Kritik Answers 2

Kritik Answers
Kritik ist Kaput

**GENERAL K ANSWERS**.................................................................................................................. 3
Kritik Answers
**GENERAL K ANSWERS**
**Framework**
Fiat Good: 2AC
Next, our interpretation is that plan is a yes/no question. If its better than the squo or a competing
policy option, we win. Thats good because
A.
It is the most predictable because the resolution asks a question about federal action.
The lack of individual agency stipulations in the resolution mean that introducing such
questions are outside the scope of the subject matter we were asked to prepare to
debate. We would be happy to address such concerns under different resolutions
B.
It facilitates the best policy analysis because it ensures that we are not forced to
compare aff apples versus neg oranges
C.
Aff choice justifiesthey can run critical affirmatives if they want and we will engage
themthey should reciprocally respect our choice to play the fiat game
D.
Our affirmative impact claims necessitateclaims of individual agency beg the question
of the efficacy of liberal politics, and we impact turn such claims by proving that their
drive for unfettered autonomy lets the government get away with destroying the world
E.
Most educationalkritiks are run in debate because graduate assistants like to talk about
their course readings with debaterswe lack the foundational understanding to engage
in high speed discourse about such arguments until weve done our homework, whereas
high school civics provides adequate grounding for policy debate. We think that there
should be two debate leagues: a policy circuit for undergrads and a critical circuit for
grad students.
F.
Even if we lose the fiat debate, we still get to leverage our aff impacts against those of
the kritikthe discursive (or other) mechanism through which their alternative solves is
just as available to our message about the necessity of authoritarianism. We are both
theoretical kritiks of the status quo
Kritik Answers
General Defense of the Aff: 2AC

(1/2)
PERM DO BOTH
PERM DO THE PLAN AND ALL OF THE ALTERNATIVE
EXCEPT THE PARTS THAT LINK TO PLAN
POLICYMAKING PROVIDES A UNIQUE SPACE TO BECOME
EDUCATED ABOUT CRITICAL ADVOCACY, THE ONLY
ALTERNATIVE IS THE CREATION OF A NEW ELITE
Coverstone 95
[Alan, Princeton High School, An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchells Outward

Activist Turn, www.wfu.edu/Studentorganizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm, acc 3-1605//uwyo-ajl]
Yet, Mitchell goes too far. In two important areas, his argument is slightly
miscalibrated. First, Mitchell underestimates the value of debate as it is
currently practiced. There is greater value in the somewhat insular
nature of our present activity than he assumes. Debate's inward focus
creates an unusual space for training and practice with the tools of
modem political discourse. Such space is largely unavailable elsewhere
in American society. Second, Mitchell overextends his concept of
activism. He argues fervently for mass action along ideological lines.
Such a turn replaces control by society's information elite with control by
an elite all our own. More than any other group in America today,
practitioners of debate should recognize the subtle issues upon which
political diversity turns. Mitchell's search for broad themes around which
to organize mass action runs counter to this insight. As a result,
Mitchell's call for an outward activist turn threatens to subvert the very
values it seeks to achieve.
KRITIK CANT SOLVE THE AFF EXTEND THE TRIBE AND

LARSON EVIDENCE. IF THE COURTS DONT ACT, BUSH
WILL CONTINUE DETAINMENT, WHICH IS WORSE THAN
PLAN
WE OUTWEIGH: FAILURE PASS PLAN THREATENS MULTIPLE
EXTINCTION SCENARIOS, INCLUDING INTERNATIONAL
LAW, MULTILATERALISM, EXECUTIVE POWER, DEMOCRACY,
AND RUSSIAN INDEPENDENCE. EVEN IF THEY WIN ONE BIG
IMPACT, WERE HOSING THEM
PLAN SOLVES BETTER THAN THE ALTERNATIVE
Cole 2003
[David, Prof. Georgetown U. Law Center, Judging the Next Emergency: Judicial
Review and Individual Rights in Times of Crisis, 101 Mich. L. Rev. 2565, August,
LN//uwyo-ajl]
To be sure, judicial decisions are not the only forces that may constrain government actors in the next
emergency. Developing cultural norms may also play a role. As noted above, Korematsu has never been
formally overruled, but it is nonetheless highly unlikely that anything on the scale of the Japanese
internment would happen again. The cultural condemnation of that initiative, reflected in Congress's
Kritik Answers
issuance of a formal apology and restitution, n52 has been so powerful that the option is a nonstarter
even without controlling Supreme Court law. But even here, the legislative apology followed judicial
decisions nullifying the convictions on writs of coram nobis. n53 In addition , the formal
requirements that judges give reasons that are binding on future judges means
that judicial decisions are likely to play a more specific constraining function
than the development of cultural norms. Indeed, John Finn has argued that the obligation to give reasons is constitutive
of constitutionalism and underscores the necessity of judicial review to any meaningful system of constitutional law. n54 Cultural
norms and political initiatives are rarely as clear-cut as a legal prohibition, and their very
contestability means that they are likely to exert less restraining force than a
judicial holding. Court decisions are, of course, also contestable, but generally along a narrower
range of alternatives.
Kritik Answers
General Defense of the Aff: 2AC

(2/2)
SPECIFIC SOLVENCY TRUMPS PREFER OUR EV ABOUT
HOW OVERRULING QUIRIN SOLVES ABUSIVE DETAINMENT
TO THEIR ABSTRACT CARDS THAT DONT ASSUME PLAN
WE MUST ASSUME A DOUBLE-RESPONSIBILITY TO
CRITICIZE INSTITUTIONS WHILE USING SOVEREIGNTY
AGAINST ITSELF
MICHAELSON & SHERSHOW (Profs of Engl @ MSU and UC
Davis) 2004
[Scott & Scott, Jan. 11, p. online: http://www.merip.org/mero/mero011104.html,

accessed June 21, 2005 //buntin]
The act of sovereignty that captures the Guantnamo detainees only to push
them beyond the reach and protection of the sovereign state is the very
manifestation of the existing state system and its corollary values. Critics are
confronted with a Hobson's choice between attempting to limit or suspend the
exercise of sovereignty through increasing legal regulation or endorsing the
exercise of sovereignty as a necessary corrective to injustice (as in the king's or
executive's pardon). On this point, progressive legal theorists have been split.
But the ultimate answer cannot lie solely in the enforcement of existing
international law and the production of yet more international documents within
the same framework, nor in the tenuous hope for occasional exceptions to that
sovereign exceptionality that is always the essential form of sovereign power.
International law alone will never avail, and not merely because its own logic
always holds in reserve a right to the same indiscriminate violence that it
condemns in the guerrilla, the pirate or the terrorist. Sovereignty is the principle
and activity that founds the state, and therefore constitutes its innermost and
outermost possibility. The sovereign black hole, loophole or zone of legal limbo is
foundational for the existing juridico-political order. Even more broadly, within
that order, the absolute end of sovereignty is unthinkable. Without sovereignty,
no decisions; and without decisions, no justice. Since sovereignty itself is
inevitable, yet particular instances of sovereign power must still be confronted
and challenged, critics of the current situation must assume a double
responsibility. On the one hand, the present resources of national and
international law must indeed be pursued to their limits, to discover and
interpret precedents for the urgent decisions of the day, and, more importantly,
to set new precedents for decisions still to come. But on the other hand, since
law itself cannot in principle ever be adequate to the full enormity of
Guantnamo, sovereignty itself must be torqued in a strange reversal, and made
to work against itself. In other words, the sovereignty of strong states with the
power to decide global matters -- the sovereignty that is, after all, finally a
collective force, a power "of the people, by the people and for the people" -must be expended without reserve in the name, not of law, but of justice, to the
point where the territory and its boundary trembles. Such is not a mechanism or
method which might be codified, because it will involve sovereign (and hence
unprecedented) acts and decisions; and because its goal is a justice understood
as an infinite task of thinking our relation to the Other. But as Jacques Derrida
suggests, "the fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news"; rather, one can
"find in this the political chance to all historical progress." All this is perhaps
difficult to imagine in a world so dominated by reasons of state and the
fanaticism of borders and identities. But the urgency of the task can hardly be
overstated. At any rate, one thing is clear: at Guantnamo Bay, as Walt Kelly
once observed, "we have met the enemy and he is us."
Kritik Answers
Kritik Answers
Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Long) (~50

sec.)
Next, Floating PICs are bad:
1. Steals all aff ground- the plan is the foundation for all
affirmative offense in debate, allowing the negative to
defend the plan crushes our ability to answer
arguments, including their K. In a world where
affirmatives are able to generate foundational offense
separate from the plan, the negatives ability to debate
is severely compromised, plan focus is best for both
teams.
2. Not educational- there is little education to be gained
from allowing the negative to agree that the plan is a
good idea in totality and that there was something
wrong with the Construction of the iac, this justifies
allowing the negative to Criticize the spelling of our
tags, while advocating the plan. Affirmatives rarely win
in this world.
3. Undermines Reciprocal Burdens- allowing the negative
to advocate the plan means that the negatives burden
has shifted from disproving the plan to disproving
anything that the affirmative has said; that is too easy
on negatives, especially on a tiny topic with lots of
generic negative ground. Their argument justifies
affirmatives defending the text of the INC but not the
justifications of the INC. It also justifies severing out of
everything that is not the plan.
4. We Turn their offensive arguments- They should have
to win the framework debate in order to win that their
K comes before the affirmative, allowing them to win
because there is a small risk that something was wrong
with the aff, separate from the plan, means that we
dodge a discussion of methodology and epistemology
and its relationship to the aff, they should have to win
that there is a meaningful relationship, not that there
could be a meaningful relationship. They dodge a
discussion of these questions, preventing any benefits
of making affs defend their whole iac.
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5. This has to be a voting issue, we have to go for this

argument just to get back to ground zero; this should
be a non-issue.
Kritik Answers
Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Short) (<20

sec.)
Next, Floating PICs are bad
1. Steals Aff ground- Floating PICs steal the only option
that affs have to generate offense, the plan.
2. Not educational- Floating PICs justify negatives
defending the plan and criticizing the spelling of our
tags, crushing education.
3. Not Reciprocal- the affirmative cannot agree with a
bulk of the neg strat and k their reps, we would have
to win a framework arg too.
4. We turn their offense- they sidestep a discussion of
epistemology and its effects on policymaking, not
defending the plan provides more meaningful
education.
5. This has to be a voting issue, we have to go for this
argument just to get back to ground zero.
Kritik Answers
Do the Plan Perm: 2AC

Perm- do the plan.
Perm solves1. That the negative can divorce themselves from the bad
representations of the IAC surely means that we can
too. If it really is just as easy as saying, we defend the
plan but not the representations of the IAC; then there
is no reason why we would not be able to do the same
thing.
2. No theoretical reason why the perm is illegit, they
might win substantive reasons why the our
representations are tied to our plan, but that is a
reason why they also would not be able to advocate it
separate from the rest of the IAC, if the very utterance
of the rest of the iac ties it to the plan, then that is
irrevocable.
3. And we will defend that the perm is a test of the
competitiveness of part of their alternative- the part
that advocates the plan, which is decidedly not
competitive, a remedy to this non-competitive nature
would be to disallow the negative to advocate the plan.
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#1 Steals Aff Ground: 1AR

Extend the 2AC #1- Floating PICs destroy all affirmative
Ground; the plan is the only way for affirmatives to
generate offense in debate. If the negative is allowed to
defend the plan as well, then there is no residual IAC
offense that we can claim, and the 2AC has to start from
scratch, meaning that affirmatives always start at a
disadvantage. This pits the block against the IAR, which
means affs rarely ever win.
If instead the aff is able to generate offense in the IAC
that does not stem from the plan but something else,
then debate for the negative becomes difficult as they
not only have to disprove the plan but everything else.
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#4 Ext. Turns Offense: 1AR

Extend the 2AC #4Any reason that they win that it is important for us to
defend the non-plan parts of the IAC, we will win are
reasons why they shouldnt defend the plan.
If the negative did not defend our plan, but solely
engaged in a criticism of our representations, then that
would facilitate a discussion of how our representations
related to and affected our plan. By choosing to defend
the plan absent from the rest of the IAC, they have
limited our discussion to just one of language, rather
than including broader issues of epistemology. This
short-circuits any reason why it would be good or
educational to examine the representations because they
have severed them from
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A2 Plan Focus Bad: 1AR

1. We will outweigh any of their arguments plan focus is
bad
A. Ground- Both teams benefit immensely from plan
focus debate, their argument would not be
possible in a world where we didnt read a plan,
most negative args would be rendered
meaningless
B. Education- the alternative is res-focused debate,
which prevents us from delving into the more
interesting aspects of the resolution by
parametrisizing it.
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A2 Plan is only a tiny part of the

speech/Discourse of 1AC is ~9
min.: 1AR
They say that the plan is relatively unimportant, this is
just not true:
1. The plan is the foundation for the rest of the
affirmative, taking the plan out of the affirmative
would render the IAC fairly nonsensical, just because
the plan can be read quickly does not render it
meaningless.
2. This is untrue from the standpoint of the negative as
well, the plan is what they get before the round, not
the entire text of the affirmative, it is the focus of the
debate in a literal as well as figurative sense.
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Must Have an Alternative: 2AC

NEXT, LACK OF ALT IS BAD
A. We need a text to provide us with ground to perm the kritiksuch arguments are
critical tests of the link
B. Utopian alternatives destroy debate because we can never win that the plan is
better than perfection
C. Vague alternatives are moving targets that prevent us from linking offense
D. It guts their solvency because their argument will never gain political traction,
all of which are voters for fairness and education
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Hasty Generalization Bad: 2AC

HASTY GENERALIZATION
A. There are many instances where advocating government change is goodthese
instances would still vote to the K
B. Call to reject doesnt justify its utilitarian basisthere are still plenty of reasons to
do the plan
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Law Transformative: 2AC (1/2)

IT IS IMPORTANT THAT EACH ONE OF US DEFENDS THE
TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF THE LAW- WORLDWIDE
RIGHTS AND FREEDOM DEPEND ON IT
KENNEDY 06
(Anthony, Supreme Court Justice, Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the
American Bar Association, Federal News Service, August 12, 2006, Lexis)
I sense, President Greco, as indicated in your remarks, that
we are at
another
turning point in the history of
the law.
The Constitution gave us judges. It's really remarkable that it did. Remember that attacks and complaints against judges were one
of the indictments, one of the allegations, in the Declaration of Independence. The framers had been pushed around by judges. And what did
they do? They created a judiciary and gave them life tenure. Why did they do that? Because they were confident that the process of reason, the
slow elaboration of the principles of justice through the case-by-case method, was the surest way to interpret the Constitution. The framers knew
that they were not prescient enough, and they were not brazen enough, to specify all of the elements of justice. They knew this could become
apparent only over time. They knew that the whole purpose of the Constitution is to rise above the inequities and the injustices that you can't
see. But now we are in an era where I sense something different happening. We know the truth needs no translation. There's a word for truth in
every language. We know that the world is getting smaller. We know that
the rule of law is essential.
We hear a lot about
we are
not making the case as well as we ought. It could be, to use a Pacific metaphor, that the tide has gone out and
we're on the beach. But a tsunami of expectations and discontent and demands and
dissatisfaction may soon sweep in upon us. We must explain to the rest of the
world the meaning, the essentiality and the purpose of the rule of law as it's
understood by the American people and by other democracies throughout the
world. And we must begin to do a better job of it, and we must begin that now.
(Applause.) I was here in Hawaii, Governor Lingle, just a few months ago and met with the University of Hawaii law students. And I asked them,
security. But our best security, ultimately our only security, is in the world of ideas. And I sense a slight foreboding. I sense that
"What does the rule of law mean?" You know, I never heard that term when I was in law school. And lawyers bandy it about a lot. Should it not be
defined? If you parse it as a grammarian might, it doesn't always work. You might have a dictator with laws that are known and that are enforced,
but that can't be the rule of law. The rule of law does not exist just because a dictator makes the trains run on time. And so I tried to define the
rule of law. And before doing so, there were certain caveats. There are certain risks. The phrase has a resonance, an allure, that you're reluctant
to destroy. And we're often reluctant to talk about universal truths lest our efforts at formulating their specifics seem too bland, too insufficient,
for the great purpose behind the phrase. So there's a risk, when we talk about the rule of law, that you say too little or that you say too much;
that you say too little and you're facile, thereby preventing us from discovering other truths; that you say too much and that you're prolix. There's
a reluctance to open the bidding so that every interest group has its particular interest, its particular goal, incorporated in the rule of law. I always
wanted to teach a law school course in constitutional law to some very bright students who had never read the Constitution. And the way I'd do it
is I'd say, "Now, here it is, but you can't read it. I want you to tell me what you think the Constitution should contain if it's a model Constitution."
They'd look. I'd say, "Now, don't peek." And just as an academic trick, I would get them interested. I've done the same thing for you, and I'm glad
it's dark, because I don't want you to look at it. I've given you a little definition of the rule of law. I have one for all the Kameamea students. What
would you put in your definition of the rule of law? Would you talk about process, knowing that there are certain truths that are not evident to us
now, that we're blind to the injustices and the prejudices of our own times? So you just talk about process? That really doesn't suffice. It's not
elevating enough. So you must talk about substance. What is the substance which you include? I suggested that the rule of law has three parts.
This is simply a working definition. If we were in the law school class at the University of Hawaii, or if we had more time, you could probably make
some suggestions for how this should be improved. But I think it's important for us to begin assessing where we are in this campaign to explain
There's a jury that's

out. It's half the world. The verdict is not yet in. The commitment to accept the
western idea of democracy has not yet been made, and they are waiting for you
to make the case. I suggest that the rule of law has three parts. The first is that the law
is binding on the government and all of its officials. This may seem a rather self-evident matter, but it's
the meaning of freedom, the meaning of the rule of law, to a doubting world. My friends, make no mistake:
a proposition that most government officials in most countries do not fully understand. If an administrative agency and an administrator in that
agency is charged with giving you a permit, the permit is not given to you as a matter of grace. It's given to you because you're entitled to it, and
it's his or her duty to give it to you. Very few countries in the world understand this.
The rule of law binds the
government and all of its officials.
This is an essential lesson that must be taught if the corruption and the greed and
the graft President Greco referred to are eliminated. The second part of the rule of law is there for you on the little slip. It is, I think, in a sense,
the rule of law must respect the dignity,

equality and human rights of every person. And then there's a second sentence, and the second sentence
says that the people are entitled to have a voice in the laws that govern them . So there's a
process element. But it isn't just process, because the right to participate in government is nothing less
than the right to help shape your own destiny. And the framers of our Constitution made it very clear that
each generation has a share, has a chance to determine its own destiny, to
determine its own direction. What are human rights? Is it the right to subsistence, the right to enough to eat, the right to
the most troubling for me. I'm not sure that it's complete. It says that
breathe clean air, the right to an education? At this point the rule of law, as we, I think, would want to define it, may depart from the idea of a
model constitution. These are two different things. In the Constitution of the United States, there are a series of essentially negative commands.
"Congress shall make no law restricting free speech or the free press." "There shall be no unreasonable search and seizures." These are negative
commands. It's easier to have the Ten Commandments -- "Thou shalt not steal" -- than the Sermon on the Mount -- "Thou shalt love thy
neighbor." It's harder to enforce the latter. But what about affirmative rights? Aren't there some basic human entitlements? You see a man on a
steam grate in the cold winter in Washington, D.C. and you say, "Well, you have the right to a jury trial, and you actually have a right to own a
if the rule of law is to have

meaning, substance, hope, inspiration for the rest of the world, it must be
coupled with the opportunity to improve human existence. I became interested a few years ago in
newspaper." He'd say, "I'm cold. I'm hungry. I want to eat." Americans must understand that
water systems in Africa, and I have attended a few lectures about it. Not long ago I heard a speaker say the following. He asked this question:
"How many hours of human labor per year are spent in the continent of Africa getting clean water?" This is work that falls on the shoulders of
women. The answer was 8 billion hours a year. I was sitting in an audience like yours, thinking, "Now, did he say 8 million? No, that can't work
out. Was it 80 million?" The answer is 8 billion. And I asked him about it later. He said, "This is very conservative, because I'm just talking about
the water that's clean when it gets back to the source."
The biggest single cause of infant mortality in
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Africa and other undeveloped nations is diarrhea. Children with a slight body
mass dehydrate quickly, and there's nothing for the heart to pump against. The
heart can't pump if it's dry. This can be fixed. This is not rocket science. One of the reasons
it can't be fixed, under present conditions, is that governments are corrupt. And
people have a right to improve their lives, to gain basic security, without corrupt
governments depriving them of the very means of existence. CONTINUED ON
NEXT PAGE-
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Law Transformative (2/2)

--KENNEDY 06 CONT-My third suggestion -- and it can only be a suggestion; it would be presumptuous to say that I can define the rule of law -- my third suggestion for
every person has a right to know what the

laws are and to enforce them without fear of retaliation or retribution . This is almost a
process-sounding precept, but it's again substantive as well. It's part of your identity, it's part of your selfdefinition, to know the laws that protect you, to know the laws that are
respected by your neighbors and friends and family. This is part of who you are.
And you're entitled to know this, and you're entitled to enforce them. I was talking with
you to think about surprised me when I wrote it, and it was this, that
some lawyers and judges not long ago from Bangladesh. They told me that a standard criminal sentence works something like this: A fine of
three dollars or nine to 12 months in jail, and at least 1,000 people a year spend a year in jail for want of the three dollars. I said, "Well, I'm not a
man of great means, but I'll write you a check for $1,000. That'll take care of 333 people." And they said, "Well, no, but then there'd be no
deterrence." Is a nation, is a people, is a culture, is a society able to embrace the western idea of the rule of law under such conditions? I suggest
we must find some ways to link the rule of law with real
progress in improving the condition of humankind. We must have some measures to assure that the vast
to you the answer is no. And
aid, the work of the NGOs, the work of this association, has some immediate, visible, tangible return so that we can make the case. You were
gracious to mention my remarks, President Greco, in San Francisco, when you last met in that city. We talked about the criminal justice system.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
And I mentioned at the time a book by

called "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." And it occurred
to me, when we were coming here to Hawaii, that Solzhenitsyn might be relevant in a somewhat different connection. He was a writer whom I
greatly admired. He had escaped from the Soviet Union and from a gulag in order to write about that experience, and he was living in the United
States. He was invited to Harvard to give the most important address given every year to the Harvard students. It was in the mid or late '70s. I
was living in California at the time. I was thrilled that my hero was addressing the Harvard College. And this was pre-fax and Internet days, so it
took me one or two days to get the text of his remarks, the text of his remarks from The New York Times. And I was shocked, stunned, terribly
attacked the West, and particularly the law and the

legal system. And he said that any society that defines the tissues of human
existence in legalistic terms is condemned to spiritual mediocrity. My hero was saying this
disappointed to read his remarks, in which he
about my profession, about the Constitution that is America's self-identity, about the Constitution that Americans still think as defining who they
We just define law differently than

Solzhenitsyn did. From his era, from his culture, law was a dictat, a ucas (ph) -- a command, a
mandate. In sum, it was a cold decree. That's not the meaning of law as our
nation and our co- democracies define it. For us, law is a liberating force. It's a
promise. It's a covenant. It says that you can hope, you can dream, you can
dare, you can plan. You have joy in your existence. That's the meaning of the law
as Americans understand it, and that's the meaning of the law that we must
explain to a doubting world where the verdict is still out. You can make this case.
You must make this case. And that is because freedom -- your freedom, my
freedom and the freedom of the next generation -- hangs in the balance. I'm
confident you will do this.
are as a people?I reflected on it for a few days, and then I got the answer.
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Policymaking Good: 1AR (1/2)

FIRST, EXTEND THE COVERSTONE 95 EVIDENCE. POLICY
DEBATE CREATES A SAFE SPACE ALLOWING US TO TEST
IDEAS, BECOMING EDUCATED ENOUGH TO HOLD ELITES
ACCOUNTABLE, STOPPING THE RISE OF NEW OPPRESSION
SECOND, DEBATE IS CIVIL SOCIETY: IT IS THE ROLE OF
CRITICAL INTELLECTUALS TO FORM A PUBLIC POLICY
SPHERE CONSTITUTED AROUND SPECIFIC POLICY IDEAS.
WE ARE NOT THE GOVERNMENT, BUT BY ORIENTING
OURSELVES TOWARDS THE STATE WE CAN ENSURE
EFFECTIVE POLITICS.
HABERMAS 98
[Jurgen, Prof. Philosophy at U. of Frankfurt, The Inclusion of the Other,
p. 31//uwyo-crowe]
A law is valid in the moral sense when it could be accepted by
everybody from the perspective of each individual. Because only general laws
fulfill the condition that they regulate matters in the equal interest of all, practical reason finds
expression in the generalizability or universalizability of the interests
expressed in the law. Thus a person takes the moral point of view when
he deliberates like a democratic legislator on whether the practice that
would result from the general observance of a hypothetically proposed
norm could be accepted by all those possibly affected viewed as
potential co-legislators. Each person participates in the role of colegislator in a cooperative enterprise and thereby adopts an
intersubjectively extended perpective from which it can be determined
whether a controversial norm can count as generalizable from the point
of view of each participant. Pragmatic and ethical reasons, which retain their
internal connection to the interests and self0understanding of individual persons, also play a role in
these deliberations; but these agent-relative reasons no longer count as rational motives and
value-orientations of individual persons but as epistemic contributions to a discourse in which norms are
Because a legislative
practice can only be undertaken jointly, a monological, egocentric
operation of the generalization test in the manner of the Golden Rule will
not suffice.
examined with the aim of reaching a communicative agreement.
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Policymaking Good: 1AR (2/2)

THIRD, TECHNICAL, COMPETITIVE DEBATE IS A
DIALECTICAL METHOD THAT TEACHES STUDENTS ABOUT
INTERPLAY BETWEEN ARGUMENTS, TRAINING THEM FOR
POLICY ENGAGEMENT
Mitchell 2000
[Gordon R., the brilliant DOD at Pitt, Preface to Strategic Deception: Rhetoric, Science
and Politics in Missle Defense Advocacy, Michigan State University Press, 2000,
xvi//uwyo]
intercollegiate policy debate is an odd and magical place,

where a keen spirit of competition drives debaters to amass voluminous
research in preparation for tournaments, and where the resulting density of ideas spurts
The world of
speakers to cram arguments into strictly timed presentation periods during contest rounds.
Expert judges trained in policy analysis keep track of such contests as

they unfold at breakneck speed, with speakers routinely delivering
intricate argumentation at over 300 words per minute. To the uninitiated
onlooker, this style of debate reveals itself as an unintelligible charade, something like a
movie-length Federal Express commercial or an auctioneering competition gone bad. But
there are rich rewards for participants who master policy debate's
special vocabulary, learn its arcane rules, and acclimate themselves to
the style of rapid-fire speaking needed to keep up with the flow of arguments. The
rigorous dialectical method of debate analysis cultivates a panoramic
style of critical thinking that elucidates subtle interconnections among
multiple positions and perspectives on policy controversies. The intense
pressure of debate competition instills a relentless research ethic in
participants. An inverted pyramid dynamic embedded in the format of
contest rounds teaches debaters to synthesize and distill their initial
positions down to the most cogent propositions for their final speeches.
FOURTH, ONLY STATE-CENTERED DISCUSSION ABOUT

POLITICS CAN REVERSE THE TREND TOWARD
TOTALITARIANISM. THIS DESTROYS DEBATE
TORGERSON 99
[Douglas, Prof and Chair Dept. Political Studies @ Trent U., The Promise of Green Politics:
Environmentalism and the Public Sphere, Duke University Press//uwyo-crowe]
One rationale for
the intrinsic value of politics is that this

politics itself is threatened. Without a
celebration of the intrinsic value of politics, neither functional nor
constitutive political activity has any apparent rationale for continuing
once its ends have been achieved. Functional politics might well be
replaced by a technocratic management of advanced industrial society.
Arendt's emphasis on
value has been so neglected by modernity that
A constitutive politics intent on social transformation might well be eclipsed by the coordinated direction of a
cohesive social movement. In neither ease would any need be left for what Arendt takes to be the essence of
there would be no need for debate.

Green authoritarianism, following in the footsteps of Hobbes, has been all too ready
to reduce politics to governance. Similarly, proponents of deep ecology, usually vague about
politics:
politics, at least have been able to recognize totalitarian dangers in a position that disparages public opinion
in favor of objective management." Any attempt to plot a comprehensive strategy for a cohesive green
movement, moreover, ultimately has to adopt a no-nonsense posture while erecting clear standards by which
to identify and excommunicate the enemy that is within.
Green politics from its inception, however, has challenged the officialdom of advanced industrial society by
invoking the cultural idiom of the carnivalesque. Although tempted by visions of tragic heroism, as we saw in
chapter, green politics has also celebrated the irreverence of the comic, of a world turned upside down to
crown the fool. In a context of political theater, instrumentalism is often attenuated, at least momentarily
displaced by a joy of performance. The comic dimension of political action can also be more than episodic.
The image of the Lilliputians tying up the giant suggests well the strength and flexibility of a decentered
constitutive politics. In a functional context, green politics offers its own technology of foolishness in
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Kritik Answers
response to the dysfunctions of industrialism, even to the point of exceeding the comfortable limits of a socalled responsible foolishness.
Highlighting the comic, these tendencies within green politics begin to suggest an intrinsic value to politics.
To the extent that this value is recognized, politics is inimical to

authoritarianism and offers a poison pill to the totalitarian propensities
of an industrialized mass society." To value political action for its own
sake, in other words, at least has the significant extrinsic value of defending
against the antipolitical inclinations of modernity. But what is the intrinsic value of
politics? Arendt would locate this value in the virtuosity of political action, particularly as displayed in debate.
Debate is a
language game that, to be played well, cannot simply be instrumentalized for
the services it can render but must also he played for its own sake. Any
Although political debate surely has extrinsic value, this does not exhaust its value.
game pressed into the service of external goals tends to lose its playful quality; it ceases to be fun.
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Kritik Answers
Policymaking Good: Ext (1/3)

ACADEMIC SWITCH-SIDE DEBATING TEACHES STUDENTS
HOW TO ORGANIZE INFORMATION AND DEFEND
ARGUMENTS, RESISTING TOTALITARIAN INFORMATION
OVERLOAD
Coverstone 95
[Alan, Princeton High School, An Inward Glance: A Response to
Mitchells Outward Activist Turn, www.wfu.edu/Studentorganizations/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Coverstone1995China.htm,
acc 3-16-05//uwyo-ajl]
Mitchell's argument underestimates the nature of academic debate in
three ways. First, debate trains students in the very skills required for
navigation in the public sphere of the information age. In the past,
political discourse was controlled by those elements who controlled
access to information. While this basic reality will continue in the future,
its essential features will change. No longer will mere possession of
information determine control of political life. Information is widely
available. For the first time in human history we face the prospect of an
entirely new threat. The risk of an information overload is already
shifting control of political discourse to superior information managers. It
is no longer possible to control political discourse by limiting access to
information. Instead, control belongs to those who are capable of
identifying and delivering bits of information to a thirsty public. Mitchell
calls this the "desertification of the public sphere."
The public senses a deep desire for the ability to manage the
information around them. Yet, they are unsure how to process and make
sense of it all. In this environment, snake charmers and charlatans
abound. The popularity of the evening news wanes as more and more
information becomes available. People realize that these half hour
glimpses at the news do not even come close to covering all available
information. They desperately want to select information for themselves.
So they watch CNN until they fall asleep. Gavel to gavel coverage of
political events assumes top spots on the Nielsen charts. Desperate to
decide for themselves, the public of the twenty-first century drinks
deeply from the well of information. When they are finished, they find
they are no more able to decide. Those who make decisions are envied
and glorified.
Debate teaches individual decision-making for the information age. No
other academic activity available today teaches people more about
information gathering, assessment, selection, and delivery. Most
importantly, debate teaches individuals how to make and defend their
own decisions. Debate is the only academic activity that moves at the
speed of the information age. Time is required for individuals to achieve
escape velocity. Academic debate holds tremendous value as a space for
training.
Mitchell's reflections are necessarily more accurate in his own situation.
Over a decade of debate has well positioned him to participate actively
and directly in the political process. Yet the skills he has did not develop
overnight. Proper training requires time. While there is a tremendous
variation in the amount of training required for effective navigation of
the public sphere, the relative isolation of academic debate is one of its
virtues. Instead of turning students of debate immediately outward, we
should be encouraging more to enter the oasis. A thirsty public, drunk on
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Kritik Answers
the product of anyone who claims a decision, needs to drink from the
pool of decision-making skills. Teaching these skills is our virtue.
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Kritik Answers

DEBATE TRAINS STUDENTS TO BECOME ACTIVISTS BY
TESTING THEIR OPINIONS AND BECAUSE OF ITS COVERT
NATURE BECOMING OUTWARDLY POLITICAL THREATENS
TO HAVE US INFILTRATED
Coverstone 95
Mitchell's argument underestimates the risks associated with an outward
turn. Individuals trained in the art and practice of debate are, indeed,
well suited to the task of entering the political world. At some
unspecified point in one's training, the same motivation and focus that
has consumed Mitchell will also consume most of us. At that point,
political action becomes a proper endeavor. However, all of the
members of the academic debate community will not reach that point
together. A political outward turn threatens to corrupt the oasis in two
ways. It makes our oasis a target, and it threatens to politicize the
training process.
As long as debate appears to be focused inwardly, political elites will not
feel threatened. Yet one of Mitchell's primary concerns is recognition of
our oasis in the political world. In this world we face well trained
information managers. Sensing a threat from "debate," they will begin to
infiltrate our space. Ready made information will increase and debaters
will eat it up. Not yet able to truly discern the relative values of
information, young debaters will eventually be influenced dramatically
by the infiltration of political elites. Retaining our present anonymity in
political life offers a better hope for reinvigorating political discourse.
As perhaps the only truly non-partisan space in American political
society, academic debate holds the last real possibility for training active
political participants. Nowhere else are people allowed, let alone
encouraged, to test all manner of political ideas. This is the process
through which debaters learn what they believe and why they believe it.
In many ways this natural evolution is made possible by the isolation of
the debate community. An example should help illustrate this idea.
Like many young debaters, I learned a great deal about socialism early
on. This was not crammed down my throat. Rather, I learned about the
issue in the free flow of information that is debate. The intrigue of this,
and other outmoded political arguments, was in its relative unfamiliarity.
Reading socialist literature avidly, I was ready to take on the world. Yet I
only had one side of the story. I was an easy mark for the present
political powers. Nevertheless, I decided to fight City Hall. I had received
a parking ticket which I felt was unfairly issued. Unable to convince the
parking department to see it my way, I went straight to the top. I wrote
the Mayor a letter. In this letter, I accused the city of exploitation of its
citizens for the purpose of capital accumulation. I presented a strong
Marxist critique of parking meters in my town. The mayor's reply was
simple and straightforward. He called me a communist. He said I was
being silly and should pay the ticket. I was completely embarrassed by
the entire exchange. I thought I was ready to start the revolution. In
reality, I wasn't even ready to speak to the Mayor. I did learn from the
experience, but I did not learn what Gordon might have hoped. I learned
to stop reading useless material and to keep my opinions to myself.
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Kritik Answers
Do we really want to force students into that type of situation? I wrote
the mayor on my own. Debaters will experiment with political activism
on their own. This is all part of the natural impulse for activism which
debate inspires. Yet, in the absence of such individual motivation, an
outward turn threatens to short circuit the learning process. Debate
should capitalize on its isolation. We can teach our students to examine
all sides of an issue and reach individual conclusions before we force
them into political exchanges. To prematurely turn debaters out
threatens to undo the positive potential of involvement in debate.
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OUTWARD ACTIVISM RISKS CREATING A NEW
HOMOGENEOUS ELITE, CRUSHING IDEOLOGICAL DISSENT,
TURNING THEIR ARGUMENT
Coverstone 95
My third, and final reaction to Mitchell's proposal, targets his desire for
mass action. The danger is that we will replace mass control of the
media/government elite with a mass control of our own elite. The
greatest virtue of academic debate is its ability to teach people that they
can and must make their own decisions. An outward turn, organized
along the lines of mass action, threatens to homogenize the individual
members of the debate community. Such an outcome will, at best,
politicize and fracture our community. At worst, it will coerce people to
participate before making their own decisions.
Debate trains people to make decisions by investigating the subtle
nuances of public policies. We are at our best when we teach students to
tear apart the broad themes around which traditional political activity is
organized. As a result, we experience a wide array of political views
within academic debate. Even people who support the same proposals
or candidates do so for different and inconsistent reasons. Only in
academic debate will two supporters of political views argue vehemently
against each other. As a group, this reality means that mass political
action is doomed to fail. Debaters do not focus on the broad themes that
enable mass unity. The only theme that unites debaters is the realization
that we are all free to make our own decisions. Debaters learn to agree
or disagree with opponents with respect. Yet unity around this theme is
not easily translated into unity on a partisan political issue. Still worse,
Mitchell's proposal undermines the one unifying principle.
Mitchell must be looking for more. He is looking for a community wide
value set that discourages inaction. This means that an activist turn
necessarily will compel political action from many who are not yet
prepared. The greatest danger in this proposal is the likelihood that the
control of the media/government elite will be replaced by control of our
own debate elite.
Emphasizing mass action tends to discourage individual political action.
Some will decide that they do not need to get involved, but this is by far
the lesser of two evils. Most will decide that they must be involved
whether or not they feel strongly committed to the issue. Mitchell places
the cart before the horse. Rather than letting ideas and opinions drive
action as they do now, he encourages an environment where action
drives ideas for many people. Young debaters are particularly
vulnerable. They are likely to join in political action out of a desire to "fit
in." This cannot be what Mitchell desires. Political discourse is a dessert
now because there are more people trying to "fit in" that there are
people trying to break out.
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A2 Only Learn As Spectators: 1AR

FIRST, NOT TRUE DEBATES ABOUT DETAINMENT TRAIN
US TO HOLD POLICYMAKERS ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR
DECISIONS. IF WE CANT HAVE A DEBATE, WE WONT
KNOW WHAT TO DO WHEN WE CONFRONT
REACTIONARIES. CROSS-APPLY COVERSTONE
SECOND, TURN VIEWING DEBATE DECISIONS AS
ACTIVISM, IN AND OF THEMSELVES, CRUSHES ACTUAL
POLITICAL ACTIVITY. WINNING A TOURNAMENT BECOMES
GOOD ENOUGH CREATING NIHILISTS WHO NEVER
ACTUALLY LOBBY THE GOVERNMENT.
THIRD, THIS IS EMPIRICALLY DENIED BY THE MASSES OF
DEBATERS WHO GO ON TO BECOME SOCIAL ACTIVISTS
AND PROGRESSIVE ATTORNEYS. WE WOULDNT HAVE
PEOPLE LIKE GORDON MITCHELL DOING WORK IN MISSILE
DEFENSE OPACITY IF IT WERENT FOR THE SAFE SPACE OF
SWITCH SIDE DEBATE
FOURTH, WORLDY ACADEMIC WORK IS DEMOCRATIZING
AND SPURS ACTIVISM
Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of
Pittsburgh, ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY, Fall 1998, p. 47.
Gordon R.
argumentative agency involves the capacity to contextualize and

employ the skills and strategies of argumentative discourse in fields of social
action, especially wider spheres of public deliberation. Pursuit of argumentative agency charges academic work with democratic energy by
In basic terms the notion of
linking teachers and students with civic organizations, social movements, citizens and other actors engaged in live public controversies beyond
argumentative agency links decontextualized

argumentation skills such as research, listening, analysis, refutation and
presentation, to the broader political telos of democratic empowerment.
Argumentative agency fills gaps left in purely simulation-based models of
argumentation by focusing pedagogical energies on strategies for utilizing argumentation as a driver of progressive social change.
the schoolyard walls. As a bridging concept,
Moving beyond an exclusively skill-oriented curriculum, teachers and students pursuing argumentative agency seek to put argumentative tools to
the test by employing them in situations beyond the space of the classroom. This approach draws from the work of Kincheloe (1991), who
suggests that through "critical constructivist action research," students and teachers cultivate their own senses of agency and work to transform
the world around them
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Kritik Answers
Policy Debate Good

CRITICAL THEORY DIMINISHES THE BENEFIT OF POLICY
DEBATE
Jentleson 2002
[Bruce, Dir. Terry Sanford Inst. Public Policy and Prof. Pub Plcy and Pol. Sci. @
Duke, The Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Debate Back In, International
Security 26:4, Spring, ASP//uwyo-ajl]
To be sure, political science and international relations have produced and
continue to produce scholarly work that does bring important policy insights.
Still it is hard to deny that contemporary political science and international
relations as a discipline put limited value on policy relevancetoo little, in my
view, and the discipline suffers for it. The problem is not just the gap between
theory and policy but its chasmlike widening in recent years and the limited
valuation of efforts, in Alexander Georges phrase, at bridging the gap. The
events of September 11 drive home the need to bring policy relevance back in
to the discipline, to seek greater praxis between theory and practice.
AND DECENTRALIZED PUBLIC DEBATE IS NECESSARY OT

TRANSFORM BUREACRACY
Martin 90
[Brian, Bureacracy, www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/90uw/uw08.html, 923-06//uwyo-ajl]
All of this can be quite useful and often effective, and should not be rejected. But
working through bureaucracy on the inside, or demanding policy changes from
the outside, does little to transform bureaucracy itself. In fact, working through
bureaucracy can reinforce the legitimacy and sway of bureaucracy itself. In
addition, campaigns oriented towards working through bureaucracy or applying
pressure for change at the top tend to become bureaucratised themselves.
Another important orientation adopted by many social activists is towards
building self-managing organisational forms for their own activities, such as
cooperative enterprises or egalitarian action groups. Self-managing
organisational forms are an alternative to bureaucracy. Direct experience in selfmanaging groups strengthens the sense of community and commitment to
social action and also provides understanding and individual strength to resist
pressures for bureaucratisation in the wider society. In as much as social
movements organise themselves as decentralised self-managing groups, linked
by federations and networks, and self-consciously set out to develop and extend
such structures, they provide a strong challenge to the domination of
bureaucratic forms of social organisation.
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Kritik Answers
Switch-side Debate Good (1/3)

CRITICAL DISTANCE & *PUBLICLY* ADVOCATING
ARGUMENTS WITH WHICH YOU DISAGREE ARE ETHICALLY
IMPORTANT:
Day, Professor, Speech, University of Wisconsin-Madison, CENTRAL STATES
SPEECH JOURNAL, February 1966, p. 7.
Dennis G.
All must recognize and accept personal responsibility to present, when

necessary, as forcefully as possible, opinions and arguments with which they
may personally disagree.
To present persuasively the arguments for a position with which one disagrees
is, perhaps, the greatest need and the highest ethical act in democratic debate.
It is the greatest need because most minority views, if expressed at all, are not
expressed forcefully and persuasively. Bryce, in his perceptive analysis of
America and Americans, saw two dangers to democratic government: the
danger of not ascertaining accurately the will of the majority and the danger
that minorities might not effectively express themselves. In regard to the
second danger, which he considered the greater of the two, he suggested:
The duty, therefore, of a patriotic statesman in a country where public opinion
rules, would seem to be rather to resist and correct than to encourage the
dominant sentiment. He will not be content with trying to form and mould and
lead it, but he will confront it, lecture it, remind it that it is fallible, rouse it -out of
its self-complacency
To present persuasively arguments for a position with which one disagrees is the
highest ethical act in debate because it sets aside personal interests for the
benefit of the common good. Essentially, for the person who accepts decision by
debate, the ethics of the decision-making process are superior to the ethics of
personal conviction on particular subjects for debate. Democracy is a
commitment to means, not ends. Democratic society accepts certain ends, i.e.,
decisions, because they have been arrived at by democratic means. We
recognize the moral priority of decision by debate when we agree to be bound
by that decision regardless of personal conviction. Such an agreement is morally
acceptable because the decision-making process guarantees our moral integrity
by guaranteeing the opportunity to debate for a reversal of the decision.
Thus, personal conviction can have moral significance in social decision-making
only so long as the integrity of debate is maintained. And the integrity of debate
is maintained only when there is a full and forceful confrontation of arguments
and evidence relevant to decision. When an argument is not presented or is not
presented as persuasively as possible, then debate fails. As debate fails
decisions become less "wise." As decisions become less wise the process of
decision-making is questioned.
And finally, if and when debate is set aside for the alternative method of
decision-making by authority, the personal convictions of individuals within
society lose their moral significance as determinants of social choice.
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Switch-Side Debate Good (2/3)

SWITCH SIDE DEBATING IS PROFOUNDLY MORAL AND
GUARDS AGAINST ABSOLUTISM
Fine, Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, Gifted
Tongues, 2001, p. 54-55.
Gary Alan
Despite these concerns, most individuals with whom I discussed the issue felt
that debating both sides of an issue was valuable, perhaps the greatest benefit
of the activity, teaching the value of respect for differing opinions, multiple
perspectives, and the dangers of absolutism. For some the ability to argue both
sides of an issue is profoundly moral:
I have seen some people become cynical as a result. I would hope with students
I teach that they learn some ethical responsibilities. But I think what debate does
is allow students to seriously consider important questions from both sides of
the issue and see other perspectives before they become committed themselves
to a position. I have students who will say, Well, I cant argue against this,
because I really believe it. But after theyve done some research they are not
so certain of their convictions. They at least can see the other side. I think they
become more humane as a result of looking at both sides. (interview)
The ability to see both points of view has the potential in this view to make one
more humane and less self-righteous. Others suggest that not only does
debating both sides of a position not weaken ones position, but it strengthens it,
perhaps by inoculating one to opposing arguments. Many debaters have strong
political positions, which the activity seems to do nothing to diminish:
I think what happens is that you leam that there are two sides to every issue. I
think most debaters come down on one side or the other in their mind, but they
are able to argue both sides. And I think that is an important thing to be able to
do. I mean because it makes what you believe in, it makes that belief even more
justified, because you do know both sides. (interview)
The ability to take a position that is contrary to ones own beliefs has several
benefits: making one appreciate the perspective of ones foes, making ones
own thoughts more complex, and helping one become aware of
counterarguments. Perhaps this stance does suggest that positions are
gamelike, but it is a game that corresponds to the way that much political
decision making operates in the real world.
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Switch-Side Debate Good (3/3)

SWITCH-SIDE DEBATING IS NECESSARY TO EXAMINE
DIVERSE POLITICAL AGENDAS AND POLITICS. THE
SOLUTION IS NOT TO SILENCE ALL REPRESENTATION; ITS
TO MASSIVELY PROLIFERATE REPRESENTATIONS AND LET
THE DEBATE EXAMINE THE WORTHINESS OF INDIVIDUAL
REPRESENTATIONS WHICH CAN SUBVERT THE SYSTEM.
EVERY TIME ANOTHER IMAGE IS REPRESENTED, IT MAKES
OVERALL MARGINALIZATION LESS EASY.
Ann Marie
3/23/01
Baldonado, Fall 1996 http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Representation.html, accessed

This questioning is particularly important when the representation of the subaltern is involved. The problem does not rest solely with the fact that
often marginalized groups do not hold the 'power over representation' (Shohat 170); it rests also in the fact that representations of these groups
are both flawed and few in numbers. Shohat asserts that dominant groups need not preoccupy themselves too much with being adequately
represented. There are so many different representations of dominant groups that negative images are seen as only part of the "natural
diversity" of people. However, "representation of an underrepresented group is necessarily within the hermeneutics of domination, overcharged
since
representations of the marginalized are few, the few available are thought to be
representative of all marginalized peoples. The few images are thought to be typical, sometimes not only of
members of a particular minority group, but of all minorities in general . It is assumed that subalterns can stand
in for other subalterns. A prime example of this is the fact that actors of particular ethnic backgrounds were often casted as
with allegorical significance." (170) The mass media tends to take representations of the subaltern as allegorical, meaning that
any ethnic "other". (Some examples include Carmen Miranda HYPERLINK "http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/carmen.gif" in The Gang's All
Here (1943), Ricardo Mantalban in Sayonara (1957), and Rudolph Valentino in The Son of the Sheik ). This collapsing of the image of the subaltern
reflects not only ignorance but a lack of respect for the diversity within marginalized communities. Shohat also suggests that representations in
one sphere--the sphere of popular culture--effects the other spheres of representation, particularly the political one: The denial of aesthetic
representation to the subaltern has historically formed a corollary to the literal denial of economic, legal, and political representation. The
struggle to 'speak for oneself' cannot be separated from a history of being spoken for, from the struggle to speak and be heard. (173) It cannot
be ignored that representations effect the ways in which actual individuals are perceived. Although many see representations as harmless
likenesses, they do have a real effect on the world. They are meant to relay a message and as the definition shows, 'influence opinion and
action'. We must ask what ideological work these representations accomplish. Representations or the 'images or ideas formed in the mind' have
Both the scarcity and the importance of minority

representations yield what many have called " the burden of representation".
Since there are so few images, negative ones can have devastating affects on
the real lives of marginalized people. We must also ask, if there are so few, who will
produce them? Who will be the supposed voice of the subaltern? Given the allegorical character of
vast implications for real people in real contexts.
these representations, even subaltern writers, artists, and scholars are asking who can really speak for whom? When a spokesperson or a certain
image is read as metonymic, representation becomes more difficult and dangerous. Solutions for this conundrum are difficult to theorize. We can
call for increased "self representation" or the inclusion of more individuals from 'marginalized' groups in 'the act of representing', yet this is easier
said then done. Also, the inclusion of more minorities in representation will not necessarily alter the structural or institutional barriers that
prevent equal participation for all in representation. Focusing on whether or not images are negative or positive, leaves in tact a reliance on the
"realness' of images, a "realness" that is false to begin with. Finally, I again turn to Spivak and her question, 'Can the Subaltern Speak'. In this
seminal essay, Spivak emphasizes the fact that representation is a sort of speech act, with a speaker and a listener. Often, the subaltern makes
an attempt at self-representation, perhaps a representation that falls outside the 'the lines laid down by the official institutional structures of
representation' (306). Yet, this act of representation is not heard. It is not recognized by the listener, perhaps because it does not fit in with what
is expected of the representation. Therefore, representation by subaltern individuals seems nearly impossible. Despite the fact that Spivak's
formulation is quite accurate, there must still be an effort to try and challenge status quo representation and the ideological work it does. The
work of various 'Third world' and minority writers, artists, and filmmakers attest to the possibilities of counter-hegemonic, anti-colonial
subversion. It is obvious that representations are much more than plain 'likenesses'. They are in a sense ideological tools that can serve to
reinforce systems of inequality and subordination; they can help sustain colonialist or neocolonialist projects. A great amount of effort is needed
to dislodge dominant modes of representation. Efforts will continue to be made to challenge the hegemonic force of representation, and of
, this force is not completely pervasive, and subversions are often possible.
'Self representation' may not be a complete possibility, yet is still an important
goal.
course
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Debate Solves Authoritarianism

DEBATE INVERTS DOCILITY AND AUTHORITARIANISM
Evans, two time NDT first-round and graduate student at U Chicago,
[eDebate] We Other Debaters, Feb 27, 2002,
N. Kirk
http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200202/0747.html, accessed February 27,

2002
Although critics of debate (e.g., Kevin Sanchez) appropriate Foucauldian
language such as describing debate as ?the pedagogy devoted to scholarship
and training in good conduct,? I can?t help but wonder if there is a little ?
repressive hypothesis? discourse going on here. ?For a long time, the story goes,
we supported a repressive/calculating/veritas-seeking/flogocentric/docile body
producing regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. The image
of the stratego-spewtron is emblazoned on our restrained, (un)mute, and
hypocrtical debating.? I don?t like certain aspects of debate as it is currently
practiced. Some of my objections are political (e.g., under-representation of
minorities, propensity of elite schools to dominate). Some are aesthetic (e.g.,
lack of clarity among most debaters). My problem with criticisms such as Kevin
S?s or William S?s or Jack S?s is that they lump something together called ?
debate? and criticize it from afar (if that isn?t rendering something standing
reserve and then surveying it with an enlightened imperial gaze, I don?t know
what is). Somehow the sentiment seems to be lurking about that we?d all be
free, uninhibited, and unrepressed beings if the debate-machine hadn?t turned
us into assembly-line products of technostrategic thinking. Ummm? repressive
hypothesis. The reality is that proto-debaters enter high school with 8-9 years of
educational training to be docile subjects and liberal humanists. If debate still
maintains vestiges of these systems of thought, I think it has more to do with
what people bring to the ?institution? of debate than what debate teaches them.
Debaters are taught to question authorit(ies), and there is certainly a higher
degrees of activism (both liberal and conservative) among debaters than among
their non-debate counterparts.
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Roleplaying Good (1/3)

AND, WE MUST POSIT OURSELVES AS THE GOVERNMENT
Rawls, Political Philosopher, 1999
(John, The Law of Peoples, p. 56-7)
How is the ideal of public reason realized by citizens who are not government officials? In a representative government, citizens vote for
representativeschief executives, legislators, and the likenot for particular laws (except at a state or local level where they may vote directly
, citizens are to
think of themselves as if they were legislators and ask themselves what
statutes, supported by what reasons satisfying the criterion of reciprocity, they would think it most
reasonable to enact. When firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view
themselves as ideal legislators, and to repudiate government officials and
candidates for public office who violate public reason, forms part of the political
and social basis of liberal democracy and is vital for its enduring strength and
vigor. Thus in domestic society citizens fulfill their duty of civility and support the idea of
public reason, while doing what they can to hold government officials to it. This duty,
like other political rights and duties, is an intrinsically moral duty . I emphasize that it is not a legal duty, for in that case it
on referenda questions, which are not usually fundamental questions). To answer this question, we say that, ideally
would be incompatible with freedom of speech. Similarly, the ideal of the public reason of free and equal peoples is realized, or satisfied,
whenever chief executives and legislators, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow the
principles of the Law of Peoples and explain to other peoples their reasons for pursuing or revising a peoples foreign policy and affairs of state
citizens are to think of themselves

as if they were executives and legislators and ask themselves what foreign
policy supported by what considerations they would think it most reasonable to advance. Once
again, when firm and widespread, the disposition of citizens to view themselves as ideal
executives and legislators, and to repudiate government officials and candidates for public office who violate the public
reason of free and equal peoples, is part of the political and social basis of peace and
understanding among peoples
that involve other societies. As for private citizens, we say, as before, that ideally
AND, ROLE-PLAYING DEBATES PROMOTE PREPARE US FOR

REAL WORLD ACTIVISM BY GIVING US A BETTER
UNDERSTANDING OF HOW POLICY WORKS, MAKING US
AFFECTIVE AGENTS TO ACHIEVE CHANGE. THIS ALLOWS
US AS INDIVIDUALS TO BECOME ACTORS WHO COULD
INDEED TRANSFORM INTERNATIONAL POLITICS.
Joyner 1999
[Christopher, Professor international Law @ University of Georgetown, Teaching

International Law: Views from an international relations political scientist].
The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives. First,
students on each team must work together to refine a cogent argument that
compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign policy issue confronting the
United States. In this way, they gain greater insight into the real-world legal
dilemmas faced by policy makers. Second, as they work with other members of
their team, they realize the complexities of applying and implementing
international law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States
policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former or
creatively reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates forces
students to become familiarized with contemporary issues on the United States
foreign policy agenda and the role that international law plays in formulating and
executing these policies. 8 The debate thus becomes an excellent vehicle for
pushing students beyond stale arguments over principles into the real world of
policy analysis, political critique, and legal defense.
34
Kritik Answers

ROLEPLAYING IS KEY TO SOCIAL JUSTICE LEARNING
WHAT THE STATE SHOULD DO ALLOWS US TO ACHIEVE
THE ALTERNATIVES GOALS
Rorty, philosopher, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, 1998, p. 98-99
Richard
The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and
that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The
trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the
foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the
amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans. It is no comfort to
those in danger of being immiserated by globalization to be told that, since
national governments are now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement for
such governments. The cosmopolitan super-rich do not think any replacements
are needed, and they are likely to prevail. Bill Readings was right to say that
the nation-state [has ceased] to be the elemental unit of capitalism, but it
remains the entity which makes decisions about social benefits, and thus about
social justice. The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond
nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was faith in Marxs philosophy of
history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevant to the
question of how to prevent the reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how to
prevent right-wing populists from taking advantage of resentment at that
reemergence. When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize
that one of the essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to
undergo is the shedding of its semiconscious anti-Americanism, which it carried
over from the rage of the late Sixties. This Left will have to stop thinking up ever
more abstract and abusive names for "the system" and start trying to construct
inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances
with people outside the academyand, specifically, with the labor unions.
Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to
feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better
place. If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the
laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget
about Baudrillard's account of America as Disneylandas a country of simulacra
and to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real
people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by
governmental action. Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than
agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific
reforms. The existence of such a list endlessly reprinted and debated, equally
familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of
professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toiletsmight
revitalize leftist politics.
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Kritik Answers

ROLE PLAYING IN DEBATE IS ESSENTIAL TO BREAK DOWN
ASSUMPTIONS, DEVELOP CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS, AND
DECONSTRUCT THE STATE
Joyner,
Professor International Law @ Georgetwon, 99 (Christopher

TEACHING INTERNATIONAL LAW: VIEWS FROM AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
POLITICAL SCIENTIST ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law, Spring, 5
ILSA J Int'l & Comp L 377)
Use of the debate can be an effective pedagogical tool for education
in the social sciences. Debates, like other role-playing simulations, help

students understand different perspectives on a policy issue by
adopting a perspective as their own. But, unlike other simulation
games, debates do not require that a student participate directly in
order to realize the benefit of the game. Instead of developing policy
alternatives and experiencing the consequences of different choices in
a traditional role-playing game, debates present the alternatives and
consequences in a formal, rhetorical fashion before a judgmental
audience. Having the class audience serve as jury helps each student develop
a well-thought-out opinion on the issue by providing contrasting facts and views
and enabling audience members to pose challenges to each debating team.
These debates ask undergraduate students to examine the international
legal implications of various United States foreign policy actions. Their
chief tasks are to assess the aims of the policy in question, determine their
relevance to United States national interests, ascertain what legal principles are
involved, and conclude how the United States policy in question squares with
relevant principles of international law. Debate questions are formulated as
resolutions, along the lines of: "Resolved: The United States should deny mostfavored-nation status to China on human rights grounds;" or "Resolved: The
United States should resort to military force to ensure inspection of Iraq's
possible nuclear, chemical and biological weapons facilities;" or "Resolved: The
United States' invasion of Grenada in 1983 was a lawful use of force;" or
"Resolved: The United States should kill Saddam Hussein." In addressing both
sides of these legal propositions, the student debaters must consult the
vast literature of international law, especially the nearly 100 professional lawschool-sponsored international law journals now being published in the United
States. This literature furnishes an incredibly rich body of legal analysis that
often treats topics affecting United States foreign policy, as well as other more
esoteric international legal subjects. Although most of these journals are
accessible in good law schools, they are largely unknown to the political science
community specializing in international relations, much less to the average
undergraduate. [*386]
By assessing the role of international law in United States foreign policymaking, students realize that United States actions do not always
measure up to international legal expectations; that at times,
international legal strictures get compromised for the sake of
perceived national interests, and that concepts and principles of
international law, like domestic law, can be interpreted and twisted in
order to justify United States policy in various international
circumstances. In this way, the debate format gives students the
benefits ascribed to simulations and other action learning techniques,
in that it makes them become actively engaged with their subjects, and
not be mere passive consumers. Rather than spectators, students
become legal advocates, observing, reacting to, and structuring
political and legal perceptions to fit the merits of their case.
The debate exercises carry several specific educational objectives.
First, students on each team must work together to refine a cogent
36
Kritik Answers
argument that compellingly asserts their legal position on a foreign
policy issue confronting the United States. In this way, they gain
greater insight into the real-world legal dilemmas faced by policy
makers. Second, as they work with other members of their team, they
realize the complexities of applying and implementing international
law, and the difficulty of bridging the gaps between United States
policy and international legal principles, either by reworking the former
or creatively reinterpreting the latter. Finally, research for the debates
forces students to become familiarized with contemporary issues on
the United States foreign policy agenda and the role that international
law plays in formulating and executing these policies. 8 The debate thus
becomes an excellent vehicle for pushing students beyond stale
arguments over principles into the real world of policy analysis,
political critique, and legal defense.
37
Kritik Answers
Traditional Debate Good (1/2)

SWITCH-SIDE PLAN-FOCUSED DEBATE ENSURES EVERY
COMPETITOR MUST EVALUATE BOTH SIDES OF POTENTIAL
POLICIES. THEY ENCOURAGE DEBATES WITHOUT CLASH.
THIS UNCRITICAL FORM OF DEBATE ELIMINATES OUR
CAPACITY TO ENGAGE IN SOCRATIC QUESTIONING, THE
ONLY FIREWALL AGAINST GENOCIDE
Villa, Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values,
Princeton University, Political Theory, April 1998 v26 n2 p147(26)
Dana R.
Arendt sees the categorical imperative as an absolute in the Platonic/authoritarian sense, standing above men and the realm of human affairs,
measuring them without any concern for context, specificity, or the "fundamental relativity" of the "interhuman realm."(30) Arendt emphasizes
The more judgment

is identified with the application of a rule or an unvarying standard, the more our
powers of judgment atrophy, and the less we are able to "stop and think" in the
Socratic sense. Moreover, the insistence that judgment is dependent on such standards leads to a "crisis in judgment" when these
this inheritance of Platonism because she sees it as inculcating a habit of mechanical, unthinking judgment.
standards are revealed to be without effective power. This, according to Arendt, is what happens in the course of the modern age, as new and
.
This process--call it the crisis in authority or, to use Nietzsche's symbolic formulation, the "death of God" --comes to its
conclusion with the advent of the evils of totalitarianism, evils so unprecedented
that they "have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards
for moral judgment."(31) The failure of the inherited wisdom of the past, the fact of a radical break in our tradition, throws us
unprecedented moral and political phenomena reveal the hollowness and inadequacy of the "reliable universal rules" the tradition had offered
back upon our own resources. Potentially, Arendt notes, the crisis is liberating, as it frees the faculty of judgment from its subservience to
objectivist regimes such as Plato's ideas or Kant's categorical imperative. As Arendt puts it in "Understanding and Politics": Even though we have
lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is beginning may have enough of
origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.(32) The
hope that the "crisis in authority" will lead to the rebirth of a genuinely autonomous faculty of judgment runs up against Arendt's own deeply
Minus the
presence of Socrates (who, like an electric ray, paralyzes his partners in
dialogue, forcing them to stop and think), the likely result of such a crisis is
thankfulness for anything that props up the old set of standards or provides the semblance of
ingrained sense that ordinary individuals will find it difficult indeed to wean themselves from pregiven categories and rules.
a new one. Responding to Hans Jonas's call for a renewed inquiry into ultimate, metaphysical grounds for judgment at a conference on her work
in 1972, Arendt declared her pessimism that "a new god will appear," and went on to observe: If you go through such a situation [as
totalitarianism] the first thing you know is the following: you never know how somebody will act. You have the surprise of your life! This goes
throughout all layers of society, and it goes throughout various distinctions between men. And if you want to make a generalization, then you
could say that those who were still very firmly convinced of the so-called old values were the first to be ready to change their old values for a new
set of values, provided they were given one. And I am afraid of this, because I think that the moment you give anybody a new set of values--or
this famous "bannister"--you can immediately exchange it. And the only thing the guy gets used to is having a "bannister" and a set of values, no
matter.(33) Arendt thought that the natural tendency of the ordinary person, when faced with the destruction of one set of authoritative rules,
would not be Socratic examination and perplexity (which only further dissolves the customary), but rather a grasping for a new code, a new
"bannister." Thinking, especially
Socratic thinking, dissolves grounds, it does not stabilize
them.
It is, as Arendt says, a "dangerous and resultless enterprise," one that can just as easily lead to cynicism and nihilism as to
independent judgment and a deepened moral integrity.(34) Arendt agrees with the analysis Kant gives in "What Is Enlightenment?": most people
would simply prefer not to make the effort that independent judgment demands, let alone risk the taken-for-granted moral presuppositions of
, Arendt holds onto the Socratic

possibility that ordinary individuals will remain open to the "winds of thought." She
profoundly agrees with Socrates that it is only through such examination that the individual is
likely to avoid complicity with the moral horrors perpetrated by popular political
regimes. Socratic thinking--which, in its relentless negativity, is the very opposite of all foundational or professional
philosophical thinking--liberates the faculty of judgment from the tyranny of rules and
custom. In this way, it prevents the individual from being "swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in."(35)
their existence. Yet however real this aversion to thinking or "paralysis" is
Independent judgment is, according to Arendt, the "by-product" of this liberating effect of thinking; it "realizes" thinking "in the world of
) Thinking may not be able to "make friends" of citizens as Socrates had hoped, but it
can "prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down."(37)
appearances."(36
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Kritik Answers
Traditional Debate Good (2/2)

TRADITIONAL DEBATE IS RE-PRESENTATION. WE DONT
CLAIM TO SPEAK A HIGHER TRUTH OR KNOW WHAT IS
BEST FOR OTHERS. WE DEBATE THOSE ISSUES
CONTINGENTLY. THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO SAY THAT DEBATE
SHOULD BE PURELY REPRESENTATIVE ARE THE
ACTIVISM/CRITIQUE CROWD.
Ann Marie
3/23/01
Baldonado, Fall 1996 http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Representation.html, accessed

1. Presence, bearing, air; Appearance; impression on the sight. 2. An Image,
likeness, or reproduction in some manner of a thing; A material image or figure;
a reproduction in some material or tangible form; in later use, a drawing or
painting. (of a person or thing); The action or fact of exhibiting in some visible
image or form; The fact of expressing or denoting by means of a figure or
symbol; symbolic action or exhibition. 3. The exhibition of character and action
upon the stage; the performance of a play; Acting, simulation, pretense. 4. The
action of placing a fact, etc., before another or others by means of discourse; a
statement or account, esp. one intended to convey a particular view or
impression of a matter in order to influence opinion or action. 5. A formal and
serious statement of facts, reasons, or arguments, made with a view to effecting
some change, preventing some action, etc.; hence, a remonstrance, protest,
expostulation. 6. The action of presenting to the mind or imagination; an image
thus presented; a clearly conceived idea or concept; The operation of the mind
in forming a clear image or concept; the faculty of doing this. 7. The fact of
standing for, or in place of, some other thing or person, esp. with a right or
authority to act on their account; substitution of one thing or person for another.
8. The fact of representing or being represented in a legislative or deliberative
assembly, spec. in Parliament; the position, principle, or system implied by this;
The aggregate of those who thus represent the elective body.
from The Oxford English Dictionary
Representation is presently a much debated topic not only in postcolonial
studies and academia, but in the larger cultural milieu. As the above dictionary
entry shows, the actual definitions for the word alone are cause for some
confusion. The Oxford English Dictionary defines representation primarily as
"presence" or "appearance." There is an implied visual component to these
primary definitions. Representations can be clear images, material
reproductions, performances and simulations. Representation can also be
defined as the act of placing or stating facts in order to influence or affect the
action of others. Of course, the word also has political connotations. Politicians
are thought to 'represent' a constituency. They are thought to have the right to
stand in the place of another. So above all, the term representation has a
semiotic meaning, in that something is 'standing for' something else. These
various yet related definitions are all implicated in the public debates about
representation. Theorists interested in Postcolonial studies, by closely examining various
forms of representations, visual, textual and otherwise, have teased out the different ways
that these "images" are implicated in power inequalities and the subordination of the
'subaltern'.
Representations-- these 'likenesses'--come in various forms: films, television, photographs,
paintings, advertisements and other forms of popular culture. Written materials--academic
texts, novels and other literature, journalistic pieces--are also important forms of
representation. These representations, to different degrees, are thought to be somewhat
realistic, or to go back to the definitions, they are thought be 'clear' or state 'a fact'. Yet
how can simulations or "impressions on the sight" be completely true? Edward Said, in his
analysis of textual representations of the Orient in Orientalism, emphasizes the fact that
representations can never be exactly realistic:
39
Kritik Answers
In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence,
but a re-presence, or a representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a
written statement about the Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally
depend, on the Orient as such. On the contrary, the written statement is a presence to the
reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real
thing as "the Orient". (21)
Representations, then can never really be 'natural' depictions of the orient. Instead, they
are constructed images, images that need to be interrogated for their ideological content.
In a similar way, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes a distinction between

Vertretung and Darstellung. The former she defines as "stepping in someone's
place. . .to tread in someone's shoes." Representation in this sense is "political
representation," or a speaking for the needs and desires of somebody or
something. Darstellung is representation as re-presentation, "placing there."
Representing is thus "proxy and portrait," according to Spivak. The complicity
between "speaking for" and "portraying" must be kept in mind ("Practical Politics
of the Open End," The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues.)
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Kritik Answers
Traditional Debate Accesses

Peformativity
TRADITIONAL DEBATE COOPTS THEIR PERFORMANCE
GOOD OFFENSE. IT INCORPORATES STYLE WITHOUT
ELIMINATING SUBSTANCE
Jeff
Parcher, February 26, 2001, www.ndtceda.com
BTW - my notions do not eliminate the notion of performance - they merely

contextualize them within a discussion that can be limited and fair. It merely
requires the performance be relevant by a reasonable criteria (ie the resolution).
Also, debates have speaker points. It seems fairly obvious to me that the debate
ballot is a clear dichotomy. One affirms or negates the resolution/plan and then
gives speaker points to reward or punish performance. Obviously, I realize that
performance impacts truth. But that's only a reason why a focus on the
resolutional question coopts the performative criteria. Of course a good
performance gets rewared in both points and in the decision itself. That's why we
don't need to make it JUST about performance. We already take the perfromance
into account inevitably. Mixing it further simply makes us drift aimlessly.
PLAN FOCUSED DEBATES ALWAYS PROVIDE A CLEARER,

FAIRER, AND MORE EDUCATION FRAMEWORK
Jeff
Parcher, February 26, 2001, www.ndtceda.com
This is absolutely devastating to the performance arguments. And even if we

could hodge-podge together some inevtiably subjective criteria in each
individual debate, they simply could never match the benefits of debate
provided by a clear plan/resolution focus. Performance debates would be
incredibly repetitive in that they would always be 90% about methodolgy rather
than the substance of performances. Because the limits to possible
performances are so large - both sides would always have an incentive to focus
on methodology rather than substance. The affirmative will be on an endless
search to coopt the negative performance (in the words of the Fort, "We are in
solidarity with these words"). The negative on an endless search to exclude the
affirmative performance through topicality or general kritiks. Rarely do I think we
would ever have debates which engaged the two performances. The current
puryeyors of this type of debate have certainly relied much more on
competitiveness arguments than on actual substantive engagement (as far as
I've seen anyway).
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Kritik Answers
Competition Good
COMPETITION IS IS NECESSARY FOR SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION
Olson and Jean- Franois Lyotard, Resisting a Discourse of
Mastery: A Conversation with Jean-Franois Lyotard, JAC 15.3, 1995,
Gary
http://jac.gsu.edu/jac/15.3/Articles/1.htm, accessed 1/21/02

Second, competition is not competition between different groups in a cultural
reality. Not at all. The notion of competition as a male model is a notion I
reject, maybe because I am a male, but, in fact, because there is not any other
way to understand the domination of the competitive pattern in our society. I
mean, this system has competed against all other systems, all the other ways of
organizing human communities. And we can consider human history not as a
linear succession with a sort of causality between each segment of this line, but
as the opposite, as the contingent and different ways in which human
communities have tried to organizeexactly in the same terms that so-called
life has fortuitously produced different forms of living beings. And between these
different entitiesanimals, vegetables, human beings, or human communities
competition was necessarily open. They are all open systems; they need to
grasp energy from outside in order to maintain themselves, and if they have to
grasp energy from outside, they are competitive with other systems. Thats true
for animals, even vegetables, and for human communities. And thats how our
system, now, won against other ways that communities have tried to organize
themselves, and it has internalized competition itself in order to continue to be
able to grasp outside and inside energies as much as possible. Its not a male
idea; there is no argument against it. There is no doubt: its not a male idea. And
Im sure women are perfectly able to understand this, even if they hate it; so do
I. But we are in this condition.
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Kritik Answers
**Permutations**
Juxtaposition Perm: 2AC
PERM DO BOTH, CRITICISM WITHOUT OPPOSITION
CAUSES COOPERTATION, ONLY JUXTAPOSITION ALLOWS
CONSTANT CRITICISM
Edelman 87
[Prof. Pol Sci @ Wisconsin, September, U. of Minn, Constructing the Political

Spectacle]
Opposition in expressed opinion accordingly make for social stability:
they are almost synonymous with it, for they reaffirm and reify what
everyone already knows and accepts. To express a prochoice or an antiabortion position is to affirm that the opposite position is being
expressed as well and to accept the opposition as a continuing feature of
public discourse. The well established, thoroughly anticipated and
therefore ritualistic reaffirmation of the differences institutionalizes
mboth rhetorics minimizing the chance of major shifts and leaving the
regime wide discretion; for there will be anticipated support and
opposition no matter what forms of action or inaction occur. As long as
there is substantial expression of opinion on both sides of an issue,
social stability persists and so does regime discretion regardless of the
exact numbers or of marginal shifts in members. The persistence of
unresolved problems with conflicting meaning is vital. It is not the
expression of opposition but of consensus that makes for instability.
Wher statements need not be defended against counterstatements they
are readily changed or inverted. Consensual agreements about the
foreign enemy of ally yield readily to acceptance of the erstwhile enemy
as ally and the former ally as enemy, but opinions about abortion are
likely to persist. Rebellion and revolution do not ferment in societies in
which there has been a long history of the ritualized exchange of
opposing views of issues accepted as important, but rather where such
exchanges have been lacking, so that a consensus on common action to
oust the regime is easily built.
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Kritik Answers
Juxtaposition Perm: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC EDELMAN EVIDENCE. PURE CRITIQUE
FAILS BECAUSE IT FLIPS THE BINARISM, NOT ENGAGING
THE DISCOURSE IT CRITICIZED, CREATING A NEW
MONOLITHIC HEGEMONY. ONLY THE PERM THAT
COMBINES THE 1AC AND THE CRITICISM CREATES
CONSTANT CRITICISM, USING THE AFF AS A TARGET,
SOLVING BETTER THAN THE ALTERNATIVE
ALSO, ALL OF THEIR PERM THEORY AND LINK ARGUMENTS
DONT APPLY BECAUSE THE PERM COMBINES THE WHOLE
1AC AND THE CRITICISM, USING THAT CONTRADICTION TO
CONSIDER BOTH SIDES, IMPACT TURNING THEIR
ARGUMENT
ALSO, COMBINING THE AFF AND THE K SOLVES BETTER
Said 94
[Edward W., Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reich Lectures,
Vintage, 1994, 60]
Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind
and what is actual hear and now, there is a double perspective that
never sees things in isoaltion. Every scene or situation in the new
country necessarily draws on its counterpart in the old country.
Intellectually, this means that an idea or expreience is always
counterposed with another, therefore, making them both appear in a
sometimes new and unpredictable light: from that justaposition, one
gets a better, perhaps more universal idea of how to think say, about a
human rights issue in one situation by comparison with another. I have
felt that most of the alarmist and deeply flawed discussions of Islamic
fundamentalism in the West have been intellectually invidious precisely
because they have not been compared with Jewish or Christian
fundamentalism, both equally prevalent and reprehensible in my own
experience of the Middle East. What is usually thought of as a simple
issue of judgment against an approved enemy, in double or exile
perspective impels a Western intellectual to see a much wider picture,
with the requirement now of taking a position as a secularist (or not) on
all theocratic tendencies, not just against the conventionally designated
ones.
ALSO, PURE CRITICISM FAILS, ONLY COMBINATION OF

CONTRADICTORY IDEAS SOLVES
Walt 98
[Stephen M., Prof. Pol. Sci, U. of Chicago, International Relations: one world,
many theories, Foreign Policy, March 22, LN]
No single approach can capture all the complexity of contemporary
world politics. Therefore, we are better off with a diverse array of
competing ideas rather than a single theoretical orthodoxy. Competition
between theories helps reveal their strengths and weaknesses and spurs
44
Kritik Answers
subsequent refinements, while revealing flaws in conventional wisdom.
Although we should take care to emphasize inventiveness over
invective, we should welcome and encourage the heterogeneity of
contemporary scholarship.
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Kritik Answers
Juxtapositon Perm: 2AR

THE EDELMAN PERMUTATION IS THE ONLY ADVOCACY
WHICH PROVIDES FOR CONSTANT CRITICISM.
JUXTAPOSITION TAKES THE WHOLE AFFIRMATIVE SPEECH
ACT AND THE WHOLE NEGATIVE CRITICISM AND ALLOWS
YOU TO VOTE FOR THE PROCESS OF CONSTANT
CRITICISM. IT USES THE PLAN TO UPHOLD THE SYSTEM AS
A TARGET FOR THE NEG CRITICISM. WITHOUT THAT, THE
CRITICISM BECOMES INVERTED, EMBODYING ITS OWN
OPPOSITE.
ALSO, NONE OF THEIR SPECIFIC EVIDENCE APPLIES. ITS
AN IN-ROUND PERMUTATION ABOUT OUR SPEECDH ACTS
AND THE BEST WAY TO MAINTAIN THE INTEGRITY OF
CRITICISM
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Kritik Answers
Juxtaposition Perm: Ext

AND, JUXTAPOSING THE AFF AND THE ALTERNATIVE
CREATES EFFECTIVE, CONSTANT CRITICISM, OVERCOMING
THE HEGEMONY OF CRITIQUE
Connolly 2002
[William E., Prof. of Pol. Sci. @ John Hopkins U., Identity/Difference: Democratic
Negotiations of Political Paradox, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
September 2002, 180-1]
Another way to pose the paradox is this: The human animal is essentially
incomplete without social form and a common language, institutional
setting, set of political traditions, and political forum for inunciating
public purposes are indispensible to the acquisition of an identity and
the commonalities essential to life. But every form of social completion
and enablement also contains subjugations and cruelties within it.
Politics, then, is the medium through which these ambiguities can be
engaged and confronted, shifted and stretched. It is simultaneously a
medum through which common purposes are crystalized and the
consummage means by which their transcription into musical harmonies
is exposed, contested, disturbed, and unsettled. A society that enables
politics as this ambiguous medium is a good society because it enables
the paradox of difference to find expression in public life
AND, JUXTAPOSITION OF INCOMPATIBLE IDEAS AVOIDS

THE PROBLEMS OF TRADITIONAL THEORY AND ENABLES A
PROCESS OF CONSTANT CRITICISM
Marcus '98
[George E., Professor of Anthro at Rice University, Ethnography through
Thick and Thin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, 1867//uwyo-ajl]
The postmodern notions of heterotopia (Foucault), juxtapositions, and
the blocking together of incommensurables (Lyotard) have served to
renew the long-neglected practice of comparison in anthropology, but in
altered ways. Juxtapositions do not have the obvious meta-logic of older
styles of comparison in anthropology (e.g., controlled comparisons within
a cultural area or "natural" geographical region); rather, they emerge
from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose controus
are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making
an account which has different, complexly connected real-world sites of
investigation. The postmodern object of study is ultimately mobile and
multiply situated, so any ethnography of such an object will have a
comparative dimension that is integral to it, in the form of juxtapositions
of seeming incommensurables or phenomena that might conventionally
have appeared to be "world apart." Comparison reenters the very act of
ethnographic specificity by a postmodern vision of seemingly improbably
juxtapositions, the global collapsed into and made and integral part of a
parallel, related local situations rather than something monolithic and
external to them. This move toward comparison as heterotopia firmly
deterritorializes culture in ethnographic writing and simulates accounts
of cultures composed in a landscape for which there is as yet no
developed theoretical comparison
47
Kritik Answers
Campbell Perm: 2AC

PERM DO THE PLAN WHILE ENDORSING THE CRITICISM
EXIGENCIES DEMAND ACTION EVEN IN THE FACE OF
CRITICISM
Campbell 98
[David, Intl Relations Prof @ UM, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity,
and Justice in Bosnia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 186]
The undecidable within the decision does not, however, prevent the decision nor
avoid its urgency. As Derrida observes, a just decision is always required
immediately, right away. This necessary haste has unavoidable consequences
because the pursuit of infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of
conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it are unavailable
in the crush of time. Nor can the crush of time be avoided, even by unlimited
time, because the moment of decision as such always remains a finite moment
of urgency and precipitation. The decision is always structurally finite, it
aalways marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive
deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it. That is why, invoking
Kierkegaard, Derrida, declares that the instant of decision is a madness.
The finite nature of the decision may be a madness in the way it renders
possible the impossible, the infinite character of justice, but Derrida argues for
the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, Derrida argues for the
necessity of this madness. Most importantly, although Derridas argument
concerning the decision has, to this pint, been concerned with an account of the
procedure by which a decision is possible, it is with respect to the ncessity of the
decision that Derrida begins to formulate an account of the decision that bears
upon the content of the decision. In so doing, Derridas argument addresses
more directly more directly, I would argue than is acknowledged by Critchley
the concern that for politics (at least for a progressive politics) one must provide
an account of the decision to combat domination.
That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, that justice
exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinalbe
cannot and should not serve as alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles,
within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and others.
Indeed, incalculable justice requires us to calculate. From where do these
insistences come? What is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is
both the character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a
relationship that because of its undecidability multiplies responsibility, and the
fact that left to itself, the incalculable and given (donatrice) idea of justice is
always very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it can always be
reappropriated by the most perverse calculation. The necessity of calculating
the incalculable thus responds to a duty a duty that inhabits the instant of
madness and compels the decision to avoid the bad, the perverse
calculation, even the worst. This is the duty that also dwells with
deconstructive thought and makes it the starting point, the at least necessary
condition, for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms.
And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we recognize
that Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences we
recognize all too well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of
xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism.
48
Kritik Answers
Campbell Perm: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC CAMPBELL 98 EVIDENCE. WHEN FACED
WITH UNDECIDABLE SITUATIONS AND THE STAKES ARE AS
HIGH AS THE 1AC, YOU HAVE TO ACT IN THE FACE OF
CRITICISM OR RISK POLITICAL PARALYSIS BECAUSE EVERY
ACTION SEEMS DOOMED, ALLOWING OPPRESSION AND
VIOLENCE TO REIGN UNCHECKED
49
Kritik Answers
Strategic Essentialism Perm: 2AC

PERMUTATION: THE PLAN IS A STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISM
THAT CREATES SPACE FOR ACTIVIST POLITICS
(THE CRITIQUE IS A FALSE CHOICE THAT IMPEDES
ACTIVISM.)
Sankaran
Krishna, Professor, Political Science, University of Hawaii, Alternatives v. 18,
1993, p. 400-401.
The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either
indulges in total critique, delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed
to nostalgic, essentialist unities that have become obsolete and have been the
grounds for all our oppressions. In offering this dichotomous choice, Der Derian
replicates a move made by Chaloupka in his equally dismissive critique of the
move mainstream nuclear opposition, the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early
1980s, that, according to him, was operating along obsolete lines, emphasizing
facts and realities, while a postmodern President Reagan easily outflanked
them through an illusory Star Wars program (See KN: chapter 4) Chaloupka
centers this difference between his own supposedly total critique of all sovereign
truths (which he describes as nuclear criticism in an echo of literary criticism)
and the more partial (and issue based) criticism of what he calls nuclear
opposition or antinuclearists at the very outset of his book. (Kn: xvi) Once
again, the unhappy choice forced upon the reader is to join Chaloupka in his
total critique of all sovereign truths or be trapped in obsolete essentialisms. This
leads to a disastrous politics, pitting groups that have the most in common (and
need to unite on some basis to be effective) against each other. Both Chaloupka
and Der Derian thus reserve their most trenchant critique for political groups
that should, in any analysis, be regarded as the closest to them in terms of an
oppositional politics and their desired futures. Instead of finding ways to live with
these differences and to (if fleetingly) coalesce against the New Right, this
fratricidal critique is politically suicidal. It obliterates the space for a political
activism based on provisional and contingent coalitions, for uniting behind a
common cause even as one recognizes that the coalition is comprised of groups
that have very differing (and possibly unresolvable) views of reality. Moreover, it
fails to consider the possibility that there may have been other, more compelling
reasons for the failure of the Nuclear Freeze movement or anti-Gulf War
movement. Like many a worthwhile cause in our times, they failed to garner
sufficient support to influence state policy. The response to that need not be a
totalizing critique that delegitimizes all narratives. The blackmail inherent in the
choice offered by Der Derian and Chaloupka, between total critique and
ineffective partial critique, ought to be transparent. Among other things, it
effectively militates against the construction of provisional or strategic
essentialisms in our attempts to create space for activist politics. In the next
section, I focus more widely on the genre of critical international theory and its
impact on such an activist politics.
50
Kritik Answers
Strategic Essentialism Perm: 1AR

NEXT, EXTEND THE KRISHNA PERM. THE NEGS WITH US
OR AGAINST US MENTALITY FRACTURES EFFECTIVE
SOCIAL ACTION INSTEAD OF FOCUSING ON
DIFFERENCES. WE SHOULD HIGHLIGHT OUR
AGREEMENTS. THIS HAS 2 IMPLICATIONS:
IT FLIPS THE K SOLVENCY BECAUSE IT ENTRENCHING AN
ALIENATING PRAXIS
IT PROVES THAT ONLY THE PERM, WHICH RECOGNIZES
THE VALUE OF BOTH ADVOCACIES, CAN LEAD TO
EFFECTIVE POLITICAL ACTION DICHOTOMOUS CHOICE
COLLAPSES PRAXIS
51
Kritik Answers
Bleiker Perm: 2AC

VIEWING TWO COMPETING IDEOLOGIES TOGETHER AND
CREATING CONTRADICTIONS ALLOWS THE IDEOLOGIES TO
COEXIST, OPENING MORE AVENUES FOR POLITICAL
THOUGHT
Bleiker 97
[Roland, PhD Cand @ Australian National U. of Political Sci, Alternatives 22, 5785//uwyo]
No concept will ever be sufficient, will ever do justice to the object it is trying to capture. The objective then becomes to conceptualize thoughts
so that they do not silence other voices, but coexist and interact with them. Various authors have suggested methods for this purpose, methods
Bakhtins dialogism, a theory

accepts the
existence of multiple meanings, draws connections between differences, and searches
for possibilities to establish conceptual and linguistic dialogues among competing ideas, values, speech forms, texts, and
that will always remain attempts without ever reaching the ideal state that they aspire to. We know of Mikhail
of knowledge and language that tries to avoid the excluding tendencies of monological thought forms. Instead, he
validity claims, and the like. Jurgen Habermas attempts to theorize the preconditions for ideal speech situations. Communication, in this case,
should be as unrestrained as possible, such that claims to truth and rightness can be discursively redeemed, albeit, one should add, though a
rationalism and universalism that it violently anti-Bakhtinian and anti-Adornian. Closer to the familiar terrain of IR we find Christine Sylvesters
empathetic cooperation, which aims at opening up questions of gender

by a process of positional slippage that occurs when one listens seriously to the
concerns, fears, and agendas of those one is unaccustomed to heeding when building
social theory. But how does one conceptualize such attempts if concepts can ever do justice to the objects they are trying to capture?
feminist method of
The daring task is, as we know from Adorno, to open with concepts what does not fit into concepts, to resist the distorting power of reification and
return the conceptual to the nonconceptual. This disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of critical philosophy. It impedes the concept from
developing its own dynamics and from becoming an absolute in itself. The first step toward disenchanting the concept is simply refusing to define
it monologically. Concepts should achieve meaning only gradually in relation to each other. Adorno even intentionally uses the same concept in
different way in order to liberate it from the harrow definition that language itself had already imposed on it. That contradictions could arise out
.
One cannot eliminate the contradictory, the fragmentary, and the discontinuous.
Contradictions are only contradictions if one assumes the existence of a prior
universal standard of reference. What is different appears as divergent, dissonant, and
negative only as long as our consciousness strives for a totalizing standpoint, which
we must avoid if we are to escape the reifying and excluding dangers of identity
thinking. Just as reality is fragmented, we need to think in fragments. Unity then is not to be found be evening
out discontinuities. Contradictions are to be referred over artificially constructed
meanings and the silencing of underlying conflicts. Thus, Adorno advocates writing in fragments, such
of this practice does not bother Adorno. Indeed, he considers them essential
that the resulting text appears as if it always could be interrupted, cut off abruptly, any time, and place. He adheres to Nietzsches advice that
one should approach deep problems like taking a cold bath, quickly into them and quickly out again. The belief that one does not reach deep
enough this way, he claims, is simply the superstition of those who fear cold water. But Nietzsches bath has already catapulted us into the vortex
of the next linguistic terrain of resistance the question of style.
52
Kritik Answers
Perm Solves: Coalitions Key

THE OPPRESSED SHOULD WELCOME THOSE FROM THE DOMINANT GROUP
COMMITTED TO FIGHTING AGAINST OPPRESSION
Khan, Professor, Law, Washburn University. Lessons From Malcolm X: Freedom by Any
Means Necessary, HOWARD LAW JOURNAL v. 38 1994.
Ali
Yet, no concept of freedom requires that every member of the dominant group
be dehumanized. Such dehumanization is unnecessary, even counterproductive, in the fight against oppression. The oppressed should welcome those
among the dominant group who gather the moral courage to rebel against their
own kind and fight for the sake of justice. n60 [*95]
53
Kritik Answers
Perm Solves: Hybridization Effective

THE PERM FUNCTIONS AS A NEGOTIATION BETWEEN THE
POLITICS OF THE 1AC AND THE ALTERNATIVE, ALLOWING
FOR MORE EFFECTIVE POLITICAL CHANGE THAN EITHER
THE ONE OR THE OTHER.
Homi K.
Bhabha, Professor, University of Sussex, THE LOCATION OF CULTURE, 1994, p.
28.
My illustration attempts to display the importance of the hybrid moment of
political change. Here the transformational value of change lies in the
rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One (unitary
working class) nor the Other (the politics of gender) but something else besides,
which contests the terms, and territories of both. There is a negotiation between
gender and class, where each formation encounters the displaced, differentiated
boundaries of its group representation and enunciative sites in which the limits
and limitations of social power are encountered in an agonistic relation. When it
is suggested that the British Labour Party should seek to produce a socialist
alliance among progressive forces that are widely dispersed and distributed
across a range of class, culture and occupational forces - without a unifying
sense of the class for itself - the kind of hybridity that I have attempted to
identify is being acknowledged as a historical necessity. We need a little less
pietistic articulation of political principle (around class and nation); a little more
of the principle of political negotiation.
54
Kritik Answers
Perm Solves: Multifaceted

Resistance Best
THE PERM SOLVES BEST A MULTIFACETED APPROACH TO COMBATING
OPPRESSION IS KEY
Khan, Professor, Law, Washburn University. Lessons From Malcolm X: Freedom by Any
Means Necessary, HOWARD LAW JOURNAL v. 38 1994.
Ali
It must be noted that Malcolm's concept of any means necessary includes, but is
not limited to non-violent civil disobedience. n29 If non-violent civil disobedience
does not change the system, then any means necessary allows the oppressed to
consider armed resistance. The oppressed may use multiple strategies. One
group among the oppressed, for example, may use non-violent means to fight
oppression; another may advocate more radical methods to change the system.
This multi-faceted approach creates more pressure on the oppressor to lift
oppression. In order for such a movement to be effective, however, the
oppressor must believe that those who are involved are serious about [*87]
their cause. Those who are oppressed must be willing to sacrifice their lives to
abolish the state of subjugation. n30 It is also important that the oppressed
maintain their underlying solidarity because it is inevitable that they will
encounter efforts to divide them and turn them against each other.
55
Kritik Answers
Perm Solves: Radicalism Dooms the

Movement
THEY WONT ACHIEVE THEIR MINDSET SHIFT, AND EVEN IF THEY DO
CONCRETE POLICIES OPTIONS WILL STILL BE KEY
Lewis professor in the School of the Environment and the Center for International
Studies at Duke University. GREEN DELUSIONS, 1992 p 11-12.
Martin
Here I will argue that eco-radical political strategy, if one may call it that, is
consummately self-defeating. The theoretical and empirical rejection of green
radicalism is thus bolstered by a series of purely pragmatic objections. Many
eco-radicals hope that a massive ideological campaign can transform popular
perceptions, leading both to a fundamental change in lifestyles and to largescale social reconstruction. Such a view is highly credulous. The notion that
continued intellectual hectoring will eventually result in a mass conversion to
environmental monasticism (Roszak 1979:289)marked by vows of poverty and
nonprocreationis difficult to accept. While radical views have come to
dominate many environmental circles, their effect on the populace at large has
been minimal. Despite the greening of European politics that recently gave
stalwarts considerable hope, the more recent green plunge suggests that even
the European electorate lacks commitment to environmental radicalism. In the
United States several decades of preaching the same ecoradical gospel have
had little appreciable effect; the public remains, as before, wedded to consumer
culture and creature comforts. The stubborn hope that nonetheless continues to
inform green extremism stems from a pervasive philosophical error in radical
environmentalism. As David Pepper (1989) shows, most eco-radical thought is
mired in idealism: in this case the belief that the roots of the ecological crisis lie
ultimately in ideas about nature and humanity As Dobson (1990:37) puts it:
Central to the theoretical canon of Green politics is the belief that our social,
political, and economic problems are substantially caused by our intellectual
relationship with the world (see also Milbrath 1989:338). If only such ideas
would change, many aver, all would be well. Such a belief has inspired the
writing of eloquent jeremiads; it is less conducive to designing concrete
strategies for effective social and economic change. It is certainly not my belief
that ideas are insignificant or that attempting to change others opinions is a
futile endeavor. If that were true I would hardly feel compelled to write a polemic
work of this kind. But I am also convinced that changing ideas alone is
insufficient. Widespread ideological conversion, even if it were to occur, would
hardly be adequate for genuine social transformation. Specific policies must still
be formulated, and specific political plans must be devised if those policies are
ever to be realized.
56
Kritik Answers
Perm Solves: Working within

Institutions Key to Change
ONLY WORKING WITHIN THE INSTITUTIONS OF POWER
CAN CREATE CHANGE
Lawrence
p. 391-393
Grossburg, University of Illinois, WE GOTTA GET OUTTA THIS PLACE, 1992,

The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance,
understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which
power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific
institutions that power can be challenged. The Left has assumed from some time
now that, since it has so little access to the apparatuses of agency, its only
alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The
Left does in fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to the
entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise, the Left
has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have
produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our world, although it is
individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they
must act within organizations, and within the system of organizations which in
fact have the capacity (as well as the moral responsibility) to fight them. Without
such organizations, the only models of political commitment are self-interest and
charity. Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others who cannot act on their
own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of global capitalism,
and everyones position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will not take
much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the
experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the fallen middle class
demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees about the future of any single
nation. We can imagine ourselves involved in a politics where acting for another
is always acting for oneself as well, a politics in which everyone struggles with
the resources they have to make their lives (and the world) better, since the two
are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to think of affirmation
action as in everyones best interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We
need to think with what Axelos has described as a planetary thought which
would be a coherent thoughtbut not a rationalizing and rationalist inflection;
it would be a fragmentary thought of the open totalityfor what we can grasp
are fragments unveiled on the horizon of the totality. Such a politics will not
begin by distinguishing between the local and the global (and certainly not by
valorizing one over the other) for the ways in which the former are incorporated
into the latter preclude the luxury of such choices. Resistance is always a local
struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to
connect into its global structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally.
Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of articulation between
them, the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto
the global. Since the meaning of these terms has to be understood in the
context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally and locally:
Think globally, act appropriately! Fight locally because that is the scene of
action, but aim for the global because that is the scene of agency. Local
struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point
of their insertion into the field of immanence. This requires the imagination and
construction of forms of unity, commonality and social agency which do not
deny differences. Without such commonality, politics is too easily reduced to a
question of individual rights (i.e., in the terms of classical utility theory);
difference ends up trumping politics, bringing it to an end. The struggle
against the disciplined mobilization of everyday life can only be built on affective
commonalities, a shared responsible yearning: a yearning out towards
something more and something better than this and this place now. The Left,
57
Kritik Answers
after all, is defined by its common commitment to principles of justice, equality
and democracy (although these might conflict) in economic, political and
cultural life. It is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion, that such things
are possible. The construction of an affective commonality attempts to mobilize
people in a common struggle, despite the fact that they have no common
identity or character, recognizing that they are the only force capable of
providing a new historical and oppositional agency. It strives to organize
minorities into a new majority.
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**Classic Turns**
Derrida Turn: 2AC
TURN CALL TO REJECT RE-INVENTS HIERARCHIES
POLITICAL ACTION IS KEY TO TRANSCEND THEIR FALSE
BINARIES
Newman 2001
[Saul, Sociology @ Macquarie University, Philosophy & Social Criticism 27: 3, pp.
4-6//uwyo]
Derrida does not simply want to invert the terms of these
binaries so that the subordinated term becomes the privileged term. He does not want to
put writing in the place of speech, for instance. Inversion in this way leaves intact the hierarchical,
authoritarian structure of the binary division. Such a strategy only re- affirms the
place of power in the very attempt to overthrow it. One could argue that Marxism fell victim to this logic
It must be made clear, however, that
by replacing the bourgeois state with the equally authoritarian workers state. This is a logic that haunts our radical political imaginary.
Revolutionary political theories have often succeeded only in reinventing power

and authority in their own image. However, Derrida also recognizes the dangers of
subversion that is, the radical strategy of overthrowing the hierarchy altogether,
rather than inverting its terms. For instance, the classical anarchists critique of Marxism went along the lines that Marxism neglected political
power in particular the power of the state for economic power, and this would mean a restoration of political power in a Marxist revolution.
Derrida
believes that subversion and inversion both culminate in the same thing the
reinvention of authority, in different guises. Thus, the anarchist critique is based on the Enlightenment idea of a
Rather, for anarchists, the state and all forms of political power must be abolished as the first revolutionary act. However,
rational and moral human essence that power denies, and yet we know from Derrida that any essential identity involves a radical exclusion or
, anarchism substituted political and economic authority for

a rational authority founded on an Enlighten- ment-humanist subjectivity. Both
radical politico-theoretical strategies then the strategy of inversion, as
exemplified by Marxism, and the strategy of subversion, as exemplified by
anarchism are two sides of the same logic of logic of place. So for Derrida:
suppression of other identities. Thus
What must occur then is not merely a suppression of all hierarchy, for anarchy only consolidates just as surely the established order of a
metaphysical hierarchy; nor is it a simple change or reversal in the terms of any given hierarchy. Rather the Umdrehung must be a
transformation of the hierarchical structure itself.
to avoid the lure of authority one must go beyond both the anarchic
desire to destroy hierarchy, and the mere reversal of terms. Rather, as Derrida suggests, if one
wants to avoid this trap the hierarchical structure itself must be transformed . Political action must invoke a
rethinking of revolution and authority in a way that traces a path between these
two terms, so that it does not merely reinvent the place of power . It could be argued that
In other words,
Derrida propounds an anarchism of his own, if by anarchism one means a questioning of all authority, including textual and philosophical
authority, as well as a desire to avoid the trap of reproducing authority and hierarchy in ones attempt to destroy it.
This deconstructive attempt to transform the very structure of hierarchy and authority, to go beyond the binary opposition, is also found in
Nietzsche. Nietzsche believes that one cannot merely oppose authority by affirming its opposite: this is only to react to and, thus, affirm the
One must, he argues, transcend oppositional thinking

altogether go beyond truth and error, beyond being and becoming, beyond good and evil. For
Nietzsche it is simply a moral prejudice to privilege truth over error. However, he
does not try to counter this by privileging error over truth, because this leaves the opposition
intact. Rather, he refuses to confine his view of the world to this opposition: Indeed what
domination one is supposedly resisting.
compels us to assume that there exists any essential antithesis between true and false? Is it not enough to suppose grades of apparentness
and as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance? Nietzsche displaces, rather than replaces, these oppositional and
authoritarian structures of thought he displaces place. This strategy of displacement, similarly adopted by Derrida, provides certain clues to
. Rather than reversing the terms of the

binary opposition, one should perhaps question, and try to make problematic,
its very structure.
developing a non-essentialist theory of resistance to power and authority
59
Kritik Answers
Fear of Co-optation Turn: 2AC

FEAR OF CO-OPTATION LEADS TO PASSIVE ACCEPTANCE
OF OPPRESSION THE BETTER ALTERNATIVE IS TO
ENGAGE IN POLITICS WHILE ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR
INCOMPLETION THAT VERY FAILURE SPURS MORE
RADICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE SYSTEMS
UNCONSCIOUS COORDINATES
Zizek 2004
[Slavoj, Ocean Rain, Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek, The Electronic Book
Review, July 1, 2004, www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servlet/ebr?
comman=view_essay&essay_id=rasmussen, Acc. 10-23-04//uwyo-ajl]
Zizek: Im trying to avoid two extremes. One extreme is the traditional

pseudo-radical position which says, If you engage in politics - helping
trade unions or combating sexual harassment, whatever - youve been
co-opted and so on. Then you have the other extreme which says, Ok,
you have to do something. I think both are wrong. I hate those pseudoradicals who dismiss every concrete action by saying that This will all
be co-opted. Of course, everything can be co-opted [chuckles] but this
is just a nice excuse to do absolutely nothing. Of course, there is a
danger that - to use the old Maoist term, popular in European student
movements thirty some years ago, the long march through institutions
will last so long that youll end up part of the institution. We need more
than ever, a parallax view - a double perspective. You engage in acts,
being aware of their limitations. This does not mean that you act with
your fingers crossed. No, you fully engage, but with the awareness that the ultimate wager in the almost Pascalian sense - is not simply that this
act will succeed, but that the very failure of this act will trigger a much
more radical process.
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Kritik Answers
Fear of Co-optation Turn: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC #__ ZIZEK 2004 EVIDENCE WHICH
INDICATES THAT AVOIDING CO-OPTATION CREATES
PARALYZING POLITICS THAT ENABLE OPPRESSION TO FILL
THE VOID. ONLY THE AFF POLITICS OF INCOMPLETION
SHATTERS STATUS QUO POLITICS BY UNDERMINING THE
ROOT CAUSE OF VIOLENCE
AND, FEAR OF CO-OPTATION FALLS INTO POWERLESSNESS
Pritchard 2000
[Elizabeth, Bowdoin College, Hypatia, Summer, CWI]
The third way in which a feminist reinscription of the development logic
of mobility jeopardizes women's well-being is that a fixation on
development or liberty as escaping or exiting the "closure" entailed in
various locations reinscribes a utopianism that jeopardizes the possibility
of a politics directed toward constructing an alternative and liveable
world. And here again, some postmodern theorists betray the legacy of
the Enlightenment. The dislocated mobile subjects of the Enlightenment
are "at home" in a utopianism that defers the burden of the definitions,
representations, and affiliations necessary for democratic political
action. Such burdensome tasks are seen to threaten closure--and hence
are repudiated.
Reinhart Koselleck argues that a legacy of the Enlightenment is the
persistence and pathology of utopianism (Koselleck 1988). The tradition
of Enlightenment critique arises in the context of political absolutism
that is instituted in the wake of religious wars. Setting themselves
against the constraining tendencies of absolutism, the Enlightenment
thinkers, whose field of action is a "single global world," engage in a
"ceaseless movement" of depersonalized critique within the horizon of
an "open-ended future." This produces a utopian self-conception
whereby "modern man is destined to be at home everywhere and
nowhere" (Koselleck 1988, 5). The error in this legacy of modernity,
according to Koselleck, is that an unpolitical position of utopianism is
mistaken as a political position. The Enlightenment thinkers were
unwilling to take responsibility for history by formulating concrete
policies and goals and designing and joining social and political
institutions; instead they resorted to polar positions as persons who
negate present realities and dream of a future they are powerless to
realize.
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The Fetish: 2AC

DISAVOWAL OF THE VIOLENCE OF REPRESENTATION AND
CALLS FOR INTERNAL RETHINKING RELY ON
ASSUMPTIONS OF METAPHYSICAL INNOCENCE,
FETISHIZING AN AUTHENTICITY THAT NEVER EXISTED
Bewes 97
[Timothy, doctorate in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Cynicism
and Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 195-6//uwyo-ajl]
postmodernism has actually
become something. Its principal characteristic is the retreat from and disavowal
of the violence of representation - both political and semiotic. There are three
further aspects to this essentially ignominious cultural operation: (i) a cultivation of stupidity (what I have called
Kelvinism, or 'metaphysical innocence') as a means of circumventing the ideational
'brutality' of the political life; (ii) a recourse to the idea of an internal or
subjective 'truth of the soul' which transcends political reality, along with the
contingencies of representation. Both of these signal an attachment to a surface/
depth model of subjectivity which in each case amounts to a fetishization of
authenticity, whether by opting to 'remain' on the surface, or by retreating
'inwards'; (iii) a collapse of faith by individuals and even politicians themselves, not only in the political infrastructure but in the very'
Despite the diligence and the sterling efforts of its best theoreti-cians, then, it seems that
concept of political engagement - here it becomes apparent that Tony Blair, for example, is more 'postodern' than any theoretician.
It should be clear that
these three responses stand in an approximately analogous relationship to the archetypal forms in
in a state of anxiety, shrinks from the violence of determinate negation
which consciousness,
and 'strives to hold on to what it is in danger of losing'. 59 At various points throughout the present work I have used the terms 'decadence',
capitulation to 'things as they

are'; it may be as well here to remind ourselves of the terms in which Hegel describes these manifestations of a retreat from truth.
'irony' and 'relativism' to refer to these instances of an epistemological loss of nerve, this
Consciousness, he says, at the decisive moment in which it is required to go beyond its own limits, (i) 'wishes to remain in a state' of unthinking
inertia'; (ii) gloats over its own understanding, 'which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego instead of any
Postmodernism,
content'; (iii) 'entrenches itself in sentimentality, which assures us that it finds everything to be good in its kind'. 60
an empirical social condition - by which I mean that a series of critical-theoretical strategies has attained a certain concrete form -
legitimizes these symptoms of cultural anxiety; postmodernism becomes synonymous, therefore, with
deceleration, with a sense of cultural and political conclusivity; postmodernism is the principal vehicle of what
Baudrillard calls 'the illusion of the end'.
AUTHENTICITY FETISHIZATION AND ITS FEAR OF REASON

AND VIOLENCE ALLOW US TO SPEND HOURS DEBATING
THE FINE POINTS OF BAUDRILLARIAN ETHICS WHILE GAS
CHAMBERS ARE BUILT
Bewes 97
and Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997,146-7//uwyo-ajl]
If it is unreasonable to suppose that the Final Solution was potentiated or even
necessarily facilitated by Schmitt's theories, it is certainly the case that this
metaphysical structure of domination in the Third Reich, whereby the status of
public citizens is reduced to a level determined entirely in the 'natural' or
biological realm of necessity, is foreshadowed in his 1927 essay. In an abstract
and insidious way Schmitt introduces the idea that the 'transcendent' realm of
the political, as a matter of course, will not accommodate a people with
insufficient strength to ensure its own participation, and that such a fact is ipso
facto justification for its exclusion. 'If a people no longer possesses the energy or
the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby
vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.'130 Schmitt's concept
of the 'political', quite simply, is nothing of the sort - is instead weighed down by
necessity, in the form of what Marshall Berman calls German-Christian interiority
- by its preoccupation with authenticity, that is to say, and true political
'identity'. Auschwitz is a corollary not of reason, understood as risk, but of the
62
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fear of reason, which paradoxically is a fear of violence. The stench of burning
bodies is haunted always by the sickly aroma of cheap metaphysics.
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The Fetish: 1AR

THEIR ARGUMENT THAT WE SHOULD AVOID DISCURSIVE
VIOLENCE IS SYMPTOMATIC OF ANXIETY IN THE WAKE OF
CONTEMPORARY FRAGEMENTATION. THIS FEAR OF
POLITICAL VIOLENCE ASSUMES THE EXISTENCE OF A
UTOPIAN VIOLENCE-FREE STATE OF METAPHYSICAL
INNOCENCE, IGNORING THE WAY THAT SUCH A STATE IS
FORECLOSED BY OUR ENTRY INTO THE POLITICAL,
DESTROYING ALL CRITICAL SOLVENCY. CROSS-APPLY THE
FIRST BEWES 97 EVIDENCE.
THIS MOURNING OF AUTHENTICITY IS DEPOLITICIZING. IT
NECESSITATES A TURN TOWARDS INTERNAL QUESTIONING
AND A RETREAT FROM POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT,
ALLOWING US TO FOCUS ON THE TRUTH OF OUR
INDIVIDUAL IDENTITIES WHILE WERE COMPLICIT WITH
ATROCITY, IN MUCH THE SAME WAY THAT EICHMANN
TOILED AWAY ENSURING THAT, UNDERNEATH IT ALL, HE
WAS A GOOD PERSON WHILE HE PARTICIPATED IN
GENOCIDE. THATS THE SECOND BEWES CARD
THIS PRECEDES ALL OF THEIR ARGUMENTS BECAUSE THE
RESISTANCE ADVOCATED BY THEIR ALTERNATIVE CANNOT
OCCUR WITHOUT POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
AUTHENTICITY CAUSES THE INTELLECTUAL PARALYSIS
THAT ALLOWS ATROCITIES TO OCCUR
Bewes 97
Thus Fackenheim's encounter with the horror and the 'obscene rationality' of Auschwitz, secondly, displays an anxiety concerning the perceived
integrity of the Third Reich, which is in fact an instinctive gesture of revulsion at the extremes which it is possible for man to justify. This
revulsion, perfectly defensible in itself, is a prerequisite and an important if unacknowledged constituent of the postmodern 'critique' of
It is this question of Hitler's 'integrity', perhaps more than anything, which

leads to the intellectual paralysis characteristic of postmodernity, of which the
most typical symptom is cynicism, in its various forms. On one level, of course, Hitler's programme was thoroughly
'integrated', if by this is meant 'internally coherent'. Certainly the consistency with which both 'good' and
'bad' Jews were persecuted - and Eichmann's diligence, it emerged, was
exemplary in this regard - ensured that the Third Reich could indeed boast of a
mindless sort of integrity. It is this consistency, together with what he calls its 'cosmic scope', which for Fackenheim elevates
rationality.
Nazi ideology to the status of a Weltanschauung, deserving of 'respect, even awe' .154 In this, how ever, Fackenheim's conception of what is or is
not appropriate to the machinery of a political regime is warped, his values infected by those of the very society he is attempting (or refusing) to
analyse. Integrity, to begin with, is not a political virtue, since it is one of those characteristics (like honesty, or moral scrupulousness) which
cannot by their very nature appear intact in the public sphere.
integrity, particularly in this narrow sense of 'internal coherence' (and this is the third point), has no positive
correlation with rationality, and is in fact profoundly opposed to the processes of
reason conceived, as Gillian Rose has defined it, in terms of risk '1" as a continually hazardous
endeavour of going beyond existing limits, a spirit directed towards progress and
the future, in which the "Hegelian moment of determinate negation is actively and recursively constitutive. The violence'
Furthermore
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represented by determinate negation is in essence mobilized against integration ,
just as it is perpetrated by the 'disintegrated' figures of Rameau, Daisy Miller, or Walter Benjamin's 'destructive character' against the
philosopher) Diderot-Moi, the dullard Winterbourne, and the 'etui-man' of Benjamin's essay
65
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Authenticity Impossible: 1AR

1. THERE IS NO PURE RELATIONSHIP WITH ANYTHING
BECAUSE EVERY ENGAGEMENT IS TAINTED BY
MISPERCEPTION, COGNITIVE MEDIATION, AND VIOLENCE.
CROSS-APPLY THE FIRST BEWES 97 CARD
2. EVERY ACT IS ALWAYS ALREADY INAUTHENTIC BECAUSE
OF ITS MEDIATION BY SIGNFICATION AND CULTURE. ONLY
YOUR DEATH IS
AUTHENTIC
Bewes 97
and Postmodernity, New York City: Verso, 1997, 59//uwyo-ajl]
If the K Foundation sought by such an act to demonstrate their freedom from the
incrimination of art by capital, and thereby their own authenticity as artists, they
inevitably failed. As perhaps they realize: 'I don't think people should find out
about it,' Cauty tells Reid. 'Nobody would understand. The shock value would
spoil ,it. Because it doesn't want to be a shocking thing; it just wants to be a
fire.' Such an absence of semiosis is unthinkable and unattainable: ,how could
the incineration of one million pounds possibly refuse to signify? As Reid
observes 0 his article, 'this piece is the beginning of ithe art work. Without this
article none of it ever existed.'
Drummond and Caut are compromised from the outset, not only by money but
by art itself, by representation, by the 'passage' from idea to vehicle, from
signified to signifier - precisely because such a passage is neither linear nor free
from diversion, is in fact
",eciprocal and systemically constituted: one begins at the signifier as often as
one begins at the signified, and at every place in the system, and at no place.
The intention to demonstrate authenticity is impli-cated in the demonstration
itself. To have bothered to'destroy the money at all, even in complete privacy, is
already to determine their sabservience to it, to bow to its power. To make a
statement, 'artis-tic' or otherwise, is to concede at once to the violent demands
of signification. Absolute authenticity necessitates one's own extinc -tion; only in
death does one accede to the immaculate. The business of humanity, 'and thus
of art, is precisely one of compromise, 'inau-thenticity' and fabication. In finding
the artistic institution phoney and depraved, the K Foundation confuse ethics
with aesthetics. Their failure to bring about the end of art dictates that
Drummond and Cauty proceed logically to self-destruction; the next bonfire must
surely,be one intended for their own physical immolation.
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Kulynych Turn: 2AC

DEBATE HAS VALUE DELIBERATIVE POLITICS AND
PERFORMANCE RECAPTURE DELIBERATIVE SPACE FROM
OPPRESSIVE STRUCTURES
Kulynych 97
[Jessica, Asst. Prof. of Poli Sci @ Winthrop, Polity 30: 2, Winter//uwyo]
A performative perspective on participation enriches our understanding of deliberative democracy. This enlarged understanding can be
demonstrated by considering the examination of citizen politics in Germany presented in Carol Hager's Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy
and Citizenry in the West German Energy Debate.(86) Her work skillfully maps the precarious position of citizen groups as they enter into
problemsolving in contemporary democracies. After detailing the German citizen foray into technical debate and the subsequent creation of
energy commissions to deliberate on the long-term goals of energy policy, she concludes that a dual standard of interpretation and evaluation is
required for full understanding of the prospects for citizen participation. Where traditional understandings of participation focus on the policy
dimension and concern themselves with the citizens' success or failure to attain policy preferences, she advocates focusing as well on the
discursive, legitimation dimension of citizen action. Hager follows Habermas in reconstituting participation discursively and asserts that the
legitimation dimension offers an alternative reason for optimism about the efficacy of citizen action. In the discursive understanding of
, success is not defined in terms of getting, but rather in terms of solving

through consensus. Deliberation is thus an end in itself, and citizens have
succeeded whenever they are able to secure a realm of deliberative politics
where the aim is forging consensus among participants, rather than achieving
victory by some over others.
participation
Through the creation of numerous networks of communication and the generation of publicity, citizen action furthers democracy by assuming a
substantive role in governing and by forcing participants in the policy process to legitimate their positions politically rather than technically.
Hager maintains that a sense of political efficacy is enhanced by this politically interactive role even though citizens were only minimally
successful in influencing or controlling the outcome of the policy debate, and experienced a real lack of autonomy as they were coerced into
adopting the terms of the technical debate. She agrees with Alberto Melucci that the impact of [these] movements cannot.., be judged by normal
criteria of efficacy and success .... These groups offer a different way of perceiving and naming the world. They demonstrate that alternatives are
possible, and they expand the communicative as opposed to the bureaucratic or market realms of societal activity.(87)
Yet her analysis is incomplete. Like Habermas, Hager relies too heavily on a discursive reconstitution of political action. Though she recognized
many of the limitations of Habermas's theory discussed above, she insists on the :innovative and creative potential of citizen initiatives. She
insists that deliberative politics can resist the tendency toward authoritarianism common to even a communicative, deliberative search for
objective truth, and that legitimation debates can avoid the tendency to devolve into the technical search for the better argument. She bases her
optimism on the non-hierarchical, sometimes even chaotic and incoherent, forms of decisionmaking practiced by citizen initiatives, and on the
diversity and spontaneity of citizen groups.
Unfortunately, it is precisely these elements of citizen action that cannot be explained by a theory of communicative action. It is here that a
, the goal of
action is not only to secure a realm for deliberative politics, but to disrupt and resist the norms and
identities that structure such a realm and its participants. While Habermas theorizes that political
solutions will emerge from dialogue, a performative understanding of participation highlights the limits of
dialogue and the creative and often uncontrollable effect of unpremeditated
action on the very foundations of communication.
When we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative perspective, we look precisely at those moments of defiance and
disruption that bring the invisible and unimaginable into view. Although citizens were minimally successful
performative conception of political action implicitly informs Hager's discussion. From a performative perspective
in influencing or controlling the out come of the policy debate and experienced a considerable lack of autonomy in their coercion into the
, the goal-oriented debate within the energy commissions could be seen as a defiant
moment of performative politics. The existence of a goal-oriented debate within
a technically dominated arena defied the normalizing separation between expert
policymakers and consuming citizens. Citizens momentarily recreated
themselves as policymakers in a system that defined citizens out of the policy
process, thereby refusing their construction as passive clients. The disruptive
potential of the energy commissions continues to defy technical bureaucracy
even while their decisions are non-binding.
technical debate
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Kulynych Turn: 1AR

NEXT, EXTEND OUR KULYNYCH EVIDENCE:
DEBATE IS AN END UNTO ITSELF BECAUSE IT DISRUPTS
NORMALIZING SYSTEMS BY ELUCIDATING THE LIMITS AND
CONSTRAINTS ON DIALOGUE THROUGH A PERFORMATIVE
ACT OF RESISTANCE WHAT WE DO IS NOT JUST
CONSTITUTED BY THE RATIONALITY OF OUR ARGUMENTS
BUT BY THE TECHNIQUES WE USE WHETHER OR NOT
THIS PARTICULAR DISCUSSION CAUSES POLITICAL
ACTION, OUR ACT OF DEFIANCE EMPOWERS IDENTITIES
AND MAKES DEBATE MEANINGFUL
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Kritik Answers
Praxis Turn: 2AC

AND, THEORETICAL INTERVENTIONS EMPTY OF PRACTICE
JUST COMMODIFY AND DESTROY THE CRITICISM PERM
SOLVES BEST
Routledge 96
[Paul, The Third Space as Critical Engagement, Antipode 28(4), October,
399//uwyo]
One of the problems of theory is that we attempt to understand
processes, things, others, in a moment of cultural petrification, where we
objectify living cultural-political forms (Jeudy, 1994). Such theory takes
place at a distance. In the production of theory we are distanced
from what Bey (1994) terms immediatism direct, lived
experience. Rather we become engaged in representations of
(an)others reality. As such, we are alienated form the lived
moment, enmeshed in the theory market, where the production of
theory becomes another part of spectacular production, another
commodity. This commodification imples that a mediation has
occurred, and with every mediation so our alienation from live
experience increases. As Mies (1983) notes, we are too frequently
engaged in uninvolved spectator knowledge, one separated form active
participation. As such, research and theory can remain analytical
and disembodied. It is not lived. To enact a third space within and
between academia and activism is to attempt to live theory in the
immediate.
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Kritik Answers
Praxis Turn:1AR
AND, EXTEND THE 2AC #__, ROUTLEDGE PRAXIS
ARGUMENT. THEORETICAL ENGAGEMENT REMOVES ITSELF
FROM LIVED EXPERIENCE, RENDERING ITSELF ANOTHER
COMMODITY TO BE BOUGHT AND SOLD, PREVENTING
TRANSFORMATION
AND, THINKING ABOUT THINKING IS USELESS. THINKING
ABOUT DOING IS KEY TO CHANGING STRUCTURAL
WRONGS
Booth 97
[Ken, Chair of Intl Pltcs @ Wales, Critical security studies, Ed. Krause & Williams,
p. 114//uwyo]
Security is concerned with how people live. An interest in practice (policy relevance) is surely part of what is involved in being a security
study of security can beneft from a range of perspectives, but not from
those who would refuse to engage with the problems of those, at this minute, who are
being starved, oppressed, or shot. It is therefore legitimate to ask what any theory that purports to belong within world
politics has to say about Bosnia or nuclear deterrence. Thinking about thinking is important, but, more
urgently, so is thinking about doing. For those who believe that we live in a humanly constituted world, the
distinction between theory and practice dissolves: theory is a form of practice, and practice is a form of theory. Abstract ideas
about emancipation will not suffice: it is important for critical security studies to
engage with the real by suggesting policies, and sites of change, to help
humankind in whole or in part, to move away from its structural wrongs.
specialist. The
ALSO, MUST LINK PROTEST TO DEMANDS ON THE STATE

OR WE LAPSE INTO POLITICAL PARALYSIS IN THE FACE OF
OPPRESSION
Foucault 82
[Michel, God, Politics and Ethics: An Interview, The Foucault Reader,
Trans. Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 377//uwyo-ajl]
Q. And this is hard to situate within a struggle that is already under way, because the lines
are drawn by others. . . .
M.F. Yes, but I think that ethics is a practice; ethos is a manner of being . Let's
take an example that touches us all, that of Poland. If we raise the question of
Poland in strictly political terms, it's clear that we quickly reach the point of
saying that there's nothing we can do. We can't dispatch a team of paratroopers,
and we can't send armored cars to liberate Warsaw. I think that, politically, we have to
recognize this, but I think we also agree that, for ethical reasons, we have to
raise the problem of Poland in the form of a nonacceptance of what is.
happening there, and a nonacceptance of the passivity of our own

governments. I think this attitude is an ethical one, but it is also political; it does not
consist in saying merely, "I protest," but in making of that attitude a
political phenomenon that is as substantial as possible, and one which
those who govern, here or there, will sooner or later be obliged to take
into account.
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Kritik Answers
Praxis Turn: 2AR

NEXT, EXTEND THE 2AC #__, THE ROUTLEDGE PRAXIS
ARGUMENT.
OUR POSITION IS THAT THE AFFS DEPLOYMENT OF
THEORY IS NOTHING BUT AN EMPTY GESTURE THAT FAILS
BECAUSE ITS DEVOID OF PRACTICE
A PURELY ACADEMIC CRITICISM, LIKE THE NEGS,
DIVORCES ITSELF FROM ANY SENSE OF PRAXIS,
INEXORABLY COMMODIFYING ARGUMENT, WHERE THEORY
BECOMES ANOTHER PRODUCT OF UNIVERSITY FACTORIES
NOT ONLY DOES THIS ARGUMENT PROVIDE SOLVENCY FOR
OUR PWERM, WHICH COMBINES THEORY AND PRACTICE,
BUT IT SERVES AS A POWERFUL INDICTMENT OF THE
POTENTIAL FOR ANY POSITIVE CRITICAL IMPACT
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Praxis Turn: Ext

REAL PROBLEMS DEMAND ACTION IVORY TOWER
CRITICISMS CAUSE IMMOBILIZATION
Booth 95
[Ken, Prof. of IR, Human wrongs and international relations, International
Affaris, ASP//delizzozzle]
Philosophical sceptics, for whom nothing is certain, and so for whom the
bases of action are always problematic, are a familiar feature of
academic life Tom Stoppard enjoyable caricatured them in his clever
comedy Jumpers, and in particular in the scene in which philosophical
sceptics were discussed whether the train for Bristol left yesterday from
Paddington station. On what basis could they ever know? Even if they
were actually on the train that was supposed to leave for Bristol, might
not the happening be explained by Paddington leaving the train? We all
know such conundrums, and indeed such people Meanwhile, flesh is
being fed or famished, and people are being tortured and killed And
even philospohical skeptics have to catch trains Some of them do Unless
acadmeics are merely to spread confusion, or snipe from the windows of
ivory towers, we must engage with the real. This means having the
courage of our confusions and thinking and acting without certainty.
In reply to those sensitive to post-colonial critiques of Western
imperialism I would argue that just because many Western ideas were
spread by commerce and the Gatling gun, it does not follow that every
idea originating in the West, or backed by Western opinion, should
therefore simply be labelled imperialist and rejected. There are some
ethnocentric ideas and individual human rights is one of them for
which we should not apologize. Furthermore, I do not see the
dissemination of powerful social and political ideas as necessarily
occurring in one direction only. As the economic and political power of
Asia grows, for example, so will its cultural power. World politics in the
next century will be more Asian than the present one. What matters
from a cosmopolitan perspective is not the birthplace of an idea, but the
meaning we give it.
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Presymbolism Turn: 2AC

TURN GROUNDING RESISTANCE IN A BEFORE THE FALL
IDENTITY RENDERS THE COLONIZED PASSIVE VICTIMS
WITHOUT AGENCY ACTIVISM WITHIN THE SYSTEM USES
ITS OWN EXCESSES TO DISMANTLE IT
Zizek '99
[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass,
The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso,
1999, 256-7//uwyo-ajl]
Against Butler, one is thus tempted to emphasize that Hegel was well
aware of the retroactive process by means of which oppressive power
itself generates the form of resistance is not this very paradox
contained in Hegel's notion of positing the presuppositions, that is, of
how the activity of positing-mediating does not merely elaborate the
presupposed immediate-natural Ground, but thoroughly transforms the
very core of its identity? The very In-itself to which Chechens endeavour
to return is already mediated-posited by the process of modernization,
which deprived them of their ethnic roots.
This argumentation may appear Eurocentrist, condemning the colonized
to repeat the European imperialist pattern by means of the very gesture
of resisting it however, it is also possible to give it precisely the
opposite reading. That is to say: if we ground our resistance to
imperialist Eurocentrism in the reference to some kernel of previous
ethnic identity, we automatically adopt the position of a victim resisting
modernization, of a passive object on which imperialist procedures work.
If, however, we conceive our resistance as an excess that results from
the way brutal imperialist intervention disturbed our previous selfenclosed identity, our position becomes much stronger, since we can
claim that our resistance is grounded in the inherent dynamics of the
imperialist system that the imperialist system itself, through its
inherent antagonism, activates the forces that will bring about its
demise. (The situation here is strictly homologous to that of how to
ground feminine resistance: if woman is 'a symptom of man', the locus
at which the inherent antagonisms of the patriarchal symbolic order
emerge, this in no way constrains the scope of feminine resistance but
provides it with an even stronger detonating force.) Or to put it in yet
another way the premise according to which resistance to power is
inherent and immanent to the power edifice (in the sense that it is
generated by the inherent dynamic of the power edifice) in no way
obliges us to draw the conclusion that every resistance is co-opted in
advance, including in the eternal game Power plays with itself the key
point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of
resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in
motion a process which leads to its own ultimate downfall.
It seems that such a notion of antagonism is what Foucault lacks: from
the fact that every resistance is generated ('posited') by the Power
edifice itself, from this absolute inherence of resistance to Power, he
seems to draw the conclusion that resistance is co-opted in advance,
that it cannot seriously undermine the system that is, he precludes the
possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent
inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able
to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce
itself. In short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect
escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges as a form of
resistance to power and is as such absolutely inherent to it, it can
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outgrow and explode it. (the philosophical point to be made here is that
this is the fundamental feature of the dialectical-materialist notion of
'effect': the effect can 'outdo' its cause; it can be ontologically 'higher'
than its cause.) One is thus tempted to reverse the Foucauldian notion of
an all-encompassing power edifice which always-already contains its
transgression, that which allegedly eludes it: what if the price to be paid
is that the power mechanism cannot even control itself, but has to rely
on an obscene protuberance at its very heart? In other words: what
effectively eludes the controlling grasp of Power is not so much the
external In-itself it tries to dominate but, rather, the obscene supplement
which sustains its own operation.
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Presymbolism Turn: 1AR

AND, EXTEND THE 2AC # ___ ZIZEK 99 PRESYMBOLISM
TURN. RESISTING OPPRESSION CREATES A BEFORE THE
FALL FANTASY, RENDERING US PASSIVE VICTIMS. ONLY
USING THE SYSTEMS OWN EXCESSES AGAINST ITSELF
EXPLODES IT FROM WITHIN, CAUSING ITS DOWNFALL
ALSO, POWER IS SPLIT FROM WITHIN BY ITS TRAUMATIC
EXCESS USING THAT DISAVOWED FOUNDATION
DISMANTLES IT
Zizek '97
[Slavoj, The Game, The Plague Fantasies, NYC: Verso, 1997, 26-7//uwyo-ajl]
This last point must be further radicalized: the power edifice itself is
split from within: in order to reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has
to rely on an inherent excess which grounds it - to put it in the Hegelian
terms of speculative identity, Power is always-already its own
transgression, if it is to function, it has to rely on a kind of obscene
supplement. It is therefore not enough to assert, in a Foucauldian way,
that power is inextricably linked to counter-power, generating it and
being itself conditioned by it: in a self-reflective way, the split is alwaysalready mirrored back into the power edifice itself, splitting it from
within, so that the gesture of self-censorship is consubstantial with the
exercise of power. Furthermore, it is not enough to say that the
`repression' of some libidinal content retroactively eroticizes the very
gesture of `repression' - this èroticization' of power is not a secondary
effect of its exertion on its object but its very disavowed foundation, its
`constitutive crime', its founding gesture which has to remain invisible if
power is to function normally. What we get in the kind of military drill
depicted in the first part of Full Metal Jacket, for example, is not a
secondary eroticization of the disciplinary procedure which creates
military subjects, but the constitutive obscene supplement of this procedure which renders it operative. Judith Butler27 provides a perfect
example of, again, Jesse Helms who, in his very formulation of the text of
the anti-pornography law~ displays the contours of a particular fantasy an older man who engages in sadomasochistic sexual activity with
another, younger man, preferably a child - which bears witness to his
own perverted sexual desire. Helms thus unwittingly brings to light the
obscene libidinal foundation of his own crusade against pornography.
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Rejection Bad Turn: 2AC

TURN - CALL TO REJECT IMPOVERISHES DISCOURSE
PERM SOLVES BEST
Ashley 88
[Richard, Untying the Soveregin State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy
Problematique, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17(2), June, 227262//uwyo]
The monological reading of theoretical discourse of the anarchy problematique
thus leaves the reader with the dichotomous choice of positions mentioned
earlier: the choice titled the blackmail of the heroic practice. One must be either inside this discourse or
outside, either for or against. On the one hand, in order to enter this discursive enclosure even if ones interest is
criticism or reform one must adopt a subjective standpoint that affirms the objective and original powers of the heroic practice
and interpret everything in its terms. One must resign oneself to complicity with the knowledgeable practices by which the anarchy
in order to
stand outside this discursive enclosure thus to repudiate the hard core representations
of the anarcy problematique one must condemn oneself to a position of
practical futility, no matter how self-righteous it may be. Saying
no to a powerful discourse that participates in the construction
of the self-evIdent truth of the anarchy problematique, one is
left to construct subjective counter-truths that cannot be
effective precisely because they remove themselves from the
workings of objective sources of power in history.
problematique is constituted as a self-evident and objective condition of life. On the other hand,
76
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Rejection Bad Turn: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC #___ ASHLEY EVIDENCE. TOTAL
REJECTION LOCKS US OUTSIDE OF DISCURSIVE SYSTEMS,
PREVENTING US FROM CHANGING THEM FROM WITHIN,
CONDEMNING US TO PASSIVE FUTILITY. THIS IS A NET
BENEFIT TO THE PERM
ALSO, TOTAL DOGMATIC SYSTEMS WHERE ONE SIDE IS
RIGHT AND THE OTHER WRONG CREATE TOTALIZING
POLITICS, RESULTING IN SLAUGHTER AND WAR
Said 94
[Edward W., Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reich
Lectures, Vintage, 1994, 113]
Such transfigurations sever the living connection between the
intellectual and the movement or process of which he or she is a part.
Moreover there is the appalling danger of thinking of oneself, ones
views, ones rectittude, ones stated positions as all-important. To read
over The God That Failed testimonial is for me a depressing thing. I want
to ask: Why as an intellectual did you believe in a god anyway? And
besides, who gave you the right to imagine that your early belief and
later disenchantment were so important? In and of itself religious belief
is to me both understandable and deeply personal: it is rather when a
total dogmatic system in which one side is innocently good, the other
irreducibly evil is substituted for the process , the give and take of vital
interchange that the secular intellectual feels the unwelcome and
inappropriate enroachment of one realm on another. Politics becomes
religious enthusiasm as it is the case today in former Yugoslavia
with results in ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter and unending conflict
that are horrible to contemplate.
AND, FOREIGN POLICY CRITICISMS BECOME COMPLICIT

WITH THE STRUCTURES THEY OPPOSE
Ashley 96
[Richard, Erics Best Friend for Life & Prof. of Poli Sci @ ASU, The
achievements of post-structuralism, International Theory: Positivism
and Beyond, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 247-8]
And to these four premises I might add just one more. Under these
circumstances, it can make little sense to rehearse all those strains of
argument that have explored the limitations of the model of critical
activity I have been discussing this in the hope that I might thereby
open up a conversation that seems so disposed to closure. Call them
post-structuralist or call them what you will, these, once more, are
strains of argument that have rigorously demonstrated how very
paradoxical is every attempt to cling fast to this model of criticism in the
face of all manner of excessive happenings that transgress or overflow
the limits of every rendition of it; how much every such attempt depends
upon strategiems for disciplining excess whose arbitrariness, whose
violence, is right there on the surface for all to see; how much, therefore,
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every such attempt must rely upon effecting a blindness to its own
emergence; and how readily, thanks to all of this,
these attempts can be drawn into a complicity (thought not a secret
complicity) with those very practices that would arrest ambiguity,
discipline the proliferation of possibilities, tame resistances, and sustain
structures of domination ostensibly opposed.
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Rejection Bad Turn: Ext

REJECTION OF SPECIFIC SOLUTIONS BECAUSE OF
RADICAL DKEPTICISM IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN PLAN
Fierlbeck 94
[Katherine, Prof. Poli Sci @ Dalhousie, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences:
Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions, History & Theory, 33: 1, ASP//uwyo-ajl]
In many respects, even the dismally skeptical post-modernists are too optimistic in their allegiance to post-modern ideas. As many others have
already pointed out, post-modernism offers little constructive advice about how to reorganize and reinvigorate modern social relations. "The
views of the post-modern individual," explains Rosenau, "are likely neither to lead to a post-modern society of innovative production nor to
engender sustained or contained economic growth." This is simply because "these are not post-modern priorities"(55). Post-modernism offers no
What
we need are specific solutions to specific problems: to trade disputes, to the redistribution of health care
resources, to unemployment, to spousal abuse . If one cannot prioritize public policy alternatives, or
salient solutions; and, where it does, such ideas have usually been reconstituted from ideas presented in other times and places.[9]
assign political responsibility to address such issues, or even say without hesitation that wealthy nations that steadfastly ignore pockets of
then the worst nightmares of the most cynical post-modernists

will likely come to life. Such an overarching refusal to address these issues is at
least as dangerous as any overarching affirmation of beliefs regarding ways to
go about solving them.
Post-modernism suffers from -- and is defined by -- too much indeterminacy. In order to achieve anything, constructive or
otherwise, human beings must attempt to understand the nature of things, and to
evaluate them. This can be done even if we accept that we may never
understand things completely, or evaluate them correctly. But if paralysis is the most obvious political consequence of
virulent poverty are immoral,
post-modernism, a graver danger lies in the rejection of the "Enlightenment ideals" of universality and impartiality. If the resounding end to the
t the opposite of "universalism" is not invariably a coexistence of "little

is, some combination of intolerance, local prejudice,
suspicion, bigotry, fear, brutality, and persecution. The uncritical affiliation with the community of one's
Cold War has taught us anything, it should be tha
narratives": it can be, and frequently
birth, as Martha Nussbaum notes, "while not without causal and formative power, is ethically arbitrary, and sometimes ethically dangerous -- in
that it encourages us to listen to our unexamined preferences as if they were ethical laws."[10]
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Ricouer Turn: 2AC

TURN THE SEARCH FOR HIDDEN MOTIVES ENGAGES IN A
HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION, RISKING SPIRAL INTO
PROFOUND SKEPTICISM
Berman 2001
[Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. Law @ U. of Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities,
LN]
Ricoeur contrasts two different "poles" among hermeneutic styles. At one pole, "hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation
and restoration of ... meaning." 23 At the other pole, hermeneutics is "understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion."
a
hermeneutics of faith to be one that treats the object of study as possessing
inherent meaning on its own terms. In contrast, the hermeneutics of
suspicion seeks to expose societal practices as illusory edifices that
mask underlying contradictions or failures of meaning. I will return to the first pole in
24 It is not entirely clear to me precisely what Ricoeur means by these two categories. Nevertheless, I understand
Part Four of this Essay, but for now I wish to focus on the hermeneutics of demystification and suspicion.
t
each of these thinkers makes "the decision to look upon the whole of
consciousness primarily as "false' consciousness." 25 Ricoeur sees this perspective as an
Ricoeur locates in the work of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud the central hallmarks of this suspicious approach. He argues tha
extension of Descartes' fundamental position of doubt at the dawn of the Enlightenment. According to Ricoeur, "The philosopher
trained in the school of Descartes knows that things are doubtful, that they are not such as they appear; but he does not doubt
that consciousness is such as it appears to itself; in consciousness, meaning and consciousness of meaning coincide." 26
The hermeneutics of suspicion takes doubt one step farther, by

distrusting even our perceptions.
This suspicious position questions the so-called "correspondence [*104] theory" of truth. As we go through our lives, most of us
generally assume that our mental perceptions accord with reality because we believe we have direct access to reality through our
senses or through reason. This is the legacy of the Enlightenment, the "answer" to the fundamental Cartesian doubt. But the
hermeneutics of suspicion maintains that human beings create false truths for themselves.
Such false truths cannot be "objective" because they always serve some
interest or purpose.
By discovering and revealing those interests or purposes, suspicious analysis seeks to expose so-called "false consciousness"
generated through social ideology or self-deception. False consciousness may arise in many different ways. Nietzsche looked to
people's self-deceit in the service of the "will to power." Marx focused on the social being and the false consciousness that arises
from ideology and economic alienation. Freud approached the problem of false consciousness by examining dreams and neurotic
symptoms in order to reveal hidden motivations and desires. Thus, "the Genealogy of Morals in Nietzsche's sense, the theory of
ideologies in the Marxist sense, and the theory of ideas and illusions in Freud's sense represent three convergent procedures of
demystification." 27
AND, SKEPTICISM STOPS SOCIAL CHANGE THEIR

PARANOIA FORECLOSES UPON REVOLUTION
Berman 2001
LN]
, one might view this as a positive development. One might think

people should stop being lulled into a false sense of believing that the
rhetoric of public life really matters. If people began to view such
rhetoric as a construction of entrenched power, so the argument might
go, they would form the nucleus of a truly revolutionary political
movement.
I doubt that such an eventuality is likely to occur. Moreover, I am not sure
that a culture of suspiciousness is the most effective way to seek
political (or personal) change anyway. Suspicious analysis seeks to expose the dangers of our enchantment with
Of course
reason or truth or collectivity, but there are dangers that arise from relentless disenchantment as well. As [*123] Richard K.
Sherwin has observed,
Without the means of experiencing more profound enchantments
, without
communal rituals and social dramas through which the culture's deepest beliefs and values may be brought to life and collectively
those beliefs ultimately lose their meaning and die... . Forms of

enchantment in the service of deceit, illicit desire, and self-gratification alone must be
separated out from forms of enchantment in the service of feelings, beliefs,
reenacted,
and values that we aspire to affirm in light of the self, social, and legal realities they help to construct and maintain. 112
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Ricoeur Turn: 1AR

AND, EXTEND 2AC # ___, THE RICOUER TURN.
SUSPCION OF HIDDEN MOTIVATIONS BEHIND
POLICYMAKING FORCES INFINITE SKEPTICISM BECAUSE
EVERY OUTCOME IS DETERMINATELY NEGATIVE. THE
IMPACT IS THE OTHER RICOUER CARD, WHICH SHOWS
THAT SUCH PARANOIA PREVENTS SOCIAL CHANGE,
ALLOWING NIHILISM TO REPLACE REVOLUTIONARY
TRANSFORMATION
ALSO, THEIR HERMENEUTICS WORK AGAINST SOCIAL
CHANGE AND KILL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Berman 2001
LN]
The second drawback of the hermeneutics of suspicion is perhaps even more important. As
some scholars have noted, the hermeneutics of suspicion can easily slip from
healthy skepticism into a kind of rhetorical paranoia. Paranoia, of course, is a
loaded term, and probably a bit unfair. Nevertheless, because it is used frequently in the
academic literature about the hermeneutics of suspicion, I will use it as well - though I want
to make clear that I believe paranoia to be the hypothetical extreme in the movement toward
skeptical scholarship. I do not mean to imply that any actual scholars necessarily display such
paranoid logic.
Critics of the hermeneutics of suspicion describe the "paranoid style of functioning" 104 as
"an intense, sharply perceptive but
narrowly focused mode of attention" that results in an attitude of "elaborate suspiciousness."
105 Paranoid individuals constantly strive to demystify appearances; they take nothing at
face value because "they regard reality as an obscure dimension hidden from casual
observation or participation." 106 On this vision,
The obvious is regarded as misleading and as something to be seen through. So, the
paranoid style sees the world as constructed of a web of hints to hidden meaning... . The way
in which the paranoid protects fragile autonomy is by insuring, or at least insisting, that the
paranoid's interpretation of events is the interpretation. 107
Such a paranoid style may, over time, have a potentially corrosive effect on society. 108
Consider the long-term consequences of repeated exposure to suspicious stories. An appeal
to religious ideals is portrayed as an exercise of political power or the result of deluded
magical thinking. A [*122] canonical work of art is revealed to be the product of a patriarchal
"gaze." The programs of politicians are exposed as crass maneuverings for higher office or
greater power. 109 The idealistic rhetoric of judicial opinions is depicted as an after-the-fact
justification for the exercise of state-sanctioned violence. And the life choices of individuals
are shown to be responses to psychological neurosis, or social pathology.
All of these are exaggerations, but they increasingly represent the rhetoric that is used to
describe human interaction both in contemporary society and in the past. As Richard Rorty
describes,
In this vision, the two-hundred-year history of the United States - indeed, the history of the
European and American peoples since the Enlightenment - has been pervaded by hypocrisy
and self-deception. Readers of Foucault often come away believing that no
shackles have been broken in the past two hundred years: the harsh old
chains have merely been replaced with slightly more comfortable ones. Heidegger describes
America's success in blanketing the world with modern technology as the spread of a
wasteland. Those who find Foucault and Heidegger convincing often view
the United States of America as ... something we must hope will be

replaced, as soon as possible, by something utterly different. 110
If that is one's viewpoint, it will inevitably be difficult to muster one's energy
to believe in the possibility of positive action in the world, short of
revolution (and even revolution is probably inevitably compromised). As
Rorty points out, though the writers of supposedly "subversive" works "honestly believe that
they are serving human liberty," it may ultimately be "almost impossible to
clamber back down from [these works] to a level of abstraction on which
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one might discuss the merits of a
strategy." 111
law, a treaty, a candidate, or a
political
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Ricoeur Turn: Ext

LAW CAN BE VIEWED AFFIRMATIVELY THE MULTIPLICITY
OF STORES CAN PROVE MORE HOPE FOR CHANGE AND
MEANING NOT LESS
Berman 2001
[Paul Schiff, Assoc. Prof. of Law @ Connecticut, Yale Journal of Law and
Humanities, LN//uwyo]
Recently, Richard K. Sherwin's When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and Popular Culture n127 has attempted a similar project.
Sherwin argues (as I have earlier in this Essay) against what he calls "skeptical postmodernism." Referring to Baudrillard, Sherwin observes that
skeptical postmodernism "manifests a marked inclination toward pessimism and

disenchantment." n128 If truth, meaning, and reality are no longer discernible, and
if any sense of the unified self or human agency is illusory, he argues, we risk living
in a world where "individuals can no longer be held accountable for having
"authored' their acts or caused an event to happen ." n129 According to Sherwin, "In the end the
skeptical postmodern is left with nothing more than endless play and detached
irony." n130
Nevertheless, like me, Sherwin refuses to jettison postmodern theory altogether. Instead, he contends, " Postmodernism need
not be skeptical... . A story might concede the demise of the autonomous
modern subject, but still find meaning through the distributed self: an identity
made up of multiple cultural and social constructs shared by others in particular
communities." n131 Similarly, taking Sherwin's [*129] "affirmative postmodern" view, we might recognize that
concepts such as truth and justice are contingent, but still see those ideas as
coherent. "Abstraction may give way to particularity, contextuality, multiplicity;
judgment may turn toward characteristic voices and localized accounts. But
localization and contextualization are not fatal to meaning. It remains possible to
seek rather than abandon meaning for concepts like truth and justice - even in
the face of contingency, unpredictability, and spontaneity ." n132
Following Sherwin's suggestion, I wish to pursue a story about law that makes no attempt to return to a formalist world where legal rules are
"truths" to be "discovered" by judges. Rather, I accept the idea that there is an infinite number of possible narratives for describing reality and
that each narrative is inevitably a product of many cultural forces. Further, I will accept that, at least within a certain range, none of these
narratives necessarily has a stronger claim to truth than any other. In such a world, how might one understand and justify law practice in
America? n133
we might conceive of law as a site for encounter, contestation, and

play among various narratives. I draw on Hannah Arendt's conception of the "public" as a space of appearance where
My suggestion is that
actors stand before others and are subject to mutual scrutiny and judgment from a plurality of perspectives. n134 The public, on this view,
"consists of multiple histories and perspectives relatively unfamiliar to one another, connected yet distant and irreducible to one another." n135
By communicating about their differing perspectives on the social world in which

they dwell together, people and communities can collectively constitute an
enlarged understanding of the world. n136 In this Part, therefore, I will first outline a prominent conception of
"communicative democracy" that builds on Arendt, offered by political theorist Iris M. Young. Then, I will speculate about law's potential as a site
for the type of idealized public discourse Young envisions. n137
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Romanticization Turn: 2AC

TURN: APPROPRIATING THE OTHER VIOLENTLY SEIZES THE
RIGHT TO SPEAK FOR SELFISH ENDS
Routledge 96
[Paul, The Third Space as Critical Engagement, Antipode 28(4), October,
399//uwyo]
The issue of representation is a vexed one which has received much
attention within the social sciences. For example, in discussing the
academic strategy of polyphony, Crang (1992) raises issues of how the
voices of others are (re)presented; the extent to which these voices are
interwoven with persona of narrator the degree of authorial power
regarding who initiates research, who decides on textual arrangements,
and who decides which voices are heard; and the power relations
involved in the cultural capital conferred by specialist knowledge.
Moreover, Harrison (quoted in McLaren 1995 240) argues that polyphony
can end up being aform of romantic ventroloquism creating the magical
notion of the Others coming to voice. These questions have important
political implications for research which must be negotiated according to
the specific circumstances of a particular project. It is all too easy for
academics to claim solidarity with the oppressed and act as relays for
their voices within social scientific discourse. This raises the danger of
an uncritical alignment with resisters on the assumption that they know
all there is to know without the intervention of intellectuals; and hence
an academics role becomes that of helping them seize the right to
speak.
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Romanticization Turn: 1AR

AND, EXTEND THE 2AC #___ ROUTLEDGE 96
ROMANTICIZATION TURN. SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF
OTHERS USES THEIR SUFFERING FOR ONES OWN ENDS,
SILENCING THEM BY SEIZING THE RIGHT TO SPEAK,
REINSCRIBING THE IMPACT
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Romanticization Turn: 2AR

NEXT, EXTEND THE 2AC #__, THE ROUTLEDGE
ROMANTICIZATION ARGUMENT.
OUR CLAIM IS THAT EFFORTS TO OPEN SPACE FOR THE
OTHER WITHIN A COMPETITIVE FRAMEWORK ARE
PROBLEMATIC BECAUSE
THE WAY THAT THE VOICE IS PRESENTED IS NOT ONLY
DETERMINED BY THE NEG, BUT ITS RE-PRESENTATION
LEGITIMIZES THE AUTHORIAL POWER OF ACADEMICS TO
SPEAK FOR OTHERS
THAT POWER USES THE GUISE OF POLYPHONY TO
PROMULGATE A FORM OF ROMANTIC VENTRILOQUISM
THAT MASKS THE OPPRESSIVE NATURE OF THEIR
RESEARCH
THIS IS DEVASTATING TO THE NEG ON 2 LEVELS
FIRST, ITS AN ABSOLUTE TAKEOUT TO ANY POSITIVE
IMLICATIONS OF THE CRITICISM BECAUSE THE NEGS
ALLEGED SPACE-CLEARING CAN NEVER LET OTHERS
SPEAK
SECOND, IT TURNS THE IMPLICATIONS BECAUSE THEIR
PERFORMANCE ONY FURTHER COMMODIFIES THE USE OF
THE PAIN OF OTHERS FOR PERSONAL GAIN, PLACING A
WARM, FUZZY LEG WARMER OVER THE JACKBOOT OF
DOMINATION
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Said Turn: 2AC

THE ALTERNATIVE OPTS FOR INACTION IN THE FACE OF
DOMINATION ONLY POLICY DISCUSSIONS CAN REORIENT
INTELLECTUALS TOWARDS FIGHTING INJUSTICE
SAID (University Professor, Columbia University) 94
[Edward W., The Intellectuals and the War, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle
for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994, New York: Vintage, p. 316-19]
HARLOW: What are the political, intellectual, and cultural imperatives for combating this agenda? In 1967 Chomsky wrote the essay
Responsibility of Intellectuals. What would be the main component of such an essay today?
jargonistic postmodernisms that now dot the

are neither capable of understanding and analyzing
the power structure of this country nor are they capable of understanding the
particular aesthetic merit of an individual work of art. Whether you call it deconstruction or
SAID: One would have to pretty much scuttle all the jaw-shattering
landscape. They are worse than useless. They
postmodernism or poststructuralism or post-anything, they all represent a sort of spectacle of giving back tickets that the entrance and saying,
were really out of it. We want to check into our private resort and be left alone. [317]
Reengagement with intellectual processes has very little to do with being

citing fashionable names, or striking acceptable poses, but rather having to do
with a return in a way to a kind of old-fashioned historical, literary, and above all, intellectual
scholarship based upon the premise that human beings, men and women, make their
own history. And just as things are made, they can be unmade and re-re-remade. That sense of intellectual and political and citizenry
politically correct, or
empowerment is what I think the intellectual class needs.

Theres only one way to anchor oneself, and that is by affiliation with a cause, with a political movement. There has to be some
; there has
to be an affiliation with matters involving justice, principle, truth, conviction. Those
dont occur in a laboratory or a library. For the American intellectual, that simply means, at bottom, in a globalized environment , that
there is today one superpower, and the relationship between the United States
and the rest of the world, based upon profit and power, has to be altered from
an imperial one to one of coexistence among human communities that can make
and remake their own histories together. This seems to me to be the numberone priority---theres nothing else.
identification, not with the powers that be, with the Secretary of State or the great leading philosopher of the time or sage
An American has a particular role. If youre an anthropologist in America, its not the same thing as being an anthropologist in India or
France; its a qualitatively different thing.
HARLOW: Were both professors in English departments, despite the fact that the humanities have been quite irresponsible, unanswerable
SAID: Not the humanities. The professors of humanities.
HARLOW: Well, OK, the professors, but there is this question
SAID: I take the general view that, for all its inequity, for all its glaring faults and follies, the university in this society remains a relatively utopian
. There needs to be some sense of the university as a place in

which these issues are not, because it is that kind of place, trivialized.
Universities cannot afford to become just a platform for a certain kind of
narcissistic specialization and jargon. What you need is a regard for the product
of the human mind. And thats why Ive been very dispirited, I must tell you, but aspects of the great Western canon debate,
place, a place of great privilege
which really suggest that the oppressed of the world, in wishing to be heard, in wishing their work to be recognized, really wish to do dirt on
everything else. Thats not the spirit of resistance. We come [318] back to Aime Cesaires line, There is room for all that at the rendezvous of
victory. Its not that some have to be pushed off and demeaned and denigrated. The question is not whether we should read more black
literature or less literature by white men. The issue is excellence---we need everything, as much as possible, for understanding the human
adventure in its fullest, without resorting to enormous abstractions and generalizations, without replacing Euro-centrism with other varieties of
ethnocentrism, or say, Islamo-centrism or Afro-centrism or gyno-centrism. Is it a game of substitutions? Thats where intellectuals have to clarify
themselves.
HARLOW: I agree, but at least within certain university contexts there have been lately two major issues: the Gulf War and multiculturalism. I
have not seen any linkage between the two.
SAID: The epistemology and the ethic of specialization have been accepted by all. If youre a literature professor, thats what you talk about. And
if youre an education specialist, thats what you talk about. The whole idea of being in the university means not only respect for what others do,
but respect for what you do. And the sense that they all are part of a community. The main point is that we ascribe a utopian function to the
intellectual. Even inside the university, the prevalence of norms based upon domination and coercion is so strong because the idea of authority is
so strong---whether its authority derived from the nation-state, from religion, from the ethnos, from tradition---is so powerful that its gone
relatively unchallenged, even in the very disciplines and studies that we are engaged in. Part of intellectual work is understanding how authority
And if you can understand that, they

your work is conducted in such a way as to be able to provide alternatives to
authoritative and coercive norms that dominate so much of our intellectual life,
our national and political life, and our international life above all.
is formed. Like everything else, authority is not God-given. Its secular.
HARLOW: What can alternative publications do to interrupt that particular way of presenting authority?
SAID: One is to remind readers that there are always other ways of looking at the issue---whatever it happens to be---than those that are officially
credentialed. Second, one of the things that one needs to do in intellectual enterprises is to---Whitehead says somewhere---always try to write
about an author keeping in mind what he or she might say of what youre writing. To adapt from that: some sense in which your constituency
might be getting signals about what youre doing. The agenda isnt set only by you; its set by others. You cant represent the others, but you can
take them into account by soliciting their attention. Let such a publication be a place in which its pages that which is occluded or suppressed or
has disappeared from the consciousness of the West, of the intellectual, can be allowed to appear. Third, some awareness of the methodological
issues involved, and the gathering of information, the production of scholarship, the relationship between scholarship and knowledge. The great
virtue of these journals is that they are not guided by professional norms. Nobody is going to get tenure out of writing for these journals. And
nobody is trying to advance in a career by what he or she does there. So that means therefore that one can stand back and look at these things
and take questions having to do with how people know things. In other words, a certain emphasis on novelty is important and somewhat lacking.
You dont want to feel too virtuous in what you are doing: that Im the only person doing this, therefore, I must continue doing it. Wit is not such a
bad thing.
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Academic Work Spurs Activism: Ext

(1/2)
INTELLECTUAL WORK SERVES AS A CRITICAL RESOURCE
FOR ACTIVISTS
Milan
Rai, independent peace researcher, CHOMSKYS POLITICS, 1995, p. 156.

Chomsky suggests that the intellecutal can make an important contribution to
the struggle for peace and justice by agreeing to serve as a resource, providing
information and analysis to popular movements. Intellectuals have the training,
facilities, access to information and opportunity to organize and control their
own work, to enable them to make a very significant contribution to people who
are trying to escape the confines of indoctrination and to understand something
about the real world in which they live; in particular, to people who may be
willing to act to change this world. For the same reasons, intellectuals can be
active and effective organizers. Furthermore, by virtue of their privilege,
intellectuals are also often visible and can exploit their privilege in valuable and
important ways.
WORLDY ACADEMIC WORK IS DEMOCRATIZING AND

SPURS ACTIVISM
Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh,
ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY, Fall 1998, p. 47.
Gordon R.
In basic terms the notion of argumentative agency involves the capacity to

contextualize and employ the skills and strategies of argumentative discourse in
fields of social action, especially wider spheres of public deliberation. Pursuit of
argumentative agency charges academic work with democratic energy by
linking teachers and students with civic organizations, social movements,
citizens and other actors engaged in live public controversies beyond the
schoolyard walls. As a bridging concept, argumentative agency links
decontextualized argumentation skills such as research, listening, analysis,
refutation and presentation, to the broader political telos of democratic
empowerment. Argumentative agency fills gaps left in purely simulation-based
models of argumentation by focusing pedagogical energies on strategies for
utilizing argumentation as a driver of progressive social change. Moving beyond
an exclusively skill-oriented curriculum, teachers and students pursuing
argumentative agency seek to put argumentative tools to the test by employing
them in situations beyond the space of the classroom. This approach draws from
the work of Kincheloe (1991), who suggests that through "critical constructivist
action research," students and teachers cultivate their own senses of agency
and work to transform the world around them.
ACADEMICS FOSTER ACTIVISM BY LEGITIMATING DISSENT

Suzie
Mackenzie, columnist, THE GUARDIAN, January 4, 2003, p. 20.

What does the intellectual have to offer that isn't already out there? "Dissent,"
Rose says. "It is the task of the intellectual to think thoughts, to say things, that
can't be said anywhere else. What I think goes most frighteningly and
disturbingly wrong in politics is that people hold intransigently to their ideals.
They admit no flaw, no break in (their own) system." You can't argue with this,
it's what any good liberal intellectual would say.
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Academic Work Spurs Activism: Ext

(2/2)
WORLDLY ENGAGEMENT FOSTERS ACTIVISM WITHIN THE
ACADEMY
Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Pittsburgh,
ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY, Fall 1998, p. 47.
Gordon R.
Encounters with broader public spheres beyond the realm of the academy can
deliver unique pedagogical possibilities and opportunities. By anchoring their
work in public spaces, students and teachers can use their talents to change the
trajectory of events, while events are still unfolding. These experiences have the
potential to trigger significant shifts in political awareness on the part of
participants. Academic debaters nourished on an exclusive diet of competitive
contest round experience often come to see politics like a picturesque landscape
whirring by through the window of a speeding train. They study this political
landscape in great detail, rarely (if ever) entertaining the idea of stopping the
train and exiting to alter the course of unfolding events. The resulting spectator
mentality deflects attention away from roads that could carry their arguments to
wider spheres of public argumentation. However, on the occasions when
students and teachers set aside this spectator mentality by directly engaging
broader public audiences, key aspects of the political landscape change,
because the point of reference for experiencing the landscape shifts
fundamentally.
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Academics as Politics is Bad (1/2)

ACADEMICS AS POLITICS IS INEFFECTIVE AND CORRUPTS
THE LEARNING PROCESS
Appiah, Professor, Princeton University, interviewed by Jenny Attiyeh,
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, August 22, 2002, p. 12.
Kwame Anthony
No, not as an intellectual, because your responsibility as an intellectual is to

deepen your understanding and therefore our understanding.... I think our
university life would be corrupted irremediably if you said to everybody in the
university, beyond understanding, you have an obligation to go out and change
those parts of the world that your understanding can help change. I don't think
we're especially good at it - practical wisdom doesn't come with theoretical
understanding usually. Do we think Einstein would have made a better leader for
Britain ... than Winston Churchill? I don't think so!
ACADEMIC POLITICIZATION UNDERMINES UNIVERSITIES

QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE
Bradford P. Wilson, Executive Director of the National Assocation of Scholars and former
Professor of Political Science, Ashland University, NATIONAL FORUM PHI KAPPA PHI JOURNAL,
Winter 1999, p. 18.
The culture wars in higher education are not between a political left and a
political right, or between liberals and conservatives. They are between those
who wish to politicize academic life as part of a larger agenda of social
transformation, and those who see in the university the only institution in
American life where knowledge is valued for its own sake, where students can be
forgiven a temporary lack of social concern and engagement for the sake of
remedying a more fundamental deprivation, their lack of self-knowledge. The
cure, insofar as there is one, is to be found in a liberal education, not in an
identity-fix offered by the latest multicultural initiative.
POLITICS AND ACADEMICS HAVE FUNDAMENTALLY

CONTRADICTORY GOALS
Appiah, Professor, Princeton University, interviewed by Jenny Attiyeh,
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, August 22, 2002, p. 12.
Kwame Anthony
The fundamental vocation of the intellectual is to figure things out, you know,
intellego, to understand. And politics isn't about understanding, politics is about
getting things done. Understanding can be an instrument of getting things done,
but nuance and complexity of understanding can be an obstacle to getting
things done. Politics - it's the art of the possible, and sometimes in order to do
the best that can be done, you have to ride roughshod over what are, for an
intellectual, important distinctions - for example, between the truth and the
untruth.
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Academics as Politics is Bad (2/2)

DEMANDS OF POLITICAL RELEVANCE DESTROY THE VERY
FOUNDATION OF THE ACADEMY
Brown, Professor of Womens Studies, University of California-Santa Cruz, THEORY
AND EVENT 2:2, 1998, p. npg.
Wendy
I think it is a terrible mistake to conflate or identify academic and political work.

To see Left academics as necessarily confining their intellectual endeavors, their
theorizing, the texts they love, their reflections, to that which is politically useful
in an immediate way, is, I think, a serious error. It is a mistake just as it would be
a mistake to claim that Alan Sokal is no Leftist because he is a physicist and is
poorly versed in social theory, and I would never make such a silly claim. But I
think it is equally silly to suggest that everything any of us ever write or say
must have immediate political cache. What we do in the academy is think, and
to constrain that thinking entirely to what is understandable and useful outside
the academy is basically to eliminate the point of the academy's existence. It is
to constrain the space of imagination, open-ended search, and inquiring into our
own knowledge and beliefs, all of which are the life-blood of intellectual work.
For me, to stop calling into question that which I believed yesterday, to stop
examining ideas I have always been attached to, would literally be to stop
thinking. It would be to go into a kind of political automatic, as opposed to using
the great privilege of being an intellectual, to keep digging up the political
ground we stand on. It would also be to constrain the space of original critique
that has always been so vital to Left projects
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Criticism Destroys Agency

ACADEMIC CRITICISM BECOMES A REPLACEMENT FOR
INDIVIDUAL ACTION. THE CRITIC BECOMES SO
COMMITTED TO REJECTION OF POWER STRUCTURES THAT
THEY FAIL TO CREATE A MIDDLE GROUND NECESSARY FOR
CHANGE
Barber 92
Benjamin (prof o political science at Rutgers), An Aristocracy for Everyone, pg.
111-112
The questions this poses for pedagogy are drawn in the recondite language
of literary postmodernism and deconstruction, but are of the fi rst importance
for education. Does the art of criticism doom the object of critical attention to
displacement by the self-absorbed critic? In other words, does criticizing
books replace reading them? Can the art of questioning be made self limiting, or do critics always become skeptics? Are skeptics in turn doomed
by their negative logic to be relativists? Must relativists melt down into
nihilists? Conservatives have worried that this particularly slippery slope cannot
be safely traversed at all, and thus have worried about a pedagogy that
relies on a too critical mode of radical questioning. They prefer to think of education as instilling the right values and teaching authoritative bodies of
knowledge to compliant students for whom learning is primarily a matter of
absorbing information. When these conservatives appeal to the ancients, it
is the rationalist Plato to whom they turn, rather than the subversive
Socrates. Yet pedagogical progressives actually confirm the conservatives' fears
when they themselves tumble happily down the slope, greasing it as they go
with an epistemology that denies the possibility of any stopping place, any
objectivity, any rationality, any criterion of reasonableness or universalism
whatsoever. Asked to choose between dogma and nihilism, between affirming hegemonic authority and denying all authority, including the authority of reason, of
science, and of open debate, what choice does the concerned teacher have but
despair? Where she seeks a middling position, she is offered orthodoxy or
nihilism. Where she seeks moderation in her students-a respect for rationality
but an unwillingness to confound it with or measure it by somebody's power, or
eloquence, or status-she is informed that all appeals to rationality are pretense:
Bertrand Russell's no less than Joseph Goebbels's, Hannah Arendt's no less
than Catherine the Great's, the rationality with which the skeptic skewers
conventional reason no less than the rationality the skeptic skewers.
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Kritik Answers
Criticism is Nihilistic (1/4)

DECONSTRUCTION WITHOUT ACTION FOR MATERIAL
JUSTICE BLOCKS POLITICAL ESCAPE FROM OPPRESSION
AND REINFORCES IVORY TOWER ELITISM
Cook, Associate Professor, Law, Georgetown University, NEW ENGLAND LAW
REVIEW, Spring 1992, p. 761-762.
Anthony
The effect of deconstructing the power of the author to impose a fixed meaning
on the text or offer a continuous narrative is both debilitating and liberating. It is
debilitating in that any attempt to say what should be done within even our
insular Foucaultian preoccupations may be oppositionalized and deconstructed
as an illegitimate privileging of one term, value, perspective or narrative over
another. The struggle over meaning might continue ad infinitum. That is, if a
deconstructionist is theoretically consistent and sees deconstruction not as a
political tool but as a philosophical orientation, political action is impossible,
because such action requires a degree of closure that deconstruction, as a
theoretical matter, does not permit. Moreover, the approach is debilitating
because deconstruction without material rootedness, without goals and vision,
creates a political and spiritual void into which the socially real power we
theoretically deconstruct steps and steps on the disempowered and
dispossessed. [*762] To those dying from AIDS, stifled by poverty, dehumanized
by sexism and racism, crippled by drugs and brutalized by the many forms of
physical, political and economic violence that characterizes our narcissistic
culture, power hardly seems a matter of illegitimate theoretical privileging.
When vision, social theory and political struggle do not accompany critique, the
void will be filled by the rich, the powerful and the charismatic, those who
influence us through their eloquence, prestige, wealth and power.
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Kritik Answers

CRITICISM IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE THAT WILL EVENTUALLY
LEAD TO THE REJECTION OF EVERYTHINGWHAT BEGINS
AS AN UNWILLINGNESS TO ACCEPT ON-FACE OBJECTIVE
KNOWLEDGE ENDS WITH A COMPLETE REJECTION OF ANY
ATTEMPT TO OBTAIN KNOWLEDGE (EXTINCTION)
Barber 92

116-118
This cursory history of esoteric arguments about the nature of knowledge may
seem far removed from the educational controversies of our time. It is offered
only as a reminder that such fashionable new forms of radical criticism as
deconstruction are but echoes of a very ancient skepticism and a very well
entrenched tradition of reductionism. It is for this reason that Allan Bloom
pins the blame for the changes in modern education on Heidegger, Nietzsche,
Marx, and other maverick critics of reason and reason's canon (see Chapter 5).
It is for this same reason that conservatives who esteem the role reason plays
in grounding and justifying fundamental values view post-modern skepticism
with alarm, and that liberals who care about reform worry that reductive
strategies are ill-suited to their purposes. As Edmund Burke once noted, those
who destroy everything are certain to remedy some grievance. The
annihilation of all values will undoubtedly rid us of hypocritical ones or the
ones misused by hypocrites. We can prevent the powerful from using reason
to conceal their hegemony by burning the cloak-extirpating reason from
political and moral discourse. However, those who come after can hardly
complain that they feel naked or that their discourse, absent such terms as
reason, legitimacy, and justice, seems incapable of establishing an
affirmative pedagogy or a just politics.
Just how crucially such seemingly abstruse issues impact on actual college
curricula is unpleasantly evident in this approving portrait of literature and
culture in a recent issue of the Bulletin of the American Association of
University Professors:
Cultural studies moves away from "history of ideas" to a contested history
of struggles for power and authority, to complicated relations between
"center" and "margin," between dominant and minority positions. Literature is
no longer investigated primarily as the masterworks of individual genius, but as
a way of designating specialized practices of reading and writing and cultural
production.... The renaming of "literature" as "culture" is thus not just a
shift in vocabulary. It marks a rethinking of what is experienced as
cultural materials ...[including] media, MTV, popular culture, newspapers,
magazines, advertising, textbooks, and advice materials. But the shift also
marks the movement away from the study of an "object" to the study of a
practice, the practice called "literary study" or "artistic production," the
practice of criticism.'
How slippery this particular slope has become! What begins as a sound
attempt to show that art is produced by real men and women with agendas and
interests attached to things like their gender, race, and economic status ends
as the nihilistic denial of art as object. What begins as a pedagogically useful
questioning of the power implications of truth ends as the cynical subverting
of the very possibility of truth. What begins as a prudent unwillingness to
accept at face value "objective" knowledge, which is understood to be, at
least in part, socially constructed, ends as the absurd insistence that
knowledge is exclusively social and can be reduced entirely to the power of
those who produce it. What begins as an educationally provocative inquiry into
the origins of literature in the practice of literary production ends in the
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Kritik Answers
educationally insidious annihilation of literature and its replacement by criticismthe practice, it turns out ever so conveniently, of those asking the questions!
Thus does the whirling blade of skepticism's latest reductive manifestations, postmodernism and deconstruction, cut and cut and go on cutting until there is
nothing left. Thus does the amiable and pedagogically essential art of criticism
somehow pass into carnage.
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USING THE ACADEMIC AREA FOR CRITICIZING EXISTENT
SYSTEMS RISKS HYPER SKEPTICAL DISCUSSIONS. THE
SELECTION OF THE MEDIAN FORCES RADICALISM AND
NIHILISM
Barber 92
Benjamin (prof o political science at Rutgers), An Aristocracy for Everyone

All thoughtful inquiry, and hence all useful education, starts with questioning. All
usable knowledge, and thus all practical science, starts with the provisional
acceptance of answers. Education is a dialectic in moderation in which probing
and accepting, questioning and answering, must achieve a delicate balance.
Stories must be told, queried, retold, revised, questioned, and retold still
again much as the American story has been. In periods of rebellion, academic
no less than social, when challenging authority means questioning answers,
there is an understandable tendency toward skepticism, even cynicism.
Michael Wood has characterized Jacques Derrida's approach to method as "a
patient and intelligent suspicion,' 3 which is a useful description of one moment
in a student's democratic education.
The methodologies deployed by critics of power and convention in the
academy do not always fi nd the dialectical center, however, and are
subject to distortion by hyperbole. Sometimes they seem to call for all
questions and no answers, all doubt and no provisional resting places. This
radicalism has many virtues as scholarship, but as pedagogy far fewer. In its
postmodern phase, where the merely modern is equated with something
vaguely reactionary and post-modernism means a radical battering down of all
certainty, this hyperskeptical pedagogy can become self-defeating.
Skepticism is an essential but slippery and thus dangerously problematic
teaching tool. It demystifies and decodes; it denies absolutes; it cuts through
rationalization and hypocrisy. Yet it is a whirling blade, an obdurate reaper hard
to switch off at will. It is not particularly discriminating. It doesn't necessarily
understand the difference between rationalization and reason, since its
effectiveness depends precisely on conflating them. It can lead to a refusal to
judge or to take responsibility or to impose norms on conduct. If, as Derrida
has insisted, "the concept of making a charge itself belongs to the structure
of phallogocentrism" (the use of reason and language as forms of macho
domination), there can be no responsibility, no autonomy, no morals, no
freedom. 4 Like a born killer who may be a hero in wartime but, unable to
discriminate between war and peace, becomes a homocidal maniac when the
war ends for everyone else, radical skepticism lacks a sense of time and place,
a sense of elementary propriety.
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Kritik Answers

THEIR PROJECT IS BANKRUPT. CONFRONTING POWER
RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH CYNICISM, SKEPTICISM, AND
REJECTION WILL NOT CREATE PRAGMATIC SOLUTIONS
Barber 92
122-123
There can be no simple answer to such complex psycho -political
questions, and I certainly do not mean to challenge philosophical reductionism
by psychoanalyzing philosophers and thereby replacing one reductive logic
with another. Nonetheless, as already suggested, Thrasymachus understood the
connection between his brand of reductive questioning and brute power perfectly well: his was the cynicism of the power realist who wanted to convince
Socrates' audience that power was all there was. He wished not to legitimize
and thus limit power, but to enthrone and sacralize it. This is clearly not the
goal of the far more naive advocates of the new hyperskepticism. They are
genuine reformers struggling against the dogmas of what they see as a
hypocritical establishment. They seek more equality, more justice, better
education for all. They want not just to expose the hypocrisies of power, but to
tame and equalize it. They want to reclaim true justice from its hypocritical
abusers. They chase shadows in the valley of cynicism but trust they are on
the path that leads to redemption.
Yet the instruments of revolution they have chosen are more suited to the
philosophical terrorist than the pedagogical reformer. Radical skepticism,
reductionism, solipsism, nihilism, subjectivism, and cynicism will not help
American women gain a stronger voice in the classroom; will not lift Americans
of color from the prison of ignorance and despair to which centuries of
oppression, broken families, and ghettoized schools have relegated them;
will not provide a fi rm value foundation for the young in equality,
citizenship, and justice. How can such reform-ers think they will empower
the voiceless by proving that voice is always a function of power? How can
they believe the ignorant will be rescued from illiteracy by showing that literacy
is an arbitrary form of cultural imperialism? How do they think the struggle
for equality and justice can be waged with an epistemology that denies
standing to reasons and normative rational terms such as justice and equality?
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Kritik Answers
**Postmodernism Bad**
Floating Subjectivity Bad (1/3)
POSTMODERN SUBJECTIVITY IS A SHELL GAME IT CAN
EXIST ONLY BY STRENGTHENING THE HOLD OF
CAPITALISM
Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville,
Boundary Dissolution in film, photography & advertising, 2000,
Laura
http://athena.louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html, accessed 10/15/02

The argument I am making about the postmodern theories of subjectivity and
global capitalism are similar to arguments made about multiculturalism and
global capitalism by David Rieff and Slavoj Zizek. Rieff suggests that
multiculturalism is a byproduct or corollary of a specific material integument
(62). Rieffs position is that although multiculturalists often regard their work as
politically leftist: resulting in the breakdown of patriarchal, European hegemony
and the ascendancy of the previously marginalized, they actually function as the
silent partner of global capitalism. Additionally, Rieff points out how closely
the buzz words of multiculturalism--cultural diversity, difference, the need to
do away with boundariesresemble the stock phrases of the modern
corporation: product diversification, the global marketplace, and the
boundary-less company (Rieff). Similarly, Zizek contends that postmodern
identity politicswhile ostensibly seeking to subvert capitalismare made
possible only in the field of global capitalism. He writes that cultural studies,
is performing the ultimate service for the unrestrained development of
capitalism and that the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is
multiculturalism (218; 216).My argument is that postmodern theories and
global capitalism dialectically influence one another. Postmodern theory is
generated by the material conditions of labor and production in late capitalism,
which needs consumers who will disregard national boundaries. By the logic
that all products of the system are necessary to the system, we assume that
anything the system produces, it needs. Ideological state apparatuses, like the
university, do the work necessary to interpellating the ideal subject of global
capitalism. My thought is that global capitalism needs postmodern theories of
subjectivity because they produce subjects who are seamlessly articulated with
the structures of global capitalism. While postmodern subjectivity may seem
wildly radical at firstbreaking down boundaries between genders, between
machines and humansthe similarities between its subjectivities and the
structures of global capitalism are eerily similar. Fluidity, flexibility, and
boundary dissolution equally describe both. The celebration of the loss of the
unified, coherent subject of modernity and the new fluid, flexible, fragmented
subject of postmodernity is the stuff of Millenial Dreams, Paul Smiths term for
the rhetoric of globalization and the array of ideological forms which interpellate
the desired subject of global capitalism. Smith writes that the annunciation of
globalization itself is part of the ideological battery used to interpellate subjects
in the current conjuncture . . . and attempt to regulate the moral and cultural
practices of subjects (46). I agree with Tereas Ebert that post-al theories are
complicit with patriarchal capitalism. Rather than seeking the liberation of the
exploited workers of late capitalismprimarily third-world, minority, povertystricken womenpostmodern theorists celebrate a liberatory freedom
experienced by a small percentage of the first world at the expense of the rest of
the world.
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FLOATING SUBJECTIVITY AND REBELLION AGAINST
MODERNITY REINFORCES PATTERNS OF DOMINATION
Cryderman, Jane and Louisa: The Tapestry Of Critical Paradigms: Hutcheon,
Lyotard, Said, Dirlik, And Brodber, 2000,
Kevin
http://65.107.211.206/post/caribbean/brodber/kcry1.html, accessed 11/7/01

In "Borderlands Radicalism," Dirlik is critical of the trends of postmodernism and
postcolonialism in regard to borders, subjectivity, and history. Dirlik claims that
postmodernism and postcolonialism tend to simply reinforce the reign of late
capitalism: Post-modernism, articulating the condition of the globe in the age of
flexible production, has done great theoretical service by challenging the
tyrannical unilinearity of inherited conceptions of history and society. The
political price paid for this achievement, however, has been to abolish the
subject in history, which destroys the possibility of political action, or to attach
action to one of another diffuse subject positions, which ends up in narcissistic
preoccupations with self of one kind of another. (89) Dirlik claims that the 'happy
pluralism' of postcolonialism -- such as its emphasis on flux, borderlands and
liminal space -- does not so much oppose elite unified narratives of nations and
cultures as it does reinforce them. Dirlik also links this trend of "fluid subject
positions" (98) in postmodernism to postcolonialism and Global Capitalism: "in
the age of flexible production, we all live in the borderlands. Capital,
deterritorialized and decentered, establishes borderlands where it can move
freely, away from the control of states and societies but in collusion with states
against societies" (Dirlik 87). Moreover, the problem "presented by postcolonial
discourse" is "a problem of liberating discourse that divorces itself from the
material conditions of life, in this case Global Capitalism as the foundational
principle of contemporary society globally" (99). Dirlik also links the intellectual
class as a product of global capitalism which, according to Dirlik, "has jumbled
up notions of space and time" (100). Indeed, both postmodernist and postcolonialist literature involve the fragmentation and rebellion against modernist
ideologies that impose essentializing identity, linear time schemes, and
totalizing narratives.
FLOATING SUBJECTIVITY FACILITATES THE HEGEMONY OF

TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALISM
Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville,
Boundary Dissolution in film, photography & advertising, 2000,
Laura
http://athena.louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html, accessed 10/15/02

This web site explores the ways postmodern theories of subjectivity facilitate
global capitalism. The seed for this project was planted during Deconstructed
Selves, Postmodern Narratives, a session at the 20th Century Lit. Conference. I
had just heard a paper on Crash so thoughts of cyborgs and strange postmodern
desires were already mingling with a project topic that was due in my Theories
of Interpretation seminar. While Silvio Gaggi flashed slides of Cindy Shermans
photographythe pictures of her well-groomed, appropriately feminized body, a
50s starlet in juxtaposition with images of excrement, false eyelashes, cigarette
butts--I discovered my topic: the ways that the postmodern notion of
subjectivity--fluid, unfixed, transgressed boundaries--and the modern notion of
subjectivity-stable, unified, coherent, preserved boundaries-are analogous to the
evolution from classical to global/late capitalism. My theory: While the
dissolution of boundaries in postmodern subjectivity may at first seem wildly
radical, it actually facilitates the hegemony by interpellating the ideal subject of
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global capitalism, one who can manipulate fluid capital, produce/consume
intangible data, and accept the dissolution of national boundaries for the
purpose of exporting manufacturing work to 3rd world countries, for the purpose
of global e-commerce, and for the formation of multinational corporations.
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FOCUSING ON TRANSITIONAL SUBJECTIVITIES CEMENTS
OPPRESSION
Ong, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, FLEXIBLE CITIZENSHIP:
THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF TRANSNATIONALITY, 1999, p. 13.
Aihwa
However, the influence on American cultural studies of the Center for

Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, with which Hall and
Gilroy are associated, has generally been limited. American studies of diasporan
cultures have tended to uphold a more innocent concept of the essential
diasporan subject, one that celebrates hybridity, cultural border crossing, and
the production of difference. In the United States, the conjuncture of postcolonial
theory and diaspora studies seems to produce a bifurcated model of diasporan
cultures. Some scholars dwell on narratives of sacrifice, which are associated
with enforced labor migrations, as well as on critiques of the immorality of
development. Others, who write about displacements in borderland areas,
emphasize subjects who struggle against adversity and violation by affirming
their cultural hybridity and shifting positions in society. The unified moralism
attached to subaltern subjects now also clings to diasporan ones, who are
invariably assumed to be members of oppressed classes and therefore
constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power. Furthermore, because of
the exclusive focus on texts, narratives, and subiectivities, we are often left
wondering what are the particular local-global structural articulations that
materially and symbolically shape these dynamics of victimhood and ferment.
FRAGMENTARY IDENTITY IS CRUCIAL TO GLOBALIZING

CAPITALISM
Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at
Louisville, Boundary Dissolution in film, photography & advertising, 2000,
Laura
http://athena.louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/snyder/bountexts.html, accessed
10/15/02
With its dependence on fluid capital and the production/consumption of
intangible data, global capitalism demands the dissolution of national
boundaries for the purpose of exporting manufacturing work to 3rd world
countries, for the purpose of global e-commerce, and for the formation of
multinational corporations. Global capitalism makes similar demands on its
ideal producing and consuming subject, who is articulated as fluid, fragmented,
and flexible. Clearly, this subject is a radical reconfiguration of the unified,
coherent subject of classical capitalism, who is articulated for the purposes of
producing and consuming solid material goods and preserving national
boundaries.
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**Pragmatism**
Pragmatism Good: 2AC (1/3)
VOTE AFF IN SOLIDARITY WITH OUR PROJECT TO REPOLITICIZE THE ACADEMY
McClean
01 Annual Conference of
David E.
, New School University, The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, Presented at the 20
the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion
%20papers/david_mcclean.htm.
leftist
critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just
mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are
to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to
suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at
curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and
racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are
enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize
that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step
program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies"
wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical
remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled
questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property
Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue,
should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We
don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it,
"When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been
'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to
drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neoMarxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to
philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens
when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the
problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical
hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that
philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody
fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes , . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism , unless it can
somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit
principle of successful action."
Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty
prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the
successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view
anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In
, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond
reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e.
disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social
hopes, as I will explain.
Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use
if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects
and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed,
other words
achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard
,
the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved
community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for
nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions
Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society
and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as
. We who fancy
ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new
kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet
capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important
questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the
prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one
belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism
which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that
undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of
peoples?"
The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and
trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of
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international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of
commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power
(all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our
quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals
are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions
take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples'
lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those
institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their
overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in
debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but
who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who
have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the socalled "managerial class."
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SMACK TALKING ABOUT CHEATERS: READ LIBERALLY
McClean
David E.
There is a lot of philosophical prose on the general subject of social justice. Some of this is quite good, and some of it is quite bad. What
. Displays of high erudition are

gratuitously reflected in much of the writing by those, for example, still clinging
to Marxian ontology and is often just a useful smokescreen which shrouds a near
total disconnect from empirical reality. This kind of political writing likes to make
a lot of references to other obscure, jargon-laden essays and tedious books
written by other true believers - the crowd that takes the fusion of Marxian and
Freudian private fantasies seriously. Nor is it the lack of scholarship that makes this prose bad. Much of it is well
"supported" by footnotes referencing a lode of other works, some of which are actually quite good. Rather , what makes this
prose bad is its utter lack of relevance to extant and critical policy debates, the
passage of actual laws, and the amendment of existing regulations that might
actually do some good for someone else. The writers of this bad prose are too
interested in our arrival at some social place wherein we will finally emerge from
our "inauthentic" state into something called "reality." Most of this stuff, of course, comes from those
distinguishes the good from the bad is not merely the level of erudition
steeped in the Continental tradition (particularly post-Kant). While that tradition has much to offer and has helped shape my own philosophical
it is anything but useful when it comes to truly relevant philosophical

analysis, and no self-respecting Pragmatist can really take seriously the strong poetry of formations like "authenticity looming on the ever
remote horizons of fetishization." What Pragmatists see instead is the hope that we can fix
some of the social ills that face us if we treat policy and reform as more
important than Spirit and Utopia.
Like light rain released from pretty clouds too high in the atmosphere, the substance of this prose dissipates
before it can reach the ground and be a useful component in a discussion of
medicare reform or how to better regulate a pharmaceutical industry that bankrupts senior citizens and condemns to death HIV
patients unfortunate enough to have been born in Burkina Faso - and a regulatory regime that permits this. It is often too
drenched in abstractions and references to a narrow and not so merry band of
other intellectuals (Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault, Luk cs, Benjamin) to be of
much use to those who are the supposed subject matter of this preternatural social justice literature. Since I have no particular allegiance
sensibilities,
to these other intellectuals, no particular impulse to carry their water or defend their reputations, I try and forget as much as I can about their
writings in order to make space for some new approaches and fresh thinking about that important question that always faces us - "What is to be
done?" I am, I think, lucky to have taken this decision before it had become too late.
One might argue with me that these other intellectuals are not looking to be taken seriously in the construction of solutions to specific sociopolitical problems. They are, after all, philosophers engaged in something called philosophizing. They are, after all, just trying to be good culture
they often write with specific reference to social issues

and social justice in mind, even when they are fluttering about in the ether of
high theory (Lukcs, for example, was a government officer, albeit a minister of culture, which to me says a lot), and social justice is
critics. Of course, that isn't quite true, for
not a Platonic form but parses into the specific quotidian acts of institutions and individuals. Social justice is but the genus heading which may be
described better with reference to its species iterations- the various conditions of cruelty and sadism which we wittingly or unwittingly permit. If
we wanted to, we could reconcile the grand general theories of these thinkers to specific bureaucracies or social problems and so try to increase
such attempts,
usually performed in the reams of secondary literature generated by their
devotees, usually make things even more bizarre. In any event, I don't think we
owe them that amount of effort. After all, if they wanted to be relevant they
could have said so by writing in such a way that made it clear that relevance
was a high priority. For Marxians in general, everything tends to get reduced to class. For Lukcs everything tends to get reduced
to "reification." But society and its social ills are far too intricate to gloss in these ways,
and the engines that drive competing interests are much more easily explained
with reference to animal drives and fears than by Absolute Spirit. That is to say, they are not
their relevance. We could construct an account which acts as a bridge to relevant policy considerations. But
easily explained at all.
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INTELLECTUALS HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO ENGAGE
WITH REAL PROBLEMSCRITICAL TO MAKING THEIR
CRITICISM RELEVANT
McClean
David E.
Is it really possible to philosophize by holding Foucault in one hand and the Code of Federal Regulation or the Congressional Record in the other?
, I see no reason why

referring to the way things are actually done in the actual world (I mean really done, not done
as we might imagine) as we think through issues of public morality and social issues of
justice shouldn't be considered a viable alternative to the way philosophy has
proceeded in the past. Instead of replacing epistemology with hermeneutics or
God knows what else as the foundation of philosophical practice, we should
move social philosophers in the direction of becoming more like social and
cultural auditors rather than further in the direction of mere culture critics. We
might be able to recast philosophers who take-up questions of social justice in a
serious way as the ones in society able to traverse not only disciplines but the
distances between the towers of the academy and the bastions of bureaucracies
seeking to honestly and sometimes dishonestly assess both their failings and
achievements. This we can do with a special advantage over economists, social
scientists and policy specialists who are apt to take the narrow view of most
issues. We do have examples of such persons. John Dewey and Karl Popper come to mind as but two examples, but in neither case was
Given that whatever it has meant to be a philosopher has been under siege at various levels
there enough grasp of the actual workings of social institutions that I believe will be called for in order to properly minister to a nation in need of
helpful philosophical insights in policy formation. Or it may just be that the real work will be performed by philosophically grounded and socially
engaged practitioners rather than academics. People like George Soros come to mind here.
But there are few people like George Soros around, and I think that the improbability of philosophers emerging as a special class of social auditor
philosophers are the class most likely to see the

places at which bridges of true understanding can be built not only between an
inimical Right and Left, but between public policy and the deep and relevant
reflections upon our humanity in which philosophers routinely engage. If philosophers
also marks the limits of social hope, inasmuch as
seek to remain what the public thinks we are anyway, a class of persons of whom it can be said, as Orwell put it,
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool, then I do not know from what other class
. For
I do not see how policy wonks, political hacks, politicians, religious ideologues
and special interests will do the work that needs to be done to achieve the kind
of civic consensus envisioned in our Constitution and Declaration of
Independence. Without a courageous new breed of public intellectual, one that is
able to help articulate new visions for community and social well being without
fear of reaching out to others that may not share the narrow views of the
Cultural Left and Cultural Right, I do not see how America moves beyond a mere
land of toleration and oligarchy.
of persons to turn to navigate the complicated intellectual and emotional obstacles that prevent us from the achievement of our country
McClean
David E.
Our new president, possessing no towering intellect, talks of a people who share a continent, but are not a nation. He is right, of course. We are
only beginning to learn to put tribal loyalties aside and to let ourselves take seriously other more salutary possibilities, though we delude
ourselves into believing that we have made great progress. Perhaps so-called "compassionate conservatism," though a gimmick to win a political
contest, will bear a small harvest of unintended and positive consequences, although I remain dubious about this if the task of thinking through
if the not-too-Neanderthal-Right is finally

willing to meet the not-too-wacky-Left at a place of dialogue somewhere in the
"middle," then that is good news, provided the Left does not miss the
opportunity to rendevous. Yet, there is a problem here. Both the Cultural Left and
the Cultural Right tend to be self-righteous purists. The best chance, then, is for
the emergence of Rorty's new Political Left, in conjunction with a new Political Right. The new Political
Left would be in the better position of the two to frame the discourse since it
probably has the better intellectual hardware (it tends to be more open-minded
and less dogmatic) to make a true dialogue work. They, unlike their Cultural Left peers, might
find it more useful to be a little less inimical and a little more sympathetic to
what the other side might, in good faith, believe is at stake. They might leave
what it might actually mean remains the chore of George W. Bush. But
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behind some of the baggage of the Cultural Left's endless ruminations (Dewey's
philosophical cud chewing) about commodity fetishization, or whether the Subject has really
died, or where crack babies fit into neo-capitalist hegemonies, and join the political fray by parsing and
exposing the more basic idiotic claims and dogmas of witless politicians and
dangerous ideologues, while at the same time finding common ground, a larger
"We" perspective that includes Ronald Reagan and Angela Davis under the same
tent rather than as inhabitants of separate worlds. The operative spirit should be
that of fraternal disagreement, rather than self-righteous cold shoulders.
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Plan focus good: Rorty (1/2)

SPECIFIC PROPOSALS PROVE THE ACTION IS THE
SUPERIOR FORM ACTIVISM
Richard
When we think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the
essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the
shedding of its semiconscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the
rage of the late Sixties. This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract
and abusive names for "the system" and start trying to construct inspiring
images of the country. Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with
people outside the academyand, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside
the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of
a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place. If
the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on the laws of the
United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget about
Baudrillard's account of America as Disneylandas a country of simulacraand
to start proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people
who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by
agreement on a concrete political platform, a People's Charter, a list of specific
reforms. The existence of such a list endlessly reprinted and debated, equally
familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of
professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toiletsmight
THE FACT THAT SOMETHING IS PRODUCTIVE AND

DESTRUCTIVE DOESNT ELIMINATE THE NEED FOR
CONCRETE POLICY ACTION
Rorty, Professor, Humanities, University of Virginia, TRUTH, POLITICS, AND
POSTMODERNISM: SPINOZA LECTURES, 1997, p. 51-52.
Richard
Derrida, another writer who enjoys

demonstrating that something very important meaning, for example, or justice, or
friendship is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of
these paradoxical fact, Derrida usually replies that the paradox doesn't matter
when it comes to practice. More generally, a lot of the writers who are labeled
`post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility, turn out to be good experimentalist
social democrats when it comes to actual political activity. I suspect, for example, that Gray,
Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found ourselves citizens of the same country, would all
be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by
philosophers have gotten a bad name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like ìmpossible;
`self-contradictory' and ùnrepresentable'. They have helped create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the
Enlightenment search for transparency - and more generally, to the `metaphysics of presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting
I am all for getting rid of the metaphysics of

presence, but I think that the rhetoric of impossibility and unrepresentability is
counterproductive overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the metaphor of things being
things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible.
accurately represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for
philosophers, and we would be better off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows
Even if we agree that we

shall never have what Derrida calls "a full presence beyond the reach of play"; our sense of
the possibilities open to humanity will not have changed. We have learned nothing about the limits
of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from psychoanalysis . All that we have learned
from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the
that `more accurate representation' was never a fruitful way to describe intellectual progress.
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notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss which the Enlightenment offered. We have been given no
reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress has been made by carrying
out the Enlightenment's political program. Since Darwin we have come to suspect that whether such progress
is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky .
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Plan focus good: Rorty (2/2)

FOCUS ON THE SPECIFIC, STATE-FOCUSED PLANS IS
CRITICAL TO ALLIANCES AND ACTIVISM
Richard
The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national
the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the
only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness
and sadism inflicted on Americans. It is no comfort to those in danger of being
immiserated by globalization to be told that, since national governments are
now irrelevant, we must think up a replacement for such governments. The cosmopolitan
super-rich do not think any replacements are needed, and they are likely to
prevail. Bill Readings was right to say that the nation-state [has ceased] to be the elemental unit of capitalism, but it
remains the entity which makes decisions about social benefits, and thus about
social justice. The current leftist habit of taking the long view and looking beyond nationhood to a global polity is as useless as was
politics. The trouble with this claim is that
faith in Marxs philosophy of history, for which it has become a substitute. Both are equally irrelevant to the question of how to prevent the
reemergence of hereditary castes, or of how to prevent right-wing populists from taking advantage of resentment at that reemergence. When we
think about these latter questions, we begin to realize that one of the essential transformations which the cultural Left will have to undergo is the
This Left will have to

stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for the system and
start trying to construct inspiring images of the country. Only by doing so can it
begin to form alliances with people outside the academy and, specifically, with the labor unions.
shedding of its semiconscious anti-Americanism, which it carried over from the rage of the late Sixties.
Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make
. If the Left forms no such alliances, it will never have any effect on
the laws of the United States. To form them will require the cultural Left to forget
about Baudrillards account of America as Disneylandas a country of simulacra and to start
proposing changes in the laws of a real country, inhabited by real people who
are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by
agreement on a concrete political platform, a Peoples Charter, a list of specific reforms. The
existence of such a list endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and
production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals toilets might
itself a better place
FOCUSING ON THE DETAILS OF POLICY IS CRITICAL TO

POLITICAL EFFECTIVENESS
TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, 1998, p. 103-104.
Richard
The Sixties did not ask how the various groups of stakeholders were to reach a consensus about when to remodel a factory rather than build a
new one, what prices to pay for raw materials, and the like
. Sixties leftists
skipped lightly over all the questions which had been
seemed to be suggesting that

once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, the people would
know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the devel oping world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how
the people would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over such
questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about the
system rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those
practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of
terms like late capitalism suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to
collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices
and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if
the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to
be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put
behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function . The cultural Left offers no answers
to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The
public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered
raised by the experience of nonmarket economies in the so-called socialist countries. They
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details about the alternatives.
Nor should it be interested in participatory democracythe liberation of the people from

the power of the technocratsuntil it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently
possess. Even someone like myself, whose admiration for John Dewey is almost unlimited, cannot take seriously his defense of participatory
democracy against Walter Lippmanns insistence on the need for expertise
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**Realism**
Realism Good: 2AC (1/2)
FIRST, STATES INEVITABLY COMPETE WITH EACH OTHER
FOR INTERNATIONAL POWER ANY ATTEMPT TO DEVIATE
FROM THIS STRUCTURE CAUSES VIOLENCE
Mearscheimer 2001
[John J., Prof. of Pol. Sci @ U. of Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power Warfare]
Great powers fear each other. They regard each other with
suspicion, and they worry that war might be in the offing. They
anticipate danger. There is little room for trust among states. For sure,
the level of fear varies across time and space, but it cannot be reduced to a trivial level. From
the perspective of any one great power, all other great powers are potential
enemies. This point is illustrated by the reaction of the United Kingdom and France to
German reunification at the end of the Col War. Despite the fact that these three states had
been close allies for almost forty-five years, both the United Kingdom and France immediately
began worrying about the potential danger of a united Germany.
The basis for this fear is that in a world where great powers have the
capability to attack each other and might have the motive to do so

any state bent on survival must be at least suspicious of other
states and reluctant to trust them. Add to this the 911 problem the absence of a
central authority to which a threatened state can turn for help and states have even greater
incentive to fear each other. Morever, there is no mechanism, other than the possible selfinterest of third parties, for punishing an aggressor. Because it is sometimes difficult to deter
potential aggressors, states have ample reason not to trust other states and to be prepared
for war with them.
The possible consequences of falling victim to aggression further
amplify the importance of fear as a motivating force in world

politics. Great powers do not compete with each other as if international marketplace.
Political competition among states is a much more dangerous business than mere
economic intercourse, the former can lead to war, and war often means mass
killing on the battlefield as well as mass murder of civilians . In
extreme cases, war can even lead to the destruction of states. The horrible
consequences of war sometimes cause states to view each other not just
as competitors, but as potentially deadly enemies. Political antagonism, in
short, tends to be intense because the stakes are great.
States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own
survival. Because other states are potential threats, and because there is no higher
authority to come to their rescue when they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for
their own security. Each state tends to see itself as vulnerable and
alone, and therefore it
aims to provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those
who help themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming
alliances. But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience: todays alliance partner
might be tomorrows enemy, and todays enemy might be tomorrows alliance partner. For
example, the United States fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and
Japan in World War II, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and allied with
West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
States operating in a self-help world almost always act

according to their own self-interest and do not subordinate their
interests to the interests of other states, or the so-called international
community. The reason is simple: it pays to be selfish in a self-help world. This is
true in the short term as well as in the long term, because if a
state loses in the short run, it might not be around for the long
haul.
Apprehensive about the ultimate intentions of other states, and a ware that they oeprate in a
self-help system, states quickly understand that the best way to ensure
their survival is to be the most powerful state in the system. The

stronger a state is relative to its potential rivals, the less likely it is that
any of those rivals will attack it and threaten its survival. Weaker states will
be reluctant to pick fights with more powerful states because the weaker states are likely to
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the bigger the gap in power between any two
states, the less likely it is that the weaker will attack the stronger. Neither
suffer military defeat. Indeed,
Canada nor Mexico, for example, would countenance attacking the United States, which is far
more powerful than its neighbors. The ideal situation is to be the hegemon in the system. As
Immanuel Kant said, It is the desire of every state, or of its ruler,
to arrive at a condition of perpetual peace by conquering the whole

world, if that were possible. Survival would then be almost guaranteed
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Realism Good: 2AC (2/2)

SECOND, REALISM MUST BE USED STRATEGICALLY
REJECTING IT RISKS WORSE USES
Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European Univ., Realism in International
Relations and International Political Economy, 1998, p. 212
Stefano
it is impossible just to heap realism onto the

and start anew. This is a non-option. Although realism as a strictly causal theory has been a
disappointment, various realist assumptions are well alive in the minds of many practitioners
Therefore, in a third step, this chapter also claims that
dustbin
of history
and observers of international affairs. Although it does not correspond to a theory which helps us to understand a real world with objective laws,
permeates our daily language
it is a world-view which suggests thoughts about it, and which

for making sense of it.
Realism has been a rich, albeit very contestable, reservoir of lessons of the past, of metaphors and historical analogies, which, in the hands of its
most gifted representatives, have been proposed, at times imposed, and reproduced as guides to a common understanding of international
affairs. Realism is alive in the collective memory and self-understanding of our (i.e. Western) foreign policy elite and public, whether educated or
, forgetting realism is also questionable. Of course,

being critical, does not
mean that they should lose the capacity to understand the languages of those
who make significant decisions, not only in government, but also in firms, NGOs, and other institutions. To the contrary,
this understanding, as increasingly varied as it may be, is a prerequisite for their very profession. More particularly, it is a
prerequisite for opposing the more irresponsible claims made in the name, although not
always necessarily in the spirit, of realism.
not. Hence, we cannot but deal with it. For this reason
academic observers should not bow to the whims of daily politics. But staying at distance, or
THIRD, THE PERM SOLVES BEST REALISM OPENS UP

SPACE FOR ONGOING CRITICISM, MAKING THE
ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE
Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H.,
Reconstructing Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, p. 1936)
For realism man remains, in the final analysis, limited by himself. As such, it emphasizes caution, and focuses not merely upon the achievement
in the absence of a
resolution of such difficulties, longer-term objectives are liable to be
unachievable, realism would seem to offer a more effective strategy of transition
of long-term objectives, but also upon the resolution of more- immediate difficulties. Given that,
than relativism itself. Whereas, in constructivism, such strategies are divorced from an awareness of the immediate problems which obstruct such
realism's
emphasis on first addressing the immediate obstacles to development ensures that it at least generates
strategies which offer us a tangible path to follow. If these strategies perhaps lack the visionary appeal of
efforts, and, in critical theoretical perspectives, they are divorced from the current realities of international politics altogether,
reflectivist proposals, emphasizing simply the necessity of a restrained moderate diplomacy in order to ameliorate conflicts between states, to
foster a degree of mutual understanding in international relations, and, ultimately, to develop a sense of community which might underlie a more
, they at least seek to take advantage of the possibilities of reform in the current
international system without jeopardizing the possibilities of order. Realism's gradualist
comprehensive international society
reformism, the careful tending of what it regards as an essentially organic process, ultimately suggests the basis for a more sustainable strategy
for reform than reflectivist perspectives, however dramatic, can offer. For the realist, then, if rationalist theories prove so conservative as to make
their adoption problematic, critical theories prove so progressive as to make their adoption unattractive. If the former can justifiably be criticized
for seeking to make a far from ideal order work more efficiently, thus perpetuating its existence and
legitimating its errors, reflectivist theory can equally be criticized for searching for a tomorrow which may never exist, thereby endangering the
Realism's distinctive contribution thus lies in its

attempt to drive a path between the two, a path which, in the process, suggests the basis on which some form of
synthesis between rationalism and relativism might be achieved. Oriented in its genesis towards addressing the
possibility of establishing any form of stable order in the here and now.
shortcomings in an idealist transformatory project, it is centrally motivated by concern to reconcile vision with practicality, to relate utopia and
reality. Unifying technical and a practical stance, it combines aspects of the positivist methodology employed by problem-solving theory with the
interpretative stance adopted by critical theory, avoiding the monism of perspective which leads to the self-destructive conflict between the two.
Ultimately, it can simultaneously acknowledge the possibility of change in the structure of the international system and the need to probe the
limits of the possible, and yet also question the proximity of any international transformation, emphasize the persistence of problems after such a
transformation, and serve as a reminder of the need to grasp whatever semblance of order can be obtained in the mean time. Indeed, it is
possible to say that realism is uniquely suited to serve as such an orientation. Simultaneously to critique contemporary resolutions of the problem
of political authority as unsatisfactory and yet to support them as an attainable measure of order in an unstable world involves one in a
contradiction which is difficult to accept. Yet, because it grasps the essential ambiguity of the political, and adopts imperfectionism as its
dominant motif, realism can relate these two tasks in a way which allows neither to predominate, achieving, if not a reconciliation, then at least a
viable synthesis. Perhaps the most famous realist refrain is that all politics are power politics. It is the all that is important here. Realism lays
claim to a relevance across systems, and because it relies on a conception of human nature, rather than a historically specific structure of world
politics, it can make good on this claim. If its observations about human nature are even remotely accurate, the problems that it addresses will
transcend contingent formulations of the problem of political order. Even in a genuine cosmopolis, conflict might become technical, but it would
not be eliminated altogether.67 The primary manifestations of power might become more economic or institutional rather than (para)military but,
where disagreements occur and power exists, the employment of the one to ensure the satisfactory resolution of the other is inevitable short of a
wholesale transformation of human behaviour. Power is ultimately of the essence of politics; it is not something which can be banished, only
tamed and restrained. As a result
allows it to relate
, realism achieves a universal relevance to the problem of political action which

critical theory, without which advance would be impossible, with the problem-
the reformist zeal of
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before reform is attempted,
must first be ensured
solver's sensible caution that

contemporary conditions
whatever measure of
security
is possible under
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#1 Mearsheimer: 1AR
EXTEND THE 2AC #___ MEARSCHEIMER 2001 EVIDENCE.
THE SELF-HELP INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM MAKES REALISM
INEVITABLE BECAUSE OF STATE COMPETITION AND THE
DESIRE FOR SURVIVAL. TRYING TO BREAK DOWN THAT
SYSTEM CAUSES POWER DIFFERENTIALS THAT RESULT IN
MASS WAR AND DEATH
THAT MAKES THEIR ARGUMENT TERMINALLY NOT UNIQUE,
BECAUSE STATES WILL STILL COMPETE AND FILL THE
VOID AND YOU VOTE ON ANY RISK OF WAR
ALSO, STATES ALWAYS ACT TO INCREASE THEIR RELATIVE
POWER, MAKING SECURITY COMPETITION INEVITABLE
Mearscheimer 2001
[John J., Prof. of Pol. Sci @ U. of Chicago, The Tragedy of Great Power
Warfare]
Given the difficulty of determing how much power is enough for today
and tomorrow, great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their
security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of
a challenge by another great power. Only a misguided state would pass
up an opportunity to be the hegemon in the system because it already
had sufficient power to survive. But even if a great power does not have
the wherewithal to achieve hegemony (and that is usually the case), it
will still act offensively to amass as much power as it can, because
states are always better off with more rather than less power. In short,
states do not become status quo powers until they completely dominate
the system.
All states are influence by this logic, which means htat not only do they
look for opportunities to take advantage of one another, they also work
to ensure that other states do not take advantage of them. After all, rival
states are driven by the same logic, and most states are likely to
recognize their own motives at play in the actions of other states. In
short, states ultimately pay attention to defense as well as offense. They
think about conquest themselves, and they work to check aggressor
states from gaining power at their expense. This inexorably leads to a
world of constant security competition, hwere states are wiling to lie,
cheat, and use brute force if it helps them gain advantage over their
rivals. Peace, if one defines that concept as a state of tranquility or
mutual concord, is nt liekly to break out in this world.
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#1 Mearsheimer: Ext
THEIR CRITICISM DOESNT PROVIDE US WITH A ROADMAP
WHICH ENSURES VIOLENCE REALISM IS NEEDED TO
KEEP THE BALANCE OF POWER STABLE IT IS ON
BALANCE BETTER
Murray, Professor Politics at the University of Wales, 1997
(Alastair J.H.,
His disagreement with realism depends on a highly contestable claim - based on Herz's argument that, with the development of global threats,
the conditions which might produce some universal consensus have arisen - that its 'impossibility theorem' is empirically problematic, that a
universal consensus is achievable, and that its practical strategy is obstructing its realisation. In much the same way, in `The poverty of
neorealism', realism's practical strategy is illegitimate only because Ashley's agenda is inclusionary. His central disagreement with realism arises
out of his belief that its strategy reproduces a world order organised around sovereign states, preventing exploration of the indeterminate
number of - potentially less exclusionary - alternative world orders. Realists, however, would be unlikely to be troubled by such charges. Ashley
needs to do rather more than merely assert that the development of global threats will produce some universal consensus, or that any number of
less exclusionary world orders are possible, to convince them. A universal threat does not imply a universal consensus, merely the existence of a
universal threat faced by particularistic actors. And the assertion that indeterminate numbers of potentially less exclusionary orders exist carries
little weight unless we can specify exactly what these alternatives are and just how they might be achieved. As such, realists would seem to be
justified in regarding such potentialities as currently unrealizable ideals and in seeking a more proximate good in the fostering of mutual
Despite the adverse side-effects that such a

balance of power implies, it at least offers us something tangible rather than
ephemeral promises lacking a shred of support. Ultimately, Ashley's demand that a new, critical approach
understanding and, in particular. of a stable balance of power.
be adopted in order to free us from the grip of such 'false conceptions depends upon ideas about the prospects for the development of a
universal consensus which are little more than wishful thinking, and ideas about the existence of potentially less exclusionary orders which are
little more than mere assertion. Hence his attempts, in 'Political realism and human interests', to conceal these ideas from view by claiming that
the technical base of realism serves only to identify, and yet not to reform, the practical, and then, in 'The poverty of neorealism', by removing
the technical from investigation altogether by an exclusive reliance on a problem of hermeneutic circularity. In the final analysis, then
Ashley's post-structuralist approach
boils down to little more than a critique which fails. It is predicated on the
assumption that the constraints upon us are simply restrictive knowledge practices, such that it presumes that the entirety of the solution to our
offers nothing by way, of alternative - no

strategies, no proximate goals, indeed, little by way of goals at all. If, in constructivism, the progressive purpose leads to strategies
problems is little more than the removal of such false ways of thinking. It
divorced from an awareness of the problems confronting transformatory efforts, and, in critical theoretical perspectives, it produces strategies
divorced from international politics in their entirety, in post-structuralism it generates a complete absence of strategies altogether. Critique
critique ultimately proves unsustainable. With its defeat, post-structuralism is left

If realism is, as Ashley puts it, 'a tradition
forever immersed in the expectation of political tragedy'. it at least offers us a
concrete vision of objectives and ways in which to achieve them which his own position.
serves to fill the void, yet this
with nothing. Once one peels away the layers of misconstruction, it simply fades away.
forever immersed in the expectation of deliverance- is manifestly unable to provide."
AND, COMPETITION AMONG STATES IS INEVITABLE 3

REASONS:
1) NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY
2) STATES HAVE OFFENSIVE CAPABILITIES
3) VAGUE INTENTIONS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former
research fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics, pg 3. )
Why do great powers behave this way? My answer is that the structure
of the international system forces states which seek only to be secure
nonetheless to act aggressively toward each other. Three features of the
international system combine to cause states to fear one another: 1) the
absence of a central authority that sits above states and can protect
them from each other. 2) the fact that states always have some
offensive military capability, and 3) the fact that states can never be
certain about other states' intentions. Given this fear-which can never be
wholly eliminated-states recognize that the more powerful they are
relative to their rivals, the better their chances of survival. Indeed, the
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best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon, because no other state
can seriously threaten such a mighty power.
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#2 Guzzini: 1AR
REALISM MUST BE USED STRATEGICALLY BECAUSE REALWORLD ACTORS RELY ON IT
Stefano
Third, this last chapter has argued that although the evolution of realism has been mainly a disappointment as a general causal theory, we have
to deal with it. On the one hand, realist assumptions and insights are used and merged in nearly all frameworks of analysis offered in
International Relations or International Political Economy. One of the book's purposes was to show realism as a varied and variably rich theory, so
,
to dispose of realism because some of its versions have been proven empirically wrong, ahistorical, or logically incoherent ,
does not necessarily touch its role in the shared understandings of observers and
practitioners of international affairs. Realist theories have a persisting power for constructing our understanding of
heterogeneous that it would be better to refer to it only in plural terms. On the other hand
the present. Their assumptions, both as theoretical constructs, and as particular lessons of the past translated from one generation of
decision-makers to another, help mobilizing certain understandings and dispositions to action. They also provide them with legitimacy. Despite
realism's several deaths as a general causal theory, it can still powerfully enframe action. It exists in the minds, and is hence
reflected in the actions, of many practitioners. Whether or not the world realism depicts
is out there, realism is. Realism is not a causal theory that explains International Relations, but, as long as realism continues to
be a powerful mind-set, we need to understand realism to make sense of International Relations. In other words, realism is a still
necessary hermeneutical bridge to the understanding of world politics. Getting rid of realism without
having a deep understanding of it, not only risks unwarranted dismissal of some valuable theoretical insights that I have tried to gather in this
book; it
would
also be futile. Indeed, it might
be the best way to
tacitly and
uncritically reproduce it.
REJECTION FAILS IT REPRODUCES SOVEREIGNTY AND

PERPETUATES EXPLOITATION ACTION MUST BE TAKEN
Agathangelou, Director of the Global Change Institute, 1997 (Anna
M., Studies in Political Economy, v. 54, p. 7-8)
dissident IR also paralyzes itself into non-action.

