1AC
Contention 1 is Anxiety
First, the surveillance method of counter-terrorism in the status quo fails to recognize
the impossibility of complete security – our desire for infinite pleasure means that the
war on terror becomes infinitely sustained. We have come to enjoy the war because
it symbolizes the retaking of the American Identity and a satiation of the anxiety we
experience as a result of loss. This makes the war and conflict a self-fulfilling prophecy
McGowan, 2013
Todd McGowan, Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont; Enjoying What We Don’t Have: A
Psychoanalytic Politics, University of Nebraska, 2013, pg. 160-163
Nowhere is the retreat from enjoyment to pleasure more evident than in the American response to
the attacks of September 11, 2001. The attacks immediately reinvigorated the social bond for a majority of Americans. The loss that
they occasioned brought subjects back to the shared sacrifice that defines their membership in
American society. Even as they were horrified by the image of the towers burning and then falling,
most Americans, in the strict psychoanalytic sense of the term, enjoyed the attacks insofar as the
attacks allowed them to experience once again their social bond with great intensity. This is a bond that one
suffers, just as one suffers from a terrorist attack. Even though it followed from an attack, this bond was not one formed through the male logic of friend/enemy,
which is why the headline in Le Monde on September 12,2001, could proclaim, “Nous sommes tous Américains.”27 The bond formed around the September 11
attacks was not initially a bond of exclusivity with a clear outside and inside. Any subject willing to accede to the experience of loss could become apart of American
One
enjoys it without deriving any pleasure from it. It is, in fact, painful. Not only is it painful, but it also
entails complete humiliation. The society experiences the shame of being a victim and enduring trauma —the shame of enjoyment itself. In
order to disguise this shameful enjoyment, the United States quickly turned to an assertion of power
that would carry with it the promise of a restored wholeness — the recovery of an imaginary perfect
security. The attack on Afghanistan brought pleasure to most members of American society. This
pleasure had the function of rendering the enjoyment that emerged through traumatic loss bearable,
but it could not fulfill its inherent promise. Enjoyment satisfies, and pleasure always disappoints. The
disappointing nature of the attack on Afghanistan paved the way to the subsequent attack on Iraq in a
further attempt to find an actual pleasure equal to what we anticipated. In terms of American society,
these foreign wars serve as alibis for the enjoyment of the traumatic attacks themselves . Because we seek
society at that moment. The not-all of the social bond occurs through the experience of loss, but the recognition of this type of bond is unbearable.
respite from the loss that binds us, we flee from the social bond despite our purported desire for it. The authentic social bond exists only in the shared experience of
loss —that is, only according to the female logic of not-having. But the attack on Iraq also illustrates the inescapability of the enjoyment attached to loss. The Iraq
War clearly follows from the male logic of having and aims at producing the pleasure resulting from possession: the United States would conquer a recalcitrant
dictator and obtain a firm ally in a globally significant region. This is both the stated justification for the war and the explanation offered by critics who see it as an
exercise in American imperialism. For both the perpetuators of the war and its critics, the war concerns having, despite the different inflections they give this idea.
But the result of the war is the failure of having and the renewed experience of loss. The pursuit of the pleasure involved in having returns American society to the
traumatic loss involved in the September 11 attacks. Of course, no one fights wars with the express intention of losing them, but every war brings with it sacrifice
and loss, which is ultimately the substance of the social bond and the source of our ability to enjoy that bond. The pursuit of the pleasure of having leads to the loss
that inevitably accompanies this pursuit. Imperial powers do not attempt to stretch their military and economic reach to the point that it breaks because of an
inescapable will to power or a biological urge for infinite expansion. The conquering drive of empires has its roots in the search for what no amount of imperial
possession can provide —the enjoyment of the experience of loss. Empires conquer increasing quantities of territory in order to discover a territory that they can’t
conquer. In this same way, the Afghanistan War disappointed the American leadership because it didn’t provide even the possibility for loss. Donald Rumsfeld’s
lament that the country didn’t have any targets to bomb points in this direction. Iraq, in contrast, promised a possible defeat, and if it hadn’t, Syria or Iran would
surely have come within the sights of the Bush administration. Whatever the proffered justification or hidden motivation, powerful societies ultimately go to war in
order to reenact a constitutive loss and facilitate the enjoyment that this loss entails.28 This is the case not just with war but with any positive project that a social
order takes up. Building a monument like the Eiffel Tower provided French society with a possession that allows for collective identification. But the work involved
with the building involved a great sacrifice in time and in money. When we think of the Eiffel Tower, we rarely think of the sacrifice required for its construction;
instead, we think of the sense of identity that it offers. It provides a positive point of identification for France itself as a nation, and French subjects can find pleasure
through this identification. Nonetheless, the enjoyment of the Eiffel Tower, in contrast to the pleasure that it offers, stems from the sacrifice required to construct
it. Every
finished societal product —such as victory in Iraq, the beauty of the Eiffel Tower, smooth roads on
which to drive —promises pleasure, but this pleasure primarily supplies an alibi for the enjoyment
that the sacrifices on the way to the product produce. These sacrifices allow us to experience the
social bond by repeating the act of sacrifice through which each subject became a member of the
social order. It is not so much that the pursuit of pleasure backfires (though it does) but that it is never done
simply for its own sake. We embark on social projects not in spite of what they will cost us but
because of what they will cost us.29 The dialectic of pleasure and enjoyment also plays itself out in the relationship that subjects in society have
to their leader. According to Freud, all group members install the leader in the position of an ego ideal, and this ego ideal held in common furthers the bond among
members of society. But the identification with the leader has two sides to it: on the one hand, subjects identify with the leader’s symbolic position as a non
castrated ideal existing beyond the world of lack; but on the other hand, subjects identify with the leader’s weaknesses, which exist in spite of the powerful
image.30 Both modes of identification work together in order to give subjects a sense of being a member of society, but they work in radically different ways. The
identification with the leader’s power provides the subject with a sense of symbolic identity and recognition, whereas the identification with the leader’s
weaknesses allows the subject to enjoy being a part of the community. The identification with the leader’s strength provides the pleasure that obscures the
enjoyment deriving from the identification with the leader’s weaknesses. The weaknesses indicate that the leader is a subject of loss, that she/he enjoys rather than
being entirely devoted to ruling as a neutral embodiment of the people. The weaknesses are evidence of the leader’s enjoyment, points at which a private
enjoyment stains the public image. By identifying with these points, subjects in a community affirm the association of enjoyment with loss rather than with
presence. But at the same time, the leader’s weaknesses cannot completely eclipse the evidence for the leader’s strength. The strength allows subjects who identify
with the leader in her/his weakness to disavow this would-be traumatic identification and to associate themselves consciously with strength rather than weakness.
The trajectory of Bill Clinton’s popularity during his presidency illustrates precisely how identification with the leader unfolds. When accusations of sexual
impropriety with Monica Lewinsky first appeared, Clinton’s public approval rating reached its highest levels. Most thought that Clinton was probably guilty of some
private wrongdoing, but they also felt that his sexual peccadilloes should remain private. Though they infuriated his Republican accusers, his sexual weaknesses had
the effect of enhancing his overall popularity. This trend continued until it became undeniably clear that Clinton really was guilty, when it became impossible to
disavow his weakness. At this point, identifying with Clinton became inescapably apparent as identifying with Clinton in his weakness, which rendered it more
difficult to sustain. The American populace could enjoy Clinton’s weakness and form a social bond through this weakness only as long as it remained partially
obscured. The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond. We
use
the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we
experience through the traumatic experience of loss. But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and
triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience.
This is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror, no end to the list of countries that the United States plans to
invade to attain complete security, no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed.31 Complete security, like complete pleasure, is
mythical. It attempts to bypass the one experience that cannot be bypassed —the foundational experience of loss — and it is this experience that holds the
key to an authentic social bond.
The paranoid anxiety of the status quo results in the projection of threats onto the
other in an effort to suture the Lack – this type of politics mobilizes the population
toward fascism
McGowan, 2013
Todd McGowan, Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vermont; Enjoying What We Don’t Have: A
Psychoanalytic Politics, University of Nebraska, 2013, pg. 44-49
While nostalgia locates the ultimate enjoyment in the subject’s own past, paranoia locates it in the other. Paranoia thus offers the subject not
just the image of the ultimate enjoyment (like nostalgia) but also an explanation for its absence. Nostalgia and paranoia usually operate side by
side in order to provide the subject a way of figuring its missing enjoyment. On its own, nostalgia as a mode of subjectivity seems to have
limited political consequences. Groups may use nostalgia as a political weapon, but its political weight is diffused to some extent because it
involves the subject's relation to itself rather than to an other. The same cannot be said for paranoia, which is why finding a way to counter
paranoia represents an urgent political task. Paranoia is political in its very structure. It views the other as a threat and produces hostility
toward the other. The paranoid subject usually adopts one of two possible attitudes toward the other. According to the first, paranoia serves to
explain the loss of the privileged object. If I take up a paranoid attitude toward the other, I see her/ his enjoyment coming at the expense of
mine. The other enjoys the lost object that is rightfully mine. The other, having stolen my enjoyment, bears responsibility for my existence as a
subject of loss. This type of paranoia
removes the burden of loss from the subject and places it onto the other,
and in addition it functions, like nostalgia, to convince the subject that having the object is a possibility . According to the
second attitude, however, paranoia represents an attempt to convince ourselves that we have not lost the privileged object. We are
paranoid not that the other has stolen the privileged object but that it plans to do so. The imagined threat
that the other poses reassures us that we have the ultimate enjoyment and that this is what the other targets. By imagining a threat, we
fantasize the privileged object back into existence despite its status as constitutively lost. At first glance, it is difficult to see how paranoia might
function as an attractive attitude for subjects to take up. The paranoid subject must endure a constant menace that has no tangible or definitive
presence. Everyone
that this subject meets is a potential enemy in disguise threatening to steal or
already having stolen the subject's privileged object. In terms of the subject's own identity, paranoia does not provide
security or stability. In fact, it uproots all sense of security that the subject has concerning its identity. But its appeal does not lie in how it
transforms subjectivity; its appeal stems from its ability to close the gap in the social field of meaning, its ability to be a guarantor that
authorizes our social interaction. Paranoia develops in response to the inherent inconsistency of social authority. There are authorities but no
Authority, and a decisive Authority would be necessary to provide subjects a sense of foundation, a sense that there is solid ground underneath
their feet. Social proclamations and regulations place the subject in an impossible position: one simply cannot believe and obey every edict
emanating from social authorities without being torn apart in the effort. These contradictions occur on all levels of social pronouncements. One
hears, for instance, about the dangers of eating too much fat, and then one hears about the cancer-preventing power of chocolate. Parents tell
their children not to fight and at the same time tell them to stand up for themselves. George W. Bush claimed that the Iraq War was waged to
prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and later claimed that its purpose was to liberate the country from a cruel dictator. Such
inconsistencies are not merely contingent developments within our particular society but necessarily follow from the ultimate groundlessness
of the social order itself. There is no final authority that calls all the shots in society and guarantees the consistency of the social order. It is
instead a structure in charge, and this structure functions through its very misfiring. The inconsistency of social authority- the gap in the social
field of meaning - provides it with an openness to difference. If social authority was a closed circuit that operated without a hitch, it would have
no way of incorporating the subject into its fold. The subject invests itself in social authority precisely because this authority gives the subject
contradictory demands. Faced with these incongruous imperatives, the subject cannot readily decipher what the social authority wants from it.
Beneath the inconsistency, the desire of the authority remains a mystery. The subject begins to desire in response to this unknown desire of the
social Other: the inconsistency of the social authority has the effect of attracting the subject and constituting the desire of the subject as the
desire of the Other. A thoroughly consistent social authority, while logically unthinkable, would not draw the desire of the subject in this way. It
might force individuals into obedience, but it would not create the investment in the social order that the inconsistent social authority creates.
Confronting the inconsistency of social authority is not an easy task for the subject. Many try to sustain a belief in its consistency through an
imaginary construction that represses contradictory ideas. The problem with this solution is that these ideas become more powerful through
their repression, and the result is some form of neurosis. Another possibility is the paranoid reaction. Rather than trying to wrestle with the
problem of the gap in authority, the paranoid subject eliminates it by positing an other existing in this gap, an other behind the scenes pulling
the strings. As Slavoj Zizek explains it, "Paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an 'Other of the Other; into an Other who, hidden behind
the Other of the explicit social texture, programs what appears to us as the unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency:
beneath the chaos of market, the degradation of morals, and so on, there is the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot." The comfort that
paranoia provides for the subject derives solely from this guarantee. For the paranoid subject, the surface inconsistency of social authority
hides an underlying consistency authorized by a real authority whom most subjects never notice. Paranoia simultaneously allows the subject to
sense its own superiority in recognizing the conspiracy and to avoid confronting the horror of an inconsistent social authority. As with nostalgia,
paranoia is primarily aligned with a right-wing political agenda. Its suspicion of the other nourishes a nationalistic
politics and energizes
the call for a return to traditional social arrangements. Just as much of the investment in the Cold War struggle derived from paranoia, it fuels
the contemporary war on terror. The exemplary right-wing political formation, Fascism, has its basis in paranoia,
seeing the Jew or some equivalent as secretly controlling the social order to the detriment of all law-abiding citizens. The idea of an
other operating behind the scenes serves to justify restrictions on civil liberties, racism, police
violence, and so on. A paranoid populace is a populace ready to embrace a Fascist regime. Despite the
inherent link between paranoia and conservatism, leftists employ paranoia to a vast extent, far more than they do nostalgia. Paranoid theories
about the secret brokers of power who decide the fate of the capitalist world are widespread on the Left. It is common sense among leftists
that big oil companies have suppressed the development of alternative energies, that the CIA assassinated Kennedy, and that major drug
companies control the Food and Drug Administration, just to name a few of the more well known conspiracy theories. The truth or falsity of
these theories has nothing to do with their function for the subject who accepts them. The paranoid subject is often correct in its various
speculations, but paranoia nonetheless provides a way for the subject to avoid confronting the inconsistency of social authority. For the
paranoid subject, conspiracy theories don't simply explain a single event; they solve the problem of the social order as such. According to this
thought process, all loss stems from the conspiracy, which has derailed the social order and upset its balance. The paranoid subject cannot
accept the necessity of loss, and the conspiracy theory works to render loss empirical rather than ontological. This is evident in Oliver Stone's
JFK (1991), a film in which Stone posits a vast conspiracy that resulted in the death of Kennedy. Of course, Stone is probably correct that this
conspiracy existed, but the film goes astray primarily through its apotheosis of Kennedy, an apotheosis that reveals what's at stake in all
paranoia. According to the film, had he remained in power, Kennedy would have prevented the horror of the Vietnam War and thus spared the
United States the psychic wound that this war created. With Kennedy, one can imagine an American social order existing without strife and
loss. The conspiracy theory allows Stone this image, which testifies to the avoidability of loss." But Stone is not the only leftist to turn to
paranoia. Many do so in order to confront forces that they otherwise couldn't identify. Among those who suffer from political oppression,
paranoia and conspiracy theory serve as vehicles for thinking through systems of control and even mobilizing action against those systems. As
Peter Knight points out, "Conspiracy thinking has played an important role in constituting various forms of African American political and
cultural activism."38 When it directly produces activism, the political valence of paranoia seems to tilt more clearly to the left than it does in the
case of Stone's film. In Marxist Fredric Jameson focuses on a related aspect of paranoia as he analyzes the paranoid film in The Geopolitical
Aesthetic. In this work, Jameson aligns conspiracy theory with what he calls cognitive mapping- the attempt to think the global capitalist system
in its totality. The diffuseness of global capitalism prevents the kind of cognitive mapping that was possible in earlier epochs. Today, in order to
think the totality at all, subjects must resort to the idea of a conspiracy. As Jameson points out in his analysis of All the President’s Men, "The
map of conspiracy itself .. . suggests the possibility of cognitive mapping as a whole and stands as its substitute and yet its allegory all at
once."40 Jameson's statement reflects his ambivalence about conspiracy theory and paranoia - even though it allegorizes cognitive mapping, it
also substitutes for it - but he nonetheless sees its usefulness as a strategy for the Left, especially when facing the global capitalist leviathan.
The problem is that even when it works to mobilize subjects to fight against an oppressive system, paranoia has the effect of depriving
subjects of their agency. By eliminating the gap in social authority and filling in this gap with a real authority who effectively runs the
show, paranoia deprives subjects of the space in which they exist as subjects. The subject occupies the position of the gap in social authority; it
emerges through and because of internal inconsistency in the social field of meaning. The extent to which paranoia allows the subject to
experience social authority as a consistent field is the extent to which it works against the subject itself. Even if it manages tangible political
victories, emancipatory politics that relies on paranoia undermines itself by increasing the power of authority in the thinking of subjects and
decreasing their freedom. What's
more, it doesn't actually work. Like nostalgia, paranoia can never constitute a
successful strategy for the subject dealing with its fundamental condition. It will never provide the
enjoyment that it promises the subject. Uncovering and eliminating the hidden real authority will bring not the ultimate
enjoyment but horrible disappointment. This is why the paranoid mindset cannot admit to itself that the hidden other has been vanquished.
The enjoyment that paranoia does provide requires the continuing existence of the threat, even
though it imagines an enjoyment that would come with the threat's disappearance. Paranoia runs aground
due to its failure to admit the connection between enjoyment and loss. It allows the subject to imagine that loss is the contingent result of a
secret malevolent force that we might conquer. By implicitly positing the avoidability of loss, paranoia leaves subjects unable to locate and
recognize the nature of their own enjoyment.
This anxiety is the core problem of the psyche. Our inability to come to terms with this
void is a fate worse than death. Our anxiety functions as the condition for the
possibility of Hiroshima and Auschwitz. In attempts to master this emptiness we
project our weakness through conflict. This projection provides us the unrestrained
power to bombard the other with pure suffering and destruction in an attempt to
control the contingencies that constitute existence.
Davis, 2001
Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative, Pg. 103-108
We begin with an effort to describe what is the deepest experience—the one most deeply denied. Catastrophic anxiety
is that fear that
haunts us from within, the fear that one has already been annihilated; that, like Beckett, one has "never
been born properly" and never will be because inner paralysis is the psyche's defining condition—a truth
attested each time when, lining to cohere as a subject, one collapses before the tidal wave of an Regression against oneself that rises up from within. An
unspeakable dread weds the psyche to terror. All
other forms of anxiety are pale after-thoughts. There is a threat
worse than extinction. The deepest self-knowledge we harbor, the knowledge that haunts us as perhaps
our deepest self-reference is the fear that our inner world is ruled by a force opposed to our being . Death is the icy wind
that blows through all we do. This is the anxiety from which other anxieties derive as displacements, delays, and vain attempts to deny or attenuate our terror
before a dread that is nameless and must remain so lest despair finalize its hold on us. In
catastrophic anxiety the destruction of one's
power to be and the ceaseless unraveling of all attempts to surmount this condition is experienced as
an event that has already happened. That event forms the first self-reference: the negative judgment of an Other on one's being—internalized
as self-undoing. Postmodern posturing before the phrase "I am an other" here receives the concretization that shatters "free play." There is a wound at the heart of
subjectivity, a self-ulceration that incessantly bleeds itself out into the world. The issue of the wound is a soul caked in ice, in a despair that apparently cannot be
mediated: the nightmare state of a consciousness utterly awake, alone and arrested, all exits barred, facing inner paralysis as the truth of one's life. We
ceaselessly flee this experience because if it ever comes down full upon us an even more terrifying
process begins: an implosion in which one's subjective being is resolved into fragments of pure
anxiety that leave one incapable of existing as subject except in the howl to which each suffered state
descends in a final, chilling recognition—that everything one has done and suffered is but sound and
fury, signifying nothing. One has become a corpse with insomnia. Identity and self-reference thereafter ceaselessly circle about that void. This is the
hour of the wolf, where one is arrested before the primary fact: at the deepest register of the psyche one finds a voice of terror. Fear of psychic dissolution is the
ground condition of our being as subjects. Subjectivity is founded in anguish before the dread of becoming no more than bits and pieces of pure horror, fleeing in
panic a voice that has already overtaken us, resolving our subjective being into traumatic episodes of pure persecution. At the heart of inwardness a malevolent
spirit presides. To put it in nuclear metaphors: catastrophic anxiety is the threat of implosion into the other's unlimited destructiveness. To complete the picture we
need only add Winnicott's point: people live in dread of this situation, projecting fear of a breakdown into the future, because the breakdown has already occurred.
