Agamben Affirmative
You can obviously mine the agamben kritik files being put out for more cards --- make sure to
read the playing with the law cards thoroughly to understand solvency for the aff --- it’s a little
tough to grasp at first --- have fun!
---spencer roetlin
---connor warshauer
---aff---
**1ac
After 9/11 the discourse surrounding American security switched from defense to
prevention --- this produces bare life globally --- terrorists abroad are
criminalised to justify paradoxical attempts to both utterly destroy them and act
as a humanitarian figure --- we drop bombs labeled food --- secondly it has
created a surveillance state domestically --- the logic of risk management in
combination with surveillance functions to assign us all the status of enemy --everyone is bombed with data collection under the mantra of guilty until proven
innocent --- we are no longer reduced to bare life --- all life has become bare life
Van Munster, 5/28/2014 – Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International
Studies (DIIS) and teaches security studies at the Department of Political Science, University of
Southern Denmark (Rens, “The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule”,
Danish Institute for International Studies, p. 146-152)//roetlin
A direct parallel, then, can be drawn between Agamben’s notion of the camp as a zone of
indistinction and the logic that informs the United States’ war on terrorism. In addition to the
physical emergence of camp-like structures such as the detainment centres for suspected terrorists, it can be said that the war
on terrorism operates through the sovereign ban in the sense that it blurs the distinction
between inside/ outside, domestic politics/international relations, order/anarchy,
trust/fear police/military and friend/enemy. This section argues that the blurring is brought about by a
fundamental change in the United States’ politics of security. Contrary to the pre-9/11 period, the starting point of post9/11 security politics is prevention rather than the defence against an actual threat: ‘‘We must
adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of
today’s adversaries ... To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our
adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively.’’ 17 The
semiotic shift from defence to prevention takes its point of departure in the behavioural potentialities of states rather than their
actual behaviour: ‘‘[T]he United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a
potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be unleashed by our adver-
We cannot let our enemies strike first.’’ 18
self-defence as it is understood in international law still operates with an image of
reactive violence, the war on terrorism replaces this picture with that of proactive
intervention: ‘‘We must deter and defend against the threat before it is unleashed.’’ 19 As such, prevention entails a
move from danger to risk. 20 The aim is no longer to confront a concrete danger, but to
intervene before threats have fully emerged. Thus, preventive security is virtual security: it is one step further
saries’ choice of weapons, do not permit that option.
Whereas anticipatory
away from danger in its potentiality, but at the same time it is real, for the future increasingly determines present security choices.
21 The shift from defence to prevention, re-action to pro-action, deterrence to
intelligence, and events to eventualities is to be considered mainly on an ontological level. Contrary to defence,
prevention takes in security rather than security as the underlying value of security politics: ‘‘We are today a nation at risk to a new
and changing threat. The terrorist threat to America takes many forms, has many places to hide, and is often invisible. Yet the need
for homeland security is tied to our enduring vulnerability .’’ 22 While
defence implies protection, safety and
trust, prevention operates on the basis of permanent feelings of fear, anxiety and
unease . Security discourses, in other words, are increasingly dominated by the logic of risk
management , a logic which calls for the management and government of potentialities
of ‘risky’ populations by means of (statistical) calculations and proactive management
rather than through the reactive management of real events and threats. The war on
terrorism cannot be pinpointed in spatiotemporal terms. The time and place of terrorism are of the
terrorist’s choosing. The success of terrorism lies in the provocation of fear and anxiety that result from the uncertainty regarding
the time and place of the next attack. Hence, all
perceived dangers (anthrax, serial killers, illegal
immigration, etc.) can be and are linked to terrorists. Fear is the rationale of the war on
terrorism in which, in the end, everything can become suspicious. The National Security
Strategy (2002) summarises it nicely: ‘‘Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in
the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes, are now spread
throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off without
warning.’’ 23 Victory is remote and to protect the local homeland, security politics has to
operate on a global level: to be safe here means that the world has to be freed from terrorists everywhere. In terms of
its effects on the contours of the global order, the prevention doctrine lays the basis for the United
States’ exemption from international law and other norms that govern conduct in international society. In this
sense, prevention invalidates the law without declaring international law openly obsolete. Faced with a nonlocalisable and open-ended threat, the war on terrorism effectively institutionalises a permanent
state of exception in which the United States reserves for itself the right to act
unilaterally, while simultaneously demanding compliance with the law from the other
states. As Hardt and Negri argue: ‘‘Here therefore, is born, in the name of the exceptionality of the intervention, a form of right
that is really a right of the police [that] is inscribed in the deployment of prevention, repression, and rhetorical force aimed at the
recon- struction of the social equilibrium.’’ 24 As such, the war on terrorism replaces the current order with a smooth, infinite space
of endless surveillance, detection and prevention. Prevention produces Ameri- can sovereignty,
but it is also produces
bare life, life that is abandoned in the process of constituting global American sovereignty. 4. THE WAR ON TERRORISM AND
THE PRODUCTION OF BARE LIFE In the war on terror, the figure of the terrorist embodies the bare life that
is the bearer of the sovereign ban. While the language of war might seem to elevate terrorism from the realm of
criminal justice (low politics) to that of war and international security (high politics), a closer look reveals that terrorists are in
fact not considered a legitimate party in the war. Rather, they are criminalised and referred
to as unlawful combatants. The distinction between enemy combatant and unlawful
combatant has much in common with the Schmittian distinction between enemy and
foe. While the first refers to the concrete other that constitutes an existential threat to the self, the foe refers to the
criminalised and morally degraded other, who should not only be defeated but
utterly destroyed . Perhaps, it is in this sense that one should make sense of the comment by the American Secretary of
Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, that the goal of the war in Afghanistan was to kill – rather than defeat – as many Taleban as possible. 25
At any rate, the framing of the war on terrorism as a war on behalf of civilisation itself denies that such values are presented in the
other. 26 Thus Zizek argues that in the war on terrorism ...we
cannot even imagine a neutral humanitarian
organization like the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organizing the
exchange of prisoners, and so on: one side of the conflict (the US-dominated global
force) already assumes the role of the Red Cross – it perceives itself not as one of
the warring sides, but as a mediating agent of peace and global order crushing rebellions
and, simultaneously, providing humanitarian aid to the ‘local populations’. Perhaps the
ultimate image of the treatment of the ‘local population’ as Homo sacer is that of the American war plane flying
above Afghanistan – one is never sure what it will drop, bombs or food parcels. 27 As noted
earlier, a second aspect in which the transformation of life into bare life is visible in the war on terrorism concerns the status and
treatment of detained suspects of terrorism. Although many of the detainees have been taken into American custody during the
armed conflict in Afghanistan, they are
not granted the prisoner of war status in the way it is
required by the Geneva Conventions. Speaking of unlawful combatants, the United States successfully keeps their
detainment outside the realm of international regulation. In a parallel movement, the fate of the detainees is also
kept outside the jurisdiction of the national American criminal justice system as a result of the extraterritorial location of the Guantanamo base where many detainees are held. While the suffering of these
detainees obviously is not comparable to the atrocities faced by inhabitants of the
concentration camps, it is nevertheless possible to detect the juridico-political structure
of the state of exception (the camp) in detainment centres such as the Guantanamo base, as
detainees are stripped from all legal rights, while they remain subjected to the power
exercised over them. 28 However, the biopolitical production of bare life does not just
take place in the camp or the immediate conflict in Afghanistan. In fact, the
production of homo sacer is made possible through bureaucratic
techniques of risk management, enabled by new laws such as the Patriot Act, that
apply well beyond the theatres of military conflict. These techniques of
bureaucratic surveillance subject life to statistical methods by which norms
of behaviour are identified within the population according to the laws of
probability . 29 In risk management, the subject is not encountered as a unique person with some
sort of indispensable inner singularity, but as an aggregate of risk factors, a modulation that can be
managed and tamed through continuous monitoring. As Rose argues, risk management ... is not a
question of instituting a regime in which each person is permanently under the alien gaze of the eye of power exercising
individualizing surveillance. It is not a matter of apprehending and normalizing the offender ex post facto. Conduct
is
continually monitored and reshaped by logics immanent within all networks of practice.
Surveillance is ‘designed in’ to the flows of everyday existence . 30 Turning individuals
into ‘dividuals’, risk management reduces life to the naked life of biographic profiles on
the basis of which new collective identities or risk classes are created. 31 The aim of the Computer
Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS) system, for instance, is to gather data about all passengers flying to the United States. On
the basis of information about name, age, address, pass- port, credit card number and previous travels, CAPPS classifies the
potential dangerousness of all travellers. It constructs three different risk classes/identities: green, yellow and red, with green
meaning non-dangerous and red meaning very dangerous. Muslim
visitors from the Middle East are
automatically assigned the yellow identity. 32 However, surveillance is not just limited to
foreigners entering the United States. The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), a joint initiative of the Department of Justice,
Department of Homeland Security, the Intelligence Community, the FBI and the State Department, seeks to install
surveillance and data collection as a routine of every-day life within and outside the
United States. As Attorney General Ashcroft argues: ‘‘The Terrorist Screening Center will provide
‘one-stop shopping’ so that every federal anti-terrorist screener is working off the same
page – whether it’s an airport screener, an embassy official issuing visas overseas, or an
FBI agent on the street.’’ 33 The result is that the differences between inside/outside,
police/military and FBI/CIA become increasingly blurred. On the one hand, there is an
increasing internalisation of external security in the form of ‘domestic spying’ and data
collection within the United States. On the other hand, externalisation of internal security (policing
beyond borders) is taking place in remote places such as Afghanistan. Hence, Tom Ridge’s (Secretary of Homeland
Security) remark, that the Terrorist Screening Center will make it possible to put
intelligence to immediate use at the front lines of the battle against terrorism misses the crucial
point that there are no clear front lines in the war on terror. Rather, the front is everywhere
and no one can expect to be exempted from the network of surveillance and inspection. In a sense,
everybody is a suspect . The administration and classification of biographical risk profiles does not work as an
immediate exclusion (monitored subjects can freely move around), but as a form of ‘inclusive exclusion’. That is, prevention
does not perform its exclusive function in simple binary terms of friend/foe, but
fabricates the ‘foe’ within the social order as potentially dangerous. The aim of intervention is no
longer the exclusion of dangerous elements, but to interfere on the actuarial basis of risk factors in order to anticipate and prevent
groupings from becoming dangerous. Through the inclusion of risk classes in a system of control, the life of legal subjects is not
reduced to that of homo sacer . Rather, the reverse is happening: the
figure of homo sacer dwells in everybody
in the sense that all life is bare life until class credentials prove otherwise – the elevation
from homo sacer to an autonomous subject is only a secondary move.
This security state bred from illogical interventionism has resulted in a permanent
state of exception in which massive amounts of people are reduced to disposability
Van Munster, 5/28/2014 – Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International
Studies (DIIS) and teaches security studies at the Department of Political Science, University of
Southern Denmark (Rens, “The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule”,
Danish Institute for International Studies, p. 141)//roetlin
ABSTRACT. This article argues that the
semiotics of the war on terrorism points at a significant shift
in United States’ discourses on security. This shift can best be described as a move from defence to
prevention or from danger to risk. Whereas the notion of defence is closely connected to the state of war, this article claims that
the war on terrorism instead institutionalises a permanent state of exception . Building
upon Agamben’s notion that the state of exception is the non-localisable foundation of a political order, this article makes two
claims. First, it argues that semiotic
shifts in United States’ security politics point at a general
trend that, to some extent, structures international American interventions. In a sense, the semiotic
shifts in American security discourse declare the United States as the sovereign of the
global order: they allow the United States to exempt itself from the (international) framework of
law, while demanding compliance by others. Second, it claims that this production of American
sovereignty is paralleled by reducing the life of (some) individuals to the bare life of homo sacer
(life that can be killed without punishment). In the war on terrorism, the production of bare life is
mainly brought about by bureaucratic techniques of risk management and
surveillance , which reduce human life to biographic risk profiles.
This universal state of exception becomes normalized through surveillance and
exposes us all to the constant potentiality of violence
Douglas, independent scholar, 2009 – (Jeremy, “Disappearing Citizenship: surveillance and
the state of exception”, published in Surveillance & Society Vol 6, No 1, p. 33-34
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//roetlin
This type of structure, which allows for an unseen seer to watch over individuals occupying a given territory, is nothing new – in fact,
such surveillance
structures have been recorded from as far back as the Early Bronze Age
earlier surveillance systems were used in order to
guard a territory against an attack, as with the lookout towers constructed at the top of castles. What
distinguishes the Roman work camp from other ancient surveillance mechanisms is the
way in which it is integrated into, and in many ways the precondition for, the political
structure that creates the camp. The encampment of rebellious Jews characterizes
the state of emergency, in which ‘normal’ law is suspended in order to use any means
necessary to protect the interest of the sovereign. Thus, the Jews in the camp must be
removed from the political realm and treated as bare life that must be constantly
monitored and exposed to the potentiality of violence. As we shall see, this camp
serves a paradigmatic example of affects of surveillance, insofar as it is the
amalgamation of the state of exception, bare life, violence, law, biopolitics, territory, and
governmentality; not to mention that evidence of surveillance and camp structures that existed thousands of years ago
demonstrates that none of these concepts are new and modern phenomena. Governmentality is able to function
as the control of the population and the creation of bare life because it employs
surveillance as a crucial tactic in the management of life – this is clearly presented in the Roman camp
example. However, although many of the concepts and techniques we see at work in the camp are
not fundamentally different today, not everything has remained the same. The importance of a
juridical-political system that acts according to the state of exception, or suspension of
the law, is evident in the emergence of recent totalitarian and ‘democratic’ permanent
(3000-2650 BC) (ibid, 78-85). However, these
states of emergency ; for example, the UK and the US have normalised the exception through
the passing of ‘laws’ (Terrorism Act, Patriot Act, etc.) that essentially nullify the application of normal
laws protecting human rights, while still holding them technically ‘in force’. We see also that these
‘exceptional’ laws go hand in hand with increased surveillance, both of which are tactics
that establish control of the population. Yet what remains to be analysed is the
relation(s) between surveillance, territory, and the state of exception – how does surveillance
allow for the rise of the state of exception and the camp? And, more broadly, how are all there concepts integrated
in an art of government? Surveillance must be regarded as the point at which the camp
and the bare of the state of exception intersect in the governmental control of the
population. Defining the Terms: Foucault and Agamben Although Michel Foucault wrote a book (Discipline and Punish) that
dealt extensively with one method of surveillance, the panoptic, his more useful contribution to the theory of surveillance comes
from his study of ‘governmentality’, or the ‘art’ of governing. In the course of his 1970s lectures at the College de France, Foucault
underwent a significant shift in the emphasis of his theory, moving from the powerterritory relationship of sovereignty to the
politico-economic governmentality of population; the concept of sovereignty concerned with maintaining power and territory is a
dated pre-modern concept, and what needs to be analysed now is the governing of a population though various circulatory (that is,
relational) mechanisms: “it is not expanse of land that contributes to the greatness of the state, but fertility and the number of men”
(Fleury quoted in Foucault 2007, 323). In other words, what is emerging in Foucault’s writings, beginning with The History of
Sexuality Vol 1, is the concept of biopolitics: “the management of life rather than the menace of death” (Foucault 1990, 143). Broadly,
what is taking place in Foucault’s works and lectures in the mid to late 1970s is his description of the differences (not transitions)
between “sovereignty, discipline, and governmental Surveillance & Society 6(1) 33 Douglas: Disappearing Citizenship management”
(Foucault 2007, 107). The
essential goal of sovereignty is to maintain power, which is achieved when laws
is the essential defining component of
sovereignty, while ‘government’ is more or less just an administrative component within the
are obeyed and the divine right of the throne is reaffirmed. ‘Power’
sovereign state – a component that is the function of the family; the family, oikos, in ancient Greece was the private management
(government) of economic matters where the father ensured the security, health, wealth, and goods of his wife and children, while
the polis was the public realm where man realised his political significance in striving for “the good life”. The rise of government in
the sixteenth century is marked by this family government model being “applied to the state as a whole” (ibid, 93), as well as by the
rise of “mercantilism” - the former not realizing its full scope and application until the eighteenth century and the latter being a stage
of rasion d’état between sovereignty and governmentality. However, when
the art of governing becomes the
predominant ‘goal’ of the state in the eighteenth century, the family is relegated to the
position of an “instrument” and population emerges as the “main target” (ibid, 108) of the
government (territory is the main target of sovereignty insofar as a sovereign defines itself according to its territory, while
government defines itself in term of its population). With population as the central concern for government, other institutions and
sites - such as territory,
the family, security (military), police, and discipline - all become
“elements” or “instruments” in the management of the population – these biopolitical
tactics are what primarily distinguish governmentality from sovereignty.
Those forms of biopolitical control generate the groundwork for racism and
eugenics --- these invisible violences outweigh any purported benefits
Van Munster, 5/28/2014 – Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International
Studies (DIIS) and teaches security studies at the Department of Political Science, University of
Southern Denmark (Rens, “The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule”,
Danish Institute for International Studies, p. 144-146)//roetlin
Taking his cue from Michel Foucault, Agamben maintains that the
sovereign right to take life has become
supplemented and permeated by a right to make life. In modern societies the sovereign threat
of death has been complemented with a concern to take charge of biological life in order
to make it more productive, fertile, healthy, etc. 11 Instead of threatening with death, biopolitics is a form
of power that is concerned with the correction, administration and regulation of
populations. Seeking to take charge of life, ‘‘it does not have to draw the line that separates the
enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm.’’ 12 The inclusion of
pure life in politics, then, also marks a shift from law to the (statistical) norm in the sense that bare life is not only, or
not even first and foremost, produced in the sovereign process of taking life, but through
the process of making life, i.e. through the distribution of human life around a norm with the purpose of reducing life’s
distance to this norm. Although the incorporation of bare life in the political realm has made it
possible to reduce, amongst others, famine and mortality in the West, it has also given rise to
‘caring’ practices such as racism and eugenics: ‘‘What follows is a kind of
bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques. For
the first time in history ... it becomes possible both to protect life and to
authorize a holocaust.’’ 13 Agamben’s rendering of sovereign power and bare life is driven by an ethical drive to lay
bare the juridico-political mechanisms of power that make it possible to commit acts of
violence that do not count as crime. 14 While not denying the uniqueness of the
suffering in the Nazi concentration camps, Agamben discovers similar structures in
contemporary society. He points out that camp-like structures such as detention centres for illegal
migrants, airport holding zones and humanitarian relief camps all produce bare life in the
sense that decisions on the life of people can be taken outside the normal framework of rule, but which nevertheless are not
completely illegal and without connection to that law. In the context of this paper, the Guantanamo
Bay detention centre for
suspected terrorists is another case in point. 15 However, as Edkins has noted, Agamben has not inquired deeper into the
politics of emergency or the politics of the ban in which the sovereign and homo sacer are constituted as each other’s mirror image.
16 Therefore, the following sections aim to provide insight into the ways in which the American governance of the emergency of 9/11
constitute global American sovereignty on the one hand and reduce political subjects to the naked life of homo sacer .
Racism is not external to biopolitics, it is a necessary component of today’s
hypocritical order --- biopower is the enabling precondition that allows for
racism to be inscribed and codified in the law --- this saturates civil society with
violence, making war structurally inevitable --- peace is impossible until the enemy
is annihilated
Mendieta, 4/25/2002 – associate professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University
(Eduardo, “‘To make live and to let die’ –Foucault on Racism”, American Psychological
Association Central Division Meeting, p. 7-8)//roetlin
This is where racism
intervenes, not from without, exogenously, but from within,
constitutively. For the emergence of biopower as the form of a new form of political rationality, entails the
inscription within the very logic of the modern state the logic of racism. For racism
grants, and here I am quoting: “the conditions for the acceptability of putting to death in a
society of normalization. Where there is a society of normalization, where there is a power that is, in all of its
surface and in first instance, and first line, a bio-power, racism is indispensable as a condition to be
able to put to death someone, in order to be able to put to death others. The homicidal [meurtrière]
function of the state, to the degree that the state functions on the modality of biopower, can only be assured by racism “(Foucault 1997, 227) To use the formulations from his 1982 lecture “The
Political Technology of Individuals” –which incidentally, echo his 1979 Tanner Lectures –the power of the state after the 18th
century, a power which is enacted through the police, and is enacted over the population, is a power over living beings, and as such it
is a biopolitics. And, to quote more directly, “since
the population is nothing more than what the state
takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if
necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.” (Foucault 2000, 416). Racism, is the
thanatopolitics of the biopolitics of the total state. They are two sides of one same 8 political
technology, one same political rationality: the management of life, the life of a population, the
tending to the continuum of life of a people. And with the inscription of racism within the state of biopower, the long history of war
that Foucault has been telling in these dazzling lectures has made a new turn: the war of peoples, a war against invaders, imperials
colonizers, which turned into a war of races, to then turn into a war of classes, has now turned into the war of a race, a biological
unit, against its polluters and threats. Racism
is the means by which bourgeois political power, biopower, rekindles the fires of war within civil society. Racism normalizes and medicalizes war.
Racism makes war the permanent condition of society, while at the same time masking
its weapons of death and torture. As I wrote somewhere else, racism banalizes genocide by
making quotidian the lynching of suspect threats to the health of the social body. Racism makes the killing of the
other, of others, an everyday occurrence by internalizing and normalizing the war of society
against its enemies. To protect society entails we be ready to kill its threats, its foes, and if we
understand society as a unity of life, as a continuum of the living, then these threat and foes are biological in
nature.
Surveillance occurs at the intersection of bare life and the state of exception,
creating totalitarianism
Douglas, independent scholar, 2009 – (Jeremy, “Disappearing Citizenship: surveillance and
the state of exception”, published in Surveillance & Society Vol 6, No 1, p. 35-36
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//roetlin
Bare Life and the State of Exception This conception of biopolitics as an ancient and founding notion of sovereignty needs to be
distinguished from what Agamben terms “bare
life” or “homo sacer” (life that may be killed but not
sacrificed). Biopolitical life, as mentioned above, is still within the juridical-political realm, but
bare life is that which is banished from the polis. It is not pure political life as such, but a
life that exists at the threshold between zoe and bios. Bare life is the indistinguishability
between natural life and political life – a life that exists neither for the sake of politics
nor for the sake of life: “bare life…dwells in the no-man’s-land between the
home and the city ” (Agamben 1998, 90). It is a life that is banished from politics – outside of law – but
included in its exclusion – still within the ‘force of law’: The ban is essentially the power of delivering
something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something presupposed as nonrelational [i.e.
bare life]. What
has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same
time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it – at once excluded and included, removed
and at the same time captured. (ibid, 110) How is this possible? How can bare life be excluded and included? What
implications would this have? In order to understand how bare life is produced and how it can exists both within and outside of the
polis, it is necessary to introduce another concept: state of exception. This notion is derived, by in
large, from Carl Schmitt’s book Political Theology, as well as from a fairly extensive debate between Walter Benjamin and Schmitt
concerning the nature of the state of exception. The
state of exception is a “suspension of law”, which is
usually instituted during a period of war or another state of emergency: “The exception, which is not codified in
the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger
to the existence of the state, or the like” (Schmitt 1922, 6). Under the state of exception there
becomes a ‘threshold’ between law that is in the norm but is suspended and law that is
not the norm – i.e. not necessarily part of the juridical order – but is in force; so, in the state of exception there
appears this “ambiguous and uncertain zone in which de facto proceedings, which are
themselves extra- or antijuridical, pass over into law, and juridical norms blur with the
mere fact – that is, a threshold where fact and law seem to become undecidable” (Agamben 2005, 29). What needs to be
underlined here is the relation between the state of exception and bare life. This point is absolutely
crucial for Agamben and for understanding the role of governmental surveillance: the state of
exception opens up the possibility of bare life and of the camp, where bare life is outside
law but constantly exposed to violence and “unsanctionable killing” (Agamben 1994, 82).