While it challenges the status quo, dissident IR fails to transform
it. Indeed, dissident IR claims that a coherent paradigm or research program even an alternative one reproduces
Yet, ironically if not tragically,
the stifling parochialism and hidden powermongering of sovereign scholarship. Any agenda of global politics informed by
critical social theory perspectives, writes Jim George must forgo the simple, albeit self-gratifying, options inherent in
readymade alternative Realisms and confront the dangers, closures, paradoxes, and complicities associated with them.
Even references to a real world, dissidents argue, repudiate the very meaning of dissidence given their sovereign
dissident scholarship opts for, instead, is

a sense of disciplinary crisis that resonates with the effects of marginal and
dissident movements in all sorts of other localities. Despite its emancipatory
intentions, this approach effectively leaves the prevailing prison
of sovereignty intact. It doubly incarcerates when dissident IR
highlights the layers of power that oppress without offering a heuristic, not to
mention a program, for emancipatory action. Merely politicizing the
supposedly non-political neither guides emancipatory action nor
guards it against demagoguery. At best, dissident IR sanctions a
detached criticality rooted (ironically) in Western modernity. Michael Shapiro, for
presumption of a universalizable, testable Reality. What
instance, advises the dissident theorist to take a critical distance or position offshore from which to see the
what becomes of those who know they are burning

in the hells of exploitation, racism, sexism, starvation, civil war, and the like
while the esoteric dissident observes critically from offshore? What hope
do they have of overthrowing these shackles of sovereignty? In not answering these
questions, dissident IR ends up reproducing despite avowals to the contrary, the
sovereign outcome of discourse divorced from practice , analysis from
policy, deconstruction from reconstruction, particulars from universals, and critical theory from
problem-solving.
possibility of change. But
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#2 Guzzini: Ext
BALANCE OF POWERS REMAINS A TOP PRIORITY- STATES
WILL STILL FEAR EACH OTHER POST THE ALT
Mearsheimer, Professor of Pol Sci at University of Chicago, 01, The
Tragedy of Great Power Politics
The optimists' claim that security competition and war among the great powers
has been burned out of the system is wrong. In fact, all of the major states
around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power and are destined
to compete for power among themselves for the foreseeable future.
Consequently, realism will offer the most powerful explanations of international
politics over the next century, and this will be true even if the debates among
academic and policy elites are dominated by non-realist theories. In short, the
real world remains a realist world. States still fear each other and seek to gain
power at each other's expense, because international anarchythe driving force
behind great-power behaviordid not change with the end of the Cold War, and
there are few signs that such change is likely any time soon. States remain the
principal actors in world politics and there is still no night watchman standing
above them. For sure, the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a major shift in
the global distribution of power. But it did not give rise to a change in the
anarchic structure of the system, and without that kind of profound change,
there is no reason to expect the great powers to behave much differently in the
new century than they did in previous centuries.
OTHERS WONT FOLLOW OUR LEAD MAKES REALISM

NECESSARY
This highlights the central difficulty with Wendt's constructivism. It is not any form of
unfounded idealism about the possibility of effecting a change in international politics. Wendt
accepts that the
intersubjective character of international institutions

render them relatively hard social facts. Rather, What is
problematic is his faith that such chance, if it could be achieved, implies
progress. Wendt's entire approach is governed by the belief that the problematic elements
such as self-help
of international politics can be transcended, that the competitive identities which create these
elements can be reconditioned, and that the predatory policies which underlie these
Everything in his account, is up for gabs: there

is no core of recalcitrance to human conduct which cannot be reformed,
unlearnt, disposed of. This venerates a stance that so privileges the
possibility of a systemic transformation that it simply puts aside
the difficulties which it recognises to be inherent in its
achievement. Thus, even though Wendt acknowledges that the intersubjective basis of
identities can be eliminated.
the self-help system makes its reform difficult, this does not dissuade him. He simply demands
that states adopt a strategy of 'altercasting', a strategy which 'tries to induce alter to take on
a new identity (and thereby enlist alter in ego's effort to change itself) by treating alter as if it
Wendt's position effectively culminates in a

demand that the state undertake nothing less than a giant leap of faith.
The fact that its opponent might not take its overtures seriously.
might not be interested in reformulating its own construction of the world.
or might simply see such an opening as a weakness to be exploited.
are completely discounted. The prospect of achieving a systemic transformation
already had that identity'.
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simply outweighs any adverse consequences which might arise from the effort to achieve it.
Wendt ultimately appears, in the final analysis, to have overdosed on 'Gorbimania'.
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#3 Murray: 1AR
REALISM IS THE BEST MIDDLE GROUND IT SYNTHESISES
CRITICAL THEORIES IN ORDER TO PROVIDE THE REAL
POSSIBILITY FOR TRANSFORMATION
I
n Wendt's constructivism, the argument appears in its most basic version, presenting an analysis
of realist assumptions which associate it with a conservative account of human nature. In
Linklater's critical theory it moves a stage farther, presenting an analysis of realist theory
which locates it within a conservative discourse of state-centrism. In Ashley's poststructuralism it reaches its highest form, presenting an analysis of realist strategy which locates
it not merely within a conservative statist order, but, moreover, within an active conspiracy
of silence to reproduce it. Finally, in Tickner's feminism, realism becomes all three
simultaneously and more besides, a vital player in a greater, overarching, masculine
conspiracy against femininity. Realism thus appears, first, as a doctrine providing the
grounds for a relentless pessimism, second, as a theory which provides an active
justification for such pessimism, and, third, as a strategy which proactively seeks to enforce
this pessimism, before it becomes the vital foundation underlying all such pessimism in
international theory. Yet, an examination of the arguments put forward from each of these
perspectives suggests not only that the effort to locate realism within a conservative.
rationalist camp is untenable but, beyond this, that realism is able to provide reformist
The
progressive purpose which motivates the critique of realism in these
perspectives ultimately generates a bias which undermines their own
ability to generate effective strategies of transition. In constructivism, this
bias appears in its most limited version, producing strategies so divorced from
the obstacles presented by the current structure of international
politics that they threaten to become counter-productive. In critical
strategies which are superior to those that they can generate themselves.
theory it moves a stage further producing strategies so abstract that one is at a loss to
determine what they actually imply in terms of the current structure of international
in post-modernism, it reaches its highest form, producing

an absence of such strategies altogether, until we reach the point at
which we are left with nothing but critique. Against this failure,
realism contains the potential to act as the basis of a more
constructive approach to international relations, incorporating many of the
strengths of reflectivism and yet avoiding its weaknesses. It
appears, in the final analysis, as an opening within which some
synthesis of rationalism and reflectivism. of conservatism and
progressivism might be built.
politics. And,
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#3 Murray: Ext
REALISM BRIDGES THE GAP BETWEEN CRITIQUE AND THE
NEED FOR POLITICAL ACTION IT CAN ENCORPORATE ALL
OF THEIR ARGUMENTS WHILE STILL RECOGNIZING THAT
TEHRE ARE PROBLEMS THAT HAVE TO BE DEALT WITH IN
THE WORLD TODAY
Ultimately, the only result of the post-positivist movement's self-styled 'alternative'
status is the generation of an unproductive opposition; between a seemingly
mutually exclusive rationalism and reflectivism. Realism would seem to hold out the
possibility of a more constructive path for international relations theory. The fact that it
is engaged in a normative enquiry is not to say that it abandons a concern for the practical
realities of international politics, only that it is concerned to bridge the gap between
cosmopolitan moral and power political logics. Its approach ultimately provides an
overarching framework which can draw on many different strands of thought,

the 'spokes' which can be said to be attached to its central hub , to enable it to
relate empirical concerns to a normative agenda. It can incorporate the lessons that
geopolitics yields, the insights that neorealism might achieve, and all the other
information that the approaches which effectively serve to articulate the specifics of its
orientation generate, and. once incorporated within its theoretical framework,
relate them both to one another and to the requirements of the ideal , in order to
support an analysis of the conditions which characterise contemporary international politics
and help it to achieve a viable political ethic. Against critical theories which are
incomprehensible to any but their authors and their acolytes and which prove
incapable of relating their categories to the issues which provide the substance
of international affairs, and against rationalist, and especially neorealist, perspectives
which prove unconcerned for matters of values and which simply ignore the relevance of
ethical questions to political action, realism is capable of formulating a position which
brings ethics and politics into a viable relationship. It would ultimately seem to
offer us a course which navigates between the Scylla of defending our values so
badly that we end up threatening their very existence, and the Charybdis of
defending them so efficiently that we become everything that they militate

against. Under its auspices. we can perhaps succeed in reconciling our ideals
with our pragmatism.
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Democratic Realism Solves the

Links
DEMOCRATIC REALISM RESPONDS TO THE CRITIQUES
CONCERNS, PROMOTING THE NATIONAL INTEREST AT THE
SAME TIME AS WORLD PEACE AND PROSPERITY.
Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute, Democratic Realism:
The Third Way, BLUEPRINT, Winter 2000,
http://www.ndol.org/blueprint/winter2000/marshall.html.
Democratic Realism seeks a new balance of American ideals and interests. It
builds on the time-honored principles of liberal internationalism: At the core of
the post-Cold War world is a growing zone of democracies committed to
relatively open markets and free trade, political relations based on agreed-upon
rules and norms of behavior, and institutions to cooperatively manage and
enforce those standards. Protecting and extending that democratic community
serves our security and economic interests while also expressing Americans'
ingrained belief in our country's historic mission. Deftly executed, policies based
on Democratic Realism can not only underpin America's vital interests and
continued global success, but help ensure a safer, more prosperous, and more
democratic world.
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Violence is Endemic
POLITICS MUST INCORPORATE THE EXISTENCE OF
ENDEMIC VIOLENCE. WE CAN INCORPORATE THIS
WITHOUT BUYING INTO EVERY REALIST PREMISE
Stefano Guzzini, Assistant Professor at Central European University, The enduring
dilemmas of realism in International Relations, Copenhagen Peace Research Institute,
December
2001, http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/gus02/gus02.pdf, accessed 8/13/02
Until now, the purpose of this article might have appeared to be just another,
perhaps more systematically grounded, critique of the difficulties realist theories
of International Relations have been facing. By drawing on the lessons one can
learn from these dilemmas, this conclusion wants to suggest a way forward.
Once we know where realism gets stuck in its analytical justification, the study
of its dilemmas should open a more reflexive way to re-apprehend Realism as a
double negation and the trap of the realism-idealism debate In what follows, I
argue that the underlying reason why realists are not facing up the implications
of the identity (distinctiveness/determinacy) and the conservative
(science/tradition) dilemma consists in the terms of the first debate in which
many realists feel compelled to justify realism. According to this selfunderstanding, realists are there to remind us about the fearful, the cruel side of
world politics which lurks behind. This distinct face of international politics
inevitably shows when the masquerade is over. In the Venetian carnival of
international diplomacy, only the experienced will be prepared when the curtain
falls and world history picks up its circular course. By trying to occupy a vantage
point of (superior) historical experience, science came then as an offer, IR
realism could not refuse. IR Realism has repeatedly thought to have no other
choice but to justify this pessimism with a need to distance itself from other
positions, to be nonsubsumable. It needed to show that whatever else might
temporarily be true, there is an unflinching reality which cannot be avoided.
Realism needed to point to a reality which cannot be eventually overcome by
politics, to an attitude which would similarly rebuff the embrace by any other
intellectual tradition. The first debate is usually presented as the place in
which this negative attitude has been played out, indeed mythically enshrined.
It is to this metaphorical foundation to which many self-identified realists return.
Yet, I think that the first debate is a place where the thoughts not only of socalled idealist scholars, but also of self-stylised realists look unduly impoverished
exactly because it is couched in terms of an opposition. When scholars more
carefully study the type of opposition, however, they quickly find out that many
so-called realist scholars have been not only critical of utopian thought and
social engineering, but also of Realpolitik. In other words, if one concentrates on
scholars and their work, and not on labels, one sees realism not simply as an
attitude of negation which it is but as an attitude of double negation: in the
words of R.N. Berki, realism must oppose both the conservative idealism of
nostalgia and the revolutionist idealism of imagination. Norberto Bobbio has
developed this double negation in his usually lucid style as both a conservative
realism which opposes the ideal, and a critical realism which opposes the
apparent, a difference too few realists have been able to disentangle. For this
double heritage of political realism is full of tensions. Realism as anti-idealism is
status-quo oriented. It relies on the entire panoply of arguments so beautifully
summarised by Alfred Hirschman. According to the futility thesis, any attempt at
change is condemned to be without any real effect. The perversity thesis would
argue that far from changing for the better, such policies only add new problems
to the already existing ones. And the central jeopardy thesis says that
purposeful attempts at social change will only undermine the already achieved.
The best is the enemy of the good, and so on. Anti-apparent realism, however, is
an attitude more akin to the political theories of suspicion. It looks at what is
hidden behind the smokescreen of current ideologies, putting the allegedly self-
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evident into the limelight of criticism. With the other form of realism , it shares a
reluctance to treat beautiful ideas as what they claim to be. But it is much more
sensible to their ideological use, revolutionary as well as conservative. Whereas
anti-ideal realism defends the status quo, anti-apparent realism questions it. It
wants to unmask existing power relations.
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Realism Inevitable
WE MUST USE REALISM BECAUSE OTHERS RELY ON IT
Stefano
The main line of critique can be summarized as follows: realism does not take its
central concepts seriously enough. To start with, its critiques claim that realism
is a sceptical practice which however, stops short of problematizing the inherent
theory of the state. It is, second, a practice which informs an international
community. Third, international politics is not power politics because it
resembles realist precepts, but because the international community which
holds a realist world-view acts in such a way as to produce power politics: it is a
social construction. Realist expectations might hold, not because they
objectively correspond to something out there, but because agents make them
the maxims that guide their actions. Finally, this can have very significant policy
effects: even at the end of the Cold War which might have shattered realist
world-views, realist practices could mobilize old codes, such as to belittle the
potential historical break of the post-Berlin wall system. Realism still underlies
major re-conceptualization of the present international system, from
Huntington's geocultural reification to `neomedievalism' - and justifies the
foreign policies which can be derived from them.
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Realism Good: Prevents Nuclear

War
REALISM KEY TO STOPPING NUCLEAR WAR.
Hans Morgenthau, University of Chicago, Realism in International Politics, 19 58,
Published in NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW, Winter 1998.
It seems to me that to a great extent the future peace of the world-and the
future peace of the world means under present conditions the future existence
of the world-will depend upon the restoration of the original, the traditional, the
realistic concepts of foreign policy: of a foreign policy which was regarded and
practiced as what you might call the "mundane business" of accommodating
divergent interests, defining seemingly incompatible interests, and then
redefining them until finally they became compatible. For it seems to me to be
very unlikely that the "cold war," as it has been practiced in the last ten years,
will continue indefinitely. About five or six years ago Sir Winston Churchill said in
a speech in the House of Commons exactly this: "Things as they are cannot last;
either they will get better, or they will get worse." If the present trend continues,
I think, in spite of what has been said about the desirability and possibility of
limited war, the danger of an all-out atomic war will increase. One of the
instruments to avoid this universal catastrophe lies in the restoration of those
processes of a realistic foreign policy to which I have referred.
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Realism Good: Prevents War (1/3)

REALISM IS KEY TO INTERNATIONAL PEACE THE
CRITIQUE ATTACKS THE WORST ASPECTS OF REALIST
POLITICS, THE PLAN EMBODIES THE BEST.
Jervis, President, American Political Science Association, INTERNATIONAL
ORGANIZATION, Autumn 1998, ASP.
Robert
Realism can also speak to the conditions under which states are most likely to
cooperate and the strategies that actors can employ to foster cooperation. This line
of theorizing is sometimes associated with neoliberalism, but the two are hard to distinguish in this area. Making a distinction would be easy if
realism believed that conflict was zero-sum, that actors were always on the Pareto frontier. This conclusion perhaps flows from the view of
neoclassical economics that all arrangements have evolved to be maximally efficient, but realists see that politics is often tragic in the sense of
. Although offensive realists who see aggression

and expansionism as omnipresent (or who believe that security requires
expansion) stress the prevalence of extreme conflict of interest, defensive
realists believe that much of international politics is a Prisoners dilemma or a
more complex security dilemma. The desire to gain mixes with the need for
protection; much of statecraft consists of structuring situations so that states
can maximize their common interests. The ever-present fear that others will take
advantage of the state and the knowledge that others have reciprocal worries
leads diplomats to seek arrangements that will reduce if not neutralize these
concerns. Even if international politics must remain a Prisoners Dilemma, it can often be made into one that is more benign by altering
actors being unable to realize their common interests
the pay-offs to encourage cooperation, for example, by enhancing each states ability to protect itself should the other seek to exploit it and
The knowledge
that even if others are benign today, they may become hostile in the future due
to changes of mind, circumstances, and regimes can similarly lead decision
makers to create arrangements that bind others and themselves, as previously noted.
increasing the transparency that allows each to see what the other side is doing and understand why it is doing it.
REALISM KEY TO DIPLOMACY AND PREVENTING CONFLICT.

Robert
Just as understanding the limits of the states power can reduce conflict, so in
protecting what is most important to them states must avoid the destructive
disputes that will result from failing to respect the vital interests of others.
Realists have long argued that diplomacy and empathy are vital tools of
statecraft: conceptions of the national interest that leave no room for the
aspirations and values of others will bring ruin to the state as well as to its
neighbors.
WAR AND VIOLENCE ARE ENDEMIC TO IR POLITICS,

MOVING AWAY WILL INEVITABLY RESULT IN GREAT POWER
WARS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
[John, Co-Director of IR Policy at University of Chicago and Former research
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg xi-xii. )
The twentieth century was a period of great international
violence.In World War I (1914-18), roughly nine million people died on European battlefields. About fifty million people
were killed duringWorld War 11(1939-45), well over half of them civilians. Soon after the end of World War II, the Cold War engulfed
the globe. During this con-frontation, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies never directly fought the United States and its
North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies,but many millions died in proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, El
Salvador, and elsewhere. Millions also died in the century's lesser, yet still fierce, wars, including the Russo-Japanese con-flicts of
1904-5 and 1939, the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1920, the Russo-Polish War of 1920-21, the various
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Hopes
for peace will probably not be realized, because the great
powers that shape the international system fear each other and
compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to
gain a position of dominant power over others, because having
dominant power is the best means to ensure one's own survival.
Strength ensures safety, and the greatest strength is the
greatest insurance of safety. States facing this incentive are fated to clash as each competes for
advantage over the others. This is a tragic situation, but there is no escaping
it unless the states that make up the system agree to form a world government. Such a vast transformation is hardly a realistic
prospect, however, so conflict and war are bound to continue as large and
enduring features of world politics.
Arab-Israeli wars, and the han-Iraq War of 1980-88. This cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium.
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ANY SHIFT AWAY FROM REALISM WILL CAUSE A POWER
VACUUM RESULTING IN GREAT POWER WARS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 3. )
Alas, the claim that security competition and war between the great
powers have been purged from the international system is wrong.
Indeed, there is much evidence that the promise of everlasting peace
among the great powers was stillborn. Consider, for example, that even
though the soviet threat has disappeared, the United States still
maintains about one hundred thousand troops in Europe and roughly the
same number in Northeast Asia. It does so because it recognizes that
dangerous rivalries would probably emerge among the major powers in
these regions if U.S. troops were withdrawn. Moreover, almost every
European state, including the United Kingdom and France, still harbors
deep-seated, albeit muted, fears that a Germany unchecked by
American power might behave aggressively; fear of Japan in Northeast
Asia is probably even more profound, and it is certainly more frequently
expressed. Finally, the possibility of a clash between China and the
United States over Taiwan is hardly remote. This is not to say that such
a war is likely, but the possibility reminds us that the threat of greatpower war has not disappeared. The sad fact is that international
politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is
likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of their competition
waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete
with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to
maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the
expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the
strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome.
Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon--that is, the only great power in
the system.
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Kritik Answers

(PREVIOUS PAGE)
There are no status quo powers in the international system, save for the
occasional hegemon that wants to maintain its dominating position over
potential rivals. Great powers are rarely content with the current distribution of power; on the contrary, they face a constant incentive to
change it in their favor. They almost always have revisionist intentions,
and they will use force to alter the balance of power if they think it can
be done at a reasonable price.3 At times, the costs and risks of trying to
shift the balance of power are too great, forcing great powers to wait for
more favorable circumstances. But the desire for more power does not
go away, unless a state achieves the ultimate goal of hegemony. Since
no state is likely to achieve global hegemony, however, the world is
condemned to perpetual great-power competition. This unrelenting
pursuit of power means that great powers are Inclined to look for
opportunities to alter the distribution of world power in their favor. They
will seize these opportunities if they have the necessary capability.
Simply put, great powers are primed for offense. But not only does a
great power seek to gain power at the expense of other states, it also
tries to thwart rivals bent on gaining power at its expense. Thus, a great
power will defend the balance of power when looming change favors
another state, and it will try to undermine the balance when the
direction of change is in its own favor.
SURVIVAL IS CONTIGENT ON OFFENSIVE MILITARY POWER

MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 36-7. )
The security dilemma," whith is one of the most well-known concepts in
the international relations literature, reflects the basic logic of offensive
realism. The essence of the dilemma is that the measures a state takes
to increase its own security usually decrease the security of other states.
Thus, it is difficult for a state to increase its own chances of survival
without threatening the survival of other states. John Hen first
introduced the security dilemma in a 1950 article in the journal World
Politkc.'7 After discussing the anarchic nature of international politics.
he writes, "Striving to attain security from . . . attack, [states] are driven
to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the
power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and
compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely
secure in such a world of competing units, power competition ensues,
and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on."8 The
implication of Herz's analysis is clear: the best way for a state to survive
in anarchy is to take advantage of other states and gain power at their
expense. The best defense is a good offense. Since this message is
widely understood, ceaseless security competition ensues.
Unfortunately, little can be done to ameliorate the security dilemma as
long as states operate in anarchy.
It should be apparent from this discussion that saying that states are
power maximizers is tantamount to saying that they care about relative
power, not absolute power. There is an important distinction here,
because states concerned about relative power behave differently than
do states interested in absolute power.'9 States that maximize relative
power are concerned primarily with the distribution of material
capabilities. In particular, they try to gain as large a power advantage as
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Kritik Answers
possible over potential rivals, because power is the best means to
survival in a dangerous world. Thus, states motivated by relative power
concerns are likely to forgo large gains in their own power, if such gains
give rival states even greater power, for smaller national gains that
nevertheless provide them with a power advantage over their rivals.20
States that maximize absolute power, on the other hand, care only
about the size of their own gains, not those of other states. They are not
motivated by balance-of-power logic but instead are concerned with
amassing power without regard to how much power other states control.
They would jump at the opportunity for large gains, even if a rival gained
more in the deal. Power, according to this logic, is not a means to an end
(survival), but an end in itself.2'
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Kritik Answers
Realism Good: Militarism Solves

War (1/2)
U.S. MILITARISM IS CRITICAL TO WORLD PEACE
Kagan, Hillhouse Professor of History at Yale, 1997 (Donald, Roles and
Missions. Orbis, Spring, Volume 41)
the keystone
of American strategy should be an effort to preserve and sustain the
situation as well and as long as possible. America's most vital interest, therefore, is
maintaining the general peace, for war has been the swiftest, most expensive, and most devastating means
of changing the balance of international power. But peace does not keep itself , although one of the most
Few, if any, nations in the history of the world have ever enjoyed such a favorable situation. It stands to reason that
common errors in modern thinking about international relations is the assumption that peace is natural and can be preserved merely by having
peace-seeking nations avoid provocative actions. The last three-quarters of the twentieth century strongly suggests the opposite conclusion:
major war is more likely to come when satisfied states neglect

their defenses and fail to take an active part in the preservation
of peace. It is vital to understand that the current relatively peaceful and secure
situation is neither inevitable nor immutable. It reflects two
conditions built up with tremendous effort and expense during the
last half century: the great power of the United States and the
general expectation that Americans will be willing to use that
power when necessary. The diminution of U.S. power and
credibility, which would follow on a policy of reduced responsibility, would thus not be a neutral act
that would leave the situation as it stands. Instead, it would be a
critical step in undermining the stability of the international
situation. Calculations based on the absence of visible potential
enemies would immediately be made invalid by America's
withdrawal from its current position as the major bulwark
supporting the world order. The cost of the resulting upheaval in
wealth, instability, and the likelihood of war would be infinitely
greater than the cost of continuing to uphold the existing
international structure.
AND, NON-VIOLENCE DOESNT SOLVE ITS JUST WISHFUL

THINKING
Regan, Political Science Professor at Fordham, 1996 (Richard, Just War:
Principles and Causes, p. 6)
Pacifists generally argue that nonviolence and nonresistance will ultimately win
the minds and hearts of aggressors and oppressors, but that argument is
neither convincing nor dispositive. The success of Gandhi or King may have been due (at
least in part) to the appeal of their nonviolent campaigns to the conscience of their oppressors. But if that is true, it is
Gandhi could appeal to the moral conscience of a free British

electorate over the heads of colonial administrators, and King could appeal to the
moral conscience of the national American electorate over the heads of
regional southern officials. There is no reason to believe that such campaigns
would have been successful against the rulers of Nazi Germany .
Second, the argument rests on an extremely optimistic view about
the reformability of human behavior. Hobbes was surely correct in describing a persistent
because
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Kritik Answers
To imagine that every or even most human
beings will behave like saints seems to be wishful thinking. And
even were human beings to be so transformed at some indefinite
future point of time, why should innocent human beings suffer
oppression in the intervening short run?
conflictual pattern of human behavior.
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Kritik Answers

War (2/2)
AND, THEIR STRATEGY IS IMMORAL AND INCITES MORE
VIOLENCE
Coates, Politics Lecturer at Reading, 1997 (A.J., The Ethics of War, p. 1156)
Doubts arise not just about the utility or efficacy of the pacifist strategy, but also
about its moral consistency. The moral claim of the strategy rests on the
assumption that non-violent resistance is noncoercive, that here is a morally
superior form of action that is not part of a culture or cycle of violence. That
assumption seems unfounded. As one critic argues: Even though your action is
non-violent, its first consequence must be to place you and your opponents in a
state of war. For your opponents now have only the same sort of choice that an
army has: that of allowing you to continue occupying the heights you have
moved on to, or of applying force dynamic, active, violent force to throw you
back off them. Your opponents cannot now uphold the laws which they value
without the use of such violence. And to fail to uphold them is to capitulate to
you In terms of its practical impact, therefore, your tactic is basically a
military one rather than a morally persuasive one or even a political one.
(Prosch 1965, pp. 104-5) Not only does non-violent resistance invite a violent
response from an opponent; it also produces in some cases even deliberately
engineers circumstances in which those of a more militant and less sensitive
disposition can realize their violent ambitions. In such circumstances it seems
either nave or hypocritical to parade ones pacific and non-violent credentials
while ignoring the key role that has been played in the unleashing of the cycle of
violence.
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Kritik Answers

Genocide
U.S. MILITARISM IS CRITICAL TO PREVENTING GENOCIDE
Diamond, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 1996 (Larry,
Why the United States must remain engaged, Orbis, Summer, Volume 40,
Number 3)
Much in Nordlinger's book is wise, prudent, and morally responsible. Let us hope that we
never again so demonize a global challenger that our officials are tempted to vitiate our
constitution and values, or make the mistake, so tragically common in the cold war, of
embracing any ethically repugnant regime that happens to be on "our side." Let us have a
serious debate on our national interests and the military means we need to defend them. If
we can pare our defense spending further by eliminating expensive weapons programs
that are not needed or not likely to work (or even in some cases not wanted by the armed
let us not make the mistake of assuming that a world

without effective rules and the power to enforce them would be
any more benign than Hobbes imagined it would be, or that a world full of
escalating rivalries, arms buildups, aggression, repression,
genocide, and war would not ultimately threaten our values, our
security, and our way of life. Especially now, in a turbulent era of power
instabilities and rapidly resurgent nationalisms, world order will depend heavily
on preeminent American military power, selectively but strategically
engaged around the world in the service of liberal principles. In the necessary
forces themselves), by all means let us do so. But
the core mistake of isolationists then and now -
task of reconfiguring U.S. foreign policy for a new century, liberal internationalism offers
the best, wisest, most secure, and most humane foundation on which to build.
EVEN IF THEY WIN THAT THE PLAN DOESNT PASS WELL

WIN THAT THE KRITIK SANCTIONS GENOCIDE
Willis 12-19-95 (Ellen, The Village Voice)
If intellectuals are more inclined to rise to the discrete domestic issue
than the historic international moment, this may have less to do with the decay
of the notion of international solidarity than with the decay of confidence in their ability
to change the world, not to mention the decay of anything resembling a
cohe re nt f ramework of ideas within which to understand it.
Certainly the received ideas of the left, to the extent that a left can still be said to exist, have been less than helpful as a
framework for understanding the Bosnian crisis or organizing a response to it. Although
American imperialism
the idea of
explains less and less in a world where the locus of power is rapidly shifting to a
fuels a strain of reflexive antiinterventionist sentiment whose practical result is paralyzed

dithering in the face of genocide. Floating around "progressive"
circles and reinforcing the dithering is a brand of vulgar pacifism
whose defining characteristic is not principled rejection of
violence but squeamish aversion to dealing with it. In the academy
in particular, entrenched assumptions about identity politics and cultural
relativism promote a view of the Balkan conflict as too complicated and
ambiguous to allow for choosing sides. If there is no such thing as universality, if multiethnic
network of transnational corporations, it still
democracy is not intrinsically preferable to ethnic separatism, if there are no clear-cut aggressors and victims but merely
clashing cultures, perhaps ethnic partition is simply the most practical way of resolving those "implacable ancient
rivalries."\
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Democracy
U.S. MILITARISM IS CRITICAL TO THE SPREAD OF
DEMOCRACY
Diamond, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, 1996 (Larry,
Why the United States must remain engaged, Orbis, Summer, Volume 40,
Number 3)
In the past, global power has been an important reason why certain countries have
become models for emulation by others. The global power of the United States,
and of its Western democratic allies, has been a factor in the diffusion of democracy
around the world, and certainly is crucial to our ability to help popular, legitimate
democratic forces deter armed threats to their overthrow, or to return to power

(as in Haiti) when they have been overthrown. Given the linkages among democracy,
peace, and human rights - as well as the recent finding of Professor Adam Przeworski
(New York University) that democracy is more likely to survive in a country when it is more
widely present in the region - we should not surrender our capacity to diffuse and
defend democracy. It is not only intrinsic to our ideals but important to our national
security that we remain globally powerful and engaged - and that a dictatorship
does not rise to hegemonic power within any major region .
LITTLE B: DEMOCRACY PREVENTS WAR, MASS DEATH,

AND GENOCIDE
Rummel, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii &
Director of the Haiku Institute of Peace Research, 1994 (Rudolph J., Power,
Genocide and Mass Murder, Journal of Peace Research, February, Volume 31,
Nubmer 1)
The principal empirical and theoretical conclusion emerging from this project confirms
Power kills, absolute power kills

absolutely. The more power a regime has, the more it can act
arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite . The more
previous work on the causes of war:
freely a political elite can control the power of the state apparatus, the more thoroughly it
can repress and murder its subjects and the more insistently it can declare war on
domestic and foreign enemies. By contrast, the more it will make war on others and
murder its foreign and domestic subjects, the more constrained the power of a regime -
the more political power is diffused, checked, and balanced - the less it
will aggress on others and commit democide . This finding holds up
through a variety of multivariate analyses comprising over a hundred different kinds of
political, cultural, social, and economic variables. All considered, including the partial
correlations, regression analysis, and the independent dimensions defined through factor
analysis, a measure of democracy versus totalitarian regimes and measures of war and
rebellion are the best independent predictors of democide (Rummel, 1995). At the
totalitarian regimes murdered their people by

the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to
execute even serial murderers. The way to virtually eliminate genocide
and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking power.
This means to foster democratic freedom. This is the ultimate conclusion of this
extremes of power, the
project.
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Alt Bad: Could Make Things Worse

THE ALTERNATIVE MAY MAKE THINGS WORSE, WILL
ELIMINATE BENEFITS OF THE CURRENT ORDER
Murray, RECONSTRUCTING REALISM: BETWEEN POWER POLITICS AND
COSMOPOLITAN ETHICS, Keele University Press: Edinburgh, 1997, p. 182.
Alastair J.H.
This is not merely to indulge in yet another interminable discourse on

the lessons of Munich, rejecting all strategies of assurance for more
familiar policies of deterrence. A realist perspective does not, as Wendt
seems to assume, require worst-case forecasting, nor does it adopt an
ethic of sauve qui peut. But it is to suggest that, when realism
emphasizes the need for a cautious, gradual approach to attempts to
transform the nature of the system, it had a point. In Wendts analysis,
change ultimately becomes as privileged as the status quo in rationalist
perspectives. If he does not hold that history is progressive, he does
hold that change is. If he is not idealistic about the possibilities of
effecting a transformation of the system, he is with regard to the way in
which it might be accomplished. Yet, even if we acknowledge that a
transformation in the structure of international politics would be
beneficial, this does not imply the acceptance of a desperate gamble to
accomplish it. And, at the end of the day, if we can accept that the
current structure of international politics contains many injustices, there
is no guarantee that its transformation would remove such iniquities
anyway. The only thing that the quest to overthrow the status quo does
not guarantee to do is to undermine those fragments of order that we
currently possess. Ultimately, constructivism can be seen to rest upon a
value of judgment which sacrifices the safe option of remaining within
the current situation for the attempt to explore its possibilities. It can be
seen to rest on a progressive philosophy which privileges the possible
over the extant and sacrifices stability on the altar of transformation.
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Alt Fails: Realism Inevitable (1/2)

REALISM IS INEVITABLE
Mearsheimer, Professor, University of Chicago, THE TRAGEDY OF
GREAT POWER POLITICS, 2001, p. 2.
John
The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and
dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of
their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always
compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to
maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense
of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all
the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to
be the hegemon-that is, the only great power in the system.
REALISM IS A FACT OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS EVEN IF

WE DONT LIKE IT
Mearsheimer, Professor, University of Chicago, THE TRAGEDY OF
GREAT POWER POLITICS, 2001, p. 3-4.
John
This situation, which no one consciously designed or intended, is genuinely

tragic. Great powers that have no reason to fight each other- that are merely
concerned with their own survival- nevertheless have little choice but to pursue
power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system. This dilemma is
captured in brutally frank comments that Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck
made during the early 1860s, when it appeared that Poland, which was not an
independent state at the time, might regain its sovereignty. Restoring the
Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any
enemy that chooses to attack us, he believed, and therefore he advocated that
Prussia should smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I
have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no
choice but to wipe them out.
Although it is depressing to realize that great powers might think and act this
way, it behooves us to see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. For
example, one of the key foreign policy issues facing the United States is the
question of how China will behave if its rapid economic growth continues and
effectively turns China into a giant Hong Kong. Many Americans believe that if
China is democratic and enmeshed in the global capitalist system, it will not act
aggressively; instead it will be content with the status quo in Northeast Asia.
According to this logic, the United States should engage China in order to
promote the latters integration into the world economy, a policy that also seeks
to encourage Chinas transition to democracy. If engagement succeeds, the
United States can work with a wealthy and democratic China to promote peace
around the globe. Unfortunately, a policy of engagement is doomed to fail.
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Alt Fails: Realism Inevitable (2/2)

STATES COMPETE WITH EACHOTHER TO SURVIVE; ANY
LOSS OF POWER IS ZERO SUM, MAKING REALIST AN
INEVITABILITY
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 32-33 )
Great powers fear each other, They regard each other with suspicion, and they worry that war might be in the offing. They
. There is little room for trust among states. For sure, the level of fear varies
. From the perspective of any one
great power, all other great powers are potential enemies. This point is illustrated
anticipate danger
across time and space, but it cannot be reduced to a trivial level
by the reaction of the United Kingdom and France to German reunification at the end of the Cold War. Despite the fact that these
three states had been close allies for almost forty-five years, both the United Kingdom and France immediately began worrying
t in a world where great

powers have the capability to attack each other and might have the motive to do so, any
state bent on survival must be at least suspicious of other states and reluctant to trust them.
Add to this the "911" problem-the absence of a central authority to which a threatened state can turn for
help-and states have even greater incentive to fear each other. Moreover,
there is no mechanism, other than the possible self-interest of third parties, for punishing an
aggressor. Because it is sometimes difficult to deter potential aggressors, states have ample reason not to trust other
states and to be prepared for war with them. The possible consequences of falling victim to
aggression further amplIfy the importance of fear as a motivating force in world politics.
Great powers do not compete with each other as if international politics were merely an economic marketplace. Political
competition among states is a much more dangerous business than
mere economic intercourse; the former can lead to war, and war often means
mass killing on the battlefield as well as mass murder of civilians. In extreme cases, war can even lead to the destruction
about the potential dangers of a united Germany.' The basis of this fear is tha
of states. The horrible consequences of war sometimes cause states to view each other not just as competitors, but as potentially
Political antagonism, in short, tends to be intense, because the

stakes are great. States in the international system also aim to guarantee
their own survival. Because other states are potential threats, and because there is no higher authority to come
to their rescue when they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for their own security . Each state tends to
see itself as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival. In international
deadly enemies.
politics, God helps those who help themselves. This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming alliances." But
alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience: today's affiance partner might be tomorrow's enemy, and today's enemy
might be tomorrow's alliance partner. For example, the United States fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and
Japan in World War H, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and allied with West Germany and Japan against China
States operating in a self-help world almost

always act according to their own sell-interest and do not subordinate
their interests to the interests of other states, or to the interests of the so-called
international community. The reason is simple: it pays to be selfish in a self-help world. This is true in the short
and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
term as weli as in the long term, because if a state loses in the short run, it might not be around for the long haul. Apprehensive
states quickly
understand that the best way to ensure their survival is to be the most
powerful state in the system. The stronger a state is relative to its potential rivals, the less likely it is that
about the ultimate intentions of other states, and aware that they operate in a self-help system,
any of those rivals will attack it and threaten its survival. Weaker states will be reluctant to pick fights with more powerful states
because the weaker states are likely to suffer military defeat. Indeed, the bigger the gap in power between any two states, the less
likely it is that the weaker will attack the stronger. Neither Canada nor Mexico, for example, would countenance attacking the
United States, which is far more powerful than its neighbors. The ideal situation is to be the hegemon in the system. As Immanuel
Kant said, "It is the desire of every state, or of its ruler, to arrive at a condition of perpetual peace by conquering the whole world, if
that were possible."12 Survival would then be almost guaranteed." Consequently, states pay close attention to how power is
distributed among them, and they make a special effort to maximize their share of world power. Specifically, they look for
opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential rivals. States
employ a variety of means-economic, diplomatic, and military-to shift the balance of power in their favor, even if doing so makes
Because one state's gain in power is another

state's loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when
dealing with each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other
states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to arguing that states are
disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their
ultimate motive is simply to survive. In short, great powers have aggressive intentions.'4
other states suspicious or even hostile.
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Alt Fails: Realism Will Reasset Itself

RELYING ON A STRUCTURAL APPROACH TO REFORMING
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS FAILS, NEW PROBLEMS WILL
ALWAYS DEMAND SPECIFIC REALISTIC SOLUTIONS.
Hans Morgenthau, University of Chicago, Realism in International Politics, 19 58,
Published in NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW, Winter 1998.
I could go on and on to give you examples. I'll give you another one which just
comes to my mind: the expectation (which was very prevalent in the last year or
so of the Second World War) that at the end of that war, with the enemies
defeated, we would enter into a kind of millennium from which, again, power
politics with all of its manifestations would be dispelled. Secretary of State
Cordell Hull, when he came back from the Moscow Conference of 1943, at which
the establishment of the United Nations had been agreed upon, said that the
United Nations would usher in a new era in foreign policy by doing away with
power politics, with alliances, with the armaments race, with spheres of
influence, and so forth. And he repeated this utopian expectation much later, in
his memoirs. This is another example of the belief that the difficulties which
confront us, the risks which threaten us, the liabilities which we must face in
international affairs are the result of some kind of ephemeral, unique
configuration; that if you do away with the latter you will have done away with
the liabilities, the risks, and the difficulties as well. This belief is mistaken; for it
is the very essence of historic experience that whenever you have disposed of
one danger in foreign policy another one is going to raise its head. Once we had
disposed of the Axis as a threat to American security, we were right away
confronted with a new threat: the threat of the Soviet Union. I daresay if we
could, by some kind of miracle, do away tomorrow with the threat which
emanates from the Soviet Union, we would very soon be confronted again with a
new threat-and perhaps from a very unexpected quarter.
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IR is Realist Now (1/2)

REALPOLITIK DOMINATES THE IR (5 REASONS):
1. NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY OVER STATES
2. STATES HAVE OFFENSIVE MILITARY CAPABILTIES
3. STATES INTENTIONS ARE AMBIGUOUS
4. LONG TERM SURVIVAL IS A STATES PRIMARY
GOAL
5. STATES ARE RATIONAL ACTORS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 31-2 )
The first assumption is that the international system is anarchic, which
does not mean that it is chaotic or riven by disorder. It is easy to thaw
that conclusion, since realism depicts a world characterized by security
competition and war. By itself, however, the realist notion of anarchy
has nothing to do with conflict; it is an ordering principle, which says
that the system comprises independent states that have no central
authority above them.4 Sovereignty, in other words, inheres in states
because there is no higher ruling body in the international system.'
There is no "government over governments. "~ The second assumption
is that great powers inherently possess some offensive military
capability, which gives them the wherewithal to hurt and possibly
destroy each other. States are potentially dangerous to each other,
although some states have more military might than others and are
therefore more dangerous. A state's military power is usually identified
with the particular weaponry at its disposal, although even if there were
no weapons. the Individuals in those states could still use their feet and
hands to attack the population of another state. After all, for every neck,
there are two hands to choke it. The third assumption is that states can
never be certain about other states' intentions. Specifically, no state can
be sure that another state will not use its offensive military capability to
attack the first state. This is not to say that states necessarily have
hostile intentions. Indeed, all of the states in the system may be reliably
benign, but it is impossible to be sure of that judgment because
intentions are impossible to divine with 100 percent certainty.7 There
are many possible causes of aggression, and no state can be sure that
another state is not motivated by one of them.8 Furthermore, intentions
can change quickly, so a state's intentions can be benign one day and
hostile the next. Uncertainty about intentions is unavoidable, which
means that states can never be sure that other states do not have
offensive intentions to go along with their offensive capabilities. The
fourth assumption is that survival is the primary goal of great powers.
Specifically, states seek to maintain their territorial integrity and the
autonomy of their domestic political order. Survival dominates other
motives because, once a state is conquered, it is unlikely to be in a position to pursue other aims. Soviet leader Josef Stalin put the point well
during a war scare in 1927: "We can and must build socialism in the
[Soviet Union]. But in order to do so we first of all have to exist."9 States
can and do pursue other goals, of course, but security is their most
important objective. The fifth assumption is that great powers are
rational actors. They are aware of their external environment and they
think strategically about how to survive in it. In particular, they consider
the preferences of other states and how their own behavior is likely to
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affect the behavior of those other states, and how the behavior of those
other states is likely to affect their own strategy for survival. Moreover,
states pay attention to the long term as well as the immediate
consequences of their actions.
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IR is Realist Now (2/2)

STATES VIEW POWER IS AN END IN ITSELF THIS HAS TWO
IMPLICATIONS:
1. MAKES THEIR LINKS NON-UNIQUE AND
INEVITABLE
2. TAKES OUT SOLVENCY AS THEIR ALTERNATIVE IS
UNREALISABLE
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 36 )
It should be apparent from this discussion that saying that states are
power maximizers is tantamount to saying that they care about relative
power, not absolute power. There is an important distinction here,
because states concerned about relative power behave differently than
do states interested in absolute power.'~ States that maximize relative
power are concerned primarily with the distribution of material
capabilities. In particular, they try to gain as large a power advantage as
possible over potential rivals, because power is the best means to
survival in a dangerous world. Thus, states motivated by relative power
concerns are likely to forgo large gains in their own power, if such gains
give rival states even greater power, for smaller national gains that
nevertheless provide them with a power advantage over their rivals.2U
States that maximize absolute power, on the other hand, care only
about the size of their own gains, not those of other states. They are not
motivated by balance-of-power logic but instead are concerned with
amassing power without regard to how much power other states control.
They would jump at the opportunity for large gains, even if a rival gained
more in the deal. Power, according to this logic, is not a means to an end
(survival), but an end in itself.2'
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Kritik Answers
Miscalculation Inevitable
POWER MISCALCULATION IS INEVITABLE
1. STATES LIE
2. THEY MAKE MISTAKES IN CALCULATED
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 38. )
Nevertheless, great powers miscalculate from time to time because they
invariably make important decisions on the basis of imperfect information. States hardly ever have complete information about any situation they confront. There are two dimensions to this problem.
Potential adversaries have incentives to misrepresent their own strength or
weakness, and to conceal their true aims.24 For example, a weaker state trying to deter a
stronger state is likely to exaggerate its own power to discourage the potential aggressor from attacking. On the other hand, a
state bent on aggression is likely to emphasize its peaceful goals while
exaggerating its military weakness, so that the potential victim does not
build up its own arms and thus leaves itself vulnerable to attack . Probably no
national leader was better at practicing this kind of deception than Adolf Hitler. But even if disinformation was not a problem,
great powers are often unsure about how their own military forces, as well as the adversary's, will perform on the battlefield. For
example, it is sometimes difficult to determine in advance how new weapons and untested combat units will perform in the face of
enemy fire. Peacetime maneuvers and war games are helpful but imperfect indicators of what is likely to happen in actual combat.
Fighting wars is a complicated business in which it is often difficult to predict outcomes. Remember that although the United
States and its allies scored a stunning and remarkably easy victory against Iraq in early 1991, most experts at the time believed
that Iraq's military would be a formidable foe and put up stubborn resistance before finally succumbing to American military
might.25
Great powers are also sometimes unsure about the resolve of opposing
states as well as allies. For example, Germany believed that if it went to
war against France and Russia in the summer of 1914, the United Kingdom would
probably stay out of the fight. Saddam Hussein expected the United States
to stand aside when he invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Both aggressors guessed wrong, but each
had good reason to think that its initial judgment was correct. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler believed that his great-power rivals would
be easy to exploit and isolate because each had little interest in fighting Germany and instead was determined to get someone
, great powers constantly find themselves

confronting situations in which they have to make important decisions
with incomplete information. Not surprisingly, they sometimes make
faulty judgments and end up doing themselves serious harm. Some defensive
else to assume that burden. He guessed right. In short
realists go so far as to suggest that the constraints of the international system are so powerful that offense rarely succeeds, and
that aggressive great powers invariably end up being punished.2' As noted, they emphasize that 1) threatened states balance
against aggressors and ultimately crush them, and 2) there is an offense-defense balance that is usually heavily tilted toward the
defense, thus making conquest especially difficult. Great powers, therefore, should be content with the existing balance of power
and not try to change it by force. After all, it makes little sense for a state to initiate a war that it is likely to lose; that would be selfdefeating behavior. It is better to concentrate instead on preserving the balance of power.27 Moreover, because aggressors seldom
succeed, states should understand that security is abundant, and thus there is no good strategic reason for wanting more power in
the first place. In a world where conquest seldom pays, states should have relatively benign intentions toward each other. If they
do not, these defensive realists argue, the reason is probably poisonous domestic politics, not smart calculations about how to
guarantee one's security in an anarchic world.
ITS IMPOSSIBLE FOR STATES TO ADEQUATELY PERCIEVE

FUTURE POWER RELATIONMISCALCULATION IS
INEVITABLE
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 35. )
Second, determining how much power is enough becomes even more
complicated when great powers contemplate how power wifi be distributed among them ten or twenty years down the road. The capabilities of
individual states vary over time, sometimes markedly, and it is often
diffi-
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cult to predict the direction and scope of change in the balance of power.
Remembet few in the West antidpated the collapse of the Soviet Union
before it happened. In fact, during the first hail of the Cold War, many in
the West feared that the Soviet economy would eventually generate
greater wealth than the American economy, which would cause a
marked
power shift against the United States and its allies. What the future holds
for China and Russia and what the balance of power will look like in 2020
is difficult to foresee.
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Perm Solves: Realism Necessary to

Understand Parts of IR
PERM: COMBINE THE ALTERNATE APPROACH TO IR WITH
THE REALIST STANCE OF THE 1AC THIS PROVIDES THE
BEST POSSIBLE SOLVENCY FOR DECREASING VIOLENCE
AND WAR.
Robert
The popularity of alternative approaches to international politics cannot be

explained entirely by their scholarly virtues. Among the other factors at work are
fashions and normative and political preferences. This in part explains the
increasing role of rationalism and constructivism. Important as they are, these
approaches are necessarily less complete than liberalism, Marxism and realism.
Indeed, they fit better with the latter than is often realized. Realism, then,
continues to play a major role in IR scholarship. It can elucidate the conditions
and strategies that are conducive to cooperation and can account for significant
international change, including a greatly decreased tolerance for force among
developed countries, which appears to be currently the case.
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A2 9/11 Disproves Realism

EVEN IN THE POST 9/11 WORLD, WE STILL LIVE IN AN
INTENSELY REALIST WORLD THE UN IS IN THE GUTTER,
COUNTRIES DO NOT WANT TO ENGAGE IN A COMMUNITY,
AND THE US STILL REMAINS DIVIDED WITH EUROPE
Rieff, Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, 2003 (David, Mother Jones,
Goodbye, New World Order, July-August,
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/07/ma_442_01.html)
<Yes, many people still want to believe in the United Nations -- though they're becoming fewer and fewer in number. There is even the fantasy
that some institutional or policy silver bullet -- the International Criminal Court, say, or the Kyoto Protocol -- will provide an Archimedean lever for
solving the world's woes. Were it not for the machinations of the United States, which refused to sign on to either Kyoto or the international court,
America stands only as an obstacle

that will be overcome on the road to inevitable progress.
Such claims have all the ingredients of a fine press release, but the reality is more depressing. It is true, for example, that European
governments increasingly subscribe to the ideology -- some would say the secular religion -- of
human rights. But then so does the United States; after all, the official position of
the U.S. government is that the intervention in Iraq was undertaken at least in
part in the name of human rights. Now a doctrine that can be claimed by the United States of America as well as the
the argument goes, we would be well on our way to a better world; even so,
still social democratic nations of Western Europe, and the nongovernmental organizations that view the United States as little more than a rogue
state -- not to mention major transnational corporations that have signed on to a U.N. "compact with business" -- has become elastic to the point
of fatuousness. If we all claim to be pledged to the cause of human rights (and who, it seems, does not?), then it is hard not to think of Dr.
Johnson's remark about patriotism, that it is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
There is the United

Nations sunk in irrelevancy, except as the world's leading humanitarian relief
organization. There is a landscape of international relations that seems far more
to resemble the bellicose world of pre-1914 Europe than the interdependent,
responsible world imagined by the framers of the U.N. Charter. There is an entire
continent, sub-Saharan Africa, mired in an economic calamity largely not of its
own making. There is a Europe that pays lip service to human rights, but
remains intransigent where its own real interests -- such as farm subsidies that effectively condemn subSaharan Africa to grinding poverty by limiting its agricultural exports -- are concerned. And then there is the
United States, seemingly bent on empire.
As far as the international system is concerned, what are the most striking aspects of the current situation?
Where was the good news again? That Augusto Pinochet was briefly detained in London, or that Slobodan Milosevic will likely spend the rest of
his life in a U.N. jail? This, while somewhere between 2 and 4 million Congolese die in the first general war in Africa since decolonization? The
, much of the world is actually in worse shape than it

was just a few decades ago. Where there has been progress, if that term is even appropriate in
so apocalyptic a context, it has been in the realm of norms -- that is, the laws that nations try
to evade and ignore, and in which many of the most decent people on this slaughterhouse of a planet continue to believe. But
we are deep in loaves-and-fishes land here . To believe that states will suddenly come to their
senses and behave as responsible members of an "international community,"
when few states have ever done this, is, indeed, to believe in miracles.
truth is that, outside the developed countries
There is unquestionably a globalized world economy, which remains largely dominated by the United States and is administered through central
banks, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. But
community,
there is no such thing as an international
at least not one worthy of the name -- assuming, that is, we mean a community of shared values and interests, not just
even the old, Cold War-era blocs are

disintegrating: The G-77, the major international organization representing the
developing world, now has trouble agreeing on anything beyond the most
generic recommendations. The run-up to the Iraq war showed the depth of the
divisions within the so-called transatlantic family, and equally sharp splits were
evident within Europe during the same period. Never mind community; how can
there be any international system when what we have actually witnessed in the
period since 9/11 has been the steady erosion of the very idea of consensus in
international relations?
shared membership in the United Nations. For that matter,
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Kritik Answers
A2 Cold War Disproves Realism

(1/2)
REALISM ACCURATELY DESCRIBES THE WORLD POST-COLD
WAR U.S. INTERVENTIONISM PROVES
Miller, IR at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003 (Benjamin, Integrated
Realism and Hegemonic Military Intervention in Unipolarity, Hanami, Associate Professor of

Political Science at San Francisco State University, Perspectives on Structural Realism, p.
34-35)
Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has undertaken several military
interventions abroad, fluctuating widely in scope from the massive intervention
in the Gulf War through medium-scale intervention in Panama and Haiti to the
limited and abruptly terminated engagement in Somalia. Similarly another
regional crisis (Bosnia) was the occasion for great fluctuations of policy. The U.S.
response to the crisis shifted from military disengagement in the first four years
of the crisis to a considerable intervention on the ground in the last three years.
It has also refrained from intervention on other occasions, notably in post-Soviet
and African crises.
Is there a coherent logic behind these wide-ranging variations in post-Cold War
U.S. intervention behavior? Numerous critics have argued that there is not, and
that this erratic behavior reflects a lack of focus in U.S. foreign policy since the
end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the former archenemy.
For example, in a recent comprehensive treatment Gholz, Press and Sapolsky
characterize U.S. behavior this way: "the U.S. intervenes often in the conflicts of
others, but without a consistent rationale, without a clear sense of how to
advance U.S. interests, and sometimes with unintended and expensive
consequences" (1997, 5).
In the following discussion I will challenge the conventional wisdom about the
illogic and incoherence of recent U.S. military interventions. I will argue that in
contrast to widespread opinion, there is a clear logic to postCold War
interventions, even if it does not amount to a preconceived and purposive grand
strategy. Indeed, the U.S. has followed, whether consciously or not, the logic of
costs and benefits, namely different combinations of incentives and constraints
in different regions. More specifically, the intensity of U.S. interests at stake and
the intensity of the regional constraints on intervention (as reflected by the
estimated costs of intervention, especially in terms of casualties) best account
for the scope of U.S. military interventions in the postCold War era. My
argument suggests that different types of regions are prone to specific levels of
intervention or nonintervention because of the different combinations of U.S.
interests and constraints in each region. Thus, this logic accounts for the
variations in the scope of interventions and predicts different patterns of U.S.
intervention in different regions. The realist explanation presented here
integrates the classical realist focus on state interests with the structural realist
emphasis on constraints on state action in order to provide a theoretical model
of hegemonic military intervention in unipolarity. To illustrate this model, this
study will outline briefly the variations in the scope of U.S. military engagement
in all the major post-Cold War regional crises, notably the Persian Gulf (19901991, Fall 1994), Panama (1989), Somalia (1992-1994), Bosnia (since 1995),
Kosovo (since 1999), Haiti (1994-1996) and also the cases of nonintervention in
post-Soviet and African crises. The proposed explanation will demonstrate the
continuing relevance of realism to major issues of postCold War U.S. foreign
policy.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Cold War Disproves Realism

(2/2)
REALISM IS MORE APPLICABLE IN THE POST COLD WAR
ERA UNIPOLARITY MAKES ALL STATES MORE
VULNERABLE TO FOREIGN AGGRESSION
Hanami, Associate Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University,
2003 (Andrew, December, Structural Realism and Interconnectivity, Perspectives on
Structural Realism, p. 200-201)
, it has been said that structural realism has run its course in
explanations of international relations in the post-Cold War era. Presumably this is because
As a theory, now decades old
since the end of the Cold War, there is now as expected the long-term absence of a major war between the major states. For some, it was the
But the occurrence of war

was never the sole reason why structural realism explained international
behavior. It was only its most dramatic, and in some ways, its most important . Structural realism today can be
expected to endure as long as state preeminence endures and states remain the
most important actors in the international system, even in peace, for in peace one finds the
high-conflict era of bipolarity in which structural realism had its greatest explanatory power.
rudiments of war. In recent years, non-state and near-state actors have been put forth as decisive new units in a world now focused on
economics, limited campaigns or on terrorism. The state therefore is said to have declined in relative importance. But one needs to identify the
impact of such non-state actors in the world before we can make an assessment about the significance of the new relations they create, and the
Interconnectivity is the relationship between states as

conditioned by structure and state motive. Interconnectivity, as a feature of the prevailing international
structure, allows that significant internal or even multilateral actors can forge relations
across borders. The inside-out and outside-in perspectives can be seen to combine when individual personalities of key leaders, for
theory that explains them.
example, may be pushed by internal, historical or group dynamics to act outwardly. An international organization may decide on an agenda
personalities and organizations are important, in part, because they

represent a state's power, and to be effective they must push with that state
and act with one eye on their external environment. Personalities and organizations may initiate foreign
policy, bin foreign policy action that stems from internal drives but which goes
against the grain of structure is risking failure, and over time, successful
leadership will see that.1 The disappearance of the Soviet Union from the center stage for some seems to mean that suddenly
simply from the internal inertia of its members. But
unit-level explanations have replaced structure. But in reality the unipolarity that was created when the Soviet Union slid away merely gives unitlevel actors like personalities the appearance of .1 greater relative profile because they stand on a narrower stage. They went there before.
Systemic dynamics that operated then continue to persist. A change in history does not necessarily require a change in the general theory that
We should not be repulsed by the continuation of the familiar just

because it did not explain all actions in the past. As the simplest structure, unipolarity may not seem as
explains history.
threatening to all states as bipolarity had been. If, however implausible, under bipolarity then-was a direct U.S.Soviet conflict of any proportion,
the results would have significant systemic effects. But since the onset of unipolarity if the U.S. and any other power engaged in a conflict, there
would be much less system it impact. Thus all states feel the release of dread that accompanied the prospect of superpower confrontation in
The change from bipolarity to

unipolarity is forcing most states to learn more about themselves, and their
world. Structure still instructs. With a lone superpower, the challenge today is not only what the U.S.
might do to second states, and they may feel the U.S. has less urgency to shape some of them as formerly was the case ,
but what other second states could do to them, directly or indirectly. Whether it was true or not, states
believed that strong bipolar confrontations would have negative consequences sooner or later . Unipolarity, whether it is a moment or a
few decades in length, has ushered in a more variegated and self-help environment and
has thus caused states to focus on their most likely or immediate problems.
which they as smaller states could only watch, wait and weather as best they can.
Neither Asia nor a united Europe, as David Rieff believes, is likely to successfully challenge U.S.
hegemony in the twenty-first century. In pan, this is because European armies are shrinking both in "size and in capability. The only
threats to U.S. leadershipterrorism, failed states, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosivic or even the heirs to Osama bin Laden are limited." In
bipolarity, major confrontations being rare and their prevention by the action of lesser states was not possible, the international system below the
level of the superpowers was, in a sense, frozen in time. Their maneuvers mattered less because it was the potential top tier movement that held
the greatest leverage. Thus the orbit of state actions took place within a relatively immobile, stable and patterned bipolar world, as structuralists
. With the erosion to unipolarity, the calculus has changed considerably. Now
more states must watch more states. There are not just two sides, therefore there is no
"protection," sociology or structure of belonging to East or West. There is a sense of
greater anarchy, or at least, greater uncertainty as to both the movement and
consequences of the actions of states in an unbalanced world. This is worrisome
particularly to smaller states because the prospect of rescue in unipolarity is reduced as the U.S.
has greater choices of how and if to prop up second states in proportion to their
value in a less bifurcated world. Both Africa and Latin America have received less attention and aid from the U.S. since
have predicted
1990. This has caused Kenneth Jowitt to remark that large parts of the world today are now "disconnected" from the main states of the world.
many things suddenly become or appear to become important to smaller

states: their economies, militaries, allies, rivals, relations with the U.S. and even their relations with bigger states like Russia, China or other
Therefore,
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Kritik Answers
. Everything matters more because the importance of margins has
increased in a unipolar world as small gains or losses tilt states no longer buoyed
by a superpower sponsorship. Indeed, the fact that the U.S. remains the only important superpower may have led Osama
regional powers
bin Laden to target the "World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001, as he and his al Qaida group tried to "balance" or, in their
minds, punish or alter U.S. behavior in the Middle East
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Kritik Answers
A2 Cold War End Proves

Liberalism
REMOVING US HEGEMONY WOULD BE CATASTROPHIC IN A
POST COLD-WAR WORLD
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 2-3. )
Alas, the claim that security competition and war between the great
powers have been purged from the international system is wrong.
Indeed, there is much evidence that the promise of everlasting peace
among the great powers was stillborn. Consider, for example, that even
though the soviet threat has disappeared, the United States still
maintains about one hundred thousand troops in Europe and roughly the
same number in Northeast Asia. It does so because it recognizes that
dangerous rivalries would probably emerge among the major powers in
these regions if U.S. troops were withdrawn. Moreover, almost every
European state, including the United Kingdom and France, still harbors
deep-seated, albeit muted, fears that a Germany unchecked by
American power might behave aggressively; fear of Japan in Northeast
Asia is probably even more profound, and it is certainly more frequently
expressed. Finally, the possibility of a clash between China and the
United States over Taiwan is hardly remote. This is not to say that such
a war is likely, but the possibility reminds us that the threat of greatpower war has not disappeared. The sad fact is that international
politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is
likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of their competition
waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete
with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to
maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the
expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the
strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome.
Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon--that is, the only great power in
the system.
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A2 Cooperation Good (1/2)

PEACE IS IMPOSSIBLESTATES WILL CHEAT
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 35 )
All states are Influenced by this logic, which means that not only do
they look for opportunities to take advantage of one another, they also
work to ensure that other states do not take advantage of them. After
all,
rival states are driven by the same logic, and most states are likely to
recognize their own motives at play in the actions of other states. In short,
states ultimately pay attention to defense as well as offense. They think
about conquest themselves, and they work to check aggressor states
from
gaining power at their expense. This inexorably leads to a world of constant security competition, where states are willing to lie, cheat, and use
brute force if it helps them gain advantage over their rivals. Peace, if one
defines that concept as a state of tranquility or mutual concord, is not
likely to break out in this world.
STATES COOPERATE TO GAIN POWER OVER POTENTIAL

RIVALSEVERY COOPERATION IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO
SUSTAIN
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 48ish]
One might conclude from the preceding discussion that my theory does
not allow for any cooperation among the great powers. But this
Conclusion would be wrong. States can cooperate, although cooperation
is sometimes difficult to achieve and always difficult to sustain. Two
factors inhibit cooperation: considerations about relative gains and
concern about cheating.'3 Ultimately, great powers live in a
fundamentally competitive world where they view each other as real, or
at least potential, enemies, and they therefore look to gain power at
each other's expense. Any two states contemplating cooperation must
consider how profits or gains will be distributed between them. They can
think about the division in terms of either absolute or relative gains
(recall the distinction made earlier between pursuing either absolute
power or relative power; the concept here is the same). With absolute
gains, each side is concerned with maximizing its own profits and cares
little about how much the other side gains or loses in the deal. Each side
cares about the other only to the extent that the other side's behavior
affects its own prospects for achieving maximum profits. With relative
gains, on the other hand, each side considers not only its own individual
gain, but also how well it fares compared to the other side. Because
great powers care deeply about the balance of power, their thinking
focuses on relative gains when they consider cooperating with other
states. For sure, each state tries to maximize its absolute gains; still, it is
more important for a state to make sure that it does no worse, and
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Kritik Answers
perhaps better, than the other state in any agreement. Cooperation is
more difficult to achieve, however, when states are attuned to relative
gains rather than absolute gains.~' This is because states concerned
about absolute gains have to make sure that if the pie is expanding, they
are getting at least some portion of the increase, whereas states that
worry about relative gains must pay careful attention to how the pie is
divided, which complicates cooperative efforts. Concerns about
cheating also hinder cooperation. Great powers are often reluctant to
enter into cooperative agreements for fear that the other side will cheat
on the agreement and gain a significant advantage. This concern is
especially acute in the military realm, causing a "special peril of
defection." because the nature of military weaponry allows for rapid
shifts in the balance of power.5' Such a development could create a
window of opportunity for the state that cheats to inflict a decisive
defeat on its victim. These barriers to cooperation notwithstanding,
great powers do cooperate in a realist world. Balance-of-power logic
often causes great powers to
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A2 Cooperation Good (2/2)

ALLIANCES ARE TEMPORARY AND UNRELIABLE
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 33-4 )
States in the international system also aim to guarantee their own survival. Because other states are potential threats, and because there is
no
higher authority to come to their rescue when they dial 911, states cannot depend on others for their own security. Each state tends to see
itself
as vulnerable and alone, and therefore it aims to provide for its own survival. In international politics, God helps those who help themselves.
This emphasis on self-help does not preclude states from forming
alliances." But alliances are only temporary marriages of convenience:
today's affiance partner might be tomorrow's enemy, and today's enemy
might be tomorrow's alliance partner. For example, the United States
fought with China and the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan in
World War I, but soon thereafter flip-flopped enemies and partners and
allied with West Germany and Japan against China and the Soviet Union
during the Cold War.
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A2 Democracy Solves War

DEMOCRACIES STILL ENGAGE IN REALIST MINDSET
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 5. )
Unfortunately, a policy of engagement is doomed to fail. If China
becomes an economic powerhouse it will almost certainly translate its
economic might into military might and make a rim at dominating
Northeast Asia. Whether China is democratic and deeply enmeshed in
the global economy or autocratic and autarkic will have little effect on its
behavior, because democracies care about security as much as nondemocracies do, and hegemony is the best way for any state to
guarantee its own survival. Of course, neither its neighbors nor the
United States would stand idly by while China gained increasing
increments of power. Instead, they would seek to contain China,
probably by trying to form a balancing coalition. The result would be an
intense security competition between China and its rivals, with the everpresent danger of great-power war hanging over them. In short, China
and the United States are destined to be adversaries as China's power
grows.
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A2 Defense Solves
OFFENSE IS THE BEST DEFENSEWHOEVER COMMITS THE
FIRST STRIKE WINS 60% OF WARS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 38. )
There is no question that systemic factors constrain aggression,
especially balancing by threatened states. But defensive realists
exaggerate those restraining forces.28 Indeed, the historical record
provides little support for their claim that offense rarely succeeds. One
study estimates that there were 63 wars between 1815 and 1980, and
the initiator won 39 times, which translates into about a 60 percent
success rate. Turning to specific cases, Otto von Bismarck unified
Germany by winning military victories against Denmark in 1864, Austria
in 1866, and France in 1870, and the United States as we know it today
was created in good part by conquest in the nineteenth century.
Conquest certainly paid big dividends in these cases. Nazi Germany won
wars against Poland in 1939 and France `0 1940, but lost to the Soviet
Union between 1941 and 1945. Conquest ultimately did not pay for the
Third Reich, but if Hitler had restrained himself after the fall of France
and had not invaded the Soviet Union, conquest probably would have
paid handsomely for the Nazis, In short, the historical record shows that
offense sometimes succeeds and sometimes does not. The trick for a
sophisticated power maximizer is to figure out when to raise and when
to fold.
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A2 Human Nature
THE ANARCHIC SYSTEM OF IR IS THE REASON WHY
OFFENSIVE REALISM IS CORRECTWE NEVER MAKE
CLAIMS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 56-7]
In sum, my argument is that the structure of the international system.
not the particular characteristics of individual great powers, causes
them to thinic and act offensively and to seek hegemony.6C I do not
adopt Morgenthau's claim that states invariably behave aggressively
because they have a will to power hardwired into them. Instead, I
assume that the principal motive behind great-power behavior is
survival. In anarchy, however, the desire to survive encourages states to
behave aggressively Nor does my theory classify states as more or less
aggressive on the basis of their economic or political systems.
Offensive realism makes only a handful of assumptions about great
powers, and these assumptions apply equally to all great powers. Except
for differences in how much power each state controls, the theory
treats all states alike. I have now laid out the logic explaining why
states seek to gain as much power as possible over their rivals. I have
said little, however, about the object of that pursuit: power itself. The
next two chapters provide a detailed discussion of this important
subject.
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A2 Mindset Shift
INEVITABLY PARANOIA AND DISAGREEMENTS OVER
COOPERATION MAKES REALIST IDEOLOGY INEVITABLE
MOVING AWAY RISKS A DECAPITATING BLOW BY AN
INVADING NATION
MEARSHEIMER 2001
fellow at the Brookings institute, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, pg 40. )
The claim Is sometimes made that great powers can transcend
realist logic by working together to build an international order
that fosters peace and justice. World peace, it would appear, can only enhance a state's prosperity and security. America's political leaders paid considerable lip service to this line of argument over the course of the
twentieth century. President Clinton, for example, told an audience at the United Nations in September 1993 that "at the birth of
this organization 48 years ago a generation of gifted leaders from many nations stepped forward to organize the world's efforts on
behalf of security and prosperity . . . Now history has granted to us a moment of even greater opportunity . . Let us resolve that
we will dream larger. . . . Let us ensure that the world we pass to our children is healthier, safer and more abundant than the one
we inhabit today.""
This rhetoric notwithstanding, great powers do not work together to promote
world order for its own sake. Instead, each seeks to maximize its
own share of world power, which is likely to clash with the goal
of creating and sustaining stable international orders. This is not to say
that great powers never aim to prevent wars and keep the peace. On the contrary, they work hard to deter wars in which they
would be the likely vic tim. In such cases, however, state behavior is driven largely by narrow calculations about relative power, not
by a commitment to build a world order independent of a state's own interests. The United States, for example, devoted
enormous resources to deterring the Soviet Union from starting a war in Europe during the Cold War, not because of some deepseated commitment to promoting peace around the world, but because American leaders feared that a Soviet victory would lead to
a dangerous shift in the balance of power.46
The particular international order that obtains at any time is mainly a by-product of the self-interested behavior of the system's
great powers. The configuration of the system, in other words, is the unintended consequence of great-power security
competition, not the result of states acting together to organize peace. The establishment of the Cold War order in Europe
illustrates this point. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States intended to establish it, nor did they work together to create it.
In fact, each superpower worked hard in the early years of the Cold War to gain power at the expense of the other, while
preventing the other from doing likewise.47 The system that emerged in Europe in the aftermath of World War II was the
unplanned consequence of intense security competition between the superpowers.
Although that intense superpower rivalry ended along with the Cold War in 1990. Russia and the United States have not worked
together to create the present order in Europe. The United States, for example, has rejected out of hand various Russian proposals
to make the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe the central organizing pillar of European security (repladng the
U.S.-dominated NATO). Furthermore,
Russia was deeply opposed to NATO expansion, which It viewed as a serious threat to Russian security. Recognizing that Russia's
weakness would preclude any retaliation, however, the United States ignored Russia's concerns and pushed NATO to accept the
Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland as new members. Russia has also opposed u.S. policy in the Balkans over the past decade,
especially NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia. Again, the United States has paid little attention to Russia's concerns and has taken
the steps it deems necessary to bring peace to that volatile region. Finally, it is worth noting that although Russia is dead set
against allowing the
United States to deploy ballistic missile defenses, it is highly likely that Washington will deploy such a system if it is judged to be
technologically feasible. For sure, great-power rivalry will sometimes produce a stable international order, as happened during
the Cold War. Nevertheless, the great powers will continue looking for opportunities to increase their share of world power, and if a
favorable situation arises, they will move to undermine that stable order. Consider how hard the United States worked during the
late 1980s to weaken the Soviet Union and bring down the stable order that had emerged in Europe during the latter part of the
Cold War.48 Of course, the states that stand to lose power will work to deter aggression and preserve the existing order. But their
motives will be selfish, revolving around balance-of-power logic, not some commitment to world peace. Great powers cannot
states are unlikely to

agree on a general formula for bolstering peace. Certainly,
international relations scholars have never reached a consensus
on what the blueprint should look like. In fact, it seems there are about as many theories
on the causes of war and peace as there are scholars studying the subject. But more important, poll- cymakers
are unable to agree on how to create a stable world. For example, at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, important differences over how to create stability in Europe divided
commit themselves to the pursuit of a peaceful world order for two reasons. First,
Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson.49 In particular, Clemenceau was determined to impose harsher
terms on Gennany over the Rhineland than was either Lloyd George or Wilson, while Lloyd George stood out as the hard-liner on
. The Treaty of Versailles, not surprisingly, did little

to promote European stability.
German reparations
Furthermore, consider American thinking on how to achieve stability in Europe in the early days of the Cold War.' The key
elements for a stable and durable system were in place by the early 1950s. They included the division of Germany, the
positioning of American ground forces in Western Europe to deter a Soviet attack, and ensuring that West Germany would not seek
to develop nuclear weapons. Officials in the Truman administration, however, disagreed about whether a divided Germany would
be a source of peace or war. For example, George Kennan and Paul Nitze, who held important positions in the State Department,
believed that a divided Germany would be a source of instability whereas Secretary of State Dean Acheson disagreed with them. In
the 1950s, President Eisenhower sought to end the American commitment to defend Western Europe and to provide West Germany
with its owr~ nuclear deterrent. This policy, which was never fully adopted, nevertheless caused significant instability in Europe. as
it led directly to the Berlin crises of 1958-59 and 196l.~'
Second, great powers cannot put aside power considerations and
work to promote international peace because they cannot be
sure that their efforts will succeed. If their attempt fails, they
are likely to pay a steep price for having neglected the balance
of power, because if an aggressor appears at the door there will
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Kritik Answers
be no answer when they dial 911. That is a risk few states are
willing to run. Therefore, prudence dictates that they behave
according to realist logic. This line of reasoning accounts for
why collective security schemes, which call for states to put
aside narrow concerns about the balance of power and instead
act in accordance with the broader interests of the international
community, invariably die at birth.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Realism Assumes States

Rational
FIRST, HISTORY PROVES THAT ONLY STATES THAT ACT
THROUGH SELF-INTEREST WILL SURVIVE ONLY THE LONG
RUN, ENSURING RATIONAL BEHAVIOR. CROSS-APPLY
MEARSHEIMER
SECOND REALISM DOES NOT POSIT RATIONALITY OR
CONSTANCY BY STATES. WE ONLY POINT OUT THAT SELFHELP SYSTEMS REINFORCE THOSE TENDENCIES
Kenneth
Waltz, Crams BFF, Neorealism and its Critics, ed. by Robert Keohane,
1986, p. 117-118
Most of the confusions in balance-of-power theory and criticisms of it, derive from misunderstanding these three points. A balance-of-power
theory, properly stated, begins with assumptions about
states:
They
are unitary actors who,
at a minimum
, seek
their own preservation
and, at a maximum, drive for universal domination. States, or those who act for them, try in more or
less sensible ways to use the means available in order to achieve the ends in view. Those means fall into two categories: internal efforts (moves
to increase economic capability, to increase military strength, to develop clever strategies) and external efforts (moves to strengthen and enlarge
ones own alliance or to weaken and shrink an opposing one). The external game of alignment and realignment requires three or more players,
and it is usually said that balance-of-power systems require at least that number. The statement is false, for in a two-power system the politics of
balance continue, but the way to compensate for an incipient external disequilibrium is primarily by intensifying ones internal efforts. To the
assumptions of the theory we then add the condition for its operation: that two or more states coexist in a se1f-help system, one with no superior
agent to come to the aid of states that may be weakening or to deny to any of them the use of whatever instruments they think will serve their
purposes. The theory, then, is built up from the assumed motivations of states and the actions that correspond to them. It describes the
constraints that arise from the system that those actions produce, and it indicates the expected outcome: namely, the formation of balances of
. The system, like a market in economics,

interactions of its units, and the theory is based on assumptions about their behavior.
A self-help system is one in which those who do not help themselves, or who do so less effectively than others,
will fail to prosper, will lay themselves open to dangers, will suffer. Fear of such unwanted
consequences stimulates states to behave in ways that tend toward the creation
of balances of power. Notice that the theory requires no assumptions of rationality or
of constancy of will on the part of all of the actors. The theory says simply that if some do relatively well,
others will emulate them or fall by the wayside. Obviously, the system wont
work if all states lose interest in preserving themselves. It will, however, continue to work if
some states do, while others do not, choose to lose their political identities, say, through amalgamation. Nor need it be assumed
that all of the competing states are striving relentlessly to increase their power . The possibility that force may be
used by some states to weaken or destroy others does, however, make it difficult for them to break
out of the competitive system.
power. Balance-of-power theory is microtheory precisely in the economists sense
is made by the
actions and
THIRD, STATES RATIONALLY CALCULATE OFFENSIVE

MEASURES BEFORE TAKING RISKS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Politics, pg 38. )
Nevertheless, great powers miscalculate from time to time because
they invariably make important decisions on the basis of imperfect
information. States hardly ever have complete information about any
situation they confront. There are two dimensions to this problem.
Potential adversaries have incentives to misrepresent their own
strength or weakness, and to conceal thek true aims.24 For example, a
weaker state trying to deter a stronger state is likely to exaggerate its
own power to discourage the potential aggressor from attacking. On the
other hand, a state bent on aggression is likely to emphasize its peaceful
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Kritik Answers
goals while exaggerating its military weakness, so that the potential
victim does not build up its own arms and thus leaves itself vulnerable to
attack. Probably no national leader was better at practicing this kind of
deception than Adolf Hitler.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Realism Constructs Threats

REALISM DOESNT REQUIRE WORST CASE FORECASTING
OR THREAT CONSTRUCTION. THE CRITIQUE SACRIFICES
STABILITY ON THE ALTER OF UNCERTAIN
TRANSFORMATION.
Murray, Politics Department, University of Wales Swansea, Reconstructing
Realism, 1997, p. 182
Alastair
This is not merely to indulge in yet another interminable discourse on the `lessons of Munich', rejecting all strategies of assurance for more
.
A realist perspective does not,
familiar policies of deterrence
, require worst-case forecasting, nor

when realism emphasises the need for a
cautious, gradual approach to attempts to transform the nature of the system, it
has a point. In Wendt's analysis, change ultimately becomes as privileged as the status quo in rationalist perspectives. If he does not
as Wendt seems to assume
does it adopt an ethic of `sauve qui peut'. But it is to suggest that,
hold that history is progressive, he does hold that change is. If he is not idealistic about the possibilities of effecting a transformation of the
system, he is with regard to the way in which it might be accomplished. Yet, even if we acknowledge that a transformation in the structure of
at the end
of the day, if we can accept that the current structure of international politics
contains many injustices, there is no guarantee that its transformation would
remove such iniquities anyway. The only thing that the quest to overthrow the status quo does guarantee to do is to undermine
those fragments of order that we currently possess. Ultimately, constructivism can be seen to rest upon a value judgment which
sacrifices the safe option of remaining within the current situation for the attempt to explore its possibilities. It can be seen to rest
on a progressive philosophy which privileges the possible over the extant and
sacrifices stability on the altar of transformation. This is not to attempt to level a charge of utopianism, as
international politics would be beneficial, this does not imply the acceptance of a desperate gamble to accomplish it. And,
Wendt complains that Mearsheimer does, by emphasising constructivism's normative rather than explanatory commitment. As Wendt responds:
`Constructivists have a normative interest in promoting social change, but they pursue this by trying to explain how seemingly natural social
structures, like self-help or the Cold War, are effects of practice ... If critical theorists fail, this will be because they do not explain how the world
works, not because of their values."' All theories ultimately have normative commitments; the fact of their existence does not allow us to
question the validity of constructivism's explanatory power. What does, however, is the impact of these normative assumptions on its account of
Just as reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of

neorealism generates its ahistoricism, the implicit progressivism of
constructivism generates its unwillingness to acknowledge even the possibility
of elements of permanency. And, just as reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of neorealism generates
strategies which threaten to become self-perpetuating, so the implicit progressivism of constructivism generates
strategies which threaten to become counter-productive.
international politics.
REALISM IS NOT A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.

Murray, Politics Department, University of Wales Swansea, Reconstructing
Realism, 1997, p. 184-5
Alastair
Now, if this is directed at realism, as it would seem to be, it seriously

misinterprets its approach. First, as we have seen, the `logic of anarchy' that
realism portrays is not a material phenomenon, but the intersubjective
emanation of cumulative past choices, albeit choices rooted in a material
account of human nature. If realism maintains that this logic represents a
relatively entrenched structure, it nevertheless holds that it is, potentially at
least, malleable by judicious statecraft. If it takes the state to be the principal
focus of this logic in contemporary world politics, there is no sense that this is
permanent or final - indeed, no sense that it is even unproblematic. Second, the
notion that realism ignores the clash between the individual's simultaneous
identification as both man and citizen mistakes the entire thrust of its work. If
realism is concerned with the duties owed to the state, it is only for the conflict
that this produces with the cosmopolitan moral obligations which fall upon men.
Third, if realism insisted that change must be compatible with the national
interests of the state, it also recognised that, particularly in an age of
interdependence and nuclear weapons, a stable international order could
ultimately only be built on some broader sense of community than that which
164
Kritik Answers
existed in states alone, and was thus centrally concerned with the extension of
community in international relations.
165
Kritik Answers
A2 Realism is Amoral
THEY DONT UNDERSTAND REALISMIT IS AN EFFORT TO
NEGOTIATE BETWEEN THE INTERESTS OF MORAL AGENTS
Murray, RECONSTRUCTING REALISM: BETWEEN POWER POLITICS AND
COSMOPOLITAN ETHICS, Keele University Press: Edinburgh, 1997, p. 2.
Alastair J.H.
Consequently, realism is portrayed by its opponents not only as being

silent in the contemporary normative debate, but as being incapable of
saying anything. Such a conception of realism is, however,
fundamentally erroneous. Realism arose in opposition to idealism; and,
given that the locus of idealism was a concern with the moral, realisms
genesis was oriented towards normative issues. Of course, it never
sought to engage in the type of abstract moral principles, and to
introduce an awareness of the pervasive influence of power in the
determination of political outcomes. Yet, whilst this presupposed an
intimate involvement with the facts as they really are, the realist
concern with the real was not exclusive, but rather a function of its
desire to juxtapose it to the ideal. It sought to interrelate morality and
power in a viable synthesis, to generate a practical ethic which might
prove more realistic, and more productive, than those which ignored the
rules of international politics. Realism ultimately represented a
fundamentally practical tradition of thought, centrally concerned with
the moral understandings of participants, with the productive application
of these understandings, and with the task of generating some form of
moral consensus in international relations which might support a stable
international order. Whatever the merits of its solutions to these issues,
it clearly was not a positivist, explanatory theory; it was profoundly
concerned for normative issues, and, in particular, for the articulation of
a self-consciously political ethic.
166
Kritik Answers
A2 Realism is a Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy (1/2)
THEYVE GOT IT BACKWARDS FAILURE TO PLAN FOR
CATASTROPHES CAUSES THEM
Macy
General Systems Scholar and deep ecologist, 1995 (Joanna,
Ecopsychology)
There is also the superstition that negative thoughts are selffulfilling. This is of a piece with the notion, popular in New Age circles, that we create our own reality I have had
people tell me that to speak of catastrophe will just make it more likely to happen. Actually, the contrary is
nearer to the truth. Psychoanalytic theory and personal experience show us
that it is precisely what we repress that eludes our conscious
control and tends to erupt into behavior. As Carl Jung observed, When an
inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate .
But ironically, in our current situation, the person who gives
warning of a likely ecological holocaust is often made to feel guilty of
contributing to that very fate.
REALISM DOES NOT REQUIRE WORST CASE FORECASTINGIT SIMPLY DOES NOT SACRIFICE STABILITY FOR
UTOPIANISM
Murray, Professor of Politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alastair J.H.,
This is not merely to indulge in yet another interminable discourse on the
"lessons of Munich', rejecting all strategies of assurance for more familiar
policies of deterrence. A realist perspective does not, as Wendt seems to
assume, require worst-case forecasting, nor does it adopt an ethic of "sauve qui
peut'. But it is to suggest that, when realism emphasizes the need for a cautious,
gradual approach to attempts to transform the nature of the system, it has a
point. In Wendt's analysis, change ultimately becomes as privileged as the
status quo in rationalist perspectives. If he does not hold that history is
progressive, he does hold that change is. If he is not idealistic about the
possibilities of effecting a transformation of the system, he is with regard to the
way in which it might be accomplished. Yet, even if we acknowledge that a
transformation in the structure of international politics would be beneficial, this
does not imply the acceptance of a desperate gamble to accomplish it. And, at
the end of the day, if we can accept that the current structure of international
politics contains many injustices, there is no guarantee that its transformation
would remove such iniquities anyway. The only thing that the quest to overthrow
the status quo does guarantee to do is to undermine those fragments of order
that we currently possess. Ultimately, constructivism can be seen to rest upon a
value judgment which sacrifices the safe option of remaining within the current
situation for the attempt to explore its possibilities. It can be seen to rest on a
progressive philosophy which privileges the possible over the extant and
sacrifices stability on the altar of transformation. This is not to attempt to level a
charge of utopianism, as Wendt complains that Mearsheimer does, by
emphasizing constructivism's normative rather than explanatory commitment.
As Wendt responds: "Constructivists have a normative interest in promoting
social change, but they pursue this by trying to explain how seemingly natural
social structures, like self-help or the Cold War, are effects of practice... If critical
167
Kritik Answers
theorists fail, this will be because they do not explain how the world works, not
because of their values."1 All theories ultimately have normative commitments;
the fact of their existence does not allow us to question the validity of
constructivism's explanatory power. What does, however, is the impact of these
normative assumptions on its account of international politics. Just as
reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of neo-realism generates its
ahistoricism the implicit progressivism of constructivism generates its
unwillingness to acknowledge even the possibility of elements of permanency.
And, just as reflectivists argue that the implicit conservatism of neorealism
generates strategies which threaten to become self-perpetuating, so the implicit
progressivism of constructivism generates strategies which threaten to become
counter-productive.
168
Kritik Answers
A2 Realism is a Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy (2/2)
REALISM IS NOT A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY- IT
ACCURATELY DESCRIBES THE WORLD
Murray, 1997 [Alastair, Politics at the University of Wales Swansea, Reconstructing
Realism, 1997 pg. 184-185]
Now, if this is directed at realism, as it would seem to be, it seriously
misinterprets its approach. First, as we have seen, the 'logic of anarchy' that
realism portrays is not a material phenomenon, but the intersubjective
emanation of cumulative past choices, albeit choices rooted in a material
account of human nature. If realism maintains that this logic represents a
relatively entrenched structure, it nevertheless holds that it is, potentially at
least, malleable by judicious statecraft. If it takes the state to be the principal
focus of this logic in contemporary world politics, there is no sense that this is
permanent or final - indeed, no sense that it is even unproblematic. Second, the
notion that realism ignores the clash between the individual's simultaneous
identification as both man and citizen mistakes the entire thrust of its work. If
realism is concerned with the duties owed to the state, it is only for the conflict
that this produces with the cosmopolitan moral obligations which fall upon men.
Third, if realism insisted that change must be compatible with the national
interests of the state, it also recognized that, particularly in an age of
interdependence and nuclear weapons, a stable international order could
ultimately only be built on some broader sense of community than that which
existed in states alone, and was thus centrally concerned with the extension of
169
Kritik Answers
A2 Social Constructivism (1/3)

CHANGING REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES DOESNT
ALTER THE MATERIAL REALITY OF STATE PRACTICES OR
HELP CREATE BETTER POLICY FOR THE OPPRESSED
Jarvis 2k [DSL, lecturer in the Dept. of Gov and International Relations, Faculty of
Economics, Politics and Business at U. of Sydney International Relations and the Challenge
of Post Modernism, University of South Carolina Press, pg 128-30]
Perhaps more alarming though is the outright violence Ashley recom-mends in response to what at best seem trite, if not imagined, injustices.
Inculpating modernity, positivism, technical rationality, or realism with violence, racism, war, and countless other crimes not only smacks of
anthropomorphism but, as demonstrated by Ashley's torturous prose and reasoning, requires a dubious logic to malce such connections in the
first place. Are we really to believe that ethereal entities like positivism, mod-ernism, or realism emanate a "violence" that marginalizes
dissidents? Indeed, where is this violence, repression, and marginalization? As self- professed dissidents supposedly exiled from the discipline,
Ashley and Walker appear remarkably well integrated into the academy-vocal, pub-lished, and at the center of the Third Debate and the forefront
of theo-retical research. Likewise, is Ashley seriously suggesting that, on the basis of this largely imagined violence, global transformation
(perhaps even rev-olutionary violence) is a necessary, let alone desirable, response? Has the rationale for emancipation or the fight for justice
been reduced to such vacuous revolutionary slogans as "Down with positivism and rationality"? The point is surely trite. Apart from members of
the academy, who has heard of positivism and who for a moment imagines that they need to be emancipated from it, or from modernity,
In an era of unprecedented change and turmoil, of new political and military

, of war in the Balkans and ethnic cleansing, is Ashley really suggesting that
some of the greatest threats facing humankind or some of the great moments of history rest on such
innocu-ous and largely unknown nonrealities like positivism and realism? These are imagined and
fictitious enemies, theoretical fabrications that represent arcane, self-serving
debates superfluous to the lives of most people and, arguably, to most issues of importance in
international relations. More is the pity tha t such irrational and obviously abstruse debate should so occupy
us at a time of great global turmoil. That it does and continues to do so reflects our lack of judicious criteria for evaluating the-ory and,
more importantly, the lack of attachment theorists have to the real world. Certainly it is right and
rationality, or realism for that matter?
configurations
proper that we ponder the depths of our theoretical imaginations, engage in epistemological and ontological debate, and analyze the sociology of
our lmowledge.37 But to suppose that this is the only task of international theory, let alone the most important one, smacks of intellectual elitism
does
Ashley's project, his deconstructive efforts, or valiant fight against positivism say to the truly marginalized, oppressed, and destitute? How does it help solve the plight of the poor, the displaced refugees, the
casualties of war, or the emigres of death squads? Does it in any way speak to
those whose actions and thoughts comprise the policy and practice of
international relations? On all these questions one must answer no. This is not to say, of course, that all
theory should be judged by its technical rationality and problem-solving capacity as Ashley forcefully argues. But to suppose that
problem-solving technical theory is not necessary-or is in some way bad-is a contemptuous
position that abrogates any hope of solving some of the nightmarish realities
that millions confront daily. As Holsti argues, we need ask of these theorists and their theories the ultimate question, "So
and displays a certain contempt for those who search for guidance in their daily struggles as actors in international politics. What
what?" To what purpose do they deconstruct, problematize, destabilize, undermine, ridicule, and belittle modernist and rationalist approaches?
Does this get us any further, make the world any better, or enhance the human condition? In what sense can this "debate toward [a] bottomless
pit of epistemology and metaphysics" be judged pertinent, relevant, help-ful, or cogent to anyone other than those foolish enough to be
poststructural approach
fails to empower the marginalized and, in fact, abandons them. Rather than ana-lyze the political
economy of power, wealth, oppression, production, or international relations and render an intelligible understanding of these processes ,
Ashley succeeds in ostracizing those he portends to represent by delivering an
obscure and highly convoluted discourse. If Ashley wishes to chastise structural realism for its abstractness
scholasti-cally excited by abstract and recondite debate.38 Contrary to Ashley's assertions, then, a
and detachment, he must be prepared also to face similar criticism, especially when he so adamantly intends his work to address the real life
, we
might ask to what extent the postmodern "empha-sis on the textual, constructed
nature of the world" represents "an unwarranted extension of approaches
appropriate for literature to other areas of human practice that are more
constrained by an objective reality. " All theory is socially constructed and realities like
plight of those who struggle at marginal places. If the relevance of Ashley's project is questionable, so too is its logic and cogency. First
the nation-state, domestic and international politics, regimes, or transnational agencies are obviously social fabrications. But to what extent is
Just because we acknowledge that the state is a socially

fabricated entity, or that the division between domestic and international society is arbitrar-ily inscribed does not make
the reality of the state disappear or render invisible international politics. Whether
socially constructed or objectively given , the argument over the ontological status of the state is
of no particular moment. Does this change our experience of the state or somehow diminish the political-economic-juridicalthis observation of any real use?
military functions of the state? To recognize that states are not naturally inscribed but dynamic entities continually in the process of being made
and reimposed and are therefore culturally dissimilar, economically different, and politically atypical, while perspicacious to our historical and
theoretical understanding of the state, in no way detracts from its reality, practices, and consequences. Similarly, few would object to Ashley's
hermeneutic interpretivist understanding of the international sphere as an artificially inscribed demarcation. But, to paraphrase Holsti again, so
That
international politics and states would not exist with-out subjectivities is a banal
tautology. The point, surely, is to move beyond this and study these processes. Thus, while intellectually interesting , constructivist theory is not an end point as Ashley seems to think, where we all throw up our
what? This does not malce its effects any less real, diminish its importance in our lives, or excuse us from paying serious attention to it .
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Kritik Answers
hands and announce there are no foundations and all reality is an arbitrary
social construction. Rather, it should be a means of rec-ognizing the structurated nature of our being and the reciprocity between
subjects and structures through history. Ashley, however, seems not to want to do this, but only to deconstruct
the state, international politics, and international theory on the basis that none of these is objectively
given but fictitious entities that arise out of modernist practices of
representation. While an interesting theoretical enterprise, it is of no great consequence to the study of international politics.
Indeed, structuration theory has long talcen care of these ontological dilemmas that otherwise seem to preoccupy Ashley.40
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Kritik Answers

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS FLAWED IT FAILS TO
ACKNOWLEDGE THE VALUES THAT WE HAVE THAT HAVE
CREATED PROSPERITY, FOR EXAMPLE BY STOPPING
SLAVERY
Kors, Professor of History at University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at
the Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2001 (Alan Charles, Triumph without
Self-Belief, Orbis, Summer, ebsco)
. It is a
dangerous intellectual error to imagine that goodness, wisdom, order, justice, peace,
freedom, legal equality, mutual forbearance, and kindness are the "default mode" in human affairs,
and that it is malice, folly, disorder, war, coercion, legal inequality, murderous intolerance, and cruelty
that stand in need of historical explanation. The West, in theory, always has understood that man has a lower
side to which he is drawn, that man is a wolf to man, and that we are governed more by prejudice and
passion than by the rational capacity of our minds. If that is so, however, then we err grievously in our
What often denies us both optimism and pride, however, is the very stringency of our self-judgment untempered by historical realism
assumptions of what it is that requires particular explanation in the world. We understand the defaults; what should astonish us is the ability to
change them. Rousseau and the postmodernists have it all backward in this domain. It is not aversion to difference, for example, that requires
aversion to difference is the human condition; rather, it is the West's

partial but breathtaking ability to overcome tribalism and exclusion that
demands explanation, above all in the singular American accomplishment. Antihistorical explanation, for
Semitism is not surprising; the opening of Christian America to Jews is what should amaze. Racial aversion and injustice are not sources of
It is not the abuse of

power that requires explanation--that is the human condition--but the Western
rule of law. Similarly, it is not coerced religious conformity that should leave us groping for understanding, but the forging of values and
institutions of religious toleration. It is not slavery that requires explanation, for slavery is one of the most universal
of all human institutions; rather, it is the values and agency by which the West
identified slavery as an evil and, astonishment of astonishments, abolished it. Finally, it is not relative
wonderment; the Fourteenth Amendment and its gradual implementation are what should astonish.
pockets of poverty in the West that should occasion our wonder, because we used to term almost infinitely worse absolute levels of poverty
simply "the human condition." Instead, what is extraordinary are the values, institutions, knowledge, risk, ethics, and liberties that created such
prosperity that we even notice that poverty at all, yet alone believe that it is eradicable. We are surprised, in a failure of intellectual analysis, by
we lose our wonder at the accomplishments and aspirations of

our civilization as a tragic result. Depravity should never startle us; rather, the identification and naming of depravity
all of the wrong things, and
should amaze us, and the attempt, frequently successful, to contain it should fill us with awe. Indeed, that attempt has been so successful in the
West, relative to the human condition, that the other world fantasized by the multiculturalists seeks entrance, again and again, at our doors, and
the multiculturalists'
ostensible rejection of the West's philosophical realism--their vaunted "social
constructionism"-does not stay with them past their medical doctor's door. In the final
the multiculturalists are not riding leaky boats to the otherness of the Third World. Most obviously,
analysis, it is that last trait, the West's commitment to a logically ordered philosophical realism, that undergirds its ways of thinking, valuing, and,
indeed, worshiping. Such philosophical realism was defended by Augustine, Aquinas, and almost all fathers and doctors of the Church. While
various extreme epistemological and ontological skepticisms and radical irrationalisms have flourished, sometimes with brilliance and profundity
Western civilization has always had at its core. a belief that there is a
reality independent of our wishes for and ideas of it; that natural knowledge of
that reality is possible and indeed indispensable to human dignity; that such
knowledge must be acquired through a discipline of the will and mind; and that
central to that discipline is a compact with reason. The West has willed, in theory at least, to reduce the
chaos of the world to natural coherence by the powers of the mind. Indeed , the belief that truth is independent of
a particular time and place is precisely what has led the West to borrow so much
from other cultures, such that, ironically, whole schools of tendentious thought decry Western "thefts," as if the recognition of
in our history,
compelling example and argument in others were a weakness, not a strength. The West recognized and adopted Eastern systems of numbers
superior to that of the Romans; it took the Aristotelianism of the High Middle Ages from the Islamic scholars who had preserved and interpreted it
in manners superior to the schools of the West; it took music, art, forms of expression, and new foods from around the earth that, in large part
out of restless curiosity about realities beyond its own, it had explored. The West has always renewed and revitalized itself by means Of
recognizing superior ways to its own. It did so, however, with a commitment to being a rational culture. The Greek principle of self-contradiction
as the touchstone of error, and thus its avoidance as a touchstone of truth, is the formal expression of a commitment to reason that the Christian
West always understood to separate us from beasts and madmen. To live with self-contradiction was not merely to fail an introduction to
philosophy, it was to be less than human. Induction from experience always had a logic, and the exploration of that logic was one of the great
and ultimately triumphant pursuits of the Western mind. To live with error was to deny oneself the fruits of human light. Again, the core
philosophical assumption of Western civilization is that there is a reality that exists independently of our will and wish, and that this reality can be
known by human inquiry and reason. There were many radical ruptures in the history of certain disciplines in the West; there were no radical
ruptures with the Western compact with reality and reason. It is that compact that led to a civilization of self-scrutiny and honest borrowings; to a
civilization in which self-criticism gave rise to a critical scholarship that could question and either strengthen or repair the West's received beliefs
themselves; to a civilization in which the mind could appeal, with ultimate success, against the irrational to the rational; to a way of
understanding that led to the sciences that have changed both the entire human relationship to nature and our sense of human possibilities,
always tempered by our knowledge of human nature.
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Kritik Answers

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF THEIR
HARMS- FAILURE TO TAKE REALIST ACTION ENSURES
SYSTEMIC OPPRESSION
Kors, Professor of History at University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign
Policy Research Institute, 2001 (Alan Charles, Triumph without Self-Belief, Orbis,
Summer, ebsco)
The fruits of that civilization have been an unprecedented ability to modify the
remediable causes of human suffering, to give great agency to utility and charity alike; to give to
each individual a degree of choice and freedom unparalleled in all of human
history; to offer a means of overcoming the station in life to which one was born by the effort of one's labor, mind, and will. A failure to
understand and to teach that accomplishment would be its very betrayal . To the extent that Western civilization
survives, then, the hope of the world survives to eradicate unnecessary
suffering; to speak a language of human dignity, responsibility, and rights linked
to a common reality; to minimize the depredations of the irrational, the
unexamined, the merely prejudicial in our lives; to understand the world in which we find ourselves, and,
moved by interest and charity, to apply that knowledge for good . The contest, then, is between the realists and
the antirealists, and the triumph of the West ultimately depends on its outcome.
The failure to assess the stakes of the struggle between the West and its communist adversary always came from either a pathological self-
. The
West has altered the human relationship to nature from one of fatalistic
helplessness to one of hopeful mastery. It has made possible a human life in
which biological atavism might be replaced by cultural value, the rule of law,
individuation, and growing tolerance. It also created an intellectual class irrationally devoted to an adversarial
hatred of one's own world or, at the least, from a gross undervaluation of what the West truly represented in the history of mankind
stance. That adversarial view of the West, in the past generation at least, had become a neo-Gramscian and thus neo-Marxist one in which the
West was seen as an unparalleled source of the arbitrary assignment of restrictive and life-stultifying roles. The enemies of the West--for some, in
practice; for others, increasingly in the ideal represented a fictive make-believe that supposedly cast grave doubt upon the West's claim of
enhancing freedom, dignity, and opportunity. With the triumph of the West in reality, and with the celebration of Marxism and the Third World
the adversarial intellectual class appears to be

retreating into ideologies and philosophies that deny the very concept of reality
itself. One sees this in the growing strength in the humanities and social
sciences of critical theories that view all representations of the world as mere
text and fiction. When the world of fact can be twisted to support this or that
side of delusion (as in astrology or parapsychology), pathology tries to appropriate what it can of
the empirical. When the world of fact manifestly vitiates the very foundations of pathological delusion, then it is the claim of facticity or
shown more and more to have been truly delusional,
reality per se that must be denied. This is what we now may expect: the world having spoken, the intellectual class, the left academic wing of it
above all, may appropriate a little postcommunist chaos to show how merely relative a moral good the defeat of Stalin's heirs has been. If it does
In Orwell's 1984, it was the mark of realistic,

totalitarian power to make its subjects say that all truth was not objective but
political--"a social construction," as intellectuals would say now--and that, in the specific case, 2
+ 2 = 5. By 2004, making students in the humanities and social sciences grant the equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5 will be the goal of adversarial
so, however, it will assail the notion of reality itself.
culture. They will urge that all logical--and, one should add, inferential--inductive truths from experience are arbitrary, mere social constructions.
The West Has Indeed Survived,, So Far The ramifications of that effort will dominate the central debates of the humanities in the generation to
come. Until there is a celebration and moral accounting of the historical reality of "The Triumph of the West," that "triumph" will be
ephemeral indeed. Academic culture has replaced the simplistic model that all culture was functional, a model that indeed could not account for
massive discontents or revolutionary change, let alone for moral categories, by the yet more astonishing and absurd model that virtually all
Whole disciplines now teach that propositions are to be judged by

their therapeutic value rather than by their inductive link to evidence until, in
the final analysis, feeling good about saying something determines the truthvalue of what is said. Understanding human weakness, however, the West has always believed that it is precisely when we want
culture is dysfunctional.
to believe something self-gratifying that we must erect barriers of experiment, rigor, and analysis against our self-indulgence and our propensity
The human ability to learn from experience and nature, so slighted in current
, is not merely an object of cultural transmission, let alone of social control, but an
evolutionary triumph of the species, indeed, a triumph on which our future
ultimately depends. There is nothing more desperate than helplessness, and there is no more inveterate cause of helplessness
than the inability to affect and mitigate the traumas of our lives . If the role of both acquired knowledge and
the transmission and emendation of the means of acquiring knowledge is only a
"Western" concern, then it is a Western concern upon which human fate
depends. In the current academic climate of indoctrination, tendentiousness, and fantasy, the independence of critical intellect and
the willingness to learn open-mindedly from experience of a reality independent
of the human will are the greatest hopes of our civilization. Has Western civilization survived?
for self-serving error.
humanistic theory
That is, has a human relationship to the world based upon the assumption of a knowable reality, reason, and a transcendent value of human
dignity and responsibility survived? Has a will to know oneself and the world objectively survived? Has a recognition of human depravity and the
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Kritik Answers
need to limit the power of men over men survived? I do not think that free men and women will abandon that hard-won shelter from chaos,
ignorance, parochial tribalism, irrationalism, and, ultimately, helplessness. Has Western civilization survived, its principle of reality justified and
intact? Yes, indeed, though it requires constant defense. The demand for perfection is antinomian, illogical, and empirically absurd. The triumph
of the West is flawed but real. While everyone else around you weeps, recall Alexander Ushakov, and celebrate the fall of the Soviet threat as he
celebrated the fall of Grenada. Then recall how everything depends on realism in our understanding, and rejoin the intellectual struggle.
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Kritik Answers
A2 State/Sovereignty Bad
INTERNATIONAL GOALS CAN ONLY BE ACHIEVED BY
STATES. ONLY REALISM ESCAPES THE TYRANNY OF SMALL
DECISIONS
Kenneth
108
Waltz, Travis BFF, Neorealism and its Critics, ed. by Robert Keohane, 1986, p. 105-
We may well notice that our behavior produces unwanted outcomes, but we are also likely to see that such instances as these are examples of
what Alfred E. Kahn describes as large changes that are brought about by the accumulation of small decisions. In such situations
people are victims of the tyranny of small decisions , a phrase suggesting that if one
hundred consumers choose option x, and this causes the market to make
decision X (where X equals 100x), it is not necessarily true that those same consumers
would have voted for that outcome if that large decision had ever been
presented for their explicit consideration (Kahn 1966:523). If the market does not present the large question for
decision, then individuals are doomed to making decisions that are sensible within their narrow contexts
even though they know all the while that in making such decisions they are bringing about a result
that most of them do not want. Either that or they organize to overcome some of the effects of the market by changing
its structurefor example, by bringing consumer units roughly up to the size of the units that are making producers decisions. This nicely makes
So long as one leaves the structure unaffected it is not possible for change
intentions
to produce desirable outcomes
the point:
in
the
and the actions of particular actors
or to avoid undesirable
ones. Structures may be changed, as just mentioned, by changing the distribution of capabilities across units. Structures may also be changed by
imposing requirements where previously people had to decide for themselves. If some merchants sell on Sunday, others may have to do so in
order to remain competitive even though most prefer a six-day week. Most are able to do as they please only if all are required to keep
comparable hours. The only remedies for strong structural effects are structural changes. Structural constraints cannot be wished away, although
many fail to understand this. In every age and place, the units of self-help systems nations, corporations, or whateverare told that the greater
good, along with their own, requires them to act for the sake of the system and not for their own narrowly defined advantage. In the 1950s, as
fear of the worlds destruction in nuclear war grew, some concluded that the alternative to world destruction was world disarmament. In the
1970s, with the rapid growth of population, poverty, and pollution, some concluded, as one political scientist put it, that states must meet the
needs of the political ecosystem in its global dimensions or court annihilation (Sterling 1974:336). The international interest must be served; and
if that means anything at all, it means that national interests are subordinate to it. The problems are found at the global level.
Solutions
to the problems continue to depend on national policies.
What are the conditions that would make

nations more or less willing to obey the injunctions that are so often laid on them? How can they resolve the tension between pursuing their own
interests and acting for the sake of the system? No one has shown how that can be done, although many wring their hands and plead for rational
behavior. The very problem, however, is that rational behavior, given structural constraints, does not lead to the wanted results. With each
country constrained to take care of itself, no one can take care of the system. A strong sense of peril and doom may lead to a clear definition of
ends that must be achieved. Their achievement is not thereby made possible. The possibility of effective action depends on the ability to provide
necessary means. It depends even more so on the existence of conditions that permit nations and other organizations to follow appropriate
. World-shaking problems cry for global solutions, but there is no

global agency to provide them. Necessities do not create possibilities. Wishing that final causes were efficient ones does
not make them so. Great tasks can be accomplished only by agents of great capability.
That is why states, and especially the major ones, are called on to do what is necessary for
the worlds survival. But states have to do whatever they think necessary for
their own preservation, since no one can be relied on to do it for them. Why the
advice to place the international interest above national interests is meaningless
policies and strategies
can be explained precisely in terms of the distinction between micro- and macrotheories. Among economists the distinction is well understood.
Among political scientists it is not. As I have explained, a microeconomic theory is a theory of the market built up from assumptions about the
behavior of individuals. The theory shows how the actions and interactions of the units form and affect the market and how the market in turn
affects them. A macro-theory is a theory about the national economy built on supply; income, and demand as systemwide aggregates. The
theory shows how these and other aggregates are interconnected and indicates how changes in one or some of them affect others and the
performance of the economy. In economics, both micro- and macrotheories deal with large realms. The difference between them is found not in
A
macrotheory of international politics would show how the international system is
moved by system-wide aggregates. One can imagine what some of them might beamount of world GNP, amount
the size of the objects of study; hut in the way the objects of study are approached and the theory to explain them is constructed.
of world imports and exports, of deaths in war, of everybodys defense spending, and of migration, for example. The theory would look something
like a macroeconomic theory in the style of John Maynard Keynes, although it is hard to see how the international aggregates would make much
sense and how changes in one or some of them would produce changes in others. I am not saying that such a theory cannot be constructed, but
a macrotheory of
international politics would lack the practical implications of macroeconomic
theory. National governments can manipulate system-wide economic variables. No
agencies with comparable capabilities exist internationally. Who would act on the possibilities of
adjustment that a macrotheory of international politics might reveal? Even were such a theory available, we
would still be stuck with nations as the only agents capable of acting to solve
global problems. We would still have to revert to a micropolitical approach in order to examine the conditions that make benign and
effective action by states separately and collectively more or less likely. Some have hoped that changes in the
awareness and purpose, in the organization and ideology of states would change the quality of
international life. Over the centuries states have changed in many ways, but the
quality of international life has remained much the same. States seek reasonable and worthy ends,
only that I cannot see how to do it in any way that might be useful. The decisive point, anyway, is that
but they cannot figure out how to reach them. The problem is not in their stupidity or ill will, although one does not want to claim that those
qualities are lacking. The depth of the difficulty is not understood until one realizes that
cannot
discover and
act on
adequate
programs.
intelligence and goodwill
Early in this century Winston Churchill observed that the British-German
175
Kritik Answers
States facing global problems
are like individual consumers trapped by the tyranny of small decisions.
naval race promised disaster and that Britain had no realistic choice other than to run it.
176
Kritik Answers
**Calculability/Util**
Utilitarianism Good: 2AC (1/2)
FIRST, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST
HORRIBLE IMPACT IMAGINEABLE, PUTTING RIGHTS FIRST
IS PUTTING A PART OF SOCIETY BEFORE THE WHOLE
Schell 1982
(Jonathan, Professor at Wesleyan University, The Fate of the Earth, pages 136137 uw//wej)
Implicit in everything that I have said so far about the nuclear predicament there has been a perplexity that I would now like to
take up explicitly, for it leads, I believe, into the very heart of our response-or, rather, our lack of response-to the predicament. I
have pointed out that our species is the most important of all the things that, as inhabitants of a common world, we inherit from
the past generations, but it does not go far enough to point out this superior importance, as though in making our decision about
extinction we were being asked to choose between, say, liberty, on the one hand, and the survival of the species, on the other.
the species not only overarches but contains all the benefits of life in
the common world, and to speak of sacrificing the species for the sake of
one of these benefits involves one in the absurdity of wanting to destroy
something in order to preserve one of its parts, as if one were to burn
down a house in an attempt to redecorate the living room, or to kill someone to
For
improve his character. ,but even to point out this absurdity fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is
not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we
ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of saying that extinction is unique not
because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys mankind as the source of all possible human subjects, and this,
in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death, for one's own individual death is the end not of any object in life
but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, however, places the mind in a quandary. One of-the confounding characteristics of death-"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that, precisely because it removes the person himself rather than
something in his life, it seems to offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak
"about" death at all, as. though death were a thing situated somewhere outside us and available for objective inspection, when
the fact is that it is within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we are. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that
death, as a fundamental element of our being, "thinks" in us and through us about whatever we think about, coloring our
thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives
SECOND, SURVIVAL OF POLITICAL ORDER KEY TO ETHICS

Stenlisli, 2003 (Pace nr.1 accessed
onlinehttp://www.pacem.no/2003/1/debatt/stensli/ )
The debate on political realism, a set of ontological assumptions about international politics, has been a central theme in international relations
over the past 40 years. Many scholars and politicians have wrestled over the question of the limitations and insights of realism. Still, realism
seems very much alive today, one reason perhaps being that the value of realism as an analytical tool seems to become more relevant to
policymakers in times of crises. In turn, such changes cause further debate among realists and their critics. In PACEM 5:2 (2002), Commander
Raag Rolfsen(1) in practise argues that we are in need of a new framework for analysing international politics. According to Rolfsen, A situation
characterized by globalisation, democratisation and a new sense of shared vulnerability demands a novel theoretical framework for world politics.
Rolfsen`s aim is indeed ambitious, but his state of departure is surprising: political realism cannot provide this framework because, again
according to Rolfsen, it was developed in an undemocratic environment.(2) Thus, we are not far from concluding that realism is corrupted and
that realists are conspicuous people.(3) This bold proclamation illuminates the front between idealism and realism in a manner that is not typical
of Norwegian academic discourses on international relations. Rolfsen has delivered a substantial and refreshing article. It is of such originality and
importance that it deserves to be debated and criticised, which is no evident feature in contributions on world politics in Norway. Having said
that, my motivation to engage in such a debate does not spring from a wholehearted embracement of realism. Rather, its source is the belief that
a theory of foreign policy cannot do without significant elements of realism. Traditional security policy can never remove our vulnerability. At this
point there simply is no disagreement between realists and idealists. However, security has an instrumental value in ensuring other ends.
Thus, acknowledging our vulnerability does not remove the value and importance of security as phenomenon and concept.(4) In this article, I will
discuss whether the effort to construct a new security concept possibly can succeed when it simultaneously becomes an attack on political
realism (PR). Rolfsen undoubtedly deals some blows against Hans Morgenthaus Theory of International Politics, although the same points have
been made by others before him.(5) Indeed, political realism has to be anchored to ideals and visions of desired end states beyond its basic
assumptions,(6) but my main line of argument is that any attempt at establishing a basis for ethical conduct in politics is bound to remain a
purely theoretical construction without empirical relevance if it is not mixed with a sound and thorough understanding of PR. The reason simply
since the existence of a polity is a precondition for thinking about,

implementing and evaluating policies in other areas, politics based on realism is
required in the first place in order to secure the polity. There can be no
democracy without a modern state, and no state without a minimum level of security through a monopoly of
violence. Herein lies a significant aspect of what makes the state legitimate to its citizens. In this way, one can even claim that all
normative evaluations and - theories implicitly rest on minimum requirements both to the
practises and theoretical considerations of realism.(7) Indeed, one should at least question whether
is, that
attempts at denying the empirical relevance of PR could lead us into paralysis or hypocrisy. The latter can even serve, unintentionally to be sure,
as a basis for demonising opponents, thus functioning as a (moral) sentiment that forms the basis of a more hawkish or brutal conduct in
international crisis than is necessary. The prudence found in Morgenthau should not be seen as cynical or a-ethical, but rather as a configuration
of thought that should balance our aspirations to fulfil what Morgenthau calls the ultimate aims of politics. The central political problem is exactly
how to translate these aspirations (like democracy and human rights) into feasible and efficient decisions. But in order to pursue these important
goals, the ability to use power, be it hard or soft, is required.
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Kritik Answers
Utilitarianism Good: 2AC (2/2)

DEONTOLOGY LOCKS US INTO A DEADLOCK WHEN VALUES
CONFLICT, ONLY WAY TO RESOLVE THAT IS BY USING
CONSEQUENTIALISM
Person, 1997
(lngmar. Lund University. Three Methods of Ethics: a debate. Eds. Baron, Marcia,
Philip Petit, and Michael Stole. Pg 13-14. uw//wej)
Now the natural rights theorist maintains, of course, that. the presence of a right is such a relevant factor, or reason, that may
justify departing from the goal of fulfilment maximization. In Ronald Dwor. kin's phrase, rights could in this way `trump' the
pursuit of maximal fulfilment. A right to M provides a reason for holding that one morally should have M even if this is at odds with
the goal mentioned. I do not say that it ensures that one should have M because the rights theorist may like to impose a limit on
the weight of rights, on how great the loss of fulfilment overall may be if a right is not to be outweighed. Suppose that my hair has
a unique healing quality: thousands of terminally ill patients could be saved if a couple of strands are removed and made into a
medicine. What should the rights theorist say if I none the less refuse to have these strands removed? Surely, something like this:
the suffering caused by respecting my right to my strands of hair is so great that we are morally justified in violating the right. But
there is a limit on the weight of my right, on its capacity to restrain maximization; a
right provides a moral reason that can be outweighed. As an aside, note that, like the
limit on the extension of rights, this limit would seem to have to be based on
consequentialist considerations, on weighing the frustration and confusion occasioned by infring- ing
our deep-seated intuitions about rights against the frustration and suffering caused by respecting them. Thus, when It
comes to the precise weight of rights, no less than their extension, we
see that it cannot be fixed unless we transcend the natural rights
framework in favour of a consequentialist one.
then
UTILITY CALCULUS ALLOWS ACTION, MORAL DOGMATISM

FREEZES US INTO INACTION
Smart, 1973
(J.J.C prof. of philosophy, Australian riatibual university. Utilitarianism: For and
Against uw//wej)
lf we are able to take account of probabilities
in our ordinary prudential decisions it seems idle
we cannot do the same thing, but must

rely on some dogmatic morality, in short on some set of rules or rigid criteria, Maybe
sometimes we just will be unable to say whether we prefer for humanity
an improbable great advantage or a probable small advantage, and in these
to say that in the field of ethics, the field of our universal and humane attitudes,
cases perhaps we shall have to toss a penny to decide what to do. Maybe we have not any precise methods for deciding what to
then our imprecise methods must just serve their turn. We need not
on that account be driven into authori.- tarianism, dogmatism or
romanticism.
do, but
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Kritik Answers
Utilitarianism Good: 1AR

First, extend our Jonathan Schell evidence, he explains
that accepting extinction to uphold rights is like burning
down a house to remodel the living room, rights are a
result of human society and accepting the destruction of
that society to uphold a right is going too far and
ultimately self-defeating.
Second, Stenlisli indicates that survival of the political
order is a precondition of all other values. The alternative
is impossible without a stable security framework.
Third, LIFE IS KEY TO ETHICS
Diana
p. 54
Meyers, prof of Philosophy @ Connecticut University, 1985
Inalienable Rights,
The right to life prohibits other persons from killing the person who possesses the right and allows this
person to defend himself if he is attacked. It is obvious that a person cannot be a moral agent unless he is
alive (at least, not within the moral sphere in which we presently find ourselves), and so it is also obvious that this right
protects something essential to moral agency. But it is doubtful that it is always supererogatory when it is
appropriate for a person to sacrifice his life for the benefit of others. Two representative cases can be adduced to call this claim into question: I) a
soldier has a duty to follow orders to participate in battles if her army is involved in a just war, and 2) a citizen may have a duty to join her
countrys army in wartime.
Fourth, Ingmar Person explains even rights must be

weighed against each other, but that deontology doesnt
allow preferential treatment of one right over another
without resorting to consequentialism, making
consequentialism inevitable, or action impossible.
Fifth, Smart in 73 illustrates how consequentialism
avoids dogmatic action, making it flexible in dealing with
different situations
UTILITARIANISM IS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE TO
EXTINCTION, OUTWEIGHING RIGHTS
Ratner 84
[Leonard G., Legion Lex Prof. Law @ USC, The Utilitarian Imperative: Autonomy,
Reciprocity, and Evolution, 12 Hofstra L. Rev. 723, Spring, LN//uwyo-ajl]
The search for the ought is a search for the goals of human behavior. Underlying the ought of every goal is an implicit description of reality that
predicts the consequences for humans of compliance or noncompliance with the ought. n49 Humans choose the goals. n50 And the perceived
accuracy of the description, along with the perceived value of the consequences predicted by the description, influence the choice. Ought and is
thus coalesce.
The goal of enhanced human need/want fulfillment implies that such enhanced
fulfillment is possible and will facilitate long-run human existence.Goals that
facilitate human existence are persistently chosen by most humans, because
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Kritik Answers
human structure and function have evolved and are evolving to facilitate such
existence. The decisionmaking organism is structured to generally prefer
survival, although some may trade long-term existence for short-term pleasure, and physiological malfunction or traumatic experience may
induce the preference of a few for personal nonsurvival. Intermediate human goals change with human
structure and function; long-run human survival remains the ultimate human
goal as long as there are humans.
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Kritik Answers
Calculability Good: 2AC (1/2)

FIRST, FAILURE TO CALCULATE ALLOWS TOTALITARIANISM
BY DENYING INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY
Campbell 98
The undecidable within the decision does not, however, prevent the decision nor avoid its urgency. As Derrida observes, a just
the
pursuit of infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of
conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it are unavailable in the
crush of time. Nor can the crush of time be avoided, even by unlimited time, because the moment of decision as
decision is always required immediately, right away. This necessary haste has unavoidable consequences because
such always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation. The decision is always structurally finite, it aalways marks
the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it. That is why,
invoking Kierkegaard, Derrida, declares that the instant of decision is a madness.
The finite nature of the decision may be a madness in the way it renders possible the impossible, the infinite character of justice,
but Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most importantly, Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most
importantly, although Derridas argument concerning the decision has, to this pint, been concerned with an account of the
procedure by which a decision is possible, it is with respect to the ncessity of the decision that Derrida begins to formulate an
account of the decision that bears upon the content of the decision. In so doing, Derridas argument addresses more directly
more directly, I would argue than is acknowledged by Critchley the concern that for politics (at least for a progressive politics)
one must provide an account of the decision to combat domination.
That
undecidability
resides within the decision, Derrida argues, that justice exceeds law and calculation, that the
should not serve as alibi for staying

out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state , or
between institutions or states and others. Indeed , incalculable justice requires us to
calculate. From where do these insistences come? What is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both the
unpresentable exceeds the determinalbe cannot and
character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship that because of its undecidability multiplies
responsibility, and the fact that
left
to itself, the incalculable and given (donatrice) idea of justice is always

can always be reappropriated by the most
very close to the bad, even to the worst, for it
perverse calculation.
The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty a duty that inhabits
the
makes it the starting point, the at least
necessary condition, for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism
the instant of madness and compels the decision to avoid the bad, the perverse calculation, even the worst. This is
duty that also dwells with deconstructive thought and
in all its forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we recognize that Derrida names the bad, the
perverse, and the worst as those violences we recognize all too well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of
xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism.
SECOND, EVEN IF WE OBSCURE THE INCALCULABLE, WE

HAVE AN ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY TO CALCULATE DEATH
BECAUSE ITS OUR ONLY MEANS OF FIGHTING INJUSTICE
Santilli 2003
[Paul C., Siena College, Radical Evil, Subjection, and Alain Badious Ethic of the Truth Event, World
Congress of the International Society for Universal Dialogue, May 18-22,
www.isud.org/papers/pdfs/Santilli.pdf, acc. 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl]
From the standpoint of an ethics of subjection there is even something unnecessary or superfluous about the void of suffering in the subject
bearers of evil. For Levinas, the return to being from the ethical encounter with the face and its infinite depths is fraught with the danger the
subject will reduce the other to a "like-me," totalizing and violating the space of absolute alterity. As Chalier puts it, "Levinas conceives of the
moral subject's awakening, or the emergence of the human in being, as a response to that pre-originary subjection which is not a happenstance
of being." But if there really is something inaccessible about suffering itself, about the 'other' side of what is manifestly finite, subjected, and
damaged, then to a certain extent it is irrelevant to ethics, as irrelevant as the judgment of moral progress in the subject-agent. Let me take the
parent-child relation again as an example. Suppose the child to exhibit the symptoms of an illness. Are not the proper "ethical" questions for the
parent to ask questions of measure and mathematical multiples: How high is the fever? How long has it lasted? How far is the hospital? Can she
get out of bed? Has this happened before? These are the questions of the doctor, the rescue squads and the police. They are questions about
Ethically our response to the needs of must be reduced to

a positivity simply because we have access to nothing but the symptoms, which are like
mine. Our primary moral responsibility is to treat the symptoms that show up in
being, not the radically other with whom I cannot identify. Say we observe someone whose hands
being, about detail, causes and effects.
have been chopped off with a machete. How would we characterize this? Would it not be slightly absurd to say, "He had his limbs severed and he
suffered," as though the cruel amputation were not horror enough. Think of the idiocy in the common platitude: "She died of cancer, but thank
God, she did not suffer", as though the devastating annihilation of the human by a tumor were not evil itself. For ethics, then, the only suffering
that matters are the visible effects of the onslaught of the world. All other suffering is excessive and inaccessible. Therefore, it is in being, indeed
in the midst of the most elemental facts about ourselves and other people, that we ethically encounter others by responding to their needs and
helping them as best we can
by identifying being and not pretending that we know any thing about
suffering, other than it is a hollow in the midst of being, that we can act
responsibly. What worries me about Levinas is that by going beyond being to what he regards as the ethics of absolute alterity, he risks
It is precisely
allowing the sheer, almost banal facticity of suffering to be swallowed in the infinite depths of transcendence. Indeed, it seems to me that Levinas
too often over emphasizes the importance of the emergence of the subject and the inner good in the ethical encounter, as though the point of
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meeting the suffering human being was to come to an awareness of the good within oneself and not to heal and repair. I agree with Chalier's
observation that Levinas's "analyses adopt the point of view of the moral subject, not that of a person who might be the object of its solicitude."
an
ethics that would be oriented to the vulnerabilities of the subjected (which are others, of
course, but also myself) needs to address the mutilation, dismemberment, the chronology
of torture, the numbers incarcerated, the look of the bodies, the narratives, the blood counts, the mines knives,
machetes, and poisons. Evil really is all that . When the mind does its work, it plunges into being, into
mathematical multiples and starts counting the cells, the graveyards, and bullet wounds.
Ethics has limits; there are situations like the Holocaust where to speak of a moral responsibility to heal and repair seems pathetic. But
Rational practical deliberation is always about the facts that encircle the void inaccessible to deliberation and practical reason.
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Calculability Good: 2AC (2/2)

THIRD, INFINITE JUSTICE REQUIRES CALCULATION
Jacques
Derrida, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Drucilla Cornell, ed,
92, p. 28-9.
, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot
serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an
institution or a state or between institutions or states and others. Left to itself, the incalculable and giving
(donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst for it can always
be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation. It's always possible. And so
incalculable justice requires us to calculate. And first, closest to what we associate with justice, namely, law,
That justice exceeds law and calculation
and should not
the juridical field that one cannot isolate within sure frontiers, but also in all the fields from which we cannot separate it, which intervene in it and
. Not only must we

calculate, negotiate the relation between the calculable and the incalculable, and negotiate without the sort of rule that wouldn't have to
be reinvented there where we are cast, there where we find ourselves; but we must take it as far as possible, beyond
are no longer simply fields: ethics, politics, economics, psycho-sociology, philosophy, literature, etc
the place we find ourselves and beyond the -already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond the distinction between national and
international, public and private, and so on. This requirement does not properly belong either to justice or law. It only belongs to either of these
two domains by exceeding each one in the direction of the other. Politicization, for example, is interminable even if it cannot and should not ever
be total. To keep this from being a truism or a triviality, we must recognize in it the following consequence: each advance in politicization obliges
This was
true for example in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in
all the emancipatory battles that remain and will have to remain in progress, everywhere in the
world, for men and for women. Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical
emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, at
least not without treating it too lightly and forming the worst complicities. But beyond these identified territories
one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret the very 4bundations of law such as they had previously been calculated or delimited.
of juridico-politicization on the grand geopolitical scale, beyond all self-serving interpretations, beyond all determined and particular
reappropriations of international law, other areas must constantly open up that at first can seem like secondary or marginal areas. This
marginality also signifies that a violence, indeed a terrorism and other forms of hostage-taking are at work (the examples closest to us would be
found in the area of laws on the teaching and practice of languages, the legitimization of canons, the military use of scientific research, abortion,
euthanasia, problems of organ transplant, extra-uterine conception; bio-engineering, medical experimentation, the social treatment of AIDS, the
macro- or micro-politics of drugs, the homeless, and so on, without forgetting, of course, the treatment of what we call animal life, animality. On
this last problem, the Benjamin text that I'm coming to now shows that its author was not deaf or insensitive to it, even if his propositions on this
subject remain quite obscure, if not quite traditional).
FOURTH, FOCUS ON THE INCALCULABLE IS PARALYZING

Stephens, chairman of the journalism and mass-communication department
at NYU, New York Times Magazine, January 23, 1994,
Mithcell
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/stephens/Jacques%20Derrida%20-%20NYT%20-%20page.htm,
accessed 11/7/02
Deconstruction had another problem: the widely held belief that reading in
search of contradictions and misunderstandings is foolish, if not insidious. John
Updike has attacked what he has called "deconstruction's fatiguing premise that
art has no health in it." Critics on the right are outraged by the implication that
there is something tangled or "impossible" about such important concepts as
"reality" and "truth," which they are committed to extricating from the grip of
quotation marks. "Derrida's influence has been disastrous," Roger Kimball, a
conservative critic and author of "Tenured Radicals," proclaims. "He has helped
foster a sort of anemic nihilism, which has given imprimaturs to squads of
imitators who no longer feel that what they are engaged in is a search for truth,
who would find that notion risible." Though Derrida considers himself a member
of the democratic left, critics on the left haven't necessarily been any kinder.
Some have charged that all this emphasis on the "impossible," on what we can't
know, threatens to leave us paralyzed, "standing" -- like poor Bartleby -- "mute
and solitary" before the world's injustices.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Tyranny of Survival (1/2)

FIRST, WE OUTWEIGH EVEN IF SURVIVAL RHETORIC
CAUSES TYRANNY, THEY HAVENT DISPROVEN OUR TRUTH
CLAIMS. WE STILL PREVENT EXTINCTION
SECOND, NO LINK THE NAZIS ALSO WORE T-SHIRTS,
THAT DOESNT PROVE OUR USE OF SURVIVAL CAUSES
OPPRESSION
THIRD, IRREVERSIBLE CHANGE JUSTIFIES SURVIVAL
RHETORIC
Callahan, Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, Hastings-onHudson, New York, The Tyranny of Survival, 1973, p. 106-7
Daniel
But let us assume that the stage of a dark cloud on some distant horizon has
been passed, and the evidence is good that serious deterioration has already set
in. At what point in the deterioration should survival become a priority? Observe
that I said a priority; it should never become the priority if that means the
sacrifice of all other values. But there are surely conditions under which it could
become a priority, and a very high one. The most important of those conditions
would be the existence of evidence that irreversibility was beginning to set in,
making it increasingly impossible to return to the original conditions. That
situation, combined with visible evidence of serious present deterioration-for
instance, an urgent need to develop compensatory technologies-would warrant
a focus on survival; for that is just what would be at stake.
FOURTH, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST

Schell 1982
the species not only overarches but contains all the benefits of life in
the common world, and to speak of sacrificing the species for the sake of
one of these benefits involves one in the absurdity of wanting to destroy
something in order to preserve one of its parts, as if one were to burn
down a house in an attempt to redecorate the living room, or to kill someone to
For
improve his character. ,but even to point out this absurdity fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is
not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we
ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of saying that extinction is unique not
because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys mankind as the source of all possible human subjects, and this,
in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death, for one's own individual death is the end not of any object in life
but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, however, places the mind in a quandary. One of-the confounding characteristics of death-"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that, precisely because it removes the person himself rather than
something in his life, it seems to offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak
"about" death at all, as. though death were a thing situated somewhere outside us and available for objective inspection, when
the fact is that it is within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we are. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that
death, as a fundamental element of our being, "thinks" in us and through us about whatever we think about, coloring our
thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives
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Kritik Answers
A2 Tyranny of Survival (2/2)

FIFTH, *INDIVIDUALISM IS ALSO TYRANNY: CALLAHAN
ARGUES AGAINST ABSOLUTISM, NOT FOR CATEGORICAL
REJECTION OF ARGUMENTS APPEALING TO SURVIVAL.
Daniel
The irony with which Rieff analyzes psychological man makes evident his
distrust and final rejection. But Rieff offers little to put in its place, in great part
because he does not offer a positive view of culture which would strike a good
bargain between the demands of the individual and of the culture. No more than
Freud can he offer the foundation for a social ethic which would integrate a
range of values in a way that would enable the individual and civilization to
mutually behave toward each other in ways which respected the requirements of
each. What Rieff has done is to lay bare the hubris and folly of an individualism
run amuck, seeking a final break from all cultural restraints. But having rejected
that form of individualism, what are the alternatives? Not an ethic of survival,
which would manage to keep the individual in line at the price of a final victory
of the community over the individual, resolving all tensions, ending the
possibility of a mutual respect. If the tyranny of individualism, inherent in the
mode of life of psychological man, presents only the prospect of a culture of
self-contained human monads occasionally jostling each other, the tyranny of
survival projects a world where the individual is effaced altogether. Both
tyrannies are proof against any kind of social ethic, for both dissolve that
necessary dialectic between individual and community which is the prime
requirement of such an ethic. A failure in the first place to posit the validity of
both individual and community will make it impossible in the end to combat the
virulence of individualism and survivalism, a virulence which not paradoxically
draws them closer together with every advance in technology and affluence.
The first step, then, in constructing a social ethic for technological societies is to
reject the polarities of the analytic attitude, on the one hand, and the species
attitude, on the other. The analytic attitude dissolves all of life into a cunning
detachment of individual from community, providing the former with the
psychological weapons to keep other human beings at bay. The species attitude,
seeking only survival and perpetuation, provides no less effective weapons for
keeping human beings at bay, only this time in the name of a future made safe
for the future. The great threat to the possibility of a social ethic for a
technological society is less the absence of all values than the triumph of one
value over all others. Both individualism and survival are struggling to achieve
that position, with a striking degree of success. Nothing is more important than
to deny both the triumph they seek.
SIXTH, SURVIVAL AS THE HIGHEST VALUE CAN'T JUST BE

REPLACED WITH UNCRITICAL INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AS
THE HIGHEST VALUE.
Daniel
Moreover, as I will develop more fully in later chapters, technological societies

impose both a tyranny of survival and a tyranny of individualism. They impose
the former because, in times of stress, their extreme fragility (stemming from
the high base of expectation they engender and the high degree of total control
their complexity demands) is instantly and terrorizingly apparent, creating a
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Kritik Answers
natural environment for an obsessive fear of annihilation, i.e., a tyranny of
survival. They impose the latter-monomaniacal individualism-because only the
privatized life seems viable or endurable in the midst of a system which presents
itself as impersonal and uncontrollable. Thus is intensified the tyranny of
individualism, which demands that each person create his or her own world ex
nihilo: self-direction, self-realization, self-fulfillment-self, self, self.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Ontology First: 2AC

PREVENTING VIOLENCE COMES BEFORE ONTOLOGY
Arnold
Davidson, 1989
Critical Inquiry, Winter, p. 424

I understand Levinas work to suggest another path to the recovery of the
human, one that leads through or toward other human beings:
The dimension of the divine opens forth froni the human face. Hence
metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enacted in our relations
with men. . . . The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face,
in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is
revealed. It is our relations with men .. . that give to theological concepts the
sole signification they admit of.35
Levinas places ethics before ontology by beginning with our experience of the
human face; and, in a clear reference to Heideggers idolatry of the village life of
peasants, he associates himself with Socrates, who preferred the city where he
encountered men to the country with its trees. In his discussion of skepticism
and the problem of others, Cavell also aligns himself with this path of thought,
with the recovery of the finite human self through the acknowledgment of
others:
As long as God exists, I am not alone. And couldnt the other suffer the fate of
God? ... I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows
me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the
philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God.
[CR, p. 47Oj
The suppression of the other, the human, in Heideggers thought accounts, I
believe, for the absence, in his writing after the war, of the experience of horror.
Horror is always directed toward the human; every object of horror bears the
imprint of the human will.38 So Levinas can see in Heideggers silence about the
gas chambers and death camps a kind of consent to the horror.39 And Cavell
can characterize Nazis as those who have lost the capacity for being horrified
by what they do.4 Where was Heideggers horror? How could he have failed to
know what he had consented to?
Hannah Arendt associates Heidegger with Paul Valerys aphorism, Les
evenments ne sont que lcume des choses (Events are but the foam of
things).4 I think one understands the source of her intuition. The mass
extermination of human beings, however, does not produce foam, but dust and
ashes; and it is here that questioning must stop.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Your Impact is Inevitable: 2AC

AND, ALL OF THEIR INEVITABIILTY ARGUMENTS ARE
QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT THAN OUR 1AC SCENARIOS.
THEY REFER TO EXTREMELY LOW LEVEL WARS THAT
DONT CAUSE ANNIHILATION. ANY BIGGER IMPACT IS
PURE RHETORIC, WHEREAS WE HAVE EV THAT A
BREAKDOWN OF THE REALIST BALANCE CAUSES GREAT
POWER WARS
ALSO, WARFARE IS AT ITS LOWEST EBB IN HUMAN
HISTORY
Gregg
Easterbrook, journalist, The End of War? THE NEW REPUBLIC, May 30, 2005,
p. 18.
War has entered a cycle of decline.
Combat in Iraq and in a few other places is an exception to a significant global
trend that has gone nearly unnoticed--namely that, for about 15 years, there have been steadily fewer armed
conflicts worldwide. In fact, it is possible that a person's chance of dying because of war has ,
in the last decade or more, become the lowest in human history. Five years ago, two academics--Monty Marshall,
But here is something you would never guess from watching the news:
research director at the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University, and Ted Robert Gurr, a professor of government at the University of
Maryland--spent months compiling all available data on the frequency and death toll of twentieth-century combat, expecting to find an everworsening ledger of blood and destruction. Instead, they found, after the terrible years of World Wars I and II, a global increase in war from the
1960s through the mid-'80s. But this was followed by a steady, nearly uninterrupted decline beginning in 1991. They also found a steady global
rise since the mid-'80s in factors that reduce armed conflict--economic prosperity, free elections, stable central governments, better
communication, more "peacemaking institutions," and increased international engagement. Marshall and Gurr, along with Deepa Khosla,
published their results as a 2001 report, Peace and Conflict, for the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the
University of Maryland. At the time, I remember reading that report and thinking, "Wow, this is one of the hottest things I have ever held in my
hands." I expected that evidence of a decline in war would trigger a sensation. Instead it received almost no notice.
AND, CURRENT GLOBAL TRENDS ARE AGAINST WARFARE

Gregg
p. 18.
In his 1993 book, A History of Warfare, the military historian John Keegan recognized the early signs that combat and armed conflict had entered
. War "may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings

as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling
their discontents," Keegan wrote. Now there are 15 years of positive
developments supporting the idea. Fifteen years is not all that long. Many things could
still go badly wrong; there could be ghastly surprises in store. But, for the moment, the
trends have never been more auspicious: Swords really are being beaten into plowshares and spears
into pruning hooks. The world ought to take notice.
a cycle of decline
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A2 Your Impact is Inevitable: 1AR

AND, EXTEND THE 2AC ANSWERS TO THE INEVITABILITY
DEBATE.
FIRST, THEIR EV ONLY SHOWS THAT LOW SCALE,
REGIONAL SKIRMISHES ARE INEVITABLE, NOT THE GREAT
POWER WARS OF THE 1AC. THEIR TRANSITION IS THE
ONLY RISK OF AN IMPACT
SECOND, WERE RUNNING CIRCLES AROUND THEM ON
THE UNIQUENESS QUESTION. EASTERBOOK 2005 SHOWS
THAT GLOBAL CONFLICT IS AT ITS LOWEST IN HISTORY
THIRD, YOU PUT EXTINCTION FIRST. THE RISK OF A
NUCLEAR WAR, WHICH SHATTERS THE MORAL FRAME.
CROSS-APPLY SCHELL 82
FOURTH, WAR IS DOWN
Gregg
p. 18.
Of course, 2001 was the year of September 11. But, despite the battles in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere that were ignited by
Islamist terrorism and the West's response, a second edition of Peace and Conflict, published in 2003, showed the total number of wars and
despite the invasion of

Iraq and other outbreaks of fighting, the overall decline of war
continues. This even as the global population keeps rising, which might
be expected to lead to more war, not less.
armed conflicts continued to decline. A third edition of the study, published last week, shows that,
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A2 Your Impact = Bare Life: 2AC

(1/3)
FIRST, NO LINK We dont ascribe a quantitative value to
someones life, but only say that we shouldnt forcibly
allow them to die in a horrific way, allowing them the
option to find their own value.
SECOND, VALUE TO LIFE IS SUBJECTIVE MUST ALLOW
PEOPLE THE CHOICE TO FIND THEIR OWN VALUE AT ALL
COSTS AND RESIST EXTERNAL ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY IT
Schwartz 2004
[A Value to Life: Who Decides and How?

www.fleshandbones.com/readingroom/pdf/399.pdf]
Those who choose to reason on this basis hope that if the quality of a life can be measured then the answer
to whether that life has value to the individual can be determined easily. This raises special problems,
however, because the idea of quality involves a value judgement, and value judgements are, by their
essence, subject to indeterminate relative factors such as preferences and dislikes. Hence, quality of life is
difficult to measure and will vary according to individual tastes, preferences and aspirations. As a result,
no general rules or principles can be asserted that would simplify

decisions about the value of a life based on its quality. Nevertheless,
quality is still an essential criterion in making such decisions because it
gives legitimacy to the possibility that rational, autonomous persons can
decide for themselves that their own lives either are worth, or are no longer
worth, living. To disregard this possibility would be to imply that no individuals can legitimately make such
value judgements about their own lives and, if nothing else, that would be counterintuitive. 2 In our case,
Katherine Lewis had spent 10 months considering her decision before concluding that her life was no longer
of a tolerable quality. She put a great deal of effort into the decision and she was competent when she made
it. Who would be better placed to make this judgement for her than Katherine herself? And yet, a doctor
faced with her request would most likely be uncertain about whether Katherines choice is truly in her best
interest, and feel trepidation about assisting her. We need to know which considerations can be used to
protect the patients interests. The quality of life criterion asserts that there is a difference between the type
of life and the fact of life. This is the primary difference between it and the sanctity criterion discussed on
page 115. Among quality of life considerations rest three assertions: 1. there is relative value to life 2. the
value of a life is determined subjectively 3. not all lives are of equal value. Relative value The first assertion,
that life is of relative value, could be taken in two ways. In one sense, it could mean that the value of a given
life can be placed on a scale and measured against other lives. The scale could be a social scale, for
example, where the contributions or potential for contribution of individuals are measured against those of
fellow citizens. Critics of quality of life criteria frequently name this as a potential slippery slope where lives
would be deemed worthy of saving, or even not saving, based on the relative social value of the individual
concerned. So, for example, a mother of four children who is a practising doctor could be regarded of greater
value to the community than an unmarried accountant. The concern is that the potential for discrimination is
too high. Because of the possibility of prejudice and injustice, supporters of the quality of life criterion reject
this interpersonal construction in favour of a second, more personalized, option. According to this
interpretation, the notion of relative value is relevant not between individuals but within the context of one
persons life and is measured against that persons needs and aspirations. So Katherine would base her
decision on a comparison between her life before and after her illness. The value placed on the quality of a
life would be determined by the individual depending on whether he or she believes the current state to be
relatively preferable to previous or future states and whether he or she can foresee controlling the
circumstances that make it that way. Thus, the life of an athlete who aspires to participate in the Olympics
can be changed in relative value by an accident that leaves that person a quadriplegic. The athlete might
decide that the relative value of her life is diminished after the accident, because she perceives her desires
and aspirations to be reduced or beyond her capacity to control. However, if she receives treatment and
counselling her aspirations could change and, with the adjustment, she could learn to value her life as a
quadriplegic as much or more than her previous life. This illustrates how it is possible for a person to adjust
the values by which they appraise their lives. For Katherine Lewis, the decision went the opposite way and
she decided that a life of incapacity and constant pain was of relatively low value to her. It is not surprising
that the most vociferous protesters against permitting people in Katherines position to be assisted in
terminating their lives are people who themselves are disabled. Organizations run by, and that represent,
persons with disabilities make two assertions in this light. First, they claim that accepting that Katherine
Lewis has a right to die based on her determination that her life is of relatively little value is demeaning to all
disabled people, and implies that any life with a severe disability is not worth Write a list of three things that
make living. Their second assertion is that with proper help, over time Katherine would be able to transform
her personal outlook and find satisfaction in her life that would increase its relative value for her. The first
assertion can be addressed by clarifying that the case of Katherine Lewis must not be taken as a general
rule. Deontologists, who are interested in knowing general principles and duties that can be applied across all
cases would not be very satisfied with this; they would prefer to be able to look to duties that would apply in
a case-based, context-sensitive approach is better suited.

Contextualizing would permit freedom to act within a particular context ,
all cases. Here,
without the implication that the decision must hold in general. So, in this case, Katherine might decide that
her life is relatively valueless. In another case, for example that of actor Christopher Reeve,
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CONTINUED
191
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(2/3)
CONTINUED
the decision to seek other ways of valuing this major life change led to him perceiving his life as highly
valuable, even if different in value from before the accident that made him a paraplegic. This invokes the
second assertion, that Katherine could change her view over time. Although we recognize this is possible in
some cases, it is not clear how it applies to Katherine. Here we have a case in which a rational and
competent person has had time to consider her options and has chosen to end her life of suffering beyond
what she believes she can endure. Ten months is a long time and it will have given her plenty of opportunity
to consult with family and professionals about the possibilities open to her in the future. Given all this, it is
reasonable to assume that Katherine has made a well-reasoned decision. It might not be a decision that
everyone can agree with but if her reasoning process can be called into question then at what point can we
say that a decision is sound? She meets all the criteria for competence and she is aware of the consequences
of her decision. It would be very difficult to determine what arguments could truly justify interfering with her
choice. The second assertion made by supporters of the quality of life as a criterion for decisionmaking is
closely related to the first, but with an added dimension. This assertion suggests that the determination of
the value of the quality of a given life is a subjective determination to be

made by the person experiencing that life. The important addition here is that the
decision is a personal one that, ideally, ought not to be made externally
by another person but internally by the individual involved. Katherine Lewis made this decision for
herself based on a comparison between two stages of her life. So did James Brady. Without this element,
decisions based on quality of life criteria lack salient information and the patients concerned cannot give
informed consent. Patients must be given the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they think their
To ignore or overlook patients judgement in this

matter is to violate their autonomy and their freedom to decide for
lives are worth living or not.
themselves on the basis of relevant information about their future, and comparative consideration of their
past. As the deontological position puts it so well, to do so is to violate the imperative that we must treat
persons as rational and as ends in themselves.
THIRD, REFUSAL TO ASSIGN A VALUE TO LIFE RENDERS

LIFE VALUELESS
Phera.com 2005
[www.phera.com/value_of_life]
Refusal to assign any value to life often leads, ironically, to ''no'' value
being attached to life. So, treating an endangered human life, or even
the value of Earth itself, in economics formally as a commodity can be
morally justified, in that risks of failure to protect it, thus become costs.
FOURTH, NUCLEAR WEAPONS USE IS A HORROR ON PAR

WITH GENOCIDE BECAUSE OF HOW IT INDISCRIMINATELY
AND ABSOLUTELY DESTROYS INNOCENT LIFE
Evans 95
[Gareth, Ministor of Foreign Affairs, Australia, On the Legality of the Threat or
Use of Nuclear Weapons, Verbatim Excerpts of Oral Statements to the
International Court of Justice, October 30,
disarm.igc.org/oldwebpages/icjquote.html, acc. 8-24-05//uwyo-ajl]
The right to self-defence is not unlimited. It is subject to fundamental
principles of humanity. Self-defence is not a justification for genocide, for
ordering that there shall be no enemy survivors in combat or for
indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population. Nor is it a justification for the
use of nuclear weapons.
The fact remains that the existence of
nuclear weapons as a class of weapons

threatens the whole of civilization. This is not the case with respect to
any class or classes of conventional weapons. It cannot be consistent
with humanity to permit the existence of a weapon which threatens the
very survival of humanity.
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There are some weapons the very existence of which is inconsistent with fundamental
general principles of humanity. In the case of weapons of this type, international law does not
merely prohibit their threat or use. It prohibits even their acquisition or manufacture, and by
extension their possession. Such an attitude has been manifested in the case of other types
of weapons of mass destruction. Both the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1992
Chemical Weapons Convention do not merely prohibit the use of biological and chemical
weapons of mass destruction, but prevent their very existence.
As was hideously demonstrated at Hiroshima, where a relatively

minuscule atomic bomb was detonated, and as the release of radiation
by the Chernobyl disaster showed to our horror, any use of nuclear
weapons, anywhere at any time, would be devastating and in no way
comparable to any use, in whatever magnitude, of conventional
weapons
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Kritik Answers

(3/3)
FIFTH, FAILURE TO ACT IN THE FACE OF ANNIHILATION
RISKS TOTALITARIANISM BY DENYING INSTITUTIONAL
RESPONSIBILITY
Campbell 98

The undecidable within the decision does not, however, prevent the decision nor avoid its
urgency. As Derrida observes, a just decision is always required immediately, right away.
This necessary haste has unavoidable consequences because the pursuit of
infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions,

rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it are unavailable in the
crush of time. Nor can the crush of time be avoided, even by unlimited time, because
the moment of decision as such always remains a finite moment of urgency and
precipitation. The decision is always structurally finite, it aalways marks the interruption
of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede
it. That is why, invoking Kierkegaard, Derrida, declares that the instant of decision is a
madness.
The finite nature of the decision may be a madness in the way it renders possible the
impossible, the infinite character of justice, but Derrida argues for the necessity of this
madness. Most importantly, Derrida argues for the necessity of this madness. Most
importantly, although Derridas argument concerning the decision has, to this pint, been
concerned with an account of the procedure by which a decision is possible, it is with respect
to the ncessity of the decision that Derrida begins to formulate an account of the decision
that bears upon the content of the decision. In so doing, Derridas argument addresses more
directly more directly, I would argue than is acknowledged by Critchley the concern that
for politics (at least for a progressive politics) one must provide an account of the decision to
combat domination.
That undecidability resides within the decision, Derrida argues, that justice exceeds
law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinalbe cannot and should
not serve as alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles,

within an institution or a state, or between institutions or states and others.
Indeed, incalculable justice requires us to calculate. From where do
these insistences come? What is behind, what is animating, these imperatives? It is both the
character of infinite justice as a heteronomic relationship to the other, a relationship that
because of its undecidability multiplies responsibility, and the fact that left to itself, the
incalculable and given (donatrice) idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to
the worst, for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse
calculation. The necessity of calculating the incalculable thus responds to a duty a duty
that inhabits the instant of madness and compels the decision to avoid the bad, the
perverse calculation, even the worst. This is the duty that also dwells with
deconstructive thought and makes it the starting point, the at least necessary
condition, for the organization of resistance to totalitarianism in all its
forms. And it is a duty that responds to practical political concerns when we recognize that
Derrida names the bad, the perverse, and the worst as those violences we recognize all too
well without yet having thought them through, the crimes of xenophobia, racism, antiSemitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism.
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A2 No Value to Life: 2AC (1/3)

FIRST, THIS ARGUMENT IS REPULSIVE People ascribe
their own value to life. Violently taking it from them is
the worst form of atrocity
SECOND, THERES ALWAYS A VALUE TO LIFE Even people
in the worst conditions find was of living beautifully
THIRD, THIS ISNT OFFENSE If someone finds their life
valueless, they can commit suicide. We at least give
people who want to live the choice
FOURTH, LIFE ONLY BECOMES VALUELESS WHEN IT IS
DECLARED AS SUCH [author is describing specific men who were in Auschwitz with
him]
Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna, Mans

Search for Meaning, 1946, p. 90-93
Victor
We have stated that that which was ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoners inner self was not so much the enumerated
only the
men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside
eventually fell victim to the camps degenerating influences. The question now arises, what could, or
psychophysical causes as it was the result of a free decision. Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that
should, have constituted this inner hold? Former prisoners, when writing or relating their experiences, agree that the most depressing influence
of all was that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be. He had been given no date for his release. (In our camp it
was pointless even to talk about it.) Actually a prison term was not only uncertain but unlimited. A well-known research psychologist has pointed
out that life in a concentration camp could be called a provisional existence. We can add to this by defining it as a provisional existence of
unknown limit. New arrivals usually knew nothing about the conditions at a camp. Those who had come back from other camps were obliged to
keep silent, and from some camps no one had returned. On entering camp a change took place in the minds of the men. With the end of
uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end. It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end. The
A man who could not see the end of

his provisional existence was not able to aim at an ultimate goa l in life. He ceased
living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life
changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a
latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach.
similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work done
on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed timeinner time-which is a result of their unemployed state.
Prisoners, too, suffered from this strange time-experience. In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue,
appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted
longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time-experience! In this connection we are reminded of Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain, which
contains some very pointed psychological remarks. Mann studies the spiritual development of people who are in an analogous psychological
position, i.e., tuberculosis patients in a sanatorium who also know no date for their release. They experience a similar existencewithout a future
and without a goal. One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me
later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over
and done, as if he had already died. This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of
imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remoteout of
reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life,
that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man who looked at it from another world. A man who let
himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have
already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present
danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make

something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our provisional
existence as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose
their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forget that often it is just such an
of its reality there lay a certain
exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camps
difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred
to close their eyes and to live in the past.
Life for such people became meaningless .
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FIFTH, VALUE TO LIFE IS SUBJECTIVE MUST ALLOW
PEOPLE THE CHOICE TO FIND THEIR OWN VALUE AT ALL
COSTS AND RESIST EXTERNAL ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY IT
Schwartz 2004
[A Value to Life: Who Decides and How?
www.fleshandbones.com/readingroom/pdf/399.pdf]
Those who choose to reason on this basis hope that if the quality of a life can be measured then the answer to whether that life has
value to the individual can be determined easily. This raises special problems, however, because the idea of quality involves a
value judgement, and value judgements are, by their essence, subject to indeterminate relative factors such as preferences and
dislikes. Hence, quality of life is difficult to measure and will vary according to individual tastes, preferences and aspirations. As a
result,
no general rules or principles can be asserted that would simplify decisions about the value of a life based on its quality.
Nevertheless, quality is still an essential criterion in making such decisions because it gives legitimacy to the possibility that
persons can decide for themselves that their own lives

either are worth, or are no longer worth, living. To disregard this possibility would be to imply that no individuals can
rational, autonomous
legitimately make such value judgements about their own lives and, if nothing else, that would be counterintuitive. 2 In our case,
Katherine Lewis had spent 10 months considering her decision before concluding that her life was no longer of a tolerable quality.
She put a great deal of effort into the decision and she was competent when she made it. Who would be better placed to make this
judgement for her than Katherine herself? And yet, a doctor faced with her request would most likely be uncertain about whether
Katherines choice is truly in her best interest, and feel trepidation about assisting her. We need to know which considerations can
be used to protect the patients interests. The quality of life criterion asserts that there is a difference between the type of life and
the fact of life. This is the primary difference between it and the sanctity criterion discussed on page 115. Among quality of life
considerations rest three assertions: 1. there is relative value to life 2. the value of a life is determined subjectively 3. not all lives
are of equal value. Relative value The first assertion, that life is of relative value, could be taken in two ways. In one sense, it could
mean that the value of a given life can be placed on a scale and measured against other lives. The scale could be a social scale, for
example, where the contributions or potential for contribution of individuals are measured against those of fellow citizens. Critics of
quality of life criteria frequently name this as a potential slippery slope where lives would be deemed worthy of saving, or even not
saving, based on the relative social value of the individual concerned. So, for example, a mother of four children who is a practising
doctor could be regarded of greater value to the community than an unmarried accountant. The concern is that the potential for
discrimination is too high. Because of the possibility of prejudice and injustice, supporters of the quality of life criterion reject this
interpersonal construction in favour of a second, more personalized, option. According to this interpretation, the notion of relative
value is relevant not between individuals but within the context of one persons life and is measured against that persons needs
and aspirations. So Katherine would base her decision on a comparison between her life before and after her illness. The value
placed on the quality of a life would be determined by the individual depending on whether he or she believes the current state to
be relatively preferable to previous or future states and whether he or she can foresee controlling the circumstances that make it
that way. Thus, the life of an athlete who aspires to participate in the Olympics can be changed in relative value by an accident
that leaves that person a quadriplegic. The athlete might decide that the relative value of her life is diminished after the accident,
because she perceives her desires and aspirations to be reduced or beyond her capacity to control. However, if she receives
treatment and counselling her aspirations could change and, with the adjustment, she could learn to value her life as a
quadriplegic as much or more than her previous life. This illustrates how it is possible for a person to adjust the values by which
they appraise their lives. For Katherine Lewis, the decision went the opposite way and she decided that a life of incapacity and
constant pain was of relatively low value to her. It is not surprising that the most vociferous protesters against permitting people in
Katherines position to be assisted in terminating their lives are people who themselves are disabled. Organizations run by, and
that represent, persons with disabilities make two assertions in this light. First, they claim that accepting that Katherine Lewis has a
right to die based on her determination that her life is of relatively little value is demeaning to all disabled people, and implies that
any life with a severe disability is not worth Write a list of three things that make living. Their second assertion is that with proper
help, over time Katherine would be able to transform her personal outlook and find satisfaction in her life that would increase its
relative value for her. The first assertion can be addressed by clarifying that the case of Katherine Lewis must not be taken as a
general rule. Deontologists, who are interested in knowing general principles and duties that can be applied across all cases would
not be very satisfied with this; they would prefer to be able to look to duties that would apply in all cases. Here, a case-based,
context-sensitive approach is better suited. Contextualizing would permit freedom to act within a particular context, without the
implication that the decision must hold in general. So, in this case, Katherine might decide that her life is relatively valueless. In
another case, for example that of actor Christopher Reeve, the decision to seek other ways of valuing this major life change led to
him perceiving his life as highly valuable, even if different in value from before the accident that made him a paraplegic. This
invokes the second assertion, that Katherine could change her view over time. Although we recognize this is possible in some
cases, it is not clear how it applies to Katherine. Here we have a case in which a rational and competent person has had time to
consider her options and has chosen to end her life of suffering beyond what she believes she can endure. Ten months is a long
time and it will have given her plenty of opportunity to consult with family and professionals about the possibilities open to her in
the future. Given all this, it is reasonable to assume that Katherine has made a well-reasoned decision. It might not be a decision
that everyone can agree with but if her reasoning process can be called into question then at what point can we say that a decision
is sound? She meets all the criteria for competence and she is aware of the consequences of her decision. It would be very difficult
to determine what arguments could truly justify interfering with her choice. The second assertion made by supporters of the quality
of life as a criterion for decisionmaking is closely related to the first, but with an added dimension. This assertion suggests that the
the value of the quality of a given life is a subjective

determination to be made by the person experiencing that life. The important
addition here is that the decision is a personal one that, ideally, ought not to be
made externally by another person but internally by the individual involved. Katherine Lewis made this
determination of
decision for herself based on a comparison between two stages of her life. So did James Brady. Without this element, decisions
based on quality of life criteria lack salient information and the patients concerned cannot give informed consent. Patients must be
To ignore or
overlook patients judgement in this matter is to violate their autonomy
and their freedom to decide for themselves on the basis of relevant information about their future, and
given the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they think their lives are worth living or not.
comparative consideration of their past. As the deontological position puts it so well, to do so is to violate the imperative that we
must treat persons as rational and as ends in themselves
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SIXTH, NO VALUE TO LIFE RHETORIC UNDERMINES
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE. IT CREATES FALSE HOPE OF
LIBERATION FROM MEANINGLESSNESS WITHOUT
ADDRESSING WHAT WE ARE LIVING FOR. VOTE TO AFFIRM
INTRINSIC VALUE TO EXISTENCE [THIS EVIDENCE IS GENDER PARAPHRASED]
Frankl, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of
Vienna, Mans Search for Meaning, 1946, p. 96-98
Victor
I once had a dramatic demonstration of the close link between the loss of faith in the future and this dangerous giving up. F, my senior block
warden, a fairly well-known composer and librettist, confided in me one day: I would like to tell you something, Doctor. I have had a strange
dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered.
What do you think I asked? That I would like to know when the war would be over for me. You know what I mean, Doctorfor me! I wanted to
know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end. And when did you have this dream? I asked. In
February, 1945, he answered. It was then the beginning of March. What did your dream voice answer? Furtively he whispered to me, March
thirtieth. When F told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the
promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On
March twenty-ninth, F suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March thirtieth, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and
suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March thirty-first, he was dead. To all outward appearances, he
had died of typhus. Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a manhis courage and hope, or lack of them
sudden loss of hope and courage can have a

deadly effect. The ultimate cause of my friends death was that the expected
liberation did not come and he was severely disappointed. This suddenly lowered his bodys
resistance against the latent typhus infection . His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed
and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the
and his body fell victim to illnessand thus the voice of his dream was right after all. The observations of this one case and the conclusion drawn
from them are in accordance with something that was drawn to my attention by the chief doctor of our concentration camp. The death rate in the
week between Christmas, 1944, and New Years, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this
increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of weather or new epidemics. It was
simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and
there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers
any attempt to restore a mans inner strength

had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsches words, [One] He
who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how , could be the guiding motto for all
of resistance and a great number of them died. As we said before,
in the camp
psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a whyan
aimfor their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim,
no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments
was, I have nothing to expect from life any more. What sort of answer can one give to that? What was really needed was a fundamental change
in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we
We needed to stop asking about the meaning of

life, and instead to thisnk of ourselves as those who were being questioned by
lifedaily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately
means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the
expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.
tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
SEVENTH, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST

Schell 1982
it does not go far enough to point out this superior

importance, as though in making our decision about extinction we were
being asked to choose between, say, liberty, on the one hand, and the survival of the
species, on the other. For the species not only overarches but contains all the
benefits of life in the common world, and to speak of sacrificing the
species for the sake of one of these benefits involves one in the absurdity
of wanting to destroy something in order to preserve one of its parts,
as if one were to burn down a house in an attempt to redecorate the
living room, or to kill someone to improve his character. ,but even to point out this absurdity fails to take the full measure
the past generations, but
of the peril of extinction, for mankind is not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we must protect so that we can go
on benefiting from it; rather, it is we ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To say this is another way of
saying that extinction is unique not because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys mankind as the source of all
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possible human subjects, and this, in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death, for one's own individual
death is the end not of any object in life but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, however, places the mind in a
quandary. One of-the confounding characteristics of death-"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that, precisely because it
removes the person himself rather than something in his life, it seems to offer the mind nothing to take hold of. One even feels it
inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak "about" death at all, as. though death were a thing situated somewhere outside us and
available for objective inspection, when the fact is that it is within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we are. It would be more
appropriate, perhaps, to say that death, as a fundamental element of our being, "thinks" in us and through us about whatever we
think about, coloring our thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives
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No Value To Life Justifies

Genocide
EUTHANASIA AND GENOCIDE IS JUSTIFIED BY THE
DEPLOYMENT OF THE RHETORIC OF NO VALUE TO LIFE
Richard
Coleson, M.A.R., J.D., ISSUES IN LAW & MEDICINE, Summer, 1997

Euthanasia also was advocated in Germany. As early as 1895, a widely-used
German medical textbook made a claim for "the right to death." Michael
Berenbaum, The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 64 (1993). Immediately following
World War I, the notion took greater root in the German medical and legal
professions, instigated largely by a publication by Professors Karl Binding and
Alfred Hoche of Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwertens Leben (Permitting
the Destruction of Unworthy Life) (1920). See 8 Issues in Law & Med. 221 (1992)
(Patrick Derr and Walter Wright, trans.) (copies of which have been lodged with
the Court). What transpired in Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s would
unalterably change the debate over the ethics and legality of physicians
participating in ending the lives of their patients. In that period, the lives of
hundreds of thousands of terminally ill, incurably sick, and mentally incompetent
patients were terminated by German doctors--the elite of the profession in
Europe--in a program of "euthanasia" propagated both by acceptance of the "
unworthy life" thesis and by the imposition of National Socialist theories of
eugenics derived from earlier concepts developed by the German medical
profession and intelligentsia. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance:
'Euthanasia' in Germany 1900-1945 93-97, 273-277, 284-285 (1994); Robert Jay
Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide 44-79
(1986); Gallagher, By Trust Betrayed, supra at 74-95. In the ensuing decades,
the connection of medical killing in Nazi Germany to contemporary debates
regarding the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia has been a matter
of great controversy. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, supra at 291-98.
[Footnote omitted] It is clear, however, that those closest to these events saw
some connection. The condemnation of the "Nazi doctors" was universal and
prompted great reflection on the question of ensuring that their actions never be
repeated. As one step, the world's physicians reaffirmed the foundational ethical
principle of their profession: that doctors must not kill. [Footnote omitted] The
cases before this Court are the most important juridical test since that time of
the meaning of that principle. For this reason alone, the experience which
influenced so much of what the world thinks today of the issue of euthanasia is
relevant to the deliberations of this Court. The acceptance by physicians of the
notion of a "life not worthy to be lived" under the "euthanasia" program was a
cornerstone of the horror that was to follow. Leo Alexander, Medical Science
Under Dictatorship, 241 New Eng. J. Med. 39, 44 (1949). Without the willingness
of doctors to participate, the euthanasia program would not have occurred.
Patrick Derr, Hadamar, Hippocrates, and the Future of Medicine: Reflections on
Euthanasia and the History of German Medicine, 4 Issues in Law & Med. 487
(1989). This "cornerstone" principle persists today. The experience of the
Netherlands (described in the Brief of Amicus Curiae the American Suicide
Foundation in No. 96-110) establishes that the participation of physicians in
killing their patients invariably rests upon, and propagates, the notion of life
unworthy of life. The writings of pro-euthanasia philosophers James Rachels,
Peter Singer, and John Harris [Footnote omitted] confirm this fact. While social
and political conditions in Western democracies obviously differ from those of
post-World War I and Nazi Germany, the consequences of legalizing physicianassisted suicide and euthanasia will be no less dire.
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No Value To Life Justifies Nazism

ALSO, THE ARGUMENT THAT CERTAIN CONDITIONS MAKE
LIFE NOT WORTH LIVING ACCEPTS THE PHILOSOPHICAL
PREMISE OF NAZI GERMANY STYLE MURDERS AND
CONCENTRATION CAMPS THAT RESPECT FOR LIFE DOES
NOT ENTAIL PRESERVING LIFE
Steven
Neeley, Assistant Professor at Saint Francis, AKRON LAW REVIEW v. 28, Summer,
1994.
The final solution in the United States and other western societies will be unlike
the final solution in Nazi Germany in its details, but not unlike it in its horror. And
I fear that some who now live will experience this final solution. They will live to
see the day they will be killed. Variations of the "slippery-slope" argument as
applied to suicide and euthanasia are abundant. Beauchamp has argued, for
example, that at least from the perspective of rule utilitarianism, the wedge
argument against euthanasia should be taken seriously. Accordingly, although a
"restricted-active-euthanasia rule would have some utility value" since some
intense and uncontrollable suffering would be eliminated, "it may not have the
highest utility value in the structure of our present code or in any imaginable
code which could be made current, and therefore may not be a component in
the ideal code for our society . . . . For the disutility of introducing legitimate
killing into one's moral code (in the form of active euthanasia rules) may, in the
long run, outweigh the utility of doing so, as a result of the eroding effect such a
relaxation would have on rules in the code which demand respect for human life.
" Beauchamp then continues down a now-familiar path: If, for example, rules
permitting active killing were introduced, it is not implausible to suppose that
destroying defective newborns (a form of involuntary euthanasia) would become
an accepted and common practice, that as population increases occur the aged
will be even more neglectable and neglected than they now are, that capital
punishment for a wide variety of crimes would be increasingly tempting, that
some doctors would have appreciably reduced fears of actively injecting fatal
doses whenever it seemed to them propitious to do so . . . . A hundred such
possible consequences might easily be imagined. But these few are sufficient to
make the larger point that such rules permitting killing could lead to a general
reduction of respect for human life.
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Theres Always Value To Life

THERES ALWAYS VALUE TO LIFE
Search for Meaning, 1946, p. 104
Victor
But I did not only talk of the future and the veil which was drawn over it. I also
mentioned the past; all its joys, and how its light shone even in the present
darkness. Again I quoted a poetto avoid sounding like a preacher myselfwho
had written, Was Dii erlebst, k,ann keme Macht der Welt Dir rauben. (What you
have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our
experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had,
and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it
into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.
Then I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my
comrades (who lay motionless, although occasionally a sigh could be heard) that
human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that
this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death. I
asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the darkness of the
hut to face up to the seriousness of our position. They must not lose hope but
should keep their courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle
did not detract from its dignity and its meaning. I said that someone looks down
on each of us in difficult hoursa friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a
Godand he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us
suffering proudlynot miserablyknowing how to die.
THERES ALWAYS VALUE TO LIFE, EVEN WITH

TREMENDOUS SUFFERING
Victor
When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his
suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the
fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can
relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in
the way in which he bears his burden. For us, as prisoners, these thoughts were
not speculations far removed from reality. They were the only thoughts that
could be of help to us. They kept us from despair, even when there seemed to
be no chance of coming out of it alive. Long ago we had passed the stage of
asking what was the meaning of life, a naive query which understands life as the
attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us,
the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and
of dying. Once the meaning of suffering had been revealed to us, we refused to
minimize or alleviate the camps tortures by ignoring them or harboring false
illusions and entertaining artificial optimism. Suffering had become a task on
which we did not want to turn our backs. We had realized its hidden
opportunities for achievement, the opportunities which caused the poet Rilke to
write, Wie viel ist aufzuleiden! (How much suffering there is to get through!)
Rilke spoke of getting through suffering as others would talk of getting
through work. There was plenty of suffering for us to get through. Therefore, it
was necessary to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments
of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be
ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage,
the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. Shamefacedly some
confessed occasionally that they had wept, like the comrade who answered my
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question of how he had gotten over his edema, by confessing, I have wept it out
of my system.
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A2 Communication Scholar
Framework: 2AC
MCCHESNEY CONCEDES THAT UNANTICIPATED
CONSEQUENCES MUST BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT
McChesney 96
[Robert W., U. of Wisconsin-Madison, The Internet and U.S. Communication

Policy-Making in Historical and Critical Perspective, Journal of Communication
46 (1), Winter, http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue4/mcchesney.html, acc. 9-3006//uwyo-ajl]
All communication technologies have unanticipated and unintended effects, and
one function of policy-making is to understand them so we may avoid or
minimize the undesirable ones. The digitalization and computerization of our
society are going to transform us radically, yet even those closely associated
with these developments express concern about the possibility of a severe
deterioration of the human experience as a result of the information revolution
(Deitch, 1994; Stoll, 1995; Talbott, 1995). As one observer notes, "Very few of
us-only the high priests-really understand the new technologies, and these are
surely the people least qualified to make policy decisions about them"
(Charbeneau, 1994, pp. 28-29). For every argument extolling the "virtual
community" and the liberatory aspects of cyberspace, it seems every bit as
plausible to reach dystopian conclusions. Why not look at the information
highway as a process that encourages the isolation, atomization, and
marginalization of people in society? In fact, cannot the ability of people to
create their own community in cyberspace have the effect of terminating a
community in the general sense? In a class-stratified, commercially oriented
society like the United States, cannot the information highway have the effect of
simply making it possible for the well-to-do to bypass any contact with the
balance of society altogether? These are precisely the types of questions that
need to be addressed and answered in communication policy-making and
precisely the types of questions in which the market has no interest (Chapman,
1995). At any rate, a healthy skepticism toward technology should be the order
of the day.
COMMUNICATION SCHOLARS HAVE TO CONSIDER

POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
Sandgathe 2001
[Sharon, Engl Dept. @ Arizona, The Culture of Agriculture, February 27,

darkwing.uoregon.edu/~tns/session_6.htm, acc 9-30-06]
As a scholar of rhetoric, much of my work examines discourse in public arenas. I
find public constructions of agriculture to be a fascinating site for study because
in agriculture people must explicitly engage the interpenetration of nature and
culture. Currently, a common way to validate a particular vision of that
interpenetration is to label a favored version of agriculture with the highly prized
signifier sustainable. In this discussion I will argue that the shifting use of the
term sustainable agriculture in public discourse reflects political conflict over
social identities, cultural values, and material practices. I will also examine how
discourses about nature, especially highly valued scientific discourses, are used
to legitimate the social agendas represented by sustainable agriculture, and
what the political consequences of that legitimization might be.
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Kritik Answers
**Democratic Talk**
Democratic Talk Turn: 2AC (1/2)
TURN: DEMOCRATIC TALK
A. REFUSING TO ACT AS IF WERE THE GOVERNMENT
DESTROYS THE DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL
OF DEBATE
Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong
Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age)
Agenda-Setting. In liberal democracies, agendas are typically regarded as the
province of elites -- of committees, or executive officers, or (even) pollsters. This is
so not simply because representative systems delegate the agenda-setting function or
because they slight citizen participation, but because they conceive of agendas as
fixed and self-evident, almost natural, and in this sense incidental to such vital
democratic processes as deliberation and decision-making. Yet a people that
does not set its own agenda, by means of talk and direct political exchange, not
only relinquishes a vital power of government but also exposes its remaining
powers of deliberation and decision to ongoing subversion. What counts as an
"issue" or a "problem" and how such issues or problems are formulated may to a
large extent predetermine what decisions are reached. For example, the choice
between building a small freeway and a twelve-lane interstate highway in lower Manhattan
may seem of little moment to those who prefer to solve the problems of urban
transportation with mass rail transit. Or the right to choose among six mildly right-ofcenter candidates may fail to exercise the civic imagination of socialists. Nor is it
sufficient to offer a wide variety of options, for what constitutes an option-how a

question is formulated-is as controversial as the range of choices offered .
Abortion is clearly an issue that arouses intense public concern at present, but to say that
it belongs on the public agenda says too little. The vital question remains: How is it
presented? In this form: "Do you believe there should be an amendment to the
Constitution protecting the life of the unborn child?" Or in this form: "Do you believe there
should be an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting abortions?" When asked the first
question by a New York Times-CBS poll, over one-half responded "yes," whereas when
asked the second question only 29 percent said "yes .,,25 He who controls the agenda-if
only its wording-controls the outcome. The battle for the Equal Rights Amendment was
probably lost because its enemies managed to place it on the public agenda as calling for
"the destruction of the family, the legitimization of homosexuality, and the compulsory use
of coed toilets." The ERA's supporters never succeeded in getting Americans to see it as
"the simple extension of the Constitution's guarantees of rights to women"-a goal that
most citizens would probably endorse. The ordering of alternatives can affect the patterns
of choice as decisively as their formulation. A compromise presented after positions have
been polarized may fail; a constitutional amendment presented at the tail end of the
period of change that occasioned it may not survive in a new climate of opinion. A
proposal paired with a less attractive alternative may succeed where the same proposal
paired with some third option would fail. What these realities suggest is that in a genuine
democracy agenda-setting cannot precede talk or deliberation, and decision but

must be approached as a permanent function of talk itself. Relegating agendasetting to elites or to some putatively "natural" process is an abdication of rights and
responsibilities. Unless the debate about Manhattan's interstate freeway permits people
to discuss their fundamental priorities for mass transportation, energy, and ecology, it is a
sham. Unless the debate over abortion permits people to discuss the social conditions of
pregnancy, the practical alternatives available to the poor, and the moral dilemmas of a
woman torn between her obligations to her own body and life and to an embryo, such
debate will treat neither pregnant women nor unborn babies with a reasonable
approximation of justice. For these reasons, strong democratic talk places its agenda
at the center rather than at the beginning of its politics. It subjects every
pressing issue to continuous examination and possible reformulation. Its agenda
is, before anything else, its agenda. It thus scrutinizes what remains unspoken,
looking into the crevices of silence for signs of an unarticulated problem, a
speechless victim, or a mute protester. The agenda of a community tells a
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Kritik Answers
community where and what it is. It defines that community's mutualism and the
limits of mutualism and draws up plans for pasts to be institutionalized or
overcome and for futures to be avoided or achieved. Far from being a mere
preliminary of democracy, agenda-setting becomes one of its pervasive, defining
functions. 180-182
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Kritik Answers
Democratic Talk Turn: 2AC (2/2)

B. THE IMPACT IS SLAVERY [THIS EV HAS BEEN GENDER
MODIFIED]
Political animals interact socially in ways that abstract morals and metaphysics cannot
account for. Their virtue is of another order, although few theorists who have defended this
claim have been called everything from m realists to immoralists for their trouble. Yet
Montaigne caught the very spirit of social man when he wrote, "the virtue assigned to the
affairs of the world is a virtue with many bends, angles, and elbows, so as to join and
adapt itself to human weakness; mixed and artificial, not straight, clean, constant or purely
men and women have to

choose not between independence or dependence but between
citizenship or slavery. Without citizens, Rousseau warns, there will be
neither free natural men nor satisfied solitaries-there will be "nothing
but debased slaves, from the rulers of the state downwards ." To a
strong democrat, Rousseau's assertion at the opening of his Social Contract that [ an
individual] is born free yet is everywhere in chains does not mean
that [an individual] is free by nature but society enchains him [or
her]. It means rather that natural freedom is an abstraction,
whereas dependency is the concrete human reality, and that the
aim of-politics must therefore be not to rescue natural freedom
from politics, but, to invent and pursue artificial freedom within
and through politics. Strong democracy aims not to disenthrall
[individuals] but to legitimate their dependency by means of
citizenship and to establish their political freedom by means of
the democratic community. 216
innocent." If the human essence is social, then
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Kritik Answers
Democratic Talk Turn: 1AR (1/3)

OUR TURNS ARE IMPORTANT BECAUSE THE KRITIK IS
UNLIKELY TO BRING ABOUT AN ENTIRELY CHANGED
WORLD THE PROCESS OF DEMOCRATIC TALK BRINGS US
TOGETHER AS A POLITICAL COMMUNITY WHERE WE CAN
ENVISION ALTERNATIVE FUTURES (RE)CREATING OUR
POWER AS POLITICALLY ACTIVE PARTICIPATING CITIZENS
MORE EV
Liberal critics of participation, imbued with the priorities of privatism, will

continue to believe that the neighborhood-assembly idea will falter for
lack of popular response. "Voters," writes Gerald Pomper, "have too many
pressing tasks, from making money to making love, to follow the arcane procedures of
government." If the successful and industrious will not participate because they are too
busy, and the poor and victimized will not participate because they are too apathetic, who
will people the assemblies and who will give to talk a new democratic life? But of course
people refuse to participate only where politics does not count-or

counts less than rival forms o private activity. They are apathetic
because they are powerless, not powerless because they are
apathetic. There is no evidence to suggest that once empowered,
a people will refuse to participate. The historical evidence of New
England towns, community school boards, neighborhood associations, and other local
bodies
is that participation fosters more participation.
272
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Kritik Answers

RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW WE HAVE TO SET THE AGENDA
LEAVING THESE DUTIES UP TO THE ELITES AND THOSE IN
CONTROL ENSURES THAT WE WILL ALL LOSE OUR
SOVEREIGNTY WE HAVE TO DETERMINE WHAT
QUESTIONS ARE GOING TO BE ASKED AND WHAT FORM
THOSE QUESTIONS TAKE TAKING PROACTIVE ACTION
EVEN IF IT IS JUST COMMON DELIBERATION IN THIS ROOM
IS WHAT IS TRULY CRITICAL TO OUR OWN POLITICAL
EFFICACY AND PREVENTING THOSE IN POWER FROM
SETTING THE AGENDA FOR US
Barber, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, 1984 (Benjamin, Strong Democracy:
Participatory Politics for a New Age)
talk can give the dead back their voices, it can also challenge the
paradigms of the living and bring fundamental changes in the
meaning or valuation of words. Major shifts in ideology and
political power are always accompanied by such paradigmaticshifts in language usage-so much so that historians have begun to map the
If
former by charting the latter. The largely pejorative meaning that the classical
and early Christian periods gave to such terms as individual and privacy was
transformed during the Renaissance in a fashion that eventually produced the
Protestant Reformation and the ethics of commercial society. Eighteenth-century
capitalism effected a transvaluation of the traditional vocabulary of virtue in a
manner that put selfishness and avarice to work in the name of public goods.
(George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty is merely the last and least in a long line of
efforts to invert moral categories.) The history of democracy itself is contained in
the history of the word democracy. The battle for self-government has been
fought over and over again as pejorative valuations of the term have competed
with affirmative ones (pitting Plato or Ortega or Lippmann or modern political
science against Machiavelli or Rousseau or Jefferson). The terms ochlocracy,
mob rule, tyranny of the majority, and rule-of the masses all reflect hostile
constructions of democracy; communitarianism, participationism, egalitarianism,
and -it must be admitted-strong democracy suggest more favorableconstructions. Poverty was once a sign of moral weakness; now it is a badge of
environmental victimization. Crime once proceeded from original now it is an
escape from poverty. States' rights once bore the stigma of dishonor, then
signified vigorous sectionalism, then was a code word for racism, and has now
become a byword for the new decentralized federalism. Busing was once an
instrument of equal educational opportunity; now it is a means of destroying
communities. The shifts in the meaning of these and dozens of other key
words mirror fundamental national shifts in power and ideology. The clash of
competing visions-of social Darwinism versus collective responsibility and
political mutualism, of original sin and innate ideas versus environmentalism, of
anarchism versus collectivism ultimately plays itself out on the field of
everyday language, and the winner in the daily struggle for

meaning may emerge as the winner in the clash of visions , with the
future itself as the spoils of victory. An ostensibly free citizenry that
leaves this battle to elites, thinking that it makes a sufficient
display of its freedom by deliberating and voting on issues
already formulated in concepts and terms over which it has
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Kritik Answers
exercised no control, has in fact already given away the greater
part of its sovereignty. How can such a citizenry -help but oppose busing if
busing means the wrecking of communities and only the wrecking of

communities? How can it support the right to abortion if abortion means murder,
period? To participate in a meaningful process of decision on these
questions, self-governing citizens must participate in the talk
through which the questions are formulated and given a
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(Barber continues)
decisive political conception. The anti-Vietnam War movement of

the 1960s did just this, of course; it won no elections, it participated
in no votes, and it contributed to no legislative debates. But it
radically altered how most Americans saw the war and so helped
bring it to an end. If language as a living, changing expression of an evolving
community can both encapsulate and challenge the past, it also provides a
vehicle for exploring the future. Language's flexibility and its
susceptibility to innovation permit [people] to construct their

visions of the future first in the realm of words, within whose
confines a community can safely conduct its deliberations.
Language can offer new solutions to old problems by altering,
how we perceive these problems and can make new visions
accessible to traditional communities by the imaginative use (and
transvaluation) of familiar language. This-is the essence of public
thinking." The process moves us perforce from particularistic and immediate
considerations of our own and our groups' interests, examined in a narrow
temporal framework ("Will there be enough gasoline for my summer vacation
trip?" for example), to general and long-term considerations of the nature of the
communities we live in and of how well our life plans fit in with that nature ("Is
dependence on oil a symbol of an overly materialistic, insufficiently selfsufficient society?" for example). In sum, what we call things affects how
we do things; and despite the lesson of Genesis, for mortals at least the
future must be named before it can be created. Language is thus

always the crucial battlefield; it conserves or liquidates tradition,
it challenges or, champions established power paradigms and it is
the looking glass of all future vision. If language is alive, society can
grow; if it is dialectical, society can reconcile its parts-past and future no less
than interest and interest or class and class. As Jurgen Habermas has
understood, democracy means above all equal access to language,
and strong democracy means widespread and ongoing

participation in talk by the entire citizenry. Left to the media, the
bureaucrats, the professors, and the managers, language quickly
degenerates into one more weapon in the armory of elite rule.
The professoriate and the literary establishment are all too willing to capture the
public with, catch phrases and portentous titles. How often in the past several
decades have Americans been made to see themselves, and thus their futures,
through the lens of a writer's book title? Recall The True Be liever, The
Managerial Society, The End of Ideology, The Other America, The Culture of
Narcissism, The Greening of America, The Totalitarian Temptation, The
Technological Society, The Two Cultures, The Zero-Sum Society, Future Shock.
We are branded by words and our future is held hostage to

bestseller lists'.195-197
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Debate Solves Democratic Talk: Ext

DEBATE SERVES AS A FORUM THROUGH WHICH WE CAN
ENGAGE IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS
Watson, 04 (J.B. Watson, Assistant Professor of sociology and gerontology
coordinator @ Stephen F. Austin State University, A Justification of the Civic Engagement

Model, p. 73-74, Service Learning: History, Theory, and Issues)
The civic engagement of ordinary citizens with voluntary associations, social
institutions, and government in local communities is a central feature of strong
democracies. Further, a fundamental feature of democratic governmental
structure is its relationship to civil society, defined as "voluntary social activity
not compelled by the state" (Bahlmueller, 1997, p. 3). Through voluntary
participation in civil society associations at the local and regional level, citizens
pursue activities that potentially serve the public good. Through this
rudimentary civic engagement, citizens learn the attitudes, habits, skills, and
knowledge foundational to the democratic process-(Patrick, 1998).
Unfortunately, in 1998 the National Commission on Civic Renewal (NCCR)
highlighted the declining quantity and quality of civic engagement at all levels of
American life. A number of other studies concur on the decline of involvement in
civic activities (Bahlmueller, 1997; McGrath, 2001; Putnam, 1995). This concern
about the nature and extent of civic engagement in the United States has
impacted the debate on the proper role of higher education in a democracy.
Higher education institutions, as transmitters of essential elements of the
dominant culture, struggle with the development of mechanisms to socialize the
next generation about democratic values. A national debate has emerged on the
higher education response to this perceived need for revitalizing constructive
democratic engagement, building civil society, and increasing citizen
participation in government at all levels. Colleges and universities have
responded with a number of civic engagement initiatives, including universitycommunity partnerships, empirical studies of political engagement, communitybased (collaborative) research, and the development of new (or expanded)
service-learning programs (Jacoby 2003).
A RENEWAL OF DEMOCRATIC TALK VIA COMMUNITY

BASED ORGANIZATIONS IS KEY TO CREATING A
FOUNDATION FOR DEMOCRACY- ALLOWING US TO
INFLUENCE THE POLITICAL REALM
Cohen 03--Professor of Political Science at Columbia University( Jean L., Civic
Innovation in America: Towards a Reflexive Politics, The Good Society 12.1 (2003) 56-
62, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/good_society/v012/12.1cohen.html)
Civic Innovation in America is a refreshing addition to what has become a growth
industry of writing on American civil society. Unlike the influential approach of
Robert Putnam, this is not a backward-looking lament about the decline of
associational life, although Sirianni and Friedland are aware of the worrisome
signs of civic disaffection and citizen passivity in the U.S. 1Yet they don't join
neo-communitarian efforts to revive traditionalistic types of "mediating
institutions" in order to secure social integration. 2Although not adverse to
mobilizing old forms of social capitalsuch as congregation-based community
organizations within and across denominational linesthey are primarily
interested in networks that expand local organizing capacities for new purposes
and with fresh democratic methods. 3 Indeed, the focus of Civic Innovation is on
significant recent attempts "from below" to reinvent and revitalize American
democracy. Accordingly, the book points the reader to the ongoing public work
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of citizens and the actual processes of civic innovation that have sprung up in
recent years. The authors maintain that: "Over the past several decades
American society has displayed a substantial capacity for civic innovation, and
the future of our democracy will depend on whether we can deepen and extend
such innovation to solve major public problems, and transform the way we do
politics." 4Theirs is a forward-looking approach: it highlights new forms of
cooperative civic participation in civil society and discusses the new modes of
governance needed to support them.
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Democratic Talk Key to Autonomy:

Ext
THE DEMOCRATIC TALK THAT WE ARE CONDUCTING IS A
NECESSARY CONDITION FOR AUTONOMY GIVING UP
POLITICAL TALK OF WHAT SHOULD BE DONE ENSURES
THAT VALUES AND BELIEFS WILL BECOME OSSIFIED
6. Maintaining Autonomy. Talk helps us overcome narrow selfinterest, but it plays an
equally significant role in buttressing the autonomy of individual wills that is

essential to democracy. It is through talk that we constantly reencounter,
reevaluate, and repossess the beliefs, principles, and maxims on the basis of
which we exert our will in the political realm. To be free, it is not enough for us
simply to will what we choose to will. We must will what we possess, what truly
belongs to us. John Stuart Mill commented on the "fatal tendency of mankind to leave all
thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful." He ascribed to this tendency "the
cause of about half [men's] errors." Mindless convictions not only spawn errors, they
turn those who hold them into charlatans of liberty. Today's autonomously held
belief is tomorrow's heteronomous orthodoxy unless, tomorrow, it is reexamined
and repossessed. Talk is the principal mechanism by which we can retest and
thus repossess our convictions, which means that a democracy that does not
institutionalize talk will soon be without autonomous citizens , though men and
women who call themselves citizens may from time to time deliberate, choose, and vote.
Talk immunizes values from ossification and protects the political process from
rigidity, orthodoxy, and the yoke of the dead past . This, among all the functions of
talk, is the least liable to representation, since only the presence of our own wills working
on a value can endow that value with legitimacy and us with our autonomy. Subjecting a
value to the test of repossession is a measure of legitimacy as well as of

autonomy: forced knowingly to embrace their prejudices, many men falter. Prejudice is
best practiced in the dark by dint of habit or passion. Mobs are expert executors
of bigotry because they assimilate individual wills into a group will and relieve
individuals of any responsibility for their actions. It is above all the imagination that
dies when will is subordinated to instinct, and as we have seen, it is the imagination that
fires empathy. Values will, naturally, conflict even where they are thoughtfully
embraced and willed; and men's souls are sufficiently complex for error or even evil to
dwell comfortably in the autonomous man's breast. Autonomy is no guarantee against
moral turpitude; indeed, it is its necessary condition. But in the social setting, it seems
evident that maxims that are continuously reevaluated and repossessed are
preferable to maxims that are embraced once and obeyed blindly thereafter . At a
minimum, convictions that are reexamined are more likely to change, to adapt
themselves to altered circumstances and to evolve to meet the challenges

offered by competing views. Political willing is thus never a one-time or
sometime thing (which is the great misconception of the social-contract tradition), but
an ongoing shaping and reshaping of our common world that is as endless and
exhausting as our making and remaking of our personal lives. A moment's
complacency may mean the death of liberty; a break in political concentration
may spell the atrophy of an important value; a pleasant spell of privatism may yield
irreversible value ossification. Democratic politics is a demanding business. Perhaps this is
why common memory is even more important for democracy than for other forms of
political culture. Not every principle of conduct can be tested at every moment; not every
conviction can be exercised on every occasion; not every value can be regarded as truly
ours at a given instant. Thus remembrance and imagination must act sometimes as
surrogates for the actual testing of maxims. Founding myths and the rituals associated
with them (July 14 in France or August 1 in Switzerland), representative political heroes
who embody admired convictions (Martin Luther King or Charles de Gaulle), and popular
oral traditions can all revivify citizens' common beliefs and their sense of place in the
political culture. These symbols are no substitute for the citizenry's active reexamination of
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values through participation in political talk, but they can and do supplement such talk
through the imaginative reconstruction of the past in live images and through the
cultivation of beliefs that are not necessarily involved in a given year's political business.
190-191
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Kritik Answers
Democratic Talk Key to Checking

Right: Ext
FAILURE TO ENGAGE IN DEMOCRATIC TALK MEANS THE
POLITICAL REALM WILL BE DOMINATED BY THE FAR-RIGHT
AND COLLAPSE INTO FASCISM, CAUSING WARS AND
TYRANNY
Rorty 98 (Richard, Stanford Philosophy Professor, Achieving Our Country, pp. 87-94)
if the pressures of globalization create such
castes not only in the United States but in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an
Orwellian world. In such a world, there may be no supernational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc.
If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and
But there will be an analogue of the Inner Partynamely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions.
The analogue of Orwells Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionalsLinds overclass, the people like you and
me. The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in
the interest of the international super-rich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the
political class of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense
that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both
the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues.7 The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhereto keep the bottom 75
percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the worlds population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about
sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created psuedo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody
war, the super-rich will have little to fear. Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the
inequalities between nations need to be mitigatedand, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere must share its wealth with the Southern.
to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state

is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the
The second is
first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.8 The first
comes naturally
to members of trade unions, and to the marginally employed people who can
most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements . Union members in the United
response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response
States have watched factory after factory close, only to reopen in Slovenia, Thailand, or Mexico. It is no wonder that they see the result of
international free trade as prosperity for managers and stockholders, a better standard of living for workers in developing countries, and a very
much worse standard of living for American workers. It would be no wonder if they saw the American leftist intelligentsia as on the same side of
the managers and stockholdersas sharing the same class interests. For we intellectuals, who are mostly academics, are ourselves quite well
insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization. To make things worse, we often seem more interested in the workers of the
developing world than in the fate of our fellow citizens. Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized
democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist

movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example,
has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream
is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to
prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers
themselves desperately afraid of being downsizedare not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that
something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and
start looking around for a strongman to vote forsomeone will assure them that, once he is elected, the
point,
smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salemen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that
of Sinclair Lewis novel It Cant Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will
happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One
the gains made in the past forty years by black and

brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come
back into fashion. The words nigger and kike will once again be heard in the workplace . All the sadism which the
academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding
back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find
an outlet. But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes
charge, he will quickly make peace with the international superrich, just as Hitler made with the
German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which
will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the
world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the
American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why
thing that is very likely to happen is that
could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossesed? It is often said that we Americans, at the end of the twentieth century,
no longer have a Left. Since nobody denies the existence of what I have called
the cultural Left,
this amounts to an admission that
is unable to engage in national politics.
that Left
It is not the sort of the Left which can be asked to deal with the
consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would have to transform itself by
opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about
money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma. I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. The first is that
the Left
should put a moratorium on theory.
It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left
should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans. It should ask the public to consider how the country of Lincoln and
Whitman might be achieved. In support of my first suggestion, let me cite a passage from Deweys Reconstruction in Philosophy in which he
expresses his exasperation with the sort of sterile debate now going on under the rubric of individualism versus communitarianism. Dewey
thought that all discussions which took this dichotomy seriously suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general
notions under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want is light upon this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete
human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes
discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationships with one another. Dewey was right to be exasperated by sociopolitical
theory conducted at this level of abstraction. He was wrong when he went on to say that ascending to this level is typically a rightist maneuver,
one which supplies the apparatus for intellectual justifications of the established order.9 For such ascents are now more common on the Left
than on the Right. The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the
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established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique. When one of todays
academic leftists says that some topic has been inadequately theorized, you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either
philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that
dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacans impossible object of desire, helps to
subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by problematizing familiar concepts. Recent attempts to subvert
social institutitons by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which
represent scholastic philosophizing at its worts. The authors of these purportedly subversive books honestly believe that the are serving
it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a

level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate
or a political strategy. Even though what these authors theorize is often something very concrete and near at handa
curent TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandalthey offer the most absract and barren explanations imaginable . These futile
attempts to philosophize ones way into political relevance are a symptom of
what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial
approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces
theoretical hallucinations. These result in an intellectual environment which is, as Mark Edmundson says in his book
human liberty. But
Nightmare on Main Street, Gothic. The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called "power." This is the
name of what Edmund- son calls Foucault's "haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful
spook."10
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Restoring Public Sphere Solves

Oppression: Ext
RESTORING THE PUBLIC SPHERE FACILITATES AN
EMANCIPATORY PRAXIS OF OPEN COMMUNITY
Lakeland 93 (Paul, professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, Preserving
The Lifeworld, Restoring the Public Sphere, Renewing Higher Education, Cross Currents,
Winter, Vol. 43 Issue 4, p488, 15p http://www.crosscurrents.org/lakeland2)
Habermas, then, is our third ally and resource. He describes the pathology of life
in late capitalist societies as the "colonization of the lifeworld by the system,"[4]
and vests the hope of movement toward a newly humane and democratic
society in the "transformation of the public sphere."[5] The former phrase
expresses the conviction that distinctly human patterns of communication and
interaction, which are in principle open and even emancipatory, are under
threat, progressively squeezed to the margins of communal life by the more
instrumental or manipulative model of interactions appropriate to technology or
to impersonal systems. By "the public sphere," Habermas means first the
empirically discerned historical phenomenon of a community of discourse in
which rational discussion of matters of social and political import took place, and
influenced the formation of public policy. Secondly, he uses the term to point
toward the (perhaps counterfactual) possibility of creating something today that
would serve to protect the lifeworld from the depredations of the system or,
more simply expressed, to preserve democracy in late capitalist society.
Habermas's view is not dissimilar to Frankl's. What Frankl saw epitomized by the
Nazi "final solution," namely, the systematic application of technology to
eradicate the sense of personal identity, Habermas sees as the logic of late
capitalist, national security, consumerist society. But where Frankl looks to inner
spiritual resources to defeat these annihilating pressures, Habermas turns to the
dynamics of the speech-act. By so doing, incidentally, he strengthens Freire's
somewhat unfocused appeal to the "dialogical method" and shows why it is so
potentially revolutionary. For Habermas, the attempt to communicate directly
with other human beings rests on a set of mutual assumptions: there is
something comprehensible to be heard; the speaker is sincere; the speaker
seeks truth; the hearer will listen; and so on. Even someone who attempts to
deceive another can only hope to do so because the hearer will assume the
speaker is acting according to the rules of open communication. Thus, the
communication community is oriented in principle towards the "ideal speech
situation," that is, a context of distortion-free discourse in which all have equal
access to the conversation, and all seek consensus on norms for action. Though
such an ideal speech situation may never exist, it operates regulatively to draw
communication onward. And what is assumed about the importance of
truthfulness and sincerity, and about the dignity of other speakers and hearers,
makes communication, which is after all the fundamental structure of human
sociality, intrinsically emancipatory. The pathologies of personal, communal, and
political life become interpretable in terms of "systematically distorted
communication," and overcoming them becomes a matter of restoring the
contexts in which communicative praxis can occur.
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Talk is Action: Ext

TALK IS ACTION IT MAKES AND REMAKES THE WORLD
IT DEFINES WHAT WE ARE AS A COMMUNITY, WHAT WE
WANT AND WHAT WE NEED
talk appears as a mediator of

affection and affiliation as well as of interest and identity, of
patriotism as well as of individuality. It can build community as
well as maintain rights and seek consensus as well as resolve
conflict. It offers, along with meanings and significations, silences, rituals, symbols,
Stripped of such artificial disciplines, however,
myths, expressions and solicitations, and a hundred other quiet and noisy manifestations
of our common humanity. Strong democracy seeks institutions that can give these things a
The third issue that liberal theorists have

underappreciated is the complicity of talk in action. With talk we
can invent alternative futures, create mutual purposes, and
construct competing visions of community. Its potentialities thrust
talk into the realm of intentions and consequences and render it
simultaneously more provisional and more concrete than
philosophers are wont to recognize. Their failure of imagination
stems in part from the passivity of thin democratic politics and in
part from the impatience of speculative philosophy with
contingency, which entails possibility as well as
indeterminateness. But significant political effects and actions are
possible only to the extent that politics is embedded in a world of
fortune, uncertainty, and contingency. Political talk is not talk about
the world; it is talk that makes and remakes the world. The posture of the
voice-and an ear.
strong democrat is thus "pragmatic" in the sense of William James's definition of

pragmatism as "the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,'
supposed necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts."
James's pragmatist "turns toward concreteness and adequacy, toward facts, toward action,
and toward power.... [Pragmatism thus] means the open air and possibilities of nature, as
Strong democracy
is pragmatism translated into politics in the participatory mode.
against dogma, artificiality and the pretense of finality in truth."
Although James did not pursue the powerful political implications of his position, he was
moved to write: "See already how democratic [pragmatism] is. Her manners are as various
and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of
The active, future-oriented disposition of strong

democratic talk embodies James's instinctive sense of pragmatism's
political implications. Future action, not a priori principle, constitutes
such talk's principal (but not principled) concern. 177-178
mother nature."
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**Performance**
A2 Performativity (1/2)
THE PERFORMANCE IS ALWAYS ALREADY TAKING PLACE.
THE EXISTENCE OF THE ROUND IS THE PERFORMANCE,
NOT SPECIFIC SPEECHES
Kulynych, Asst Professor of Political Science at Winthrop University, Polity,
Winter, 1997, n2 p315(32)
Jessica
We bring normativity to our performances as ethical principles that are themselves subject to resistance. By unearthing the contingency of the
, the question is not should we resist (since

resistance is always, already present), but rather what and how we should resist .
"self-evident," performative resistance enables politics. Thus
This notion of performativity is also important for understanding the possibilities for innovation in Habermasian deliberative participation. Just as
a protestor exposes the contingency of concepts like justice, a dialogue exposes the limits and contingency of rational argumentation. Once we
are sensitive to the performative nature of speech, language and discourse, then we can see that deliberative politics cannot be confined to the
Deliberation must be theatrical: it is in the performance of deliberation that that

. Indeed it is precisely the non-rational aspects of
deliberation that carry the potential for innovation. In his description of the poignant reminders of
demonstration Chaloupka recognizes that it is at the margins that the actual force of
the demonstration resides, no matter what happens at the microphone. The oral
histories of demonstrations (the next day over coffee) linger over the jokes and
funny signs and slogans, the outrages and improprieties, more than the
speeches and carefully coherent position papers. (68)
rational statement of validity claims.
which cannot be argued for finds expression
PERFORMANCE IS ALWAYS CONTEXT-DEPENDENT. OUR

CRITICISM CAN ONLY BE EVALUATED IN THE CONTEXT OF
DEBATE
Winter, 1997, n2 p315(32)
Jessica
Consequently, a performative concept of political participation changes debates

within the traditional participation literature over the inclusion of protest
activities and community decisionmaking in the definition of political
participation. While these debates have generally been conducted on familiar
terrain, justifying the inclusion of such activity by delineating its impact on the
distribution of goods, services, or political power by the government, a
performative concept of participation breaks down this distinction altogether.
(75) Because performative participation is defined by its relation to a set of
normalizing disciplinary rules and its confrontation with those rules, nothing can
be categorically excluded from the category of political participation. As Honig
eloquently puts it, "not everything is political on this (amended) account; it is
simply the case that nothing is ontologically protected from politicization, that
nothing is necessarily or naturally or ontologically not political."(76) Therefore,
the definition of political participation is always context dependent; it depends
upon the character of the power network in which it is taken. Political
participation is not categorically distinguished from protest or resistance, but
rather the focus is on the disruptive potential of an action in a particular network
of power relations. To say that participation is context dependent means not only
that any action is potentially participation, but also that no particular action is
necessarily a participatory act. Housecleaning is a good example. The character
of the power network in which one exists defines housecleaning as a potential
act of political participation. In her description of the defensive strategies of
Black women household workers, Bonnie Thorton Dill argues that the refusal to
mop the floor on hands and knees, or the refusal to serve an extra dinner,
constitutes an effective act of resistance.(77) It is not the act itself that is
politically definitive, but rather the context. Black domestic laborers, who in this
context are constructed as desperate, willing to do any type of work, and always
immediately available for service, resist that construction by acting as if they
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have other choices. Thus it is the context of the domestic labor relationship that
defines the repertoire of political actions. Similarly, Jonathan Kozol describes
poor welfare mothers living in the degrading conditions of the South Bronx
whose homes "no matter how besieged, are nonetheless kept spotless and
sometimes even look cheerful."(78) For women who are constructed as
thoroughly dependent, irresponsible, unfit, and unclean, cleaning the house
takes on the character of resistance; it becomes a political act. Housecleaning
itself is not necessarily political, rather, the disciplinary context of a gendered
social welfare state gives political import to seemingly banal, everyday
activities.
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A2 Performativity (2/2)
COALITIONS MUST PRECEDE VICTORY THROUGH
PERFORMANCE
Winter, 1997, n2 p315(32)
Jessica
A performative perspective on participation enriches our understanding of

deliberative democracy. This enlarged understanding can be demonstrated by
considering the examination of citizen politics in Germany presented in Carol
Hager's Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the West
German Energy Debate.(86) Her work skillfully maps the precarious position of
citizen groups as they enter into problemsolving in contemporary democracies.
After detailing the German citizen foray into technical debate and the
subsequent creation of energy commissions to deliberate on the long-term goals
of energy policy, she concludes that a dual standard of interpretation and
evaluation is required for full understanding of the prospects for citizen
participation. Where traditional understandings of participation focus on the
policy dimension and concern themselves with the citizens' success or failure to
attain policy preferences, she advocates focusing as well on the discursive,
legitimation dimension of citizen action. Hager follows Habermas in
reconstituting participation discursively and asserts that the legitimation
dimension offers an alternative reason for optimism about the efficacy of citizen
action. In the discursive understanding of participation, success is not defined in
terms of getting, but rather in terms of solving through consensus. Deliberation
is thus an end in itself, and citizens have succeeded whenever they are able to
secure a realm of deliberative politics where the aim is forging consensus among
participants, rather than achieving victory by some over others.
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Performance is Commodified (1/2)

THEIR POETRY SUPPORTS THE CULTURE INDUSTRY. IT IS
MANUFACTURED DISSENT
Dr. Lee Spinks lectures in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland,
Writing, Politics, and the Limit: Reading J. H. Prynne's "The Ideal Star-Fighter," Intertexts,
Fall
2000 v4 i2 p144(23)
It would be easy to conclude from passages like this that avant-garde styles of
writing which foreground the production of subject positions within the
discursive configuration of a text are necessarily subversive of established
political order because they forestall the "reconciliation of the general and
particular, of the rule and the specific demands of the subject matter" that
underpins the systematic totality of the culture industry. This belief in the
inherently subversive effect of textual polyphony and difference underscores
Easthope's reading of modernist poetics. But the matter is not so simple. For as
Adorno and Horkenheimer demonstrate, incommensurable or "refractory
material" is always and everywhere implicated in a dialectical relationship with
the "total process of production" that it opposes (Adorno and Horkheimer xii).
One of their more melancholy insights is that the culture industry actively
produces different images and styles in order to reassert the absolute uniformity
of its own authority. Novelty is all around us, from the "standardized jazz
improvisation to the exceptional film star whose hair curls over her eye to
demonstrate her originality" but what is individual here "is no more than the
generality's power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as
such" (Adorno and Horkheimer 154). The "accidental" or incommensurable detail
is "accepted as such" because it can be endlessly reproduced as a "house style"
or "lifestyle practice" and, paradoxically, it is the capacity of the culture industry
to transform difference into a set of uniform discriminations that allows a social
body to be demarcated according to the sectional logic of politicians, advertisers
and marketing executives. Fredric Jameson makes exactly the same point when
he observes that what has happened in the contemporary or postmodern phase
of monopoly capitalism is "that aesthetic production today has become
integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of
producing fresh waves of producing ever more novel-seeming goods (from
clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an
increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation
and experimentation" (Jameson 4-5). It is therefore inadequate to proclaim the
ineluctable emancipatory promise of incommensurable or refractory material
because "capitalism also produces difference or differentiation as a function of
its own internal logic" (Jameson 406).
CHALLENGES TO CONFORMITY ONLY CEMENT THE OVERARCHING CONTROL OF THE DOMINANT LANGUAGE
Fall
2000 v4 i2 p144(23)
The central claim of this essay is that these critical debates concerning the
dialectic between totality and difference in modern cultural production provide
the most rewarding context within which to discuss the relationship between
textuality and politics in Prynne's poetry. For Prynne's work takes as its subject
the very status of writing, and the epistemological practices writing both
produces and brings into question, in a cultural sphere dominated by the power
of instrumental reason to enforce a principle of "equivalence" where "whatever
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Kritik Answers
does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect" (Adorno and
Horkheimer 6). The importance of style, or the mode of relation between
thought and its representation, to this question becomes apparent when we
consider that the failure to challenge this universal principle of equivalence
means to accept that the "identity of everything with everything else is paid for
in that nothing may at the same time be identical with itself" (Adorno and
Horkheimer 12). Yet any challenge to this process of abstraction and exchange
based upon the formal autonomy or "difference" of style is vulnerable to
Adorno's charge that it is through difference and exchange "that non-identical
individuals and performances become commensurable and identical" (Adorno,
Negative Dialectics 146-47).
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Performance is Commodified (2/2)

POETIC RESISTANCE IS DIRECTED BY THE CULTURE
INDUSTRY
Fall
2000 v4 i2 p144(23)
Prynne's difficult and dialectical style in fact proposes two points of resistance to
the principle of equivalence enforced by instrumental rationality and the culture
industry. Both may be explicated by reference to Adorno's assertion that the
work of art is a "fetish against commodity fetishism" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
227). The fetishistic element within art, according to Adorno, lies in its illusory
claim that its value is integral to itself rather than an effect of consumption and
exchange. This insistence of the artwork upon its autonomy as a source of value,
and the cultivation of styles and modes of reference that place it at one remove
from the world around it, is often identified as the origin of the 'elitism' of
modernist art. But if we reconsider the entire question of modernist style in the
context of the remorseless conversion of use or human labor value into
exchange value effected by late capitalism, then the conviction of the modernist
artwork that it conceals an autonomous and non-exchangeable source of value
offers a challenge to prevailing political and cultural conditions. For it is only by
"persisting with its illusory claim to a non-exchangeable dignity" argues Simon
Jarvis, that "art resists the notion that the qualitatively incommensurable can be
made qualitatively commensurable" (Jarvis 117). This is the artwork's first point
of resistance to the principle of equivalence within commodity production. Yet it
might still be objected that far from challenging the commodification of culture,
the autonomous character of the artwork is instead produced by capitalism,
which enables both art and artistic labor to be alienated from any broader social
or cultural purpose.
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Performance Fails
FAITH IN PERFORMANCE IS NAVE AND FAILS TO CHANGE
POLITICS
Rothenberg & Valente 97
[Molly Anne, Assoc. Prof. English @ Tulane, & Joseph, Prof. @ Illinois,
Performative Chic: The Fantasy of a Performative Politics, College Literature
24: 1, February, ASP]
The recent vogue for performativity, particularly in gender and postcolonial
studies, suggests that the desire for political potency has displaced the demand
for critical rigor.[1] Because Judith Butler bears the primary responsibility for
investing performativity with its present critical cachet, her work furnishes a
convenient site for exposing the flawed theoretical formulations and the hollow
political claims advanced under the banner of performativity. We have
undertaken this critique not solely in the interests of clarifying performativity's
theoretical stakes: in our view, the appropriation of performativity for purposes
to which it is completely unsuited has misdirected crucial activist energies, not
only squandering resources but even endangering those naive enough to act on
performativity's (false) political promise.
It is reasonable to expect any practical political discourse to essay an analysis
which links its proposed actions with their supposed effects, appraising the fruits
of specific political labors before their seeds are sown. Only by means of such an
assessment can any political program persuade us to undertake some tasks and
forgo others. Butler proceeds accordingly: "The task is not whether to repeat, but
how to repeat or, indeed to repeat, and through a radical proliferation of gender,
to displace the very gender norms that enable repetition itself" (Gender Trouble
148). Here, at the conclusion to Gender Trouble, she makes good her promise
that subjects can intervene meaningfully, politically, in the signification system
which iteratively constitutes them. The political "task" we face requires that we
choose "how to repeat" gender norms in such a way as to displace them.
According to her final chapter, "The Politics of Parody," the way to displace
gender norms is through the deliberate performance of drag as gender parody.
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**Link Answers: General**

A2 The Case is Apolitical/Has No
Theory
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE IS
FALSE BOTH FORMS OF POLITICAL ACTION INVOLVE AND
DEPEND ON THE OTHER
Homi K.
Bhabha, Professor, University of Sussex, THE LOCATION OF CULTURE, 1994, p.
21-22.
Committed to what? At this stage in the argument, I do not want to
identify any specific 'object' of political allegiance - the Third World, the
working class, the feminist struggle. Although such an objectification Of
Political activity is crucial and must significantly inform political debate,
it is not the only option for those critics or intellectuals who are
committed to progressive political change in the direction of a socialist
society. It is a sign of political maturity to accept that there are many
forms of Political writing whose different effects are obscured when they
are divided between the 'theoretical' and the 'activist'. It is not as if the
leaflet involved in the organization of a strike is short on theory, while a
speculative article on the theory of ideology ought to have more
practical examples or applications. They are both forms of discourse and
to that extent they produce rather than reflect their objects of reference.
The difference between them lies in their operational qualities. The
leaflet has a specific expository and organizational purpose, temporally
bound to the event; the theory of ideology makes its contribution to
those embedded political ideas and principles that inform the right to
strike. The latter does not justify the former; nor does it necessarily
precede it. It exists side by side with it - the one as an enabling part of
the other - like the recto and verso of a sheet of paper, to use a common
serniotic analogy in the uncommon context of politics.
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**Alternative Answers: General**

Individual Action Fails
THE ALTERNATIVE ALONE WILL FAIL. THE NATURE OF
DISCOURSE AND DOMINANT RECONTEXTUALIZATION
PREVENTS INDIVIDUALS FROM SOLVING
D. Franklin
Ayers 2005
The Review of Higher Education, 28.4, Neoliberal Ideology in Community College

Mission Statements: A Critical Discourse Analysis
Because discourses are determined by higher levels of social structuring, texts
such as community college mission statementsand the discourses they
represent are not created entirely by individuals. Instead, individual producers of
text can only choose among the discursive options available at higher levels of
social structuring. Because no ideology is monolithic, multiple discourses exist
and are available to producers of text, although hegemonic discourses may
make alternatives nearly imperceptible. Because discourses reflect ideologies of
groups with unequal power resources and because the producer of text must
choose among these discourses, he or she engages in a negotiation of power
relations. [End Page 534]
To the degree that powerful groups act upon discourses at various levels of
social structuring, their ideologies and world views gain authority. Dominant
discourses consequently determine the meanings assigned to social and
material processes, and they do this in ways that reinforce power inequities. One
way that meanings may be determined is through recontextualization
(Fairclough, 1995). Recontextualization is a process in which the discourse
related to one social process dominates or colonizes the discourse related to
another social process.
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Mann
THE CONTEXT OF DEBATE COOPTS THE CRITICISM SINCE
IT IS ANTICIPATED AND FOOTNOTED ALTERNATIVE
TACTICS WOULD BE NECESSARY FOR IT TO HAVE AN
EFFECT
Paul Mann, professor of comparative literature at Pomona college, Masocriticism, 1999,
pg. 106-107.
Without exception, all positions are oriented toward the institutional apparatus.
Marginality here is only relative and temporary: the moment black studies or
womens studies or queer theory conceives of itself as a discipline, its pri mary
orientation is toward the institution. The fact that the institution might treat it
badly hardly constitutes an ethical privilege. Any intellectual who holds a
position is a function of this apparatus; his or her marginality is, for the most
part, only an operational device. It is a critical commonplace that the state is not
a monolithic hegemony but rather a constellation of disorganized and
fragmentary agencies of production. This is often taken as a validation for the
political potential of marginal critical movements: inside-outside relations can be
facilely deconstructed, and critics can still congratulate themselves on their
resistance, but the contrary is clearly the case. The most profitable intellectual
production does not take place at the center (e.g., romance philology), where
mostly obsolete weapons are produced; the real growth industries are located
precisely on the self-proclaimed margins. It will be argued that resistance is still
possible, and nothing I propose here argues against such a possibility. I wish
only to insist that effective resistance will never be located in the position,
however oppositional it imagines itself to be. Resistance is first of all a function
of the apparatus itself. What would seem to be the transgres sive potential of
such institutional agencies as certain orders of gender criticism might
demonstrate the entropy of the institution, but it does nothing to prove the
counterpolitical claims of the position. Fantasies of resistance most of ten serve
as mere alibis for collusion. Any position is a state agency, and its relative
marginality is a mode of orientation, not an exception. Effective resistance must
be located in other tactical forms
CRITICISM CAN NEVER BE MAINTAINED AND IS IGNORED

BECAUSE OF ITS PROLIFIC NATURE
Paul Mann, professor of comparative literature at Pomona college, Masocriticism, 1999,
pg. 16-17.
The avant-garde, which always began in brilliant refusals and destructions, must
in the end abandon those economies that, with frightening efficiency, have put it
to use, made it instrumental, profited from it, developed ways to get a return
even from negation, even from the death drive itself. In the light of the sun of expenditure,
such a culture seems the narrowest of misconceptions . Imagine instead that the vast proliferation
of writing, drawing, painting, performancenot just what cultures have preserved for us through
the filtration systems of their own values, but all writing, all music, and so onis the actual, lived field of
culture; that culture is waste, expenditure: productivity and destruction without
any exclusion or discrimination; that all of these works have been produced not
so that a few precious articles of value, the best that has been known and
thought, can, through a sort of reasoned brokerage, be conserved as culture
per se, but so that they would be destroyed; that what is most important about
all of those poems and paintings and constructions is precisely that the vast
majority of them disappear even as they are born, that they dismember and
consume themselves without our ever knowing them, vanish in the air, into the
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death they most desired, never to be remembered again.
Imagine a writing that saw itself in

this light, a light that never shines on most of what we call culture, that never consigns itself to productive discourse but
always escapes, that is valuable only because it escapes, because it is elsewhere, nowhere. Or imagine a certain book: it
arrives uncalled for, unpredicted, perhaps in the mail, perhaps fallen from the sky, unmarked by a publishers apparatus,
by advertising, even by an authors name; a book made of white noise that erases itself as it goes along and everything
you say for weeks is stolen from it; a book that you cut into pieces and disseminate at random (on the street, on walls,
through the mail) or that you burn without having read it and scatter the ashes to the four winds; or imagine such a book
that you never receive in the first place. Perhaps that is the useless book one must learn to write, that is the only book
one ever writes. Or perhaps it is precisely a book one cannot write, but only imagine, and in imagining it call it down
upon ones writing, to tear ones own writing apart. As this talk, this argument that began at cross-purposes and went
nowhere, unravelling itself as it proceeded, even now beginning to cease vibrating in the air, will soon vanish ,
leaving nothing but a fading imprint on your memories, soon to be effaced as

you turn toward more productive labors, and itself only the trace of an
expenditure whose disappearance it briefly betrayed
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Power Vaccuum
POWER IS ZERO SUM THE ALTERNATIVE ONLY SHIFTS
POWER ELSEWHERE
John Mearsheimer, Professor at University of Chicago,
Great Power Politics p. 34)
2001
(The Tragedy of
Consequently, states pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they
make a special effort to maximize their share of world power. Specifically, they look for
opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional increments of

power at the expense of potential rivals. States employ a variety of meanseconomic,
diplomatic, and militaryto shift the balance of power in their favor, even if doing so makes
other states suspicious or even hostile. Because one states gain in power is another
states loss, great powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing with
each other. The trick, of course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the
other states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative power is tantamount to
arguing that states are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their
ultimate motive is simply to survive. In short, great powers have aggressive intentions.
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Kritik Answers
**SPECIFIC K ANSWERS**
**Apocalyptic Rhetoric**
Perm Solvency
PERM: DO BOTH EVEN YOUR AUTHOR CONCEEDS THAT
APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC USED AWAY FROM RELIGIOUS
FORM IS KEY TO SPUR ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL CHANGEITS KEY TO AVOIDING TYRANNY
QUINBY in 1994
[Lee, Anti-Apocalypse,
http://www.dhushara.com/book/renewal/voices2/quin/quinby.htm //wyo-pinto]
I am not saying that this is all bad. Precisely because it is on tap in the
United States, it is possible for apocalyptic ideas to aid struggles for
democracy by exciting people toward activism. This is the force of
Cornet West's warning about ,this country's failures in creating a
multiracial democracy: "Either we learn a r;ew language of empathy and
compassion, or the fire this time will consume us all. , But even when
apocalyptic imagery is used to fight racist suppressions of freedom, as
with West's allusion to James Baldwin's warning, it runs the risk of
displacing concrete political analysis. While advocating a new kind of
leadership "grounded in grass-roots organizing that highlights
democratic accountability," West's insistence that if we don't learn this
lesson the fire will consume us all is the kind of hyperbole that
undermines his own earlier analysis of local devastation. People in
positions of privilege can, and clearly do, dismiss the threat to their own
way of life as by and large inaccurate.
At stake here are the relationships between power, truth, ethics, and
apoca@pse. In attempting to represent the unrepresentable, the unknowablethe End, or death par excellence -apocalyptic writings are a quintessential
technology of power/knowledge. They promise the defeat of death, at least for
the obedient who deserve everlasting life, and the prolonged agony of
destruction for those who have not obeyed the Law of the Father. One does not
have to succumb to apocalyptic eschatology to understand why end-time
propensities imperil democracy: the apocalyptic tenet of preordained history
disavows questionings of received truth, discredits skepticism, and disarms
challengers of the status quo. Appeals to the Day of judgment, the dawn of a
New Age, even the dream of a cryogenic "return" to life, put off the kinds of
immediate political and ethical judgments that need to be made in order to
resist both overt domination and the more seductive forms of disciplinary power
operative in the United States today and fostered by the United States in other
countries.
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Apocalyptic Rhetoric Good (1/3)

ONLY BY CONFRONTING THE APOCALYPSE CAN WE
EXPOSE THE CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN THE SYSTEM OF
THE BOMB, OUR APOCALYPTIC RHETORIC IS KEY
MODERN AMERICAN POETRY NO DATE
[from Thomas McClanahan's "Gregory Corso",
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/corso/bomb.htm //wyo-pinto]
Although it can be read as a polemic against nuclear war, "Bomb" is also
an examination of the loss of humanistic virtue. Additionally, it is a
vehicle for expressing Corso's developing epistemology. To know the
world, for the younger poet, is to recognize it as a Heraclitean
continuum, an alteration of consciousness that prefigures the way man
understands himself and the world about him. Like the bomb, powerful
forces--whether they are generated by great religious prophets or
authentic poetic statement--provide the elemental energy that
transforms human consciousness. So Corso's poem is a paradoxical
rendering of two points of view: on the one hand it is about the
destructive power of a weapon that can annihilate mankind, while at the
other extreme it concerns the positive force of man's own potential to
see the world from a new perspective.
CONFRONTING THE APOCALYPSE CAUSES SOCIAL

TRANCENDENCE- ITS THE ONLY WAY TO RESCUE PEOPLE
WINK in 2001
[Walter, nqa, Apocalypse Now? Christian Century, Oct 17,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79514992 //
wyo-pinto]
If that were the whole story about apocalyptic, many of us would want nothing
to do with it. That is not the whole story, however. There is a positive role for
apocalyptic as well as its better-known negative. The positive power of
apocalyptic lies in its capacity to force humanity to face threats of unimaginable
proportions in order to galvanize efforts at self and social transcendence. Only
such Herculean responses can actually rescue people from the threat and make
possible the continuation of humanity on the other side. Paradoxically, the
apocalyptic warning is intended to remove the apocalyptic threat by acts of
apocalyptic transcendence.
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CONFRONTING THE APOCALYPSE CREATES A FEARLESS
FEAR THAT INCITES ACTION AGAINST WHAT IS SAID AS
INEVITABLE- THIS FEARLESS FEAR IS KEY TO ACTION AS
OPPOSED TO THE INACTION OF THE CURRENT SYSTEM- A
CALL FOR INACTION PARALYZES*****
WINK in 2001

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79514992 //wyopinto]
Positive apocalyptic, by contrast, calls on our every power to avert what
seems inevitable. "Nothing can save us that is possible," the poet W. H.
Auden intoned over the madness of the nuclear crisis; "we who must die
demand a miracle." And the miracle we got came about because people
like the physician Helen Caldicott refused to accept nuclear annihilation.
But she did it by forcing her hearers to visualize the consequences of
their inaction.
Imagination, says Anders, is the sole organ capable of conveying a truth
so overwhelming that we cannot take it in. Hence the bizarre imagery
that always accompanies apocalyptic. Optimists want to believe that
reason will save us. They want to prevent us from becoming really
afraid. The anti-apocalyptist, on the contrary, insists that it is our
capacity to fear which is too small and which does not correspond to the
magnitude of the present danger. Therefore, says Anders, the antiapocalyptist attempts to increase our capacity to fear. "Don't fear fear,
have the courage to be frightened, and to frighten others too. Frighten
thy neighbor as thyself." This is no ordinary fear, however; it is a fearless
fear, since it dares at last to face the real magnitude of the danger. And
it is a loving fear, since it embraces fear in order to save the generations
to come. That is why everything the anti-apocalyptist says is said in
order not to become true.
If we do not stubbornly keep in mind how probable the disaster is and if
we do not act accordingly, we will not be able to prevent the warnings
from becoming true. There is nothing more frightening than to be right.
And if some amongst you, paralyzed by the gloomy likelihood of the
catastrophe, should already have lost their courage, they, too, still have
the chance to prove their love of man by heeding the cynical maxim:
"Let's go on working as though we had the right to hope. Our despair is
none of our business."
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Kritik Answers

