*** Suffering Reps (NDI 2014)

***

Neg

1NC the General

Representations of suffering otherizes the sufferers and
steals their subjectivity; the law silences their voice and
destroys their agency.

Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the

University of Wollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture,
University of Wollongong, Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering:
Australian law in black and white, Research Online, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)

Representational practices define and constitute the representative

as well as the represented, in a dialectical process . Representation is a rich term
with a long history that leaves traces in various related meanings (Pitkin, 1972). There are three main senses of the term
to be explored here, which may be called political, legal and aesthetic forms of representation. When rulers are
responsible to the ruled, they may be said to represent them, in a political sense. In the context of legal practice, we refer
to lawyers representing their clients. And in the visual arts we say that a painting or photograph represents its subject.
This aesthetic sense can also refer to media representations of people and events. Hannah Arendt (1973: 75) pointed out

the new politics of the Jacobins after the French revolution

derived legitimacy from their capacity to suffer with the immense
class of the poor, accompanied by the will to raise compassion to
the rank of the supreme political passion and the highest political
virtue. This new source of legitimacy replaced other forms of representation, displacing the republic and forms of
that

government (under the Girondins) by the Jacobins invocation of le peuple, les malheureux, in Robespierres coupling of
the concepts. The continuing appeal of the Jacobin formula in French political rhetoric was seen in the 2007 Presidential
election, when both Nicholas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal dedicated their campaigns to la France qui souffre (Renault,

In political and legal discourse suffering is reconstructed from

an experience of pain or deprivation into a relationship, and this is
notably a relationship between those who suffer and those who do
not. Renault (2008: 376) reports on Veena Dass analysis of reactions to the Bhopal disaster in India, which found that
legitimating tropes of legal discourse detached suffering from the
victims. The discourse of suffering was used to reduce those who
suffered to silence, while the negotiations and construction of
events, including that of the suffering itself, were commandeered by
politicians and lawyers. The emphasis here is on the victims of
suffering, while the legal mechanisms are shown to have deprived
them of a voice. Images of suffering typically portray the sufferer as
the other, as distanced from us the responsible, the actively
viewing subject. In a series of photographs by Pierre Gonnord reproduced in El Pais under the heading El
silencio de los marginados (Garcia, 2008), the mute, closed faces of the marginalised
are in contrast to the outgoing, engaging presence of the
photographer himself, depicted by a newspaper photographer. The
representation of suffering forms an essential component in that
political economy of suffering that involves domination,
desaffiliation and dispossession. On one hand, suffering is constituted as a salient political
phenomenon by artistic, media and political representations. On the other hand , responses to suffering
are framed by representations of the suffering subject and its
converse, the responsible subject. Where suffering is represented as
silence, the role of those responsible becomes to represent, to speak
2008: 151).

for, and, finally, to act for the sufferers. The media, politicians and
lawyers play these roles with professional zeal. In the meantime,
responsibility for ones own actions and legal liability for specific
injustices and the spoils of dispossession are washed away by the
tide of a reimagined history, dispersal of collective responsibilities
and the re- presentation of suffering embodied in those who suffer.

The affs depictions of suffering can never be objective nor

benign; the law commodifies the subjects of suffering to create
a permanent state of exception, where the law is suspended
and militarism becomes normalized.

Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at

the University of Wollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text
Culture, University of Wollongong, Responsibility and the Representation of
Suffering: Australian law in black and white, Research Online, e-Cardanos
CES, 7 123-146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)

Suffering, no matter how objective its conditions, cannot be

understood in isolation from its broader social and cultural milieu . It
has been noted, above, that the social aspects of suffering indicate that people
do not suffer simply as a result of some natural condition. Their
suffering has social origins and causes, and its very construction as
suffering has important consequences for the way it is experienced
and the frame within which solutions may be sought . The concluding sections of
this article explore ways in which the theoretical analysis with which it began may be applied to understanding,
reimagining and responding to the suffering of Indigenous Australians. I turn first to questions of representations of
suffering to see how these constitute subjects who suffer, before dealing with questions of responsibility. In earlier

it was noted that representation in all three of its forms

aesthetic, political and legal may actually compound suffering and
render the sufferers more powerless. Mute suffering is a powerful
photographic trope, identified in the work of Pierre Gonnord (Garcia, 2008) and also familiar from television
discussion

reports of famines and disasters, and advertisements for aid agencies. The trope is active in depictions of Aboriginal

An archival photograph on the cover of a leading Australian

newspapers weekend magazine section (Good Weekend, 2009) on
the anniversary of the Prime Ministers apology showed a tribal
Aboriginal couple in a classic pose of powerlessness and mute
suffering. The headline read Lest we forget, using the motto
familiar from invocations to remember the war dead, thus referring
back to the genocidal imaginary of an earlier age, in which the demise of the
Aboriginal race was assumed, and the role of the white man was to ease the
dying pillow (Dodson et al., 2006). While ostensibly reminding us of injustice or of its redress through the
Apology, the subjects of suffering are silenced, symbolically killed by
the unmistakable reference to remembrance and fallen soldiers. These
Australians.

constructions of suffering represent the suffering subject in two senses: as an aesthetic and moral image, and as a silent

Representation in
these multiple senses came together with devastating impact in
subject who is in need of representation: by a photographer, a politician, or a lawyer.

Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory in 2007 following

the release of the Little Children are Sacred report on child abuse .
The emergency response, described above, was justified by the
horrifying images of widespread Aboriginal child abuse that were
talked up by the government. The image of suffering was used to
justify the suspension of law. Renault (2008: 31) reports Nancy Scheper-Hughess analysis of the
same tactic in Brazil. She has particularly described the way in which the
violence and dehumanisation in the favelas constitute not only
factors aggravating social suffering inside these social exclusion
zones, but also arguments to justify armed violence exercised
against their inhabitants by the rest of society (unlimited police repression, death
squads, etc). The constitution of suffering as a social pathology going
beyond the experience or comprehension of those who do not suffer
constructs the sufferers in a zone of biopolitics where police
repression, military intervention and extra-judicial killings are
justified as the exception to the law. The Australian government was
quite explicit in making this link: the suffering constituted grounds
for an emergency response that justified the suspension of law. In the
first instance the terminology of a state of emergency (Agamben, 2005) was used to suspend the operation of the Racial

After its promise at the 2007 election to apply the Act to

the intervention, it took the new Labor government two years to
transmute emergency powers into special measures, and other
devices described above, to maintain the operation of the
intervention while shielding them from legal appeals on the grounds
of racism. With the pretext of protecting suffering children and
women, successive governments have deprived whole communities
of their rights to property and to legal protection from racial
discrimination. The representation of suffering Aboriginal people has
been used to constitute them as a biopolitical substratum, unworthy
of the legal protections afforded citizens as fully-fledged political
subjects.
Discrimination Act.

We must refuse the commodification of injury and suffering,

and along with it, the politics of liberalism. Nothing short of
total abstinence of liberal ethics, politics, and episteme can
actualize change. Instead of ignoring violence or suffering, we
simply reject the representations that juxtaposition life
against suffering; instead of wishing away violence or
suffering, our alternative allows for new forms of experience
and sensuous life.

Abbas 10 (Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political

Science, Philosophy at the Liebowitz Center for International Studies,
Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics,
and Aesthetics, Palgrave Macmillion, RJ)

the invocation of
the worst sufferings of mankind is bound to shut up and line
everyone else in submission, not to the pain of others (as it may
appear), but more fundamentally to iterations of who I am as one
who suffers, as one who responds to suffering, and as one troubled
by each of those questions rather than having settled them .47 Nussbaum
or Shklar, in their philosophical commitments to differ- ent
metaphysics (even in explicit noncommitments to metaphysics), do
not even consider that their invocation of events of unimaginable
suffering as cautionary tales for all of humanity is beholden to the
sub- lime in ways complicit with liberalisms political economy of
suffering. In being so, they inadvertently evacuate the political in favor
of some formalistic ethical certitude that may carry its own violent
oblitera- tions, dysfunctionalizing political judgment in submission
to ethical judgments already made for us. The ethicization of
discourse on suf- fering, and the submission to the violence of
violence, is a parallel to the death of the political. Similarly, as long
as the aesthetic follows this logicthat representation is unethical and violent in nature
and that we must somehow leave it behindit will be limited in its vision, unable to
see the deep and necessary ontological connection between
suffering and representation. Beyond considering aesthetics at play in the artistry of rights
In Martha Nussbaums celebration of cosmopolitanism, the familiar move of

and interests that privileges the Western scopic and rhetoricist regimes, the aesthetic must be seen as

The resulting essential,

ontic, and experiential proximity to suffering may allow us to
radically reimagine our subjection to injuries, interests, and rights.
The elements of a historical materialism of suffering introduced over
the course of this chapternecessity, hope, and a materialist
sensuous ethosreconsider woundedness and victimhood in order to
illuminate the multiplicity of relations that are, and can be, had to
our own and others suffering. They expose the presumptions and
certainties regarding the imperatives suffering poses for sufferers
that codify a basic distance from suffering and an inability to
insinuate the question of suffering in our comportments,
orientations, and internal relations of simultaneity to the world. A
righteous or tolerant pluralism of sufferings, enacted wounds, and
relations to our own and others suffering is not my objective here.
One only has to consider, to build to a different end, how the
judgments, actions, and reactions of many among us cannot help but
reject consolations that come from codified knowledges and certitudes, such as those pertaining to what suffering is, how we must
despise it, and how we must fix it. Then, one only has to question the imperatives these
more closely derived from aisthesis (perception from the senses).

knowledges and certitudes pose for all of us, and examine the utilitarian charm of the beguiling tragedy of
powerless institutions and other conscriptions of sympathy, empathy, voice, and desire for a markedly

This may involve not giving lib- eral institutions or fervent

recruiters of various marginalities the power to set the terms of
honoring the suffering and hope of others, and not giving them the
power to corner our pathos, in a moment of ethical noblesse, by
emphasizing how anothers suffering is impenetrable and
different world.

unknowable. As much as this ethical noblesse upholds the letting be of the other, it is a
preservation, first and foremost, of oneselfper- versely reminiscent of the confusing touch-me-not of the
Christ back from the dead, a Christ whose triumph over death ironically inspires entire cultures built on
surplus fear, suffering, and death as offerings for those with terminal senses but endless lives (often the

It is imperative to reject both the

righteous or tolerant pluralism of sufferings and the touch-me-not
version of seemingly other-centered politics in favor of seeing our
sufferings and our labors as coconstitutive of the world we inhabit.
courtesy of the same historical cryogenics).