Agamben’s position can be understood in the triadic relation ‘state of exception-camp-bare life’; the ultimate power of the sovereign,
and the complete dissolution of democracy into totalitarianism – two political
state of
exception becomes the rule and the camp emerges as the permanent realization of the
indistinguishability between violence and law, to which we all, as homines sacri, are
exposed. The paradigmatic example is, of course, Nazi Germany; but what remains to be seen is how this triad can be applied to
systems that, according to Agamben, already have an “inner solidarity” (ibid, 10) – happens at the point when the
our current political milieu.
The United States federal government should substantially curtail its domestic
surveillance.
The affirmative allows us to enter into a practice of studying the law for more than
just ends --- it is part of a slow unraveling of normative legality that will create a
better vocabulary to discuss sovereign violence
Agamben, 2005 – professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris
(Giorgio, “The State of Exception”, pg. 63)//roetlin
In the Kafka essay, the enigmatic image of a law that is studied but no longer practiced corresponds, as a sort of remnant, to the
unmasking of mythico-juridical violence effected by pure violence. There
is, therefore, still a possible figure of
law after its nexus with violence and power has been deposed, but it is a law that no
longer has force or application, like the one in which the “new attorney,” leafing
through “our old books,” buries himself in study, or like the one that Foucault may
have had in mind when he spoke of a “new law” that has been freed from all
discipline and all relation to sovereignty.¶ What can be the meaning of a law that survives its
deposition in such a way? The difficulty Benjamin faces here corresponds to a problem that can be formulated (and it was effectively
formulated for the first time in primitive Christianity and then later in the Marxian tradition) in these terms: What
becomes
of the law after its messianic fulfillment? (This is the controversy that opposes Paul to the Jews of his time.) And
what becomes of the law in a society without classes? (This is precisely the de- bate between Vyshinsky and
Pashukanis.) These are the questions that Benjamin seeks to answer with his reading of the “new attorney.” Obvi- ously, it
is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves its end,
nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintain- ing the law in a
spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it . The decisive point here is that
the law—no longer practiced, but studied— is not justice, but only the gate
that leads to it . What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its
deactivation and inactivity [inoperosità]— that is, another use of the law . This is precisely what
the force-of-law (which keeps the law working [in opera] beyond its formal suspension) seeks to prevent. Kafka’s
characters—and this is why they interest us—have to do with this spectral figure of the
law in the state of exception; they seek, each one following his or her own
strategy, to “study” and deactivate it, to “play” with it.¶ One day humanity
will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to
restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good . What is
found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law,
but a new use that is born only after it . And use, which has been contaminated by
law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or
of play . And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that
one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the
world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made
juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41).
Rather than attempting to eliminate use of the law, you should adopt a politics of
playing with the law --- switch it from sacred to toy --- in the context of this debate
round that means using hypothetical implementation to deactivate the law
Mills 8 (Catherine Mills is currently an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Bioethics
in the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University. I was previously employed at
University of Sydney, Australia, and have been Lecturer in Philosophy at University of New
South Wales, and the Australian National University. I completed a PhD in Philosophy at the
Australian National University. My main research interests lie in the areas of biopolitics and
bioethics. “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice”, The Agamben
Effect p. 23-24)///CW
To return to my starting point more can now be said of the idea of playing with law as if it were a disused object, that is, a toy. It
is
now possible to better appreciate the perceived revolutionary potential of play and of the
toy. As, we have seen, the toy brings to light the “temporality of history in its pure differential and qualitative value.” That is, in
making present human temporality in itself, the pure differential margin between the ‘once’ and the ‘no
longer’” (IH, 72), the toy permits a release from continuous and linear time and the
realization of and return to history, understood as the tine homeland of humanity (IH, 104-5). In relation to law,
we can now say that as a disused object the law has lost its use value in the realm of the
politico-economic and has instead been relegated to the profane use that can be made of
it by children. The characterization of its being in force without significance appears to locate the law within the diachronic
element of the “‘once’…‘no longer,’” rather than in the synchrony of miniaturization. This is significant because it highlights the
ritualistic dimension of law, which compensates
for the disjuncture of past and present, Agamben
reabsorbing diachrony into synchrony. Play, however, transforms synchrony into
diachrony by breaking the tie between past and present. This production of a differential margin in the
argues, by
dialectic of rite and play is the condition of history; it is that which allows for the now. As a toy and only as a toy, as an object of play,
the rite of law contributes to the revelation of the essential historicity of the human. ¶ The ritualistic dimension of saw is important
for another reason as well. Agamben
insists on the impossibility of the elimination of either
diachronic or synchronic signification: in all games and rites, the one remains a stumbling other, thereby
preventing attainment of a pure state of diachrony or synchrony. Thus, he writes, "at the end of the game," the toy—
the privileged signifier of absolute diachrony—“turns around into its opposite and is presented as the
synchronic residue that the game can no longer eliminate (IH, 79). This implies playing with
law does not mean eliminating the law , for there is actually a sense in which the law is rescued from its
own obsolescence in play. Rather than being maintained solely in a state of decay
characterized by the simple lack of practico-economic value as law, it is of a
given a new use . But this does not take the form resacralizaion of the law and restoration of
transcendental meaning or force. Instead the new use of law takes the form of its
deactivation or deposition . Before saying more of this, it is worth cautioning against the
phrase "at the and of the game" used above, for in what sense would the game in which humanity plays with law have
an end? To construe the game of playing with law as having an end would in fact push Agamben’s conception of the messianic
toward an identification with the eschatological, a conflation that he explicitly resists in, The Time that Remains. Thus, within his
own characterization, it would be more accurate to insist on the endlessness of play. As with the acting
of study with which it is Intimately related in the paragraph in question, play in interminable; it has no end beyond pleasure. As
Agamben writes in Idea of Prose, “Not only can study have no rightful end, it does not even desire one.”
**2ac
case
solvency --- challenge reps
Challenging representations and hegemonic narratives allows us to challenge
current power structures
Agamben, 2000 – professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris
(Giorgio, “Means Without End: Notes on Politics”, p. 93-95)
Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always already in the open
and do not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it. That is why they are not
interested in mirrors, in the image as image. Human
beings, on the other hand, separate images
from things and give them a name precisely because they want to recognize
themselves, that is, they want to take possession of their own very appearance.
Human beings thus transform the open into a world, that is, into the battlefield of a
political struggle without quarter. This struggle, whose object is truth, goes by the name of History. It is
happening more and more often that in pornographic photographs the portrayed subjects, by a calculated stratagem, look into
the camera, thereby exhibiting the awareness of being exposed to the gaze. This unexpected gesture violently belies the fiction
that is implicit in the consumption of such images, according to which the one who looks surprises the actors while remaining
unseen by them: the latter, rather, knowingly challenge the voyeur’s gaze and force him to look them in the eyes. In that precise
moment, the insubstantial nature of the human face suddenly comes to light. The fact that the actors look into the camera means
that they show that they are simulating; nevertheless, they paradoxically appear more real precisely to the extent to which they
exhibit this falsification. The same procedure is used today in advertising: the image appears more convincing if it shows openly
its own artifice. In both cases, the one who looks is confronted with something that concerns unequivocally the essence of the
face, the very structure of truth. We may call tragicomedy of appearance the fact that the face uncovers only and precisely
inasmuch as it hides, and hides to the extent to which it uncovers. In this way, the appearance that ought to have manifested
human beings becomes for them instead a resemblance that betrays them and in which they can no longer recognize themselves.
Precisely because the face is solely the location of truth, it is also and immediately the location of simulation and of an
irreducible impropriety. This does not mean, however, that appearance dissimulares what it uncovers by making it look like
what in reality it is not: rather, what human beings truly are is nothing other than this dissimulation and this disquietude within
the appearance. Because
human beings neither are nor have to be any essence, any nature,
or any specific destiny, their condition is the most empty and the most insubstantial
of all: it is the truth. What remains hidden from them is not something behind appearance, but rather appearing itself,
that is, their being nothing other than a face. The task of politics is to return appearance itself to
appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear. The face, truth, and exposition are
today the objects of a global civil war, whose battlefield is social life in its entirety,
whose storm troopers are the media, whose victims are all the peoples of the Earth.
Politicians, the media establishment, and the advertising industry have understood the insubstantial character of the face and of
the community it opens up, and thus they transform it into a miserable secret that they must make sure to control at all costs.
State power today is no longer founded on the monopoly of the legitimate use of
violence — a monopoly that states share increasingly willingly with other
nonsovereign organizations such as the United Nations and terrorist organizations;
rather, it is founded above all on the control of appearance (of doxa). The fact that
politics constitutes itself as an autonomous sphere goes hand in hand with the
separation of the face in the world of spectacle — a world in which human
communication is being separated from itself. Exposition thus transforms itself into a
value that is accumulated in images and in the media, while a new class of
bureaucrats jealously watches over its management.
solvency --- playing with the law
Our affirmation is a form of play that liberates debate from rigid rules and
detaches humanity from the sacred
Dragona, 8 – PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Communication and Mass Media at University
Of Athens, Freelance media arts curator (Daphne, “WhoDaresToDe-sacraliseTodaySPlay,”
Personal Cinema, Page Last Modified 24 April 2008,
http://www.personalcinema.org/warport/index.php?n=Main.WhoDaresToDesacraliseTodaySPlay?)
Giorgio Agamben considers play a most important element in culture, explaining that it is
the only one that can profane what is considered sacred. It can liberate humanity from
the “sacred”, without negating it. It can profane the “sacred” without destroying the myth
behind; it does not simply politicise. And if play is to cause changes and form our lives in
better ways, this would be through its capacity to be an act of profanation by itself. But,
unfortunately, this tendency according to Agamben is in decline and the need to regain it
is a political necessity (Agamben 2006 : 127). What are the conditions of play today? Can it
seriously play a role in our everyday lives? Who could re-attribute its capability to profane?
Defining play There have been many definitions of play from different disciplines and
orientations. Sutton – Smith in his book The Ambiguity of Play refers frequently to Mihail
Spariosu who had called play “amphibolous” describing a basic disagreement between the
Western philosophers over whether play is an orderly and rule- governed affair according
to the common western society norms, or a chaotic, violent and indeterminate interaction
of forces, according to some more modern approaches (Sutton Smith 1997/2001: 80). Roger
Caillois had also seen two poles in play, but as a continuum where diversified forms could be set.
On one extreme we find “paidia”, an “indivisible principle”, common to diversion, turbulence,
free improvisation and carefree gaiety which is manifested by uncontrolled fantasy. At the other
end, we find “ludus”, bound with “arbitrary, imperative and purposely tedious conventions”. The
more the “frolic and impulsive exuberance” of paidia is “disciplined by an inversed tendency to
its anarchic and capricious nature”, the more play approaches ludus (Caillois 1958/2001: 13).
The Western European thought mostly followed the rationalistic common pattern and
embraced the politicized, ruled form of play surpassing its anarchic and vivid features.
This can be easily seen by the well known definitions of Huizinga and Caillois who, although
they described play as free and unproductive activity, still insist on its dependency on the rules
and its separation from everyday life. (Caillois 1958/2001: 43, Huizinga 1955: 13) Is it play or
game? The old scholars, Huizinga and Caillois, did not especially differentiate the two terms. It
seems that the rules that institutionalised play gave form to games. Play appears to be the
idea, the notion, the anarchic and spontaneous basis, the activity based on fantasy, what Caillois
called paidia, as Plato and Aristotle first put it. Accordingly, games seem to be the
expressions and the forms of play that are governed by rules, demand discipline and
form hierarchies, need a constraint space and time, reflecting more the ludus element.
Generally, one could assume that play as a notion precedes games – it is their presupposition; it
is the play ‘instinct’ that inspires the formation of forms. (Huizinga in Wark 2007: 181) In our
times, with the explosion of the video game industry, the two words seem to have enclosed
different features and ideas. Edward Castronova highlights the difference as follows: “Play is an
intense, survival- relevant action that is not serious… Play is make believe… Play is an easy- tocopy behaviour that brings joy… Games are not the same thing as play. Games are designed goal
environments with uncertain outcomes. They are social institutions. Games are a perfect
environment for creating play, but also they appear under other circumstances. Elections… stock
markets… wars are games.” (Castronova 2007: 100,101) In the digital era, games in the form of
video games distant themselves more from play. Games compared to play can be described,
can be analysed; they become a product, a commodity; they can be copied, copyrighted
and become a subject of control. As Alexander R. Galloway notes, the video game is a cultural
object bound by history and materiality, consisting of an electronic computational device and a
game simulated in software (Galloway, 2006: 1) Risks of play Mckenzie Wark writes in his
recent book Gamer Theory that games are no longer a past time, outside or alongside of life.
They are now the very form of life, and death, and time, itself (Wark 2007: 06) To a certain
degree, every civilization can be described and characterised by its games but what happens
today is that life itself has taken the form of a game; of game and not play. While gaming
platforms today are being used widely for different disciplines we might need to wonder: What
are the risks play runs in this context? How could they be faced? The risk of contamination
According to the classic thinkers of play, there was one main threat for play, its
“contamination” by the ordinary life. Play could only be considered as a “stepping out of
real life, into a temporary sphere with a disposition of its own” (Huizinga 1955: 8). The world
of play and that of everyday life were considered as two different universes, antagonistic to each
other (Caillois, 1958/2001: 44, 53). This austere distinction was what the situationists tried
to break and to transcend. “Play, radically broken from a confined ludic time and space, must
invade the whole of life”, they stated in 1958. The situationists with their notions of the
psychogeographies, the derive, the situation and the détournement had proposed a fusion of
play into the cities, a total swift where the player is in reality the “liver”. In our days, a different
fusion of play occurred. Our everyday life is a fusion in itself of the virtual and the real. As
Edward Castronova mentions “the real world can be a terribly empty place.” Synthetic worlds
may offer experiences and opportunities that one might not have in their real life. Of course,
“reality remains reality, strongly sensated but unfiltered, raw. It will always command attention,
but it has long since abandoned the claim to all of our attention. We already live partly in media.
Games are just the latest improvement.” (Castronova 2007: 30, 69) The risk of productivity Play
is longer by definition an occasion of pure waste; waste of time, energy, ingenuity and skill.
Play’s second major risk is the one formed by productivity, by players who belong to the
generation of the prosumers, as they are producers and consumers at the same time. Play
nowadays becomes part of the immaterial labour, within which as Lazzarato notes ‘leisure time’
and ‘working time’ are increasingly fused, making play – in our case- inseparable from work
(Lazzarato 1997). This affective labor of play produces the informational and cultural content of
the commodity that at the end is defined as game. Within this content stand today’s synthetic
worlds where the players contribute voluntarily with their work and behaviour to the formation
of the gaming worlds and the augmentation of the virtual economy. Communication is
continually improved as the power of this form is found in the collective process, in the
users/prosumers social relations. People of course might as well make profit for themselves.
This kind of play can be to their advantage. But one can not overlook the fact that this era of
ludocapitalism, as Dibbel frames it, is “a curious new post-industrial revolution, driven by play
as the first one was driven by steam”. (Dibbell in Shaviro 2007) The risk of being the alibi The
risk of play being exploited and being used as an alibi for economical or political profit is not a
new one. The ambiguous –in ethic terms - economy of the casinos, the lotteries and the
hippodromes or even the economy of the sports industry are such phenomena that have given
birth to discussions, problems and even scandals for most of the countries of the Western world.
However, the highest risk for play today is found in the exploitation of play being made
by the military entertainment complex. War as a game is an old metaphor. Chess and Go
and especially the 19th century Kriegsspiel which was used to aid Prussian officers, could be
considered as predecessors of the games that would be used for military entertaining purposes
later on (Halter 2002). But what the media and especially the video games changed was the
possibilities given for nationalistic propaganda. Games like America’s Army, are at the same
time a recruiting tool, an edugame, a test bed and tool and a propaganda game. Such games can
influence attitudes and behaviours and win a communication battle that would otherwise be
lost. Creating falsifying images of super-clean pure war, as seen on the screens, the games
succeed in “using sweet power to win a war on ideas” (Neiborg 2007: 79) Summarizing the
risks above, the impression given is that we have “nowhere to hide outside the gamespace”
(Wark 2007: 183). But, are we trapped within a total game or is play itself trapped as well at the
end? The sovereignity of the game over play today is a fact. Having been
institutionalized, play has been accredited with the seriousness of an academic, social,
political and economic value and has become an issue of controversial discussion
accordingly. But in reality, again, it is mostly games we are talking about, not play.
Contemporary play is purposely sacralised and distant, used as an excuse for games’
abuses. Being considered sacred, play’s case reminds us of religion. Religion does not unify all;
on the contrary it keeps the roles distinct and separated. It keeps people apart from the divine
(Agamben 2006: 124). So it happens with play, keeping the players apart from play itself.
Could this separation be broken? And could play become an important contributory factor to
our lives’ amelioration? Setting play free “It was in fact from art that play broke free” Raoul
Vaneigem wrote in reference to Dada (Vaneigem 1967). To transcend rigid and crystallized
forms, rules need to be broken. One can play by rules, or play with the rules. Freedom can
be regained by those who can play with today’s forms of play, who can appropriate
them, see through and reverse them, by those who can profane what is considered sacred.
Following the famous predecessors of the dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Situationism, artists
today turn again towards play and use it as a means to challenge stereotypes, to offer new ways
of reading and understanding, to break the constraints and offer new perspectives. Art merged
with new media, activism, philosophy, politics and social sciences takes the role of the animator,
the hacker, the player – “liver” today. Artists working on these fields through projects that do
not necessarily need to be game – based, reveal play’ s multifaceted original character and
propose means for its use, liberation and expansion within different sides of life. Play as play…
Play can not be doubted and its fundamental role, original features and continuous presence is
what some artists highlight. Axel Stockburger’s Tokyo Arcade Warriors – Shibuya and William
Wegman’ s Dog Duet (Two Dogs and a ball) showcase how play absorbs one in the most serious
and utter way. Documenting only the figures of players and not the action itself, one can still not
deny or doubt play even if it is hidden. Other artists working on the field, show how playfulness
is kept intact, while common playgrounds are being transformed into new ones based on
technology. Such are the cases of Himalaya’ s Head by Devart where a snow war takes place
between physical and virtual players or Jumping Rope by Orna Portugaly, Daphna Talithman
and Sharon Younger, where participants are invited to jump a rope which is being turned by two
virtual projected characters. Play back in action… Artists like the Ludic Society and Gordan
Savicic follow a neo – situationist approach of play; they bring action back to the real dimension
and spread it in the cities. In their projects they create ludic ambiances and city walks where the
notions of the “dérivé”, the “détournement” and the “psychogeographies” are being appropriated
to raise questions about today’s everyday life and potentialities for playfulness. Objects of Desire
by the Ludic Society is a playful metaphor where objects take the place of subjects, with
obsessions and desires that they follow to find their home. Gordan Savicic’ s Constraint City /
the pain of everyday life is based on a corset with high torque servo motors and a WIFI-enabled
game-console, that when worn, can write and read the city codes while also being a fetish object
causing pain according to the strength of signal it gets. Following a different direction, David
Valentine and MediaShed, also re-invite play back to the ordinary life, as seen on their video The
duellists that documents a CCTV parkour performance. Two free-runners run an acrobatic
competition in a shopping mall of Manchester Arndale. The fluid, uninterrupted movement of
them acting as players re - energizes the environment in the most vivid and spontaneous way.
Play caught in between… Other artists look into limits between the virtual and the real in today’
s play. The work of Silver and True named Sell your Rolex comments on the virtual dimension
lived by millions of people today. Taking the roles of the user and its avatar, players note that
behaviours of the virtual world are odd, funny and embarrassing when brought back to real life.
How accurate is simulation after all in realistic terms? The MIT Lab with Stiff People’ s League
mingles the two dimensions through a mixed reality game of soccer, happening simultaneously
in the real space and in the world of Second Life. The common relationship between physical
and virtual world is inverted as physical players need to rely on the virtual ones to play the
game. Play reclaimed… Different questions are being raised by artists regarding play’s
exploitation for purposes of political, nationalistic and ideological propaganda. Is morality a
question? Are people conscious enough about what they are playing? John Klima in his project
The Great Game.Epilogue brings reality into a game context as he incorporates in a child’s
arcade ride true information from the conflict in Afghanistan, which has been collected by the
Department of Defense of the US. John Paul Bichard with the Art of War addresses the issue of
the representation of violence and its ways of interpretation through the contemporary media.
Through two video works with footages from the army, one cannot tell what is real and what is
imaginary anymore. In a similar direction, Vladan Joler has created the Schengen Information
System, Version 1.0.3, a game where the player takes on the role of the activist who should
intrude the building of the Schengen Information System and destroy the archives. Making use
of publicly accessible technology and information, the artist has managed to make a realistic
reconstruction and reverse the common use of games for military training purposes. Derivart
wishing to tackle a socio-economical issue -that of real estate in Spain - use play to situate a
problem and raise people’s awareness. The Burbujometro, showing the prices of apartments in
different Spanish cities in the form of bubbles, that the user can shoot, criticizes the building
boom of the 2000s. Play 2.0… The Folded-in project, created by Personal Cinema and the
Erasers is a different critique on today’s play. The project examines the notion of borders in the
era of the web 2.0 social networks. In the form of an online game application which reverses and
criticizes the platform of YouTube, the projects seeks to find if players in the digital spaces could
be liberated from their common prejudices and beliefs and to what extent they are supporters of
immaterial labour, being the ideal prosumers. Taking this problem more to its extremes, one
meets the phenomenon of the gold farming. Ge Jin with his documentary The Gold Farmers
examines how the growth of virtual economy has given birth to the phenomenon of the gaming
sweatshops and aims to answer how it leads play to become real work and what facts are hidden
behind it. Play re-discussed… But how far can games and their creators go when observing,
reproducing and criticizing today’s real world? Danny Ledonne, a young artist from Colorado,
polarised the audience when he made a videogame of the Columbine assassination in the 90’s.