WE MUST TAKE ACTION IN THE FACE OF THE REAL
APOCALYPSES- GLOBAL WARMING, THE OZONE HOLE,
WAR, POLLUTION, NUCLEAR WAR- THE THREATS WONT
GO AWAY ******
WINK in 2001 [Walter, nqa, Apocalypse Now? Christian Century, Oct
17,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79
514992 //wyo-pinto]
It is not difficult to see in that warning perils that threaten the very viability of
life on earth today. Global warming, the ozone hole, overpopulation, starvation
and malnutrition, war, unemployment, the destruction of species and the rain
forests, pollution of water and air, pesticide and herbicide poisoning, errors in
genetic engineering, erosion of topsoil, overfishing, anarchy and crime, the
possibility of a nuclear mishap, chemical warfare or all-out nuclear war:
together, or in some cases singly, these dangers threaten to "catch us
unexpectedly, like a trap." Our inability thus far to measure ourselves against
these threats is an ominous portent that apocalypse has already rendered us
powerless.
Terrible as it was, the destruction of the World Trade Center was not an
apocalypse. That horror will slowly recede. Other acts of infamy may take place.
But we can anticipate a time when terrorism will decline. Nor are we helpless.
We have the means to stop at least many, perhaps even most, of the terrorist
attacks hurled at us. But we can see the other side of this catastrophe, when life
feels normal again.
The threats to our very survival that I listed above, however, will not go away.
They could well spell the end of humanity, and even of most sentient life. This is
the awful truth that we have yet to recognize: We are living in an apocalyptic
time disguised as normal, and that is why we have not responded appropriately.
If we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction, as scientists tell us we are,
our response has in no way been commensurate with the danger. We Homo
sapiens are witnessing the greatest annihilation of species in the last 65 million
years, and our children may live to witness ecocide with their own eyes. So while
we are understandably preoccupied with terrorism, and must do everything
necessary to stamp it out, we must at the same time wake up to these more
serious threats that could effectively end life on this planet.
SOUTH AFRICA PROVES THAT OUR MODEL OF

APOCALYPSE WORKS- WE MUST INCITE ACTION
WINK in 2001

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_28_118/ai_79514992 //wyopinto]
BUT THE VERDICT is not yet in. It is late, but a positive response to the
real apocalypse of our time is still possible. Consider South Africa. When
I was there in the 1980s, it appeared that armed revolution was
inevitable. Blacks were becoming more desperate by the day. Teenage
boys were confronting the police and army without concern for their
safety. Chaos was beginning to overtake the townships, as children,
outraged by the timorousness of their parents, seized the initiative
themselves. Whites were taking an increasingly hard line. It was a recipe
235
Kritik Answers
for disaster. The whole scene reeked of an apocalypse of the negative
sort.
Then the most unexpected thing happened. The white government chose, under
intense internal and international pressure, to relinquish power, and negotiated
with its former black enemies a process that led to the election of a black
president, a model constitution, and relatively low casualties, considering the
alternatives. No one to my knowledge anticipated this turn of events. What had
appeared as an inevitable (negative) apocalyptic bloodbath turned out to have
been a (positive) apocalyptic situation instead, thanks to the "anti-apoca
236
Kritik Answers
**Badiou**
A2 Badiou: 2AC
EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE REQUIRES A
REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION, MEANING THAT
EVERY AFFIRMATION OF LIFE OCCURS AGAINS THE
BACKGROUND OF HUMN DEATH AND FINITUDE
Zizek '99
1999, 153-4//uwyo-ajl]
It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of
psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical
restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the
superego is suspended, left behind. Does not Lacan himself provide a number of hints that
the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms
to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St Paul or Badiou :
psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does not already posit a 'new

harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean for
one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is
Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean',
something (a void) is confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a
new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal,
precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identifiction with a Cause:
negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic
identification - that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it, but is
simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance
between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what 'Death' stands for at its most radical is
not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of the world', the selfwithdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with
'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate clean' that opens up the domain of the
symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged MasterSignifier. Here, Lacan parts company with St Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already was dead - that is to
say, after Freud, one cannot directly have faith in a Truth-Event ;
every such Event ultimately remains

a semblance obfuscating a preceding Void whose Freudian name is death drive.
So Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination of the exact status of this domain beyond the rule of
the Law. That is to say: like Lacan, Badiou delineates the contours of a domain beyond the Order of
Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the 'morbid' super ego connection between Law
and its transgressive desire. For Lacan, however, the Freudian topic of the death drive cannot be
accounted for in the terms of this connection: the 'death drive' is not the outcome of the
morbid confusion of Life and Death caused by the intervention of the symbolic
Law. For Lacan, the uncanny domain beyond the Order of Being is what he calls
the domain 'between the two deaths', the pre-ontologicalf domain of monstrous
spectral apparitions, the domain that is 'immortal', yet not in the Badiouian
sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but in the sense of what Lacan
calls lamella, of the monstrous 'undead' object-libido.18
237
Kritik Answers
Perm Solvency (1/3)

WE SHOULD COMBINE THE PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE
THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO SOLVE THE CASE WHILE
MAINTAINING AN AFFIRMATIVE CONCEPTION OF ETHICS
OUTSIDE THE BOUNDS OF THE STATE
Hallward, Lecturer in the French department @ Kings College, 2K2 (Peter
BADIOU'S POLITICS: EQUALITY AND JUSTICE,
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm)
At this point, the reader has to wonder if the OPs policy of strict nonparticipation in the state really stands up. The OP declares with some pride that
we never vote, just as in the factories, we keep our distance from trade
unionism (LDP, 12.02.95: 1).26 The OP consistently maintains that its politics of
prescription requires a politics of non-vote. But why, now, this either/or? Once
the state has been acknowledged as a possible figure of the general interest,
then surely it matters who governs that figure. Regarding the central public
issues of health and education, the OP maintains, like most mainstream
socialists, that the positive tasks on behalf of all are incumbent upon the state
(LDP, 10.11.94: 1).27 That participation in the state should not replace a
prescriptive externality to the state is obvious enough, but the stern either/or so
often proclaimed in the pages of La Distance politique reads today like a
displaced trace of the days when the choice of state or revolution still figured
as a genuine alternative.
WE SHOULD COMBINE BADIOUS GENERIC CONCEPTION

OF BEING WITH OUR DESCRIPTION OF THE SPECIFIC,
WHICH DOESNT RESULT IN DEPICTION OF THE SINGULAR
Hallward, Lecturer in the French Department @ Kings College, 2K3 (Peter
Badiou: A Subject to Truth, P. 274)
At each point, the alternative to
Badious strictly generic conception

of things is a more properly specific understanding of individuals
and situations as conditioned by the relations that both enable and
constrain their existence. In order to develop this alternative, it is essential
to distinguish scrupulously between the specific and what might be called the
specified (Badious objectified).5 Actors are specific to a situation even
though their actions are not specified by it, just as a historical account is
specific to the facts it describes even though its assessment is not specified by
them. The specific is a purely relational subjective domain. The specified, by
contrast, is defined by positive, intrinsic characteristics or essences (physical,
cultural, personal, and so on). The specified is a matter of inherited instincts
as much as of acquired habits. We might say that the most general effort of
philosophy or critique should be to move from the specified to the

specificwithout succumbing to the temptations of the purely
singular. Badiou certainly provides a most compelling critique of the
specified. But he hasat least thus far inadequate means of
distinguishing specified from specific. The result, in my view, is an
ultimately unconvincing theoretical basis for his celebration of an
extreme particularity as such.
238
Kritik Answers
Perm Solvency (2/3)

BADIOUS OWN WRITING CONCEDES THE NECESSITY OF
INCLUDING THE STATE WITHIN OUR POLITICAL FOCUS.
WHEN SOMETHING MUST BE DONE THAT ONLY THE STATE
CAN DO LIKE THE PLAN BADIOUS ETHICS FORCE US TO
DEMAND THE PLAN FROM THE STATE WHILE MAINTAINING
A PROPER DISTANCE TOWARDS IT THIS ALLOWS THE
PLAN TO FUNCTION AS A TRULY ETHICAL COMMITMENT
Hallward, Lecturer in the French department @ Kings College, 2K2 (Peter
BADIOU'S POLITICS: EQUALITY AND JUSTICE,
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm)
Badious early and unequivocally hostile attitude to the state has
considerably evolved. Just how far it has evolved remains a little unclear. His conception of politics remains
We know that
resolutely anti-consensual, anti-re-presentative, and thus anti-democratic (in the ordinary sense of the word). A
philosophy today is above all something that enables people to have done with the "democratic" submission to the world
as it is (Entretien avec Alain Badiou, 1999: 2). But he seems more willing, now, to engage with this submission on its
own terms. La Distance politique again offers the most precise points de repre. On the one hand, the OP remains
suspicious of any political campaign for instance, electoral contests or petition movements that operates as a
prisoner of the parliamentary space (LDP, 19-20.04.96: 2). It remains an absolute necessity [of politics] not to have the
state as norm. The separation of politics and state is foundational of politics. On the other hand, however, it is now
their separation need not lead to the banishment of the state from
the field of political thought (LDP, 6.05.93: 1).24 The OP now conceives itself in a
tense, non-dialectical vis--vis with the state, a stance that rejects an intimate
cooperation (in the interests of capital) as much as it refuses any antagonistic conception
of their operation, any conception that smacks of classism. There is to no more choice to be
made between the state or revolution; the vis--vis demands the presence of the two terms and not
equally clear that
the annihilation of one of the two (LDP, 11.01.95: 3-4). Indeed, at the height of the December 95 strikes, the OP
recognised that the only contemporary movement of dstatisation with any real power was the corporate-driven
movement of partial de-statification in the interests of commercial flexibility and financial mobility. Unsurprisingly, we
The
state is what can sometimes take account of people and their situations in other
registers and by other modalities than those of profit. The state assures from
this point of view the public space and the general interest. And capital does not
incarnate the general interest (LDP, 15.12.96: 11). Coming from the author of Thorie de la contradiction,
are against this withdrawal of the state to the profit of capital, through general, systematic and brutal privatisation.
these are remarkable words.
239
Kritik Answers
Perm Solvency (3/3)

BADIOUS ETHICAL PROJECT NECESSITATES ENDLESSLY
RECONSTITUTING THE SOCIAL REALM TO OPEN IT UP TO
THE TRUTH-EVENT THE SPECIFIC DEMAND OF THE PLAN
CAN HAVE UNIVERSAL ETHICAL RESONANCE AND CAN
FORM THE BASIS OF A POLITICS OF TRUTH
Barker, Lecturer in Communications and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of
Philosophy @ Cardiff U, 2K2 (Jason, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, P. 146-48)
How does Balibars theory of the State constitution stand alongside Badious, and can we find any key areas of mutual
agreement between these two ex-Althusserians? The most general area of difference involves Balibars aporetic
approach to the question of the masses. Balibar refuses to see any principle underlying the masses conduct, since the
latter are synonymous with the power of the State. Badiou, on the other hand, regards the masses (ideally) as the
bearers of the category of justice, to which the State remains indifferent (AM, 114). Two divergent theories of the State,
then, each of which is placed in the service of a distinctive ethics. With Balibar we have an ethics or ethic in the
sense of praxis of communication which encourages a dynamic and expanding equilibrium of desires where every
With Badiou we have an

ethics of truths which hunts down those exceptional political
statements in order to subtract from them their egalitarian core,
thereby striking a blow for justice against the passive democracy of
the State. Overall we might say that the general area of agreement lies in the fact that, in each case,
opinion has an equal chance of counting in the democratic sphere.
democracy remains a rational possibility. In particular, for both Balibar and Badiou, it is love as an amorous feeling
towards or encounter with ones fellow man a recognition that the fraternal part that is held in common between
human beings is somehow greater than the whole of their differences which forges the social bond. However, on the
precise nature of the ratio of this bond their respective paths diverge somewhat. In Balibars case we are dealing with an
objective illusion wherein one imagines that the love one feels for an object (an abstract egalitarian ideal, say) is shared
by others. Crucially, love in this sense is wholly ambivalent, wildly vacillating between itself and its inherent opposite,
hate.18 On this evidence we might say that a communist peace would be really indistinct from a fascist one.
Therefore, the challenge for Balibar is to construct a prescriptive political framework capable of operating without repression in a utilitarian public sphere where the free exchange of opinions is more likely than not to result in the self-
In Badious case what we are dealing with, on the other

is a subjective
reality. The social contract is forever being conditioned, worked on
practically from within by the political militants, in readiness for the
occurrence of the truth-event. This is the unforeseen moment of
an amorous encounter between two natural adversaries (a group of
students mounting a boycott of university fees, for instance) which retrieves the latent communist
axiom of equality from within the social process. Here we have a
particular call for social justice (free education for all!) which strikes a chord
with the whole people (students and non-students alike). Crucially, love in this sense is
infinite, de-finite, in seizing back (at least a part of) the State power directly into
the hands of the people. Moreover, in this encounter between students and the university authorities
limitation of extreme views.
hand and what we have been dealing with more or less consistently throughout this book
there is an invariant connection (of communist hope) which is shared by all, and where any difference of opinion is purely
the challenge is to develop and deepen an

ethical practice, not in any utilitarian or communitarian sense
since the latter would merely risk forcing a political manifesto
prematurely, perhaps giving rise to various brands of State-sponsored
populism9 but in the sense of a politics capable of combating
repression; a politics which, in its extreme singularity, holds itself open
to seizure by Truth.
incidental. Momentarily, at least. For Badiou,
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Kritik Answers
Human Rights Solve

BADIOU IS WRONG ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS THEYRE A
CRUCIAL RALLYING POINT FOR ACTIVISTS AGAINST
OPPRESSION
Dews, Prof of Philosophy @ U of Essex, 2K4 (Peter, Think Again: Alain Badiou
and the Future of Philosophy, P. 109)
Badiou is not mistaken, of course, in suggesting that the discourse of human rights
has come to provide a crucial ideological cover for economic and cultural
imperialism, not to mention outright military intervention. No one doubts the murderous hypocrisy with which the
Western powers, led by the US, have invoked the language of human rights in recent years. But 'human rights'
have also been a rallying call for many activists around the globe. In the form of the
Helsinki Accords, they were a major focus for the East European opposition in the years leading up to 1989- They
were equally important tactically for Latin America's struggle against the
dictatorships, and continue to provide a vital political point of leverage for many
indigenous populations, not to mention the Tibetans, the Burmese, the
Palestinians. The United States, as is well known, continues to refuse recognition to the recently established
International Criminal Court, fearful, no doubt, that members of its own armed forces, and perhaps of former
administrations, could be amongst those arraigned before it.
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Double Bind
BADIOU IS IN A DOUBLE-BIND: EITHER THERES NO WAY
TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN TRUE AND FALSE EVENTS
WHICH MEANS THE ALTERNATIVE CANT SOLVE, OR
SUBJECTS OF THE EVENT GO INTO IT WITH A
PRECONCEIVED NOTION OF THE EVENT, WHICH MAKES
TRUE FIDELITY IMPOSSIBLE
Hallward, Professor of French at Kings College, London, 2K4 (Peter,
Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 15-16)
Badiou insists on the rare

and unpredictable character of every truth. On the other hand, we
know that every truth, as it composes a generic or egalitarian sampling of the situation,
will proceed in such a way as to suspend the normal grip of the state of
its situation by eroding the distinctions used to classify
and order parts of the situation. Is this then a criterion that subjects must
presume in advance or one that they come to discover in each case? If not the former, if truth is
entirely a matter of post-evental implication or
consequence, then there can be no clear way of
distinguishing, before it is too late, a genuine event (which
One implication of this last point is easily generalized.
relates only to the void of the situation, i.e. to the way inconsistency might appear within a situation)
from a false event
(one that, like September 11th or the triumph of National Socialism,
But if there is always an

initial hunch which guides the composition of a generic
set, a sort of preliminary or prophetic commitment to the
generic just as there is, incidentally, in Cohens own account of generic sets, insofar as this
reinforces the basic distinctions governing the situation).
account seeks to demonstrate a possibility implicit in the ordinary extensional definition of set25
then it seems difficult to sustain a fully post-evental

conception of truth. In short: is the initial decision to affirm an event unequivocally free, a
matter of consequence alone? Or is it tacitly guided by the criteria of the generic at every step, and
thereby susceptible to a kind of anticipation?
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Kritik Answers
Alternative Fractures Coalitions

BADIOUS ALTERNATIVE IS A DISASTROUS FORM OF
POLITICS BECAUSE THE SUBJECTS OF A TRUTH CAN NEVER
TRANSLATE THAT TRUTH TO THOSE HOSTILE TO THEIR
AGENDA, AND THUS CAN NEVER MAKE POLITICAL
COALITIONS
Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 17)
is it enough to explain the process of subjectivation,

the transformation of an ordinary individual into the militant
subject of a universalizable cause, or truth, mainly through
analogies with the process of conversion? It is certainly essential to maintain (after
6. In a related sense,
Saint Paul) that anyone can become the militant of a truth, that truth is not primarily a matter of background or
If it exists at all, truth must be equally indifferent to both

nature and nurture, and it is surely one of the great virtues of Badious account of the subject that it, like
disposition.
Zizeks or Lacans, remains irreducible to all the forces (historical, social, cultural, genetic .. .) that shape the individual or
the lack of any substantial explanation

of subjective empowerment, of the process that enables or
inspires an individual to become a subject, again serves only to
make the account of subjectivation unhelpfully abrupt and
abstract. Isnt there a danger that by disregarding issues of
motivation and resolve at play in any subjective decision, the
militants of a truth will preach only to the converted? Doesnt the
real problem of any political organization begin where Badious
analyses tend to leave off, i.e. with the task of finding ways
whereby a truth will begin to ring true for those initially indifferent
or hostile to its implications?
ego in the ordinary sense. On the other hand,
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Kritik Answers
Divorcing Politics from State Bad

BADIOUS DESIRE TO SEPARATE POLITICS FROM THE
STATE MAKES POLITICS ITSELF IMPOSSIBLE
Bensaid, Prof @ the U of Paris VIII and leading member of the Ligue Commiuniste
Revolutionnaire, 2K4 (Daniel Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P.
99-100)
in Badiou, the intermittence of event and subject renders the very idea of
politics problematic. According to him, politics defines itself via fidelity to the event whereby the victims of
oppression declare themselves. His determination to prise politics free from the state in order
to subjecrivize it, to deliver it from history in order to hand it over to the event, is part of a tentative
search for an autonomous politics of the oppressed. The alternative effort, to subordinate
Yet
politics to some putative meaning of history, which has ominous echoes in recent history, is he suggests to incorporate
it within the process of general technicization and to reduce it to the management of state affairs. One must have the
courage to declare that, from the point of view of politics, history as meaning or direction does not exist: all that exists is
However, this divorce between event

and history (between the event and its historically determined conditions) tends
to render politics if not unthinkable then at least impracticable (PP 18).
the periodic occurrence of the a priori conditions of chance.
BADIOUS ALTERNATIVE FAILS BECAUSE HES BLIND TO

POLITICAL POWER STRUCTURES HIS DEMAND TO
DIVORCE POLITICS FROM THE STATE MEANS IT CANT
DEAL WITH TODAYS MOST PRESSING PROBLEMS
Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. 18-19)
to what extent can we abstract an exclusively political truth from
matters relating to society, history and the state? Take those most familiar topics of cultural
Most obviously,
politics: gender, sexuality and race. No doubt the greater part of the still incomplete transformation here is due to
militant subjective mobilizations that include the anti-colonial wars of liberation, the civil rights movement, the feminist
movements, Stonewall, and so on. But has cumulative, institutional change played no role in the slow movement towards
since under the current state of things

political authority is firmly vested in the hands of those with economic power,
can a political prescription have any enduring effect if it manages only to
distance or suspend the operation of such power? If a contemporary political
sequence is to last (if at least it is to avoid the usual consequences of capital flight and economic sabotage)
must it not also directly entail a genuine transformation of the economy itself , i.e.
racial or sexual indistinction, precisely? More importantly:
enable popular participation in economic decisions, community or workers control over resources and production, and so
In todays circumstances, if a political prescription is to have any widespread

consequence, isnt it essential that it find some way of bridging the gap between
the political and the economic? Even Badious own privileged example indicates the uncertain purity of
on?
politics. The declaration of 18 March 1871 (which he quotes as the inaugural affirmation of a proletarian political
capacity) commits the Communards to taking in hand the running of public affairs,3 and throughout its short existence
the Commune busies itself as much with matters of education, employment and administration as with issues of equality
Is a sharp distinction between politics and the state helpful in such

circumstances? Do forms of discipline subtracted from the state, from the party,
apply in fact to anything other than the beginning of relatively limited political
sequences? Does the abstract ethical imperative, continue!, coupled with a
classical appeal to moderation and restraint,38 suffice to safeguard the long-term
persistence of political sequences from the altogether necessary return of statelike functions (military, bureaucratic, institutional . . .)? To what extent, in short, does Badious position, which he
and power.
presents in anticipation of an as yet obscure step beyond the more state-centred conceptions of Lenin and Mao, rather
return him instead to the familiar objections levelled at earlier theories of anarchism?
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Kritik Answers
**Baudrillard**
Baudrillard Destroys Social Change
(1/2)
BAUDRILLARDS ALTERNATIVE ALLOWS CONSERVATIVE
IDEOLOGICAL DISTORTION
Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of
Cardiff, Wales, Whats Wrong with Postmodernism, 1990, p. 190-191. *Gender
Christopher
modified
Baudrillards alternative is stated clearly enough: a hyperreal henceforth
sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the
imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the
simulated generation of difference (p. 167). It is a vision which should bring
great comfort to government advisers, PR experts, campaign managers, opinionpollsters, media watch-dogs, Pentagon [spokespeople] spokesmen and others
with an interest in maintaining this state of affairs. Baudrillards imagery of
orbital recurrence and the simulated generation of difference should
commend itself to advocates of a Star Wars program whose only conceivable
purpose is to escalate EastWest tensions and divert more funds to the militaryindustrial complex. There is no denying the extent to which this and similar
strategies of disinformation have set the agenda for public debate across a
range of crucial policy issues. But the fact remains (and this phrase carries more
than just a suasive or rhetorical force) that there is a difference between what
we are given to believe and what emerges from the process of subjecting such
beliefs to an informed critique of their content and modes of propagation. This
process may amount to a straightforward demand that politicians tell the truth
and be held to account for their failing to do so. Of course there are cases like
the IrangateContra affair or Thatchers role in events leading up to the
Falklands war where a correspondence-theory might seem to break down
since the facts are buried away in Cabinet papers, the evidence concealed by
some piece of high-level chicanery (Official Secrets, security interests, reasons
of state, etc.), or the documents conveniently shredded in time to forestall
investigation of their content. But there is no reason to think as with
Baudrillards decidedly Orwellian prognosis that this puts the truth forever
beyond reach, thus heralding an age of out-and-out hyperreality. For one can
still apply other criteria of truth and falsehood, among them a fairly basic
coherence-theory that would point out the various lapses, inconsistencies, nonsequiturs, downright contradictions and so forth which suffice to undermine the
official version of events. (Margaret Thatchers various statements on the
Malvinas conflict especially the sinking of the General Beigrano would
provide a good example here.)29 It may be argued that the truth-conditions will
vary from one specific context to another; that such episodes involve very
different criteria according to the kinds of evidence available; and therefore that
it is no use expecting any form of generalised theory to establish the facts of this
or that case. But this ignores the extent to which theories (and truth-claims)
inform our every act of rational appraisal, from commonsense decisions of a
day-to-day, practical kind to the most advanced levels of speculative thought.
And it also ignores the main lesson to be learnt from Baudrillards texts: that any
politics which goes along with the current postmodernist drift will end up by
effectively endorsing and promoting the work of ideological mystification.
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Kritik Answers
Baudrillard Destroys Social Change

(2/2)
RELEGATING HUMAN SUFFERING TO THE REALM OF THE
SIGN AND SIMULATION IS JUST DISGUISED NIHILISM,
WHICH CRUSHES THE POSSIBILITY FOR EFFECTIVE
POLITICS
Kellner, Philosophy Chair @ UCLA, 89 (Douglas, Jean Baudrillard, P. 107-8)
Yet does the sort of symbolic exchange which Baudrillard advocates really provide a solution to the question of
death? Baudrillards notion of symbolic exchange between life and death and his ultimate embrace of nihilism (see 4.4) is
radically devalues life and

focuses with a fascinated gaze on that which is most terrible death. In a
popular French reading of Nietzsche, his transvaluation of values demanded
negation of all repressive and life- negating values in favor of affirmation of life,
joy and happiness. This philosophy of value valorized life over death and
derived its values from phenomena which enhanced, refined and nurtured
human life. In Baudrillard, by contrast, life does not exist as an autonomous source of
value, and the body exists only as the caarnality of signs, as a mode of display
of signification. His sign fetishism erases all materialjty from the body and social
life, and makes possible a fascinated aestheticized fetishism of signs as the
primary ontological reality. This way of seeing erases suffering, disease, pain and
the horror of death from the body and social life and replaces it with the play of
signs Baudrillards alternative. Politics too is reduced to a play of signs, and
the ways in which different politics alleviate or intensify human suffering
disappears from the Baudrillardian universe. Consequently Baudrillards theory spirals
into a fascination with signs which leads him to embrace certain privileged forms
of sign culture and to reject others (that is, the theoretical signs of modernity such as meaning, truth,
the social, power and so on) and to pay less and less attention to materiality (that is, to needs,
desire, suffering and so on) a trajectory will ultimately lead him to embrace nihilism (see
probably his most un-Nietzschean moment, the instant in which his thought
4.4). Thus Baudrillards interpretation of the body, his refusal of theories of sexuality which link it with desire and
pleasure, and his valorization of death as a mode of symbolic exchange which valorizes sacrifice, suicide and other
symbolic modes of death are all part and parcel of a fetishizing of signs, of a valorization of sign culture over all other
modes of social life. Such fetishizing of sign culture finds its natural (and more harmless) home in the fascination with the
realm of sign culture which we call art. I shall argue that Baudrillards trajectory exhibits an ever more intense
aestheticizing of social theory and philosophy, in which the values of the representation of social reality, political struggle
and change and so on are displaced in favor of a (typically French) sign fetishism. On this view, Baudrillards trajectory is
best interpreted as an increasingly aggressive and extreme fetishizing of signs, which began in his early works in the late
1 960s and which he was only gradually to exhibit in its full and perverse splendor as aristocratic aestheticism from the
mid-1970s to the present. Let us now trace the evolution of his fascination with art, a form of sign culture which
Baudrillard increasingly privileges and one which provides an important feature attraction of the postmodern carnival.
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Kritik Answers
Alternative Masks Violence

FOCUS ON THE HYPER-REAL PRIVILEGES THE SIGNIFIER
OVER THE SIGNIFIED, NUMBING US TO ACTUAL VIOLENCE
Krishna 93
[Snakaran, Dept. Poli Sci @ Hawaii, Alternatives 18, 399]
By emphasizing the technology and speed in the Gulf War, endlessly analyzing
the representation of the war itself, without a simultaneous exposition of the
ground realities, postmodernist analyses wind up, unwittingly, echoing the
Pentagon and the White House in their claims that this was a clean war with
smart bombs that take out only defense installations with minimal collateral
damage. One needs to reflesh the Gulf War dead through our postmortems
instead of merely echoing, with virilio and others, the disappearance of
territory or the modern warrior with the new technologies; or the intertext
connecting the war and television; or the displacement of the spectacle.
Second, the emphasis on speed with which the annihilation proceeded once the
war began tends to obfuscate the long build-up to the conflict and US complicity
in Iraqi foreign and defense policy in prior times. Third, as the details provided
above show, if there was anything to highlight about the war, it was not so much
its manner of representation as the incredible levels of annihilation that have
been perfected. To summarize: I am not suggesting that postmodern analysts of
the war are in agreement with the Pentagons claims regarding a clean war; I
am suggesting that their preoccupation with representation, sign systems, and
with the signifier over the signified, leaves one with little sense of the
annihilation visited upon the people and land of Iraq. And, as the Vietnam War
proved and Schwartzkopf well realized, without that physicalist sense of violence
war can be more effectively sold to a jingoistic public.
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Our Representations Solve

TURNMEDIA IMAGES REVEAL THEIR OWN ILLUSIONS
Baudrillard, professor of philosophy of culture and media at Univ. or Paris,
1994, Illusion of the End, pg. 60-61
Jean
And yet there will, nonetheless, have been a kind of verdict in this Romanian
affair, and the artificial heaps of corpses will have been of some use, all the
same. One might ask whether the Romanians, by the very excessiveness of this
staged event and the simulacrum of their revolution, have not served as
demystifiers of news and its guiding principle. For, if the media image has put an
end to the credibility of the event, the event will, in its turn, have put an end to
the credibility of the image. Never again shall we be able to look at a television
picture in good faith, and this is the finest collective demystification we have
ever known. The finest revenge over this new arrogant power, this power to
blackmail by events. Who can say what responsibility attaches to the televisual
production of a false massacre (Timisoara), as compared with the perpetrating of
a true massacre? This is another kind of crime against humanity, a hijacking of
fantasies, affects and the credulity of hundreds of millions of people by means of
television a crime of blackmail and simulation. What penalty is laid down for
such a hijacking? There is no way to rectify this situation and we must have no
illusions: there is no perverse effect, nor even anything scandalous in the
Timisoara syndrome. It is simply the (immoral) truth of news, the secret
purpose [destination] of which is to deceive us about the real, but also to
undeceive us about the real. There is no worse mistake than taking the real for
the real and, in that sense, the very excess of media illusion plays a vital
disillusioning role. In this way, news could be said to undo its own spell by its
effects and the violence of information to be avenged by the repudiation and
indifference it engenders. Just as we should be unreservedly thankful for the
existence of politicians, who take on themselves the responsibility for that
wearisome function, so we should be grateful to the media for existing and
taking on themselves the triumphant illusionism of the world of communications,
the whole ambiguity of mass culture, the confusion of ideologies, the
stereotypes, the spectacle, the banality soaking up all these things in their
operation. While, at the same time, constituting a permanent test of intelligence,
for where better than on television can one learn to question every picture,
every word, every commentary? Television inculcates indifference distance,
scepticism and unconditional apathy. Through the worlds becoming-image, it
anaesthetizes the imagination, provokes a sickened abreaction, together with a
surge of adrenalin which induces total disillusionment. Television and the media
would render reality [le reel] dissuasive, were it not already so. And this
represents an absolute advance in the consciousness or the cynical
unconscious of our age.
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Baudrillard is Wrong (1/2)

BAUDRILLARDS CRITIQUE IS EMPIRICALLY DENIED BY THE
GULF WAR
Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of
Cardiff, Wales, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War, 19 92, p.
Christopher
11.
How far wrong can a thinker go and still lay claim to serious attention? One
useful test-case is Jean Baudrillard, a cult figure on the current postmodernist
scene, and purveyor of some of the silliest ideas yet to gain a hearing among
disciples of French intellectual fashion. Just a couple of days before war broke
out in the Gulf, one could find Baudrillard regaling readers of The Guardian
newspaper with an article which declared that this war would never happen,
existing as it did only as a figment of mass-media simulation, war-games
rhetoric or imaginary scenarios which exceeded all the limits of real-world,
factual possibility.1 Deterrence had worked for the past forty years in the sense
that war had become strictly unthinkable except as a rhetorical phenomenon, an
exchange of ever-escalating threats and counter-threats whose exorbitant
character was enough to guarantee that no such event would ever take place.
What remained was a kind of endless charade, a phoney war in which the stakes
had to do with the management of so-called public opinion, itself nothing more
than a reflex response to the images, the rhetoric and PR machinery which
create the illusion of consensus support by supplying all the right answers and
attitudes in advance. There would be no war, Baudrillard solemnly opined,
because talk of war had now become a substitute for the event, the occurrence
or moment of outbreak which the term war had once signified. Quite simply, we
had lost all sense of the difference or the point of transition between a war
of words, a mass-media simulation conducted (supposedly) by way of preparing
us for the real thing, and the thing itself which would likewise take place only
in the minds and imaginations of a captive TV audience, bombarded with the
same sorts of video-game imagery that had filled their screens during the buildup campaign.
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Baudrillard is Wrong (2/2)

BAUDRILLARDS CRITIQUE IS NAVE AND CONTRADICTORY,
DOES NOT CORRESPOND WITH REALITY, AND IS
NORMATIVELY USELESS
James Marsh, Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, 19 95, Critique, Action, and
Liberation, pp. 292-293
Such an account, however, is as one-sided or perhaps even more one-sided than
that of naive modernism. We note a residual idealism that does not take into
account socioeconomic realities already pointed out such as the corporate
nature of media, their role in achieving and legitimating profit, and their function
of manufacturing consent. In such a postmodernist account is a reduction of
everything to image or symbol that misses the relationship of these to realities
such as corporations seeking profit, impoverished workers in these corporations,
or peasants in Third-World countries trying to conduct elections. Postmodernism
does not adequately distinguish here between a reduction of reality to image
and a mediation of reality by image. A media idealism exists rooted in the
influence of structuralism and poststructuralism and doing insufficient justice to
concrete human experience, judgment, and free interaction in the world.4 It is
also paradoxical or contradictory to say it really is true that nothing is really true,
that everything is illusory or imaginary. Postmodemism makes judgments that
implicitly deny the reduction of reality to image. For example, Poster and
Baudrillard do want to say that we really are in a new age that is informational
and postindustrial. Again, to say that everything is imploded into media images
is akin logically to the Cartesian claim that everything is or might be a dream.
What happens is that dream or image is absolutized or generalized to the point
that its original meaning lying in its contrast to natural, human, and social reality
is lost. We can discuss Disneyland as reprehensible because we know the
difference between Disneyland and the larger, enveloping reality of Southern
California and the United States.5 We can note also that postmodernism misses
the reality of the accumulation-legitimation tension in late capitalism in general
and in communicative media in particular. This tension takes different forms in
different times. In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, social,
economic, and political reality occasionally manifested itself in the media in such
a way that the electorate responded critically to corporate and political policies.
Coverage of the Vietnam war, for example, did help turn people against the war.
In the 1980s, by contrast, the emphasis shifted more toward accumulation in the
decade dominated by the great communicator. Even here, however, the
majority remained opposed to Reagans policies while voting for Reagan. Human
and social reality, while being influenced by and represented by the media,
transcended them and remained resistant to them.6 To the extent that
postmodernists are critical of the role media play, we can ask the question about
the normative adequacy of such a critique. Why, in the absence of normative
conceptions of rationality and freedom, should media dominance be taken as
bad rather than good? Also, the most relevant contrasting, normatively
structured alternative to the media is that of the public sphere, in which the
imperatives of free, democratic, nonmanipulable communicative action are
institutionalized. Such a public sphere has been present in western democracies
since the nineteenth century but has suffered erosion in the twentieth century as
capitalism has more and more taken over the media and commercialized them.
Even now the public sphere remains normatively binding and really operative
through institutionalizing the ideals of free, full, public expression and
discussion; ideal, legal requirements taking such forms as public service
programs, public broadcasting, and provision for alternative media; and social
movements acting and discoursing in and outside of universities in print, in
demonstrations and forms of resistance, and on media such as movies,
television, and radio.7
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A2 Disaster Porn (1/3)

TURN: VIOLENCE IS INESCAPABLE. OUR VIOLENCE
ENABLES UNDERSTANDING MORE THAN IT INHIBITS.
REMEMBERING AND REPRESENTING VIOLENCE IS
ESSENTIAL TO AVERT THE DESTRUCTION OF THE OTHER.
REJECT THE CRITIQUES SILENCE.
Michael Eskin, Research Fellow and Lecturer, European Literature, Cambridge
University, Dialectical Anthropology, 24: 407-450, 1999, p. 391-6
Derrida allows nothing prior to language; since, in Derrida's s philosophy, everything is
inscribed in language, he places speech and language prior to ethics, prior to any possible
ethical injunction. Derrida's formulations owe a tremendous debt to several major
epistemological shifts. of the early twentieth century: Sapir's and Whorf's notion that
language conditions thought, for example, or Lacan's claims that both conscious and
unconscious thought processes (and thus the subject) are structured by language.
Because for Derrida ethics is inscribed, along with everything else, in language, and
because for Derrida language is inherently violent in that it is always a reduction,
a totalization, he reaches the conclusion that even a Levinasian ethics cannot

ever avoid violence: "One never escapes the economy of war." The origin of this
violence inherent in discourse is the act of inscribing the other in the definitions
and terms of the same: Predication is the first violence. Since the verb to be and the
predicative act are implied in every other verb, and in every common noun, nonviolent
language, in the last analysis, would be a language of pure invocation . . .purified of all
rhetoric [in Levinas' terms] . . . . Is a language free from all rhetoric possible? Derrida
answers his own question in the negative, affirming that "there is no phrase which is
indeterminate, that is, which does not pass through the violence of the concept. Violence
appears with articulation." Foucault has expressed this same sentiment, maintaining that
"We must conceive discourse as a violence we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice
we impose upon them." Naming and predication-two acts essential to
language-confine what is being described, and fix it in one's own terms . As we
shall see from an examination of Hiroshima non amour, memory works the same way,
attempting to enclose the past within determinate parameters, employing the
same brand of totalization to whose presence in language Derrida has gestured. Concern
over the necessary violence of memory as representation to the consciousness, as willed
inscription in one's own terms of what is other because past, is perhaps the most obvious
point at which Derrida, Levinas, Duras, and Resnais converge, for the impossibility of
remembering an historical event as it was-of actually arriving at a clear understanding of a
past event by imaging it through memory, by re-presenting it to our memory-is a chronic
preoccupation of Hiroshima mon amour. Resnais confronted this dilemma as well in the
process of constructing Nuit et brouillard. Claiming historical authority over
Auschwitz, or giving the illusion that it is comprehensible, would only, in Resnais'

opinion, "humaniz[e] the incomprehensible terror," thereby "diminishing it,"
perhaps even romanticizing it; so, unable to describe the violence, and unwilling
to inscribe it, Resnais opted instead to document our memory of it . Resnais carries
no illusions that the past can be duplicated to any significant degree, rendered for us now
as it was then. Given the accepted generic constraints of a film, he says, " it is absolutely
absurd to think that in that space of time one can properly present the historical
reality of such a complex event. [Historical facts] were the bases for our `fiction,'
points of departure rather than ends in themselves." This explains what Leo Bersani has
described as Resnais' clear favoring of the word "imagination" over the word "memory"
when referring to his own films." However, in the case of Hiroshima mon amour, instead of
filling in with imagination the details between the historical "facts," the film throws its
hands up at any effort to "remember" or "see" the tragedy at Hiroshima. Thus, Hiroshima
mon amour, in the words of one critic, turns out "to be a film about the impossibility of
making a documentary about Hiroshima"1' or, in Armes' more broadly epistemologically
oriented phrase, "a documentary on the impossibility of comprehending." Duras reminds
us of this in her synopsis of the screenplay: "Impossible de parler de HIROSHIMA. Tout ce
qu'on peut faire c'est de parler de l'impossibilite de parler de HIROSHIMA ( Impossible to
speak of HIROSHIMA. All one can do is speak of the impossibility of speaking of

HIROSHIMA)." She then drives the point home in Hiroshima mon amour's unforgettable
opening sequence, as Okada incessantly reminds Riva that she can never know
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Hiroshima's tragedy. Riva knows, for example, that there were two hundred
thousand dead and eighty thousand wounded, in nine seconds; she can rattle off
the names of every flower that bloomed at ground zero two weeks after the
bombing; she has been to the museum four times, seen the pictures, watched
the films. As if to accentuate the veracity of' Riva's learned data, Duras alerts the reader
in a footnote to the origin of the details, and there is hardly a more famous or traditionally
reputable source on the immediate aftermath of the bombing than John Mersey's
Hiroshima. And yet, as one critic has commented, "les images collees aux murs . . . sont
incapables de faire revivre completement la realite du fait (images pasted to walls . . .
are incapabale of completely restoring the reality of the fact). " Despite Riva's
wealth of statistical (read: historically trustworthy) data, Okada is able to refute
her with confidence, "Tu n'as rien vu a Hiroshima (You saw nothing at Hiroshima),"
and the almost incantatory
continued
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Kritik Answers

continued
repetition of this phrase strengthens its punch. Duras increases the effect by reminding us that the day of the bombing of Hiroshima, while a
tragedy for Okada, coincides with Riva's liberation from her horrifying wartime experience in Nevers, France. This fact forces the question: How
can Riva ever understand as a tragedy an event that corresponded with her own emotional rebirth and reclaiming of some measure of normalcy?
Okada points
out that the entire world was celebrating while Hiroshima smouldered in ashes.
This fact forces another, similar question, one that I myself must confront on reading or watching Hiroshima mon amour : How could
the Westerners in the audience ever expect to grasp the tragedy that they
originally celebrated as the end of the war? These reminders have their own Verfremdungseffekt further
The effect is even stronger on what Duras must have assumed would be a predominantly Western audience, when
alienating the audience/reader from the history of Hiroshima, dispelling any lingering notion that historical tragedy can ever be fully
. Riva's optimism is almost infectious, though, and she indeed believes that she can master the history behind the leveling of
. She claims to know everything, and she is once again swiftly negated by
the Japanese. She contents herself by concluding that, even if she does not know yet, ca s'apprend (one learns)."" She is not gifted
comprehended
Hiroshima
with memory, though, as Okada reminds her and thus all she can claim to know about Hiroshima is what she has "invente." This particular verbal
exchange is highlighted by the fact that it is for the first time in the text Riva's turn to use the word "rien," until this point a word uttered
frequently and only by Okada: ELLS: Je n'ai rien invente. (SHE: I invented nothing.) LUI: Tu as tout invente. (HE: You invented everything.) Proof of
her inability to approach comprehension of Hiroshima arrives in the form of a laugh, when Riva asks her lover if he was at Hiroshima the day of
the bombing and he laughs as one would laugh at a child. She shows herself further distanced from the historical event by the manner in which
she sounds out the name of the city, "Hi-ro-shi-ma," as if it were-or rather because it is-radically foreign to her. (Later, in the same manner,
Okada sounds out Riva's youth, the story of which will always be unknown and incomprehensible to him: "Jeune-a-Ne-vers [ Young-in-Nevers].")
Her memory of Hiroshima, created by herself and inscribed in terms that she can understand from photographs taken by other people, is mere
"illusion," truth several times removed. She remembers, though, and almost obsessively, because she knows that it is worse to forget
Historical memory must be reductive,
sometimes violently so, according to a Derridean understanding of it,

because it is always a form of representation and thus of predication. A less diplomatic statement made by Okada goes so far as to suggest that
one's memory only ever serves one's own purposes: "Est-ce que to avais remarque," he asks, "que c'est
toujours dans le meme sens que l'on remarque les chows? (Did you ever notice that one always notices things in the same way?)." We notice
However, just
as language-the system of representation par excellence-carries in its every use the violence
inherent in its reductiveness, we use it anyway, as it enables far more
than inhibits. In Levinas's formulation, not only is discourse our primary means of relating
to and maintaining the other, but the absence of it, silence, "is the inverse of
language . . . a laughter that seeks to destroy language. " Derrida accords with
Levinas: "denying discourse" is "the worst violence," "the violence of the night which
precedes or represses discourse." Despite the violence that Riva's impulse
toward memory commits against any ideal or "objective" history, absolute
forgetting is far more dangerous; by any account, remembering and representing
past violence must be seen as a necessary evil, as a sort of
metaphysically violent means of averting future real, physical violence.
Still, the partial forgetting of the unforgettable tragedy is inevitable, as John Ward points out in his treatment of Resnais' films: "With the
passage of time we become so insensitive to other people's suffering that we
can lie in the disused ovens of Auschwitz and have our photographs taken as
souvenirs." Duras' text also renders disturbing images of forgetting, of loubli. Riva confesses to her own struggle against ignorance: "mei
what suits us, in the direction and sense which we prefer, and we notice it in the manner in which we can best use it.
aussi, j'ai essaye de lutter de toutes mes forces contre l'oubli . . . . Comme toi, j'ai oublie (me too, I've tried to struggle with all my strength
against forgetting . . . . Like you, I've forgotten). "During the third part of Duras' script, at the staged demonstration against nuclear armaments,
Okada seems far too preoccupied with taking Riva back to his family's house to care about the demonstration, even if it is only a performance for
a film. Immediately after explaining the appearance of the charred skin of Hiroshima's surviving children, he informs her, "Tu vas venir avec moi
encore une fois (You will come with me once again)." Remembering the bombing is quite obviously not a first priority for him. There are other
grim reminders of the forgetting in the reconstruction of Hiroshima and the importation of American culture. At one point, Riva and Okada enter a
nightclub called "Casablanca" -a strange immortalization of American pop culture in a city leveled by an American bomb less than two decades
earlier. Moreover, the Japanese man who tries to converse with Riva in the Casablanca gladly (and proudly, it seems) speaks the language of the
conquerors, the bomb-droppers. The attitude on display in this scene is reminiscent of one in John Hersey's account of the months following the
bombing, in Hiroshima: [Dr. Fujiil bought [the vacant clinic] at once, moved there, and hung out a sign inscribed in English, in honor of the
conquerors: M. MUJII, M.D. MEDICAL & VENEREAL Quite recovered from his wounds, he soon built up a strong practice, and he was delighted, in
While there is
certainly something to be said for not bearing a grudge, the speed of the
forgetting and forgiving seems unbelievable. Memory represents historical tragedy insufficiently, in violently
the evenings, to receive members of the occupying forces, on whom he lavished whiskey and practiced English.
subjective reductions; we are never able to experience being there and can never know the event, can never have witnessed it firsthand. Thus,
we forget. Duras' script clearly stresses both the necessity and difficulty of remembering, but demonstrates, perhaps pessimistically, that we will
veer slightly but inexorably toward l'oubli. And
once we forget, violence will erupt again.
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THE CRITIQUE IS REDUCTIVE. THEY FORECLOSE THE
ESSENTIAL ABILITY TO MOBILIZE VIOLENCE AGAINST
VIOLENCE.
Eskin, Research Fellow and Lecturer, European Literature, Cambridge
University, Dialectical Anthropology, 24: 407-450, 1999, p. 403-4
Michael
I have tried to demonstrate through this reading of Hiroshima mon amour that
Resnais' and Duras' text falls prey to the violence of historical memory and to
the worse violence of absolute oblivion. Strictly following a theoretical apparatus
reconstructed from the thought of Levinas and Derrida, Hiroshima mon amour
seems to participate, through the apparently deliberate reduction to race and
place and event of two already allegorical and emblematic characters, in the
very violence which Resnais and Duras set out initially to document, the most
reductive of predications. The script trades in an economy of violence, dealing
out the abstractions and totalizations that are the seed of every Holocaust, that
mark every uninhabitable corner of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This conclusion
seems to me, though, far too conclusive, far too reductively critical and
discomforting, far too dependant on a great deal of interpretive faith, not
unmerited but certainly not absolute, in the debate between and formulations of
Levinas and Derrida What I am trying gingerly to say is that our reading should
remain sensitive, attentive and open enough to discover those points at which
the theoretical scaffolding may fail us, points at which a Levinasian/Derridean
reading seems to stall; I believe a conclusive dismissal of Hiroshima mon amour
as a text governed and permeated by violence is probably one such moment. I
would propose instead a different, and hopefully more useful, reading of my
reading of this well-intentioned script and film. For, while Hiroshima mon amour
is certainly guilty of the very violence it claims as its object, it is likely from
this portrayal and mobilizing of violence that the film sees its greatest
anti-violent gesture; all that is required is a return to Duras' stated desire to
avoid the banal describing of "l'horreur par l'horreur." Instead of horrifying us
with horror, as she refused to do, Duras' screenplay has shown us the humble
beginnings of horror: the total forgetting of past horrors, and the blatant
inscribing of infinite Others within the finitudes of the language of the Same. And
in this, Duras and Resnais may have succeeded, ultimately, in their declared
mission to bring the horrifying tragedy of Hiroshima back to life, to see it reborn,
out of the ashes.
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**Butler**
Butler Answers: 2AC (1/2)
255
Kritik Answers
Butler Answers: 2AC (2/2)
256
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A2 Legal Categories Bad

BAILING ON LEGAL CHANGE FOR PARODIC PERFORMANCE
FAILS TO BREAK DOWN GENDER CATEGORIES AND
COLLAPSES INTO QUIETISM
Nussbaum 99 (Martha, Feb. 22, Professor of Parody, New Republic, Lexis)
Butler offer when she counsels subversion? She tells us to engage in
parodic performances, but she warns us that the dream of escaping
altogether from the oppressive structures is just a dream: it is within the
What precisely does
oppressive structures that we must find little spaces for resistance, and this resistance cannot hope to
change the overall situation. And here lies a dangerous quietism. If Butler means only to
warn us against the dangers of fantasizing an idyllic world in which sex raises no serious problems, she is
wise to do so. Yet frequently she goes much further. She suggests that the institutional structures that
ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society, and the continued inequality of women,
will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to find
pockets of personal freedom within them. "Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and
because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of
any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me
socially." In other words: I cannot escape the humiliating structures without ceasing to be, so the best I can
In Butler, resistance is always

imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic,
organized public action for legal or institutional change. Isn't this like
saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but
you can find ways of mocking it and subverting it, finding your personal
freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance? Yet it is a fact
that the institution of slavery can be changed, and was changed-- but
not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It was
changed because people did not rest content with parodic
performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval. It is
do is mock, and use the language of subordination stingingly.
also a fact that the institutional structures that shape women's lives have changed. The law of rape, still
defective, has at least improved; the law of sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist before;
marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical control over women's bodies. These things were
changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as their answer, who thought that power,
Butler not only eschews such a hope,

she takes pleasure in its impossibility. She finds it exciting to contemplate the alleged
where bad, should, and would, yield before justice.
immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced that she must
remain such. She tells us--this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power-- that we all eroticize the
power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to
be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or
institutional change. Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction
impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic
parodic performance is not so bad when you are a

powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where
Butler's focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a
fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised,
beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however
parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement,
beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the
integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a
in structure. Well,
return to the bad state. If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad,
when a major theorist tells women in

desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a
cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than
it actually has.
but it is not really our business. But
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Kritik Answers
**Biopolitics**
Agamben Answers: 2AC (1/6)
FIRST, NO LINK PLAN DOESNT TAKE A STANCE ON THE
BODILY SITUATION OF DETAINEES. IT ONLY STRIPS THE
EXECUTIVE OF ONE SOURCE OF CONTROL
SECOND, AGAMBENS ALTERNATIVE TO PLAN IS
PARALYZING AND DELINKS THE LAW AND JUSTICE,
ENABLING TOTALITARIANISM
Kohn 2006
[Margaret, Asst. Prof. Poli Sci @ Florida, Bare Life and the Limits of the Law,.Theory and
Event, 9:2, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.2kohn.html, Retrieved 926-06//uwyo-ajl]
Is there an alternative to this nexus of anomie and nomos produced by the state of exception? Agamben invokes genealogy and politics as two
interrelated avenues of struggle. According to Agamben, "To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a
space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of 'politics'." (88) In a move reminiscent of Foucault, Agamben
suggests that breaking the discursive lock on dominant ways of seeing, or more precisely not seeing, sovereign power is the only way to disrupt
. Agamben clearly hopes that his theoretical analysis could contribute

to the political struggle against authoritarianism, yet he only offers tantalizingly
abstract hints about how this might work. Beyond the typical academic conceit that theoretical work is a
decisive element of political struggle, Agamben seems to embrace a utopianism that provides
little guidance for political action. He imagines, "One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused
objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good." (64) More troubling is his
messianic suggestion that "this studious play" will usher in a form of justice that
cannot be made juridical. Agamben might do well to consider Hannah Arendt's
warning that the belief in justice unmediated by law was one of the
characteristics of totalitarianism.
its hegemonic effects
It might seem unfair to focus too much attention on Agamben's fairly brief discussion of alternatives to the sovereignty-exception-law nexus, but
it is precisely those sections that reveal the flaws in his analysis. It also brings us back to our original question about how to resist the
. For Agamben, the

problem with the "rule of law" response to the war on terrorism is that it ignores
the way that the law is fundamentally implicated in the project of sovereignty with
its corollary logic of exception. Yet the solution that he endorses reflects a similar blindness .
authoritarian implications of the state of exception without falling into the liberal trap of calling for more law
Writing in his utopian-mystical mode, he insists, "the only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and
Agamben, in spite of all of his theoretical sophistication, ultimately falls into the trap of hoping
that politics can be liberated from law, at least the law tied to violence and the
demarcating project of sovereignty.
law."(88) Thus
THIRD, PLAN IS NECESSARY FOR THE ALTERNATIVE

BECAUSE THE EXECUTIVE WILL STILL VIOLENTLY DETAIN.
THIS CREATES A DOUBLE BIND: EITHER THE END RESULT
OF THE ALT IS PLAN AND THERES NO LINK DIFFERENTIAL
OR IT DOES THE STATUS QUO AND DOESNT SOLVE
FOURTH, PERM RECOGNIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN
DEMOCRATIC INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION AND ENGAGE IN
THE RESISTANCE OF THE 1AC
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FIFTH, PERM SOLVES BEST ACKNOWLEDGING THE
TENSION OF MODERNITY WHILE ENGAGING IN
DEMOCRATIC STRUGGLE ALLOWS POLITICS BEYOND THE
POLICE STATE IN OPPOSITION TO SOVEREIGNTY AND
EXCEPTION
Deranty 2004
[Jean-Philippe, Macquarie University, Agambens challenge to normative theories of modern rights,
borderlands e-journal, Vol. 3, No. 1,
www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-7-05//uwyoajl]
. If, with Rancire, we define politics not through the institution of

sovereignty, but as a continual struggle for the recognition of basic
equality, and thereby strongly distinguish politics from the police order
viewed as the functional management of communities (Rancire 1999), then it
is possible to acknowledge the normative break introduced by the
democratic revolutions of the modern age without falling into a onesided view of modernity as a neat process of rationalisation. What should be
stressed about modernity is not primarily the list of substantive inalienable and imprescriptible human rights, but the
equal entitlement of all to claim any rights at all. This definition of politics must be
47
accompanied by the parallel acknowledgment that the times that saw the recognition of the fundamental equality of all also
produced the total negation of this principle. But this parallel claim does not necessarily render the first invalid. Rather
points to a tension inherent in modern communities,
it
between the political demands of
equality and the systemic tendencies that structurally produce stigmatisation and exclusion.
One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower

hypothesis without renouncing the antagonistic definition of politics.
48.
As
Rancire remarks, Foucaults late hypothesis is more about power than it is about politics (Rancire 2002). This is quite clear in the
1976 lectures (Society must be defended) where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancire suggests, when the
"biopower" hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes problematic. There is a
The power that

subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply
because the exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly
provides implicit recognition. Power includes by excluding, but in a way
that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that Foucault was developing in his
way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not disjunctive.
last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228): "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and
exclusionary essence of social structures

an equivalent implicit recognition of all, even in
the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can
sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to
exclusion.
only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical,
demands
as a condition of its possibility
SIXTH, NO ALTERNATIVE AGAMBEN ISOLATES

SOVEREIGNTY AS INEVITABLY EXCLUSIONARY OF NONPOLITICAL LIFE, MEANING THERES NO WAY TO ESCAPE
THAT SYSTEM, RENDERING THEIR OFFENSE INEVITABLE
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SEVENTH, OUR SPECIFIC USE OF BIOPOLITICS IS GOOD,
LEADING TO LIBERAL DEMOCRACY THAT SOLVES THEIR
VIOLENCE AND OPPRESSION CLAIMS
Dickinson, Prof @ University of Cincinnati, 2K4 (Edward Ross,
Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse
About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March)
the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and
the practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakasble . Both are
In short,
instances of the disciplinary society and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that
genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it
analysis can easily become

superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different
strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes . Clearly the
democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite
different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the
fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that
matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population
management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive
regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully
produce health, such a system can and historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again,
there are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of
biopolitics that are very different from those of National Socialist Germany.
Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of selfdirection and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or
totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of
democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly
narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or imperative
of increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive
change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves
of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany. 90 Of course
it is not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such
regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the
potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of people that I think it
becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a strategic configuration of
power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as
much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism
cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics, the only
end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at odds with
the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are
regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian
states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they are two alternative ways of
organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The
concept power should not be read as a universal stifling night of oppression ,
manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey,
are essentially or effectively the same. Power is a set of social relations, in
which individuals and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective
subjectivity. And discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent. Discursive
elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can be combined in different
ways to form parts of quite different strategies (like totalitarianism or the
democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure,
but rather circulate. The varying possible constellations of power in modern
societies create multiple modernities, modern societies with quite radically
differing potentials.
is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad perspective. But that
EIGHTH, POWER IS ZERO SUM THE ALTERNATIVE ONLY

SHIFTS POWER ELSEWHERE
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Consequently,
states
2001
(The Tragedy of
pay close attention to how power is distributed among them, and they make a special effort to maximize their share
look for opportunities to alter the balance of power by

acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential rivals.
of world power. Specifically, they
States
employ a variety of meanseconomic, diplomatic, and militaryto shift the balance of power in their favor, even if doing so makes other states
Because one states gain in power is another states loss, great

powers tend to have a zero-sum mentality when dealing with each other. The trick, of
suspicious or even hostile.
course, is to be the winner in this competition and to dominate the other states in the system. Thus, the claim that states maximize relative
power is tantamount to arguing that states are disposed to think offensively toward other states, even though their ultimate motive is simply to
survive. In short,
great powers have aggressive intentions.
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NINTH, AGAMBEN ESSENTIALIZES THE STATE, IGNORING
THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND
TOTALITARIANISM
Heins, Vis Prof Poli Sci @ Concordia U and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in
Frankfurt, 2K5 (Volker, Giorgio Agamben and the Current State of Affairs in Humanitarian Law and
Human Rights Policy, 6 German Law Journal No. 5, May, http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?
id=598)
Agamben is not interested in such weighing of costs and benefits because he

assumes from the outset that taking care of the survival needs of people in
distress is simply the reverse side of the modern inclination to ignore precisely
those needs and turn life itself into a tool and object of power politics . By way of
conclusion, I will indicate briefly how his view differs from two other, often no less shattering critiques of modern humanitarianism. Martti
Koskenniemi warned that humanitarian demands and human rights are in danger of degenerating into "mere talk."[47] The recent crisis in Darfur,
Sudan, can be cited as an example for a situation in which the repeated invocation of human rights standards and jus cogens norms, like those
articulated in the Genocide Convention, might ultimately damage those norms themselves if states are unwilling to act on them.[48] This
criticism implies that human rights should be taken seriously and applied in a reasonable manner. Both David Kennedy and Oona Hathaway have
gone one step further by taking issue even with those who proved to be serious by joining treaties or engaging in advocacy. In a controversial
quantitative study, Hathaway contended that the ratification of human rights treaties by sets of given countries not only did not improve human
rights conditions on the ground, but actually correlated with increasing violations.[49] In a similar vein, David Kennedy radicalized Koskenniemi's
point by arguing that human rights regimes and humanitarian law are rather part of the problem than part of solution, because they "justify" and
"excuse" too much.[50] To some extent, this is an effect of the logic of legal reasoning: marking a line between noncombatants and combatants
increases the legitimacy of attacking the latter, granting privileges to lawful combatants delegitimizes unlawful belligerents and dramatically
worsens their status. On the whole, Kennedy is more concerned about the dangers of leaving human rights to international legal elites and a
professional culture which is blind for the mismatch between lofty ideals and textual articulations on the one side, and real people and problems
on the other side.[51] Whereas these authors reveal the "dark sides" of overly relying on human rights talk and treaties, the moral fervor of
activists or the routines of the legal profession, Agamben claims that something is wrong with human rights as such, and that recent history has
demonstrated a deep affinity between the protection and the infringement of these rights. Considered in this light, the effort of the British aid
organization Save the Children, for instance, to help children in need both in Britain and abroad after World War I faithful to George Bernard
Shaw's saying, "I have no enemies under seven"is only the flip side of a trend to declare total war on others regardless of their age and
situation. This assertion clearly goes far beyond the voices of other pessimists. Agamben's work is understandable only against the backdrop of
According to
Agamben, democracy does not threaten to turn into totalitarianism, but rather
both regimes smoothly cross over into one another since they ultimately rest on
the same foundation of a political interpretation of life itself .[52] Like Carl Schmitt, Agamben sees
an entirely familiar mistrust of liberal democracy and its ability to cultivate nonpartisan moral and legal perspectives.
the invocation of human rights by democratic governments as well as the "humanitarian concept of humanity"[53] as deceptive manouvers or, at
least, as acts of self-deception on the part of the liberal bourgeois subject. The difference between Agamben and Schmitt lies in the fact that
Schmitt fought liberal democracy in the name of the authoritarian state, while Agamben sees democracy and dictatorship as two equally
confronts us with a mode of thinking in

vaguely felt resemblances in lieu of distinctly perceived differences. Ultimately, he
offers a version of Schmitt's theory of sovereignty that changes its political valence and downplays the difference
between liberal democracy and totalitarian dictatorshipa difference about
which Adorno once said that it "is a total difference. And I would say," he added, "that it would
be abstract and in a problematic way fanatical if one were to ignore this
difference."[54]
unappealing twins. Very much unlike Schmitt, the Italian philosopher
TENTH, DESIRE IS TOO DYNAMIC TO BE CONTAINED BY

THE SOVEREIGN ITS FLUDITY ENABLES BIOPOWER THAT
TRANSCENDS THE STATE OF EXCEPTION BY CREATING
NEW FORMS OF LIFE OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM ***
Neilson 2004
[Brett, University of Western Sydney, Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism, Contretemps
5, December 2004, www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyo-ajl]
Like Agamben, Hardt and Negri take as a point of departure the Foucauldian account of biopolitics as a system of rule that emerges at the
beginning of the modern era with the exercise of power over life itself. Importantly, however, they extend Foucaults argument by drawing on
Gilles Deleuzes Postscript on the Society of Control. Foucault describes the modern system of disciplinary rule that fixes individuals within
institutions (hospitals, schools, prisons, factories, and so on) but does not succeed in consuming them completely in the rhythm of productive
, Hardt and Negri trace the emergence of a new mode

of power that is expressed as a control that extends throughout the
consciousness and bodies of the populationand at the same time across the entirety of social relations.9
practices or productive socialization. By contrast
In so doing, they combine the Deleuzian emphasis on free-floating and mobile logics of control (data banking, risk management, electronic
tagging, and so on) with an attention to the productive dimension of biopower (living labour) derived from the work of exponents of Italian
operaismo like Paolo Virno and Christian Marazzi. While Hardt and Negri question the tendency of these thinkers to understand all contemporary
forms of production on the horizon of communication and language, they are clearly indebted to their notions of immaterial labour and general
intellect (which in turn derive from a reading of the famous Fragment on Machines from Marxs Grundrisse). It is this emphasis on the
productive aspect of biopower that places Hardt and Negri at odds with Agamben on bare life
a concept that, for them, excludes the question of labour from the field of theoretical observation. Thus, in a footnote, they comment
critically on a line of Benjamin-inspired interpretations of Foucault (from Derridas Force of Law to Homo Sacer itself): It seems fundamental to
us, however, that all of these discussions be brought back to the question of the productive dimension of the bios, identifying in other words
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the materialist dimension of the concept beyond any conception that is purely naturalistic (life as zo) or simply anthropological (as Agamben
in particular has a tendency to do, making the concept in effect indifferent).10 With this identification of what Agamben calls indistinction as
indifference (indifference to productive power of cooperation between human minds and bodies), Hardt and Negri voice their most severe
, Agambens philosophical specification of the

negative limit of humanity displays behind the political abysses that modern
totalitarianism has constructed the (more or less heroic) conditions of human passivity.11 The apparatus of the
sovereign ban condemns humanity to inactivity and despair. By contrast, Hardt and Negri claim
that bare life must be raised up to the dignity of productive power. Rather than
reducing humanity to mere living matter, the exceptional power of the modern state
becomes effective at precisely the moment when social cooperation is seen no longer the result of the
investment of capital but an autonomous power, the a priori of every act of production.12 Try as it may to relegate humanity
to minimal naked life (or zo), the modern constituted order cannot destroy the enormous
creativity of living labour or expunge its powers of cooperative production.
reservations about the concept of bare life. For them
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ELEVENTH, AGAMBEN MISUNDERSTANDS THE SHIFTS IN
SOVEREIGNTY, PAPERING OVER INSIDIOUS VIOLENCE
Hardt & Dumm 2000
[Michael & Thomas, Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between
Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri's Empire, Theory & Event 4:3,
Muse//uwyo-ajl]
The most significant difference between our projects, though, is that Agamben
dwells on modern sovereignty whereas we claim that modern sovereignty has
now come to an end and transformed into a new kind of sovereignty, what we
call imperial sovereignty. Imperial sovereignty has nothing to do with the
concentration camp. It no longer takes the form of a dialectic between Self and
Other and does not function through any such absolute exclusion, but rules
rather through mechanisms of differential inclusion, making hierarchies of hybrid
identities. This description may not immediately give you the same sense of
horror that you get from Auschwitz and the Nazi Lager, but imperial sovereignty
is certainly just as brutal as modern sovereignty was, and it has its own subtle
and not so subtle horrors.
TWELFTH, AGAMBENS USE OF THE CAMP CONFLATES

VICTIM WITH OPPRESSOR, PREVENTING US FROM
HOLDING PERPETRATORS RESPONSIBLE AND DESTROYING
ANY ETHICAL OBLIGATION TO ACT SINCE WE POSIT
EVERYONE AS THE VICTIM
Sanyal, Assist Prof of French @ UC Berkeley, 2K2 (Debarati, A Soccer Match in
Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism, Representations, Issue 79, Caliber)

Agambens
radicalization of Levis gray zone has even more disturbing consequences for
understanding the relations of power within the camps. The unstable boundary
between oppressor and oppressed in the gray zone is radicalized in Agambens
account such that the two positions appear to be reciprocal and convertible: It
Beyond the problems inherent in a transhistorical treatment of shame and complicity,
seems, in fact, that the only thing that interests him [Levi] is what makes judgement impossible: the gray zone in which
victims become executioners and executioners become victims (Remnants, 17).18 While Agamben nowhere suggests
his emphasis on the camps as sites for a

potentially endless circulation of guilt nevertheless takes the convertibility of
victims and executioners as a structural given. Primo Levi, however, was at
pains to emphasize that this convertibility was a politically expedient fiction
designed to erase the difference between victim and executioner by forcing Jews to
that perpetrators and victims truly did exchange positions,
participate in the murder and cremation of their own. He also stressed the singular, unimaginable strain such a
To transform such a charged, ambiguous lived

reality into a formal conception of convertibility has disturbing ethical
consequences. It suggests that the perpetrators too, by virtue of occupying this
zone of radical inversion and participating in the traumatic conditions of camp
life, could be perceived as victims. The fallacy of this structural reciprocity, however, is refuted by Levi
predicament must have exerted upon the SK.
in a cautionary preface to his discussion of the Sonderkommando: This mimesis, this identification or imitation or
exchange of roles between oppressor and victim, has provoked much discussion. . . . I do not know, and it does not much
interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that the murderers existed, not only in
Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an
aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to
The conceptualization of the gray zone as a

transhistorical and trans-subjective site of culpability, in which victims become
executioners and executioners become victims, thus conflates the positions of
Muslims, Prominents, Kapos, and SS in a gesture that reaches beyond the concentration
camp experience to include us in a general condition of traumatic culpability.
This blurring of subject positions leads to a vision of inescapable guilt, in which
the negators of truth. (Drowned, 50)
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Kritik Answers
we are always already collectively steeped in the eliminationist logic that led to
the concentration camp and continue unknowingly to perpetuate its violence. But
just as this vision posits an ever-encroaching web of complicity, it also, paradoxically, proposes an
infinitely elastic notion of victimhood. If we are obscurely complicit with the logic of the
soccer match, the irrealization of violence in daily life, we are also comparably violated by the
historical trauma of the camps. The generalization of complicity and
victimization not only dismantles the historical specificity of the camps and the
survivors testimonies. It also, more disturbingly, coopts the figure of the victim
as an other who is but an avatar of ourselves, a point I will address in a moment.
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THIRTEENTH, THEORY IS IRRELEVENT ABSENT SPECIFIC
APPLICATION MUST COMBINE THEORY AND PRACTICE
FOR A PHILOSOPHY AS LIFE
Foucault 82
[Michel, God, Politics and Ethics: An Interview, The Foucault Reader, Trans. Catherine
Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 373-4//uwyo-ajl]
M.F. That's right. When Habermas was in Paris, we talked at some length, and in fact I was quite struck by his observation of the
extent to which the problem of Heidegger and of the political implications of Heidegger's thought was quite a pressing and
After
explaining how Heidegger's thought indeed constituted a political
disaster, he mentioned one of his professors who was a great Kantian,
important one for him. One thing he said to me has left me musing, and it's something I'd like to mull over further.
very well-known in the '30s, and he explained how astonished and disappointed he had been when, while looking through card
catalogues one day, he found some texts from around 1934 by this illustrious Kantian that
were thoroughly Nazi
in orientation.
I have just recently had the same experience with Max Pohlenz, who heralded the universal values of Stoicism all his life. I came
across a text of his from 1934 devoted to Fiihrertum in Stoicism. You should reread the introductory page and the book's closing
remarks on the Fuhrersideal and on the true humanism constituted by the Volk under the inspiration of the leader's directionHeidegger never wrote anything more disturbing. Nothing in this condemns Stoicism or Kantianism, needless to say.
there is a very tenuous "analytic" link

between a philosophical conception and the concrete political attitude of
someone who is appealing to it; the "best" theories do not constitute a very effective
protection against disastrous political choices; certain great themes such as
"humanism" can be used to any end whatever-for example, to show with what gratitude Pohlenz would
But I think that we must reckon with several facts:
have greeted Hitler.
a
demanding, prudent, "experimental" attitude is necesary; at every
moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with
what one is doing, with what one is. I have never been too concerned about people who say: "You are bor-rowing
ideas from Nietzsche; well, Nietzsche was used by the Nazis, therefore. . ."; but, on the other hand, I have always
been concerned with linking together as tightly as possible the historical
and theoretical analysis of power relations, institu-tions, and knowledge, to the
movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question in
reality. If I have insisted on all this "practice," it has not been in order to "apply" ideas, but in order to put them to the test and
modify them. The key to the Personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to
be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-aslife, in his philosophicallife, his ethos.
I do not conclude from this that one may say just anything within the order of theory, but, on the contrary, that
Among the French philosophers who participated in the Resistance during the war, one was Cavailles, a historian of mathematics
None of the philosophers of

engagement- Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty-none of them did a thing.
who was interested in the development of its internal structures.
FOURTEENTH, EVEN IF THE LAW WAS ORIGINALLY

FOUNDED ON VIOLENCE, IT NOW OPERATES IN A NONVIOLENT WAY
Deranty 2004
www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm, acc 1-705//uwyo-ajl]
this strategic use of the decisionistic tradition is that it does not do justice to
the complex relationship that these authors establish between violence and
normativity, that is, in the end the very normative nature of their theories. In brief, they are not saying
that all law is violent, in essence or in its core, rather that law is
dependent upon a form of violence for its foundation. Violence can found
the law, without the law itself being violent. In Hobbes, the social contract,
despite the absolute nature of the sovereign it creates, also enables
individual rights to flourish on the basis of the inalienable right to life (see
29. The problem with
Barret-Kriegel 2003: 86).

30. In Schmitt, the decision over the exception is indeed "more interesting than the regular case", but only because it makes the
regular case possible. The "normal situation" matters more than the power to create it since it is its end (Schmitt 1985: 13). What
Schmitt has in mind is not the indistinction between fact and law, or their intimate cohesion, to wit, their secrete
indistinguishability, but the origin of the law, in the name of the law. This explains why the primacy given by Schmitt to the
decision is accompanied by the recognition of popular sovereignty, since the decision is only the expression of an organic
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Kritik Answers
community. Decisionism for Schmitt is only a way of asserting the political value of the community as homogeneous whole, against
liberal parliamentarianism. Also, the evolution of Schmitts thought is marked by the retreat of the decisionistic element, in favour
of a strong form of institutionalism. This is because, if indeed the juridical order is totally dependent on the sovereign decision,
then the latter can revoke it at any moment. Decisionism, as a theory about the origin of the law, leads to its own contradiction
unless it is reintegrated in a theory of institutions (Kervgan 1992).
Agamben sees these authors as establishing a circularity of

law and violence, when they want to emphasise the extra-juridical origin
of the law, for the laws sake. Equally, Savignys polemic against rationalism in legal theory, against Thibaut and his
31. In other words,
philosophical ally Hegel, does not amount to a recognition of the capture of life by the law, but aims at grounding the legal order in
For Agamben, it seems, the origin and the essence

of the law are synonymous, whereas the authors he relies on thought
rather that the two were fundamentally different.
32. Agamben obviously knows all this . He argues that it is precisely this inability of the decisionists to
hold on to their key insight, the anomic core of norms, which gives them the sad distinction of accurately describing an evil order .
But this reading does not meet the objection to his problematic use of
that tradition.
the very life of a people (Agamben 1998: 27).
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#2 Alternative Kills Liberation: 1AR

(1/2)
EXTEND THE 2AC KOHN 2006 EV
First Agambens alternative is so abstract that it offers
no mean of liberation. Delinking the law and justice
enables unchecked power that allows totalitarian
violence, flipping their argument.
SECOND, RIGHTS ARE CRITICAL TO HUMYN DIGNITY-AGAMBENS ALTERNATIVE FAILS BECAUSE:
1. IGNORES THE VALUE OF RIGHTS IN RESISTING
EXPLOITATION
2. FOSTERS GESTURAL POLITICS THAT CANNOT ADDRESS
THE PROBLEMS OF THE OPPRESSED
Frances Daly, Research Fellow, Philosophy Department, Australian National
University, The non-citizen and the concept of human rights, BORDERLANDS
E-JOURNAL v. 3 n. 1, 2004,
www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/daly_noncitizen.htm.
, Agamben
27. Certainly
calls for making all residents of extraterritorial space (which would include both citizen and non-citizen) as
existing within a position of exodus or refuge, and in this we can perhaps see some basis for resistance. A position of refuge, he argues, would be
able to "act back onto" territories as states and 'perforate' and alter' them such that "the citizen would be able to recognize the refugee that he
or she is" (Agamben, 2000: 26). In this Agamben directs our attention usefully to the importance of the refugee today both in terms of the plight
of refugees and their presence in questioning any assumption about citizen rights, and also in placing the refugee, or "denizen" as he says using
reduces the concepts of

right and the values they involve to forms of State control, eliding all difference
within right and thereby terminating an understanding of the reasons for a
disjuncture between legality and morality and of an existing separation of rights
from the ideal of ethicality, in which liberation and dignity exist to be realized
beyond any form of contract.
Tomas Hammar's term, as the central figure of a potential politics (Agamben, 2000: 23). But he also
28. It is always possible to suppose that a self-fashioned potentiality is simply available to us, and in some senses it is, but not because a type of
theory merely posits the social and the historical as completely open to our manipulation or 'perforation'. Likewise, we cannot merely assume
that changing 'forms of life' necessarily amount to types of refusal. Such a claim would only make sense if it were put forward on the basis of an
appreciation of an impulse to freedom from particular types of constraint and oppression. It would also require a sense of how this impulse takes
place within a variety of conditions, some of which might be easily altered and some of which might not. In the absence of an engaged sense of
what this impulse means, and of the context in which elements of freedom and unfreedom do battle, it is impossible to speculate on the nature of
Agamben merely
presumes that a strategy by which we all identify as refugees will renew a
politics and thereby end the current plight of the refugee, as if no other reality
impinges on this identification. This is also assumed on the basis that the State
in Agamben's theorizing, the abstraction of an all-encompassing, leviathan State is equally, readily and easily liable
to perforation. This contradiction is indicative of a wider problem where what we
encounter is a form of critique that is oddly inappropriate to the type of issue it
addresses.
29. Much can be said in criticism of the doctrine of right, of the limited nature of the understanding
the subjectivity or potentiality which might be emerging or which might be in stages of decomposition.
of freedom and rights in documents on rights, of the assumption of the place of citizen rights as the locus of the fundamental rights of the
But what must be

stated, I feel, is that it would be a serious impoverishment of the ethical problem
that we currently face to deny any potential value of rights in carrying forth
traces of an impetus towards human dignity, of the ideals of freedom and
equality, and to thus reduce rights to what might be termed an absolute politics.
Rights cannot be reduced to citizenship rights as if the ideas of rights and
citizenship are coterminus. What most critically needs to be understood is,
firstly, why values of freedom and equality have such a limited and fragile place
within conditions of such inordinate legalism , and, secondly, what the absence of freedom, which
the cause of human rights inevitably suggests, means for the installation of any
human, and most significantly, the absence of any sense of the undetermined nature of what being might mean.
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Kritik Answers
such rights. Without such an understanding we are left with a gestural politics
that contains a posture of radicalism but one which fails to connect the
aspirations of those who are struggling to achieve elementary rights with a
vision of a world that could accord them a degree of dignity. To acknowledge this
is not to be seduced by concepts of right or law, but is rather to refuse the denial
of a radical questioning of the possibilities with which a discourse presents us .
Benjamin's understanding of a genuinely messianic idea is something that is
"not the final end of historical progress, but rather its often failed and finally
accomplished interruption" (Benjamin, 1974: 1231). We find this in values that resist
exploitation and assaults upon human dignity. And it is this realm that currently
requires urgent, emphatic and significant renewal.
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#2 Alternative Kills Liberation: 1AR

(2/2)
RATIONAL, INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS ARE GOOD ONLY WAY TO
PREVENT FUTURE HOLOCAUSTS
Robert Tracinski, Received his undergraduate degree in Philosophy from the
University of Chicago and studied with the Objectivist Graduate Center and Editorial
Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, Why It Can Happen Again, Ayn Rand Institute, April 22,
2003, http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?
page=NewsArticle&id=7888&news_iv_ctrl=1021, UK: Fisher
Most people avoid these stark implications by retreating to a compromise
between self-sacrifice and self-interest. Calls for sacrifice are proper, they say,
but should not be taken "too far." The Fascists condemned this approach as
hypocrisy. They took the morality of sacrifice to its logical conclusion. They
insisted, in the words of Italian Fascist Alfredo Rocco, on "the necessity, for
which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total
immolation of individuals." And the Nazis certainly practiced what Rocco
preached. A central goal of the concentration camps, wrote survivor Bruno
Bettelheim, was "to break the prisoners as individuals, and to change them into
a docile mass." "There are to be no more private Germans," one Nazi writer
declared; "each is to attain significance only by his service to the state." The
goal of National Socialism was the relentless sacrifice of the individual: the
sacrifice of his mind, his independence, and ultimately his person. A free
country is based on precisely the opposite principle. To protect against what
they called the "tyranny of the majority," America's Founding Fathers upheld the
individual's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The implicit basis
of American government was an ethics of individualism--the view that the
individual is not subordinate to the collective, that he has a moral right to his
own interests, and that all rational people benefit under such a system. Today,
however, self-sacrifice is regarded as self-evidently good. True, most people do
not want a pure, consistent system of sacrifice, as practiced by the Nazis. But
once the principle is accepted, no amount of this "virtue" can ever be
condemned as "too much." We will not have learned the lessons of the
Holocaust until we completely reject this sacrifice-worship and rediscover the
morality of individualism.
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Kritik Answers
#5 Perm: 1AR
EXTEND THE PERM. RECOGNIZING MODERNITYS
PROBLEM WITH EXCLUSION WHILE USING DEMOCRATIC
STRUGGLE ENABLES A CONTESTATION OF DIGNITY THAT
CHALLENGES THE EXCEPTION, AS SHOWN BY DERANTY
2004
ALSO, SOVEREIGNTY MUST BE USED STRATEGICALLY
CRITIQUE CAN BE SIMULTANEOUS
Lombardi, Assoc Prof of Political Science @ Tampa, 96 (Mark Owen, Perspectives on
Third-World Sovereignty, P. 161)
Sovereignty is in our collective minds. What we look at, the way we look at it and what we expect to
see must be altered. This is the call for international scholars and actors. The assumptions of the
paradigm will dictate the solution and approaches considered. Yet, a mere call to
change this structure of the system does little except activate reactionary
impulses and intellectual retrenchment. Questioning the very precepts of
sovereignty, as has been done in many instances, does not in and of itself address the
problems and issues so critical to transnational relations. That is why theoretical
changes and paradigm shifts must be coterminous with applicative studies. One
does not and should not precede the other. We cannot wait until we have a neat
self-contained and accurate theory of transnational relations before we launch
into studies of Third-World issues and problem-solving. If we wait we will never address
the latter and arguably most important issue-area: the welfare and quality of life
for the human race.
THE PERM USES POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT TO AVOID THE

ESSENTIALISM OF THE SOVEREIGN AND AGAMBENS
ALTERNATIVE BY USING CONTINGENCY TO CHALLENGE
THE ATROCITY THAT BOTH MAKE INEVITABLE
Deranty 2004
49. This proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agambens reduction

of the overcoming of the classical conceptualisation of potentiality and
actuality to the single Heideggerian alternative. Instead of collapsing or
dualistically separating potentiality and actuality, one would find in
Hegels modal logic a way to articulate their negative, or reflexive, unity,
in the notion of contingency. Contingency is precisely the potential as
existing, a potential that exists yet does not exclude the possibility of its
opposite (Hegel 1969: 541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an
ontology of contingency that recognises the place of contingency at the
core of necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible
became real vindicates Hegels claim that the impossible should not be
opposed to the actual. Instead, the possible and the impossible are only
reflected images of each other and, as actual, are both simply the
contingent. Auschwitz should not be called absolute necessity (Agamben
1999a: 148), but absolute contingency. The absolute historical necessity
of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency, which, if true,
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Kritik Answers
would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat.
Its absolute necessity in fact harbours an indelible core of contingency,
the locus where political intervention could have changed things, where
politics can happen. Zygmunt Baumans theory of modernity and his
theory about the place and relevance of the Holocaust in modernity
have given sociological and contemporary relevance to this alternative
historical-political logic of contingency (Bauman 1989).
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#5 Perm: Ext
AMBIGUOUS MODERNITY THAT ACKNOWLEDGES
INCOMPLETION PROVIDES THE TOOLS FOR RESISTING
OPPRESSION
Deranty 2004
50. In the social and historical fields, politics is only the name of the
contingency that strikes at the heart of systemic necessity. An ontology
of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the
possibility, and the possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the
one heritage of modernity, and the contingency of catastrophe as
logically entailing the possibility of its opposite. Modernity is ambiguous
because it provides the normative resources to combat the apparent
necessity of possible systemic catastrophes. Politics is the name of the
struggle drawing on those resources.
51. This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern
subjects to rights. Modern subjects are able to consider themselves
autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that
they are recognised as full members of the community, endowed with
the full capacity to judge. This account of rights in modernity is precious
because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political
struggles, as fights for rights. We can see now how this account needs to
be complemented by the notion of contingency that undermines the
apparent necessity of the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know
that their rights are granted only contingently, that the possibility of the
impossible is always actual. This is why rights should not be taken for
granted. But this does not imply that they should be rejected as illusion,
on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent in the horrors of
the 20th century. Instead, their contingency should be the reason for
constant political vigilance.
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#7 Good Biopower: 1AR (1/2)

AGAMBEN IS WRONG BIOPOWER DOESNT CAUSE
EXCEPTION OR VIOLENCE, BUT MAINTAINS LIFE
Ojakangas 2005
[Mike, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Impossible Dialogues on BioPower: Agamben and Foucault, Foucault Studies 2 (5-28), www.foucaultstudies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf, acc. 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl]
In fact, the history of modern Western societies would be quite incomprehensible without taking into account that there exists a form
The effectiveness of
bio-power can be seen lying
precisely in that it refrains and withdraws before every demand of killing, even though these dem
of power which refrains from killing but which nevertheless is capable of directing peoples lives.
ands would derive from the demand of justice. In biopolitical societies, according to Foucault, capital punishment could not be maintained except
by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal: One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of bi
ological danger to others. However, given that the right to kill is precisely a sovereign right, it can be argued that the biopolitical societies analyzed by Foucault were not entirely bio-political. Perhaps, thereneither has been nor can be a society that is entirely
European societies have abolished capital punish

ment. In them, there are no longer exceptions. It is the very right to kill that ha
s been called into question. However, it is not called into question because of enlightened moral sentiments, but rather b
ecause of the deployment of bio-political thinking and practice.
bio-political. Nevertheless, the fact is that present-day
For all these reasons, Agambens thesis, according to which the concentration camp is the fundamental bio-
The bio-political paradigm of the West is not

the concentration camp, but, rather, the present-day welfare society and, instead o
f homo sacer, the paradigmatic figure of the bio-political society can be seen, for
example, in the middle-class Swedish social-democrat. Although
political paradigm of the West, has to be corrected.
this figure is an object and a product of the huge bio-political machinery, it does not mean that he is permitted to kill without committing homi
cide. Actually, the fact that he eventually dies, seems to be his greatest crime against the machinery. (In bio-political societies, death is not onl
y something to be hidden away, but, also, as Foucault stresses, the most shameful thing of all. ) Therefore, he is not exposed to an unconditi
onal threat of death, but rather to an unconditional retreat of all dying. In fact, the biopolitical machinery does not want to threaten him, but to encourage him, with all its material and spiritual capacities, to live healthily, to live long
and to live happily even when, in biological terms, he should have been dead longago.
This is because biopower is not bloody power over bare life for its own sake but pure p
ower over all life for the sake of the living. It is not power but the living, the cond
ition of all life individual as well as collective that is the measure of the success of biopower.
BIOPOLITICS IS NOT THE PROBLEM IN AND OF ITSELF

ITS BIOPOLITICS DEPLOYED IN TOTALITARIANS SOCIETIES
WHICH IS BAD OUR STRENGTHENING OF DEMOCRATIC
STRUCTURES SOLVES THEIR IMPACT
Dickinson, Prof @ University of Cincinnati, 2K4 (Edward Ross,
Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse
About Modernity, Central European History, vol. 37, no. 1, March)
In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucaults ideas have
fundamentally directed attention away from institutionally centered conceptions of government and the state . . . and
toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and its microphysics.48 The broader, deeper, and less visible
ideological consensus on technocratic reason and the ethical unboundedness of science was the focus of his
interest.49 But the power-producing effects in Foucaults microphysical sense
(Eley) of the construction of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of an entire institutional apparatus and system
simply do not explain Nazi policy.50 The destructive dynamic

of Nazism was a product not so much of a particular modern set of ideas as of a
particular modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrous
potential of those ideas. What was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and
disciplines of biopolitics, which occurred everywhere in Europe . Instead, it was the
principles that guided how those instruments and disciplines were organized and used, and the
external constraints on them. In National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a
totalitarian conception of social management focused on the power and ubiquity
of the vlkisch state. In democratic societies, biopolitics has historically been
constrained by a rights-based strategy of social management . This is a point to which I will
of practice ( Jean Quataert),
return shortly. For now, the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at the level of the state. A comparative
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Other states passed compulsory sterilization laws in
the 1930s indeed, individual states in the United States had already begun doing so in 1907. Yet they did
not proceed to the next steps adopted by National Socialism mass sterilization, mass
framework can help us to clarify this point.
eugenic abortion and murder of the defective. Individual figures in, for example, the U.S. did make such suggestions.
neither the political structures of democratic states nor their legal and
political principles permitted such policies actually being enacted . Nor did the scale of
forcible sterilization in other countries match that of the Nazi program. I do not mean to suggest that
such programs were not horrible; but in a democratic political context they did
not develop the dynamic of constant radicalization and escalation that
characterized Nazi policies.
But
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Kritik Answers
#7 Good Biopower: 1AR (2/2)

BIOPOLITICS DOESNT CAUSE ATROCITY
Ojakangas 2005
[Mike, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Impossible Dialogues on BioPower: Agamben and Foucault, Foucault Studies 2 (5-28), www.foucaultstudies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf, acc. 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl]
For Foucault, the coexistence in political structures of large destructive
mechanisms and institutions oriented toward the care of individual life was
something puzzling: It is one of the central antinomies of our political
reason. However, it was an antinomy precisely because in principle the
sovereign power and bio-power are mutually exclusive. How is it possible
that the care of individual life paves the way for mass slaughters? Although
Foucault could never give a satisfactory answer to this question, he was
convinced that mass slaughters are not the effect or the logical conclusion of
bio-political rationality. I am also convinced about that. To be sure, it can be
argued that sovereign power and bio-power are reconciled within the modern
state, which legitimates killing by bio-political arguments. Especially, it can be
argued that these powers are reconciled in the Third Reich in which they
seemed to coincide exactly. To my mind, however, neither the modern
state nor the Third Reich in which the monstrosity of the modern state is
crystallized are the syntheses of the sovereign power and bio-power, but,
rather, the institutional loci of their irreconcilable tension. This is, I believe,
what Foucault meant when he wrote about their demonic combination.
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#9 Essentialism: 1AR (1/2)

EXTEND 2AC NUMBER 3, HEINS 2005 EVIDENCE. GROUP IT.
THE CRITICISM ESSENTIALIZES OPPRESSION BY
COLLAPSING DEMOCRACY AND TOTALITARIANISM INTO A
SINGLE TRANSCENDENT ENTITY, DESTROYING CRTICISIM
OF DIFFERENT FORMS OF OPPRESSION
ALSO, THAT TAKES OUT THEIR IMPACT BECAUSE
AGAMBENS TRANSHITORICAL ARGUMENT CONFLATES
DIFFERENT HISTORICAL ERAS. GLOBAL CAPITAL IS MORE
DECENTRALIZED THAN FASCISM, MAKING THEIR
TERMINAL OFFENSE IMPOSSIBLE.
IT ALSO PROVES THAT THE PERM SOLVES BEST BECAUSE
WE CAN ENGAGE IN CRITICISM OF THE SHORTCOMINGS OF
RIGHTS, WHILE STILL PROVIDING THE MECHANISMS
NECESSARY TO PREVENT FULL SCALE FASCISM
AGAMBEN ESSENTIALIZES INTERNMENT INTO A
TRANSHISTORICAL ENTITY, PREVENTING TESTIMONY
NECESSARY TO MOBILIZE AGAINST DIVERSE FORMS OF
OPPRESSION AND TO CRITICIZE THE SHORTCOMINGS OF
WESTERN RIGHTS DISCOURSE FROM WITHIN ***
Deranty 2004
11. In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between

phenomena seems particularly counter-intuitive in the case of dissimilar
modes of internment. From a practical point of view, it seems counterproductive to claim that there is no substantial difference between
archaic communities and modern communities provided with the
language of rights, between the lawlessness of war times and
democratic discourse. There must be a way of problematising the
ideological mantra of Western freedom, of modernitys moral superiority,
that does not simply equate it with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie 2001).
Habermas and Honneth probably have a point when they highlight the
advances made by modernity in the entrenchment of rights. If the
ethical task is that of testimony, then our testimony should go also to all
the individual lives that were freed from alienation by the
establishment of legal barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion. We
should heed Honneths reminder that struggles for social and political
emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over any
other discourse (Fraser, Honneth 2003). To reject the language of human
rights altogether could be a costly gesture in understanding past
political struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious
strategic, political loss for accompanying present struggles. We want to
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Kritik Answers
criticise the ideology of human rights, but not at the cost of
renouncing the resources that rights provide. Otherwise, critical
theory would be in the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very
people it purports to speak for, and of depriving itself of a major
weapon in the struggle against oppression.
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#9 Essentialism: 1AR (2/2)

AND, AGAMBENS FOCUS ON LANGUAGE IGNORES HOW
HISTORICAL CONDITIONS HAVE CHANGED, PREVENTING
RESISTANCE TO OPPRESSION
Wark 2004
[McKenzie, Re: <nettime> Agamben: No to Bio-Political Tattooing,
posted to nettime mailing list, January 27,
amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0401/msg00092.html,
What never occurs to Agamben is to inquire into the historical rather
than philological -- conditions of existence of this most radical challenge
to the state. Agamben reduces everything to power and the body. Like
the Althusserians, he too has dispensed with problem of relating
together the complex of historical forces. In moving so quickly from the
commodity form to the state form, the question of the historical process
of the production of the abstraction and the abstraction of production
disappears, and with it the development of class struggle.
AGAMBENS TRANSHISTORICAL MODEL OF BIOPOWER

COLLAPSES HISTORY, IGNORING ITS CONTEXTUAL
FUNCTION
Panagia 99
[Davide, The Sacredness of Life and Death: Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and
the Tasks of Political Thinking, Theory & Event 3:1, Muse//uwyo-ajl]
What emerges through the logic of the paradox of sovereignty is an event
Agamben calls the zone of indistinction. In the suspension of the rule through
the state of exception, what we are presented with is a complex plateau where
such philosophically distinct categories as state of nature and law, outside and
inside, exception and rule flow through one another to the point of literal
indistinction. On Agamben's account, the operation of sovereignty abandons
individuals whenever they are placed outside the law and in so doing, exposes
and threatens them to a sphere where there is no possibility of appeal.
(Agamben, p. 29) What is crucial for Agamben's entire project, then, is to point
out how the zone of indistinction collapses the possibility of making distinctions which is to say further, to point out how political philosophy finds the limit of
thinking in the paradox of sovereignty. In the sphere of indistinction, we cannot
think as if distinctions operated as they might in everyday life.6.
The political point here is, I think, insightful and worth pursuing. What makes this
insight problematic, however, is Agamben's treatment of history and the status
of homo sacer therein. Part of the task of this book is to ascertain how the
category of homo sacer is a specifically historical category. This is evident in
Agamben's constant referral to ancient Roman legal documents as well as his
exploration of the reappearance of homo sacer throughout history. But it is
precisely the possibility that homo sacer is something that occurs 'throughout
history' that makes Agamben's analysis at times difficult to swallow. At the
purely conceptual level, one might be willing to accept the meta claim that
Agamben seems to be making. But Agamben does not want to limit himself to
the conceptual level. He wants to insist on the material dimension of homo sacer
and the actuality of this category in contemporary life. There is thus a
substantial tension between the particularity of homo sacer as a material
instance of modern politics and the trans-historical category of homo sacer as a
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category constituted by the paradox of sovereignty and the state of
indistinction.
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#9 Essentialism: Ext
AGAMBEN CONFLATES DIFFERENT HISTORICAL PERIODS
INTO A SINGULAR AND STABLE TRANSHISTORICAL
BIOPOLITICS THAT NEVER EXISTED, MEANING NONE OF
THEIR HISTORICAL IMPACTS APPLY
Wark 2004
[McKenzie, Re: <nettime> Agamben: No to Bio-Political Tattooing,
posted to nettime mailing list, January 27,
amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0401/msg00092.html,
Eugene asks about Georgio Agamben. Below is a short note on him. I find his writings on the
state les interesting and useful than his return to the question of commodity fetishism, which
is a refreshing revisiting of a neglected concept. On the state, his approach seems
more philological than historical. By not bringing his thinking on the

commodity and on the state more closely together, one is not really
given much of a handle on how developments in the commodity form
may have transformed the state. 'Biopower' becomes a vague,
transhistorical notion in Agamben. Agamben is one of the few contemporary thinkers to
try to think *past* Debord's Society of the Spectacle, which I think is still an untranscended
horizon in its matching of political and theoretical intransigence. And so in the note below I
concentrate on his handling of Debord.
AND, NAZISM AND CONTEMPORARY DECENTRALIZED

CONTROL FUNCTION DIFFERENTLY
Neilson 2004
[Brett, University of Western Sydney, Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty,
Biopolitics, Capitalism, Contretemps 5, December 2004,
www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-704//uwyo-ajl]
Negris ruse in this review is to suggest that the permanent state of exception specified by
the first Agamben describes the new condition of global Empire. But he counters Agamben on
his own terms, charging that it is inaccurate to fix everything that happens in
the world today onto a static and totalitarian horizon, as under Nazism.
Such an equation, for Negri, is anachronistic and inaccurate, since it
conflates the fascist rule of the twentieth century with contemporary
modes of decentralized global control. With implicit reference to the first chapter
of Stato di Eccezione, where Agamben describes the current world situation as global civil
war (a term initially used by both Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt), Negri questions the
notion of a sovereign ban that renders constituent and constituted power indistinct:
But things are differentif we live in a state of exception it is because we
live through a ferocious and permanent civil war, where the positive and
negative clash: their antagonistic power can in no way be flattened onto
indifference.18 There can be no doubt that Stato di Eccezione finds Agamben writing of a
positive counterpower that breaks the connection of violence to law posited by Schmitts
exceptionalist model of sovereignty. For Schmitt, the state of exception exists only as a
means of maintaining and restoring the constituted sovereign order. By contrast, Agamben
follows the argument of Benjamins Critique of Violence, which posits a divine or
revolutionary violence that intercedes upon the struggle of constituent and constituted
power, breaking the connection of violence to law that, in the final instance, undergirds their
interrelation. By opening the possibility of a power that operates in complete independence
from the law, Agamben claims, Benjamin specifies the nature of the violence that pertains in
the permanent state of exception. Furthermore, by virtue of the influence of his essay,
Benjamin provokes the negative reaction of Schmitt, whose entire political theory can be read
as a fearful response to the prospect of an exception that does not return to the norm. This is
not to claim, however, that Stato di Eccezione affirms Negris equation of constituent violence
with living counterpower. Rather the Benjaminian violence celebrated by Agamben remains
separate from the whole complex of constituent and constituted power, both interceding
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upon them with an energy that makes the paradigm of modern sovereignty obsolete and, in
so doing, maintaining them in indistinction.
282
Kritik Answers
#10 Criticism Causes

Powerlessness: 1AR (1/2)
EXTEND 2AC NEILSON 2004 EV. GROUP IT.
FIRST, THE NEG POSITS BIOPOWER AS AN ALL
ENCOMPASSING NEGATIVE STRUCTURE THAT CO-OPTS ALL
RESISTANCE, WHICH RENDERS US UNABLE TO INTERVENE
BECAUSE EVERY MOVE IS SHUT OFF IN ADVANCE,
DOOMING US TO ENDLESS ATROCITY. THE BETTER
ALTERNATIVE IS TO USE BIOPOWER AGAINST ITSELF. PURE
DESIRE EXPLODES THE SYSTEMS COORDINATES,
UNDERMINING ITS FOUNDATIONS FROM WITHIN
SECOND, THIS TAKES OUT ALL OF THE INTERNALS TO
THEIR OFFENSE BECAUSE THE 1AC USES A DIFFERENT
KIND OF BIOPOWER THAN AGAMBEN IS CRITICIZING BY
APPROPRIATING IT AGAINST ITSELF, RATHER THAN USING
IT TO EXCLUDE NON-POLITICAL LIFE
THIRD, AGAMBENS MODEL OF BIOPOLITICS CREATES
POWERLESSNESS, SUBVERTING RESISTANCE
Hardt & Dumm 2000

Muse//uwyo-ajl]
But still none of that addresses the passivity you refer to. For that we have to
look instead at Agamben's notions of life and biopower. Agamben uses the term
"naked life" to name that limit of humanity, the bare minimum of existence that
is exposed in the concentration camp. In the final analysis, he explains, modern
sovereignty rules over naked life and biopower is this power to rule over life
itself. What results from this analysis is not so much passivity, I would say, but
powerlessness. There is no figure that can challenge and contest sovereignty.
Our critique of Agamben's (and also Foucault's) notion of biopower is that it is
conceived only from above and we attempt to formulate instead a notion of
biopower from below, that is, a power by which the multitude itself rules over
life. (In this sense, the notion of biopower one finds in some veins of
ecofeminism such as the work of Vandana Shiva, although cast on a very
different register, is closer to our notion of a biopower from below.) What we are
interested in finally is a new biopolitics that reveals the struggles over forms of
life.
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Kritik Answers

Powerlessness: 1AR (2/2)
FOURTH, AGAMBENS CONCEPTION OF POWER IS
POLITICALLY DISABLING BECAUSE IT REDUCES EVERY
RESISTANCE TO AN ALL PERVASIVE POWER STRUCTURE
ONLY VIEWING IT AS AN EXPLOSION OF DESIRE ALLOWS
US TO SUBVERT THE SOVEREIGN BY ALLOWING
BIOPOWERS OWN PRODUCTIVITY TO DESTROY ITSELF
Neilson 2004
[Brett, University of Western Sydney, Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics,

Capitalism, Contretemps 5, December 2004,
www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyoajl]
How then can Negri maintain that constituent power and sovereignty are opposites, separate
even in the absoluteness to which both lay claim? Already in Il potere constituente, three
years before the publication of Homo Sacer, Negri fends off the argument that reduces
constituent power to an infinite void of possibilities or the presence of negative possibilities.
For him, the crucial question is the relation between potentiality (potenza) and power
(potere). He recognizes
in the definition of potentiality that runs from Aristotle and the Renaissance and from
Schelling to Nietzsche
a metaphysical alternative between absence and power, between desire and
possession, between refusal and domination.8
Far from opening a zone of indistinction, Negri believes this alternative

to open a choice, at least when it is not closed off by the dogma that
reduces power to a pre-existing physical fact, finalized order, or
dialectical result. And the philosophical conduit of this opening is the great current of modern
political thought, from Machiavelli to Spinoza to Marx, which understands constituent
power as an overflowing expression of desire, an absence of

determinations, and a truly positive concept of freedom and democracy.
For Negri, the danger of Agambens thought lies not in its Aristotelian rigour or
formal elegance but in its inability to open a panorama of revolutionary
struggle that can oppose the modern order of sovereignty and the
transcendental ideal of power that backs it up. As long as constituent power
remains caught in the paradox of sovereignty and the constituted order
produces bare life as the limit condition of an exception that has become the
rule, there can be no hope of questioning the transcendentalism
of sovereign power or imagining a form of political conduct that remains
free of the impositions of the modern state. Thus it is the concept of bare life that
becomes the primary object of Negris critique of Agambens understanding of sovereignty.
This much is clear in Empire, where Negri and his co-author Michael Hardt distance
themselves from the notion of bare life.
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Kritik Answers

Powerlessness: Ext (1/3)
CRITICISM OF BIOPOLITICS OBSCURES THE CONTROL OF
LIFE, JUSTIFYING THE STATUS QUO
Virno 2002
[Paolo, Paolo Virnos criticism of Agamben, www.generationonline.org/p/fpagamben1.htm, acc. 9-24-06//uwyo-ajl]

when Agamben speaks
of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it into an ontological
category with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinion, he is very
wrong-headed. The problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the
concept of labor-power. When there is a commodity that is called labor-power it
is already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on the other hand, that labor-power is only one of the
Agamben is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no political vocation. Then,
aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a paradoxical commodity, because it is not a real commodity like a
book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is
necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential. Toni (Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand,
use biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the biopolitical - in relation to the birth
of liberalism - that Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a discourse over the biopolitical and my apprehension, my fear, is that the
biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides, covers problems instead
of being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an "open doors" word, a word with an
exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my
fear is of fetish words in politics because it seems like the cries of a child that is
afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama, mama!", "biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate
that there can be a serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the term biopolitics sometimes is a
consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases, instruments of work and not propaganda words.
THEIR ALTERNATIVE ENSURES THE PERPETUAL

REPLICATION OF SOVEREIGNTY ONLY WORKING
THROUGH THE SPECIFIC PRACTICES OF SOVEREIGNTY CAN
SUCCEED ATTEMPTS TO MOVE AWAY FROM IT OUTSIDE
OF THE STATE REPRODUCE SOVEREIGN POWER
Walker, Prof of International Relations @ Arizona State U, 2K2 (RBJ,
Reframing the International, P. 3-5)
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Kritik Answers

AND, THE NEGATIVITY OF BARE LIFE NEUTRALIZES
REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL WHICH IS TOO DYNAMIC TO
BE CONSTRAINED BY POWER, AS IS PROVEN BY
HISTORICAL STRUGGLES
Neilson 2004
[Brett, University of Western Sydney, Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics,

Capitalism, Contretemps 5, December 2004,
www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/neilson.pdf, acc 1-7-04//uwyoajl]
In these articulations with Hardt, Negris disagreement with Agamben
stems from
an equation of constituent power with living labour and a refusal to
ground ontology
in the condition of bare life. If, in Empire, this quarrel with Agamben is
relatively
marginal (confined to footnotes and passing comments), it assumes
prominence in a
subsequent essay, Il mostro politico. Nuda vita e potenza. In this piece,
which traces
the philosophical and historical consequences of eugenics (from classical
Greece to
contemporary biotechnology), the concept of bare life is understood as
an ideological
device for neutralizing the transgressive potentiality of human existence.
Here Negris
criticism of Agamben is more rhetorical and direct:
Were the Vietnamese combatants or the blacks who revolted in the
ghettos naked?
Were the workers or the students of the 1970s naked? It doesnt seem so
if you look
at photos. At least if the Vietnamese werent denuded by napalm or the
students
hadnt decided to give witness naked as a sign of their freedom. 13
Human struggle, by this account, cannot be held ransom to the
biopolitical machine that
produces bare life. Even in the case of the Nazi camps, Negri contends, it
is mistaken to
equate bare life with powerlessness. The mussulmani (or denuded
concentration camp
victims) of whom Agamben writes in Remnants of Auschwitz (1999) are
humans before
they are naked. And to make bare life an absolute and assimilate it to
the horrors of
Nazism is a ruse of ideology:
Life and death in the camps represents nothing more than life and death
in the
campsan episode of the civil war of the twentieth century, a horrific
spectacle of
the destiny of capitalism and the ideological masking of its will, of the
capitalist
motive against every instance of liberty. 14
For Negri, the concept of bare life denies the potentiality of being. Like
Hobbess
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Leviathan, which promotes a vision of life as subjugated and unable to
resist, the theory of
bare life represents a kind of foundation myth for the capitalist
state. It is a cry of weakness
that constructs the body as a negative limit and licenses a nihilistic
view of history. More
pointedly, bare life is the opposite of Spinozan potential and corporeal
joy.15 With this
statement, Negri reaches the nub of his disagreement with Agamben. As
an alternative
to the Aristotelian notion of potentiality (as intrinsically and
paradoxically connected to
the act), he poses the Spinozan vision of potentiality (potenza) as the
unstoppable and
progressive expansion of desire (cupiditas). By this view, fully developed
by Negri in
The Savage Anomaly, the construction of politics is a process of
permanent innovation.
Desire is the determinant force of the constitution of the sociala
creative project that
is continually reopened and defined as absolute in this reopening. At
once conflictual
and constituent, desire in this analysis functions without lack and
provides the basis for
an absolute democracy that reaches beyond modern political
representation.
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EACH EXERCISE OF POWER IS CO-PRODUCTIVE WITH ITS
OWN IMMANENT RESISTANCE THAT USES IT AS ITS
TARGET, ALLOWING BETTER SUBVERSION THAN AN
ISOLATED REJECTION FROM THE OUTSIDE
Foucault 78
[Michel, God, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I, trans.
Robert Hurley, New York City: Random House, Vintage Books Edition,
95-6//uwyo-ajl]
-Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather
consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in
relation to power. Should it be said that one is always "inside" power,
there is no "escaping" it, there is no absolute outside where it is
concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? Or that,
history being the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of history, always
emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly
relational character of power relationships. Their existence depends on a
multiplicity of points of resistance:
these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power
relations. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the
power network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul
of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead
there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case:
resistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are
spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, ram-pant, or violent; still
others that are quick to compromise, interested, or sacrificial; by
definition, they can only exist in the strategic field of power relations.
But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound, forming
with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end
always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat. Resistances do not derive
from a few heterogeneous prin-ciples; but neither are they a lure or a
promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations
of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite.
Hence they too are distributed in irregular fash-ion: the points, knots, or
focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying
densities, at times mobiliz-ing groups or individuals in a definitive way,
inflaming certain points of the body, certain moments in life, certain
types of behavior. Are there no great radical ruptures, massive binary
divisions, then? Occasionally, yes. But more often one is dealing with
mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a
society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings,
furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding
them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds.
Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that
passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly
localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses
social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless the
strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a
revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state
relies on the institutional integration of power relationships.
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A2 Neilson Conclude Negative:

1AR
FIRST, NO HE DOESNT. HE ONLY SAYS THAT NEITHER
AUTHOR TAKES THE OTHER SERIOUSLY ON CERTAIN
POINTS, WHICH IS NON-RESPONSIVE TO THE ARGUMENT
THAT WERE MAKING
SECOND, EVEN IF AGAMBEN AVOIDS OUR ARGUMENT, THE
NEGATIVE CRITICISM DOESNT BECAUSE IT STILL POSITS
POWER AS BEING SO TOTAL THAT EVERY ACTION GETS
CO-OPTED, PREVENTING PRODUCTIVE RESISTANCE.
CROSS-APPLY NEILSON
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#11 Agamben Misunderstands

Sovereignty: 1AR
THEIR PICTURE OF THE CAMP OBSCURES THE DAILY
VIOLENCE OF SOVEREIGNTY
Hardt & Dumm 2000

Muse//uwyo-ajl]
TD: In that regard, my sense is that you both recognize the power of Giorgio
Agamben's argument in Homo Sacer concerning the extraordinary violence of
sovereignty at the end of modernity and yet you seek to overcome what may
(not too unjustly) be thought of as a terrifying passivity that his position could
result in.14.
MH: Our argument in Empire does share some central concerns with Agamben's
Homo Sacer, particularly surrounding the notions of sovereignty and biopower.
Agamben brilliantly elaborates a conception of modern sovereignty based on
Carl Schmitt's notions of the decision on the exception and the state of
emergency, in which the modern functioning of rule becomes a permanent state
of exception. He then links this conception to the figure of the banned or
excluded person back as far as ancient Roman law with his usual spectacular
erudition. The pinnacle and full realization of modern sovereignty thus becomes
the Nazi concentration camp: the zone of exclusion and exception is the heart of
modern sovereignty and grounds the rule of law. My hesitation with this view is
that by posing the extreme case of the concentration camp as the heart of
sovereignty it tends to obscure the daily violence of modern sovereignty in all its
forms. It implies, in other words, that if we could do away with the camp then all
the violence of sovereignty would also disappear.
BIOPOWER DOESNT EMERGE FROM THE SOVEREIGN, BUT

FROM SOCIAL RELATIONS THAT ARE BEYOND PLAN
Lazzarato no date
[Maurizio, From Biopower to Biopolitics, Trans. Ivan A. Ramirez,
www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/lazzarato_biopolitics.pdf, acc 1-7-05//uwyoajl]
Foucault needs a new political theory and a new ontology to describe
the new power relations expressed in the political economy of forces. In
effect, biopolitics are grafted and anchored upon a multiplicity of
disciplinary [de commandemant et d'obissance] relations between
forces,
those which power coordinates, institutionalizes, stratifies and targets,
but
that are not purely and simply projected upon individuals. The
fundamental
political problem of modernity is not that of a single source of sovereign
power, but that of a multitude of forces that act and react amongst each
other according to relations of command and obedience. The relations
between man and woman, master and student, doctor and patient,
employer
and worker, that Foucault uses to illustrate the dynamics of the social
body
are relations between forces that always involve a power relation. If
power,
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in keeping with this description, is constituted from below, then we need
an
ascending analysis of the constitution of power dispositifs, one that
begins
with infinitesimal mechanisms that are subsequently invested,
colonized,
utilized, involuted, transformed and institutionalized by ever more
general
mechanisms, and by forms of global domination.
Consequently, biopolitics is the strategic coordination of these power
relations in order to extract a surplus of power from living beings.
Biopolitics
is a strategic relation; it is not the pure and simple capacity to legislate
or
legitimize sovereignty. According to Foucault the biopolitical functions of
coordination and determination concede that biopower, from the
moment
it begins to operate in this particular manner, is not the true source of
power. Biopower coordinates and targets a power that does not properly
belong to it, that comes from the outside. Biopower is always born of
something other than itself.
291
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Sovereignty: Ext (1/2)
AGAMBEN IS WRONG. BIOPOWER IS DISPERSED THROUGH
SOCIETY, MAKING RESISTANCE POSSIBLE AND
UNDERMINING SOVEREIGN POWER
Lazzarato no date
[Maurizio, From Biopower to Biopolitics, Trans. Ivan A. Ramirez,

www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/lazzarato_biopolitics.pdf, acc 1-7-05//uwyoajl]
Agamben
2. Giorgio
, recently, in a book inscribed explicitly within the research being undertaken on the concept of
biopolitics, insisted that the theoretical and political distinction established in antiquity between zoe and bios, between natural life
and political life, between man as a living being [simple vivant] whose sphere of influence is in the home and man as a political
subject whose sphere of influence is in the polis, is now nearly unknown to us. The introduction of the zoe into the sphere of the
polis is, for both Agamben and Foucault, the decisive event of modernity; it marks a radical transformation of the political and
is this impossibility of distinguishing between

zoe and bios, between man as a living being and man as a political subject , the product of the
action of sovereign power or the result of the action of new forces over
which power has no control? Agambens response is very ambiguous
and it oscillates continuously between these two alternatives. Foucaults
response is entirely different: biopolitics is the form of government taken
by a new dynamic of forces that, in conjunction, express power relations
that the classical world could not have known. Foucault described this
dynamic, in keeping with the progress of his research, as the emergence of a multiple and
heterogeneous power of resistance and creation that calls every
organization that is transcendental, and every regulatory mechanism
that is extraneous, to its constitution radically into question. The birth of
biopower and the redefinition of the problem of sovereignty are only
comprehensible to us on this basis. Foucaults entire work leads toward
this conclusion even if he did not coherently explain the dynamic of this power, founded on the freedom of
subjects and their capacity to act upon the conduct of others, until the end of his life .
philosophical categories of classical thought. But
POWER ISNT STATE-CENTERED OR INSTITUTIONAL BUT

RATHER, A MULTIPLICITY OF DISPERSED SOCIAL FORCES
Foucault 78
92-3//uwyo-ajl]
Hence the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowl-edge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of
word power is apt to lead to a number of misunderstandings. By power, I do not mean "Power"
as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience
of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of
subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I
do not have in mind a general system of domi-nation exerted by one
group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body.
The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the
sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a
domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal
forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in the first
instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in
which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless strug-gles
power. But the
misunderstandings with re-spect to its nature, its form, and its unity
and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus
forming a chain or a system, or on the con-trary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and
lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystalliza-tion is embodied in the state
apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies
possibility,
. Power's condi-tion of
or in any case the viewpoint which permits one to understand its exercise, even in its more "peripheral"
effects, and which also makes it possible to use its mech-anisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order,
must not be
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sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of
sovereignty from which secondary and de-scendent forms would
emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of
their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and
unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but
it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point,
because
or rather in
every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it em-braces everything, but because it comes from
everywhere. and "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that
emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that I;ests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their move-ment. One
power is not an institution, and not a structure;
needs to be nominalistic, 110 doubt:

neither
is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attrib-utes to a complex strategical situation in a particular
society
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Sovereignty: Ext (2/2)
BIOPOWER OCCURS IN THE SHIFT TO POPULAR
ADMINISTRATION AND ISNT LOCATED IN THE SOVEREIGN
Foucault 78
135-7//uwyo-ajl]
For a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to
decide life and death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria potestas
that granted the father of the Roman family the right to "dispose" of the life of his children
and his slaves; just as he had given them life, so he could take it away. By the time the right
of life and death was framed by the classi-cal theoreticians, it was in a considerably
diminished form. It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign over his
subjects could be exercised in an absolute and un-conditional way, but only in cases where
the sovereign's very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he were
threatened by external enemies who sought to over-throw him or contest his rights, he could
then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state;
without "directly proposing their death," he was empowered to "expose their life": in this
sense, he wielded an "indirect" power over them of life and death. I But if someone dared to
rise up against him and transgress his laws, then he could exercise a direct power
over the offender's life: as punishment, the latter would be put to death.
Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute
privilege: it was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and his own
survival. Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer to the prince of the natural right
possessed by every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death of others? Or
should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested with the formation of that new
juridical being, the sovereign?2 ln any case, in its modern form-relative and limited-as in its
ancient and absolute form, the right of life and death is a dlissymmetrical one.
The sovereigm exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by
refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was
capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the "power of life
and death" was in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after
all, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be re -ferred to a
historical type of society in which Power was exercised mainly as a
means of deduction (prelewement), a subtraction meclhanism, a right to appropriate a
portion of the wealth, a tax: of products, goods and services, labor and blood, levied on. the
subjects. Power in this instance was essentially a riglht of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and
ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.
Since the classical age the West has undergome a very profound
transformation of these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" hasl tended to be no
longer the major form of power but merelly one element among others, wlorking to incite,
reinforce, control" monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on
generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than
one Idedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying
them. There has been a Parallel shift in the right of death, (or at least a tendency to align
itself with the exigencies of a life-adminis-tering power and to define itself accordingly. This
death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now mamifested as
simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or
deveIop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth
century, and, all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their
own populations. But this formidable power of death -and this is perhaps what
accounts for part of its force and the cynicisom with which it has so greatly expanded its
limits -now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a
positive influence on life, that endeawors to administer, optimize, and

multiply it, subjecting it to Iprecise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no
Ronger waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on 1behalf
of the existence of everyone:; entire popula-tions are mobilized for the purpose of wholes:ale
slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as manage:rs of
life and survival, of bodies amd the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so
many wars, causing so' many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as
the technology of wars bias caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the
decision that initiattes them and the one that terminaltes them are in fact increa:singly
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informed by the naked questtion of survival. The atomilc situation is now at the end point of
this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power
to guarantee an irudividual's con-tinued existence. The principle underlying tbie tactics of
bat-tle-that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living-has become the principle
that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in question is no longer the
juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a

population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a
recent returm of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the
level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomema of population.
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#13 Praxis: 1AR

PROTEST ISNT ENOUGH MUST LINK IT TO PRACTICE
AND DEMANDS ON THE STATE OR WE LAPSE INTO
POLITICAL PARALYSIS IN THE FACE OF OPPRESSION
Foucault 82
Trans. Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 377//uwyo-ajl]
Q. And this is hard to situate within a struggle that is already under way,
because the lines are drawn by others. . . . M.F. Yes, but I think that
ethics is a practice; ethos is a manner of being. Let's take an example
that touches us all, that of Poland. If we raise the question of Poland in
strictly political terms, it's clear that we quickly reach the point of
saying that there's nothing we can do. We can't dispatch a team of paratroopers, and we can't send armored cars to liberate Warsaw. I think
that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I think we also agree that,
for ethical reasons, we have to raise the problem of Poland in the form of
a nonacceptance of what is. happening there, and a nonacceptance of
the passivity of our own governments. I think this attitude is an ethical
one, but it is also political; it does not consist in saying merely, "I
protest," but in making of that attitude a political phenomenon that is as
substantial as possible, and one which those who govern, here or there,
will sooner or later be obliged to take into account.
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#14 Liberalism Doesnt Cause

Exception: 1AR
AGAMBEN HAS NO JUSTIFICATION FOR THE
INDISTINCTION BETWEEN THE FOUNDING AND
CONTINUED OPERATION OF THE LAW
Deranty 2004
grounding in the political is just the result of a theoretical

decision, and the alternatives should be confronted more explicitly. This lack of a substantial engagement with other legal
alternatives becomes obvious a few pages later, when Agamben analyses once more the specific problem of the
35. But this
application of the law. When he writes that "in the case of the juridical norm, the reference to the concrete case supposes a
"process" that always implies a plurality of subjects, and that culminates in the last instance in the enunciation of a sentence, that
is to say, a statement whose operative reference to reality is guaranteed by institutional powers" (Agamben 2003: 69), he
simply formulates a classical distinction that can receive an entirely

different treatment with no less plausibility. A recent philosophical
solution to the gap between justification and application has been
famously given by Habermas (1990 and 1996). Chapters 5 and 6 of Between facts and norms in particular provide an
excellent overview of plausible alternatives to Schmitts decisionistic theory of adjudication, from Kelsen to Critical Legal Studies.
Agamben cannot simply use the fact that "the application of a

norm is not contained in it" as leading directly to the theory of the state
of exception, since from the very same premise another form of political
grounding of the legal could be advanced, one, for instance, that focuses on
intersubjectivity and the institutionalisation of dissensus. The "violence" that realizes
36. But then
the statement is not necessarily "without logos". For Schmitt, it draws its authority from the political, that is, the logos of the polis
as ethnos; for another tradition, it would do so from the logos of intersubjectively constituted and essentially contested
institutions
RIGHTS ONLY JUSTIFY EXCLUSION IF THEYRE ABSTRACT

MODERNITY DISTILLS THEM INTO UNIVERSAL CITIZENSHIP
PREVENTING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION
Deranty 2004
. Agamben
17
quotes Arendts critical conclusion: the conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a
human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted
with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human (Arendt 1966:
fails to quote the very next line, which makes all the
difference: "The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of
the human being" (Arendt 1966: 299).
18. What Arendt means is that only when they are realised in a political
"commonwealth" do human rights have any meaning. They are an
abstraction otherwise. More important than the right to freedom or the right
to justice is "the right to have rights", that is, to be the member of a
political community. Arendt therefore asserts the opposite of what
Agamben wants to say: she believes that the political solution lies in what he considers to
be a fiction, namely the citizen. Her point is that when man and citizen come apart, we realise that man never
really existed as a subject of rights. This is the exact opposite of
Agamben for whom the citizen is just a travesty.
299; Agamben 1998: 126). But he
19. Despite this opposition, Agamben borrows Arendts critical interpretation of the French revolution and modernity in general,
human rights
lose all significance if they are not reinscribed within a political
even though this interpretation itself is not beyond doubt. The French declaration makes it clear that
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community that transforms them into constitutional principles, and the American
constitution also defines a clear link between individual freedom and a political order whose goal is freedoms protection. Yet,
Agamben reads the first article of the Declaration of 1789, "all men are born and remain free and equal in rights" as proof that
.
Birth here refers not to nationality, but simply to the fundamental fact of
the equality of all human beings in right. The term effectuates the
radical break with ancient and absolutist natural law, a break that is synonymous with
modern sovereign power applies to bare life, here in the form of birth (Agamben 1995: 128). But this seems disingenuous
legal modernity. In ancient natural law, rights were associated with the social position or the notion of a perfect cosmic order
underpinned by God
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Agamben Collapses the State

AGAMBENS ALTERNATIVE MAKES NO SENSE ON A PUBLIC
LEVEL THE NET RESULT IS COMMUNITIES AT WAR WITH
THE STATE WHICH WOULD COLLAPSE THE STATE
Cmiel, Prof of Cultural History @ Iowa, 96 (Kenneth, The Fate of the Nation and the
Withering of the State, American Literary History, Spring, P. 196,
http://alh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/8/1/184)
If community cannot be a closed thing, if it is forever open to the potentially
new, then the dream of a national community is simply impossible. In
Agamben's community, the idea of something being "un-American" makes no
sense, for there is no defining essence in a "whatever singularity." Yet Agamben
is also aware that capitalism and the state will continue. Indeed, he recognizes that after the
fall of Communism, they are sweeping the globe. Politics, in the future, Agamben argues, will not be community building
but the perpetual project of communities against the state, "a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity),
I doubt
Agamben's new community is actually coming. It remains far from clear that
communities without identities are emerging anywhere except in the febrile
imaginations of a few philosophers. It is not that I dislike the dream. It is for me the most attractive
dream there is. It is that I am skeptical that such "whatever singularities" are possible on
more than the level of personal behavior. Politics is too clunky for such subtlety.
Even the new social movements seem far more down-to-earth and prone to
defining themselves than Agamben's theorizing. Politics , alas, xdemands more
leaden language. Still, the image of the state fighting communities is one worth pondering. Its distance from
earlier welfare state thinking could not be more dramatic. Instead of the state embodying the will of
the nation, we have a picture of numerous communities at war with the
state. It is, and I say this with no relish, a far more plausible picture of our emerging politics than Walzer's happy
pluralism. Just think of insurance companies, Perotistas, and gay and lesbian
activistsall communities distrustful of the state, all committed to struggling
with the state. Agamben does not ask what this perpetual warfare will do to government. Like Walzer, he
assumes that the state will trudge on as before. Yet if this warfare between
humanity and the state is constant, is it not plausible to surmise that hostility to
the state will become permanent? With the fiction that the state embodies the
nation's will dying, who will defend the state? Who will keep it from becoming
the recipient of increasing rancor and from being permanently wobbly? Isn't that
a good way of understanding recent politics in the US? And as for Agamben's own Italy the
an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization" (84).
past decade has revealed a public far more disgusted with the state than even in America.
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**Foucault**
Foucault Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, PLAN IS NECESSARY FOR THE ALTERNATIVE
BECAUSE IT CHALLENGES A MORE VIOLENT FORM OF
UNILATERAL BIOPOWER. THIS CREATES A DOUBLE BIND:
EITHER THE END RESULT OF THE ALT IS PLAN AND
THERES NO LINK DIFFERENTIAL OR IT DOES THE STATUS
QUO AND DOESNT SOLVE
SECOND, PERM: DO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE OUR
ADVOCACY IS THE FIRST TEMPORARY EXPRESSION OF THE
CRITIQUE ALTERNATIVE. REFORM IS NECESSARY TO
ENGAGE THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Foucault, French Sociologist, 1988
(Michel, On Criticism in Michel Foucault: Politics Philosophy Culture Interviews

and other writings 1977- 1984)
D.E. You mean it will be possible to work with this government?
FOUCAULT: We must escape from the dilemma of being either for or against . After all, it is
possible to face up to a government and remain standing. To work with a govern ment implies neither subjection nor total acceptance. One may work with it and
yet be restive. I even believe that the two things go together.
D.E. After Michel Foucault the critic, are we now going to see Michel Foucault the reformist? After all, the reproach was often made that the
criticism made by intellectuals leads to nothing.
FOUCAULT First Ill answer the point about that leads to nothing. There are hundreds and thousands of people who have worked for the
emergence of a number of problems that are now on the agenda. To say that this work produced nothing is quite wrong. Do you think that twenty
years ago people were considering the problems of the relationship between mental illness and psychological normality, the problem of prison,
the problem of medical power, the problem of the relationship between the sexes, and so on, as they are doing today?
Furthermore, there are no reforms as such. Reforms are not produced in the air, independently of those who carry them out. One cannot not take
account of those who will have the job of carrying out this transformation.
And, then, above all, I believe that an opposition can be made between critique and transformation, ideal critique and real transformation.
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of
familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.
We must free ourselves from the sacrilization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human
life and in human relations as thought. Thought exists independently of systems and structures of discourse. It is something that is often hidden,
but which always animates everyday behavior. There is always a little thought even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even
in silent habits.
Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show
that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be
accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult .
In these circumstances, criticism (and radical criticism) is absolutely indispensable for any transformation. A transformation that remains within
the same mode of thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjusting the same thought more closely to the reality of things can merely be
a superficial transformation.
as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought

them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible.
On the other hand,
It is not therefore a question of there being a time for criticism and a time for transformation, nor people who do the criticism and others who do
the transforming, those who are enclosed in an inaccessible radicalism and those who are forced to make the necessary concessions to reality. In
the work of deep transformation can only be carried out in a free

atmosphere, one constantly agitated by a permanent criticism .
fact I think
D.E. But do you think the intellectual must have a programmatic role in this transformation?
A reform is never only the result of a process in which there is conflict
FOUCAULT
,
confrontation, struggle, resistance
To say to oneself at the outset: what reform will I be able to carry out? That is not, I believe, an aim for the intellectual to pursue. His role, since
he works specifically in the realm of thought, is to see how far the liberation of thought can make those transformations urgent enough for people
to want to carry them out and difficult enough to carry out for them to be profoundly rooted in reality.
It is a question of making conflicts more visible, of making them more essential

than mere confrontations of interests or mere institutional immobility. Out of these conflicts, these
confrontations, a new power relation must emerge, whose first, temporary expression
will be a reform. If at the base there has not been the work of thought upon itself and if, in fact, modes of thought, that is to say
modes of action, have not been altered, whatever the project for reform, we know that it will be swamped, digested by modes of behavior and
institutions that will always be the same.
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THIRD, NO LINK PLAN DOESNT EXERCISE POWER OVER

THE BODIES AT GUANTANAMO. IT ONLY OVERRULES ONE
ASPECT OF DETAINMENT
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FOURTH, NO IMPACT FOUCAULT DOESNT SAY THAT
BIOPOWER IS NECESSARILY BAD, BUT THAT ITS
DANGEROUS. PLAN IS AN INSANTIATION OF POWER
CREATING ITS OWN RESISTENCE, CHALLENGING VIOLENCE
FIFTH, DEMANDS ON THE STATE ARE MORE EFFECTIVE
THAN RADICAL REJECTION THEIR ALTERNATIVES FEAR
OF COOPTION PARALYZES POLITICAL PRAXIS ONLY
THROUGH THE DEMANDS OF THE PLAN CAN WE CHANGE
THE SYSTEM
Zizek, Senior Researcher @ Libjulian, Slovenia, 98
The dialectical tension between the vulnerability and invulnerability of the system also enables us to denounce the
ultimate racist and/or sexist trick, that of 'two birds in the bush instead of a bird in hand": when women demand dimple
equality, quasi -"feminists" often pretend to offer them "much more" (the role of the warm and wise "conscience of
society/'elevated above the vulgar everyday competition and struggle for domination...)- the only proper answer to this
offer, of course. Is "no, thanks! Better is the enemy of the good! We do not want more, just equality!" Here, at least, the
last lines in Now Voyager ("why reach for the moon. When we. Can have the stars?") Are wrong. It is homologous with the
Native American who wants to become integrated into the predominant "white" society, and a politically correct
progressive liberal endeavors to convince him that he is thereby renouncing his very unique prerogative, the authentic
native culture and tradition- no thanks, simple equality is enough, I also wouldn't mind my part of consumerist alienation!
A modest demand of the excluded group for the full participation at the society's
is much more threatening for the system than the apparently much
more "radical" rejection of the predominant social values" and the assertion of the
...
universal rights
superiority of one's own culture. For a true feminist, Otto Weininger's assertion that, although women are "ontologically
false." lacking the proper ethical stature, they should be acknowledged the same rights as men in public life, is infinitely
more acceptable than the false elevation of' women that makes them 'too good" for the banality of men's rights. Finally,
is not that every opposition, every attemot at subversion is

automatically "co-opted." On the contrary, the very fear of being co-opted that
makes us search for more and more radical, "pure" attitudes, is the supreme
strategy of suspension or marginalization. The point is rather that true subversion is not always where it
seems to be sometimes. A small distance is much more explosive for the system that an
ineffective radical rejection. In religion. A small heresy can be more threatening than
an outright atheism or passage to another religion; for a hardline Stalinist, a
Trotskyite is infinitely more threatening than a bourgeois liberal or social
democrat. As Le Carre put it, one true revisionist in the Central Committees is worth
more than thousand dissidents outside it. It was easy to dismiss Gorbachev for
aim ing only at improving the system, making it more efficient - he nonetheless
set in motion its disintegration. So one should also bear in mind the obverse of the inherent transgression:
the point about inherent transgression
one is tempted to paraphrase Freuds claim from the Ego and the Id that man is not only much more immoral than he
believes, but also much more moral than he knows - the system is not only infinitely more resistant and
invulnerable than it may appear (it can co-opt apparently subversive strategies, they can serve as its support), it is also
infinitely more vulnerable (a small revision etc. Can have large unforeseen
catastrophic consequences).
SIXTH, FOUCAULDIAN CRITIQUE DENIES AGENCY BY

IGNORING ANY SOCIAL JUSTICE OR USEFUL HUMAN
ACTION
Cook, Associate Professor at Georgetown Law, NEW ENGLAND LAW REVIEW,
Spring, 1992
Anthony
Unless we are to be trapped in this Foucaultian moment of postmodern insularity, we must resist the temptation to sever description from
explanation. Instead, our objective should be to explain what we describe in light of a vision embracing values that we make explicit in struggle.
values should act as magnets that link our particularized struggles to other
struggles and more global critiques of power. In other words, we must not, as Foucault seems all too
These
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forsake the possibility of more universal narratives that, while tempered by
attempt to say and do something about the oppressive world in which we
live. Second, Foucault's emphasis on the techniques and discourses of knowledge that
constitute the human subject often diminishes, if not abrogates, the role of human
agency. Agency is of tremendous importance in any theory of oppression,
because individuals are not simply constituted by systems of knowledge but also
constitute hegemonic and counter-hegemonic systems of knowledge as well.
Critical theory must pay attention to the ways in which oppressed people not
only are victimized by ideologies of oppression but the ways they craft from
these ideologies and discourses counter-hegemonic weapons of liberation.
willing to do,
postmodern insights,
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SEVENTH, NO ALTERNATIVE FOUCAULDIAN POWER IS SO
ALL ENCOMPASSING THAT NO BREAK FROM CO-OPTATION
IS POSSIBLE
EIGHTH, FOUCAULT MISUNDERSTANDS POWER LIBERAL
SOCIETY IS SUBSTANTIVELY DIFFERENT FROM
INTERNMENT
Walzer, Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies & Former
Professor at Harvard, 1983 (Michael, The Politics of Michel Foucault, Dissent, Fall)
For it is Foucault's claim, and I think he is partly right, that the discipline of a prison,
say, represents a continuation and intensification of what goes on in more
ordinary places-and wouldn't be possible if it didn't. So we all live to a time schedule,
get up to an alarm, work to a rigid routine, live in the eye of authority, are periodically
subject to examination and inspection. No one is entirely free from these new
forms of social control. It has to be added, however, that subjection to these new
forms is not the same thing as being in prison: Foucault tends systematically to
underestimate the difference, and this criticism, which I shall want to develop, goes
to the heart of his politics.
NINTH, THEIR TOTALIZING CRITICISM OF POWER

PREVENTS REFORMWE MUST USE THE STATE FOR
INCREMENTAL ENDS.
Faubian, professor of anthro @ Rice University, Michel Foucault:
Power, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume 3, 1994, p. xxxi-xxxii
James D.
Foucault wanted, then, to move both the descriptive and prescriptive functions
of political analysis away from the juridico-discursive language of legitimation.
To try to put the matter as simply as possible: he does not think that all power is
evil or all government unacceptable, but does think that theorems claiming to
confer legitimacy on power or government are fictions; in a lecture of 1979, he
expresses sympathy with the view of earlier political skeptics that civil society
is a bluff and the social contract a fairy tale. This does not mean that the
subject matter of political philosophy is evacuated, for doctrines of legitimation
have been and may still act as political forces in history. But his analytic quarrel
with legitimation theory is that it can divert us from considering the terms in
which modern government confers rationality, and thus possible acceptability,
on its activity and practice. This is the main reason why he argues political
analysis is still immature, having still not cut off the kings head.1o The
deployment and application of law is, for Foucault, like everything else, not good
or evil in itself, capable of acting in the framework of liberalism as an instrument
for economizing and moderating the interventions of governmental power,
necessary as an indispensable restraint on power in some contexts, uses, and
guises; it is to be resisted as an encroaching menace in others. In his
governmentality lectures, Foucault investigates the evolution, from the era of
the police states through the development of parliamentary liberal government,
of the ambiguous and dangerous hybridization of law with a rationality of
security and with new theories of social solidarity and social defense. This
historical analysis and diagnosis informs Foucaults commentary on the civil
liberties politics of seventies France, with its distinctive contemporary
recrudescence of raison detat and the police state. But at the same time, in a
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way we tend not to think of as typically French, he dryly mocked and debunked
the excesses of what he called state phobiathe image of the contemporary
state as an agency of essential evil and limitless despotism. The state, he said,
does not have a unitary essence or indeed the importance commonly ascribed
to it: what are important to study are the multiple governmental practices that
are exercised through its institutions and elsewhere. (In a lecture describing the
seventeenth-century theory of raison detat, Foucault characterized it as a
doctrine of the permanent coup detata piquant choice of phrase, because it
had been the title of a polemical book written against de Gaulle by Francois
Mitterrand. We know that Foucault did not share the view, common in the French
Left, of de Gaulles government as an antidemocratic putsch with crypto-fascistic
tendencies. The Left, he also suggested, should expect to win elected power
not by demonizing the state (never a very convincing platform for a socialist
party) but by showing it possessed its own conception of how to govern.
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#2 Perm: 1AR
PERM SOLVES BEST - MICROPOLITICS AND LARGER
STRUGGLES AGAINST OPPRESSION SHOULD BE
COMBINED, CREATING A RADICAL REFORMISM IN
OPPOSITION TO TOTALIZING POLITICS
May 93
[Todd, Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and
Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1993, 118//wfi-ajl]
The risk of a totalizing theory of politics is that it will unsuspectingly
promote what it struggles against, because it is ignorant of oppressions
at the micropolitical level. The alternative to this, though, is not a
bourgeois reformism but what one critic has called a "radical reformism"
(Gandal 1986, p. 122). This radical reformism recognizes both that a
change of power which comes solely at the top hazards a repetition of
the old forms of domination and that not just any small reform will
change micropolitical domination. Instead, what the radical reformist
seeks are changes at the micropolitical level which actually change the
relations of power between groups. Those changes involve very different
types of struggle, depending upon the situation of the groups involved.
They cannot be cast in a common form or be reduced to a common goal.
But they possess a solidarity that derives from a complementarity
investing all struggles against domination under capitalism. I ,
Micropolitical struggles do not replace the struggle against exploitation,
and no one of them can be substituted for the others. What binds them
is the recognition that in the modern epoch power operates in many and
diffuse ways, and that to end the domination of such power is a matter
of many independent but mutually reinforcing struggles both at the
micropolitical and the macropoliticallevel. And thus, there is a need for
the kinds of analyses which are situated not in the region of general
political theory, but in the domains of struggles which occur both
beneath and across that region. "I am attempting. . . apart from any
totalization-which would be at once abstract and limiting-to open up
problems that are as concrete and general as possible, problems that
approach politics from behind and cut across societies on the diagonal,
problems that are at once constituents of our history and constituted by
that history" (Foucault 1984b, pp. 375-76).
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Juxtaposition Solves: 1AR (1/2)

WE SHOULD JUXTAPOSE FOUCAULDIAN CRITICISM IN
OPPOSITION TO THE IDEAS HE CRITICIZES
Cook 92
[Anthony E., prof at Georgetown School of Law, New England Law Review,
1992, LN//wfi-ajl]
Thus, Foucault has prompted an entirely different approach to social
criticism. Rejecting modernist attempts to develop master narratives in
the fashion of Hegel, Marx, and Kant, Foucault instructs us to "develop
action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and
disjunction, and to prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over
uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems." n14
"Believe," he advises us, "that what is productive is not sedentary but
nomadic." n15
JUXTAPOSITION OF INCOMPATIBLE IDEAS AVOIDS THE

PROBLEMS OF TRADITIONAL THEORY AND ENABLES A
PROCESS OF CONSTANT CRITICISM
Marcus '98
[George E., Professor of Anthro at Rice University, Ethnography through
Thick and Thin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, 1867//uwyo-ajl]
The postmodern notions of heterotopia (Foucault), juxtapositions, and
the blocking together of incommensurables (Lyotard) have served to
renew the long-neglected practice of comparison in anthropology, but in
altered ways. Juxtapositions do not have the obvious meta-logic of older
styles of comparison in anthropology (e.g., controlled comparisons within
a cultural area or "natural" geographical region); rather, they emerge
from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose controus
are not known beforehand, but are themselves a contribution of making
an account which has different, complexly connected real-world sites of
investigation. The postmodern object of study is ultimately mobile and
multiply situated, so any ethnography of such an object will have a
comparative dimension that is integral to it, in the form of juxtapositions
of seeming incommensurables or phenomena that might conventionally
have appeared to be "world apart." Comparison reenters the very act of
ethnographic specificity by a postmodern vision of seemingly improbably
juxtapositions, the global collapsed into and made and integral part of a
parallel, related local situations rather than something monolithic and
external to them. This move toward comparison as heterotopia firmly
deterritorializes culture in ethnographic writing and simulates accounts
of cultures composed in a landscape for which there is as yet no
developed theoretical comparison
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Juxtaposition Solves: 1AR (2/2)

JUXTAPOSING FOUCAULDIAN ACCOUNTS OF POWER WITH
TRADITIONAL SOVEREIGN MODELS EXPOSES
DISCIPLINARY RELATIONS
Boyle 97
[James, Prof. Law at Washington College of Law, Foucault in
Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hardwired Censors,
University of Cincinatti Law Review, Fall, LN//wfi-ajl]
From the point of view of this Article, one of Foucault's most interesting
contributions was to challenge a particular notion of power, power-assovereignty, and to juxtapose against it a vision of "surveillance" and
"discipline." n21 At the heart of this project was a belief that both our
analyses of the operation of political power and our strategies for its
restraint or limitation were inaccurate or misguided. In a series of essays
and books Foucault argued that, rather than the public and formal
triangle of sovereign, citizen, and right, we should focus on a series of
subtler private, informal, and material forms of coercion organized
around the concepts of surveillance and discipline. The paradigm for the
idea of surveillance was the Panopticon, Bentham's plan for a prison
constructed in the shape of a wheel around the hub of an observing
warden. At any moment the warden might have the prisoner under
observation through a nineteenth century version of the closed-circuit
TV. n22 Unsure when authority might in fact be watching, the prisoner
would strive always to conform his behavior to its presumed desires.
Bentham had hit upon a behavioralist equivalent of the superego,
formed from uncertainty about when one was being observed by the
powers that be. The echo of contemporary laments about the "privacyfree state" is striking. To this, Foucault added the notion of disciplinecrudely put, the multitudinous private methods of regulation of
individual behavior ranging from workplace time-and-motion efficiency
directives to psychiatric evaluation. n23
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#5 Demands on the State Good:

1AR (1/4)
OUR DEMAND TURNS THE TABLES ON THE BIOPOLITICAL
APPARATUS. WE UTILIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN
FREEDOM AND CONTROL TO ARTICULATE A SERIES OF
DEMANDS WHICH ARE A STRATEGIC REVERSAL OF POWER
RELATIONS
Campbell, Prof of IR @ Newcastle U, 98 (David, Writing Security, September 1, P.
203-5)
The answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. I suggested above in a tentative way how we might think differently
Were those possibilities explored, the

boundaries of American identity and the realm of the political would be very
different from that which currently predominates, for the distinction between
what counts as normal and what is thus pathological would have been
refigured. Besides, the evident differences in emergent discourse of danger demonstrates how even those
about some issues pertinent to United States Foreign Policy.
articulations with the most affinity do not mechanically reproduce a monolithic identity. Of course, the pursuit of new
possibilities through different interpretations is often strongly contested. Even recommendations to redirect political
practices so as to confront new challenges sometimes do not escape old logic. For example, the effort to address
environmental issues within the parameters of international relations and nation security often involves simply extending
the old registry of security to cover his new domain. Usually signified by the appropriation of the metaphor of war to a
new problem, this is evident in some of the literature that advocates the importance of global cooperation and
management to counter environmental degradation, where ecological danger often replaces fading military threats as
the basis of an interpretation designed to sustain sovereignty. 35 Yet as I noted in Chapter 7, environmental danger can
As a danger that
can be articulated in terms of security strategies that are de-territorialized,
involve communal cooperation, and refigure economic relationships, the
environment can serve to enframe a different rendering of the political.
also be figured in a manner that challenges traditional forms of American and western identity.
Recognizing the possibility of rearticulating danger leads us to a final question: what modes of being and forms of life
could we or should we adopt? To be sure, a comprehensive attempt to answer such a question is beyond the ambit of this
book. But it is important to note that asking the question in this way mistakenly implies that such possibilities exist only
the extensive and intensive nature of the relations of power

associated with the society of security means that there has been and remains a
not inconsiderable freedom to explore alternative possibilities. While traditional
analyses of power are often economistic and negative, Foucaults understanding
of power emphasizes its productive and enabling nature. 36 Even more
important, his understanding of power emphasizes the ontology of freedom
presupposed by the existence of disciplinary and normalizing practices . Put simply,
in the future. Indeed,
there cannot be relations of power unless subjects are in the first instance free: the need to institute negative and
constraining power practices comes about only because without them freedom would abound. Were there no possibility
of freedom, subjects would not act in a way that required containment so as to effect order. 37 Freedom, though, is not
because it is only through power that subjects

exercise their agency, freedom and power cannot be separated . As Foucault maintains: At
the absence of power. ON the contrary,
the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the
intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential freedom, it would be better to speak of an agonism of
a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle: less of a face-to-face confrontation which
paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation. 38 The political possibilities enable by permanent provocation of
power and freedom can be specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the bio-power
discussed above. In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in western nations have been
increasingly directed towards modes of being and forms of life such that sexual conduct has become an object of
concern, individual health has been figured as a domain of discipline, and the family has been transformed into an
instrument of government the ongoing agonism between those practices and the freedom of the counter demands
drawn from those new fields of concern. For example, as the state continues to prosecute people according to sexual
orientation, human rights activist have proclaimed the right of gays to enter into formal marriages, adopt children, and
These claims are a

consequence of the permanent provocation of power and freedom in biopolitics,
and stand as testament to the strategic reversibility of power relations: if the
terms of governmental practices can be made into focal points for resistances,
then the history of government as the conduct of conduct is interwoven with
the history of dissenting counter-conducts Indeed, the emergence of the state as the major
receive the same health and insurance benefits granted to their straight counterparts.
articulation of the political has involved an unceasing agonism between those in office and those they rule. State
intervention in everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the result of which has been both resistance to the
state and new claims upon the state. In particular, the core of what we now call citizenship consists of multiple
bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of there struggle over means of state action, especially in the
making of war. In more recent times, constituencies associated with womens, youth, ecological, and peace movements
(among others) have also issued claims on society. These resistances are evidence that the break with the discursive /
non discursive dichotomy central to the logic of interpretation underlining this analysis is (to put in conventional terms)
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not only theoretically licensed; it is empirically warranted.. Indeed, expanding the interpretive imagination so as to
enlarge the categories through which we understand the constitution of the political has been a necessary precondition
for making sense of Foreign Policys concern for the ethical borders of identity in America. Accordingly, there are manifest
political implications that flow from theorizing identity. As Judith Butler concluded: The deconstruction of identity is not
the deconstruction of politics; rather it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated.
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Kritik Answers

1AR (2/4)
FOUCAULT'S MODEL OF POWER DOOMS EVERY
RESISTANCE TO INEVITABLE CO-OPTATION BECAUSE OF A
LACK OF SUBJECTIVITY ANTAGONISM EXCEEDS ITS
POSITIVE HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS AND CAN BREAK
THE POWER CYCLE BY USING THE EDIFICE'S EXCESS
AGAINST ITSELF
Zizek '99
[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and
Badass, The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology,
New York: Verso, 1999, 256-7//uwyo-ajl]
Against Butler, one is thus tempted to emphasize that Hegel was well aware of the retroactive
process by means of which oppressive power itself generates the form of
resistance is not this very paradox contained in Hegel's notion of positing the
presuppositions, that is, of how the activity of positing-mediating does not merely elaborate
the presupposed immediate-natural Ground, but thoroughly transforms the very core of its
identity? The very In-itself to which Chechens endeavour to return is already mediatedposited by the process of modernization, which deprived them of their ethnic roots.

of resisting it however, it is also possible to give it precisely the opposite reading. That
is to say: if we ground our resistance to imperialist Eurocentrism in the reference
to some kernel of previous ethnic identity, we automatically adopt the
position of a victim resisting modernization, of a passive object on which imperialist
procedures work. If, however, we conceive our resistance as an excess that
results from the way brutal imperialist intervention disturbed our previous self-enclosed
identity, our position becomes much stronger, since we can claim that
our
resistance is grounded in the inherent dynamics of the imperialist
system that the imperialist system itself, through its inherent antagonism,
activates the forces that will bring about its demise. (The situation here is
strictly homologous to that of how to ground feminine resistance: if woman is 'a symptom of
man', the locus at which the inherent antagonisms of the patriarchal symbolic order emerge,
this in no way constrains the scope of feminine resistance but provides it with an even
stronger detonating force.) Or to put it in yet another way the premise according to
which resistance to power is inherent and immanent to the power edifice

(in the sense that it is generated by the inherent dynamic of the power edifice) in no way
obliges us to draw the conclusion that every resistance is co-opted in
advance, including in the eternal game Power plays with itself the key point is that
through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very
inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which
leads to its own ultimate downfall.
It seems that such a notion of antagonism is what Foucault lacks: from the
fact that every resistance is generated ('posited') by the Power edifice itself, from this
absolute inherence of resistance to Power, he seems to draw the conclusion that resistance is
co-opted in advance, that it cannot seriously undermine the system that is, he
precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent
to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In
short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its
cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is
as such absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. (the
philosophical point to be made here is that this is the fundamental feature of the dialecticalmaterialist notion of 'effect': the effect can 'outdo' its cause; it can be ontologically 'higher'
than its cause.) One is thus tempted to reverse the Foucauldian notion of an allencompassing power edifice which always-already contains its transgression, that which
allegedly eludes it: what if the price to be paid is that the power mechanism cannot even
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control itself, but has to rely on an obscene protuberance at its very heart? In other words:
what effectively eludes the controlling grasp of Power is not so much the
external In-itself it tries to dominate but, rather, the obscene supplement
which sustains its own operation.
And this is why Foucault lacks the appropriate notion of the subject: the
subject is by definition in excess over its cause, and as such it emerges
with the reversal of the repression of sexuality into the sexualization of
the repressive measures themselves. This insufficiency of Foucault's theoretical
edifice can be discerned in the way, in his early History of Madness, he is already oscillating
between two radically opposed views: the view that madness is not simply a phenomenon
that exists in itself and is only secondarily the object of discourses, but is itself the product of
a multitude of (medical, legal, biological...) discourses about itself; and the opposite view,
according to which one should 'liberate' madness from the hold exerted over it by these
discourses , and 'let madness itself speak'.
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Kritik Answers

1AR (3/4)
FOUCAULT IGNORES THE WAY THAT THE POWER EDIFICE
IS SPLIT FROM WITHIN AND HOW THE ITS DISAVOWED
FOUNDATION CAN UNDERMINE IT
Zizek '97
[Slavoj, The Game, The Plague Fantasies, NYC: Verso, 1997, 267//uwyo-ajl]
We are now in a position to specify the distinction between the
Foucauldian interconnection between Power and resistance, and our
notion of ìnherent transgression'. Let us begin via the matrix of the
possible relations between Law and its transgression. The most
elementary is the simple relation of externality, of external opposition, in
which transgression is directly opposed to legal Power, and poses a
threat to it. The next step is to claim that transgression hinges on the
obstacle it violates: without Law there is no transgression; transgression
needs an obstacle in order to assert itself. Foucault, of course, in Volume
I of The History of Sexuality, rejects both these versions, and asserts the
absolute immanence of resistance to Power. However, the point of
ìnherent transgression' is not only that resistance is immanent to
Power, that power and counter-power generate each other; it is not only
that Power itself generates the excess of resistance which it can no
longer dominate; it is also not only that - in the case of sexuality - the
disciplinary `repression' of a libidinal investment eroticizes this gesture
of repression itself, as in the case of the obsessional neurotic who
derives libidinal satisfaction from the very compulsive rituals destined to
keep the traumatic jouissance at bay.
This last point must be further radicalized: the power edifice itself is
split from within: in order to reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has
to rely on an inherent excess which grounds it - to put it in the Hegelian
terms of speculative identity, Power is always-already its own
transgression, if it is to function, it has to rely on a kind of obscene
supplement. It is therefore not enough to assert, in a Foucauldian way,
that power is inextricably linked to counter-power, generating it and
being itself conditioned by it: in a self-reflective way, the split is alwaysalready mirrored back into the power edifice itself, splitting it from
within, so that the gesture of self-censorship is consubstantial with the
exercise of power. Furthermore, it is not enough to say that the
`repression' of some libidinal content retroactively eroticizes the very
gesture of `repression' - this èroticization' of power is not a secondary
effect of its exertion on its object but its very disavowed foundation, its
`constitutive crime', its founding gesture which has to remain invisible if
power is to function normally. What we get in the kind of military drill
depicted in the first part of Full Metal Jacket, for example, is not a
secondary eroticization of the disciplinary procedure which creates
military subjects, but the constitutive obscene supplement of this
procedure which renders it operative. Judith Butler27 provides a perfect
example of, again, Jesse Helms who, in his very formulation of the text of
the anti-pornography law~ displays the contours of a particular fantasy an older man who engages in sadomasochistic sexual activity with
another, younger man, preferably a child - which bears witness to his
own perverted sexual desire. Helms thus unwittingly brings to light the
obscene libidinal foundation of his own crusade against pornography.
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Kritik Answers

1AR (4/4)
THE INNER LAW OF THE SUBJECT EMERGES FROM THE
FAILURE OF THE EXTERNAL LAW, ALLOWING THE SUBJECT
TO DISRUPT DISCIPLINARY POWER
Zizek '99
Butler's elaboration of the logic of melancholic identification with the lost
object in fact provides a theoretical model which allows us to avoid the
ill-fated notion of the 'internalization' of externally imposed social forms:
what this simplistic notion of 'internalization' misses is the reflexive turn
by means of which, in the emergence of the subject, external power (the
pressure it exerts on the subject) is not simply internalized but vanishes,
is lost: and this loss is internalized in the guise of the 'voice of
conscience', the internalization which gives birth to the internal space
itself:
In the absence of explicit regulation, the subject emerges as one for
whom power has become voice, and voice, the regulatory instrument of
the psyche . . . the subject is produced, paradoxically, through this
withdrawal of power, its dissimulation and fabulation of the psyche as a
speaking topos.
This reversal is embodied in Kant, the philosopher of moral autonomy,
who identifies this autonomy with a certain mode of subjection, namely,
the subjection to even the humiliation in the face of the universal moral
Law. The key point here is to bear in mind the tension between the two
forms of this Law: far from being a mere extension or internalization of
the external law, the inner Law (Call of Conscience) emerges when the
external law fails to appear, in order to compensate for its absence. In
this perspective, liberation from the external pressure of norms
embodied in one's social conditioning (in the Enlightenment vein) is
strictly identical to submission to the unconditional inner Call of
Conscience. That is to say: the opposition between external social
regulations and internal moral Law is that between reality and the Real:
social regulations can still be justifted (or pretend to be justified) by
objective requirements of social coexistence (they belong to the domain
of the 'reality principle'); while the demand of the moral Law is
unconditional, brooking no excuse 'You can, because you must!', as Kant
put it. For that reason, social regulations make peaceful coexistence
possible, while moral Law is a traumatic injunction that disrupts it.. One
is thus tempted to go a step further and to invert once more the
relationship between 'external' social norms and the inner moral Law:
what if the subject invents external social norms precisely in order to
escape the unbearable pressure of the moral Law? Isn't it much easier to
have an external Master who can be duped, towards whom one can
maintain a minimal distance and private space, than to have an extimate Master, a stranger, a foreign body in the very heart of one's
being? Doesn't the minimal definition of Power (the agency experienced
by the subject as the force that exerts its pressure on him from the
Outside, opposing his inclinations, thwarting his goals) rely precisely on
this externalization of the extimate inherent compulsion of the Law, of
that which is 'in you more than yourself? This tension between external
norms and the inner Law, which can also give rise to subversive effects
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Kritik Answers
(say, of opposing public authority on behalf of one's inner moral stance),
is neglected by Foucault.
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#6 Nihilism (Cook): 1AR (1/2)

THEY ARE IN A DOUBLE BIND EITHER FOUCAULT IS A
NIHILIST OR THE ALTERNATIVE DOESNT SOLVE
Hicks, Prof and Chair of Philosophy at Queens College of the CUNY, 2K3 (Steven V.,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond, Foucault and Heidegger:
Critical Encounters, Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, p. 109, Questia)
Here Foucault seems less interested in defining a purpose for incitation and struggle than underscoring its potential creativity: bringing into
Given his belief that even our modern

discourses of liberation, rights, and humanism are all deeply entangled in the
inarticulable and inescapable background web of power practices, Foucault's
only option to passive nihilism seems to be the perpetuation and amelioration
of the conditions that make struggle itself possible 77 And this political task of
promoting the pathos of struggle functions as an alternative to the ascetic
ideal: creating and maintaining many sites of resistance to the numerous
forms of domination, exploitation, and subjectification present in the social and
political body. 78 Admittedly, the pathos of struggle has a strong (and from a Nietzschean
perspective, a possibly suspect) negative component: struggling against any system of
constraints or technologies of power that prevent individuals (affected by the
systems) from having the possibility of altering them or the means of
modifying them. 79 As an ethico-political ideal, the pathos of struggle would call for the
negation of all political, social, and cultural conditions that preclude the
possibility of struggling to change these conditions . As Foucault writes, perhaps one must not be for
the struggle as much gaiety, lucidity and determination as possible. 76
consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality. 80 But it would also contain an affirmative component as well, a struggle for
something: Minimally, it will be a struggle for the establishing of conditions in which self-creation is made possible, in which the assertion of
individuality and otherness is viable. 81 As with Nietzsche's alternative ideals (of recurrence and will to power), the final trajectory of the
pathos of struggle remains undetermined. It can't tell us beforehand what our goals should be, only that (a) the conditions of their conception
and articulation must remain polymorphous and unhierarchical, and that (b) whatever they are, they should remain rooted in gratitude and
service to life a joyful creative, and self-constituting engagement rather than resentment against it. 82 But as with Nietzsche's
nonascetic ideals, the pathos of struggle might also supply some affirmative content as well: the doing of what is necessary to affirm your
creative freedom and enhance the ongoing process of self-definition and social definition (within the constraints of not excluding or
disempowering the viable other). For example, overcome the oppression of your present situation if it prevents you from getting a sufficient
sense of power and effectiveness in relation to life except by devaluing life. 83 In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Schiller's attempt to instill
we might view Foucault as attempting to

instill an agonistic education a will to struggle within an overarching
aesthetics of lifeto prepare the ground for, and manifest, our creative
freedom. 84 According to Foucault, glimpses of freedom and creation of the self as a work
of art are prompted by continuous acts of resistance and political struggle that
serve to loosen the hold of those vast matrices of disciplinary power and
technologies of the body that threaten to overwhelm and homogenize us (cf. HS, 2,:ion). 85 As Foucault sees it, then, a will to struggle, an aesthetic agonism, becomes
the defining characteristic and alternate (nonascetic) ideal that allows us to best live
out our unresolved existencesurrounded by ubiquitous, inescapable power
arrangements and tottering on the abyss of nihilism.
an aesthetic education in humanity to promote political freedom,
FOUCAULT IS FASCINATING, AND IRRELEVANT TO PUBLIC

POLICY
McClean
David E.
Or we might take Foucault who, at best, has provided us with what may
reasonably be described as a very long and eccentric footnote to Nietzsche (I have
once been accused, by a Foucaltian true believer, of "gelding" Foucault with other similar remarks). Foucault, who has provided the Left of
the late 1960s through the present with such notions as "governmentality," "Limit," "archeology," "discourse" "power" and "ethics," creating or
, has made it overabundantly clear that all of our moralities and

practices are the successors of previous ones which derive from certain
configurations of savoir and connaisance arising from or created by,
respectively, the discourses of the various scientific schools. But I have not yet
found in anything Foucault wrote or said how such observations may be
translated into a political movement or hammered into a political document or
redefining their meanings
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theory (let alone public policies) that can be justified or founded on more than
an arbitrary aesthetic experimentalism. In fact, Foucault would have shuddered
if any one ever did, since he thought that anything as grand as a movement
went far beyond what he thought appropriate. This leads me to mildly
rehabilitate Habermas, for at least he has been useful in exposing Foucault's
shortcomings in this regard, just as he has been useful in exposing the shortcomings of others enamored with the
abstractions of various Marxian-Freudian social critiques.
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#6 Nihilism (Cook): 1AR (2/2)

RESISTANCE DOESNT REQUIRE REJECTION OF
DISCIPLINARY PRACTICES, ONLY THEIR INTERROGATON
May 93
Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Pennsylvania: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, 125//wfi-ajl]
Resistance in contemporary society does not require the complete
abandonment of psychology. What it does require is an understanding of
the ways in which psychology has contributed to our present,
particularly the dangers it poses and the damages it has fostered in that
present. It is indeed important for us to get free of psychology. But to get
free of psychology is not necessarily to abandon it. It is to understand its
hold on us, theoretically and practically, and to be able to make choices
about what place, if any, we want it to have in our future. If Foucault's
last works on Greek and Roman sexuality were not written in order to
offer concrete alternatives to contemporary methods of self-formation,
neither is the idea of experimentation which motivated them an implicit
advocacy of the complete abandonment of psychology. They are an
attempt to understand who we are and what our present is like, by
reference to histories of practices rather than to the unfolding of truths
or falsehoods.
REJECTING DISCIPLINE CREATES NEW FORMS OF UTOPIAN

DOMINATION ONLY ANALYZING HOW POWER
CONSTITUTES KNOWLEDGE ALLOWS RESISTANCE
Cook 92
[Anthony, Associate Professor of Law @ Georgetown, Hangs out with
Gingrich, New England Law Review, LN//wfi]
Third, Foucault's intervention at these localized sites of domination is not
a mere seizing of power that replaces one utopian vision with another
that is likely to be as dominating as its predecessor when based on the
same techniques and knowledge systems embedded in the displaced
system. Instead, Foucault's intervention has a theoretical dimension that
is of primary importance. He
wants first and foremost to challenge the specific ways in which
knowledge is produced and constituted. That is, he wants to explore the
ways in which we are socialized into seeing the world and its possibilities
in a certain way and dismissing other visions as "unreasonable" or
"impossible." We must understand the extent to which we all carry
around in our heads fascist, [*759] racist, homophobic, and sexist
constructs that are produced and reproduced by received discourses of
knowledge that are inextricably connected to the exercise of power and
domination of certain groups. When this is realized, the possibility of
building around rather than on these constructs is enhanced. All of this, I
believe, is good.
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#10 Reformism Good: 1AR

FOUCAULT IGNORES JURIDICAL POWER AS A KEY SOURCE
OF VIOLENCE FOR THE CONSTITUTIONAL STATE. WE CAN
STRATEGICALLY REFORM THE LAW AND USE THE
EXTENSION OF RIGHTS TO HEDGE AGAINST POWER
FOUCAULT HIMSELF WAS ENGAGED IN THESE VERY SAME
POLITICAL LIKE THE AFF
Habermas, Permanent Visiting Prof @ Northwestern U, 87 (Jrgen, The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, P. 289-291)
Foucault begins by analyzing the normative language game of rational natural law in connection with the latent functions
that the discourse on authority has in the age of Classicism for the establishment and the exercise of absolutist state
power. The sovereignty of the state that has a monopoly on violence is also expressed in the demonstrative forms of
punishment that Foucault depicts in connection with the procedures of torture and ordeal. From the same functionalist
perspective, he then describes the advances made by the Classical language game during the reform era of the
Enlightenment. They culminate, on the one hand, in the Kantian theory of morality and law and, on the other hand, in
utilitarianism. Interestingly enough, Foucault docs not go into the fact that these in turn serve the revolutionary
establishment of a constitutionalized slate power, which is to say, of a political order transferred ideologically from the
sovereignty of the prince to the sovereignty of the people. This kind of regime is, after all, correlated with those
Because Foucault
filters out the internal aspects of the development of law, he can
inconspicuously take a third and decisive step: Whereas the sovereign power of
Classical formations of power is constituted in concepts of right and law, this
normative language game is supposed to be inapplic able to the disciplinary
power of the modern age; the latter is suited only to empirical, at least nonjuridical,
concepts having to do with the factual steering and organization of the behavioral
modes and the motives of a population rendered increasingly manipulable by
normalizing forms of punishment that constitute the proper theme of Discipline and Punish.
science: "The procedures of normalization come to be ever more constantly engaged in the colonization of those of the
law. I believe that all this can explain the global functioning of what I would call a society of normalization." 33 As the
the complex life-context of

modern societies as a whole can as a matter of fact be less and less construed in
the natural-law categories of contractual relationships. However, this
circumstance cannot justify the strategic decision (so full of consequences for Foucault's theory)
to neglect the development of normative structures in connection with the
modern formation of power. As soon as Foucault takes up the threads of the biopolitical
establishment of disciplinary power, he lets drop the threads of the legal organization of the
exercise of power and of the legitimation of the order of domination. Because of
this, the ungrounded impression arises that the bourgeois constitutional state is
a dysfunctional relic from the period of absolutism. This uncircumspect leveling of culture and
politics to immediate substrates of the application of violence explains the ostensible gaps in his presentation. That
his history of modern penal justice is detached from the development of the
constitutional state might be defended on methodological grounds. The
theoretical narrowing down to the system of carrying out punishment is more
questionable. As soon as he passes from the Classical to the modern age, Foucault pays no
attention whatsoever to penal law and to the law governing penal process.
Otherwise, he would have had to submit the unmistakable gains in liberality and
legal security, and the expansion of civil-rights guarantees even in this area, to
an exact interpretation in terms of the theory of power. However, his presentation is utterly
distorted by the fact that he also filters out of the history of penal practices itself all aspects of legal
regulation. In prisons, indeed, just as in clinics, schools, and military
installations, there do exist those "special power relationships" that have by no
means remained undisturbed by an energetically advancing enactment of legal
rights Foucault himself has been politically engaged for this cause. This selectivity
transition from doctrines of natural law to those of natural societies shows,34
does not take anything away, from the importance of his fascinating unmasking of the capillary effects of power. But
his generalization, in terms of the theory of power, of such a selective reading hinders
Foucault from perceiving the phenomenon actually in need of explanation: In the
welfare-state democracies of the West, the spread of legal regulation has the
structure dilemma, because it is the legal means for securing freedom that themselves endanger the freedom
of their presumptive beneficiaries. Under the premises of his theory of power, Foucault so levels down the
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complexity of societal modernization that the disturbing paradoxes of this
process cannot even become apparent to him.
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Alt Fails: Body Cannot Be a Site of

Resistance
FOUCAULT PLACES AGENCY WITHIN THE BODY WHICH
OFFERS LITTLE CHANCE FOR RESISTANCE.
Rufo, Rhetoric and Power: Rethinking and Re-linking, ARGUMENTATION AND
ADVOCACY v. 40 n. 2, Fall 2003, ASP.
Kenneth
The grounds on which Foucault believed such a liberation to be possible are

problematic given that power is always already a relational domination. Therein
lies his emancipatory failure; as Murphy (1995, p. 7) notes: "The oxymoron of an
'active subject' has been the Achilles' heel of any project, such as critical
rhetoric, influenced by Foucault." If all are produced as subjects, then to whom
and from whom can we speak? Certainly, Foucault's body is not the only agency
within the "body of discourse" or the "body politic." The placement of agency
within the body offers little chance of resistance, for even the body is constituted
within the discursive realm. As Kevin Olson (1996, p. 32) explains, speaking of
punk rockers' attempt to cast off the social norm:
We cannot claim ... that such power is mobilized from the body or that the
source of resistance arises from some innate corporeal rebellion. It is difficult to
imagine a property of the body that could constitute an alternative to the
structuring force of power, since there is no sense in which we can say that
bodies are 'elastic' or that they can resist the impression of power ... the idea of
resistance to the effects of power is incoherent in the terms Foucault uses to
discuss it. His analysis fails to explain how the body can resist power or take on
a structure not completely determined by disciplinary regimes.
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Alt Fails: Cannot Escape Subjectivity

YOUR METHODOLOGY IS BANKRUPT BECAUSE IT STILL
PRIVILEGES THE NOTION OF A SUBJECT AS A UNITARY
ACTOR
Simons, professor of political philosophy and feminist theory @ the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICAL, 1995, p. 25-26
Jon
Moreover, Foucaults analysis of the systematic arrangement of the elements of

discourse3 leads him to conclude that the figure of Man was the effect of a
change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. The existence of Man is
contingent on the rules of regulation and systematic relations that constitute the
modern episteme. Humanism presupposes the existence of Man, who for
Foucault is a figure of discourse which appeared only at the end of the
eighteenth century. The startling implication of this is that [i]f those
arrangements were to disappear .. . then one can certainly wager that Man
would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea (1973b: 387).
Indeed, Foucault suggests that the modern episteme is coming to an end, having
exhausted the possible constellations of theory available between the three sets
of doubles (l972a: 70). Humanism is a failed philosophical project because it
takes Man to be its foundation for knowledge, whereas he is one of its effects.
Foucault not only declares the demise of the modern episteme but aims to
contribute to it. What Foucault was trying to achieve in his archaeological
discourse was his (in)famous decentring that leaves no privilege to any centre,
especially the subject (1972a: 205). Foucault argues that Man, the subject or the
author cannot be considered as the foundation, origin or condition of possibility
of discourse. Rather, the subject, and especially the author, can be defined as an
element within a discursive field, a particular space from which it is possible to
speak or write and which must be filled if the discourse is to exist (1972a: 95
6). For example, the subject of a discourse such as medicine is a function of
legal rights, criteria of competence, institutional relations and professional
hierarchy. Doctors can only operate as the subjects of medical discourse if they
speak from the correct institutional sites: the hospital, laboratory, the
professional journal. They also have different roles depending on the object of
discourse they speak about, sometimes observing, sometimes questioning,
listening or seeing, which also vary with the institutional site they are in. Since,
in relation to medical discourse, we find a variety of subject roles in different
positions, it is concluded that discourse is not the majestically unfolding
manifestation of a thinking, knowing, speaking subject, but ... a totality, in which
the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be
determined (1972a: 545). Discourses of knowledge should not be analysed as
unities by reference to psychological individuality or to the opinions of a
particular person (63, 70).
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Alt Fails: Geneologies Dont Produce

Change
GENEALOGIES, ALTHOUGH INTERESTING, DONT
GENERATE POLITICAL CHANGETHEY JUST LEAD US
DOWN AN ENDLESS PATH OF QUESTIONS
Foucault, SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED: LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE
1975-1976, 2003, p. 3-4.
Michel
So what was I going to say to you this year? That Ive just about had enough; in
other words, Id like to bring to a close, to put an end to, up to a point, the series
of research projectswell, yes, researchwe all talk about it, but what does it
actually mean?that weve been working on for four or five years, or practically
ever since Ive been here, and I realize that there were more and more
drawbacks, for both you and me. Lines of research that were very closely
interrelated but that never added up to a coherent body of work, that had no
continuity. Fragments of research, none of which was completed, and none of
which was followed through; bits and pieces of research, and at the same time it
was getting very repetitive, always falling into the same rut, the same themes,
the same concepts. A few remarks on the history of penal procedure; a few
chapters on the evolution, the institutionalization of psychiatry in the nineteenth
century; considerations on sophistry or Greek coins; an outline history of
sexuality, or at least a history of knowledge about sexuality based upon
seventeenth-century confessional practices, or controls on infantile sexuality in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; pinpointing the genesis of a theory and
knowledge of anomalies, and of all the related techniques. We are making no
progress, and its all leading nowhere. Its all repetitive, and it doesnt add up.
Basically, we keep saying the same thing, and there again, perhaps were not
saying anything at all. Its all getting into something of an inextricable tangle,
and its getting us nowhere, as they say. I could tell you that these things were
trails to be followed, that it didnt matter where they led, or even that the one
thing that did matter was that they didnt lead anywhere, or at least not in some
predetermined direction. I could say they were like an outline for something. Its
up to you to go on with them or to go off on a tangent; and its up to me to
pursue them or give them a different configuration. And then, weyou or I
could see what could be done with these fragments. I felt a bit like a sperm
whale that breaks the surface of the water, makes a little splash, and lets you
believe, makes you believe, or want to believe, that down there where it cant be
seen, down there where it is neither seen nor monitored by anyone, it is
following a deep, coherent, and premeditated trajectory.
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Alt Fails: Remains Enmeshed in

Power
EVEN IN SELF-EXAMINATION, WE ARE STILL ENSNARED BY
THE WEB OF CONSTITUTIVE POWER
Simons, professor of political philosophy and feminist theory @ the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, FOUCAULT AND THE POLITICAL, 1995, p. 36
Jon
Analysis at self-formation contributes to a broader social critique. Modern

subjection of the insane took the form of an ethical self-recognition. In Tukes
asylum, the inmates were made to feel guilty for the negligence which led to
their loss of reason. They became aware of themselves as guilty, as objects of
punishment and therapy and as unequal to their keepers, who had not exceeded
their liberty but submitted it to the reason of morality and reality. It was through
awareness of themselves as objects that the mad were restored to awareness of
themselves as responsible subjects, capable of restraining their own behaviour
rather than being restrained by the paternal authority of the asylum. The
asylum. . . organized. . . guilt. . . for the madman as a consciousness of himself
(1965: 24750). On a grander scale, the definition of European Man, identified
with his reason, can be drawn by its opposition to the experience of madness,
now understood as mental illness. That form of human self-recognition and type
of subjecting thought puts in question . . . the limits rather than the identity of a
culture (xiii). We are limited to the identities in which we recognize ourselves as
ethical as well as scientific beings.
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Alt Fails: Praxis

THEORY IS IRRELEVENT ABSENT SPECIFIC APPLICATION
MUST COMBINE THEORY AND PRACTICE FOR A
PHILOSOPHY AS LIFE
Foucault 82
[Michel, Politics and Ethics: An Interview, The Foucault Reader, Trans.
Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 373-4//wfi-ajl]
Q. There is much talk in America these days comparing your work to that
of Jurgen Habermas. It has been suggested that your work is more
concerned with ethics and his with politics. Habermas, for example, grew
up reading Heidegger as a politically disastrous heir of Nietzsche. He
associates Heidegger with German neo-conservatism. He thinks of these
people as the conservative heirs of Nietzsche and of you as the
anarchistic heir. You don't read the philosophical tradition this way at all,
do you?
M.F. That's right. When Habermas was in Paris, we talked at some length,
and in fact I was quite struck by his observation of the extent to which
the problem of Heidegger and of the political implications of Heidegger's
thought was quite a pressing and important one for him. One thing he
said to me has left me musing, and it's something I'd like to mull over
further. After explaining how Heidegger's thought indeed constituted a
political disaster, he mentioned one of his professors who was a great
Kantian, very well-known in the '30s, and he explained how astonished
and disappointed he had been when, while looking through card
catalogues one day, he found some texts from around 1934 by this
illustrious Kantian that were thoroughly Nazi in orientation.
I have just recently had the same experience with Max Pohlenz, who
heralded the universal values of Stoicism all his life. I came across a text
of his from 1934 devoted to Fiihrertum in Stoicism. You should reread the
introductory page and the book's closing remarks on the Fuhrersideal
and on the true humanism constituted by the Volk under the inspiration
of the leader's direction-Heidegger never wrote anything more
disturbing. Nothing in this condemns Stoicism or Kantianism, needless to
say.
But I think that we must reckon with several facts: there is a very
tenuous "analytic" link between a philosophical conception and the
concrete political attitude of someone who is appealing to it; the "best"
theories do not constitute a very effective protection against disastrous
political choices; certain great themes such as "humanism" can be used
to any end whatever-for example, to show with what gratitude Pohlenz
would have greeted Hitler.
I do not conclude from this that one may say just anything within the
order of theory, but, on the contrary, that a demanding, prudent,
"experimental" attitude is necesary; at every moment, step by step, one
must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing,
with what one is. I have never been too concerned about people who
say: "You are bor-rowing ideas from Nietzsche; well, Nietzsche was used
by the Nazis, therefore. . ."; but, on the other hand, I have always been
concerned with linking together as tightly as possible the historical and
theoretical analysis of power relations, institu-tions, and knowledge, to
the movements, critiques, and experiences that call them into question
in reality. If I have insisted on all this "practice," it has not been in order
to "apply" ideas, but in order to put them to the test and modify them.
The key to the Personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be
sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his
philosophy-as-life, in his philosophicallife, his ethos.
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Among the French philosophers who participated in the Resistance
during the war, one was Cavailles, a historian of mathematics who was
interested in the development of its internal structures. None of the
philosophers of engagement-Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Pontynone of them did a thing.
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Alt Fails: Praxis

GIVING UP ON RESISTANCE THROUGH AGENCY ALLOWS
OPPRESSION TO REMAIN DOMINANT ONLY THE PERM
SOLVES
Cook 92
[Anthony, Associate Professor of Law @ Georgetown, Hangs out with
Gingrich, New England Law Review, LN//wfi]
Several things trouble me about Foucault's approach. First, he nurtures
in many ways an unhealthy insularity that fails to connect localized
struggle to other localized struggles and to modes of oppression like
classism, racism, sexism, and homophobia that transcend their localized
articulation within this particular law school, that particular law firm,
within this particular church or that particular factory.
I note among some followers of Foucault an unhealthy propensity to rely
on rich, thick, ethnographic type descriptions of power relations playing
themselves out in these localized laboratories of social conflict. This
reliance on detailed description and its concomitant deemphasis of
explanation begins, ironically, to look like a regressive positivism which
purports to sever the descriptive from the normative, the is from the
ought and law from morality and politics.
Unless we are to be trapped in this Foucaultian moment of postmodern
insularity, we must resist the temptation to sever description from
explanation. Instead, our objective should be to explain what we
describe in light of a vision embracing values that we make explicit in
struggle. These values should act as magnets that link our particularized
struggles to other struggles and more global critiques of power. In other
words, we must not, as Foucault seems all too willing to do, forsake the
possibility of more universal narratives that, while tempered by
postmodern insights, attempt to say and do something about the
oppressive world in which we live.
Second, Foucault's emphasis on the techniques and discourses of
knowledge that constitute the human subject often diminishes, if not
abrogates, the role of human agency. Agency is of tremendous
importance in any theory of oppression, because individuals are not
simply constituted by systems of knowledge but also constitute
hegemonic and counter-hegemonic systems of knowledge as well.
Critical theory must pay attention to the ways in which oppressed people
not only are victimized by ideologies of oppression but the ways they
craft from these ideologies and discourses counter-hegemonic weapons
of liberation.
PROTEST ISNT ENOUGH MUST LINK IT TO PRACTICE

AND DEMANDS ON THE STATE OR WE LAPSE INTO
POLITICAL PARALYSIS IN THE FACE OF OPPRESSION
Foucault 82
Trans. Catherine Porter, Ed. Paul Rabinow, 377//wfi-ajl]
Q. And this is hard to situate within a struggle that is already under way,
because the lines are drawn by others. . . .
M.F. Yes, but I think that ethics is a practice; ethos is a manner of being.
Let's take an example that touches us all, that of Poland. If we raise the
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question of Poland in strictly political terms, it's clear that we quickly
reach the point of saying that there's nothing we can do. We can't
dispatch a team of paratroopers, and we can't send armored cars to
liberate Warsaw. I think that, politically, we have to recognize this, but I
think we also agree that, for ethical reasons, we have to raise the
problem of Poland in the form of a nonacceptance of what is. happening
there, and a nonacceptance of the passivity of our own governments. I
think this attitude is an ethical one, but it is also political; it does not
consist in saying merely, "I protest," but in making of that attitude a
political phenomenon that is as substantial as possible, and one which
those who govern, here or there, will sooner or later be obliged to take
into account.
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Alt Fails: Suspicion

ALTS SUSPICION FORECLOSES UPON PRODUCTIVE
ACTION
Faubian, Professor, Anthropology, Rice University, MICHEL FOUCAULT: POWER,
ESSENTIAL WORKS OF FOUCAULT 1954-1984 Volume 3, 1994, p. xviii-xix
James D.
One of the key clarifying points Foucault makes is that what is most interesting
about links between power and knowledge is not the detection of false or
spurious knowledge at work in human affairs but, rather, the role of knowledges
that are valued and effective because of their reliable instrumental efficacy.
Foucault often uses the French word savoira term for knowledge with
connotations of know-how (a way to make a problem tractable or a material
manageable)for this middle sort of knowledges, which may fall short of
rigorous scientificity but command some degree of ratification within a social
group and confer some recognized instrumental benefit. The reason the
combining of power and knowledge in society is a redoubtable thing is not that
power is apt to promote and exploit spurious knowledges (as the Marxist theory
of ideology has argued) but, rather, that the rational exercise of power tends to
make the fullest use of knowledges capable of the maximum instrumental
efficacy. What is wrong or alarming about the use of power is not, for Foucault,
primarily or especially the fact that a wrong or false knowledge is being used.
Conversely, power and the use of knowledge by power are not guaranteed to be
safe, legitimate, or salutory because (as an optimistic rationalist tradition
extending from the Enlightenment to Marxism has inclined some to hope) the
knowledge that guides or instrumentalizes the exercise of power is valid and
scientific. Nothing, including the exercise of power, is evil in itselfbut
everything is dangerous. To be able to detect and diagnose real dangers, we
need to avoid equally the twin seductions of paranoia and universal suspicion,
on the one hand, and the compulsive quest for foundationalist certainties and
guarantees, on the otherboth of which serve to impede or dispense us from
the rational and responsible work of careful and specific investigation.
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**Benjamin**
Benjamin Answers: 2AC
BENJAMIN IS GOOD FOR AESTHETICS, BAD FOR POLICY
McClean
David E.
Cavell meant this reflection to be taken non-pejoratively because he seems to

take Benjamin more seriously as an aesthetician and literary metaphysician (in
Rorty-speak, as a "strong poet") than as a serious, social commentator with good
ideas. Keeping Benjamin and his cohorts in the box of aesthetics and
metaphysics is, I believe, good intellectual policy for social critics seeking to be
relevant. They should be cited for seasoning and not for meat.
Yet I am not at all convinced that anything I have described is about to happen, though this essay is written to help force the issue, if only a little
I am convinced that the modern Cultural Left is far from ready to actually run
the risks that come with being taken seriously and held accountable for actual
policy-relevant prescriptions. Why should it? It is a hell of a lot more fun and a lot
more safe pondering the intricacies of high theory, patching together the world a
priori (which means without any real consideration of those officers and
bureaucrats I mentioned who are actually on the front lines of policy formation
and regulation). However the risk in this apriorism is that both the conclusions
and the criticisms will miss the mark, regardless of how great the minds that are
engaged. Intellectual rigor and complexity do not make silly ideas politically
salient, or less pernicious, to paraphrase Rorty. This is not to say that air-headed jingoism and conservative rants about
bit.
republican virtue aren't equally silly and pernicious. But it seems to me that the new public philosopher of the Political Left will want to pick better
yardsticks with which to measure herself.
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**Chaloupka**
Chaloupka Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, TURN EVEN IF NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARENT
CONTROLLABLE, PLAN SOLVES SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED
ACTIONS THAT CAUSE THEIR USE
SECOND, CHALOUPKA DOESNT UNDERSTAND IR.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ONLY REMAIN TEXTUAL BECAUSE
DETERRENCE WORKS. OUR SCENARIOS INDICATE A
BREAKDOWN ON MAD THAT ACTUALIZES NUCLEAR WAR.
THIRD, PERM: TO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE. THE
CRITIQUE ALONE IS A FALSE CHOICE THAT DOOMS
ACTIVISM
Sankaran Krishna, Professor of Political Science, U of Hawaii, Alternatives 19 93, v.
18. p. 400-1
The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either
indulges in total critique, delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed
to nostalgic, essentialist unities that have become obsolete and have been the
grounds for all our oppressions.
In offering this dichotomous choice, Der Derian replicates a move made by
Chaloupka in his equally dismissive critique of the move mainstream nuclear
opposition, the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s, that, according to
him, was operating along obsolete lines, emphasizing facts and realities,
while a postmodern President Reagan easily outflanked them through an
illusory Star Wars program (See KN: chapter 4)
Chaloupka centers this difference between his own supposedly total critique of
all sovereign truths (which he describes as nuclear criticism in an echo of literary
criticism) and the more partial (and issue based) criticism of what he calls
nuclear opposition or antinuclearists at the very outset of his book. (Kn: xvi)
Once again, the unhappy choice forced upon the reader is to join Chaloupka in
his total critique of all sovereign truths or be trapped in obsolete essentialisms.
This leads to a disastrous politics, pitting groups that have the most in common
(and need to unite on some basis to be effective) against each other. Both
Chaloupka and Der Derian thus reserve their most trenchant critique for political
groups that should, in any analysis, be regarded as the closest to them in terms
of an oppositional politics and their desired futures. Instead of finding ways to
live with these differences and to (if fleetingly) coalesce against the New Right,
this fratricidal critique is politically suicidal. It obliterates the space for a political
activism based on provisional and contingent coalitions, for uniting behind a
common cause even as one recognizes that the coalition is comprised of groups
that have very differing (and possibly unresolvable) views of reality. Moreover, it
fails to consider the possibility that there may have been other, more compelling
reasons for the failure of the Nuclear Freeze movement or anti-Gulf War
movement. Like many a worthwhile cause in our times, they failed to garner
sufficient support to influence state policy. The response to that need not be a
totalizing critique that delegitimizes all narratives.
The blackmail inherent in the choice offered by Der Derian and Chaloupka,
between total critique and ineffective partial critique, ought to be transparent.
Among other things, it effectively militates against the construction of
provisional or strategic essentialisms in our attempts to create space for activist
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politics. In the next section, I focus more widely on the genre of critical
international theory and its impact on such an activist politics.
FOURTH, TURN DEBATE ISNT A TRAGIC PERSPECTIVE ON

NUCLEAR WAR ITS A COMICAL GAME IN WHICH WE
THROW AROUND SCENARIOS THAT WE TAKE WITH A
GRAIN OF SALT, OVERCOMING THE PERSPECTIVE
CHALOUPKA CRITICIZES
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FIFTH, NO LINK CHALOUPKA IS CRITICIZING ANTINUCLEARISTS WHO DEFEND UNSPEAKABILITY. THE 1AC IS
AN EXPLICITY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THE TEXTUAL
SPEAKABILITY OF NUKES
SIXTH, CLAIMING THAT NUKES ARE ONLY TEXTUAL
ERASES THE HISTORY OF FOURTH WORLD NUCLEAR
VIOLENCE
Masahide Kato, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, 19 93,
Alternatives vol. 18, p. 339
, from the perspectives of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations, the
nuclear catastrophe has never been the unthinkable single catastrophe but
the real catastrophe of reptetitive and ongoing nuclear explosions and exposure to
radioactivity. Nevertheless, ongoing nuclear wars have been subordinated to the imaginary
grand catastrophe by rendering them as mere preludes to the apocalypse. As a
consequence, the history and ongoing processes of nuclear explosions as war have
been totally wiped out from the history and consciousness of the First World
Thus
community. Such a discursive strategy that aims to mask the real of nuclear warfare in the domain of imagery of nuclear catastrophe can be
observed even in Stewart Fiths Nuclear Playground, which extensively covers the history of nuclear testing in the Pacific:
Nuclear explosions in the atmosphere were global in effect. The winds and seas carried radioactive contamination over vast areas of the
fragile ecosphere on which we all depend for our survival and which we call the earth. In preparing for war, we were poisoning our planet and
going to battle against nature itself.
AND, THAT LEGITIMIZES NUCLEAR VIOLENCE

Masahide Kato, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, 19 93,
Alternatives vol. 18, p. 339
, the problematic
division/distinction between the nuclear explosions and the nuclear war is kept
intact. The imagery of final nuclear war narrated with the problematic use of the
subject (we) is located higher than the real of nuclear warfare in terms of
discursive value. This ideological division/heirarchization is the very vehicle through
which the history and the ongoing processes of the destruction of the Fourth World and Indigenous
Nations by means of nuclear violence are obliterated and hence legitimatized.
Although Firths book is definitely a remarkable study of the history of nuclear testing in the Pacific
SEVENTH, IMAGINING NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION IS A

PROJECT OF SURVIVAL THEIR ALTERNATIVE CREATES
REPRESSION AND DENIAL WHICH MAKES NUCLEAR WAR
MORE LIKELY
Lenz, Science and Policy Professor at SUNY, 90 (Nuclear Age Literature For Youth, p.
9-10)
all people
have difficulty grasping the magnitude and immediacy of the threat of nuclear arms and this
psychological unreality is a basic obstacle to eliminating that threat . Only events that
A summary of Franks thought in Psychological Determinants of the Nuclear Arms Race notes how
people have actually experienced can have true emotional impact. Since Americans have escaped the devastation of
nuclear weapons on their own soil and nuclear weapons poised for annihilation in distant countries cannot be seen,
we find it easy to imagine ourselves immune to the

threat. Albert Camus had the same phenomenon in mind when he wrote in his essay Neither Victims nor Executioners
heard, smelled, tasted, or touched,
of the inability of most people really to imagine other peoples death (he might have added or their own). Commenting
on Camus, David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton observed that
this distancing from deaths reality is
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yet another aspect of our insulation from lifes most basic realities .
We make love by
telephone, we work not on matter but on machines, and we kill and are killed by proxy. We gain in cleanliness, but lose in
If we are to heed Camuss call to refuse to be either the victims of violence

or the perpetrators of it like the Nazi executioners of the death camps, we
must revivify the imagination of what violence really entails. It is here , of course,
that the literature of nuclear holocaust can play a significant role. Withou t either
firsthand experience or vivid imagining, it is natural , as Frank points out, to deny the existence
of death machines and their consequences. In psychiatric usage denial means to
exclude from awareness, because letting [the instruments of destruction] enter consciousness would create
understanding.
like the Jews of the Holocaust,
too strong a level of anxiety or other painful emotions. In most life-threatening situations, an organisms adaptation
adapting ourselves to nuclear fear is

counterproductive. We only seal our doom more certainly . The repressed fear, moreover,
increases chances of survival, but ironically,
takes a psychic toll.
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EIGHTH, CRITICIZING REPRESENTATIONS OF NUCLEAR
PRESENCE DOESNT PRECLUDE THE NEED FOR CONCRETE
ACTION
Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, Truth, Politics, and
Postmodernism, Spinoza Lectures, 1997, p. 51-2
Richard
This distinction between the theoretical and the practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that
something very important meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the
the paradox doesn't matter when it comes

, a lot of the writers who are labeled `post-modernist; and who
talk a lot about impossibility , turn out to be good experimentalist social democrats when it
comes to actual political activity. I suspect, for example, that Gray, Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found ourselves citizens
implications of these paradoxical fact, Derrida usually replies that
to practice.
More generally
of the same country, would all be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist philosophers have gotten a
bad name because of their paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like ìmpossible; `self-contradictory' and
ùnrepresentable'. They have helped create a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for
transparency - and more generally, to the `metaphysics of presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated,
. I am all for getting rid of the metaphysics of presence, but I

the rhetoric of impossibility and unrepresentability is counterproductive
overdramatization. It is one thing to say that we need to get rid of the metaphor of things being accurately represented, once and
sharply delimited, wholly visible
think that
for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason. This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for philosophers, and we would be better
off without it. But that does not show that we are suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate representation'
Even if we agree that we shall never have what

a full presence beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities
open to humanity will not have changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from
was never a fruitful way to describe intellectual progress.
Derrida calls "
metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history, or from psychoanalysis. All that we have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may
We have been
given no reason to abandon the belief that a lot of progress has been made by
carrying out the Enlightenment's political program. Since Darwin we have come to suspect that whether
need a different gloss on the notion of `progress' than the rationalistic gloss which the Enlightenment offered.
such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky.
NINTH, MEDIA IMAGES PLAY THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF

REVEALING THEIR OWN ILLUSIONS
Jean
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**CLS**
CLS Answers: 2AC (1/4)
FIRST, TURN WE EXPOSE THE FLAWS IN EX PARTE
QUIRIN, SOLVING BETTER THROUGH HISTORICAL
ANALYSIS
SECOND, CRITIQUE DOESNT SOLVE THERES NO REASON
POINTING OUT FLAWS IN THE SYSTEM WILL LEAD TO A
HUGE MINDSET SHIFT. THE LAW WILL STILL UNILATERALLY
DETAIN ENEMY COMBATANTS. PREFER OUR SPECIFIC
TRIBE AND KATYAL EV
THIRD, TURN- UPHOLDING LEGAL PRINCIPLES PROVES
THE LAWS FRAUDULENCE AND HOLDS IT ACCOUNTABLE
Vclav
Havel, playwright, political prisoner, and president elect of Czechoslovakia,
1986 (Living in Truth, p. 137-38)

A persistent and never-ending appeal to the laws not just to the laws
concerning human rights, but to all laws does not mean at all that those who
do so have succumbed to the illusion that in our system the law is anything
other than what it is. They are well aware of the role it plays. But precisely
because they know how desperately the system depends on it on the noble
version of the law, that is they also know how enormously significant such
appeals are. Because the system cannot do without the law, because it is
hopelessly tied down by the necessity of pretending the laws are observed, it is
compelled to react in some way to such appeals. Demanding that the laws be
upheld is thus an act of living within the truth that threatens the whole
mendacious structure at its point of maximum mendacity. Over and over again,
such appeals make the purely ritualistic nature of the law clear to society and to
those who inhabit its power structures. They draw attention to its real material
substance and thus, indirectly, compel all those who take refuge behind the law
to affirm and make credible this agency of excuses, this means of
communication, this reinforcement of the social arteries outside of which their
will could not be made to circulate through society. They are compelled to do so
for the sake of their own consciences, for the impression they make on
outsiders, to maintain themselves in power (as part of the systems own
mechanism of self-preservation and its principles of cohesion), or simply out of
fear that they will be reproached for being clumsy in handling the ritual. They
have no other choice: because they cannot discard the rules of their own game,
they can only attend more carefully to those rules. Not to react to challenges
means to undermine their own excuse and lose control of their mutual
communications system. To assume that the laws are a mere facade, that they
have no validity and that therefore it is pointless to appeal to them would mean
to go on reinforcing those aspects of the law that create the facade and the
ritual. It would mean confirming the law as an aspect of the world of
appearances and enabling those who exploit it to rest easy with the cheapest
(and therefore the most mendacious) form of their excuse. I have frequently
witnessed policemen, prosecutors or judges if they were dealing with an
experienced Chartist or a courageous lawyer, and if they were exposed to public
attention (as individuals with a name, no longer protected by the anonymity of
the apparatus) suddenly and anxiously begin to take particular care that no
cracks appear in the ritual. This does not alter the fact that a despotic power is
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hiding behind that ritual, but the very existence of the officials anxiety
necessarily regulates, limits and slows down the operation of that despotism.
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FOURTH, PERM DO BOTH. FIGHTING WITHIN THE
SYSTEM BY PRETENDING THAT WE CAN CHANGE IT IN
SPITE OF ITS LIMITATIONS PRODUCES A MORE EFFECTIVE
CLS THAT ENGAGES IN PRAXIS
Sparer 84
[Ed, Prof. Law and Soc Welfare @ Pennsylvania, Fundamental Human Rights,
Legal Entitlements, and the Social Struggle: A Friendly Critique of the Critical
Legal Studies Movement, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 509, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
From this background, Gordon traces an emerging "interpretative" Critical legal theory that emphasizes the role of legal doctrine in "beliefsystems that people have externalized and allowed to rule their lives." n121 It is "belief systems" that count, even though "many constraints on
human social activity," such as finite resources, do exist. Given these belief systems, not even the "organization of the working class or capture of
the state apparatus will automatically" produce conditions which lead to "the utopian possibilities of social life." He then concludes:
, this does not mean that people should stop trying to organize the working
class or to influence the exercise of state power; it means only that they have to
do so pragmatically and experimentally, with full knowledge that there are no
deeper logics of historical necessity. . . . Yet, if the real enemy is us -- all of us, the structures we carry around in our
heads, the limits on our imagination -- where can we even begin? Things seem to change in history when
people break out of their accustomed ways of responding to domination, by
acting as if the constraints on their improving their lives were not real and that
they could change things; and sometimes they can, though not always in the
way they had hoped or intended; but they never knew they could change them at all until they tried. n122
Gordon's conclusion is profound. But it contradicts the view that a negative attack on
liberal legal doctrine is the key path to a liberated future. n123 People break out of
their accustomed ways of responding to [*558] domination by acting as if they
could change things. "Acting as if they could change things" does not mean confining scholarly endeavor to negative
doctrinal analysis, even though negative doctrinal analysis may be one helpful step towards acting . Acting means struggling
for and living a different way, even if only "experimentally," and this requires praxis, theory which
Of course
guides and is in turn influenced by action. n124 Yet the whole of Gordon's piece, until his conclusion, is an exposition which becomes a polemic -almost an apology -- for the negative Critical analysis which constitutes virtually the sole response to the practitioners' yearning for helpful
theory
FIFTH, SPECIFIC SOLVENCY TRUMPS PREFER OUR TRIBE

AND KATYAL EV SHOWING THAT OVERRULING QUIRIN
CREATES EFFECTIVE DUE PROCESS RIGHTS
SIXTH, HERES MORE EV INDETERMINACY MEANS YOU
HAVE TO EVALUATE THE EMPIRICAL JUSTIFICATION OF
OUR SOLVENCY CLAIMS
Hasnas 95
[John, JD & PhD Phil @ duke, Asst. prof. Bus Ethics @ Georgetown, Back to the
Future, 45 Duke L.j. 84, October, LN//uwyo-ajl]
I have suggested that this greatly overstates what the indeterminacy argument
actually implies. Rather, the proper inference to draw from a demonstration that
the law is indistinguishable from politics is that the cases in which the law should
be employed to reform society are limited to those in which the desired reforms
can be effectively realized through political action. The insight the legal realists
provided long ago was that to identify these cases, one must undertake the
pragmatic examination of how the law works in practice relative to alternative
methods of social control. Thus, there is a need for empirical investigation to
determine how the expected outcomes of collective political action compare with
those of politically unrestrained individuals functioning in a market environment.
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Further, to be valid, this investigation must compare like with like; it must
compare what can reasonably be achieved
[*131] through real-world political processes staffed by less than perfect human
beings with what is likely to result from unrestrained human interaction in the
flawed markets that actually exist, not the utopian results of an ideal political
system with those of imperfect, real-world markets. Because this is the case and
because the Crits have resisted undertaking such investigations, I have argued
that they have missed the point of the indeterminacy argument, and that if this
argument is in fact correct, the way forward into our jurisprudential future lies in
a return to the uncompleted project of the realists.
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SEVENTH, EXPERIENTIAL DECONSTRUCTION:
ORGANIC INTELLECTUALS MUST CONTEXTUALIZE
CRITICISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SPECIFIC OPPRESION,
STRATEGICALLY USING HEGEMONIC NORMS TO CREATE
THEIR ALTERNATIVE ****
Cook 90
[Anthony E., Assoc Prof. Law @ Florida, Beyond Critical Legal Studies, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 985, March,
LN//uwyo-ajl]
Because he appreciated the dialectic of theory and the broad-based

confrontational strategies of socially transformative action, King stands as the paradigmatic
organic intellectual of twentieth-century American life. King's method and practice offer direction to progressive scholars concerned about
the exclusionary, repressive, and non-communal dimensions of American life.
[*1013] Gramsci's conception of the organic intellectual provides a useful framework for understanding the thought of King and what it has to
offer CLS. The organic intellectual brings philosophy to the masses, not for the merely instrumental purposes of unifying them, "but precisely in
order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small
Gramsci's organic intellectual struggles to transform those who

are oppressed as a means of transforming the conditions under which they are
oppressed. n79 Gramsci understands domination in terms of both coercion and consent, the latter constituting what he refers to as
intellectual groups." n78
hegemony. Under his formulation, hegemony consists, then, of "[t]he 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the
general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group." n80 Gramsci argues that "this consent is 'historically' caused by the
prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production." n81
Thus, oppression is not only physical and psychological but also cultural. n82
King, like Gramsci's organic intellectual, empowered his community through a practical effort to
bridge the gap between theory and lived experience. King's work consisted of four interrelated
activities. First, he used theoretical deconstruction to free the mind to envision
alternative conceptions of community. Second, he employed experiential
deconstruction to understand the liberating dimensions of legitimating
ideologies like liberalism and Christianity, dimensions easily ignored by the abstract,
ahistorical, and potentially misleading critiques that rely exclusively on
theoretical deconstruction. Third, he used the insights gleaned from the first two
activities to postulate an [*1014] alternative social vision intended to transform the
conditions of oppression under which people struggle. Drawing from the best of
liberalism and the best of Christianity, King forged a vision of community that
transcended the limitations of each and built upon the accomplishments of both.
Finally, he created and implemented strategies to mobilize people to secure that
alternative vision. I refer to this multidimensional critical activity as "philosophical praxis."
Although many critical theorists engage primarily in theoretical deconstruction, and some appreciate certain forms of experiential deconstruction,
n83 few have embraced either a full experiential deconstruction or the third and fourth dimensions of philosophical praxis --
reconstructive theorizing and socially transformative struggle. n84 These dimensions of critical
activity directly confront the material conditions of oppression whereas the
preoccupation with deconstructing theory does not. King went further than these
critical theorists by examining the subtle and complex ways in which consent
was shaped, while fully appreciating the role of state and private coercion in
legitimating authority in the lives of the oppressed.
This Part examines how King filtered his theoretical deconstruction of hegemonic
theologies through his knowledge of the history and experience of oppression,
and thereby made that theoretical deconstruction richer, more contextual, and
ready to engage the existential realities of oppression. The interplay between King's theoretical and
experiential deconstruction is best illustrated by reference to the African-American Church -- the institution providing the organic link between
philosophy and the masses, theory and praxis. n85
My analysis proceeds in four steps. First, I examine how African-American religion served at once to legitimate slave society, delegitimize that
society, and inform alternative visions of community. Second, I examine King's use of theoretical deconstruction and illustrate its dependence on
the historic mission of the African-American Church. Like a true organic intellectual engaged in a philosophical praxis, King used theoretical
deconstruction to illustrate the possibilities [*1015] of his reconstructive vision and the centrality of social struggle in realizing that vision. Third,
I discuss King's experiential deconstruction, his unwillingness to be distracted by the reified abstractions of theoretical deconstruction. Finally, I
the combination of theoretical and experiential deconstruction results in a

more contextual framework -- one more appreciative of the conditions of choice
within which authority is legitimated and challenged through reconstructive
vision and struggle.
show how
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EIGHTH, LIBERALISM IS INEVITABLE AND NECESSARY TO
ACCOMPLISH CLSS LIBERATORY GOALS
Sparer 84
The thrust of CLS critique is devoted, in turn, to the exposure of the contradictions in liberal philosophy and law. This strand of the Critical legal
, the
critique lends itself to exaggeration. This observation may be appreciated by considering what happens when
Critical legal theorists themselves make tentative gestures at the social direction in
which we should move. Such gestures, even from the most vigorous critics of
liberalism, do not escape from liberalism and, indeed, liberal rights theory. Nevertheless,
those gestures have great merit, particularly because of their use of liberal
rights. For example, Frug, while expounding his vision of the city as a site of localized power and participatory democracy, attacks liberal
critique is quite powerful and makes a much-needed contribution. In my view, however, it suffers from two general problems. First
theory and its dualities as an obstacle to his vision. n19 At the same time, without [*518] acknowledging the significance of what he is doing,
Frug relies on the liberal image of law and rights to defend the potential of his
vision. He writes:
It should be emphasized that participatory democracy on the local level need not mean the
tyranny of the majority over the minority. Cities are units within states, not the state itself; cities, like all
individuals and entities within the state, could be subject to state-created legal restraints that protect individual rights. Nor does participatory
democracy necessitate the frustration of national political objectives by local protectionism; participatory institutions, like others in society, could
. The liberal image of law as mediating

between the need to protect the individual from communal coercion and the
need to achieve communal goals could thus be retained even in the model of
participatory democracy. n20
still remain subject to general regulation to achieve national goals
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#4 Permutation: 1AR (1/2)

WE MUST RECOGNIZE THE LIMITATIONS OF LAW WHILE
USING IT AS A STRATEGY FOR SURVIVAL.
Ruthann
Robson, Professor of Law, CUNY Law School, New York, Lesbian (Out)law,
1992, p. 89-90
Yet these legal strategies can also afford concrete improvements as we live our
lives within the dominant culture. They can even make us validate our own
experiences because they have been recognized by the law. Within our own
communities, theories, and relationships, the implementation of equality in
the form of antidiscrimination rules of law would bring out change.
Gone would be the Latina Lesbian Caucus, womenonly space, sliding scales,
anthologies of older lesbians. If we accepted the rule of law as the rule of
lesbianism, we would not discriminate between lesbians and nonlesbians. For
many of us, this is unacceptable. I am not proposing that we must either
totally adopt antidiscrimination discourse into all facets of our lives, or we
must totally abandon it as a legal strategy. Such a duality is a false one.
We are not hypocritical, inconsistent, or contradictory if we recognize
antidiscrimination as a potential strategy for legal change, yet
recognize its limitations. Our desires are as complex as we are. Concepts
such as equality and antidiscrimination cannot fulfill our desires. Yet we can use
these legal notions to effect the type of legal change that can facilitate
our survival. Our formidable task is strategizing, theorizing, and actualizing our
own desires against a legal background of discrimination, all the while resisting
our own domestication.
REJECTION FAILS- MUST COMBINE THE PLAN AND THE

ALTERNATIVE
HUTCHINSON AND MONAHAN 84
(Allan and Patrick, Asst Prof @ NYU and Asst Prof @ Ottawa U, January, 36 Stan.
L. Rev. 199, CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES SYMPOSIUM: Law, Politics, and the Critical
Legal Scholars: The Unfolding Drama of American Legal Thought, MosE)
The development and implementation of such an enlarged notion of legal
doctrine would require a complete restructuring of the existing order. Unger, of
course, is not blind to this. With a truly grand sweep, he drafts the essential
framework of such a society; he substantiates and formalizes the "structure of
no-structure." He envisages the establishment of a "rotating capital fund" n150
to finance individual projects and to effect a decentralization of production and
exchange. The legal counterpart of this notion would be "the disaggregation of
the consolidated property right." n151 Yet Unger recognizes that some regime of
rights would be necessary for his proposals to succeed. n152 He therefore
suggests the creation of four kinds of rights: immunity rights which give
individuals the power to resist interference and domination by any other
individual or organization, including the state; destabilization rights which entitle
individuals to demand the disruption of established institutions and forms of
social practice; market rights which give a conditional claim to divisible portions
of social capital, in place of the existing absolute property rights; and solidarity
rights which foster mutual reliance, loyalty, and communal responsibility. Such
arrangements, according to Unger, need not be established all at once, but can
be introduced gradually. n153 Unger finds this scheme attractive because it
accommodates continuing conflict between transitory factions of society; it
allows [*233] "history itself [to] become a source of moral insight." n154
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REFORM INSTITUTIONS FROM THE INSIDE. ITS THE ONLY
WAY TO SOLVE AND PRESERVE DEMOCRACY
McInerney III, Associate, Dorsey & Whitney LLP, New York, Creighton Law
Review, 31 Creighton L. Rev. 805, May, 1998
Thomas F.
Herein lies the normative turn in Habermas' thought. He claims that not only has
this new paradigm in law emerged, but also that such new understanding of law
and politics must be guided by an understanding of the limits of human reason,
of which an intersubjective, or discourse-oriented approach to rationality,
entails. n240 Communicative, and hence intersubjective, rationality provides the
means of reassessing modernist legal institutions in light of a proceduralist
reconstruction of law and democracy. n241 As such, his discourse theory
provides a critical tool to evaluate existing political, legal, and social institutions.
Such a critical program need not advocate the elimination of current institutions,
but can build on the principles on which such institutions are based. It may thus
be used to reinterpret existing traditions and institutions to realize a certain
kinetic power for reinvigorating democracy. n242 This rather thin normative
argument requires only the critical reappraisal of legal and political institutions
in accordance with the discourse principle in an attempt to implement the
principle in existing practice. After mapping the earlier paradigms, Habermas
makes the descriptive claim that a new paradigm has emerged to replace the
traditional liberal-bourgeois paradigm and welfare-bureaucratic [*832] paradigm.
n238 This new paradigm attempted to overcome the inadequacy of the previous
orders. It represents a departure from modernism and can be termed a postmodern paradigm. Unlike modernist ideologies, the post-modern paradigm
arises from an intersubjective n239 notion of rationality. No longer can political
and legal decisions be considered the product of a singular will within this
paradigm but, instead, must be viewed as a consensus-oriented process of
decision-making involving communication by and among all concerned
participants. Under this paradigm, law must be understood procedurally. This
normative stance may at first appear inconsistent. On the one hand, Habermas
asks that we accept his descriptive claims that a new post-modern paradigm has
emerged. On the other hand, he claims that we must adopt a proceduralist view
of law and an intersubjective notion of reason. Because our current political and
legal systems are not to be abandoned completely, Habermas intends his
communicative sense of rationality to be more completely realized in the
existing legal order. n243 Habermas does not conceive the possibility of
realizing such changes in existing institutions as problematic. He [*834] argues
that through a process of reification, we have come to believe, incorrectly in his
view, that existing social and political institutions are fixed entities which cannot
undergo change. n244 Rights, such as freedom of speech, although justified by
appeal to modernist ideals when implemented originally, have taken on new
meaning within this new paradigm. As such, these rights become essential to
the more complete realization of intersubjective rationality and communicative
decision-making. n245 Having established the methodological basis upon which
Habermas's theory is founded, attention may be given to more foundational
aspects to the theory beginning with his under standing of communicative
action. n243. Put in critical theoretical terms, The critical enterprise must now be
a critique of the inherent potential for reaction within the existing power
structure - i.e., the question is not one of dismantling the structure and replacing
it by another, but rather one of buttressing the existing power structure against
the threat looming from the right - whether the political, the economic, or the
religious right.
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#7 Experiential Deconstruction
Turn: 1AR
BLACK CHRISTIANITY PROVES OUR ARG READING THE
INSTITUTION AGAINST ITSELF ALLOWS
COUNTERHEGEMONIC FREEDOM
Cook 90
LN//uwyo-ajl]
2. The Role of Religion in the Delegitimation of Authority. -- Although the use of

religion as an instrument of social control often necessitated oversight by white
masters, n101 strict enforcement was not maintained, and slaves often met
separately for religious services, including weekly and Sunday evening services.
n102 It was within the freedom provided for religious worship that Africans
began to assert some control over how the void created by the disintegration of
their historical identity and community would be filled. In this small space of
freedom, an alternative conception of community was defined and the history of
a new American people began to emerge. African-American religion and its
primary vehicle of expression, the African-American Church, supplied the needed
catalyst for the reconstruction of community destroyed by slavery. n103
To the surprise and fear of many whites, slaves transformed an ideology
intended to reconcile them to a subordinate status into a manifesto of their Godgiven equality. n104 This deconstruction was both revolutionary and pragmatic
in nature. The Africans' appropriation of conservative evangelicalism as a
bulwark against the degradation and countless microaggressions of slavery
proved that there were alternate interpretations of the text that supposedly
justified their subjugation. Slaves demonstrated that scripture was subject to an
alternative interpretation that called for the eradication of the very social
structure evangelicals sought to legitimate. n105 In short, slaves deconstructed
ideology through their struggles against oppression.
Although slavemasters and evangelicals attempted to limit the transmission of
counter-hegemonic interpretations of scripture, their [*1019] efforts met with
limited success. African gospel preachers and slaves who learned to read against
their masters' wishes (and, many times, against state law as well) were
determined to read the Bible in light of their own experiences. Many slaves
realized that the message of submission, docility, and absolute obedience to the
master was a distorted picture of the Bible's eternal truths. n106
STRUGGLE IS A CATALYST FOR MAKING RIGHTS

DETERMINATE, DISMANTLING OPPRESSION
Cook 90
LN//uwyo-ajl]
Unlike some CLS scholars, King understood the importance of a system of

individual rights. CLS proponents have urged that rights are incoherent and
indeterminate reifications of concrete experiences; they obfuscate, through the
manipulation of abstract categories, disempowering social relations. n158 King,
on the other hand, understood that the oppressed could make rights
determinate in practice; although "law tends to declare rights -- it does not
deliver them. A catalyst is needed to breathe life experience into a judicial
decision." n159 For King, the catalyst was persistent social struggle to transform
the oppressiveness of one's existential condition into ever closer approximations
of the ideal. The hierarchies of race, gender, and class define those conditions,
and the struggle for substantive rights closes the gap between the latter and the
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ideal of the Beloved Community. Under the pressures of social struggle, the
oppressed can alter rights to better reflect the exigencies of social reality -- a
reality itself more fully understood by those engaged in transformative struggle.
King's Beloved Community accepted and expanded the liberal tradition of rights.
King realized that notwithstanding its limits, the liberal vision contained
important insights into the human condition. For those deprived of basic
freedoms and subjected to arbitrary acts of state authority, the enforcement of
formal rights was revolutionary. African-Americans understood the importance of
formal liberal rights and demanded the full enforcement of such rights in order
to challenge and rectify historical practices that had objectified and subsumed
their existence.
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A2 Religious Institution
Rationalized Oppression: 1AR
FIRST, OUR 2AC COOK EV PRE-EMPTS THIS. INSTITUTIONS
MAINTAINED HEGEMONY BY NOT CONTEXTUALIZING
THEMSELVES IN TERMS OF ACTION AGAINST OPPRESSION.
PLAN SOLVE BY ENGAGING SUBORDINATION
SECOND, THIS IS A DISAD TO THE ALT. PRAXIS IS
NECESSARY TO AVOID CO-OPTATION
Cook 90
LN//uwyo-ajl]
King's synthesis of pragmatic and revolutionary evangelicalism was most

powerfully expressed in his "Letter from Birmingham City Jail." n151
Conservative evangelicalism's dichotomy between the spiritual and the secular
caused many religious leaders, just as in the days of slavery, to continue to
oppose any interpretation of Christianity demanding that equality before God in
the spiritual realm also be embodied in the legal and social relations defining the
secular realm. These leaders still offered patience as a panacea for the pain of
persecution and the joys of an afterlife as an answer for the sufferings of this
life. If integration was the will of God, He and not humans would change people's
hearts in His own way and time. Be patient, they urged, and wait on the Lord.
n152 King discerned the hegemonic role of this theology and boldly challenged
the injustice to which it gave rise wherever he encountered it. To those who
urged that nonviolent, [*1033] direct action was "unwise and untimely," King
sharply retorted:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by
the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet
engaged in a direct action movement that was "well-timed," according to the
timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of
segregation. For years now I have heard the words "Wait!" It rings in the ear of
every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant
"Never." . . . We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday, that
"justice too long delayed is justice denied." n153
King expressed his great disappointment with this otherworldly orientation of the
white Church:
In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white
churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and
sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of
racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, "Those are
social issues with which the gospel has no real concern," and I have watched so
many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which
made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular.
n154
Thus, King spent his life leading African-Americans into direct confrontation with
oppressive institutions and practices. Through direct action the African-American
community exposed the contradictions and violence endemic to American
society. In this way, the civil rights movement King led was itself a powerful form
of experiential deconstruction, one that provided fertile ground for a new vision
of community in America.
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#8 Liberalism Good Turn: 1AR

CLS FORECLOSES STRATEGIC LIBERALISM, DESTROYING
LIBERATORY MOVEMENTS AND REINFORCING OPPRESSION
Cook 90
LN//uwyo-ajl]
ther are
some liberating as well as legitimating aspects of the line-drawing or boundary-setting
enterprise we critique. Democratic socialism, the American Revolution, the AfricanAmerican civil rights movement, and other social movements were based, in part,
on the liberating dimensions of liberal theory. Failing to recognize this, some scholars
unwittingly fall into too simplistic an analysis of the problem and its possible
solutions. When we appreciate the liberating dimension of ideology, revealed by experiential deconstruction, we might conclude that
Second, when we adopt this more contextual and experiential approach to understanding oppression, we will realize that
there are many dimensions of the present system that are good and quite enabling.
Thus, although I share critical methods, I question the conclusions of CLS. The CLS critique rightly points out that we need not accept oppressive
institutions and practices as unalterable expressions of truth, because the premises on which they are based are contradictory and indeterminate
at best. The critique suggests, therefore, that we are free to envision and construct alternative forms of community that represent a more
accurate or at least more plausible conception of human nature -- one believed to be fundamentally good, which may replace "our pervasive
alienation and fear of one another with something more like mutual trust." n74 But should we be so certain that this optimistic view of human
From this optimistic view, one

might envision emerging a quite oppressive community in which groups, behind
the guise of love and mutual dependency, legitimate [*1011] behavior that is more
oppressive than anything imagined by Hobbes' sovereign. When, therefore, CLS proponents argue
nature is clearly more liberating than the insights provided by Hobbes or Locke?
that liberalism's public-private dichotomy undermines a society's transformative potential, we should also ask how and when does it advance
, if CLS' primary concern is one of legitimation and power, it is

important to ask under what conditions the liberal discourse of rights may be
strategically delegitimizing and substantively empowering.
those efforts. Indeed
EVEN IF THEYRE RIGHT, WE SHOULD STILL FIGHT FOR

RIGHTS TO MAKE A HUMANE SOCIETY THE ALTERNATIVE
IS ETHICAL ABDICATION
Sparer 84
My point is that both liberal and radical theory (including Critical legal theory) must balance competing values. Of course, the same problem
. There is no way of generalizing a resolution of all

potentially contradictory values in all situations. This impossibility, however, does not
necessarily implicate the virtues of and need for rights themselves. Nor does it mean
that we should not struggle to alter the political and social context in which
rights operate or to win preference for certain rights over others.
The significance of the CLS overemphasis on and exaggeration of contradictions is that it increases the
tendency on the part of some Critical legal theorists to emphasize negative
critique because they are overwhelmed by the very deficiencies they criticize in
liberal legal theory. n21 At the same time, some Critical legal theorists lose an appreciation
[*519] of the potential contribution of rights, a potential contribution which coexists with their negative potential.
Exaggeration thereby promotes an "undialectical" approach despite Critical theory's emphasis on dialectics .
affects any statement of "rights" as well
CLS DISEMPOWERS BY IGNORING THE LIBERATORY

