Bataille K Not My Work

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We offer this debate to ecstatic communication, sacrificing certainty to social
exuberance. The 1AC models the political productivity of the state. More
peace. More safety. More reason. More work. More talk. Less communication.
The status quo is tragedy. The 1AC is farce.
Act 1: The Anointing.
The pups of war are yelping, and the 1AC adds their bark of protest to the
chorus. Demands of restrint from the war machine mean nothing, for
militarism thrives on the 1ACs fascinated indignation.
John Hutnyk 2003 [Goldsmith College at University of London; Critique of Anthropology v. 23]
Bataille was clearly a militant against the war, there is no doubting his engagement in this
regard: ... we can express the hope of avoiding a war that already threatens. But in
order to do so we must divert the surplus production, either into rational extension of a
difcult industrial growth, or into unproductive works that will dissipate an energy that
cannot be accumulated in any case. (Bataille, 1949/1988: 25) And even after the war he maintained a theoretical interest in ways to escape restrictions. In
the second volume of The Accursed Share, Bataille speculates on alcohol, war and holidays as the choices for expenditure. He is not so naive as to think that a larger
participation in erotic games would help avoid war (nice thought), but he does rethink the ways of avoiding war: we will not be able to decrease the risk of war before we have
reduced, or begun to reduce, the general disparity in standards of living (Bataille, 1991: 188). This banality is what Bataille sees as the only chance for an alternative to war,
and it is possible even in the midst of the Cold War. The trouble was, faced with war itself, Bataille retreated to the library. Batailles contempt for and fascination with fascist
community must Nancy says be behind his withdrawal (Nancy, 1991: 17). Unlike Marx in the Brumaire, Batailles analysis lls him with unease and inevitable failure in the
face of a paradox at which his thinking came to a halt (Nancy, 1991: 23). It is this interruption that left Bataille susceptible to the postmodern- ist revision which drained any
sense of a political programme the ght against fascism from his work.9He was conned to the library, resigned, introspective, and in the end left passing books on to others
Spiralling into the

conagration of the sun, which gives energy without (obvious) return, he later wrote:
The planet congested by death and wealth a scream pierces the clouds Wealth and death
with a whis- pered recommendation (the review Critiquewas the last publishing venture he started, and it continues today).
close in. No-one hears this scream of a miserable waiting. And then: Knowing that there is no response. (Bataille, 2001: 221) And, nally, from the
The only escape is failure. (Bataille, 2001: 223)

Everything that we know is true, but on condition of disappearing in us (we know better in ceasing to
Notebook for Pure Happiness written towards the end of his life:
know). (Bataille, 2001: 247) Part IV Have I not led my readers astray? (Bataille, 1991: 430) Bataille cannot be left to rot in the library. How useful an
experiment would it be to try to apply Batailles notion of expenditure to politics today? Klaus-Peter Kpping asks questions about modernity which
arise explicitly from his reading of Bataille as a theorist of transgression, addressing political examples such as Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Indonesia
A more extravagant general economy framework for such questions might

take up the massive accumulation that is the excess of an arms trade promoting regional
conicts as integral to sales gures on the one side, with the performative futility of
massed anti-capitalism rallies and May Day marches that fall on the nearest Sunday so
as not to disrupt the city on the other. Expenditure and squandering today, in Batailles sense, might be seen in both the planned obso- lescence of
(Kpping, 2002: 243).
cars, computers and nearly all merchandise, as well as in the waste production and fast-food service industry cults and fashionista style wars, tamogochi and Beckham haircuts
that currently sweep the planet. No doubt it would be too mechanical to rest with such applications, too utilitarian, but the relevance is clear. The use-value of Georges Bataille
is somewhat eccentric and the deployment of pre-Second World War circumstances as a comparative register for today is of course merely speculative. No return to the 1930s
(colourize lms now). Yet, taking account of a long list of circumstantial differences no Hitler, no Moscow, no Trotskyite opposition, etc. is also unnecessary since it is only in
the interests of thinking through the current conjuncture so as to understand it, and change it, that any return should ever be contemplated. The importance of French
anthropology Mauss as well as psychoanalysis and phenomenology, cannot be underestimated and all are crucial in Batailles comprehension of the rise of fascism. Can
these matters help us to make sense of political debates in the midst of a new world war today? That the intellectual currents which shaped Batailles analysis were postMarxist did not, then, replace the importance of Marx. Today
the comprehension of Bushs planetary terror machine
still requires such an analysis,
but one that can also be informed by the reading of Batailles thought as shaped by the
intellectual currents mentioned above. In a period of capitalist slump, crisis of credit, overextended market, defaulted debt and threatening collapse,
the strategy of war looms large. Even before the events of 11 September 2001 in New York, Bush was clearly on the warpath with missile defence
systems, withdrawal from various international treaties and covenants, and massive appropriations for military and surveillance systems.
The
imperial element is clear and sustained the aggression against the Palestinians, the
adventure in Afghanistan and the war on Iraq (to defend papa Bushs legacy) obviously have
their roots in the imperialist mercantile tradition plunder and war in pursuit of resources,
primarily oil, secondarily armaments sales. If this is potlatch, it is of the destructive kind that
Bataille feared. The possibility of a geo-political solution other than war should be evaluated. But it is a matter of record that, under the Bush family
regime, the USEurope alliance has not been interested in pursuing any programme of reduction of disparity, a few suspensions of Third World debt
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Bataille searches for an alternative to war in some vast

economic competition through which costly sacrifices, comparable to war, would yet give
the competitor with initiative the advantage Bataille, 1949/1988: 172), he holds out hope for a kind of gift without return. That
and UN summits notwithstanding. When
he showed some enthusiasm for the Marshall Plan after the Second World War as a possible model for this might need to be ascribed to the exhausted condition of post-war
France, but he soon revised his assessment. The Marshall Plan was not as disinter- ested as Bataille implied; it facilitated circulation and recoupment of surplus value as prot.
The Cold War and nuclear proliferation turned out to be the preferred examples of reckless waste in actuality as recognized in volume two of The Accursed Share (Bataille,
Today, redistribution is not considered an option, the threat of Asian capitalism after the slaughter of millions can
be ignored, and the war on Islam (known variously as the Gulf War, Zionism, and the War on Terror)
appears as the primary strategy (combined with a war on South America, mistakenly named as a war on drugs, and a war on immigration
1991: 188). (
disguised as a security concern). The secondary strategy is a newly hollowed out version of liberal welfare. In 1933 Bataille had written of the bourgeois tendency to declare
equality and make it their watchword, all the time showing they do not share the lot of the workers (Bataille, 1997: 177). In the 21st century, Prime Minister Blair of England
has made some gestures towards a similar pseudo- alternative. At a Labour Party congress in the millennium year he spoke of the need to address poverty and famine in Africa,
and no doubt still congratulates himself on his pursuit of this happy agenda; as I write a large entourage of delegates and diplomats are ying to Johannesburg for another
conference junket the Earth Summit. The party accompanying Blair and Deputy Prescott includes multinational mining corporation Rio Tinto Executive Director Sir Richard
If there
are no gifts, only competitions of expenditure, what then of the effort of Bataille to oppose
fascism? It is not altruistic, and yet it is the most necessary and urgent aspect of his work that is given to us to read for today. Is fascism a charity-type
Wilson (The Guardian, 12 August 2002). Rio Tinto is hardly well known for its desire to redistribute the global share of surplus expenditure for the welfare of all.
trick? A deceit of double dealing which offers the illusion of more while giving less? Something like this psycho-social structure of fascism appears to be enacted in the potlatch
appeasements of the propaganda spinsters surrounding Blair. The New Labour and Third Way public offering is ostentatiously to be about more healthcare, more police, more
schools, but Blair spins and rules over a deception that demands allegiance to a privatization programme that cares only about reducing the costs (xed capital costs) of
providing healthy, orderly, trained employees for industry, of short-term prot and arms sales to Israel, of racist scare-mongering and scapegoating of asylum seekers, refugees
and migrants, of opportunist short-term gain head-in-the-sand business-as-usual. Similarly, the gestures of multi-millionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates in establishing
charity foundations to ease their guilt is not just a matter of philanthropy, it is a necessary gambit of containment (and these two in particular bringing their cyber-evangelism
The liberal rhetoric of charity and the militant drums

of war are the two strategies of the same rampant restrictive economy. Carrot and
stick. Team A and team B of capitalist hegemony the critique of the gift is clear, a gift is not a gift but a debt of time
to the markets of Eastern Europe, South and South-East Asia).
and this is not really generosity or hospitality. The same can be said perhaps of war it is not war but prot, just as the gift reassures the giver of their superior status, the war
on terror unleashes a terror of its own; war does not produce victories but rather defeat for all. Bataille shows us a world in ruins. September 11 has been made into the kind of
event that transforms an unpopular (even unelected) gure into a leader under whom the nation coheres in a new unity much as Bataille saw Nuremburg achieve for the
National Socialists. Of course I am not suggesting Bush is a Nazi he hasnt got the dress sense but
people were betrayed by the trick of
a democracy
that offers pseudo-participation once every four years, and this time in a way that has consequences leading inexorably to a massive ght. The
kowtowing to big business with a rhetoric of social security has been heard before it was called the New Deal (or welfare state) and was a deception almost from the start.
Where there was perhaps some contractual obligation of aid in the earlier forms, today the trick of the buy-off bribery of service provision is contingent and calculated
watchwords of security that

really mean death and despair to those on the wrong side of the wire. The largest prison population ever (under
according only to corporate strategic gain. While we lurch towards endless war, governments reassure us with the
democracy or any other form of government), mass connement for minor offences (three strikes), colour overcoded death row (Mumia Abu-Jamal etc.), arrest and detention
The incarcerated souls in the concentration camps of

Sangatte,10 Woomera,11 Kamunting12 or Guantanamo13 are wired in and offered up as
sacrificial gifts to the rule of new judicial-administrative fascism. A new toothy-smiling Christian cult of death
without trial or charge, celebratory executionism, etc.
and technology, spun carefully via press conferences and TV sitcoms television has given up any pretence of journalism in favour of infotainment. Does the US administration
dream of a new post-war era where, once again like Marshall, they could come with a plan to rebuild upon ruins? This would indicate the exhaustion of the current mode of
production, which, with information promised renewal but quickly stalled. Whatever the case, the enclosure of the US and Europe behind fortress walls does not experience
now shows ensure prophylactic protection, and ruin may be visited upon all. It was Bataille who said that perhaps only the methods of the USSR would ... be equal to a ruined
Polite critiques and protest have no purchase orderly rallies

against the aggression in Afghanistan, against asylum and immigration law, against the
immensity (Bataille, 1949/1988: 1678).
destruction of Palestine, etc., get no airtime (instead, political soap opera like The West Wing, as the current equivalent in ideological terms to the
Cold Wars Bomber Command). Every leader that accedes to the War on Terror programme and its excesses (civilian deaths, curtailment of civil
liberty, global bombing) is an appeaser. This is like the dithering of Chamberlain, only this time the opposition activists are ghting in a post-national
arena and Stalins slumber will not be broken, the Red Army cannot run inter- ference, there is no Churchill rumbling in the wings,
the fascist
empire will prevail without militant mobilization across the board. This is
the appeasers gift betrayal into the ranks assigned to us by generals and industrial
magnates (Bataille, 1985: 164). The unravelling of the tricks of social welfare, of asylum and
aid programmes, of interest even (the narrowing of news broadcasts to domestic affairs) or
respect, of the demon- ization of others, of tolerance, the hypocrisy of prejudice all this
prepares us for a war manufactured elsewhere. After the breakdown of the gifts tricks,
fascism is the strategy, the obverse side of capitals coin. In this context, the geo-politics that
enables, or demands, appeasement of the imperious corporate/US power is the
restricted destruction we should fear, and we should fight in a struggle that goes
beyond national defence, wage claims or solidarity. The discipline of the Soviets and of Bataille could be our tools. Bataille reads
on in his library. We are left speculating with him, rashly charging in with ideas that are less excessive, less exuberant, that modera- tion might withhold. But there is no more
important time to consider the efforts in the arts to ght militarism out of control, and, as Bush drags the world into permanent war, it is worth asking why Batailles surrealistic
opposition to Hitler was inadequate. Is it because there are no more thinkers in the Party? Is it that subversion is uninformed and its spirit quiet? Chained to the shelves, it is not
enough to know that
charity.
appeasement of the military-industrial machine is the obverse side of liberal
Why are we still unable to acknowledge this is the path to war? What would be adequate to move away from appeasement to
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Against the immense hypocrisy of the
world of accumulation (Bataille, 1991: 424), the answer is clear: we should condemn this
mouldy society to revolutionary destruction (Bataille, 1997: 175). The Bataille of La
Critique Sociale might argue for a glorious expenditure as that which connects people
together in the social and recognizes their joint labour to produce themselves, and this must
be redeemed from the restricted economy that insists on expenditure for the maintenance of
hierarchy. If he were leaving the library today, the Bataille of anti-war Surrealism might say it is
time for a wake-up knock-down critique of the barking dogs. The castrating lions of
appeasement must be hounded out of town. Back in your kennels, yelping pups of
doom. Fair call, Georges Bataille.
containment and more? What kind of sovereign destruction would Bataille enact today?
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We declare ourselves sovereign, and refuse identification with the excess of
the USFG. We offer this debate to ecastic communication, sacrificing certainty
to social exuberance.
Act 1: The Anointing
The attempt to restore balance to the international system denies the
excessive violence at the heart of state sovereignty. The aff re-enacts political
theater built upon the extermination of others.
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat 2007
[Thomas Blom Hansenis Adjunct Professor of Anthropology atColumbia University, Senior Research Scientist at Yale University, Visiting Professor at the University
of Edinburgh, and Professor of Anthropology at theUniversity of Amsterdamwhere he served as Dean of the International School for Humanities and Social
Sciences. Recently, Hansen was offered a position as full professor at Stanford University where he is to head a new research institute for the anthropological study
of South-East Asia.[1] Finn Stepputat is Senior Researcher at Danish Insitute International Studies,
Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Post-Colonial World
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7996.html]
The attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 aimed at what Al-Qaeda saw as the heart of America's global empire. The subsequent reactions
in America and the rest of the world demonstrated that sovereignty and its ultimate expression--the ability and the will to employ overwhelming violence
The "war on terror" and the

attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated that underneath the complex structures of
power in modern, liberal societies, territorial sovereignty, and the foundational violence that
gave birth to it, still remains the hard kernel of modern states--an intrinsically violent "truth" of the modern
and to decide on life and death--have been recongured in the last decades of the twentieth century.
nation-state that remains its raison d'tre in periods of crisis. Jus ad bellum, the possibility of waging war against those one declares as enemies remains
a central dimension of how a state performs its "stateness." At the same time, these reactions also vindicated Hardt and Negri's assertion that "imperial
sovereignty" of the twenty-rst century differs from earlier forms of imperial power (Hardt and Negri 2000, 161-204). As opposed to earlier eras, today's
empire of global network-power has no outside.
The enemies, or "deviants," within this space of moral-politicaleconomic domination are all "within," and are often former allies of the U.S.
government. In the simplied view of the Bush administration, these constitute an "axis of evil"
that must be punished and disciplined in preemptive military strikes to secure internal peace in
the United States and among its allies. The sovereign prerogative is to declare who is an
internal enemy, and the "war on terror" is a war on internal enemies--within nation-states now
policed under new stringent security acts, and within the global empire where legality and
rights have been suspended for those declared "illegal combatants" and incarcerated in
Afghan prisons, Guantanamo Bay, and other "spaces of exception." The global transformations of
politics, economy, and culture have been explored in various ways by theorists of globalization and international relations. 1 Their obvious merits
notwithstanding, these works still maintain an unbroken link between state power, sovereignty, and territory. Sovereignty resides in the state, or in
institutions empowered by states, to exercise sovereign power in supra national institutions and within the nation-state dened by its territory and the
control of its populations. The emphasis in this body of literature remains on sovereignty as a formal, de jure property whose efficacy to a large extent is
derived from being externally recognized by other states as both sovereign and legitimate. This taking effective sovereignty for granted is questioned by
Stephen Krasner (1999) in his inuential work, "Sovereignty: Organized Hypocracy." Krasner shows how international sovereignty and the principles of
nonintervention are being breached in numerous ways by imposition as well as agreement, but in his account, sovereignty remains inherently linked to
territory and the state power of states. It seems that sovereignty cannot be imagined independently of the state. This volume questions the obviousness
of the state-territory-sovereignty link. In tune with a line of constructivist scholarship in International Relations theory (e.g., Kratochwill 1986; Ruggie
1993; Biersteker and Weber 1996) we conceptualize the territorial state and sovereignty as social constructions. Furthermore, we suggest to shift the
ground for our understanding of sovereignty from issues of territory and external recognition by states, toward issues of internal constitution of
sovereign power within states through the exercise of violence over bodies and populations. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel remarks that during "the
feudal monarchy of earlier times, the state certainly had external sovereignty, but internally, neither the monarch nor the state was sovereign" (Hegel
[1821] 1991, 315). This "internal sovereignty" of the modern state was only possible under "lawful and constitutional conditions," in a unitary
"Rechtsstaat" whose "ideality" would show itself as "ends and modes of operation determined by, and dependent on, the end of the whole" (316,
emphasis as in original). Hegel makes it clear that this modern "ideality" of sovereignty can only be realized insofar as local and familial solidarities of
"civil society" are sublated to expressions of patriotism through the state, particularly in situations of crisis (316). Even in this, the most systematic
thinker of the modern state, sovereignty is not the bedrock of state power but a precarious effect--and an objective--of state formation. Building on
insights from a previous volume that sought to "denaturalize" the postcolonial state (Hansen and Stepputat 2001), and motivated by global events, we
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propose in this volume to take a fresh and ethnographically informed look at the meanings and forms of sovereignty in the same postcolonial zones of
the world. Our aims are threefold. First, we suggest that sovereign power and the violence (or the threat thereof) that always mark it, should be studied
as practices dispersed throughout, and across, societies. The unequivocal linking of sovereign power to the state is a historically contingent and peculiar
The discipline of International

Relations has for decades assumed states to be both normal, that is, with de facto legitimate
control of their populations and territory, and identical, that is, with similar interests,
strategies, and expected patterns of action. To become a normal sovereign state with normal citizens continues to be a powerful ideal,
outcome of the evolution of the modern state system in Europe since the West-phalian peace in 1648.
releasing considerable creative energy, and even more repressive force, precisely because its realization presupposed the disciplining and subordination
sovereignty of the state is an aspiration that seeks to create

itself in the face of internally fragmented, unevenly distributed and unpredictable congurations
of political authority that exercise more or less legitimate violence in a territory. Sovereign
power, whether exercised by a state, in the name of the nation, or by a local despotic power or
community court, is always a tentative and unstable project whose efficacy and legitimacy
depend on repeated performances of violence and a "will to rule." These performances can
be spectacular and public, secret and menacing, and also can appear as scientic/technical rationalities of
of other forms of authority. We suggest that
management and punishment of bodies. Although the meanings and forms of such performances of sovereignty always are historically specic, they are,
constructing their public authority through a capacity for visiting violence on

human bodies. The "secret" of sovereignty seems, in other words, still to be dened in the tension between the will to arbitrary violence and the
existence of bodies that can be killed but also can resist sovereign power, if nothing else by the mere fact of the simple life force they contain. If
sovereign power originates in excessive and exceptional violence that wants nothing or
sees nothing beyond its own benet or pleasure, its object, but also its ultimate resistance,
is found in the simple life of bodies that desires nothing beyond itself and the simple
moments of pleasure of everyday life. This fundamental embeddedness of sovereignty in the
body was at the center of Georges Bataille's exploration of the concept and its meaning in the
modern world. To Bataille, sovereignty is not merely an archaic form of power and
subordination but articulated more fundamentally in attitudes, or acts, beyond the realm of
utility and calculation. "Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty" (Bataille 1991, 198). 8
Sovereign enjoyment is excessive and beyond the needs of those enjoying. A sovereign
command does not calculate minutely what it wants, but inadvertently reproduces
obedience qua its very gesture of disregard of danger and death (225-30). Sovereignty resides in
every human being and shows itself in the desire to enjoy and revel in brief moments of careless freedom , in sexual
ecstasy, in moments of simple nonanticipatory existence, when an individual experiences
"the miraculous sensation of having the world at his disposal" (199). This was the original
however, always
condition of man in "his non-alienated condition [. . .] but what is within him has a destructive violence, for example
the violence of death" (214). A part of Bataille's essay anticipates Foucault's work by arguing that modern bourgeois
society, and communism with even more determination, have striven to eradicate the
wastefulness, irrationality and arbitrariness at the heart of sovereignty: both as a mode
of power, as a mode of subordination driven by the subject's projection of their own desire onto
the spectacle of wasteful luxury of the court and the king, and as a space for arbitrary and
spontaneous experiences of freedom and suspension of duties. The essence of Bataille's proposition is that because the
exercise of sovereignty is linked to death, excessive expenditure (depenser) and bodily pleasure can neither be contained by any discipline, nor be fully
"democratized" into an equal dignity of all men. Because sovereignty revolves around death, the ultimate form of expenditure beyond utility, it
constitutes in Mbembe's words an "anti-economy" (Mbembe 2003, 15). To Bataille,
sovereignty has no positive existence

but is a miracle intrinsic to human existence and can only be determined through what he
calls a "negative theology" that captures the "miraculous moments" (241) in which
sovereignty is experienced: in the awe of the leader or the king, in the disregard of death, of timidity, of prohibitions. Because sovereignty ows
from the assertion of a basic life force that foregrounds the body and the senses rather than the intellect, it is ultimately connected with the will to take life, and to give up one's
life but not in a calculated and rational fashion. Sovereignty is the opposite of "faintheartedness" and Bataille writes: "Killing is not the only way to regain sovereign life, but
sovereignty is always linked to a denial of the sentiments that death controls" (221). In Bataille's view, the divine is the ultimate sovereign phenomenon, organized around an
unknowable but indivisible void, a "deep unity of NOTHING" (234), that only can be known through its effects, the enchantment it generates, the imagination it res and the
objects it sacralizes.9 To Bataille, the mystery of sovereignty has an irrevocably archaic quality, an "animality that we perceive in sovereignty" whose reappearance as various
forms of irrational excess upsets and disturbs the ideals of equality and reciprocity forged in modern bourgeois societies (and those under communism). Echoing Mauss's notion of
gift-giving as an inherently unequal form of reciprocity because the giver always retains more than he/she gives, Bataille argues that "the universal aspiration of the sovereignty
of the gift giver" (347), that is, the desire to impress, assert and dominate through excessive expenditure inevitably presents a problem for the bourgeois sense of
"proportionality" (348). Bataille tried to understand sovereignty as a common denominator for what we may call the "gift of power"--the mystery of the will to power of certain
individuals, the charisma that violence, selshness, and ruthlessness generate--and he identied its origins in elementary life force that expresses itself in extraordinary actions
and moments. For all its subtle insights, it is not surprising that Bataille's work has been accused of rearticulating themes in the philosophical "vitalism"--from Nietzsche's ideas of
the willpower of a future superior being, Bergson's biological ideas of the elan vital as an irrepressible life force, to Heidegger's much deeper ontological reections, and even
Merleau Ponty's writings on emotional and embodied intensities. But, unlike these writers, Bataille shifted the emphasis from searching for the sources of the will to understanding
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will as an effect that is deducted from violence and other sovereign acts. However, on the whole, vitalist thinking had a troubled and ambiguous relationship with rightwing politics
and critiques of modernity throughout the twentieth century.10 The crux of this problem lies in Bataille's somewhat impoverished analysis of modern bourgeois society as governed
by lifeless, disciplinary and commercial logics, and his view of sovereignty, the sacred, and the elementary forces of life as residues of an archaic age. The positing of sovereignty
as a mark of something originary, of a will that is self-born and unaccountable and yet vitalizes the dull procedures of modernity, was even more pronounced in Carl Schmitt's
earlier and controversial work on "political theology" from 1920. Written in the context of the upheavals following World War I, Schmitt's work on "the political" as an agonistic
relation between friends and foes (Schmitt [1932] 1976) was deeply skeptical of parliamentary democracy and of rationalist or idealist notions of justice that in his view basically
relied on only supercially secularised Christian ideas of mercy and salvation. Instead, Schmitt proposed the Hobbesian "decisionist" argument that law does not reect the norms
of a society but rather the will, the fortitude and authority of those who decide what is law. "For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign
who denitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists" (Schmitt 1985, 13). The key concept for Schmitt was here the notion of the "exception" (Ausnahme), which
encapsulates what Bataille calls the "sovereign moment" in that it is a conceptual and normative void from where the law can be given but also where the vitality of the decision
shows itself: "In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition" (15). In Schmitt's view, sovereignty does not
have the form of law; it lies behind, and makes possible the authority of the law. The specicity of the legal form lies not in content or style but in a certain excess, a surplus
content that precisely is the trace of a decision: "That constitutive, specic element of a decision is, from the perspective of the content of the underlying norm, new and alien.
Looked at normatively, the decision emanates from nothingness" (33). Although Schmitt's decisionism on the surface may appear as hard-nosed realism, it is crucially dependent
on a vitalist conception of modernity and democracy as weak, formalistic, and dull social forms. In the view of Schmitt and his many contemporaries who were sympathetic to
modern society remains dependent on the passion and intensity derived from
archaic and premodern phenomena such as religion, war, the magicality of the decision,
and the sovereign power of the leader. Although sovereignty and state power is implicitly equated throughout Schmitt's work, his
Nazism,
idea of the decision has a wider application and resonates in many ways with Bataille's idea of sovereignty as the sensual and embodied antithesis of the
normative and customary. Both agree that sovereignty and its traces are ubiquitous and important in modern societies, always appearing under the sign
sovereignty is beyond
definition, it is a "nothingness," a force or will that only can be known in the moment of
its appearance. In the recent work of Giorgio Agamben, one nds a highly creative attempt to combine the insights of Schmitt, Bataille,
of something excessive, or exceptional. Yet, for all the power attributed to the sovereign decision or moment,
Kantorowicz, and others, and yet, through a Foucauldian optic, to get beyond the unmistakably metaphysical and vitalist tenor of their expositions.
Agamben rejects Foucault's notion of sovereignty as an archaic form of power superseded by modern biopolitics and suggests that ,
"the
production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense
biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception" (Agamben 1998, 6). Instead of beginning with Hobbes, the absolutist state and the origins of
sovereign power in Christian theology, Agamben argues that "bare life," or simple biological life, "has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion
founds the city of men" in the Western political tradition (7). In antiquity, the city and community proper consisted of free men and citizens--whereas
women, slaves, outcasts, and other forms of life, that is, the majority of human beings, were excluded from the political community, and yet remained
This "inclusive exclusion" is captured in the Roman concept of

homo sacer, the sacred man who is expelled and banished from the community and who may be
internal and crucial to society and economy.
killed by members of the community--but not sacriced as he is not worthy of this gesture of honor before the divine. This gure, the outlaw, the
Friedlos, or the convict, was historically the symbol of the outside upon whose body and life the boundaries of the political community could be built. The
expulsion of someone who used to have rights as a citizen, or simply to categorize some individuals in a society as a form of life that is beyond the reach
of dignity and full humanity and thus not even a subject of a benevolent power, is the most elementary operation of sovereign power--be it as a
government in a nation-state, a local authority, a community, a warlord, or a local militia. At the same time, Agamben shows the gure of the sovereign
to be ambiguous--a gure whose status and corporeality appears as fragile and ambivalent but also exempted from the rules of ordinary life as that of
sovereign violence
that founds the political community by excluding various forms of "bare life" has not disappeared
with the emergence of modern biopolitical forms of governance. On the contrary. The essential
operation of totalitarian power was to reduce the population to pliable bodies that could
be improved, shaped, and regimented, but also exterminated if deemed unnecessary or
dangerous. Modern states seek not only to produce citizens who are responsible and
amenable to rational self-governance. They also seek to make these citizens bearers of
the sovereignty of the nation and the state and thus, in a sense, produce their own ideal cause: the eighteenth-century idea, that the
sovereignty of the state is the sum of, and expression of, the aggregate of each individual citizen. Thus , beneath the governance through
reason and norms, lies the imperative of obedience to the rules, and further yet, the
performance of violence and the armed protection of the community--Home Guards, civil patrols, the armed forces, and so on. The assertion in Western
his double, the homo sacer, the gure symbolizing simple, mute and bare life (Agamben 1998, 49-103). This logic of
states after September 11 of the "hard kernel" of sovereignty is, among many other things, manifested in substantial expansions of these forms of domestic defense forces, or the
huge Homeland Security program in the United States, many of which are based on voluntary commitments from citizens. These institutions--the armed heart of the sovereign
nations--are both the instrument of national integration (as in the United States and Israel) and simultaneously closed to anyone considered culturally or religiously "alien."
The production of sovereignty through the nation and the state are, in other words, often
exclusive projects that inadvertently presuppose and produce large numbers of poor,
marginalized, or ethnic others as outsiders, people who are not yet ready to become citizens or included in the true political-cultural
community. The state nds itself in constant competition with other centers of sovereignty that dispense violence as well as justice with impunity-criminal gangs, political movements or quasi-autonomous police forces that each try to assert their claims to sovereignty. In such situations ,
the
state is not the natural and self-evident center and origin of sovereignty, but one among
several sovereign bodies that tries to assert itself upon the bodies of asylum seekers,
"terrorists," or mere criminals.
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***1NC Alt+Impact Shell

Act 2. The Cutting.
Sacrifice the 1AC. Severe its head, ay its corpse, and wear its skin.
Sacrificial theater offers a moment of transfiguration. Risk this intimate
encounter with death to give your life meaning beyond mere existence and
duration.
Liran Razinsky 2009
[The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009]
Thus we see that the stakes are high. What is at stake is the attempt of the subject to grasp itself in totality. This attempt necessitates bringing death
into the account, but death itself hampers this very attempt. One never dies in the rst person. Returning to Bataille, why does he believe sacrice to
be a solution to Hegels fundamental paradox? For him, it answers the requirements of the human, for Man meets death face to face in the sacrice, he
sojourns with it, and yet, at the same time, he preserves his life. In sacrice, says Bataille, man destroys the animal within him and establishes his
human truth as a being unto death (he uses Heideggers term). Sacrice provides a clear manifestation of mans fundamental negativity, in the form
The sacrificer both destroys and survives. Moreover, in the

sacrice, death is approached voluntarily by Man. In this way the paradox is overcome, and yet
remains open. We can approach death and yet remain alive, but, one might ask, is it really
death that we encountered, or did we merely fabricate a simulacrum? Bataille insists elsewhere,
however, that sacrifice is not a simulacrum, not a mere subterfuge. In the sacricial ritual, a
real impression of horror is cast upon the spectators. Sacrifice burns like a sun, spreading
radiation our eyes can hardly bear, and calls for the negation of individuals as such (The
Festival 313; 215). We did not fool death; we are burned in its fire. Batailles idea of the sacrice
of death (Bataille, Hegel 335-36; 286).
also addresses Freuds paradox. It might be impossible to imagine our own death directly, but it is possible to imagine it with the aid
of some mediator, to meet death through an others death. Yet on some level this others death must be our own as well for it to be
effective, and indeed this is the case, says Bataille. He stresses the element of identication: In the sacrice, the sacricer identies
himself with the animal that is struck down dead. And so he dies in seeing himself die (Hegel 336; 287).
There is no
sacrifice, writes Denis Hollier, unless the one performing it identifies, in the end, with
the victim (166). Thus it is through identication, through otherness that is partly
sameness, that a solution is achieved. If it were us, we would die in the act. If it were a complete other, it would not, in any way, be our death. Also noteworthy is
Batailles stress on the involvement of sight: and so he dies in seeing himself die (Hegel 336; 287), which brings him close to Freuds view of the nature of the problem, for
Freud insists on the visual, recasting the problem as one of spectatorship, imagining, perceiving. Batailles description recapitulates that of Freud, but renders it positive. Yes, we
, meeting death is a need,

not uncalled-for. We must meet death, and we must remain as spectators. Thus it is through
identication and through visual participation in the dying that a solution is achieved,
accompanied by the critical revaluation of values, which renders the meeting with death
crucial for humanness. Note that both possibilities of meeting deathin the sacricialritual we have just explored, and in theatre or art, to which we now turnare social. Thus Freuds text,
remain as a spectator, but it is essential that we do so. Without it, we cannot be said to have met death. Signicantly
although it insists on the irrepresentability of death, actually offers, unintentionally perhaps, a possible way out of the paradox through turning to the
other.
Death perhaps cannot be looked at directly, but it can be grasped sideways,

indirectly, vicariously through a mirror, to use Perseuss ancient trick against
Medusa. The introduction of the other, both similar to and different from oneself, into
the equation of death helps break out of the Cartesian circle with both its
incontestable truth and its solipsism and affirmation of oneself. The safety that
theater provides, of essentially knowing that we will remain alive, emerges as a kind
of requirement for our ability to really identify with the other. In that, it paradoxically
enables us to really get a taste of death. Bataille radicalizes that possibility. Although Freud deems the estrangement of
death from psychic life a problem, as we have seen and shall see, theater is not a solution for him. With Bataille however, theater emerges as a much
more compelling alternative. Again, it is a matter of a delicate nuance, but a nuance that makes all the difference. The idea common to both authors
that we can meet death through the other and yet remain aliveis ambiguous. One can lay stress on that encounter or on the fact of remaining alive.
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11 Freud SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 75 Looking Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille tends to opt for the second possibility, but his text
can also be read as supporting the rst. The benet in bringing Freud and Bataille together is that it invites us to that second reading. An Encounter
with Death Death in Freud is often the death of the other. Both the fear of death and the death wish are often focused on the other as their object. But
almost always it is as though through the discussion of the other Freud were trying to keep death at bay. But along with Bataille, we can take this other
more seriously. Imagining our own death might be impossible, yet we can still get a glimpse of death when it is an other that dies. In one passage in
his text, the death of the other seems more explicitly a crucial point for Freud as wellone passage where death does not seem so distant. Freud
comments on the attitude of primeval Man to death, as described abovenamely that he wishes it in others but ignores it in himself. But there was for
him one case in which the two opposite attitudes towards death collided, he continues. It occurred when primeval man saw someone who belonged to
him diehis wife, his child, his friend []. Then, in his pain, he was forced to learn that one can die, too, oneself, and his whole being revolted against
the admission. (Thoughts 293) Freud goes on to explain that the loved one was at once part of himself, and a stranger whose death pleased primeval
man. It is from this point, Freud continues, that philosophy, psychology and religion sprang. 12 I have described elsewhere (Razinsky, A Struggle)
how Freuds reluctance to admit the importance of death quickly undermines this juncture of the existential encounter with death by focusing on the
emotional ambivalence of primeval man rather than on death itself. However, the description is there and is very telling. Primeval man witnessed
death, and his whole being revolted against the admission. Man could no longer keep death at a distance, for he had tasted it in his pain about the
dead (Freud, Thoughts 294). Once again, it is through the death of the other that man comes to grasp death. Once again, we have that special
admixture of the other being both an other and oneself that facilitates the encounter with death. Something of myself must be in the other in order for
me to see his death as relevant to myself. Yet his or her otherness, which means my reassurance of my survival, is no less crucial, for if it were not
present, there would be no acknowledgement of death, ones own death always being, says Freud, ones blind spot. 13
Liran Razinsky SubStance
#119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 76 I mentioned before Heideggers grappling with a problem similar to Batailles paradox. It is part of Heideggers claim,
which he shares with Freud, that ones death is unimaginable. In a famous section Heidegger mentions the possibility of coming to grasp death through
the death of the other but dismisses it, essentially since the other in that case would retain its otherness: the others death is necessarily the others
and not mine (47:221-24). Thus we return to the problem we started withthat of the necessary subject-object duality in the process of the
representation of death. Watching the dead object will no more satisfy me than imagining myself as an object, for the radical difference of both from
me as a subject will remain intact. But the possibility that seems to emerge from the discussion of Freud and Bataille is that in-between position of the
person both close and distant, both self and other, which renders true apprehension of death possible, through real identication. 14 As Bataille says,
regarding the Irish Wake custom where the relatives drink and dance before the body of the deceased: It is the death of an other, but in such
instances, the death of the other is always the image of ones own death (Hegel 341; 291). Bataille speaks of the dissolution of the subject-object
boundaries in sacrice, of the fusion of beings in these moments of intensity (The Festival 307-11; 210-13; La Littrature 215; 70). Possibly, that is
what happens to primeval man when the loved one dies and why his whole being is affected. He himself is no longer sure of his identity. Before, it
was clearthere is the other, the object, whom one wants dead, and there is oneself, a subject. The show and the spectators. Possibly what man
realized before the cadaver of his loved one was that he himself is also an object, taking part in the world of objects, and not only a subject. When he
understood this, it seems to me, he understood death. For in a sense a subject subjectively never dies. Psychologically nothing limits him, 15 while an
object implies limited existence: limited by other objects that interact with it, limited in space, limited in being the thought-content of someone else.
Moreover, primeval man understood that he is the same for other subjects as other subjects are for himthat is, they can wish him dead or, which is
pretty much the same, be indifferent to his existence. The encounter made primeval man step out of the psychological position of a center, transparent
to itself, and understand that he is not only a spirit but also a thing, an object, not only a spectator; this is what really shakes him. 16 The Highest
Stake in the Game of Living Thus far we have mainly discussed our rst two questions: the limitation in imagining death and the possible solution
through a form SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 77 Looking Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille of praxis, in either a channeled, ritualized or a
spontaneous encounter with the death of an other, overcoming the paradox of the impossibility of representation by involving oneself through deep
identication. We shall now turn to our third question, of the value of integrating death into our thoughts. We have seen that Batailles perspective
continuously brings up the issue of the value of approaching death. The questions of whether we can grasp death and, if we can, how, are not merely
abstract or neutral ones. The encounter with death, that we now see is possible, seems more and more to emerge as possessing a positive value,
indeed as fundamental. What we shall now examine is Freuds attempt to address that positive aspect directly, an attempt that betrays, however, a
deep ambivalence. As mentioned, Freuds text is very confused, due to true hesitation between worldviews (see Razinsky, A Struggle). One
manifestation of this confusion is Freuds position regarding this cultural-conventional attitude: on the one hand he condemns it, yet on the other hand
he accepts it as natural and inevitable. For him, it results to some extent from deaths exclusion from unconscious thought (Thoughts 289, 296-97).
Death cannot be represented and is therefore destined to remain foreign to our life. 17 But then Freud suddenly recognizes an opposite necessity: not
But this attitude [the

cultural-conventional one] of ours towards death has a powerful effect on our lives.
Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living,
life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an
American irtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen,
as contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly
bear its serious consequences in mind. Our emotional ties, the unbearable intensity
of our grief, make us disinclined to court danger for ourselves and for those who
belong to us. We dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are
dangerous but in fact indispensable, such as attempts at artificial ight, expeditions
to distant countries or experiments with explosive substances. We are paralyzed by
the thought of who is to take the sons place with his mother, the husbands with his
wife, the fathers with his children, if a disaster should occur. Thus the tendency to
exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other
renunciations and exclusions. Yet the motto of the Hanseatic League ran: Navigare
necesse est, vivere non necesse. (It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary
to live.) (Thoughts 290-91) Readers unfamiliar with Freuds paper are probably shaking their heads in disbelief. Is it Freud who utters these
to reject death but to insert it into life. Not to distance ourselves from it, but to familiarize ourselves with it:
words? Indeed, the oddity of this citation cannot be over-estimated. It seems not to belong to Freuds
Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no.
2, 2009 78 thought. One can hardly nd any other places where he speaks of such an intensication of life and fascination with death, and praises
uncompromising risk-taking and the neglect of realistic considerations. In addition to being unusual, the passage itself is somewhat unclear. 18 The
examplesnot experimenting with explosive substancesseem irrelevant and unconvincing. The meaning seems to slide. It is not quite clear if the
problem is that we do not bring death into our calculations, as the beginning seems to imply, or that, rather, we actually bring it into our calculations
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too much, as is suggested at the end But what I wish to stress here is that the passage actually opposes what Freud says in the preceding passages,
where he describes the cultural-conventional attitude and speaks of our inability to make death part of our thoughts. In both the current passage and
later passages he advocates including death in life, but insists, elsewhere in the text, that embracing death is impossible. In a way, he is telling us that
we cannot accept the situation where death is constantly evaded. Here again Bataille can be useful in rendering Freuds position more intelligible. He
seems to articulate better than Freud the delicate balance, concerning the place of death in psychic life, between the need to walk on the edge, and the
ight into normalcy and safety. As I asserted above, where in Freud there are contradictory elements, in Bataille there is a dialectic. Bataille, as we
have seen, presents the following picture: It might be that, guided by our instincts, we tend to avoid death. But we also seem to have a need to
intersperse this ight with occasional peeps into the domain of death. When we invest all of our effort in surviving, something of the true nature of life
evades us. It is only when the nite human being goes beyond the limitations necessary for his preservation, that he asserts the nature of his being
(La Littrature 214; 68). The approaches of both Bataille and Freud are descriptive as well as normative. Bataille describes a tendency to distance
ourselves from death and a tendency to get close to it. But he also describes Mans need to approach death from a normative point of view, in order to
establish his humanity: a life that is only eeing death has less value. Freud carefully describes our tendency to evade death and, in the paragraph
under discussion, calls for the contrary approach. This is stressed at the end of the article, where he encourages us to give death the place in reality
and in our thoughts which is its due (Thoughts 299). Paradoxically, it might be what will make life more tolerable for us once again (299). But
since Freud also insists not only on a tendency within us to evade death, but also on the impossibility of doing otherwise, and on how death simply
cannot be the content of our thought, his sayings in favor of bringing death close are confusing and confused. Freud does not give us a reason for the
need to approach death. He says that life loses in interest, but surely this cannot be the result of abstaining from carrying out experiments with
explosive substances. In addition, his ideas on the shallowness of a life without death do not seem to evolve from anything in his approach. It is along
Sacrifice, Bataille says, brings together life

in its fullness and the annihilation of life. We are not mere spectators in the
sacrificial ritual. Our participation is much more involved. Sacrificial ritual creates a
temporary, exceptionally heightened state of living. The sacred horror, he calls
the emotion experienced in sacrifice: the richest and most agonizing experience. It
opens itself, like a theater curtain, on to a realm beyond this world and every
limited meaning is transfigured in it (Hegel 338; 288). Bataille lays stress on
vitality. Death is not humanizing only on the philosophical level, as it is for Hegel or
Kojve. Bataille gives it an emotional twist. The presence of death, which he
interprets in a more earthly manner, is stimulating, vivifying, intense. Death and
other related elements (violence) bring life closer to a state where individuality
melts, the mediation of the intellect between us and the world lessens, and life is
felt at its fullest. Bataille calls this state, or aspect of the world, immanence or
intimacy: immanence between man and the world, between the subject and the
object (The Festival 307-311; 210-213). Moments of intensity are moments of
excess and of fusion of beings (La Littrature 215; 70). They are a demand of life itself, even though they sometimes seem to
the lines offered by Batailles worldview that I wish to interpret them here.
contradict it. Death is problematic for us, but it opens up for us something in life. This line of thought seems to accord very well with the passage in
Freuds text with which we are dealing here, and to extend it. Life without death is life lacking in intensity, an impoverished, shallow and empty life.
Moreover, the repression of death is generalized and extended: the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many
other renunciations and exclusions. Freud simply does not seem to have the conceptual tools to discuss these ideas. The intuition is even stronger in
the passage that follows, where Freud discusses war (note that the paper is written in 1915): When war breaks out, he says, this cowardly,
conservative, risk-rejecting attitude is broken at once. War eliminates this conventional attitude to death. Death could no longer be
Liran Razinsky
SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 80 denied. We are forced to believe in it. People really die. . . . Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has
recovered its full content (Thoughts 291). Thus what is needed is more than the mere accounting of consequences, taking death into consideration
as a future possibility. What is needed is exposure to death, a sanguineous imprinting of death directly on our minds, through the accumulation of
deaths of others. Life can only become vivid, fresh, and interesting when death is witnessed directly. Both authors speak of a valorization of death,
and in both there is a certain snobbery around it. While the masses follow the natural human tendency to avoid death, like the American couple or
those who are busy with the thought of who is to take our place, the individualists do not go with the herd, and by allowing themselves to approach
death, achieve a fuller sense of life, neither shallow nor empty. 19 Yet again, Freuds claims hover in the air, lacking any theoretical background.
Bataille supplies us with such background. He contests, as we have seen, the sole focus on survival.
Survival, he tells us, has a
price. It limits our life.
As if there were an inherent tension between preserving life and living it. Freud poses the same
tension here. Either we are totally absorbed by the wish to survive, to keep life intact, and therefore limit our existence to the bare
minimum, or else we are willing to risk it to some extent in order to make it more interesting, more vital and valuable. Our usual
world, according to Bataille, is characterized by the duration of things, by the future function, rather than by the present. Things
the threat of death: it ruins value

where value is only assured through duration. It also exposes the intimate order of life that is continuously
are constituted as separate objects in view of future time. This is one reason for
hidden from us in the order of things where life runs its normal course. Man is afraid of death as soon as he enters the system of
projects that is the order of things (The Festival 312; 214). Sacrifice is the opposite of production and
accumulation. Death is not so much a negation of life, as it is an affirmation of the
intimate order of life, which is opposed to the normal order of things and is therefore
rejected. The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life []. Death
reveals life in its plenitude (309; 212). Batailles neutral image of life is the equivalent of Freuds shallow and
empty life. What Freud denounces is a life trapped within the cowardly economical system of considerations. It is
the economy of value and future-oriented calculations that stand in

opposition to the insertion of death into life. Who is to take the sons place with his mother, the husbands
precisely
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with his wife, the fathers with his children. Of course there is an emotional side to the story, but it is this insistence on replacement
The need for duration, in the

words of Bataille, conceals life from us (The Festival 309; 212). For both
authors, when death is left out, life as it is is false and superficial. Another Look at
Speculation Both authors, then, maintain that if elements associated with death
invade our life anyway, we might as well succumb and give them an ordered place in
our thoughts. The necessity to meet death is not due to the fact that we do not have
a choice. Rather, familiarization with death is necessary if life is to have its full value,
and is part of what makes us human. But the tension between the tendenciesto ee death or to embrace it
that leaves us on the side of survival and stops us sometimes from living the present.
is not easily resolved, and the evasive tendency always tries to assert itself. As seen above, Bataille maintains that in sacrice, we
are exposed through death to other dimensions of life. But the exposure, he adds, is limited, for next comes another phase,
performed post-hoc, after the event: the ensuing horror and the intensity are too high to maintain, and must be countered. Bataille
speaks of the justications of the sacrice given by cultures, which inscribe it in the general order of things.
Act 3: The Feast

Sacrificing the goods of the 1AC enacts liberation, challenging the utilitarian
logic that culminates in extinction.
Jesse Goldhammer 2005 [Lecturer/Instructor, Institute of Government Studies, U.C. Berkeley, The
Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought p. 10-14]
violence.
Although Bataille agrees with Maistre, Sor,el, and the French revolutionaries that sacricial violence can be adapted to modern political settings, Bataille disputes the historical
association of sacrice with political foundation and authority. Maistre, Sorel, and the French revolutionaries sought to place sacrice in the service of moral revolutions in order to
In chapter 4,1 examine how the renegade surrealist Georges Bataille used the sacricial ideas developed by his predecessors to challenge the basic premise of the French discourse on sacricial
human liberation requires not better politics,

achieved through violent political foundation, but rather the sacrificial dismantling of the
constitutive elements of modern political activity. Taking aim at liberalism and utilitarianism
in particular, Bataille pursues an idea of revolutionary sacrifice that liberates human beings
from all forms of servility, including morality authority, identity, community-the whole modern political enterprise. Bataille argues that revolutionary
liberation requires the retrieval of sacricial activities that subvert rational, useful, and productive modes of thought and
action-anything that transforms human beings into things. Rather than producing
something that the sacricer can use, such as power rendered sacred, Bataillian sacrifice
generates an ecstatic experience of self-loss. In Bataille's vie sacrifice must free
humanity from politics, not support, establish, or reestablish it. Bataffle thus envisions that unproductive sacricial activities will give birth
ground new forms of politics and legitimate power. For Bataille, however ,
to a metapoitical community paradoxically dened by its permanent lack of foundation. In this way Bataille uses the works of Maistre and Sorel to repudiate the basic assumptions
of the French discourse on sacricial violence. Batalile's radical reformulating of political sacrice reveals what is at stake in using sacricial violence to found politics. During the
t93os, Bataille increasingly distanced sacricial practices from the realm of politics because he was fearful that founding violence would generate fascism rather than freedom. On
the eve of World War II, Bataille extended this logic as far as it would go, imagining that sacricial violence would achieve ecstatic liberation if it were practiced in the bedroom or
on and through the text. Although Bataille never evinces any reticence about violence or cruelty I argue that he ultimately realized that sacrice practiced in either a French
revolutionary, Maistrian, or Sorelian fashion led to tyranny. Batallle's contribution to the French discourse on sacricial violence is thus ironical. On one hand, he pushes the idea of
sacricial violence to its logical conclusion by arguing that the sacrice of another being for the sake of political change cannot generate anything useful or productive. On the
other hand, the legendary sacricial crime-to borrow again from Machiavelli-permanently alters the sacricers as well as the basis upon which they can form a community with
others. Thus, Bataille recognized that seeking political change through sacrice permanently destabilizes the basic elements of modern Western politics. Although Bataille lays
bare the risk of using sacricial violence to found politics, he also succumbs to the same temptation as his predecessors who condemned the use of sacrice by others, but wished
to harness it for themselves. Bataille criticizes the French revolutionaries, Maistre, and Sorel for placing sacrice in the service of authoritarian structures of power. Like the other
members of the discourse on sacricial violence, however, Bataille never abandons the idea that sacricial violence is a sacred, spectacular form of bloodshed that plays a vital
role in the formation of human communality. During the Cold War, Bataille uncharacteristically developed this position into a quasi-scientic, general theory of political economy
sacrificial loss
that will save the modern world from the dangers of political sclerosis and the
possibility of nuclear annihilation. In setting sacrice to work, Bataille contradicts his prewar claims about the absolute uselessness of sacrice. At
Representing a systematic critique of utilitarianism, this postwar theoretical work illustrates Bataille's effort to nd contemporary examples of
the same time, he also demonstrates the sublime appeal-the attraction and danger-of adapting ancient ideas about violence and loss to modern political conditions. It was
precisely this particular quality of sacricial violence that originally attracted the French revolutionaries,.leading them to inaugurate the discourse on sacricial violence. Dening
sacrice is difficult because of the ambiguity inherent in violence. Violence is generally dened in terms of physical injury or harm to subjects and objects. Violence directed
against humans involves injury to or constraint of the body and mind. Against objects, violence entails damage or destruction. Metaphoric violence, the broadest aspect of the
denition, includes innumerable symbolic, culturally specic notions of harm. The modern meaning of violence is limited and, unfortunately, confused by the fact that it is
distinguished from "force," which today is often used to mean legitimate violence. Because there are various, irreconcilable concepts of right, there is also irresolvable debate
about the difference between force and violence. In the ancient world, however, the concept of violence retained the ambiguity eschewed by the modern world, Vi "force," is the
root of the Latin vi/coda, "violence," collapsing the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate bloodshed. I/jo lentus denotes "acting with (unreasonable) force towards others,
violent, savage, aggressive."' In this case, "unreasonable" describes not the illicitness or illegality of a violent act, but rather its disproportionate, extraordinary; or distinctive
quality: This denition of plo/cows is negative and thus departs from the more ambiguous meaning of vLs, which retains a positive quality. In addition to signifying the use of
physical strength to compel or constrain vigorously as well as the unlawful use of force, pbs also implies binding force or authority.' J/ls thus encompasses the essential
uncertainty of violence, the fact that it can be "good" or "bad," depending on the context. A subcategory of violence, sacrice is etymologically an act that renders holy or sacred.
If rendering sacred entails a process of setting apart from the quotidian or profane, then sacricial violence is a paradoxical practice: it is a form of violence capable of breaking
and forming distinctions or erasing and drawing boundaries. This denition is counterintuitive because the modern view of violence exclusively associates it with the breaking
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down of social distinctions, chaos, mayhem, disruption, anarchy, loss of control, and the like. In contrast, sacricial violence involves a double movement; it transgresses limits in
purpose of sacrifice is not limited to

the restoration of a particular order, limit, boundary, or status quo. The function of sacrice is contingent upon
order to inscribe or reinscribe them. 'What is more, this is not necessarily a conservative operation. The
how it "makes sacred." Some sacred things are pure, elevated, divine, majestic, and absolute; others are impure, debased, demonic, abject, and inassimilable. When violentia
denotes the capacity to transgress, pollute, or profane things that are pure or sacred, it captures only the negative aspect of the violent dou-ble movement of sacrice.Viewed
, sacrifice holds the potential to generate a positive

sacredness, which mimics the legitimacy of political power. In this respect, sacrice describes a variety of
from the standpoint of force or legitimate violence
practices that transform the negativity of violence into something socioculturally acceptable. Like any other social phenomenon, violence has normal and exceptional
manifestations. Socially acceptable violence does not call attention to itself or to its author; it is woven into the fabric of everyday life. Exceptional, spectacular; or transgressive
violence creates a tear in that fabric and, in so doing, sets its authors and their victims apart from their fellow human beings.This separation by dint of violence is the essence of
the sacricial mechanism and the reason why such bloodshed is considered sacred. A process of collective destruction, sacricial violence is often ritualized or culturally
pregured. Although this book is concerned with the meanings of human sacrice in a modern political context, sacrice has, more often than not, involved animal, vegetable,
and inanimate objects. Ritual sacricial practices and their meanings are typically inherited from the past and are usually invoked only in particular circumstances. As the very
term implies, ritual sacrice is anticipated, orchestrated, and socially acceptable; like Mass or potlatch, it is a symbolic form of violence that conforms to a regularized set of
expectations. The participants in the ritual know what kind of violence will take place; they know how that violence will be conducted, and by whom; most important, they know
whit category of victim (pridner ofwar, woman, racial or religious minority, etc.) will be selected. Although the actual function ofritual sacrice may remain a mystery to those who
practice it, its total meaning is predetermined. Thus, ritual sacrice can be compared to a game of chance: the rules may not be written down, but they are xed. These rules
govern the selection ofthe victim, even though the specic victim and the actual outcome remain unknown. Finajly, like games of chance, sacricial rites can have various
outcomes, a reection of their "success" or "failure?' Sacrice is not always ritually prescribed. Two factors separate spontaneous sacricial violence from its ritual cousin: the
absence of agreement about sacricial legitimacy and procedure. Without ritual prescription-knowing whom, when, and how to kill-communities that spontaneously sacrice
inevitably nd themselves deeply divided about the reasons for and methods of killing. Indeed, in such cases, sacrice may simply heighten communal conict. Whifr ritual
sacrice expresses the rigidity and hierarchy of the social order that it serves, spontaneous sacrice has no specic allegiance to any set of cultural symbols or social distinctions.
Spontaneous sacricial violence is potentially revolutionary when it symbolically manifests' ociocuIrural meanings and symbols that compete with dominant, traditional ones.
sacrifice can, through violence, open a space of

contestation that serves to challenge status quo views and practices. It is a telltale sign
that a community in crisis is pregnant with a new political order.
Disconnected from an orchestrated and authorized set of practices, spontaneous
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2NC Pups of War Overview

The Aff is all bark and no bite, chasing militarism like a dog running after a car.
They have produced a terrible yelping, but even if they caught the state it is
doubtful they would no what to do. The 1ACs activism mirrors the
productivity the state, and its indignation at militarism reinforces its awful
fascination.
Reject the role of the ballot as aligning yourself with the proper political
discourse, and instead vote negative to theatrically dismember the aff. Offer
this debate to useless sacrifice rather than political productivity, giving up the
false security provided by the liberal discourses of appeasement. Homo sacer
is not here to be saved in this debate, but voting negative allows a moment of
the sacred communication that is the prerequisite to the value of both life and
debate.
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2NC Cerberus Overview

The affirmative promises peace and security through reigning in the
destabilizing excesses of American power. But the state is violent excess, and
the guarantee of stability is just another form of permanent war. The
affirmative role-plays the state, simulating its sovereignty and even promises
you survival as the cost of joining in their servility.
But you are sovereign in this debate, and you should use your ballot to
theatrically dismember the aff. This sacrifice releases us from utilitarian logic
of good accumulation, and cutting off the head of the 1AC fractures the lines
of authority binding us in terror to the state. Vote negative as an act of
sovereign exuberance, embraced the sacred communication that is the
prerequisite to the value of both life and debate.
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2NC Impact Overview