Wishing to express this controversy, he made a documentary about the game investigating the
issues of games, violence, and ethics. A lot of answers regarding the strategies followed by artists
today and the phenomenon of the play culture, are also given in the 8 bit documentary by
Marcin Ramocki & Justin Strawhand where they examine the overall influence play has in our
everyday culture. CONCLUSION Play in our times presents a paradox. Despite its wide use
and continuous presence in different forms of cultures, it is distant and trapped in its own
formations, the games. Games are being accused; play is being sacrilised and is placed on a
pedestal. Running certain risks, within this structure, play’s influential role on our culture is
questioned. If, following Giorgio Agamben, play’s significance lies on the fact that it can
detach humanity from the “sacred”, play would need to liberate itself first from the
constraints of the sacred. To achieve this, one should not deny play; because this would
lead to its cancellation. What one should do is to profane, to neglect, to surpass the
constraints and break the rules. And this again can happen only through play itself,
through its anarchic and vivid features that are today being wept out. This is how the
actions taken by the artists can be described: as actions of profanity where they appropriate the
myth and reverse the ceremony of the sacred. This violation is also an act of play itself that is
then set free from all constraints. But there is one last point to remember: According to
Agamben, profanation gains its complete meaning only when what has been profaned, is
then rendered back to the people, at their disposal to start all over again. So this act is not
an act of cancellation or politicisation; it is an act about raising awareness and about reassigning to play its capacity to become a passage for true life, as Vaneigem would describe
it. Can art fulfill this? Let’s hope so and wait and see…
The affirmative is the act of studying or playing with the law --- we cannot simply
erase the law but by studying while discarding its relevance we can deactivate it
and achieve justice
Agamben 5 (Giorgio – Univ. Verona Philosophy professor 2005 “State of Exception” p. 6364)///CW
It is from this perspective that we must read Benjamin’s statement¶ in the letter to Scholem on August 11, 1934, that “the Scripture
without¶ its key is not Scripture, but life” (Benjamin 1966, 618/453), as well the¶ one found in the essay on Kafka, according to which
“[t]he law which¶ is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice” (Benjamin 1934,¶ 437/815). The Scripture (the Torah)
without its key is the cipher of the¶ law in the state of exception, which is in force but is not applied or is¶ applied without being in
force (and which Scholem, not at all suspecting¶ that he shares this thesis with Schmitt, believes is still law). According to¶ Benjamin,
this law—or, rather, this force-of-law —is no longer law but¶ life, “life as it is lived,” in Kafka’s novel, “in the village at the foot of the¶
hill on which the castle is built” (Benjamin 1966, 618/453). Kafka’s most¶ proper gesture consists not (as Scholem believes) in having
maintained¶ a law that no longer has any meaning, but in having shown that it ceases¶ to be law and blurs at all points with life.¶ In
the Kafka essay, the
enigmatic image of a law that is studied but no¶ longer practiced
corresponds, as a sort of remnant, to the unmasking of¶ mythico-juridical violence
effected by pure violence. There is, therefore,¶ still a possible figure of law after its nexus
with violence and power has¶ been deposed, but it is a law that no longer has force or
application, like¶ the one in which the “new attorney,” leafing through “our old books,”¶
buries himself in study, or like the one that Foucault may have had in¶ mind when he spoke of a “new law” that has been
freed from all discipline¶ and all relation to sovereignty.¶ What can be the meaning of a law that survives its deposition in such¶ a
way? The difficulty Benjamin faces here corresponds to a problem that¶ can be formulated (and it was effectively formulated for the
first time in¶ primitive Christianity and then later in the Marxian tradition) in these¶ terms: What becomes of the law after its
messianic fulfillment? (This¶ is the controversy that opposes Paul to the Jews of his time.) And what¶ becomes of the law in a society
without classes? (This is precisely the debate¶ between Vyshinsky and Pashukanis.) These are the questions that¶ Benjamin seeks to
answer with his reading of the “new attorney.” Obviously,¶ it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves¶ its
end, nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining¶ the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it.
The¶ decisive point here is that the
law—no longer practiced, but studied—¶ is not justice, but only
the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage¶ toward justice is not the erasure of law,
but its deactivation and inactivity¶ [inoperosità]—that is, another use of the law. This is precisely what
the¶ force-of-law (which keeps the law working [in opera] beyond its formal¶ suspension) seeks to prevent. Kafka’s characters—and
this is why they¶ interest us—have to do with this spectral figure of the law in the state¶ of exception; they seek, each one following
his or her own strategy, to¶ “study” and deactivate it, to “play” with it.¶ One
day humanity will play with law just
as children play with disused¶ objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use
but to¶ free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more¶ proper and
original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is¶ born only after it. And use,
which has been contaminated by law, must¶ also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study,
or¶ of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at¶ that justice that one
of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a¶ state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely¶ cannot be
appropriated or made juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41).
Playing with the law solves
Kotsko 13 (Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago
and the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath,
The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, and Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty.
“How to Read Agamben” 6/4/13 http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/how-to-readagamben)///CW
Many critics of the War on Terror, including Judith Butler, have used Agamben’s terminology to mount a kind of moral critique of
American foreign policy. One might say, for instance, that the US government is wrong to create a kind of exceptional law-free zone
in Guantánamo Bay, because that results in turning the detainees into bare life — which is bad. And certainly it is; yet Agamben’s
political work is a little too complex to fit easily into this kind of moralizing discourse. For Agamben, the
answer to the
problem posed by sovereign power cannot be to return to the “normal” conditions of the
rule of law, because Western political systems have always contained in their very structure
the seeds that would grow into our universalized exception. It can’t be a matter of refraining from
reducing people to “bare life,” because that is just what Western legal structures do. The extreme, destructive conjunction of
sovereign authority and bare life is not a catastrophe that we could have somehow avoided: for Agamben, it represents the deepest
and truest structure of the law.¶ Now may be the time to return to that Kafka story about Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus,
entitled “The New Attorney.” (The text is available here. I recommend you take a moment to read it — it’s very short, and
quite interesting.) In this brief fragment, we learn that Bucephalus has changed careers: he is no longer a warhorse, but a lawyer.
What strikes Agamben about this story is that the steed of the greatest sovereign conqueror in the ancient world has taken up the
study of the law. For Agamben, this provides
an image of what it might look like not to go back to a
previous, less destructive form of law, but to get free of law altogether:¶ One day humanity will
play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it
for good…. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice
that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely
cannot be appropriated or made juridical.¶ The
law will not be simply done away with, but it is used in
a fundamentally different way. In place of enforcement, we have study, and in place of
solemn reverence, play. Agamben believes that the new attorney is going the state of emergency one
better: his activity not only suspends the letter of the law, but, more importantly, suspends its
force, its dominating power. ¶ Agamben’s critical work always aims toward these kinds of strange, evocative
recommendations. Again and again, we find that the goal of tracking down the paradoxes and
contradictions in the law is not to “fix” it or provide cautionary tales of what to avoid,
but to push the paradox even further. Agamben often uses the theological term “messianic” to describe his
argumentative strategy, because messianic movements throughout history — and here Agamben would include certain forms of
Christianity — have often had an antagonistic relationship to the law (primarily, but not solely, the Jewish law, or Torah).
Accordingly, he frequently draws on messianic texts from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions for inspiration in his attempt
to find a way out of the destructive paradoxes of Western legal thought.
Playing with the law rips the law of its force and application and turns the ritual
into a pure means that disrupts biopolitics
Morgan 7 (Benjamin Morgan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.
He has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on literature,
science, and aesthetics. “Undoing Legal Violence: Walter Benjamin's and Giorgio Agamben's
Aesthetics of Pure Means” March 2007 Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 34, No. 1 p. 4664)///CW
PLAYING WITH THE LAW¶ This philosophical effort to describe noninstrumental means is the basis for¶ Agamben's political
response to our 'global state of exception'. A theory of¶ pure
means can counteract a central problem of the
state of exception: its¶ exacerbation of the 'nexus between violence and law'.65 Benjamin, as we¶ have
seen, views law as inherently violent in both its creation and preservation¶ in so far as it is conceived as instrumental. Agamben
argues that the state¶ of exception extends this legal violence beyond its own boundaries by making¶ it possible for extra-legal
actions to acquire legal status. Tracing the legal¶ history of the term 'force of law' (the title Derrida gave to an essay in which¶ he
analyses 'Critique of Violence'), Agamben describes those actions that,¶ though not legally authorized, nonetheless draw upon the
violence that¶ guarantees law's dictates: 'decrees, provisions, and measures that are not¶ formally laws nevertheless acquire their
"force".'66 What is peculiar - and¶ dangerous - about the state of exception is that its suspension of legal norms¶ allows any action to
potentially acquire legal force.67 As such, in suspending¶ the law, the state of exception does not also suspend the violence that
creates¶ and maintains law, but rather makes it available for appropriation by revolutionary¶ groups, dictators, the police, and so
forth: 'It is as if the suspension of¶ law freed a force ... that both the ruling power and its adversaries, the¶ constituted power as well
as the constituent power, seek to appropriate.'68¶ Agamben terms this potential coincidence of every human action and legal¶ force
the inseparability of law and life.¶ Given
that suspending law only increases its violent activity,
Agamben¶ proposes that 'deactivating' law, rather than erasing it, is the only way to¶
undermine its unleashed force.69 It is in this context that Agamben offers the¶ apparently strange
solution of 'play' with which I began:¶ One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused¶ objects, not in
order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them¶ from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and
original¶ use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And¶ use, which has been contaminated by law,
must also be freed from its own¶ value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play.70¶ In proposing this playful relation
Agamben makes the move that Benjamin¶ avoids: explicitly describing what would remain after the
violent destruction¶ of normativity itself. 'Play' names the unknowable end of 'divine
violence'.¶ Agamben himself may not be entirely comfortable with this moment; in the¶ final paragraph of State of Exception, he
replaces this prediction with a¶ question and a possibility:¶ only beginning from the space thus opened [that is, by law's deposition]
will it¶ be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation¶ of the device that, in the state of exception, tied
it to life.71¶ Playfulness disappears completely in The Time That Remains, where¶ Christian love instead designates our relation to
the fulfilled law: 'once he¶ divides the law into a law of works and a law of faith ... and thus renders it¶ inoperative and unobservable
... Paul can then fulfil and recapitulate the law¶ in the figure of love.'72 Despite Agamben's apparent hesitation, this
idea of¶
play is instructive because of its resonance with Agamben's own¶ articulations of
aesthetic experience.¶ In an essay arguing that play derives from ritual, Agamben claims that¶ 'everything
pertaining to play once pertained to the realm of the sacred'.73¶ Play is the participation in a ritual
whose meaning has been forgotten: it¶ converts sacred objects into mere toys. This is what gives it its (literally)¶
revolutionary force: Agamben notes that play 'overturns' the sacred 'to the¶ point where it can plausibly be defined as "topsy-turvy
sacred".'74 This¶ mediation between the sacred and the secular is the function that Agamben¶ would
like play to perform
on the law: overturning it without destroying it.¶ Play would do this by retaining law's form
while forgetting its meaning;¶ Agamben writes that 'Playland is a country whose inhabitants are
busy¶ celebrating rituals, and manipulating objects and sacred words, whose sense¶ and
purpose they have, however forgotten.'75 This ritual with a forgotten¶ purpose articulates a means
without end in so far as the end has become¶ unknowable through its forgetting. This account also amounts to a¶ transposition
of Benjamin's often-cited account of the relation between the¶ sacred and the profane in 'The Work of Art in the Age of its
Technological¶ Reproductibility':¶ the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art always has its basis in ritual.¶ This ritualistic basis,
however mediated it may be, is still recognizable as¶ secularized ritual in even the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.76¶
Agamben's toy is thus not opposed to, but the counterpart of Benjamin's¶ 'authentic' work of art.¶ Furthermore, Agamben's claim
that law that has opened itself to play 'no¶ longer has force or application'77 depends upon the logic
that, for Agamben,¶ characterizes Kantian aesthetics. This negative definition of the figure of law¶ - as law minus force and
application - removes law's functionality and¶ normativity while maintaining that something called law still exists. Defining¶ 'pure
law' as what it is not repeats a rhetorical move for which Agamben¶ criticizes Kant, namely that in the third critique, 'judgment
identifies the¶ determinations of beauty only in a purely negative fashion'78 and consequently¶ 'our appreciation of art begins
necessarily with the forgetting of¶ art'.79 Agamben thus glosses Kant's fourth definition of the beautiful (that¶ 'which is cognized
without a concept as the object of a necessary¶ satisfaction'80) to emphasize its constitutive negativity: the beautiful, he¶ says, is
'normality without a norm'.81 In State of Exception, it may not be¶ problematic that our appreciation of law would begin with the
forgetting of¶ law; indeed this forgetting may be the difficult work that the book proposes.¶ But it is not only the negative structure of
the argument but also the kind of¶ negativity that is continuous between Agamben's analyses of aesthetic and¶ legal judgement. In
other words, 'normality without a norm', which¶ paradoxically articulates the subtraction of normativity from the normal, is¶ simply
another way of saying 'law without force or application'.82 To the¶ degree that this is true, Kantian aesthetic judgement hasn't
disappeared in¶ our experience of pure mediality; in fact, its name has barely changed.¶ But perhaps most interesting is the
similarity between Agamben's¶ description of the disused law and a much less famous passage in Kant's¶ third critique. In a footnote
to his definition of the beautiful as 'an object's¶ form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the¶
presentation of a purpose',83 Kant describes an object much like Agamben's¶ disused law. Anticipating a possible quarrel with his
explication, Kant¶ imagines someone who would point out that there are all sorts of objects¶ whose use we don't know, but which
still aren't considered beautiful:¶ It might be adduced as a counterexample to this definition that there are things¶ in which one can
see a purposive form without cognizing an end in them, e.g.,¶ the stone utensils often excavated from ancient burial mounds, which
are¶ equipped with a hole, as if for a handle, which, although they clearly betray by¶ their shape a purposiveness the end of which one
does not know, are¶ nevertheless not declared to be beautiful on that account.84¶ These stone utensils whose ends are unknown and
unknowable give us an idea¶ of what the law would look like to the humanity that Agamben hopes will play¶ with it. Where Agamben
imagines a future in which the law will still exist but¶ will have lost its purpose, Kant describes a present in which we discover¶
instrumental objects whose purpose is unknown. These objects offer us yet¶ another figure of 'means without end': things which
'betray by their shape a¶ purposiveness', but whose end has been erased by historical time. Kant argues¶ that these objects are not
actually susceptible to aesthetic reflection on the¶ grounds that the counter-argument assumes. But they are significant because¶
their obscured ends allow them to raise a question about their status as¶ aesthetic objects. This is the precise question raised by
Agamben's figure of a¶ law to be played with after its use value has been superseded.¶ To say, however, that Agamben's theory of a
deactivated law returns to a¶ theory of aesthetic judgement is not to say that Agamben aestheticizes law -¶ at least in the sense of this
term that makes it an accusation. In The Time That¶ Remains, Agamben argues that a certain way of thinking about messianism¶
runs the risk of aestheticization: reducing 'ethics and religion to acting as if¶ God, the kingdom, truth, and so on existed' amounts to
'an aestheticization¶ of the messianic in the form of the as if.s85 But I am not suggesting that the¶ infiltration of aesthetic experience
into Agamben's messianic law amounts to¶ a substitution of fictional for real redemption. It is not some fictionality in¶ our relation
to the deposed law that renders our experience of it aesthetic but,¶ rather, its suspension of the relation between means and ends. As
such,¶ Agamben's argument against the aestheticization of the messianic - that 'the¶ messianic is the simultaneous abolition and
realization of the as if - does¶ not address the aesthetic trace that remains in the messianic law as¶ formulated in State of Exception.
This trace, I think, may testify more to the¶ productive political possibilities of Kantian aesthetic judgement itself than to¶ some
falsity of Agamben's solution.¶ Even so, this still amounts to a reading of Agamben against Agamben's¶ own intention. Agamben
ends State of Exception by suggesting that our¶ experience of the law as a pure means is
capable of reclaiming the political¶ space that he believes has been eclipsed:¶ a space between [life and law] for
human action, which once claimed for itself¶ the name of 'politics'.... To a word that does not bind, that neither commands¶ nor
prohibits anything, but says only itself would correspond an action as pure¶ means, which shows only itself without any relation to
an end.86¶ If it is as difficult to separate the figure of pure means from aesthetic¶ purposiveness as Benjamin's and Agamben's own
writings suggest, then one¶ can easily see the beauty inherent in 'action as pure means, which shows¶ only itself'.87 This leaves us
with a different answer to the question with¶ which Agamben opens his book - 'What does it mean to act politically?'88 -¶ than
Agamben gives. We might say that what it means to act politically is to¶ act aesthetically. To enlist the figure of pure means in a call
for the return of¶ an authentic politics is to partially ground the political on that moment in¶ aesthetic judgement when we
appreciate something not because it is useful¶ or because it fits with our conceptual understanding of the world, but simply¶ because
we have a relation to it, independent of its purpose.
surveillance internal link/impact
Biopolitically violent electronic surveillance and information collecting systems
are at the forefront of the move from Athens to Auschwitz
Agamben, 1/10/2004 – professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in
Paris (Giorgio, “No to Bio-Political Tattooing”, published in Le Monde, a French evening
newspaper)//roetlin
There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal
dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered
inhumane and exceptional. Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the
state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached
previously unimaginable levels. All the same, it wouldn’t be possible to cross certain
thresholds in the control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new biopolitical era, without going one step further in what Michel Foucault called the progressive animalisation of man which is
established through the most sophisticated techniques. Electronic filing of finger and retina prints,
subcutaneous tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are elements that
contribute towards defining this threshold. The security reasons that are invoked to
justify these measures should not impress us: they have nothing to do with it. History
teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest
of the citizenry. What is at stake here is nothing less than the new "normal" bio-political
relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do
with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrollment and
the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean
the body’s biological life. These technological devices that register and identify naked
life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between
these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we
once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny. Thus, by applying these
techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a
human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the
point that it’s humanity itself that has become the dangerous class. Some years ago, I had written that the
West’s political
paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had
passed from Athens to Auschwitz . It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because
one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish. I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at
Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported persons
into concentration camps. The
bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its
territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the
normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state’s gears and mechanisms. That’s
why we must oppose it.
The sovereign’s use of surveillance renders the entire populace bare life --- this
universal state of exception exposes us all to the constant potentiality of violence
Douglas, independent scholar, 2009 – (Jeremy, “Disappearing Citizenship: surveillance and
the state of exception”, published in Surveillance & Society Vol 6, No 1, p. 37
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//roetlin
Electronic and biometric surveillance are the tactics through which the government is
creating a space in which the exception is routine practice. The biopolitical implication
of surveillance is the universalization of bare life: “History teaches us how practices first reserved for
foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry” (ibid). These new control measures have created a situation in
which not
only is there no clear distinction between private and political life, but there is
no fundamental claim, or right, to a political life as such – not even for citizens from
birth; thus, the originary biopolitical act that inscribes life as political from birth is more and more a potential depoliticization and
ban from the political realm. We are all exposed to the stateless potentiality of a bare life excluded
from the political realm, but not outside the violence of the law (and therefore still included):
“states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to
the point that it's humanity itself that has become the dangerous class” (ibid). Making
people suspects is equivalent to making people bare life – it is the governmental (a
Foucauldian governmentality rather than an Agambenian sovereignty I would argue) production of a life exposed to
the pure potentiality of the state of exception: “the sovereign ban, which applies to the exception in no longer
applying, corresponds to the structure of potentiality, which maintains itself in relation to actuality precisely through its ability not
to be” (Agamben 1994, 46). Surveillance
is the technique that opens up this potentiality, which
allows for the normalization of the exception. In this particular instance – i.e. biometric data
collection and surveillance in the US – the state of exception as a permanent form of governmentality and the universalization of
homines sacri has been brought into existence though the USA Patriot Act2 and the Patriot Act II3.
biopolitics impact
The biopolitical determination of the threshold beyond which life ceases to have
juridical value creates the category of a “life devoid of value” which spills over to
the biological body of every living being and nullifies value to death
Agamben, 98 – professor of philosophy at university of Verona (Giorgio, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pg. 139-140)//roetlin
It is not our intention here to take a position on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still today, in certain countries,
occupies a substantial position in medical debates and provokes disagreement. Nor are we concerned with the radicaliry with
which Binding declares himself in favor of the general admissibility of euthanasia. More interesting for our inquiry is the fact
that the sovereignty of the living man over his own life has its immediate counterpart in the
determination of a threshold beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can,
therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide. The new juridical category of “life
devoid of value” (or “life unworthy of being lived”) corresponds exactly—even if in an apparently different
direction—to the bare life of homo sacer and can easily be extended beyond the limits imagined
by Binding. It is as if every valorization and every “politicization” of life (which, after all, is implicit in
the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence) necessarily implies a new decision concerning the
threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only “sacred life,” and
can as such be eliminated without punishment. Every society sets this limit; every society—
even the most modern—decides who its “sacred men” will be. It is even possible that this limit, on which
the politicization and the exceprio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in
the history of the West and has now— in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national
sovereignty—moved inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined
to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living
being.
Biopolitics utilizes racism in order to
kill
Mendieta, 4/25/2002 – associate professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University
(Eduardo, “‘To make live and to let die’ –Foucault on Racism”, American Psychological
Association Central Division Meeting, p. 6-7)//roetlin
I have thus far discussed Foucault’s triangulation between the discourses of the production of truth, the power that these discourse
enact and make available to social agents, and the constitution of a political rationality that is linked to the invention and creation of
its horizon of activity and surveillance. I want now to focus on the main theme of this courses’ last lecture. This theme discloses in a
unique way the power and perspicacity of Foucault’s method. The theme concerns the kind of power that biopower renders available,
or rather, how biopolitics produces certain power effects by thinking of the living in a novel way. We will approach the theme by way
of a contrast: whereas the power of the sovereign under Medieval and early Modern times was the power to make 7 die and to let
live, the power of the total state, which is the biopower state, is the power to make live and to let die.
