal horizon of National Socialist biopolitics. Faced with a biopower that excludes him and threatens to annihilate him, the protagonist Oskar Matzerath exercises a type of violence that could be characterized as “phatic”, which not only defends his life, but also vindicates his subjectivity against an apparently unsurmountable power.