B. Exorcism through Evacuation And
so a crypt is built to contain this anguish and repress the experience that is its
cause. We organize a "life" of identities and stabilities to give ourselves the illusion of escape. Unable
to reverse our condition we take up the only alternative. We try to evacuate the whole thing: to blow
it out into the world and invest it in objects that are fitted to receive the full brunt of one's discontent
and powerless to reply. Projection, the ego's priest, is founded in identification with an internal aggressor. That is the complex that informs the effort
to lodge our disorders and forbidden desires in others so that we can wage an attack on our inner conflicts then watch the ensuing spectacle from a safe distance.
Evacuation thus finds in projection a prime agent of human perception and the secure base for the perpetual, mutual defeat that Sartre finds in all "concrete
relations with others." We're always on the lookout for a chance to make someone else bear our discontents. But
it's never enough.
Satisfaction eludes us. We keep erupting, bleeding from within, in a leukemia of soul that rages whenever we see those who have in "their daily lives"
"a beauty that makes us ugly."For then the projections return with the force of the furies. Envy and resentment erupt as the assault within our inner world of the
truth of our "character"—a truth we deny by reinvesting it externally. This grows apace over the years and then we long for a listing deliverance, a final solution in
the dim recognition that when projection proceeds from the register of catastrophe it requires and longs for a grand exorcism. What we seek incessantly is a total
evacuation of all inner discord, a complete and lasting externalization in an ideal victim, one in whom all that haunts us will stay outside, lodged in the world in what
Hegel calls a "standing negation"9. Our need is for a subject who is destroyed and lives on, proof of a sublime aggression sculpted in time. The Bomb provides such
an opportunity. The
criteria required to exorcize catastrophic anxiety finds in it the conditions for expelling
the most primitive anxieties in the perfect objective correlative. The subject voids itself of its core
anxiety—the inability to reverse inner destructiveness—by becoming the power to destroy, unbound,
raining judgment down on a mass of subjects who are indifferently bound together as fragments of
pure suffering unable, after that action, to ever form any identity except as walking corpses, hibakusha,
deadened affect delivered over to the condition of death-in-life.10 Projection here succeeds because in that shattered mirror one sees oneself reflected as the
equal of the power within that originally proclaimed one's utter worthlessness. Malign "reversal" has grown to the event. All
inner anxiety about
one's power to be resolves itself in the power to act free of restraint. We have become the thing we
feared. Its destructiveness is now ours and nothing else has being. The Contradiction: The Sublime—From the Crypt The
mediation traced above is driven by a contradiction about which it circles endlessly. That is what the sublime object of the ego-ratio reveals when read from its
crypt. Sublime action seeks an absolute reversal of catastrophic anxiety in the absolute affirmation of unshakable guarantees. Catastrophe must be reversed
because it is that experience of contingency that underlies the horror of contingency in all its forms, the lone driving the search for the guarantees needed to
contain it. In catastrophe contingency is the other's will as unbounded, unlimited destructiveness.
The threat of extinction is the "restraint"
here placed on subject. This restraint is prior to the dialectic of "desire restrained and checked" on which Hegel grounds his phenomenology.
Desire here isn't restrained and checked—it is turned back against itself in torment. The other
requires my destruction for their pleasure and assures that end by colonizing the psyche with an
aggression that renders impotent every effort to make a beginning, a tentative move toward
independence or self-cohesion. There is no exit but one apparently: identification with the aggressor. I become a self by turning someone or
something else into an object delivered over to the true golden rule: do onto others what was once done onto you. This logic maintains because catastrophic
anxiety internalized is death-work as the self-mediation whereby we enact the command of the Other. The
only way out, the only way to
finalize this process, is evacuation through a lasting exorcism. It alone confers on the psyche a certitude beyond all cogitos. It is
also the mediation that finds it, in flight forward, already, in its primitive imaginary, one with the Bomb. In its inner world, the catastrophic subject experiences itself
as full of death, disease, corruption. The Bomb alone has the power to cast all "nuclear waste" outside and beneath oneself in a way that indefinitely extends the
temporality of that act. Radiation disease is a death that works inward—invisibly, yet inexorably. Death thereby breeds itself forth into an indefinite future,
omnipresent in a working, a differance that begets delayed effects as further insurance against Nachtraglichkeit. The extension of death's dominion attained in the
Bomb serves one grand function: to prevent the return of projections by extending the temporality of the deed into a future that is lived, by its victims, as a
judgment that is inevitable, irreversible, the antithesis of Benjamin's messianic time, ticking—a plea to delay death that can only be answered by death. The Bomb
To do its job a sublime event must exorcize everything within the subject
that makes it an object of its own contempt. What better way than Orwell's boot brought down in an act of splitting that magnifies the
distance between the terror on the ground and the view from above. Catastrophe is now fully outside oneself located in an
other who has become nothing but matter, body become spectacle of pain frozen forever in charred sculptures strewn across a
thus serves as felix culpa to an inner necessity.
devastated landscape, Laocoon Munched; but with the Howl silenced and deferred until it erupts later from within the survivors in a semiosis that can only be read
by the scientists who planted it there and have now come (as biopower/knowledge) to study their handiwork as it blooms and bursts from deep within the body of
the hibakusha as further testimony of one's power/jouissance. Evacuation is complete. Death-work has been lodged securely in the Other. In the hibakusha one
gets to see one's Thanatos as a narrative principle, a force in history. One gets to see, over time, what it is like to live death. Soul-murder as the innermost reality of
the crypt, produces and finds in the hibakusha its dialectical image. As the expressive figura of death incarnate, a terrifying verveilledoch here attains its objective
correlative. To purge oneself of catastrophic anxiety, an utterly dehumanized object is not enough. Neither the Sartrean look nor the Nazi act suffice. The disorder
of the psyche is deeper, prior to desire (Sartre) and demand (Nazism). The projection of death-work can never rest by simply investing one's self-contempt in
another. For evacuation to work, the object must become something one can study, inspect, perform operations upon. Catastrophic
anxiety is the
a proiri that gives Auschwitz and Hiroshima their necessity in the genocidal imagination. The Bomb constitutes
an Event because the psyche reverses its core condition—its cardiac arrest in inner self-loathing—through a projection that is total and irreversible. If the
evacuation of trauma is the abiding motive atop the crypt, there is nothing abstract or Lacanian about
the Real that results from its projection. Evacuation is that malevolent reversal that condemns one to
endless repetition. One blows one's self-hatred and one's rage over that state fully out into the world but is thereby rendered powerless to do anything
but gape in rapt amazement at one's creation. That is perhaps why, for over fifty years now, whenever given the opportunity, Paul Tibbets has proudly repeated the
declaration that he has not had a moment's remorse or regret. Death-work externalized leaves one a spent and reified subject, lacking any power other than the
endless repetition of one's deed. The wheel thus comes full circle in the only justice granted such subjects. When catastrophic anxiety is only mediated by deathwork, the affects that compose subjectivity are rent assunder and scattered in pockets of pure persecution. With each attempt to compose an inner self-cohesion,
death-work, as internal saboteur, rises up in a renewed attack on the effort to be. Using the Bomb to reverse this disorder produces as its result a perfect, attic
justice. Guilt and remorse are denied the doers of the deed because to feel such things is to renew a process of self-unraveling. What the Bomb was meant to
deliver one from has become the guardian of untroubled sleep. With
the call of conscience rendered impossible, the subject
becomes overtly psychotic and must cling ever more desperately to an untroubled memory of the
sublime event. The subject thereby pronounces, without being able to comprehend or mediate it, the truth about itself: in the ravaged landscape of
Hiroshima the founding inner world of the psychotic-a world of utter fragmentation and the obliteration of every term of reference-has finally found a home to
which it must say "stay thou art so fair," a home in which nothing inhuman is unheimlich.
The moralization of anxiety manifests itself in our inability confront evil. To displace
this anxiety, we make ourselves “good” to protect ourselves from danger. Failure to
confront this psychical conflict reifies the original trauma and makes the destruction
of the self meaningless.
Davis, 2001
Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative, Pg 86-87
No wonder resistance becomes the key term in the first stage of the unfolding drama. This time, however, Kant can’t shift everything onto a
plane of conceptual defenses and controls. Affect weighs too heavily. Intermediate moves immanent within that register are required.
Opposing affects must be created and marshaled as a first line of defense. For the first time in Kant, rationalistic mediation gives way to
dramatic self-mediation. Kant will finally attempt an agon that moves solely within the medium of affect. To resist psychic unraveling he must
establish a countervailing force within the order of affect itself. For Kant, however, affective
self-mediation is equivalent to
bending everything in a moral direction. In doing so the author of the ethic of pure duty gives us the true genealogy of morals.
That dubious ascent begins once the force threatening destruction is characterized as “evil.” Anxiety is
thereby transformed into a moralizing fear: that we lack the power to resist “evil.” Moralizing then
structures the subsequent discourse, but without exorcizing the psychological subtext that will
undercut it. This contradiction is, in fact, what ethics will here reveal about itself.
In making ourselves “good” subjects we make ourselves beings unworthy of destruction. That
transformation also requires the resources of rhetoric, since we must “persuade” a tough audience. The true goal in remaking
ourselves is to tame the power that threatens us by tapping its conscience. To do so we create, within
ourselves, a new agency, one that, recognizing our virtue, promises protection. We thereby create the illusion
that the threatening force has been softened and then transformed into a voice that warmly supports
the good intentions of the nascent ego. The superego as ego-ideal has been created. So ends the founding self-mediation in the
genealogy of an ethical ration. By staging this internal drama, the psyche has taken the action within required to create the space needed to
assert control over affect. The necessary act follows – the attempt to affect a complete reversal of the psyche’s initial condition. Kant asserts
repeatedly that we can only judge the sublime, and experience its proper “pleasure,” if we view things from “a safe place.” But in the psyche, as
opposed to mind, the safe place doesn’t exist a priori. It has to be invented, and with it the most revealing picture of the genesis of what we
now call the “ego.” It is a difficult birth to a dubious and troubled function. The problem of the ego is one of generating a transformation from
impotence to power within affect itself, through an agon immanent to that register. But Kant is unable to sustain such an agon. We get instead
a displacement toward concepts through a use of the defensive mechanism known as splitting. Ego and inner world divide in an unbridgeable
rift, thus establishing this condition as the true “identity” of the ego. The ego is the effort to repress the conflicts in the psyche from which it
derives. But while displacement and intellectualization offer a handle, the ego’s work is far from done. The continuing pressure of inner
conflicts requires a further battle. In that struggle moralizing interpretations do yeoman service by splitting the psyche’s original trauma into a
longed-for reification—the opposition of the ego to the drives.
We have become creatures full of instincts. The crucial task of the aff is to open up the
unconscious counter narrative to provide a mirror to reflect upon the presupposed
American identity.
Sucharov, 2005
Mira M. Sucharov, assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, “The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli Palestinian Peace,”
Pg 27-28
Just as individuals and groups possess consciousness and an unconscious, I argue that every society
maintains not only a dominant (conscious) narrative, but an unconscious counternarrative as well, which
the former has in part arisen to conceal. As the counternarrative represents the role that society most fears adopting,
it resides in the unconscious, where it will not interfere with the day-to-day transmission and fulfillment of the dominant narratives and the dominant roles. For
instance, a "defensive" state's counternarrative would encapsulate the view that 'we are not only
defensive, but sometimes we can be aggressive.'35 Narratives and counternarratives can coexist in two
ways— either with the counternarrative being simply an unactualized fear, or with the
counternarrative corresponding to an actual role being enacted alongside the dominant role-identity.
Thus, while an actor may consciously be aware of a counterrole that she abhors (e.g., the "good student" who avoids cheating on exams), the unconscious reminds
us that the "cheater" is latent in the "self-portfolio" of the good student. In the event that this student cheats, radical change can only come about once the self has
been reconciled with its unconscious opposite. Actors
will not become aware of the divergence from their dominant
identity without the aid of a "mirror," however. Only with the help of outside forces drawing
attention to the clash between the two narratives will elites experience a cognitive dissonance
necessitating a realignment between actions and role-identity. One of the most salient transmission
belts for the creation of state narratives is collective memory. Memory—active or latent recall of
things occurring in the past—has begun to be understood as not solely a private activity, but as
representing a group phenomenon as well.36 On the collective level, memory can be either experience-near-active, one-step removed, or
distantly removed. Active memory would be represented by Holocaust survivors in Israel and the Diaspora, for instance; One step removed would be the surrogate
memories that their immediate Offspring carry with them,37 and distantly removed would be exemplified by the Rabbinic injunction that Jews experience the
annual telling of the Exodus from Egypt as if "they were there." While a case could be made for discounting the importance of actual experiences in favor of the way
those experiences arc remembered, both of these are crucial for ascertaining role identity. Just
as traumatic events in a person's life may
be repressed in memory but still shape that person's identity, the international observer needs to
account for actual experiences, yet view these as embedded within a narrative context. Similarly, some
historical events undergo a process of memory revision; in these cases the observer must be sensitive to the effect that the new discourse has on the society's
perception of these events, whether or not these stories accord with fact. The clinical parallel in psychoanalysis is that while the analysand's relationship with her
parents is considered crucial to uncovering the contours of her psychology, the analyst as a rule does not attempt to meet the parents firsthand: rather, the
patient's recounting of these experiences is considered to be the most important channel of investigation— and hence transformation. Since we are talking about
collections of individuals, memory needs to be actively transmitted to the society's members in order for it to influence the citizens' sense of collective identity. One
of the ways this can be done is through ritual. Being repetitive while symbolically imbued, ritual gains meaning only through the symbols attributed to it by the
group, and is a collective process that serves to link actors to a series of past events for which they may not have been physically present. Moreover, private rituals
that are collectively prescribed, such as prayer, serve to bind the individual to the collective, particularly when there is a formalized liturgy. Most collective rituals
occur according to the calendar, and therefore can encompass regular ceremonies that come to act as markers for the individual's personal time cycle.38Sometimes
particular collective memories that have been sustained over time are ruptured, with citizens contemplating new facts about their country's past. Revisionist history
is an example of an attempt to bring forth these sorts of new facts. When history is reinterpreted, the society can either shun the dissenting voices, or else gradually
reevaluate the original narratives. When this reevaluation occurs, society is more apt to uncover the hitherto unconscious counternarratives, a discovery that can
lead to the realization that the state's behavior might be contradicting the state's role-identity. In other words, revisionist historians and other domestic dissenters
can serve as the "mirror" referred to later.
Vote affirmative to give up hope in the face of guarantees - only holding yourself
completely open in the face of the promise of a sustainable status quo can open space
for self-overcoming that allows us to engage in new forms of praxis
Davis, 2006
Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Death’s Dream Kingdom, Pg. 63
To know this situation for what it is challenges what is finally the deepest and most fundamental of
the guarantees. The principle of Hope. To appropriate Eliot: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" There is perhaps nothing that
can be done to change the situation I've described. But then what is the purpose of knowing such things if they only produce meaningless
suffering? Is despair the end result of a life shorn of the guarantees? Or are we finally like the drunks in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, knowing
that in order to sustain the illusions required to go on living they must pronounce Hickey mad and reject everything he revealed to them about
their lives as a product of that madness?
Perhaps it's time to admit what the need for Hope really signifies.
Denial of responsibility for certain situations under the assumption that knowing them correctly
would lead to despair. Raising that specter is, of course, the rhetorical ploy invoked to prematurely terminate inquiry lest it impinge on
emotional and psychological needs. Despair thus remains an empty concept. We don't know what it is and never will as long
as we use the need for hope to prevent discovery of our capacities to endure. Whether despair is
what we will find on the other side of hope is something we can't know. For all hope really signifies is
a testament to our weakness and our fears. Perhaps we are called to something beyond it. What Shakespeare called tragic
readiness. For in opening ourselves to the possibility of despair we also open ourselves to the possibility
of self-overcoming and through it the discovery of a praxis that lies on the other side of the
conceptual and existential paralyses created by the guarantees. We can't know "what is to be done?" as long as we
continue to respond to our situation by invoking ahistorical values and guarantees that are grounded in an essentialistic and ahistorical theory
of human nature.
Plan
The United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic
surveillance by ceasing all domestic surveillance.
Contention 2 is Framing
An ethics of existence forecloses the tragic struggle in which we never confront our
inner trauma- only our affirmative can open new ways of relating to ourselves that
can overcome these limitations- the 1AC is a precondition for any meaning to our lives
Davis, 2006
Walter A.Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.238-240)
In her critique of Kantian ethics Alenka Zupancic often refers to the Lacanian idea that there
is a loss deeper than one's life. The
loss of one's reason for living. The apostle of duty offers a heroic example of how one escapes the threat of that loss. What I'm
suggesting here is that ethics actually begins on the other side of it. With the possibility that first exists when one discovers that one has already
lost or violated or fatally compromised one's reason for living because the values one thinks one honors and the actual truth of one's life are
thoroughly at odds. The
traumatic event that brings one to this recognition is the origin of ethics. This is the
ethical task it establishes: to see if one can pay the price for having violated oneself by assuming the
full burden of the situation one has thereby created.
