Case
Case Frontlines
1NC Case Frontline: KQ Zong Aff
1. Past-oriented approaches towards whiteness neglect the way future
discourse affects the present – futurity is key to full awareness
Baldwin, 11 (Andrew, Co-Director of the Institute of Hazard at the University of Durham’s Department
of Geography, “Whiteness and futurity: Towards a research agenda,” Progress in Human Geography 2012,
originally published August 3, 2011, http://phg.sagepub.com/content/36/2/172, AW)
My argument is that a past-oriented approach to accounting for geographies of
whiteness often neglects to consider how various forms of whiteness are shaped by
discourses of futurity. This is not to argue that a historicist approach to conceptualizing white
geographies is wrongheaded; the past continues to be a crucial time-space through which to understand
whiteness. It is, however, to argue that such a past-focused orientation obscures the way
the category of the future is invoked in the articulation of whiteness. As such, any
analysis that seeks to understand how whitenesses of all kinds shape contemporary (and indeed past)
racisms operates with only a partial understanding of the time-spaces of whiteness. My argument is that
we can learn much about whitenesses and their corresponding forms of racism by
paying special attention to the ways in which such whitenesses are constituted by
futurity. I have offered some preliminary remarks on how we might conceptualize geographies of
whiteness qua futurity, but these should only be taken as starting points. Much more pragmatically, what
seems to be required is a fulsome investigation into the way the future shapes white geographies. What
might such a project entail? For one, geographers would do well to identify whether and how the
practice of governing through the future inaugurates new and repeats old forms of
whiteness. It would also be worth comparing and contrasting how the future is made
present in various dialectical accounts of whiteness. For instance, what becomes of
whiteness when understood through the binary actual-possible as opposed to an
actual-virtual binary, which has been my main concern? Alternatively, what becomes
of the category of whiteness if it is shown to be constituted by a future that has no
ontology except as a virtual presence? And, perhaps more pressing, how might whiteness be
newly politicized? Futurity provides a productive vocabulary for thinking about and
challenging whiteness. It does not offer a means of overcoming white supremacy, nor does it
provide white people with a normative prescription for living with their whiteness guilt- or worry-free.
Futurity is, however, a lacuna in the study of whiteness both in geography and outside
the discipline, and this alone suggests the need to take it seriously. But equally, and
perhaps more urgently, there is the need to study whiteness and futurity given how
central the future is to contemporary governance and politics. Indeed, at a moment
when the future features prominently in both political rhetoric – in his inaugural speech,
Obama implores America to carry ‘forth that great gift of freedom and [deliver] it safely to future
generations’ – and everyday life, how people orient themselves towards the future is
indelibly political. The future impels action. For Mann (2007), it is central to interest. For
Thrift (2008), ‘value increasingly arises not from what is but from what is not yet but
can potentially become, that is fromthe pull of the future’. Attention to whiteness and futurity may
at minimum enable us to see more clearly the extent to which the pull of whiteness
into the future reconfigures what is to be valued in the decades ahead.
2. The aff’s attempt at continued re-presentation of the Zong is a futile
attempt of remembering that will only eclipse over the place of the dead
Hartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at Columbia University,
“The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall 2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO
Publishing, AW)
At the portal that symbolized the finality of departure and the impossibility of reversion, the tensions that reside in mourning the
dead are most intensely experienced. Mourning
is both an expression o[ loss that tethers us to
the dead and severs that connection or overcomes loss by assuming the place of
the dead. The excesses of empathy lead us to mistake our return with the captives'.
To the degree that the bereaved attempt to understand this space of death by placing themselves in the position of the captive, loss
is attenuated rather than addressed, and the phantom presence of the departed and the
dead eclipsed by our simulated captivity. "You are back!" We are encouraged to see ou rselves as Lhe vessels
for the captive's return; we stand in the ancestor's shoes. We imaginatively wi t- ness the crimes of the past and cry for those
victimized -the enslaved, the ravaged, and the slaughtered . And the obliterative assimilation of empathy enables us to cry for ou
rselves, too. As we remember those ancestors held in Lhe dungeons, we can't bul think of our own dishonored and devalued l ives
and t he unrealized aspirations and the broken promises of abolition, reconstruction, and the civil rights movemen t. The i n
transigence of our seemi ngly eternal second•class status propels us Lo make recou rse to stories of origi n, unshakable explanatory
narratives, and sites of inju ry-the land where our blood has been spilt -asif some essen liaJ ingredien t of ourselves can be recovered
at the castles and forts tha t dot the western coast of Africa, as
if the location of the wound was itself the
cure, or as if the weight of dead generations could alone ensure our progress. lronica
ll}1 the decla ration "You are back!" undermines the very violence that these memorial s assiduously work to present by claimi ng
that the tourist'sexcursion is theancestor'sreturn.Given this, what does the journey back bode for the present? What is surprisi ng is
Lhat despite
the emphasis placed on remembrance and return, these ceremonies are actually
unable to articulate in any decisive fashion , other than the reclamatio n or a true identity, what
remembering yields. While the journey back is the vehicle of remedy, recovery, and sel f-reckoni ng. the question
begged is what exactly is the redressive work actualized by remembrance. Is not the
spectacular abjection of slavery reproduced in facile representations of the
horrors of the slave trade? What ends are served by such representations, beyond
remedying the failures of memory through the dramatic reenactment of captivity and the incorporation of the dead? The most
disturbing aspect of these reenactments is the suggestion that the rupture of the Middle Passage is neither irreparable nor
irrevocable but bridged by the tourist who acts as the vessel for the ancestor. Inshort, the captive finds his redemption in the tourist.
3. The aff’s focus on telling the history of the Zong fails at transforming the
present and fully representing the full atrocity of slavery with just
simulation
Hartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at Columbia University,
“The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall 2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO
Publishing, AW)
The point here is not to condemn tourism. but Lo rigorously
examine the politics of memory and
question whether "working through" is even an appropriate mod el for our
relationship with history. In Representing the Holocaust, Dominick LaCapra opts for working th rough as kind
of middle road between redemptive totaJiza tion and the im possibility of representa- tion and suggests that a degree of recovery is
possible i n the con text or a responsible working throu gh of the past. He asserts
that i n coming to terms with
trauma, there is the possibility of retrieving desirable aspects of the past that might be
used in rebuilding a new life.23 While LaCapra's argu men ts are persuasive, I wonder to what
degree the backward glance can provide us with the vision to build a new life? To
what extent need we rely on the past in transforming the present or, as Marx warned , can we
on ly draw ou r poetry from the fu ture and not the past? 2• Here I am not advanci ng the impossi- bil ity of representa tion or
declaring theend of history. but wondering aloud whether the image of enslaved ancestors can
transform the present. I ask this question in order to discover again the political and ethical
relevance of the past. If the goa l is something more than assimilating the terror of the past into our storehouse of
memory, the pressing question is, Why need we remember? Does the emphasis on remembering and working through
the past expose our insatiable desires for curatives, healing, and anything else that
proffers the restoration of some prelapsarian intactness? Or is recollection an avenue for undoing
history? Can remembering potentially enable an escape from the regularity of terror and the routine of violence constitutive of black
life in the United States? Or is it that remembering has become the only conceivable or viable form of political agency? Usually
the injunction to remember insists that memory can prevent atrocity, redeem the
dead, and cultivate an understanding of ourselves as both individuals and
collective subjects. Yet, too often, the injunction to remember assumes the ease of
grappling with terror, representing slavery's crime, and ably standing in the
other's shoes. I am not proscribing representations of the Middle Passage, particularly since it is the absence of a public
history of slavery rather than the saturation of representa tion that engenders these com pulsive performances, but instead poin ting
lo the
danger of facile invocations of captivity, sound bites about the millions lost,
and simulations of the past that substitute for critical engagement.
4. Haunting metaphors reassert colonial power – perpetuate a dancing
around the wound effect that trades off with mobilization for change and
strip the victims of agency and dignity
Cameron, 08 (Emilie, Department of Geography at Queen’s University, “Indigenous spectrality and
the politics of postcolonial ghost stories,” Cultural Geographies, July 11, 2008,
http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/15/3/383, AW)
What does it mean, then, to be ‘haunted’ in a decolonizing settler colony like British
Columbia? Who is haunted in these stories, and who or what is doing the haunting? What kind of future might these hauntings
demand? Do
they signal, as Derrida intended, a recognition of the always unfinished and
unfinishable in our relation to the present and past and, by extension, a sense of generosity and hospitality towards ghosts?
Or do they, as Sarah Ahmed55 has argued in relation to white guilt in postcolonial Australia, constitute yet
another self-referential engagement with the colonial past, in which the
experiences and desires of the settler occlude consideration of other desires and
possibilities? This is the reason for my wariness in the face of haunting tropes, for I fear
that postcolonial ghost stories risk perpetuating a kind of endless ‘dancing around a
wound’56 that Daniel David Moses identifies among liberal, left-leaning Canadians, anxiously replaying their
complicity in an ugly colonial past while neglecting to mobilize effectively for
change in the present. The ghosts of the Stein do not seem to me to represent the Nlaka’pamux with
very much dignity or agency, and surely any postcolonial trope we might mobilize ought at the
very least to figure Indigenous peoples with dignity. In Haraway’s terms, it seems to me that
‘haunting’ has the potential to function as a particularly ‘deadly’ trope, one that
requires the death and immateriality of Indigenous peoples to make an e/affective claim on non-Indigenous
British Columbians. It is a trope within which today’s living descendents of the generalized ‘spirits’ haunting the Stein, people like
Chiefs Leonard Andrew and Ruby Dunstan, seem to have no place: As the direct descendents of those aboriginal peoples who have
inhabited, shared, sustained, and been sustained by the Stein Valley for tens of thousands of years down to the present, our authority
in this watershed is inescapable… Under the cooperative authority of our two bands we will maintain the Stein Valley as a wilderness
in perpetuity for the enjoyment and enlightenment of all peoples.57 And so, at a time when (primarily non-Aboriginal) geographers,
among others, seem to have taken an interest in ghostly matters,
it seems critical to acknowledge that
ghostliness is a politicized state of being. Many scholars have interpreted these politics as a function
of visibility – that is, they suggest that the uncovering and exposure of the ghosts of the past
is an emancipatory act. In many cases this may be true, but I would suggest that there is also a
politics of vision involved in these hauntologies. Those who see and imagine ghosts
are as deserving of interrogation as the ghosts themselves, and the ghosts of the Stein
are profoundly self-referential. And so while the spectral does seem to offer a means of
conceptualizing that which we cannot easily see, even of giving some voice to colonial traumas,
confining the Indigenous to the ghostly also has the potential to re-inscribe the
interests of the powerful upon the meanings and memories of place.
5. The 1AC’s focus on the events of transatlantic slavery prevents change
and uses suffering narratives to distract from emancipation
Hartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at Columbia University,
“The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall 2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO
Publishing, AW)
History that hurts. The dungeon provides no redemption. Reckoning with our responsibility to
the dead cannot save them. The victor has already won . It is not possible to undo
the past. So, to what end do we conjure up the ghost? Of what use is an itinerary of terror?
Does it provide little more than evidence of what we cannot change, or quell the
uncertainty and doubt regarding millions Jost and u nknown? The debate still rages as lo how many
were transported to the Americas, killed in the raids and wars Lhat supplied the trade, perished on the
long journey to the coast, committed suicide, died of dehydration during the Middle Passage. or were
beaten or worked to death-22 million. 30 million, 60 million, or more? 21 Isn't it enough to know that for
each captive who survived the ordea l of captivity and season- ing, at least one did not? At best, the
backdrop of this defeat makes visible the diffuse violence and the everyday routines of domination, which
continue to characterize black life but are obscured by their everydayness. The normative character of terror insures i ts i nvisibility; i t defies detection behind rational categories l ike crime,povert y, and
pathology. ln other words, the necessity to underscore the centrality of the event.
defined here in terms of captivity, deportation , and social death, is a symptom of
the difficulty of representing "terror as usual." The oscillation between then and now
distills the past four hundred years into one definitive moment. And, at the same time,
the still-unfolding narrative of captivity and dispossession exceeds the discrete
parameters of the event. In itemizing the long list of violations, are we any closer to
freedom, or do such litanies only confirm what is feared-history is an injury that
has yet to cease happening? Given the irreparable nature of this event, which Jamaica
Ki ncaid describes as a wrong that can be assuaged only by the impossible, that is, by undoing
the past. is acting out the past the best approximation of work- ing through available to us? By
suffering the past are we better able to grasp hold of an elusive freedom and make
it substantial? Is pain the guarantee of compensation? Beyond con templating injury or
apportioning blam e, how can this encounter with the past fuel emancipatory efforts? Is
it enough that these acts of commemoration rescue the u n named and unaccounted for from obscurity
and obl ivion , counter the disavowals constitutive or the U.S. nalionaJ community, and unveil the
complicitou s discretion of the scholar- shi p of the trade?