Foucault discerned here a telling asymmetry. If the sovereign exercised his power with the executioner’s axe, with the perpetual
threat of death, then life was abandoned to its devices. Power was exhibited only on the scaffold, or the guillotine –its terror was the
shimmer of the unsheathed sword. Power was ritualistic, ceremonial, theatrical, and to that extent partial, molecular, and
calendrical. It was also a power that by its own juridical logic had to submit to the jostling of rights and claims. In the very
performance of its might, the power of the sovereign revealed its limitation. It
is a power that is localized and
circumscribed to the theater of its cruelty, and the staging of its pomp. In contrast, however, the power of the
biopower state is over life [expand]. And here Foucault asks “how can biopolitics then reclaim the power over
death?” or rather, how can it make die in light of the fact that its claim to legitimacy is that it is guarding, nurturing, tending to
life? In so far as biopolitics is the management of life, how does it make die, how does it kill? This is a similar
question to the one that theologians asked about the Christian God. If God is a god of life, the giver of life, how can he put to death,
how can he allow death to descend upon his gift of life –why is death a possibility if god is the giver of life? Foucault’s answer is that
in order to re-claim death, to be able to inflict death on its subjects, its living beings,
biopower must make use of racism ; more precisely, racism intervenes here to grant access to death to the
biopower state. We must recall that the political rationality of biopower is deployed over a
population, which is understood as a continuum of life. It is this continuum of life that eugenics, social
hygiene, civil engineering, civil medicine, military engineers, doctors and nurses, policeman, and so on, tended to by a
careful management of roads, factories, living quarters, brothels, red-districts, planning and planting of gardens and
recreation centers, and the gerrymandering of populations by means of roads, access to public transformations, placement of
schools, and so on. Biopolitics is the result of the development and maintenance of the hothouse of the political body, of the bodypolitic. Society has become the vivarium of the political rationality, and biopolitics acts on the teeming biomass contained within the
parameters of that structure built up by the institutions of health, education, and production.
at: cards about foucault
Agambens theory of Biopower is fundamentally different than Foucoults analysis
Kendrick 2012 Victoria University of Wellington (Foucault, Biopower & IR)
In summary, both sets of authors discussed above commit, from
a Foucauldian perspective, fundamental
methodological errors. Hardt & Negri explain power relations according to a transcendent logic, and explicitly break one
of Foucault’s methodological rules; “not to attempt some kind of deduction of power starting from its centre and aimed at the
discovery of the extent to which it permeates into the base, of the degree to which it reproduces itself down to and including the most
molecular elements of society.”48 Meanwhile,
Agamben’s analysis is also anti-genealogical, in that it
places the present need of explaining zones of exception at the supposed origin of
sovereignty, albeit an origin that perpetually re-inscribes itself as the function of
sovereignty. Yet both sets of authors have a predominant influence in the IR literature, over a dearth of more accurate
Foucauldian readings. It should seem odd then, that when the shortcomings of biopower in IR
literature are identified, it is Foucault that gets the blame. This is especially so when Foucault made it quite clear that,
although his concepts and insights were produced to be freely interpreted and redeployed according to the directions of others’
investigations, certain
methodological principles were integral to his work. I maintain that a Foucauldian
direction in which
Agamben, and Hardt & Negri have ultimately led biopower is best represented by Michael Dillon, probably
the most explicit and prolific theorist of biopower in IR.49 Dillon is particularly interested in the
IR can only be built upon a certain level of methodological adherence to these principles. The
ramifications of Foucault’s insights into security, war, and race, and views biopolitics from this perspective. For Dillon, the central
import of biopower is not that it is a strategy which promotes life, but that in promoting life its central concern is to differentiate
between the fit and unfit. “Biopolitics is therefore always involved in the sorting of life for the promotion of life. Sorting life requires
waging war on behalf of life against life forces that are inimical to life.”50War
becomes a central concern for Dillon
because, as Foucault first states in The History of Sexuality, vol 1, biopower not only is a power that fosters
life, but concomitantly disallows life. 51 Foucault, however, did not pursue this line of
inquiry to fully develop its implications, and Dillon’s project launches itself from the point made by Bigo that
“[t]he question of security as it relates to war, and to international war, is not really
discussed by Foucault and the Foucaultians.” 52
at: holocaust trivialization
He’s obviously not being literal --- he’s not even claiming our experiences are on
par with nazi victims
Van Munster, 5/28/2014 – Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International
Studies (DIIS) and teaches security studies at the Department of Political Science, University of
Southern Denmark (Rens, “The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule”,
Danish Institute for International Studies, p. 144)//roetlin
Supra fn. 4, at p. 181, passim , Agamben’s outspoken
statement that the concentration camp is the
political paradigm of the West does not purport that life today faces the same
horrors that inhabitants of concentration camps had to confront.
***This card is in the 1ac and has an answer in it
Those forms of biopolitical control generate the groundwork for racism and
eugenics --- these invisible violences outweigh any purported benefits
Van Munster, 5/28/2014 – Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International
Studies (DIIS) and teaches security studies at the Department of Political Science, University of
Southern Denmark (Rens, “The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule”,
Danish Institute for International Studies, p. 144-146)//roetlin
Taking his cue from Michel Foucault, Agamben maintains that the
sovereign right to take life has become
supplemented and permeated by a right to make life. In modern societies the sovereign threat
of death has been complemented with a concern to take charge of biological life in order
to make it more productive, fertile, healthy, etc. 11 Instead of threatening with death, biopolitics is a form
of power that is concerned with the correction, administration and regulation of
populations. Seeking to take charge of life, ‘‘it does not have to draw the line that separates the
enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subjects; it effects distributions around the norm.’’ 12 The inclusion of
pure life in politics, then, also marks a shift from law to the (statistical) norm in the sense that bare life is not only, or
not even first and foremost, produced in the sovereign process of taking life, but through
the process of making life, i.e. through the distribution of human life around a norm with the purpose of reducing life’s
distance to this norm. Although the incorporation of bare life in the political realm has made it
possible to reduce, amongst others, famine and mortality in the West, it has also given rise to
‘caring’ practices such as racism and eugenics: ‘‘What follows is a kind of
bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques. For
the first time in history ... it becomes possible both to protect life and to
authorize a holocaust.’’ 13 Agamben’s rendering of sovereign power and bare life is driven by an ethical drive to lay
bare the juridico-political mechanisms of power that make it possible to commit acts of
violence that do not count as crime. 14 While not denying the uniqueness of the
suffering in the Nazi concentration camps, Agamben discovers similar structures in
contemporary society. He points out that camp-like structures such as detention centres for illegal
migrants, airport holding zones and humanitarian relief camps all produce bare life in the
sense that decisions on the life of people can be taken outside the normal framework of rule, but which nevertheless are not
completely illegal and without connection to that law. In the context of this paper, the Guantanamo
Bay detention centre for
suspected terrorists is another case in point. 15 However, as Edkins has noted, Agamben has not inquired deeper into the
politics of emergency or the politics of the ban in which the sovereign and homo sacer are constituted as each other’s mirror image.
16 Therefore, the following sections aim to provide insight into the ways in which the American governance of the emergency of 9/11
constitute global American sovereignty on the one hand and reduce political subjects to the naked life of homo sacer .
at: inevitable
We are not inevitably trapped in the position of the dominated --- no power exists
without resistance --- we can utilize the alternative as a method of creating
strategies of resistance that can be used on a global scale
Mendieta, 4/25/2002 – associate professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University
(Eduardo, “‘To make live and to let die’ –Foucault on Racism”, American Psychological
Association Central Division Meeting, p. 3-4)//roetlin
“That
one can never be “outside of power” does not mean that one is in every way
trapped . I would suggest rather (but these are hypotheses to be explored): that power is coextensive with the
social body; there are not, between the links of its networks, any golden sands of basic freedoms; that power relations are
intermingled with other types of relations (of production, kinship, family, sexuality) where they play both a conditioning and a
conditioned role, that these
relations don’t obey the unique form of interdiction and
punishment, but that that they take multiple forms; that their interweaving sketches out
the general facts of domination, that this domination is organized in a more or less
coherent and unitary strategy; that the dispersed, heteromorphous and local procedures of power are readjusted,
reinforced and transformed by these global strategies, and all this with numerous phenomena of inertia, dislocation and resistance;
that one
must not therefore accept a primary and massive fact of domination (a binary
structure with on one side the “dominating” and on the other, the “dominated”) but rather a multiform production
of relations of domination which are partially integratable into the strategies of the
whole; that relations of power do in fact “serve,” but not at all because they are “in the service” of an economic interest taken as
primitive, but because they can be used in strategies; that there are no relations of power without
resistances ; that the latter are all the more real and effective to the extent that they are formed there where the relations of
power are exercised; resistance to power doesn’t have to come from elsewhere in order to be
real, nor is it trapped because it is the compatriot of power. It exists all the more insofar
as it is there where power is; it is therefore, like power, multiple and integratable into
global strategies.”
at: suffering reps
Representations of suffering test the limits of biopower by bearing responsibility
to naked life --- this breaks through the imperfection of language demanding
solidarity beyond identity or universality
Athanasiou ’03 (Athena – prof of social anthropology University of Thessaly, Department of
History, Archaeology, and Social Anthropology, “Technologies of Humanness, Aporias of
Biopolitics, and the Cut Body of Humanity,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
14.1, p. 127-128)
My theme here is the political engagement with the technoperformativity of biopolitics in the age of genocide and in light of what
Giorgio Agamben has called the Nomos of modernity—the concentration camp and its spectral echoes in Europe and the Balkans.
Martin Heidegger’s critique of technology will provide the basis on which to address and develop my questions: What happens to the
language of representation when it encounters the challenge of the conveyance of broken, abandoned, dismembered human
attempt to trace the
technoperformativity of modern biopolitics at its choppy limits, designated as they are
by the palpable and yet ineffable—at once all too represented and radically
unrepresentable—corporeality of deported, tortured, raped, violated, detained, dismembered,
quarantined, annihilated, and surviving bodies. It is on the ethicopolitical force of such engagement
that rests the responsibility to face up to the exigency of thinking and responding, even
if there can be no question of knowing what it means, even if one cannot sense what it
would be like to suffer the pain of the marked Other as s/he stands before the totalizing
nomos of the power over naked life and living death, before biopolitical sovereignty and its demand for a uniform
and [End Page 127] unified body politic. This act of responding, mediated as it may be by the
unfixable semantic and performative forces of language, exceeds the formal structure of
mere naming or re-membering. It even exceeds bearing witness. It is, above all, a movement of
imagining the necessary possibility of shifting, evading, or disrupting this limitation,
this irreparable limit to othering the self and selfing the other; a movement of reckoning
with the radical incalculability of the possibility of perverting the limits of this impasse,
even though—or rather, because—there can be no question of fully overcoming it; and even though—or rather, because—
language will always fail us.
corporeality onto the body of the text? How does unrepresentability organize the representable? I
k
at: cosmo
The Kritik terminally reinforces state power --- retrenches 1ac impacts
Pallitto and Heyman 8 – Political Science, Seton Hall University; Department of Sociology
and Anthropology, The University of Texas at El Paso (Robert and Josiah, “Theorizing CrossBorder Mobility: Surveillance, Security and Identity”, 2008,
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/viewFile/3426/3389)
KW
One such analysis involves the concept of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism
covers various phenomena
within which political and cultural imaginations become relatively unbounded, losing
their localized prejudices and sentiments, and thus cosmopolitanism is, predictably, often
celebrated as a triumph of technology, or of social-cultural development (Vertovec and Cohen, 2002). However,
its benefits are unequally distributed, and they come at a cost . The mobility
freedom enjoyed by some depends on an “authoritarian underside” that denies
movement to others (Sparke, 2006: 173, 174). Mobility freedom can be seen as a right or as a privilege, but
either way it usually comes with greater speed of movement and lower designation of risk; that is,
high rights and high speed are mutually reinforcing, and they are associated with lower risk. Those designated as
“higher-risk,” on the other hand, will experience risk in a double sense: they are seen to pose a higher risk of harm to others,
and at the same time they themselves are more at risk for state scrutiny, detention and even
mistreatment. Ulrich Beck (1992,1999) sees risks as products of modern and post-modern technological, social, and economic
processes, creating new, shared domains of political collectivity that cut across traditionally bounded polities. Risk
calculations made on a global scale can drive political decisionmaking, with the resulting
calculations shaping the space for action in a postmodern context. This may be plausible for some
issues (such as global warming), but as our analysis of securitization of movement after 9/11 shows, world risk may also result in
greater differentiation of treatment and potentially segmentation of subjectivities. When applied to social groups, risk
calculation is problematic because of its stratifying effect that entrenches the unequal
position of those at the losing end of the rights/risk/speed calculus.
at: deleuze
Sovereign surveillance imposes self-regulation upon the populace --- we become
objectified through the gaze of an unseen seer
Douglas, independent scholar, 2009 – (Jeremy, “Disappearing Citizenship: surveillance and
the state of exception”, published in Surveillance & Society Vol 6, No 1, p. 34-35
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3402/3365)//roetlin
Yet what emerges is, on the one hand, a theory of the top-down
management of a population that is
controlled through governmental mechanisms such as statistics-guided surveillance and
police practices, and, on the other hand, the bottom-up subjectivization of population through
the regulation of actions confronted with state power relations; this may also be regarded as
biopolitical population control and individualizing discipline, respectively. These two streams of governmentality surface in
Foucault’s later writings from time to time, but he never clearly reconciles the art of government and subjectivization. This
subjective ‘conduct’ or ‘governing the self’ is a self-disciplining that is made possible
through the knowledge of oneself as ‘the other’, as the object of an unseen seer (as is
discussed with the panoptic model in Discipline and Punish). This self-conduct, however, is framed in terms
of the problematic of government that uses the power relation techniques of governing
others to govern themselves (Foucault 2000, 340-342); but again, where do these two points
converge and differ? It seems as though we must look to surveillance to answer this
question. We know that surveillance is certainly a governmental ‘technique’ for the management and control of the population, but
we also see that subjectivization is only possible via surveillance , as just mentioned with the
panoptic model. However, panoptic surveillance is an ancient notion, developed at least as far back as EBII, sometime around 30002650BC (Yekutieli 2006, 78). The
relation between the seer and the subject is no longer that of a
physical perspective from a point fixe, nor is it localised in a contained space, as with Bentham’s
prison model. Rather, as Paul Virilio would argue, surveillance is making the traditionally
confined space of the camp the very centre of the city. However, before examining the juridical-political
applications of this notion, we must understand Giorgio Agamben’s conception of biopolitics in terms of “bare life” and “the state of
exception”.
at: derrida
Derrida fundamentally misunderstands Agamben
Donahue 13 (Luke Donahue is a writer who specializes in deconstruction, “Erasing Differences
between Derrida and Agamben” 2013 Oxford Literary Review p. 29-30)///CW
While Part One of Homo Sacer focuses on the sovereign who appears¶ most in the law, Part Two focuses on the banished ex-citizen
who¶ appears most devoid of law and most animal. This exile is homo sacer,¶ excluded from the legal order. But while exiled from
the polis, he is¶ not completely abandoned to animal life: just as the sovereign state¶ of exception still holds a relation to law, so too
does homo sacer. When¶ Agamben
calls homo sacer bare life, he does not mean that bare life is
the¶ pure, unqualified life of zoe. Rather, bare life is a ‘zone of indistinction’¶ between zoe
and bios, between life that is absolutely animal and life¶ that is qualified as human and political. While bare life is commonly¶
confused with zoe, Agamben says clearly: ‘Neither political bios nor¶ natural zoe, sacred life is
the zone of indistinction in which zoe and bios¶ constitute each other in including and excluding each other’
(HS, 90).7¶ What is more, while bare life is the play between bios and zoe, there is¶ no bios or zoe prior to the bare life of homo sacer.
Just as nature and¶ culture only appear after the originary confusion between them, so the¶ condition of possibility of the appearance
of either pure bios or pure¶ zoe is the originary co-contamination that ‘precedes’ either of them.¶ Derrida
continually
misunderstands these points when he identifies¶ bare life with zoe, as in the following
apposition: ‘bare life (zoe)’.8¶ This confusion gives Derrida the impression that ‘Agamben
is required¶ to demonstrate that the difference between zoe and bios is absolutely¶
rigorous’ (BS, 326). But Agamben’s point is just the opposite: the¶ distinction never was
rigorous. There never was an original unity or¶ an original and secure difference.
Derrida misunderstands Agamben’s argument --- the fact that bios and zoe cannot
be separated is the entire point
Kotsko 12 (Adam Kotsko is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Shimer College in Chicago
and the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath,
The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, and Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty
“On Derrida’s critique of Agamben” 6/30/12 https://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/30/onderridas-critique-of-agamben/)///CW
I have not closely studied Derrida’s critique of Agamben from The Beast and the Sovereign, yet given how frequently it’s been
deployed by Agamben skeptics, I feel comfortable giving a brief, blog-style response to it: that
bios and zoē cannot be
neatly distinguished does not undermine Agamben’s project, but is indeed the entire
point.¶ Agamben reads the Western tradition as a series of increasingly destructive failed
attempts to separate them out in some kind of stable and sustainable way. The reason these attempts fail
is that the neat distinction is impossible — indeed, even in the encounter between the sovereign (the very
embodiment of bios as political life) and the homo sacer (the emblem of zoē as bare life), which should surely count as the starkest
possible contrast between these two concepts of life, an uncanny overlapping occurs wherein both are included through their very
exclusion.¶ Agamben
is thus not trying to get rid of bios in favor of a pure zoē — i.e., to abolish
to get at another politics,
another form of life that would not be governed by this founding opposition of the
contingent historical reality that is Western politics.¶ There is doubtless a lot to be said in critique of
Agamben’s project, but Derrida’s critique misses its target as far as I can tell.
politics and allow us all to return to our raw animality or unblemished nature — but
at: give back the land
We internal link turn --- biopolitical control produces a logic that culminates in
global colonization --- nobody is safe, not even the colonizers
Mendieta, 4/25/2002 – associate professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University
(Eduardo, “‘To make live and to let die’ –Foucault on Racism”, American Psychological
Association Central Division Meeting, p. 1-2)//roetlin
Briefly, in Stoler’s work I discern two main criticisms. On the one hand that Foucault failed to give enough attention to the
colonial dimensions of the emergence of biopolitics. On the hand, Stoler affirms that Foucault abandoned
the line of investigation pursued in the 1976 lectures. The first criticism is only acceptable if we weaken its claims. In other words,
Foucault did fail to pay attention to the details of the way in which the
normalization of the political body of a
population was related to projects of foreign colonization . Yet, Foucault is not conceptually and
theoretically unaware of their complicity and interdependence. At one point in the lectures he explicitly
talks about the way in which the emergence of the biopower state is a form of internal colonization ,
in which the tactics of the domestication and normalization of the colonized body are
applied on the colonizing body. The second criticism would not stand if we read the 1976 lectures, along with those in
1977, as well as his Tanner lectures, and the lectures gathered in the volume edited by Martin, Gutman, and Hutton (1988). I think
that the two last volumes of the history of sexuality to be printed during Foucault’s life time eclipsed his work on governmentality
and political rationality (Burchell, Gordon, and Miller 1991) 2 Nonetheless, let me just offer the following synoptic overview of the
lectures. The lectures dealt with: First and foremost a retrospective look at what Foucault had been doing over the last five years,
since he had been elected to the Collège de France. This retrospective look sought to cull the conceptual elements of the approach
that have been used in works like the Archeology of Knowledge, and Discipline und Punish. In the first two lectures, published in the
1980 volume edited by Colin Gordon, Knowledge/Power, Foucault lays out his understanding of the relationship between
archeology, genealogy, and subjugated knowledges, on the one hand, and legitimate, official, and erudite forms of knowledge on the
other. Foucault also distinguished between two paradigms or forms of understanding power. On one side we have what he calls the
economicist form of power that attributes to the sovereign a legitimate right that this
then can exert upon subjects as a form of contract. The key words of this representation of power are:
right, law, and jurisprudence . This is the juridical idea of power. On the other side we
have what Foucault calls a disciplinary form of power, which is above all anti-sovereign, and anti-judicial. It is a
form of control that exerts force by normalizing, and creating the conditions of
surveillance that lead to subjects’ docility. It is a form of power that is diffused and does not act
on individuals, but determines a horizon of action. It does not discipline, but normalizes. It does not operate on
juridical rules, or rights, but on norms and standards that refer to a social technology. It is a power that emerges with the
development of the human sciences, and in particular the sciences of normalization. In this way, this power is not centralized, but
diffused, not owned, but anonymous, not exerted, but relayed and lived.
at: neoliberalism
Case turns the K --- the system’s motor will never be jammed in a world of
security’s state of exception
Agamben, 2000 (Giorgio Agamben, professor of philosophy at the European Graduate
School; “Means Without End,” Univ. Minnesota Press, 2000, pg. 133)
Nothing is more nauseating than the impudence with which those who have turned money into their only raison d'etre periodically
wave around the scarecrow of economic crisis: the rich nowadays wear plain rags so as to warn the poor that sacrifices will be
necessary for everybody. And the docility is just as astonishing; those who have made themselves stolidly complicitous with the
imbalance of the public debt, by handing all their savings over to the state in exchange for bonds, now receive the warning blow
without batting an eyelash and ready themselves to tighten their belts. And yet those who have any lucidity left in them know that
the crisis is always in process and that it constitutes the internal motor of capitalism in its
present phase, much as the state of exception is today the normal structure of political power . And
just as the state of exception requires that there be increasingly numerous sections of
residents deprived of political rights and that in fact at the outer limit all citizens be reduced to naked life, in
such a way crisis, having now become permanent, demands not only that the people of the Third
World become increasingly poor, but also that a growing percentage of the citizens of the industrialized
societies be marginalized and without a job. And there is no so-called democratic state
today that is not compromised and up to its neck in such a massive production of human
misery.
Capitalism isn’t the root cause of anything --- pretending it is justifies the worst
violence --- empirics prove
Aberdeen, 3 (Richard Aberdeen; 2003 “THE WAY A Theory of Root Cause and Solution”
http://freedomtracks.com/ uncommonsense/theway.html)
A view shared by many modern activists is that capitalism, free enterprise, multi-national corporations and
globalization are the primary cause of the current global Human Rights problem and that by
striving to change or eliminate these, the root problem of what ills the modern world is being
addressed. This is a rather unfortunate and historically myopic view, reminiscent of early “class
struggle” Marxists who soon resorted to violence as a means to achieve rather
questionable ends. And like these often brutal early Marxists, modern anarchists who resort to violence to
solve the problem are walking upside down and backwards, adding to rather than correcting, both the
immediate and long-term Human Rights problem. Violent revolution, including our own
American revolution, becomes a breeding ground for poverty, disease, starvation and often
mass oppression leading to future violence. Large, publicly traded corporations are created by individuals or
groups of individuals, operated by individuals and made up of individual and/or group investors. These business enterprises are
deliberately structured to be empowered by individual (or group) investor greed. For example, a theorized ‘need’ for offering salaries
much higher than is necessary to secure competent leadership (often resulting in corrupt and entirely incompetent leadership),
lowering wages more than is fair and equitable and scaling back of often hard fought for benefits, is sold to stockholders as being in
the best interest of the bottom-line market value and thus, in the best economic interests of individual investors. Likewise, major
political and corporate exploitation of third-world nations is rooted in the individual and joint
greed of corporate investors and others who stand to profit from such exploitation. More
than just investor greed, corporations are driven by the greed of all those involved, including individuals
outside the enterprise itself who profit indirectly from it. If one examines “the course of human events” closely, it can correctly be
surmised that the
“root” cause of humanity’s problems comes from individual human greed
and similar negative individual motivation. The Marx/Engles view of history being a “class” struggle ¹ does not
address the root problem and is thus fundamentally flawed from a true historical perspective (see Gallo Brothers for more details).
So-called “classes” of people, unions, corporations and political groups are made up of individuals who
support the particular group or organizational position based on their own individual
needs, greed and desires and thus, an apparent “class struggle” in reality, is an extension of individual motivation.