The ethical situation, accordingly, confronts the subject with the necessity to choose to be in a
radically new way or die inside. Nothing less is demanded than a totally new way of relating to oneself, for the guilt one
experiences in such a situation is existentializing. One is guilty toward oneself for having failed to honor the duties that one bears to oneself, for
having so thoroughly lied to oneself about one's life. As Hamlet learns, it is through that recognition that one first discovers that one has tragic
responsibilities toward oneself that can no longer be evaded because one with this situation is the even deeper discovery that there are failures
that can be irreversible. That is the possibility defining the situation one is now in. What one does will reveal the truth of who one is. Guilt
toward oneself has overtaken all possibilities of displacement and denial. Fail now and one dies within. Most people will, of course, do just
about anything to avoid guilt or to get cleansed of it as quickly as possible. That is why so many fail the test when it comes to them, shrinking
inside rather than expanding to the demands of our innermost possibility, the one defining our humanity. An
ethics of existence
begins with the traumatic experience in which everything we've tried to escape about ourselves
catches up with us. One then knows that one's prior life has been a flight. And all one's brave ideas
and bright ethical claims airy nothing—the indulgence in comforting and self-alienating lies. But now one
is finally, like Hamlet, in the situation from which there is no exit. An ethics grounded in the possibility of freedom
depends on the actions one performs within oneself when one finds oneself in a crisis that can no
longer be denied. This is precisely the kind of situation Kant is unable to consider, which is why he constructs in Duty the principle of
choice that renders it impossible. In serving Duty one is delivered from the repressed thought that now can never arise: that one's whole life
and all its choices, especially the ethical ones, may be no more than a flight from things in oneself that one flees because one fears that if one is
ever forced to face oneself one will suffer a destruction worse than death. Destruction within. An
existentializing ethic begins on
the other side of all the things we do to delay that event. For it is when the thing one fears happens
that one first discovers the truth of one's life, the depth of one's inauthenticity. The trauma that will
measure one's humanity has arrived. Nothing else now exists but the lonely struggle of the psyche
with itself. Suicide (including the primary form of suicide, inner death) is one term of that situation. Ethics is the other. An ethics of
existence is what one does when one finally finds oneself in the traumatic situation that brings one before oneself. There is one lesson in this, a
lesson that probably can't be learned. Rather than running from the trauma we should plunge toward it, since it is only through it that we can
discover both the truth about ourselves and what we are able to do in the face of that truth. To
activate that possibility all that's
needed perhaps is to drown out the noise and chatter one keeps running in one's head. Perhaps the truth is
that the truth about ourselves is not deeply repressed and unknown. It's closer than we think, available to introspection if we but dared. But
that's what makes the kind of impassioned reflection Hamlet engages in so terrifying. It
exemplifies everything we know and
don't want to know about ourselves.18 Here is an attempt to offer an image that describes in depth the existentialpsychoanalytic condition from which the possibility of ethics derives. In George Orwell's 1984 Winston Smith when tortured with the thing he
most fears betrays the thing he loves. To save his life he sacrifices what gives it meaning. He capitulates before an inner torment that reduces
the psyche to a condition of catastrophic anxiety. (The image of the cage of rats placed over the head they will raven externalizes in a perfect
objective correlative the terror that has the power to dissolve the psyche. What is a phobia after all but an inner condition displaced into an
external fear?) What I want to suggest here is that Winston Smith's phobia describes the inner condition that defines any subject traumatized
by itself. Such
a subject lives tortured by the struggle not to betray the thing one loves, the thing that
could give one's life meaning. But one saves it only if one is willing to sacrifice everything to the
acceptance of the suffering and inner torment that service to it entails. This is the ethical act whereby
a subject attains tragic agency. Becoming an existentially autonomous agent is the process of engaging the disorders of one's
psyche in the effort of active reversal. The wish to escape that effort, to soften it, or to insist that suffering must always have a happy resolution
is the voice of self-betrayal. If one gives in to it one loses, with Winston, the thing one has finally found, the thing one can love more than one's
life but only by suffering all that it demands. That thing more precious than life is the tragic struggle that gives life perhaps the only meaning it
can have.
The ethic of the aff is key - only an ethical act that confronts our inner trauma with a
constant and inner openness can we create the conditions for self-overcoming
necessary to open ourselves to a meaningful existence - the only ethical choice is to
fully confront contingency
Davis, 2006
Walter A. Davis, professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.235-238
What follows attempts to distill the ethic of existence in to its fundamental principles . I also try here to present those
thesis in a way that will engage the reader's psyche and emotions at precisely the place within us where each of us makes a basic decision
about ourselves. That's the only "self" that matters. The others are selfreifying defenses. The argument thus constitutes both an appeal to the
reader's freedom and an attempt to impinge on that freedom, to bring each reader before him or herself by challenging defenses with the
power that some ideas have to light a fire in the soul. (1) We concur with Kant that if a choice is not free it's not moral. The possibility of
freedom depends, however, on an in-depth analysis of one's psyche. Such an analysis leads from the destruction of ego
identity to the need to bring about a complete reversal in one's relationship to oneself by deracinating the voice of the other. Thinking is ethical
insofar as it engages one thing: the battle of a subject with itself over the meaning of its being. (2) There is no way to abridge that
process nor to provide guarantees that will secure a safe outcome. To sustain the psychoanalytic turn, the
psyche must continually throw itself into question and root out the emotions that bind it to a pattern of lies. An
ethic of the existential subject depends on maximizing what Keats termed negative capability: the ability to be in "uncertainties, Mysteries,
doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Rather than resolving doubts, the purpose of thought and action
is to deepen them. An act is ethical insofar as it deepens the conflict of the subject with itself. (3) One acts
ethically only when all symbolic and ideological supports have collapsed. Only then can one take on
responsibility for oneself because only then is one at issue and at risk. The ethical act must radically open itself
to contingency in a situation where one must create values, yet where those values can derive from nothing but the depth of one's
engagement in the situation. By the same token, such values cannot be a final solution but must open themselves to later contingencies. Ethics
must always allow itself to be measured by contingency because contingency is precisely what calls up ethical responsibility. The primary
ethical situation is not one where there is a clear course of duty, but where a subject trembles before its responsibility to create new values in a
situation that reduces received values to rubble. (4) Ethics begins when there is a genuine crisis of values, even perhaps the
need for a re-valuation of all values. For Kant there was not nor could there be such a crisis. The values were known, immutable, and
generally agreed upon. The only question was what kind of principle they would be grounded in; which meant for Kant and the Aufklarung, how
could they be grounded in Reason. For us, in contrast, the primary fact is a historicity that bites into the very possibility of the ethical. Every
ethical value must be willing to historicize itself. That recognition entails the following considerations. The desert grows. Under the guise of
fundamentalist crusades, herd moralities dominate. The extent of inhumanity is appalling. So many values that once seemed so solid
have been so thoroughly debunked. The possibility of ethics now begins with a systematic exposure of all superego pathologies, all the
ethical ideologies that societies use to introduce a fundamental passivity into subjects while convincing those
same subjects that they are good in a goodness that depends on willed ignorance. An existential ethic is radically
destructive of received beliefs, radically disruptive of the desires of the normal subject. Refusing and exposing all Symbolic supports, it seeks in
the struggle of the psyche with its disorders the source of value. (5) Ethics is a matter of extremity. It begins in the most extreme act—
the act of radical individuation in which one opens one's psyche to an interrogation that must be sustained in its
extremity. Ethics is about a choice in which a subject risks the value and meaning of its existence, not about
those choices that assure it of that meaning. Moreover, it is only when one does this that one experiences for the first time the
terror implicit in the oft-quoted Sartrean statement "existence precedes essence." (6) Ethics must engage and derive from the
dread that defines choice. Let me illustrate this proposition by contrasting Hamlet's choice with the situation in Styron's Sophie's Choice.
The horrifying choice Sophie faces—to choose which of her children will be sent to the gas chamber—is a forced choice and thus extreme and
exceptional in a way that deprives it of the possibility of being normative.17 Hamlet's choice, in contrast, is a free one that issues from nothing
but his freedom and the readiness with which he accepts the selftorture that existence entails. Sophie is tortured from without by the madness
of the other; and the inhuman logic that madness requires in order to know itself. (Styron calls the officer who forces the choice on Sophie a
"genius" of the Reich.) Hamlet is tortured from within by the logic of self-criticism and self-overcoming that informs the existentializing process.
We are fortunate if we never face a situation like Sophie's; nor suffer the death-in-life that is the result of such choices. But insofar as we have a
psyche Hamlet's situation is the general one that defines us. Or to put it in properly ethical terms, engaging the kind of situation he faces is the
act that activates the inherent possibility that defines us. The choice that founds such an ethic must therefore be distinguished both from the a
priori choice made by the apostle of duty and Sophie's forced choice. All three refer to extreme choices and situations. In only one, however, is
guilt toward oneself both the origin of the choice and its result. That is, only one of the three choices is the ground of its own possibility and
thereby the source of an existentialization that issues in values bound to the tragic contingencies of our situatedness.
2AC
A2 – Realism
We control the internal link to their impacts. The psychoanalysis of the affirmative
forces an internal investigation of the ways in which the subject’s subconscious
desires rationalize what we would consider self-interest. This means that we can only
make sense of realism through a lens of psychoanalysis.
Sucharov, 2005
(Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, “The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for IsraeliPalestinian Peace,” pg 17-18)
The psychological turn that international relations took with the rise of behavioralism in the 1960s has begun to
expand beyond focusing on cognition—how individuals think—to a wider appreciation of the role of emotional
determinants of action, one of many factors that were long dismissed as unscientific. Part of the reason for this
hesitant courtship is no doubt the long strides that international relations theory has taken toward refining its
investigative lenses, such that less easily observable phenomena can be more confidently incorporated into the
solid theoretical infrastructure that the discipline has now adopted. A central example of this evolution is the
analytical watershed inaugurated by neorealism, which fashioned a conceptual playing field where little had
existed before. Neorealism, a theoretical school that views international relations as taking place within an
anarchical state system with no overarching authority, in turn spawned the constructivist turn in international
relations—the approach that stresses the importance of social identity in determining international outcomes—
and subsequent counterarguments that built on yet other social and psychological precepts— all of which agree
that there is such a thing as an international system—though they understand the effects of anarchy differently.
Introducing psychoanalysis to international relations can therefore be seen as the next logical step for a relatively
young discipline that seeks to understand why political actors behave the way they do. While all psychoanalysts
draw on Freud's unique contribution, subsequent approaches have altered many of his assumptions. This trend
has kept pace with the embracing of new epistemological and ontological perspectives by other scientific and
social scientific fields, such as the quantum revolution in physics -a paradigm shift that has since influenced other
disciplines. The form of psychoanalytic theory that I use here is the contemporary relational strand, one that
analysts have alternately termed "relational-model theorizing," a "dyadic systems perspective," and
"intersubjectivity theory." This approach shares an ontology basic to constructivism in international relations: the
psychology (identity) of the person (state) is not hard-wired into the unit, but develops in part from the actions of
other actors in the social environment (the family; the therapeutic setting; the international system), and in part
through the shared assumptions that permeate that system. As an approach centered on the individual mind,
contemporary psychoanalysis takes into account the broader social context within which actors act. Psychoanalysis
also provides a coherent theory of behavior incorporating three elements that have mostly been invisible in
international relations theory, but that provide a fuller understanding of how states and nonstate actors interact:
emotion, the unconscious, and the possibility for actors' own cognitive and emotional insight to be a source of
behavior change. In drawing on these principles, perhaps the most significant contribution that psychoanalysis can
make to international relations is in improving on prevailing theories of identity, which in turn illuminate questions
about international action. Within international relations, constructivism has been criticized for neglecting the
question of how identity is, in fact, created. Cognitive psychology—which international relations has begun to draw
on liberally—in part helps to fill this gap. Yet with its assumption that the emotional legacy of early interpersonal
relationships is essential in shaping personality and subsequent behavior, psychoanalysis offers a more
comprehensive model of identity creation than those put forth by cognitive theorists. Recognizing these
explanatory benefits, contructivists have recently called for exploring the potential that psychoanalysis holds for
understanding international politics. Thus, unlike the prevailing psychoanalytic approaches in international
relations—namely, psychohistories of individual leaders, and the focus-group potential of micro-level conflict
resolution, the psychoanalytic approach I use here is meant to coexist happily alongside other streams of systemic
theory in international relations.
Forcing the state away from what it considers a core tenet of national defense in the
exact opposite way it desires creates the conditions necessary for reflection of the
efficacy of the initial policies of surveillance, which changes future policy.
Sucharov, 2005
(Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, “The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for IsraeliPalestinian Peace,” pg 32-)
Like most individuals, states possess a complex arsenal of motivations that are not all palatable to the
polity's sense of self—not least of which is due to the discrepant voices vying for influence in any
society. Yet the dominant self—that overarching group ethos that does not necessarily reflect each
single (sub)voice—implicitly prescribes a set of normatively acceptable behaviors. Should a state
adopt a policy course that contradicts the state's role-identity, we can expect some sort of cognitive
dissonance to arise, leading to a radical realignment between actions and identity. Just as a man who
once struck his wife might offer the apologetic plea that I don't know what got into me!," it is up to the
analyst to help the subject come to terms with the aggression that has, evidently, been very much inside
of him all along. The policy shift therefore results from the force of the "role-identity" prodding the
"self" back into behavioral consistency. However, acting in contradiction to one's role-identity does
not necessarily result in a behavior shift. The dissonance between role-identity and behavior must be
both unbearable and experienced at an emotional level in order for such a shift to result. If the
dissonance remained at a cognitive level, it is likely that the subject would employ one of a number of
cognitive biases in order to rationalize the discrepancy.42 The dredging up of the unconscious
counternarrative assures that the dissonance is experienced deeply enough to result in the taking of
radical action to realign actions with identity.43 This hypothesis of "cognitive-emotional realization" is
grounded in the clinical findings of psychoanalytic theory that suggest that, under certain conditions,
actors may become consciously aware of previously unconscious processes.44 The classic understanding
of cognitive dissonance—as articulated by Leon Festinger—is that inconsistency between behavior and
belief results in "psychological discomfort" that leads to "activity oriented toward dissonance reduction
just as hunger leads to activity oriented toward hunger reduction."45 In line with psychoanalysis, the
actual cognitive-emotional realization brings to light what had previously been stored in the
unconscious areas of the state's subjective world. In actuality, the assumption here is that the rolechallenging behavior (paired with domestic challenges) causes elites to "reflect" on the state's roleidentity. Moreover, my use of "cognitive-emotional realization" imbues the concept with a distinctively
emotional component as well. Whereas pure "cognitive dissonance" refers to the challenging of an
individual's worldview (i.e., the revelation of new "facts"),46 I am introducing the more ontologically
powerful notion of challenges to the self.47 When this behavior undermines the very legitimacy
buttressing the state's raison d'etat, the dissonance is particularly acute. Catalysts for Realization.
Once decision-makers come to realize that the state's foreign-policy actions have contradicted the
state's role-identity, a policy shift may result. The important question that remains is: what
contributes to this realization? Numerous sources may act as the "mirror" necessary for the state to
reflect on its behavior. For clarity, I have divided them into three categories: domestic elements
(including the military, the peace movement, revisionist historians, artists and the domestic media),
other states (including allies and adversaries, as well as those state's news media), and international
structures (including international organizations, norms, and regimes). Domestic Elements: The Military.
If the military acts in a way that the populace sees as contradicting the state's self-image (even if the
military is merely carrying out governmental policies), society can experience a corresponding cognitive
dissonance. In a democracy, the military takes its directives from the government; however, military
culture is instrumental in shaping the broader strategic culture encompassing foreign-policy
decisions—and role-identity—more generally. Most of the time, the relationship between the civilian
and military spheres resembles a symbiosis: commands are given by civilians and implemented by the
military, which in turn will advise and reshape subsequent policies. In some cases, ex-military personnel
will pursue a career in government on being discharged. However, it is possible for the military to
experience a sense of dissonance between a particular policy and its overall defense doctrine, or
ethic. Soldiers might articulate discomfort in carrying out a particular mission, or the number of
conscientious objectors may rise. In a country in which conscientious objection is previously unheard of,
the founding of such a movement will therefore signal an even higher degree of dissonance between
behavior and institutional role-identity. In examining foreign-policy shifts, the role of the military is
crucial in representing the degree of concordance between national role-identity and foreign policy. In
states where the military has particular salience for establishing national identity—those states with
mandatory and universal conscription, for instance—that institution will be particularly salient.
Their dependence on pragmatism to justify unrealistic internal link chains and counter
psychological methods creates the worst type of moral tunnel vision in which we
become incapable of understanding the carnage of our ideology – this makes ethics
impossible.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.47-48)
But it's always a good idea when seeking an explanation of the human motives behind actions to stick
with the empirical. With stated intentions and official rationales. Otherwise we give ourselves over to
psychobabble. Despite official denial by the Department of Defense that DU is harmful, a series of
explanations are now in place to account for the development and use of DU weapons. DU is costeffective, militarily efficient, and turns to productive use a waste product we'd otherwise have to
dispose of at great cost. In a variety of ways for the past two days: "We who leave here in sorrow know
that we will one day be reunited with her in joy." My concern here is not with the ontological status of
this preposterous belief, but with its psychological function as a guarantee that offers human beings a
way to deprive death of its finality. And the terror that prospect entails. The function of guarantees is to
enable human beings to bear events and contingencies that would otherwise be too traumatic. There is
much that we can face apparently only by denying. Such perhaps is one accurate estimation of what it
means lo be a human being, to remain a child of one's needs and desires disguising that fact in the form
of beliefs and ideas. The primary purpose of religion, philosophy, and culture has been to provide
conceptual, psychological, and emotional guarantees so I hat traumatic events become part of a larger
framework that assures the realization of our hopes and dreams. Without such supports, most people
supposedly would find life unlivable. Through the ministry of the guarantees we banish those thoughts
and feelings that we are convinced would deprive life of meaning, plunging us into despair. Experience,
accordingly, becomes the movement from and to the affirmation of the guarantees through their
imposition on events. The main line of Western philosophy can most profitably be seen as I series of
efforts to provide a ground for the guarantees. That effort achieves one of its culminations in Hegel who
defined the purpose of philosophy as the elimination of the contingent. As father of the philosophy of
history, he offered that new discipline a single goal: to demonstrate that the rational is real and the real
rational; that history is the story of progress, liberty, the realization of a universal humanity Or, to put it
in vulgar terms, democracy and civilization are on the march and will soon sweep the entire Middle East.
In order to triumph over the contingencies of existence—doubt about oneself, one's place in the world,
and one's final end—many guarantees are needed. Moreover, they must form a system of reinforcing
beliefs such that if one guarantee is threatened other guarantees come in to fill the breach. Thereby the
function of the system as a whole is assured. Within the system of guarantees one guarantee, however,
is superordinate. The belief that human nature is basically good. As animal rationale we are endowed
with an ahistorical essence that cannot be lost. Evil is an aberration. Consequently, I here's always
reason for hope and the belief that no matter how bad things get we'll always find a way to recover
everything that I lie guarantees assure. Psyche. It's all a matter of pragmatic efficiency with a little
capitalist profit motive thrown in for good measure. There's only one thing wrong with this explanation.
It leaves out the basis for the calculus. There's every reason to use DU and no reason not to use it if, and
only if, one rationale informs all decisions. How to maximize death, regardless of consequences or
alternatives. Introduce any countervailing motives and the entire chain of decisions becomes
questionable. Conscious, stated intentions then reveal themselves as functions of something else that
has been conveniently rendered unconscious. What looks like a purely pragmatic matter devoid of
psychological motives now reveals the opposite: the fact that Thanatos so inhabits the system that the
absence of anything opposed to it "goes without saying." Thanatos has become what Wittgenstein
called a "form of life,"7 a way of being so deeply rooted that it operates automatically, habitually, and of
necessity. It has become a collective unconscious. And as such it is no longer accessible to those whose
intentions conceal and reveal it. The reason for sticking with the empirical is now clear. There is
something insane in the empirical. That is what the historian must uncover. Before we ask ourselves
how this situation came to pass we need to ask another question. For it's easy to claim we don't know
about such things because the media refuses to tell us about them. There's another reason for our
ignorance, however, and it's the one we need to confront. I refer to the possibility that we choose our
ignorance because otherwise we'd lose the system of guarantees we depend on for our identity and our
understanding of history. As Barbara Bush put it in telling Diane Sawyer why she doesn't watch the
news: "Why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen,
and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my
beautiful mind on something like that?"8 It would be easy to deride Mrs. Bush, to congratulate oneself
on not sharing her attitude. What I hope to show, however, is that on an essential level, one
determinative in the last instance, we are in full agreement with her and delude ourselves as long as we
think otherwise.