POTENTIAL OF LIBERALISM
Crenshaw, et al, Professor of Law, Columbia University, Critical Race
Theory, Ed. Kimberl Crenshaw et al, 1995, p. 110-111
Kimberl
Finally, in addition to exaggerating the role of liberal legal consciousness and

underestimating that of coercion, CLS scholars also disregard the transformative
potential that liberalism offers. Although liberal legal ideology may indeed
348
Kritik Answers
function to mystify, it remains receptive to some aspirations that are central to
black demands; it may also perform an important function in combating the
experience of being excluded and oppressed. This receptivity to black
aspirations is crucial, given the hostile social world that racism creates. The
most troubling aspect of the critical program, therefore, is that trashing rights
consciousness may have the unintended consequences of disempowering the
racially oppressed while leaving white supremacy basically untouched.
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No Links (1/2)
YOUR ARGUMENT ASSUMES THE WRONG LIBERAL
LEGALISM- THE AFF HAS A COMMITMENT TO NEUTRALITYWE CAN NEVER ACHIEVE WHAT YOUR ALTERANTIVE CALLS
FOR
ALTMAN 90
(Andrew, Prof of Philosophy @ Georgia State, 1990, Critical Legal Studies: A

Liberal Critique, Pg. 102-103) PHM
This chapter has examined three important lines of argument in the CLS
literature. All three attempt to establish that liberal theory is internally
inconsistent, and all three claim that the inconsistency arises from the liberal
embrace of pluralism, neutrality, and the rule of law. The central contention of
these arguments is that it is impossible to satisfy both the demands of legality
and those of neutrality in a context of moral, religious, and political pluralism. I
found that the three main lines of argument deployed to support such a
contention are all wanting. The arguments rest to a large degree on a confused
understanding of the liberal commitment to neutrality. In addition, the more
radical CLS arguments rest on a seriously inadequate understanding of linguistic
meaning. Once those confusions and inadequacies are remedied, it becomes
clear that the requirements of legality and neutrality can be met in a pluralist
context.
NO LINK- SOCIAL REALITY IS NOT CONSTITUED BY LAWMULTIPLE ALTERNATE FACTORS

ALTMAN 90
Liberal Critique, Pg. 151) PHM
To join the issue with the rule conception, one must deny the claim that socially
meaningful behavior must be explained by reference to social rules. This denial
became more and more frequent in the 1960s and 1970s. The view became
widespread that social rules must be explained by reference to individual
presocial motivation. According to this view, rules do not constrain and channel
individual behavior at all or do so only in sporadic and marginal ways. By and
large, rules are resources and instruments that individuals manipulate to get
what they want or think good, and what they want or think good, at the most
fundamental level, is not determined by social rules. Rules exert no power (or
little power) of their own over individual thought, desire, and action; they are
mere words. Nonetheless, rules can be invoked by those who wield power to
rationalize their actions and even to convince those over whom they exercise
power that their subordination is right and proper. Let us call this the
instrumentalist view of social rules. Edgerton summarizes the influence of this
view on contemporary thinking:
In most social theory today, rules are seen as ambiguous, flexible, contradictory,
and inconsistent; they are said seldom to govern the actions of people, much
less to mold these people by being internalized by them. Instead, they serve as
resources for human strategies.4
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No Links (2/2)
NO LINK- LIBERAL LEGAL PHILOSOPHY DOESNT SAY THAT
LAW SOLVES ALL OUR PROBLEMS, BUT THAT IT IS BETTER
THAN DOING NOTHING- YOU MUST WIN EVERY INSTANCE
OF LAW IS BAD
ALTMAN 90

In the course of criticizing liberal legal philosophy, Robert Gordon has argued
against "the kind of rule fetishism that supposes salvation comes through rules,
rather than through the social practices that the rule makers try to symbolize
and crystallize."65 It should now be apparent that Gordon's criticism of
liberalism in this regard rests on several misconceptions. First, liberal theory
does not promise salvation through legal rules; what it promises is a society that
does a better job of protecting people from intolerance, prejudice, and
oppression than it would if law was dispensed with. Second, Gordon poses a
false dichotomy: Protection must be attempted either through rules (presumably
he has legal rules in mind) or through the nonlegal practices of society. The
soundest version of liberal theory will reject this dichotomy and argue that
protection from intolerance, prejudice, and oppression requires both legal rules
and at least some complementary social practice.
351
Kritik Answers
Turns: Ricoeur
CLS CREATES AN EXTREME LEGAL HERMEUTICS OF
SUSPICION, PREVENTING ANY LEGAL REFORM
Hasnas 95
[John, JD & PhD Phil @ duke, Asst. prof. Bus Ethics @ Georgetown, Back to the
Future, 45 Duke L.j. 84, October, LN//uwyo-ajl]
the irrationalists offer no specific program for legal reform.
Unlike the mainstream Crits,

n83 This
is because, as their designation
[*104] suggests, they believe that reason is impotent to resolve legal and moral issues. Heavily influenced by the philosophy of Richard Rorty
n84 and the deconstructionist school of literary criticism associated with Jacques Derrida, n85 the irrationalists believe that objective knowledge
is impossible. Following Rorty, they reject the correspondence theory of truth that holds that a statement is true when it is an accurate
representation of an underlying reality. n86 They assert that since it is impossible "to step outside our skins--the traditions, linguistic and other,
within which we do our thinking and self-criticism--and compare ourselves with something absolute," n87 reality is socially constructed, i.e., the
result of social practices that "embody contingent choices concerning how to organize the thick texture of the world in consciousness." n88 Thus,
the irrationalists adopt the coherence theory in which "the meaning of words are not determined by external referents, but instead by their
This, however, implies that "the

attempt to fix the meaning of an expression leads to an infinite regress," n90 and
coherence with other words or judgments within our total body of knowledge." n89
hence, that "meaning is ultimately indeterminate." n91 Since this is true generally, it obviously must be true within the legal realm as well. n92
Therefore, for the irrationalists, the indeter- [*105] minacy of the law is merely a consequence of the inherent indeterminacy of human
language. n93
This philosophical position, which has been described as radical subjective idealism, n94 leads the
irrationalists to embrace an extreme form of epistemic skepticism in which "it is
impossible to say anththing true about the world." n95 This, of course, entails a
commitment to ethical relativism such that "any action may be described as
right or wrong, good or bad." n96 Thus, for the irrationalists, reason is irrelevant to our normative pursuits. Since
there are no objective moral or legal truths, reason cannot help us find them:
"Legal and moral questions are matters to be answered by experience, emotion, introspection, and conversation, rather than by logical proof."
n97 Hence,
when judges decide cases, they should do what we all do when we face a moral decision. We identify a limited set of alternatives; we predict the
most likely consequences of following different courses of action; we articulate the values that are important in the context of the decision and
the ways in which they conflict
[*106] with each other; we see what relevant people (judges, scholars) have said about similar issues; we talk with our friends; we drink
enormous amounts of coffee; we choose what to do. n98
SKEPTICISM STOPS SOCIAL CHANGE THEIR PARANOIA

FORECLOSES UPON REVOLUTION
Berman 2001
LN]

movement.
Of course
, without

reenacted,
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Kritik Answers
Turns: Judicial Oppression

THE ALTERNATIVE FREES JUDGES FROM LEGAL RULES,
ALLOWING UNCHECKED OPPRESSION
Solum 87
[Lawrence B., Assoc. Prof. Law @ Loyola, On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing
Critical Dogma, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 462, Spring, ln//uwyo-ajl]
This is not the place for extended consideration of this conception of freedom. I
do wish, however, to make an observation [*500] about its implications: the
sort of freedom brought about by acceptance of the strong indeterminacy thesis
disassociates internal critique from programmatic social change. This radical sort
of freedom might enable individual legal adjudicators, practitioners, and scholars
to undergo "conversions," liberating them from the constraints of doctrine. But
the nature of such a liberation is ambiguous. It is hardly clear that liberating
those who wield legal power from the "mistaken" belief that legal doctrine
constrains their actions will have a progressive effect. If the mystification thesis
is correct, then acceptance of the indeterminacy thesis also will awaken those in
power to the fact that legality is no barrier to repression. n111
Singer recognizes the argument that "if we let judges do just what they want,
they would inevitably exercise judicial power in oppressive ways," and responds:
But people do not want just to be beastly to each other. To suppose so is to
ignore facts. People want freedom to pursue happiness. But they also want not
to harm others or be harmed themselves. The evidence is all around us that
people are often caring, supportive, loving, and altruistic, both in their family
lives and in their relations with strangers.
It is also not true that, if left to do "just what they like," government officials will
necessarily harm us or oppress us. They may do these things if that is what they
want to do. But it is simply not the case that all government officials admire
Hitler and Stalin and use them as role models. n112
It is possible that all that stands between us and a progressive system of justice
is the elimination of the myth that legal rules constrain judges, but the violent
lessons of human history place a heavy burden of persuasion on those who
make that claim. Singer's view is profoundly optimistic.
353
Kritik Answers
Turns: Criticism Perpetuates

Capitalism
THEIR CRITIQUE OF THE LAW PREVENTS SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION NECESSARY TO CREATE SOCIALISM
Johnson 84
[Phillip E., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, Critical Legal Studies Symposium: Do You
Sincerely Want To Be Radical? 36 Stan. L. Rev. 247, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
I have already described Critical legal scholarship as ambivalent in its diagnosis
of our social and personal ills, and, of course, uncertainty of diagnosis leads to
uncertainty in the prescription of a remedy. There is a further problem with the
remedy itself, and the vacuity of Critical scholarship when faced with the task of
proposing remedies stems partly from a reluctance to come to grips with this
problem. The issue can be put quite simply: If we assume that leftist political
movements aim to create "socialism," and that "socialism" means something
like individual self-determination within an ethic of cooperation, does this goal
imply a centralization or a decentralization of power?
Not many years ago socialism meant nationalization -- ownership and control of
the economy by the national government. But government management of
industry and agriculture has been tried on a large scale in many countries, and
the results have not been exactly what the pioneers of socialism had hoped.
Inequalities of wealth have no doubt been reduced, but the bureaucratic state
provides no cure for alienation, competitive individualism, greed, power-seeking,
or other ills previously associated with capitalism. Furthermore, bureaucracies
operate "by the book," and therefore even the most benign bureaucracy is
inherently hostile to individual selfdetermination. Anyone with experience in
public employment cannot fail to be aware of this fact.
To escape the rigidity of bureaucracy, socialists must reduce the scale of
economic and political organizations. Hence, they have been interested in
worker control of individual factories, in small-scale cooperatives, and in semiindependent local geographical units where social cooperation might flourish.
But how is a decentralized socialist [*285] society to prevent those small-scale
units from adopting antisocialist policies? Some localities are sure to set up new
hierarchies, or to refuse to share the wealth with the disadvantaged or the
unproductive.If local units are permitted to trade with each other, market forces
will again begin to operate. Unless there is pervasive control by a national
bureaucracy, what is to prevent self-governing economic units from turning
capitalist and attracting most of the movable capital and the most ambitious
people?
It is not for me to say whether socialists should prefer the rigidities of
bureaucracy or the risks of autonomy, but any socialist or "radical" author who
evades the dilemma or attempts to straddle it is peddling sheer fantasy. Neither
will it do to propose that a "balance" be struck between national and local
authority. Power will inevitably gravitate to the authority that does the balancing.
354
Kritik Answers
Turns: Law Key to Solving Atrocity

TRASHING THE LAW DESTROYS OUR BEST MEANS OF
PROTECTING THE WEAK AGAINST THE STRONG,
ALLOWING FOR ENDLESS OPPRESSION AND ATROCITY
Hegland 85
[Kenney, Prof. of Law @ Arizona, Goodbye to Deconstruction, 58 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1203, July,
ln//uwyo-ajl]
I fear deconstruction because people might come to believe

that the Rule of Law is a hoax masking illegitimate power.
So, what are these chips?
in it,
come to believe
I believe this would be
a bad thing. I offer, in support, one war story and one literary quote.
In the summer of 1965, I went south as a member of the Law Student Civil Rights Research Council. I worked with attorney C.B. King in Albany,
Georgia. That summer there were many civil rights marches, and the police often refused to protect the demonstrators. I recall sitting in a Federal
District Court with C.B. King and listening to the judge tell a rural sheriff, "The law requires you to protect the demonstrators. If you don't, I have
no choice but to hold you in contempt." Be this illusion, I would not blithely dispel it.
Law can protect the weak from the strong. Economic and racial minorities would
be in a worse condition in a deconstructed world, for our southern sheriff would
argue, "The only reason I must protect them folks is to protect their first
amendment rights, and the only reason they have first amendment rights is to get their voices heard, and, what with television
being what it is, I can assure them of a much larger audience by turning my dogs on
them." Right on, Sheriff! n38
[*1220] A character in Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons, argues that he would "cut down every law in England" to get the Devil. n39 Sir
Thomas More responds:
And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you -- where would you hide, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick
with laws from coast to coast . . . and if you cut them down . . . d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? n40
I realize that one war story and one literary quote will not prove the need for the Rule of Law. I realize there are counter examples and, indeed,
conflicting images: "In Heaven there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb," Grant Gilmore assures us, while "[i]n Hell there will
, the issue of the importance of the

Rule of Law ultimately resolves itself into a vision of human nature. Morton Horwitz has
be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed." n41 No doubt
written that to see the Rule of Law as an "unqualified human good" is to "succumb to Hobbesian pessimism" and to embrace a "conservative
One hates to admit to being suspicious, fearful and, perhaps, even

mean-spirited. Yet, we live in a century that has produced Hitler and Stalin.
Perhaps now is not the time to dump the Rule of Law.
doctrine." n42
"Goodbye to Deconstruction" -- I stole the title. In 1936 Fred Rodell of Yale wrote a delightful essay, "Goodbye to Law Reviews." n43 Mostly he
pokes fun at the pomposity of law reviews.
There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is style. The other is content. That, I think, about covers the ground. [*1221] . . .
[I]t seems to be a cardinal principle of law review writing and editing that nothing may be said forcefully and nothing may be said amusingly.
This, I take it, is in the interest of something called dignity. n44
Rodell's ultimate point goes, however, to content. And in this he is quite serious.
. With law as the only alternative

to force as a means of solving the myriad problems of the world, it seems to me
that the articulate among the clan of lawyers might, in their writings, be more pointedly
aware of those problems, might recognize that the use of law to help toward
their solution is the only excuse for the law's existence, instead of blithely
continuing to make mountain after mountain out of tiresome technical molehills.
I do not wish to labor the point but perhaps it had best be stated once in dead earnest
n45
Articulate deconstructionists, instead of blithely denying the existence of the

mountain with tiresome epistemology, might better devote their obvious talents
to making it more habitable. n46
THE ALTERNATIVE TO LAW IS A WORLD WHERE THERE IS

NO ORDER AND PEOPLE DO WHAT THEY WANT- JUSTIFIES
EVEN WORSE ATROCITIES THAN YOUR IMPACT
ALTMAN 90
Consider the legal duty to aid a person to whom one owes no contractual or
statutory obligation. The traditional common law rule is that there is no legal
duty to aid such a person (a "stranger"). But there are a series of rules that
qualify and carve out exceptions to the traditional rule. Thus, there is a rule that
if the actions of the defendant helped to create the dangerous situation in which
the plaintiff found himself, the defendant may have had a duty to render aid.32
355
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There is a rule that if the plaintiff and the defendant stand in some "special
relationship," there may be a duty to render aid, even if there is no statute or
valid contract between the two requiring the aid.33
356
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Turns: Law Key to Solving

Exploitation
LAW ALLOWS A COLLECTION OF RULES TO SETTLE
SOCIETAL PROBLEMS LIKE VIOLENCE- THE ALTERNATIVE
HOMOGONIZES IDENTITY AND ELIMINATES PROTECTION
FROM THE ADVANTAGED
ALTMAN 90

"Let it be conceded that law typically operates at a higher level of abstraction
than other social rules, at least in a liberal society that exhibits moral, religious,
and political pluralism. The law there will often exclude considerations that
would be viewed as relevant from the perspective of a certain ethical system,
religious doctrine, or political morality. If it did not, legal reasoning could not be
clearly distinguished from unconstrained moral inquiry and political choice.
Moreover, the liberal conception of the rule of law requires that public and
private power be regulated by norms that are generalizable across situations
and can be applied in a regularized, predictable manner. This again requires that
certain aspects of a case be deliberately disregarded in the name of
predictability. Where institutions cannot presuppose that all officials share the
same set of background moral, religious, and political ideas, the authoritative
norms that they lay down cannot regularly call for highly context-sensitive
judgments without threatening the regularity, predictability, and perhaps even
the stability of the system.
Liberal law, then, does require a high level of abstraction, in the sense that it
sometimes prescribes a deliberate disregard for certain particulars of a case that
could be quite relevant to a decision if one were involved in more contextsensitive moral or political deliberation. Thus, the liberal should concede that
legal reasoning will often take place at a significantly higher level of abstraction
than context-sensitive normative deliberation. But he will contend that there are
two very good arguments for institutions that regulate power in accordance with
reasoning that proceeds at a relatively high level of abstraction, given a context
of moral, religious, and political pluralism. First, it settles the terms of social life
in a way that allows us to avoid reopening fundamental questions about society
and human life every time a conflict or dispute breaks out. This liberates our
energies from constant moral and ideological battles and enables us to pursue
vigorously other aims: commercial, scientific, artistic, and so forth. Second, legal
abstraction can materially assist in protecting people from intolerance and
prejudice: When the Jew, the black, or the homosexual is regarded as "just
anybody" by the existing system of legal rules, he or she is protected from the
inclinations of intolerance and prejudice that could well playa role in more
context-sensitive modes for regulating public and private power. Let us examine
the CLS response to each of these liberal arguments.
RULE OF LAW IS THE ONLY OPTION IN A WORLD OF THE

NATION-STATE- THE ALTERNATIVE ALLOWS THE
PRIVELEDGED TO EXPLOIT THE DISADVANTAGED
ALTMAN 90

357
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Morton Horwitz has correctly pointed out that the rule of law can constrain not
only oppressive and misguided uses of power but also benevolent and beneficial
ones.66 Whether the rule of law is to be prized, then, hinges on the question of
whether there is a greater need to confine through the rule of law the intolerant
and oppressive impulses of humans or to liberate the tolerant and benevolent
impulses from the constraints of legality. I do not believe that there is an a priori
answer to this question. To that extent, Horwitz is quite right to say that it is a
mistake to characterize the rule of law as an "unqualified human good," a
characterization made by E. P. Thompson.67 However, the sorry human history
of persecution, prejudice, and intolerance over the past several centuries makes
one conclusion inescapable: Within the context of the nation-state and over the
foreseeable future, the need to confine the impulses of intolerance and
oppression with the requirements of legality will continue to be far greater than
the need to liberate the impulses of of tolerance and benevolence from the
restrictions of the rule of law.68
358
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Turns: Rights Good (1/4)

RIGHTS ALLOW RESISTANCE, EMPOWERMENT AND
RECONFIGURING OF LAW OUTSIDE THE LEGAL SYSTEM
Minow, Professor of Law, Harvard University, Yale Law Journal, Interpreting
Rights: An Essay for Robert Cover, pg L/N 1987
Martha
Before drawing on these interpretive themes, I should try to clarify what I mean
by "rights," an overused word in legal, philosophical, and political debates.
Defining "rights" is a difficult task because there is considerable ambiguity in the
meanings invoked in the debates about rights, and because much ink has been
spilled by legal and political theorists on this subject. One meaning is the
formally announced legal rules that concern relationships among individuals,
groups, and the official state. "Rights" typically are the articulation of such rules
in a form that describes the enforceable claims of individuals or groups against
the state. n25 [*1867] Yet a second meaning will become important in this essay.
"Rights" can give rise to "rights consciousness" so that individuals and groups
may imagine and act in light of rights that have not been formally recognized or
enforced. Rights, in this sense, are neither limited to nor co-extensive with
precisely those rules formally announced and enforced by public authorities.
Instead, rights represent articulations -- public or private, formal or informal -- of
claims that people use to persuade others (and themselves) about how they
should be treated and about what they should be granted. I mean, then, to
include within the ambit of rights discourse all efforts to claim new rights, to
resist and alter official state action that fails to acknowledge such rights, and to
construct communities apart from the state to nurture new conceptions of rights.
Rights here encompass even those claims that lose, or have lost in the past, if
they continue to represent claims that muster people's hopes and articulate
their continuing efforts to persuade. Consciousness, or cognizance, of rights,
then, is not simply awareness of those rights that have been granted in the past,
but also knowledge of the process by which hurts that once were whispered or
unheard have become claims, and claims that once were unsuccessful, have
persuaded others and transformed social life. The connections between past and
future claims of rights are voiced through interpretations of inherited
understandings of rights. Interpretation engages lawyers and nonlawyers in
composing new meanings inside and outside of legal institutions. Charges
against new rights express opposition to this interpretive process.
359
Kritik Answers

RIGHTS ARE PART OF THE DECONSTRUCTIVE ENTERPRISE
THEY OVERLOOK THE FACT THAT RIGHTS DEMANDS ARE
MADE BY SPECIFIC OPPRESSED GROUPS THAT USE THEIR
DEMANDS TO CALL INTO QUESTION SOCIETYS DOMINANT
IDEOLOGIES
Goldfarb, Associate Law Professor at Boston College, 92 (Phyllis, A DIVERSITY OF
INFLUENCE: From the Worlds of "Others": Minority and Feminist Responses to Critical Legal
Studies, New England Law Review, Spring, 26 New Eng.L. Rev. 683)
Because some
scholars have focused narrowly on legal consciousness as the

they view appeals to legal consciousness -- through rights rhetoric, for
example -- as ultimately legitimating the prevailing social conditions and as fundamentally
counterproductive to meaningful social change. n23 This argument is not without merit in the terms in which it is phrased.
Nevertheless, it overlooks the fact that challenges captured in abstract rights language
are presented, not by generic groups, but by specific groups with identifiable histories whose
relationship to the social order may influence the way in which others perceive
their rights claims. African-Americans acquired a place in American society through chattel slavery which persists in the form of an
entrenched race hierarchy that denies recognition of African-Americans' full humanity. Against this backdrop, African-Americans'
assertions of rights have been a radical challenge to social arrangements, a
CLS
predominant ideological support of civil society,
challenge containing sufficient threat at various historical moments to provoke violent resistance. n24 One must first appreciate the central
ideological importance of racism in American society in order to fully comprehend the radical nature of nonwhites' claims to equal rights in a
Civil rights claimants , who understood experientially the intransigent daily realities
were not likely to underestimate the challenge posed to the
traditional social order by their assertion of mainstream equality . n26 As Crenshaw suggests,
[*692] people of color knew that when powerful elements in society had defined particular racial
characteristics as conclusive proof of inferiority, an equality claim was a potent
assault on these collective psychological structures . n27 By proclaiming the
unthinkable -- that people understood to be inferior were entitled to equality -the civil rights movement, through simple assertion of rights routinely granted
to whites, began delegitimating the ideology of race consciousness. In a
powerful deconstructive move, the reified abstractions harbored by masses of
white Americans concerning the characteristics attributed to African-Americans
were thrown into question by African-Americans' assertion of mainstream
equality. n28 Crenshaw and others suggest that the feature of this story that African-Americans continue to need most to deconstruct is
the racist imagery, not the rights imagery. n29 Liberal legal notions, such as rights, represent
strategies to be deployed in this deconstructive enterprise . n30 The recognition of
African-Americans as rights-bearers, as members of the American community,
transformed the experience of race oppression . In Patricia Williams' words: [*693] Rights imply
a respect which places one within the referential range of self and others, which
elevates one's status from human body to social being. For blacks , then, the
attainment of rights signifies the due, the respectful behavior, the collective
responsibility properly owed by a society to one of its own . n31 The civil rights
movement reinforced one ideological support of American society -- legal consciousness -to undermine another ideological support of American society -- race consciousness. As
context of deeply-felt white supremacy. n25
of their own race domination,
Crenshaw explains, the effect of the latter ideology had been to isolate African-Americans so effectively that no other route to social power was
Only by playing the logic of the two prevailing ideologies against one
another, applying the language of rights to the situation of African-Americans,
could the movement hope to achieve any progress at all. The contradiction
between American legal mythology and the systemic treatment of AfricanAmericans created the only room within which the racially subordinated could
maneuver. n32 The weight of daily oppression created an urgency that impelled
African-Americans to seize the only viable opportunity for change that
presented itself. n33
available.
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Kritik Answers

RIGHTS EXPOSE OPPRESSION AND GIVE SILENCED VOICES
A FORUM FOR RECOGNITION
Minow, Professor of Law, Harvard University, Yale Law Journal, Interpreting
Rights: An Essay for Robert Cover, pg L/N 1987
Martha
What, then, is the equality signaled by rights discourse? The equality registered
by rights claims is an equality of attention. The rights tradition in this country
sustains the call that makes those in power at least listen. Rights -- as words and
as forms -- structure attention even for the claimant who is much less powerful
than the authorities, and for individuals and groups treated throughout the
community as less than equal. n70 The interpretive [*1880] approach construes
a claim of right, made before a judge, as a plea for recognition of membership in
a community shared by applicant and judge, much as reader and author share
the world of the text. n71 The language of rights voices an individual's desire to
be recognized in tones that demand recognition. n72 Rights discourse implicates
those who use it in a form of life, a pattern of social and political commitment.
n73 Which claims will persuade, and how? With what consequences for prior and
subsequent claims? Which claims, indeed, will be recognized as even deserving
communal attention? n74 These are difficult and persistent questions in a
community committed to rights discourse. There is a risk that those points of
view that have been silenced in the past will continue to go unheard, and will be
least adaptable to the vocabulary of preexisting claims. These are issues for
struggle, and some struggles may well take place beyond rights discourse,
beyond language. Some people may feel so shut out that the appeal to a
communal commitment to rights makes no sense to them. Nonetheless, an
interpretive conception of rights is a way to take the aspirational language of the
society seriously n75 and to promote change by reliance on inherited traditions.
It is a way to challenge those who want to close the doors now that some of the
previously excluded have fought and found their way in. n76 [*1881] The
metaphors of interpretation and conversation enable a conception of community
connections forged through the exchange of words in the struggle for meaning.
n77 In a powerful novel about contemporary South Africa, Nadine Gordimer's
Rosa Burger responds to a critic of liberalism by saying: I'm not offering a theory.
I'm talking about people who need to have rights -- there -- in a statute book, so
that they can move about in their own country, decide what work they'll do and
what their children will learn at school. . . . People must be able to create
institutions -- institutions must evolve that will make it possible in practice. That
utopia, it's inside . . . without it, how can you . . . act? n78 The use of rights
discourse affirms community, but it affirms a particular kind of community: a
community dedicated to invigorating words with power to restrain, so that even
the powerless can appeal to those words. It is a community that acknowledges
and admits historic uses of power to exclude, deny, and silence -- and commits
itself to enabling suppressed points of view to be heard, to make covert conflict
overt. n79 Committed to making available a rhetoric of rights where it has not
been heard before, this community uses rights rhetoric to make conflict audible
and unavoidable, even if limited to words, or to certain forms of words. n80 If
there is [*1882] conflict experienced in the introduction of rights rhetoric to a
new area, it is over this issue: Should the normative commitment to restrain
power with communal dedication reach this new area? The power in question
may be public or private. For example, with children's rights, large
disagreements persist over whether and how communal limits should constrain
the exercise of private, especially parental, power. n81 Children's rights may
enlarge state power over both children and adults, not simply recognize
children's pre-existing autonomy. n82 But it is the meaning of autonomy, and its
relation to rights, that claims attention next.
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DEMANDS OUTSIDE OF RIGHTS RHETORIC FAIL
DEMANDING RIGHTS MAY REIFY THE DOMINANT SYSTEM
BUT ARE THE ONLY TO PROTECT THE LIVES AND LIBERTY
OF THE OPPRESSED
Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, RACE,
REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN
ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW, Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331)
Rights discourse provided the ideological mechanisms through which the
conflicts of federalism, the power of the Presidency, and the legitimacy of the courts could be orchestrated against
Jim Crow. Movement leaders used these tactics to force open a conflict between whites that eventually benefited Black people.
Casting racial issues in the moral and legal rights rhetoric of the prevailing ideology
helped create the political controversy without which the state's coercive
function would not have been enlisted to aid Blacks. Simply critiquing the
ideology from without or making demands in language outside the rights discourse
would have accomplished little. Rather, Blacks gained by using a powerful
combination of direct action, mass protest, and individual acts of resistance, along with appeals to
public opinion and the courts couched in the language of the prevailing legal
consciousness. The result was a series of ideological and political crises. In these
crises, civil rights activists and lawyers induced the federal government to aid Blacks
and triggered efforts to legitimate and reinforce the authority of the law in ways
that benefited Blacks. Simply insisting that Blacks be integrated or speaking in the language of "needs" would have endangered
the lives of those who were already taking risks -- and with no reasonable chance of success. President Eisenhower , for example,
would not have sent federal troops to Little Rock simply at the behest of protesters
demanding that Black schoolchildren receive an equal education . Instead, the
successful manipulation of legal rhetoric led to a crisis of federal power that
ultimately benefited Blacks. n192 Some critics of legal reform movements seem to
overlook the fact that state power has made a significant difference -sometimes between life and death -- in the efforts of Black people to transform
their world. Attempts to harness the power of the state through the appropriate
rhetorical/legal incantations should be appreciated as intensely powerful and
calculated political acts. In the context of white supremacy, engaging in rights discourse should
be seen as an act of self-defense. This was particularly true because the state could not assume a position of neutrality
regarding Black people once the movement had mobilized people to challenge the system of oppression: either the coercive mechanism of the
state had to be used to support white supremacy, or it had to be used to dismantle it. We know now, with hindsight, that it did both. n193
LIBERAL LEGAL THEORY INTEGRATES NON-LEGAL

SOLUTIONS AS A COMPANION TO LAW- THERE IS NO
NORMATIVE VIEW INHERENT IN OUR REPRESENTATIONS
AND ONLY THE AFF CAN CREATE A FRAMEWORK FOR
RIGHTS
ALTMAN 90

In addition, it would be a distortion of liberal theory to suggest that it has no
place for nonlegal modes of social regulation, such as mediation. Liberals can
and do acknowledge the value of such nonlegal mechanisms in certain social
contexts and can consistently allow a place for them in liberal society. And those
who reject the rule of law can argue in the political arena for extending the role
of such informal mechanisms. Of course, a liberal state could not allow the
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antinomians to eradicate legal institutions; in that sense, one might say that the
liberal rule of law is not neutral. But the kind of political neutrality which the
liberal defends does not aim to guarantee that any normative view has an
opportunity to remake society wholly in its vision. It does guarantee an
opportunity to negotiate and compromise within a framework of individual
rights, and there is no reason why those who defend nonlegal modes of social
regulation cannot seize the opportunity under a liberal regime to carve out a
significant role for nonlegal modes of social regulation within the liberal state.
The liberal version of political neutrality demands that antinomians have such an
opportunity, but there is nothing remotely inconsistent in liberal thought in
making that demand or prohibiting anti legalism from going so far as to destroy
all legal institutions.
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Turns: Alternative Causes Rights

Rollback
THE ALTERNATIVES DIALECTICAL CONCEPTION OF RIGHTS
PUTS ALL GUARANTEES AT RISK, JEOPARDIZING
LIBERATION
Sparer 84
Kennedy, however, adds a second reason for agreeing with Klare [*525] rather
than Lynd: "[T]he left doesn't need a counter-theory that ends with rights"
because "our program for the future must emerge dialectically from our past,
rather than as a deduction from it." n38 This point causes me some concern.
Kennedy is no longer talking about rights theory but about rights themselves.
His refusal to develop a counter-theory which "ends" with rights is due not
merely to the inadequacy of rights alone to protect and imprve the workers'
situation; that could be achieved by making clear that much more is needed,
even for the adequate functioning of the rights themselves. Rather, his refusal is
based on a disavowal of an ongoing (one might say "principled") commitment to
rights. n39
What "our program for the future" is must emerge "dialectically" (rather than as
a "deduction" from our past). Does this mean that Kennedy's "future program"
may not include the right of working people to organize? This very possibility is
why -- given the deductions from past history and present experience discussed
later in this essay -- some of us feel it is appropriate to make a principled
commitment to the legal right of working people to organize and engage in
concerted activities, just as we would make a commitment to the right to
dissent. We cannot trust future programs that emerge "dialectically," but which
are not based on at least limited deductions from our past.
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Turns: Minorities
CLS DISEMPOWERS MARGINALIZED GROUPS WHO USE
LEGAL DISCOURSE IN TRANSFORMATIVE WAYS
Goldfarb, Associate Professor, Boston College Law School, New England Law
Review, Spring, 1992, 26 New Eng.L. Rev. 683
Phyllis
Viewed through Minow's eyes, rights talk represents a demand for public airing
that makes pre-existing conflicts "audible and unavoidable." It is a "process by
which hurts that once were whispered or unheard have become claims, and
claims that once were unsuccessful, have persuaded others and transformed
social life." Rights, Minow argues, can remake relationships; in relating her view,
Minow helps us remake our relationship to rights. This transformative approach
to rights, adopted by movements of the disempowered, is a view that feminist
scholars and scholars of color have urged proponents of Critical Legal Studies to
embrace. The foregoing descriptions comprise content-oriented critiques of
certain CLS theories. Feminists and minorities would offer a methodological
critique as well, a critique rooted in sensitivity to the methods by which one
builds theory. Each has implicitly and explicitly criticized certain CLS literature
for its contextual failures, its inattention to the specific ways that diverse groups
of people experience society and feel its impact in their everyday lives. Each
would contribute to CLS a theory-building epistemology grounded in political
struggle, attentive to the conditions in which people live, and inclusive of the
perspectives they express. The infusion of these diverse perspectives, especially
from the voices of the disempowered, and attention to political practice are
likely to affect CLS theories. For feminists and critical race scholars, this infusion
of voices and involvement in practice represent a moral and epistemological
imperative for a transformative project aimed at reducing hierarchy.
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Turn: Working in System Good (1/2)

THERES NO ALTERNATIVE TO RIGHTS STRATEGIES THAT
WILL SOLVE DEMANDS CAN ONLY BE MADE USING THE
INSTITUTIONAL LOGIC OF THE PRESENT SYSTEM
DEMANDS FOR RIGHTS CREATE INSTITUTIONAL CRISES
THAT CAUSE REAL REFORMS
Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, RACE, REFORM, AND
RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW,
Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331)
The Critics' product is of limited utility to Blacks in its present form. The
implications for Blacks of trashing liberal legal ideology are troubling , even
though it may be proper to assail belief structures that obscure liberating possibilities. Trashing legal ideology seems to tell us repeatedly what
trashing offers no
idea of how to avoid the negative consequences of engaging in
reformist discourse or how to work around such consequences. Even if we imagine the wrong world when we think in
terms of legal discourse, we must nevertheless exist in a present world where legal
protection has at times been a blessing -- albeit a mixed one. The fundamental problem is that,
although Critics criticize law because it functions to legitimate
existing institutional arrangements, it is precisely this legitimating
function that has made law receptive to certain demands in this area.
The Critical emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation leads to the conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should
has already been established -- that legal discourse is unstable and relatively indeterminate. Furthermore,
be avoided because it reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the world that it embodies. Yet Critics offer little beyond this
focus on delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest

that, once rights rhetoric has been discarded, there exists a more
productive strategy for change , one which does not reinforce existing patterns of domination.
Unfortunately, no such strategy has yet been articulated, and it is difficult to
observation. Their
imagine that racial minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward point out in their [*1367] excellent
popular struggles are a reflection of

institutionally determined logic and a challenge to that logic . n137
People can only demand change in ways that reflect the logic of
the institutions that they are challenging . n138 Demands for change
that do not reflect the institutional logic -- that is , demands that do not
engage and subsequently reinforce the dominant ideology -- will probably be
ineffective. n139 The possibility for ideological change is created
through the very process of legitimation , which is triggered by crisis. Powerless
people can sometimes trigger such a crisis by challenging an institution
internally, that is, by using its own logic against it . n140 Such crisis occurs
when powerless people force open and politicize a contradiction
between the dominant ideology and their reality . The political consequences [*1368]
account of the civil rights movement,
of maintaining the contradictions may sometimes force an adjustment -- an attempt to close the gap or to make things appear fair. n141 Yet,
because the adjustment is triggered by the political consequences of the contradiction, circumstances will be adjusted only to the extent
necessary to close the apparent contradiction. This approach to understanding legitimation and change is applicable to the civil rights
movement. Because Blacks were challenging their exclusion from political society, the only claims that were likely to achieve recognition were
Articulating their formal demands

through legal rights ideology, civil rights protestors exposed a series of
contradictions -- the most important being the promised privileges of American citizenship and the practice of absolute racial
those that reflected American society's institutional logic: legal rights ideology.
subordination. Rather than using the contradictions to suggest that American citizenship was itself illegitimate or false, civil rights protestors
By seeking to
restructure reality to reflect American mythology , Blacks relied upon and
ultimately benefited from politically inspired efforts to resolve the
contradictions by granting formal rights . Although it is the need to maintain legitimacy that
proceeded as if American citizenship were real, and demanded to exercise the "rights" that citizenship entailed.
presents powerless groups with the opportunity to wres
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Turn: Working in System Good (2/2)

WEVE GOT TO WORK THROUGH THE SYSTEM TO CHANGE
IT.
Andrew
Sullivan, Editor of the New Republic, Virtually Normal, 1995, p. 88-91
Moreover, a cultural strategy as a political strategy is a dangerous one for a

minority-and a small minority at that. Inevitably, the vast majority of the culture
will be at best uninterested. In a society where the market rules the culture,
majorities win the culture wars. And in a society where the state, pace Foucault
actually does exist, where laws are passed according to rules by which the
society operates, culture, in any case, is not enough. It may be necessary, but it
is not sufficient. To achieve actual results, to end persecution of homosexuals in
the military, to allow gay parents to keep their children, to provide basic
education about homosexuality in high schools, to prevent murderers of
homosexuals from getting lenient treatment, it is necessary to work through the,
very channels Foucault and his followers revile. It is necessary to conform to
certain disciplines in order to reform them, necessary to speak a certain
language before it can say something different, necessary to abandon the
anarchy of random resistance if actual homosexuals are to be protected. As
Michael Walzer has written of Foucault, he 11 stands nowhere and finds no
reasons, Angrily he rattles the bars of the iron cage. But he has no plans or
projects for turning the cage into something more like a human home." The
difficult and compromising task of interpreting one world for another, of
reforming an imperfect and unjust society from a criterion of truth or reasoning,
is not available to the liberationists. Into Foucault's philosophical anarchy they
hurl a political cri de coeur. When it eventually goes unheard, when its impact
fades, when its internal nihilism blows itself out, they have nothing left to offer.
Other homosexuals, whose lives are no better for queer revolt, remain the
objects of a political system which the liberationists do not deign to engage. The
liberationists prefer to concentrate-for where else can they go?-on those
instruments of power which require no broader conversation, no process of
dialogue, no moment of compromise, no act of engagement. So they focus on
outing, on speech codes, on punitive measures against opponents on campuses,
on the enforcement of new forms of language, by censorship and by
intimidation. Insofar, then, as liberationist politics is cultural, it is extremely
vulnerable; and insofar as it is really political, it is almost always authoritarian.
Which is to say it isn't really a politics at all. It's a strange confluence of political
abdication and psychological violence.
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Indeterminacy False (1/4)

THE LAW REASONABLY GUIDES IMPLIMENTATION EVEN IN
HARD CASES
Solum 87
What then is the truth about indeterminacy? There is certainly room for dispute,
but as practical boundaries for the debate, three conclusions are firm. First, legal
doctrine underdetermines the results in many, but not all, actual cases. That is
to say that aside from the easiest cases, aspects of the outcome are rule-guided
but not rule-bound. For example, in the most routine cases, the amount of a
traffic fine or of a damage award may vary within some range. Second, although
there may be some cases in which the result is radically underdeterminate, in
the sense that any party could "win" under some valid interpretation of legal
doctrine, it does not follow that the doctrine itself is indeterminate over all
cases. For example, the three-pronged test for impermissible state
establishment of religion, articulated in Lemon v. Kurtzman, n97 is often
criticized as highly underdeterminate. But, in spite of any uncertainty about
some applications of the Lemon test, we can be quite sure that a court applying
the Lemon test would strike down any law giving parochial school teachers a pay
raise out of state funds. n98 Third, it is pure nonsense to say that legal doctrine
is completely indeterminate even with respect to very [*495] hard cases. Even
in the hardest hard case, legal doctrine limits the court's options. One of the
parties will receive a judgment, not some unexpected stranger; the relief will be
related to the dispute at hand and will not be a declaration that Mickey Mouse is
the President of the United States.
EVIDENCE OF INDETERMINACY IS FLAWED: SELECTION

BIAS
Solum 87
Furthermore, one of the primary criteria for inclusion in a casebook may be
indeterminacy itself: practically indeterminate cases may be useful
pedagogically because they can be used to illustrate both the methods and
limits of formal legal reasoning as well as the role of principle and policy. The
generalization that the law is practically indeterminate may thus stem from the
predominance of such examples in the materials with which legal scholars work
on a daily basis. n104
Finally, critical legal scholars have a strong practical motive for belief in the
indeterminacy thesis. If one believes that the rules are strongly determinate, but
fundamentally wrong, one is left with very little room to maneuver within the
limited horizons of legal scholarship. The notion that it is possible to achieve
radical results working with the existing body of legal doctrine -- because the
seeming constraints are illusory -- has powerful attraction for those committed
to social change, but whose professional lives are confined to the academy and
not the capitol buildings.
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INDETERMINACY IS AN UNPROVABLE FARCE THE LAW IS
ONLY UNDERDETERMINED AND USUALLY WORKS
Solum 87
[*475] This confusion between indeterminacy and underdeterminacy is also reflected in Duncan Kennedy's definition of formalism in his early
essay, Legal Formality: "The essence of rule application, as I have defined it above, is that it is mechanical. The decision process is called rule
application only if the actor resolutely limits himself to identifying those aspects of the situation which, per se, trigger his response." n47
Kennedy has defined rule application in such a way that only a completely
determined decision will count as a decision that is not indeterminate . The difficulty with
this definition is that legal rules (or, more broadly, doctrines) can significantly constrain outcomes
even if they do not mechanically determine them.
My general argument against the internal skeptic's defense is that underdeterminacy is not the same as
indeterminacy and that a case need not be indeterminate to be hard. With all this in mind, I can agree with critical scholars that there
are some cases that appear easy on their surface but are actually hard. But the internal skeptics believe that by demonstrating that easy cases
are hard cases, they have also demonstrated that the law is indeterminate. At this stage in the argument, I part company with these advocates of
indeterminacy.
, the internal skeptic cannot demonstrate that all law is

indeterminate through conventional legal argumentation. The first reason is conceptual: if a
decision is not determinate, it does not follow that it is also not
underdeterminate and, therefore, indeterminate. Neither does it follow that because a case is hard, it is
For two principal reasons
indeterminate. Even if all seemingly easy cases were actually hard cases, it would not follow that the law is indeterminate with respect to all
these cases -- although it would follow that the law is less determinate than we might have thought. Hard cases can be very hard, even if their
results are not completely indeterminate. I submit further that even the hardest of hard cases are merely underdetermined by the law, not
indeterminate. But I defer discussion of this point until later in this essay.
The second reason internal skepticism cannot prove complete indeterminacy is rooted in the standards implicit in the practice of acceptable legal
there are at least some very easy cases that are completely determinate
argument:
.
For example, if I were sued by Gore Vidal for slander on the basis of the first paragraph of this [*476] article, the only possible outcome would
A skeptic might respond that it is possible to think of an argument

suggesting that I should lose the case, or that the judge could simply rule
against me without explanation. But it is simply incredible to say that any such
argument or arbitrary ruling would be considered acceptable by the legal
profession. That is, this sort of defense of indeterminacy is not internal to the law. It may, however, have some critical bite -- a matter I
be a verdict for me.
turn to in the following discussions of external skepticism and the epiphenomenalist defense.
THE VAST MAJORITY OF CASES ARE DETERMINATE YOU

JUST DONT HEAR ABOUT THEM
Hegland 85
[Kenney, Prof. of Law @ Arizona, Goodbye to Deconstruction, 58 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1203, July,
ln//uwyo-ajl]
Let us return to the mundane -- can legal doctrines determine the outcome of
specific legal controversies? I think the acne case establishes, at least in theory,
that legal rules and doctrines can determine outcomes and that they can
constrain judicial discretion and immunize decisions from subjective preference.
But even if I have won my quarrel theoretically, I have not done much to save
the legal order if all I have shown is that legal doctrine determines outcome only
in what I must now concede to be the most ridiculous of hypotheticals. What of
the real world of judges, lawyers and clients? Does doctrine determine outcome
there?
My sense is that legal doctrines determine the outcomes in most cases. I do not
believe this is due to the litigants' lack of imagination or resources. It is because
doctrines are not mirages; they have real substance and are what they appear
to be.
Law professors teach the difficult cases of the casebooks, read the novel cases
of the advance sheets, and fret over "major" Supreme Court decisions. Law
professors overestimate the degree of legal uncertainty. I teach a course in
contracts, and last summer I took a week to read every appellate decision in my
home state dealing with that subject over the last several years. It is, by and
large, boring stuff: "The rule is X, the facts are Y, and therefore we hold for the
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plaintiff." I realize that in the process of writing an opinion an uncertain case
may become certain. Nonetheless, in most of the opinions I read, there was
simply no sign of doctrinal uncertainty: seldom were there dissenting opinions,
seldom were cases distinguished, and seldom did the court discuss "social
policy" to convince the reader that the legal doctrine should apply. Typically, the
doctrine was recited and then applied. It was a long week.
Now it may be that, for some dark or benign purpose, the judges of Arizona are
out to hoodwink us, or for perhaps some climatic reason, Arizona lawyers have
been made dumb and their clients poor. But, if my reading of the cases is fair, I
think that as an empirical matter the deconstructionists have some explaining to
do -- and it will not do to simply assert, rather than prove, that Sun-Belt lawyers
lack imagination and resolve.
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INDETERMINACY DOES NOT MEAN WE CANNOT MAKE
REASONABLE PREDICTIONS
Gordon, Professor of Law, Stanford University, Stanford Law Review, January,
1984, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 57,
Robert
The other argument rests, I think, on a misunderstanding of what the Critics

mean by indeterminancy. They don't mean -- although sometimes they sound as
if they do -- that there are never any predictable causal relations between legal
forms and anything else. As argued earlier in this essay, there are plenty of
short- and medium-run stable regularities in social life, including regularities in
the interpretation and application, in given contexts, of legal rules. Lawyers, in
fact, are constantly making predictions for their clients on the basis of these
regularities. The Critical claim of indeterminacy is simply that none of these
regularities are necessary consequences of the adoption of a given regime of
rules. The rule-system could also have generated a different set of stabilizing
conventions leading to exactly the opposite results and may, upon a shift in the
direction of political winds, switch to those opposing conventions at any time.
YOUR INDETERMINACY ARGUMENT ASSUMES THE PAST

DONT MANIFEST IN FUTURE DECISIONS- PAST MISTAKES
GUIDE FUTURE- ADDITIONALLY, YOUR ARGUMENT THAT
LAW CANNOT HAVE A POSITIVE EFFECT IS WRONGPOWER DISTRIBUTION PROVES
ALTMAN 90

Ultra-theory relies, in fact, upon a seriously flawed conception of social reality
and rests upon several fallacious inferences. We may begin the criticism of it
with a point to which I have already alluded, concerning the issue of whether the
social past can control the social future. The CLS ultra-theorist correctly believes
that the social past can never guarantee the character of the social future. It is
never a necessary truth that the social world will continue to turn in the way it
has been turning up to now. However, ultra-theorists fallaciously infer from this
that the social past cannot control the social future, that social rules cannot
constrain and channel human social behavior and thought. This inference is a
fallacy because control is always a matter of degree; it may never reach the
point of constituting a necessary connection between past and future, but it
does not follow that there is no control. 35
CLS ultra-theorists have been led astray here by an ill-conceived reliance on the
metaphysical categories of contingency and necessity. They reason that the
social future is contingent, that it does not have to be a certain way; in
particular, it does not have to be a repetition of the social past. They fallaciously
conclude that the social past can exert no control over the social future.
Underlying this fallacious inference is the mistaken belief that there can be a
relation of control between x and y only if x's prescription that y behave in a
certain way necessarily leads to y behaving in that way.
Moreover, the ultra-theorist's view that control requires necessary connections
contradicts his own view that one individual can control another. Recall that the
CLS ultra-theorist denies that social rules have the power to control the behavior
and thought of individuals but that he simultaneously affirms that individuals
(e.g., slaveowners) can control other individuals (e.g., their slaves). Yet the ultra-
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theorist argument explaining why rules cannot control individuals also defeats
the possibility of individuals controlling other individuals. Nothing makes it
impossible for slaves to revolt, for workers to rebel, for the oppressed to rise up.
The ultra-theory argument would force one to conclude that masters exert no
control over slaves, bosses no control over workers, the oppressors no control
over the oppressed. These conclusions are flatly inconsistent with the claims of
CLS ultra-theorists, in addition to being wholly implausible. The conclusion to
draw from the fact that the oppressed can revolt at any time is not that the
oppressors do not exert control over them but that the control is not total. And
exactly the same conclusion should be drawn about social rules: The fact that
such rules can be trashed at any moment does not show that they exert no
control, only that the control is not total.
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EVEN IF THEYRE RIGHT, THAT ONLY MEANS THAT
JUSTIFICATIONS ARE DISPARATE LEGAL OUTCOMES ARE
STILL DETERMINATE
Solum 87
I pause now to examine this argument in some detail. It is easy to agree that existing legal rules are not fully determined by any unified and
consistent social theory. Even if we had a fully satisfactory theory justifying the broad outlines of the modern state, it would be hard to argue that
it does not follow

from this admission that critical scholars have made out a case for complete
indeterminacy of justification. Some specific legal rules may necessarily follow from a
broad social theory; many legal rules may be incompatible with a given theory.
[*467] Moreover, indeterminacy of justification does not entail indeterminacy in a set of
legal rules. n16 A number of competing theories could be used to justify or
critique a wide range of legal doctrines, while the legal doctrines themselves
nonetheless would constrain the outcome of particular cases. n17 For example, one could make
any such theory required a particular set of legal rules, much less the precise set of rules we have now. However,
consequentialist arguments for and against the doctrine of promissory estoppel, while the doctrine itself remained determinate in application. Of
course, if (as is often the case) the justification for a rule is used to guide its application, indeterminacy of justification will lead to greater
indeterminacy of legal outcomes. n18
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A2 Language Makes Law

Indeterminate: 2AC
LINGUISTIC INDETERMINACY CAN GO EITHER WAY,
CANCELLING OUT ANY EFFECT ON THE LAW
Solum 87
But the difficulty with appealing to Wittgenstein's skeptical paradox is that it
costs the indeterminacy thesis its critical bite. Wittgenstein makes the following
observation:
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule,
because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The
answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can
also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor
conflict here. n56
Thus, we may admit the paradox but reject its significance because it has no
consequences for human conduct. Like other skeptical paradoxes, it has no
existential force. As Saul Kripke puts it, "It holds no terrors in our daily lives." n57
My argument, therefore, relies on the distinction between logical and practical
possibility. This distinction can be illuminated by a brief discussion of an
analogous problem with epistemological skepticism. An epistemological skeptic
might claim that we can never really know anything. An anti-skeptic might
respond with an [*479] example of an "easy case" of knowledge: you know that
you are currently sitting in a chair and reading this peculiar article. The skeptic
might respond by raising a skeptical possibility: for all you know you are only a
brain in a vat being manipulated by an evil scientist to think you are sitting and
reading this essay, when in fact you are doing neither of these things. n58
Very roughly, it is my view that rule-skepticism can be shown to be toothless for
the same reason that this sort of epistemological skepticism is toothless:
worrying about being a brain in a vat will not have any effect on what you do.
Likewise, worrying about rule-skepticism will not have any effect on the way
cases are decided. The skeptical possibilities invoked by both rule-skepticism
and epistemological skepticism are not practical possibilities, and only practical
possibilities affect the way one acts.
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CLS Recreates Oppression (1/2)

TURN- CLS CONFLATES AND CREATES OPPRESSION; WE
MUST CRITICIZE FROM THE OPPRESSEDS PERSPECTIVE
Anthony
Cook Professor of Law, Critical Race Theory, Ed. Kimberl Crenshaw et al,
1995, p. 89-90
The third problem with the CLS critique is that it threatens to conflate the
unique histories of the various forms of alienation and oppression
engendered by the subconscious acceptance and assimilation of liberal ideology.
the experiences of racism and sexismto name but twoare certainly
related to the way individuals experience liberalism as oppressive but
cannot be reduced to that experience. Therefore, exploration of the
various histories of oppression, often ignored by CLSs account can
provide an essential basis for any reconstructed community. Finally,
deconstruction should ultimately lead to a reconstructive vision, which will
involve some line-drawing and boundary-setting. CLS should not only explain
why liberalisms boundary-setting is problematic; it must also suggest how to
redraw those boundaries to satisfy other goals. I believe CLS too often falls
victim to a myopic preoccupation with the limited role of theoretical
deconstruciton and a too narrowly tailored experiential deconstruction that
focuses exclusively on how individuals experience liberalism. Hegemonic
ideologies are never maintained by logical consistencey alone; knowledge of the
full range of conditions under which they remain oppressed, exposes new
problems and possibilities. When one begins to contemplate how alternative
visions of community might look and be implemented, one must consider
carefully the view from the bottomnot simply what oppressors say
but how the oppressed respond to what they say. The view from the
bottom may offer insights into why individuals accept their subordinate status in
society despite the illogic and inconsistency of the dominant ideology.
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CLS Recreates Oppression (2/2)

TRASHING THE LEGAL SYSTEM LEAVES OPPRESSION
INTACT AND RESULTS IN REAL WORLD SUFFERING THE
RISK OF OUR IMPACT IS WORSE THAN THEIRS
Goldfarb, Associate Law Professor at Boston College, 92 (Phyllis, A DIVERSITY OF
INFLUENCE: From the Worlds of "Others": Minority and Feminist Responses to Critical Legal
Studies, New England Law Review, Spring, 26 New Eng.L. Rev. 683)
Some CLS theories imply that the use of rights rhetoric by people of [*694] color to try to remove some of the harshest manifestations of racial
domination exemplifies a false legal consciousness or a counterproductive faith in the power of liberalism to produce social change. n34 Certain
critical race theorists have responded that this implication stems from a misapprehension of the options for genuine social struggle open to the
The decision to pursue a rights strategy

may well represent a conscious and critical assessment of the
constraints imposed by the conditions of racial subjugation . n36 The
denial of this possibility may itself represent a form of false consciousness. n37 As Crenshaw observes: " In the context of
white supremacy, engaging in rights discourse should be seen as
an act of self-defense." n38 [*695] Richard Delgado suggests that rights can protect
minorities from those who, in the absence of legal sanctions,
would feel freer to act upon racist impulses . n39 Although certain CLS scholars despair of the
vision of atomized individuals that underlies rights language, n40 Delgado states that minorities , who regularly experience the
intrusions of oppression, value the distance that rights place between
themselves and others. n41 Such distance offers a measure of
safety from race-based violence, contempt and abuse. In the sort of
informal community that some CLS writers prize, a community operating by fluid and
flexible exercises of discretion unbounded by rights and rules , n42
Delgado wonders what structures would protect minorities from
racist behavior. n43 For minorities, Delgado indicates, abandoning formality may mean
abandoning security, making the informal community a setting of
disproportionate vulnerability for people of color . n44 These different attitudes about
socially, economically and politically dispossessed. n35
rights and rule structures are vividly portrayed in a story related by Patricia Williams. In renting an apartment in New York City, Williams insists on
a conventional lease to demonstrate her trustworthiness, while Peter Gabel, her white male colleague, demonstrates his trustworthiness by
avoiding a lease and engaging in an informal conversational transaction. n45 Williams rejects the CLS critique of legalism and formality not
because it is inaccurate, but because it voices a single perspective that grows from a particular social experience, ignoring the experiences of
other social groups. n46 Her conclusion is that we should not abandon rights language for all purposes, but that we should "listen intently to each
other," to "bridge the experiential distance" between us, n47 and to "attempt to become multilingual in the semantics of each others' rightsvaluation." n48 Robert Williams also ties differential rights-valuation to the social experiences of different social groups. Williams asserts that CLS
theory [*696] has underestimated peoples of color when it worries that they have come to believe in the "truth" of rights rather than in the
simple instrumental character of attaining rights. n49 From the standpoint of the empowered, Williams observes, rights represent abstract,
from the standpoint of the subordinated, rights have

palpable reality
metaphysical concepts, but
more
: One cannot experience the pervasive, devastating reality of a "right," . . . except in its absence. One
must first be denied that seat on the bus, one must see the desecration of one's tribe's sacred lands, one must be without sanitary facilities in a
farm field, to understand that a "right" can be more than a concept. A right can also be a real, tangible experience. . . . What else could a right be
other than an abstraction to someone who has never had their abstractions taken away or denied. . . . Arising from the historical experience of
peoples of color in United States society "concepts" such as "rights" or "justice" assume a life of their own in an experiential sense. It is in this
struggle for the tangible benefits of these "concepts" that peoples of color mobilize themselves to forge their own discourse. Unavoidably and
irredeemably derivative in part of the majority society's discursive practices . . . . this type of discourse which finds its genesis in the historical
struggles of peoples of color strategically employs those concepts, such as "rights," which speak most directly and forcefully to the prejudices of
many people
of color reject the CLS critique of rights consciousness in its present form. They view the CLS emphasis on
delegitimating legal ideology as a project that relinquishes too
much, since appeals to legal ideology represent one of the only
strategies that has effectively elicited a response to the
desperate needs of subordinated people . Minority scholars seem to read CLS rights critiques
the dominant culture. n50 Because differences in rights-valuation grow out of their different social experiences,
simply as cautionary tales about the dangers of engaging liberal ideology, while they continue to make realistic decisions, given the limited array
Debunking legal ideology may indeed meet the

needs of those who experience oppression primarily in terms of
feelings of alienation from community. People of color, however,
have often chosen another strategy, for regardless of the status
of options, to risk such engagement.
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of legal consciousness, they have identified racism as an
ideology more threatening to their lives
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CLS is Nihilistic
CLS COLLAPSES INTO NIHILISM
Johnson 84
The seemingly sophisticated tendency of Critical scholars to see "politics" at the
root of every practice is also unsatisfying. Politics deals with the accommodation
and adjustment of claims backed by power, and to see nothing but politics in law
is to adopt the claim of Thrasymachus that justice is the will of the stronger.
n110 That amounts to nihilism, which is a coherent position only if one is
prepared to accept the implication that might makes right. It is clear that the
Critical scholars do not want to accept that implication, which, after all, would
make them very wrong indeed. They want to escape the impasse of nihilism by
liberating themselves from an inherited burden of false consciousness that
makes hard choices seem inevitable.
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No Alternative (1/2)
CLS HAS NO HARD REFERENCE, PREVENTING THE
CONSTRUCTION OF A REALISTIC ALTERNATIVE
Johnson 84
The second major problem with a purely negative use of Marxism is that
criticism itself is meaningless without a standard of reference, whether express
or implied. Critical scholars who describe "capitalist" society as oppressive or
hierarchical are like New Yorkers who speak of Cleveland as being in the "West."
Contemporary capitalist society may be oppressive and hierarchical judged by
some ideal standard and yet have less oppression and hierarchy than most or
even all other societies that have ever existed. Critical legal writing
systematically evades the question, "Compared to what?"
My point is not that one always has to propose an alternative [*261] when one
criticizes, but rather that failure to specify the standard of reference robs the
criticism of meaning. When Critical scholars say that life in a capitalist society is
alienating, I do not know if they mean that this is true because of some
particular characteristic of capitalist society or because life in every known from
of society is alienating. If the latter is the case, then blaming alienation on
capitalism is absurd.
In a word, the relationship of Critical legal though to Marxism or any other
ideological position is obscure. Without a firm ideological basis the Critical
viewpoint is itself obscure, and indeed it is not easy to explain how Critical
scholarship differes from "liberal" or "traditional" scholarship, except in its
greater obscurity. n42 Liberal scholarship itself is strongly Critical, and may even
have prepared the way for nihilism by undermining so much that had seemed
certain.
THE CRITICAL LEGAL ALTERNATIVE IS SO VAGUE THAT IT

JUSTIFIES MAINTAINING THE STATUS QUO
Johnson 84
There is no mystery about what the Critical legal scholars are against: They are
against capitalism, liberalism, and illegitimate hierarchy. It is much harder to say
what they are for. In fact, Critical legal writing has practically nothing to suggest
in the way of a positive political program. For a movement that claims to be
political, this is truly an astonishing vacuum. At the 1981 Yale Symposium on
Legal Scholarship, for example, Duncan Kennedy called for "utopian
speculation," "dreaming up the ways we think things might be better than they
are," because radicals need to ask, " What would we do with power, anyway?"
n89 On the same occasion, Alan Freeman chided his colleagues for failing to
follow through on the radical implications of their papers. The most he could
propose himself, however, was that radicals should escape from liberal thinking
by incorporating "insights from other methods: structuralism, phenomenology,
advanced Marxist thought, radical empiricism, and comparative methods." n90
Roberto Mangabeira Unger concluded his book Law in Modern Society by
observing that the solution to the conflict between personal autonomy and
community "could be fully worked out only with the help of a metaphysics we do
not yet possess." n91 Whatever may have been their authors' intentions, the
political [*282] implications of these messages seem concervative to me. If we
not only don't know how to get there from here, but also don't know where
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"there" is, doesn't it follow that we should stay here until more information
comes along?
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No Alternative (2/2)
CLS HAS NO ALTERNATIVE, REPLACING POLITICAL ACTION
WITH USELESS DREAMING
Johnson 84
The Critical scholars sincerely want to be radicals: Indeed, some of them formed
their standards of right and wrong in a counterculture that associated radical
politics with goodness itself and identified liberalism with "selling out." They are
also aware that the existing legal order is not as securely founded upon reason
as some people like to pretend. Unfortunately, they do not have a radical
alternative to propose. Their strategy in this awkward situation is to retreat into
a mystical utopianism that is couched in political language but in fact has little
to do with politics. The "incoherence" of liberalism is their incoherence, its
"failure" their failure. Critical legal writing provides a way of sounding like a
radical when you don't know how to be one.
THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO LAW- IT IS THE MOST

COHERENT WAY TO SETTLE SOCIAL ISSUES
ALTMAN 90
There are serious problems with this CLS view of the implications of the
patchwork thesis. Even if there are incompatible principles that underlie different
segments of doctrine, it does not follow that the judge is free to choose which
principle to rely on in deciding a case. Recall from the discussion in chapter 2
that our legal culture incorporates a convention that requires that cases be
decided in a way that provides the greatest degree of logical coherence with the
settled rules and decisions. Suppose that in most cases a decision relying on a
particular principle fits better with the settled materials than one relying on a
competing principle. The supposition is not inconsistent with the patchwork
thesis, but if it is true, then it would be wrong to claim, as Dalton does, that
equally forceful legal arguments could be given for both sides in almost any
case. The better legal argument would be the one that displays the better fit
with the settled decisions and norms, and the law itself would be highly
determinate, even if the patchwork thesis were true.
CLS HAS NO RECONSTRUCTIVE VISION

Anthony
Cook Professor of Law, Critical Race Theory, Ed. Kimberl Crenshaw et al,
1995, p. 89-90
The third problem with the CLS critique is that it threatens to conflate the unique
histories of the various forms of alienation and oppression engendered by the
subconscious acceptance and assimilation of liberal ideology. the experiences of
racism and sexismto name but twoare certainly related to the way
individuals experience liberalism as oppressive but cannot be reduced to that
experience. Therefore, exploration of the various histories of oppression, often
ignored by CLSs account can provide an essential basis for any reconstructed
community. Finally, deconstruction should ultimately lead to a reconstructive
vision, which will involve some line-drawing and boundary-setting. CLS should
not only explain why liberalisms boundary-setting is problematic; it must also
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suggest how to redraw those boundaries to satisfy other goals. I believe CLS too
often falls victim to a myopic preoccupation with the limited role of theoretical
deconstruciton and a too narrowly tailored experiential deconstruction that
focuses exclusively on how individuals experience liberalism. Hegemonic
ideologies are never maintained by logical consistencey alone; knowledge of the
full range of conditions under which they remain oppressed, exposes new
problems and possibilities. When one begins to contemplate how alternative
visions of community might look and be implemented, one must consider
carefully the view from the bottomnot simply what oppressors say but how the
oppressed respond to what they say. The view from the bottom may offer
insights into why individuals accept their subordinate status in society despite
the illogic and inconsistency of the dominant ideology.
382
Kritik Answers
Alternative Fails: Elitism

THE ALTERNATIVE IS ELITIST SELF-PRESERVATION, SHORTCIRCUITING ANY RADICAL POTENTIAL
White 84
[G. Edward, Critical Legal Studies Symposium: The Inevitability of Critical Legal
Studies, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 649, January, ln//uwyo-ajl]
. In calling for the transformation of social
institutions, they were calling for the transformation of a world in which they
have been comfortable and prominent. Few of the designated beneficiaries of
their cells for change share their close identification with a hierarchical
educational system in which the most prestigious members of the hierarchy get the fewest apparent demands made on their
The Critical theorists therefore cannot have it both ways
time. How many members of the oppressed classes would applaud a world in which persons designated law professors got paid rather well for
teaching five hours a week, or perhaps not at all? How many would be inclined to think that persons living that kind of life have any idea what it
means to be oppressed? And while some Critical theorists might willingly work one month out of a year as janitors or secretaries, others might
. There are powerful

forces of self-preservation operating to retard the impact of transformative
proposals, and when one adds to those forces a newly emergent skepticism
about the wisdom of elites, one can readily imagine a scenario in which Critical
legal scholars preach their transformative proposals to audiences wearing
headsets.
not like to have their salaries equalized even with other law professors, let alone with maintenance workers
CRITICAL LEGAL THEORY IS INSULATED WITHIN THE

ACADEMY, REINSCRIBING CAPITAL
Johnson 84
nothing is more vulnerable to a Marxist critique than the CLS
movement itself. Most of these scholars are law professors at prestigious
universities, predominantly at Harvard and Stanford; such a career implies acceptance by the
legal intellectual establishment. From this platform they preach a sort of nihilistic
utopianism, a most unconvincing doctrine that in no way threatens the existing
order of society. Their visibility at the elite universities lends credibility to the
image of neutrality and tolerance that the Ruling Hegemony wishes to project.
Their rhetoric reassures law students that the only alternatives to the present
system are "utopian." The obvious Marxist explanation of the CLS movement is that it permits a few
harmless academic leftists to adopt a radical pose, while receiving good salaries
and excellent fringe benefits for serving the interests of the capitalists. n54
The irony is that
YOUR ALTERNATIVE HAS BEEN FRACTURED- CLS IS ONLY

COMPREHENSIBLE WITHIN ELITE CIRLCES AND IT IS DEAD
NEASCU 00
(Dana, Former Asst. Corporate Counsel, 8 J.L. & Pol'y 415, CLS stands for Critical
Legal Studies, if Anyone Remembers, MosE)
Critical Legal Studies ("CLS"), n1 which started as a Left movement within legal academia, n2 has undergone so
many [*416] changes, that one may liken it to products of pop culture, such as the
television cartoon show, South Park. n3 South Park features a character named Kenny, totally unlike any other
cartoon hero, tragic or otherwise. Like Kenny, who is an outsider and who speaks a language
unintelligible to all except, astonishingly, his classmates, CLS no longer seems to
possess a voice comprehensible to anyone outside its own small circle. Kenny, unlike all
other cartoon figures, dies in every episode. n4 Significantly , often Kenny's death has been self-inflicted though not necessarily intentional - when, for instance, he ignores warnings of
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imminent danger. Like Kenny, CLS has suffered many often self-inflicted injuries.
Like South Park, generally, CLS is certainly colorful, but often little more than that and, as in the cartoon, except for the certainty of Kenny's death
and later resurrection, there seems more flash than substance in its existence. We are left to guess whether CLS will prove to be as resilient after
apparent death, as Kenny
384
Kritik Answers
Alternative Fails: Fractures

Movement
YOUR ALTERNATIVE FAILS- FRACTURED LEFT
NEASCU 00
(Dana, Former Asst. Corporate Counsel, 8 J.L. & Pol'y 415, CLS stands for Critical
Legal Studies, if Anyone Remembers, MosE)
As a result of this array of dissenting and conflicting interests, CLS has been left
with no cohesive voice, and it appears now as a mere witness to the powerless
atomization of an emasculated radical Left discourse. This atomization may have
promoted certain group solidarities, and possibly offered short term relief. But,
despite CLS's influence on legal discourse, it never seemed able to attain even a
partially-unified leftist discourse. This failure might be the cause of mutual
estrangement among all of its "members" - or at least a failure to offer a
common core - that eventually risks oblivion for the movement as a whole. In
response, CLS now must rediscover its voice in the legal community, even
though the old leftist habits and texts have far less luster and glitter than
fashionable literary theories.
385
Kritik Answers
Alternative Fails: Indeterminacy

Kills Criticism
CLSS FOCUS ON INDETERMINACY NEUTRALIZES
CRITICISM OF THE LAW, PREVENTING THE CREATION OF A
NEW ORDER
Solum 87
Far from enabling a progressive transformation of legal practice,
the indeterminacy thesis, at least the strong version, disempowers the critique of legal
ideology that critical scholars hope will facilitate emancipatory social change. Seen
But this appeal is superficial.
in broad terms, their critique has two parts. First, the mystification thesis will unveil the structures of domination masked by legal doctrine.
Second, the indeterminacy thesis will explain how domination circumvents the apparent autonomy of the law and frees legal actors from the
apparent constraints imposed by the existing rules. Thus, mystification and indeterminacy are the intellectual foundations both for a program of
external critique that will reveal the law to the layman for what it is, and for an internal critique through which progressive legal actors will freely
use legal practice to achieve emancipatory ends.
the strong indeterminacy thesis undercuts, rather than advances,

the projects of both internal and external critique. Because the strong
indeterminacy thesis calls for disengagement from the form and conventions of
discourse that makes legal practice possible, the thesis blunts an internal
critique of the law. Stanley Cavell puts the point as follows:
My contention is that
The internal tyranny of convention is that only a slave of it can know how it may be changed for the better, or know why it should be eradicated.
Only masters of a game, perfect slaves to that project, are in a position to establish conventions which better serve its essence. This is why deep
revolutionary changes can result from attempts to conserve a project, to take it back to its idea, keep it in touch with its history. To demand that
the law be fulfilled, every jot and tittle, will destroy the law as it stands, if it has moved too far from its origins. Only a priest could have
confronted his set of practices with its origins so deeply as to set the terms of Reformation. n105
Cavell's idea can be put into a legal context by examining the critical legal theory of Roberto Unger. Unger identifies "deviationalist doctrine" as
the positive alternative for legal scholarship. The project of deviationalist doctrine must maintain "the minimal characteristics of doctrine" that is
"the willingness to take the extant [*499] authoritative materials as starting points." n106 Like the Reformation, Unger's program acknowledges
the structure from which it hopes to deviate. The indeterminacy thesis, however, undercuts the project of deviationalist doctrine at its starting
. If there is a measure of determinacy in the law, and legal discourse and reasoning are more than
Unger's deviationalist doctrine begins with a flawed, but at
least functional, language with which to embark on the creation of a more
humane legal order. But if the law is indeterminate, and legal reasoning a sham,
then they cannot serve as the raw material for constructing a body of doctrine
with emancipatory potential -- deviationalist doctrine itself would be incapable of
effecting real change. Instead, the social order would remain governed by the
underlying ideology or political and economic forces -- and if the forces were to change, then the
point
mere apologies for domination, then
doctrine would not need to do so. Under the strong indeterminacy thesis, legal doctrine becomes "a wheel that can be turned though nothing else
moves with it," and so it "is not part of the mechanism." n107
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Alternative Fails: Historical Record

of Marxism
MARXISMS LONG HISTORY OF BLOODSHED AND
OPPRESSION DELEGITIMIZES THE FOUNDATION OF THEIR
ALTERNATIVE CLAIMS
Johnson 84
A similar uncertainty about the cause of our ills is reflected in the uneasy
relationship between Critical legal scholarship and Marxism. Some of the articles
from the CLS movement are explicitly Marxist, and the movement as a whole
employs Marxist jargon and methods of analysis. Marxist remedies, however, are
rarely recommended. Although they do not dwell upon the point, the Critical
scholars seem to be aware of the consistently horrible record of Marxist regimes
n31 -- the slave labor camps, the mass deportations, the suppression [*258] of
labor unions, the denial of freedom of conscience, the bureaucratic rigidity, the
personality cults. They appear to recognize that refugee traffic between Marxist
and non-Marxist societies is a one-way affair.
Understandably, even radical scholars in a sophisticated intellectual community
hesitate to embrace such an inviting target for "Critical" scrutiny by others. This
ambivalence can lead to amusing equivocations.The prolific Mark Tushnet, for
example, pays Marxism the compliment of saying that it "generates the central
position to which all theories of knowlede respond," n32 and he has tried his
hand at sketching a Marxist analysis of American public law. n33 But we must
not assume that Tushnet is therefore a Marxist, for he has also written that he
"uses Marxism" merely as a "rhetorical mode" to show that he realizes that
those in positions of power will not peacefully relinquish those positions when
the time comes, and to demonstrate that he is a real radical and not just another
reformer like John Hart Ely or Lawrence Tribe. n34 How a rhetorical mode can
generate a central position to which all theories must respond is not explained.
What Tushnet and other Critical legal scholars seem to like about Marxism is its
doctrine of historical contingency, its insistence that "all knowledge is a social
product and thus that knowledge can have no transcendent validity." n35 This
"Critical" side of Marxism is useful for attacking "capitalism" or "liberalism"
(although it could be equally useful in undermining Marxism itself), n36 and as
such it can [*259] be detached from the Marxist program of party dictatorship.
Marxism as a practical revolutionary program is attrative mainly to those who,
like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, n37 believe that the important thing is to
feed the hungry and that human liberty is worth sacrificing to that end. The
Critical scholars are well aware that man does not live by bread alone. Their
primary concern is for social equality, for abolition of hierarchies of power. n38
Marxist dictatorship is no solution to that problem.
But discarding the vulnerable positive program of Marxism generates at least
two further difficulties, neither of which has been adequately addressed in any of
the Critical legal literature with which I am familiar. First, how are we to judge
the validity of a Marxist critique of capitalist society if Marxism is so wrong in its
positive program? There is an analogy here to the predicament of psychoanalytic
theory that the efficacy of psychoanalysis as a form of treatment has been
strongly called into question. n39 Conceivably the Freudian theories of the
personality might be true even if treatment based on those theories has no
special power to cure, but the power to cure has always been an important
argument for the truth of the theory. n40 The failure of Marxism as a remedy for
exploitation and oppression is so spectacular as to call into question its central
doctrines, [*260] including the premise that economic or political institutions
are to blame for our psychological and spiritual ills. How are we to verify or
falsify a Marxist or Marxist-style analysis? Critical legal scholarship seems to rule
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the question out of order. We are entitled to be suspicious, especially since
Critical Theory appeals so powerfully to the egotism of disaffected intellectuals
like the CCLS members by granting them special insight and a pivotal role in
history. n41
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Alternative Fails: Non-Rights

Strategies Bad
NON-RIGHTS STRATEGIES FAIL BECAUSE DOMINANT
SOCIETY CAN MORE EASILY IGNORE DEMANDS NOT MADE
FROM WITHIN THE DOMINANT RIGHT DISCOURSE
Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, RACE, REFORM, AND
RETRENCHMENT: TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW,
Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 1331)
Rights have been important . They may have legitimated racial inequality, but they have also been the
means by which oppressed [*1385] groups have secured both entry as formal
equals into the dominant order and the survival of their movement in the face
of private and state repression . The dual role of legal change creates a dilemma for Black reformers. As long as race
consciousness thrives, Blacks will often have to rely on rights rhetoric when it is necessary to protect Black interests. The very reforms brought
about by appeals to legal ideology, however, seem to undermine the ability to move forward toward a broader vision of racial equality. In the
Critics are correct in observing

that engaging in rights discourse has helped to deradicalize and co-opt the
challenge. Yet they fail to acknowledge the limited range of options presented
to Blacks in a context where they were deemed "other," and the unlikelihood
that specific demands for inclusion and equality would be heard if articulated in
other terms. This abbreviated list of options is itself contingent upon the ideological power of white race consciousness and the
continuing role of Black Americans as "other." Future efforts to address racial domination , as well as class
hierarchy, must consider the continuing ideology of white race consciousness by
uncovering the oppositional dynamic and by chipping away at its premises . Central
quest for racial justice, winning and losing have been part of the same experience. The
to this task is revealing the contingency of race and exploring the connection between white race consciousness and the other myths that
legitimate both class and race hierarchies. Critics and others whose agendas include challenging hierarchy and legitimation must not overlook
the importance of revealing the contingency of race. Optimally, the deconstruction of white race consciousness might lead to a liberated future
until whites recognize the hegemonic function of racism and

turn their efforts toward neutralizing it, African-American people must develop
pragmatic political strategies -- self-conscious ideological struggle -- to minimize the costs of
liberal reform while maximizing its utility. A primary step in engaging in self-conscious ideological struggle must
for both Blacks and whites. Yet,
be to transcend the oppositional dynamic in which Blacks are cast simply and solely as whites' subordinate "other." n200 The dual role that rights
have played makes strategizing a difficult task. Black people can afford neither to resign themselves to, nor to attack frontally, the legitimacy and
The subordinate position of Blacks in this society makes it

unlikely that African-Americans will realize gains through the kind of direct challenge
to the legitimacy of American liberal ideology that is now being waged by Critical scholars. On the other
incoherence of the dominant ideology.
hand, delegitimating [*1386] race consciousness would be directly relevant to Black needs, and this strategy will sometimes require the
pragmatic use of liberal ideology. This vision is consistent with the views forwarded by theoreticians such as Frances Fox Piven and Richard
Cloward, Antonio Gramsci, and Roberto Unger. Piven and Cloward observe that oppressed people sometimes advance by creating ideological and
political crisis, but that the form of the crisis-producing challenge must reflect the institutional logic of the system. n201 The use of rights rhetoric
during the civil rights movement created such a crisis by presenting and manipulating the dominant ideology in a new and transformative way.
Challenges and demands made from outside the institutional logic would have
accomplished little because Blacks, as the subordinate "other," were already
perceived as being outside the mainstream . The struggle of Blacks, like that of all subordinated groups, is a
struggle for inclusion, an attempt to manipulate elements of the dominant ideology to transform the experience of domination. It is a struggle to
create a new status quo through the ideological and political tools that are available. Gramsci called this struggle a "War of Position" and he
direct challenges to the

dominant class accomplish little if ideology plays such a central role in
establishing authority that the legitimacy of the dominant regime is not
challenged. Joseph Femia, interpreting Gramsci, states that "the dominant ideology in modern capitalist societies is highly
institutionalized and widely internalized. It follows that a concentration on frontal attack, on direct assault against the
bourgeois state ('war of movement' or 'war of manoeuvre') can result only in disappointment and
defeat." n202 Consequently, the challenge in such societies is to create a counter-hegemony by maneuvering within and expanding the
regarded it as the most appropriate strategy for change in Western societies. According to Gramsci,
dominant ideology to embrace the potential for change. Gramsci's vision of ideological struggle is echoed in part by Roberto Unger in his vision of
rather than discarding

liberal legal ideology, we should focus and develop its visionary undercurrents :
deviationist doctrine. Unger, who represents another strand of the Critical approach, argues that,
[T]he struggle over the form of social life, through deviationist doctrine, creates opportunities for experimental revisions of social life in the
direction of the ideals we defend. An implication of our ideas is [*1387] that the elements of a formative institutional or imaginative structure
Liberal ideology embraces communal and

liberating visions along with the legitimating hegemonic visions . Unger, like Gramsci and
Piven and Cloward, seems to suggest that the strategy toward meaningful change depends on
skillful use of the liberating potential of dominant ideology .
may be replaced piecemeal rather than only all at once. n203
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Alternative Fails: Praxis (1/3)

CLSS FOCUS ON THEORY ALIENATES ITSELF FROM SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS, MAINTAINING DOMINATION
Sparer 84
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point,
however, is to change it." n108 The commitment to theory which contributes to,
and in turn is informed and developed by, social practice concerned with
changing the world, is a theme occasionally encountered in Critical legal writing.
n109 In this essay, I use [*553] the word "praxis" to refer to such a unity of
theory and action. n110 The need for praxis should be self-evident to scholars
such as those in Critical studies, whose view is that domination and exploitation
of human beings characterizes our social life, since mere tinkering with a legal
system misleads us. Therefore, fundamental transformation of social relations,
including those involved in the production process, is necessary. Richard Flacks,
a sociologist, puts it this way:
[I]t seems urgent for academic radicals and Marxists to develop a more reflexive
understanding of the implications for anc relevance of their intellectual work to
political practice. It may be a characteristic of late capitalism that even Marxism
can become nothing more than a token in the game of professional
achievement. n111
Despite such a warning, the practical relationship of Critical legal theory to social
movement and struggle in the United States today is, at best, very limited.
Neither lawyers nor political activists receive much enlightenment from Critical
legal theory with regard to their actual work. Nor is Critical legal theory itself
much affected by the practical work of such people. While there are exceptions
to these generalizations, n112 the absence of praxis in current Critical legal work
seems to be one of its most marked features. Gordon, a Critical legal theorist,
writes:
THE ALTERNATIVE IS REDUCTIONISTIC AND MIRED IN

THEORY, PREVENTING THE ORGANIZATION OF
MOVEMENTS AGAINST OPPRESSION
Sparer 84
Gabel is entirely right when he insists on understanding people and social
relations in the real, concrete, specific world in which they exist. But surely that
part of the concrete world he summarizes with such eloquence is not "the social
totality within which the psyche is formed." At least a fair number of people do
have experience with a more genuine, personal love. Some people do seek
something better in "work" than "mechanical functioning," at least when they
are assured of a job to support their existence. People, at least a fair number,
are frequently dissatisfied with the "packaged emptiness" on which they spend
their wages. n126
I agree with Karl Klare when he writes: "I regard as inaccurate the view that . . .
it is possible to describe the working class as in any sense satisfied with current
standards of living in either the material or cultural aspects." n127 But if this is
so, then it should be possible to struggle now over the conditions which Gabel
describes. Nevertheless, neither Gabel's work nor that of most other Critical
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legal theorists provides theory that can aid such struggle. Indeed, it does not
even recognize the need for new directions in scholarship which [*560] would
aid such struggle. In the course of constant efforts at delegitimation, some
Critical legal theorists begin to think and talk about "the law" as if it were no
more than litigation, doctrines, and case outcomes -- precisely the narrow view
of most conventional legal theorists. Critical theorists rarely conceive of legal
strategies to employ outside the courtroom for the purpose of building social
movement.Somehow, the affirmative relationship of law to social movement
becomes lost. n128
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DELEGITIMIZING THE LAW CREATES HELPLESSNESS,
DRIVING ACTIVISTS AWAY FROM SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Sparer 84
Therein lies the source of the real sadness (a word more accurate here than
"cynicism") of some Critical legal theorists who are also [*573] law school
teachers. In some respects, of course, what we address here is essentially a
continuation of the praxis issue discussed in the last part. But it is more. The
Critical legal professors are not only scholars; they are also teachers.The people
they teach are, in the main, not going to be scholars. They are going to be
practitioners. Do the Critical legal professors have anything to say to these
students -- except that they assume the students will discover in their practice
those successful methods of change which the teachers not only have not found
but do not care to seek? The more logical assumption, by far, is that such law
teaching will be simply one more law school factor in the decisions of students
once concerned with social change to pursue corporate careers. What, after all,
can the student do as a lawyer in the face of monumental, overpowering, and
all-pervasive injustice other than pursue the same buck that everybody else
does?
The radical law teacher's responsibility is not simply to expose doctrinal
incoherencies and build historical accounts. It is to point the way to a different
kind of practice, one which utilizes that historical account. The practice needed
is not one which focuses primarily on the law school, however much change in
the law school is needed. It is a practice located "out there," in the world outside
the law school, where injustice, legal procedures and programs, incipient protest,
and social movement constantly intermingle. n174
[*574] The radical teacher's responsibility is to study such practice, analyze its
conditions, and demonstrate it, if need be, by personal example. When I say the
"radical law teachers's" responsibility, I do not mean, of course, the
responsibility of each and every law teacher who professes a radical faith. Not
everybody does everything. I do mean that it is central to the tasks of radical
law teachers, just as are the activities and study Freeman espouses. Without at
least a collegial relation to those engaged in social movement practice and
theory, the radical teacher will lead more students away from, rather than into,
the social struggle to reconstruct our world by democratizing our civil life.
CLS IS CUT OFF FROM PRACTICE, PREVENTING

INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
Sparer 84
Critical legal scholarship contributes so little to those engaged in
social change efforts and learns so little from social change practice is its deeply held belief that delegitimation of
liberal legal scholarship (which includes virtually all scholarship outside the Critical legal camp) is the principal
contribution that it can make to significant change. The reasoning is that only by breaking the hold that
The first reason that
current liberal thinking has on our minds can we [*556] even begin to create a vision of the sort of society towards which we should be
struggling. Because the principal ideological support of our current social structure is liberalism, exposing that ideology is the obvious task for
scholars seeking to end the oppression and domination that characterize present society.
Not all Critical legal theorists subscribe to this formulation. Kennedy, for example, is insistent that "the critique of liberal legalism is only a small
contribution to a valid strategy of legal leftism." n115 He seeks "a unity of theory and practice" and has some specific suggestions as to what
scholars might do in the law schools themselves. n116 But even he has little to say about theory's use in transformative social struggle in the
world outside the law schools.
This silence results because Kennedy and many other Critical
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scholars agree with the crux of Freeman's formulation. They do not see what else theory can effectively
do, and thus they concentrate on the inadequacies of liberal doctrines (broadly defined)
and on the ways liberal ideology rationalizes the way things are. n117 But the situation remains unsatisfactory, and I cannot help but believe that
some of the same Critical legal scholars who justify the divorce of theory from the world of social struggle know this. They know this even when
they seek to evade it.
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CLS CANT CHALLENGE THE DOMINANT LOGIC
Crenshaw, et al, Professor of Law, Columbia University, Critical Race
Theory, Ed. Kimberl Crenshaw et al, 1995, p. 111
Kimberl
The CLS emphasis on deconstruction as the vehicle for liberation leads to the
conclusion that engaging in legal discourse should be avoided because it
reinforces not only the discourse itself but also the society and the world that it
embodies. Yet CLS scholars offer little beyond this observation: their focus on
delegitimating rights rhetoric seems to suggest that once rights rhetoric has
been discarded, there exists a more productive strategy for change, one that
does not reinforce existing patterns of domination. Unfortunately, no such
strategy has yet been articulated, and it is difficult to imagine that racial
minorities will ever be able to discover one. As Frances Fox Piven and Richard
Cloward point out in their excellent account of the civil rights movement,
popular struggles are a reflection of institutionally determined logic and a
challenge to that logic. People can demand change only in ways that reflect the
logic of the institutions they are challenging. Demands for change that do not
reflect the institutional logicthat is demands that do not engage and
subsequently reinforce the dominant ideologywill probably be ineffective.
ABSENSE OF A PROGRAM MEANS CLS CAN NOT HELP THE

OPPRESSED
Dalton, Professor of Law, Yale University, Critical Race Theory, Ed. Kimberl
Crenshaw et al, 1995, p. 80
Harlon
After acknowledging the practitioner/theorist split, Gordon observes: It is not

not at allthat the practitioners are against theory. (Remember,
practitioners equals people of color.) They are hungry for theory that would
help make sense of their practices; that would order them meaningfully into
larger patterns of historical change or structures of social action; that would help
to resolve the perpetual dilemma of whether it is or is not a contradiction in
terms to be a radical lawyer, whether one is inevitably corrupted by the
medium in which one works, whether ones victories are in the long run defeats
or ones defeats victories; or that would suggest what tactics, in the boundless
ocean of meanness and constraint that surround us, to try next. I want to affirm
that Gordons is a fair and accurate description both of practitioners and of
people of color. We hunger for theory. But, as Gordon goes on to point out, there
is the lingering and widespread suspicion within the CLS movement that the
theorists do not hunger for praxis. And it is this absence of a positive program on
the part of many in CLS (with some quite notable exceptions), and indeed the
disdain for program by some, that is one of the central difficulties that people of
color have with the Critical Legal Studies movement. I think that this difficulty is
rooted in biography, in specific history, in what Cornel West refers to as
genealogy.
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A2 Thats Not Our Indeterminacy

Thesis: 1AR
FIRST, THE NEGS GENERALIZED LINKS PROVE THEY USE
THE STRONG INDETERMINACY THESIS. THATS THE ONLY
WAY THEY CAN SHOW THAT PLAN IS BAD WITHOUT
SPECIFIC EV.
SECOND, THE STRONG THESIS IS ENDEMIC TO CLS
Solum 87
The strong version of the indeterminacy thesis claims that all cases are "hard"
cases or, more precisely, that in every case any result can be derived from the
preexisting legal doctrine. Although some critical scholars have explicitly
rejected the strong indeterminacy thesis, contemporary critical legal scholarship
still abounds in [*471] assertions that the law is radically indeterminate. In a
recent article, for example, Clare Dalton writes, "doctrinal inconsistency
necessarily undermines the force of any conventional legal argument, and . . .
opposing arguments can be made with equal force. . . . [L]egal argumentation
disguises its own inherent indeterminacy. . . . [L]egal doctrine is unable to
provide determinate answers to particular disputes." n38 Giradeau Spann also
affirms the strong version of the thesis: "[T]he characteristics of [legal] doctrine
that made it indeterminate in Chadha will make it indeterminate in all other
cases as well." n39 Likewise, Charles Yablon claims that "[t]he experienced
advocate knows that the doctrinal regime is sufficiently complex that there will
always be some set of authoritative materials which, through skillful
manipulation of the level of specificity and characterization of the facts, he can
declare to be 'controlling' of the case at bar" in a way that supports "any position
a client wishes to maintain." n40
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A2 Reification: 2AC
REIFICIATION ISNT INTRINSICALLY BAD ITS A
NECESSARY TOOL TO PREVENT FUTURE DOMINATION
Sparer 84
But is it bad to "reify"? In Marxist thinking, to reify a concept such as a right is to
invest it with qualities over and above those of the particular human beings who
created or use it. It is as if the right had a life of its own. It exists independently
of the particular social setting from which it came and continues regardless of
the conscious choices of the people in a later setting.
Reification, as a general proposition, can have serious and negative
consequences but not all "reifying" is necessarily bad. It is true that when we
characterize a certain legal right as "universal" or "inalienable," we are reifying
it. But this may have a legitimate purpose. For example, we may fear that some
group may in the future dominate our society and attempt to stifle all dissent.
We should protect as best we can against such an event by today
acknowledging that dissent is a human value that needs protection. In so doing,
we reify the legal right to dissent in order to protect the human right of selfexpression and free conscience. We should do the same with certain rights of
working people. In spite of the difficulties of drawing a "coherent" line as to what
is "inalienable" and what is not, concern for the human values of free conscience
and mutual association, coupled with a deduction from history about what
happens in the absence of such legal rights, justifies such an effort. n42
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A2 Rights Tradeoff: 2AC

THE POLITICAL RIGHTS OF PLAN ARENT ZERO SUM
THEY SPILLOVER AND CREATE MORE PROTECTIONS FOR
EVERYONE
Sparer 84
In this manner, Marx develops the perspective, deeply imbedded in
contemporary Critical legal thinking, that the "inalienable rights" of each person,
articulated in our Declaration of Independence and [*530] the Constitution, are
rights which subtract from those of other persons or, at best, separate people
from one another. n53 Even Lynd, in his dipute with Kennedy over liberal rights
and the workers' struggles, seems to accept this point of view. n54
While it is easy to understand how one person's right to separately possess
property limits another person's separate possession of property, I fail to see
how one person's exercise of, for example, free speech and dissent necessarily
limits another person's. Quite the contrary; the exercise of these latter rights can
increase the next person's ability to exercise them. It is not the social
legitimization which flows from the formal recognition of rights thast inhibits
transformative, humanizing social struggle. Many factors impede such struggle.
But rights such as free speech and dissent protect the ability of groups of people
-- including working people -- to change their society, better their group
situation, and expand their human freedom.
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A2 Feminist Jurisprudence: 2AC

ESSENTIALIST FEMINISM REINFORCES GENDER
STEREOTYPES THROUGH VALORIZATION OF WOMENS
DIFFERENCES, HARMING OURSELVES AND OUR
LISTENERS, AND KILLING THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER
OF THEIR CRITIQUE.
Iris Marion Young, Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of
Pittsburgh, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory,
1990,
p. 89-90
Within the context of antifeminist backlash, the effect of gynocentric feminism

may be accommodating to the existing structure. Gynocentric feminism relies on
and reinforces gender stereotypes at just the time when the dominant culture
has put new emphasis on marks of gender difference. It does so, moreover, by
relying on many of those aspects of women's traditional sphere that traditional
patriarchal ideology has most exploited and that humanist feminists such as
Beauvoir found most oppressive--reproductive biology, motherhood, s domestic
concerns. Even though its intentions are subversive, such renewed attention to
traditional femininity can have a reactionary effect on both ourselves and our
listeners because it may echo the dominant claim that women belong in a
separate sphere.
Humanist feminism calls upon patriarchal society to open places for women
within those spheres of human activity that have been considered the most
creative, powerful, and prestigious. Gynocentric feminism replies that wanting
such things for women implies a recognition that such activities are the most
humanly valuable. It argues that in fact, militarism, bureaucratic hierarchy,
competition for recognition, and the instrumentalization of nature and people
entailed by these activities are basic disvalues.24
Yet in contemporary society, men still have most institutionalized power, and
gynocentric feminism shows why they do not use it well. If feminism turns its
back on the centers of power, privilege, and individual achievement that men
have monopolized, those men will continue to monopolize them, and nothing
significant will change. Feminists cannot undermine masculinist values without
entering some of the centers of power that foster them, but the attainment of
such power itself requires at least appearing to foster those values. Still, without
being willing to risk such co-optation, feminism can be only a moral position of
critique rather than a force for institutional change.
Despite its intention, I fear that gynocentric feminism may have the same
consequence as the stance of moral motherhood that grew out of nineteenth
century feminism a resegregation of women to a specifically women's sphere,
outside the sites of power, privilege, and recognition. For me the symptom here
is what the dominant culture finds more threatening. Within the dominant
culture a middle-aged assertive woman's claim to coanchor the news alongside
a man appears considerably more threatening than women's claim to have a
different voice that exposes masculinist values as body-denying and selfish. The
claim of women to have a right to the positions and benefits that have hitherto
been reserved for men, and that male dominated institutions should serve
women's needs, is a direct threat to male privilege. While the claim that these
positions of power themselves should be eliminated and the institutions
eliminated or restructured is indeed more radical, when asserted from the
gynocentric feminist position it can be an objective retreat.
Gynocentrisms focus on values and language as the primary target of its
critique contributes to this blunting of its political force. Without doubt, social
change requires changing the subject, which in turn means developing new
ways of speaking, writing, and imagining. Equally indubitable is the gynocentric
feminist claim that masculinist values in Western culture deny the body,
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sensuality, and rootedness in nature and that such denial nurtures fascism,
pollution, and nuclear games. Given these facts, however, what shall we do? To
this gynocentrism has little concrete answer. Because its criticism of existing
society is so global and abstract, gynocentric critique of values, language, and
culture of masculinism can remove feminist theory from analysis of specific
institutions and practices, and how they might be concretely structurally
changed in directions more consonant with our visions.
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A2 Fem K of Intl Law: 2AC

FEMINISM HAS NO ALTERNATIVE TO INTERNATIONAL LAW
Charlesworth, Professor and Director of the Centre for International and
Public Law, Faculty of Law, Australian National University, April, 19 99, The American
Hilary
Journal International Law 93 A.J.I.L. 379
[*379] I have mixed feelings about participating in this symposium as the

feminist voice. On the one hand, I want to support the symposium editors'
attempt to broaden the standard categories of international legal methodologies
by including feminism in this undertaking. On the other hand, I am conscious of
the limits of my analysis and its unrepresentativeness -- the particularity of my
nationality, race, class, sexuality, education and profession shapes my outlook
and ideas on international law. I clearly cannot speak for all women participants
in and observers of the international legal system. I also hope that one day I will
stop being positioned always as a feminist and will qualify as a fully fledged
international lawyer. My reservations are also more general because presenting
feminism as one of seven rival methodological traditions may give a false sense
of its nature. The symposium editors' memorandum to the participants
encouraged a certain competitiveness: we were asked, "Why is your method
better than others?" I cannot answer this question. I do not see feminist
methods as ready alternatives to any of the other methods represented in this
symposium. Feminist methods emphasize conversations and dialogue rather
than the production of a single, triumphant truth. n1 They will not lead to neat
"legal" answers because they are challenging the very categories of "law" and
"nonlaw." Feminist methods seek to expose and question the limited bases of
international law's claim to objectivity and impartiality and insist on the
importance of gender relations as a category of analysis. The term "gender"
here refers to the social construction of differences between women and men
and ideas of "femininity" and "masculinity" -- the excess cultural baggage
associated with biological sex.
FEMINISM MUST SPEAK THE LANGUAGE OF THE

DOMINANT ORDER TO SUCCEED
Hilary Charlesworth, Professor and Director of the Centre for
International and Public Law, Faculty of Law, Australian National University, April,
1999, The American Journal International Law 93 A.J.I.L. 379
[*380] The philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has pointed out that feminist theorizing
typically requires an unarticulated balance between two goals. Feminist analysis
is at once a reaction to the "overwhelming masculinity of privileged and
historically dominant knowledges, acting as a kind of counterweight to the
imbalances resulting from the male monopoly of the production and reception of
knowledges" and a response to the political goals of feminist struggles. n2 The
dual commitments of feminist methods are in complex and uneasy coexistence.
The first demands "intellectual rigor," investigating the hidden gender of the
traditional canon. The second requires dedication to political change. The
tension between the two leads to criticism of feminist theorists both from the
masculine academy for lack of disinterested scholarship and objective analysis
and from feminist activists for co-option by patriarchal forces through
participation in male-structured debates. n3 Feminist methodologies challenge
many accepted scholarly traditions. For example, they may clearly reflect a
political agenda rather than strive to attain an objective truth on a neutral basis
and they may appear personal rather than detached. For this reason, feminist
methodologies are regularly seen as unscholarly, disruptive or mad. They are
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the techniques of outsiders and strangers. Just as nineteenth-century women
writers used madness to symbolize escape from limited and enclosed lives, n4
so twentieth-century feminist scholars have developed dissonant methods to
shake the complacent and bounded disciplines in which they work. At the same
time, most feminists are constrained by their environment. If we want to achieve
change, we must learn and use the language and methods of the dominant
order.
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**CRT**
CRT Answers: 2AC (1/4)
FIRST, NO LINK WE DONT CLAIM TO USE THE LAW TO
END RACISM. WE JUST CREATE DUE PROCESS RIGHTS
SECOND, THE ALTERNATIVE IS WORSE BECAUSE IT
ABDICATES TO THE STATUS QUO, MAGNIFYING RACISM BY
PROVIDING NO DUE PROCESS RIGHTS
THIRD, LIBERAL LEGALISM IS TRANSFORMATIVE
TRASHING LEAVES OPPRESSION INTACT
Crenshaw, Law Professor at UCLA, 88 (Kimberle Williams, RACE, REFORM, AND RETRENCHMENT:
TRANSFORMATION AND LEGITIMATION IN ANTIDISCRIMINATION LAW, Harvard Law Review, May, 101 Harv. L. Rev.
1331)
There are
difficulties, however, in attempting to use Critical themes and ideas to understand the civil
rights movement and to describe what alternatives the civil rights constituency could have
pursued, or might now pursue. While Critical scholars claim that their project is concerned with domination, few have made more than
The Critics offer an analysis that is useful in understanding the limited transformative potential of antidiscrimination rhetoric.
a token effort to address racial domination specifically, and their work does not seem grounded in the reality of the racially oppressed. This
deficiency is especially apparent in critiques that relate to racial issues. Critical scholars have criticized mainstream legal ideology for its
tendency to portray American society as basically fair, and thereby to legitimate the oppressive policies that have been directed toward racial
minorities. Yet Critical scholars do not sufficiently account for the effects or the causes of the oppression that they routinely acknowledge. The
result is that Critical literature exhibits the same proclivities of mainstream scholarship -- it seldom speaks to or about Black people. The failure of
the Critics to incorporate racism into their analysis also renders their critique of rights and their overall analysis of law in America incomplete.
this failure leads to an inability to appreciate fully the transformative

significance of the civil rights movement in mobilizing Black Americans and
generating new demands . Further, the failure to consider the reality of those most oppressed by American institutions
Specifically,
means that the Critical account of the hegemonic nature of legal thought overlooks a crucial dimension of American life -- the ideological role of
racism itself. Gordon, Freeman, Tushnet, and Gabel fail to analyze racism as an ideological pillar upholding American society, or as the principal
basis for Black oppression. The Critics' failure to analyze the hegemonic role of racism also renders their prescriptive analysis unrealistic. In the
spirit of Alan Freeman's declaration, Critics often appear to view the trashing of legal ideology "as the only path that might lead to a liberated
if trashing is the only path that might lead to a liberated future,

Black people are unlikely to make it to the Critics' promised land . n97 The Critics'
future." n96 Yet [*1357]
commitment to trashing is premised on a notion that people are mystified by liberal legal ideology and consequently cannot remake their world
until they see how contingent such ideology is. The Critics' principal error is that their version of domination by consent does not present a
realistic picture of racial domination. Coercion explains much more about racial domination than does ideologically induced consent. n98 Black
people do not create their oppressive worlds moment to moment but rather are coerced into living in worlds created and maintained by others.
Moreover, the ideological source of this coercion is not liberal legal consciousness, but racism. If racism is just as important as, if not more
important than, liberal legal ideology in explaining the persistence of white supremacy, then the Critics' single-minded effort to deconstruct
liberal legal ideology will be futile. Finally, in addition to exaggerating the role of liberal legal consciousness and underestimating that of coercion,
Critics also disregard the transformative potential that liberalism offers. Although liberal
legal ideology may indeed function to mystify, it remains receptive to some aspirations that are
central to Black demands, and may also perform an important function in
combating the experience of being excluded and oppressed . n99 This receptivity to Black
aspirations is crucial given the hostile social world that racism creates. The most troubling aspect of the Critical program, therefore, is that
trashing" rights consciousness may have the unintended consequence of

disempowering the racially oppressed while leaving white supremacy basically
[*1358] untouched . These difficulties are discussed below as they relate to the critiques of Gordon, Freeman, and Tushnet. I. Gordon:
"
The Underemphasis on Coercion. -- Robert Gordon's explanation of ideological domination illustrates how an exclusive focus on consent leaves
gaping holes in his reader's understanding of hegemony. Gordon writes that beliefs are "the main constraints upon making social life more
bearable." n100 Yet how can others understand the fact that Black people, although unable to bring about a world in which they fully participate,
can imagine such a world? Clearly, something other than their own structure of thought prevents Blacks from changing their world. This fact
The coercive
power of the state operates to suppress some groups , particularly when there is consensus among
others that such coercion is warranted. Racism serves to single out Blacks as one of these groups
"worthy" of suppression. n101 Gordon, however, does not offer any way to understand this. If his exclusive focus on
suggests that a more complete explanation of domination requires that coercion and consent be considered together.
ideological domination is to be taken literally, one is left believing that Black Americans are unable to change their world because they accept the
dominant ideology and thus cannot imagine an alternative existence. Yet to say that the beliefs of Black Americans have boxed them into a
subordinate existence because of what they believe is to ignore the history of coercive racial subordination. Indeed, it would be difficult for
Blacks, given the contradiction between American fiction and Black American reality, to believe as much of the American mythology as whites do.
The most significant aspect of Black oppression seems to be what is

believed about Black Americans , not what Black Americans believe. Black people are boxed in
largely because there is a consensus among many whites that the oppression of
Blacks is legitimate. This is where consensus and coercion can be understood together: ideology convinces one group that the
coercive domination of another is legitimate. It matters little whether the coerced group rejects the
dominant ideology [*1359] and can offer a competing conception of the world; if
they have been labeled "other" by the dominant ideology, they are not heard .
n102
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the stigma of "otherness ," which effectively precludes their
potentially radicalizing influence from penetrating the dominant consciousness .
n104 If this is the case, then Blacks will gain little through simply transcending their own belief structures. The challenge for Blacks
may be to pursue strategies that confront the beliefs held about them by
whites. For Blacks, such strategies may take the form of reinforcing some aspects of
the dominant ideology in attempts to become participants in the dominant
discourse rather than outsiders defined , objectified, and reified by that discourse. In this
sense, the civil rights movement might be considered as an attempt to
deconstruct the image of "the Negro" in the white mind. By forcing the political
system to respond to Black demands, Blacks rejected images of complacency
and docility that had been invoked by some whites to dismiss Black demands .
n103 Blacks seem to carry
n105
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FOURTH, PREFER OUR SPECIFIC SOLVENCY TRIBE AND
KATYAL INDICATE THAT PLAN CHALLENGES CURRENT
DETAINMENT PRACTICES
FIFTH, PERM DO BOTH
COMBINING MODERN NORMATIVE LEGAL THEORY WITH
CRT ENABLES RESISTANCE AGAINST ENDEMIC RACISM
Harris 94
[Angela P., Prof. Law @ Berkeley, The Jurisprudence of Reconstruction, 82 Calif. L. Rev. 741, July,
LN//uwyo-ajl]
CRT's commitment to the liberation of people of color - and the project of critical social science
(generally) and normative legal scholarship (in particular) as a way to further that liberation
- suggest a faith in certain concepts and institutions that postmodernists lack. When race-crits tell modernist stories,
they assume that "people of color" describes a coherent category with at least some shared values and interests. They assume that the
idea of "liberation" is meaningful - that racism is something that can one day somehow cease to exist, or cease to
exert any power over us. Modernist narratives assume a "real" reality out there, and that
reason can bring us face to face with it. And modernist narratives have faith that once enough people see the
truth, right action will follow: that enlightenment leads to empowerment, and that empowerment leads to emancipation.
people of color and whites live in the

same perceptual and moral world, that reason speaks to us all in the same way
despite our different experiences, and that reason, rather than habit or power, is what will motivate people. Modernist
Modernist narratives, then, are profoundly hopeful. They assume that
narratives also can be profoundly romantic. They imagine heroic action by a formerly oppressed people rising up as one, "empowered" to be who
they "really" are or choose to be, breathing the thin and bracing air of freedom.
This optimism and romanticism, though easy to caricature, cannot be easily dismissed. As Patricia Williams and Mari Matsuda have pointed out,
faith in reason and truth and belief in the essential freedom of rational subjects
have enabled people of color to survive and resist subordination. n63 Political
modernism, more generally, has been a powerful force in the lives of subjugated
peoples; as a practical matter, politically liberal societies are [*754] vastly
preferable to the alternatives. n64 A faith in reason has sustained efforts to
educate people into critical thinking and to engage in debate rather than
violence. n65 The passionate and constructive energy of modernist narratives of emancipation is also grounded in a moral faith: that
human beings are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights; that oppression is wrong and resistance to oppression right; that
opposing subjugation in the name of liberty, equality, and true community is the obligation of every rational person. In its modernist moments,
CRT aims not to topple the Enlightenment, but to make its promises real.
n66
SIXTH, THIS ISNT OFFENSE THE FACT THAT WE CANT

SOLVE EVERY PROBLEM DOESNT MEAN WE SHOULDNT
DO SOMETHING
SEVENTH, DE-POLITICIZATION OF LAW FAILS- MEANS A
SEPERATION OF LAW AND POLITICS THAT CREATS A
STRUGGLE FOR STATE POWER- THIS MAKES THE ALT
POWER-DRIVEN AS OPPOSED TO DRIVEN FOR SOCIAL
PROGRESS
ALFIERI ET AL 98
(Anthony, Law Prof and Director @ U Miami Law, Spring, BOOK REVIEW: Black
And WhiteCritical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, La Raza Law Journal, l/n, MosE)
At bottom, the conflicts within CRT and the attacks upon it emanate from CRT's
own growing antipathy toward the traditional civil rights discourse that animates
liberal race reform. To Critical Race theorists, liberal faith in a court-driven,
technocratic eradication of racial bias is misplaced. n33 Faith in the rationality of
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Kritik Answers
progressive law reform, they argue, rests on principles of neutrality, objectivity,
and value-free reasoning. Obtaining a set of nonideological, regulative
principles, however, requires a depoliticization of the legal process.
Depoliticization, in turn, compels the separation of law and politics. When
pushed outside the domain of liberal theory, CLS teaches, the conceptual
separation of law and politics collapses in the raw, delegitimating competition
for state power. n34 Because of this material inseparability, the depoliticization
of law and the liberal state fails. In this way, the CRT politics of race represents a
complex variant of the CLS politics of law: power-driven, instrumental, and valueladen.
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EIGHTH, EXPERIENTIAL DECONSTRUCTION:
ORGANIC INTELLECTUALS MUST CONTEXTUALIZE
CRITICISM IN THE CONTEXT OF SPECIFIC OPPRESION,
STRATEGICALLY USING HEGEMONIC NORMS TO CREATE
THEIR ALTERNATIVE ****
Cook 90
LN//uwyo-ajl]
Because he appreciated the dialectic of theory and the broad-based

confrontational strategies of socially transformative action, King stands as the paradigmatic
organic intellectual of twentieth-century American life. King's method and practice offer direction to progressive scholars concerned about
the exclusionary, repressive, and non-communal dimensions of American life.
[*1013] Gramsci's conception of the organic intellectual provides a useful framework for understanding the thought of King and what it has to
offer CLS. The organic intellectual brings philosophy to the masses, not for the merely instrumental purposes of unifying them, "but precisely in
order to construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small
Gramsci's organic intellectual struggles to transform those who

are oppressed as a means of transforming the conditions under which they are
oppressed. n79 Gramsci understands domination in terms of both coercion and consent, the latter constituting what he refers to as
intellectual groups." n78
hegemony. Under his formulation, hegemony consists, then, of "[t]he 'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the
general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group." n80 Gramsci argues that "this consent is 'historically' caused by the
prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production." n81
Thus, oppression is not only physical and psychological but also cultural. n82
King, like Gramsci's organic intellectual, empowered his community through a practical effort to
bridge the gap between theory and lived experience. King's work consisted of four interrelated
activities. First, he used theoretical deconstruction to free the mind to envision
alternative conceptions of community. Second, he employed experiential
deconstruction to understand the liberating dimensions of legitimating
ideologies like liberalism and Christianity, dimensions easily ignored by the abstract,
ahistorical, and potentially misleading critiques that rely exclusively on
theoretical deconstruction. Third, he used the insights gleaned from the first two
activities to postulate an [*1014] alternative social vision intended to transform the
conditions of oppression under which people struggle. Drawing from the best of
liberalism and the best of Christianity, King forged a vision of community that
transcended the limitations of each and built upon the accomplishments of both.
Finally, he created and implemented strategies to mobilize people to secure that
alternative vision. I refer to this multidimensional critical activity as "philosophical praxis."
Although many critical theorists engage primarily in theoretical deconstruction, and some appreciate certain forms of experiential deconstruction,
n83 few have embraced either a full experiential deconstruction or the third and fourth dimensions of philosophical praxis --
reconstructive theorizing and socially transformative struggle. n84 These dimensions of critical
activity directly confront the material conditions of oppression whereas the
preoccupation with deconstructing theory does not. King went further than these
critical theorists by examining the subtle and complex ways in which consent
was shaped, while fully appreciating the role of state and private coercion in
legitimating authority in the lives of the oppressed.
This Part examines how King filtered his theoretical deconstruction of hegemonic
theologies through his knowledge of the history and experience of oppression,
and thereby made that theoretical deconstruction richer, more contextual, and
ready to engage the existential realities of oppression. The interplay between King's theoretical and
experiential deconstruction is best illustrated by reference to the African-American Church -- the institution providing the organic link between
philosophy and the masses, theory and praxis. n85
My analysis proceeds in four steps. First, I examine how African-American religion served at once to legitimate slave society, delegitimize that
society, and inform alternative visions of community. Second, I examine King's use of theoretical deconstruction and illustrate its dependence on
the historic mission of the African-American Church. Like a true organic intellectual engaged in a philosophical praxis, King used theoretical
deconstruction to illustrate the possibilities [*1015] of his reconstructive vision and the centrality of social struggle in realizing that vision. Third,
I discuss King's experiential deconstruction, his unwillingness to be distracted by the reified abstractions of theoretical deconstruction. Finally, I
the combination of theoretical and experiential deconstruction results in a

more contextual framework -- one more appreciative of the conditions of choice
within which authority is legitimated and challenged through reconstructive
vision and struggle.
show how
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NINTH, YOUR ALTERNATIVE IS FOCUSED ON A
BLACK/WHITE DICHOTOMY- THIS STOPS COALITIONAL
POLITICS AND CREATES A COMPETITIVE DRIVE AMOUNG
THE DISENFRANCHISED FOR ATTENTION
HUTCHINSON 2K4
(Darren, Prof @ Wash College, August, 53 Am. U.L. Rev. 1187, American
University Law Review, MosE)
A third area of critical race innovation involves multiracial politics. Internal critics
have argued that racial discourse in the United States fixates upon black/white
racial issues, thereby marginalizing Latino, Native American, and Asian American
experiences. n95 Empirically, this observation is indisputable. Race theorists
lack a full understanding of the breadth of racial injustice. The inclusion of the
experiences of Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans in racial
discourse can improve CRT in several ways. First, a multiracial discourse permits
a full accounting of the problem of racial inequality and allows for the
construction of adequate remedies for racial subordination. n96 Although all
people of color suffer racism, often in similar ways, racial hierarchies impact
communities of color in diverse ways. A narrow focus on black/white subjugation
severely limits the reach of antiracist remedies.
The black/white paradigm also prevents persons of color from engaging in
coalition politics. n97 By treating racism as a problem that affects blacks
primarily (or exclusively), racial discourse in the United States divides persons of
color who could align to create formidable political forces in the battle for racial
justice.
Binary racial discourse also causes persons of color to compete for the attention
of whites, as marginalized racial groups treat racial justice as a [*1201] zerosum game. n98 Instead of recognizing the pervasiveness and complexity of
racial injuries, binary racial discourse leads to the tyranny of oppression ranking
and to competing demands for centrality in a marginalized space of racial
victimization.
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#5 Perm: 1AR
WORKING WITHIN THE SYSTEM ALLOWS US TO TAKE IT
DOWN- EDUCATION IS PROOF THAT WE CAN EFFECTIVELY
FIGHT RACISM
LADSON-BILLINGS 99
(Gloria, Prof @ U Wisconsin-Madison, Race isRace isnt, Pg. 23) PHM
Examples of pedagogical countermoves are found in the work of both Chicago
elementary teacher Marva Collins and Los Angeles high school mathematics
teacher Jaime Escalante. Although neither Collins nor Escalante is acclaimed as
a "progressive" teacher, both are recognized for their persistence in believing in
the educability of all students. Both remind students that mainstream society
expects them to be failures, and prod them to succeed as a form of
counterinsurgency. Their insistence on helping students achieve in the
"traditional" curriculum represents a twist on Audre Lorde's notion that one
cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. Instead, they
believe one can only dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.
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Kritik Answers
**Cuomo**
Preventing Nuke War Is a
Prerequisite to Positive Peace
PREVENTING NUCLEAR WAR IS THE ABSOLUTE
PREREQUISITE TO POSITIVE PEACE
Folk, Prof of Religious and Peace Studies at Bethany College, 78 (Jerry,
Peace Educations Peace Studies : Towards an Integrated Approach, Peace & Change, Vol.
V, No. 1, Spring, P. 58)
Those proponents of the positive peace approach who reject out of hand the work
of researchers and educators coming to the field from the perspective of negative peace too
easily forget that the prevention of a nuclear confrontation of global dimensions
is the prerequisite for all other peace research, education, and action. Unless
such a confrontation can be avoided there will be no world left in which to build
positive peace. Moreover, the blanket condemnation of all such negative peace
oriented research, education or action as a reactionary attempt to support and reinforce the
status quo is doctrinaire. Conflict theory and resolution, disarmament studies, studies of the
international system and of international organizations, and integration studies are in
themselves neutral. They do not intrinsically support either the status quo or
revolutionary efforts to change or overthrow it. Rather they offer a body of knowledge
which can be used for either purpose or for some purpose in between. It is much
more logical for those who understand peace as positive peace to integrate this
knowledge into their own framework and to utilize it in achieving their own
purposes. A balanced peace studies program should therefore offer the student exposure to
the questions and concerns which occupy those who view the field essentially from the point of view of
negative peace.
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Negative Peace Key to Positive

Peace
NEGATIVE PEACE IS A PRECONDITION FOR POSITIVE
PEACE VIOLENCE IS SOMETIMES NECESSARY TO ACHIEVE
THESE GOALS
Sandole, Professor of Conflict Resolution and International
Relations at George Mason U, 96 (Dennis J. D., Conflict Resolution, USIA
Electronic Journals, Vol. 1, No. 19, December,
usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/1296/ijpe/pj19sand.htm)
Negative peace, however, does not go far enough; it is one part -- albeit, often an essential part -- of a
larger process that is rarely attempted -- and if attempted, rarely achieved -- by traditional diplomacy. The remaining part
consists of "positive
peace": the elimination of the underlying structural causes and conditions that have given
negative peace
deals with symptoms of underlying problems -- "putting out fires" -- while
positive peace deals with the underlying, "combustible" problems themselves.
rise to the violent conflict which negative peace processes seek to contain. To put it simply,
Why doesn't traditional diplomacy deal with positive peace? One reason is that diplomats are trained in dispute
settlement -- reaching agreements about how to establish negative peace -- without, good intentions to the contrary,
necessarily addressing the underlying problems that gave rise to the disputes that are being settled. Hence, negotiations
to end wars or to control or reduce armaments, resulting in treaties or other agreements, are efforts to halt or manage
actual or threatened violence resulting from conflicts without necessarily dealing with their underlying, deep-rooted
causes and conditions. [CONTINUES] The stage has been set for this: NATO, under U.S. leadership, established the
North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991 and the Partnership for Peace in 1994, to reach out to, and collaborate with,
its former Warsaw Pact adversaries. These developments are a powerful sign that the Cold War is over and therefore, by
implication, that nations are undergoing a shift from a narrow world view based on national security to a comprehensive
one based on common security. Hence, the United States and its security partners are conceptually able to move
beyond negative into positive peace. What this will entail in Bosnia is for the United States and its NATO and other
partners to remain there long enough to ensure that negative peace holds. At the same time, they should work with
international governmental and nongovernmental (including conflict resolution) organizations, and with the conflicting
With secure negative peace as a point of

departure, positive peace in Bosnia begins with the reconstruction of the country. But lest the
parties, to pursue, achieve, and maintain positive peace.
United States and its partners repeat the failure of the European Union to achieve positive peace in the Bosnian city of
Mostar through substantial investments in rebuilding Mostar's infrastructure, this reconstruction must reflect a
comprehensive peacebuilding strategy -- reconciliative as well as physical -- over a period of time. Some frameworks
that could be useful in guiding U.S.-led activities in this regard are: the "contingency model" of Ron Fisher and Loraleigh
Keashly, which matches an intervention with the intensity of a given conflict, and then follows up with other interventions
designed to move the parties toward positive peace; the "multi-track framework" of IMTD's Ambassador John McDonald
and Louise Diamond, which combines the resources of nongovernmental conflict resolution practitioners with those of the
business and religious communities, media, funders, and others as well as governmental actors, in the pursuit of positive
peace; and my own design for a "new European peace and security system" which combines elements of these and other
by expanding their
options to include cooperative processes geared to positive peace as well as
competitive processes associated with negative peace, the United States and its
partners will enhance their prospects for success in dealing with the deep-rooted
intrastate ethnic and other conflicts that seem to be the dominant form of
warfare in the post-Cold War world. Intervening in such conflicts may mean
"taking casualties," particularly in cases where one party is attempting to
impose a genocidal "final solution" on another, as in Rwanda or Bosnia . In such
situations, the use of an appropriate amount of force to achieve negative peace may
be a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of positive peace. We should not , in
such cases, allow the U.S. experience in Somalia to prevent us from acting. Genocide in Rwanda or
frameworks within the context of the OSCE. There is a working hypothesis implicit in all this:
Bosnia does, sooner or later, affect the interests of the United States and others. The use of such extreme violence to
"resolve" conflicts anywhere in the world is not only morally reprehensible, but constitutes a model for others to emulate,
The implicit emphasis here on early

warning and early action is part of the gist of conflict resolution: being proactive
instead of reactive. A proactive approach to problem solving worldwide is in the U.S. national interest. This
perhaps increasing the costs of dealing with it later on.
means, among other things, pursuing a bipartisan U.S. foreign policy to avoid the necessity of having to issue unrealistic
timelines in any future deployment of forces, plus paying the massive U.S. debt to the United Nations so that the United
States can more credibly and effectively lead in the debate over U.N. reform as well as in efforts to craft effective
international responses to problems worldwide.
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Absolutism Bad
ABSOLUTIST REJECTIONS ARE ULTIMATELY UNPRODUCTIVE
WE MUST EMBRACE THE DIFFERENCES IN PEACE THEORY
IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE COMMON GOALS
Folk, Prof of Religious and Peace Studies at Bethany College, 78
(Jerry, Peace Educations Peace Studies : Towards an Integrated Approach, Peace &
Change, Vol. V, No. 1, Spring, P. 59)
The conflicting positions held by various researchers, educators, and activists in the peace
studies field can be seen as complementary rather than contradictory. Tensions,
disagreements, and arguments of considerable intensity are unavoidable and indeed
desirable in this as in other fields of endeavor. Such dialectical tensions ensure a depth and
breadth of perception which one position alone could not produce. Truth is often
paradoxical, and therefore a dialectical approach to it is most appropriate.
Antagonisms insure that the dialectic is kept alive. They introduce a third
dimension into one's understanding of truth and preserve it from petrification and
sterility. Therefore, premature closures, mutual excommunications, and fixations on
a particular but incomplete position or approach should be avoided. On the other hand, there
may indeed be some fringe groups or persons in the field who, by the ultimate and legalistic
commitment to a particular approach or ideology and the absolute rejection of any
other ideas or approaches, call their legitimacy as peace researchers, educators or activists into
question. An absolutistic commitment to the status quo would be one example.
Absolutistic and rigid commitments to the capitalist, Marxist or liberal democratic systems
might be another. Rigid and fanatic loyalty to a particular revolutionary or reformist
tradition or to the reformist or revolutionary tradition itself would be a third. None of the approaches or
positions with regard to peace studies which this paper discusses, however, are identical with any of these ideological
it is time particularly in the peace studies field, that the ultimate value
commitments of individuals and groups be given more weight than their politics and
philosophical preferences. The preference of one individual or group for Marxist
socialism might be based on precisely the same value commitments which have
led another to prefer liberal democracy. In summary, a well-balanced peace studies
program ought to involve researchers, educator and activists. At all three levels, it ought to include some
participants who approach the field primarily from the standpoint of negative peace and
others who approach it using primarily the positive peace paradigm. Among the latter
orientations. Moreover,
group some should be highly sympathetic to the radical revolutionary tradition and others more in sympathy with the
through the structure and interactions of the program not

only the tension and conflicts but also the positive interrelationships between these
various groups ought to become visible. A program structured according to such principles would admittedly
be difficult to construct and even more difficult to administer. It would, however, be more that merely comprehensive. It
would be a microcosm of the world and therefore a laboratory in which to
experiment with the actual building of creative peace among groups and individuals
of the most divergent persuasions.
reformist approach of liberal democracy. Moreover,
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**Deep Ecology**
Permutation Solvency: 2AC
HUMAN INTERFERENCE IS INEVITABLE ECO-PRAGMATISM
INTEGRATES DISPARATE ENVIRONMENTAL APPROACHES,
BETTER SOLVING ANTHRO BY UNITING HUMAN AND
ENVIRONMENTAL WELL-BEING
Mintz 2004
[Joel A., Prof. law @ Nova Southeastern University, Some Thoughts on the
Merits of Pragmatism as a Guide to Environmental Protection, 31 B.C. Envtl Aff.
L. Rev. 1, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Environmental pragmatism is a relatively new direction in modern philosophy. n34 A product of the late 1980s and 1990s, it
attempts to connect the precepts and methods of philosophical pragmatism to
the solution of real environmental issues. n35
The most comprehensive collection of essays by environmental pragmatists may be found in Environmental Pragmatism, edited by Andrew Light
and Eric Katz. n36 In their introduction to this work, Light and Katz accurately observe that environmental pragmatism refers to "a cluster of
related and overlapping concepts," as opposed to a single view. n37 They note that it may take at least four distinct forms:
(1) examinations into the connection between classical American philosophical pragmatism and environmental issues; (2) the articulation of
practical strategies for bridging gaps between environmental theorists, policy analysts, activists, and the public; (3) theoretical investigations into
the overlapping normative bases of specific environmental organizations and movements in order to provide grounds for the convergence of
activists on policy choices; and (4) general arguments for theoretical and meta-theoretical moral pluralism in environmental normative theory.
n38
What all of the environmental pragmatist approaches share, however, is a rejection of the view that "adequate and workable environmental
ethics must embrace non-anthropocentrism, holism, moral monism, and, perhaps, a commitment to some form of intrinsic value." n39
[*7] For Kelly Parker, the principal insight of environmental pragmatism is that " the human sphere is embedded at
every point in the broader natural sphere, that each inevitably affects the other
in ways that are often impossible to predict, and that values emerge in the ongoing transactions between
humans and environments." n40 Parker defines environment as "the field where experience occurs, where my life and the lives of others arise
and take place." n41 He believes that pragmatism commits us to treating all places where experience unfolds, i.e., all environments, with "equal
, people are encouraged to "restructure our

social institutions" so that the public is afforded "a real voice in determining the
kinds of environments we inhabit." n43
seriousness." n42 Moreover, under Parker's pragmatic approach
Like Parker, Sandra B. Rosenthal and Rogene A. Buckholz also emphasize the organic unity of the individual embedded in his or her environment.
, human beings are biological creatures, part of, and continuous with,
nature. n45 In light of this, the philosophical argument over anthropocentrism is
meaningless since no real line may be drawn between human and
environmental well-being. n46 Rosenthal and Buckholz see the "systematic focus" of pragmatism as being on "science as
n44 To them
method, or as lived through human activity, on what the scientist does to gain knowledge." n47 Humans exist in the world as active
experimenters who create knowledge and formulate ethical values by integrating "potentially conflicting values and viewpoints." n48
Another leading environmental pragmatist, Bryan G. Norton, also advocates a pluralistic approach. n49 In Norton's opinion:
The goal of seeking a unified, monistic theory of environmental ethics represents a misguided mission, a mission that was formulated under a
The search for a "Holy Grail"

of unified theory in environmental [*8] values has not progressed towards any
consensus regarding what inherent value in nature is, what objects have it, or what it means to have
set of epistemological and moral assumptions that harks back to Descartes and Newton. . . .
such a value. n50

Norton's expressed preference is for the integration of multiple values on three "scales" of human concern and valuation: (1) locally developed
values that reflect the preferences of individuals; (2) community values that protect and contribute to human and ecological communities; and
(3) global values, which express a hope for the long-term survival of our species. n51 As Norton views it:
A good environmental policy will be one that has positive implications for values associated with the various scales on which humans are in
fact concerned, and also on the scales on which environmentalists think we should be concerned if we accept responsibility for the impacts of our
current activities on the life prospects and options--the "freedom" of future generations. n52
One particularly provocative aspect of environmental pragmatic thought is its

desire for compatibilism, i.e., a philosophical framework within which competing
environmental theories may be compatible in practice. n53 Andrew Light is an advocate for this view.
n54 Light contrasts the views of social ecologists and materialists, such as Murray Bookchin and Herbert Marcuse, n55 who view environmental
degradation as presupposed by a capitalist economy, and ontologists, including "deep ecologists" like Arne Naess, n56 whose focus is on reform
of the self, and one's relationship with the non-human world, as expressed in individual identity. n57 To harmonize these mutually antagonistic
schools of environmental thought, Light proposes a pragmatic "principle of tolerance." n58 [*9] Under it, theorists and practitioners are required
to communicate a "straightforward public position" that endorses the considerations on which they agree, and the practices best suited to
meeting their mutually desired goals, while leaving some questions that divide them to private dispute. n59
412
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Permutation Solvency: 1AR

HUMAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL INTEREST ARENT
MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE PLAN PROTECTS BOTH, CREATING
A LESS VIOLENT WORLD
Schroeder 2003
[Christopher, Prof. Law and Pub Policy Studies & Dir. Public Law @ Duke,
Environmental Protection as a Jurisdynamic Experience: Prophets, Priests, and
Pragmatists, 97 Minn. L. Rev. 1065, April, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Sorting out the competing source-of-value claims made within the broad
literature of environmental philosophy and ethics would force a greater detour
here than I can make. Instead, I will simply provide three observations to lend
some support to the view that a critical stance toward business as usual
regarding the environment and a pragmatic approach to values need not be
opposed to one another. First, Deep Ecologists and others who voice the
prophetic message have an established record of extended and detailed
investigations into ways that we might satisfy human needs through methods
that are much less resource consumptive than the current status quo. They
order such investigations in significant part because they recognize that
satisfying human needs does indeed have a significant value. A large part of the
prophetic project seeks ways to accommodate both a high degree of human
need satisfaction and environmental protection, not always to denigrate the
former. Prophets think that society's current balance between the two is out of
kilter, but they need not think that the two do not have to be balanced at all.
The "doing more with less" movement, soft energy paths, hydrogen-based fuel
cells, recycling - these and other such efforts are not [*1085] merely strategic
efforts to reduce amoral or non-moral opposition to the moral hegemony of
environmentalism. Instead, they are efforts to accommodate competing moral
values.
THE PROBLEM OF SHALLOW ECOLOGY ISNT

ANTHROPOCENTRISM, BUT A SHORT-TERM FOCUS
SHOULD COMBINE QUALIFIED ANTHROPOCENTRISM WITH
BROADER CONCERN FOR THE HUMAN WORLD
OVERCOMES THIS
Grey 93
[William, Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, Anthropocentrism
and Deep Ecology, Australian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 71, no 4, 1993,
www.uq.edu.au/~pdwgrey/pubs/anthropocentrism.html, acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
That we habitually assume characteristically anthropocentric perspectives and
values is claimed by deep ecologists to be a defect. And as a corrective to this
parochialism, we are invited to assume an "ecocentric" (Rolston 1986, Callicott
1989) or "biocentric" (Taylor 1986) perspective. I am not persuaded, however,
that it is intelligible to abandon our anthropocentric perspective in favour of one
which is more inclusive or expansive. We should certainly abandon a crude
conception of human needs which equates them (roughly) with the sort of needs
which are satisfied by extravagant resource use. But the problem with so-called
"shallow" views lies not in their anthropocentrism, but rather with the fact that
they are characteristically short-term, sectional, and self-regarding. A suitably
enriched and enlightened anthropocentrism provides the wherewithal for a
satisfactory ethic of obligation and concern for the nonhuman world. And a
genuinely non-anthropocentric view delivers only confusion.
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Anthro Good/Inevitable (1/3)

DEEP ECOLOGY ISOLATES US FROM NATURE, REINSCRIBES
ANTHROPOCENTRISM ANTHRO COMBINED WITH A
HOLISTIC PERSPECTIVE SOLVES BEST BY ALLOWING
BETTER VALUING OF HUMANS AND NATURE
Grey 93
There are several very plausible elements in the concerns of deep
ecology. First, there is the worry about the effects of unconstrained
human interference in natural systems impoverishing and degrading them. Human interference and
human action is often contrasted with the wisdom of natural cycles and natural development. Contrast the violence of a stripmined hillside, or a clear-felled forest with the tranquil majesty of a climax ecosystem such as a tropical rain forest or a coral reef.
.
A second worry focuses on the way that we tend to treat humans and
human activity in isolation from, rather than as a part of nature. This is often
"Nature knows best", it is said
characterized as an atomistic conception of humans as discrete and separate interacting units, in contrast to the holistic organic
conception of organisms as nodes in complex biotic webs. The sharp separation between humanity and nature is said to be one of
the characteristic deficiencies of shallow thought, which is often accompanied by the denial that the nonhuman world possesses
intrinsic value.
A third common worry concerns the extremely short-term view which people commonly take about the consequences of their
actions. <466>
There is an obvious tension which arises when attempting to rectify the

first two worries at the same time. For extolling the virtues of the
natural, while at the same time vilifying the man-made or artificial, depends
on a distinction between the natural and the artificial which the stress on
a continuity between human and nonhuman (the focus of the second worry)
undermines. On the one side there is emphasis on continuity and dependency, and on the other on distinctness and
separation. It seems that, while we are a part of nature, our actions are nevertheless unnatural.
deep ecologists often risk lapsing into an incoherence,

from which they are able to save themselves (as I will illustrate) with the help of
a little covert anthropocentrism. Or putting the point another way, a suitably enriched
(non-atomistic) conception of humans as an integral part of larger
systemsthat is, correcting the misconception of humanity as distinct and separate from the natural world means
that anthropocentric concern for our own well-being naturally flows on to
concern for the nonhuman world. If we value ourselves and our projects,
and part of us is constituted by the natural world, then these evaluations
will be transmitted to the world.
This is one of the points where
ANTHROPOCENTRISM IS NOT ONLY INEVITABLE, BUT

NECESSARY TO STOP THE COMING GREAT AGE OF
EXTINCTION
Grey 93

If the concerns for humanity and nonhuman species raised by advocates of deep ecology are expressed as concerns about the fate
From a planetary perspective, we may be

entering a phase of mass extinction of the magnitude of the Cretaceous.
For planet earth that is just another incident in a four and a half billion
year saga. Life will go onin some guise or other. The arthropods, algae and the ubiquitous bacteria, at least, will almost
certainly be around for a few billion years more . And with luck and good management, some
of the more complex and interesting creatures, such as ourselves, may
continue for a while longer as well. Of course our present disruptive and
destructive activities are, or should be, of great concern to us all. But that is a
of the planet, then these concerns are misplaced.
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quite properly human concern, expressing anthropocentric values from
an anthropocentric perspective. Life will continue; but we should take
steps to maintain and preserve our sort of living planet; one that suits us
and, with a few exceptions, our biotic co-existents.
I will illustrate the way that allegedly non-anthropocentric points of view incorporate
a covert anthropocentrism with some representative examples which, I believe, reveal the
inevitability of anthropocentrism and show that it is not necessarily
something to be deplored. Anthropocentrism is natural and inevitable,
and when properly qualified turns out to be perfectly benign. The first illustration
concerns a proposal to develop a non-anthropocentric basis for value by grounding it in the naturalness of an historical process.
415
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HUMAN INTERVENTION IS INEVITABLE, ITS A QUESTION
OF THE MERITS OF ACTION, NOT A QUESTION OF
WHETHER TO ENGAGE IN IT OR NOT
Bookchin 95
[Murray, Social Ecologist, Philosophy of social ecology, 139//uwyo]
416
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HUMAN INTERVENTION IN NATURE IS INEVITABLE
Bookchin 95
[Murray, Social Ecologist, Philosophy of social ecology, 131//uwyo]
417
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Human Intervention Good

HUMAN ACTIVITY CAN POSITIVELY AFFECT ECOLOGY
SOCIETY IS THE ONLY MEANS OF RESOLVING THE CRISIS
Bookchin 89
[Murray, Social Ecologist, Remaking Society, 17//uwyo]
418
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Deep Ecology Justifies Ecocide (1/2)

THE ALTERNATIVE SIMPLIFIES NATURE, CAUSING
INACTION THAT MAKES ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION,
NUCLEAR WAR, AND EXTINCTION INEVITABLE
Bookchin 87
[Murray, social ecologist, The modern crisis, 108//uwyo]
419
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Deep Ecology Justifies Ecocide (2/2)

DEEP ECOLOGY REINSCRIBES ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND
MAMMAL CHAUVINISM AND DESTROYS ANY FOUNDATION
OF NATURAL VALUE
Grey 93
Finally, I consider the "ecocentric" approach advocated, for example, by
J. Baird Callicott (1989), which is another attempt to develop a nonanthropocentric basis for value. This "deep" approach, inspired by Aldo
Leopold (1949), on examination also reveals covert anthropocentrism.
For example, in "On the Intrinsic Value of Nonhuman Species" Callicott
explores various grounds on which we might extend moral consideration
to nonhuman individuals. One particular line which he explores, and
revealingly rejects is "holistic rationalism". Goodness, on this view, is
identified above all with the objective harmony of the biosphere as a
whole, which "exemplifies or embodies the Good" (Callicott 1989, p.
142). Since species serve the good of the biotic whole (which is quite
independent of human interest) we have a non-anthropocentric
justification for species preservation. But individual species, from this
perspective, are transitional components of developmental stages of the
planet's evolutionary odyssey:
The Age of Reptiles came to a close (for whatever reason) to be followed
by the Age of Mammals. A holistic rationalist would not regret the
massive die-off of the late Cretaceous because it made possible our yet
richer mammal-populated world. The Age of Mammals may likewise end.
But the "laws" of organic evolution and of ecology (if any there be) will
remain operative. In time speciation would occur and species would
radiate anew. Future "intelligent" forms of life may even feel grateful, if
not to us then to their God (or the Good), for making their world
possible. The new Age (of Insects, perhaps) would eventually be just as
diverse, orderly, harmonious and stable and thus no less good than our
current ecosystem with its present complement of species.
With friends like the holistic rationalists, species preservation needs no
enemies. (Callicott 1989, p. 142)
This passage is revealing. Note the characterization of the Age of
Mammals as "richer" than the Age of Reptiles. As mammal chauvinists
we might agree, but it is not clear on what grounds Callicott can justify
the claim. It is also easy to agree that our demise, and the demise of the
ecosystem which currently supports us, would be a matter of regret. But
clearly it would be regrettable because of a decidedly anthropocentric
set of values, interests and perceptionsif Callicott really eschews such
concerns entirely, the grounds on which his regret is based are deprived
of any foundation.
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Deep Ecology Reinscribes

Anthropocentrism (1/2)
THE ALTERNATIVE INSERTS HUMAN JUDGMENT IN PLACE
OF ECOLOGICAL INTEREST, ALLOWING FOR
TOTALTIARIANISM
Bobertz 97
[Bradley C., Book Review: Of Nature and Nazis, 22 Colum. J. Envtl. L. 353,
LN//uwyo-ajl]
Apart from the political dangers Ferry associates with deep ecology, he believes the philosophy suffers from a fundamental self-contradiction.
The argument that natural objects can possess their own interests strikes Ferry
as "one of the most absurd forms of anthropomorphism." n100 We cannot "think
like a mountain," to use Aldo Leopold's famous phrase, n101 because, quite obviously, we are not
mountains. Recalling Sierra Club v. Morton, n102 the famous standing case involving a proposal to construct a ski resort in California's
Mineral King valley, Ferry claims that environmentalists "always suppose that the interests of
objects (mountains, lakes and other natural things) are opposed to development. But how do we
know? After all, isn't it possible that Mineral King would be inclined to welcome a
ski slope after having remained idle for millions of years?" n103 Yet few people, including the
writers Ferry labels as deep ecologists, would disagree with the fact that recognizing value in natural objects is
an act of human cognition. Perhaps a person suffering from profound psychosis might claim the ability to understand how a
mountain "thinks," but the writers Ferry criticizes do not advance 8540*379 such bizarre claims. n104 For deep ecologists and environmental
ethicists, phrases such as "think like a mountain" are metaphorical and heuristic, not literal and agenda-setting.
a far graver problem with deep ecology lies in its appeal to those who
might translate a nature-centered ideology into coercive political action. By
promoting the idea that nature has intrinsic value, deep ecologists necessarily
promote an antihuman, antitechnology, and antimodern worldview, Ferry believes. If we
According to Ferry,
assert that humans are merely "part" of the natural order, our position in that order must be a humble one:
The entire Cosmos may well be assigned a positive coefficient higher than that of humankind itself, since in the hierarchy of beings it constitutes
the primary condition: nature can do without men, but not vice versa, which is why the idea of a "preference for nature" finds itself gradually
legitimized as all in all the most logical metaphysical horizon of deep ecology. n105
DEEP ECOLOGY REINSCRIBES ANTHROPOCENTRIC VALUES

Bookchin 94
[Murray, Social ecologist, Which way for the ecology movement? 3//uwyo]
421
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422
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Deep Ecology Reinscribes

Anthropocentrism (2/2)
THE ALTERNATIVE FALLS BACK INTO RESOURCE
CALCULATION, DESTROYING ENVIRONMENTAL
PROTECTION
Cross 89
[Frank B., Assoc. Prof. Bus Law @ Texas, Natural Resource Damage Valuation,
42 Vand. L. rev. 269, March, LN//uwo-ajl]
Yet those who ascribe to the intrinsic value of nature may themselves oppose
the monetary measurement of that value. Some deep ecologists, for example,
are uncomfortable with the capitalist system's [*294] focus on private property.
n122 For these ecologists, relying on economics is "technocratic" and the root of
environmental degradation; monetary natural resource damages contribute to
the problem rather than the solution. n123 These people refuse to place a
monetary value on nature, finding that the very effort demeans the underlying
worth of nature. n124 Their refusal leaves the law only two options:
Economically valuing natural resources at zero or at infinity. The former
alternative inevitably creates an incentive to destroy the resources that the
naturalist seeks to protect. n125 The latter is transparently unworkable, as it
suggests that the death of a single fly provides grounds for bankrupting the
largest corporations. n126 While it is indisputably difficult to assess the
monetary value of natural objects, the effort should be made. Otherwise,
"treating the problem as an inherent incapacity of analysis to incorporate the
intangible can only retard the needed development of these important abilities."
n127 No persuasive methodologies, however, objectively and reliably ascertain
the intrinsic worth of natural resources.
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Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: 2AC

DEEP ECOLOGY RISKS CO-OPTATION BY GENOCIDAL
FASCISTS
A)SCARE-MONGERING GETS HIJACKED
B)SUBORDINATION OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS
C)ANTI-RATIONAL ALTERNATIVE
Smith 2003
[Kev, Greenpepper, Ecofascism: Deep Ecology and Right-Wing Co-optation,
Synthesis/Regeneration 32, http://www.greens.org/s-r/32/32-13.html, acc 10-406//uwyo-ajl]
It is striking how many traits the Wandervgel have in common with the Deep
Ecology movement. In particular, their self-conception that they were a nonpolitical response to a deep cultural crisis, favoring direct emotional experience
over social critique and action. In the same paper, Janet Biehl states, When
respect for nature comes to mean reverence, it can mutate ecological politics
into a religion that Green Adolfs can effectively use for authoritarian ends. In
Britain, a wing of the National Front issues the cry, Racial preservation is
Green! while in the United States, white supremacist Monique Wolfing remarks
that animals and the environment, are in the same position as we are. Why
would we want something created for ourselves and yet watch nature be
destroyed? We work hand in hand with nature and we should save nature along
with trying to save our race.
The key question is whether supporters of Deep Ecology are vulnerable to
absorption by far-right groups in the same way that the Wandervgel were. The
main fear for this happening lies in Deep Ecology's demonization of reason.
Deep Ecology sees reason as endemic to human-centered worldviews that have
produced the ecological crisis. Alternatively, Deep Ecology promotes intuition as
equal or even superior to reason. As a result Deep Ecology is subject to the
dangers represented by earlier anti-rational and intuitionist worldviews that,
once carried over into the political realm, have produced anti-human and even
genocidal movements. Peter Staudenmaier fears that this is perhaps, the
unavoidable trajectory of any movement which acknowledges and opposes
social and ecological problems but does not recognize their systemic roots or
actively resist the political and economic structures which generate them.
Deep Ecology, as a philosophy, seems to be both systematically and morally
problematic. Where Deep Ecology theories have gone wrong is in the extreme
reaction to perceived centuries of human exploitation of nature and the
dominance of rationalist thought. The primacy of intuitive thought means that it
lacks the self-analysis that normally acts as a safety check to prevent straying
onto moral thin ice. These factors then serve to prevent an accurate picture of
the ecological crisis from emerging. The role of personal consciousness-raising
on both rational and intuitive levels should be complementary rather than
competitive. In the manner of the classic circularity of extreme left and right
thought, Deep Ecology has the potential to find itself back at the totalitarian
starting point it intended to usurp.
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Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: 1AR

(1/2)
EXCESS REVERENCE FOR NATURE DE-SENSITIZES US TO
HUMAN AGENCY, A PROCESS THAT WAS INSTRUMENTAL IN
NAZISM
Bookchin 94
[Murray, Social Ecologist, Which way for the ecology movement? 41//uwyo]
425
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Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: 1AR

(2/2)
DEEP ECOLOGYS DOGMATIC FOCUS CREATES HUMAN
PREJUDICE AND NAZISM
Bookchin 94
[Murray, Social ecologist, Which way for the ecology movement? 7-8//uwyo]
426
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Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: Ext

(1/2)
TURN: THE NAZIS USED NATURE STORIES TO JUSTIFY
GENOCIDE
ONEILL IN 95
Sadhbh, researching an MA thesis on ecophilosophy at UCD, DEEP
ECOLOGY AND FEMINISM: TO THE WORLD AND BACK, 1995, p.
http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/zine/imb95/ecofemin.htm.
Most recently, a member of Earth First! in Ireland wrote in Common
Ground that no qualitative difference exists between the Jewish
holocaust and the "eco-holocaust" currently underway. That sort of
comparison is made, mind, in the spirit of biospherical egalitarianism as
formulated by Naess. Despite the many indications from evolutionary
biology and the science of ecology that nature really does, in rather
different ways to human beings, posit values, make choices, pursue ends
and so on, to equate the tragedy we are inflicting on nature with the
horror that we are capable of inflicting on our own fellow species is
nothing short of fascism. There are many examples of how the Nazis, for
instance, used naturalistic myths and ecology to justify oppression and
systematic murder in the interests of nature.
NAZI GERMANY JUSTIFIED IMPERIALIST EXPANSION INTO

EASTERN EUROPE ECOLOGICALLYPROTECTING THE
ENVIRONMENT FROM THE PEOPLE WHO WERE POLLUTING
IT
STAUDENMAIER IN 98
(Peter, anarchy theorist, Professor for the Institute for Social Ecology,
Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical
Antecedents, February 1998,
http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html)
Darr was one of the party's chief "race theorists" and was also
instrumental in galvanizing peasant support for the Nazis during the
critical period of the early 1930s. From 1933 until 1942 he held the posts of
Reich Peasant Leader and Minister of Agriculture. This was no minor fiefdom; the
agriculture ministry had the fourth largest budget of all the myriad Nazi ministries
even well into the war.38 From this position Darr was able to lend vital
support to various ecologically oriented initiatives. He played an

essential part in unifying the nebulous proto-environmentalist
tendencies in National Socialism: It was Darr who gave the ill-defined
anti-civilization, anti-liberal, anti-modern and latent anti-urban
sentiments of the Nazi elite a foundation in the agrarian mystique . And it
seems as if Darr had an immense influence on the ideology of National
Socialism, as if he was able to articulate significantly more clearly than before the
values system of an agrarian society contained in Nazi ideology and -- above all -to legitimate this agrarian model and give Nazi policy a goal that was clearly
oriented toward a far-reaching re-agrarianization.39 This goal was not only
quite consonant with imperialist expansion in the name of Lebensraum,

it was in fact one of its primary justifications, even motivations. In
language replete with the biologistic metaphors of organicism, Darr
declared: "The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take
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back as much land in the East as is necessary to establish a harmony
between the body of our Volk and the geopolitical space."40 Aside from
providing green camouflage for the colonization of Eastern Europe , Darr
worked to install environmentally sensitive principles as the very basis of the
Third Reich's agricultural policy. Even in its most productivist phases, these
precepts remained emblematic of Nazi doctrine. When the "Battle for Production"
(a scheme to boost the productivity of the agricultural sector) was proclaimed at
the second Reich Farmers Congress in 1934, the very first point in the program
read "Keep the soil healthy !" But Darr's most important innovation was the
introduction on a large scale of organic farming methods, significantly labeled
"lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise," or farming according to the laws of life. The
term points up yet again the natural order ideology which underlies so much
reactionary ecological thought. The impetus for these unprecedented measures
came from Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and its techniques of biodynamic
cultivation.41
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Deep Ecology Justifies Nazism: Ext

(2/2)
ABSOLUTE PROTECTION OF THE ECOSYSTEM IS UNSTABLE
IGNORES SOCIETY, COLLAPSES TO FACISM AND
BARBARISM
STAUDENMAIER IN 98
(Peter, anarchy theorist, Professor for the Institute for Social Ecology,
Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical
Antecedents, February 1998,
http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html)
As noted above, this failure most commonly takes the form of a call to
"reform society according to nature," that is, to formulate some version
of 'natural order' or 'natural law' and submit human needs and actions to
it. As a consequence, the underlying social processes and societal
structures which constitute and shape people's relations with their
environment are left unexamined. Such willful ignorance, in turn,
obscures the ways in which all conceptions of nature are themselves
socially produced, and leaves power structures unquestioned while
simultaneously providing them with apparently 'naturally ordained'
status. Thus the substitution of ecology for clear-sighted socialecological inquiry has catastrophic political repercussions, as the
complexity of the society-nature dialectic is collapsed into a purified
Oneness. An ideologically charged 'natural order' does not leave room
for compromise; its claims are absolute. For all of these reasons, the
slogan advanced by many contemporary Greens, "We are neither right
nor left but up front," is historically naive and politically fatal. The
necessary project of creating an emancipatory ecological politics
demands an acute awareness and understanding of the legacy of
classical ecofascism and its conceptual continuities with present-day
environmental discourse. An 'ecological' orientation alone, outside of a
critical social framework, is dangerously unstable. The record of fascist
ecology shows that under the right conditions such an orientation can
quickly lead to barbarism.
DEEP ECOLOGISTS ENDORSE INHUMAN POLICIES AND

HUMAN SUFFERING
TOKAR IN 90
Brian, Author of The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future,
August 1990,New Internationalist,
http://www.newint.org/issue210/eco.htm
A major controversy began when Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman
was quoted in an interview by deep ecologist Bill Devall making some
shockingly misanthropic statements in the name of deep ecology and
Earth First! Deep ecologists claim overpopulation as the underlying
cause of ecological crisis and advocate population reduction. Foreman
took this one step further, advocating forced sterilizations, ending food
aid to starving people (particularly, at the time, in Ethiopia), and sealing
US borders against refugees from the wars in Latin America. To Foreman,
such measures were ways to let nature seek its own balance, and
prevent more destruction of our wilderness, more poisoning of our water
and air.
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430
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A2 Were Not Fascists: 1AR

IRRELEVENT THEIR PROGRAM WILL BE CO-OPTED BY
OTHERS FOR FASCIST ENDS
Smith 2003
[Kev, Greenpepper, Ecofascism: Deep Ecology and Right-Wing Co-optation,
Synthesis/Regeneration 32, http://www.greens.org/s-r/32/32-13.html, acc 10-406//uwyo-ajl]
There are two reasons why I find such a statement from a moderate Deep
Ecologist worrying. The first is that it misses the point that you do not
necessarily have to be a fascist in order to propagate right-wing ideology.
Secondly, it still places the issue of population control ahead of the issue of how
resources are unevenly distributed among the global population. It is astonishing
how many environmental groups (and not just Deep Ecologists; the mainstream
Dutch environmental group Milieu Defensie is a depressing recent example) still
rate population growth over the systematic over-consumption of the
industrialized world. This misinforms the person on the street, reinforcing fears
that their stably populated Western country may be overrun by the teeming
dark-skinned multitudes of the Third World. Such scare-mongering plays directly
into the hands of the new right and lends inadvertent support to calls for stricter
border controls.
We would do well to examine the example of the Wandervgel, a youth
movement that arose in Germany during the first three decades of the 20th
Century. Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of the paper Ecofascism: Lessons From
The German Experience, characterizes this movement as a hodge-podge of
counter-cultural elements, blending neo-Romanticism, Eastern philosophies,
nature mysticism, hostility to reason, and a ... search for authentic, nonalienated social relations. Their back-to-the-land emphasis spurred a passionate
sensitivity to the natural world and the damage it suffered. Although some
sectors of the movement gravitated towards various forms of emancipatory
politics, most of the Wandervgel were eventually absorbed by the Nazis.
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Deep Ecology Justifies

State/Capitalism
BIOCENTRISM PREVENTS OPPOSITION TO CAPITALISM
AND THE STATE BECAUSE IT SHUNS FOCUS ON SOCIAL
PROBLEMS
Bookchin 95
[Murray, Social ecologist, Philosophy of social ecology, 133//uwyo]
432
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Deep Ecology Creates Suffering

DEEP ECOLOGY SUBORDINATES ALL VALUES TO NATURE,
CREATING RACISM AND HUMAN SUFFERING
Green Fuse 2006
[Deep Ecology Critique, June, http://www.thegreenfuse.org/deepcrit.htm, acc.
10-4-06//uwyo-ajl]
Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! which claims to draw inspiration from
deep ecology, has made several deeply misanthropic comments.
"It is rather painful to read about some of the positions taken by the Foreman
faction in the E.F! Journal: for example, Foreman arguing that even a nuclear war
would not be that damaging to the Earth and would hasten the end of industrial
society... and his remarks elsewhere that we should "allow Ethiopians to starve";
Christopher Manes suggesting that one solution to overpopulation would be to
dismantle the medical technology designed to save lives, and of AIDS as
Nature's solution to overpopulation; and Reed Noss writing of genetic "deep
ecology elite" as a "chosen people" out to save the Earth (pp. 64, 68, 83-84, 923,101-3).
George Sessions, Book Review: Martha Lee, Earth First!. Trumpeter: 13, 4 (1996)
Sessions adds that if such comments claim to draw on deep ecology they show a
misunderstanding of its philosophy.
Murray Bookchin comments:
"They are barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones and
outright social reactionaries who offer a vague, formless often self contradictory
and invertebrate [movement] and a kind of crude eco-brutalism similar to
Hitler's. Deep ecologists feed on human disasters, suffering and misery...[and
are guilty of thinking which]...legitimates extremely regressive, primitivistic and
even highly reactionary notions."
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Case Comes First

MUST ADDRESS EXIGENT ISSUES BEFORE ADDRESSING
PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE ON NATURE
Bookchin 94
[Murray, Social Ecologist, Which way for the social ecology movement? 1//uwyo]
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Alternative Fails: Bad Activism

ANTHROPOCENTRISM IS SO INGRAINED THAT THE
ALTERNATIVE IS IMPOSSIBLE
Cross 89
[Frank B., Assoc. Prof. Bus Law @ Texas, Natural Resource Damage Valuation,
42 Vand. L. rev. 269, March, LN//uwo-ajl]
Perhaps the argument over the intrinsic worth of natural resources is largely
pointless. Political realists contend that concern for inherent animal welfare lacks
public credibility. Whatever the metaphysical basis for nature's intrinsic value,
the advocates of this position risk being considered impractical and fuzzyheaded, if not outright crackpots. Their arguments are treated with more ridicule
than respect. n136 Perhaps these critics are partly correct. As long as
government is making the legal rules and as long as only humans vote, the
concerns of nature never will be reflected directly in our nation's governmental
policy. Most environmental laws enacted to date focus on protecting people's
[*296] interest in the natural environment. n137 Nature's influence on people
may be felt in a myriad of ways, but legislation is not among them. Inasmuch as
the question is phrased in public policy terms, the answer must come from
humans alone. n138
Indeed, the terminology from a discussion of natural resources seems
antithetical to intrinsic valuation. The term "resource" implies usefulness to man.
n139 Similarly, "value" may require a human subject to express a preference
regarding the natural object. n140 Remove the human subject, and the concept
of value loses meaning. n141 The legal valuation of natural resources is a
human undertaking that is limited inescapably to human understanding and
choice.
Of course, one may be persuaded that nature has intrinsic value for which
government should account. Enlightened human preference thus may capture at
least a portion of intrinsic value, but the preference is predicated necessarily on
an informed human understanding of intrinsic value, not on the value itself.
n142 This recognition also helps defeat the antidemocratic and elitist features
potentially existing in concepts of intrinsic value. n143
THE ALT FAILS: RESOURCE-VIEW OF NATURE IS TOO

ENTRENCHED
McCullough 95
[Edwin r., solo practice in Chicago, JD Loyola, Through the Eye of a Needle, 10
J. Envtl. L. & Litig. 389, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Though deep ecology presents a utopian vision of the future, its prospects are
about as dim as are the prospects of Weiss' intergenerational equity theory.
Weiss' theory is more mainstream and is backed by a vast body of law, which is
distilled into well-drafted introductory principles. Deep ecology offers strong simple statements for new
legal and/or moral principles and offers a fundamentally different worldview for the future. The principles of deep ecology, however, offer us tools
for improving environmental law now. Indeed, some of the principles of deep ecology, though not expressed in name, have been adopted by
other environmentalists.
Two environmental writers, law professor, Earl Finbar Murphy, n111 and conservation biologist, David W. Ehrenfeld, n112 discussed various
aspects of ecology with anthropocentric logic before deep ecology became a familiar notion. They independently arrived at the same point;
nonhuman life has value independent of human activity. This is another way of stating the first principle of the deep ecology platform. [*420]
Dr. Ehrenfeld's article, The Conservation of Non-Resources, begins with the idea of conservation being identified with the preservation of natural
resources. The term, resource, can be defined narrowly as the reserve of commodities that has an appreciable money value to man, either
directly or indirectly. Ehrenfeld points out that over the years, conservationists increasingly have been preoccupied with preservation of natural
is the
endangered Houston toad, an animal with no demonstrated or conjectural
resource value to man. n113
He observes that due to the dominant worldview, species and communities that
lack economic value are not easily protected. Thus, a "value" must be
discovered by which the non-resource can metamorphose into a resource. n114
features, species, communities, and ecosystems - items which are not conventional resources. His example of a non-resource
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He notes the practical political weakness of concocting a "value" for a nonresource; this kind of value is not as appealing as those backed by the promise
of a short-term economic gain. He notes that "when everything is called a
resource, the word loses all meaning - at least in our value system." n115 From a
conservation viewpoint, it may become quite risky to find economic values for
non-resources.
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Alternative Fails: Premodern

Society Bad
PRE-MODERN SOCIETY IS MORE DESTRUCTIVE TO THE
EARTH
Green Fuse 2006
[Deep Ecology Critique, June, http://www.thegreenfuse.org/deepcrit.htm, acc.

10-4-06//uwyo-ajl]
Deep ecology sometimes appears to idealize a the society of indigenous huntergatherer tribes, but in reality many primitive tribes are not especially ecocentric.
Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade writes:
"...many peoples past and present living close to nature have all too often
been blindly destructive of their environment. While many indigenous societies
have a great reverence for nature, there are also both non-Western and Western
peasant and nomadic cultures that have overgrazed and overcultivated land,
decimated forests, and where population pressures have been severe, killed off
animals needlessly and indifferently."
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Asteroid Turn
ANTHROPOCENTRISM IS NECESSARY TO STOP NATURAL
PHENOMENA LIKE ASTEROID COLLISIONS AND ICE AGES,
WHICH THREATEN MASS EXTINCTION ON A SCALE MUCH
MORE THREATENING TO THE BIOSPHERE AND
BIODIVERSITY THAN HUMAN ACTIVITY EMPIRICALLY
PROVEN BY THE GREAT EXTINCTIONS OF THE PAST
Grey 93
Robert Goodin has proposed a "moderately deep" theory of value, according to which what imparts value to an outcome is the
naturalness of the historical process through which it has come about (Goodin 1991, p. 74). Putting aside the problem, mentioned
the
deliverances of natural historical processes are not necessarily benign,
nor ones which should command our approval . The traumatic disruptions to the planet
brought about by natural forces far exceed anything which we have
been able to effect. Consider, first, what Lovelock (1979) has called the worst
atmospheric pollution incident ever: the accumulation of that toxic and
corrosive gas oxygen some two billion years ago, with devastating consequences for the
then predominant anaerobic life forms. Or the Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago, which
wiped out the large reptiles, the then dominant life forms. Or the
Permian extinction some 225 million years ago, which eliminated an estimated 96
per cent of marine species. Like the eruption of Mt St Helens, these were natural events, but it is implausible
above, that the distinction between what is natural and what is cultural (or technological, or artefactual) is problematic,
to suppose that they are to be valued for that reason alone.

There is of course an excellent reason for us to retrospectively evaluate these great planetary disruptions positively from our
current position in planetary history, and that is that we can recognise their occurrence as a necessary condition for our own
mass extinctions
are awful for those who are caught up in them.
Suppose that astronomers detect a modest asteroid or comet, say five or ten
kilometres diameter, on collision course with planet Earth [8]. The impending collision would be
perfectly natural all right, and cataclysmic enough to do to us what
another one rather like it probably did to the dinosaurs. Such periodic
disruptive events are natural all right, though they probably destroy most of the then extant large life forms.
existence. But what could be more anthropocentric than that? However, as Gould has pointed out,
These times of renewal provide opportunities for smaller, flexible organisms to radiate opportunistically into vacated niches, and
life goes on. From a biocentric or ecocentric perspective there is little doubt that our demise would provide comparable
Should we, in <470>such circumstances, step aside

so that evolution can continue on its majestic course? I think not, and I think further
that interference with the natural course of events, if it could be effected, would
be no bad thingat least from our point of view and in terms of our interests, which it is quite legitimate to promote
opportunities for development which we currently prevent.
and favour.
Suppose again that we are entering one of the periodic epochs of

reduced solar energy flux. An ice age is imminent, with massive
disruptions to the agriculturally productive temperate zones. However suppose
further that by carefully controlled emissions of greenhouse gases it would
be possible to maintain a stable and productive agriculture. No doubt this would be
to the detriment of various arctic plant and animal species, but I do not think that such interference, though "unnatural" would be
therefore deplorable. Nature in and of itself is not, I suggest, something to be valued independently of human interests. It could be
modifying our natural environment, we would be

following the precedent of three billion years of organic evolution, since
according to the Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock (1979), the atmosphere and oceans are not just
biological products, but biological constructions.
Other natural propertiessuch as biodiversity, beauty, harmony, stability, and integrity
have been proposed to provide a non-anthropocentric basis for value.
But unless we smuggle in some anthropocentric bearings, they fare no
better than the property of being the outcome of a natural process in
providing an intuitively plausible ordering of better and worse states of
the world. For example, if biodiversity is taken as a basic value-giving characteristic, then the state of the planet just after
argued moreover that in thus
the Cambrian explosion (about 570 million years ago) would be rated much more highly than the world of the present, as it was far
richer in terms of the range and diversity of its constituent creatures. Most biology textbooks recognize between twenty and thirty
extant animal phylathe phylum being the fundamental design plan of an organism (and the second broadest classification,
438
Kritik Answers
following 'kingdom', in biological taxonomy). Yet the Burgess Shale, one small quarry in British Columbia dating back some 530
million years, contains the remains of fifteen to twenty organisms so unlike one another, or anything now living, as to each
In terms of basic diversity, a far greater range

of radically different anatomical types existed at that epoch of
evolutionary development.
constitute a separate phylum (Gould 1989).
439
Kritik Answers
HIV Turn
DEEP ECOLOGY PREVENTS US FROM FIGHTING VIRII LIKE
HIV AND SMALLPOX OUT OF RESPECT FOR VIRAL
AUTONOMY
Grey 93
There are a number of problems with such a permissive criterion of
moral considerability. One is that there are conflicts of interest between
goal-directed entities, and something needs to be said about how these
are to be resolved. Smallpox and HIV no doubt have their own viral
autonomy (as well as being the products of natural historical processes),
but for all that it is perfectly legitimate to disregard their interests when
they conflict with our own. Yet it is hard to see how a decision to deny
them a place in the scheme of things can be defended except by appeal
to a value system which favours human interests. Plumwood allows that
in casting the moral net widely we will have to "make distinctions for
appropriate treatment within each class of items" (p. 147). It seems
reasonable to suspect that human standards of appropriateness will be
brought to bear to settle cases where such conflicts arise.
NEW WAVE OF SUPER VIRII LIKE AIDS WILL USE HUMAN

TRAVEL TO CAUSE EXTINCTION
Leibovich 97
[Lori, staff, X stands for eXtinction: Interview with Frank Ryan, M.D., a
prominent physician, Salon, Newsreal, March 1997,
www.salon.com/march97/news/news2970321.html, Acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
And "Virus X" is one of them? What is "Virus X"?
The title of my book, "Virus X," means a virus that threatens human
extinction. The X stands for "eXtinction." I should add that most of the
book is devoted to less terrible, scary but interesting, scenarios. But it
would be foolish not to face the worst-case scenario, which I discuss in
the book.
There were fears that AIDS might fit that description. Is it because of
international transportation and ease of travel that these viruses have
become so threatening?
Yes. Human behavior has greatly changed the natural goal posts with
regard to the threat of new plague viruses. Take AIDS, for example.
According to my hypothesis, in the past a band of hunters might have
been bitten or scratched by chimpanzees harboring the virus; the result
would have been a lethal attack localized to the hunter band -- or at
worst their home village.
Today, thanks to the global village, a new plague virus could
perambulate the globe at the speed of a passenger jet. Then a new step
in the plague scenario would take place in the massively populated cities
-- they would become viral "amplification zones."
440
Kritik Answers
African AIDS Outweighs

HIV INFECTION THREATENS THE EXTINCTION OF THE
AFRICAN CONTINENT
KRQE News 2002
[Associated Press, Africans are Faced with Extinction by AIDS, August 28, 2002,
100777.com/doc/205 acc 9-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
The disease will undermine the continent's social and economic stability,
with the biggest increases in early deaths coming among people who are
in their 30s, 40s and 50s, when they should be at their most productive,
and will leave a population of AIDS orphans in its wake, the conference
was told.
In five African countries, deaths will outstrip births by 2010, meaning
falling populations.
"Unfortunately, many African countries are only beginning to see the
impact of high levels of HIV prevalence," said the Census Bureau's Karen
Stanecki.
"By 2010, we project that life expectancies in these countries will be
back to levels that have not been seen since the 19th century."
The Census Bureau's "middle-case scenario," which assumes that the
epidemic will begin to level off in Africa over the next eight years,
predicts the average life expectancy in Botswana and Mozambique will
drop to just 27 years.
"We are faced with extinction," said Dr. Banu Khan, head of the National
AIDS Co-ordinating Agency in Botswana.
THE DEVASTATION OF THE AIDS VIRUS IN AFRICA IS A

MANIFESTATION OF GLOBAL APARTHEID OPPOSITION TO
ALL DEVALUATION OF BLACK LIFE IS THE MOST
IMPORTANT DISCURSIVE STEP IN FIGHTING RACISM AND
COLONIALISM
Deen 2001
[Thalif, Staff, Rights: Caste, Drugs, AIDS have Racism Links, Say US Groups,
Inter Press Service, August 23, 2001,
www.aegis.com/news/ips/2001/IP010807.html , acc 8-30-04//uwyo-ajl]
Meanwhile, the Washington-based NGO Africa Action said that the global
AIDS pandemic must be seen as a matter of international racism.
"The AIDS crisis - whose epicentre is Africa - is the harvest for an
international system of global apartheid, where the consequences of
racism, slavery and colonialism have, five centuries on, impoverished
the African continent and left it on its own to combat the worst plague in
human history." AIDS, it said, is the black plague. So while AIDS is a
global threats that knows no borders and does not discriminate by race,
it is mainly killing black people.
Africa Action said the racism conference should recognise that the
resolution of the global AIDS pandemic is directly dependent upon the
international fight against racism.
"It is the devaluation of black life that has enabled the Western world to
turn its eyes away from this global health crisis," it added. "Of all of the
struggles against racism that we will discuss in Durban, none has farther
reaching consequences for the immediate future of our common
humanity."
441
Kritik Answers
442
Kritik Answers
Singularity Turn
HUMAN TECHNOLOGY IS A COMPONENT OF NATURAL
COSMOLOGICAL EVOLUTION RESISTING
ANTHROPOCENTRISM BLOCKS THE SINGULARITY
NECESSARY TO SOLVE ALL WORLDLY PROBLEMS
Glasser 2006
[Micah J., Independent Philosopher, Cosmological Deep Ecology and the
Singularity, Event Horizon, January 25,
http://technoeventhorizon.blogspot.com/2006/01/cosmological-deep-ecologyand.html, acc. 10-4-06//uwyo-ajl]
Man is a part of a system. As Man evolves both biologically and technologically so does that system. The system I am talking about is our
environment and that environment is the entire Cosmos. Of course the most important part of that environment is the earth itself.
Some ecologists and environmentalists seem to view man and his technology as something over
and against nature. This position couldn't be further from the truth. Both man and his technology are
outgrowths of nature. Nature is not a thing that is static, that, if it wasn't for man and his
technology, would be pristene. Nature is a part of the ever changing Flux and as such it is
always in motion and ever changing. The history of the Cosmos is a history of extraordinary change and
complexification. As the Cosmos unfolds new properties emerge. Two of those
properties, at this late stage of cosmological development, are intelligent life
and technology. Are we to believe that the emergence of intelligent life in the Cosmos is merely an accident a contingent
epiphenomena and that its purpose as a component of that vast system is merely to destroy itself no sooner than it emerges? I find such gross
pessimism to be both ill founded and, ultimately, misanthropic.
The truth of the matter is that, even though as individuals we may be self-determined, the Cosmos, of which we are an inextricable part, is
the exponential technological evolution that leads

to singularity is a natural part of the cooling and development of the Cosmos. This
does not mean that human civilization can abandon all pretenses of responsibility, but what it does mean is that as our civilization
approaches technological singularity our true nature will become manifest. We will,
at that point, be denuded. The inconceivable technological power unleashed by the event of
the singularity will empower man to fulfill that which he most fundamentally desires, or in other terms, technological
determined. This determination indicates to me that
singularity will be the point at which man bears the fruit that was latent in the seed which is man.
In any case what ever happens will be a natural occurrence that is no more capable of being controlled than is the gravitational constant or the
speed limit of light
443
Kritik Answers
**Deleuze and Guattari**

Perms
THE 1AC IS A SLOW EXPERIMENT; EVEN IF IT FAILS TO
LIBERATE US, IT IS BETTER THAN THE NEGATIVES FAST
REJECTION AND OVERDOSE, WHICH LEADS TO COLLAPSE
AND DEATH
Deleuze, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris; and Felix
Guattari, psychoanalyst, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 160-161
Gilles
You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you
have to keep small supplies of signifiance and subjectification, if only to turn
them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when
things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small
rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the
dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You dont reach the BwO, and its plane of
consistency, by wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of
those emptied and dreary bodies at the very beginning: they had emptied
themselves of their organs instead of looking for the point at which they could
patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the
organism. There are, in fact, several ways of botching the BwO: either one fails
to produce it, or one produces it more or less, but nothing is produced on it,
intensities do not pass or are blocked. This is because the BwO is always
swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and the plane that sets it free. If
you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking
precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a
black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratifiedorganized,
signified, subjectedis not the worst that can happen; the worst that can
happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which
brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done:
Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an
advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization,
possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and
there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot
of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that
one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and
escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate,
continue: a whole diagram, as opposed to still signifying and subjective
programs. We are in a social formation; first see how it is stratified for us and in
us and at the place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper
assemblage within which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass
over to the side of the plane of consistency. It is only there that the BwO reveals
itself for what it is: connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of
intensities. You have constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to
be plugged into other collective machines. Castaneda describes a long process
of experimentation (it makes little difference whether it is with peyote or other
things): let us recall for the moment how the Indian forces him first to find a
place, already a difficult operation, then to find allies, and then gradually to
give up interpretation, to construct flow by flow and segment by segment lines
of experimentation, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, etc. For the BwO is
all of that: necessarily a Place, necessarily a Plane, necessarily a Collectivity
(assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and
fragments of all of these; for it is not my body without organs, instead the
me (moi) is on it, or what remains of me, unalterable and changing in form,
crossing thresholds).
444
Kritik Answers
Alternative Increases Oppression

IN PRACTICE THEIR ALTERNATIVE WILL FURTHER
TYRANNICAL CONTROL AND GENOCIDE
Barbrook, coordinator of the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University
of Westminster, 8/27/1998, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-lRichard
9808/msg00091.html, accessed 3/3/03

Deleuze and Guattari enthusiastically joined this attack against the concept of historical progress. For them, the 'deterritorialisation' of urban
society was the solution to the contradiction between participatory democracy and revolutionary elitism haunting the New Left. If the centralised
city could be broken down into 'molecular rhizomes', direct democracy and the gift economy would reappear as people formed themselves into
small nomadic bands. According to Deleuze and Guattari, anarcho-communism was not the 'end of history': the material result of a long epoch of
social development. On the contrary, the liberation of desire from semiotic oppression was a perpetual promise: an ethical stance which could be
equally lived by nomads in ancient times or social movements in the present. With enough intensity of effort, anyone could overcome their
hierarchical brainwashing to become a fully-liberated individual: the holy fool.<21> Yet, as the experience of Frequence Libre proved, this
rhetoric of unlimited freedom contained a deep desire for ideological control by

the New Left vanguard. While the nomadic fantasies of A Thousand Plateaus were being
composed, one revolutionary movement actually did carry out Deleuze and Guattari's
dream of destroying the city. Led by a vanguard of Paris-educated intellectuals, the Khmer
Rouge overthrew an oppressive regime installed by the Americans. Rejecting the 'grand
narrative' of economic progress, Pol Pot and his organisation instead tried to construct a rural
utopia. However, when the economy subsequently imploded, the regime embarked on ever
more ferocious purges until the country was rescued by an invasion by neighbouring Vietnam. Deleuze and
Guattari had claimed that the destruction of the city would create direct democracy
and libidinal ecstasy. Instead, the application of such anti-modernism in practice resulted in
tyranny and genocide. The 'line of flight' from Stalin had led to Pol Pot.
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI'S BELIEF IN TRANSFORMATION

THROUGH FREEDOM FROM DIALECTICAL OPPOSITION
FAILS THE FIGURES AND INSTITUTIONS WHICH COULD
CREATE THIS FREEDOM ARE REAPPROPRIATED BY
CONTEMPORARY OPPOSITIONAL POLITICS, FORECLOSING
EXITS FROM THE EXISTING POLITICAL SYSTEM
Mann, Prof of English at Pomona, 95 (Paul, Stupid Undergrounds, PostModern
Culture 5:3, Project MUSE)
Intellectual economics guarantees that even the most powerful and challenging
work cannot protect itself from the order of fashion. Becoming-fashion, becoming-commodity, becomingruin. Such instant, indeed retroactive ruins, are the virtual landscape of the stupid underground. The exits and lines of flight
pursued by Deleuze and Guattari are being shut down and rerouted by the very
people who would take them most seriously. By now, any given work from the stupid underground's critical
apparatus is liable to be tricked out with smooth spaces, war-machines, n - 1s, planes of consistency, plateaus and deterritorializations, strewn
The nomad is already succumbing to the

rousseauism and orientalism that were always invested in his figure; whatever
Deleuze and Guattari intended for him, he is reduced to being a romantic
outlaw, to a position opposite the State, in the sort of dialectical operation
Deleuze most despised. And the rhizome is becoming just another stupid
subterranean figure. It is perhaps true that Deleuze and Guattari did not
adequately protect their thought from this dialectical reconfiguration (one is reminded of
Breton's indictment against Rimbaud for not having prevented, in advance, Claudel's recuperation of him as a proper Catholic), but no
vigilance would have sufficed in any case. The work of Deleuze and Guattari is
evidence that, in real time, virtual models and maps close off the very exits they
indicate. The problem is in part that rhizomes, lines of flight, smooth spaces,
BwOs, etc., are at one and the same time theoretical-political devices of the
highest critical order and merely fantasmatic, delirious, narcissistic models for
writing, and thus perhaps an instance of the all-too-proper blurring of the
about like tattoos on the stupid body without organs.
445
Kritik Answers
distinction between criticism and fantasy . In Deleuze-speak, the stupid underground would be mapped not as a
margin surrounding a fixed point, not as a fixed site determined strictly by its relation or opposition to some more or less hegemonic formation,
but as an intensive, n-dimensional intersection of rhizomatic plateaus. Nomadology and rhizomatics conceive such a "space" (if one only had the
proverbial nickel for every time that word is used as a critical metaphor, without the slightest reflection on what might be involved in rendering
the conceptual in spatial terms) as a liquid, colloidal suspension, often retrievable by one or another techno-metaphorical zoning (e.g.,
"cyberspace"). What is at stake, however, is not only the topological verisimilitude of the model but the fantastic possibility of nonlinear passage,
of multiple simultaneous accesses and exits, of infinite fractal lines occupying finite social space. In the strictest sense, stupid philosophy. Nomad
thought is prosthetic, the experience of virtual exhilaration in modalities already mapped and dominated by nomad, rhizomatic capital (the
political philosophy of the stupid underground: capital is more radical than any of its critiques, but one can always pretend otherwise). It is this
very fantasy, this very narcissistic wish to see oneself projected past the frontier into new spaces, that abandons one to this economy, that seals
these spaces within an order of critical fantasy that has long since been overdeveloped, entirely reterritorialized in advance. To pursue
nomadology or rhizomatics as such is already to have lost the game. Nothing is more crucial to philosophy than escaping the dialectic and no
project is more hopeless; the stupid-critical underground is the curved space in which this opposition turns back on itself. It is not yet time to
abandon work that so deeply challenges our intellectual habits as does that of Deleuze and Guattari, and yet, before it has even been
comprehended, in the very process of its comprehension, its fate seems secure. One pursues it and knows that the pursuit will prove futile; that
every application of these new topologies will only serve to render them more pointless. The stupid optimism of every work that takes up these
figures is, by itself, the means of that futility and that immanent obsolescence. One must pursue it still.
446
Kritik Answers
Deleuze Bad (General)

DELEUZIAN PERSPECTIVISM COLLAPSES INTO
NEOCONSERVATIVE SUPPORT FOR THE STATUS QUO
BECAUSE IT DOESNT PROVIDE A SOLID POINT OF
CRITICISM OF OPPRESSION
Zerzan no date
[John, primitivist, The catastrophe of postmodernism, the Athenaeum Reading
Room, www.evans-experimentalism.freewebspace.com/zerzan01.htm, acc 1-1505]
The dilemma of postmodernism is this: how can the status and validity
of its theoretical approaches be ascertained if neither truth nor
foundations for knowledge are admitted? If we remove the possibility of
rational foundations or standards, on what basis can we operate? How
can we understand what the society is that we oppose, let alone come to
share such an understanding? Foucault's insistence on a Nietzschean
perspectivism translates into the irreducible pluralism of interpretation.
He relativized knowledge and truth only insofar as these notions attach
to thought-systems other than his own, however. When pressed on this
point, Foucault admitted to being incapable of rationally justifying his
own opinions. Thus the liberal Habermas claims that postmodern
thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard are `neoconservative' for
offering no consistent argumentation to move in one social direction
rather than another. The pm embrace of relativism (or `pluralism') also
means there is nothing to prevent the perspective of one social
tendency from including a claim for the right to dominate another, in the
absence of the possibility of determining standards.
447
Kritik Answers
D & G Exclude Women

D & G EXCLUDE WOMEN
Jardine, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University,
1984, http://substance.arts.uwo.ca/44/04jard44.html, accessed 2/21/03
Alice
"sexuality
is the ultimate, uncontrollable becoming, when it can manage to escape
immediate Oedipalization. ("Sexuality passes through the becoming-woman of /the/ man and the becoming-animal of the
human" [MP, p. 341].) But also because, as "introductory power," "Woman" is both the closest to
the category of "Man" as majority, and yet she remains a distinct minority . D + G
Why then do D + G privilege the word woman? First, as they explain through a series of unanalyzed stereotypes, because it is
itself" which
explain that the notions of majority and minority here should not be opposed in any purely quantitative way: "Let us suppose that the constant or
standard is Manany white-male-adult-city-dweller-speaking a standard language-European-heterosexual (the Ulysses of Joyce or of Ezra Pound).
It is obvious that "the Man" has the majority, even if he is less numerous than the mosquitoes, children, Blacks, peasants, homosexuals . . . etc."
(MP, p. 133). The problem is not to gain, or accede to, the majority, but to become a minority; and this is particularly crucial for women if they
desire to remain radical, creative, without simply becoming (a) Man: The only becoming is a minority one. Women, regardless of their number,
are a minority, definable as a state or sub-set; but they only create by rendering possible a becoming, of which they do not have the ownership,
into which they themselves must enter, a becoming-woman which concerns all of mankind, men and women included. (MP, p. 134) The woman
who does not enter into the "becoming woman" remains a Man, remains "molar," just like men: Woman as a molar entity must become woman,
so that man as well may become one or is then able to become one. It is certainly indispensable that women engage in molar politics, in terms of
a conquest which they conduct from their organization, from their own history, from their own subjectivity: "We as women . . ." then appears as
the subject of the enunciation. But it is dangerous to fall back upon such a subject, which cannot function without drying up a spring or stopping
a flood. The Song of life is often struck up by the driest women, animated by resentment, by the desire for power and by cold mothering.... (MP,
p. 339) That is, woman (with her obligatory connotations: "transparent force, innocence, speed," [MP, p. 354] is what Man (both men and
women: "virility, gravity," [MP, p. 354]) must become. There must be no "becoming man" because he is always already a majority. "In a certain
way, it's always 'man' who is the subject of a becoming.... A woman has to become woman, but in a becoming-woman of all of mankind" (MP, p.
Man is always the subject of any becoming, even if "he" is a woman. A

woman who is not a "woman-become" is a Manand a subject to that extent and to that
extent only. Woman is never a subject but a limita border of and for Manthe "becoming
woman" is l'avenir de l'homme tout entierthe future of all Mankind. For D + G, She is what
the entire world must become if Man men and womenis truly to disappear. But to the
extent that women must "become woman" first (in order for men, in D + G's words, to
"follow her example"), might that not mean that she must also be the first to disappear? Is it not
possible that the process of "becoming woman" is but a new variation of an old
allegory for the process of women becoming obsolete? There would remain only her simulacrum: a female
figure caught in a whirling sea of male configurations. A silent, mutable, headless, desire-less, spatial surface necessary only for His metamorphosis ? Physicists say:
357). That is,
Holes are not the absence of particles, but particles going faster than light. Flying anuses, rapid vaginas, there is no castration. Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux Most important theorists have a repertory of exemplary fictions, fictions that they call upon frequently to
interact with their specific theories in creative if predictable ways. Between the scene of Lacanian psychoanalysis and that of Lol V. Stein's
ravishing, for example, the privileged rapport is one of repetition: for Lacan, Marguerite Duras understood and repeated his teachings without
him.19 Or, between the invagination of Derrida's ecriture and that of the narrator in Maurice Blanchot's L'Arret de mort, what is privileged is the
process of mime: for Derrida, Blanchot understood his writings with him, inseparably. 20 D + G's exemplary fiction writers include Lewis Carroll,
Franz Kafka, Pierre Klossowski, and Michel Tournierto mention only a few. What all of these writers' texts share with those of D + G is the
surface quality of their figures: the privileged modality of relationship between the configurations of Deleuzian becoming and those of fiction is
allegory. This is made most clear through Deleuze's essay on Tournier's 1967 novel, Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique. 21 There it is no longer
a question of whether Duras's Lol, as hysterical body, is or is not a subject of narrative; of whether Blanchot's J. and N., as organs of a hysterical
text, are or are not simply new angles for modernity. For here it is a question of Speranza, a true Body-without-Organs: a woman who is not a
woman but a female figure (an island), a space to be unfolded, molded, into new configurations for the metamorphosis of Man. In t, we first
stumble across Robinson just after he has been shipwrecked on his island. Finding himself completely alone, the Only and perhaps Last Man on
this island, he first succumbs to depression, evasion, infantile panicleaving himself exposed, helpless. For Deleuze, this signals Man's first steps
outside of intersubjectivity: "What happens when others are lacking in the structure of the world? There only reigns the brutal opposition of the
sun and the earth, of an insupportable light and an obscure abyss . . ." (LS, p. 355). To avoid loss of self, however, this twentieth-century
Robinson first tries the old solutions. He creates for himself a task: he spends months, perhaps years, perhaps even decadesthe length of time
does not matterbuilding a new boat-structure in which he might escape. But once the vessel is completed, it is too large, too heavy, and too
cumbersome for him to push to the sea towards freedom. Robinson succumbs, once again, to the deepest depressionand, indeed, abjection:
He kept eating, his nose to the ground, unspeakable things. He went underneath himself and rarely missed rolling in the soft warmth of his own
excrement.... He moved about less and less, and his brief movements always brought him back to the wallow. There he kept losing his body and
delivering himself of its weight in the hot and humid surroundings of the mud, while the noxious emanations of the stagnating waters clouded his
mind. (VLP, p. 38) Haunted by his lost sister (the one who died young), his mother (sometimes cold but always self-sacrificing), his wife (left
behind in old England), Robinson-the-Man has a brush with what the Man calls insanity. And so, as a Man, Robinson decides that he must
henceforth master both himself and the island if he is to survive. He sets about building a kingdom: he creates a calendar; he invents a way to
write; he builds a house, cultivates the land. He names the island Speranza and realizes that now, in time and mastery, she is his slave. Woman
is, therefore, no longer absent from Man's adventures, even though he remains outside of inter-subjectivity: Besides, it seemed to him, when
looking a certain way at the map of the island which he had sketched approximately, that it could represent the profile of a headless female
body, a woman, yes, seated with her legs folded under her, in a posture within which it would have been impossible to sort out what there was of
submission, of fear, or of simple abandonment. This idea crossed his mind, then it left him. It would come back. (VLP, p. 46)22 In spite of various
humiliations, depressions, and disappointments, Robinson continues his mastery over Speranza. A decisive step is the introduction of time into
this one-Man kingdom with a kind of primitive clock. In the "future," Robinson succumbs to his former states of abjection within the space of
Speranza only when that clock of progress stops. Slowly, however, and in spite of his frenzied, productive activity, Robinson realizes that his
relationship with "himself" is changing. His "self," in fact, can no longer exist in a world without the Other. Robinson is ready to lose his Self, his
Manhood: "Who I? The question is far from being pointless. It isn't even insoluble. Because if it's not him, it must be Speranza. There is from here
on a flying I which will sometimes alight on the man, sometimes on the island, and which makes of me, in turn, one or the other" (VLP, pp. 88-89).
448
Kritik Answers
A2 Life is Carbon
THE AFF IS WRONG THE HUMN BODY ISNT LIMITED TO
CARBON, BUT IS SILICONIC IN THE MACHINIC WAY IT
EMERGES FROM INTERSUBJECTIVE FLOWS LIKE
COMMUNICATION AND CAPITAL, INDICATING MEANING TO
LIFE BEYOND THE MATTER THAT COMPOSES US
Beddoes no date
[Diane J., Material gadget, Breeding Demons: A critical enquiry into
the relationship between Kant and Deleuze with specific reference to
women, Transmat, www.cinestatic.com/transmat/Beddoes/BD7s4.htm, acc 1-15-05]
Deleuze notes that biologists have often questioned why life is effected
through carbon, rather than through silicon, and goes on to say that la
vie des machines modernes passe par le silicium (the life of modern
machines runs through silicon).[377] This is where becoming-women
moves, where money released from capital moves, where life becomes
non-organic, nature becomes a thinking machine, infinities of tiny
demons leap, effecting a co-ordinated and fluid movement, eroding the
statues of power, the historical . Becoming-woman moves towards
becoming-imperceptible, but women do not dissolve or disappear in that
movement: it is rather than life itself becomes mobile, because it is not
longer in the womb nor arranged in the organisms which emerge from
them, but instead becomes a movement, a cycle that turns on its
hinges. Humans are no longer the privileged class, but the surrogate
reproductive machinery of a machinic phylum which is passing across
into a different base, in a movement which effects the conjunction of
teleology and mechanism, and transforming the nature of intelligence.
HUMAN IDENTITY IS MORE THAN CARBON ITS CODED

BY COMMUNICATION FLOWS, THAT RECOGNITION IS
NECESSARY TO RESIST CAPITALIST ALIENATION
Brassier 2001
[Ray, Doctoral candidate at University of Warwick, Alien Theory: The
Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter, Doctoral Thesis, April,
www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Brassier/ALIENTHEORY.pdf, acc 1-1405//uwyo]
Yet it is a failure which transcendental scepticism may yet help
circumvent through the Alien-subjects unilateralising force-(of)-thought;
an
intrinsically sceptical force which constitutes an instance of a priori
cognitive
resistance to those epistemic norms and informational codes via which a
triumphant World-Capitalism maintains the structural isomorphy
between
material power and informational force, thereby ensuring its
quasitranscendental
dominion over all cognitive experience. A transcendental
scepticism agrees with eliminative naturalism: human beings are simply
carbonbased
information processing machines. But it also recognises the necessity of
449
Kritik Answers
cross-pollinating that assessment born of evolutionary reductionism with
transcendental insight; an insight which consists in radicalising and
generalising
Marxs identification of the material infrastructure as the ultimate
determinant
for the ideological superstructure315: World-Capitalism is now the global
megamachine determining a priori the cognitive parameters within
which the
phenomenological micromachinery of organically individuated sapience
operates. By acknowledging the fact that political intervention can no
longer
afford to ignore this insight; by recognising that empirical agency alone is

incapable of circumventing capitals all-encompassing universality as WorldCapitalism, transcendental scepticism constitutes an instance of a priori
political resistance.
450
Kritik Answers
A2 Death Doesnt Destroy Being:

2AC (1/2)
FIRST, EVEN IF DEATH DOESNT KILL BEING, IT DOES
ANNIHILATE CONSCIOUSNESSES THAT ARE COMPOSED OF
PRECISE COMBINATIONS OF ENERGY AND MATTER,
MEANING THAT DEATH EXTINGUISHES THOUGHT
PROCESSES THAT PEOPLE ARE ATTACHED TO, MEANING
THAT FORCED DEATH IS VIOLENT AND UNDESIRABLE
SECOND, THIS IGNORES THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION IN
CREATING HUMAN IDENTITY. WERE MORE THAN THE
MATTER OF OUR PARTS, BUT CREATE MEANING THROUGH
COMMUNICATIVE PROCESSES, SOMETHING DESTROYED BY
DEATH
THIRD, CARBON ATOMS ARENT THE KEY COMPONENT OF
LIFE, COMPLEX INFORMATION PROCESSING IS, MEANING
THAT DEATH CAUSES ANNIHILATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Tipler 94
[Frank J., Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University, The
Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection
of the Dead, New York: Doubleday, 1994, 124-5//uwyo-ajl]
IN ORDER TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER LIFE can continue to exist forever,
I shall need to define "life" in physics language. I claim that a "living
being" is any entity which codes information (in the physics sense of this
word) with the information coded being preserved by natural selection.
Thus "life" is a form of information processing, and the human mind-and
the human soul-is a very complex computer program. Specifically, a
"person" is defined to be a computer program which can pass the Turing
test, which was discussed in Chapter II.
This definition of "life" is quite different from what the average personand the average biologist-would think of as "life." In the traditional
definition, life is a complex process based on the chemistry of the carbon
atom. However, even supporters of the traditional definition admit that
the key words are "complex process" and not "carbon atom."
Although the entities everyone agrees are "alive" happen to be based on
carbon chemistry, there is no reason to believe that analogous processes
cannot be based on other systems. In fact, the British biochemist A. G.
Cairns-Smith! has suggested that the first living beings--':our ultim:ate
ancestors-were based on metallic crystals, not carbon. If this is true,
then if we insist that living beings must be based on carbon chemistry,
we would be forced to conclude that our ultimate ancestors were not
alive. In Cairns-Smith's theory, our ultimate ancestors were selfreplicating patterns of defects in the metallic crystals. Over time, the
pattern persisted, but was transferred to another substrate: carbon
molecules. What is important is not the substrate but the pattern, and
the pattern is another name for information.
451
Kritik Answers
But life of course is not a static pattern. Rather, it is a dynamic pattern
that persists overtime. It is thus a process. But not all processes are
alive. The key feature of the "living" patterns is that their persistence is
due to a feedback with their environment: the information coded in the
pattern continually varies, but the variation is constrained to a narrow
range by this feedback. Thus life is, as I stated, information preserved by
natural selection.
452
Kritik Answers
A2 Death Doesnt Destroy Being:

2AC (2/2)
FOURTH, EVEN IF THERE ARE OTHER POSSIBILTIES AFTER
DEATH, THE IDENTITIES THAT WERE ATTACHED TO WILL
BE EXTINGUISHED BECAUSE CONSCIOUSNESS COMES
FROM INFORMATION PROCESSSING THAT REQUIRES
PARTICULAR SEQUENCES OF QUANTUM STATES TO OCCUR
Tipler 94
The Bekenstein Bound follows from the basic postulates of quantum
theory combined with the further assumptions that (1) the system is
bounded in energy, and (2) the system is bounded, or localized, in
space. A rigorous proof of the Bekenstein Bound would require quantum
field theory, but it is easy to describe in outline why quantum mechanics
leads to such a bound on the information coded in a bounded region. In
essence, the Bekenstein Bound is a manifestation of the uncertainty
principle. Recall that the uncertainty principle tells us that there is a limit
to the precision with which we can measure the momentum of a particle
and its position. More precisely, the uncertainty principle says that the
location of a point in phase space-a concept I defined in Chapter IIIcannot be defined more closely thal1 Planck's constant h. Since a
system's state is defined by where it is located in phase space, this
means that the number of possible states is less than or equal to the
size of the phase space region the system could be in, divided by the
size of the minimum phase space size, Planck's constant. (I've given a
mathematical expression of this argument in the Appendix for
Scientists.) This state counting procedure, based on there being an
absolute minimum size h to a phase space interval, is an absolutely
essential method of quantum statistical mechanics. We have already
used it in Chapter III to prove the almost periodicity of a bounded
quantum system. It is confirmed by the thousands of experiments which
have been based on this counting method.9 In high energy particle
physics, any calculation of the "cross section" requires counting the
possible number of particle initial and final states, and the above state
counting method is used.lO The cross section, which is the measure of
how many particles scatter in a particular direction when they collide in
particle accelerators, is the basic quantity tested in particle physics. The
Bekenstein Bound on the number of possible states is thus confirmed by
the correctness of the calculated cross sections. In summary, the
Bekenstein Bound on the total information that can be coded in a region
is an absolute solid conclusion of modern physics, a result as solid as the
Rock of Gibraltar.
One can also use the Bekenstein Bound to deduce an upper bound to the
rate of information processing. The time for light to cross a sphere of a
given diameter is equal to the diameter of the sphere divided by the
speed of light. Since a state inside the sphere cannot completely change
until a signal has time to travel trom one side to the other, the rate of
information processing is bounded above by the above Bekenstein
Bound divided by this time interval. Putting in the numbers (details in
the Appendix for Scientists), we calculate that the rate of state change is
less than or equal to 4 X 1051 bits per second, multiplied by the mass of
the system in kilograms. That is, the rate of information processing
453
Kritik Answers
possible for a system depends only on the mass of the system, not on its
spatial size or on any other variable. So a human being of mass 100
kilograms cannot change state more rapidly than about 4 X 1053 times
per second. This number is of course enormous-and in fact a human will
probably change state much, much more slowly than this-but it's finite.
454
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A2 Life is Meaningless Because the

Sun Will Go Out: 2AC
FIRST, THERES NO WARRANT FOR WHY THE DEATH OF
OUR PLANET IN BILLIONS OF YEARS MAKES LIFE THAT
EXIST NOW MEANINGLESS. EACH INDIVIDUALS CREATES
CONTINGENT VALUE FOR THEIR LIFE THROUGH
COMMUNICATION AS DEMONSTRATED BY THE HABERMAS
EVIDENCE AND TO FORCE DEATH UPON THEM BECAUSE OF
AN EVENT IN THE UNFATHOMABLE FUTURE IS REPUGNANT
SECOND, HUMANITY WILL ADAPT TO THE DESTRUCTION
OF ITS HABITAT BY INEVITABLY PROGRESSING TO A TYPE
III CIVILIZATION
Kaku 95
[Michio, Prof. of theoretical physics at the City College, NY,
Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time
Warps, and the 10th Dimension. New York: Ancor Books, March,
281//uwyo-ajl]
Taking the larger view of the development of civilization, Dyson also
believes that, at the current rate of development, we may attain Type I
status within a few centuries. He does not believe that making the
transition between various types of civilizations will be very difficult. He
estimates that the difference in size and power separating the various
types of civilizations is roughly a factor of 10 billion. Although this may
seem like a large nuimber, a civilization growing at the sluggish rate of 1
percent per year can expect to make the transition between the various
civilizations within 2,500 years. Thus it is almost guaranteed that a
civilization can steadily progress toward Type III status.
THIRD, THIS OUTWEIGHS ALL OTHER ARGUMENTS

BECAUSE 20TH CENTURY GENOCIDE DEMONSTRATES THE
SHEER HORROR OF EXTERMINATING LIFE
Tipler 94
I shall obtain a hold on this future reality by focusing attention on the
physics relevant to the existence and behavior of life in the far future. I
shall provide a physical foundation for eschatology-the study of the
ultimate future--by making the physical assumption that the universe
must be capable of sustaining life indefinitely; that is, for infinite time as
experienced by life existing in the physical universe. All physical
scientists should take this assumption seriously because we have to
have some theory for the future of the physical universe--since it
unquestionably exists-and this is the most beautiful physical postulate:
455
Kritik Answers
that total death is not inevitable. All other theories of the future
necessarily postulate the ultimate extinction of everything we could
possibly care about. I once visited a Nazi death camp; there I was
reinforced in my conviction that there is nothing uglier than
extermination. We physicists know that a beautiful postulate is more
likely to be correct than an ugly one. Why not adopt this Postulate of
Eternal Life, at least as a working hypothesis? I shall show in Chapter n
that the universe is in fact capable of sustaining life at least another
million trillion years. Specifically, I shall demonstrate that it is technically
feasible for life to expand out from the Earth and engulf the entire
universe, and that life must do so if it is to survive.
456
Kritik Answers
**Derrida**
A2 Deconstruction
DERRIDEAN DECONSTRUCTION PREVENTS POLITICAL
STRATEGIZING
Crawford, Prof of Humanities and Comparative Lit @ U of Minnesota, 90 (Claudia,
Nietzsche as Postmodernist?, Ed. Clayton Koelb, P. 197)
457
Kritik Answers
A2 New International (1/2)

THERE IS ZERO MEANS TO ACTUALIZE THEIR ALTERNATIVE
DERRIDA DECONSTRUCTS HIMSELF TO DEATH
Eagleton, Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester, 99 (Terry,
Marxism without Marxism, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas
Specters of Marx, edited by Michael Sprinker)
There is an exasperating kind of believer who holds what he does until he meets someone else who holds the same. At this point, confronted with
the bugbear of an òrthodoxy', he starts nervously to retract, or at least to qualify. There is more than a touch of this adolescent perversity in
Derrida, who like many a postmodernist appears to feel (it is a matter of sensibility rather than reasoned conviction) that
the dominant is ipso facto demonic and the marginal precious per se. One condition of the
unthinking postmodern equation of the marginal with the creative, apart from a convenient obliviousness to such marginal
groups as Fascists, is the rolling back of political movements which are at once mass and
oppositional. The mark of a genuine radical is a hearty desire to stop having to be so obdurately oppositional, a sentiment one can
hardly imagine as dear to the heart of a deconstructionist. If one takes the point of James Joyce's retort to an invitation to return to a newly
independent Irish republic - `So as to be its first critic?' - one also registers the self-indulgence. Derrida has now taken Marxism on board, or at
least dragged it halfway up the gangplank, because he is properly enraged by liberal-capitalist complacency; but there is also something
unavoidably opportunist about his political pact, which wants to exploit Marxism as critique, dissent, conveniently belabouring instrument, but is
What he wants
is a Marxism without Marxism
far less willing to engage with its positivity.