What would it mean, as Louis puts it to the Rabbi, to incorpo- rate sickness into ones sense of how things

Perhaps
the sufferer not be incidental to the suffering when suffering is
defined as a problem only in the terms we can pretend to solve, only
to fail at that, too. Perhaps liberal politics should accept that statistics of diseases, mortalities, and morbidities, calculated in terms
of the loss in human productivity, on the one hand, and those of
prison populations and philanthropic gifts, on the other, are not
graceful confessions of its mastery of suffering or death. It is not that
there are no sufferings to be named, interpreted, and tended to.
However, it is important to remember that this is not a random,
altruistic, or unme- diated process, and it benefits those with the
agency and position to act on anothers suffering. Perhaps politics should be
are supposed to go, to convoke a politics that is good with death but asks for more life?

able to speak to, and for, the reserve army of those with abject, yet-to-be-inter- preted-and-recompensed
sufferings, and those who have no ability to be injured outside of the terms native to liberal capitalist

Perhaps politics can diverge from its reliance on certain

frames of suf- fering in order to address the ubiquity and
ordinariness of human tragedy and suffering. Perhaps, still, if
politics is concerned with the creation and maintenance of forms of
life, then the activities of this making, when they negotiate with the past, present, and future,
necessitate a look at the way old and new wounds are enacted in
order to yield forms that are different. Ultimately, perhaps liberalisms
colonization of suffering, and its moral dominion over it, needs to be
resisted and loosened. Questioning the forms in which we suffer and
are told to do so is not the same as altogether questioning the
reality or centrality of suffering and our responsibility to it. The ways in
which we suffer tell us what we need and do not need, what our bodies can and cannot bear. Politics
must be pushed to engineer the passing of certain forms of
suffering, not the passing of suffering altogether. The claim to
having nailed the problem of suffering becomes sus- pect when
politics learns from suffering not via the question of justice but,
more immediately, as it responds to the suffering that is life; when it is
discourse.

urgent to understand those ways of suffering that do not follow liberal logics; when attending to bodies
who suffer, remember, and act out of their wounds differently is extremely necessary; when the question
of the suffering of action is inseparable from the actions of the suffering; when our experience of the world
and its ethical, politi- cal, and aesthetic moments is not prior to or outside of justice, but constitutive of it;
and when the need to understand necessity, the lack of choice, and the ordinariness of tragedy is part of

This is an offering
toward a politics that is not modeled on the liberal, capitalist, and
colonizing ideals of healthy agents who are asked to live
diametrically across from the pole of victimhood. Such an approach
would factor in the material experiences of destruction, tragedy,
the same story as the clumsiness of our responses to grand disaster.

violence, defeat, wounds, memory, hope, and survival that risk

obliteration even by many well-meaning victim-centered politics. The
imagining of such a politics is not merely premised on suf- fering as something to be undone. Rather, it
holds on to the ability to suffer as something to be striven for,
grasped anew, and salvaged from the arbitrary dissipations imposed
on it by global powers who not only refuse to take responsibility for
the plight that they have every role in creating and locating but also
shamelessly arbitrate how the wounded can make their suffering
matter. Modern schemes for solving the problem of human suffering
succumb to their own hubris, even as they set the terms of joy and
sorrow, love and death, life and hope, salvation and freedom, that
those subject to these schemes ought to have a role in determining .
Maybe these schemes have no relevance to those who suffer abjectly, or maybe the latter have lost their

It is time that we
confront the nau- seating exploitations and self-affirming
decrepitude of Western liberal capitalist arbitrations of where
suffering must live and where it must diethese moralities keep
themselves alive and ascendant by always invoking their choice
exceptions, fixating on those marginal relations to suffering and life
signified in the savage acts of, say blowing up ones own and others
bodies, often regarded as savage for no other reason than their
violation of some silly rational choice maxim. There are many other
exceptions that confront these dominations, not the least of which
are the forms of acculturations, past and present, that see the realm
of ethics as deeper and richer than the space of individual moralities
acted out. Similarly, some of these exceptions to learn from hold and honor suffering as an
inherently social act, as a welcome burden to carry with and for each other. If it is indeed the
case that the world is so because the colonized have not stopped
regurgitating, then the incipient fascisms in the metropoles today
ought to make us wonder whether our problem as people of this
world is not that there is not enough liberalism, but that, at best,
liberalism is insufficient, and, at worst, it is complicit . Perhaps the
majority of the world needs a politics that is material enough to
speak to, and with, their silences, their pain, their losses, their
defeats, their victories, their dispensabili- ties, their mutilations,
their self-injuries, their fidelities, their betrayals, their memories,
their justice, their humor, and their hope. At stake in such an
imagining is nothing less than the possibility of newer forms of joy,
desire, hope, and life itself.
senses living among the dead who tyrannize us and the dead who beseech us.

1NC Colonel Maoist

The 1ACs call to action is nothing more than a valorization of
poverty and lack the affirmative operates under the position
of the Maoist their endless criticisms do nothing but prop up
the very system that produces alterity in the first place,
turning the case.

Chow 93 (Rey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown,

1993, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural
Studies)

The Orientalist has a special sibling whom I will, in order to highlight

her significance as a kind of representational agency, call the Maoist .
Arif Dirlik, who has written extensively on the history of political movements in twentieth-century China,
sums up the interpretation of Mao Zedong commonly found in Western Marxist analyses in terms of a
"Third Worldist fantasy""a

fantasy of Mao as a Chinese reincarnation of Marx

who fulfilled the Marxist promise that had been betrayed in the
West."'6 The Maoist was the phoenix which arose from the ashes of
the great disillusionment with Western culture in the 1960s and
which found hope in the Chinese Communist Revolution .17 In the 1970s,
when it became possible for Westerners to visit China as guided and
pampered guests of the Beijing establishment, Maoists came back
with reports of Chinese society's absolute, positive difference from
Western society and of the Cultural Revolution as "the most
important and innovative example of Mao's concern with the pursuit
of egalitarian, populist, and communitarian ideals in the course of
economic modernization" (Harding, p. 939). At that time, even poverty in China
was regarded as "spiritually ennobling, since it meant that [the]
Chinese were not possessed by the wasteful and acquisitive
consumerism of the United States" (Harding, p. 941). Although the
excessive admiration of the 1970s has since been replaced by an
oftentimes equally excessive denigration of China, the Maoist is very
much alive among us, and her significance goes far beyond the China
and East Asian fields. Typically, the Maoist is a cultural critic who lives in
a capitalist society but who is fed up with capitalism a cultural
critic, in other words, who wants a social order opposed to the one
that is supporting her own undertaking. The Maoist is thus a
supreme example of the way desire works: What she wants is always
located in the other, resulting in an iden-tification with and
valorization of that which she is not/does not have. Since what is
valorized is often the other's deprivation"having" poverty or
"having" nothingthe Maoist's strategy becomes in the main a
rhetorical renunciation of the material power that enables her
rhetoric.

The discursive representation of the victimized subaltern robs

the oppressed of their vocabulary and denies their political
agency; the affirmative draws on suffering as a way to further
their own political agenda and legitimize their priveleged
positions.

Chow 93 (Rey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown,

1993, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural
Studies)

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the Maoist is disillusioned to watch the China they sanctified crumble
before their eyes. This is the period in which we hear disapproving criticisms of contemporary Chinese
people for liking Western pop music and consumer culture, or for being overly interested in sex. In a way
that makes her indistinguishable from what at first seems a political enemy, the Orientalist ,

the
Maoist now mourns the loss of her loved objectSocialist Chinaby
pointing angrily at living "third world" natives . For many who have built their
careers on the vision of Socialist China, the grief is tremendous. 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 West-ern 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

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
"raped" when they report experiences of professional frustration and conflict.

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 academies 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 he seen as lacking. Even though the Maoist is
usually contemptuous of Freudian psychoanalysis because it is "bourgeois," her investment in oppression

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 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. The difficulty facing us, it seems
and victimization fully partakes of the Freudian and Lacanian notions of "lack."

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

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
dedication to "vindicating the subalterns."

these descendents of the Maoist may be quick to point out the exploitativeness of Benjamin Disraelis "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?

We must refuse the commodification of injury and suffering,

and along with it, the politics of liberalism. Nothing short of
total abstinence of liberal ethics, politics, and episteme can
actualize change. Instead of ignoring violence or suffering, we
simply reject the representations that juxtaposition life
against suffering; instead of wishing away violence or
suffering, our alternative allows for new forms of experience
and sensuous life.

Abbas 10 (Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political

Science, Philosophy at the Liebowitz Center for International Studies,
Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics,
and Aesthetics, Palgrave Macmillion, RJ)

the invocation of
the worst sufferings of mankind is bound to shut up and line
everyone else in submission, not to the pain of others (as it may
appear), but more fundamentally to iterations of who I am as one
who suffers, as one who responds to suffering, and as one troubled
by each of those questions rather than having settled them .47 Nussbaum
or Shklar, in their philosophical commitments to differ- ent
metaphysics (even in explicit noncommitments to metaphysics), do
not even consider that their invocation of events of unimaginable
suffering as cautionary tales for all of humanity is beholden to the
sub- lime in ways complicit with liberalisms political economy of
suffering. In being so, they inadvertently evacuate the political in favor
of some formalistic ethical certitude that may carry its own violent
oblitera- tions, dysfunctionalizing political judgment in submission
to ethical judgments already made for us. The ethicization of
discourse on suf- fering, and the submission to the violence of
violence, is a parallel to the death of the political. Similarly, as long
as the aesthetic follows this logicthat representation is unethical and violent in nature
and that we must somehow leave it behindit will be limited in its vision, unable to
see the deep and necessary ontological connection between
suffering and representation. Beyond considering aesthetics at play in the artistry of rights
In Martha Nussbaums celebration of cosmopolitanism, the familiar move of

and interests that privileges the Western scopic and rhetoricist regimes, the aesthetic must be seen as

The resulting essential,

ontic, and experiential proximity to suffering may allow us to
radically reimagine our subjection to injuries, interests, and rights.
more closely derived from aisthesis (perception from the senses).

The elements of a historical materialism of suffering introduced over

the course of this chapternecessity, hope, and a materialist
sensuous ethosreconsider woundedness and victimhood in order to
illuminate the multiplicity of relations that are, and can be, had to
our own and others suffering. They expose the presumptions and
certainties regarding the imperatives suffering poses for sufferers
that codify a basic distance from suffering and an inability to

insinuate the question of suffering in our comportments,

orientations, and internal relations of simultaneity to the world.
A righteous or tolerant pluralism of sufferings, enacted wounds, and
relations to our own and others suffering is not my objective here.
One only has to consider, to build to a different end, how the
judgments, actions, and reactions of many among us cannot help but
reject consolations that come from codified knowledges and certitudes, such as those pertaining to what suffering is, how we must
despise it, and how we must fix it. Then, one only has to question the imperatives these
knowledges and certitudes pose for all of us, and examine the utilitarian charm of the beguiling tragedy of
powerless institutions and other conscriptions of sympathy, empathy, voice, and desire for a markedly

This may involve not giving lib- eral institutions or fervent

recruiters of various marginalities the power to set the terms of
honoring the suffering and hope of others, and not giving them the
power to corner our pathos, in a moment of ethical noblesse, by
emphasizing how anothers suffering is impenetrable and
unknowable. As much as this ethical noblesse upholds the letting be of the other, it is a
different world.

preservation, first and foremost, of oneselfper- versely reminiscent of the confusing touch-me-not of the
Christ back from the dead, a Christ whose triumph over death ironically inspires entire cultures built on
surplus fear, suffering, and death as offerings for those with terminal senses but endless lives (often the

It is imperative to reject both the

righteous or tolerant pluralism of sufferings and the touch-me-not
version of seemingly other-centered politics in favor of seeing our
sufferings and our labors as coconstitutive of the world we inhabit.
courtesy of the same historical cryogenics).

What would it mean, as Louis puts it to the Rabbi, to incorpo- rate sickness into ones sense of how things

Perhaps
the sufferer not be incidental to the suffering when suffering is
defined as a problem only in the terms we can pretend to solve, only
to fail at that, too. Perhaps liberal politics should accept that statistics of diseases, mortalities, and morbidities, calculated in terms
of the loss in human productivity, on the one hand, and those of
prison populations and philanthropic gifts, on the other, are not
graceful confessions of its mastery of suffering or death. It is not that
there are no sufferings to be named, interpreted, and tended to.
However, it is important to remember that this is not a random,
altruistic, or unme- diated process, and it benefits those with the
agency and position to act on anothers suffering. Perhaps politics should be
are supposed to go, to convoke a politics that is good with death but asks for more life?

able to speak to, and for, the reserve army of those with abject, yet-to-be-inter- preted-and-recompensed
sufferings, and those who have no ability to be injured outside of the terms native to liberal capitalist

Perhaps politics can diverge from its reliance on certain

frames of suf- fering in order to address the ubiquity and
ordinariness of human tragedy and suffering. Perhaps, still, if
politics is concerned with the creation and maintenance of forms of
life, then the activities of this making, when they negotiate with the past, present, and future,
necessitate a look at the way old and new wounds are enacted in
order to yield forms that are different.
discourse.

perhaps liberalisms colonization of suffering, and its moral

dominion over it, needs to be resisted and loosened. Questioning the
forms in which we suffer and are told to do so is not the same as
altogether questioning the reality or centrality of suffering and our
responsibility to it. The ways in which we suffer tell us what we need and do not need, what our
bodies can and cannot bear. Politics must be pushed to engineer the passing
of certain forms of suffering, not the passing of suffering altogether.
Ultimately,

The claim to having nailed the problem of suffering becomes suspect when politics learns from suffering not via the question of
justice but, more immediately, as it responds to the suffering that is
life; when it is urgent to understand those ways of suffering that do not follow liberal logics; when
attending to bodies who suffer, remember, and act out of their wounds differently is extremely necessary;
when the question of the suffering of action is inseparable from the actions of the suffering; when our
experience of the world and its ethical, politi- cal, and aesthetic moments is not prior to or outside of
justice, but constitutive of it; and when the need to understand necessity, the lack of choice, and the
ordinariness of tragedy is part of the same story as the clumsiness of our responses to grand disaster.