IR SPECIFIC – The method of the affirmative best supplements our understanding of
international relations by including elements that are absent in normal policy
examinations of international relations.
Sucharov, 2005
(Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, “The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for IsraeliPalestinian Peace,” pg 18-20)
It has long been argued that even within the confines of rational-choice approaches, the nature of a
decision-maker's preferences cannot be assumed a priori, and indeed their distinctiveness derives from
factors ranging from emotions to personality to the selective use of historical analogies. Emotion, in
short, can be considered the sine qua non of social life, a realization that has recently begun to
permeate international relations theory. Moreover, the concept of the unconscious that anchors
psychoanalysis can illuminate the question of why an individual experiences a sense of dissonance when
her actions do not conform to her identity; the mechanism by which the dissonance between action and
identity can become unbearable; and therefore why humans experience the need to match the two. The
unconscious is that aspect of the self that remains the most untapped yet potentially the most satisfying
determinant of action, coming, as it does, early in the causal chain. At its most basic, the unconscious is
simply the repository for those characteristics that an actor fears adopting; in other words, "action
fantasies" that the actor despises but can plausibly entertain. This fundamental tension between the
feared and the imaginable is what normally keeps these fantasies in check, and is what makes the
unconscious so potentially powerful as an explanatory tool. And while the unconscious is an admittedly
contested concept, scholars from various fields have issued tentative calls for its exploration, and
convincing deductive and empirical research certainly justify its consideration. One theoretical
perspective that has been criticized for ignoring the unconscious is sociology's symbolic interactionism,
an approach that underpins constructivism in international relations. Part of the reason for the tension
between sociology, including symbolic interactionism, and psychoanalysis arguably lies in an antiquated
understanding of psychology: the false belief that to employ psychology as an explanatory approach,
one must ignore the impact that one's social environment has on one's personality, self-image, and
behavior. However, contemporary psychoanalysis presents a view of the self that is more relational than
what Freudian drive theory had suggested. A psychoanalytic approach does not have to assume that
unconscious or otherwise emotional factors arise from the actor independent of the shared
understandings that define the social environment. Admitting an explanatory role for the unconscious
therefore does not imply a rejection of intersubjectivity, mutual-constitution, or any of the other
organizing principles of sociology and constructivism. Rather, it simply means that ideas held in the
unconscious serve as one filter through which actors interpret social interaction. The unconscious,
therefore, may be understood either as one element of agency that the actor brings to interpreting his
social script, or as itself the product of social forces that interpret and constrain action. The first
perspective assumes that agency does not have to be conscious to be meaningful; agency at its most
basic can simply imply action, and intentionality can therefore encompass an unconscious component.
The second view means that the unconscious does not have to be understood as a pre-wired
component of the unit that in turn shapes behavior; rather it can be viewed as an emergent and
mediating phenomenon. We can therefore understand cognition as being inherently situated within
social processes. This is consistent with a relational view of social life, and yet it is an important
theoretical addition to the prevailing wisdom in international relations about how social understandings
ultimately shape behavior. A final contribution that psychoanalysis can make to our understanding of
international relations—and conflict resolution in particular—is its assumption that entrenched behavior
patterns can be altered through cognitive and emotional insight. In addition to challenging the static
conception of "human nature" that underpinned classical realism (arguably the first theory of
international relations) and that provided a rather pessimistic view of human affairs, this assumption is a
valuable addition to any theory of international relations in which the prevailing theories of action—
material power in the case of states, polarity in the case of state systems—are difficult, if not impossible
to manipulate. As a result, many of the most prominent international relations theories have lacked
meaningful policy implications. Conversely, psychoanalytic theory suggests tools for ameliorating some
of the most pressing global problems, including protracted conflict and war. While some
psychoanalytically based conflict-resolution approaches use the focus-group format to simulate the
healing function of the therapy setting, this book demonstrates that the gaining of conscious insight into
one's role deviation—a prerequisite for policy change—can come about through real-life international
interaction that requires neither a skilled conflict practitioner nor the willingness of elites to participate
in such an exercise. Rather, under certain conditions, role conflict can prompt domestic and
international elements to hold a "mirror" to the face of elites, resulting in a collective cognitive
dissonance that can lead to policy change. This mirror can take a number of forms—acts of protest by
domestic groups, media coverage, and actions by allies, adversaries or international structures. These
sources will be discussed further.
IR SPECIFIC – What their internal links consider to be “self-interest” for a state doesn’t
actually exist. States are not sentient. Instead, they are composed by a collection of
minds that act in self-interest, which means that psychoanalytic evaluation of the self
is a prior question to understanding the interests of the state.
Sucharov, 2005
(Mira M., assistant professor of Political Science at Carleton University, “The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for IsraeliPalestinian Peace,” pg 21-22)
Rather than referring to a notion of collective selfhood that is shared by multiple states- as some
constructivist theorists of "collective identity" would maintain—the title of this book, "the international
self," is meant to suggest not only that each state possesses a distinctive identity, but that this identity
develops out of the state's relationship with other international actors. This concept also implies that
decisions emanating from the polity are derived from a process not simply the sum of the state's
"parts." Yet while we have already shown that psychoanalysis can accommodate a role for
environmental processes in shaping behavior, we still need to be aware of the risks of
anthropomorphizing the state, a practice that gets to the heart of the debate between two analytical
positions that cut across the social sciences: methodological individualism and holism. While
methodological individualism views social life as the product of actions taken by individuals, holism
understands the group to be a meaningful unit in and of itself. Yet, to an extent, the debate between the
two perspectives is already fixed. While the holists have in their favor a precedent of semantic habit—
we tend to anthropomorphize the state in everyday speech more often than not (e.g., "Washington
decided to wage war against al-Qaeda")—methodological individualism is allied with the rich literature
of rational choice, and more prosaically the commonsense discomfort that arises when we ascribe
human characteristics to things, including groups. Groups do not have "minds" any more than do other
social facts, and group behavior is, after all, the product of individuals acting on the group's behalf.
Finally, given the presence of disparate individuals and subgroups constituting any society, it can be
misleading to attribute a single group "consciousness" to a political entity. In a foreign-policy context,
accordingly, adherents of this view would focus on elite attitudes, bureaucratic politics, and/or
interest group activities to tease out the causal relationship between Intentions and outcomes. Yet a
strong case can be made for the emergent properties of states and their policy processes: something
happens between the point at which citizens articulate preferences and those preferences are
translated into policies. Insofar as elite decisions do not always reflect the opinion of the majority,
there remains some degree of independent agency that may very well accrue to the state as a whole.
Under this reasoning, it would be plausible to assert the existence of an overarching group self, as
Alexander Wendt does when he claims that "states are people too." In addition to the views of
significant strands of psychoanalytic thought (which would not necessarily be expected to assume that
units other than the individual can be psychoanalyzed), the idea of a group self enjoys far-reaching
support across the social sciences—international relations included. This includes neorealism's
assumption that the state is a unitary actor, the Collective self hood implied by social identity theory,
the concept of "political culture," early psychoanalytic assumptions about the group, as well as studies
on obedience, group-think, and the "crowd" phenomenon. There is a reason why scholars are drawn to
the group as a unit of analysis—witness anthropologists' concern with tribes and civilizations,
sociologists' focus on street gangs and societies, and political scientists' emphasis on states and
transnational actors. Group behavior and individual behavior are not necessarily identical. Nor can an
individual be expected to behave the same way in the context of a group as he or she would alone.
Moreover, constructivism goes so far as to assume the possibility of shared norms across states, a claim
that has enjoyed much empirical support during the first active decade of constructivist research. It is
much more defensible to argue the existence of a collective identity within a state, the boundaries of
which contain degrees of centralized media, language, and other discursive channels for cultural
dissemination, and which prescribe the roles that the group's members are expected to perform
within the context of that group. And if different subgroups within the state disseminate disparate
narratives, we can assume that the most dominant group within society (as defined by some
combination of ethnicity, class, or gender) has custody over a single, consequential 'dominant' narrative.
Finally, even if we choose to ascribe a state's national ethos to its elites, we need to remember that
state leaders are the product of the society in which they were reared. This view would effectively
mitigate the tension between elite- and mass-level phenomena in international relations, since both
elites and masses are socialized by the overarching structure of the collective.
A2 – Disadvantages
The internal link’s dependence on rationality only serves to protect us from the
unknown that the future holds. This ultimately reduces all forms of knowledge to
something that can be calculated, which ensures violence. The only way to reverse
this trend is to force a confrontation with tragedy and the unknown.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.51-52)
Emotional: The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves. Whatever threatens that
feeling must be exorcised. Health, normalcy, and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings. Hope
and optimism aren't just healthy attitudes; they are requirements of our nature. Biologically wired. We
cannot remain for long in trauma. Recovery, moreover, must restore our faith in the guarantees and our
hopes for the future. The need for hope is, In fact, the capstone of the entire system of guarantees. Yet it too
apparently has a history. Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent
depression and anxiety. Informed of this fact by Bill Maher, the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the
spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture: "Don't they know that depression is a good thing; that it's
something you have to go through in order to grow?" Not anymore.
The key to understanding the power of the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise. Thanks to
religion, death, suffering, and evil are deprived of their power. Through the attainment of reason, all other
forms of consciousness and what they might reveal are put in their place. Poetic knowing is deprived both of
its legitimacy and its terror. Science, as fulfillment of reason, assures us of domination over nature.
What Heidegger termed technoscientific rationality becomes the measure of what is real. Belief in
historical progress banishes the recurrent suspicion that history may lack direction or, even worse, move
to the darkest of ends. The condition is thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic
events such as 9-11 except as occasions to take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and
restore our guarantees. It is in the personal order, however, that the guarantees do their deepest work.
Psychologically, belief in the self or self-identity exorcises the most frightening contingency: that there is a void
at the center of the American psyche with panic anxiety and its corollary, compulsive consumption, the
expression of a desperate non-identity. That specter brings us before the greatest fear: that our psyche,
not our conscious, deliberative intentions, is the author of our actions, an author who will do anything in
order to feel safe, secure, and righteous. All of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a
single necessity: the need to feel good about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing
anything that would trouble us. Resolution, catharsis (i.e., the discharge of painful tensions or awareness), and
renewal emerge as the needs that bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it
impossible for us to know. It is easy to deprecate Dubya and, apparently, to hold onto the idea that he's a
temporary aberration. But the problem goes deeper. To revive a battle cry from the 1960s, insofar as one
is wedded to any one of the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution. For the grandest
function of the system of guarantees, as a whole and in each one of its parts, is to blind us to history.
And so to take up again the question stated previously, how did the situation now being created in Iraq
come about? The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for
America a repressed history.
The negative is attempting to apply reason to ethics and psychology. This only creates
a hard understanding of our inner psyche, which is a loss of the self that outweighs
every other impact.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.174-175)
This recognition implies a primary question. What is the nature and extent of the ethical responsibility
human beings have for such a condition? To what extent can evil and the actions that flow from it be
said to be chosen in the exercise of a freedom for which one bears ethical responsibility? Traditionally
ethical responsibility only applies to actions that are taken after deliberation and with full knowledge
of the consequences: actions where choice is a function of our ability to reason; where the moral law
is known; and where one chooses to violate it for motives that can be specified as functions of a selfinterest that overrides all other motives and considerations. Mitigate any of these factors and one
mitigates ethical responsibility. Ethical responsibility is compromised or eliminated, for example, if
one's action is determined by forces outside one's control: if one acts without premeditation, under
duress, in blind obedience to customs or authorities, as the result of a pathology, because of some
limitation in the ability to think or to understand the consequences of one's action, or because one
acted without any conscious intention to do wrong. However deplorable their deeds the mad, for
example, are not evil. Evil requires consciousness, choice, freedom. If evil is to be a human possibility
on a par with the possibility of goodness it must be something that is determined within the order of
freedom. The trouble with the traditional understanding of these conditions, however, is the effort to
confine them within the limits of rationalism and a purely cognitive model of the mind. Rationality is
noble but single-minded devotion to it leaves the true life of the psyche undetected. Focusing on it
prematurely shifts discussion to a rarefied mode of mentation that is then cut off from the rest of the
personality. To sustain and deny that split reason is then given disproportionate weight in determining
what we are and do. But the dream of reason is precisely that. A dream: a desire—to bring one's being
into correspondence with reason and thereby eliminate everything else, especially in determining the
questions of ethics. No one brought this dream to bear on moral experience more rigorously than
Immanuel Kant. That effort is the sublime beauty of his thought. But experiencing oneself in terms of a
priori rationality comes at a terrible cost. Life becomes a process in which we sleepwalk our way
through most of what we do because we've cut ourselves off from the actual bases of our actions. Our
psyche becomes a stranger to us. We fixate on giving rational accounts of ourselves and in the process
alienate ourselves from everything else. Emotions become irrationalities, breaks with reason, things
we must overcome; or, worse, things we can only acknowledge when they are good, proper, and in
tune with reason. The rest of our being becomes brute inclinations, frailties of our nature, desires that
disrupt an otherwise rational identity. As a result, in terms of ethics, whether we know it or not, under the
guise of reason we've made an offer that most human beings cannot refuse. Claiming not to consciously intend
what one does has become the grand excuse. Traditional definitions of the three cardinal categories of ethics are a
monument to that motive. Restricting intention, motive, and choice to the canons of rationality fashions them to
the designs of human mendacity. For if by intention we mean a deliberate rational choice with full knowledge of
the consequences, evil, as I've described it, is not chosen. If along the same lines we restrict motive lo purposes for
which we bear responsibility because they issue not from frailties of our nature or the force of circumstances but
from an explicit knowledge of what one is doing and why, evil, as thus far described, does not exist within the
order of human motivation. One can identify self-interest, careerism, and happiness as motives, but to say that
many agents act in order to advance Thanatos is hard to fathom. Unless, that is, we expand the category of motive
to include purposes that derive from the psyche in all its inherent conflictedness. But once posit such a possibility,
choice becomes a concept that must be rethought in a radically new way.
Their internal links are symptoms of the fantasy that we strive to maintain. This logic
becomes used to justify atrocity. The affirmative’s rejection of attempting to control
the future allows alternate practices to emerge. Vote affirmative to traverse the
fantasy of their internal link chains. Even if you don’t think we can solve, the 1AC is a
more productive through experiment than their disad.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.63-65)
"Is there anything more evil than shooting children in a school yard or flying planes into buildings?" One
hears this rhetorical question often today. Getting it firmly implanted in our minds seems to be one of
the current ideological functions of the media. A correct response requires careful reflection on the
circumstance that underlies the knee-jerk response thanks to the power of the image it conjures up. The
promise inherent in Technoscientificrationality is deliverance from images. Killing for it, like everything
else, occurs at a distance. In the inaugural moment: Tibbets in the cockpit of the Enola Gay unable to
imagine what he has just done as a human act. "It was all impersonal."12 And today: in the silent, secret,
midnight ways that radiation poisoning works from within, like a deed without a doer, separated in
space and time from its absent cause. Perhaps killing at a distance is the greater evil precisely because it
abrogates the image and the human connection between slayer and slain. If I kill another man with my
bare hands my deed is immediate to my embodied consciousness. To kill that way you have to feel hate,
fear, anguish, remorse, etc. whereas to kill from a distance or through an invisible contamination is to
render the whole thing impersonal. With the desired result: the ability, for example, of the man who
dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, incinerating 600,000 people in a second and condemning another
300,000 to the condition of hibakusha, the walking dead, to boast for over 59 years now that he has
never felt a moment of regret or remorse. Tibbets' lack of moral imagination is one with his
representative status as precursor. For now it's easy to litter a landscape with DU while denying that the
stuff has any long-term medical or environmental effects.13 The evil of killing at a distance is that it
makes death unreal. Protected from the image, all who participate in the deed are delivered over to a
pure and impersonal calculus. (An aside: if we really want to support our troops we must achieve for
them a new Bill of Rights. No one should ever be ordered to use weapons without being given a full
knowledge of the long-term human and environmental consequences of those weapons. To do
otherwise is to deprive our soldiers of the choice that makes them human.) The powers that be learned
one lesson from Vietnam. No more images. The mistake was to let us see the carnage up close every
night on TV. The news as image entered our consciousness at the register where genuine change begins.
Where horror is felt, free of the tyranny of the concept and the hypnotic power of the guarantees.
Desert Storm was the corrective: the Nintendo war, a war broadcast to look just like one of the video
games we'd been programmed to love. Prohibition of the image is now a fundamental article of faith.
No images are allowed to come back to us from Iraq II. (Michael Moore's real crime was to give us a
brief glimpse at what the mainstream media proscribe.) Abolition of the image is one of the primary
conditions of ecocide. Everything must be rendered abstract, invisible, unreal. No image can be allowed
to trouble our sleep, to lacerate our soul. For then we might begin to know that there is indeed an evil
far worse than shooting children in schoolyards or flying airplanes into buildings. To move us toward
that knowledge let me end with the forbidden, which I must here attempt to convey solely through the
more abstract medium of words since I've not yet gained permission to reproduce a photograph I saw
not long ago. It's the picture of an Iraqi baby, a victim of DU, who was born with no nose, mouth, eyes,
anus or genitals and with flipper limbs, a common result of radiation exposure in utero. That child's body,
full of red open ulcers, is twisted in knots, its ulcerated face contorted in a look of unspeakable suffering.
An authentic image of the sacredness of human life. Of the preciousness of every breath. To look at that
child is to realize one's duty to mourn it, to give voice to its right to invade Our consciousness and
expose the evil of those who prate on about being pro-life while refusing to let us see what they've
reduced life to. Luke, 17:1-2. The image of that child must become the force in our minds that motivates
us to deracinate all guarantees that shield us from the reality of that child's situation. Or to put it
another way: every time one demands catharsis, resolution, and renewal that child is born again,
condemned to its writhing. That is why its image must embolden us to question the most hallowed of
the guarantees, the one I've refrained from discussing until now. In the face of such evil what is to be
done? Is resistance ever justified in resorting to violence? No, we are told, because "if we do so we
become just like them." This ethical principle supposedly applies universally and atemporally. It does so,
however, because it assures t he guarantee that no matter what happens we'll never get our hands
dirty. History can't intrude on the categorical imperative. Whatever action one takes one must maintain
one's ethical purity. Even if that means there is nothing one can do and after it's been demonstrated I
hat there are no non-violent ways to change the situation. Perhaps we can no longer allow ourselves the
luxury of such an ethic. Bush did the moral imagination one favor. His pre-emptive unilateralism made
official what has been clear for so long but denied due to its implications. There is no body to which we
can turn for Justice: not the U.N., the World Court, or any other framework of international law. The U.S.
will flaunt its contempt for such bodies whenever it suits its purpose. And thus another mode of
peaceful, non-violent praxis is deprived of its guarantee.
A2 – Counterplans
Their counterplan still attempts to maintain some type of guarantee for the future.