, in effect,
, which is
to say a Marxism on his own coolly appropriative terms. `We would be tempted to distinguish this spirit of the Marxist critique ... at once from
Marxism as ontology, philosophical or metaphysical system, as "dialectical materialism", from Marxism as historical materialism or method, and
from Marxism incorporated in the apparatuses of party, State, or workers' International.' It would not be difficult to translate this into the tones of
a (suitably caricatured) liberal Anglicanism: we must distinguish the spirit of Christianity from such metaphysical baggage as the existence of
God, the divinity of Christ, organized religion, the doctrine of the resurrection, the superstition of the Eucharist and the rest. Or: one would wish to
distinguish the spirit of deconstruction from the dreary intellectual paraphernalia of `writing', `difference', `trace', organized journals and
conventions, formal reading groups, movements to install the teaching of philosophy in French schools and so on. It is entirely possible to
If Derrida thinks, as
that there can be any effective socialism without organization , apparatuses
and reasonably well-formulated doctrines and programmes, then he is merely the victim of some
academicist fantasy which he has somehow mistaken for an enlightened anti-Stalinism. (He has, in fact, no materialist or
approve of the spirit of the Huns, with all its admirable robustness, while deploring what they actually got up to.
he appears to do,
historical analysis of Stalinism whatsoever, as opposed to an ethical rejection of it, unlike many more orthodox currents of Marxism.) The truth is
he is hardly concerned with an effective socialism at all. Deconstruction , with its

is a kind of
intellectual equivalent of a vaguely leftish commitment to the underdog, and like
all such commitments is nonplussed when those it speaks up for come to power. Poststructuralism dislikes success , a stance which
that
preoccupation with slippage, failure, aporia, incoherence, not-quiteness, its suspicion of the achieved, integral or controlling,
allows it some superbly illuminating insights into the pretensions of monolithic literary texts or ideological self-identities and leaves it a mite
Derrida's indifference to almost all of the actual

manifestations of Marxism is a kind of empty transcendence
wrong-footed in the face of the African National Congress.
historical or theoretical
- a typically
deconstructie trumping of some alternative position which leaves one's own case invulnerable only in proportion to its contentlessness. Much the
same can be said of his curiously empty, formalistic messianism, which voids this rich theological tradition of its content and retains its ghostly
impulse only, somewhat akin to the Kafka who (as Walter Benjamin remarks) is left with nothing but the transmissible forms of a tradition which
The critical, negative passion of his politics in this book is one which
ought rightly to embarrass every academic radical for whom deconstruction is a
sexy form of common-or-garden scepticism, or yet another way of keeping the literary canon alive by plodding through
has dwindled to nothing.
it yet again, this time with a scalpel in hand. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the
euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ènd of ideologies' and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never
neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never
before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. This is not the kind
of thing that is likely to go down well in Ithaca or Irvine, where they learnt long ago that ideology had ended and the great emancipatory
And what does Derrida counterpose , in the very next paragraph, to the
dire condition he so magnificently denounces? A `New International' , one `without status, without title,
discourses run thankfully aground.
and without name ... without party, without country, without national community ...' And, of course, as one gathers elsewhere in the book,
without organization, without ontology, without method, without apparatus. It is the ultimate
poststructuralist fantasy: an opposition without anything as distastefully
systemic or drably òrthodox' as an opposition, a dissent beyond all formulable discourse, a promise which
would betray itself in the act of fulfilment, a perpetual excited openness to the Messiah who had better not let
us down by doing anything as determinate as coming. Spectres of Marxism indeed . 85-87
458
Kritik Answers
A2 New International (2/2)

THEIR CALL FOR DEMOCRACY TO COME IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE THEIR CHANGE IS JUST REFORMISM THEY
END UP CRUSHING THE REVOLUTION THAT SOLVES
BETTER
Lewis, member of the International Socialist Organization & Spanish Professor at the University of Iowa, 99
(Thomas, The Politics of Hauntology in Derridas Specters of Marx, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on
Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx, edited by Michael Sprinker)
New forms of struggle and especially new agents of social change, it is claimed, must either be found or
theorized into existence. Hence, the perceived need arises for something on the
order of Derrida's New International `without common belonging to a class'. I argued above that the contemporary
working class includes both `blue collar' and `white collar' workers, and that the internationalization of capitalism has created a growing
international working class. I thereby sought to contest the claim that the working class is increasingly smaller and irrelevant as a social force. I
also indicated that divisions among the working class along lines of gender, race, nationality and sexual orientation have traditionally been the
object of intense activity and theoretical discussion within Marxism. While recognizing the formidable obstacles encountered, I emphasized that
it is possible to overcome such divisions through common struggle . Finally, I argued that
only the working class - that is, individuals who may embody a number of specific identities but who act collectively on the
basis of their shared interests as workers - possesses the structural capacity both to bring down
capitalism and to create socialism. On this view, it is both theoretically and politically necessary to affirm the working class as the
primary agent of social transformation. Derrida's SM provides a stinging indictment of the contemporary world system, as well as a serious
SM also presents an
elaborate case for reform socialism over and against revolutionary socialism . This
case is based on what, in a friendly spirit, might be termed a `misreading' of the Russian Revolution. Moreover, the main tenet of
the case is the repudiation of the notion that the working class remains central
to the project of winning socialism . Among the more astounding dimensions of SM, therefore, surely must figure the
social contexts in which the book appears. Derrida suggests a reformist road to socialism precisely
at the end of a period in which the political and moral hollowness of traditional
social democracy could not be in greater evidence . Socialist parties all over Western Europe, but
critique of recently published apologies for capitalism. As I have endeavored to show, however,
particularly in France, Spain, Italy and Germany, have failed to preserve - much less extend - the gains for workers once embodied in the socalled `welfare state' (Anderson and Camiller 1994; Ross and Jensen 1994; Camiller 1994; Abse 1994; and Padgett and Paterson 1994). These
same Socialist parties have not just collaborated with but in numerous instances have actually initiated the attacks on workers, immigrants and
the poor. As if all that were not enough, European social democracy has signally failed to organize an effective movement from below against the
resurgence of Fascism and neo-Fascism. Everything that can be said in criticism of Europe's Socialist parties equally applies to the Democratic
Party in the us. An openly capitalist party, the us Democratic Party advertises itself as the friend of workers and minorities, relying on its image as
a `lesser evil' to secure electoral victories. Throughout the Reagan-Bush years, however, Democraticcontrolled congresses signally failed to
challenge the basic premises and policies of Reaganism. Even today, when faced with a cynically selfstyled `Republican Revolution',
disagreements between Republicans and Democrats concern only how fast and how deep to cut social programs. If Republicans demand $270
billion in Medicare cuts, for example, Democrats respond by demanding $145 billion. The logic and necessity of slashing social programs are
never questioned .24 Similarly, the Democrats collude with Republicans on issues of racism and immigration. Clinton, as much as any Republican,
has contributed to the false stereotyping of the recipients of public assistance as African-American `welfare queens'. And, while many Democrats
are on record as deploring Proposition 187 as a legal measure, nearly all Democrats concede to Republicans that an immigration `problem'
exists. Thus, the Clinton administration has recently beefed up the number of border cops and ordered harsher treatment of undocumented
workers. No doubt
Derrida's proposal for a New International represents

reform socialism
in part
a call to return to
the values of àuthentic'

. In the us, Derrida's proposal represents a call to return to genuinely `progressive' values.
The bankruptcy of European social democracy, as well as the vicissitudes of the American Democratic Party, does indeed create political
Yet two points remain, each suggesting that attempts to

revive reform socialism waste energies . First, the European Socialist parties which eventually found themselves
openings in which the socialist Left can and must seek to rebuild.
authoring and imposing austerity measures on workers and minorities started out long ago with sterling anti-capitalist principles. Good intentions
are not enough in this regard, however, since politics and the economy are separated in capitalist society, and the latter wields greater clout.
Second, transformed by the discipline demanded by international capitalism, these nominally `socialist' parties occupy several of the very
Reform socialism has little to offer

workers today. Callinicos has cogently summarized the current crisis in Europe in this way: à major recession which has highlighted
governments against which workers are presently demonstrating in large numbers.
longer term weaknesses of European capitalism; a withdrawal of popular support from the mainstream political parties; and the resort to forms of
political and social action which, consciously or unconsciously, tend to escape the limits of liberal bourgeois politics' (1994, 9). Soon after the
publication of SM in France, for example, the country was rocked by militant strikes and demonstrations lasting almost nine months between fall
1993 and summer 1994: Air France workers; 1,000,000 French citizens marching against plans to privatize sectors of education; fishing workers;
farmers; hundreds of thousands of French workers marching several times against unemployment and austerity decrees; tens of thousands of
students marching, building barricades and burning fires in protest against tuition hikes and the uncertain, potentially dismal future they face.
Even as the recession seemed to be coming to an end in Europe, the anger of French workers and students exploded again in fall 1995 - this time
with sufficient force to sustain a three-week strike in the public sector. Importantly, in the Air France strike, the anti-privatization campaign in
education, the fight against changes in the universities and the recent public sector strike, real concessions were wrested from the state. None of
this renewed workers' activity, nor the fact that victories can be claimed, provides strong support for SMs assertions that barricades and workingclass militancy are out of fashion. In the us, too, polls show today that Americans are more skeptical about their government and its political
parties than at any time in memory. A wave of militant demonstrations followed the 1994 congressional elections that gave Gingrich and the
`Contract With America' a majority in the Senate and House of Representatives. Massive marches on Washington in support of gay rights,
women's rights and civil rights have also taken place since the 1994 elections. The number of strikes, moreover, as well as the number of
production hours lost and workers participating in strikes, increased significantly in 1994. And no one who spent any time during the early 90s in
Decatur, Illinois or Detroit, Michigan can have any doubts about the willingness of us workers to fight back. Both areas - which include the
struggle of locked-out Staley Workers in Decatur and striking newspaper workers in Detroit - have been accurately referred to as `war zones'. The
In
every part of the globe political developments during recent years have been
characterized by their speed and volatility . It is important, however, to emphasize the still uneven and
ambiguous character of the emerging challenge to the existing order: ` It has begun to liberate forces - in the
shape of renewed workers' resistance to capitalist attacks - which could unleash
another upturn in the European [and us, my insertion] class struggle. But it has also given an opening to elements of
violence routinely used by state and local cops has been fiercely answered by the militancy and stamina of workers and their families.
459
Kritik Answers
barbarous reaction that had been confined to the political margins since 1945' (Callinicos 1994, 37). Nothing guarantees the growth of the Left as
The same political vacuum which

creates opportunities for the Left is also creating, at least at this juncture,
opportunities for the Right : Às yet there is no clear cut direction to events that would mark a decisive shift either to the
a result of the major struggles that look likely to occur over the next few years.
right or to the left. But the dynamic evolution of the crisis since 1989 gives no reason for thinking that the situation will remain so open'
(Callinicos 1994, 36-7). In time, events will show whether their future directionality owes more to the subjective agency of the Left in this period or to the Right. That is why the question of socialist organization stands at the forefront of debate among the Left today. Derrida's SM, with its call
for a New International, should be discussed as a serious contribution to this debate. Nevertheless, SM's 'hauntological politics' must be firmly
rejected as incapable of answering the demands of our time. `The time is out of joint': Derrida repeatedly works this line from Hamlet in order to
suggest that socialist revolution is impossible because of the meta physical limitations of Marxism .25 Our present time may indeed be òut of
Greater instabilities in an already crisis-prone

system, deepening anger among the world's exploited and oppressed, and
sharper divisions both within and among national and international ruling
classes - these developments make our time one in which classical Marxism and
its tradition of revolution from below have much more to offer than hauntology
does in the international struggle for a democratic socialist society . 157-161
joint', but it is not so because of bad metaphysics.
460
Kritik Answers
**Discourse Kritiks (General)**

Discourse Kritik Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, NO LINK THEY CANT PROVE THAT OUR RHETORIC
WAS ARTICULATED WITH THE INTENT OF
MARGINALIZATION
SECOND, LABEL POLITICS MISIDENTIFY THE CAUSE OF
PREJUDICE IN AGGRESSIVITY, SO THE NEW SYMBOL FILLS
IN THE SAME ROLL
APPROPRIATIONS OF OLD LABELS RECONCEIVE THEIR
MEANING
Zizek 97
[Slavoj, Moving away from the darkness, The Plague of Fantasies, New York: Verso, 1997,
111-2//uwyo-ajl]
In his formidable Fear in the Occident,7 Jean Delumeau draws attention to the unerring succession of atutudes in a medieval city infested by
plague: first, people ignore it and behave as if nothing terrible is really going on; then they withdraw into privacy, avoiding contact with each
other; then they start to resort to religious fervour, staging processions, confessing their sins, and so on; then they say to themselves 'What the
hell, let's enjoy it while it lasts!', and indulge passionately in orgies of sex, eating, drinking and dancing; finally, they return to life as usual, and
again behave as if nothing terrible is going on. However, this second 'life as usual' does not occupy the same structural role as the first: it is, as it
were, located on the other side of the Moebius band, since it no longtt signals the desperate attempt to ignore the reality of plague, but, rather
Does not the same go for the gradual replacement

of (sexually, racially...) aggressive with more 'correct' expressions, like the chain
nigger - Negro - black - African American or crippled - disabled - bodily challenged? This
replacement functions as a metaphorical substitution which potentially
proliferate and enhances the very (racist, etc.) effect it tries to banish, adding
insult to injury. In analogy to Delumeau, one should therefore claim that the only way actually to
abolish the hatred-effect is, paradoxically, to create the circumstances in which
one can return to the first link in the chain and use it in a non-aggressive way -like
following the patterns of 'life as usual' the second time in the case of plague. That is to say: as long as the expression
'crippled' contains a surplus, an indelible mark, of aggressivity this surplus will
not only be more or less automatically transferred on to any of its 'correct'
metaphorical substitutes, it will even be enhanced by dint of this substitution.
The strategy of returning to the first link, of course, is risky; however, the
moment it is fully accepted by the group targeted by it, it definitely can work.
its exact opposite: resigned acceptance of it . . . .
When radical African-Americans call each other 'niggers', it is wrong to dismiss this strategy as a mere ironic identification with the aggressor;
rather, the point is that it functions as an autonomous act of dismissing the aggressive sting
THIS HAS TWO IMPLICATIONS

IT MOOTS ALL OF THEIR OFFENSE BECAUSE THE MEANING
OF A LABEL IS RECONCEPTUALIZED AND REINSCRIBED
IT FLIPS THEIR TURN, PROLIFERATING THE OPPRESSION
THAT IT TRIES TO SOLVE
THIRD, SPEAKING ERRORS ARE INEVITABLE AND GOOD
BECAUSE THEY PROVIDE A LOCUS FOR CONSTANT
CRITICISM, SOMETHING THE NEG BY ITSELF PRECLUDES
Alcoff 92
[Linda, Prof. of Feminist Studies at the University of Syracuse, The Problem of
Speaking for Others, Cultural Critique, Winter 91-2, 22//uwyo]
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it is both morally and politically objectionable to structure ones actions
around the desire to avoid criticism, especially if this outweighs other questions of effectivity. In some cases perhaps
But surely
the motivation is not so much to avoid criticism as to avoid errors, and the person believes that the only way to avoid errors is to avoid all
, errors are unavoidable in the theoretical inquiry as well as

political struggle, and moreover they often make contributions. The desire to
find an absolute means to avoid making errors comes perhaps not from a desire
to advance collective goals but a desire for personal mastery, to establish a
privileged discursive posotion wherein one cannot be undermined or challenged and thus is master of the situation.
From such a position ones own location and positionality would not require
constant interrogation and critial reflection; one would not hae to
constantly engage in this emotionally troublesome endeavor and would be
immune from the interrogaton of others. Such a desire of rmastery and immunity
must be resisted.
speaking for others. However
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FOURTH, THE CRITICISM ASSUMES STABLE SPEECH ACTS,
PREVENTING US FROM TAKING BACK HURTFUL WORDS
AND COLLAPSING INTO A JURIDICAL MODEL OF STABLE
SUBJECTIVITY THAT KILLS ACTIVISM
Butler, Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley,
Performativity and Performance, Ed. Parker and Sedgwick, 1995, p. 204
Judith
That words wound seems incontestably true, and that hateful, racist, misogynist,
homophobic speech should be vehemently countered seems incontrovertibly
right. But does understanding from where speech derives its power to wound
alter our conception of what it might mean to counter that wounding power? Do
we accept the notion that injurious speech is attributable to a singular subject
and act? If we accept such a juridical constraint on thought - the grammatical
requirements of accountability - as a point of departure, what is lost from the
political analysis of injury when the discourse of politics becomes fully reduced
to juridical requirements?? Indeed, when political discourse is collapsed into
juridical discourse, the meaning of political opposition runs the risk of being
reduced to the act of prosecution. How is the analysis of the discursive
historicity of power unwittingly restricted when the subject is presumed as the
point of departure for such an analysis? A clearly theological construction, the
postulation of the subject as the causal origin of the performative act is
understood to generate that which it names; indeed, this divinely empowered
subject is one for whom the name itself is generative.
FIFTH, LANGUAGE DOESNT HAVE A DETERMINATE EFFECT

WORDS ARE EMPTY ABSENT CONTEXT, MEANING OUR
RHETORIC CAN BE READ IN A HETERODOX MANNER TO
CHALLENGE VIOLENCE
SIXTH, PERM, DO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE.
REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE DOESNT PRECLUDE THE
NEED FOR CONCRETE ACTION
Richard

to practice. More generally, a lot of the writers who are labeled `post-modernist; and who talk a lot about impossibility,
turn out to be good experimentalist social democrats when it comes to actual
political activity. I suspect, for example, that Gray, Zizek, Derrida and I, if we found ourselves citizens of the same country, would all
be voting for the same candidates, and supporting the same reforms. Post-modernist philosophers have gotten a bad name because of their
paradox-mongering habits, and their constant use of terms like ìmpossible; `self-contradictory' and ùnrepresentable'. They have helped create
a cult of inscrutability, one which defines itself by opposition to the Enlightenment search for transparency - and more generally, to the
I am
all for getting rid of the metaphysics of presence, but I think that the rhetoric of
impossibility and unrepresentability is counterproductive overdramatization . It is one thing to say
`metaphysics of presence; the idea that intellectual progress aims at getting things clearly illuminated, sharply delimited, wholly visible.
that we need to get rid of the metaphor of things being accurately represented, once and for all, as a result of being bathed in the light of reason.
This metaphor has created a lot of headaches for philosophers, and we would be better off without it. But that does not show that we are
suddenly surrounded by unrepresentables; it just shows that `more accurate representation' was never a fruitful way to describe intellectual
Even if we agree that we shall never have what Derrida calls "a full presence
beyond the reach of play"; our sense of the possibilities open to humanity will
not have changed. We have learned nothing about the limits of human hope from metaphysics, or from the philosophy of history,
progress.
or from psychoanalysis. All that we have learned from `post-modern' philosophy is that we may need a different gloss on the notion of `progress'
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We have been given no reason to abandon the
belief that a lot of progress has been made by carrying out the Enlightenment's
political program. Since Darwin we have come to suspect that whether such progress is made will be largely a matter of luck. But
we have been given no reason to stop hoping to get lucky .
than the rationalistic gloss which the Enlightenment offered.
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SEVENTH, CRITIQUES OF SPEECH PRODUCES A
REACTIONARY POLITICS IN WHICH CHANGE IS FOCUSED
ON LANGUAGE DIRECTLY TRADING OFF WITH EFFORTS TO
REFORM THE SOCIOECONOMIC ROOT CAUSES OF
INJUSTICE
Brown, Professor Political Science UC Berkeley, 2K1
(Wendy, Politics Out of History, pg. 35-37)
Speech codes kill critique, Henry Louis Gates remarked in a 1993 essay on hate speech.14 Although Gates was referring to what happens when
hate speech regulations, and the debates about them, usurp the discursive space
in which one might have offered a substantive politi cal response to bigoted epithets, his point
also applies to prohibitions against questioning from within selected political practices or institutions. But turning political
questions into moralistic onesas speech codes of any sort donot only prohibits certain
questions and mandates certain genuflections, it also expresses a profound
hostility toward political life insofar as it seeks to preempt argument with a legis lated and enforced truth. And the realization of that patently undemocratic desire can only and always convert emancipatory
aspirations into reactionary ones. Indeed, it insulates those aspirations from questioning at the very moment that Weberian forces of rationalization and bureaucratization are quite likely to be domesticating them from another direction. Here we greet a persistent political para dox: the
moralistic defense of critical practices, or of any besieged identity, weakens what it strives to fortify precisely by sequestering those practices
from the kind of critical inquiry out of which they were born. Thus Gates might have said, Speech codes, born of social critique, kill critique.
identity-based institutions, born of social critique, invariably

become conservative as they are forced to essentialize the identity and naturalize the
boundaries of what they once grasped as a contingent effect of histori cally specific
social powers.
But moralistic reproaches to certain kinds of speech or argument kill critique not only by
displacing it with arguments about abstract rights versus identity-bound injuries, but also by configuring political
injustice and political righteousness as a problem of remarks, attitude, and speech rather than as a matter of
historical, political-economic, and cultural formations of power. Rather than offering
And, we might add, contemporary
analytically substantive accounts of the forces of injustice or injury, they condemn the manifestation of these forces in particular remarks or
events. There is, in the inclination to ban (formally or informally) certain utterances and to mandate others, a politics of rhetoric and gesture that
itself symptomizes despair over effecting change at more significant levels. As vast quantities of left and liberal attention go to determining what
socially marked individuals say, how they are represented, and how many of each kind appear in certain institutions or are appointed to various
, the sources that generate racism, poverty, violence against women, and other elements of social
injustice remain relatively unarticulated and unaddressed. We are lost as how to address those sources; but rather than
commissions
examine this loss or disorientation, rather than bear the humiliation of our impotence, we posture as if we were still fighting the big and good
fight in our clamor over words and names. Dont mourn, moralize.
EIGHTH, REJECTING DISCOURSE DOES NOTHING AND

LEAVES ATTITUDES UNCHANGED.
Kelly, 12/98
Peace Review
One might ask, in "listening" to violent language and to the people who use it, whether we are actually condoning such language. This is far from
When I listen to a person who, for example, uses sexist

language, I am not lending my approval to sexist language. Instead, what I am
saying is that the person behind the language, and my desire to make a
connection with that person, are more important than the sexist language. If I
refuse to listen to the person who uses sexist language, then I might prevent
one particular case where sexist language is used. But I do nothing to overcome
the person's sexist attitudes. She will continue to use sexist language long after I am out of sight. But if I give her a
the case. To listen is not to pass judgment.
voice, if I show her respect, if I try to take her seriously as a person, then In the future pershapes she will be more apt to take what I say about
sexism seriously. If she knows that sexist language bothers me, then perhaps she will be less likely to use it around me.
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Newspeak Turn: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC ZIZEK 97 EVIDENCE. THEIR ARGUMENT
IS PREMISED ON A MISUNDERSTANDING OF COGNITION
WORDS DONT HAVE INTRSINSIC MEANINGS BUT CONVEY
INFORMATION THROUGH METAPHOR. WHEN YOU REPLACE
ONE WORD WITH ANOTHER, THE NEW WORD CONTAINS
AN IMPLICIT REFERENCE TO THE CONNOTATIONS OF THE
OLD WORD. THE DISCRIMINATORY SURPLUS MEANING
GETS TRANSFERRED TO ALTERNATIVE LABELS AND
PATRONIZING AGGRESSIVITY IS MAGNIFIED IN THE GUISE
OF AN ILLUSORY CHANGE
THIS HAS THREE IMPLICATIONS
IT DESTROYS ALL THEIR OFFENSE OUR LANGUAGE ISNT
ANY WORSE THAN THE RECONCEPTION
IT FLIPS THEIR IMPACT THEY ENHANCE THE LABELS
SUBJECTIVE MEANING BY REINSCRIBING ITS VIOLENCE
RETURNING TO THE FIRST LINK IN THE SIGNIFYING CHAIN
IS THE ONLY WAY TO DESTROY ITS AGGRESSIVE STING,
EXPOSING THE SOURCE OF VIOLENT MEANING
CANT SEEK TO CHANGE CONCEPTS BY SUBSTITUTING
WORDS THIS ONLY MASKS THE EXISTENCE AND USE OF
THOSE CONCEPTS AND GUARANTES THAT THEY WILL
REAPPEAR IN THE NEW WORDS. SHOULD USE THE
ORIGINAL WORDS TO HIGHLIGHT THEIR INDETERMINATE
INADEQUACY
Bewes 97
In this light, to begin to use again terms and concepts which had seemed to be
theoretically proscribed (the author, the subject, reality, sexual and cultural
identity, the universal) is not necessarily to betray a reactionary or a nostalgic
desire for 'presence'; on the contrary, what the critical insights of poststructuralism (more specifically, deconstruction) reveal is not only the possibility
but the imperative that such terms continue to be used. There are no others and if there were, they would by definition not only be liable to but would
comprise exactly the same catachrestic abuses
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#2 Newspeak Turn: Ext (1/5)

SELF-CENSORSHIP MAINTAINS THE VIOLENT IDEOLOGY OF
THE STATUS QUO BY CREATING A DISTANCE BETWEEN
POLITICAL APPEARANCES AND THE DISAVOWED OBSCENE
HATRED THAT SUPPORTS THEM
Zizek '97
[Slavoj, Jazz, The Plague of Fantasies, NYC: Verso, 1997, 25//uwyo-ajl]
The key point not to be missed here is how this fragile coexistence of extreme
and violent homophobia with a thwarted - that is, publicly unacknowledged,
ùnderground' - homosexual libidinal economy bears witness to the fact that the
discourse of the military community can operate only by censoring its own
libidinal foundation. At a slightly different level, the same goes for the practice of
hazing (the ceremonial beating up and humiliating of the US Marines by their
elder peers: sticking theii, medals directly on to their breast skin, etc.): when the
public disclosure of these practices (somebody secretly shot them on video and
made the tape public) caused such an outrage, what disturbed the public was
not the practice of hazing itself (everybody was aware that things like this were
going on) but the fact of rendering it public. Outside the confines of military life,
do we not encounter a strictly analogous self-censoring mechanism in
contemporary conservative populism, with its sexist and racist bias? Recall the
election campaigns of Jesse Helms, in which the racist and sexist message is not
publicly acknowledged (on the public level, it is sometimes even violently
disavowed), but is instead inarticulated `between the lines', in a series of
double-entendres and coded allusions. The point is that this kind of selfcensorship (not openly admitting one's own fundamental message) is necessary
if, in the present ideological~conditions, Helms's discourse is to remain
operative: if it were to articulate its racist bias directly, in a public way, this
would make it unacceptable in the eyes of the predominant political discursive
regime; if it were effectively to abandon the self-censored coded racist message,
it would endanger the support of its targeted electoral body. Conservative
populist political discourse is therefore an excellent example of a power
discourse whose efficiency depends on the mechanism of self-censorship: it
relies on a mechanism which is operative only in so far as it remains censored.
Against the image, ever-present in cultural criticism, of a radical subversive
discourse or practice `censored' by Power, one is even tempted to claim that
today, more than ever, the mechanism of censorship intervenes predominantly
to enhance the efficiency of the power discourse itself.
POLITICALLY CORRECT SIGNIFER REPLACEMENT ALLOWS

NEW, AGGRESSIVE FORMS OF DISCRIMINATORY
HUMILIATION IN THE GUISE OF DISTANCE
Zizek '99
1999, 253-4//uwyo-ajl]
Take politically correct probing into hate speech and sexual harassment: the trap
into which this effor falls is not only that it makes us aware of (and thus
generates) new forms and layers of humiliation and harassment (we learn that
'fat', 'stupid', 'short-sighted' . . . are to be replaced by 'weight-challenged', etc.);
the catch is, rather, that this censoring activity itself, by a kind of devilish
dialectical reversal, starts to participate in what it purports to censor and fight
is it not immediately evident how, in designating somebody as 'mentally
challenged' instead of 'stupid', an ironic distance can always creep in and give
rise to an excess of humiliating aggressivity one adds insult to injury, as it
were, by the supplementary polite patronizing dimension (it is well known that
467
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aggressivity coated in politeness can be much more painful than directly abusive
words, since violence is heightened by the additional contrast between the
aggressive content and the polite surface form...). In short, what Foucault's
account of the discourses of discipline and regulate sexuality leaves out of
consideration is the process by means of which the power mechanism itself
becomes eroticized, that is, contaminated by what it endeavours to 'repress'. It
is not enough to claim that the ascetic Christian subject who, in order to fight
temptation, enumerates and categorizes the various forms of temptation,
actually proliferates the object he tries to combat; the point is, rather, to
conceive of how the ascetic who flagellates in order to resist temptation finds
sexual pleasure in this very act of inflicting wounds on himself.
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PAPERING OVER A TOUCHY SUBJECT IS THE TRIUMPH OF
FANTASY
Stavrakakis '99
[Yannis, Teaching Fellow at the University of Essex, Lacan and the Political, New
York City: Routledge, 1999, 88-9//uwyo-ajl]
In this regard, Lacan is extremely clear. Through this fantasy modern society
returns to a state of myth:
How is one to return, if not on the basis of a peculiar (special) dis-course, to a
prediscursive reality? That is the dream - the dream be-hind every conception
(idea) of knowledge. But it is also what must be considered mythical. There's no
such thing as a prediscursive re-ality. Every reality is founded and defined by a
discourse. (XX: 32)
In opposition to such a 'regressive' attitude, Lacanian theory promotes a return
to the founding moment of modernity. Recognising the irreducible character of
impossibility, the constitutivity of the real as expressed primarily in the failure of
our discursive world and its continuous rearticulation through acts of identification, far from being a postmodern move, reveals
the truly modern character of the Lacanian project; instead of a postmodern
mysticism it leads to a reorientation of science and knowledge. Recognising the
constitutivity of the real does not entail that we stop
symbolising; it means that we start trying to incorporate this recognition within
the symbolic itself, in fact it means that since the symbolic entails lack as such,
we abstain from covering it over with fantasmatic constructs - or, if one accepts
that we are always trapped within the field of fantasy, that we never stop
traversing it. The guiding principle in this kind of approach is to move beyond
fantasy towards a self-critical symbolic gesture recognising the contingent and
transient character of every symbolic construct. This is a scientific discourse
different from the reified science of standard modernity.
THE REPLACEMENT OF OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE WITH NEW

SIGNIFIERS IS EVEN WORSE, UNDERESTIMATING THE GAP
BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND THE CONSCIOUS REGULATION
OF ITS EFFECTS AND ENSURING THAT ANY RESOLUTION IS
ARBITRARY
Zizek 99
[Slavoj, Steelers Linebacker, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political
Ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 332-3//uwyo-ajl]
In all these domains, the difJerend seems to be irreducible - that is to say, sooner or later we find ourselves in a grey zone whose mit cannot be
dispelled,.by the application of some single universal rule. Here we encounter a kind of counterpoint' to the 'uncertainty principe' of quan -tum
physics; there is, for example, a structural difficulty in determining whether some comment was actually a case of sexual harassment or one of
Confronted with such a dubious statement, a 'politically correct'

radical a priori tends to believe the complaining victim
(if the victim experienced it as harassment, then harassment it was. . .), while a diehard
racist hate speech.
orthodox liberal tends to believe the accused (if he sincerely did not mean it as harassment, then he should be acquitted. . .). The point, of
this undecidability is structural and unavoid-able, since it is the big

Other (the symbolic network in which victim and offender are both embedded )
course, is that
which ultimately 'decides' on meaning, and the order of the big Other is, by definition, open; nobody can dominate and regulate its effects.
That is the problem with replacing aggressive with 'politically correct'

expressions: whan one replaces 'short-sighted' with 'visually challenged', tone
can never be sure that this replacement itself will not generate new effects of
patronizing and/or ironic offensiveness, all the more humiliating inasmuch as it is
masked as benevolence. The mistake of this 'politically correct' strategy is that it
underestimates the resistance of the Ianguage we actually speak to the
conscious regulation of its effects, epecially effects that involve Fower relations.
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So to resolve the deadlock, one convenes a committee to formulate, in an
ultimately arbitrary way, the precise rules of conduct. It is the same with medicine and 'biogenetics
(at what point does an acceptable and even desirable genetic experiment or intervention turn into unacceptable manipulation?), in the
application of universal hum all rights (at what point does the protection 0f the victim's rights turn into an imposition of Western values?), in
sexual mores (what is the proper, non-patriarchal procedure of seduc-tion?), not to mention the obvious case of cyberspace (what is the status of
sexual harassment in a virtual community? How does one distinguish between 'mere words' and 'deeds'?). The work of these committees is
caught in a symptomal vicious cycle: on the one hand, they try to legitimate their decisions by reference to the most advanced scientific
,knowledge (which, in the case of abortion, tells us that a foetus does not yet possess self-awareness and experience pain; which, in the case of a
mortally ill person, defines the threshold beyond which euthanasia is the only meaningful solution); on the other hand, they have to evoke some
non-scientific ethical criterion in order to direct and posit a limitation to inherent scientific drive.
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CLEANSING IDEOLOGY FROM LANGUAGE IS A CRY FOR
HELP A LONGING FOR FANTASMIC HARMONY EMBODIED
IN A THROATY GROAN
Stavrakakis '99
[Yannis, Teaching Fellow at the University of Essex, Lacan and the Political, New
York City: Routledge, 1999, 114-5//uwyo-ajl]
We can also approach this constitutive play between possibility and iInpossibility
through the example of communication. What Lacan argues, and here his
difference from Habermas is most forcefully demonstrated, is that "it is exactly
because total communication is impossible, because it is exposed as an
impossible fantasy, that communication itself becomes possible. Lacan
starts from the assumption that communication is always a failure: moreover,
that it has to be a failure, and thats the reason we keep on talking. If we
understood eachother, we would all remain silent. Luckily enough, we dont
understand each other, so we keep on talking
(Verhaeghe, 1995: 81)
The utopian fantasy of a perfect universal language, a language common to all
humanity, was designed to remedy this lack in communication insofar as it is
caused by the different idioms and languages in use (Eco, 1995: 19). The perfect
language was conceived as the final solution to this linguistic cbfusion, the
confusio linguarum, which inscribed an irreducible lack at the heart of our
symbolic universe, showing its inability to represent the real. It entailed a
fantasmatic return to a pre-confusion state in which a perfect language existed
between Adam and God. This was a language that mirrored reality, an
isomorphic language which had direct and unmediated access to the essence of
things: 'In its original form.. .language was an absolutely certain and transparent
sign for things, because it resembled them. The names of things were lodged in
the things they designatedThis transparency was destroyed at Babel as a
punishment for men. (Foucault, 1989: 36). Human imagination never stopped
longing for that lost/impossible state when language, instead of the agency of
castration, was the field of a perfect harmony; hence all the attempts to
construct a perfect language, to realise fantasy: Umberto Eco in his Search for
the Perfect Language recounts the history of all these attempts within European
culture, from St. Augustine's fantasy, in which the distance between object and
symbol is annulled,17 up to Dante, a priori philosophical languages and
Esperanto. This history is, of course, a genealogy of falures, the history of the
insistence on the realisation of an impossible dream, a dream, however,
that was designed as a perfect solution to the inherent division of the social. As
Eco points out, linguistic confusion is conceived as standing at the root of
religious and political division, even of difficulties in economic exchange (Eco,
1995: 42-3). In that sense-;-the achievement of perfect communication is
articulated as the perfect solution to all these problems. This is clearly a utopian
problematic. Alas, as Antonio Gramsci points out in his text 'UniversaL Language
and Esperanto', no advent of a universal language can be planned in advance:
the present attempts at such a language belong only in the realm of Utopia:
they. are the product of the same mentality that wanted Falangists and happy
colonies. In history and social life nothing is fixed, rigid and final. There never
will be... this flow of molten vol-canic matter, burns and annihilates the Utopias
built on arbitrary acts and vain delusions such as those of a universal language
and of Esperanto.
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THE IMPACT PRESUMES STATIC REFERENCE, WHICH IS
EITHER A NAVE MISTAKE OR A VISIOUS LIE
Seshadri-crooks 2000
[Kalpana, Asst prof engl boston college, Desiring Whiteness, NYC: Routledge,
141-2//uwyo-ajl]
Racial identity, too, I would like to suggest - Le., words like black and white,
when used as nouns - works like names. 10 That is, they are rigid designators they are signifiers that have no signified. They establish a reference, but deliver
no connotations or meaning whatsoever. We can, of course, reasonably argue
that race does not exist insofar as the identity of a person as "black" or "white"
is contingent upon a cluster of concepts that are them-selves too protean to be
able to uphold anything like a necessary truth. We can cite historical evidence to
show that groups that were once considered white are no longer classified as
such for this or that reason, etc. But as my discussion in Chapter 1 specified,
arguments leveled at race theory are highly ineffectual and possess insufficient
explanatory power. Thus rather than lapse into the historicist argument, it may
be more productive to view racial color designators as operating not unlike
proper names. The proper name is neither wholly one's own (Le., we are all
named by others) nor is it mean-ingful. One inhabits the name as the reference
of oneself, and as Kripke asserts, it bears no relation to a set of properties that
establish either its meaning or its reference: Nixon is Nixon, or as he says,
quoting Bishop Butler, "everything is what it is and not another thing" (Kripke
1982: 94). Is this not true for "black" and "white"? If someone is designated as
one or the other, there is a necessary truth to that designation, but does it
mean? What would be the cluster of concepts that could establish such an
identity? Even in identity statements such as "blacks are people of African
descent" or "whites are people of European descent," though the predicates
supposedly define and give the meaning of black and white, establishing the
necessity of these concepts in every counter-factual situation will not be possible
if only because national designations, and the notion of descent, are historically
volatile and scientifically invalid respectively. No set of qualitative descrip-tions
can establish black or white identity across all possible worlds, but we cannot
therefore say that black and white do not exist, which is the error that a number
of critical race theorists fall into. As Kripke says,
it is not how the speaker thinks he got the reference, but the actual chain of
communication, which is relevant. ... Obviously the name is passed on from link
to link. But of course not every sort of causal chain reaching from me to a
certain man will do for me to make a reference. There may be a causal chain
from our use of the term "Santa Claus" to a certain historical saint, but still the
children, when they use this, by this time probably do not refer to that saint. ... It
seems to me wrong to think we give ourselves some properties which somehow
qualitatively uniquely pick out an object and determine our reference in that
manner.(Kripke 1982: 93-4)
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FOCUSING ON LANGUAGE UNDERESTIMATES PREJUDICE
SYMBOLIC CONTROL ONLY BEGS THE QUESTION OF
UNCONSCIOUS MOTIVATION
Lane 98
[Chrisopher, English Professor at Emory, Savage Ecstacy: Colonialism and the
Death Drive, The Psychoanalysis of Race, 1998//uwyo-ajl]
The repercussions of Fanons Hegelianism are nonetheless acute. While Fanon
complains of being sealed into thingness (218) by white racism, he also aims
toward mastery of language because it affords remarkable power (18). On
one level, we can appreciate why linguistic mastery is threatening to white
racism. However, Fanon also avows, at the beginning of Black Skin, White Masks,
that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other (17). Ironically, Fanon is at his
most Lacanian here, for he clarifies that we cannot limit the tyranny of prejudce
to intentional racism; nor can we simply defeat it by mastery of language: The
signifier raises a further, generic dimension of alienation that implicates men
and women of all races while exceeding their capacity for symbolic control. This
is surely why Fanon claims The Other will become the mainstail of [the white
mans ] preoccupations and his desires(170), and why he states of the black
man, The goal of his behavior will be The Other (in the guise of the white man)
(154).
DIALOGUE OVER LABELS WITH A FIXED GOAL OF

EMPOWERMENT AS A KNOWN AND STABLE END
GUARANTEES HEGEMONIC REGIMES OF TRUTH MORE
DISCURSIVELY VIOLENT THAN THE ORIGINAL
Bewes 97
The disavowal of political representation, combined with the seduc -tiveness of a
'political' ideology of absolute sincerity, is one explanation for the appeal of the
Communitarian agenda. Another is (ii) the fetishization of specificity. Etzioni favours
localized as opposed to centralized legislation, and informal as opposed to formal structures of law enforcement. Thus divorce, the principal
'threat' to family life (a tautologous diagnosis that resembles John Major's cosmetic proposals to solve the problem of 'yobbery'), should be not
banned or condemned, but discouraged.98 Similarly 'hate' (in the form of racism or sexism, for example) is best coun-tered not by legislation but
of the 'discussions' initiated following incidents of

campus racism is voyeuristic, almost pornographic in its attention to episodic
detail. One has a sense of salivation, more bloodthirsty than at any seventeenthcentury public evisceration, and of tri-umphalism over the ritual punishment of
the guilty parties: humiliation by workshop.
by 'dialogue' and 'education'. Etzioni's account
The next evening the [offended] women organized a meeting with some students in the same dormitory and discussed the matter. They were
joined by a supportive professor. Several white people made it clear that they were deeply embarrassed. The session was followed up by more
forums, a press conference, and a seminar at the law school. These dis-cussions, in turn, triggered a campus-wide debate on the issues at hand.
The local newspapers also took note. The article in the campus news-paper included an apology from the person who had put up the form in the
first place. The four women said that toward the end they no longer felt like victims but rather 'empowered'.99
The Communitarian citizen, then, fills the gaps left by the skeletal legal framework, makes 'complete' a legislative structure which must refrain
from explicit adjudication on its own account. By maintaining instead a 'hands-off' policy of implicit governance, Communitarianism proposes an
.A
society of unwritten -that is, not legally binding - laws is assumed to be freer; in
fact, as we can see, the tacit legislature of Communitarianism effects a far more
thorough and indeed repressive policing of the individual. The figure who arouses the most
ethos of unwritten rules of behav-iour, under the sign of 'empowerment', which are no less powerful and effective because they are implicit
sympathy in Etzioni's story is the quitevobviously cynical student who, as his college campus succumbed o the viral effect of a positivistic 'antiracist' consensus, took to emblazoning his notebooks and the walls of his room with swastikas. 'The work of education is never done,' says
Etzioni, a little sinisterly. Clearly not education but rather the problematic of Dostoevsky's man underground is the issue here: the necessity to
prove that one is 'a man and not a prig in a .barrelorgan:. The dawning Influence of Commumtanamsm in British political life IS a symptom of the
'epidemic of consensus' identified by Baudrillard as a millenarian phenomenon, and of the fear of violence - political, semiotic, historicalidentified by Hegel as a crisis of healthy 'philosophical scepticism.
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#4 Censorship Bad Turns: 1AR

THE REFUSAL TO REAPPROPRIATE EXCLUSIONARY
LANGUAGE IS POLITICALLY PARALYZING DOGMATISM
Butler, Chair of the Rhetoric Department at U.C.-Berkley, 97 (Judith,
Excitable Speech, P. 162)
dogmatism appears as well in the effort to circumscribe speech that injures,
and offends. Whether it is the censorship of particular kinds of
representation or the circumscription of the domain of public discourse itself, the
effort to tighten the reins on speech undercuts those political impulses to exploit
speech itself for its insurrectionary effects. The intellectual opposition to questions that destabilize a
Such
excites, threatens,
sense of reality seems a mundane academic case in point. To question a term, a term like "the subject" or "universality," is
The
changeable life of that term does not preclude the possibility of its use. If a term
becomes questionable, does that mean it cannot be used any longer, and that
we can only use terms that we already know how to master? Why is it that posing a
to ask how it plays, what investments it bears, what aims it achieves, what alterations it undergoes.
question about a term is considered the same as ena cti ng a pro hi bitio n a gai nst use? Why is it that we sometimes
do feel that if a term is dislodged of its prior and known contexts, that we will not be able to live, to survive, to use
language, to speak for ourselves? What kind of guarantee does this effort to refer the speech act back to its originating
context exercise, and what sort of terror does it forestall? Is it that in the ordinary mode, terms arc assumed, terms like
"the subject" and "universality," and the sense in which they "must" be assumed is a moral one, taking the form of an
Are we not paralyzed

by a fear of the unknown future of words that keeps us from interrogating the
terms that we need to live, and of taking the risk of living the terms that we keep
in question?
imperative, and like some moral interdictions, a defense against what terrifies us most?
DISALLOWING MODIFICATION IGNORES THE POTENTIAL

FOR RE-APPROPRIATION BY RE-ITERATING THE USEFUL
CONCEPTS OF THOSE WE CRITICIZE FOR THEIR
EXCLUSIONS
Butler, Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, The
Psychic Life Of Power: Theories In Subjection, 1997, p. 93.
Judith
For Foucault, the subject who is produced through subjection is not produced at
an instant in its totality. Instead, it is in the process of being produced, it is
repeatedly produced (which is not the same as being produced anew and again).
It is precisely the possibility of a repetition which does not consolidate that
dissociated unity, the subject, but which proliferates effects which undermine
the force of normalization. The term which not only names, but forms and
frames the subjectlet us use Foucaults example of homosexuality--mobilizes a
reverse discourse against the very regime of normalization by which it is
spawned.
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#4 Censorship Bad Turns: Ext (1/4)

GENDER STUDIES PROVE REDEPLOYMENT GOOD
Jerry
Muller, Coming Out Ahead, First Things, August 1993(accessed online)

Butler holds to the Foucaultian axioms that power is ubiquitous and that it is
only power which establishes truth. She concludes that "power can be neither
withdrawn nor refused, but only redeployed. Indeed, in my view, the normative
focus for gay and lesbian practice ought to be on the subversive and parodic
redeployment of power rather than on the impossible fantasy of its full-scale
transcendence." The "redeployment" of power, in this case, means that those
with the power of interpretation use their power to subvert the belief that there
is anything "natural" about sexual identity, desire, and conduct, and to break the
normative link between biological endowment, behavior, and sexual object. "The
loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender
configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing
narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: 'man' and
'woman.'" Within this agenda, transitive and intermediate forms of sexual
identity acquire a special significance. Drag, cross-dressing, and butch/femme
lesbian identities, Butler writes, all serve to "parody" the notion of a naturebased gender, and reveal that cultural gender does not flow naturally and
inevitably from anatomical sex, but rather is a socially learned role
(performance) with no essential link to anatomy. "Parodic proliferation," she
declares, "deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized
or essentialist gender identities."
SUPPRESSING LANGUAGE BECAUSE IT IS OFFENSIVE

PRESERVES ITS INJURIOUS MEANING ONLY BY USING
THE LANGUAGE CAN SPACE BE OPENED TO RECONSTRUCT
A MORE HUMANE MEANING
Kurtz and Oscarson, Members of National Council of Teachers of English
Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2K3 (Anna and Christopher,
BookTalk: Revising the Discourse of Hate, ProQuest)
Butler also argues that the daily, repeated use of words opens a space for
another, more empowering kind of performance. This alternative performance ,
Butler insists, can be "the occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an original
subordination for another purpose, one whose future is partially open" (p. 38). To
think of words as having an "open" future is to recognize that their authority lies
less in their historical than in their present uses; it is to acknowledge that people
can revise the meaning of words even as we repeat them; it is to embrace the
notion that the instability of words opens the possibility that we can use them to
(re)construct a more humane future for ourselves and others. Because words can
be revised, Butler contends that it would be counterproductive simply to stop
using terms that we would deem injurious or oppressive. For when we choose
not to use offensive words under any circumstance, we preserve their existing
meanings as well as their power to injure. If as teachers, for instance, we were simply to forbid the
However,
use of speech that is hurtful to LGBT students we would be effectively denying the fact that such language still exists.
To ignore words in this way, Butler insists, won't make them go away. Butler thus
suggests that we actually use these words in thoughtful conversation in which
we work through the injuries they cause (p. 1.02). Indeed, Butler insists that if we are to
reclaim the power that oppressive speech robs from us, we must use, confront,
and interrogate terms like "queer." We must ask how such terms affect both the speaker and the subject,
what the purpose of their use is, and how their meaning can be altered to empower those whom they name. Thus, as
language is violence, but only if we allow it to be. She encourages us

to believe that words can take on new meanings-ones which forbid stasis,
Butler helps us see,
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challenge our habits, and open the possibility that
create spaces for learning in which everyone feels safe.
teachers and students might be able to
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REGULATING SPEECH MAKES RE-APPROPRIATING SPEECH
IMPOSSIBLE ONLY BY USING LANGUAGE CAN
RESIGNIFICATION OCCUR
Fleche, Assist Prof of English @ Boston College, 99 (Anne, Excitable Speech: A
Politics of the Performative, Theatre Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3, October, Project Muse)
Excitable Speech might seem surprising to readers of Butler's previous work. Having argued, in Gender Trouble
and Bodies That Matter, that bodies and subjects are constructed in the cultural forms that articulate them,
Butler
now argues that to speak is not quite the same as to act. For Butler the
conservative conflation of speech and act is neither performative nor, in her sense of the word, constructionist,
because it argues for a notion of free speech that presumes an unconstrained, sovereign subject. Butler
considers this problem and its possible remedies in her analyses of Supreme Court decisions, anti-pornography
arguments, and the policy against homosexuals in the military. In every instance, she complicates the relation of
speech to act, by introducing fantasy, linguistic instability, and temporality, arguing against censorship and the
legal redress of hate speech and for its critical re-articulation. The key move in the analysis comes in the opening
chapter, "On Linguistic Vulnerability," where Butler deconstructs the relation of the body to speech. Working from
texts by Toni Morrison and Shoshana Felman, Butler argues that language and the body are neither strictly
separable nor simply the same, but speak together, as it were, to produce the effect known as the social speaking
subject. Thus verbal threats, for example, are also, in some way, bodily ones: "[T]he body is the blindspot of
speech, that which acts in excess of what is said, but which also acts in and through what is said" (11). Once the
body/speech relation is deconstructed, censorship, with its assumptions of causality between word and act,
because speech
threatens, delivers and delays, it opens up a future of options. It is the gap between
becomes even more troubling. Butler finds promise in this problem, arguing that,
speech and conduct she wants to emphasize. In theatrical terms, this is the gap in which Brecht sees the actor
intervening--in his view performance is not referential, but a social gest, playful and capable of change. Indeed
Butler's notion of performativity, sometimes understood as the ability of

language to produce what it names, is nearly the opposite of referentiality: it is an effect of
representation that cannot wholly be controlled. Performativity is what gives a future to the
name in name-calling. In the process of coming out, for example, homosexuality
is named but never fully defined: while coming out "renders homosexuality discursive," Butler
emphasizes, "it does not render discourse referential . . . . [I]t is important not to close the gap
between the performative and the referential" (125). To close this gap is to leave
no remedy for hate speech short of state intervention, and the state is certainly
not neutral. Butler points out that the Supreme Court has tended to protect racist behavior as speech, while
restricting pornographic literature. In censoring pornography, the court appears to agree with feminist arguments
the policy against gays in the

military assumes that to identify oneself as a homosexual is to act upon another
person in a homosexual way, to make such an identification "contagious," as Butler
puts it. And yet, in a case of cross burning, the Supreme Court found that when he burned a
cross in front of a black family's house, a white teenager was expressing a
"viewpoint" in the "free marketplace of ideas" (53). These decisions imply that
language should not have power to do what it says, but that the state, in
regulating speech, should. When speech becomes injurious act in some cases
and remains free speech in others, it is clear that a theory of speech, and not a
legal remedy, is what is most urgently needed. Consequently, Butler opposes linguistic
determinism and the "anti-intellectualism" of the academy's efforts to return to "direct" speech. Language is
politically and socially useful, she argues , precisely to the extent that it is "excitable"--by
which she means "out of control", in play, "performative:" "Indeed, the act-like character of certain
offensive utterances may be precisely what keeps them from saying what they
mean to say or doing what it is they say" (72). Language is neither fully social nor fully semantic
that pornographic representation is a discriminatory act. Similarly,
but socially performed and cited, interpellating a body and a social self while excluding "impossible" bodies,
selves and speech. In a brief reference to the argument elaborated in her book The Psychic Life of Power (also
Butler counters the legal arguments for restricting hate speech with
Foucault's "less legal" notion of power as an effect, produced through multiple
forces. Foucault's idea of power eliminates the sovereign, accountable subject (or state) that speech regulation
seeks to restore. It is power, Butler argues, that makes speech into censorship, by
legislating what counts. Thus, not all social forms are simply censored, tainted or
unusable: the terms of legibility produce the possibility of breaking silence, of
thwarting exclusion, and of acting "with authority without being authorized" (157),
as in the civil disobedience of Rosa Parks . [End Page 348] Rather than offer prescriptions,
Butler uses her own writing to illustrate the power of resignification. In her rhetorical readings
1997),
of Supreme Court decisions, for example, the justices' words become surprisingly rich and suggestive. She is
herself an expert resignifier. Resignifying words, Butler acknowledges, does not take away their hurt. She does
think that sometimes people should be prosecuted for injurious speech and that universities might need to
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Kritik Answers
regulate speech--but should do so only when they have "a story to tell" about its harmful effects. She is not
Excitable Speech asks whether regulation makes it

easier or harder to reappropriate speech, and why we fear to take the exciting risk of language,
opposed to all speech regulation. But
where a threat might also be a promise.
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REGULATING LANGUAGE DESTROYS THE HOPE OF TRUE
EMANCIPATION WE MUST BE ABLE TO RESIGNIFY
DEROGATORY TERMS TO DEFUSE THEIR INJURIOUS
ABILITIES
Disch, Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Minnesota, 99 (Lisa,
Judith Butler and the Politics of the Performative, JSTOR)
Judith Butler's longstanding political concern has been to discern what in the structure of subjectivity makes it
so diffi cult to shift from moralized to politicized mobilization and so easy to fall into identity politics and the
politics of scapegoating. In The Psychic Life of Power, she analyzes the psychic and social process of subject
formation to disclose the investments that stand in the way of "the development of forms of differentiation [that
could] lead to fundamentally more capacious, generous, and 'unthreatened' bearings of the self in the midst of
In Excitable Speech, she rebuts the work of the theorists who

introduced hate speech into the legal arsenal. Whereas they share her premise
that we are linguistic beings, Butler charges that in advocating speech codes,
censorship, and other regulatory approaches to linguistic injury, hate speech
theorists destroy "something fundamental about language and, more
specifically, about the subject's constitution in language" (ES, 27 ). Butler proposes
to counter injurious speech with "subver sive resignification": the insubordinate
use of a derogatory term or authoritative convention to defuse its power to
injure and to expose "prevailing forms of authority and the exclusions by which
they proceed" (ES, 157-58). These two books are especially important for answering the charge that
poststructuralist critics of humanism demolish political agency when they take issue with autonomy. Butler's
theory of "insurrectionary" speech acts opens up the possibility of an agency
that does not fantasize "the restoration of a sovereign autonomy in speech" but,
rather, plays our dependency on sanctioned forms of address into an everyday
resistance (ES, 145,15). Insurrectionary speech does considerable theoretical work
to break the impasse between autonomy and determinism that stalls many
discussions of political agency in "postliberatory times" (The Psychic Life of Power [PL], 18).
community" (CR, 140).
And although this contribution is significant, it may strike some readers as incomplete. Butler is more attentive
to examples where dominant institutions (such as the courts and the military) have subversively resignified
potentially insurrectionary initiatives (such as hate speech) than she is to instances where per formative agency
has transformed the status quo. Even if Butler's own examples do not establish it as such, I will argue that
the
"politics of the performative" is a politics of insurrection.
First, I offer a brief summary of

Butler's concepts "heterosexual matrix," "heterosexual melancholy," and "gender performativity," as these are
indispensable to appreciating her recent writings.
CENSORSHIP WILL BE COOPTED BY CONSERVATIVE

ELEMENTS TO DESTROY MINORITY RIGHTS INSTEAD
LANGUAGE SHOULD BE USED TO SUBVERT THE
CONVENTIONAL MEANINGS OF THE WORDS
Nye, Prof of Philosophy @ U of Wisconsin Whitewater, 99 (Andrea, Excitable Speech: A
Politics of the Performative; In Pursuit of Privacy: Law, Ethics, and the Rise of Technology,
JSTOR)
Excitable Speech and In Pursuit of Privacy will appeal to very different audiences. Judith Buder is a theorist's theorist whose mastery of the
complex intellectual gyrations of poststructuralism and postmodernism will be daunting to all but an initiated few, while Judith Wagner DeCew is
a legal scholar who uses traditional reviews of case law and standard techniques of rational argument to make her point. Nevertheless, they ask
the same important questionIn promoting the rights of women, to what extent should feminists call for state action? and they give the same
negative answer: Not very far at all. Butler's concern is with recent controversies surrounding regulation of "hate language," specifically decisions
that broadly interpret the "fighting words55 doctrine, which makes certain uses of speech unprotected under the First Amendment's guarantee of
freedom of speech. She argues against Catharine MacKinnon 5s claim that pornography is subject to government intervention because it is action
that effectively silences women. DeCew, on the other hand, defends a broad view of the "right to privacy 55 that protects not only private
information but also individual decision making from state interference. Their methods in making these points could not be more different. Butler
works meticulously through a dense thicket of the analytic speech act theory of John Austin, the structuralist and poststructuralist theories of
Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu, psychoanalytic constructions in the style of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and German critical theory to
Once the state has the power to legislate

what can be said and not said, she argues, that power will be coopted by
conservative elements to defeat liberal causes and minority rights. State power
will also curtail the freedom of speech of private individuals that is the very basis
for effective antidotes to derogatory name calling . DeCew, however, painstakingly reviews the legal and
conclude that state regulation of hate language should be resisted.
philosophical history of privacy rights as well as current debates about its scope and status before she takes on the question of whether feminists
have any interest in preserving a private sphere. For DeCew, too, a major target is MacKinnon, specifically her argument that leaving alone the
privacy of home and family means leaving men alone to abuse and dominate women. DeCew argues that decisions that protect the use of
sexually explicit materials in the home, consensual sex practices in private, and personal decisions about abortion are in the interest of women as
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well as men, even though in some cases, such as wife beating, there may be overriding considerations that justify state intervention. Both
For Butler, the danger

is that the state becomes arbiter of what is and is not permissible speech,
allowing rulings that the erection of burning crosses by the Ku Klux Klan is
protected speech but that artistic expressions of gay sexuality or statements of
gay identity are actions rather than speech and so are not protected . The danger DeCew
authors argue persuasively for a more careful look at the dangers lurking behind calls for state action.
sees is that once the right to privacy is denied or narrowly defined, the state can, on the grounds of immorality, move into women's personal
lives to interfere with sexual expression, whether homosexual or heterosexual, or with the right to choose an abortion established in Roe v. Wade.
Both DeCew and Butler, however, provide alternative remedies for the admitted harm that state action is intended to redress. For DeCew, the
right to privacy is not absolute; like freedom, it can be overridden by other rights thus the state can intervene in domestic abuse cases because
of the physical harm being done. Butler's remedy for harmful hate language is more deeply rooted in postmodern theories of the speaking
Given the postmodern view that the subject can never magisterially use a
language with fixed meanings according to clear intentions, it is always pos sible
to subvert the conventional meanings of words. What is said as a derogatory slur
"nigger," "chick," "spic," or "gay," for example can be "resignified," that is, returned in such a manner
that its conventional meaning in practices of discrimination and abuse is
subverted. Butler gives as examples the revalorization of terms like "black" or "gay," the satirical citation of racial or sexual slurs,
subject.
reappropriation in street language or rap music, and expressions of homosexual identity in art depicting graphic sex. These are expressions that
any erosion in First Amendment rights might endanger.
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Kritik Answers

LANGUAGE CRITIQUES UNDERMINE THE FREE-PLAY OF
DIALOGUE NECESSARY FOR EDUCATION
Roskoski and Joe Peabody, A Linguistic and Philosophical Critique
of Language Arguments, 1991,
Matthew
http://debate.uvm.edu/Library/DebateTheoryLibrary/Roskoski&Peabody-LangCritiques,
accessed 10/17/02
As Brennan notes, the mandate "to inculcate moral and political values is not a
general warrant to act as 'thought police' stifling discussion of all but stateapproved topics and advocacy of all but the official position." (Brennan 577). Not
only does the first amendment create a moral or deontological barrier to
language "arguments", the principles it defends also create a pragmatic barrier.
The free and sometimes irreverent discourse protected by the first amendment
is essential to the health and future success of our society. History has borne out
the belief that the freedom to challenge convictions is essential to our ability to
adapt to change. As Hyde and Fishman observe, university scholars must be
allowed to "think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the
unchallengeable" because "major discoveries and advances in knowledge are
often highly unsettling and distasteful to the existing order." This leads them to
conclude that "we cannot afford" to impose "orthodoxies, censorship, and other
artificial barriers to creative thought" (Hyde & Fishman 1485). Given the rapid
pace of political and technological change that our society faces, and given that
debates often focus around the cutting edge of such changes, the imposition of
linguistic straitjackets upon the creative thought and critical thinking of debaters
would seem to uniquely jeopardize these interests. This is not just exaggerated
rhetoric, nor is it merely our old debate disadvantages in new clothes. Hyde &
Fishman's claims have been repeatedly validated by historical events. Had Elie
Wiesel debated in Germany, a "Zionist language" argument would not have been
unlikely. As Bennett Katz has argued, The essentiality of freedom in the
community of American Universities is almost self-evident... To impose any strait
jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil
the future of our Nation... Teachers and students must always remain free to
inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding;
otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die. (Katz 156).
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#7 Discourse Focus Trades off with

Action: 1AR
LANGUAGE CRITIQUES ARE COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE FOR
PROGRESSIVE POLITICS
Wallace, Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona College and MacArthur
Fellow, Atlantic Monthly, April 2001, p. 54-55.
David Foster
There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports
to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in factin its Orwellian substitution
of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itselfof vastly more
help to conservatives and the U.S. status quo than traditional SNOOT
prescriptions ever were. Were I, for instance, a political conservative who
opposed taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be
delighted to watch PCE progressives spend their time and energy arguing over
whether a poor person should be described as "low-income" or "economically
disadvantaged" or "pre-prosperous" rather than constructing effective public
arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates on
corporations. (Not to mention that strict codes of egalitarian euphemism serve
to burke the sorts of painful, unpretty, and sometimes offensive discourse that in
a pluralistic democracy leads to actual political change rather than symbolic
political change. In other words, PCE functions as a form of censorship, and
censorship always serves the status quo.)
FOCUSING ON HOW WE TALKED ABOUT THE ISSUE, RATHER THAN HOW TO

DEAL WITH IT, TRADES OF WITH ACTIVISM AND DESTROYS THE ABILITY
TO FORM COALITIONS
Ward Churchill, Keetoowah Cherokee, 25+ year member of the American Indian
Movement and Professor, Indigenous Studies, University of Colorado Boulder. FROM A
NATIVE SON, 1996 p. 460.
There can be little doubt that matters of linguistic appropriateness and precision
are of serious and legitimate concern. By the same token, however, it must be
conceded that such preoccupations arrive at a point of diminishing return. After
that, they degenerate rapidly into liabilities rather than benefits to
comprehension. By now, it should be evident that much of what is mentioned in
this article falls under the latter category; it is, by and large, inept, esoteric, and
semantically silly, bearing no more relevance in the real world than the question
of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Ultimately, it is a means to
stultify and divide people rather than stimulate and unite them. Nonetheless,
such issues of word choice have come to dominate dialogue in a significant
and apparently growing segment of the Left. Speakers, writers, and organizers or
persuasions are drawn, with increasing vociferousness and persistence, into
heated confrontations, not about what theyve said, but about how theyve said
it. Decisions on whether to enter into alliances, or even to work with other
parties, seem more and more contingent not upon the prospect of a common
agenda, but upon mutual adherence to certain elements of a prescribed
vernacular. Mounting quantities of a progressive time, energy, and attention are
squandered in perversions of Maos principle of criticism/self-criticism now
variously called process, line sharpening, or even struggle in which there
occurs a virtually endless stream of talk about how to talk about the issues. All
of this happens at the direct expense of actually understanding the issues
themselves, much less doing something about them. It is impossible to escape
the conclusion that the dynamic at hand adds up to a pronounced avoidance
syndrome, a masturbatory ritual through which an opposition nearly paralyzed
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by its own deeply felt sense of impotence pretends to be engaged in something
meaningful. In the end, it reduces to a tragic delusion at best, cynical game
playing or intentional disruption at worst. With this said, it is only fair to observe
that its high time to get off this nonsense, and on with the real work of effecting
positive social change.
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#7 Discourse Focus Trades off with

Action: Ext
PUNISHING LANGUAGE TRADES OFF WITH MORE
EFFECTIVE SOCIAL CHANGE
Roskoski and Joe Peabody, A Linguistic and Philosophical Critique
of Language Arguments, 1991,
Matthew
http://debate.uvm.edu/Library/DebateTheoryLibrary/Roskoski&Peabody-LangCritiques,
accessed 10/17/02
Previously, we have argued that the language advocates have erroneously
reversed the causal relationship between language and reality. We have
defended the thesis that reality shapes language, rather than the obverse. Now
we will also contend that to attempt to solve a problem by editing the language
which is symptomatic of that problem will generally trade off with solving the
reality which is the source of the problem. There are several reasons why this is
true. The first, and most obvious, is that we may often be fooled into thinking
that language "arguments" have generated real change. As Graddol and Swan
observe, "when compared with larger social and ideological struggles, linguistic
reform may seem quite a trivial concern," further noting "there is also the
danger that effective change at this level is mistaken for real social change"
(Graddol & Swan 195). The second reason is that the language we find
objectionable can serve as a signal or an indicator of the corresponding
objectionable reality. The third reason is that restricting language only limits the
overt expressions of any objectionable reality, while leaving subtle and hence
more dangerous expressions unregulated. Once we drive the objectionable idea
underground it will be more difficult to identify, more difficult to root out, more
difficult to counteract, and more likely to have its undesirable effect. The fourth
reason is that objectionable speech can create a "backlash" effect that raises the
consciousness of people exposed to the speech. Strossen observes that "ugly
and abominable as these expressions are, they undoubtably have had the
beneficial result of raising social consciousness about the underlying societal
problem..." (560).
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#8 Alternative Fails: 1AR

CRITICISMS OF LANGUAGE FAIL WE CANNOT
OBJECTIVELY DETERMINE WHETHER CERTAIN WORDS ARE
GOOD OR BAD. WE CAN ONLY USE LANGUAGE AS A TOOL
NOT AS AN ACCURATE PICTURE OF THE WORLD
Rorty, Prof of Philosophy at Stanford, 82 (Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism,
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/index.htm)
This Davidsonian way of looking at language lets us avoid hypostatising
Language in the way in which the Cartesian epistemological tradition , and particularly
the idealist tradition which built upon Kant, hypostatised Thought. For it lets us see language
not as a tertium quid between Subject and Object, nor as a medium in which we
try to form pictures of reality, but as part of the behaviour of human beings. On
this view, the activity of uttering sentences is one of the things people do in
order to cope with their environment. The Deweyan notion of language as tool rather than picture is
right as far as it goes. But we must be careful not to phrase this analogy so as to
suggest that one can separate the tool, Language, from its users and inquire as
to its "adequacy" to achieve our purposes. The latter suggestion presupposes
that there is some way of breaking out of language in order to compare it with
something else. But there is no way to think about either the world or our
purposes except by using our language. One can use language to criticise and
enlarge itself, as one can exercise one's body to develop and strengthen and enlarge it, but one cannot see language-as-a-whole in
relation to something else to which it applies, or for which it is a means to an end. The arts and the sciences, and philosophy as their selfreflection and integration, constitute such a process. of enlargement and strengthening. But Philosophy, the attempt to say "how language
It
is the impossible attempt to step outside our skins-the traditions, linguistic and
other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism-and compare ourselves
with something absolute. This Platonic urge to escape from the finitude of one's
time and place, the "merely conventional" and contingent aspects of one's life, is
responsible for the original Platonic distinction between two kinds of true
sentence. By attacking this latter distinction, the holistic "pragmaticising" strain
in analytic philosophy has helped us see how the metaphysical urge -common to fuzzy
Whiteheadians and razor-sharp "scientific realists"- works. It has helped us be sceptical about the
idea that some particular science (say physics) or some particular literary genre
(say Romantic poetry, or transcendental philosophy) gives us that species of true sentence which
is not just a true sentence, but rather a piece of Truth itself . Such sentences may be very useful
relates to the world" by saying what makes certain sentences true, or certain actions or attitudes good or rational, is, on this view, impossible.
indeed, but there is not going to be a Philosophical explanation of this utility. That explanation, like the original justification of the
assertion of the sentence, will be a parochial matter-a comparison of the sentence with alternative sentences formulated in the same
or in other vocabularies. But such comparisons are the business of, for example, the physicist or the poet, or perhaps of the
philosopher - not of the Philosopher, the outside expert on the utility, or function, or metaphysical status of Language or of Thought.
The Wittgenstein-Sellars-Quine-Davidson attack on distinctions between classes of sentences is the special contribution of analytic
philosophy to the anti-Platonist insistence on the ubiquity of language. This insistence characterises both pragmatism and recent
"Continental" philosophising. Here are some examples: Man makes the word, and the word means nothing which the man has not made
it mean, and that only to some other man. But since man can think only by means of words or other external symbols, these might
turn around and say: You mean nothing which we have not taught you, and then only so far as you address some word as the
interpretant of your thought. . . . . . . the word or sign which man uses is the man himself Thus my language is the sum-total of myself;
for the man is the thought. (Peirce) Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental
signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. (Derrida) . . . psychological
nominalism, according to which all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities-indeed, all
awareness even of particulars-is a linguistic affair. (Sellars) It is only in language that one can mean something by something. (Wittgenstein)
Human experience is essentially linguistic. (Gadamer) . . . man is in the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever
brighter upon our horizon. (Foucault) Speaking about language turns language almost inevitably into an object . . . and then its reality vanishes.
(Heidegger) This chorus should not, however, lead us to think that something new and exciting has recently been discovered about Language-
They are saying

that attempts to get back behind language to something which "grounds" it, or
which it "expresses," or to which it might hope to be "adequate," have not,
worked. The ubiquity of language is a matter of language moving into the
vacancies left by the failure of all the various candidates for the position of
"natural starting-points" of thought, starting-points which are prior to and
independent of the way some culture speaks or spoke . (Candidates for such starting-points include
e.g., that it is more prevalent than had previously been thought. The authors cited are making only negative points.
clear and distinct ideas, sense-data, categories of the pure understanding, structures of prelinguistic consciousness, and the like.)
Peirce and Sellars and Wittgenstein are saying that the regress - of interpretation cannot be cut off by the sort of "intuition" which
Cartesian epistemology took for granted. Gadamer and Derrida are saying that our culture has been dominated by the notion of a
"transcendental signified" which, by cutting off this regress, would bring us out from contingency and convention and into the Truth.
Foucault is saying that we are gradually losing our grip on the "metaphysical comfort" which that Philosophical tradition provided-its
picture of Man as having a "double" (the soul, the Noumenal Self) who uses Reality's own language rather than merely the vocabulary
of a time and a place. Finally, Heidegger is cautioning that if we try to make Language into a new topic of Philosophical inquiry we
shall simply recreate the hopeless old Philosophical puzzles which we used to raise about Being or Thought. This last point amounts to
saying that what Gustav Bergmann called "the linguistic turn" should not be seen as the logical positivists saw it-as enabling us to ask
Kantian questions without having to trespass on the psychologists' turf by talking, with Kant, about "experience" or "consciousness."
That was, indeed, the initial motive for the "turn,"" but (thanks to the holism and pragmatism of the authors I have cited)
analytic philosophy of language was able to transcend this Kantian motive and
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adopt a naturalistic, behaviouristic attitude toward language. This attitude has
led it to the same outcome as the "Continental" reaction against the traditional
Kantian problematic, the reaction found in Nietzsche and Heidegger. This convergence shows that the traditional association of
analytic philosophy with tough-minded positivism and of "Continental" philosophy with tender-minded Platonism is completely misleading. The
pragmaticisation of analytic philosophy gratified the logical positivists' hopes,
but not in the fashion which they had envisaged. it did not find a way for
Philosophy to become "scientific," but rather found a way of setting Philosophy
to one side. This post-positivistic kind of analytic philosophy thus comes to resemble the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida tradition in
beginning with criticism of Platonism and ending in criticism of Philosophy as such. Both traditions are now in a period of doubt about their own
status. Both are living between a repudiated past and a dimly seen post-Philosophical future.
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Holocaust Trivialization Answers:

2AC (1/3)
1. NO LINK WE DONT ASSERT THAT AN EVENT WILL
OCCUR THAT IS IDENTICAL THE HOLOCAUST, BUT SHOW
THE POTENTIAL FOR ATROCITIES TO OCCUR IN THE
FUTURE BASED ON HISTORICAL EXAMPLES, SUCH AS THE
ONE PERPETRATED IN NAZI GERMANY
2. TURN - REJECTION OF HOLOCAUST RHETORIC
DEPOLITICIZES IT AND RESULTS IN FURTHERING OF
VICTIMIZATION, IGNORING THIRD WORLD VIOLENCE, AND
THE FAILURE OF RADICAL POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
Zizek 2001
[Slavoj, Go away, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, 2001, New York: Verso,
2001, 67-8//uwyo]
, this very depoliticization of the
Holocaust, its elevation into the properly sublime Evil, the un'touchable
Exception beyond the reach of 'normal' political discourse, can also be a political
act of utter cynical manipulation, a political intervention aiming at legitimizing a
certain kind of hierarchical political relation. First, it is part of the postmodern
strategy of depoliticization and/or victimization. Second, it disqualifies forms of
Third World violence for which Western states are (co)responsible as minor in comparison with the
Absolute Evil of the Holocaust. Third, it serves to cast a shadow over every rad -ical political
project - to reinforce the Denkverbot against a radical political imagination: 'Are you aware that what you propose leads ultimately to the
Holocaust?' In short: notwithstanding the unquestionable sincerity of some of its proponents , the 'objective' ideologicopolitical content of the depoliticization of the Holocaust, of its ele-vation into the abyssal absolute
Evil, is the political pact of aggressive Zionists and Western Rightist anti-Semites
at the expense oftoday's radical political possibilities. In it, Israeli expansionism towards Palestinians
Are these not the terms that designate the Lacanian encounter of the Real? However
para-doxically joins hands with the Western anti-Semite's avoidance of the concrete analysis of the political dynamics of anti-Semitism -of how
this same dynamics is today pursued by other means (or, rather, with other goals, displaced on to other targets
).
3. ENDORSING THE UNIQUENESS OF THE HOLOCAUST

IMPLICITLY DENIES OTHER HISTORICAL GENOCIDES,
MAKING FUTURE GENOCIDE INEVITABLE
Stannard 96
[David E., Prof. Am Studies @ Hawaii, Uniqueness as Denial, Is the Holocaust
Unique? Ed. Rosenbaum, 197]
In addition to the damage that is inherent tin the cultural violence of genocide denial there is the matter of the future dangers that it promotes.
:
Where scholars deny genocide, in the face of decisive evidence that it has occurred, they contribute to
a false consciousness that can have the most dire reverberations. Their
message, in effect, is: murderers did not really murder; victims were not really killed, mass
murder requires no confrontation, no reflection, but should be ignored, glossed over. In
this way scholars lend their considerable authority to the acceptance of this ultimate human crime. More than that, they encourage
indeed invite a repetition of that crime from virtually any source in the
immediate or distant future. By closing their minds to truth, that is, such scholars
contribute to the deadly psychohistorical dynamic in which unopposed genocide
begets new genocides.
As Roger Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton recently have written regarding the continuing denial of the Armenian holocaust
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This, of course, is one of the great and justified fears that Jews long have harbored regarding the threat of Holocaust denial that it invites
when advocates of the allegedly unique suffering

of the Jews during the Holocaust themselves participate in denial of other
historical genocides and such denial is inextricably interwoven with the very
claim of uniqueness they thereby actively participate in making it much easier
for those other genocides to be repeated. And, in the case of genocides against the native peoples of the
Americas, not to be repeated but to continue. As, indeed, they are at this very moment. For never, really, have they stopped .
repetition and anti-Jewish mass violence and killing. But
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2AC (2/3)
4. OUR COMPARISONS DONT DENY THE UNIQUENESS OF
THE SHOAH, OUR COMPARISON OF THE DIFFERENCES AND
SIMILARITIES PRECLUDES SUCH A BLANKET ATTITUDE
AND DEMONSTRATES HOW EASY IT IS FOR NORMAL
PEOPLE TO LAPSE INTO ATROCITY
Lifton & Markusen 90
[Robert, Psych prof at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Eric, Researcher at
Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, The Genocidal Mentality, 911//uwyo]
It is neither easy nor pleasant to invoke the Nazis for comparison with gorups
within our own democratic society. Our image of the Nazis tends to be that of
thugs murderers, an image they did much to earn. But students of Nazi genocide
have long stressed what recent work on the Nazi doctors has confimred: namely,
that ordinary Germans became involved in killing, people who had previously
shown no particular inclination toward violence. These findings are especially
troubling because they bring the Nazis closer to the rest of us. We are much
more comfortable viewing them as a separate tribe of demons. But the painful
truth is that, they are more part of our century, more involved in historical and
psychological questions that still bedevil us, than we have wished to
acknowledge. In our present genocidal predicament, responsibility lies in seeking
to draw form the Nazi project lessions that might head off the ultimate nuclear
Auschwitz.
To use the Nazis comparatively in this manner is in no way to deny the
uniqueness of their Holocaust. No other historical genocide has been so
systematically carried out against an entire people, even to attempt to round up
Jews from virtually all over the weorld in order to kill them. We therefore reject
the revisionist position of some German historians to the effect that the
Holocaust is just one of the many examples of cruelty that dominate human
history, and should be given no special emphasis. We would, in fact, insist upon
stressing differences or disanalogies between the Nazi and nuclear situations.
As Charles S. Maier explains, while exploring similar quesitons, Comparison is a
dual process that scrutinizes two or more systems to learn what elements they
have in common and what elements distinguish them. It does not assert
identity; it does not deny unique components.
The most fundamental difference, of course, is that Nazi mass killing is a matter
of historical record, so that (as one observer put it) even if nuclear-weapons
arrangements are viewed as an Auschwitz waiting to happen, no one is being
gassed or cremated. The distinction is between the actual and the potential.
Another fundamental difference has to do with intent. The Nazis killed
designated victimes primarily Jews, but also Gypsies, Poles, Russians, mental
patients, and homosexuals. In contrast, the stated nuclear intent is to prevent
war, and the killing would take place only with a failure of that structure of
deterrence. Still another difference is the reality of a dangerous adversary: the
Jews posed no threat to the Nazis, but the Soviets pose a real military threat to
us. And many more differences would emerge with a fuller exploration of the
complexities of German history. There is a final, sobering difference having ot do
with victimizers and victims. There was a clear-cut distinction between the Nazis
themselves as perpetrators and those they decided to kill. In the nuclear case,
should the weapons be used, there will be no such distinctions: everybody would
become a victim. At Nuremberg, after the Second World War, there was an
attempt to hold individuals and groups accountable for their role in killing. There
can be no nuclear Nuremberg; hope lies only in establishign responsibility for
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genocide prior to its occurring responsibility for participating in a genocideal
system and a genocidal process.
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2AC (3/3)
5. PROHIBITING COMPARISONS BETWEEN THE
HOLOCAUST AND OTHER HISTORICAL OCCURRENCES PUTS
US IN AN IMPOSSIBLE POSITION OF NOT BEING ALLOWED
TO REFLECT ON IT, PLAYING INTO THE HANDS OF
HOLOCAUST DENIERS
Zizek 2001
[Slavoj, Prof. @Inst. Of Sociology, U. of Ljubliana, Repeating Lenin, 2001,

www.lacan.com/replenin.htm Acc. 8-20-04]
In a closer analysis, one should exhibit how the cultural relativism of the "rightto-narrate" orientation contains its own apparent opposite, the fixation on the
Real of some trauma which resists its narrativization. This properly dialectical
tension sustains today's the academic "holocaust industry." My own ultimate
experience of the holocaust-industry police occurred in 1997 at a round table in
the Centre Pompidou in Paris: I was viciously attacked for an intervention in
which (among other things) I claimed, against the neoconservatives deploring
the decline of faith today, that the basic need of a normal human being is not to
believe himself, but to have another subject who will believe for him, at his place
- the reaction of one of the distinguished participants was that, by claiming this,
I am ultimately endorsing the holocaust revisionism, justifying the claim that,
since everything is a discursive construct, this includes also the holocaust, so it
is meaningless to search for what really happened there... Apart from displaying
a hypocritical paranoia, my critic was doubly wrong: first, the holocaust
revisionists (to my knowledge) NEVER argue in the terms of the postmodern
discursive constructionism, but in the terms of very empirical factual analysis:
their claims range from the "fact" that there is no written document in which
Hitler would have ordered the holocaust, to the weird mathematics of "taking
into account the number of gas ovens in Auschwitz, it was not possible to burn
so many corpses." Furthermore, not only is the postmodern logic of "everything
is a discursive construction, there are no direct firm facts" NEVER used to deflate
the holocaust; in a paradox worth noting, it is precisely the postmodern
discursive constructionists (like Lyotard) who tend to elevate the holocaust into
the supreme ineffable metaphysical Evil - the holocaust serves them as the
untouchable-sacred Real, as the negative of the contingent language games.26
The problem with those who perceive every comparison between the holocaust
and other concentration camps and mass political crimes as an inadmissible
relativization of the holocaust, is that they miss the point and display their own
doubt: yes, the holocaust WAS unique, but the only way to establish this
uniqueness is to compare it with other similar phenomena and thus demonstrate
the limit of this comparison. If one does not risk this comparison, of one prohibits
it, one gets caught in the Wittgensteinian paradox of prohibiting to speak about
that about which we cannot speak: if we stick to the prohibition of the
comparison, the gnawing suspicion emerges that, if we were to be allowed to
compare the holocaust with other similar crimes, it would be deprived of its
uniqueness...
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A2 Representation Links (1/4)

REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE DOES NOT PRECLUDE THE
Richard

I am
progress.

FOCUS ON REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE WORSENS REAL

VIOLENCE
Gomel, Tel-Aviv University, Written in Blood: Serial Killing and Narratives of
Identity, Post Identity, Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 1999, p. 24-25,
Elana
http://ids.udmercy.edu/pi/2.1/PI21_24-70.pdf, accessed 1/28/02
ONE CAN START WITH FOUCAULTS famous and endlessly circulated statement in The Order of Things: It is comforting, however, and a source of
profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will
disappear as soon as this knowledge has discovered a new form. (xxiii) Man the Universal Subject, a cookie-cutter mold of (post)technological
identity, stamping out simulacra of individuality. But why should we be comforted and experience relief at the thought of his imminent
dissolution? Perhaps because, at least from Adorno on, the subject of reason has also been identified as the subject of violence. The universal
the Enlightenment has been reconceptualized as the universal killer, armed

with the most potent of weaponsrepresentation. In their Introduction to the collection typically entitled
Man of
Violence of Representation Armstrong and Tennenhouse offer the basic formula of this approach: The violence of representation is the
suppression of difference (8). In this particular reading of Foucault the discursive constructedness of identity is directly responsible for corporeal
violence inflicted by some (post)modern subjects upon others. In his recent book Serial Killerr and in the series of articles that preceded it Mark
Seltzer applies this insight to the fascinating and grisly phenomenon of serial killing, variously identified also as stranger killing and sometimes
The
serial killer, I will be arguing, is in part defined by such a radicalized experience of
typicality within. Simply put, murder by numbers (as serial murder has been called) is the form
of violence proper to statistical persons . (30-1) Violence of representation,
representation of violence and violence per se smoothly link into an unbroken
chain, leading from statistics to mayhem and from typology of subjects to fingertyping of putrefying bodies . My goal in this essay
is to put a hitch into this chain, to question the easy fit between discursive moulds of identity and the individual selfexperience of serial killers, and to suggest that represenration may be not so much the cause of
violence as a post factum defence against it. I do not imply, however, that violence in general or serial murder
lust murder. For Seltzer the enigma of the serial killers personality consists in an experience of typicality at the level of the subject
in particular are totally free from the constraints of discourse or that the identity of the serial killer is not constructed using the building blocks of
the serial
form of violence is conditioned not so much by the monolithic coherence of
representation as by its breakdown. The violent behavior of a serial killer is not a direct outcome of any social
cultural narratives (though the narratives in question are more variegated than Seltzer suggests). Rather, I would claim that
construction but a random, causeless choice which is retrospectively incorporated into a generic narrative of identity. The repeated ritualistic
violence, then, becomes a means of reinforcing this identity but achieves precisely the opposite, its complete disintegration. Rather than being
generated by representation, corporeal violence offers a resistance to it.
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THEY MISUNDERSTAND COGNITION - IDENTIFICATION
WITH IMAGES OF DOMINATION UNDERMINES
RELATIONSHIPS OF SUBORDINATION
Krips '99
[Henry, Professor of Communication at the Pitt, Fetish: an erotics of culture,
Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999, 5-6//uwyo-ajl]
Arguments against linking the cultural and psychic realms also seem apposite in
criticizing MacKinnon's claim that there exists a direct causal connection
between pornography and a psychic characteristic of its male consumers,
namely sexual aggression. At a theoretical level, her argument fails to take into
account Freud's point that identification with a phantasy figure flows readily
across gender lines. For example, in the Dora case, Freud argues that Dora's behavior
manifests an unconscious desire for Frau K., her father's lover and suitor's wife. For Freud
her desire does not indicate any sexual instability. Instead, through an identification with
her father's desire, it signals an unconscious paternal identification. In other words, for
Freud the significant aspect of Dora's phantasy is not the sexual content of the
desire but rather the paternal position from which she engages with it. By parity
of reasoning, it follows that quite "normal" male readers of porn may identify
with the position of woman victim rather than male aggressor, in which case
their aggressive tendencies cannot be reinforced in the simplistic way that
MacKinnon suggests.3 In short, as Laura Kipnis points out, neither the biology
nor gender of readers of Hustler magazine determines the form of their
identification with its pornographic materials, let alone forces them into a
common psychic response (Kipnis 1996, 196). In the same way, one may argue,
gender-swapping phantasy games played by Net users do not indicate their gender
instability. On the contrary. one might turn the argument around and conclude that the
preponderance of biological males among Net users suggests that even when playing at
being a woman, they are engaging in a "boys' game."
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THEIR CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATIONS IS UTOPIAN,
BECAUSE REPRESENTATION CAN NEVER BE PERFECT RECOGNIZING THAT OUR REPRESENTATIONS ARE
IMPERFECT OPENS US THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ETHICAL
RELATIONSHIP TO OTHERS
Colebrook,"Questioning Representation", 2000
a strain of nostalgia and utopianism runs through both forms of antirepresentationalism: both the desire to return to a world that is lived as present,
rather than subjectively re-presented , and the desire to overcome all commitments to presence in
As I've already suggested,
the celebration of a [End Page 59] differential, non-autonomous and post-human writing. If the concept of representation generates the
, we have to ask ourselves

whether we can cleanse thought of the risky vocabulary of representation, whether
consistent incoherence of a real that is then represented and a subject who then represents
we can return to the lived immediacy of pre-modern pre-subjective mutual recognition, or whether we can paste over our Cartesian separation
and think a world that is not written by us but that writes itself. Is the representational antinomy or paradox an accident and is it curable?
We might consider post-Kantian anti-representationalism as an increasing anti-subjectivism. Talk of schemes, representations, constructions, and
paradigms does generate notions of what these schemes are schemes of. To talk of representation as a construction, schematization or
structuration also implies that there is one who constructs, or that there is (to use Nietzsche's phrase) a doer behind the deed (Nietzsche 1967,
45). Representation presents us with what Michael Dummett refers to as the danger of falling back into psychologism (1993, 129).
How possible is it to overcome these illusions and to remain within representation without appealing to what is, or, more important, without
demanding autonomy? Perhaps representation in both its epistemological and ethical/political senses is valuable precisely for the contradictions
and tensions it presents for thought. Consider, to begin with, knowledge as representation and the possibility that we might no longer trouble
ourselves with an ultimate foundation for our representations, and this because any attempt to do so would bring us up against our own
representational limit. In Realism with a Human Face, Hilary Putnam distinguishes between two broad readings of Wittgenstein's notion that the
limits of my language are the limits of my world. The first response to such a predicament would be to rule out as nonsensical any attempt to
think outside my world. The second response, favored by Putnam, would be that this recognition brings us up against the very notion that my
world is my world (Putnam 1990, 28). While we have no appeal or foundation that lies outside representation, we sustain a philosophical question
in the face of this inability. We might say, then, that rather than be ruled out of court as a nonsensical illusion, representation functions as a
useful antinomy. The idea that our world is always a represented world renders us both responsible for that world, at the same time as we
recognize our separation or non-coincidence with the world.
And this might be how we can retrieve a notion of autonomy through representation in the second, ethical, sense. As I have already suggested,
autonomy need not be defined as the feature of pre-social or pre-linguistic [End Page 60] moral individuals. Rather, to take an act of speech as
autonomous is to see it as not grounded in a pre-given, law, nature or being. Thus the "subject" on this account would not be a substantive entity
that authors its own meaning fully, but would be effected through acts of representation. Why save a notion of subjective autonomy? Think of the
converse situation: a world of writing effects, disowned speech acts, performances without performers or moves in a game without players. Such
a world imagines that it is possible to have a form of speech that does not carve out a point of view, that is not located in a way of being, that
presents no resistance to perpetual coming and self-invention. It is a world in which the representational illusion is disavowed, a world in which
speech takes place without the reifying error that I imagine myself as one who speaks. The idea that there is a writing, speaking or language that
represents and that can't be owned by subjects does, quite sensibly, challenge the idea that what we say is a straightforward representation of
what such an idea of a radically anonymous writing in

general precludes is the autonomy effects generated through processes of
representation. Just as cultural studies--we are told--dreams of a world in which truth claims, foundations and representational claims
some pre-linguistic meaning or ownness. But
are no longer made, and just as Richard Rorty imagines a world of ironists who accept their language games as nothing more than games and
themselves as nothing more than players (Rorty 1989, 80), so the attempt to think beyond autonomy imagines a world in which what I say is not
taken as issuing from the intention of some reified, congealed and illusory notion of man. But we might think of autonomy alongside the
antinomy of representation. To take demands as autonomous is to recognize them as both ungrounded, as well as being demands for a certain
grounding. If what I say makes a claim for autonomy, then it is both owned as what I say (and thereby institutes me as a subject), at the same
time as the claim for autonomy separates this saying from any pre-given subject. To be autonomous, a claim would have to be more than a
determined expression of a subject; it would have to have its own positive, singular and effective force. As Kant argued, true autonomy could not
be thought of as issuing from a natural ground; but once we think an autonomous law this generates the regulative idea (but not knowledge) of a
subject from whom this law has issued.
Consider this antinomy in terms of some of the typical approaches to representation in popular culture--in particular, in popular feminism. It is
widely asserted that women are subordinated to alien domains of representation. Eating disorders are explained by referring to the nonrepresentative nature of bodies in the media (Wolf 1990); pornography is [End Page 61] criticized as a misrepresentation of women as passive
and compliant sexual objects (Dworkin 1982); and, in general, the notion of stereo-type functions throughout feminism and other critical
movements to suggest that subjects suffer from alien representations. This critical approach to alien, imposed or stereotypical
representations more often than not issues in the demand for more accurate, authentic or
autonomous representations. In its simplest forms, the diagnosis of certain practices as a
form of representational violence is tied to the demand for an overcoming of the
representational divide. This demand would supposedly be met by more realistic
images of women, by non-patriarchal or non-objectifying erotica, and through the freeing of women from the representational closure of
the beauty myth. What is demanded, in short, is that the subject be continuous with representations: that there might be a public domain of
representation that is at one with one's inner being, where subjects would not regard themselves as extrinsic to, or belied by, a general
representational norm.
However, it is just this demand for non-separation from representation that sustains the problem, and part of this problem lies in not addressing
. The idea of a representation that would not be alien to my

being would only be possible on two counts: either by resisting the necessary
discontinuity of representation and insisting on the possibility of a proper or essential representation, or by
imagining that we could do away with being altogether, such that representation would not be seen
the predicament of autonomy
as discontinuous or alien to any pre-presentational thing. These two possibilities might be cashed out as follows. On the one hand, we could
achieve a social domain of complete mutual recognition (perhaps something like the Greek polis or the bourgeois public sphere) in which the
individual is thoroughly at one with the social whole. There would be no need for a demand for representation precisely because what functioned
as a normative representation of the individual would already be thoroughly normal. The domain of representation would be entirely proper, not
an alienation of my being, but its adequate expression. On the other hand, the representational scar might be healed by a radical resistance to
representation in general: the refusal of all norms, stereotypes or reified concepts of the individual. This would issue in the pulverization of the
representational domain, a multiplication of images, writing effects, simulacra or texts without author, identity or subject.
On both these accounts, what is resisted, refused or targeted as a symptom is autonomy: the idea of a self or subject outside the domain of
representation. In the first model of recognition, autonomy is lamented as a [End Page 62] symptom of a public/private divide that has alienated
the subject from socially recognizable being. For, it is argued, I need only demand autonomy in a world that already seems set over against me,
in a world that is not fully my world. In the second anti-representational model of proliferating simulacra or the virtual, what is resisted is the idea
that there is an autonomous subject who represents (or is represented). There is, rather, nothing other than representation; and this means that,
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strictly speaking, we are no longer talking about representation. In both these cases, one imagines a continuity with the world, a non-separation
of representation such that the horrors of anthropologism are resisted: life is not subordinated to some alien, imposed, or externally given notion
of man.
continued
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continued
what gets lost in this post-representational utopia (or retrieval of the pre-representational polity) is
the predicament of autonomy and its attendant responsibility. If we acknowledge an essential separation of
representation, then we also have to allow the question of who represents or what is demanding representation. The error of not
doing so would be anthropomorphism: a failure to recognize that experiencing a
world is always experiencing it in a certain way, from a certain point of view, and through a certain form of
But
life. This does not entail substantive subjectivism - the idea that the world is given to some pre-given subject. But the world is given in a certain
way, and this establishes a position with regard to the world. Acknowledging this minimal form of ownness or location of knowledge therefore
entails that we cannot think of the world as writing itself, giving itself or offering itself in a dispersed, anonymous or continuous representation.
The idea of autonomy enables us to think the point or determination of the world's representation: autonomy, not in the sense of giving oneself a
the dream of a pre-representational world

disavows the extent to which this
common good, as common, must already have separated itself from the
immediacy of any single experience. If we think of autonomy as a responsibility for the essential separation of
law, but in recognizing an effected lawfulness of the self. By contrast,
in which all human beings recognized themselves in a common good,
representation, then we bring back a fruitful tension.
To represent oneself is to submit to a transindividual system of language, signification or representation. But any such representational
scheme can never be fully disowned, rendered anonymous, collective, inhuman or fully dispersed beyond all
The idea of autonomous representation is, perhaps, an oxymoron.
subjectivity. Rather, the act of representation institutes autonomy, or places a self in a point of view. Autonomy ought not to be [End Page 63]
defined in terms of a being that is then expressed. Rather, the procedure of autonomy is a recognition that there is no foundational being other
than its continual institution through a representation that dislocates itself from a prior presence. If we do not recognize that representation
effects an autonomy that it can then be seen to belie, if we try to overcome this scar of representation, then we do so at the expense of
forgetting what it is to think. In short, we attack the error of anthropologism--the idea of a general human subject who represents us all--with the
error of anthropomorphism: the idea of a world that is fully and adequately given, without representation, separation or the contribution of
thought
REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE IS NOT THE SAME AS

ACTUAL VIOLENCE
Elana Gomel, Post Identity, Winter 1999
http://ids.udmercy.edu/pi/2.1/PI21_24-70.pdf
The universal Man of the Enlightenment has been reconceptualized as the
universal killer, armed with the most potent of weaponsrepresentation. In their
Introduction to the collection typically entitled Violence of Representation
Armstrong and Tennenhouse offer the basic formula of this approach: The
violence of representation is the suppression of difference ( 8). In this particular
reading of Foucault the discursive constructedness of identity is directly
responsible for corporeal violence inflicted by some (post)modern subjects upon
others. In his recent book Serial Killers and in the series of articles that preceded
it Mark Seltzer applies this insight to the fascinating and grisly phenomenon of
serial killing, variously identified also as stranger killing and sometimes lust
murder. For Seltzer the enigma of the serial killers personality consists in an
experience of typicality at the level of the subject:
The serial killer, I will be arguing, is in part defined by such a radicalized
experience of typicality within. Simply put, murder by numbers (as serial
murder has been called) is the form of violence proper to statistical persons.
(301)
Violence of representation, representation of violence and violence per se
smoothly link into an unbroken chain, leading from statistics to mayhem and
from typology of subjects to fingertyping of putrefying bodies. My goal in this
essay is to put a hitch into this chain, to question the easy fit between discursive
moulds of identity and the individual self-experience of serial killers, and to
suggest that representation may be not so much the cause of violence as a post
factum defence against it.
I do not imply, however, that violence in general or serial murder in particular
are totally free from the constraints of discourse or that the identity of the serial
killer is not constructed using the building blocks of cultural narratives (though
the narratives in question are more variegated than Seltzer suggests). Rather, I
would claim that the serial form of violence is conditioned not so much by the
monolithic coherence of representation as by its breakdown
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A2 Indigenous Peoples Labels

Bad: 2AC
CAN APPROPRIATE FLAWED RHETORIC OF OTHERS IN
ORDER TO CHALLENGE IT AS LONG AS OUR OWN
RHETORIC IS LIBERATORY
Pewewardy 99
[Cornel, Professor of Education at University of Kansas, Multicultural Educaiton,

Vol 6 No 3, Spring 1999, 6//uwyo-ajl]
Previous research focusing on aboriginal peoples in the United States have used
American Indian, Indian, and Native American as the nomenclature for this
population. This article subverts this traditiona by instead using the terms
Indigenous Peoples and First Nations People. These terms are capitalized
because they are proper nouns (particular persons) and not adjectives (words
describing nouns). It is also capitalized to signifiy and recognize the cultural
heterogeneity and political sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples in the western
hemisphere (Yellow Bird, personal communication, 1997). In this respect, the
consciousness of the oppressor transforms Inidgenous identity into a commodity
of its domination and disposal (Freire, 1997). Ceasing to call Indigenosu Peoples
American Indians is more than an attempt at political correctness. It is an act of
intellectual liberation and it is a correction to a distorting narrative of imperialist
discovery and progress that has been maintained far too long by Europeans
and Euro-Americans. Thus, American Indian and Indian are sometiems used
interchangeably in the vernacular of this article only when trying to make a point
in an attempt to liberate and combat linguistic hegemony, which is both a direct
and indrect power block to the identity of Indigenous Peoples (Yellow Bird,
personal communication, 1997).
FOCUSING ON LABELS FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES REIFIES

NON-INDIGENOUS RIGHTS TO LAND AND DEFLECTS
LEGITIMATE CRITICISM, CREATING MORE
DISEMPOWERMENT
dErrico 98
[Peter, Prof of Legal Studies at University of Massachusettes/Amherst, Native

American Studies A Note on the Name,
www.umass.edu/nativestudies/name.html, April 1998, acc 9-20-04//uwyo-ajl]
Concern for political correctness focused more on appearances than reality. As
John Trudell observed at the time, "They change our name and treat us the
same." Basic to the treatment is an insistence that the original inhabitants of the
land are not permitted to name themselves. As an added twist, it seems that the
only full, un-hyphenated Americans are those who make no claim of origin
beyond the shores of this land. Many of these folk assert that they are in fact the
real "native" Americans.
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Kritik Answers
EPrime Answers: 2AC (1/3)

EPRIME EXISTS ONLY AS A LINGUISTIC TOOL- IT IS NOT AN
INSTRUMENT OF POWER
WILSON NO DATE
[Robert Anton, nqa, http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm ]
Another concern I hear from people involves a false belief that those who
advocate the use of E-prime wish to change the English language through some
form of coercion, or lawful action. Folks, E-prime serves as a linguistic tool, not
as an instrument of power. I know of no advocate of E-prime, including its
inventors, who desire to change the history of literature or to force people to use
E-prime. Almost all of the works of literature, poetry, and religious scripture
contain abundant uses of non-E-prime and I've yet to meet an E-prime advocate
who wishes to change that.
EPRIME EXCLUDES ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF LANGUAGEUSING EPRIME IS CENSORSHIP

FRENCH 1992
[James D, Computer Programmer that writes a lot about linguistics and

semantics including articles published in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Top Ten
Arguments Against Eprime, Et Cetera, http://learn-gs.org/library/etc/49-2french.pdf //wyo-pinto]
THE CLAIM THAT E-Prime has an inherent, beneficial effect on
a person's writing ability seems highly questionable, considering
that E-Prime deliberately eliminates a whole class of
statements from the language, resulting in fewer alternatives .
The English writer can use all of the statements available to
the E-Prime writer, plus a whole class of statements containing
the verb "to be." The greater variety of available wordings
should make the English writer's efforts more interesting
to read, not less. (Any bad writing that occurs because of the
over-use of the verb "to be" - a common failing - can be
more easily overcome by simply cutting back on one's use of
"to be," rather than resorting to E-Prime .)
YOUR CONFLICT CLAIMS ARE BULLSHIT- CONTEXT SOLVES

THE LINKS TO YOUR ARGUMENT
FRENCH 1992
The harmful effects that may result from the use of the isofidentity and the is-of-predication are often ameliorated by
the context, and so the need to eliminate all such statements
from our language is not as great as the advocates of E-Prime
apparently assume. It is one thing to say, "The rose is red" in
a flat statement of "fact"; it is quite another to say, "The rose is
red to me." If in response to the question, "What does John
Jones do for a living?" I answer, "He's a professor," there
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Kritik Answers
seems to be little that a general semanticist should quarrel
with, given that the response is occurring within the context
of asking what the man does for a living, a context that greatly
affects the meaning of the answer .

NO BENEFIT TO EPRIME- IT SHUTS OFF LANGUAGE
FRENCH 1992
The range of perfectly acceptable "to be" statements covers
a vast expanse, and includes asymmetrical relations, e.g., "Mt.
McKinley is higher in elevation than Mt . Shasta"; negation,
"The map is not the territory" ; location, "Oakland is on the
west coast" ; auxiliary, "It is raining," "I am going to the store,"
etc.; and possibly many other unidentified forms, e.g., "I am
aware of that ." These forms must be sacrificed when adopting
E-Prime, at considerable cost for no proven benefit .
TO BE KEY TO PROGRESS
FRENCH 1992
There may be considerable benefits to humankind in the
use of the verb "to be" that the formulations of general semantics
do not take into consideration . We know that one of
the best languages for time-binding is mathematics, a language
that relies heavily on the notion of equivalence and
equality. "Y = Z" seems quite similar in form to "John Jones
is that professor." Mathematicians do not ascribe content to
their languages, however, whereas English speakers frequently
confuse language and "reality ." For the purposes of
time-binding and progress, it may be better to keep "to be" in
the language - but cut the link between identity-in-thelanguage
and identification-in-our-reactions (by training ourselves
in general semantics) - rather than to take a meat-axe
to the verb "to be ."
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Kritik Answers

EPRIME STOPS THE HUMAN RACE FROM ADVANCING AND
SHUTS OFF INDIVIDUAL AGENCY
FRENCH 1992
The phrase "the natural order of evaluation," as a general
semantics formulation, refers to the process of moving from
lower orders of abstraction to higher; from, for example, the
notions of test-taking, attending classes, and reading textbooks,
to the generalized notion of "student ." A civilization
advances when it can move from the idea of individual trees
to that of "forest." Korzybski claimed that the capacity to produce
higher and higher abstractions leads to a general consciousness
of abstracting, which he described as "the very key
to further human evolution ." (Science and Sanity, 3rd ed.,
p.xxi) E-Prime tends to make the expression of higher orders
of abstraction more difficult; instead of describing someone
as a student, for example, the E-Prime speaker is more likely
to say, "She attends classes at the university," or some such
thing. That sort of forced return to lower orders of abstraction
may have drawbacks that the advocates of E-Prime have
not examined . It would seem more in line with the timebinding
of the human race, to leave the individual free to
choose the appropriate order of abstraction in the given case,
rather than to erect a structure that forces him or her to lower
orders. Of course, many individuals do neglect the lower
orders of abstraction in their talking and reacting, but training
in general semantics may be a better prescription for that
malady than E-Prime .
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Kritik Answers
EPrime Bad (Jack Attack!)

EPRIME IS AN INSUFFICIENT ACTIVIST MOVE THE STATIC
NATURE OF THE TO BE VERB IS RECREATED BETWEEN
THE LINES
Burroughs '69
[William S., amazing writer and junkie, The Job, 199//uwyo]
Consider now the human voice as a weapon. To what extent can the unaided human voice duplicate effects that can be done with a tape
recorder? Learning to speak with the mouth shut, thus displacing your speech, is fairly easy. You can also learn to speak backwards which is
fairly difficult. I have seen people who can repeat what you are saying after you and finish at the same time. This is a most disconcerting trick,
particularly when practiced on a mass scale at a political rally.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO ACTUALLY SCRAMBLE
SPEECH?
A FAR-REACHING BIOLOGIC WEAPON CAN BE FORGED FROM A NEW LANGUAGE. In fact such a language already exists. It exists
as Chinese, a total language closer to the multi-level structure of experience, with a script derived from hieroglyphs, more closely related to the
objects and areas described. The equanimity of the Chinese is undoubtedly derived from their language being structured for greater sanity. I
notice the Chinese, wherever they are, retain the written and spoken language, while other immigrant peoples will lose their language in two
. THE AIM OF THE PROJECT IS TO BUILD A LANGUAGE IN WHICH CERTAIN

FALSIFICATIONS INHERENT IN ALL EXISTING WESTERN LANGUAGES WILL BE
INCAPABLE OF FORMULATION. The follow-falsifications to be deleted from the proposed language.
The IS of identity. You are an animal. You are a body. Now whatever you may be you are not an "animal," you are not a
"body," because these are verbal labels. The IS of identity always carries the implication of that
and nothing else, and it also carries the assignment of permanent condition . To stay
that way. All naming callling presupposes the IS of identity. The concept is unnecessary in a
hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian and in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun IS in the sky, sun in sky suffices . The
verb to be can easily be omitted from any language and the followers of Count
Korzybski have done this, eliminating the verb to be in English. HOWEVER, IT IS
DIFFICULT TO TIDY UP THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BY ARBITRARY EXCLUSION OF
CONCEPTS WHICH REMAIN IN FORCE SO LONG AS THE UNCHANGED LANGUAGE
IS SPOKEN"
generations
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**Fear Bad**
A2 Fear of Death Bad: 2AC (1/5)
1. NO LINK THEIR EVIDENCE IS DESCRIPTIVE OF PEOPLE
WHO ARE OBSESSED WITH DEATH IN THE PAST AND NOT
ADVOCACY OF POLICIES THAT ACTUALLY PREVENT
FUTURE VIOLENCE, LIKE THE 1AC
2. NOT COMPETITIVE THE 1AC DOESNT ARGUE, ON
FACE, THAT DEATH IS A BAD THING. THEY ASSUMED THAT
FOR THEMSELVES, WHICH PROVES THAT FEAR OF DEATH
IS INEVITABLE
3. GOOD FEAR OF DEATH IS DISTINCT FROM IRRATIONAL
FEAR IT ALLOWS US TO REDUCE DANGER, LIVE
ETHICALLY, AND PREPARE FOR A PEACEFUL DEATH ON
OUR OWN TERMS
Gyatso 2003
[Geshe Kelsang, fully accomplished meditation master, internationally renowned

spiritual teacher who can show us from his experience how to begin our spiritual
paths, author, Fear of Death, Tharpa Publications,
www.tharpa.com/background/fear-of-death.htm, acc 10-26-04//uwyo-ajl]
Generally, our fear of death is an unhealthy and unrealistic fear-we don't want to
die, so we ignore the subject, deny it, or get morbidly obsessed by it and think
that life is meaningless. However, right now we cannot do anything about dying,
so there is no point fearing death itself. What kind of fear is useful?
A healthy fear of death would be the fear of dying unprepared, as this is a fear
we can do something about, a danger we can avert. If we have this realistic fear,
this sense of danger, we are encouraged to prepare for a peaceful and
successful death and are also inspired to make the most of our very precious
human life instead of wasting it.
This "sense of danger" inspires us to make preparations so that we are no longer
in the danger we are in now, for example by practicing moral discipline, purifying
our negative karma, and accumulating as much merit, or good karma, as
possible.
We put on a seat belt out of a sense of danger of the unseen dangers of traffic
on the road, and that seat belt protects us from going through the windshield.
We can do nothing about other traffic, but we can do something about whether
or not we go through the windscreen if someone crashes into us.
Similarly, we can do nothing about the fact of death, but we can seize control
over how we prepare for death and how we die. Eventually, through Tantric
spiritual practice, we can even attain a deathless body.
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4. EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE REQUIRES A
REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION, MEANING THAT
BACKGROUND OF FEAR OF DEATH
Zizek '99
It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the
end of psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic
'rebirth' - the radical restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such
a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind.
Does not Lacan himself provide a number of hints that the end of
analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very
Pauline terms to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not
that of St Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does
not already posit a 'new harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were merely wipes the slate clean for one. However, this 'merely' should be
put in quotation marks, because it is Lacan's contention that, in this
negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is
confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a new TruthEvent. For Lacan, negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal, precedes
any positive gesture of enthusiastic identifiction with a Cause: negativity
functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic
identification - that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it,
but is simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly
changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what 'Death' stands for
at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night
of the world', the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of
subjectivity, the severing of its links with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the
slate clean' that opens up the domain of the symbolic New Beginning, of
the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier. Here, Lacan parts
company with St Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already was dead - that is to say, after Freud,
one cannot directly have faith in a Truth-Event;
every such Event ultimately remains a

semblance obfuscating a preceding Void whose Freudian name is death
drive. So Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination of the exact status of this domain
beyond the rule of the Law. That is to say: like Lacan, Badiou delineates the contours of a
domain beyond the Order of Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the
'morbid' super ego connection between Law and its transgressive desire. For Lacan, however,
the Freudian topic of the death drive cannot be accounted for in the terms of this connection:
the 'death drive' is not the outcome of the morbid confusion of Life and
Death caused by the intervention of the symbolic Law. For Lacan, the
uncanny domain beyond the Order of Being is what he calls the domain
'between the two deaths', the pre-ontologicalf domain of monstrous
spectral apparitions, the domain that is 'immortal', yet not in the
Badiouian sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but in the
sense of what Lacan calls lamella, of the monstrous 'undead' objectlibido.18
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5. FEAR OF DEATH MOTIVATES HEROIC PROTECTION OF
OTHERS, ALLOWING US TO TRANSCEND OUR ISOLATION
TOWARDS A LIBERATORY ETHICS OF LOVE AND JUSTICE
FOR THE OPPRESSED
Greenspan 2004
[Miriam, Psychotherapist who understands the Chakras, Excerpt, Healing
through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair, May 11,
2004, www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/excerpts/bookreview/excp_5513.html,
Acc 10-26-04//uwyo]
"Fear is a very powerful emotion. When you feel fear in your body, it's helpful to
relate to it as
an energy that can be mobilized for life. It may feel like a constriction in your
chest, throat, or abdomen. Breathe through it without judgment and allow
yourself to feel it as a very strong force. If you pray for help, you can begin to
expand this energy we call 'fear' and use it for healing and transformation.
"In this regard, we can take our model from the heroes of Flight 93 who. realizing
that they were bound for death, stormed the plane and brought it down without
hitting a civilian target. One cannot even imagine being able to do this without
fear. Fear for the lives of others was the energy that mobilized them to do
something meaningful with their last moments of life. Some of these people said
good-bye to their husbands and wives and wished them happiness before they
left this earth. They had found some peace in their last moments, peace in the
midst of turbulence. And they found it through their last wish, which they
heroically put into action: to help others live.
"Perhaps there is nothing that can redeem the dead but our own actions for the
good. This is a time to find out what we want to do for the world and do it. And,
as every trauma survivor knows, this is the way to make meaning out of pain,
perhaps the most effective way: to draw something good out of evil. The heroes
of September 11 point us to the choice we each have: to help create a state of
global peace and justice that we, like they, will not see before we die. It is in
giving ourselves to this vision, out of love for this world that we inhabit together,
that we stand a chance of transcending the human proclivity to damage life. And
that we honor those we have brought into this world and who must inherit it. . . .
"Our only protection is in our interconnectedness. This has always been the
message of the dark emotions when they are experienced most deeply and
widely. Grief is not just "my" grief; it is the grief of every motherless child, every
witness to horror in the world. Despair is not just "my" despair; it is everyone's
despair about life in the twentyfirst century. Fear is not just 'my' fear; it is
everyone's fear of anthrax, of nuclear war, of truck bombs, of airplane
hijackings, of things falling apart, blowing up, sickening and dying.
"If fear is only telling you to save your own skin, there's not much hope for us.
But the fact is that in conscious fear, there is a potentially revolutionary power of
compassion and connection that can be mobilized en masse. This is the power of
fear. Our collective fear, which is intelligent, is telling us now: Find new ways to
keep this global village safe. Find new forms of international cooperation that will
root out evil in ways that don't create more victims and more evil. Leap out of
the confines of national egos. Learn the ways of peace. Find a ceremony of
safety so that not just you and I but all of us can live together without fear."
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6. INACTION LEADS TO POWERLESSNESS AND AN
ENDLESS CYLE OF DESPAIR WORSE THAN FEAR ONLY
ACTION AGAINST NUCLEAR VIOLENCE CAN OVERCOME IT
Sandman & Valenti 86
[Peter M. & Joann M., Scared stiff or Scared into Action, Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, January 1986, 12-6//uwyo]
The main obstacle to action, writes Frank, is neither apathy nor terror but
simply a feeling of helplessness. To combat it, I have perhaps overemphasized
the small signs that antinuclear activities are at last beginning to influence the
political process.(19) Helplessness, hopelessness, futility, and despair are words
one hears even more often than fear from the barely active and the formerly
active. And like fear, these emotions can easily lead to psychic numbing. Those
who feel powerless to prevent nuclear war try not to think about it; and it serves
the needs of those who do not wish to think about nuclear war to feel powerless
to prevent it. Messages of hope and empowerment, however, break this vicious
circle.
The label hope, as we use it, subsumes a wide range of overlapping
concepts: for example, optimism, a sense of personal control and
efficacy, confidence in methods and solutions, a sense of moral
responsibility, and a vision of the world one is aiming for.
It is well established (and hardly surprising) that hope is closely
associated with willingness to act. Activism appeals most to people who
feel positive about both the proposed solution and their personal
contribution to its achievement. Over the long term, this means that
antinuclear organizers must communicate a credible vision of a nuclearfree world. Meanwhile, they must offer people things to do that seem
achievable and worthwhile. The nuclear-weapons-freeze campaign
attracted millions of new activists in 1982 because it offered credible
hope. By 1985 many of those millions could no longer ground their hope
in the freeze; some found other approaches and some returned to
inactivity.
Most social psychologists today see the relationship between hope and
action as independent of fear or other feelings. For example, Kenneth H.
Beck and Arthur Frankel conclude that three cognitions (not emotions)
determine whether people will do something about a health risk:
recognizing the danger as real, believing the recommended plan of
action will reduce the danger, and having confidence in their ability to
carry out the plan. (20)
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7. DENIAL OF FEAR CAUSES POWERLESSNESS THAT
MAINTAINS THE PARANOIAC POSTURES OF NATIONALISM,
NUCLEARISM, AND STATE VIOLENCE FEAR OF
DESTRUCTION MOTIVATES US TO OVERCOME THOSE
DIVISIONS
Gleisner 83
[John, consultant psychiatrist at the North Western Regional Health Authority in
Greater Manchester, active in the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons,
The enemy within, new internationalist 121, March,
www.newint.org/issue121/enemy.htm, acc 10-26-04//uwyo]
The noted sociologist and psychologist Gregory Bateson drew an analogy
between nuclear deterrence and drug addiction: the fix (new weapon) gives a
sense of wellbeing that gradually fades only to require a bigger fix. What the two
also have in common is a powerful dose of denial. Denial of the danger of
nuclear war underlies government thinking on defense. The publics denial may
be less strong, but they are hampered in their understanding by a pervading
sense of powerlessness, which in turn leads to more denial: nuclear war may
well happen. But not to me.
Our thinking cannot change without combatting denial and projection the
mechanisms of the psychological war machine. Logical argument in the face of
paranoia is as ineffective as with a person in the grips of a psychotic episode.
Emotion is whats needed emotion directed appropriately. Fear of nuclear war
and its effects are legitimate and appropriate and can lead to reappraisal of the
old fear the Russian threat. Another method of penetrating denial is to look
for the absurdity in the whole upside-down logic of the old them-us thought
structure.
Confronting denial and projection can be painful, disorienting and can leave one
feeling powerless. But another new belief network is gaining ground. The peace
movement is at last building another way of thinking that can sway governments
as countless people are daring to reject the old them-us psychology. But the
question is: can we develop this new way of thinking in time to avert
catastrophe?
8. FEAR OF DEATH IS NECESSARY TO PREVENT GENOCIDE

AND EXTINCTION
Beres, PhD at Princeton, 96 (Louis Rene, No Fear, No Trembling Israel,
Death and the Meaning of Anxiety,
www.freeman.org/m_online/feb96/beresn.htm)
Fear of death, the ultimate source of anxiety, is essential to human survival. This is true not
only for individuals, but also for states. Without such fear, states will exhibit an
incapacity to confront nonbeing that can hasten their disappearance. So it is today
with the State of Israel. Israel suffers acutely from insufficient existential dread. Refusing to tremble before the growing
prospect of collective disintegration - a forseeable prospect connected with both genocide and war - this state is now
unable to take the necessary steps toward collective survival. What is more, because death is the one fact of life which is
not relative but absolute, Israel's blithe unawareness of its national mortality deprives its still living days of essential
confronting death can give the most

positive reality to life itself. In this respect, a cultivated awareness of nonbeing is central to each state's
pattern of potentialities as well as to its very existence. When a state chooses to block off such an
awareness, a choice currently made by the State of Israel, it loses, possibly forever, the altogether critical
benefits of "anxiety." There is, of course, a distinctly ironic resonance to this argument. Anxiety, after all, is
absoluteness and growth. For states, just as for individuals,
generally taken as a negative, as a liability that cripples rather than enhances life. But anxiety is not something we
"have." It is something we (states and individuals) "are." It is true, to be sure, that anxiety, at the onset of psychosis, can
lead individuals to experience literally the threat of self-dissolution, but this is, by definition, not a problem for states.
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Anxiety stems from the awareness that existence can actually be destroyed , that
one can actually become nothing. An ontological characteristic, it has been commonly called Angst, a word related to
anguish (which comes from the Latin angustus, "narrow," which in turn comes from angere, "to choke.") Herein lies the
relevant idea of birth trauma as the prototype of all anxiety, as "pain in narrows" through the "choking" straits of birth.
Kierkegaard identified anxiety as "the dizziness of freedom," adding: "Anxiety
is the reality of freedom

as a potentiality before this freedom has materialized." This brings us back to Israel. Both
individuals and states may surrender freedom in the hope of ridding themselves of an
unbearable anxiety. Regarding states, such surrender can lead to a rampant and delirious collectivism
which stamps out all political opposition. It can also lead to a national self-delusion which
augments enemy power and hastens catastrophic war. For the Jewish State, a lack of
pertinent anxiety, of the positive aspect of Angst, has already led its people to what is likely an irreversible rendezvous
with extinction.
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#3 Good Fear of Death: 1AR (1/2)

PLAN SOLVES BY EMBRACING AN ETHIC OF UNIVERSAL
SYMPATHY WE CAN COME TO TERMS WITH OUR OWN
DEATH BY ALLEVIATING THE SUFFERING OF OTHERS
Schulz, Professor of Philosophy @ Tubigen U, 2K (Walter, Continental Philosophy
Review 33, P. 483-485)
It is significant that the death of others is thematized neither by Scheler nor by Heidegger and Sartre. These thinkers
begin their analyses of death always from the self that is in each case mine as an isolated individual. The meaning that
the death of others has for me is not regarded by them. The centering of the death problem in the question of ones own
death may be conditioned by the hegemony of the principle of interiority in the epoch of Christian metaphysics, whose
one may not,

when one wants to comprehend the whole problem of death, look only ahead
towards ones own death. However, it is this shall once more be expressly exhibited just as
necessary, to go against the other extreme which confronts us in modern
sociological observations of images of death. Its characteristic is that it
thematizes only death, more exactly: the dying of others. This modern approach blocks so
secularized form is existential philosophy. This is factically a constriction of the problematic. Thus,
we think from its point of view the complex of questions in an almost stronger way than the existentialist perspective,
insofar as here the fact is excluded along with disregarding his own death that man is a self-understanding and as
such fears death. In opposition to the one-sidedness of both either thematizing only my death or observing only the
dying of others one ought to treat the phenomenon of death dialectically ; that is, to refer
to the facts, that man following Kierkegaard is himself and the same time his species. In The Concept of Anxiety
Kierkegaard brought to our attention the meaning of this complex in relation to history. Every individual for himself takes
as his point of departure his history and advances the history of the species which, however, represents its own
dimension. This means that the individual can just as little be released from universal history as the latter can be
released from the individual, whereby the individuals history and the history of the species can exhibit not only different
tendencies, but also both make it possible to experience in relation to one another a different evaluation: one can lose
This dialectical approach, which has

says in our context we are here pulling
together our argumentation my death as an individual and death in general, which
occurs to the human species, must not be thought without the other . My death
oneself in universal history or over-emphasize ones own singularity.
still in no way been philosophically estimated in its universal meaning, now
appears to me as the essential, and at the same time I do in fact know that my death is only a special case of death in
This dialectic, from which a mediation appears possible between existential introspection and sociological
becomes first concrete through the insertion of a mediating
determination between my death and death in general. This mediating
determination is the death of other men or women, which, existentially and sociologically
regarded, can in fact become relevant for me in thoroughly different degrees and
under the most differentiating respects. None of these three determinations dyingness in general,
general.
extrospection,
the death of others and my death are, however, posited for themselves, rather all of them are to be mediated with the
other. The structure of this mediation shall be made more clear by way of example in the brevity required here. The
general determination of dyingness and transitoriness becomes for me first and foremost tangible and concrete in the
death of others. It becomes in no way superfluous through this concretization. It remains essential as a background
determination, and that means it indicates the possibility of my death. The observation of death, more exactly, the dying
of others, is certainly the only real experience of death. But in this extrospection the possible relation to my death comes
into play and plays along always already more or less concealed, because the other and myself are subjugated to the
same destiny of dying. Vice versa: the passing into death or more simply said: the thought, I myself must die, which
comes over the aging human being becomes a little more tolerable in dialectically looking away from myself, that means
in view of the universal lot of dying, that itself only appears in stark reality, when we actually see humans dying and
observe the uncanny change from life to death in order to cite an interpretation of Max Schur on Freuds sentence from
beings actually die, not only a few, rather all

of them, each and every one of us, when it is his turn. This dialectic - in which I look away from myself
the work Reflections upon War and Death: Human
to others or from others to myself, uniting us under the universal lot of transitoriness is no solution to the problem of
death, not even a recipe against the fear of death. But the possibility of a resigned acquiesce that stands opposite both
the struggle against violent death over against the help for
the dying indicates certainly here that they can be taken up in their positivity
without falling into the illusion that death can be abolished and that the fear of
death is an archaic remnant and in itself irrational. Both these tendencies find
their foundation in the thought of a universal sympathy that binds me to all
things living. This sympathy actualizes itself as sympathy, which means as a
return behind selfishness in all its forms. This return is identical with the
immediate recognition that the other is equal to me insofar as he is also a living
thing, which must expire and become nothing. This connectedness between
human beings that reveals itself in the light of the common determinateness of
death retains in its ground that is, in the thought of universal transitoriness
the form of negativity. But it also refers to the fact that the individual does not
have to stare spellbound at his own imminent end. Rather if surely also to a small
tendencies at work today
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degree only the individual is able to think beyond his death in view of the task
common to everyone, reducing suffering within the world in the face of death.
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#3 Good Fear of Death: 1AR (2/2)

HEALTHY FEAR OF DEATH PREVENTS SHORT-TERM WORSE
FORMS OF DEATH, MOTIVATING ACTION FOR A BETTER
LIFE
Gyatso 2003
[Geshe Kelsang, fully accomplished meditation master, internationally renowned
spiritual teacher who can show us from his experience how to begin our spiritual
paths, author, Fear of Death, Tharpa Publications,
www.tharpa.com/background/fear-of-death.htm, acc 10-26-04//uwyo-ajl]
According to Buddhism, there is unhealthy fear and healthy fear. For example,
when we are afraid of something that cannot actually harm us - such as spiders or something we can do nothing to avoid - such as old age or being struck down
with smallpox or being run over by a truck - then our fear is unhealthy, for it
serves only to make us unhappy and paralyze our will.
On the other hand, when someone gives up smoking because they are
afraid of developing lung cancer, this is a healthy fear because the
danger is real and there are constructive steps they can take to avoid it.
We have many fears-fear of terrorism, fear of death, fear of being
separated from people we love, fear of losing control, fear of
commitment, fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of losing our job, the
list is never-ending! Many of our present fears are rooted in what Buddha
identified as "delusions" - distorted ways of looking at ourself and the
world around us. If we learn to control our mind, and reduce and
eventually eliminate these delusions, the source of all our fear-healthy
and unhealthy-is eradicated. However, right now we need the healthy
fear that arises from taking stock of our present situation so that we can
resolve to do something about it. For example, there is no point in a
smoker being scared of dying of lung cancer unless there is something
that he or she can or will do about it, i.e. stop smoking. If a smoker has a
sufficient fear of dying of lung cancer, he or she will take steps to kick
the habit. If he prefers to ignore the danger of lung cancer, he will
continue to create the causes of future suffering, living in denial and
effectively giving up control.
Just a smoker is vulnerable to lung cancer due to cigarettes, it is true
that at the moment we are vulnerable to danger and harm, we are
vulnerable to ageing, sickness, and eventually death, all due to our
being trapped in samsara the state of uncontrolled existence that is a
reflection of our own uncontrolled minds. We are vulnerable to all the
mental and physical pain that arises from an uncontrolled mind-such as
the pains that come from the delusions of attachment, anger, and
ignorance.
We can choose to live in denial of this and thereby give up what control
we have, or we can choose to recognize this vulnerability, recognize that
we are in danger, and then find a way to avert the danger by removing
the actual causes of all fear (the equivalent of the cigarettes) - the
delusions and negative, unskillful actions motivated by those delusions.
In this way we gain control, and if we are in control we have no cause for
fear. A balanced fear of our delusions and the suffering to which they
inevitably give rise is therefore healthy because it serves to motivate
constructive action to avoid a real danger. We only need fear as an
impetus until we have removed the causes of our vulnerability through
finding spiritual, inner refuge and gradually training the mind.
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#4 Repression Turn: 1AR (1/3)

EXTEND THE ZIZEK 99 CARD. THERES NO SUCH THING
AS A PURE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE. EVERY TIME YOU SAY
THAT SOMETHINGS GOOD, BETWEEN THE LINES YOURE
SAYING THAT SOMETHING ELSE, LIKE DEATH, IS BAD
BECAUSE THE UNCONSCIOUS STAIN OF YOUR OWN
MORTALITY IS IN THE BACKGROUND OF EVERY ACTION
THAT YOU TAKE, WHETHER ITS EXPLICT OR NOT. THEIR
YES TO LIFE IS AN IMPLICIT NO TO THE SAME DEATH
THAT WERE SAYING IS BAD. FEAR OF FINITUDE IS STILL
CONTAINED IN ALL OF THEIR ARGUMENTS, REPRESSED
BENEATH THE SURFACE OF THEIR WORDS, MEANING THAT
IT EMERGES IN EVEN WORSE FORMS THAT YOU CANT
INTERROGATE BECAUSE YOUVE MADE THEM INVISIBLE,
TURNING THE CRITICISM.
THIS MEANS WELL WIN THE UNIQUENESS FOR OUR
TURNS BECAUSE SOME FORM OF ANXIETY FROM DEATH IS
INEVITABLE IN ALL DISCOURSE, THE ONLY QUESTION IS
OF WHETHER THOSE REPRESENTATIONS INTERROGATE
THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY OF POLITICAL REALITY BY
ACKNOWLEDING OUR INEVITABLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE
TRAUMA OF DEATH THATS INHERENTLY REPRESSED BY
THE SYMBOLIC. THERES ONLY A RISK OF THE
ALTERNATIVE MASKING FEARS INFLUENCE.
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THEORETICAL DISTANCE FROM OUR OWN LIKELIHOOD OF
DEATH IS AN ATTEMPT TO PHANTASMICALLY ERASE THE
ANXIETY THAT IT CAUSES, MASKING HOW IT AFFECTS OUR
DAILY ACTIVITY IN COVERT WAYS
Park 2001
[James, Philosopher, Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety & Death, 4th ed.,
www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/XP181.html, acc 10-26-04//uwyo-ajl]
The 'fear of death' is a composite experience encompassing:
(1) the abstract, objective, external, empirical fact of biological death;
(2) our personal, subjective, emotional fear of ceasing-to-be,
which arises from our awareness of our own finitude, and
(3) our ownmost ontological anxiety,
our Existential Predicament disguised as the fear of ceasing-to-be.
This least understood and most repressed existential dimension of
death,
which has also been called "being-towards-death"
and "the anxiety-of-nonbeing",
will be the central focus of this phenomenological investigation.
Whenever "death" is mentioned, we think first of biological death,
but this tendency to focus exclusively on the objective, terminal fact of
dying
may well be a trick of thought designed to protect us
from noticing our fear of ceasing-to-be or our even deeper ontological
anxiety.
We have other protective techniques as well:
religious illusions, philosophical desensitization, and diversionary smalltalk.
Most of these distracting ploys amount to seeing death exclusively
as an objective event, which befalls all plants, animals, and people
eventually.
All such attempts to picture and talk about death as a fact
are (at least in part) attempts to evade the two deeper dimensions of
death
by interpreting death only from the point of view of a spectator.
Even our scholarly symposia about death
are often designed to provide an objective understanding of death.
Such approaches keep death outside of ourselves
a phenomenon we know about only as observers, never as
participants.
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ONLY DIRECTLY ADDRESSING THE ANXIETY PROVOKED BY
FINITUDE BY OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGING ITS INFLUENCE
CAN TRAVERSE THAT MASKING PROCESS, ALLOWING US
TO COME TO TERMS WITH DEATHS HOLD OVER US
Park 2001
[James, Philosopher, Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety & Death, 4th ed.,
www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/XP181.html, acc 10-26-04//uwyo-ajl]
But it will be more difficult to separate the deeper dimensions of death:
our terrifying fear of ceasing-to-be and our underlying ontological
anxiety. If we probe even below our personal fear of ceasing-to-be-inthe-world, we may discover the cause of much of our evasive talk and
deceptive posturing; we may pull the covers off our trembling, naked
ontological anxiety. If we find ways to look deeply into ourselves,
exposing even our most clever tricks of thought, then not only will we
begin truly to fear our own deaths, but we may even confront our
underlying ontological anxiety.
This ontological anxiety is obscurely felt by all of us as a subjective
awareness drifting up from our inner depths, a pervasive haunting of our
whole being, which we are reluctant to confront because we have no
easy way to handle it. This continuous inner state-of-being is not the
result of the fact of dying; it is not worry arising from the inevitability of
actual death. Rather, our ontological anxiety is the deepest truth of our
existence, obviously deeper than the external, objective, empirical fact
of biological death, but even deeper than our inward, subjective,
personal fear of ceasing-to-be. Our ontological anxiety does not arise
from the fact of death, but much of our concern about death arises from
our ontological anxiety! (This paradoxical statement should become
clear in the next 70 pages.)
If our ontological anxiety truly grips us, we can go either of two
possible ways: (1) We can organize our lives around this all-pervasive
'threat', courageously embracing our ontological anxiety, moving
ourselves toward "Authentic Existence". Or (2) we can be freed from our
ontological anxiety after having fully acknowledged it (and attained
some Authenticity), thereby coming into the new inner state-of-being
"Existential Freedom".
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#5 Fear is Key to Love: 1AR

LOVE AND FEAR ARE COMPATIBLE FEAR IS NECESSARY
TO PROTECT LOVED ONES
Sandman and Valenti, Prof of Human Ecology @ Rutgers and Preeminent
Risk Communications Expert, 86 (Peter and JoAnn, Scared stiff or scared into action ,
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1986, P. 1216,
http://www.psandman.com/articles/scarstif.htm)
Love Anger without love soon becomes sterile or uncontrolled, while love without anger can still inspire a movement. But
there is no need to choose; love and anger are compatible. Nothing could better symbolize anger than the powerful boltcutters with which the Greenham Common women routinely destroy the fence surrounding the cruise missile site.
Nothing could better symbolize love than the webs of twine and ribbon and memorabilia with which they decorate the
same fence. We suspect it is this combination the anger not rancid, the love not languid that has captured the
Love is compatible with fear as well. As we suggested

people are more affected by fear appeals targeted at
their loved ones than by those aimed at themselves. Ironically, one of the classic
studies from the early 1960s tried to persuade citizens to support community
fallout shelters; strong fear appeals threatening family safety worked better than
threats to the individual.(17) But love is not compatible with psychic numbing. Just as numbness
interferes with the ability to love freely, so active love drives away the
numbness. Antinuclear activists almost universally report that they remain active less for themselves than for those
imaginations of peace activists around the world.
earlier, some evidence indicates that
they love, and that without love they could not stay with the fight. This is not to suggest that these activists are more
loving than their neighbors, only that their love helps them stay active and that their activism is a powerful expression of
Just as
activists rely on love to keep them going, one can mobilize the uninvolved by
talking about the people, places, and values one holds dear and encouraging
listeners to do the same. Something or someone to fight for is as indispensable
to activism as something or someone to fight against.
love. It is relevant that the children of activists are far more confident of their futures than most children.(18)
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#6 Inaction Turn: 1AR

POLICY ACTION AGAINST NUCLEAR WAR SPURS RADICAL
CHANGE TOWARDS A POLITICS OF PEACE AND LOVE
Sandman & Valenti 86
[Peter M. & Joann M., Scared stiff or Scared into Action, Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, January 1986, 12-6//uwyo]
While people are most likely to take action against nuclear war when they feel
angry, loving, and hopeful rather than terrorized into numbness, it is also true
that action against nuclear war tends to liberate peoples anger, love, and hope.
The growth of commitment is circular, in other words, with feelings,
understandings, and behaviors alternating in complex patterns; action, however,
is likely to begin the process.
The notion that behavior is as much a cause as a result of feeling, attitude, and
knowledge is commonplace among clinicians, who often urge clients to try new
behaviors as a way of breaking patterns and opening a path to new
understanding. It is familiar ground also for social psychologists and provides the
foundation for one of psychologys most robust persuasion models, Leon
Festingers theory of cognitive dissonance, whereby behavior triggers an effort
to regain consistency by finding information and building attitudes to support
the behavior itself. (23)
This theory makes sense of what petition-circulators have universally observed:
that people are more likely to read the literature they are offered after signing
than before. If before signing they experience the literature as an unwelcome
prod, after signing (out of politeness, perhaps) they need the literature to justify
their new behavior.
The lesson for the antinuclear movement is clear: Any experience such
as signing petitions, wearing buttons, or going to rallies however
partial or even irrelevant its motivation can provide a reason to
consider the issues more deeply, and this consideration can launch a
cycle of incrementally increasing commitments to peace.
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#7 Fear Solves War: 1AR

FEAR OF NUCLEAR WAR IS CRITICAL TO PREVENTING ALL
OUT STATE VIOLENCE AND WAR
Futterman 94
[J.A.H., fortysomething male, enjoys classical, folk, bluegrass, jazz,
some rock, & some rap, self-identifies as a Lutheran Jewpiscopalian,
and watches Iron Chef, Obscenity and Peace: Meditations on the
Bomb, Virtual Church of the Blind Chihuahua,
www.dogchurch.org/scriptorium/nuke.html, acc. 10-26-04//uwyo]
I could say that if I didn't do it, someone else would, but that answer was
rejected at Nuremberg. (It's also a better reason to leave the weapons
program than to stay.) I continue to support the nuclear weapons
business with my effort for many reasons, which I discuss throughout
this piece. But mostly, I do it because the fear of nuclear holocaust is the
only authority my own country or any other has respected so far when it
comes to nationalistic urges to make unlimited war. As William L. Shirer
states in his preface to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Touchstone
Books, New York, 1990),
"Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in
the tradition of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, and the Third Reich
the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France,
Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of
history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the
ballistic missile, and of rockets which can be aimed to hit the moon."
Now this contrasts with the argument of those who would "reinvent
government" by putting up bureaucratic roadblocks to maintaining the
reliability of the US nuclear arsenal through research and testing. They
reason that if the reliability of everyone's nuclear arsenals declines,
everyone will be less likely to try using them. The problem is that some
"adventurer-conqueror" may arise and use everyone's doubt about their
arsenals to risk massive conventional war instead. An expansionist
dictatorship might even risk nuclear war with weapons that are simpler,
cruder, less powerful, much riskier (in terms of the possibility of
accidental detonation) but much more reliable than our own may
eventually become without adequate "stockpile stewardship."[14]
But the inhibitory effect of reliable nuclear weapons goes deeper than
Shirer's deterrence of adventurer-conquerors. It changes the way we
think individually and culturally, preparing us for a future we cannot now
imagine. Jungian psychiatrist Anthony J. Stevens states, [15]
"History would indicate that people cannot rise above their narrow
sectarian concerns without some overwhelming paroxysm. It took the
War of Independence and the Civil War to forge the United States, World
War I to create the League of Nations, World War II to create the United
Nations Organization and the European Economic Community. Only
catastrophe, it seems, forces people to take the wider view.
Or what about fear? Can the horror which we all experience when we
contemplate the possibility of nuclear extinction mobilize in us sufficient
libidinal energy to resist the archetypes of war? Certainly, the moment
we become blas about the possibility of holocaust we are lost. As long
as horror of nuclear exchange remains uppermost we can recognize that
nothing is worth it. War becomes the impossible option. Perhaps horror,
the experience of horror, the consciousness of horror, is our only hope.
Perhaps horror alone will enable us to overcome the otherwise invincible
attraction of war."
Thus I also continue engaging in nuclear weapons work to help fire that
world-historical warning shot I mentioned above, namely, that as our
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beneficial technologies become more powerful, so will our weapons
technologies, unless genuine peace precludes it. We must build a future
more peaceful than our past, if we are to have a future at all, with or
without nuclear weapons a fact we had better learn before worse
things than nuclear weapons are invented. If you're a philosopher, this
means that I regard the nature of humankind as mutable rather than
fixed, but that I think most people welcome change in their personalities
and cultures with all the enthusiasm that they welcome death thus,
the fear of nuclear annihilation of ourselves and all our values may be
what we require in order to become peaceful enough to survive our
future technological breakthroughs.[16]
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Spectacle of Death Good (1/4)

DEATH IMAGERY AFFIRMS LIFE AND OPENS UP THE
POSSIBILITY OF CHANGE
Fox, Philosophy Professor at Queens, 85 (Michael Allen, Nuclear War: Philosophical
Perspectives, ed. Fox and Groarke, p. 127)
There remains but one choice: we must seek a reduction of world tensions, mutual trust, disarmament, and peace.35
Security is not the absence of fear and anxiety, but a degree of stress and
uncertainty with which we can cope and remain mentally healthy. For security,
understood in this way, to become a feature of our lives, we must admit our
nuclear fear and anxiety and identify the mechanisms that dull or mask
our emotional and other responses. It is necessary to realize that we cannot entrust security
to ourselves, but, strange as it seems and however difficult to accept, must entrust it to our adversary Just as the safety
and security of each of us, as individuals, depends upon the good will of every other, any one of whom could harm us at
any moment, so the security of nations finally depends upon the good will of other nations, whether or not we willingly
The disease for which we must find the cure also requires
that we continually come face to face with the unthinkable in image
accept this fact.
and thought and recoil from it. 36 In this manner we can break its hold over us and free ourselves to begin new
confronting massive death helps us bring

ourselves more in touch with what we care most about in life. We
[will then] find ourselves in no way on a death trip, but rather
responding to a call for personal and professional actions and
commitments on behalf of that wondrous and fragile entity we
know as human life.
initiatives. As Robert J. Lifton points out,
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DEATH IS OMNIPRESENT. THE SPECTACLE IS THE ONLY
WAY ONE CAN EVEN BEGIN TO COME TO TERMS WITH
DEATH
Gonzalez-Crussi, M.D. Pathologist, Children's Memorial Hospital,
Confronting the Margin, June 2, 2000, http://seeingthedifference.berkeley.edu/gonzFrank
crussi.html, accessed 1/23/03
What one may actually perceive in the spectacle of death depends on the
individual. Seeing is invariably in the eye of the beholder. I shall briefly refer to
two styles of seeing that I may call "culturally dependent," for lack of a better
term. In the traditional Mexican culture, which is permeated by a strong current
of Indian naturalism, death is something very concrete. I am not an
anthropologist, but this much I can say from my subjective impressions during
my youth: death in Mexico is always embodied. Death is this cadaver, right here.
It is something that may be palpated, touched, weighed, turned around. I was
always impressed by the directness with which the survivors addressed the
cadaver during a funeral ceremony in the lower socio-economic strata. There is
much display of emotion, and the bereaved talk to the deceased. It is a new
form of relationship. The survivors speak to the dead person: they reproach him
for having left this world; they remind him of the joys and sorrows that they
shared together; they make confessions, grant absolutions or admit having
wronged him; and they promise him that they will remember him forever. They
talk to him, not at him. I am sure that, if these addresses were only monologues,
they were the kind of monologue that absolutely required the presence of the
cadaver as mediator of the monologizing. The present-absent is much more
present than absent, if I may thus express this unique status. In other words, the
corporeal reality of the departed is strongly felt. It is a powerful sign that
propitiates the illusion that the dead are still with us. Death is primarily a
presence. When the dead are deprived of their corporal wrappings--the flesh,
the nerves, the arteries (by now utterly superfluous)--there remains the
skeleton. The skeleton is the almost universal emblem of death. But because it is
eminently tangible and concrete--solid, stone-like--it has had a great career in
Mexico. In the Mexican culture, the symbolic skeleton, the calavera, is not only
felt, palpated, and even played with, but is also tasted, in the form of the sugar
skulls that are consumed on All Souls Day, the day of the dead. For it is not only
recent death that has a presence. Death is recurrently present, eminently
present in the mind, at least on All Souls Day, the Dia de los Muertos, the "Day
of the Dead," year after year. It is otherwise for cultures in which death is
primarily an absence or a disappearance. In one philosophical tradition of AngloAmerican culture, the living person is easily destroyed. Recall that John Locke
says that personal identity is "inseparable from thinking," a mere consciousness
displaying unity across time. And David Hume saw the person as "a train of
perceptions" glued together by certain relations. Consciousness must attach
itself to an animal body, or, as we say today more specifically, to a functioning
brain. But body and brain were secondary, and in a sense irrelevant.
Consciousness alone conferred identity. Consciousness alone embodied the
essence of personhood. But if the person is merely a precarious bundle of
mental activities, the dead person must be flimsier yet. The "Great Iceberg of
Cotton Wool" of which Henri Michaux speaks in one of his poems, can erase all
traces of the person. Death thus becomes an erasure, that is to say a
disappearance, an absence, or a mere attribute of the insubstantial mind, of the
fleeting consciousness, like the person itself. Not a concrete osseous
framework--as is the Mexican skeleton, the calavera--but a wholly immaterial
entity. Defined as an absence, it absented itself. Because it could not be seen, it
ended up suffering the fate announced in the popular saying "Out of sight, out of
mind." It was proscribed, and it became the Unmentionable. To finish these
comments, I wish to say that I believe there is a parallel between the death-
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related Mexican naturalism, and--strange to recount--certain ideas that I have
found in the pages of Russian novelists. It has been remarked that Tolstoy never
approached death as a philosophical problem. He never seems to be looking for
comprehensive concepts, conclusions, or intellectual approaches to death. He is
not striving to create a philosophy of death; he is merely describing the
experience of living beings. Since death cannot be understood, conceptualized,
reduced to system, or dealt with syllogistically, the only thing left is to look at it.
Such is the gist of the Mexican attitude. The gaze will not penetrate to the
essence of the problem. It will barely skim its surface, but that is all we can do.
And this is what Tolstoy does: to describe tirelessly, to evoke every detail of the
external corporeality of death, to all the minutiae. Read the last pages of Ivan
Ilyich, to find there a recreation of every sensory impression, the sounds, the
sights, the odors that impressed a child. Vladimir Jankelevitch points out that
this is one constant throughout the whole Tolstoyan work. He revels in the
details, in the concrete particularities.
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THE SPECTACLE OF DEATH IS EMBEDDED IN AMERICAN
CONSCIOUSNESS. THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHETHER
DEATH CAN BE LEVERAGED TO FORCE RECOGNITION OF
OUR COMPLICITY AS IN VIETNAM, OR IF IT IS VIRTUALIZED
AND USED TO JUSTIFY DOMINANCE. SPEAKING DEATH
AGAINST FURTHER NUCLEAR VIOLENCE ROBS IT OF ITS
ABILITY TO PACIFY
Davis, Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche After 9-11, July 29,
2002, http://goinside.com/02/7/death.html, accessed 1/23/03
Walter
For if we found ourselves abject objects of the others wrath at Pearl Harbor we
now had a way to bring about a complete and lasting transformation of that
situation. Projective identification finds in the Bomb a way to take everything
weak and vulnerable in oneself and invest it in an other who is reduced to an
object of contempt and obliteration. The resulting mania banishes any threat
of a return of depressive anxieties. In the Bomb the manic triadtriumph,
contempt, and dismissal (Klein, 1957) celebrates its Sabbath.
Metapsychologically, the transformation is complete and can be schematized
thus: abjection reversed; blockage overcome; aggression unbound. Narcissistic
grandiosity thereby finds the fullest possible expansion; the perfect phallic
mirror in the mushroom cloud rising above the spectacle as proof of the Bombs
power to compel submission to its will. Evacuation attains an exorcism of an
unprecedented ordera psychotic attack on linking (Bion 1959) that is totalizing
in its scope and that scoffs at all humanistic considerations. Thanatos in the
bomb achieves the condition Freud feared: a condition in which death has been
fully eroticized. Pleasureor jouissanceunder the Bomb equals releasing a
destructiveness that voids all inner tensions in an aggression that has the
blessing of the super-ego, an aggression that feels righteous. As confirmation
consider this, but one example among many: Navy Day, October, 1945, a crowd
of 120,000 gather in the Los Angeles Coliseum to celebrate a simulated
reenactment of the Bombing of Hiroshima, complete with a mushroom cloud
that rises from the fifty yard line to the joyful cheers of that rapt throng (Boyer,
1985). The first Super-Bowl. The society of the spectacle (Debord,1994) here
announces its truth as a mass audience cums to the ritual that confers on it a
lasting, ghostly identity: the howl of joy that rises as a hymn of praise to the
burgeoning cloud is the new American collectivity in Hosanna before the image
of its inhumanity as it blossoms before them, big with the future. A History
Lesson From which follows a quick tour of the underside of American history
from 1945 to the present. The debacle of Vietnam. The error: the image came
home to roost. With the evening news America each night supped full with
horror. The lesson: no more images. The solution: Iraq, the Nintendo war, a
war represented on TV as a video game. No images of the 100,000 Iraqui dead
entered the American conscience to trouble our sleep. Instead, with victory the
proclamation of George H. Bush : Weve finally put an end to Vietnam
syndrome. The lesson of history learned the son now deploys it globally in a
war where, he informs us, much will happen that we will never get to hear
about or see. Extremes meet: the image is banished but the promise of global
action is affirmed. George W. Bush is an apt pupil. He knows that in order to
resolve the trauma of 9-11 he must satisfy an outraged public by finding a way
to repeat the psychological operations perfected in Hiroshima. He knows that
nothing less than a global war against terrorism will suffice. But he also
knows that the pleasure of the image must be replaced by another kind of
satisfaction, one appropriate to the information age, an age in which pleasure
has itself become virtual. Subjects formed by what is today perhaps the primary
relationship, the relationship to the computer, dance to the subtext, heeding the
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command to enjoy our symptom (Zizek,1989). For it is now possible to imagine
and experience scorched-earths as so many blips on a computer screen with
disavowal already in place and pleasure assured in a jouissance that is one with
Thanatos: the reduction of the human to the statistical and the boundless power
one feels in manipulating, at the speed of light, a world so rendered into ones
hands. The society of the spectaclea society that needed Hiroshima and Navy
Day in the L.A. Coliseumis replaced by the society of the virtual. The postmodern subject has entered a condition of bliss, the hegemony of Thanatos
assured by the sacrifice of the image. Mass carnage grows apace: over a
million Iraqui civilians have now died as a result of our sanctions; more civilians
(collateral damage) have now died in Afghanistan as a result of our bombings
than perished at the WTC. But the knowledge of these things has become
virtual, disembodied, imageless and thus is already fading, leaving no residue in
the national consciousness.
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THEIR EVIDENCE DESCRIBES THE WAY DEATH IS
PERCEIVED IN THE STATUS QUO. WE CALL THAT INTO
QUESTION BECAUSE IT WEDS US TO THE PSYCHE THAT
DROPPED THE BOMB. REFUSING TO ENGAGE THE IMAGE
OF VIOLENCE WROUGHT BY THE BUSH DOCTRINE LETS
AMERICA GET AWAY WITH EXPLOITATION.
Davis, Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche After 9-11, July 29,
2002, http://goinside.com/02/7/death.html, accessed 1/23/03
Walter
What, then, are the possibilities of healing and renewal that we can derive from
an awareness of the tragic complexities of 9-11 and its aftermath? A
responsible reply must begin with the recognition that it was through us that
terror on a global scale first came into the world; and that we remain its
primary global practitioner. For an internalization of that fact delivers a deathblow to the belief that catharsis and renewal require the reassertion of
adolescent myths about ourselves and our place in history. Historical memory
must become instead the process of creating a tragic culture: one for whom
memory is conscience and not hagiography; one for whom the past weighs like
a nightmare precisely because it has not been constituted. That is the true
meaning of Hiroshima. Ground-zero haunts us not because we feel guilt about
it but because we dont. Which is why, whenever we are traumatized, we
repeat the psychological operations we perfected in Hiroshima in a progressive
self-reification that we remain powerless to reverse as long as we refuse to
internalize what actually happened on 8-6-45. But to do that we must begin the
long, hard task of rooting out everything in our culture that weds us to the
psyche that dropped the bomb. Such an effort requires, moreover, that we
free ourselves from our own liberal, mental health myth: the belief, articulated
by Lifton (Lifton and Mitchell, 1995) that admitting error assures renewal through
the power of the American protean self to reclaim the ideals that make
American history the story of inevitable progress. What Hiroshima teaches us,
on the contrary, is that history remains irreversible in its tragic consequences
until we find our own equivalent of Gandhis ethic: that the way out of hell is one
that sustains trauma and depressive mourning as the destiny of historical
subjects who know that reversal begins only when we are willing to plumb the
depths of our collective disorder. A tragic understanding of history assures us
no catharsis, no renewal, no guarantees. What it offers instead is the realization
that to sustain and deepen the trauma is our only hope. (7)
For the
alternative is truly horrifying: the Bush doctrine a blank check for whatever
carnage will be needed to satisfy our blood-lust and to preserve our right to
ravage the planets resources. Because one fact above all others is, as Marx
would say, determinative in the last instance of what is going on in the world
today. 5% of the worlds population consume 25% of its resourcesand they do
so by exerting control over the destiny of other countries. Bin Laden is a
symptom, a nostalgic religious fanatic, but his fanaticism derives from a
condition that is actual. In Rio de Janeiro, at the one ecological conference he
attended, George H. Bush delivered a proclamation even more chilling than his
crowing about Vietnam syndrome: The American way of life is not
negotiable. As long as that dogma remains in place there will be many more
ground-zeroes.
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**Empire**
Movements Fail
HARDT AND NEGRI PROVIDE NO MECHANISM FOR THE
CREATION OF SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL MOVEMENTS THE
FACT THAT CLASS OPPRESSION ALREADY EXISTS AND HAS
BEEN GETTING WORSE FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS MEANS
THAT IT EITHER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED BY NOW OR IT
WONT HAPPEN
Cox, Prof of Sociology @ National U of Ireland, 2K1 (Lawrence, Social Movements and
Empire, Rethinking Marxism Vol. 13, No. 3-4)
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Alternative Causes Violence

ACTUAL ENDORSEMENT OF THEIR ALTERNATIVE WOULD
CAUSE A VIOLENT BACKLASH PROVES THAT THEIR CALL
IS HOLLOW
Zizek, Fellow @ Institute for Sociology @ Ljubljana, 2K1 (Slavoj, Have Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the 21 st Century, Rethinking
Marxism, Vol. 13 No. 3-4)
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Alternative is False Radicalism

THEIR IMPOSSIBLE DEMAND IS MADE IN ORDER TO
RETAIN THE SEMBLANCE OF RADICALISM WITHOUT
ACTUALLY HAVING TO RISK TAKING RADICAL ACTIONS
Zizek, Fellow @ Institute for Sociology @ Ljubljana, 2K1 (Slavoj, Repeating Lenin,
http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm)
My personal experience is that practically all of the "radical" academics silently
count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the
secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them
even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a
radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environment of the "symbolic
classes" in the developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct
zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a
defense against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual
whose hidden logic is: "Let's talk as much as possible about the necessity of a
radical change to make it sure that nothing will really change!" Symptomatic is here the
journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of
in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of the

modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link
with the radical revolutionary past... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture towards the Third
course, THAT October -
Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game in a straight way, and are honest
the pseudo-radical academic

Leftists who adopt towards the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain, while their
own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obliges no one to
anything determinate.
in their acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to
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Capitalism is Sustainable
HARDT AND NEGRIS ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE
INSTABILITY OF CAPITALISM ARE WRONG THE KRITIK
WILL FAIL
Kimball, Managing Editor of New Critierion, 2K1 (Roger, The new antiAmericanism, The New Critierion, Vol. 20, No. 2, October,
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/oct01/empire.htm)
I suspect that part of the reason Empire is such a hit in the academy is its superior insulation. Hardt and Negri have
The single greatest

embarrassment to Marxist theory has always been the longevity of capitalism. It
was supposed to implode from internal contradictions long ago. But here it is 2001
and capitalism is still going strong and making the world richer and richer. Attempting to explain this is the
sealed every point of ingress: no hint of reality is allowed to seep in.
greatest test of a Marxists ingenuity. Here is how Hardt and Negri handle the problem: As we write this book and the
twentieth century draws to a close, capitalism is miraculously healthy, its accumulation more robust than ever. How can
we reconcile this fact with the careful analyses of numerous Marxist authors at the beginning of the century who point to
They
offer three hypotheses for this imponderable situation. One, that capitalism has
reformed itself and so is no longer in danger of collapse (an option they dismiss
out of hand). Two, that the Marxist theory is right except for the timetable : Sooner
or later the once abundant resources of nature will run out. Threewell, it is a little difficult to say what the third
hypothesis is. It has to do, they say, with the idea that capitalisms expansion is internal
rather than external, that it subsumes not the noncapitalist environment but
its own capitalist terrain that is, that the subsumption is no longer formal but real. I wont attempt to
explain this for the simple reason that I havent a clue about what it means. Is there any important option
they have neglected? Could it, just possibly, be that the careful analyses of
numerous Marxist authors was just plain wrong? This is a possibility apparently too awful to
the imperialist conflicts as symptoms of an impending ecological disaster running up against the limits of nature?
contemplate, for Hardt and Negri never raise it.
THE ALT FAILS EMPIRE WILL NOT OVERSHOOT AND

CAPITALISM WILL NOT COLLAPSE ON ITSELF
Empire is
based on a laughably tiny idea, and one that is also old and wrong. The idea,
again, is Marxs idea about the inevitable collapse of capitalism . It seemed big once upon a
time. It is now as thoroughly discredited as an historical or political idea can be.
Hardt and Negri gussy up Marx with a formidable panoply of New Age rhetoric
about globalization. But the creaking you hear as you make your way through
the book is the rusty grinding of the dialectic: it goes nowhere, it means nothing ,
Eakins is also wrong to suggest that Empire may represent the Next Big Idea. This is mainly because
but it keeps creaking along.
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Resistance Fails
RESISTANCE FROM THE MULTITUDES WILL FAIL 9/11
PROVES THAT ACTS OF RUPTURE WILL BE RECUPERATED
Passavant and Dean, Assoc Profs of Political Science @ Hobart and William
College, 2K2 (Paul and Jodi, Representation and the Event, Theory and Event, Vol. 5,
No. 4)
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Kritik Answers
Alternative = Oppression
CALLS FOR UNITY EXCLUDE MARGINALIZED POSITIONS
HARDT AND NEGRIS VISION OF THE MULTITUDE WILL
OPPRESS AND IGNORE DISADVANTAGED VOICES WE
SHOULD FIGHT CAPITALISM FROM THE INSIDE
Rofel, Prof of Anthropology @ UC Santa Cruz, 2K1 (Lisa, Discrepant Modernities and
Their Discontents, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Vol. 9, No. 3, Project Muse)
Why can we not dream of flexible alliances and
articulations? On one level Hardt and Negri would certainly agree. Their vision of
rhizomatic politics inspired by Deleuze and Guattari leaves room for a wide variety of alliances. Yet I find their
dream of a common language frightening. Who will establish the proper
grammar of this language? Who will set the communicative import of terms?
What of those who wish to speak in multiple tongues? They traipse over the
issue of translation as if it were merely a pragmatic dilemma rather than , as many
scholars have shown, a question of power. For those who live on the sexual margins , for
example, the dream of the multitude brings not hope but fear. What reassurances
do Hardt and Negri offer that the recent history of degraded existence for those
forced out of the multitude in the name of sexual respectability will not be
repeated in their version of unity? Can we not dream of fighting capitalism
through articulations and alliances of variously identified subjects? Can we not
dream of fighting capitalism in the manner, for example, of those who have fought
AIDS? AIDS activism has addressed the mutual imbrication of power in the
endless relays between expert discourse and institutional authority, between
medical truth and social regulation, and between popular knowledge practices
and struggles for survival. AIDS activism has thus multiplied the sites of political
contestation to include immigration policy, public health policy, the practice of
Why must we be forced into a dream of unity?
epidemiology and clinical medicine, the conduct of scientific research, the operation of the insurance and pharmaceutical
and ultimately
the public and private administration of the body. It is unsettling that Hardt and Negri do not
discuss these politics. Why must they dismiss them as merely about co-optation? Hardt
and Negri have missed the enormous body of work that has shown that we do
not have to pit class against other identities but, rather, can conceive of class in
a manner that does not implicitly make the class subject a white, masculine,
Euro-American subject. If bodies do matter, then Hardt and Negri still have a
long way to go.
industries, the role of the media, the decisions of rent-control boards, the legal definition of family,
17
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Alternative Fractures Other

Movements
HARDT AND NEGRIS ALTERNATIVE IS EXPLICITLY
GROUNDED IN A DENIAL OF THE ABILITY OF MOVEMENTS
TO COMMUNICATE AND MAKE ALLIANCES THEY DENY
THE LOCALIZED EFFORTS OF REAL RESISTANCE
MOVEMENTS AND TRY TO SUBSTITUTE THE IMPOSSIBLE
MODEL OF THE MULTITUDE
Cox, Prof of Sociology @ National U of Ireland, 2K1 (Lawrence, Social Movements and
Empire, Rethinking Marxism Vol. 13, No. 3-4)
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Alternative Causes Terrorism

HARDT AND NEGRIS STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE
FORCLOSE ANY POLITICAL NEGOTIATION
INTELLECTUALLY ENDORSING THE KRITIK CAUSES
TERRORISM
Empire is a contemporary redaction of the radicalism and anti-Americanism of the 1960s. It is the
intellectual rationalization of attitudes whose practical effects were
demonstrated so vividly on September 11. Books like Empire are not innocent academic
inquiries. They are incitements to violence and terrorism . This is something that Antonio Negri, at
any rate, understands perfectly well. Emily Eakin described Negri as a flamboyant Italian philosopher
and suspected terrorist mastermind who is serving a 13-year prison sentence in Rome for
inciting violence during the turbulent 1970s.
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Kritik Answers
**Exceptionalism (USC)**
Exceptionalism Answers: 2AC
FIRST NO LINK PLAN NEVER POSITS GUANTANAMO AS A
SITE OF EXCEPTION OR CLAIMS TO LIBERATE DETAINEES
FROM SOVEREIGNTY, MEANING THERES NO RISK OF
MASKING POWER
SECOND, WE SOLVE THE IMPACT THEIR NOLL EV
ASSUMES THAT EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION HAPPENS
AND THAT WE DEFINE IT AS NOT BEING AN HR VIOLATION,
WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE BECAUSE PLAN CREATES GENEVA
ADHERENCE
THIRD, THEIR AUTHOR CONCLUDES AFF AGAMBENS
ALTERNATIVE IS PARALYZING AND DELINKS THE LAW AND
JUSTICE, ENABLING TOTALITARIANISM
Kohn 2006
[Margaret, Asst. Prof. Poli Sci @ Florida, Bare Life and the Limits of the Law,.Theory and
Event, 9:2, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v009/9.2kohn.html, Retrieved 926-06//uwyo-ajl]
Is there an alternative to this nexus of anomie and nomos produced by the state
of exception? Agamben invokes genealogy and politics as two interrelated
avenues of struggle. According to Agamben, "To show law in its nonrelation to
life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for
human action, which once claimed for itself the name of 'politics'." (88) In a
move reminiscent of Foucault, Agamben suggests that breaking the discursive
lock on dominant ways of seeing, or more precisely not seeing, sovereign power
is the only way to disrupt its hegemonic effects. Agamben clearly hopes that his
theoretical analysis could contribute to the political struggle against
authoritarianism, yet he only offers tantalizingly abstract hints about how this
might work. Beyond the typical academic conceit that theoretical work is a
decisive element of political struggle, Agamben seems to embrace a utopianism
that provides little guidance for political action. He imagines, "One day humanity
will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to
restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good." (64) More
troubling is his messianic suggestion that "this studious play" will usher in a form
of justice that cannot be made juridical. Agamben might do well to consider
Hannah Arendt's warning that the belief in justice unmediated by law was one of
the characteristics of totalitarianism.
It might seem unfair to focus too much attention on Agamben's fairly brief
discussion of alternatives to the sovereignty-exception-law nexus, but it is
precisely those sections that reveal the flaws in his analysis. It also brings us
back to our original question about how to resist the authoritarian implications of
the state of exception without falling into the liberal trap of calling for more law.
For Agamben, the problem with the "rule of law" response to the war on
terrorism is that it ignores the way that the law is fundamentally implicated in
the project of sovereignty with its corollary logic of exception. Yet the solution
that he endorses reflects a similar blindness. Writing in his utopian-mystical
mode, he insists, "the only truly political action, however, is that which severs
the nexus between violence and law."(88) Thus Agamben, in spite of all of his
theoretical sophistication, ultimately falls into the trap of hoping that politics can
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be liberated from law, at least the law tied to violence and the demarcating
project of sovereignty.
FOURTH, THIS ISNT OFFENSE, ITS A BAD PMN PLAN

CREATES COMPARATIVELY MORE DUE PROCESS, SOLVING
OUR INTERNATIONAL PERCEPTION ADVANTAGES
[READ YOUR AGAMBEN ANSWERS]
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**Feminism**
Feminism Answers: 2AC (1/2)
DECLARING SEXUAL INTELLIGIBILITY IS AN ACT OF BODILY
ADMINISTRATION AND ESTABLISHES A CATEGORY OF
EXPENDABLE LIFE.
Butler, Johns Hopkins University, Sexual Inversions, Foucault and the Critique of
Institutions. 1993; mac//sam
Judith
How does this inversion from early to late modern power affect Foucault's
discussion of yet another inversion, that between sex and sexuality) Within
ordinary language we sometimes speak, for instance, of being a given sex,
and having a certain sexuality, and we even presume for the most part
that our sexuality in some way issues from that sex, is perhaps an
expression of that sex, or is even partially or fully caused by that sex.
Sexuality is understood to come from sex, which is to say that the
biological locus of 11 sex' in and on the body is somehow conjured as
the originating source of a sexuality that, as it were, flows out from
that locus, remains inhibited within that locus, or somehow takes its
bearings with respect to that locus. In any case, "sex" is understood
logically and temporally to precede sexuality and to function, if not as its
primary cause, then at least as its necessary precondition.
However, Foucault performs an inversion of this relation and claims that
this inversion is correlated with the shift from early to late modern
power. For Foucault, "it is apparent that the deployment of sexuality, with its
different strategies, was what established this notion of 'sex'."' Sexuality is
here viewed as a discursively constructed and highly regulated network
of pleasures and bodily exchanges, produced through prohibitions and
sanctions that quite literally give form and directionality to pleasure
and sensation. As such a network or regime, sexuality does not emerge
from bodies as their prior cause; sexuality takes bodies as its
instrument and its object, the site at which it consolidates, networks,
and extends its power. As a regulatory regime, sexuality operates
primarily by investing bodies with the category of sex, that is, making
bodies into the bearers of a principle of identity. To claim that bodies
are one sex or the other appears at first to be a purely descriptive claim. For
Foucault, however, this claim is itself a legislation and a production of
bodies, a discursive demand, as it were, that bodies become produced
according to principles of heterosexualizing coherence and integrity,
unproblematically as either female or male. Where sex is taken as a
principle of identity, it is always positioned within 11 held of two
mutually exclusive and fully exhaustive identities; one is either male or
female, never both at once, and never neither one of them.
Foucault writes
the notion of sex brought about a fundamental reversal; it made it possible
to invert the representation of the relationships of power to sexuality,
causing the latter to appear, not in its essential and positive relation to
power, but as being rooted in a specific and irreducible urgency which
power tries as best it can to dominate; thus the idea of "sex" makes it
possible to evade what gives "power" its power; it enables one to
conceive power solely as law and taboo.'
For Foucault, sex, whether male or female, operates as a principle of
identity that imposes a fiction of coherence and unity on an otherwise
or unrelated set of biological functions, sensations, pleasures. Under
the regime of sex, every pleasure becomes symptomatic of "sex,"
"sex" itself functions not merely as the biological ground or cause of
but as that which determines its directionality, a principle of
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Kritik Answers
teleology or destiny, and as that repressed, psychical core that
furnishes c clues to the interpretation of its ultimate meaning. As a
fictional imposition of uniformity, sex is "an imaginary point" and an
"artificial unity, but as fictional and as artificial, the category wields enormous
power ' Although Foucault does not quite claim it, the science of reproduction
produces intelligible "sex" by imposing a compulsory heterosexuality
on the description of bodies. One might claim that sex is here
according to a heterosexual morphology.
The category of "sex" thus establishes a principle of intelligibility for human
beings, which is to say that no human being can be taken to be is
human, unless that being is fully and coherently marked by sex And yet
it would not capture Foucault's meaning merely to claim that there are
humans who are marked by sex and thereby become intelligible. The
point is stronger: to qualify as legitimately human, one must be
coherently sexed. The incoherence of sex is precisely what marks off
the abject and the dehumanized from the recognizably human.
536
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537
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538
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A2 Feminism: 1AR
FEMINIST IDENTITY CATEGORIES ARE CONSTITUTED BY
NORMALIZATION ONLY QUESTIONING THEM CAN
PROVIDE FREEDOM FROM GENDER SUBORDINATION
Butler 95
[Judith, Prof of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, Contingent Foundations,
Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, New York: Routledge,
50//wfi-ajl]
Paradoxically, it may be that only through releasing the category of
women from a fixed referent that something like "agency" becomes
possible. For if the term permits of a resignification, if its referent is not
fixed, then possibilities for new configurations of the term become
possible. In a sense, what women signify has been taken for granted for
too long, and what has been fixed as the "referent" of the term has been
"fixed," normalized, immobilized, paralyzed in positions of subordination.
In effect, the signified has been conflated with the referent, whereby a
set of meanings have been taken to inhere in the real nature of women
themselves. To recast the referent as the signified, and to authorize or
safeguard the category of women as a site of possible resignifications is
to expand the possibilities of what it means to be a woman and in this
sense to condition and enable an enhanced sense of agency.
FEMINISMS STABLE FEMININE SUBJECT NORMALIZES

IDENTITY, VIOLENTLY MARGINALIZING THE PEOPLE IT
CLAIMS TO DEFEND, REINSCRIBING OPPRESSION ***
Butler 99
[Judith, prof. of rhetoric at UC Berkeley, Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999, 7-8//wfi-ajl]
My suggestion is that the presumed universality and unity of the subject
of feminism is effecitvely undermined by the constraints of the
representational discourse in which it functions. Indeed,
the premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as
a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to
accept the category. These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and
regulatory consequences of that construction, even when the
construction has been elaborated for emancipatory purposes. Indeed,
the fragmentation within feminism and the paradoxical opposition to
feminism from women whom feminism claims to represent suggest the
necessary limits of identity politics. The suggestion that feminism can
seek wider representation for a subject that it itself consturcts has the
ironic consequence that feminist goals risk failure by refusing to take
account of the constitutive powers of their own representational claims.
This problem is not ameliorated through an appeal to the category of
women for merely strategic purposes for which they are intended. In
this case, exclusion itself might qualify as such an unintended yet
consequential meaning. By conforming to a requirement of
representational politics that feminism articulate a stable subject,
feminism thus opens itself to charges of gross misrepresentation.
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White Feminism Bad: 1AR
540
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541
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**Gift**
A2 The Gift: 2AC (1/4)
YOUR AUTHORS CONCEDE THAT WE SHOULDNT ABANDON
ATTEMPTS TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE OR
THAT WE CANT EVER TAKE POLITICAL ACTION
Arrigo & Williams, Their Authors from the Califonria School of
Professional Psychology, 2K (Bruce & Christopher, The (Im)Possibility of
Democratic Justice and the Gift of the Majority On Derrida, Deconstruction, and
the Search for Equality, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Volume 16,
Number 3, August)
With regard to the (im)possibility of a legally imposed equality in
search of a transformative justice, we (as social and political beings) must go

beyond what is consciously imaginable, calculable, and knowable. We must go
beyond the realm of recognized possibility. This article does not assume
the position, as some critics of Derrida may suggest, that, given the ruse
of the gift, affording minority populations opportunity to attain

equality should therefore be discarded entirely (see Rosenfeld, 1993, on
the dilemmas of a Derridean and deconstructive framework for affirmative
action). This article is far from a right-wing cry for cessation of
those undertakings that would further the cause of equality in

American society. This article is also not a statement of despair , a
skeptical and nihilistic pronouncement on the (im)possibility of justice (Fish,
1982) in which we are all rendered incapable of establishing a
provisional, deconstructive political agenda for meaningful social
change and action.
THEIR ARGUMENT IS THAT THE STATE SHOULD NEVER

TAKE ANY ACTION AND THEY ABANDON ALL LAWS IN
WHICH CASE THEY LINK TO ALL OF OUR STATE GOOD
ARGUMENTS AND ALL OF OUR ANARCHY BAD ARGUMENTS
THEIR ALTERNATIVE IN THIS CASE INCREASES HUMAN
SUFFERING AND ABANDONS STRATEGIES THAT CAN CHIP
AWAY AT STATE POWER
Chomsky, Renowned Political Activist & Linguistics Professor at MIT, 4-242K (Noam, Talking 'Anarchy' With Chomsky, By David Barsamian,
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000424/chomsky)
Comment on an African proverb that perhaps intersects with what we're talking about: "The
master's tools will never be used to dismantle the master's
house." If this is intended to mean, don't try to improve conditions
for suffering people, I don't agree. It's true that centralized power ,
whether in a corporation or a government, is not going to willingly commit
suicide. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't chip away at it , for many
reasons. For one thing, it benefits suffering people. That's something
that always should be done, no matter what broader
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considerations are. But even from the point of view of dismantling the master's house, if people can learn what power they
have when they work together, and if they can see dramatically at just what point they're going to be stopped, by force, perhaps, that teaches
The alternative to that is to sit in academic

seminars and talk about how awful the system is .
very valuable lessons in how to go on.
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TURN: GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENTS
LITTLE A: THEIR ALTERNATIVE RELIES ON AND DEMANDS
THE CREATION OF A WORLD BASED ON DERRIDAS
CONCEPTION OF DEMOCRACY TO COME IF THEY SAY IT
DOESNT THEY DONT SOLVE ANY OF THE KRITIK.
Arrigo & Williams, Their Authors from the Califonria School of Professional
Psychology, 2K (Bruce & Christopher, The (Im)Possibility of Democratic Justice and the
Gift of the Majority On Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Search for Equality, Journal of
Contemporary Criminal Justice, Volume 16, Number 3, August)
What we do suggest, however, is simply the following: That political and/or legislative
attempts at empowerment (as they currently stand) are insufficient to attain the deconstructive and discursive
condition of equality for minority citizen groups (Collins, 1993). More significant, we contend that construction of these initiatives as
Derridean gifts advance, at best, fleeting vertiginous moments of inequality and injustice. Still further,
we recommend the (im)possible ; that which, at first blush, admittedly delivers no pragmatic value for
social analysts. Our invitation is for a fuller, more complete displacement of equality
and initiatives pertaining to it such that there would be no giving for its own sake; that giving would not be construed as giving, but as the way of
democratic justice (i.e., its foreseeabilitywould be [un]conscious, its recognizability would be with[out] calculation). If we are able to give without
realizing that we have done so, the possibility of reciprocation, reappropriation, and the economy of narcissism and representation are abruptly
interrupted and perhaps indefinitely stalled. This form of giving more closely embodies the truth of human existence; that which betters life for all
without regard for differential treatment, neither promoting nor limiting those who are other in some respect or fashion. This re-presentation of
this justice both of and beyond the calculable economy of

the law (Derrida, 1997), requires a different set of principles by which
equality is conceived and justice is rendered. What would this difference entail? Howwould it be embodied in civic life?
equality,
In the paragraphs that remain, our intent is to suggest some protean guidelines as ways of identifying thework that lies ahead for the
A cultural politics of difference

grounded in an affirmative postmodern frameworkwould
necessarily prevail (Arrigo, 1998a; Henry&Milovanovic, 1996). In this more emancipatory, more liberatory vision, justice
(im)possibility of justice and the search for aporetic equality.
would be rooted in contingent universalities (Butler, 1992; McLaren, 1994). Provisional truths, positional knowledge, and relational meanings
would abound (Arrigo, 1995). New egalitarian social relations, practices, and institutions would materialize, producing a different, more inclusive
context within which majority and minority sensibilities would interact (Mouffe, 1992). In otherwords, the multiplicity of economic, cultural, racial,
gender, and sexual identities that constitute our collective society would interactively and mutually contribute to discourse on equality and our
understanding of justice. These polyvalent contributions would signify a cut in the fabric of justice, a text that pretends to be a whole (i.e., the
Equality on these terms would become an

ethical, fluid narrative: an anxiety-ridden moment of suspense (Derrida, 1997, pp. 137-138) cycling
toward the possibility of justice. For Derrida (1997), this is the
moment of undecidability . The cacophony of voices on which this aporetic equality would be based would displace
any fixed (majoritarian) norms that would otherwise ensure an anterior, fortified, anchored justice. Instead, the undecidable,
as an essential ghost (Derrida, 1994), would be lodged in every decision
about justice and equality (Desilva Wijeyeratne, 1998). For Derrida (1997), this
spectral haunting is the trace, the differance .19 It is the avenir or
that which is to come. The avenir is the event that exceeds
calculation, rules, and programs: It is the justice of an infinite
giving (Desilva Wijeyeratne, 1998, p. 109). It is the gift of absolute dissymmetry beyond an economy of calculation (Derrida, 1997). This
is what makes justice, and the search for equality, an aporia: It is possible only as an experience of the impossible. However, it is the
very (im)possibility of justice itself that renders the experience,
and the quest for equality, amovement toward a destination that
is forever deferred, displaced, fractured, and always to come .
whole of democratic justice) (Derrida, 1997, p. 194).
544
Kritik Answers

LITTLE B: THEIR DISCURSIVE CALL FOR THE DEMOCRACY
TO COME DIVERTS REAL WORLD MOVEMENTS FROM MORE
EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS AND UNDERMINES THEIR POWER
Bedggood, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Auckland, 99 (David,
Saint Jacques: Derrida and the Ghost of Marxism, Cultural Logic, located at:
http://eserver.org/clogic/2-2/bedggood.html)
in his misappropriation of Marx, Derrida offers the young idealists of today a

brand of anarchism they can consume in the belief that their actions constitute a
rebellion for "democracy" and "emancipation" against the dehumanising norms
and conventions that alienate them . Just as Stirner's "association of egoists" was a figment of his "Thought", Derrida's new
International has the potential to divert a new generation of alienated youth into
discursive acts against the symptomatic phrases rather than the materialist
substance of capitalist crisis . 72. In his response to his critics who deride the idea of an "international" without class he replies: Whenever I speak of
71. So
the New International in Specters of Marx, emphasising that, in it, solidarity or alliance should not depend, fundamentally and in the final analysis, on class affiliation, this in no wise
signifies, for me, the disappearance of "classes" or the attenuation of conflicts connected with "class" differences or oppositions (or, at least, differences or oppositions based on the
new configurations of social forces for which I do in fact believe that we need new concepts and therefore, perhaps new names as well) . . . the disappearance of power relations, or
relations of social domination . . . . At issue is, simply, another dimension of analysis and political commitment, one that cuts across social differences and oppositions of social forces
(what one used to call, simplifying, "classes"). I would not say that such a dimension (for instance, the dimension of social, national, or international classes, or political struggles
within nation states, problems of citizenship or nationality, or party strategies, etc.) is superior or inferior, a primary or a secondary concern, fundamental or not. All that depends, at
every instant, on new assessments of what is urgent in, first and foremost, singular situations and of their structural implications. For such an assessment, there is, by definition, no
pre-existing criterion or absolute calculability; analysis must begin anew every day everywhere, without ever being guaranteed by prior knowledge. It is on this condition, on the
the term
"international" is a mystique. It covers for a nihilistic cult. Its Marxist meaning is
inverted; just as messianicity is messianism without a given messiah -- because everyone is one's own messiah. There is no prior
knowledge that can guide any collective action because that pre-anything (society, religion,
etc.) is spectral, is the unfilled "void". There are only irreducible acts which individuals perform at
any given moment by personally attempting to calculate , on the spot as it were, which of many
"dimensions" or "forces" immediately concern them, "responsibly" and in the
name of "justice" (whose gift?). If there is one name to apply to this contingent conjunction of "forces" which tries to "name" the "new" it is as I have argued
condition constituted by this injunction, that there is, if there is, action, decision and political responsibility -- repoliticization.108 73. In other words,
above, performativity.109 Moreover, as I set out to prove, Derrida's performativity is the idealist philosophical license for the political/social concept of reflexivity as developed by
we could
not get a better prescription for "demobilising" and "depoliticising" the masses in
the face of the current world crisis of capitalism .
Soros and Giddens to express their abstract understanding of the 'structure-agency' problem in the new global economy.110 Teamed-up, as performo-reflexivity,
545
Kritik Answers

AND, THE FAILURE OF ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENTS
CAUSES EXTINCTION
Shiva, Physicist & Ecologist and Director of the Research Foundation for
Science Technology and Natural Resource Policy, 12-12-99 (Vandana, The
Historic Significance of Seattle, located at:
http://flag.blackened.net/global/1299arshiva.htm)
The failure of the W.T.O Ministerial meeting in Seattle was a historic watershed , in more than one
way. Firstly, it has demonstrated that globalisation is not an inevitable phenomena
which must be accepted at all costs but a political project which can be responded to politically . 50,000 citizens from all
walks of life and all parts of the world were responding politically when they protested
peacefully on the streets of Seattle for four days to ensure that there would be no new round of trade negotiations for accelerating and
expanding the process of globalisation. Trade Ministers from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean were responding politically when they
refused to join hands to provide support to a "contrived" consensus since they had been excluded from the negotiations being undertaken in the
"green room" process behind closed doors. As long as the conditions of transparency, openness and participation were not ensured, developing
.
The rebellion on the streets and the rebellion within the W.T.O. negotiations has
started a new democracy movement - with citizens from across the world and
the governments of the South refusing to be bullied and excluded from
decisions in which they have a rightful share . Seattle had been chosen by the U.S to host the Third
countries would not be party to a consensus. This is a new context and will make bulldozing of decisions difficult in future trade negotiations
Ministerial conference because it is the home of Boeing and Microsoft, and symbolises the corporate power which W.T.O rules are designed to
protect and expand. Yet the corporations were staying in the background, and proponents of free-trade and W.T.O were going out of their way to
say that W.T.O was a "member driven" institution controlled by governments who made democratic decisions. The refusal of Third World
Governments to rubber-stamp decisions from which they had been excluded has brought into the open and confirmed the non-transparent and
anti-democratic processes by which W.T.O rules have been imposed on the Third World and has confirmed the claims of the critics. W.T.O has
earned itself names such as World Tyranny Organisation because it enforces tyrannical anti-people, anti-nature decisions to enable corporations
to steal the world's harvests through secretive, undemocratic structures and processes. The W.T.O institutionalises forced trade not free trade,
and beyond a point, coercion and the rule of force cannot continue. The W.T.O tyranny was apparent in Seattle both on the streets and inside the
Washington State Convention centre where the negotiations were taking place. Non violent protestors including young people and old women,
labour activists and environmental activists and even local residents were brutally beaten up, sprayed with tear gas, and arrested in hundreds.
The intolerance of democratic dissent, which is a hallmark of dictatorship, was unleashed in full force in Seattle. While the trees and stores were
lit up for Christmas festivity, the streets were barricaded and blocked by the police, turning the city into a war zone. The media has referred to
the protestors as "power mongers" and "special interest" groups. Globalisers, such as Scott Miller of the U.S. Alliance for Trade Expansion said
that the protestors were acting out of fear and ignorance. The thousands of youth, farmers, workers and environmentalists who marched the
streets of Seattle in peace and solidarity were not acting out of ignorance and fear, they were outraged because they know how undemocratic
the W.T.O is, how destructive its social and ecological impacts are, and how the rules of the W.T.O are driven by the objectives of establishing
corporate control over every dimension of our lives - our food, our health, our environment, our work and our future. When labour joins hands
with environmentalists, when farmers from the North and farmers from the South make a common commitment to say "no" to genetically
engineered crops, they are not acting in their special interests. They are defending the common interests and common rights of all people,
everywhere. The divide and rule policy, which has attempted to put consumers against farmers, the North against the South, labour against
the broad based

citizens campaigns stopped a new Millennium Round of W.T.O from being launched in Seattle, they did launch their
own millennium round of democratisation of the global economy . The real Millennium
Round for the W.T.O is the beginning of a new democratic debate about the future of the earth and the future of it's people. The
centralized, undemocratic rules and structures of the W.T.O that are
establishing global corporate rule based on monopolies and monocultures need
to give way to an earth democracy supported by decentralisation and diversity.
The rights of all species and the rights of all people must come before the rights
of corporations to make limitless profits through limitless destruction. Free
trade is not leading to freedom. It is leading to slavery. Diverse life forms are being enslaved
through patents on life, farmers are being enslaved into high-tech slavery, and
countries are being enslaved into debt and dependence and destruction of their
domestic economies. We want a new millennium based on economic democracy not economic totalitarianism . The
future is possible for humans and other species only if the principles of
competition, organised greed, commodification of all life, monocultures,
monopolies and centralised global corporate control of our daily lives enshrined in the
W.T.O are replaced by the principles of protection of people and nature, the
obligation of giving and sharing diversity, and the decentralisation and selforganisation enshrined in our diverse cultures and national constitutions. A
new threshold was crossed in Seattle - a watershed towards the creation of a
global citizen-based and citizen-driven democratic order . The future of the World Trade
environmentalists had failed. In their diversity, citizens were united across sectors and regions. While
Organisation will be shaped far more by what happened on the streets of Seattle and in the non-governmental (NGO) organisation events than by
The rules set by the secretive World Trade

Organisation violate principles of human rights and ecological survival . They violate
rules of justice and sustainability . They are rules of warfare against the people and the planet.
Changing these rules is the most important democratic and human rights
struggle of our times. It is a matter of survival .
what happened in the Washington State Convention Centre.
546
Kritik Answers
Anti-Globalization Turn: 1AR (1/2)

EXTEND OUR ANTI-GLOBALIZATION TURN: THEIR
ALTERNATIVE IS PREMISED ON DERRIDAS POSTMODERN
CONCEPTION OF THE NEW INTERNATIONAL AND
DEMOCRACY TO COME. THEIR DISCURSIVE CALL FOR
THESE STRUCTURES DEMOBILIZIE AND DEPOLITICIZE
REAL WORLD MOVEMENTS THAT ARE NECESSARY BRING
DOWN THE WALLS OF SOVEREIGNTY AND HEGEMONY.
THEIR ALTERNATIVE IS TOO IDEALISTIC IT FORSAKES
ORGANIZATION AND ALLIANCES THAT ARE NEEDED TO
SOLVE. THE IMPACT IS RAMPANT EXPANSION OF
GLOBALIZATION WHICH CAUSES EXTINCTION.
OUR ARGUMENTS FLIPS THE ALTERNATIVE EVILS WILL
CONTINUE TO EXIST IN THEIR WORLD BUT THE
DEMOCRACY TO COME WILL UNDERMINE ANY WAY TO
SOVLE THEM THIS ANSWERS ALL OF THEIR OFFENSE
ABOUT CHANGING THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS
Froment-Meurice, Professor of French at the University of Vanderbilt, 2K1
(Marc, Specters of M, Parallax, Volume 7, Number 3)
the sense of the new International
Without (sans) is
. This untimely link new alliance without
alliance, messianism without messianism, without content is a relationless relation, without belonging or pertaining, or, better yet, what I call
departing/disowning (de partenance). It is the party of the partyless and the a-political although it is not a third way opening between the two
traditional parties (conservative or progressive, right or left); above all it is not a gathering, an assembly of whoever happens to be unhappy
with traditional politics, with the democratic system based on alternation (even if this points to a blatant lie, since most of the time it all boils
down to the same: new heads simply alternate with old heads). Nor is it a matter of assembling all those who are uninterested in politics or who
is to assemble and gather

individuals but to recognize that the option of community vs.
individualism plays the same game , based on the same conception of the modern
subject as autonomous and autarkic . U.S. society offers good evidence for this: it is everything
seek an alternative way free radicals in the margins. In general, the point precisely
except a society, while displaying a most depressing show of people obsessed by community whatever it may be: it starts with the
neighborhood or the churches, not to mention family and its values, of course. Yet there has never been a more dissociated and divided society.
Essentially there has never been a more destructive myth than

that of the individual who associates with others to form a we
that is nothing but a facade or may even be completely factitious .
First and this should be the starting point there is no individual who cannot be infinitely divided. Should there be only one, the individual is
never one, except materially, if I may say so, although nearly every part of the body is replaceable nowadays (not to mention the sex). And now
here is we, of this new International (which has never existed and thus is not new in the sense that we speak of a new car model): it (we)
should not designate a community to which we belong except in terms of that to which we do not belong: not a family, not a nation, not a
Yet surely if we belong to

nothing at all, it will not take anyone long to notice that we are
nothing at all an abstraction, a ghost, even more so than the clouds of ideology and also that we cannot help but belong de
party, not a sex, not a language, and so on everything and anything, stretching it to the limit.
facto to a language, for instance: just as the International(e) was written in French. But that didnt stop it from becoming the Soviet anthem
until Stalin replaced it with his anthem, with its clear nationalist resonance. An untimely link is a link nonetheless, or rather an alliance an
engagement, complete with a commitment and a (diamond) ring. But this alliance does not rely on any positive contents for its definition, or on
the items of a program to be carried out. That might imply that this alliance does not commit to anything only to witnessing itself (herself,
alliance being feminine): like language said by Holderlin (quoted by Derrida in Specters) to have been given to human beings so that they can
bear witness to what they are: speaking beings, first and foremost. Having quoted precisely the same fragment by Holderlin, I called this
circularity deposition: What man [the human being] is he receives it from the word, and this being is being the witness of the word or its warden
answering for it. Deposition is what one might call such circularity: to be the depositary of Being and making a deposition for its manifestness in
speaking the received language.8 But it is important always to underscore, as Derrida does, that Inheritance is never a given, it is always a
task9 ; that the human being has to be, like Dasein. (Have / to [a / a` ]: have as in have to. . . and not possess such is the sense of the
ownmost in Heidegger. At least in one of several Heideggers, the one I address in that he speaks to me.) Further, a language has to be learned,
starting with ours, the one we owe it to (so) to speak; the one we owe ourselves to, inasmuch as it has given us its word, given not as a fact but
as a promise. Such circularity without origin constitutes a ring: infinite circulation of meaning, stopping nowhere (this would translate into the
concept of God if God could be a concept and therefore nowhere a God or nowhere as God). What I also call langagement gives the formal
structure of language (in quotation marks: the concept of formality is just meant to prevent any positive content from keeping its countenance):
its transmissibility (or translatability) precisely prohibits any closure and thus any appropriation without remainder in one unique and universal
language. To the very extent that the promise (the gift of language, of the word as given word) is not incarnated in any determined language
just as there cannot really be any country corresponding to the Promised Land10 to that (de-ceptive) extent the idiom bears witness to this
infinite engagement: it (the idiom) is the witness that, at the heart of that which allows the circulation of meaning, there is some resistance. The
idiom will not yield to translatability unabridged and integral, and likewise the new International attests to the existence or occurrence in the
bosom of universal westernization the merchandising of the planet now called globalization of some thing that resists any appropriation
547
Kritik Answers
insofar as this thing is not actually a thing and, deep down, is nothing at all or is this nothing without which, as it happens, no whole or
This sketchy
alliance is spectral, first of all. It haunts the home like nihilism , described by
totalization is possible (thus impossible: no totalization is able to totalize nothing or a bunch of spectres).
Nietzsche as the uncanniest, most unheimlich of guests. I need not really mention again how it all starts and what ushers in the Specters,
this starting point

conditions the nature of the new alliance and in this sense
communism is not only not dead, it also cannot die : to the extent that a spectre
namely that it is Marx himself who speaks of the specter of communism.1 1 But I will mention it because
also
cannot ever be anything except dead surviving inasmuch as it is chased, hounded, warded of, professed dead at last, for good, once and for
all.
Continues
548
Kritik Answers
Anti-Globalization Turn: 1AR (2/2)

No one, perhaps, has paid enough attention to the oppositional dialectics that result from this apparition of the specter. Not only are the powers of old Europe forming a Holy Alliance
in order to ward off this spectre, the Communists also have to come out and manifest themselves, perhaps first and foremost, since they are henceforth a recognized player or power,
in order to crush the fiction or hallucination of the communist specter (even if they owe their recognition to him). Communists must get up an erection well rendered by the first
two lines of the International(e) in French, repeating Debout, Arise and they have to get up, lift, pick up, sublate (Hegels Auf hebung is the lever) the wicked specter, a specter
who is, uncannily enough, communist. Communists must manifest themselves as such, being communist beings: as the spectres negation. But does this not make them run the risk
of disabling what made communism such a formidable, uplifting power, namely that it appeared only as a spectre, a hallucination? Its a thousand times easier to fight against real
(manifest) powers than against thin air. In the same spirit, Heidegger describes Angst exactly as a fear of nothing: related to nothing special, only to being as a whole. All this points
to why I have never had a need to be anti-communist also known as a swine, said Sartre: yet communists managed to be so even more so than the most bigoted anti-communists.
Besides, the latter the reactionaries of the Holy Alliance were the ones most directly touched by the fall of communism. Suddenly they lost their entire raison detre, became
unable to oppose anything, and therefore in these well-lubricated dialectics haunting Marxism they could no longer pose or recognize themselves in their opponents negation. Am I
saying that now, now that communist beings have virtually vanished (except for a handful of survivors), communist Being is going to make a comeback, come back to spook us like
Marxs spectre in old Europe, except that this time everyone in the whole world would be affected the globalized world said to be opposed by the new International? I am actually
asking whether the question has any meaning: without any beings to embody it and have it materialize, how to speak of a pure communist Being? Does it not make it all fall back into
the ontotheological clouds Marx denounced for being ideological superstitions (pure spirit, bodyless Holy Ghost)? But also how not to see that, by defining the new International in
terms of an opposition (an opposition, simply, to reality), one repeats and sublates Hegels specter haunting (the various) Marxism(s), driving it (them) to its (their) demise and/or
end(s), each time and whatever the attempts to cut the theory from what makes it work (for instance in the invention of a so-called epistemological shift thanks to which true
The need urgent and challenging to

conceive the struggle in terms that do not call for opposition , of classes for instance, is plain. Is class
struggle nothing but the same old song echoing? Has it outlived its given time, its usefulness? But that still doesnt entitle anyone to
be so naive (full of counterfeit or rather interested naivete) and proclaim, urbi et orbi, that there is no struggle left ,
nothing but the euphoria of a classless society. The struggle is lasting, the fight goes on, even if the last
fight (It is the last fight / The International(e) / Shall be the human race (all of humankind) [Cest la lutte finale / LInternationale / Sera le genre
scientific Marxism might be cut off from its stubborn sprite without which it could not even pretend to be true)?
humain]) is also a struggle for the end of fighting. (Unlike the Marseillaise, the International(e) has no warmongering and nationalist strain but delivers a vibrant call to abolish all
Whoever proclaims that there should be nothing but the

International(e) as the whole of humankind in the future seems to give in to a dangerous or at least idealistic utopia:
the ends of the new Alliance , deep down, are the dissociation of any (interest) group, including the
discipline and encourage deserters.)
association of the International, by the same token (Let us band together: that is its motif, if I may repeat it; with an us possible only if it is opposed to them).
549
Kritik Answers
Anti-Globalization Movements Up
Now (1/2)
ANTI-GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENTS ARE STRONGER THAN
EVER THEY SOLVE BECAUSE THEY ARE ORGANIZED AND
BROAD BASED
LA Times 11-24-2K2
Authorities on development issues , including some of globalization's stalwart defenders, say
the movement in this country has broadened, matured and become more
influential in the 33 months since Seattle. "The movement is getting much more
sophisticated, even the activists in the streets ," said Nancy Birdsall, a former World Bank
official who heads the Center for Global Development in Washington. " It's gone from anti-globalization
to alternative globalization to managing globalization ." Development
experts credit activist pressure at least in part for a range of
developments, including a decision by the World Bank to give poor countries a bigger voice in developing poverty-reduction
plans and agreement by the World Trade Organization to give top priority to the needs of poor countries in the round of worldwide trade talks
launched last year. Globalization critics denounce some of those initiatives as inadequate. But if nothing else, they represent an acknowledgment
that wealthy nations and their financial institutions cannot afford to appear indifferent to global injustice. "They won the verbal and policy battle,"
said Gary Hufbauer, a pro-globalization economist at the Institute for International Economics in Washington. "They did shift policy. Are they
Experts see
evidence of the movement's growing influence in other arenas.
Several high-profile economists , including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, have
endorsed some of the specific criticisms and objectives of the
movement. Their critique was reinforced by growing evidence of the failure of "Washington consensus" formulas to foster growth in
happy that they shifted it enough? No, they're not ever going to be totally happy, because they're always pushing."
Africa, Asia and Latin America. The issue of Third World debt relief resonated with a much wider audience when Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill
and Irish rock star Bono jointly toured some of sub-Saharan Africa's poorest countries. Many development experts point to Jubilee 2000, the Third
World debt-relief group whose work has been championed by Bono, as the non-government organization with perhaps the most influence over
Jubilee 2000 had a tremendous impact in mobilizing

focus and political support for the decisions that were eventually
made," said Mats Karlsson, the World Bank's vice president for external affairs. The result, he said, "is a very radical debt relief program
public policymaking. "
that is now being implemented country by country." Other groups have had an effect too. Oxfam, the London-based relief organization, made
waves with a report stating that more trade liberalization, if managed properly, is the best prescription for reducing world poverty. The
All of
the major organizations have grown enormously more powerful
and effective. The only thing that's shrunk is the street protests," said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the liberal Center for
Economic and Policy Research in Washington. " The movement hasn't lost momentum at all.
It just shifted to a different set of tactics." For every organization
involved in what some call the "movement of movements," there
have also been smaller but symbolically important victories . Jubilee
International Labor Organization has convened a high-profile working group to assess the social implications of globalization. "
USA's crusade has been joined by a remarkably wide range of organizations, from conservative evangelical churches to the San Francisco 49ers
football team. For the World Bank Bond Boycott, which hopes to generate the kind of financial pressure that helped end apartheid, a big turning
point was the Milwaukee City Council's 13-1 vote this spring to join the campaign. "We've seen a huge shift," said boycott coordinator Neil
Leaders say the

movement's evolving profile reflects a deliberate decision to tone
down the increasingly provocative street mobilizations staged outside
Watkins. "When we started in 2000, there's no way we could have even talked to the city of Milwaukee."
meetings of the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization and other global institutions. Although authorities said the vast majority of
participants were peaceful, small groups of Black Bloc anarchists and other extremists were giving the protests a violent edge. In Seattle, their
antics contributed to $2 million in property damage and 500 arrests. Then came Sept. 11. Public revulsion for terrorism and heightened concern
about security created even more ambivalence within the movement about the merits of street mobilizations. Anti-globalization groups had been
planning a Seattle-size protest at the fall 2001 meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Washington, but the sessions were canceled shortly after
Sept. 11. When the institutions held their spring meetings here in April, only 1,000 or so protesters rallied outside their headquarters. "After 9/11,
the U.S. movement obviously reevaluated its tactics and its tone," said Lori Wallach, who has directed Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
operation since 1990. "But even before 9/11, there was a strategy judgment that we needed to diversify the ways in which we organized and
the movement's current level of energy and

engagement far exceeds what prevailed during the struggle over
ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement .
mobilized." Wallach said
550
Kritik Answers
Anti-Globalization Movements Up
Now (2/2)
STATUS QUO MOVEMENTS SOLVE GLOBALIZATION
ORGANIZATION IS CRITICAL
Workers Power Global 2K1 ([anti] capitalisim: from resistance to
revolution, Workers Powers Action Guide To the Anti-Capitalist Movement, June, located at:
http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/anticap0.html)
We are present at a turning point in history . From Seattle to Genoa. In less than two years the antiglobalisation movement has travelled a long and spectacular journey . Washington,
Melbourne, Prague, Seoul, Nice, Quebec, Barcelona to name only a few cities have seen major demonstrations against corporate exploitation
and environmental destruction as well as against the hollowing out of democracy by the governments of G8 and their pliant international
the movement has got bigger and ever more clearly targeted on
the real enemy: the capitalist system . Since Seattle, tens of thousands of police, innumerable rounds of tear gas,
agencies. Along the way,
batons, steel perimeter fences, vicious police dogs, exclusion orders, sealed borders, closed airports, blockaded roads, midnight raids all have
the movement is growing
been deployed by the capitalist governments to stop our voices being heard. But
despite all that.
Seattle, 30 November, was a defining moment when the movement became conscious of its power. But it did not come from nowhere. Years of
grassroots collective action in the USA culminated in Seattle. Students had been at the heart of it, campaigning against the unleashing of
corporate depravity that marked politics in the Clinton years. A new generation of activists on campuses across the USA and Canada became
politicised by the invasion of the mind-snatchers as the big corporations made their move to take over of education. Faced with the hubris of
money, student politics moved on from the politics of identity and introspection to anti-corporatism - to stem and turn back the agents of Nike,
Coca-Cola and McDonalds dressed up as educationalists. Heavy-handed attempts at censorship or blackmail in the face of criticism of the big
brand names only radicalised them more. They investigated the operations of the big corporations away from their campuses and found that the
money used to bribe their administrators was sucked out of sweatshop labour in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and China the one-dollar-aday impoverished billions of the Third World. Seattle put it all together. As Manning Marable said: "The demonstrations in Seattle showed that
growing numbers of Americans are recognising that all of these issues Third World sweatshops, the destruction of unions, deteriorating living
standards, the dismantling of social programs inside the US are actually interconnected." But the campus campaigns in the USA were only one
strand of the emerging anti-globalisation movement. The Zapatista uprising on New Years Day 1995 in the Chiapas region of Mexico was a
rebellion against land hunger and violent autocracy and for indigenous rights and the end of the countrys enslavement to US companies,
Tens of thousands of new and old activists rallied to their call to

support them and to open up many fronts of struggle against imperialism . A
exploitation and foreign debt.
Zapatista internationalism was born in the Laconda rainforests and quickly formed cross-currents with the North American and then European
anti-capitalists. Another strand that emerged in the 1990s was the radicalisation of some NGOs. In Britain, 1997 and 98 saw Jubilee 2000 mobilise
70,000 and 50,000 respectively to demand the G7 cancel the debts of the Third World. In the South, many of the smaller, more independent,1
NGOs who were closer to the suffering caused by government and business alike signed up to the anti-globalisation movement. Paradoxically, the
"privatisation" of healthcare and famine relief removed the shackles of apolitical humanitarianism and allowed a generation of NGO workers to
become overtly radical. But by far the biggest component of the emerging world anti-globalisation movement has been the millions of workers
who have taken to the streets and gone on strike to resist the many attacks on them which originated in IMF "structural adjustment programmes"
during the 1980s and 1990s. The IMF has engineered cuts in health and education programmes, let rip state controlled prices for foodstuffs and
tens of millions have fought back time and again in

South Asia, West Africa and Latin America. Sometimes they have won
concessions. But often they have been betrayed by reformist and nationalist leaders. All too
often they have not received active solidarity from trade unionists and leftists in the North. Yet, until the mid-1990s, we
were in an era of rearguard actions against the sweeping tide of globalisation and
fuel and downsized the public sector workforce. But
neo-liberalism. US imperialism swept all before it in the wake of its victory in the Cold War. As Walden Bello noted, this era peaked with the
the era of globalization . But it

spawned a movement against itself and this connected with other movements .
founding of the World Trade Organization in 1994-95, the apogee of capitalism in
Success in stalling the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) gave it confidence. Then came the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, which
Bello has called the Stalingrad of the IMF when it became clear that the IMF itself, with its prescription for capital account liberalization, helped
create the crisis, and with its cure of tight money and tight budgets, converted a financial crisis into economic collapse in Thailand, Indonesia,
and Korea. Across the WTO, IMF and finally the World Bank a complete crisis of legitimacy set in during the closing years of the 20th century.
The
broadening of the anti-globalisation movement has been accompanied since then by
its ideological deepening, in particular a growing sense of practical
internationalism and conscious anti-capitalism . The phenomenon of summit-hopping is one expression of
Their defensiveness and confusion only emboldened the movement against them, leading to the turning point that was Seattle.
this, as is the proliferation of counter-conferences and teach-ins with representatives from all over the world. The massive anti-Davos summit in
The movement of one

no and many yeses intensified the debate around alternative visions and
programmes for a world free from exploitation and oppression and what
alliances and tactics are necessary to get there . That is welcome. But the course of the movement itself
Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001, gathered toghether all wings of the anti-globalisation movement.
has posed the question of which way forward? far more directly than any forum could. The buzz of success is giving way to a sharp debate over
goals, strategy and tactics. After the Gothenburg violence we are hearing loud pleas for moderation and compromise from a self-appointed layer
of go-betweens in the movement. All they ever wanted was a place at the negotiating table - and their support for protests that put them there
has to be understood in the light of that. Susan George, an early icon of the movement who praised it last year for "doing more in one year than
all her books have down in the last 25 years" was quick to condemn plainly and clearly the protestors action on the streets of Gothenburg
because violence is invariably the game of our adversary.even in the case of provocation, even when the police is responsible for having opened
hostilities Even those that proclaim to be revolutionary buckle under the pressure of bourgeois denuciation of street violence. The Socialist Party
in Sweden a so-called Trotskyist group - denounced those responsible for attacking police and property for scar[ing] the life out of the
population in Gothenburg. They criticise several so called left organisations that still refuse to resolutely distance themselves from a direction
which is totally stillborn . . Instead of total repudiation and contempt these organisations try to fish in the swamps of political street violence,
said the Swedish section of the Fourth international. The Swedish SP counterposes work in mass movements to street violence. The fact is,
effective mass protest has always been met with police violence. The fact is that those who denounce violence do not share our goal or that of
hundreds of thousands of youth today: to smash the apparatus of capitalist repression that keeps our movement down and guarantees the
continued rule of the big corporations. Christophe Aguiton, leader of ATTAC, anxious also to distance himself from the violence at Gothenburg,
claims that the coalition of peaceful forces inside the anti-globalisation movement has meant that the question is no more, as in the 1970s, in
the great majority of cases, to conquer the Power via revolutionary organisations, but to find other ways for radical protest. We draw the
opposite conclusion. The ferocity of the state shown in Gothenburg and Barcelona in June 2001, the removal or restriction of our democratic
this movement needs to raise its game. If we

dont, we risk falling back to the isolated and fragmented protests over debt, pollution etc
rights under way as we prepare for Genoa, show that
that characterised the 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, that is where some of the NVDA activists are headed as if frightened by the power of the
mass movement they helped create that is shaking capitalism to its foundations. Today, this minute, we have the best chance since the 1970s to
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Kritik Answers
build revolutionary organisations that have a mass base among young people and organised workers. Today the spectre" of anti-capitalism
stalks the worlds rulers literally it is just yards away from their pampered international gatherings. So it is time the movement outlined its goals
clearly. Anti-capitalism means expropriation of all the MNCs, banks, and the other large companies and landowners too, so that economic power
is put in the hands of the workers and peasants without which rational economic planning will prove impossible. It means fighting for the
overthrow of the bosses and bureaucrats in G7 and G77 countries alike. It means workers and peasants taking power into their own hands by
means of general strikes and armed militias. It means working class people running their own lives - through the forums of elected and recallable
delegates in councils. Lets grasp the opportunity to build a revolutionary international movement. Globalisation has sounded an alarm call to the
youth and activists at the base of the worlds workers' movement. The dramatic surge in the concentration and centralisation of capital, the size
and velocity of capital movements, the power of the G8 dominated "world economic institutions", the downsizing or privatisation of social welfare
all threaten workers and small farmers and a substantial proportion of the lower middle classes. But enormous new opportunities also lie ahead.
The greater unification of the world economy the higher levels of education and literacy called for by the introduction of new information and
communications technology means that workers can spread the struggles and the lessons of struggles at the speed of thought, to use Bill
A revolutionary fight that links the anticapitalist movement with the multi-millioned organised working class will
destroy capitalism. This pamphlet is an action guide for building that movement.
Gates phrase. One no and many yes-es will not destroy capitalism.
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Kritik Answers
Provisional Truth Turn: 2AC (1/2)

TURN: PROVISIONAL TRUTHS
LITTLE A: THEIR ALTERNATIVE RELIES ON THE CREATION
AND ACCEPTANCE OF PROVISIONAL TRUTHS
This justice that is to come, this equality as an aporetic destination, resides in

discourse. The production of provisional truths and knowledge
requires that the voice(s) of alterity emerge to construct new
visions of relational and positional equality and justice. Thus, the
undecidability of interactionthe inclusion of minority discourse with majoritarian discourse as differance
represents a radically democratic in-road producing multilingual,
multicultural, and multiracial effects for equality . This is what Caputo (1997) refers to
as a highly miscegenated polymorphism (p. 107). For Derrida (1991, 1997), a radical democracy is
constituted by preparedness for the incoming of the other . Derrida (1997)
advocates highly heterogenous, porous, selfdifferentiating quasi-identities, [and] unstable identities . . . that . . . do not close over and form a
a receptacle for difference that receives

the provisional truths, positional knowledge, and supplemental
processes of meaning making is necessary in the struggle for
(im)possible equality.
seamless web of the selfsame (p. 107). In short,
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Kritik Answers
Provisional Truth Turn: 2AC (2/2)

LITTLE B: OPENING SPACE FOR THESE TYPES OF
PROVISIONAL TRUTHS OPENS THE DOOR FOR HOLOCAUST
DENIAL
Sherry, Earl R. Larson Civil Liberties & Civil Rights Law Professor at the University of
Minnesota, 96 (Suzanna, THE SLEEP OF REASON, Georgetown Law Journal, February, 84
Geo. L.J. 453)
The consequences of accepting
pluralism go much deeper
epistemological
than making some epistemological pluralists look inconsistent or undermining attacks on the status quo, and are much more troubling than
If we cannot confidently assert that the

earth is round or that evolution occurred, because those with a different
epistemology present a counterargument that is valid in their
world even if not in ours, then the same must be true of other scientific or historical
statements. It is only the tools of the Enlightenment tradition that
allow us to refute such unsupported claims as that virtually all of what we now consider the
simply failing to fulfill the expectations of its proponents.
accomplishments of Western civilization was stolen from black Africans, n160 or that the tragic bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building
It is only the acceptance of reason and

empiricism as the epistemological standard that allows us to reject such
pseudoscientific theories , currently fashionable in some quarters, as that melanin is "one of the strongest
electromagnetic field forces in the universe" with the power to make its possessors intellectually superior, n161 or that Jewish
doctors are injecting black babies with the AIDS virus. n162 Nor is it a defense that the
was the work of agents of the United States government.
modern alternative epistemologies advocated by radical and religious scholars do not always lead to such absurdity. n163 The point is that
antirational epistemologies, unlike the principles of the Enlightenment, offer no weapons

against a variety of intellectual and political atrocities . As Marvin Frankel points
out, "for most of Judaism's 5700-plus years, . . . the great Western religions neither caused democracy to happen nor exhibited discomfort about
its absence." n164 [*483] Even today, the religious epistemologies that mandate discrimination against gays and lesbians are indistinguishable
from those in the not too distant past that mandated discrimination against blacks. n165 And if the melanin or AIDS myths are not sufficiently
there is a more horrific example of the beliefs that

become acceptable when reason and empiricism are demoted as
socially constructed epistemologies . Deborah Lipstadt notes that postmodern
doctrines have allowed Holocaust denial theories to flourish and
to be treated as "the other side ," another "point of view," or a "different
perspective": n166 [The postmodern doctrines of Fish and Rorty] fostered an atmosphere in which it
became harder to say that an idea was beyond the pale of rational thought. At its most radical it contended that there
was no bedrock thing such as experience. . . . Because
deconstructionism argued that experience was relative and
nothing was fixed, it created an atmosphere of permissiveness
toward questioning the meaning of historical events and made it
hard for its proponents to assert that there was anything "off
limits" for this skeptical approach . n167 Thus, those who deny that
the Holocaust occurred are, in an epistemologically plural world,
as entitled to demand public recognition of their beliefs as are the
silly or frightening,
creationists, the Afrocentrists, and all the others who reject the epistemology of the Enlightenment. They can demand -- and many defenders of
epistemological pluralism, if not current case law, would support such demands from other groups -- that textbooks should reflect the existence
and potential soundness of denial theories; that if the public schools teach the Holocaust as a historical event, they must also teach that it may
not have happened; that if parents object to their children being taught what they consider a historical fabrication, the [*484] children should be
excused from history class; that if a state university funds student speech on historical topics generally it must also fund a group dedicated to
Lipstadt sees Holocaust denial as "a threat to all those

who believe in the ultimate power of reason ," n168 but the converse
is also true: the denial of the ultimate power of reason is a threat
to those who would keep the memory of the Holocaust alive .
denying the Holocaust.
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Kritik Answers
Provisional Truth: 1AR

THE ALTERNATIVE CREATES UNDECIDABILITY,
CONTINGENT UNIVERSALITIES, AND PROVISIONAL
TRUTHS
This article conceptually explores the problem of democratic justice in

the form of legislated equal rights for minority citizen groups. Following Derridas critique of Western
logic and thought, at issue is the (im)possibility of justice for under- and nonrepresented constituencies. Derridas
socioethical treatment of justice, law, hospitality, and community suggests that the
majority bestows a gift (ostensible sociopolitical empowerment); however, the ruse of this gift is that the giver
affirms an economy of narcissism and reifies the hegemony and power of the majority. This article concludes by
speculating on the possibility of justice and equality informed by an
affirmative postmodern framework. A cultural politics of
difference, contingent universalities, undecidability, dialogical
pedagogy, border crossings, and constitutive thought would
underscore this transformative and deconstructive agenda .
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**Global/Local**
Micropolitics Only Benefit Privileged
ATTENTION GIVEN TO MICROPOLITICS OBSCURES ACTUAL
SUCCESSES OF DISFAVORED GROUPS AND ONLY BENEFITS
THE PRIVILEGED
Collins, Prof. of Sociology - Dept. of African-American Studies at Univ. of
Cincinnati, Fighting Words, 1998, 135-7
Patricia Hill
In this academic context, postmodern treatment of power relations suggested by the rubric of decentering may provide some relief to
intellectuals who wish to resist oppression in the abstract without decentering their own material privileges. Current preoccupations with
hegemony and microlevel, local politicstwo emphases within postmodern treatments of powerare revealing in this regard. As the resurgence
of interest in Italian Marxist Antonio Gramscis work illustrates (Forgacs 1988), postmodern social theorists seem fascinated with the thesis of an
all-powerful hegemony that swallows up all resistance except that which manages to survive within local interstices of power. The ways in which
many postmodernist theorists use the heterogeneous work of French philosopher Michel Foucault illustrate these dual emphases. Foucaults
sympathy for disempowered people can be seen in his sustained attention to themes of institutional power via historical treatment of social
structural change in his earlier works (see., e.g., Foucaults analysis of domination in his work on prisons [979] and his efforts to write a
genealogy linking sexuality to institutional power [ii98oa]). Despite these emphases, some interpretations of his work present power as being
everywhere, ultimately nowhere, and, strangely enough, growing. Historical context is minimizedthe prison, the Church, France, and Rome all
disappearleaving in place a decontextualized Foucauldian theory of power. All of social life comes to be portrayed as a network of power
relations that become increasingly analyzed not at the level of large-scale social structures, but rather at the local level of the individual
(Hartsock 1990). The increasing attention given to micropolitics as a response to this growing hegemony, namely, politics on the local level that
are allegedly plural, multiple, and fragmented, stems in part from this reading of history that eschews grand narratives, including those of
collective social movements. In part, this tendency to decontextualize social theory plagues academic social theories of all sorts, much as the
richly textured nuances of Marxs historical work on class conflict (see, e.g., The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1963]) become
routinely recast into a mechanistic Marxist theory of social class. This decontextualization also illustrates how academic theories empty out
the more political and worldly substance of radical critiques (West 1993, 41) and thus participate in relations of ruling. In this sense,
postmodern views of power that overemphasize hegemony and local politics provide a
seductive mix of appearing to challenge oppression while secretly believing that such
efforts are doomed. Hegemonic power appears as ever expanding and invading. It may even attempt to annex the
counterdiscourses that have developed, oppositional discourses such as Afrocentrism, postmodernism, feminism, and Black feminist thought.
This is a very important insight. However, there is a difference between being aware of the power of ones enemy and arguing that such power is
This emphasis on power

as being hegemonic and seemingly absolute, coupled with a belief in local resistance as
the best that people can do, flies in the face of actual, historical successes.
African-Americans, women, poor people, and others have achieved results
through social movements, revolts, revolutions, and other collective social action
against government, corporate, and academic structures. As James Scott queries, What remains
so pervasive that resistance will, at best, provide a brief respite and, at worst, prove ultimately futile.
to be explained is why theories of hegemonyhaveretained an enormous intellectual appeal to social scientists and historians (1990, 86).
emphasizing
hegemony and stressing nihilism not only does not resist injustice but
participates in its manufacture. Views of power grounded exclusively in notions of hegemony and nihilism are not only
pessimistic, they can be dangerous for members of historically marginalized groups. Moreover, the emphasis on local
versus structural institutions makes it difficult to examine major structures such
as racism, sexism, and other structural forms of oppression. 7 Social theories that
reduce hierarchical power relations to the level of representation, performance, or
constructed phenomena not only emphasize the likelihood that resistance will fail in
Perhaps for colonizers who refuse, individualized, local resistance is the best that they can envision. Over
the face of a pervasive hegemonic presence, they also reinforce perceptions that local, individualized micropolitics constitutes the most effective
terrain of struggle. This emphasis on the local
If politics
becomes reduced to the personal, decentering relations of ruling in academia
and other bureaucratic structures seems increasingly unlikely. As Rey Chow opines,
What these intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import, and thus
depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful demand (1993, 13).
dovetails nicely with increasing emphasis on the personal as a source of power and with parallel attention to subjectivity.
Viewing decentering as a strategy situated within a larger process of resistance to oppression is dramatically different from perceiving
decentering as an academic theory of how scholars should view all truth. When weapons of resistance are theorized away in this fashion, one
might ask, who really benefits? Versions of decentering as presented by postmodernism in the American academy may have limited utility for
African-American women and other similarly situated groups. Decentering provides little legitimation for centers of power for Black women other
the way to be legitimate within

postmodernism is to claim marginality, yet this same marginality renders Black
women as a group powerless in the real world of academic politics . Because the logic of
than those of preexisting marginality in actual power relations. Thus,
decentering opposes constructing new centers of any kind, in effect the stance of critique of decentering provides yet another piece of the new
A depoliticized decentering disempowers Black women as a group

while providing the illusion of empowerment. Although individual African-American women intellectuals may
politics of containment.
benefit from being able to broker the language and experiences of marginality in a commodified American academic marketplace, this in no way
groups already
privileged under hierarchical power relations suffer little from embracing the
language of decentering denuded of any actions to decenter actual hierarchical
power relations in academia or elsewhere. Ironically, their privilege may actually
increase.
substitutes for sustained improvement of Black women as a group in these same settings. In contrast,
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Kritik Answers
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Localism Causes Oppression (1/2)

THE LOCAL IS UTILIZED TO FULFILL THE INTERESTS OF
ELITES
Engel, SUNY Buffalo School of Law, Injury and Identity: The Damaged Self in
Three Cultures, April 24, 1999, http://homepage1.nifty.com/tkitamura/engel.html,
David
accessed 11/16/02
Law plays a distinctive role in relation to the social settings in which injuries
occur. The judge may act as arbiter, choosing among the contending realities in
the locales where conflict arises, but the judges re-presentation of reality has its
own distinctive qualities. This was partially evident in Vosburg v. Putney, with its
explication of the norms of the playground as well as the classroom. It was fully
evident in the runaway ox-cart case, where the judge sustained familiar village
concepts of remedy while subverting familiar village concepts of marriage and
family. The judge is not just an arbiter; the judge tells his or her own story. The
judge is a mythmaker. The court projects a version of reality back upon the
social setting from which the case emerges, and this refashioned version of local
truths inevitably redefines them. Judges, like politicians, understand the power
of the myth of the local. They may attempt to legitimate their pronouncements
about order and responsibility by relying on romanticized images of schools,
families, and communities, selectively rendered and stripped of contestation and
ambiguity. Although citizens differ about particular local norms or practices,
most would respond to the importance of local-ness itself as a value in
opposition to intrusions by big government, big business, or alien persons into
local settings. By using, and inevitably distorting, the norms and practices they
discover in local settings, the spokespersons for state law shield themselves
from the accusation that they are intruding on the common sense of ordinary
people. They legitimate their decisions as mere reflections of a mythic local
community. Of course, the laws selectivity and distortion shapes identities in
particular ways. Law transforms symbols and images drawn from local settings
and redeploys them as authoritative pronouncements that can potentially
change the very settings from which they are drawn.
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Kritik Answers
Localism Causes Oppression (2/2)

PRIVILEGING THE LOCAL CEMENTS CULTURAL
OPPRESSION
Ong, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural
Logic of Transnationality, 1999, p. 33-34
Aihwa
More broadly, postcolonial theorists focus on recovering the voices of subjects

silenced by patriarchy and colonial rule (The Empire Writes Back is the title of
one popular collection); they assume that all contemporary racial, ethnic, and
cultural oppressions can all be attributed to Western colonialisms. American
appropriations of postcolonial theory have created a unitary discourse of the
postcolonial that refers to highly variable situations and conditions throughout
the world; thus, Gayatri Spivak is able to talk about the paradigmatic subaltern
woman, as well as New World Asians (the old migrants) and New Immigrant
Asians (often model minorities) being disciplinarized together? Other
postcolonial feminists also have been eager to seek structural similarities,
continuities, conjunctures, and alliances between the postcolonial oppressions
experienced by peoples on the bases of race, ethnicity, and gender both in
formerly colonized populations in the third world and among immigrant
populations in the United States, Australia, and England. Seldom is there any
attempt to link these assertions of unitary postcolonial situations among
diasporan subjects in the West to the historical structures of colonization,
decolonization, and contemporary developments in particular non-Western
countries. Indeed, the term postcolonial has been used to indiscriminately
describe different regimes of economic, political, and cultural domination in the
Americas, India, Africa, and other third-world countries where the actual
historical experiences of colonialism have been very varied in terms of local
culture, conquest, settlement, racial exploitation, administrative regime, political
resistance, and articulation with global capitalism. In careless hands,
postcolonial theory can represent a kind of theoretical imperialism whereby
scholars based in the West, without seriously engaging the scholarship of
faraway places, can project or speak for postcolonial situations elsewhere.
Stuart Hall has warned against approaches that universalize racial, ethnic, and
gender oppressions without locating the actual integument of powerin
concrete institutions. A more fruitful strand of postcolonial studies is
represented by subaltern scholars such as Partha Chatterjee, who has criticized
the Indian national projects, which are based on Western models of modernity
and bypass many possibilities of authentic, creative, and plural development of
social identities, including the marginalized communities in Indian society. He
suggests that an alternative imagination that draws on narratives of
community would be a formidable challenge to narratives of capital. This
brilliant work, however, is based on the assumption that both modernity and
capitalism are universal forms, against which non-Western societies such as
India can only mobilize pre-existing cultural solidarities such as locality, caste,
tribe, religious community, or ethnic identity. This analytical opposition between
a universal modernity and non-Western culture is rather old-fashioned it is as if
Chatterjee believes the West is not present in Indian elites who champion
narratives of the indigenous community. Furthermore, the concept of a universal
modernity must be rethought when, as Arif Dirlik observes, the narrative of
capitalism is no longer the narrative of the history of Europe; non-European
capitalist societies now make their own claims on the history of capitalism. The
loose use of the term the postcolonial, then, has had the bizarre effect of
contributing to a Western tradition of othering the Rest; it suggests a postwar
scheme whereby the third world was followed by the developing countries,
which are now being succeeded by the postcolonial. This continuum seems to
suggest that the further we move in time, the more beholden non-Western
countries are to the forms and practices of their colonial past. By and large,
anthropologists have been careful to discuss how formerly colonized societies
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have developed differently in relation to global economic and political
dominations and have repositioned themselves differently vis-a-vis capitalism
and late modernity. By specifying differences in history, politics, and culture,
anthropologists are able to say how the postcolonial formation of Indonesia is
quite different from that of India, Nicaragua, or Zaire.
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Kritik Answers
Globalism Key to Resistance

GLOBAL ORGANIZATION CAN HIGHLIGHT AND UNITE THE
STRUGGLES OF MANY LOCALITIES
Maximilian Forte, Department of Anthropology, University of Adelaide, Renewed
Indigeneity in the Local-Global Continuum and the Political Economy of Tradition: The Case
of Trinidads Caribs and The Caribbean Organization of Indigenous People, March 18-21,
1998, http://www.centrelink.org/renewed.html, accessed 11/16/02

One may also begin to see how local and global levels or arenas each acts as
restraints, parameters and motivations that both condition and inspire, constrain
and enable the revitalization of Carib identification. Globalized terms, images,
motifs and practices of indigeneity act as fund of materials which are engaged
and sifted through by Caribbean Amerindians to define who they were, are, and
who they are to be (see Robertson 1992). Mere association with and invocation
of the names of large international indigenous bodies can serve as symbolic
capital for these groups. To a certain extent, the material for a reformulated and
revived indigenous identity comes from and is negotiated out of a globalized
aboriginality and a globally organized political economy of tradition where even
the most seemingly inane or trivial traditional practices take on large, global
significance as an alternative to the evils of modernization. I see these trends
as adding, paradoxically, to the Caribs own authenticity claims paradoxical
because they emphasize the icons and language of local continuity (despite the
various global indigenous elements drafted into the process of recreating the
meaning of those elements said to be locally continuous), and yet, in the "public
eye" in Trinidad their indigenous qualities may be enforced insofar as they are
endorsed by "foreign" trends and institutions, thus rendering them more serious,
more "real." I see the Caribs self-understanding of indigeneity as very much a
"work-in-progress," an indigenous "site under (re)construction," within a growing
global network. We might even tentatively begin to posit that this global
network is the indigene, that is, adaptable to and derivative of a variety of local
platforms. A central process in the reconstruction of Carib indigeneity is the
organization, reproduction and display of "Carib culture" for a national audience
and for the tourist market (for a similar case, see Friedman 1990). Presentation
itself thus becomes an instrument in the constitution of selfhood. Processes of
globalization help to "lift" the discourse of local aboriginal issues and struggles
to a global plane. Aboriginal global organization helps in itself to further define
aboriginality. International organizations, whether inter-statal or indigenous,
assist in the creation of an "international personality" of indigenous peoples. The
Caribs increasingly come to define themselves, in part, within and through the
international network of indigenous organizations.
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Kritik Answers
Alternative Kills Movements

THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE GLOBAL AND THE
LOCAL CREATING SUCH A FALSE DICHOTOMY DESTROYS
THE ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND THE POWER OF SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS
Stehr, Sociologist and Senior Research Fellow of the Sustainable
Development Research Institute @ U of British Colombia, 2K1 (Nico, The
Fragility of Modern Socities: Knowledge and Risk in the Information Age, P.99
100)
I also do not
accept any rigid dichotomy between local (or regional) and global
phenomena, according to which every characterization of the social
sphere must either take on strictly local attributes or eliminate
them altogether in the wake of the effects of globalization. As
long as the local/global axis is dichotomized in such a rigid and
asymmetric manner, the theoretical and empirical dilemma will be
that the political, social and economic processes have to be
categorized under the heading either of global attributes or of
authentic local circumstances that bear at best only a superficial
resemblance to phenomena alleged to be global in scope. As a result, a
My own perspective on the effects of globalization, however, is not a post-modern one.
prohibition against a synchronism the incommensurable' (Max Frisch) or the 'non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous'
To follow such prohibitions

is to miss out on significant societal processes that result from
struggles between local and global phenomena, or that constitute
emerging social structures, cultural processes of political
developments that succeed in joining these forces in novel ways.
Cultural manifestations are never created ex nihilo and strictly in
accordance with either local or global reference (Tomlinson, 1999). But it is also
unrealistic to expect that forms of knowledge disappear altogether in
the wake of the effects of globalization without leaving any trace (see Stehr,
1991), or that well-established patterns of social conduct vanish without
signs of lasting influence. With globalization and fragmentation
proceeding concurrently, global as well as particularist ic political
developments generate and heighten conflicts (see Schmidt, 1995), for example between
(Wilhelm Finder) must be strictly observed (see Mannheim, (1928; 1993: 358).
192
claims of universal human rights and particularistic identities based on language, religion, nationality, race and ethnicity (see
political opportunities that result from extending the

boundaries of governance beyond the nation-state and ominous
threats that issue from the same developments for the nation-state
appear to co-exist side-by-side in many of the accounts of the
political implications of globalization.
Benhatib, 1999). Indeed, images of
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Kritik Answers
Rejection Bad
THE CRITIQUE PARALYZES. CRITICISM MUST COME FROM
WITHIN STRUCTURES OF GLOBAL POWER
Agrawal, assistant professor of political science at Yale University, Peace &
Change, Oct 96, Vol. 21 Issue 4, p464, 14p.
Arun
The stance of this reviewer may be summarized as "I will engage, I must
critique"--in contrast to the poststructuralist position of "I will critique, I will
reject." Throughout this essay, I have tried to highlight the two dilemmas
inherent in adopting a poststructuralist stance. One is led either to a position
that repeats one's initial assumptions, or one is forced into contradictions that
result from questioning metanarratives. In response, I suggest two small
strategic shifts for poststructuralist scholars, the first of which can already be
witnessed in the work of Stacy Leigh Pigg.[9] Instead of avowing an explicit
commitment to poststructuralism and calling for a repudiation of "development,"
it might be far more fruitful to examine the ways in which attempts by the state
to foster development are often used as instruments of legitimation and
extension of political control, yet also often engender resistance and protest. It
was Foucault, after all, who pointed to the positive as well as the negative
aspects of power.[10] A second productive move might be to accept the
impossibility of questioning all metanarratives and instead to rethink how
development can be profitably contested from within as well as from outside.
Persistent criticisms of "development" are indispensable; calls to go beyond it
make sense primarily as signifiers of romantic utopian thinking. In posing the
dualisms of local and global, indigenous and Western, traditional and scientific,
society and state--and locating the possibility of change only in one of these
opposed pairs--one is forced to draw lines that are potentially ridiculous, and
ultimately indefensible.[11] Development, like progress, rationality, or
modernity, may be impossible to give up. Harboring the seeds of its own
transformation, it may be far more suited to co-optation than disavowal. Rather
than fearing the co-optation by "development" of each new strategy of change,
it may be time to think about how to co-opt "development." "[R]eversing,
displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding"[12] is not just the task of
the postcolonial position; it is the impossible task of all critical positions.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Localism
THERES GOOD GLOBALISM AND BAD GLOBALISM. WE
MUST SUPPORT THE GOOD TO OVERCOME THE BAD.
Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy,
2/20/2003, http://www.fair.org/media-beat/030220.html, accessed 2/23/03
Norman
One of the big media buzzwords to emerge in recent years is "globalization." By

now, we're likely to know what it means. That's unfortunate -- because at this
point the word is so ambiguous that it doesn't really mean much of anything.
News outlets have reported that key international pacts like NAFTA and the
World Trade Organization gained U.S. approval during the 1990s because most
politicians in Washington favor "globalization." According to conventional media
wisdom, those globalizers want to promote unfettered communication and joint
endeavors across national boundaries. Well, not quite. These days, at the White
House and on Capitol Hill, the same boosters of "globalization" are upset about
certain types of global action -- such as the current grassroots movement
against a war on Iraq. For the most part, the same elected officials and media
commentators who have applauded money-driven globalization are now
appalled by the sight of anti-war globalization. The recent spectacle of millions
of people demonstrating against war on the same day around the world was
enough to cause apoplexy at the White House. That's consistent with a
recurring pattern: "Pro-globalization" forces are unhappy to see the globalizing of
solidarity for labor rights, economic justice, the environment and alternatives to
war. A similar contradiction belies the media image of "anti-globalization"
activists as foes of internationalism who want to rigidify national boundaries,
reinforce isolation and prevent worldwide interactions. On the contrary,
advocates for human rights, environmental protection and peace -- while largely
opposing global superstructures like NAFTA and the WTO -- have been busily
creating ways to work with like-minded people all over the planet. The form of
"globalization" deemed worthy of the name by media is corporate globalization,
which gives massive capital even more momentum to flatten borders and run
roughshod over national laws. Deluging every country with Nikes, Burger Kings
and ATMs is presumptively indicative of progress, no matter how bad the
working conditions, how unhealthy the products or how unjust the economic
consequences. Meanwhile, fans of "globalization" routinely contend that
protection of labor rights or the environment amounts to unfair restraint of
trade, retrograde protectionism and antiquated resistance to "reforms." By
itself, "globalization" is much too simplistic a word to tell us anything. The term
is so murky that we may need to discard it, or at least develop some new
phrases to bring realities into focus. Today, the war-crazed Bush administration
and the bipartisan majority of enablers in Congress are fervent proponents of
what might be called "isolationist intervention." Sure, the present-day American
leaders proclaim their global vision and declare that they want to engage with
the world, but on their own terms -- with the U.S. government reserving the right
to determine its policies in isolation from any nation that fails to offer
subservient support. With hefty corporate backing, they insist that the United
States has the right to intervene militarily overseas. Why? Because they say so.
The gist of this approach to "globalization" was well expressed by the glib pundit
Thomas Friedman, whose 1999 book "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" lauded the
tandem roles of corporate capitalism and American militarism. "The hidden hand
of the market will never work without a hidden fist," he wrote. "McDonald's
cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies
to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." This
veiled hand-and-fist stance is being actively rejected by millions of people
marching through cities in many parts of the world. And the leaders of numerous
countries are giving voice to that rejection. Speaking to the U.N. Security Council
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Kritik Answers
on Feb. 18, Malaysia's prime minister Mahathir Mohamed -- the incoming chair of
the Non-Aligned Movement -- combined realism with idealism. "We have no
military or financial strength," he said, "but we can join the world movement to
oppose war on moral grounds." The globalization of that movement is
something to behold. And nurture.
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Kritik Answers
Permutation
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ARE SUCCESSFULLY REDEPLOYED
FOR LOCAL ENDS
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France 19751976,2003, p. 6
Michel
So I would say: for the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating
criticizability of things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general
feeling that the ground was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places
where it seemed most familiar, most solid, and closest [nearest] to us, to our
bodies, to our everyday gestures. But alongside this crumbling and the
astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and local critiques, the facts
were also revealing something that could not, perhaps, have been foreseen from
the outset: what might be called the inhibiting effect specific to totalitarian
theories, or at leastwhat I mean isall-encompassing and global theories. Not
that all-encompassing and global theories havent, in fairly constant fashion,
providedand dont continue to provide tools that can be used at the local
level; Marxism and psychoanalysis are living proof that they can. But they have,
I think, provided tools that can be used at the local level only when, and this is
the real point, the theoretical unity of their discourse is, so to speak, suspended,
or at least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced,
caricatured, dramatized, theatricalized, and so on. Or at least that the totalizing
approach always has the effect of putting the brakes on. So that, if you like, is
my first point, the first characteristic of what has been happening over the last
fifteen years or so: the local character of the critique; this does not, I think,
mean soft eclecticism, opportunism, or openness to any old theoretical
undertaking, nor does it mean a sort of deliberate asceticism that boils down to
losing as much theoretical weight as possible. I think that the essentially local
character of the critique in fact indicates something resembling a sort of
autonomous and noncentralized theoretical production, or in other words a
theoretical production that does not need a visa from some common regime to
establish its validity.
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Kritik Answers
**Habeas Corpus**
Habeas Corpus Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, PERM DO BOTH
YOU CAN ACKNOWLEDGE THAT HABEAS VIOLATIONS
ELSEWHERE ARE BAD AND STILL GRANT IT TO ENEMY
COMBATANTS
SECOND, CRITICIZING REPRESENTATIONS DOESNT
PRECLUDE THE NEED FOR CONCRETE ACTION
Richard

to practice.
More generally

think that

Derrida calls "
We have been
THIRD, SPECIFIC SOLVENCY TRUMPS - PLAN SOLVES

WORSE INJUSTICE BY GUARANTEEING DUE PROCESS TO
ENEMY COMBATANTS AND ENDING INDEFINITE
DETAINMENT AND TORTURE UNDER MILLIGAN. CROSSAPPLY TRIBE AND KATYAL
FOURTH, THEIR LINK EV IS TERRIBLE IT JUST SAYS
THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF HABEAS WITHOUT SHOWING
WHY WE USE ONE OR THE OTHER OR GIVING A REASON
THAT THATS BAD
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Kritik Answers

FIFTH, APPROPRIATING THE OTHER VIOLENTLY SEIZES
THE RIGHT TO SPEAK FOR SELFISH ENDS
Routledge 96
[Antipode]
speak.
SIXTH, THE STATUS QUO IS WORSE COMBATANTS HAVE

NO RIGHTS. PLAN AT LEAST GIVES THEM TO SOME
PEOPLE
SEVENTH, THEIR BRIGHT EV INDICTS THE ALTERNATIVE
ACTION IS THE ONLY REMEDY TO INDIFFERENCE. PLAN IS
KEY TO TAKING A SIDE AND DOING SOMETHING
EIGHTH, TURN- UPHOLDING LEGAL PRINCIPLES PROVES
THE LAWS FRAUDULENCE AND HOLDS IT ACCOUNTABLE
Vclav
Havel, playwright, political prisoner, and president elect of Czechoslovakia,
1986 (Living in Truth, p. 137-38)

appeal to the laws not just to the laws concerning human rights, but to all laws does
not mean at all that those who do so have succumbed to the illusion that in our
system the law is anything other than what it is. They are well aware of the role it plays. But precisely because they
A persistent and never-ending
know how desperately the system depends on it on the noble version of the law, that is they also know how enormously significant such
appeals are. Because the system cannot do without the law, because it is hopelessly tied down by the necessity of pretending the laws are
Demanding that the laws be upheld is thus an act

of living within the truth that threatens the whole mendacious structure at its
point of maximum mendacity. Over and over again, such appeals make the purely ritualistic
nature of the law clear to society and to those who inhabit its power structures.
They draw attention to its real material substance and thus, indirectly, compel all those who take refuge
behind the law to affirm and make credible this agency of excuses, this means of communication,
observed, it is compelled to react in some way to such appeals.
this reinforcement of the social arteries outside of which their will could not be made to circulate through society. They are compelled to do so for
the sake of their own consciences, for the impression they make on outsiders, to maintain themselves in power (as part of the systems own
mechanism of self-preservation and its principles of cohesion), or simply out of fear that they will be reproached for being clumsy in handling
the ritual. They have no other choice: because they cannot discard the rules of their own game, they can only attend more carefully to those
rules. Not to react to challenges means to undermine their own excuse and lose control of their mutual communications system.
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Kritik Answers
To assume that the laws are a mere facade, that they have no validity and that therefore it is pointless to
appeal to them would mean to go on reinforcing those aspects of the law that create
the facade and the ritual. It would mean confirming the law as an aspect of the world of appearances and
enabling those who exploit it to rest easy with the cheapest (and therefore the most mendacious)
form of their excuse. I have frequently witnessed policemen, prosecutors or judges if they were dealing with an experienced
Chartist or a courageous lawyer, and if they were exposed to public attention (as individuals with a name, no longer protected by the anonymity
of the apparatus) suddenly and anxiously begin to take particular care that no cracks appear in the ritual. This does not alter the fact that a
the very existence of the officials anxiety necessarily

regulates, limits and slows down the operation of that despotism.
despotic power is hiding behind that ritual, but
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Kritik Answers

NINTH, THIS ISNT OFFENSE, ITS A BAD PMN THERE
WILL ALWAYS BE INJUSTICE THAT PLAN DOESNT SOLVE.
USING THAT TO VOTE NEG DEJUSTIFIES DOING ANYTHING,
CREATING NIHILISM
TENTH, THE ALTERNATIVE OPTS FOR INACTION IN THE
FACE OF DOMINATION ONLY POLICY DISCUSSIONS CAN
REORIENT INTELLECTUALS TOWARDS FIGHTING INJUSTICE
SAID (University Professor, Columbia University) 94
[Edward W., The Intellectuals and the War, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle
for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994, New York: Vintage, p. 316-19]
HARLOW: What are the political, intellectual, and cultural imperatives for combating this agenda? In 1967 Chomsky wrote the essay
Responsibility of Intellectuals. What would be the main component of such an essay today?
jargonistic postmodernisms that now dot the

are neither capable of understanding and analyzing
the power structure of this country nor are they capable of understanding the
particular aesthetic merit of an individual work of art. Whether you call it deconstruction or
SAID: One would have to pretty much scuttle all the jaw-shattering
landscape. They are worse than useless. They
postmodernism or poststructuralism or post-anything, they all represent a sort of spectacle of giving back tickets that the entrance and saying,
were really out of it. We want to check into our private resort and be left alone. [317]
Reengagement with intellectual processes has very little to do with being

citing fashionable names, or striking acceptable poses, but rather having to do
with a return in a way to a kind of old-fashioned historical, literary, and above all, intellectual
scholarship based upon the premise that human beings, men and women, make their
own history. And just as things are made, they can be unmade and re-re-remade. That sense of intellectual and political and citizenry
politically correct, or
empowerment is what I think the intellectual class needs.