Likewise, nations engage in wars of aggression, not because capitalism or classes of society are
at root cause, but because individual members of a society are individually convinced
that it is in their own economic survival best interest. War, poverty, starvation and lack
of Human and Civil Rights have existed on our planet since long before the rise of modern
capitalism, free enterprise and multi-national corporation avarice, thus the root problem obviously goes
deeper than this. Junior Bush and the neo-conservative genocidal maniacs of modern-day America could not have recently
effectively gone to war against Iraq without the individual support of individual troops and a certain percentage of individual citizens
within the U.S. population, each lending support for their own personal motives, whatever they individually may have been. While it
is true that corrupt leaders often provoke war, using all manner of religious, social and political means to justify, often as not,
entirely ludicrous ends, very rare indeed is a battle only engaged in by these same unscrupulous miscreants of power. And though a
few iniquitous elitist powerbrokers may initiate nefarious policies of global genocidal oppression, it takes a very great many
individuals operating from individual personal motivations of survival, desire and greed to develop these policies into a multinational exploitive reality. No
economic or political organization and no political or social cause
exists unto itself but rather, individual members power a collective agenda. A workers’ strike
has no hope of succeeding if individual workers do not perceive a personal benefit. And similarly, a corporation will not
exploit workers if doing so is not believed to be in the economic best interest of those
who run the corporation and who in turn, must answer (at least theoretically) to individuals who collectively through
purchase or other allotment of shares, own the corporation. Companies have often been known to appear benevolent, offering both
higher wages and improved benefits, if doing so is perceived to be in the overall economic best interest of the immediate company
and/or larger corporate entity. Non-unionized business enterprises frequently offer ‘carrots’ of appeasement to workers in order to
discourage them from organizing and historically in the United States, concessions such as the forty-hour workweek, minimum
wage, workers compensation and proscribed holidays have been grudgingly capitulated to by greedy capitalist masters as necessary
concessions to avoid profit-crippling strikes and outright revolution.
at: psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis has enabled modern governmentality --- its techniques are used
manage populations and develop disciplinary society
Milchman and Rosenberg 02 Milchman teaches in the department of Political Science of
Queens College of the City University of New York. He has published on Marxism, modern
genocide, Max Weber, Heidegger, Foucault, and postmodernism. He has co-edited
Postmodernism and the Holocaust, with Alan Rosenberg (Rodopi, 1998) and Martin Heidegger
and the Holocaust, with Alan Rosenberg (Humanities Press, 1996), Alan is Associate Professor
of Philosophy at Queens College of the City University of New York. He has published widely on
psychoanalysis, the Holocaust, and the philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault.
Among the books that he has co-edited are Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, with
Alan Milchman (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming); Contemporary Portrayals of
Auschwitz: Philosophical Challenges, with James Watson and Detlef B. Linke (Humanity
Books); Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition, with Paul Marcus (NYU press, 1998);
Healing Their Wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocaust Survivors and Their Families, with Paul
Marcus (Praeger, 1989); and Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark
Time, with Gerald Myers (Temple University Press, 1988). “A Foucauldian Analysis of
Psychoanalysis: A Discipline that ‘Disciplines’” Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic
Arts, http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/milch&rosen.htm/
For Foucault, the
very genesis of the discipline of psychoanalysis is itself linked to historical
changes in the exercise of power-relations, and in particular to the emergence of
governmentality. According to the later Foucault, modern power-relations cannot be grasped on the basis of political
theory's traditional model of power-law-sovereignty-repression. This juridical model of power, which still dominates political theory,
and sees power as emanating from a sovereign, from the top down, ignores the fact that power today also comes from below. As
Leslie Paul Thiele has argued in his explication of Foucault's contribution to a theory of power: "Power forms an omnipresent web of
relations, and the individuals who support this web are as much the producers and transmitters of power as they are its objects." In
place of the juridical model of power, Foucault argues that modern power-relations are instantiated through what he designates as
"governmentality." For Foucault: The
exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of
conduct and putting in order the possible outcome. Basically power is less a confrontation between two
adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very broad meaning
which it had in the sixteenth century. `Government' did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather it
designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of
communities, of families, of the sick. .... To
govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action
of others. For Foucault, then, the operations of the modern state are not restricted to interdiction or
repression in the political sense, but have expanded to incorporate the practices of governmentality.
Government, in the Foucauldian sense, depends on the knowledge generated by the human
sciences, by the disciplines, in particular psychoanalysis; indeed, the state claims that it
governs on the basis of that knowledge. Here, the central role of the human sciences in the
operation of the developing disciplinary society, and its techniques for the control and
management of its citizens becomes especially clear. Moreover, governmentality, and the
technologies for the control of individuals, are by no means limited to the state. Indeed,
according to Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, modern, liberal societies do not leave the regulation of
conduct solely or even primarily to the operations of the state and its bureaucracies:
"Liberal government identifies a domain outside 'politics,' and seeks to manage it
without destroying its existence and its autonomy." This is accomplished through the
activities of a host of institutions and agents not formally part of the state apparatus,
including psychoanalytic facilities and analysts. As Nikolas Rose has pointed out, psychoanalysis, like
"All the sciences which have the prefix `psy-' or `psycho-' have their roots in this shift in the relationship
between social power and the human body, in which regulatory systems have sought to
codify, calculate, supervise, and maximize the level of functioning of individuals. The
`psy sciences' were born within a project of government of the human soul and the
construction of the person as a manageable subject." As a manifestation of governmentality and its powerrelations, psychoanalysis is implicated in the control of the individual. For Foucault, psychoanalysis is a discipline
that "disciplines," that helps to create politically and economically socialized,
useful, cooperative, and -- as one of the hallmarks of bio-power -- docile
individuals . Indeed, according to John Forrester, for Foucault, psychoanalysis is "the purest version of
the social practices that exercise domination in and through discourse, whose power lies
in words, whose words can never by anything other than instruments of power." Of
course, the aim of the analyst is not control, but the "mental health" of the individual
and the "betterment" of society. Nonetheless, the result of the psychoanalytic
management-oriented conception of the subject is an individual who is susceptible to
techno-medical control. Moreover, as Nikolas Rose has suggested, the power-knowledge obtained
by psychoanalysis (and indeed all of the psy sciences) and its technologies for the control of the
individual: fed back into social life at a number of levels. Individuals could be classified and distributed
to particular social locations in the light of them -- in schools, jobs, ranks in the army,
types of reformatory institutions, and so forth. Further, in consequence, new means emerged
for the codification and analysis of the consequences of organizing classrooms, barracks,
prisons, production lines, the family, and social life itself....Hence, the psy knowleges
could feed back into more general economic and social programs, throwing up new
problems and opportunities for attempts to maximize the use of the human resources of
the nation and to increase its levels of personal health and well-being. Whatever its impact or
health and welfare, this power-knowledge enhanced the degree of control to which the person
was subject, and made it possible to effectively discipline the individual. Indeed, the
existence of our developing disciplinary society is inconceivable without
the psy sciences, and the power-relations which they consolidate. The discipline and
control of the individual to which psychoanalysis made its signal contribution, was
linked to its conception of, and commitment to, normalization. Foucault signalled the increasing role
of normality and normalization in the functioning of the developing disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish: "The judges of
normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the `social
worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself,
subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements." For Foucault, discipline
and
normalization were inseparable components of the emergence of the human sciences,
and their technologies. Indeed, he asserted that "a normalizing society is the historical outcome
of a technology of power centered on life." Psychoanalysis did not break with this complex. Indeed, according to
Foucault, "Freud was well aware of all this. He was aware of the superior strength of his position on the matter of normalization."
Indeed, psychoanalysis
was thoroughly implicated in the societal process in which the
norm increasingly supplanted the law, in which the West was "becoming a society which
is essentially defined by the norm." For Foucault: "The norm becomes the criterion for evaluating individuals. As it
truly becomes a society of the norm, medicine, par excellence the science of the normal and the pathological, assumes the status of a
royal science." Lest one conclude that Foucault is not referring to psychoanalysis here, he is quick to point out that
"psychoanalysis, not only in the United States, but also in France, functions
massively as a medical
practice: even if it is not always practiced by doctors, it certainly functions as therapy, as
a medical type of intervention. From this point of view, it is very much a part of this network of
medical 'control' which is being established all over." Deviation from the norm, in the establishment of
which psychoanalysis played a signal role, the anomaly, became the object of the technologies and therapeutic techniques of the psy
sciences, psychoanalysis among them. The
theological conception of evil had given way to the
psychoanalytic conception of deviance, in the combat against which the analyst was now
enlisted to play a leading role. As Hubert Dreyfus has claimed, "Freudian theory thus reinforces the collective
practices that allow norms based on alleged sciences of human nature to permeate every aspect of our lives." These
practices
then become a lynchpin of the developing disciplinary society and its techniques for
managing people.
The negative attempts to put us on the couch, interpreting our fantasies for us
until we don’t know what we want anymore --- the rule of psychoanalysis is
regardless of what you say, you mean something else --- this paradox makes
politics impossible --- the impact is the 1ac
Deleuze 2004 – (Gilles, thinker, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, pg. 274-280
[Originally published in Italian. "Relazione di Gilles Deleuze" and discussions in Armando
Verdiglione, ed., Psicanalisi e Politica; Atti del Comvegno di studi tenuto a Milano l'8-9
Maggio 1973. Milan: Feltrinelli, 19-3, pp. 7-11, 17-21, 37-40, 44-45, 169-172. Abridged and
edited.])
I would like to present five propositions on psychoanalysis. The first is this: psychoanalysis
today presents a political danger all of its own that is different from the implicit dangers of the
old psychiatric hospital. The latter constitutes a place of localized captivity; psychoanalysis, on
the other hand, works in the open air. The psychoanalyst has in a sense the same position that Marx
accorded to the merchant in feudal society: working in the open pores of society, not only in private offices,
but also in schools, institutions, departmentalism, etc. This function puts us in a unique position with respect
to the psychoanalytic project. We recognize that psychoanalysis tells us a great deal about the
unconscious; but, in a certain way, it does so only to reduce the unconscious, to destroy it, to
repulse it, to imagine it as a sort of parasite on consciousness . For psychoanalysis, it is fair to say
there are always too many desires. The Freudian conception of the child as polymorphous pervert shows that there
are always too many desires. In our view, however, there are never enough desires. We do not, by one method or another, wish to
reduce the unconscious: we prefer to produce it: there is no unconscious that is already there; the unconscious must be produced
politically, socially, and historically. The question is: in what place, in what circumstances, in the shadow of what events, can the
unconscious be produced. Producing the unconscious means very precisely the production of desire in a historical social milieu or
the appearance of statements and expressions of a new kind. My second proposition is that psychoanalysis is a
complete machine, designed in advance to prevent people from talking , therefore from
producing statements that suit them and the groups with which they have certain affinities. As
soon as one begins analysis, one has the impression of talking. But one talks in vain; the entire
psychoanalytical machine exists to suppress the conditions of a real expression. Whatever one
says is taken into a sort of tourniquet, an interpretive machine; the patient will never be able
to get to what he really has to say. Desire or delirium (which are in a deep sense the same thing), desire-delirium is by
its nature a libidinal investment of an entire historical milieu, of an entire social environment. What makes one delirious are classes,
peoples, races, masses, mobs. Psychoanalysis, possessed of a pre-existing code, superintends a sort of destruction. This code consists
of Oedipus, castration, the family romance; the most secret content of delirium, i.e. this divergence from the social and historical
milieu, will be destroyed so that no delirious statement, corresponding to an overflow in the unconscious, will be able to get through
the analytical machine. We say that the schizophrenic has to deal not with family, nor with his par-
ents, but with peoples, populations, and tribes. We say that the unconscious is not a matter of
generations or family genealogy, but rather of world population, and that the psychoanalytical
machine destroys all this. I will cite just two examples: the celebrated example of president Schreber whose delirium is
entirely about races, history, and wars. Freud doesn't realize this and reduces the patient's delirium exclusively to his
relationship with his father. Another example is the Wolfman: when the Wolfman dreams of six or seven wolves, which is by
definition a pack, i.e. a certain kind of group, Freud immediately reduces this multiplicity by bringing everything back to a single
wolf who is necessarily the Father. The entire collective libidinal expression manifested in the delirium of the Wolfman will be
unable to make, let alone conceive of the statements that are for him the most meaningful. My third proposition is that
psychoanalysis works in this way because of its automatic interpretation machine. This
interpretation machine can be described in the following way: whatever you say, you
mean something different . We can't say enough about the damage these machines
cause. When someone explains to me that what I say means something other than what I say, a split in the ego as
subject is produced. This split is well known: what I say refers to me as the subject of an utterance or statement, what I
mean refers to me as an expressing subject. This split is conjured by psychoanalysis as the basis for castration and
prevents all production of statements . For example, in certain schools for problem children,
dealing with character or even psychopathology, the child, in his work or play activities, is
placed in a relationship with his educator, and in this context the child is understood as the
subject of an utterance or statement ; in his psychotherapy, he is put into a relationship with the analyst or the
therapist, and there he is understood as an expressing subject. Whatever he does in the group in terms of his
work and his play will be compared to a superior authority, that of the psychotherapist who
alone will have the job of interpreting, such that the child himself is split; he cannot will
acceptance for any statement about what really matters to him in his relationship or in his
group. He will feel like he's talking, but he will not be able to say a single word about what's
most essential to him. Indeed, what produces statements in each one of us is not ego as subject, it's something entirely
different: multiplicities, masses and mobs, peoples and tribes, collective arrangements; they cross through us, they are with in us,
and they seem unfamiliar because they are part of our unconscious. The challenge for a real psychoanalysis, an antipsychoanalytical analysis, is to discover these collective arrangements of expression, these collective networks, these peopl es who
are in us and who make us speak, and who are the source of our statements. This is the sense in which we set a whole held of
experimentation, of personal or group experimentation, against the interpretive activities of psychoanalysis. My fourth
proposition, to be quick, is that psychoanalysis implies a fairly peculiar power structure. The
recent book by Castel, Le Psychanalysme, demonstrates this point very well. The power structure occurs in the contract, a
formidable liberal bourgeois institution. It leads to "transference" and culminates in the analyst's silence. And the analyst's
silence is the greatest and the worst of interpretations. Psychoanalysis uses a small number of collective
statements, which are those of capitalism itself regarding castration, loss, and family, and it
tries to get this small number of collective statements specific to capitalism to enter into the
individual statements of the patients themselves. We claim that one should do just the opposite, that is, start
with the real individual statements, give people conditions, including the material conditions, for the production of their
individual statements, in order to discover the real collective arrangements that produce them.
Lacanian theory genders human activities --- makes patriarchy inevitable
Iréne Matthis, '4 (Associate Duke Prof, “Dialogues on Sexuality, Gender, and Psychoanalysis”,
p. 108-109)//roetlin
Lacan’s introduction of post-Saussurean linguistics into
psychoanalysis was a mistake. Precisely because the relationship of femininity to the
phallus is a purely symbolic equation for Lacan, patriarchy can never disappear. Lacan’s
theory of sexual difference is a watertight system, one that will always impose its own
normative language of sexual difference on whatever people actually do. The historical
content of the structure will change, but the structure itself will remain forever intact .34 I
may find that sixteenth-century notions of what counts as “feminine” are vastly different from our own, but the grid that
produces the notion of “the feminine” in the first place remains unchanged. What I am
objecting to, then, is that Lacanian theory is structured so as to formally require the
“gendering” or “sexing” of a vast array of human activities. Lacanian theory is a
printing machine for gender labels. It is incumbent on those who believe that this
is an excellent thing for feminism and for psychoanalysis to justify their belief.
From a feminist and historicizing point of view,
Gender inequality causes extinction
Bem, '93 (Psych Professor -- Cornell, The Lenses of Gender, pg. 195)//roetlin
In addition to the humanist and feminist arguments against gender polarization, there is an overarching moral argument that fuses
the antihumanist and antifeminist aspects of gender polarization. The essence of this moral argument is that by
polarizing
human values and human experiences into the masculine and the feminine, gender
polarization not only helps to keep the culture in the grip of males themselves; it also
keeps the culture in the grip of highly polarized masculine values. The moral problem here is that
these highly polarized masculine values so emphasize making war over keeping the
peace, taking risks over giving care, and even mastering nature over harmonizing with
nature that when allowed to dominate societal and even global decision making, they
create the danger that humans will destroy not just each other in massive numbers but
the planet.
at: schmitt
counterplans
**pics
2ac --- generic pic start
Perm do the counterplan --- it’s just one way in which the plan could be
implemented
Prost 4 (Judge – United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, “Committee For Fairly
Traded Venezuelan Cement v. United States”, 6-18,
http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/federal/judicial/fed/opinions/04opinions/04-1016.html)
The URAA and the SAA neither amend nor refine the language of § 1677(4)(C). In fact, they merely suggest, without disqualifying
other alternatives, a “clearly higher/substantial proportion” approach. Indeed, the SAA specifically mentions that no “precise
mathematical formula” or “‘benchmark’ proportion” is to be used for a dumping concentration analysis. SAA at 860 (citations
omitted); see also Venez. Cement, 279 F. Supp. 2d at 1329-30. Furthermore, as the Court of International Trade noted, the SAA
emphasizes that the Commission retains the discretion to determine concentration of imports on a “case-by-case basis.” SAA at
860. Finally, the
definition of the word “substantial” undercuts the CFTVC’s argument. The
word “substantial” generally means “considerable in amount , value or worth.” Webster’s
Third New International Dictionary 2280 (1993). It does not imply a specific number or cutoff. What may be substantial in one situation may not be in another situation. The very
breadth of the term “substantial” undercuts the CFTVC’s argument that Congress spoke clearly in establishing a standard for the
Commission’s regional antidumping and countervailing duty analyses. It therefore supports the conclusion that the Commission is
owed deference in its interpretation of “substantial proportion.” The Commission clearly embarked on its analysis having been
given considerable leeway to interpret a particularly broad term.
Perm do both
Pic’s are a voting issue --- a. Ground and strategy skew: they moot the value of
the 1ac and force the aff to start the debate in the 2ac --- b. Encourage vague plan
writing: that hurts the negative’s ability to generate offense and is uniquely worse
for them --- c. Education: pics reduce debate to superficial distinctions between
the plan and counterplan --- this moots breadth of education --- d. Affirmative
contradiction: it forces us to argue against ourselves which makes debate abusive
and unfair --- this supersedes education --- e. Its infinitely regressive: justifying
any single pic opens up the floodgates for menial one word pics --- f. Lit checks: if
they don’t have a piece of evidence specifically advocating the action of the
counterplan it means debate is impossible for the aff to predict --- reject the team
not the argument
The pic pedagogically recreates the state of exception: the law is superceded in
instances that suit them --- this sort of logic means the counterplan cant solve
because
1. Retrenches all the 1ac impacts
2. it sets a precedent of circumvention which uniquely undermines the
counterplan
this is impacted further by the 1ac douglas evidence --- the state of exception opens
up the possibility of bare life and of the camp, where bare life is outside law but
constantly exposed to violence and “unsanctionable killing”
2ac --- pics with terror net benefits
Extend the 1st card in the 1ac --- the van munster ev says --- <insert your explanation>
Claims of inevitable and catastrophic terrorism are epistemically bankrupt --counterterrorism strategies both replicate terror and cause more violence
Walt ‘15 – [Stephen. Prof IR Harvard. “Chill Out, America” Foreign Policy, 5/29/15
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/29/chill-out-america-fear-terror-threats/ ]
prominent experts and politicians seem determined to keep the American people
in a perpetual state of trembling fear . Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations thinks “the question is not
These days,
whether the world will continue to unravel but how fast and how far.” The outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, told
Congress last year that “[the world is] more dangerous than it has ever been.” (Someone really ought to tell the general about the Cold War, the Cuban
missile crisis, and a little episode known as World War II.) Not to be outdone, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believes the United States “has
not faced a more diverse and complex array of crises since the end of the Second World War.” And then there’s CNN and Fox News, which seem to
think that most news stories should be a variation on Fear Factor. ¶
One could multiply alarming forecasts such as
these almost endlessly. As investigative journalist David Sirota tweeted in response to a recent speech by New Jersey governor and
erstwhile presidential aspirant Chris Christie, where FDR told Americans the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” today’s politicians and pundits
if you’re an ordinary American citizen living here in the
United States, how much should you worry about foreign dangers? Surely, people in contemporary
mostly tell us to “Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.”¶ But
Syria, South Sudan, Gaza, Libya, eastern Ukraine, and any number of other places face obvious and disturbing dangers, as the media reminds us daily.
Not so much unless you have friends or family in a war zone or you’ve invested your entire retirement portfolio in Greek
government bonds.¶ Here in the United States, in fact, it’s hard to identify any looming or
imminent external threats, and certainly none as dire as the dangers that other societies face or as serious as
But Americans?
the challenges the United States has overcome in the past. As I’ve noted before, the United States still has the world’s largest and
most diverse economy, the world’s most powerful conventional forces, and a robust nuclear deterrent. It has no powerful enemies
nearby, close allies in every corner of the world, and it is insulated from most foreign dangers by two enormous oceans. Despite the
hype about the shrinking of geopolitical space and the emergence of a tightly connected “global village,” distance and the “stopping
power of water” still provide considerable security, if not quite 100 percent protection.¶ Look, nobody is saying that there aren’t any
problems lurking outside U.S. borders, or suggesting there aren’t some nasty characters in today’s world. For starters, eight other countries have
nuclear weapons, and we’re not on the best of terms with some of them. China’s growing power and long-term ambitions are an obvious concern, and
the violent extremist movements that are convulsing countries in the Middle East and Africa are troubling on several levels. I’m even willing to concede
that cybersecurity is worth some degree of vigilance, even if the danger is often overhyped. Problems such as these deserve attention, careful study, and
But
sometimes vigorous and sustained action.¶
when did the country that conquered North America, won World Wars I and II, and stared down
Joseph Stalin and his successors become so easily scared by spooks, ghosts, tin-pot dictators, and marginal radical movements like the Islamic State,
whose total fighting force is smaller than two U.S. Army divisions and whose territory is mostly worthless desert? That’s not to say these problems are
We exaggerate external dangers
in part because violent events are vivid and dramatic, and they seem scary even
when they are rare and when they are taking place tens of thousands of miles away. (The
of no concern; it’s to ask why we routinely see this year’s troubles as the Greatest Danger Ever. ¶
Islamic State understands this, by the way, which is why they use beheadings instead of something more “civilized” and discreet, such as a drone
global news coverage and the 24/7 news cycle have led
many people to conclude the world is becoming more violent and dangerous, when the
actual long-term trend has been going in the other direction. Durable peace is a boring
“non-event” in which nothing much happens, so nobody bothers to report it. And that
means most people don’t appreciate how safe they really are.¶ But the main reason so many people stay
afraid is that fear is good for the people who purvey it, and so they work hard to instill fear in the rest of us. Fear is what keeps the
United States spending more on defense than the next dozen states combined. Fear is
what gets politicians elected, fear is what justifies preventive wars, excessive
government secrecy, covert surveillance, and targeted killings. And fear is what keeps people watching CNN
strike.) As Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack have noted,
and Fox News, and running out to buy the New York Times or the Washington Post. As both democratic and authoritarian leaders have long known,
you can get people to do a lot of foolish things if they are sufficiently
scared.¶ Unfortunately, this enduring exaggeration of external dangers can blind us to real problems. In fact, if you look at the
past 25 years or so, it is abundantly clear that external enemies have done far less
damage to the United States than we have done to ourselves. Saddam Hussein was a very bad man, but he
wasn’t threatening or harming Americans after we kicked his ass in 1991. Ditto Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and the whole wretched
Assad family. They were all problems, to be sure, but they weren’t threatening many Americans and U.S. leaders did business with each of them at one
In terms of actual harm inflicted, America’s most lethal opponent in recent
years was the original al Qaeda. Al Qaeda struck U.S. military and diplomatic assets in several countries during the 1990s,
and then the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks killed 2,977 people and caused an estimated $178 billion in property damage and
other economic losses. Those losses are hardly trivial — even for a $16 trillion economy — but they pale in comparison
to the damage that we’ve done to ourselves .¶ Do the math. After 9/11, the Bush
administration’s foolhardy invasion of Iraq cost at least $3 trillion dollars, more than
40,000 U.S. personnel killed or wounded, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. What
time or another.¶
did we get for it? A broken Iraqi state, enhanced Iranian influence in the region, and the emergence of the Islamic State. The invasion of Iraq also
diverted resources and attention from Afghanistan, guaranteeing the NATO mission there would also fail (at a cost of another $1 trillion or so).¶ Let’s
add to these costs the creation of failed states in Libya and Yemen. The United States is
not solely responsible for either outcome, but our interventions in both places surely did
not help. The panicked U.S. response to 9/11 also produced an excessive “war on terror”
that included the use of torture, illegal surveillance, and the emergence of an out-ofcontrol intelligence community that repeatedly broke U.S. law and then lied about it .