This is an offering toward a politics that is not modeled on the

liberal, capitalist, and colonizing ideals of healthy agents who are
asked to live diametrically across from the pole of victimhood. Such
an approach would factor in the material experiences of destruction,
tragedy, violence, defeat, wounds, memory, hope, and survival that
risk obliteration even by many well-meaning victim-centered
politics. The imagining of such a politics is not merely premised on suf- fering as something to be
undone. Rather, it holds on to the ability to suffer as something to be
striven for, grasped anew, and salvaged from the arbitrary
dissipations imposed on it by global powers who not only refuse to
take responsibility for the plight that they have every role in
creating and locating but also shamelessly arbitrate how the
wounded can make their suffering matter.
Modern schemes for solving the problem of human suffering
succumb to their own hubris, even as they set the terms of joy and
sorrow, love and death, life and hope, salvation and freedom, that
those subject to these schemes ought to have a role in determining .
Maybe these schemes have no relevance to those who suffer abjectly, or maybe the latter have lost their

It is time that we
confront the nau- seating exploitations and self-affirming
decrepitude of Western liberal capitalist arbitrations of where
suffering must live and where it must diethese moralities keep
themselves alive and ascendant by always invoking their choice
exceptions, fixating on those marginal relations to suffering and life
signified in the savage acts of, say blowing up ones own and others
bodies, often regarded as savage for no other reason than their
violation of some silly rational choice maxim. There are many other
exceptions that confront these dominations, not the least of which
are the forms of acculturations, past and present, that see the realm
of ethics as deeper and richer than the space of individual moralities
acted out. Similarly, some of these exceptions to learn from hold and honor suffering as an
senses living among the dead who tyrannize us and the dead who beseech us.

If it is indeed the
case that the world is so because the colonized have not stopped
regurgitating, then the incipient fascisms in the metropoles today
ought to make us wonder whether our problem as people of this
world is not that there is not enough liberalism, but that, at best,
liberalism is insufficient, and, at worst, it is complicit . Perhaps the
majority of the world needs a politics that is material enough to
speak to, and with, their silences, their pain, their losses, their
defeats, their victories, their dispensabili- ties, their mutilations,
their self-injuries, their fidelities, their betrayals, their memories,
their justice, their humor, and their hope. At stake in such an
imagining is nothing less than the possibility of newer forms of joy,
desire, hope, and life itself.
inherently social act, as a welcome burden to carry with and for each other.

1NC Multiculturalism
The affirmatives focus on cultural tolerance ignores the
exploitative social structures that creates difference in the
first place; their absolute focus on inclusion necessarily
excludes the Other from participating in politics.

Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry Autumn 2007, Tolerance as an

Ideological Category, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)

Why are today so many problems perceived as problems of

intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice? Why
is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? T he
immediate answer is the liberal multiculturalist's basic ideological
operation: the "culturalization of politics" - political differences,
differences conditioned by political inequality, economic
exploitation, etc., are naturalized/neutralized into "cultural"
differences, different "ways of life," which are something given,
something that cannot be overcome, but merely "tolerated." To this, of
course, one should answer in Benjaminian terms: from culturalization of politics to politicization of culture.

The cause of this culturalization is the retreat, failure, of direct

political solutions (Welfare State, socialist projects, etc.). Tolerance is their post-political ersatz:
The retreat from more substantive visions of justice heralded by the
promulgation of tolerance today is part of a more general
depoliticization of citizenship and power and retreat from political
life itself. The cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly
constitutes a rejection of politics as a domain in which conflict can
be productively articulated and addressed, a domain in which
citizens can be transformed by their participation. [1]
nothing expresses better the inconsistency of the postpolitical liberal project than its implicit paradoxical identification of
culture and nature, the two traditional opposites: culture itself is
naturalized, posited as something given. (The idea of culture as "second nature" is,
Perhaps,

of course, an old one.) It was, of course, Samuel Huntington who proposed the most successful formula of
this "culturalization of politics" by locating the main source of today's conflicts into the "clash of

after the
end of the Cold War, the "iron curtain of ideology" has been replaced
by the "velvet curtain of culture. [2] Huntington's dark vision of the "clash of civilizations"
civilizations," what one is tempted to call the Huntington's disease of our time - as he put it,

may appear to be the very opposite of Francis Fukuyama's bright prospect of the End of History in the
guise of a world-wide liberal democracy: what can be more different from Fukuyama's pseudo-Hegelian
idea of the "end of history" (the final Formula of the best possible social order was found in capitalist liberal
democracy, there is now no space for further conceptual progress, there are just empirical obstacles to be
overcome), [3] than Huntington's "clash of civilizations" as the main political struggle in the XXIst century?

The "clash of civilizations" IS politics at the "end of history ."

The framework of cultural tolerance justifies militant

aggression and intervention; every framework of acceptance
necessitates a framework of exclusion.

Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry Autumn 2007, Tolerance as an

Ideological Category, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)

Contemporary liberalism forms a complex network of ideologies ,

institutional and non-institutional practices; however, underlying this multiplicity is a
basic opposition on which the entire liberal vision relies , the
opposition between those who are ruled by culture, totally
determined by the life-world into which they were born, and those
who merely "enjoy" their culture, who are elevated above it, free to
choose their culture. This brings us to the next paradox: the ultimate source of
barbarism is culture itself, one's direct identification with a
particular culture which renders one intolerant towards other
cultures. The basic opposition is thus related to the opposite between collective and individual:
culture is by definition collective and particular, parochial, exclusive
of other cultures, while - next paradox - it is the individual who is
universal, the site of universality, insofar as s/he extricates itself
from and elevates itself above its particular culture. Since, however,
every individual has to be somehow "particularized," it has to dwell
in a particular life-world, the only way to resolve this deadlock is to
split the individual into universal and particular, public and private
(where "private" covers both the "safe haven" of family and the non-state public sphere of civil society

In liberalism, culture survives, but as privatized: as way of

life, a set of beliefs and practices, not the public network of norms
and rules. Culture is thus literally transubstantiated: the same sets of beliefs and practices change
(economy)).

from the binding power of a collective into an expression of personal and private idiosyncrasies.

Insofar as culture itself is the source of barbarism and intolerance,

the inevitable conclusion is that the only way to overcome
intolerance and violence is to extricate the core of subject's being,
its universal essence, from culture: in its core, the subject has to be kulturlos. (This,
incidentally, gives a new twist to Joseph Goebbels's infamous formula "when I hear the word culture, I
reach for my gun" - but not when I hear the word civilization.) Wendy Brown problematizes this liberal
notion on a multitude of levels:

First, it is not truly universal, kulturlos. Since, in our societies, a

sexualized division of labor still predominates which confers a male
twist on basic liberal categories (autonomy, public activity,
competition), and relegates women to the private sphere of family
solidarity, etc., liberalism itself, in its opposition of private and
public, harbors male dominance. Furthermore, it is only the modern
Western capitalist culture for which autonomy, individual freedom,
etc., stand higher than collective solidarity, connection,
responsibility for dependent others, the duty to respect the customs
of one's community - again, liberalism itself privileges a certain
culture, the modern Western one.
Brown's second line of attack concerns the freedom of choice - here, also, liberalism shows a

strong bias. It shows intolerance when individuals of other cultures

are not given freedom of choice (cliterodectomy, child brideship, infanticide, polygamy,
family rape...); however, it ignores the tremendous pressure which, for
example, compels women in our liberal society to undergo plastic
surgery, cosmetic implants, Botox injections, etc., in order to remain
competitive on the sex market.
Finally, there are all the self-referring paradoxes centered on the impasse of tolerating intolerance.

Liberalist multiculturalism preaches tolerance between cultures,

while making it clear that true tolerance is fully possible only in the
individualist Western culture, and thus legitimizes even military
interventions as an extreme mode of fighting the other's intolerance
- some US feminists supported the US occupation of Afghanistan and
Iraq as a form of helping the women in these countries... However, Brown
tries to get too much mileage from this self-referential paradox which a radical liberal would simply assume
without any inconsistency: if I believe in individual choice and tolerance of different cultures, OF COURSE
this obliges me to be "intolerant" towards cultures which prevent choice and tolerance .

Brown
makes it easy here with focusing on today's anti-Islamism - but what
about, say, the struggle against Nazism? Is it not also a "paradox"
that the allied block fought a brutal war against Fascism on behalf of
tolerance and peace? So what? There are limits to tolerance, and to
be tolerant towards intolerance means simply to support ("tolerate")
intolerance.

Our alternative is to embrace the underground; institutions are

propped up under the framework of tolerance and interpassive
action interrogating and critiqueing the bankrupt practices of
Western episteme allows for a new paradigm of politics that
effectuates change.

Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry Autumn 2007, Tolerance as an

Ideological Category, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)

Orwell's point is that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary

change as a kind of superstitious token that should achieve the
opposite, i.e., PREVENT the change from really occurring - a today's
academic Leftist who criticizes the capitalist cultural imperialism is
in reality horrified at the idea that his field of study would really
break down. There is, however, a limit to this strategy: Orwell's insight holds only for a certain kind
of "bourgeois" Leftists; there are Leftists who DO HAVE the courage of their convictions, who do not only

The
starting point of these true revolutionaries can be the very position
of the "bourgeois" Leftists; what happens is that, in the middle of
their pseudo-radical posturing, they get caught into their own game
and are ready to put in question their subjective position. It is difficult to
want "revolution without revolution," as Robespierre put it - Jacobins and Bolsheviks, among others...

imagine a more trenchant political example of the weight of Lacan's distinction between the "subject of the

first, in a direct negation, you start

by wanting to "change the world" without endangering the
subjective position from which you are ready to enforce the change;
enunciated" and the "subject of the enunciation":

then, in the "negation of negation," the subject enacting the change

is ready to pay the subjective price for it, to change himself, or, to
quote Gandhi's nice formula, to BE himself the change he wants to
see in the world. - It is thus clear to Orwell that, in our ideological everyday, our predominant
attitude is that of an ironic distance towards our true beliefs:

the left-wing opinions of the average 'intellectual' are mainly

spurious. From pure imitativeness he jeers at things which in fact he
believes in. As one example out of many, take the public-school code
of honor, with its 'team spirit' and 'Don't hit a man when he's down',
and all the rest of that familiar bunkum. Who has not laughed at it?
Who, calling himself an 'intellectual', would dare not to laugh at it? But it is a bit different when you meet
somebody who laughs at it from the outside; just as we spend our lives in abusing England but grow very
angry when we hear a foreigner saying exactly the same things. /.../ It is only when you meet someone of a
different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.

There is nothing "inner" in this true ideological identity of mine - my

innermost beliefs are all "out there," embodied in practices which
reach up to the immediate materiality of my body - "my notions-notions of good
and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful - are essentially middle-

my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honor,

my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the
characteristic movements of my body"... One should definitely add
to this series smell: perhaps the key difference between lower
popular class and middle class concerns the way they relate to
smell. For the middle class, lower classes smell, their members do
not wash regularly - or, to quote the proverbial answer of a middleclass Parisian to why he prefers to ride the first class cars in the
metro: "I wouldn't mind riding with workers in the second class - it is
only that they smell!" This brings us to one of the possible definitions of what a Neighbor
class notions;

means today: a Neighbor is the one who by definition smells. This is why today deodorants and soaps are
crucial - they make neighbors at least minimally tolerable: I am ready to love my neighbors... provided
they don't smell too bad. According to a recent report, scientists in a laboratory in Venezuela added a
further element to these series: through genetic manipulations, they succeeded in growing beans which,
upon consumption, do not generate the bad-smelling and socially embarrassing winds! So, after decaf
coffee, fat-free cakes, diet cola and alcohol-free beer, we now get wind-free beans... [16] Lacan
supplemented Freud's list of partial objects (breast, faeces, penis) with two further objects: voice and gaze.
Perhaps, we should add another object to this series: smell.
We reach thereby the "heart of darkness" of habits. Recall numerous cases of pedophilia that shatter the
Catholic Church: when its representatives insists that these cases, deplorable as they are, are Church's
internal problem, and display great reluctance to collaborate with police in their investigation, they are, in
a way, right - the pedophilia of Catholic priests is not something that concerns merely the persons who,
because of accidental reasons of private history with no relation to the Church as an institution, happened
to chose the profession of a priest; it is a phenomenon that concerns the Catholic Church as such, that is

It does not concern the

"private" unconscious of individuals, but the "unconscious" of the
institution itself: it is not something that happens because the
Institution has to accommodate itself to the pathological realities of
libidinal life in order to survive, but something that the institution
itself needs in order to reproduce itself. One can well imagine a "straight" (not
inscribed into its very functioning as a socio-symbolic institution.

pedophiliac) priest who, after years of service, gets involved in pedophilia because the very logic of the
institution seduces him into it. Such an institutional Unconscious designates the obscene disavowed
underside that, precisely as disavowed, sustains the public institution. (In the army, this underside consists

In other
words, it is not simply that, for conformist reasons, the Church tries
to hush up the embarrassing pedophilic scandals; in defending itself,
the Church defends its innermost obscene secret. What this means is that
identifying oneself with this secret side is a key constituent of the
very identity of a Christian priest: if a priest seriously (not just rhetorically)
denounces these scandals, he thereby excludes himself from the
ecclesiastic community, he is no longer "one of us" (in exactly the same way a
of the obscene sexualized rituals of fragging etc. which sustain the group solidarity.)

citizen of a town in the South of the US in the 1920s, if he denounced Ku Klux Klan to the police, excluded

Consequently, the
answer to the Church's reluctance should be not only that we are
dealing with criminal cases and that, if Church does not fully
participate in their investigation, it is an accomplice after the fact;
moreover, Church AS SUCH, as an institution, should be investigated
with regard to the way it systematically creates conditions for such
crimes.
himself from his community, i.e., betrayed its fundamental solidarity).