Theres only one way to anchor oneself, and that is by affiliation with a cause, with a political movement. There has to be some
; there has
to be an affiliation with matters involving justice, principle, truth, conviction. Those
dont occur in a laboratory or a library. For the American intellectual, that simply means, at bottom, in a globalized environment , that
there is today one superpower, and the relationship between the United States
and the rest of the world, based upon profit and power, has to be altered from
an imperial one to one of coexistence among human communities that can make
and remake their own histories together. This seems to me to be the numberone priority---theres nothing else.
identification, not with the powers that be, with the Secretary of State or the great leading philosopher of the time or sage
An American has a particular role. If youre an anthropologist in America, its not the same thing as being an anthropologist in India or
France; its a qualitatively different thing.
HARLOW: Were both professors in English departments, despite the fact that the humanities have been quite irresponsible, unanswerable
SAID: Not the humanities. The professors of humanities.
HARLOW: Well, OK, the professors, but there is this question
SAID: I take the general view that, for all its inequity, for all its glaring faults and follies, the university in this society remains a relatively utopian
. There needs to be some sense of the university as a place in

which these issues are not, because it is that kind of place, trivialized.
Universities cannot afford to become just a platform for a certain kind of
narcissistic specialization and jargon. What you need is a regard for the product
of the human mind. And thats why Ive been very dispirited, I must tell you, but aspects of the great Western canon debate,
place, a place of great privilege
which really suggest that the oppressed of the world, in wishing to be heard, in wishing their work to be recognized, really wish to do dirt on
everything else. Thats not the spirit of resistance. We come [318] back to Aime Cesaires line, There is room for all that at the rendezvous of
victory. Its not that some have to be pushed off and demeaned and denigrated. The question is not whether we should read more black
literature or less literature by white men. The issue is excellence---we need everything, as much as possible, for understanding the human
adventure in its fullest, without resorting to enormous abstractions and generalizations, without replacing Euro-centrism with other varieties of
ethnocentrism, or say, Islamo-centrism or Afro-centrism or gyno-centrism. Is it a game of substitutions? Thats where intellectuals have to clarify
themselves.
HARLOW: I agree, but at least within certain university contexts there have been lately two major issues: the Gulf War and multiculturalism. I
have not seen any linkage between the two.
SAID: The epistemology and the ethic of specialization have been accepted by all. If youre a literature professor, thats what you talk about. And
if youre an education specialist, thats what you talk about. The whole idea of being in the university means not only respect for what others do,
but respect for what you do. And the sense that they all are part of a community. The main point is that we ascribe a utopian function to the
intellectual. Even inside the university, the prevalence of norms based upon domination and coercion is so strong because the idea of authority is
so strong---whether its authority derived from the nation-state, from religion, from the ethnos, from tradition---is so powerful that its gone
relatively unchallenged, even in the very disciplines and studies that we are engaged in. Part of intellectual work is understanding how authority
And if you can understand that, they

your work is conducted in such a way as to be able to provide alternatives to
authoritative and coercive norms that dominate so much of our intellectual life,
our national and political life, and our international life above all.
is formed. Like everything else, authority is not God-given. Its secular.
HARLOW: What can alternative publications do to interrupt that particular way of presenting authority?
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Kritik Answers
SAID: One is to remind readers that there are always other ways of looking at the issue---whatever it happens to be---than those that are officially
credentialed. Second, one of the things that one needs to do in intellectual enterprises is to---Whitehead says somewhere---always try to write
about an author keeping in mind what he or she might say of what youre writing. To adapt from that: some sense in which your constituency
might be getting signals about what youre doing. The agenda isnt set only by you; its set by others. You cant represent the others, but you can
take them into account by soliciting their attention. Let such a publication be a place in which its pages that which is occluded or suppressed or
has disappeared from the consciousness of the West, of the intellectual, can be allowed to appear. Third, some awareness of the methodological
issues involved, and the gathering of information, the production of scholarship, the relationship between scholarship and knowledge. The great
virtue of these journals is that they are not guided by professional norms. Nobody is going to get tenure out of writing for these journals. And
nobody is trying to advance in a career by what he or she does there. So that means therefore that one can stand back and look at these things
and take questions having to do with how people know things. In other words, a certain emphasis on novelty is important and somewhat lacking.
You dont want to feel too virtuous in what you are doing: that Im the only person doing this, therefore, I must continue doing it. Wit is not such a
bad thing.
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Kritik Answers
**Habermas**
Habermas Answers: 2AC
HABERMAS HAS NOTHING NEW TO OFFER
McClean
David E.
I cannot find in Habermas's lengthy

narratives regarding communicative action, discourse ethics, democracy and ideal speech situations very much more
than I have found in the Federalist Papers, or in Paine's Common Sense, or in Emerson's Self Reliance or Circles.
I simply don't find the concept of uncoerced and fully informed communication
between peers in a democratic polity all that difficult to understand, and I don't
much see the need to theorize to death such a simple concept, particularly
where the only persons that are apt to take such narratives seriously are already
sold, at least in a general sense. Of course, when you are trying to justify yourself in the face of the other members of your chosen club (in
Habermas's case, the Frankfurt School) the intricacy of your explication may have less to do with
simple concepts than it has to do with parrying for respectability in the eyes of
your intellectual brethren. But I don't see why the rest of us need to partake in
an insular debate that has little to do with anyone that is not very much
interested in the work of early critical theorists such as Horkheimer or Adorno,
and who might see their insights as only modestly relevant at best. Not many
self-respecting engaged political scientists in this country actually still take these
thinkers seriously, if they ever did at all.
Take Habermas, whose writings are admittedly the most relevant of the group.
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Kritik Answers
**Heidegger**
Ethics Turn
HEIDEGGERS FOCUS ON THE ONTOLOGY IGNORES THE
TRANSCENDENT FACE OF ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY
Shapiro, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, Moral
Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, ed. by Campbell and Shapiro, 1999, p. 64Michael
65
The primary Levinasian struggle with philosophical discourse is conducted within

Heideggerian language because the philosophical depth of Levinas's ethics of
infinite responsibility to alterity is revealed in both his debts to and departures
from Heidegger. Prepositions are crucial here for while Levinas accepts
Heidegger's notion of the individual's intimate connection with alterity, he
rejects the Heideggerian grammar of the self-other relationship. The rejection
takes the form of two grammatical shifts enacted in Levinas's writing, beginning
with the change from "with" to "in front of." Whereas for Heidegger the
relationship to the other "appears in the essential situation of Miteinandersein,
reciprocally being with another, Levinas expresses resistance to the
"association of side-by-side" that Heidegger's Mit suggests: "[I]t is not the
preposition mitthut should describe the original relationship with the other." It is
instead the in front of, the face-to-face that locates the ethical relation to the
other. This grammatical shift to the face-to-face acknowledges the fundamental
separation of the self from the Other. To maintain an ethical bond with the Other,
to maintain the infinity of the Other, is to see the self in its relation to something
"it cannot absorb.
REFLECTION NEGATES THE OTHER: ONLY OUR

FRAMEWORK PRECLUDES MURDER
Emmanuel Levinas, Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne, 1996, Levinas Basic
Philosophical Writings p. 9-10
In relation to beings in the opening of being, comprehension finds a signification for them on the basis of being. In this sense, it does not invoke
these beings but only names them, thus accomplishing a violence and a negation. A partial negation which is violence. This partiality is indicated
by the fact that, without disappearing, those beings are in my power. Partial negation, which is violence, denies the independence of a being: it
belongs to me. Possession is the mode whereby a being, while existing, is partially denied. It is not only a question of the fact that the being is an
instrument, a tool, that is to say, a means. It is an end also. As consumable, it is nourishment, and in enjoyment, it offers itself, gives itself,
belongs to me. To be sure, vision measures my power over the object, but it is already enjoyment. The encounter with the other (autrui) consists
in the fact that despite the extent of my domination and his slavery, I do not possess him. He does not enter entirely into the opening of being
where I already stand, as in the field of my freedom. It is not starting from being in general that he comes to meet me. Everything which comes
to me from the other (autrui) starting from being in general certainly offers itself to my comprehension and possession. I understand him in the
framework of his history, his surroundings and habits. That which escapes comprehension in the other (autrui) is him, a being. I cannot negate
him partially, in violence, in grasping him within the horizon of being in general and possessing him. The Other (Autrui) is the sole being whose
The Other (Autrui) is the sole being I can wish to kill. I

yet this power is quite the contrary of power. The triumph of this power is its defeat as
power. At the very moment when my power to kill realizes itself, the other (autrui) has
escaped me. I can, for sure, in killing attain a goal; I can kill as I hunt or slaughter animals, or as I fell trees. But when I have
grasped the other (autrui) in the opening of being in general, as an element of the world where I
stand, where I have seen him on the horizon, I have not looked at him in the face, I have not
encountered his face. The temptation of total negation, measuring the infinity of this attempt and its impossibility - this is the
presence of the face. To be in relation with the other (autrui) face to face is to be unable to
kill. It is also the situation of discourse. If things are only things, this is because the relation with them is established as comprehension. As
negation can only announce itself as total: as murder.
can wish. " And
beings, they let themselves be overtaken from the perspective of being and of a totality that lends them a signification. The immediate is not an
object of comprehension. An immediate given of consciousness is a contradiction in terms. To be given is to be exposed to the ruse of the
understanding, to be seized by the mediation of a concept, by the light of being in general, by way of a detour, "in a roundabout way." To be
given is to signify on the basis of what one is not. The relation with the face, speech, an event of collectivity, is a relation with beings as such, as
pure beings. That the relation with a being is the invocation of a face and already speech, a relation with a certain depth rather than with a
horizon - a breach in the horizon - that my neighbor is the being par excellence, can indeed appear somewhat surprising when one is accustomed
to the conception of a being that is by itself insignificant, a profile against a luminous horizon and only acquiring signification in virtue of its
. The face signifies otherwise. In it the infinite resistance of a

being to our power affirms itself precisely against the murderous will that it
defies; because, completely naked (and the nakedness of the face is not a figure of style), the face
signifies itself. We cannot even say that the face is an opening, for this would be to make it relative to an environing plenitude. Can
presence within this horizon
things take on a face? Is not art an activity that lends faces to things? Does not the facade of a house regard us? The analysis thus far does not
suffice for an answer. We ask ourselves all the same if the impersonal but fascinating and magical march of rhythm does not, in art, substitute
itself for sociality, for the face, for speech. To comprehension and signification grasped within a horizon, we oppose the signifyingness of the face.
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Kritik Answers
Will the brief indications by which we have introduced this notion allow us to catch sight of its role in comprehension itself and of all the
conditions which delineate a sphere of relations barely suspected? In any case, that which we catch sight of seems suggested by the practical
the
encounter with the face - that is, moral consciousness - can be described as the
condition of consciousness tout court and of disclosure; how consciousness is
affirmed as the impossibility of killing; what are the conditions of the appearance of the face as the temptation and
the impossibility of murder; how I can appear to myself as a face; in what manner, finally , the relation with the other (autrui) or
the collectivity is our relation, irreducible to comprehension, with the infinite - these are
the themes that proceed from this first contestation of the primacy of ontology.
Philosophical research, in any case, cannot be content with a mere reflection on the
self or on existence. Reflection offers only the tale of a personal adventure, of a
private soul, which returns incessantly to itself, even when it seems to flee itself.
philosophy of Kant, to which we feel particularly close. In what way the vision of the face is no longer vision but audition and speech; how
The human only lends itself to a relation that is not a power.
Ontological Fascism Turn: 2AC

**** ONTOLOGICAL CRITICISM TRADES OFF WITH ONTIC
POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, ALLOWING ONE TO BECOME
COMPLICIT IN GRAND IDEOLOGIES OF FASCISM AND
TECHNOLOGY THAT ONE CRITICIZES ONE DISMISSES THE
OFFICIAL VERSION OF IDEOLOGY ON BEHALF OF ITS
INNER GREATNESS, BECOMING A MORE EFFECTIVE COG IN
ITS OPERATION
Zizek 99
[Slavoj, Unapologetic Self-Plagierist, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of

political ontology, NYC: Verso, 1999,13-4//uwyo-ajl]
Apropos of this precise point, I myself run into my first trouble with Heidegger
(since I began as a Heideggereian my first published book was on Heidegger
and language). When, in my youth, I was bombarded by the official Communist
philosophers stories of Heideggers Nazie engagement, they left me rather cold;
I was definitely more on the side of the Yugoslav Heideggerians. All of a sudden,
however, I became aware of how these Yugoslav Heideggerians were doing the
same thing with respect to the Yugoslav ideology of self-management as
Heidegger himself did with respect to Nazism: in ex-Yugoslavia, Heideggerians
entertained the same ambiguously assertive relationship toward Socialist selfmanagement, the official ideology of the Communist regime in their eyes, the
essense of self-management was the very essence of modern man, which is why
the philosophical notion of self-management suits the ontological essence of our
epoch, while the standard political ideology of the regime misses this inner
greatness of self-managementHeideggerians are thus eternally in search of a
positive, ontic political system that would come closest to the epochal
ontological truth, a strategy which inevitably leads to error which, of course, is
always acknowledged only retroactively, post factum, after the disastrous
outcome of ones engagement.
As Heidegger himself put it, those who come closest to the ontological Truth are
condemned to err at the ontic level err about what? Precisely about the line
between ontic and ontological. The paradox not to be underestimated is that the
very philosopher who focused his interest on the enigma of ontological
difference who warned again and again against the metaphysical mistake of
conferring ontological dignity on some ontic content (god as the highest Entity,
for example) fell into the trap of conferring on Nazism the ontoligcal dignity of
suiting the essence of modern man. The standard defense of Heidegger against
the reproach of his Nazi past consists of two points: not only was his Nazi
engagement a simple personal error (a stupidity [Dummheit], as Heidegger
himself put it) in no way inherently related to his philosophical project; the main
counter-argument is that it is Heideggers own philosophy that enables us to
discern the true epochal roots of modern totalitarianism. However, what remains
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Kritik Answers
unthought here is the hidden complicity between the ontological indifference
towards ocncrete social systems (capitalism, Frascism, Communism), in so far as
they all belong to the same horizon of modern technology, and the secret
priveleging of a concrete sociopolitical model (Nazism with Heidegger,
Communism with some Heideggerian Marxists), as closer to the ontological
truth of our epoch.
Here, one should avoid the trap that caught Heideggers defenders, who
dismissed Heideggers Nazi engagement as a simple anomaly, as a fall into the
ontic level, in blatant contradiction to his thought, which teaches us not to
confuse ontological horizon with ontic choices (as we have already seen,
Heidegger is at his strongest when he demonstrates how, on a deeper structural
level, ecological, conservative, and so on, oppositions to the modern universe of
technology are already embedded in the horizon of what they purport to reject:
the ecological critique of the technological exploitation of nature ultimately leads
to a more environmentally sound technology, etc. Heidegger di not engage in
the Nazi political project in spite of his ontological philosophical approach, but
because of it; this engagement was not beneath his philosophical level on the
contrary, if one is to understand Heidegger, the key point is to grasp the
complicity (in Hegelese: speculative identity) between the elevation above
ontic concerns and the passionate ontic Nazi political engagement.
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Kritik Answers
Ontology = Nazism: 1AR

HEIDEGGERS FOCUS ON ONTOLOGY MAKES FASCIST
IDEOLOGY POSSIBLE THROUGH A FALSE INNER DISTANCE,
BLINDING ITSELF TO ONTIC ATROCITY
Zizek 99
[Slavoj, Unapologetic Self-Plagierist, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of
political ontology, NYC: Verso, 1999,14-5//uyo-ajl]
One can see the ideological trap that caught Heidegger: when he criticizes Nazi
racism on behalf of the true inner greatness of the Nazi movement, he repeats
the elementary ideological gesture of maintaining an inner distance towards the
ideological text of claiming that there is something more beneath it, a nonideological kernel: ideology exerts its hold over us by means of this very
insistence that the Cause we adhere to is not merely ideological. So where is
the trap? When the disappointed Heidegger turns away from active engagement
in the Nazi movement, he does so because the Nazi movement did not maintain
the level of its inner greatness, but legitimized itself with inadequate (racial)
ideology. In other ords, hat he expected from it was that it should legitimize
itself through direct awareness of its inner greatness. And the problem lies in
this very expectation that a political movement that will directly refer to its
historico-ontological foundaiton is possible. This expectation, however, is in itself
profoundly metaphysical, in so far as it fails to recognize the gap separating the
direct ideological legitimization of a movement from its inner greatness (its
historico-ontological essence) its constitutive, a positive condiiton of its
functioning. To use the terms of the late Heidegger, ontological insight
necessarily entails ontic blindness and error, and vice versa that is to say, in
order to be effecitve at the ontic level, one must disregard the ontological
horizon of ones activity. (In this sense, Heidegger emphasizes that science
doesnt think and that, far from being is limitation, this inability is the very
motor of scientific progress.) In other words, what Heidegger seem suntable to
endorse is a concrete political engagement that would accept its necessary,
constitutive blindness as if the moment we acknowledge the cap separating
the awareness of the ontological horizon from ontic engagement, any ontic
engagement is depreciated, loses its authentic dignity.
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Ontology = Nazism: Ext (1/3)

EXCLUSIVE FOCUS ON THE ONTOLOGY OF TECHNOLOGY
COLLAPSES INTO A FASCIST FANTASY OF BLOOD AND SOIL
Daniels 2002
[Michael D., Trinity University, Heidegger and Nazism, Prometheus:
The John Hopkins Student Journal of Philosophy, Vol. I, Fall 2002,
http://www.jhu.edu/prometheus/Heidegger%20and%20Nazism.pdf, acc
10-11-04//uwyo-ajl]
The Nazis, Heidegger believed, were opposed to the view of technology
held by
Americanism and communism, rather they trusted the feelings and
sensibilities of the
Volk and the need to create a German state out of German Volk. The
Volk stresses historical realization and exaltation of the Germans as
German.38
Alan Paskow notes that Volk is merely a metaphysical justification for
racism, however, Heidegger saw much more in the Volk. Central to
Heideggers support of the Nazis was that their radicalism made possible
a courageous confrontation with the question of Being. This, in his view
would make possible a truly human, or what Heidegger called a truly
spiritual, world. 39 If spiritual leaders pose this question radically
enough, a common questioning will pervade the community. Thereby,
the Volk can play an active role in shaping its fate by placing history
into the openness of the overpowering might of all the world-shaping
forces of human existence and by struggling ever anew to secure its
spiritual world.40
Heidegger believed that Hitler was committed to facing the deepest and
most
troubling questions. Furthermore, Heidegger hoped Hitler would evoke a
communal
reflection on the question of Being. In effect, Hitler would engineer a
communal escape
from the Platonic cave into the light of reality.41
In Heideggers view, the Nazis understood that knowledge was
fundamentally rooted in praxis and thus reconstituting the unity of life in
a way unknown since the pre-Socratics. For the Greeks before Plato,
there was no theory apart from, or above, practice. The Greeks
understood that theory was the highest mode of human activity, but
they understood it as the supreme realization of practice.
THE SEARCH FOR AN AUTHENTIC MOVEMENT, FREE OF

TECHNOLOGY REQUIRES NAZISM BECAUSE EVERY
CONCEPTION OF RIGHTS IS INFECTED WITH ONTIC
REASONING
Zizek 99
[Slavoj, Unapologetic Self-Plagierist, The Ticklish Subject: The absent
centre of political ontology, NYC: Verso, 1999, 12-3//uwyo-ajl]
Here, however, complications arise: on closer inspection, it soon
becomes clear that Heideggers argumentative strategy is twofold. On
the one hand, he rejects every concern for democracy and human rights
as a purely ontic affair unworthy of proper philosophical ontological
questioning democracy, Fascism, Communism, they all amount ot the
577
Kritik Answers
same with regard to the epochal destiny of the West; on the other hand,
his insistence that he is not convinced that democracy is the political
form which best suits the essence of technology none the less suggests
that there is another political form which suits this ontological essence
better - for some time Heidegger thought he had found it in the Fascist
total mobilization (but, significantly, never in Communism, which
always remains for him epochally the same as Americanism).
Heidegger, of course, emphasizes again and again how the ontological
dimension of Nazism is not to be quated with Nazism as an ontic
ideologico-political order; in the well-known passage from An
Introduction to Metaphysics, for example, he repudiates the Nazi
biologist race ideology as something that totally misses the inner
greatness of the Nazi movement, which lies in the encounter between
modern man and technology. None the less, the fact remains that
Heidegger never speaks of the inner greatness of, say, liberal
democracy as if liberal democracy is just that, a superficial world-view
with no underlying dimension of assuming ones own epochal destiny.
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Kritik Answers

THE HEIDEGGEREAN FOCUS NECESSITATES VALORIZATION
OF BLOOD AND WORK, ALLOWING FASCISM TO ENTER
THROUGH THE WINDOW
Wolin 2000
[Richard, Department of History at City University of New York, Arbeit Macht Frei:
Heidegger as the Philosopher of the German Way, Nietzshe, Heidegger, and the Future
of Democracy, Winter Quarter, January 24, 2000, olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/wolin.pdf,
Acc. 10-12-04//uwyo-ajl]
Since the Logic is a lecture course rather than a public political statemen (which, therefore, might necessitate certain
compromises with the regime), it presumably reflects Heideggers genuine views. That is why
find him,
it is so disturbing to
at least in
one instance, flirting with the regimes racial-biological doctrines. Equally

disturbing is
the fact that Heidegger suggests one might reconcile Nazisms racial precepts (the
concepts of blood and racial descent) with his own pet existential
themes and ideals
(mood, work, historicity):

Blood, racial descent (das Geblt) can only be [reconciled] with the foundationa mood of man when it is determined by
temperament and mood [das Gemt]. The contribution of blood comes from the foundational mood of man and belongs to the
determination of our Dasein through work. Work = the historical present. The present (die Gegenwart) is not merely the now;
instead it is the present insofar as it transposes our Being in the emancipation of existence that is accomplished through work. As
someone who works man is transported into the publicness o
existence. Such being-transported belongs to the essence of our Being: that is, to
our being-transported amid things in the world. . . . As something original,
existence never reveals itself to us via the scientific cognition of objects, but32 instead in the essential moods of that flourish in
work and in the historical vocation of a Volk that predetermines all else.
One of the Nazis major domestic political concerns in the regimes initial years
was whether they would be successful in integrating the German working classes
traditionally, staunch supporters of the political left -- within the National Socialist
the
Volksgemeinschaft. To that end they established the German Labor Front to assure
German workers that their role in the new state was an indispensable one. Both
strength through joy and beautification of labor programs discussed earlier

were an
offshoot of the same effort.47 In his vigorous celebration of the joy of work
(Arbeitsfreudigkeit), Heidegger once again demonstrates the elective affinities
between
Existenzphilosophie and the National Socialist worldview:
The question of the joy of work is important. As a foundational mood, joy is the
basis of the possibility of authentic work.
In work as something present, the making present of

Being occurs. Work is presencing in the original sense to the extent that we insert ourselves in the preponderance of Being;
through work we attain the whole of Being in all its greatness, on the basis of the great moods of wonder and reverence, and
thereby enhance it in its greatness (102).
HEIDEGGERS CRITICISM OF WESTERN RATIONALISM

OPENS UP THE SPACE FOR NATIONAL SOCIALISM BECAUSE
OF THEIR PERCEIVED INAUTHENTICITY
Wolin 2000
Needless to say, a rejection of universal concepts by no means entails a

commitment to Nazism. Yet, with this radical philosophical maneuver,
Heidegger left
himself vulnerable to political movements whose major selling point in
opposition to
579
Kritik Answers
the presumed decrepitude of Western liberalism -- was an unabashed
celebration of
volkish particularism. The same normative criticisms Heidegger had
brought to bear
against Western rationalism were also used by him as arguments against
their
corresponding political forms: cosmopolitanism, rights of man,
constitutionalism. Search
as one may through Heideggers voluminous philosophical corpus, one is
extremely hard pressed to find a positive word concerning the virtues of
political liberalism. His
philosophical and political predilections were related to one another
necessarily rather
than contingently.
580
Kritik Answers

HEIDEGGERS OBSESSION WITH FACTICITY AND
AUTHENTIC PARTICULARISM ALLOWS ONE TO LAPSE INTO
CONSERVATIVE GLORIFICATION OF A RURAL FANTASY AND
ENDORSEMENT OF FASCISM
Wolin 2000
[Richard, Department of History at City University of New York, Arbeit
Macht Frei: Heidegger as the Philosopher of the German Way,
Nietzshe, Heidegger, and the Future of Democracy, Winter Quarter,
January 24, 2000, olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/wolin.pdf, Acc. 10-1204//uwyo-ajl]
The epistemological emphasis on faciticity, which celebrates the
particularism
of ones own immediate heritage/life/milieu, is a logical corollary of a
perspective that
esteems the concrete over the abstract. In this regard, the central
position that
Heidegger in Being and Time accords to mineness (Jemeinigkeit) is
also indicative and
revealing. When in 1933 Heidegger turned down an offer for a position
at Humboldt
University in Berlin, he justified his decision by glorifying the provincial
values of
locality and region, which he contrasted to the corrupting influences of
modern city life:
The world of the city runs the risk of falling into a destructive error. A
very loud
and very active and very fashionable obstrusiveness often passes itself
off as
5
concern for the world and existence of the peasant. But this goes exactly
contrary
to the one and only thing that now needs to be done, namely, to keep
ones
distance from the life of the peasant, to leave their existence more than
ever to its
own law, to keep hands off lest it be dragged into the literatis dishonest
chatter
about folk character and rootedness in the soil.4
According to intimate Heinrich Petztet, the Freiburg philosopher felt ill at
ease
with big-city life, "and this was especially true of that mundane spirit of
Jewish circles,
which is at home in the metropolitan centers of the West." 5 In the late
1920s Heidegger
would vigorously protest the growing Jewification (Verjudung) of
German spiritual
life.6 Thus, in Heideggers corpus the boundaries between philosophy
and
weltanschauung are fluid and not impenetrable.7 To date, the
predominant formalphilosophical
interpretations of his work have systematically neglected its ideological
dimensions, to their own detriment. By proceeding from a philosophical
standpoint that
consistently valued the particular over the universal, Heideggers
thought was exposed
581
Kritik Answers
from the outset to grave ethical and political deficits. This conclusion
suggests that in
seeking to account for Heideggers 1933 political lapsus, the existential
standpoint he
cultivated in the early 1920s is as important as the historicalbiographical contingencies
stressed by his defenders.
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A2 We Dont Advocate Nazism:

1AR
THEYRE MISSING THE BOAT ON OUR ARGUMENT. WE
ARENT SAYING THAT YOU SHOULD REJECT THEM BECAUSE
THEY CITED SOMEONE WHO WAS A NAZI, BUT RATHER,
THAT EXCLUSIVE FOCUS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY AFFECTS
BEING LEADS TO POLITICAL PARALYSIS AND ACCEPTANCE
OF ATROCITY IN THE ONTIC REALM.
IF YOU SPEND ALL OF ENERGY SEARCHING FOR A WORLD
THAT WILL DISCLOSE ITSELF IN ITS AUTHENTICITY, THAT
ALLOWS YOU TO PARTICIPATE IN HORRIFIC VIOLENCE
BECAUSE IT DOESNT MEET THE CRITERIA OF AN
ONTOLOGICAL IMPACT. HEIDEGGER EVEN ADMITS THAT
THE TWO KINDS OF QUESTIONING TRADE OFF. CROSSAPPLY ZIZEK 99
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A2 Nazism is Inauthentic: 1AR

EVEN IF NATIONAL SOCIALISM IS REALLY INAUTHENTIC,
THATS NON-RESPONSIVE TO THE ARGUMENT THAT THE
ATTEMPT TO ASSERT AUTHENTICITY DELUDES ONE INTO
ACCEPTING ONTICALLY ATROCIOUS POLITICAL CHOICES.
CROSS-APPLY ZIZEK 99
IF THIS IS TRUE, OUR ARG IS A TURN. THE SEARCH FOR
AUTHENTICITY RESULTS IN COMPLICITY IN POLITICS THAT
ARE EVEN MORE INAUTHENTIC, REINSCRIBING THE WILL
TO WILL THAT THEYRE CRITICIZING. WE THINK THAT WE
HAVE A PURE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WORLD BUT ARE
EVEN MORE TIED TO THE MEDIATION OF REALITY
THIS ARGUMENT BETRAYS HISTORICAL REVISIONISM
THE CRITICISM OF INAUTHENTICITY IS DIRECTLY TIED TO
REJECTION OF ONTIC ETHICS BECAUSE OF THEIR
MODERNITY
Wolin 2000
In the massive secondary literature on Being and Time, the concept of

historicity
has suffered from relative neglected. Perhaps this is because it
represents the aspect of
Heideggers treatise where the philosopher stands in the greatest
proximity to
contemporary politics and, hence, the moment where the ideological
aspects of his
thought are most exposed. The reasons for this neglect are in part
comprehensible. To
date Being and Time has primarily been interpreted in a
Kierkegaardian/existential vein.
It portrays a highly individualized Dasein wrestling with a series of basic
ontological
questions: the struggle for authenticity, the meaning of death, the nature of
care. Yet,
7
the discussion of historicity, which in many respects represents a culmination of
the
books narrative, emphasizes a set of concerns -- destiny, fate, the nature of
authentic
historical community (Gemeinschaft) -- that are difficult to reconcile with the
Kierkegaardian interpretation of the work as basically concerned with Dasein as
an
isolated individual Self. To be sure, were this Heideggers standpoint, it would be
very
difficult to reconcile the idea of historical political commitment with his intentions,
and
one would have to view Heideggers later political commitment as standing in
584
Kritik Answers
contradiction with Being and Times basic ideals. It has often been argued in
the
philosophers defense that since Heideggers actions on behalf of
Nazism demanded a
surrender of individuality to the ends of the historical community, his
political choice
stood at cross-purposes with his philosophy. According to this reading,
therefore,
Heideggers political involvement represented an instance of
inauthenticity. However,
this interpretation forfeits its cogency once the concept of historicity -- in
which
Heidegger unambiguously declares the centrality of collective historical
commitment -- is
taken seriously.
As Lwith understood, it is but a short step from the facticity and
particularism of
individual Existenz to a celebration of volkish parochialism in collectivehistorical terms.
For Heidegger the mediating link between these two aspects of Dasein -the individual
and the collective -- was the conservative revolutionary critique of
modernity. This
strident lament concerning the world-historical decadence of bourgeois existence
was
first articulated in the work of Nietzsche, Spengler as well as countless lesser
Zivilisationskritiker. In Thomas Manns Confessions of an Unpolitical Man, for
example,
the antinomy between Kultur and Zivilisation occurs over one hundred times.
585
Kritik Answers
Heidegger Kills Change

HEIDEGGERS ALTERNATIVE IS BASED ON DOGMATIC
AUTHORITARIANISM THAT CAN NEVER LEAD TO POSITIVE
CHANGE
Thiele, Prof of Political Science @ U of Florida, 2K3 (Leslie Paul, The Ethics and
Politics of Narrative, Foucalt and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed. Rosenberg and
Milchman)
The pursuit of knowledge continues unabated for the skeptic. Yet it proceeds with a suspicious eye. There are inherent
limitations to and a price to pay forthe pursuit of knowledge. Charles Scott describes Foucault's efforts in this regard:
Far from the skepticism that argues that nothing is really knowablegenealogies embody a sense of the historical limits
that define our capacities for knowing and believing. Things are known. But they are known in ways that have
Both Heidegger and Foucault maintain that there is

no legitimate basis for the radical skeptic's conviction that knowledge is
impossible or unworthy of pursuit. This sort of skepticism , Heidegger states, consists
merely in an addiction to doubt. 9 The skeptical nature of political philosophical
thought, in contrast, is grounded in the imperative of endless inquiry. The point for
considerable social and cultural costs. 8
Heidegger and Foucault is to inquire not in order to sustain doubt, but to doubt that one might better sustain inquiry. At
inquiry is tempered with a sensibility of the ethico-political costs of

any knowledge that is gained. Doing political philosophy of this sort might be
likened to walking on a tightrope. If vertigo is experienced, a precarious balance
may be lost. Falling to one side leaves one mired in apathy, cynicism, and
apoliticism. This results when skeptical inquiry degenerates into a radical
skepticism, an addictive doubt that denies the value of (the search for)
knowledge and undermines the engagements of collective life, which invariably
demand commitment (based on tentatively embraced knowledge). Falling to the
other side of the tightrope leaves one mired in dogmatic belief or blind
activism. Authoritarian ideologies come to serve as stable foundations, or a
reactive iconoclasm leads to irresponsible defiance. Apathy, cynicism, and
apoliticism, on the one side, and dogmatic authoritarianism or reactive
iconoclasm, on the other, are the dangerous consequences of losing one's
balance. These states of mind and their corresponding patterns of behavior relieve the vertigo of political
the same time,
philosophical inquiry, but at a prohibitive cost. It has been argued that Foucault did not so much walk the tightrope of
political philosophy as straddle it, at times leaving his readers hopeless and cynical, at times egging them on to an
irresponsible monkeywrenching. For some, the Foucauldian flight from the ubiquitous powers of normalization
undermines any defensible normative position. Hopelessness accompanies lost innocence. Cynicism or nihilism become
the only alternatives for those who spurn all ethical and political foundations. By refusing to paint a picture of a better
future, Foucault is said to undercut the impetus to struggle. Others focus on Foucault's development of a tool kit whose
contents are to be employed to deconstruct the apparatuses of modern power. Yet the danger remains that Foucault's
hyperactive tool-kit users will be unprincipled activists, Luddites at best, terrorists at worst. In either case, Foucault
provides no overarching theoretical vision. Indeed, Foucault is upfront about his rejection of ethical and political theories
and ideals. I think that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system, Foucault
stipulates. Reject theory and all forms of general discourse. This need for theory is still part of the system we reject. 10
One might worry whether action is meant to take the place of thought. If Foucault occasionally straddles the tightrope of
Heidegger obviously stumbled off it. In the 19305, Heidegger enclosed

himself within an authoritarian system of thought grounded in ontological
reifications of a folk and its history. Heidegger's historicization of metaphysics
led him to believe that a new philosophic epoch was about to be inaugurated. It implicitly called for a
philosophical Fuehrer who could put an end to two millennia of ontological
forgetting. 11 The temptation for Heidegger to identify himself as this intellectual
messiah and to attach himself to an authoritarian social and political movement
capable of sustaining cultural renewal proved irresistible . Whether Heidegger ever fully
recovered his balance has been the topic of much discussion. Some argue that Heidegger's
prerogative for political philosophizing was wholly undermined by his infatuation
with folk destiny, salvational gods, and political authority. 12
political philosophy,
586
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Heidegger Irrelevent
HEIDEGGERS PHILOSOPHY DOES NOT APPLY AND IS
DANGEROUS IN THE POLITICAL REALM BECAUSE
METAPHYSICAL RESULTS WILL NOT RESULT FROM
POLITICS
Wolin, Prof of Modern European Intellectual History @ Rice, 90 (Richard, The Politics
of Being, P. 117-118)
Moreover, as Harries indicates, Heidegger's theory of the state as a "work" is modeled upon his theory of the work of art.
Thus, as we have seen, in Heidegger's view, both works of art and the state are examples of the "setting-to-work of
truth." In essence, the state becomes a giant work of art: like the work of art, it participates in the revelation of truth, yet
on a much more grandiose and fundamental scale, since it is the Gesamtkunstwerk within which all the other sub-works
enact their preassigned roles. However, the idea of basing political judgments on analogy with aesthetic judgments is an
Though we may readily accept and even welcome

Heidegger's claim that works of art reveal the truth or essence of beings
extremely tenuous proposition.
("The work
[of art] ... is not the reproduction of some particular entity that happens to be present at any given time," observes
we must question the

attempt to transpose aesthetico-metaphysical criteria to the realm of political
life proper. Is it in point of fact meaningful to speak of the "unveiling of truth" as
the raison d'etre of politics in the same way one can say this of a work of art or a
philosophical work? Is not politics rather a nonmetaphysical sphere of human
interaction, in which the content of collective human projects, in stitutions, and
laws is articulated, discussed, and agreed upon? Is it not, moreover, in some sense
dangerous to expect "metaphysical results" from politics? For is not politics
instead a sphere of human plurality, difference, and multiplicity; hence, a realm in
which the more exacting criteria of philosophical truth must play a sub ordinate
role? And thus, would it not in fact be to place a type of totalitarian constraint on
politics to expect it to deliver over truth in such pristine and unambiguous
fashion? And even if Heidegger's own conception of truth (which we shall turn to shortly) is sufficiently tolerant and
pluralistic to allay such fears, shouldn't the main category of political life be justice instead
of truth? Undoubtedly, Heidegger's long-standing prejudices against "valuephilosophy prevented him from seriously entertaining this proposition; and thus, as
a category of political judgment, justice would not stand in sufficiently close
proximity to Being. In all of the aforementioned instances, we see that Heideggers political
philosophy is overburdened with ontological considerations that end up stifling
the inner logic of politics as an independent sphere of human action.
Heidegger; "it is, on the contrary, the reproduction of the thing's general essence"),66
587
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Rejecting Tech Leads to Extinction

HEIDEGGERS PHILOSOPHY OF REJECTING ALL
TECHNOLOGY MAKES LIFE MEANINGLESS, CULMINATING
IN EXTINCTION
Hicks, Prof and Chair of philosophy @ Queens College of the CUNY, 2K3 (Steven V.,
Critical Encounters, Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, p. 109, Questia)
Heidegger's
insightful reading of Nietzsche and the problem of nihilism is itself too ascetic.
Heidegger's emphasis on silence as proper to Dasein's being, his frequent use of
quasireligious (even Schopenhauerean) terms of grace and call of conscience, his
many references to the destiny of the German Volk, his avoidance of politics and
the serious quietistic tone of Heideggerian Gelassenheit are all reminiscent of
the life-denying ascetic ideal Nietzsche sought to avoid. 65 Moreover, Foucault
seems to join with Derrida and other neo-Nietzscheans in regarding
Heidegger's idea of letting Being behis vision of those who have left
traditional metaphysics behind and with it the obsession with mastery and
technology that drives contemporary civilizationas too passive or apathetic a
response to the legitimate problems of post-Nietzschean nihilism that
Heidegger's own analysis uncovers. 66 Here we have arrived at a key difference between Heidegger
Why a philosophical shock? The answer, in part, may be that from Foucault's perspective,
and Foucault: for Foucault, Heidegger takes insufficient account of the playful and even irreverent elements in Nietzsche
and of Nietzsche's critique of the dangers of the ascetic ideal. Foucault joins with other new Nietzscheans in promoting,
as an alternative to Heideggerian Gelassenheit, the more Nietzschean vision of playing with the textwhich in
Foucault's case means promulgating active and willful images of resistance and struggle against particular practices of
domination, rebellion against micro-powers, and blatant disregard for tradition (cf. DP, 27). 67 This context-specific,
unambiguously confrontational nature of Foucault's critique of the forms of domination and technologies of power lodged
in modern institutions offers a more Nietzsche-like response than the one Heidegger offers to the nihilistic problems of
the lessons Heidegger would have us draw from

Nietzsche throw us back to the passive nihilism of emptiness that Nietzsche
feared. While not predicting the emergence of better times, Foucault tries to offer a better (less passive, less ascetic)
model for reforming our background practices and for cultivating an affirmative attitude toward
life that he and other neo-Nietzscheans think may be our only chance to keep
from extinguishing life on earth altogether. 68
Western civilization. As Foucault sees it,
588
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Alternative Fails: Lapses Into Ontic

Thought
EVERY ATTEMPT TO RECONCEPTUALIZE BEING LAPSES
INTO ONTIC THOUGHT, MEANING THAT THE AFF IS STILL
TIED TO THE HISTORICAL POLITICAL HORIZON THAT
THEYRE CRITICIZING
Wolin 2000
[Richard, Department of History at City University of New York, Arbeit
Macht Frei: Heidegger as the Philosopher of the German Way,
Nietzshe, Heidegger, and the Future of Democracy, Winter Quarter,
January 24, 2000, olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/wolin.pdf, Acc. 10-1204//uwyo-ajl]
That the standpoint of Being and Time is informed by the conservative
revolutionary worldview suggests that Heideggers existential analytic,
far from a purely
formal undertaking, is in fact laden with ontic content -- a content
derived from the
Zeitgeist of the interwar years. The critique of everydayness in
Division I of
publicness, falling, curiosity, and the they emerges precisely
therefrom.
Inattention to this dimension of Heideggers work suggests the pitfalls a
purely textimmanent reading, in which the filiations between politics and
philosophy are a priori
extruded.
The intimate relationship between fundamental ontology and the
German
ideology should come as no surprise. Heidegger always insisted that
ontological
questioning can never be atemporal and never comes to pass in an
historical void. Instead,
it is unavoidably saturated with historicity. As he remarks at one point in
Being and
Time: every ontology presupposes a determinate ontic point of view. . .
Outfitted with a measure of historical perspective, we are now aware of
the extent
to which the early Heidegger made this critique his own. 10 As Lwith
comments:
Whoever. . .reflects on Heideggers later partisanship for Hitler, will find
in this
first formulation of the idea of historical existence the constituents of
his
political decision of several years hence. One need only abandon the still
quasireligious
isolation and apply [the concept of] authentic existence -- always
particular to each individual -- and the duty that follows therefrom to
specifically German existence and its historical destiny in order
thereby to introduce into the general course of German existence the
energetic but empty movement of existential categories (to decide for
oneself; to take stock of 9 oneself in the face of nothingness;
wanting ones ownmost destiny; to take responsibility for oneself)
and to proceed from there to destruction now on the terrain of politics.
It is not by chance if one finds in Carl Schmitt a political
decisionism -- in which the potentiality-for-Being-a-whole of
individual
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existence is transposed to the totality of the authentic state, which is
itself
always particular -- that corresponds to Heideggers existentialist
philosophy.
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Alternative Fails: Tech Returns

REJECTING A CERTAIN FORM OF TECHNOLOGICAL
DOMINATION MERELY REPLACES IT WITH A NEW ONE,
FURTHERING THE TECHNOLOGIZATION OF LIFE AND
REINSCRIBING THE TARGET OF CRITICISM
Zizek 99
[Slavoj, Unapologetic Self-Plagierist, The Ticklish Subject: The absent
centre of political ontology, NYC: Verso, 1999, 11-12//uwyo-ajl]
In his project of overcoming metaphysics, Heidegger fully ensorses this
Nietzschean dismissal of quick and easy exists from metaphysics; the only real
way to break the metaphysical closure is to pass through it in its most
dangerous form, to endure the pain of metaphysical nihilism at its most extreme,
which means that one should reject as futile all false sedatives, all direct
attempts to suspend the mad vicious cycle of modern technology by means of a
return to premodern traditional Wisdom (from Chrsitianity through Oriental
thought), all attempts to reduce the threat of modern technology to the effect of
some ontic social wrong (capitalist exploitation, patriarchal domination,
mechanicist paradigm). These attempts are not only ineffectual: the true
problem with them is that, on a deeper level, they incite the evil they are
fighting even further. An excellent example here is the ecological crisis: the
moment we reduce it to disturbances provoked by our excessive technological
exploitation of nature, we silently already surmise that the solution is to rely
again on technological innovations: new green technology, more efficient and
global in its control of natural processes and human resources Every concrete
ecologogical concern and project to change technology in order to improve the
state of our natural surroundings is thus devalued as relying on the very source
of the trouble.
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Alternative Causes Suffering

HEIDEGGER UNDERMINES MORALS AND POLITICS THE
ALTERNATIVE WILL ONLY CAUSE SUFFERING AND THE
DESTROY ALL ETHICS
Thiele, Prof of Political Science @ U of Florida, 2K3 (Leslie Paul, The
Ethics and Politics of Narrative, Foucalt and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Ed.
Rosenberg and Milchman)
The complementarity of Heidegger's and Foucault's accounts of modern demons and saving graces should not be too
surprising. Foucault's indebtedness to and fascination with Heidegger is well documented. 1 My intent in this chapter is
neither to focus on the complementarity of these visions, nor to outline the striking philosophical and political differences
that remain in Heidegger's and Foucault's work. Rather, I attempt to make a claim for what at first blush might appear a
Heidegger and Foucault are often

castigated as ethico-political dead-ends. They are criticized for their
unwillingness or inability to supply the grounds for sound moral and political
judgment. Heidegger's embrace of Nazism, in particular, is frequently identified
as proof positive that he has little, if anything, to contribute to the ethicopolitical domain. The standard charge is that his highly abstract form of
philosophizing, empyrean ontological vantage point, and depreciation of das
Man undermines moral principle and political responsibility. From his
philosophical heights, it is suggested, Heidegger remained blind to human
sufferings, ethical imperatives, and political practicalities. He immunized himself
against the moral sensitivity, compassion, and prudence that might have
dissuaded him from endorsing and identifying with a brutal regime. Those who
embrace his philosophy, critics warn, court similar dangers. In like fashion, it is held
lost cause. Despite their originality and intellectual brilliance,
that Foucault dug himself into an equally deep, though ideologically relocated, moral and political hole. Genealogical
studies left Foucault convinced of the ubiquity of the disciplinary matrix. There would be no final liberation. The sticky,
normalizing webs of power were inescapable and a hermeneutics of suspicion quashed any hope of gaining the ethical
and political high ground. 2 As such, critics charge, Foucault stripped from us all reason for resistance to unjust power
and all hope of legitimating alternative ethico-political institutions. In a Foucauldian world of panoptic power that shapes
wants, needs, and selves, critics worry, one would have no justification for fighting and nothing worth fighting for. 3 In
sum, Heidegger's and Foucault's critics suggest that both thinkers undermine the foundations of the practical wisdom
needed to ethically and politically navigate late modernity. Despite the brilliance and originality of their thought, arguably
the greatest philosopher and the greatest social and political theorist of the twentieth century remain ungrounded
Critics argue that Heidegger's statements and

actions endorsing and defending Nazi authoritarianism and Foucault's radical
anarchism, as displayed in his discussions of popular justice with Maoists,
demonstrate that neither thinker is capable of supplying us with the resources
for sound moral and political judgment.
ethically and divorced from political responsibility.
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Alternative Causes Paralysis (1/2)

HEIDEGGERS PHILOSOPHY HAS MORAL CONSEQUENCES
AND LEADS TO PARALYSIS IT JUSTIFIES SITTING BACK
AND ALLOWING FOR THE HOLOCAUST WHILE CRITICIZING
THE TECHNOLOGY USED TO KILL THE JEWS
Bookchin, Founder of the Institute for Social Ecology and Former Professor
@ Ramapo College, 95 (Murray, Re Re-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the
Human Spirit Against Antihumanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism, p.
168-170)
"Insofar as Heidegger can be said to have had a project to shape human lifeways, it was as an endeavor to resist, or
should I say, demur from, what he conceived to he an all-encroaching technocratic mentality and civilization that
rendered human beings 'inauthentic' in their relationship to a presumably self-generative reality, 'isness', or more
Heidegger viewed modernity' with

its democratic spirit, rationalism, respect for the individual, and technological
advances as a 'falling' (Gefallen) from a primal and naive innocence in which
humanity once 'dwelled, remnants of which he believed existed in the rustic
world into which he was born a century ago. 'Authenticity', it can be said without
any philosophical frills, lay in the pristine Teutonic world of the tribal Germans
who retained their ties with the Gods, and with later peoples who still tried to
nourish their past amidst the blighted traits of the modern world. Since some authors try
esoterically, 'Being' (Sein). Not unlike many German reactionaries,
to muddy Heidegger's prelapsarian message by focusing on his assumed belief in individual freedom and ignoring his
hatred of the French Revolution and its egalitarian, 'herd'-like democracy of the 'They', it is worth emphasizing that such
a view withers m the light of his denial of individuality. The individual by himself counts for nothing', he declared after
As
a member of the Nazi party, which he remained up to the defeat of Germany
twelve years later, his antihumanism reached strident, often blatantly
reactionary proportions. Newly appointed as the rector of the University of
Freiburg upon Hitler's ascent to power, he readily adopted the Fuehrer-principle
of German fascism and preferred the title Rektor-Fuhrer, hailing the spirit of
National Socialism as an antidote to 'the darkening of the world, the flight of the
gods, the destruction of the earth [by technology], the transformation of men
into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative. His most
becoming a member of the National Socialist party in 1933. 'The fate of our Volk m its state counts for everything.' 22
28
unsavory remarks were directed in the lectures, from which these lines are taken, 'from a metaphysical point of view',
against 'the pincers' created by America and Russia that threaten to squeeze 'the farthermost corner of the globe ... by
Technology, as Heidegger construes it, is 'no mere

means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another
whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the
realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.30 After which Heidegger rolls out technology's
transformations, indeed mutations, which give rise to a mood of anxiety and
finally hubris, anthropocentricity, and the mechanical coercion of things into
mere objects for human use and exploitation. Heidegger's views on technology are part of a larger
technology and ... economic exploitation.'29
weltanschauung which is too multicolored to discuss here, and demands a degree of interpretive effort we must forgo for
Suffice it to say that there is a good deal

of primitivistic animism in Heidegger's treatment of the 'revealing' that occurs
when techne is a 'clearing' for the 'expression' of a crafted material - not unlike
the Eskimo sculptor who believes (quite wrongly, I may add) that he is 'bringing out' a
hidden form that lies in the walrus ivory he is carving. But this issue must be
seen more as a matter of metaphysics than of a spiritually charged technique.
Thus, when Heidegger praises a windmill, in contrast to the 'challenge' to a tract
of land from which the hauling out of coal and ore' is subjected, he is not being
'ecological'. Heidegger is concerned with a windmill, not as an ecological
technology, but more metaphysically with the notion that 'its sails do indeed
turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing'. The windmill 'does
not unlock energy from the air currents, in order to store it'. 31 Like man in
relation to Being, it is a medium for the 'realization' of wind, not an artifact for
acquiring power. Basically, this interpretation of a technological interrelationship
reflects a regression - socially and psychologically as well as metaphysically
into quietism. Heidegger advances a message of passivity or passivity
the present in the context of a criticism of technophobia.
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conceived as a human activity, an endeavor to let things be and 'disclose'
themselves. 'Letting things be' would be little more than a trite Maoist and
Buddhist precept were it not that Heidegger as a National Socialist became all
too ideologically engaged, rather than 'letting things be', when he was busily
undoing 'intellectualism,' democracy, and techno logical
[continues]
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Alternative Causes Paralysis (2/2)

[continues]
intervention into the 'world'. Considering the time, the place, and the
abstract way in which Heidegger treated humanity's 'Fall' into technological
inauthenticity a Fall that he, like Ellul, regarded as inevitable, albeit a
metaphysical, nightmare - it is not hard to see why he could trivialize the
Holocaust, when he deigned to notice it at all, as part of a techno-industrial
condition. 'Agriculture is now a motorized (motorsierte) food industry, in essence
the same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and
extermination camps,' he coldly observed, 'the same as the blockade and
starvation of the countryside, the same as the production of the hydrogen
bombs. In placing the industrial means by which many Jews were killed before
the ideological ends that guided their Nazi exterminators, Heidegger essentially
displaces the barbarism of a specific state apparatus, of which he was a part, by
the technical proficiency he can attribute to the world at large! These immensely
revealing offhanded remarks, drawn from a speech he gave in Bremen m 1949,
are beneath contempt. But they point to a way of thinking that gave an
autonomy to technique that has fearful moral consequences which we are living
with these days in the name of the sacred, a phraseology that Heidegger would
find very congenial were he alive today. Indeed, technophobia, followed to its logical and
crudely primitivistic conclusions, finally devolves into a dark reactionism and a
paralyzing quietism. For if our confrontation with civilization turns on passivity
before a disclosing of Being, a mere dwelling on the earth, and a letting
things be, to use Heideggers verbiage much of which has slipped into deep
ecologys vocabulary as well the choice between supporting barbarism and
enlightened humanism has no ethical foundations to sustain it. Freed of
values grounded in objectivity, we are lost in a quasi-religious antihumanism,
a spirituality that can with the same equanimity hear the cry of a bird and ignore
the anguish of six million once-living people who were put to death by the
National Socialist state.
32
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Heidegger Was a Nazi

HEIDEGGER IS A NAZI AND THAT UNIQUELY INFLUENCED
HIS PHILOSOPHY
Thiele, Prof of Political Science @ U of Florida, 2K3 (Leslie Paul,
The Ethics and Politics of Narrative, Foucalt and Heidegger: Critical
Encounters, Ed. Rosenberg and Milchman)
Heidegger was a Nazi, and a rather unrepentent one at that. Some suggest
Heidegger's Nazism cannot be separated from his philosophy, that indeed the
former follows from the latter. The argument, in short, is that Heidegger's political
biography pretty well tells the whole story. This position has been rearticulated periodically since
the end of the Second World War, each time creating something of an academic row. 16 To be sure, the story of
Heidegger's life does not well illustrate an education in sound moral and political
judgment, except perhaps as an example of a lesson left unlearned. Yet the story that Heidegger
himself tells about human life, about human being in history, can do much to
cultivate moral and political judgment. I assert this despite insightful critiques of Heidegger that
accuse him of ignoring and eliding phronesis as a human potentiality. 17 My argument, then, is not that Heidegger's work
explicitly celebrates prudence, but that
his philosophical narrative facilitates its
cultivation.
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Anti-Humanism Justifies Genocide

ANTI-HUMANISMS ALL-OR-NOTHING MENTALITY
JUSTIFIED THE HOLOCAUST WE MUST CHALLENGE THE
REDUCTION IN HUMANIST VALUES IN ORDER TO PREVENT
ANOTHER HOLOCAUST
Ketels, Assoc Prof of English @ Temple U, 96 (Violet B., Havel to the Castle! The
Power of the Word, 548 Annals 45, November, Lexis)
History has survived them and provides a regenerative, other view against nihilism and detachment. It testifies that
our terror of being found guilty of phrases too smooth or judgment too simple is
not in itself a value. Some longing for transcendence persists in the human
spirit, some tenacious faith that truth and goodness exist and can prevail . What
happened in the death camps, the invasion of Prague by Russian tanks, the rape of Muslim women, the dismembering of
Bosnian men, the degrading of a sophisticated society to subsistence and barbarous banditry: these things do not
become fictions simply because we cannot speak of them adequately or because composing abstractions is safer than
responding to the heinous reality of criminal acts. No response to the Holocaust and its murderous wake or to the
carnage in the former Yugoslavia could possibly be adequate to the atrocities alphabetized in file folders of perpetrators
or to the unspeakable experiences burned into brains and bodies of survivors. But no response at all breeds new
Bellow warned about the "humanistic civilized moral imagination"

that, seized with despair, "declines into lethargy and sleep ." n15 Imagine the plight of
human creatures if it were to be silenced altogether, extinguished or forgotten. " Humanism did not produce
the Holocaust, and the Holocaust, knowing its enemies, was bent on the
extermination of humanism. It is an odd consequence of an all-or-nothing
mentality to repudiate humanist values because they are inadequate as an
antidote to evil." n16 Basic human rights asserted in words cannot be restored in reality unless they are matched
to practices in all the spheres of influence we occupy. We feel revulsion at the repudiation of
humanist values so visible in the savagery of the battlefield and the councils of
war. Yet we seem inoculated against seeing the brutalities of daily human
interactions, the devaluing of values in our own intellectual spheres, the moral
and ethical debunking formally incorporated into scholarly exegesis in literature,
philosophy, the social sciences, and linguistics, the very disciplines that cradled
humanist values. Remembering for the future by rehearsing the record, then, is not enough, as the most
eloquent witnesses to Holocaust history have sorrowfully attested. We must also respond to the record
with strategies that challenge humanist reductionism in places where we
tend to overlook it or think it harmless. Our moral outrage should be intensified,
not subdued, [*50] by what we know. We must search out alternatives to the
anomie that seizes us when the linguistic distance between words and reality
seems unbridgeably vast, and reflections upon historical events ill matched to
the dark complexities of the human experience we would illumine.
catastrophe. Saul
ANTI-HUMANISM DESTROYS HUMAN DIGNITY

Campbell, Prof of International Politics @ U of Newcastle, 99 (David,
The Deterritorialization of Responsibility, Moral Spaces, Eds. Michael J. Shapiro
& David Campbell)
Liberalism is thus insufficient for human dignity because the election that justifies man "comes
from a god or Godwho beholds him in the face of the other man, his neighbor, the original 'site' of the Revelation."34
Similarly, humanism is insufficient, and "modern antihuman-ism ... is true over

and beyond the reasons it gives itself." What Levinas finds laudable in
antihumanism is that it "abandoned the idea of person, goal and origin of
itself, in which the ego is still a thing because it is still a being ." As such,
antihumanism does not eradicate the human, but "clears the place for subjectivity
positing itself in abnegation, in sacrifice, in a substitution which precedes the
will." It would therefore be a grave error to conclude in haste that Levinas's antihumanism is either inhuman or
inhumane. To the contrary. Levinas declares that "hu manism has to be denounced only
because it is not sufficiently human," '' because it is insufficiently attuned to
alterity. If one understood "humanism" to mean a "humanism of the Other," then
there would be no greater humanist than Levinas.
3
36
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Liberal Humanism Solves

Oppression
LIBERAL HUMANISM LIBERATES MORE THAN IT DESTROYS
AND STOPS THE WORST OPPRESSION IN HISTORY THE
WESTS FIGHT AGAINST COMMUNISM PROVES
Kors, Prof of History @ U of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy
Research Institute, 2K1 (Alan Charles, Triumph without Self-Belief, Orbis, Summer,
ebsco)
For generations, and to this day, the great defenders of the humane consequences of the allocation of capital by free markets--Ludwig von Mises,
Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, for example--have remained unexplored, marginalized, or dismissed as absurd by most American
intellectuals. The lionized intellectuals were and are, in sentimental memory, those who dreamed about and debated how one would make the
transition from unproductive and unjust capitalism to the cornucopia of central planning. For a full generation, academic intellectual culture
above all generally viewed the West's anticommunist military strength, let alone its willingness to project that strength, as the great obstacle to
international justice and peace, and derided the doctrine of peace through strength as the slogan of the demented. For at least a generation,
Western intellectual contempt for the West as a civilization, a set of ideals, and the object of hope for the potentials of humanity has been the
curriculum of the humanities and "soft" social sciences. Given these ineffably sad phenomena, the seeming triumph of the West (both the
collapse of neo-Marxist theory at universities outside the West, and especially the downfall of the Soviet empire) will be understood by Western
intellectuals as showing, in the latter case, how absurd Western fears were from the start, and, in both cases, not so much a victory for the West
as merely the economic collapse of communists who in various ways betrayed their ideals or failed to temper them with adequate pragmatism or
relativism. One must recall, however, the years 1975-76 in the world of the intellectual Left: the joy at American defeat in Indochina; the
excitement over Eurocommunism; the anticipation of one, ten, a hundred Vietnams; the contempt for Jean-Francois Revel's The Totalitarian
Temptation; the ubiquitous theories of moral equivalence; the thrill Of hammers and sickles in Portugal; the justifications of the movement of
Cuban troops into those great hopes for mankind, Angola and Mozambique; the loathing of all efforts to preserve Western strategic superiority or
even parity. One must recall, indeed, the early 1980s: the romanticization of the kleptomaniacal and antidemocratic Castroite Sandinistas and the
homicidal megalomaniac Mengistu of Ethiopia; the demonization of Reagan's foreign policy; the outrage when Susan Sontag declared the
audience of Reader's Digest better informed than readers of The Nation about the history of the USSR; the mockery of the president's description
of the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and of communism as a vision that would end on "the dustbin of history"; and the academic associations
that approved politically correct resolutions for a nuclear freeze. The latter included the American Historical Association, which voted in
overwhelming numbers to inform the American government and public that, as professional historians, they knew that Reagan's rearmament
program and deployment of missiles in Europe would lead to a severe worsening of U.S.-Soviet relations, end the possibilities of peace, and
culminate in an exchange of weapons in an ineluctable conflict. All of that will be rewritten, forgotten, indirectly justified, and incorporated into a
The initial appeal of communism

and romanticized Third World leaders--Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh,
world view that still portrays the West as empire and the rest of the world as victim.
Fidel Castro, Sekou Toure, and Daniel Ortega--who would redefine human well-being and productivity (well, they certainly
reflected the Western pathology whereby intellectuals delude

themselves systematically about the non-West, about that "Other" standing
against and apart from the society that does not appreciate those intellectuals' moral and practical authority and
redefined something)
status. However, when an enemy arose that truly hated Western intellectuals--namely, fascism--and whose defeat depended upon the West's
self-belief, Western intellectuals quickly became masters of judgments of absolute superiority and had no difficulty in defining a contest between
good and evil. Cognitive dissonance is an astonishing phenomenon, and in academic circles, it prevents three essential historical truths from
the most murderous regime in all of human history, the Bolsheviks in

power, has fallen: its agents were guilty of irredeemable crimes against
humanity, and its apologists should do penance for the remainder of their lives.
being told. First,
Anticommunists within the law were warriors for human freedom; communists and anti-anticommunists, whatever their
The most that can be said in communism's

favor is that it was capable of building, by means of, slave labor and terror, a simulacrum
of Gary, Indiana, once only, without ongoing maintenance, and minus the good stuff. Secondly, voluntary
exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law has
demonstrably created the means of both prosperity and diverse social options.
Such a model has been a precondition of individuation and freedom, whereas
regimes of central planning have created poverty, and (as Hayek foresaw) ineluctable
developments toward totalitarianism and the worst abuses of power. Dynamic freeintentions, were warriors for human misery and slavery.
market societies, grounded in rights-based individualism, have altered the entire human conception of freedom and
dignity for formerly marginalized groups. The entire "socialist experiment," by contrast, ended in stasis, ethnic hatreds,
the absence of even the minimal preconditions of economic, social, and political renewal, and categorical contempt for
Thirdly, the willingness to contain communism, to fight

its expansion overtly and covertly, to sacrifice wealth and often lives against its
heinous efforts at extension--in Europe, Vietnam, Central Asia, Central America, Korea, Laos,
Cambodia, and, indeed, Grenada--was, with the struggle against Nazism over a much briefer period,
the great gift of American taxpayers and the American people to planet earth. As Britain under
both individuation and minority rights.
Churchill was "the West" in 1940, so was the United States from 1945 to 1989, drawing from its values to stand against what was simultaneously
its mutant offspring and its antithesis. In the twentieth century, the West met and survived its greatest trial. On the whole, however, Western
intellectuals do not revel in these triumphs, to say the least. Where is the celebration? Just as important, where is the accounting? On the Left, to
have either would be to implicate one's own thought and will in the largest crime and folly in the history of mankind. We have seen myriad
documentaries on the collective and individual suffering of the victims of Nazism, but where is the Shoah, or the Night and Fog, let alone the
the countless
victims who froze to death or were maimed in the Arctic death camps would go
unremembered; the officers and guards who broke their bodies and often their
souls would live out their lives on pensions, unmolested; and those who gave the orders would die
Nuremberg trails of the postcommunist present? As Solzhenitsyn predicted repeatedly in The Gulag Archipelago,
peacefully and unpunished. Our documentary makers and moral intellectuals do not let us forget any victim of the
Holocaust. We hunt down ninety-year-old guards so that the bones of the dead might have justice, and properly so .
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The bones of Lenin's and Stalin's and Brezhnev's camps cry out for justice, as do
the bones of North Vietnam's exterminations, and those of Poi Pot's millions, and
Mao's tens of millions. In those cases, however, the same intellectuals cry out against--what is their phrase?--"witch-hunts,"
and ask us to let the past be the past. We celebrated the millennium with jubilation; we have not yet celebrated the triumph of the West. Ask
American high school or even college students to number Hitler's victims and Columbus's victims, and they will answer, for both, in the tens of
millions. Ask them to number Stalin's victims and, if my experience is typical, they will answer in the thousands. Such is their education, even
now. The absence of celebration, of teaching the lessons learned, and of demands for accountability is perhaps easily understood on the Left.
Convinced that the West above all has been the source of artificial relationships of
dominance and subservience, the commodification of human life, and ecocide, leftist
intellectuals have little interest in objectively analyzing the manifest data about
societies of voluntary exchange, or in coming to terms with the slowly and newly released data about the conditions of
life and death under the Bolsheviks and their heirs, or in confirming or refuting various theories on the outcome of the Cold War (let alone, given
their contemporary concerns, in analyzing ecological or gender politics under communist or Third World regimes). Less obvious, but equally
striking in some ways, has been the absence of celebration on so much of the intellectual Right, because it is not at all certain something worth
calling Western civilization did in fact survive the twentieth century.
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Humanism Solves Genocide

STRENGTHENING HUMAN VIRTUES IS THE ONLY WAY TO
MAINTAIN PEACE SOLVES FURTHER HOLOCAUSTS
THE political bestiality of our age is abetted by our willingness to tolerate the
deconstructing of humanist values. The process begins with the cynical
manipulation of language. It often ends in stupefying murderousness before
which the world stands silent, frozen in impotent "attentism"--a wait-and-see
stance as unsuited to the human plight as a pacifier is to stopping up the hunger
of a starving child. We have let lapse our pledge to the 6 million Jewish victims of
the Holocaust that their deaths might somehow be transfiguring for humankind.
We allow "slaughterhouse men" tactical status at U.N. tables and "cast down our
eyes when the depraved roar past." n1 Peacemakers, delegated by us and circumscribed by our fears,
[*46]
temporize with thugs who have revived lebensraum claims more boldly than Hitler did. In the Germany of the 1930s, a
demonic idea was born in a demented brain; the word went forth; orders were given, repeated, widely broadcast; and
men, women, and children were herded into death camps. Their offshore signals, cries for help, did not summon us to
rescue. We had become inured to the reality of human suffering. We could no longer hear what the words meant or did
not credit them or not enough of us joined the chorus. Shrieking victims perished in the cold blankness of inhumane
silence. We were deaf to the apocalyptic urgency in Solzhenitsyn's declaration from the Gulag that we must check the
only the unbending

strength of the human spirit, fully taking its stand on the shifting frontier of
encroaching violence and declaring "not one step further," though death may be
the end of it--only this unwavering firmness offers any genuine defense of peace
for the individual, of genuine peace for mankind at large. n2 In past human crises, writers
disastrous course of history. We were heedless of the lesson of his experience that
and thinkers strained language to the breaking point to keep alive the memory of the unimaginable, to keep the human
conscience from forgetting. In the current context, however, intellectuals seem more devoted to abstract assaults on
values than to thoughtful probing of the moral dimensions of human experience. "Heirs of the ancient possessions of
we seem to have lost our nerve, and not only

because of Holocaust history and its tragic aftermath. We feel insecure before
the empirical absolutes of hard science. We are intimidated by the "high
modernist rage against mimesis and content," n4 monstrous progeny of the union
between Nietzsche and philosophical formalism, the grim proposal we have
bought into that there is no truth, no objectivity, and no disinterested
knowledge. n5 Less certain about the power of language, that "oldest flame of the
[*47] humanist soul," n6 to frame a credo to live by or criteria to judge by, we are
vulnerable even to the discredited Paul de Man's indecent hint that "wars and revolutions
are not empirical events . . . but 'texts' masquerading as facts ." n7 Truth and
reality seem more elusive than they ever were in the past; values are
pronounced to be mere fictions of ruling elites to retain power. We are
embarrassed by virtue. Words collide and crack under these new skeptical strains, dissolving into banalities the colossal
higher knowledge and literacy skills," n3
enormity of what must be expressed lest we forget. Remembering for the future has become doubly dispiriting by our having to remember for the
present, too, our having to register and confront what is wrong here and now. The reality to be fixed in memory shifts as we seek words for it; the
memory we set down is flawed by our subjectivities. It is selective, deceptive, partial, unreliable, and amoral. It plays tricks and can be invented.
It stops up its ears to shut out what it does not dare to face. n8 Lodged in our brains, such axioms, certified by science and statistics, tempt us to
concede the final irrelevance of words and memory. We have to get on with our lives. Besides, memories reconstructed in words, even when they
are documented by evidence, have not often changed the world or fended off the powerful seductions to silence, forgetting, or denying.
Especially denying, which, in the case of the Holocaust, has become an obscene industry competing in the open market of ideas for control of our
sense of the past. It is said that the Holocaust never happened. Revisionist history with a vengeance is purveyed in words; something in words
must be set against it. Yet what? How do we nerve to the task when we are increasingly disposed to cast both words and memory in a condition
of cryogenic dubiety? Not only before but also since 1945, the criminality of governments, paraded as politics and fattening on linguistic
manipulation and deliberately reimplanted memory of past real or imagined grievance, has spread calamity across the planet. "The cancer that
has eaten at the entrails of Yugoslavia since Tito's death [has] Kosovo for its locus," but not merely as a piece of land. The country's rogue
adventurers use the word "Kosovo" to reinvoke as sacred the land where Serbs were defeated by Turks in 1389! n9 Memory of bloody massacres
in 1389, sloganized and distorted in 1989, demands the bloody revenge of new massacres and returns civilization not to its past glory but to its
gory tribal wars. As Matija Beckovic, the bard of Serb nationalism, writes, "It is as if the Serbian people waged only one battle--by widening the
Kosovo charnel-house, by adding wailing upon wailing, by counting new martyrs to the martyrs of Kosovo. . . . Kosovo is the Serbianized [*48]
history of the Flood--the Serbian New Testament." n10 A cover of Suddeutsche Zeitung in 1994 was printed with blood donated by refugee
We stand benumbed before

multiplying horrors. As Vaclav Havel warned more than a decade ago, regimes that generate
them "are the avant garde of a global crisis in civilization." The
depersonalization of power in "system, ideology and apparat," pathological
suspicions about human motives and meanings, the loosening of individual
responsibility, the swiftness by which disastrous events follow one upon another
"have deprived us of our conscience, of our common sense and natural speech
and thereby, of our actual humanity." n12 Nothing less than the transformation of
human consciousness is likely to rescue us.
women from Bosnia in an eerily perverse afterbirth of violence revisited. n11
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A2 Reject Technology: 2AC

THE PROBLEM ISNT TECHNOLOGY, BUT OUR
RELATIONSHIP TO IT. REJECTING IT MASKS THE PROBLEM
AND ONLY ACKNOWLEDGING ITS INCOMPLETION CAN
TRAVERSE ITS HOLD OVER US
Daniels 2002
[Michael D., Trinity University, Heidegger and Nazism, Prometheus: The John Hopkins
Student Journal of Philosophy, Vol. I, Fall 2002, http://www.jhu.edu/prometheus/Heidegger
%20and%20Nazism.pdf, acc 10-11-04//uwyo-ajl]
Despite his grave concerns about technology, he was never simply an

opponent
of it nor did he seek its abolition or destruction. The problem, Heidegger
believed, was
not technology per se, but the hegemony that technology had come to
exercise over
human action. Techne as a form of uncovering reveals the world as a
process of
production. Everything within the world is thus merely the equipment
with which this
productive enterprise is carried out. Modern man imagines that
technology produces
goods to satisfy his wants and desires, providing a nice lifestyle.
Technology, however,
can only serve human beings if they live according to something other
than technical
and economic imperatives. Only if distinctively human action is placed at
the center of
our concern will technology serve our ends. We can only become active,
as opposed to
productive, beings if we are guided by phronesis. Phronetic insight,
however, is only
possible if we resolutely face the possibility of our own death and accept
the destiny
that is revealed in the moment of vision. Thus, we must resolve
ourselves to face the
question of Being. Without resolve to do this, we will lose the capacity
for action and
become mere cogs in the equipment that constitutes the world
uncovered by techne.
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A2 Spanos: 2AC (1/3)

SPANOS DEMAND FOR PURITY ENSURES HIS
MARGINALIZATION AND FORECLOSES ON COALITION
BUILDING ONLY THE PERM OFFERS A WAY OUT
Perkin 93
[J. Russell, Prof. English @ St. Marys, Theorizing the Culture Wars, Postmodern
Culture 3: 3, 1993, Muse//uwyo]
My final criticism is that Spanos, by his attempt to put all humanists into the
same category and to break totally with the tradition of humanism, isolates
himself in a posture of ultraleftist purity that cuts him off from many potential
political allies, especially when, as I will note in conclusion, his practical
recommendations for the practical role of an adversarial intellectual seem
similar to those of the liberal pluralists he attacks. He seems ill-informed about
what goes on in the everyday work of the academy, for instance, in the field of
composition studies. Spanos laments the "unwarranted neglect" (202) of the
work of Paulo Freire, yet in reading composition and pedagogy journals over the
last few years, I have noticed few thinkers who have been so consistently cited.
Spanos refers several times to the fact that the discourse of the documents
comprising The Pentagon Papers was linked to the kind of discourse that firstyear composition courses produce (this was Richard Ohmann's argument); here
again, however, Spanos is not up to date. For the last decade the field of
composition studies has been the most vigorous site of the kind of oppositional
practices The End of Education recommends. The academy, in short, is more
diverse, more complex, more genuinely full of difference than Spanos allows,
and it is precisely that difference that neoconservatives want to erase.
By seeking to separate out only the pure (posthumanist) believers, Spanos
seems to me to ensure his self-marginalization. For example, several times he
includes pluralists like Wayne Booth and even Gerald Graff in lists of "humanists"
that include William Bennett, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza. Of course,
there is a polemical purpose to this, but it is one that is counterproductive. In
fact, I would even question the validity of calling shoddy and often inaccurate
journalists like Kimball and D'Souza with the title "humanist intellectuals." Henry
Louis Gates's final chapter contains some cogent criticism of the kind of position
which Spanos has taken. Gates argues that the "hard" left's opposition to
liberalism is as mistaken as its opposition to conservatism, and refers to Cornel
West's remarks about the field of critical legal studies,
"If you don't build on liberalism, you build on air" (187). Building on air seems to
me precisely what Spanos is recommending. Gates, on the other hand, criticizes
"those massively totalizing theories that marginalize practical political action as
a jejune indulgence" (192), and endorses a coalition of liberalism and the left.
PERM DO BOTH
SPANOS ALONE ISNT EMANCIPATORY COMBINING THE
CRITICISM WITH PROBLEM SOLVING IS OPTIMAL
Lewandowski 94
[John, Prof @ SUNY Binghamton, Philosophy and Social Criticism 20, 119]
Spanos rightly rejects the textuality route in Heidegger and Criticism precisely
because of its totalizing and hypostatizing tendencies. Nevertheless, he holds on
to a destructive hermeneutics as disclosure. But as I have already intimated,
disclosure alone cannot support a critical theory oriented towards emancipation.
I think a critical theory needs a less totalizing account of language, one that
articulates both the emphatic linguistic capacity to communicate, solve
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problems in and criticize the world. The essential task of the social critic and
any literary theory that wants to be critical is to couple world disclosure with
problem-solving, to mediate between the extra-ordinary world of textuality and
the everyday world of texts. In this alternative route, literary theory may
become the kind of emancipatory oriented critical theory it can and should be.
604
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605
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606
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**Human Rights Bad (Imperialism)**
HR Bad Answers: 2AC (1/4)

FIRST, NO LINK WE DONT DICTATE THE
INTERNATIONALIZATION OF RIGHTS. OUR EV JUST SHOWS
THAT OTHERS WILL VOLUNTARILY MODEL PLAN
SECOND, WE CONTROL UNIQUENESS ZAKARIA SHOWS
THAT DEMOCRATIC PROMOTION IS INEVITABLE NOW. WE
JUST SEND A BETTER SIGNAL THAT STABILIZES STATUS
QUO TRANSITIONS
THIRD, ESSENTIALISM TURN
A. THEIR ARGUMENT ESSENTIALIZES NON-WESTERN
CULTURES, DEPRIVING THEM OF AGENCY
Mered 96
[Sohail, JD Candidate @ Western Reserve University School of Law, Its Not a Cultural
Thing: Disparate Domestic Enforcement of Internaitonal Criminal Procedure Standards
A Comparison of the United States and Egypt, Case Western Reserve Journal of
International Law, Winter, LN//uwyo-ajl]
. Most significant and dangerous is the assumption by

that a culture is monolithic. Their reliance on stereotypes of
entire races, ethnicities, and religions stems from that assumption. n65 The
result is an argument which must fail because of its oversimplification . No culture can be viewed as a
homogeneous grouping of people; nor can religion alone characterize a culture. Relativists like to
refer to the "Islamic culture," thereby obliterating significant cultural differences which
The cultural relativist position fails in several ways
relativists
exist among peoples from Morocco to Indonesia (passing through some sub-Saharan African nations, such as Nigeria). n66 These cultural
differences, due to the diversity of race, and ethnicity, as well as historical experience, all give insight into the way these different states may
A simplistic scholarly argument which conveniently overlooks

intricacies and complexities necessarily raises suspicions and destroys itself.
behave.
B. THIS MIMICS COLONIZATION, ENTRENCHING

OPPRESSION
Butler 99
the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1999, 18-19//uwyo-ajl]
Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the
The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a

reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor
instead of offering a different set of terms. That the tactic can operate in feminist and antifeminist contexts alike suggests that the colonizing
gesture is not primarily or irreducibly masculinist. It can operate to effect other relations of racial, class, and heterosexist subordination , to name
totalizing gestures of feminism.
but a few. And clearly, listing the varieties of oppression, as I began to do, assumes their discrete, sequential coexistence along a horizontal axis
that does not describe their convergences within the social field. A vertical model is similarly insufficient; oppressions cannot be summarily
ranked, causally related, distributed among planes of originality and derivativeness. Indeed, the field of power structured in part by the
imperializing gesture of dialectical appropriation exceeds and encompasses the axis of sexual difference, offering a mapping of intersecting
differentials which cannot be summarily hierarchized either within the terms of phallogocentrism or any other canddidate for the position of
Rather than an exclusive tactic of masculinist signifying

economies, dialectical appropriation and suppression of the Other is
one tactic among many deployed centrally but not exclusively in the service of
expanding and rationalizing the masculinist domain.
primary condition of oppression.
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FOURTH, NO ALTERNATIVE CROSS-CULTURAL EXCHANGE

IS INEVITABLE IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD, PREVENTING
CULTURAL AUTHENTICITY
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FIFTH, THE ALTS RELATIVISM RISKS CRUSHING
TOTALITARIANISM
Farber & Sherry 95
[Daniel A., Henry J. Fletcher Professor of Law and Assoc Dean of Faculty @ U. of
Minnesota, & Suzanna, Earl R. Larson Prof. of Civ Rights and Civ Liberties Law @ U. of
Minnesota, Is the Radical Critique of Merit Anti-Semitic? California Law Review, May,
LN//uwyo-ajl]
This unsettling possible alignment of radical constructivism with the worst

totalitarian regime of this century should also - upon reflection - seem less than shocking.
n147 The core of the radical constructivist paradigm is a rejection of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on rationality and scientific explanation.
n148 Instead, radical constructivists seek to explain the world solely as the result - deliberate or unconscious - of ideology and the pursuit of
dominance. But that standard leaves little room for shared concepts of merit, morality, or anything else. n149 As other scholars have noted,
radical constructivism "leaves no ground whatsoever for distinguishing reliable knowledge from superstition." n150 As a feminist philosopher who
it can readily slide into moral

relativism n151 - only one step away from relying on raw power to
determine truth. For if ideas are mere reflections of the exercise of power, it becomes difficult to
find a basis for criticizing social arrangements. And if raw power is the test of truth,
totalitarians are merely the most unabashed constructors of reality. Much
sympathizes with what we have called radical constructivism has warned,
as radical constructivists may dislike this conclusion, its potential is present in their conceptual apparatus.
SIXTH, TURN PLAN SOLVES THE WORSE IMPERIALISM OF

FORCIBLY DETAINING ENEMY COMBATANTS FOR LIFE
WITHOUT DUE PROCESS
SEVENTH, TURN: THEIR PATRONIZING RESPECT FOR
OTHERS IS RACISM UNDER ANOTHER GUISE AND
SMOOTHES THE PATH FOR CAPITAL-DRIVEN DESTRUCTION
Zizek '99
New York: Verso, 1999, 215-6
How, then, does the universe of Capital relate to the form of nation-state in our era of global capitalism? Perhaps this relationship is best
designated as 'autocolonization': with the direct multinational functioning of Capital, we are no longer dealing with the standard opposition
between metropolis and colonized countries; a global company, as it were, cuts its umbilical cord with its mother-nation and treats its country of
origin as simply another territory to be colonized. This is what is so disturbing to patriotically orientated right-wing populists, from Le Pen to
Buchanan: the fact that the new multinationals have exactly the same attitude towards the French or American local population as towards the
population of Mexico, Brazil or Taiwan. Is there not a kind of poetic justice in this self-referential turn of today's global capitalism, which functions
as a kind of 'negation of negation', after national capitalism and its internationalist! colonialist phase? At the beginning (ideally, of course), there
is capitalism within the confines of a nation-state, and with the accompanying international trade (exchange between sovereign nation-states);
what follows is the relationship of colonization, in which the colonizing country subordinates and exploits (economically, politically, culturally) the
the final moment of this process is the paradox of colonization, in

which there are only colonies, no colonizing countries - the colonizing power is no longer
a nation-state but the global company itself. In the long term, we shall all not only wear Banana Republic shirts
colonized country;
but also live in banana republics.
the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is

multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats
each local culture as the colonizer treats colonized people - as 'natives' whose
And, of course,
mores are to be carefully studied and 'respected'. That is to say: the relationship between traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist
self-colonization is exactly the same as the relationship between Western cultural imperialism and multiculturalism - just as global capitalism
multiculturalism involves a
patronizing Eurocentrist distance and/or respect for local cultures
without roots in one's own particular culture. In other words, multiculturalism
is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a 'racism with a distance' - it
'respects' the Other's identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed 'authentic'
community towards which the multiculturalist maintains a distance
made possible by his/her privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which
involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing nation-state metropolis,
empties its own position of all positive content' (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist; he or she does not oppose the the Other the particular
values of his or her own culture); none the less he or she retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able
to appreciate (and depreciate) other particular cultures properly -
multiculturalist respect for the Other's
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specificity is the very form of asserting one's own superiority. Pursuing
multiple perspectives legitimizes racism and disables us from solving
ecological and social disasters
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EIGHTH, PERM DO BOTH
COMBINING UNIVERSALITY AND RELATIVISM CHECKS
ETHNOCENTRISMAND LOCAL REPRESSION
Donoho 2001
[Douglas Lee, Prof. Law @ Southeastern University, Autonomy, SelfGovernance, and the Margin of Appreciation: Developing a
Jurisprudence of Diversity within Universal Human Rights, 15 Emory
International Law Review 391, Fall, LN//uwyo-ajl]
On the other side of the debate, reliance on relativism by non-Western states and scholars reflects a mixture
of contrasting motives.
For some repressive regimes, the lure of relativism

undoubtedly lies in its potential for deflecting international scrutiny.
Universalists' deep suspicion regarding the motives of those who champion relativism seems well founded.
Indeed, prominent among states promoting relativism at the World Conference in Vienna were those on the
short list of the World's most egregious violators - measured on virtually any scale - of basic human dignity.
many of these government's

espoused claims of cultural or [*414] religious imperative are nothing
more than cynical manipulations meant to undermine the effectiveness
of rights. Yet the appeal of relativism is hardly limited to repressive governments. Especially among nonWesterners, arguments about relativism are a reflection of something far
more profound than the misleading, "either/or" dichotomy of universal
versus relative rights. For many, the appeal of a seemingly relativist perspective is simply a means to advocate
n63 Only a true Pollyanna would fail to suspect that
genuine concern over the cultural, social, and political domination of Western values. n64 It similarly reflects an understandable
desire to preserve local traditions and values - a desire that on some level clearly conflicts with progressive human rights
development and may serve as the unwitting ally of oppression. n65 Finally, the relativist perspective may be used to promote selfgovernance and autonomy - the prerogative to develop the specific meaning of human rights, in accordance with local terms of
reference. n66 To a significant extent, genuine concerns for diversity, pluralism and local autonomy have been obscured by the
West's legitimate fear that "relativism" could serve as the "last refuge for oppression." n67 The "relativist" label has thus become,
, the fears and

corresponding rhetoric of the West have created a misleading
oppositional narrative that obscures the real and difficult issues that
genuine diversity poses for the international human rights system. n69
in the [*415] words of Makau Wa Mutua, a bit like "human rights name-calling." n68 In this sense
As is often true in political debates, the competing motivations of universalist and relativist governments
have been manifested in arguments imprecisely cast in "either/or" terms; that is, all rights are, in all of their
manifestations, either universal or relative. Yet one plausible reading of the compromise language of the
this is a false dichotomy. Rather, it may be that the Vienna

international human rights can be
simultaneously universal and variant.
Vienna Declaration suggests that
Declaration reflects the notion that
NINTH, TURN: THEIR RELATIVISM IS ITSELF

ETHNOCENTRIC
Morgan-Foster 03
[Jason, JD Cand at U. of Michigan School of Law, A New Perspective on the Universality
DebA2 Reverse Moderate Relativism in the Islamic Context, ILSA Journal of Intl and
Comparative Law, Fall, LN//uwyo-ajl]
: the notion that all values are culturally

relative, the belief in "the equal dignity and worth of all cultures," or "the
equal right of all peoples to participate in the formation of international law" are themselves culturally shaped
value judgments, which would be void under the cultural relativist's
own theory. There is no reason for cultural relativists to accept these starting points as universal in order to support a doctrine which
Strict cultural relativism has been criticized as self-contradictory
denies the legitimacy of [*43] universals. n37 From a normative human rights perspective, strict cultural relativism is also questionable because
it has little to no support in human rights conventions. The only treatment of strict cultural relativism in a human rights convention is article 63(3)
of the European Convention on Human Rights, which says that "[t]he provisions of this Convention shall be applied in [colonial territories] with
due regard, however, to local requirements." n38 A strict cultural relativist reading of this provision has been rejected by the European Court of
Human Rights in Tyrer v. United Kingdom, where the local custom of corporal punishment was at issue. n39
Thus, because of the logical self-contradiction inherent in strict cultural relativism, and because of the virtual complete lack of support for
strict cultural relativism in the human rights discourse, strict cultural relativism fails as a paradigm to conceptualize the universality discourse .
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TENTH, TURN GROUNDING RESISTANCE TO A FALLEN
IDENTITY OF PRE-WESTERN INTERVENTION RENDERS THE
COLONIZED PASSIVE VICTIMS WITHOUT AGENCY
ACTIVISM WITHIN COLONIALISM USES ITS OWN EXCESSES
TO DISMANTLE IT
Zizek '99
[Slavoj, Senior Researcher at Institute for Social Studies, Ljubliana and Badass, The
Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology, New York: Verso, 1999, 2567//uwyo-ajl]
Against Butler, one is thus tempted to emphasize that Hegel was well
aware of the retroactive process by means of which oppressive power
itself generates the form of resistance is not this very paradox
contained in Hegel's notion of positing the presuppositions, that is, of
how the activity of positing-mediating does not merely elaborate the
presupposed immediate-natural Ground, but thoroughly transforms the
very core of its identity? The very In-itself to which Chechens endeavour
to return is already mediated-posited by the process of modernization,
which deprived them of their ethnic roots.
of resisting it however, it is also possible to give it precisely the
opposite reading. That is to say: if we ground our resistance to
imperialist Eurocentrism in the reference to some kernel of
previous ethnic identity, we automatically adopt the position of
a victim resisting modernization, of a passive object on which
imperialist procedures work. If, however, we conceive our
resistance as an excess that results from the way brutal
imperialist intervention disturbed our previous self-enclosed
identity, our position becomes much stronger, since we can
claim that our resistance is grounded in the inherent dynamics
of the imperialist system that the imperialist system itself, through
its inherent antagonism, activates the forces that will bring about its
demise. (The situation here is strictly homologous to that of how to
ground feminine resistance: if woman is 'a symptom of man', the locus
at which the inherent antagonisms of the patriarchal symbolic order
emerge, this in no way constrains the scope of feminine resistance but
provides it with an even stronger detonating force.) Or to put it in yet
another way the premise according to which
resistance to power is inherent and immanent to the power edifice (in
the sense that it is generated by the inherent dynamic of the power
edifice) in no way obliges us to draw the conclusion that every
resistance is co-opted in advance, including in the eternal game Power
plays with itself the key point is that through the effect of
proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very
inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a
process which leads to its own ultimate downfall.
It seems that such a notion of antagonism is what Foucault lacks: from
the fact that every resistance is generated ('posited') by the Power
edifice itself, from this absolute inherence of resistance to Power, he
seems to draw the conclusion that resistance is co-opted in advance,
that it cannot seriously undermine the system that is, he precludes the
possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent
to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce
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itself. In short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an
effect escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges
as a form of resistance to power and is as such absolutely inherent to
it, it can outgrow and explode it. (the philosophical point to be made
here is that this is the fundamental feature of the dialectical-materialist
notion of 'effect': the effect can 'outdo' its cause; it can be ontologically
'higher' than its cause.) One is thus tempted to reverse the Foucauldian
notion of an all-encompassing power edifice which always-already
contains its transgression, that which allegedly eludes it: what if the
price to be paid is that the power mechanism cannot even control itself,
but has to rely on an obscene protuberance at its very heart? In other
words: what effectively eludes the controlling grasp of Power is not so
much the external In-itself it tries to dominate but, rather, the obscene
supplement which sustains its own operation.
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#3 Essentialism Turn: 1AR

MUTUA ESSENTIALIZES NON-WESTERN CULTURES, RECREATING THE HIERARCHY THAT THEY CRITICIZE.
REIFYING AN IMAGINED MACRO CULTURE ESTABLISHES
THE FRAMEWORK WHERE SUBORDINATION OF BOTH
INDIVIDUALS AND CULTURES.
THIS TURNS THE CRITIQUE, AND ACTS AS A SOLVENCY
TAKEOUT THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE K ARE INEVITABLE.
THEIR ARGUMENT ESSENTIALIZES NON-WESTERN
CULTURES, SUPPRESSING THOSE WHO DEMAND HUMAN
RIGHTS
Mered 96
[Sohail, JD Candidate @ Western Reserve University School of Law, Its
Not a Cultural Thing: Disparate Domestic Enforcement of Internaitonal
Criminal Procedure Standards A Comparison of the United States and
Egypt, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Winter,
LN//uwyo-ajl]
In stereotyping entire peoples, and assuming a monolithic cultural thought,
relativists fail to account for the dissenters in a society (or as relativists would
characterize it, a culture), who are the intellectuals and the individuals who
claim their human rights have been abused. Relativists discount the intellectual
dissent as Westernized. n71 The simplicity of this argument is intellectually
dishonest. The entire intellectual voice of a country cannot be so flippantly
ignored and discounted. It is the perfect argument from the relativists' point of
view since the crux of [*153] their position is that any Western idea is simply
inapplicable to the nonWest, so any non-Westerner who espouses ideas
determined to be Western can be discounted as Westernized and thus irrelevant
to the debate about his or her own culture. The intellectual elite in the West is
regarded as the most eloquent representative of their societies. Relativists have
offered no convincing argument why non-Western elites do not represent their
societies. The only adequate retort to this dismissal of non-Western elites is to
prove that the human rights are universal, and thus the intellectual dissenters
are necessarily only espousing values of their own culture. At the 1993 U.N.
World Conference on Human Rights, the Dalai Lama, leader of Tibetan
Buddhism, stated that it was in "the inherent nature of all human beings to
yearn for freedom, equality, and dignity." n72 A more peculiar aspect of the
relativist position is the minimal importance it lends to the individual
complainants from the non-Western world who claim their government has
violated their human rights. The relativists fail to address the question of why
there are individuals who complain if the rights allegedly violated are foreign to
their cultural concepts. Individuals claim the rights they know are inalienable
because they are human beings, regardless of their culture. These individual
complainants cannot be dispensed as Westernized intellectuals. They are
perhaps the most effective argument in support of the position that international
human rights standards speak universally to all peoples. n73
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#5 Relativist Apologism Turn: 1AR

THE APOLOGETIC NATURE OF THE KRITICISM IS AN
ATTEMPT TO REGARNISH TIES BETWEEN THE WEST AND
EAST UNDER A FEAR OF ORIENTAL RETALIATION. THE
IMPLICATIONS OF THE CRITICISM INDICATE THAT MATUA
AND HUMAN RIGHT LIBERALS ARE AFRAID OF A
STRONGER ORIENT THAT WILL BACKLASH AGAINST THEIR
OPPRESSERS, THIS APPOLIGETIC NATURE REASTABLISHES
A NORM OF WESTERN DOMINANCE, WITHOUT TAKING
DOWN THE SOCIETAL NORMS THAT ALLOWS FOR THESE
HIERARCHIES
THEIR RELATIVISTIC POSITION MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO
CRITICIZE AND DISMANTLE OPPRESSION, ALLOWING
TOTALITARIANISM TO FILL THE VOID
Farber & Sherry 95
[Daniel A., Henry J. Fletcher Professor of Law and Assoc Dean of Faculty
@ U. of Minnesota, & Suzanna, Earl R. Larson Prof. of Civ Rights and Civ
Liberties Law @ U. of Minnesota, Is the Radical Critique of Merit AntiSemitic? California Law Review, May, LN//uwyo-ajl]
This unsettling possible alignment of radical constructivism with the worst
totalitarian regime of this century should also - upon reflection - seem less than
shocking. n147 The core of the radical constructivist paradigm is a rejection of
the Enlightenment and its emphasis on rationality and scientific explanation.
n148 Instead, radical constructivists seek to explain the world solely as the
result - deliberate or unconscious - of ideology and the pursuit of dominance. But
that standard leaves little room for shared concepts of merit, morality, or
anything else. n149 As other scholars have noted, radical constructivism "leaves
no ground whatsoever for distinguishing reliable knowledge from superstition."
n150 As a feminist philosopher who sympathizes with what we have called
radical constructivism has warned, it can readily slide into moral relativism n151
- only one step away from relying on raw power to determine truth. For if ideas
are mere reflections of the exercise of power, it becomes difficult to find a basis
for criticizing social arrangements. And if raw power is the test of truth,
totalitarians are merely the most unabashed constructors of reality. Much as
radical constructivists may dislike this conclusion, its potential is present in their
conceptual apparatus
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BALANCING RIGHTS AND PLURALITY SOLVES BEST
Donoho 2001
[Douglas Lee, Prof. Law @ Southeastern University, Autonomy, SelfGovernance, and the Margin of Appreciation: Developing a
Jurisprudence of Diversity within Universal Human Rights, 15 Emory
International Law Review 391, Fall, LN//uwyo-ajl]
It is probable, therefore, that the elements of relativist language in the
Vienna Declaration reflect no more than a widespread desire among nonWestern states to manifest local preferences, preserve a degree of
autonomy in the implementation of rights, and promote diversity values.
Thus, in its best light, such language is motivated by the idea that the
manifestation of human rights must somehow accommodate communal
preferences and recognize diversity and self-governance wherever
possible without violating underlying universal values. n81
This position suggests an undefined balance between universal values
and local preferences. At a minimum, the international community's
continued emphasis on universality demands that culturally based
variations in [*421] rights must be compatible with, and preserve, core
universal values. It similarly requires that diversity and autonomy
concerns not undermine the progressive development of human rights
or serve as an excuse for oppression or uncritical preservation of the
status quo.
The Vienna Declaration may be seen, therefore, as a practical
compromise among competing motivations. It essentially directs
international institutions to accomplish a difficult and delicate task interpret the specific meaning of rights in ways that allow diversity, selfgovernance, and autonomy, while maintaining core, universal human
rights values. In the case of select rights, such as those relating to the physical integrity of the
individual, there may be little or no room for variation. n82 For other rights, there may be little actual
consensus over their specific meaning and significant potential for variations that nevertheless preserve core
universal values. n83 For still others, it may turn out that consensus is lacking even over the supposed core
value represented in the abstract normative standard. In such cases, the level of shared understanding over
specific meaning may be so shallow as to cast doubt on the existence of the right itself as a meaningful
international standard.
ETHICAL UNIVERSALISM IS COMPATIBLE WITH CULTURAL

DIVERSITY AND IS NECESSARY TO FIGHT ETHNOCENTRISM
Tilley 2000
[John J., Assoc. Prof of Philosophy at Indiana University-Purdue
University Indianapolis, Cultural Relativism, Human Rights Quarterly,
22.2, The John Hopkins University Press, 539//uwyo-ajl]
The trouble with the ethnocentrism argument is quite simple: to grant
universalism is not to be ethnocentric. In fact, it's consistent with universalism to
advance the following as universally valid: "Ethnocentrism is immoral." So the
ethnocentrism argument fails. The same goes for arguments that substitute
"imperialistic," "authoritarian," or "antipluralistic" for "ethnocentric." For
example, although universalism implies that some moral requirements are the
same for everyone, it does not imply that we all have a moral requirement to be
the same, nor that we have any moral requirement that discourages cultural
diversity. Most likely, one of our main requirements is to respect such diversity
(and hence to respect cultural integrity). 67 Therefore, universalism is compatible
with cultural pluralism.
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A BLANKET REJECTION OF HEGEMONIC IDEALS ALSO
REJECTS THE ONLY HOPE FOR ENDING OPPRESSION. WE
SHOULD COMBINE WESTERN ENLIGHTENMENT WITH THE
ALTERNATIVE.
Michael Thompson, 2003 Iraq, Hegemony, and the Question of the American
Empire accessed online http://www.logosjournal.com/thompson_iraq.htm
Hegemony in international terms without some kind of competing force, such as
the Soviets, can clearly lead to the abuse of power and a unilateralist flaunting
of international institutions that do not serve at the imperium's whim. But this
should not mean that hegemony itself is a negative concept. Although empire is
something rightfully reviled, hegemony may not be as bad as everyone thinks.
We need to consider what is progressive and transformative in the ideas and
values of the western republican and liberal traditions. We need to advocate not
an anti-hegemonic stance in form, but an anti-hegemonic and anti-imperialist
stance in content, one that advocates the particular interests of capital of the
market in more broad terms rather than the universal political interests of
others. Rather than choose between western hegemony on the one hand and
political and cultural relativism on the other, we need to approach this problem
with an eye toward cosmopolitanism and what the political theorist Stephen Eric
Bronner has called "planetary life."
Simple resistance to American "imperial" tendencies is no longer enough for a
responsible, critical and rational left. Not only does it smack of tiers-mondisme
but at the same time it rejects the realities of globalization which are inexorable
and require a more sophisticated political response. The real question I am
putting forth is simply this: is it the case that hegemony is in itself inherently
bad? Or, is it possible to consider that, because it can, at least in theory, consist
of the diffusion of western political ideas, values and institutions, it could be
used as a progressive force in transforming those nations and regions that have
been unable to deal politically with the problems of economic development,
political disintegration and ethnic strife?
It is time that we begin to consider the reality that western political thought
provides us with unique answers to the political, economic and social problems
of the world and this includes reversing the perverse legacies of western
imperialism itself. And it is time that the left begins to embrace the ideas of the
Enlightenment and its ethical impulse for freedom, democracy, social progress
and human dignity on an international scale. This is rhetorically embraced by
neoconservatives, but it turns out to be more of a mask for narrower economic
motives and international realpolitik, and hence their policies and values run
counter to the radical impulses of Enlightenment thought. Western ideas and
institutions can find affinities in the rational strains of thought in almost every
culture in the world, from 12th century rationalist Islamic philosophers like
Alfarabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sinna) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) to India's King Akbar and
China's Mencius. The key is to find these intellectual affinities and push them to
their concrete, political conclusions.
Clearly, the left's problem with the idea of the spread of western political ideas
and institutions is not entirely wrong. There was a racist and violent precedent
set by the French and English imperial projects lasting well into the 20th century.
The problem is in separating the form from the content of western hegemonic
motives and intentions. And it is even more incorrect to see the occupation of
Iraq as a symptom of western ideas and Enlightenment rationalism. Nothing
could be further from the case and the sooner this is realized, the more the left
will be able to carve out new paths of critique and resistance to a hegemony
that is turning into empire.
And it is precisely for this reason why, in institutional terms, the UN needs to be
brought back in. Although there are clearly larger political and symbolic reasons
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for this, such as the erosion of a unilateralist framework for the transition from
Hussein's regime, there is also the so-called "effect of empire" where Iraq is
being transformed into an instrument of ideological economics. The current U.S.
plan for Iraq, one strongly supported by Bremer as well as the Bush
administration, will remake its economy into one of the most open to trade,
capital flows and foreign investment in the world as well as being the lowest
taxed. Iraq is being transformed into an neo-liberal utopia where American
industries hooked up to the infamous "military-industrial complex" will be able to
gorge themselves on contracts for the development of everything from
infrastructure to urban police forces.
continued
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continued
As time moves on, we are seeing that Iraq provides us with a stunning example
of how hegemony becomes empire. It is an example of how the nave intention
of "nation building" is unmasked and laid bare, seen for what it truly is: the
forceful transformation of a sovereign state into a new form suited to narrow
western (specifically American) interests. Attempts to build a constitution have
failed not from the lack of will, but from the lack of any political discourse about
what form the state should take and about what values should be enshrined in
law. Ruling bodies have become illegitimate almost immediately upon their
appointment because there exists almost complete social fragmentation, and
the costs of knitting it together are too great for America to assume.
In the end, America has become, with its occupation of Iraq and its unilateralist
and militaristic posture, an empire in the most modern sense of the term. But we
should be careful about distinguishing empire from a hegemon and the
implications of each. And since, as Hegel put it, we are defined by what we
oppose, the knee-jerk and ineffectual response from the modern left has been to
produce almost no alternative at all to the imperatives that drive American
empire as seen in places such as Iraq. To neglect the military, economic and
cultural aspects of American power is to ignore the extent to which it provokes
violent reaction and counter-reaction. But at the same time, to ignore the
important contributions of western political ideas and institutions and their
power and efficacy in achieving peace and mutual cooperation, whether it be
between ethnic communities or whole nations themselves, is to ignore the very
source of political solutions for places where poverty, oppression and
dictatorships are the norm and remain stubbornly intact.
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#10 Zizek Presymbolism: 1AR (1/2)

THE KRITIK IS GROUNDED IN A GOAL TO RETURN
CULTURES BACK TO THEIR UNTOUCHED PRE-COLONIAL
STATEONE CANNOT UNDUE THE EFFECTS OF
COLONIALISM. THE ALT OBLITERATES ANY COALITION
BUILDING POSSIBILITIES AS YOUR MOVEMENT IS
PREMISED ON VICTIMHOOD. THE APARTHEID AND TAIWAN
ARE EXAMPLES OF SOCIETIES THAT WERE COLONIZED
WHOS IDENTITIES AND SOCIETIES ARE ALTERED
INDEFINATELY.
AND, THE 1AC FUNCTIONS AS A CRITICISM OF
IMPERIALISM, WE ARE THE EXCESS OF OPPRESSION THAT
LEADS TO IMPERIALISMS ULTIMATE COLLAPSE.
THE ZIZEK EVIDENCE IS A UNIQUE LINK TURN TO THEIR
ALTERNATIVECOUNTER-HEGEMONIC MOVEMENTS WILL
COLLAPSE WESTERN IDEALISM NOW THE ALTERNATIVE
COLLAPSES THESE MOVEMENTS PERPETUATING THE
SYSTEM THROUGH REFORMIST MEASURES
THIS IS A NET BENEFIT TO THE PERMONLY A RISK THAT
OUR ETHIC WILL BUILD COALITIONS AROUND THE RIGHT
TO LIFE TO TAKE DOWN VIOLENT SYSTEMS OF HEGEMONY
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#10 Zizek Presymbolism: 1AR (2/2)

MULTICULTURALISM REINCRIBES EUROCENTRISM BY
APPROPRIATING OTHER CULTURES INTO THE WESTERN
MACHINE SINCE WESTERN THOUGHT IS INEVITABLE,
ONLY AN ASSERTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT-BASED
CONTINGENCY CAN OVERCOME IMPERIALISM ***
Zizek '92
[Slavoj, Doesn't like sharing Chinese food, Enjoy Your Symptom!
Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, New York City: Routledge, 1992,
184-5//uwyo-ajl]
Consequently, our position here is radically "Eurocentric": the break of
the Enlightenment is irreversible, the epoch of the Enlightenment is "an
epoch to end all epochs," i.e., by means of the Versagung which
constitutes the subject of the Enlightenment, an abyss becomes visible
against the background of which all other epochs can be experienced in
their epochal closure, as something ultimately contingent. 59 The point
is simply that the Enlightenment, like a cancerous tissue, contaminates
all preceding organic unity and changes it retroactively into an affected
pose. In Hegelese: as soon as we enter the Enlightenment, every
presupposition (of an organic ground) is suspected of being "posited."
Suffice it to recall the returns to oriental wisdom, the rejections of the socalled "Western Protestant-Cartesian imperialist paradigm," which
abound today. Apropos of them, one usually emphasizes the need to
distinguish authentic cases of such "returns" from their commercialized
distortions (newspaper ads for "transcendental meditation," e.g.). Yet
perhaps such an opposition is all too naive; perhaps what appears as a
commercialized distortion of the authentic oriental wisdom is today its
truth; perhaps the very "return to the lost oriental wisdom" is
already in service of the late capitalist social machine,
facilitating the untroubled run of its nuts and bolts-perhaps we
betrayed "oriental wisdom" the moment we uprooted it from its
pretechnologicallife world and transfunctionalized it into an
individual therapeutic means. In other words, here, also, the dialectical
maxim "the cleaner you are, ther dirtier you are" is in force: the more
"truly" you return to oriental wisdom, the more your effort
contributes to the transformation of oriental wisdom into a cog
in the Western social machine. . . The reverse of it is that those who
preach "multicultural decenterment," "openness toward nonEuropean cultures," etc., thereby unknowingly affirm their
"Eurocentrism," since what they demand is imaginable only
within the "European" horizon: the very idea of cultural pluralism
relies on the Cartesian experience of the empty, substanceless
subjectivity-it is only against the background of this experience
that every determinate form of substantial unity can appear as
something ultimately contingent.
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No Link
OTHERS ADOPT US CULTURE BECAUSE IT REFLECTS THE
DIVERSITY OF AMERICAN SOCIETY AND, NATIONS
REALIZE THAT THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO US
IDEOLOGY
Victor Davis Hanson, Ph. D. in Classics, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution,
Stanford University, a Professor Emeritus at California University, Fresno, A Funny Sort of
Empire: Are Americans really so imperial? National Review Online, November 27, 20 02,
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson112702.html, UK:Fisher
In that regard, America is also a revolutionary, rather than a stuffy imperial
society. Its crass culture abroad rap music, Big Macs, Star Wars, Pepsi, and
Beverly Hillbillies reruns does not reflect the tastes and values of either an
Oxbridge elite or a landed Roman aristocracy. That explains why Le Monde or a
Spanish deputy minister may libel us, even as millions of semi-literate Mexicans,
unfree Arabs, and oppressed southeast Asians are dying to get here. It is one
thing to mobilize against grasping, wealthy white people who want your copper,
bananas, or rubber quite another when your own youth want what black,
brown, yellow, and white middle-class Americans alike have to offer. We socalled imperialists don't wear pith helmets, but rather baggy jeans and
backwards baseball caps. Thus far the rest of the globe whether Islamic
fundamentalists, European socialists, or Chinese Communists has not yet
formulated an ideology antithetical to the kinetic American strain of Western
culture.
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Relativism Is Self-Refuting
RELATIVISM REFUTES ITSELF
Schick and Vaughn 2002
[Theodore, Jr., Muhlenberg College & Lewis, How to Think about Weird
Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, Third ed., Boston: McGraw Hill,
87//uwyo-ajl]
According to the relativist whether a subjectivist, a social
constructivist, or a conceptual relativist everything is relative. To say
that everything is relative is to say that no unrestricted universal
generalizations are true (an unrestricted generalization is a statement to
the effect that something holds for all individuals, societies, or
conceptual schems). But the statement No unrestricted universal
generalizations are true is itself an unrestricted universal
generalization. So if relativism in any of its forms is true, its false. As a
result, it cannot possibly be true.
To avoid such self-contradiction, the relativist may try to claim that the
statement Everything is relative is only relatively true. But this claim
wont help, because it just says that relatavists (or their society or their
conceptual scheme) take relativism to be true. Such a claim should not
give the nonrelativist pause, for the fact that relativists take relativism to
be true is not in question. The question is whether a non-relativist should
take relativism to be true. Only if relativists can provide objective
evidence that relatvisim is true should a nonrelativist believe that its
true. But this evidence is precisely the kind that relatvists cant provide,
for, in their view, there is no objective evidence.
Relativists, then, face a dilemma: If they interpret their theory
objectively, they defeat themselves by providing evidence against it. If
they interpret their theory relativistically, they defeat themselves by
failing to provide any evidence for it. Either way, relativists defeat
themselves.
RELATIVISM PRESUPPOSES THAT CULTURAL HEGEMONY IS

UNIVERSALLY NEGATIVE, DISPROVING ITSELF
Tilley 2000
22.2, The John Hopkins University Press, 528-9//uwyo-ajl]
Perhaps relativists will complain that the effectiveness of the examples
stems from act-descriptions that refer to motives. This calls for two
replies. First, there is nothing underhanded about such descriptions.
They are a common way of producing highly definite moral judgments.
Second, relativists should be wary about granting "effectiveness" to the
examples. If [End Page 529]
they mean that the examples are indeed universally valid, they have
abandoned their thesis, for they have admitted that some moral
judgments are valid for everyone. This admission contradicts relativism
no matter what act-descriptions appear in the judgments. Also, it implies
that there is nothing about moral predicates that prevents the
judgments in which they occur from being valid for all cultures. So it's
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likely that many such judgments are universally valid, including many
that say nothing about motives.
Some relativists (though not the diehard ones) are likely to make a second
complaint. They will exclaim: "But we don't deny that such judgments are
universally valid! The whole point of our thesis is that cruelty and oppression are
universally wrong, that respect and tolerance are universally right!" But if this is
indeed their "whole point," they have nothing to contribute to moral theory.
If relativism is not an alternative to universalism, if it is merely a set of
commonplace remarks that most any brand of universalism can accommodate,
it lacks the philosophical importance its defenders claim for it. 52 To the extent
that it has that importance, it conflicts with universalism, which means that it
does deny, implicitly at least, that the example judgments are universally valid.
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Defense: Non-Westerners Want

Dignity
EVEN IF HUMAN RIGHTS ARE WESTERN IN ORIGIN, NONWESTERNERS STILL DESIRE THEM BECAUSE THEY
PROVIDE BASIC DIGNITY
Mered 96
[Sohail, JD Candidate @ Western Reserve University School of Law, Its
Not a Cultural Thing: Disparate Domestic Enforcement of Internaitonal
Criminal Procedure Standards A Comparison of the United States and
Egypt, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Winter,
LN//uwyo-ajl]
Relativists, notably non-Western scholars, argue that some violations of
human rights are due to the fact that non-Western cultures value
collective societal rights over individual rights. The concept of individual
rights originated in Europe, and thus cannot be applied to the nonWestern world. Conceding the point that the concept of individual rights
as referred to in international instruments has Western origins, relativists
have nevertheless failed to prove that non-Western cultures do not value
individual rights as well. This argument assumes that the natural law
ideals of Locke can only be referred to in those Western terms used in
international conventions. The fact that some cultures value collective
rights more than the West does not preclude the same cultures valuing
the concepts embodied in the human rights which protect basic human
dignity. When non-Westerners allude to the greater emphasis on group
rights, they are referring to a greater consideration for units such as the
family or the community. n70 They have failed to prove, however, that
the weaker emphasis on individualism in their society would permit a
state to strip an individual of his or her civil rights. Relativists have yet to
prove that the concepts are mutually exclusive.
EVEN IF RIGHTS ARE CULTURAL, THEYRE PRAGMATICALLY

DESIRABLE BECAUSE THEY ENSURE FAIRNESS
Binder 99
[Guyora, Prof. of Law @ SUNY Buffalo, Cultural Relativism and Cultural
Imperialism in Human Rights Law, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review,
1999, LN//uwyo-ajl]
At the same time, and for the same reasons, the admission that support
for international protection of civil and political rights rests on culturally
specific value judgments does not refute those value judgments.
Advocates sought a foundation for international human rights law in the
natural liberty of individuals only in order to overcome the
foundationalist arguments of defenders of the absolute autonomy of
sovereign states. But arguments for and against international human
rights law or state autonomy need no foundations. We can always
assess international legal institutions and doctrines in pragmatic terms,
as contributing to human betterment, or as embodying broadly
participatory decisions emerging from acceptably fair processes, or as
tolerably useful and superior to available alternatives, or to the costs of
pursuing change. n11 This is how we commonly assess domestic
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political institutions. Why should we treat international legal institutions
any differently?
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A2 Foundationalism Bad
EVEN IF WE HAVE NO CERTAIN FOUNDATIONS, WE CAN
USE CHAINS OF INFERENCE TO CREATE PRAGMATIC
ETHICAL CODES THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE IS THE
REJECTION OF ALL KNOWLEDGE INCLUDING THE K
Tilley 2000
22.2, The John Hopkins University Press, 537//uwyo-ajl]
Second (and at the price of some repetition), fallibilism, as it pertains to
moral beliefs, implies merely that such beliefs are "tentative" or
"provisional" in the special sense fallibilists give those terms. It implies
that moral beliefs are corrigible, or in principle revisable, and as such are
in the same boat with the following beliefs (all of which, according to
fallibilism, are in principle revisable): "1=1;" "I exist;" "others besides
myself exist;" "my birth preceded my reading of Folkways;" "there is
more than one culture in the world;" "relativists and universalists use
language when defending their views."
Does anyone, including any relativist, lack confidence in these beliefs?
Of course not. Nor is there any need to, even if we reject
foundationalism. Foundationalism is neither the only plausible account of
justification, nor the only one at home with the commonsense view that
some beliefs warrant considerable confidence. 64 So the rejection of
foundationalism does not put "substantial limits" on the confidence we
can place in our beliefs. If it be said that special difficulties attend
confidence in moral beliefs, my reply is that this needs to be shown; it
does not follow from fallibilism. If it is shown, it will apply to all moral
beliefs, including the ones relativists are eager to vindicate--namely,
those that aspire to merely "local," or culturally specific, validity. Hence
it will advance the relativist's cause not a whit.
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A2 Morality Is Culturally Created

NOT TRUE [TWO REASONS]
A)NO EVIDENCE OF CULTURAL DETERMINISM
B)IT UNDERMINES RELATIVISM
Tilley 2000
22.2, The John Hopkins University Press, 539-40//uwyo-ajl]
The weakness of this argument resides in the word "biased." The fact
that a thesis is culturally biased discredits the thesis only if "biased"
means roughly the same as "distorted" or "mistaken." 70 But if it has
that meaning, two problems arise. First, cultural determinism is not
confirmed by any evidence marshaled for it, because according to
cultural determinism, that evidence is not evidence at all, but a batch of
mistakes or distortions. Second, the relativist's new argument fails to
make relativism more plausible than universalism. Its main premise,
cultural determinism, implies that every [End Page 540] product of the
human mind is culturally biased. So every such product is discredited,
including cultural relativism and cultural determinism.
In short, the relativist has shot himself in the foot. His argument rests on
a premise which, if interpreted so that it can do the work assigned to it,
discredits both itself and relativism. (Of course, if it discredits itself we
can dismiss it as false, in which case it discredits nothing. Such are the
puzzles spawned by self-discrediting premises.) His problem is similar to
one he faced earlier, when he claimed that every truth is merely a local
truth. His present argument rests on a similar claim, one that thwarts his
aims just as surely as the earlier one did.
Perhaps the relativist will respond by revising cultural determinism so
that it concerns only normative moral theories. He then can use it
against such theories without threatening either relativism or cultural
determinism. 71 This tactic fails. For one thing, metaethical theories are
no less biased than normative ones, in any sense of "biased" that
supports the view that normative theories are inescapably biased.
Ironically, this is especially true of the metaethical thesis of relativism,
which owes much of its popularity to historically specific "biases," among
them the anti-Victorian attitude of early twentieth century intellectuals.
72
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K = Imperialist
THE CRITICISM IS ITSELF THE RESULT OF WESTERN
CULTURAL NORMS, IMPOSING THEM UPON THE WORLD
Morgan-Foster 2003
[Jason, JD Cand at U. of Michigan School of Law, A New Perspective on
the Universality DebA2 Reverse Moderate Relativism in the Islamic
Context, ILSA Journal of Intl and Comparative Law, Fall, LN//uwyo-ajl]
Strict cultural relativism has been criticized as self-contradictory: the
notion that all values are culturally relative, the belief in "the equal
dignity and worth of all cultures," or "the equal right of all peoples to
participate in the formation of international law" are themselves
culturally shaped value judgments, which would be void under the
cultural relativist's own theory. There is no reason for cultural relativists
to accept these starting points as universal in order to support a doctrine
which denies the legitimacy of [*43] universals. n37 From a normative
human rights perspective, strict cultural relativism is also questionable
because it has little to no support in human rights conventions. The only
treatment of strict cultural relativism in a human rights convention is
article 63(3) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which says
that "[t]he provisions of this Convention shall be applied in [colonial
territories] with due regard, however, to local requirements." n38 A strict
cultural relativist reading of this provision has been rejected by the
European Court of Human Rights in Tyrer v. United Kingdom, where the
local custom of corporal punishment was at issue. n39
Thus, because of the logical self-contradiction inherent in strict
cultural relativism, and because of the virtual complete lack of
support for strict cultural relativism in the human rights discourse, strict
cultural relativism fails as a paradigm to conceptualize the universality
discourse.
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**Kappeler**
Kappeler Answers: 2AC (1/5)
FIRST, NO LINK WE DONT SAY THAT VIOLENCE IS AN
ABERRATION. WE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT ITS INEVITABLE
AND THAT REALISM IS THE LEAST BAD APPROACH
SECOND, WE OUTWEIGH THE VIOLENCE THEY DESCRIBE
IS LOWSCALE. MINIMAL COERCION IS NECESSARY IN THE
FACE OF MUCH LARGER SCALE THREATS OF ANNIHILATION
THIRD, PERM DO BOTH
YOU SHOULD ACKNOWLEDE THAT VIOLENCE IS AN
AGENCY ISSUE AND PASS PLAN
Kappeler, Assoc Prof at Al-Akhawayn U, 95 (Susanne, The Will to Violence: The
politics of personal behavior, P.8)
personal behavior is no alternative to political action; there is no

question of either/or. My concern, on the contrary, is the connection between these
recognized forms of violence and the forms of everyday behavior which we
consider normal but which betray our own will to violence- the connection , in
other words, between our own actions and those acts of violence which are normally
the focus of our political critiques. Precisely because there is no choice between
dedicating oneself either to political issues or to personal behavior, the
question of the politics of personal behavior has (also) to be moved into the
centre of our politics and our critique.
Moreover,
FOURTH, WE SOLVE PLAN TAKES RESPONSIBILITY FOR

VIOLENCE DONE IN OUR NAME BY CHALLENGING
UNILATERAL DETAINMENT WITHOUT DUE PROCESS.
CROSS-APPLY TRIBE AND SANYAL
FIFTH, KAPPELERS CRITICISM COLLAPSES REAL AND
VIRTUAL VIOLENCE, PREVENTING MOBILIZATION AGAINST
ATROCITY
Bronfen 86
[Elisabeth, U. of Munich, Disavowal and Insight, Art History 11:1, March,

ASP//uwyo-ajl]
There is undoubtedly a heuristic value in focusing on structural similarities and
in denying that a fictional representation is fundamentally different from a
documentary one when seen from the point of view of the function of this image.
This allows Kappeler to reveal how violation can take place on more than just the
literal level. Yet it seems necessary to me to see that there is also a fundamental
difference between a depiction based on or involving the real violence done to
a physical body (Thomas Kasire, snuff movies) and the imagined one,
representing this violence on paper, canvas or celluloid, without any concretely
violated body as its ultimate signified. Not because the latter can then be
absolved from any responsibility toward the material of its depiction, but
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because to collapse the two levels on which signification works might also mean
not doing justice to the uniquely horrible violence that occurs when a body is
used quite literally as the site for an inscription by the other.
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SIXTH, MULTILATERALISM SOLVES WE REPLACE THE
VIOLENCE OF HARD POWER WITH INTERNATIONAL
COOPERATION, SHORT-CIRCUITING THEIR IMPACT. CROSSAPPLY NYE
SEVENTH, EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE
REQUIRES A REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION,
MEANING THAT THE ALTERNATIVE OCCURS AGAINS THE
BACKGROUND OF COVERT VIOLENCE
Zizek '99
1999, 153-4//uwyo-ajl]
It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of
psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic 'rebirth' - the radical
restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the
superego is suspended, left behind. Does not Lacan himself provide a number of hints that
the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms
to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St Paul or Badiou :
psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it does not already posit a 'new

harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes the slate clean for
one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is
Lacan's contention that, in this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean',
something (a void) is confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a
new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal,
precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic identifiction with a Cause:
negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility of the enthusiastic
identification - that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for it, but is
simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the balance
between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what 'Death' stands for at its most radical is
not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of the world', the selfwithdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with
symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged MasterSignifier. Here, Lacan parts company with St Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already was dead - that is to
say, after Freud, one cannot directly have faith in a Truth-Event ;
every such Event ultimately remains

a semblance obfuscating a preceding Void whose Freudian name is death drive.
So Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination of the exact status of this domain beyond the rule of
the Law. That is to say: like Lacan, Badiou delineates the contours of a domain beyond the Order of
Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the 'morbid' super ego connection between Law
and its transgressive desire. For Lacan, however, the Freudian topic of the death drive cannot be
accounted for in the terms of this connection: the 'death drive' is not the outcome of the
morbid confusion of Life and Death caused by the intervention of the symbolic
Law. For Lacan, the uncanny domain beyond the Order of Being is what he calls
the domain 'between the two deaths', the pre-ontologicalf domain of monstrous
spectral apparitions, the domain that is 'immortal', yet not in the Badiouian
sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but in the sense of what Lacan
calls lamella, of the monstrous 'undead' object-libido.18
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EIGHTH, KAPPELER DOESNT GET COGNITION THE
VIOLENT IMAGE ALLOWS THE VIEWER TO EMPATHIZE
WITH THE VICTIM, ENABLING QUESTIONING OF OUR
REPRESENTATIONS AT THE SAME TIME AS IT DEPICTS
THEM
Bronfen 86
[Elisabeth, U. of Munich, Disavowal and Insight, Art History 11:1, March,
ASP//uwyo-ajl]
to use another as object for self-expression always
involves a shift or non-identity between self and self-reflecting image . As Lacan points out, to
see oneself in an image is recognition as misrecognition. The interesting thing is that a third
What she ignores in her argument, however, is that
term/body is needed for this to occur, even if it involves the reduction of a subject to an object, from the gazing subjects point of view. That is to
say, narcissistic self-recognition occurs only through the introduction of difference, even if an attempt is made to efface this difference again in
, the subjectivity of the objectified other is always latently possible,

present, and potentially signifiable, even if not signified. That is to say, the attempt to
efface the others voice is a strategy that can unwittingly turn upon itself and
expose its own limitations.
the process. Due to this
Thus the process by which the gazing man recognizes himself in the look of the gazed-at woman always also implies an element of duplicity. For
since she is sexually different from him he both can and cannot see himself in her. His objectifying gaze depends on the transformation of the
otherness of the other into an image of similarity yet it is precisely this otherness that seems to make the reduction so satisfying. Even if the
ultimate goal is homophobic bonding, it occurs over a body which will always give back the sought-for look of self-recognition only imperfectly. As
such, the woman/object is always double, both confirming and not confirming the male gaze, similar but not the same. Thus I would argue that
her text (voice) is always also inscribed in the male text, even if we are asked to be blind to it, even if it is that which marks where the dominant
structure of representation is staged in this scenario falters. The dynamics involved in violating the body of a woman by transforming it into a
Woman/victim as figure for something alterior to herself seems to me to be more complicated. What, for example, remains unexplained by
Kappelers formula is why the representation of another is needed to bring about self-expression, why a straightforward self-portrait will not
suffice or, to put it another way, why patriarchy needs to designate certain members of society as other, in order to stabilize its own power.
Clearly what this suggests is that the violent creation of similarity out of difference is more satisfying than a static homogeneous space. Clearly
also, the charm of reducing another to a silent object which will not respond in word or gaze allows an unlimited plethora of inscriptions and
semantizations by the gazing subject that remain unchallenged. But if the object of the representation is always only a silent victim, the question
remains, why is it possible that the victim can mirror the master?
In part as a response to Barthess discussion of de Sades writings, Kappeler distinguishes further between two forms of victimization. The first
form is a straightforward act of objectification, annihilating the womans subjectivity, with the victim objecting to the vexation and crying out in
pain. The second form involves a complicit victim: faking subjectivity, she chooses (in Barthess terminology) to ejaculate or discharge, to
transform herself into a libertine, and enjoy herself in her vexation. Yet Kappelers point is that while the subject of this situation desires the
womans complicity and pleasure, wants her to want to be a victim masquerading as subject, it is ultimately the subjects feeling of pleasure that
is at stake. She sees this analogous to Barthess notion of the authors search for his readers pleasure as a way to guarantee his own pleasure as
supreme writing object. The point of her comparative reading is to show that where the question of complicity and collaboration is involved, the
object (the willing woman libertine) and the reader (the willing co-player of the authors game) are in similar positions, serving similar functions,
What this collaboration is blind to, is the possibility of

identifying with some position other than that of the speaking subject, for
example that of the victim/object. For her this second form of violence, the collaboration with the master-plot, is
namely to confirm the speaking male subject.
doubly perfidious because it not only denies the subjectivity of another but pretends to deny its own elision of the other. Astute as her analysis is,
it does raise the question of what Kappeler is willing to ignore in her will to
expose the literal content of figural language. For one could also say that by pretending to
deny the others victimization, by faking an objectified others subjectivity, a
space is opened that ironically (and critically) questions these strategies at
exactly the same moment that it stages them.
NINTH, POWER IS ZERO SUM THE ALTERNATIVE ONLY

SHIFTS POWER ELSEWHERE
2001
(The Tragedy of

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TENTH, KAPPELERS ARGUMENT IS PREMISED ON AN
ESSENTIALIST APPLICATION OF SEXUALITY TO VIOLENCE
Pringle 96
[Rosemary, Book Reviews, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist
Geography 3:2, July, ASP//uwyo-ajl]
Kappeler insists that we have 'ample opportunity in situations of no such threat to challenge the legitimacy of violence and to practise
alternatives' (p. 258). We must scrutinise our own will to power and find alternative political ways of resisting oppression and domination. 'We' is
used deliberately as a shifting signifier in relation to which the reader is free to recognise herself, to identify as included or excluded, perhaps
either at different times. Most of the time I felt excluded. I admired the honesty of her account of white women's racism, and I laughed wryly at
her attack on the more self-indulgent moments of therapy. Beyond that, I was unable to connect at all with her critique of sexuality and desire,
. Kappeler goes over much old ground in

insisting that sexuality is fundamentally gender-specific and cannot be
democratised. If she believes this, it is hard to see why she would bother about
politics in the first place. Any attempt to claim sexual subjectivity or an active
desire is interpreted as part of a will to power and hence an act of violence. Dworkin,
Mackinnon, Pateman and Jeffries are quoted approvingly. If anything , Kappeler outdoes them in her insistence
that sexuality may have to be given up in order to eradicate violence:
if experience shows that sex indeed means violence and sexual excitement the pleasure of power--that
with a politics that seems to take so little account of subjectivity
sex minus the violence does not leave us with non-violent sex but simply 'no sex' at all--it does not follow that we therefore must accept
violence
; it follows that 'sex' as such is unacceptable.
(p. 181)
ELEVENTH, THIS MIMICS COLONIZATION, ENTRENCHING

OPPRESSION
Butler 99


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TWELFTH, TURN - ATTEMPTING TO CLEANSE LANGUAGE
OF VIOLENCE FETISHIZES AUTHENTICITY, RESULTING IN
POLITICAL DISENGAGEMENT BECAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE
AT THE HEART OF ALL LANGUAGE AND INTERACTION
Bewes 97

Thus, what secondly distinguishes the 'metaphysical innocence' of Rameau is his pursuit of violence - not only the violence of determinate
negation, of alienation from culture and the serial progression of knowledge, but the violence of imperfection, of disrupted subjectivity, of
unforeseen catastrophes and superfluous resources, of human inconsistency and what Gillian Rose calls the 'agon' of existence. Violence, like
suffering and fickleness for Dostoevsky, represents subjective (as against objective) culture, a last manifestation of individual volition, and a point
. Violence increases as the result not of a

deterioration in social behaviour but of a lowering in the cultural threshold
beyond which action appears as violence. In such a context Rameau's disintegration, his 'epigrammatic'
of resistance to what BaudriUard calls the 'triumph' of simulation
existence and his cultivation of violence represent the final recourse of a disfranchised and alienated subjectivity faced with an apparently sewn
up, indifferent world.
In postmodernity this threshold between action and violence is lower, perhaps, than ever before. Political correctism, 'Queer' theory,
Communitarianism, the liberation discourse of the Internet, calls for homogenization of the private and public lives of politicians, the new
of a
fetishization of objective culture. To find intolerable the violence of linguistic
oppression, of 'inauthentic' sexual identity (the product of Freud's 'family romance', etc.), of political antagonism, of the formalization of
truth in its dissemination, of the compart mentalization of public and private life, of the indeterminacy of moral options, is in every
case to subscribe to a peculiar literalism, to evince a profound discomfort with
the signifying relation, to take the signifier persistently for the thing itself, in
such a way that political activity is replaced with a series of cosmetic
adjustments to objective culture.
discipline of 'postmodern ethics', all are varying instances of a collective endeavour to put a freeze on reason as risk, the consequence
Rameau's cynicism therefore represents a commitment to subjective culture, to reality, to the referent and to the signified, to the truth of the
world and of the individual. Cynicism constitutes a certain necessary indifference to objective culture, a certain subjective wager, a projection of
In a climate in which 'authenticity' is at a

premium, where all action has been proscribed as intolerably violent, and where self
consciousness is therefore only a disabling mechanism to be discad, cynicism appears as a spirit in
disintegration, the monopoly broker of disinvestment in the present, the sole locus of
reason and of faith in anything other than the phenomenal here and now, the disposition which alone embodies both energy and depth .
the self beyond objective culture and beyond its own limits.
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#5 Alternative Causes Violence: 1AR

(1/2)
THE ALTERNATIVE DISEMPOWERS RESISTANCE
KAPPELERS FOCUS ON THE INDIVIDUAL RATHER THAN
PROVIDING A MEANS TO COMBAT VIOLENCE PREVENTS
EFFECTIVE RESISTANCE TO VIOLENCE
Gelber 95 (Kath, Review of The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behaviour,
Green Left Weekly, http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1995/198/198p26b.htm)
The Will to Violence presents a powerful and one-sided critique of the forces which enable violence between individuals to occur. Violence
Kappeler's
thesis is that violence in all these cases is caused in the final instance by one
overriding factor -- the individual choice to commit a violent act. Of course, in
one sense that is true. Acknowledging alternative models of human behaviour and analyses of the social causes of violence,
between individuals is taken in this context to mean all forms of violence, from personal experiences of assault to war.
Kappeler dismisses these as outside her subject matter and exhorts her readers not to ignore the agent's decision to act as he [sic] did, but to
explore the personal decision in favour of violence. Having established this framework, she goes on to explore various aspects of personal
decisions to commit violence. Ensuing chapters cover topics such as love of the other, psychotherapy, ego-philosophy and the legitimation of
Kappeler is dismissive of
social or structural analyses of the multiple causes of alienation, violence and
war. She dismisses such analyses for their inability to deal with the personal
decision to commit violence. For example, some left groups have tried to explain men's
sexual violence as the result of class oppression, while some Black theoreticians
have explained the violence of Black men as a result of racist oppression. She
continues, The ostensible aim of these arguments may be to draw attention to
the pervasive and structural violence of classism and racism, yet they not only
fail to combat such inequality, they actively contribute to it . Kappeler goes on to argue that,
dominance. However, it is the introduction which is most interesting. Already on the third page,
although such oppression is a very real part of an agent's life context, these èxplanations' ignore the fact that not everyone experiencing the
same oppression uses violence, i.e. the perpetrator has decided to violate. Kappeler's aim of course was to establish a framework for her
her rejection of
alternative analyses not only as of little use, but as actively contributing to the
problem, frames her own thesis extremely narrowly . Her argument suffers from both her inability, or
unwillingness, to discuss the bigger picture and a wilful distortion of what she sees as her opponents' views . The result is less
than satisfactory. Kappeler's book reads more as a passionate plea than a coherent argument . Her overwhelming
focus on the individual, rather than providing a means with which to combat
violence, in the end leaves the reader feeling disempowered. After all, there
must be huge numbers of screwed up and vengeful people in the world to have
chosen to litter history with war, environmental destruction and rape . Where do we go
from here? Those lucky enough to have read Kappeler's book are supposed to decide
not to use violence ourselves. A worthy endeavour, but hardly sufficient to
change the world.
particular project: a focus on the individual and the psychological to find a cause for violence. However,
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#5 Alternative Causes Violence: 1AR

(2/2)
FOCUS ON REPRESENTATIONAL VIOLENCE WORSENS REAL
VIOLENCE
Gomel, Tel-Aviv University, Written in Blood: Serial Killing and Narratives of
Identity, Post Identity, Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 1999, p. 24-25,
Elana
http://ids.udmercy.edu/pi/2.1/PI21_24-70.pdf, accessed 1/28/02
ONE CAN START WITH FOUCAULTS famous and endlessly circulated statement in
The Order of Things: It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to
think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a
new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear as soon as this
knowledge has discovered a new form. (xxiii) Man the Universal Subject, a
cookie-cutter mold of (post)technological identity, stamping out simulacra of
individuality. But why should we be comforted and experience relief at the
thought of his imminent dissolution? Perhaps because, at least from Adorno on,
the subject of reason has also been identified as the subject of violence. The
universal Man of the Enlightenment has been reconceptualized as the universal
killer, armed with the most potent of weaponsrepresentation. In their
Introduction to the collection typically entitled Violence of Representation
Armstrong and Tennenhouse offer the basic formula of this approach: The
violence of representation is the suppression of difference (8). In this particular
reading of Foucault the discursive constructedness of identity is directly
responsible for corporeal violence inflicted by some (post)modern subjects upon
others. In his recent book Serial Killerr and in the series of articles that preceded
it Mark Seltzer applies this insight to the fascinating and grisly phenomenon of
serial killing, variously identified also as stranger killing and sometimes lust
murder. For Seltzer the enigma of the serial killers personality consists in an
experience of typicality at the level of the subject The serial killer, I will be
arguing, is in part defined by such a radicalized experience of typicality within.
Simply put, murder by numbers (as serial murder has been called) is the form
of violence proper to statistical persons. (30-1) Violence of representation,
representation of violence and violence per se smoothly link into an unbroken
chain, leading from statistics to mayhem and from typology of subjects to
fingertyping of putrefying bodies. My goal in this essay is to put a hitch into this
chain, to question the easy fit between discursive moulds of identity and the
individual self-experience of serial killers, and to suggest that represenration
may be not so much the cause of violence as a post factum defence against it. I
do not imply, however, that violence in general or serial murder in particular are
totally free from the constraints of discourse or that the identity of the serial
killer is not constructed using the building blocks of cultural narratives (though
the narratives in question are more variegated than Seltzer suggests). Rather, I
would claim that the serial form of violence is conditioned not so much by the
monolithic coherence of representation as by its breakdown. The violent
behavior of a serial killer is not a direct outcome of any social construction but a
random, causeless choice which is retrospectively incorporated into a generic
narrative of identity. The repeated ritualistic violence, then, becomes a means of
reinforcing this identity but achieves precisely the opposite, its complete
disintegration. Rather than being generated by representation, corporeal
violence offers a resistance to it.
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#7 Negation: 1AR
EXTEND THE 2AC#1 ZIZEK 99 CARD. THERES NO SUCH
THING AS A PURE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE. EVERY TIME YOU
SAY THAT SOMETHINGS GOOD, BETWEEN THE LINES
YOURE SAYING THAT SOMETHING ELSE, LIKE DEATH AND
VIOLENCE, ARE BAD. THEIR YES TO LIFE IS AN IMPLICIT
NO TO THE SAME DEATH AND VIOLENCE THAT WERE
SAYING IS BAD. FEAR OF APOCALYPTIC VIOLENCE IS STILL
CONTAINED IN ALL OF THEIR ARGUMENTS, REPRESSED
BENEATH THE SURFACE OF THEIR WORDS.
THIS MEANS WELL WIN THE UNIQUENESS FOR OUR
TURNS BECAUSE SOME FORM OF VIOLENT
REPRESENTATION IS INEVITABLE IN ALL POLITICAL
DISCOURSE, THE ONLY QUESTION IS OF WHETHER THOSE
REPRESENTATIONS INTERROGATE THE FUNDAMENTAL
FANTASY OF POLITICAL REALITY BY ACKNOWLEDING OUR
INEVITABLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE TRAUMA OF DEATH
AND VIOLENCE THATS INHERENTLY REPRESSED BY THE
SYMOBLIC
CONCEIVING OF VIOLENCE AS AN UNDESCRIBABLE
HORROR IS A FANTASY THAT ALLOWS US TO AVOID THE
TRAUMATIC ANTAGONISM THAT CONSTITUTES REALITY
ONLY IDENTIFICATION OF ITS OBSCENE UNDERSIDE
ALLOWS US TO INTERROGATE ITS IDEOLOGICAL
GROUNDING
Zizek 2001
[Slavoj, Megalomaniacal mercy killer, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five
Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, New York: Verso, 30-2//uwyo]
the passion for the Real is this identification with this heroic gesture
of fully assuming the dirty obscene underside of Power : the heroic attitude of Somebody has to do
The very core of
the dirty work, so lets do it!, a kind of mirror-reversal of the Beautiful Soul which refuses to recognize itself in its result. We find this stance also
in the properly Rightist admiration for the celebration of heroes who are ready to do the necessary dirty work: it is easy to do a noble thing for
ones country, up to sacrificing ones life for it it is much more difficult to commit a crime for ones countryHitler knew very well how to play
this double game apropos of the Holocaust, using Himmler ot spell out the dirty secret. In his speech to the SS leaders in Posenon October 4
1943, Himmler spoke quite openly about the mass killing of the Jews as a glorious page in our history, and one that has never been written and
never can be written; he explicitly included the killing of women and chilrden:
We faced the question: what should we do with the women and children? I decided here too to find a completely clear solution. I did not regard
myself as justified in exterminating the men that is ot say, to kill them or have them killed and to allow the avengers in the shape of chilrden
to grow up for our sons and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the earth.
The very next day, the SS leaders were ordered to attend a meeting where Hitler himself gave an account of the state of the war; here, Hitler did
not have to mention the Final Solution directly oblique references to the SS leaders knowledge and to their shared complicity, were enough:
The entire German people know that it is a matter of whether they exist or do not exist. The bridges have been destroyed behind them. Only the
it is along these lines that we can oppose the reactionary

and the progressive passion for the Real: while the reactionary one is the
endorsement of the obscene underside of the Law, the progressive one is
confrontation with the Real of the antagonism denied by the passion for purification, which in both its versions, the
way forward remains. And, ideally,
Rightist and the Leftist assumes that the Real is touched in and through the destruction of the excessive elemtn which introduces antagonism.
Here, we should abandon the standard metaphorics of the Real as the terrifying Thing that is impossible to confront face to face, as the ultimate
Real concealed beteath the layers of imaginary and/or symbolic Veils: the very idea that, beneath the deceptive appearances, ther elies hidden
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some ultimate Real Thing too horrible for us to look at directly is the ultimate appearance this Real Thing is a fantasmic spectre whose presence
guarantees the consistency of our symbolic edifice, thus enabling us to avoid confronting its constitutive inconsistency (antagonism). Take Nazi
ideology: the Jew as its Real is a spectre evoked in order to conceal social antagonism that is, the figure of the Jew enables us to perceive social
totality as an organic Whole. And does not the same go for the figure of Woman Thing inaccessible to the male grasp? Is she also not the
ultimate Spectre enabling men to avoid the constitutive deadlock of the sexual relationship?
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#8 Subversion: 1AR
THEY MISUNDERSTAND COGNITION - IDENTIFICATION
WITH IMAGES OF DOMINATION UNDERMINES
RELATIONSHIPS OF SUBORDINATION
Krips '99
[Henry, Professor of Communication at the Pitt, Fetish: an erotics of culture,
Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999, 5-6//uwyo-ajl]
Arguments against linking the cultural and psychic realms also seem apposite in
criticizing MacKinnon's claim that there exists a direct causal connection
between pornography and a psychic characteristic of its male consumers,
namely sexual aggression. At a theoretical level, her argument fails to take into
account Freud's point that identification with a phantasy figure flows readily
across gender lines. For example, in the Dora case, Freud argues that Dora's behavior
manifests an unconscious desire for Frau K., her father's lover and suitor's wife. For Freud
her desire does not indicate any sexual instability. Instead, through an identification with
her father's desire, it signals an unconscious paternal identification. In other words, for
Freud the significant aspect of Dora's phantasy is not the sexual content of the
desire but rather the paternal position from which she engages with it. By parity
of reasoning, it follows that quite "normal" male readers of porn may identify
with the position of woman victim rather than male aggressor, in which case
their aggressive tendencies cannot be reinforced in the simplistic way that
MacKinnon suggests.3 In short, as Laura Kipnis points out, neither the biology
nor gender of readers of Hustler magazine determines the form of their
identification with its pornographic materials, let alone forces them into a
common psychic response (Kipnis 1996, 196). In the same way, one may argue,
gender-swapping phantasy games played by Net users do not indicate their gender
instability. On the contrary. one might turn the argument around and conclude that the
preponderance of biological males among Net users suggests that even when playing at
being a woman, they are engaging in a "boys' game."
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#12 Authenticity: 1AR

EXTEND THE 2AC #4 BEWES 97 EVIDENCE. THE CALL TO
ERASE VIOLENCE FROM LANGUAGE IS A FANTASY THAT
IGNORES THE WAY THAT VIOLENCE IS ENDEMIC TO ALL
POLITICS. ATTEMPTS TO COVER IT UP AND PRETEND THAT
WE CAN HAVE A NON-VIOLENT COMMUNICATION PROVIDE
FALSE DISTANCE BETWEEN US AND THAT VIOLENCE,
ALLOWING YOU TO ACT IN EVEN MORE DESTRUCTIVE
WAYS WHEN YOU HYSTERICALLY LASH OUT AT PERCEIVED
THREATS TO YOUR LIFE WHILE BELIEVING YOUVE
ESCAPED VIOLENCE IN THE GUISE OF A SUPERFICIAL
LINGUISTIC ALTERATION.
THE EXTERNAL IMPACT IS DEPOLITICIZATION THE ONLY
WAY TO ERASE VIOLENCE IS TO CEASE ALL POLITICAL
ENGAGEMENT BECAUSE EVERY ACTION CONTAINS THE
STAIN OF VIOLENCE. THAT POSITION MAKES US
COMPLICIT IN OPPRESSION AND EVEN MORE HORRIFIC
FORMS OF PHYSICAL ANNIHILATION, WHICH OUTWEIGHS
ANY NEGLIBILE IMPACT OF IN ROUND DISCURSIVE
VIOLENCE BECAUSE IT IMPLICATES YOUR VERY ABILITY TO
CONDUCT POLITICS, SUCH AS THE 1AC AND THE
CRITICISM, IN THE FIRST PLACE
AND, RETREAT FROM VIOLENT RHETORIC INTO FANTASIES
OF METAPHYSICAL INNOCENCE ALLOWS US TO SPEND
HOURS DEBATING THE FINER POINTS OF THE
AUTHENTICITY OF OUR WORDS WHILE GAS CHAMBERS
ARE BUILT
Bewes 97
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- by its preoccupation with
authenticity, that is to say, and true political 'identity'. Auschwitz is a corollary
not of reason, understood as risk, but of the fear of reason, which paradoxically
is a fear of violence. The stench of burning bodies is haunted always by the
sickly aroma of cheap metaphysics.
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**Kato**
Kato Answers: 2AC (1/4)
FIRST, WE OUTWEIGH: EVEN IF WE IGNORE PAST NUCLEAR
WARS, THE ONES THAT PLAN SOLVES ARE BAD IN AND OF
THEMSELVES AND WOULD KILL THE VERY PEOPLE THEY
DESCRIBE
SECOND, PERM - DO THE PLAN AND ACCEPT THAT
NUCLEAR WARS VIA NUCLEAR TESTING AND URANIUM
MINING ARE BEING CARRIED OUT AGAINST INDIGENOUS
PEOPLES AND THE FOURTH WORLD. THIS SOLVES
BECAUSE THE ALT IS LITERALLY PLAN PLUS.
THIRD, NO LINK: KATO CRITICIZES NOT RECOGNIZING
TESTING AS AN ACTUAL NUCLEAR WAR WE ONLY SAY
THAT THE PLAN PREVENTS A NUCLEAR WAR,
RECOGNIZING ONGOING NUCLEAR WARS
Kato, Political Science Professor at the University of Hawaii at Honolulu, 93 (Masahide,
Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites, and Nuclear War, Alternatives, V. 18, N.
3)
Nuclear criticism finds the likelihood of "extinction" as the most fundamental
aspect of nuclear catastrophe. The complex problematics involved in nuclear catastrophe are thus reduced to the single
possible instant of extinction. The task of nuclear critics is clearly designated by Schell as coming to grips with the one and only final instant
"human extinction-whose likelihood we are chiefly interested in finding out about:" Deconstructionists, on the other hand, take a detour in their
efforts to theologize extinction. Jacques Derrida, for example, solidified the prevailing mode of representation by constituting extinction as a fatal
absence: Unlike the other wars, which have all been preceded by wars of more or less the same type in human memory (and gunpowder did not
mark a radical break in this respect), nuclear war has no precedent. It has never occurred, itself; it is a non-event. The explosion of American
bombs in 1945 ended a "classical," conventional war, it did not set off a nuclear war The terrifying reality of the nuclear conflict can only be the
By representing the
possible extinction as the single most important problematic' of nuclear catastrophe (posing it
as either a threat or a symbolic void), nuclear' criticism disqualifies the entire history of nuclear
violence, the "real" of nuclear catastrophe as a continuous and repetitive
process. The "real" of nuclear war is designated by nuclear critics as a "rehearsal' (Derrik De Kerkhove) or "preparation" (Firth) for what
they reserve as the authentic catastrophes' The history of nuclear violence offers, at best, a reality
effect to the imagery of "extinction." Schell summarized the discursive position of nuclear critics very succinctly, by
signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or text At least today apparently."
stating that nuclear catastrophe should not be conceptualized "in the context of direct slaughter of hundreds of millions people by the local
effects: "8 Thus the elimination of the history of nuclear violence by nuclear critics stems from the process of discursive "delocalization" of
nuclear violence. Their primary focus is not local catastrophe, but delocalized, unlocatable, "global" catastrophe
FOURTH, EXTINCTION OF THE SPECIES IS THE MOST

Schell 1982
world, and to speak of

sacrificing the species for the sake of one of these benefits involves one in
the absurdity of wanting to destroy something in order to preserve one
of its parts, as if one were to burn down a house in an attempt to
redecorate the living room, or to kill someone to improve his character. ,but even to point out this absurdity
For the species not only overarches but contains all the benefits of life in the common
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fails to take the full measure of the peril of extinction, for mankind is not some invaluable object that lies outside us and that we
must protect so that we can go on benefiting from it; rather, it is we ourselves, without whom everything there is loses its value. To
say this is another way of saying that extinction is unique not because it destroys mankind as an object but because it destroys
mankind as the source of all possible human subjects, and this, in turn, is another way of saying that extinction is a second death,
for one's own individual death is the end not of any object in life but of the subject that experiences all objects. Death, however,
places the mind in a quandary. One of-the confounding characteristics of death-"tomorrow's zero," in Dostoevski's phrase-is that,
precisely because it removes the person himself rather than something in his life, it seems to offer the mind nothing to take hold
of. One even feels it inappropriate, in a way, to try to speak "about" death at all, as. though death were a thing situated somewhere outside us and available for objective inspection, when the fact is that it is within us-is, indeed, an essential part of what we
are. It would be more appropriate, perhaps, to say that death, as a fundamental element of our being, "thinks" in us and through
us about whatever we think about, coloring our thoughts and moods with its presence throughout our lives
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FIFTH, NUCLEARISM IS INEVITABLE MAINTENANCE AND
DETERRENCE ARE NECESSARY FOR WORLD PEACE
Robinson 2001
[C. Paul, Sandi National Laboraties, A White Paper:Pursuing a New Nuclear Weapons Policy
for the 21st Century, March 22, www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Nuclear-Weapons-Policy21stC.htm, 9-23-06//uwyo-ajl]
I served as an arms negotiator on the last two agreements before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and have spent most of my career
enmeshed in the complexity of nuclear weapons issues on the government side of the table. It is abundantly clear (to me) that formulating a new
nuclear weapons policy for the start of the 21st Century will be a most difficult undertaking. While the often over-simplified picture of deterrence
, there are
huge arsenals of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, all in quite
usable states, that could be brought back quickly to their Cold War postures .
during the Cold War-two behemoths armed to the teeth, staring each other down-has thankfully retreated into history
nevertheless
Additionally, throughout the Cold War and ever since, there has been a steady proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass
destruction by other nations around the globe. The vast majority of these newly armed states are not U.S. allies, and some already are exhibiting
hostile behaviors, while others have the potential to become aggressors toward the U.S., our allies, and our international interests.
Russia has already begun to emphasize the importance of its arsenal of nuclear weapons to compensate for its limited conventional capabilities
to deal with hostilities that appear to be increasing along its borders. It seems inescapable that the U.S. must carefully think through how we
should be preparing to deal with new threats from other corners of the world, including the role that nuclear weapons might serve in deterring
these threats from ever reaching actual aggressions.
the abolition of nuclear weapons as an impractical dream
I personally see
future. I came to this view
in any foreseeable
from several directions. The first is the impossibility of ever "uninventing" or

erasing from the human mind the knowledge of how to build such weapons. While the sudden appearance of
a few tens of nuclear weapons causes only a small stir in a world where several thousands of such weapons already exist, their
appearance in a world without nuclear weapons would produce huge effects . (The
impact of the first two weapons in ending World War II should be a sufficient example.) I believe that the words of Winston Churchill, as quoted by
Margaret Thatcher to a special joint session of the U.S. Congress on February 20, 1985, remain convincing on this point: "Be careful above all
things not to let go of the atomic weapon until you are sure, and more sure than sure, that other means of preserving the peace are in your
hands."
the majority of the nations who have now acquired arsenals

of nuclear weapons believe them to be such potent tools for deterring conflicts
that they would never surrender them. Against this backdrop, I recently began to worry that because there were
Similarly, it is my sincere view that
few public statements by U.S. officials in reaffirming the unique role which nuclear weapons play in ensuring U.S. and world security, far too
many people (including many in our own armed forces) were beginning to believe that perhaps nuclear weapons no longer had value. It seemed
to me that it was time for someone to step forward and articulate the other side of these issues for the public: first, that nuclear weapons remain
nuclear
weapons will likely have an enduring role in preserving the peace and preventing
world wars for the foreseeable future. These are my purposes in writing this paper.
of vital importance to the security of the U.S. and to our allies and friends (today and for the near future); and second, that
SIXTH, IMAGINING NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION IS A PROJECT

OF SURVIVAL THEIR ALTERNATIVE CREATES REPRESSION
AND DENIAL WHICH MAKES NUCLEAR WAR MORE LIKELY
9-10)
all people


yet another aspect of our insulation from lifes most basic realities . We make love by

understanding.
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SEVENTH, CRITICIZING REPRESENTATIONS OF NUCLEAR
PRESENCE DOESNT PRECLUDE THE NEED FOR CONCRETE
ACTION
Richard

to practice.
More generally

think that

Derrida calls "
We have been
EIGHTH, PLAN SOLVES WORSE IMPERIALISM BY ENDING

THE UNILATERAL AND INDEFINITE DETAINMENT AND
TORTURE OF ENEMY COMBATANTS BY THE EXECUTIVE
NINTH, APPROPRIATING THE OTHER VIOLENTLY SEIZES
THE RIGHT TO SPEAK FOR SELFISH ENDS
Routledge 96
[Antipode]
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speak.
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TENTH, THEY PORTRAY THE FOURTH WORLD AS
POWERLESS VICTIMS. THIS IS THE NEW MEANS OF
COLONIAL PACIFICATION IT PRESUPPOSES THE
INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF THE FOURTH WORLD AND
UNDERMINES ANY MOVES TOWARDS REAL SOLIDARITY
THE IMPACT GUTS THEIR ALTERNATIVE SOLVENCY AND
FLIPS THE K
Root, Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Toronto 97 (Deborah, Borrowed
Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation, Edited by Bruce Ziff)
Why would Karma and his countercultural predecessors identify with people who, time and time again, are presented as victims? First Nations
it is precisely the image of Indians as doomed victims that

some white people identify with: she calls this the "I'm a victim too complex. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche conceived,
something like this complex as the very core of Christian culture, underlining the link between pity and contempt. Thinking of
someone else as a victim is a way of displacing one's own pain : in reactive Christian thinking, I
am less of a victim than you because you are more of a victim than me. White hippies do tend to recognize some
of the oppressive aspects of industrial, consumerist society but manifest this by focusing
on and identifying with people who seem to be even more oppressed, thus
reproducing the 1970s movie version of Natives as defeated victims who exist only
in the past. Western culture is permeated with the duplicitous , Christian notion of
victimization, which on the one hand implies a moral or spiritual superiority and
on the other a kind of weakness that is to be overcome . Martyred saints are represented as suffering
writer Deborah Doxtator makes the point that
physical torment with a heroic steadfastness of faith. Yet the body, whether sinful or suffering, is thought to be inherently abject. Thus, to be a
White representations (both "sympathetic" and explicitly

racist) of colonial wars tend to maintain this definition and underline the view that Native
heroism derives from and is the consequence of defeat. The white fascination
with the romantic, abstract heroism of Native people is thus able to function as
another means of colonial pracification because it presupposes the inevitable
defeat and disappearance of the nations . Colonialism adds a new twist to the Christian view that people are
victim is to be both heroic and abject.
victims by their very nature or essence, and here the relation between aggressor and victim becomes wholly static and cannot shift. Every-one is
of course, conceiving of an enemy nation as heroic also

makes the oppressors look good because they have defeated a truly worthy and
valiant enemy. This, too, is nothing new in Western culture. Recall the famous Roman sculpture of the dying Gaul, an image of a
frozen into his or her position and role. And,
heroic, yet defeated enemy. Here we approach what it was we all forgot in our eagerness to embrace the representation of Inidans as heroic
if Native nations are portrayed as inherently abject and doomed to defeat,

white viewers will not feel any connection to colonialism , either in the past or in the present. This is
why the phony Native culture of movies, Edward Curtis photographs, and television is so appealing to white people: if, as Hollywood and
capitalism would have it, the nations are foreordained to assimilate and vanish, then white
viewers need not question racism or face the discomfort of interrogating our
continuing position as members of a colonizing nation. We will not feel
connected to ongoing struggles in James Bay, Chiapas, Kanesatake, and elsewhere and to the different relation to the
land that these struggles express. Any sense of connection to events occurring on the ground is
lost, and "Native" becomes another empty category that can be mined for its trappings and images.
And the "love" of Indians professed by counterculture old and new continues to have
nothing to do with Native people and certainly nothing to do with supporting
contemporary Native struggles. Westerns and other colonial narratives are in the business of producing binarisms which
have had effects on all of us. As white people, we need to rethink and recover the histories
erased by popular culture and school textbooks. There were always alternatives to John Wayne. We also need to think
victims:
through the nature of power and its relation to culture. John Trudell said somewhere that there is a difference between being oppressed and being
powerless: Native people may be oppressed, but the traditions have power; white people may be "in charge" within a colonial context, but our
It is up to us to look into how our traditions were

taken over and distorted by a destructive, soulless ethos and find ways to heal
our cultural diseases. This is where Karma's approach breaks down: he thinks he has to turn himself into a "white-skinned Indian"
culture has lost its heart, soul, and life-its power.
because he cannot find a way to transform and locate power in his own tradition. Because of the elided histories, he is unable to identify with the
white people who have resisted oppression over the centuries. He, too, is rendered passive by the romantic discourse of inevitable defeat and
disappearance. And because Karma thinks white culture is one thing-the dead, shopping-mall culture of our time-appropriation becomes his only
escape, and it becomes impossible for him to imagine standing side by side with Native people as equals.
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**Levinas/Derrida**
A2 Infinite Responsibility (1/3)
[you might want to read Calculability Good]
DERRIDAS ETHIC TOWARDS THE OTHER REQUIRES
THINKING THROUGH THE OPPRESSORS EYES,
DESTROYING ETHICS
Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale
Law, Transcendental Deconstruction, Transcendent Justice-- Part II, 92 Mich. L. Rev. 1131,
1994, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/articles/trans02.htm
Derrida's ethics of Otherness has a second component: It employs a different sense of individuality and uniqueness.
Under this view, justice requires one to speak in the language of the Other by
trying to see things from the Other's point of view. (78) This conception of justice seems most attractive
when we are the injurer or the stronger party in a relationship, or when we are in the position of a judge who is attempting to arbitrate between
competing claims. For example, suppose that we are the State, the stronger party, the oppressor, or the injurer, or suppose that we are
contemplating an action that might put us in such a position. It seems only just that we should try to understand how we have injured or
oppressed the Other (or might be in a position to injure or oppress). We can only do this if we try to see the problem from the Other's perspective
and understand her pain and her predicament in all of its uniqueness. The duty we owe to the Other is the duty to see how our actions may affect
or have affected the Other; to fulfill this duty we must put away our own preconceptions and vocabulary and try to see things from her point of
view. Similarly, if we are a judge in a case attempting to arbitrate between the parties, the ethics of Otherness demands that we try to
Suppose,
, that we are not the injurer, but the victim; not the State, but the
individual; not the strong, but the weak; not the oppressor, but the oppressed.
Does justice require that we speak in the language of the person we believe is
injuring or oppressing us? Must a rape victim attempt to understand her
violation from the rapist's point of view? Does justice demand that she attempt
to speak to the rapist in his own language - one which has treated her as less
than human? Must a concentration camp survivor address her former captor in
the language of his worldview of Aryan supremacy? We might wonder whether
this is what justice really requires, especially if the injustice we complain of is
precisely that the Other failed to recognize us as a person , refused to speak in our language, and
understand how our decision will affect the two parties, and this will require us to see the matter from their perspective.
however
declined to consider our uniqueness and authenticity.
VOTE TO SAVE LIVESTHE EXISTENCE OF ENDANGERED

3RD PARTIES MAKES RESPONSIBILITY IMPOSSIBLE TO
DETERMINE
Campbell, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle,
Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, ed. by Campbell and Shapiro, 1999,
David
p. 35-36
Levinas's thought is appealing for rethinking the question of responsibility, especially with respect to situations like the Balkan crisis, because it
there is no circumstance under which we could declare that it was not

our concern. As Levinas notes, people can (and obviously do) conduct their relationship to the Other in terms of exploitation,
oppression, and violence. But no matter how allergic to the other is the self, "the relation to
the other, as a relation of responsibility, cannot be totally suppressed, even when it takes the
form of politics or warfare." In consequence, no self can ever opt out of a relationship with the other: "[I]t is impossible
to free myself by saying, 'It's not my concern.' There is no choice, for it is always and inescapably my
maintains that
concern. This is a unique 'no choice,' one that is not slavery." This unique lack of choice comes about because in Levinas's thought ethics has
been transformed from something independent of subjectivitythat is, from a set of rules and regulations adopted by pregiven, autonomous
agentsto something insinuated within and integral to that subjectivity. Accordingly, ethics can be understood as something not ancillary to the
existence of a subject; instead, ethics can be appreciated for its indispensability to the very being of the subject. This argument leads us to the
recognition that "we" are always already ethically situated, so making judgments about conduct depends less on what sort of rules are invoked as
regulations and more on how the interdependencies of our relations with others are appreciated. To repeat one of Levinas's key points: "Ethics
redefines subjectivity as this heteronomous responsibility, in contrast to autonomous freedom." Suggestive though it is for the domain of
Levinas's
formulation of responsibility, subjectivity, and ethics nonetheless possesses some problems
when it comes to the implications of this thought for politics. What requires particular attention is
the means by which the elemental and omnipresent status of responsibility, which is founded in the one-to-one or face-tointernational relations where the bulk of the work on ethics can be located within a conventional perspective on responsibility
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face
, can function in circumstances marked by a multiplicity of others.
relationship
Although the reading of Levinas here agrees that "the ethical exigency to be responsible to the other undermines the ontological primacy of the
meaning of being," and embraces the idea that this demand "unsettles the natural and political positions we have taken up in the world and
predisposes us to a meaning that is other than being, that is otherwise than being:" how those disturbances are negotiated so as to foster the
maximum responsibility in a world populated by others in struggle remains to be argued. To examine what is a problem of considerable import
I want to consider Levinas's discussion of "the third person ," the

andof particular importance in a consideration of the politics of international
actionthe role of the state in Levinas's thought.
given the context of this essay,
distinction he makes between the ethical and the moral,
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EMPATHIZING WITH THE OTHER IGNORES LARGER
STRUCTURES OF DOMINATION, REINSCRIBING THE GAP
BETWEEN THE SELF AND THE OTHER
Rey Chow, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University
of California at Irvine, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural
Studies, 1993, p. 12 15, UK: Fisher
In the "cultural studies" of the American academy in the 1990s, the Maoist is
reproducing with prowess. We see this in the way terms such as "oppression,"
"victimization," and "subalternity" are now being used. Contrary to Orientalist
disdain for contemporary native cultures of the non-West, the Maoist turns
precisely the "disdained'' other into the object of his/her study and, in some
cases, identification. In a mixture of admiration and moralism, the Maoist
sometimes turns all people from non-Western cultures into a generalized
"subaltern" that is then used to flog an equally generalized "West." 21
Because the representation of "the other" as such ignores (1) the class and
intellectual hierarchies within these other cultures, which are usually as
elaborate as those in the West, and (2) the discursive power relations structuring
the Maoist's mode of inquiry and valorization, it produces a way of talking in
which notions of lack, subalternity, victimization, and so forth are drawn upon
indiscriminately, often with the intention of spotlighting the speaker's own sense
of alterity and political righteousness. A comfortably wealthy white American
intellectual I know claimed that he was a "third world intellectual," citing as one
of his credentials his marriage to a Western European woman of part-Jewish
heritage; a professor of English complained about being "victimized" by the
structured time at an Ivy League institution, meaning that she needed to be on
time for classes; a graduate student of upper-class background from one of the
world's poorest countries told his American friends that he was of poor peasant
stock in order to authenticate his identity as a radical "third world"
representative; male and female academics across the U.S. frequently say they
were "raped" when they report experiences of professional frustration and
conflict. Whether sincere or delusional, such cases of self-dramatization all take
the route of self-subalternization, which has increasingly become the assured
means to authority and power. What these intellectuals are doing is robbing
the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import, and thus
depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful
demand. The oppressed, whose voices we seldom hear, are robbed twicethe
first time of their economic chances, the second time of their language, which is
now no longer distinguishable from those of us who have had our
consciousnesses "raised."
In their analysis of the relation between violence and representation, Armstrong
and Tennenhouse write: "[The] idea of violence as representation is not an easy
one for most academics to accept. It implies that whenever we speak for
someone else we are inscribing her with our own (implicitly masculine) idea of
order." 22 At present, this process of "inscribing" often means not only that we
"represent" certain historic others because they are/were ''oppressed"; it often
means that there is interest in representation only when what is represented can
in some way be seen as lacking. Even though the Maoist is usually
contemptuous of Freudian psychoanalysis because it is "bourgeois," her
investment in oppression and victimization fully partakes of the Freudian and
Lacanian notions of "lack." By attributing "lack," the Maoist justifies the
"speaking for someone else" that Armstrong and Tennenhouse call "violence
as representation." As in the case of Orientalism, which does not necessarily
belong only to those who are white, the Maoist does not have to be racially
"white" either. The phrase "white guilt" refers to a type of discourse which
continues to position power and lack against each other, while the narrator of
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that discourse, like Jane Eyre, speaks with power but identifies with
powerlessness. This is how even those who come from privilege more often
than not speak from/of/as its "lack." What the Maoist demonstrates is a circuit of
productivity that draws its capital from others' deprivation while refusing to
acknowledge its own presence as endowed. With the material origins of her own
discourse always concealed, the Maoist thus speaks as if her charges were a
form of immaculate conception.
[Continues.No Text Removed]

[Continued.No Text Removed]
The difficulty facing us, it seems to me, is no longer simply the "first world"
Orientalist who mourns the rusting away of his treasures, but also students from
privileged backgrounds Western and non-Western, who conform behaviorally in
every respect with the elitism of their social origins (e.g., through powerful
matrimonial alliances, through pursuit of fame, or through a contemptuous
arrogance toward fellow students) but who nonetheless proclaim dedication to
"vindicating the subalterns." My point is not that they should be blamed for
the accident of their birth, nor that they cannot marry rich, pursue fame, or even
be arrogant. Rather, it is that they choose to see in others' powerlessness an
idealized image of themselves and refuse to hear in the dissonance between
the content and manner of their speech their own complicity with violence.
Even though these descendents of the Maoist may be quick to point out the
exploitativeness of Benjamin Disraeli's "The East is a career," 23 they remain
blind to their own exploitativeness as they make "the East" their career. How do
we intervene in the productivity of this overdetermined circuit?
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Levinas Destroys Ethics (1/2)

LEVINASIAN ETHICS IS ORIENTED TOWARDS PREONTOLOGICAL ALTERITY, BASED ON ORIGINARY
NEGATIVITY, BLOCKING AFFIRMATION OF ETHICS IN
SPECIFIC CONTEXTS
Hallward 2001
[Peter, Nip/Tuck junky, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Trans. Peter
Hallward, New York: Verso, 2001, xxii-xxiii//uwyo-ajl]
ethical questions can arise only in a specific situation and under
which,
, are essentially indifferent to differences,
For Badiou, true
circumstances
however divisive
concerning subjects 'disinterested' in the other as such, the other qua other (i.e. in the circumstances created by a truthprocedure).
The 'ethical ideology', by contrast, precisely presumes to transcend all

situated restrictions and to prevail in a consensual realm beyond
division, all the while orientated around the imperious demands of
difference and otherness qua otherness, the difference of the altogether other as much as the
irreducibly incommensurable demands of every particular other. As Badiou is the first to recognize, nowhere is the
essential logic more clearly articulated than in Levinas's philosophy,
where 'the Other comes to us not only out of context but also without
mediation... .'28 According to Levinas, there can be no ethical situation as
such, since ethics bears witness to a properly meta- or preontological
responsibility (roughly, the responsibility of a creature to its transcendent creator, a creator altogether beyond the
ontological field of creation). For Levinas, as for Derrida after him, the other is other only if he immediately evokes or expresses the
absolutely (divinely) other.
Since the alterity of the other is simultaneously 'the alterity of the human other [Autruzl and of the Most High [Tres Haut]' ,29 so
our responsibility to this other is a matter of 'unconditional

obedience', 'trauma', 'obsession', 'persecution', and so on.30 Of course, the limited creatures that we are can apprehend
then
the Altogether-Other only if this otherness appears in some sense 'on our own level', that is, in the appearing of our 'neighbour' (of
our neighbour's face): there is only 'responsibility and a Self because the trace of the [divinely] Infinite . . . is inscribed in
in my 'non-relation' with
the Other, 'the Other remains absolute and absolves itself from the
relation which it enters into'.32 The relation with the other is first and foremost a 'relation' with the
proximity'.31 But this inscribing in nearness in no sense dilutes the essential fact that
transcendent.beyond as such. Levinasian ethics, in short, is a form of what Badiou criticizes as anti-philosophy, that is, the
reservation of pure or absolute value to a realm beyond all conceptual distinction
LEVINAS ARGUMENT DEPENDS ON THE THEOLOGICAL

INFINITY OF GOD. SECULAR APPROPRIATION LAPSES INTO
FINITUDE, BLOCKING RESPONSIBILITY
Badiou 2001
[Alain, Number muncher, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Trans.

Peter Hallward, New York: Verso, 2001, 21-3//uwyo-ajl]
: the ethical
primacy of the Other over the Same requires that the experience of
alterity be ontologically 'guaranteed' as the experience of a distance, or of
an essential non-identity, the traversal of which is the ethical experience itself. But nothing in the simple
phenomenon of the other contains such a guarantee. And this simply because the
The difficulty, which also defines the point of application for these axioms, can be explained as follows
finitude of the other's appearing certainly can be conceived as resemblance, or as imitation, and thus lead back to the logic of the
Same. The other always resembles me too much for the hypothesis of an originary exposure to his alterity to be necessarily true.
The phenomenon of the other (his face) must then attest to a radical alterity which he nevertheless does not contain by himself.
The Other, as he appears to me in the order of the finite, must be the epiphany of a properly infinite distance to the other, the
traversal of which is the originary ethical experience.
n order to be intelligible, ethics requires that the Other be in

some sense carried by a principle of alterity which transcends mere
finite experience. Levinas calls this principle the 'Altogether-Other', and
it is quite obviously the ethical name for God. There can be no Other if he is not the immediate
This means that i
phenomenon of the AltogetherOther. There can be no finite devotion to the non-identical if it is not sustained by the infinite
devotion of the principle to that which subsists outside it
. There can be no ethics without God the
ineffable.
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In Levinas's enterprise, the ethical dominance of the Other over the theoretical ontology of the same is entirely bound up with a
to believe that we can separate what Levinas's thought unites

is to betray the intimate movement of this thought, its subjective rigour. In truth,
Levinas has no philosophy - not even philosophy as the 'servant' of theology. Rather, this is philosophy (in the
religious axiom;
Greek sense of the word) annulled by theology, itself no longer a theology (the terminology is still too Greek, and presumes
proximity to the divine via the identity and predicates of God) but, precisely, an ethics.
To make of ethics the ultimate name of the religious as such (i.e. of that which relates [re-lie] to the Other under the ineffable
authority of the Altogether-Other) is to distance it still more completely from all that can be gathered under the name of
'philosophy'.
every effort to turn

ethics into the principle of thought and action is essentially religious. We
To put it crudely: Levinas's enterprise serves to remind us, with extraordinary insistence, that
might say that Levinas is the coherent and inventive thinker of an assumption that no academic exercise of veiling or abstraction
can obscure: distanced from its Greek usage (according to which it is clearly subordinated to the theoretical), and taken in general,
ethics is a category of pious discourse.
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Levinas Destroys Ethics (2/2)

OBSESSION WITH ABSTRACT RESPONSIBILITY ALLOWS US
TO IGNORE SINGULARITY, MEANING THAT NONE OF THEIR
SWEEPING DEMANDS MANIFEST IN THE REAL WORLD
WE FEEL BETTER ABOUT OURSELVES WHILE PEOPLE ARE
ENSLAVED
Badiou 2001
[Alain, Number muncher, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Trans.
Peter Hallward, New York: Verso, 2001, 14-6//uwyo-ajl]
3. Finally, thanks to its negative and a priori determination of evil, ethics
prevents itself from thinking the singularity of situations as such, which
is the obligatory starting point of all properly human action. Thus, for
instance, the doctor won over to 'ethical' ideology will ponder, in
meetings and commissions, all sorts of considerations regarding 'the
sick', conceived of in exactly the same way as the partisan of human
rights conceives of the indistinct crowd of victims - the 'human' totality
of subhuman entities [reels].
But the same doctor will have no difficulty in accepting the fact that this
particular person is not treated at the hospital, and accorded all
necessary measures, because he or she is without legal residency
papers, or not a contributor to Social Security. Once again, 'collective'
responsibility demands it! What is erased in the process is the fact that
there is only one medical situation, the clinical situation,7 and there is
no need for an 'ethics' (but only for a clear vision of this situation) to
understand that in these circumstances a doctor is a doctor only if he
deals with the situation according to the rule of maximum possibility - to
treat this person who demands treatment of him (no intervention here!)
as thoroughly as he can, using everything he knows and with all the
means at his disposal, without taking anything else into consideration.
And if he is to be prevented from giving treatment because of the State
budget, because of death rates or laws governing immigration, then let
them send for the police! Even so, his strict Hippocratic duty would
oblige him to resist them, with force if necessary.
'Ethical commissions' and other ruminations on 'healthcare expenses' or
'managerial responsibility', since they are radically exterior to the one
situation that is genuinely medical, can in reality only prevent us from
being faithful to it. For to be faithful to this situation means: to treat it
right to the limit of the possible. Or, if you prefer: to draw from this
situation, to the greatest possible extent, the affirmative humanity that
it contains. Or again: to try to be the immortal of this situation.
As a matter of fact, bureaucratic medicine that complies with ethical
ideology depends on 'the sick' conceived as vague victims or statistics,
but is quickly overwhelmed by any urgent, singular situation of need.
Hence the reduction of 'managed', 'responsible' and 'ethical' health-care
to the
abject task of deciding which sick people the 'French medical system'
can treat and which others - because the Budget and public opinion
demand it - it must send away to die in the shantytowns of Kinshasa.
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Levinas/Derrida Destroy Ethics

THE ALTERNATIVE IS PREMISED ON THE INCALCULABLE
CALL OF THE OTHER, PREVENTING AN UNCONDITIONAL
COMMITMENT TO A TRUTH EVENT THAT PRODUCES
SUBJECTIVITY, PROVIDING THE ONLY ACCESS TO THE
SINGULARITY BECAUSE OF ITS UNIVERSAL ACCESSIBILITY
Hallward 2001
Hallward, New York: Verso, 2001, xxv-xxvii//uwyo-ajl]
Like Badiou, Derrida is careful to distinguish the realm of decision from the realm of
knowledge. To reduce my decision to respond to the calculus of reasons and the assessment
of possibilities is to eliminate its radical character as a decision. The decision must
always concern what I cannot know. Ethics is a matter of 'responsibility in
the experience of absolute decisions made outside of knowledge or given norms' .39 But
Derrida does not stop there.
The responsible decision must concern not only the notknown, it must
evade conceptualization altogether. 'In order for [absolute responsibility] to be
what it must be it must remain inconceivable, indeed unthinkable.'40 The decision becomes
precisely what is impossible for the subject as such. If, then, a response or a decision does
take place, it can only have been 'the decision of the other in me'. 41 Like Abraham
responding to God's instruction to sacrifice his son, I must respond

without trying to interpret (and thus appropriate) the other's meaning. I must respond
simply because radical otherness demands it; only then do I become the unknowing vehicle
for this other's decision.
Hence the mysterium tremendum whose 'trembling' quivers throughout Donner la mort: 'we
fear and tremble before the inaccessible secret of a God who decides for
us although we remain responsible' .42 Hence, too, the irreducibly
'tragic' and 'guilty' quality of Derrida's ethical responsibility (54-5/51), the
impasse of a responsibility to impossibly overwhelming (and impossibly incommensurable)

obligations. This impasse, moreover, is only exacerbated by any attempt to justify an ethical
decision. Since every such decision must be made by a fully solitary or 'irreplaceable' subject,
so then its justification according to the necessarily general or universal criteria of collective
ethics threatens 'to dissolve my singularity in the medium of the concept', to betray my
secret within the publicity of language - in short, to threaten me with replacement.43 If it is to
be a genuine decision, it seems, the decision must take place as a pure leap of faith, one that
resists any location in the situation, any justification by its subject, and any
'conceptualization' by philosophy.
Badiou's emphasis on the material topology of a truthprocedure, by

contrast, is designed precisely to situate every such leap and to justify
every apparently 'unjustifiable' commitment in terms of its eternal and universal
address.
The decision is no less 'incalculable', no less extra-ordinary or extra-legal. But for

Badiou, an ordinary (replaceable) individual becomes irreplaceable,
becomes a (singular) subject, only through this very commitment itself ; it
is only the commitment to a truth-process that 'induces a subject'.44 Whereas Derrida
maintains that responsibility to 'the absolute singularity of the other. . . calls for a betrayal of
everything that manifests itself within the order of universal generality' ,45 Badiou declares
that we can access the realm of singularity only through adherence to
strictly universal criteria - that is, to the universality produced by a truth-procedure.
Derrida's responsibility keeps itself 'apart and secret', it 'holds to what is apart and secret'
(33/26tm); whereas Badiou's commitment, inspired by Lacan's logic of the matheme the
literal basis for an 'integral transmission' of truth46 - pursues clarity for

all. Derrida's tension between (singular) subject and (collective) justification disappears here
without trace, as does every hint of pathos roused by a responsibllity deemed impossible a
priori. A true statement, as Badiou conceives it, is precisely one that can be
made by anyone, anyone at all.47 Again, with Badiou, impossibility is invariably
thought in terms of a particular situation, that is, as the Real of that situation, the void
around which it is structured in its systematic entirety - and thus the point
from which, through a process of eminently' logical revolt' ,48 it becomes possible to
transform the situation as a whole. And whereas both Badiou and Derrida orientate
their ethics around the advent of something 'to come' that escapes incorporation within any
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Kritik Answers
logic of anticipation or figuration, Badiou's event remains situated vis-a-vis the
state of the' situation (the elements of the 'symptomal' or 'evental' site [site
evenementiel] are perfectly accessible 'in their own right'; they are inaccessible only from
within the perspective adopted by the state of the situation), whereas Derrida's
messianic event is simply 'monstrous' in the strong sense, consigned to

a general 'formlessness'.
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Kritik Answers
**Nietzsche**
Nietzsche Answers: 2AC (1/6)
FIRST, TURN THE 1AC IS AN AFFIRMATION OF LIFE
AGAINST THE NEGATIVITY OF ENEMY COMBATANT
DOCTRINE
SECOND, PERM DO BOTH
DEFENSE OF MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES IS NECESSARY FOR
CONSTANT CRITICISM, CHALLENGING BEING BY THINKING
IN FRAGMENTS
Bleiker 97
[Roland, PhD Cand @ Australian National U. of Political Sci, Alternatives 22, 5785//uwyo]
No concept will ever be sufficient, will ever do justice to the object it is trying to capture. The objective then becomes to conceptualize thoughts
so that they do not silence other voices, but coexist and interact with them. Various authors have suggested methods for this purpose, methods
Bakhtins dialogism, a theory

accepts the
existence of multiple meanings, draws connections between differences, and searches
for possibilities to establish conceptual and linguistic dialogues among competing ideas, values, speech forms, texts, and
that will always remain attempts without ever reaching the ideal state that they aspire to. We know of Mikhail
of knowledge and language that tries to avoid the excluding tendencies of monological thought forms. Instead, he
validity claims, and the like. Jurgen Habermas attempts to theorize the preconditions for ideal speech situations. Communication, in this case,
should be as unrestrained as possible, such that claims to truth and rightness can be discursively redeemed, albeit, one should add, though a
rationalism and universalism that it violently anti-Bakhtinian and anti-Adornian. Closer to the familiar terrain of IR we find Christine Sylvesters
empathetic cooperation, which aims at opening up questions of gender

by a process of positional slippage that occurs when one listens seriously to the
concerns, fears, and agendas of those one is unaccustomed to heeding when building
social theory. But how does one conceptualize such attempts if concepts can ever do justice to the objects they are trying to capture?
feminist method of
The daring task is, as we know from Adorno, to open with concepts what does not fit into concepts, to resist the distorting power of reification and
return the conceptual to the nonconceptual. This disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of critical philosophy. It impedes the concept from
developing its own dynamics and from becoming an absolute in itself. The first step toward disenchanting the concept is simply refusing to define
it monologically. Concepts should achieve meaning only gradually in relation to each other. Adorno even intentionally uses the same concept in
different way in order to liberate it from the harrow definition that language itself had already imposed on it. That contradictions could arise out
.
One cannot eliminate the contradictory, the fragmentary, and the discontinuous.
Contradictions are only contradictions if one assumes the existence of a prior
universal standard of reference. What is different appears as divergent, dissonant, and
negative only as long as our consciousness strives for a totalizing standpoint, which
we must avoid if we are to escape the reifying and excluding dangers of identity
thinking. Just as reality is fragmented, we need to think in fragments. Unity then is not to be found be evening
out discontinuities. Contradictions are to be referred over artificially constructed
meanings and the silencing of underlying conflicts. Thus, Adorno advocates writing in fragments, such
that the resulting text appears as if it always could be interrupted, cut off abruptly,
any time, and place. He adheres to Nietzsches advice that one should approach
deep problems like taking a cold bath, quickly into them and quickly out again .
of this practice does not bother Adorno. Indeed, he considers them essential
The belief that one does not reach deep enough this way, he claims, is simply the superstition of those who fear cold water. But Nietzsches bath
has already catapulted us into the vortex of the next linguistic terrain of resistance the question of style.
THIRD, NO LINK WE DONT ASSERT DEVOTION TO A

TRANSCENDENT LAW. PLAN IS ONLY A CONTINGENT
CONTESTATION OF NEGATIVITY
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FOURTH, EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE REQUIRES
A REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION, MEANING THAT
BACKGROUND OF HUMN DEATH AND FINITUDE
Zizek '99
1999, 153-4//uwyo-ajl]
It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic
'rebirth' - the radical restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind.
Does not Lacan himself provide a number of hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms
does not
already posit a 'new harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely wipes
the slate clean for one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is Lacan's contention that, in
this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is confronted
which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan, negativity, a
negative gesture of withdrawal, precedes any positive gesture of enthusiastic
identifiction with a Cause: negativity functions as the condition of (im)possibility
of the enthusiastic identification - that is to say, it lays the ground, opens up space for
it, but is simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this reason, Lacan implicitly changes the
balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what ' Death' stands for at its most radical is not
merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of the world', the selfwithdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with
symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier. Here,
to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St Paul or Badiou: psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it
Lacan parts company with St Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already was dead - that is to say, after Freud, one cannot directly have
every such Event ultimately remains a semblance obfuscating a preceding

Void whose Freudian name is death drive. So Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination of the exact status
faith in a Truth-Event;
of this domain beyond the rule of the Law. That is to say: like Lacan, Badiou delineates the contours of a domain beyond the Order of Being,
beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the 'morbid' super ego connection between Law and its transgressive desire. For Lacan,
: the 'death drive' is not

the outcome of the morbid confusion of Life and Death caused by the
intervention of the symbolic Law. For Lacan, the uncanny domain beyond the Order
of Being is what he calls the domain 'between the two deaths', the pre-ontologicalf
domain of monstrous spectral apparitions, the domain that is 'immortal', yet not in the Badiouian sense of the
however, the Freudian topic of the death drive cannot be accounted for in the terms of this connection
immortality of participating in Truth, but in the sense of what Lacan calls lamella, of the monstrous 'undead' object-libido.18
FIFTH, THE ALT DOESNT SOLVE WITHOUT PLAN,

UNILATERAL DETAINMENT WILL CONTINUE, LOCKING IN
THE SLAVE MORALITY OF THE STATUS QUO
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SIXTH, CALL TO REJECT RE-INVENTS HIERARCHIES
POLITICAL ACTION IS KEY TO TRANSCEND THE NIHILISTIC
BINARY OF THE ALTERNATIVE
Newman 2001
[Saul, Sociology @ Macquarie University, Philosophy & Social Criticism 27: 3, pp.
4-6//uwyo]
Derrida does not simply want to invert the terms of these
binaries so that the subordinated term becomes the privileged term. He does not want to
put writing in the place of speech, for instance. Inversion in this way leaves intact the hierarchical,
authoritarian structure of the binary division. Such a strategy only re- affirms the
place of power in the very attempt to overthrow it. One could argue that Marxism fell victim to this logic
It must be made clear, however, that
by replacing the bourgeois state with the equally authoritarian workers state. This is a logic that haunts our radical political imaginary.
Revolutionary political theories have often succeeded only in reinventing power

and authority in their own image. However, Derrida also recognizes the dangers of
subversion that is, the radical strategy of overthrowing the hierarchy altogether,
rather than inverting its terms. For instance, the classical anarchists critique of Marxism went along the lines that Marxism neglected political
power in particular the power of the state for economic power, and this would mean a restoration of political power in a Marxist revolution.
Derrida
believes that subversion and inversion both culminate in the same thing the
reinvention of authority, in different guises. Thus, the anarchist critique is based on the Enlightenment idea of a
Rather, for anarchists, the state and all forms of political power must be abolished as the first revolutionary act. However,
rational and moral human essence that power denies, and yet we know from Derrida that any essential identity involves a radical exclusion or
, anarchism substituted political and economic authority for

a rational authority founded on an Enlighten- ment-humanist subjectivity. Both
radical politico-theoretical strategies then the strategy of inversion, as
exemplified by Marxism, and the strategy of subversion, as exemplified by
anarchism are two sides of the same logic of logic of place. So for Derrida:
suppression of other identities. Thus
What must occur then is not merely a suppression of all hierarchy, for anarchy only consolidates just as surely the established order of a
metaphysical hierarchy; nor is it a simple change or reversal in the terms of any given hierarchy. Rather the Umdrehung must be a
transformation of the hierarchical structure itself.
to avoid the lure of authority one must go beyond both the anarchic
desire to destroy hierarchy, and the mere reversal of terms. Rather, as Derrida suggests, if one
wants to avoid this trap the hierarchical structure itself must be transformed . Political action must invoke a
rethinking of revolution and authority in a way that traces a path between these
two terms, so that it does not merely reinvent the place of power . It could be argued that
In other words,
Derrida propounds an anarchism of his own, if by anarchism one means a questioning of all authority, including textual and philosophical
authority, as well as a desire to avoid the trap of reproducing authority and hierarchy in ones attempt to destroy it.
This deconstructive attempt to transform the very structure of hierarchy and authority, to go beyond the binary opposition, is also found in
Nietzsche. Nietzsche believes that one cannot merely oppose authority by affirming its opposite: this is only to react to and, thus, affirm the
One must, he argues, transcend oppositional thinking

altogether go beyond truth and error, beyond being and becoming, beyond good and evil. For
Nietzsche it is simply a moral prejudice to privilege truth over error. However, he
does not try to counter this by privileging error over truth, because this leaves the opposition
intact. Rather, he refuses to confine his view of the world to this opposition: Indeed what
domination one is supposedly resisting.
compels us to assume that there exists any essential antithesis between true and false? Is it not enough to suppose grades of apparentness
and as it were lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance? Nietzsche displaces, rather than replaces, these oppositional and
authoritarian structures of thought he displaces place. This strategy of displacement, similarly adopted by Derrida, provides certain clues to
. Rather than reversing the terms of the

binary opposition, one should perhaps question, and try to make problematic,
its very structure.
developing a non-essentialist theory of resistance to power and authority
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Kritik Answers
Nietzsche Ansers: 2AC (4/6)

SEVENTH, THE ALTERNATIVE ALONE DESTROYS ANY
CHECK ON CRUELTY, LEGITIMIZING ATROCITY
May, College Research Fellow in Philosophy @ Birkbeck College, 99 (Simon,
Nietzsches ethic versus morality: The new ideal, Nietzsches Ethics and his War on
Morality, P. 132-133)
An apologist for Nietzsche might suggest that his ethic is not alone in effectively legitimizing inhumanity. He might argue,
for example, that some forms of utilitarianism could not prevent millions being sacrificed if greater numbers could
thereby be saved; or that heinous maxims could be consistently universalized by Kant's Categorical Imperativemaxims
against which Kant's injunction to treat all human beings as ends in themselves would afford no reliable protection, both
because its conception of 'humanity' is vague and because it would be overridden by our duty, as rational agents, to
with Nietzsche there is not

even an attempt to produce a systematic safety net against cruelty, especially if
one judges oneself to be a 'higher' type of person with life-enhancing pursuits
and, to this extent, his philosophy licenses the atrocities of a Hitler even though, by his
personal table of values, he excoriates anti-Semitism and virulent nationalism. Indeed, to that extent it is
irrelevant whether or not Nietzsche himself advocates violence and bloodshed or
whether he is the gentle person described by his contemporaries. The reality is
that the supreme value he places on individual life-enhancement and selflegislation leaves room for, and in some cases explicitly justifies, unfettered
brutality. In sum: the point here is not to rebut Nietzsche's claim that 'everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man'
respect just such universalized maxims. To this apologist one would reply that
serves his enhancement 'as much as its opposite does' (BGE, 44my emphasis)for such a rebuttal would be a major
It is rather to suggest that the necessary balance

between danger and safety which Nietzsche himself regards as a condition for
flourishing (for example, in this quote from BGE, 44) is not vouchsafed by his extreme
individualism. Indeed, such individualism seems not only self-defeating, but also
quite unnecessary: for safeguards against those who have pretensions to
sovereignty but lack nobility could be accepted on Nietzsche's theory of value as
just another 'condition for the preservation' of 'higher' types. Since the
overriding aim of his attack on morality is to liberate people from the
repressiveness of the 'herd' instinct, this unrelieved potential danger to the
'higher' individual must count decisively against the successand the possibility
of successof his project.
ethical undertaking in its own right.
EIGHTH, THE SURFACE/DEPTH MODELS SEARCH FOR

SUBJECTIVE INTEGRITY RELIES ON ASSUMPTIONS OF
METAPHYSICAL INNOCENCE, FETISHIZING AN
AUTHENTICITY THAT NEVER EXISTED
Bewes 97

become something. Its principal characteristic is the retreat from and disavowal of the violence of
representation - both political and semiotic. There are three further aspects to this essentially ignominious cultural operation: (i) a cultivation of
stupidity (what I have called Kelvinism, or 'metaphysical innocence') as a means of circumventing the ideational 'brutality' of the political life; (ii)
a recourse to the idea of an internal or subjective 'truth of the soul' which

transcends political reality, along with the contingencies of representation. Both of
these signal an attachment to a surface/ depth model of subjectivity which in each
case amounts to a fetishization of authenticity , whether by opting to 'remain' on the
surface, or by retreating 'inwards'; (iii) a collapse of faith by individuals and even politicians themselves, not only in
the political infrastructure but in the very' concept of political engagement - here it becomes apparent that Tony Blair, for example, is more
'postodern' than any theoretician.
.
in a state of anxiety, shrinks from the violence of determinate
negation and 'strives to hold on to what it is in danger of losing'. 59 At various points throughout the present work I have used the
terms 'decadence', 'irony' and 'relativism' to refer to these instances of an epistemological loss of nerve, this capitulation to
'things as they are'; it may be as well here to remind ourselves of the terms in which Hegel describes these manifestations of a
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retreat from truth. Consciousness, he says, at the decisive moment in which it is required to go beyond its own limits, (i) 'wishes to remain in a
state' of unthinking inertia'; (ii) gloats over its own understanding, 'which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren
Ego instead of any content'; (iii) 'entrenches itself in sentimentality, which assures us that it finds everything to be good in its kind'. 60
Postmodernism, an empirical social condition - by which I mean that a series of critical-theoretical strategies has attained a certain concrete form
- legitimizes these symptoms of cultural anxiety; postmodernism becomes synonymous, therefore, with deceleration, with a sense of cultural and
political conclusivity; postmodernism is the principal vehicle of what Baudrillard calls 'the illusion of the end'.
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NINTH, AUTHENTICITY FETISHIZATION AND ITS FEAR OF
REASON FORCES A RETREAT FROM THE POLITICAL WHILE
GAS CHAMBERS ARE BUILT
Bewes 97

TENTH, TURN THE SEARCH FOR HIDDEN MOTIVES

ENGAGES IN A HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION, RISKING
SPIRAL INTO PROFOUND SKEPTICISM
Berman 2001
LN]
Ricoeur contrasts two different "poles" among hermeneutic styles. At one pole, "hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation
and restoration of ... meaning." 23 At the other pole, hermeneutics is "understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion."
a
hermeneutics of faith to be one that treats the object of study as possessing
inherent meaning on its own terms. In contrast, the hermeneutics of
suspicion seeks to expose societal practices as illusory edifices that
mask underlying contradictions or failures of meaning. I will return to the first pole in
24 It is not entirely clear to me precisely what Ricoeur means by these two categories. Nevertheless, I understand
Part Four of this Essay, but for now I wish to focus on the hermeneutics of demystification and suspicion.
t
each of these thinkers makes "the decision to look upon the whole of
consciousness primarily as "false' consciousness." 25 Ricoeur sees this perspective as an
Ricoeur locates in the work of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud the central hallmarks of this suspicious approach. He argues tha
extension of Descartes' fundamental position of doubt at the dawn of the Enlightenment. According to Ricoeur, "The philosopher
trained in the school of Descartes knows that things are doubtful, that they are not such as they appear; but he does not doubt
that consciousness is such as it appears to itself; in consciousness, meaning and consciousness of meaning coincide." 26
The hermeneutics of suspicion takes doubt one step farther, by

distrusting even our perceptions.
This suspicious position questions the so-called "correspondence [*104] theory" of truth. As we go through our lives, most of us
generally assume that our mental perceptions accord with reality because we believe we have direct access to reality through our
senses or through reason. This is the legacy of the Enlightenment, the "answer" to the fundamental Cartesian doubt. But the
hermeneutics of suspicion maintains that human beings create false truths for themselves.
Such false truths cannot be "objective" because they always serve some
interest or purpose.
By discovering and revealing those interests or purposes, suspicious analysis seeks to expose so-called "false consciousness"
generated through social ideology or self-deception. False consciousness may arise in many different ways. Nietzsche looked to
people's self-deceit in the service of the "will to power." Marx focused on the social being and the false consciousness that arises
from ideology and economic alienation. Freud approached the problem of false consciousness by examining dreams and neurotic
symptoms in order to reveal hidden motivations and desires. Thus, "the Genealogy of Morals in Nietzsche's sense, the theory of
ideologies in the Marxist sense, and the theory of ideas and illusions in Freud's sense represent three convergent procedures of
demystification." 27
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ELEVENTH, AND, SKEPTICISM STOPS SOCIAL CHANGE
THEIR PARANOIA FORECLSOES UPON REVOLUTION
Berman 2001
LN]

movement.
Of course
, without

reenacted,
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Nietzsche = Nihilism
NIETSZCHES DENIAL OF BEING LEADS TO NIHILISM
REMOVING ALL MEANING IN LIFE THIS LEADS TO AN
ENDLESS SEARCH FOR POWER WHICH NEVER IS
SUCCESSFUL
Hicks, Prof and Chair of Philosophy @ Queens College of the CUNY, 2K3 (Steven
V., Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault: Nihilism and Beyond, Foucault and Heidegger:
Critical Encounters, Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, P. 109, Questia)
Here again, one might raise objections to Heidegger's equating of Nietzsche's doctrine of will to power with the metaphysics of subjectivity. After
all, Nietzsche often attacked Descartes's ego cogito as a logical or linguistic fiction (cf. BGE, 16, 54). Yet according to Heidegger,
Nietzsche still follows Descartes's lead in making human beings the subject or
foundation of things. Unlike Descartes, however, Nietzsche's subject is not a fixed mental substance, but the body interpreted as
a center of instincts, drives, affects, and sublimations, i.e., as will to power. Heidegger claims that this body as
given idea still involves Nietzsche in a fixity that brings him into the
philosophy of presence: Nietzsche argues that being is as fixated, as permanent (N, 2:200). And this
forced sense of presence, Heidegger thinks, leads to the dangers of radical
objectifiability and to the disposability of beings, i.e., treating beings as nothing
but objects of use, control, and management. 32 Moreover, like its Cartesian counterpart, the Nietzschean
subject reins supreme over the whole of beings and posits the measure for the beingness of every being (N, 4:121). 33 In claiming that
truths are illusions and that Being is an empty fiction, Nietzsche fashions for the subject an absolute power to enjoin what is true and what
is false and hence to define what it means to be or not to be a being (N, 4:145). According to Nietzsche, what is truewhat has beingis
that which serves the interest of the subject whose essence is will to power (in the mode of existence of eternal recurrence; cf. N, 2:203).
Being is thus reduced to the status of a value or a condition of the preservation

and enhancement of the will to power (N, 4:176). This is why Heidegger considers
Nietzsche the consummation, and not the overcoming, of Western
metaphysics: by reducing Being to a value, the doctrine of will to power makes
the nihilism of the metaphysical tradition (the assumption that Being itself is nothing and the human
will everything) a matter of philosophical principle . 34 Thus Nietzsche's counter-ideals
of will to power and eternal recurrence, far from overcoming nihilism, actually
express or exemplify the loss of any sense of Being, or the withdrawal of Being
itself, in favor of beings (i.e., products of human will). As Heidegger reads him, Nietzsche
understands Being in terms of value (or what is useful for enhancing the human will) because Being itself has totally
withdrawn in default. And this brings to completion traditional metaphysics, which, according to Heidegger, is the history of Being in its
Nietzsche's metaphysics of will to power is the most

extreme withdrawal of Being and thus the fulfillment of nihilism proper (N, 4:204,
232). So Nietzsche brings to completion, in his denial of Being, the very nihilism
he wanted to overcome. Far from twisting free of the ascetic ideal, Heidegger claims, Nietzsche 's
doctrine of will to power actually provides the basis for its most complete
expression in the modern secularized ascetic will-tocontrol everything . In other
words, instead of seeking salvation in a transcendent world by means of ascetic
self-denialthe aspect of metaphysics that Nietzsche most obviously rejects
salvation is now, Heidegger claims, sought exclusively in the free self-development of
all the creative powers of man (N, 4:89). This unlimited expanding of power for
power's sake parallels in many ways what Nietzsche characterized as the most
terrifying aspect of the ascetic ideal: the pursuit of truth for truth's sake . It is,
withdrawal. As Heidegger sees it,
according to Heidegger, the hidden thorn in the side of modern humanity (cf. N, 4:99). This hidden thorn expresses itself variously in the
Protestant work ethic and in the iron cage of bureaucratic-technological rationality (discussed in the works of Max Weber); it also expresses
itself in the various power aims of modern scientific/technological culture as well as in the frenzied impulse to produce and consume things at
Nietzsche's own figure of the Overman (Ubermensch)

foreshadows the calculating, technological attitude of modern secularized
asceticism: His Overman [stands] for the technological worker-soldier who
would disclose all entities as standingreserve necessary for enhancing the
ultimately aimless quest for power for its own sake.35 This emerging
technological human, grounded in a control-oriented anthropocentrism, compels
entities to reveal only those one-dimensional aspects of themselves that are
consistent with the power aims of a technological/productionist culture. Instead of
ever faster rates. Heidegger even suggests that
dwelling and thinking in a world unified by what Heidegger metaphorically terms the fourfold of earth and sky, gods and mortals, impoverished
modern technocrats occupy a world bereft of gods in which thinking becomes calculating, and dwelling becomes tantamount to the
technological domination of nature and what Nietzsche calls the common economic management of the earth in which mankind will be able
to find its best meaning as a machine in the service of this economy (WP, 866). Thus citizens come to be viewed primarily as consumers,
wilderness is looked upon in terms of wildlife management areas, and genuine human freedom is replaced by the organized global conquest
of the earth, and the thrust into outer space (N, 4:248). As Heidegger sees it, our era entertains the illusion that man, having become free for
his humanity, has freely taken the universe into his power and disposition (N, 4:248). In summary, Nietzsche tried to combat the nihilism of the
ascetic ideal (e.g., the collapse of the Christian table of values) by bringing forth new nonascetic values that would enhance rather than devalue
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instead of overcoming nihilism, Nietzsche
simply reinforced it. By characterizing Being as an empty fiction and the
last smoke of a vaporized reality (TI, 2:2, 481), and by degrading it to the status of a value for enhancing the
subject's will to power, Nietzsche loses any sense of Being as such . For him it is a mere nothing, a
nihil. And this brings to completion the fundamental movement of history in the
West, which is nihilism: the withdrawal of Being itself and the consequent focus
on beings as objects for consolidating the power of Will and for expanding it out
beyond itself in an ever-increasing spiral . 36 As Heidegger sees it, this eternally recurring
will to power, or will to will, is a will-to-control that only reinforces the
nihilism Nietzsche feared: the loss of meaning or direction, the
devaluation of the highest values, the constructs of domination,
and the devotion to frenzied consumption and production.
humanity's will to power. According to Heidegger, however,
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Nietzsche Legitimizes Genocide

(1/2)
NIETZSCHES PHILOSOPHIES LEGITIMIZED NAZISM AND
THE HOLOCAUST
Ortega-Cowan, B.A. @ Boston College and J.D. with Honors @ Florida
State U College of Law, 2K3 (Roman, Dubious Means to Final Solutions:
Extracting Light from the Darkness of Ein F Hrer and Brother Number One, 31
Fla. St. U.L. Rev. 163, Fall)
Nietzsche's emphasis on the triumph of the will over emotion gave the
Nazis the mental strength to accomplish the horrors of the Holocaust. n35 The
choice of self-definition through hardness was seen as central to the
establishment and assertion of a new national identity, and such emphasis led to a
devaluation of human compassion and other emotions. n36 With a set ideology of
hatred founded upon angry anti-Semitism, a belief in "scientific" racial
superiority, and a will immune from emotional influence, the Nazis embarked on
a catastrophic mission targeting a clearly defined enemy. After taking control of the
government, they quickly built a wall of legal repression around the Jews, which
culminated in the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht decrees and left the Jews
vulnerable to the violence that lay ahead. n37
Finally,
NIETZSCHES PHILOSOPHIES LEGITIMIZED THE

HOLOCAUST HIS NOTIONS OF MASTER MORALITY
FUELED THE FIRE BEHIND GENOCIDES OF THE WEAK AND
IMPERFECT FRAMING THEM AS MANS GREATEST
DANGER
Aschheim, Prof of German Cultural and Intellectual History @ Hebrew U,
Jersulem, 97 (Steven E., Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust,
Nietzsche and Jewish Culture, Ed. Jacob Golomb, P. 13-16)
At any rate, what I am proposing here is that both in its overall bio-eugenic political and medical vision, its programmatic
obsession with degeneration and regeneration, whether in parodistic form or not, there are clear informing parallels with
key Nietzschean categories and goals. From one perspective, as Robert Jay Lifton has recently persuasively argued,
Nazism is about the "medicalisation of killing". Its genocidal impulses were implicit
within a bio-medical vision and its vast, self-proclaimed programmatic task of
racial and eugenic-hygiene. On an unprecedented scale it would assume control
of the human biological future, assuring health to positive racial stock and
purging humanity of its sick, degenerative elements. Its vision of "violent cure",
of murder and genocide as a "therapeutic imperative", Lifton argues, resonates with
such Nietzschean themes.40 While every generation may emphasize their
particular Nietzsche, there can be little doubt that in the first half of this century
various European political circles came to regard him as the deepest
diagnostician of sickness and degeneration and its most thoroughgoing
regenerative therapist. "The sick", he wrote, "are man's greatest danger; not the
evil, not the 'beasts of prey'."41 To be sure, as was his wont, he employed these notions in multiple,
shifting ways, as metaphor and irony (he even has a section on "ennoblement through degeneration"42) but most often,
most crucially, it was represented (and understood) as a substantial literal danger whose overcoming through drastic
Although he
was not alone in the wider nineteenth-century quasi-bio-medical, moral,
discourse of "degeneration"43 - that highly flexible, politically adjustable tool that
cut across the ideological spectrum, able simultaneously to locate, diagnose and
resolve a prevalent, though inchoate, sense of social and cultural crisis through
an exercise of eugenic labeling and a language of bio-social pathology and
potential renewal44 - he formed an integral part in defining and radicalizing it. He
measures was the precondition for the urgent re-creation of a "naturalized", non-decadent humankind.
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Kritik Answers
certainly constituted its most important conduit into the emerging radical right. What else was Nietzsche's
Lebensphilosophie,
his reassertion of instinct and his proposed transvaluation whereby

the healthy naturalistic ethic replaced the sickly moral one (a central theme conveniently
ignored or elided by the current post-structuralist champions of Nietzsche). "Tell me, my brothers", Zarathustra asks,
"what do we consider bad and worst of all? Is it not degeneration}'"15 In this world, the reassertion of all that is natural
and healthy is dependent upon the ruthless extirpation of those anti-natural ressentiment sources of degeneration who
have thoroughly weakened and falsified the natural and aristocratic bases of life. Over and over again, and in different
The Nazi
bio-political understanding of, and solution to "degeneration", as I have tried to
show here and elsewhere, was in multilayered ways explicitly Nietzscheinspired. From the World War I through its Nazi implementation, Nietzschean
exhortations to prevent procreation of "anti-life" elements and his advocacy of
euthanasia, of what he called "holy cruelty" - "The Biblical
ways, Nietzsche declared that "The species requires that the ill-constituted, weak, degenerate, perish".46
contiued
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Kritik Answers
Nietzsche Legitimizes Genocide

(2/2)
continued
prohibition 'thou shalt not kill'", he noted in The Will to Power, "is a piece of naivete compared with the seriousness of the
prohibition of life to decadents: 'thou shalt not procreate!'. . . Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted
- that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be antinature itself as morality!"47 - both inspired and provided a
The translation of traditional antiJewish impulses into genocide and the murderous policies adopted in different
degrees to other labeled outsiders (Gypsies, physically and mentally handicapped, homosexuals,
criminals, inferior Eastern peoples and Communist political enemies) occurred within the distinct
context of this medico-bio-eugenic vision. There were, to be sure, many
building-blocks that went into conceiving and implementing genocide and mass
murder but I would argue that this Nietzschean framework of thinking provided a
crucial conceptual precondition and his radical sensibility a partial trigger for its
implementation. Related to but also going beyond these programmatic parallels and links we must raise another
"higher" rationale for theorists and practitioners off such measures.48
highly speculative, though necessary, issue: the vexed question of enabling preconditions and psychological motivations.
Clearly, for events as thick and complex as these no single theoretical or methodological approach or methodology will
suffice. Yet, given the extraordinary nature of the events, more conventional modes of historical analysis soon reach their
limits and demand novel answers (the study of Nazism has provided them in abundance, some more, some less
convincing49). I am not thus claiming exclusiveness for the Nietzschean element at this level of explanation, but rather
arguing for his continued and important relevance. To be sure, of late, many accounts of the ideas behind, and the
psychological wellsprings enabling, mass murder have been, if anything, anti-Nietzschean in content. For Christopher
Browning it was hardly Nietzschean intoxication, the nihilistic belief that "all is permitted", that motivated the "ordinary
killers" - but rather prosaic inuring psychological mechanisms such as group conformity, deference to authority, the
dulling powers of alcohol and simple (but powerful) processes of routinization.50 For George L. Mosse, far from indicating
a dynamic anti-bourgeois Nietzschean revolt, the mass murders represented a defense of bourgeois morality, the
attempt to preserve a clean, orderly middle-class world against all those outsider and deviant groups that threatened
it.51 These contain important insights but, in my view, leave out crucial experiential ingredients, closely related to the
Nietzschean dimension, which must form at least part of the picture. At some point or another, the realization must have
dawned on the conceivers and perpetrators of this event that something quite extraordinary, unprecedented, was
occurring and that ordinary and middle-class men were committing radically transgressive, taboo-breaking, quite "unbourgeois" acts.52 Even if we grant the problematic proposition that such acts were done in order to defend bourgeois
interests and values, we would want to know about the galvanizing, radicalizing trigger that allowed decision-makers and
perpetrators alike to set out in this direction and do the deed. To argue that it was "racism" merely pushes the argument
We are left with

the issue of the radicalizing, triggering forces. These may be many in number
but it seems to me that Nietzsche's determined anti-humanism (an atheism that, as
a step backward, for "racism" on its own -while always pernicious - has to be made genocidal.
George Lichtheim has noted, differs from the Feuerbachian attempt to replace theism with humanism33),
apocalyptic imaginings and exhortatory visions, rendered such a possibility, such

an act, conceivable in the first place (or, at the very least, once thought of and
given the correct selective readings easily able to provide the appropriate
ideological cover). This Nietzschean kind of thought, vocabulary and sensibility
constitutes an important (if not the only) long-term enabling precondition of
such radical elements in Nazism. With all its affinities to an older conservatism,
it was the radically experimental, morality-challenging, tradition-shattering
Nietzschean sensibility that made the vast transformative scale of the Nazi
project thinkable. Nietzsche, as one contemporary commentator has pointed
out, "prepared a consciousness that excluded nothing that anyone might think,
feel, or do, including unimaginable atrocities carried out on a gigantic order ".54 Of
course, Nazism was a manifold historical phenomenon and its revolutionary thrust sat side by side with petit-bourgeois,
beyond its doctrinal emphases on

destruction and violent regeneration, health and disease, the moral and
historical significance of Nazism lies precisely in its unprecedented
transvaluations and boundary-breaking extremities, its transgressive acts and
shattering of previously intact taboos. It is here - however parodistic, selectively
mediated or debased - that the sense of Nazism, its informing project and
experiential dynamic, as a kind of Nietzschean Great Politics continues to haunt
us.
provincial, traditional and conservative impulses.55 But surely,
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Kritik Answers
Nietzsche Legitimizes Patriarchy

NIETZSCHES CALLS FOR DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN THE
WEAK AND THE STRONG ARE NOTIONS OF CLASSISM
AND SERVE TO REINFORCE PATRIARCHAL DOMINANCE
Schutte, Assist Prof of Philosophy @ U of Florida, 84 (Ofelia, Nietzsches Politics,
Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks, P. 186-188)
As long as one gives philosophical credibility to the rhetoric of the "superior type" or "higher" person and sets aside the
political and practical implications of how this rhetoric is instantiated, both by Nietzsche and by the historical patriarchal
While the
logic of unspecified prejudice calls for the higher/lower distinction without
committing itself to any particulars to fill those categories, Nietzsche has made
it quite clear what groups by "nature" or "destiny" are higher and what lower. Here
are two statements regarding women and workers, two groups Nietzsche has
condemned to the "low." Reversing Goethe's statement that "the eternal feminine draws us higher," the
tradition in which we still live, we are defending what I shall call "the politics of unspecified prejudice."
author of Beyond Good and Evil wrote: "I do not doubt that every nobler woman will resist this faith, for she believes the
same about the Eternal-Masculine."62 The criterion of a woman's "nobility," then, is her "faith" that the male, as male, is
more noble than herself.
This insidious rhetoric is also applied to the slave, who is urged

to believe that his exploitation is justified because the master/aristocrat is more
noble than he. When one unmasks the realities of this rhetoric, one sees that the
practical advantages do not go to "superior" personseven assuming there
were so pure a typebut simply to the privileged classes of the established
society. Nietzsche himself points this out in Twilight of the Idols: The labor question. The stupidityat bottom, the
degeneration of instinct, which is today the cause of all stupiditiesis that there is a labor question at all. Certain things
one does not question: that is the first imperative of instinct. . . . But what was done? . . . The instincts by virtue of which
the worker becomes possible as a class, possible in his own eyes, have been destroyed through and through with the
most irresponsible thoughtlessness. The worker was qualified for military service, granted the right to organize and to
vote: is it any wonder that the worker today experiences his own existence as distressingmorally speaking, as an
injustice? But what is wanted? ... If one wants an end, one must also want the means: if one wants slaves, one is a fool if
The theme of the "strength" of not questioning the

structure of power that serves the interests of a privileged class is not simply
anti-liberal to the point of malice (as Nietzsche suggests in the aphorism that precedes this one). It is
anti-critical to the point of malice. These statements on women, the working class, and the
need of the privileged class for thoughtless and obedient "slaves" are not simply
isolated opinions on Nietzsche's part, as sometimes they tend to be read. They
are logically tied to other notions that Nietzsche is commended for holding
such as the distinction between the "superior" person and the "herd," the belief
in a "strong" culture, and even the love of one's fate. The fact that we ignore the concrete side
one educates them to be masters.63
of the issue while holding on to the more abstract side shows that in this case we are much less logical than Nietzsche,
for we are the ones caught in a logical dilemma, while Nietzsche is not. Nietzsche, however, is caught in a much larger
type of contradiction even though his logic is tight with respect to the connection between elitism and oppression. This is
the contradiction between his intended affirmation of life and his reactionary and nihilistic politics. Still, the political
implications of Nietzsche's thought can be turned around to some extent if we ask: was not Nietzsche correct in insisting
upon a logical connection between a "strong" masculine ideal, a "strong" culture, and a blind system of political
exploitation and psychological repression? Is it not true that if the goal of one's values is to implement a "strong"
patriarchal system where a few will command and the rest will obey, it is then foolish to allow moral codes which favor
the notions of the universal brotherhood and sisterhood of human beings? Does not the morality of universal human
dignity entail in theory, if not also in practice, the elimination of all forms of elitism, domination, and oppression? In
thanks to his
uninhibited articulation of the extreme he has exposed the logic of patriarchal
domination in its essence. While Nietzsche has outlined various incentives for overturning the democratic
Nietzsche's idea of "greatness" one finds the logic of the extremeof this he was well aware. But
influences of modern times and for instituting a "purer" system of patriarchal domination under the banner of
it is up to us, not him, to make the choice

as to what we want our political future and our moral values to be. His appeals
to destiny, intolerance, and the suspension of critical questioning of
authoritarian political institutions are not convincing.
overcoming the "evils" of "effeminacy" and "decadence,"
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Kritik Answers
Alternative Causes Annihilation