Their obsession with security and the future fail to force a confrontation with the
trauma of the unknown - this means that only the aff can solve. Anything else results
in a return to the ideology of security.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.38-39)
But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way. I
have termed it the guarantees. By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect
ourselves from the reality of historical trauma. The significance of events—the Shoah, Hiroshima, 9-11—
is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker
views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways, considering things about the human being that
we've persistently denied or marginalized. One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings
to traditional ways of thinking. That's why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the
attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain
and interpret it. The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated. A way has been
found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration, a temporary departure from
values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or
universal about " human nature." Something trans-historical. History may disrupt our essence but it
cannot destroy it. The concept of human nature—in all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and
psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychology—is the
primary way in which we endeavor to deny history. An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests
that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that
have nothing to do with "human nature" or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that
concept. Events put us as subjects—and as thinkers— into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves
and our world. The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed. Ideologists rush in to fill that void and
restore the guarantees. Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility
implicit in an event . That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for
history a radically different way of thinking. To put it concretely, a trauma cannot be resolved until it's
been constituted. The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task; indeed, to render
it impossible a priori. To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the
desire and demand for resolution. The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing
imperative: to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same
register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images, symbolic actions, and emotions that are of
equal depth but that move us in an antithetical direction—toward the inner transformation needed to
purge ourselves of Thanatos. Such an effort, however, cannot itself be yet another variant of the
guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values. If anything, the possibility
of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force
that death has within us. The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process
such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident. The
critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise. It must be the activation within our psyche
of a countervailing drama.
Any risk of “solvency” for the counterplan is a reason to vote aff because it is an
attempt to guarantee the future by pre-emptive action. Even claims of a “net-benefit”
are a link to the affirmative criticism. Only the aff forcibly confronts the unknown.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.51-52)
Emotional: The innermost need of human beings is to feel good about themselves. Whatever threatens that
feeling must be exorcised. Health, normalcy, and productivity depend on avoiding negative feelings. Hope
and optimism aren't just healthy attitudes; they are requirements of our nature. Biologically wired. We
cannot remain for long in trauma. Recovery, moreover, must restore our faith in the guarantees and our
hopes for the future. The need for hope is, In fact, the capstone of the entire system of guarantees. Yet it too
apparently has a history. Today over 10 million of our children are on prescription drugs to prevent
depression and anxiety. Informed of this fact by Bill Maher, the French actress Julie Delphy spoke the
spontaneous wisdom of an archaic culture: "Don't they know that depression is a good thing; that it's
something you have to go through in order to grow?" Not anymore. The key to understanding the power of
the guarantees is to understand the fears that they exorcise. Thanks to religion, death, suffering, and evil are
deprived of their power. Through the attainment of reason, all other forms of consciousness and what they
might reveal are put in their place. Poetic knowing is deprived both of its legitimacy and its terror. Science,
as fulfillment of reason, assures us of domination over nature. What Heidegger termed technoscientific
rationality becomes the measure of what is real. Belief in historical progress banishes the recurrent
suspicion that history may lack direction or, even worse, move to the darkest of ends. The condition is
thereby set that makes it impossible for us to experience traumatic events such as 9-11 except as occasions to
take whatever actions are needed to reaffirm our goodness and restore our guarantees. It is in the personal
order, however, that the guarantees do their deepest work. Psychologically, belief in the self or selfidentity exorcises the most frightening contingency: that there is a void at the center of the American psyche
with panic anxiety and its corollary, compulsive consumption, the expression of a desperate non-identity. That
specter brings us before the greatest fear: that our psyche, not our conscious, deliberative intentions, is
the author of our actions, an author who will do anything in order to feel safe, secure, and righteous. All
of our emotional needs then stand forth under the rule of a single necessity: the need to feel good
about oneself at whatever cost and to sustain hope by banishing anything that would trouble us.
Resolution, catharsis (i.e., the discharge of painful tensions or awareness), and renewal emerge as the needs that
bind us with an iron necessity to the guarantees and all that they make it impossible for us to know. It is easy to
deprecate Dubya and, apparently, to hold onto the idea that he's a temporary aberration. But the
problem goes deeper. To revive a battle cry from the 1960s, insofar as one is wedded to any one of
the guarantees one is part of the problem and not the solution. For the grandest function of
the system of guarantees, as a whole and in each one of its parts, is to blind us to history. And
so to take up again the question stated previously, how did the situation now being created in Iraq come about?
The next three sections constitute an attempt to answer that question by constructing for America a repressed
history.
Any net benefit to the counterplan links to the criticism of the affirmative and is a
reason that the counterplan cannot solve the affirmative. We must confront the
unknown to solve.
Davis, 2001
Watler A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative, Pg. 38-39
One upshoot of that act is a recovery of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos as a way of thinking about
history. In anticipation of later developments (chapter 4, part 2), I only present the basic lines of this
idea here. The depth-charge sounded by an Event is its ability to reveal that the relationship of Eros and
Thanatos is not eternal but historical to the core with the end of that dialectic entailing the possible
extinction of one of the terms. This is the spectre Freud exorcized by establishing a dualistic way of
conceptualizing the two categories. The alternative is an immanent dialectic, one where history as
contingency subjects everything to irreversible change with Thanatos a force in culture dedicated to the
extinction of Eros and with the power to bring about that closure to the "eternal" dialectic. Traumatic
events constitute an abrupt and painful reversal of the "eternal" dialectic because in them we fund Eros
deprived of all assurances. Contra Freud, there is nothing universal, biological, or ahistorical about "the
eternal battle." Both terms are fully implicated in history, caught up in processes Capable of producing
irreversible transformations. Forces in the psyche opposed to life, which we have persistently
marginalized in proclaiming our humanism, rise up in the Event to challenge all we believe about
"human nature" and history. Rather than a world grounded in love, the primacy of goodness in "human
nature," the achievement of rationality and the ameliorative virtues of the social process, the Event
reveals a world in which envy and hate stalk life, seeking a final solution that can only come with the
extinction of the antagonist. After such knowledge we can never begin again, cleansed of history,
restored, through its narration, to some essential humanistic identity, with all our fundamental beliefs in
essential goodness reaffirmed, Eros again pristine and empowered. Feeling the pressure of death as it
weighs upon and works within us becomes the gauge that measures the depth of our participation in
history. The Event rends all the masks that enable us to conceive evil as an aberrance. Existential
contingency unseats all essentializing views of human nature, revealing historicity as a process in which
Thanatos may be the drive informing "the reality principle." There is nothing in "human nature" that
protects us from this eventuality. Positing an essential, and always recoverable, nature outside history is
not the solution but part of the problem, the way we blind ourselves a priori to our situation.
Only a complete withdrawal from psychological guarantees can force us to confront
trauma. The counterplan’s insistence that there is something tangible that can be
manipulated or solved for is a link.
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.38-39)
But to undertake that task we must purge ourselves of the thing in ourselves that stands in the way. I
have termed it the guarantees. By that term I refer to all those assurances we set up a priori to protect
ourselves from the reality of historical trauma. The significance of events—the Shoah, Hiroshima, 9-11—
is their power to call such guarantees into question by exposing cherished beliefs to the claims of darker
views and by forcing us to think in radically new ways, considering things about the human being that
we've persistently denied or marginalized. One dimension of any traumatic event is the shock it brings
to traditional ways of thinking. That's why the dominant response to any historical trauma is the
attempt to restore the guarantees by finding a way t o impose them on the event in order to contain
and interpret it. The ideological function of the guarantee is thereby demonstrated. A way has been
found to limit the impact of the event by picturing it as an aberration, a temporary departure from
values and beliefs that can always be recovered because they constitute something essentialistic or
universal about " human nature." Something trans-historical. History may disrupt our essence but it
cannot destroy it. The concept of human nature—in all t h e variants constituting the philosophic and
psychological history of that idea from Plato and Aristotle through American self psychology—is the
primary way in which we endeavor to deny history. An event is traumatic precisely because it suggests
that history occurs beyond the limits we want to impose on it and therefore may move in directions that
have nothing to do with "human nature" or the cherished beliefs and values we derive from that
concept. Events put us as subjects—and as thinkers— into a traumatic relationship to both ourselves
and our world. The anxiety at the center of thought is revealed. Ideologists rush in to fill that void and
restore the guarantees. Our effort must be t o do the opposite and thereby sustain the vital possibility
implicit in an event . That possibility is to sustain a break with the guarantees and thereby find for
history a radically different way of thinking. To put it concretely, a trauma cannot be resolved until it's
been constituted. The Western Logos is a monument to t he effort to avoid t h a t task; indeed, to render
it impossible a priori. To reverse that tradition the things above all we must rid ourselves of are the
desire and demand for resolution. The recycling of the guarantees must give way to a n existentializing
imperative: to constitute and work within trauma in a way that addresses the psyche at the same
register as Gibson and Abu Ghraib do by creating images, symbolic actions, and emotions that are of
equal depth but that move us in an antithetical direction—toward the inner transformation needed to
purge ourselves of Thanatos. Such an effort, however, cannot itself be yet another variant of the
guarantees as happens when Love and Eros are posited as ahistorical values. If anything, the possibility
of Love is far more difficult and exacting than death because it can only arise by reversing the prior force
that death has within us. The following two sections offer a brief picture of the kind of agonistic process
such an effort entails in order to whet our appetite for something that should by now be evident. The
critique of ideology cannot be a merely intellectual exercise. It must be the activation within our psyche
of a countervailing drama.
A2 – Kritiks
Our ethics come first -- Discovery of the unconscious is crucial to the recognition of
responsibility by every subject- only our framework opens space for agency and
recognition of our choices- our ethics are crucial to understand the historical
contingencies that make up the status quo and open space for change
Davis, 2006
(Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University Death's Dream Kingdom pg.182-185)
Freud discovered more than the Unconscious. He discovered our responsibility for it; for becoming aware of
how what we repress rules our life and therefore our duty to gain knowledge of our unconscious as the
precondition for becoming an ethically responsible agent. In terms of ethics there's a quick way to
summarize the significance of the Unconscious. What we don't know about ourselves is what we do—to
the other. In calling us to such a reflection on ourselves Freud also taught us a new way to reflect, one
that forces us to move beyond the rational world of conscious deliberations and intentions. Once make
the psychoanalytic turn and the sources of self-knowledge increase exponentially. Every time one
understands a dream, a paraphraxis, an aesthetic experience, a fantasy, one suffers in principle a revolution
in one's life. For such experiences put one in touch with the deep conflicts that define the psyche. A dream, for
example, does not tell us about something outside the realm of our conscious grasp, though this view of
repression typifies how a convenient misunderstanding blunts the force of psychoanalysis. A good
dream reveals the desires and conflicts structuring our life. It thereby opens our quotidian life to an indepth exploration. Listen to a dream rightly and one finds that one must confront something one has been
avoiding—or doing. Such is what it would mean to assume responsibility for one's dreams. One would start to
live from an awareness of one's psyche rather than in a continued attempt to escape that awareness.
Freud doesn't abolish intention, he expands it by showing how often consciousness is defense mechanism and
rationality the cover that conceals the actual motives on which we act; and how often accordingly insistence
on conscious intentions is the lie we cling to in order to deny our responsibility. The seductive or
prohibitive way of relating that a parent adopts toward a child, for example, may carry as its primary
repressed intention the desire to wound that child in their sexuality. This is why it's so necessary at a
later point in time for such parents to deny that they ever harbored let alone acted on such an intention.
And yet our actions do indeed speak louder than words in conveying our actual intentions. Action is
concrete intentionality because it is through it that we live out our feelings, desires, and conflicts. And
they are what the other invariably receives, as a message that is often sharply different from what we
say, especially when through the exercise of intentionality we reassure ourselves about what good,
loving human beings we are. The psyche is a lonely hunter, avid in the pursuit of purposes it carefully
conceals from itself. The ethical greatness of Sigmund Freud is the crisis he introduced into that practice.
Rather than getting us off the hook, psychoanalysis sticks it far deeper in us than any previous ethic.
Intentionality is convenient because it absolves us of the greatest responsibility—responsibility for who we are.
Everything stays in the safely guarded space of deliberative, discursive, quasi-judicial rationality as if this
were the primary way we relate to ourselves or, to turn the screw a peg further, as if when we aren't
relating to ourselves this way we aren't fully moral agents fully responsible for our actions. But once let
responsibility expand into the inner life of the psyche and we take on a new ethical burden: to know
oneself in depth and not recoil in horror from what one learns or persist in virtuous denial of the hidden motives
one must confront in order to become responsible for one's psyche. Indeed, deliberation is itself transformed
by l he psychoanalytic turn. Freud shows that to deliberate correctly one must focus the inquiry on
those motives that one tries to conceal from oneself, since they are where the truth of one's conduct
may lie.
In terms of the problem of evil this line of thought has an obvious implication. Our primary responsibility,
which we continually shirk, is to find the evil in ourselves. Theoretically and emotionally the same thing
prevents that discovery: the desire to uphold the idea that human nature is inherently or basically good, with
evil an aberration, a fall, a break with the natural order of things, an exception to the rule of human decency.
Psychoanalysis, like history, renders such sentiments questionable at best. And irrelevant to where inquiry
must begin—with psychological conflict, the primary fact that defines us. To be human is to live denned
by wounds and disorders that are prior to the mediations (themselves rare) that result in a moral
character that can be termed good. Goodness is not something essentialistically guaranteed in a nature;
it's an achievement that comes through the overcoming of ways of being that have a foothold in us long
before some human beings take up the effort to reverse them.
Psychoanalysis from this point of view is neither pessimistic nor relativistic. It is humanistic in the
deepest way, seeing the human as an achievement and valuing it by demonstrating what that
achievement requires. Psychoanalysis doesn't point to ethical relativism. It points instead to an order of rank
among human beings based on the degree to which a knowledge of one's psyche has become the basis of one's
actions. Ethically, to know one's psyche is of necessity to engage in an effort to transform it, since inner change
is the only way to halt the projection of what otherwise does harm to others. Psychological change is the
primary task; ethics the result.
Their alternative misses the point. In lieu of a criticism of the affirmative, it is a much
better act to internalize our anxiety and explore the effects within the psyche. This
allows us an uncastrated interaction with reality.
Davis, 2001
Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative, pg. xviii-xix
Virginia Woolf said that "in or about December 1910 human nature changed." She would have recorded
a similar shock in August of 1945. The change Woolf witnessed has now, of course, been safely
domesticated and has a local habitation and a name: modernism. The second change also has a name—
postmodernism—but the ideologies most closely associated with its development remain mired in the
first moment of an arrested dialectic.12 Irony and aporia dominate the "postmodern sensibility"
because its considerable energies are devoted to a displacement of the Event that remains at the center
of our collective historical Unconscious—the referent that serves as the motive behind the denial of
reference. Reference must be continually deferred, then rendered impossible, because anxiety and
flight from that anxiety define our actual response to the one referent that will continue to weigh on our
consciousness until we restore the proper dialectical direction and move from the delights of skeptical
play to a recovery of the demands of unhappy consciousness. Einstein said "the Bomb changed
everything—except the ways we think." As such, it is the inwardness of our inwardness, never more so
perhaps than when we use deconstructive irony as the master trope that delivers us from the burden of
a historically situated subjectivity or, at that opposite extreme that amounts to the same thing, when we
reassert an essentialist humanism as the fixed and universal system of understanding and explanation
that washes us clean of history and its contingencies. What if we broke with both strategies—and rather
than deconstructing the Bomb or containing it we tried to internalize it and then trace the ways it
explodes and implodes within the psyche? Such an effort would take as its goal a reconstitution of the
tragic as the dialectical category that provides the only adequate idea for comprehending—and
existing—in the present. Such a humanism, however, confronts as its prior and primary task a
deracination of the system of guarantees on which previous "humanisms" have depended. For the
function of that system, with respect to history, has been to establish, as canons of research and
explanation, a set of essentialistic concepts of meaning, logic, and human nature that function to
insulate historians and their audiences so that horror can never be more than the temporary aberration
from which we always, of necessity, recover. The narration of History thereby becomes yet another
occasion for deploying—and thereby reinforcing—the central beliefs and Values of the humanistic
tradition. That tradition thus provides the ego, or identity-principle, that "we" (the community of
humanistic interpreters) move from and to in dealing with events that challenge our certainties.13 We
love to read and write histories because such stories tell us who we already know we are, while
conveniently exorcizing the threat of those accounts that would hold up a different mirror to our nature.
History is, indeed, a "fiction," the corpse over which we warm ourselves so that we may rise cleansed,
catharted, the system of needs, beliefs, and guarantees restored—with existence the self-reference
perpetually deferred. What if, instead, we approached history as a reality—and a discipline— in which
we must risk ourselves utterly? One in which to know is to suffer irreversible change in one's beliefs,
values, and even in one's "identity," with nothing in the logos of thought able to protect us from that
possibility? The reign of the a priori would thereby come to an end, the principle of hope a category
we'd risk, not one we'd need to renew at whatever cost. Could such an engagement constitute the true
"force and signification" of Hiroshima16 and thereby evidence that events in history are the true
"Absolute" that abide with us—the gift of the past to the future as that call of conscience requiring of us
no less than a fundamentally new understanding of the human psyche and the human condition?
The permutation solves – psychoanalytical evaluation of our anxiety and our reliance
on stability and security are prior questions to the alternative and the framework of
the criticism. The alternative is still castrated by desire, which means that it does not
access proper historical context.
Davis, 2006
Walter A., professor emeritus at The Ohio State University, Deracinations: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative, pg. 1-3
In August 1945 Elias Canetti writes the following in his journal: "A tormenting thought; as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without
noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn't notice. Our
task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn't have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction."1 What Canetti
can't see is that the point he refers to is the one he inhabits. He can't see it because it is too close and blinds him (as it would soon the
inhabitants of two cities) with a light not of this world. The
proliferation of new theories of history in recent decades is
itself a response to a historical situation—that defined by the Bomb. That connection is also what these
theories cannot know about themselves and ceaselessly displace in teaching us all the new ways we
can know and write about the past. What they do know is that the assumptions and guarantees on
which historians have traditionally relied in constituting their subject and the needs that histories
fulfill in offering us an account of events structured by these guarantees are no longer adequate to a
contemporary awareness of history and historicity.2 To cite the major developments (though in no necessary order of
importance):3 1. Foucault's concept of genealogical history and the archeology of knowledge and its creative extension in the new historicist
methodologies developed by Stephen Greenblatt and his circle. 2. The hermeneutic theories of history and historical explanation developed by
Gadamer, Habermas, and Ricoeur, with special note given to Ricoeur's development of a complex theory of time and narrative. 3. Derrida's
recent work on Marx and Benjamin and his continuing effort to expose the Hegelian assumptions about history, progress, and the logos which
structure the way history is narrated by historians who know little or nothing of Hegel. 4. Althusser, Sartre, Gramsci, and the many often
sharply opposed approaches to history developed in recent years by Marxists as different as Frederic Jameson, G. A. Cohen, Perry Anderson,
and Stuart Hall. 5. The recovery of Kant's speculations on history and its recent extension in Lyotard's theory of the differend. 6. The attempts
by Slavoj Zizek, Joan Copjec, and Teresa Brennan to articulate the theory of history implicit in Lacan. 7. The massive significance of Walter
Benjamin's speculations, the continued vitality of Adorno and the Frankfurt school, and the renewed interest in the thought of Kenneth Burke.