This obscene underground of habits is what is really difficult to

change, which is why the motto of every radical emancipatory
politics is the same as the quote from Virgil that Freud chose as the
exergue for his Interpretations of Dreams: Acheronta movebo - dare
to move the underground!

Framework
Representations of suffering are neither objective nor benign;
suffering is commodified in order to justify a permanent
suspension of the law whereby militant policing, violent acts of
suppression, and rapeability are inscribed into the lives of the
colonized thats Mohr. The question you should ask yourself
in this debate is what does voting aff do for the oppressed
they describe in the 1AC?
Our kritik tests the intrinsicness between the ballot and their
narratives of suffering hold the aff to a high threshold to
prove that an affirmative ballot will help _______.
That comes prior the belief that what we say directly changes
the lives of the oppressed is nave its a question of how we
interrogate our own priveleged positions in relation to the
subaltern.

Chow 93 (Rey, professor of English and comparative literature and director

of the comparative literature program at the University of California, Writing
Diaspora: tactics of intervention in contemporary cultural studies,)

We need to remember as intellectuals that the battles we fight are

battles of words. Those who argue the oppositional standpoint are
not doing anything different from their enemies and are most
certainly not directly changing the downtrodden lives of those who
seek their survival in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan space alike.
What academic intellectuals must confront is thus not their
victimization by society at large (or their victimization-in-solidarity-withthe-oppressed), but the power, wealth, and privilege that ironically
accumulate from their oppositional viewpoint, and the widening
gap between the professed contents of their words and the upward
mobility they gain from such words. (When Foucault said intellectuals
need to struggle against becoming the object and instrument of power, he
spoke precisely to this kind of situation.) The predicament we face in the
West, where intellectual freedom shares a history with economic enterprise,
is that if a professor wishes to denounce aspects of big business,. . . he will
be wise to locate in a school whose trustees are big businessmen.28 Why
should we believe in those who continue to speak a language of
alterity-as-lack while their salaries and honoraria keep rising? How do
we resist the turning-into-propriety of oppositional discourses, when the
intention of such discourses has been that of displacing and disowning the
proper? How do we prevent what begin as tactics that which is without any
base where it could stockpile its winnings (de Certeau, p.37)from turning
into a solidly fenced-off field, in the military no less than in the academic
sense?

The 1AC is the paradigm example of interpassive politics by

claiming to take action on behalf of the oppressed, the
affirmative merely operates within hegemonic ideological
coordinates the media and academia merely legitimize
themselves via the narratives of suffering.

Zizek 97 (Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana,

Repeating Lenin, www.lacan.com/replenin)

One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task
today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act, to
directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul
de sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against the global
capital?"), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If,
today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed
in an empty space - it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic
ideological coordinates: those who "really want to do something to
help people" get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like
Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist
campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by
the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say,
denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological
conditions or which use child labor) - they are tolerated and supported
as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of
activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing
things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something
really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian,
politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing
something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the
same! Let us take two predominant topics of today's American radical
academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of
postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, "postcolonial studies"
tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the
colonized minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing experience,
of the power mechanisms which repress "otherness," so that, at the
end of the day, we learn that the root of the postcolonial
exploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and, furthermore,
that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance towards the
"Stranger in Ourselves," in our inability to confront what we
repressed in and of ourselves - the politico-economic struggle is thus
imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of
the subject unable to confront its inner traumas... The true
corruption of the American academia is not primarily financial, it is
not only that they are able to buy many European critical
intellectuals (myself included - up to a point), but conceptual:
notions of the "European" critical theory are imperceptibly

translated into the benign universe of the Cultural Studies chic. 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 course, THAT October 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 Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise:
they at least play their game in a straight way, and are honest in their
acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the pseudoradical 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.

Impact Bare Life

And, their depictions of suffering reduces human existence to
bare life that necessitates the state of exception, when the
sovereign suspends the law and conrols life and death via
necropolitics.

Duarte 5 (Andr, Biopolitics and the dissemination of violence: the

Arendtian critique of the present, April 2005,
http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/69/102 //RJ)

These historic transformations have not only wrought more violence

at the core of the political but have also redefined its character by
giving rise to biopolitical violence. As we have stated, what
characterizes biopolitics is the dynamic of both protecting and
abandoning life through its inclusion and exclusion from the political
and economic community. Thus, in Arendtian terms, the aspect that best
describes biopolitical danger is the risk of converting the animal
laborans into what Agamben has described as the homo sacer, the
human being that can be put to death by anyone and whose death
does not imply any crime whatsoever.16 In other terms, when politics is
conceived of as biopolitics, in the sense of increasing life and
happiness of the national animal laborans, the Nation-state becomes
more and more violent and murderous. If we link Arendt's thesis from The Human
Condition to those defended in The Origins of Totalitarianism we understand that the Nazi and
Stalinist extermination camps were the most refined laboratories
designed for the annihilation of the 'bare life' of the animal laborans,
although they were not the only instances devoted to human
slaughter. Hannah Arendt does not center her analysis only on the process of the extermination itself;
she also discusses the historical process under which large-scale exterminations were rendered possible:
the emergence of the animal laborans out of uprootedness and superfluousness of modern masses. She
gives us a hint of this understanding when she affirms, in Ideology and Terror: a new form of
government, a text written in 1953 and later added to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism,

isolation is that impasse into which men are driven when

the political sphere of their lives is destroyed. Isolated man who lost
his place in the political realm of action is deserted by the world of
things as well, if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as an animal laborans whose
in 1958, that

necessary 'metabolism with nature' is of concern of no one. Isolation then become loneliness.

Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian

government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its
executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness
and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses
since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and have become
acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and
the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our
own time. To be uprooted means to have no place in the world,
recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not
to belong to the world at all.17

The historical process of converting the homo faber, the prototype of the human being as the creator of
durable objects and institutions, into the animal laborans and, later on, into the homo sacer, can be
retraced in Arendtian terms to the nineteenth century wave of imperialist colonization. In this process,

European countries imposed well-planned administrative genocide in

African territories as a means of domination and exploitation. As argued
in the second volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism, European colonialist countries
combined racism and bureaucracy and thus promoted the most
terrible massacres in recent history, the Boers' extermination of the
Hottentot tribes, the wild murdering by Carl Peters in German
Southeast Africa, the decimation of the peaceful Congo population from 20 to 40 million reduced to 8 million people; and finally,
perhaps the worst of all, it resulted in the triumphant introduction of
such means of pacification into ordinary, respectable foreign
policies18. This vital equation between protecting and destroying
life was also at the core of the two World Wars, as well as in many
other local warlike conflicts, in the course of which whole
populations have become stateless or deprived of a free political
space. It is more than symptomatic that, in spite of all their structural political differences, the
United States of Roosevelt, the Soviet Russia of Stalin, the Nazi
Germany of Hitler and the Fascist Italy of Mussolini were all
conceived of as States devoted to the production and reproduction
of the needs of the national animal laborans. According to Agamben, since our
contemporary politics does not recognizes no other value than life, Nazism and Fascism, that
is, regimes which have taken bare life as its supreme political
criterion, are bound to remain unfortunately timely.19 Finally, it is quite
obvious that this same vital logic of enforcing and annihilating life still continues to be effective both in

economic growth depends on the

increase of unemployment and on many forms of political exclusion .
post-industrial and in underdeveloped countries, since

When politics is reduced to the tasks of enforcing, preserving and

promoting life and happiness of the animal laborans it really does
not matter if those objectives require increasingly violent acts, both
in national and international milieus. Therefore, it should not be surprising if today the
legality or illegality of the State's violent acts have become a secondary aspect in political discussions,
since what really matters is to protect and stimulate the life of the National (or, depending on the case,

In order to maintain the sacrosanct ideals of

increased mass production and increased mass consumerism
developed countries can ignore the finite character of natural
reserves that can jeopardize the future of humanity and thus refuse
to sign International Protocols regarding the conservation of natural
resources and diminishing the emission of dangerous polluting
gases. They can also launch preventive humanitarian attacks,
interventions or wars, disregard basic civil rights everywhere, create
detention camps that escape all legislation, like Guantanamo20,
enforce the Airport jails where suspects are kept incommunicable, or
multiply refugee camps for those who no longer have a homeland or
have been evacuated from zones of conflict. Some countries have even
Western) animal laborans.

imprisoned whole populations in ghettos or built up concrete walls to physically isolate them from other
communities and thus give rise to new forms of social, political and economical apartheid. In short,

there are countries that can allow themselves to impose the highest

level of violence possible against suspect individuals or political

regimes - the so-called 'rogue-countries', les tats voyous21 which, in one way or another, supposedly interfere with the security,
maintenance and growth of their own national life cycle. If, according to
Arendt, the common world is the institutional in-between space that should survive the natural cycle of life
and death of human generations, what happens in modern mass societies based on continuous laboring
and consuming activities is the progressive abolition of the institutional artificial barriers that separate and

This is what explains the

contemporary sensation of vertigo, instability and unhappiness, as
well as the impossibility of combining stability and novelty in order
to think and act in a politically creative way.23 However, what should not be
protect the human world from the forces of nature.22

missed in the Arendtian argument is that in the context of a waste economy, in which things must be
almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to
come to a sudden catastrophic end24, it becomes not only possible, but also necessary, that people be

Therefore, when
Arendt announces the grave danger that eventually no object of
the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through
consumption25, we should also remember that human annihilation,
elevated to the status of a supreme and managed end in totalitarian
regimes, still continues to occur, although in different degrees and by different methods,
taken as raw material ready to be consumed, discarded or annihilated.

in the contemporary dark holes of the oblivion such as miserably poor Third World neighborhoods and
Penitentiaries, underpaid and infra-human labor camps, not to mention slave labor camps, always in the
name of protecting the vital interests of the animal laborans.