Our Winfree evidence is a terminal non-unique to the entire affirmative.
Unfortunately for them, the aff doesnt happen! Debate isnt a site for political
contestation or policy-making, its a theatre for politics, comprised of
monologues, performances and interactions between characters. That means
that the ONLY thing that matters is how we situate ourselves symbolically in
this theatre of cruelty. This theatre usually ends in tragedy: a death. For the
affirmative this is their impact ___genocide___ what they call a reason to vote
aff. However, you can vote negative on presumption without thinking about
the advantages: the aff doesnt happen, debate is nothing but an interplay of
monologues and characters. If we win even a small risk that the way they cast
the 1AC is bad you vote negative, EVEN IF WE DONT WIN THE ALTERNATIVE
because they dont have ANY offense on why their form of roleplaying is good.
Now extend Razinsky 9 the affirmative takes up the role of the tragic hero,
constantly fighting for the forces of the rational Good. However, this never
ending struggle only manifests as a destruction of what makes life meaningful.
The affirmative arrests the beautiful excesses of life to an ideal of survival.
Voting negative establishes a different character role, one who sacrifices the
rationality of the tragic hero Sisyphus for an intimate relationship with death.
You should discursively EMBRACE the death of millions, not because death is
awesome or because those fuckers deserve to die, but because thinking about
what death means to us symbolically allows us to establish a new ontological
relationship to our mortality. Were impact turning the affirmative: allowing
the death of billions is good in this round because it inserts death INTO life.
This inverts the economy of restraint in which life is servile to its own
mortality. We dont think everyone should commit suicide, rather we think that
embracing our eventual death frees our life from the ontological constraints of
the sovereign limitation.
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We control the direction of aff solvency: - the politics of survival ensures

catastrophic over-accumulation which culminates in extinction thats
Goldhammer.. We have too much wealth, too much poverty, too much
militarism, and too much utility. Trying to maximize the good of life just adds
further fuel to this bonfire of accumulation, guaranteeing an explosive release
of nuclear annihilation. Only the alternative has a chance of breaking this
murderous cycle of accumulation.
Our kritik is an impact turn to timeframe: extending survival for the sake of
survival turning existence duration, like a bad movie that will never end
thats razinski. You are sovereign, and you should walk out of the theater
rather than sit still out of pure inertia. Face the blinding radiance of sacrifice,
and quake in awe of the moments of exuberance that define the true value of
existence.
This means we control magnitude, for renouncing sacrifice for the sake of
survival empties life of joy. It is better to risk extinction than live in a world
dominated by fear of future consequences. Thats Razinski and Goldhammer.
Turn-Their extinction impact calculus purges life of the exuberance that makes
it worth living. Consequentialisms over-accumulation ensures nuclear
extinction as the final sacrifice .
Alan Stoekl 2006, Professor of Comparative Lit at Penn State University
[Reading Bataille Now ed. Winnubst p. 258-261]
Bataille's theory, at rst, at least, would seem to posit just such a harmony, albeit one that
involves the violence of sacrice rather than the contentment of the lotus-eater. Man in his
primitive state was in harmony, not with the supposed peace of Eden, but with the
violence of the universe, with the solar force of blinding energy: The nave man was not a stranger in
the universe. Even with the dread it confronted him with, he saw its spectacle as a festival to which he had been invited. He perceived its glory, and
believed himself to he responsible for his own glory as well. (Bataie 1976a, 192) While LeBlanc's theory of sacrice is functional-he is concerned mainly
with how people use sacrice, in conjunction with warfare, to maximize their own, or their group's, success-Baraille's theory is religious in that he is
concerned with the ways in which people commune with a larger, unlimited, transcendent reality. But in order to do so, they must enjoy an unlimited
carrying capacity. And yet, if we think a bit more deeply about these two approaches to human expenditure (both LeBlanc and Bataille are, ultimately,
theorists of human violence), we start to see notable points in common. Despite appearing to be a theorist of human and ecological scarcity, LeBlanc
nevertheless presupposes one basic fact: there is always a tendency for there to be too many humans in a given population. Certainly populations grow
at different rates for different reasons, but they always seem to outstrip their environments: there is, in essence, always an excess of humans that has to
be burned off. Conversely, Bataille is a thinker of limits to growth, precisely because he always presupposes a limit-if there were no limit, after all, there
could be no excess of anything (yet the limit would be meaningless if there were not always already an excess, for the excess opens the possibility of the
limit). As we know, for Bataille coo there is never a steady state: energy (wealth) can he reinvested, which results in growth; when growth is no longer
possible, when the limits to growth have been reached, the excess must be destroyed. If it is not, it will only return to cause us to destroy ourselves:
if we aren't strong enough to destroy, on our own, excessive energy, it cannot be

used; and, like a healthy animal that cannot be trained, it will [p. 260] come back to destroy
us, and we will be the ones who pay the costs of the inevitable explosion. (Bataille 1976a, 31; 1988, 24) In fact, Bataille sounds a lot like LeBlanc
war. For
when he notes, in The Accursed Share, that the peoples of the "barbarian plateaus" of central Asia, mired in poverty and technologically inferior, could
no longer move outward and conquer other adjacent, richer areas. They were, in effect, trapped; their only solution was the one that LeBlanc notes in
similar cases: radical infertility. This, in effect, was the solution of the Tibetans, who supported an enormous population of infertile and unproductive
the ultimate example of

this is nuclear war. The modern economy, according to Bataille, does not recognize the
possibility of excess-and therefore limits; the Protestant, and then Marxist, ideal is to reinvest
all excess hack into the productive process, always augmenting output in this way.
"Utility," in this model, ends up being perfectly impractical: only so much output, nally,
can be reabsorbed into the ever-more-efficient productive process. As in the case with Tibet,
monks (1976a, 106; 1988, 108). Bataille does, then, implicitly face the question of carrying capacity. Perhaps
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ultimately the excess will have to be burned off. This can happen either peacefully,
through various posrcapitalist as the Marshall Plan, which will shift growth to other parts of the
world, or violently and apocalyptically, through the ultimate in war: nuclear holocaust. One can
see that, ultimately, the world itself will been become vast chaos, fully developed, with no place for the excess to go. The bad alternative-nuclear
holocaust-will result in the ultimate reduction in carrying capacity: a burned-out, depopulated earth. Humanity is, at the same time, through industry,
which uses energy for the development of the forces of production, both a multiple opening of the possibilities of growth, and the innite faculty for
burnoff in pure waste I/acl/ire in,ne de consumation en pureperte]. (Bataille 1976a, 170; 1988, 181) Modern war is rst of all a renunciation: one
produces and amasses wealth in order to overcome a foe. War is an adjunct to economic expansion; it is a practical use of excessive forces. And this
perhaps is the ultimate danger of the present-day (1949) buildup of nuclear arms: armament, seemingly a practical way of defending one's own country
or spreading one's own values, of growing, in other words, ultimately leads to the risk of a "pure destruction" of excess-and even of carrying capacity. In
the case of warfare, destructiveness is masked, made unrecognizable, by the appearance of an ultimate utility: in this case the spread of the American
economy, and the American way of life, around the globe. Paradoxically, there is a kind of self [p. 261] consciousness concerning excess, djbense, in
a thorough ignorance in the

modern one, which would always attempt to put waste to work, even at the cost of
apocalypse. Bataile, then, like Lelanc, can be characterized as a thinker of society who
situates his theory in the context of ecological limits. From Bataille's perspective, however, there
is always too much rather than too little, given the existence of ecological ("natural") and
social ("cultural") limits. The "end" of humankind, its ultimate goal, is thus the destruction
of this surplus. While LeBlanc stresses war and sacrice as means of obtaining or maintaining what is essential to human (personal, social)
the "nave" society--which recognizes waste for what it is (in the form of unproductive "glory")-and
survival, Bataille emphasizes the maintenance of limits, and survival, as mere preconditions for engaging in the glorious destruction of excess. By seeing
warfare as a mere (group) survival mechanism, LeBlanc makes the same mistake as that made by the supporters of a nuclear buildup; he, like they, sees
warfare as practical, serving a purpose. If, however, our most fundamental gesture is the burning off of a sur plus, the production of that surplus must
be seen as subsidiary. Once we recognize that everything cannot be saved and reinvested, the ultimate end (and most crucial problem) of our existence
becomes the disposal of a surplus. All other activity "leads" to something else, is a means to some other end; the only end that leads nowhere is the act
of destruction by which we may-or may not-assure our (personal) survival (there is nothing to guarantee that radical destruction-consumation-does not
turn on its author).
We work in order to spend, in other words. Survival and reproduction alone

are not the ultimate ends of human existence. We could characterize Bataille, for this
reason, as a thinker of ecology who nevertheless emphasizes the primacy of an ecstatic
social act (destruction). By characterizing survival as a means, not an end (the most
fundamental idea in "general economy, expenditure for Bataille becomes a limitless
insubordinate act-a real end (that which does not lead outside itself). I follow Bataille in this
primacy of the delirium of expenditure over the simple exigency of Personal or even social
survival (which we can associate with LeBlanc). This does not preclude, however, a kind of
ethical aftereffect of Bataille's expenditure: survival for this reason can be read as the
fundamentally unintentional consequence of expenditure, rather than its purpose. Seeing
a nuclear buildup as the wrong kind of waste-because it is seen as a means, not an end-can lead,
in Bataille's view, to a rethinking of the role of expenditure in the modern world, and hence,
perhaps, to the world's (but not modernity's) preservation.
We control probability because war is motivated by irrationality. We must

sever the head of the king to avert the ecstatic extinction made inevitable by
consequentialist reason.
Wendy C. Hamblet 2005
[Canadian philosopher with a specialization in ethics and violence. She teaches
Ethics and Morality, and Political and Social Philosophy at Adelphi University
Peace Review 17:39-45] mono-cephalic means one-headed
But, at this evolutionary apex, a problem arises in paradise. As the monocephalic state
increasingly closes itself off, it sties social existence, smothers creative energies, chokes the
passion from its citizen-devotees, suffocates their spiritual urges, and reduces all
sacrifices to mundane utility. When the perfect eternality of the structure is complete and
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the nation duly deied, all labors have become co-opted in utter servitude. Bataille names this
culminating stage of development, the peaceful, stable end sought by all states, in its most
excessive extrapolationfascism. Ultimately, however, life and time must break free and
move forward into futures. This most solid state holds rm for a short while only; then there
begins a condensation of forces. Life rises up and explodes the suffocating stasis, disintegrating
the solid, erect whole. Existence and liberty ow forth in rage, blood, tears, and passion.
The death of God is complete. For Bataille, these endless cycles describe the movement of
history: the erection of unitary gods of knowledge and power that ultimately ossify into
totalities, and then explode in hysterical, raging catastrophes, releasing the explosive liberty of life from
mundane servitude. The acephalic chaos will eventually recompose, slowly heaving up an ugly divine head once again. Life turns back on its chaotic
freedom and develops what Bataille calls an aversion to the initial decomposition. The chaotic structure moves from the ek-stasis bliss of wanton
pleasures and pains toward the stasis of the deity once again. Time, states, and human individuals, for Bataille, move between the two contradictory
forms: stasis and ek-stasis. Time demands both forms in the worldthe eternal return of an imperative object, and the explosive, creative, destructive
rage of the liberty of life. Batailles analysis of state evolution offers resolution to the mystery of the frequency of wars in the modern civilized era: It
suggests that war composes a potlatcha manic ecstasy of useless self-expenditure that permits a breakout from mundane servitude. W e may not
readily recognize, in our states, the extreme forms that Bataille describesfascist stasis or chaotic ecstasy. We believe that, although chaos is
unquestionably undesirable, fascism is promoted only by madmenMussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. We may be convinced that fascist urges fade with
global democracy where all people will, eventually, know the order and security of the rst world. Modern Western states, we may object, compose a
golden mean between Batailles two economies, aspiring neither to fascism nor to a manic primitivism, but to the reasonable metron of golden rules.
the roots of the Western world are well planted in the fascist drive for hyper-order
and changeless eternality. Hesiod and the PreSocratics, as much as Jewish and Christian myth,
cite a common arche of the universe in the good works of a god that renders order (cosmos) out
of chaos (kaos). For the ancients, one head (cephalus) is far superior to many; simplicity is
beauty, whereas the many compose hoi poloi, an embarrassment of riches. The foundational
logic that posits monocephalic order as ontologically and morally superior to acephalic
multivocity remains an unquestioned assumption embedded in the Western lifeworld. A single
well-ordered edice, stretching high into the skyerect, rigid, unyieldingis preferable, in the
Western mind, to the broadest playing eld studded with incongruous heroics. Batailles
meditations on the dark underside of reasons projects and triumphs, on such prohibited
subjects as monstrous tortures, illicit sexual excesses, and the colorful anuses of apes,
provide a theater of cruelty and death that is designed to challenge the polite threshold of
civilized culture, to shock and interrupt the philosophical tradition it invades, and to subvert the
pretenses of rened sophistication thought denitive of civilized society. Bataille shows that
people are torn by conicting drives, by lofty ideals, and by the dark concealed forces
they suppress and deny. Lorenz states that Batailles treatment of the dark, concealed urges in
human nature offer resolution to the paradox of the simultaneous lofty goals of modern states
and the frequency of brutal aggressions by those very states naming themselves the most
civilized. Perhaps the popularity and frequency of war even in the civilized modern era
represents the release of suppressed subterranean drives within industrialized, rationalist,
rigidly hierarchically ordered populations enslaved to reason and utility. The violence that oods the
But
globe in modernity, that claims to be serving reasonable projects of global freedom and democracy, may represent new forms expressing old desires,
the projects of monocephalic statehood aspiring to deication. Bataille recognizes chthonic forces as instrumental in the modern world: The economic
history of modern times is dominated by the epic but disappointing effort of erce men to plunder the riches of the Earth [and turn its re and metal
into weapons] . . . . [M]an [lives] an existence at the mercy of the merchandise he produces, the largest part of which is devoted to death. The erce
men of modernitygods, kings, and their modern sequels (presidents, popes, corporate rulers)extend their control to the ends of the planet. Fierce
men disembowel the Earth and turn on their own kind the products of molten metal torn from her bowels to ensure the permanence of their nations.
War, states Bataille, represents the desperate obstinacy of man opposing the exuberant power of time and nding security in an immobile and almost
somnolent erection. Bataille believes that primitive urges are still at work in the projects of modernity. Human beings, as much as superstructures of
power, must satisfy their dark urges for the good of their communities. They must release their death drives if they are to gather together in heartfelt
communities. Human beings crave mystical, passionate, frenzied escape from the rigorous projects of their ordered systems. If Bataille is correct,
inner demons will beckon them

from their ordered worlds to revel in orgiastic festival. Surely Batailles claimthat lifes
erotic drives will out and fulll themselves in deathly destructiveness and wanton joyshould
trouble us greatly, given the leveling effects of modern industrial society, its will to mediocrity,
utility, and conformity. But is Bataille correct in his attribution of a measureless and rending
character to modern war? Is modern warfare the aimless catastrophe that Bataille claims it to
be? If so, then modern wars can be explained, according to Bataille, as ecstatic release from
people must ultimately break free from the mundane enterprises of their everyday lives. Their
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the fascist orientation of modern ordered states and from peoples imprisonment within
the merchandise they produce. Modern war, with its Shock and Awe techno-theatrics,
should provide a wondrous release from mundane servitude. War could be said to satisfy
collective fantasies of manic omnipotence and the drive for self-sacrice for sacred values.
Perhaps the wars of modernity occur with such rabid frequency because people must
satisfy their suppressed lust for a sexualized release from the cold reality of state projects,
the utilitarian reasons of state. This resonates with Clausewitzs claim that peoples martial
enthusiasm must nd release in politically restrained wars or fulll itself in the maximum
exertion of self-expenditure, that is, self-annihilation. For Clausewitz, modernity represents that
unfettered stage when war has escaped all political bounds and reasonable restraint. Although
ostensibly a world driven by the lofty goals, modernityfor Clausewitzcomposes an era of
absolute war. The democratic revolution may have embraced other goalscitizen welfare and the grandeur of their rulersbut democracy, for Clausewitz,
composes merely one of a number of crucial forces (the scientic revolution that provides the technology, the industrial revolution that provides mass production of weaponry,
and the imperialism that draws the entire globe into the war system) that have been successfully harnessed to the power- projects of the mightiest nations. The goods of the
modern West, including the good of democracy, exist to extend Western hegemony globally in the marketplace of military power. But Bataille claims that war is useless
expenditurea release of the primal urges of a community toward excessive overow. He states: Military existence is based on a brutal negation of any profound meaning of
death and, if it uses cadavers, it is only to make the living march in a straighter line. But, if war is to be posited as an ecstatic release, it must compose orgiastic overow, an
entirely useless and pointless expenditure of the nations nest goods. Excessive expenditure is defeated the moment the violent explosion of forces serves mundane projects of
servitude and utility. When war serves the purposes of the state, it loses its manic and ecstatic character and ceases to fulll the peoples deepest needs for release from
servitude and instrumentality. B ut Bataille is mistaken; the apparent uselessness of modern warfare is a deception, an illusion. War is one of the oldest traditions of our species.
It has become a timeworn vehicle precisely because it serves a great many functions in states. Clausewitz names the institution of war a form of communication between
nations. Franco Fornari states: War is a multi- functional institution. . . . It is extremely difcult to nd a substitute that would perform all of its functions. One of the most
crucial functions that war provides in service of the state is the crystallization of its monopoly on violence. War is a crucial aspect of the centralizing, evolutionary process that
culminates, ultimately, in fascist stability. The establishment of a massive and robust military is THE MANIC ECSTASY OF WAR 43 utterly necessary to the deication of the
structure and the raising of a sturdy cephalus, because, along with the creation of strong policing and military forces, war serves to alienate the private violence of the citizens
and place their collective aggressive energies into the hands of the cephalus. War serves the collective illusion of eternality. War serves other crucial functions in the state: it
conrms the values, virtues, and meanings of ones own cultural group. Sacred symbolsags, national anthems, tales of past heroes, fallen ancestorsare put to work in
luring the best of the nationits strong and courageous youthsto the extreme patriotism required to maintain order in fascist regimes. The seduction of the nations best to its
wars includes their provision of an international stage to display the collective prowess of the nation, a point of pride for all citizens, even the most oppressed of the society,
and it allows for the individual display of the soldiers manly characterthe valor, the seless- ness, the loyalty. The wars of modern super-states continue in the tradition of
imperialist projects of old. Posited as serving the most seless valuesthe advancement of freedom, democracy, and the spread of civilizationtodays wars clearly bring too
massive a booty to be named seless expenditures. In fact, for the past fty years, wars have increasingly become shameless lootings of helpless peoplesthe projects of
economists and accountants and big busi- nessmen puried by political propaganda and backed by an arsenal of modern techno-weaponry. War serves the needs of the
cephalus; it serves the personal narcissism of the leaders, and the collective narcissism of the combatants and civilians. Above all, modern wars serve economic goals; their
booty is prodigious. They may cost the sacred love-object (the nation) massive capital, human and monetary, but the generals, the political leaders, and their corporate cronies
prot handsomely from the hostilities. War also serves the fantasy that the sacred love-object is the savior and benefactor of the globe; war serves the paranoid collective
delusion that the cephalus is infallible and indestructible, unlimited as the god in its strength and in its moral substance. Killing the enemies, propagandized as evil, the collective illusion is fed that evil is overthrown: thus the sanctity of the love- object is preserved. Sacred values are recomposed; the cephalus stands taller, more erect, more rm
than ever in the wake of a good war. B ut for all the benets served by the institution of war, modern wars are deeply tragic; they do waste millions of innocent lives; they tear
apart societies and disburse homeless families across the globe. One in nine of the earths seven billion now lives a miserable, wandering, hopeless existence on parched lands
where even the earth mother is barren. WENDY C. HAMBLET 44 Ultimately the greatest tragedy of modern war lies in its stark utility to the few at the extreme expenditure of its
many. The utility of war defeats the purposes of war by frustrating the deepest needs of the societythe peoples need to build heartfelt communities, a need that can only be
served by expressing the collective aggressive energies of the society beyond utility. Bataille states that: Since [war] is essentially constituted by armed force, it can give to
those who submit to its force of attraction nothing that satises the great human hungers, because it subordinates everything to a particular utility . . . it must force its halfseduced lovers to enter the inhuman and totally alienated world of barracks, military prisons, and military administrations. In fact, it may well be the non-release of ecstatic
urges that explains a states return, year after year and decade after decade, to that old institution. It may be that the deepest paradox of modern war is that, in its usefulness to
the cephalus and in its service to the fascist drives of the state, war proves utterly useless in dispensing its most fundamental function; it ceases to discharge the most vicious
and cruel needs of the people, their deepest primitive motivations, whose collective release makes possible the formation of a heartfelt community. Bataille counts this failure as
the most tragic of the multiple tragedies of modern war. The sacred values of communitylife, freedom, festival, and the joy of communal fraternityare rendered meaningful
only in juxta- position to their opposites. Bataille states: The emotional element that gives an obsessive value to communal life is death. But, ultimately, insists Bataille, the
sacrice will be celebrated beyond the reasonable purposes of the cephalus. If Bataille is correct, then we can be certain that
, for those states whose
wars are utterly utilitarian, self-annihilation is imminent .
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***Perm
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2NC Perm Frontline

Our alternative severs the head of the 1AC, which makes the perm severance.
The alternatives sacrifice of the goods of the 1AC is mutually exclusive with
the affs propagation of calculative and conservative rationalities. This is a
voting issue because it skews the sacrificial game of debate by making all
criticism of the aff impossible. The aff cant sever discourse because its
crucial to kritik ground as well as aff solvency
All links are disads to the permutation. If we win a risk that their form of
political performance is bad there isnt a reason to endorse the permutation
because it maintains the pathetic utility of cost-benefit analysis as the
determinant of policy thats goldhammer and razinski
Sublimation DA - even if the perm is legitimate, it becomes just another
rational discourse of the good. Sacrifice requires an intimate encounter with
death, and the perm renounces the dangerous passions of existence which are
necessary for the alt to solve.
Amalgamation DA - Sacrifice combined with the program of the 1AC is the
worst of both worlds, producing a politics of mass murder and annihilaton.
Goldhammer 2005 [Jesse, Lecturer/Instructor, Institute of Government Studies, U.C. Berkeley,
The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought p. 189-191]
It is true that The Accursed Share revisits eroticism and sovereignty, topics that led Bataille away from politics in the 193os. After the war, however,
human beings
will be driven to a "catastrophic war" unless they find outlets, such as eroticism, for
their excess energy. Similarly, in "Sovereignty" Bataille argues that "sovereignty is no longer
alive except in the perspectives of communism."" In the case of both eroticism and sovereignty
Bataille is expressly looking for instances of unproductive expenditure or sacrifice, which may
save human beings from their dangerously compulsive, modern need to engage in economic
accumulation without loss. 'What sets The Accursed Share apart from Bataille's prewar work is also what implicates Bataille in his
Bataille treated these concepts politically. For instance, in the epilogue of The History of Eroticism, Bataille speculates that
own critique of the French discourse on sacricial violence. Like his predecessors, Bataille ultimately puts sacrice to work, a theoretically problematic
endeavor that nds its strangest outlet in his consideration of the Marshall Plan. At the conclusion of World War II ,
Bataille was fearful

that:competition and excessive economic production in the United States and the Soviet Union
would precipitate a devastating third world war. This Cold War pessimism was alleviated only by the appearance of
the Marshall Plan, which Bataille interpreted as a form of unproductive expenditure. Here he de-. scribes the Marshall Plan in terms of the general
economy: "Mankind will move peacefully toward a general resolution of its problems only ([this threat causes the U.S. to assign a large share of the
excess-deliberately and without return-to raising the global standard of living, economic activity thus giving the surplus energy produced an outle,t other
than war." 94 By associating the Marshall Plan with unproductive expenditure, Bataille falls into the same theoretical trap as Sorel, Maistre, and the
French revolutionaries. Bataille's argument for economic sacrice may be less pernicious than the French revolutionaries' conviction that human sacrice
would help them to found a republic, but they nonetheless share an expectation that sacrice will produce specic, ideal, and peaceful political
any
attempt to use sacrifice for the sake of traditional (elevated) sovereignty risks a violent,
authoritarian politics. That essay illustrates, above all, that one cannot use fascist
techniques to achieve antifascist ends without complicity in fascism's imperiousness. Similarly, the
outcomes. The belief that sacrice will generate an ideal politics of any sort directly contradicts Bataille's fascism essay, where he argues that
Marshall Plan may have provided humanity with an outlet for surplus energy, but it also "wasted" wealth productively, served utilitarian-minded liberals,
and elevated American international interests, none of which was even remotely akin to the apolitical intentional communities originally desired by
Bataille. His postwar work notwithstanding, Bataille fundamentally rejects the basic premise of the discourse on sacricial violence that sacrice founds
new political regimes. By the end of the 1930s, Bataille declares politics an impossible task, rendering irrelevant the issue of foundation. If
wholly unproductive sacrifice were to create anything, it would be metapolitical

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communities without conventional notions of authority and identity. As Bataille pushes the concept of
Pillz
sacrice to its limit, shifting its locus from the street to the bedroom and text, he reveals the difficulty experienced by Maistre, Sorel, and the French
revolutionaries in assigning a political role to sacrice. They put sacricial violence to work in the establishment of politically signicant ctions such as
citizenship, authority, morality, and representation. In each case, there was an expectation that the sacricial crime would lay the groundwork for a new
era ofjustice. Following the Marquis de Sade, Bataille comes to appreciate the political absurdity of founding sacrice: "An already old and corrupt nation,
courageously shaking off the yoke of its monarchical government in order to adopt a republican one, can only maintain itse4'thongh many crimes,-for it
is already a crime, and f it wants to move from crime to virtue, in other words from a violent state to a peaceful one, it would fall into an inertia, of which
its certain ruin would soon be the result, "95 Sade observes that the regicidal crime, which inaugurated the French Republic as well as the French
discourse on sacricial violence, is a sacrice destined to repeat itself because it strips away the possibility of distinguishing right from wrong. In other
words, violent political foundation undermines its own possibility. Sade's admonishment applies to the Terror, when the French revolutionaries tragically
repeated the regicide thousands of times. It anticipates Maistre, who imagines a world in which the unending sacrice of the innocent redeems the sins
of the guilty. It foresees the work of Sorel, whose myth of the general strike depends upon the working class's martyred repetition of Jesus' crucixion.
And, nally, it highlights the absurdity of Bataille's postwar search for unproductive expenditure in quotidian politics. In each of these cases, sacrice
works to produce virtue and redemption. Sade's argument is straightforward: violent sacrice never founds politics without also giving rise to an endless
violent waste, which he hopes will

demolish the modern ctions that leave human beings powerless and servile. Bataille's
sacrificial community does not repair, restore, or regenerate. It is incapable of
establishing, founding, and inaugurating. It "begins" with the violation of the limits that
make politics possible, and, tragically, it must exist in a permanent state of violation.
repetition of the original crime. Bataille ultimately develops this insight into a notion of
Ontology DA trying to become two characters at once destroys any

foundation for Being-in-the-world. You cant cut off the head half-way without
becoming a re-appropriated subject of fear and contingency. Dont hesitate
when the guillotine falls to cleave the 1AC in twine! To hesitate is nothing but
the nihilistic tendency for certainty. Embrace the tragedy of the dice throw.
The perms net benefit makes their sacrifice ridiculous. Sacred ecstasy
requires us to gamble everything, identifying with waste beyond recuperation.
Winfree 2009 [Jason, Assoc Prof Philosophy @ California State University, The Obssessions of
George Bataille: Community and Communication ed. Mitchell/Winfree p. 42-44]
With respect to the lover, we desire like a gambler wagers. "Like the winnings of a gambler;' writes Bataille,
"sexual, possession prolongs desire-or extinguishes it" (OC 6: 106/ON 86).The sheer momentum of the movement requires that its strength be
squandered. Desire is unsatised not because it fails, but because it exceeds the search for satisfaction, because it is also raw expenditure. For this
reason, desire is misunderstood if it is represented as the innite tragic movement toward an inaccessible object, as though desire not only is prohibited
by its very structure from attaining its aim, but as though its structure is fundamentally teleological. The obsession with this logic is always mournful
(psychoanalysis) or moral (transcendental philosophy) and in both cases remains theological insofar as the concern is governed by or measured against
an imaginary sense of propriety or ownership or end. The desire that binds lovers is not so much directed toward an unattainable sumnut, however, as it
is itself the summit, the point "where life is impossibly at the limit."' Desire and summit can no more be separated than lightning and its ash. In this
respect Bataille is unequivocal: "The
summit isn't what we 'ought to reach,' " (OC 6: 57/ON 39; tni)).
Rather, "It's what is. Never what should be" (OC 6: 111/ON 91). If desire is unsatised, that is because it exceeds the
conservative search for satisfaction, because it is not teleological, because we are driven beyond the need of satisfaction without being driven to
anything, because our unnished character is in this very way excessive, [p. 42] not impoverished. If love is unsatised it is because it has perished,
leaving us wasted and ruined. The lovers' love is sacred. It does not belong to the profane order of work and its accumulated labor, the profane and
banal order of capital. For Bataille, the sacred designates an object that is beyond all others in value, but the sacred character of our carnal love has
The sacrifices brought about by the love of lovers require expenditure

without recuperation; we give up our careers as dancers, we speak on the phone for hours on
end, we waste the day in bed, and we give ourselves over entirely to that waste and
identify ourselves with it. These sacrices have nothing to do with the sacrifice of
theology. As Bataille puts it, "in divine love, the limit is given in perfection," and this limit
necessarily excludes play and its risk. Certainly, one risks nothing by loving God, whose
innite perfection is expressed through an innite and undiscriminating love, just as one risks
nothing by loving the ag. And that is as good as to say that in neither case does one really love, even if there remains
nothing to do with divine love.
operative a libidinal bind that does not fail to risk those others who refuse the religious-nationalistic sublimation of carnal desire, of
the lovers touch or its absence.
God and nation stand before us as the ugly symptoms of efficiency

that guarantee that desire not only leaves the lover intact but also yields a profit. By
contrast, carnal love and the love of lovers concerns the excess of suffering, and Bataille
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insists that "without this excess we could not play" (OC 6 86/ON 71).That is, it is by way of the
excesses of suffering carnal desire that we are ourselves put into play, thrown like dice. And
nitude is unbounded just in the sense that dice in their inevitable free fall carry an
unpredictable combination that proves exhilarating or devastating, and in any case leads to ruin, even as it leads to the affirmation
of what we are in love. The oscillation expressed above in terms of the acceleration leading to summit or decline, the ecstasy of insufficiency, is not only
a thematically explicit object in Bataille's writings, privileged and important because of the manner in which it bears upon and articulates the ontological
task. Rather, Batailles work itself is characterized by the very movement it describes, constantly uctuating between decline and glory in its expression.
This is not to say Bataille's writing is motivated by the task of adequation between form and content, Sache and expression, but to insist that the
ontological task is born from and gives expression to fundamental conditions of human life, conditions that enter into that expression and call it forth.
Insufficiency is not, therefore, a category or concept to which the world must measure up, by which it would be rendered intelligible, but is rather the
condition out of which Bataille writes. The work is ontological, then, not only because of its explicitly thematic ontological concerns, but because it
exhibits in its very structure, expression, and aim, the ontological conditions it also diagnoses, the [p. 43] reciprocity of chance and insufficiency,
isolation and contact. Thus, the same insufficiency thematized in the Sonirne athologique at once tears that work apart, rendering it
dsoeuure-inoperative, unworking, fragmentary-and in this way it accounts for the alternately depressed and ecstatic articulations of naked existence
exposed to chance, the violent and sometimes incoherent shifts of focus, mood, and intention. The work itself is an open wound communicating with
those who read and those who are read, the elective community of Bataille's readership. Perhaps no part of the Somme exhibits the elective
communities involved in this work and its unworking (dsoeuureinent as clearly as does On Nietzsche, which denies its readers any systematic or
historical or critical exposition of Nietzsche, which is not even about Nietzsche at all, contrary to the most basic initial assumptions elicited by the title,
but which offers instead articulations that have more to do with coffee shops, toothaches, and pretty girls than the academically overburdened and
overdetermined will to power. Throughout the violent and radically unstable terrain of the works comprising the Sonune, Nietzsche is present neither as
thematic object nor authoritative voice, but as part of an elective community, as participant in the bond of attraction and inclination to the community of
chance and risk that requires of Bataille that he write. In Inner Experience, Bataffle announces, thereby placing the production of his own work squarely
within the ontological claims it makes: "It is from a feeling of community binding me to Nietzsche that the desire to communicate arises in me, not from
an isolated originality" (OC 5: 39/IF 26-27). And similarly from Guilty: "My life with Nietzsche as a companion is a community. My book is this community"
(OC 6: 33/ON 9). Not a dialogical community of interpretation (Auslegung), but an affective community bound by chance, attracted to one another and
the luck that congures that attraction-"Chance, it turned out, corresponded to Nietzsche's intentions more accurately than power could" (OC 6: 17/ON
xxv). Bataille's books and those that read them are bound like lovers or suspended like a crowd before a dead-heat horse race entering the chute, one
momentum conguring another and holding it together while luck falls. "Thus we are nothing, neither you nor I, beside burning words which could pass
from me to you, imprinted on a page: for I would only have lived in order to write them, and, f it is true that they are addressed to you, you will bye from
having had the strength to hear them" (OC 5: 111/IE 94; em). Not a community of like minds struggling to give shape to a Sache, but beings bound by
the passion of chance, suffering their luck as their lot. When Nietzsche proclaims in On the Genealogy qf Morals, "atheism and a second innocence go
together,""' he at once condemns the theological interpretation of the world as guilty. Nothing devalues our insufficiency like the attempt to lie meaning
a being subject to chance is acphalic, a

headless being, a being not ordered theologically, and that is to say, not ordered at all, but
shot through with desire and cast into the world as one particle among others. To the same extent that
into the world, denying chance, personalizing [p. 44] luck, thus writing it off. But
Acphale is not and cannot become a program, atheism is not a belief or a position. It concerns rather, as Nietzsche puts it, "the meaning of the earth,""
that is, the sense of life without transcendence, the immanence of falling luck, the exposure to love and death, ecstatic and nite existence. Bataille's
community with Nietzsche is the community of those attracted by that luck, bound to one another by the passion of chance, the lucky suffering that
need not make of itself a meaning, the risk and play of ecstatic insufficiency that is effortless in its beauty and cruelty and momentum. The community
with Nietzsche, the ecstasy of acphalic atheism, is the affirmation of desire and its risk, the incomprehensibility of the chance that constitutes our
we risk
ourselves. If the risk ceases, if I withdraw some aspect to keep it from changing, the
resulting regularity will be misleading: I'll pass from the tragic to the ridiculous" (OC 6:
87/ON 72; em). Nothing is more ridiculous, therefore, than theology and its guilt, nothing more
absurd than the faade of our most serious understanding, which serves the social
order and de facto community as its justication. Atheism is a matter of play, a matter of
chance, a name for the way we are played by our luck. The community with Nietzsche, the
community of lovers, the tragic community, elective community-never a matter of fact, but
only value, the force of attraction that makes us crazy and feverish and delivers us over to one
another in tears, laughter, and orgasm. Elective community is the point of acphalic
contact.
being: "Only when our response to desire remains incomprehensible is that response true .... ....We are to the degree that
Utility DA - the perm instrumentalizes sacrifice for the good of the plans
future, ruining the sovereign ecastasy of sacrifice.
Allison 2009 [David, professor of philosophy @ SUNY Stony Brook, The Obssessions of George
Bataille: Community and Communication ed. Mitchell/Winfree p. 124-125]
The breach in the psychophysical integrity of another and of oneself is not a means for
a higher good, which would be communication. Corntnunication through these breaches in our
and the other's psychophysical integrity turns in a vertigo, a solar explosion, independent of the
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consequences. Communication excludes concern for our interests, excludes concern for
the time to come. Communication is not the good that we ensure or acquire through an
action, which therefore requires us to coordinate, discipline, focus and narrow down, and
subordinate our forces. It is itself not a future with which we are concerned: "the
debauchee has a chance to reach the summit only if he has no intention to do so. The ultimate
moment of the senses requires real innocence and the absence of moral pretensions and
consequently even of the consciousness of evil" (OC 6: 57/ON 38; tm). Communication is not an
enduring state; exhaustion comes quickly. It is not a good which requires conservation and
preservation. When our strength begins to fail, when we feel ourselves declining, we become
preoccupied with acquiring and accumulating goods of all sorts, with enriching ourselves in view
of the difficulties to come. We act. Communication is disconnected from the concern for
the future, but the relation between the summit and decline can be reversed in an effort to
establish a relationship of utility between them. When sovereignty declines, communication
is viewed and recuperated from the point of view of servile existence, of utility.
Sacrifice and orgy will be viewed as actions achieving some good. They were seen to be
expenditures useful for achieving victory in war. The victorious survivors knew the benets of
victory, acquired the women, booty, and territory. Sacrice, which involves sacrice of oneself
with the victim, will be interpreted as a means to achieve personal salvation in another life.
Sacricing oneself was also seen as a means to achieve equality and justice for the community
on earth. Throughout history, reasons were developed for one to head for the summit, releasing
and risking all one's forces. Indeed, these reasons produced history.
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AT: Aff Challenges Militarism

Freedom requires the sacrifice of knowledge, even that which supposedly
challenges American domination. The 1AC labors to produce global knowledge,
enacting servility to the roguery of state violence.
Malik 2006 [Suhail, teaches in the Department of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths College Theory
Culture Society v.23 2-3]
It follows that sovereignty is rogue in democracy and democracy is therefore guaranteed and harnessed by a power that is itself rogue. If there is
to be global democracy, there must be global sovereignty and so a global voyoucracy, a rogue state that is beyond the terms of that democracy.
The
sovereign state that orders legitimacy, which is the de facto condition of order, is
necessarily voyou, rogue, counter-ordering; an identity of opposing categories whose condensation can here be marked
(beyond the
terms Derrida sets up) by the terms sovoyoureign or soverogue, a power that establishes only a quasi-order. Today, Derrida continues, such states are
only the USA and whatever (always subsidiary) allies it picks up in the course of undertaking such actions in implementing its sovereignty. But the USA
is exceptional in this quasi-order in that it is the primary rogue state the only truly rogue state (as Chomsky also says for different reasons) because
of its outstanding international sovereign powers.
US international domination in the name of a common,

global democracy is that of a global sovereignty (though this is not to say world sovereignty);
it is, as is often declared, a global abuse of power necessarily so. This global sovereignty of the USA is
sometimes exercised through the UN but must also take place in terms of other outstanding manifestations of power if it is to be supersovereign,
including that of its military (quaforce), its economics (quaconsumption), its cultural production (quaentertainment) and its politics (quademocracy).
Such sovoyoureign or soverogue power(s) are not occasioned across or outside of democratic organization or polities at whatever level: it happens
through and in democracy, insistently so.
Soveroguery is the condition for the production of global
knowledge
and it is that by which knowledge in its globality has to be comprehended. But how is sovereignty to be understood in its identity
with countersovereignty? We have seen that, for Derrida, Batailles counterconcept of sovereignty speaks to the counter-order of voyoucracy. We shall
now take up this account in order to more exactly determine the sovereignty of American global dominance. Doing so will return us directly to the
question of knowledge in the actual conditions of globalization. Batailles interest in sovereignty is in a general aspect that is opposed to the servile
and the subordinate (1993: 197); it is general because it can belong to anyone. Such generality means that the determination of sovereignty cannot be
restricted to its traditional identication with the power of either the State or law as it has been from Plato to Hobbes, Schmitt and, in a more
complicated manner, Agamben. It can be the sovereignty of the voyou, for example. Bataille draws up an initial distinction between the general aspect
of sovereignty and what the term means as regards a legally constituted and recognized state or individual (that is therefore subordinate to law).
However, as Derrida proposes, in its sovoyoureignty or soveroguery, it is today the USA alone that sidesteps this distinction: yes, the USA is of course a
sovereign state in the legally constituted sense and so is subject to international law; yet it is in a position to countermand the obeisance to any such
law or consensus of a general will, since it alonehas the power to dominate and authorize non-legal actions in outright and blatant deance of
international convention and expectations. In this it exemplies at a supernational level the general aspect of sovereignty beyond law of which Bataille
speaks. The problem of the constitution of global knowledge can now be taken up since, for Bataille, sovereignty opposes and falls outside of servility,
work and use, and knowledge is constituted in a temporal binding through just these actions. Sovereignty is external to knowledge for Bataille because,
taking the stabilized modality of knowledge production known as science as example, to do science is to disregard the present time with a view to
subsequent results (1993: 2012). Relatively uncontroversial as this characterization may be, several signicant consequences follow from it: rst, that
the knowledge constituted in and by science, that is the present activity of science, is directed by a futural determination, a future organized in terms
of use; second, knowledge unfolds in time; third, any knowledge that results from such an activity is itself subject to the same condition, that is, the
knowledge that results from science is itself organized in terms of future results which is to say, fourth, that through the prospect of its use knowledge
to know is always to strive, to work;

it is always a servile operation, indenitely resumed, indefinitely repeated (1993: 202).
Knowledge as it is constituted by science (as an exemplar) is organized with a view to use
whether that use is practical (technics) or theoretical (science) is a secondary concern.
Knowledge, then, is not sovereign at least, insofar as it is understood in terms of science
or, more generally, a futural mobilizis constituted by the workof its future determinations. Hence Batailles part conclusion:
ation. Put the other way, as Bataille affirms again and again, sovereignty cannot be known.
Accepting this characterization of sovereignty, the co-determination of American domination
and global knowledge is not then just a historical and political concern but also a theoretical
and conceptual one. More specically, as much as the fate and problems of American domination(however it is characterized) is tied to the fate and problems of any attempt to
construct a theoretical or practical case for a global knowledge, so the question of
American sovereign domination of international and global politics in however complicated a
sense is also a question as to the conditions and possibility of global knowledge. With Bataille,
sovereignty is an experience that cannot be comprehended in science, not even
political science, and certainly not with regard to law in its primarily futural determination of
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the present. It cannot be regulated or experienced with view to any known future.
Rather, sovereignty would have to occur in a moment which remains outside, short of or
beyond, all knowledge (Bataille, 1993: 201). Such a moment cannot be known but is experienced; as Bataille puts it, consciousness of the moment is not truly such, is not sovereign,
except in unknowing. Only by cancelling, or at least neutralizing, every operation of
knowledge within ourselves are we in the moment, without eeing it (1993: 203). It is the
moment that is sovereign in how it seizes the mind and abjures from its own futural
determination, refuting any conversion into work or use. The interruption or blocking of this
futural aspect of experience is not a voluntaristic action or a programmable intervention but
is for Bataille possible in the grip of strong emotions that shut off, interrupt or override the ow of thought. This is the case if we weep, if we sob, if we
laugh till we gasp (1993: 203). It is not the epiphenomena of strong emotions such as the burst of laughter or tears that stops thought; rather, the
blocking of thought and knowledge are occasioned by the object of the laughter, or the object of the tears, that is, by the moments which occasion
that laughter and those tears, as if we were trying to arrest the moment and freeze it in the constantly renewed gasps of our laughter or our sobs
It is the absolute momentousness and momentaryness of strong emotions, an

experience that is always particular, that therefore apprehend what is involved in sovereignty,
even as the latter dees knowledge or other attempts to determine it that can be futurally
organized. This momentary experience without knowledge is risk.
(Bataille, 1993: 203).
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***Framework
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2NC Framework Frontline

Debate is a theater - the theatrical sacrifice of the alt is preferable to
simulating the good of the 1AC. Vote neg to claim debate as a space of ecastic
communication.
Roleplaying DA - the debate method of the 1AC trains us to become ministates, actors whose ultimate sovereignty must trace back to the fountainhead
of the USFG. This trains us to internalize the goods of peace and justice that
enable endless exterminatory conicts thats Razinski and goldhammer.
Cloistering DA - they turn debate into a ritual of mastery disconnected from
the realities of politics violence.
Chan 2k [Stephen, Professor IR Dean Ethics at Notingham Trent University, Millennium Vol. 29,
No. 3, pp. 565-589]
WE DO NOT DEFEND GENDERED LANGUAGE
There are also more Lucifer-like dangers, ho wever. When you understand that a man believes
he can change the world as a result of meditation and specific rituals, and when you try
to nd out wh y he is so certain that, after performing that ritual, he really will become
master of the world or at least of his villagewell, there again is the temp tation of absolute
liberty; in other words, the suppression of the human condition. Man is a limited, conditioned being. But the freedo m o f a god, or a mythic ancestor, or a spirit no longer
trammelled by a mortal body! Those are temptatio ns.25. First, however, there are so me questions to ask about IR. For what is the paradigm now of the
person of IR? He or she goes to the Internatio nal Studies Association conferences and
performs his or her knowledge to other performers. He or she reads (translations and
summaries of) the texts of the moment, and seeks a reexivity within those texts;
locates a critical practice within the conference hall and classroo m; believes that
discourse, and his or her participation in discourse, constructs the world. This is a
professionalism pure and proper, and it is hermetically sealed fro m the world, rather
than in hermeneutic dialogue with it. It is a conceit to justify comfort. And I guess it is a certain
coming of age: having nally spoken and written a constructivism that says it is our purpose
to speak and write, that the world that suffers is merely the victim of discourse, and that
therefore, the purpose of the person of IR is to engage with discourse rather than
engage with suffering. It is ingenious and disingenuous, and causes regret that Buddhism
has no sense of actual purgatory. We have come to resemble those higher men and sublime
men who so ught to distract Zarathustra from his eternal joy, and caused him to give in to what
Eliade called the temp tation of the eternal return. Within IR, of course, we have the
temptations of eternal return: ever a new paradigm, new debate, or merely new
fashion, anything, to prevent us from confronting the fact that, since IRs inventio n,
suffering, and IRs inaccessibility to it, have been constant.
Sovereignty DA - Politics is war, and we refuse to make peace with the state.
Heeding the Sirens Song of the USFG ensures a politics of extermination.
Mansfield 2008 [Nick, prof cultural studies @ Macquarie Univerity, Theorizing War: From
Hobbes to Badiou p. 120-125]
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In Clausewitz, war emerges easily when society opens its hand. Peace is not ashamed of war and
uses it. Policy extends itself into war, drawing the whole of the society with it. The argument
is even stronger than this, because policy does not represent the cynical manipulation of the social, seducing or tricking it into war. The impulse of the
social is controlled by policy, without which the drive to violence for its own sake, a violence of annihilation of the other, would be even stronger, even
wilder. We have here two very different versions of the social and its relationship with war. Yet both reveal how the alternation of war and the social (war
as the social's other, war as the execution of collective social intention) leads to a collapse of the foreign-ness between the two. This foreign-ness is
assumed, then elaborately disproved, even if from opposite directions. In Hobbes, society moves away from war, but always drags it with it, as its
War accompanies every exing of the social, every moment, and

threatens to overwhelm what is determined to suppress or conceal it. In Clausewitz, society
compelling and unshakeable underside.
stoops, through policy, to the war that would seem to contradict it, but that is in fact the fullest activation of its energies. In Michel Foucault's account of
the social war, we see something similar, when Foucault cheekily, cleverly, reverses Clausewitz's statement. At the outset of the series of lectures that
comprise Society Must be Defended, he announces his hypothesis: "[plower is war," he writes, "the continuation of war by other means" (Foucault, 2003,
p. 15). What this claim implies is that the relations of power in a society do not quell or disable war, but continue it, because they were founded in a real
war that really happened and that can be specied. It also means that the establishment of supposedly peaceful social relations by the institution of
formal putatively legitimate power is not intended to end or preclude the inequality in relations established in the violent struggle for power. Indeed, the
purpose of the establishment of formal power as peace is to reinvigorate war throughout the social, "in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and
war is
continuing in displaced, disguised or re-represented form, undiminished if translated into a
wholly other language of articulation. "We are always writing the history of the same war, even when we are writing the history of
even the bodies of individuals" [p. 121] (Foucault, 2003, p. 16). What this means, according to Foucault, is that within all social practices
peace and its institutions" (p. 16). Foucault sets two ways of analysing power against one another, On the one hand, we have a theory of power in terms
of its legitimacy. Sovereignty claims a legal authority underwritten by a civil contractual logic,
in which the natural "primal" (Foucault, 2003, p. 16) right of the individual is surrendered. When this legal authority exceeds itself, the result is tyranny
or oppression. On the other hand is another theory of power altogether, one in which the excess of power is not an abuse, but merely the inevitable
extension of the logic of dominance that denes social relations, because it is its ancestry. The former is a model of order and hierarchy, where a legally
violence is always seen

as a transgression of its proper power, perhaps one that can be explained in terms of the
psychology or incompetence of the historical players periodically entrusted with that power.
Beneath the excess, however, the legitimacy of the contract endures, embarrassed by violence
and ostensibly separate from it. Violence in the contract system is a mistake. In the alternative
model, social power merely translates the divisions and antagonisms of war into another form.
Social institutions merely continue the war already well underway-perhaps so long
underway, it is rarely recognised as war, even taken for granted. In what Foucault calls here the
"war-repression" schema (Foucault, 2003, p. 17), what is at stake is not legitimacy but
merely "dominance and submission" (p. 17). An account of society seen from the point of view of relations of domination,
constituted governing power has its limits strictly dened. It may overstep these limits and brutalise, but this
rather than from the evaluation of legitimacy, will reveal a wholly other social logic. Foucanit outlines systematically the difference between the two.
Foucault claims that European political thought since the Middle Ages has been preoccupied with the issue of the legitimacy of royal power, at the
behest of that power. He quotes approvingly Petrarch's complaint "Is there nothing more to history than the praise of Rome?" (Foucault, 2003, p. 74), The
sovereign progress of sovereignty as the ostensible clarication and consolidation of the good leads discourse to twin emphases: the legal elaboration of
the right of the sovereign and the concomitant explanation of the duties of the subject. In this discourse, the duty to justify legitimacy leads to the
assumed obligation to cleanse power[p. 122] of what might seem to compromise it: its reliance on violent domination. Domination is made to disappear
and is not seen as intrinsically part of the sovereign power that accompanies it. Foucault produces here an inversion of the relationship between
sovereignty and domination. Instead of adopting the more conventional line that dominance is a mere instrument of a sovereign power that pretends to
be legitimate but is simply the rationalisation of the centralisation of power in the hands of the few, Foucault locates sovereignty within a larger
unfolding of dominance. His recent work, he says, has been given over to stress the fact of domination in all its brutality and its secrecy, and then to
show not only that right is an instrument of that domination... but also how, to what extent, and in what form right... serves as a vehicle for and
implements relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but relations of domination. (Foucault, 2003, p. 27) It is not that dominance merely serves an
established regime by arguing its legitimacy and disguising its violence by formulations of sovereign order. The doctrine of right is merely one aspect of
a larger technique of dominance, and is subsequent, subordinate and junior to it. It is this elaborate and widespread mechanics of domination that needs
to be revealed. Subordination is not the duty of those subject to legitimate power, but the fate of the dominated, not the acceptance of an authority
necessary to save us from ourselves, but the continuation of a brutal violence in which many must forever be kept in check. The mode of analysis most
appropriate to this situation must be unconventional. First, it must look at power not in terms of how its most petty manifestations can be justied from
the logic of legitimacy at the putative centre. It must look at power in its most local and peripheral manifestations, at its extremities (Foucault, 2003, p.
27). Secondly, it must not see what is going on at these extremities as explained or reducible to what is intendedby sovereignty. To continue to reduce
what happens at the periphery to what is intended at the centre ends by obscuring the detailed and particular forms of the operation of power produced
as the mariner by which we live: "rather than asking ourselves what the sovereign looks like from on high, we should be trying to discover how multiple
bodies, forces, energies, matters, desires, thoughts and so on are gradually, progressively, actually and materially constituted as subjects, or as the
subject" (p. 28). It is here that Foucault stresses the difference between what he is trying to do and the Hobbesian schema, whereby the particularities of
the operation of [p. 123] power in specic local contexts are made sense of by the construction of a single magnicent if monstrous body, where the
localisation, plurality, incommensurability and fragmentation of social relations are denied, and where everything is seen as subordinate to a single logic
of necessary legitimacy, a legitimacy to which all local grievances and desires are to be subject. As we have seen, this legitimacy is partly justied by its
claim to be the only way in which our desires can in fact be satised. If we were left to our desires, our desires would not be fullled. Only by denying our
desire can we have it. If, as in Foucault's view, the Leviathan is the "central soul" (p. 29) which obscures the detailed operation of power in its peripheral
effects, then its complex logic of desire can be explained in another way: the desire of the individual subject is always and forever wrong, an illegitimate
desire to be measured against the desire legitimated by the imagined social centre. The Leviathan thus produces an apparently "natural" desire whose
function is to be contradicted by the correct desire sovereignty makes acceptable. Following the logic of Foucault's argument, therefore, sovereignty's
imagined centralisation is really just itself something that operates to pressure what happens at the peripheral and local. The centre is just an image
deployed at the periphery. The choice of terms like "centre" and "periphery" therefore is merely a way of disputing a political ction on its own terms, not
a reversal of priorities. Foucault is not arguing that we must suppress the centre and pay attention to the under-privileged periphery: there is only a
periphery, where the centre functions merely as an image of an absent and unreachable ideal, one whose only function is to inuence what happens
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locally. This is because power operates in endlessly mobile and uid networks, where individual localities are constantly reinventing their relationship
with one another, not as regions of a hierarchical system that makes sense from the top down. The local both operates and receives these ows of
power. In sum, then, Foucault sees political analysis that concentrates on the issue of legitimacy imagined by Hobbes as the Leviathan as overlooking
Sovereignty is a
seductive issue, a "trap" (Foucault, 2003, p. 34). Each side of the social struggle has used
sovereignty for its own purposes, ignoring the new modality of power that has risen
alongside sovereignty, producing its own prolix discourses, not of the legitimacy of sovereign
right, but of the standards of normalising truth. This new style of power that Foucault calls "disciplinary power" (p. 36)
the more compelling and pragmatic issue of the techniques of the operation of dominance within which we live.
is "absolutely incompatible" (p. 35) with sovereignty. Yet, it is between these two styles of power that since the nineteenth century, modern political life
has unfolded [p. 124] in a tortuous negotiation between overt and tactical discourses of right and hall-concealed but insistent routines of discipline. The
two cannot be reduced to one another and are radically disjunctive but they "necessarily go together" (p. 37). The saturation of the social body by petty
relations of domination reveals a political organisation whose tendency is not towards the clarication and renement of right, but towards an endless
struggle. This struggle, Foucault argues, lies behind the structures of law. Law, he says, was "not born of nature- but but of real battles, victories,
massacres and conquests" (p. 50). These wars are not abstract or hypothetical. They can be precisely identied. He writes, Law is not pacication, for
beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the
smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war... we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are
therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it Is this battlefront that puts us all
on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone's adversary. (Foucault, pp. 50-1) This perpetual
struggle, which will be decided not by an adjudication of right, but by someone's victory and someone else's defeat, is immanent to all social relations.
The discourse of sovereignty, which has done so much to distract us from this unfolding struggle, is merely a tactic in this battle, producing seductive
and mystifying discourses of law and right. Beneath the condescension of universalising right, struggle goes on without let-up, the real struggle, the
social war, the persistence of a war, explained away or supposedly overcome by right. Foucault's own writing then sees itself as both commemorating
and activating an alternative concealed tradition of historico-political writing, the rst legitimate one, he claims, since medieval times (Foucault, 2003, p.
The discourse of
sovereignty denies its implication in, even subordination to, this struggle, setting up
the chimera of legitimacy as worse than a ruse. The discourse of struggle has its own logic of right, but not of a
52). This legitimacy derives from the discourse's awareness that it is itself taking sides and is a weapon in a struggle.
universal transcendental right, or particular and partisan rights, once owned, then lost, now to be recovered. This discourse is unashamedly "perpectival"
(p. 52). [p. 125] When it gives a complete account of the social struggle, arguing its own truth, presenting its own map of others' positions and motives,
it does so tendentiously, using the truth as a weapon in its own campaigns, resisting the claim to universal, eternal and impersonal truthfulness. Truth as
juridico-political discourse ascendant since

Ancient Greece is challenged, under threat. This discourse does not descend from the abstract
and totalising domain of the super-human metaphysical. It rises from the below of society (p.
54), from the chaos, confusion and dim perceptions that are all available within the bitter
and desperate grounds of the struggle itself. The partisanship is on the ground of the ght.
a tactic, then, not as an identity. The "pacied universality" (p. 53) of
It is deected into dim disproportions, refracted by particular angularities. It is in and of the struggle, it is the struggle itself. It is praised and activated by
Foucault, even in its dark and poisonous hatred, and in its cruel and desperate luxury, he half-identies his own hard discourse with it. We see here the
cool historian-jurist--philosopher revealing what lies behind his own tropes of violence and war, of deployments, tactics, of occupation and regimen.
The sound of politics may seem to be vociferous debate, but that is merely misheard
gunfire. It is that double sound with which Foucault wants to compare his own writing. This writing of history as struggle must remain bitter. It
cannot be allowed to make sense. The risk of dialectical thinking as an alternative model of social struggle is that it ends by subordinating itself to a logic
of order, resolution and identication, the redemption of the cruelty of struggle in the piety of sensible progress (Foucault, 2003, p. 58).
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AT: Rational Discourse Good

Debate as rational discourse dissolves the sacred, destroying the interpretive
context that makes communication possible.
Li 2005 [Victor, teaches in the English Department at the University of Toronto, parallax, 2005,
vol. 11, no. 3, 7286]
Though aided by the life-worlds intuitively known and unquestioned background convictions,
communicative participants nonetheless still have to work to achieve mutual understanding
or agreement when they are faced with an action situation or interpretive problem that
emerges in the everyday world. They can reach agreement only through a conscious yes or no
position they take on three differentiated validity claims that are raised respectively in the
objective, social and subjective domains of their world: the claims are to truth, rightness or
justice and expressive truthfulness or sincerity.19 Up to this point, the life-world has been described as a stabilizing and conservative factor in the
process of reaching understanding. Habermas in fact sees the life-world as the conservative counterweight to the risk of disagreement that arises with
every actual process of reaching understanding; for communicative actors can achieve an understanding only by way of taking yes/no positions on
criticizable validity claims.20 However, as Habermas points out, italicizing his statement for emphasis, The relation between these weights changes
with the decentration of worldviews.21 The decentration of worldviews becomes possible through the growing reexivity achieved in ontogenetic
learning processes that act as pacemakers for the socio-cultural development of modernity. Thus as we become more and more reexively modern, our
worldview also becomes increasingly decentred. Correspondingly, the more our worldview is decentred, the harder it is to achieve consensual
understanding since we can no longer rely on a pre-interpreted, critique-proof life-world, but have to turn instead to rational procedures for reaching
understanding. Habermas characterizes this transition as the rationalization of the life-world and sees it as a switch from normatively ascribed
agreement to communicatively achieved understanding.22 The rationalization of the life-world thus appears to follow a developmental trajectory
much like that of the socio-cultural evolution from pre-modern mythic to modern decentred worldviews. Habermas puts it this way: A directional
dynamics is built into the communicatively structured life-world in the form of the polarity between a state of pre-established pre-understanding and a
consensus to be achieved: in the course of time, the reproductive achievements switch from one pole to the other.23 This directional dynamics as
shown in the rationalization of the life-world resembles the larger scale rationalization of society which Habermas, following thinkers like Durkheim and
Weber, describes as the transition from primitive tribal groups with their pre-reective, collectively shared, homogeneous life-world to the reexive,
differentiated, and communicatively achieved life-world of modern politics.24 Recognizing the similarity between pre-modern societies and the lifeworld in its original, concrete, pre-rationalized state, Habermas writes: The life-world concept of society nds its strongest empirical footing in archaic
the nearly ultrastable,

normative authority of the sacred and the mythic in pre-modern societies is linguistied,
that is, dissolved by reexive communicative action oriented to understanding, so too the
societies [] [which in their ideal state are] almost homogeneous, and nearly ultrastable.25 Just as
rationalization of the life-world involves a process in which the pre-established agreements and prelinguistically guaranteed norms of the everyday
concrete life-world are opened up to reexive forms of discourse or argumentation with their yes/no stance on validity claims raised in the course of
By the rationalization of the life-world, Seyla Benhabib notes, is meant

nothing other than the increase in argumentative practices within the everyday
world.26 Modern societies thus undergo a process of rationalization that Habermas also
calls the linguistification of the sacred. The modern rationalized life-world is no longer
beholden to the authority of the sacred, but depends solely on rationally motivated
forms of understanding that lead to a consensus based on the authority of the better
argument.27 In the idealized or fully rationalized life-world, we have a constant revision of uidized traditions, i.e. traditions which have become
communicative interactions.
reexive; [] a state in which legitimate orders depend on discursive procedures for positing and justifying norms.28 It should be noted, however,
that the critical reexivity, the constant sceptical revision of all pre-established traditions and norms we nd in the rationalization process lands the lifeworld in an aporetic situation. On the one hand,
the life-world is the ever- present, intuitively understood

background within which all communicative action and forms of understanding occur; it also
provides a store of pre-interpreted knowledge which enables cultural understanding,
forms group solidarity and shapes the competences of socialized individuals.29 On the other
hand, the life-worlds rationalization gains it the critical reexivity and autonomy that
threaten to devalue, if not destroy, the very context in which it stands and the resources
on which it draws. To his credit, Habermas recognizes this problem, though, as we shall see, his
attempts at resolving it result in what Stephen Crook has described as an example of his having
the honesty to make his own problem worse.30 The rationalization of the life-world thus
involves a rather destructive hermeneutics of suspicion that calls into question customary forms of life. As
Habermas puts it: [T]he transition to argumentation has something unnatural about it: it marks a break with the ingenuous straightforwardness with
which people have raised the claims to validity on whose intersubjective recognition the communicative practice of everyday life depends. This
unnaturalness is like an echo of the developmental catastrophe that historically once devalued the world of traditions and thereby provoked efforts to
rebuild it at a higher level.31 Words like unnatural and catastrophe attest to the radical change visited on all past claims and traditions by modern
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the distrust shown to all conventions established by tradition
should cause alarm since it appears to suggest that up to the moment of modernity
the forms of recognition that traditional practices permitted were illusory through and
through.32 Such a sweeping skepticism is, however, central to Habermass view of
rationalization as the progress towards a postconventional modernity: No normative validity
claim raised in the life-world is immune to challenge; everything counts as a hypothesis
until it has regained its validity through the authority of good reasons.33 Loss and
Compensation If nothing in the life-world is immune to challenge and everything in it counts as a
hypothesis, and if the life-worlds background knowledge is submitted to an ongoing test
across its entire breadth,34 then a difficult question arises for Habermas: can the life-world still
be an inescapable horizon or context of understanding and the source of cultural knowledge and
normative values, if, at the same time, it is constantly challenged or tested across its entire
breadth? Even though Habermas might respond that the life-worlds rationalization through
moral argumentation (or discourse ethics) can be seen as a correction and transcendence of its
conventional limits, doesnt the unmerciful gaze of rationalization threaten, at least in
theory, to dissolve the very ground of the life-world from which the corrective gaze
emanates? And wouldnt such a rational dissolution of normatively ascribed agreement for
a risk-laden, counter- factual communicatively achieved understanding place us within the
impossible space of an unlivable scepticism and undischargeable rationalism?35 In her
perceptive study of Habermass work, Maeve Cooke worries, for example, that the life-worlds
fabric could be worn away through constant critical examination and rejection of its
traditions, practices, and xed patterns of personality development.36
rationalization processes. J. M. Bernstein argues that
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AT: Public Sphere/Demands on State Good