8. The work of Louis O. Mink, Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Roy Schafer, and others on the narrative and tropological principles that shape
the writing of history. To this list one can add Collingwood and McKeon's earlier theorizing about history, the work of Braudel, Baudrillard,
deCerteau, Calinescu, and Bourdieu and the new modes of historical writing and historical investigation developed by anthropologists such as
Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and Natalie Zemon Davis. The list is by no means complete because one must add to it two developments that
may be of greater significance and that complicate the issue of the historical. I refer, first, to the
number of alternative histories
that have emerged in recent years thanks to feminist, multicultural, postcolonial, subaltern, and queer studies. Such works have
contributed more than new knowledge to our understanding of the past. They have broken with the logic, the
procedures, and the ruling assumptions of traditional historical methodologies by showing how that logic has as its primary function the
exclusion (or marginalization) of "voices" that challenge its hegemony and the motives that inform its explanations. Such studies are not merely
of local interest. They
entail a theoretical crisis: the recognition that the principles of historical explanation
that we regard as true, rational, objective, and universal are cultural, conventional, ideological, and
deeply implicated in power and the repressions required for its maintenance. Ways of thinking derived from
other cultures or voices silenced by the dominant culture may provide precisely the critical handle required to understand what is really at work
in the privileging of certain canons of reasoning and explanation as scientific and "objective" and the rejection of other experiences and ways of
thinking as illegitimate and unfounded. The
true bite of the multicultural— seldom honored because it cuts in every direction—is
the idea that none of us are locked into privileging our own culture and "subject position(s)." We can
gain distance from our frameworks by immersing ourselves in other ways of thinking. We can then
use that experience to become aware of things that our culture and its dominant interest groups do
not want to know about themselves. The implication of such an orientation for history is considerable, since historical
explanation is perhaps the primary way in which a community establishes the structures of belief, mind, and feeling on which it depends in
giving an "identity" to its members.4 Thanks
to the explosion of the multicultural, we now have a way to
internally distance ourselves from such beliefs and practices, even perhaps, following Nietzsche, to touch all that "goes
without saying" with the hammer as with a tuning fork.
Case Stuff
War on Terror Bad
The myth of effective security fosters a violent project that necessitates the creation
of terrorists to be sacrificed on the altar of society
McGowan, 2013
Associate Professor at the University of Vermont (Todd, Enjoying What We Don’t Have, Project Muse)
The fundamental barrier to the establishment of an authentic social bond is the resistance to avowing the traumatic nature of that bond. We
use the pleasure that accompanies the bombing of Afghanistan to disguise the shared enjoyment we
experience through the traumatic experience of loss. But this pleasure inevitably disappoints us and
triggers the belief that someone has stolen the complete pleasure that we expected to experience. This
is why there can properly be no end to the War on Terror, no end to the list of countries that the United
States plans to invade to attain complete security, no end to the number of terrorist leaders executed.31
Complete security, like complete pleasure, is mythical. It attempts to bypass the one experience that
cannot be bypassed — the foundational experience of loss — and it is this experience that holds the key
to an authentic social bond. The structure of society (which is the result of the structure of signification) is such that it
blinds the subject to the possibility of shared sacrifice and the social bond that results from it. No matter
how often children hear the ideology of sharing or how many times we repeat to them the gospel of fairness, they will inevitably believe that
their sacrifice has enabled others to enjoy more than their proper share or unfairly.
Loss of the Self
Surveillance devastates the gap between the Self and our informaticized bodies – the
total knowledge it provides deprives one of the ability to function as a subject,
eradicating one’s identity – this results in complete annihilation
Friesen et al, 2012
Dr. Norm Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University. His academic credentials include a PhD in
Education from the University of Alberta. Andrew Feenberg, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University. Grace Smith, Arapiki Solutions,
Inc. (Norm Friesen, Andrew Feenberg, Grace Smith, and Shannon Lowe, 2012, “Experiencing Surveillance”, pp. 82-83, (Re)Inventing The
Internet, http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-6091-734-9_4)
Students of surveillance have been so impressed by the ever-growing completeness of this data image that they animate it as though it were an
actual person. Identity is seen as coeval with an assemblage of traces rather than with actual presence. Thus, van der Ploeg writes of “the
inability to distinguish between ’the body itself’ and ’body information”’ (van der Ploeg, 2003, p. 69). Haggerty and Ericson similarly write, the
surveillance assemblage standardizes the capture of flesh/information flows of the human body. It is not
so much immediately concerned with the direct physical relocation of the human body (although this may be an ultimate consequence),
but with transforming the body into pure information, such that it can be rendered more mobile and
comparable. (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000, p. 613) There is something right about this turn in surveillance theory, and yet it is obvious that we
are still able to distinguish the real person from the traces that person leaves behind. The trace is bound to us by its origin and often by internal
signs of various sorts, so we do not quite leave it behind after all. And yet we do not want to drag along every trace of our passage through life.
We count on the erasure of most traces. It is this erasure that enables us to face the world afresh each day and to face it with a self-image we
construct at least partially anew for each new situation in which we find ourselves. In existential–phenomenological terms, privacy
and
secrecy are centrally constitutive of self and selfhood. Holding something private or secret emphasizes
the difference between self and other, and confirms the autonomy of one’s interiority and individuality.
“Secrecy secures, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside of the obvious world,” as Simmel (1906, p. 462) puts it. In
contemporary conditions of surveillance and dataveillance, subjectivity itself is dependent on maintaining
the gap between our embodied selves and our informaticized bodies. It would be intolerable for
everyone to have full access to our salary, the details of our relations to our family, our medical
histories, sexual proclivities, and so on. Such knowledge would completely objectify us and force us to
live up to (or down to) the image of ourselves implied in this knowledge. Like Sartre’s spy at the keyhole,
himself espied, we would be evacuated of those aspects of identity and interiority concealed within us,
frozen in the objectifying gaze of the other, and essentially deprived of our ability to function as a
subject. We could no longer choose to project an identity appropriate to our inclination and situation as
everything having to do with our identity would have been pre-empted. Truly, to be completely “outed”
is to be annihilated.
The gaze of surveillance invades and traps one psychologically, rendering one
enslaved
Vaz, 1995
(Angelina, Fall 1995, Dalhousie French Studies Vol. 32, Mises en scène du regard (Fall 1995), pp. 37-38, “Who's Got the Look? Sartre's Gaze and
Foucault's Panopticism”, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40837004)
This grand formula is even applicable at the level of an encounter between two individuals where the theme of “subjection by exposure” is
dominant. As
Sartre says, “being-seen constitutes me as a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my
freedom […]. I am a slave to the degree that my being is dependent at my center of a freedom which is
not mine and which is the very condition of my being” (Being, p. 358). In this sense, the gaze does not just
create and invade physical spaces; there is a sense in which the gaze invades and traps me
psychologically. As a temporal-spatial object in the world, being locked at forces me to apprehend myself as the
object of the Other’s unknowable appraisals-of value judgments. And these value judgments affect me.
Thus, as the “object of values which come to qualify me without my being able to act on this
qualification, or even to know it, I am enslaved” (p. 358).
AT: Psych not falsifiable/Psych Bad
Psychoanalysis is both falsifiable and accurate
Grant and Harari, 2005
(Don and Edwin, psychiatrists, “Psychoanalysis, science and the seductive theory of Karl Popper,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of
Psychiatry 39)
Attacks on psychoanalysis and the long-term therapies derived from it, have enjoyed a long history and much publicity [1-4]. Yet, the
justification for such attacks has been challenged on many grounds, including their methodology [5] and the empirically demonstrable va- lidity
of core psychoanalytic concepts [6,7]. Also, bur-
geoning neuroscience research, some of which is sum- marized below,
indicates likely neurological correlates for many key clinically derived psychoanalytic concepts such as
self-coherence [8], repression [9] and projective identification [10].
Furthermore, the
effectiveness of psychoanalysis and its derivative therapies has been supported by empirical research [11,12], particularly for patients with DSM axis II pathology. Despite this evidence, the attacks on psychoanalysis continue
unabated, not only from some psychiatrists [13,14] but also from the highest levels of politics and health bureaucrats [15], although what exactly is being attacked is often unclear.
Experimental data and empirical evidence prove the validity of psychoanalysis
Petocz, 2015
PhD in Psychology, currently teaches history, psychology, and critical thinking at the University of Western Sydney. Visiting researcher at the
Department of Philosophy, Kings College, London University in 2000 (Agnes, 1/12/2015, “The scientific status of psychoananalysis revisited”,
Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting)
A reservoir of experimental data pertinent to Freud’s work currently exists and, as we have shown in detail,
offers support for a respectable number of his major ideas and theories … However, a sizeable
proportion of those observers who are presumably concerned with evaluating the standing of
psychoanalysis have simply refused to acknowledge the existence, or accept the credibility, of such
findings. (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996, pp. 284-285) After a hundred years of controversy, we can now put to rest the criticism
of psychoanalysis that its most fundamental assertion- the importance of unconscious processes—is
mistaken or without empirical foundation. The data are incontrovertible: consciousness is the tip of the psychic
iceberg that Freud imagined it to be. (Western, 1999, p. 1097) There is a cornucopia of empirical evidence in the cognitive
neurosciences, attachment field, infant-observation research, develop- mental psychology, clinical
psychopathology, and the therapeutic process that are corroborations, validations, extensions, revisions
and emendations of Freud’: contributions. (Mills, ZIIJ7, p. 540)
Falsifiability is a bad standard—it incorporates unexamined materialism which
undermines the basis of the theory and also turns their framework arguments by
undercutting metaphysical debate and argumentative clash. There’s no offense
because metaphysical belief is inevitable but falsifiability drives us to hold them
without debate
Castellano, 2012
(Daniel, The Insufficiency of Empiricism, http://www.arcaneknowledge.org/philtheo/empiricism2.htm)
Since falsifiability really means being empirically falsifiable, and the empirical is restricted to physical
observation, Popper’s theory furtively incorporates philosophical materialism into his theory of science,
which is then misused as a general theory of knowledge. With one stroke, any sort of metaphysical,
religious, or spiritual speculation is dismissed as not meriting credibility. Rather than be forced to
honestly engage metaphysical arguments with counterarguments, we are excused from debating them
altogether, as if they were beyond reason. Clearly, this position is unwarranted, and it arises from the
error of equating non-empiricism with irrationality. The scientific method is an excellent way to arrive at
near-certain knowledge in areas that are susceptible to both physical observation and controlled experiment.
Many ordinary types of knowledge are not susceptible to controlled experiment, as is the case with the
study of history or any other aspect of the past, which can never be replicated. Such sciences must use
different rules of evidence, and the basis of certitude in their results is of a different quality than that of the
natural sciences. Other types of knowledge are not susceptible to physical observation, such as our
conscious experiences (as opposed to their neural correlates), or abstract reasoning about mathematical or
metaphysical entities. This non-physical knowledge is not inferior to that of the empirical sciences, but
on the contrary is considered the most certain knowledge of all, as we directly comprehend the truth of
a tautology and directly experience our own consciousness. The knowledge of empirical sciences, on the
other hand, is mediated indirectly through the exercise of our consciousness and abstract reasoning.
From this, the foolishness of philosophical materialism is evident: we only know matter through the
mind, so it is absurd to doubt the existence of the mind or soul without doubting the existence of
matter. Similarly, physics is only intelligible against a background of logical, metaphysical, and mathematical
assumptions. The natural sciences are still epistemologically subordinate to philosophy, in fact if not in
culture. Our cultural rejection of abstract philosophy in favor of “hard” science has not eliminated the
need for philosophy, but has simply removed it from conscious discourse, reducing it to a set of
unconsciously held and poorly understood assumptions. Popper himself recognized this in his study of
quantum mechanics, which he called “the great quantum muddle,” in reference to how physicists incoherently
invoked contradictory philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics. Even the most radically antiphilosophical man has a philosophy, but if he consciously rejects the study of philosophy, he is doomed to
hold his philosophy unconsciously and incoherently.
Scientific analysis creates a psychic split and solves subjective value
Kalaidjian, 2012
Walter, professor at Johns Hopkins. “Traversing Psychosis: Lacan, Topology, and ‘The Jet-Propelled Couch’”. Pgs. 190-191.
American Imago, Vol. 69, No. 2, 185–213. 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Thus, the Möbius strip gives topological representation to the division that splits the
subject of scientific knowledge as the
latter “forgets a dimension of truth that psychoanalysis seriously puts to work” (p. 738). Psychoanalysis asserts
the subject’s determination by the unconscious and—as the topology of the Möbius strip demonstrates—that
psychic truth, as an interior void, marks the impasse of science’s “deadlocked endeavor to suture the
subject” within the regime of its logic and formal procedures. As lacan puts it in “On the Subject Who is Finally in
Question,” truth effects “its detour [biais] in knowledge” (1953a, p. 194) or, in alexandre leupin’s blunt translation, “Truth makes a hole
in science” (leupin, 2004, p. 56). Insofar as this “hole” bears on the real, its traumatic detour in knowledge
befalls science as a kind of psychotic break. Indeed, “a successful paranoia,” lacan asserts, “might just as well
seem to constitute the closure of science” insofar as the latter “does not-want-to-know-anything about
the truth as cause” (1965–66, p. 742) but instead sustains its regime of knowledge through the foreclosure
(Verwerfung) of incompleteness. Science’s divide between reason and epistemological crisis reaches back to
its enlightenment origins in the Cartesian cogito, split as it is between, on the one hand, an insistence on
clarity and certainty driven by, on the other hand, a passionate self-doubt. While the latter’s truth as cause is
ultimately foreclosed in the modern regime of science’s objectified axiomatics, psychoanalysis holds its own rational
methodology in productive tension with the fading of the subject. Thus, psychoanalysis brings a rational,
scientific rigor to bear on its analysis of the unconscious structured as a language without, however,
suturing the gap between its disciplinary knowledge and the particular psychic disposition of the subject
rooted in an unconscious truth as cause. This qualified and paradoxical identification of the subject of science with the
psychoanalytic subject turns on the understanding that, as Jean-Claude Milner (1991) has it, “Just because there is an ideal of science, there is
no ideal science” (p. 33). Perhaps, however, the loss of its own status as an “ideal science” is most traumatic for psychoanalysis precisely in its
encounter with the ideal of science not just as it sutures the subject of science but as it likewise drives the systematic rigor of the psychotic
subject.
Neg Stuff
Psychoanalysis bad for IR
Psychoanalysis can’t explain international relations --- the move from the clinic to the
macro-sphere is too great - obviously not everyone shares the exact same fantasies
and there’s no mechanism to actualize change
Boucher 2010
literary and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University (Geoff M., “Zizek and Politics: A Critical Introduction”,
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_hmrBgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%C5%BDi%C5%BEek+and+Politics:+An+Introduction&ot
s=3uqgdGUwxC&sig=MNP7oMG7JXgWMj49yz2DHRTs6BI#v=onepage&q&f=false)//trepka
Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remark- able that, for all the criticisms of Zizek's political
Romanticism, no one has argued that the ultra-extremism of Zizek's political position might reflect his untenable
attempt to shape his model for political action on the curative final moment in clinical psychoanalysis.
The differences between these two realms, listed in Figure 5.1, are nearly too many and too great to restate which has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The key thing is this. Lacan's notion of travers- ing the fantasy involves
the radical transformation of people's sub- jective structure: a refounding of their most elementary beliefs about
themselves, the world, and sexual difference. This is undertaken in the security of the clinic, on the basis of the
analysands' volun- tary desire to overcome their inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties. As a clinical and
existential process, it has its own independent importance and authenticity. The analysands, in transforming their
subjective world, change the way they regard the objective, shared social reality outside the clinic. But they do
not transform the world. The political relevance of the clinic can only be (a) as a support- ing moment in
ideology critique or (b) as a fully-fledged model of politics, provided that the political subject and its social object are
ultimately identical. Option ((7), Zizek's option, rests on the idea, not only of a subject who becomes who he is only through his (mis)
recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but whose 'traversal of the fantasy' is immediately identical with his transformation of the
socio-political system or Other. I-Ience, according
to Zizek, we can analyse the institutional embodiments of this
Other using psy- choanalytic categories. In Chapter 4, we saw Zi2ek's resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective)
Ego Ideal and the (objec- tive) Symbolic Order. This leads him to analyse our entire culture as a single subject-object,
whose perverse (or perhaps even psychotic) structure is expressed in every manifestation of contemporary life.
Zizek's decisive political-theoretic errors, one substantive and the other methodological, are different (see Figure 5.1) The substantive problem
political change worth the name with the total change of the subject-object that is, today, global capitalism. This is a
type of change that can only mean equat- ing politics with violent regime change, and ultimately
embrac- ing dictatorial govermnent, as Zizek now frankly avows (IDLC 412-19). We have seen that the ultrapolitical form of Zizek's criti- cism of everyone else, the theoretical Left and the wider politics, is that no
one is sufficiently radical for him - even, we will discover, Chairman Mao. We now see that this is because Zizek's model of
is to equate any
politics proper is modelled on a pre-critical analogy with the total transformation of a subiect's entire subjective structure, at the end of the
talking cure. For what could the concrete consequences of this governing analogy be? We
have seen that Zizek equates the
individual fantasy with the collective identity of an entire people. The social fantasy, he says, structures
the regime's 'inherent transgressions': at once subjects' habitual ways of living the letter of the law, and the regime's myths of
origin and of identity. If political action is modelled on the Lacanian cure, it must involve the complete
'traversal' - in Hegel's terms, the abstract versus the determinate negation - of all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must
involve the periodic founding of of entire new subject–objects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the first Žižekian political subject was
Schelling’s divided God, who gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 144–8). But can
the
political theorist reasonably hope or expect that subjects will simply give up on all their inherited ways,
myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating moment? And can they be legitimately asked or expected
to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only retrospectively see, after they have
acceded to the Great Leap Forward? And if they do not – for Žižek laments that today subjects are
politically disengaged in unprecedented ways – what means can the theorist and his allies use to move them
to do so?
Psychoanalysis Bad
Psychoanalysis is rooted in the logic of calculable subjects, assimilating ethics into an
economy of knowledge that does not allow for alterity. This culminates in the
obliteration of the Other
Derrida, 2002
[Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction.
He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy, “Without Alibi,”
Asking your forgiveness in turn for having disappointed you and tried your patience, I hasten to my conclusion in a dryly programmatictelegraphic- fashion. And algebraic-that is, hyperformalized. I do not even know if what I am preparing to expedite in this way defines a task or
a horizon for psychoanalysis, at the end of its States General. It is for me a question, rather, of what remains to be thought, done, lived,
suffered, with or without bliss, but without alibi, beyond even what could be called a horizon and a task, thus beyond what remains not only
necessary but possible. For what I am going to name at top speed punctures the horizon of a task, that is, exceeds the anticipation of what must
come about as possible. As possible duty. Beyond any theoretical knowledge, and thus any constative, but also beyond any power, in particular
the power of any performative institution. What
I am going to name defies the economy of the possible and of
power, of the "I can," "I may." It is in fact a matter of economy in all senses of the term, that of the law of the proper
[oikonomia] and of familial domesticity, that of the sovereign state, of the right of property, of the market, capital,
modes of appropriation in general, and, more broadly, of all that Freud calls "psychic economy." Here I am
calling on a beyond of economy, thus of the appropriable and the possible. One may well believe that economy is
already defied by the so-called mythological speculation on the death drive and the drive for power, thus on cruelty as well as sovereignty.