To talk about the process of human consumption is not to employ a

metaphoric language but to properly describe the matter in
question. Heidegger had already realized it when in the notes written during the late thirties and later
published under the title of Overcoming Metaphysics. In these notes he stated that the differences
between war and peace had already been blurred in a society in
which metaphysical man, the animal rationale, gets fixed as the
laboring animal, so that labor is now reaching the metaphysical rank of the unconditional
objectification of everything present.26 Heidegger had also already understood
that once the world becomes fully determined by the cyclical
'circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption' it is at the
brink of becoming an 'unworld' (Unwelt), since man, who no longer
conceals his character of being the most important raw material, is
also drawn into the process. Man is 'the most important raw material' because he remains
the subject of all consumption27. After the Second World War and the dissemination of detailed

Heidegger pushed his criticisms even

further, since he then acknowledged that even the understanding of
man in terms of both subject and object of the consumption process
was inadequate to describe the whole process of planned mass
annihilation. He then came to understand this process of human
mass dehumanization in terms of the conversion of man into nothing
more than an 'item of the reserve fund for the fabrication of corpses'
(Bestandsstcke eines Bestandes der Fabrikation von Leichen), always ready to be
manipulated, managed and destined to technological production and
destruction. What happened in the 'extermination camps'
(Vernichtungslger) was not that millions of people met death as their own
most fundamental possibility; much to the contrary, their essential
information concerning the death factories

possibility of dying was definitely stolen from them and they merely
'passed away' in the process of being 'unconspicuously liquidated'
(unauffllig liquidiert).28 Men as an animal laborans (Arendt), as homo sacer (Agamben), as an item of the
reserve fund (Heidegger) are descriptions of the very same process of dehumanization by means of which
humankind and human life are reduced to the lowest status of living and unqualified raw material. As
argued by Agamben, when it becomes impossible to differentiate between bios and zoe, that is, when bare
and unqualified life is transformed into a qualified form of life29, we can then recognize the emergence
of a biopolitical epoch in which States promote the animalization of man by policies that aim at both

Such considerations favor Agamben's thesis

concerning the widespread presence of the homo sacer in the
contemporary world: if it is true that un-sacrificial life is the figure that
our time proposes to us, although life has become eliminable in an
unprecedented measure, then the bare life of the homo sacer
concerns us in a particular way. If today there is not a single
predetermined figure of the sacrificial man, perhaps that is because
all of us have virtually become homines sacri.30
protecting and destroying human life.

By discussing the changes in the way power was conceived of and exercised at the turn of the nineteen-

Foucault had firstly realized that when life turned out to be a

constitutive political element, one that had to be carefully managed,
calculated, ruled and normalized by means of different caring
policies, giving rise to biopolitical measures, these policies soon
became murderous ones. When the Sovereign's actions became destined to promote and
century,

stimulate the growth of life beyond the task of merely imposing violent death, wars turned into more and
more bloodshed and extermination became a regular procedure both within and outside of the Nation.
After the constitution of the modern biopolitical paradigm, says Foucault, political conflicts aim at
preserving and intensifying the life of the winners, so that enemies cease to be political opponents and
come to be seen as biological entities: it is not enough to defeat them, they must be exterminated since

Foucault thus
characterizes the historical consequences that the emergence and
consolidation of the modern biopolitical paradigm implied at the turn
to the nineteen-century: death that was based on the right of the
sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the
social body to ensure, maintain or develop 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 now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that
exerts a positive influence on life that endeavors to administer,
optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and
comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name
of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of
the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the
purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity:
massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival,
of bodies and 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 have caused them to tend
increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates
them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly
informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end
they constitute risks to the health of the race, people or community.

the power to expose a whole population to death is

the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued
existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle - 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
case 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 return 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 largescale phenomena of population..31
of point of this process:

Thus, under the biopolitical paradigm the

other's death is not only merely my life,

in the sense of my personal security; the other's death, the death of
the bad race, of the inferior race (or of the degenerated or
abnormal), is what will render life in general saner; saner and more
pure32 In On Violence, Arendt argued a similar thesis concerning the violent character of racist or
naturalist conceptions of politics. According to Arendt, nothing could be theoretically more dangerous than
the tradition of organic thought in political matters, in which power and violence are interpreted in terms
of biological metaphors that can only induce and produce more violence, especially where racial matters

Racism as an ideological system of thought is inherently

violent and murderous because it attacks natural organic data that,
as such, cannot be changed by any power or persuasion, so that all
that can be done when conflicts become radicalized is to
exterminate the other.33 Biopolitical violence, the specific
character of different violent phenomena underlying both
totalitarianism and the quasi-totalitarian elements of modern mass
democracies, is the tragic inheritance sustained by all kinds of
naturalized conceptions of the political. According to her views, all forms of
are involved.

naturalizing the political harm the egalitarian political artificiality without which no defense and 'validation

It was the analysis of the terrible

experience of both political and economic refugees, of those
interned in different kinds of concentration camps, of those left with
no home and all those who have lost their own place in the world,
that showed her that nature - and, of course, human nature - cannot
ground and secure any right or any democratic politics. She herself suffered
the consequences of being left with no homeland between 1933 and 1951. This denial of any
rights whatsoever showed her the paradox that the naturalistic
understanding and foundation of the Rights of Man implied, since
once those rights ceased to be recognized and enforced by a
political community, their unalienable character simply vanished,
living unprotected exactly those very human beings that mostly
needed them: The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable whenever
of human freedom and dignity' are possible.

people appeared who were no longer citizens of a sovereign state.34

The core of her argument is that the loss of the Rights of Man did
not per se deprive a human being of his/her life, liberty, property,
equality before the law, freedom of expression or the pursuit of
happiness; the real 'calamity' was that people in these

circumstances no longer belong to any community whatsoever . Their

plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them35. In other
words, nationalistic and racialized biopolitics has produced a huge
mass of people that have no access to what Arendt has called as the
right to have rights insofar as they have been stripped of their
right to belong to some kind of organized community: Man, it turns out,
can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the
loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity36. The abstract nakedness of merely being a human
being is not a trustful substitute for the artificial character of all the pacts freely consented to by active
citizens. By analyzing the dynamic of the extermination camps, Arendt understood that humanity goes
far beyond the notion of the human being a mere natural living being with its minimum natural
denominator: human beings can be transformed into specimens of the human animal, and that man's
'nature' is only 'human' insofar as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly
unnatural, that is, a man37. In other words, humanity, when it is politically understood, does not reside in
the natural fact of being alive, since human beings depend on artificial legal and political institutions to

The Arendtian rejection of understanding the human being

as a living being in the singular, as well as her postulation of human
plurality as the condition of all innovative politics depend on her
thesis that politics has to do with the formation of a common world
in the course of people's acting and exchanging opinions. Politics depends
protect them.

on the human capacities to agree and disagree, so that everything that is mysteriously given to us by
nature becomes politically irrelevant. For Arendt, equality is not a natural gift, but a political construction
oriented by the principle of justice. In other words, political equality is the result of agreements through
which people decide to grant themselves equal rights, since the political sphere is based on the
assumption that equality can be forged by those who act and exchange opinions among themselves and
thus change the world in which they live in.38 According to Arendt, there can be no democratic politics
worthy of the name unless everyone, regardless of their nationality, is included in the political and
economic community of a definite State intending to recognize and protect them as their citizens;
otherwise, no human being can discover his/her own place in the world. Agamben's thesis goes even
further than Arendt's in detecting the perplexities inherent to the traditional foundation of the Rights of
Man. By following up and radicalizing Arendt's reflections, he discovers in the text of the Declaration of the
Rights of Man a fundamental piece of modern biopolitics since these rights constitute the very inscription

in the Declarations of
the Rights of Man of 1789 natural bare life is both the foundational
source and the carrier of the rights of man, since the man's bare life
- or, more precisely, the very fact of being born in a certain territory of naked life into the political-juridical order. According to Agamben,

is the element that effects the transition from the Ancient regime's principle of divine sovereignty to
modern sovereignty concentrated in the Nation-State:

It is not possible to understand the development as well as the

national and biopolitical 'vocation' of the National-State in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if one forgets that in its own
basis we find out not man as the free and conscious subject but,
mostly, man's bare life, the mere fact of being born, which, in the
transition from the ancient subject to the citizen, was invested as
such as the principle of sovereignty.39
To conclude this text, I would like to emphasize that Arendt's main reflections concerning totalitarianism
still remain relevant nowadays, especially when directed towards the feebleness of actually existing
democracies. The core of Arendt's diagnosis of the present is that whenever politics has mostly to do with

it will be
indispensable to reduce the animal laborans to the even more
degrading status of the homo sacer, of bare and unprotected life
that can be delivered to oblivion and to death. Our actual
understanding of politics as the administrative promotion of
the maintenance and increase of the vital metabolism of affluent Nation-states,

abundance and the happiness of the human being as an animal

laborans has as its correlates economic and political exclusion,
prejudices, violence and genocides against the naked life of the
homo sacer. I also believe that Arendt can shed light on our current dilemmas, providing us
theoretical elements for a critical diagnosis of the present as well as for the opening of new possibilities for
collective action in the world. Arendt was a master of chiaroscuro political thinking in the sense that she
was never blind to the contrasts between the open possibilities of radically renovating the political and the

If we
still want to remain with Arendt, then we have to attentively think
and consciously seek to participate in new spaces and new forms of
life devoted to political association, action and discussion, wherever
and whenever they seem to subvert the tediously multiplication of
the same in its many different everyday manifestations . Arendt did not want
strict chains of a logic that binds violence and political exclusion under a biopolitical paradigm.

to propose any political utopia but nor was she convinced that our political dilemmas had no other possible
outcome, as if history had come to a tragic end. Neither a pessimist nor an optimist, she only wanted to
understand the world in which she lived in and to stimulate us to continue thinking and acting in the

if a radically new political alternative can still come to be

in our world, the responsibility for it will always be ours . Therefore, if we
wish to remain faithful to the spirit of Arendt's political thinking,
then we should think and act politically without constraining our
thinking and acting to any previously defined understanding of what
politics 'is' or 'should' be. In other words, the political challenge of the present is to multiply
present. At least,

the forms, possibilities and spaces in which we can perform our political actions. These can be strategic
actions destined to enforce political agendas favored by political parties concerned with social justice.

They can also be discrete, subversive actions favored by small

groups at the margins of the bureaucratized party machines that
promote political intervention free of teleological or strategic
intents, since their goal is to sustain an intense and radical
politicization of existence. Finally, there are also actions in which
ethical openness towards otherness becomes fully political: small
and rather inconspicuous actions of acknowledging, welcoming, and
extending hospitality and solidarity towards others.

K Prior
Recognizing our own culpability for violence is a prerequisite
to addressing the affs impacts.

Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the

University of Wollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture,
University of Wollongong, Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering:
Australian law in black and white, Research Online, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)

Reappraisal of the role of the political subject of suffering opens the

way to a new approach to the vicious circle of white responsibility:
black suffering. Pace Pearson, it is not white guilt that constitutes black
victimhood. Indigenous people suffer as a result of historical and
social conditions, yet they are represented as suffering in a
biopolitical space outside the norms of the Australian polity and its
legal framework. Recognising white responsibility for colonial and
postcolonial injustices, right up to the amendments to the Racial
Discrimination Act proposed at the end of 2009, does not deprive
Aboriginal people of their responsibility, social cohesion or will. That
is perpetrated by precisely those laws that treat the Indigenous
population as irresponsible, as existing in a lawless state of
suffering and victimhood.
Let us be more explicit about the sources of Indigenous dsaffiliation, the
short French term that denotes the weakening of intersubjective supports.
This was caused by an active process of colonisation and detachment of
people from their land, their laws and their families and communities.
Recognition of these causes and conditions does not lead inevitably
to a paralysis of guilt, nor need it lead to paternalistic policies that
seek to oversee the demise of the race or to supervise the parenting
practices of entire communities (under white guidance). This
recognition indicates priorities for both Indigenous and settler
communities. Overcoming alienation and reestablishing
intersubjective supports cannot be imposed on or offered to a
community from outside. It must be an autonomous and continuing
organising process. Members of the settler society must remember
what it is they are sorry for, and to have sufficient understanding of
their wrongs and the damage caused to ensure that they are not
repeated. This will include reminding the parliaments of the nation (Rudd,
2008: 170) who, in the present situation, seem so prone to ethical amnesia.
Indigenous communities need the freedom to fight alienation and
the resources to support themselves and each other.
The discourse of suffering does not only offer insights into the constitution of
the political subject who suffers. As the Australian case indicates, the
other of the sufferers is likewise constituted by their position in

relation to the sufferers, including their responsibility for the

suffering, or the advantages they have gained from dispossession.
The significance of the word sorry was characteristic of the
construction of complementary identities of a community of
sufferers and of a responsible collective. By adopting the position
that the settler community as a whole should apologise to the
Indigenous community, the former acknowledged their part in the
destructive impact on Indigenous societies.
Since the major impact of the policies of child removal had been on the
intersubjective ties between Indigenous people, the apology was most
relevant to the type of suffering that Renault calls desaffiliation. The
suffering caused by dispossession and domination was not explicitly
addressed. While it may have been a sub-text of the demand for an
apology, questions of material loss and benefit were always carefully shielded
from the discourse. It has already been mentioned that the Prime Minister
expressly avoided any commitment to reparations, and the entire debate was
about stolen children, not stolen land. The question of land is more
sensitive for white society, since any serious effort to redress that
injustice may affect their property. The question of land rights, through
court cases, political conflicts and legislation, notably during the 1990s, is
another major chapter in the history of Australia (Yunupingu, 1997; Motha,
1998; McNamara and Grattan 1999). While it goes to the heart of
dispossession, it cannot be retold here.
The domination suffered by Indigenous people is effected in large
part by the operation of law, and the law itself is the foundation of
the nations legitimacy. That legitimacy continues to be disputed,
despite the universal claims of the Australian common law, since the prior
Aboriginal laws were never recognised. This is the suffering that
never can be recognised within the scope of a legal system obsessed
with its self- referential legitimacy (Veitch, 2007: 112-4). The law
making practices of the parliaments of the nation continue to
draw on a rhetoric of suffering and responsibility while reinforcing
their legitimacy through incessant legislating and story telling. At
the same time that those laws and stories purport to represent the
original occupants of the territory, they work to legitimate their own
domination over them. This is where we find the wreckage of law as
a means to redress suffering or to enforce responsibility.
The laws of Australia continue to exist in the shadows of legitimacy, with the
Aboriginal laws of the land lying beneath like an unstable geological layer,
the shifting sands beneath a modern polity. As the narratives of suffering
and identity, of White Australia and its Black History proliferate,
the communities are themselves constituted by discourses of
suffering and responsibility. These can contribute to the developing
self- awareness of Australian society as long as they can be
recognised as competing legitimacy stories, while the underlying

conditions of dispossession, domination and the destruction of

intersubjective supports are still visible, through Indigenous
stories,10 under the elaborately coded and codified mantle that we
keep weaving. It is only through conscientious recognition of our
own responsibility that we may develop as political subjects and
recognise others in all their own subjectivity.