1NC Case Frontline: AW Red Atlantic Aff
1. Past-oriented approaches towards whiteness neglect the way future
discourse affects the present – futurity is key to full awareness
Baldwin, 11 (Andrew, Co-Director of the Institute of Hazard at the University of Durham’s Department
of Geography, “Whiteness and futurity: Towards a research agenda,” Progress in Human Geography 2012,
originally published August 3, 2011, http://phg.sagepub.com/content/36/2/172, AW)
My argument is that a past-oriented approach to accounting for geographies of
whiteness often neglects to consider how various forms of whiteness are shaped by
discourses of futurity. This is not to argue that a historicist approach to conceptualizing white
geographies is wrongheaded; the past continues to be a crucial time-space through which to understand
whiteness. It is, however, to argue that such a past-focused orientation obscures the way
the category of the future is invoked in the articulation of whiteness. As such, any
analysis that seeks to understand how whitenesses of all kinds shape contemporary (and indeed past)
racisms operates with only a partial understanding of the time-spaces of whiteness. My argument is that
we can learn much about whitenesses and their corresponding forms of racism by
paying special attention to the ways in which such whitenesses are constituted by
futurity. I have offered some preliminary remarks on how we might conceptualize geographies of
whiteness qua futurity, but these should only be taken as starting points. Much more pragmatically, what
seems to be required is a fulsome investigation into the way the future shapes white geographies. What
might such a project entail? For one, geographers would do well to identify whether and how the
practice of governing through the future inaugurates new and repeats old forms of
whiteness. It would also be worth comparing and contrasting how the future is made
present in various dialectical accounts of whiteness. For instance, what becomes of
whiteness when understood through the binary actual-possible as opposed to an
actual-virtual binary, which has been my main concern? Alternatively, what becomes
of the category of whiteness if it is shown to be constituted by a future that has no
ontology except as a virtual presence? And, perhaps more pressing, how might whiteness be
newly politicized? Futurity provides a productive vocabulary for thinking about and
challenging whiteness. It does not offer a means of overcoming white supremacy, nor does it
provide white people with a normative prescription for living with their whiteness guilt- or worry-free.
Futurity is, however, a lacuna in the study of whiteness both in geography and outside
the discipline, and this alone suggests the need to take it seriously. But equally, and
perhaps more urgently, there is the need to study whiteness and futurity given how
central the future is to contemporary governance and politics. Indeed, at a moment
when the future features prominently in both political rhetoric – in his inaugural speech,
Obama implores America to carry ‘forth that great gift of freedom and [deliver] it safely to future
generations’ – and everyday life, how people orient themselves towards the future is
indelibly political. The future impels action. For Mann (2007), it is central to interest. For
Thrift (2008), ‘value increasingly arises not from what is but from what is not yet but
can potentially become, that is fromthe pull of the future’. Attention to whiteness and futurity may
at minimum enable us to see more clearly the extent to which the pull of whiteness
into the future reconfigures what is to be valued in the decades ahead.
2. The aff’s attempt at continued re-presentation of the Zong is a futile
attempt of remembering that will only eclipse over the place of the dead
Hartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at Columbia University,
“The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall 2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO
Publishing, AW)
At the portal that symbolized the finality of departure and the impossibility of reversion, the tensions that reside in mourning the
dead are most intensely experienced. Mourning
is both an expression o[ loss that tethers us to
the dead and severs that connection or overcomes loss by assuming the place of
the dead. The excesses of empathy lead us to mistake our return with the captives'.
To the degree that the bereaved attempt to understand this space of death by placing themselves in the position of the captive, loss
is attenuated rather than addressed, and the phantom presence of the departed and the
dead eclipsed by our simulated captivity. "You are back!" We are encouraged to see ou rselves as Lhe vessels
for the captive's return; we stand in the ancestor's shoes. We imaginatively wi t- ness the crimes of the past and cry for those
victimized -the enslaved, the ravaged, and the slaughtered . And the obliterative assimilation of empathy enables us to cry for ou
rselves, too. As we remember those ancestors held in Lhe dungeons, we can't bul think of our own dishonored and devalued l ives
and t he unrealized aspirations and the broken promises of abolition, reconstruction, and the civil rights movemen t. The i n
transigence of our seemi ngly eternal second•class status propels us Lo make recou rse to stories of origi n, unshakable explanatory
narratives, and sites of inju ry-the land where our blood has been spilt -asif some essen liaJ ingredien t of ourselves can be recovered
at the castles and forts tha t dot the western coast of Africa, as
if the location of the wound was itself the
cure, or as if the weight of dead generations could alone ensure our progress. lronica
ll}1 the decla ration "You are back!" undermines the very violence that these memorial s assiduously work to present by claimi ng
that the tourist'sexcursion is theancestor'sreturn.Given this, what does the journey back bode for the present? What is surprisi ng is
Lhat despite
the emphasis placed on remembrance and return, these ceremonies are actually
unable to articulate in any decisive fashion , other than the reclamatio n or a true identity, what
remembering yields. While the journey back is the vehicle of remedy, recovery, and sel f-reckoni ng. the question
begged is what exactly is the redressive work actualized by remembrance. Is not the
spectacular abjection of slavery reproduced in facile representations of the
horrors of the slave trade? What ends are served by such representations, beyond
remedying the failures of memory through the dramatic reenactment of captivity and the incorporation of the dead? The most
disturbing aspect of these reenactments is the suggestion that the rupture of the Middle Passage is neither irreparable nor
irrevocable but bridged by the tourist who acts as the vessel for the ancestor. Inshort, the captive finds his redemption in the tourist.
3. They appeal to the same legal apparatus they cite as the source of
oppression for help. Their use of the legal system reinforces the oppression
they seek to eradicate because the law has “safe” limits as to how far it will
go to achieve justice
Ansley 89
Frances Lee Ansley, Professor of Law at University of Tennessee. Cornell Law Review September, 1989 74 Cornell L. Rev. 993,
STIRRING THE ASHES: RACE, CLASS AND THE FUTURE OF CIVIL RIGHTS
SCHOLARSHIP
[*1031] Law plays an important role. Law functions not as a weapon wielded so that, say, bosses win
and workers lose in every legal conflict, but more subtly and powerfully by convincing us that the
status quo is natural and just. Law plays a "fundamental social role . . . as legitimation of existing
social and power relations." n150 According to Freeman, the redress of centuries of
discrimination was simply too unsettling for the system to accommodate. n151
Undoing black subordination turned out to require massive social dislocation and
redistribution. But our legal ideas and institutions are strongly, centrally antiredistributionist. Concepts like the legitimacy of existing rights, the myth of equal opportunity and
the sacredness of formal equality are lynch-pins in rationalizing class domination, and in justifying
substantive inequalities in our class system. For Freeman, this account explains the uneven shape of
Supreme Court civil rights doctrine. n152 Having committed itself to ending race discrimination, the
Court soon found itself under tremendous pressure (both external and internal) to achieve results. In
ordering remedies, n153 and sometimes even in finding violations, n154 the Court was pushed to try to
end conditions of injustice, not simply instances of discrimination. In attempting to do so, the Court
stretched traditional jurisprudence quite far. Eventually, however, this impulse was
contained and anti-discrimination law was restricted within "safer" bounds not so
potentially destabilizing to the system.
4. By using formal legal structures to correct injustice, they only reify the
legal system’s mechanistic conception of justice. The concept that the
system has always been bad is a myth used to extend its preferential
existence.
Glen 7
[Patrick. Attorney with the Office of Immigration Litigation, Former Law Lecturer @ Georgetown and Northern
Ohio. “The Deconstruction and Reification of Law in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” and the Trial” Southern
Interdisciplinary Law Journal, Vol 23 No 2. Winter 2007. ln/khirn]
The reification of law is made complete by the formalization of the legal apparatus, a total
generalization of legal principles that no longer requires man and operates on the basis of the
cogs and wheels put into place by initial and subsequent codifications. This mechanistic
conception of justice creates the appearance of the empty norm and, in severing the
question of origin from its societal bases, obscures even those foundational premises that
should shed light on what the essence of the law is. An examination of Kafka's law and the
legal relationships in Kafka's stories displays this phenomenon with remarkable consistency. From an
objective perspective, it is clear that the law in these stories has become reified, transformed into a
formalistic system. Although Kafka does not write a great deal on the history of the court, through hearsay
a few "legends" are conveyed. Titorelli, when apprising K. of the possible decisional outcomes, notes
that definite acquittal is no longer granted, though it had been in the legends told of the court.
The ever-active Block, even though he has employed Huld and an array of pettifogging attorneys,
yearns to employ one of the "great lawyers," those brilliant jurists talked about only in legends
who could secure any outcome they desired. These references are brief and come to the
reader after passing through many ears and mouths, yet these legends paint a portrait of a system that has
not always been so rigid and formal. The objective reification creates this image of eternity
and the notion that the system has always been the way it is. By concealing these legends
and chalking them up to fantasy the system is able to perpetuate its own existence
not only into the future, but also as a fiction that extends into the past. Subjectively, the relationships of
all who come into contact with the Law are reified. "Before the Law" is simplistic in its overt construction;
the sole relationship that consumes the reader is between the man from the country and the doorkeeper.
The law remains forever on the periphery. If the task of the man is truly to attain the law, has he achieved
this goal? It seems not. Yet if this is so, it is less a function of an emptiness behind the gate than of the
formalism alluded to by Weber. Viewing the law as reified one is led to the conception of the judge, and by
obvious extension the law, [*58] that Weber characterized as necessary in capitalist society. Justice
becomes a matter of computation; the law is given information and a judgment is disgorged. The man has
given the doorkeeper some information, for the doorkeeper knows that he has come from the city seeking
admittance to the law. That being the case, non-admittance must be the result of one of two things, both
endemic to a reified system. First, the law might be in the process of computing the judgment. It may have
attained all necessary information and is simply passing it through the necessary channels to decide the
judgment. Perhaps the matter is extremely complex, requiring the consultation of any number of
codifications. Or perhaps the light shining in the dimness of the dying man's eyes is evidence of an
imminence of judgment. Maybe the process itself is infinite, tracing Deleuze and Guattari's field of
immanence, the information passed on from room to room, another functionary always waiting behind
the closed door to prolong the process indefinitely. The waiting may simply be a function of this
processing. In any event, this function itself is a result of the reification of law which expels the
exhortations of the man from its midst to focus solely on the thingified relation he has brought to the gate.
Second, if the law has become reified and thus formal, then surely the rules of invocation are also formal
and rigid. This matter has already been touched upon, but it is worth repeating in this context. German
law was impersonal and formal and no doubt required a certain form of invocation to summon it forth.
Previously I had noted the doctrines of standing and justiciability. Obviously it could be something far
more mundane, such as a complaint being filed on paper of the wrong color or the improper structure of
the man's question of entrance. No matter the reason, the rules of the law have not been
complied with and the law itself has not taken notice of the man. A machine will only
work if certain levers are pulled and buttons pushed. If the exact sequence is not held to
nothing will happen. Law as machine, reified law, has this exact characteristic; one must call it forth
very specifically, taking care in the structure of the sentence, the order of the words, the color of the
complaint, etc. If not, no audience will be granted. Whether the non-admittance of the man from the
country is a function of the first or second scenario is not important. In either case it is the reification of
law that has alienated the man, leaving him alone on the slopes of despair waiting for a judgment that
may or may not come, depending solely on how well the machine is working or the question of whether it
is even in the process of functioning. Ernst Fischer paints this portrait succinctly: "The law is no longer a
living being, but a petrified institution, no longer timely, only still intimidating." 272 In such a stark
portrait one is inevitably reminded again of Kafka's own words, recast through the reified and clouded
consciousness of the man: "How modest this man is. He comes to the Law and begs.
Instead of storming the Law [*59] and smashing it to pieces he comes and begs." This isn't
technically a quote - just my rephrasing of a statement Kafka had made.
5. Haunting metaphors reassert colonial power – perpetuate a dancing
around the wound effect that trades off with mobilization for change and
strip the victims of agency and dignity
Cameron, 08 (Emilie, Department of Geography at Queen’s University, “Indigenous spectrality and
the politics of postcolonial ghost stories,” Cultural Geographies, July 11, 2008,
http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/15/3/383, AW)
What does it mean, then, to be ‘haunted’ in a decolonizing settler colony like British
Columbia? Who is haunted in these stories, and who or what is doing the haunting? What kind of future might these hauntings
demand? Do
they signal, as Derrida intended, a recognition of the always unfinished and
unfinishable in our relation to the present and past and, by extension, a sense of generosity and hospitality towards ghosts?