The quest for political productivity empowers the public-private divide that is
exterminating dissent. Only the kritiks social revolt solves.
Harney and Martin 2007

[Stefano, Chair in Strategy Culture and Society at University of London & Randy theory & event
10:2 ]
Whatever the cornucopia offered by nance, something prevents access to the immanent luxury
of the social, something 'destines life's exuberance to revolt,' to rebel against new forms of
'military exploitation, religious mystication, and capitalist misappropriation,' to seek out
a more luxuriate mode of excess, a mode of discretion and difference lived by all. (Bataille
1993: 77) A mean and indifferent mode of excess burns off all this self-activity, if not all this
revolt, and leaves behind an effect, a state effect. Bataille asks us in his studies to seek out the effects of the
accursed share, the state effects that come to trace the state-form. We mean by the state-form something more than the state as it is used as a
category by political scientists. We mean something Bataille provokes us to consider. We mean that which becomes visible in the struggle over excess
as an economy of excess, that which stands in for the mode of excess itself. So to ask what state-form corresponds to this mean and indifferent mode of
excess is to take these state effects as clues, effects produced by a public capacity itself forged in the struggle today to produce capital's division of risk
and at risk populations. To produce both the embracing of risk and the sorting of at risk populations that animate both nancialization and the war on
terror a certain kind of struggle, a certain kind of privatization must be at work. And this work of privatization can be read in the work left to the stateform.
The contemporary state-form operates
to criminal effect. Its crime is not simply violation of law it is charged to
enshrine, or to legitimate private property as public theft. At its most comprehensive and constitutive ,
criminality issues from the

state-form positioning against society as such--an anti-social opposition to the expansive
sociality that is irrecuperable to narrow protocols of accumulation. This effect hints at what
is new about the contemporary mode of excess. From the state we hear scarcely a word about
the social. Rather, it positions itself on the meridian that delimits public and private. The
effect of publicity in the state-form today is a contradictory one, one that hates the public, fears the social, courts the criminal, and cannot help itself.
Let us use the terms publicity and privatization here to mean something terminologically specic, and historically specic to capitalism. Privatization
here assumes that the sociality called forth by capital must be reduced and converted into private property if it is to be a recognizable form for capital of
what Jean-Paul Sartre called the practico-inert. Privatization is also the struggle that produces publicity, what Jacques Ranciere calls the 'distribution of
the public and the private' (Ranciere 2006, 55) and therefore what can count as common. Privatization here comes rst, not after some vulnerable
Publicity is the subsequent state economy dedicated to privatizing excess sociality. By

naming itself as public, publicity continues the work of privatization that brought publicity
into being, and ensures that collective action taken up in the name of publicity not only
fetishes the public (Bratsis 2005), but leaves the real struggle of privatization as it is
understood here, untouched.
Understanding the state-form historically as the evidence of economy brought to bear on excess
public sector.
leaves room for what goes unmarked by conventional notions of public and private, even when those notions are employed in a Marxist framework as
founding terms, and instead allows us see the excess of sociality as founding both public and private. Or as Jacques Derrida puts it: 'At its height of
hyperbole, the absolute opening, the uneconomic expenditure, is always reembraced by an economy and is overcome by economy.' (Derrida 1980: 75)
The economy of public and private (here an at risk effect and a risk effect), signs of the mode of
excess, emerge from the struggle against excessive sociality, and under capitalism, this privatization aims most
vitally at the means of production.
The publicity produced in the period when the tendency to industrial capitalism predominated seems capacious
today. The struggle over property and machinery, scientic patents and natural resources, produced a publicity that opened onto the commonality of
social reproduction. The welfare state and wars against fascism, civil rights and anti-colonialism, all operated in the space produced by what was
relinquished in the struggle in elds, factories, and offices. Of course publicity produces its own unruliness, much as the struggle of privatization itself.
Exactly because publicity must be reproduced by a labour both internal and external to it, publicity sometimes does not know its own limits. In civil
rights, in the popular front, and most seriously in anti-colonialism, the space of publicity was ab-used as Gayatri Spivak would say, and there was an
attempt to move past the confrontation with the private to the struggle of privatization itself. (Spivak 2006) There was a feel for excess, and a prophecy
of a new mode. But all the while nance and science was preparing an interdependency, a general intellect, that would shatter this publicity by altering
the means of production and with it the stakes of the struggle for privatization.
This new interdependency and its privatization is oddly
foreshadowed by Bataille in his chapter on the Soviet Union where a new mode of excess takes shape in the drive for productivity and the building up of
the means of production.
'In the end, all of one's waking hours are dedicated to the fever of work,'
he writes. (Bataille 1993: 160) Here publicity takes the form of the means of production itself,
produced by a privatization of all other aspects of life. Only productivity becomes a matter of
commonality. All else, distinguished as social reproduction, is vulnerable to the violence of
privacy. Of course this not the privacy of the conventional private, but of a privatization drive to
destroy excess sociality and produce a state economy, a proper publicity of total
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One feels that this feverish work is with us today, but without even the vague hope of the publicity of the Soviet Union. What is being
privatized to permit such a fever to take hold, and what kind of publicity stokes this re, and as ever, is threatened by the ames? The risk and at risk
populations that reach publicity as private and public matters and are its objects of attention suggest a new tendency in privatization. This tendency
turns on social reproduction but again not directly through what is conventionally understood by privatization, but at its roots, at its moment of
production in the struggle over a new means of production. Conventional privatization is only a symptom of this struggle at the root, and one of an
It is only a symptom because today the struggle over privatization occurs at the level
of life itself, and especially at the level of the cognitive and affective capacities of the body.
already advanced disease.
The General Intellect that Marx identied with science, and undoubtedly with machinery, is recast by autonomist thinkers as a mass intellectuality
residing in brains and bodies of labour. A history of production across these bodies takes on all the difference of these bodies and becomes legible only
in this context. The biopolitics identied in contemporary scholarship is often understood as the site of politics but might also be marked as the residue
of politics, as what is left to publicity after a new means of production is privatized, taking off the table the politics of privatization and leaving only the
politics of public and private as it is currently constituted, as biopolitics. So today it might be necessary as Patricia Clough recently put it in articulating
the technoscience that underlies a subindividual ontology, to move 'beyond biopolitics.' iii
For instance, in the work of Lauren Berlant there is an
anticipation of this privatization of the reproductive realm. She notes the way that in the Reagan era what was the private sphere comes forward into
the public sphere, but as a matter of immorality. (Berlant 1997) This was an early symptom of the consequences of privatizing social reproductive
capacities, putting them to work, and leaving only the anti-reproductive moment to the public, a moment that begins in immorality and will end in just a
few years in wholesale criminality. When social reproduction itself, when sociality itself, becomes the target of privatization, when not machinery but
brains and souls are to be rendered into dead labour, into private property, biopolitics may be one word for what
is left to publicity. But even this term might be too generous, too sociable. Because when the social itself is privatized, only the anti-social, only the
criminal remains for publicity. A state economy emerges that is not just concerned with the anti-social, but takes the anti-social as its modus operandi,
takes indifference to qualities of society as its public face. In short, the couple risk/at risk in the public sphere of a criminal state-form. It must be
quickly added that this criminal state-form is not criminal in the liberal sense of deviating from a societal norm, nor criminal in the traditional Marxist
sense of supporting the theft of wealth through labour- time.
It is a state against society. The war on terror

mixes risk-embracing populations like soldiers and at risk populations like Arab civilians and
seeks out a criminal path, and an anti-social outcome. But who can blame it for being in a true sense, and
not in the sense used by economists, path dependent?
All visible sociality is fast being criminalized, marked as having been
unsuccessfully privatized. Such sociality becomes a threat to productivity, to the basis of the state-form, to its criminality and thus
the criminality of the state stands against sociality at every turn. Productivity is the metric by which privatization appears as self-
The fever of
work is interrupted, risk is suspended, at the moment the criminal becomes its
opposite, not anti-sociality but sociality. And of course this moment comes all the time as
capital's dream of living only on dead souls is interrupted by the waking hunger for social genius,
for mass intellectuality, for living labour. Suddenly the siege must be lifted, prisoners
released, raids called off, risky deals bailed out, at risk populations made into relative
surplus ones.
The question of who is attributed with the capacity to self-manage and who is deemed unmanageable brings us to governance. The ubiquitous
rationalizing. But at the same time, this stance marks criminality as the last site of the un-privatized social.
term of comparison making formal equality of things more universal than ever, governance can be applied to hospitals, universities, countries, and corporations. But more
importantly in can be applied to populations. Populations that embrace risk, that manifest the privatization of the General Intellect, embrace governance as the governmentality
of indifference. Governance oversees the hedging of interest against interest. But more than that governance tests for a population's ability to produce interests, to risk those
interests in the name of speculative accumulation. Governance is here a form of bioprospecting in the veins of mass intellectuality for collective cognitive capacities that can be
applied to accumulation strategies. And governance is the mouth of the criminal state-form, calling out to the social, in order to privatize or criminalize it. Those who call back
and identify their interests are the lucky ones, these newly identied interests and their bearers are made productive, made to take risks, and led into the fever of work. Those
who do not answer, or cannot be heard, are said to be those without interests, the at-risk, the criminal.
With interests rising out of populations and returning to private hands
for example in corporate multiculturalism or fair trade or green consumption, the state is left only with those at risk, those feared to be without interest. And of course the gure
today who is most without interest is a certain criminal character, the terrorist. And as Angela Y. Davis notes 'racism played a critical role in the ideological production of the
communist, the criminal, and the terrorist.' (Davis 2005: 121-2) The roving racism of the at risk category is the business that is left to the state, but this is also the business that
is left of the state. And this is why governance must also fail, why it must remain contradictory in the corporation, the nation, the NGO. If it were to work it would suggest a
totality of structured in difference, to use an older phrase, that would be deadly to the anti-social character of the contemporary state-form. If governance were to do more than
merely strip mine the general intellect and leave it scarred, it would become sociable, and would quickly become the enemy of the state. This is the condition of the war on
terror, a ailing limb of the criminal state which constantly ings itself toward the very criminality, the very condition of being without interest, that it sees in the object of its
violence. It works against proper environments of risk, against the extraction of new interests, and instead piles up at risk populations and smashes constitutions and remakes
them in a Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde act that belies its criminal inheritance in the face of the privatization of all that is healthy for the reproduction of society.
The state attacks
itself here too. Clearly this is part of a wretched history that Marx identies as Bonapartism in his account of the crisis of class representation in the 18 th Brumaire. Within a
century the notorious burning of the Reichstag will signal the mass mobilization of the state against itself that brings us fascism. Now the state is engaged in mass shedding, war
is demobilizing even as its proteering is part of the executive's curriculum vitae (including the notable intimacies with Enron and Halliburton). The self-destructiveness of today's
politics is brought on by the incessant relinquishing of excess sociality, including that initiated by the state, to privatization. And what cannot be returned to the private must be
criminalized and this is why in the end George W. Bush must criminalize himself. No matter how much he seeks out laws, in the end he is driven to move beyond them, to turn
against himself as an instance of society. His wars, his camps, his dismissals of those charged with upholding the law, belie the impatience behind their own pleas for
permanence. Unable to uphold the legality of his policy, he incriminates himself and uses this sentence to stay the course of execution. Bush delegates decision to maintain
authority over those who would judge.
But it is worse, because as much as the state is at risk in this publicity, poison to itself no matter how many wars it launches or jails it
builds, it has not even the possibility of criminality. It is criminal, but it will never revolt. It can be anti-social, but it cannot abide any un-privatized sociality in its midst, no welfare
state, no war on poverty. And yet this mode of excess is premised on un-privatized sociality, which is to say not on the criminal, the anti-social, but on criminality, the possibility
that a population is not anti-social, not consumed by the fever of work, not smothered in risk. This criminality is itself the possibility of a structure of feeling beneath this fever,
within this embrace, of a luxuriant excess privatized to make this work and speculation possible, but always escaping it. The fate of those at risk, those immersed in criminality,
It is the state today that
is left to die. There is no difference between its typical operation and its normalizing
exception. Only such indifference has been left to it. Nicos Poulantzas wrote in his late work that 'the state itself bathes in the struggles that
the fugitive social-private, is to live, but the fate of the contemporary state-form, the criminal state, the anti-social public, is to die.
constantly submerge it.'(Poulantzas 1980: 151) When those struggles have at their heart the excess produced by the social capacities carried in the
brains and souls of living labour, privatization leaves nothing to the imagination. To look for some suspension of law when the ability to legislate is itself
given over to capital in the form of governance, is to miss the residual character of the contemporary state-form. And yet Poulantzas also noted more
than once 'the class enemy was always present within the state.' (Poulantzas 1980: 151) That the contemporary state-form is the effect of living labour
coming into contact with the anti-social edice of its deeds, the ruins of every social project, suggests that criminality remains present in the criminal
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state. This criminality at the heart of the state economy destines revolt from the depths
of the mode of excess.
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***Just Pups of War
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Pups of War: AT Link Turn

Even if they win they link turn, well still win that sacrifice is still the best way
to solve our aff. Thats the alternative and impact debate.
Political discourse against the abuses of American militarism is appeasement.
Hutnyk makes two arguments.
First, the state thrives on political discourse, for it reinforces the values of
rationality and consent that enable its awful violence. The aff protest is
careful not to oversep the bounds of democratic legitimacy, like the anti-war
protestors who get a permit to make sure they dont disrupt the traffic.
Second, the state is criminal, and demanding restraint only allows it to play
the part of benevolent giver of peace. The democratic norms to which they
appeal are a ruse, keeping us in line for more wars are prepared in the name
of peace.
The affirmative play-acts the rejection of war. Their repugnance sustains state
violence.
Nick Mansfield, Prof Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, 2008
[Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou p. 163-166]
The general revulsion at war therefore is not necessarily incompatible with a generalisation
of war in practice. Indeed, my aim has been to show the opposite: that the general deployment and the general rejection of war are part of
a single complex. It is much too simple, however, to see this complex as part of a willing blindness on the part of the bulk of humanity, wherein moral
comfort and self-regard would be assured by rejection of war even though affluent lifestyles may depend on war for their continued opportunity. It is too
we play at rejecting wars from which we are actually happy to

prot. Our rejection of war, like our purported commitment to democracy and human rights, is
not merely hypocritical. It must be understood as part of a complex in which war and its
other emerge together in a double relationship in which they both encourage and refuse
one another: we reject war because it ruins social relations, shatters bodies and savages our
human rights. Yet, we [p. 164] also look to war to preserve the social, protect threatened lives
and enlarge rights. War kills and saves simultaneously. It destroys the things in the name of
which it is implemented. To see a loss of difference between war and its other is to overlook the
complex situations in which war emerges and which keep it alive despite our moral
repugnance and endless official lamentations for those of us whom it has annihilated. To say that war is double and
easy to see the war problem simply morally, that
that it is implicated conceptually in other values that we want to preserve is not to simply say that we should be resigned to war enduring. It is an
attempt to provide a new and useful way by which war can be understood, and argues, as all analysis does, that material situations like war cannot be
dealt with if they are not understood, and that new ways must continually be sought to rethink them. Theory is not an enduring ideal truth to be applied
to practical situations, but the invention of new conceptual forms that may help us represent and explain hitherto obscure or enigmatic phenomena.
Thinking of war in terms of the war/other complex means always seeing the emergence of war as the deployment of something else with it. The two
must always appear in relationship with one another even if they are considered to be antagonistic or mutually destructive. So war and whatever its
other might be in a particular context, facilitate the emergence of one another, even in their deance of one another. It is this inseparability of war and
its other that makes it possible to see war and its other as co-ordinated. What was Nazi war but a tribute, in its most organised and exultant
murderousness, to life? What was Communist insurgency but the most regimented and anonymous embrace of the possibilities of freedom? And what
are democracy's post-1989 wars but the most brutal and oppressive attempt to spread human rights? These complex situations can and should not be
disguised by an eternal but vacuous resort to morality. The logic that attributes the doubleness of war to hypocrisy is a singularly unenlightening
example of the ascendancy of moral discourse in discussions of war. Of course, our attitude to war must be moral: we could not protect ourselves from
the cult of official violence if it were not, nor could we begin to see war as a problem and something to be surpassed, something I have assumed as
relatively uncontentious from the outset. Yet, because war is politically, economically, and above all, conceptually situated, it must be recognised not as
Since the Vietnam War, resistance to war has been

fundamentally based on revulsion at its violence and destructiveness and the popular
primarily a moral, but a political problem.
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culture that naturalise it. This resistance has been primarily rhetorical and gestural, as it
bets its interest in the aesthetics of war and in tune with the [p. 165] general aestheticisation of
politics of the time. It has rested on general humanist clichs about community, fraternity
and an ideal social future. In other words, it has relied on a banal and unsustainable
understanding of the mutual alienation of the human and war. This conception is not wrong in any
simple sense, but it is too uncomplicated to deal with the dynamics of the war/other complex, in which the human can be as much a justication for war
as reason for scepticism towards it, and is indeed probably both. To engage with war properly, we have to realise that this kind of opposition is not
Humanist sentimentality often attempts to

present what we have identied as war's others as unquestionable or non-negotiable: How
can we possibly contest the value implicit in love, or sociality or human rights? Is not this the
worst kind of post-modern relativism, in which we allow what should be absolute values to be
held up for debate? Yet it is these various "values" that accompany and facilitate the
emergence of war, and that always wrong-toot us when we attempt to reject it. Do we not want dictators to be removed, women's rights
enough. When war is in play, so is something else, war's various others.
restored and ethnic cleansing resisted? If we are in favour of these goals, how can we resist the wars that aim to achieve them? Does not this make the
The refusal to debate these values results in both an

impotent and unworldly rejection of war, on the one hand, and a mindless acquiescence to
it, on the other. The argument of this book has been that it is necessary to understand the
complexity of the implication of such values in war.
rejection of war merely automatic and adolescent?
Demanding restraint from the state legitimates endless wars waged in the
name of peace.
Nick Mansfield 2006
[Asociate Professor in Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney
theory & event
9:4]
Discussing what is new about the "new wars," Herfried Munkler argues that in the wars that have
developed in the decolonised world: "military force and organised crime go increasingly
together."2He goes on: "The new wars know no distinction between combatants and noncombatants, nor are they fought for any denite goals or purposes; they involve no temporal or
spatial limits on the use of violence."3In the low intensity, asymmetrical conicts Munkler sees as
typical of contemporary war, war is without limits, and has no identiable outside, either in
space or time.
The inverse of this argument is Martin Shaw's identication of one of the key
attributes of "the new Western way of war": "The key understanding, therefore, is that
warghting must be carried on simultaneously with 'normal' economics, politics and social life in
the West. It is imperative it doesnot impact negatively on these."4Western publics only
tolerate a war that can be co-ordinated seamlessly with peace. This is not an alienation of
war from social life, but its absolute co-ordination with it. It is not here a question of
war being kept hidden behind a screen of peaceful social advancement from one day to the
next. Instead, war under this dispensation becomes completely compatible with what we
conventionally understand as peace. In the end, this is what allows the complete saturation
of society by war: the ability to represent the normal unfolding of social life as relatively
undisturbed.
In their discussion of the paradoxes of global political governance, Dillon and
Reid present a more complex account of the inter-relationship between war and peace. Here
liberal governance both provokes and repudiates war. They write: "It . . . seems obvious
that the radical and continuous transformation of societies that global liberal governance so
assiduously seeks must constitute a signicant contribution to the very violence that it equally
also deplores."5Here, global political institutions which have charged themselves with the
task of drawing fragile states into the contemporary world of transparent and open (especially
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nancial) administration which makes them accessible to the ow of international capital,
unsettle societies enough that warfare is risked, while equally bemoaning war as a sign
of institutional failure. The pressure put, for example, on the small states of the Western Pacic
by local powers like Australia both aggravates communal tensions by destabilising inherited
power structures, while bemoaning the subsequent unrest as symptomatic of cultures seen as illequipped for contemporary global modernity.
Each of these accounts presents a different
insight into the various ways in which war and peace co-exist in the contemporary. War totally
inltrates peace, yet war is only allowed when it confirms the apparent inviolability of
peace. The governance that insists on the rationalisation and stabilisation of civic society stokes
instability and war. War is consistently incited in peace while being simultaneously alienated
from it. Peace is administered in such a way that war presses to return, always and
everywhere. But how are we to theorise this possibly epoch-making development? How do our
philosophies of war and peace allow us to represent and consider this development and its
consequences for the future global polity and for the identity of civil society, which, since Hobbes
at least has always relied on the institution of social peace through the containment of war as its
touchstone? The aim of this paper is to present a strand of thinking in modern and postmodern
cultural theory that essays a formulation of the war/peace complex that history now so clearly
proposes to us. It is in the long acknowledged but under-investigated connection between
Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida that one version of the reformulation of the war/peace
complex becomes articulable.
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Pups of War: 2NC Alternative
Liberation requires sacrifice, not a better political program.

Extend Goldhammer 05.
The ecastic experience of sacrifice frees us from utilitarian concern for the
good, forming a sovereign existence not subjugated to the needs of survival.
This forms of a space of political contestation that is the prerequisite to a
sovereign community that is not just endless domination.
Sacrifice enacts a theater of liberation.
Extend Razinsky 09.
Cutting off the head of the USFG challenges its political authority, while
wearing their skins breaks down the wall separating us from others. Sacrifices
radiation burns like the radiation of the sun, allowing an intimate encounter
with death. The encounter with risk not subordinated to productivity or
survival is the only way to access the exuberance that gives life meaning.
Politics is theater, and it usually ends in tragedy.
Only our sacred ecstasy can confront the dark drives pulling us to destruction.
The rational political proposal of the aff brought a knife to a gun-fight.
Jason Winfree, Assoc Prof Philosophy at California State University, 2009
[The Obssessions of George Bataille: Community and Communication ed. Mitchell/Winfree p. 3439]
The character of this psychological structure requires analysis the Left cannot provide, beholden as it is to this side of production. And
the emotive force that binds the energies of fascism, the analysis must extend to the
"emotions that give the masses the surge of power that tear them away from the
domination of those who only know how to lead them on to poverty and to the
slaughterhouse" (OC 1: 409/VE 166), and more generally still, to "what holds us rmly
together, what links our origins to the emotions that constitute it" (OC 1: 404/VE 163). Such is
the only way to remain true to the struggle against capitalism and the various closed systems its
instability provokes-restoration, fascism, nazism, communism. In short, both the political
failures and the structural limitations of the Left require a new understanding, one directed
toward what Bataille calls the "ocean of men in revolt," which alone "can save the world
from the nightmare of impotence and carnage in which it sinks!" (OC 1: 412/yE 168). The ontological
along with
direction of research undertaken by the College has palpable, practical motivations. Walter Benjamin, who attended the College of Sociology regularly,
reportedly worried that it, along with the program of Acphale, lent itself all too readily to fascist and nazi appropriation.' Certainly the "ocean of revolt"
that Bataille suggests might "save the world" is a disquieting response to threats immediately facing human life at the time, threats that clearly drew
upon the very emotional bond that so interests the College. And Bataille himself identies Mussolini and Hitler as heterogeneous elements initially
recalcitrant to homogenous society. Certainly, heterogeneity does not guarantee desirable historical-political outcomes. But Bataille is also clear that the
condensation of power in such gures of authority, "[t]he imperative presence of the leader, amounts to a negation of the fundamental effervescence
that he taps; the revolution, affirmed as a foundation, is, at the same time, fundamentally negated from the moment that internal domination is militarily
exerted on the militia" (OC 1: 362-63/yE 153). The dangers posed by affective emotion and its military constellation, far from requiring a retreat from the
College's position, therefore, calls it forth. Even Benjamin's analysis of the aestheticization of politics---which he evidently began to level against the
College-could not be proffered without this basis of attraction. This is no doubt the sense in which Bataile writes, what the College aims at, and what it
oust
critique is "not merely the ground of an intellectual debate but rather ... precisely
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the theatre where the political tragedy is playing" (CS 159/83). [p. 37] The third crisis that
marks the emergence of the College is, therefore, a crisis of the political itself, the fact that the
most impending problems, in spite of their political shape, do not admit political
solutions. Their miminence makes of the College an exigency. To address the unfathomable
suffering wrought by the violence of limited political life and the established social order, it is
necessary to develop a new, more comprehensive approach. Sacred sociology thus takes as its
topos the "entire conimunifying movement of society" (CS 140/74), aiming at an understanding of the universal community affirmed in the "Programme
(Relative to Acphale)?' The task, in other words, is "to apply intelligence less to so-called political situations and to the logical deductions that ensue,
than to the immediate comprehension of life" (OC 1: 409-10/yE 166). This explicitly ontological task occupies Bataille for the rest of his life, nding
mature theoretical expression in The Accursed Share and Erotisni. During the period of the College, however, this task is developed in particular through
the distinction between elective and traditional communities, and the interest of the College lay almost exclusively with the former. The College thus
determines the ontological direction of its work in terms of an understanding of the relation of the individual and the social order, whose de facto ties are
loosened in proportion to the formation of elective bonds. During the inaugural session of the College, llataille and Caillois east the scope of elective
communities in terms of religious orders and secret societies (and no doubt this is what bothers Benjamin, as though the College abandons the problems
of the day and seeks solutions in secret brotherhoods!). Yet Bataille's development of the notion of elective community tends almost entirely in the
direction of the break with de facto community, on the one hand, and the community of lovers, 4n the other. To the extent that secret societies exemplify
the eld of research undertaken by the College, Bataille is more interested in the secret than he is the societies and religious orders that would provide
for that research a more accessible and determinate object. Obsessed by the "secret" at the heart of our contact with one another, Bataille's interest has
little or nothing to do with that which could be held or shared or protected by a secret organization. In relation to the two determinations of community
set forth by the College-traditional and elective-the tragic human being and the lover, respectively, therefore, bear more and more the burden of
Bataille's revolution. The contestation of community becomes less and less programmatic and at the
same time, more fateful, its possibility belonging to the ontology of social life at the very point where action, will, and understanding discover their limits,
and where this discovery is
devoid of transcendence and the possibility of recuperative
accumulation.
Thematically explicit in the title of a lecture Caillois was unable to deliver-" Brotherhoods, Orders, Secret Societies, Churches"-it
is therefore [p. 38] remarkable and telling that Bataille's introduction to the event focuses on concerns altogether different from those Caillois intended
three types of human

being, three types of relation to de facto or traditional community, which at the same time
successively correspond to the three crises described above. The rst type, the "armed lout,
aims at expelling everything foreign, forcing it to the outside, and he dominates the war,
sustains it, as it were, and in doing so no doubt motivates the formation of the College. Like the
"armed lout," the "man of law and discourse:' the second type, is also motivated by the
threat of impotence, but his action is itself impotent and inevitably serves the inertia
of arms. Because he perpetuates that against which he fights, the "man of law and
discourse" is for Bataille a comic figure, like the fool who impotently wipes the shit from
his shoe on his own carpet, ineptly spreading what repulses him, like leftist revolutionaries
carrying the value of production into the revolution, or carrying the revolution into the
state-sponsored halls of negotiation. Bataille writes, "Deep down 1 think there is something
wretched, something obnoxious, about opposing a reality, such as the one threatening
human existence today, with discourses alone, assertions of law, a whole blaring discord and
the armies belonging to this discourse and this discord. I do not believe it is possible to oppose
the rule of arms with anything except some other rule: and, other than the rule of arms, only
that of tragedy exists" (CS 271/147). The third type, tragedy, is thus born from the
impotence of human life in the face of blind and indifferent forces of nature, politics, or
history. Both the structure of an event and a comportment in relation to the event, tragedy
opposes the world of work and production and will as the necessary exposure to a
recalcitrant and unworkable chance, what Bataille calls the "sovereignty of existence laid
bare. Tragedy exposes the impotence of action, the fact that action always serves ends
other than its own, that even its accomplishments are impoverished. "The neophyte
learns that [even] the will to efficacious action is one that limits itself to dismal dreams," says
Bataille (OC 1: 528/VE 226).
to address. Rather than speak about the character of clandestine organizations, Bataille describes instead
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Pups of War: AT: Coalitions

They cant perm because we have delcared war. At best their strategic
alliance instrumentalizes the glories of sacrifice, betraying the ows of rage
and hope that makes politics possible.
"WE ARE FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS and, to the extent that our existence is the condemnation of everything that is recognized today, an inner exigency
demands that we be equally imperious. What we are starting is a war. It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light. It is too late
to be reasonable and educated-which has led to a life without appeal. Secretly or not, it is
necessary to become completely different, or to cease being" (OC 1: 443/VE 179). Because it is explicitly
mentioned, it is tempting to take the religiosity of the statement as self-evident. However, nothing is further from the truth. For what alone is
unmistakable here is the ferocity of the articulation-erce not because it is designated so, but because of its mood, urgency, and pronounced
the force of contestation [p. 33] that is unmistakable in these lines, and it
requires and effects a radical abandonment of that category of value that denes and
justifies both religious and political discourse: education. Bataille's concern here is not for the sake of a common
combative character. It is
good, already determined in advance and without question in the direction of upbuilding and formation, the good of the social order and the fulllment of
life has been

dulled, deadened, and muted by the social bonds common to and developed through the
communal or social forces of religion and politics alike, forces of normalization, security,
and the accumulation of wealth. Bataille's call to form a community is at once and unequivocally a call for the destruction of community
individual talent in its service. His concern here is rather a question of life and death. And there is a profound sense that
in any traditional sense, It is a call to do away with the bonds we most readily and thoughtlessly dene as communal. Item 7 of the "Programme" reads:
"Fight for the decomposition and exclusion of all communities, national, socialist,
communist or churchly-other than universal community" (OC 2: 275/BR 121). It is a call
for revolution. From the vantage point of apologists for capital or bourgeois democracy (and is there really a difference?), there could be no
distinction between these demands and those of militant revolutionaries, be they conunuuist, socialist, or anarchistic. For Bataille, however, the need
to become completely different, or cease being, requires a break from the formative
dimension of revolutionary activity, its participation in congresses and talks, its
displacement of debate from the space of the streets to the hallways of negotiation.
The entire force of revolutionary creativity rests for Bataille in the emotional bond that
wells up within the masses as refusal, the atmosphere of hope and rage that swells like
an uncontainable wave. The need to become completely different requires the
abandonment of political process--defined as it necessarily and inevitably is by those who
already have a voice but not political practice. It is a refusal to concede that political thought and action must occur
within the sphere of established discourse, which begins with distrust, "a complete lack of condence in the
spontaneous reactions of the masses," and which in this way, at just this point, unites militant
revolutionaries and bourgeois intellectuals alike. Thus, Bataille can say at once, "it is necessary to produce and to eat:
many things are necessary that are still nothing, and so it is with political agitation" (OC 1: 403/VE I 62).And at the same time: "When we
speak to those who want to hear us, we do not essentially address their political
finesse. The reactions we hope for from them are not calculations of positions, nor are
they new political alliances. What we hope for is of a different nature.' What Bataille hopes for is an affirmation of the bond that
does not belong to discourse, production, or accumulation; a confrontation with the impotence perpetuated by traditional social structures of nationality,
religion, party, and the like; a mobilization of hope and rage incomprehensible [p. 34] and irresponsible to everyone who tethers the question of the
political to the axis of security. It is a contestation of the "morally empty and materially miserable life" perpetuated and sustained by institutional
structures of power and their widespread internalization (OC 1: 402/VP 161). Undoubtedly, the "Programme" is destined to fail, if it really is a program at
all. [tens 3 highlights this difficulty, stating, "Assume the function of destruction and decomposition, but as accomplishment and not as the negation of
being" (OC 2: 275/BR 121). The demand not only poses insurmountable structural difficulties of understanding: how destruction could be deprived of its
Contributing
nothing worthy or capable of appropriation by the established order-that of discourse,
the accumulation of wealth, the value of security, and so on-it beckons its own destruction. For it
negative work, how it could be taken as an achievement in any positive sense. It also articulates a real political problem.
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addresses itself solely to the raw violent drives society either represses or sublimates. What is
more, not only does the "Programme" addresse itself to those drives, but it also gives them expression, and it deploys them in its very call. Its call to
Its refusal to calmly suffer for a placid future, its rejection of all
political projects that sacrifice the present for an indenite and impossible end, its demand to "[c]onsider the world to
affirm crime is itself criminal.5
come in the sense of reality contained as of now, and not in the sense of a permanent happiness which is not only inaccessible, but hateful"-in each of
deploys the
form of program to effect a cut with everything every program supposes. Community
is not an idea or concept, an aim or goal, nor is it an extant dimension of social reality. It is a
declaration of war.
these affirmations, this project tears itself apart as project. What looks like a program is in fact a heterological operation, one that
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***Just Cerberus
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Cerberus: Link Framing

Kritik turns the case. The knowledge behind the 1AC excess thrown off by the
international system, ensuring plan becomes a way to wage new wars in the
name of peace.
Suhail Malik 2006
[teaches in the Department of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths College
Theory Culture Society v.23 2-3]
Abstract Taking globalization to be in large part a consequence of American domination,

we follow Derridas characterization of this domination as being a mode of sovereignty of worldscale institutions and force. Such sovereignty, which is also a roguery, is the primary actual
condition for a global knowledge. Batailles characterization of rogue sovereignty, however,
proposes that knowledge is eclipsed under such a condition by an experience that is irreducibly
an unknowing. Knowledge is thus corroded by or, at best, in a critical relation to the
manifestation of a global experience generated by the actual conditions of globalization. It is
relatively uncontroversial to propose that global knowledge as a project, as a fact is consequent to the process of globalization that has taken place
under this name since the 1980s or thereabouts. But this obvious remark immediately indexes a question as to what knowledge could in fact be if it is
subject to this process. There are two aspects to this question. The rst, which we do not address here, concerns the very great difficulties that the
global as a name or modality of ultimate extension poses for a rational tradition in which knowledge is (or has) a universal or absolute foundation. The
second is what the current actuality of the term global, its historical constitution, means for anything that could be called global knowledge. This will
specifics or content of knowledge are extended and

transformed by globalization, as a maximum world-limit of any knowledge-base,
-distribution, or -contestation. The question is whether what knowledge is also transforms
in this process. It is proposed here that it does since global knowledge relies on the historical
conditions of globalization for its realization and reconguration of knowledge, and these
conditions are in turn primarily (which is not to say exclusively) occasioned and
promulgated by Americas global dominance which, in a complex manner, is sovereignly constituted. The following
be our primary concern. It is self-evident that the
paragraphs attempt to schematize in the most rudimentary fashion this determination of what globalization qua Americas sovereign domination means
for the possibility of global knowledge. The brevity of this contribution permits only the signalling of several hypotheses regarding global knowledge as
it is thus occasioned. These hypotheses are consequent to the central issue that arises in the course of the following pages: whether in fact there can be
knowledge at all in the condition of the global, or if the experience of that condition leads to the eclipse of knowledge. Accepting for the sake of speed
the commonplace that political-economic globalization has been and continues to be secured and mobilized enormously by and for American interests,
the question remains as to what Americas dominance is in

this relatively new inter- and trans-national conguration of economic, political and cultural
interests in short, how does the USA globally dominate? There is of course an enormous literature on this,
sometimes under the name of neo-liberalism,
some of whose proposals can be signalled by terms such as Empire, hegemony, security, and, of course, globalization itself. However, in order to
address the specic characterization of American sovereignty as primary condition for globalization, we take up the less familiar account of US
dominance as a voyoucracy proposed by Jacques Derrida. Derrida takes up the term on the basis of the French translation for the phrase rogue state
as tat voyou and from the French mid-19th-century bourgeois use of the term in order to denounce an illegal and outlaw power that brings
together . .. all those who represent a principle of disorder a principle not of anarchic chaos but of structured disorder, so to speak, of plotting and
conspiracy, of primordial offensiveness and offences against public order (Derrida, 2005: 66). The phrase rogue state is also used to denounce states
that also represented a principle of disorder or of terrorism in the eyes of the USA and other supposedly legitimate states, as Derrida calls them,
whose own legitimacy is founded in respect [of] an international law that they have the power to control for example, in the modern and complex
formation of a heterogeneous
but oftentimes closely knit and tightly bound group like the United States, the United Nations, and the Security Council, even NATO (to which one might
add for good measure alliances and coalitions like the G8, the IMF, and so on). (Derrida, 2005: 68) The denunciation of rogue states is thus structurally
homologous to the bourgeois denunciation of a voyoucracy in order to secure their own legitimacy (to legitimate, if it can be put this way). What is
globalization was
being affirmed and instigated by the Clinton administration in its early years through national
and international institutions. That is, rogue states are an indispensable designation for the
securing of the claim to international legitimacy for globalization, by which is therefore meant
a certain global order (for which terrorism is a central rhetorical and factual operation,
critical here is that the phrase rogue states came to have prominence exactly as the term and strategic policy of
as Derrida mentions, 2005: 66). Of the many ramications of this (de)legitimation strategy only two will be taken up here: rst the characterization of a
voyoucracy and second what purchase on legitimacy is retroac- tively granted by the term on the powers that mobilize it. First, then, it is to be noted
that a voyoucracy is not an outright abandonment of order but is (presented as) the power or force (a kratos) of an illegitimate and quasi-criminal
(voyou) counter-order. Voyoucracy signals a sovereignty exorbitant to the legitimate sovereignty of the State and law in the national or international
domain. The denunciation of rogue states is thus a matter of one kind of sovereignty against another, of legitimate against so-designated illegitimate
sovereignties. To this end Derrida remarks in passing that if the voyou-cracy represents a power, a challenge to the power of the State, a criminal and
transgressive countersovereignty, we have here all the makings of a counterconcept of sovereignty such as we might nd in Bataille (2005: 678). We
will return in due course to this particular characterization of a voyoucracy since it will bring us directly to the problem of whether a global knowledge
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international and national legitimacy and illegitimacy as it is proclaimed

and insti- tutionalized by dominant powers relies on a discourse and politics of
democracy and freedom or, in so-said contrary rogue political formation, their deprivation. This is evident in the charters and ambitions of
international institutions such as the UN, NATO, the G8, the IMF, the EU and also, notably, for the USA too. Democracy is in this way a
legitimation of international power, the democracy-globalization coupling serving to secure
international political and economic dominance by already powerful states (which is why Chinas
can be established. Second,
economic might and limited democratic polity presents a more vexed problem for globalization under this aegis than, say, India or Brazil).
The aff stokes the fires of war. At best their so-called peace will seethe with
limitless violence.
Nick Mansfield 2006
theory & event
9:4]
. Dealing with the enemy becomes a mere extension of police work. In return, the
domestic street is notionally militarized. This slippage allows both war and policing to be
justied as mere analogies to one another: how can you contest the war against terror
when it is really just a version of the police work that makes you feel safe in your home?
And inversely, how can you possibly doubt the legitimacy of policing when it is really a
version of the war fought against those who despise liberty and threaten innocence?
It is a truism to say that each war redenes the nature of war itself, due to changes in arms
technology, military organisation or geo-strategic history. The long war of terror is no exception,
but what is most new about it, and what makes it most t its age, is that it promises the
erasure of the difference between war and peace, and concomitantly between war and civil society: terrorists and
criminals swap identity, emerge anywhere at any time and are imputed to share a hostility to the whole Western way of life. This rhetorical slippage,
however, conrms what many theorists of war have been proposing in different ways for a long time. We will no longer have war and peace in the future,
social policy, diplomatic manipulation and

military strategy exchange characteristics, contriving enemies at home, representing
political antagonists abroad as criminals, and abolishing not only the idea of a military
frontier, but of warfare itself as simply a matter of literal or possible armed conict. In the
future, the question will be not "Why did we choose war instead of peace?" but "What
configuration of the peace-war complex embroils us now? " Discussing what is new about the "new
but ever more complex entanglements of one in the other, where
wars," Herfried Munkler argues that in the wars that have developed in the decolonised world: "military force and organised crime go increasingly
together."2He goes on: "The new wars know no distinction between combatants and non-combatants, nor are they fought for any denite goals or
purposes; they involve no temporal or spatial limits on the use of violence."3In the low intensity, asymmetrical conicts Munkler sees as typical of
contemporary war, war is without limits, and has no identifiable outside, either in space or time.
The
inverse of this argument is Martin Shaw's identication of one of the key attributes of "the new Western way of war": "The key understanding, therefore,
is that warghting must be carried on simultaneously with 'normal' economics, politics and social life in the West. It is imperative it doesnot impact
negatively on these."4Western publics only tolerate a war that can be co-ordinated seamlessly with peace. This is not an alienation of war from social
life, but its absolute co-ordination with it. It is not here a question of war being kept hidden behind a screen of peaceful social advancement from one
day to the next. Instead, war under this dispensation becomes completely compatible with what we conventionally understand as peace. In the end, this
is what allows the complete saturation of society by war: the ability to represent the normal unfolding of social life as relatively undisturbed.
In their
discussion of the paradoxes of global political governance, Dillon and Reid present a more complex account of the inter-relationship between war and
liberal governance both provokes and repudiates war. They write: "It . . . seems
obvious that the radical and continuous transformation of societies that global liberal governance
so assiduously seeks must constitute a signicant contribution to the very violence that it equally
also deplores."5Here, global political institutions which have charged themselves with the
task of drawing fragile states into the contemporary world of transparent and open (especially
nancial) administration which makes them accessible to the ow of international capital,
unsettle societies enough that warfare is risked, while equally bemoaning war as a sign of
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institutional failure. The pressure put, for example, on the small states of the Western Pacic by local powers like Australia both aggravates communal
tensions by destabilising inherited power structures, while bemoaning the subsequent unrest as symptomatic of cultures seen as ill-equipped for
contemporary global modernity.
Each of these accounts presents a different insight into the various ways in which war and peace co-exist in the
War totally inltrates peace, yet war is only allowed when it confirms the apparent
inviolability of peace. The governance that insists on the rationalisation and stabilisation
of civic society stokes instability and war. War is consistently incited in peace while being
simultaneously alienated from it. Peace is administered in such a way that war presses to
return, always and everywhere. But how are we to theorise this possibly epoch-making
development?
contemporary.
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Cerberus 2NC Alternative

Liberation requires sacrifice, not a better political program.
Extend Goldhammer 05.
The ecastic experience of sacrifice frees us from utilitarian concern for the
good, forming a sovereign existence not subjugated to the needs of survival.
This forms of a space of political contestation that is the prerequisite to a
sovereign community that is not just endless domination.
Sacrifice enacts a theater of liberation.
Extend Razinsky 09.
Cutting off the head of the USFG challenges its political authority, while
wearing their skins breaks down the wall separating us from others. Sacrifices
radiation burns like the radiation of the sun, allowing an intimate encounter
with death. The encounter with risk not subordinated to productivity or
survival is the only way to access the exuberance that gives life meaning.
No one knows what is coming.

History throws off ecastic revolutions, sacred moments of transformation that
disprove the cynicism of bitter realism.
Edgar Morin 2006

[Morin founded and directed the magazine Arguments (1954-1962). In 1959 his book Autocritique was published. In
1969, Morin spent a year at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. In 1983, he published De la
nature de lURSS, which deepened his analysis of Soviet communism and anticipated the Perestroika of Mikhail
Gorbachev. Morin was married to Johanne Harrelle, with whom he lived for 15 years. In 2002, Morin participated in the
creation of the International Ethical, Scientic and Political Collegium.
Realism and Utopia Diogenes 2006 v 53 p. 135-144]
As the idea of a determinist order of the world and of History has completely
collapsed, you are obliged to confront uncertainty on all sides; as the limits of the reductive
and compartmentalized mode of thinking are revealed more and more, you have to try to grasp
the complex in the literal sense of the word complexus meaning that which is woven together.
Blaise Pascal, in the 17th century, was already expressing what ought to be self-evident: All
things, even the most separated from one another, are imperceptibly linked one to the other,
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all things assist and are assisted, cause and are caused an idea which already
introduces the sense of reciprocity. Pascal goes on: I consider it impossible to know the
parts if I do not know the whole, as it is impossible to know the whole if I do not know each part individually.
Pillz
Pascal understood that knowledge was a shuttle passing from the whole to the parts and from the parts to the whole; it was the link
element, that is, the capacity to contextualize, to situate an item of knowledge and an item of information within a context such
that they might take on meaning. Why is it becoming more and more difficult for us to make use of our cognitive aptitudes which
always function through contextualization and tting things into wholes? Because, in effect, we are now living in a global era; the
problems are ever more linked one with another and are more and more vast. But it is especially because we are more and more
under the inuence of disjunctive, reductive and linear thought. We have retained not the words of Pascal but those of Descartes,
that is, that you have to break down things into their component parts in order to know them. As soon as you have elements which
pose problems within a system, you have to separate out the problems; you solve the different problems individually and then you
have the solution for the whole. You have to separate science and philosophy, you have to keep disciplines apart . . . yes, but on
condition that they can link together again; whereas, today, there is a separation and compartmentalization that is hermetic. There
is a disjunction between the humanist culture that of the humanities, that which makes us reect and think and so enriches us
and the compartmentalized scientic culture. And it is a fact that this disjunction has spread everywhere, even into politics. It is
this fragmentary mode of thought which dominates, and which encloses the fragments within the world, whereas the other form of
techno-scientific
thought which takes no account of creatures, people and cultures is clearly incapable of
understanding the problems of these socio-centric human groupings; in the same way as
such socio-centric groupings are incapable of realizing the problems associated with
technicity. All of which today puts us in a very serious situation. From this point of view, the
imperative is to create connections.
thought will dissect the world longitudinally, in slices related to economics, technology and so on. This
Creating connections is what complex thought strives to do. In the sphere of politics and human activity, my diagnosis is that we are witnessing a
struggle between the forces of association and the forces of dislocation. Solidarity or barbarity .
We are going to burst asunder

from a want of solidarity; we will burst asunder from a failure to reform our way of
thinking. To what extent is it a problem of thought? To the extent that the classic alternatives
block our thought. Realism and utopia are two antinomies that are mutually exclusive
according to our received way of thinking. If you are realists, you cant be utopians. If you are
utopians, you are excluded from realism. It is the same thing for unicity and multiplicity. The
proponents of the former can but homogenize everything and unify the world in the abstract.
Those arguing for the latter certainly perceive the worlds diversity, but they see it as
compartmentalized. The problem lies in the impossibility of escaping these selfdestructive alternatives, in the impossibility of thinking complexity. But this is the great challenge that faces us. Towards an anthropolitics
Solidarity or barbarity is an alternative which derives its sense not just from the sphere of the immediate, the concrete, the local, the experienced, but also from the European
and global spheres. Wherever this debate is taking place, it obliges us to line up on the side of the forces of association and solidarity in the hope that they will prove stronger
than the opposing forces of rupture, dislocation and wilful con- cealment. It impels us to be part of a movement which, if it is not broken, perhaps will no longer lead us to the
best of all possible worlds, but may usher in the hope of a better world. Though we must set aside the messianic illusion of a radiant future, we can nevertheless nourish the
hope of such a better world, even while recognizing that this hope may never be entirely fullled. For me, the terrestrial homeland takes shape in the realization that all of us
human beings are derived from the same trunk, born of the same matrix the earth through our biological evolution. It is the awareness that we share the same identity and
that, across our cultural diversities, made even more apparent since we have entered the global age, all human beings share the one destiny in relation to the great problems of
life and death. It was this type of awareness that elicited the consciousness of belonging to a homeland. Otto Bauer,6 at the end of the 19th century, dened the homeland as a
community of destiny, but which encapsulated the idea of a common identity across a culture, sharing a common, mythological, origin, tracing back to a common mythic
ancestor. But in my terrestrial homeland, the ancestor is not at all mythical, he is a little bipedal creature. In him we nd the grandfather of all. This idea of a common humanity
and of a homeland co-extensive with the earth is both very realist, since it is based on an anthropological identity, but also very rational, given the challenges of life and death
which confront us all. It could even be called religious in the sense that picks up the etymological origin of this term (Lat. religio = a binding together) by binding all
humankind into a fraternity. Within our nation, as within Europe and throughout the whole world, we are having to confront immense problems. Socialism believed that the ills
that afflicted humanity were the work of a single monster, capitalism: suppress capitalism and all these ills would also be suppressed. But we have seen that that did not
suppress wars, nor did it suppress exploitation. We have come to realize that there is not just one monster, but a number of them. And they are not mini-monsters, they are
more and more enormous in size: the technobureaucratic monster, the monster of the uncontrolled spread of technoscience . . . all these reverberate within daily life and create
deep-seated ills. Our well-being is becoming a situation of ill-being. We should not forget to diagnose the weakness of political thought of the Left which, after the organic
collapse of Marxism, found itself incapable of rethinking the historical problem of mankind in society and of envisaging a positive politics of history. When socialism was
formulated in the 19th century, it grew out of an historical perspective. Today, such an historical perspective is once again necessary. I am afraid that, in the absence of a single
unifying concept, if a sudden and violent crisis occurred, we would have to suffer catastrophic consequences. If a very great crisis were to come, we would not be sheltered from
its terror. When the great crisis of 1929 struck, and Germany was frightfully smitten with conditions not only more severe than elsewhere but also exacerbated by the context of
national humiliation in which they occurred, the world witnessed the rise of Nazism within an environment of complete legality. It must also be recognized, however, that the
same period saw Roosevelts New Deal providing an alternative democratic solution. Why the New Dealworked was perhaps because the United States was a country of
immigrants. We are urged to be vigilant, without opening the door to the improbable. Even recently we have had great expectations. But of what? There were the expectations
of the general spread of democracy, of the emergence from an economy of constraint and poverty. There was hope that the United Nations could perhaps function properly.
Such hopes arose not only in relation to the demise of the USSR, but also in Africa and Latin America where dictatorships were falling. But the springtime of the peoples in 1848
was followed by a terrible repression. That of the last century has seen a terrible regression.
We can no longer continue to nourish disproportionate hopes, like those crazy
hopes we in France had at the Liberation. We were coming out from under the yoke of Nazism, but our great aspirations were rapidly disappointed. So, does that
mean that we are always likely to be disenchanted, seeing our hopes reduced to despair? In a
word, no. I believe that we must live to the full the ecstatic moments of history; they are
the consolation of so many years of mediocrity. I experienced the Liberation of Paris. May
1968 was a little moment of historical delight that I also enjoyed. I was fortunate to be in
Lisbon at the time of the Carnation Revolution. As for the fall of the Berlin Wall,
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unfortunately I was only able to experience it by proxy, not being present, but I was happy to
see Rostropovitch playing in front of the Wall. Life is bearable only if one can introduce into
it not a utopia but poetry, that is, an intensity, a sense of festival, of joy, communion,
happiness and love. There is an ecstasy of history which is a collective ecstasy of love. Francesco Alberoni, in
Falling in Love7 whose wonderfully untranslatable Italian title is Innamoramento e amore describing that marvellous, ecstatic moment when love
comes upon one, wrote: Nascent revolutions are moments of falling in love. Its a phrase I like quoting. But such revolutions are not the nal struggle,
they are the initial struggle. I might even say the struggle before the initial struggle. They are the curtain-raiser, even, to the initial struggle. Why?
Because what is needed is a formidable effort of intellectual reconstruction, a whole new way of thinking, even; we must show ourselves t and able
we have a
clear idea of what we want, what we aspire after, and so we wager on its realization
even though we may fear that our ideas will be defeated. The second is through application of strategy:
to confront the challenge of the uncertain, and there are two ways by which it may be confronted. The rst is by way of a wager:
in
other words, the ability, in terms of information received and chances met, to modify our manner of advancing. Resistance is not something purely
negative. It does not consist simply in opposing oppressive forces, but it looks ahead to liberations. It is the Polish example, its the example of the
Soviet people, its the example of occupied France. Resistance has an inherent virtue.
We are condemned to resist. What I

call living life is not just living poetically, it is also knowing how to resist in life. Heraclitus
said: If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it. We come back to the idea of the
possible impossible, which we must explore in depth.
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Cerberus: AT: Realism

Their realism is not realistic enough. We acknowledge the inevitability of
violence, and they are the ones being nave about the rationality and restraint
of the state. International relations is war, not the well-organized machine
presented by the 1AC.
The collapse of communism proves the futility of realisms predictions. Its
false inevitability admits defeat in advance, blind to the ecastic possibilities of
the present.
Edgar Morin 2006
[Morin founded and directed the magazine Arguments (1954-1962). In 1959 his book Autocritique was published. In
1960, Morin travelled extensively in Latin America, visiting Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Mexico.He returned to France
where he published L'Esprit du Temps. That same year, French sociologist Georges Friedmann brought him and Roland
Barthes together to create a Centre for the Study of Mass Communication that, after several name-changes, became
the Edgar Morin Centre of the EHESS, Paris[2]. Beginning in 1965, Morin became involved in a large multidisciplinary
project, nanced by the Dlgation Gnrale la Recherche Scientique et Technologique in Plozvet. In 1968, Morin
replaced Henri Lefebvre at the University of Nanterre. He became involved in the student revolts that began to emerge
in France. In May 1968, he wrote a series of articles for Le Monde that tried to understand what he called "The Student
Commune." He followed the student revolt closely and wrote a second series of articles in Le Monde called "The
Revolution without a Face," as well as co-authoring Mai 68: La brche with Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort[3]. In
1969, Morin spent a year at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. In 1983, he published De la
nature de lURSS, which deepened his analysis of Soviet communism and anticipated the Perestroika of Mikhail
Gorbachev. Morin was married to Johanne Harrelle, with whom he lived for 15 years. In 2002, Morin participated in the
creation of the International Ethical, Scientic and Political Collegium.
Realism and Utopia Diogenes 2006 v 53 p. 135-144]

So what can we do to avoid being deceived by such pseudo-realists whose attitudes are in
fact totally utopian? How can we stop ourselves from simply saying: Well, yes, if something
cannot be made real it must be purely utopian . . ., and not thus become mired in a
realism which cannot see beyond itself? The very present itself has an enigmatic and uncertain
face. This is detectable even in the West. Everything that seems solid and functional is yet
capable of falling apart. The present remains unknowable. We are living in a sort of cyclonic
low-pressure zone. We get the feeling that the storm is about to burst at any moment, but then
no, it doesnt, it seems to move away. And then, wait on, it hasnt really moved away at all. We
dont really know what is going to happen. The present is the realm of uncertainty.
Regarding the post-communist period, it is interesting to see just how surprising, or
unsurprising, things turn out to be. The Russian historian Yuri Afanasevs3 analysis brings to
light that once that gigantic apparatus that was the Soviet State became fragmented
into a thousand pieces, each of the pieces changed into a little capitalist entity. Realpolitikand the politics of the ideal To paraphrase Rimbaud: I have made the magic study Of
happiness . . . one might say: I have made the interminable study Of the real. To be able to
diagnose what the real consists of today, other sources of illumination would be necessary. But
the subject is inexhaustible. The first thing is to reject trivial realism, which insists that
we must adapt to the immediate, to the established order, to the fait accompli and admit
the victory of the victorious. But beyond such trivial realism, what remains? We need to
recognize that the real is swarming with possibilities and we have no way of knowing
what may emerge from it, nor how to choose ones own purposive direction or situate
oneself in relation to it. Within the sphere of human reality, the imaginary, the
mythological and of course the affective all cohabit together, something that the
compartmentalization of the social and human sciences does not sufficiently take into
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account. As for economics, it is much too rened a science. Why? Because its object is
expressed in figures and quantities. But from such perfection, esh, blood, passion,
suffering, happiness and cultural expression have all been abstracted away. Therein lies
the problem of todays reality, where politics, the art of the polis, has been made entirely
subservient to economics, the art of the kosor household. To rediscover true reality, we have
to be restored to a state of responsibility as subjects. It may be a commonplace to say so, but it
must be constantly repeated: any knowledge be it of an object or a crowd-lled lecture
theatre is a translation and a reconstruction. Of course, one can be deceived by
hallucinations, one can be in error, but there is no knowledge which is a photographic
reection of what is real. Admittedly, knowledge in the form of ideas and theories is a
translation/reconstruction of the real in a rened form, but this also can carry with it enormous
illusion and error. Such illusions are the stuff of the whole of human history. Marx and Engels
said that the history of humanity was that of the errors and illusions that human beings had
made about themselves and about what they had achieved. But in so saying, they also
committed the same types of errors and had the same illusions. So is it not worthwhile saying to
oneself: Cant we at least try to react? Quite clearly, all knowledge is interpretation. The illusion
lies in saying: I will call real what I think is real; that is to say: I label as realism that which
derives from my personal conception of the real. Reality, even at its most objective, always has
a cognitive and subjective element to it. To truly know reality, what is required is a subject
capable of thinking critically within his/her own limited personal mental space, and then,
through that ability, being capable of questioning the truths which present as self-evident
within the doctrinal system into which they are incorporated. It might be added that the
discrediting of all individually autonomous moralities and all autonomous assertions of
responsibility is the common feature of all belligerent nationalisms and all totalitarian
systems, from stalinism to nazism.
Even if realism has validity, that doesnt prove the 1AC is claims are right. It
does NOT prove that the aff doesnt reproduce the violent excesses leading to
our destruction.
Even if realism possesses truth, it is fragmentary and willfully ignorant about
its own limits. Only a sacred methodology has a chance of understanding the
international.
Stephen Chan 2000
[Professor IR Dean Ethics at Notingham Trent University, Millennium Vol. 29, No. 3, pp. 565-589]
Preconditions For Writing a Sacral IR

The difficulty of writing an essay such as this is that it feels like the writing of fragments, only
because the fragments are, within a particular discipline, unknown. That the discipline o
stensibly concerns itself with the international makes the writing of such fragments tragic, or
perhaps pathetic. Yet, it is IR that is a borrowing discipline. It cannot claim its borrowing of
Kant and Hegelnever mind Nietzscheis for instance more than fragmentary. The tragedy
lies in its circumscribed choice of fragments, and this circumscription is a repudiation of
the international, and nally a repudiation of knowledge. The compound tragedy is that
the fragmentary borrowing, the circumscription, and the repudiation are advertised as
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an unending and recurring quest for truth; but this truth can only ever, under such co
nditions, be fragmentary and circumscribed. Truth as monolitheven if it fades and recurs
and truth-seeking as aristocratic, are conceits. I have tried to illustrate in this essay both the
subjectivity and self- reexive subjectivity o f any search for truth, and to o ffset the oriental
stories with kno wled ge fro m Western disciplines and thinkers o utside IR. More to the point, I
have tried to illustrate the desirability of various truths, and ho w the multiplicity of them sho
uld be contextualised within a quest for good. Not only that, but the telling of truths, and the
quest for good, establish an intersubjectivity which is amenable to a hermeneutics, as
Ricoeur suggested, mo st plausibly established in art and stories. Thus, if the reader has
an aversion to Tibetan devotional statuary, he or she still has the injunctions of IRs Roland
Bleiker, which are injunctions towards the freely co mpositional.48 But it is not enough merely to
tell stories. I am saying here that, in its rush to secularity, IR has forgotten the need to tell
stories that are sacralthat are compositions towards the sacredand which are
reectivities upon long and different histories of establishing the conditions of goodness and,
yes, o f truth/s. It is the methodologies o f reection that, I propose, exist in the world s cultures
as sacral devices. Nietzsche was right about the divided cogito, but did not infuse his
Zarathustra sufficiently with it. Zarathustras exposure to the world are exposures only to
provide him with to uchstones that reassert his o wn rightness. There is none of the irony of a
Subcomandante Marcos, and his sense of co mp assion to all those who are imperfect before it is
less than developed. Nietzsches creation is, nally, an assertion in the face o f the world, and
not a Tibetan Boddhisattva who chooses very deliberately to remain within it. He has, in
Ricoeurs terms, no intersubjectivity; in Kngs terms, no ethic for the world which disgusts him;
and, in Eliades terms, departs the moral depredations of the world by giving in to his o wn
temptation of Superhumanity as constant recurrence. He does not constantly recur in the world,
but is engaged in continually approaching a truth that is beyond the world s detritus.
This is not nihilistic, but only in the sense that it is beyond the context of nihilism: the
world of struggle and the world of the international. To be in good, rather than becoming
in truth, is the distinction drawn here between Nietzsches Zarathustra and Tibets Avalokitsvara.
These are choices of stories, yes? And both are written sacrally, debating the methodologies
towards transcending the material and secular. Only one of them, having the capacity to
complete transcendence, draws back to live within the inco mplete: to attain not sacredness,
but a conditio n of perpetual sacrality. This perpetual state draws from and prosecutes the cause
of good, and this good is not the subject or object of discourse: it is kno wn by simple
intersubjective experience. Finally, in his completed ethic, Kng got it right. There is nothing
co mplicated about this. Good is simply so mething done. The trick, beyo nd IR, is simply that it
can be done in one thousand truthful ways.
Realism is mythology, blind to its reliance on untestable stories to make sense

of vast array of empirical evidence The K solves best for IR methodology and
education.
Cynthia Weber 2005
[Professor IR at Lancaster University, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction p. xvixvii]
What, for example makes realism's story about sovereign nation-states locked into a
battle for survival or idealism's story about the possibilities of international cooperation so
compelling? In this book I suggest that what makes these IR stories appear to be true are the IR
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myths upon which they are based. IR myths are apparent truths, usually expressed as
slogans, that IR traditions rely upon in order to appear to be true. The 'truth' or the
'falsity' of an IR myth is beside the point. Examining how an IR myth functions to make an IR
tradition appear to be true is the point. So, for example, the IR myth 'international anarchy is the
permissive cause of war' is the apparent truth that realism and these days neorealism depend
upon. Similarly, 'there is an international society' is the IR myth that makes the stories told by
idealism and neoidealism appear to be true. None of this should come as a surprise to IR
theorists. We know that different IR traditions rely upon very different IR myths in order to
appear to be true. So how do we make sense of these contradictory ways of seeing the world for
our students? The usual strategy is to test' the validity of the IR myths against the 'facts'
of inter national politics to determine which IR myth (and therefore which IR tradition) offers the most accurate description of
international politics. Proving that an IR myth, tradition, or theory is wrong so that it can be replaced by another one which is 'true' is usually what we
mean by doing 'critical IR theory'. But what if we push our analysis just a bit further? What if we unpack not just IR traditions but the IR myths upon
which they are based? What if we ask of IR myths (as we do of IR traditions), what makes the story they tell about international politics appear to be
true? What makes international anarchy appear to he the permissive cause of war, or why does there appear to be an international society? If we pursue
these questions, then we not only push our analysis of IR traditions further. We push what it means to do 'critical JR theory'. Why is this the case?
Because the alternative way of doing critical JR theory proposed in this book allows us to examine not only how one 'truth' replaces another 'truth' but
also how 'truths' get constructed. This is beyond the scope of most traditional critical IR theory which concerns itself only with evaluating which 'truth'
appears to be most 'true'. By declaring one theory 'true' and another one 'false', traditional critical IR theory cannot then go back and examine what
realism critiques idealism by 'proving' that its IR

myth, 'international anarchy is the permissive cause of war', is 'more true' than idealism's
myth, 'there is an international society'. But, in so doing, realism cannot ask what makes
its IR myth about international anarchy appear to be true. And. without critically
analysing its own IR myth, realism ultimately proves nothing. Asserting the 'truth' of
one IR myth over another in no way guarantees the 'truth' of an IR myth, no matter how
much empirical evidence is amassed to support the 'truth' of the myth. This is the case
because the 'truth' of an IR myth depends as much upon how empirical evidence is
organized into a coherent story about international politics as it does on the evidence
alone. This is a central problem with how critical theory is usually practised in the discipline of international relations. International Relations Theory
makes the 'true' theory appear to be true. For example,
takes this problem seriously. How it takes it seriously is by shifting its analytical emphasis away from looking for 'empirical evidence' to support the
'truth' of an IR myth towards an investigation of the organization of the 'facts' that make an IR story about international politics appear to be true. Doing
critical IR theory in this way means we have to suspend our usual preoccupation with getting to the 'real truth' about an IR myth, tradition, or theory and
ask instead, what makes a particular story about international politics appear to be true? Or. to put it somewhat differently, how does the 'truth' function
in a particular IR myth? It is not accidental that this book as my answer to how to teach IR theory better should locus on stories and how they are told .
If the world is made up of 'facts' and stories that organize those 'facts'. then there is
no more important skill to pass on to students than to make them better readers and
writers of stories, better interpreters of not just the 'facts but of the organization of the 'facts'. With this in mind, international
Relations Theory does not try to be a comprehensive textbook crammed with every 'fact' about international life or even international
theory. By focusing on the major IR traditions of realism, idealism, historical materialism, constructivism, postmodernism, gender, and
globalization, it attempts to help students to read and write their world better by arming them with the ability to critically ask, how
does the 'truth' get told?
Humans might be violent, but NOT because of the inevitability of realism.