The costs to our global image are far from trivial, and it remains to be seen
if our commitment to civil liberties will emerge unscathed . None of these actions were forced
upon us by a powerful, hostile foe; they were choices made by U.S. leaders from both parties. ¶ And don’t forget that little financial hiccup in 2008. The
global financial crisis originated here in the United States, and it was an entirely the product of hubris and insufficient oversight. The Federal Reserve
Bank of Dallas estimates the cost in lost output from the 2008 crisis is between $6 and $14 trillion, or roughly $50,000-$120,000 per U.S. household.
Unless you’re one of the 1 percent, this ain’t chump change. And as former FP editor Moisés Naím recently noted, political fragmentation within the
United States has stymied efforts to reform economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the Export-Import Bank — both of which
could be important tools of U.S. influence — and thwarted efforts to reach intelligent trade agreements that could make U.S. citizens richer and improve
our geopolitical position vis-à-vis China. In his words, “The most potent forces constraining America’s economic power in the world are coming from
Capitol Hill, not Beijing.” Another self-inflicted wound.¶ The final cost of all this foolishness has been an understandable opposition to
continued U.S. engagement abroad. Hawks are now fretting that the American people no longer seem enthusiastic about intervening
all over the world, but what did they expect given the disasters that their own foolish policies produced? With typical hyperbole, the
Wall Street Journal now sounds the alarm about the emergence of Russia, Iran, and China as “regional hegemons” (a label that
greatly exaggerates each state’s position) and blames this supposed “hegemony” on an “American retreat.” A key reason these three
states are in a somewhat better position today than they were a decade ago is that too many U.S. leaders have listened to the Wall
Street Journal‘s foreign policy advice and squandered American power in a series of pointless and failed crusades.¶ In short, what
ought to worry most Americans is not that we face a powerful, cunning, and hostile set of foreign rivals (though I do have long-term
concerns about China’s ambitions in Asia and elsewhere). The
real worry should be America’s demonstrated
talent for shooting itself in the foot and then pretending that was where it was aiming all
along. If you want to something to worry about, you should ponder our inability or unwillingness to learn from past mistakes, the ability of special
interests to warp key elements of U.S. foreign policy, the bipartisan tendency to recycle failed policies and the people who devised them, and our
habitual surprise when we meddle in places we don’t understand and discover that some of the people we’ve been pushing around don’t like it, want us
Unless and until these features of U.S. foreign policy
are altered, even those of us who are lucky to be living here in the relative security of the
United States have something to worry about.
out, and are willing to do nasty things to achieve that goal.
disads
at: crime da
Politicizing the criminal as the enemy subjects them not to law but unlimited
sovereignty, enabling the state to justify sacrifice of the political community and
making civil war inevitable
Lajous, 12 – doctor of Law at Yale, professor and researcher at Centro de Investigación y
Docencia Económica, a Mexican center of research and higher education specialized in social
sciences (Alejandro Madrazo, “Criminals and enemies? The Mexican drug trafficker in official
discourse and in narcocorridos,” translated by Fernanda Alonso)//bghs-BI
II. The criminal and the enemy in the political imaginary8 The temptation
to label a criminal as an enemy and
point him out as "public enemy number 1”, is enormous, especially when the threat he represents is
perceived as overwhelming. But the distinction between a criminal and an enemy in the
political imaginary is crucial: it reflects and supports the distinction between sovereignty
and law, between political action –in its strictest sense— and legal action. Criminals and enemies may do the same violent acts,
destroying property and persons. Nevertheless, the modern political imaginary carefully maintained the distinction as a matter of
both formal law and informal representation. (Kahn, 2010; 1) In
the modern political imaginary, the criminal
and the enemy occupy different spaces: the criminal faces the law; the enemy faces
sovereignty. Law is restricted, predetermined, it cannot overturn the rules that it is made up of;
sovereignty is unlimited, unrestricted, subject only to its ability to affirm itself. The criminal is not the
enemy; the enemy is not the criminal. The enemy can be killed but not punished. (…) On the other hand, the
criminal can be punished but, in most of the West, he cannot be killed. (Kahn, 2010; 1)9 The distinction lies
precisely on the difference between the criminal’s relationship to law and the enemy’s relationship to sovereignty. The
criminal is a citizen, a part of the political community, and therefore enjoys the protection of the very laws
which he infringes; the enemy is the opposite of a citizen, located outside the political
community and posing a threat to it; consequently the enemy does not enjoy the protection of the law, nor is he
under obligation to abide by it. Moreover, the enemy has the right to resist the violence of a political community to which he does
not belong to; the criminal does not. Informally, warfare
is imagined as a sort of duel: a reciprocal
relationship of threat, of killing and being killed. (…) This is why every war is imagined as
“self-defense” by both sides of the conflict. The confrontation with the criminal, on the other hand, is certainly
not imagined as a duel. Criminals have no right of self-defense against the police. The force of law is asymmetrical. For this reason,
we think of the violence of law – policing – as “depoliticized.” There is a corresponding depoliticalization of the violence of crime: it
is not political threat, but personal pathology. Law enforcement aims to prevent the violence of the criminal from becoming a source
of collective self-expression. Were it to become so, we would confront an enemy. (Kahn, 2010; 2) The law in a political community
says nothing to its enemies, nor does it say anything about its enemies. The enemy does not operate in the restricted field of law,
operating instead in the unrestricted space of sovereignty. Contrastingly, the criminal is determined by the law he infringes:
Everything about the criminal is defined by law, from the elements of the crime, to the procedure of adjudication, to the character of
punishment. His depoliticalization is accomplished through his complete juridification. The law, however, will not tell us who are
our enemies. It will not define the conditions of victory or defeat. It will not tell us how seriously to take a threat or how devastating
to make the response. The enemy, despite the efforts of international law, is not a juridical figure at all. (Kahn, 2010; 2) The enemy is
located outside the political community and threatens it. Because of this, the
enemy endows members of the
community with an identity: they are ultimately identified in contrast to the person who is
not a member of the political community: the enemy (who is in turn, identified in contrast to the first). The
criminal does not fulfill that role in the political imaginary. His existence does not identify us, and he does not
identify himself as opposed to the political community, but rather he participates in it. True, he participates from a marginal and
stigmatized position, but he is part of the community that punishes him. Against
the enemy, the state may
legitimately require sacrifices from us –including our lives— so as to protect the
continuity of the political community. Against the criminal, we require the State’s
protection, not vice versa. We are presented then, with two very different categories, which must not be confused. The criminal
is a member of the political community; the enemy is not. The criminal is subject to the law of the community and is simultaneously
protected and bound by it; the enemy is not. The criminal should be punished; the enemy destroyed or subdued. The criminal is
completely juridified (he is regulated and precisely constraint by the law) and, therefore, depoliticized; the enemy is necessarily a
politicized subject (he defines the polis by opposing it) and cannot be understood through the law. But the distinction between
criminal and enemy is not only important to them; the distinction is fundamental –foundational even– to the political community,
i.e. to "us", all individuals belonging to it: At stake in the criminal/enemy distinction, I will argue, is the relationship of sovereignty
to law. These are not just categories of theory, but the organizing principles of political and personal narrative. When we lose control
of the categories, we can lose the sense of who we are. (Kahn, 2010; If we collapse the two categories, we lose our political identity.
We no longer know who belongs to the "us" (the political community, which in principle, includes criminals) and who belongs to the
"they" (the enemies). When the criminal becomes an enemy, the community’s action is no longer the application of law, but that of a
civil war: Indeed, under some circumstances criminals do become enemies: the order of law becomes the disorder of civil war.
(Kahn, 2010; 5) When
the criminal is politicized, he is mistaken for the enemy; he becomes
the enemy. He is no longer identified by the law (which signals him as an offender), but instead he is identified as that which
opposes sovereignty, that is the political community; against which he is now "entitled" to confront. The community can
no longer demand obedience from him. He goes from being in an asymmetrical relationship governed by the law to a
symmetric relation (symbolically) analogous to a duel, in which the law disappears and all that remains is the
contrast of two competing wills in the field of sovereignty. That is, in a space in which
only a civil war can be deployed, no longer a normative system.
at: terror da
<insert explanation of root cause claims from 1ac>
<k the impact>
<impact calc>
Claims of inevitable and catastrophic terrorism are epistemically bankrupt --counterterrorism strategies both replicate terror and cause more violence
Walt ‘15 – [Stephen. Prof IR Harvard. “Chill Out, America” Foreign Policy, 5/29/15
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/29/chill-out-america-fear-terror-threats/ ]
prominent experts and politicians seem determined to keep the American people
in a perpetual state of trembling fear . Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations thinks “the question is not
These days,
whether the world will continue to unravel but how fast and how far.” The outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, told
Congress last year that “[the world is] more dangerous than it has ever been.” (Someone really ought to tell the general about the Cold War, the Cuban
missile crisis, and a little episode known as World War II.) Not to be outdone, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believes the United States “has
not faced a more diverse and complex array of crises since the end of the Second World War.” And then there’s CNN and Fox News, which seem to
One could multiply alarming forecasts such as
these almost endlessly. As investigative journalist David Sirota tweeted in response to a recent speech by New Jersey governor and
think that most news stories should be a variation on Fear Factor. ¶
erstwhile presidential aspirant Chris Christie, where FDR told Americans the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” today’s politicians and pundits
if you’re an ordinary American citizen living here in the
United States, how much should you worry about foreign dangers? Surely, people in contemporary
mostly tell us to “Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.”¶ But
Syria, South Sudan, Gaza, Libya, eastern Ukraine, and any number of other places face obvious and disturbing dangers, as the media reminds us daily.
Not so much unless you have friends or family in a war zone or you’ve invested your entire retirement portfolio in Greek
government bonds.¶ Here in the United States, in fact, it’s hard to identify any looming or
imminent external threats, and certainly none as dire as the dangers that other societies face or as serious as
But Americans?
the challenges the United States has overcome in the past. As I’ve noted before, the United States still has the world’s largest and
most diverse economy, the world’s most powerful conventional forces, and a robust nuclear deterrent. It has no powerful enemies
nearby, close allies in every corner of the world, and it is insulated from most foreign dangers by two enormous oceans. Despite the
hype about the shrinking of geopolitical space and the emergence of a tightly connected “global village,” distance and the “stopping
power of water” still provide considerable security, if not quite 100 percent protection.¶ Look, nobody is saying that there aren’t any
problems lurking outside U.S. borders, or suggesting there aren’t some nasty characters in today’s world. For starters, eight other countries have
nuclear weapons, and we’re not on the best of terms with some of them. China’s growing power and long-term ambitions are an obvious concern, and
the violent extremist movements that are convulsing countries in the Middle East and Africa are troubling on several levels. I’m even willing to concede
that cybersecurity is worth some degree of vigilance, even if the danger is often overhyped. Problems such as these deserve attention, careful study, and
But
sometimes vigorous and sustained action.¶
when did the country that conquered North America, won World Wars I and II, and stared down
Joseph Stalin and his successors become so easily scared by spooks, ghosts, tin-pot dictators, and marginal radical movements like the Islamic State,
whose total fighting force is smaller than two U.S. Army divisions and whose territory is mostly worthless desert? That’s not to say these problems are
We exaggerate external dangers
in part because violent events are vivid and dramatic, and they seem scary even
when they are rare and when they are taking place tens of thousands of miles away. (The
of no concern; it’s to ask why we routinely see this year’s troubles as the Greatest Danger Ever. ¶
Islamic State understands this, by the way, which is why they use beheadings instead of something more “civilized” and discreet, such as a drone
global news coverage and the 24/7 news cycle have led
many people to conclude the world is becoming more violent and dangerous, when the
actual long-term trend has been going in the other direction. Durable peace is a boring
“non-event” in which nothing much happens, so nobody bothers to report it. And that
means most people don’t appreciate how safe they really are.¶ But the main reason so many people stay
afraid is that fear is good for the people who purvey it, and so they work hard to instill fear in the rest of us. Fear is what keeps the
United States spending more on defense than the next dozen states combined. Fear is
what gets politicians elected, fear is what justifies preventive wars, excessive
government secrecy, covert surveillance, and targeted killings. And fear is what keeps people watching CNN
strike.) As Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack have noted,
and Fox News, and running out to buy the New York Times or the Washington Post. As both democratic and authoritarian leaders have long known,
you can get people to do a lot of foolish things if they are sufficiently
scared.¶ Unfortunately, this enduring exaggeration of external dangers can blind us to real problems. In fact, if you look at the
past 25 years or so, it is abundantly clear that external enemies have done far less
damage to the United States than we have done to ourselves. Saddam Hussein was a very bad man, but he
wasn’t threatening or harming Americans after we kicked his ass in 1991. Ditto Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and the whole wretched
Assad family. They were all problems, to be sure, but they weren’t threatening many Americans and U.S. leaders did business with each of them at one
In terms of actual harm inflicted, America’s most lethal opponent in recent
years was the original al Qaeda. Al Qaeda struck U.S. military and diplomatic assets in several countries during the 1990s,
and then the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks killed 2,977 people and caused an estimated $178 billion in property damage and
other economic losses. Those losses are hardly trivial — even for a $16 trillion economy — but they pale in comparison
to the damage that we’ve done to ourselves .¶ Do the math. After 9/11, the Bush
administration’s foolhardy invasion of Iraq cost at least $3 trillion dollars, more than
40,000 U.S. personnel killed or wounded, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. What
time or another.¶
did we get for it? A broken Iraqi state, enhanced Iranian influence in the region, and the emergence of the Islamic State. The invasion of Iraq also
diverted resources and attention from Afghanistan, guaranteeing the NATO mission there would also fail (at a cost of another $1 trillion or so). ¶ Let’s
add to these costs the creation of failed states in Libya and Yemen. The United States is
not solely responsible for either outcome, but our interventions in both places surely did
not help. The panicked U.S. response to 9/11 also produced an excessive “war on terror”
that included the use of torture, illegal surveillance, and the emergence of an out-ofcontrol intelligence community that repeatedly broke U.S. law and then lied about it .
The costs to our global image are far from trivial, and it remains to be seen
if our commitment to civil liberties will emerge unscathed . None of these actions were forced
upon us by a powerful, hostile foe; they were choices made by U.S. leaders from both parties.¶ And don’t forget that little financial hiccup in 2008. The
global financial crisis originated here in the United States, and it was an entirely the product of hubris and insufficient oversight. The Federal Reserve
Bank of Dallas estimates the cost in lost output from the 2008 crisis is between $6 and $14 trillion, or roughly $50,000-$120,000 per U.S. household.
Unless you’re one of the 1 percent, this ain’t chump change. And as former FP editor Moisés Naím recently noted, political fragmentation within the
United States has stymied efforts to reform economic institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the Export-Import Bank — both of which
could be important tools of U.S. influence — and thwarted efforts to reach intelligent trade agreements that could make U.S. citizens richer and improve
our geopolitical position vis-à-vis China. In his words, “The most potent forces constraining America’s economic power in the world are coming from
Capitol Hill, not Beijing.” Another self-inflicted wound.¶ The final cost of all this foolishness has been an understandable opposition to
continued U.S. engagement abroad. Hawks are now fretting that the American people no longer seem enthusiastic about intervening
all over the world, but what did they expect given the disasters that their own foolish policies produced? With typical hyperbole, the
Wall Street Journal now sounds the alarm about the emergence of Russia, Iran, and China as “regional hegemons” (a label that
greatly exaggerates each state’s position) and blames this supposed “hegemony” on an “American retreat.” A key reason these three
states are in a somewhat better position today than they were a decade ago is that too many U.S. leaders have listened to the Wall
Street Journal‘s foreign policy advice and squandered American power in a series of pointless and failed crusades.¶ In short, what
ought to worry most Americans is not that we face a powerful, cunning, and hostile set of foreign rivals (though I do have long-term
concerns about China’s ambitions in Asia and elsewhere). The
real worry should be America’s demonstrated
talent for shooting itself in the foot and then pretending that was where it was aiming all
along. If you want to something to worry about, you should ponder our inability or unwillingness to learn from past mistakes, the ability of special
interests to warp key elements of U.S. foreign policy, the bipartisan tendency to recycle failed policies and the people who devised them, and our
habitual surprise when we meddle in places we don’t understand and discover that some of the people we’ve been pushing around don’t like it, want us
Unless and until these features of U.S. foreign policy
are altered, even those of us who are lucky to be living here in the relative security of the
United States have something to worry about.
out, and are willing to do nasty things to achieve that goal.
framework (if you go planless)
pre-req
We’re a pre-req to a productive politics
Agamben, 1998 – professor of philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris
(Giorgio, “Homo Sacer”, Stanford University Press, p. 10)//roetlin
Foucault’s death kept him from showing how he would have developed the concept and study of biopolitics. In any case, however,
the entry of zoē into the sphere of the polis – the
politicization of bare life as such – constitutes the
decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political- philosophical categories of
politics today seems to be passing through a lasting eclipse,
this is because politics has failed to reckon with this foundational event of modernity.
The “enigmas” (Furet, L’Allemagne nazi, p.7) that our century has proposed to historical reason and that
remain with us (Nazism is only the most disquieting among them) will be solved only on the terrain –
biopolitics – on which they were formed. Only within a biopolitical horizon will it be
possible to decide whether the categories whose opposition founded modern politics (right/left, private/public,
classical thought. It is even likely that if
absolutism/democracy, etc.) – and which have been steadily dissolving, to the point of entering today into a real zone of
indistinction – will
have to be abandoned or will, instead, eventually regain the meaning they lost
in that very horizon. And only a reflection that, taking up Foucault’s and Benjamins suggestion, thematically
interrogates the link between bare life and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies
seemingly most distant from one another, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and,
at the same time, return thought to its practical calling.
at: decision-making
Switch-side debate creates worse decision making by lending credibility to Rightist
fascism
Kahn, 10 (Richard Kahn, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research at the
University of North Dakota, Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The
Ecopedagogy Movement, 2010, pp. 9-11)
Worse still, though, is that here environmental literacy has not only been co-opted by corporate
state forces and morphed into a progressively-styled, touchy-feely method for achieving higher
scores on standardized tests like the ACT and SAT, but in an Orwellian turn it has come to stand
in actuality for a real illiteracy about the nature of ecological catastrophe, its causes, and
possible solutions. As I will argue in this book, our current course for social and environmental
disaster (though highly complex and not easily boiled down to a few simple causes or strategies
for action) must be traced to the evolution of: an anthropocentric worldview grounded in what
the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1993) refers to as a matrix of domination (see chapter 1); a
global technocapitalist infrastructure that relies upon market-based and functionalist versions
of technoliteracy to instantiate and augment its socio- economic and cultural control (see
chapters 2 and 3); an unsustainable, reductionistic, and antidemocratic model of institutional
science (see chapter 4); and the wrongful marginalization and repression of pro-ecological
resistance through the claim that it represents a “terrorist” force that is counter to the morals of
a democratic society rooted in tolerance, educational change, and civic debate (see chapter 5).