THE ALTERNATIVES DESTRUCTION OF ONTOLOGY CAUSES
VIOLENCE AND ANNIHILATION
Hicks, Prof and Chair of Philosophy @ Queens College of the CUNY, 2K3 (Steven V.,
Critical Encounters, Ed. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, P. 109, Questia)
This response, however, only succeeds in postponing Heidegger's real objection. For according to Heidegger, psychology
(and indeed, all of the human sciences) are caught up in the web of traditional metaphysical thinking. As such,
Nietzsche's 'psychology' is simply coterminous with metaphysics . [it] lies grounded in the very essence of modern
Heidegger argues that modern metaphysics is defined

precisely by the fact that man becomes the measure and center of beings,
and this, in turn, results in the modern technological understanding of beings as
objects for use and control, or as Heidegger says, entities wholly present as standingreserve (Bestand) (QT, 17). 26 This extends even to human beings themselves, who
are increasingly transformed by the human sciences (and their technological systems)
into resources for objectification and control (cf. N, 4:23445). Here, Heidegger anticipates
Foucault's claim that modern technological systems attempt to make human beings
wholly present as bio-power, or subjects completely present for surveillance
and control via the disciplinary practices of institutions (psychological, juridical, carceral)
whose aim is to normalize human life. 27 Thus from Heidegger's perspective, the actual
nihilism Nietzsche feared annihilation, spreading violence, and so forthis
evoked by the preponderance, in the modern world, of this productionist,
technological objectification of being, and by the complete ordering of all
beings in the sense of a systematic securing of stockpiles for further
technological usage, control, and domination (N, 4:22934). The relentlessness of [this] usage
extends so far that the abode of Beingthat is, the essence of manis omitted; man is threatened with
the annihilation of his essence, and Being itself is endangered (N, 4:245). Ironically,
Heidegger argues, it was precisely Nietzsche's proposing of Being as a value posited
by the will to power that led to this final [nihilistic] step of modern
metaphysics, in which Being comes to appear as will to power (N, 4:234). Simply put,
Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power succeeds in reducing the whole
question of Being to the status of a value; and this completes the metaphysics of subjectivity
initiated by Descartes, which in turn results in a blindness to the whole question as to
what Being itself is. This blindness to Being, Heidegger argues, is at the root
of all nihilism and is connected to the modern technological/productionist
attitude toward the world (cf. N, 4:23132). Why does Heidegger make this claim? Heidegger believes that
metaphysics (N, 4:2, 8).
metaphysics is essentially the history of Being, a history in which Being discloses itself as withdrawn in default or
concealed (cf. N, 4:23032). He basically reads the whole history of Western philosophy as the history of Being and its
gradual self-concealment. In this context, Heidegger praises Nietzsche for his insight into the basic development of
that history: In his [Nietzsche's] view it is nihilism . The phrase 'God Is Dead' is not an atheistic proclamation; it is a
Heidegger even
suggests that Nietzsche came close to recognizing (albeit opaquely) that the
fundamental question of Being had been omitted, forgotten, or suppressed
within the metaphysical tradition of previous philosophy, and that this omission
of the default of Being in its unconcealment is the very essence of nihilism
(cf. N, 4:23032). For example, when Nietzsche denies truth or refers to Being as an
empty fiction (see TI, 481), Heidegger claims that he is actually experiencing and
expressing the nothing or omission of Being itself in the history of Western
philosophy, which is tantamount to nihilism:
formula for the fundamental experience of an event in Occidental history (N, 1:156).
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Kritik Answers
Nihilism Fails
NIHILISM IS AN INEFFECTIVE MEANS OF RESISTANCE THAT
REPLICATES EVERYTHING BAD ABOUT THE STATUS QUO
Mann, Prof of English @ Pomona, 95 (Paul, Stupid Undergrounds, PostModern
Culture 5:3, Project Muse)
One might find it amusing to assume the pose of someone who states problems with brutal simplicity. As in this little
nugget: Every historical form of cultural and political revolt, transgression, opposition, and escape has turned out to be
nothing more than a systemic function. The notion of recuperation has encountered a thousand alibis and counter-tropes
but still constitutes the closest thing cultural study has to a natural law. Collage, antimelodic high-decibel music,
antimasterpieces, romantic primitivism, drunkenness and drugs, renegade sexuality, criticism itself: it is amazing that a
Every conceivable
form of negation has been dialectically coordinated into the mechanism of
progress. The future of the anti has not yet been reconceived . That is why it is ridiculous to
single radical claim can still be made for any of this, and entirely characteristic that it is.
accuse some poor kid with a bad attitude or some putative grownup with a critique but no "positive program for change"
strictly speaking, nihilism doesn't exist. What was once called

nihilism has long since revealed itself as a general, integral function of a culture
that, in all its glorious positivism, is far more destructive than the most
vehement no. Nothing could be more destructive, more cancerous, than the
positive proliferation of civilization (now there's a critical clich), and all the forms of
opposition have long since revealed themselves as means of advancing it. As for
the ethos of "resistance": just because something feels like resistance and still
manages to offend a few people (usually not even the right people) hardly makes it
effective. It is merely ressentiment in one or another ideological drag . And how can
of being nihilistic:
anyone still be deluded by youth, by its tedious shrugs of revolt? Even the young no longer believe their myth, although
they are quite willing to promote it when convenient. Punk nihilism was never more than the nihilism of the commodity
itself. You should not credit Malcolm McLaren with having realized this just because he was once pro-situ. All he wanted
was to sell more trousers without boring himself to death; indeed he is proof that the guy with the flashiest ressentiment
sells the most rags. And if he wasn't bored, can he be said to have advanced the same favor to us?
NIHILISM ENTRENCHES IDEAS THAT PROMOTE

ARROGANCE AND VICTIMIZATION
Dyson, Assist Prof of Law @ SMU, 05 (Maurice R., Awakening an Empire of Liberty:
Exploring the Root of Socratic Inquiry and Political Nihilism in American Democracy,
Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, Vol. 83 No. 2, Wash Univ Law
Quarterly)
for West, these three entrenched dogmas are in turn driven by three
forms of "political nihilism." These are evangelical nihilism, paternalistic nihilism,
and sentimental nihilism. "Evangelical nihilism" is a notion of arrogant
superiority that justifies might as right, or in other words, the belief that the U.S. would
not be so powerful if we were not right. West terms it "evangelical" because of its perceived militant
Furthermore,
intolerance for dissension as well as blind faith to the belief that the exercise of power is a predicate to ensuring security
and prosperity. For West, the quintessential evangelical nihilist is derived from Plato's Republic in the form of
Paternal nihilism, on the other

treats American citizens as victims of deception by government actors who
in turn attempt to superficially appease the masses. These governmental
leaders fundamentally accept corrupt regimes and policies rather than question
them. He finds in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov the literary metaphor for paternal nihilism in the form
Thrasymachus who debates with Socrates the moral superiority of might.(FN1)
hand,
of the Grand Inquisitor. As West points out, this character knows full well the atrocities of the Inquisition represent a gross
distortion of the Christian gospel, but nonetheless, personally takes part in condemning infidels to death sentences
The political nihilist is

faulted here not just for his failure of imagination to envison a truer democracy,
but for his lack of conviction to battle corrupt elites even when history has
shown these battles can be vigorously waged.(FN3) Sentimental nihilism refers to
West's belief that the news media's oversimplification and sensationalized
reporting of global events sacrifices truth for distraction. Sentimental nihilism
pacifies the American people by blunting the critical aspects of news events that
implicate corruption in government.
because he believes the corrupted church is the best that mankind can hope for.(FN2)
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Kritik Answers
Nihilism Causes Terrorism (1/2)

NIHILISM IS THE ROOT OF ALL TERRORISM IT PERVERTS
THE NOTION OF NATIONALISM AND PRIDE AND
LEGITIMIZES UNENDING CYCLES OF VIOLENCE
Ignatieff, Carr Prof of Human Rights @ Harvards Kenndy School of
Government, 2K4 (Michael, The Temptations of Nihilism, an extract from The
Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, New England Review Vol. 25 No.
1/2, P. 54-74)
Neither side in a war on terror is immune from this temptation of coming to see
violence as an end in itself. Agents of a democratic state may find themselves driven
by the horror of terror to torture, to assassinate, to kill innocent civilians, all in
the name of rights and democracy. Succumbing to this inversion is the principal way that both groups slip from the
lesser evil to the greater. If, however, this temptation is strong, a strategy of combating it with lesser evils may not be plausible at all. A lesser
evil morality may be too rational. It makes the assumption that violence by a liberal democratic state faced with terror can be controlled in the
name of ethically appropriate ends like rights and dignity. A lesser evil approach to a war on terror would assume, for example, that agents of a
liberal democratic state should be able to hold the line that divides intensive interrogation from torture, or the line that separates targeted
assassination of enemy combatants from assassinations that entail the death of innocent civilians. Current U.S. policy does not allow
assassination of civilians in peacetime but does permit killing of enemy combatants in wartime, with the proviso that such assassinations must be
discriminate and avoid collateral damage. This policy--a lesser evil approach if there ever was one--implies that the agents charged with
defending a state have the strength of character, together with a clear enough sense of the values of the society they are defending, to be
trusted with morally ambiguous means. But a perfectionist case against such an approach would argue that morally equivocal means are hard to
control and thus liable to end in betrayal of the values that a liberal democracy should stand for. Hence liberal states should not allow those who
defend them to have any of the moral discretion implied in lesser evil approaches. States should absolutely ban extreme interrogations, targeted
assassinations, and other uses of violence, because once you start with means like these, it becomes next to impossible to prevent the lesser
from shading into the greater evil. Another problem with the lesser evil would be that liberal democratic regimes encourage a kind of moral
narcissism, a blinding belief that because this kind of society authorizes such means, they must be acceptable. Thus democratic values, instead
of preventing the lesser from shading into the greater evil, may actually blind democratic agents to the moral reality of their actions. The nobility
of ends is no guarantee against resort to evil means; indeed, the more noble they are, the more ruthlessness they can endorse. This is why
democracy depends on distrust, why freedom's defense requires submitting even noble intentions to the test of adversarial review. I can see
three distinct ways--the tragic, the cynical, and the fanatical--in which nihilism
can come to dominate both a terrorist campaign and a war on terror. The first
might be called tragic because it occurs despite the political intentions of all
concerned, when terrorists and counterterrorists become trapped in a downward
spiral of reprisal and counterreprisal. One side kills to avenge its last victim; the
other side replies to avenge its last victim. Both sides start with an ethic of
restraint and end up in a struggle without end. Here shedding of blood creates
two communities--the terrorists and the counterterrorists--in which loyalty to the group prevails over
institutional accountability or individual principle. Both sides are bonded to their own because both
have blood on their hands or blood to avenge. Their bonds to the group are stronger than any they have to
the institutions that could possibly restrain their behavior . Violence creates belonging and belonging
produces closure. Terrorists listen only to themselves and no longer to
restraining messages from the communities their violence is supposed to serve.
Counterterrorist agencies, having suffered losses, bond with each other, view their civilian
superiors as spineless libertarians, chafe under operational restrictions on their
use of force, seek to evade these wherever possible, covering up as they do so,
and seek to fight the terrorists on their own terms. At the bottom of this downward spiral,
constitutional police forces and counterterror units can end up behaving no
better than the terrorist cells they are trying to extirpate. Their moral conduct
becomes dependent on the increasingly repellent conduct of the other side. This
is the unintentional path to nihilism, taken by constitutional forces to defend the
fallen and to revenge their losses. In the process, torture and extrajudicial killing may
become routine. Gillo Pontecorvo's masterful film The Battle of Algiers (I965) portrays the Algerian war for independence, between
i955 and 196Z, as a tragic duel in which two sides, conscientiously believing in the rightness of their course, become trapped in just such a
downward spiral as we have been considering. The film may be fictional, but it is drawn from extensive documentary research into the actual
history of the Algerian struggle. While clearly siding with the Algerian revolution, Pontecorvo takes care to avoid any moral caricature of the
French, and shows why torture could be seen as a rational and effective way to break up the terrorist cells working in the Algiers Casbah. Nor
does the filmmaker conceal the bloody reality of the liberation struggle, showing the full horror of an attack on a caf that leaves the street
strewn with mangled bodies and traumatized survivors. The film maintains an extraordinarily subtle moral balance, supporting the Algerian
struggle for freedom without mitigating the crimes committed in its name, condemning the French use of torture without failing to do justice to
the reality that it was committed not by brutes but by people with dedicated convictions. The Battle of Algiers thus becomes a testament to the
tragedy of terrorist war. Calling this path tragic is not to excuse it, merely to distinguish it from a second path, which is altogether more cynical .
In the tragic path, violence, once used as a means, becomes an end in itself, to
the horror of those who are trapped by the conduct of the other side. In the
second path, violence doesn't begin as a means to noble ends. It is used, from the beginning, in
the service of cynical or self-serving ones. On both the terrorist and
counterterrorist sides, there are bound to be individuals who actually enjoy
violence for its own sake. Violence and weapons exert a fascination all their own,
and their possession and use satisfy deep psychological needs. It isn't necessary to delve into
the question of why human beings love violence and seek to use weapons as instruments of power and even of sexual gratification. The fact that
violence attracts as well as repels is a recurring challenge to the ethics of a lesser evil, since it explains why the appetite for violence can become
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Kritik Answers
insatiable, seeking ever more spectacular effects even though these fail to produce any discernible political result. Many terrorist groups use
political language to mask the absence of any genuine commitment to the cause they defend. In their cynicism, they can become uncontrollable,
because once violence is severed from the pursuit of determinate political ends, violence will not cease even if these goals are achieved. What is
true of terrorists can also characterize counterterrorists. The type of personnel attracted to police and antiterrorist squads may be recruited
because they are drawn to violent means. These means confer power, boost sexual confidence, and enable them to swagger and intimidate
others. The type of personality attracted into a counterterror campaign may not have any intrinsic or reflective commitment to democratic values
of restraint. Rules of engagement for the use of deadly force need be obeyed only when superiors are watching and can be disregarded at any
other time. There may always be a gap, therefore, between the values of a liberal democracy when it is under attack and
continued
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Kritik Answers
Nihilism Causes Terrorism (2/2)

continued
the conduct of the counterterrorist forces who have to take the war to the enemy. There is no necessary reason to
suppose that those who defend a democracy do so out of any convinced belief in its values. Their chief motivation may
be only the thrill of the chase and the glamour of licensed violence. Liberal states cannot be protected by herbivores. But
if we need carnivores to defend us, keeping them in check, keeping them aware of what it is they are defending, is a
recurrent challenge. On the terrorist side, there will always be a gap between those who take the political goals of a
terrorist campaign seriously and those who are drawn to the cause because it offers glamour, violence, money, and
power. It is anyone's guess how many actual believers in the dream of a united Ireland there are in the ranks of the IRA.
But it is a fair bet to suppose that many recruits join up because they want to benefit from the IRA's profitable protection
rackets. The IRA bears as much relation to the Mafia as it does to an insurrectionary cell or a radical political party, and
the motivations that draw young people into the movement are often as criminal as they are political. When criminal
goals predominate over political ones, it becomes difficult for leaders to prevent their followers from turning violence into
an end in itself. The criminal allure of terrorist groups and the cynicism of those who join them are additional reasons why
it is a mistake to conciliate or appease a group like the IRA with political concessions. Their political goals may be
subsidiary to their criminal interests, and like any criminal enterprise they can be driven out of business only by the force
of the law. Equally, to express surprise that they tarnish political ideals with squalid tactics, or that they seem to be
indifferent to the costs that their violence imposes on the communities they purport to represent, would be to
misunderstand their real nature and purpose. Not all terrorists, however, are moral cynics. Not all terrorist groups use
There are other groups whose political

purposes are genuine, but who nonetheless end up turning violence into a way
of life. These are the groups that have the characteristics, not of criminal gangs,
but of fanatic sects. Here nihilism takes the form, not of believing in nothing, but
of believing in too much. What I mean is a form of conviction so intense, a
devotion so blind, that it becomes impossible to see that violence necessarily
betrays the ends that conviction seeks to achieve. Here the delusion is not tragic, as in the first
politics as an excuse for other straightforwardly violent ends.
case, because believers are not trapped into violence by the conduct of the other side. Nor is it cynical: for these are true
They initiate violence as a sacred and redemptive duty. This is the third
path to nihilism, the fanatical use of high principle to justify atrocity. What is
nihilistic is the belief that such goals license all possible means, indeed obviate
any consideration of the human costs. Nihilism here is willed indifference to the
human agents sacrificed on the altar of principle. Here nihilism is not a belief in
nothing at all; it is, rather, the belief that nothing about particular groups of
human beings matters enough to require minimizing harm to them. The high
believers.
principles commonly used to justify terrorism were once predominantly secular--varieties of conspiratorial Marxism--but
today most of the justifying ideologies are religious. To call religious justifications of violence nihilistic is, of course, to
make a certain kind of value judgment, to assert that there cannot be, in principle, any metaphysical or God-commanded
justification for the slaughter of civilians. From a human rights standpoint, the claim that such inhumanity can be divinely
inspired is a piece of nihilism, an inhuman devaluation of the respect owed to all persons, and moreover a piece of
hubris, since, by definition, human beings have no access to divine intentions, whatever they may be. The hubris is not
confined to vocalizing divine intention. It also consists in hijacking scriptural tradition. The devil can always quote
scripture to his use, and there is never a shortage in any faith of texts justifying the use of force. Equally, all religions
contain sacred texts urging believers to treat human beings decently. Some may be more universalistic in these claims
than others. Some may confine the duties of benevolence to fellow believers, while others may extend these duties to
the whole of humankind. But whatever the ambit of their moral concern, all religious teaching offers some resistance to
the idea that it is justifiable to kill or abuse other human beings. This resistance may range from outright condemnation
nihilist use of religious doctrine is one that perverts

the doctrine into a justification for inhuman deeds and ignores any part of the
doctrine which is resistant to its violent purposes. The nihilism here engages in a
characteristic inversion: adjusting religious doctrine to rationalize the terrorist
goal, rather than subjecting it to the genuine interrogation of true faith. It is
to qualified justification as a last resort. A
unnecessary here to document the extent to which Al Qaeda has exploited and distorted the true faith of Islam. To take
but one example, the tradition of jihad, which refers to the obligation of the believer to struggle against inner weakness
and corruption, has been distorted into an obligation to wage war against Jews and Americans. In the hands of Osama bin
Laden, the specifically religious and inner-directed content of jihad has been emptied out and replaced by a doctrine
justifying acts of terror. This type of religious justification dramatically amplifies the political impact of terrorist actions.
When Al Qaeda strikes, it can claim that it acts on behalf of a billion Muslims. This may be a lie, but it is an influential one
nonetheless. Appropriating religious doctrine in this way also enables the group to offer potential recruits the promise of
martyrdom. Immortality complicates the relationship between violent means and political ends, for the promise of eternal
life has the effect of making it a secondary matter to the suicide bomber whether or not the act achieves anything
political at all. What matters most is securing entry into Paradise. Here political violence becomes subservient not to a
Once violent means cease to serve determinate political

ends, they take on a life of their own. When personal immortality becomes the
goal, the terrorists cease to think like political actors, susceptible to rational
calculation of effect, and begin to act like fanatics. It is not easy to turn human beings into
political end but to a personal one.
fanatics. In order to do so, terrorist groups that use suicide bombers have to create a cult of death and sacrifice,
anchored in powerful languages of belief. Osama bin Laden used an interview with an American journalist in May I998 in
Afghanistan to justify terrorism in the language of faith: The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind for it is
directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah, the tyrants, the traitors who commit acts of treason
against their own countries and their own faith and their own prophet and their own nation .What
is noticeable
here is the use of religion not just to justify killing the infidel but to override the
much more serious taboo against killing fellow believers. The function of nihilism
here is to recast real, living members of the Islamic faith as traitors deserving
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death. Nihilism takes the form of nullifying the human reality of people and
turning them into targets.
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Kritik Answers
Nihilism is the Root Cause of

Violence
NIHILISM IS THE ROOT OF ALL VIOLENCE AND MANIFESTS
PERMANENT DEATH CULTS IN SOCIETIES
Ignatieff, Carr Prof of Human Rights @ Harvards Kenndy School of Government,
2K4 (Michael, The Temptations of Nihilism, an extract from The Lesser Evil: Political
Ethics in an Age of Terror, New England Review Vol. 25 No. 1/2, P. 54-74)
Nihilism--which is the blunt name for taking the gloves off--holds real dangers for
both sides. When a democratic state licenses all means to repress a terrorist
group, it may only play into the hands of its enemy . Some terrorist groups
deliberately seek to draw reprisals upon themselves in order to radicalize their
own population. As the state's repression increases, the terrorists respond by tightening their screws on their
base of support, replacing a political relation to their own side with one of unvarnished tyranny, killing or intimidating
anyone who questions whether the costs of the campaign are outweighing the gains. Populations that once supported
armed struggle for reasons of conviction become trapped either in fanaticism or in complicit silence. In the process,
political regulation of terrorist groups by their community at large becomes impossible. Moderate voices who might
persuade a community to withdraw their support from terror are silenced. In place of a properly political culture, in which
groups and interests compete for leadership, a people represented by suicide bombers ceases to be a political
community at all and becomes a cult, with all the attendant hysteria, intimidation, and fear. This is the process by which
nihilism leads to a war without end. In such a terrorist cult, many praiseworthy moral virtues are inverted, so that they
serve not life but death. Terrorist groups typically expropriate the virtues of the young--their courage, their headstrong
disregard for consequences, their burning desire to establish their own significance--and use these to create an army of
Once violence
becomes part of a community death cult, the only rational response by a state
under attack must be to eliminate the enemy one by one, either by capture and
lifelong imprisonment or by execution. Those for whom violence has become the
driving rationale of conduct cannot be convinced to desist. They are in a deathly
embrace with what they do, and argument cannot reach them . Nor can failure. It
counts for nothing that violence fails to achieve their political objective because
such achievement has long since ceased to be the test of their effectiveness . It is
redemption they are after, and they seek death sure that they have attained it. They have nothing to
negotiate for, and we have nothing to gain by negotiating with them . They will take
the doomed. In this way, violence becomes a career, a way of life that leads only to death.
gestures of conciliation as weakness and our desire to replace violence with dialogue as contemptible na"ivet. To say we
are at war with Al Qaeda and suicide bombers in general is to say that political dialogue is at an end. We have nothing to
say to them nor they to us.
Either we prevail or they do, and force must be the arbiter.
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Kritik Answers
Nihilism Causes Authoritarianism

NIHILISM CULIMINATES IN AUTHORITARIANISM
Christenson, Nippert Prof of Law and Dean @ U of Cincinnati College of Law, 85
(Gordon A., Uncertainty in Law and its Negation: Reflections, 54 U. Cin. L. Rev. 347)
Some dramatically characterize the trends just described as legal nihilism or the negation of the exercise
of legitimate power without the assertion of substantive theory in its place. As Michael Polanyi so cogently
nihilism, whether real or imagined, leads [*357]

inexorably to authoritarian responses and to the rise of
ideology. The second phenomenon which gave rise to our particular predicament thus emerged
has noted,
from the conversion of subjective moral judgment into ideology. Whether derived from the twentieth
century revolutions based on socialism or Marxism, on the human rights movement, or on a resurgence of
neo-conservatism, the intellectual roots of such movements are well described in European and Latin
resulting in the negation of

law and value, are Neitzche's moral and ethical
superiority, Dostoyevski's novels and short stories and the works of the phenomenologists,
American literatures. Symbolic of that literature, and
existentialists and structuralists. All ask similar questions. Post-Marxist thinkers -- Habermas, Foucault and
Berger and other non-legal critical scholars -- have gained influence in legal scholarship which finds them
If there is no common basis for law or

morality other than through a subjective or ideological
construct, then the question is not what values underpin a
particular legal system, but how one's subjective
preferences may be infused with power, strategy and
tactics throughout the general community or imposed by
coercion. The lawyer-advocate has long used various techniques based on pragmatic ideas of
to be useful analytic tools.
progress, the frontier and change. These have been associated with the romanticism of the defender of the
poor and downtrodden, the fighter for civil rights, the human-rights warrior and the social reformer, who
use courts and law as instruments of social change. In this construct, law as a secular system has no
normative content that is not ultimately subjective. If God is dead, all things are morally possible. The main
claim to legitimacy or validity rests in process; namely that the advocates who represent a particular
morality or a particular social philosophy fight and prevail as warriors and advocates in an existing
decisionmaking process, akin to chivalry, aimed at changing official behavior or custom by fighting
injustice, admittedly a subjective construct. Once, however, the subjective advocacy model of changing the
social structure is an accepted way of life, the natural reaction is that sauce for the goose is sauce for the
gander. If the objective validity of the normative system tacitly is rejected by those who seek to change it,
then radicals holding an opposite belief might just as well produce a similar claim by an activism with
subjective preferences even more firmly rooted within the vices of common life. The dialectic of thesis,
antithesis and synthesis that seemed to move outward from the subjective to an objective world-view could
work for the radical right just as well as for the Marxist left!
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Kritik Answers
**Nonviolence**
Nonviolence Answers: 2AC (1/6)
FIRST, NO LINK PLAN DOESNT TAKE A STANCE ON
VIOLENT RESPONSE. IT ONLY ENDS CURRENT DETAINMENT
PRACTICES
SECOND, PERM DO BOTH
WE MUST BE PRAGMATIC PACIFISTS TO END STATE
VIOLENCEABSOLUTE PACIFISM FAILS TO CHALLENGE
THE POLICIES OF THE STATE BY OPTING OUT OF THE
GAME ENTIRELY
Robert L.
Phillips, professor of philosophy, War and Justice, 1984, p. 114-6
It conceivable that governments might grant selective objection the same legal
status as it gives to pacifism? The answer, I fear, is no. And that tells us
something important about pacifism. Governments are prepared to tolerate
pacifism, because it poses no threat either to their political policies or to the
manner in which wars are conducted. The pacifist objects equally to all wars
waged by all governments. In this sense he opts out of the game altogether. By
contrast, the selective objector will be forced to analyze both the policy
decisions of the government as well as the conduct of the armed forces. He will
be publicly carrying out an officially sanctioned comparison between mutually
agreed just-war criteria and the actual performance of the government. That is a
lot to expect of governments as we know them, but there is still more. What
would be the implication of a state granting an exemption on selective grounds?
Fundamentally, the state would be agreeing with the claim that its war policies
may be reasonably interpreted as unjust. The belief that all war is wrong is a
proposition which states might agree is debatable among rational men, and,
therefore, claims to exemption on this basis may be allowed. It is a very different
matter, however, to grant exemption for a particular war, for here we are faced
not with two philosophical theories about violence but with a factual dispute.
Selective objection presupposes that both the government and the claimant
agree upon the criteria for undertaking a justified war and the rules for
conducting it. The claimant would have to show, in order to qualify for an
exemption, that his government is engaged in acts of war which a person might
reasonably characterize as immoral. As such an admission is inseparable from
policy questions, it is inconceivable that any government would be willing (or politically able) to wage war while publicly agreeing that there is sufficient reason
to doubt the morality of that war to grant exemptions from it. This is not to say
that individuals should not refuse to fight in wars which they believe are immoral
but to acknowledge that governments cannot be expected to institutionalize
such a practice. The evenhandedness of the pacifist who objects to all wars does
not threaten the particular policies of any state. In condemning them all equally,
pacifism exempts itself from political reality: What is needed, then, is not a
general pacifism but a discriminating conscientious refusal to engage in war in
certain circumstances. States have not been loath to recognize pacifism and to
grant it a special status. The refusal to take part in all war under any conditions
is an unworldly view bound to remain a sectarian doctrine. It no more challenges
the states authority than the celibacy of priests challenges the sanctity of
marriage. By exempting pacifists from its prescriptions the state may even seem
to display a certain magnanimity. But conscientious refusal based upon the
principles of justice as they apply to particular conflicts is another matter. For
such refusal is an affront to the governments pretensions, and when it becomes
widespread, the continuation of an unjust war may prove impossible.
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Kritik Answers
THIRD, PLAN IS NECESSARY FOR ALTERNATIVE SOLVENCY

IN THE SQUO PEOPLE WILL STILL BE VIOLENTLY
DETAINED. THIS MAKES A DOUBLE BLIND EITHER THE
ALT CAUSES PLAN AND THERES NO LINK DIFFERENTIAL
OR IT DOESNT SOLVE
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FOURTH, MULTILAT SOLVES BY ALLOWING US TO ADDRESS
PROBLEMS WITH INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION, SOLVING
BAD FORMS OF VIOLENCE. CROSS-APPLY NYE
FIFTH, WAR AND VIOLENCE ARE ENDEMIC TO IR POLITICS,
WARS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
Hopes
SIXTH, THEIR AUTHORS MISUNDERSTAND IR, WHICH IS A

SELF HELP SYSTEM. RATIONAL ACTORS ARE DETERRED BY
VIOLENCE, CREATING WORLD PEACE
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SEVENTH, NON-VIOLENCE FAILS AND MAKES US
COMPLICIT WITH GENOCIDETHEIR ALTERNATIVE
DEVALUES LIFE AND LEADS TO MORE CONFLICT AND
MILLIONS OF DEATHS
Havel stresses the potential of truth and humane values to transform human consciousness incrementally over time. We must constantly work
Violence may
be unavoidable in the face of totalitarian savagery. Still, it must remain a means of last resort.
Repeatedly, he warns that violence breeds violence. Havel is not, however, a pacifist ,
for every good thing and struggle against violence. But Havel is tough-minded, his vision comprehensive and realistic.
as that term applies to Quakers or others who organize peace movements. n40 Although the regime Havel and his fellow dissidents resisted for
more than thirty years accused them of terrorist tactics and plots, they conscientiously sought legal justification for their resistance, using the
letter even of unjust laws to manifest support for the principle of legality. Their attitude was "fundamentally hostile to the notion of violent
change--simply because it places its faith in violence," Havel writes in one place. He immediately restates the point, however, in a powerfully
"the 'dissident' attitude can only accept violence as a necessary

evil in extreme situations, when direct violence can only be met by violence and
where remaining passive would in effect mean supporting violence." n41 He
recalls us to the tragic blindness of European pacifism that helped to prepare the
ground for World War II. He points to the fact that the Czechs sent troops to the
Persian Gulf and stood willing to contribute to a U.N. force in the former Yugoslavia . But he is at pains to
significant parenthesis:
condemn violence used as a quick fix to change political systems--the sacrifice of human beings here and now for "abstract political visions of the
future." The problems in human society "lie far too deep to be settled through [*55] mere systemic changes, either governmental or
technological." n42 Havel writes and thinks out of a unique humanist tradition that has been continuous in Czech history. He has specifically
identified with the humanism of the founder of the Czech state, Tomas Masaryk, who regarded "ethical, aesthetic and scientific categories" as "no
less real than bread and butter." Masaryk felt the need for a social revolution "more moral and less materialistic than that envisaged by the
Marxists." Like Havel, he hoped to avoid violence, but he does not rule it out altogether. His language is as circumspect as Havel's: We must
We may, should,
must protect, defend ourselves. In extreme cases with the sword . But even in self-defense we
consistently reject every act of violence; otherwise we shall never be able to disentangle ourselves from violence.
must restrain ourselves from new, active acts of violence. n43 In an address prepared for delivery at a 1985 peace conference, Havel explains
the reticence of Europeans to join Western peace movements as rooted in the

skepticism of those who have already been burned by succumbing to other
forms of utopianism, specifically the Stalin-Leninist variety, which grotesquely
deformed its utopian principles as soon as it got power. The very word "peace"
has been drained of all content by the European experience of "peace in our
time." n44 The Western version of peace sounds far too much like appeasement. Havel speculates whether World War II, with its millions
of corpses, could have been avoided if the Western democracies had stood up to Hitler forcefully and in time. He ascribes to the Czech people as
the inability to risk, in extremis, even life itself to save what

gives it meaning and a human dimension leads not only to the loss of meaning
but finally and inevitably to the loss of life as well--and not one life only but
thousands and millions of lives. n45
a whole the firmly rooted idea that
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EIGHTH, OUR PLAN IS THE EXEMPTION NUCLEAR
ANNIHILATION MUST BE PREVENTED BEFORE NONVIOLENCE
Marty, Professor of Political Science. Mepbis State University, 71 (William R., The
Journal Politics, Vol. 33, No. I, Feb, p. 19-20, JSTOR)
Defenders of nonviolence sometimes level a final crushing charge
against violencethat it is, in an age of nuclear weapons, a sure path
to annihilation. Dr. King, for example, argued that our choice is no
longer nonviolence or violence, rather it is nonviolence or
nonexistence.17 The only new element in this argument for
nonviolence is the threat of nuclear annihilation. That threat,
presumably, makes total commitment to nonviolence both necessary
and possible. In fact, however, certain types of violence pose no threat
of nuclear warfare, hence the horrors of nuclear warfare provide no
reason or incentive to give up these types of violence; other types of
violence pose a real threat of nuclear warfare, but the dangers involved
in abandoning conventional weapons will seem greater and more
immediate, hence conventional violence is unlikely to be abandoned;
and, finally, realistic plans for community order and nuclear
disarmament, the most likely path to survival, depend, at least
potentially, upon violent enforcement. For these reasons, the call to
total commitment to nonviolence in order to avoid total nuclear
annihilation is neither rationally necessary nor psychologically likely to
be adopted. Each of the listed objectives deserves elaboration. First,
certain types of violence pose no threat of nuclear annihilation. The
man or woman who keeps a weapon in the home to deal with intruders
(burglars, sex criminals, rioters) may be unwise for several reasons,
but not because his or her weapon poses a threat of nuclear warfare.
Whether this person uses a weapon against an intruder, or resists
nonviolently, or submits, will have no effect on whether nuclear war is
waged between nations, though it will have considerable effect on his
or her personal safety. To ask this person to disarm in order to avoid
nuclear warfare is as ridiculous as it would be to ask city officials
having no say whatever in the decision to wage nuclear warfare to
disarm their police in order to avoid nuclear annihilation. Even on a
national and international level there are types of violence that pose
little threat of nuclear warfare. In Chad and Sudan, for example, there
has been guerrilla and civil warfare for years, but the threat of nuclear
warfare resulting from these conflicts is small or nonexistent because
nuclear weapons don't exist in those nations and because nations with
nuclear weapons have no incentive to intervene that is worth a nuclear
confrontation. In these cases the threat of nuclear warfare is
inadequate as an incentive to adopt nonviolence because no apparent
threat of nuclear warfare exists. In sum, from the individual to the
international level, there are types of violence that pose no real threat
of nuclear warfare, and certainly are not perceived by those employing
them as threatening nuclear warfare; hence they have no incentive to
adopt nonviolence as an alternative to nuclear warfare. In other cases,
such as the continuing crisis in the Middle East, the possibility of
nuclear warfare is real, but the threat is unlikely to cause renunciation
of violence because other dangers seem greater and more immediate.
To Israel the dangers of adopting nonviolence in the face of Arab
hatred and calls for national extinction seem greater than the dangers
of nuclear warfare resulting from armed defense. The Israelis are
unlikely to make a total commitment to nonviolence in all
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circumstances despite a real threat of nuclear confrontation. The same
situation occurs in Vietnam. There was at least a remote chance of
nuclear confrontation in Vietnam at one time, but that did not provide
adequate incentive to any of the involved parties, from the Viet Cong
to the United States and Russia, to renounce all types of violence,
though it did produce some restraints on United States and Russian
intervention. Again, when the danger of death is already great by
conventional means, and when abandonment of conventional weapons
appears as suicidal, then the threat of nuclear warfare will he
inadequate as an incentive to renounce all types of violence. An appeal
to the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, or to the Saigon government,
or to both, to abandon violence in order to avoid the possibility of
nuclear war would be fruitless.
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Kritik Answers

EVEN NON-VIOLENT MOVEMENTS INEVITABLY BECOME
TOTALITARIAN AND VIOLENTTHE LEADERS CANNOT
CONTROL THE MASSES
Steger, Prof in the Dept of Politics and Government @ Illinois State U, 00 (Manfred
B., Gandhis Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power)
Urging all Indians to crown the swadeshi campaign by publicly burning their foreign-made clothes, Gandhi spoke in
glowing terms of the "inspiring sight" of large piles of garments going up in smoke: "And as the flames leapt up and
enveloped the whole pyramid [of clothes], there was a shout of joy resounding through the air. It was as if our shackles
had been broken asunder. A glow of freedom passed through the vast concourse. It was a noble act nobly performed."62
Yet, the flames of swadeshi kindled by thousands of ordinary Indian also symbolized, like no other satyagraha action, the
fundamental tension at the core of Gandhi's nonviolent nationalism. For the Ma-hatma, the burning clothes
manufactured in England conveyed India's economic, political, and spiritual emancipation from the threads of
oppression. He viewed these spectacles as symbols of the nonviolent purification of a corrupted civilization and its
materialist culture, and, therefore, the purgation of a tainted Indian identity. For othersincluding some of Gandhi's
closest associates and friends, like Charlie Andrewsthe
flames of swadeshi signified a rather

violent act of self-definition that seemed to be an ominous sign of things to
come: the obliteration of the Other by nationalist passions set ablaze. Indeed,
the first indication that Gandhi was incapable of controlling the nationalist
passions of the masses set free during the noncooperation campaign came as
early as April 1921, when a sub-inspector of police and four constables were
killed in an act of mob violence provoked by the trial of Khilafat workers in the city of Malegaon. Gandhi
chided the perpetrators for having "put back the hands of the clock of progress," and reminded them that, "Non-violence
Yet another incident took place

in Bombay on November 17, 1921, the day the Prince of Wales arrived there for an
official visit. Violent attacks were launched by Hindu and Muslim noncooperators upon Parsi and Christian Indians who had voluntarily taken part in the
Prince's welcome. The violence escalated as many non-cooperators looted shops
and burned clothes. Soon these actions expanded to the torching of entire
buildings and the beating of government officials, ultimately leading to the
deaths of several policemen and demonstrators. When, after three days of violence, the passions
had finally cooled down, fifty-eight Bombay citizens had been killed and nearly four
hundred had been injured.64
is the rock on which the whole structure of non-co-operation is built."63
EVERY AFFIRMATIVE ETHICAL STANCE REQUIRES A

REPRESSED ELEMENT OF NEGATION, MEANING THAT THE
ALTERNATIVE OCCURS AGAINS THE BACKGROUND OF
COVERT VIOLENCE
Zizek '99
1999, 153-4//uwyo-ajl]
It would therefore be tempting to risk a Badiouian-Pauline reading of the end of psychoanalysis, determining it as a New Beginning, a symbolic
'rebirth' - the radical restructuring of the analysand's subjectivity in such a way that the vicious cycle of the superego is suspended, left behind.
Does not Lacan himself provide a number of hints that the end of analysis opens up the domain of Love beyond Law, using the very Pauline terms
psychoanalysis is not 'psychosynthesis'; it

does not already posit a 'new harmony', a new Truth-Event; it - as it were - merely
wipes the slate clean for one. However, this 'merely' should be put in quotation marks, because it is Lacan's contention
that, in this negative gesture of 'wiping the slate clean', something (a void) is
confronted which is already 'sutured' with the arrival of a new Truth-Event. For Lacan,
negativity, a negative gesture of withdrawal, precedes any positive gesture of
enthusiastic identifiction with a Cause: negativity functions as the condition of
(im)possibility of the enthusiastic identification - that is to say, it lays the ground,
opens up space for it, but is simultaneously obfuscated by it and undermines it. For this reason,
Lacan implicitly changes the balance between Death and Resurrection in favour of Death: what 'Death' stands for at its most
radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the 'night of the world', the self-withdrawal , the absolute contraction of
to which Badiou refers? Nevertheless, Lacan's way is not that of St Paul or Badiou:
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subjectivity, the severing of its links with 'reality' - this is the 'wiping the slate
clean' that opens up the domain of the symbolic New Beginning, of the emergence of the 'New
Harmony' sustained by a newly emerged Master-Signifier. Here, Lacan parts company with St Paul and Badiou: God not only is but always-already
every such Event ultimately remains a

semblance obfuscating a preceding Void whose Freudian name is death drive. So
was dead - that is to say, after Freud, one cannot directly have faith in a Truth-Event;
Lacan differs from Badiou in the determination of the exact status of this domain beyond the rule of the Law. That is to say: like Lacan, Badiou
delineates the contours of a domain beyond the Order of Being, beyond the politics of service des biens, beyond the 'morbid' super ego
connection between Law and its transgressive desire. For Lacan, however, the Freudian topic of the death drive cannot be accounted for in the
the 'death drive' is not the outcome of the morbid confusion of Life
and Death caused by the intervention of the symbolic Law. For Lacan, the uncanny
domain beyond the Order of Being is what he calls the domain 'between the two
deaths', the pre-ontologicalf domain of monstrous spectral apparitions, the domain that
terms of this connection:
is 'immortal', yet not in the Badiouian sense of the immortality of participating in Truth, but in the sense of what Lacan calls lamella, of the
monstrous 'undead' object-libido.18
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TURN - ATTEMPTING TO CLEANSE LANGUAGE OF
VIOLENCE FETISHIZES AUTHENTICITY, RESULTING IN
POLITICAL DISENGAGEMENT BECAUSE OF THE VIOLENCE
AT THE HEART OF ALL LANGUAGE AND INTERACTION
Bewes 97
Thus, what secondly distinguishes the 'metaphysical innocence' of Rameau is his pursuit of violence - not only the violence of determinate
negation, of alienation from culture and the serial progression of knowledge, but the violence of imperfection, of disrupted subjectivity, of
unforeseen catastrophes and superfluous resources, of human inconsistency and what Gillian Rose calls the 'agon' of existence. Violence, like
suffering and fickleness for Dostoevsky, represents subjective (as against objective) culture, a last manifestation of individual volition, and a point
. Violence increases as the result not of a

deterioration in social behaviour but of a lowering in the cultural threshold
beyond which action appears as violence. In such a context Rameau's disintegration, his 'epigrammatic'
of resistance to what BaudriUard calls the 'triumph' of simulation
existence and his cultivation of violence represent the final recourse of a disfranchised and alienated subjectivity faced with an apparently sewn
up, indifferent world.
In postmodernity this threshold between action and violence is lower, perhaps, than ever before. Political correctism, 'Queer' theory,
Communitarianism, the liberation discourse of the Internet, calls for homogenization of the private and public lives of politicians, the new
of a
fetishization of objective culture. To find intolerable the violence of linguistic
oppression, of 'inauthentic' sexual identity (the product of Freud's 'family romance', etc.), of political antagonism, of the formalization of
truth in its dissemination, of the compart mentalization of public and private life, of the indeterminacy of moral options, is in every
case to subscribe to a peculiar literalism, to evince a profound discomfort with
the signifying relation, to take the signifier persistently for the thing itself, in
such a way that political activity is replaced with a series of cosmetic
adjustments to objective culture.
discipline of 'postmodern ethics', all are varying instances of a collective endeavour to put a freeze on reason as risk, the consequence
Rameau's cynicism therefore represents a commitment to subjective culture, to reality, to the referent and to the signified, to the truth of the
world and of the individual. Cynicism constitutes a certain necessary indifference to objective culture, a certain subjective wager, a projection of
In a climate in which 'authenticity' is at a

premium, where all action has been proscribed as intolerably violent, and where self
consciousness is therefore only a disabling mechanism to be discad, cynicism appears as a spirit in
disintegration, the monopoly broker of disinvestment in the present, the sole locus of
reason and of faith in anything other than the phenomenal here and now, the disposition which alone embodies both energy and depth .
the self beyond objective culture and beyond its own limits.
DETERRENCE IS NECESSARY FOR WORLD PEACE

Robinson 2001
, there are
nevertheless
I personally see
in any foreseeable

hands."

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nuclear
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#2 Pragmatic Pacifism Perm: 1AR

(1/2)
WE MUST ADOPT AN INTRINSIC FORM OF PACIFISM
ABSOLUTE PACIFISM JUSTIFIES PASSIVITY IN THE FACE OF
ATROCIOUS ACTS LIKE RAPE OR GENOCIDE
Robert L.
Let us label this position intrinsicalism and contrast it with what I shall call
tactical pacifism. Someone who believes that it is morally permissible to use
force to resist or prevent violence might adopt the pacifist stance as a purely
tactical matter. He might judge that pacifism is likely to be the best means of
bringing about peace. This could happen in at least two ways. It might be
thought that pacifism is the appropriate response because of peculiar historical
circumstances. Thus, India in 1946 and the United States in the 1960s could be
seen as places where nonviolent resistance would be an appropriate tac tic. In
both of those places the rule of law obtained to the degree that the penalties for
such disobedience were relatively mild, and there was a chance that such tactics
might succeed. However, the same person could well decide that pacifism was
not obligatory in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. Someone might also adopt
tactical pacifism based upon a judgment about the actual possibility of using
force justly in the modern era. While admitting the theoretical possi bility of
justified force, it may be thought that as long as certain sorts of weapons are
retained, or as long as terror is officially sanctioned, then a justified war simply
cannot be fought. Both of these versions of tactical pacifism are compatible with
bellum justum; indeed, they are entailed by that doctrine. Neither makes an a
priori commitment to the position that the use of force will always, under all conceivable circumstances, be wrong. The behavior of the tactical pacifist may be
indistinguishable from that of the intrinsicalist on many occasions, but the
former leaves open the question of whether force is justified in a given circumstance, and this marks an important moral difference. Thus, intrinsicalism is
the only version of pacifism which can be described as a moral position opposed
to bellurn justum. In Narvesons words, To hold the pacifist position as a
genuine, full-blooded moral principle is to hold that nobody has a right to fight
back when attacked, that fighting back is inherently evil, as such. It means we
are mistaken in supposing we have a right of self-protection.
MUST BACK UP NON-VIOLENCE WITH THE THREAT OF

VIOLENCE ACTION OF MLK AND MALCOLM X PROVE THIS
SOLVES BEST
J. A. H. Futterman, Ph.D. from UT-Austin and Physicist at the University of
California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Obscenity and Peace: Meditations on
the Bomb, 1990-94, http://www.dogchurch.com/scriptorium/nuke.html, UK: Fisher
Even when non-violence does succeed, it does so by rallying the majority of the
population toward whom it is directed to stop the direct perpetrators of injustice
by force -- the force of law in the form of the police, the prisons, and the polls -force that necessarily includes the threat of violence. In other words, non-violent
resistance harnesses (or co-opts), rather than eliminates violence.
In fact, non-violence is sometimes even helped by the threat of violence to
achieve its objectives. The non-violence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was
complemented by the willingness to use "any means necessary" of Malcolm X.
These two men were sending white America the same message concerning
justice and racial equality. If whites failed to respond to the message stated
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gently, whites would be given the opportunity to respond to it stated violently. It
took both statements to achieve the progress made thus far.
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#2 Pragmatic Pacifism Perm: 1AR

(2/2)
WE DONT ADVOCATE VIOLENCE, JUST DEFENSE AGAINST
OPPRESSION
Hans
Massaquoi, Ebony, February 1993, p. 36

Now the reporter wants to know whether Malcolm X suggests using violence.
The benign expression vanishes and his eyes become fierce. We dont
advocate violence, but non-violent tactics based solely on morality can only
succeed when you are dealing with a basically moral people, he explains. A
man who oppresses another man because of his color is not moral. It is the duty
of every Afro-American to protect himself [herself] against mass murderers,
bombers, lynchers, floggers, brutalizers and exploiters. If the government is
unable or unwilling to protect us, we reserve our right as citizens to defend
ourselves by whatever means necessary. A man with a rifle or club can only be
stopped by a person armed with a rifle or club.
[herself is my feminist editing, ceo]
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A2 Violence Snowballs: 1AR

THE STRATEGIC EXERCISE OF VIOLENCE DOESNT
SNOWBALL INTO A CULT OF TERRORIT IS A NECESSARY
PART OF OUR STRATEGIC REPERTOIRE OF RESISTANCE
Churchill, (Keetoowah Band Cherokee) Professor of Ethnic Studies and
Coordinator of American Indian Studies, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 90-92
Ward
This perception of pacifism as a self-justifying ideological preemption of proper

praxical consideration, subliminally intended to perpetuate the privileged status
of a given progressive elite, is helpful in determining what is necessary to
arrive at a true liberatory praxis within advanced capitalist contexts. The all but
unquestioned legitimacy accruing to the principles of pacifist practice must be
continuously and comprehensively subjected to the test of whether they, in
themselves, are capable of delivering the bottom-line transformation of statedominated social relations which alone constitutes the revolutionary/liberatory
process. Where they are found to be incapable of such delivery, the principles
must be broadened or transcended altogether as a means of achieving an
adequate praxis. By this, it is not being suggested that nonviolent forms of
struggle are or should be abandoned, nor that armed struggle should be the
normative standard of revolutionary performance, either practically or
conceptually. Rather, it is to follow the line of thinking recently articulated by
Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) when he noted: If we are to consider ourselves
as revolutionaries, we must acknowledge that we have an obligation to succeed
in pursuing revolution. Here, we must acknowledge not only the power of our
enemies, but our own power as well. Realizing the nature of our power, we must
not deny ourselves the exercise of the options available to us; we must utilize
surprise, cunning and flexibility; we must use the strength of our enemy to undo
him, keeping him confused and off-balance. We must organize with perfect
clarity to be utterly unpredictable. When our enemies expect us to respond to
provocation with violence, we must react calmly and peacefully; just as they
anticipate our passivity, we must throw a grenade. What is at issue is not
therefore the replacement of hegemonic pacifism with some cult of terror.
Instead, it is the realization that, in order to be effective and ultimately
successful, any revolutionary movement within advanced capitalist nations must
develop the broadest possible range of thinking/action by which to confront the
state. This should be conceived not as an array of component forms of struggle
but as a continuum of activity stretching from petitions/letter writing and so
forth through mass mobilization/demonstrations, onward into the arena of armed
self-defense, and still onward through the realm of offensive military
operations (e.g., elimination of critical state facilities, targeting of key individuals
within the governmental/corporate apparatus, etc.). All of this must be
apprehended as a holism, as an internally consistent liberatory process
applicable at this generally-formulated level to the late capitalist context no less
than to the Third World. From the basis of this fundamental understanding
and, it may be asserted, only from this basis can a viable liberatory praxis for
North America emerge. It should by now be self-evident that, while a substantial
even preponderant measure of nonviolent activity is encompassed within
any revolutionary praxis, there is no place for the profession of principled pacifism to preclude much less condemn the utilization of violence as a
legitimate and necessary method of achieving liberation. 167 The dismantling of
the false consciousness inherent in the ideology of nonviolent revolution is
therefore of primary importance in attaining an adequate liberatory praxis.
TACTICAL USE OF VIOLENCE IS NECESSARY

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Ed
14
Mead, a guy who went to prison for violent protest, 1998, Pacifism as Pathology, p.
Those who denounce the use of political violence as a matter of principle, who
advocate nonviolence as a strategy for progress, are wrong. Nonviolence is a
tactical question, not a strategic one. The most vicious and violent ruling class in
the history of humankind will not give up without a physical fight. Nonviolence
as a strategy thus amounts to a form of liberal accommodation and is bound to
fail. The question is not whether to use violence in the global class struggle to
end the rule of international imperialism, but only when to use it.
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#5 Violence Inevitable: 1AR

POWER ELSEWHERE
2001
(The Tragedy of

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#7 Pacifism Allows Atrocity: 1AR

VIOLENCE IS KEY TO RESIST OMNICIDEPACIFISM IS
MORALLY BANKRUPT COMPLICITY IN THE VIOLENCE OF
THE STATE
Mike
Ryan, Canadian anti-imperialist, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 161
We recognize the right of oppressed peoples to respond to their oppression with

violence, but we abstain from engaging in violence ourselves. Thus we recognize
our own participation in the oppression of other peoples while we also attempt
to deny the critical situation in which we ourselves are found today, a
circumstance described by Rosalie Bertell in an earlier quote. If, as Bertell
suggests, we are sitting upon a dying earth, and consequently dying as a
species solely as a result of the nature of our society, if the technology we have
developed is indeed depleting the earth, destroying the air and water, wiping
out entire species daily, and steadily weakening us to the point of extinction, if
phenomena such as Chernobyl are not aberrations, but are (as I insist they are)
mere reflections of our daily reality projected at a level where we can at last
recognize its true meaning, then is it not time--long past time --when we should
do any thing, indeed everything, necessary to put an end to such madness? Is it
not in fact an act of unadulterated self-defense to do so? Our adamant refusal to
look reality in its face, to step outside our white skin privilege long enough to
see that it is killing us, not only tangibly reinforces the oppression of people of
colour the world over, it may well be the single most important contributor to an
incipient omnicide, the death of all life as we know it. In this sense, it may well
be that our self-imposed inability to act decisively, far from having anything at
all to do with the reduction of violence, is instead perpetuating the greatest
process of violence in history. It might well be that our moral position is the most
mammoth case of moral bankruptcy of all time.
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Pacifism = State Collusion (1/2)

PACIFIST PROTEST IS A COLLUSION WITH THE STATEIT
HAS ZERO REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL
Coordinator of American Indian Studies at University of Colorado, 2001, Pacifism as
Ward
Pathology, p. 61-62
Precisely. The preoccupation with avoiding actions which might provoke

violence is thus not based on a sincere belief that violence will, or even can,
truly be avoided. Pacifists, no less than their unpacifist counterparts, are quite
aware that violence already exists as an integral component in the execution of
state policies and requires no provocation; this is a formative basis of their
doctrine. What is at issue then cannot be a valid attempt to stave off or even
minimize violence per se. Instead, it can only be a conscious effort not to refocus
state violence in such a way that it would directly impact American pacifists
themselves. This is true even when it can be shown that the tactics which could
trigger such a refocusing might in themselves alleviate a real measure of the
much more massive state-inflicted violence occurring elsewhere; better that
another 100,000 Indochinese peasants perish under a hail of cluster bombs and
napalm than Americas principled progressives suffer real physical pain while
rendering their governments actions impracticable. Such conscientious
avoidance of personal sacrifice (i.e., dodging the experience of being on the
receiving end of violence, not the inflicting of it) has nothing to do with the lofty
ideals and integrity by which American pacifists claim to inform their practice.
But it does explain the real nature of such curious phenomena as movement
marshals, steadfast refusals to attempt to bring the seat of government to a
standstill even when a million people are on hand to accomplish the task, and
the consistently convoluted victim-blaming engaged in with regard to domestic
groups such as the Black Panther Party. Massive and unremitting violence in the
colonies is appalling to right-thinking people but ultimately acceptable when
compared with the unthinkable alternative that any degreee of real violence
might be redirected against mother country radicals. Viewed in this light, a
great many things make sense. For instance, the persistent use of the term
responsible leadership in describing the normative nonviolent sector of North
American dissent always somewhat mysterious when applied to supposed
radicals (or German Jews) is clarified as signifying nothing substantially
different from the accommodation of the status quo it implies in more
conventional settings. The rules of the game have long been established and
tacitly agreed to by both sides of the ostensible oppositional equation:
demonstrations of resistance to state policies will be allowed so long as they
do nothing to materially interfere with the implementation of those policies. The
responsibility of the oppositional leadership in such a trade-off is to ensure that
state processes are not threatened by substantial physical disruption; the
reciprocal responsibility of the government is to guarantee the general safety of
those who play according to the rules This comfortable scenario is enhanced by
the mutual understanding that certain levels of appropriate (symbolic) protest
of given policies will result in the oppositional victory of their modification (i.e.,
really a tuning of policy by which it may be rendered more functional and
efficient, never an abandonment of fundamental policy thrusts), while efforts to
move beyond his metaphorical medium of dissent will be squelched by any
means necessary and by all parties concerned. Meanwhile, the entire unspoken
arrangement is larded with a layer of stridently abusive rhetoric directed by each
side against the other. We are left with a husk of opposition, a ritual form
capable of affording a sentimentalistic Im OK, youre OK satisfaction to its
subscribers at a psychic level but utterly useless in terms of transforming the
power relations perpetuating systemic global violence. Such a defect can,
however, be readily sublimated within the aggregate comfort zone produced by
the continuation of North American business as usual; those who remain within
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the parameters of nondisruptive dissent allowed by the state, their symbolic
duty to the victims of U.S. policy done (and with the bases of state power wholly
unchallenged), can devote themselves to the prefiguration of the revolutionary
future society with which they proclaim they will replace the present social order
(having, no doubt, persuaded the state to overthrow itself through the moral
force of their arguments).92 Here, concrete activities such as sexual
experimentation, refinement of musical/artistic tastes, development of various
meat-free diets, getting in touch with ones id through meditation and
ingestion of hallucinogens, alteration of sex-based distribution of household
chores, and waging campaigns against such bourgeois vices as smoking
tobacco become the signifiers of correct politics or even revolutionary
practice. This is as opposed to the active and effective confrontation of state
power.
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Pacifism = State Collusion (2/2)

PACIFISM IS PLAYING BOTH SIDES OF THE ROADIT
FACILITATES THE RACIST CO-OPTATION OF THIRD WORLD
VIOLENT STRUGGLE
Ward
Pathology, p. 72-74
It is possible then to visualize a world revolutionary process in which the

necessity of armed participation and attendant physical suffering) by white
radicals is marginalized or dispensed with altogether. Their role in this scenario
becomes that of utilizing their already attained economic and social advantages
to prefigure, both intellectually and more literally, the shape of the good to be
shared by all in the postrevolutionary context; is presumed that they will
become a (perhaps the) crucial social element, having used the space
(comfort zone) achieved through state concessions generated by the armed
pressure exerted by others to the constructive rather than destructive purpose
of developing a superior model of societal relations. The function of
responsible oppositional leadership in the mother country as opposed to the
irresponsible variety that might precipitate some measure of armed resistance
from within before the Third World has bled itself in diminishing state power from
without (and who might even go so far as to suggest whites could directly
participate) is first and foremost to link the mother country movements
inaction symbolically and rhetorically to Third World liberation struggles. The
blatant accommodation to state power involved in this is rationalized (both to
the Third Worlders and to the movement rank-and-file) by professions of
personal and principled pacifism, as well as in the need for working models of
nonviolent behavior in postrevolutionary society. From there, the nonviolent
American movement (by now overwhelmingly composed of white
progressives) can be steered into exactly the same symbolic and rhetorical
solidarity with an emerging nonwhite armed revolution within the United
States and voila! positive social transformation has not only been
painlessly achieved (for whites), but they (being the prefigurative nonviolent
experts on building postrevolutionary society) have maneuvered themselves
into leading roles in the aftermath. All of this, of course, is predicated on the
assumption that the colonized, both within and without, will ultimately prove
equal to their part, and that revolutionary transformation will actually occur. In
the event that the colonizing state ultimately proves the stronger of parties in
such a contest, the nonviolent movement having restricted its concrete
activities to limits sanctioned by that same state will have a natural fall-back
position, being as it were only a variant of the loyal opposition.22 The result of
the carefully-constructed balance (between professed solidarity with armed
Third World insurgents on the one hand, and tacit accommodation to the very
state power against which they fight on the other) is that North American
adherents to nonviolence are intended to win regardless of the outcome; the
comfort zone of white skin privilege is to be continued in either event. Or this
is the outcome that fence-sitting is expected to accomplish. The range of
tremendous ethical, moral, and political problems inherent in this attitude are
mostly so self-evident as to require no further explanation or targeting, and
elimination of some internal entity as the subversive element undercutting the
national will and purpose. At such times the state needs no, indeed can
tolerate no hint of, domestic opposition; those who are tainted by a history of
even the milder forms of antisocial behavior can be assured of being selected
as the scapegoats required for this fascist sort of consensus building. While the
precise form which might be assumed by the scapegoating involved in a
consolidation of North American fascism remains unknown, it is clear that the
posture of the mass nonviolent movement closely approximates that of the Jews
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in Germany during the 1930s. The notion that it cant happen here is merely a
parallel to the Jewish perception that it wouldnt happen there, insistence on
inhabiting a comfort zone even while thousands upon thousands of Third World
peasants are cremated beneath canisters of American napalm is only a
manifestation of the attitude of going on with business as usual, even in a
holocaust.27 Ultimately, as Bettelheim observed, it is the dynamic of attempting
to restrict opposition to state terror to symbolic and nonviolent responses which
gives the state the idea that [its victims can] be gotten to the point where they
[will] walk into the gas chambers on their own.128 And, as the Jewish experience
has shown for anyone who cares to look the matter in the face, the very inertia
of pacifist principles prevents any effective conversion to armed self-defense
once adherents are targeted for systematic elimination by the state.
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Embracing Violence = Nonviolence

IN ORDER TO HAVE A SUCCESSFUL TRANSITION TO
NONVIOLENCE, WE MUST FIRST SUBMIT TO THE VIOLENCE
Walter
Wink, professor of theology, The Powers that be: Theology for a new Millennium,
1999, p. 119-120
What Gandhi learned from this experiment is that it is impossible to move
oppressed people directly from submission to active nonviolence. They need first
to own their feelings of rage and even hatred and be willing to fight against their
oppressors. They need to be energized by their anger. Then they can freely
renounce violence for a nonviolent alternative that transforms the energy of
their anger into a dynamic and resolute love. We can apply Gandhis insight
practically. If our children are being bullied at school, of course we would prefer a
nonviolent solution, and one can usually be found. But it may be important for
our children at least to be willing to fight on their own behalf before turning to a
nonviolent solution. Otherwise, requiring them literally to turn the other cheek
can simply encourage cowardice. It will be submission to evil rather than a
creative alternative to violence. Heres how one boy dealt with a bully on a
school bus. The child was too slight of build to fight the far sturdier bully. But he
had a weakness that he made into a strength: chronic sinusitis. One day,
exasperated at the bullys behavior, he noisily blew a load of snot into his right
hand and approached his nemesis, hand outstretched, saying, I want to shake
the hand of a real bully. The bully retreated, wide-eyed, to his seat. That ended
the career of that bully. Those sinuses were the ultimate weapon, and they were
always at the ready!
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Pacifism = Violence (1/3)

NONVIOLENCE RISKS APPEASEMENT WHICH RESULTS IN
MORE CONFLICT
Rummel, Prof of Political Science @ U of Hawaii, 81 (R.J., The Just Peace,
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil1s/TJP.CHAP 10.HTM)
Violent conquest is usually wrong (the Just Package). Forcibly imposing one's values and goals on another, aside from its
general immorality, can create smoldering resentment, grievance, and hostility that later may burst into greater conflict
in some exceptional conflict situations, the only resolution

possible or desirable may be through conquest: a test of strength and the
unambiguous violent defeat of the other side--as of Hitler's Germany . To believe that
and violence. Nonetheless,
conflict should always be resolved through negotiation, mediation, and compromise invites an aggressor to assume that
Resisting aggression forces a test of interests,

capabilities, and will--if the aggressor so wants it. And this may be a faster,
ultimately less conflictful, less violent way of resolving conflict than conciliation
or appeasement. In resisting aggression, gauge different power responses. Do not automatically respond to
aggression in kind. The most effective response is one which shifts power to bases
which can be employed more effectively, while lessening the risk of violent
escalation. And respond proportionally. To meet aggression in equal measure is legitimate, while overreaction risks
escalation to a more extended and intense conflict, and underreaction appears weak and risks
defeat and repeated aggression.
what is his is his, but what is yours is negotiable.
YOU CANT IMAGINE THE WORLD AS PEACEFUL THIS

SELF DECEPTION BEGETS MORE VIOLENCE
Laren 2K1 (Carter, Pacificism Empowers Terrorism, Capitalism Magazine,
October 4, http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID= 1128)
if being an idealist meant being excused from
having to defend those ideals. Consider an individual engaged in the following line of reasoning: "It would
Pacifists would argue that they are idealists, as
be ideal if all people knew how to perform open- heart surgery, so I am going to behave as if everyone is a heart
Although this may be idealism, it is also idiocy (and selfdestructive). Pacifists think that by pretending that violence doesn't exist,
eventually it won't. This is not just silly; it is a vicious, deadly lie. Aggression
cannot be defeated by rewarding it. Organizers of "Don't turn tradgedy [sic] into a war" rallies across
surgeon. I am an idealist."
the country would have Americans believe that the proper response to the murder of thousands of innocent lives is a
This is mass suicide. It is an invitation to the

Hitlers, the Stalins, the Attilas, and the Bin Ladens of the world to slaughter the
American people and to gut their corpses. Implicit in the pacifist's drivel is the implication: "may the
candlelight vigil and impromptu poetry readings.
worst man win." Only two types of people can accept a philosophy like this: a fiend or a fool. A fiend hates everyone,
A fool believes that if he smiles

sheepishly at Adolf Hitler, Hitler will suddenly change his mind and decide to
take-up knitting. They are both wrong, and they are both evil, [because in both
cases such a policy can only lead to the destruction of the good. To promote this
evil in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks, pacifists have added a few extra
deceptions to their arsenal. One of these is the equation of war and racism. "War and Racism are Not the
including himself, and so doesn't care if the "worst man" wins.
Answer," reads an anti-war poster at a San Francisco university. This statement blatantly implies that those who support
war against terrorist-harboring nations are racist. It relies on the insecurity of the reader by convincing him to oppose
A war against the Afghan, Iranian, and other

terrorist-supporting governments does not constitute racism. It constitutes selfdefense. Racism is clearly wrong, but pacifism doesn't hold a monopoly on that
idea.
war for fear of being (unjustly) labeled "racist."
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PACIFISM CAUSES IMMEDIATE ESCALATION OF VIOLENCE*
Robert L.
Narveson argues that what I have called intrinsicalism is a genuine moral

position in virtue of its claim that the use of force in self-defense is in itself evil
and that pacifism is incumbent on everyone, not just those who happen to
believe that the use of force is evil. So intrinsicalism satisfies the Kantian test for
calling a particular principle a moral imperative. Narvesons objection to pacifism
is directed toward what he claims are logical inconsistencies in the principle
itself. For the belief that the use of force is inherently evil must minimally entail
that people have a right not to be the object of violent attacks. At least part of
what must be meant by saying that a particular action is wrong is that people
have a right not to have that sort of thing done to them; they have a right to
take steps to prevent the abridgement of that right. This is an interesting line of
argument because its effectiveness depends not upon an opposed set of moral
principles but upon an analysis of what it means to possess a right in general. If
the notion of having a right is to make any sort of sense, if it is not be be
merely an expression, then to say that someone has a right must also be to say
that he is justified in taking steps to prevent that right from being abridged. The
must is a logical must: To say that you have a right to X but no one has any
justification whatever for preventing people from depriving you of it, is selfcontradictory. If you claim a right to X, then to describe some action as an act of
depriving you of X, is logically to imply that its absence is one of the things you
have a right to.8 A pacifist might well reply that this logical point, while sound,
is not a description of his position. What Narveson shows is that if a person has a
right, [they] cannot also have a duty to be purely passive in the face of an attack
upon that right. Of course, the pacifist will insist that his is not a doctrine of
passivity or fatalism. As a moral agent, he is concerned with ethical imperatives,
with guiding action. So the question becomes not whether a person does or does
not have a duty to acquiesce in the removal of one of his rights but, rather, what
level of force is appropriate in face of a violent attack. Narveson might well reply
that the commitment always to refrain from violence is in effect a permission to
abrogate his rights. For if an opponent knows in advance that the pacifist will
only resist up to the level of actual fighting, then [they] will simply escalate his
attacks beyond that point. This is precisely what happened when nonviolent
resistance was tried briefly in Nazi-occupied Norway.
**This evidence has been gender modified
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TRUE PEACE NECESSITATES SOME UNAVOIDABLE
VIOLENCE VIOLENCE IS KEY TO DIGNITY AND OTHER
VIRTUES
Rummel, Prof of Political Science @ U of Hawaii, 81 (R.J., The Just Peace,
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkil1s/TJP.CHAP 10.HTM)
Such are major subprinciples of peacemaking. Conflict engages what the parties want and can and will do
in a situation in which relevant status quo expectations are disrupted. Situational perceptions,
expectations, interests, capabilities, and will are the elements of the conflict--and of peacemaking.
Material things--land, people, wealth, ports, borders--are merely the tools or objects of conflict. And
material conditions, such as the topography of a country or a mountainous border between states, only
frame and physically limit conflict. The essence of conflict is an opposition of minds. The arena of conflict is
peacemaking is
not necessarily the best and most immediate response to conflict.
the mental field. The principles and rules for its resolution are psychological. Now,
Doubtlessly, some conflicts are unnecessary, some needlessly intense and long-lasting. But some also are a
real and unavoidable clash, the only means through which one, as a partisan, can protect or further vital
war against
Hitlers Germany from 1939 to 1945 cost millions lives, but it prevented
the greater misery, the terror, the executions, the cold-blooded
murders which probably would have occurred had Hitler consolidated
his control of Europe and subjugated the Soviet Union. We always can
end a conflict when we want by surrender. But some ideas are more
important than peace: Dignity. Freedom. Security. That is, peace with
justice--a just peace. There is another relevant qualification. The term "peacemaking" is well
interests and achieve a more satisfactory and harmonious just peace. For example,
established, and I used it accordingly. Unfortunately, the verb "make" can imply that peace is designed and
constructed, as a house is planned and erected brick by brick or a road engineered and built. This
implication is especially seductive in this age when society is seen as manmade (rather than having
evolved),9 and many believe that communities should be centrally planned and managed. But peace is not
constructed like a bridge. Peace emerges from the balancing of individual mental fields. What the leaders
of a group or nation honestly believe, actually want, truly are willing to get, are really capable of achieving
are unknown to others--and perhaps only partially to themselves. Nonetheless only they can best utilize
the information available to them to justly satisfy their interests. For a third party to try to construct and
enforce an abstract peace imposed on others is foolhardy. Such a peace would be uncertain, forestall the
necessary trial-and-error balancing of the parties themselves, and perhaps even create greater conflict
later. The best peace is an outcome of reciprocal adjustments among those involved. At most, peacemaking
Pacifists believe that violence and war

cannot occur if people laid down their arms and refused to fight. But
this ignores unilateral violence. Under threat, a state or government
may try to avoid violence by submission. The result may be
enslavement, systematic execution, and elimination of leaders and
"undesirables." The resulting genocide and mass murder may
ultimately end in more deaths than would have occurred had people
fought to defend themselves. I agree that in some situations nonviolence
may be an effective strategy for waging conflict,10 as in the successful Black civil
should ease the process. A final qualification.
rights demonstrations of the 1960s in America; or the successful nonviolent, civil disobedience movement
for Indian independence from Britain begun by Mahatma Gandhi in 1922. In some situations refusal to use
there are also

conflicts, especially involving actual or potential tyrants, despots, and
other such oppressors, in which nonviolence cannot buy freedom from
violence by others or a just resolution of a dispute. Then a down
payment on such a peace requires public display of one's capability and
a resolve to meet violent aggression in kind.
violence may avoid unnecessary escalation and ease peacekeeping. However,
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Kritik Answers
Pacifism Doesnt Solve Violence

PACIFISM IS NOTHING MORE THAN A FORM OF MORAL
EGOISM THAT ALLOWS INDIVIDUALS TO BE PASSIVE IN
THE FACE OF BRUTALITY
Robert L.
There is one way of attempting to get around this internal contradiction which
intrinsicalism appears to carry with it. Instead of seeing pacifism as a moral
position in the ordinary sense, perhaps we should understand it as a commitment to an ideal type. The pacifist will concentrate on developing into the
kind of person for whom nonviolence is a permanent part of the soul, and by
example he will encourage others to do the same. The pacifist would admit that
the world does contain men who commit violent at tacks upon others, but his
concern will be to demonstrate by his own example that an alternative way of
life is possible: men do not have to take life; they do not have to adopt the
posture of the utilitarian bargainer. This kind of saintliness does, however,
seem irresponsible. The unwillingness of the pacifist to dirty his hands is no
doubt the source of the charge that he is more concerned about the state of his
soul than with the preservation of life. The unwillingness to kill or injure may be
part of the pacifists very being, but what happens to his respect for life
defense when his refusal to fight causes loss of lives which could have been
saved? Critics of the argument that pacifism is part of a program to attain an
ideal of self-hood respond with the charge of moral egoism. It [moral egoism]
differs from ordinary egoism only in its allegedly spiritual quality. It is a
thoroughgoing refusal to dirty ones own hands.... I suggest that those whose
concerns are thus limited are warped, self-righteous and ultimately self-serving.
The pacifist saint who stands by while others are being murdered or bru talized.., how does he differ from a moral idiot, except in point of
pretentiousness?
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Kritik Answers
Pacifist Activism Fails: General

NONVIOLENT CHANGE IS TEMPORARY
Brian Martin, STS U of Wollongong 2001Nonviolence Versus Capitalism
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/01nvc/nvcall.html
It is important to note that not all uses of nonviolent action lead to long-lasting,
worthwhile change. Nonviolent action is not guaranteed to succeed either in the
short term or long term. The 1989 prodemocracy movement in China, after a
short flowering, was crushed in the Beijing massacre. Perhaps more worrying are
the dispiriting aftermaths following some short-term successes of nonviolent
action. In El Salvador in 1944, the successful nonviolent insurrection against the
Martnez dictatorship did not lead to long term improvement for the El
Salvadorean people. There was a military coup later in 1944, and continued
repression in following decades. The aftermath of the Iranian revolution was
equally disastrous. The new Islamic regime led by Ayatollah Khomeini was just
as ruthless as its predecessor in stamping out dissent.
ABSOLUTE PACFICISM IS IMPOSSIBLE

Mohandes
Gandhi, as quoted in The Pacifist Conscience, ed. by Peter Mayer, 1966, p
214
I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I
would advise violence. Thus when my eldest son asked me what he should have
done, had he been present when I was almost fatally assaulted in 1908, whether
he should have nm away and seen me killed or whether he should have used his
physical force which he could and wanted to use, and defended me, I told him
that it was his duty to defend me even by using violence. Hence it was that I
took part in the Boer War, the so called Zulu rebellion and the late War. Hence
also do I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of
violence. I would rather have India resort to aims in order to defend her honour
than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness
to her own dishonour.
NONVIOLENCE ALONE FAILS.

Brian Martin STS @ U of Wollongong 2001Nonviolence Versus Capitalism
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/01nvc/nvcall.html
The consent theory of power Gandhi approached nonviolent action as a moral
issue and, in practical terms, as a means for persuading opponents to change
their minds as a result of their witnessing the commitment and willing sacrifice
of nonviolent activists. While this approach explains some aspects of the power
of nonviolent action, it is inadequate on its own. Moral persuasion sometimes
works in face-to-face encounters, but has little chance when cause and effect
are separated. Bomber pilots show little remorse for the agony caused by their
weapons detonating far below,[24] while managers of large international banks
have little inkling of the suffering caused by their lending policies in foreign
countries.
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Kritik Answers
Pacifist Activism Fails: Law is

Violent
ALL LAW IS VIOLENCE. THE CRITIQUE OF MILITARISM
FAILS.
Jacques
Derrida, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Drucilla Cornell, ed,
92, p. 40-2.
To discuss the conservative violence of law, Benjamin sticks to relatively modern
problems, as modern as the problem of the general strike was a moment ago.
Now it is a question of compulsory military service, the modern police or the
abolition of the death penalty. If, during and after World War I, an impassioned
critique of violence was developed, it took aim this time at the law-conserving
form of violence. Militarism, a modern concept that supposes the exploitation of
compulsory military service, is the forced use of force, the compelling (twang) to
use force or violence (Gewalt) in the service of the state and its legal ends. Here
military violence is legal and conserves the law, and thus it is more difficult to
criticize than the pacifists and activists believe; Benjamin does not hide his low
esteem for these declaimers. The ineffectiveness and inconsistency of
anti-military pacifists results from their failure to recognize the legal and
unassailable character of this violence that conserves the law. Here we are
dealing with a double bind or a contradiction that can be schematized as follows.
On the one hand, it appears easier to criticize the violence that founds since it
cannot be justified by any preexisting legality and so appears savage. But on the
other hand, and this reversal is the whole point of this reflection, it is more
difficult, more illegitimate to criticize this same violence since one cannot
summon it to appear before the institution of any preexisting law: it does not
recognize existing law in the moment that it founds another. Between the two
limits of this contradiction, there is the question of this ungraspable
revolutionary instant that belongs to no historical, temporal continuum but in
which the foundation of a new law nevertheless plays, if we may say so, on
something from an anterior law that it extends, radicalizes, deforms,
metaphorizes or metonymizes, this figure here taking the name of war or
general strike. But this figure is also a contamination. It effaces or blurs the
distinction, pure and simple, between foundation and conservation. It inscribes
iterability in originarity, in unicity and singularity, and it is what I will call
deconstruction at work, in full negotiation: in the "things themselves"and in
Benjamin's text. As long as they do not give themselves the theoretical or
philosophical means to think this co-implication of violence and law, the usual
critiques remain naive and ineffectual. Benjamin does not hide his disdain for the
declamations of pacifist activism and for the proclamations of "quite childish
anarchism" that would like to exempt the individual from all constraints. The
reference to the categorical imperative ("Act in such a way that at all times you
use humanity both in your person and in the person of all others as an end, and
never merely as a means," p. 285), however uncontestable it may be, allows no
critique of violence. Law (droit) in its very violence claims to recognize and
defend said humanity as end, in the person of each individual. And so a purely
moral critique of violence is as unjustified as it is impotent. For the same reason,
we cannot provide a critique of violence in the name of liberty, of what Benjamin
here calls "gestaltlose Freiheit," "formless freedom," that is, in short, purely
formal, as empty form, following a Marxist-Hegelian vein that is far from absent
throughout this meditation. These attacks against violence lack pertinence and
effectiveness because they remain alien to the juridical essence of violence, to
the Rechtsordnung, the order of law (droit). An effective critique must lay the
blame on the body of droit itself, in its head and in its members, in the laws and
the particular usages that law adopts under protection of its power (Macht). This
order is such that there exists one unique fate or history (nur ein einziges
Schicksal, "only one fate," p. 285). That is one of the key concepts of the text,
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Kritik Answers
but also one of the most obscure, whether it's a question of fate itself or of its
absolute uniqueness. That which exists, which has consistency (das Bestehende)
and that which at the same time threatens what exists (das Drohende) belong
inviolably (unverbriichlich) to the same order and this order is inviolable because
it is unique. It can only be violated in itself. The notion of threat is important
here but also difficult, for the threat doesn't come from outside. Law is both
threatening and threatened by itself: This threat is neither intimidation nor
dissuasion, as pacifists, anarchists or activists believe. The law turns out to be
threatening in the way fate is threatening. To reach the "deepest meaning" of
the indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit, "uncertainty," p. 28S) of the legal threat
(der Rechtsdrohung), it will later be necessary to meditate upon the essence of
fate at the origin of this threat.
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Kritik Answers
Pacifist Activism Fails: Final

Solution (1/3)
JEWISH PACIFISM IN THE FACE OF THE FINAL SOLUTION IS
THE ULTIMATE PROOF OF THE INADEQUACY OF NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE
Ward
Pathology, p. 32-37
Pacifism possesses a sublime arrogance in its implicit as sumption that its

adherents can somehow dictate the terms of struggle in any contest with the
state. Such a supposition seems unaccountable in view of the actual record of
passive/nonviolent resistance to state power. Although a number of examples
can be mustered with which to illustrate this point including Buddhist
resistance to U.S. policies in Indochina, and the sustained efforts made to
terminate white supremacist rule in southern Africa none seems more
appropriate than the Jewish experience in Hitlerian Germany (and later in the
whole of occupied Europe). The record is quite clear that, while a range of pacifist forms of countering the implications of nazism oc curred within the German
Jewish community during the l930s, they offered virtually no physical opposition
to the consolidation of the nazi state. To the contrary, there is strong evidence
that orthodox Jewish leaders counseled social responsibility as the best
antidote to nazism, while crucial political formulations such as the Zionist
Hagana and Mossad el Aliyah Betactually seem to have attempted to co-opt the
nazi agenda for their own purposes, entering into cooperative relations with the
SS Jewish Affairs Bureau, and trying to use forced immigration of Jews as a
pretext for establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.8 All of this was
apparently done in an effort to manipulate the political climate in Germany by
not exacerbating conditions and not alienating the German people any
further in a manner more favorable to Jews than the nazis were calling for.~
In the end, of course, the nazis imposed the final solution to the Jewish
question, but by then the dynamics of passive resistance were so entrenched in
the Jewish zeitgeist (the nazis having been in power a full decade) that a sort of
passive accommodation prevailed. Jewish leaders took their people, quietly and
nonviolently, first into the ghettos, and then onto trains evacuating them to
the east. Armed resistance was still widely held to be irresponsible. Eventually,
the SS could count upon the brunt of the nazi liquidation policy being carried out
by the Sonderkommandos, which were composed of the Jews themselves. It was
largely Jews who dragged the gassed bodies of their exterminated people to the
crematoria in death camps such as Auschwitz/Birkenau, each motivated by the
desire to prolong his own life. Even this became rationalized as resistance; the
very act of surviving was viewed as defeating the nazi program. By 1945,
Jewish passivity and nonviolence in the face of the weltanschauung der
untermenschen had done nothing to prevent the loss of millions of lives. The
phenomenon sketched above must lead to the obvious question: [How could]
millions of men [sic] like us walk to their death without resistance? In turn, the
mere asking of the obvious has spawned a veritable cottage industry among
Jewish intellectuals, each explaining how it was that the process had left the
Jewish people no choice but to go along, to remain passive, to proceed in
accordance with their aversion to violence right up to the doors of the
crematoria and beyond. From this perspective, there was nothing truly
lacking in the Jewish performance; the Jews were simply and solely blameless
victims of a genocidal system over which it was quite impossible for them to
extend any measure of control. The Jews having suffered horribly under nazi
rule,6 it has come to be considered in exceedingly poor taste antisemitic,
according to the logic of the Anti-Defamation League of Bnai Brith to suggest
that there was indeed something very wrong with the nature of the Jewish
response to nazism, that the mainly pacifist forms of resistance exhibited by the
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Kritik Answers
Jewish community played directly into the hands of their executioners.
Objectively, there were alternatives, and one need not look to the utterances of
some lunatic fringe to find them articulated. Even such a staid and
conservative political commentator as Bruno Bettelheim, a former concentration
camp inmate, has offered astute analysis of the role of passivity and nonviolence
in amplifying the magnitude of the Holocaust. Regarding the single known
instance
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Kritik Answers

Solution (2/3)
CONTINUED
in which inmates physically revolted at Auschwitz, he observes that: In the single
revolt of the twelfth Sonderkommando, seventy SS were killed, including one
commissioned officer and seventeen non-commissioned officers; one of the
crematoria was totally destroyed and another severely damaged. True, all eight
hundred and fifty-three of the kommando died. But. . . the one Sonderkommando
which revolted and took such a heavy toll of the enemy did not die much differ ently than all the other Sonderkommandos. Aside from pointing out that the
Jews had literally nothing to lose (and quite a lot to gain in terms of human
dignity) by engaging in open revolt against the 55, Bettelheim goes much
further, noting that such actions both in and outside the death camps stood a
reasonable prospect of greatly impeding the extermination process. He states
flatly that even individualized armed resistance could have made the Final
Solution a cost-prohibitive proposition for the nazis: There is little doubt that the
[Jews], who were able to
provide themselves with so much, could have provided themselves with a gun or
two had they wished. They could have shot down one or two of the SS men who
came for them. The loss of an SS with every Jew arrested would have noticeably
hindered the functioning of the police state.2 Returning to the revolt of the
twelfth Sonderkommando, Bettelheim observes that: They did only what we
should expect all human beings to do; to use their death, if they could not save
their lives, to weaken or hinder the enemy as much as possible; to use even
their doomed selves for making extermination harder, or maybe impossible, not
a smooth-running process If they could do it, so could others. Why didnt they?
Why did they throw their lives away instead of making things hard for the
enemy? Why did they make a present of their very being to the SS instead of to
their families, their friends, even to their fellow prisoners[?] Rebellion could
only have saved either the life they were going to lose anyway, or the lives of
others. . Inertia it was that led millions of Jews into the ghettos the SS had
created for them. It was inertia that made hundreds of thousands of Jews sit
home, waiting for their executioners. Bettelheim describes this inertia, which
he considers the basis for Jewish passivity in the face of The persecution of the
Jews was aggravated, slow step by slow step, when no violent fighting back
occurred. It may have been Jewish acceptance, without retaliatory fight, of ever
harsher discrimination and degradation that first gave the SS the idea that they
could be gotten to the point where they would walk into the gas chambers on
their own . . . [I] n the deepest sense, the walk to the gas chamber was only the
last consequence of the philosophy of business as usual. Given this, Bettelheim
can do little else but conclude (correctly) that the post-war rationalization and
apologia for the Jewish response to nazism serves to stress how much we all
wish to subscribe to this business as usual philosophy, and forget that it hastens
our own destruction, to glorify the attitude of going on with business as usual,
even in a holocaust.
THE FINAL SOLUTION PROVES THE TOTAL FAILURE OF

PACIFISM
Ward
Pathology, p. 40One may assume for the moment that such a gross distortion of reality is hardly the intent of even the hardiest pacifist polemicists, although it
may well be an intrinsic aspect of their position. Worse than this is the Inconsistency of nonviolent premises. For instance, it has been abundantly
nazi policy toward the Jews, from 1941 onward, was bound up in the
notion that extermination would proceed until such time as the entire Jewish
documented that
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Kritik Answers
population within German occupied territory was liquidated?~ There is no indication
whatsoever that nonviolent intervention/mediation from any quarter held the least prospect
of halting, or even delaying, the genocidal process. To the contrary there is evidence
that efforts by neutral parties such as the Red Cross had the effect of speeding
up the slaughter. That the Final Solution was halted at a point short of its full realization was due
solely to the massive application of armed force against Germany (albeit for reasons other
than the salvation of the Jews). Left to a pacifist prescription for the altering of offensive state policies, and the effecting of positive social change,
. Even the
highly symbolic trial of SS Colonel Adolph Eichmann could not be accomplished by
nonviolent means, but required armed action by an Israeli paramili tary unit
World Jewry at least in its Eurasian variants would have offered total extermination by mid-1946 at the latest
fifteen
years after the last death camp was closed by Russian tanks. There is every indication that adherence to pacifist principles would have resulted
in Eichmanns permanent avoidance of justice, living out his life in reasonable comfort until to paraphrase his own assessment he leapt into
With reference to the Jewish experience,

nonviolence was a catastrophic failure, and only the most extremely violent
intervention by others saved Europes Jews at the last moment from slipping over the brink of
the grave laughing at the thought of having killed six million Jews.
utter extinction. Small wonder that the survivors insist, Never again!
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Kritik Answers

Solution (3/3)
NON VIOLENCE WOULD HAVE HAD NO CHANCE TO STOP
THE NAZIS DENMARKS STRATEGY WOULDNT HAVE
WORKED ON A GLOBAL SCALE A THOUSAND YEAR REICH
WOULD OF RESULTED
That said, I admit that I admire non-violent resistance. [4] Remember, however,
that non-violent resistance is a sophisticated technique that works only when
used by the "right" people at the "right" time against the "right" opponents. For
example, the Indians successfully used non-violent resistance to persuade the
British to end the Raj, because the British eventually acknowledged that the
Indians, led by the British-educated Gandhi, were human beings like themselves.
The Nazis, who with their "Master Race" ideology admitted only so-called
"Aryans" to the category of human, provide an example counter to that of the
British. There were some successful acts of non-violent confrontation against the
Nazis, like King Christian of Denmark's public declaration that he would wear the
yellow star if it were introduced in his country. He did so in response to the Nazi
practice of ordering Jews to wear yellow-starred armbands so that the Nazis
could more easily isolate them from their surrounding society. That many Danes
followed their king's example helped camouflage many Jews until they could
escape to Sweden in fishing boats. [5] Now this resistance worked partly
because the Nazis considered the Danes to be "Aryans" like themselves. Had the
Poles tried the same thing, the Nazis would have been perfectly happy to use
the event as an excuse for liquidating more Poles. Rather than awaken the
Nazis' moral sense, non-violent confrontation on the part of the Poles would
probably have enabled the Nazis to carry out their agenda in Poland more easily.
The other reason these acts succeeded was that overwhelming violence of the
Allies had stretched the Nazi forces too thin to suppress massive action by a
whole populace, and eventually deprived the Nazis of the time they needed to
find other ways to carry out their "final solution."
In other words, non-violence resistance alone would have been very slow to work
against the Nazis, once they had consolidated their power. And while it slowly
ground away at the evil in the Nazi soul, how many millions more would have
died, and how much extra time would have been given to Nazi scientists trying
to invent atomic bombs to go on those V-2 rockets? The evil of Nazism may well
have expended itself, but perhaps after a real "thousand-year Reich," leaving a
world populated only by blue-eyed blondes. In other words, if the world had used
non-violence alone against the Nazis, the results may have been much worse
those of the war.[6]
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Kritik Answers
Civil Disobedience Fails (1/2)

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE CAUSES MARGINALIZATION,
DISPROPORTIONAL PUNISHMENT, AND FAILS TO HAVE
TRANSFORMATIVE EFFECTS
Schwartz, J.D. 1981 Georgetown University Law Center, BOSTON
UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL, Fall 1994, p. 256-257.
Rachael E.
Recent decades have seen an impressive expansion of the extent to which

international law recognizes fundamental individual rights. Public international
law no longer concerns itself solely with the subject of relations between states.
However, the establishment of a law of individual remedies and the
accompanying enforcement institutions to assure vindication of these rights has
not kept as swift a pace as the recognition of the existence of the rights
themselves. As a result, many people have bare rights with no legal substantive
basis or process for obtaining redress for violations of these rights. Faced with
such a state of affairs, several options are available to the aggrieved individual.
One may simply resign one's self to one's fate. While it is understandable that
some may take this route as a means of short-term self-preservation, it is
unacceptable to many. Alternatively, one may attempt to avail one's self of
those limited legal avenues which are open. This is admirable, but ultimately
may well prove a futile risk; the individual may gain nothing only to become
known to the government as a "troublemaker." A third possibility is civil
disobedience; that is, open and non-violent breaking of the law of a state with
voluntary acceptance of such punishment as may be imposed pursuant to that
law. Prominent practitioners of civil disobedience include Henry David Thoreau,
Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This too has obvious risks: there
may be little chance that the punishment will be fair or that those in authority
will be persuaded by a display of moral integrity to correct their behavior rather
than retaliate.
Nonviolent change is temporary. The 1989 prodemocracy movement in

China was crushed in the Beijing massacre. In El Salvador 1944, the
nonviolent insurrection against the Martnez dictatorship didnt lead to
long term improvement. Iranian non-violent revolutions have been
ultimately unsuccessful, as was Jewish pacifism. Ghandis non-violence
was only successful in the context of global armed resistance to British
colonialism. For every Martin Luther King, there is a counter-example
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Civil Disobedience Fails (2/2)

WE MUST BE PRAGMATIC PACIFISTS TO END STATE
VIOLENCEABSOLUTE PACIFISM FAILS TO CHALLENGE
THE POLICIES OF THE STATE BY OPTING OUT OF THE
GAME ENTIRELY
Robert L.
It conceivable that governments might grant selective objection the

same legal status as it gives to pacifism? The answer, I fear, is no. And
that tells us something important about pacifism. Governments are
prepared to tolerate pacifism, because it poses no threat either to their
political policies or to the manner in which wars are conducted. The
pacifist objects equally to all wars waged by all governments. In this
sense he opts out of the game altogether. By contrast, the selective
objector will be forced to analyze both the policy decisions of the
government as well as the conduct of the armed forces. He will be
publicly carrying out an officially sanctioned comparison between
mutually agreed just-war criteria and the actual performance of the
government. That is a lot to expect of governments as we know them, but there is still more. What would be the implication of a
state granting an exemption on selective grounds? Fundamentally, the state would be agreeing with the claim that its war policies may be
reasonably interpreted as unjust. The belief that all war is wrong is a proposition which states might agree is debatable among rational men, and,
therefore, claims to exemption on this basis may be allowed. It is a very different matter, however, to grant exemption for a particular war, for
here we are faced not with two philosophical theories about violence but with a factual dispute. Selective objection presupposes that both the
government and the claimant agree upon the criteria for undertaking a justified war and the rules for conducting it. The claimant would have to
show, in order to qualify for an exemption, that his government is engaged in acts of war which a person might reasonably characterize as
immoral. As such an admission is inseparable from policy questions, it is inconceivable that any government would be willing (or politically able)
to wage war while publicly agreeing that there is sufficient reason to doubt the morality of that war to grant exemptions from it. This is not to say
that individuals should not refuse to fight in wars which they believe are immoral but to acknowledge that governments cannot be expected to
of the pacifist who objects to all wars does

not threaten the particular policies of any state. In condemning them all
equally, pacifism exempts itself from political reality: What is needed,
then, is not a general pacifism but a discriminating conscientious refusal
to engage in war in certain circumstances. States have not been loath to
recognize pacifism and to grant it a special status. The refusal to take
part in all war under any conditions is an unworldly view bound to
remain a sectarian doctrine. It no more challenges the states authority
than the celibacy of priests challenges the sanctity of marriage. By
exempting pacifists from its prescriptions the state may even seem to
display a certain magnanimity. But conscientious refusal based upon the
principles of justice as they apply to particular conflicts is another
matter. For such refusal is an affront to the governments pretensions,
and when it becomes widespread, the continuation of an unjust war may
prove impossible.
institutionalize such a practice. The evenhandedness
THEIR NOTION OF DISOBEDIENCE CEMENTS THE STATES

MONOPOLY OF VIOLENCE
Jordan J.
Paust, Professor of Law, University of Houston, EMORY LAW JOURNAL, Spring
1983, p. 549-550.
With such a focus, one should discover that private individuals and
groups can and do engage in numerous forms of permissible violence. It
is too simplistic to say, therefore, that authoritative violence can only be
engaged in by "the government" or by governmental elites and
functionaries. As Professor Reisman stated, the notion that only state
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institutions can permissibly use high levels of violent coercion "is a
crucial self-perception and deception of state elites." Thus, the useful question is not
whether private violence is permissible, but what forms of private violence are permissible, when, in what social context, and why. As Professor
[I]nsistence on non-violence and deference to all

established institutions in a global system with many injustices can be
tantamount to confirmation and reinforcement of those injustices. In certain
Reisman further suggests:
circumstances, violence may be the last appeal or the first expression of demand of a group or unorganized stratum for some measure of human
dignity. Of course, such an injunction can also have particular relevance concerning the question of revolutionary social violence. Here, as
elsewhere
, no facile "rule" or simplistic prohibition will do.
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A2 Violence Alienates the People:

2AC
PASSIVE PROTEST DOESNT WIN THE MASSES-VIOLENCE
CHANGES THE LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Mike
Ryan, Canadian anti-imperialist, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 134-135
Turning now to the argument that violence alienates the people, I find myself
face to face with several unanswerable flaws of logic. If violence alienates the
people, are we to refrain from engaging in any but passive acts of protest (and
here I use the term protest rather than resistance quite consciously) because
this will win popular support? If this is the case, I am forced to ask why, after
years of consistent nonviolent protest, no qualitative growth, and only the
slightest quantitative, has occurred within our movement? From these questions,
I would go on to suggest that catering our activity to our perception (which
might not even be accurate) of the level of resistance acceptable to people, far
from being revolutionary, is in fact counter to the development of revolutionary
Consciousness: A party (or, in our case, an organization or movement) which
bases itself on an existing average level of consciousness and activity, will end
up reducing the present level of both. It is the partys responsibility to lead, to
change the existing level of consciousness and activity, raise them to higher
levels) It is clear that the peace movement, rather than offering vital
connections and a direction for popular discontent (which plainly exists), has
failed to offer anything more than a repetitive and increasingly boring spectacle.
The government in Ottawa, and the general populus, has increasingly taken to
yawning at our activities.
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A2 Non-Violence Key to Prevent

Eradication of Movement: 2AC
NON-VIOLENCE ONLY AVOIDS PERSECUTION BECAUSE IT IS
INEFFECTIVEANY SUCCESSFUL REVOLUTION HAS TO
DEAL WITH THE VIOLENCE OF THE STATE
Mike
Ryan, Canadian anti-imperialist, 2001, Pacifism as Pathology, p. 135-136
The argument that violence brings repression down on the left indicates a
naivete bordering on sheer madness. Do we really believe that if we could
devise a nonviolent means of eliminating the state we would be allowed to
proceed unhindered in carrying it out? The state is violent in its very nature. The
police, the army, and prisons stand as immediate, tangible evidence of this. The
genocide of Third and Fourth World peoples stands as evidence of this. Canadas
role as an arms producer and supplier for the Indonesian colonization of East
Timor is a daily, ongoing act of violence. Violence, overt and covert, aggressive
and preventive, is fundamental to the function of the Canadian state. No
violence issuing from the movement could hope to be more than a pale
reflection of the constant violence of the repressive apparati. That this violence
generally remains invisible is more a statement of our failure than of our
success, a reflection of the degree to which we have remained within the limits
acceptable to the state. As Mao said in 1939: It is good and not bad if the
enemy fights against us: I think it is bad for us be it for individual, a party, an
army, or a school of thought if the enemy does not take a stand against us,
because in that case it could only mean that we are hand in glove with the
enemy. If we are being fought by the enemy, then that is good: it is proof that
we have drawn a clear line between us and the enemy. If the enemy goes
vigorously into action against us, and accepts nothing at all, then this is even
better: it shows that we have not only drawn a clear line between us and the
enemy, but that our work has achieved tremendous success.
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Pacifism Bad: War Good (1/2)

ATTEMPTS AT PACIFISM FAIL EVIL EXISTS IN THE WORLD
ATTEMPTS AT UTOPIANISM ARE SUICIDAL
Adam G. Mersereau, Served in the enlisted and officer ranks of the United States
Marine Corps from 1990 to 1995; now an attorney, Down with the Peace Movement: The
trouble with the antiwar warriors, National Review Online, January 15, 20 03,
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-mersereau011503.asp
Many members of the peace movement also hold tightly to a loosely defined
utopianism. They believe that the human race (save conservative Republicans)
is evolving toward a higher and more noble plane of social existence. The
activists themselves are, of course, at the forefront of the evolutionary curve;
while the Cro-Magnon in the White House and his Cabinet of Neanderthals
stubbornly resist progress. Although the Left has largely declared the concepts
of "good" and "evil" to be pass, the peace activist believes that the heart of
man is intrinsically "good," and that it would be "evil" if we do not give Saddam
Hussein every chance to let his goodness shine through.
Utopianism is dead in the minds of most people, because as veterans of the 20th
century, which was the bloodiest century ever, we cannot deny that "good" and
"evil" are entangled within the hearts of men and many of his ideologies, and
that peace is little more than a welcome respite between wars. We also
know that unless the Saddam Hussein's and Kim Jong-il's of the world are
Utopians too, then to champion utopianism in America or Europe is useless.
Utopianism is folly; unilateral utopianism is suicidal. But rather than
adjust their policy to reflect reality, the peace activists will march in circles, carry
their signs, and wait for reality to reflect their policy.
PACIFISM THE WORST OF ALL WORLDS CAUSES

MILLIONS OF DEATHS, APPEASEMENT OF ENEMIES, AND
THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE
Epstein, Graduate of Duke University, BA Philosophy, Junior fellow at the Ayn
Rand Institute, Peacenik Warmongers, Ayn Rand Institute, December 9, 20 02,
Alex
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=7458, UK: Fisher

Pacifism necessarily invites escalating acts of war against anyone who practices
it.
There is an increasingly vocal movement that seeks to engage America in ever
longer, wider, and more costly wars--leading to thousands and perhaps millions
of unnecessary deaths. This movement calls itself the "anti-war" movement.
Across America and throughout the world, "anti-war" groups are staging "peace
rallies" that attract tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of participants,
who gather to voice their opposition to an invasion of Iraq and to any other U.S.
military action in the War on Terrorism. The goal of these rallies, the protesters
proclaim, is to promote peace. "You can bomb the world to pieces," they chant,
"but you can't bomb it into peace." If dropping bombs won't work, what should
the United States do to obtain a peaceful relationship with the numerous hostile
regimes, including Iraq, that seek to harm us with terrorism and weapons of
mass destruction? The "peace advocates" offer no answer. The most one
can coax out of them are vague platitudes (we should "make common cause
with the people of the world," says the prominent "anti-war" group Not in Our
Name) and agonized soul-searching ("Why do they hate us?"). The absence of a
peacenik peace plan is no accident. Pacifism is inherently a negative doctrine--it
merely says that military action is always bad. As one San Francisco protestor
put the point: "I don't think it's right for our government to kill people." In
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practice, this leaves the government only two means of dealing with our
enemies: to ignore their acts of aggression, or to appease them by capitulating
to the aggressor's demands.
Pacifism Bad: War Good (2/2)

PACIFISM MAKES WARS BIGGER AND LONGER HARDLINE
MILITARISM WOULDVE PREVENTED THE RISE OF HITLER
Of course, if deterrence is not enough, if your opponent is that crazy, what do
you do? Running away may work for individuals, but not for nations, so I will
neglect that option. Negotiation is also unworkable, because you can't reason
with bullies. They exhibit a kind of willful mindlessness, a demonic will to
unconsciousness. They don't negotiate back, they merely use your forbearance
to buy time and opportunity to get at you, or to get around you like Hitler did,
while Chamberlain declared, "peace in our time." You assert your position, and
set some limits. And if they exceed your limits, you use force.
But is it moral to use force? Those of us who might contemplate calling the
police in order to stop a murder must believe that occasionally it is. Further, I
maintain that sometimes it may be immoral to do anything else. Remember that
Hitler could have been stopped easily by a show of force when he threatened to
annex the Sudetenland. That force was not brought to bear in a timely manner is
due largely to the pacifist sentiment in Europe and America at the time.
Instead of engaging in a minor military expedition which would have forced
Hitler to back down, to lose face, and ultimately to lose political power, the world
passively sold out Czechoslovakia to him, paving the way for a much more
prolonged and bloody conflict later a conflict that resulted in the
development of the first atomic bombs. In other words, I think a reflexive
pacifism is no more entitled to a presumption of moral innocence than nuclear
weapons work, and that pacifism applied in the wrong way at the wrong time
contributed to the development of the nuclear weapons that pacifists now find
so abhorrent. In short, pacifism can sometimes help to make wars bigger and
worse than they have to be.
Pacifism Bad: Unethical

PACIFISM EQUATES DEFENDANT TO AGGRESSOR, RAPIST
TO RAPE VICTIM DESTROYS ABILITY TO MAKE
NORMATIVE JUDGMENTS ABOUT VIOLENCE THAT ARE
CRITICAL TO SAFETY
Delaney, Freelance Writer in Los Angeles, Debunking the Clichs of Pacifism,
Capitalism Magazine, October 13, 2001, http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1157,
Kevin
UK: Fisher
The philosophy of pacifism can be expressed in a single principle: "The use of
force is morally wrong." This means that ALL force - any kind of force - is out of
the question and must be opposed. If you spend any amount of time thinking
about the issue (which most pacifists do not), you'll very quickly be able to think
of a number of situations in which the use of force is clearly not only not morally
wrong, but clearly necessary - a woman fighting off a rapist, for example. Take a
few moments to come up with several such "exceptions," then abstract their
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common element, and you'll arrive at the ominous error at the root of the
pacifist philosophy: pacifism makes no distinction between force which is
initiated, and force which is used in self-defense. Were a pacifist totally
consistent in his philosophy, he'd have to say that the woman who fights off the
rapist is wrong to do so - after all, she's certainly committing an act of force. If
the pacifist were also consistent in his use of clichs, he'd say that in fighting the
rapist off, the woman has "sunk to the rapist's level." She has "resorted to
violence," and is now "just like him." This same thought process (or lack of it) is
behind the pacifists' opposition to war - specifically, in the case of our current
situation, the opposition to a country fighting back when war has been initiated
against it. To the pacifist, attacker and victim are moral equals. Which side
initiated the war is of no interest to him; his mind knows only the abstraction
"war," and that he's against it. Pacifism used to be known as "nonresistance,"
which names the heart of the matter: total passivity and surrender when faced
with any kind of threat. Of course, you never hear the position stated this way:
today's pacifists almost always make their case exclusively in terms of what
they're against, rarely what they're for (except in the most general sense, such
as "world peace," etc.). Full-fledged pacifists are relatively rare, yet their clichs
are nevertheless having an effect on many minds, throwing monkey-wrenches
into people's convictions at a time when this country needs every ounce of
moral certainty it can muster. Over the past few weeks, I'm sure you've heard at
least once, something to the effect of: "If we bomb our enemies, we'll just be
doing to them what they did to us. We'll be sinking to their level!" If you
understand the pacifists' basic error, you can see very clearly what's wrong with
this picture: the failure to differentiate between the force of an aggressor, and
force used in retaliation against the aggressor in self-defense. No, it's not
morally wrong to fight back against someone who's attacking you; if you value
your life, it's absolutely essential that you do.
Pacifism Causes Oppression

THEIR ARGUMENT EQUATES TO SUPPORT FOR
OPPRESSIVE DICTATORSHIPS
Brockerman, Assistant Editor for Capitalism Magazine, Pacifists and
Professors of Oppression, Capitalism Magazine, October 12, 20 01,
Steven
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1154, UK: Fisher

Righteous in their indignation against the use of American military force, the
pacifists and professors, nonetheless, willingly accept the preemptive
annihilation of an entire city in Syria by that nation's despotic ruler. They who
speak intolerantly of American racism are, nevertheless, willing to tolerate the
slave trade thriving in Sudan. Avowed defenders of the Palestinians, they look
the other way when those who even mildly publicly criticize Arafat have their
tongues cut out or worse. About all that oppression they are silent. What those
pacifists and professors are not silent about, though, is their opposition to
America's right to self-defense. They who tolerate Mid-Eastern Arab tyrannies
are not silent in their intolerance of America. The pacifists and the professors
cannot accept that America -- a nation they hate with the religious fervor of an
Islamic terrorist -- is morally right and, thus, morally superior; therefore, they are
willing to grimly evade not only the reason America was attacked on September
11, but also the reason they -- the pacifists and the professors -- are attacking
America now. America was attacked, not because the U.S. has oppressed the
Arab people, but because the U.S. represents the greatest threat to those MidEast dictatorships that do and, thus, represents the greatest hope to the Arab
peoples. America is now being attacked by many in the universities, not because
the U.S. is racist or imperialist, but because the U.S. stands for individual rights,
capitalism and the pursuit of happiness, which are the greatest rebukes to the
beliefs of the pacifists and the professors and anyone else whose ideas make
possible and then excuse dictatorship, poverty and oppression.
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Pacifism Causes Aggression (1/2)

PEACE MOVEMENTS ULTIMATELY FAIL EVEN IF THE US
TURNS MORE PEACEFUL, OTHER ENEMIES WONT
Adam G. Mersereau, Served in the enlisted and officer ranks of the
United States Marine Corps from 1990 to 1995; now an attorney, Down with the
Peace Movement: The trouble with the antiwar warriors, National Review
Online, January 15, 2003, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/commentmersereau011503.asp
Peace activists may be well intentioned; but at their worst, they are more
helpful to America's enemies than to America. The best we can say is that
they are clinically nave. They are as insufferable as a college freshman who
believes he and his political-science professor can end poverty if only people
would listen. It is as if the peace activists believe they have discovered for the
first time those self-evident and thus ancient truths that human life is sacred,
and war is tragic. Little do they know that a majority of the Iraqis who stroll past
their peace marches in Baghdad support an American invasion. Many would
eagerly fight and risk death in an armed revolution if they could obtain the
resources and momentum to launch one for themselves.
Navet allows the peace movement to thrive, but it is animated by arrogance.
THE ARROGANCE
While campaigning for the presidency, candidate Bush said that his
administration would conduct its foreign policy with less arrogance than past
administrations had displayed. He is now widely accused of forsaking the lessarrogant approach and of choosing, instead, to rattle his saber at any dictator he
thinks he can rattle. But is it really arrogant for the president to insist that a
violent and unpredictable dictator with ambitions to control the world's oil supply
who is also a friend of al Qaeda should be denied a secret nuclear,
chemical- and biological-weapons program? Is it arrogant to suggest that
Saddam Hussein should be removed from power if he continues to defy and
deceive the international community? Likewise, is it arrogant to expect the North
Koreans to abide by the Agreed Framework, under which the U.S. promised to
inject millions of U.S. tax dollars into the faltering North Korean economy?
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Perhaps it is slightly arrogant, but the peace movement is fantastically more
arrogant.
The peace movement is founded upon a subtle ethnocentrism that escapes
detection even by the multicultural Left where most peace activists are bred.
The group that most openly celebrates the diversity of mankind does not
understand that many people in the world hold diverse beliefs and subscribe to
ideologies that are entirely independent of American influence. In the mind
of the peace activist, America is not just the sole superpower, it is the center of
gravity for all world events; and so every world event is simply an equal (and
sometimes opposite) reaction to a prior American action. Peace activists believe
that America's economy and culture are such dominant forces in the lives of
people throughout the world that the actions and policies of other nations can be
interpreted only as mere reactions to the actions and policies of the United
States government. Therefore, they believe America has the unbounded ability
to manipulate foreign governments through economic and cultural means.
Peacenik foreign policy is really very simple: Without an action by the United
States, there will be no reaction by others. If America does not start a war, there
will be no war. This is the arrogant ethnocentrism of the peace movement.
Under this view, it is unthinkable that quaint little dictators such as Saddam
Hussein or Kim Jong-il might deign to manipulate America as much or more
than America tries to manipulate them. It is unthinkable that a nation would
resort to building nuclear weapons if they did not first feel threatened by the
world's only super-bully. It is inconceivable that Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-il
might have diabolical plans and evil aspirations that were not created by, and
are not controlled by, the U.S. State Department. The peace activist then
reaches the conclusion that the United States can make a unilateral decision for
peace, simply by choosing to lay down its arms. If the United States would
ignore open and notorious breaches of U.N. directives and treaties, and simply
refuse to disturb the current state of peace, then peace would prevail by default.
Of course, the choice between war and peace is not ours alone. There could be
war and likely will be war regardless of our course of action. The only
questions are: on whose terms, and on whose turf?
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Pacifism Causes Aggression (2/2)

NONVIOLENCE IS CODE FOR APPEASEMENT HISTORY
PROVES THAT EVEN RHETORICAL STANCES AGAINST THE
USE OF FORCE CAN EMBOLDEN AGGRESSORS
Sowell 2K1 (Thomas, September 23, Pacifism on Principle is Suicide,
Capitalism Magazine, http://capmag.com/articlePrint.asp?ID= 1108)
Although most Americans seem to understand the gravity of the situation that terrorism has put us in -- and the need for
some serious military response, even if that means dangers to the lives of us all -- there are still those who insist on
posturing, while on the edge of a volcano. In the forefront are college students who demand a peaceful response to an
the pacifist
platitudes of the 1930s that contributed so much to bringing on World War II. A
former ambassador from the weak-kneed Carter administration says that we should look at the
root causes behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon . We
act of war. But there are others who are old enough to know better, who are still repeating
should understand the alienation and sense of grievance against us by various people in the Middle East. It is
astonishing to see the 1960s phrase root causes resurrected at this late date and in this context. It was precisely this
kind of thinking. which sought the root causes of crime during that decade, creating soft policies toward criminals,
which led to skyrocketing crime rates. Moreover, these soaring crime rates came right after a period when crime rates
On the international scene, trying to assuage

aggressors feelings and look at the world from their point of view has had an
even more catastrophic track record. A typical sample of this kind of thinking can be found in a speech
were lower than they had been in decades.
to the British Parliament by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938: It has always seemed to me that in dealing with
foreign countries we do not give ourselves a chance of success unless we try to understand their mentality, which is not
always the same as our own, and it really is astonishing to contemplate how the identically same facts are regarded from
Chamberlain sought to remove

the causes of strife or war. He wanted a general settlement of the grievances
of the world without war. In other words, the British prime minister approached Hitler with the attitude of
someone negotiating a labor contract, where each side gives a little and everything gets worked out in the end. What
Chamberlain did not understand was that all his concessions simply led to new
demands from Hitler -- and contempt for him by Hitler . What Winston Churchill understood at
two different angles. Like our former ambassador from the Carter era,
the time, and Chamberlain did not, was that Hitler was driven by what Churchill called currents of hatred so intense as
to sear the souls of those who swim upon them. That was also what drove the men who drove the planes into the World
Pacifists of the 20th century had a lot of blood on their hands for
weakening the Western democracies in the face of rising belligerence and
military might in aggressor nations like Nazi Germany and imperial Japan . In Britain
Trade Center.
during the 1930s, Labor Party members of Parliament voted repeatedly against military spending, while Hitler built up
the most powerful military machine in Europe. Students at leading British universities signed pledges to refuse to fight in
All of this encouraged the Nazis and the Japanese toward war against
countries that they knew had greater military potential than their own. Military
potential only counts when there is the will to develop it and use it, and the
fortitude to continue with a bloody war when it comes. This is what they did not
believe the West had. And it was Western pacifists who led them to that belief.
Then as now, pacifism was a statement about ones ideals that paid little
attention to actual consequences. At a Labor Party rally where Britain was being
urged to disarm [!!!]as an example to others, economist Roy Harrod asked one
of the pacifists: You think our example will cause Hitler and Mussolini to
disarm? The reply was: Oh, Roy, have you lost all your idealism? In other words, the
the event of war.
issue was about making a statement --that is, posturing on the edge of a volcano, with World War II threatening to
erupt at any time. When disarmament advocate George Bemard Shaw was asked what Britons should do if the Nazis
What a shame our

schools and college neglect history, which could save us from continuing to
repeat the idiocies of the past, which are even more dangerous now in a nuclear
age.
crossed the channel into Britain, the playwright replied, Welcome them as tourists.
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**Normativity**
Normativity Answers: 2AC (1/7)
FIRST, EVEN IF THERE IS NO STABLE, OBJECTIVE LEGAL
SUBJECT, PEOPLE STILL ACT IN RESPONSE TO THE LAW,
MAKING IT THE BEST PRAGMATIC MEANS OF SOCIAL
CHANGE. CROSS-APPLY OUR SPECIFIC TRIBE AND KATYAL
SOLVENCY
SECOND, PERFORMATIVE CONTRADICTION REJECTING
NORMATIVE LEGAL THROUGHT PRESCRIBES A NON-NLT
LEGAL NORM, WHICH IS BAD BECAUSE IT PREVENTS US
FROM LINKING OFFENSE, DESTROYS ARGUMENTATIVE
ACCOUNTABILITY, AND IS A VOTER FOR FAIRNESS AND
EDUCATION
THIRD, PERM DO BOTH
ABANDONING NORMATIVITY IS IMPOSSIBLE.
ACKNOWLEDGING THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM WHILE
VICARIOUSLY PARTICIPATING IN LITIGATION CREATES
SUBJECTIVE FREEDOM THROUGH THE LAWS REPEATED
FAILURE, COMING TO TERMS WITH LEGAL APORIA
Carlson 99
[David Gray, Prof Law @ Cardozo, Duellism in Modern American Jurisprudence,
99 Colum. L. Rev. 1908, November, LN//uwyo-ajl]
of Professor Schlag's points
about legal scholarship are undoubtedly well taken. But it doesn't follow that it
should or even could be abolished. In truth, whether he admits it or not, Professor Schlag himself
does legal scholarship. He does not follow his own advice about not doing it. Nor could he. If legal scholarship
stands for participation in the realm of the symbolic, then legal scholarship - i.e.,
culture - is the very medium that perpetuates self-consciousness.
Should normative legal scholarship be abolished, as Professor Schlag suggests? Some
Schlag is very hard on law professors who give advice to judges. He mocks their work as mere "pretend-law," n313 mere journalism. n314 "One
need only pick up a judicial opinion, a state statute, a federal regulation, or a law review article to experience an overwhelming sense of dread
and ennui." n315 Meanwhile, judges are not even paying attention to legal scholarship n316 - which, experience teaches, is disappointingly true.
Vicarious participation in litigation or legislation can nevertheless be defended as a

participation in culture itself. Law professors can contribute to that culture by
making law more coherent, and in this sense their project is at least as worthy as any that philosophy, history or
astrophysics [*1951] could devise. Law has an objective structure that exceeds mere subjectivity. This objective structure can be altered by hard
work. An altered legal world, however, is not the point. Evidence of consequential impact is gratifying, but this is simply what mere egotism
in the work itself that the value of legal scholarship can be found. Work is
what reconciles the failure of the unhappy consciousness to achieve justice. Work is,
requires. It is
in Hegel's view,
desire held in check, fleetingness staved off... work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and
something permanent... This negative middle term or the formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of
consciousness which now... acquires an element of permanence. n317
By working the law, lawyers, judges, private citizens,

even academics can make it more permanent, more resilient, more "existential," n318 but, more to the
point, they make themselves more resilient, more "existential." n319 Work on law can
increase freedom - the positive freedom that relieves the worker of "anxiety" fear of disappearance into the Real. n320 When work is done, the legal universe swells and fills itself out - like an
appetite that "grows by what it feeds on." n321 But far more important , the self gains a place in the world by
the very work done. Work is the means of "subjective destitution" or "narcissistic loss" n322 - the complete
externalization of the subject and the surrender of the fantasy support upon
which the subject otherwise depends . In Lacanian terms, "subjective destitution" is the wages of cure at the end of
Hegel, then, gives a spiritual turn to that worthy slogan "publish or perish."
and
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analysis. n323 Or, in Hegelian terms, cure is "the ascesis that is necessary if consciousness is to reach genuine philosophic knowledge." n324
this state, we precisely lose the suspicion that law
(i.e., the big Other)
does not exist.
In
n325
In Hegel's inspirational words:

Each individual consciousness raises itself out of its allotted sphere, no longer finds its essence and its work in this particular sphere, but grasps
itself as the Notion of will, grasps all spheres as [*1952] the essence of this will, and therefore can only realize itself in a work which is a work of
the whole. n326
I make no special claim that legal academic work is worthy of extra-special respect. It is a craft, like any other. As such, it is at least worthy of its
share of respect. If spirit unfolds and manifests itself in the phenomenal world of culture, n327 why should it not also manifest itself in the law
reviews?
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FOURTH, NO IMPACT SCHLAG JUST SAYS NORMATIVITY
HAPPENS WITHIN A FIELD OF VIOLENCE, NOT THAT IT
CAUSES VIOLENCE
FIFTH, THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF JUSTICE MAKES JUSTICE
POSSIBLE BY SUBLIMATING ETHICS THE ALTERNATIVE IS
A FANTASY SCREEN THAT INSTALLS A SENSE OF
SUBJECTIVE COMPLETION THAT NEVER EXISTED
Carlson 99
For this very reason, justice is quite opaque to general definition. Being a phallic
trope, justice never has been and never will be defined. Any definition of justice
could only occur by use of signifiers, yet justice is precisely what is beyond
signification. n51 So conceived, it is clear that justice must always fail. n52
Doing justice is therefore always an act of "sublimation" - in sublimation, I
"elevate an object to the dignity of the Thing." n53 Justice, as this void between
legal concepts, participates in what Slavoj <hac Z>i<hac z>ek calls the "ethics
of the Real," which is
the moral Law in its impenetrable aspect, as an agency that arouses anxiety by
addressing me with the empty, tautological and, for that very reason, enigmatic
injunction 'Do your duty!', leaving it to me to translate this injunction into a
determinate moral obligation - I, the moral subject, remain forever plagued by
uncertainty, since the moral Law provides no guarantee that I "got it right"... n54
Justice, I contend, is Professor Schlag's "robust referent." Yet what Schlag does
not consider is that justice always necessarily fails. Justice is a negative located
in the interstices of law. Any attempt to legislate justice [*1918] is mere
sublimation. To deliver on this promise of justice, law would have to fill the legal
universe and crowd out the negative moment of justice. n55 To the extent law
fails to deliver on its promise - when it fails to fill the legal universe - it precisely
leaves open the possibility of justice itself. n56 Justice is designed to fail!
According to the false Lacanian autobiography, law has promised justice, but it
cannot deliver. Law has castrated the subject but has not lived up to its side of
the bargain. It has defaulted on its promise of restitution. Law only fills the field
of justice with more signifiers, on a logic by which law is remade with every
instance of legal practice. Revealingly, Schlag writes: "To be really good at 'doing
law,' one has to have serious blind spots and a stunningly selective sense of
curiosity." n57 Professor Schlag captures the practice of law acutely in this
remark. "Doing law" is filling the gap with signifiers, a practice that does indeed
require serious blind spots in the performance of it. To speak or to act is literally
to forget - that the castrated subject is not whole. n58
There is no sense, however, in being angry about judicial failure. Law cannot be
blamed for what it cannot deliver. The healthy subject comes to learn that this
failed bargain is a falsehood. The subject never had the phallus. n59 Nor does
the symbolic realm withhold it. Nothing has been lost and no restitution is due.
n60 Schlag's insinuation, that the symbolic realm has breached its obligation to
deliver justice is thus false. n61
SIXTH, NO LINK WE DONT CLAIM THAT LAW ACHIEVES

FINAL JUSTICE, JUST THAT PLAN IS PERCEIVED IN A
CONSEQUENTIALLY BENEFICIAL WAY
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SEVENTH, THE CRITICISM MISIDENTIFIES THE LACKING
NATURE OF LANGUAGE, REINSCRIBING STABLE
SUBJECTIVITY
Carlson 99
I began by suggesting that Pierre Schlag assumes the position of a duellist. He
thinks legal academics are either fools or knaves. But he mistakes his opponent.
The villain is language itself. Language is what causes the split in the subject,
and Professor Schlag has made the classic error of assuming that legal
academics are deliberately withholding l'objet petit a. They hold surplus
enjoyment and are to blame for the pain and the lack that always accompanies
the presence of the subject in the symbolic order.
If this psychoanalytic suggestion explains the angry tone of Schlag's work, it also
explains the basic errors into which he falls. When one considers this work as a
whole, most of these errors are obvious and patent. Indeed, most of these errors
have been laid by Schlag himself at the doorstep of others. But, in surrendering
to feeling or, as perhaps Schlag would put it, to context (i.e., the pre-theoretical
state), Schlag cannot help but make these very same errors. Some examples:
(1) Schlag's program, induced from his critiques, is that we should rely on feeling
to tell us what to do. Yet Schlag denounces in others any reliance on a pretheoretical self. n328
(2) Schlag warns that, by definition, theory abstracts from context. n329 He
warns that assuming the right answer will arise from context unmediated by
theory is "feeble." n330 Yet, he rigorously and repetitively denounces any
departure from context, as if any such attempt is a castration - a wrenching of
the subject from the natural realm. He usually implies that context alone can
provide the right answer - that moral geniuses like Sophocles or Earl Warren can
find the answer by consulting context.
[*1953] (3) Schlag complains that common law judges are "vacuous fellows"
when they erase themselves so that law can speak. n331 Yet, Schlag, a natural
lawyer, likewise erases himself so that context can speak without distortion.
(4) Schlag warns that merely reversing the valences of polarities only reinstates
what was criticized. n332 Yet he does the same in his own work. In attacking the
sovereignty of the liberal self, he merely asserts the sovereignty of the romantic
self. Neither, psychoanalytically, is a valid vision. One polarity is substituted for
another. n333
(5) Schlag scorns the postulation of ontological entities such as free will, but
makes moral arguments to his readers that depend entirely on such postulation.
(6) Schlag denounces normativity in others, but fails to see that he himself is
normative when he advises his readers to stop being normative. The pretense is
that Schlag is an invisible mediator between his reader and context. As such,
Schlag, the anti-Kantian, is more Kantian than Kant himself. Thus, context
supposedly announces, "Stop doing normative work." Yet context says nothing of
the sort. It is Schlag's own normative theory that calls for the work slowdown.
(7) Schlag urges an end to legal scholarship when he himself continues to do
legal scholarship. He may wish to deny that his work is scholarship, but his
denial must be overruled. We have before us a legal scholar, like any other.
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Kritik Answers

EIGHTH, DISAVOWAL OF THE VIOLENCE OF
REPRESENTATION AND CALLS FOR INTERNAL RETHINKING
RELY ON ASSUMPTIONS OF METAPHYSICAL INNOCENCE,
FETISHIZING AN AUTHENTICITY THAT NEVER EXISTED
Bewes 97

become something. Its principal characteristic is the retreat from and disavowal
of the violence of representation - both political and semiotic. There are three
further aspects to this essentially ignominious cultural operation: (i) a cultivation of stupidity (what I have called
Kelvinism, or 'metaphysical innocence') as a means of circumventing the ideational
'brutality' of the political life; (ii) a recourse to the idea of an internal or
subjective 'truth of the soul' which transcends political reality, along with the
contingencies of representation. Both of these signal an attachment to a surface/
depth model of subjectivity which in each case amounts to a fetishization of
authenticity, whether by opting to 'remain' on the surface, or by retreating
'inwards'; (iii) a collapse of faith by individuals and even politicians themselves, not only in the political infrastructure but in the very'
concept of political engagement - here it becomes apparent that Tony Blair, for example, is more 'postodern' than any theoretician.
in a state of anxiety, shrinks from the violence of determinate negation
and 'strives to hold on to what it is in danger of losing'. 59 At various points throughout the present work I have used the terms 'decadence',
capitulation to 'things as they

are'; it may be as well here to remind ourselves of the terms in which Hegel describes these manifestations of a retreat from truth.
'irony' and 'relativism' to refer to these instances of an epistemological loss of nerve, this
Consciousness, he says, at the decisive moment in which it is required to go beyond its own limits, (i) 'wishes to remain in a state' of unthinking
inertia'; (ii) gloats over its own understanding, 'which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego instead of any
Postmodernism,
content'; (iii) 'entrenches itself in sentimentality, which assures us that it finds everything to be good in its kind'. 60
an empirical social condition - by which I mean that a series of critical-theoretical strategies has attained a certain concrete form -
legitimizes these symptoms of cultural anxiety; postmodernism becomes synonymous, therefore, with
deceleration, with a sense of cultural and political conclusivity; postmodernism is the principal vehicle of what
Baudrillard calls 'the illusion of the end'.
AND, AUTHENTICITY FETISHIZATION AND ITS FEAR OF

REASON AND VIOLENCE ALLOW US TO SPEND HOURS
DEBATING THE FINE POINTS OF BAUDRILLARIAN ETHICS
WHILE GAS CHAMBERS ARE BUILT
Bewes 97

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NINTH, PUBLIC CRITICISM OF EXECUTIVE POWER CREATES
CRITICAL MOMENTUM THAT FORCES THE COURTS TO
HOLD PRESIDENTIAL ABUSES ACCOUNTABLE WEN HO
LEE PROVES
Yamamoto 2005
[Eric K., Prof. Law @ Hawaii, White (House) Lies: Why the Public Must Compel
the Courts to Hold the President Accountable for National Security Abuses, 68
Law & Contemp. Prob. 285, Spring, LN//uwyo-ajl]
These events and counter-messages garnered national press. Belatedly, the
mainstream media responded with new images and opinions. Writers who had
contributed significantly to the public vilification of Dr. Lee now became critical
of his treatment and even advocated for his release. n116 On August 22 and 23,
2000 - during the crucial days when Judge Parker was considering the defense's
key motions for bail, discovery, and evidence - editorials and [*310] headlines
in major newspapers declared: "Wen Ho Lee Deserves Bail and Fair Treatment"
(San Francisco Chronicle); "Is Lee Guilty Until Proven Innocent?" (Chicago
Tribune); "Free Wen Ho Lee" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch); "Wrong One Is on Trial in
Lee Case" (Los Angeles Times); and "Bail for Wen Ho Lee" (New York Times).
n117
Organizers also employed an effective strategy of public education through print
ads in major newspapers. For example, on August 7, 2000, Chinese for
Affirmative Action organized a full-page ad in the New York Times demanding
"Drop all charges. Free Dr. Wen Ho Lee now." The ad was titled, "Wen Ho Lee &
The Nuclear Witch Hunt" and focused on being "charged with being ethnic
Chinese." The ad presented Dr. Lee in a different light than New York Times
readers had become accustomed to seeing. Instead of the stereotypical foreign
spy, Dr. Lee was presented as an "American scientist" separated from his wife
and two children for eight months, countering the usual media image of Dr. Lee
in shackles.
Op-ed pieces also countered the executive lies and stereotypes. Attorneys
Theodore Wang and Victor Hwang published an opinion piece titled, "Charged
With Being Ethnic Chinese." n118 In it they exposed the racial profiling and
challenged the premise on which the government based its racist actions. They
correctly framed the issue as "not only for Lee but for all Americans concerned
about whether the government should be able to launch criminal investigations
based on the race of a suspect." They also argued that "by focusing only on
Asian Americans, a real spy may have escaped the scrutiny of the federal
government altogether." n119 This and other op-ed pieces strategically framed
the issue of racial profiling as one for "all Americans" and publicly questioned
the effects of allowing the government to continue such practices without
accountability. n120
Critical legal advocacy and organized pressure helped reframe for the public,
and for Judge Parker, the real issues - selective racial prosecution Executive lies
and the need for accountability. This new sense in the public culture of what was
really going on and what was really at stake provided the backdrop for
courtroom decisions. Amid intensifying demands to free Dr. Lee and put the
Justice Department on trial instead, Judge Parker ordered the government to
disclose documents on racial profiling and negotiate a release agreement with
Dr. Lee. n121
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TENTH, DEBATE AND DELIBERATIVE POLITICS ARE
CONSTANT RENEGOTIATION OF VALIDITY CLAIMS,
CARRYING THE CAPACITY FOR CONSTANT INNOVATION OF
MEANING
Kulynych 97
[Jessica, Asst. Prof. of Poli Sci @ Winthrop, Polity 30: 2, Winter//uwyo]
If we interpret the "to show" here not as pointing out what is wrong with disciplinary society (which would leave Foucault subject to Fraser's
normative criticism), but rather as "showing," or "showing up," then we no longer need the introduction of normative notions, we are merely
doing disciplinary society one better. Making a point is a function of discourse, the ability to align and arrange arguments that support a position.
Yet, the performative protestor does not argue against the state, he mocks it. The protestor works at the margins of discourse, utilizing puns and
jokes and caricature to "expose" the limits of what is being said. Thus, performative resistance, when considered as critique, does not need to tell
us what is wrong, rather it reveals the existence of subjection where we had not previously seen it. I am not suggesting that we can get a
normative anchor out of the notion of performativity. To the contrary, I am suggesting performative resistance makes no such normative
performativity is not about normative distinctions. We bring normativity to

By unearthing the contingency of
the "self-evident," performative resistance enables politics. Thus, the question is
not should we resist (since resistance is always, already present), but rather
what and how we should resist.
This notion of performativity is also important for understanding the possibilities for innovation in Habermasian deliberative
participation. Just as a protestor exposes the contingency of concepts like justice, a dialogue exposes the limits and
contingency of rational argumentation. Once we are sensitive to the performative nature of speech, language and
distinctions, or rather, that
our performances as ethical principles that are themselves subject to resistance.
discourse, then we can see that deliberative politics cannot be confined to the rational statement of validity claims. Deliberation must be
that that which cannot be argued for finds

expression. Indeed it is precisely the non-rational aspects of deliberation that carry
the potential for innovation. In his description of the poignant reminders of demonstration Chaloupka recognizes that it is
theatrical: it is in the performance of deliberation
at the margins that the actual force of the demonstration resides, no matter what happens at the microphone. The oral histories of
demonstrations (the next day over coffee) linger over the jokes and funny signs and slogans, the outrages and improprieties, more than the
Any convincing account of the politics of

deliberation must take account of the creative potential that resides in the
performance of debate.
speeches and carefully coherent position papers.(68)
ELEVENTH, THE ALTERNATIVE COLLAPSES BACK INTO

NORMATIVITY, REINSCRIBING LEGAL VIOLENCE
Annelise
Riles, Ford Fellow in Public International Law, Harvard Law School, 1993 94,
1994 U. Ill. L. Rev. 597, *650

If Geertz's argument signals a loss of faith in the interdisciplinary scholar's ability to combine the theories of each discipline, is there hope for the
current effort to break law and society into myriad component parts and relate these anew, as Geertz sought to do with his turn to fact and law?
in manipulating one dichotomy

after another, the scholar has the sinking sense that all the possible positions are
prefigured. As noted at the outset, practitioners of legal anthropology now pessimistically perceive the possibilities of their discipline.
In this respect, I think, the two disciplines share a moment of theoretical impasse, for
Likewise, although it is now increasingly fashionable for lawyers to turn outside their discipline for grand insights, they do so with increasing
, the totally new insight, the epistemology-bursting

, never seems fulfilled. Every combination and recombination, every construction and
deconstruction seems already prefigured. Just as the "whole" of culture now has ceased to do the work of
organizing our arguments, the "whole" of the discipline certainly no longer seems worth supporting or opposing. But neither do its parts . The
effect of this change is that there no longer is much rhetorical force in claiming dangerous
or creative spaces in-between. How can Leach's disciplinary terrorism be maverick if the opposition he bridges is no longer real for
wariness. The image of what anthropology might have to offer
perspective
us? How can Geertz's shuttling between fragmented points of relation feel innovative if the parameters within which these points lie are entirely
familiar from the start? To claim that there is nothing new to combine, or that relation no longer works, is to relinquish the identity of the
productive scholar -- who is productive because he or she makes new forms. B. Normative and Reflexive Knowledge As noted at the opening of
this part, one must stand for something in an article such as this one; reflecting on the arguments of others in itself is not enough. If the task of
relationship building in interdisciplinary scholarship has lost its force, therefore, I now must argue for an alternative. This understanding pervades
the works we have considered from Henry Maine to the present day. The imperative to harness observations, as here about the state of
interdisciplinary scholarship, into a claim, as here for a future direction of interdisciplinarity, and the difficulty experienced in doing so,
characterizes much contemporary interdisciplinary work. Indeed, one of the enduring characteristics of the tradition we have considered is
precisely this transformation from what we might call a reflexive mode of knowledge into a normative mode and back again. Every work we have
considered in the preceding pages has made its contribution to legal knowledge by approaching its subject reflexively. By this, I mean that
insight always is produced by observing a topic in European or American law from another,
wider vantage point. Maine, for example, reflects upon legal positivism from the *644 point of view of the history of European
civilization. Leach takes the problem of an international response to terrorism and recasts it in terms of violence in primitive societies. This
reflexivity involves a broadening of perspective, and it often is achieved by a kind of movement beyond one's starting position to another position
and back again, as when Geertz takes us on a tour of the world's legal systems or when Maine moves through successive stages of historical
development. When contemporary interdisciplinary scholars argue for attention to the "outside," to "context," or to a "wider reality" beyond the
law, I think they are conflating the metaphors we use to describe this reflexive mode of knowledge -- metaphors of expansion and movement --
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. Yet every author also understands him or herself to be staking out
a normative claim. Maine is for a more academic tradition of legal scholarship, and he is against the democratization of legal
with an "actual" outside
institutions. Leach, likewise, has a political motive in treating the terrorist bombings of the 1970s and the atom bombing of Hiroshima as
commensurates. This kind of normative claim, in contrast to reflexive knowledge, is achieved precisely by holding things constant, by refusing to
move to another perspective even if one understands such movement as possible, and
by constricting rather than
continued
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Kritik Answers

continued
expanding
inquiry so that a sharp claim can be made.
the scope of
It is no wonder that we describe
such normative knowledge using stationary metaphors -- staking out a position, taking a stand, etc. To make a claim about the future of
normative and
reflexive knowledge. It is worth noting at the outset, however, that these two modes of knowledge are not logically
contradictory. On the contrary -- it is precisely Maine's reflexive reconsideration of modern legal institutions from a broader historical
interdisciplinary work in legal anthropology, then, is to be normative in the sense of this engagement between
vantage point that gives rise to his antipopulism, and it is Leach's interest in understanding primitive society on its own terms that leads him to
. One of the defining aspects of the interplay

reflexive and normative modes of engagement is that each slips effortlessly,
almost uncontrollably, into the other. There is no resting point at which one is reflexive or
defend the terrorist's world view against the position of international law
between
normative: we "know" that every relativism is actually an argument for something or other. Indeed, this knowledge gives rise to one of the classic
modes of critique in the repertoire of both lawyers and anthropologists, as we expose the "position" or "argument" behind a certain reflexive
: we can always understand a normative claim such as a

to be the expression of a particular point
of view, and indeed, as soon as such a normative claim is made, it seems to engender a reflexive
turn. It is not just that a normative argument produces a reflexive one. Rather, the very same knowledge,
effectuated in a reflexive mode, invariably becomes normative. Maine's historicization of
exposition. The same is true of normative argument
call for the universal protection of rights of expression, for example,
Bentham's positivism, for example, in turn becomes an argument against the universal application of positivism. Leach's reconsideration of the
cultural construction of terrorism becomes a normative claim for the importance of attention to cultural difference itself. One of the defining
aspects of the interplay between reflexive and normative knowledge in interdisciplinary scholarship, then, is the way in which each relativism in
turn becomes its own position, which then is open to relativization again. A reflexive observation becomes an argument to stand by, and that
argument then can be reconsidered in a reflexive way. By way of example, we might consider a prominent article by lawyer and anthropologist
Sally Falk Moore, Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers What to Say to Africans About Running "Their Own" Native Courts. Building
on a career-long investigation into the British colonial legal system, its assumptions about African society, and the response it generated among
the Chagga, Moore takes as her point of departure a 1957 British directive concerning the organization of customary courts among the natives of
Tanganyika. The theme of the piece is the conflict between the British administrators and the village courts over British legal notions, such as res
judicata and the Rule of Law as a rule of the written word, and the intended audience of the piece includes both lawyers and anthropologists. The
contribution of the piece is a reflexive reconsideration of what Moore takes as the Anglo-American faith in the rule of law. She writes in the article
abstract: This article is presented at two levels throughout. On the surface it is a straightforward historical analysis of a directive to British officers
. . . . On a deeper level the article uses the British colonial occasion to explore widely held cultural assumptions in Anglo-American law about the
definability of "justice," the concept of time and timing in legal affairs, and the complex place of the idea of legitimate, authoritative, and
permanent "knowledge" in legal institutions. *646 Moore's ultimate target is the colonial government's obsession with rule making, with
cataloguing African practices into a codifiable form. In a classic relativizing spirit, she is concerned that we understand that notions of a "rulegoverned judiciary" of the kind she finds in the texts of H.L.A. Hart, and the obsession with written precedent on which it depends, are culturally
specific ways of resolving conflicts, not -- as she quotes her colonial directive to claim -- natural law. This reflexive turn engenders many of the
patterns we have observed in other contemporary works of Legal Anthropology: Moore emphasizes the rationality of African legal systems on
their own terms and in so doing discovers a social reality outside the law. She argues that the architects of the British colonial legal regime failed
to understand that "[t]he Africa of reality had its own social and legal logic." This African reality, moreover, is the realm of expertise of the
anthropologist: "The colonials had to cope with the consequences of this 'localism' but did not understand the nature of local rural communities,"
she notes, owing partly to the fact that (unlike anthropologists) "most of them did not speak any of the many local languages." She explains that
"[t]he colonials did not picture these villages as they were . . . . Had they known what we now know about the internal political life of African
neighborhoods and villages, they might have had a very different understanding of what was going on." She even notes concerning the 1950s
writing of a Restatement of African Law, that the law professor in charge saw the insights of anthropologists as too imprecise to be useful to
courts engaged in modernization and nation building. This reconsideration of law from a wider perspective is also its own normative argument, a
kind of lecture to lawyers about the cultural particularity of their world view. The ultimate point Moore hammers home to her legal audience is the
classic plea for attention to context. As she puts it, "[t]his circumstance raises a question in relation to the colonial instance that has far wider
application: Is it possible to 'know' much about a legal system without knowing the character of the case-generating milieu?" The answer for
Moore clearly is no. Text is meaningless without context. This rhetoric in turn is organized around a severe and confident break between the legal
and social spheres -- both of the subject, the colonial administrator and the Chagga, and the subtext, the lawyer and the anthropologist.
"Certainly the difference between the designed judicial institution and the 'event-evolved' set of neighborhood institutions is very great." The
effort of looking at the world of law from a broader perspective now has become the subject of an argument to Moore's legal colleagues. Yet
Moore does not stop with the lessons of anthropology for law. In a fascinating passage, she attacks the "fashion" of anthropological critiques of
colonial practices that show the ignorance of colonial administrators about local practices: "As the colonial period has been safely over for more
than thirty years, showing colonial flaws coupled with colonial arrogance is not only politically risk free, it is a rather conventional version of
history for our time." Claiming for herself a more "experimental" territory, she asserts an interest in "the cumulative historical production of
institutions" that lies beyond such simple assertions of colonial failure. Given the symbolic association of the legal academic and the colonial
administrator in her text, one is left to wonder what this might mean for those who, like the vulgar critics of colonialism, engage in vulgar lectures
to legal academics about the weaknesses of legal formalism and rule- based adjudication. The paper cannot come to a close, in other words, until
Moore's normative claims on behalf of anthropological methods engender their own reflexive reconsideration. The transformation of reflexive into
normative modes and back again spawns a parallel transformation in the knowledge it produces. For example, we saw that anthropologists first
reflected on law from a wider point of view and discovered relationships by doing so. These relationships soon became a position in themselves,
outside the law. It was only a matter of time, therefore, before that position itself would become the subject of reflexive interpretation, as I have
done in the pages above. Yet if reflexive modes of knowledge engender normative knowledge and vice versa, these modes are not alternatives in
the lexicon of *648 lawyers and anthropologists, nor are they opposites. One cannot simply choose to relativize or to argue for something, as one
would choose a Law and Economics approach or a Law and Anthropology approach to a legal problem, because each is understood to negate the
possibility of the other. Likewise, it would be nonsensical to try to devise an approach that would combine normative and reflexive knowledge:
one cannot be a relativist and stand for something, it is often said. Each mode engulfs the entire enterprise of representation, so that if I write in
one genre, I cannot invoke the other. This is because unlike disciplines or cultures, normative and reflexive modes of knowledge are not of the
same order. They are not contained in a single frame, as law and anthropology are contained in the frame of disciplinarity, or as Barotse legal
systems and Anglo-American law are contained in the frame of cultural difference. Taking a position and looking at things from a relativizing point
of view will not create a relationship even if we want it to. Reflexive and normative knowledge were not always incommensurable in this way.
Henry Maine's peers would not have interpreted his appeal to a wider historical perspective as negating the possibility of normative argument
about legal positivism or practical engagement with contemporary legal problems. Maine's failure to treat his argument and his reflexive analysis
as incommensurable, I think, contributes to the contemporary view of Ancient Law as uninteresting scholarship at best and embarrassingly naive
scholarship at worst. Leach might exemplify an epistemological change, vis-aea-vis Maine, then. Although we saw that Leach quite consciously
stakes out claims about the rationality of the terrorist even as he treats his own arguments about terrorism as objects of reflexive inquiry, there is
a marked tension between these two modes of engagement, and the tension is resolved only by the irony in his assertion that savages are not
"dog-headed cannibals" that acknowledges the possibility of relativizing the normative claim even as it seeks to hold that claim constant. It has
become necessary for Leach, as it was not for Maine, to appeal to a rhetorical device such as irony to keep what have become two
incommensurable modes of engagement in view. This incommensurability, still implicit in Leach's case, now itself has become a problem, a topic
of furious debate. One hardly can have a conversation about law these days without arguing about relativism. *649 The transformation of
normativity into reflexivity and back again has become its own topic of normative engagement, in other words. We might consider this a key
aspect of the contemporary epistemological moment for both disciplines. The effect of this development is that being in favor of an
interdisciplinary method of legal studies today means having faith in this transformation of one mode of knowledge into another. Or to rephrase
the claim in more normative terms, what is best about contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship is the transformation of knowledge it
engenders. Although this movement is not "real" in the sense of a reality outside the law, I am suggesting that it is worth taking seriously in its
own right. In this sense, Maine's appeal to movement and change, in which structure appears as reflection after the fact on the path of such
movement, can be as much a model to us as Leach's more contemporary arguments in which structure is prefigured as an organizing frame. Yet
this transformation of modes of knowledge differs from the movement both Maine and Geertz advocate in that normativity and reflexivity are not
positions, places of the same order that occupy a single plane. At least at this juncture, no linear connection can be drawn between them nor can
any descriptive thesis summarize the transformation of one into the other. I do not mean to imply that this kind of transformation is unique to
anthropological approaches to law. On the contrary, lawyers know that slippage from normativity to reflexivity and back again pervades legal
thinking as well. Yet perhaps the tension between disciplines provides an apt metaphor for describing what we do not yet have other language to
describe. Perhaps this incommensurablity becomes concretized, or institutionalized in the gulf between disciplines that both lawyers and
anthropologists celebrate, so that interdisciplinary engagement between law, as the metaphorical province of normativity and politics, and
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anthropology as the metaphorical province of reflection and difference, provides a technology for experiencing and elaborating the
incommensurability of reflexive and normative thought. In the pages above, I have endeavored to trace a path through a series of claims for an
anthropological, ethnological, or interdisciplinary study of the law. A consideration of this tradition leaves us with a number of possible
observations. First, it leads to an appreciation of the extent to which contemporary anthropological appeals to reality outside the law, discovered
through empirical observation of context, and through emphasis on real people rather than the theoretical structures of law, is predicated on
shared notions among lawyers and anthropologists about the salience of the disciplinary divide. Ironically, *650 however, if the success of the
arguing for
attention to context against the legal text, for example -- can never offer an escape
from the theoretical impasse created by the dichotomy precisely because the
move is prefigured in the very structure of the dichotomy itself . Such an earnest -even in some cases strategically self-righteous -- plea on behalf of the outside, whether it be the new
methodological innovation or the "real world out there," may find itself welcome in both legal and anthropological circles but hardly
seems poised to make ground-breaking contributions to either. We need an
alternative to a move to the periphery that always prefigures a return to the
center. Second, in tracing the emergence of the project of discovering and elaborating relationships as the modern project of
rhetoric is predicated on a shared epistemology, then simply defending one side or another of a shared dichotomy --
interdisciplinary work, we come to appreciate why this project also now fails to satisfy. This elaboration of relationships between disciplines,
between law and society, or between ever smaller fragments of each seems predictable because it is. In order to work, the entities to be
combined must already exist in a prefigured frame -- disciplinary or cultural difference, for example -- so that we know at the outset the
parameters within which the new mix will take its form. The recent attempt to show scholarly productivity by finding ever more intricate,
indeterminate, or subtle connections only heightens the sense of a project that now is spent.
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#3 Permutation: 1AR
SCHLAGS CRITICISM ONLY GETS IT HALF RIGHT- THE
BUREAUCRACY CERTAINLY OPERATES ON A FIELD OF PAIN
AND DEATH, BUT WE SHOULD NOT BREAK FROM THE LAW,
BUT INSTEAD EMBRACE IT
CARLSON & SCHROEDER IN 2003
(JEANNE AND DAVID, CARDOZO LAW PROFESSORS, 57 U MIAMI L. REV 767)

Beyond laying down the law, another normative program emerges from Schlag's
work: "What is missing in normative legal thought is any serious questioning, let
alone tracing, of the relations that the practice, the rhetoric, the routine of
normative legal thought have (or do not have) to the field of pain and death." 18
The suggestion is that we should come to realize that law itself is the very
ground for the field of pain and death. When this is realized, the normative
program to lay down the law becomes a high moral imperative. It appears
from Schlag's work that the proper project for legal scholarship is to
expose law's responsibility for pain and death. This is what we should
do. When legal scholarship has achieved this task, presumably pain
and death will have been eliminated. Turning the tables on law and
economics, Pierre implies that it would be efficient (i.e., useful to
human utility) if law would abolish itself. But, stranded on a field
exfoliated of pain and death, what next? The implicit program seems to
be that, once the distortions of law are removed, the subject simply
does not have to be told to do anything. Whatever the subject does will
be authentic. This is the free, liberated subject that Schlag's
normativity implies--a natural subject from whom completeness and
authenticity has been unfairly denied by the legal bureaucracy. If we are right,
then underlying Schlag's polemic against law is an uncritical romantic
psychology. This would in turn mean that Schlag is not so much a critical
scholar as a romantic one. This implicit psychology means that Schlag has
something in common with the political liberals he attacks. Both Schlag and
liberals believe in the autonomy of the human subject--and the
possibility that the subject can achieve this desired state of freedom.
Furthermore, they both believe in the existence of subjectivity in a state of nature on which positive law or social engineering cannot possibly
improve. Law, then, has become a tool for oppressing the bureaucratic society that legal academia unwittingly serves. Legal subjects, subjected
to the law, are alienated from themselves by the law. The corollary to this [*771] is that there must be at least the possibility that subjectivity
could be other than it is now--distorted by law. Lest we be misunderstood, we emphasize that we agree with much of the above account. We
agree with Schlag's suggestion that normativity cannot succeed. Virtually every observation that Schlag makes about law and policy scholarship
(normativity) is correct. Where we disagree is that there is a subject left standing once legal normativity is abolished. Unfortunately, although
Schlag ostensibly bases much of his analysis on the post-modern critique of the liberal conception of the autonomous self-identical subject, he, in
fact, falls back on a liberal conception of a natural self. Romanticism implies that the self-identical individual of liberalism is real--but disfigured by
law and hence on a field of pain and death. The post-modern position is quite different. It denies the pre-legality of personality and suggests that
Lacanian
psychoanalysis agrees with half of Schlag's proposition. The subject is
on a field of pain and death, where it is not self-identical, but severely
wounded by law. It is precisely law (broadly understood as the symbolic
order) that castrates the subject, as Schlag maintains. Breaking the
chains of the law, however, would not free but would obliterate the
subject. Subjectivity is nothing but the split, the gap, the rift in the
natural subject torn by law. If law is removed, the rift that creates
subjectivity is obliterated. What was Lacan's name for a person who
successfully follows Schlag's normative program and slips the chains of
law? His term for such a person was "psychotic." 19 For Lacan, the
normative program is precisely not to let go of the symbolic order, for
that would be the death of subjectivity, not its liberation.
personality is itself a legal idea. On this view, the self-identical subject of liberalism cannot exist as a theoretical matter.
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#3 Permutation: Ext
DISCOURSE RELIES ON INFORMATION FROM THE
OUTSIDE; WITHOUT ENGAGING IN THE REAL WORLD,
CHANGE IS IMPOSSIBLE.
Habermas, Prof @ Goethe U in Frankfurt, 90 (Jurgen, Discourse Ethics: Notes on a
Program of Philosophical Justification, The Communicative Ethics Controversy, Ed.
Benhabib and Dallmayr, P. 100-101)
The principle of discourse ethics makes reference to a procedure, namely, the discursive redemption of normative claims
discourse ethics can properly be characterized as formal, for it

provides no substantive guidelines but only a procedure: practical discourse.
Practical discourse is not a procedure for generating justified norms but a
procedure for testing the validity of norms that are being proposed and
hypothetically considered for adoption. This means that practical discourses
depend on content brought to them from outside. It would be utterly pointless
to engage in a practical discourse without a horizon provided by the life world of
a specific social group and without real conflicts in a concrete situation in which
the actors considered it incumbent upon them to reach a consensual means of
regulating some controversial social matter. Practical discourses are always related to the concrete
to validity. To that extent,
point of departure of a disturbed normative agreement. These antecedent disruptions determine the topics that are "up"
for discussion. This procedure, then, is not formal in the sense that it abstracts from content. Quite the contrary is true. In
practical discourse is dependent upon contingent content being "fed"

into it from outside. In discourse this content is subjected to a process in which particular values are ultimately
its openness,
discarded as being not susceptible to consensus. The question now arises whether this very selectivity might not make
the procedure unsuitable for resolving practical questions.
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#5 Sublime Justice: 1AR

INSOFAR AS PEOPLE THINK OF THE LAW AS REAL, IT
EXISTS, ALLOWING FOR POWERFUL CHANGE
DETAINMENT PROVES
Carlson 99
Conceived as that which causes the judge to decide (per Schlag's definition), law is dynamic. It is indeed "performative," as Schlag maintains.
Law exists, and so it

animates the judge who pronounces judgment. It bears not a circular but a linear relation to the judge.
Law animates when the judge's free will suppresses the judge's pathological
criteria and lets the judge be the law's oracle. n164 True, the empirical judge is capable of bad faith. Perhaps
what the judge had for breakfast rather than the law caused a judicial decision to be pronounced. But law's possibility, at least, is
affirmed by license of free will. n165
Consequence, Schlag maintains, cannot prove that law exists. n166 But quite the opposite is true. Law's consequence
(which Schlag concedes) n167 proves law's existence and its suitability for scientific study. n168
Schlag is prepared to concede that the law causes human beings to act, as when
they execute or incarcerate a prisoner. It then follows that either (a) the law has a mechanical effect on human
n162 This future anterior grammar of law doesn't make it purely subjective, however. n163
beings - an absurdity n169 - [*1932] or (b) human beings have the capacity to choose to obey law. The second possibility is the only plausible
one, because Schlag effectively admits the existence of free will and moral capacity. Thanks to this concession, we can affirm that law exists and
that human beings can choose to follow the law. n170 Admittedly, we can never confirm legal effect directly, because it must be mediated by
We can, however, confirm its possibility and rule out its impossibility.
If thoughts (such as law) induce free human beings to act, then thoughts are
things - and powerful things at that. To the extent we indulge in a belief in free
will, law is potentially effective. When it is, when human beings execute the law, law's effects are rendered "tangible"
free will, which can only be postulated. n171
and "visible" - the very attributes of the super-realist metaphysics that seem to underwrite Schlag's work. Although law cannot be felt directly, its
indirect effects are sensual indeed
LEGAL THOUGHT EMBRACES THE NEGATIVITY OF ETHICS,

CREATING SUBJECTIVE FREEDOM
Carlson 99

Schlag criticizes legal academics for unwitting indulgence in a contradiction. The
self is supposed to be sovereign. Yet the self bows down [*1943] to the rule of
law. n244 The choice to be bound is supposed to be a contradiction in terms.
n245
From what has been said, it should be clear that there is no contradiction here.
The self that stands against the natural world, and the animal inclinations that
afflict its body, is a negative entity. At heart, the subject is nothing at all. n246
Yet, if it is to "exist," it must have externally observable properties. It must do
something, and the things it does become an attribute of the self. We are what
we do. n247
The subject that lawfully follows its passion achieves existence and so
perpetuates itself. n248 This is the positive freedom of the self. Any self choosing
to conform to the law has put forth its moral character in the world. It was the
free choice of the self to do this. n249 Hence, the free self can choose to be
bound, without contradiction. n250
This concrete subject is likewise free to violate the law and to perpetuate itself
by crime. This is the negative freedom of the concrete subject. It is not properly
freedom at all, but slavery to inclination. Crime constitutes inclination speaking
in defiance of the moral side, thereby committing a crime on the subject's own
self. The particularity of the criminal is therefore not freedom but slavery. n251
In fact, tied into the very idea of following the law is the idea of a free will that
might choose not to follow the law. The free will that aspires to follow the law
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never truly binds itself. A subject that puts itself forward as lawful could give into
impulse tomorrow and is therefore "free" (in the negative sense) to violate the
law. Lawfulness is therefore a constant struggle - the ongoing achievement of
the concrete self. Furthermore, it is a struggle in which the subject must fail:
Freedom realizes itself through a series of failures: every particular attempt to
realize freedom may fail; from its point of view, freedom remains an empty
possibility; but the very continuous [*1944] striving of freedom to realize itself
bears witness to its "actuality." n252
Freedom is thus "powerful." It exhibits the "primacy of possibility over actuality."
n253 Forever potential, it is nevertheless a possibility that transforms the world.
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#7 Alt Reinscribes Subject: 1AR

(1/2)
THE ALTERNATIVE IS A BEFORE THE FALL FANTASY OF A
PRE-LEGAL SUBJECT
Carlson 99

In contrast to this view, Professor Schlag wants to say that freedom means the
concrete self can do what it feels like. But he should know better than to exalt
the authenticity of the pre-legal natural self, and he has on occasion chastised
others for doing just that. n254 To exalt the sovereignty of such a self (that may
be in the thrall of criminal passion) instead of the liberal self is to permit the
contingent side of the self to govern in its moral arbitrariness. n255 In other
words, the essence of personality is the rationality of the liberal self. Negative
freedom denies the essence of personality and therefore ends up destroying its
own self. n256
To summarize, Schlag's work is based on a romantic psychology. If only the
concrete self were freed from law, Schlag implies, it would know what to do. Law
offers mere "norms" and presents the subject with empty choices. Such a theory
of the self ignores the fact that human nature has two sides - the natural and the
moral. One side cannot be privileged at the expense of the other.
To be sure, many of Schlag's criticisms of liberal psychology n257 are well taken.
Liberal psychology absolutely denies a place for the unconscious and irrational.
His accusation that liberal philosophy does not consider the challenge of
deconstruction to liberal psychology is an excellent contribution. Liberal
philosophy in recent times deserves criticism for not peering very deeply into
the soul of the legal subject. n258 But liberal philosophy is also on to something:
The moral dimension of personality [*1945] is constitutive and cannot be
abolished without destroying personality entirely.
THE ALTERNATIVE IS A FANTASMIC ATTEMPT TO RESTORE

A UNITARY SUBJECT, SHORING UP ENJOYMENT STOLEN BY
THE LAW
Carlson 99

In his disenchantment with reason, Schlag has written that, just because lawyers
pursue their profession "does not establish whether liberal categories such as
'individual rights' are on the order of rocks, trees, dollar bills, rubles, words,
advertising images, or angels." n69 Within the gross and scope of this ontic
spectrum, rocks and trees are trenchantly existential. They can be felt. Dollars
are perhaps less so, on most measures of the money supply, but rubles, words,
advertising images, angels and liberal category drift into the realm of
"ontological entities" n70 - mere figments of the imagination. These latter items
do not "exist." Perception mediated by thought is not to be trusted.
Law's defect, then, is that, like Macbeth's dagger, it is insensible to feeling. Law
is nothing but thought. Thought (mediation) does not exist, and neither does
law. n71 Tangibility - immediacy of intuition - is, I infer, Schlag's criterion of
epistemic certainty. What is tangible does not rely on language for its integrity.
n72 Tangibility transcends the legal order. It is quite alegal and for this very
reason valid. n73
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Such a criterion of reality means that, in the end, Schlag's program is a romantic
one. Law has deprived the subject of its jouissance. If law would kindly step
aside, the subject could enjoy an immediate restitution of its lost parts - a unity
that would be certified by feeling. Therefore, justice supposedly demands that
law abolish itself so that the concrete subject in its negative freedom can be
guided by its natural, uncomplicated [*1921] dimension - by feeling - towards
wholeness. n74 But for law, the subject could enjoy itself all the time. n75
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#7 Alt Reinscribes Subject: 1AR

(2/2)
SCHLAGS PARANOID VISION OF LEGAL BUREACRACY IS A
FANTASY ATTEMPT TO RATIONALIZE THE FAILURE OF THE
SYMBOLIC
Carlson 99

Lacanian theory allows us to interpret the meaning of this anti-Masonic vision
precisely. Schlag's bureaucracy must be seen as a "paranoid construction
according to which our universe is the work of art of unknown creators." n273 In
Schlag's view, the bureaucracy is in control of law and language and uses it
exclusively for its own purposes. The bureaucracy is therefore the Other of the
Other, "a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the great Other (the symbolic
order)." n274 The bureaucracy, in short, is the superego (i.e., absolute
knowledge of the ego), n275 but rendered visible and projected outward. The
superego, the ego's stern master, condemns the ego and condemns what it
does. Schlag has transferred this function to the bureaucracy.
As is customary, n276 by describing Schlag's vision as a paranoid construction, I
do not mean to suggest that Professor Schlag is mentally ill or unable to
function. Paranoid construction is not in fact the illness. It is an attempt at
healing what the illness is - the conflation of the domains of the symbolic,
imaginary, and real. n277 This conflation is what Lacan calls "psychosis."
Whereas the "normal" subject is split between the three domains, the psychotic
is not. He is unable to keep the domains separate. n278 The symbolic domain of
language begins to lose place to the real domain. The psychotic raves
incoherently, and things begin to talk to [*1947] him directly. n279 The
psychotic, "immersed in jouissance," n280 loses desire itself.
Paranoia is a strategy the subject adopts to ward off breakdown. The paranoid
vision holds together the symbolic order itself and thereby prevents the subject
from slipping into the psychotic state in which "the concrete 'I' loses its absolute
power over the entire system of its determinations." n281 This of course means and here is the deep irony of paraonia - that bureaucracy is the very savior of
romantic metaphysics. If the romantic program were ever fulfilled - if the
bureaucracy were to fold up shop and let the natural side of the subject have its
way - subjectivity would soon be enveloped, smothered, and killed in the night of
psychosis. n282
Paranoid ambivalence toward bureaucracy (or whatever other fantasy may be
substituted for it) is very commonly observed. Most recently, conservatives
"organized their enjoyment" by opposing communism. n283 By confronting and
resisting an all-encompassing, sinister power, the subject confirms his existence
as that which sees and resists the power. n284 As long as communism existed,
conservatism could be perceived. When communism disappeared, conservatives
felt "anxiety" n285 - a lack of purpose. Although they publicly opposed
communism, they secretly regretted its disappearance. Within a short time, a
new enemy was found to organize conservative jouissance - the cultural left. (On
the left, a similar story could be told about the organizing function of racism and
sexism, which, of course, have not yet disappeared.) These humble examples
show that the romantic yearning for wholeness is always the opposite of
[*1948] what it appears to be. n286 We paranoids need our enemies to organize
our enjoyment.
Paranoid construction is, in the end, a philosophical interpretation, even in the
clinical cases. n287 As Schlag has perceived, the symbolic order of law is
artificial. It only exists because we insist it does. We all fear that the house of
cards may come crashing down. Paradoxically, it is this very "anxiety" that
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shores up the symbolic. The normal person knows he must keep insisting that
the symbolic order exists precisely because the person knows it is a fiction. n288
The paranoid, however, assigns this role to the bureaucracy (and thereby
absolves himself from the responsibility). Thus, paranoid delusion allows for the
maintenance of a "cynical" distance between the paranoid subject and the realm
of mad psychosis. n289 In truth, cynicism toward bureaucracy shows nothing but
the unconfronted depth to which the cynic is actually committed to what ought
to be abolished.
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#9 Normativity Good: 1AR

THE CRITIQUE OF NORMATIVITY IS SIMPLY WRONGWE
MUST EMBRACE NORMATIVE THEORY INSTEAD OF
ATTEMPTING TO DECONSTRUCT ITS CLAIMS
Tushnet, Prof of Law @ Georgetown U, 92 (Mark V., The left critique of
Normativity: A comment, Michigan Law Review, August, Lexis)
one might find another tool for rebuilding normative
discourse. It is to relinquish any normative [*2347] claims for leftist inclinations. n92
Left legal scholarship would be exclusively critical, deconstructing the normative
claims made elsewhere in legal scholarship but offering nothing at all in their
place. This project, too, seems difficult to sustain. Left legal academics walk into classrooms
To use Delgado's terms, though,
every day in which students demand that we say what our views are on controverted issues. A stance of unremitting
critique will not satisfy them. To face such dissatisfaction routinely is simply uncomfortable. Thus, even a leftist teacher
committed to "only critique" is likely to succumb in the classroom. n93 Because the classroom is where we try out many
of our ideas, it seems likely that the normativity to which this teacher is pushed in the classroom will come to infect his or
There is, of course, an alternative. Perhaps the critique of normativity

goes all the way down, in which case the "only critique" stance is the only one
an intellectually honest legal academic can take. But perhaps the critique of
normativity is wrong. Legal academics might then remain committed to the
project of comprehensive normative rationality, and their modest normative
gestures would be promissory notes to be cashed in elsewhere, in the
development of a comprehensive normative theory. n94
her scholarship.
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#10 Simulation/Roleplaying Good:

1AR (1/3)
INFORMAL DELIBERATIVE SITUATIONS, SUCH AS THIS
DEBATE ARE A USEFUL STARTING POINT TOWARDS
INFORMING PUBLIC DISCOURSE AND EFFECTUATING
SOCIAL CHANGE.
KULYNYCH IN 1997
(JESSICA, Performing politics: Foucault, Habermas, and postmodern participation

Polity, Winter 1997 v30 n2)
Participation equals discursive participation; it is communication governed by
rational, communicatively achieved argument and negotiation. Habermas
distinguishes two types of discursive participation: problem-solving or decisionoriented deliberation, which takes place primarily in formal democratic
institutions such as parliaments and is regulated or governed by democratic
procedures; and informal opinion-formation, which is opinion-formation
"uncoupled from decisions... [and] effected in an open and inclusive network of
overlapping, subcultural publics having fluid temporal, social and substantive
boundaries."(11) In many ways this two-tiered description of discursive
participation is a radically different understanding of political
participation, and one better suited to the sort of societies we
currently inhabit. Habermas moves the focus of participation away
from policymaking and toward redefining legitimate democratic
processes that serve as the necessary background for subsequent
policymaking. While only a limited number of specially trained
individuals can reasonably engage in decisionmaking participation, the
entire populous can and must participate in the informal deliberation
that takes place outside of, or uncoupled from, formal decisionmaking
structures. This informal participation is primarily about generating
"public discourses that uncover topics of relevance to ail of society,
interpret values, contribute to the resolution of problems, generate
good reasons, and debunk bad ones."(12) Informal participation has two
main functions. First, it acts as a "warning system with sensors that,
though unspecialized, are sensitive throughout society."(13) This
system communicates problems "that must be processed by the
political system."(14) Habermas labels this the "signal" function. Second,
informal participation must not only indicate when problems need to be
addressed, it must also provide an "effective problematization" of
those issues. As Habermas argues, from the perspective of democratic
theory, the public sphere must, in addition, amplify the pressure of
problems, that is, not only detect and identify problems but also
convincingly and influentially thematize them, furnish them with
possible solutions, and dramatize them in such a way that they are
taken up and dealt with by parliamentary complexes.
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1AR (2/3)
THE PROCESS OF DELIBERATION IS AN END IN AND OF
ITSELF- EVEN WHEN WE CANT DIRECTLY INFLUENCE
POLICY
KULYNYCH IN 1997

VII. The Politics of Deliberation in a Performative Perspective A performative
perspective on participation enriches our understanding of deliberative
democracy. This enlarged understanding can be demonstrated by considering
the examination of citizen politics in Germany presented in Carol Hager's
Technological Democracy: Bureaucracy and Citizenry in the West German Energy
Debate.(86) Her work skillfully maps the precarious position of citizen groups as
they enter into problemsolving in contemporary democracies. After detailing the
German citizen foray into technical debate and the subsequent creation of
energy commissions to deliberate on the long-term goals of energy policy, she
concludes that a dual standard of interpretation and evaluation is required for
full understanding of the prospects for citizen participation. Where traditional
understandings of participation focus on the policy dimension and concern
themselves with the citizens' success or failure to attain policy preferences, she
advocates focusing as well on the discursive, legitimation dimension of citizen
action. Hager follows Habermas in reconstituting participation discursively and
asserts that the legitimation dimension offers an alternative reason for optimism
about the efficacy of citizen action. In the discursive understanding of
participation, success is not defined in terms of getting, but rather in
terms of solving through consensus. Deliberation is thus an end in
itself, and citizens have succeeded whenever they are able to secure a
realm of deliberative politics where the aim is forging consensus
among participants, rather than achieving victory by some over others.
Through the creation of numerous networks of communication and the
generation of publicity, citizen action furthers democracy by assuming a
substantive role in governing and by forcing participants in the policy
process to legitimate their positions politically rather than technically.
Hager maintains that a sense of political efficacy is enhanced by this
politically interactive role even though citizens were only minimally
successful in influencing or controlling the outcome of the policy
debate, and experienced a real lack of autonomy as they were coerced
into adopting the terms of the technical debate. She agrees with Alberto
Melucci that the impact of [these] movements cannot.., be judged by normal
criteria of efficacy and success .... These groups offer a different way of
perceiving and naming the world. They demonstrate that alternatives are
possible, and they expand the communicative as opposed to the
bureaucratic or market realms of societal activity.(87)
INFORMAL PARTICIPATION REDUCES OUR ROLES AS

CONSUMING CITIZENS, INCREASING THE LIKELIHOOD
THAT WE WONT BE PASSIVE TO THE REGIMENTING
PROCESSES OF THE BUREAUCRACY.
KULYNYCH IN 1997

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When we look at the success of citizen initiatives from a performative
perspective, we look precisely at those moments of defiance and disruption that
bring the invisible and unimaginable into view. Although citizens were
minimally successful in influencing or controlling the out come of the
policy debate and experienced a considerable lack of autonomy in their
coercion into the technical debate, the goal-oriented debate within the
energy commissions could be seen as a defiant moment of
performative politics. The existence of a goal-oriented debate within a
technically dominated arena defied the normalizing separation between
expert policymakers and consuming citizens. Citizens momentarily
recreated themselves as policymakers in a system that defined citizens
out of the policy process, thereby refusing their construction as
passive clients. The disruptive potential of the energy commissions
continues to defy technical bureaucracy even while their decisions are
non-binding.
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1AR (3/3)
INSULAR DELIBERATION AND SIMULATING THE POLITICAL
PROCESS CAN GENERATE IMPORTANT VIEWPOINTS ON
ISSUES FACING SOCIETY
MITCHELL AND SUZUKI IN 2004
(GORDON AND TAKESHI, UNIV OF PITTSBURGH COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSOR

AND TSUDA COLLEGE COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSOR, BEYOND THE DAILY ME:
ARGUMENTATION IN AN AGE OF ENCLAVE DELIBERATION, PAPER PRESENTED AT
THE SECOND TOKYO CONFERENCE ON ARGUMENTATION AUGUST 2-5, 2004,
TOKYO, JAPAN)
One should not be too quick to dismiss the value of tournament
debating purely on the grounds that it unfolds in obscure enclaves.
Such activity benefits greatly the modest number of debaters who are able to
learn the games arcane rules and invest the substantial resources required for
tournament travel (Muir, 1990; Panetta, 1993). Recall Sunsteins stipulation
enclave deliberation is not intrinsically bad it all depends on whether
the walls insulating particular discourse communities are temporary or
permanent. While it is true that insular deliberative groups can
generate truly novel viewpoints on important issues facing society,
such views can only deepen societys overall argument pool if
eventually, such groups turn outward to communicate with those
beyond their tight circle of members (Cox & Jensen, 1989; Weiss, 1987).
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#11 Alt Lapses Back into NLT: 1AR

SUBJECT FREE FROM LAW CANNOT EXIST
CARLSON & SCHROEDER IN 2003
(JEANNE AND DAVID, CARDOZO LAW PROFESSORS, 57 U MIAMI L. REV 767)

Lacanian theory shows the defects in both normative policy scholarship
and romanticism--the two dominant modes of thinking in American law
schools. As for the latter, the Lacanian concept of the subject's false
autobiography helps explain why a romantic faith in the wholeness of
the subject apart from the law cannot be accepted. We find that
although Pierre Schlag intuits the Lacanian insight of the split subject
castrated by artificial law, he implies a romantic liberal vision of a selfidentical, uncastrated subject who could exist in a mythical state of
nature free from law's corrupting influence. Lacan teaches otherwise.
He suggests that law is a constituent part of the constitution of the
subject. To lay down the law, as Schlag suggests, is to lay down our
subjectivity. The law cannot be escaped. Better to make it our work
product, so that we recognize ourselves in the law.
SCHLAGS CRITIQUE IS BOUND BY THE RHETORIC HE

CRITICIZESHE FAILS TO BREAK FROM THE NARROWNESS
OF THE LAW
Conaghan, Prof @ Kent Law School, 2K3 (Joanne, Beyond Right and
Reason: Pierre Schlag, the Critique of Normativity, and the Enchantment of
Reason: Schlag in Wonderland, Miami Law Review, April, Lexis)
A final concern emerging from the confines of Schlag's selective mimicry of the mainstream lies in its resolutely legal
character. American legal scholars do not, by and large, like to stray too far beyond the boundaries of what is acceptably
Schlag. He/they prefers the snug confines of traditional

legal discourse and its discontents, modestly professing ignorance and lack of expertise beyond the
"legal" n65 and interestingly, neither does
terrain of law, narrowly understood as judicial decisions and the doctrines and theories legal scholars derive from them.
Schlag bemoans this narrowness repeatedly but seems in no great hurry to

escape it. Indeed, one sometimes wonders whether or not his insistence on so limited an enquiry masks a fear of his
moving beyond what he has experienced as safe and steady ground. By his own admission, this is the critique of "an
insider," n66 but does it simultaneously affirm the attractions of remaining "inside"? This dogged determination to steer
might introduce is also manifest in Schlag's

exclusive preoccupation with reason's aesthetic appeal. While I applaud his efforts to draw
clear of the complexities that an extra-legal dimension
attention to the coercive power of particular aesthetic forms--in the context of law, the compelling effects of grid-like
manifestations of reason--his neglect of, indeed total silence in relation to, other features of law's coerciveness puts him
at risk of overstating his case. This is particularly so when what is neglected is so closely bound up with what he
addresses at such length. Here, I am thinking in particular of the ideological context within which law operates and upon
which reason seeks to make her mark. In my view, there is an ideological dimension to the effective deployment of
There is a detectable
distinction (not always but sometimes) between invocations of reason that are dependent
upon the political and ideological landscape for their validity and deployments of
reason that [*557] draw upon (or seek to develop) our aesthetic inclinations, particularly
our attraction to order and coherence. n67 Often, what seems reasonable is
inextricably related to our understanding of what is possible, and yet, it is not
always the case that what is possible is determined by the boundaries of reason.
The ideological landscape abounds with all of the "sources of belief" making an appearance in Schlag's critique. The
point is that reason as a particular aesthetic does not always work to disqualify
reason as a repository for widely held ideological beliefs. Although the former may contribute
to understandings of the latter, it may not wholly determine (or be determined by) them. A failure to
acknowledge this explicitly arguably serves to weaken the power of Schlag's
critique. There are times when he invokes a primarily ideological concept of
reason--one that relies on notions of truth, self-evidence, and righteousness--and
then proceeds to critique it for its failure to adhere to an aesthetic form . Sometimes,
reason that is not, or is only secondarily, dependent upon its aesthetic form.
this is effective, and it is almost always amusing. n68 At other times, one has a sense that the boot does not fit, that he
is over-emphasizing the importance of the schematic structure of the argument in circumstances where its success has
little to do with its schematic structure and everything to do with its correspondence to the ideological status quo. Put
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if reason's appeal to self-evidence (Sunstein) or virtue (Nussbaum) is
dependent upon factors beyond its internal logic, it is not thereby significantly
diminished by demonstrating that that logic has reached its limits . Schlag's account of
the wonderland of American legal scholarship is undoubtedly perceptive; his dissection of the stances
adopted by those who typify it both masterly and liberating, and his
representation of his own alienation intensely resonant of the experiences of
many who occupy the margins of the legal academy . Indeed, therein lies its appeal. But by the
same token, it is at times injudicious in its forays into "hostile" terrain. It fails adequately to guard
against the dangers of importation, co-option, domestication, and reproduction.
It constitutes even as it deconstructs. In Schlagean terms, the power of his
critique is diminished by neglect of aspects of the "rhetorical economy" with
which he is engaging. n69 In simpler terms, there appear to be dimensions to his
enchantment of which he is unaware.
bluntly,
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#11 Alt Lapses Back into NLT: Ext

THE ALTERNATIVE LAPSES BACK INTO REASON AND NLT
University of Miami 2003
[Pierre Schlag, the Critique of Normativity, and the Enchantment of Reason:

Smoking in Bed 57 U. Miami L. Rev. 827, April, LN//uwyo-ajl]
However, Schlag knows all this. Indeed, he writes, "critical reflexivity is not
invariably or even intrinsically liberating or empancipatory. On the contrary,
pushed to its limits, it is single-minded and formalistic." n54 Exactly. And critical
reflexivity can not tell you when you are onto a good thing versus a bad one,
n55 or in a "good practice" [*838] versus a "bad one." So? Why so hard on the
proponents of Reason? After all, they are just trying to get somewhere. For them,
reason is the means to the end. Yet Schlag suggests they want more. The
proponents of Reason, he claims, want to have their cake and eat it too. n56 He
indicts this fantasy and says that the pretense that one can have it both ways is
what keeps academics focusing on the wrong questions. This can lead to the
question, "Why is critical reflexivity so unrewarded?" Well, it could be because if
belief in Reason is a faith that we believe can answer "the big question," and
that belief simultaneously rejects faith as an answer, critical reflexivity will
expose the very thing rejected by the faithful - the inadequacy of their "answer"
by the dictates of their faith. In other words, Schlag uses reason to expose
unreason in Reason. n57
By using reason to expose unreason, however, Schlag too arguably asks the
"wrong" questions, making the case of "what is a legal academic to do?" seem
more desperate than it is. The questions he appears to think are the ones worth
pursuing seem to me to be precisely the ones that can not be answered. At least
not with any more reliability than the questions he claims are the wrong
questions. Moreover, the difference between those questions that Schlag claims
are the "wrong" questions and the ones he claims are the "right" questions is
that the "wrong" ones are a prelude to or a call to action (even if no real action
follows). That is, even if "advocating 'progressive legal change' <noteq>
advancing progressive legal change" n58 the question of how to do so appears
to be one about what actions to take.
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Normative Thought Inevitable (1/3)

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO ESCAPE NORMATIVE CLAIMS-MIGHT
AS WELL TRY TO LIVE WITH IT.
RADIN AND MICHELMAN IN 1991
( MARGARET JANE AND FRANK, STANFORD AND HARVARD LAW PROFESSORS,

139 U PA. L. REV 1019, APRIL)
What should we do? What should the law be? What do you propose?' . . . asks
normative legal thought." n11 Normative, we thus understand, is what
every prescriptive utterance is; normativity marks every saying
addressed to a question of what someone should (or should not) do.
Now, it seems obviously correct that normativity, thus sweepingly defined, is
pandemic in legal thought and writing. But so is it pandemic, we would say, in
thought and writing about legal thought -- as represented, say, by the articles in
this symposium.
[*1021] To work, in writing, at the displacement or destabilization of
some named practice of writing (like normative legal thought) n12 is
already to exemplify and thereby to commend some different, some
critically chastened, practice. n13 Moreover, it is extremely difficult to
carry on the work of destabilization without appearing to lapse into
normative modes of discourse. Take, for example, this passage from an
article by Schlag:
[T]his [talk-talk genre] simply argues that we should talk [some] new talk. . . .
Variations on this old talk/new talk include the following: we should talk . . . more
normatively, [or] more contextually . . . [etc.] or in that hopeful humanist way
until we figure out what the hell we're doing up here 30,000 feet from earth
arguing about how we should land. n14
"We should talk more normatively" (WSTMN, for short) is the name of a certain
sentence -- the one that says we should talk more normatively. If uttering
WSTMN is contemptible as just talk or as normative talk (and, to boot, as naively
presupposing that how we talk, what we do, is within our power to decide
n15 ), then what is a reader supposed to make of the sentence that says that
uttering WSTMN is contemptible on those grounds? It seems that saying that
cannot (coherently) be an argument about whether or how we should (or should
not) talk. How can one argue that what makes an utterance (or a genre)
unworthy of attention or respect is that it is normative talk? To argue
is to invoke the practice of argument, and that practice consists of
normative talk. (Maybe you could try by some other means to remove
that practice from society's repertoire, but you can't well do that by
arguing about it.) But if this utterance of Schlag's is not argument,
then what is it?
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Kritik Answers

NORMATIVE THOUGHT IS INEVITABLE DISCUSSING THE
RULE OF LAW IS THE ONLY WAY TO PREVENT COMPLETE
DESTRUCTION OF RIGID CONCEPTIONS OF LEGAL THEORY
Mootz, Assoc Prof of Law @ Western New England College School of Law, 94 (Francis
J., The Paranoid Style in Contemporary Legal Scholarship, Houston Law Review, Fall, Lexis)
The differences between my conception of postmodern legal theory and Schlag's are highlighted by our very different
reactions to the idea of the rule of law. Schlag regards the rule of [*883] law as a "virtually empty" signifier whose sole
purpose is "simply to arrest thought upon impact." n36 Schlag does not propose to reformulate the idea of the rule of
law, or even to replace it with a more fitting concept, because such moves would circle within the same vacuous maze of
normative legal thought. n37 Schlag's disengagement from the language used by lawyers and judges is so stark and
unrepentant that its significance easily is underestimated. In an important sense, the ongoing struggle over the terms
and conditions of social organization defines Western history. A significant feature of this struggle has been the ongoing
Schlag bifurcates the

operation of the legal system from the discourse of its participants, arguing that
the normative claims made by those attempting to describe what the rule of law
entails is superfluous to the reality of law. By doing so, he openly places in
question whether discourse can describe, not to mention influence, practice . n38
effort to describe what it means for a society to be governed by the rule of law.
Admittedly, much of the "fancy" scholarship of the academy is removed from the everyday language of legal practice,
but the assertion that every theoretical invocation of the rule of law is detached from some deeper, hidden, nonlinguistic
realm of legal reality greatly overstates the case. The extent of critical detachment presumed by Schlag's total rejection
of the usefulness of discussing the rule of law is quite fantastic. An individual who truly could achieve this detachment
would be exhibiting the paranoid style. n39 I [*885] wholeheartedly share Schlag's assessment that the justificatory
efforts of judges and scholars alike to define the rule of law has been framed by the unhelpful polarity of justify and
the recognition that past formulations no

longer suffice leads me to attempt to articulate a new conception of the rule of
law that accords with our experience. n41 It is possible to destroy rigid
conceptions of the rule of law without embracing endless deconstruction that
renders further discussion moot. Schlag is correct that the traditional accounts of the rule of law often are
caricatures that arrest thought and discussion, n42 but I argue that we should resume a vital
discussion rather than conclude that all discussion inherently is vacuous . The
redeem and constrain and control strategies. n40 Yet
criticism that rule of law talk doesn't capture reality reveals a wistfulness for the foundationalist hope of discovering a
By claiming that
everyone else is trapped in a meaningless maze, Schlag conveniently avoids
placing himself at risk in normative dialogue. By asserting that normative legal
dialogue is irrelevant, Schlag eliminates the possibility that he might have to
change his mind in light of the force of a better argument, and he avoids an
obligation to rescue the hoi polloi from the maze. In sum, Schlag's approach insulates him from
political truth that is not subject to a contingent, ongoing dialogue among members of society.
the contingent and provisional language of social discourse. Such an insulating move runs contrary to antifoundational
that the law never operates outside the context of

wider social struggles to define the terms of sociopolitical organization.
Traditional normative legal thought ordinarily is criticized as being unhelpful
because it offers a constricted and artificial conception of legal norms, not
because normative legal thought is by nature irrelevant to legal practice . Quite the
opposite seems true: every assertion of legal power is predicated on a normative
conception of politics that always is subject to attack and reassessment. Escape
from the maze of normative legal thinking is the [*886] familiar dream of empiricists and
accounts of the rule of law, which emphasize
rationalists alike, but it simply is not possible. Talking about the reality of law as distinct from our representation of this
reality in normative legal dialogue constitutes a performative contradiction. n43 This is not to say that reality is wholly
linguistic, but rather that our experience and understanding of reality is always linguistically mediated in a shared realm
of normative public dialogue. n44
NORMATIVE THOUGHT CANNOT BE COMPLETELY

DESTROYEDWE SHOULD FOCUS ON CLEARING A WAY
THROUGH THE MAZE INSTEAD OF REJECTING IT
As Hilary Putnam concisely states, "the
elimination of the normative is attempted mental

suicide." n49 I would refine Putnam's observation by including paranoid distanciation within the scope of mental
755
Kritik Answers
Schlag writes powerfully, invariably capturing my interest and leading me to important new
effort to distance himself from the normative legal language that
is our heritage falls short, as it must . I congratulate Schlag for his skill in destroying some of the most
cherished talismans in our legal vocabulary, including the rule of law. But destruction is never total. In
the wake of destruction we inevitably chart new paths in the maze. Legal theory
properly is viewed not as an attempt to escape the maze of normative legal
thought, but as an effort to develop shared strategies for navigating through the
maze. Forging a path, rather than finding an exit, is the goal. That is enough for me.
suicide. Professor
insights. However, his
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Kritik Answers

SCHLAGS CHARACTERIZATION OF THE MAZE FAILS TO
TAKE ITS FUNCTION WITHIN CRITICAL THEORY INTO
ACCOUNTESCAPE FROM THE MAZE IS IMPOSSIBLE
The epistemological problems posed by modernist critical projects are only partially answered by adding a postmodern
Schlag's effort to analyze legal scholarship from outside the maze is

extremely problematic. Schlag believes that most scholars reside within a maze
characterized by "dreariness," but that a select few have found a way out,
gained perspective [*879] on the maze, and now engage in a fruitful questioning
that reveals rather than obscures the law. n20 In sharp contrast, I reject the idea that
such a dramatic escape can take place. Just when a scholar believes that she
has scaled the last wall of the maze, she will be confronted by a boundless
horizon of paths endlessly circling within the ambit of the same maze . Hope for escape
gloss.
must always be dashed in the end, but this does not mean that an individual's comportment within the maze is without
The central problem for contemporary jurisprudence is not

the failure to recognize the maze as an unavoidable
condition that is productive of knowledge. Postmodern thought is a stimulating force, but it has been
ethical or political significance.
the maze of normative legal discourse, but
overused and abused by more than one scholar in search of a truly radical break from the politics of normalcy. The
Schlag's confusion over

what the maze represents, how it operates, and the consequential function of
critical theory, exemplifies the postmodern crisis in legal theory. Put differently, Schlag's
questions raised by the maze are much more subtle and complex than Schlag allows.
characterization of the maze, offered with a sly wink and a conspiratorial nod to others in the know, comes off sounding
just a bit paranoid.
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Kritik Answers
Alternative Fails
SCHLAGS REFUSAL TO DELINEATE A PRECISE OBJECT OF
HIS CRITIQUE CAUSES HIS KRITIK TO BE CO-OPTED INTO
THE VERY NORMATIVE SYSTEM HE CHALLENGES WHILE HE
IGNORES KEY NORMATIVE STRUCTURES WE NEED TO
CRITICIZE
Conaghan, Professor @ Kent Law School, 2K3 (Joanne, Beyond Right and
Reason: Pierre Schlag, the Critique of Normativity, and the Enchantment of Reason: Schlag
in Wonderland, Miami Law Review, April, Lexis)
Schlag's refusal to delineate with any precision the object of his
critique is not a risk-free strategy. One difficulty arising is that reason remains deliciously
ephemeral throughout, assuming a [*550] dream-like, shadowy quality that at times
heightens its allure and triggers a desire to capture and contain it . This is of course a
Nevertheless,
reflection of Schlag's own ambivalence towards reason, signalled in particular by his use of the word "enchantment" n29
Schlag's portrayal of reason is that of a siren, a femme

fatale, who simultaneously entices and deceives. And, while he urges us
endlessly to recognize her pathological tendencies, we remain suspicious that he
is still in her thrall. More importantly, however, the nebulous quality of Schlag's
invocations of reason is misleading and belies the prescriptive content of the
notion(s) he deploys. Reason, for Schlag's purposes, is bounded in ways he does not
openly acknowledge. Woven within the fabric of his critique is a particular
perspective from which reason's purposes are derived and its shortcomings
identified and assessed.
to denote our (his?) affinity to it.
ALT CANT SOLVE THE NORMS YOU TRY AND CHANGE

WONT TRANSFER TO THE PUBLIC SPHERE YOU CAN
ONLY CHANGE ONE INSTANCE OF BAD DISCOURSE
Habermas, Prof @ Goethe U in Frankfurt, 90 (Jurgen, Discourse Ethics:
Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification, The Communicative Ethics
Controversy, Ed. Benhabib and Dallmayr, P. 82-83)
True as it
may be that freedom of opinion in the sense of freedom from external
interference in the process of opinion formation is one of the inescapable
pragmatic presuppositions of every argumentation, the fact remains that what
the skeptic is now forced to accept is no more than a the notion that as a
participant in a process of argumentation he has implicitly recognized a
principle of freedom of opinion'. This argument does not go far enough to convince him in his capacity as
Admittedly, a second objection can be raised against such arguments, one that is not so easily refuted.
an actor as well. The validity of a norm of action, as for example a publicly guar anteed constitutional right to freedom of
It is by no means self-evident that rules which are

unavoidable within discourses can also claim to be valid for regulating, action
outside of discourses. Even if participants in an argumentation are forced to
make substantive normative presuppositions (e.g., to respect one another as Competent subjects;
expression, cannot be justified in this fashion.
to treat one another as equal partners; to assume one another's truthfulness; and to cooperate with one another),34
they could still shake off this transcendental pragmatic compulsion when they
leave the field of argumentation. The necessity of making such presuppositions is not transferred directly
from discourse to action. In any case, a separate justification would be required to explain
why the normative content discovered in the pragmatic presuppositions of
argumentation should have the power to regulate action.
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Pragmatism Good
PRAGMATICALLY COMBINING THE INSIGHTS OF THE
CRITICISM WITH THE AFF SOLVES BEST
RADIN AND MICHELMAN IN 1991
( MARGARET JANE AND FRANK, STANFORD AND HARVARD LAW PROFESSORS,
139 U PA. L. REV 1019, APRIL)
The poststructuralist moment in critical practice is conceptual,
diagnostic, and global. It fastens on intellectual structures and denies
their analytic probity. It indicts whole discourses and all their works by
showing their conceptual, categorical frameworks in a state of
collapse. In the poststructuralist frame of mind, we search for dialectical fault
lines implanted in discursive frameworks. We deflate argumentative paradigms
built around a characteristic set (one for each target jurisprudence) of
categories, distinctions, and oppositions. We show their failures of closure -perhaps by exposing addiction to a "fundamental contradiction," n51 perhaps
by exposing tactics of recursion and deferral. n52
The pragmatist moment in critical practice is, by contrast, empirical,
epidemiological, and local. It notices characteristic kinds of errors or
biases that recur when target discourses are deployed by nonideal -incompletely committed and assiduous -- practitioners caught in
specific cultural environments. n53 The pragmatically minded critic
does not deny or ignore conceptual instability. Neither does she hold
that conceptual instability per se discredits a framework. Indeed, she
does not especially care to discredit any discourse intrinsically or
holistically. She rather seeks to evaluate the discourse in use (given its
conceptual instabilities) by ordinarily complacent, culturally bound
practitioners. She asks, for example, about the tendency of the discourse, in
its cultural setting, to focus [*1032] on some problems and blur others.
Pragmatically successful critique does not necessarily mean that
practitioners give up use of the framework. It may mean, rather, that
they watch out and correct for biases to which the culturally situated
framework is prone.
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Kritik Answers
**Nuclearism**
Nuclearism Answers: 2AC (1/3)
FIRST, PERM DO BOTH
NUCLEARISM CANT SOLVE WITHOUT A POLITICS
Lifton & Falk 82
[Robert Jay & Richard, Prof. Psychiatry * Prof Intl Affairs, Indefensible Weapons:
The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism, New York: Basic Books,
133]
. The entrenched forces that stand behind nuclearism are
powerful and wily, and, if necessary, ruthless. Popular movements are
notoriously easy to coopt, divert, infiltrate, bore, and outlast. For the antinuclear
movement to succeed, it desperately needs a politics , that is, a clear understanding of what must
yet we must not be too encouraged
be changed and how to do it. This understanding of what must be changed and how to do it. This understanding must also include an alternative
idea of security. The antinuclear ranks are not composed of idealists who believe that peace on earth, goodwill to men and women is an idea
whose time has come. Overwhelmingly they are acting out of fear of the nuclear menace, increasingly deciding that this fear takes precedence
in the end this movement

will not succeed unless it combines a negation of nuclearism with the persuasive
creation of new ways to protect independence and territorial integrity of the
states that make up world society. At this time, then, it is crucial to initiate discussions of the politics of
over their more traditional concerns about national defense and preserving a way of life. But
antinuclearism. My hope is that this book is read primarily as a contribution to this work.
SECOND, THEY HAVENT DISPROVED OUR TRUTH CLAIMS

IN THE STATUS QUO THERE REALLY IS A THREAT OF
NUCLEAR DISASTER. UNLESS THEY TAKE OUT THE IMPACT,
VOTE AFF.
THIRD, REALISM SOLVES THEIR ARGUMENT NUMBING IS
IRRELEVENT IF DETERRENCE AND SELF-INTEREST
PREVENT AGENTS FROM USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
CROSS-APPLY KHALILZAD
FOURTH, NUCLEARISM IS INEVITABLE MAINTENANCE
AND DETERRENCE ARE NECESSARY FOR WORLD PEACE
Robinson 2001
, there are
nevertheless
I personally see
in any foreseeable

760
Kritik Answers
hands."

nuclear
761
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FIFTH, IMAGINING NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION IS A PROJECT
OF SURVIVAL THEIR ALTERNATIVE CREATES REPRESSION
AND DENIAL WHICH MAKES NUCLEAR WAR MORE LIKELY
9-10)
all people


yet another aspect of our insulation from lifes most basic realities . We make love by

understanding.