States no longer pursue war as strategy, but instead as senselessly murderous
excess.
Adriana Cavarero, Prof Political Philosophy at Universit degli studi di Verona, 2009
[Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence trans. McCuaig p. 60-65]
. During the early years of the present century, the area of greatest suffering has been Iraq,
where from 2003 through the rst half of

2006 the estimated total number of deaths among the population comes close to six hundred thousand.' This list is obviously arbitrary and incomplete. Nor is it a question of numbers, even if a focus on quantities
butchery and carnage are now directed-in the bulk of

cases, although not exclusively-at the civilian population. In an epoch of "mass death unprecedented in history,
10 to continue to discuss war in terms of regulated conict between states, in line with the classical and
"symmetrical" model of a clash between men in uniform, is, in this sense, misleading. The kind of war that
matured in the twentieth century and looms over the new millennium is not only asymmetric, as were and are all
colonial wars, but, like them, consists predominantly of the homicide, unilateral and sometimes planned, of the
is inevitable when we are dealing with mass homicide.9 The numbers serve merely to emphasize how
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defenseless.
Nor does the rhetorical expedient, typical of military language, of 'collateral damage" do any good: on the factual plane, it does not succeed in masking the
existence of "the blown-off limbs, the punctured eardrums, the shrapnel wounds, and the psychological horror that are caused by heavy bombardment:"' Struck one by one, in the
singularity of their vulnerable bodies, the helpless ones stand at the center of modern destruction and highlight its drift into horrorism. This places them in a position of
Often execrated as a tremendous evil and as the maximal

expression of human violence, war has been regarded as inevitable for millennia. But the modern age especially has
perspective on horror that, in speaking of war, no discussion ought any longer ignore.
been able to make use of theories that, variously articulated and cutting across different disciplinary levels, have
succeeded in endowing this inevitability with a natural foundation. I refer to theories, originating in the early twentieth
century and not untouched by the eroticization of horror already discussed, that trace violence back to
"aggressiveness, defined as an instinctual drive, [that] is said to play the same functional role in the household of nature as the nutritive and sexual instincts in the
life process of the individual and the species."2 This is Arendt's characterization, in an essay from the 196os in which she imputes this naturalistic acceptation of violence primarily to the modern social sciences. As
the author implies, the term "social sciences" is not to be taken in a narrow sense. It is meant simply as a comprehensive label for the various elds of knowledge that emphasize the pulsional origin of the
, Hobbes was already speaking of war as part of human nature, in

his celebrated description of the state of nature as a state of war. The modern social sciences, to stay with
Arendt's thesis, go a step further, however; they ascribe war, like violence, not just to "an irrepressible instinct
of aggression" but also to "a secret death wish of the human species. 1113 Thus Freud and psychoanalysis inevitably come to the foreground. The Freudian idea of a
phenomenon of vio [p. 63] lance. At the dawn of the modern era, for that matter
death wish is well known: "a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state."4 He describes it as a drive that, albeit originally directed inward
in the form of self-destructiveness, also projects outward, "against the external world and other organisms. `5 In other words, and to adopt the technical imprecision Of Arendtian
terminology; it is a desire for death that is at the same time an instinct of aggression. As is equally well known, Freud developed this theme during the nal phase of the writings
in which, from 1914 to 1922, he described the functioning of psychic activity. The background is the period during and shortly after the First World War, an epoch in which death
and destruction were operative on a vast scale. It should also be noted that, as proof of the plausibility of the intrinsic linkage between the death wish and the impulse of
destruction, he resorts to an argument taken from the eld of biology; to be precise, he describes the passage from single-cell organisms to multicellular ones in terms of a death
wish that, instead of directing its destructive impulse inward toward the single cell, is redirected outward. So when Arendt denounces the naturalistic conception of violence
derived from the "modern social sciences:' she hits the mark: the incursion into the eld of the natural sciences is a salient trait of psychoanalytic theory in its formative phase.
Rather than at Freud, though, the denunciation ought to be directed at the immense success of certain Freudian categories in the second half of the twentieth century, especially
at the way they have been absorbed and reworked, if not hypostasized, by the various disciplines that have intersected with psychoanalysis, one way or another, over the course
of the century. The phenomenon is, to put it mildly, conspicuous. Especially on the plane of media popularization, the century saw the expansion of a horizon of meaning within
which the death wish along with the destructive impulses, and not seldom their horrorist side a la Bataille, acquired the status of established, unquestionable, and evident
principles. Any reection on violence in general and war in particular was virtually obliged to take them into account. At the start of the third millennium, in other words in the era
of socalled global war, a prime example of this is a book published in the United States by James Hillman in 2004. It is entitled A Terrible Love of War and is [p. 64] based on the
Jungian theory of archetypes. But the book stands out not because of the reference to Jung, or to psychoanalysis in general, but because of the nonchalance with which Hillman
recuperates and mixes together the main strands of twentieth-century naturalistic thought on violence to corroborate his thesis. He maintains that war "belongs to our souls as an
archetypal truth of the cosmos"16 and that this archetypal truth is, as the title oF his second chapter puts it, "normal]' He proceeds with an analysis of the theme of a horror that
remains human even in its atrocious inhumanity, adding that war is sublime and belongs to the sphere of religion .17 "If war is sublime, we must acknowledge its liberating
transcendence and yield to the holiness of its call "18 This does not mean, obviously, that Hillman wishes for a perpetual state of war. His aim is rather to get rid of the "pacist
rhetoric'' that, in denying the natural-psychic-root of the phenomenon, impedes comprehension of it. As the reader will easily intuit, while the authors cited (often inappropriately)
are highly disparate, it is principally categories deriving from psychoanalysis, the sociology of the sacred, and the anthropology of sacrice that underpin the articulation of
Hillman's discourse, The theoretical density, as well as the internal problematics of these categories, which in his text are forced to undergo drastic simplication, are transformed
into banal clichs. In order to justify war as an uorenounceable and vital experience, Hillman often appeals not just to the authority of his authors but to a so-called common
opinion that by now constitutes the vulgate, in the form of the stereotypical and the obvious, of those same authors. An example is the facility with which he takes for granted
'bur fascination with war lms, with weapons of mass destruction, with pictures of blasted bodies and bombs bursting in the air."" To this Hillman adds, on a confessional note,
"the fascination, the delight in recounting the dreadful details of butchery and cruelty. Not sublimation, the sublime."" Typical as well in the way it casts a shadow of abnormality-if
thesis has its own stringent logic. Once

violence is rooted in the natural realm of the impulses or, if one prefers, in the archetypical order of the cosmos,
the horror of war cannot fail to transmit its fascination both to everyone's visual experience and to the literary practice of some. And, even
not pathological stupidity or obtuseness-over those who do not share the fascination with butchery, Hillman's
more logically, it is combatants with rsthand experience in the eld who savor the full fascination. The words of the soldiers that Hillman diligently reports in his text for the
purpose of documenting his theory prove it. Among them, the words of a cinematographic version of General Patton stand out, when, faced with the devastation of battle and
kissing a dying officer, he exclaims, "I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life." Then there is the authen [p. 65] tic declaration of a marine who confesses,
"The thing I wish I'd seen-I wish could have seen a grenade go into someone's body and blow it up:' No one else, though, rivals the laudable capacity to synthesize of the
In the name of a
realism grounded in the power of clich, the entire repertory of war's horror is thus reduced by Hillman to
the realm of enjoyment. "The savage fury of the group, all of whose members are out for one another's blood:' which the celebrated work of Ren Girard inscribes
anonymous American soldier who, in describing a bayonet charge, denes it as "awful, horrible, deadly, yet somehow thrilling, exhilarating.'
in the phenomenology of ritual," becomes the trivial wage of the warrior. For that matter the stereotype of the soldier excited by killing has a long and prestigious history. A
certain arousal by violence was already characteristic of Homer's warriors, and the warmongering rhetoric of every age, ennobled by writers and poets, is full of soldiers made
happy by death. The events of the twentieth century, and even more those occurring right now, might suggest to the singers and scholars of massacre that they change register.
Today it is particularly senseless that the meaning of war and its horror-as well, obviously, as its terror-should still be entrusted to the perspective of the warrior. If it is true, as the
"wars, with the violence and cruelty they unleash, appear to have a common ground
(killing and getting killed), always the same and impervious to chronology,"" it is also true that only warriors,
after all t this paradigm. The civilian victims, of whom the numbers of dead have soared from the Second World
War on, do not share the desire to kill, much less the desire to get killed. Nor does the pleasure of butchery,
on which Hillman insists, appear to constitute a possible common ground in this case. You would have to ask
the victims of the bombing, cooked by incendiary bombs in the shelters of Dresden, or those whose skin was
peeled off by phosphorous bombs in the Vietnamese villages, where the pleasure and excitement was for them. .
historian Giovanni Dc Luna laments, that
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Cerberus: AT: Death Predictions Good

Their predictions mobilize a crowd of babies seeking security from the teat of
the state. Democratic discourse cannot account for the its own fascination
with violence, meaning only sacrifice can break with the status quo.
Diken 2006
[Bulent, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Alternatives 31 (2006), 431452
The evil is us. The war against the evil is not a matter of opposing others but of
confronting ourselves, our own desire. In this sense, Lord of the Flies is a story of fascism in
us all. Thus in the famous preface he wrote for a book of ethics, Michel Foucault claimed that
the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. . . . And not only historical fascism, the
fascism of Hitler and Mus- solini . . . but also the fascism in us that causes us to love power,
to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.46Which is also the reason why
Simon hears the following from the Lord of the Flies: . Democracy is great, so the lm tells
us, but it is also impotent. It lacks mobiliz- ing power and the capacity for radical acts.
Both Piggy, the intellectual, and Ralph, the democrat, lack this abilityexcept in this incident, where Ralph dares to look evil in the eye. The moment
for a radical act is however surpassed: after Ralph has become the new enemy, no one needs the totem animal any more. Thus, Ralphs act does not
amount to more than an empty gesture. But still we should not exclude the possibility of such acts; they have a time and a moment. And radical they
If evil is in us, then an ethical act must be an

act of self destruction, an act that undermines what make us a we. Signicantly in this
are in aiming for the destruction of our most cherished object.
respect, Benjamin was the rst to divide Schmitts concept of exception, producing a remainder of it. For Schmitt, exception is a limit concept that
presupposes a normal situation as its background. The state of exception aims at the preservation of this normality with extraordinary means. In
other words, Schmitts project is to legitimize the state of exception, or to normalize what is exceptional. Along similar lines, we could argue that the
state of exception on the island is reactionary, or, to phrase it differently, that violence is rational. The generalized exception, the festival, is Jacks way
of strengthening his power. In this, everything is made uid; all hierarchies are reversed. But one thing remains constant: Jack, the leader. To be sure,
Benjamin was in many ways inspired by Schmitts methodological extremism, even though his own project was opposed to Schmitts. Whereas Schmitt
wanted to legitimize Nazi power, Benjamin criticized it. Schmitt was conservative, Benjamin revolutionary. Indeed, this tension found its best expression
in their understanding of sovereignty. Hence to Schmitts exception Benjamin opposed the suspension of suspension, a real exception, or, better, an
exception to exception itself. What is decisive here is the notion that, when generalized, exception loses its status as a limit of normality. The tradition
of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history
that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our
position in the struggle against Fascism.57 Whereas in Schmitt exception is the political kernel of the law, it becomes divine justice in Benjamin. And
then we are confronted with the difference between two exceptions: Schmitts exception is nothing else than an attempt at avoiding the real
exception, the revolution, or divine justice. Benjamins exception, in stark contrast, suspends the relationality between the law and its suspension in
a zone of anomy dominated by pure violence with no legal cover.58The question of this real exception is the one that cannot be posed today without
immediately facing the accusation of being a nihilist or a fundamentalist. And why is it so? To end with an answer to this question, let us focus on the
nal scene. Speechless The whole jungle is on re. Ralph is being hunted. He is hopeless, without being able to nd a shelter from violence. Running
fre- netically, he makes his way to the beach, but collapses there. Worn out, breathless, he is about to surrender to his predators, who are not far
behind him. But miraculously at this point, he notices a naval officer looking at him. Obviously a ship has seen the re. He is saved by the re, which
was intended to destroy him. Shortly after, the other boys arrive with their painted bodies and sharp- ened spears. They are startled when they see the
officer. The officer, in turn, looks puzzled. With this scene, the lm ends. But, unforgivably in our view, it omits an essential dialogue from the book. In
the book, when the naval officer sees the naked boys with masks and weapons, he thinks they are playing, having fun and games, and crucially
(mis)interprets the situation as a Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island.59 Coral Islandis R. M. Ballantynes childrens novel from the nineteenth
century in which three British boys on a tropical island successfully defend civilization against pirates, cannibals, and wild animals. In other words, it
is a nave version of Lord of the Flies. Which makes the dialogue essential, also because it is here that the rst living adult gure appears. Crucially,
however, this gure turns out to be an infantilized adult, for whom war is a game, like Blent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen 447 the Coral Island.
Further, the boys in the lm are rescued by soldiers only to move to another war, to a more general state of exception. In a sense, therefore, the
world the lm depicts is a world with no outside. The outside is as violent, and as infantilized, as the boys island. Indeed, by omitting this crucial
point, the lm creates the illusion that outside the island things are normalthat outside there is civilization. The irony, however, is that the boys
are, in the rst place, on the island because of a war. They are, so to speak, waging a war within a bigger war. This official war of the adults is not
less butwith more technology, bigger crowds, and more powerful sadistsmore violent than everything that happens on the island. The two worlds
are continuous.60 Herein lies the signicance of the fact that the lm is about boys. Why boys? Perhaps because Golding thought that boys, as halfformed beings, could be perfect symbols of the central conict between civilization and barbarism. Thus the boys in the lm occupy a grey zone of
indistinction between society and nature. But still, why does the only man in the lm appear like a boy? Indeed, Lord of the Flies is an allegory of
the childhood of society is the state of nature. And the nature that
comes after society is the state of exception, a condition in which the citizen is reduced
to a member of a crowd. At a rst approximation, therefore, infantilization is about
regressive evolution: a movement not from the child to the adult but from the adult to the child,
from the human to the orangutan, from society, bios, to the nature, zoe. The state of
exception is a world in which orangutan stems from human beings. And, in a sense, the
becoming orangutan of man is what explains the increasing infantilization of the
infantilization. After all,
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contemporary culture, especially in the context of consumption and the war against
terror. It is well known that in premodern times the child did not exist; that is, did not constitute a different being. Hence in paint- ings, for
Pillz
example, the children were depicted as grown-ups, only smaller in size, as child-men.61First in modernity childhood took the form of an exceptional
period in individual chronology, and the child emerged as a subject to be normalized and disciplined: the child-man is, per denition, desocialized.
Therefore, some of the most signicant panoptic institutions of modernity, the nursery and the school, for instance, mark the difference between the
child and the man. To be a proper man one should rst be a proper child; that is, disciplined and normalized in a site of connement. And then
one could move forward to other institutions, to factories, universities, marriages, and nally to the elderly care, 448 From War to War living a life on
the move from one closed site to another, each with its own laws, each marked by an inside-outside divide.62This is, however, changing in todays
control societies, whose main symptom is the breaking down of panoptic boundaries: In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again
(as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never nish anythingbusiness, training, and military
service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation.63 Perhaps today the discipline specic to the
nursery is also mov- ing beyond the panoptic walls with the result that the man-child is, again, everywhere, in every domain. That ones childhood
never nishes means that the nursery extends itself to the whole soci- etythat, in a sense, the exception becomes the rule. In this sense,
infantilization is the end of the outside, of the divide between the child and the adult. In the smooth biographic space that emerges, the distinction
between the child and the adult can be created only at a fantasy level, hiding the fact that the outside of the nursery is also a nursery: the infantilized
world of the man-child. Otherwise, outside this fantasy frame, the child (the exception) and the adult (the rule) are indistinguishable, and thus the
imperatives that govern adult life are the same as those that govern the nursery: play, learning, protection. In the new spirit of capitalism it is
imperative to play; that is, to be nomadic, experimenting, and inspired.64Ours is a society in which play is consumption, consumption is play. Ideally,
the consumer is a child, who shops impulsively, whose desire is to be aroused, channeled, and manip- ulated. Second, we live in a knowledge-based
societyone in which we never nish learning. Continuous assessment is thus indispensable to it.65And nally, ours is a society of fear, of
scaremon- gering, in which we are continually told that we need to be protected. For security, we are advised to sacrice even democracy. After all,
in-fant means speechless. The children need no agora; if they had one, they would destroy it anyway, as they did the conch in Lord of the Flies. If the
young human feels intense grief, anger, or other emotion, he is not able to contain it, and he is forced into acting out. A frustrated child is unable to
internalize the discomfort or to release it by verbal expression. He rids himself of this unbearable tension by an act, like kicking against the oor. . . .
Crying, head- banging, screaming, or other forms of temper tantrums are a childs way of obtaining a denied wish.66 Blent Diken and Carsten Bagge
political infantilization today comes with a rigid polarization between

good and bad (you are either with us or against us), which reduces reality to fairy stories,
or, rather, to a comedy of (t)errors: no weapons of mass destruction are found; Bin Laden
is not caught; Afghanistan seems to be more deserted than ever; democracy has not arrived in
Iraq, and so on. But everything goes on and on. In this, the audience is treated like an
infantilized crowd. It is striking, in this respect, to observe the parallel between the
infantilized subject of security and the frightened subject of terror, the hostage. The hostage is
an anonymous gure, a naked, formless body, which is absolutely convertible: anybody and
everybody can be a hostage.67 Likewise, the politics of security redefines the citizen as
a fearful subject, like a child, to be protected. Any- body and everybody must be
protected. Consequently, both the enemy and the friend are desubjectied; while the enemy
is reduced to an illegal combatant or a fundamentalist, the friend, the subject of security,
becomes infantilized. It is against this background that Lord of the Flies is an allegory of a
biopolitical, or, better, a postpolitical society that elevates security to its most sacred
principle of organization in the form of a permanent state of exception and tries to combine it with conLaustsen 449 It is no wonder that
sumerism (so that we need security to be able to consume and need to consume to be able to feel secure). After all, violence in Lord of the Flies was
just an exceptional circumstance: The boys were just playing! The crucial question is whether this is a valid answer in todays society: Is the exception
just an exception or is it generalized? Who then today counts as evil, as the Lord of the Flies? And how is evil to be fought? Control society is a society
in which fear/terror and businesses, like unidentical twins, work together through a disjunctive synthesis to form a single dispositif. It is, therefore, no
coincidence that spite as a postpolitical strategy reemerges in todays society. Hence, with reference to the recent protests/res in the French suburbs,
Slavoj Zizek asks: Where is the celebrated freedom of choice, when the only choice is the one between playing by
the rules and (self-)destructive violence, a violence which is almost exclusively directed
against ones ownthe cars burned and the schools torched were not from rich neighborhoods,
but were part of the hard-won acquisi- tions of the very strata from which protestors originate.68
In the contemporary, postpolitical society, the agora is not functioning as it is
supposed to be: Violence cannot be translated into a political language and, thus, it can
only assume the form of an obscene, irrational outburst. Such impotent violence is selfsacricial, and loudly so. It is spite: Lord of the Flies as savior.
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***Link
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Link - Human Rights

Human rights are about as radical as a David Matthews album. The affs
activism is a buzzard ying around the corpses of war, and that dependence
ensures the continuation of international violence.
Nick Mansfield, Prof Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, 2008
[Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou p. 167-168]
Whenever the West is attacked it always believes that it is the Enlightenment that is the target.
The Enlightenment legacy is still clung to as if it is novel and threatening to other
societies, still insurgent, fragile, ever uncompromised and futuristic. Soldiers are sent out to defend or
expand this legacy, or simply just to demonstrate that it cannot be intimidated, and will be defended. These soldiers execute
saturation bombings, high-tech sweeps of civilian neighbourhoods and brutal displays of the range of their materiel. They believe in
the enlightened righteousness of the massive show of force. Soon, they will disrupt social networks, disable economic life, ridicule
culture and perhaps even torture detainees and rape children. The havoc they wreak will be far more destructive than the regimes
they have replaced. But this will not really matter or it will be dismissed as accidental, because they are agents of the Enlightenment,
whose eventual triumph will justify everything. In conquered territory, political institutions will probably only be established via weak
coalitions of communal groups or through the co-operation of warlords. In this way, a country can settle into a loose if pessimistic
quiet, and you may even be able to pretend that the most sensational or publicised of your enemies, the Viet Cong or Al-Qaida, for
example, have been defeated. At home, in pursuit of this defence of the Enlightenment, police powers will be increased, the courts
war will provoke ever greater activism

on behalf of human rights [p. 168] and the Enlightenment legacy. Lawyers, judges,
politicians, journalists, Internet bloggers, new political movements and even the leader
writers of broadsheet newspapers will reassert their commitment to freedom and
democracy.
will be restrained and the media either seduced or intimidated. Yet this
The relationship between war and human rights has never been any less complicated than this.
Human rights achieved their present prominence not through ideological deliberation, but as the
principles which victors, hoping for a new international covenant, held up as what they had been
ghting for in the Second World War. Delivered by war, clear commitments to human rights
would help both to prevent wars and also, ironically, to decide which ones to ght. Derrida said
famously that there is no law without force (Derrida, 2002). There is no law without at least the
possibility of it needing, one day, to be enforced. Analogously, there are no human rights
without the possibility that they might one day have to be fought for. The history and
politics of human rights in our era are thoroughly caught up in war. Human rights are
simultaneously what wars have produced, what wars are for and how we can resist them. There
are no human rights without the possibility of war and vice versa.
In post-modern society, a commitment to human rights became a substitute for political

engagement. Politics was so compromised, it seemed useless and immovable, Yet, the fact that
the historical function of doctrines of human rights is implicated inextricably in warfare shows
that there can be no separation of human rights activism from the most brutal
execution of physical power. This is not to say that the two are identical. Nor is it to reduce the importance of the
clash between them: human rights and violence may be historically connected but they remain in erce tension, even in contradiction
with one another. This is the exact problem that we need to confront: we have an almost automatic ethical obligation to reduce
violence, yet we cannot ignore the fact that simple goodwill cannot ensure rights. On the other hand, violence implicitly violates:
mutilating bodies, casting lives adrift, ruining social networks, obliterating cultures and compromising the freedom of civic identities.
There is no outside of the relationship between human rights and power, because there is no war simply and resolutely separable
from its other. Human rights are a political and not a moral issue therefore ,
and our hopes of advancing them

requires a renewal of, and commitment to, the political relationship.
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Rights discourse backfires, obscuring the excessive violence at the heart of

sovereignty.
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat 2007
[Thomas Blom Hansen(born 22 January 1958) is aDanishanthropologist and leading contemporary commentator on religious and political violence inIndia. He has
worked on religious identities, local political organization and informal networks in Bombay and pursued an interest in the anthropology ofpolitics,
thepostcolonialstate andsovereignty. More recently he has done research onreligious revivaland the everyday meanings offreedomand belonging in postapartheidSouth Africa. Hansen is part of an international research network entitled The Religious Lives of Migrants, funded by theFord Foundationand theSocial
Science Research Councilin New York, which explores religious meanings and institutions among internationalmigrantsin a global and comparative perspective.
He is currently Adjunct Professor of Anthropology atColumbia University, Senior Research Scientist at Yale University, Visiting Professor at the University of
Edinburgh, and Professor of Anthropology at theUniversity of Amsterdamwhere he served as Dean of the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences.
Recently, Hansen was offered a position as full professor at Stanford University where he is to head a new research institute for the anthropological study of SouthEast Asia.[1]
Finn Stepputat is Senior Researcher at Danish Insitute International Studies,
Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Post-Colonial World
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7996.html]
In this "age of rights" (Bobbio 1996), it seemed possible, until very recently, to claim that the
exercise of sovereignty in its arcane and violent forms was becoming a thing of the past, that
sovereignty now finally rested with the citizens, at least in liberal democracies. The world
order after September 11, 2001, seems to belie this optimistic assumption, and it may be
useful to revise the standard history of what Foucault somewhat reluctantly called
"democratization of sovereignty." The languages of legality have, he argued, "allowed a
system of rights to be superimposed upon the mechanisms of discipline in such a way as
to conceal its actual procedures--the element of domination inherent in its techniques--and to
guarantee to everyone, by virtue of the sovereignty of the state, the exercise of his proper
sovereign rights" (Foucault 1994, 219). The crucial point is that, today, sovereignty as embodied
in citizens sharing territory and culture, and sharing the right to exclude and punish "strangers,"
has become a political common sense, or what Derrida calls "ontotopology" (Derrida 1994), that
denes the political frontlines on immigration in Europe, on autochthony and belonging in Africa,
on majoritarianism and nation in South Asia and so on. In order to assess and understand the
nature and effects of sovereign power in our contemporary world, one needs to disentangle
the notion of sovereign power from the state and to take a closer look at its constituent
parts: on the one hand, the elusive "secret" of sovereignty as a self-born, excessive, and
violent will to rule; on the other hand, the human body and the irrepressible fact of "bare life"
as the site upon which sovereign violence always inscribes itself but also encounters
the most stubborn resistance.
Continued
A part of Bataille's essay anticipates Foucault's work by arguing that modern bourgeois society,
and communism with even more determination, have striven to eradicate the wastefulness,
irrationality and arbitrariness at the heart of sovereignty: both as a mode of power, as a mode of
subordination driven by the subject's projection of their own desire onto the spectacle of wasteful
luxury of the court and the king, and as a space for arbitrary and spontaneous experiences of
freedom and suspension of duties. The essence of Bataille's proposition is that because the
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exercise of sovereignty is linked to death, excessive expenditure (depenser) and bodily
pleasure can neither be contained by any discipline, nor be fully "democratized" into an
equal dignity of all men. Because sovereignty revolves around death, the ultimate form
of expenditure beyond utility, it constitutes in Mbembe's words an "anti-economy" (Mbembe
2003, 15).
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Link - International Stability

What the aff calls stability is perpetual war waged in the name of order.
Wendy C. Hamblet 2005
[Canadian philosopher with a specialization in ethics and violence. She teaches
Ethics and Morality, and Political and Social Philosophy at Adelphi University
Peace Review 17:39-45] Mono-cephalic means one-headed
Because of wars great functionality to the state, there remains little mystery to the long-term
success of war as a state institution over the formative millennia of civilization. The continuing
popularity of war among modern states ostensibly dedicated to democracy, freedom,
and the dignity of human beings, remains bafing to violence scholars. K arl von Clausewitzs
On War, considered by many scholars to be the canonical treatment of the war philosophy,
attributes to war a logic all its own: war composes a compulsion, a dynamic that aims at
excessive overow, absolute expenditure of the energies of the state. War seeks absolutization as it feeds and res the populations martial enthusiasm; if unchecked by political
goals, war will fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of self-expenditureself-annihilation.
War composes a potlatch of state resources, a useless splurge of the nations human and
economic wealth for no better reason than wanton celebration of state power. The
language of absolute expenditure resonates with the philosophy of Georges Bataille. His
philosophy explains two principles of expenditure the principle of classical utility dened by
utilitarian goals serving current power relations, and that of nonproductive expenditurethat is,
orgiastic outow or ek-stasis that escapes mundane servitude to reason and utility. Political
implications of the two economies are exposed in Batailles Propositions on Fascism. There, the
two dialectical opposites represent extreme possibilities for the state structures. The rst
model aspires to perfect order, like the timeless realm of the gods, a frozen homogeneous perfection that is monocephalic (single-headed). Like the god, the monocephalic state becomes
self-identified as a sacred entitychangeless, eternal, and perfect, its laws and customs
xed and imperative. At the other end of the structural spectrum resides the second form of
statethe acephalic statedisordered, anarchic, and volatile. This state is seen by
ordered states as a terrifying, heterogeneous primitive lifeform where uncivilized tribes
practice mystical thinking, incommensurable truths, and mad affective experience.
Unreasonable. Useless. Mad. People within the acephalic social structure enjoy abundant
ritual lives that offer escape from the mundane in orgiastic festivals involving drunken- ness,
dancing, blood rites, wanton tortures, self-mutilation, and even murder in the name of dark
monster gods. The monocephalic state, on the other hand, has overcome all death. The
civilized state boasts an enlightened stable form that promotes reason, life, and progress,
whereas the primitive society is referred to chaos, madness, and death.
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Link - Biodiversity
We cannot kill nature, for nature is destruction. Even the current mass
extinction event expresses a sovereignty that exceeds all human
understanding.
Allan Stoekl, Prof French and comparative literature at Penn State University, 2007
[Batailles Peak: Energy, Religion, and Sustainability p. 197]
If for a moment we assume that the global world of commerce, replete with electronic
media, the Internet, virtual television, and whatnot, is the replacement for and the simulacrum of
the nonunivcrsal21 city, we can only conclude that it can be so only as long as "nature no
longer exists." But the fact that nature no longer exists, or at least seems no longer to exist,
depends, ironically, on a natural given: the presence of fossil fuels in the earth-oil and coal,
primarily. Labor power discovered these fuels, put them to work, "harnessed" them, transformed
their energy into something useful. But labor power did not put the fuels in the earth. And
perhaps more important from our perspective, it will be hard-pressed to replace them when they
are gone. Nature-produced energy-the "homogeneous" energy that lends itself to work and the
other, "heterogeneous" energy that is sovereign, not servile.22 If the very term "nature" is
contestable, one thing that cannot be contested is that the primary sources of energy come from
natural sources: millions of years of algae accumulating in certain ecosystems, for
example.23 Thus pollution, dependent on this energy from natural sources, is ultimately
natural; so too is global warming. So too is the incomprehensible unharnessed energy
of the universe, which our labor and knowledge can only betray. So too will be massive
die-off of humans and other organisms at the point of depletion. Man as the author of his
own creation-homo faber-is opened by the radical exteriorityi the nitude, the heterogeneity, but
also the innite richness of"nature."Man, as Sade would remind us, can never hope to have
his reason domesticate a nature that "threatens the adequacy of rational
systematicity"24 or that defies the seeming necessity of all human activity. Nature deals
death, and there is no way, nally, to grasp it by simply exploiting it ("knowing" it) as a
resource or analyzing away its threat as sublime difference.
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Link - Economy
At best the aff feeds the economys addiction to excess. Constant exposure to
catastrophic collapse is the permanent state of late capitalism.
Marcus A Doel 2009
[Centre for Urban Theory, School of the Environment and Society, Swansea University,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pages 1054 ^ 1073]
By strange coincidence, I nd myself revising this paper amid a nancial crisis

that foregrounds the question: what, if anything, is happening? The credit crunch that began in the summer of 2007 precipitated in
September and October 2008 the spectacular failure of bedrock nancial institutions (eg AIG, Fannie May, Freddie Mac, Lehman
Brothers, and Merrill Lynch), the paralysis of money markets and interbank lending, the mark-to-market write-down of hundreds of
billions of dollars worth of `toxic assets' linked to securities and derivatives, and a palpable sense of panic and disbelief as market
participants, politicians, and media commentators teetered on the edge of the abyss.
Exorbitant asset bubbles

burst, incalculable off-balance-sheet originate- to-distribute risks overwhelmed the
banking system, counterparty trust evaporated, and 1068 M A Doel financial markets
froze. At this juncture, nancial capitalism was neither an ideological formation nor a
self- correcting mechanism. It was a broken apparatus on the cusp of implosion. The
habitual discourse of dissimulation credit squeeze, distressed and impaired assets, market corrections, write-downs, and negative growth was more
or less completely supplanted by a frank discourse of crisis: systemic failure, banking collapse, nancial meltdown, and economic depression. Some
even mooted that the end of capitalism was nigh, at least in the guise of structured nance (Blackburn, 2008; Wade, 2008), while others argued for a
resurgence of the Real (Badiou, 2008b; Haldane, 2009). In a desperate attempt to avert calamity, states across the world committed over $2 trillion
dollars to recapitalize and, in some cases, nationalize the banking system, acquire a vast array of toxic assets, guarantee interbank lending, and
stimulate liquid- ity. Even with this level of sovereign risk, however,
the financial system remains vulnerable to

widespread credit defaults, rapid deleveraging, rampant debt deation, and illiquidity,
all
of which would be exacerbated by a sharp global recession. Given the severity of the global nancial crisis, miserly thinking has reimposed itself with a
vengeance. Financial institutions and regulators have been accused of almost criminal recklessness and negligence, risk management has been found
wanting, and nancial capitalism stands accused of sacricing the Real of servicing production and distribution on the altar of wanton speculation.
Hedge funds, short sellers, credit-ratings agencies, mark-to-market accountancy, and the bonus culture amongst bankers have borne the brunt of the
witch hunt. The quest for a new nancial architecture, tighter regulation, and countercyclical capital requirements is already on the agenda. The aim is
excessive risk taking, excessive leverage, excessive

exposure, excessive short selling, excessive speculation, excessive off-balance-sheet
transactions, etc. The fundamental difficulty, however, is that none of these activities is an
epiphenomenon. Each is an essential aspect of financial capitalism. All that miserly
thinking can deliver is a recalibration that cannot but fail to thwart the crisis tendencies of
nancial capitalism. Whether it is cast as probable or improbable, exposure to systemic risk
and catastrophic failure is always the fate of the system. The financial crisis has
dramatized the system's perilous exposure to the catastrophic risks of exorbitant asset bubbles and the
to rein in the excesses of nancial capitalism:
products of structured nance. It has also dramatized the fact that the nancial architecture of the world economy holds together only insofar as it is
held together (Langley, 2008). The scope and scale of state intervention have underscored the fact that fragility is distributed throughout the entire
constellation of associations. And, for all of the talk of a distinction between the nancial system and the Real Economy,
the crisis has
highlighted the baselessness of value.
For when market participants, politicians, and media commentators teetered on

the edge of the abyss, what they sensed was the palpable absence of a `oor' to value. State intervention was not simply an attempt to relieve the
banking system of its exposure to catastrophic risks, toxic assets, and incalculable loses; it was rst and foremost an attempt to put a `oor' under the
baselessness of value. For at the heart of the nancial crisis is the void, and this void has a very precise location. This location is a cornerstone of
nancial capitalism: off-balance-sheet entities (OBSEs), especially asset-backed securities and credit derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations
while the world's gross domestic product

was a mere $54 trillion, the total asset value of developed economies had been inated to
circa $300 trillion and the total value of derivatives contracts exceeded $500 trillion.
Little wonder, then, that state-backed scal stimulus packages and quantitative easing are
unlikely to have much effect.
(CDOs), constant proportion debt obligations, and credit default swaps. By 2007,
From restricted economy to global nancial crisis 1069

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Link - Hegemony/Rogue State

The USA is the only rogue state. It exemplifies the violent excess of
destabilizing sovereignty.
Suhail Malik 2006
[teaches in the Department of Visual Arts, Goldsmiths College
Theory Culture Society v.23 2-3]
The denunciation of rogue states is thus structurally homologous to the bourgeois denunciation of a voyoucracy in
order to secure their own legitimacy (to legitimate, if it can be put this way). What is critical here is that the phrase
rogue states came to have prominence exactly as the term and strategic
policy of globalization was being affirmed and instigated by the Clinton administration in its early years through
national and international institutions. That is, rogue states are an indispensable designation for the securing of the claim to inter-
a certain global order (for which

terrorism is a central rhetorical and factual operation, as Derrida mentions, 2005: 66).
national legitimacy for globalization, by which is therefore meant
Of the many
ramications of this (de)legitimation strategy only two will be taken up here: rst the characterization of a voyoucracy and second what purchase on
legitimacy is retroac- tively granted by the term on the powers that mobilize it. First, then, it is to be noted that a voyoucracy is not an outright
abandonment of order but is (presented as) the power or force (a kratos) of an illegitimate and quasi-criminal (voyou) counter-order. Voyoucracy signals
a sovereignty exorbitant to the legitimate sovereignty of the State and law in the national or international domain. The denunciation of rogue states is
thus a matter of one kind of sovereignty against another, of legitimate against so-designated illegitimate sovereignties. To this end Derrida remarks in
passing that if the voyou-cracy represents a power, a challenge to the power of the State, a criminal and transgressive countersovereignty, we have
here all the makings of a counterconcept of sovereignty such as we might nd in Bataille (2005: 678). We will return in due course to this particular
characterization of a voyoucracy since it will bring us directly to the problem of whether a global knowledge can be established. Second, international and
national legitimacy and illegitimacy as it is proclaimed and insti- tutionalized by dominant powers relies on a discourse and politics of democracy and freedom or, in so-said
contrary rogue political formation, their deprivation. This is evident in the charters and ambitions of international institutions such as the UN, NATO, the G8, the IMF, the EU and
, the democracy-globalization
coupling serving to secure international political and economic dominance by
already powerful states (which is why Chinas economic might and limited democratic polity presents a more vexed problem for
also, notably, for the USA too. Democracy is in this way a legitimation of international power
globalization under this aegis than, say, India or Brazil). Drawing on the example of the UN, Derrida notes that the ordering authority over the
international domain which promotes and acts as a supposed guarantor for democracy must in fact be the strongest power in that putatively
democratic institution and polity. As such it organises and implements for use by the United Nations precisely so that it itself may then use the United
Nations all the concepts, ideas (constitutive or regulative), and requisite political theorems, beginning with democracyand sovereignty (Derrida, 2005:
100, emphasis in original). An immediate contradiction or aporia comes then to be demonstrated in the claim to legitimacy, to setting the terms of
legitimacy in and of democracy, by the currently dominant state power(s): that if the constitution of this force is, in principle, supposed to represent
and protect this world democracy, it in fact betrays and threatens it from the outset in an auto- immune fashion (Derrida, 2005: 100). Put starkly, the
contradiction is this: universal democracy, beyond the nation-state and beyond citizenship, in fact calls for a supersovereignty that cannot but betray
it (Derrida, 2005: 101). The contradiction between democracy and sovereignty is rendered here at a supernational level but this is only a particular
version of what takes place at all dimensions of democratic organization: that sovereignty is the condition of democracy even as it prohibits a fully operational democracy. And, as is well known from the protest of anti-globalization movements, this non-democratic, even anti-democratic, sovereignty that
guarantees and legitimizes democracy is in democratic terms only ever an abuse of power; an abuse that is, as Derrida puts it, constitutive of
sovereignty itself and so constitutive of democracy. It follows that sovereignty is rogue in democracy and democracy is therefore guaranteed and
harnessed by a power that is itself rogue. If there is to be global democracy, there must be global sovereignty and so a global voyoucracy, a rogue
state that is beyond the terms of that democracy. The sovereign state that orders legitimacy, which is the de factocondition of order, is necessarily
voyou, rogue, counter-ordering; an identity of opposing categories whose condensation can here be marked (beyond the terms Derrida sets up) by the
terms sovoyoureign or soverogue, a power that establishes only a quasi-order. Today, Derrida continues, such states are only the USA and whatever
But the USA is

exceptional in this quasi-order in that it is the primary rogue state the only truly
rogue state (as Chomsky also says for different reasons) because of its outstanding
international sovereign powers. US international domination in the name of a
common, global democracy is that of a global sovereignty (though this is not to say world
(always subsidiary) allies it picks up in the course of undertaking such actions in implementing its sovereignty .
sovereignty); it is, as is often declared, a global abuse of power necessarily so. This global sovereignty of the USA is sometimes exercised through the
UN but must also take place in terms of other outstanding manifestations of power if it is to be supersovereign, including that of its military (quaforce),
its economics (quaconsumption), its cultural production (quaentertainment) and its politics (quademocracy). Such sovoyoureign or soverogue power(s)
are not occasioned across or outside of democratic organization or polities at whatever level: it happens through and in democracy, insistently so.
Soveroguery is the condition for the production of global knowledge and it is that by which knowledge in its globality has to be comprehended. But how
is sovereignty to be understood in its identity with countersovereignty? We have seen that, for Derrida, Batailles counterconcept of sovereignty
speaks to the counter-order of voyoucracy. We shall now take up this account in order to more exactly determine the sovereignty of American global
dominance. Doing so will return us directly to the question of knowledge in the actual conditions of globalization. Batailles interest in sovereignty is in
a general aspect that is opposed to the servile and the subordinate (1993: 197); it is general because it can belong to anyone. Such generality means
that the determination of sovereignty cannot be restricted to its traditional identication with the power of either the State or law as it has been from
Plato to Hobbes, Schmitt and, in a more complicated manner, Agamben. It can be the sovereignty of the voyou, for example. Bataille draws up an initial
distinction between the general aspect of sovereignty and what the term means as regards a legally constituted and recognized state or individual
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(that is therefore subordinate to law). However, as Derrida proposes, in its sovoyoureignty or soveroguery, it is today the USA alone that sidesteps this
distinction: yes,
the USA
is of course a sovereign state in the legally constituted sense and so is subject to international law; yet it is in a position to countermand the
obeisance to any such law or consensus of a general will, since it alonehas the power to dominate and authorize non-legal actions in outright and blatant deance of
exemplifies at a supernational level the general aspect of

sovereignty beyond law of which Bataille speaks.
international convention and expectations. In this it
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Link - Ethics
Their ethical stance allows the aff to think of themselves as good, creating a
distance from their own violence that makes annihilaiton inevitable.
Kenneth Irzkowitz 1999
[Assoc Prof Philosophy at Marietta College, College Literature 26.1]
morality
has blinded us to the importance of disutility, to the praiseworthiness of nonproductive
usages serving no end beyond themselves. We generally assume that there are no such
praiseworthy usages, but Bataille insists that there are. Indeed, there is a whole realm of
them, he contends, as well as the need for an ethics corresponding to them, one able to take
their violence into account.
Bataille rejects the notion of a unied good. When he criticizes the moral good, this is because by assuming such unity,
Continued
The purpose of offering a series of such strong, disturbing characterizations is not to dismiss ordinary moral values but to supplement them, to say that
such values are not enough for us. At the same time that we outlaw and condemn all of these ruinous squanderings, our sovereign aspirations demand
brutality, murder, prostitution, swearing, sex, infamy, ruin, degradation, and

nally treason. These are activities we must prohibit, activities we cannot allow ourselves
to participate in, but which at the same time identify who we are. Hypermorality instructs
that while we cannot take up such behaviors, we cannot not take them up either. We cannot
not squander ourselves in these and other ways, many of which are offensive of mention to ordinary morality. To help emphasize just
them. The list includes
how offensive, there is a passage near the beginning of Death and Sensuality depicting the spectacle of primitive ritual human sacrice, the communal
production of a wasteful expenditure witnessed in common. Bataille uses the word "sacred" to describe the experience of the witnesses, underlining just
how fundamental and revelatory to us he thinks such events were. Disturbing as it must be to us, he holds that the event of the spectacle of ritual
sacrice has power of conveying a profound meaning, This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to
those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the
succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective
nature of religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice. (Bataille 1962, 16) It is a disturbing thought that only a spectacular
killing, that only events of this kind, can satisfy the human desire for the experience of sacred meaning. Along with a fear of our own immoral excess
comes the question of whether hypermorality invites unleashing this destructive excess. Would Bataille like to see us unleashed, perhaps in the style of
Charles Manson, to produce our own spectacles of ritual sacrice? Certainly Bataille describes irrational violence as having an undeniable meaning, one
that is revelatory of the sacred continuity alluded to in the previous citation. Soon after that citation he similarly asserts that we seek "the power to look
death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity" (1962, 18). Where do we nd this power? We
nd it in transformative experiences akin to the sacrice described above. In other words, to acquire the power to know the unknowable, the production
of transformative violence is the key. In the name of this power, the production of violence is not an accident but a goal. This production is the key to the
transformative experiences that give our lives a sense of intensity, depth, and meaning. Hence, we always have ample motive to seek such experiences,
violence will be
produced. Moreover, no morality will ever be able to put an end to these productions. No
morality has the power to stop the persistence of the sacred violence in our lives, since
this violcnce is the only key we have to the experience of the miraculous, of the sacred. As for
Charles Manson, Bataille would certainly try to understand Manson's and our own violence in this
context of the sacred, of our need for depth and meaning. The production of transformative
violence is fundamental to our being, whether we are conscious of it in this way or not. He,
to seek to bear witness to transformative violence. Given such ample motive, violence and spectacles of such
then, would not regard Manson's production as an anomaly, as unlike what he himself would be driven to produce. Yet in our lives there are also limits. It
is unlikely that Bataile would applaud Manson for the same reason he ultimately rejects Sade. They are both indiscriminate; they both go too far.
"Continuity is what we are after,' Bataille conrms, but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is
not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain. De Sade's
aberration exceeds that limit. (Bataille 1962, 13) In other words, our wasteful consumption must also have limits. To actually approve of our own
self-destruction goes too far. Later on in Death and Sen suality, Bataille continues, Short of a paradoxical capacity to defend the indefensible, no one
would suggest that the cruelty of the heroes of Justine and Jullette should not be wholeheartedly abominated. It is a denial of the principles on which
humanity is founded. We are hound to reject something that would end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are
building we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. (Bataile 1962, 179-80) This passage is crucial for understanding Bataille's
ethics. Usually Bataille writes on behalf of the violence that remains unaffected by absolute prohibitions. Prohibitions cannot obviate this transformative
violence. There is always ample motive to produce the experiences of sacred transformation, i.e., to transgress the prohibitions. Yet self-preservation is
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also a fundamental value for BatailIe there is also ample motive to resist the violence that denies the value of the well being of life itself. As he says in
the second of the above passages, we must condemn what threatens to destroy us; our sovereign aspirations can be taken too far. In another passage
he speaks of our need "to become aware of... [ourselves] and to know clearly what... [our] sovereign aspirations are in order to limit their possibly
disastrous consequences" (1962, 181). It is when we are ignorant of these aspirations that we are most vulnerable to them, enacting them anyway,
albeit inattentively. In the end, hypermorality asks us to encounter our aspirations to evil, to join in what Bataille calls "complicity in the knowledge of
Evil" in order to construct what he calls a "rigorous morality" (1973, unpaginated Preface). What does it mean to encounter such aspirations, to join in
such complicity? Bataille's hypermorality requires that, as a culture, we appreciate the value of becoming more active in our productions of
violence. From his earliest writings to his latest, Bataille always bemoaned the decline of the practice of sacrice in the modem world, beginning in the
West, and he always believed that such a decline only obscures our productions of violence, rather than doing away with them or the needs from which
they stem. Two closely related discussions of this appear in his early essays "The Jesuve" and "Sacricial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van
Gogh," where Bataille suggests that the decline of the practice of sacrice has been far less than a blessing for us. He argues that the production of
violence continues, the danger of this production continues, although in the most unrecognizable forms. The examples given in the essay "Sacricial
Mutilation" emphasize both how easy it is to distance ourselves from this danger as well as how terrible such a danger could be. They include a man
twisting off his own nger and a woman tearing out her own eye, both terrible examples of our strange, cruel, and uncontrollable needs for expenditure.
Along similar lines, as a commentary on events of this kind, Bataile argues, The practice of sacrice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due
to its universality, a human action more signicant than any other. Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrice,
with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the
conditions of present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior. (Bataille 1985, 73) Here as throughout his writings,
Bataile emphasizes two key aspects of the decline of sacrice that we ignore at our own peril. In the rst place, he contends that the violent need that
ritual sacrice was once able to address remains with us despite all optimism to the contrary. We don't put violence on display in the same ritualized
fashion, but the need remains constant. We've only become less aware of it in ourselves, and less aware of ourselves as those who have need of such
violence. Thus Bataille's rst point is that the need for nonproductive usages does not diminish when it is denied. His second point is that this denial in
which the need persists represents a decline in self-awareness, one with obviously dangerous consequences. No longer do we congregate as a
community to witness the violence we desire to bring into this world and to affirm our lack of control over this violence, our lack of control over this
desire. We no longer congregate to produce the sacricial spectacle, to produce thereby a community of mutual complicity in the knowledge of the
sacred continuity of being. We no longer allow ourselves to organize spectacles in the name of the sacred that enact that which exceeds the good. Such
spectacles would have to violate every stricture of human rights known to us today. Yet we have not changed, according to Bataile, except for becoming
We are now more than ever the condemned on the way to becoming
the destroyed by way of imagining ourselves as the good. Even an utter catastrophe
like the Holocaust does little to alter our naive self-image. In his short piece on David
Rousset's book The Universe of the Concentration Camp, Bataille refuses to side with the
moralists because moralistic self-delusion here is our problem, not our solution, There exists
in a certain form of moral condemnation an escapist denial. One says, basically, this
abjection would not have been, had there not been monsters .... And it is possible, insofar
as this language appeals to the masses, that this infantile negation may seem effective; but in
the end it changes nothing. It would be as vain to deny the incessant danger of cruelty as it
would be to deny the danger of physical pain. One hardly obviates its effects atly attributing it
to parties or to races which one imagines to he inhuman. (Bataille 1991, 19) Based on what we
have already seen in this paper, Bataille can never accept the moralist's claim, distancing
us from the purveyors of evil, no matter how attractive it is to join hands at a particular
moment of victory over an oppressive enemy. It would be inconsistent for him to specify a
particular set of disagreeable behaviors and state that they aren't human, that they aren't ours.
Even at this point, standing in the ruins, the main point would be to obstruct our
all-too-ready inclination to nd ways of denying the cruelty at the heart of us all; to
interfere with our desire to attribute all cruelties to the monstrous one or the aberrant few. For
hypermorality, this cruelty is precisely what we need to take into account of ourselves,
rather than to deny it as the evil of others.
less known to ourselves than ever.
How is this to be done? Bataille faces a serious dilemma that a contrast between his hypermorality and Aristotle's morality helps to show. The goal of
morality is to take virtuous behaviors into account, to make them part of our lives by learning through habituation to enjoy right behaviors with respect
to our pleasures and pains. Aristotle says that it is the job of "legislators [to] make the citizens good by forming habits in them .... and it is in this that a
good constitution differs from a bad one" (1941, 952, 1103b). He continues saying that "the whole concern both of virtue and of political science is with
pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be good, he who uses them badly bad" (1941, 955, 1105a). As he puts it, "We assume ...
that excellence tends to do what is best with regard to pleasures and pains, and vice does the contrary" (1941, 955, lIlO4b). How do we become
excellent? We begin with instruction by role models, who demonstrate the praiseworthy behaviors and the rule to follow in practice until we follow it
automatically, internalized as part of our second nature of moral character. Such learning is by imitation of those who delight in shunning the wrong
pleasures, who delight in withstanding the right pains. Such imitation is difficult but noble and good, making us excellent. In contrast to these virtuous
displays serving Aristotle's purposes of moral instruction, what about the kinds of spectacles or displays Bataille proposes with his hypermorality?
Whereas Aristotle's are displays of virtue, Bataile's would be closer to displays of vice. Whereas the former invite imitation of the right relations to
pleasure and pain, the latter would invite imitation of morally wrong relations. In the former case we have a heroic role model. In the latter case ,
the
role model would be closer to the opposite, to the traitor, the practitioner of vice; the role
model would be closer to Sade
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Link - Violence is Bad