By contrast, the environmental literacy standards now showcased at places like the Zoo School
as “Hall- marks of Quality” (Archie, 2003, p. 11) are those that consciously fail to develop the
type of radical and partisan subjectivity in students, that might be capable of deconstructing
their socially and environmentally deleterious hyper-individualism or their obviously socialized
identities that tend toward 10 Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis statesanctioned norms of competition, hedonism, consumption, marketization, and forms of quasifascistic patriotism. Just as Stapp (1969) theorized environmental literacy as a form of political
moderation that could pacify the types of civic upheaval, that occurred during the Civil Rights
era, now too during the tendentious political atmosphere that has arisen as the legacy of the
George W. Bush presidency, being environmentally literate quite suspiciously means learning
how to turn the other cheek and listen to “both sides” of an issue—even when the issue is the
unprecedented mass extinction of life taking place on the planet. In a manner that accords more
with Fox News than Greenpeace, a leading environmental literacy pamphlet (Archie, 2003)
emphasizes that “Teaching and learning about the environment can bring up controversies that
must be handled in a fair and balanced manner in the classroom” (p. 11). Later in the document
a teacher from Lincoln High School in Wisconsin is highlighted in order to provide expert advice
in a similar fashion: “I’d say the most important aspect of teaching about the environment is to
look at all aspects involved with an issue or problem. Teach from an unbiased position no matter
how strong your ideas are about the topic. Let the kids make decisions for themselves” (p. 12),
she implores. This opinion is mirrored by the Environmental Education Division of the
Environmental Protection Agency (a federal office, created by the Bush administration,
dedicated to furthering environmental literacy), which on its own website underscores as “Basic
Information” that “Environmental education does not advocate a particular viewpoint or course
of action. Rather, it is claimed that environmental education teaches individuals how to weigh
various sides of an issue through critical thinking and it enhances their own problem-solving
and decision-making skills.”10 Yet, this definition was authored by an administration trumping
for a wider right-wing movement that attempts to use ideas of “fair and balanced” and “critical
thinking” to occlude obvious social and ecological injustices, as well as the advantage it gains in
either causing or sustaining them. This same logic defending the universal value of nonpartisan
debate has been used for well over a decade by the right to prevent significant action on global
warming. Despite overwhelming scientific acceptance of its existence and threat, as well as of its
primarily anthropogenic cause, those on the right have routinely trotted out their own pseudoscience on global warming and thereby demanded that more research is necessary to help settle
a debate on the issue that only they are interested in continuing to facilitate. Ecopedagogy: An
Introduction 11 Likewise, within academic circles themselves, powerful conservatives like David
Horowitz have the support of many in government who are seeking to target progressive
scholars and viewpoints on university and college campuses as biased evidence of a leftist
conspiracy at work in higher education (Nocella, Best & McLaren, Forthcoming). In order to
combat such alleged bias, “academic freedom” is asserted as a goal in which “both sides” of
academic issues must be represented in classrooms, departments, and educational events. The
result of this form of repressive tolerance (see chapter 5) is simply to impede action on matters
worth acting on and to gain further ideological space for right-wing, corporate and other
conservative-value agendas.11 It is clear, then, that despite the effects and growth of
environmental education over the last few decades, it is a field that is ripe for a radical
reconstruction of its literacy agenda. Again, while something like environmental education
(conceived broadly) should be commended for the role it has played in helping to articulate
many of the dangers and pitfalls that modern life now affords, it is also clear that it has thus far
inadequately surmised the larger structural challenges now at hand and has thus tended to
intervene in a manner far too facile to demand or necessitate a rupture of the status quo. What
has thereby resulted is a sort of crisis of environmental education generally and, as a result, the
prevailing trends in the field have recently been widely critiqued by a number of theorists and
educators who have sought to highlight their limitations.
at: switch side debate
Bracketing off of our protest is enabled by the state of exception and legitimizes
brutal cycles of governmentality --- turns switch-side
Elmer and Opel, 8 (Greg Elmer, associate professor of communication and culture at Ryerson
University, PhD in communication from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, director of
the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University, Andy Opel, associate professor of
communication at Florida State University, PhD in mass communication from the University of
North Carolina, member of the International Communication Association, November 2008,
“Preempting Dissent: The Politics of an Inevitable Future,” pages 29-41)
SHORTLY AFTER THE LARGE-SCALE PROTESTS against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in late November 1999, police,
law enforcement agencies, the military, and global weapons manufacturers began to rethink their responses to public protests. Since
the Seattle protests, similar semi—annual gatherings of government officials and corporate trade lawyers have consistently attracted
large public protests, organized by public-interests groups denied participation in the decision-making process of trade agreements
such as the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Free
Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Wide—scale protests were seen in Prague, Genoa, Cancun, Quebec City, Miami, and, most
recently, Mar Del Plata, Argentina. Moreover, as we will see in this chapter, as the size and sophistication of resistance grew, so too
did political and legal responses to that resistance. Responses to such protests have been greatly influenced by military and so—
called ‘homeland’ security strategies enacted after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the initiation of the controversial second Gulf
War. As we see in this chapter, the
combination of a changing political climate in response to war
and terrorism, particularly the expansion of preemptive forms of social control and
political containment, has resulted in a new set of practices that have reconfigured
public space and criminalized multiple aspects of free speech and public assembly in the
United States. This chapter argues that in the shadow of 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the ongoing
“War on Terror,” a disturbing form of geopolitical apartheid has emerged in the United
States. At the core of this trend is a set of micro-political strategies and technologies that
attempt to contain spaces of dissent and detain protestors (Boghosian, 2004). Some activists and critics have
labeled these anti-democratic tendencies the “Miami Model,” after the strategies deployed in November 2003 against Free Trade of
the Americas protestors by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies stationed in Miami. The Miami model of law
enforcement was characterized by 1) the deployment of overwhelming numbers of law enforcement officers, 2) preemptive arrests of
peaceful and law—abiding protestors, and 3) widespread police surveillance techniques before, during, and after protests (Getzan,
2004). And while these three pillars—overwhelming force, preemptive arrests, and surveillance—-provide a good overview of police
and law enforcement strategies, in this chapter we focus on the manner in which spaces of dissent, debate, and democracy are being
regulated and policed through the courts, going into more depth in the next chapter, through a study of the introduction of weapons
meant to easily contain and detain protestors and, more broadly, immobilize dissent. Of
greater concern is the
degree to which such strategies systematically marginalize dissent, spatially and
politically speaking. From the creation of “free speech zones” and the proposal for
protest free “Pedestrian Safety Zones”2° to the political screening of participants in
political “town hall meetings,” space has increasingly become a tool to limit open debate,
freedom of speech, and political dissent in the US. Part of our interest in exposing the strategies of political
segregation, first through the containment of protest spaces, and second, through the deployment of preemptive hand-held
weapons, is theoretical. The
segregation of deviance has often been influenced by Foucaultian
theories of panopticism and social control. An increasing number of scholars, however, are arguing that
Foucault’s panoptic prison, even deployed in metaphorical terms, has been overextended, particularly when considering broader
geographic perspectives (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000; Elmer, 2004). Many scholars arguing that panopticism must move beyond
architectures or institutions of social control, do so in large part to theorize emerging technological, “virtual,” or simulated forms of
surveillance and discipline (e.g., Bogard; Gandy). While we find such arguments to be productive, they typically juxtapose their ideas
against corporeal surveillance and monitoring of the past. Human surveillance and policing factors, conversely, play a key role in
monitoring political organizing activities and training, peaceful protests, and acts of civil disobedience (Boghosian, 2004, p. 29).
Moreover, Foucault’s metaphorical use of a penitentiary as the historical trope or dispositif for social discipline, reformation, and
self-actualization, while providing a broad conceptual framework for a dispersed theory of self-discipline, control, and conformity,
has little to say about that which escapes conformity, namely public protest, civil disobedience, and other forms of social and
political dissent. Under the constant gaze of social mores and values, Foucault’s subjects are implored to change and police their own
behaviour. The proliferation of surveillance technologies (such as closed-circuit TV, CCTV), preemptive policing, programs that
attempt to anticipate future social and geopolitical risks (Elmer Opel, 2006), and the presumption of guilt instead of innocence, are
in part a response to past intelligence failures. The inability to gain adequate and up-to-date intelligence on domestic and
international risks in the US, UK, Iraq, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, etc., continues to highlight the limits and shortcomings of
surveillance programs and intelligence—gathering techniques. The recognition of decentred and distributed network infrastructures
and relationships among protesters, migrants, and terrorists in the US and elsewhere, has similarly stretched conventional thinking
about the structure and deployment of surveillance programs and technologies. In short, members of such feared networks are not
typically considered panoptic subjects, that is to say, they are not clients, candidates, or inmates in need of reform, or self-discipline.
Rather, it is argued that such networked subjects have become increasingly influenced by strategic and indefinite forms of
containment and detainment. Didier
Bigo’s (2006) extension of Foucault’s theories of social
control provides a helpful point of departure. While Bigo shares the goal of extending
theories of social and political control outside of the prison and other social institutions,
he maintains an interest in the social control of populations, specifically through the
mobility, capture, and detainment of specific populations. By introducing the concept of
the “ban-opticon,” Bigo succeeds in moving outside the panoptic walls of punishment, to
question the optics and governmentality of indefinite detainment, a questionable spatial
and legal tactic used in the “War on Terror” and with migrant communities. Such
detainees, be they in Guantanamo Bay or in immigrant holding centres in the EU and
elsewhere, have no intention of turning their subjects into law-abiding, productive
citizens (Miller, 1993), rather their goal is both to remove individuals from war, or to
merely return them to their previous location—to ban them. In both cases, individuals are immobilized
and excluded from participating in war and/ or entering Western societies. Although political protestors produce a different set of
challenges from domestic law enforcement and forces of political control in the US—primarily their visibility in the media as
increased evidence of opposition to the political status quo—they are similarly immobilized, contained, and in some cases detained
without charge. Such detainments, further, in many instances are not subject to punishment (fines, etc.); rather, they are
increasingly used to preemptively, and temporarily remove protestors from public spaces until the conclusion of protests
(Boghosian, 2004, p. 29). The
operationalization of preemptive tactics in the US further
highlights the limitations of Foucault’s decentred model of power, in which sovereignty
is manifest through dispersed disciplinary technologies. Strategies of political
containment and detainment, spatially and individually speaking, are in large part
enabled by what Gieorgio Agamben (2005) refers to as the “state of exception,” the “no
man’s land between public law and political fact” (p. 1). Ironically, while conservatives in the US continue to
argue against a “living constitution,” where interpretations over the nation’s law change over time,21 the Bush administration
actively sought to reinterpret executive powers during the so-called War on Terror. Following Agamben, Didier Bigo (2006) argues
that such interpretations are enacted through explicit declarations by political rulers, a declaration that invokes an exception to the
rule of law. Broadly construed, the
US administration continues to invoke the War on Terror to
blur the line between law and politics. In defence of the secret wiretapping program, the Bush administration has
argued that an exception to the rule of law was enacted by the legislation, giving the president preemptive powers to carry out
surveillance. Similar arguments have been made in the UK, Canada, and France. The Boston Globe and other media in the US also
reported about the growing use of “signing statements” by the US president, as a means to state his exception to the new law. For
example, after the signing of US Senator John McCain’s anti—torture bill in the January 2006, the president declared that “The
executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President as Commander in
Chief.” He also added that this interpretation “will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President ... of
protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks” (Savage, 2004). Of course, many
American laws that
govern executive power, public debate, and, as we see next, dissent and protest in public
space, are so broadly written that they practically cultivate political exceptionalism. For
example, as an adjunct to debates over the US Patriot Act, the “spatial tactics” of law enforcement have recently produced a series of
controversial rulings about the accessibility of public spaces for the purposes of political protest. Thus, at a time when public
advocates and intellectuals have reinforced the importance of understanding the democratic and political aspects of various
geographies——most notably innovative and tolerant ones (Florida, 2003) and environmentally sustainable ones (Gore, 2007)—the
American legal system continues to downplay or altogether avoid spatial considerations in First Amendment cases. Timothy Zick
(2005), for example, argues that “The
reason courts fail to properly scrutinize spatial tactics is that
they have accepted the common conception of place as mere res—a neutral thing, an
undifferentiated mass, a backdrop for expressive scenes” (p. 3). Results of this legal
conception of place as a “neutral thing” include the protest zones (some resembling
cages”) established at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions during
the summer of 2004 as well as the now routine practice of keeping protestors many
blocks and often miles away from free trade, WTO, or GATT meetings. Later in the same
year the G8 summit was held on the tiny (private) Sea Island, just off the coast near
Savannah, Georgia, a choice that made it nearly impossible——given the security noose
around the island——to stage a meaningful and visible protest. In South Carolina, the well-known
activist Brett Bursey gained nationwide attention for a series of attempts to protest against President Bush at Republican Party
organized rallies, the last of which, in 2004, resulted in his arrest and conviction under a statute that enables the Secret Security to
establish a security perimeter or zone around the president. Mirroring Zick’s argument about the court’s treatment of space as an
objective or neutral equation in contemporary politics, an aide to the former South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, was quoted
on National Public Radio as saying that: The statute under which Mr. Bursey’s been charged alleges that he failed to vacate an area
that had been cordoned off for a visit by the president of the United States. It is a content—neutral statute, and Mr. Bursey is charged
not because of what he was doing but because of where he was doing it. The US statute in question—-USC 18: 1 752(a)(l)(ii),
“Temporary residences and offices of the President and others”—while not a new, post-9/11 law, nevertheless raises obvious
questions and concerns about its use as a political tool for spatially and politically marginalizing dissent. The law in effect establishes
a temporary “residence” for the president as he goes about his business across the country. The law forbids groups or individuals
from entering or remaining with an area (defined as “building,” “grounds,” or “any posted, cordoned off. . .” area where the president
is visiting).24 Moreover, the law does not apply universally, only to those who intend “to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of
Government business or official functions.” Interestingly, in the course of preparing Bursey’s defence, lawyers were able to gain
access to the Secret Service’s policy manual on protests. The South Carolina Progressive Network subsequently used the document to
highlight the means by which the Bush administration was interpreting the above mentioned law to segregate protestors away from
the president’s supporters and the media. Moreover, The Progressive Network also maintained that while the law did give the Secret
Service the power to cordon off access to the president, “There is no limitation to the size of the restricted area.” Furthermore, “In
the Bursey case, the restricted area was approximately 70 acres and stretched for a mile.”25 With no spatial limits on the separation
of protestors from the US president, political marginalization becomes a distinct possibility. The spatial segregation of speakers
according to the content of their messages all too easily bifurcates voices and perspectives into “two sides,” mirroring the dominant
red/ blue political culture of the US. Thus in the absence of political leaders, protests, and, perhaps more importantly, acts of civil
disobedience, lose their publicity, all too often becoming marginalized spectacles distanced from the machinations of political
parties, candidates, and government. Zick put it this way: “In
these places, protests and demonstrations
become staged events, bland and neutered substitutions for the passionate and, yes,
sometimes chaotic face-to—face confrontations that have characterized our country’s
past” (Zick, 2005, p. 45). The process of segregating public space according to political message
and turning public gatherings into “staged events” is contrasted with the actual political
strategy of the staged event or “town hall meeting,” where pre-screened publics appear
to ask government officials “authentic” questions, a practice that has many online
examples as well.26 This illusion of public participation is another quality of the spatial
turn in free speech politics where city streets are cordoned off to become de facto
“stages” for media cameras. By literally separating the demonstrators from the object of
their demonstration, the protest zone becomes “a way of controlling the content of the
debate without really acknowledging that is what is being done” (Mitchell, 2003, p. 39). In addition
to creating media frames and stages, protest zoning also facilitates preemptive police tactics, placing
all potential protestors in one location in the name of security. Fencing in protestors or
zoning them away from a given site implies a threat or danger that requires preemptive
zoning, thus “assuming guilt until innocence is proven” (Mitchell, 2003, p. 39). Mitchell refers
to this zoning as the “ghettoization” of protest; we prefer the South African analogy of an
apartheid as more accurate. Whereas a ghetto is often viewed as the result of low-income people clustered together out
of necessity and a lack of resources, apartheid was an explicit legal and spatial strategy that segregated settlements and produced a
second-class citizenry. Parallels can be drawn to the state of liberal democracy in the United States, where protestors and political
dissidents are legally restrained and contained outside of the so-called mainstream political stage. Yet, as we will see in the next
chapter, preemptive arrests, facilitated by segregationist spatial tactics and exceptionalist forms of governmentality, often move
beyond the realm of the panoptic to the violent repressive use of weaponry, what are creatively termed “less-lethal technologies.” As
we shall see, many new crowd control technologies have incorporated decidedly preemptive logics that explicitly reinforce our belief
that the preemptive doctrine is as much about controlling behaviours and seeking broader political compliance as it is a technique
for reducing actual risks and dangers.
---neg---
case
cedes the political
Agamben cedes the political --- his theories are consolatory and insufficiently
supported
Virno, June 2002 – italian professor of philosophy teaching the University of Rome (Paolo,
Interview with Paolo Virno for Archipélago number 54, http://www.generationonline.org/p/fpvirno2.htm)//roetlin
Agamben is a problem. Agamben
is a thinker of great value but also, in my opinion, a thinker with no
political vocation . Then, when Agamben speaks of the biopolitical he has the tendency to transform it into an
ontological category with value already since the archaic Roman right. And, in this, in my opinion, he is very wrong-headed. The
problem is, I believe, that the biopolitical is only an effect derived from the concept of labor-power. When there is a commodity that
is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life. Agamben says, on the other hand, that labor-power is only
one of the aspects of the biopolitical; I say the contrary: over all because labor power is a paradoxical commodity, because it is not a
real commodity like a book or a bottle of water, but rather is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed
into a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential. Toni
biopolitics in a historically determined sense, basing
it on Foucault, but Foucault spoke in few pages of the biopolitical - in relation to the birth of
liberalism - that Foucault is not a sufficient base for founding a discourse over the biopolitical
and my apprehension, my fear, is that the biopolitical can be transformed into a word that hides,
covers problems instead of being an instrument for confronting them. A fetish word, an
"open doors" word, a word with an exclamation point, a word that carries the risk of
blocking critical thought instead of helping it. Then, my fear is of fetish words in politics because it
seems like the cries of a child that is afraid of the dark..., the child that says "mama, mama!",
"biopolitics, biopolitics!". I don't negate that there can be a serious content in the term, however I see that the use of the
term biopolitics sometimes is a consolatory use, like the cry of a child, when what serves us are, in all cases,
(Negri) and Michael (Hardt), on the other hand, use
instruments of work and not propaganda words.
holocaust trivialization
Agamben is nothing more than an opportunist --- he preys on such terrible and
sensitive issues as the holocaust in his attempt to aestheticize politics
Durantaye, 5/21/2009 – Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard
University (Leland de la, “Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction”, Stanford University Press,
p. 12-13)//roetlin
One response to the challenge of defining Agamben’s idea of politics, and the concomitant
problem of relating his early work on art to his later work on politics, has been to diagnose what a number of
commentators have called an “aestheticization” of politics in his writing. J.M. Bernstein (2004) has called
Agamben’s approach in Remnants of Auschwitz an “aestheticization of [the
concentration camp prisoner’s] fate for the sake of a metaphysics of language” (14). A similar
indictment is to be found in Mesnard and Kahan who find that Agamben’s ethical and political reflections in
that work stem from “an aesthetic position” (Mesnard and Kahan 2001, 126). The charges levelled by
Bernstein, Mesnard, and Kahan are the most scathing that can be made, tantamount as they are to accusing Agamben of
callous opportunism in his discussion of the most sensitive and painful of matters.
Whether those charges of are justified is something that we will look at in depth in Chapter Seven. For the moment, it is important to
take note of this idea of an aestheticization of politics–as well as that this is not the only key in which it has been advanced.
Benjamin Morgan (2007) has argued that Agamben’s
conceptions of the relations of means to ends
and law to violence are fundamentally shaped by Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement
and thereby that his idea of politics is one whose model is to be found in an idea of art.
On a related note Arne de Boever (2006) has concluded that “Agamben’s thought is crucially a literary-political thought. It is a
literary thought that, in its political force, cannot be articulated within the limits of political science. Thus, it oscillates between the
literary and the political and demands to be studied comparatively, across the disciplines” (159; italics in original). Whether or not
De Boever is right in this claim, it should not be mistaken for a solution to the problem.
natives da
Rejecting sovereignty and identity devastates indigenous struggles against ongoing
colonialism
Connolly ’04 (William E. – Johns Hopkins Prof Political Science, “The Complexity of
Sovereignty,” in Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, Ed. Edkins, Pin-Fat, and Shapiro, p.
29-30)
People do protest vocally about inalienable property rights when the question of
distinctive forms of governance over lands previously wrested from indigenous peoples
comes up. But they can be offered these examples of previous creativity in the property form within capitalism to loosen
them up a little. And be reminded that, in the past, the most creative embellishments have been reserved for those who already
control major economic resources. Recall, for instance, that Tocqueville worried about the future effects of the "new
manufacturing aristocracy" on the agricultural form of property that he considered to be indispensable to American democracy.
But he did not follow that concern with a call to dismantle the aristocracy of capital; he reserved that conclusion for those
Amerindians who lacked Christianity and, at least he thought, agriculture. To chart plural practices of property
and governance within capitalism is to encourage support for the worldwide movement of
indigenous peoples to govern large stretches of territory previously wrested from them.
Such practices are being pursued today in large areas of Canada and Australia. New strategies are being proposed
for indigenous peoples to participate in world capitalism in ways that stretch and
pluralize the paradigmatic practices of capitalist property, ownership, territory, and
sovereignty. Indigenous casino capitalism might become a way to generate capital for other productive activities. Such
changes neither overturn global capital nor remain within its most familiar forms. Such modes of governance
enable indigenous peoples both to reject the coercive demand that they be stationary
peoples with unchangeable customs and to fold traditional elements of spirituality into
new practices of territory, property, capital, and governance.
K
race link
Alt doesn’t solve and turn --- Depicting the modern constitutional state as camp is
not enough --- biopolitics can be ruptured through correcting abandonment by the
state along racial and class lines
Giroux 2k6 (Henry A. – Professor at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies
Department, College Literature 33.3, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the
Biopolitics of Disposability,” p. 181-182)
Given the Bush administration's use of illegal wiretaps, the holding of "detainees" illegally and
indefinitely in prisons such as Guantanamo, the disappearance, kidnapping, and torture of
alleged terrorists, and the ongoing suspension of civil liberties in the United States, Agamben's
theory of biopolitics rightly alerts us to the dangers of a government in which the state of
emergency becomes the fundamental structure of control over populations. While Agamben's
claim that the concentration camp (as opposed to Foucault's panopticon) is now the model
for constitutional states captures the contrariness of biopolitical commitments that have less
to do with preserving life than with reproducing violence and death, its totalitarian logic is too
narrow and fails in the end to recognize that the threat of violence, bare life, and death is
not the only form of biopower in contemporary life. The dialectics of life and death,
visibility and invisibility, and privilege and lack in social existence that now constitute
the biopolitics of modernity have to be understood in terms of their complexities,
specificities, and diverse social formations. For instance, the diverse ways in which the
current articulation of biopower in the United States works to render some groups disposable
and to privilege others within a permanent state of emergency need to be specified. Indeed, any
viable rendering of contemporary biopolitics must address more specifically how biopower
attempts not just to produce and control life in general, as Hardt and Negri insist, or to reduce
all inhabitants of the increasing militarized state to the dystopian space of the "death camp," as
Agamben argues, but also to privilege some lives over others. The ongoing tragedy of pain and
suffering wrought by the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina reveals a
biopolitical agenda in which the logic of disposability and the politics of death are
inscribed differently in the order of contemporary power—structured largely around wretched
and broad-based racial and class inequalities. I want to further this position by arguing that
neoliberalism, privatization, and militarism have become the dominant biopolitics of the midtwentieth-century social state and that the coupling of a market fundamentalism and
contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of capital accumulation, violence, and
disposability, especially under the Bush administration, has produced a new and dangerous
version of biopolitics.4 While the murder of Emmett Till suggests that a biopolitics structured
around the intersection of race and class inequalities, on the one hand, and state violence, on the
other, has long existed, the new version of biopolitics adds a distinctively different and more
dangerous register. The new biopolitics not only includes state-sanctioned violence but
also relegates entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability. As William
DiFazio points out, "the state has been so weakened over decades of privatization that it . . .
increasingly [End Page 181]fails to provide health care, housing, retirement benefits and
education to a massive percentage of its population" (2006, 87). While the social contract has
been suspended in varying degrees since the 1970s, under the Bush Administration it has been
virtually abandoned. Under such circumstances, the state no longer feels obligated to take
measures that prevent hardship, suffering, and death. The state no longer protects its
own disadvantaged citizens—they are already seen as dead within a transnational
economic and political framework. Specific populations now occupy a globalized space of
ruthless politics in which the categories of "citizen" and "democratic representation," once
integral to national politics, are no longer recognized. In the past, people who were
marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the
government, either because of the persistence of a drastically reduced social contract or
because they still had some value as part of a reserve army of unemployed labour. That is no
longer true. This new form of biopolitics is conditioned by a permanent state of class
and racial exception in which "vast populations are subject to conditions of life
conferring upon them the status of living dead" (Mbembe 2003, 40), largely invisible in
the global media, or, when disruptively present, defined as redundant, pathological, and
dangerous. Within this wasteland of death and disposability, whole populations are
relegated to what Zygmunt Bauman calls "social homelessness" (2004, 13). While the rich
and middle classes in the United States maintain lifestyles produced through vast inequalities of
symbolic and material capital, the "free market" provides neither social protection and security
nor hope to those who are poor, sick, elderly, and marginalized by race and class. Given the
increasing perilous state of the those who are poor and dispossessed in America, it is crucial to
reexamine how biopower functions within global neoliberalism and the simultaneous rise
of security states organized around cultural (and racial) homogeneity. This task is made
all the more urgent by the destruction, politics, and death that followed Hurricane Katrina.
psycho link
Agamben fails to provide a realizable alternative --- the affirmative’s utopian
fantasy of playing with the law inevitably fails to create a real political solution
Sharpe 9 (Matthew Sharpe is author of Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real, coeditor of
Traversing the Fantasy, and the author of numerous pieces on political theory, psychoanalysis,
and critical theory. He currently teaches philosophy and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin
University “Only Agamben Can Save Us? 2009 The Bible and Critical Theory, Vol. 5, No.