One may well recognize in the death drive, namely, the beyond of the pleasure and reality principles, an
aneconomic appearance. And what is more aneconomic, you may say, than destruction? And cruelty? In truth, Freud works
constantly to reintegrate this aneconomy, thus to take it into account, to bring reason to bear on it, in a
calculable fashion, in an economy of the possible. And one cannot blame him for that. He always reduces both
knowledge and ethics, even law and politics, to this economy of the possible. Even if one reckons with the detour
through the indirect, and even if the indirect supposes a hiatus, according to the most visible tendency of Freud's interpretation of Freud, it is
a question of a strategy of the possible and thus of economic conditionality: appropriation, the possible as power
of the "I can," "I may," the mastery of the performative that still dominate� and thus neutralizes [symbolically, in
the order of the "symbolic," precisely] the event it produces, the alterity of the event, the very arriving of the arrivant. Well, I
will affirm that there is, it is indeed necessary that there be refer- ence to some unconditionality, an
unconditional without sovereignty, and thus without cruelty, which is no doubt a very difficult thing to mink It is necessary
for this economic and symbolic conditionality to constitute it- self. The affirmation I am advancing advances itself, in advance, already, without
me, without alibi, as the origmary affirmation from which, and thus beyond
which the death drive and the power, cruelty,
and sovereignty drives determine themselves as "beyond" the principles. The originaty affirmation, which
advances itself in advance, lends rather than gives itself. It is not a principle, a princedom, a sovereignty . It comes then from
a be- vond the beyond, and thus from beyond the economy of the possible. It is attached to a life, certainly, but to a life
other than that of the economy of the possible, an im-possible life no doubt, a survival, not symbolizable but the
only one that is worthy of being lived, without alibi, once and for all, the only one from which to depart (notice I say from which to depart) for a
possible thinking of life. Of a life that is still worthy of being lived, once and for all. One cannot justify a pacifism, for example, and the right to
life, in a radical fashion, by setting out from an economy of life, or from . what Freud alleges, as we saw, under the names ofa biological
constitution - ot an idiosyncrasy. This can only be done on the basis of a sur-vival that owes nothing to the alibi of some mytho-thcological
beyond. This,
originary affirmation of beyond the beyond offers itself on the basis of numerous figures
of the impossible. I have studied a few of these elsewhere; hospitality, gift, forgiveness—and above all the unpredictability, the
"perhaps," the "what if" of the event, the coming, and the coming of the other in general, his or her or its arriving.
Their possibility is« ways announced as the experience of a non-negative impossible. The hospitable exposure to the event, to
the coming, to the visitation of the unpredictable arrivant cannot, be made into the horizon of a task not even for
psychoanalysis, although it claims some privilege in the experiencc of the unpredictable coming of the
other, at the arrival of the anrivant. But what may, perhaps, become a task, tomorrow, for psychoanalysis, for a new psychoanalytic reason,
for a new psychoanalytic Enlightenment, is a revolution that, like all revolutions, will come to terms with the impossible, negotiate with the
non-negotiable that has re- mained non-negotiable, calculate with the unconditional as such, with the inflexible unconditionality of the
unconditional.
The absolute openness to the Other as incalculability exceeds the structures of
psychoanalytic knowledge
Derrida, 2002
[Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction.
He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy, “Without Alibi,”
However, without even recalling Freud’s lack of sympathy for French revolutions, we may say that nothing, on the other hand, has
been
more foreign to psychoanalysis, up until now, mote disturbing for it, than the public space of these States
General here, than this decor, these protocols, the duration and the technical apparatus that, for almost three years, have been setting
the conditions for your meeting. Another, still invisible scene, therefore, continues to escape you. The signs you've
received from this hidden scene remain indecipherable behind a whole staging [mist en seine] organized in view of deliberations in common,
authorized by decisions and performative declarations of the organizers or even the participants. Now what
happens, comes about,
event of the other as arrivant (the one 'who or' which arrives'), is the
impossible that exceeds and puts to rout, sometimes cruelly, that which the economy of a performative act
is supposed to produce in a sovereign manner, when an already legitimated speech takes ad¬vantage of some convention. If
comes to pass, or, as we say in French, ce qui arrive, the
things happen [arrivent], if there are those' of us and those others who arrive, the others especially, the arrivarits, it is always as the impossible
beyond of all the instituting utterances, beyond all convention, beyond mastery, beyond the "I can," "I may," beyond the economy of
appropriation of a "that is in my power," an "it is possible for me," the "this power belongs to me," the "this possible is conferred on me," all of
which presumptions are always implied by performative acts. If
at least others arrive, from close by or far away, from the family or
from the most distant strangeness, they
do it, like everything that happens, like every event worthy of the name, like everything that is
all convention and all scenic control, all pleasure or reality
principle, beyond all drive for power and perhaps all death drive. It is a hospitality of visitation and
not of invitation, when what arrives from the other exceeds the rules of hospitality and remains
unpredictable for the hosts. I do not know whether, behind their statutory authorities and behind the official signatories of the Call
coming, in the form of the impossible, beyond
and the 1 convocation, behind the masters of ceremony, the historical States; General up until 1789 ever had a veritable and sovereign stage
director:; What is certain is that no stage director has ever been able to foresee and program anything whatsoever beyond the first act opening
the proceedings. And even that is doubtful.
Psychoanalysis's relationship to the outside community replicates the logic of
sovereignty, which is the foundation of modern violence. Instead, we must resist the
resistance created by psychoanalysis, as such, and open ourselves to revolution.
Derrida, 2002
[Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction.
He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy, “Without Alibi,”
That it is not alone, far from if, in not having thought through this Revolution and its aftermaths, is paltry consolation, especially for those who,
like myself, believe that psychoanalysis, having announced as much at its birth, 'should have something indispensable and essential not just to
say but also to do on this subject. Without alibi. The decisive thing that there would be to say and to do on this subject should register the
shock wave of one or more psychoanalytic revolutions. Notably on the subject of what is called, therefore, sovereignty and cruelty. But if the
mondialisation (worldwide-ization) of the world that we are told is underway resists psychoanalysis in multiple
ways, not authorizing it to touch that world's fundamental axioms of ethics, law, and politics, if, inversely,
psychoanalysis resists in multiple ways and in an autoimmune fashion, thus failing to think through and to
change these axioms, is not then this concept of resistance, even where a is as stratified and complicated as I tried to
show, just as problematic as those of sovereignty and cruelty? Even in its enigmatic multiplicity (I counted 5 + or -1
concepts or places of "resistance,” according to Freud), does
not this concept of resistance still imply border lines
front lines or theaters of war whose model is precisely what is becoming outdated today? If there is
still war, and for a long time yet, or in any case war's cruelty, warlike, torturing, "massively or subtlety cruel
"aggression, it is no longer certain that the figure of war, and especially the difference between individual wars, civil
wars," and national wars, still corresponds to concepts whose rigor is assured. A new discourse on war is
necessary. We await today new "Thoughts for the Times on War t and Death" (I am citing some titles of Freud; "Zeitgemasses fiber Krieg
und Tod," 191J) and a new "Why War?" ("Warum Krieg?" 1932), or at, least new readings of texts of this sort. Thus it is not certain that the
con-t cept of front, the figure of a front line or of an indivisible trench, of a beachhead, of a capital front indissodable from that of war, it is
not certain that all this can furnish a model of something like a resistance—either I internal or external. As much
as the concepts of sovereignty or cruelty, it is perhaps the concept of resistance that awaits another revolution, its own,
after the French Revolution of two hundred years ago and the po¬litical revolutions that followed, likewise after the psychoanalytic revolu¬tion
and those that perhaps followed it. For there is always more than one revolution possible in the revolution. And what one might also call the —
technical or techno-scientific revolution (whether it touches on micro-¬electronics, telc-virtualization, or genetics) is never simply external to
the others* For example, there
is a dimension of tele-technical virtuality, of the tele-technical revolution of the possible
that psychoanalysis, in its dominant axis, has failed-still fails no doubt and this is another resistance—to take
rigorously into account, and that, moreover, will have "played an essential role in the principle of convocation as in the imple¬mentation, the
preparation, and the type of exchange of these very States General, in their space, then spacing, their becoming-time of worldwide space, in
their horizontal networking, thus in their potential though lim¬ited dehierarchization over the networks of the World Wide Web. In a word,
what is the revolutionary? And the postrevoiutionary? And what is world war and postwar for psychoanalysis today? These ate perhaps other
forms of the same question.
Psychoanalysis is silent in the face of the call of the Other. We must not ground
politics in psychoanalysis if we are to keep open the possibility for an ethical
responsibility for alterity
Derrida, 2002
Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction.
He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy, “Without Alibi,”
First of all, this difficult concept of indirection, of a certain irrecritude, of an oblique, angular, or mediating nonstraightness. This concept, to
which I think I must devote much attention without abusing Freud's text, does not signify only detour, strategic ruse, continuous transaction
with an inflexible force, for example, with the cruelty or sovereign-power drive. Even though Freud does not say it, certainly not in this way,
this concept of the indirect seems to me to take into account, in the mediation of the detour, a radical
discontinuity, a heterogeneity, a leap into the ethical (thus also into the juridical and political) that no
psychoanalytic knowledge as such could propel or authorize. On the subject of the polarity love/hatred (which out of
politeness toward Einstein he compares to the polarity attraction/repulsion), Freud says clearly in fact that, like the polarity preservation/cruel
destruction, it must not be hastily submitted to ethical judgments evaluating "good and evil" (209). It
is not for the psychoanalyst
as such to evaluate or devaluate, to discredit cruelty or sovereignty from an ethical point of view . First of
all, because he knows that there is no life without the competition between the forces of two antagonistic drives. Whether one is
talking about the cruelty or the sovereignty drive, psychoanalytic knowledge as such has neither the
means nor the right to condemn it. In this regard, it is and must remain, as knowledge, within the neutrality of the undecidable.
Whence what I call the "etats d'ame," that is, the hesitation, the confused mental state, or the soul-searching of
psychoanalysis. To cross the line of decision, a leap that expels one outside psychoanalytic knowledge
as such is necessary. In this hiatus, I would say, the chance or risk of responsible decisions is opened up,
beyond all knowledge concerning the possible. Is that to say that there is "no relation between psychoanalysis and ethics,
law, ot politics? No, there is, there must be an indirect and discontinuous consequence: to be sure, psychoanalysis as such does
not produce or procure any ethics, any law, any politics, but it belongs to responsibility, in these three domains, to take
account of psychoanalytic knowledge. The task, which is immense and remains entirely to be done, both for psychoanalysts and for
whom¬ever, citizen, citizen of the world, or mega-citizen, concerned with re¬sponsibility (in ethics, law, politics), is to organize this taking
account of psychoanalytic reason without reducing the heterogeneity, the leap into the undecidable, the beyond of the possible, which is the
object of psy¬choanalytic knowledge and economy, in particular, of its mythological discourse on the death drive and beyond the principles. It
is in this place that is difficult to delimit, the space of undecidability and thus of decision opened up by the discontinuity of the indirect, that the
transformation to come of ethics, law, and politics should take into account psychoanalytic knowledge (which does not mean seeking a
program there) and that, recip¬rocally, the analytic community should take into account history, notably the history of law, whose recent or
ongoing performative mutations have not, with only few exceptions, interested it or called upon its contribu-tions. Everything here, it seems to
me, remains to be done, on both sides.
Even if their critique has validity, the world-wide resistance to psychoanalysis makes it
irrelevant when it comes to questions of ethics and politics
Derrida, 2002
Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria. Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction.
He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy, “Without Alibi,”
I have already expressed some doubts about the homogeneous structure of this multiple concept of resistance (Wtderstand) in Fteud. I will do
so differently today. No doubt the
world, the process of worldwide-ization of the world, as it goes along, with
ail its consequences—political, social, economic, juridical, techno-scienitific, and so forth—resists
psychoanalysis today. It does so in new ways that you are doubtless in the process of interrogating. It resists in an unequal
fashion that is difficult to analyze. It opposes psychoanalysis not only with a model of positive science,
or even positivistic, cognitvistic, physicalistic, psycho-pharmacologcal, genetistic science, but notably
also sometimes the academicism of a spiritualist, religious, or flat-out philosophical hermeneutic or
even (because none of these are mutually exclusive) archaic tnstitutions, concepts, and practices of the ethical, the
juridical, and the political that seem to be still domlnated by a certain logic, that is, by a certain ontotheological metaphysics of sovereignty (autonomy and omnipotence of the subject—individual or state—
freedom, egological will, conscious intentionality, or if you will, the ego, the ego ideal, and the superego, etc). The first gesture of
psychoanalysis will have been to explain this sovereignty, to give an account of its ineluctability while aiming to
deconstruct its genealogy— which passes also by way of cruel murder. As for the physical, neuronal, or generic sciences, Freud was the first not
to reject, but to expect a lot from them—provided that one knows how to wait expectantly, precisely, and to articulate without confusing,
without precipitously homogenizing, without crushing the different agencies, structures, and laws, while respecting the relays, the delays, and,
do I dare say, the deferred of difference. In fact, both in the world and in the analytic communities, these posirivist or spiritualist models, these
metaphysical axioms of ethics, law, and politics, have not even had their surfaces scratched, much less
been "deconstructed'' by the psychoanalytic revolution. They will resist it for a long time yet ; in truth, they are
made to resist it. And one may, a "act, call this a fundamental "resistance." When faced with this resistance, psychoanalysis, no doubt, in the
statutory forms of its community, in the greatest authority of its discourse, in its most visible institutions, resists Oouilywhaz remains archaic in
this woridwide-ization. It doesn't like what it sees, but it doesn't tackle it, doesn't analyze it. And this resistance is also ; a self-resistance. There
is something wrong, in any case an autoimmune function in psychoanalysis as everywhere else, a rejection of self, a resist¬ance to self, to its
own principality, its own principle of protection.
Psychoanalysis has not thought through politics, ethics, and sovereignty, and thus
offers no real hope for the future.
Derrida, 2002
Jacques, French philosopher, born in French Algeria, Derrida is best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction.
He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy, “Without Alibi,”
As I see it, psychoanalysis has
not yet undertaken and thus still will
succeeded to thinking, penetrating, and
changing the axioms of the ethical, the juridical, and the political, notably in those seismic places where
theoloeical phantasm of sovereignty quakes and where the must traumatic, let us say in a still confused manner
the most cruel events of our day are being produced. This quaking of the human earth gives rise to a new
scene, which since the Second World War has been structured by unprecedented juridical performatives (and all the
"mythologies" that Freud speaks of, in particular the psychoanalytic mythology of the drives, are tied to conventional fictions, that is, to the
authorized authority of performative acts), such
as the new Declaration of Human Rights—the rights not just of manias we
say in French, but of woman as well—the condemnation of genocide the concept of crime against humanity
(imprescriptible in France), the creation under way of new in¬ternational penal authorities, not to mention the growing struggle against the
vestiges of forms of punishment called "cruel," which remain the best emblem of the sovereign power of the state over the life and death of
the citizen, namely, besides war, the death penalty, which is massively enforced in China, in the United States, and in a number of Arab Muslim
countries. It is especially here that the concept of cruelty, this obscure and enigmatic concept, this site of obscurantism both within and without
psychoanalysis, calls for indispensable analyses, to which we will have to return. These
are all things about which, if I am not
so far
mistaken, psychoanalysis as such, in its statutory and authorized discourse, or even in the quasi f totality of its productions, has
said next to nothing, has had next to nothing original to say. In the very place where one expects the most specific
response from psychoanalysis—in truth, the only appropriate response. I mean once again: without alibi. All this, produces a mutation
that I venture to call revolutionary, in particular, a mutation on the subject of the subject and of the citizen subject,
that is the relations among democracy, citizenship, and noncitizenship, in other words, the state and the beyond of the state. If
psychoanalysis does not take this mutation into account, if it does not engage with it, if it does not transform itself at this
rhythm, it will itself as it alreadyis in large measure, deported, overwhelmed, left on the side of the road, exposed to
all the drifts of the currents, to all appropriations, to all abduction, or else inversely, it will remain
rooted in the conditions of a period that saw its birth, still aphasic in the Central European cradle of its birth: a
certain equivocal aftermath of a French Revolution, whose event, it seems to me, psychoanalysis has not yet thought through. In particular as
regards that which, in the said French Revolution and its legacy, will have concerned the obscure con¬cepts of sovereignty and cruelty.
Pyschoanalysis is non-falsifiable hindsight thinking
Samuels, 1993
Training Analyst – Society of Analytical Psychology and Science Associate – American Academy of Psychoanalysis (Andrew, Free Associations,
“The mirror and the hammer: depth psychology and political transformation”, Vol. 3D, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing)
The paper is about the depth psychology of political processes, focusing on processes of political change. It is a contribution to the longstanding ambition of depth
psychology to develop a form of political and cultural analysis that will, in Freud's words, 'under-stand the riddles of the world'. It has to be admitted that there is an
equally longstanding reluctance in the non-psychological commun¬ity to accept the many and varied ideas and suggestions concerning political matters that have
been offered by analysts of all persua¬sions. I do not believe this can all be put down to resistance. There
is something offensive above
reductive interpretations of complex socio-political problems in exclusively psychological terms. The
tendency to panpsychism on the part of some depth psychologists has led me to wonder if an adequate methodology and
ethos actually exists with which to make an engagement of depth psychology with the public sphere possible.¶
By 'politics' I mean the arrangements within a culture for the organization and distribution of power, especially
economic power, and the way in which power is deployed to maintain the survival and enhance the quality of human life. Economic and political power includes
control of processes of information and representation as well as the use of physical force and possession of vital resources such as land, food and water. On a more
personal level, political power reflects the ability to choose freely whether to act and what action to take in a given situation. 'Politics'
refers to the
interplay between the personal and public dimensions of power. That is, there is an articulation between public, economic
power and power as expressed on the personal, private level. This articulation is demonstrated in family organization, gender and race relations, and in religious
and artistic assumptions as they affect the life of individuals. (I have also tried to be consistent in my use of the terms 'culture', 'society' and 'collective'.)'¶ Here is an
example of the difficulty with psychological rcduc-tionism to which I am referring. At a conference 1 attended in London in 1990, a distinguished psychoanalyst
referred to the revolutionary students in Paris in 1968 as 'functioning as a regressive group'. Now, for a large group of students to be said to regress, there must be,
in the speaker's mind, some sort of normative developmental starting point for them to regress to. The social group is supposed to have a babyhood, as it were.
Similarly, the speaker must have had in mind the possibility of a healthier, progressive group process — what a more mature group of revolutionary students would
have looked like. But complex
social and political phenomena do not conform to the individualistic,
chronological, moralistic, pathologizing framework that is often imported.¶ The problem stems from
treating the entire culture, or large chunks of it, as if it were an individual or, worse, as if it were a baby.
Psychoanalysts project a version of personality development couched in judgemental terms onto a
collective cultural and political process. If we look in this manner for pathology in the culture, we will surely
find it. As we are looking with a psychological theory in mind, then, lo and behold, the theory will explain
the pathology, but this is a retrospective prophecy (to use a phrase of Freud's), twenty-twenty hindsight. In this
psychoanalytic tautologizing there is really nothing much to get excited about. Too much psychological writing on the culture, my
own included, has suffered from this kind of smug 'correctness' when the 'material' proves the theoretical point. Of course it does! If we are interested in envy or
greed, then we will find envy or greed in capitalistic organization. If we set out to demonstrate the presence of archetypal patterns, such as projection of the
shadow, in geopolitical relations, then, without a doubt, they will seem to leap out at us. We influence what we analyse and so psychological reflection on culture
and politics needs to be muted- there is not so much 'aha!' as one hoped.