Or do they, as Sarah Ahmed55 has argued in relation to white guilt in postcolonial Australia, constitute yet
another self-referential engagement with the colonial past, in which the
experiences and desires of the settler occlude consideration of other desires and
possibilities? This is the reason for my wariness in the face of haunting tropes, for I fear
that postcolonial ghost stories risk perpetuating a kind of endless ‘dancing around a
wound’56 that Daniel David Moses identifies among liberal, left-leaning Canadians, anxiously replaying their
complicity in an ugly colonial past while neglecting to mobilize effectively for
change in the present. The ghosts of the Stein do not seem to me to represent the Nlaka’pamux with
very much dignity or agency, and surely any postcolonial trope we might mobilize ought at the
very least to figure Indigenous peoples with dignity. In Haraway’s terms, it seems to me that
‘haunting’ has the potential to function as a particularly ‘deadly’ trope , one that
requires the death and immateriality of Indigenous peoples to make an e/affective claim on non-Indigenous
British Columbians. It is a trope within which today’s living descendents of the generalized ‘spirits’ haunting the Stein, people like
Chiefs Leonard Andrew and Ruby Dunstan, seem to have no place: As the direct descendents of those aboriginal peoples who have
inhabited, shared, sustained, and been sustained by the Stein Valley for tens of thousands of years down to the present, our authority
in this watershed is inescapable… Under the cooperative authority of our two bands we will maintain the Stein Valley as a wilderness
in perpetuity for the enjoyment and enlightenment of all peoples.57 And so, at a time when (primarily non-Aboriginal) geographers,
among others, seem to have taken an interest in ghostly matters,
it seems critical to acknowledge that
ghostliness is a politicized state of being. Many scholars have interpreted these politics as a function
of visibility – that is, they suggest that the uncovering and exposure of the ghosts of the past
is an emancipatory act. In many cases this may be true, but I would suggest that there is also a
politics of vision involved in these hauntologies. Those who see and imagine ghosts
are as deserving of interrogation as the ghosts themselves, and the ghosts of the Stein
are profoundly self-referential. And so while the spectral does seem to offer a means of
conceptualizing that which we cannot easily see, even of giving some voice to colonial traumas,
confining the Indigenous to the ghostly also has the potential to re-inscribe the
interests of the powerful upon the meanings and memories of place.
6. The 1AC’s focus on the events of transatlantic slavery prevents change
and uses suffering narratives to distract from emancipation
Hartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at Columbia University,
“The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall 2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO
Publishing, AW)
History that hurts. The dungeon provides no redemption. Reckoning with our responsibility to
the dead cannot save them. The victor has already won . It is not possible to undo
the past. So, to what end do we conjure up the ghost? Of what use is an itinerary of terror?
Does it provide little more than evidence of what we cannot change, or quell the
uncertainty and doubt regarding millions Jost and u nknown? The debate still rages as lo how many
were transported to the Americas, killed in the raids and wars Lhat supplied the trade, perished on the
long journey to the coast, committed suicide, died of dehydration during the Middle Passage. or were
beaten or worked to death-22 million. 30 million, 60 million, or more? 21 Isn't it enough to know that for
each captive who survived the ordea l of captivity and season- ing, at least one did not? At best, the
backdrop of this defeat makes visible the diffuse violence and the everyday routines of domination, which
continue to characterize black life but are obscured by their everydayness. The normative character of terror insures i ts i nvisibility; i t defies detection behind rational categories l ike crime,povert y, and
pathology. ln other words, the necessity to underscore the centrality of the event.
defined here in terms of captivity, deportation , and social death, is a symptom of
the difficulty of representing "terror as usual." The oscillation between then and now
distills the past four hundred years into one definitive moment. And, at the same time,
the still-unfolding narrative of captivity and dispossession exceeds the discrete
parameters of the event. In itemizing the long list of violations, are we any closer to
freedom, or do such litanies only confirm what is feared-history is an injury that
has yet to cease happening? Given the irreparable nature of this event, which Jamaica
Ki ncaid describes as a wrong that can be assuaged only by the impossible, that is, by undoing
the past. is acting out the past the best approximation of work- ing through available to us? By
suffering the past are we better able to grasp hold of an elusive freedom and make
it substantial? Is pain the guarantee of compensation? Beyond con templating injury or
apportioning blam e, how can this encounter with the past fuel emancipatory efforts? Is
it enough that these acts of commemoration rescue the u n named and unaccounted for from obscurity
and obl ivion , counter the disavowals constitutive or the U.S. nalionaJ community, and unveil the
complicitou s discretion of the scholar- shi p of the trade?
Case Extensions
Notes
Some of these arguments are already in the frontlines but not in both of
them, so be careful. Also, some cards may need the tags changed depending
on which aff you are against (replacing Zong to transatlantic slavery).
Haunting Bad
Haunting metaphors reassert colonial power – forces assimilation and
glosses over the material existence of those affected
Cameron, 08 (Emilie, Department of Geography at Queen’s University, “Indigenous spectrality and
the politics of postcolonial ghost stories,” Cultural Geographies, July 11, 2008,
http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/15/3/383, AW)
The very slipperiness and indeterminacy of haunting makes it amenable to a great variety of invocations and seems
to
capture something of the unfinished, contested nature of colonial and postcolonial
geographies, but in this essay I ask what risks are involved in deploying a ‘spectrogeographical’ lens in studies of the colonial
and postcolonial, and particularly in figuring Indigenous bodies, voices, and histories in ghostly terms. If, as Haraway notes, we
inevitably read the world through tropes, we can still choose ‘less-deadly
version[s] for moral discourse’,11 and at a time when spectral metaphors are proliferating, it seems
crucial to interrogate the ‘deadliness’ of this particular line of thought. I would like to
make a contribution along these lines by drawing attention to the longer history of haunting tropes in Canada and their reemergence in the past decade or so in, among other places, a wilderness park in southwestern British Columbia. My intent is to draw
points of connection between past and present hauntologies and interrogate the positionality of those who figure Indigenous peoples
in ghostly terms. I will argue that allegorical
representations of Indigenous peoples as ghosts haunting the
Canadian state reinscribe colonial relations even as they are characterized as ‘post’
colonial expressions of recognition and redress, raising questions about the
politics of postcolonial ghost stories. In a recent review of the proliferation of haunting metaphors in
Canadian cultural production, Goldman and Saul cite Canadian settler-author Catherine Parr Traill’s declaration that ‘ghosts or
spirits… appear totally banished from Canada. This is too matter-of-fact a country for such supernaturals to visit’.12 Traill made this
claim in 1833, but it was echoed by poet and critic Earle Birney in 1947 when he stated that ‘it’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re
haunted’.13 Birney was referring to certain Canadians’ preoccupation with their apparent ‘lack’ of history in comparison to their
American neighbours, a matter of particular nationalist concern that has defined Canadian cultural production for decades. Such
claims to ‘ghostlessness’, however, are more the exception than the rule. Northey14
argues that, in fact, ghosts have been at the center of nation-building projects in Canada
for a long while, beginning in the nineteenth century. In particular, and of relevance to this essay, Bentley15 argues that
ghosts have been instrumental figures in efforts to connect Aboriginality with settler history, creating an aesthetic link between the
‘Indian past’ and the settler present. The Aboriginal
ghost has been used to evoke a generalized
sense of history in the Canadian landscape, but always with a sense of linearity and succession. It
is assumed that Aboriginal ghosts are all that remains of the ‘disappearing Indian’, and that
settler-Canadians have inherited this rich land from those who have now ‘passed’.
The ‘spectral native’ was a particularly common figure among the Confederation poets, a group of writers working at the turn of the
twentieth century who aimed to cultivate a uniquely Canadian literary voice and articulate the grounds for a budding Canadian
nationalism.16 One of their more celebrated members, Duncan Campbell Scott, also spent his career in the federal Department of
Indian Affairs, holding the post of Deputy Superintendent from 1923–1932, the era during which some of the most restrictive and
assimilative policies relating to Aboriginal peoples were crafted and implemented. While traveling into Northern Ontario to arrange
for the surrender of Cree and Ojibway lands in 1905, Scott wrote a poem entitled ‘Indian Place Names’ that begins: The race has
waned and left but tales of ghosts, That hover in the world like fading smoke About the lodges: gone are the dusty folk That once
were cunning with the thong and snare And mighty with the paddle and the bow; They lured the silver salmon from his lair, They
drove the buffalo in trampling hosts, And gambled in the teepees until dawn. But now their vaunted prowess is all gone, Gone like a
moose-track in April snow. But all the land is murmurous with the call Of their wild names that haunt the lovely glens Where lonely
water falls, or where the street Sounds all day with the tramp of myriad feet.17 Scott wrote a number of mournful Indian poems like
this one, lamenting the loss of the very cultures he was instrumental in attacking. Although critics like Stan Dragland18 have argued
that Scott’s poetry gave expression to his inner torment over the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into Canadian society,
Groening19 insists that Scott’s poems
supported and articulated his assimilationist agenda.
Ghostly, fading Indians, regrettable or not, were an essential component of Scott’s vision
as Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Scott was unequivocal that Indians should
‘progress into civilization and finally disappear as a separate and distinct people,
not by race extinction but by gradual assimilation with their fellow citizens’, 20
and the motif of fading, spectral Indians in Scott’s poetry worked to naturalize the
policies he enacted as Deputy Superintendent. The portrayal of Indigenous peoples as
fading ghosts extended far beyond Scott’s poetry, but the political implications of Scott’s
use of this trope are particularly stark given the context within which ‘Indian Place Names’ was written.
Scott was engaged in negotiations with real, live ‘Indians’ when he wrote this poem, and it is
this mismatch between the poem’s aestheticized ‘ghosting’ of Indigenous peoples
and their embodied, material existence around the treaty table that is of note . This
mismatch becomes all the more resonant from a contemporary vantage point: the Cree and Ojibway clearly did
not ‘wane’, after all. They were real then and they are real today, in spite of Scott’s
efforts, both poetic and bureaucratic.
Looking to the Past Bad
Starting points based in the past create the linearity they kritik and
preclude change – a future-oriented approach is key
Baldwin, 11 (Andrew, Co-Director of the Institute of Hazard at the University of Durham’s Department
of Geography, “Whiteness and futurity: Towards a research agenda,” Progress in Human Geography 2012,
originally published August 3, 2011, http://phg.sagepub.com/content/36/2/172, AW)
geographies of whiteness? For my purposes here, they refer to geographies – spaces,
places, landscapes, natures, mobilities, bodies, etc. – that are assumed to be white or are
in some way structured, though often implicitly, by some notion of whiteness (Bonnett, 1997; McCarthy and
What, then, are
Hague, 2004; Vanderbeck, 2006). The argument put forward in this paper is that research on geographies of whiteness is almost
invariably past-oriented (Bonnett, 1997, 2000; Hoelscher, 2003; Pulido, 2000). By ‘past-oriented’ I mean that whiteness,
whether understood as a past or present phenomenon, tends
to be explained, accounted for and examined as an
expression of social relations that took shape in the past (Satzewich, 2007). In the paper, I aim to
show how this work is dominated by an orientation that looks to the past as the temporal horizon through which research and
learning about past or present white racial identity occurs. By and large, this work assumes that in order to challenge or reconfigure
whitenesses and their corresponding racisms whiteness must be diagnosed using some form of past-oriented analysis (Bonnett,
1997). The racist past is, thus, used to explain the racist present. A brief example makes the point. In
an essay that many (Baldwin, 2009a; Dwyer and Jones, 2000; Jackson, 1998; McCarthy and Hague, 2004) suggest is a main point of
reference for debate about whiteness in geography, Alastair Bonnett (1997) argues that whiteness ought to be understood as a
a methodological approach that reaches
into the past for answers about contemporary race and racism. Elsewhere, Audrey Kobayashi
function of historical geography.2 As such, Bonnett privileges
and Linda Peake (2000) make a similar claim that whiteness is a historically constructed position: to understand whiteness requires
understanding its multiple genealogies.