AT Permutation
The permutation is incoherent
A. Framework means perms arent responsive this is a disad
to their method our links prove that the 1ACs depictions of
suffering are problematic and reinscribe violence.
B. They cant sever their representations (1) severance
makes the aff a moving target which allows them to shift out of
the negatives best offense undermines competitive equity.
(2) Thats another link severance is the logic which justifies
bailing out on helping the subaltern after narratives of
suffering are presented.
C. Their attempts to incorporate criticims of their ideology
while endorsing the ethics of the 1ac is emblematic of liberal
violence and prevents alternative political discussions and fails
to question dominant ideologies. Only a total rejection of the
1acs representations creates sites of resistance.

Abbas 10 (Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political

Science, Philosophy at the Liebowitz Center for International Studies,
Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics,
and Aesthetics, Palgrave Macmillion)

The dizzying back and forth between professed Kantians and Humeans blurs
the fact that, regardless of whether morality is anchored interior to
the acting subject or determined by the effects of the actions of the
subject as they play out in the outside world, the unit of analysis is
quite the same. Thus, when touchy liberals desire better attention to
the fact of human pain and suffering, they manage to talk about
cruelty where, ironically, cruel actions are derivatives of cruel
agents and the victims suffering is just fallout.
Besides this shared inability to dispel the primacy of the agent and the
perpetrator in favor of the sufferer of pain, the rift between Kant and Hume is
deceptive in another way. In terms of historical evolution, the current
status of cruelty betrays a fetish of the active agent. It is no
accident that the terms good and evil require a focus on cruelty
and its infliction, leaving untouched the suffering of cruelty. Moral
psychology ends up being the psychology of cruelty, which is a moral
question, and hence of those who cause it. In the same frame, suffering is
never a moral, let alone political or legal, question unless a moral
agent with a conscience has caused it. All sufferers automatically
become victims in the eyes of politics and law when recognized.
Suffering is thus relevant as a political question only after it is a

moral one, when it is embodied and located in a certain way, when it

surpasses arbitrary thresholds.
It is one thing to claim that liberalism, whether empiricist or idealist,
cannot overcome its subject-centeredness even in its moments of
empathy for the victim. It is another to understand the stubborn
constitution of the agent at the helm of liberal justice and ask what
makes it so incurable and headstrong and what the temperament of
this stubbornness might be: is it pathetic, squishy, helplessly compassionate, humble, philanthropic, imperialist, venomous, neurotic, all of the
above, or none of these? Not figuring out this pathos is bound to
reduce all interaction with liberal assertions to one or another act of
editing or correcting them. Inadvertently, all protests to liberalism
tread a limited, predictable path and will be, at some point,
incorporated within it. Liberalisms singular gall and violence is
accessed every time a resistance to it is accommodated by
liberalism. Think, for instance, not only of how often liberals affirm
their clumsiness and mediocrity in speaking for the others suffering
but also of how quickly its antagonistspurveyors of many a
righteous anti-representational politicsmake space for the voice
of others without challenging the (liberal, colonizing) structures that
determine and distribute the suffering and speaking self, and the
suffering and speaking other, to begin with. This protest leaves
unquestioned what it means to speak for ones own, or others,
suffering and whether there are other ways of speaking suffering
that problematize these as the only options.

Link Autobiography
Presentations of autobiography get subsumed within dominant
culture and fail to make broader cultural or political change; it
innately priveleges the literate and articulate while
commodifying their narrative and fails to give the majority of
outsiders any agency.

Coughlin 95 (Anne, Associate Professor of Law at the Vanderbilt Law

School, Regulating the Self: Autobiographical Performances in Outsider
Scholarship, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)

Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in

remarks made by strangers, colleagues, and friends, her taste for
irony fails her when it comes to reflection on her relationship with
her readers and the material benefits that her autobiographical
performances have earned for her. Perhaps William should be more
inclined to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors for behaving as
readers of autobiography invariably do. When we examine this literary
faux pas - the incongruity between Williams's condemnation of her editors
and the professional benefits their publications secured her we detect yet
another contradiction between the outsiders' use of autobiography
and their desire to transform culture radically. Lejeune's
characterization of autobiography as a "contract" reminds us that
autobiography is a lucrative commodity. In our culture, members of the
reading public avidly consume personal stories, which surely explains why
first-rate law journals and academic presses have been eager to market
outsider narratives. No matter how unruly the self that it records, an
autobiographical performance transforms that self into a form of
"property in a moneyed economy" and into a valuable intellectual
asset in an academy that requires its members to publish.
Accordingly, we must be skeptical of the assertion that the outsiders
splendid publication record is itself sufficient evidence of the success of their
endeavor.
Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its authors life,
with the resulting commercial success and academic renown. As one
critic of autobiography puts it, failures do not get published. While
writing a successful autobiography may be momentous for the
individual author, this success has a limited impact on culture.
Indeed, the transformation of outsider authors into success stories
subverts outsiders radical intentions by constituting them as
exemplary participants within contemporary culture, willing to
market even themselves to literary and academic consumers. What
good does this transformation do for outsiders who are less
fortunate and less articulate than middle-class law professors?
Although they style themselves cultural critics, the storytellers do not reflect

on the meaning of their own commercial success, nor ponder its

entanglement with the cultural values they claim to resist. Rather, for the
most part, they seem content simply to take advantage of the
peculiarly American license, identified by Professor Sacvan
Bercovitch, to have your dissent and make it too.

Link Empathic Identification

The affirmatives use of empathic identification commodifies
the suffering of the other the ravaged subject is commodified
to create an economy of pleasure and pain, a frame of
reference upon which dominant ideologies sustain themselves.

Berlant 99 (Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor in the Department of

English in the University of Chicago, The Subject of True Feeling: Pain,
Privacy and Politics, in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law ed.,
Sarat Kearns, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Pg. 49 54)

Ravaged wages and ravaged bodies saturate the global marketplace

in which the United States seeks desperately to compete
competitively, as the euphemism goes, signifying a race that will be won by the nation whose
labor conditions are most optimal for profit. In the United States the media of the
political public sphere regularly register new scandals of the
proliferating sweatshop networks at home and abroad, which
has to be a good thing, because it produces feeling and with it
something at least akin to consciousnessi that can lead to action.
Yet, even as the image of the traumatized worker proliferates, even
as evidence of exploitation is found under every rock or commodity,
it competes with a normative/utopian image of the U.S. citizen who
remains unmarked, framed, and protected by the private trajectory
of his life project, which is sanctified at the juncture where the
unconscious meets history: the American Dream. 4 In that story one's identity is
not borne of suffering, mental, physical, or economic. If the U.S. worker is lucky enough to live at an
economic moment that sustains the Dream, he gets to appear at his least national when he is working and
at his most national at leisure, with his family or in semipublic worlds of other men producing surplus

In the American dreamscape his identity is private

property, a zone in which structural obstacles and cultural
differences fade into an ether of prolonged, deferred, and
individuating enjoyment that he has earned and that the nation has
helped him to earn. Meanwhile, exploitation only appears as a
scandalous nugget in the sieve of memory when it can be condensed
into an exotic thing of momentary fascination, a squalor of the
bottom too horrible to be read in its own actual banality.
manliness (e.g., via sports).

The exposed traumas of workers in ongoing extreme conditions do

not generally induce more than mourning on the part of the state
and the public culture to whose feeling-based opinions the state is
said to respond. Mourning is what happens when a grounding object is lost, is dead, no longer
living (to you). Mourning is an experience of irreducible boundedness: I
am here, I am living, he is dead, I am mourning. It is a beautiful, not sublime,
experience of emancipation: mourning supplies the subject the definitional
perfection of a being no longer in flux. It takes place over a distance:
even if the object who induces the feeling of loss and helplessness is

neither dead nor at any great distance from where you are. 5 In other
words, mourning can also be an act of aggression, of social
deathmaking: it can perform the evacuation of significance from
actually-existing subjects. Even when liberals do it, one might say, "others" are
ghosted for a good cause. 6 The sorrow songs of scandal that sing of
the exploitation that is always "elsewhere" (even a few blocks away) are in
this sense aggressively songs of mourning. Play them backward, and the military
march of capitalist triumphalism (The Trans-Nationale) can be heard. Its lyric, currently crooned by every

It exhorts citizens to understand

that the "bottom line"7 of national life is neither utopia nor freedom
but survival, which can only be achieved by a citizenry that eats its
anger, makes no unreasonable claims on resources or control over
value, and uses its most creative energy to cultivate intimate
spheres while scrapping a life together flexibly in response to the
market world's caprice. 8
organ of record in the United States, is about necessity.

In this particular moment of expanding class unconsciousness that

looks like consciousness emerges a peculiar, though not
unprecedented, hero: the exploited child. If a worker can be
infantilized, pictured as young, as small, as feminine or feminized,
as starving, as bleeding and diseased, and as a (virtual) slave, the
righteous indignation around procuring his survival resounds
everywhere. The child must not be sacrificed to states or to profiteering. His wounded
image speaks a truth that subordinates narrative: he has not
"freely" chosen his exploitation; the optimism and play that are
putatively the right of childhood have been stolen from him. Yet only
"voluntary" steps are ever taken to try to control this visible sign of
what is ordinary and systemic amid the chaos of capitalism, in order
to make its localized nightmares seem uninevitable . Privatize the
atrocity, delete the visible sign, make it seem foreign. Return the
child to the family, replace the children with adults who can look
dignified while being paid virtually the same revolting wage . The problem
that organizes so much feeling then regains livable proportions, and the uncomfortable pressure of feeling

the pressure of feeling the shock of being

uncomfortably political produces a cry for a double therapy-to the
victim and the viewer. But before "we" appear too complacently different from the privileged
dissipates, like so much gas. Meanwhile,

citizens who desire to caption the mute image of exotic suffering with an aversively fascinated mourning (a

this feeling culture crosses

over into other domains, the domains of what we call identity
politics, where the wronged take up voice and agency to produce
transformative testimony, which depends on an analogous conviction about the selfdesire for the image to be dead, a ghost), we must note that

evidence and therefore the objectivity of painful feeling. The central concern of this essay is to address the
place of painful feeling in the making of political worlds. In particular, I mean to challenge a powerful

national sentimentality, a
rhetoric of promise that a nation can be built across fields of social
difference through channels of affective identification and empathy.
Sentimental politics generally promotes and maintains the
hegemony of the national identity form, no mean feat in the face of
continued widespread intercultural antagonism and economic
popular belief in the positive workings of something I call

cleavage. But national sentimentality is more than a current of feeling

that circulates in a political field: the phrase describes a
longstanding contest between two models of u.S. citizenship . In one, the
classic model, each citizen's value is secured by an equation between abstractness and emancipation: a
cell of national identity provides juridically protected personhood for citizens regardless of anything
specific about them. In the second model, which was initially organized around labor, feminist, and
antiracist struggles of the nineteenth-century United States, another version of the nation is imagined as