The rejection of violence is the rejection of our humanity, ensuring explosing
excess culminating in extinction
It would be pointless to deny that most illegal violence is abhorrent or immoral. At the same
time, however, given the violence of the life of our culture, we need to understand immoral
violence more deeply than any blanket condemnation of it will allow. Beyond our
condemnations, we need to recognize that the acts we most prohibit are paradoxically also
the very ones we most celebrate. A foremost proponent of this need is the French
philosopher and writer Georges Bataille. Relying on a notion of excess energy and the problem of
its expenditure, Bataille argues that the transgression of law is what he calls an accursed yet
ineluctable part of our lives. We make laws in the name of prohibiting acts of violence, yet the
problem of the expenditure of an excess of energy requires behaviors that violate the
very same rules we cherish and intend to uphold. The commentator Jean Piel took note of how Bataille managed "to view the world as if it
were animated by a turmoil in accord with the one that never ceased to dominate his personal life" (1995, 99). Here, the fact of an individualin-turmoil
reects the surplus of energy disturbing life in general, rather than a moral deciency for which an individual can be held accountable. For Bataille, an
individual's wasteful behaviors are ultimately reections of the problem of the surplus of solar energy. Piel put it this way: "The whole problem is to know
how, at the heart of this general economy, the surplus is used" (1995, 103). How should the surplus of solar energy be used? Bataile contends that this
surplus is never extinguished and that its expenditure always leads towards the commission of violence. The surplus of energy is accursed and nally
cannot serve us productively. The accursed excess confronts us with the problem of how to expend energy when this results in usages that cannot made
be useful. Thus the production of violence has a value for us as those condemned to the realm of non-productive expenditures. We undoubtedly deny
this value, as Bataille notes, when "Under present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its
function, to giftgiving, to squandering without reciprocations" (1988, 38). Nonetheless, as Bataille puts it, "the impossibility of continuing growth makes
way for squander" (1988, 29). When this impossibility of useful expenditure is ignored, then we fail to recognize ourselves on the deepest level, as who
we most fundamentally are. Against this failure and in the name of a kind of inverted Hegelian selfrecognition, Bataille calls for the transgression of our
prohibitionist moral values. We need an ethics of squandering goods, of squandering what is good, in recognition of an overabundance over and beyond
all others, i.e. an overabundance that can only, at best, be squandered. He writes, life suffocates within limits that are too close: it aspires in manifold
ways to an impossible growth; it releases a steady ow of excess resources, possibly involving large squandenngs of energy. The limit of growth being
reached, life enters into ebullition: Without exploding, its extreme exuberance pours out in a movement always bordering on explosion. Bataille 1988.
30) As living lives that must enter into ebullition, we nd ourselves fundamentally committed no more to moral righteousness than to immoral outpourings of energy, to sudden and violent outbursts exceeding all rational considerations. The protests of moralism are
secondary and never responsive to Bataille's questioning of morality: "Supposing there is no
longer any growth possible, what is to be done with the seething energy that remains?" (1988,
31). We are told by reason and morality to do what is best, which is to prohibit behaviors that are
nonproductive or harmful. Our morality identies the right with the useful and productive, with
whatever makes us better. Bataille, however, argues against this morality and for the
requirement of useless, nonproductive, violent outpourings of energy-a requirement for what
he calls "a draining-away, a pure and simple loss, which occurs in any case" (1988, 31). These
violent, nonproductive outpourings, according to Bataille, are required of us all as living
beings regardless of whether or not we take the responsibility to manage and arrange their
occurrence in our lives. At issue, for Bataille, is energy in excess, energy as an excess. As an
excess, such energy must be discharged explosively in outpourings that, in the end, are
inevitable. Does it make a difference how an excess of energy is squandered if, in the end, the results will have to be violent, if we cannot avoid
taking actions that must be acknowledged as wrong? Bataille proposes that we face up to the value of the choices that remain, rather than continue to
shrink from the available options, especially those moral prohibitionism would regard as either dirty or simply unacceptable. All expenditures, even acts
of squandering, cannot be equally unacceptable; our available options lie with respect to the contrasting degrees of unacceptability of various acts and
the various amounts of waste each entails. He states that "in no way can [an] ... inevitable loss be accounted useful . . . but there remains] a matter of
an acceptable loss, preferable to another that is regarded as unacceptable (1988, 31). The key to the possibility of an ethics for Bataille is that beyond
the nave hopes of our prohibitionist morality, we can see that some acts of violence are preferable to others. He contends in this vein that we need
something counterintuitive, a kind of morality of evil, a morality able to face up to what he refers to as "a question of acceptability, not utility" (1988,
31). This distinction between the acceptable and the useful transforms the idea of a moral project to where it becomes right to enact those wrongs that
would constitute the best (i.e., least damaging) uses of energy given the requirements of expenditure in situations of limited growth. For Bataille, it is
"right" to "constructively" suspend moral prohibitions in order to substitute less damaging acts for the more violent alternatives. Our
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prohibitionist morality is an inevitable failure in even imagining how a surplus of energy
may best be discharged. By default, this morality results in more violent discharges of
energy, in lives that are, as a consequence, made worse. Like Nietzsche, Bataille proposes a revaluation of moral values, a transformation of what
Nietzsche calls "herd" morality. For both Bataille and Nietzsche, ordinary morality is too constricted with respect to the biggest picture, to conducting the
totality of our lives. The value of the "herd" morality breaks down when taking human life as a whole into account. To recognize ourselves for all that we
are means having to change the outlooks that now constrain us. In recognizing ourselves we alter our values and behaviors in the name of living the
fullest lives possible. A system of moral values, under construction, may be regarded as analogous to any system of valuation. For example, we may
also construct a system of trading equities on the stock exchanges. This latter value-system will select some equities as preferable to others, and makes
trades accordingly. Good trades acquire better equities while bad trades acquire worse ones. Moreover, the value-system as a whole is better to the
extent it maximizes good trades. The best value-system makes the greatest number of good trades, thereby maximizing prots, and minimizing what is
lost. Analogous to this kind of value-system, a morality may be regarded as a system of exchanges with the aim of maximizing excellence in living. As
such, a morality values actions and intentions as better or worse in the name of right and wrong. We ordinarily assume that an action is wrong simply if
it violates the system of moral rules (the Ten Commandments, for example) and right if the rules are upheld. Given this assumption, to do the right thing
is analogous to using the stockpicking system correctly. On this level, when morality tells us what to do, we are either right or wrong, depending simply
on whether or not the rules are obeyed. But Bataille's Nietzschean morality demands that we evaluate the value of the moral value-system itself, the
success or failure of the system generating the rules. Those who trade equities know not to stand by a set of rules that loses money. A value-system may
sometimes have to be abandoned. For Bataille, the same is true for a dysfunctional set of moral values. Yet our moral system that sets the standard of
value for our behaviors has been subjected to no standards of evaluation. We need to abandon the assumption that the rules of morality are absolute,
productive in all contexts, and beyond dispute. We need to make it possible to employ so-called 'immoral" values when these have life affirming effects,
and to suspend or transgress 'moral" values when these serve a sufficient life-affirming purpose. The key is to recognize ourselves as the extreme
beings we are. Bataille sees human life as beyond the limits set by morality, as desiring nothing less than the wild, destructive, celebratory excesses by
means of which we are granted ecstatic gifts. We produce acts of violence in part because they have a supreme value for us, even though the thought of
such acts as having supreme value is always laughable and almost always denied. A typical day betrays little in the way of a lust for outrageous excess.
However, for Bataile, a typical day reveals only a part of our being. According to Literature and Evil, just as certain insects, in given conditions, ock
towards a ray of light, so we all ock to an area at the opposite end of the scale from death. The mainspring of human activity is generally the desire to
reach the point farthest from the funereal domain, which is rotten, dirty and impure. We make every effort to efface the traces, signs and symbols of
death. Then, if we can, we efface the traces and signs of these efforts. (Bataille 1973, 48). In other words, there is a radical duality at work in our lives,
although traces of this duality are ordinarily effaced. For Bataille, there is rst the fundamental value of the unacceptable and second the unacceptability
of this rst fundamental value, i.e., the overwhelming need to efface the value of the unacceptable along with every trace of it as a value in our lives. He
contends that both the left and right poles of this duality are mainsprings of human selfrecognition. With the right pole of effacement, we suppress the
awareness of the left pole, of the presence of our own destructive desires. He acknowledges that the resulting self-conception does t us to the extent
that "the being which we are is primarily a nite being (a mortal individual)... [with] limitations [that] are no doubt necessary" (1973, 50). Yet, at the
same time, Bataille's own writings never fail to emphasize the primacy of what is harmful to us, of what is neither useful nor good, of what is beyond our
mere nitude. Throughout Literature and Evil, for example, he repeatedly affirms the destructive behaviors and dark values that must come at the
expense of survival needs. Mere survival is the necessary but insufficient condition of striving to live a full life. To live fully actually means to live at the
expense of future survival, to completely waste ourselves, blind to all consequences. Along these lines, Literature and Evil argues that to live life really
means nothing less than that we don't "ee wisely from the elements of death [but instead] enter the regions that wisdom tells us to avoid" (Bataille
1973, 50). To live fully we must shun wisdom; in living fully we laugh even at death itself, in the awareness that "When we enter the regions that wisdom
tells us to avoid... we really live" (1973, 50). When we achieve "a heightened consciousness of being," we burn, because only "by going beyond ... these
limitations which are necessary for... preservation... [are we able to] assert. the nature of... [our] being" (1973, 50). The rst chapter of Literature and
Evil similarly contends that "Death alone-or, at least, the ruin of the isolated individual in search of happiness in time-introduces that break without
which nothing reaches the state of ecstasy" (Bataille 1973, 13). This is because for every individual, "an irreducible, sovereign part of himself is free from
the limitations and the necessity which he acknowledges" (1973, 16). Indeed, in the same chapter, Bataille celebrates the desire for self-ruin as a divine
or sovereign inspiration, as one taught to us by religion, Greek tragedy, and the great books. In his words, The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek
tragedy and, ultimately, of all reli gions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot
bear. This tendency is the opposite of Good. Good is based on common interest which entails consid eration of the future. Divine intoxication . . . is
the dark forces that drive us towards

ruining ourselves cannot be dismissed-these forces are a crucial part of who we are.
Concomitantly, we suffer from a problem of self-recognition, of not knowing ourselves for who we
are. This failure to know ourselves does not limit our dissoluteness and ruinousness, only our
self-knowledge as such. The selfimage of ourselves as good prevents our acknowledging
the problem of the surplus of energy that must be squandered, as the problem of who
we ourselves are beneath and beyond that of the irrational atrocities that particular individuals
commit. Our prohibitionist morality deals with evil only after the fact, without taking into account
the prior, fundamental value disruption has for our lives. The epigraph to this article from
Literature and Evil says that we won't recognize ourselves for who we are until we see ourselves
as condemned, which Bataille considers his main point (1973, 25). But the failure to
recognize ourselves has an alarming implication, that we may be headed in the direction
of self-destruction, and that we are actually driven in this direction by our need to produce our
own nal condemnation. Bataille gives us reason to pause to wonder whether we are
blundering towards self-annihilation beneath the amazingly resilient image we have of
ourselves as good. Do we have sufficient motive to avoid proceeding violently and negligently,
to the very moment of our own demise? To not have to go all the way to self-destruction, we
need to show and know ourselves outside of the house of the good, to recognize
ourselves for who we are also as evil, as condemned. But when we remain complacently
within this house or realm, Bataille's dialectic of self recognition remains for the most part
entirely in the present. (Bataille 1973, 9) The main point, for Bataille, is that
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unknown. From within the house of the good, it makes little sense to alter the image of the
human to include the necessity of evil. Indeed it seems like an irrational or frivolous act to do so,
as stated in The Accursed Share,
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Link -System > Genocide

Labeling genocide a systematic product of modernity allowing us to ignore the
violence within ourselves.
Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History at University of London, 2006
[History, Memory and Mass Atrocity p. 4-12]
In the light of research ndings about 'ordinary men' it might at rst seem inappropriate to talk
of the 'sacrificial' nature of the Holocaust. There is, however, an equally large body of
literature which reveals the antisemitic context in which the 'ordinary men' operated.' In the case
of the Einsatzgruppen, these apparently contradictory characteristics of order and purity and
sacrice and violence - coexist in equal measure. What this reveals is neither the 'underside
of modernity' nor a 'relapse into barbarism'; rather, it simply means that the Nazi project of
order and beauty was to be attained by unleashing an untrammelled violence.
CONTINUED
Does this fact mean that violence was eliminated from the latter stages of the Holocaust? Even excluding the hundreds of thousands who perished
miserably in ghettos and mass-shootings, those [p. 10] subjected to the Nazi machinery of destruction - the most singlemindedly bureaucratic murder
process yet devised - were not free from the exercise of violence. Violence need not involve the relation of individuals; the state is just as capable of
treating the 'object of violence' as one 'potentially worthy of bodily harm, or even annihilation'. With or without the element of pleasure to the
perpetrators of violence,"
the Holocaust was no clinical operation devoid of emotional input.
There are
many recorded acts of sadism and brutality in the death camps, acts which are often dismissed as the personal proclivities of individual guards in a situation where they were free
to act out their fantasies, but which do not typify the death procedure. This is simply not true
; every survivor account of the camps is
suffused with an atmosphere of terror
which only a power relationship built on total inequality can produce. It is not even
necessary to provide explicit details; listen, for example, to Elie Wiesel's description of arriving at Auschwitz: It was night. There were thousands, at least
it seemed to me that there were thousands and thousands of Jews, who came here from everywhere and went into the re. And I was afraid, I asked
myself whether this meant the end of the Jewish people.28 This simple depiction positively reeks of fear, its undertone of violence inescapable. Those
who talk of 'industrial death' have not reected on what it might be like to arrive at a death-camp, a terrifying experience which is one of the key
moments in many testimonies. But apart from the violence experienced at every moment in the camps,29 it is possible to see the death process as a
whole as an outburst of violence, one which mobilised itself through channels of industrial technique. This brings us to the heart of the confusion.
Is
it the role of technique in itself that marks out the Holocaust as so horric, because it was so
devoid of the passions associated with murder? Arendt thought so: the seemingly irresistible
proliferation of techniques and machines, far from only threatening certain classes with
unemployment, menaces the existence of whole nations and conceivably of all mankind.
[17] This is a way of thinking which leads to thoroughgoing indictments of modernity.
Gianni Vattimo, for example, writes of: the discovery that the rationalisation of the world turns against reason and its ends of perfection and emancipation, and does so not by
error, accident, or a chance distortion, but precisely to the extent that it is more and more perfectly accomplished.30 [p. 11] This is probably convincing enough to mean that
. Nevertheless, although
enticing, Vattimo's argument is too simple to be entirely convincing. It fails to acknowledge
that not all modemities end in catastrophe, and that not all bureaucracies are inherently
genocidal (though they may become so). One of the good things to emerge out of the Goidhagen debate was proof of a widespread reluctance
thinkers who today call for a completion of the 'project of modernity or who appeal to universal reason are being naive
to admit that the killers could enjoy their violence, or at least to admit that the endless catalogue of atrocities found in survivor testimonies amounts to
more than anecdotes of unusual, isolated incidents. Taking photographs seriously as historical evidence has also helped demonstrate that everyday
the dominance of the 'modernity' critique

means that there is a certain perverse comfort to be derived from believing that it was
the procedures of a disciplinary, medicalised, rationalised society which led inexorably to
the death world of Auschwitz. The indictment of rational society helps blind us (willingly, if
unconsciously) to the extreme violence and, worse, the desire for violence, which characterised the
violence was part of the experience of genocide. Nevertheless, it is clear that
Holocaust experience. It is an indictment which perpetuates a process of not listening to the victims, of concentrating on the 'objective' documents of
the perpetrators. Yet this concentration on the perpetrators paradoxically replicates a rationalised thought process in order to condemn rationalised
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violence deriving from the desire to break

free of a rationalised world was a dening characteristic of the Holocaust.
society per se. It therefore becomes all the more difficult to face the fact that
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Link - Torture Bad

Their moralistic outrage to torture is a vampire, sucking outrage from the
state
Avital Ronell 2008
[Diacritics Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2008]
Not to remain stuck to a fatherlandnot even if it suffers most and needs help mostit is less
difficult to sever ones heart from a victorious fatherland. Not to remain stuck to some pity
not even for higher men (hheren Menschen) into whose rare torture and helplessness
some accident allowed us to look. Not to remain stuck to a scienceeven if it should lure us with the most precious nds that
seem to have been saved up precisely for us. Not to remain stuck to ones own detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the bird
who [End Page 165] ies ever higher to see ever more below himthe danger of the ies. Not to remain stuck to our own virtues and become as a
whole the victim of some detail in us, such as our hospitality, which is the danger of dangers for superior and rich souls who spend themselves lavishly,
almost indifferently, and exaggerate the virtue of generosity into a vice. [52] The inventory prescribes extreme forms of detachment, even to the extent
of urging the detachment from detachment, so that independence and the ability to command are properly tested. The problem with testing ones
independencethe test for Nietzsche is bound up with the possibility of independenceis that it copies the word that tries to describe the freeing
perspective for us: in-dependence, Un-abhngigkeit. In other words, independence depends on dependence, and can only come about by the negation of
dependency. But dependence comes rst and always squats in any declaration of independence; so-called independence can never shake loose its origin
in dependent states. The un or in of what depends and hangs onto has to undo the core dependency and produce a nonaddictive prospect. This way of
skating on the rim of negativity is typical enough of the Nietzschean maneuver that, keeping up its stamina, endeavors not to trigger a dialectical
takeover. The test site circumscribed by this text occupies a zone between negation and projected reconciliation; it carves a hole in any possible
synthesis. Independence can never be stabilized or depended upon, which is why it has to submit punctually to the test of its own intention and
possibility. The nots that Nietzsche enters into the decathlon of testing are also a way of signing his own name by courting and swerving around the
nihilistic threat: Nicht/Nietzsche. This is the text, remember, in which Nietzsche says that every philosophical work installs a biographical register; he
makes it clear that he has strapped himself into this text and also that its articulation should not be limited to the disseminated indications of this or that
biographeme. Nonetheless the test run that he proposes bears the weight of his history, including his never-ending break-up with Richard Wagner. Thus
the rst self-testing command says: Not to remain stuck (hngenbleiben) to a personnot even the most lovedevery person is a prison, also a nook
[52].
Beginning with the necessity of wrenching oneself loose from a beloved person, whether a
prison or shelter, the inventory goes on to name the urgency of breaking with ones country,
even in times of war or need, even when the patriotic introject wants and calls you. A
superpower nation-state should be the easiest to sever with. If the inventory is set up
in terms of serial nots this is no doubt because Nietzsche needs to enact the complicity of
the Versuch with its linguistic appointees: the tester or attempter must desist from adhering
to the temptation that calls. The act, if such it is, of desistence is not as such a negative one,
as Derrida has argued in his reading of Lacoue-Labarthe: Without being negative, or being
subject to a dialectic, it both organizes and disorganizes what it appears to determine
[Desistance 41]. Being tested, which brings together attempter with the tempting, does not
fall purely into the zone of action or its purported otherpassivitybut engages both
at once. Already the locution being tested, always awkward and slightly wrenching, invites the intervention of the passive where action or at
least some activity is indicated. The test takes one through the magnetizing sites to which one is spontaneously, nearly naturally, attracted. This could
be a resting place, a shelter and solace overseen by the friendly protectors of the pleasure principle. But Nietzsche, like the other guy, takes the test
pity, the most dangerous affect,

counts for the one to which we are most prone. We are tempted and tested by pity,
roped in by its grim allure, and even if we are not gods, pity can make us crumble and
beyond the pleasure principle. Elsewhere Nietzsche states that pity toppled the gods;
christianize. (This does not mean that Nietzsche advocates the vulgarity of some forms of indifference. Only that action and intervention should not
Liberal pity policies would be nauseating

to Nietzsche; they are not radical, strong, or loving enough. Of course nowadays, I would even take liberal pity.)
eventuate from pity, as do benevolent racism [End Page 166] and the like.
Science belongs to the list of the desistedresistance would come off as too strong a term, too repressive and dependent on what presents itself. The
inclusion of science in the subtle athletics of the not may reect the way Nietzsche had to break away from his scientic niche of philology, but there is
more to it. It is not just a matter of releasing oneself from a scientic commitment in order to pass the Nietzschean test. As the other term in the
partnership, science itself stands to lose from too tight a grip and needs eventually to loosen the bond. A true temptress, science fascinates, perhaps
seduces and lulls. It captivates and often enough gives one a high, an intoxicating sense of ones own capacity for mastery. Yet science itself is
implicated in the relation thus structured. For science not only curates the test from a place of superiority, but is itself subject to the rigors and renewals
of testing. So even if it invites the blindness of fascination and the sum of addictive returns, science needs to be released if only to go under, to dissolve
its substantial mask and be turned over to fresh scientic probes. The movement of dislocation and disappropriation continues even to the point of
disallowing sheer detachment. Increasing the dosage of desistance to the level of turning on itself, Nietzsche proposes that one should not remain
dependent on ones experience of voluptuous detachment. He keeps the tested being in the vehicle of the dis-, and rigorously refuses to issue a permit
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for sticking to any moment or structure of being that would seem welcoming or appropriate. (It is appropriate only to disappropriate, to trace ones own
expropriation from a site that persistently beguiles with the proper.) Thus one must desist even from becoming attached to ones own virtues, such as
Virtue can enlarge itself, take

over; it is vulnerable to imperial acts of expansion. One can become enslaved to ones
virtue, attend to it immoderately, and turn oneself into a hospital for the vampirizing
other. In this ward, as in other Nietzschean wings, strong and superior beings encounter the danger of infection, a weakening. They give too much
hospitality. Virtue itself, no matter how generous or exemplary, can trip up the one being tested.
and spend themselves as if they were innitely capable of the offerings for which they are solicited. The offerings turn into sacrice; the superior soul
gives itself away, nding that it is spent, exhausted. Thus the virtue of generosity, coextensive with hospitality, is turned into a vice. Virtue tips into its
other, and generosity soon becomes a depleting burden.
The aff presents torture as a deviation from the norm, ignoring the exuberant
cruelty inherent to modern war. Only the alt can address the dark motivations
that make the theatrics of torture inevitable. .
Adriana Cavarero, Prof Political Philosophy at Universit degli studi di Verona, 2009
[Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence trans. McCuaig p. 76-77]
The official investigations and judicial proceedings following the scandal of the Abu Ghraib
photographs have tried, as everyone knows, to promote the thesis that the essence of the
misdeed lay in the sadistic and deviant behavior of a few of the soldiers involved, a handful of "bad apples:"22
Corroborating the classic connection between politics and lying, this has not only conrmed a deeply rooted tendency of the U.S. authorities to engage in
dissembling behavior but has obviously helped to supply new matter for modern reection on torture, 2,3 compelling the critical literature on the matter
to bring its own arguments up to date. Special emphasis has thus been placed on "interrogational torture,"" that is, on the difference that supposedly
separates harsh but legal interrogation techniques from the degeneration of these techniques into torture. The task of extracting information from the
victims, or, if one prefers, making them confess the truth, belongs for that matter to the traditional paradigm of torture illustrated by Foucault. Obviously
though, for analyzing the facts of Abu Ghraib today, things are more complicated: once you allow legal practices intended to make the prisoner suffer in
mind and body, perhaps even listing them in detail in dedicated manuals and thus recommending them, to distinguish between harsh interrogation and
interrogational torture often amounts to no more than abstruse and ghastly quibbling.25 Nor do things become any simpler when it comes to the second
type of torture discussed in the literature on the subject, terroristic torture, by which is meant a technology of pain intended to frighten and intimidate
both the victims who actually undergo it and their accomplices and supporters. Cutting loose from the pretended legality of the interrogational model,
the discourse here passes over not only into therealm of intimidation but into that of revenge
and humiliation, which allude symptomatically to the supplice. And yet we are always, even in
terms of frank horrorism, within the domain of rational, or at any rate strategic, behavior, in
the domain of violent acts that appear to select their own ends or rather pretend to do so. 26 As
though to torture rather than simply kill served some useful purpose. As though a
certain utility-information in the case of interrogational torture; intimidation, humiliation, or
revenge in the case of terroristic torture-were the upshot.
That utility played any fundamental part in the atrocious theater of Abu Ghraib is, however,
doubtful. Most of them bit players, 90 percent of the detainees in the Iraqi prison "were of no
intelligence value"27 according to the assessment of the American authorities themselves, in
other words were of no utility when it came to supplying information. As for intimidation,
revenge, and humiliation, the torture certainly included them among its goals and drew
nourishment from them for its own cruelty, yet not in such a way as to assign these objectives a
decisive role and make them the pivot of a strategic economy. As the photographs demonstrate,
what prevailed was the pleasure of farce, the entertainment of a horror transformed
into caricature, a license to dehumanize on the part of willing actors in an atrocious
pantomime. In this sense, in the contemporary era and in the global spotlight of history, the
viewpoint of the regular fighter-in regulation uniform and endowed with regular horrorist
"appetites"achieved its most expressive portrait at Abu Ghraib. In an age in which the
traditional gure of the enemy has been denitively replaced by the defenseless as casual
victim, the traditional gure of the warrior has also promptly adapted to the general
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festival of violence against the defenseless by making way for an obscene caricature of
itself.
To compare the incomparable, you could even say that, after the images from Abu Ghraib, what has emerged is a contrast between the actors of a
violence against the helpless who show that they accompany their crime with a certain trivial enjoyment and the actors on the other side who reveal a
propensity for the grim and the lugubrious, even though they sometimes hymn the joys of paradise as the reward for slaughter. But in this respect, the
phenomenology of contemporary horrorism is so complex in the array of its modes, attitudes, and tones as to discourage any reductive contrast. The
Abu Ghraib presented horror in the imbecile and idiotic form of

the leer. As though, having lost even the howl that freezes in her throat, all that remained of
Medusa today were a dull repugnance.
very disconcerting fact remains that
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Link - War on Terror Bad

The war on terror will not bow to the rational kritik provided by the 1AC. Their
stance of transgressive innocence bolsters the war machine
Nick Mansfeld 2006
theory & event
9:4]
An example Bataille gives of this is Aztec human sacrice. The Aztecs, according to Bataille, captured and then feted a particular human individual, on
whom they lavished the greatest wealth and luxury, art and adornment. At the end of a specied period of time, this individual would be brutally and
ostentatiously slaughtered. The aim of this festival was to open a channel through the otherwise sealed world of logical order, and allow humans to
connect with the ows of continuity that represented the truth of being, and from which in daily life, people needed to struggle to exempt themselves.
This process was what Bataille understood as transgression. Because they involved a wilful destruction of all that had been painstakingly accrued
War is one of these

transgressive rituals. Rather than seeing war as an emotional explosion of primitivism, or the
result of calculating strategy, Bataille saw war as one of the processes whereby human societies
broke out of the constraint of purpose and order to encounter the truth they could not always
live.
Several things need to be said about this process. Firstly, to summarise the complex
logic here. Transgression expresses a society's engagement with the irrational and excessive
ows of energy that have made all its systems and logics possible, but which also exceed and
threaten them. Engagement with these ows is a fullment of our nature, but it must be felt as a
contradiction of our normal, rational, life, that it simultaneously conrms. War opens up
possibilities of ecstasy, intensity and violence, while retrospectively constructing before
and to endure beside and beyond them, an imagined culture of reason, innocence and
meaning. Dissociation and excess require this zone as the antecedent of transgression, in fact,
what is to be transgressed. Reason, morality and purpose then are constructed as the
necessary counterpart and context of excessive violence and disarray. Following this
logic, war then cannot be simply something executed by "the social" nor can it be a simple
version of it. It denes the social as the locus of an innocence that violence is to transgress, a
rightness that needs to be deed by a brutality that conrms and consolidates it. Innocence
thus needs war as that which both confirms and justifies it as innocence.
Secondly, this
through disciplined practices of husbandry and production, Bataille named these transgressive practices "consumption."
process of transgression requires a re-thinking of subjectivity. The subjectivity of normal social life is an articial construct made available by the ows of
energy, but perched precariously upon them. Such specic, individual or localised subjectivities are mere ctions, chimera. Bataille wasn't afraid to say
that the truth of subjectivity was available, but only through the process of transgression, the drive to radical exteriority. Only the subject that could
instantiate the ows of the cosmic energy eld was authentic to Bataille, and humans recognized and tried to live this subjectivity. The gure that
incarnated or represented this asymptotic subject, Bataille called the sovereign 11. The sovereign embodied a subjectivity that lived the intense basic
truth of cosmic force. Individual identity was only ever a pathetic degradation of this heroic possibility. The subject of war, then, is radical exteriority
imagined as livable, and is in deance of any of the constraints and order that dene conventional subjectivity. This sovereignty is both the same as and
different to the one Agamben derives from Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. It is a logic of exception from historical accountability. However, in Bataille
crucially, it is less a hardened singular authority than a dream of the instantiation of radical chaos, one that subjectivity aims to emulate in its truth. As
Derrida argues in "Force of Law"12and most recently in Rogues, this sovereignty must be seen in its dangerous doubleness, as both the risk of the worst
and the only promise of justice.
Thirdly, Bataille thought that rituals of sacrice proposed a question. Rituals dramatised the human need to make
contact with the forces of the cosmos, but why did they have to take this form: the slaughter of a human being? What was specic about this process
that made it sensible as an engagement with cosmic truth? Sacrice, he postulated, annihilated its object. It took something we might recognize as a
version of ourselves, another human subject more or less equivalent to us, and it turned this subject into an object and then destroyed it. Bataille argued
that this process of annihilation of the object dened what consumption was all about. It was simply the human act of denial of our own objectivity .
By
thoroughly destroying the object, human beings separated themselves from the
possibility of considering themselves to be objects, and thus showed that they could not be reduced to the level of the
merely calculable that dened the rational practices of daily life. The human approach to objects in general involves, rstly, this insistence on their
reduction to pure objectivity, and secondly, on their being used up, being annihilated as a display of control over and contempt for the objects that we
believe we are showing are ontologically different from ourselves .
War then, turns what is not an object into an

object, and then annihilates it in order to show that we are not like it. It does this by rst
annihilating any impression or trace of alternative subjectivity in the object, and then consuming it as an object, by physically destroying it in order to
show the triumph of its own claim to not only exclusive subjectivity, but a subjectivity projected backwards to us from the radical exteriority in which our
truth resides.
It would be possible to use this insight to speculate in subjective-cultural terms on the US government's response to the terrorist
attacks of September 11.
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Qaida, the US mounted a massive attempt to reclaim the prerogatives of subjectivity. It
needed to turn itself from object to subject, by insisting on the objectivity of others, at rst
in Afghanistan and then Iraq. These others must have their subjectivity minimised -- by in the case of Iraq, the ontology of the
nation being reduced from millions of people to one demonised name ("Saddam Hussein"), by the obscuring of the casualty rates of the Iraqi people, and
by having their political aspirations reduced to being identical with the middle of any Western democracy. This objectication of subjectivity licenses
violence and restores subjectivity to the US. More than vengeance, more than strategy or oil, the original political popularity of the Iraq venture could be
In sum, then, war

allows us access to a triumphal and exterior subjectivity we feel is our truth, by
annihilating the other first as subject and then as object. Although this project fulls us, we always
seen as an attempt to reclaim a subjectivity lost by the mystery, the abject confusion of having been objectied.
represent and understand it as a transgression, a contradiction of our normal rational innocence. This latter point helps us to a provisional answer to one
of the questions we have been pursuing: how a war-like culture with a history of relentless conquest and genocide is able to believe itself so peace-loving
and innocent. The logic of war is understood as an adventure beyond innocence and reason and its conventional liberal interiorities out into an
exteriority that provides a subjectivity beyond constraint. An innocent domain then is perpetually retrospectively reinvented by the wars it requires as
the thing that war leaves behind. Similarly, dening a social rift, or even a policy, as a war -- war on crime, war on drugs, a culture war -- retrospectively
identies the social as a transgressed innocence, a site of authentic self-identity and normality threatened by the poor, drugs, liberal dissent, and so
on.
According to Bataille's double logic, then, war unfolds as a transgression of radical innocence and of reason. Innocence and war would be part of
one complex, necessary to one another, but they would be understood to be and represented as fundamentally separate, and notionally opposite to one
another. How does this complex relationship play itself out? Beside its transgressive nature, we have identied two other things about war: the radical
exteriority of its understanding of subjectivity and its will to annihilation of its object. It achieves this by rst erasing any trace of subjectivity in the
object, and then destroying it as object. The aim here, according to Bataille's theory of consumption, is to arrogate subjectivity to oneself, by rendering
any notion of the subjectivity and consequently the being of the other impossible. One's own subjectivity emerges only as an uber-subjectivity, as the
supersession of subjectivity in an act of destruction. The destruction of the subjectivity of the war-object also then involves the destruction or at least the
surpassing of the warrior's own subjectivity. In destroying the subjectivity of the other, it imagines itself out in the stream of larger entropic energy that
logic of the annihilation of the other and the exteriority of

subjectivity are the same logic therefore. The war/society complex can be seen then as the exteriorization of the
Bataille saw as the meaning of the cosmos. The
subject by pursuing the will-to-annihilation of the object. This denes the war/society in its radical disloyalty to itself. The war/society produces this logic
in both its peaceful and aggressive phases: in military force, police tactic, media campaign or social policy, but also in its economics, its consumption
and its consumerism, yet the war/society is able to insist on the radical disjunction between its different phases, a disjunction it cannot even really
produce let alone stabilize. (Where exactly would the dividing line fall?) This common ground, even when disguised by a refuge in the logic of
transgression, indicates the dominant mode of the globalizing West, on its mission as the ultra-violent bestower, even incarnation, of peace.
By
constructing its own subjectivity as the supersession of subjectivity through the annihilation of all alternative subjectivities, the subjectivity of the
war/society is at work in war, but not at stake. Not only does war provide an image of innocence by representing its violent self as other to society, but
the exteriorising subject never has content enough to be in any way answerable. Because its logic requires the annihilation of its object, it can refuse to
acknowledge the position from which it could be interrogated or accused. Hence the refusal of the United States to imagine being answerable to the
The war/society is protected from accusation, until it is defeated, and

becomes an object again. The west will not suffer interrogation of its innocence while it
remains triumphant. What this means is that the war/society will not amend itself, will
not become responsible or fair or self-reexive as long as it continues to believe that its
historic mission has been a success. This cannot be summarily dismissed as a commitment
to the doctrine of "might is right," though the continuity between the ancient faith in
providence's manifestation of its truth through trial-by-violence and contemporary belief in
military victory as implicit vindication would repay investigation. What we can say with some
certainty is that what has been unwittingly chosen is a radical commitment to defeat as the only
impetus towards self-knowledge. Thus, as we have seen with the Vietnam War, only the
indenite postponement of the acknowledgement of defeat can allow faith in war to endure.
International Criminal Court.
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Link - TNWs
The affirmatives rational appeal against nukes reinforces the drive to nuclear
destruciton
Ira Chernus, Assoc Prof Religion at the University of Colorado, Boulder, 1985
[Journal of the American Academy of Religion]
The relationships between war and myth illuminate at least part of that mysterious
human nature which apparently baffled Thomas Powers when he sought the irrational motives of
war. They also help explain the relative futility of four decades of persuasively logical
arguments for nuclear disarmament. While all wars are compounded of both pragmatic purposes and mythic dimensions,
the nuclear age has reduced pragmatic purposes to virtual insignicance. War between super-powers, whether cold or hot, is now almost entirely
mythic enactment. When rational motives dwindle to irrelevance, it is not only superuous but actually dangerous to keep decrying the irrationality of
nuclear weapons until they begin falling

from the sky. That would be the ultimateand ultimately pyrrhicvictory for the "defense
intellectuals." Would it not be wiser to shift the grounds of the debate and bring the
deeper motivations of the nuclear arms race into the light of public understanding? The rst
step in such a shift is to look at the mythic paradigms that have shaped our perceptions of
weapons and war in the nuclear age.
war. We could go on debating the possibility of nding rational purposes for
Continued
The persuasiveness of this mythic framework is enhanced by the media that disseminate it. Most people learn whatever they know
about the nuclear issue from "the news;" "the news" disseminates and legitimizes all our reigning mythologies. But the average
person sees no connection at all between "the news" and myth, because myth is taken to mean a lie (or at best a fantasy) while "the
news" is assumed to be a literal record of real happenings in the real world. So nuclear myth passes for literal truth. In a culture that
the myth of
rational nuclear balance rests especially heavily on literal acceptance, for the faith in
technical reason enshrined in the paradigm depends on an equally firm faith in literalism.
Indeed, the two faiths are two mutually reinforcing sides of a single coin. Literal truth connes
us to the realm of abstract reason which can only calculate causes and effects, means and
ends. It is essential to our fantasy of a world wholly comprehended and wholly controlled,
denes literal truth as the only form of truth, any mythology must pass as literally true to be credited. But
and thus to our dream of humanly-constructed global balance. Our passion for literalism fueled the similar dreams and fantasies that led to a world
dominated by technologythe technology whose ultimate product and most tting emblem is the Bomb. Seeing only means and ends, however,
literalism blinds us to the mythic dimension. A myth which depends on literal acceptance therefore has a blindness to its own mythic nature built into it.
Literal truth also fosters the nuclear contest

because it is necessarily single-minded truth, insisting on absolute oppositions between true
and false, right and wrong, and (by extension) good and evil. Our passion for literalism
reinforces our vision of nuclear armament as an apocalyptic crusade against the twin evils of the
Soviet Union and irrationality itself. At the same time it creates a one-dimensional world in
which the given reality is the only possible reality. It sties the capacity of myth to stimulate
imagination, discover new possibilities for the future, and show us the multiple dimensions
of truth. Robert J. Lifton has written at length on this aspect of nuclear age psychology. His
theory of psychic numbing rests largely on the insight that the "mythic zone" of our minds, in
which new images arise to reect changing realities, has been frozen by the terror of nuclear
annihilation. But this new terror only intensied a process that began long before Hiroshima.
Western civilization had been learning for several centuries to see the world as a
collection of inert objects, totally amenable to human manipulation. Inevitably, we began
to see other human beings as equally inert objects, and then finally our own selves as
inert and therefore dead. Literalism was as much a source as a sign of this process. When
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It prevents us from understanding our own deepest motivations.
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taken literally, as it inevitably must be, the myth of rational nuclear balance is a myth of and for
"death in life." If our pervasive psychological deadness continues its triumphant march, it will
some day culminate in a universal physical deadness. Since there will be no retrospect afterwards, we must
observe now in prospect that the paradigm of rational balance will be a fundamental contributing factor to nuclear annihilation. So the danger of
debating about the rational uses of nuclear weapons is not conned to the futility of a debate that misses the essential point.
There is
perhaps even greater danger in continuing the debate because its terms and
assumptions all lie in the realm of literal technical reasoning. It reinforces the potentially
lethal paradigm we have been describing, regardless of the conclusions it attains.
The affirmatives crusade against the deadly irrationality or nuclear weapons

plays the enemys game. Only the alternatives theatrical war can challenge
nuclear violence.
Rather than trying to score more points in a game it cannot win, the disarmament
movement would be well advised to reject the game and its premises altogether. What
would this mean in practical terms?
It would mean a new focus on the mythic
dimensions of the issue and a concerted effort to apprise the public that all it
stands to gain from nuclear armament is the mythic satisfaction of re-enacting the dominant vision of nomos. Assuming that everyone knows what
there is to lose, the public (this being a democracy) could then make informed decisions about nuclear policy. At the very least, discussion of the
mythic aspects could get us off the merry-go-round of endlessly recycling the same old arguments. It is difficult to predict what new topics might come
The absurdities of nuclear policy have led us to

recognize the preponderant element of mythic play in the nuclear contest, and in war as
a whole. The next step might well be to notice a similar element in many of the institutions of society, and then go on to see the large majority
to the fore. I can only offer here a few tentative possibilities.
of human life as mythic enactment repeated for its own intrinsic satisfactions. When we speak of "the human drama" (or "the human comedy") we
life may be best understood as an immense playor, more precisely, an

infinite number of little plays, interwoven in immensely complex ways. Indeed, the
human species might be defined as a living theater in which this endless play of plays is
played out. War is one scene in which the drama reaches heightened levels of
intensity; but the same mythic dynamics we have uncovered in war are constantly working (though most often unconsciously) throughout our lives. This is a rather
voice an age-old intuition that
large claim to make in a small paragraph. And I do not intend here to begin unravelling its tangled complexities. I want only to suggest that there would be some important
practical, as well as theoretical, implications to such a view of life. One implication is a new understanding of the uniqueness of nuclear weapons. They are qualitatively different
from all previous weapons because they are the rst weapons that can destroy the theater in which the human drama unfolds. From this perspective war between super-powers
is indeed obsoletenot because it lacks any rational purpose or practical gain, but because the human drama will end if the theater is demolished. The nuclear disarmament
movement's most compelling cry is not "No more war!" but "The show must go on!" In fact, it seems unlikely that the human drama will ever dispense entirely with its war
. The appeals of war that we have outlined are probably too deeply alluring to be
relinquished. But the many links between war and myth suggest a new approach to this issue too. Generally, when the question of the
scenes
abolition of war is raised, the answer is said to hinge on the issue of violence; those who believe that violence is innate in human beings hold that war
is forever, while those who disagree see a hope of eliminating war. The analysis offered here suggests that violence is not the crucial element in
understanding war. Certainly the power and intensity of war are related to its physical violence, but they are not identical with nor reducible to that
although some form of warfare may

be inevitable, it is not clear that warfare need involve killing. It may be possible to find
other mythic scenarios that will offer the same fulfillments as traditional war without
demanding loss of life or even physical violence (Brown: 180-183). It is naive, of course, to avoid the issue of violence
violence. And the appeals of war go signicantly beyond its intensity and power. Therefore,
altogether. There may be something in human nature that makes the abolition of violent war a futile dream. Even if this were the case, we could still
learn to see "conventional" war as a form of deadly serious play. War approached as play is likely to be less
destructive than war seen as a crusade against absolute evil. Its goal is not so much
destruction of the enemy as re-enactment of the intertwining of life and death in the
human theater. In the nuclear age, its message takes on particularly potent meaning. While all "conventional" wars destroy life and
nurture death, nuclear war would destroy death as well as life; it would bring the cycle of life-and-deaththe very lifeblood of the human drama, as it
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their moral
commitment to maximize life and minimize death, they see the two only as logical
opposites and argue logically on behalf of life. Here, as in their logical arguments against
the Bomb, they may be defeating their own cause by accepting their opponents*
premises. The "defense intellectuals" and other devotees of unlimited human control
have an equally passionate belief in the rational conquest of death, though their path to
conquest leads dangerously close to the abyss. The nuclear peril is a sign that the denial of
death, however well-meaning its motives, is a questionable course. Rather than declaring
war obsolete in order to stave off death, it may be wiser to declare that the show, with its
ever-turning wheel, must go on. Yet there is certainly a valid moral imperative to seek peaceful solutions to every conict. Philosophical
is of warto a dead stop. Those who hope to abolish all warfare generally fail to see this dimension of war. With
speculations should not give us license to accept violence passively and stop searching for meaningful alternatives. The overriding imperative of the present, however, is to nd
forms of war that do not threaten to destroy the theater in which war dramas and all other dramas are enacted. The most valuable form of war today may be the war of human
beings against weapons of omnicide. Many disarmament activists are loathe to see themselves as engaged in a war. Yet unconsciously the traditional war paradigm holds sway
over all of us, no matter how committed we are to peace. I suspect that a large majority of disarmament activists do unconsciously feel themselves in a warindeed a war to
the deathagainst the weapons that could destroy nomos forever. As the anti-nuclear movement grows, it will attract increasing numbers of people who feel comfortable with
The image of a nonviolent war against

weapons may be a useful aid in creating a broadly based mass movement for
disarmament. It simply recognizes that most people will not give up their attachment to
a war of cosmic significance unless they are given another such war in its place. Those
the war paradigm and many who positively enjoy the idea of a good ght in a good cause.
who insist on the total abolition of war will not be happy with this suggestion. But those who insist that the show must go on, with
war and all, may see merit in it.
The affirmative deploys the means-ends reasoning that makes nuclear war
possible. Only the alts sacred over-owing can confront the violence of
nuclear weapons.
Beyond these practical considerations, the shift to a mythic

perspective has signicant theoretical aspects. Many of the terrors of the modern world,
both nuclear and non-nuclear, have grown out of an exclusive concern with technical
means-and-ends reasoning. While much of life is still re-enactment of scenes from the human
drama, undertaken for its own sake, Western civilization has come to deny this truth. A new
focus on mythic play could teach us how frequently we are pursuing ends in themselves
without knowing it. More importantly, by raising this fact to consciousness it could give us a
conceptual framework in which to assess the value of those ends and thus free us to
choose new ends. If nuclear armament has become largely an end in itself, it is hard to
imagine a more desperately needed lesson. We might discover that freedom to perceive
and choose our forms of play is also freedom from the rationalism, literalism, and
psychic numbing that plague us so perilously. We might discover, too, that we need not
justify our lives as means to some end which is in turn only a means to some other
end. As our world overows with more and more means, it is increasingly drained of
consciously perceived ends to give meaning to those means. Surely this sense of
meaningless futility is deeply related to our numbed apathy in the face of impending
disaster. The more we try to calculate purely rational means to save ourselves, the
more firmly we fasten ourselves into this trap. The myths and teachings of religious tradi90
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tions can help to free usnot so much by preaching the moral sanctity of life as by
teaching us to value ends over means and to nd fulllment in the play of life as an end in
itself. Only if we see life as an end in itself will we cherish it and preserve it. The world will
always be filled with conict and folly and evil. We will always be tempted to ask, as Walt
Whitman once did, what good life and self can be amid "the empty and useless years." If we
learn to see life as an infinite theater, though, we may find deep meaning and comfort
at such moments in Whitman's simple answer: "That you are herethat life exists and
identity, that the powerful play goes on, and
you may contribute a verse."
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Link - Terrorism
Terrorism is an excess generated by the solutions designed to address it.
There is no end to the cycle of terror and counter-terror. Stefano Harney &
Randy Martin 2007
[theory & event 10:2 ]
If the Cold War contested the future, its apparent heir, the war on terror battles over the
present. This is more than the hyper-vigilance of a politics of fear. The terrorist is the
quintessential gure of bad risk however effectively it may be deployed. We cannot await it. The
only safety lies in bringing its moment into our midst, that is, by pre-emptive strike. Terror's
temporality is anti-utopian, it implies the immanence of the future in the present. The
risk economy, the investment action upon a possible future difference in the present, shares
the same sensibility. Foreign and domestic applications of risk management forge a
nefarious connection in George W. Bush's 2002 National Security Document. In this proud proclamation of imperial doctrine, pre-emption
is bequeathed to one nation and friends (whether old or newly acquired) affirm their allegiance by replicating U.S. anti-inationary monetary policy. Low
and behold this same language turns up in Iraq's strategy for national development. Ination, when it is not an assault on labor (as low unemployment or
high wages) anthropomorphizes the world of goods (supply being chased by demand and puffing itself up accordingly).
Just as industrialization
forced association upon self-sufficient labor, and consumerism wove a common web of dreams in the marketplace, nancialization imposes a generalized
condition of mutual indebtedness. Personal nance, like free wage labor, amounts to an enormous aggregation of the capacity to produce nancial value
while assuming the risks of failure to realize value. Like production and consumption, nancialization is also a form of dispossession of one array of lifemaking circumstances that forces an elaboration of what people must subsequently do and be together. The future itself becomes a factor of production
as each possible outcome is shifted into an actionable present. The derivative represents the moment when a small intervention, an arbitrager's
momentary opportunity, seizes upon a highly dispersed volatility and leverages it to extensive effect. Unlike the entrepreneur, born of initiative, the
arbitrager exists only through the action of others, deriving themselves as a cluster of volatilities. The derivative is the extensive energy within the body
of nance. It is also incorporated into the grand strategy for engaging and negating unsupportable risk and excess .
Terror wars are in this

respect derivative wars. They "deter forward" using small deployments of risk capable
special forces to leverage imperial intervention. They succeed in their initial
displacements (of toppling regimes) but produce the very thing they claim to fight but
that are in actuality their condition of further circulation, namely terror. Terror is an
inassimilable excess that occasions intervention without end. Unlike earlier imperialisms that sought to
extract, civilize and develop, this logic of occupation quickly becomes indifferent to its prize and impatient with itself.
It would be tempting to see in
the gap between a general interest in combating terror everywhere, and a particular occupation of two energy states an affirmation of Bataille's
equilibration of devastation and prot. Afghanistan's geo-strategic potential for transshipment of oil and gas, Iraq's prized proven oil reserves,
Halliburton's corrupt proteering would seem to affirm the straightforward arithmetic captured by the slogan, "blood for oil." Control of energy
consumption would prove the ultimate colonization of Bataille's accursed share. As compelling as the slogan has been to lay bare the motives of imperial
excess, Bataille's thought would also have us refuse the enclosure of our own surplus capacity in so certain a lock down of interest-borne scarcity. There
can be no denying oil's requirement to the present economic convention. But the necessity of oil politics as they are presented must be contested if the
present mode of excess is to be seen as other than laying us all to waste as an inexorable drive to war to control supply in the face of imminent scarcity.
Specically, blood for oil is a pipeline that has smuggled in a Malthusian logic of genocidal scarcity. The argument goes like this. The days of
expanding oil supply are behind us. The rate at which new wells are drilled has been eclipsed by the rate at which new demand has expanded, in
consequence, a bell-shaped forecast named for the geo-physicist who made it, "Hubbert's Peak," pinpoints the date of diminishing returns. Population
growth assures that there will not be enough oil to go around. Security for the imperium dictate that it grabs hold of whatever remains. Oil and war are
fraternal twins. Yet Hubbert's peak, so pointed in sounding the alarm, is also vulnerable on its own economic foundations. As oil prices rise, abandoned
elds again become protable, along with the rationale for further investment to extract oil from otherwise unappealing shale. The conation of access
to oil with control of its sources certainly lines up with imperial history. But that history discloses how the very regimes installed to control oil territories
repress domestic populations and wind up destabilizing access, a lesson reected in the fully nancialized oil futures markets by meeting volatility with
arbitrage.i
While nancial protocols have been installed as governing ideas,
the occupation of Iraq looks like anything
but a design for control.
Instead, oil exports have held steady, and risk has been distributed throughout a population
that has been cleaved from its national form and from its own productive capacities. Iraq's Public Distribution System, the last
ii
remnant of Baathist socialism is to be displaced by small cash handouts to fuel the now rampant speculative economy. But to render
socialism scarce is to commit an error of measurement and concept. The extensive energy of consumption privileged the erotic as the
alter to commodication, and maintained socialism as that portion of the world devoted to a social economy that capital could not
absorb. The erotic which animated consumer desire has now been displaced by risk, which inhabits the intensities of circulation.
Populations at risk may be treated instrumentally but they are also freed from instrumentality-they exist, not to accomplish further
The war on terror claims that population

makes no difference and touts its capacity to intervene anywhere at anytime. Its excess
belies another. The notion that intervention can be anywhere raises the prospect that it could be for anything. The empire of
accumulation, but as human assemblages in their own right.
indifference passes intervention from necessity to the realm of discretion, acting upon difference becomes a luxury within reach.
Added to this is the discretionary force of something like the derivatives market, a hitherto unfathomable wealth sundered from use
that exists only to further itself. The recourse to war that cannot discern between foreign and domestic, that attacks terror, but also
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crime, drugs, culture, and the like, sketches in negative relief the magnitude of the difference that state and capital now resist. Never
mind that they had a hand in proliferating it all. The abundance of difference in our midst, along with excess wealth advertised for allpurposes, presents the immanence of the social as a self-expanding luxury for all. The war on terror is not the only project legible in
the transfer of Bataille's mode of excess into the present.
Terror gives urgency to the proliferation of

financial risk but it also deects attention from that excess which the state has
increasing trouble concealing--its own criminality. If capital morphs under the present
mode of excess, so too does its strange bed-fellow, the state-form.
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Link - Respect/Empathy for Other

The rhetoric of empathy and respect is a rhetoric of method. Only the
alternatives willingness to risk communication as violence and interruption
allows an ethical relationship to the other.
GARY PETERS 2004
[University of the West of England, Human Studies 27: 187206]
The essence of rhetoric is its lack of essence, its emptiness, which, nonetheless, bewitches and persuades thanks to a speech that literally formulates
the body of the speaker for the duration of the teaching event. This body does not mirror the other but, rather, ares-up as an embodied language: an
improvi- sational gesture that radically exceeds the reexive power of the alter-ego, thus constituting a teaching, albeit one devoid of a body of
knowledge that can be passed from teacher to student. As Merleau-Ponty affirms: nothing really passes between them and yet the fact is we have
178) But, and this is the point, it is

a power that is produced by the movement of rhetoric into an exteriority that is radically absent
from given forms of knowledge. In this respect, and contrary to the derogation of rhetoric, it is
an art of persuasion that does not hide absence behind the illusory presence and substance of
its ne words. On the contrary, rhetoric draws attention to and intensifies the experience of a
fundamental ontological void, the primordial silence (1981, p. 184) between the speaking
word (1981, p. 197). This is the power of rhetoric, the power to produce a world in the face of a
radical phenomenological pluralism that, in spite of Husserls efforts, unravels the
intersubjective lifeworld, casting its inhabitants out into a solitary exteriority that only rhetoric
can speak to, albeit obscurely. By all accounts this describes very well Heideggers manner of teaching, creating, in his case, a
the power to understand over and above what we may have spontaneously thought. (1981, p.
pedagogy where phenomenology and rhetoric, working in tandem, become the vehicle for the radical transformation necessary to remember and
address again the question of Being. Anticipating, in a sense, Merleau-Pontys observation that nothing passes between teacher and student and yet
there is transformation, Rudiger Safranski grasps the absence at the core of Heideggers singular, but famed, teaching when he recalls Jas- pers
comments on Heidegger: It is astonishing how Heidegger manages to captivate us. . . Admittedly, his students then will have felt much the same as we
do today that one is drawn into his thought until one arrives at the moment of rubbing ones eyes in astonishment and asking oneself: that was quite
something, but what use is the. . . experience to me? Karl Jaspers strikingly formulated this experience with Heideggers philosophizing in his notes. . .
This is what Jaspers said about Heidegger: Among contemporaries the most exciting thinker, masterful, compelling, mysterious but then leaving you
empty-handed (Safranski 1999, p. 100). All of the rhetorical ingredients are here: mastery, compulsion, mystery and nothingness.
Rhetoric
gives nothing, it does not instruct, it persuades, and persuasion masters the other not through a
superior grasp of a knowledge that can be bequeathed by the teacher, but through the
production of a fascinat- ing, seductive and compelling body, occupying in a specic manner, an
other, more powerful world. Merleau-Ponty, with typical subtlety, grasps this particular mode of learning: I begin to understand a
particular philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. In fact, every language
carries its own teaching. . . (Merleau-Ponty 1981, p. 179). Merleau-Ponty is not describing empathy but something quite different. The model of
learning suggested here is, like Kants, imitative or reproductive and forms part of the model of exemplication where the singular manner of the
teacher provides the model to be adopted by the students and used in their own way. (Kant, 1973, para. 49) In this regard, and with the
phenomenological project in mind, it is the fundamental productivity of the phenomenological/ rhetorical compact which ensures that the reproduction
in question is, paradoxically perhaps, the reproduction of production: production can only be reproduced. Pluralism, Language and
A pedagogy based upon the reproduction of production will not be empathic but,
rather, pluralistic. Instead of eroding the barrier between self and other through dialogue and
understanding, the innite plurality of producers (and the production of innite plurality) creates what Blanchot calls a
Estrangement
relation of the third kind. He writes: Now what founds this third relation, leaving it still unfounded, is no longer proximity proximity of struggle, of
the strangeness between us: a

strangeness it will not suffice to characterize as a separation or even as a distance. Rather an
interruption An interruption escaping all measure (Blanchot, 1993, p. 68). Teaching, in this
view, would resemble a regime of estrangement rather than of empathy, where teacher and
student are cast as strangers rather than ana- logical twins, and where the phenomenological
continuity between self and other, so important for Husserl as a guarantor for a predictable
intersubjective world beyond/after the reduction, suffers an interruption that, as Blanchot
will argue, breaks the bonds of intersubjectivity. Instead of an organic/psychic bond there is an
interval; an empty space, a between that demarcates a radical pluralism not based upon the
services, of essence, of knowledge, or of recognition, not even of solitude but rather
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all-too- familiar notions of diversity, co-existence and toleration, all of which sit only too
comfortably alongside empathy and dialogue, but one signifying a fundamental inequality that
strips the other of its horizon (its sphere of own- ness), its position in space and time, its
selfhood. For Blanchot this does not leave nothingness but, rather, it leaves speech the
violence of speech.
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Link - Schmitt
Schmitt is right that the state is built on the sovereign exception, but their
politics justifies endless extermination. The alternatives solves by declaring
itself sovereign through the act of sacrifice, creating the exception to the
exception.
Blent Diken 2006
[Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Alternatives 31 (2006), 431452
Signicantly in this respect, Benjamin was the rst to divide Schmitts concept of exception,
producing a remainder of it. For Schmitt, exception is a limit concept that presupposes a
normal situation as its background. The state of exception aims at the preservation of this
normality with extraordinary means. In other words, Schmitts project is to legitimize the state of
exception, or to normalize what is exceptional. Along similar lines, we could argue that the state
of exception on the island is reactionary, or, to phrase it differently, that violence is rational. The
generalized exception, the festival, is Jacks way of strengthening his power. In this, everything
is made uid; all hierarchies are reversed. But one thing remains constant: Jack, the leader. To
be sure, Benjamin was in many ways inspired by Schmitts methodological extremism, even
though his own project was opposed to Schmitts. Whereas Schmitt wanted to legitimize Nazi
power, Benjamin criticized it. Schmitt was conservative, Benjamin revolutionary. Indeed, this
tension found its best expression in their understanding of sovereignty. Hence to Schmitts
exception Benjamin opposed the suspension of suspension, a real exception, or, better, an
exception to exception itself. What is decisive here is the notion that, when generalized,
exception loses its status as a limit of normality. The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that
the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a
conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is
our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the
struggle against Fascism.57 Whereas in Schmitt exception is the political kernel of the law, it
becomes divine justice in Benjamin. And then we are confronted with the difference between
two exceptions: Schmitts exception is nothing else than an attempt at avoiding the real
exception, the revolution, or divine justice. Benjamins exception, in stark contrast, suspends
the relationality between the law and its suspension in a zone of anomy dominated by pure
violence with no legal cover.58The question of this real exception is the one that cannot be
posed today without immediately facing the accusation of being a nihilist or a fundamentalist.
And why is it so? To end with an answer to this question, let us focus on the nal scene.
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Link - Theory
You must sacrifice the theoretical knowledge of the 1AC. It is servile
production that ultimately means nothing.
Jason DeBoer no date given
[Bataille versus Theory http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7XwWuL0tswIJ:www.sauerthompson.com/essays/Bataille%2520Versus%2520Theory,%2520an%2520essay%2520by%2520Jason
%2520DeBoer.doc+Bataille+versus+Theory%E2%80%9D+Fierce+Language&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us]
The writings of Georges Bataille have recently become the object of a certain resurgence, or rather, a recuperation, within the academy. As Batailles
death in 1962 recedes into the past, the number of critical essays and articles about him continues to grow at an incredible rate. Most of this criticism
has taken the approach of situating Bataille and his ideas into a pre-determined framework of postmodern thought, either through
the systematic embellishment of his role as an intellectual inuence on Foucault, Derrida, and others, or his role as an intermediary gure between
Nietzsche and the French postmodernists. While there certainly is merit and validity in linking Bataille intellectually to these writers, it is the radicalness
and originality of Batailles writing which ultimately becomes lost in these analyses when viewed through such an historical lens. It seems inevitable that
which, in the guise of earnest analyses and close

readings, serves foremost to dispel the threat that such writers pose to academia. A
Bataille, like Nietzsche, will be subjected to a critical scrutiny,
calculated process of intellectual taming is deployed against these radical thinkers; this procession of commentaries and dissections nearly always
leaves nothing but a dilution of the original work. To avoid this, I will not concern myself with situating Batailles writings within the present state of
theory (whether it be philosophical, critical, sociological, or psychological). Rather, I think it would be more noble to attempt a critique of the theoretical
enterprise by analyzing it through Batailles own array of concepts. If the ideas of thinkers like Nietzsche, Sade, or Bataille are to be afforded the
credence they deserve, it is only tting that theory itself be judged according to their claims, which may run in opposition to the claims made by
traditional theory. Georges Bataille organizes his writings around many core concepts or ideas, many of which remain diffuse and somewhat
underdeveloped in their denitions or meanings. Communication, sovereignty, heterology, inner experience, the sacred, dpense or expenditure,
transgression, excess, etc.; each concept appears in his texts as a momentary connotation, a brief enunciation that creates an impact in the reader, then
disappears before becoming fully ensnared within the parameters of conceptualization. Perhaps it is this vagueness or ambiguity inherent in all of
Batailles concepts that prevents them from being appropriated by the theoretical mainstream and being put to work in a dogmatic system. In order for
an idea to be put to work, for it to be able to perform a function, perhaps it must rst have a proper denition... which many of Batailles concepts lack.
The broadness of his terms (indeed, Batailles move from a restrictive to a general economy shows a digression from the specic, from specialization)
may keep them from being utilized by others; this subversion of utility arises from the difficulty of pinpointing where or when a Bataillean concept begins
or ends. This sacrice of clarity certainly is an intentional strategy, Batailles own employment of unworkable concepts. It is within this arena of
thought that I wish to examine the contemporary state of theory. When one wants to discuss things such as philosophy, literature and poetry, as such, in
their broadest sense, it seems impossible to provide a working denition which encapsulates enough of the dened to provide a basis for meaningful
discourse. As soon as one makes statements about philosophy, etc. the stage is set for interpretive breakdown. Without a general concept of
philosophy there will be confusion as to the terms meaning; with such a normative concept, there will be disagreement over the validity of such a
norm. Traditionally, philosophers have countered the problems of conceptual vagueness by imposing stricter and stricter specialization on their terms.
Bataille, on the other hand, has reveled in the imprecision of such terms as philosophy, and, instead of specializing and building on such traditional
notions, he has deployed his own set of concepts from the basis of whim (which he saw as the opposite of specialization). His attacks against philosophy
strike it as a generality, before the complexities and specialties of epistemology, ontology, philosophy of language, etc. muddy the issue and make such
a meta-critique more difficult. For Bataille,
philosophy must be attacked insofar as it is a general project, not

in its particular and multiple manifestations, and this can only be done by contrasting
philosophy with other general concepts which differ from and oppose it... the sacred, excess,
communication, etc. With this view in mind, I will attempt to compare and critique the
theoretical enterprise itself, using Batailles notions as both guidelines and weapons. Firstly,
though, I should remark on the victim, the generality referred to as theory. Theory (again,
whether it be philosophical, critical, sociological, etc.) can be said to consist of a variety of
related movements. It can be thought of as the analyses of givens, predictions for the future, the
systematic organization of knowledge, the very path along which thought must follow,
or even thought itself. Theory is almost invariably a process that maintains knowledge
(guaranteed by certainty) as its end result. Bataille contests the claim that a process of
examination leads somehow to knowledge, because for him this external theorizing can only
depart from or deny the only certain knowledge that humans may have: We have in fact
only two certainties in this world -- that we are not everything and that we will die. Bataille
posits knowledge of death not as the end result of a theoretical operation, but as an inner experience from which everything else
radiates. This knowledge of death is in no way an understanding or comprehension of death; it is only the certainty that death will
some day consume us, only a knowledge of mortality. Death cannot be regarded as an object of knowledge because it cannot be
managed or subordinated by thought. Death is sovereign, hence inconceivable. Knowledge of our own mortality can only be
peripheral to death itself. (Batailles other certainty, that we are not everything, paves the way for his notions of heterology and
discontinuity, which I will examine in another essay.) Thus, the supposed end-product of theory, knowledge, is declared impossible by
Bataille, except for the certainties of death and the discontinuity of beings. He writes: we can have no knowledge except to know
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that knowledge is nite. Death, in the end, consumes thought. Any truth claims of theory are not sustainable according to Batailles
rigid criteria for knowledge (namely, that only absolute certainty could guarantee knowledge). Batailles thought desires to exceed
the very notion that knowledge is possible or that theory produces what it claims: going to the end means at least this: that the
Bataille continues to attack knowledge insofar as it relates

to the strivings of theory, with knowledge either as the end product of theorys work or as the
presumed foundation from which theory issues. Since knowledge is always linked to work
and project, it is always servile to a concern for the future; it takes us away from the
sovereignty of inner experience, which is only concerned with the moment. This inner experience is incapable of theorization; it
limit, which is knowledge as a goal, be crossed.
evades the project-oriented grasp of language: Everyday the sovereignty of the moment is more foreign to the language in which we express ourselves,
which draws value back to utility: what is sacred, not being an object, escapes our apprehension. There is not even, in this world, a way of thinking that
escapes servitude, an available language such that in speaking it we do not fall back into the immutable rut as soon as we are out of it. Batailles
suspicion, even hatred, of language runs deep. However, this does not prevent him from according theory, philosophy, and science their place in the
world. He believed that man should relegate such operations to a less prominent role in his thought, and instead concentrate more on his own inner
experience. Bataille creates a dichotomy between experience and theory with silence, sovereignty, and concern with the moment functioning as
aspects of inner experience, and language, servility, and preparation for the future existing as inherent aspects of theory. By opposing language with
inner experience, Bataille creates a dilemma for himself and his own writings. His steadfast position makes him something of an idealist regarding inner
experience; Bataille leaves little room for reconciliation between a true silence which resists denitions and a sovereign use of language which is able to
resist project. It is poetry, he nally decides, that is able to occupy this space, as a form of language that is sacreda term Bataille used atheistically,
meaning opposed to utility, usefulness, and concern for the future. Even with his extreme cynicism that theory could ever transgress the servile nature
of language in order to offer a glimpse into inner experience, Bataille continued to write, and not just poetry. In order to justify the agenda behind
theoretical writings like Nietzsches or his own, which were able to perform a metaphilosophical critique of theory while still using some of its forms of
questioning, Bataille needed to temper his idealism with a modied denition of project: Nevertheless inner experience is project, no matter what. It is
suchman being entirely so through language which, in essence with the exception of its poetic perversion, is project. But project is no longer in this
case that, positive, of salvation, but that, negative, of abolishing the power of words, hence of project. In other words, his is a theory which questions
itself by attacking the foundation of theory itself: language. In this way, through a type of writing that strives for silence, even topics such as inner
experience can be broached. Principle of inner experience: to emerge through project from the realm of project. Although Bataille writes that the
nature of experience is, apart from derision, not to be able to exist as project, it is this derisive character of experience that can be expressed in a
theory that ridicules itself, that acknowledges the impossibility of its own goal: knowledge. Bataille nds the perfect form of such anti-foundational
thinking in the aphoristic writings of Nietzsche: I am talking about the discourse that enters into darkness and that the very light ends by plunging into
darkness (darkness being the denitive silence). I am talking about the discourse in which thought taken to the limit of thought requires the sacrice, or
death, of thought. To my mind, this is the meaning of the work and life of Nietzsche. Not only did Nietzsche mirror Batailles own disgust for Christianity
and philosophy, but the writing form which Nietzsche championed, the aphorism, became another weapon in Batailles arsenal, a useful tool against
the utility of philosophical language. Only an aphoristic, fragmentary writing can harbor the violent, sacred qualities of poetry; only an incomplete form
of writing can trace or elucidate the impossibility of knowledge as a product of theory, by revealing a lack within knowledge itself. For Bataille, the swift
violence of aphorism was the most effective method of attacking philosophical theory, by critiquing all theoretical foundations in a series of broad
strokes: A continual challenging of everything deprives one of the power of proceeding by separate operations, obliges one to express oneself through
rapid ashes, to free as much as is possible the expression of ones thought from a project, to include everything in a few sentences... It was this
stylistic strategy that Bataille adopted for circumventing theoretical project, and he understood the difficulty (in fact, the impossibility) of proceeding any
other way. Bataille believed that only a violent theory could usurp a utilitarian one, only a violent theory could clear the way for violence, which would
put an end to the possibility of language. The excess of violence is silent, the opposite of the solidarity with other people implicit in logic, laws and
language. In a way, violence consumes theory; its very excess countermines reason. He writes: the expression of violence comes up against the
double opposition of reason which denies it and of violence itself which clings to a silent contempt for the words used about it. And there certainly is a
violent nature to Batailles nihilistic critique of theory and philosophy. Indeed, he may consider one decit of philosophy to be that it does not strive
violently for silence, but instead only meekly labors over question after question: Philosophy cannot escape from this limit of philosophy, of language,
that is. It uses language in such a way that silence never follows, so that the supreme moment is necessarily beyond philosophical questioning. At any
theory, lost in the servility of

work, is doomed to struggle from an untenable foundation (a non-arbitrary basis for
language) to an impossible end-product (certain knowledge, besides that of mortality or
the discontinuity of beings). Bataille believed that goal and authority are the requirements for
discursive thought and that subsequently discourse forms projects. If this goal is knowledge,
this authority, for philosophy, is ultimately external and metaphysical, hence religious. For
Bataille, the only authority is inner experience, but its authority is in no way externalized. Outside the self,
rate it is beyond philosophy as far as philosophy claims to answer its own questions. Philosophical
there was only chance and the randomness of the universe. Instead of God, chance. If theory sought the guarantee of God to
support its claims, it was both misguided and ultimately empty of value. For those who grasp what chance is, the idea of God seems
insipid and suspicious, like being crippled. Bataille was no irrationalist, but his critique of the metaphysics anchoring theory nally
involved a rejection of reason itself, in order to purge the mind of any need for a connection with a God or metaphysical
foundation. But the supreme abuse which man ultimately made of his reason requires a last sacrice: reason, intelligibility, the
ground itself upon which he stands man must reject them, in him God must die; this is the depth of terror, the extreme limit where
he succumbs. It is an ecstatic moment of doubt. He believed that
one reaches ecstasy by a contestation of
knowledge.
Batailles challenge to theory reaches its zenith as the abandonment or transgression of reasons need for God. Salvation is the
summit of all possible project and the height of matters related to projects. Batailles atheology replaces the authority of metaphysical foundation with
Compared with work,

transgression is a game. In the world of play philosophy disintegrates. If transgression
became the foundation-stone of philosophy (this is how my thinking goes), silent contemplation
would have to be substituted for language. This is the contemplation of being at the pinnacle of
being. It is at this pinnacle that theory becomes a victim, a sacrifice at the hands of a
the sovereign authority of experience, and the work of philosophy is overcome in an act of transgression:
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great, silent theorist, Georges Bataille.