I do wonder, though, whether a past-oriented approach to the
study of white geographies reproduces the teleological assumption that white
racism can be modernized away. Such an assumption privileges an ontology of
linear causality in which the past is thought to act on the present and the present is
said to be an effect of whatever came before. Consequently, efforts to understand racism are thought to
proceed from, or be enhanced by, some correct historical analysis of whiteness. According to this kind of temporality, the
future is the terrain upon or through which white racism will get resolved. It cleaves the
future from the present and, thus, gives the future discrete ontological form. Yet, in so doing, this kind
of temporality disregards the ways in which the future is very often already
present in the present not as a discrete ontological time-space, but as an absent or
virtual presence that constitutes the very meaning of the present (Anderson, 2010a; Massumi,
2007). This is a rather significant oversight when attempting to account for geographies of whiteness because it means that such
geographies are not simply a function of the past but of the future as well. So, then, what
about the future? To what extent are geographies of whiteness a function not just of the past but of the future? How are white
geographies maintained in relation to the future? In what ways is the future already present in various forms of whiteness? It seems
that the geographic literature on whiteness is silent on these questions. In pointing this out, I do not mean to indict or discredit the
historicist approach that has come to dominate understandings of whiteness. Again, past-oriented analyses of various kinds have
been and continue to be critical for understanding whitenesses and the various racisms to which they give rise. I simply wish to
acknowledge that by
foregrounding the past in the present the geographic study of
whiteness risks overlooking how whitenesses are made and maintained in relation
to futures both distant and immanent. Here, the task for a futureoriented geographic
research on whiteness might be to understand how both contemporary and past
forms of whiteness relate to the future (Anderson, 2010a), or how specific geographic expressions of
whiteness are contingent on the future. For instance, the task might be to understand how discourses of futurity shape various forms
of white supremacy from right-wing xenophobias to left-nationalisms to practices of liberal humanitarianism, and how these shape,
for instance, geographies of place, nature, space, mobility, bodies and so on. A
worthwhile starting point for
this work might be to analyse how discourses of white crisis, such as those found in Great
Britain in the early 1900s (Bonnett, 2004) or throughout the West during processes of post-Second World War decolonization
(Thobani, 2007), relate to and are shaped by notions of futurity. They
do relate to the future. The question
is: how and to what effect? Acknowledging how the future is made present in white
geographies is important for at least three reasons. First, as many now argue (Grusin, 2010; Massumi,
2007), the future is an important site through which individuals and societies are
governed (Anderson, 2010a). A focus on whiteness and futurity provides scope for thinking about
the way in which governing through the future might inaugurate new or
reconfigure old forms of whiteness. Eugenic science is a useful example here. Eugenics was underwritten by an
imagined future eradicated of human imperfections. Thus we might seek to understand how white geographies are reproduced
through new future-oriented technologies, like genetic screening and nanotechnology (Rose, 2007). Second, understanding
how white geographies articulate with discourses of futurity opens up new
terrains for conceptualizing and challenging racism. If white supremacy is, in part,
reproduced through shared practices of futurity, what then are these practices? What
kinds of futures do such practices seek to expunge or produce, and how can they be resisted? The case of genetic medicine is again
illustrative. For instance, individual genemapping allows ‘genetic citizens’ to witness their ‘future’ health by assessing their genetic
predisposition for disease (Rose, 2007). Genetic citizenship is, in turn, shaped by new practices of bodily purification aimed at
foreclosing certain ‘unhealthy’ futures. We might ask whether and how these practices are white. Third, a
focus on
whiteness and futurity points to the idea that affect shapes white racial formation
(Hook, 2005). For the future can never exist except as a form of virtual present , and affect
can be understood, in part, as a generalized attitude towards the presencing of
particular futures. (Important, however, is that affect can also be understood as a generalized attitude towards
presencings of the past. Think, for example, affects of nostalgia and loss.) Thus, we might ask: what futures infuse the affective logics
of whiteness? How does this future presencing occur? And how, if at all, are these futures constitutive of specific white spatiotemporalities? These reasons together provide a rationale for a research agenda concerned with understanding how the future works
as a resource in the geographic expression of whitenesses.
The aff’s focus on telling the history of the Zong fails at transforming the
present and fully representing the full atrocity of slavery with just
simulation
Hartman, 02 (Saidiya, professor of African American literature and history at Columbia University,
“The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101, 4, Fall 2002, Duke University Press, EBSCO
Publishing, AW)
The point here is not to condemn tourism. but Lo rigorously
examine the politics of memory and
question whether "working through" is even an appropriate mod el for our
relationship with history. In Representing the Holocaust, Dominick LaCapra opts for working th rough as kind
of middle road between redemptive totaJiza tion and the im possibility of representa- tion and suggests that a degree of recovery is
possible i n the con text or a responsible working throu gh of the past. He asserts
that i n coming to terms with
trauma, there is the possibility of retrieving desirable aspects of the past that might be
used in rebuilding a new life.23 While LaCapra's argu men ts are persuasive, I wonder to what
degree the backward glance can provide us with the vision to build a new life? To
what extent need we rely on the past in transforming the present or, as Marx warned , can we
on ly draw ou r poetry from the fu ture and not the past? 2• Here I am not advanci ng the impossi- bil ity of representa tion or
declaring theend of history. but wondering aloud whether the image of enslaved ancestors can
transform the present. I ask this question in order to discover again the political and ethical
relevance of the past. If the goa l is something more than assimilating the terror of the past into our storehouse of
memory, the pressing question is, Why need we remember? Does the emphasis on remembering and working through
the past expose our insatiable desires for curatives, healing, and anything else that
proffers the restoration of some prelapsarian intactness? Or is recollection an avenue for undoing
history? Can remembering potentially enable an escape from the regularity of terror and the routine of violence constitutive of black
life in the United States? Or is it that remembering has become the only conceivable or viable form of political agency? Usually
the injunction to remember insists that memory can prevent atrocity, redeem the
dead, and cultivate an understanding of ourselves as both individuals and
collective subjects. Yet, too often, the injunction to remember assumes the ease of
grappling with terror, representing slavery's crime, and ably standing in the
other's shoes. I am not proscribing representations of the Middle Passage, particularly since it is the absence of a public
history of slavery rather than the saturation of representa tion that engenders these com pulsive performances, but instead poin ting
lo the
danger of facile invocations of captivity, sound bites about the millions lost,
and simulations of the past that substitute for critical engagement.
State Bad
They appeal to the same legal apparatus that they cite as the source of
oppression for help. Their use of the legal system reinforces the oppression
they seek to eradicate because the law has “safe” limits as to how far it will
go to achieve justice
Ansley 89
Frances Lee Ansley, Professor of Law at University of Tennessee. Cornell Law Review September, 1989 74 Cornell L. Rev. 993,
STIRRING THE ASHES: RACE, CLASS AND THE FUTURE OF CIVIL RIGHTS
SCHOLARSHIP
[*1031] Law plays an important role. Law functions not as a weapon wielded so that, say, bosses win
and workers lose in every legal conflict, but more subtly and powerfully by convincing us that the
status quo is natural and just. Law plays a "fundamental social role . . . as legitimation of existing
social and power relations." n150 According to Freeman, the redress of centuries of
discrimination was simply too unsettling for the system to accommodate. n151
Undoing black subordination turned out to require massive social dislocation and
redistribution. But our legal ideas and institutions are strongly, centrally antiredistributionist. Concepts like the legitimacy of existing rights, the myth of equal opportunity and
the sacredness of formal equality are lynch-pins in rationalizing class domination, and in justifying
substantive inequalities in our class system. For Freeman, this account explains the uneven shape of
Supreme Court civil rights doctrine. n152 Having committed itself to ending race discrimination, the
Court soon found itself under tremendous pressure (both external and internal) to achieve results. In
ordering remedies, n153 and sometimes even in finding violations, n154 the Court was pushed to try to
end conditions of injustice, not simply instances of discrimination. In attempting to do so, the Court
stretched traditional jurisprudence quite far. Eventually, however, this impulse was
contained and anti-discrimination law was restricted within "safer" bounds not so
potentially destabilizing to the system.
By using formal legal structures to correct injustice, they only reify the legal
system’s mechanistic conception of justice. The concept that the system has
gotten better is a myth used to extend its preferential existence.
Glen 7
[Patrick. Attorney with the Office of Immigration Litigation, Former Law Lecturer @ Georgetown and Northern
Ohio. “The Deconstruction and Reification of Law in Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” and the Trial” Southern
Interdisciplinary Law Journal, Vol 23 No 2. Winter 2007. ln/khirn]
The reification of law is made complete by the formalization of the legal apparatus, a total
generalization of legal principles that no longer requires man and operates on the basis of the
cogs and wheels put into place by initial and subsequent codifications. This mechanistic
conception of justice creates the appearance of the empty norm and, in severing the
question of origin from its societal bases, obscures even those foundational premises that
should shed light on what the essence of the law is. An examination of Kafka's law and the
legal relationships in Kafka's stories displays this phenomenon with remarkable consistency. From an
objective perspective, it is clear that the law in these stories has become reified, transformed into a
formalistic system. Although Kafka does not write a great deal on the history of the court, through hearsay
a few "legends" are conveyed. Titorelli, when apprising K. of the possible decisional outcomes, notes
that definite acquittal is no longer granted, though it had been in the legends told of the court.
The ever-active Block, even though he has employed Huld and an array of pettifogging attorneys,
yearns to employ one of the "great lawyers," those brilliant jurists talked about only in legends
who could secure any outcome they desired. These references are brief and come to the
reader after passing through many ears and mouths, yet these legends paint a portrait of a system that has
not always been so rigid and formal. The objective reification creates this image of eternity
and the notion that the system has always been the way it is. By concealing these legends
and chalking them up to fantasy the system is able to perpetuate its own existence
not only into the future, but also as a fiction that extends into the past. Subjectively, the relationships of
all who come into contact with the Law are reified. "Before the Law" is simplistic in its overt construction;
the sole relationship that consumes the reader is between the man from the country and the doorkeeper.
The law remains forever on the periphery. If the task of the man is truly to attain the law, has he achieved
this goal? It seems not. Yet if this is so, it is less a function of an emptiness behind the gate than of the
formalism alluded to by Weber. Viewing the law as reified one is led to the conception of the judge, and by
obvious extension the law, [*58] that Weber characterized as necessary in capitalist society. Justice
becomes a matter of computation; the law is given information and a judgment is disgorged. The man has
given the doorkeeper some information, for the doorkeeper knows that he has come from the city seeking
admittance to the law. That being the case, non-admittance must be the result of one of two things, both
endemic to a reified system. First, the law might be in the process of computing the judgment. It may have
attained all necessary information and is simply passing it through the necessary channels to decide the
judgment. Perhaps the matter is extremely complex, requiring the consultation of any number of
codifications. Or perhaps the light shining in the dimness of the dying man's eyes is evidence of an
imminence of judgment. Maybe the process itself is infinite, tracing Deleuze and Guattari's field of
immanence, the information passed on from room to room, another functionary always waiting behind
the closed door to prolong the process indefinitely. The waiting may simply be a function of this
processing. In any event, this function itself is a result of the reification of law which expels the
exhortations of the man from its midst to focus solely on the thingified relation he has brought to the gate.
Second, if the law has become reified and thus formal, then surely the rules of invocation are also formal
and rigid. This matter has already been touched upon, but it is worth repeating in this context. German
law was impersonal and formal and no doubt required a certain form of invocation to summon it forth.
Previously I had noted the doctrines of standing and justiciability. Obviously it could be something far
more mundane, such as a complaint being filed on paper of the wrong color or the improper structure of
the man's question of entrance. No matter the reason, the rules of the law have not been
complied with and the law itself has not taken notice of the man. A machine will only
work if certain levers are pulled and buttons pushed. If the exact sequence is not held to
nothing will happen. Law as machine, reified law, has this exact characteristic; one must call it forth
very specifically, taking care in the structure of the sentence, the order of the words, the color of the
complaint, etc. If not, no audience will be granted. Whether the non-admittance of the man from the
country is a function of the first or second scenario is not important. In either case it is the reification of
law that has alienated the man, leaving him alone on the slopes of despair waiting for a judgment that
may or may not come, depending solely on how well the machine is working or the question of whether it
is even in the process of functioning. Ernst Fischer paints this portrait succinctly: "The law is no longer a
living being, but a petrified institution, no longer timely, only still intimidating." 272 In such a stark
portrait one is inevitably reminded again of Kafka's own words, recast through the reified and clouded
consciousness of the man: "How modest this man is. He comes to the Law and begs.
Instead of storming the Law [*59] and smashing it to pieces he comes and begs." This isn't
technically a quote - just my rephrasing of a statement Kafka had made.
Off Case
T
Notes
These are short versions of the 1NC shells. If you are wanting to make T
your #1 option in the debate, I would recommend using Anav’s limits cards
from the framework file to support your standards claims.
1NC Exploration T: Red Atlantic Aff
A. Interpretation: explore means to travel in or through an area for the
purpose of learning about it
Oxford 14 (Oxford Dictionaries 2014
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/explore)
explore Syllabification: ex·plore Pronunciation: /ikˈsplôr verb [with object] 1Travel in or through
(an unfamiliar country or area) in order to learn about or familiarize oneself with
it: the best way to explore Iceland’s northwest • figurative the project encourages children to explore the
world of photography More example sentencesSynonyms 1.1 [no object] (explore for) Search for resources
such as mineral deposits: the company explored for oil More example sentences 1.2Inquire into or discuss
(a subject or issue) in detail: he sets out to explore fundamental questions More example sentences
1.3Examine or evaluate (an option or possibility): you continue to explore new ways to generate income
Ocean is the single continuous body of salt water
Science Dictionary 2 The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2002. Published
by Houghton Mifflin. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ocean
ocean (ō'shən) Pronunciation Key The continuous body of salt water that covers 72
percent of the Earth's surface. The average salinity of ocean water is approximately three percent.
The deepest known area of the ocean, at 11,034 m (36,192 ft) is the Mariana Trench , located in the
western Pacific Ocean. Any of the principal divisions of this body of water, including the Atlantic, Pacific,
Indian, and Arctic Oceans. Our Living Language : The word ocean refers to one of the Earth's four
distinct, large areas of salt water, the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. The word can also
mean the entire network of water that covers almost three quarters of our planet.