3)///CW
Jacques Derrida qualifies his recourse to a messianicity without messianism. Alain Badiou looks¶ to Paul’s messianism to illustrate a
logic allegedly characteristic of any ‘political’ subjectivity. By¶ contrast, we have seen in Part I how Giorgio Agamben is far closer to
an open recuperation of¶ kabalistic messianism. Yet, I want now to contend that critical theorists should definitively not¶ lose our
(human) heads, faced by such extraordinary formulations as those which close The¶ Open. Thinking of psychoanalysis – one
of earlier critical theory’s decisive sources – should at¶ least put
us on our analytic guard about to a position
whose idea of ‘redemption’ invokes infancy,¶ boredom, the fantasy of ‘playing with the law’
(Agamben, 2005b, 64), an ‘Edenic’ sexuality¶ without mystery (Agamben, 2004, 90–92), a ‘community’ without any discernible
symbolic¶ identity nor founding prohibitions, and an ‘in-humanity’ characterized by what Heidegger precisely¶ calls the ‘nowhere
without a no’ of animals’ prediscursive ‘captivation’ by their ‘disinhibitors’.15¶ Gershom Scholem, who by contrast with
Agamben frankly diagnoses Sabbatai Zevi as a manic¶ depressive (Scholem, 1971, 60), is characteristically more sober. ‘The
escapist and extravagant¶ nature of such utopianism’, Scholem writes of the kabalistic messianism
Agamben rejoins in The¶ Open:¶ … [a utopianism] which undertakes to determine the content of
redemption¶ without having experienced it in fact, does of course subject it to the wild indulgence¶ of
fantasy …(Scholem, 1971, 13–14).¶ Keeping our analytic heads, I want to ask now firstly about the form in which the content¶ of
Agamben’s messianism is proffered, and in which it has been received. For Agamben presents¶ his thought in the
recent texts as meaningfully political, or as pointing towards what he calls¶ ‘another’, ‘coming’ or ‘new politics’. And,
given the timely political subjects that Agamben analyses¶ in Homo Sacer and State of Exception – which both addressed executive
exceptionalism –¶ Agamben has been widely received in the post-Marxian left as a political theorist or philosopher.¶ One stylistic
peculiarity of these more ostensibly political texts, certainly, is the interruption of¶ Agamben’s erudite analyses of the history of ideas
with invocations of this ‘new politics’. The¶ content of these political invocations is cut from the same messianic cloth as the claims
Agamben¶ presents in The Open: namely, desoeuvrement or worklessness (Agamben, 2000, 141), ‘pure¶ mediality’,
‘inoperative community, … the coming people, whatever singularities, or however¶ else they might be called [sic.] ...’
(Agamben, 2000, 117–118)¶ Agamben’s claim to speak authoritatively concerning ‘the political’ , on
the strength of his¶ readings of philosophical and religious texts, seems principally to be founded on the following¶ non
sequitur. Versions of this non sequitur frame The Open, Means Without Ends, and Homo¶ Sacer:¶ i. At the beginning of political
philosophy, the opening book of Aristotle’s Politics defines¶ human beings as both political (zoon politikon) and speaking animals
(zoon logon echon). These¶ traits single humans out as living animals who are yet beyond (meta) their physical, animal being ¶ (zoe).
We are animals capable of qualified forms of life: especially the bios theoretikos and bios¶ politikos.¶ Given this true exegetical
premise, the problem is, Agamben
feasts immediately upon the¶ questionable conclusion that:¶ ii.
the most needful, if not the only, ‘political’ thing left to do (at least in our allegedly ‘ultrahistorical’¶ cul de sac) is
accordingly to theoretically question this Aristotelian framing of the¶ political realm. Any more
mundane disputation within this political realm would by implication¶ fall above or beneath, but in any case ‘outside’, the scope of
political thought. So, for example,¶ The Open advises us:¶ We must learn … to think of man as what results from the incongruity of
these¶ two elements [of man and animal], and investigate … the practical and political¶ mystery of separation … It is more urgent to
work on these divisions, to ask in¶ what way – within man – has man been separated from non-man … than it is¶ to take positions on
the great issues, on so-called human rights and values …¶ (Agamben, 2004, 16).¶ The hidden premise is evidently the ultra-idealistic
idea that:¶ iii. Politics, or at least what is of significance in political life, is determined in advance by the¶ framing ontologicophilosophical categories that would delimit the political realm.¶ In the most open variants of this position, Agamben
strays
very close to what could be termed¶ a ‘political Platonism’. By Platonism, we mean here that lineage of
Western thought that accords¶ un-tethered priority to theoria over praxis or else – as in Agamben’s type of case – simply forgets¶ the
theoretico-practical difference, by directly collapsing praxis into theoria. The false conclusion,¶ pleasing only to theoreticians, is that
true theoria would itself be equated with progressive¶ political action. Does Agamben really sponsor such a Platonism?¶ To answer,
we can consider how in Means Without Ends, Agamben
invokes the idea of a¶ political ‘form-of-life’
which would lie, as we now know, beyond all Law and its founding violence¶ (Agamben, 2000, 3–12). What
does this ‘form-of-life’ involve? Disappointingly for the practically ¶ oriented
critical theorist, Agamben explains that it involves neither action nor
considerations of ¶ any higher justice . No: it involves ‘thought’:¶ I call thought the nexus that
constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable¶ context as form-of-life … an experimentum that has as its object the potential¶
character of life and of human intelligence. To think does not mean merely to¶ be effected by this or that thing, but rather … to be
affected by one’s own receptiveness¶ and to experience in each and every thing that is thought a pure¶ power of thinking (Agamben,
2000, 9).16¶ However unencouraging or simply opaque this reads, Agamben’s recourse to Heidegger in¶ The Open (see I) indicates,
Agamben’s Platonism does need to be situated in its specific modern¶ philosophical heritage. In particular, it cannot escape the
reader that the characteristic form of¶ argumentation Agamben proffers us in all his texts is transcendental in the technical sense
this¶ term acquired after Kant’s critical philosophy. Whether he is analyzing how words refer to¶ things17¶ , the distinction between
human and animal, or – as in Homo Sacer – the relations between¶ law and life, Agamben’s aim is always the disclosure of the
condition[s] of possibility of the¶ phenomena or ‘separations’ in question.¶ We saw in Part I above, for instance, how Agamben
contends in The Open that the Western¶ distinction between man and animal has been framed by way of ‘deciding’ on an
exceptional¶ liminal figure. We now need to qualify that, for Agamben, this ‘decision’ is a transcendental¶ datum. Agamben’s claim is
that it made possible the West’s succeeding understandings of how¶ human beings can be speaking and also living animals. In other
words, the form of Agamben’s¶ argument in The Open replicates that of Agamben’s earlier treatments of the relation between ¶
language and being in Language and Death – where indexicals and the voice are what make¶ possible language’s ability to refer –
and also of the political realm, wherein Carl Schmitt’s¶ theological conception of the ‘sovereign … decision on the state of exception’
(cf. Agamben,¶ 2005b, ch.1) is elevated to what trans-historically makes possible:¶ … the creation and definition of the very space in
which the juridico-political¶ order can have validity … the fundamental localization (ortung) which …makes¶ the validity of the
juridical order possible (Agamben, 1998, 19 (my italics)).¶ So Agamben’s critical descriptive analyses of existing phenomena are
avowedly transcendental¶ in their logic and their intent. Our
principal concern, by contrast, is with his ‘positive’
political¶ statements. What of these?, the supporter of Agamben might still rejoin with justice. Do they¶ not have a different
argumentative form? And how might this form relate to the extra-political¶ messianism into which he is drawn?¶ To answer, let us
now consider the two chapters (3 and 4) in
Homo Sacer in which Agamben¶ comes closest to an
identifiable, political prescription:¶ i. chapter 3 of Homo Sacer opens by addressing the distinction between
constituting and¶ constituted political power. This distinction is central to Schmitt’s 1921 Die Diktator and his ¶ 1928
Verfassungslehre. In a way that literally paraphrases Schmitt’s reactionary critique of legal¶ positivism and / as
‘parliamentarianism’, Agamben complains that today ‘the general tendency’¶ in the liberal West is ‘to regulate everything by means
of rules’. Against the background of these¶ claims, Agamben turns with praise to Negri’s 1992 work, Constituting Power. Negri’s
text,¶ Agamben argues, interrupts today’s insipid liberal consensus. Against the grain, Il Potere Constituente: ¶ … undertakes to show
the irreducibility of constituting power (defined as ‘the¶ praxis of a constituting act, renewed in freedom, organized in the context of
a¶ free praxis’) to every constituted [already established, legalized] power ...¶ (Agamben, 1998,.43).¶ Like Benjamin, whose ‘Critique
of Violence’ aims at conceiving a ‘pure’ violence outside of¶ the horizon of law-preserving or law-constituting violence (cf. Agamben,
2005b, ch. 3), Negri’s¶ aim is to conceive of a constituting power ‘that cannot lose its [creative or constituting] characteristic¶ in
creating’. (at Agamben, 1998, 43) The problem is that Agamben has to confess in¶ Homo Sacer that he cannot see that Negri
succeeds in this attempt. Negri does not, in Agamben’s¶ words:¶ … find any criterion, in his wide analysis of the historical
phenomenon of¶ constituting power, by which to isolate constituting from sovereign power¶ (Agamben, 1998, 43).18¶ Why then does
Agamben turn to Negri here? The strength of Negri’s book, Agamben now¶ qualifies, ‘lies elsewhere’ than in its analysis of the
categories of constituted and constituting¶ political powers. Where does this different significance lie? Here, Agamben says without
blinking,¶ ‘the problem is … moved from political philosophy to first philosophy’. (Agamben, 1998, 44)¶ Negri allegedly opens up a
theoretical perspective given which constituting power, despite appearances¶ and history, ‘ceases to be strictly a political category
and necessarily presents itself as¶ a category of ontology’. (Agamben, 1998, 44) In order to weigh Negri’s notion of constituting¶
power, Agamben contends, we need to recur to Aristotle – not however to the Politics or Ethics,¶ but to Book Theta of the
Metaphysics concerning the categories of potentiality (dynamis) and¶ actuality (energeia). In this way, Agamben’s analysis of
constituting power in Homo Sacer issues¶ directly into ontology, and finds its messianic pitch there:¶ Only an entire new conjunction
of possibility and reality, contingency and necessity,¶ and the other pathe tou ontas will make it possible to cut the knot that¶ binds
sovereignty to constituting power (Agamben, 1998, 44).¶ Book Theta of the Metaphysics stands in unlikely opposition to ‘those
politicians today who¶ want to reduce all constituting power to constituted power’, for Agamben (44). It does so as it¶ allegedly
allows us to glimpse the possibility that dynamis can be thought ‘by itself’, without relation¶ to the energeia (actuality) we might have
assumed it was there to actualize. Just as a tradie¶ will keep his ability to ply his trade if he is retrenched, down-sized or downs tools
(cf. Franchi,¶ 2004, 36–37), so Agamben specifies:¶ … if potentiality is to have its own consistency and not always disappear
immediately¶ into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over¶ into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be
the potentiality not to … do¶ or be… (Agamben, 1998, 45).¶ ii. chapter 4 of Homo Sacer (‘The Form of Law’) sets out from an analysis
of the comportment¶ of Kafka’s ‘man from the country’ in the famous parable of the door of the law. Within the¶ contemporary
period wherein Agamben has told us that the state of exception has become the¶ norm, so that all today’s laws are allegedly ‘in force
without significance’, the enigmatic passivity¶ of the man in Kafka’s fable is read by Agamben as an eminent instance of a new,
‘passive politics’.¶ In his assessment, Kafka’s
unlikely political hero undertakes ‘nothing other than a
complicated¶ and patient strategy to have the door closed in order to interrupt the law’s being
in force without¶ significance’ (Agamben, 1998, 55).¶ In what would this passive and patient
politics consist? Again it is difficult to say. For in answering,¶ Agamben almost instantly reconfigures
his analysis of the man at the door around an¶ ontological inquiry (firstly) into the meaning of JeanLuc Nancy’s notion of ‘abandonment’ which¶ in its turn issues (secondly) into the ruminations of the later Heidegger. The State of
Exception¶ controversially asserts that Benjamin’s ‘pure violence’ – the ‘extreme ‘thing’ of politics’ – is the¶ ‘counterpart’ to
Heidegger’s Being (Agamben, 2005b, 59–60). In similar ontological clip, chapter¶ 4 of Homo Sacer remarkably announces the
‘political’ importance of rethinking the relation of¶ Law to life through Heidegger’s thought of ontological difference. According to
later Heidegger,¶ readers will recall, Sein is not an entity. This is because it is the condition for the possibility of ¶ any such entities
intelligibly appearing to us. In giving seindes over to presence, Being ‘itself’ as¶ it were withdraws, abandons or dissimilates itself
behind what it makes possible. If this much is¶ well and good, less immediately clear is what any of this could have to do with the
enigmatic¶ praxis of Kafka’s man from the country. Agamben is once again clear. The bridge that would¶ span the apparent gulf
between fundamental ontology and a reflection on the (non-)relation of¶ subjects to sovereignty and law is, he argues, to be located
directly on the side of ontology:¶ If Being in this sense is nothing other than Being in the ban of being, then [sic.]¶ the ontological
structure of sovereignty … fully reveals its paradox… it is necessary¶ to remain open to the idea that the relation of abandonment is
not a relation¶ … [what is required is] nothing less than an attempt to think the politico-social¶ factum no longer in the form of a
relation ... (Agamben, 1998, 60).¶ Once again, that is, politics is abandoned in a philosophical analysis whose
logics explicitly¶ point away from the political realm to a reflection on the transcendental conditions for any such ¶ realm.
fem link
The concept of “play” is inherently exclusionary of gender difference --- Agamben’s
concept of Playland and biopolitics only apply to males which turns the case and
makes biopolitics inevitable
Mills 8 (Catherine Mills is currently an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor of Bioethics
in the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University. I was previously employed at
University of Sydney, Australia, and have been Lecturer in Philosophy at University of New
South Wales, and the Australian National University. I completed a PhD in Philosophy at the
Australian National University. My main research interests lie in the areas of biopolitics and
bioethics. “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice”, The Agamben
Effect p. 23-24)///CW
As I have argued elsewhere, to the extent that relationality enters into Agamben’s thought, it does so early in the form of
autoaffection. But this radical rejection of relationality appears to be premised on the elimination of alterity altogether, including
the alterity internal to and constitutive of autoaffection. The question that can be asked here, then, is what the cost of this would be.
To make clear the weight of this question let me briefly consider one way in which this neglect of alterity and difference plays out. As
I mentioned previously, Agamben takes his initial inspiration for his conception of play as an interruption of calendrical time from
Collodi’s description of Playland in Pinocchio. One notable characteristic of this description that Agamben
passes over
in silence is that Playland is populated entirely by boys. Without taking this issue up in detail, the
question that poses itself here is to what extent this idyllic conception of play is actively
premised on the exclusion of gender difference. In what way would the presence of a
girl or girls disrupt, interrupt, or undo the cacophonous, indifferent play of boys? Not
dissimilarly, Agamben is silent on issues of gender in reference to Aristotle’s distinction
between the life of the oikos and politics, even though it is insistently present in the designation of the oikos as
the domain of reproduction that necessarily precedes and supports the life of politics. As Derrida sharply remarks, the
distinction of bios and zoe is not as straightforward as Agamben takes it to be. The
point here is not that "girls" or "women" should, as if they could, simply be added to the scene
of the play or biopolitics in such a way that the scene itself and the conceptual
framework built on it would remain without substantial change. Nor is the point to simply note
the exclusion of women from Agamben’s philosophical lexicon at an explicit textual level—the
consistent use of gender-specific pronouns as if their reference were universal may sill
be indicative of a philosophical blindness or “amnesia,” but it does not reach to the depths of the problem in
itself. For what would it be to ask the “question of gender” within the messianic
framework that Agamben proposes? Indeed, can such questions he asked within that framework?
derrida link
The basis of Agamben’s philosophy is based on a false dichotomy between bios and
zoe found in Aristotle’s text --- this paradoxically turns the case because Agamben
attempts to posit himself as the first to discover the truth which makes his work a
form of sovereignty
Swiffen 12 (Amy Swiffen is a professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Concordia University.
She has a PhD from the University of Alberta. Her intellectual background is in socio-legal
studies and social and political theory. Her areas of expertise include sociological theory,
deviance studies, criminology, ethics, biopolitics, psychoanalysis and the philosophy of law
“Derrida Contra Agamben: Sovereignty, Biopower, History” 9/30/12 Societies)///CW
Derrida’s issue with this conception of sovereignty is multi-layered. As mentioned above, he begins¶ by pointing out how it involves
the naming of firsts: Agamben “Wants to be the first to announce an¶ unprecedented new
(…) and also to be the first to recall that in fact it’s always been like that,¶ from time immemorial ([1], p. 332).” Indeed,
thing
Agamben claims both that the ‘‘Production of a¶ biopolitical body [is] the originary
activity of sovereign power,” and that the politicization of bare life¶ in the state of exception is the “Decisive event of
modernity ([2], pp. 4, 6).” That is, he claims to be¶ uncovering the essence of sovereignty in the state of
exception, while at the same time identifying the¶ entry of bare life into the polis as distinguishing of modernity. Derrida
insists that the confusions and¶ contradictions inherent in this formulation are obscured
by the naming of firsts. To illustrate, let us¶ turn more closely to the attribution of the zoe/bios distinction to Aristotle
and scrutinize whether it can¶ indeed be found in his ancient text.¶ For Agamben’s theory to hold, the
difference between zoe and bios must really be present in¶ Aristotle. However, Derrida points out
several instances where Aristotle seems to use the term zoe in a¶ way that contradicts the
interpretation that Agamben puts forward. One significant exception would¶ seem to be the famous
definition of the human being as politikon zoon (‘political animal’). With the¶ term politikon zoon,
Aristotle seems to be describing a zoe that is political. In fact, Derrida points out¶ that zoe, or zen (‘to
live’), is used repeatedly by Aristotle in the Politics to describe the human as a¶ political animal, and
each time he “Never fails to specify” that the human zoon is political “By nature”¶ (physei) (Aristotle quoted in [1], p. 315). This
specification implies that the descriptor ‘political’ refers¶ to how humans live naturally, and is
thus a qualification of their animal life. Being political is a natural¶ attribute of human life and their specific difference from other
animals. The definition of the human as¶ politikon zoon, therefore, would seem to be a glaring exception to the zoe/bios distinction.
Agamben¶ addresses the issue by claiming that there is no contradiction if one interprets the meaning of the¶ qualifier politikon
properly. Here is the passage:¶ It is true that in a famous passage of the same work [the Politics], Aristotle defines man as a politikon
zoon¶ (Politics 1253a, 4). But here (aside from the fact that in attic Greek the verb bio nai is practically never used¶ in the present
tense), “political” is not an attribute of the living being as such, but rather as a specific¶ difference that determines the genus zoon
([2], p. 2).¶ Agamben is arguing that there is a difference between an attribute of a living being and a specific¶ difference that defines
the living being. Yet, Derrida’s position is that this difference is neither certain ¶ nor clear. The phrase politikon zoon implies both:
“The specific difference or the attribute of man’s¶ living, in his life as a living being, in his bare life, if you will, is to be political ([1], p.
330).” There is¶ no clear difference between the two notions. They seem to be “Perfectly reciprocal” and¶ ‘complementary’ ideas ([1],
p. 330). Thus, Derrida
insists that Aristotle did not oppose zoe and bios as¶ Agamben suggests. The
concept of politikon zoon implies there was never any such distinction in his¶ concept of the political; for Aristotle,
“Man is that living being who is taken by politics: he is a¶ politically living being, and essentially so ([1], p. 348).” Thus, Derrida
claims that it is ‘obvious’ that¶ Aristotle is already “Thinking of biopolitics ([1], p. 349).” However, the division in life that
The distinction ¶ is
of Agamben’s own making much more than the argumentative gesture he
deploys would suggest .¶ It is evident that Derrida agrees with Agamben that biopower is
an important concept in the¶ contemporary moment. He notes the “Incredible novelties in bio-power” that must be
addressed, but¶ there is an issue concerning the “conceptual strategies relied on” to
characterize these novelties ([1],¶ pp. 330, 326). Derrida’s reading of Aristotle demonstrates the zoe/bios distinction,
apparently¶ structures sovereignty is not based in his ancient text in the way that Agamben implies.
which is “The¶ frontier along which Agamben constructs his whole discourse,” does not go deep enough to function as¶ an originary
political relation ([1], p. 321). Moreover, the
insistence on seeing historical and¶ philosophical origins,
exemplified by the reading of the bios/zoe division in Aristotle is, in effect,¶ producing
the very sovereign form of exclusion that Agamben criticizes in his work . This
is not to¶ suggest that Derrida’s position is that ancient texts are not relevant to contemporary politics. On the¶ contrary, they are
‘indispensable’ for understanding the “Bio-powers or zoo-powers of what we call¶ the modernity of ‘our time’ ([1], p. 333).” The issue
however is how to conceive of the relationship¶ between these texts and ‘our time,’ how to think history neither in terms of
‘diachronic succession’ nor¶ ‘synchronic simultaneity’ ([1], p. 333). Agamben’s
approach involves thinking
history in terms of “A¶ decisive and founding event ([1], p. 333).” Derrida’s criticism intends
to compel a reconsideration of¶ this way of “Thinking history, of doing history, of articulating a logic and a rhetoric
onto a thinking of¶ history ([1], p. 332).”¶ The difference in conceiving history corresponds to a difference in the two thinkers’
positions on¶ the future of sovereignty. On the one hand, Derrida
rejects conceptualizing sovereignty in
terms of an¶ essential relation. The readings in The Beast and the Sovereign suggest instead that sovereignty has¶
“More than one ground (…) more than one solid and single threshold ([1], p. 334).” This is not to¶ suggest Derrida leaves us with
an abyssal void or groundless depth underlying the concept; rather, it¶ suggests that there are multiple forms of
partition, division, and condition that broach a sovereignty¶ that is imagined to be indivisible. If this is
correct then it is not possible to oppose sovereignty¶ because sovereignty is not one thing.14
For instance, to unconditionally oppose sovereignty would¶ mean opposing classical principles of freedom and self-determination.
There is no way to¶ conceptualize freedom without a certain sovereignty. Thus, it is impossible to reject sovereignty¶ without also
threatening the value of liberty. The issue is therefore not a choice between sovereignty¶ ¶ and non-sovereignty but among ways of
sharing, transferring, translating, and dividing sovereignty.15¶ In contrast, Agamben’s formulation conceives sovereignty in terms of
an essential relation to bare life.¶ The idea of an essential political relation implies that it might be possible to overcome sovereign ¶
politics, if only the relation were discarded.16 Sovereignty could be abandoned and a ‘coming¶ community’ ushered in, in which
there would be no exception of the fact of living from the form of¶ life [20].17