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Link - Agamben
Agamben reduces sacrice to a political problem of homo sacer. The failure to fully confront the
sacred nature of violence dooms them to repeating communities of extermination.
Jeffrey Librett 2007

[Professor German University Oregon diacritics 37.2-3]
This philosophical program in Agambens early essays guides his later work on the homo sacersovereign relation but also distorts and disturbs the later work in three principal ways. First, it
prompts him to propose an exclusively juridicopolitical understanding of the sacredness
of the homo sacer, effectively scapegoating the juridical sphere for a more broadly
theopolitical problem, while placing the specically Christian background [End Page 11] of his
antinomianism in a misleadingly secular, rational, and universalist light. Symptomatically,
in order to accomplish this juridicopolitical reduction Agamben must reject Batailles
analysis of sacrificealong with the entire modern anthropological reading of the
sacredout of hand. For this rejection protects his discourse against any sustained
confrontation with the importance of the sacrificial dimension for both what he calls
the homo sacer and his own approach to law in his theorization of the homo sacer..
Second, Agambens philosophical program impoverishes the account he provides of the Nazi
death camps as an extreme example of the sovereign-homo sacer relation by making
it impossible for him to appreciate the importance of Christian antinomianism in the
formation of National Socialist ideology. For Agambens philosophical orientation requires or
presupposes that he ignore or underestimate, rst of all, the sacrificially anti-Semitic
dimension of Christian antinomianismthe tendency of such antinomianism to make Judaism
responsible for the ontological desert into which representation exiles us all. Further, as a
consequence of his continuing commitment to this tradition, Agamben cannot see how important
the tradition remains, even if in a displaced form, for Nazi anti-Semitism. I argue that Agambens
animus against the letter blinds him to the Christian and sacricial dimensions of the Holocaust
he ignores the former and explicitly, emphatically denies the latter dimensionbecause this
animus represents his own commitment to the Christian antinomianism that, in its
racialized National Socialist form, attempts to rid itself of the letter by sacrificing not
only Judaism but the (biologically, racially construed) Jews. Because his radically antinomian
program would become unsettled by his recognition of its important overlap with the ideological
bases of National Socialism, Agamben cannot ultimately acknowledge the Christian and
sacrificial aspects of the Holocaust.
Finally, in Remnants of Auschwitzhis main reading (outside of Homo Sacer) of the signicance
of the Nazi death campsAgamben positions testimony as the exemplary instance of the
speaking of speech, the taking-place of language. The result of the destruction of European Jewry
becomes here the revelation of poetic speech as a manifestation of the absolute. Unwittingly,
Agamben ends up participating in the very kind of theodicy he ostensibly wished to
avoid by denying the sacrificial character of the Holocaust in the rst place. This
observation makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that his politics is to be founded not
merely on metaphysics, as Adam Thurschwell rightly stresses, but also on positive religious
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commitments [see note 1] as in turn his religionor his messianismis, as he repeatedly
suggests, to be realized as a politics.2
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Link - Psychoanalysis
Reject their mournful psychoanalys, which treats desire as lack rather than glorious excess. Our
commitment to risk destruction for exuberance cannot be second-guessed under the sterile gaze
fo the analyst.
In giving expression to the sense of elective communities, Bataille's exposition relies heavily on the gure lovers. Lovers are exemplary of elective
community, nding one another by chance, attracted by one another [p. 40] with a momentum and intensity indifferent to the demands of work and
social cohesion. The appearance of the beloved on the scene falls with the swiftness and decisiveness of an ax, tearing the lover away from all other
interests, including that of self-preservation, bestowing on him the exhilaration of total risk. The beloved shines with a "precarious radiance" that exerts
upon the lover a violence and suspension like that of falling dice, which arrange existence anew. "The lovers' world, like life," writes Bataille, "is built on a
set of accidents that give an avid, powerful will to be the response it desires" (CS 51/20). In other words, the attraction congured by chance requires the
lover to stake herself, putting her entire being in play, ut it requires this as an obsession and not an obligation. As Bataille puts it n On Nietzsche ,
"the desire in us defines our luck," shapes the chance constellation of beings and events
wherein it nds itself, and it does so by risking itself and by virtue of the risk it itself is (OC 6:
88/ON 73; tm). And that means the coincidence of wills in the face of chance-which is the contact
of love itself-results from a gamble and not a calculation. "It 'risks' me and the one I love"; it plays us [II inc
'use! en jets, met en jets l'tre aiin], says Bataille of carnal love. The lover's response to the radiance of the beloved is incomprehensible and
outrageous! So much so that "[c]ompared to the person I love, the universe seems poor and empty" (OC 6: 84/ON 69). The example of lovers is of
particular importance because it articulates both the insufficiency and the innocence that dominate Bataille's ontological considerations. In a sense, the
tenuousness and tenderness of lovers reects a more generally constitutive condition of human life, that "[t}here exists at the basis of human life a
principle of insufficiency" (OC 5: 97/IE 81). When that insufficiency is repressed and mythologized into the ontological primacy of the individual, making
guilty insufficiency is as restricted a

sense of human being as Marxist economic analysis is of community; indeed, both subsist on the
reftssal of chance, the one staking its future on the calculated probability of survival,
the other on dialectical necessity. The lovers who chance everything and are constituted
in that risk (hasard), however, exhibit all the "magnificence" of an existence "created in
the image of a universe untouched by the defilement of merit or intention" (CS 53/21).
Their contact is so innocent that it excises itself altogether from the world of reward
and punishment, justification and critique, their insufficiency excessive to the
impoverished world of need. Thus, Bataille insists, "What characterizes man from the outset and what leads up to the completed
of sociality a contract added on for the sake of security, existence is rendered guilty. But
rupture at the summit is not only the will for sufficiency, but the cunning, timid attraction on the side of insufficiency" (OC 5: 105/EE 88). And "what
attracts isn't immediate being, but a wound" (OC 6: 45/ON 22). Excessive insufficiency is an ontological condition, since "[aj being that isn't cracked [p.
The cracked being, however, is at once, at the very point

where its self-enclosure ends and it opens onto the world, exposed and naked, falling outside itself,
41] isn't possible;' writes Bataille (OC 5: 259/G23).
a lucky being, a chance being. Insufficiency and the excess of suffering that characterizes it is the condition of play. with it and through it "we go from
enduring the cracks (from decline) to glory (we seek out the cracks)" (OC 5: 259/G 23). Community is not, therefore, an extant division or willed
unity within the social order, but a configuration of luck and chance where one being opens onto another and is what it is only through
this opening. The language of exposure and ex-position goes a long way in articulating the structural conditions of this occurrence, but it is
nevertheless insufficient to characterize the contact here at issue. Bataffle insists rather that this opening is a wound and elective community the
affective attraction of one lacerated insufficiency by another.
Community is constituted in the overlapping of
wounds,
the sharing not only of what cannot be shared, but the sharing of a suffering that is neither mine nor yours, a suffering that does not
belong to us, but which gives us to one another, and in doing so both maintains and withdraws the beings so congured. In community, the other does
not complete me but completes my insufficiency, shares the luck which is never only mine. Elective community is like a lovers' kiss-an
exhilarating affirmation of chance, the will to be what befalls it but that its will could never produce. With respect to the lover, we desire
like a gambler wagers. "Like the winnings of a gambler;' writes Bataille, "sexual, possession prolongs desire-or extinguishes it" (OC 6: 106/ON 86).The
sheer momentum of the movement requires that its strength be squandered.
Desire is unsatisfied not because it fails,

but because it exceeds the search for satisfaction, because it is also raw expenditure. For
this reason, desire is misunderstood if it is represented as the infinite tragic movement
toward an inaccessible object, as though desire not only is prohibited by its very structure
from attaining its aim, but as though its structure is fundamentally teleological. The obsession
with this logic is always mournful (psychoanalysis) or moral (transcendental philosophy) and
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in both cases remains theological insofar as the concern is governed by or measured against
an imaginary sense of propriety or ownership or end. The desire that binds lovers is not so
much directed toward an unattainable sumnut, however, as it is itself the summit, the
point "where life is impossibly at the limit."' Desire and summit can no more be separated than lightning and its ash.
In this respect Bataille is unequivocal: "The summit isn't what we 'ought to reach,' " (OC 6: 57/ON 39; tni)). Rather, "It's what is. Never what should be"
(OC 6: 111/ON 91). If desire is unsatised, that is because it exceeds the conservative search for satisfaction, because it is not teleological, because we
are driven beyond the need of satisfaction without being driven to anything, because our unnished character is in this very way excessive, [p. 42] not
The lovers' love is sacred. It

does not belong to the profane order of work and its accumulated labor, the profane
and banal order of capital. For Bataille, the sacred designates an object that is
beyond all others in value, but the sacred character of our carnal love has nothing to
do with divine love. The sacrices brought about by the love of lovers require expenditure
without recuperation; we give up our careers as dancers, we speak on the phone for hours on end, we waste the day in bed, and we
impoverished. If love is unsatised it is because it has perished, leaving us wasted and ruined.
give ourselves over entirely to that waste and identify ourselves with it.
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Link - Marxism
The Revolution must be awesome.
A. The aff works to liberate the future through accumulation of anti-capitalist
productivity. This drive to hoard dooms them to new cycles of capitalist
accumulation. We cannot escape the ghosts of past oppression through
laboring for the future.
Wendling 6. (Amy Wendling, Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Creighton College. Reading
Bataille Now. Ed. Winnubst. P 64-51)
Sovereignty and the Revolutionary Subject Bataille's discussion of "sovereignty" occupies the entire third volume of The Accursed Share. This volume
explains the nal two chapters of volume 1, in which Bataille sketches the forms of consumption characteristic of Soviet industrialization as a modality of
In sovereign consumption,
consumption is not subjected to an end outside of itself. In the terms of classical Marxism, to act
sovereignly is to privilege use over exchange value, or individual over productive consumption . In a temporal
schema, to act sovereignly is to privilege the present over the past or future. We
might recognize sovereign consumption as noncoercive pleasure or play, consumption
that exceeds a productive, work-driven economy. A sovereign world would have the vision-and the language-to
the forms of consumption characteristic of the bourgeois world, as a cruel accumulation .
accommodate such a recognition and to accommodate it in a mode other than dubbing it irresponsible, irrational, childlike, or mad. Let me offer an
example of sovereign consumption from the realm of sexuality, a realm that Bataille also highlights in both his ction and his philosophy. The compulsory
productive heterosexuality characteristic of bourgeois cultures is also part of the coercion to production. Bataille's por [p. 47] nography, all of which
describes nonreproductive if mostly heterosexual sex, ts into his project for this reason. Nonreproducrive sex-sex for sex's sake, queer sex, or sex for
pleasure-are all modes of nonproductive, or sovereign consumption: consumption that does no work, produces no new workers, and uses energy without
recompense. All bourgeois cultural taboos about sexuality are rooted in the coercion to production. For Bataille, the sovereign individual, a version of the
Nietzschean noble or Hegelian master (1991b, 219; 1973, 267), "consumes and doesn't labor" (199lb, 198; 1973, 248). Like Nietzsche, Bataille argues
that bourgeois societies-we readily recognize them as our own-have made this sort of consumption impossible for us by inverting the values attached to
Accumulation eclipses the character of the sovereign: we stockpile, hoard, and hold
in reserve rather than use or enjoy. Our deepest pleasures derive from the hoarding
itself: from the security of knowing it is there, should we want it. Because of this out
pleasures remain vicarious, theoretical, indefinitely deferred and abstract. In an inversion
it.
of economic values, the pressure to accumulate eclipses Bataille's sovereign consumption. Similarly, in Nietzsche, the
priest's inversion of moral values eclipses the goodness of nobility. For Bataille, the bourgeois class is the rst-and
ultimately only- r revolutionary class: an ascetic class that revolts specically against the sovereign nobility in favor of
accumulation. The bourgeois revolution over against sovereignty conditions and inescapably schematizes all
subsequent revolution and appeals to revolution. The very idea and practice of revolution is itself
bourgeois. Revolution is a bourgeois concept, and the world in which Bataille finds
himself continues to be the world of a feudal order that is breaking down. Bataille writes: 1
cannot help but insist on these aspects: I wish to stress, against both classical and present-day
Marxism, the connection of all the great modern revolutions, from the English and the French onward, with a feudal
order that is breaking down. There have never been any great revolutions that have struck
down an established bourgeois domination. All those that overthrew a regime started
with a revolt motivated by the sovereignty that is implied in feudal society, (1991b,
279; 1973, 321) Conceptually, revolution demarcates the transition from sovereignty to
accumulation. Revolution will always be connected with the dissolution of a feudal order and the privileges
emblematized by such an order: access to nonproductive consumption, enjoyment, or use-value itself, by right of birth.
[p. 48] But why not, rather, a conception of
plenitude
and entitlement
for all,
also by right of birth, instead of
Such a view is impossible when Nietzschean ressentiment

is the impetus for liberation, because postrevolutionary subjects have learned to
demonize the very things that they most desire. This point goes some distance
toward explaining why revolutionary class hatred is insufficiently analytic and
confuses the aristocracy with the bourgeoisie. It also explains why the revolution attempted in 1848 was a disaster.
competition and struggle for survival?
Bataille writes: The days ofJuue, the Commune, and Spartakus are the only violent convulsions of the working masses struggling against the bourgeoisie,
but these movements occurred with the help of a misunderstanding. The workers were misled by the lack of obstacles encountered a little earlier when
the bourgeoisie, in concert with them, rose up against men born of that feudality which irritated everybody. (1991b, 289) Under this historical error,
born of the precipitous mixing of classes, the particularity of the bourgeoisie is misunderstood. The bourgeois is no lord or lady waited upon,
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but a money-grubbing, guilt-ridden, obsessive worker, too cheap to hire help, self-righteously conrmed in his or her work ethic and ascetic way of life. I
am not suggesting that the bourgeois does not have privileges. He or she does, but not in the same way as the feudal lord or lady. The bourgeois goal
is always further accumulation, never consumption, and therefore never sovereignty. Bataille writes, "The masses have never united except
in a radical hostility to the principle of sovereignty" (l99lb, 288; 1973, 329). The masses do not unite against accumulation, except when that
accumulation is expressed as sovereignty, and therefore not as accumulation at all, but as consumption. The proletarian worker
perceives an excessive consumption as the necessary result of the bourgeois accumulation of property. But this is a misperception, for
When the proletarian worker comes to power, a

bourgeois revolution recurs because this mass worker, the slave ascendant, forever
operates in an economy of scarcity: hoarding resources from the memory of being
deprived. The problem of accumulation begins again. The structure is of actual
scarcity, followed by perceived scarcity and hoarding that holds on as a historical
remainder. Never fully overcome, this remainder becomes part of the historically
sedimented fear through which bourgeois cultures function. The problem is that a
resentful revolutionary subject is unfit and unable to enjoy wealth and, by extension,
political sovereignty. In The German Ideal [p. 49] ogy, Marx answers this criticism by claiming that through the process of revolutionary
the bourgeois does not enjoy but accumulates.
action, the proletariat is able to overcome accumulated habit and conditioning, learn to consume well, and thus become t for rule (1978, 193). Only an
upsurge of violent revolutionary action will be a sufficient lesson in consumption, a trial by violence that returns the bondsman back to the scene of the
struggle to the death. For Marx, the emergent subject, baptized by re, is transformed into a being capable of sovereignty-or dead-at the end of the
the process of revolutionary action instills not liberation but a

fearful repetition of servitude, now internal. In short, transformation is never so neat
as Marx would have it. The problem of how subjects who have lived through
oppression wield power has been notoriously sticky, reappearing in all thoughtful
considerations of postrevolutionary subjects.
process. But we have seen that
B. The alternative sways to the rhythms of the revolution. Only abandoning the
security of programmable protest can exorcise the capitalist demons haunting
anti-capitalist production.
Wendling 6. (Amy Wendling, Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Creighton College. Reading
Bataille Now. Ed. Winnubst. P 64-51)
Conclusion T remain hopeful about postrevolurionary subjects and the abilities of such subjects to occupy positions of power in critical
I also remain hopeful about a notion of sovereignty partially liberated

from the context of oppression in which it was forged and about consumption as
enjoyment that somehow exceeds a context of production, or work. In seeking to keep
sovereignty alive, Baraille too does not envision a return to the oppreslive sovereignty characteristic of a feudal system .
Sovereignty operates for Bataille more as a conceptual, methodological, and practical
postulate rather than as a historical nostalgia. But it is precisely because of this that sovereignty can stage
and self-aware ways.
its insurgency anywhere. Baraille suggests that enjoyaunt itself is the upsurge of sovereignty: "The enjoyment of production is in
opposition to accumulation (that is, [in opposition) to the production of the means of production) . . . [Sovereignty is] neither
anachronistic nor insignicant [because it is the general) condition of each human being" (1991b, 281; 1973, 322, my emphasis).
Sovereignty is the overcoming of the urge to hoard; the overcoming of bourgeois

subjectivity; the refusal of the historical sedimentation of cruelty, accumulation, and
the bad conscience, Acting sovereignly, I leave behind fear, and I stop living in
expectation of death. I fear the loss of enjoyment more than death. Bataille's sovereignty
anticipates the existentialist refrain of freedom at any cost. But unlike in existentialism, Bataille's sovereignty preserves corporeality:
I live sovereignly, not despite my feats of death, but because of my enjoyment of life.
For according to Baraille, "if we live sovereignly, the representation of death is impossible, for
the present is not subject to the demands of the future. That is why, in a fundamental sense, living
sovereignly is to escape, if not death, at least the anguish of [p. 51] death. Not that dying is hateful-but living servilely is hateful"
(1991b, 219). Nor has Bataille given up on communism: "Sovereignty is no longer alive except in the perspectives of communism"
(1991b, 261; 1973, 305). For communism is the only kind of thinking and practice that tries to restore individual consumption, to
restore use-value and with it enjoyment as the general condition of life. Bataille knows that the jury is out on communism: its
historical moment is too near to rake a clear view of its implications as a whole. Because of its historical proximity, communism has
fallen between the cracks of dogmatic and politicized positions. Bataille writes that "the lack of interest in understanding communism
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evinced by practically all noncommunists and the involvement of militants in a cohort acting almost without debate-according to
directives in which the whole game is not known-have made communism a reality that is foreign, as it were, to the world of reection"
(1991b, 264). Bataille's comments on communism in volume 3 of The AccnrsedShare seek to redress this gap, forcing the owl of
Minerva to rake her customary ight earlier than usual. Cleansed of teleology, communist revolution becomes the theoretical and
practical pursuit of such enjoyment, of a different kind of liberation. And in contemporary thinkers as diverse as Jacques Derrida,
we find sketches of non-teleological liberations, which are no

longer revolutions that reinstate repressive subjectivities. Derrida speaks of ongoing,
underground practices of resistance (1994, 99). Haraway insists on the non-innocence
and impurity of all positions of resistance that appear alongside hegemonic cultural
ideals (1991, 1997). Addressing the temporal deferral of communism itself, Negri writes, "Communism does not come in a
Donna Haraway, and Antonio Negri,
'subsequent period,' it springs up contemporaneously as a process constituting an enormous power of antagonism and of real
the real interest of communism in its

vision of a human being whose general condition is to play without labor in an economy
of plenty. No price must be exacted for enjoyment, and there is no question of entitlement. The eclipse of this
assertion, in favor of the accumulating and stockpiling of the means of production for
future use, is communism missing its own best point
supersession" (1991, 181). Anticipating these thinkers, Bataille situates
We must sacrifice the need to promote the greater good to break with
capitalism.
Yang 2k. (Mayfaire Mei-Hui, Professor of Anthropology @ the U of California, Santa Barbara.
Current Anthropology, Volume 41, Number 4. Aug-Oct. 2000)
Another body of critiques of capitalism emerging in French intellectual circles (Schrift 1997, Botting and Wilson 1998) offers a very different approach
from the more dominant tradition of political economy which privileges the tropes of labor and production. Inspired by Marcel Mausss (1967) classic
work on primitive gift economies and by a Nietzschean challenge to the asceticist ethics and utilitarianism of capitalism, these writers
include Georges Bataille (1985, 1989a, 1989b), Jean Baudrillard (1975), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Marshall Sahlins (1972, 1976), and Pierre Clastres
(1987). Instead of taking capitalism as the subject of analysis, these writings seek to mount their critique from outside capitalism, focusing on
the radical difference of primitive economies and the way in which primitive gift,
sacrificial, ritual, and festival

economies present oppositional logics and harbor the potential for alternative social
orders. Despite certain shortcomings, these works are more conducive to re- conceptualizing capitalism in such a way as to reveal the
multiplicity of economies, the tensions between them, and their differential embeddings within the larger social formation. The passage
from The Grundrisse with which we began is also cited by Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production (1975:8687), but he does so in order to launch his
unique critique of historical materialism. Baudrillard ob jects to Marxs assumption that the contradictions of labor and ownership in
capitalism can be projected back to precapitalist societies such as primitive, archaic, and feudal forms as their structural pivots.
Marx .challenged bourgeois society, his theories did not go far enough to extricate
themselves from the productivist and utilitarian ethic of capitalism found in such
concepts as subsistence, labor, economic exchange, and relations and means of
production. For Baudrillard, this failure to achieve a radical break from capitalist
epistemology means that Marxism liberates workers from the bourgeoisie but not
from the view that the basic value of their being lies in their labor and productivity.
Historical materialism is thus unable to grasp the profound difference between
societies based on symbolic circulation and societies based on ownership and
exchange of labor and commodities. Notions of labor and production do violence to these societies, where the point of life
Although
and the structural order are predicated not on production but on symbolic exchange with humans, spirits, and ancesors. Historical materialism cannot
these societies possess mechanisms for the collective consumption of the

surplus and deliberate antiproduction whenever accumulation threatens the continuity of cycles of reciprocity (p. 143). It
see that
fails to recognize that they did not separate economics from other social relations such as kinship, religion, and politics or distinguish between infra- and
superstructure.
It also perpetuates the Enlightenment invention of Nature as a resource for

human production rather than an encompassing symbolic field whose offerings to
humans must be compensated through sacrifice.13 Baudrillards emphasis on consumption and the radical
difference of precapitalist formations owes much to the earlier work of Georges Bataille. Bataille produced a very different kind of critique of capitalism,
one focused not on production but on consumption. He found that in archaic economies production was subordinated to nonproductive destruction
(1989a:90). The great motive force of these societies was not the compulsion to produce (which unleashes a process of objectication whereby all
forms of life, including humans, become things) but a desire to escape the order of things and to live for the present moment through exuberant
consumption in the form of excesses of generosity, display, and sacrice. The societies of Kwakwa _ka _wakw potlatch feasting, Aztec human sacrice,
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Islamic militarism, and Tibetan monastic Lamaism all understood the necessity of nonproductive expenditure (Bataille 1989b). They set aside a major
proportion of their wealth for expenditures which ensured the wasting and loss of wealth rather than rational accumulation. This destructive
consumption allowed them to avoid the deadly hand of utility and to restore some of the lost intimacy of an existence without a separation between
sacred and profane. Whereas Weber (1958) looked to religion to explain the origins of the capitalist ethic, Bataille looked to archaic religion for seeds of a
subversion of capitalism. If forms 13.
of archaic ritual prestation and sacricial destruction of wealth could be reintegrated into modern economies, capitalism would have built-in mechanisms
for social redistribution and for limiting its utilitarian productivism and incessant commodication of nature and culture. Its expansionary tendencies
would suffer frequent shutdowns and reversals. Baudrillard contests the functional explanation that primitive magic, sacrice, and religion try to
accomplish what labor and forces of production cannot. Rather than our rational reading of sacrice as producing use values ,
sacrifice is
engagement in reciprocity with the gods for taking the fruits of the earth (1975:82
83).
Batailles project called for widening the frame of our economic inquiry to what he called a
general economy, which accounted not only for such things as production, trade, and nance
but also for social consumption, of which ritual and religious sacrifice, feasting, and festival were important
components in precapitalist economies. In Batailles approach, religion was not an epiphenomenal derivative of the infrastructures of production but an
economic activity in itself. A general economy treats economic wealth and growth as part of the operations of the law of physics governing the global
eld of energy for all organic phenomena, so that, when any organism accumulates energy in excess of that needed for its subsistence, this energy
must be expended and dissipated in some way. What he proposed in his enigmatic and mes- merizing book The Accursed Share was that, in our mod-
productivism, we have lost sight of this fundamental law of physics and material
existence: that the surplus energy and wealth left over after the basic conditions for
subsistence, reproduction, and growth have been satised must be expended. If this energy
is not destroyed, it will erupt of its own in an uncontrolled explosion such as war. Given the
ern capitalist
tremendous productive power of modern industrial society and the fact that its productivist ethos has cut off virtually all traditional avenues of ritual and
festive expenditures, energy surpluses have been redirected to military expenditures for modern warfare on a scale unknown
in traditional societies. Ba- taille thought that the incessant growth machine that is the post-World War II U.S. economy could be deected from a
catastrophic expenditure on violent warfare only by potlatching the entire national economy. In giving away its excess wealth to poorer nations, as in the
Mar-shall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe, the United States could engage in a nonmilitary rivalry for prestige and inuence with the Soviet Union, that
other center of industrial modernitys radical reduction of nonproductive expenditure.14 Thus, Bataille wished to resuscitate an important dimension of
the economy, nonproductive expenditure, that has all but disappeared in both capitalist and state socialist modernity.
Sacrificial expenditure challenges the logic of accumulation that sustains

consumerism
Yang 2k. (Mayfaire Mei-Hui, Professor of Anthropology @ the U of California, Santa Barbara.
Current Anthropology, Volume 41, Number 4. Aug-Oct. 2000)
Scholars such as Jean-Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Batailles
views on luxury and sacricial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer
capitalism is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift,
asceticism, and accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of expenditure. It
exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that
supply creates its own demand; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods
and between need and desire (Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer
capitalism is driven by consumption rather than production. Thus, Batailles vision of the ritual
destruction of wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does
not address this different phase of consumer capitalism, whose contours have only become
clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me that despite their overt similarities, the
principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are basically
incompatible. If Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would have said that
this sort of consumption is still in the service of production and productive
accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment,
media, fashion, and home de cor merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather
than leading to the nality and loss of truly nonproductive expenditure. Even much of modern
warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied into the furthering of military-industrial production.
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Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer culture today challenge the basic
economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self-depleting archaic sacrificial
economy does.15 Furthermore, capitalist consumption is very much an individual
consumption rather than one involving the whole community or social order.
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***Alternative
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Alt Solves Extinction

Sacrificing the goods of the 1AC solves extinction.
Hamblet 3 (Wendy, Ph.D. Department of Philosophy, Adelphi University, The sacred monstrous: a
reection on violence in human communities)
Intra-specic aggression is originally an adaptive process, Lorenz explains. It develops in species to serve four important selective functions. First, it
helps to maintain an even distribution of animals over a given inhabitable area. Second, it aids in sexual selection. The rival ght naturally selects the
hardier, more aggressive ghters to command both territorially and sexually. Thereby a third benet is accomplished. Family defense is enhanced since
the selective process favors the evolution of particularly strong and courageous defenders of family and herd. Fourth, intra-specic aggression leads to
the establishment of a ranking order in the group, a feature Lorenz notes as crucial to the development of advanced social life in higher vertebrates.
Ironically, the "pecking order" that [p. 11] results from aggressive rivalry ultimately brings stability to the community since it creates a social situation in
which ghts between the members are limited to the service of sorting and ordering functions." intra-specic aggression, then, serves important
functions in the healthy evolution of the animal group and remains adaptive where its limits are intact. Under restricted conditions, it accomplishes the
cooperation and cohesion that hind the group and enhance its chances for survival in hostile environments and over against other animal groups.
Humans, however, are distinguished from animals in this regard: humans evolved very quickly into the kinds of beings who were not restricted by their
environment. They gained a relative freedom ti-om environmental exigencies very early in their evolution, beginning with their mastery of re. This
remains the crux of the problem for humankind's exaggeratedly aggressive urges. In a particularly disturbing passage, Lorenz tells: Obviously,
instinctive behavior mechanisms failed to cope with the new circumstances which culture unavoidably produced even at its very dawn. There is evidence
that the rst inventors of pebble tools, the African Australopithecines, promptly used their new weapon to kill not only game but fellow members of their
species as well. Peking Man, the Prometheus who learned to preserve re, used it to roast his brothers; beside the regular use of re lie the mutilated
and roasted bones of sinanthropos pekinensis himself. !O Lorenz explains that when intra-specic aggression exerts selective pressures uninuenced by
environmental pressures, it can develop in a direction that is markedly maladaptive. Evolution of the species can then take a turn that can he irrelevant
Aggressive behavior can, more than any other qualities and functions,
become exaggerated to the point of the grotesque and the inexpedient. Humans have been particularly exposed to the ill consequences of
or detrimental, or even catastrophic to the survival of the species.
maladaptive selective processes, according to Lorenz, The "grotesque and inexpedient" destructive intensity of the human being is a "hereditary evil"
that drove the earliest men to slaughter their fathers and brothers and neighbours. Lorenz asserts that selective processes gone astray are what we are
still witnessing today in elaborate displays of aggressive prowess, those perverted elaborations of swaggering machismo and overblown bravado still
practiced in obsessively patriarchal societies. In nature, ghting is an ever present phenomenon and the weapons and behavior mechanisms that serve
that process are highly developed. Yet ghts between intra-specic rivals rarely end in death. Encounters between prey and predator may result in death
but this does not constitute aggression, on Lorenz's terms. According to Lorenz, a victim sought for food does not incite "aggressive" impulses any more
than a chicken in the refrigerator incites human aggression. Animals stalking food do not display the "expressive movements" that signal aggression. On
the other hand, those signals are clearly displayed in the [p. 12] way young boys thrash each other in the schoolyard or young men brawl in barrooms,
or eyed in the heated explosions characteristic of political debates or sports contests (among both participants and spectators). 1 venture the
the mere invention of atom bombs by beings as flammable as we are testifies to the perversion of human aggressive
impulses toward "the grotesque and the inexpedient." Lorenz distinguishes between rituals transmitted by tradition and those passed by heredity,
speculation that
but the distinction is a moot one, Rituals that have begun as traditional practice, like the redirected aggression ritual (a ritual that prevents aggression
toward the mate
or another intimate member of the social group by diverting it toward a more remote or defenseless object) become, after long
practice, part of what Lorenz calls "the xed instinct inventoiy"2 of the species. This indicates that rituals take hold one way or another. They will
eventually become identifying marks of the group whether consciously accepted, enforced and transmitted to the young, or absorbed into the bodies of
the participants to develop into needs that become, in turn, driving forces that require their means of discharge. Perhaps the most stunning
among Lorenz's many shocking claims is the priority of aggression rituals to rituals of love, nurturance and friendship. The latter, explains Lorenz,
developed over many generations as trans form at ions of "ceremonies of appeasement," rituals meant to redirect aggression by placating the attacker.
Intra-specic aggression-selective practices grown "grotesque and inexpedient"-are fundamental to the human world, thousands of years older than love
or friendship, and source and origin of the latter. Lorenz asserts: intra-specic aggression can certainly exist without its counterpart, love,
but conversely there is no love without aggression. 13 Even laughter in its original form was probably an appeasement or greeting ceremony developed
from redirected aggression.' 4 I suggest that we can still witness its aggressive roots in the cruel way that children (and many adults) ridicule others who
are mentally or physically different or culturally alien to the home group. Lorenz's project is to demonstrate that, by observing the natural behavior
patterns of the animal world, we will discover not only much that will remind us of our own behavior, but much that warns us that our behavior may not
be under the strict governance of reason that we believe it to be. Lorenz is committed to collapsing the popular fallacy (the fallacy upon which was
originally founded the discipline of anthropology) that all that is "natural" is adaptive. Our inclinations may all too often follow blindly the patterned
materiality of our histories and, since our histories are primarily murderous, that is a problem for healthy human engagement. Many people today still
refuse the evolutionary explanation for the development of humankind on earth. It not only contradicts their religious myths and challenges the notion of
human centrality in the cosmic drama, but the claim that we are evolved from apes offends their sense of species supe [p. 13] riority. However, if Lorenz
is correct, the common origin of human and beast is not at all the problem. It is the differences between us and the animals since the forking in the
evolutionary chain that causes our greatest problems. Lorenz has fallen from the foreground of the discussion of human nature largely because he
employs the language of "instincts" to speak about human behavioral dispositions. The concept of instinct has lost favour in philosophical and social
scientic discourse not merely because that term reminds us of the discomting fact of our animal ancestry, but because the admission of instinctive
behaviors suggests a "biological fatalism" that precludes the viability of analytical solutions to human problems." Instincts are morally blind and thus it is
disturbing to think our behaviors under their sway. But it is important to note that Lorenz himself was no biological fatalist. He rmly believed that we
can, over time, alter even fundamental dispositions. But his nal analysis of the human situation was not overly optimistic, as the concluding words of
his book testify: how abjectly stupid and undesirable the historical mass behavior of humanity actually is. 16 Lorenz does not intend to clear human
beings of the charge of maladaptive behaviors. Rather, he wants the history of that inaladaptativeness to stand as an ethical warning to the species.
Unless we develop healthier rituals of engagement, we are doomed to the biologically just deserts of species extinction.
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Alt Solves Ethics

Sacrifice confronts the horrific violence dripping through our language of
justice and peace. The aff dooms us to excessive murder in the name of the
good.
The problem with equating Bataille and Kierkegaard is that the depiction of sacrificing the low
for the high suggests a more conventional moral position than Bataille puts forth, one
where sacrifices are understood as good, in the name of a greater good, whether we reach this good
or not. This is precisely the position Bataille sets out to resist, however, and not only because, as he puts it, "we do not possess the excessive store of
strength necessary to attain the fulllment of our sovereignty" (1962, 167). The problem is more one of the value or direction of our exertions than of
Sovereignty actually takes us in the latter

direction, with our sacrifices authenticated but in the name of something other than the
good, perhaps something not higher but lower. Bataille's own words to this effect are that "Evil-an acute form of Evil-has a
their strength or brute force. Some of our exertions are good but others are evil.
sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality" (4973, unpaginated preface). indeed, his view is that our
ultimate aspirations will be misunderstood unless we see them less on the side of good than of evil. When he calls for a hypermorality, he demands we recognize that in fully
accounting for ourselves, the prohibition of evil aspirations does not suffice. Here Bataille invokes Sade to represent sovereign aspirations as entirely gratuitous, what Bataile
calls "the need for an existence freed from all limits" (1962, 162). Sade is an exemplar to show us that we have such aspirations. What we can see in him, says Bataille, "is the
ruinous form of eroticism. Moral isolation means that all the brakes are off; it shows what spending can really mean" (1962, 167). One thing such spending shows, according to
"pleasure is . . close to ruinous waste" (1962, 166), with "[e]rotic conduct ... the
opposite of normal conduct as spending is the opposite of getting" (1962, 166). In this view,
we regularly engage in behaviors that actually amount to an extravagant exercise in"
squander[ing ourselves] ... to no real purpose" (1962, 166). Moreover, these include both sexual behaviors as well as others far
Bataile, is that
more extreme, &uta&ty aa munlcc are further steps in the same direction. Similarly prosti tution, coarse language and everything to do with eroticism and infamy play their
part in turning the world of sensual pleasure into one of ruin and degradation. Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding
away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can.
As remote as we can: that is hardly strong enough; we want a world turned upside down and inside out. The truth of eroticism is treason. (Bataille 1962, 166-67) The purpose of
offering a series of such strong, disturbing characterizations is not to dismiss ordinary moral values but to supplement them, to say that such values are not enough for us. At the
same time that we outlaw and condemn all of these ruinous squanderings, our sovereign aspirations demand them. The list includes brutality, murder, prostitution, swearing, sex,
infamy, ruin, degradation, and nally treason. These are activities we must prohibit, activities we cannot allow ourselves to participate in, but which at the same time identify who
we are. Hypermorality instructs that while we cannot take up such behaviors, we cannot not take them up either. We cannot not squander ourselves in these and other ways,
many of which are offensive of mention to ordinary morality. To help emphasize just how offensive, there is a passage near the beginning of Death and Sensuality depicting the
, the communal production of a wasteful expenditure witnessed in

common. Bataille uses the word "sacred" to describe the experience of the witnesses,
underlining just how fundamental and revelatory to us he thinks such events were. Disturbing as
it must be to us, he holds that the event of the spectacle of ritual sacrifice has power of
conveying a profound meaning, This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the
death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts
the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the
succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.
Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective nature of religion dictates,
has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice. (Bataille 1962, 16) It is a disturbing
thought that only a spectacular killing, that only events of this kind, can satisfy the human
desire for the experience of sacred meaning. Along with a fear of our own immoral excess comes the question of whether
spectacle of primitive ritual human sacrice
hypermorality invites unleashing this destructive excess. Would Bataille like to see us unleashed, perhaps in the style of Charles Manson, to produce our own spectacles of ritual
sacrice? Certainly Bataille describes irrational violence as having an undeniable meaning, one that is revelatory of the sacred continuity alluded to in the previous citation. Soon
after that citation he similarly asserts that we seek "the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity"
described above. In other words, to

acquire the power to know the unknowable, the production of transformative violence is the
key. In the name of this power, the production of violence is not an accident but a goal. This
production is the key to the transformative experiences that give our lives a sense of
intensity, depth, and meaning. Hence, we always have ample motive to seek such experiences, to seek to bear witness to transformative
(1962, 18). Where do we nd this power? We nd it in transformative experiences akin to the sacrice
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violence. Given such ample motive, violence and spectacles of such violence will be produced. Moreover, no morality will ever be able to put an end to these productions. No
morality has the power to stop the persistence of the sacred violence in our lives, since this violcnce is the only key we have to the experience of the miraculous, of the sacred.
As for Charles Manson, Bataille would certainly try to understand Manson's and our own violence in this context of the sacred, of our need for depth and meaning. The production
of transformative violence is fundamental to our being, whether we are conscious of it in this way or not. He, then, would not regard Manson's production as an anomaly, as unlike
what he himself would be driven to produce. Yet in our lives there are also limits. It is unlikely that Bataile would applaud Manson for the same reason he ultimately rejects Sade.
They are both indiscriminate; they both go too far. "Continuity is what we are after,' Bataille conrms, but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings
can alone establish is not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain. De Sade's
aberration exceeds that limit. (Bataille 1962, 13) In other words, our wasteful consumption must also have limits. To actually approve of our own self-destruction goes too far.
Later on in Death and Sen suality, Bataille continues, Short of a paradoxical capacity to defend the indefensible, no one would suggest that the cruelty of the heroes of Justine
and Jullette should not be wholeheartedly abominated. It is a denial of the principles on which humanity is founded. We are hound to reject something that would end in the ruin
of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are building we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. (Bataile 1962, 179-80) This
passage is crucial for understanding Bataille's ethics. Usually Bataille writes on behalf of the violence that remains unaffected by absolute prohibitions. Prohibitions cannot obviate
this transformative violence. There is always ample motive to produce the experiences of sacred transformation, i.e., to transgress the prohibitions. Yet self-preservation is also a
fundamental value for BatailIe there is also ample motive to resist the violence that denies the value of the well being of life itself. As he says in the second of the above
passages, we must condemn what threatens to destroy us; our sovereign aspirations can be taken too far. In another passage he speaks of our need "to become aware of...
[ourselves] and to know clearly what... [our] sovereign aspirations are in order to limit their possibly disastrous consequences" (1962, 181).
It is when we are
ignorant of these aspirations that we are most vulnerable
to them, enacting them anyway, albeit inattentively. In

the end, hypermorality asks us to encounter our aspirations to evil, to join in what Bataille calls "complicity in the knowledge of Evil" in order to construct what he calls a "rigorous
morality" (1973, unpaginated Preface). What does it mean to encounter such aspirations, to join in such complicity? Bataille's hypermorality requires that, as a culture, we
the decline of the

practice of sacrifice in the modem world, beginning in the West, and he always believed that
such a decline only obscures our productions of violence, rather than doing away with them or the needs from which they
appreciate the value of becoming more active in our productions of violence. From his earliest writings to his latest, Bataille always bemoaned
stem. Two closely related discussions of this appear in his early essays "The Jesuve" and "Sacricial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh," where Bataille suggests
that the decline of the practice of sacrice has been far less than a blessing for us. He argues that the production of violence continues, the danger of this production continues,
although in the most unrecognizable forms. The examples given in the essay "Sacricial Mutilation" emphasize both how easy it is to distance ourselves from this danger as well
as how terrible such a danger could be. They include a man twisting off his own nger and a woman tearing out her own eye, both terrible examples of our strange, cruel, and
uncontrollable needs for expenditure. Along similar lines, as a commentary on events of this kind, Bataile argues, The practice of sacrice has today fallen into disuse and yet it
sacrifice,
with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing
that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the conditions of present-day life, leads an
isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior. (Bataille 1985, 73) Here as throughout
his writings, Bataile emphasizes two key aspects of the decline of sacrice that we ignore at our
own peril. In the rst place, he contends that the violent need that ritual sacrice was once able
to address remains with us despite all optimism to the contrary. We don't put violence on
display in the same ritualized fashion, but the need remains constant. We've only become
less aware of it in ourselves, and less aware of ourselves as those who have need of such
violence. Thus Bataille's rst point is that the need for nonproductive usages does not diminish
when it is denied. His second point is that this denial in which the need persists represents a
decline in self-awareness, one with obviously dangerous consequences. No longer do we
congregate as a community to witness the violence we desire to bring into this world and
to affirm our lack of control over this violence, our lack of control over this desire. We no
longer congregate to produce the sacrificial spectacle, to produce thereby a community of
mutual complicity in the knowledge of the sacred continuity of being. We no longer allow
ourselves to organize spectacles in the name of the sacred that enact that which exceeds
the good. Such spectacles would have to violate every stricture of human rights known to us today. Yet we have not changed, according to Bataile, except for becoming
has been, due to its universality, a human action more signicant than any other. Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of
less known to ourselves than ever. We are now more than ever the condemned on the way to becoming the destroyed by way of imagining ourselves as the good. Even an utter
catastrophe like the Holocaust does little to alter our naive self-image. In his short piece on David Rousset's book The Universe of the Concentration Camp, Bataille refuses to side
with the moralists because moralistic self-delusion here is our problem, not our solution, There exists in a certain form of moral condemnation an escapist denial. One says,
basically, this abjection would not have been, had there not been monsters .... And it is possible, insofar as this language appeals to the masses, that this infantile negation may
seem effective; but in the end it changes nothing. It would be as vain to deny the incessant danger of cruelty as it would be to deny the danger of physical pain. One hardly
obviates its effects atly attributing it to parties or to races which one imagines to he inhuman. (Bataille 1991, 19) Based on what we have already seen in this paper, Bataille can
never accept the moralist's claim, distancing us from the purveyors of evil, no matter how attractive it is to join hands at a particular moment of victory over an oppressive
enemy. It would be inconsistent for him to specify a particular set of disagreeable behaviors and state that they aren't human, that they aren't ours. Even at this point, standing in
the ruins, the main point would be to obstruct our all-too-ready inclination to nd ways of denying the cruelty at the heart of us all; to interfere with our desire to attribute all
cruelties to the monstrous one or the aberrant few. For hypermorality, this cruelty is precisely what we need to take into account of ourselves, rather than to deny it as the evil of
others. How is this to be done? Bataille faces a serious dilemma that a contrast between his hypermorality and Aristotle's morality helps to show. The goal of morality is to take
virtuous behaviors into account, to make them part of our lives by learning through habituation to enjoy right behaviors with respect to our pleasures and pains. Aristotle says
that it is the job of "legislators [to] make the citizens good by forming habits in them .... and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one" (1941, 952, 1103b). He
continues saying that "the whole concern both of virtue and of political science is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be good, he who uses them
badly bad" (1941, 955, 1105a). As he puts it, "We assume ... that excellence tends to do what is best with regard to pleasures and pains, and vice does the contrary" (1941, 955,
lIlO4b). How do we become excellent? We begin with instruction by role models, who demonstrate the praiseworthy behaviors and the rule to follow in practice until we follow it
automatically, internalized as part of our second nature of moral character. Such learning is by imitation of those who delight in shunning the wrong pleasures, who delight in
withstanding the right pains. Such imitation is difficult but noble and good, making us excellent. In contrast to these virtuous displays serving Aristotle's purposes of moral
instruction, what about the kinds of spectacles or displays Bataille proposes with his hypermorality? Whereas Aristotle's are displays of virtue, Bataile's would be closer to displays
of vice. Whereas the former invite imitation of the right relations to pleasure and pain, the latter would invite imitation of morally wrong relations. In the former case we have a
heroic role model. In the latter case, the role model would be closer to the opposite, to the traitor, the practitioner of vice; the role model would be closer to Sade. Hence, nally,
whereas in Aristotle, the learner easily accepts the identication with the role model and wants to continue to imitate his/her virtuous pursuits and aversions, in the latter case,
hypermorality
proposes that we witness ourselves as we can never accept ourselves. In the
sacrificial spectacle, we witness ourselves far removed from the Aristotelian model, closer
such identications would have to be tenuous at best, always fraught with ambivalence and would even be unacceptable. In this sense, Bataille's
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to vice than virtue, closer to evil than good, closer to the other's pain than to his or her
pleasure. For Bataille, only by witnessing ourselves in this way (as we are) do we begin to
take into account the cruelty that lies at the heart of us all. Still, how far in the direction of praiseworthy cruelty
can we really go? Bataille bemoans the decline of the practice of ritual sacrice, seeing in our cultural and personal excesses of violence the same need at work as in the ritual
sacrice, albeit in a far more destructive fashion. But there can be no clear solution to this problem we face, even assuming it has been correctly understood and portrayed.
Bataille himself admits in discussing Sade that we cannot consent to practices that are overly destructive On the other hand, only the sacricial spectacle would seem to be
effective in showing us to ourselves, with the prospect of such showing lying at the heart of hypermorality itself. What to do in the face of such a dilemma? It is obviously horrible
to exercise cruelty, yet perhaps even worse to do nothing, to nd no way to praise and pursue this exercise. Doing nothing, we can have the pleasant ease of remaining ignorant
, "Our ignorance only has this incontestable effect: It causes us

to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood" (1988, 23). Pie! asks us,
in support of Bataille, to consider the only options we have, Will. - [we] continue to "undergo"
what.. [we] could "bring about." that is, to let the surplus provoke more and more
catastrophic explosions instead of voluntarily 'consuming" it, of consciously destroying it
through ways .[we) can choose and" agree to"? (Pie! 1995, 104).
of our situation and dilemma. But as Bataile explains
The tragic spectacle of sacrificial violence enacts the best ethical relationship
to the horror described by the 1AC. As we wound, we ourselves are broken. If
we ay the affirmative, we also wear their skin.
David Allison, Prof Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook, 2009
[The Obssessions of George
Bataille: Community and Communication ed. Mitchell/Winfree p. 122-123, 127]
To communicate with another is to break through his integrity, his independence, his
autonomy, his nature-to intrude upon him, unsettle him, wound him. Communication takes
place when beings put themselves at risk, each putting himself and the other in the region
of death and nothingness. Communication is suicidal and criminal. It is striking that the longing to
communicate with those most unlike ourselves-with sacred and demonic beings-so dominates ancient humanity. The outer zone where the sphere of
Sacrifice-of goods, other animals, even of our

firstborn children--is the most signicant of all human acts (OC 2: 1 3/VE 73). It is as
fundamental as the satisfaction of needs. The word sacrice-sacrum ficio---etymologically
means "to make sacred. In a sacrice something supremely precious-our nest harvest
and livestock, our rstborn son-_is set aside from all use, separated absolutely from the
profane sphere. What is set apart from all profane use is separated absolutely, denitively, in
being destroyed. The knife that tears open the body of the sacricial victim, tears apart
his protective hide or skin that kept him functioning, releasing blood and the writhing
turmoil of spilt organs, reveals the violence of a stag or boar taken from the wilderness, the inner violence of its life, reveals
work and reason comes to an end is the sacred--sacrum, "separated.
anonymous untamed forces in the child. The shaman, the priest, Abraham penetrates into the sacred zone, and there, in the violence of the knife and
consuming re, sacrice reveals the sacred. The sacricial priest leaves the profane sphere to perform the sacrice and act in the name of the people
who identify with his act. Bringing to him of their harvest and livestock, the beast of the wilderness, or their rstborn child, they participate in his
Those who perform sacrifice identify themselves with the victim. The[p. 123] Aztec
priests covered themselves with the blood of the sacricial victims, excoriated them, and
pulled the skin of the victims over their own naked bodies. And we who consign to the sacred sphere our
deed.
resources, the game from our hunt, our own children, identify with them, identify with the victims. The stag or wild boar sacriced would have sustained
and nourished us, How could we not identify with our own rstborn child, sacriced to the mountain god Jahweh? At the moment of the blood sacrice,
the participants nd their own identity plunged into the void. When the re blazes upon a sacred victim, it blazes too on us .
We slash open,
crucify, or burn in holocaust the divine force that has been revealed in the sacrificial
victim. The slashings and re we inict on what is precious to us-our nest livestock and
harvest, our rstborn son wounds us irremediably. We communicate with wounds inicted and
self-inicted. The communication takes place between humans and sacred beings, each
rent, wounded, exposed to one another by their wounds. God and humans communicate in
the violation of the integrity of their natures, in crime.
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Continued.
Pillz
Tragedies, whether the real tragedies of individuals or those represented in tragic theater, hold us in
anxiety and in fascination. Our energies are expended in contact with terrifying cataclysms of
nature and with individuals torn asunder, whose agonies rend our self-sufficiency. Tears and grieving
disconnect the future and recognize that the force and meaning of the past have come to an end. The
forces of life hold on with strength and will to the present with all its irrevocable loss,
inconsolable with words and projects. Tragic art holds humans in thrall to losses that they themselves
have not known. Communication occurs when doctors, nurses, and truck drivers go to the 50 million
people today displaced by wars and famine, to perform surgeries in dusty tents, distribute sacks of
food, nurse children dying of AIDS. [p. 127] "What seems 'faultless' and stable-a whole that has a
look of completion (house, person, street, landscape or sky). The 'fault,' or defect can appear
though" (OC 5: 266/C 30). They, too are incomplete. They are not crystallizations in the intersections of the universal laws of the universe. "On the
same level you nd-the ridiculous universe, a naked woman, and torment" (OC 5: 267/C 31). In current language, communication strongly denotes
communication among humans; but Walter Benjamin found biologists wondering whether in fact all animate organisms communicate, whether
communication belongs to the nature of animate organisms. However, communication there meant the transmission of information. In Being and Time,
Heidegger, replacing the substantive account of things with the relational account of implements, reduces things to the force that informs the user. The
communication with
the sacred and demonic; it is also communication with other species, inanimate things, the
material universe. It is with our incompleteness, our orifices gaping open, and our
unanswerable questions that we communicate with a world out of joint, spread about us
term communication, as Bataille uses it, to denote the contact of a sovereign being with what is other, is rst the
disconnected, a concatenation of riddles, fragments, and dreadful accidents.' Indeed, communication with the sacred and with natural things is prior to
communication with other humans.
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Alt Solves Ontology