It comes from the Greek Okeanos, a river believed to circle the globe. The word sea can
also mean the vast ocean covering most of the world. But it more commonly refers to large landlocked or
almost landlocked salty waters smaller than the great oceans, such as the Mediterranean Sea or the Bering
Sea. Sailors have long referred to all the world's waters as the seven seas. Although the origin of this
phrase is not known for certain, many people believe it referred to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea,
the Persian Gulf, the Black Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Indian Ocean, which were the
waters of primary interest to Europeans before Columbus.
B. Violation – the affirmative’s historical re-presentation of transatlantic
slavery is physically removed from the single continuous body of salt water
and is not exploration of the ocean
C. The affirmative interpretation unlimits by eliminating the bright line
boundary of the ocean. Exploration could be from any location and involve
any number of contemplation or analytic methods. There is no other way to
distinguish exploration from any thought process or the ocean from any
physical location, making it impossible for the negative to be adequately
prepared and clash.
Timmons 12 Bob Timmons, Artist - Author – Speaker, the Artist for the Ocean October 21, 2012
Ocean Guardians
http://oceanguardians.com.au/artist-for-the-ocean-bob-timmons/
Everything is connected and everything affects the ocean in the end since its majority of
the planet’s surface and subsurface
D. T is a voter because it’s necessary for good, well-prepared debating
1NC Exploration T: Zong Aff
A. Interpretation: explore means to travel in or through an area for the
purpose of learning about it
Oxford 14 (Oxford Dictionaries 2014
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/explore)
explore Syllabification: ex·plore Pronunciation: /ikˈsplôr verb [with object] 1Travel in or through
(an unfamiliar country or area) in order to learn about or familiarize oneself with
it: the best way to explore Iceland’s northwest • figurative the project encourages children to explore the
world of photography More example sentencesSynonyms 1.1 [no object] (explore for) Search for resources
such as mineral deposits: the company explored for oil More example sentences 1.2Inquire into or discuss
(a subject or issue) in detail: he sets out to explore fundamental questions More example sentences
1.3Examine or evaluate (an option or possibility): you continue to explore new ways to generate income
Ocean is the single continuous body of salt water
Science Dictionary 2 The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2002. Published
by Houghton Mifflin. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ocean
ocean (ō'shən) Pronunciation Key The continuous body of salt water that covers 72
percent of the Earth's surface. The average salinity of ocean water is approximately three percent.
The deepest known area of the ocean, at 11,034 m (36,192 ft) is the Mariana Trench , located in the
western Pacific Ocean. Any of the principal divisions of this body of water, including the Atlantic, Pacific,
Indian, and Arctic Oceans. Our Living Language : The word ocean refers to one of the Earth's four
distinct, large areas of salt water, the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. The word can also
mean the entire network of water that covers almost three quarters of our planet.
It comes from the Greek Okeanos, a river believed to circle the globe. The word sea can
also mean the vast ocean covering most of the world. But it more commonly refers to large landlocked or
almost landlocked salty waters smaller than the great oceans, such as the Mediterranean Sea or the Bering
Sea. Sailors have long referred to all the world's waters as the seven seas. Although the origin of this
phrase is not known for certain, many people believe it referred to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea,
the Persian Gulf, the Black Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Indian Ocean, which were the
waters of primary interest to Europeans before Columbus.
B. Violation – the affirmative’s historical re-presentation of the Zong is
physically removed from the single continuous body of salt water and is not
exploration of the ocean
C. The affirmative interpretation unlimits by eliminating the bright line
boundary of the ocean. Exploration could be from any location and involve
any number of contemplation or analytic methods. There is no other way to
distinguish exploration from any thought process or the ocean from any
physical location, making it impossible for the negative to be adequately
prepared and clash.
Timmons 12 Bob Timmons, Artist - Author – Speaker, the Artist for the Ocean October 21, 2012
Ocean Guardians
http://oceanguardians.com.au/artist-for-the-ocean-bob-timmons/
Everything is connected and everything affects the ocean in the end since its majority of
the planet’s surface and subsurface
D. T is a voter because it’s necessary for good, well-prepared debating
Marx K
A potential link
Class is fundamentally different from race and gender – Race struggles
downplays class struggles and negate the importance of class
Gimenez 2001 (Martha, Professor of Sociology at CU Boulder, “Marxism and Class, Gender and Race”,
Race Gender and Class, Volume 8)
There are many competing theories of race, gender, class, American society, political economy,
power, etc. but no specific theory is invoked to define how the terms race, gender and
class are used, or to identify how they are related to the rest of the social system. To some
extent, race, gender and class and their intersections and interlockings have become a mantra to be
invoked in any and all theoretical contexts, for a tacit agreement about their ubiquitousness and meaning
seems to have developed among RGC studies advocates, so that all that remains to be done is empirically
to document their intersections everywhere, for everything that happens is, by definition,
raced, classed, and gendered. This pragmatic acceptance of race, gender and class, as givens,
results in the downplaying of theory, and the resort to experience as the source of
knowledge. The emphasis on experience in the construction of knowledge is intended as a corrective to
theories that, presumably, reflect only the experience of the powerful. RGC seems to offer a subjectivist
understanding of theory as simply a reflection of the experience and consciousness of the individual
theorist, rather than as a body of propositions which is collectively and systematically produced under
historically specific conditions of possibility which grant them historical validity for as long as those
conditions prevail. Instead, knowledge and theory are pragmatically conceived as the products or
reflection of experience and, as such, unavoidably partial, so that greater accuracy and relative
completeness can be approximated only through gathering the experiential accounts of all groups. Such is
the importance given to the role of experience in the production of knowledge that in the eight page
introduction to the first section of an RGC anthology, the word experience is repeated thirty six times
(Andersen and Collins, 1995:1-9). I agree with the importance of learning from the experience of all
groups, especially those who have been silenced by oppression and exclusion and by the effects of
ideologies that mystify their actual conditions of existence. To learn how people describe their
understanding of their lives is very illuminating, for "ideas are the conscious expression -- real or illusory - of (our) actual relations and activities" (Marx, 1994:111), because "social existence determines
consciousness" (Marx, 1994: 211). Given that our existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production,
experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the
context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself, however, is suspect
because, dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is, at the same time, unique, personal, insightful and
revealing and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical
forces about which individuals may know little or nothing about (for a critical assessment of experience as
a source of knowledge see Sherry Gorelick, "Contradictions of feminist methodology," in Chow,
Wilkinson, and Baca Zinn, 1996; applicable to the role of experience in contemporary RGC and feminist
research is Jacoby's critique of the 1960s politics of subjectivity: Jacoby, 1973:37-49). Given the
emancipatory goals of the RGC perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist theory that it can
move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the "interlocking"
metaphor. This would require, however, a) a rethinking and modification of the postulated relationships
between race, class and gender, and b) a reconsideration of the notion that, because everyone is located at
the intersection of these structures, all social relations and interactions are "raced," "classed," and
"gendered." In the RGC perspective, race, gender and class are presented as equivalent
systems of oppression with extremely negative consequences for the oppressed. It
is also asserted that the theorization of the connections between these systems
require "a working hypothesis of equivalency" (Collins, 1997:74). Whether or not it is
possible to view class as just another system of oppression depends on the
theoretical framework within class is defined. If defined within the traditional sociology of
stratification perspective, in terms of a gradation perspective, class refers simply to strata or population
aggregates ranked on the basis of standard SES indicators (income, occupation, and education) (for an
excellent discussion of the difference between gradational and relational concepts of class, see Ossowski,
1963). Class in this non-relational, descriptive sense has no claims to being more fundamental than
gender or racial oppression; it simply refers to the set of individual attributes that place individuals within
an aggregate or strata arbitrarily defined by the researcher (i.e., depending on their data and research
purposes, anywhere from three or four to twelve "classes" can be identified). From the standpoint of
Marxist theory, however, class is qualitatively different from gender and race and
cannot be considered just another system of oppression . As Eagleton points out, whereas
racism and sexism are unremittingly bad, class is not entirely a "bad thing" even though socialists would
like to abolish it. The bourgeoisie in its revolutionary stage was instrumental in ushering a new era in
historical development, one which liberated the average person from the oppressions of feudalism and put
forth the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Today, however, it has an unquestionably
negative role to play as it expands and deepens the rule of capital over the entire
globe. The working class, on the other hand, is pivotally located to wage the final
struggle against capital and, consequently, it is "an excellent thing" (Eagleton,
1996:57). While racism and sexism have no redeeming feature, class relations are,
dialectically, a unity of opposites; both a site of exploitation and, objectively, a site
where the potential agents of social change are forged. To argue that the working class is
the fundamental agent of change does not entail the notion that it is the only agent of change. The
working class is of course composed of women and men who belong to different
races, ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and so forth, so that gender and
racial/ethnic struggles have the potential of fueling class struggles because, given
the patterns of wealth ownership and income distribution in this and all capitalist
countries, those who raise the banners of gender and racial struggles are
overwhelmingly propertyless workers, technically members of the working class, people who
need to work for economic survival whether it is for a wage or a salary, for whom racism, sexism and class
exploitation matter. But this vision of a mobilized working class where gender and racial struggles are not
subsumed but are nevertheless related requires a class conscious effort to link RGC studies to the Marxist
analysis of historical change. In so far as the "class" in RGC remains a neutral concept, open to any and all
theoretical meanings, just one oppression among others, intersectionality will not realize its revolutionary
potential. Nevertheless, I want to argue against the notion that class should be
considered equivalent to gender and race. I find the grounds for my argument not
only on the crucial role class struggles play in processes of epochal change but also in
the very assumptions of RGC studies and the ethnomethodological insights put forth by West and
Fenstermaker (1994). The assumption of the simultaneity of experience (i.e., all interactions are raced,
classed, gendered) together with the ambiguity inherent in the interactions themselves, so that while one
person might think he or she is "doing gender," another might interpret those "doings" in terms of "doing
class," highlight the basic issue that Collins accurately identifies when she argues that ethnomethodology
ignores power relations. Power relations underlie all processes of social interaction and this is why social
facts are constraining upon people. But the pervasiveness of power ought not to obfuscate the fact that
some power relations are more important and consequential than others. For example, the power that
physical attractiveness might confer a woman in her interactions with her less attractive female supervisor
or employer does not match the economic power of the latter over the former. In my view, the flattening
or erasure of the qualitative difference between class, race and gender in the RGC perspective is the
foundation for the recognition that it is important to deal with "basic relations of domination and
subordination" which now appear disembodied, outside class relations. In the effort to reject
"class reductionism," by postulating the equivalence between class and other
forms of oppression, the RGC perspective both negates the fundamental
importance of class but it is forced to acknowledge its importance by postulating
some other "basic" structures of domination. Class relations -- whether we are referring to
the relations between capitalist and wage workers, or to the relations between workers (salaried and
waged) and their managers and supervisors, those who are placed in "contradictory class locations,"
(Wright, 1978) -- are of paramount importance, for most people's economic survival is determined by
them. Those in dominant class positions do exert power over their employees and subordinates and a
crucial way in which that power is used is through their choosing the identity they impute their workers.
Whatever identity workers might claim or "do," employers can, in turn, disregard
their claims and "read" their "doings" differently as "raced" or "gendered" or both,
rather than as "classed," thus downplaying their class location and the class nature of
their grievances . To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to "reduce" gender or racial
oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and "nameless" power at the root of
what happens in social interactions grounded in "intersectionality" is class power.
For the rest, go to Anav’s baller Marx file (he also has
cool links)
Middle Passage PIK
1NC Red Atlantic
We advocate that the United States federal government should endlessly
explore the oceans as a site of saltwater slavery.
The phrase “middle passage” imposes a linear progression of slave history
with a known end point. This turns the 1AC’s historical analysis by
restricting it within a set timeframe strategically omitting the slave’s
ongoing captivity.
Stephanie E. Smallwood 2007 Associate Professor of history University of Washington, Ph.D. Duke
University in 1999 “saltwater slavery”
Sibell's story reflects an important truth underlying the distinctive out Ines of our respective
narratives: hers is a window not onto the experience of the slave ship, but rather on to
the memory of it. The effort to construct a history—tracing the movement of captives from Africa to
America—stands quite apart from the effort to integrate a memory—looking from America to Africa
through the experience of the slave ship. ‘Sibell’s supplies a narrative that is less about enduring the crisis
of the slave ship than about surviving it. Indeed, what is most striking about 'Sibell's story is its
unambiguous message that the trauma of the slave ship survivor lay in the effort of
integration—the challenge to integrate pieces of a narrative that do not fit neatly
together to suture the jagged edges and bleeding boundaries of lives fragmented by captive migration.
In this regard, it is intriguing also to consider the ways her narrative differs from Equiano's Narrative.