Psychoanalysis is not verifiable – continual contradictions and no base criteria
Tuck, 2014
B.S. from University of Michigan, (Andrew, “Why Did American Psychiatry Abandon Psychoanalysis?”,
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/107788/antuck.pdf?sequence=1)
To say that psychoanalysis has grown stagnant as a scientific field may at first seem a sweeping and completely unwarranted claim. After all, in
terms of producing new branches of thought, psychoanalytic theory has undoubtedly proven an expansive and fruitful domain; to argue that
psychoanalytic progress suddenly stopped after Freud would require answering to object relations theory, ego psychology, self psychology, and
Lacanian psychoanalysis, to name but a few. Furthermore, rather than dying with Freud in 1939, psychoanalysis produced these subfields
through a variety of different thinkers—the role of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Heinz Kohut, and Jacques Lacan in their respective theories
above seem to demonstrate that psychoanalysis was not a one-man show after all. In fact, it was during the decades immediately following
Freud’s death that dynamic psychiatry was at the peak of its influence in the United States. 11,12 Given
the proliferation of new
models and theories of psychoanalytic thought under an equally diverse group of psychoanalysts, on
what grounds could the argument that psychoanalysis failed to produce visible and useful knowledge
possibly possess any merit? The answer is in the question: it was precisely the sheer amount and
diversity of psychoanalytic subfields that delegitimized psychoanalysis as a whole: the presence of such
diversity of opinion within the same field undermined the authority of any one subfield. Rather than
adding to a collective fund of psychoanalytic knowledge, each of these different subfields took a
different approach to psychoanalytic theory and practice. Former American Psychiatric Association president Alan Stone
said: Today, at least in my opinion, and I am not entirely alone in thinking this, neither Anna Freud's Ego Psychology nor
Melanie Klein's Object Relations Theory seem like systematic advances on Freud's ideas. Rather they
seem like divergent schools of thought, no closer to Freud than Karen Horney who rebelled against
Freudian orthodoxy. 13 The frequent emergence of these competing “divergent schools of thought” and
their dissenting followers, then, made any developments in psychoanalysis seem to other scientists less
like legitimate scientific discoveries and more like competing hypotheses. In contrast with more established fields
like biology, innovations in psychoanalysis often seemed to contradict earlier psychoanalytic ideas as well as
one another, frequently forming branches and sub-branches without regard to maintaining any sort of
continuity or internal consistency in psychoanalysis as a whole. 14,15 In fact, many of these developments were
reactionary in nature, responding to other trends in psychoanalysis rather than to new clinical data. This is the case of Heinz Kohut’s
development of self psychology, which was a reaction against the subfields of ego psychology and classical drive theory. The revival of American
interest in the work of Melanie Klein in the second half of the twentieth century has also been described as a reaction against ego psychology.
16 Furthermore, never did
one of these new theories thoroughly abrogate and replace a previous one in the
way that, for example, Einstein’s theory of general relativity transformed Newtonian physics. This is not
to say that a new idea in psychoanalysis would not have been met with resistance upon its introduction;
however, it soon proved that psychoanalysis on the whole lacked the tools that other disciplines had to
debunk or prove new theories. By what criteria could psychoanalysts reject or accept a new hypothesis? In physics, a new model
was expected to be compatible with currently available data, as well as able to make predictions to be confirmed by observation17; similarly, a
new pharmaceutical drug was expected to prove itself by beating a control in a double-blind trial. But
such criteria, even if
psychoanalysts wanted to use them, were not as conveniently applied to unconscious phenomena
proposed by psychoanalysis. Even the gathering of data from clinical psychotherapy was typically unable
to resolve the conflict between two competing subfields; problematically, any clinical data that could
potentially prove the efficacy of one psychoanalytic school could be interpreted to support others as
well. 18 In an article for Psychoanalytic Psychology, psychologist Robert Holt, even as he argued for the validity of psychoanalysis as a
“testable scientific theory,”19 admitted the difficulty of producing data that could settle disputes between psychoanalytic and nonpsychoanalytic theories, let alone between schools within psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis cannot be the basis for political change
Sharpe, 2010
Lecturer, philosophy and psychoanalytic studies, and Goucher, senior lecturer, literary and psychoanalytic studies – Deakin University, 2010
(Matthew and Geoff, Žižek and Politics: An Introduction, p. 182 – 185, Figure 1.5 included)
Can we bring some order to this host of criticisms? It is remarkable that, for all the criticisms of Žižek’s political Romanticism, no one has argued that the ultraextremism of Žižek’s
political position might reflect his untenable attempt to shape his model for political
action on the curative final moment in clinical psychoanalysis. The differences between these two realms, listed in
Figure 5.1, are nearly too many and too great to restate – which has perhaps caused the theoretical oversight. The key thing is
this. Lacan’s notion of traversing the fantasy involves the radical transformation of people’s subjective
structure: a refounding of their most elementary beliefs about themselves, the world, and sexual difference. This is undertaken in
the security of the clinic, on the basis of the analysands’ voluntary desire to overcome their inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties. As a clinical and
existential process, it has its own independent importance and authenticity. The analysands, in transforming their subjective world, change the
way they regard the objective, shared social reality outside the clinic. But they do not transform the world. The political
relevance of the clinic can only be (a) as a supporting moment in ideology critique or (b) as a fully- fl edged model of politics, provided that the political
subject and its social object are ultimately identical. Option (b), Žižek’s option, rests on the idea, not only of a subject who becomes who he is only
through his (mis) recognition of the objective sociopolitical order, but whose ‘traversal of the fantasy’ is immediately identical with his
transformation of the socio- political system or Other. Hence, according to Žižek, we can analyse the institutional embodiments of this
Other using psychoanalytic categories. In Chapter 4, we saw Žižek’s resulting elision of the distinction between the (subjective) Ego Ideal and the (objective)
Symbolic Order. This
leads him to analyse our entire culture as a single subject–object, whose perverse (or perhaps even
psychotic) structure is expressed in every manifestation of contemporary life. Žižek’s decisive political- theoretic errors, one substantive and the other
methodological, are different (see Figure 5.1) The
substantive problem is to equate any political change worth the name with the
total change of the subject–object that is, today, global capitalism. This is a type of change that can only mean equating politics with violent regime
change, and ultimately embracing dictatorial government, as Žižek now frankly avows (IDLC 412–19). We have seen that the ultra- political form of Žižek’s criticism
of everyone else, the
theoretical Left and the wider politics, is that no one is sufficiently radical for him – even, we will
is because Žižek’s model of politics proper is modelled on a pre- critical analogy
discover, Chairman Mao. We now see that this
with the total transformation of a subject’s entire subjective structure, at the end of the talking cure. For what could the concrete
consequences of this governing analogy be? We have seen that Žižek
equates the individual fantasy with the collective identity of an
entire people. The social fantasy, he says, structures the regime’s ‘inherent transgressions’: at once subjects’ habitual ways of living the letter of the law,
and the regime’s myths of origin and of identity. If political action is modelled on the Lacanian cure, it must involve the
complete ‘traversal’ – in Hegel’s terms, the abstract versus the determinate negation – of all these lived myths, practices and habits. Politics must
involve the periodic founding of entire new subject–objects. Providing the model for this set of ideas, the fi rst Žižekian political subject was Schelling’s divided God,
who gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time (IDLC 153; OB 144–8). But can
the political theorist reasonably hope
or expect that subjects
will simply give up on all their inherited ways, myths and beliefs, all in one world- creating
moment? And can they be legitimately asked or expected to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they will only retrospectively see, after they have
acceded to the Great Leap Forward? And if
they do not – for Žižek laments that today subjects are politically disengaged in unprecedented ways – what
means can the theorist and his allies use to move them to do so?
Psychoanalytic critique causes passivity and destroys political struggle
Gordon, 2001
Paul Gordon, psychotherapist living and working in London, Race & Class, 2001, v. 42, n. 4, p. 30-1
The postmodernists' problem is that they cannot live with disappointment. All
the tragedies of the political project of
emancipation -- the evils of Stalinism in particular -- are seen as the inevitable product of men and women
trying to create a better society. But, rather than engage in a critical assessment of how, for
instance, radical political movements go wrong, they discard the emancipatory project and
impulse itself. The postmodernists, as Sivanandan puts it, blame modernity for having failed them: `the intellectuals and
academics have fled into discourse and deconstruction and representation -- as though to
interpret the world is more important than to change it , as though changing the interpretation is all we could do in
a changing world'.58 To justify their flight from a politics holding out the prospect of radical change through self-activity, the
disappointed intellectuals find abundant intellectual alibis for themselves in the very work they
champion, including, in Cohen's case, psychoanalysis. What Marshall Berman says of Foucault seems true also of psychoanalysis; that it
offers `a world-historical alibi' for the passivity and helplessness felt by many in the 1970s, and that it has
nothing but contempt for those naive enough to imagine that it might be possible for modern human- kind to be free. At every turn for
such theorists, as Berman argues, whether in sexuality, politics, even our imagination, we are nothing but prisoners:
there is no freedom in Foucault's world, because his language forms a seamless web, a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever
dreamed of, into which no life can break . . . There is no point in trying to resist the oppressions and injustices of modern life, since even our
dreams of freedom only add more links to our chains; however, once we grasp the futility of it all, at least we can relax.59 Cohen's political
defeatism and his conviction in the explanatory power of his new faith
of psychoanalysis lead him to be contemptuous
and dismissive of any attempt at political solidarity or collective action . For him, `communities' are always
`imagined', which, in his view, means based on fantasy, while different forms of working-class organisation, from the craft fraternity to the
revolutionary group, are dismissed as `fantasies of self-sufficient combination'.60 In this scenario, the
idea that people might
come together, think together, analyse together and act together as rational beings is
impossible. The idea of a genuine community of equals becomes a pure fantasy, a `symbolic retrieval' of something that never existed
in
the first place: `Community is a magical device for conjuring something apparently solidary out of the thin air of modern times, a mechanism of
re-enchantment.' As for history, it is always false, since `We are always dealing with invented traditions.'61 Now, this
is not only nonsense,
but dangerous
nonsense at that. Is history `always false'? Did the Judeocide happen or did it not? And did not some people even try
to resist it? Did slavery exist or did it not, and did not people resist that too and, ultimately, bring it
to an end? And are communities always `imagined'? Or, as Sivanandan states, are they beaten out on the smithy of a people's collective
struggle? Furthermore, all attempts to legislate against ideology are bound to fail because they
have to adopt `technologies of surveillance and control identical to those used by the state' . Note
here the Foucauldian language to set up the notion that all `surveillance' is bad. But is it? No society can function without
surveillance of some kind. The point, surely, is that there should be a public conversation about such moves and that those responsible
for implementing them be at all times accountable. To equate, as Cohen does, a council poster about `Stamping out racism' with Orwell's
horrendous prophecy in 1984 of a boot stamping on a human face is ludicrous and insulting. (Orwell's image was intensely personal and
destructive; the other is about the need to challenge not individuals, but a collective evil.) Cohen reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about
punitive action against racists, as though punishment or other firm action against them (or anyone else transgressing agreed social or legal
norms) precluded `understanding' or even help through psychotherapy. It is indeed a strange kind of `anti-racism' that portrays active racists as
the `victims', those who are in need of `help'. But this is where Cohen's argument ends up. In their move from politics to the academy and the
postmodernists may have simply exchanged one grand narrative, historical
materialism, for another, psychoanalysis.62 For psychoanalysis is a grand narrative, par
excellence. It is a theory that seeks to account for the world and which recognises few limits on its explanatory potential. And the
claimed radicalism of psychoanalysis, in the hands of the postmodernists at least, is not a
radicalism at all but a prescription for a politics of quietism, fatalism and defeat. Those wanting to
world of `discourse', the
change the world, not just to interpret it, need to look elsewhere.
Psychoanalysis is bad science - it’s untestable, produces contradictory analyses, and
can’t make predictions
Beystehner, 2013
J.D. from University of Georgia (Kristen M, “Psychoanalysis: Freud's Revolutionary Approach to Human Personality”,
http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/beystehner.html)
Storr (1981) insists, "Only
a few fundamentalist psychoanalysts of an old-fashioned kind think that Freud was a scientist or
that psychoanalysis was or could be a scientific enterprise," and that, "...to understand persons cannot be a scientific
enterprise" (p. 260). Although many psychoanalysts themselves would undoubtedly consider psychoanalysis to be a science, many critics would
disagree. Popper, by far one of psychoanalysis' most well-known critics and a strong critic of Grünbaum, insists that psychoanalysis cannot be
considered a science because it is not falsifiable. He claims that psychoanalysis'
"so-called predictions are not predictions
of overt behavior but of hidden psychological states. This is why they are so untestable" (Popper, 1986, p. 254).
Popper (1986) claims that only when individuals are not neurotic is it possible to empirically determine if prospective patients are currently
neurotic (p. 254). Popper (1986) asserts that psychoanalysis
has often maintained that every individual is neurotic to
some degree due to the fact that everyone has suffered and repressed a trauma at one point or another in his or her life (p. 255).
However, this concept of ubiquitous repression is impossible to test because there is no overt behavioral
method of doing so (p. 254). Other critics claim that psychoanalysis cannot be considered a science due to its lack
of predictions. Psychoanalysts, critics maintain, state that certain childhood experiences, such as abuse or
molestation, produce certain outcomes or states of neurosis. To take this idea one step further, one should be
able to predict that if children experience abuse, for instance, they will become characterized by certain
personality traits. In addition, this concept would theoretically work in reverse. For instance, if individuals are observed in a particular
neurotic state, one should be able to predict that they had this or that childhood experience. However, neither of these predictions
can be made with any accuracy (Colby, 1960, p. 55). Additional critics insist that psychoanalysis is not a science because of the lack
of interpretive rules or regulations. Colby (1960) contends that critics of psychoanalysis have difficulties with the idea that "there are no clear,
intersubjectively shared lines of reasoning between theories and observations" (p. 54). For instance, one
psychoanalyst will observe
one phenomenon and interpret it one way, whereas another psychoanalyst will observe the same
phenomenon and interpret it in a completely different way that is contradictory to the first
psychoanalyst's interpretation (Colby, 1960, p. 54). Colby (1960) concludes that if analysts themselves cannot concur
that a certain observation is an example of a certain theory, then the regulations that govern
psychoanalytic interpretation are undependable (p. 55). Eysenck (1986) maintains:Zizhave always taken it for granted that
the obvious failure of Freudian therapy to significantly improve on spontaneous remission or placebo treatment is the clearest
proof we have of the inadequacy of Freudian theory, closely followed by the success of alternative
methods of treatment, such as behavior therapy. (p. 236) Whereas critics, such as Popper (1986), insist that Freud's theories cannot be
falsified and therefore are not scientific, Eysenck claims that because Freud's theories can be falsified, they are scientific. Grünbaum (1986)
concurs with Eysenck that Freud's theory is falsifiable and therefore scientific, but he goes one step further
and claims that Freud's theory of psychoanalysis has been proven wrong and is simply bad science.
No Endless War
No risk of endless warfare
Gray, 2007
[Colin, Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies and Professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at the University of Reading,
graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Oxford, Founder and Senior Associate to the National Institute for Public Policy, formerly with
the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Hudson Institute, July 2007, “The Implications of Preemptive and Preventive War
Doctrines: A Reconsideration”, http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/ssi10561/ssi10561.pdf]
7. A policy that favors preventive warfare expresses a futile quest for absolute security. It could do so. Most controversial policies contain
within them the possibility of misuse. In
the hands of a paranoid or boundlessly ambitious political leader, prevention
could be a policy for endless warfare. However, the American political system, with its checks and
balances, was designed explicitly for the purpose of constraining the executive from excessive folly. Both
the Vietnam and the contemporary Iraqi experiences reveal clearly that although the conduct of war is an
executive prerogative, in practice that authority is disciplined by public attitudes. Clausewitz made this point superbly with his
designation of the passion, the sentiments, of the people as a vital component of his trinitarian theory of war. 51 It is true to claim that power
can be, and indeed is often, abused, both personally and nationally. It is possible that a state could acquire a taste for the apparent swift
decisiveness of preventive warfare and overuse the option. One might argue that the easy success achieved against Taliban Afghanistan in
2001, provided fuel for the urge to seek a similarly rapid success against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In other words, the delights of military success
can be habit forming. On balance, claim seven is not persuasive, though it certainly contains a germ of truth. A country with unmatched wealth
and power, unused to physical insecurity at home—notwithstanding 42 years of nuclear danger, and a high level of gun crime—is vulnerable to
we ought not to endorse the argument that the United States
should eschew the preventive war option because it could lead to a futile, endless search for absolute
security. One might as well argue that the United States should adopt a defense policy and develop capabilities shaped strictly for
homeland security approached in a narrowly geographical sense. Since a president might misuse a military instrument
that had a global reach, why not deny the White House even the possibility of such misuse? In other
words, constrain policy ends by limiting policy’s military means. This argument has circulated for many decades and, it
must be admitted, it does have a certain elementary logic. It is the opinion of this enquiry, however, that the claim that a policy
which includes the preventive option might lead to a search for total security is not at all convincing. Of
course, folly in high places is always possible, which is one of the many reasons why popular democracy is the superior form of government. It
would be absurd to permit the fear of a futile and dangerous quest for absolute security to preclude
prevention as a policy option. Despite its absurdity, this rhetorical charge against prevention is a stock
favorite among prevention’s critics. It should be recognized and dismissed for what it is, a debating point
with little pragmatic merit. And strategy, though not always policy, must be nothing if not pragmatic.
demands for policies that supposedly can restore security. But
AT: Loss of the Self
“No value to life” doesn’t outweigh - prioritize existence because value is subjective
and could improve in the future
Tännsjö, 2011
[Torbjörn, the Kristian Claëson Professor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, 2011, “Shalt Thou Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics
of Killing,” online: http://people.su.se/~jolso/HS-texter/shaltthou.pdf]
I suppose it is correct to say that, if
Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living, then according to
utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an end to humanity. But this does not mean that,
each of us should commit suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when I presented the idea that utilitarianism should
be applied, not only to individual actions, but to collective actions as well.¶ It is a well-known fact that people rarely commit suicide.
Some even claim that no one who is mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as evidence for the claim that people live lives worth
living? That would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may avoid suicide because they believe that it is morally wrong to kill oneself.
It is also a possibility that, even if people lead lives not worth living, they believe they do. And even if some
may believe that their lives, up to now, have not been worth living, their future lives will be better. They
may be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about the future.¶ From the point of view of evolutionary biology, it is natural to
assume that people should rarely commit suicide. If we set old age to one side, it has poor survival value (of one’s genes) to kill oneself. So it
should be expected that it is difficult for ordinary people to kill themselves. But then theories about cognitive dissonance, known from
psychology, should warn us that we may come to believe that we live better lives than we do.¶ My
strong belief is that most of us
live lives worth living. However, I do believe that our lives are close to the point where they stop being worth living. But then it is at
least not very far-fetched to think that they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be too optimistic.¶ Let us just for the
sake of the argument assume that our lives are not worth living, and let us accept that, if this is so, we
should all kill ourselves. As I noted above, this does not answer the question what we should do, each one of
us. My conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The explanation is simple. If I kill myself, many people will
suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this will happen: ¶ ... suicide “survivors” confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt
are quite common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize
that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself. Suicide also leads
to rage, loneliness, and awareness of
vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates many popular perceptions of
suicide. ¶ The fact that all our lives lack meaning, if they do, does not mean that others will follow my
example. They will go on with their lives and their false expectations — at least for a while devastated because of my suicide. But then I have
an obligation, for their sake, to go on with my life. It is highly likely that, by committing suicide, I create more suffering (in their lives) than I
avoid (in my life).