Sacrifice enacts ecastic community, celebrating a non-servile ontology beyond
enslavement to fear of loss
JesseGoldhammer2005
[Lecturer/Instructor,InstituteofGovernmentStudies,U.C.Berkeley,TheHeadlessRepublic:SacrificialViolencein
ModernFrenchThoughtp.179191]
Iproposetoassumeasalawthathumanbeingsareneverunitedwitheachotherexceptthroughtearsorwounds,an
ideathathasacertainlogicalforceinitsfavor.Whenelementsarrangethemselvestocreatethewhole,thisiseasily
producedwheneachofthemloses,throughatearinitsintegrity,aportionofitsparticularbeingforthebenefitofthe
communalbeing.Initiations,sacrifices,andfestivalsrepresentjustsuchmomentsoflossandcommunicationbetween
individuals.78Thispassagecapturestheimportantinterconnectednessofsacrifice,ontology,andcommunityin
Bataille'sthought.Humanbeingsarenotunitedbyself
interestoraltruism;theyarenotboundtogetherbyfear,faith,
orcontract.Com
p.184munitybeginsonlywhenuseless,violent,andwastefulactivitiesforcehumanstoconfront
death,callingtheintegrityoftheirselvesintoquestion.Thisconfrontationwithnonbeingisliberatingbecauseit
generatesanonservileontology:Indeed,inthisstateofbeing,oneisnotevenaslavetoone'sself.Bataillewrites:"The
sacrificialtearopeningthefestivalisaliberatingtear.Theindividualwhoparticipatesinthelossisvaguelyawarethat
thislossengendersthecommunitysustaininghim.""Communityandlibertythusparadoxicallyariseduring
frenzied,violentmomentsofselfdisintegration,whencommunicationbetweenindividualsisnondiscursiveand
ecstatic.ThegroupAc6phale,Bataille'sfinalcollaborationofthe393as,attemptedtousesacrificialpracticesinordertoconjureaBatailliancommunityinto
existence.UnliketheCercleorContreAttaque,Acbphalewasasecretsocietywhosemembersexpressednointerestinengaginginpoliticsororganizingamass
movement.Instead,AcphalemetandconductedsacrificialritesintheSaintNomlaBretbcheforestoutsideParis.InanefforttopracticewhattheCollegehadbeen
contentmerelytodebate,Acphalesoughttoreconstitutethesacredineverydaylife.Itsgoal,accordingtoStoekl,was"tostimulatetherebirthofthekindofsocial
valuesBatafflehadespousedintheCritiquesocialeessays:expenditure,risk,loss,sexuality,death?'8IncreatingAc6phale,Bataillewishedtobypasspolitics,which
hadprovedtobeonlyanimpedimenttotheformationofhissacrificialcommunity.ThemembersofAcphaleominouslycontemplatedconductingarealhuman
sacrifice,butnoonewaswillingtoplaytheroleofexecutioner.Thefailureofthesesorcerer'sapprenticesthetermusedbyBatailletodescribeAcphale's
"work"illustratestheexhaustionofBataille'sconceptofsacrifice.ThereisadirectconnectionbetweenBataille'sreadingoftheregicideofLouisXVIandAcphale's
conjuringofasacrificialcommunity.Thesacrificeofthekingandofpoliticspreparesforthepossibilityofacommunityformedbyatragicbutjoyfuldisposition
towarddeath.Deathisvitaltocommunalformationbecause,asRichmartremarks,"itrevealstoallpersonsboththeirfinitudeandextensionintounbounded
ecstasy."81Innotestitled"JoyintheFaceofDeath:'Batailleruminatesontheregicide'sprincipalmystery,whichinauguratedthediscdurseonsacrificialviolence:
"Humanheartsneverbeatashardforanythingelseastheydofordeath?'Maistremarvelsatsoldiers'enthusiasmonthebattlefield.Sorelreflectsontheattractive,
contagious,andsublimequalitiesofmartyrdom.Bataillerespondssimilarlytotheimportanceoftheexperienceofsublimeviolence:"Itseemsthatasortofstrange,
intensecommunicationp.185isestablishedamongmeneachtimetheviolenceofdeathisnearthem?'Batailie,likeMaistreandSorel,believesthattheindividual
experienceofdeathpromotesakindofecstaticcommunicationthatpossessesimportantsocialeffects.Unlikethem,however,Bataillepointstoafundamental
disruptionofbeingastheimpulsetocommunicate:Thegrave,decisivechangethatresultsfromdeathissuchablowtospiritsthat,farfromtheusualworld,theyare
cast,transportedandbreathless,somewherebetweenheavenandearth,asiftheysuddenlyperceivedthedizzying,ceaselessmotionpossessingthem.Thismotionthen
appearstobepartlydreadfulandhostile,butexternaltotheonethreatenedbydeathortheonedying;itisallthatisleft,deprivingtheonewhowatchesthedyingas
muchastheonewhodies.Thusitisthat,whendeathispresent,whatremainsoflifeonlylivesonoutside,beyondandbesideitself .Ecstaticexperiencelife
that"livesonoutside,beyondandbesideitself"isthebasisforthekindofcommunicationthatrendersBataillian
communitypossible.Thisexperienceisinstantiatedsacrificially,allowingthesacrificertoparticipateinthe
unrecoverablelossofthesacrificed.Thecumulativeeffectofsuchaconfrontationwithdeathisontological
destabilization,whichBataillecharacterizesasapermanentlywoundedself.ForBataille,theregicideinvolvessuch
atotallossthatitaugurstheformatioiofacommunityinwhichallpoliticalconcepts,includingmanhimself,have
beensundered,leavingnothingbehindsaveunemployednegativityitself.WhileparticipatinginAc6phale,Batailleheldthatsacrifice'stearing
ofbeingwouldjoinhumanstogetherthroughcommunicationthatinvokedaunique.communality:"Thosewholookatdeathandrejoicearealreadynolongertheindividualsdestinedforthe
body'srottendecay,becausesimplyenteringintothearenawithdeathalreadyprojectedthemoutsidethemselves,intotheheartofthegloriouscommunityoftheirfellowswhereeverymisery
isscoffedat...Thecommunityisnecessarytotheminordertobecomeawareoftheglory.boundupintheinstantthatwillseethemtornfrombeing.""
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Sacrifice breaks with the ontology of goods, enabling ecastic community

beyond the humanist subject
Chris Gemerchak, PhD Philosophy from Katholike University in Leuven Belgium, 2009
Bataille assimilated the wisdom of the underground man who realized the inhumanity of
subjecting oneself to reason and mathematics, calculation and prosperity, and who asserted the
positive value of letting pure caprice and whimsical desire command one's actions, even if-no,
precisely because-it goes against reason and common sense. Alternatively, I could have asserted
that the foundation of Bataille's ethics rests on a refusal to submit to the homogeneous
economy of goods insofar as that is to forfeit the fullness of our humanity, that one should not
treat others as things insofar as that is to turn oneself into a thing among things, self-same, separate and isolated. Neither response would have been
wrong, but neither do they get to the obscure heart of the matter-the very obscurity of which is why it was and remains a very challenging question, one
that has stayed with me ever since that sweltry afternoon. For while it may be true that there are obvious answers, it is not necessarily the case that
they do justice to the question, or even understand the question in a deep sense. On the one hand then, it is possible to specify clearly Bataille's views
concerning ethics or morality as those terms are commonly understood: namely, as concerning the deliberative choices of a subjective agent, an
individual who autonomously determines the best course of action in the interest of the greatest good and according to existing norms. For it is
precisely this style of normative, utilitarian ethics that Bataille will challenge on the grounds that it is inadequate to the breadth and
ambiguity of life. And this is because every term involved in such an ethics -deliberation
and action, but particularly

individual, interest, good and shouldis representative of the very type of humanist
ideology and representational thinking that Bataille sees not only as distorting but also as
alienating with regard to the human province. This is not to suggest that Bataille advocates an
unrealistic, anarchistic gesture of eliminating morality full stop. In fact the existence of traditional
morality is rather convenient in terms of having something against which one can resist. What
he contests rather is the hegemony of an ethics that adheres to the principle of
reason, which, as he asserts frequently, comes down to the calculations of interest for the good
of the individual or a community of individuals and is oriented toward survival in the future
rather than life in the present. If he is to contest the ethical perspective that guarantees the sovereign rights of these terms-'individual' and 'community,'
'good' and 'interest'-then the rst step is to undermine the stability of these terms themselves. To approach the core of Bataille's thought with respect to
being "ethical"-or ethical being-we will thus follow Bataille's methodology as he tries to unearth the component elements of traditional ethics from their
The first move is a radical questioning-or better, putting at

risk-of the ethical individual, the [p. 65] humanist subject (individual or group) as the
paradigm of an ethical being. That which undermines the individual perspective, and thus is at the core of his ethical thought, is a
sedimentation. This method involves a double gesture.
moment of communication, an "inner experience" (l'exptirience intrieure) that reveals the existence of community. This will become clearer as we
continue. For now let us say that his new ground and paradigm of ethical thought will be community. The second move then, as just suggested, will be to
rethink this alternative "ground" of ethics and to rethink "the Good" which is at stake, a task that will engage us in an exploration of his thought
concerning the transformation of communal being, the being of community No Interest in the Individual Bataille was infamous for the lengths to which
he would go to undermine our habitual perspectives, and the fundamental target at which his various excesses took aim is the one habit it seems
hardest for us to unlearn-the individual perspective. As indicated above, the rst step in any articulation of his morality is the calling into question of the
subjective agent itself, the human subject understood in the traditional sense of an active, self-reexive identity or ego (the "I" or the Cartesian subject)
who autonomously determines a course of action based upon prior knowledge of its goals and in conformity with a doctrine of human goods and norms.
The central problem to address when

articulating Bataille's ethics of community is thus his critique of the ideology of the
subject qua individual, which is the primary obstacle to overcome if community is to
emerge. Yet Bataille knew how recalcitrant our mentality is when it comes to challenging this notion. He knew that the individual perspective is
In question is effectively any notion of a transcendental subject with good intentions.
not to be swept away with a single gesture. Indeed, one of the cornerstones and constants of his thought is precisely the attempt to undermine the
notion of a self-identical subject-the subject as a thing-or the notion of identity full stop. One might even go so far as to say that the entirety of his
anthropological and religious thinking rests on the notion of the insignicance of the individual in isolation. This assertion, however, brings with it an
entire shift of perspective concerning our activities and values, our capitalist economy and parliamentary democracy, and of course our ethical
doctrines. For with this challenge to humanist ideology as a starting point, all those ways in which an individual affirms oneself and pursues ones own
interest-right down to the very desire to persevere in being, to stay alive, to banish death from life-are viewed as betrayal of the truth of existence: the
truth of "intimacy." Intimacy, to be sure, is a term which resists positive denition. It is not a state that [p. 66] can be achieved .
It is simply
there in anguishing and ecstatic moments of self-loss or coniniunication: anguishing
because of the violence enacted on the individual who has the impression of being torn, of dying
to oneself as an individual; ecstatic in that the habitual perspective of being a separate
individual-of having one's own existence apart from others and the things of the world-dissolves
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in communication with the outside, a brief moment of release that effectively extends one
beyond (one's) being and out into nothingness. These terms will be claried as we continue. In
short then, the challenge of intimacy or communication to the hegemony of individuality is the
hidden foundation of Bataille's identiable morality. The challenge is precisely this: intimacy
and communication occur in moments where one puts one's existence into play by
assuming the risk of death (se niettre ell'/e,4), such that failure to do so, to ee from death
or fear for one's continued existence in the future is to forgo the truth of "sovereign"
(free and useless) existence and accept a life of servitude: "Play ... leads to the inoperable
spirit (ci l'esprit dsoeuvr)" (OC 5: 234/US 208; tm); play has "as its end the indifference to
every end, being only an occasion to show a soul beyond the concerns of utility" (OC 12: 106). To the "obvious" answers to the question
of Bataille's ethics that I mentioned above, we could thus add something like this: to exist in the service of some interest, to subordinate present life to
an end or future goal, to judge actions according to their usefulness, consider the greater good or even think of consequences beyond the present
moment ... in short, to work or employ one's negativity in any way is a betrayal of the humanity within us, is a "fragmentation" of existence and the time
of existence. It is possible to pinpoint almost exactly the crossroads where this difficulty rst became explicit. We jump to July 4, 1939, the date of
Bataile's nal lecture to the loose association of inuential intellectual gures known as the "College of Sociology?' Political forces and technological
rationality had combined to bring Europe to a state of critical mass, With the dying breath of the College, Bataille articulates what he claims to be the
"nal question of man, or, to take it further, the ultimate question of being," which hangs in the balance as the group disbands, and its members go their
separate ways. Now during his lecture leading up to the formulation of this 'ultimate question,' Bataille refers to certain cardinal notions that had
emerged in his most recent writings and that he would continue to reformulate and rene with an increasing sense of urgency in the years that
immediately followed.' Foremost among these is one of his most inuential concepts penned in the seminal article from 1933 ("The Notion of
Expenditure," OC I: 302-20/yE ll-29) and pursued under different guises for the better part of thirty years, namely, the "principle of loss" or
"nonproductive expenditure. With this he means violent, destructive, or "unreserved"

expenditure that is blind to and in deance of recompense and that generates sacred,
symbolic, or nonutilitarian value. In addition to, and perhaps in contradiction with, the active
sense of loss as excessive expenditure that had often dominated his thought to this point, in this
nal lecture to the College he also emphasizes one of his other fundamental principles, the
"insufficiency" of being(s)," which brings with it mutually implicative ontological and
anthropological connotations. First, the principle of the insufficiency of being rejects the
traditional notion that Being is something substantial and knowable (or even something at all),
some higher identity or essence that serves as a foundation and goal of existence. Being,
rather, is no-thing and nowhere, is movement and pure difference. Second, this principle also
establishes the radically desirous, open, or social nature of the human being. According to the insufficiency of being, the human [p.70] being is desire
pure and simple: "revealed nothingness, an unreal emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality,"" which seeks to recognize itself in another being
of desire, another emptiness housed within an external form. If one is not to close one's eyes to an upsetting consciousness of the truth of existence,
then one must be willing to acknowledge the fact that one is essentially nothing, an absence misguided by reection into thinking it is a presence. It is
just such a revelation that Bataille, in countless ways, attempts to bring to light. But as suggested earlier, the principle of individuation is always putting
up its defenses to this abysmal truth.
Consequently, the insufficient or "incomplete" nature of the human being entails that the being in question is always and everywhere searching for
something that will provide it some self-assurance and restore its sense of identity. If the subject is essentially insufficient or incomplete it will attempt to
human being is
defined by a fundamental impasse: the desire to lose is coupled with desire as
insufficiency, which quickly translates into the desire of the individual to "lose itself in some
other ['vaster being"] that exceeds it" (OC 2: 369/VE 250), to gain being by losing it. Again,
he declares a fundamental 'need' for loss as expenditure: "Men, assembling for a
sacrifice and for a festival, satisfy their need to expend a vital excess. This "loss,"
however, is not exactly irrevocable: "The individual who participates in loss is obscurely aware
that this loss engenders the community that supports him" And this brings us back to Batailles
"ultimate question," which reads as follows: "[I]t is difficult to know to what extent the
community is but the favorable occasion for a festival and a sacrice, or to what extent the
festival and the sacrice bear witness to the love individuals give to the community" (OC 2:
371/VE 251). This simple opposition, proving undecidable, would have a crippling effect on
Bataille's attempt to identify a real community that would remain faithful to his inviolable
principles.
fulll or complete itself outside itself, whether through production, acquisition, or merger. It would seem then that the
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Sacrifice shatters the ontologies of wholeness we use to rationalize the world

AlexanderIrwin,AsstProfReligionAmherstCollege,2002
[SaintsoftheImpossible:Bataille,Weil,andthePoliticsoftheSacredp.161163]
Becausesacrificeresistsrationalormoralpurpose,Batailleprovidesitwitharadicallydifferentcharge.Duringmostofthe,rg3os,Batailleviews
sacrificeasaformofcollectiveviolence,butonethatnolongeroperateswithinthedomainofpeople'sbeliefs,servingtostructureandboundthem
inpolitically meaningfulways.Instead,Batailleconceptualizestheeffectsofsacrificialviolenceontologicallybecauseheidentifiesreification,not
moraldecadence,asthefundamentalmodernproblem.Inhisview,capitalism,utilitarianism,andparliamentarianismhavereducedhumanbeingsto
servilethings.ThespiritofBataille'sdiagnosisofthehumanconditionisnot,primafacie,dissimilarfromthatofeitherMaistreorSorel.They,too,
arguethatthemorallyregenerativepropertiesofsacrificialviolencewillservetohealhumanbeingsoftheirreification.ButbecauseBarailleincludes
moralityitselfamongthosephenomenathatcontributetothedecadenceofthemodernage,herejectshispredecessors'concernwithareturntomoral
andspiritualwholeness.Bataillecriticizesthegoalofhumanwholenessasareligiousandphilosophicalfantasythat
servesonlytoenslavehumanbeingstotheidealdictatesofreasonandmorality.Furthermore,evenifwholeness
weredesirable,sacrificialviolence,asBatailleconceivesofit,nolongerpossessesaregenerativecapacity.Rather,
sacrificeisaviolentoperationthatexposeshumanbeingstodeath,loss,rupture,andfragmentationelementsof
accursednessthatBatailletreatsasessentialcomponentsofhumanity.Ratherthanallowinghumanbeingstoflee
fromtheirbasehumanityintorealmsofidealismandpurity,suchasreligion,philosophy,orpolitics,Baraillesuggests
thatsacrificeoffersthemavisceralreminderthattheirhumanityisthoroughlyintertwinedwithwhathumans
rejectasradicallyorher,namely,deathornotbeing.Thus,theantidotetoreificationinthemodernageconsists
notinregenerativemoralityorreconstructedwholeness,butratherinaconfrontationwithwhatBataillecallsthe
accursedshare(hapartinaudite).14ForBataille,unityandwholenessareantitheticaltobeinghuman,which
avoidsreificationonlywhenitconfrontsitsownabsence,anexperienceachievedthroughsacrifice.
AlthoughBatailleradicallyrejectsmanyofthepreviousdefinitionsofsacrificialviolenceintheFrenchdiscourse,
heretainsitsmostimportantfeature:communality.EveninBataille'shands,sacrificialviolenceillustratesthe
paradoxofacommunitybuiltaroundviolentdestruction.Maistrecharacterizedsacrificiallossconservatively:death
reinvigoratedpreexisting,divinelysanctioned,socialandpoliticalnorms.TheFrenchrevolutionariesandSorelviewed
sacrificemorecreativelyasthecollectivetakingofalifeforthesakeofanewsociopoliticalorder.BecauseBataille
definessacrificeasviolent,unrecoverableloss,itcontributestoaconceptofcommunityfundamentallyopposedtothose
envisionedbyMaistre,Sorel,andtherevolutionaries.Republicanism,monarchism,andanarchosyndicahsmall
presupposethepossibilityofauthority,eveniftheypositradicallydifferentembodimentsofit.Baraille'sconceptof
sacrificegivesrisetoacommunityinwhichtheactoffoundationnevercoheres.Whatbindsthecommunity
togetheristhesharedexperienceofunrecoverableviolentloss.Sacrificecultivatescommunitybyfosteringanondiscursive
communicationbetweenhumanbeingswhosesunderedindividualitypermitstheformationofanecstaticbond.Thisbondgivesrisetoa
metapolitica.lcommunityinwhichsovereigntyhasneitherbasisnordominion.InBataille'sview,sacrificecannotparticipateintheconstructionof
republicanism,monarchism,oranarchosyndicalismbecause,liketheobelisk,thoseideasofcommunitybetraytheirsacrificialoriginbypositingthe
possibilityofarenewederectionofauthority.Baraille'sconceptofsacrificeinvitesreflectiononwhatcommunitywouldbeifitwereneverto
recoverwhatwasviolentlydestroyedtocreateit.Thisisafundamentallyantipoliticalnotionofcommunityinsofar,asitsubvertsalltheconcepts
thathavehistoricallymadepoliticspossible.AlthoughMaistre,Sorel,andtheFrenchrevolutionariesagreeonlittlepolitically,allpositatheoryof
sacrificialviolencethatrequiresreplacementorrecoveryofthatwhichsacrificedestroys.
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Alt Solves Resistence

Rational political discourse fails. Only claiming the sacred enables resistance
to power.
AlexanderIrwin,AsstProfReligionAmherstCollege,2002
[SaintsoftheImpossible:Bataille,Weil,andthePoliticsoftheSacredp.214225]
How,inthecontextofacountrywithoutafuture,asocietywhosemoralbaseshadcollapsed,acivilizationpoisedon
thebrinkofsuicide,wasitpossibletofindmeaninginlife,toarticulateethicalpositions,tospeakofbeauty,loyalty,
love?Noareaofindividualorcollectivelifeappearedunaffectedbythe contagionofmeaninglessness,violence,cynicism,andsham(RCL,).The
languageitselfinwhichconventionalphilosophicalandpoliticaldiscoursehadbeenconductedappearedcorruptedtothepointofuselessness.Formany,wordslike"democracy,""freedom,"
or"revolution"tosaynothingofthestillmorevacantabstractionsoftheologyandoldfashionedmoralphilosophycouldelicitnothingbutindifference,orasneer.Theoldvalueswere
unquestionablydefunct.Buthow(fromwhatmaterialsandaccordingtowhatguidelines)werenewvaluestobediscoveredor"created"(BOGII,a73)?Evenifnew,legitimatevalueswere
somehowtoemerge,moreover,itseemeddoubtfultheycouldbedisseminated.Publicdebateonethicalandpoliticalquestions
whetherinthe
academy,theintellectualandartisticworld,ortheparliamentaryinstitutionsofbourgeoisdemocracyappearedto
leadnowhere.Rationaldiscussiondegeneratedintodemagogueryorremainedpowerlessinthefaceofimmediateor
threatenedviolence.Anendlessproliferationofmutuallyexclusivetheories,claims,andprogramsfilledaplethoraof
shortlivedreviews,bulletins,journals,books,andmanifestos,yettheoutpouringoffranticintellectualenergy
generatedfewifanymeaningfulresults.Toarguepoliticalandmoral[p.215]positionshonestlyappearedimpossible
whentheverylanguageofdiscussionhadbeenunderminedbypropagandisticmisuseandwhenHitler'sexampleseemed
todemonstrateconclusivelythatnotideasbutbruteforceultimatelychartedthecourseofhistory.How,evenifgood
ideascouldbedevised,couldtheyeverbeconvincinglyexpressedandallowedthechancetoexertinfluence?The
betterpoliticalandsocialideaswere,WeilarguedintheconcludingpagesofReflections,themorelikelytheywereto
challengefundamentalsocietalassumptions,andthemorecertainitbecamethatmediaenfiefedtothestatusquo
wouldcaricatureorignoretheseideas,effectivelypreventingthemfromeverbecomingmattersofseriouspublic
debate.ThesearethechallengeswithwhichWellandBataillefoundthemselvesconfrontedinthe19305.Theyare
issuesthatwillperhapsstrikeusasnotwhollyunrelatedtoourownexperience.ThedifficultyBataille,Weil,andtheir
contemporariesconfrontedwasthenecessitybothtocreate(ordiscover)valuesandtocommunicatethem.Thesocialcontext
renderedthesetasksurgentandinseparable.AsWeilagainnotedinthelaterpagesofReflections,thestructuresofeducation,information,capital,andpowerinEuropeansocietyhadcreateda
situationinwhichthosepossessingtheskillsandtoolsforeffectivecommunicationhadnothingmeaningfultosay,whilethosewithinsightsintothetruthofthesocialmechanismwere
deprivedofmeansofreflectionandcommunication,How(ifatall)couldthetwodimensionstruthandexpressivepower,contentandformbebroughttogether?Theproblemmayagain
strikeusasnotwithoutrelevancetoourownhistoricalmoment.Theelusive,"sliding"qualityofthesacredwasoneoftheconcept'smostimportantadvantagesfromBataille'sandWell's
perspective.Inclosing,Iwouldliketofocusonaparticularaspectofthiselusiveness.ConnectedtotheDurlcheimianpolaritybetween"right"and"left"formsofsacralityisanother
fundamentalambiguity,oneBatailleandWeilturnedtoadvantage.InbothBataille'sandWeil'swork,passagescanbefoundinwhichsacrednessappearsaswhatcanbestbetermedatextual
phenomenon:aparticularwayofwritingorrepresentingbeings,relations,andpractices:aboveallamodeofwriting/performingone'sself.Seenfromthisangle ,sacrednessor
sainthoodwouldbeaboveallastyleofselfproductionandspecificallyaliterary
politicalattitudeofmobileotherness
adoptedwithrespecttothenormalizing,monopolar,monolithicpowerBataillelabeled"homogeneity"andWell"the
social."Onthisreading,sacrednessappearsnotasaparticular,fixedcontentorattribute,butasashiftingstanceof
perpetualselfgivinginandasselfdistancing:astancethatmaintainsthegapbetweentheselfandthesocialorder,
holdingopenthatseparationorwoundasthefreespaceforcritiqueandspontaneouscreativeaction.Ifthesacredis
seeninthisway,sacrednessor"sainthood"mightbeunderstoodasatacticalself
positioningcomparabletothatdescribedbyDavid
Halperininhisdiscussion(withintheframeworkofanimpressivepieceofcontemporaryhagiography)ofopportunitiesforaFoucauldianqueerpoliticalpraxis.Halperinanalyzesqueer
"identity"notasarigidessencebutasatacticalpostureofresistance.Queernessisnotastablefeature,disposition,orsetofpredeterminedbehaviors.Instead,forHalperin,queer"identity"is
orshouldbean"eccentricpositiouality"or"strategicpossibil[p.221]ity"definedbyitsoppositionalcharacterandsubjectatalltimestoshiftsandrevisions.'Asanothertheoristhas
succinctlyphrasedit,"Thegreatvirtueof'queer'[lies]preciselyinitsundefinability;[...]Thepointispreciselytorefusetheacceptedidentities,theexpectedandpredictablealignmentsor
divisions."Whateveritsultimatefatewithinthefieldofcontemporarytheory,thenotionofqueernessas"positionality"illuminatesasignificantaspectofthewayinwhichnotionsofthe
sacredfunctionedforBatailleandWell.BatailleandWellfrequentlydiscussedsacredness,heterogeneity,orsainthoodintermsthatallowthesequalitiestoappearasnamesormarkersfora
strategicstanceor"potentiallyprivilegedsitefortheanalysisofculturaldiscourses."12Forthesefigures,sacralitynamesanintellectualstyle,apatternofselfpositioninginpoliticalspaces.
SainthoodaspracticedbyWeilandBatailleisasystematicallycriticalorientationtosocietyandpolitics,alwaysoperatingfromastanceofheterogeneityandrisk .Sacralityisthe
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performativeassertionofalterityandunmasterability.AsWeiliangoodorasBatailleanevil,thesacredisa"sliding"positionalityofresistancetothe
Pillz
normalizingeffectsofdominantsocialvaluesystems,theperpetualreassertionofacritical"nonidentity.1113Thissortofnonidentity,muchmorethanahaughtyrejectionofcommunalbonds
assuch,waswhatWeilintendedwithherfamousrefusalto"liveinasetting[milieu]whereonesays'we'andtobeapartofthat'we'"(AD,z6).Toposition!constructoneselfassacredisto
modelamovementconfoundinghegemonicforces'effortstoassignstable,manipulablesocialandpoliticalidentities(e.g.,"woman,""Jew,""philosopher,""leftist,"or"homosexual")
correlatedwithpredictablepatternsofthoughtandbehavior.Weil'sandBataille'smobilizationofreligiouslanguageinpoliticalspacefunctionedasameanstoeludestandardgridsof
ideologicallocalizationandcontrol.Yetnumerouspassagescanalsobecitedinwhichbothauthorsdescribeandinvokethesacrednotasa"textual"phenomenon,butasarealandpotent
forcecapableofexertingaconcreteinfluenceontheworld.ThisispatentlytrueofWeil'sabsolutegood(objectofthesaint'sloveandradicalobedience),whichsheroutinelycharacterizesasa
bindingandtransformingenergy,an"activeforce"(E,336)whosepowerfuleffectsonindividualhumanbe[p.222]ingsandcommunalmilieuscanbediscerned,bythequalifiedobserver,
withaprecisionandassurancecomparabletothoseattainedintheprediction,verification,andmeasurementofphysicalforcesbythenaturalsciences."Meanwhile,SuzanneGuerlachas
shownconvincinglythatBataille,too,isconcernedwiththesacrednotmerelyasatextualphenomenonorliterarytrope,but
asarealaffectiveforcecapableofgeneratingrealpoliticaleffects.IncontrasttohislateradmirersintheTelQuelgroup,preoccupiedaboveallwith
textualtransgressionandwith"aquestionofphilosophy,andofitsend,"Bataillehimselfpursued"thereligiousquestionofthesacred(which,sinceDurkheim,isrelatedtotheimplicitly
politicalissueofsocialcohesion)."AsGuerlacindicates,thispreoccupationhasbeenasourceofdiscomfitureforBataille'santireligiousadmirersandexegetes,whohavegenerallysoughtto
"evacuate"thedimensionofthesacredfromtheirinterpretationsofhiswork."Whichisit,then?Isthesacredacriticalpositionality,orisitanexplosiveemotionalforceunleashedthrough
certainformsofindividualandcollectivepracticeandcapableofalteringtheshapeofwhatitmaynolongerbeappropriatetocall"subjectivity"?Issainthoodastanceoneadopts,atheatrical
maskoneborrows,orisitaheterogeneousforcethatborrowsus(andthattransforms,transmutes,perhaps"decreates"usintheprocess)?BitailleandWellrefusedtodecidethisquestionin
binaryterms,andtheprotean(callit"formless"[BOGI,117])characterofthesacredenabledthisequivocation.Thereinlay
apartofitsappeal."Thesacred"couldpointsimultaneouslyandequallytoan"eccentricpositionality"andtoan
emotionalenergy,a"forceagissante"unleashedthroughthecommunicativepracticesthesewriterssoughttomodel.
Preciselythisdoublevalencemadetheconceptvaluablefortherevisioningsofpoliticalandliterarypracticeonwhich
BatailleandWeilembarked,Yetifsacrednessisaforce(themotorofthe"sovereignoperation"),itisneverinthesetwo
writerstheunilateraldischargeofpower.Onthecontrary,sacrality/sovereigntymanifestsitselfasperpetual"revolt,"
never"theexerciseofpower"(BOGV,zar).Sacrednessisthemobile,multifacetedcontestationofalleffortstofixpower
inrigidhierarchiesthatplacesomehumanbeings"at[p.223]thedisposal"ofothers(RGL,52,8384).Thatthis
stratificationandtheresultingexploitationregeneratethemselvesperpetuallywithinanycomplexsocialorderasa
consequenceofitsunavoidabledivisionoflaboronlymeansthatresistancetooppressionmustbejustastirelessly
renewed.SainthoodbecameforBatailleandWeilawaytoname(and,bynaming,summon)therealenergyofmoral
wakefulnessnecessaryforthisongoingeffort.ThesacredasBatailleandWellembodieditwasnottheengineofa
theocratictyranny,noraninvestmentofcertainstructuresofpowerwithsupernaturallegitimation,butratherthe
endlesscontestationofallformsofauthoritythatwouldconfiscateautonomyorclaimunconditionalallegiance.Thedivine(theimpossible)providedleveragefor
therelativizationofallmerelyhuman,merely"possible"powerclaims.Asthereligiousinsurgentsofallerashaveknown,menandwomeninhabitedbytheholyassumea"marvelous,"though
nodoubtalsodangerous,freedomvisvistheestablishedsocialorder(BOGI,270).ForBatailleandWell,suchfreedomwhichmaybecomean"obligation"(EL,8o84)isthelibertyto
ventureperpetuallyintothose"places"(social,political,religious,erotic)thatare"mostrepugnanttodecentsociety"(BOGI,270).Itisintheexperienceofthistransgressivefreedomthatthe
emotiveandpoliticaldimensionsofsainthood(itsdualaspectsasactiveforceandcriticalpositionality)cometogether.Itistoparticipationinthisinterminableperformance,the
nevercompleted"ritesofliberation"(270),thatBatailleandWeilincite.
Sacrifice enacts a headless community, radically challenging all hierarchy and

authority
JesseGoldhammer2005
Because the obelisk is like an authoritative pile driven into a foundational swamp lled with
sacricial blood, it cannot return to the French what they, in a t of revolutionary fervor,
destroyed. In the Place de la Concorde, spatially speaking, an empty notion of authority
surrounds a traditionally elevated one. As Denis Holier writes, "Bataille's Place de la Concorde ...
is the place where loss is incarnate-embodied in a man who identies himself by his lack. The
headless man, Acephalus, rises up where the guillotine let in the freezing gales of empty space."'
Holier's observation reveals Bataille's agreement with Maistre: the regicide was a profoundly evil
act, which Maistre lamented and Bataille celebrated. Rather than auguring the return of God, as
Maistre had hoped, the regicide killed him, leaving in his place an absence so complete that it
forbids the accumulation of transcendental power. Negativity or destruction without recompense:
such is the fruit of the regicide and the basis for Bataille's concept of sacricial violence. The
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regicide does not make way for the obelisk, which represents none other than the next
generation's sovereign intentions. Rather, the regicide calls into question any future claim to
authority, leaving the Place de la Concorde to represent not a place of peace, but rather one of
permanent disorientation and subversion. Somewhere under the obelisk remain the impression
of the guillotine and the blood of the king. Informing Bataille's novel interpretation of the
regicide, antipathy toward morality, and subversion of power-indeed, his attitude toward politics
in to lo is a trenchant rejection of idealism. He rejects all traditions of thought that value the
ideal or elevated over the material or base. One of his most eloquent critiques of idealism
appears in an early essay in which Bataille argues that the big toe is "the most human part of the
body." Using the big toe as a metaphor for seductive baseness, Bataille explains that human
beings reject aspects of their uniqueness when they celebrate all that is noble and pure in the
hope of masking all that is low and impure: Although within the body blood ows in equal
quantities from high to low and from low to high, there is a bias in favor of that which elevates
itself, and human life is erroneously seen as an elevation Human life entails, in fact, the rage
of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to
refuse-a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot. 'O Bataille uses the
image of the big toe to criticize the metaphysics of elevation. Humans err in their belief that
humanity is uniquely an ideal achievement. Idealism is reason's attempt to hide the truth about
being human from human beings. This error led human beings to demonize the very part of their
bodies that Bataille argues is the most human, an exercise in self-loathing. Without the
"grotesque" big toe, humans could not stand erect, nor could they differentiate themselves from
beasts. This observation recalls Maistre's claim that the greatest human achievements are mired
in the worst. Bataille's celebration of the big toe is a reminder that what it means to be human is
inescapably deformed, dirty, base, immoral, material, and incapable of rational thought. At the
same time, however, Bataille does not seek to elevate the big toe to a higher status. Its value
consists paradoxically in its abjectness. Like the regicide, the big toe symbolizes a permanent
destabilization of the boundaries established by idealistic thought. When the former royal
executioner Sanson guillotined the king, neither monarchists nor republicans imagined that the
sacrice would be a permanently destabilizing loss. Both the Roman and Christian sacricial
traditions instructed otherwise. During the Revolution, the examples of Brutus and Jesus
illustrated that different forms of sacricial violence could be used to destroy as well as create
authority. In the minds of the revolutionaries, and then later in the writings of Maistre and Sorel,
the concept of sacricial violence became inextricably linked to the formation of both political
and spiritual communities bound together by traditionally elevated notions of power. Sacrice
accomplished this remarkable task by skillfully manipulating the sacred categories that structure
people's perceptions of authority. Impurity and purity, sin and redemption, moral decadence and
regeneration-these are the dueling sacred polarities altered by sacricial bloodshed in the French
discourse. Sacrice negotiates be-tween these terms by fostering different forms of exchange.
Kill the king, the revolutionaries believed, and the republic would be puried. Embracing a similar
logic, Maistre claimed that the Terror would punitively cleanse the French of their secular hubris.
More than a hundred years later, Sorel argued that proletarian martyrs would regenerate
working-class morality saving-in the religious sense of the word-French society from bourgeois
decadence. In all three cases, the sacricial death of one human being generated new social
bonds by neutralizing and reconguring the sacred bases of the old ones. Sacricial loss thus
came to be associated with the creation of new morality, new authority, and new political
regimes. Sacricial Innovation in the Work of Bataille Bataille's interpretation of the regicide as
a sacrice that cannot recover what it has lost presents a radical challenge to the Roman and
Christian sacricial traditions as well as to their incorporation into the French discourse on
sacricial violence. Unrecoverable sacricial loss is a violent operation that only wastes. In
producing nothing useful, sacrice subverts all idealistic distinctions. Stripped of idealism, Brutus'
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licide and Jesus' crucixion can no longer participate in the task of foundation because sacrice
loses its ability to produce popular authority or redemption. In order for authority to be legitimate
or for redemption to cleanse bodies or souls, the sacricial operation must be capable of
establishing stable, hierarchical boundaries between sacred polarities. Cathartic, expiatory, and
redemptive exchange permits this delimitation to take place because violent loss is balanccd
against some kind of psychological, spiritual, or moral gain. However, regicide that does not
recover something from the violent destruction of the king-that does not make sacred in a
particular way-is useless. In this way, Bataillian spcrice permits no establishment, no obelisk, no
higher source of power or authority, because it is a total loss without sacred exchange. It has no
capacity to establish order, as, for instance, between sacrilegious and divine bloodshed, or
between force and violence. It can neither recover, nor make useful, the pure sacred authority of
the king. Only if conceived in ideal and compensatory terms can the collective taking of a life
delineate between high and low, pure and impure. If the desire to practice the art of politics were
compared to the myth of Icarus,a favorite of Bataille's, then sacrice would correspond to the
sun's blinding, wasted energy, which melted Icarus' wings, reminding all human beings of the
fragility of their activities and their existence. Bataillian sacrice challenges human beings to
confront and test the limits of their being, without ever allowing for the reestablishment of order.
It is a violent and ecstatic state of permanent alternation between purity and impurity With no
nality, no conservation, and no reserve, Bataille's concept of sacrice reects not just a critique
of idealism but also, more specically, of Hegelian dialectics. Bataille attended A.lexandre
Kojve's lectures on Hegel during which Kojve famously declared history to be over. Bataille's
confrontation with Hegelian philosophy left him feeling "suffocated, crushed, shattered, killed ten
times over."" If history was over, what was left to do? In a letter to Kojve, Bataille wondered
what it meant to act freely in such a condition: "If action ("doing") isas Hegel says-negativity, the
question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has 'nothing more to do' disappears or
remains in a state of 'unemployed negativity' Personally I can only decide in one way, being
myself precisely this 'unemployed negativity' (I would not be able to dene myself more
precisely). ,12
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***Answers
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AT: Bataille is Bad

Group their Bataille indicts
1. We arent Bataille, their ad homs to Batailles methodology dont take into
account 40 years of philosophical refinement.
2. Sacrifice provides the key to understanding violence in human societies
Goldhammer 2005 [Jesse, Lecturer/Instructor, Institute of Government Studies, U.C. Berkeley,
The Headless Republic: Sacricial Violence in Modern French Thought p. 23-25]
sacrifice permits human collectivities to cope with the "negative sentiments"

that accumulate as a result of hierarchical social structures. His point about the origin of sacrificial rites is
political: the distribution of power in any society -ancient or mo4ern-produces conict,
which, in turn, finds an outlet in sacred practices. Turner overemphasizes the extent to which sacrice serves as a valve for
Turner argues that
the release of social pressure. Sacrice has too many differ-' ent modalities and meanings to be reduced to one function. At the same time, however, Turner makes clear that
one important function of sacrifice is the reduction of conict , which he characterizes as the fostering of "generic
human communality" Unlike Ren Girard, who limits the role of sacrice to the reduction of intracommunal violence, Turner recognizes that sacrifice is also a
ritual stage upon which communities play out social, political, and economic conicts,
sometimes with the intention of renovating them, sometimes with the goal of
reconfiguring them altogether.32 In claiming that sacrice fosters communal unity, Turner assumes a distinct political attitude toward
sacrice. This attitude hinges upon his recognition that sacrice is an ambiguous and process-oriented form of violence that alternates between structure and chaos. According to
Turner's terminology, sacrice is, on one hand, a prophylaxis, which functions to maintain, reinforce, or construct socio-moral boundaries. In this form, sacrice is highly ritualistic,
sacrifice "may be an indicator of

the dissolution of all structuralfines or boundaries, an annihilator of artificial
distances, restorative of communitas however transiently ,' 133 In contrast to prophylactic sacrice, this description
a preventive talisman against communal disaggregation and harm. On the other hand, Turner writes that
of sacricial "abandonment" captures the capacity of sacrice to dissolve the bounding limits of social life. Together, these opposing sacricial impulses illustrate that the
sacricial process is not, strictly speaking, a movement to or from an ordered society. Instead, the sacricial process contains opposite movements-consistent with Nietzsche's
Apollonian and Dionysian forces-that contribute in different ways to communal unity and coherence. Describing this double movementjurner writes: In the sacrice of
abandonment, the classical theological notions of sin, redemption, and atonement all nd their places as phases in a process which seeks personal and social renewal through the
surgical removal, interiorly in the will, exteriorly by the immolation of a victim, of the pollution, corruption, and division brought about by mere participation in the domain of social
structure. Sacrice is here regarded as a limeo, or entry into the domain of corrununitas, where all that is and ever has been human and the forces that have caused humanity to
be are joined in a circulation of mutual love and trust. In the sacrice of prophylaxis, structure certainly is cleansed, but left intact; here enlightened self-interest prevails.
Turner's sacrificial process holds in tension and displays opposing Violent impulses.///
The sacrifice of abandonment restores a "primitive," undifferentiated unity to the
sacrificing community; the prophylactic sacrifice instantiates moral frameworks and
structural bonds. According to Turner, prophylactic sacrice "employs the metaphor of death to establish or reestablish structures of society and culture, with
which orderly life may be lived?' Thus, the prophylactic sacrice captures the dominant meaning of martyrdom, which uses the "metaphor of death" to highlight a set of ideals or
particular way of life. In contrast, the sacrice of abandonment generally maps to scapegoats, in whose destruction communities cathartically participate. Finally, Turner reveals
sacrifice is not exclusively a reaction to crises, to the natural or human forces of

dissolution. Sacrifice can also serve to set in motion disuniing forces in order to es tablish power relations on a new basis. For Turner, sacrifice is ultimately a potent
structuring, restructuring, and "destructuring" force capable of bonding communities .
that
34 Turner's political attitude toward sacrice is instructive for thinking about the French Revolution, which encompassed such a variety of sacricial practices. Paradoxically
anachronistic and modern, these practices formed a sacricial process through which different segments of French society alternately sought political protection and dissolution.
In the hands of the revolutionaries, who were self-consciously aware of their intention to transform French politics radically, sacrice came to serve both functions. The
revolutionaries used sacrice to demolish the Old Regime and to shore up the new Republic. The instrumental use of sacrice during the French Revolution illustrates that there is
no conservatism intrinsic to the sacricial mechanism. Echoing Nietzsche, it also demonstrates that ancient ideas of communal violence can participate in as well as mask modern
Those who dismiss the sacrificial practices of the French revolutionaries as anachronistic
barbarism fundamentally miss how those selfsame acts contributed to the dissolution
and establishment of political obedience. According to this violent tradition, which has such powerful roots in ancient Western politics
and religion, authority and communit' begin with neither the word, the deed, nor the contract.
Instead, in the beginning, there is only sacrificial blood.
political struggles for power.
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This argument is irrelevantwe dont have to prove Bataille is right about
everything to win that the aff is utterly incapable of addressing the states
inherent tendency to excessive violence.
Sacrifice provides the key to understanding violence in human societies
Jesse Goldhammer 2005
[Lecturer/Instructor, Institute of Government Studies, U.C. Berkeley, The Headless Republic:
Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought p. 23-25]
Turnerarguesthatsacrificepermitshumancollectivitiestocopewiththe"negativesentiments"thataccumulateasa
resultofhierarchicalsocialstructures.Hispointabouttheoriginofsacrificialritesispolitical:thedistributionof
powerinanysocietyancientormo4ernproducesconflict,which,inturn,findsanoutletinsacredpractices.Turner
overemphasizestheextenttowhichsacrificeservesasavalveforthereleaseofsocialpressure.Sacrificehastoomany
differ'entmodalitiesandmeaningstobereducedtoonefunction.Atthesametime,however,Turnermakesclearthat
oneimportantfunctionofsacrificeisthereductionofconflict,whichhecharacterizesasthefosteringof"generic
humancommunality"UnlikeRenGirard,wholimitstheroleofsacrificetothereductionofintracommunalviolence,
Turnerrecognizesthatsacrificeisalsoaritualstageuponwhichcommunitiesplayoutsocial,political,andeconomic
conflicts,sometimeswiththeintentionofrenovatingthem,sometimeswiththegoalofreconfiguringthem
altogether.32Inclaimingthatsacrificefosterscommunalunity,Turnerassumesadistinct politicalattitudetoward
sacrifice.Thisattitudehingesuponhisrecognitionthatsacrificeisanambiguousandprocessorientedformofviolence
thatalternatesbetweenstructureandchaos.AccordingtoTurner'sterminology,sacrificeis,ononehand,aprophylaxis,
whichfunctionstomaintain,reinforce,orconstructsociomoralboundaries.Inthisform,sacrificeishighlyritualistic,a
preventivetalismanagainstcommunaldisaggregationandharm.Ontheotherhand,Turnerwritesthatsacrifice"maybe
anindicatorofthedissolutionofallstructuralfinesorboundaries,anannihilatorofartificialdistances,restorative
ofcommunitashowevertransiently,'133Incontrasttoprophylacticsacrifice,thisdescriptionofsacrificial"abandonment"capturesthecapacityofsacrificetodissolvetheboundinglimits
ofsociallife.Together,theseopposingsacrificialimpulsesillustratethatthesacrificialprocessisnot,strictlyspeaking,amovementtoorfromanorderedsociety.Instead,thesacrificialprocesscontainsopposite
movementsconsistentwithNietzsche'sApollonianandDionysianforcesthatcontributeindifferentwaystocommunalunityandcoherence.Describingthisdoublemovementjurnerwrites:Inthesacrificeofabandonment,
theclassicaltheologicalnotionsofsin,redemption,andatonementallfindtheirplacesasphasesinaprocesswhichseekspersonalandsocialrenewalthroughthesurgicalremoval,interiorlyinthewill,exteriorlybythe
immolationofavictim,ofthepollution,corruption,anddivisionbroughtaboutbymereparticipationinthedomainofsocialstructure.Sacrificeishereregardedasalimeo,orentryintothedomainofcorrununitas,whereall
thatisandeverhasbeenhumanandtheforcesthathavecausedhumanitytobearejoinedinacirculationofmutualloveandtrust.Inthesacrificeofprophylaxis,structurecertainlyiscleansed,butleftintact;hereenlightened
Turner'ssacrificialprocessholdsintensionanddisplaysopposingViolentimpulses.Thesacrificeof
abandonmentrestoresa"primitive,"undifferentiatedunitytothesacrificingcommunity;theprophylactic
sacrificeinstantiatesmoralframeworksandstructuralbonds.AccordingtoTurner,prophylacticsacrifice"employsthemetaphorofdeathtoestablishorreestablish
selfinterestprevails.
structuresofsocietyandculture,withwhichorderlylifemaybelived?'Thus,theprophylacticsacrificecapturesthedominantmeaningofmartyrdom,whichusesthe"metaphorofdeath"tohighlightasetofidealsor
sacrificeisnot
exclusivelyareactiontocrises,tothenaturalorhumanforcesofdissolution.Sacrificecanalsoservetosetin
motiondisuniingforcesinordertoestablishpowerrelationsonanewbasis.ForTurner,sacrificeisultimatelya
potentstructuring,restructuring,and"destructuring"forcecapableofbondingcommunities.34Turner'spoliticalattitudetoward
particularwayoflife.Incontrast,thesacrificeofabandonmentgenerallymapstoscapegoats,inwhosedestructioncommunitiescatharticallyparticipate.Finally,Turnerrevealsthat
sacrificeisinstructiveforthinkingabouttheFrenchRevolution,whichencompassedsuchavarietyofsacrificialpractices.Paradoxicallyanachronisticandmodern,thesepracticesformedasacrificialprocessthroughwhich
differentsegmentsofFrenchsocietyalternatelysoughtpoliticalprotectionanddissolution.Inthehandsoftherevolutionaries,whowereselfconsciouslyawareoftheirintentiontotransformFrenchpoliticsradically,
sacrificecametoservebothfunctions.TherevolutionariesusedsacrificetodemolishtheOldRegimeandtoshoreupthenewRepublic.TheinstrumentaluseofsacrificeduringtheFrenchRevolutionillustratesthatthereis
.Those
whodismissthesacrificialpracticesoftheFrenchrevolutionariesasanachronisticbarbarismfundamentallymiss
howthoseselfsameactscontributedtothedissolutionandestablishmentofpoliticalobedience.Accordingtothis
violenttradition,whichhassuchpowerfulrootsinancientWesternpoliticsandreligion,authorityandcommunit'begin
withneithertheword,thedeed,northecontract.Instead,inthebeginning,thereisonlysacrificialblood.
noconservatismintrinsictothesacrificialmechanism.EchoingNietzsche,italsodemonstratesthatancientideasofcommunalviolencecanparticipateinaswellasmaskmodernpoliticalstrugglesforpower
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AT: K Contradicts Itself

Voting neg enacts the sacrifice described in the alternative text. Even if
achieves some external goal, that is purely an accidental by-product. At the
moment of sacrifice, it is pure expenditure without the expectator of reward.
Even if they win thats the alt is somewhat calculative, the aff and perms
subsumption of sacrifice to a political program links a great deal more. The
fact that we are willing to risk the 1ACs impact proves we are giving up the
goods that block our access to the sacred.
If the kritik is productive, it is only accidently. The initial moment of the

alternatives sacrifice is one of pure loss.
AlexanderIrwin2002
[ProfReligionatAmherstCollege,SaintsoftheImpossible:Bataille,Weil,andthePoliticsoftheSacredp.1415]
Revolutionisnotattheveryleast,notprimarilyameanstoapracticalend(theoverthrowofcapitalism,thecreation
ofaworkers'state);itisanendinitself,asacrificeindefianceoftheprincipleofutility.TheBatailleanrevolution
aimsnotatvictory,butatpureloss.Thepoliticaltriumphoftheproletariat,ifitwereinfacttocomeaboutasaresult
ofsuchaneffort,wouldhavetobeseenasakindofaccidentalby
product.YetBatailleisnotentirelylimpidonthequestionsofendsand
means.Certainpassagesin"TheNotionofExpenditure"(includingthelinesjustcitedonthedesireof"themiserable"toenter"thecircleofpower")canbereadaspositingoverarching
politicalaimsforthesacrificialrevolution,thuscallingintoquestionthepurityof"pureloss"inthepoliticalrealm.WhilehechallengedDurkheim'sdomesticationofthesacred,thereduction
ofsacrificetosocialutility,Bataillerecognizedthatsuchutilitydidinfactattachtosacrificialoperations(asMausshadshownthatitdidtopotlatch)andthatnotonlysociologistsbutthe
practitionersof"primitive"sacrificethemselvesmightverywell,ifquestioned,describetheirritualbehaviorsintermsofutilitarianaims.Batailledidnotdenythe utilitarian
aspectsofsacrificeanditsequivalents,buthedidmaintainthattheseaspectsweresecondaryandthatintheconceptof
pureexpenditurehehadidentifiedsacrifice'sessentialnature.
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AT: Util
Utils search for the greatest good collapses into the greatest evil, for it
imposes a false bottle-kneck that ensures catastrophic expenditure.
Stone 6[Dan,ProfessorofModernHistoryatUniversityofLondon,History,MemoryandMassAtrocityp.7073]
InhisIntroductiontothePrinciplesofMoralsandLegislation(1789),abookoriginallyintendedastheprefacetoahuge
tractoncrimeandpunishment,Benthamsought'torearthefabricoffelicitybythehandsofreasonandofthelaw'.4In
thisfirst'scientific'penalcode,Benthamarguedthathumannaturewasgovernedbytwobasicfeelings:pleasureandpain.Hebelievedthese
feelingsexistedasempiricalfactsandrequirednospecialproof.Butfromthisbasicpremisehejumped[p.71]toavaluejudgementthatpeopledesiredthe
maintenanceofpleasureatalltimes,akindofpsychologicalhedonism,whichhedescribedthus:Bytheprincipleofutilityismeantthatprinciplewhichapprovesor
disapprovesofeveryactionwhatsoever,accordingtothetendencywhichitappearstohavetoaugmentordiminishthehappinessofthepartywhoseinterestisin
question:or,whatisthesamethinginotherwords,topromoteortoopposethathappiness.[PML:11121Bentham's'calculusoffelicity',thesupportofthemajority
foragivenpolicy,requirednojustification,becauseitwasnecessarilybringingthegreatesthappinesstothegreatestnumber.Giventhepossibility
forimmoralapplicationsofBentham'sutilitarianism,wecanseewhysomanytodayfeelappalledbyit.Forexample,howisthelibertyofarapisttobebalancedwiththepainofthevictim?
Benthamitearbitrationisbasednotonconcernsofequalitybutonvaguenotionsof'generalwelfare'.Clearly,onecannotcountenanceaphilosophywhichnecessitatesadegreeofpain
commensuratewiththedegreeofhappinesstobeattained,andthathasnomoralargumentagainstthemiseryofthefew.TheexterminationoftheJewswas
justified(whenitwasmentionedatall)onsimilarutilitariangroundsthecreationoftheVolksgenieinschaft.Itwould
thusappeartobetheultimateproofoftheunacceptabilityofBentham'sphilosophy
.ButcantheoriginoftheNazis'goalbeexplained
rationally?Sinceitisborneof'irrational'fearsofracialpollutionandsoforth,thejustificationcomplieswithutilitarianism,butthebirthofthethoughtanditsrealisationdonot:'Onlythetruly
madcouldhavebelievedthatitwaswarthattheywerewagingagainsttheJews.'5Thus,nomatterhowindebtedtotheworkingsofZweckrationcditdt(purposiverationality)thebureaucracy
ofmassmurderwas,theutilitarianjustificationofgenocideforrhetoricalpurposesseemsonlytoscratchthesurfaceoftheHolocaust.6TheNazisdidjustifytheiractionsonutilitarian
grounds,andwithoutformallydeviatingfromthehedonisticpsychologyofBentham.Butoneneverescapesthefeelingthatthiswasmerelyacover.Despitethefindingsofhistorianswith
regardtowhatordinarypeopleknewatthetime,sothatitisnolongerpossibletoclaim'Niemandwardabeiandkeinerhat'sgewujlt',7theexterminationoftheJewswasnot(otherthan
tacitly)apubliclymandatedpolicy.AndsinceBenthamhimselfworriedthatincreasedstateinterventionwouldonlydiminishthepossibilitiesforthepursuitofindividualhappiness,the
utilitarianclaimbecomes,intheNazicontextofthe'55State',simplyanofficial[p.72]lie,althoughthoseinvolvedintheactualkillingsattemptedtoconvincethemselvesandothersofthe
veracityofthishe.AsSSObersturmfiihrerKarlKretschmerwrotetohiswifeon27September1942:'AsIsaid,Jaminaverygloomymood.Imustpullmyselfoutofit.Thesightofthedead
(includingwomenandchildren)isnotverycheering.Butwearefightingthiswarforthesurvivalornonsurvivalofourpeople.'8NorcanoneequateHitlerwiththeBenthamiteidealofthe
lawmaker,evengiventheclaimthatthe'happinessoftheindividuals,ofwhomacommunityiscomposed...istheendandthesoleendwhichthelegislatoroughttohaveinview',thatitis'the
solestandard,inconformitytowhicheachindividualought,asfarasdependsuponthelegislator,tobemadetofashionhisbehaviour'(PML:34,Bentham'semphasis).Thetroubleisthat
Benthamequatedutilitarianismwithconsciouscalculation,henceusefulness,eventhoughthiswasnotconsistentwithhisbasicdefinitionoftheprincipleofutility.Inotherwords,for
Bentham,thegreatesthappinessforthegreatestnumbermustnecessarilybewiththeaimofincreasingproduction,ofprovidingbenefitsforitsrecipients.AndasHannahArendtremindsus,it
ispreciselytheabsenceofutilitariancriteriafortheconcentrationcampswhichlendsthemtheir'curiousairofunreality'.9Whatisrequiredhereisautilitarianism
thatgoesbeyondutility,thataccountsfortheapparentparadoxthatutilitariangoalscanaimatuselessnessasmuch
asat'usefulness'.ThismightprovideaclearerresponsetotheHolocaustthanthestatementssotypicalofearliercommentators,caughtinthesametrapasBentham.They,onthe
onehand,claimedthattheHolocaustmustbeirrationalpreciselybecauseitservednousefulpurpose.Itisusuallythefactthatthemurdersdivertedenergyawayfromthewareffortthatis
citedinordertobackupthisclaim;asAlainI'inkielkrautwrites:'WeknowtodaythattheGermanswentagainsttheirowninterestsbyeliminatinganoftenirreplaceablelabourforcewhichfed
theirwartimeeconomy."Anemphasisontheusefulnessofthe'useless'mightprovidemoreinsightthanthosetheorieswhich,ontheotherhand,soughttoaccountfortheHolocaustwithin
somesortofMalthusianschemeoftheriddingofsurpluspopulations(Rubenstein/AlyandHeim),orwithina'Marxist'frameworkinwhichthelanguageofthe'JewishQuestion'wasmerelya
frontfortheeconomicgainstobehadfromtheeliminationoftheJews(KrausandKulka).Bothinterpretationscanbedisprovedonstraightforwardempiricalgrounds )'An
interpretationofutilitarianismfoundedonuselessnesswouldbethoroughlyconsistentwiththelogicofBentham,
butfundamentallyoutofstepwithhisemphasisonthebenefitstobederivedfromit.Suchasystemofthoughtisto
befoundinthewritingsofBataille.Centraltohisworkisadenialthattheenergywithinhumansocietyis[p.73]
adequatelyaccountedforbythenotionsofproductionandconservationcontainedwithinclassicaleconomictheories.Suchtheories,heclaims,
arethereforethoseofa'limitedeconomy'.AsmuchacritiqueofMarxasofSmith,Batailleargues,fromhisessay'TheNotionofExpenditure'(1933)toEroticism(1957),thattheproduction
anddistributionofwealthcannotencompasstheentiretyofhumanactivity:Thelivingorganism,inasituationdeterminedbytheplayofenergyon
thesurfaceoftheglobe,ordinarilyreceivesmoreenergythanisnecessaryformaintaininglife;theexcessenergy
(wealth)canbeusedforthegrowthofasystem(e.g.,anorganism);ifthesystemcannolongergrow,oriftheexcess
cannotbecompletelyabsorbedinitsgrowth,itmustnecessarilybelostwithoutprofit;itmustbespent,willinglyornot,
gloriouslyorcatastrophically.12Indeed,Batailleaffirmsthattheexcesscanneverbecompletelyabsorbedintothe
rationaleconomy,thatprofitwillunavoidablybesquanderedbydissipat[ing]asubstantialportionofenergyproduced,
sendingitupinsmoke'(AS,I:22).The'generaleconomy'comprisesboththe'limitedeconomy'ofMarxistsandliberals,
aswellastheenergywhichcannotbeused'profitably'fortheincreaseofequipment.3Theexperienceofthis'lifebeyond
utility'Batailleterms'sovereignty'(AS,II:198).WhereBenthamtalkedofaffectintermsofpleasureandpain,and
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thecontrolledbalancebetweenthemtobemaintainedbycalculatedaction,Bataille'sconceptofsovereigntywastogive
fullreigntoaffect:sovereigntyis'thenegationofprohibition'(AS,II:254;cf.403).Incontrasttotheutilitariangoalof
theproductionofproduction(thatis,spendingonthebasisofanexpectationoffuturereturns),sovereigntyjustifiedall
uselessconsumption,allnonproductivespending(AS,II:312).Sovereigntywastheexperienceofsociety's
'heterogeneousenergy',entirelydissociatedfrominstrumentalaction.Failuretopermitthefunctioningofthegeneral
economy,thatistosay,failuretopermitthesquanderingofexcessenergy,leadstobottlenecksinthesystemand
'deprivesusofthechoiceofanexudationthatmightsuitus'(AS,I:234),withpotentiallycatastrophicresults.Already
wecanseewheresuchthoughtisleadinguswithregardtotheHolocaust.CantheHolocaustbeseenastheattempt,
underthebourgeois'limitedeconomy',toattainaliferuledbybanishedsovereignvalues?
Util fails because it is impossible to distinguish between pleasure and pain.