Because Equiano shaped his text in response to eighteenth-century British antislavery sentiments
specifically, and Enlightenment humanism and moral reformism generally, he wove a tale of migration
and progressive displacement that, like this book, moves along a trajectory that any reader familiar with
the tropes of early modern travel literature would recognize. In stark contrast, the fractured state of
'Sibell's account reflects the nonlinear temporality of a nonwestern subject and the
familiar rhythms of oral, as distinct from written, narrative expression. 'Sibell's account reflects also the
ways trauma disrupts normative narrative structures (whatever the cultural background of the subject)
and the role that storytelling plays in the integration of traumatic memory. It is not just that "traumatic
events" disrupt "attachments of family, friendship, love, and community" or "shatter the construction of
the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others." More fundamentally, trauma specialist Judith
Herman asserts, trauma directly disrupts the very "systems of attachment and meaning that link
individual and community." Thus, another specialist has defined traumatic events as ones "that cannot be
assimilated with the victim's 'inner schemata' of self in relation to the world." The "work of
reconstruction," Herman writes, "actually transforms the traumatic memory, so that it can be integrated
into the survivor's life story. Especially difficult to discipline was 'Sibell's recollection of the transaction
that set her on the irreversible journey into saltwater slavery. The act of sale did more than transfer
property rights to her person. In her reminiscence, it also propelled her, seemingly in an instant, into a
new world—a world molded by the European Atlantic political economy—the world of white people, big
ships, the expanse of the sea, and its ominous soundscape. In memory, the transaction also had a messy
social dimension that belied the seeming simple exchange of economic values, for it drew 'Sibell, the
brother-in-law, gun, and gunpowder together in a moment of collective embrace. This was the moment
when social and mercantile values collided. By the rationalized logic of the market, this was a clean
bartering of goods, one in which the girl, the gun, and the powder exchanged hands smoothly. But the
transaction held the opposite meaning in 'Sibell's experience: it was not a smooth exchange but rather one
marked by friction. She clung to her kinsman, and he could not let her go as long as her voice continued to
resound in his ears. Only when she finally fell silent did he let her go. ‘ Sibell’s remembered
experience cannot fit into the neat temporal and spatial categories that frame my narration of the
"middle passage " with its orderly narrative progression from African captivity through
Atlantic commodification to American slavery. It is the meaning of remembered events rather than their
temporal order that governs their place in 'Sibell's narrative. 'Sibell "finds" the people who she will
remember in Barbados, already constructed as American subjects on the slave ship, already answering to
what will be their plantation slave names, Sally, Dublin, and so on. The temporal and spatial categories of
her remembered middle passage overlap, as past, present, and future comfortably commingle ("in de way
me meet a Man, and de Man know my Dahdy and all my Family.—Ah! Budder . . . you see me here now
but dere has bin grandee fight in my Country for me, for he will tell my Family"). 'Sibell's story
conveys the very important truth that hers is a narrative that cannot come to
closurer, because the events that give it shape have not yet exhausted their dramatic content. Her
original captivity is not a past event; rather, it remains unresolved: her father and family continue
to look for her; she is here in American slavery now, but her return to the world that framed her
remembered African self is imminent. 'Sibell's narrative suggests that the slave ship charted no course of
narrative continuity between the African past and American present, but rather memorialized an
indeterminate passage marked by the impossibility of full narrative closure. The saltwater in
African memory, then was perhaps the antithesis of a "middle" passage, with all
that phrase implies about a smooth, linear progression leading to a known end. For
many in the pioneering generations of slaves, there could be no such integration of the terror of Atlantic
memory.
1NC Zong
We advocate exploration of the oceanic wreckage of the Zong without their
use of the phrase “Middle Passage”
The phrase “middle passage” imposes a linear progression of slave history
with a known end point. This turns the 1AC’s historical analysis by
restricting it within a set timeframe strategically omitting the slave’s
ongoing captivity.
Stephanie E. Smallwood 2007 Associate Professor of history University of Washington, Ph.D. Duke
University in 1999 “saltwater slavery”
Sibell's story reflects an important truth underlying the distinctive out Ines of our respective
narratives: hers is a window not onto the experience of the slave ship, but rather on to
the memory of it. The effort to construct a history—tracing the movement of captives from Africa to
America—stands quite apart from the effort to integrate a memory—looking from America to Africa
through the experience of the slave ship. ‘Sibell’s supplies a narrative that is less about enduring the crisis
of the slave ship than about surviving it. Indeed, what is most striking about 'Sibell's story is its
unambiguous message that the trauma of the slave ship survivor lay in the effort of
integration—the challenge to integrate pieces of a narrative that do not fit neatly
together to suture the jagged edges and bleeding boundaries of lives fragmented by captive migration.
In this regard, it is intriguing also to consider the ways her narrative differs from Equiano's Narrative.
Because Equiano shaped his text in response to eighteenth-century British antislavery sentiments
specifically, and Enlightenment humanism and moral reformism generally, he wove a tale of migration
and progressive displacement that, like this book, moves along a trajectory that any reader familiar with
the tropes of early modern travel literature would recognize. In stark contrast, the fractured state of
'Sibell's account reflects the nonlinear temporality of a nonwestern subject and the
familiar rhythms of oral, as distinct from written, narrative expression. 'Sibell's account reflects also the
ways trauma disrupts normative narrative structures (whatever the cultural background of the subject)
and the role that storytelling plays in the integration of traumatic memory. It is not just that "traumatic
events" disrupt "attachments of family, friendship, love, and community" or "shatter the construction of
the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others." More fundamentally, trauma specialist Judith
Herman asserts, trauma directly disrupts the very "systems of attachment and meaning that link
individual and community." Thus, another specialist has defined traumatic events as ones "that cannot be
assimilated with the victim's 'inner schemata' of self in relation to the world." The "work of
reconstruction," Herman writes, "actually transforms the traumatic memory, so that it can be integrated
into the survivor's life story. Especially difficult to discipline was 'Sibell's recollection of the transaction
that set her on the irreversible journey into saltwater slavery. The act of sale did more than transfer
property rights to her person. In her reminiscence, it also propelled her, seemingly in an instant, into a
new world—a world molded by the European Atlantic political economy—the world of white people, big
ships, the expanse of the sea, and its ominous soundscape. In memory, the transaction also had a messy
social dimension that belied the seeming simple exchange of economic values, for it drew 'Sibell, the
brother-in-law, gun, and gunpowder together in a moment of collective embrace. This was the moment
when social and mercantile values collided. By the rationalized logic of the market, this was a clean
bartering of goods, one in which the girl, the gun, and the powder exchanged hands smoothly. But the
transaction held the opposite meaning in 'Sibell's experience: it was not a smooth exchange but rather one
marked by friction. She clung to her kinsman, and he could not let her go as long as her voice continued to
resound in his ears. Only when she finally fell silent did he let her go. ‘ Sibell’s remembered
experience cannot fit into the neat temporal and spatial categories that frame my narration of the
"middle passage " with its orderly narrative progression from African captivity through
Atlantic commodification to American slavery. It is the meaning of remembered events rather than their
temporal order that governs their place in 'Sibell's narrative. 'Sibell "finds" the people who she will
remember in Barbados, already constructed as American subjects on the slave ship, already answering to
what will be their plantation slave names, Sally, Dublin, and so on. The temporal and spatial categories of
her remembered middle passage overlap, as past, present, and future comfortably commingle ("in de way
me meet a Man, and de Man know my Dahdy and all my Family.—Ah! Budder . . . you see me here now
but dere has bin grandee fight in my Country for me, for he will tell my Family"). 'Sibell's story
conveys the very important truth that hers is a narrative that cannot come to
closurer, because the events that give it shape have not yet exhausted their dramatic content. Her
original captivity is not a past event; rather, it remains unresolved: her father and family continue
to look for her; she is here in American slavery now, but her return to the world that framed her
remembered African self is imminent. 'Sibell's narrative suggests that the slave ship charted no course of
narrative continuity between the African past and American present, but rather memorialized an
indeterminate passage marked by the impossibility of full narrative closure. The saltwater in
African memory, then was perhaps the antithesis of a "middle" passage, with all
that phrase implies about a smooth, linear progression leading to a known end. For
many in the pioneering generations of slaves, there could be no such integration of the terror of Atlantic
memory.
Extension
The phrase “middle passage” forces the slaves narrative into linearity when
it is based in disorientation –
(SIMON CUTHBERT-KERR 2008 Simon, senior Policy Lead, Health Protection Team at The
Scottish Government, and Lecturer in the Department of History at University of Dundee, “Journal of
American Studies / Volume 42 / Issue 02 / August 2008”
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=2135140&jid=AMS&volumeId=42&iss
ueId=02&aid=2135132)
The most satisfying section of the book considers the psychological impact of the Middle Passage.
Smallwood argues convincingly that the market forces of enslavement and
commodification defined a straightforward temporal narrative of slavery for
Europeans (as implied the term "Middle Passage"), a narrative that was denied to
slaves. The very alienness of the ocean, which for land-based West African cultures was a
place of supernatural power, caused slaves spatial and temporal disorientation,
and contributed to their commodification, and to "the complete disintegration of
personhood" (r 2;)- Smallwood suggests that a linear narrative did not exist for slaves
because the trauma of enslavement did not end-it remained unresolved for each
individual until he or she was reunited with their kin, physically or spiritually after death. Yet spiritual
return was unlikely because the deaths of so many Africans during the Middle Passage were not attended
by the rituals which allowed the soul to pass to the next realm and rejoin the community of the living, the
not-yet-born and the ancestors. ln the Americas, a diasporic Africa emerged among those who were bound
together by the shared Atlantic experience, formed from the "plurality of remembered places immigrant
slaves carried with them" (189). As American-born generations became established, the one-way
migration from Africa to America led to creole culture valuing the African diaspora in America more
highly than that of Africa itself. For saltwater slaves, however, Smallwood argues that the
memory of enslavement and the Atlantic journey remained unresolved, an
experience too traumatic to be understood as part of one's own life, and an event which
prevented such individuals assimilating fully into the creole slave community.
Mourning K
Strategy Notes
The Zong 1NC is definitely how you want to be framing it against the KQ
version, but when facing the AW version (Red Atlantic) it is helpful to use
the CX to build some of the links. You should ask about their use of
“endless” and how it relates to their want to “reclaim the past” because the
way in which they answer it could put them at either end of the paradox,
and you would need to change the 1NC accordingly.
I put the extension cards in a somewhat organized order, but it is important
to highlight that all of the extension cards contain aspects of all three parts
of the argument (link, impact, and alt).
1NC Red Atlantic
Mourning is a paradox - The 1AC’s call to endless re-presentation of the
events of transatlantic slavery further entrenches the destructive violence
they isolate through a kind of psychic plagiarism that seeks to assimilate the
other into the narcissistic self
Kirkby, 06 (Joan, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, “Remembrance
of the Future’: Derrida on Mourning,” Social Semiotics Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2006,
http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=df402c47-70d2-4356-80fcd0a1d8f6c5dd%40sessionmgr4002&vid=2&hid=4206, AW)
Derrida also recalls de Man’s insistence on ‘‘the performative structure of the text in general as promise’’
(1986, 93), and goes on to argue that ‘‘the essence of speech is the promise, that there is no speaking that
does not promise, which at the same time means a commitment toward the future through . . . ‘a speech
act’ and a commitment to keep the memory of the said act, to keep the acts of this act’’ (1986, 97). He also
reflects upon the significance of the word aporia in de Man’s last texts, in which an absence of path
‘‘gives or promises the thinking of the path’’ and provokes the thinking of ‘‘what
still remains unthinkable or unthought’’ (Derrida 1986, 132). The aporia provokes ‘‘a
leap of memory and a displacement of thinking which leads toward a new
thinking’’. Aporicity promises an other thinking, ‘‘an other text, the future of another
promise. All at once the impasse . . . becomes the most ‘trustworthy,’ ‘reliable’ place or moment
for reopening a question . . . which remains difficult to think.’’ (Derrida 1986, 132/133)
The aporia ‘‘engenders, stimulates, makes one write, provokes thought . . .’’. There is
in it ‘‘the incalculable order of a wholly other: the coming or the call of the other’’
(Derrida 1986, 137). The aporia of de Man’s death has provoked Derrida’s re-reading of de Man and a recasting of the process of mourning. These ideas from de Man are then segued into the psychoanalytic
model of mourning to produce what I would argue is a new, intellectually and emotionally nuanced
model of mourning, a model wherein healthy psychic functioning depends neither
on a refusal to mourn or abandoning the dead. The Derridean model offers a respect for
the (dead) Other as Other; it allows agency to the mourner in the possibility of an
ongoing creative encounter with the Other in an externalising, productive, futureoriented memory; it emphasises the importance of acting out the entrusted
responsibility, which is their legacy to us; it upholds the idea of community and reminds
us of our interconnectedness with our dead. And in a sort of irreligious religiosity, it
enables us to conceive of a bond greater than ourselves, ‘‘the far away’’ within us.