This nation is peopled by suffering citizens and

noncitizens whose structural exclusion from the utopian-American
dreamscape exposes the state's claim of legitimacy and virtue to an
acid wash of truth telling that makes hegemonic disavowal virtually
impossible, at certain moments of political intensity. Sentimentality
has long been the means by which mass subaltern pain is advanced,
in the dominant public sphere, as the true core of national
collectivity. It operates when the pain of intimate others burns into
the conscience of classically privileged national subjects, such that
they feel the pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their pain .
Theoretically, to eradicate the pain those with power will do whatever is
necessary to return the nation once more to its legitimately utopian
odor. Identification with pain, a universal true feeling, then leads to structural social change. In return,
subalterns scarred by the pain of failed democracy will reauthorize
universalist notions of citizenship in the national utopia, which
involves believing in a redemptive notion of law as the guardian of
public good. The object of the nation and the law in this light is to eradicate systemic social pain,
the absence of which becomes the definition of freedom. Yet, since these very sources of
protection-the state, the law, patriotic ideology-have traditionally
buttressed traditional matrices of cultural hierarchy, and since their
historic job has been to protect universal subject/citizens from
feeling their cultural and corporeal specificity as a political
vulnerability, the imagined capacity of these institutions to
assimilate to the affective tactics of subaltern counterpolitics
suggests some weaknesses, or misrecognitions, in these tactics . For
one thing, it may be that the sharp specificity of the traumatic model of pain
implicitly mischaracterizes what a person is as what a person
becomes in the experience of social negation; this model also falsely
promises a sharp picture of structural violence's source and scope,
in turn promoting a dubious optimism that law and other visible
sources of inequality, for example, can provide the best remedies for
their own taxonomizing harms. It is also possible that
counterhegemonic deployments of pain as the measure of structural
injustice actually sustain the utopian image of a homogeneous
national metaculture, which can look like a healed or healthy body in
contrast to the scarred and exhausted ones. Finally, it might be that the
tactical use of trauma to describe the effects of social inequality so
overidentifies the eradication of pain with the achievement of justice
that it enables various confusions: for instance, the equation of pleasure
with freedom or the sense that changes in feeling, even on a mass
scale, amount to substantial social change. Sentimental politics
the index of collective life.

makes these confusions credible and these violences bearable, as its

cultural power confirms the centrality of interpersonal identification
and empathy to the vitality and viability of collective life. This gives
citizens something to do in response to overwhelming structural
violence. Meanwhile, by equating mass society with that thing called "national culture," these
important transpersonal linkages and intimacies all too frequently serve as proleptic shields, as ethically
uncontestable legitimating devices for sustaining the hegemonic field.9

Link Empowerment
Discourse of empowerment reinforce the legitimacy of
antidemocratic politics and reinscribe the domination of the
sovereign; rather, self-alienation allows for a refusal to engage
in colonial institutions that creates true political agency while
denying passivity.

Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the

University of Wollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture,
University of Wollongong, Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering:
Australian law in black and white, Research Online, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)

Domination, disadvantage and dispossession may be manifested or

experienced as victimhood. Though it is not constituted by or constitutive
of white guilt, there are mutual relationships between the political
subjectivities of the dominated and the dominating, the
dispossessed and the possessor. Australian debates over
responsibility, redistribution policies, collective identity and race
relations now bring intellectuals, activists, political parties and
social movements together across racial lines to contest the
fundamental terms in which the communities understand themselves
and each other. These are some of the practices, names and narratives
(Gatti, 2010) that constitute identities in a single territory that was colonised
but never ceded by the first nations. This analysis recognises these
constitutive foundations of identity formation, taking account of political,
economic and historical conditions and the stories that are told about them.
It requires understanding white responsibility for specific injustices,
without automatically casting those who have suffered from them as
passive victims. The narratives of nation can only be effectively told
if they are developed as a dialogue.
Passivity arises when the discourse of suffering imagines a victim
of suffering, posed against an active dominant group that represents
those sufferers, as discussed in the previous section. Wendy Brown
criticises movements that simply
perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the organization of
the activity through which the suffering is produced and without addressing
the subject constitution that domination effects, that is, the constitution of
the social categories, workers, blacks, women, [...] (Brown, 1995: 7)
The problem, then, is to recognise and allocate responsibility for
suffering under conditions that allow those who suffer to constitute
and imagine themselves as political subjects. It is only in this way
that we can avoid their simplistic representation as biopolitical or
even biological objects. Renault (2008: 372) calls attention to a critique

that began with Gramsci as an analysis of the barriers to the development of

the worker as a revolutionary subject. The critique is continued by those
contemporary figures who explicitly pose the question of political
subjectivity as a problem, and Renault names Balibar, Butler, Zizek inter
alia.
Renault points out that the three forms of suffering, domination,
deprivation and desaffiliation, have been characterised by specific
political movements, through which participants have constituted
themselves as political subjects in various ways according to their
times and circumstances. While the industrial proletariats struggles
against domination were seen as a model of political resistance from the
nineteenth into the mid twentieth century, the struggles of peasants and
other extremely poor people against deprivation were less developed, or at
least less fully theorised and constructed by Marxist theory. Renault (2008:
33) refers to the more recent movements of Indigenous and landless interests
(specifically in Bolivia and Brazil) as models that have become better
recognised for their struggles against dispossession.
Recognition that the constitution of subjectivity is one of the key
obstacles to an effective response to suffering refocuses attention
on desaffiliation. If suffering is in large part a problem of
powerlessness and the social construction of victimhood, then
clearly desaffiliation is a key category of analysis. So, if resistance is
the active response to domination, and if appropriation is the active
response to deprivation, how can one respond actively to
desaffiliation?
Dass analysis of Bhopal indicated that the reduction of those who suffer
to the status of passive and silent victims is a process of
disempowerment. The natural response, then, would be to call for
their empowerment. Yet we must be careful with what we mean by this
fashionable word (Burgi, 2009: 26). Brown contrasts empowerment,
as a means of generating one's capacities... without capitulating to
constraints by particular regimes of power, to resistance [which]
implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always
transpires inside the regime (1995: 22). Yet even though the term
opens up more possibilities than the reactive notion of resistance,
and articulates that feature of freedom concerned with action,
there are dangers in the way it imagines subjectivity. Indeed, the
possibility that one can feel empowered without being so forms an
important element of legitimacy for the antidemocratic dimensions
of liberalism. (Brown, 1995: 23)
If empowerment is to enable the engagement of active political
subjects with the objective social conditions of their suffering, then
we need to reengage with the concept of alienation. Social suffering,
for Renault (2008: 387), is characterised by structures that block the
satisfaction of needs, both organic (psychic and corporeal) and

intersubjective needs. The resulting self-alienation requires a

realisation of self by engaging with those conditions, or as Brown
would put it, organization of the activity through which the
suffering is produced (1995: 7).

Link Multiculturalism
The affirmatives focus on cultural tolerance ignores the
exploitative social structures that creates difference in the
first place; their absolute focus on inclusion necessarily
excludes the Other from participating in politics.

Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry Autumn 2007, Tolerance as an

Ideological Category, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)

Why are today so many problems perceived as problems of

intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice?
Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation, political struggle,
even armed struggle? The immediate answer is the liberal
multiculturalist's basic ideological operation: the "culturalization of
politics" - political differences, differences conditioned by political
inequality, economic exploitation, etc., are naturalized/neutralized
into "cultural" differences, different "ways of life," which are
something given, something that cannot be overcome, but merely
"tolerated." To this, of course, one should answer in Benjaminian terms:
from culturalization of politics to politicization of culture. The cause of this
culturalization is the retreat, failure, of direct political solutions
(Welfare State, socialist projects, etc.). Tolerance is their post-political ersatz:
The retreat from more substantive visions of justice heralded by the
promulgation of tolerance today is part of a more general
depoliticization of citizenship and power and retreat from political
life itself. The cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly
constitutes a rejection of politics as a domain in which conflict can
be productively articulated and addressed, a domain in which
citizens can be transformed by their participation. [1]
Perhaps, nothing expresses better the inconsistency of the postpolitical liberal project than its implicit paradoxical identification of
culture and nature, the two traditional opposites: culture itself is
naturalized, posited as something given. (The idea of culture as "second
nature" is, of course, an old one.) It was, of course, Samuel Huntington who
proposed the most successful formula of this "culturalization of politics" by
locating the main source of today's conflicts into the "clash of civilizations,"
what one is tempted to call the Huntington's disease of our time - as he put
it, after the end of the Cold War, the "iron curtain of ideology" has
been replaced by the "velvet curtain of culture. [2] Huntington's dark
vision of the "clash of civilizations" may appear to be the very opposite of
Francis Fukuyama's bright prospect of the End of History in the guise of a
world-wide liberal democracy: what can be more different from Fukuyama's
pseudo-Hegelian idea of the "end of history" (the final Formula of the best
possible social order was found in capitalist liberal democracy, there is now

no space for further conceptual progress, there are just empirical obstacles to
be overcome), [3] than Huntington's "clash of civilizations" as the main
political struggle in the XXIst century? The "clash of civilizations" IS
politics at the "end of history."

Link Racial Identity

The presentation of racial identity into debate is a way for the
community to assuage its guilt for being racist narratives of
non-whiteness are exploited and commodified to legitimize the
white body you have an obligation to reject the
commodification of racial identity.

Leong 12 (Nancy, Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Sturm

College of Law, Racial Capitalism, Harvard Law Review, University of Texas)

A white person or institution who engages in an exchange with a

non-white person, therefore, increases its status as a non- racist and
cross-culturally competent actor by signaling those attributes
through affiliation. Because we cannot, generally, probe the inner cognitive
processes of a white individual for racist ideation or infiltrate the internal
workplace culture of an institution to detect racist norms, a white persons
affiliation with a non-white individual serves as a proxy for making
independent judgments along those axes.162 Such affiliation signals to
outsiders that the white person or institution is non-racist because,
presumably, if they were racist, they would not want to participate in the
exchange with the non-white person, and the non-white person would not
agree to participate in the exchange with them. Such status-seeking
explains the intensity of the drive to acquire the capital associated
with non-whiteness through affiliation. It also explains why nonwhiteness is particularly desirable to market participants seeking
either to distinguish themselves favorably from other participants or
simply to avoid distinguishing themselves unfavorably.
Real world examples reveal the status associated with affiliation
with non-white people. First, closeness with non-white people allows
whites to deflect charges of racism. As the popular satirical blog Stuff
White People Like163 puts it, Obviously, whites want black friends so
as not to appear racist.164 One commentator has referred to this as
the some of my best friends defense - the idea is that, if one has
close non-white friends (or friends of other outsider groups) one
cannot also be racist (or prejudiced against those groups). Sociologist
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva identified this defense as a common theme in a series
of interviews with white people about race relations, finding that, while
whites harbor prejudice and resentment, a common tactic was to
shelter these views behind claims of having non-white friends and
associates.166 Such capitalization of non-whiteness is valuable given
the manifest undesirability of the racist label, which
commentators have dubbed the only true equivalent to a racial
epithet for white people.167

The presentation of non-whiteness creates a system of racial

capital by showcasing the non-white body, whiteness
reaffirms its supremacy and solidifies its social power.