SIXTH, WE DO NOT REALLY KNOW THE IMPACT TO

NUCLEAR WAR- DENYING THAT DESTRUCTION CAN OCCUR
THROUGH THE CRITICISM FURTHERS NUMBING
Lifton and Markusen, Prof of International Relations @ Princeton U and
Assist Researcher @ U of New York, 90 (Robert Jay and Eric, The Genocidal Mentality, P.
203)
Not only are we much more ignorant
about what we call nuclear war than we care to admit, but "we don't know how
much we do or do not know about it." Since, as the Israeli philosopher Avner Cohen points out, "we do
Dissociation is called forth to cover over and deny ignorance.
not really know how to conceive of nuclear warfare as a concrete actuality, how it could be properly kept under control
and how it might be brought to termination," it is less than responsible to claim how such an event could be "managed,
all evidence suggests that "no matter what nuclear war

might be, it would not be the kind of rule-governed practice" often assumed on
the basis of past wars. And while the principle of deterrence has a long history in political and military
controlled or concluded." But
practice going back to the time of the Greek city-states, the consequences, should deterrence fail and the deterrer act on
his threat, were always limited: after the war and destruction, there would be recovery and resumption of life.
Precisely the present absence of those limits "should deterrence fail," the un certainty or unlikelihood of any significant amount of human life remaining,
radically distinguishes nuclear deterrence from that tradition. Dissociation,
especially in the form of psychic numbing, helps blur that distinction by denying
not only our ignorance but also what we can be expected to know.
762
Kritik Answers

SEVENTH, CRITICIZING NUCLEAR REPRESENTATIONS
DOESNT PRECLUDE THE NEED FOR CONCRETE ACTION
Richard

to practice.
More generally

think that

Derrida calls "
We have been
EIGHTH, MEDIA IMAGES PLAY THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF

REVEALING THEIR OWN ILLUSIONS
Jean
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764
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#1 Permutation: 1AR
THE PERMUTATION TO DO THE PLAN WHILE RETHINKING
SOLVES BEST THEIR OWN AUTHOR SAYS THAT THERE IS
NO SINGLE TRUTH ENGAGING IN POLITICAL ACTION AND
RECOGNIZING THE POWER OF THE HUMAN RACE ALLOWS
US TO RESIST NUCLEAR AGGRESSION
Lifton and Markusen, Prof of International Relations @ Princeton U and
Assist Researcher @ U of New York, 90 (Robert Jay and Eric, The Genocidal Mentality, P.
278-279)
Species awareness means awareness of human choice: "This is not the End of
Timeunless we choose to make it so. We need not accept the death
sentence . . . .We are not powerless." By choosing instead a human future, we arein the words of the
Polish Solidarity leader Adam Michnik"defending hope." And "hope is important. Perhaps more important than anything
else." Hope is greatly enhancedas is the acceptance of individual mortalityby the sense of reasserting the
immortality of the species. The task is intensified by the psychological upheavals we can expect in connection with the
we must recognize that the

hopeful future is not an apocalyptic heavenly peace but rather expanded
awareness on behalf of human continuity. This adaptation will not eliminate
peoples need to define themselves in relation to otherness, but it can begin to
subsume that otherness to larger human commonality. It must include struggles
against widespread oppression and drastic human inequities by invoking the kind of
originality in political action that has taken place in the Solidarity movement in Polandand in related
millennial transition of the year 2000. Whatever the millennial imagery,
movements in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgariaand was so cruelly frustrated in the student
This
species-oriented approach would defy the given models of defiance. No one
can claim knowledge of a single, correct path. Rather, there must be endless
combinations of reflection and action and, above all, the kind of larger collective
adaptation we have been discussing. At the same time, we must remain aware
of persisting genocidal arrangements and expressions of genocidal mentality.
We cannot afford to stop thinking. Nor can we wait for a new Gandhi or Saint Joan to deliver us.
Rather, each of us must join in a vast project political, ethical, psychologicalon
behalf of perpetuating and nurturing our humanity. We are then people getting
up from their knees to resist nuclear oppression. We clear away the thick
glass that has blurred our moral and political vision. We become healers, not
killers, of our species.
movement in China: Political action that enlarges, rather than blights or destroys, human possibilities.
765
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#4 Nuclear Weapons Key to Peace:

1AR
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE NECESSARY FOR WORLD PEACE,
ELIMINATING EVILS, AND ENSURING PROTECTIONS OF
FREEDOMS THEIR ARGUMENT IGNORES THE RATIONAL
BASIS FOR THE CREATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
With the above statement as background I observe that many peace activists
confront the evil impulse in the powers of war with the evil impulse in
themselves. They rightly see nuclear war as a threat to the planet, and therefore
a threat to themselves and humanity, and so confront the threat of violence with
anger. Such an attitude is self-defeating, because acting from it creates more
conflict, rather than less. Rather than making peace, such action merely makes
war on war.
Now the peace activists didn't invent this type of response. In the same spirit,
nuclear weapons were first invented by good people who were confronting the
evil of the Nazis (who were trying to develop their own atomic bomb) with the
evil impulse in themselves. And by continuing to develop and/or maintain a
stockpile of them we give our assent to this evil impulse. I give my assent.
I give it because in response to the Nazis, I would have done the same thing. In
response to Stalinism, I would also have done as my predecessors did. I believe
that Nazism had to be defeated at all costs, and Stalinism had to be contained,
in order to preserve and enlarge the freedoms that I hold dear for myself and for
all people. Such a response satisfies the criterion of Utilitarianism -- the greatest
good for the greatest number -- at least in its outcome so far. Even the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which hastened the defeat of the evil of
Japanese Imperialism, satisfies the criterion of Utilitarianism in that it spared the
loss of American lives and the even worse devastation of Japan and loss of
Japanese lives that would have resulted from a conventional invasion. And I
suppose I would have supported it for that reason. (And if you think there we
could have demonstrated the bomb over an unpopulated area, remember that
we used our entire stockpile of two bombs, and that it took two cities, to bring
about the surrender.) [29] But the image of an orphaned baby, burned and
screaming, annihilates forever the argument that it was good. [30] It was an evil
response of good people to evil, and it was the best that we humans could do at
the time.
[30] Ironically, what I had remembered as an image of Hiroshima turns out to be
H. S. Wong's photo taken after the Japanese conventional bombing of Nanking
on August 29, 1937.
And so the question of whether I am good or evil in my participation in the
nuclear weapons business is already contained in the discussion of yezer tov and
yezer ra, above. Or in the Christian idea that we are simultaneously sinners and
saints. I am neither one nor the other -- like you, I am both. In associating with a
nuclear weapons program, I confront the evil of potential aggressors against
America with my own evil impulse. On the other hand, it is necessary (but not
sufficient) for us to defend our turf, even in this outrageous manner, if we are to
defend our freedom. (Otherwise we risk being attacked just for being vulnerable.
And if the old enemy is no longer visible on our horizon, all we need do is to
become complacent for a new one to appear.) Just as an individual needs his evil
impulse to live, so does a nation. The question is not how to eliminate the evil
impulse -- the question is how to harness it. How can we use it for good?[31]
766
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#5 Fear of Nuc Weapons Solves

Usage: 1AR
FEAR OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS HAS PREVENTED THEIR USE
DETERRENCE HAS CHECKED CONFLICT
Rajaraman, Professor of Theoretical Physics at JNU, 2K2 (R., Ban battlefield
nuclear weapons, The Hindu, April 22,
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/04/22/stories/2002042200431000.htm[
There were a variety of different reasons behind each of these examples of abstinence from using nuclear weapons. But
one major common factor contributing to all of them has been an ingrained terror of nuclear devastation. The well
documented images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the awesome photographs of giant mushroom clouds emerging from
Armageddon scenarios have all

contributed to building up a deep rooted fear of nuclear weapons . This is not limited just
to the abhorrence felt by anti-nuclear activists. It permeates to one extent or another the
psyche of all but the most pathological of fanatics. It colours the calculations,
even if not decisively, of the most hardened of military strategists. The
unacceptability of nuclear devastation is the backbone of all deterrence
strategies. There is not just a fear of being attacked oneself, but also a strong mental barrier
against actually initiating nuclear attacks on enemy populations, no matter how
much they may be contemplated in war games and strategies. As a result a
taboo has tacitly evolved over the decades preventing nations, at least so far,
from actually pressing the nuclear button even in the face of serious military
crises.
nuclear tests in the Pacific and the numerous movies based on nuclear
767
Kritik Answers
#5 Fear of Nuc Weapons Solves

Usage: Ext
FEAR AND HORROR FORCE PEOPLE TO TAKE THE PATH
TOWARDS PEACE
But the inhibitory effect of reliable nuclear weapons goes deeper than Shirer's
deterrence of adventurer-conquerors. It changes the way we think individually
and culturally, preparing us for a future we cannot now imagine. Jungian
psychiatrist Anthony J. Stevens states, [15]
"History would indicate that people cannot rise above their narrow sectarian
concerns without some overwhelming paroxysm. It took the War of
Independence and the Civil War to forge the United States, World War I to create
the League of Nations, World War II to create the United Nations Organization
and the European Economic Community. Only catastrophe, it seems, forces
people to take the wider view.
Or what about fear? Can the horror which we all experience when we
contemplate the possibility of nuclear extinction mobilize in us sufficient libidinal
energy to resist the archetypes of war? Certainly, the moment we become blas
about the possibility of holocaust we are lost. As long as horror of nuclear
exchange remains uppermost we can recognize that nothing is worth it. War
becomes the impossible option. Perhaps horror, the experience of horror, the
consciousness of horror, is our only hope. Perhaps horror alone will enable us to
overcome the otherwise invincible attraction of war."
Thus I also continue engaging in nuclear weapons work to help fire that worldhistorical warning shot I mentioned above, namely, that as our beneficial
technologies become more powerful, so will our weapons technologies, unless
genuine peace precludes it. We must build a future more peaceful than our past,
if we are to have a future at all, with or without nuclear weapons a fact we
had better learn before worse things than nuclear weapons are invented. If
you're a philosopher, this means that I regard the nature of humankind as
mutable rather than fixed, but that I think most people welcome change in their
personalities and cultures with all the enthusiasm that they welcome death
thus, the fear of nuclear annihilation of ourselves and all our values may be what
we require in order to become peaceful enough to survive our future
technological breakthroughs.[16]
Of course, we could just try for a world-wide halt to scientific research and
technological change. This is obviously not desirable because technological
change serves humanity like biological diversity serves life in general -- it gives
us ways to cope with new challenges to our existence. For example, medical
scientists deliberately forced the smallpox virus into virtual extinction. Nor is
halting technological change possible, because the demand for such change is
so great people want the new stuff so much that they actually buy it.
The fear of nuclear annihilation may be what we require in order to become
peaceful enough to survive our future technological breakthroughs.
In other words, when the peace movement tells the world that we need to treat
each other more kindly, I and my colleagues stand behind it (like Malcolm X
stood behind Martin Luther King, Jr.) saying, "Or else." We provide the peace
movement with a needed sense of urgency that it might otherwise lack.
Fear of Nuclear Weapons Good: Ext

(1/4)
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FEAR IS OKAY IN THE CONTEXT OF A DEBATE ROUND

DISCUSSION HELPS ALLEVIATE THE NUMBING CAUSED BY
FEAR
Dr. Peter M. Sandman is a preeminent risk communication speaker and consultant in
the United States and has also worked extensively abroad, Ph.D. in Communication from
Stanford University in 1971, and Dr. JoAnn M. Valenti, a founding member of SEJ and
elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Scared stiff
or scared into action, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 19 86, pp. 1216, Winner
of the 1986/1987 Olive Branch Award for Outstanding Coverage of the Nuclear Arms Issue,
given by New York Universitys Center for War, Peace, and the News Media,
http://www.psandman.com/articles/scarstif.htm, UK: Fisher
Numerous testimonials indicate that the shock therapy of a fear appeal may
sometimes cut through paralysis. But such testimonials are usually from activists
who were neither paralyzed nor numb in the first place, whose fear was
maintained at reasonable levels by their own activism, and who derived new
energy and reinforcement from what people in the adjacent seats may well have
found intolerable. Our wager is that the fear speeches revitalize the committed
into renewed action, startle the apathetic into fresh attention, and torment the
terrorized and the numb into starker terror and deeper numbness.
In a set of guidelines for Helping People Deal With Terrifying Films, Frances
Peavey advised readers in 1981: Do not stand up after the film is over and try
to scare people with further horrifying facts. This is a violent act and does not
encourage peace. When people are subjected to too much fear-provoking
material, they tend toward numbing, forgetting or feeling so violated that they
are hostile to the overall message.(12) At that time Peavey still saw value in
terrifying films, so long as the discussion afterward helped people deal with
the feelings they aroused. In 1985, when few are apathetic but many are
numbed by terror, the value of the films themselves is much reduced.
FEAR MOTIVATES PEOPLE TO PURSUE CONSTRUCTIVE

MEANS TO SUSTAIN PEACE AND PREVENT LARGE-SCALE
CATASTROPHE
Lifton, Distinguished Prof of Psychiatry and Psychology @ John Jay College,
2K1 (Robert Jay, Illusions of the second nuclear age, World Policy Journal,
Spring, Vol. 18, Iss. 1, P. 25)
dangers associated with nuclear weapons are greater
than ever: the continuing weapons-- centered policies in the United States and elsewhere; the difficulties in
The trouble is that in other ways the
controlling nuclear weapons that exist under unstable conditions (especially in Russia and other areas of the former
the eagerness and potential capacity of certain nations and

"private" groups to acquire and possibly use the weapons. In that sense, the nuclear
quietism is perilous. Or, to put the matter another way, we no longer manifest an
appropriate degree of fear in relation to actual nuclear danger . While fear in itself is hardly
to be recommended as a guiding human emotion, its absence in the face of danger can lead to
catastrophe. We human animals have built-in fear reactions in response to threat.
These reactions help us to protect ourselves-to step back from the path of a
speeding automobile, or in the case of our ancestors, from the path of a wild animal. Fear can be
transmuted into constructive planning and policies: whether for minimizing vulnerability to
attacks by wild animals, or for more complex contemporary threats. Through fear, ordinary people can be
motivated to pursue constructive means for sustaining peace , or at least for limiting
the scope of violence. Similarly, in exchanges between world leaders on behalf of
preventing large-scale conflict, a tinge of fear-sometimes more than a tinge- can enable each
to feel the potential bloodshed and suffering that would result from failure . But with
Soviet Union);2 and
nuclear weapons, our psychological circuits are impaired. We know that the weapons are around-and we hear talk about
nuclear dangers somewhere "out there" -but our minds no longer connect with the dangers or with the weapons
themselves. That blunting of feeling extends into other areas. One of the many sins for which advocates of large nuclear
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stockpiles must answer is the prevalence of psychic numbing to enormous potential suffering, the blunting of our ethical
In the absence of the sort of threatening nuclear rhetoric the

United States and Russia indulged in during the 1980s, we can all too readily
numb ourselves to everything nuclear, and thereby live as though the weapons
pose no danger, or as though they don't exist. To be sure, we have never quite been able to
standards as human beings.
muster an appropriate level of fear with respect to these weapons-one that would spur us to take constructive steps to
remove the threat. We have always been able to numb ourselves in this regard, which must be seen as a basic human
response to a threat that is apocalyptic in scope and so technologically distanced as to be unreal. But there were at least
brief moments when we would awaken from our nuclear torpor.
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(2/4)
THE AFFIRMATIVES ACTIVISM IS CRITICAL TO
EMPOWERING INDIVIDUALS ALLOWING THEM TO BREAK
ANY FEAR CAUSED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Dr. Peter M. Sandman is a preeminent risk communication speaker and consultant in
the United States and has also worked extensively abroad, Ph.D. in Communication from
Stanford University in 1971, and Dr. JoAnn M. Valenti, a founding member of SEJ and
elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Scared stiff
or scared into action, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 19 86, pp. 1216, Winner
of the 1986/1987 Olive Branch Award for Outstanding Coverage of the Nuclear Arms Issue,
given by New York Universitys Center for War, Peace, and the News Media,
http://www.psandman.com/articles/scarstif.htm, UK: Fisher
The main obstacle to action, writes Frank, is neither apathy nor terror but
simply a feeling of helplessness. To combat it, I have perhaps overemphasized
the small signs that antinuclear activities are at last beginning to influence the
political process.(19) Helplessness, hopelessness, futility, and despair are words
one hears even more often than fear from the barely active and the formerly
active. And like fear, these emotions can easily lead to psychic numbing. Those
who feel powerless to prevent nuclear war try not to think about it; and it serves
the needs of those who do not wish to think about nuclear war to feel powerless
to prevent it. Messages of hope and empowerment, however, break this
vicious circle.
The label hope, as we use it, subsumes a wide range of overlapping concepts:
for example, optimism, a sense of personal control and efficacy, confidence in
methods and solutions, a sense of moral responsibility, and a vision of the world
one is aiming for.
It is well established (and hardly surprising) that hope is closely associated with
willingness to act. Activism appeals most to people who feel positive about
both the proposed solution and their personal contribution to its achievement.
Over the long term, this means that antinuclear organizers must communicate a
credible vision of a nuclear-free world. Meanwhile, they must offer people things
to do that seem achievable and worthwhile. The nuclear-weapons-freeze
campaign attracted millions of new activists in 1982 because it offered credible
hope. By 1985 many of those millions could no longer ground their hope in the
freeze; some found other approaches and some returned to inactivity.
Most social psychologists today see the relationship between hope and action as
independent of fear or other feelings. For example, Kenneth H. Beck and Arthur
Frankel conclude that three cognitions (not emotions) determine whether people
will do something about a health risk: recognizing the danger as real, believing
the recommended plan of action will reduce the danger, and having confidence
in their ability to carry out the plan.(20) Similarly, Suttons review of the fearappeal literature finds inconsistent support for the notion that people can accept
higher levels of fear if they feel the proposed solution will remedy the problem,
but strong evidence that, regardless of fear, people are more inclined to act on
solutions they see as more effective.(21)
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(3/4)
NUCLEAR WEAPONRY CHECKS DICTATORIAL CONQUEST
AND GLOBAL WAR
I could say that if I didn't do it, someone else would, but that answer was
rejected at Nuremberg. (It's also a better reason to leave the weapons program
than to stay.) I continue to support the nuclear weapons business with my effort
for many reasons, which I discuss throughout this piece. But mostly, I do it
because the fear of nuclear holocaust is the only authority my own country or
any other has respected so far when it comes to nationalistic urges to make
unlimited war. As William L. Shirer states in his preface to The Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich (Touchstone Books, New York, 1990),
"Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the
tradition of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the
empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia.
The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden
invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile, and of rockets which
can be aimed to hit the moon."
Now this contrasts with the argument of those who would "reinvent government"
by putting up bureaucratic roadblocks to maintaining the reliability of the US
nuclear arsenal through research and testing. They reason that if the reliability
of everyone's nuclear arsenals declines, everyone will be less likely to try using
them. The problem is that some "adventurer-conqueror" may arise and use
everyone's doubt about their arsenals to risk massive conventional war
instead. An expansionist dictatorship might even risk nuclear war with weapons
that are simpler, cruder, less powerful, much riskier (in terms of the possibility of
accidental detonation) but much more reliable than our own may eventually
become without adequate "stockpile stewardship."[14]

(4/4)
NATIONS WILL INEVITABLY SEEK THE DEADLIEST
WEAPONS INGRAINED IN HUMAN NATURE EXISTENCE
OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS CHECKS DEVELOPMENT OF
WORSE WEAPONS IN THE FUTURE
Some people argue that the goal of civilization is to raise our children so that
wars don't happen. Unfortunately, we've had civilization for six thousand years,
and our history has been as dysfunctional as our families. The only thing that's
ever made us pause in our societal "addiction" to war is nuclear weaponry, and
the realization that the next big war may kill us all.
But if war is humanity's heroin, nuclear weaponry is its methadone. That
is, the treatment has potentially dangerous side effects. I am partly referring to
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the doctrine of deterrence by Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD. It is MAD,
because it is intrinsically unstable, as those who lived through the Cuban Missile
Crisis may recall. The Strategic Defense Initiative, (or Star Wars) was an attempt
to move toward something more stable, and its successor, the Ballistic Missile
Defense Organization (BMDO), may in time succeed, provided it is managed as a
research program rather than as a political football. But even a successful BMD
will not make the world stable against massively destructive war -- it will merely
make it more stable than it is now. BMD is a technical fix that does not address
the real cause of the instability.
As long as war is the ultimate arbiter of international disputes, nations will arm
themselves with ultimate weapons. And that means, that if something worse
than nuclear weapons can be discovered and developed, it will be. And then we
will find something worse than that, and so on perhaps until we, ourselves,
prematurely punctuate the end of our universe with as big a bang as the one
which began it. Nuclear weapons may actually be giving us a chance to learn to
get along with each other before we get something really dangerous, a kind of
world-historical warning shot.[8] The problem is not nuclear weapons, the
problem is war.
#5 Nuclear Imagery Good: 1AR

DISCUSSING NUCLEAR WAR IS KEY TO PREVENTIN GIT
DENYING THE POSSIBILITY OF NUCELAR WAR INCREASES
POWERLESSNESS
Goodman & Hoff 90
[Lill & Lee, authors, Omnicide]
Why then do we feel so powerless? One of our problems is a partly voluntary
lack of imagination. It protects us from fully visualizing the unthinkable horrors
of such a war. It also prevents us from insisting that government serve our
mandates (which, after all, defines democracy) rather than the other way
around. Instead of searching for ways to prevent those who consider nuclear war
a viable course of action from every carrying it out, we engage in self-deceptive
maneuvers as a protection against feeling inadequate, helpless, and anxious.
Unfortunately, distorting or denying the gravity of our present condition does not
change its reality. On the contrary, as already noted, it may even be
instrumental in bringing about the disaster.
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A2 Nuclear Numbing: 2AC

NUMBING CAN ONLY BE SOLVED BY EXPOSING THE TRUTH
OF NUCLEARISM PROTECTING PEOPLE FROM EXPOSURE
ONLY DOOMS THEM
Gallagher 93
[Carole, photographer, American Ground Zero: the Secret Nuclear War]
The phrase nuclear numbing was coined by Dr Robert jay Lifton, a psychiatrist
whose definitive studies of the emotional health effects of nuclearism (beginning
most notably with the interviews of the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for
his book Death in Life) have been a major part of his lifes work. His writings
suggest that the passivity, the numbness that I witnessed may have been a
natural byproduct of both the trauma of the atomic bomb tests conducted so
close by (near enough for the shock waves to throw people from their beds) and
the cover-up, the web of lies in which the downwinders were tangled. To cope
with the psychic damage from their betrayal, perhaps it was necessary to avoid
acquiring further information that would make their vague fears specific enough
to require decisive action. In this warping of awareness and crippling of grass
roots political potency, the downwinders were the cold War bellwether of an
increasingly unquestioning nation. They were the unwitting casualties of an
American nuclear jihad the Cold War against Communism. Each society
produces its own slaughter of innocents, of those who are most expendable in
dangerous times, whether the danger is falsely manufactured to achieve a
political end or truly exists. My country right or wrong: the issue of blind
obedience to authority is germane to all societies that value abstract ideals
above life itself. The active or passive role of absolute repression of individual
choice, by either a government or a religion, seems to be a repetition of the
human holocaust syndrome, genocide. And at the heart of this planetary misery
is a manipulative net of what Erasmus called deceitful fictions for the rabble
reaching back into recorded history, with which the powerful few of both the
church and the state control the lives of the many, always for their own good.
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A2 Nuclear Deterrence Immoral:

2AC (1/2)
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE DESIGNED TO DETER WARS
THEY ARE MORALLY ACCEPTABLE BECAUSE THEY SECURE
THE WORLD
Gusterson, Assoc Prof of Anthropology and Science Studies @ MIT and Adjunct
Fellow @ Harvard Us Center for Psychology and Social Change, 93 (Hugh, Ethnographic
Writing on Militarism, Journal of Contemporary Ethnology, April, Vol. 22, No.1, P.72)
How can the anthropologist and the political citizen learn to live together in the same person in such a situation? How, for
example, should one write about an interview subject like Lester,3 who told me that, although his university
colleagues tried to talk him out of working at a nuclear weapons laboratory, their objections did not trouble him? He
believes that it is more ethical to work on nuclear weapons than on less

destructive conventional weapons because nuclear weapons are designed to
deter wars rather than to fight them. He says that he could never work as a lawyer defending
murderers or other criminals but feels morally comfortable with his work as a nuclear warhead designer, and even
if it might be morally reprehensible not to work on nuclear weapons

because, as he sees it, they make the world more stable. Lester is puzzled by those who cannot see
wonders
that nuclear weapons make us safer by making war unthinkable. Like most of his colleagues, he is confident that
nuclear weapons can be controlled by humans, that technological progress is

unavoidable and beneficial, and that nuclear weapons are the embodiment of a
transcendent rationality, which alone can discipline the dark impulses leading
humans to make war. Everything in his life, where he sees the atom bent to the experimental will of human
rationality on a daily basis, confirms those beliefs. Lester does not worry that the United States will misuse the hydrogen
bombs he designs, bombs he describes as "no more strange than a vacuum cleaner. You don't feel a fear for them at
all." In fact, he sees weapons technology as "beautiful." "How do I explain that?" he asked me. "To me, a spectrometer is
a very pretty thing ... and you feel badly that it's going to be destroyed [in a nuclear test]."
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Kritik Answers
A2 Nuclear Deterrence Immoral:

2AC (2/2)
DETERRENCE IS MORAL
A)NECESSARY TO THWART IMMORAL REGIMES
B)ALL OTHER SECURITY REGIMES RELY ON DETERRENCE,
MAKING THE MORAL DILEMMA INEVITABLE
Joseph, Under Secretary Arms Control & International Security and Former
Professor of National Security Studies & Director of the Center for
Counterproliferation Research at the National Defense University, 98 (Robert,

THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR DETERRENCE TODAY, Orbis, Winter, Volume 42, Issue
1)
the blanket charge that any use of nuclear weapons--and even
reliance on the threat of nuclear retaliation for deterrence--would be immoral goes
Morality and ethics. In terms of morality,
beyond past proclamations, such as those contained in the 1983 Catholic bishops' pastoral letter which, while calling for
general disarmament and condemning the first use of nuclear weapons, left ambiguous the role of nuclear weapons for
deterrence. If allowed to stand unchallenged, such a charge could carry substantial weight in the policy debate,
especially in a democracy (and perhaps only in a democracy) built upon moral principles. But it does not take a trained
are at best simplistic, and perhaps--in light

of what we know about human nature and history--dangerous in themselves . The
ethicist to recognize that such blanket moral assertions
use, or even threat of use, of any weapon may contain elements of moral ambiguity. And like other weapons--whether a
club in Rwanda or artillery surrounding Sarajevo--nuclear weapons could be used in ways that are clearly immoral.
Moreover, the scale of destruction that could result from the employment of even a few nuclear weapons makes
imperative the need to consider carefully the full range of moral issues associated with the possession of these weapons.
Perhaps for this reason, well-intentioned people have for decades debated where ethical lines should be drawn regarding
policymakers during
were forced to decide where the greater risk lay and make decisions
with real consequences. Given the awful consequences of failure, the choice was not simple. On the one
the possession and use of nuclear weapons. Yet, within this realm of considerable ambiguity,
the Cold War
hand, nuclear deterrence could fail. In the aftermath of such failure, it was possible (but by no means certain, insofar as a
conscious choice for use would have to be made by political authorities) that nuclear weapons would be unleashed on
in the absence of a credible

nuclear deterrent, conventional deterrence could fail, as it had so often in the
past, twice globally, resulting in another devastating war with casualties perhaps
even greater than those in World War II. Looking back, one might even argue that those
who condemned nuclear weapons as immoral were simply wrong. The Western alliance's
nuclear weapons were in fact the moral weapon of choice. They worked precisely
as intended by deterring an immoral totalitarian state from attacsking Western
Europe and undermining the peace, values, and freedom which the democracies
cherished. Indeed, given the tens of millions of innocent noncombatants killed in
two world wars, one can argue that the possession of nuclear weapons to deter
yet another outbreak of mass slaughter by conventional weapons, either in Europe or
Asia, was squarely in the just war tradition. The argument that the external environment has changed
civilian populations with truly catastrophic consequences. On the other hand,
so much with the end of the Cold War that no ethical or moral basis for nuclear arms remains is likewise unconvincing.
American lives and interests remain threatened. In fact, the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons have made
the likelihood of conflict and the prospect of the use of weapons of mass destruction even greater than in the past in
several key regions. But just as before, sound public and defense policy will emerge only from a prudent calculation of
risks and benefits, not from sweeping generalizations about the morality or immorality of possession or use of nuclear
The "new eliminationists" who wrap themselves in the cloak of moral

superiority and certainty should be asked to address the consequences of disarming
the great democracies in a world in which advanced conventional, chemical, and
biological weapons (and in some cases nuclear capabilities) continue to spread among states
explicitly hostile to democratic values.
weapons.
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A2 Proliferation K: 2AC
CRITICISM OF THIRD WORLD NUCLEARPOWERS NOT
ETHNOCENTRIC WE THINK ALL NUCLEAR POWERS ARE
IRRESPONSIBLE
Rao & Vanaik 2002
[Parsa & Achin, All Nuclear Powers are Irresponsible, Gulf News, June 10,
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/02/06/10/53954.html, acc 9-38-06//uwyo-ajl]
Does the nuclear belligerence of India and Pakistan confirm Western criticism
that Third World countries possessing nuclear weapons cannot be expected to
behave responsibly?
All nuclear powers, whether they belong to the West or to the Third World, are
irresponsible. How else can you explain the stockpiling of nuclear weapons by
the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War? It was sheer madness because
they did not make hundreds of nuclear warheads for deterrence. They had the
capacity to destroy not only each other but the whole world many times over. It
was sheer irresponsibility.
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**Religion**
Wrath of God Answers: 2AC (1/6)
1. NO LINK THERES NO WARRANT FOR WHY PLAN
MAKES ANY METAPHYSICAL ENTITY ANGRY
2. SOULS DONT EXIST. HUMAN IDENTITY IS NOTHING
MORE THAN AN ARRANGEMENT OF FINITE QUANTUM
STATES
Tipler 94
The Bekenstein Bound follows from the basic postulates of quantum
theory combined with the further assumptions that (1) the system is
bounded in energy, and (2) the system is bounded, or localized, in
space. A rigorous proof of the Bekenstein Bound would require quantum
field theory, but it is easy to describe in outline why quantum mechanics
leads to such a bound on the information coded in a bounded region. In
essence, the Bekenstein Bound is a manifestation of the uncertainty
principle. Recall that the uncertainty principle tells us that there is a limit
to the precision with which we can measure the momentum of a particle
and its position. More precisely, the uncertainty principle says that the
location of a point in phase space-a concept I defined in Chapter IIIcannot be defined more closely thal1 Planck's constant h. Since a
system's state is defined by where it is located in phase space, this
means that the number of possible states is less than or equal to the
size of the phase space region the system could be in, divided by the
size of the minimum phase space size, Planck's constant. (I've given a
mathematical expression of this argument in the Appendix for
Scientists.) This state counting procedure, based on there being an
absolute minimum size h to a phase space interval, is an absolutely
essential method of quantum statistical mechanics. We have already
used it in Chapter III to prove the almost periodicity of a bounded
quantum system. It is confirmed by the thousands of experiments which
have been based on this counting method.9 In high energy particle
physics, any calculation of the "cross section" requires counting the
possible number of particle initial and final states, and the above state
counting method is used.lO The cross section, which is the measure of
how many particles scatter in a particular direction when they collide in
particle accelerators, is the basic quantity tested in particle physics. The
Bekenstein Bound on the number of possible states is thus confirmed by
the correctness of the calculated cross sections. In summary, the
Bekenstein Bound on the total information that can be coded in a region
is an absolute solid conclusion of modern physics, a result as solid as the
Rock of Gibraltar.
One can also use the Bekenstein Bound to deduce an upper bound to the
rate of information processing. The time for light to cross a sphere of a
given diameter is equal to the diameter of the sphere divided by the
speed of light. Since a state inside the sphere cannot completely change
until a signal has time to travel trom one side to the other, the rate of
information processing is bounded above by the above Bekenstein
Bound divided by this time interval. Putting in the numbers (details in
the Appendix for Scientists), we calculate that the rate of state change is
less than or equal to 4 X 1051 bits per second, multiplied by the mass of
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the system in kilograms. That is, the rate of information processing
possible for a system depends only on the mass of the system, not on its
spatial size or on any other variable. So a human being of mass 100
kilograms cannot change state more rapidly than about 4 X 1053 times
per second. This number is of course enormous-and in fact a human will
probably change state much, much more slowly than this-but it's finite.
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3. TURN FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANITY REQUIRES
STONING OF DIVORCEES AND HELLFIRE FOR GLBT
INDIVIDUALS, JUSTIFYING THE MURDER OF INNOCENT
INDIVIDUALS LIKE MATTHEW SHEPARD AND IS AN
INDEPENDENT REASON TO REJECT THE NEG
4. THERE ARE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF POSSIBLE DEITIES
AND YOU CANT BE CERTAIN OF WHICH ONE IS REAL.
TAKING A POSITION ON ONE INCREASES THE CHANCE OF
PISSING OFF ONE OF THE OTHER ONES, MEANING THE
SAFEST POSITION IS ONE OF NEUTRALITY
5. IF GOD EXISTS, ITS PROVEN THAT IT WONT INTERACT
WITH OUR REALITY, MEANING THERES NO IMPACT
Infidels.org 2003
[An Introduction to Atheism, February 24,
www.infidels.org/news/atheism/intro.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajlo]
If God interacts with our universe in any way, the effects of his
interaction must have some physical manifestation. Hence his
interaction with our universe must be in principle detectable.
If God is essentially non-detectable, it must therefore be the case that he
does not interact with our universe in any way. Many atheists would
argue that if God does not interact with our universe at all, it is of no
importance whether he exists or not. A thing which cannot even be
detected in principle does not logically exist.
Of course, it could be that God is detectable in principle, and that we
merely cannot detect him in practice. However, if the Bible is to be
believed, God was easily detectable by the Israelites. Surely he should
still be detectable today? Why has the situation changed?
Note that I am not demanding that God interact in a scientifically
verifiable, physical way. I might potentially receive some revelation,
some direct experience of God. An experience like that would be
incommunicable, and not subject to scientific verification -- but it would
nevertheless be as compelling as any evidence can be.
But whether by direct revelation or by observation, it must surely be
possible to perceive some effect caused by God's presence; otherwise,
how can I distinguish him from all the other things that don't exist?
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6. PERM DO BOTH. YOU CAN ACKNOWLEDGE GODS
EXISTENCE AND STILL VOTE AFF.
7. RELIGION HAS CAUSED MORE EARTHLY DESTRUCTION,
CONFLICT, AND SUFFERING THAN ANY OTHER FORCE
Infidels.org 2003
Religion represents a huge financial and work burden on mankind. It's
not just a matter of religious believers wasting their money on church
buildings; think of all the time and effort spent building churches,
praying, and so on. Imagine how that effort could be better spent.
Many theists believe in miracle healing. There have been plenty of
instances of ill people being "healed" by a priest, ceasing to take the
medicines prescribed to them by doctors, and dying as a result. Some
theists have died because they have refused blood transfusions on
religious grounds.
It is arguable that the Catholic Church's opposition to birth control -- and
condoms in particular -- is increasing the problem of overpopulation in
many third-world countries and contributing to the spread of AIDS worldwide.
Religious believers have been known to murder their children rather
than allow their children to become atheists or marry someone of a
different religion. Religious leaders have been known to justify murder
on the grounds of blasphemy.
There have been many religious wars. Even if we accept the argument
that religion was not the true cause of those wars, it was still used as an
effective justification for them.
8A. IF EVOLUTION IS TRUE, THEN EVERYTHING IN THE

BIBLE IS A LIE
Gitt 95
[Werner, Creationist Information Scientist, 10 Dangers of theistic
evolution, Creation Ex Nihilo, vol 17 no 4, September-November,
www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1305.asp, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
The entire Bible bears witness that we are dealing with a source of truth
authored by God (2 Timothy 3:16), with the Old Testament as the
indispensable 'ramp' leading to the New Testament, like an access road
leads to a motor free way (John 5:39). The biblical creation account
should not be regarded as a myth, a parable, or an allegory, but as a
historical report, because:
Biological, astronomical and anthropological facts are given in didactic
[teaching] form.
In the Ten Commandments God bases the six working days and one day
of rest on the same time-span as that described in the creation account
(Exodus 20:8-11).
In the New Testament Jesus referred to facts of the creation (e.g.
Matthew 19:4-5).
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Nowhere in the Bible are there any indications that the creation account
should be understood in any other way than as a factual report.
The doctrine of theistic evolution undermines this basic way of reading
the Bible, as vouched for by Jesus, the prophets and the Apostles. Events
reported in the Bible are reduced to mythical imagery, and an
understanding of the message of the Bible as being true in word and
meaning is lost.
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B. THE OVERWHELMING WEIGHT OF EXPERIMENTAL AND
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE VERIFIES EVOLUTION
Talkorigins.org 97
[The absolute best site on evolution on the internet, period,
contributed to by biological scientists, Five Major Misconceptions
about Evolution, October 1, talkorigins.org/faqs/faqmisconceptions.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
Biologists define evolution as a change in the gene pool of a population
over time. One example is insects developing a resistance to pesticides
over the period of a few years. Even most Creationists recognize that
evolution at this level is a fact. What they don't appreciate is that this
rate of evolution is all that is required to produce the diversity of all
living things from a common ancestor.
The origin of new species by evolution has also been observed, both in
the laboratory and in the wild. See, for example, (Weinberg, J.R., V.R.
Starczak, and D. Jorg, 1992, "Evidence for rapid speciation following a
founder event in the laboratory." Evolution 46: 1214-1220). The
"Observed Instances of Speciation" FAQ in the talk.origins archives gives
several additional examples.
Even without these direct observations, it would be wrong to say that
evolution hasn't been observed. Evidence isn't limited to seeing
something happen before your eyes. Evolution makes predictions about
what we would expect to see in the fossil record, comparative anatomy,
genetic sequences, geographical distribution of species, etc., and these
predictions have been verified many times over. The number of
observations supporting evolution is overwhelming.
What hasn't been observed is one animal abruptly changing into a
radically different one, such as a frog changing into a cow. This is not a
problem for evolution because evolution doesn't propose occurrences
even remotely like that. In fact, if we ever observed a frog turn into a
cow, it would be very strong evidence against evolution.
9. THERES NO EVIDENCE THAT GOD WILL TAKE CARE OF

THE PROBLEMS OF CASE. ITS EMPIRICALLY DENIED BY
THE MANY ECO-CATASTROPHES LIKE THE TSUNAMI THAT
SHE OR HE MANAGED TO OVERLOOK
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10. GOD DOESNT EXISTPARADOX OF CAUSATION
PROVES
Russell no date
Bertrand, philosopher, http://members.aol.com/JAlw/joseph_alward.html
"If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there
can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God,
so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the
same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant
and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How
about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject."
The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the
world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other
hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is
no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that
things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our
imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon
the argument about the First Cause."
11. EMOTIONS ARGUMENT PROVES GOD DOESNT EXIST

EVILBIBLE.COM 03
A God who knows everything cannot have emotions. The Bible says
that God experiences all of the emotions of humans, including anger,
sadness, and happiness. We humans experience emotions as a result of
new knowledge. A man who had formerly been ignorant of his wife's
infidelity will experience the emotions of anger and sadness only after
he has learned what had previously been hidden. In contrast, the
omniscient God is ignorant of nothing. Nothing is hidden from him,
nothing new may be revealed to him, so there is no gained knowledge to
which he may emotively react.
We humans experience anger and frustration when something is
wrong which we cannot fix. The perfect, omnipotent God, however, can
fix anything. Humans experience longing for things we lack. The perfect
God lacks nothing. An omniscient, omnipotent, and perfect God who
experiences emotion is impossible.
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12A. SEX ABUSE IS ENDEMIC TO CHRISTIANITY
Rice 01
(Fredric, The Skeptic Tank January 17, 2001
http://www.skeptictank.org/clrabuse.htm)
The problem of Christian clergy child sexual abuse is so epidemic in Westernized
socities that the "Sodomizing Priest" has become both stereotypical and cliche.
It's not limited to one particular brand name of Christianity; it's not an aspect of
ideological differences; it's epidemic to all Christian brand names.
B. SEX ABUSE DESTROYS SPIRITUALITY

Franz 02
(Thaeda, Liberty University, Power, Patriarchy and Sexual Abuse in the Christian
Church,http://www.fsu.edu/~trauma/v8/Church.pdf)
In the book, Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches (1993), Carol
Heggen describes the manner in which sexual abuse can leave victims
feeling spiritually
bereft. Her discussion of the problems between victims of sexual abuse
and the church is threefold. First, according to Heggen, the church has
ignored the problem of sexual
abuse. Second, the church has ignored victims of sexual abuse. Third,
the church through policies and subtle patriarchal language- has
enveloped perpetrators in a web of
safety where their violations will be forgiven and forgotten under the
guise of grace.
Heggen (1993) claims there can be profound spiritual damage in the
instances of
sexual abuse where the abuser and the victim are both religious. If the
victim prayed to
God for protection, and the abuse continued, the victim may see God as
uncaring
(Heggen, 1993). If the perpetrator is a church leader, the violation is
even worse. For
example, if a little girl is being molested by her father, who is a minister,
both the
violation of the father/daughter trust, and the pastor/church member
trust occurs. This
can hinder the victims ability to develop a close relationship with God in
the future. God
begins to be associated with the experience of molestation, and can
keep the victim from seeking out religious spiritual help later in life. The
fact that the church at worst
unwilling, and at best unable to discuss sexual abuse has not made it
any easier for these victims to have their questions answered regarding
God and His not having protected them.
785
Kritik Answers
#1 Finite Quantum States: 1AR

EXTEND 2AC NUMBER 2 TIPLER 94 EVIDENCE. QUANTUM
MECHANICS PROVES THAT YOUR IDENTITY IS NOTHING
MORE THAN A SERIES OF QUANTUM PARTICLE STATES.
YOU SHOULD PREFER OUR EVIDENCE ON THIS POINT
BECAUSE ITS BASED ON EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE IN THE LAB
AND IS FALSIFIABLE, WHEREAS THEIR EVIDENCE IS
UNEVIDENCED CONJECTURE THAT YOU COULD NEVER
DETERMINE WHETHER IT WAS TRUE OR NOT. THIS HAS
TWO IMPACTS:
A. IT TAKES OUT THE INTERNAL LINK TO ALL OF THEIR
OFFENSE BECAUSE YOU NO LONGER EXIST AFTER YOU
DIE, MEANING NO RISK OF HELLFIRE
B. IT MEANS CASE OUTWEIGHS BECAUSE DEATH IS
FINAL, ANNIHILATING YOUR IDENTITY. PLAN IS THE
ONLY WAY TO CONTINUE YOUR EXISTENCE
AND, COMPLEX INFORMATION PROCESSING IS THE BASIS
OF LIFE, MEANING THAT DEATH CAUSES ANNIHILATION OF
CONSCIOUSNESS
Tipler 94
IN ORDER TO INVESTIGATE WHETHER LIFE can continue to exist forever,
I shall need to define "life" in physics language. I claim that a "living
being" is any entity which codes information (in the physics sense of this
word) with the information coded being preserved by natural selection.
Thus "life" is a form of information processing, and the human mind-and
the human soul-is a very complex computer program. Specifically, a
"person" is defined to be a computer program which can pass the Turing
test, which was discussed in Chapter II.
This definition of "life" is quite different from what the average personand the average biologist-would think of as "life." In the traditional
definition, life is a complex process based on the chemistry of the carbon
atom. However, even supporters of the traditional definition admit that
the key words are "complex process" and not "carbon atom."
Although the entities everyone agrees are "alive" happen to be based on
carbon chemistry, there is no reason to believe that analogous processes
cannot be based on other systems. In fact, the British biochemist A. G.
Cairns-Smith! has suggested that the first living beings--':our ultim:ate
ancestors-were based on metallic crystals, not carbon. If this is true,
then if we insist that living beings must be based on carbon chemistry,
we would be forced to conclude that our ultimate ancestors were not
alive. In Cairns-Smith's theory, our ultimate ancestors were selfreplicating patterns of defects in the metallic crystals. Over time, the
pattern persisted, but was transferred to another substrate: carbon
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molecules. What is important is not the substrate but the pattern, and
the pattern is another name for information.
But life of course is not a static pattern. Rather, it is a dynamic pattern
that persists overtime. It is thus a process. But not all processes are
alive. The key feature of the "living" patterns is that their persistence is
due to a feedback with their environment: the information coded in the
pattern continually varies, but the variation is constrained to a narrow
range by this feedback. Thus life is, as I stated, information preserved by
natural selection.
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A2 Cant Disprove Gods

Existence: 1AR
FIRST, THATS BECAUSE NO NEGATIVE IS PROVABLE.
HOWEVER, IN LIGHT OF AN ABSENCE OF ANY EMPIRICAL
EVIDENCE, YOU MIGHT AS WELL ASSUME THAT IT
DOESNT EXIST. I CANT PROVE PINK UNICORNS DONT
EXIST, BUT THERES STILL NO RATIONAL BASIS TO
ASSUME THAT THEY DO
SECOND, EVEN IF GOD DOES EXIST, THERES NO
INDICATION THAT IT INTERACTS WITH OUR WORLD,
MAKING THIS IRRELEVENT
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#7 Religious Suffering: 1AR (1/3)

RELIGIOUS DOGMATISM BREEDS INTOLERANCE AND
VIOLENCE
Nussbaum 2004
[Martha, Ernst Freund distinguished service prof of law and ethics at U of
chicago, Relgious Intolerance, Foreign Policy, Sept/Oct, 44//uwyo-ajl]
Sometimes old ideas are the most dangerous, and few ideas are older
than those that undergird religious intolerance. Lamentably, these ideas
are acquiring new life. In 2002, Hindus in Gujarat, India, killed several
hundred Muslims, with the collaboration of public officials and the police.
Europe has recently seen a frightening rebirth of anti-Semitism, while
the appeal of radical forms of Islam appears to be increasing in the
Muslim world. Prejudice against Muslims and a tendency to equate Islam
with terrorism are too prominent in the United States. On and on it goes.
Intolerance breeds intolerance, as expressions of hatred fuel existing
insecurities and permit people to see their own aggression as legitimate
self-defense.
CHRISTIANITY CAUSES HATRED AND WAR

Dolgorukii 97
(Alexis, columnist, Associated press: 26 May 1997)
I would like to have "the undoubted blessings brought by Christianity"
demonstrated to me. As for myself, as an historian I can find nothing at all that
Christianity has done to make life on this planet better for the greatest mass of
people. Christians have always babbled blithely about "love and peace" but I
see absolutely no historical indication that they have produced anything but
hatred and war! Christians also babble on about "Christian Charity", but that too
is a lie. Charity existed long before Christianity and Christian Charity (such as it
is) has always come with chains of adamant fastened to it. "Christian Charity" is
best exemplified by "The Salvation Army", a militant Christian Organization that
feeds the hungry but insists that they be evangelized along with dinner!
RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE GIVES WAY TO NIHILISM AND

THE JUSTIFICATION OF SUFFERING AND INEQUALITY
Nussbaum 2004
[Martha, Ernst Freund distinguished service prof of law and ethics at U of
The appeal of religious intolerance is easy to understand. From an early
age, humans are aware of helplessness toward things of the highest
importance, such as food, love, and life itself. Religion helps people cope
with loss and the fear of death; it teaches moral principles and motivates
people to follow them. But precisely because religions are such powerful
sources of morality and community, they all too easily become vehicles
for the flight from helplessness, which so often manifests itself in
oppression and the imposition of hierarchy. In todays accelerating world,
people confront ethnic and religious differences in new and frightening
ways. By clinging to a religion they believe to be the right one,
surrounding themselves with coreligionists, and then subordinating
others who do not accept that religion, people can forget for a time their
weakness and mortality.
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CHRISTIANITY KILLED MORE PEOPLE THAN THE NAZIS
Dolgorukii 97 (Alexis, columnist, Associated press: 26 May 1997)
What has Christianity given humanity? Well, there's the Inquisition,
which murdered more people than the Nazi death camps. There's the
various Crusades, which murdered millions in the name of the "Prince of
Peace". There's the religious Wars of the Reformation which killed untold
millions of people in Europe. And there's the Nazis themselves, who
never would have been able to preach their doctrine of racial hatred had
that hatred not been fostered by a millennium of anti-Jewish
preachments from the pulpits of Christian Churches. And lastly, and far
more insidiously there's the unending grinding oppression administered
by Christianity and its minions on all the people over whom they held
sway. What else has it given us? Well with its totally insane views on
sexuality and sin, Christianity has given the human race guilt and
psychosis to an absolutely astonishing degree.
ALL DEFENDERS OF CHRISTIANITY ARE BIASED AND LIE

Schnook 03 (Charlotte, EVILBIBLE.COM,
http://www.evilbible.com/hitler_was_christian.htm)
Considering that Christianity has thus far been incapable of producing an
unbiased, educated follower which speaks the truth, (I havent encountered
any), I have been forced to dispel the myth by writing this essay.
CHRISTIANITY ENCOURAGES PARENTS TO STARVE THEIR

CHILDREN TO DEATH
Rice 01 (Fredric, The Skeptic Tank January 17, 2001
Parents who murder their own children by starving them to death or by allowing
them to die from easilly treatable diseases and other medical problems are
doing so because their religious masters tell them to. As followers, the parents
have no cognitive volition of their own when the health and safety of their
children come second to obeying the dictates of their religious masters. It is the
priesthood which should be held accountable for the murder of children first and
foremost; then the parents of the murdered child must be held accountable.
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Kritik Answers

CHRISTIANITY WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HOLOCAUST
Schnook 03
(Charlotte, EVILBIBLE.COM, http://www.evilbible.com/hitler_was_christian.htm)
History is currently being distorted by the millions of Christians who lie to have
us believe that the Holocaust was not a Christian deed. Through subterfuge and
concealment, many of todays Church leaders and faithful Christians have
camouflaged the Christianity of Adolf Hitler and have attempted to mark him an
atheist, a pagan cult worshipper, or a false Christian in order to place his
misdeeds on those with out Jesus. However, from the earliest formation of the
Nazi party and throughout the period of conquest and growth, Hitler expressed
his Christian support to the German citizenry and soldiers. Those who would
make Hitler an atheist should turn their eyes to history books before they
address their pews and chat rooms.
CHRISTIANITY INSPIRED HITLERS ANTI-SEMITISM

Schnook 03
(Charlotte, EVILBIBLE.COM, http://www.evilbible.com/hitler_was_christian.htm)
Hitlers anti-Semitism grew out of his Christian education. Austria and Germany
were majorly Christian during his time and they held the belief that Jews were an
inferior status to Aryan Christians. The Christians blamed the Jews for the killing
of Jesus. Jewish hatred did not actually spring from Hitler, it came from the
preaching of Catholic priests and Protestant ministers throughout Germany for
hundreds of years. The Protestant leader, Martin Luther, himself, held a livid
hatred for Jews and their Jewish religion. In his book, On the Jews and their
Lies, Luther set the standard for Jewish hatred in Protestant Germany up until
World War 2. Hitler expressed a great admiration for Martin Luther constantly
quoting his works and beliefs.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Those Ppl Werent Real

Christians: 1AR
FIRST, EVEN IF THE PEOPLE WHO CAUSE RELIGIOUS WARS
ARENT REAL CHRISTIANS, THE NEGS ARGUMENT
ENGAGES IN THAT SAME FALSE CHRISTIANITY BY CALLING
FOR THE NIHILISTIC REJECTION OF EVERY PLAN THAT
TRIES TO SAVE LIVES
THAT ALSO MEANS THAT THEY DONT ACTUALLY DO THEIR
ALTERNATIVE, MEANING IT CANT SOLVE FOR THE
CRITICISM AND THERES AN EQUAL RISK WHETHER YOU
VOTE AFF OR NEG
ALSO, THIS ARGUMENT IS FALLACIOUS THEYRE
MANIFESTATIONS OF THE SAME RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGY,
PROVING HOW BANKRUPT IT IS
Infidels.org 98
This is rather like the No True Scotsman fallacy.
What makes a real believer? There are so many One True Religions it's hard to
tell. Look at Christianity: there are many competing groups, all convinced that
they are the only true Christians. Sometimes they even fight and kill each other.
How is an atheist supposed to decide who's a real Christian and who isn't, when
even the major Christian churches like the Catholic Church and the Church of
England can't decide amongst themselves?
In the end, most atheists take a pragmatic view, and decide that anyone who
calls himself a Christian, and uses Christian belief or dogma to justify his actions,
should be considered a Christian. Maybe some of those Christians are just
perverting Christian teaching for their own ends -- but surely if the Bible can be
so readily used to support un-Christian acts it can't be much of a moral code? If
the Bible is the word of God, why couldn't he have made it less easy to
misinterpret? And how do you know that your beliefs aren't a perversion of what
your God intended?
If there is no single unambiguous interpretation of the Bible, then why should an
atheist take one interpretation over another just on your say-so? Sorry, but if
someone claims that he believes in Jesus and that he murdered others because
Jesus and the Bible told him to do so, we must call him a Christian.
AND, FOISTING YOUR RELIGION UPON OTHERS THROUGH

STATE ACTION IS RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE THAT
JUSTIFIES VIOLENCE
Nussbaum 2004
[Martha, Ernst Freund distinguished service prof of law and ethics at U
of
Two ideas typically foster religious intolerance and disrespect. The first is
that ones own religion is the only true religion and that other religions
792
Kritik Answers
are false or morally incorrect. But people possessed of this view can also
believe that others deserve respect for their committed beliefs, so long
as they do no harm. Much more dangerous is the second idea, that the
state and private citizens should coerce people into adhering to the
correct religious approach. Its an idea that is catching on, even in
many modern democracies. Frances reluctance to tolerate religious
symbols in schools and the Hindu right wings repeated claims that
minorities in India must become part of Hindu culture are disturbing
recent examples. The resurgence of this kind of thinking poses a
profound threat to liberal societies, which are based on ideas of liberty
and equality.
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Kritik Answers
#8 Evilution Disproves Religion: 1AR

EXTEND 2AC NUMBER 8. IF THE EARTH IS REALLY
MILLIONS OF YEARS OLD AND LIFE GRADUALLY EVOLVED,
THEN THAT DISPROVES THE CREATION ACCOUNT IN THE
BIBLE, UNDERMINING THE ENTIRETY OF ITS VALIDITY, AS
PROVEN BY GITT 95, AN EXPERT SOURCE FROM THE
CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT.
ALSO, THEYLL NEVER WIN THAT EVOLUTION IS FALSE.
ITS BEEN REPEATEDLY PROVEN BY EXPERIMENTAL TESTS
AND REAL WORLD DATA, AS PROVEN BY THE TALK
ORIGINS EVIDENCE.
ALSO, EVOLUTION UNDERMINES THE ENTIRE
BELIEVABILITY OF THE CHRISTIAN EDIFICE
Creation Magazine 89
[The Atheists KnowWhy Christianity has to Fight Evolution, Vol 11 Issue 4,
September, www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v11/i4/bozorath.asp, acc 120-2005//uwyo-ajl]
Christianity has fought, still fights, and will continue to fight science to
the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly
and finally the very reason Jesus earthly life was supposedly made
necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble
you will find the sorry remains of the Son of God. If Jesus was not the
redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then
Christianity is nothing.
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Evolution Contradicts Christianity:

Ext (1/2)
EVOLUTION MAKES THE CREATION STORY IMPOSSIBLE IN
SO MANY WAYS THAT IT HURTS
Creation Ex Nihilo 89
[Allan Rosser, March-May 1989, vol 11, no. 2,
www.answersingenesis.org/docs/3855.asp, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
if the Bible is the God-breathed Word of God, authoritative and correct,
then the theistic evolutionist who 'accepts' the scriptural account of
man's creation does have to stretch it a little to say that man's creation
from dust just took millions of years through transforming life-forms. If it
happened this way, God must have been deceiving us when He said He
made man from dust. What prevented Him from telling it like it was?
The fact that death came by one man. Adam (Romans 5:12) is a serious
challenge to theistic evolution, as many creatures already would have
died in the evolutionary process. The death that came through Adam
was two-fold, even as Christ's death was twofold:
(i) physical death: and
(ii) spiritual death-separation from God.
It was from physical death that Jesus rose. Let us not think that this
death that Adam brought in was only spiritual. The result of his sin was
that he was not allowed to eat of the tree of life. As a result of this, he
died physically many years later. Chapter 5 of Genesis tells us 'And he
died . . .' some eight times, no doubt to emphasize the consequences of
Adam's sin.
As some degree of ape-man. Adam was going to die, so what was the
use of God's warning to Adam, 'In the day you eat of it, dying you will
die'? (literal translation). Did God give Adam the ability to live for ever
and then after Adam's sin take it away?
In Scripture we read 'for since by man came death, by man came also
the resurrection of the dead, for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ
shall all be made alive' (1 Corinthians 15:22,23). If Adam was the end of
the evolutionary line, then thousands of evolving men had already died,
and death did not come by Adam. Chapter 15 also tells of the second
Adam, who was Christ. If the first Adam " ex ape-man " was as real a
person as the second Adam, then there came a day when God must
have said: 'You are of this moment man, Adam!'
APE-MAN'S MATES?
Suddenly, everything was different. Now he is sinless and can sin, but as
an 'ape-man'or part 'ape-like creature', be couldn't have sinned. Now he
couldn't take the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or
he would be sinning, and would die. A moment ago these were no
restrictions; now there are. For years he had gone without clothes, and
of course he would not have been ashamed. But now he is a man. When
did he lose his ape hair? A moment ago be had mates, now he has none!
If we make some allowances and jump these hurdles, the women of that
day would present a problem. Let us set the stage again. If the theistic
evolutionist believes Adam to be descended from ape-like creatures, but
a creation of God, then what about the woman Eve? If Adam was a
theistic evolution 'creation' " a literal, though stretched, interpretation of
the Genesis account-then what about Eve? God Himself said, 'It is not
good for man to be alone'.
What an incredible situation Adam's mother and father, sissy and
brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces, and his
grandparents perhaps, were all around him, and be was lonely! Maybe
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God left them out of Eden, or was this first man 'called out' even as
Abraham was in Genesis chapter 12?
ANIMAL RELATIVES?
God brought all the animals before Adam, and the Bible recounts that
there was not found among the animals a suitable mates or helper for
Adam. Did all the animals not include his mother and father, sisters and
brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces, and his
grandparents? Did God only bring a couple of every kind of animal and
did he leave Adam's relatives out? Why couldn't he marry one of them?
What was wrong with one of his distant relatives, or the closer ones?
continued
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Kritik Answers
Evolution Contradicts Christianity:

Ext (2/2)
continued
Even if, amazingly, only one family had become the proto-man type,
surely there must have been others near enough, well up in the
evolutionary tree. Surely if the line-up of eligible spinsters included his
unmarried female relatives, Adam would have said, 'This one will do!'.
And God would have said, 'No Adam. you can't marry that sort, you are
a new sort of creature, you are a new creation. Or rather a new
evolution.. She is not your sort!'
CHIMP OFF THE OLD BLOCK?
Adam would have said 'But she is just like my mother and my sister.'
God would have replied 'They are no longer your kith and kin.'
Or did God erase from Adam's mind who he used to be? Did God also
remove from his parents' and relatives' memories all knowledge of Adam
before he became Adam? Or did God suddenly and completely so
transform him that he realized that he was no longer a 'chip off the old
block', and was determined to start his own family tree?
If, though, it was because through a special creative act of God he was
now different, then why couldn't God have started from scratchscratching dirt up to make the man, not just rehashing an existing
creature?
So, some allow that God evolved man, yet at a definite point declared:
'Ape, you are now man! Adam is your name!' And at that point, God
invested him with God-likeness and the opportunity to live for ever as
well. But, did he omit to evolve Eve? Is this why he had to create Eve?
The Bible is very explicit as to how God made Eve. She was made from
Adam's side.
CAIN AND THE APE HYBRIDS?
Years later, their son Cain, having killed Abel, is banished to the land of
Nod. And there he marries one of the daughters of the land. Where did
she come from? Was she one of the ape-men family? One of his
ancestors' group? If Cain could have married an ancestor type, then
surely Adam could have. Cain certainly wasn't in the Garden of Eden, but
were none of his relatives suitable, if he was only two generations away
from them? If he couldn't have married an ape-woman, had God made a
hybrid variety, one that wasn't sterile?
If we accept the Bible account, then Adam and Eve were a special
creation, made on the sixth day of Creation weak. We find also that
Adam lived to see Noah's father, and Noah probably saw Abraham. In
the days of Abraham there was writing. Was Adam's story not written?
Why has no trace of Adam's ancestry been revealed? Has God hidden it
from us and deceived us? Did Adam not tell his children even till the
eighth generation, or did God take it from his mind?
If there is anything miraculous about the creation of man, we must
accept it by faith. If there is nothing miraculous, who says these isn't?
Will we believe man who doesn't know everything of God? If God is God
and His word is truth, then let us accept the plain sense of Scripture by
faith in God, the holy One who does not lie.
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A2 Evolution Is Only a Theory:

1AR
EVOLUTION IS A THEORY AND A FACT. YOUR AUTHORS
HAVE NO IDEA HOW SCIENCE OPERATES
Gould 93
[Steven J., scientific genius, Evolution is a fact and a theory,
talkorigins, January 22, talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html, acc 120-05//uwyo-ajl]
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part
of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to
hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument:
evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many
aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists
can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence
can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument
before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly
hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory
only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science-that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it
once was."
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are
different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts
are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and
interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories
to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in
this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending
the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they
did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be
discovered.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Evolution Contradicts
Thermodynamics: 1AR
THAT LAW ASSUMES CLOSED SYSTEMS. THE EARTH ISNT
BECAUSE OF SOMETHING CALLED THE SUN
Talkorigins.org 97
This shows more a misconception about thermodynamics than about
evolution. The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is
possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to
a hotter body." [Atkins, 1984, The Second Law, pg. 25] Now you may be
scratching your head wondering what this has to do with evolution. The
confusion arises when the 2nd law is phrased in another equivalent way,
"The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy is an
indication of unusable energy and often (but not always!) corresponds to
intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Creationists thus
misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from
order to disorder.
However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun
provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato
plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why
should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can't have
more usable energy still? Creationists sometimes try to get around this
by claiming that the information carried by living things lets them create
order. However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from
disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes,
tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few
examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an
intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with
lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order
arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to
violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?
The thermodynamics argument against evolution displays a
misconception about evolution as well as about thermodynamics, since a
clear understanding of how evolution works should reveal major flaws in
the argument. Evolution says that organisms reproduce with only small
changes between generations (after their own kind, so to speak). For
example, animals might have appendages which are longer or shorter,
thicker or flatter, lighter or darker than their parents. Occasionally, a
change might be on the order of having four or six fingers instead of
five. Once the differences appear, the theory of evolution calls for
differential reproductive success. For example, maybe the animals with
longer appendages survive to have more offspring than shortappendaged ones. All of these processes can be observed today. They
obviously don't violate any physical laws.
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A2 No Transitional Fossils: 1AR

FIRST, EVERY SPECIES IS TRANSITIONAL. ITS NOT LIKE A
COMPLETELY NEW SPECIES IS CREATED OVERNIGHT
BECAUSE ITS SO GRADUAL.
SECOND, THEYVE BEEN FOUND
Talkorigins.org 97
To say there are no transitional fossils is simply false. Paleontology has
progressed a bit since Origin of Species was published, uncovering
thousands of transitional fossils, by both the temporally restrictive and
the less restrictive definitions. The fossil record is still spotty and always
will be; erosion and the rarity of conditions favorable to fossilization
make that inevitable. Also, transitions may occur in a small population,
in a small area, and/or in a relatively short amount of time; when any of
these conditions hold, the chances of finding the transitional fossils goes
down. Still, there are still many instances where excellent sequences of
transitional fossils exist. Some notable examples are the transitions from
reptile to mammal, from land animal to early whale, and from early ape
to human. For many more examples, see the transitional fossils FAQ in
the talk.origins archive, and see
http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/talk_origins.html for sample images
for some invertebrate groups.
THIRD, THIS BETRAYS A MISCONCEPTION ABOUT

CATEGORIES
Talkorigins.org 97
The misconception about the lack of transitional fossils is perpetuated in
part by a common way of thinking about categories. When people think
about a category like "dog" or "ant," they often subconsciously believe
that there is a well-defined boundary around the category, or that there
is some eternal ideal form (for philosophers, the Platonic idea) which
defines the category. This kind of thinking leads people to declare that
Archaeopteryx is "100% bird," when it is clearly a mix of bird and reptile
features (with more reptile than bird features, in fact). In truth,
categories are man-made and artificial. Nature is not constrained to
follow them, and it doesn't.
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#12 Sexual Abuse: 1AR

SEX ABUSE=DEHUMANIZATION
Clark 03
(Peg, The Daily News September 14, 2003

http://www.bishopaccountability.org/news2003_07_12/2003_09_14_Clark_GuestCommentary.htm)
In sexual abuse a victim is denied his or her full humanity; this is
dehumanization. In dehumanization, paradoxically, the oppressor too
becomes less human in the denial.
DEHUMYNIZATION IS WORSE THAN NUCLEAR WAR

Montagu and Matson 83
(Author and Professor of American at the University of Hawaii, Ashley
and Floyd, THE DEHUMANIZATION OF MAN, preface)
It neither kills outright nor inflicts apparent physical harm, yet the extent of its
destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or
natural calamity on record - and its potential damage to the quality of human life
and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that reason this
sickness of the soul might well be called the 'Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.'
Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization.
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Christianity = Sex Abuse: Ext (1/3)

SEXUAL ABUSE INEVITABLE IN CHRISTIANITY, SIX
REASONS:
Franz 02 (Thaeda, Liberty University, Power, Patriarchy and Sexual Abuse in the Christian
There are six beliefs present within the church that have aided
perpetrators in rationalizing their behavior when it comes to abuse
(Heggen, 1993). Some of these beliefs are not obvious parts of any
Christian doctrine. They are found in the subtle subtext of sermons, Bible
studies, and Sunday school lectures throughout the church. Then they
are taken a step further in the minds of the perpetrator to justify his
actions.
The first belief is that God intends for men to dominate and for women
and children to submit (Heggen, 1993; Kroeger & Beck, 1996). As head
of the family, the authority of the husband/father is not to be
questioned, under any circumstances, regardless of how outrageous his
behavior may be (LaHaye, 1980). If he beats his wife, it is his business. If
he molests his children, it is his business. He is the unquestioned
authority and lord over his domestic domain. The second belief is that
because of her role in the Fall, woman is morally inferior to man
(Heggen, 1993). She requires his guidance and is unable to stay on the
straight
and narrow without it. After all, according to the Bible, it was Eve who
sinned first and led her husband, Adam, into sin with her. Some men in
the church believe that this is proof that women cannot be kept from sin
without the control of their husbands.
Additionally, this belief encourages women to trust their husbands
sense of right and wrong, over their own internal set of values (Kreoger
& Beck, 1996). In some cases, this leads a woman to allow her husband
to convince her that it is morally just for him to molest their daughter.
Even if the woman knows such a thing is wrong, she defers to her
husbands moral compass, because she has been told by the church that
hers is defective (Kroeger & Beck, 1996). The third belief is that children
are inherently evil and must have their wills broken (Heggen, 1993). The
idea is that children must be forced to submit to their parents or they
will never learn to submit to God (Heggen, 1993). Children are seen as
willful, and forcing them into submission is seen as a parents duty-rather than an act of abuse. If a mother feels the actions of her husband
are too extreme, she may not say anything--not because she doesnt
want to protect her children, but because the church tells her that her
opinion comes second to that of her husband. The fourth belief is that
marriage is to be preserved at all costs (Heggen 1993). If the
husband/father is abusive, it is the wife/mothers responsibility to find a
way to help herself and her children endure as an act commitment to the
marital covenant.
The fifth belief is that suffering is a Christian virtue (Heggen, 1993).
Traditionally, the role of the ideal Christian woman is to be a suffering
servant (Fortune, 1983; Kroeger & Beck, 1996). A woman who decides
to step out from under a yoke of suffering is oftentimes seen as weak
and lacking in faith (Fortune, 1983). Women who complain about their
marital situation are sometimes seen as lacking commitment to their
family and to their faith. Fellow congregants may suggest if she would
only pray more, and complain less, then all would be well. The final
belief is that Christians must promptly forgive those who sin against
them (Heggen, 1993). Victims of sexual abuse have been told to forgive
and forget-- and to give it to God, as if the responsibility for
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reconciling with the perpetrator lays squarely on the shoulders of the
victim (Heggen, 1993; Kreoger & Beck, 1996).
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CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANITY IS BEST PREDICTOR OF
SEXUAL ABUSE
Heggen 93 (Carolyn Holderread, author,
"Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches",
p. 73: http://www.skeptictank.org/cabuse6.htm)
"A disturbing fact continues to surface in sex abuse

research. The
first best predictor of abuse is alcohol or drug addiction
in the
father. But the second best predictor is conservative
religiosity,
accompanied by parental belief in traditional malefemale roles.
This means that if you want to know which children are
most likely
to be sexually abused by their father, the second most
significant
clue is whether or not the parents belong to a
conservative
religious group with traditional role beliefs and rigid
sexual
attitudes.
ALL ATTEMPTS TO SOLVE ONLY MOVE THE ABUSE

ELSEWHERE
After they go through their period of "therapy," they often

get shipped off to yet another church where, since their
new congregations are never informed of their master's
past, the cycle of abuse continues. (NOTE: "Megan's Law"
now makes the location of convicted sex offenders public
knowledge. THIS IS A WIN FOR THE GOOD SIDE! Everyone
who has worked to get Megan's Law passed has made it
tougher for Christian clergy to hide their convicted child
moslesters within our communities.) Thus -- whether
unintentionally or not -- the Christian clergy ends up being
a safe dating service for pedophiles. Pedophiles may safely
gravitate toward the Christian clergy fairly confident in the
knowledge that even if they're ever reported or get caught,
they'll simply be moved to yet another location and be
provided with new children to abuse.
CHRISTIAN RHETORIC IS A COVER-UP FOR SEX ABUSE

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The inescapable conclusion is that the Christian clergy

screams from the pulpit in an attempt to draw attention
away from their own horrid criminal activities and desires.
It's also an inescapable conclusion -- due to the epidemic
problem they create -- that they are successful.
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REALITY OF SEX ABUSE IS EXCLUDED FROM CHRISTIAN
WORLDVIEW
Considering the prevalence of sexual abuse, it is quite

likely that there are at least
a few survivors in any one church congregation. The church
has a history of speaking
only in generalities regarding sexual sin (Heggen, 1993).
The discomfort of the church in
dealing with sexual matters can make victims feel very
isolated (Heggen, 1993). For
victims who have been sexually abused, it is doubly painful
to hear that their reality does
not have a place within the confines of their church . Many
victims are told that such
things just do not happen among good Christian peopleparticularly if they identify
their perpetrator as someone who is a leader in the church
(Heggen, 1993).
PATRIARCHAL ORDER OF CHRISTIANITY MAKES ABUSE

ENDEMIC
Additionally, the majority of pedophiles are men (E.

Schrader LSW, personal communication, January 2002),
and the majority of people holding positions of leadership
in the church are men (Neuger, 1993). So, it would make
sense that since men are leading the church, and men are
more often perpetrators rather than victims, that the topic
of sexual abuse has thus far been ignored (Fortune, 1983).
However, the gender of church leadership is only the tip of
the iceberg in determining why dealing with sexual abuse
has taken such a low priority within the church. The church
has embraced the notion that women are subject to the
dominance of men (Neuger, 1993). There are few stories of
women in the Bible (Neuger, 1993). When women are
portrayed in the Bible, they are described as either evil and
seductive, or as impossible ideals of self-sacrifice and love
(Neuger, 1993). It is possible that religious women may be
afraid to confront sexism in the church because they fear
male protection and approval will be withdrawn from them
(Rayburn, 1982). This fear can also carry over to God, and
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to the withholding of divine blessing and acceptance
(Rayburn, 1982).
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A2 Life Without God Pointless:

1AR
FIRST, THIS IS RIDICULOUS EACH INDIVIDUAL CREATES
CONTINGENT MEANING FOR THEIR OWN LIVES.
ARBITRARILY CLAIMING THAT NO NON-THEIST HAS VALUE
TO THEIR LIVES IS OFFENSIVE
SECOND, LIFES MEANING IS CREATED BY THE INDIVIDUAL
FROM THE BEAUTY AVAILABLE TO EXISTENCE, MAKING
GOD IRRELEVENT
Infidels.org 2003
Perhaps it is to some, but still, many atheists live a purposeful life. They
decide what they think gives meaning to life, and they pursue those
goals. They try to make their lives count, not by wishing for eternal life,
but by having an influence on other people who will live on. For example,
an atheist may dedicate his life to political reform, in the hope of leaving
his mark on history.
It is a natural human tendency to look for "meaning" or "purpose" in
random events. However, it is by no means obvious that "life" is the sort
of thing that has a "meaning".
To put it another way, not everything which looks like a question is
actually a sensible thing to ask. Some atheists believe that asking "What
is the meaning of life?" is as silly as asking "What is the meaning of a
cup of coffee?". They believe that life has no purpose or meaning, it just
is.
Also, if some sort of mystical external force is required to give one's
existence a "meaning", surely that makes any hypothetical god's
existence meaningless?
THIRD, LIFE ONLY BECOMES VALUELESS WHEN IT IS

DECLARED AS SUCH [author is describing specific men who were in Auschwitz with
him]

Victor
We have stated that that which was ultimately responsible for the state of the prisoners inner self was not so much the enumerated
only the
men who allowed their inner hold on their moral and spiritual selves to subside
eventually fell victim to the camps degenerating influences. The question now arises, what could, or
psychophysical causes as it was the result of a free decision. Psychological observations of the prisoners have shown that
should, have constituted this inner hold? Former prisoners, when writing or relating their experiences, agree that the most depressing influence
of all was that a prisoner could not know how long his term of imprisonment would be. He had been given no date for his release. (In our camp it
was pointless even to talk about it.) Actually a prison term was not only uncertain but unlimited. A well-known research psychologist has pointed
out that life in a concentration camp could be called a provisional existence. We can add to this by defining it as a provisional existence of
unknown limit. New arrivals usually knew nothing about the conditions at a camp. Those who had come back from other camps were obliged to
keep silent, and from some camps no one had returned. On entering camp a change took place in the minds of the men. With the end of
uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end. It was impossible to foresee whether or when, if at all, this form of existence would end. The
A man who could not see the end of

his provisional existence was not able to aim at an ultimate goa l in life. He ceased
living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life. Therefore the whole structure of his inner life
changed; signs of decay set in which we know from other areas of life. The unemployed worker, for example, is in a
latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach.
similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. Research work done
on unemployed miners has shown that they suffer from a peculiar sort of deformed timeinner time-which is a result of their unemployed state.
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Prisoners, too, suffered from this strange time-experience. In camp, a small time unit, a day, for example, filled with hourly tortures and fatigue,
appeared endless. A larger time unit, perhaps a week, seemed to pass very quickly. My comrades agreed when I said that in camp a day lasted
longer than a week. How paradoxical was our time-experience! In this connection we are reminded of Thomas Manns The Magic Mountain, which
contains some very pointed psychological remarks. Mann studies the spiritual development of people who are in an analogous psychological
position, i.e., tuberculosis patients in a sanatorium who also know no date for their release. They experience a similar existencewithout a future
and without a goal. One of the prisoners, who on his arrival marched with a long column of new inmates from the station to the camp, told me
later that he had felt as though he were marching at his own funeral. His life had seemed to him absolutely without future. He regarded it as over
and done, as if he had already died. This feeling of lifelessness was intensified by other causes: in time, it was the limitlessness of the term of
imprisonment which was most acutely felt; in space, the narrow limits of the prison. Anything outside the barbed wire became remoteout of
reach and, in a way, unreal. The events and the people outside, all the normal life there, had a ghostly aspect for the prisoner. The outside life,
that is, as much as he could see of it, appeared to him almost as it might have to a dead man who looked at it from another world. A man who let
himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have
already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present
danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make

something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our provisional
existence as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose
their hold on life; everything in a way became pointless. Such people forget that often it is just such an
of its reality there lay a certain
exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camps
difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred
to close their eyes and to live in the past.
Life for such people became meaningless .
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A2 Life Without God is Terrifying:

1AR
FIRST, THIS IS INEVITABLE. SOME SORT OF FEAR WILL
EXIST NO MATTER WHAT. CHRISTIANS TRY TO SURVIVE
JUST LIKE ANYONE ELSE
SECOND, TURN - THE BELIEF IN GOD CREATES MORE
TERROR BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THE THE
ETERNAL FATE OF YOUR SOUL. AT LEAST OUR FEAR IS
FINITE
THIRD, THERE ARE A NUMBER OF WAYS TO COPE WITH
TERROR IN A GODLESS FRAMEWORK LIKE KITTENS, THE
NEW WILLIAM SHATNER ALBUM, OR ALCOHOL
Infidels.org 2003
There are many ways of obtaining comfort:
Your family and friends
Pets
Food and drink
Music, television, literature, arts and entertainment
Sports or exercise
Meditation
Psychotherapy
Drugs
Work
That may sound like rather an empty and vulnerable way to face danger, but so
what? Should individuals believe in things because they are comforting, or should
they face reality no matter how harsh it might be?
In the end, it's a decision for the individual concerned. Most atheists are
unable to believe something they would not otherwise believe merely
because it makes them feel comfortable. They put truth before comfort,
and consider that if searching for truth sometimes makes them feel
unhappy, that's just hard luck. Often truth hurts.
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Alternative Hurts Religion

RELIGION SHOULD BE A PRIVATE MATTER
ENTANGLEMENT ALLOWS ENROACHMENT ON THE
RELIGIOUS
Stevenjaygould.org no date
[Religious Court Rulings,
www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/courtrulings.html, acc 1-20-05//uwyo-ajl]
In the 1992 Lee v. Weisman case, the Court ruled that public schools may not
sponsor invocations at graduation ceremonies. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
wrote: "The First Amendment's Religion Clauses mean that religious beliefs and
religious expression are too precious to be either proscribed or prescribed by the
State. The design of the Constitution is that preservation and transmission of
religious beliefs and worship is a responsibility and a choice committed to the
private sphere, which itself is promised freedom to pursue that mission. It must
not be forgotten then, that while concern must be given to define the prot ection
granted to an objector or a dissenting nonbeliever, these same Clauses exist to
protect religion from government interference."
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**Securitization**
Security Good: Helps Marginalized
People
SECURITIZATION IS EMANCIPATINGGIVING
MARGINALIZES ISSUES LIKE HUMAN RIGHTS VISIBILITY
Jeff Huysmans, Lecturer in politics at the department of government at Open
University, Alternatives Defining Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative
Dilemma of Writing Security Feb 2002 p. 59-60.
There is no solution for the normative dilemma in the social-con structivist

security analyses defined above. The particular understanding of language
makes any security utterance potentially securitizing. Consequently, enunciating
security is never innocent or neutral. Of course, this does not have to result in a
normative dilemma; it does so only if one wants to or has to utter security in a
political context while wanting to avoid a securitization of a par ticular area.
Someone may also employ security language with the intention of securitizing
an area. This does not necessarily require a conservative interest in keeping the
status quo or in establishing law and order. Securitization can also be performed
with an emancipatory interest. Given the capacity of security language to prioritize questions and to mobilize people, one may employ it as a tactical device to
give human-rights questions a higher visibility, for example. It is also possible to
mobilize security questions in nonsecurity areas with the intention to change the
conservative bias of the security language. This would require a positive concept
of security that defines liberation from oppression as a good that should be
secured.
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Alt Bad: Allows Suffering to

Continue
REJECTING OUR PLAN IN FAVOR OF THE CRITIQUE
PRIVILEGES SEMANTICS OVER REAL HUMAN SUFFERING
WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO RESPOND TO THREATS TO
HUMAN LIFE AND DIGNITY IN THE STATUS QUO WITHOUT
WORRYING ABOUT WHETHER WE OVERLY SECURITIZE
SUCH THREATS.
Nicholas Onuf, Professor, International Relatoins, Florida International University,
Symposium on the Norms and Ethics of Humanitarian Intervention, Center for Global Peace
and Conflict Studies Working Paper 00-03, May 5, 2000,
http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/gpacs/OnufHumanitarian.pdf.
Paradoxically, if an emergency is defined as a situation calling for immediate
action, then these situations cease to be emergenciesimmediate action
remedied nothing. In the meantime, human misery deepens. It is no wonder,
then, that suffering becomes secondary, as violations of human rights take
priority. At least this is a tendency among progressive liberals for whom the
situation has become an inescapable morass, and for whom human rights are
the great project of social reform in our time.
Critics of liberalism think little of the human rights movement. They are
disposed to see social reform activism, and more generally the development of
civil society, as a manifestation of global liberal governance or, more
scornfully, liberal peace. According to Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, liberal
peace finds itself deeply implicated in a terrain of disorder in which some states
are powerful, some states are in radical dissolution, traditional societies are
collapsing and civil conflict is endemic, where international corporations and
criminal cartels are also involved, and where international organizations and
nongovernmental organizations are inextricably committed as well. Dillon and
Reid have argued against calling the more striking manifestations of global
disorder complex emergencies because doing so unduly simplifies their vexed
political character and masks the degree to which global liberal governance is
implicated in making them so vexed. Their alternative descriptionemerging
political complexesimplies that the people who want to call these situations
emergencies are cynically motivated. Perhaps some humanitarian liberals are
cynically motivated; others no doubt have complex political motivationspeople
always do. Yet banishing emergency from our vocabulary because people have
mixed motives in calling for immediate action has the untoward result of
forestalling action that could help the many victims of the liberal peace and its
global disorder. Progressive liberals and their critics both end up making
suffering secondary to their own programmatic concerns.
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Alt Fails:
Engagement/Nonengagement
Doublebind
ITS A DOUBLE-BIND: EITHER THE ALTERNATIVE LINKS OR
DOESNT SOLVE. IN ISOLATION, ALTERNATIVES CANT
INDIVIDUALLY DECONSTRUCT DOMINANT SECURITY
DISCOURSE. THEY MUST ENGAGE WITH SECURITY, BUT IN
DOING SO LEGITIMIZE THE PRACTICES BEING CRITIQUED.
Although the critical edge of this literature cannot be ignored, denaturalizing

security fields is not necessarily successful in moderating the normative
dilemma. The research continues to map the security discourses, therefore
repeating, in an often highly systematic way, a security approach to, for
example, migration or drugs. Demonstrating the contingent character of the
politicization does question the foundational character of this contingent
construction, but it does not necessarily undermine the real effects. It does this
only when these discourses rely heavily for their effects on keeping the natural
character of its foundations unquestioned. This points to a more general issue
concerning this kind of analysis. Although it stresses that language makes a
difference and that social relations are constructed, it leaves underdeveloped
the concept of security formation that heavily prestructures the possibilities to
speak differently through rarifying who can speak security, what security can
be spoken about, how one should speak about security, and so on.27 Another
related problem is that the approach assumes that in dictating the mere
existence of alternative practices challenges the dominance of the dominant
discourse. This is problematic since the alternative constructions do not exist in
a vacuum or in a sheltered space. To be part of the game, they must, for
example, Coy test political constructions of migration. Alternative practices are
thus not isolated but engage with other, possibly dominant, constructions. This
raises the question of how the engagement actually works. It involves
relations of power, structuring and restructuring the social exchanges. Staging
alternative practices does not necessarily challenge a dominant construction.
The political game is more complex, as Foucaults interpretation of the sexual
revolution the liberation from sexual repressionof the second half of the
twentieth century showed.28 In a comment on human-rights approaches of
migration, Didier Bigo raises a similar pointthat opposing strategies do not
necessarily radically challenge established politicizations: It is often misleading
to counterpose the ideology of security to human rights because they
sometimes have more in common than their authors would like to admit. They
often share the same concept of insecurity and diverge only in their
solutions.29 The main point is that alternative discourses should not be left in a
vacuum. The way they function in the political struggle should be looked at. How
are the alternative discourses entrenched in a specific political game? Are they
possibly a constitutive part of the mastery of the dominant construction?
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Alt Fails: Securitizes Itself

USELESSTHE ALTERNATIVE ACKNOWLEDGES BUT CANT
OVERCOME THE NORMATIVE SECURITY DILEMMA
As already said, theorization means that authors explain the structuring work of
the discursive formation. They interpret the power-knowledge nexus by locating
it in symbolic and institutional contexts. The first question is therefore a heuristic
one of how to understand what is happening, rather than a critical question of
how to intervene in the securitization of societal areas. To some extent, this
theoretical agenda engages with the dilemma in a traditional way: at some
point, it separates the research question from the question What is to be
done? This does not mean that the agenda ignores the latter question; rather,
the interpretation of why and how an issue is structured into a security question
is a precondition for answering the practical question.
But this more traditional way of dealing with the normative dilemma is only one
side of the theoretical game. The theoretical approach also engages with social
relations in a more direct way that is, without separating the research question
from the practical one. A theorization of power relations and the symbolic dimensions of the security formation can be critical in itself. By explicitly
uncovering dimensions of the security formation that are commonly left
implicit, it performs a critical practice. Moreover, explaining the work of power
relations involved in the securitization of societal questions is a politicizing act in
itself. As Stefano Guzzini remarks: integrating social relations in a power analysis
politicizes the issue in question since power is a concept that is generally
used to define what counts as a political issue, what it is possible to change.33
This does not imply that this form of social constructivisrn claims that it escapes
the normative dilemma. Due to its interpretation of language, it cannot but
accept that security enunciations risk the opening of space for successful
securitizing practices. The bottom line is, then, that the agenda has to accept
the normative dilemma as a dilemma. It cannot escape that its own security
writing risks contributing to the securitization of an area. As a general
statement, it shares this position with the other research projects I have
sketched. It differs from the others in the specific way in which it hopes to
moderate the risk of reifying security threats that is, by theorizing the powerknowledge nexus and interpreting securitization as a specific political strategy.
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Perm Solves: Starting Point

SECURITY HAS MEANING. WE MUST ASSUME THAT
SECURITY IS UNIVERSAL IN ORDER TO DECONSTRUCT IT.
Burke, Prof at the School of Political Science and International Studies
at University of Queensland, Alternatives Aporias of Security 20 02 p. 2
Anthony
While this article argues strongly that security has no essential ontological
integrity, it also argues that if the power and sweep of security are to be
understood and challenged, its claims to universality must be taken seriously.
They underpin and animate sweeping forms of power, subjectivity, force, and
economic circulation and cannot be dismissed out of hand. Nor, in the hands of
some humanist writerswho have sought to think human and gender security in
radical counterpoint to realist images of national and international securityare
such claims always pernicious. They have a valuable moral and political force
that undermines, perhaps unwittingly, the logocentric presuppositions of the
realist discourses they question. Yet a common assumption that security can be
ontologically completed and secured does present a hurdle for the kind of
ontopolitical critique that we really need.2 The answer is not to seek to close
out these aporias; they call to us and their existence presents an important
political opening. Rather than seek to resecure security, to make it conform to a
new humanist idealhowever laudablewe need to challenge security as a
claim to truth, to set its meaning aside. Instead, we should focus on security as
a pervasive and complex system of political, social, and economic power, which
reaches from the most private spaces of being to the vast flows and conflicts of
geopolitics and global economic circulation. It is to see security as an
interlocking system of knowledges, representations, practices, and institutional
forms that imagine, direct, and act upon bodies, spaces, and flows in certain
waysto see security not as an essential value but as a political technology. This
is to move from essence to genealogy: a genealogy that aims, in William
Connollys words, to open us up to the play of possibility in the present . . . [to]
incite critical responses to unnecessary violences and injuries surreptitiously imposed upon life by the insistence that prevailing forms are natural, rational,
universal or necessary. 3
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Perm Solves: Must Act

USING THE STATE DOESNT MEAN WE THINK IT IS
PERFECT. WE WORK WITH IT BECAUSE THERES NO OTHER
OPTION
Mazur, doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University
of California Santa Barbara, 1997, American Indian Studies, p. 251
Eric
We might add also that notions of authority, sovereignty, and political participation are not necessarily constructed on a single intellectual
foundation. In the case of Nathan Jim, our introduction to this wide- ranging conflict over authority, as well as in the broader historical
development of the relationship of Native American religious traditions and the American constitutional order, there are clear differences over
how authority is determined, and by whom and under what circumstances. Native traditions, centered (at least in part) on the cultural orientation
toward land, cannot but conflict with the American constitutional order's orientation toward the same land. Not as easily integrated into American
culture as Christianity's symbolic emphasis on "The Word" (and its parallel relationship to the Constitution as symbolic of the federal
government's authority dependent on territoriality), Native American religious traditions expose the very real and tangible conflict that lies at the
heart of the American constitutional order. The strengths behind the Constitution are grounded in the control of the land, and any challenge to
. Nathan Jim may not see the legal system

of the American constitutional order as his law, but he has understood the power
it holds over him, and has agreed to abide by it. So, too, in many ways, have Native
American religious traditions agreed to abide by the American constitutional
order. They may not accept the source of its authority, but in the face of
overwhelming power, they may have had no other choice but to accept it.
that control can be met with subtle, but immeasurable resistance
WE GOTTA DO SOMETHING AND CANNOT TOTALLY KRITIK

SUBJECTIVITY
Burke, Prof at the School of Political Science and International Studies
at University of Queensland, Alternatives Aporias of Security 20 02 p. 22
Anthony
It is perhaps easy to become despondent, but as countless struggles for

freedom, justice, and social transformation have proved, a sense of seriousness
can be tempered with the knowledge that many tools are already availableand
where they are not, the effort to create a productive new critical sensibility is
well advanced. There is also a crucial political opening within the liberal problematic itself, in the sense that it assumes that power is most effective when it is
absorbed as truth, consented to and desiredwhich creates an important space
for refusal. As Cohn Gordon argues, Foucault thought that the very possibility of
governing was conditional on it being credible to the governed as well as the
governing.60 This throws weight onto the question of how security works as a
technology of subjectivity. It is to take up Foucaults challenge, framed as a
reversal of the liberal progressive movement of being we have seen in Hegel,
not to discover who or what we are so much as to refuse what we are.61 Just as
security rules subjectivity as both a totalizing and individualizing blackmail and
promise, it is at these levels that we can intervene. We can critique the machinic
frameworks of possibility represented by law, policy, economic regulation, and
diplomacy, while challenging the way these institutions deploy language to draw
individual subjects into their consensual web. This suggests, at least
provisionally, a dual strategy. The first asserts the space for agency, both in
challenging available possibilities for being and their larger socioeconomic
implications. Roland Bleiker formulates an idea of agency that shifts away from
the lone (male) hero overthrowing the social order in a decisive act of rebellion
to one that understands both the thickness of social power and its fissures,
fragmentation, and thinness. We must, he says, observe how an individual
may be able to escape the discursive order and influence its shifting boundaries.
. . . By doing so, discursive terrains of dissent all of a sudden appear where forces
of domination previously seemed invincible.62 Pushing beyond security requires
tactics that can work at many levelsthat empower individuals to recognize the
larger social, cultural, and economic implications of the everyday forms of
desire, subjection, and discipline they encounter, to challenge and rewrite them,
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and that in turn contribute to collective efforts to transform the larger structures
of being, exchange, and power that sustain (and have been sustained by) these
forms. As Derrida suggests, this is to open up aporetic possibilities that
transgress and call into question the boundaries of the self, society, and the
international that security seeks to imagine and police.
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A2 Dillon: 2AC
DILLON DOESNT ADVOCATE REJECTION ENDORSING THE
POLITICAL ACT OF PLAN IS CONSISTENT WITH IS CALL
FOR ANOTHER FORM OF JUSTICE
Dillon 99
[Michael, Prof. IR @ Lancaster, Another Justice, Political Theory 27: 2, April,
Sage//uwyo]
Inordertobeatall,then,thiswayofbeinghastoposeandrespondtothe
questionwhatitistobe.Indoingsoittakesitsbearingcomposureoftransits,plots,courses,andfixesfromtheconnectednessinthemidstofwhich
italwaysalreadyfindsitself.Moreoftenthannot,itisonlywhenthosenavigationalaidsaredisrupted,anditsautomaticpilotsbreakdown,thatitfully
recognises its radically hermeneutical condition. It is at these points,
especially,thatthecallofanotherJusticeresoundsmostloudlythroughoutits
hermeneuticism. Here the bearing of a new bearing may be assumed. Each
alwayshastobeassumedquestioningly,however,withinagivenworld;and
none ever exhausts the task of having to do so. For another Justice always
already arises within and alongside is vented through the legislation, execution, and adjudication of existing distributive regimes.
This making way for other ways of being to be is a political art. Other justices emerge out of the injustices of regimes of distributive justice in response
to the call of another Justice. That is why there is an intimate link between
another Justice and politics. Such a politics isneitherasupposedlyhabitual
tradition,acontractualnegotiation,noranepistemicallyrealistcomputation
ofthecorrelatesofrigorouslyself-interestedbehaviour.It is an irruptive and
inventive practice called up by specific historical circumstances. Politics
becomes that way of being (politeia) whose composure is an art of intimation,articulation,intervention,andjudgment.It is a practice that responds to
the call ofanotherJustice.There is no guarantee that it will be available when
required, just as there is no guarantee that it will be successful should it be
exercised,orthateverybodyisabletopracticeitondemand.Toooftenrule,
managementdecision,andviolenceoccludeit.Recognisablewhenitmakes
itsappearance, we have to bear witness to it.
ETHICS AND POLITICS CAN CO-EXIST THE PERM IS

OPTIMAL
Dillon 99
[Michael, Prof. IR @ Lancaster, Another Justice, Political Theory 27: 2, April,
Sage//uwyo]
Philosophys task, for Levinas, is to avoid conflating ethics and politics.
The opposition of politics and ethics opens his first major work, Totality and
Infinity, and underscores its entire reading. This raises the difficult question
of whether or not the political can be rethought against Levinas with Levinas.
Nor is this simpl y a matter ofaskingwhetherornotpoliticscanbeethical.It
embracesthequestionofwhetherornottherecanbesuchathingasanethic
ofthepolitical.Herein,then,liesanimportantchallengetopoliticalthought.
Itarisesasmuchfortheontopoliticalinterpretationasitdoesfortheunderstandingofthesourceandcharacterofpoliticallifethatflowsfromthereturn
oftheontological. For Levinas the ethical comes first and ethics is first philosophy. But that leaves the political unregenerated, as Levinass own deferral to a Hobbesian politics, as well as his very limited political interventions,
indicate. In this essay I understand the challenge instead to be the necessity
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of thinking the co-presence of the ethical and the political. Precisely not the
subsumption of the ethical by the political as Levinas charges, then, but the
belonging together of the two which poses, in addition, the question of the
civil composure required of a political life.
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Kritik Answers
**Speaking for Others**

A2 Speaking for Others: 2AC (1/2)
FIRST, THERES NO WAY TO DETERMINE THE LINK.
IDENTITY IS FLUID AND YOU DONT KNOW HOW WE
IDENTIFY
SECOND, TURN THEY ASSUME A STATIC NOTION OF
GROUP IDENTITY BY ISOLATING IT AS BEING ABSOLUTELY
OTHER, DENYING WITHIN GROUP DIFFERENCE AND
UNSTABLE IDENTIFICATION OF INDIVIDUALS
--THAT FLIPS THE INTERNAL LINK
Butler 99


THIRD, TURN RETREAT FROM SPEAKING FOR OTHERS IS

ANOTHER FORM OF PRIVILEGE THAT ALLOWS VOICES TO
BE TRAMPLED SPEAKING EXCLUSIVELY FOR YOURSELF IS
IMPOSSIBLE
Alcoff 92
This problem is that Trebilcots position, as well as a more general retreat position, presumes
an ontological configuration of the discursive context that simply does not
obtain. In particular, it assumes that one can retreat into ones discrete location and
make claims entirely and singularly based on that location that do not range
over others, that one can disentangle oneself from the implicating networks between ones
discursive practices and others locations, situations, and practices. (In other words, the
claim that I can speak only for myself assumes the autonomous conception of the self in Classical Liberal theory that I am unconnected to other
But there is no neutral place

to stand free and clear in which ones words do not prescriptively affect or
mediate the experience of others, nor is there a way to decisively demarcate a
boundary between ones location and all others. Even a complete retreat from
speech is of ocurse not neutral since it allow the continued dominance of
current discourses and acts by omission to reinforce dominance.
in my authentic self or that I can achieve an autonomy from others given certain conditions.)
As my practices are made possible by events spatially far from my body so too my own practices make possible or impossible practices of
. The declaration that I speak only for myself has the sole effect of allowing
me to avoid responsibility and accountability for my effects on others; it cannot
literally erase those effects.
others
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FOURTH, ALCOFF ONLY SAYS THAT CLAIMING TO SPEAK

ON BEHALF OF THE OTHER IS A BAD THING, NOT THAT
MAKING ANY CLAIM ABOUT THEM IS BAD. WE DONT
CLAIM TO REPRESENT OR EVEN KNOW WHAT ALL OF
__________ THINK.
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A2 Speaking for Others: 2AC (2/2)

FIFTH, PERFORMATIVE CONTRADICTION THE VERY CLAIM
THAT ACTING ON BEHALF OF A GROUP HURTS THAT
GROUP IS AN ATTEMPT TO ACT ON BEHALF OF THAT
GROUP, DESTROYING ALTERNATIVE SOLVENCY, SKEWING
THE 2AC BECAUSE WE HAVE TO ANSWER MULTIPLE
WORLDS, AND DESTROYIGN EDUCATION BECAUSE OF A
LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY WHICH IS A VOTER FOR
FAIRNESS AND EDUCATION
SIXTH, PERM DO BOTH AFFIRM THE 1AC AND ENGAGE
IN CRITICISM OF REPRESENTATIONS THAT CLAIM TO ACT
ON BEHALF OF THE OTHER
SEVENTH, THE PERM SOLVES SPEAKING ERRORS ARE
INEVITABLE AND GOOD BECAUSE THEY PROVIDE A LOCUS
FOR CONSTANT CRITICISM, SOMETHING THE NEG BY
ITSELF PRECLUDES
Alcoff 92
But surely it is both morally and politically objectionable to structure ones
actions around the desire to avoid criticism, especially if this outweighs other
questions of effectivity. In some cases perhaps the motivation is not so much to
avoid criticism as to avoid errors, and the person believes that the only way to
avoid errors is to avoid all speaking for others. However, errors are
unavoidable in the theoretical inquiry as well as political struggle, and
moreover they often make contributions. The desire to find an absolute means
to avoid making errors comes perhaps not from a desire to advance collective
goals but a desire for personal mastery, to establish a privileged discursive
posotion wherein one cannot be undermined or challenged and thus is master of
the situation. From such a position ones own location and positionality would
not require constant interrogation and critial reflection; one would not
hae to constantly engage in this emotionally troublesome endeavor and would
be immune from the interrogaton of others. Such a desire of rmastery and
immunity must be resisted.
EIGHTH, NO SPECIFIC LINK STORY POSITIONALITY

UNDERDETERMINES THE EFFECT OF A SPEECH ACT
ABSENT SPECIFIC ANALYSIS OF HOW WE DISEMPOWER,
THEIR ARGUMENT IS REDUCTIONIST AND NOT A REASON
TO REJECT
Alcoff 92
Speaking for Others, Cultural Critique, Winter 91-2]
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The first response I will consider is to argue that the formulation of the problem
with speaking for others involves a retrograde metaphysically
unsupportable essentialism that assumes one can read the truth and
meaning of what one says straight from the discursive context. This response I
will call the charge of reductionism response, because it argues that a sort of
reductionist theory of justification (or evlauation) is entailed by premises 1 and
2. Such a reductionist theory might, fo rexample, reduce evaluation to a political
assessment of the speakers location where that location is seen as an
insurmountable essence that fixes one, as if ones feet are superglued to a spot
on the sidewalk.
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#3 Retreat: 1AR
EXTEND THE 2AC #3 ALCOFF 92 EVIDENCE. THIS DOES
TWO THINGS FOR US
IT PROVES THAT THERES NO ALTERNATIVE TO SPEAKING
FOR OTHERS. EVERY DISCURSIVE POSITION PRESUPPOSES
ENGAGEMENT WITH THE WORLD, MEANING THAT EVEN IF
YOU VOTE NEGATIVE, YOU STILL SPEAK FOR OTHERS
INTERESTS, ONLY IN A MORE IMPLICIT WAY, PROVING
THAT THE ALTERNATIVE LINKS JUST AS BADLY
IT DEMONSTRATES HOW A RETREAT FROM SPEAKING FOR
OTHERS CREATES NEW FORMS OF OPPRESSION BY
OMMITTING DISCUSSION OF OPPRESSION, ALLOWING ONE
TO ESCAPE REAL WORLD VIOLENCE INTO A SELFIMPORTANT YUPPIE LIFESTYLE, ALLOWING STATUS QUO
DOMINATION TO OCCUR, UNCHECKED, TURNING THEIR
ARGUMENT
ALSO, FALLING BACK TO ACADEMIC CRITICISM ALLOWS A
RETREAT FROM POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT AND INCREASED
EXPLOITATION OF THE OPPRESSED FOR PERSONAL GAIN
Alcoff 92
Speaking for Others, Cultural Critique, Winter 91-2, 13//uwyo\
Neither premise 1 nor premise 2 entail reductionism or essentialism. They argue
for the relevance of location, not its singular power of determination. Since they
do not specify how we are to understand the concept of location, it can certainly
be given a nonessential meaning.
While the charge of reductionism response has been popular among academic
theorists, a second response which I will call the retreat response has been
popular among some sectionso f the US feminist movement. This response is
simply to retreat from all practices of speaking for and assert that one can only
know ones own narrow individual experience and ones own truth and can
enver make claims beyond this. This response is motivated in part by the desire
to recognize difference, for example, different priorities, without organizing
these differences into hierarchies.
Now, sometimes I think this is the proper response ot the problem of speaking
for others, depnding on who is making it. We certainly want to encourage a more
receptive listening on the part of the discursively privileged and discourage
presumptuosu and oppressive practices of speaking for. But a retreat from
speaking for will not result in an increase in receptive listening in all cases; it
may resul tmerely in a retreat into a narcissistic yuppie lifestyle in which a
privileged person takes no responsibility for her society whatesoever. She
may even feel justified in exploiting her priveleged capacity for personal
happiness at the expense of others on the grounds that she has no alternative.
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Kritik Answers
#3 Retreat: Ext
AND RETREAT FROM POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT FOR FEAR
OF VIOLENCE IN SEARCH OF AUTHENTICITY ALLOWS US
TO SPEND HOURS DEBATING THE FINE POINTS OF ETHICS
TOWARDS THE OTHER WHILE GAS CHAMBERS ARE BUILT
Bewes 97
- by its preoccupation with
authenticity, that is to say, and true political 'identity'. Auschwitz is a
corollary not of reason, understood as risk, but of the fear of reason,
which paradoxically is a fear of violence. The stench of burning bodies is
haunted always by the sickly aroma of cheap metaphysics.
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#6 Perm: 1AR
EXTEND THE 2AC #6 JUXTAPOSITION PERM. ENGAGING IN
CRITICISM OF SPEAKING FOR OTHERS, BY ITSELF, FAILS
BECAUSE IT MERELY FLIPS THE BINARISM AND FAILS TO
ACTUALLY ENGAGE THE DISCOURSE THAT IT CRITICIZES,
CREATING A NEW FORM OF MONOLITHIC HEGEMONY IN
WHICH NOTHING IS CHALLENGED. HOWEVER, COMBINING
THE 1AC AND THE CRITICISM ALLOWS FOR CONSTANT
CRITICISM, USING THE AFFS REPRESENTATIONS AS A
TARGET FOR CRITICAL INTERROGATION, LEADING TO
BETTER SOLVENCY THAN THE ALTERNATIVE BY ITSELF.
CROSS-APPLY THE ALCOFF 92 SOLVENCY EVIDENCE.
ALL OF THEIR PERM THEORY AND LINK ARGUMENTS
DONT APPLY BECAUSE THIS ISNT A STANDARD PERM. IT
COMBINES THE ENTIRETY OF THE 1AC AND THE CRITICISM
AND USES THAT CONTRADICTION TO ALLOW A
CONSIDERATION OF BOTH SIDES AND THE ISSUE AND A
MORE CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF SPEAKING FOR,
FUNCTIONING AS AN IMPACT TURN TO THEIR ADVOCACY
OF ONE-SIDED CRITICISM.
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#9 Reductionism: 1AR
EXTEND THE 2AC #9. THE ARGUMENT THAT
POSITIONALITY DETERMINES WHETHER A
REPRESENTATION IS GOOD OR NOT IGNORES THE MORE
COMPLICATED ISSUE OF HOW OUR SPEECH ACT ACTUALLY
OPERATES IN DISCURSIVE SPACE
THIS HAS TWO IMPLICATIONS
IT DESTROYS THE LINK. WITHOUT AN EXPLANATION OF
HOW OUR ACT FUNCTIONS, YOU DONT HAVE ENOUGH
INFORMATION TO DETERMINE THAT AN INTERNAL LINK
EXISTS
IT LOCKS THEIR CRITICISM INTO SUBJECT ESSENTIALISM
THAT RESULTS IN THE VERY OTHERIZATION THAT THEYRE
CRITICIZING, TURNING THE ARGUMENT
AND, THEIR METAPHYSICS OF PRESENCE IS JUST
WRONG THERE IS NO STABLY EXISTING OTHER,
ATTEMPTING TO FIT ONE INTO A DISCREET LABEL
MAGNIFIES OPPRESSION
Bewes 97
In this light, to begin to use again terms and concepts which had seemed to be
theoretically proscribed (the author, the subject, reality, sexual and cultural
identity, the universal) is not neces-sarily to betray a reactionary or a nostalgic
desire for 'presence'; on the contrary, what the critical insights of poststructuralism (more specifically, deconstruction) reveal is not only the
possibil-ity but the imperative that such terms continue to be used. There are no
others - and if there were, they would by definition not only be liable to but
would comprise exactly the same catachrestic abuses
AND HERES THE ALTERNATIVE (OPTIONAL)

LACANIAN ETHICS RESISTS ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE THE
SUBJECT TO IDENTITARIANISM BY FOCUSING ON
CONSTITUTIVE LACK, NOT WHO IS LACKING
Stavrakakis 99
[Yannis, New Age composer, Lacan and the Political, 1999, NY: Routledge,
37//uwyo-ajl]
By locating, at the place previously assigned to an essence of the individual
psyche, a constitutive lack, Lacanian theory avoids the essentialist
reductionism of the social to the individual level and opens the way to the
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Kritik Answers
confluence of psychoanalysis and socio-political analysis, since this lack can only
be filled by socio-political objects of identification. The point here is that analytic
theory is not only concerned with lack but also with what attempts to fill this
lack: Psychoanalysis is otherwise directed at the effect of discourse within the
subject' (Ill: 135). In that sense, `Lacan.. believed in the priority of social discourses, of language, over the subject' (Copjec, 1994: 53). This
is the meaning of the constitutivity of the symbolic in the emergence of the subject that we have been describing up to now. Michelman is correct
then when asserting that `Durkheim and Lacan are thus allied in their critiques of various forms of psychological and biological reductionism that
deny the existence and efficacy of facts of this order [the symbolic/social order]' (Michelman, 1996: 127). Thus Lacan not only seems aware of
the dangers pointed by Durkheim and reiterated by Jameson with which we started this book but avoids them in the most radical way: ~there is
no subject according to Lacan which is not always already a social subject' (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1992: 30)27
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The Alternative is a Fantasy

CRITICIZING OUR SPEAKING IS AN ATTEMPT TO RESTORE
THE SYMBOLIC HIERARCHY. MARKING OUR DISCOURSE AS
THE CONTINGENT BARRIER TO STOPPING OPPRESSION IS
A NOSTALGIC UTOPIAN FANTASY, MAKING
TOTALITARIANISM POSSIBLE
Aleman 97
[Jorge, Spanish psychoanalyst, Lacan: The End, Lacanian Ink #11,
www.lacan.com/frameX16.htm acc 9-21-04//uwyo]
The task of non-metaphysical thinking and psychoanalysis thus come to a new
crossroads. They both discuss the localization of the void and how to handle it,
and with Lacan the way of writing it. This crossroads has a political scope: the
key to totalitarianism becomes intelligible while revealing the way the Master
tries to fill up the void with a law of history or of nature whose temporality is
assured in progress. This is about giving substance to the void in such a way
that everything which is not involved in this project is viewed as dregs to be
eliminated. This might be why Lacan reminded left wing militants in the
mid-'60s: "I sustain that psychoanalysis has no right to interpret revolutionary
practice, rather revolutionary theory would do well to take responsibility for
leaving empty the place of truth as cause."
Lacan destroys the sphere, a privileged manner of hiding the "void of Being"
while setting up a topology of the speaking being aimed at a non-metaphoric
writing, lest topology not convey the nostalgia forever attempting to restore a
certain symbolic hierarchy, a specific last word on the real of jouissance and its
empty place in the symbolic.
The emphasis of this article is not only on the fact that Heidegger
unintentionally broached psychoanalysis before it was conceived. We have yet
tried to exacerbate the experience of psychoanalysis, interrogating the fact that
the speaking being may be "cured" in its core of the most subtle form of his
fantasme-the metaphysics that always returns with the meaning that may hide
its contingency.
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**State Bad, Juhdge**

Strategic Use of State Good
MORALISTIC CRUSADES AIMED AT CHANGING THE STATE
ARE MISLEADING ABOUT THE NATURE OF OPPRESSIVE
FORCES. THIS OBFUSCATION DENIES THE POTENTIAL FOR
RADICAL TRANSFORMATION
But here the problem goes well beyond superficiality of political analysis or
compensatory gestures in the face of felt impotence. A moralistic, gestural
politics often inadvertently becomes a regressive politics. Moralizing
condemnation of the National Endowment for the Arts for not funding
politically radical art, of the U.S. military or the White House for not embracing
open homosexuality or sanctioning gay marriage, or even of the National
Institutes of Health for not treating as a political priority the lives of HIV target
populations (gay men, prostitutes, and drug addicts) conveys at best naive
political expectations and at worst, patently confused ones. For this
condemnation implicitly figures the state (and other mainstream
institutions) as if it did not have specific political and economic
investments, as if it were not the codification of various dominant
social powers, but was, rather, a momentarily misguided parent who
forgot her promise to treat all her children the same way. These
expressions of moralistic outrage implicitly cast the state as if it were
or could be a deeply democratic and nonviolent institution; conversely, it
renders radical art, radical social movements, and various fringe
populations as if they were not potentially subversive, representing a
significant political challenge to the norms of the regime, but rather
were benign entities and populations entirely appropriate for the state
to equally protect, fund, and promote. Here, moralisms objection to
politics as a domain of power and history rather than principle is not
simply irritating: it resuits in a troubling and confused political stance.
It misleads about the nature of power, the state, and capitalism; it
misleads about the nature of oppressive social forces, and about the
scope of the project of transformation required by serious ambitions
for justice. Such obfuscation is not the aim of the moralists but falls
within that more general package of displaced effects consequent to a
felt yet unacknowledged impotence. It signals disavowed despair over
the prospects for more far-reaching transformations.
WE MUST NOT REJECT THE STATE- LIMITED AND

STRATEGIC USE OF THE STATE IS VITAL TO SUCCESSFUL
POLITICS
Derrida,
French philosopher, 2K
(Jacques, Intellectual Courage: An Interview Culture Machine
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j002/articles/art_derr.htm)
Q: Two essential problems of globalisation are the dissolution of the state and the impotence of politics. In your recently published text
'Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!', you develop certain ideas concerning a new right to asylum and a new balance of power
between the different places of the political in view of a possible new role of the city. How do you think philosophy could and should react to the
problems mentioned with a kind of institutional fantasy?
JD: I am not sure I understand what you call 'institutional fantasy'. All political experimentation like the initiative of the 'refugee city', despite its
limits and its inevitably preliminary character, has in it a philosophical dimension. It requires us to interrogate the essence and the history of the
All action, all

political decision making, must invent its norm or rule. Such a gesture traverses or
implies philosophy. Meanwhile, at the risk of appearing self-contradictory, I believe that one must fight against that
state. All political innovation touches on philosophy. The 'true' political action always engages with a philosophy.
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which you call the 'dissolution of the state' (for the state can in turn
limit the private forces of appropriation, the concentrations of
economic power, it can retard a violent depoliticisation that acts in the
name of the 'market'), and above all resist the state where it gives in
too easily to the nationalism of the nation state or to the
representation of socio-economic hegemony. Each time one must
analyse, invent a new rule: here to contest the state, there to
consolidate it. The realm of politics is not co-extensive with the state,
contrary to what one believes nowadays. The necessary repoliticisation
does not need to serve a new cult of the state. One ought to operate
with new dissociations and accept complex and differentiated
practices.
832
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State is Key to Solving Oppression

(1/2)
INDIVIDUAL ACTION ALONE IS NOT ENOUGHTHE STATE
IS CRITICAL TO JUMPSTART HUMAN RIGHTS RECORDS
THAT PREVENT WAR AND OPPRESSION
William W. Burke-White, Lecturer, Public and International Affairs and Senior Special
Assistant to the Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton
University, Human Rights and National Security: The Strategic Correlation, THE HARVARD
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW REVIEW v. 17, Spring 2004, p. 266-267.
The social beliefs explanation begins from the proposition that individuals within human rights protecting states share a preference for a
minimum set of protections of human rights. This assumption is appropriate for two reasons. First, according to liberal political science theory,
If the observed state policy is

to protect human rights, then at least some subset of the domestic polity must share that preference. Second,
even if individuals within a domestic polity seek a variety of
differentiated ends, basic respect for human rights allows individuals
to pursue--to some degree at least--those ends as they define them. Liberal
state policy represents the preferences of some subset of the domestic polity. n100
theory thus suggests that individuals within a human rights respecting state tend to support basic human rights provisions. The next step in the
social beliefs argument is to recognize that respect for human rights has an inherently universalist tendency. n101 Unlike cultural or national
rights, human rights are just that--human. They apply as much [*267] to those individuals within a domestic polity as to those outside the polity.
Such cosmopolitan liberalism indicates that "the more people are free, the better off all are." n102 The net result is that individuals within a
Given a set
of universalist human rights values in states that respect human rights, the policy articulated
by the government may be one which respects human rights at home
and demands their protection abroad. This belief in a thin set of
universal human rights may cause the leadership of the state to frame
its security policy around that belief structure and to refrain from
aggressive acts that would violate the human rights of citizens at home
or abroad. As Peter Katzenstein argues, "security interests are defined by actors who respond to cultural factors." n103 Acts of
human rights respecting state tend, on the average, to support the human rights of individuals in other states as well.
international aggression tend to impinge on the human rights of individuals in the target state and, at least temporarily, limit their freedom. After
all, bombs, bullets, death and destruction are not consistent with respect for basic human rights. n104 Framed in the liberal international
relations theory terms of policy interdependence, international aggression by State A imposes costs on State B, whose citizens' human rights will
be infringed upon by the act of aggression. This infringement in turn imposes costs on citizens in State A, whose citizens have a preference for
the protection of the human rights of citizens in both states. This shared value of respect for human rights thus may restrain State A from
pursuing international aggression. n105 By contrast, a state which commits gross human rights violations against its own people will not be
subject to this restraint. Such violations often occur when the government has been "captured" by a select minority that chooses to violate
human rights. If the citizens themselves are not in favor of human rights at home, they are unlikely to be committed to the enforcement of
Where capture occurs, the government is not responsive to

the preferences of the domestic polity. In such cases, even if there is a
strong preference among citizens to protect human rights at home and
abroad, the government is unlikely to respond to those interests and
its policies will not be constrained by them.
human rights abroad.
CALLS UPON THE STATE ARE THE ONLY WAY TO ACHIEVE

SOCIAL PROGRESS THE ALTERNATIVE IS A COMBINATION
OF ANARCHY AND NIHILISM WE END UP DITHERING IN
THE FACE OF ATTROCITIES
Here again a comparison with Hobbes is illuminating. Hobbes thought that political sovereignty was a literal necessity--else life was nasty,
brutish, and short. He supported every sort of sovereignty, and so for him tyranny was nothing more than "monarchy misliked." Foucault believes
that discipline is necessary for this particular society-capitalist, modern, or whatever; he abhors all its forms, every sort of confinement and
for him liberalism is nothing more than discipline concealed. For neither
Hobbes nor Foucault does the constitution or the law or even the actual
workings of the political system make any difference. In fact, I think, these things
make all the difference. One of Foucault's followers, the author of a very intelligent essay on Discipline and Punish, draws from
control, and so
that book and the related interviews the extraordinary conclusion that the Russian Revolution failed because it "left intact the social hierarchies
: the Bolsheviks created a new

regime that overwhelmed the old hierarchies and enormously expanded and
intensified the use of disciplinary techniques. And they did this from the heart of the social system and not
and in no way inhibited the functioning of the disciplinary techniques." Exactly wrong
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Foucault desensitizes his reader
to the importance of politics; but politics matters. Power relations, he says, "are both intentional and
from what Foucault likes to cal the capillaries, from the center and not the extremities.
nonsubjective." I don't know what that sentence means, but I think that the contradictory words are intended (nonsubjectively?) to apply to
Every disciplinary act is planned and calculated; power is

intentional at the tactical level where guard confronts prisoner; doctor, patient; lecturer,
different levels of power
audience. But the set of power relations, the strategic connections, the deer -functionalism of power has no subject and is the product of no one's
plan
continued
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State is Key to Solving Oppression

(2/2)
continued
Foucault seems to disbelieve in principle in the existence of a dictator or a party
or a state that shapes the character of disciplinary institutions. He is focused
instead on what he thinks of as the "micro-fascism" of everyday life and has
little to say about authoritarian or totalitarian politics-that is, about the forms of
discipline that -are most specific to his own lifetime. But these are not the forms most specific to his own country, and
Foucault does believe in sticking close to the local exercise of power. Nor does he often use terms like "micro-fascism." He is not a "general
intellectual" of the old sort-so he tells us-who provides an account and critique of society as a whole.' The general intellectual belongs to the age
of the state and the party, when it still seemed possible to seize power and reconstruct society. He is, in the world of political knowledge, what
.
political epistemology.
is the ultimate source of his anarchism/nihilism.
the king is in the world of political power. Once we have cut off the king's head, power and knowledge alike take different forms
Foucault's
more recent work is an effort to explain these forms, to work out what can be called a
I now want to examine this epistemology, for it

Sometimes Foucault seems to be committed to nothing more than an elaborate pun on the word "discipline"-which means, on the one hand, a
branch of knowledge and on the other a system of correction and control. This is his argument: social life is discipline squared. Discipline makes
discipline possible (the order of the two nouns can be reversed). Knowledge derives from and provides the grounds for social control; every
particular form of social control rests on and makes possible a particular form of knowledge. It follows that power isn't merely repressive but also
creative (even if all it creates is, say, the science of penology); and similarly, knowledge isn't merely ideological but also true. But this doesn't
make either power or knowledge terribly attractive. Penology is "constituted" by the prison system in the obvious sense that there could not be a
study of prisoners or of the effects of imprisonment if there were no prisons. One form of discipline generates the data that makes the other
possible. At the same time, penology provides both the rationale and the intellectual structure of the prison system. There could be no exercise of
discipline, at least no sustained and organized exercise, without disciplinary knowledge. It is a nice model, though perhaps a little too easy. In
any case, Foucault proceeds to generalize it. "Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it
induces regular effects of power." So for every society, for every historical age, there is a regime of truth, unplanned but functional, generated
somehow out of the network of power relations, out of the multiple forms of constraint, and enforced along with them. There are certain types of
discourse that the society accepts "and makes . . . true," and there are mechanisms that enable us to distinguish true and false statements-and
sanctions, so that we won't make mistakes. Foucault believes that truth is relative to its sanctions and knowledge to the constraints that produce
it. There would appear to be no independent standpoint, no possibility for the development of critical principles. Of course, one can ask the
obvious questions: what is Foucault's standpoint? to what set of power relations is the genealogical antidiscipline connected'? Foucault is far too
intelligent not to have worried about these questions. They are standard for any relativism. He responds in two ways: first by saying, as I have
already noted, that his genealogies are fictions waiting for the "political realities" that will make them true. Each present invents its own past, but
Foucault
Foucault has invented a past for some future present. At other times,
says more simply that his work is made possible by the
events of '68 and by subsequent local revolts here and there along the disciplinary continuum. As the conventional disciplines are generated and
validated by the conventional uses of power, so Foucault's antidiscipline is generated by the resistance to those uses. But I don't see, on
Foucault's terms, how it can be validated by resistance until the resistance is successful (and it's not clear what success would mean). But
perhaps, after all, the demand that Foucault show us the ground on which he stands, display his philosophical warrants, is beside the point. For
makes no demands on us that we adopt this or that critical principle or replace

these disciplinary norms with some other set of norms. He is not an advocate. We
he
are to withdraw our belief in, say, the truth of penology and then support ..- what? Not every prison revolt, for there may be some that we have
, Foucault's position is simply incoherent. The

powerful evocation of the disciplinary system gives way to an antidisciplinarian
politics that is mostly rhetoric and posturing. But there is more that has to be said. In those
prison revolts with which we might rightly sympathize, the prisoners don't in fact
call into question the line between guilt and innocence or the truth value of
jurisprudence or penology. Their "discourse" takes a very different form: they
describe the brutality of the prison authorities or the inhumanity of prison
conditions, and they complain of punishments that go far beyond those to which they were legally condemned. They denounce official
arbitrariness, harassment, favoritism, and so on. They demand the introduction and enforcement of
what we might best call the rule of law. And these descriptions, complaints,
denunciations, and demands make an important point. Foucault is certainly right
to say that the conventional truths of morality, law, medicine, and psychiatry are implicated in the
exercise of power; that is a fact too easily forgotten by conventionally detached scientists, social scientists, and even
philosophers. But those same truths also regulate the exercise of power. They set
limits on what can rightly be done, and they give shape and conviction to the
arguments the prisoners make. The limits are important even if they are in some
sense arbitrary. They aren't entirely arbitrary, however, insofar as they are intrinsic
to the particular disciplines (in both senses of the word). The truths of jurisprudence and penology, for example, distinguish
"good reason" not to support. At this point, it seems to me
punishment from preventive detention. And the truths of psychiatry distinguish the internment of madmen from the internment of political
. A liberal state is one that maintains the limits of its constituent disciplines
and disciplinary institutions and that enforces their intrinsic principles.
Authoritarian and totalitarian states, by contrast, override those limits, turning
education into indoctrination, punishment into repression, asylums into prisons,
and prisons into concentration camps. These are crude definitions; I won't insist upon them; amend them as you
will. I only want to suggest the enormous importance of the political regime, the sovereign state. For it is the state that
establishes the general framework within which all other disciplinary institutions
operate. It is the state that holds open or radically shuts down the possibility of
local resistance. The agents of every disciplinary institution strive , of course, to
extend their reach and augment their discretionary power. Ultimately, it is only
state power that can stop them. Every act of local resistance is an appeal for
political or legal intervention from the center. Consider, for example, the factory revolts of the 1930s that led
dissidents
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(in this country) to the establishment of collective bargaining and grievance procedures, critical restraints on scientific management, which is one
of Foucault's disciplines, though one that he alludes to only occasionally. Success required not only the solidarity of the workers but also at least
some support from the liberal and democratic state. And success was functional not to any state but to a state of that sort; we can easily imagine
other "social wholes" that would require other kinds of factory discipline. A genealogical account of this discipline would be fascinating and
valuable, and it would undoubtedly overlap with Foucault's accounts of prisons and hospitals. But if it were complete, it would have to include a
genealogy of grievance procedures too, and this would overlap with an account, which Foucault doesn't provide, of the liberal state and the rule
. Here is a kind of knowledge-political philosophy and philosophical

jurisprudence-that regulates disciplinary arrangements across our society. It
arises within one set of power relations and extends toward the others; it offers
a critical perspective on all the networks of constraint. This suggests that
whatever the value of detailed analyses and critiques of local discipline, we still
require-I don't mean that society requires, or capitalism or even socialism requires, but you and I require-what Foucault calls "general
intellectuals." We need men and women who tell us when state power is
corrupted or systematically misused, who cry out that something is rotten, and
who reiterate the regulative principles with which we might set things right . But I
of law
don't want to end on this last note. I don't want to ask Foucault to be uplifting. That is not the task he has set himself. The point is rather that one
can't even be downcast, angry, grim, indignant, sullen, or embittered with reason unless one inhabits some social setting and adopts, however
tentatively and critically, its codes and categories. Or unless, and this is much harder, one constructs a new setting and proposes new codes and
categories. Foucault refuses to do either of these things, and that refusal, which makes his genealogies so powerful and so relentless, is also the
catastrophic weakness of his political theory
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State Key to Solving War (1/2)

STRONG HUMAN RIGHTS RECORDS FOSTER PEACE-HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTIONS CREATE INSTITUTIONAL
CONSTRAINTS ON AGGRESSION
One causal pathway rooted in liberal international relations theory that may explain the observed correlation between systematic human rights
aggression is the institutional constraint that accompanies

human rights protections. n97 Institutionalization of human rights norms has at least two powerful effects on state
behavior. First, human rights protections govern how broad a spectrum of the
community has at least some voice in the political decisions of the state. Even if the state is not a democratic
violations and interstate
polyarchy, if it provides basic protections for the human rights of all or most citizens, then a very broad spectrum of the polity is represented in
political affairs. Freedom of thought and freedom from extrajudicial bodily harm, for example, allow citizens to develop their own views on
voices, in turn, increases

the level of political competition--one of the key structural explanations
for the democratic peace--even without the establishment of a democratic form of government. n98 Of course , in
a non-democratic, but human rights respecting state, the views of individual
interests may not have a direct effect on state policy, but, arguably, they can still increase the level of
political competition by facilitating debate and the exchange of ideas.
The second effect of institutionalized protections of human rights is to set a minimum floor of treatment for all citizens within the domestic
polity. Even in a non-democracy, minimum human rights protections ensure that [*266]
rights are accorded to individuals not directly represented by the government. By ensuring a minimum
treatment of the unrepresented, human rights protections prevent the government from
externalizing the costs of aggressive behavior on the unrepresented. In
human rights respecting states, for example, unrepresented individuals
cannot be forced at gunpoint to fight or be bound into slavery to
generate low-cost economic resources for war, and thus restrain the state from
engaging in aggressive action. On the other hand, in a state where power is narrowly concentrated in the hands
political issues and, often, to express those views through public channels. A wider spectrum of
of a political elite that systematically represses its own people, the state will be more able to bear the domestic costs of war. By violating the
human rights of its own citizens, a state can force individuals to fight or support the military apparatus in its war-making activities. Similarly, by
denial
of freedom of thought and expression might well insulate the
government from the electoral costs of an aggressive foreign policy.
n99
denying basic human rights, a state may be better able to bear the political costs of war. Even if such a state had fair elections,
HUMAN RIGHTS CONCIOUSNESS AT THE STATE LEVEL

CHECKS CONFLICT: (1) FOSTERS HUMAN RIGHTS
CULTURE; (2) EXPANDS CITIZEN OPPOSITION; (3)
UNDERMINES STATE COERCION TOWARDS WAR
The institutionalization of human rights protections is not only a means of signaling benign intent, but is
also inversely correlated with a state's ability to engage in aggressive
conduct. As a state embeds human rights protections in its domestic
system--even without democratization--a number of structural changes
occur within the society that limit aggressive potential. First, as Thomas Risse and
Kathryn Sikkink have argued, a culture of human rights may develop within the population and become institutionalized domestically. n121 Such
a human rights culture would reject international aggression as a threat to the human rights of citizens in other states. Second,
institutionalization of human rights protections expands the ability of

citizens to voice opposition to aggressive state policy through freedoms of belief, speech,
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institutionalization erodes the ability of the state to coerce
its citizens into providing the resources and human capital necessary
for aggressive war. n122
and assembly. Third,
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Kritik Answers
State Key to Solving War (2/2)

STATE ENFORCEMENT OF HUMAN RIGHTS SOLVES WAR
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW REVIEW v. 17, Spring 2004, p. 271.
human
rights informed foreign policy would include far more active advocacy for improvement in some states' human rights records. Such policies
should be advocated not just for the traditional human rights reasons
of life and human dignity, n115 but also because improved human rights
records may enhance national and global security by preventing states
from engaging in international aggression in the future. Even for skeptics of the
In dealing with states of concern, improving a given state's human rights policy is almost never a primary goal of U.S. policy. A
universal duty to promote human rights on grounds of individual dignity, this second argument should have persuasive weight in asserting the
strategic importance of human rights in U.S. foreign policy.
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Kritik Answers
Alternative Creates Worse

Oppression (1/2)
DIRECT OPPOSITION TO THE STATE CREATES NEW, WORSE
FORMS OF MAOIST REPRESSION ONLY ALLOWING THE
STATE TO FAIL UNDER ITS OWN WEIGHT CAN CHALLENGE
THE STATUS QUO
BAD Press 92
[Anarchism and Civility, BAD Broadside #6, June,
http://world.std.com/~bbrigade/badbsd6.htm, acc. 10-2-06//uwyo-ajl]
A generally accepted anarchist tenet is that the State can only be effectively dismantled by a voluntary, cooperative and spontaneous
. Authoritarian revolutions gotten up by manipulative vanguardists

are rejected as inconsistent with the anarchist belief that the means must be
consistent with the ends. History has plenty of examples to show that seizure of
power through elitist revolt, rather than furthering the goals of the revolution, actually becomes a process
for the strengthening of the State in a new and more vicious form. From an evanescent
moment of exultant freedom one inevitably wakes up to the hangover of a Napoleon or a Lenin or a
insurrection by the people
Mao.
Nevertheless, contemporary anarchists are often still mesmerized by the call to arms, even when the chance of such a romantic gesture
The only real revolutions occur when popular discontent causes the
state to collapse under the weight of its own folly, not when some bloody
vanguard, following whatever destructive fantasy its leaders concoct, meets the
modern state head-on. This inevitably results in meaningless hardship for the
people involved, with the greatest misery reserved for innocents who gets in the
way of either side's fallacious ideology. Being a "rebel" and antagonizing the flatulent powers-that-be in a modern
succeeding is nil.
state can be an exciting game, but it is only bluster and puerile self-gratification when genuine revolt is implausible. In the end the most radical
"revolutionaries" either end up as bitter, dead-end martyrs or become the next generations' "born-again" capitalists. Having had their fling, they
come to believe in their new "realism" as solipstically as they embraced rebellion. None of this brings us any closer to a solution to the problem of
the State.
The fallacy of revolutionary adventurism is mirrored on a personal level by the intolerant and abusive discourse of identity politics.
Everyone is pre-judged by their race, gender, sexual or religious affiliation, and

socially compartmentalized in some politically correct egg basket. The goal of the anarchist
movement is to establish a free, tolerant and cooperative society which will embrace diversity and celebrate difference. If the means are to be
Identifying
the "enemy" by birth or predilection, regardless of an individual's actual beliefs or actions, is simple bigotry. Awarding
consistent with the ends, then how can such a abrasive and bigoted practice as identity politics possibly achieve that end?
moral virtue on the same grounds is simple stupidity. Similarly, essaying to act as a unwarranted spokesperson for a diverse grouping of
Real people, stripped of

their individual identities, are thus subsumed in some hypothetical singledimensional construct that effectively denies them any complexity of character.
This isn't an answer to institutionalized racism and bigotry, but rather its mirror
image.
individuals who by chance share a single basic characteristic is the most arrogantsort of elitism.
This sort of prejudicial activity has appeal for the simpleminded. It's easy to either attack or adulate a stranger on the grounds of appearance. A
similar anxiety powered the old Sumptuary laws which punished anyone who dressed above their social class -- it was too unnerving for the elite
to think they might make a mistake and treat an inferior as an equal, thanks to illicit appearances. Political prejudice makes it simple to get
through the difficulty of rootless modern life where there are no clear cut exterior indications of what a person might really be like. All white
males (unless, perhaps, gay) are dangerous, power-driven and bigoted. All women (unless, perhaps, Republican) are intuitive, nurturing and
empathetic with Nature. Members of minorities (take your pick) are morally superior to members of majorities. Classifications and labels which
assist us in making such decisions are more real (and more important) than the people they describe. Et cetera. Bullshit.
The goal of a tolerant and cooperative society of free individuals can only be
achieved by those very means -- by being tolerant, cooperative and free. We must be better companions
to our fellow mortals, whatever their outward characteristics . Civility, which facilitates cooperation, is
imperative if anarchy is to really work. Pigheaded and self-important
aggressiveness, hypercriticism and easy intolerance is a recipe for the status
quo. We don't mean to suggest some sort of all accepting, "turn-the-other-cheek" bourgeois crap, either. Once you get beyond the labels,
there are still unfortunately plenty of folks that it makes sense to despise. Arrogant, violent, intolerant, fanatical, bigoted, manipulative,
rapacious... individuals with these characteristics must be guarded against, but they are not all found in one easily recognized group identity.
These adjectives equally describe individual men, women, blacks, whites, handicapped people -- the whole gamut of the human race. Nor is
anyone as morally pure as some of our new puritan idealists would insist that they be. A person is the sum of their character traits, not a
distillation of the most pronounced ones. Radicals are just as prone to frailties of character as industrialists. It is by their actual effect on their
community and environment that we should evaluate our fellow beings, not by some dominant virtue or fault which particularly excites us. It
would be far preferable to tolerate a insensitive verbal bigot who in practice actually helped people than a pious hypocrite who mouthed
politically correct platitudes and then went home and beat his lover.
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Kritik Answers
Alternative Creates Worse

Oppression (2/2)
THEY TOTALIZE THE STATE IN REVERSE, REINSCRIBING ITS
FLAWS AND PREVENTING REORIENTATION NECESSARY
FOR EFFECTIVE POLITICS
Williams & Krause 97
[Michael, Asst. Prof. of Poli Sci @ Southern Maine, & Keith, Prof. of Polic Sci @
Grad Inst. Intl Stud, Critical Security Studies, xvi//uwyo-ajl]
Many of the chapters in this volume thus retain a concern with the centrality of the state as a locus not only of obligation but of effective political
. The task of a critical approach is

not to deny the centrality of the state in this realm but rather, to understand more fully
its structures, dynamics, and possibilities for reorientation. From a critical perspective, state action is
flexible and capable of reorientation, and analyzing state policy need not
therefore be tantamount to embracing the statist assumptions of orthodox conceptions. To
exclude focus on state action from a critical perspective on the grounds that it plays
inevitably within the rules of existing conceptions simply reverses the error of
essentializing the state. Moreover, it loses the possibility of influencing what remains the
most structurally capable actor in contemporary world politics.
action. In the realm of organized violence, states also remain the preeminent actors
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Kritik Answers
Alternative Causes Power Vaccuum

STATISM IS NECESSARY TO PREVENT A POWER VACCUUM
ALLOWING WORSE OPPRESSION BY CORPORATE POWER
Knox 2000
[R. Redemocracy, http:///www.marininternet.com/rknox/car15.html, acc. 10-206//uwyo-ajl]

We are fools to think that free markets will do anything other than to consolidate
and monopolize the marketplace, which is their nature to do if uncontrolled or
unchecked by responsible democratic government. Uncontrolled and unchecked
top-down hyper-capitalism is as anti-social,-- as harmful to individuals, to
families and to our village values as totalitarian communism and its top-down
central control proved to be for countries in the Eastern Block.
This is precisely why our so-called "FOUNDERS" did not grant Constitutional rights to corporations. Rather they required corporations to petition
for Legislative Charters to incorporate for specific social benefit for time certain periods, after which they were un-incorporated. Our founders
held corporations in the same low or suspect repute as they did the Crown of England for the same economic reasons... the Crown and
corporations shared an equal potential for evil anti-individual behaviors. Fortunately, although there is an obvious corporate bias in law, corporate
speech does not rise to a Constitutionally guaranteed right---at least not yet. But you can bet that corporations are working to achieve this, too.
After all, corporations have won through politics and legal machinations what it was not granted by the Founders,---the status, protections and
rights of individual personhood, actually super-personhood, as corporations (fake, pseudo or contrived persons) enjoy far more benefits and
protections in many respects than do individuals (real persons).
CORPORATIONS = Viritual Persons Who Enjoy More Power and Benefits than Real People, by design.
Corporations enjoy many benefits that have correctly been labeled as super-personhood, and have won legislative benefits that are not
. Corporations are now in a position

of usurping individual rights essentially becoming a private government equally
or more insidious than any undemocratic form of government.
extened to individuals which are granted specific rights under the Constitution
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Kritik Answers
Alternative Causes Nuclear War

AVOIDING STRATEGIC USE OF THE STATE LEADS TO
NUCLEAR COUNTER-REVOLUTIONS
Martin
Shaw, 2001
[Review of International Studies, The unfinished global revolution: intellectuals

and the new politics of international relations,
http://nationalism.org/library/science/ir/shaw/shaw-ris-2001-27-04.pdf]
The new politics of international relations require us, therefore, to go beyond the
anti-imperialism of the intellectual left as well as of the semi-anarchist traditions
of the academic discipline. We need to recognize three fundamental truths. First,
in the twenty-first century people struggling for democratic liberties across the
non- Western world are likely to make constant demands on our solidarity.
Courageous academics, students and other intellectuals will be in the forefront
of these movements. They deserve the unstinting support of intellectuals in the
West. Second, the old international thinking in which democratic movements are
seen as purely internal to states no longer carries convictiondespite the
lingering nostalgia for it on both the American right and the anti-American left.
The idea that global principles can and should be enforced worldwide is firmly
established in the minds of hundreds of millions of people. This consciousness
will become a powerful force in the coming decades. Third, global stateformation is a fact. International institutions are being extended, and (like it or
not) they have a symbiotic relation with the major centre of state power, the
increasingly internationalized Western conglomerate. The success of the globaldemocratic revolutionary wave depends first on how well it is consolidated in
each national contextbut second, on how thoroughly it is embedded in
international networks of power, at the centre of which, inescapably, is the West.
From these political fundamentals, strategic propositions can be derived. First,
democratic movements cannot regard non-governmental organizations and civil
society as ends in themselves. They must aim to civilize local states, rendering
them open, accountable and pluralistic, and curtail the arbitrary and violent
exercise of power. Second, democratizing local states is not a separate task from
integrating them into global and often Western-centred networks. Reproducing
isolated local centres of power carries with it classic dangers of states as centres
of war.84 Embedding global norms and integrating new state centres with global
institutional frameworks are essential to the control of violence. (To put this
another way: the proliferation of purely national democracies is not a recipe for
peace.)
Third, while the global revolution cannot do without the West and the UN, neither
can it rely on them unconditionally. We need these power networks, but we need
to tame them too, to make their messy bureaucracies enormously more
accountable and sensitive to the needs of society worldwide. This will involve
the kind of cosmopolitan democracy argued for by David Held.85 It will also
require us to advance a global social-democratic agenda, to address the literally
catastrophic scale of world social inequalities. This is not a separate problem:
social and economic reform is an essential ingredient of alternatives to warlike
and genocidal power; these feed off and reinforce corrupt and criminal political
economies. Fourth, if we need the global-Western state, if we want to
democratize it and make its institutions friendlier to global peace and justice, we
cannot be indifferent to its strategic debates. It matters to develop international
political interventions, legal institutions and robust peacekeeping as strategic
alternatives to bombing our way through zones of crisis. It matters that
international intervention supports pluralist structures, rather than ratifying
Bosnia-style apartheid.86
As political intellectuals in the West, we need to have our eyes on the ball at our
feet, but we also need to raise them to the horizon. We need to grasp the
historic drama that is transforming worldwide relationships between people and
state, as well as between state and state. We need to think about how the
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Kritik Answers
turbulence of the global revolution can be consolidated in democratic, pluralist,
international networks of both social relations and state authority. We cannot be
simply optimistic about this prospect. Sadly, it will require repeated violent
political crises to push Western and other governments towards the required
restructuring of world institutions.87 What I have outlined is a huge challenge;
but the alternative is to see the global revolution splutter into partial defeat, or
degenerate into new genocidal warsperhaps even nuclear conflicts. The
practical challenge for all concerned citizens, and the theoretical and analytical
challenges for students of international relations and politics, are intertwined.
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Permutation Solvency (1/3)

WE MUST USE THE INSTITUTIONS THAT EXERCISE POWER
TO CHANGE THEM
Grossburg, Professor, University of Illinois, WE GOTTA GET OUTTA THIS
PLACE, 1992, p. 391-393.
Lawrence
The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance,
understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which
power is actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific
institutions that power can be challenged. The Left has assumed from some time
now that, since it has so little access to the apparatuses of agency, its only
alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The
Left does in fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to the
entire range of apparatuses of decision making and power. Otherwise, the Left
has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not individuals who have
produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our world, although it is
individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they
must act within organizations, and within the system of organizations which in
fact have the capacity (as well as the moral responsibility) to fight them. Without
such organizations, the only models of political commitment are self-interest and
charity. Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others who cannot act on their
own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of global capitalism,
and everyones position is increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will not take
much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the
experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the fallen middle class
demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees about the future of any single
nation. We can imagine ourselves involved in a politics where acting for another
is always acting for oneself as well, a politics in which everyone struggles with
the resources they have to make their lives (and the world) better, since the two
are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to think of affirmation
action as in everyones best interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We
need to think with what Axelos has described as a planetary thought which
would be a coherent thoughtbut not a rationalizing and rationalist inflection;
it would be a fragmentary thought of the open totalityfor what we can grasp
are fragments unveiled on the horizon of the totality. Such a politics will not
begin by distinguishing between the local and the global (and certainly not by
valorizing one over the other) for the ways in which the former are incorporated
into the latter preclude the luxury of such choices. Resistance is always a local
struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to
connect into its global structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally.
Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of articulation between
them, the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto
the global. Since the meaning of these terms has to be understood in the
context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally and locally:
Think globally, act appropriately! Fight locally because that is the scene of
action, but aim for the global because that is the scene of agency. Local
struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point
of their insertion into the field of immanence. This requires the imagination and
construction of forms of unity, commonality and social agency which do not
deny differences. Without such commonality, politics is too easily reduced to a
question of individual rights (i.e., in the terms of classical utility theory);
difference ends up trumping politics, bringing it to an end. The struggle
against the disciplined mobilization of everyday life can only be built on affective
commonalities, a shared responsible yearning: a yearning out towards
something more and something better than this and this place now. The Left,
after all, is defined by its common commitment to principles of justice, equality
and democracy (although these might conflict) in economic, political and
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cultural life. It is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion, that such things
are possible. The construction of an affective commonality attempts to mobilize
people in a common struggle, despite the fact that they have no common
identity or character, recognizing that they are the only force capable of
providing a new historical and oppositional agency. It strives to organize
minorities into a new majority.
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Kritik Answers

REFORMIST STRATEGIES CHALLENGE THE STATE TOO
THEY ARENT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE WITH RADICAL
APPROACHES
Dixon, Founding Member of Direct Action Network, 2K5 (Chris, Reflections on
Privilege, Reformism, and Activism, http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/ioaa/dixon2.html)
Evidently sasha doesn't grasp my argument in "Finding Hope." Or else he disagrees. It's difficult to tell because, while skillfully sidestepping
engagement with my discussion of privilege, he also sidesteps the main thrust of my essay: rethinking radicalism, particularly in the context of
we have to move beyond the myopic view --often endemic among

anarchists--that the most 'important' activism only or mainly happens in the streets ,
privilege. As I wrote, "
enmeshed in police confrontations." In other words, spheres of traditional 'radical action' are limited and limiting. And though I don't believe that
sasha fundamentally disagrees with this criticism, he refuses to accept its broader consequences. For instance, where I question the bounds of
'radicalism' with examples of struggles like opposing prison construction and establishing community and cultural centers, he conclusively points
to "a set of demands and goals of which none suggest any serious critique of capitalism and the state in their totality." There is much more to the
"totality" that we all confront than capitalism and the state. That's unequivocal. Furthermore, a "totality" has an undeniable physical presence,
and people do in fact contest and resist it every day through a variety of struggles using a variety of means--not all containing the "serious
critique" necessary to satisfy sasha. J. Kellstadt nicely observes this, noting that an 'activist' perspective (not unlike sasha's) overlooks a whole
layer of more "everyday" forms of resistance - from slacking off, absenteeism, and sabotage, to shopfloor "counter-planning" and other forms of
autonomous and "unofficial" organizing - which conventional activists and leftists (including most anarchists) have a bad track record of
acknowledging. And this still leaves out all of those modes of struggle which take place beyond the shopfloor, such as various forms of cultural
and sexual revolution. Unfortunately, sasha doesn't deign to discuss these all-too-pedestrian realities, many of which potentially embrace the
very anarchist ethics he touts. They certainly have bearing on the lives of many folks and speak to a breadth of social struggle, but they
apparently don't constitute a sufficient "critique." Even if sasha were to acknowledge their importance, my sense is that he would erect a
rationalized theoretical division between Kellstadt's "everyday forms of resistance" and 'reformism.' No doubt, he would use a rhetorical sleight of
hand on par with the "simple fact of language that those who want to reform the present system are called reformists." A seemingly irrefutable,
self-apparent statement, this actually glosses over legitimate questions: Are 'reformists' so easily discernable and cleanly categorized? Are all
'reforms' equal? Can they be part of a long-term revolutionary strategy? So let's talk plainly about reformism. No matter how much some might
wish otherwise, it simply isn't a cut-and-dry issue. And while it actually deserves a book-length examination, here I'll sketch some general
considerations. Principally, I ask, assuming that we share the goal of dismantling systems of power and restructuring our entire society in
nonhierarchical ways, what role does reform play? Must we eschew it, unconditionally embrace it, or is there another approach? sasha steadfastly
represents one rather limited 'radical' view. To bolster his critique of 'reformism,' for instance, he critically cites one of the examples in my essay:
demanding authentic public oversight of police. "[This] might be a small step for social change in some general sense," he argues, "but ultimately
it is a step backwards as it strengthens the legitimacy of the police and of imposed decision." I respect the intent of this critique; it makes sense if
in real life, it's both simplistic and

insulated. Look at it this way: accepting sasha's argument, are we to wait until the coming insurrectionary
upheaval before enjoying an end to police brutality ? More specifically, are AfricanAmerican men to patiently endure the continued targeting of "driving while
Black"? Should they hold off their demands for police accountability so as to
avoid strengthening "the legitimacy of the police and of imposed decision "? And if
they don't, are they 'reformists'? Many folks who experience daily police occupation understand that ending the
"imposed decision" (often epitomized by police) will require radical change, and they work toward it. At
the same time, they demand authentic public oversight of police forces. The two don't
have to be mutually exclusive . I'll even suggest that they can be complementary , especially if we
acknowledge the legacies of white supremacy and class stratification embedded in policing. Ultimately, we need a lucid
conception of social change that articulates this kind of complementarity . That is,
we need revolutionary strategy that links diverse, everyday struggles and
demands to long-term radical objectives, without sacrificing either . Of course, this isn't to
say that every so-called 'progressive' ballot initiative or organizing campaign is necessarily radical or strategic. Reforms are not all created
equal. But some can fundamentally shake systems of power, leading to enlarged gains
and greater space for further advances . Andre Gorz, in his seminal book Strategy for Labor, refers to these as
one is privileged enough to engage with the police on terms of one's own choosing. Yet
"non-reformist" or "structural" reforms. He contends, "a struggle for non-reformist reforms--for anti-capitalist reforms--is one which does not base
its validity and its right to exist on capitalist needs, criteria, and rationales. A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but
the end of slavery, the eight-hour workday,

desegregation. All were born from long, hard struggles, and none were endpoints.
Yet they all struck at the foundations of power (in these cases, the state, white supremacy, and capitalism),
and in the process, they created new prospects for revolutionary change . Now
consider contemporary struggles: amnesty for undocumented immigrants , socialized health care, expansive
environmental protections, indigenous sovereignty . These and many more are arguably
non-reformist reforms as well. None will single-handedly dismantle capitalism or other
systems of power, but each has the potential to escalate struggles and sharpen
social contradictions. And we shouldn't misinterpret these efforts as simply
meliorative incrementalism , making 'adjustments' to a fundamentally flawed system. Certainly that tendency exists, but
there are plenty of other folks working very consciously within a far more radical strategy, pushing for a qualitative shift in struggle. " To
fight for alternative solutions ," Gorz writes, "and for structural reforms (that is to say, for
intermediate objectives) is not to fight for improvements in the capitalist system; it is rather to
break it up, to restrict it, to create counter-powers which, instead of creating a
new equilibrium, undermine its very foundations ." Thankfully, this is one approach among a diverse array
what should be." Look to history for examples:
of strategies, all of which encompass a breadth of struggles and movements. Altogether, they give me hope.
847
Kritik Answers

SMALL STEPS FORWARD ARE POSSIBLE AND NECESSARY
ITS THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE THE SYSTEM ANY BETTER
WITHOUT THROWING OUR HANDS UP AND DECIDING THAT
NOTHING IS POSSIBLE
all micro-forms of discipline are functional to a larger system
I have suggested that

. Foucault
sometimes calls this system capitalism, but he also gives it a number of more dramatic names: the disciplinary society, the carceral city, the
panoptic regime and, most frightening (and misleading) of all, the carceral archipelago. But whatever this larger system is, it isn't the political
system, the regime or constitution. It isn't determined by a Hobbist sovereign, shaped by a legislator or a founding convention, controlled
through a judicial process. The crucial point of Foucault's political theory is that discipline escapes the world of law and right-and then begins to
"colonize" that world, replacing legal principles with principles of physical, psychological, and moral normality. Thus in his book on prisons:
"Although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism enables
it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery both immense and minute...." And the code by which this machinery operates is a
scientific, not a legal code. The function of discipline is to create useful subjects, men and women who conform to a standard, who are certifiably
sane or healthy or docile or competent, not free agents who invent their own standards, who, in the language of rights, "give the law to
The triumph of professional or scientific norms over legal rights and of

local discipline over constitutional law is a fairly common theme of
contemporary social criticism. It has given rise to a series of campaigns in
defense of the rights of the mentally ill, of prisoners, hospital patients, children
themselves."
(in
schools and also in families). Foucault himself has been deeply involved in prison reform or--1 had better be careful--in a political practice with
And indeed there have been reforms (in this country at least, but I
new laws about consent, confidentiality, access to records; judicial
interventions in the administration of prisons and schools. Foucault has little to
say about this sort of thing and is obviously skeptical about its effectiveness . Despite
his emphasis on local struggles, he is largely uninterested in local victories. But what other
victories can he think possible, given his strategic knowledge'? Consider (1) that discipline-in-detail, the precise control of
regard to prisons that might give rise to reforms.
suspect in Europe too):
behavior, is necessary to the (unspecified) large-scale features of contemporary social and economic life; (2) that this kind of control requires the
microsetting, the finely meshed network, the local power relation, represented in ideal-typical fashion by the cellular structure of the prison, the
daily timetable of prison events, the extralegal penalties inflicted by prison authorities, the face-to-face encounters of guard and prisoner; (3)
that the prison is only one small part of a highly articulated, mutually reinforcing carceral continuum extending across society, in which all of us
are implicated, and not only as captives or victims; (4) and finally, that the complex of disciplinary mechanisms and institutions constitutes and is
constituted by the contemporary human sciences-an argument that runs through all of Foucault's work, to which I will return. Physical disciplines
and intellectual disciplines are radically entangled; the carceral continuum is validated by the knowledge of human subjects that it makes
how can
Foucault expect anything more than a small reform here or there , an casing of disciplinary
rigor, the introduction of more humane , if no less effective, methods' ? What else is possible? And yet
possible. Given all this-leave aside for the moment whether it adds up to a fully satisfactory account of our social life-
sometimes, not in his books but in the interviews-and especially in a series of interviews of the early 1970s, which still reflect the impact of May
'68-Foucault seems to see a grand alternative: the dismantling of the whole thing, the fall of the carceral city, not revolution but abolition. It's for
this reason that Foucault's politics are commonly called anarchist, and anarchism certainly has its moments in his thought. Not that he imagines
a social system different from our own, beyond discipline and sovereignty alike: "I think that to imagine another system is to extend our
participation in the present system." It is precisely the idea of society as a system, a set of institutions, that must give way to something elsewhat else, we can't imagine. Perhaps human freedom requires a nonfunctionalist society whose arrangements, whatever they are, serve no larger
purpose and have no redeeming social value. The nearest thing to an account of such arrangements comes in an interview first published in
November 1971. "It is possible," says Foucault, "that the rough outline of a future society is supplied by the recent experiences with drugs, sex,
communes, other forms of consciousness, and other forms of individuality." In that same interview, with some such vision in mind, he repudiates
the likely reformist results of his own prison work: "The ultimate goal of [our] interventions was not to extend the visiting rights of prisoners to 30
minutes or to procure flush toilets for the cells, but to question the social and moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty." As this last
passage suggests, when Foucault is an anarchist, he is a moral as well as a political anarchist. For him morality and politics go together. Guilt and
To abolish power systems

is to abolish both moral and scientific categories: away with them all! But what will be left'? Foucault does
innocence are the products of law just as normality and abnormality are the products of discipline.
not believe, as earlier anarchists did, that the free human subject is a subject of a certain sort, naturally good, warmly sociable, kind and loving.
Rather, there is for him no such thing as a free human subject, no natural man or woman. Men and women are always social creations, the
Foucault's radical abolitionism, if it is serious, is not anarchist so much as

nihilist. For on his own arguments, either there will be nothing left at all, nothing visibly human; or new
codes and disciplines will be produced, and Foucault gives us no reason to
expect that these will be any better than the ones we now live with . Nor, for that matter,
products of codes and disciplines. And so
does he give us any way of knowing what "better" might mean.
848
Kritik Answers
No Link
PROPOSING REFORMS DOESNT LEGITIMIZE THE STATE
Frost, University of Kent, Mervyn, 96, Ethics in International Relations, p. 90-1)
A first objection which seems inherent in Donelans approach is that utilizing the modern state domain of discourse in
effect sanctifies the state: it assumes that people will always live in states and that it is not possible within such a
by having recourse
to the ordinary language of international relations I am not
thereby committed to argue that the state system as it exists is
the best mode of human political organization or that people ought
always to live in states as we know them. As I have said, my argument is that whatever
proposals for piecemeal or large-scale reform of the state system
are made, they must of necessity be made in the language of the
modern state. Whatever proposals are made, whether in
justification or in criticism of the state system, will have to make
use of concepts which are at present part and parcel of the theory
of states. Thus, for example any proposal for a new global institutional
arrangement superseding the state system will itself have to be
justified, and that justification will have to include within it
reference to a new and good form of individual citizenship, reference to a new
legislative machinery equipped with satisfactory checks and balances, reference to satisfactory law
enforcement procedures, reference to a satisfactory arrangement for distributing the goods produced in the
world, and so on . All of these notions are notions which have been developed and finely honed within the theory
of the modern state. It is not possible to imagine a justification of a new
world order succeeding which used, for example, feudal, or traditional/tribal,
discourse. More generally there is no worldwide language of political morality which is not completely shot
language to consider alternatives to the system. This objection is not well founded,
through with state-related notions such as citizenship, rights under law, representative government and so on.
849
Kritik Answers
No Alternative
THE NEGATIVES PROBLEMATIZING OF STATE IDENTITY
HAS NO ALTERNATIVE
Cole,
professor of History @ Univ of Michigan, 95

(Juan R. I. Feature Review: Power, Knowledge, and Orientalism Diplomatic
History Vol. 19 No. 3 Summer)
In short, Campbells imaginative and innovative approach places the politics of
identity at the very core of U.S. Foreign Policy. Nevertheless, this reviewer must
express a few doubts about his inflection of poststructuralist principles and
Possibilities. Even if the struggle over identity formed the core of
contemporary politics on the national and international levels, the crisis of
politics could not be reduced to the crisis of representation. As much
as we learn from Writing Security about the production of identity, as little
do we learn about the reconstitution of politics. Diplomats, policymakers,
industrialists, intellectuals, and social activists, to name but a few, enter the
arena of identity politics under conditions that are uneven and change over
time. Campbell, however, treats identity struggles, and the strategies of
otherness and particular forms of representation that go along with
them, as having neither origins nor agency and as being unaccountable
to multiple patterns of causality and specific historical moments. Some
might argue that the omissions of the question of agency and of
conventional causal explanations are the very trademarks of
poststructuralism The lack of attention to historical details and
peculiarities, and to the nonprogressive movement of history through
time, however, is certainly not an inevitable price of poststructuralist
analysis. Campbells alternative to the realist notion of an essentialist
and universalist search for power is a universal and ahistorical search
for identity and differentiation from the Other. Images of the American
frontier, for instance, have no doubt a different purpose and significance in an
emerging as opposed to a late capitalist order. Furthermore, Campbells critique
of state- and nation-centered politics is curiously at odds with his focus on the
American identity.20 Such a systemic approach toward the history of identity
struggles is perhaps natural to political science, but not to poststructuralism.
By claiming that an only vaguely specified2l poststructuralist attitude
sees theory w practice (emphasis in original) (p. i), Campbell takes a
shortcut and tends to deny any meaningful understanding of the
mediation between theory and practice, or between the discursive and
the non-discursive.
850
Kritik Answers
A2 Borders: 2AC
SOVEREIGNTY IS NECESSARY FOR COALITIONS OF
RESISTANCE
Gupta 92
[Akhil, Prof. Anthro @ Stanford, Cultural Anthropology 7(1), JSTOR//uwyo-ajl]
Second, just as formal equality of citizens in the nation-state often
constitutionally enshrined (Andersons deep horizontal comradeship), so the
equality of nation-states in the world system is given concrete expression the
charter and functioning of international organizations such as the United
Nations. The independence of third world countries, dependent as it is on the
international order of the United Nations, thus redirects spatial identity from the
nation at the same time that it produces it.
Last, independence from colonial rule made it imperative for postcolonial third
world nation-states to examine the nature and meaning of sovereignty. They
soon realized that the independence they had fought so hard to obtain could not
be sustained under the pressure exerted by the superpowers to incorporate
them into clientistic relationships. The only way to resist this pressure was to
band together and form a common front and to use this union strategically to
prevent absorption into either bloc. Sovereignty not only depends on the
protection of spatial borders, but it is above all the ability of state elites to
regulate activities that flow across those borders, such as the crossing of
commodities and surpluses, the passage of people in the form of labor, tourists,
et cetera, and the movement of cultural products and ideas. It is significant that
the agenda of successive meetings of nonaligned nations moved from an initial
emphasis on the Cold War and colonialism to questions of imperialism, unequal
trading relationships, and the new information order. It was realized that
economic dependence, indebtedness, and cultural imperialism were as great, if
not greater, dangers to sovereignty as was military invasion. The Nonaligned
Movement thus represented an effort on the part of economically and militarily
weaker nations to use the interstate system to consolidate the nation-state.
851
Kritik Answers
**Terror Talk**
Terror Talk Answers: 2AC (1/5)
FIRST, NO LINK WE DONT SAY THAT TERROR IS
INTRINSICALLY CONNECTED TO ISLAM, WHICH IS WHAT
THEIR EV DESCRIBES. ALL INTENTIONAL KILLING OF
INNOCENTS IS BAD
SECOND, NO IMPACT - RHETORIC DOESNT SHAPE REALITY
Fram-Cohen 85
[Michelle, Reality, Language, Translation: What Makes Translation Possible? American Translators Association
Conference, enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/michelleframcohen//possibilityoftranslation.html, 9-2406//uwyo-ajl]
Nida did not provide the philosophical basis of the view that the external world is the common source of all languages. Such a basis can be found
in the philosophy of Objectivism, originated by Ayn Rand. Objectivism, as its name implies, upholds the objectivity of reality. This means that
reality is independent of consciousness, consciousness being the means of

perceiving ?reality, not of creating it. Rand defines language as "a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote
concepts." (15) These symbols are the written or spoken words of any language. Concepts are defined as the "mental integration of two or more
units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted." (16) This means that concepts are
abstractions of units perceived in reality. Since words denote concepts, words are the symbols of such abstractions; words are the means of
Since reality provides the data from which we abstract and

form concepts, reality is the source of all words --and of all languages. The very existence of
translation demonstrates this fact. If there was no objective reality, there could be
no similar concepts expressed in different verbal symbols. There could be no similarity between
representing concepts in a language.
the content of different languages, and so, no translation.

Translation is the transfer of conceptual knowledge from one language into another. It is the transfer of one set of symbols denoting concepts into
another set of symbols denoting the same concepts.
This process is possible because concepts have
specific referents in reality.
Even if a certain word and the concept it designates exist in one language but not in another,
the referent this word and concept stand for nevertheless exists in reality, and can be referred to in translation by a descriptive phrase or
neologism. Language is a means describing reality, and as such can and should expand to include newly discovered or innovated objects in
reality. The revival of the ancient Hebrew language in the late 19th Century demonstrated the dependence of language on outward reality. Those
who wanted to use Hebrew had to innovate an enormous number of words in order to describe the new objects that did not confront the ancient
Hebrew speakers. On the other hand, those objects that existed 2000 years ago could be referred to by the same words. Ancient Hebrew could
not by itself provide a sufficient image of modern reality for modern users.
THIRD, TURN: TERRORIST DISCOURSE PREVENTS

DEVOLUTION INTO MORAL NIHILISM
Jean Berthke
Elshtain, Professor, Social and Political Ethics, University of
Chicago,THINKING ABOUT SEPTEMBER 11: DEFINING TERRORISM AND TERRORISTS, 20 03,

p. 19-20.
This line of reasoning pertains directly to how we talk about terror and terrorists. Just as the words martyr and martyrdom are distorted, whether
in the Western or the Islamic tradition, when applied not to those prepared to die as witnesses to their faith but instead to those who commit
suicide while killing as many civilians as possible. So terrorist is twisted beyond recognition if it is used to designate anyone anywhere fighting for
a cause. Terrorists are those who kill people they consider their "objective enemy," no matter what those people may or may not have done.
Terrorist and terrorism entered ordinary language to designate a specific

phenomenon: killing directed against all ideological enemies indiscriminately and
outside the context of a war between combatants. According to the logic of terrorism, enemies can legitimately be
killed no matter what they are doing, where they are, or how old they are. The word terror first entered the political
vocabulary of the West during the French Revolution. Those who guillotined thousands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris were pleased to speak
a complex, subtle, and generally

accepted international language has emerged to make critical distinctions
between different kinds of violent acts. Combatants are distinguished from
noncombatants. A massacre is different from a battle. An ambush is different from a firefight. When Americans look
back with sadness and even shame at the Vietnam War, it is horrors like the My
Lai massacre they have in mind. Those who called the slaughter of more than 400 unarmed men, women, and children
of revolutionary terror as a form of justice. Since the era of the French Revolution,
a battle were regarded as having taken leave of their senses, perhaps because they were so determined to justify anything that Americans did in
the Vietnam War that they had lost their moral moorings.2 A terrorist is one who sows terror.
Terror subjects its victims
or
to paralyzing fear.
would-be victims
In the words of the political theorist Michael Walzer, terrorisms "purpose is to destroy the
morale of a nation or a class, to undercut its solidarity; [terrorisms] method is the random murder of innocent people. Randomness is the crucial
feature of terrorist activity. If one wishes fear to spread and intensify over time, it is not desirable to kill specific people identified in some
The
reference is not to moral innocence, for none among us are innocent in that way, but to our inability
to defend ourselves from murderous attacks as we go to work, take a trip, shop, or ride a bus.
particular way with a regime, a party, or a policy. Death must come by chance."3 Terrorism is "the random murder of innocent people."
In other words, civilians are not combatants. The designation of terrorism becomes contested because terrorists and their apologists would prefer
not to be depicted accurately. It is important to distinguish between two cases here. In some hotly contested political situations, it may be in the
interest of one side to try to label its opponents as "terrorists" rather than "combatants" or "soldiers" or "fighters." We must ask who such men
(and women) are attacking. Do they target soldiers at outposts or in the field? Do they try to disable military equipment, killing soldiers in the
852
Kritik Answers
process? As they carry out such operations, are they open to negotiation and diplomacy? If so, it seems reasonable to resist a blanket label of
"terrorism" for what they are up to. In a situation in which noncombatants are deliberately targeted and the murder of the maximum number of
using terms like "fighter" or "soldier" or "noble warrior" is not only beside the point but
collapses the distance between those who plant bombs in cafs
or fly civilian aircraft into office buildings and those who fight other combatants,
noncombatants is the explicit aim,
pernicious. Such language
taking the risks attendant upon military forms of fighting. There is a nihilistic edge to terrorism: It aims to destroy, most often in the service of
wild and utopian goals that make no sense at all in the usual political ways. The distinction between terrorism, domestic criminality, and what we
might call "normal" or "legitimate" war is vital to observe. It helps us to assess what is happening when force is used. This distinction, marked in
historic, moral, and political discourses about war and in the norms of international law, seems lost on those who call the attacks of September
11 acts of "mass murder" rather than terrorism and an act of war under international law. It is thus both strange and disheartening to read the
words of those distinction-obliterators for whom, crudely, a dead body is a dead body and never mind how it got that way. Many of these same
individuals would, of course, protest vehemently, and correctly, were commentators, critics, and political actors to fail to distinguish between the
great world religion that is Islam and the terrorists who perpetrated the events of September 11. One cannot have it both ways, however, by
insisting on the distinctions one likes and heaping scorn on those who put pressure on ones own ideological and political commitments. If we
could not distinguish between a death resulting from a car accident and an intentional murder, our criminal justice system would fall apart. And
if we cannot distinguish the killing of combatants from the intended targeting of

peaceable civilians and the deliberate and indiscriminate sowing of terror among
civilians, we live in a world of moral nihilism. In such a world, everything reduces to the same shade of gray
and we cannot make distinctions that help us take our political and moral bearings. The victims of September 11 deserve more from us.

FOURTH, LANGUAGE DOESNT HAVE A DETERMINATE
EFFECT WORDS ARE EMPTY ABSENT CONTEXT, MEANING
OUR RHETORIC CAN BE READ IN A HETERODOX MANNER
TO CHALLENGE VIOLENCE
FIFTH, PERM DO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE
Richard

I am
progress.

SIXTH, CRITICISM OF TERROR RHETORIC RENATURALIZES

ITS CAUSES, INSTILLING POWERLESSNESS
Rodwell 2005
[Jonathan, PhD Cand. @ Manchester Metropolitan University, Trendy But Empty:
A Response to Richard Jackson, 49th Parallel, Spring,
www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue15/rodwell1.htm, 9-23-06//uwyo-ajl]
853
Kritik Answers
The larger problem is that without clear causal links between materially
identifiable events and factors any assessment within the argument actually
becomes nonsensical. Mirroring the early inability to criticise, if we have no
traditional causational discussion how can we know what is happening? For
example, Jackson details how the rhetoric of anti-terrorism and fear is
obfuscating the real problems. It is proposed that the real world killers are not
terrorism, but disease or illegal drugs or environmental issues. The problem is
how do we know this? It seems we know this because there is evidence that
illustrates as much Jackson himself quoting to Dr David King who argued global
warming is a greater that than terrorism. The only problem of course is that
discourse analysis has established (as argued by Jackson) that Kings argument
would just be self-contained discourse designed to naturalise another arguments
for his own reasons. Ultimately it would be no more valid than the argument that
excessive consumption of Sugar Puffs is the real global threat. It is worth
repeating that I dont personally believe global terrorism is the worlds primary
threat, nor do I believe that Sugar Puffs are a global killer. But without the ability
to identify real facts about the world we can simply say anything, or we can say
nothing.
854
Kritik Answers

SEVENTH, CRITIQUES OF SPEECH PRODUCES A
REACTIONARY POLITICS IN WHICH CHANGE IS FOCUSED
ON LANGUAGE DIRECTLY TRADING OFF WITH EFFORTS TO
REFORM THE SOCIOECONOMIC ROOT CAUSES OF
INJUSTICE
Speech codes kill critique, Henry Louis Gates remarked in a 1993 essay on hate speech.14 Although Gates was referring to what happens when
hate speech regulations, and the debates about them, usurp the discursive space
in which one might have offered a substantive politi cal response to bigoted epithets, his point
also applies to prohibitions against questioning from within selected political practices or institutions. But turning political
questions into moralistic onesas speech codes of any sort donot only prohibits certain
questions and mandates certain genuflections, it also expresses a profound
hostility toward political life insofar as it seeks to preempt argument with a legis lated and enforced truth. And the realization of that patently undemocratic desire can only and always convert emancipatory
aspirations into reactionary ones. Indeed, it insulates those aspirations from questioning at the very moment that Weberian forces of rationalization and bureaucratization are quite likely to be domesticating them from another direction. Here we greet a persistent political para dox: the
moralistic defense of critical practices, or of any besieged identity, weakens what it strives to fortify precisely by sequestering those practices
from the kind of critical inquiry out of which they were born. Thus Gates might have said, Speech codes, born of social critique, kill critique.
identity-based institutions, born of social critique, invariably

become conservative as they are forced to essentialize the identity and naturalize the
boundaries of what they once grasped as a contingent effect of histori cally specific
social powers.
But moralistic reproaches to certain kinds of speech or argument kill critique not only by
displacing it with arguments about abstract rights versus identity-bound injuries, but also by configuring political
injustice and political righteousness as a problem of remarks, attitude, and speech rather than as a matter of
historical, political-economic, and cultural formations of power. Rather than offering
And, we might add, contemporary
analytically substantive accounts of the forces of injustice or injury, they condemn the manifestation of these forces in particular remarks or
events. There is, in the inclination to ban (formally or informally) certain utterances and to mandate others, a politics of rhetoric and gesture that
itself symptomizes despair over effecting change at more significant levels. As vast quantities of left and liberal attention go to determining what
socially marked individuals say, how they are represented, and how many of each kind appear in certain institutions or are appointed to various
, the sources that generate racism, poverty, violence against women, and other elements of social
injustice remain relatively unarticulated and unaddressed. We are lost as how to address those sources; but rather than
commissions
examine this loss or disorientation, rather than bear the humiliation of our impotence, we posture as if we were still fighting the big and good
fight in our clamor over words and names. Dont mourn, moralize.
EIGHTH, REJECTING DISCOURSE DOES NOTHING AND

LEAVES ATTITUDES UNCHANGED.
Kelly, 12/98
Peace Review
One might ask, in "listening" to violent language and to the people who use it, whether we are actually condoning such language. This is far from
When I listen to a person who, for example, uses sexist

language, I am not lending my approval to sexist language. Instead, what I am
saying is that the person behind the language, and my desire to make a
connection with that person, are more important than the sexist language. If I
refuse to listen to the person who uses sexist language, then I might prevent
one particular case where sexist language is used. But I do nothing to overcome
the person's sexist attitudes. She will continue to use sexist language long after I am out of sight. But if I give her a
the case. To listen is not to pass judgment.
voice, if I show her respect, if I try to take her seriously as a person, then In the future pershapes she will be more apt to take what I say about
sexism seriously. If she knows that sexist language bothers me, then perhaps she will be less likely to use it around me.
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NINTH, LABEL POLITICS MISIDENTIFY THE CAUSE OF
PREJUDICE IN AGGRESSIVITY, SO THE NEW SYMBOL FILLS
IN THE SAME ROLL
APPROPRIATIONS OF OLD LABELS RECONCEIVE THEIR
MEANING
Zizek 97
[Slavoj, Moving away from the darkness, The Plague of Fantasies, New York: Verso, 1997,
111-2//uwyo-ajl]
In his formidable Fear in the Occident,7 Jean Delumeau draws attention to the unerring succession of atutudes in a medieval city infested by
plague: first, people ignore it and behave as if nothing terrible is really going on; then they withdraw into privacy, avoiding contact with each
other; then they start to resort to religious fervour, staging processions, confessing their sins, and so on; then they say to themselves 'What the
hell, let's enjoy it while it lasts!', and indulge passionately in orgies of sex, eating, drinking and dancing; finally, they return to life as usual, and
again behave as if nothing terrible is going on. However, this second 'life as usual' does not occupy the same structural role as the first: it is, as it
were, located on the other side of the Moebius band, since it no longtt signals the desperate attempt to ignore the reality of plague, but, rather
Does not the same go for the gradual replacement

of (sexually, racially...) aggressive with more 'correct' expressions, like the chain
nigger - Negro - black - African American or crippled - disabled - bodily challenged? This
replacement functions as a metaphorical substitution which potentially
proliferate and enhances the very (racist, etc.) effect it tries to banish, adding
insult to injury. In analogy to Delumeau, one should therefore claim that the only way actually to
abolish the hatred-effect is, paradoxically, to create the circumstances in which
one can return to the first link in the chain and use it in a non-aggressive way -like
following the patterns of 'life as usual' the second time in the case of plague. That is to say: as long as the expression
'crippled' contains a surplus, an indelible mark, of aggressivity this surplus will
not only be more or less automatically transferred on to any of its 'correct'
metaphorical substitutes, it will even be enhanced by dint of this substitution.
The strategy of returning to the first link, of course, is risky; however, the
moment it is fully accepted by the group targeted by it, it definitely can work.
its exact opposite: resigned acceptance of it . . . .
When radical African-Americans call each other 'niggers', it is wrong to dismiss this strategy as a mere ironic identification with the aggressor;
rather, the point is that it functions as an autonomous act of dismissing the aggressive sting
TENTH, SPEAKING ERRORS ARE INEVITABLE AND GOOD

BECAUSE THEY PROVIDE A LOCUS FOR CONSTANT
CRITICISM, SOMETHING THE NEG BY ITSELF PRECLUDES
Alcoff 92

it is both morally and politically objectionable to structure ones actions
around the desire to avoid criticism, especially if this outweighs other questions of effectivity. In some cases perhaps
But surely
the motivation is not so much to avoid criticism as to avoid errors, and the person believes that the only way to avoid errors is to avoid all
, errors are unavoidable in the theoretical inquiry as well as

political struggle, and moreover they often make contributions. The desire to
find an absolute means to avoid making errors comes perhaps not from a desire
to advance collective goals but a desire for personal mastery, to establish a
privileged discursive posotion wherein one cannot be undermined or challenged and thus is master of the situation.
From such a position ones own location and positionality would not require
constant interrogation and critial reflection; one would not hae to
constantly engage in this emotionally troublesome endeavor and would be
immune from the interrogaton of others. Such a desire of rmastery and immunity
must be resisted.
speaking for others. However
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Kritik Answers

ELEVENTH, COUNTERSPEECH SOLVES BETTER THAN
CENSORSHIP
Calleros 95
[Charles R., Prof. of Law @ ASU, Paternalism, Counterspeech, and Campus HateSpeech Codes: A Reply to Delgado and Yun, 27 Ariz. St. L.J. 1249, Winter,
LN//uwyo-ajl]
The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of
speech, just not the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary
sanctions as a form of empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert
enough to catch his verbal hardball and throw it back with ten times the force.
Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of
offensive speech is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is
conceded by Delgado and Yun. In both of the cases described above, the targets
of hateful speech were supported by a community united against bigotry. The
community avoided splitting into factions because the universities eliminated
the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful speakers were
protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the
bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top
administrators to develop standards for, and some limitations on, their
participation in such partisan speech. n72
Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering
precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford,
as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff
are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of
bigotry and are ready to speak out [*1262] against intolerance when it is
isolated as an issue rather than diluted in muddied waters along with concerns
of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
depended partly for their success on the consciences of the national and
international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their
television sets and in the print media, n73 the empowerment of the targets of
hateful speech rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community
who sympathize with them. One can hope that the counterspeech and
educational measures used with success at A.S.U. and Stanford stand a good
chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual inquiry at any
campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate.
TWELFTH, THE CRITICISM ASSUMES STABLE SPEECH

ACTS, PREVENTING US FROM TAKING BACK HURTFUL
WORDS AND COLLAPSING INTO A JURIDICAL MODEL OF
STABLE SUBJECTIVITY THAT KILLS ACTIVISM
Butler, Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley,
Performativity and Performance, Ed. Parker and Sedgwick, 1995, p. 204
Judith
That words wound seems incontestably true, and that hateful, racist, misogynist,
homophobic speech should be vehemently countered seems incontrovertibly
right. But does understanding from where speech derives its power to wound
alter our conception of what it might mean to counter that wounding power? Do
we accept the notion that injurious speech is attributable to a singular subject
and act? If we accept such a juridical constraint on thought - the grammatical
requirements of accountability - as a point of departure, what is lost from the
political analysis of injury when the discourse of politics becomes fully reduced
to juridical requirements?? Indeed, when political discourse is collapsed into
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Kritik Answers
juridical discourse, the meaning of political opposition runs the risk of being
reduced to the act of prosecution. How is the analysis of the discursive
historicity of power unwittingly restricted when the subject is presumed as the
point of departure for such an analysis? A clearly theological construction, the
postulation of the subject as the causal origin of the performative act is
understood to generate that which it names; indeed, this divinely empowered
subject is one for whom the name itself is generative.
858
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Terror Discourse Good: 1AR

MORAL CONDEMNATIONS OF TERRORISM IS APPROPRIATE
Robert Phillips, Director of the Program for War and Ethics, University of Connecticut,
TERRORISM,
PROTEST AND POWER, Martin Warner and Roger Crisp, eds., 1990, p. 68-9.
Moral denunciations of terrorism are appropriate and mandatory. Terrorist acts

are profoundly immoral and, in addition, tend not to be the short cut which their
practitioners advertise. One has only to look at the areas of the world where
terror has held sway to see that violence is typically prolonged, sometimes
indefinitely. The reason for this is not difficult to discern. Each side comes to
perceive the other as 'criminal' and thus as beyond the pale of civilized
negotiation.
859
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Counterspeech Solves: 1AR

COUNTERSPEECH SOLVES BEST
Strossen 2001
[Nadine, Pres. ACLU & Prof. Law @ NYU, Incitement to Hatred: Should There Be
a Limit? 25 S. Ill. U.L.J. 243, Winter, LN//uwyo-ajl]
The viewpoint-neutrality principle reflects the philosophy, first stated in
pathbreaking opinions by former United States Supreme Court Justices Oliver
Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, that the appropriate response to speech
with which one disagrees in a free society is not censorship but counterspeechmore speech, not less. Persuasion, not coercion, is the solution. n38 Accordingly,
the appropriate response to hate speech is not to censor it, but to answer it.
Recall, as I discussed earlier, that this is the strategy that the Anti-Defamation
League has been pursuing so effectively in response to Internet hate speech.
[*255]
This counterspeech strategy is better than censorship not only in principle,
butalso from a practical perspective. That is because of the potentially
empoweringexperience of responding to hate speech with counterspeech. I say
"potentially,"since I realize that the pain, anger and other negative emotions
provoked by being the target of hate speech could well have an incapacitating
effect on some targeted individuals, preventing them from engaging in
counterspeech. Even in such a situation, though, other members of the
community who are outraged by the hate speech could engage in
counterspeech, and that is likely to have a more positive impact than a censorial
response. Furthermore, once other community members denounce the hate
speech, it should be easier for the target to join them in doing so.
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**Threat Construction**
Threat Construction Answers: 2AC
(1/3)
FIRST, NO LINK PLAN DOESNT OVERTLY IDENTIFY ANY
NATION AS A THREAT IT ONLY ENDS EXECUTIVE
DETAINMENT, MEANING THERES NO RISK OF
CONSTRUCTING A THREAT
SECOND, THE ENEMY IMAGE DETERS INSTEAD OF
PROVOKING ATTACK, CIRCUMVENTING ANY RISK OF AN
IMPACT
Hermann 95
[Richard, Prof. Poli Sci @ Ohio State, International Organization, Summer,
431//uwyo]
The logic behind the association of particular strategies with particular images is
grounded in the dimensions and attributes of each image. For example, if an
actor perceives a target as an enemy, it perceives the target as a powerful,
aggressive threatening actor that constantly probes for weakness in its efforts to
expand its influence in the international system. Since the perceivers primary
interests are threatened by the perceived revisionist motivation of the target,
the perceiver will seek to bridle the targets expansionist designs. It will not
cooperate with the target in any substantial way since it perceives that the
target would take advantage of cooperative initiatives. Furthermore, it will not
directly attack the target because it perceives it as having a capability base
similar to its own. This suggests a cautious, resisting strategy to counter the
probes of the target.
THIRD, MULTILAT SOLVES BY ALLOWING US TO ADDRESS

PROBLEMS WITH INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION, SOLVING
BAD FORMS OF VIOLENCE. CROSS-APPLY NYE
FOURTH, HISTORY IS ON OUR SIDE. WE CONSTRUCTED
THE USSR AS AN ENEMY FOR OVER HALF A CENTURY, BUT
DETERRENCE AND SELF-INTEREST PREVENTED CONFLICT
FIFTH, WAR AND VIOLENCE ARE ENDEMIC TO IR POLITICS,
WARS
MEARSHEIMER 2001
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Hopes
862
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Threat Construction Answers: 2AC

(2/3)
SIXTH, PERM DO PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE
Richard

I am
progress.

SEVENTH, OUR ENGAGEMENT IN SCENARISM OVERCOMES

THE TRAP OF THREAT CONSTRUCTION WE AVOID THE
ILLUSION OF CERTAINTY IN IDENTIFYING FUTURE
THREATS, AND INSTEAD USE SCENARIOS TO CRITICALLY
EXAMINE POSSIBLE OUTCOMES TO DETERMINE THE BEST
COURSE OF ACTION. THE OTHER TEAMS REFUSAL TO
ENGAGE IN THIS PROCESS ONLY REINFORCES THE
PRACTICE OF SHALLOW RISK ANALYSIS.
Liotta, Jerome E. Levy Cahir, Economic Geography and National Security, Naval War
College and Timothy E. Somes, Professor Emeritus, The Art of Perceiving Scenarios
and the Future, NAVAL WAR COLLEGE REVIEW v. 56 n. 4, Autumn 20 03,
P.H.
http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2003/Autumn/cy1-a03.htm.
, the scenarios we are talking about are not the limited threat-based planning
scenarios common in defense planning. Threat-based scenarios, generally based on
assessments of current or postulated threats or enemy capabilities, determine only the amount and types of
force needed to defeat an adversary. (Similarly, capabilities-based planning seeks to avoid the perceived limits of
threat-derived scenarios.)6 In contrast, the scenarios we want to consider should look well
beyond current evaluations of threats. If future military force capabilities are
derived from the kind of scenarios we are discussing, they must encompass the
full range of possibilities, with a commensurate weighing of benefits, costs, and
Finally
863
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risks. Accomplishing this is a difficult but essential challenge, if decision makers
are to come to any informed, perceptive conclusions for the future. In Wacks words,
Scenarios serve two purposes. The first is protectiveanticipating and understanding risk. The second is entrepreneurialdiscovering strategic
, decision makers prefer the illusion

of certainty to understanding risk and realities. But the scenario builder and
analyst should strive to shatter the decision makers confidence in his or her
ability to look ahead with certainty at the future. Scenarios should allow a
decision maker to say, I am prepared for whatever happens, because we have
thought through complex choices with a knowledgeable sense of risk and
reward.8
options of which one was previously unaware.7 Often, and probably naturally
864
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Threat Construciton Answers: 2AC

(3/3)
EIGHTH, NO IMPACT - RHETORIC DOESNT SHAPE REALITY
Fram-Cohen 85
[Michelle, Reality, Language, Translation: What Makes Translation Possible? American Translators Association
Conference, enlightenment.supersaturated.com/essays/text/michelleframcohen//possibilityoftranslation.html, 9-2406//uwyo-ajl]
Nida did not provide the philosophical basis of the view that the external world is the common source of all languages. Such a basis can be found
in the philosophy of Objectivism, originated by Ayn Rand. Objectivism, as its name implies, upholds the objectivity of reality. This means that
reality is independent of consciousness, consciousness being the means of

perceiving ?reality, not of creating it. Rand defines language as "a code of visual-auditory symbols that denote
concepts." (15) These symbols are the written or spoken words of any language. Concepts are defined as the "mental integration of two or more
units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted." (16) This means that concepts are
abstractions of units perceived in reality. Since words denote concepts, words are the symbols of such abstractions; words are the means of
Since reality provides the data from which we abstract and

form concepts, reality is the source of all words --and of all languages. The very existence of
translation demonstrates this fact. If there was no objective reality, there could be
no similar concepts expressed in different verbal symbols. There could be no similarity between
representing concepts in a language.
the content of different languages, and so, no translation.

Translation is the transfer of conceptual knowledge from one language into another. It is the transfer of one set of symbols denoting concepts into
another set of symbols denoting the same concepts.
This process is possible because concepts have
specific referents in reality.
Even if a certain word and the concept it designates exist in one language but not in another,
the referent this word and concept stand for nevertheless exists in reality, and can be referred to in translation by a descriptive phrase or
neologism. Language is a means describing reality, and as such can and should expand to include newly discovered or innovated objects in
reality. The revival of the ancient Hebrew language in the late 19th Century demonstrated the dependence of language on outward reality. Those
who wanted to use Hebrew had to innovate an enormous number of words in order to describe the new objects that did not confront the ancient
Hebrew speakers. On the other hand, those objects that existed 2000 years ago could be referred to by the same words. Ancient Hebrew could
not by itself provide a sufficient image of modern reality for modern users.
NINTH, PREFER OUR EV THEIR K IS UTOPIAN THEORY

WITH ZERO GROUNDING IN PRAXIS OR CONSEQUENCE
Mearsheimer 95
[John, Prof. Poli Sci @ Chicago, International Security, Winter, 38//uwyo]
, critical theory per se has little to say about the future shape of
international politics. In fact, critical theory emphasizes that, It is impossible to predict the future. Robert Cox explains this
point: Critical awareness of potentiality for change must be distinguished from
utopian planning, i.e. the laying out of the design of a future society that is to be the end goal of change. Critical
understanding focuses on the process of change rather than on its ends; it
Very significantly, however
concentrates on the possibilities of launching a social movement rather than on what that movement might achieve. Nevertheless,
international relations scholars who use critical theory to challenge and subvert
realism certainly expect to create a more harmonious and peaceful international
system. But the theory itself says little about either the desirability or feasibility
of achieving that particular end.
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#2 Threat Rhetoric Deters War: 1AR

NEGLECTING SECURITY AND DETERRENCE CAUSES WAR
Doran 99
[Charles, Prof. IR @ John Hopkins, Survival, Summer, 148-9//uwyo]
And by neglecting the underlying problem of security, the probability of war
perversely increases: as governments fail to provide the kind of defence and
security necessary to maintain deterrence, one opens up the possibility of new
challenges. In this regard it is worth recalling one of Clauswitzs most important
insights: A conqueror is always a lover of peace. He would like to make his entry
into our state unopposed. That is the underlying dilemma when one argues that
a major war is not likely to occur and, as a consequence, on need not necessarily
be so concerned about providing the defences that underlie security itself.
History shows that surprise threats emerge and rapidly destabilising efforts are
made to try to provide that missing defence, and all of this contributes to the
spiral of uncertainty that leads in the end to war.
WORLD WAR II PROVES ITS BETTER TO BELIEVE IN

THREATS THAN IGNORE THEM AND RISK WAR
Thompson 85
[Kenneth, Prof. poli sci @ Virginia, Moralism and morality in politics and diplomacy, 1985,
130//uwyo]
We need also to recall that the failures leading up to World War II were not alone
failures of military preparation and military action. They were also political
failures, as Arnold Wolfers and Hans J. Morgenthau pointed out, of the allies and
of France and Britain in particular, to concert their foreign policies and present
any kind of united, consistent and coherent opposition which carried weight with
Hitler, rather than tempting him with the disunity of the West.
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#5 Realism Inevitable: 1AR

POWER ELSEWHERE
2001
(The Tragedy of

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#7 Scenario Analysis Good: 1AR

(1/3)
OUR SCENARIOS ARE NOT FALSE CONSTRUCTION OF
THREATS BUT RATHER AN EXAMINATION OF CRITICAL
UNCERTAINTIES WHICH IS VITAL IN MAKING RESPONSIBLE
POLICY DECISIONS.
P.H.
Scenarios structure the future into both predetermined and uncertain elements.
Any good scenario reading explores and seeks to comprehend these elements.
Often, events that are already in the pipeline, such as demographic shifts or
energy dependency, bring consequences that have yet to unfold, and these
consequences may have immense impact.
Schwartz provides one example to illustrate the shortcomings of conventional
forecasting and trend analysis:
[Consider] the U.S. birthrate. In the early 1970s it hovered around 3 million
births per year; forecasters at the U.S. Census Bureau projected that this trend
would continue forever. Schools, which had been rushed into construction during
the baby boom of the fifties and early sixties, were now closed down and sold.
Policymakers did not consider that the birthrate might rise again suddenly. But a
scenario might have considered the likelihood that original baby boom children,
reaching their late thirties, would suddenly have children of their own. In 1979,
the U.S. birthrate began to rise . . . in 1990 [it was] almost back to the 4 million
of the fifties. Demographers also failed to anticipate that immigration would
accelerate. To keep up with demand, the state of California (which had been
closing schools in the late 1970s) . . . [had to] build a classroom every day for
the next seven years.16
Assessing and developing the two fundamentalspredetermined elements and
critical uncertaintieswhen building a scenario may be among the more
valuable aspects of this process, or at least on what strategic planners spend
much of their time. Yet experience tells us that many of our war college
students, initially introduced to this art of scenario reading, find of particular
value the process of deciding what are predetermined elements, as opposed to
critical uncertainties. When we examine geostrategic regions, for example, we
may strive to recognize which elements of each region are predetermined, such
as geography, and which may be critical but uncertain identities, such as how
the predetermined importance of geography can be made less important, or
even irrelevant, by the uncertainty and influence of technology.
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(2/3)
ENGAGING IN SCENARIOS ALLOWS US TO OVERCOME
UNDECIDABILITY BY LEADING THE DECISION MAKER TO
CHANGE THEIR FUNDAMENTAL PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY.
P.H.
The challenge for strategic planners is to help decision makers understand what
the future security environment might look like, to affect their perceptions, in
essence, to help them reperceive. Wack, who gained some fame as a strategic
planner during the oil crises of the 1970s with his ability to get the senior
executives in Shell Oil to understand what might happen in the energy business,
wrote in the Harvard Business Review some years later:
Scenarios deal with two worlds: the world of facts and the world of perceptions.
They explore the facts but they aim at perceptions inside the heads of decision
makers. Their purpose is to gather and transform information of strategic
significance into fresh perceptions. This transformation process is not trivial
more often than not it does not happen. When it works, it is a creative
experience that generates a heartfelt Aha! from you . . . [decision makers]
and leads to strategic insights beyond the minds previous reach. 3
In short, to think and act effectively in an uncertain world, people need to learn
to reperceiveto question their assumptions and their understanding about the
way the world works. By questioning those assumptions and rethinking the
correct way to operate under uncertainty, we often see the world more clearly
than we otherwise would. Wack summarized his goals as a strategic planner and
developer of scenarios by stating:
I have found that getting to that [decision makers] Aha! is the real challenge
of scenario analysis. It does not simply leap at you when youve been presented
all the possible alternatives . . . . It happens when your message reaches the
microcosms of decision makers, obliges them to question their assumptions
about how their . . . world works, and leads them to change and reorganize
their inner models of reality.
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(3/3)
SCENARIOS LIKE THE 1AC ESCAPE THE TRAP OF
UNDECIDABILITY BY LEADING TO A CONSTANT REPERCEPTION OF THE FUTURE THROUGH EXAMINATION OF
CRITICAL UNCERTAINTIES. FAILURE TO EFFECTIVELY
ENGAGE IN SCENARIOS WILL LEAD TO FUTURE DISASTER.
P.H.
The relationship between driving forces, predetermined elements, and critical
uncertainties is complex, but important to understand, as we learn to read the
flow of what is occurring in useful scenarios. As Schwartz points out, I
sometimes think of the relationship between predetermined elements and
critical uncertainties as a choreographed dance. You cannot experience the
dance just by knowing the sequence of steps. Each dancer will interpret them
differently, and add his or her unpredictable decisions. 19 In terms of national
security and defense, one cannot anticipate the nature of a war merely by
looking at the military orders of battle, even if you know your plans and those of
the enemy. In the same fashion, by developing scenarios oriented to a more
distant future, the interrelationship between that which is predetermined and
that which is uncertain may be equally open to interpretation and changing
factors. Pierre Wack offers several thoughts with respect to the use of scenarios
as tools:
I have found that scenarios can effectively organize a variety of seemingly
unrelated economic, technological, competitive, political, and societal
information and translate it into a framework for judgmentin a way that no
model could do. . . . Decision scenarios describe different worlds, not just
different outcomes in the same world. . . . You can test the value of scenarios by
asking two questions: (1) What do they leave out? In five to ten years . . .
[decision makers] must not be able to say that the scenarios did not warn of
important events that subsequently happened. (2) Do they lead to action? If
scenarios do not push managers to do something other than that indicated by
past experience, they are nothing more than interesting speculations. 20
We are experiencing a world of dynamic change where even the most mindnumbing, dramatic events do not impress us for long. Yet any good strategist
and planner must be able to help the nations leaders see more clearly the
different futures that may occur. To operate in an uncertain world, we need to
reperceiveto question our assumptions about how the world works, so that we
see the world more clearly. The purpose of this is to help us make better
decisions about the future.
Perhaps one way to think about this is to obvert George Santayanas famous
saying about learning from history by changing our perception of things that are
yet to come, by suggesting that those who do not learn from the future are
destined to make mistakes in it. To be able to understand that future, we have
to have a mental map flexible enough to consider plausible alternatives and
possibilities we might not otherwise consider.
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#9 Prefer Our Args: 1AR

THE ALT CANT SOLVE ZERO EXPLANATION OF HOW
REALISM IS UNSEATED AS THE PRIMARY MODE OF
POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Mearsheimer 95
[John, Prof. Poli Sci @ Chicago, International Security, Winter, 91-2//uwyo]
The most revealing aspect of Wendts discussion is tha the did not respond to
the two main charges leveled against critical theory in False Promise. The first
problem with critical theory is that although the theory is deeply concerned with
radically changing state behavior, it says little about how change comes about.
The theory does not tell us why particular discourses becoem dominant and
others fall by the wayside. Specifically, Wendt does not explain why realism has
been the dominant discourse in world politics for well over a thousand years,
although I explicitly raised this question in False Promise (p. 42). Moreover, he
sheds no light on why the time is ripe for unseating realism, nor on why realism
is likely to be replaced by a more peaceful, communitarian discourse, although I
explicitly raised both questions.
CRITICAL APPROACHES LACK STRUCTURAL

EXPLANATIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Walt 91
[Stephen, Poli Sci @ Chicago, International Studies Quarterly, 1991, 223//uwyo]
In short, security studies must steer between the Scylla of political opportunism
and the Charybdis of academic irrelevance. What does this mean in practice?
Among other things, it means that security studies should remain wary of the
counterproductive tangents that have seduced other areas of international
studies, most notably the postmodern approach to international affairs
(Ashley, 1984, Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989; Lapid, 1989). Contrary to their
proponents claims, post-modern approaches have yet to demonstrate much
value for comprehending world politics; to date, these works are mostly criticism
and not much theory. As Robert Keohane has noted, until these writers have
delineated . . . a research program and shown . . . that it can illuminate
important issues in world politics, they will remain on the margins of the field
(Keohane, 1988:392). In particular, issues of war and peace are too important for
the filed to be diverted into a prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced
from the real world.
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Dillon Supports Acting Against

Terrorism
DILLON HAS ADVOCATED MORE EFFICIENT STATE
RESPONSES TO TERROR THREATS.
Smith, Economics Editor of the Times of London, THE EDGE, March
2003, http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCContent/downloaddocs/EdgeMarch.pdf.
David
In the wake of 9/11, the ESRC has allocated more than 600,000 for three
Research projects examining the quality of Britains response to, and
preparedness for, terrorist incidents. One of those involved is the University of
Lancasters Professor of Politics, Michael Dillon. What we lack, he says, is a
single relevant department of state like Americas Homeland Security. We seem
to take a very British view, its all about committees. (In Britain there are close
to 50 agencies that would be involved in dealing with a major terrorist attack.)
Professor Dillon is also critical of the Governments slowness to modernise the
legislation for Civil Defence, pointing out that it dates back to the Cold War in
1948 and desperately needs updating. So what needs to be done? Professor
Dillon lists three immediate priorities: Firstly, bring in legislation sooner so local
bodies know their responsibilities; secondly, improve their financial resources so
they can cope with a chemical or biological attack, and thirdly, provide more
obvious direct political leadership.
MORE EVIDENCE:
Smith, Economics Editor of the Times of London, THE EDGE, March
2003, http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCContent/downloaddocs/EdgeMarch.pdf.
David
Buttressed by ESRC research projects on terrorism, commissioned in the wake of

September 11, Gardner also calls into question Britains state of readiness. One
researcher, Professor Michael Dillon of the University of Lancaster, suggests the
government machine is locked into the 50-year old mentality of dealing with the
ColdWar, rather than the new and more diverse risks from terrorism. A
government that has been criticized for too much centralization appears
unwilling to centralize enough when it comes to its civil contingency strategy.
Terrorism, by its nature, succeeds partly by action but mainly by fear.
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**Zizek: Psychopolitics**
Lacan Destroys Social Change (1/2)
ALTERNATIVE DOESNT SOLVE CASE RECOGNIZING THE
LACK CANT ACCESS THE REAL-WORLD POLICY IMPACTS
INEVITABLE IN THE STATUS QUO
Robinson, PhD @ U of Nottingham, 2K5 (Andy, The Political Theory of
Constitutive Lack: A Critique, Theory and Event 8.1, The Johns Hopkins
University Press, Project Muse)
The function of the iekian "Act" is to dissolve the self, producing a historical
event. "After the revolution", however, everything stays much the same. For all its
radical pretensions, iek's politics can be summed up in his attitude to neo-liberalism: 'If it works, why not try a dose of
The phenomena which are denounced in Lacanian theory are invariably

readmitted in its "small print", and this leads to a theory which renounces both
effectiveness and political radicalism. It is in this pragmatism that the ambiguity
of Lacanian political theory resides, for, while on a theoretical level it is based on
an almost sectarian "radicalism", denouncing everything that exists for its
complicity in illusions and guilt for the present, its "alternative" is little different
from what it condemns (the assumption apparently being that the "symbolic"
change in the psychological coordinates of attachments in reality is directly
effective, a claim assumed wrongly to follow from the claim that social reality
is constructed discursively). Just like in the process of psychoanalytic cure, nothing actually
changes on the level of specific characteristics. The only change is in how one relates to the
characteristics, a process iek terms 'dotting the "i's"' in reality, recognizing and thereby installing necessity32. All
that changes, in other words, is the interpretation: as long as they are reconceived as
expressions of constitutive lack, the old politics are acceptable. Thus, iek claims that
it?'31.
de Gaulle's "Act" succeeded by allowing him 'effectively to realize the necessary pragmatic measures' which others
pursued unsuccessfully33.
THE CRITICISM IS PREMISED ON ORIGINARY LACK,

DESTROYING ANY HOPE OF POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION
The idea of "constitutive lack" is supposed to entail a rejection of neutral and universal standpoints, and it is this rejection which constructs it as
. In practice, however, Lacanians restore the idea of a universal

framework through the backdoor. Beneath the idea that "there is no neutral
universality" lurks a claim to know precisely such a "neutral universality" and to
claim a privileged position on this basis. A consistent belief in contingency and "antiessentialism" entails scepticism about the idea of constitutive lack. After all, how does one
an "anti-essentialist" position
know that the appearance that 'experience' shows lack to be constitutive reflects an underlying universality, as opposed to the contingent or
even simulated effects of a particular discourse or episteme? Alongside its opponents, shouldn't Lacanian theory also be haunted by its own
fallibility and incompletion? There is a paradox in the idea of radical choice, for it is unclear whether Lacanians believe this should be applied
reflexively. Is the choice of Lacanian theory itself an ungrounded Decision? If so, the theory loses the universalist status it implicitly claims. If
not, it would seem to be the kind of structural theory it attacks. A complete structural theory would seem to assume an extra-contingent
standpoint, even if the structure includes a reference to constitutive lack. Such a theory would seem to be a radical negation of the incompletion
of "I don't know".
The myth of constitutive lack, like all myths, has a closing role: it limits what can be said
through an "order not to think". On the other hand, the idea that creativity is motivated by a stance that "I-don't-know"
#
has an opening effect. As Callinicos puts it, 'what Badiou and iek calls the "void" in a situation is rather the set of determinate possibilities it
contains, including that of transformation'122. If there is no irreducible "Real" beneath each blockage or lack, these can be overcome by creative
action, as with the creative role of anomalies in paradigm-change in the sciences, and the creative role of "psychotic" philosophies such as those
. The imperative in Lacanian theory is to "accept" lack,
of Deleuze and Nietzsche

of a non-mythical idea of contingency is to use opportunities for openness as a basis for creativity.
whereas the logic
Lacanian theories involve a strong commitment to slave morality,
#
Furthermore,
as
exemplified by Laclau's insistence that every chain of equivalence involve a unity against an external threat123, Norval's advocacy of the use of
Zizek's
"revolutionary" insistence on the need for masochistic self-degradation,
'subjective destitution' and identification with a Master and a Cause 126, not to
mention his directly reactive insistence that self-awareness amounts to
"apartheid" as a bogeyman in South African politics124 and Mouffe's demand for submission to rules125, and also in
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awareness of the negative, of death and trauma, prior to any active identification or articulation127 . This is a
reterritorializing "contingency" which fits closely with the operation of capitalist
ideology, where 'under conditions we recognize as desperate, we are told to
alter ourselves', not the conditions, because the self is conceived as a decisionist
founder128. The alternative is a difference which is not reified into a "positive" negativity. According to Deleuze, there are two models
of contingency: the creative power of the poet, and the politician's denial of difference so as to prolong an established order. It is for the latter
that negation (lack) is primary, 'as if it were necessary to pass through the misfortunes of rift and division in order to be able to say yes'. For the
poet, on the other hand, difference is 'light, aerial and affirmative'. 'There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the play of
differences', differences which should be affirmed as positive and not overcoded by negativity
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Lacan Destroys Social Change (2/2)

LACANIAN PESSIMISM IS A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
THEIR HYPER-SKEPTICISM LOCKS IN THE STATUS QUO,
PREVENTING RADICAL SOCIAL CHANGE
#
There is more than an accidental relationship between the mythical operation of the concept of "constitutive lack" and Lacanians'
conservative and pragmatist politics. Myth is a way of reducing thought to the present: the isolated signs which are included in the mythical
gesture are thereby attached to extra-historical abstractions. On an analytical level
, Lacanian
theory can be very "radical",
unscrupulously exposing the underlying relations and assumptions concealed beneath officially-sanctioned discourse. This
radicalism,
, never translates into political conclusions
however
: as shown above, a radical rejection of anti-"crime" rhetoric
turns into an endorsement of punishment, and a radical critique of neo-liberalism turns into a pragmatist endorsement of structural adjustment.
It is as if there is a magical barrier between theory and politics which insulates the latter from the former. One should recall a remark once made
Lacanians have a "radical"

theory oriented towards happiness, but politically, their primary concern is
security. As long as they are engaged in politically ineffectual critique,
Lacanians will denounce and criticize the social system, but once it comes to
practical problems, the "order not to think" becomes operative.
by Wilhelm Reich: 'You plead for happiness in life, but security means more to you'133.
#
This "magic" barrier is the alibi function of myth. The short-circuit between specific instances and high-level abstractions is politically
consequential. A present evil can be denounced and overthrown if located in an analysis with a "middle level", but Lacanian theory tends in
practice to add an "always" which prevents change. At the very most, such change cannot affect the basic matrix posited by Lacanian theory,
, Lacanian theory operates as an alibi: it offers a little

bit of theoretical radicalism to inoculate the system against the threat posed by
a lot of politicized radicalism134. In Laclau and Mouffe's version, this takes the classic Barthesian form: "yes, liberal
because this is assumed to operate above history. In this way
democracy involves violent exclusions, but what is this compared to the desert of the real outside it?" The iekian version is more complex:
"yes, there can be a revolution, but after the revolution, one must return to the
pragmatic tasks of the present". A good example is provided in one of iek's texts. The author presents an excellent
analysis of a Kafkaesque incident in the former Yugoslavia where the state gives a soldier a direct, compulsory order to take a voluntary oath - in
other words, attempts to compel consent. He then ruins the impact of this example by insisting that there is always such a moment of "forced
one should not attempt to escape it lest one end up in psychosis or
choice", and that

totalitarianism135. The political function of Lacanian theory is to preclude critique by encoding the present as myth.
There is a danger of a stultifying conservatism arising from within Lacanian

political theory, echoing the 'terrifying conservatism' Deleuze suggests is active in any reduction of history to negativity136. The
#
addition of an "always" to contemporary evils amounts to a "pessimism of the will", or a "repressive reduction of thought to the present".
Stavrakakis, for instance, claims that attempts to find causes and thereby to
solve problems are always fantasmatic137, while iek states that an object which is perceived as blocking
something does nothing but materialize the already-operative constitutive lack138. While this does not strictly entail the necessity of a
it creates a danger of discursive slippage and

hostility to "utopianism" which could have conservative consequences. Even if
conservative attitude to the possibility of any specific reform,
Lacanians believe in surplus/contingent as well as constitutive lack, there are no standards for distinguishing the two. If one cannot tell which
social blockages result from constitutive lack and which are contingent, how can one know they are not all of the latter type? And even if
constitutive lack exists, Lacanian theory runs a risk of "misdiagnoses" which have a neophobe or even reactionary effect. To take an imagined
example, a Lacanian living in France in 1788 would probably conclude that democracy is a utopian fantasmatic ideal and would settle for a
pragmatic reinterpretation of the ancin regime. Laclau and Mouffe's hostility to workers' councils and iek's insistence on the need for a
The pervasive negativity and cynicism of

Lacanian theory offers little basis for constructive activity. Instead of radical
transformation, one is left with a pragmatics of "containment" which involves a
conservative de-problematization of the worst aspects of the status quo. The
inactivity it counsels would make its claims a self-fulfilling prophecy by acting as
a barrier to transformative activity.
state and a Party139 exemplify this neophobe tendency.
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Lacan = Being Towards Death

THE ALTERNATIVES OBSESSION WITH NEGATIVITY LOCKS
IN A BEING TOWARDS DEATH THAT PREVENTS
AFFIRMATION OF LIFE
Hallward 2001
Hallward, New York: Verso, 2001, xvi-xix//uwyo-ajl]
What distinguishes Badiou's Philosophical ethics from Lacan's own
essentially' anti-philosophical stance is the precise status allocated to
the Real in this arrangement.15 Badiou emphasizes the topological
location of the Real, the Real as 'being, in a situation, in any given
symbolic field, the point of impasse, or the point of impossibility, which
precisely allows us to think the situation as a whole'.16 The Real is what
seems empty or void from the perspective of those who re-present and
dominate the situation (i.e. from the perspective assumed by the 'state
of the situation'); rejected from any stable assignation of place, it is
thereby that which calls into question the prevailing regime of place and
placement tout court,17 Badiou's Real is always strictly situationspecific. But from a later Lacanian perspective, the unsymbolizable Real
often comes
to indicate general human finitude in its most elementary form, that is,
death. As Lacan's most forceful contemporary disciple puts it:
The whole of Lacan's effort is precisely focused on those
limitexperiences in which the subject finds himself confronted with the
death drive at its purest, prior to its reversal into sublimation. , " What
'Death' stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly
life, but the 'night of the world', the self-withdrawal, the absolute
contradiction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with 'reality' ,18
A Lacanian ethics is designed to enable us to endure this severing
without flinching, as the price to be paid for a 'symbolic New Beginning,
the emergence of the "New Harmony" sustained by a newly emerged
Master-Signifier'.
And it is at this point, Zizek continues, that 'Lacan parts company with
Badiou' (154). For confrontation with Lacan's Real here amounts to an
experience of the abject, inarticulable realm of the corpse as such - the
'undead' that is Oedipus after his mutilation, or Antigone reduced to her
'living death' ,19 Zizek accepts this reduction without hesitation. Since
'modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as "out
of joint", as excluded from the order of things, from the positive order of
entities', so 'for that reason, the ontic equivalent of the modern subject
is inherently excremental. . . , There is no subjectivity without the
reduction of the subject's positive-substantial being to a disposable
"piece of shit''' (157). From Zizek's perspective, what thus 'remains
beyond Badiou's reach ... is this domain "beyond the Good", in which a
human being encounters the death drive as the utmost limit of human
experience, and pays the price by undergoing a radical "subjective
destitution", by being reduced to an excremental remainder' (161).
Badiou would no doubt plead guilty as charged. For the great virtue of
his system, compared with Lacan's, is surely its separation of the merely
ineffable, in-significant horror of death from the generic 'destitution' or
subtraction no doubt demanded by every subjectification. It is Badiou's
achievement to have subtracted the operation of truth from any
redemption of the abject, and to have made the distinction between
living and unliving, between finite and infinite, a matter of absolute
indifference. The 'Real' emergence of 'the undead-indestructible object,
[of] Life deprived of support in the symbolic order'20 is incapable of
provoking the slightest reaction either from within the domain of purely
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multiple being-as-being on the one hand, or from the domain of an
infinite, properly immortal subjectivization on the other. From Badiou's
perspective, death can never quality as an event.
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Lacan = Oppression
PSYCHOANALYSIS FORCES SEXUALITY INTO THE JURIDICAL
MODEL OF THE FAMILY, ALLOWING DISCIPLINE OF
OTHERNESS
May 93
Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault, Pennsylvania: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, 48-9//wfi-ajl]
The intrusion of the deployment of sexuality upon the traditional sexual
arrangement of the family and its bonds (kinship structures, codes of
name and material transmission, and so on) forced it to change its shape
in order to accommodate this new, powerful set of practices. Although a
more complete analysis of the changes produced by this intrusion is
given by Foucault's colleague Jacques Donzelot (1979), Foucault points
out that the deployment of sexuality entails a set of power relationships
that differ from those of the family alliance. For the family alliance,
power was realized on a juridical model of law, right, and possession. For
the new sexuality, however, power is a matter of local and dispersed
tactics that run through such nonfamilial domains as the school and the
clinic.
What binds these local and dispersed tactics into a uniform sexuality is
both their convergence upon an expanded set of behaviors that are
considered to be sexually relevant and the development of the
normality/abnormality axis to which all sexuality is now referred. At this
intersection psychoanalysis finds its place, structuring the new
deployment of sexuality and grafting it onto the traditional familial
alliance. Indeed, the great genius of psychoanalysis lies in this: that it
was able to integrate the dispersed and mobile relations of sexuality into
the rigid codes of familial alliance without causing the breakdown of that
alliance. Because psychoanalysis presented the deployment of sexuality
as a matter of juridical power, of law-specifically the law that prohibits
incest-the family, while becoming infused with sexual strategies, was
able to retain a sense of itself as the focal point of those strategies and
as their juridical protector. Thus sexuality, which threatened to burst the
bonds of familial alliance by introducing into it new matrices of power, is
coordinated with the familial scheme. Children have strange desires, it is
true; nevertheless, in the end it is their parents they desire, just as their
parents desire one another and their own parents.
What was being constituted in this new sexuality, which psychoanalysis
sponsored and to which it owes such a great debt? Essentially, sexuality
itself was being constituted, a modern sexuality that is often heralded as
the deepest truth or, better, as the essence of the modern soul. As the
soul was being created by disciplinary techniques, so its essence was
being fashioned by sexual techniques. And in both strategies
psychological thinking, psychological discourse, and psychotherapeutic
intervention were drawing their nourishment and contributing their
effects. In both strategies, moreover, certain social figures were being
created, figures that correspond to contemporary networks of power and
that invite contemporary modes of intervention--often psychological
intervention. In prisons, the figure of the delinquent emerged, a criminal
not in the mere authorship of a crime but in an existence that was itself
deviant. The delinquent "is not only the author of his acts. . . but is
linked to his offense by a whole bundle of complex threads (instincts,
drives, tendencies, character)" (Foucault 1977a, p. 253). As such, the
delinquent requires observation, intervention, and rehabilitation--or, if
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Kritik Answers
these things fail, at least surveillance and usefulness for intervening with
other delinquents.
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A2 Stavrakakis: 2AC
ENDORSING THE AFFIRMATIVE AS AN ACT OF HOPE, NOT
UTOPIA, IT IS POSSIBLE TO HAVE POLITICS WITHOUT
UTOPIA
Stavrakakis, Teaching Fellow in Government @ U of Essex, 99 (
Yannis, Lacan and the Political, P. 111-112)
What should not be neglected however in Ricoeurs standpoint is the centrality of
the element of hope. No doubt, a society without hope is a dead society . Yet, in
reality, to eliminate the element of hope is a dead society. Yet, in reality, to eliminate the element of hope
from human life is not only undesirable but also impossible . As Jacques Derrida has put it:
There is no language without the performative dimension of the promise , the minute
I open my mouth I am in the promise. Even if I say I dont believe in truth or whatever, the
minute I open my mouth there is a believe me at work. Even when I lie, and perhaps
especially when I lie, there is a believe me in play. And this I promise you that I am speaking the truth is a messianic a
priori, a promise which, even if it is not kept, even if one knows it cannot be kept, takes place and qua promise is
messianic. (Derrida, 1996:82-3) In addition, for Derrida, this element of hope is not necessarily utopian: I
would not call this attitude utopian. The messianic experience of which I spoke takes place here and now that is the fact
Is it then
possible to retain this element of hope without incorporating it into a utopian
vision? Can we have passion in politics without holocausts? Furthermore, is it
possible to have a politics of hope, a politics of change without utopia? The
experience of the democratic revolution permits a certain optimism . Democratization is
certainly a political project of hope. But democratic discourse is not (or should not be) based on the
vision of a utopian harmonious society. It is based on the recognition of the impossibility and the
catastrophic consequences of such a dream. What differentiates democracy from other political
forms of society is legitimization of conflict and the refusal to eliminate it
through the establishment of an authoritarian harmonious order . Within this framework
of promising and speaking is an event that takes place here and now and is not utopian (ibid.).
the antagonistic diversity between different conceptions of good is not seen as something negative that should be
eliminated, but as something to be valued and celebrated. This requires the presence of institutions that establish a
specific dynamic between consensus and dissent This is why democratic politics cannot aim towards harmony and
reconciliation. To believe that a final resolution of conflict is eventually possible, even when it is envisaged as asymptotic
approaching to the regulative idea of a free unconstrained communication, as in Habermas, is to put the pluralist
democratic project at risk.(Mouffe, 1996b:8)14
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Marxism Answers: 2AC (1/2)
881
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Marxism Answers: 2AC (2/2)
882
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Brown Turns (1/2)

TURN: THEIR LINK AND REJECTION CLAIMS ARE PART OF A
MELANCHOLIC POLITICS THAT MOURNS THE LEFTS PAST
THIS INTELLECTUAL STRAIGHTJACKET TIES THEM TO A
POLITICS THAT TIME HAS PASSED AND IGNORES THE
POLITICAL POSSIBILITIES TO BE FOUND IN OUR IMPURE
POLITICS
Brown, Professor, Political Science and Womens Studies, University of California-Berkeley, Resisting Left
Melancholia, LOSS: THE POLITICS OF MOURNING, ed. David L. Eng & David Kazanjian, 20 02, p. 460-463.
Wendy
Now our challenge would be to figure out who or what is this substitutive object. What do we hate that we might preserve the idealization of that
romantic Left promise? What do we [460] punish that we might save the old guarantees of the Left from our wrathful disappointment?
Two familiar answers emerge from recent quarrels and reproaches on the Left. The first is a set of social and political formations variously known
as cultural politics or identity politics. Here the conventional charge from one portion of the Left is that political movements rooted in cultural
identity racial, sexual, ethnic, or gendered not only elide the fundamental structure of modernity, capitalism, and its fundamental formation,
class, but also fragment Left political energies and interests such that coalition building is impossible. The second culprit also has various names
poststructuralism, discourse analysis, postmodernism, trendy literary theory got up as political analysis. The murder charges here are also
familiar: postfoundational theories of the subject, truth, and social processes undermine the possibility of a theoretically coherent and factually
Together or separately, these

two phenomena are held responsible for the weak, fragmented, and disoriented
character of the contemporary Left. This much is old news. But if read through the prism of Left
true account of the world and also challenge the putatively objective grounds of Left norms.
melancholia, the element of displacement in both sets of charges may appear more starkly, since we would be forced to ask: What aspects of Left
analysis or orthodoxy have wilted on the vine for its adherents, but are safeguarded from this recognition through the scornful attention heaped
on identity politics and poststructuralism? Indeed, what narcissistic identification with that orthodoxy is preserved in the lament over the loss of
its hold on young Leftists and the loss of its potency in the political field? What love for the promises and guarantees that a Left analysis once
held is preserved, as responsibility for the tattered condition of those promises and guarantees is distributed onto debased others? And do we
here also see a certain thingness of the Left take shape, its reification as something that is, the fantastical memory that it once was, at the
very moment that it so clearly is not/ one? . . . . .
Now let us bring these speculations about a melancholic Left back to Stuart Halls more forthrightly political considerations about the troubles of
If Hall understands our failure as a Left in the last quarter century

as a failure within the Left to apprehend this time, this is a failure that is only
reiterated and not redressed by our complaints against those who are
succeeding (liberal centrists, neoconservatives, the Right) or by our complaints
against one another (antiracists, feminists, queer activists, postmodernists, or
unreconstructed Marxists). In Halls understanding, this failure is not simply the
consequence of adherence to a particular [461] analytic orthodoxy the
determinism of capital, the primacy of class although it is certainly that.
Rather, this failure results as well from a particular intellectual straitjacket an
insistence on a materialism that refuses the importance of the subject and the
subjective, the question of style, the problematic of language. And it is the
combination of these two that is deadly: Our sectarianism, Hall argues in the conclusion of The
Hard Road to Renewal, consists not only of a defensiveness toward the agendas fixed by
now anachronistic political-economic formations (those of the 1930s and 1945),
but is also due to a certain notion of politics, inhabited not so much as a theory,
more as a habit of mind. We go on thinking a unilinear and irreversible political
logic, driven by some abstract entity we call the economic or capital,
unfolding to its preordained end. Whereas, as Thatcherism clearly shows, politics
actually works more like the logic of language: you can always put it another
way if you try hard enough. 9
Certainly the course of capital shapes the conditions of possibility in politics, but
politics itself is either conducted ideologically, or not at all. 10 Or, in another of Halls pithy
formulas, politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them. 11
the contemporary Left.
It is important to be clear here. Hall never claims that ideology determines the course of globalization but claims that it harnesses it for one
political purpose or another, and when it is successful, the political and economic strategies represented by a particular ideology will also
themselves bring into being certain political-economic formations within global capitalist developments.
Now we are beginning . . . to move into a post-Fordist society what some
theorists call disorganized capitalism, the era of flexible specialisation. One way of reading present developments is that privatization is
Thatcherisms way of harnessing and appropriating this underlying movement within a specific economic and political strategy and constructing
it within the terms of a specific philosophy. It has succeeded, to some degree, in aligning its historical, political, cultural and sexual logics with
some of the most powerful tendencies in the contemporary logics of capitalist development. And this, in part, is what gives it its supreme
confidence, its air of ideological complacency: what makes it appear to have history on its side, to be coterminous with the inevitable course of
the future. The left, however, instead of rethinking its economic, political, and cultural strategies in the light of this deeper, underlying logic of
dispersal and diversification (which after all, need not necessarily be an enemy of greater democratization) simply resists it. If Thatcherism can
lay claim to it, then we must have nothing to do with it. Is there any more certain way of rendering yourself historically anachronistic? 12
If the contemporary Left often clings to the formations and formulations of

another epoch, one in which the notions of unified movements, social [462]
totalities, and class-based politics were viable categories of political and
theoretical analysis, this means that it literally renders itself a conservative force
in history one that not only misreads the present but also installs
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traditionalism in the very heart of its praxis, in the place where commitment to
risk and upheaval belongs. Walter Benjamin sketches this phenomenon in his attack on Eric Kastner, the Left-wing Weimer
Republic poet, who is the subject of his Left-Wing Melancholy essay: This poet is dissatisfied, indeed heavy-hearted. But this
heaviness of heart derives from routine. For to be in a routine means to have
sacrificed ones idiosyncracies, to have forfeited the gift of distaste. And that
makes one heavy-hearted. 13 In a different tonality, Stuart Hall sketches this problem in the Lefts response to
Thatcherism:
I remember the moment in the 1979 election when Mr. Callaghan, on his last political legs, so to speak, said with real astonishment about the
offensive of Mrs. Thatcher that She means to tear society up by the roots. This was an unthinkable idea in the social-democratic vocabulary: a
. The truth is that traditionalist ideas, the ideas of social and

moral respectability, have penetrated so deep inside socialist consciousness that
it is quite common to find people committed to a radical political programme
underpinned by wholly traditional feelings and sentiments. 14
radical attack on the status quo
Brown Turns (2/2)

THEIR POLITICS OF MOURNING ARE REALLY JUST
MELANCHOLIA IN DRAG (PUN INTENDED), WHICH
FORECLOSES UPON ANALYZING THE POLITICAL
POTENTIALITIES OF OUR CURRENT SITUATION
Wendy Brown, Professor, Political Science and Womens Studies, University of CaliforniaBerkeley, Resisting Left Melancholia, LOSS: THE POLITICS OF MOURNING, ed. David L. Eng
& David Kazanjian, 2002, p. 458-459.
For the last two decades, cultural theorist Stuart Hall has insisted that the crisis of the
Left is due neither to internal divisions in the activist or academic Left nor to the clever
rhetoric or funding schemes of the Right. Rather, he has charged, this ascendancy is
consequent to the Lefts own failure to apprehend the character of the age and to develop a
political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character. For Hall, the rise of
the Thatcher-Reagan Right was a symptom rather than a cause of this failure, just as the Lefts
dismissive or suspicious attitude toward cultural politics is for Hall a sign not of its unwavering principles but of its anachronistic habits of thought and its fears and
anxieties about revising those habits.
? I want to develop just one thread of this problem

through a consideration of the phenomenon named Left melancholia by Walter Benjamin more than half a
But what are the content and dynamic of these fears and anxieties
century ago. What did Benjamin mean by and with this pejorative appellation for a certain intellectual and political bearing? As most readers will know, Benjamin was
neither categorically nor characterologically opposed to the value and valence of sadness as such, nor to the potential insights gleaned from brooding over ones
losses. Indeed, he had a well-developed appreciation of the productive value of acedia, sadness, and mourning for political and cultural work, and in his study of
, Benjamin treated melancholia itself as something of a creative wellspring. But Left

melancholia is Benjamins unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally,
more attached to a particular political analysis or ideal even to the failure of that ideal
than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present. In Benjamins enigmatic insistence on the political
value of a dialectical historical grasp of the time of the Now , Left [458] melancholia represents not only a refusal to
come to terms with the particular character of the present, that is, a failure to understand
history in terms other than empty time or progress. It signifies as well a certain
narcissism with regard to ones past political attachments and identity that exceeds any
contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation. 1
The irony of melancholia, of course, is that attachment to the object of ones sorrowful loss
supersedes any desire to recover from this loss, to live free of it in the present, to be
unburdened by it. This is what renders melancholia a persistent condition, a state, indeed, a
structure of desire, rather than a transient response to death or loss. In Freuds 1917 meditation on
melancholia, he reminds us of a second singular feature of melancholy : It entails a loss of a more ideal kind [than
mourning]. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of
love. 2 Moreover, Freud suggests, the melancholic will often not know precisely what about the object
has been loved and lost: This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an
object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in
which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious. 3 The loss precipitating melancholy is more often than not
Baudelaire
unavowed and unavowable. Finally, Freud suggests that the melancholic subject low in self-regard, despairing, even suicidal has shifted the reproach of the onceloved object (a reproach waged for not living up to the idealization by the beloved) onto itself, thus preserving the love or idealization of the object even as the loss
of this love is experienced in the suffering of the melancholic.
Now why would Benjamin use this term, and the emotional economy it represents, to talk about a particular formation on and of the Left? Benjamin never offers a
precise formulation of Left melancholia. Rather, he deploys it as a term of opprobrium for those more beholden to certain long-held sentiments and objects than to
the possibilities of political transformation in the present. Benjamin is particularly attuned to the melancholics investment in things. In the Trauerspiel, he argues
that melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge, here suggesting that the loyalty of the melancholic converts its truth (every loyal vow or memory)
In its tenacious selfabsorption [melancholy] embraces dead objects in its contemplation. 5 More simply,
melancholia is loyal to the world of things, 6 suggesting a certain logic of fetishism with
about its beloved into a thing, indeed, imbues knowledge itself with a thinglike quality. 4 Another version of this formulation:
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all the conservatism and withdrawal from human relations that fetishistic desire implies
contained within the melancholic logic. In the critique of Kastners poems in which Benjamin first coins Left melancholia, Benjamin
suggests that sentiments themselves become things for the Left melancholic who takes as much pride in the [459] traces of former spiritual goods as the bourgeois
We come to love our Left passions and reasons, our Left analyses and
convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter with
these terms or the future that would be aligned with them. Left melancholia, in short, is
Benjamins name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling,
analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thinglike and frozen in the heart of the
putative Leftist. If Freud is helpful here, then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably crushed ideal,
do in their material goods. 7
contemporarily signified by the terms Left, Socialism, Marx, or the Movement.

Certainly the losses, accountable and unaccountable, of the Left are many in our own time. The literal disintegration of socialist regimes and the legitimacy of
Marxism may well be the least of it. We are awash in the loss of a unified analysis and unified movement, in the loss of labor and class as inviolable predicates of
political analysis and mobilization, in the loss of an inexorable and scientific forward movement of history, and in the loss of a viable alternative to the political
economy of capitalism. And on the backs of these losses are still others: we are without a sense of international, and often even local, Left community; we are
. Thus we
suffer with the sense of not only a lost movement but also a lost historical moment, not
only a lost theoretical and empirical coherence but also a lost way of life and a lost course
of pursuits.
This much many on the Left can forthrightly admit, even if we do not know what to do about it. But in the hollow core of all these
losses, perhaps in the place of our political unconscious, is there also an unavowed loss
the promise that Left analysis and Left commitment would supply its adherents a clear and
certain path toward the good, the right, and the true? Is it not this promise that formed the
basis for much of our pleasure in being on the Left, indeed, for our self-love as Leftists and
our fellow feeling toward other Leftists? And if this love cannot be given up without
demanding a radical transformation in the very foundation of our love, in our very capacity
for political love or attachment, are we not doomed to Left melancholia, a melancholia that
is certain to have effects that are not only sorrowful but also self-destructive? Freud again: If the love
without conviction about the Truth of the social order; we are without a rich moral-political vision of the Good to guide and sustain political work
for the object a love which cannot be given up though the object itself is given up takes refuge in narcissistic identification, then the hate comes into operation on
this substitutive object, abusing it, debasing it, making it suffer and deriving sadistic satisfaction from its suffering. 8
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Permutation Key to Socialism

SOCIALISM MUST EMBRACE THE CAUSES OF OTHER
OPPRESSIONS IF IT IS TO EVER BE SUCCESSFUL
Foster, University of Oregon, The Renewing of Socialism: An Introduction,
THE MONTHLY REVIEW v. 57 n. 3, July-August 2005. Available from the World Wide Web at:
John Bellamy
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0705jbf.htm, accessed 4/12/06.

Socialism cannot survive unless it transcends not only class divisions that divide
off those who run the society from those that are compelled to work mainly on
their behalf, but also all other major forms of oppression that cripple human
potential and prevent democratic, social alliances. If any lesson was learned
from the experiences of twentieth-century attempts to create socialism it is that
class struggle must be inseparable from the struggles against gender, race, and
national oppressionsand against other forms of domination such as those
directed against gays or against those politically designated as the disabled.
Socialism also cannot make any real headway unless it is ecological in the sense
of promoting a sustainable relation to the environment, since any other
approach threatens the well-being and even survival of the human species,
along with all other species with which we share the earth. The various forms of
non-class domination are so endemic to capitalist society, so much a part of its
strategy of divide and conquer, that no progress can be made in overcoming
class oppression without also fightingsometimes even in advance of the class
strugglethese other social divisions. If the political emancipation of bourgeois
society constituted one of the bases upon which a wider human emancipation
could be built, a major obstacle to the latter has been the fact that political
emancipationthe realm of so-called inalienable human rightshas remained
incomplete under capitalism. That obstacle must in all cases be overcome as a
necessary part of the struggle for a socialist society.
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**Miscellaneous**
A2 Art (1/2)
AESTHETICS ARENT ENOUGH THEORETICAL
ENLIGHTENMENT IS NECESSARY TO INSTILL SOCIAL
REVOLUTION
Best & Kellner 2002
[Steven & Douglas, Richard Rorty and Postmodern Theory,

www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/richardrortypostmoderntheory.pdf, 924-06//uwyo-ajl]
Theory is necessary to the extent that the world is not completely and
immediately transparent to
consciousness. Since this is never the case, especially in our own hypercapitalist
culture where
the shadows flickering on the walls of our caves stem principally from television
sets, the
corporate-dominated ideology machines that speak the language of deception
and manipulation.
As we show in our book The Postmodern Adventure (Best and Kellner, 2001),
which contains
studies of Thomas Pynchon, Michael Herr, Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Philip K.
Dick, and other
imaginative writers, Rorty is right that fiction can powerfully illuminate the
conditions of our
lives, often in more concrete and illuminating ways than theory. Ultimately, we
need to grant
power to both theory and fiction, and understand their different perspectives
and roles. For just
as novels like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle had dramatic social impact, so too has
the discourse of
the Enlightenment, which provided the philosophical inspiration for the American
and French
Revolutions, as well as numerous succeeding revolts in history.
MUSIC AND ART HAVE LIMITS IN SPACE AND TIME WHICH

ALLOW THEM TO BE EASILY COMMODIFIED AND USED TO
AFFIRM BOURGEOIS CULTURE
John Beverley, The Ideology of Postmodern Music and Left Politics, 1990
(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.1beverley.html)
The antidote to Muzak would seem to be something like Punk. By way of a
preface to a discussion of Punk and extending the considerations above on the
relation between music and commodification, I want to refer first to Jackson
Pollock's great paintingAutumn Rhythm in the Met, a picture that--like Pollock's
work in general--is particularly admired by Free Jazz musicians. It's a vast
painting with splotches of black, brown and rust against the raw tan of unprimed
canvas, with an incredible dancing, swirling, clustering, dispersing energy. As
you look at it, you become aware that while the ambition of the painting seems
to be to explode or expand the pictorial space of the canvas altogether, it is
finally only the limits of the canvas which make the painting possible as an art
object. The limit of the canvas is its aesthetic autonomy, its separation from the
life world, but also its commodity status as something that can be bought,
traded, exhibited. The commodity is implicated in the very form of the "piece;"
as in the jazz record in Nausea, "The music ends." (The 78 RPM record--the
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commodity form of recorded music in the 20s and 30s-- imposed a three minute
limit per side on performances and this in turn shaped the way songs were
arranged in jazz or pop recording: cf. the 45 and the idea today of the "single.")
Such a situation might indicate one limit of Jameson's cultural hermeneutic. If
the strategy in Jameson is to uncover the emancipatory utopian- communist
potential locked up in the artifacts of the cultural heritage, this is also in a sense
to leave everything as it is, as in Wittgenstein's analytic (because that which is
desired is already there; it only has to be "seen" correctly), whereas the problem
of the relation of art and social liberation is also clearly the need to transgress
the limits imposed by existing artistic forms and practices and to produce new
ones. To the extent, however, such transgressions can be recontained within the
sphere of the aesthetic-- in a new series of "works" which may also be available
as commodities--, they will produce paradoxically an affirmation of bourgeois
culture: in a certain sense they are bourgeois high culture.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Art (2/2)
ART AS RESISTANCE CAN GIVE AN AESTHETIC
GRATIFICATION WHICH STOPS FURTHER STRUGGLE
John Beverley, The Ideology of Postmodern Music and Left Politics, 1990
(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.1beverley.html)
Adorno and the Frankfurt School make of the Kantian notion of the aesthetic as a
purposiveness without purpose precisely the locus of the radicalizing and
redemptive power of art, the sense in which by alienating practical aims it sides
with the repressed and challenges domination and exploitation, particularly the
rationality of capitalist institutions. By contrast, there is Lenin's famous remark-it's in Gorki'sReminiscences--that he had to give up listening to
Beethoven'sAppasionata sonata: he enjoyed it too much, it made him feel soft,
happy, at one with all humanity. His point would seem to be the need to resist a
narcotic and pacifying aesthetic gratification in the name of the very difficult
struggle--and the corresponding ideological rigor--necessary to at least setting in
motion the process of building a classless society. But one senses in Lenin too
the displacement or sublation of an aesthetic sensibility onto the field of
revolutionary activism. And in both Adorno and Lenin there is a sense that music
is somehow in excess of ideology.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Love
LOVE DOESNT BRING PEACEFUL RECONCILIATIONIT
RECREATES DIVISION AND OTHERNESS
Dillon, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the Univ. of
Lancaster, 1996, the Politics of Security, 194-5
Michael
But do not mistake this love for a peaceful reconciliation, or a reconciliation

which brings peace, neither for a release that brings tranquillity. There is a force
in this I love you, I want you to be. Do not be fooled into thinking, therefore,
that the only violence of any consequence is the violence which elides the other,
effaces and defaces the other; as if, if we could, facing up to rather than effacing
the other, we might bring an end to violence. For in this releasing love also lies
the power and latent force of an injunction an injunction that is itself
disjointed.128 Issuing from someone who is himself out-of-joint, this
injunctioneffects another disjunction. Oedipus, with love, and through love,
releases them to their inheritance of life. That injunction insists, albeit lovingly,
that the other can be no other than other, come what may; and exhorts it to
remain so. Ultimately, he says, you can (must) be no other than other because
that is what you are; haunted, as am I, by an Otherness which I recognise but
can never know, and I love you for it. Smitten as he is with love, Oedipus smites
back in the same currency: Pray for life my children, live where you are free to
grow and season. Pray god you find a better life than mine, the father who begot
you. In being loved, and finding love, these lines suggest, you do not find peace.
Instead, the struggle of your being is refreshed. This, therefore, is not the
struggle-free love of a happy ending. Love does not gather everything together
in unison and unity here. An expression of their being-in-common, of their
belonging together in virtue of difference, this love also effects a new scission or
severance in which the possibility of the being of these other beings
specifically his daughters takes place. It consequently also splits asunder,
severs and divides, allowing for a further duplication of difference. For only in
division does the possibility of possibilities and their multiplication occur. There
is violence in it precisely, therefore, because it is an acceptance of this mortal
freedom. Moreover, it is not a freedom which is paternally, or patriarch-ally,
granted by Oedipus, despite his being their father. His off-spring are being
wrenched from his grasp, and it is not a freedom, in any event, that is within his
gift. Instead, it is an antecedent freedom which, in extremity, he now recognises
that he shares in common with them. This I love you, I want you to be therefore
says: stand up for yourself and before others take up the burden of
freedom afresh and live it out more fully. Just as he tries to give that which he
does not have the bearings of their latitude to be so Oedipus love amounts
to an impossible command. Freeing them of himself is not possible. He cannot
efface what he is and what has happened. He cannot, in fact, withdraw what has
already been given, and nothing can free them of the inheritance into which
they have come.129 In short, they cannot be delivered of their existence. But, is
it possible to have it delivered over to them, freely to assume it as best they
might, in a freeing way? Perhaps this is what Oedipus is trying to do. They alone
can bear their inheritance. But, in the way in which he himself comports himself
towards its handing-on saying something like grieve for me, therefore, keep
me enough to use me as you must130 Oedipus tries to contribute somehow
to their free reception and assumption of it. Ultimately, however, it is impossible
because (irrespective of the awfulness of the inheritance which he leaves to
them) there is nothing he, or they, can do to secure compliance with a command
to find and enjoy a better life. And, yet, that is precisely the forceful insistent
desire of love for the loved one. For its otherness, and the Otherness it bears, to
thrive.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Poetry
LITERATURE FAILS TO UNDERMINE THE HEGEMONIC
MODES OF REPRESENTATION
Beverley, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Cultural
Studies at Pitt, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Critical Theory, 19 99, p.4
John
Our hypothesis in Literature and Politics was that the dominant forms of modern
Central American literaturepoetry in particularhad become a material force
an ideological practice, in the sense Louis Althusser gives the termin the
construction of the revolutionary movements that were vying for power in the
region. However, as Marc and I struggled to finish the book we were struck with
a growing sense of the limitations of literature as a form of popular
empowerment and agencylimitations revealed dramatically for us in the
debates around the poetry workshop experiment in Nicaragua and in the
question of testimonio as a narrative form that resisted in some ways being
treated simply as a new kind of literature. We ended Literoture and Politics with
these words: "We return, therefore, in closing to the paradox that has been with
us from the beginning of this book: literature has been a means of nationalpopular mobilization in the Central American revolutionary process, but that
process also elaborates or points to forms of cultural democratization that will
necessarily question or displace the role of literature as a hegemonic cultural
institution" (207).
POETRY CANNOT BE TRANSFORMATIVE IN THE CURRENT

POLITICAL CLIMATE
Jamie Owen Daniel, English Department, The University of Illinois at Chicago, Does
"poetry makes nothing happen?": The Case for Public Poetry as a Counter-Public Sphere,
1997,
http://english.rutgers.edu/does.htm , accessed January 30, 2002.
Thus, as attractive as the idea of public poetry may be as an alternative public
sphere, it nonetheless remains fixated and fixed at the level of changing the
final product rather than the process of production. Merely allowing "diverse
relations of power and privilege" to intermingle in public space, whether a poetry
slam or spontaneous street festival or an academic conference such as this one,
does not magically render those constituencies equal, given their various
histories of deprivation or exploitation. Our inability or unwillingness to confront
the bigger, less easily manipulable world outside the institutions of culture is, it
seems to me, symptomatic of a key flaw in the celebration of more public poetry
as a potential counter-public sphere, for no matter how we de- or reconstruct the
hierarchy of authority, no matter how many voices we allow or encourage to
intermingle, we still can't make a democratic public sphere, or a democratic
culture, in a society based on a system that remains fundamentally antidemocratic.
891
Kritik Answers
A2 Silence
SILENCE IS CONSENT. SPEAKING RESTORES DIGNITY
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope,
ed. Robert Lifton, 1986
1971, quoted in: In A Dark Time,
When a bull is being led to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and
trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge
that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back
to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience.
I have never heard of a [hu]man who broke away and fled while being led to his
execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be
executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would
rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesnt weigh
his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesnt
know the despicable feeling of despair. Later I often wondered whether it is right
to scream when you are being beaten and trampled underfoot. Isnt it better to
face ones tormentors in a stance of satanic pride, answering them with
contemptuous silence? I decided that it is better to scream. This pitiful sound,
which sometimes, goodness knows how, reaches into the remotest prison cell, is
a concentrated expression of the last vestige of human dignity. It is a mans way
of leaving a trace, of telling people how he lived and died. By his screams [one]
he asserts [the] his right to live, sends a message to the outside world
demanding help and calling for resistance. If nothing else is left, one must
scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.
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Kritik Answers
A2 Third World Bad

THIRD WORLD, WHILE IMPRECISE AND ESSENTIALIZING,
IS A USEFUL PHRASE AND NECESSARY FOR
COMMUNICATION
Lewis, associate research professor of geography, co-director of Comparative
Area Studies, Duke University, 1992, Green Delusions, pp. 191-192
Martin W.
One must take care to draw distinctions within this broad zone of global poverty.
The environmental problems and prospects of Mexico, for example, are as
different from those of Mali as they are from those of Germany. Still, terms such
as the Third World or the South provide convenient labels for the earths
relatively poor countries. In this chapter Third World will be employed to
designate both the relatively nonindustrialized and the recently industrializing
areas of the globe. The term admittedly obscures almost as much as it reveals,
but such imprecision is necessary if we are to avoid using stiflingly cumbersome
forms of expression.
893

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Kritik ist Kaput

General Defense of the Aff: 2AC

[Alan, Princeton High School, An Inward Glance: A Response to Mitchells Outward

KRITIK CANT SOLVE THE AFF EXTEND THE TRIBE AND

General Defense of the Aff: 2AC

[Scott & Scott, Jan. 11, p. online: http://www.merip.org/mero/mero011104.html,

Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Long) (~50

5. This has to be a voting issue, we have to go for this

Floating PICs Bad: 2AC (Short) (<20

Do the Plan Perm: 2AC

#1 Steals Aff Ground: 1AR

#4 Ext. Turns Offense: 1AR

A2 Plan Focus Bad: 1AR

A2 Plan is only a tiny part of the

Must Have an Alternative: 2AC

Hasty Generalization Bad: 2AC

Law Transformative: 2AC (1/2)

turning point in the history of

the rule of law is essential.

We hear a lot about

There's a jury that's

The rule of law binds the

government and all of its officials.

the rule of law must respect the dignity,

if the rule of law is to have

The biggest single cause of infant mortality in

Law Transformative (2/2)

every person has a right to know what the

And I mentioned at the time a book by

attacked the West, and particularly the law and the

We just define law differently than

Policymaking Good: 1AR (1/2)

Policymaking Good: 1AR (2/2)

intercollegiate policy debate is an odd and magical place,

Expert judges trained in policy analysis keep track of such contests as

FOURTH, ONLY STATE-CENTERED DISCUSSION ABOUT

One rationale for

the intrinsic value of politics is that this

value has been so neglected by modernity that

there would be no need for debate.

To the extent that this value is recognized, politics is inimical to

Policymaking Good: Ext (1/3)

Policymaking Good: Ext (2/3)

Policymaking Good: Ext (3/3)

A2 Only Learn As Spectators: 1AR

argumentative agency involves the capacity to contextualize and

argumentative agency links decontextualized

Policy Debate Good

AND DECENTRALIZED PUBLIC DEBATE IS NECESSARY OT

Switch-side Debate Good (1/3)

All must recognize and accept personal responsibility to present, when

Switch-Side Debate Good (2/3)

Switch-Side Debate Good (3/3)

Baldonado, Fall 1996 http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Representation.html, accessed

Both the scarcity and the importance of minority

Debate Solves Authoritarianism

http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200202/0747.html, accessed February 27,

Roleplaying Good (1/3)

(John, The Law of Peoples, p. 56-7)

citizens are to think of themselves

AND, ROLE-PLAYING DEBATES PROMOTE PREPARE US FOR

[Christopher, Professor international Law @ University of Georgetown, Teaching

Roleplaying Good (2/3)