To summarise then. First, with regard to mourning, Derrida privileges the process of
incorporation, which classical psychoanalysis has been seen as the pathological response to
loss. He does this essentially because incorporation acknowledges the other as other,
while the so-called normal process of mourning (introjection) merely assimilates the other
into the self in a kind of psychic plagiarism. Second, however, it is not an
unreconstructed incorporation that he recommends; he makes two important
theoretical moves. In the distinction between memory as interiorisation (erinnerung) and memory as
a giving over to thinking and inscription (gedachtnis), he appropriates gedachtnis to integrate with
incorporation. So that what we internalise upon the death of the other is their
dynamic engagements with the other*/their modus vivendi, their animating principle,
their dialogue with the world. We do not have to give them up*/we do not murder
them and find a substitute for the dead are irreplaceable. Third, the other important thing
about gedachtnis is that it is an externalising memory; it is linked with technical or
mechanical inscription, with writing and rhetoric. It is productive; it leads to external
engagement in an ongoing dialogue with the other. It is, as he says, a ‘‘remembrance of
the future’’ (Derrida 1986, 29). In conclusion, Derrida asks ‘‘What is love, friendship, memory?’’
The Alternative is to deconstruct the 1AC with an unconditional ethic to the
Other in the form of an aporia – this is the only way to embrace the paradox
of mourning and prevent both over and aborted interiorization
Derrida, 86 (Jacques, Professor of the Humanities at the University of California Irvine,
“Mnemosyne,” in Memoires for Paul de Man, translated by Cecile Lindsay, 1986, it’s a book, AW)
Everything remains “in me” or “in us,” “between us,” upon the death of the other.
Everything is entrusted to me; everything is bequeathed or given to us, and first of all to what I call
memory-to the memory, the place of this strange dative. All we seem to have left is memory since nothing
appears able to come to us any longer, nothing is coming or to come, form the other to the present. This is
probably true, but is this truth true, or true enough? The preceding sentences seem to suppose a certain
clarity in respect to what we mean by “in me,” “in us,” “death of the other,” “memory,” “present,” “to
come,” and so on. But still more light (plus de lumiere” is needed. The “me” or the “us” of which we
speak then aris and are delimited in the way that they are only through this experience
of the other, and of the other as other who can die, leaving in me or in us this
memory of the other. This terrible solitude which is mine or ours at the death fo the other is
what constitutes that relationship to self which we call “me,” “us,” “between us,”
“subjectivity,” “intersubjectivity,” “memory.” The possibility of death “happens,” so
to speak, “before” these different instances, and makes them possible. Or, more precisely,
the possibility of the death of the other as mine or ours in-forms any relations to the other and the finitude
of memory. We weep precisely over what happens to us when everything is entrusted to the sole memory
that is “in me” or “in us.” But we must also recall, in another turn of memory, that the “within me”
and the “within us” do not arise or appear before this terrible experience. Or at least
not before its possibility, actually felt and inscribed in us, signed. The “within me” and the
“within us” acquire their sense and their bearing only by carrying within
themselves the death and the memory of the other; of an other who is greater than
them, greater than what they or we can bear, carry, or comprehend, since we then lament being
no more than “memory,” “in memory.” Which is another way of remaining inconsolable before
the finitude of memory. We know, we knew, we remember – before the death of the loved onethat being-in-me or being-in-us is constituted out of the possibility of mourning.
We are only ourselves from the perspective of this knowledge that is older than
ourselves; and this is why I say that we being by recalling this to ourselves: we
come to ourselves through this memory of possible mourning. In other words this is
precisely the allegory, this memory of impossible mourning. Paul de man would perhaps
say: of the unreadability of mourning. The possibility of the impossible commands here the
whole rhetoric of mourning, and describes the essence of memory. Upon the death
of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside
us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists
the closure of our interiorizing memory. With the noting of this irrevocable memory. With the
nothing of this irrevocable absence, the other appears as other, and as other for us, upon his
death or at least in the anticipated possibility of a death, since death constitutes and makes
manifest the limits of a me or an us who are obliged to harbor something that is greater and other then
them; something outside of within them. Memory and interiorization: since Freud this is how the
“normal” “work of mourning” is often described. It entails a movement in which an
interiorizing idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the
other, the other’s visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring them.
This mimetic interiorization is not fictive; it is the origin of fiction, of apocryphal
figuration. It takes place in a body. Or rather, it makes a place for a body, a voice, and a
soul which, although “ours,” did not exist and had no meaning before this possibility that one
must always begin by remembering, and whose trace must be followed. II faut, one
must: it is the law, that law of the (necessary) relation of Being to law. We can only live this
experience in the form of an aporia: the aporia of mourning and of prosopopeia, where the
possible remains impossible. Where success fails. And where faithful interiorization
bears the other and constitutes him in me (in us), at once living and dead. It makes
the other no longer quite seems to be the other, because we grieve for him and
bear him in us, like an unborn child, like a future. And inversely, the failure
succeeds: an aborted interiorization is at the same time a respect for the other as
other, a sort of tender rejection, a movement of renunciation which leaves the
other alone, outside, over there, in his death, outside of us.
1NC Zong
Mourning is a paradox - The 1AC’s call to endless re-presentation of the
Zong’s events further entrenches the destructive violence they isolate
through a kind of psychic plagiarism that seeks to assimilate the other into
the narcissistic self
Kirkby, 06 (Joan, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, “Remembrance
of the Future’: Derrida on Mourning,” Social Semiotics Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2006,
http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=df402c47-70d2-4356-80fcd0a1d8f6c5dd%40sessionmgr4002&vid=2&hid=4206, AW)
Derrida also recalls de Man’s insistence on ‘‘the performative structure of the text in general as promise’’
(1986, 93), and goes on to argue that ‘‘the essence of speech is the promise, that there is no speaking that
does not promise, which at the same time means a commitment toward the future through . . . ‘a speech
act’ and a commitment to keep the memory of the said act, to keep the acts of this act’’ (1986, 97). He also
reflects upon the significance of the word aporia in de Man’s last texts, in which an absence of path
‘‘gives or promises the thinking of the path’’ and provokes the thinking of ‘‘what
still remains unthinkable or unthought’’ (Derrida 1986, 132). The aporia provokes ‘‘a
leap of memory and a displacement of thinking which leads toward a new
thinking’’. Aporicity promises an other thinking, ‘‘an other text, the future of another
promise. All at once the impasse . . . becomes the most ‘trustworthy,’ ‘reliable’ place or moment
for reopening a question . . . which remains difficult to think.’’ (Derrida 1986, 132/133)
The aporia ‘‘engenders, stimulates, makes one write, provokes thought . . .’’. There is
in it ‘‘the incalculable order of a wholly other: the coming or the call of the other’’
(Derrida 1986, 137). The aporia of de Man’s death has provoked Derrida’s re-reading of de Man and a recasting of the process of mourning. These ideas from de Man are then segued into the psychoanalytic
model of mourning to produce what I would argue is a new, intellectually and emotionally nuanced
model of mourning, a model wherein healthy psychic functioning depends neither
on a refusal to mourn or abandoning the dead. The Derridean model offers a respect for
the (dead) Other as Other; it allows agency to the mourner in the possibility of an
ongoing creative encounter with the Other in an externalising, productive, futureoriented memory; it emphasises the importance of acting out the entrusted
responsibility, which is their legacy to us; it upholds the idea of community and reminds
us of our interconnectedness with our dead. And in a sort of irreligious religiosity, it
enables us to conceive of a bond greater than ourselves, ‘‘the far away’’ within us.
To summarise then. First, with regard to mourning, Derrida privileges the process of
incorporation, which classical psychoanalysis has been seen as the pathological response to
loss. He does this essentially because incorporation acknowledges the other as other,
while the so-called normal process of mourning (introjection) merely assimilates the other
into the self in a kind of psychic plagiarism. Second, however, it is not an
unreconstructed incorporation that he recommends; he makes two important
theoretical moves. In the distinction between memory as interiorisation (erinnerung) and memory as
a giving over to thinking and inscription (gedachtnis), he appropriates gedachtnis to integrate with
incorporation. So that what we internalise upon the death of the other is their
dynamic engagements with the other*/their modus vivendi, their animating principle,
their dialogue with the world. We do not have to give them up*/we do not murder
them and find a substitute for the dead are irreplaceable. Third, the other important thing
about gedachtnis is that it is an externalising memory; it is linked with technical or
mechanical inscription, with writing and rhetoric. It is productive; it leads to external
engagement in an ongoing dialogue with the other. It is, as he says, a ‘‘remembrance of
the future’’ (Derrida 1986, 29). In conclusion, Derrida asks ‘‘What is love, friendship, memory?’’
The Alternative is to deconstruct the 1AC with an unconditional ethic to the
Other in the form of an aporia – this is the only way to embrace the paradox
of mourning and prevent both over and aborted interiorization
Derrida, 86 (Jacques, Professor of the Humanities at the University of California Irvine,
“Mnemosyne,” in Memoires for Paul de Man, translated by Cecile Lindsay, 1986, it’s a book, AW)
Everything remains “in me” or “in us,” “between us,” upon the death of the other.
Everything is entrusted to me; everything is bequeathed or given to us, and first of all to what I call
memory-to the memory, the place of this strange dative. All we seem to have left is memory since nothing
appears able to come to us any longer, nothing is coming or to come, form the other to the present. This is
probably true, but is this truth true, or true enough? The preceding sentences seem to suppose a certain
clarity in respect to what we mean by “in me,” “in us,” “death of the other,” “memory,” “present,” “to
come,” and so on. But still more light (plus de lumiere” is needed. The “me” or the “us” of which we
speak then aris and are delimited in the way that they are only through this experience
of the other, and of the other as other who can die, leaving in me or in us this
memory of the other. This terrible solitude which is mine or ours at the death fo the other is
what constitutes that relationship to self which we call “me,” “us,” “between us,”
“subjectivity,” “intersubjectivity,” “memory.” The possibility of death “happens,” so
to speak, “before” these different instances, and makes them possible. Or, more precisely,
the possibility of the death of the other as mine or ours in-forms any relations to the other and the finitude
of memory. We weep precisely over what happens to us when everything is entrusted to the sole memory
that is “in me” or “in us.” But we must also recall, in another turn of memory, that the “within me”
and the “within us” do not arise or appear before this terrible experience. Or at least
not before its possibility, actually felt and inscribed in us, signed. The “within me” and the
“within us” acquire their sense and their bearing only by carrying within
themselves the death and the memory of the other; of an other who is greater than
them, greater than what they or we can bear, carry, or comprehend, since we then lament being
no more than “memory,” “in memory.” Which is another way of remaining inconsolable before
the finitude of memory. We know, we knew, we remember – before the death of the loved onethat being-in-me or being-in-us is constituted out of the possibility of mourning.
We are only ourselves from the perspective of this knowledge that is older than
ourselves; and this is why I say that we being by recalling this to ourselves: we
come to ourselves through this memory of possible mourning. In other words this is
precisely the allegory, this memory of impossible mourning. Paul de man would perhaps
say: of the unreadability of mourning. The possibility of the impossible commands here the
whole rhetoric of mourning, and describes the essence of memory. Upon the death
of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside
us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists
the closure of our interiorizing memory. With the noting of this irrevocable memory. With the
nothing of this irrevocable absence, the other appears as other, and as other for us, upon his
death or at least in the anticipated possibility of a death, since death constitutes and makes
manifest the limits of a me or an us who are obliged to harbor something that is greater and other then
them; something outside of within them. Memory and interiorization: since Freud this is how the
“normal” “work of mourning” is often described. It entails a movement in which an
interiorizing idealization takes in itself or upon itself the body and voice of the
other, the other’s visage and person, ideally and quasi-literally devouring them.
This mimetic interiorization is not fictive; it is the origin of fiction, of apocryphal
figuration. It takes place in a body. Or rather, it makes a place for a body, a voice, and a
soul which, although “ours,” did not exist and had no meaning before this possibility that one
must always begin by remembering, and whose trace must be followed. II faut, one
must: it is the law, that law of the (necessary) relation of Being to law. We can only live this
experience in the form of an aporia: the aporia of mourning and of prosopopeia, where the
possible remains impossible. Where success fails. And where faithful interiorization
bears the other and constitutes him in me (in us), at once living and dead. It makes
the other no longer quite seems to be the other, because we grieve for him and
bear him in us, like an unborn child, like a future. And inversely, the failure
succeeds: an aborted interiorization is at the same time a respect for the other as
other, a sort of tender rejection, a movement of renunciation which leaves the
other alone, outside, over there, in his death, outside of us.
2NC Link Extensions
The 1AC seeks to polyvocally understand the violence of transatlantic
slavery - this quest to reveal history effaces the memory of the other
through endless re-presentation.