Leong 12 (Nancy, Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Sturm

College of Law, Racial Capitalism, Harvard Law Review, University of Texas)

Yet showcasing a few select non-white employees does not actually

require changing a workplace culture in which most non- white
individuals feel subtly unwelcome.200 Indeed, employers may actually
preserve existing racial hierarchies by hiring and showcasing nonwhite employees. christi cunningham argues that the practice of
tokenism . . . leverages undervalued identities and preserves
commodified values of race by parading an exception.201 By
showcasing non-white employees in prominent positions, employers
signal that unsuccessful non-white employees are responsible for
their own failures, while at the same time maintaining a system in
which white employees are in fact preferred.202
Whether overtly furthering a companys reputation or more covertly
maintaining the racial status quo, showcasing does not actually require
numerical diversity within a companys ranks to match the
appearance of diversity in its leadership. But if an employer does
acquire a numerically diverse workforce, that non- white presence
has additional instrumental value.
First, numerical diversity yields racial capital by establishing and
maintaining the companys good reputation. Wilkins explains that
diversity statistics are used to convey[] a reassuring message to
law schools and the public at large that slow but nevertheless
significant progress is being made on overcoming the legacy of
[previous] racist and exclusionary practices.203 Employers often
features diversity statistics on their websites and in promotional materials as
a way of communicating that information as widely as possible.
Moreover, the presence of non-white employees throughout an
employers workforce adds racial capital by providing a statistical
defense against current litigation or preempting future litigation. For
example, Wal-Mart recently undertook a well- publicized initiative to
diversify its own ranks and to insist on diversity in its business
partners.204 Wal-Mart has achieved some striking numerical results. It
wrote to each of its top one hundred law firms, stating that to retain Wal-Mart
as a client that firm had to demonstrate a meaningful interest in the
importance of diversity; it also required each firm to submit a slate of
candidates to serve as the relationship attorney with Wal-Mart, with at least
one female and one person of color on the slate.205 The initiative resulted in
changing forty relationship attorneys and shifting $60 million worth of WalMarts legal work to management by female or non-white attorneys.206

These diversity measures have accompaniedand, we might infer,

are designed to respond toa wave of employment discrimination
allegations against Wal-Mart. The company recently succeeded in
securing dismissal of a class action brought by more than 1.5 million women
alleging sex discrimination in hiring and promotion.207 Several of the women
who served as lead plaintiffs in Wal-Mart v. Dukes testified to racial as well as
gender discrimination in their depositions.208 Wal-Mart also faced a
smaller class-action lawsuit initiated by two black truck drivers,
alleging race discrimination in hiring.209 And the NAACPs 2005
Industry Survey gave Wal-Mart a grade of C minus within the areas
of employment, vendor development, advertising/marketing,
charitable giving and investing/franchising.210
Regardless whether Wal-Mart committed race discrimination within
the meaning of the law, its diversity initiatives have succeeded in
protecting the companys image. The company has received awards
and considerable media praise for its efforts.211 And by affiliating
itself with non-white employees and racially diverse business
partners, Wal-Mart also insulates itself from future allegations of
race discrimination. Racial capitalism yields valuable rewards: WalMarts diversity initiative may ultimately save the company billions
of dollars in adverse jury verdicts or litigation settlements.
These examples illustrate the way that racial capitalism occurs within
institutions. The phenomenon is so common as to be unremarkable. But in
the following Part, I will demonstrate that racial capitalism has profoundly
negative consequences for society

Link Solidarity
Their position of charity and false solidarity from above are the
voyeuristic investments in suffering that re-entrench existing
power structures and make true solidarity impossible.

El Kilombo Intergalactico 7 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Beyond Resistance: Everything, p. 1-2)

In our efforts to forge a new path, we found that an old friendthe Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN)was already taking enormous strides to move toward a

it was thus necessary to attempt an

evaluation of Zapatismo that would in turn be adequate to the real
event of their appearance. That is, despite the fresh air that the
Zapatista uprising had blown into the US political scene since 1994,
we began to feel that even the inspiration of Zapatismo had been
quickly con- tained through its insertion into a well-worn and
untenable narrative: Zapatismo was another of many faceless and
indifferent third world movements that demanded and deserved
solidarity from leftists in the global north. From our position as an
organization composed in large part by people of color in the United
States, we viewed this focus on solidarity as the foreign policy
equivalent of white guilt, quite distinct from any authentic
impulse toward, or recognition of, the necessity for radical social
change. The notion of solidarity that still pervades much of the
Left in the U.S. has continually served an intensely conservative
political agenda that dresses itself in the radical rhetoric of the
latest rebellion in the darker nations while carefully maintaining
political action at a distance from our own daily lives, thus producing
a political subject (the solidarity provider) that more closely resembles a
spectator or voyeur (to the suffering of others) than a participant or active
agent, while simultaneously working to reduce the solidarity recipient to a mere object (of our pity and mismatched socks). At both ends of this relationship, the
process of solidarity ensures that subjects and political action never
meet; in this way it serves to make change an a priori impossibility . In
other words, this practice of solidarity urges us to participate in its
perverse logic by accepting the narrative that power tells us about
itself: that those who could make change dont need it and that those who need change cant make it.
politics adequate to our time, and that

To the extent that human solidarity has a future, this logic and practice do not!
For us,

Zapatismo was (and continues to be) unique exactly because it

has provided us with the elements to shatter this tired schema. It has
inspired in us the ability, and impressed upon us the necessity, of always viewing our- selves as dignified
political subjects with desires, needs, and projects worthy of struggle. With the publication of The Sixth

Zapatistas have made it even

clearer that we must move beyond appeals to this stunted form of
solidarity, and they present us with a far more difficult challenge: that wherever in the
world we may be located, we must become companer@s (neither
Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle in June of 2005, the

followers nor leaders) in a truly global struggle to change the world. As a direct
response to this call, this analysis is our attempt to read Zapatismo as providing us with the rough draft of
a manual for contemporary political action that eventually must be written by us all.

Solidarity is the manifestation of the illusion of compassion

the subaltern becomes the point of reference upon which
Western society exemplifies wealth, satisfaction, and
happiness by convincing the oppressed of its suffering.

Baudrillard 96 (Jean, The Perfect Crime, 1996, p. 133 137)

Our reality: that is the problem. We have only one, and it has to be saved. `We
have to do something. We can't do nothing.' But doing something solely because you
can't not do something has never constituted a principle of action or freedom. Just a
form of absolution from one's own impotence and compassion for one's own fate.
The people of Sarajevo do not have to face this question. Where they are, there is
an absolute need to do what they do, to do what has to be done. Without illusion
as to ends and without compassion towards themselves. That is what being real
means, being in the real. And this is not at all the `objective' reality of their
misfortune, that reality which `ought not to exist' and for which we feel pity, but
the reality which exists as it is -- the reality of an action and a destiny.
This is why they are alive, and we are the ones who are dead. This is why, in our own
eyes, we have first and foremost to save the reality of the war and impose that -compassionate -- reality on those who are suffering from it but who, at the very
heart of war and distress, do not really believe in it. To judge by their own
statements, the Bosnians do not really believe in the distress which surrounds them. In
the end, they find the whole unreal situation senseless, unintelligible. It is a hell, but an
almost hyperreal hell, made the more hyperreal by media and humanitarian harassment,
since that makes the attitude of the whole world towards them all the more
incomprehensible. Thus, they live in a kind of spectrality of war -- and it is a good
thing they do, or they could never bear it.
But we know better than they do what reality is, because we have chosen them to
embody it. Or simply because it is what we -- and the whole of the West -- most lack.
We have to go and retrieve a reality for ourselves where the bleeding is. All these
`corridors' we open up to send them our supplies and our `culture' are, in reality,
corridors of distress through which we import their force and the energy of their
misfortune. Unequal exchange once again. Whereas they find a kind of additional
strength in the thorough stripping-away of the illusions of reality and of our
political principles -- the strength to survive what has no meaning -- we go to
convince them of the `reality' of their suffering -- by culturalizing it, of course, by
theatricalizing it so that it can serve as a point of reference in the theatre of
Western values, one of which is solidarity.
This all exemplifies a situation which has now become general, in which
inoffensive and impotent intellectuals exchange their woes for those of the
wretched, each supporting the other in a kind of perverse contract -- exactly as the

political class and civil society exchange their respective woes today, the one
serving up its corruption and scandals, the other its artificial convulsions and inertia.
Thus we saw Bourdieu and the Abbe Pierre offering themselves up in televisual
sacrifice, exchanging between them the pathos-laden language and sociological
metalanguage of wretchedness. And so, also, our whole society is embarking on the
path of commiseration in the literal sense, under cover of ecumenical pathos. It is
almost as though, in a moment of intense repentance among intellectuals and
politicians, related to the panic-stricken state of history and the twilight of values, we had
to replenish the stocks of values, the referential reserves, by appealing to that
lowest common denominator that is human misery, as though we had to restock
the hunting grounds with artificial game. A victim society. I suppose all it is doing
is expressing its own disappointment and remorse at the impossibility of
perpetrating violence upon itself.
The New Intellectual Order everywhere follows the paths opened up by the New World
Order. The misfortune, wretchedness and suffering of others have everywhere
become the raw material and the primal scene. Victimhood, accompanied by Human
Rights as its sole funerary ideology. Those who do not exploit it directly and in their
own name do so by proxy. There is no lack of middlemen, who take their financial or
symbolic cut in the process. Deficit and misfortune, like the international debt, are
traded and sold on in the speculative market -- in this case the politicointellectual market, which is quite the equal of the late, unlamented military-industrial complex. Now, all commiseration is part of the logic of misfortune [malheur].
To refer to misfortune, if only to combat it, is to give it a base for its objective repro-duction in perpetuity. When fighting anything whatever, we have to start out -- fully
aware of what we are doing -- from evil, never from misfortune.

AFF
Speaking for others is inevitable, but the aff resolves the
impacts.

Jazeel and McFarlane 09

/Tariq, PhD in Cultural Geography, Lecturer in Human Geography at The University of
Sheffield, and Colin, PhD, Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Durham University,
The limits of responsibility: a postcolonial politics of academic knowledge production,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographiers, The Royal Geographical Society,
2009. Pages 114-115)/

At a banal level, research must be considered as one key optic through which intellectual
communities in the global North find out about the world; the knowledge we disseminate
has effects on the imaginative geographies of our students, readers and fellow conference
delegates, which itself demands a kind of responsible fidelity to the places and
communities we research. In some senses this is no different from calling for a
responsible and transparent press, but in the context of the authority that intellectual
work calls around itself, it is to also remind that the academic knowledge we produce is
constitutive, and powerfully so. At worst then, in contemporary transnational academic
landscapes, our research daily produces the world precisely by computing the global
South in this unproblematic way, with the EuroAmerican professional intellectual poised
and positioned as the one who diagnoses (Spivak 1999, 255). At best on the other hand,
as Edward Said or David Scott might suggest, research performed as criticism
care-ful of, and attentive to, our own locatedness in the field as well as the
EuroAmerican academy holds that potential of putting back together
aspects of our common life so as to make visible what has been obscured
(Scott 2008, vi; our emphasis), or we would add, what can be achieved. This is an
insurrectionary, yet in our terms responsible, disposition toward
knowledge production that we would urge.
Whatever the scenario though, according to Gayatri Spivak (and famously so),
speaking for in this sense is entirely unavoidable in EuroAmerican
knowledge production. We believe that this recognition can be enabling. What
these thoughts around the double play of representation in disciplinary knowledge
production gesture toward is the necessity of a due sense of responsibility in
the light of such an awareness about the representational mechanics of
knowledge production. Unlike the epistemological dictums of enlightenment ways of
knowing, research is always more than merely formalised curiosity. The stakes of
knowledge production are greater, because knowledge is in and of the world,
generative precisely because of its representational dynamics. If we are
aware of this, then methodologically we are always marked inside messy
spaces of immersion and involvement at all stages of knowledge production.
If it is interest that takes us toward a research project, then responsibility must be
stitched into that interestedness from the very outset. Knowledge production is
inseparable from politics in this respect. Interest can never be innocent.

Conceiving of research and knowledge production this way inevitably

reconfigures the geographies in which we emplace ourselves as researchers.
Anyone who produces knowledge of a thing (people place community) can never be
outside that thing. Knowledge is never outside power thought this way (Jazeel 2007,
2946). At every stage of our research endeavour we must perennially
confront those most important questions concerning what knowledge does,
who it is for, and why we are producing it, which in turn demands an openness to
knowledge that drives change, is insurrectionary, just as it recognises the
inevitability of speaking for. In this respect, our intellectual representations
can make room for interventions. They can humbly stake out opposition in
search of social, political and intellectual openings. But they can also be
participatory and collaborative in the field communities we work with, rather than
authoritative and dogmatic (Said 2004 [1982], 42). As we discuss now, a crucial
dimension in all this is a commitment to uncertainty, humility and unlearning in the
research process that might enable both researcher and researched to move on, change,
not stand still. As Doreen Massey has recently written with regards to theorys
relationship to politics, It is utterly invigorating to be in a situation where
ideas really matter. But also one where they are not simply taken as truth
(2008, 496).