Mark Sullivan 2004
[MD PhD, Department Editor of American Pain Society Bulletin
American Pain Society Bulletin v. 14 n. 6 Pain and Ecstasy: From Suffering to Sacrice to
Exaltation]
As Sontag mentions, the modern view is that pain and pleasure are directly opposed to
each other. One excludes the other in a simple zero-sum game. Jeremy Bentham founded that
most modern of ethical theories, utilitarianism, on just this hedonic calculus. Utilitarianism
calculates the ethical value of an action by summing the pleasure created and subtracting the
pain produced. This theory acknowledges that something could be both pleasurable and painful.
But the possibility that something could be pleasureable because it is painful throws the
theory into disarray. Subsequent modern philosophers have challenged parts of Benthams calculus. For example, John Stuart Mill
thought some pleasures were higher, or qualitatively better, than others, but he did not challenge the opposition between pleasure and pain. This theme
can be found in modern poetry as well. The rst stanza of Emily Dickinsons poem 125 is: For each ecstatic instant We must an anguish pay In keen
and quivering ratio To the ecstasy. The modern framework rationally balances pain and pleasure in terms of ethical value and of what is deserved. To
understand ones reaction to the photo of the ecstatic tortured Chinese man, one needs to look beyond this framework. This photograph does not really
experience of pain and pleasure. It shows both pain and ecstasy. The Oxford
English Dictionary denes ecstasy as the state of being beside oneself, thrown into a
frenzy or stupor, with anxiety, astonishment, fear or passion. So it is clear that ecstasy can be produced
show the simultaneous
by unpleasant experiences. As they further explain, The classical senses of [the Greek word for ecstasy] are insanity and bewilderment, but in the
late Greek the etymological meaning received another application, viz., withdrawal of the soul from the body, mystic or prophetic trance; hence, in later
medical writers the word is used for trance etc., generally. Both the classical and post-classical senses came into the modern languages, and in the
So ecstasy encompasses the mystical state

of rapture where the body was supposed to become incapable of sensation, while the soul
present uses they seem to be blended (OED Online, accessed 9-22-04).
was engaged in the contemplation of divine things. The Chinese man does indeed appear as if he might be engaged in the contemplation of divine
things. To help with the understanding of how pain is compatible with ecstasy, Sontag refers us to the ecstasy of martyrs like St. Sebastian. St. Sebastian
was an early Christian popularized by Renaissance painters and believed to have been martyred during the persecution of Christians by the Roman
emperor Diocletian. When it was discovered that he was a Christian who had converted many soldiers, Sebastian was ordered to be killed by arrows. The
archers left him for dead, but a Christian widow nursed him back to health. He then presented himself before Diocletian, who condemned him to death
by beating (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2004). A martyrs death brings him to God. This is enough to make the dying process ecstatic. The pain thus
endured was thought to provide a cleansing of sins and perhaps thereby to further contribute to ecstasy. The example of St. Sebastian helps one
understand pain as a path to ecstasy. But this Chinese man is not known to be a martyr in the traditional religious sense, so some broader path between
pain and ecstasy must be found. Perhaps this man murdered the prince as part of a popular revolt, and thus became a martyr for a political cause. Even
if this were true, one still needs to understand the path from pain to ecstasy on psychological rather than purely spiritual terms. Sontag offers us a
suggestion of this path: from pain to sacrice to exaltation. The pain is suffered for the sake of another. The purpose of the pain lies outside of the
sufferer. And the experience of pain for this purpose literally takes the sufferer out of himself in ecstasy. This is a view of pain and suffering rooted in
religious thinking, but perhaps the sense of sacrice need not be explicitly religious. One nonreligious modern example of pain and ecstasy is the
Ecstatic Birthing program in the United Kingdom. Ecstatic Birth is a system designed to help women give birth consciously, easily, and without medical
intervention. We can give up our devotion to pain and struggle, expand and give birth to our babies, our projects and our lives in ecstasy (Ecstatic
Birth, 2004). This program is similar to other natural birth programs in the United States that focus on relaxation through breathing and visualization as a
means to avoid pain medication and other medical intervention (Gaskin, 2002). Although a primary purpose of these programs is to avoid the hospital
and medications, the programs also focus on using the pain of uterine contractions as energy that may promote bliss. This is supposed to produce a
healthier and happier baby. What is not modern about this image of the Chinese
man, and what makes the viewer cringe, is its

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picture of extreme suffering as a kind of transguration. This simply does not compute in a
secular and scientic world view. In this world, pleasure is good, and pain is bad. The
notion that pain and pleasure can fold back onto each other in complex ways is absent. The
ways in which pain and pleasure can annihilate the self and liberate one from the
bounds of the ego are not included. One exception to this rule is an intriguing study
that showed that noxious thermal stimuli produced activation in putative reward
circuitry as well as classic pain circuitry. (Becerra, Breiter, Wise, Gonzales, & Borsook, 2001).
The authors conclude that their data support the notion that there may be a shared neural
system for evaluation of aversive and rewarding stimuli. Although this nding provides a
possible physiological mechanism for the ecstasy of martyrs, it makes it no less
disconcerting. Here, let us return to the eroticism that was Batailles primary concern. He
considered eroticism a little death precisely because the boundaries of the self are
overcome in sexual climax and the edicts of the rational ego often ignored in its pursuit. We
dismiss the pursuit of sexual ecstasy through pain, i.e., masochism, as a perversion that has
nothing to teach the rest of us. But for Bataille, this was only one example of liberation
through surrender, a paradoxical but universal feature of the human psyche. So, gaze
upon this disturbing image of the Chinese man and observe how it makes you feel. Draw your
own conclusions.
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AT: Util (Optional)

2NC:
They can't win that util is good:
Extend 1NC Wang util is bad because it prefers the masses to the oppressed
individuals.
Extend 1NC Johnston in a world where voting aff doesn't even result in plan
implementation, it doesn't matter if util is good or bad because they can't
even save any lives.
Extend 1NC Boehner their wanting to save as many people as possible only
re-entrenches the fact that structural problems are structural they're only
systemic because the aff says so.
2NR:
The Boehner alone is big enough to win us the debate, but even if you don't
think it is, look to the fact that the Johnston snuck up on them from behind.
And, extend the Wang: their utilitarian claims only oppress the oppressed,
reinforcing their subjugation.
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AT: Cede the Political

We outweigh. At best, this argument proves we arent politically productive.
Were winning the imperative to recover the ecstasy of sacrifice is more
important than politics, even if it dooms us to nuclear war.
Turn-The political discourse of the aff has ZERO chance of checking back
militarism. Wars exuberant horror has become its own reward, and the affs
indignation conceals the utter irrationality of state violence.
NickMansfield,ProfCulturalStudiesatMacquarieUniversity, 2008
[TheorizingWar:FromHobbestoBadioup.9598]
Similarly,themethodusedbytheStatetosubordinatethewarmachinetoStatepurposesandmeaningremainsalways
problematicfortheState.WehaveseenabovehowtheStateappropriatesandsubsumesnomadiclogic,marshalling
andharnessingit,butthatthen,theinstitutionsoftheStateoverspilltheconstraintsofStatelogictoreinventthemselvesaswarmachines.Thesamethinghappensspecificallyin
relationtowar.TheStateappropriatesthewarmachineandgivesitwarasitssetobject.Becauseofitsuniversalisingthinkinganditscommitmenttofinality,theStatealwaysdrivesto
transformitswarmachineintototalwar.ThislinksStatewartocapitalism,accordingtoDeleuzeandGuattari,becauseonlycapitalismcanprovidetheresourcesthatmaketotalwarpossible.
Furthermore,intotalwar,thesocialanditsfuturechangefrombeingamereresourcetobeingthemeaningandpurposeofwar.Alternative[p.96]societiesintotalwararenotmerelytobe
subduedbutannihilated.Inthissense,totalwar"merelyrealizesthemaximalconditionsoftheappropriationofthewarmachinebytheStateapparatus"(DeleuzeandGuattari,1987,p.421).
ButunconditionedwarisitselfalwaysathreattotheState,notonlytheStatesittargetsbuttheStatethatseekstoputitintooperation.Once
warfarehasbecomeunlimited,withanabsoluteobject,thentheStateisitselfencounteringitslimitsandflirtingwiththeperilousgameoftryingtoputtheminto
operation.TheStatehasgivenrisetoaworldwidewarmachinetowhichitincreasinglybecomessubordinate."theappropriationhaschangeddirection,orratherthat
Statestendtounleash,reconstitute,animmensewarmachineofwhichtheyarenolongeranythingmorethantheopposableorapposedparts"(DeleuzeandGuattari,
1987,p.421).Thewarmachinethenencompassesthewholeearth,andexceedstheStatesthathavechosenit.Thisremappingoftheplanetbyawarmachineinexcess
oftheStatewas,inDeleuzeandGuattari'shands,awayofdescribinginanewwayaworldunderthreatofMutuallyAssuredDestruction,duringtheColdWar.
However,itisworthconsideringthisintermsoftheWarOnTerror,whichhasequallyheldtheworldhostagetoawarmachineperhapsimpossibletocontrol."[litis
necessarytofollowtherealmovementattheconclusionofwhichtheStates,havingappropriatedawarmachine,andhavingadaptedittotheiraims,reimpartawar
machinethattakeschargeoftheaim,appropriatestheStates,andassumesincreasinglywiderpoliticalfunctions"(DeleuzeandGuattari,1987,p.421). Thewaron
terrorunleashesatotalwarmachinethatoverflowsthelogicoftheStateandthattheStateisunabletocontrol.In
turn,thecultureoftheState,itscommitmenttoidentity;citizenshipandorderareunderthreatfromtheimpulseto
violenceanddominationostensiblyusedtoprotecttheState.Becauseitdoesnotrecogniseresponsibility,the
warmachine,evenwhentheStatebelievesithasitundercontrolintheinstitutionofthemilitaryorder,cannotbeheld
accountable.AswehaveseeninFreudandBataille,theinclusionofthislogicwithintheStatealwaysmeansthatthemilitaryordercansoeasilyslipoverintoatrocity.Italsomeans
thattheimperativeofwarcanbeusedtoevadethenormalconstitutionalrestraintsofcivilsociety:thecultureofwarbringsintopoliticsaviolenceanddesperationprotectedfromlegal
nicetieslikecivilrightsbyasentimentalandphysicalcrudenessandimpatiencethatoverridesthesubtletiesoflaw,andeventhediscussionofpoliticalpriorities.Wemustpayattentionto
thegravityofgenerals.Wemustsupportthetroopsnomailerhowcynicalorabsurdisthewarinwhichtheyarepreparedtofight.[p.97]
Thereareother,perhapsmorephantasmatic,waysinwhichthewarmachineredefinestheState.Forexample,inentertainment,politicsbecomessubordinatetoakind
oflust,inwhichtheStatebecomesthemerenominalshellofavisceralviolence.AteenagersecretlyrefightstheGulf
War,Hewinsafaster,asimplervictorythistime,purginghiscountry'spurposeofanycomplicationorhesitation.Hecan
ignoreallnaggingvoices.Sopure,sopatriotic,souncompromising,sointent,someaningful,soviolentishis
trajectory,theparliamentary,bureaucratic,media
savvysophistriesthattheStateitselfhastonegotiatecannot
inhibithim.Thereisaclean,vicious,notableandunironicsplendourinhisviolencethathefeelsheneedstohide,even
thoughheisproudofit.Heismoremerciless,morepurposeful,morerightthaneventherighteousnesshecommemorates.Foldedintohisgloryisthevalidationofthevictoryof
hisnationandthecarnalluxuryofthecrueltyitlicensesbutcannotpubliclyenact.Hismissionisadaylightvalidationofthetroopsbutlackstheconscienceandconstraint,andthereasontobe
right.So,hisdirtywarisadirtysecrethekeepsfromevenhimself.Bodiesflybackwardsoverhishead,uncounted,unnamed,anilldefinedyetmaniacalvermin,easilyforgotten.Eventhe
righteousvictoryofthemissionaryStateplayedoutinyourdarkenedroomisshameful:abittoounrestrained,abittoocruel,abitmorethanmightbenecessary.Thelicenceprovidedbythe
victoriousStatevalidatesbutchokesthecruelsubterfugeoftheviciousrighteouschild.
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ThehotcathexisofnationalsolidityensuresthePresidentofinalienablerighteousness.Fromhereonin,itisalljust
planningandpersuasion.Heknowsitcanonlyendwell.Evencrueltyandsubterfugeareallowed,perhapsevenenjoyed
intheconfirmationofrighteousness.Whocanstopus?Forceandthensuccessexcuseeverything,creatingrealitieson
thegroundthatmustbeaccepted.Whothencansaytheyarebetterthanuswhenwehavewon?Thereis
nologicof
empire,justaggrandisement,themeaningfulnessofmore,ofstronger,of
,ofFREEDOM.Noonecantakeit
away.ThepointisthatevenwhenitisvalidatedbythehigherreasonoftheState,evenwhenitissuppressedintothe
strictlineamentsofthemilitaryapparatus,evenwhenthereisaliberalism,ahumanism,aliberation,ademocracy,a
rationalism,anidealism,humanrights,acoherentacademicargument,alaw,ajustice,adiscourseofgenderequity,
nationalprogress,humanmeaningandsoonandsoforth,itisalwaysaviolenceunleashingcruelty,righteousness,
calumny,honour,intimidation,sentimentality,brutalityandalltheotherlogicsoftherampantwarmachine,the
warmachineandreasonallowing,excusing,validating,concealingoneanother.
[p.98]Howdoesthefightingchildconnectwiththerighteouspresident,theponderinggeneral,theambitiousjournalistandtheanxiousactivist?Theyplayoutameaningfulgiveand
takewheredifferentlevelsofdecisionvalidateoneanother.Thehiddenlineamentsofthefightingboymayormaynotfeedthehardcalculationofthepresident;theheroicworldlinessofthe
soldiermayormaynotrequirethepresident'sdutyofcynicalcare,butdrawsonit,andisreleasedbyitanyway.'Whatliesbehindthedecisionsthatgetmade,whatmemories?Whattraces?
Whattrustinnowornever,nowandforever?Whatlustsareinquestion?Somethinggivesusenergy,faith,hope,trust,wheredoesitcomefromifnottheunleashingofthedisruptiveenergy
ofrebuildingtowhichourviolenceiscommitted?Inotherwords,wearedoingitnow.ThedoublelogicofthewarmachineandtheStaterunthroughthesocialbody,thewayittwistsinon
itself,choosingandunchoosingtheviolencethatbringsbothorderandfreedom,inourpolitics,inourdiplomacy,inoursocialvision,inourrelationshipsandinourentertainment,allenfolded
inandoveroneanother,refusing,frustratingandfeedingononeanother.Thewarthatappalsus,thatweconjureastheforeverlastresort,defies
allofourvalues,butitalsoreassuresus,flattersusandfreesus,andwetrustit.Theorderthatweimplementisthe
consolidationoftheenergyofdisruption,harm,movementandselfmutilationwerevile,and,inturn,onlyorderrequires
movement.Itwillnotend,thisfeedingandfoldingoverofthatwhichdespisesmultipliesandalienatesitself.Itwill
neverbeover.
The affs critqiue of militarism is redundant. Only sacrifice without purpose or

good creates the glorious expenditure and community that can avert
extinction.
AllanStoekl,ProfFrenchanccomparativeliteratureatPennStateUniversity,2007
[BataillesPeak:Energy,Religion,andSustainabilityp.189192]
Thereisvirtuallynopointanymoreintryingtoworkoutacritiqueofmodernity:depletiondoesitforus,relentlessly,
derisively,definitively.Perhapstheknowledgemodernityhasprovided,bothtechnicalandtheoretical,hasbeennecessary;inthiscasethefossilfuelregimeinseparablefrommodernity
hasbeenanecessary,ifephemeral,stageofhumandevelopment.Butthefall,thedie
off,looms.Thelargerproblem(entailingataskneverfully
undertakenbyBataille)istothinka"good"dualitythepostmodernaffirmationofsheerexpenditurethroughdreadandthe
recognitionoflimits(interdiction,themortalityofreference)onthescaleofhumanmusclepowerandthefinitudeofthebody.Areturntothepast?Notreally,sincetheimminentdepletionof
fossilfuelresourceswillpushusinthatdirectionanyway:musclepower,bodypower,willbea,ifnotthe,majorcomponentintheenergymixofthefuture."Butcertainl ywhatis
imperativeisanawarenessthatanyeconomynotbasedontheprofligatewasteofresources(commonlycalleda"sustainable"economy)mustrecognizeand
affirmthetendencytoexpend,indeedbebasedonit.Andinseparablefromthattendency,asweknow,arethepassions,
asBataillewouldcallthem:glory,butalsodelirium,madness,sexualobsession.Or,perhapsclosertohome,aword
rarelyifeverusedbyBataille:freedom.Notthefreedomtoconsume,thewasteoffossilfuelinputs,butthefreedomof
theinstant,fromthetask,freedomdisengagedfromthelinkageofpleasuretoalong
term,everreceding,andlargely
unjustifiedgoal.An"intimate"freedombutnotthefreedomofprestige,rank,notthefreedomofManinandassecurity."Expenditurewithoutreturn"isafloatingconcept,definedin
oppositiontotherestrainedeconomywhosepossibilityitopensbutwhichitdefies.Asanendnotleadingoutsideitself,itcouldbeanything;butwhatismostimportantisthatwithit there
isamovementof"communication,"ofthebreakingofthenarrowlimitsofthe(ultimatelyillusory)selfinterested
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individual,andnodoubtaswellsomeforiiilfpersonalorcollectivetransport,enthusiasm.ThisconcernwithamouvementhorsdesoicannodoubtbetracedtoSade,butitalsoderives
fromtheFrenchsociologicaltraditionofDurkheim,wherecollectiveenthusiasmwasseentoanimatepubliclifeandgivepersonallifealargermeaning."AsBatailleputsitinL'economieahi
mesuredel'univers(EconomyontheScaleoftheUniverse):"Youareonly,andyoumustknowit,anexplosionofenergy.Youcan'tchangeit.
Allthesehumanworksaroundyouareonlyanoverflowofvitalenergy...Youcan'tdenyit:thedesireisinyou,it's
intense;youcouldneverseparateitfrommankind.Essentially,thehumanbeinghastheresponsibilityhere[alacharge
in]tospend,inglory,whatisaccumulatedontheearth,whatisscatteredbythesun.Essentially,he'salaugher,adancer,
agiveroffestivals."Thisisclearlytheonlyseriouslanguage.(CC,7:1516)Bataille'sfuture,derivedfromDurkheim
aswellasSade,entailsacommunityunitedthroughcommonenthusiasm,effervescence,andinthissensethereissome"good"gloryitisnota
termthatshouldbeassociatedexclusivelywithrankorprestige.CertainlytheDurkheimianmodel,muchmoreorthodoxand(French)Republican,favoredanegalitarianismthatwould
prevent,throughitscollectiveenthusiasm,theappearanceofmajorsocialinequality.Bataille'scommunitywouldcontinuethattraditionwhilearguingfora"communication"muchmore
radicalinthatitputsinquestionstablehumanindividualityandthesubordinationtoitofall"resources."Onthisscore,atleast,itisaradicalDurkheimianism:thefusionenvisagedisso
completethattheveryboundariesoftheindividual,notonlyofhisorherpersonalinterestsbutofthebodyaswell,arerupturedinacommunitythatwouldcommunicatethrough"sexual
wounds."DeCerteaubringstoanyreadingofDurkheimanawarenessthattheeffervescenceofagroup,itspotentialfor"communication,"isnotsomuchamassphenomenon,aneventof
socialconformityandacceptance,buta"tactics"notonlyofresistancebutofintimateburnoffandofanecstaticmovement"outofoneself"Ifwearetothinka"communication"inthe
postfossilfuelera,itwillbeoneoflocalincidents,ruptures,physicalfeints,evasions,andexpulsions(ofmatter,ofenergy,ofenthusiasm,ofdesire)notoneofmassorcollectiveeventsthat
onlyinvolvearesurrectionofa"higher"goalorjustificationandaconcomitantsubordinationofexpenditure.)Yetthereisnothingthatisinherentlyexcessive.Becausewastecanveryeasily
contributetoasenseofrank,orcanbesubsumedasnecessaryinvestment/consumption ,noempiricalverificationcouldevertakeplace. Heterogeneous
matterorenergyeludesthescientificgazewithoutbeing"subjective."ThisistheparadoxofBataille'sproject:theveryempiricismwewouldliketoguaranteea"selfconsciousness"andapure
a'epenseisitselfafunctionofaclosedeconomyofutilityandconservation(thestudyofastableobjectforthebenefitandprogressofmankind,etc.).Expenditure,depense,
intimacy(thetermsarealwayssliding;theyareinherentlyunstable,forgoodreason)areinsteadfunctionsofdifference,
oftheinassimilable,butalso,aswehaveseenonanumberofoccasions,ofethicaljudgment.ItisaBatailleanethics
thatvalorizestheMarshallPlanovernuclearwarandthatdeterminesthatoneislinkedtosacrificeinallitsforms,
whereastheotherisnot.Inthesamewaywecanproposeanethicsofbodily,"tactical"effortandloss.Wecangosofar
astosaythatexpenditureisthedeterminationofthesocialandenergeticelementthatdoesnotleadoutsideitselfto
somehighergoodorutilityParadoxicallythisdeterminationitselfisethical,becauseaninsubordinateexpenditureis
anaffirmationofacertainversionoftheposthumanasaftereffect,beyondtheclosedeconomyofthepersonalandbeyondthe
socialasguarantorofthepersonal.Butsuchadeterminationdoesnotdependonan"initself,"onadefinitivesetofclassifications,onataxonomythatwillguaranteethestatusofacertainact
orofacertainpolitics.
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AT: Sacrifice is Violent

Humans cannot escape the problems of violence and death.
Extend Goldhammer and Razinski.
At best, we can enact a theatrical sacrifice that disperses the violent energies
that would otherwise be accumulated by the state for its policies of
extermination.
This argument proves why they will never win a link turn or perm. If they are
too squeamish to confront the sacrifical violence of the 1AC, then they have no
chance of contesting the appalling savagery of the state.
Violence is inevitable, which means sacrifical expenditure is the best way to

break apart the dominating violence of the state.
Alexander Irwin, Asst Prof Religion Amherst College, 2002
[Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred p. 39-40]
Even
as he resisted the Durkheimian view of sacrifice's utility and reasonableness, Bataille
remained Durkheimian enough to see sacrificial dynamics as the enduring paradigm for
relations between individual and collectivity. Bataille never fully banished from his
writing the Durkheimian schema of a sacrificial convulsion productive of shared meaning
and communal cohesion (even if, for Bataille, what is shared is the calling into question of all meaning, at the "extreme limit of
This chapter's exploration has already clarified significant points regarding Bataille's attitude vis--vis a possible "closure" of sacrifice.
the possible"). Thus, the specter of a (constantly suppressed, constantly resurfacing) "utility of the useless 1154 haunts Bataille's writing on/of
sacrifice. On the border (along the dchirure) where sacrificial violence passes into language, perhaps matters could not be otherwise.
Nancy's demand for a politics that renounces dark "outsides" retains its force. Yet if the price of dissipating the specter of sacred [40] violence is
subscription to the bald claim that "There is no 'obscure God.' There is no obscurity which would be God," then we can see that the closure of the
sacrificial vision must be undertaken not only "after Bataille [...j and beyond him,"55 but directly against him. For if it is undeniable that
"fascination is already proof that something has been accorded to obscurity and its bloody heart,"- 16
is no less true that Bataille as the Acphale held his own bloody heart in his hand and vowed to "live only from what fascinates" (BOC I,
Through the avatars of sacrifice, Bataille interrogated the permutations of what he saw
as the fundamental violence of the human being. He sought to understand, on the one
hand, how violence connects humans to an acephalic universe and, on the other, how
violence functions in the political realm. Violence (sometimes overt, sometimes veiled) is the key
instrument of political tyranny, of "Caesarian" domination and the exploitation of the poor by the rich. How could
such domination and exploitation be opposed? Since Bataille considered violence an
irreducible aspect of human nature, it could not for him be a question of "nonviolent
resistance," but of searching for a different kind of violence that could resist
dominating force. Bataille's investigation of sacrifice was an ongoing quest for liberative
potentials in the conjunction of violence and an atheistic "religious spirit . 11-17
As Bataille pursued his obsessive investigation of sacricial violence in its psychological, political,
and poetic dimensions, another French thinker was exploring related issues. Simone Weil saw in
the concept of "force" a principle connecting war, social exploitation, cosmic order, and mystical
truth. For Weil, force was encountered as the instrumentality of dehumanizing
oppression. Yet to eliminate force from human life was impossible, since in a real sense
our existence is made of force composed of that which destroys it. Chapter z will trace Well's
efforts to come to terms with the challenges posed by this contradiction.
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Sacrifice creates a community against the violence of the state. We are

motivated by a tragic politics mutually exclusive with the extermination their
evidence asssumes.
Alexander Irwin 2002
[Prof Religion at Amherst College, Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the
Sacred p. 22-24]
While Acphale sought communal bonds, the accents of a defiant individualism also
reemerged in Bataille's writings in this period. One expression of this ambiguous coexistence
of group identification and individual authority was the "shamanistic" position occupied
within the secret society by Bataille himself . Roger Calllots notes that for Bataille, the "theoretical interest" of shamanism
was vivid "only to the extent that he could aspire to become a shaman himself. 1130 At the same time that he preached the ideal of the headless
community "without a chief" (BOG 1,489), there can be no doubt that, in the group Acphale as actually constituted, Bataille himself claimed the
clear and unequivocal leadership role, amounting to a sacerdotal authority. "The cards were in his hands alone; he dealt them out in his own way
following a hierarchy of participants of which he remained the only master" (ML, zz).
If the community was to be the
matrix of a rekindling of sacred forces,
Bataille in his own person was the primary channel and vector of
those forces. Pierre Klossowski, who participated in some of the group's rituals, affirms that the acephahc figure that symbolized
the aspirations of the community was in fact a portrait of Bataille himself. The Acphale is "purely Bataille emblematized by
Masson. The figure of the god with his attributes" - the sword, the flame, the labyrinth represented by the visible entrails "formed a sort of mandala in which Bataille contemplated, and invited us to contemplate, his own experience."31 Bataille thus
cast himself in a double role incorporating the two dimensions of Durkheimian sacrifice. As the Acphale, Bataille became both a
symbolic figure representing the community to itself and a shaman or sacrificial priest palpably unleashing sacred forces
through rituals intended to fuse the members in intense solidarity. The Acphale is a forbidding and isolated figure, but his
solitary self-mutilation liberates the energies that make possible the cohesion of the group.
Nietzsche had also been a lonely thinker haunted by the notion of community. Placing Acphale under Nietzsche's intellectual
sign, Bataille underscored the significance for the community of the emblematic or heroic individual. Thus, Bataille's
mythologizing of "Nietzsche-Dionysos" in the pages of the journal Acphale con [p. 23] stitutes not only a homage to a
philosophical predecessor, but an account of the role Bataille envisaged for himself. Following Karl Jaspcrs's suggestions in
Nietzsche: Fin fuhrung in this Verstandnis seines Philosophierens (1936), Bataille believed an "imitation of Nietzsche" (atheistic
rewriting of the imitatio Christi) was possible and necessary, for those willing to abandon the confines of a "small politics" for
the open-ended exploration of the "total possibilities of humanity."" Shaping oneself to the Nietzschean ideal opened the road to
a community freed from all forms of servility.
In the Acphale texts devoted to defending Nietzschean thought against fascist co-optation, Bataille stressed both Nietzsche's
representative character (which enables Nietzsche to point to, in some sense to become, the binding force of a new form of
human community) and the terrible solitude that was Nietzsche's lot. "Because he could not confuse emasculation and
knowledge, and because his thought opened on a lucid explosion which could not cease before having exhausted his forces [...],
Nietzsche collapsed in a humiliating solitude." But Nietzsche became by his very isolation a symbol and rallying point, the "hero"
of all who refused conformity and servitude (BOG I, 480). "In the image of the one [Dionysosj he was avid to be even to his
madness, Nietzsche is born of the Earth torn by the fire of the Sky, is born lightning-struck and in that way charged with this fire
of domination becoming FIRE OF THE EARTH" (484). Nietzsche, fused with Dionysos, rises to messianic stature: "THE SACRED
-NIETZSCHEMJ - FIGURE OF TRAGIC DIONvsOs DELIVERS LIFE FROM SERVITUDE" (484). Bataille salutes in Nietzsche the
"incarnation" of humanity's maddest and most exalting possibilities, life and thought transformed into a "festival," the assertion
of a freedom so vast that "no language would suffice to reproduce its movement"
As a sacred figure, Nietzsche forms a pendant to the "heterogeneous" fascist leader, radiating a "force that shatters the regular
the community summoned by

Nietzsche is rooted not in imperative violence but in a "tragic experience of self and
world," an "experience of the negative [...] or of the impossible," consisting precisely in
the "affirmed certainty that it is not possible to place oneself outside the reach of
tragedy. 1133 [p. 24] This is what Bataille means by "religion": a community without
domination, united at once by the demand for a mad freedom and by the awareness
of shared vulnerability to tragedy. From the conjunction of freedom and tragic
consciousness springs a paradoxical, nonhierarchical, permanently wounded
sovereignty. Such sovereignty separates people from each other irrevocably in the
very moment that it exposes them to each other in the nakedness of tragic
compassion. (The Acphale stands naked and isolated, with his heart in his hand and a death's head lodged in his groin.) Decisive for
course of things" and inspires ecstatic communal devotion (BOG I, ',4. Yet
Bataille's subsequent thought is the understanding that humans commune in the limit experience of the tragic sacred and that sacrality must be
crystallized or channeled ("incarnated") by a sacred-symbolic individual. This figure animates community while at the same time remaining
separated from community in an infinite solitude that is both sovereignty and "humiliation."
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AT: Alt > Fascism

We produce a headless community, a commitment to sacrifice the political
authority that would make fascism possible. All their arguments about how the
kritik rejects the state prove that we are 100% aligned against totalitarian
politics.
The alt ruptures the authority that enables fascism. Only the perms linking of
sacrifice to the sovereign imperative of the plan produces the fascism they
describe.
Goldhammer 2005
[Jesse, Lecturer/Instructor, Institute of Government Studies, U.C. Berkeley, The Headless
Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought p. 169-174] acephalic means without head
Most important, Bataille's fascism essay reveals that his sacrificial view of proletarian
revolution is in tension with his critical understanding of fascist power. Seeking to prevent
the proletarian revolution from taking a fascist turn, Bataille argues that any attempt to
use sacrifice for the sake of political foundation risks fascism , the logical culmination
of sacrificial founding violence used to constitute authority. By claiming that unproductive
sacrificial loss ruptures political authority, Bataille's discussion of fascism begins his repudiation of the French
discourse on sacrificial violence. In his essay on unproductive expenditure, Bataille offers no vocabulary for the internal dynamics of
transformative sacrificial processes. How does the unrecoverable sacrifice of a person or thing affect the participants? What role does such
sacrifice play in the realm of politics? Seeking to answer these questions in his essay, on fascism, Bataille significantly broadens his analysis of
sacrifice from a study of the act itself to an inquiry into the sacred concepts upon which it depends. He introduces the concepts of homogeneity
and heterogeneity in order to describe two opposing modes of existence, each of which highlights different roles of the sacred in modern life.
Homogeneity, which is similar to the profane, describes societies structured by production, rationality, specialization, organization, conservation,
predictability, and preservation. For Bataille, these terms characterize modern Western bourgeois society, which excludes anything that does not
conform to its homogeneous structure. "Above all:' writes Michle Richman, "homogeneity is identified as comtnensurabiity among elements and a
consciousness of the process whereby 'human relations can be maintained by a reduction to fixed rules based on the identity of person and
well-defined situations; in principle, violence is excluded from the course of an existence so defined! '129 The hallmark of the homogeneous society
is the contract, which forms the basis of all social bonds because, as jean-Michel Heimonet observes, "the contract establishes a general
equivalence among men, things, and men and things."" Heterogeneity; which is more closely associated with sacredness, is a bipolar category that
encompasses everything that is unproductive, irrational, incommensurable, unstructured, unpredictable, and wasteful.While homogeneity excludes
violence, heterogeneity is the chief domain of violence. Bataille offers five descriptions of heterogeneous elements: (i) taboo and mana; (2)
everything resulting from unproductive expenditure, including excrement, eroticism, and violence; (3) ambiguous phenomena that are
simultaneously attractive and repulsive; (4) excess, delirium, and madness; and () any reality that is affectively forceful or shocking.3t The
bipolarity of heterogeneity captures two related but opposing, shifting, and unstable characteristics of sacred things; purity and impurity." Pure
sacred and impure sacred, which Bataille labels "right" and "left" respectively, challenge Mauss's and Durkheim's rigid theoretical views on sacred
objects, which they consider (negatively) as the source of all prohibitions.33 Mauss and Durkheim qualir the sacred as dangerous and repulsive. In
contrast, building upon Maistre's observation that the pure authority of-the king requires the impure violence of the executioner, Bataille captures
the ambiguity of the sacred by qualifying it as a form of energy that fluctuates between two oppositely charged poles.34 Bataille also
counrerintuitively describes both heterogeneous sacred polarities as sovereign in an effort to convey the double significance of the sacred.When
qualified with the word "imperative," the term "sovereign" describes sacred things, such as kings, who are noble, pure, elevated, and singular.35
In contrast, Bataille uses words like "base:' "abject:' and "accursed" to characterize subversive sovereignty, sacred power that is ignoble, impure,
mired, or chthonian. The executioner, who also participates in the formation of monarchical power (imperative sovereignty), exhibits subversive
heterogeneity that is radically impure, and as a result is placed completely outside the social hierarchy defined by the king. Thus, Bataille's
theoretical elaboration on Maistre's original distinction reveals that both the king and his executioner are sovereign, but in consequence of
opposite sacred qualities and with different ontological effects. Bataille's dualistic concept of heterogeneity serves as the basis for his novel
understanding of sovereignty. Because heterogeneity is its primary animating force, sovereignty has two forms, the imperative and the subversive.
Imperative sovereignty describes ruling power whose legitimacy is constructed on a hierarchical, elevated, and amplified basis. In his postwar
writings on sovereignty, Bataille describes its imperative form as belonging to kings, priests, chieftains, and "all men who possess and have never
entirely lost the value that is attributed to gods and 'dignitaries."36 Although imperative sovereignty is the preeminent source of state power and
is typically associated with mastery and supremacy, Bataille argues that it,is actually servile because it is useful. In contrast, subversive or
revolutionary sovereignty derives its power from the abject and useless. Bataille writes: "Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereign ty:'37
Subversive sovereignty is experienced as unproductive loss and dissolution; instead of authoritatively establishing limits (laws), this revolutionary
form of power comesinto being when limits are transgressed. For this reason ,
sacrifice plays an essential role in the

invocation of an impure heterogeneous sovereignty. When useless, sacrifice also gives
rise to an acephalic community, which has no trace of, imperative sovereignty and,
therefore, no leader or authority. No headless community can form, however, if its
members seek to conserve some aspect of the sacrifice. Bataille rejects sovereignty that
relies upon purity and hierarchy in order to establish dominion.
Bataille uses the concepts of homogeneity and heterogeneity to

describe the affective qualities of politicalpower embodied by leaders, institutions, symbols, and the like. All traditional forms of political power combine homogeneous and
heterogeneous elements, albeit in different ways. Consider three extremes: liberalism, monarchism, and fascism. The liberal state is the most homogeneous. As Stoeki
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"The imperative,
or sovereign, form of heterogeneity goes to aid the homogeneous forces: it guarantees
the stability of a society which can give itself meaning only through the sadistic
exclusion of impure heterogeneity."" Stoeki's reading of Bataille suggests a quasi-Weberian interpretation of liberal states: -parliamentary
interprets Bataille's fascism essay, however, homogeneous forces never completely exclude heterogeneous ones, even in liberal states:
regimes remain stable thanks to legal-rational authority, which they achieve, in part, through the force of the law, namely violence. The
homogeneous state maintains, through the army and police, a store of imperative heterogeneity, which guards the boundaries of the state's
homogeneous authority through violent exclusion. Monarchies and fascist regimes operate differently. As Stoeki points out, "The king or the fascist
leader (as imperative heterogeneity) is in a way excluded from the homogeneous activities of society, but he dominates that society and embodies
it."" In the case of the king, the imperative sovereignty of the monarchy, which itself relies on the equally imperative heterogeneity of Christianity,
cooperates with and coopts the subversive (impure) heterogeneity of the executioner in order to police the boundaries of the royal body. For the
fascist leader, as Bataille's essay reveals, the mixture of homogeneity and heterogeneity becomes increasingly potent and complex. His analysis,
which focuses particularly on fascism's appropriation of religion and the military, reveals a fascination with the important role of imperative
heterogeneity in the fascist movement. Although Bataille recognizes, even admires, the revolutionary potential of this mixture of pure and impure
only communities organized on the basis of subversive

heterogeneity can be truly liberating. The fluidity of the categories used by Bataille to describe the psychological
sacred fascist power, he remains convinced that
structure of fascism demonstrates the importance of the sacrificial mechanism, which inserts an element of agency into what otherwise appears as
an unchangeable world of sacred polarities. The crucifixion of Christ clearly demonstrates this mechanism when it transforms the impure,
bleeding, and agonized body of Christ into the pure, transcendental figure of the corpus nsysticurn. Bataille, like his predecessors in the discourse,
sacrificial violence makes things sacred. Unlike them, however, Bataille also
realizes the theoretical importance of the capacity of sacrifice to negotiate between
different forms of the sacred. For Bataille, the imperative heterogeneity of the army is
not the same kind of sacred power as the subversive heterogeneity of the proletariat .
recognizes that
Indeed, in his discussion of the army Bataille characterizes it as imperatively heteroge -neous: hierarchy and discipline in the service of death.
Because the army amalgamates purity and violence, it possesses an ambiguous attractive power, which Bataille describes in the following way:
"This process is the intermediary through which disgusting slaughter is radically transformed into its opposite, glory -namely, into a pure and
intense attraction. "40 Although armies are not engaged in sacrificial acts per .se, the military demonstrates that violence can be transformed into
a positive, glorious accessory of political power. Similarly, religion has a dual characterization that contributes to its own form of attraction.
Bataille writes: "The supreme being of theologians and philosophers represents the most profound introjection of the structure characteristic of
hooaigeueity into heterogeneous existence: in his theological aspect, God preeminently fulfills the sovereign form?'41 Religion is attractive
because it elevates the abject through sacrificial symbolism, such as Christ's sacrifice. Religion confers order, status, and purity on death, which is
originally and profoundly impure. In describing the affective power of fascism, Bataille focuses on the army and religion because of their long,
combined historical complicity in the foundation and exercise of political power. Bataille perceives both institutions as possessing violent and/or
sacrificial mechanisms that provide for the purification of impure heterogeneity. In their ability to convert subversive heterogeneity into pure or
imperative heterogeneity-to transform abject sacred into pure sacredthe army and the church support the augmentation and stabilization of
authoritarian political power. Like the French revolutionaries, Maistre, and Sorel, Bataille appreciates that the effectiveness of political power-its
authority-is intimately linked to the afectivity of violence. Bataille's analysis of the emergence of fascism also suggests that he is particularly
attuned to the affective impact of fascism's use of both martial and religious violence. "Fascist power;' Bataille writes, "is characterized by a
foundation that is both religious and military, in which these two habitually distinct elements cannot be separated."" Bataille discovers that fascism
Bataille
admires fascism's ability to convert impure heterogeneity into a pure sweetener of its
authority, he rejects the desirability of a revolution based on imperative heterogeneity. Like
other forms of Western politics, fascism is politically unfeasible without imperative
heterogeneity, the pure sacred product of armies or churche s. Sword and scepter participate in the
taps into the same sacred well of affectivity as other regimes, but in ways that vastly increase mass enthusiasm. Although
establishment of authority by conferring legitimacy upon the exercise of power, which is elevated and concentrated in the leader or Fhrer. With
or without these institutional props, Western forms of authority, be they traditional, legal-rational, or charismatic, rely on the pure sacred qualities
of imperative heterogeneity. Furthermore, in the Western political tradition, this uplifting of power to the status of right always occurs at the
expense or with the complicity of subversive (impure) heterogeneity What makes fascism unique, according to Bataille, is that it is the most
authoritative of all political regimes. Bataffie compares the "total power" of the fascist chief with that of a king, who "manifests ... the fundamental
Fascism requires
supreme authority, which is concentrated like royal power in its chief. It is this kind of
authority that Bataille hopes to destroy by marshaling the impure heterogeneity of
unproductive sacrificial violence.
tendency and principle of all authority: the reduction to a personal entity, the individualization of power."43
140
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Pillz
AT: Alt > Nihilism

Extend the alt debate from above. Sacrifice is key to both liberation from
domination and an ethical stance that can give value to our existence.
The ecastic community provides the only avenue for politics and ethics in an
age of totalitarianism masquerading as liberal democracy.
Christopher Stanley 1998 [University Leeds, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law
VoI.XI no.32]
ThispointismadethroughtheapparentmovementinthethoughtofBataillefromexterioritytointeriority,whichIinterpretasamovefromlapolitiquetolepolitique.Batailleappearsto
stop"thinking"communityinaturnto"innerexperience":butthisisonlyanappearance.BataiUeisneitherconcernedwiththeinnerorexperience(asDerridanotesinhisessayon
Bataille))6TheeventofexcessleadingtothispointofruptureintermsofBataille's"
activitiesincommunity
"
were
bothpolitical
andaesthetic(totalitarianismandsurrealism).Thisperiodofexcessresonateswiththecontemporary.Thismay
appearasanunexpectedallusion.However,statementsto"thinkthepolitical"intermsofradicalfinitudeexpress
therealizationthatthe
current
manifestationof
democraticliberalismis
thatof
an"unheardtotalitarianism"
andthat"democracyistocome".Theexcessesofthecontemporarymaybelessobviousthanthatofthe1930sand1940s.Theeradicationofconflictintermsofideologyandpolitical
economywhichcontemporarydemocracypurportstodeliverincurstheflatteningofmeaningandthetotalisationofvalue.Thepoliticalspherehasbeen
"closed"inaprocessofsimulationandmultipleorderingofrepresentation(asBaudrillardwouldsuggest).17Itisin
responsetothisappearanceofclosurethatarethinkingofthepoliticaloccurs.Thespaceofthis"thinkingthe
political"isintheinterstitialoftheremainderatthe"endofpolitics":arejectionofthetyrannyofrepresentationand
thecommencementofthinkingthepoliticalthroughthephilosophicalastheonlyresponseavailablein"opposition"tothe
sovereigntyofformexternallydeterminingdesireandlanguage."After"lawandsocietycomesjusticeandcommunitybothin
termsofrepressiverhetoricandintheaffirmationoffinitudeandimminence. Bataille'srealisationatthepointofhis"turn"tointeriorityhavingthoughtthelimitof
communitywasthatthelimitisnotofthesubject'sinterioritybutacrossing(glissement)beyondandtowardtheoutsideofthelimit.Thereislesscontradictionthanmightatfirst
appearbetweenBataille'swritingsontransgressionanddesireandthoseonsovereigntyandcommunity.Bothareexpressionsof
workingatthelimitasexcavationsinthecommunicationofcommunality.Theyarereliantupononeanother.18Ifhislaterwork(suchas"Inner
Experience"whichisofteninterpretedasreflectingaSartreanexistentialisminthesenseofraisinganengagement)19hasbeenneglectedwithincontemporarycommentariesitisbecauseithasbeenpossibleto
appropriateBatailletotheexcessiveandrelativistclaimsofthepostmodern.However,itisthe"uneasinessofpoliticalexigency"hauntingBataitle,which(andthisistheparallelmoveinthepostmodern)causeshim
toconsidersacrificenotintermsofeconomyandtranscendencebutintermsasfinitudeandabundance:fromtheeconomyofthelimitasscarcitytotheeconomyofthelimitasabundanceandexcessof
communication(thelimitasapointofpassagenotclosureinaHeideggariansense).ThereisarelationbetweensacrificeandfinitiudeintermsofeconomybutitisBataille's"move"fromexterioritytointeriority
whichsuggeststhinkingat"anotherlimit"whereintheissueofsovereigntyisrefiguredintermsoffinitudeandsacrificeasabandonmentasopposedtotransgression.This"move"toabandonmentisthesubjectofthe
SignificantatthisstageisBataille's
thoughtonthedynamicsofsocialgroupsleadinghimtothethinkthe"limit"(contestation)ofcommunityin"InnerExperience "
(1943).Bymeansof"experiments"conductedinthesecondhalfofthe1930sinthenamesofgroupssuchasContreAttaque,AcdphaleandtheCollegedeSociologie,Bataillesoughttograspthe
natureofcommunalexistencethroughtheexperienceofpoliticalextremityintheformoftheSovietexperienceandFascism. 20
dialoguebetweenBlanchotandNancyandcanbetracedthroughBataille'sinvolvementintheAc~phaleGroupandinhisnovel"TheBlueofNoon"(1935).
BataillewantedtounderstandthemysteryofthesocialbonddistinguishesBataille'sworldofexcess,irony,violence,Blanchot'seconomyofimpersonalityandnocturnaldispersion,andtheLevinasianuniverseof
gravity,disymmetryandresponsibility,asingleconfigurationofcommunicationinsists."SeeJosephLibertson,Proximity:Levinas,Blanchot,BatailleandCommunication(BostonMA:Kluwer,1982),3.and
Bataille'sactivitiesduringthisperiodwereinformedbythebelief
thattotalitarianism"completed"historyandthattherewasanotherwayofbeingtogethersavetheseductionofFascismor
betrayalbythebureaucratichorrorofStalinism.21ThesetwoideasmotivatedBatailletorethinkthesocialbondintermsof
ritual,mythandsexuality,engaginginareconfigurationofthepoliticalintheremainderoftheexcessofideologicaland
aestheticforms.Intheend,intheearlyyearsoftheColdWar,Batailleappearstocapitulateinthesenseofrelyingonapolitical
neutrality,hebypassestheoppositionbetweenresistanceandcollaborationintherecognitionthatneutralitymeanttherefusalof
allactionandadistancingfromallpoliticalundertaking.Thisapparentfailurecanbecontestedif"InnerExperience"isinterpretedasatextnotofaesthetics(inthesenseof
perceiveinthesamegesturethesenseofawakeningoftheGreatPoliticsforwhichNietztschesolonged.
Heidegger's"move"topoeticsaftertheRectoralAddressof1933orofBlanchot'srecitsduringtheColdWarperiodafterhisambiguouspoliticalpositionduringtheOccupation).Thepointofcontestationcrucialto
this"move"isBataille'sideaofexperienceasekstasisreferringalsototheoutside,astheprefixekdetermines.Theexperienceisalsosomethingimpossible(thelimitintheextremelimitofpossible).
Bataille'spoliticsbecomesnotapoliticsofthepossiblebutapoliticsoftheimpossible:heremainspoliticalinthe
senseofBeardsworth'srethinkingofthequestionofthepoliticalintermsofradicalfinitude.Bataillemovedduringthe1930s
froman"outward",actionorientateddefinitionofdesire(virility)toan"inward"one.Itisamove"from"politicstophilosophy
enablingarethinkingofthepolitical.ItisamoverelatedtotheevolutionofEuropeanpoliticsandtheoutwarddefinitiononlyachievesresonanceagaininParisinMay1968inthe
marginalityofthesituationistorautonomes.PriortothepointofBataille's"withdrawal"fromthepoliticalheexperiencedtheconflictbetweenoppositionandcollaborationwhichthrusthimtowardpartialsolutions
throughalternativemechanismsofcommunality,sacrificeandsovereignty.InMay1968itappearedasthoughthecollectiveritualsthathadfascinatedmembersofthe"secretsocieties"Bataillewasinvolvedwithin
the1930swerebeingstagedontheboulevardsoftheLatinQuarterinParis.22This"explosivecommunication"(atthelimitofcommunicationinthesenseoftheaffirmationofexposuretotheoutside(other)inthe
incompletionofmeaning)resultedfromadissymmetryofdesirewhichisthefoundationofanethicofallrelationswithothers(followingLevinas).Inthisformulationdesireisbothfatalandvitalandisplacedasa
sovereignfunctionaboveorremovedfromlawandconvention.ThepoliticalandsocialcontextBataillewitnesseddeniedhimtheabilitytoexperiencedesireandcommunityoutwiththeLawinthisformas
Therestrictionsofexcessivepoliticaleconomyforced
abundancebecauseofactivity:workasopposedtounworking;experimentasopposedtoinnovation.
141
Sacrifice K
Greenhill
Bataille's"turn"to"innerexperience".23ThetensionbeforethelimitofthepoliticalapparentlycausesBataille
towithdrawfromthepolitical.Itisawithdrawalwhichenableshimtodiscoveran"abundance"ofdesire(desire
withoutthelimitimposedbythesovereigntyoflaw)throughthe"devastation"ofthesubjectthroughinnerexperienceastheexposureofthesubjecttotheoutsideItisthis
.
"devastation"(theexposuretoabundance)
andhisrejectionoftheaimsofAcephale
(
thatcommunalityshould
commencewiththerelationshipbetweenthegroupandsacrificeasfoundationalintheconstructionofthesocial
bondandthereforeintheinterrogationoftheprohibitionwhicheliminatesviolence)whichcouldpromptBatailleto
state"Thecommunityofthosewhodonothaveacommunity". Bataillecouldonlyarriveatthiscommentthroughthe
Pillz
24
arrivalatthelimitofdeathinthesacrificeofanotherwhoseexistenceconfirmstheexistenceofthesingularbeing,forcingthe
confrontationorexposurewiththelimitofbeingatthepointoffinitude Itisamovefromarestrictedtoageneraleconomyof
desirewhicheliminatessovereigntythroughthe"devastation"ofthesubjectwhosedesireisotherwisethanforLaw.Bataille's
recognitionisthatofthelimitofthesocialbond(ascomunusorcommunis)whichinthe1930shehadstruggledtounderstand
butwhichcouldonlybecomprehendedthroughunworking(atwhichpointsovereigntyisnothing)andatthelimitofthoughtand
language.
.
142
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Pillz
AT: Romanticizes Natural/Past

We do NOT romanticize the past. We invoke a new form of sovereignty, not a
return to some natural essence.
Bataille conflicts with romanticism --- cant return to lost origins
Rebecca Comay 1990
[Yale French Studies 78]
Intimacy" would involve, then, not the transparency of identity, but rather the opaque
intransigence of what connects at the point of greatest secrecy. "Normal" communication (in the "profane" sense of correspondence and
consensus) cannot be more fragile, therefore, than when "sovereign communication" silently rules. The darkness of "common subjectivity" (to use
Bataille's language) would thus be prior to the communal mergers of intersubjectivity, at least as classically conceived. Communication, in my
sense, is in fact never stronger than when communication, in the weak sense, in the sense of profane language which makes us-and the
world-penetrable) proves useless, and becomes the equivalent of darkness. We speak in various ways to convince others and to seek agreement ....
This incessant effort. would be apparently impossible if we were not first bound to one another by the feeling of common subjectivity, impenetrable
to itself, and for which the world of distinct objects is impenetrable. [9, 311] And is it enough to point out that Bataille's "nostalgia" is at best an
"
This "unease' is, indeed, at the

root of Bataille's confrontation with Breton,9 with Bumler (1, 447-65), with
Romanticism (9, 206), with Hemingway (8, 230-33), with (at times) Proust (5, 156-75), with
naturalism ("the poetic fallacy of animality" [7, 293]), with sexual liberationism,' with
"Orientalism" (5, 30): with every attempt to reduce transgression to the sentimental
movement of restoration and return. Such nostalgia would have the "suspicious and
lugubrious" (5, 540) stupor of an idealizing aestheticism: "the European's sickly taste for an exotic color" (5,
30)-"like a film about 'primitive' countries" (1, 530)-a numbing abstraction from present conditions which only masks an
accommodation to the status quo. It would occlude the historic specificity of the given with
the passive longing for the past, hypostatizing present circumstances by the very appeal to
bygone days. History itself would prevent such an easy overcoming. 9. Bataille's (not unambivalent)
"uneasy" one (5, 155), opposed to every form of pastoralism and every form of naive escape?
critique of the surrealists tends to focus, among other things, on the naivet of their appeals to transcendence (the "sur") which would, in his view,
obscure contemporary social conditions (with its concomitant technical rationality) thus leading to various regressivities and archaisms. For the
clearest elaborations of this argument, see "La 'vieille taupe' et le prefix sur dans les mots surhomme et surrealiste" (2, 93-112), "La Valeur
d'usage de D. A. F. de Sade" (2, 54-69), "La Religion surrealiste" (7, 381-95), and "Le iurralisme en 1947" (11, 259-61). 10. "Despite
appearances, I am opposed to the tendency that seems to prevail today. I am not one of those who see in the abolition of sexual taboos a way out"
The radical impurity of beginnings and ends-the ambivalent birth and death of "history"-should prohibit any temptation to regress. "The nostalgia
for a bygone world is ... based on a shortsighted judgment . . ." (7, 126). Even if we do have a paradoxical nostalgia for it, we can only by some
aberration regret the loss of the religious and royal edifice of the past. The effort to which this edifice responded was only an immense failure and
Hit is true that the essential is missing from our world we can only go further, without imagining, even for an instant, the possibility of a return
back. [8, 275] From what would one escape? It is too late to speak of leaving. Has not the "experience" of fascism itself blurred forever the line
between effervescence and utility, organizing lumpen uselessness into the efficiency of state service, fusing charismatic sovereignty with the
mechanical rationality of order, marking the final penetration (to speak Habermasian) of Zweckrationalitat into the lifeworld of pure dpense? (1,
339-7 1). Such blurring indeed would erode the last enclave of uncontaminated spontaneity-implicating the body, the unconscious, desire, sexuality
itself within the restricted circuit of the commodity exchange. A blurring which would paralyze-as Adorno and Horkheimer saw all too clearly,
Marcuse not clearly enough-all hope of exit and mock every fantasy of regression as being the collusive daydream of the herd. Making "Auschwitz"
henceforth (as Bataille puts it, with an almost Adornian pathos) the very "sign of man" (11, 226), the decisive rubric of our day. Turning the
To what would one return? Historic

precedents are neither conceivable nor provided. There is no historic form of
sovereignty which is not already implicated in the machinations of profane rationality.
present into a "field of ashes" (5, 40), without an option of escape.
Even the most "primitive" potlatches of the Tlingit and Kwakiutl were already contaminated by the calculus of acquired rank and power (Bataille
does not, despite appearances, share Mauss's idealizations of the communifying bond of archaic "generosity.") Early potlatch was already caught
up in the rational circuit of exchange. Tribal depense proves to be a "comedy" (7, 73) of compensation and control 82 Yale French Studies an
insurance policy underwritten by the machinations of a "crooked will" (7, 75). For the Pacific chieftain indeed is guaranteed to win through
losing-gift summoning countergift-stockpiling prestige and honor in return for the dilapidations of the fiscal reserve. "He enriches himself with his
contempt for wealth, and what he shows himself to be miserly of is the power of his own generosity" (7, 72).
"nature" a nostrum.
Nor is prehistoric
If it is true that, in his invocation of "ends in themselves" (1, 305), Bataille would seem to invoke the most
classical split between the natural and the cultural the immanent entelechy of phusis pitted against the exteriority of techn (Aristotle); the
apparent "purposelessness" of the flower pitted against the functionality of the artifact (Kant); the wasteful effusions of the songbird pitted against
the niggardly efficiencies of the craftsman (Schiller) -he is unsentimental in his attachments, and dismisses every yearning for archaic Nature as
being just "poetic fulguration" (7, 294). Despite appearances. It is true that our meager acts of effervescence are said to be just "the expression of
the Earth and its laws" (2, 155)-the very laws of "cosmic energy" which one would ignore, warns Bataille, at one's own peril (7,33). True, too, that
"communication" at times seems modelled on the labyrinthine bondings of molecular existence (1, 433ff.). And it is true that the undulations of
expenditure seem to suppose a "link between lovemaking and lightwaves" (5, 283)-"perhaps arbitrary," demurs Bataille, but no less telling. But
this is not the "cosmic Lebensphilosophie" some might imagine. '1 For natural immediacy is not an option. "In this kind of situation there is no
recourse to animality" (8, 196). The unfettered immediacy of natural existence (apparently unquestioned by Bataille)'2 is neither possible nor
desirable for humanity. For one thing, such immediacy remains "unfathomable" (7, 294). For another, it lacks all verve. The soggy indifference of
"life" ("like water in water" [7, 295]) in fact is devoid of sacred tension. The animal (unfettered by work and prohibitions) knows not the joyful
horror of transgression; it knows just the "slumber" (7, 313) of instinctual life. Libertarian appeals to 11. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987(, 235. 12. On evidently Hegelian grounds. The epigraph to Thorie de Ia religion cites
Kojve (whose testimony is taken to be impeccable( on the difference between the immediacy of animal hunger and the mediated "negativity" of
human desire REBECCA COMAY 83 nature would only neutralize "sin" as wholesome spontaneity (fun sex, healthy appetite): Genet and Sade,
143
Sacrifice K
Greenhill
Pillz
the violation of taboos is not a "return

to animal violence" (10, 68): transgression (dialectically?) 1-3 preserves the very
prohibition it would surmount.
Baudelaire and Proust knew rather the awful attraction of forbidden fruit. For
144
Sacrifice K
Greenhill
Pillz
T: Alt is Patriarchal
Turn: Our model of sacrifice is expenditure, breaking down the accumulating
forces that enable traditional masculine conquest
A
JesseGoldhammer2005
Althoughvirilityiscommonlydefinedasanaccumulationofmaleforce,especiallysexualpotencyBatailleviewsit
throughthelensofunproductiveexpenditure.Theresultisaconceptofmalepowerthatreliesonanontologyof
waste,notaccumulation.ForBataille,themaleerectionhasnopurposeotherthantowasteitself,animagecapturedby
Troppman,themaincharacterinBataille'snovelLeBleuduclef(BlueofNoon),writtenin1935butnotpublisheduntil
3957.SusanRubinSuleimanremarksthatTroppmanissymbolicallycastrated,areflectionofBataffle'scharacterization
oftheimpotencefeltbyantifascistFrenchintellectualsintheI930s.Forinstance,whenTroppmanisunabletomakelove
toabeautifulwomannamedDirty,sheeuphemisticallytauntshim:"Ifonlyyoucouldloseyourhead?'60Suleiman
arguesthatthisslippagebetweencastrationanddecapitationindicatesincreasedvirilityfromauniquelyBataillian
perspective:
Decapitationisasymboliccastration,ifFreudistobebelieved;butTroppmanisalreadysymbolicallycastrated,sohis
decapitationwouldberedundant.(Troppnian,incidentally,wasthenameofamassmurdererbeheadedinParisin5870.)
Unless,ofcourse,"losinghishead"restoredhispotency,accordingtothatcharacteristicallyBaraillianequationwhich
statesthataviolentlossofcontrolisthepreconditionofjouisaauce,aradicallettinggo.61
Itispreciselythis"violentlossofcontrol:'anticipatedbyunproductiveexpenditure,celebratedinBlueofNoon,and
capturedinBataille'sContreAttaquewritings,thatcharacterizesBataille'sconceptofvirility.Virilityisparadoxicallya
formoforgiasticpowerlessnessorjouissance,asortofantiauthoritarianauthority.Thisstateofbeingformsan
exactparalleltoBataille'snotionofsub
p.180
versiveoracephalicsovereignty62Indisposingofitselfeffervescently,virilitypermitsontologicalselfsacrificeinthe
serviceofarevolutionthatwastesunproductivelyallthatitopposes.Therevolutionaryroleofsovereignvirilityisthus
metapoliticalbecauseitpromisesaselfwoundingmasculinitythatturnstheproletariatinwardanduponitself.Sovereign
virilityalsothwartstraditionalnotionsofpoliticalfoundation,whichrequireidealismandelevatedauthority.
145

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Sacrifice K

College Prep 2010-2011

Sacrifice K (Alta 2013)

College Prep 2010-2011

College Prep 2010-2011

College Prep 2010-2011

***1NC Link Shell (Pups of War)

Spiralling into the

The only escape is failure. (Bataille, 2001: 223)

A more extravagant general economy framework for such questions might

the compre- hension of Bushs planetary terror machine

still requires such an analysis,

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Bataille searches for an alternative to war in some vast

The liberal rhetoric of charity and the militant drums

people were betrayed by the trick of

watchwords of security that

The incarcerated souls in the concentration camps of

Polite critiques and protest have no purchase orderly rallies

appeasement of the military-industrial machine is the obverse side of liberal

College Prep 2010-2011

College Prep 2010-2011

***1NC Link Shell (Cerberus)

The "war on terror" and the

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The discipline of International

sovereignty of the state is an aspiration that seeks to create

constructing their public authority through a capacity for visiting violence on

sovereignty has no positive existence

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This "inclusive exclusion" is captured in the Roman concept of

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***1NC Alt+Impact Shell

The sacrificer both destroys and survives. Moreover, in the

, meeting death is a need,

Death perhaps cannot be looked at directly, but it can be grasped sideways,

College Prep 2010-2011

But this attitude [the

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Sacrifice, Bataille says, brings together life

Survival, he tells us, has a

price. It limits our life.

the threat of death: it ruins value

the economy of value and future-oriented calculations that stand in

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The need for duration, in the

Act 3: The Feast

human liberation requires not better politics,

College Prep 2010-2011

purpose of sacrifice is not limited to

, sacrifice holds the potential to generate a positive

sacrifice can, through violence, open a space of

College Prep 2010-2011

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***2NC Top Shelf

College Prep 2010-2011

2NC Pups of War Overview

College Prep 2010-2011

2NC Cerberus Overview

College Prep 2010-2011

2NC Impact Overview

College Prep 2010-2011

We control the direction of aff solvency: - the politics of survival ensures