Derrida et al, 96 (Jacques, Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael Naas, “By Force of Mourning,” Critical Inquiry Vol 22, No. 2 (Winter, 1996),
University of Chicago Press, JSTOR, AW)
Without even trying to say something more, however minimal, about this magnificent book and about the
strange time of reading by which I was overwhelmed, I would like to venture a few words on the subject of
mourning, and on the time of an interminable mourning, so as not to rush ahead-something I would deem
intolerable-to speak this evening of the last book of Marin as I might have spoken in another time and in
more conventional circumstances of his most recent book. In returning regularly to common places, I
mean to the places that were common to us, sitting in the office I shared with him for so long on
Boulevard Raspail, walking around the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, taking part just recently in a
discussion during the seminar he led for many years with certain among you whom I see in this room, I
have said to myself that, ever since psychoanalysis came to mark this discourse, the image
commonly used to characterize mourning is that of an interiorization (an
idealizing incorporation, introjection, consumption of the other, in effect, an experience
that would have received one of its essential aspects from the Eucharist, which was, for Louis, the great
Thing, the great mourning object, both his object and the object of his mourning, to which he will have
devoted a work so original and all-consuming, a work that unrelentingly pursues the eucharistic body
from every side-exegetical, philosophical, historical, logical, linguistic-as if it were necessary before dying
to come to know what mourning is, to know how to come to terms with death, and how to transfigure the
work of death into a work that gives and gives something to be seen). Now, if the modes of
interiorization or of subjectification that psychoanalysis talks about are in some
respects undeniable in the work of mourning where the death of the friend leaves
us, that is, leaves us alone, I told myself the following, which is certainly not original but which I
feel with a singular acuteness and, indeed, an increased intensity: if this interiorization is not
possible, if it must not and this is the unbearable paradox of fidelity-be possible
and completed, it would not be because of a limit, because of a border that cannot
be crossed, because of a frontier that comes to enclose a given space, organizing
finitude into an inside and an outside that would be, in effect, homogeneous with one
another, symmetrical and commensurable on each side of an indivisible line. It would be, rather,
because of another organization of space and of visibility, of the gazing and the
gazed upon. Whatever the truth, alas, of this inevitable interiorization (the friend can no
longer be but in us, and whatever we may believe about the after-life, about living-on, according to all the
possible forms of faith, it is in us that these movements might appear), this being-in-us
reveals a truth to and at death, at the moment of death and even before death by
everything in us that prepares itself for and awaits death, that is, in the undeniable
anticipation of mourning that constitutes friendship. It reveals the truth of its topology and
tropology. When we say "in us," when we speak so easily and so painfully of inside and
outside, we are naming space, we are speaking of a visibility of the body, a geometry
of gazes, an orientation of perspectives. We are speaking of images. What is only in us seems to
be reducible to images, which might be memories or monuments, but which are
reducible in any case to a memory that consists of visible scenes that are no longer
anything but images, since the other of whom they are the images appears only as
the one who has disappeared or passed away, as the one who, having passed away, leaves "in
us" only images. He is no more, he whom we see in images or in recollection, he of whom we speak, whom
we cite, to whom we attempt to give back words, to let speak-he is no more, he is no longer here, no
longer there. And nothing can begin to dissipate the terrifying and chilling light of
this certainty. As if respect for this certainty were still a debt, the last one, owed to
the friend.
The 1AC’s attempt to reveal the events of the Zong is coopted by a
narcissistic pathos that is destructive towards the Other – only an approach
that leaves the Other both alone and not abandoned is ethical
Derrida, 2K (Jacques, Professor of the Humanities at the University of California Irvine, “Lyotard and
us,” parallax vol. 6, no. 4, 28-48, http://www.sfu.ca/~poitras/par_derrida_00.pdf, AW)
In order to free myself, and you as well, from the narcissistic pathos which such a situation,
the exhibition of such an ‘us’, opens onto, I was dreaming of at last being capable of another choice. I was
dreaming of escaping from genres in general, and in particular, two genres of
discourse – and two unbearable, unbearably presumptuous ways of saying ‘us’. On
one side I wanted to stay clear of the expected homage to J.F.L.’s work as thinker, an homage
taking the form of a philosophical contribution belonging in one of the numerous
conferences in which we took part together, J.F. and me, in so many places, towns, countries
(and in the very place in which this talk was first delivered, the College International de Philosophie which
remains so dear to me for being, since its origin, desired, inhabited, shared with him, like further away
places, such as one house, in particular, on the Pacific Wall). Such homage taking the form of a
philosophical contribution, I do not feel up to today, and Lyotard’s œuvre does not need me
for that. But on the other hand, I also wanted to stay away from a homage in the form of
a personal testimony, always somewhat appropriating, always threatening to give in to an
indecent way of saying ‘us’, or worse: ‘me’, when precisely the first wish is to let JeanFrancois speak, to read and cite him, him alone, staying back, and yet without
leaving him alone as he is left to speak, which would amount to another way of
abandoning him. A double injunction, then , self-contradictory and merciless . How
to leave him alone without abandoning him? How to, without further treason, disavow the act
of narcissistic remembrance so full of memories to cry or make cry about? I have just framed these words
‘cry’, ‘make cry’, [pleurer, faire pleurer7 ] for reasons that will become clear later.
2NC Impact Extensions
We must adopt an ethic to the Other – only the alt acknowledges the
Otherness of the Other and prevents narcissistic violence from introjection
or total incorporation
Kirkby, 06 (Joan, Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, “Remembrance
of the Future’: Derrida on Mourning,” Social Semiotics Vol. 16, No. 3, September 2006,
http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=df402c47-70d2-4356-80fcd0a1d8f6c5dd%40sessionmgr4002&vid=2&hid=4206, AW)
As he said, in response to a question from Geneveive Lloyd at the Sydney Seminars, he was moved to
challenge the pertinence of the distinction set up by Abraham and Torok, ‘‘two analysts, two friends, now
dead’’, because neither introjection nor incorporation is satisfactory: ‘‘if I succeed
‘normally’ in the process of introjection then I am untrue to the Other, the Other
simply becomes myself, and it’s a way of remembering the Other by forgetting the
Other. The Other becomes part of myself and I have a narcissistic relation to the
Other inside myself’’. That, he declares, is ‘‘an untrue mourning, untrue to the memory of
the Other’’. That is why he prefers their so-called pathological option: incorporation. If
mourning is to be ‘‘the mourning of the Other as such’’, he argues, ‘‘then it has to be incorporated’’:
‘‘But the incorporation should not be total, and in that case, of course, the Other
remains foreign in myself, it remains Other, it doesn’t become part of myself. I
cannot appropriate the Other in myself so it is a failure in a work of mourning, but
it is the only way of respecting the Otherness of the Other’’. In that sense, you succeed
only by failing, ‘‘the only possible way of mourning’’ is ‘‘the impossible mourning’’
(Patton and Smith 2001, 66). In his recasting of Abraham and Torok’s schema, Derrida privileges
incorporation over introjection, their model of healthy mourning, which assimilates the other
to the sameness of the self. Derrida prefers incorporation because it acknowledges the
otherness of the other, their irreducibility to ourselves. However, to the idea of
incorporation, he adds the idea of a certain kind of memory as refracted through Hegel and
de Man; namely gedachtnis, a thinking externalizing memory that gives us over to writing
and thought in a future-oriented engagement with the dead.
2NC Alt Extensions
The alternative solves – our form of aporia problematizes the resolved
action of the 1AC by embracing an immobilization of thinking that works
within the paradox to achieve a new thinking that is wholly other
Derrida, 86 (Jacques, Professor of the Humanities at the University of California Irvine, “Acts: The
meaning of a given word,” in Memoires for Paul de Man, translated by Eduardo Cadava, 1986, it’s a book,
AW)
I would have wanted to speak to you of the thinking of Paul de Man and of "deconstruction in America"
from the triple point of view of history, literature, and politics. A promise not kept but you will understand
why I have used Rousseau to introduce these questions; I mean here the Rousseau of the Social Con-tract
interpreted by Paul de Man. What de Man calls a "textual allegory" powerfully brings to light the
"literarity" or "fictionality" of political discourse or rather of the promise written on the "politicity" of the
political. And this structure of textual allegories which "generate history" is also presented, in a very
precise sense of the term, as an "allegory of unreadability," that is to say, as an aporetic
structure: the madness of the promise and the madness of memory. The aporetic and
madness. The word "aporia" recurs often in Paul de Man's last texts. I believe that we would
misunderstand it if we tried to hold it to its most literal meaning: an absence of path , a
paralysis before road-blocks, the immobilization of thinking, the impossibility of
advancing, a barrier blocking the future. On the contrary, it seems to me that the experience of
the aporia, such as de Man deciphers it, gives or promises the thinking of the path, provokes the thinking
of the very possibility of what still remains unthinkable or unthought, indeed, impossible. The figures
of rationality are profiled and outlined in the madness of the aporetic. Now the
aporetic always immobilizes us in the simultaneously unsurpassable and
unsatisfying system of an opposition, indeed, of a contradiction. The aporia is apparently,
in its negative aspect, the negative contraction of the dialectic, a dialectic which does not
find its path or its method, its grand methodical circle. A couple of examples used more than once
by Paul de Man in order to describe this irreducible aporia: allegory and irony, the performative and the
constative. It is above all in relation to the latter that the word "aporia" is indispensable to him. But each
time, the aporia provokes a leap of memory and a displacement of thinking which
leads us back not just toward an "older" unity than the opposition but also toward
a new thinking of the disjunction, of a disjunction whose structure is wholly other,
forgotten or yet to come, yet to come because forgotten, and always presupposed by the
opposition. We have caught a glimpse of this through the couple allegory/irony in relation to "The
Rhetoric of Temporality." It is clearer yet in the most recent texts in terms of the couple
performative/constative. And aporicity evokes, rather than prohibits, more precisely,
promises through its prohibition, an other thinking, an other text, the future of
another promise. All at once the impasse (the dead-end) becomes the most
"trustworthy," "reliable" place or moment for reopening a question which is finally
equal to or on the same level as that which remains difficult to think. The rigorous
demonstration of "Rhetoric of Persuasion (Nietzsche)" no doubt ends in an aporia, precisely in terms of
the couple constative/ performative, but this aporia evokes (fait appel), in some way situates, the place of
evocation through an act of memory. This act calls us back to a time and place "before"
oppositions (before the per-formative/constative opposition but also before that of literature and
philosophy, and consequently many others); it therefore procures and promises a
“somewhat more reliable point of ‘reference’ from which to ask the question.” This
“reliability will no doubt be precarious and menaced by what renders all “promises” necessary and mad,
but it will not promise itself any the less because of this. And what this act of memory promises
is a thinking of the act which theorists of speech acts have never thought, not even
suspected, even when the defined the performative as an acting word. After having
analyzed the rhetorical structure of the “deconstruction of thought as act” in terms of Nietzche (AR, p.
129), Paul de Man emphasizes fictionality and undecidabiltiy (another form of aporicity)
in these terms.
Our form of mourning solves – only way to prevent full interiorization that
coopts the Other’s existence with our ourselves and maintain an ethic that
respects the Otherness of the Other
Derrida, 86 (Jacques, Professor of the Humanities at the University of California Irvine,
“Mnemosyne,” in Memoires for Paul de Man, translated by Cecile Lindsay, 1986, it’s a book, AW)
When we say “in us” or “between us” to recall ourselves faithfully “to the memory
of,” of which memory are we speaking, Gedachtnis or Erinnerung? The movement of
interiorization keeps within us the life, thought, body, voice, look or soul of the
other, but in the form of those hypomnemata, memoranda, signs or symbols, images or
representations which are only lacunary fragments, detached and dispersed-only
‘‘parts’’ of the departed other. In turn they are parts of us , included ‘‘in us’’ in a
memory which suddenly seems greater and older than us, “greater,” beyond any
quantitative comparisons: sublimely greater than this other that the memory harbors and guards
within it, but also greater with this other, greater than itself, inadequate to itself,
pregnant with this other. And the figure of this bereaved memory becomes a sort of
(possible and impossible) metonymy, where the part stands for the whole and for more
than the whole that it exceeds. An allegorical metonymy, too, which says something
other than what it says and manifests the other (allos) in the open but nocturnal
space of the agora – in its plus de lumiere: at once no more light, and greater light . It speaks the
other and makes the other speak, but it does so in order to let the other speak, for the
other will have spoken first. It has no choice but to let the other speak, since it
cannot make the other speak without the other having already spoken, without this
trace of speech which comes from the other and which directs us to writing as much as to
rhetoric. This trace results in speech always saying something other than what it
says: it says the other who speaks “before” and “outside” it; it lets the other speak in the
allegory. Whence the structure of the “rhetoric of temporality.” But what defies the simple and
“objective” logic of sets, what disrupts the simple inclusion of a part within the whole, is
what recalls itself beyond interiorizing memory (Erinnerung), is what recalls itself to
thought (Gedachtnis) and thinks itself as a “part” which is greater than the whole.” It is
the other as other, the non-totalizable trace which is in-adequate to itself and to
the same. This trace is interiorized in mourning as that which can no longer be
interiorized, as impossible Erinnerung, in and beyond mournful memory*/constituting it,
traversing it, exceeding it, defying all reappropriation, even in a coded rhetoric or conventional
system of tropes, in the exercises of prosopopoeia, allegory, or elegiac and grieving
metonymy. But this exercise lies in wait for, and technique always feeds off of, the true Mnemosyne,
mother of all muses and living source of inspirations. Mnemosyne can also become a poetic topos. To this
thought there belongs the gesture of faithful friendship, its immeasurable grief but also its life: the
sublimity of a mourning without sublimation and without the obsessive triumph of
which Freud speaks.