This article probes the contradictions and unacknowledged risks inherent in the notion of citizenship today. A key paradox at its heart is that citizenship is both an “engine of universality and a break or limit upon it” (Bosniak 2006). This essay explores the latter, namely the anthropology of contexts in which citizenship and biological self-preservation are being radically decoupled, and the policies, techniques, and media (biological, health, juridical) through which such decoupling takes place. What concepts have been brought to the fore by anthropologists to address the emerging “faultlines of survival” embodied in the term, citizenship? How have these concepts been taken up, becoming vehicles for resisting, or at least assessing, what has become of citizenship? Moving beyond narrowly conceptualized policy problems and calculations, this essay also considers alternative pathways through which the ‘political’ is being mobilized and through which a new politics of rescue appears.